I can’t sleep. My head is spinning like there are roller coaster cars barreling at full speed around in my skull. It’s that sweet spot between emotional and exhausted in which I love to write. I came to New York for the prerelease to hang out with the good folks out here and see some family. Being in a city makes me hate living out of one a lot more. That is, until I see a price-tag. It’s just so tempting to be away from where I live.
You see, I come from the land of darkness. I come from the land of doom. I come from a place where a tiny percentage of the population understands that there is an entire world outside of rural Pennsylvania. They are known for doing things smart people don’t do, which is probably why the teenage pregnancy rate is unmistakably and disturbingly above the national average.
So any excuse to go practically anywhere else is good enough for me. I figured I could justify coming just to hang out by convincing myself that it somehow mattered that it was the 20th anniversary of my escape from the womb, which, as we all know, it doesn’t. But as you can tell from my description of the old home place, I didn’t take much convincing. At home, I spend most of my time in bed, trying to get out of bed. I wanted to prerelease.
Here’s my report:
Round 1, game 1, I cast Gideon turn 5. Game 2, I cast Gideon turn 7. My opponent made a lot of mistakes.
Round 2, game 1, I cast Gideon turn 5. Game 2, I cast Gideon turn 6. My opponent made a lot of mistakes.
Round 3, game 1, I cast Gideon turn 5. Game 2, I cast Gideon turn 9 and it got eaten by that +1/+0 unblockable rebound spell. Game 3, I cast Gideon turn 8.
Round 4, game 1, I didn’t cast Gideon. Games 2 and 3 I cast Gideon turn 5 to his board of one tapped creature. My opponent made a couple mistakes.
Round 5, my opponent played Awakening Zone and one, then two guys worth killing, and I had one, then two removal spells respectively. My opponent made a lot of mistakes.
I’ve drafted Rise of Eldrazi a few times now and have been doing pretty well. The format seems to revolve around basic evasion more than most in recent history. There’s a decent amount of removal but there are a lot of guys that demand it, such as the Eldrazi, some of the more undercosted Level-Uppers, and things like the +3/+3 Umbras and Wurms and 5/4 Trample Spawnmakers for 5R. This makes a 2/1 flier for 3’s expected lifespan a lot longer. Ground guys often get swamped in the trenches by a bunch of walls and 0/1 chump-blockers.
The set has a lot of decisions, and I like that aspect of it quite a bit. There are still some cards that are often just game over which is frustrating, but eventually you get the hang of it. Losing to assassins is like riding a bike that you hate.
When do you Level-Up and when do you play another guy? When do you use your removal spell to get in some damage and when do you save it for an Eldrazi? When do you sacrifice Spawn to cast an extra spell or when do you wait a turn to save your guys for more mana/chumpblockers?
One important thing is chumping. You want to keep your life total high so you can Vendetta an Eldrazi, or take a hit from one, or get hit by one of the many Falter effects and still be stable. There is the +2/+0 Threaten and Drake Umbra and lots of Invokers. There are a lot of things that deal a lot of damage out of seemingly nowhere, so it is important to maintain a high life total. An additional reason you have to start chumping earlier than you would normally is because drawing another spawnmaker means you can buy more turns from a ground guy but not an evasive creature if you didn’t save more life when you could have.
In case you didn’t already know, the Level Uppers are quite good. They let you spend a lot of mana without investing cards so you can play bigger and better spells without just doing nothing on your first few turns. They are early slots in your curve that are good late-game draws, and they have a lot of interesting interactions and things to play around or keep in mind. That’s my type of Magic card.
A lot of people say the format is pretty slow, which is true to a point. I think it just feels slower than it is after the past couple formats we’ve had. To be honest, I think there might be a sick RB aggro deck in Eldrazi Limited. There is a lot of direct damage and a few cheap guys. One experiment I tried to some decent success was using the Goblin Tunneler. Your Nantuko Husk vampire can get a lot of damage in. You can even just use it on a level-up creature and then level it up and get them for 3 or 4 you wouldn’t have otherwise. Then you use things like Essence Feed and Sins of the Past to finish them off. Essence Feed when you have a vampire crawling through a tunnel is 10 damage. That’s a lot.
I think Lust for War is the perfect card for this deck. It can take a certain type of guy out of commission, like a tapper or a non-wall blocker, and deal them 6 or 9 points. Even putting it on a huge guy that is attacking anyway is going to be a good amount of damage for the mana you’re putting in. It is a card that I think is being underrated by most of the set reviewers, and will actually turn out to be quite good in the right kind of deck.
Another critter I put into tunnels was Kiln Fiend, which is a card that I would like to try in a UR deck with rebound spells. Particularly in a deck with Distortion Wake and Staggershock, complimented with Mnemonic Wall. This would be the best home for the extremely powerful Drake Umbra. Admittedly, it would be kind of a niche deck based on getting Kiln Fiends, but UR control with some walls and removal along with Mnemonic Wall and See Beyond to get ahead on cards is already a decent archetype, and this is just a possible spin on that type of deck that would allow for some combo-like kills.
The Eldrazi are being thought of in the wrong way by a lot of people. The dedicated “Eldrazi deck” is a pipe-dream. First, the odds of getting the right combination of removal, ramp effects, Eldrazi cards, and normal guys to not die is staggering. Then, even if you get the right mix by filling in things like Gigantomancer and the Green Invoker as extra “Eldrazi,” you have built a mana-ramp deck; the most inconsistent and least skill-rewarding archetype in the game. It’s a game-plan reliant on running good in multiple ways at once.
That line is going to make the ramp-lovers explode, but it is really true. I love ramp decks and have played them in the past. I even tested multiple of them for post Rise of Eldrazi Standard (which I will get to in a moment). The truth is that you are pushing your deck to the limits of the draws with which you can win. All land and no land draws happen to every deck, and there are the all removal (no pressure) draws that more aggressive strategies have to deal with. Control has a few weird draws of too many late-game cards (which is less common as they usually don’t play too many late-game effects) or not enough ways to hit land drops. Combo has its own set of mulligan rules entirely. But mana-ramp decks? You get the typical pitfalls as well as the all big-spells draw, the all mana-ramp draw, the “I’m not going to survive to cast these huge spells” draw, and all for the added benefit of being able to play something big and hoping they don’t have an answer.
That is not a recipe for success (successipe?).
“But AJ, Siege-Gang Commander and Avenger of Zendikar are amazing cards!” Not when you invest 4 cards into casting them, which is what Ramp decks do. A couple of accelerators early to get them out there, then some dead draws in more accelerators later on because you filled your deck with do-nothings in order to cast your Siege-Gang and Avenger faster. This is not how I want to be playing Magic.
But I digress, my original point was about the Eldrazi cards. Now, I have cast quite a few of these in my drafts so far, but I have done so in the context of actual Magic games. For example, I had a RB removal-heavy deck that dealt with all of their major threats, and that deck needed a big finisher. I had 2 Rapacious Ones, a 4Dread Drone, and 2 Cadaver Imp to get any of them back, all of which are quite good with the Eldrazi.
The key is that I would be playing all of those cards if I had no Eldrazi. They just made it so I could play a couple. I wasn’t trying to inch my way there by spending multiple cards and insisting on hitting a ton of land drops; I was just using the powerful finishers to utilize what my deck was already doing.
Brood Birthing is often a trap. If you use it to cast a spell, then you’re throwing a card away. If you use it to chump block, you played 1R, Gain 8 life. And what about the times where you don’t have a spawn? Awktown, USA.
Another thing is that just because a card costs a lot doesn’t make it good. I’m talking specifically about a certain 9 mana 7/7 with Annihilator 1. That is a lot of mana. If your argument is that you can sacrifice 4 tokens to cast it, my counterpoint would be that you could just sac 3 tokens and cast an 8/8 with Annihilator 2. Sacrificing 4 tokens is practically spending a card. You don’t get to count your spawnmakers as fractional card advantage if you blow all of that advantage on a 7/7 that eats a land and trades with a guy, or just rolls over to any removal spell, but more often than not just rots in your hand all game until he’s irrelevant anyway.
The Crusher costs less and does more, and just about every other Eldrazi has some ability that makes it worthwhile. That guy does not, so please don’t feel obligated to play him because of his race. That’s profiling. It’s 2010. You should know better.
Let’s talk Constructed. I have been in the brew-house ever since the prerelease and have eliminated some possibilities. I tried some pretty out-there stuff and it was a lot of fun, but nothing really panned out particularly well. I’m going to talk about some of the concepts I tried out. As many times as it has been said, it is worth repeating: For every good idea, there are at least 50 failed attempts, and you never know what is going to work, so you just have to try everything.
The first deck I tried was Warp World with the new spawnmakers and rampers. It was horribly inconsistent in more ways than one. If you didn’t draw ramp, you were too slow. If you didn’t draw removal, you were going to lose to aggro. If you didn’t draw Warp World, you were going to lose to pretty much everything. It was fun when it worked, but that wasn’t too often. I did notice that getting to 7 mana was pretty easy, but even then it was often without a lot of permanents to fully abuse Warp World.
That led me to a Vicious Shadows brew. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait.
This deck used a lot of the same ramp cards and aimed to get Vicious Shadows out there quickly, and sacrifice spawn tokens in their draw step to dome them out with the help of Howling Mine to fuel your hand and increase your Sudden Impacts. It was a cool idea, and was decent when it drew Vicious Shadows, but didn’t get the nuts as often as I’d be happy with. I thought about adding Black for Liliana Vess and Inquisition/Duress in the sideboard, but the mana got messy and I had to play more and more Enters the Battlefield Tapped lands, which is the opposite of what the deck wanted to do. Here’s the basic shell I was trying out, maybe you can make it work better than I could:
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Overgrown Battlement
4 Noble Hierarch/Birds of Paradise
3 Kozelik’s Predator
4 Emrakul’s Hatcher
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Vicious Shadows
4 Garruk Wildspeaker
4 Howling Mine
2 Font of Mythos
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Scalding Tarn
4 Rootbound Crag
3 Mountain
7 Forest
The idea is that if you get Shadows out fast enough it doesn’t matter if they have Wrath of God (Day of Judgment… I’m never going to get used to that) because they will just die if they cast it. Even if they get it off before you cast Shadows, you can let them Wrath and then cast a Hatcher and they better have another Wrath or Shadows is coming down. Overgrown Battlement is a nice one as it is great to get you to where you need to be in both time and mana, and drawing two can make a lot of both of those. Lotus Cobra is just the most explosive mana accelerator ever.
Noble Hierarch/Birds of Paradise plays into Wrath more, and could easily be Rampant Growth since getting to 4 [mana] on [turn] 3 and 5 on 4 are the important spots. They just make your best draws more explosive. It is pretty cool to go turn 2 Lotus Cobra, turn 3 Fetchland, Rampant Growth, Garruk though. You could try to jam some man-lands in there, which would greatly help your post-board game-plan. It was just frustrating to stunt your development early, but that problem is lessened if you cut the one-drop mana guy. I was thinking something techy like sideboarding Overruns, taking out the Howling Mines, and just beating them down, making their Celestial Purges and Kor Sanctifiers really bad.*
Borderland Ranger/Pilgrim’s Eye is another card that might warrant a slot, but without actually accelerating you, it’s hard to justify finding the room for it. The deck is still Absurdly-with-a-capital-A vulnerable to Flashfreeze. If you played Borderland Ranger/Pilgrim’s Eye and Birds of Paradise over Noble Hierarch, you could jam a couple of Swamps and play Inquisition of Kozelik and/or Duress in the sideboard.
* After playing in the StarCityGames.com Standard Open in Atlanta, I played against a player with a lot of spawnmakers and he used Coat of Arms (the spawnmakers and spawn all have type-Eldrazi) and Eldrazi Monument (what it was actually “meant” for), and those seem like a sicko plan that is much better than my Overrun idea. It makes their Kor Sanctifiers better, but you hit them for so much in that turn and then they tap low on their next turn to deal with it. Imagine if you have a second Monument, or if your first one was a Coat of Arms and you had 5 guys. All of that, and it’s not Flashfreezable. Sexy.
We were really deep in the brew-house, and when you’re that deep, things start to get a little dark. I even tried a midrange Enchantress deck with Kor Spiritdancer and Mesa Enchantress. Yeah.
One of the decks that showed the most promise was the GW Vengevine deck. Chapin already discussed this archetype a bit, and I’m sure you’ve heard people talking about the possibilities so I’ll just touch on it. Here was my take, largely under-tested:
4 Wall of Omens
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Vengevine
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Kor Skyfisher
2 Stoneforge Mystic
1 Scute Mob
1 Birds of Paradise
1 Student of Warfare
1 Behemoth Sledge
1 Basilisk Collar
2 Path to Exile
1 Oblivion Ring
2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
2 Gideon Jura
4 Stirring Wildwood
4 Sunpetal Grove
1 Tectonic Edge
1 Sejiri Steppe
Basic Lands
The Planeswalkers are too powerful not to play despite their non-synergy with Vengevine. You have enough ways to trigger it with lots of cheap guys (some of whom cantrip), Rangers, and Skyfishers. I think the second piece of equipment is necessary. The deck has so much attrition and late-game that it just needs to live to a gamestate where you can grind them out. Gideon making creatures attack into a Knight of the Reliquary or whatever, while your Wall of Omens soaks up the rest of the attackers, is pretty sweet. The sideboard probably has a Kor Firewalker, some Celestial Purges, a couple more Oblivion Rings, and maybe some Dauntless Escorts.
This is a good deck for Borderland Ranger if you are interested in that card. You can play it turn 2 pretty easily and it makes sure you get to four mana to Vengevine, Ranger, or Elspeth on time (and by “on time” I of course mean “early”). It’s nice to have the extra card to pitch to Blightning while advancing your board as well. Then it isn’t just a dud late because it still carries equipment, and the land drop helps you with Scute Mob and playing multiple guys a turn to trigger Vengevine when they are expensive guys. That’s not to mention it helps you activate manlands, plus finding more White for Student of Warfare. It’s also a fine card to return with Kor Skyfisher. Basically, it should be in the deck. I just don’t know what to cut. Without having played the deck, I think the Path to Exiles can go. It might also be right to cut the Stoneforge Mystic package altogether and just jam some Baneslayers.
Next week I will be talking about my Time Walk deck, which is the best deck to come out of this brainstorming session. One last joke-deck that could spark some inspiration in someone out there. It actually showed a lot of promise but was a little too slow. It had some quick draws, and it was consistently doing SOMETHING, but it wasn’t consistently doing something quickly. Ponder may help, but there are no slots. Behold:
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Baneslayer Angel
4 Knight of the Reliquary
3 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Emrakul, The Eons Torn
4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 See Beyond
2 Garruk Wildspeaker
1 Stirring Wildwood
1 Celestial Colonnade
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Verdant Catacombs
7 Forest
2 Island
1 Plains
4 Halimir Depths
1 Khalni Garden
1 Sejiri Steppe
Somebody smarter than me can figure out that manabase. You need G on turn one, 2UU , and 3WW while having the Knight of the Reliquary targets in manlands and Steppe and Garden, the Halimir Depths, enough fetches for Jace and Depths and Knight’s stats, and enough Forests and Plains to sacrifice to Knight of the Reliquary as well as not blanking fetches late game. You might want a Blue fetch so you can give Knight an extra +1/+1 when you need him to find a second Blue for you. I just don’t know what to cut. Probably a Catacombs. Anyway, it’s like a normal Junk-esque Bant deck, but it can cheat fatties into play. See Beyond puts fatties back in your deck, helps when you’re flooded, puts Knight of the Reliquary targets back in the deck, puts Basics back in your deck to turn on fetchlands, and gets rid of redundant Planeswalkers. A draw spell that can help you make land drops or help you keep from flooding for so cheap is invaluable, and the fact that you have 4 cards in your deck that you very rarely want in your hand, the drawback is often a bonus and otherwise irrelevant.
You use Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Halimir Depths (or Knight to get the latter) to make sure your Polymorphs hit well. Sometimes you can just blind it and hope, and sometimes you can put it back with See Beyond if you give up on trying to use it. I bet there will be somebody somewhere that has to use it to kill an opposing Baneslayer or Iona on White and hoping they hit a Wall of Omens or Knight of the White Orchid.
Baneslayer Angel is one of the best fatties to cheat into play, and the most effective way to cheat her into play is by not cheating at all and paying full price. Wizards did the ‘cheating’ for you on that one.
With a couple of Lotus Cobra and some fetches, maybe a Knight of the Reliquary or a Garruk Wildspeaker for help, you can actually cast the Iona sometimes as well.
The sideboard would have some counterspells in Negate and maybe Spell Pierce. Then the typical Flashfreezes and Celestial Purges most likely. Wall of Omens gets the nod for being insane against the aggressive decks and Jund, and only costing one colored mana, which is a lot easier to do than Kor Firewalker’s restrictive cost. It’s possible that Spreading Seas and 1 Tectonic Edge is a better plan against Jund than Flashfreezes and Celestial Purges. Wall of Omens comes in either way.
That’s enough for this week. Hopefully you got some ideas or were able to discard some you already had. Next week I will be talking about the new Standard format (clue: Wall of Omens is format-defining) and talk about the deck I played at the StarCityGames.com Atlanta Standard Open event (clue: It played 4 Wall of Omens).