{From Right Field is a column for Magic players on a budget or players who don’t want to play netdecks. The decks are designed to let the budget-conscious player be competitive in local, Saturday tournaments. They are not decks that will qualify a player for The Pro Tour. As such, the decks written about in this column are, almost by necessity, rogue decks. The author tries to limit the number of non-land rares as a way to limit the cost of the decks. When they do contain rares, those cards will either be cheap rares or staples of which new players should be trying to collect a set of four, such as Dark Confidant, Birds of Paradise, or Wrath of God. The decks are also tested by the author, who isn’t very good at playing Magic. He will never claim that a deck has an 85% winning percentage against the entire field. He will also let you know when the decks are just plain lousy. Readers should never consider these decks "set in stone" or "done." If you think you can change some cards to make them better, well, you probably can, and the author encourages you to do so.}
* I’m pulling for Chris Sligh in the American Idol competition. Not only does he have a great voice, but we look a lot alike. Besides, his last name is Sligh. How can Magic players not root for a guy named Sligh?
* I know that I’m tilting at windmills with this one, kinda like I’m hoping that Justin Timberlake can settle on just one woman among Cameron Diaz, Scarlett Johanson, and Jessica Biel. It’s been a while since I said this, but it bears repeating. People, we simply must stop equating “more” and “most” with “better” and “best.” I weigh more than Monica Keena, so I must be better looking. Now, I think all but the most stubborn people and those with incredibly weird tastes would agree that that statement just isn’t true. Yet, when it comes to tourney-winning Magic decks, the Magic community seems to believe that more equals better. If a deck has the most wins over any period, it must be better than ones that don’t. Take a look at Frank Karsten’s column from Valentine’s Day. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m picking on Frank. Lord knows he’s about sixteen tons better than me. He just writes a very visible column and one with lots of data on decks’ wins and Top 8 finishes.
The only problem with this type of analysis is that people misunderstand the significance of the data, and start talking about which decks are the “best” or “worst” or “aren’t any good anymore.” Look, a deck winning more tourneys doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily better than ones winning less. Don’t get me wrong. Large numbers of wins are a nice indicator of a deck’s “goodness,” but the relative numbers don’t give you the relative “goodness” of decks. Sometimes, the absolute number of wins is a mere function of how many people are playing it. The more that play it, the more likely it is to win something.
Moreover, the Internet, and especially sites like StarCityGames.com and the official site, have a power to warp the metagame. It’s funny to see Frank’s column with his deck listings and exclamation points beside some decks that have made huge gains in wins. “Wow! A deck that I wrote about two weeks ago on the official site made a big gain in wins last week!! That’s incredible!!!”
Eh. Not really. When a player with a Pro Tour pedigree writes about a deck on the most-read Magic site on the internet, that deck’s bound to be played more the next week. More play = more wins. Pretty simple. And it has nothing to do with whether the deck is “better” than ones that won less than it did. More wins just means that it won more.
If you want to know about the relative “goodness” of decks, well, no one has the time for that. It would require each deck being played against each other deck thousands of times by players of equal skill or, better yet, in a manner that allowed for perfect plays each time. Not gonna happen. Sorry.
All I’m ranting about here is that you don’t get caught up mistaking “more wins” for a “better deck.”
* Some people have said that I’m against change. I hate clichés like Britney Spears hates her new haircut. One of my least favorite clichés is “Change is good.” Gawd, how I hate the drones and clones who spout that in the business world. Outside of the business world, that cliché might be even worse.
Lemme explain something to you. Change isn’t necessarily good. I had an uncle who lost an arm in a milling accident. That was a change for him. He went from two arms to one. I dare you to tell him “Change is good!” He’ll use his one good arm to beat you to death with an axe head.
No, change isn’t good. Good change is good. Bad change is bad.
I have nothing against Wizards pushing the boundaries of Magic design. In fact, if it’s done well, I like it a lot. Ravnica Block was done well. It was fresh. That freshness is what makes the game grow almost like a living entity. However, the R&D folks have shown that they don’t really know how to gauge the power of a card or a mechanic. So, of course, I worry that this “cobblering of the color pie” (as I call it), if done badly, will hurt the game by making colors meaningless.
Right now, I feel that it’s being done badly. I don’t mean that it’s being done haphazardly. Presuming that what I’ve read on the official site is all true, they’ve put a lot of thought into this. As with my last point, we can’t confuse “a lot” with “good,” though. Clearly, the R&D folks wouldn’t have done what they did if they didn’t think it was good. (Unless they got so far down the pike that there wasn’t time to turn back.) However, believing that what you’re doing is good and / or right is not the same as what you’re doing actually being good and / or right.
* What do I see as the solution to this situation? Actually, it’s not too tough. If you’re going to move a mechanic into a color, you just need to balance the color pie by making sure that the color gaining something loses another something just as powerful. For example, let’s say that you wanted to start giving Red good efficient countermagic. Maybe spells like Delete (Instant, 1RR, Counter target spell), Mana Tax (Instant, 1R, Counter target spell unless its controller pays 3), and Sweat (Instant, 2RR, Counter target spell and untap up to four lands). All of a sudden, Red is the color of fast mana, direct damage, and efficient countermagic.
Balance makes the game fun for everyone.
Give Red a lot of countermagic; take something else away.
Right now, that give-and-take isn’t being done. Blue has countermagic and instant-timed discard now. What?!? Ridiculous.
“People cried that the sky was falling when Psionic Blast was reprinted, and it’s come to nothing.”
I don’t like the “we could, but we won’t” argument. That’s the argument that lawyers use when they want judges to ignore the unconstitutionality of a law. They try to argue in Court that, “Yes, Your Honor, we could use the law in that illegal way, but we won’t. We promise.” Well, if you could, then that’s all that matters. It’s not whether you would or not. It’s whether it could be done.
You start down the slope of giving direct damage back to Blue or giving it instant-timed discard, and you might not come back up.
Which wouldn’t be A Bad Thing if Blue also lost something of equal value.
Trouble is, it didn’t.
WotC has now set this precedent that Blue could get instant-timed direct damage, countermagic, and Instant-timed discard. We won’t even talk about the st00p1d creatures like Teferi. “Well, we could do that a lot more for Blue, but we won’t.”
Sure thing. I trust you.
* Apparently, I alarmed a lot of faithful readers a couple of weeks ago with my vigorous rant on bad behavior. Let me assure you that I won’t rant and rave all of the time. I have a lot of fun both writing and playing. I have different voices, though. Not all of them are happy and sweet. Sometimes, I get worked up. Luanne’s mellowed me out a lot in the past four years, but I still need to let my Inner Jerk free once in a while. I simply plan on being more true to all of those different voices instead of bottling up the ones that call ‘em like they see ‘em. Many times – many, many times – in the past couple of years, I had a column going one way, and I toned it down for no reason other than “I’ve been writing a lot more mellow-ly lately. I shouldn’t be so harsh.” If you only knew how many of my columns in the past couple of years bored me, you’d probably be shocked. A lot of people presume that writers (or any creators, really) just think that everything they produce smells like vanilla and roses.
Not me. I hate more of my stuff than I like. And Lord knows that I’m never satisfied with a deck. Of course, I rarely win anything. So not being satisfied with my decks should go without saying.
Still and all, I’m an ass. I know it, and I’m not going to fight it anymore. I guess that’s one of those freedoms that comes with age. I don’t hold my tongue like I used to. It’s not that I can’t. It’s that I realize that, regardless of Political Correctness, sometimes, it really is best to tell the emperor that he’s not wearing any clothes. I think that our own Rivien Swanson said it best:
"Way too many wankers are in the world, and it’s time someone took a stand against them. All this soft-spined, touchy-feely political correctness BS is breeding them like wildfire because we’re all too afraid of hurting their feelings to put them in their place.
"I fully stand behind Chris in this; don’t put up with wankers. Show them that people who act like that are not accepted in our society – much less the cushy lives they do tend to lead. The Good Guy has been coming in last for far too long."
My wife likes to say that I should “accept it, and move on.” Sorry, darling. I love you, but I don’t buy that philosophy. I have another one, and it goes like this:
The Meaning of Life According to Romeo
Our purpose here is to leave this world a better place than it was when we came into it.
Accepting that crap is crap and moving on doesn’t help make the world a better place. I do accept the things that I can’t change, but I will rail like hell against those things that I might have the power to affect.
However, a complete “accept it, and move on” attitude is defeatist. I intend to go down fighting.
* One of the things that I realize that I’m not going to change, though, is the cards that Wizards prints. Regardless of the lip service that some of the “official” writers might put in their columns, Wizards doesn’t listen to what cards we like and what we don’t. At least, they don’t listen to those of us that they don’t meet on the Pro Tour. What Wizards and Hasbro look at are sales. From what I gather, Time Spiral and Planar Chaos are selling quite well. Not as well as Ravnica and Guildpact, but, then again, neither Time Spiral nor Planar Chaos contains rare dual lands.
Okay, I guess I could try to change the cards they print. If they’re so reliant on sales figures to tell them if they’re doing well or not, I could suggest a boycott of Magic. Which would be supremely stupid of me. StarCityGames.com is in the business of selling Magic cards (among other things). I write for StarCityGames.com. I also play the game. Talk about being between Iraq and a hard place, huh?
So, I’m going to shut up now about how I don’t like what they’re doing with the color pie. I’m just going to play with whatever cards they give me. What else can I do? Besides, I’m tired of raging against the machine with no results. I need to save my energy for things that I really can help change.
* Other people worried that I was abandoning decks altogether. Never fear, rocks and rockettes. I write about Magic: The Card Game. I will be talking about decks as long as I’m invited to keep writing about them, especially when I get an interesting challenge. It doesn’t get much more interesting than this.
I was online a few weeks ago, and one of my MTGO buddies hunted me down.
“People hate countermagic in the Casual Room, don’t they?” he said.
“Pretty much.”
“I love Blue, though. And Black. How can I play Blue and Black but not run countermagic?” he asked.
“Sounds like a challenge to me!” I responded.
“I don’t think you can make a decent Blue-based deck without any countermagic in it,” he replied
“I accept your challenge!”
“Oh, and no Teferi,” he added.
“D’oh!”
That made sense, though. Teferi is simply broken. People will say that it’s not, relying on the fact that not every single deck in existence uses it. That’s just another fallacy to which we’ve fallen prey. A card can be broken without everyone using it. It’s not a question of how many decks use it. It’s a question of what the card does. By preventing your opponent from responding with spells and by allowing you to play any and all creatures you have with Instant timing, Teferi breaks some fundamental rules so utterly that they become shattered.
Don’t misunderstand me. I love the card. Love love love love love the card. Just not in the Casual Decks room.
I had to ask myself: other than countering stuff, what does Blue do well? What does it do when it teams up with Black? Obviously, Blue bounces stuff, it draws cards, and it teams up with Black for some very nice combination effects. Right now, my two favorite ways to work Black and Blue together are Madness and instant-timed discard.
Yes, even though Blue shouldn’t get it. Like I said last week with Brute Force: don’t like; but I’ll use it while I got it.
I’m not going through the evolution of this deck. What’s below is version six. At various times, this had Dimir Infiltrator, Confiscate, Sage of Epityr, and Nether Traitor in it. Slowly, I whittled down the cards. I was especially pleased that I got to use Blizzard Specter with Dimir Cutpurse.
Creatures (18)
Lands (23)
Spells (19)
The best play with this deck is getting your opponent’s hand empty and then hitting them with both Blizzard Specter and Dimir Cutpurse during one combat phase. Make sure that you put the Cutpurse’s triggered ability on the stack first so that it will go off last. Then, choose “return a permanent” for the Blizzard Specter. What you end up doing, then, is sending back some permanent and making them discard it. In other words, except for a great topdeck, they’re in big trouble.
Of course, a creature that could block either one of those guys is going to put a crimp in the plan. Fortunately, you’ll be drawing cards like a fiend with the Cutpurse and Repeal. In addition, the Looter and Courier will end up being card advantage when you ditch a Madness card.
Wrath of God and Damnation will also be problems. Just don’t overextend. Your hand should stay fairly full. In fact, I can’t tell you – because the government says I can’t or the terrorists might win – how many times my hand has been so full that I’ve had to discard down to seven at the end of my turn.
Why has this been working so well? Apparently, it’s because every non-land card except for the Dimir Signets have a potential for generating card advantage.
* Are you wondering where the Planar Chaos cards are? I looked at some. They just didn’t excite me in this deck. Wistful Thinking almost made the cut. Man, there’s nothing as good as pitching cards for Madness effects off of that thing. Trouble is, even with Madness, there’s often still a card disadvantage. Sure, you could point it at your opponent…. it just never worked out well like that.
A Black card was on the team until the final cut. That card: Big Game Hunter. BGH had only one flaw. It didn’t kill Teferi. Ribbons of Night does, though. In went the Ribbons. (On the other hand, if you’re really and truly worried about Teferi, run Sudden Death over Ribbons. It doesn’t draw a card, but Teferi will indeed die thanks to the Split Second ability on Sudden Death.)
And that’s how Madhouse ended up looking like it does.
* By the way, Madness doesn’t work with Teferi on board. Don’t waste Madness spells like that. Kill Teferi. Then, try Madness tricks.
* Have I mentioned that I hate Teferi?
* I was quite proud of the forum hounds regarding the aforementioned column. We ended up with seven pages of comments, and not one reference to Hitler. I have a friend who runs a forum on Ford Thunderbirds, and his theory is that any discussion on internet message boards that goes on for more than a couple of pages will inevitably spiral down into a discussion about – or accusations of people being like – Hitler. So far *crosses fingers* not one mention of Hitler.
* So, where are all of those Planar Chaos cards? How about in a Black/White Sliver deck. Necrotic Sliver is just too versatile to pass up, and it’s an uncommon. Dear Gawd, it makes me sweat like a third-grader trying out to be an altar boy. All of my Slivers become Vindicates? No, wait. It’s better than that. They become Instant-timed Vindicates! Tell me how that’s bad?
Well, we need other Slivers to really exploit the ability. Okay, so you don’t truly need any others. Necrotic Sliver alone means that the deck has four Vindicates-on-sticks. More Slivers, though, means more Vindicates-on-sticks. Here’s a deck I’m working on. I haven’t tested it vigorously yet, but I’m on the verge:
Creatures (20)
Lands (24)
Spells (16)
With Arenas and Grave Pacts going for as little as six bucks each and Murray (a.k.a. Skeletal Vampire) at two-fifty each, the non-land rares in this deck can be had for under sixty bucks. If you want to save money on the Murrays, try Nantuko Husk. As for the Arenas, heck, Phyrexian Gargantua can draw cards while Smallpox is a great card advantage engine in this deck.
Those aren’t perfect changes, of course. Skeletal Vampire and his friends fly; Nantuko Husk does not. Phyrexian Arena gives you an extra card every turn; the Gargantua gives you two and does it one time only. Still, they are cards to think about and / or test and / or use unless and until you decide to get / use the others.
However, you want Grave Pact in here in the worst possible way. I can’t stress that enough. If you want to play a deck like this and have none of the non-land rares, get Grave Pacts first. The synergy with the Slivers, especially Necrotic Sliver, is spine-tingling. You sacrifice a Sliver to destroy a land or other non-creature permanent (not a creature; I’ll explain later). The sacrificing of your Sliver triggers the Grave Pact. That means that the other guy loses a non-creature permanent to the Necrotic Sliver’s ability and a creature to the Grave Pact. That, of course, is why you don’t want to use the Necrotic Sliver’s ability on a creature if Grave Pact is out. With the Pact triggering anyway, your opponent will just sacrifice the creature you had targeting with the Sliver’s ability. Get two-for-one whenever you can.
* Grave Pact is almost overpowered in today’s metagame. Against decks that don’t run many creatures, decks like Dralnu du Louvre, Grave Pact ruins their game completely. Against aggro decks, it utterly wrecks combat math. As far as my slight testing has shown, only a deck like Boros Deck Wins really has an easy time with this deck. It can match creatures while sending burn to your head. Gruul Beats is close, but not as close as BDW.
* Chill to the Bone might also become Faith’s Fetters. I like the Fetters better depending on which way the wind is blowing, activated-abilities-wise.
* Sorry. Still no Shaft, a.k.a. Damnation, in my decks. While I can’t stress enough that players who gravitate toward Black need to be saving up to buy this card, it’s too expensive for me to start suggesting for budget players’ decks. I plan on approaching Damnation the same way that I did with the Ravnica Block rare dual lands. Once the next set has come out, I’ll start incorporating Shaft into decks. If you’re serious about playing Black, that should give you plenty of time to get four of those. That’s just one per month or about $5.75 per week. All you have to do is give up buying a pack and a half of Magic cards per week. Start saving now! Collect all four!
* I’ve started on my first Planar Chaos Precon Decon, and it’s not for Rituals of Rebirth. – You’d think the deck that contains Teneb, the Harvester, would be the one I’d work on first. I thought it would be, too. When I saw the decklist for Endless March, what with the Stonecloakers and Calciderms and Whitemane Lions, I knew I had to work on it first. I haven’t done much with it yet, but I can tell you this. Stonecloaker is as good as I thought it would be. So far, it ruined a Dredge deck and even a Dralnu deck (though, I couldn’t play the ‘Cloaker at instant-timing). Man, do I like that card.
That’s gonna have to be all for this week. It’s not that I don’t have more issues to address. Boy, do I have unresolved issues! However, Craig shouldn’t have to edit a Rizzo-length article unless it’s written by Rizzo. So, I am out like Reno 911!‘s Super Terry.
Chris Romeo
FromRightField-at-Comcast-dot-net