Some things in life feel amazing. When, for example, at the terminus of your relationship, the girl you’ve been hooking up with for the last few weeks actually remembers to return the five million pairs of gym shorts and cheap undershirts she’s ganked from you, it is as if you’re lounging in a bathrobe catching suggestive glances from Heidi Klum while sipping Guinness out of a mug made from solid gold.
Other times, however, the exhilaration need not be quite so dynamic. Sometimes you windmill slam Rorix off the topdeck with no other outs, and flap your imaginary wings as the Slide player realizes he can only deal that four points of damage. Sometimes you shotgun a paper fifteen minutes before class and turn the other cheek to the “C-“ you know you’re fixing to get slapped with, only to stare in awe at the immortal words, “Class Cancelled. Jury Duty. Paper Due Friday.” And sometimes, just sometimes, the Red Sox win the World Series.
All of that pales in comparison to my joy at writing again.
Oh, you poor faceless masses. RFeldman released a beast when he suggested I get back to the keyboard. Pray nothing devilish happens, my pretties! Bwah hah hah! Ha.
I’d put an asterisk there if I was The Ferrett, addressing the issue of Why All Evil Villains Have Evil Laughs. I mean, seriously, does anyone in the real world actually do that? Does Saddam Hussein cackle every day after his morning coffee just to hear the echoes of his illustrious voice? I assume not, since that might bother the other prisoners, but one never knows.
But I am not TF, and as a new author I don’t know how to format Asterisks so as to avoid Getting Killed By Our Esteemed Editor. So, good ladies and gentlemen, that will wait for another day.
I am writing this article for two primary reasons: Number one is obviously to namedrop as flagrantly and savagely as is humanly possible.
Pro Tour Gerry Thompson. Wow, that feels good.
I can’t punctuate my articles with asides of Aten-esque self-loathing like the champ himself, so I’ll have to settle for doing it less subtly. I am, after all, the guy who named my Pro Tour Atlanta team after Mark Zadjner despite having spoken to the man exactly once: when he was busy doing the Dance of Shadows on the sidelines as my team lucksacked a victory over Hoaen, Gomersall, and Gerard at the Grand Prix: Chicago PTQ. So you’ll have to bear with me on that. Hopefully I’ll refine my style as I progress, and you won’t cringe Pavlov-style whenever I precede a sentence, “So I was talking to suchandsuch…”
The second (and more pressing) reason is to help people learn how to play the CAL deck, since it is actually the stone nuts.
Seriously, here’s why you should listen to me — because, of course, you should. I’ve played at three Pro Tours, day-2-ing one (yippee skippy), and have qualified for five, but that literally does not matter at all because the PTQ environment is both random and sporadic. I could go into a lengthy aside about the obvious faults in the current PTQ system, but suffice to say that somehow players like Derrick Sheets and Richard Feldman (up until recently) have never played at the pro level. That is another rant for another day.
What is relevant, however, is that I have playtested the Extended format like it is going out of style.
Now by that, I don’t mean simply playing games. I wrote some articles on another site back in the day about playtesting, and I stand by the principles contained therein even though many of the specific statements I made reflect my immaturity at that point in my life.
You have to understand that the goal of playtesting is to determine why certain decks have strategic advantages over other decks, and exactly what plan you need to employ with those decks in order to win games. The consequence of analyzing playtesting sessions this way is that you begin got fundamentally understand the format. Thus, rather than reveling in the irrelevant numbers or senseless data (matchup win-percentages) that authors inexplicably spew out to give weight to their positions, you can arrive at meaningful conclusions such as “Psychatog has strategic advantage over Boros Deck Wins because its cheap counterspells and removal allow it to keep tempo with its opposition before dropping an insurmountable threat that the Boros Deck is not equipped to handle.”
These are the types of conclusions that I arrived at over the course of my hundreds of pre-and-post-board games against the Extended gauntlet with my version of the CAL deck.
I also read every single CAL feature match from the last two weeks’ coverage. That’s how, for example, I learned to side out Burning Wish against Psychatog. The only reason I mention that is because, if you play this deck at a PTQ, you ought to do the exact same thing. Olivier Ruel is, I promise you, better than every single player reading this article right now. (He’s certainly better than the guy writing it.) If he does something, there is probably a good reason behind it.
Before I start talking about how to play the deck, however, let me provide you with the list I have been using in testing—the same deck that I took to a second-place finish (after a grueling six-hour top 8) at the recent Memphis PTQ before losing an unwinnable matchup in the finals to Balancing Tings:
CAL is a good deck for good players. Perhaps nothing about playing this deck is more important than the preceding sentence. If you are terrible — and I believe it was Andy Stokinger who reminded us that everyone is terrible — then you have no business playing this deck. More importantly, even if you don’t think you’re terrible, you probably are anyway. If you sit down and say, “I want to play CAL,” you are doing so with the realization that playing the wrong land on turn 1 can (and will) cost you the match. You understand that you have neither a faster clock nor a more impregnable engine than the other decks in the format. You understand that the majority of your matchups will hinge upon finding and resolving a single spell before your window of opportunity runs out, so every single card you can draw, every single turn you can squeeze out of your twenty-point life total before you die, is absolutely essential.
If you cycle one too few lands, if you dredge one turn too early, if you dredge one turn too late, if you name one card improperly on a Cabal Therapy, if you tap one too many sources of red or black or white or green mana at the wrong time, you will lose the game. You do not have a nice convenient buffer zone of time where the brokenness of your deck will power you through any and all adverse situations.
Make no mistake about it—the deck is in fact broken beyond belief. But it is not Disciple-Skullclamp-Affinity broken in that you can put out your hand and bash for twenty before the opponent has any idea what is going on.
Here is why you play CAL: you want to have as many options as possible, while still disrupting the opponent enough to win via the consistency and power of your engine. Notice I said earlier that your engine wasn’t in and of itself more broken than anything the other decks had access to. Psychatog has Life from the Loam, and theirs is actually better than yours because of Cephalid Coliseum.
The difference is that they have to Gifts Ungiven for their one single copy. You, on the other hand, get to play seven. Your entire deck revolves around breaking that engine in half, and every card in the deck moves you closer towards that goal. You have to remember to use that synergy to your advantage, because it, along with the free wins you get by using Solitary Confinement against decks that are unprepared, will be what wins you games.
Finally, I want to explain a couple of the card choices in the deck. Normally, when people do card-by-card analyses of their decklists I actually transform into Jaws, swim up to their houses, and devour them whole like minnows (or whatever it is that sharks generally eat) because nobody wants to know why Wooded Foothills is in the Red/Green deck. In this case, however, I feel like a couple of cards do need explaining.
Genesis:
Olivier wasn’t playing this guy. If you’re as good as he is, you probably don’t need it, because it doesn’t tend to win you games that you’d otherwise lose. It lets you infinitely recur threats against Psychatog… But you usually beat them anyway, and if you play out your test spells intelligently they don’t have enough countermagic to stop you.
I, however, know the limits of my own ability, and realize that over the course of the ten-plus rounds of a PTQ, I will probably make more than my fair share of mistakes. This guy acts as a buffer for a screw-up or two.
He also protects against random situations that you can’t foresee happening. For example, if Affinity flips Erayo, Soratami Ascendant against you, it’s very hard to win, even with Confinement out. It’s still possible, but you have to have seven lands out, cast Life from the Loam three times per turn every other turn, and spend the turn you aren’t casting it cycling lands at your opponent’s end step and dredging it back. I, for one, didn’t understand that until about four games into testing. If those test games had been a PTQ, I would have lost the match.
With Genesis, however, you just sit behind Solitary Confinement, discard Genesis, get him back, and win the match. Having the Genesis/Confinement engine to fall back on prevents you from losing games due to situations you haven’t thought about — and in a PTQ environment, that is more than worth a single slot in the deck to me.
Svogthos, the Restless Tomb:
Unlike Genesis, whose inclusion appears to be obvious at first glance, it seems like people weren’t playing this guy because they simply hadn’t thought about him. Sometimes you need to win the game without resolving a single spell (against a grip full of countermagic, for example), or with your Genesis/Seismic Assault Cranial Extracted away. This guy can’t be Extracted, and he tends to be a huge beast. He is also another huge dork to make the Pachyderm Plan even more amazing after sideboard.
At the recent PTQ, this guy won me at least two matches. People also forget about him all of the time and swing into your 7/7 as if he was a Cloud of Faeries. Keep him sandwiched between a Swamp and an Overgrown Tomb, and much like the Shinka/Eiganjo in Red Deck, you can mise free wins off of awful players.
Incidentally, before people ignite their fair share of fireworks on the boards: I do not think every single PTQ player is completely and utterly terrible. The reason I keep mentioning how bad people are is not to say that, as a rule, nobody knows what they are doing. What I do want to emphasize, however, is that you have to look for ways to win with every single decision you make. You don’t lose anything by trying you make your opponent forget about your Svogthos, so why not do it?
Similarly, if you Millstone Cabal Therapies or Genesis off a Dredge, don’t announce them loudly so as to alert your opponent to a play he might potentially miss. Of course, if he asks what you Milled, tell him and show him the cards. But there is no need to hop on the table, sound the alarm, grab a megaphone, and scream at him how badly his hand is about to be wrecked by your Birds of Paradise.
As an example, I won the Quarterfinal round of this past PTQ by badly bluffing a Putrefy. I didn’t have the Putrefy, and my opponent had an unflipped Exalted Angel… So I cycled around six cards, and did over-the-top-bad-acting “OhMyGod”s and other frustrated-sounding exclamations, and then “suspiciously” kept three lands open after a Life from the Loam where I could have tried to cycle into a Chainer’s Edict. My opponent thought I was trying to bluff him into flipping Exalted Angel, and gave a knowing smirk when I suggested, “Take four?” and he said, “No thanks.” I drew the Putrefy around three turns later, smashed his Angel’s face into an ice-cream cone like Dane Cook, and won the game at eight or so life.
You have to play in a fashion that allows your opponent to make mistakes. Playing solid Magic does not necessarily win PTQs. Once you get to a certain level, everybody knows more or less what they are doing. You have to generate wins by actively trying to beat your opponent; you don’t just play out your cards and see what happens. Anticipate what they are thinking, react to their decisions, and pretty soon they’ll find themselves outmaneuvered both inside the game and out.
Oh, yeah, the third card: Haunting Echoes. This guy is how you win the Astral Slide matchups as well as the mirror. It’s also savage to bring in against Scepter-Chant or Psychatog, because it’s nearly always game if it resolves. Nobody expects it, either, which once again gives you an opportunity to outplay your opponent. If you know you’re going to win with Haunting Echoes, you place the appropriate value on Burning Wish and don’t fight as hard to try and stick a Seismic Assault. You also don’t make bonehead plays like Wishing for Hull Breach against an Overgrown Estate that shouldn’t matter because your long-term plan doesn’t involve winning with damage.
The bottom line is this: any time you have access to knowledge that your opponent doesn’t, you create an environment that is conducive to your winning the game.
Some General Notes:
You have got to understand that Life from the Loam does not always have to be an engine card. People dredge it back for no reason all of the time. Unless you need to make Svogthos bigger (or you need to Mill a Genesis at your end step so that you can get back something important during your upkeep, or you have to resolve a Cabal Therapy immediately), there is no reason to dredge back Life if you don’t want to (or can’t) cast it this turn. You want to be looking at as many cards as possible as quickly as possible. If you don’t have spare mana, it’s perfectly fine to cycle three lands, Life them back, cycle the lands, then use your next draw step to draw a card.
L4L is one of the most incredible engines ever printed, but if you’re just drawing cards at the expense of doing anything else, you’re probably going to lose!
Also, throw away hands that didn’t do anything. Eternal Witness, Birds of Paradise, Wooded Foothills, Forest, Swamp, Solitary Confinement, Sakura-Tribe Elder seems like a fine hand, but when you play it you realize that it doesn’t actually accomplish anything. Hands without disruption or without options in the form of cycling lands/Burning Wish/Dark Confidant need to be shipped back. You don’t win games by sitting down and developing your mana base.
Right. On to the matchups.
Psychatog/Dredgatog:
There is one thing and one thing only that you have to understand when playing this match: they are the aggressive deck in this matchup. If they do not get a Psychatog on the table within the first five turns of the game, you are going to win barring a completely abysmal draw on your part. This is because the very strategy of your deck circumvents what they are trying to do. They have sixty billion counterspells; you win with an uncounterable engine. They have creature removal; you don’t care about it at all. They have one (or, even better, zero) Life from the Loams; you have seven. But you can’t take advantage of that if you die to Psychatog first, or if you let them get Gifts online before your own engine kicks into gear.
What does this mean?
Never ever ever take a counterspell with a Duress/Cabal Therapy if you can get rid of Psychatog or Gifts Ungiven. You’ll deal with their countermagic later. If you can force through an early Seismic Assault off of a Duress/Therapy, by all means do it. But if you’re not fixing to cast Assault or Burning Wish for Echoes/Cranial Extraction, you really have no reason to go after their counterspells. Otherwise, just trade one-for-one with them via forcing them to kill Bob, making them counter Eternal Witness, and so forth, until you can Burning Wish for something broken or just win with Svogthos/Genesis. Obviously, you’ll go for Seismic Assault if you have it, but it’s really not your primary plan in this matchup.
Sideboarding:
-4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
-3 Solitary Confinement
-4 Burning Wish
-1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
+3 Loxodon Hierarch
+2 Putrefy
+1 Chainer’s Edict
+1 Cranial Extraction
+1 Haunting Echoes
+1 Duress
+1 Cabal Therapy
+1 Dark Confidant
+1 Life from the Loam
As a general rule, side out Elder whenever he can’t block and kill anything. You really don’t need the acceleration all that much, and you can get the colored mana if you really need it. That was the #1 mistake I saw on the weekend.
Also, even though I made it clear earlier when I said that Olivier sided out Burning Wish in the matchup, let me explain why that is what you need to do. You don’t have the time or the mana to Burning Wish for all your answers. Everything you replace Burning Wish with is a spell they have to counter or will inevitably necessitate an answer from them… And that’s all you want Burning Wish to do anyway. Why spend the two extra mana, especially if you’re staring down Dr. Teeth? It doesn’t matter if you have four Burning Wishes for Chainer’s Edict if they plop down a turn 3 Psychatog, because unless you can cast it right then and there — which you can’t do if they played first — none of those options matter. Having the one Edict in the deck that is actually useful under that circumstance is better than the four Burning Wishes that don’t accomplish anything at all. I know you can Wish for Edict there, pass the turn, and take one — but even then, you have to have a discard spell to force your Edict through on the next turn. You’re hardly ever that lucky.
Essentially, for game two, you’re a fairly solid beatdown deck that has about eight “I win!” spells. It’s very difficult for them to win when any spell that resolves essentially kills them. It’s like the Wakefield principle, except that instead of fatties you just dome them for twenty and say “Thanks, B” on your way out the door.
Scepter-Chant:
This matchup plays out a lot like Psychatog, except that they are much better against you because their plan doesn’t revolve around winning with a single guy. They also always have the threat of Scepter on Chant which you actually cannot beat game one (this is one reason why I agree with Ruel/Karsten that you have to maindeck Putrefy somewhere — but I have no idea where to get the space, so I haven’t put it in my deck yet). They have Decree of Justice, too, and a whole hell of a lot more card drawing. Finally, they can deal with Seismic Assault in the form of Cunning Wish for Disenchant.
The upside is that you don’t die quite as fast, so you have a little bit more time to work your engine. Do everything you can to keep them from drawing cards or Scepter-locking you. If they Isochron Scepter on Counterspell, that is perfectly fine with you.
Bob is your friend in this matchup, so try and use him well. You can also kick them in the ass with Svogthos if you’ve been doing your job right, since they have no good way to stop him. He ends the game pretty quickly. Also, beware of Brain Freeze on turns where you’re going crazy with Life from the Loam. As long as it doesn’t kill you it’s fine, but you don’t want to be caught with your pants down punting a game you couldn’t possibly lose otherwise.
Sideboarding is the same as against Psychatog, except that you keep Svogthos in, swap Chainer’s Edict with Hull Breach (since they can kill you with either Angel, Rage, or decree of Justice, so you don’t know if Edict will help you), and keep out the fourth Life from the Loam. The reasoning behind this is that they can’t really kill you before you get your engine online — and while multiple Lifes aren’t exactly a bad thing, you don’t take a Billy Jensen-style victory lap either.
Scepter-Chant also can’t randomly Coffin Purge your Lifes, so you don’t need the multiples as insurance. If people start playing Hinder or something, bringing the fourth one in is probably a good idea.
Red/Boros/Whatever Deck Wins:
The thing to realize about this deck is that they have no maindeck way of dealing with Solitary Confinement, so you want to try to dig to it as fast as possible. This means that especially in the early game, it’s fine to play out Dark Confidant. To be sure, you want to block with that guy as fast as you can, but don’t be paranoid about the damage. It’s not like you don’t play twenty-eight lands.
You are much, much more scared of the Land Destruction variant of the deck than the one that runs straight burn with somewhere around three Chars. Against the burn version, just cycle as many lands as possible and keep your life total high enough to maximize your chances of casting one of your six broken enchantments. There’s really not a lot to say about that version of the deck.
Against the land destruction variant, it’s oftentimes correct to keep several different sac-lands on the table until you absolutely need them. Use foresight. Obviously you don’t want to take unnecessary damage from a Ravnica dual land or anything like that, but at the same time you only play two sources of white mana in your entire deck. This means that if they blow up your Sacred Foundry, you’ll have to spend a turn Lifeing your lands back and won’t be able to cast a Solitary Confinement that you rip off the top.
One thing about this version that works to your advantage, though, is that since they can’t kill you as fast, it’s much, much easier to win with Seismic Assault straight-up. Make sure to pay attention to both of your life totals, though. All the time I see people fling lands at the opponent’s creatures when they ought to send them to the dome. Count how much damage you can do next turn given the lands in play, the ones in your hand, and the ones you’re getting back from the yard. If it’s necessary to play a cycling land the turn before so as to Life from the Loam an additional time, take that into consideration.
The vast majority of the time you cast Seismic Assault, you are usually able to win the next turn. Be mindful of that, and don’t get too excited about wiping the opponent’s side of the table. If you do, you can be sure he’ll rip Lightning Helix and Firebolt right off the top like a professional, and talk about how awful you are to all of his friends.
Sideboarding:
-2 Cabal Therapy
-3 Dark Confidant
-1 Genesis
+2 Putrefy
+3 Loxodon Hierarch
+1 Overgrown Estate.
Against the Burn version, I also side out Svogthos and the Duresses in favor of the three Cabal Therapies. The reasoning behind this is that Duress is better against LD because they have more redundancy. When you Cabal Therapy naming Molten Rain and they show you Pillage, you feel like the kid in kindergarten who has wet his britches in front of the entire class. Against the burn version, on the other hand, you can generally tell which direct damage spell they are holding by the way they play their cards. As a side bonus, you can also hit extremely annoying men like Goblin Legionnaire.
I am sure you won’t run into the Bonesplitter version of RDW in your metagame, but rest assured the deck actually quite savage. It makes you feel like much less of an ass when you rip the turn 8 Savannah Lions, but that is another article for another day. At any rate, if someone tries it, you sideboard as if you’re playing against the burn version of the deck.
Affinity:
This matchup is much less of a pain because of Genesis, as I described earlier. What can happen if you don’t run that guy is that you get them Confinement-locked, but they have a Pithing Needle or two on Seismic Assault and you deck yourself before you can get a Hull Breach and Witness it back to finally kill them.
As it is, the problem cards are Arcbound Ravager, Myr Enforcer, and Cranial Plating (obviously not in tandem). Resolving a Seismic Assault puts an end to two of these, but many times the Ravager is actually too big to kill. For this reason I tend to name Ravager off my Cabal Therapies, barring any additional information.
If they play Erayo, she obviously becomes your primary concern, but most people don’t run said chica so you’re usually safe there.
If they are bad, too, sometimes you can snag both a flipped Erayo and something juicy like a Pithing Needle with a single Hull Breach. At that point you feel exactly like you did when you were twelve and your Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition came around in the mail. You’d walk down to the mailbox and nab it before your parents came home, glancing suspiciously left and right in case, you know, people were spying on you and whatnot. The best part was that they had no idea what you were up to when they bought you the subscription, because come on — sports are harmless, right?
It’s the exact same thing here. Your opponent thinks, “Hey, Erayo is wrecking them right now as it is; why not lay down my Pithing Needle already even though he can’t kill me yet, just to put the nail in the coffin? What harm can it possibly do?” They you twofer them, tell them to their face how terrible they are at the game of Magic, and finally fling sixty-eight lands at their dome all at once because you don’t have to throw away a Cycling land and a Life from the Loam every turn.
Aside from that little detail, I find that Chainer’s Edict is usually a very effective Wish target. The flashback comes up surprisingly often, especially against a more-or-less clean board position. What you don’t want happening is that you Wish for the obvious call of Hull Breach, only to be staring into the juicy orange eyes of an Atog next turn. It all depends on which version of Affinity you are playing against.
You sideboard the same way you do against the burn version of Red Deck Wins. Beware of Cabal Therapy, Flaring Pain, and Naturalize/Disenchant depending on the version. Overgrown Estate isn’t quite as big a house here as it is against RDW, since they tend to kill you in one fell swoop, but it can still buy you a few turns. Your Loxodon Hierarchs will buy you enough time to Cranial Extract them for whatever answer to Confinement you believe that they have. Make sure to try and use Putrefy to gain tempo, too, whenever possible.
CAL Mirror:
There is an ideal situation for this matchup, and then there are the times when it gets messy. If you can Duress your opponent and it’s clear that he can’t Seismic Assault you out within the first few turns, what you want to do is Cranial Extraction all of his Burning Wishes. At that point you can just win with Confinement lock, since he has no way to kill your enchantment, and no way to get rid of your Genesis once you Dredge to it.
Meanwhile, if he tries the same bit on you, you can just Hull Breach his enchantment and either win with Haunting Echoes, Seismic Assault, or by decking them with Confinement/Genesis if you know they don’t have Genesis in their deck.
Of course, it’s not always that pretty. What usually ends up happening is that you destroy each other’s hand, and whoever has Dark Confidant on the table wins. This version of the deck, however, has tools that give it a bit of an advantage. Genesis helps you win wars of attrition, particularly with Cabal Therapy/Eternal Witness. Svogthos is a nice huge clock that they can’t deal with, and it also bites people in the ass because they don’t expect it. Lots of people commit the error of Cranial Extracting Seismic Assault against this build of the deck — which is just fantastic for you, because you can win handily without the Assault as mentioned before. Haunting Echoes is the trump in these situations.
Sideboarding:
I have seen many people do something like +3 Loxodon Hierarch, +2 Putrefy, +1 Dark Confidant, +1 Overgrown Estate, +2 Duress/Therapy with the Ruel list. I have no idea what they sideboard out, though, because that is a lot of cards. I myself tend to do something simple like:
+2 Putrefy
+1 Dark Confidant
+1 Duress
-1 Solitary Confinement
-3 Sakura-Tribe Elder.
I like as much mana acceleration as possible in the deck, hence the one Tribe-Elder left, just because of the aforementioned Ideal Burning Wish Sequence. If you can power out your mana, oftentimes you leave them with no chance. I’d leave in more Elders but there’s just not a whole lot to sideboard out.
I hate bringing in the elephants simply because lots of the time they are just guys. If they have their Seismic Assault plan going, they trump you. If they have out a Svogthos (now that the tech is out), they trump you. If they don’t want to worry about your man, they can just Therapy it, in which case they effectively trump you because they’re dealing with your threat at their own convenience. Even if you get something cute like Hierarch/Genesis, they can still win with Haunting Echoes and you just spent about fifty thousand mana doing nothing.
Also, because the man who matters is Dark Confidant, in all likelihood they’ll have gone for a Chainer’s Edict anyway and your pachyderm will die for no reason.
Essentially, barring any new technology, you can sit back and trade threats. You’re just trying not to die, and unless one of you gets the nut draw (in which case the other person will lose) you’ll have plenty of time to cast Haunting Echoes for the game.
That covers all of the matchups I’ve playtested enough to feel confident analyzing in an article. The bottom line is this: CAL is a deck to play if you’re completely confident in your ability not to embarrass yourself when you play it. If you haven’t tested it to the point where you scream every time you discard a land to deal two points of damage, you haven’t tested it enough. You should be dredging in your dreams and cycling in your sleep. If your girlfriend walks up to you and asks, in that patently feminine manner that suggests something is amiss, “What are you thinking about, sweetie?” your answer should be — without hesitation — “Cycle Forgotten Cave.”
CAL is like a pet. Be nice to it, call it cute things, hug it every once in awhile, and it’ll serve you well. I promise. Mine, for example, is cooking me breakfast right now.
Just don’t let it around any Withered Wretches. It really, really hates those guys.
~Z