Insert Column Name Here - Robbing Peter

I had spent the entire weekend playing Rock Band, of course. I had sung my throat raw to “Dani California,” played through “Foreplay/Long Time” on Expert with my crew, and beaten my palms bloody on songs like “The Hand That Feeds.”

Really, if there was a Rock Band strategy site at this point, I’d probably try to edit it. I can just imagine it; people submitting articles every week to discuss the fine details of pulling off the extended hammer-ons at the end of the solo on “Green Grass and High Tide” (the hardest song in the game, don’tcha know), discussing the optimal Star Power paths for a band through “Here We Go Again,” and reviewing the weekly new song releases from a Rock Band perspective.

The problem is, this sounds good, but who’s gonna pay for it? I mean, SCG gets by because we sell cards, which you purchase on a regular basis. But what could you possibly buy from Rock Band? Oh, there are accessories — metal foot pedal replacements, custom guitar stickers, light and smoke shows — but nobody’s going to dump thirty bucks a month for the hottest speakers.

So a whole idea dies aborning. Alas! www.StarCityRock.com had such a nice ring to it. (As does My Name Is Might Have Been, my new webcomic, which has a startling revelation about the nature of the post-apocalyptic world the characters are living in. And no, really, this is not a non sequitur.)

Still, my adoration of a newer game left me with a massive problem: Playing my current game of choice had deprived me of sleep. I had, stupidly enough, stayed up until five in the morning on two consecutive nights, weedling away on a silly little plastic ukulele. So when I finally opened up the Morningtide prelease window on MODO, I was running on, oh, seven hours of sleep total over the weekend.

And I am pushing forty.

Oh, it’s fine when you college-aged whelps run the no-sleep gambit over the weekend. You have bodies designed to recover from that sort of thing. My body, on the other hand, complains like an untuned Pinto when I try to force it into gear.

“Give me caffeine,” it grumbles. So I feed it caffeine. And it goes, “All right,” and then it sort of lumbers along in gear. But it takes me five minutes to place at order at Dunkin Donuts to get the caffeine, and then I stare numbly at things a lot.

Not the time for high strategy. So what does my karma give me when I have seaweed mush for brains? One of the more complex pools that I’ve ever had.

Let’s take a look:

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 03-16-2008

Lorwyn Limited

Creatures (55)

Lands (3)

White
Solid Playables: Burrenton Bombardier, Changeling Sentinel, Cloudgoat Ranger, Crib Swap, Feudkiller’s Verdict, Judge of Currents, Order of the Golden Cricket, Plover Knights, Stonybrook Schoolmaster, Weight of Conscience

Potent stuff here. Weight of Conscience seems to be a vital piece of removal in Sealed builds, because it’s often what allows you to win a race — hey, you’re beating down with tiny guys in the air and around the corners, and whoops, your opponent plops down this gigantic thing you can get around, but you can’t race. Weight of Conscience is surprisingly key in a lot of matches — I’m used to Pacifism effects being good, natch, but it seems just more key in this new Sealed environment.

Feudkiller’s Verdict is as good as I previewed it, but the problem in Sealed is that it’s a little harder to set up the win with it. You can get ten life, and you can get a 5/5 guy, but this new Sealed is so removal- and reinforce- and evasion-heavy that a 5/5 vanilla guy sitting on the ground often just isn’t enough to really make a difference. He buys you a turn or two and a chump blocker, which is no small effect, but general it’s harder to really get this to fire like a bomb in Sealed.

Changeling Sentinel is, well, a Changeling. As a 3/2 on the ground, he’s pretty unimpressive these days. But as a Changeling, he’s in hot demand to fill slots in a White deck.

Oh, and Burrenton Bombardiers? Love â€˜em. There’s nothing tricky about them, but they’re an early threat and a late-game trick, which makes them particularly flexible and thus an auto-include. Will they win you the game with their amazing power? Probably not. But they’re a staple card, the card that lets other cards work their magic well.

This is actually a pretty decent Kithkin build here, with a fair amount of evasion and some solid tricks. I like it, but let’s move on.

Blue
Solid Playables: Deeptread Merrow, Dewdrop Spy, Disperse, Glen Elendra Pranksters, Inkfathom Divers, Latchkey Faerie, Negate, Streambed Aquitects, Whirlpool Whelm

Wow. Almost every card in this pool is playable, though some are weaker than others. We have some great tricks — I mean, how much do you need me to write about Disperse? — and some good fliers, and the skeleton of a passable Merfolk build.

Problem is, it’s neither fish nor fowl. (Get it? Merfolk? Fish? Oh, I am tired.) There aren’t quite enough of the Merfolk to make it an all-out archetype (though there are a lot of good cards, sans a tapping device, we’re forced to send the White merfolk charging into unprotected combat). And there are a lot of Rogue cards here, but nothing really spectacular. And the combat tricks mostly consist of “Not this turn” — viable in an environment that seems to rely on critters with +1/+1 counters, but not dealbreaking.

Yowtch.

Red
Solid Playables: Adder-Staff Boggart, Consuming Bonfire, Inner-Flame Igniter, Lash Out, Lightning Crafter, Rivals’ Duel, Sunflare Shaman

We’re light on playables here, but the bomb is Lightning Crafter. It’s hard to use against Blue, Black, or Red, since they have easy answers… But left unanswered, it will kill you dead post-haste. It’s a bomb-omb in Sealed deck, and I want to play with it because it is power on a stick.

But it’s hard to get off. I know this from experience. But if you can? Should I try for the gold? BLEAH! ME TIRED! WHY MAKE CHOICESES?

(Also: Skipping ahead briefly to the artifacts, we have Thornbite Staff. That plus Lightning Crafter is instant death for most decks, if you can get it active. But again, the getting it active….)

Also, Rivals’ Duel is expensive and slow and will never ever kill a Changeling, but it serves some purposes. It’s good in Sealed, and you can always side it out if your opponent’s too much like you.

Green
Solid Playables: Cloudthresher, Earthbrawn, Everbark Shaman, Fertilid, Hunting Triad, Leaf Gilder, Lignify, Lys Alana Bowmaster, Lys Alana Huntmaster, Winnower Patrol

Wow. I tend to judge a color by how much it has of what I want in its traditional outlets, and this has land fetching, and pump spells, and flier-blockers, and token-generators, and….

…well, almost no beef. Cloudthresher’s pretty nice.

The problem with Green is that it has next to no evasion. It looks good, really good, but on its own it’s just going to get flown over or nerfed by removal. One Eyeblight’s Ending will kill that pumped Cloudthresher toot sweet — I know.

But Fertilid…. Oh, how I love you in Sealed. Hey, lemme attack in, get some damage, or block and then zip land off! He’s awesome. Get him.

Also, I had not one, but two matches with guys with double-Winnower Patrol. Not good. Especially when they triggered twice.

So How’d I Do?
Well, I was so sleepy, I tried out some terrible U/B splash Red Rogue build, making sure that I had enough Goblins for Lightning Crafter. But that didn’t work out so well, because I was dumb.

No, I mean dumb. Hey, I’ll go to cast Pack’s Disdain, and then realize that none of my creatures shares a type! Great. So the Wolf-Skull Shaman lives. And then I kept tapping out at the wrong time for my opponents to land their own Lightning Crafters, and I got demolished in three straight games.

Then I went for some kinda U/W/b Merfolky-Faerie build. Again, no soap. Mostly because I kept forgetting triggers.

It’s hard to say what the ideal build for this is, because you can go in a lot of directions, but most of them seem unstable. The key cards aren’t quite present, allowing you to go an almost-strong Kithkin, a nearly-there Rogue build, a sorta-Merfolk deck, a really splashy four-or-five color Green deck. And while I’m sure people will tell me, “Clearly, this is the deck you want” as though this were handed down by God Himself in the forums, this is one of the crazier builds I had. I’d actually have to do some serious playtesting to find out what is ideal here.

But why was I losing? Because I was tired, and I wasn’t keeping to my own New Year’s Resolutions! I wasn’t writing the cards down, I wasn’t thinking about mulligans as much as I should have, and I wasn’t really awake.

So I took a new stab at a new deck, possibly an erroneous build, but it had the virtue of not being too tricky for Temporary Idiotboy here:

7 Forest
1 Mountain
6 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Cloudgoat Ranger
1 Cloudthresher
1 Crib Swap
1 Kithkin Daggerdare
1 Kithkin Healer
1 Lash Out
1 Leaf Gilder
1 Lignify
1 Lys Alana Huntmaster
1 Plover Knights
1 Shimmering Grotto
1 Vivid Crag
1 Burrenton Bombardier
1 Changeling Sentinel
1 Earthbrawn
1 Everbark Shaman
2 Fertilid
1 Feudkiller’s Verdict
1 Hunting Triad
1 Lys Alana Bowmaster
1 Order of the Golden Cricket
1 Pack’s Disdain
1 Rivals’ Duel
1 Weight of Conscience
1 Winnower Patrol

The Gods, however, abandoned me at the same time my mind did.

In the first match where I started seriously trying (I was already 1-4 for the week thanks to my befuddled pre-nap Magic games), I faced a 1660 player who a lot of Elves and Kithkin who didn’t draw a whole lot of action. In the first game, he could only manage a turn 2 Ballyrush Banneret, a turn 4 Changeling Sentinel, and a turn 6 Elvish Warrior before I ran him over.

The second game, he mulliganed and stalled. He tried gamely with a Leaf Gilder into Imperious Perfect, but I had the Pack’s Disdain (which I counted properly this time) and won.

The second match, well, the turns 3 and 4 Winnower Patrols, which triggered on turns 5 and 6 and then got followed up with a Bog-Strider Ash, did me in before I could compensate.

The second game of the second match was a fiasco, but that was my fault. There was a stalemate, and I attacked all-in to force his hand, an Earthbrawn in my hand. I had the opportunity to kill a Countryside Crusher with it, but I instead saved my evasion guy, which he tried to kill with a trick. He was down to ten life, I’d just Feudkillered up to 28, with an active Cloudgoat Ranger on the table. I figured that I would kill him in two turns, so what could happen?

In retrospect, I had other evasion guys, but he drew removal — thanks to the Crusher — and then slapped down a Wort, Boggart Auntie. I tried to rebuild, but between his all-star rares of Reach of Branches, Wort, and an 8/8 Crusher, he eventually crushed me a turn away from the finish line with a combination of his own Earthbrawn and a Blades of Velis Vel.

If I’d chump blocked (which I thought about — I knew he had the Blades), I would have survived the turn, but then I wouldn’t have been able to kill him the next turn. I hate situations like that. But I should have chumped, hoping to draw some awesome trick. (Even though the next draw showed me it wouldn’t have arrived.)

The third match was ugly. The guy had a brutal Treefolk deck — the kind of Sealed pull where you feel like you can’t win against it.

Seriously. Look!

Turn 2 Woodland Changeling, turn 3 Battlewand Oak, turn 4 Dauntless Dourbark, turn 5 Winnower Patrol, turn 6 Orchard Warden. And a Forest almost every turn. Oh, and I mulliganed to five cards after a no-land seven and a one-land, wrong-color six.

That was absurd against a deck that had no removal. Had I been thinking straight, I prolly woulda switched to a more removal-heavy, alternate-color build, but no. As it was, he also revealed an Everbark Shaman, a Greatbow Dowyer, a Bosk Banneret, and an Ambassador Oak. I held out for a while thanks to Consuming Bonfire and an impressive army of my own, but he whittled me down in a long, painful game.

Match four? Hey, another no-land seven and a one-land, wrong-color six, suck five mulligan! I tried my best, but he had the Moonglove Extract for my Leaf Gilder, and I remained stuck with a handful of cards as he killed me with a Marsh Flitter. I won the second game with some surprisingly good playskill, but in the third match he dropped….

…Bitterblossom.

And me with no removal! I thought I might pull it off for a bit when I got my Lys Alana Bowmaster, stalling and wiping the board with various Elves and Changelings as his life total dropped…. But eventually he got the Pack’s Disdain and won from eight life.

The fifth match, I was disillusioned, but I thought I’d give it a shot. Turns out that Ceaseless Searblades and Soulbright Elemental is kind of an ugly combo if you can’t stop it, which took me down a much-needed nine life in a single turn. That life was critical, and I died.

Then I went, “Well, he has Pyroclast Consul and Winnower Patrol. Good thing he can’t activate them both at the same time, â€˜cause that would completely mess me up!” As it turns out, he flipped Crib Swap, making it somehow even worse. I died.

Bleah. 1-4.

I’m gonna go play some Rock Band. There I’m a star, baby.

Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy

Insert Column Name Here – Robbing Peter

Creatures (55)

Lands (3)

Spells (32)