Insert Column Name Here - Something Old, Something New

Hey there. Miss me? Well, I’ve been out for the last two weeks because I had nothing to say. I missed the Prerelease event due to my playing with liquid nitrogen at a convention (throw a bunch of 300-below-zero fluid into a swimming pool, and it makes an awesome mist), and as such I missed out on all the cool strategy.

I guess I could have told you what I thought was good in Future Sight, but that’s just cheating. I’m not good enough to tell you how the cards are right off the bat. I need to play them before I can properly judge their merit, so waited until I could attend the release tournament this Saturday to see how it went.

I have divined the following two things when playing in Prerelease (or, in this case, Release) Events:

1) The third release is always disappointing.
I’ve mentioned this before, but you see those hundred and eighty-someodd cards, and you think, “Wow! These are amazing! They’re totally going to change the face of this format! Wow-wee!”

Individually, they’re awesome. But in Sealed, you will get a slim fifteen of those awesome cards, and by the time you actually start sorting, you’ll realize that if Time Spiral’s cards don’t support the colors you’re in, you’re not running it. Thus, more often than not, you open some totally awesome card that you can’t squeeze in because while it’s awesome, Time Spiral is weak.

That third set never shakes up the format as much as you’d like. Sure, it adds in some new cards that you have to play around, and tosses in a couple of crazy-ass bombs, and there are some guys to work with, but it’s never as exciting as “ALL NEW TIME SPIRAL, EVERY CARD IS FRESH AND UNSEEN, WHOO HOO!”

So what happens with me at every release is that I face The Choice. Do I go with the good build, the one that I know will do well because it’s packed with the 90% of the same damn cards I’ve been running at every event for the past three months, or do I go with the new and awesome weaker build that is stuffed with 40% of the new and crazy?

2) I need to pay more attention.
For me, the release events are my time to kick back and enjoy myself, to slap some cards down and play… Well, casually. But it tends to backfire.

I usually pay attention to my own cards with a fair amount of caution. I’ve read the cards that are in my deck, and I took some time to decide whether they should go in there. Sure, occasionally, I’ll whiff and think that Phthisis is an instant, but usually I’m pretty savvy as to whether my guys have flashback or flanking.

The cards in the other guy’s deck? This isn’t a tournament, not a real one. I allow takebacks if the guy misses something about my cards, I goof around, I’ll show him what’s in my deck at the end of the round because hey, we’re here to look at new cards.

The problem is that once in each of the last release tourneys, I’ve won a game based on something I wasn’t supposed to do. I pointed a spell at a creature that it wouldn’t affect for one reason or another, and the player didn’t notice, and it went to the graveyard. Which affected the rest of the game in such a way that I won.

This isn’t good, even though I usually don’t notice it until after the guy’s scooped up the cards. I don’t like winning via my opponent’s ignorance, and so at future events I’m going to have to spend a little less time smiling and a little more time scoping out exactly what that card with all the funny text is at the table. (It doesn’t help that I don’t read spoilers, either.)

Ah well.

Anyway, I opened up one Time Spiral Deck, one Planar Chaos pack, and two Future Sight packs, and here’s what I found looking up at me:

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 05-13-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (66)

Lands (2)

Spells (22)

Man, this was disappointing. This was a bomb-laden tournament, with Akromas popping out everywhere, and I get stuck with Force of Savagery as a rare? Sucks. To. Be. Me.

Still, it wasn’t a flat-out terrible pool; it just is a little scattershot. Let’s see what I have.

White
Solid Playables: Amrou Scout, Amrou Seekers, Blade of the Sixth Pride, Castle Raptors, Flickering Spirit, Lumithread Field, Outrider en-Kor, Pallid Mycoderm, Pentarch Ward

Now, that’s a solid Rebel chain. Admittedly, I have but one way to fetch that chain, but should I get active, I have a bunch of weenies ready to go.

There are just three slight problems with this, though:

a) No removal. There’s not one instant or sorcery that gets rid of or neutralizes my opponent’s creatures. I have some solid evasion, but nothing that actually stops something ugly once it gets online.

b) No beef. My biggest guy here is a 3/3. That’s usually a sign for doom in this format, because unless I can come out of the gates a-blazin’ – which, admittedly, I probably can with this lineup – then I’m going to get stopped cold by the first 5/5 who hits the table.

c) No new. The only two Future Sight cards in this are Lumithread Field and a generic 3/1. Neither of those are even particularly interesting. Come on, Future Sight, be worth my while!

All of those problems can be fixed, of course, by the addition of another color. So let’s look around.

Green
Solid Playables: Ashcoat Bear, Deadwood Treefolk, Havenwood Wurm, Nantuko Shaman, Nessian Courser, Phantom Wurm, Search For Tomorrow, Sprout Swarm, Uktabi Drake

I read about Sprout Swarm and went, “Holy crap, that’s nuts.” Then the reviews started coming in that said, “Holy crap, Sprout Swarm is nuts.” Thus, having two of them is quite nice indeed, though it’s a shame we don’t have more Thallids to make it crazyriffic.

I should also add that having seen Sporoloth Ancient in play, it’s nutty. Speeding up all of your Thallids by a turn makes them absolutely wild if you have it and, say, a Thallid Shell-Dweller and borderline catastrophic if there’s a Pallid Mycoderm or Thallid Germinator. 1/1s are easily disposable in this format, true, but building up an army of chump blockers and swarmers never hurts.

I also severely underestimated Imperiosaur at first, because I was thinking of my Casual games (where dual lands and bouncelands are the norm) and not Sealed. Then Imperiosaur came out on turn 4 a couple of times against me, and I went, “Okay, that’s bad.” It’s a generic 5/5, but a generic 5/5 in a format where you’re going to run only one or two nonbasic lands? Okay, then.

Llanowar Augur, I’m still on the fence about. The “during your upkeep” cards force you to make some difficult choices, as Wizards intended, but on the first turn it’s a nice chump blocker than turns into a very-foreseeable Giant Growth later on. But is that worth the investment? My initial copout is “Depends on the deck,” but we’ll see. Probably most of you guys have more experience playing the format than I do, but it’s not like you’re slow to sound off in the forums.

Oh, and a 3/3 for three mana? It’s quite nice. Me like.

That said, this is a solid Green pool, and it offers a lot of what I like to see in Green in this format – beef and mana fixing. Alas, the whole “Make your guys big” is missing, meaning that once again we’re venturing into the territory of “We kill your guys in combat or not at all.” Which is, in my practical experience, a straight ticket to the 1-3 bracket.

Red
Solid Playables: Blazing Blade Askari, Conflagrate, Dead / Gone, Flowstone Embrace, Gathan Raiders, Greater Gargadon, Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, Orcish Cannonade, Skirk Shaman, Subterranean Shambler

I was looking for removal? Here it is. Obviously, Jaya Ballard’s a draw in any case, but the removal here in the form of Cannonade, Dead / Gone, Conflagrate, and Flowstone Embrace makes this Red positively nutty. Plus, we have some conditional beef on the upper end (Raiders, Gargadon) and some other dudes we can throw in if we’d like.

I should add that years of conditioning made me overlook Flowstone Embrace right away. I thought, “Jeez, why would I want to play that? I could only tap my guys to kill themselves, or to render them useless for attacking.” Then someone pointed out during a Magic discussion that hey, the enchantment taps, not the creature, and the light went on. Nice usage of new design space, Wizards. That said, it’s particularly sweet because it kills small things dead and can make a Greater Gargadon really quite the annoyance in an open field.

We’ll almost certainly be choo-choo-choosing Red. But what about….

Black
Solid Playables: Corpulent Corpse, Dark Withering, Gorgon Recluse, Skittering Monstrosity, Twisted Abomination

Here we come to the real problems from a “New Set” perspective. We have lots of new cards that I don’t know are playable or not.

Case #1: We have Deepcavern Imp, which has a nice little hasty flying body, but a drawback at the end of the next turn. But is that too much of a drawback for a 2/2 pinger? I don’t know!

Case #2: Cutthroat il-Dal. I was assured by not one, but two players at the release party that she was nutty. It’s easier to get to Hellbent than ever, and a 4/1 shadowy person is really bad. It seemed unlikely, since this format’s hell on x/1s, but could I be wrong? How would I know?

Case #3: Grave Scrabbler. Seems nice in Madness. How nice is it, though, and how often can you get off its cost and effect to get it to work right? In other words, sure it’s good when it fires and gets something back from your yard, but how often will you be able to discard it at will and have the mana and have something you want back in the yard… And will that occur often enough to make it work? I dunno!

Case #4: Augur of Skulls. “Hi, I can stay on defense or strip your opponent’s hand.” I like that. But how easy is it for my opponent to play around it? No clue, sirrah!

Ah, it’s not the best color in the pool. But it is full of madness and hellbent, and it does have curiosity going for it.

Blue
Solid Playables: Aven Augur, Dream Stalker, Dreamscape Artist, Infiltrator il-Kor, Telekinetic Sliver, Venser’s Diffusion, Viscerid Deepwalker

Some cards, you don’t have to play with much. A 2/2 flier is almost always at least playable in any given format, and if it has an effect, all the better. Likewise, suspend has shown us that Infiltrator il-Kor is probably going to be worth it most of the time (even if it competes with the Erratic Ephemeron suspend slot), and a bounce spell is a bounce spell.

That said, this is some pretty weak Blue. Some nice cards, but not much depth. Given everything that has come to pass before, I’ll skip-skip-skip.

And The Rest:
Solid Playables: Saffi Eriksdotter, Nicol Bolas, Serrated Arrows

Both Saffi and Nicol Bolas are nice, if I’m in those colors. Which I probably won’t be, but I should list ‘em anyway. Serrated Arrows is nice no matter where I am, but it’s especially nice given that I have a lot of Red burn effects; I can drag people down to my level.

The Deck
Now, I had two ways to go here that I could see – one that was a pretty easy path, the other slightly more complex.

1) I could go with a solid R/G/W build, using Green for the high-end beef and mana fixing, White for the Rebel chain and fliers, and Red to blaze a path clear. (Depending on the cards and the build, I could also very easily go straight-up Red/White, but I likes me some Sprout Swarm.)

2) I have a lot of removal and could go R/B, using a lot of discard and hellbent effects to clear the path for my guys.

But the big question is, where am I at?

If this was a Sealed tournament, you bet your buns I’d be headed towards R/G/W. It’s got power, it’s got quickness, and it’s got moxie.

But aside from Sprout Swarm and the Flowstone Embrace, it also has nothing new. (Okay, there’s also Gathan Raiders, but I played in Onslaught with Zombie Cutthroat, and it’s a similar feel.) It’d be a good ol’fashioned Time Spiral deck, something I’d seen a lot of times before, with a handful of cards and time-tested strategies.

Is that the wave of the future?

On the other hand, we have a much harder deck to work with – one with tons of discard outlets and two solid Madness spells (and possibly three, depending on how Grave Scrabbler works out) and two cards that I don’t know precisely how good they are when they become Hellbent.

I know that R/B doesn’t work for me, ever. It seems like it’d be awesome, but I always wind up with a bunch of little 2/2 dorks while the Green players are busting out hugeness, and I never get the removal, and then someone plops down some enchantment and I fold.

It’s not the best strategy, I think. But on the other hand, I will get to play with the new cards. And that’s what I came to do, right?

Aight, Red/Black in a small tourney. Here we go:

1 Boldwyr Intimidator
1 Conflagrate
1 Dead / Gone
2 Flowstone Embrace
1 Gathan Raiders
1 Greater Gargadon
1 Jaya Ballard, Task Mage
1 Orcish Cannonade
1 Skirk Shaman
1 Subterranean Shambler

1 Augur of Skulls
1 Corpulent Corpse
1 Cutthroat il-Dal
1 Dark Withering
2 Deepcavern Imp
1 Gorgon Recluse
1 Grave Scrabbler
1 Skittering Monstrosity
1 Skulking Knight
1 Twisted Abomination

1 Serrated Arrows

8 Mountains
8 Swamps
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

How’d I do? What happened? Well, I’ll tell you next week. In the meantime, let me ask you a pair of questions, to be answered in the forums:

1) What was the Future Sight card that disappointed you most at the Prerelease/Release when you played with it?

2) What card surprised you most for being much better than you thought it would be?

Sound off. I’m curious.

The Weekly Plug Bug
As you may know, as a Magic writer and an employee of StarCityGames.com, I’m obligated to have a webcomic due to a truly strange workplace edict that my boss Pete Hoefling laid down. Craig Stevenson didn’t want to, but eventually Pete had a talk with him and explained that if he didn’t start up his webcomic toot suite Craig would be out on the street… And so Craig reluctantly started up his webcomic Ungrateful Dead.

He didn’t want to, mind you. It’s all Pete’s idea.

Likewise, I’m none too thrilled about my own webcomic Home on the Strange, but Pete’s crazy about having webcomics creators working for him. “Pete, I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about myself,” I said. “You know how I hate self-promotion.”

“Just plug it,” Pete said, stonefaced.

“It’s gauche,” I complained.

“Do you like having insurance?” he asked pointedly.

Anyway. Yeah. Home on the Strange, yeah, it’s something I write. This week it’s about Branch the social moron dating, whatever.

Pete made me do it, okay?

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