Insert Column Name Here - Taking You At Your Word

When people ask me, “What do you do for a living?” I inevitably say this:

“I work for a website that offers strategy tips on the world’s most complicated game.”

Some people nod and smile at this, and move on. Others ask me what the game is. And still others get argumentative.

“It can’t be that complicated,” they say. “What about chess?”

“Child’s play compared to Magic. Chess has a set number of pieces, and a set number of board spaces, and you can’t change either.”

“Yeah, well, poker.”

“Poker’s all about reading other people,” I respond. “The game itself is a matter of fairly trivial odds.”

“How about…” They generally stammer at this point, trying to think of another game, since the people who bristle at the idea that there is a world’s most complicated game and I am somehow connected to it don’t play all that many games.

“How about you take a game,” I said, “Where there are roughly eight thousand pieces to choose from. Each of those pieces changes the core rules of the game in some fundamental way… And the game’s rules itself are contained in a document that is a hundred and thirty pages long. Worse, each of the cards often interact with each other, so at any given point you may have five or six cards affecting each other.”

“Um….” they say. But too late! I’m pressing in for the kill.

“Then you take sixty of those cards – or, if you choose to open them at random from packs, you can get away with forty – and decide which of each of those rules-bending cards are best configured to work with each other best. In order to play those cards, you need to some some fairly sophisticated mathematical analysis* to figure out what ratio of card-enablers to actual cards with effects you can play.

“Then your opponent and you – neither of you knowing what’s in his hand, or often even his deck – must play blindly against each other, anticipating strategies as they are revealed a card at a time….

“I have an appointment,” they say, rushing off, sweat prickling across their brow. I chase after them.

“But wait!” I say. “Don’t you want to hear about the metagame? Or sideboarding? How about tempo and board position and draft pick order and archetypes and gizzards and blow-me-downs and unclegristles?**”

They flee, and I scream at their backs: “I guess maybe it’s a little more complicated than you thought? Huh? Huh?”

But the whole point here is a good one: even some of the game’s greatest luminaries disagree on whether it is possible to play a “perfect” game of Magic, given that you so often have to work around imperfect information. All too often you make the play that should win it, only to find that your opponent is packing a card that you hadn’t accounted for… And, honestly, that you probably shouldn’t have accounted for, since playing around it would have lost you the game the other 95% of the time.

Eli Kaplan says that when he plays Sealed deck, he plays to try to find “The perfect build.” I don’t; I play to try and win, and to hell with elegance. But every week passes, and I play my five to ten matches for this column, and by Jiminy if I don’t wonder sometimes whether you folks are right.

I mean, did I misbuild my deck?

There’s no way to figure it out for sure. Those games are gone, baby, gone like the wind. And everything looks great in hindsight; I always love it when people yell at folks because “If you’d picked that card as your third pick, your deck would have had all of these cards,” forgetting that changing one pick in a draft (particularly an early pick) changes every other card that you’d see.

But maybe… Just maybe… I could try it again. So this week, I thought I’d try a bold new experiment: I’d take some feedback from my readers and see whether I should, indeed, have gone a different route.

For the record, here’s last week’s card pool:

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 04-15-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (48)

Lands (2)

Spells (25)

And here’s what the forums had to say:

jligon@09 spoke thusly:

I dunno, Ferrett. I don’t see why you need to choose between G/W and B/W sliver recursion. Green gives you Greenseeker and Evolution Charm, so playing your solid green men and splashing for the ridiculous Necrotic Sliver is no problem- and gives you access for splashing for Stormbind, too. Thus, I’d have gone G/W/r/b, splashing only for Stormbind and Necrotic Sliver; whichever one you happen to draw, you can go fetch that land with the Charm/Greenseeker. It’s a bit light on removal, but you’ve got Sunlance and the machine-gun of Stormbind and Necrotic Sliver, plus great tricks like Strength in Numbers, Aether Web, Fortify, and Thrill of the Hunt.

1 Mountain
1 Swamp
8 Forest
7 Plains

Shade of Trokair
Greenseeker
Soltari Priest
Kavu Predator
Mire Boa
Spinneret Sliver
Saltfield Recluse
Yavimaya Dryad
Necrotic Sliver
Calciderm
2x Watcher Sliver
Pulmonic Sliver
Stormfront Riders
Phantom Wurm

Sunlance
Healing Leaves
Thrill of the Hunt
Aether Web
Evolution Charm
Strength in Numbers
Fortify
Stormbind

17 Lands, 15 Creatures, 8 Others

This presents what I feel to be the most synergetic and powerful deck available, while sacrificing as little as possible to the mana gods. Obviously, your deck did all right… But as powerful as the interaction between your White and Black slivers are, I just don’t think on the whole they stand up to the sheer power of your Green cards- so here’s my take on what I think is the best of both worlds.

The only card I’m a little sorry about leaving out is the Havenwood Wurm; as it stands, I think you could use one more randomly large body. But in general I like these other creatures, and your general lack of removal mandates the playing of even marginal tricks like Healing Leaves, in my opinion.

EDIT: Also, I left out Momentary Blink because I’m not confident it’s a great trick without Blue mana, at least not in this deck where you really have no comes-into-play effects that are worth reusing – and obviously, I’d splash for the legit bombs in Necrotic Sliver and Stormbind before Blink. What do you think, better than Healing Leaves? Healing Leaves does give you the chance of a turn 3 5/5 attacking.

I wasn’t sure about that. After all, a double-splash seemed troublesome with just singleton lands and only two ways to get them – either I drew Terramorphic or Greenseeker survived or I got Evolution Charm, or I was stuck with dead cards in the hand. That seemed to be risking the ire of the Mana Gods something fiercely. But then Shalie had this to say:

“I agree with the G/W build, the green has an overall higher quality. Did you get carried away by your love for black removal (again!)? You don’t have to play Dark Withering every time it’s in the pool.”

Two people? Hmm. Perhaps they were right. And so I figured I’d set out to play again!

I can’t play the same opponents, obviously, but this is a league with other players. I had the same card pool. So I could just go in and play five more games, then see how it all turned out. Not bad… except by then my League had clocked over, which meant that all of my opponents had opened another pack.

Noooo problem. When I’m bored and cheap (which happens more often than you’d think), I go and sometimes play against one- or two-pack additions with my old no-extra-packs Sealed deck. It’s a total win/win for your ego; when you pull out a victory, you know you did it against a guy who had a better selection of cards to choose from. And when you lose? Aw, heck, he had a better selection of cards to choose from.

So what I could do was this:

1) Play a couple of matches with my old B/W deck to see how it worked in this new, spicier League.

2) Play a couple of matches with this new G/W/b/r deck to see how it worked.

3) Compare, contrast, have a beer.

So that’s what I did.

My Old B/W Deck….
Went 5-1. The power of Pulmonic and Necrotic Sliver had never been more evident, as I got the lock out twice. (It’s more difficult than you’d think.) Plus, I just got scads of removal, and my ability to recur Aven Riftwatcher gave me a lot of life. It was good.

I even discovered the fun of getting out a Necrotic when my opponent had a board full of Slivers and a ton of mana to use it. “Just keep priority,” I muttered nervously, thumbing the right key – and when I cast Necrotic I immediately sacrificed it to off his biggest Sliver, and by the time he went to use the ability it was done sac-ro-ficed.

It was a pretty darned solid beatdown deck, with enough critters to bear the brunt of the assault and enough tricks to really churn it out during any combat… And my respect for Melancholy rises daily, as its ability to shut down the biggest guy on the board is often worth a mana (at least until they bounce or Disenchant it).

Could be the luck of the draw, though. Leagues have all sorts of strange players, some of them absolutely awful, and so I couldn’t be sure. I’d say two of the players seemed sketchy (which is why I played an extra match).

The New G/W Deck…
…went 1-4. This, I wasn’t expecting.

Let us be honest, though, and say that I carried out this experiment on a day when I had no goddamned luck. I woke up to discover that my laptop was dying, and a bad install of Norton Antivirus to replace the sucktacular McAfee Virus went horrifyingly wrong, forcing me to spend seven hours loading and reloading my computer. My taxes came in, and lo, I owed a lot.

“Thank God,” I said, “That my wife will be coming home soon. I’m frustrated doing all of this deck support. She’ll get back, we’ll go out to a movie, I can relax….”

That’s when she called. “Don’t forget,” she said. “Tonight, I’m going over to Jen’s to get some work done.”

Right. No wife. No car. In a house where, frankly, I was sick of looking at a screen, but where else could I go? So I settled into MODO, knowing that I was toying with danger because the universe hated me that day.

Grimly, I carried out this experience AND OMG I HATE THE FRICKIN’ UNIVERSE.

I cannot blame the entirety of this experiment’s failure on the build. In Game 1, Match 2, I played against an opponent who was so inexperienced he left his Terramorphic Expanse unsacrificed for two turns, despite the fact that he did not lay a land on turn 2. I, on the other hand, kept a hand of three spells and four lands.

By turn 15, I had fourteen lands on the table. Kind of hard to win that one.

Game 2. “Okay,” I said. Three lands, four spells, two of them castable. I’m on the play. I’m fine.

By turn 6, I’d drawn one land. Amazingly enough, thanks to this gentleman’s reasonably weak play, I was still in it, but I was struggling. He laid Reality Acid on my one big blocker as I was forced to hold a Calciderm back on defense. But I had a Stormfront Riders in my hand, which would turn the tide of things! I could return my guy before the Acid went off, and reuse my Calciderm, and have two chump blockers!

Turn 7 went by. No land.

Turn 8 went by. No land.

Turn 9 came and went, and no land, and so went my hopes for the game. And it’s really hard to choke out a “good game” to a guy who plays not one, but two maindecked Glass Asps.

So some of it is the universe conspiring against me.

The rest was troubles with the deck, or so I thought. (I gotta be honest and say that ego gets in the way here; of course I believed my build to be at least decent, especially given that it had done all right.)

The mana was, as I thought it might be, rough. I generally don’t like splashing two-way unless I have some serious mana-fixing, like Search for Tomorrow and Prismatic Star. Greenseeker and Terramorphic and aren’t bad, but they don’t float my boat in the same way… And yes, I kept running into situations where I had Necrotic Sliver and no Black mana, or had the Stormbind and no Red mana, or I needed double-White and had this stupid frickin’ one-of Swamp in my hand.

That last one isn’t the deck’s fault. But you feel like it is when it happens, man, you feel it.

But the other problem with this G/W deck was a little more serious to me – in the W/B deck, if I ran into a problem, I could cack it. Yeah, I know, “Ferrett likes Black,” but when I lost I lost to big crap. Like, for example, the Numot, the Devastator in Matches 1 and 3 (and I had the Temporal Isolation for it in the first match, but he trumped it with a very ugly Prismatic Ward). Or the Vesuvan Shapeshifter in Match 4, which I just watched helplessly as it did its little dance and I hoped to God I had Stormbind.

Essentially, with this build I had a bunch of little guys – there are precisely two creatures with a native power of over three – which cannot possibly survive in combat except for a combat trick in my hand. And barring one enchantment that I never drew the mana for, I had zero ways to send them into the graveyard if they chose not to engage me in combat.

Whereas the B/W deck loved combat. Go ahead, send with your guys! I’ll Kor Dirge this and Midnight Charm that, and Cradle to Grave that suspend guy! Bring it on!

What we had here is a mixture – an aggressive deck that wanted to come out of the gates swinging, but not the tools to do it. Cards like Watcher Sliver and Saltfield Recluse and Healing Leaves are passive defense cards, walls to hold other guys back while you charge in (or, in the case of Recluse, wreck their blocking when they have to block). There are aggro decks out there, but this isn’t one of them – aggro decks in Sealed have to have a curve that tops off, and this ends at Stormfront Riders.

(As noted, the Havenwood might have helped.)

It’s not a flat-out terrible deck, but it did have a lack of overall synergy. And I’m not a fan of the one-land splash anyway – maybe it works for some people, but it sure as shootin’ didn’t work on this build.

I may try this again in the future. And I suspect that at some point, the forums will probably be right on some alternate build – but today, it didn’t work for me. Maybe it’s my play style.

Ya never know.

Meet The Ferrett!
If you’re in Troy, Michigan, I will be attending Penguicon – the open-source and sci-fi convention – to plug my webcomic. I’ll be on several panels, yammering on in my high, thin voice, just in case you want a piece of this action.

That said, it’s a really cool convention with liquid nitrogen ice cream and a Jack Bauer-style training session, so yeah. I’d hit it.

Special Bonus “Before Everyone Stops Caring” Section:
I’ve been meaning to post this here for awhile, but this is the last week when anyone will care, so hey. Here’s the most impossible build I ever got for Time Spiral Limited:

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 04-15-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (46)

Lands (1)

1 Terramorphic Expanse

Spells (28)

Looks easy, right? You go for the Dragon, which gets you the Sengir Vampire and Sudden Death. But if you go R/W/B, you wind up playing with a lot of substandard guys (and less than you’d normally have) and substandard removal (Assassinate, Grapeshot without a ton of Suspenders), and very ugly mana.

Maybe you go heavy W/B with a splash for a Dragon. But then to fill out the creature base you’re stuffing in a pair of Evil Eyes to try to get above twelve creatures, which often handicaps the whole “Dragon” plan, or you’re going with Deadly Grub. Or maybe you go U/W, or…

I dunno. I couldn’t make it work. And is Grinning Totem playable? Gah.

The Weekly Plug Bug
This week, Home on the Strange takes on the whole Internet as Karla attempts to take over mySpace! And she starts by outlining her master plan, telling you exactly what sorts of strange people haunt LiveJournal, Xanga, and Blogger….

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

* – Sophisticated for a game, folks. I’m chatting with a beautiful mathematician as we speak, and by God she’d laugh at how trivial this all is.

** – Sometimes I make up crap just to make it sound more complicated. I shouldn’t, I’m sure, but sometimes I get cocky.