Grudgingly, I have to admit that there won’t be a great deal about Magic Online this week. You’d think that there would be literally nothing about it, seeing as I have spent the last week here in Hawaii, but keeping me away from the Internet is, frankly, a hopeless cause.
Originally, I was going to write about what impact this weekend’s Pro Tour would have on the Magic Online metagame, but there is plenty of time for that next week. I’m sure you’re all still too busy drafting with Guildpact or playing in release leagues to notice, anyway. For me, something far more interesting went on this weekend, and it involved my very own Magic Online clan, Cymbrogi.
Basically, Cymbrogi is a collection of friends who have known each other from general Internet forumery over the last few years. At some point, we all started gathering in a custom chat window on Magic Online (to create a custom chat window, type ‘/join <whatever you want the name to be>’ in any chat pane) and quickly formed bonds of friendship that are still going strong now. The first window we made was /join misetings, but that quickly filled up with people who were both not as cool as the rest of us, and not nearly as good at Magic. That some of us aren’t actually that good either could make for some pretty appalling chats. Those of us “in the know” started going /join misetings2 instead to keep the signal-to-noise ratio at a manageable level, which in hindsight, wasn’t much better, but was made for some very good times.
The next step was to make it official and form a clan. I don’t recall exactly who came up with the name “Cymbrogi,” but they sold it based on the fact that it apparently translated to “a band of brothers.” We later found out that it can also mean “a bunch of gay men,” so it’s a good thing we’re generally the kind of people who can take a good joke. To date, none of the remaining /join misetings crew ever managed to find us elitist bastiches over in /join misetings2. I’m betting they’re probably fuming a little about that now… how unlucky!
Coming up to this Pro Tour, we found ourselves with four clan members qualified, and thanks to the new actual trip to the Pro Tour prize payout thing, all four would be attending. The rest of the clan got to work early and often, trying to come up with a competitive deck for our boys to play. Several months ago, one of our leading theorists Karl Kahn, known to us as NicotineJones (currently banned from the StarCityGames forums for arguing with Mike Flores*), put forward an idea that we could team Tallowisp with some of those fancy new Black cards from Guildpact. Most of us laughed, knowing full well that NicotineJones has a personal… thing for Tallowisp.
You see, back when the next format of importance was the Kamigawa block Pro Tour, NicotineJones built another White Weenie deck based around Tallowisp, that somehow made it into the hands of Ryan Cimera slash Bubbletape. Having qualified via an Top 8 at some Extended Grand Prix, Cimera managed to pilot the Tallowisp deck straight into the Top 8 of the Pro Tour, where he promptly named “Black” on a Blessed Breath and got knocked out by Kenji “boom, boom! … six sake!” Tsumura.
The guys from Cymbrogi then proceeded to inflate their Magic Online Constructed ratings for a while with the deck, before the ever-changing online metagame forced then to move on. This meant that when NicotineJones once again threw out the Tallowisp idea, everyone put their head down and got their playtesting on. Any further details on the creation of the deck are not important at this point, and other clan members will no doubt go into greater detail than I ever would at a later date if people are actually interested. Suffice to say, our clan forum has a twenty-eight page thread on the deck, and it will continue to grow as things change over time on Magic Online.
The interesting part is that, of the four clan members and a friend of mine who had qualified for this event and had traveled with me, four out of five guys playing the following deck made Day 2.
Creatures (24)
- 4 Tallowisp
- 4 Thief of Hope
- 3 Kami of Ancient Law
- 4 Dark Confidant
- 4 Ghost Council of Orzhova
- 3 Plagued Rusalka
- 2 Teysa, Orzhov Scion
Lands (23)
Spells (13)
This was the highest Day 2 success rate of any deck, according to the stats run by uncle Teddy Knutson in the MagictheGathering.com coverage. The other four guys who rode this deck into battle were Ben Ashman (FakeHat), Ben Peebles-Mundy (Peebles), Anthony Purdom (Agentis), and James Glover (k2vsate). Goodman ended up in 22nd place after losing the last two rounds to what he described, with a shrug, as “a bit of bad luck”. Both matches are available amongst the written coverage of the event on MagictheGathering.com
Just reading the deck lets you know how cool it is, and over the weekend, people (both spectators and the coverage team alike) began to gather around Goodman’s table to see the guy who seemed to be winning with Thief of Hope and both White and Black Shoals. I don’t think I’ve ever felt prouder of our clan than when I came back into the coverage team room after working the floor some, to hear Scott Johns and Brian David Marshal gushing over our deck. Then there was Osyp Lebedowicz looking at Goodman in their feature match and saying “wait, wait… are you the Shoal guy?”
What was interesting was the chatter back in the clan room. We may have had four (plus one) guys playing the deck on the Pro Tour, but we also had a bunch of people who wanted to start running the deck through the 8-man queues on Magic Online. The main problem being that if anyone did start playing before round one of the Pro Tour, then some of the other competitors may get inside information on what to expect from the deck, or even worse, make changes to their sideboards to our detriment.
As it was, it turned out there was nothing to worry about. When I got to the venue on Friday and plugged myself into the network, I logged into Magic Online to find that some of the guys had already started running the queues based on some misunderstanding about the local Hawaiian time. I guess the Pro Tour competitors were too preoccupied with the spectacle of Hawaii itself, or figured it was too late to bother with last minute changes based on weird decks they saw on Magic Online.
By the end of Day 1, there was such a great variety of decks that Ghost Dad was mostly lost in the noise of the Orzhov decks in attendance, despite having 80% success rate at making the cut. Not so much online. Clan members were reporting total win records something around 87 wins verses 27 loses, which is apparently a 76.3% win ratio, but I wouldn’t know about that kind of numbers stuff.
The reason our deck seemed so lost in the crowd was the completely unexpected influx of Orzhov decks. When the public took their first look at Guildpact, the denizens of Orzhova came in at a resounding third place to the aggressive Gruul, and the tricksy Izzet. Ignoring the decks that splash into multiple guilds, or decks that focus on guilds from Ravnica (soooo last week), there were 18 Gruul decks, 52 Izzet decks and a jaw-dropping 108 Orzhov decks playing on Day 1.
However, on Day 2, people started to take notice of this Little Deck That Could, and Goodman started appearing in feature matches towards the end of the day. People were even posting on forums that they wanted to see the deck, so there it is up there. If you really cared you could have dug through all the decks typed up the judges, but I know some of you are just as lazy as I am.
I remember at some point one of the Wizards R&D guys asking Goodman what he would play if he could start the tournament again, and he wasted no time in replying,
“The exact same seventy-five cards. I just got a bit unlucky.”
Later on, apparently the guys relented a little and agreed that they could afford to lose the Miren and the Enfeeblement from the sideboard in favor of an extra copy of both Persecute and a Pithing Needle. That said, I have never known these guys to be completely happy with a deck, and I’m sure the list will under go further changes by the time the week is out.
So there you have it. That was my own wee personal brag at how cool my clan is. Call in to catch up this time next week, and maybe we’ll get back to the usual Magic Online shenanigans.
Aloha!
{e}
* As much as NicotineJones is a good friend of mine, he most likely deserved it. The funny thing is that Flores actually agreed with NJ’s points, but the moderators still had to give him the boot for the manner in which he raised his… heh… “objections.”