Block Constructed at the moment confuses me.
I’d started working a while ago and created a deck I was quite happy with – a Blue/Green sort of mid-range deck, using Morphs and some of the best Blue and Green cards all around, and was having very solid success against the aggressive decks, winning against Wild Pair, and doing okay against control. I could go toe-to-toe with most Black-centric control decks, the kind with discard instead of countermagic, and expect to pull out of three games as a winner in the card-advantage fight. While I pulled south of 50-50 against Teferi-centric control decks, it wasn’t so horribly outgunned that I never won, just a little bit rough and I couldn’t guarantee winning the match though I could reasonably guarantee going to game 3. Against some MTGO players this is almost as good as winning the match. If you’ve ever tried to win game three playing a Teferi-Teachings control with four minutes on the clock, and the cards could flop either way: maybe a win, maybe a loss, depending on how well the two decks drew and what kind of fights the Green deck tried to pick.
Unfortunately, nobody else could replicate these results. My esteemed editor and Champion of All of Britain dropped at 1-2 in an IPA qualifier, and I dismissed the result… not at first, because he’d told me he knew what he was doing, but definitely after I’d learned he’d lied to me about his post-sideboarding strategy against control decks, which more or less conveyed that he wasn’t using the same plan I was and thus should not be surprised to have a different result. Josh Silvestri seeded the deck in a small Block Constructed mock tournament, and apparently the three-color deck drew its mana better than the two-color deck. Nowhere in here did anyone look at it against White Weenie, to see how consistently the deck bullied the little White men, and thus understand the “weird” card choices like Wipe Away in the context of the format. Whenever anyone told me they didn’t “get” why Wipe Away was in the deck, I knew that the deck wasn’t being accurately represented… but my focus was elsewhere, and since the person I was interested in helping had already solidified his deck choice (and I’d say it’s a pretty solid one) my interest stayed elsewhere because nothing was lighting a fire in my brain. I don’t have to stick up for every deck I’ve ever conceived… but still, I didn’t understand why nobody else could do well with my concoction, when I was reaping in the tickets those first two weeks.
Somehow, Block Constructed is coming to the forefront again, and I’d like to think I’d learned a few lessons about it. The focus is spreading wider and wider, and the metagame is broadening as the technology becomes both more advanced and better-known. With just these two sets of cards we’re seeing about four real decks hitting the spotlight: White Weenie, Wild Pair, Teferi Control, and Black/X Control. White Weenie is the easy leader, mostly because the other decks claim to beat it but are generally lying, except for Black/X control… who beats it and isn’t lying. The format still breaks down into one of two dichotomies: fast men or fast mana. The beatdown decks – predominantly led by White Weenie, though some smaller niches do exist for mono-Red beatdown and hybridized White lists playing a bit of burn – play very fast men and aggressively try to kick you to death. It works pretty well thanks to the fact that the White creatures are actually really, really good. The control or control-combo decks all have fast mana, be it Wall of Roots and Gemhide Sliver for the Wild Pair deck or a variety of artifacts for the controlling decks, and they lean hard on that acceleration to keep up… with White Weenie, and with each other.
This made me want to play with a very unusual card, one that could affect any of the leaders in the metagame: break an artifact or break a man. Conveniently this card was also quite crucial in a previous Block Constructed format, and one for which my role is apparently remembered to this day and spoken of by Scott Johns and Mike Flores… about how I was trying to figure out how to port the then-popular “Fires” deck over to Block Constructed for Invasion Block and was thinking up a Red-Green “all Haste or all 187” deck, only to watch Mike Flores and Paul Jordan playing a couple decks at Neutral Ground with this card, FTK, and Raging Kavu. As the story goes, I squealed about their deck and leaked it, when in fact I then came home, wrote about where my thoughts and my thoughts only took me when further conceiving of the deck, posted an under-developed list and apparently put a spotlight on “Rocket Shoes” quickly enough to warp the metagame enough so that Zvi could win with an anti-Red deck. It happens to be that no one was talking about it, so even a poorly-developed and ill-tuned list was enough to point people away from the slow and ponderous Yawgmoth’s Agenda control decks to play an actual good kind of deck instead of something slow and bad. Paul Jordan is still playing this card, if you look back into his PTQ reports for this past season with Boros Deck Wins, and in Block Constructed it still does what few other things do… it just happens to be a different list of things than it did back then, hitting Soltari Priest instead of Crimson Acolyte.
The card setting fire to my brain was Thornscape Battlemage, and how to play it in a good deck. Requiring both Green and White mana, it is starting out with two strikes against it, at least as far as being able to be placed in a “good deck” is concerned.
Starting off, you’ll want access to either kicker… one hurts beatdown, and the other can stall the mana-acceleration of a control deck considerably. We already know that Red-based mana control strategies are struggling, though Blink Riders does occasionally do well… but conceiving of a “just” Red-Green mana control deck didn’t seem to go anywhere particularly fast. Everything curved out at four mana, and it got really hard to actually play Boom/Bust when you had to target Terramorphic Expanse instead of Flagstones of Trokair… suffice it to say as much as I wished the deck would work, Radha didn’t quite Get There this time. In humor, I looked back through other Block Constructed formats some of these Timeshifted cards came from, remembering fondly a large number of decks on my stroll down Memory Lane. After all, this Block Constructed format could at least in some fashion be thought of as “Bring Your Own Block” Block Constructed, with the all-time greats battling it out for superiority to see who’d win. I got to thinking about Green/White decks, because in any difficult or complex format that’s what Mike Flores does (apparently), and hit back upon one of the cards I had pegged early on to be a key tool to possibly exploit in the format: Hunting Wilds.
I didn’t really think too much about this… after all, I was having fun playing Blue-Red Tron, and doing quite well suspending Bluntman and Chronic for fun if not necessarily for profit. After I got tired of Wildfire this and Repeal that, I started drafting again for a while, just to see if I could goof off and have some fun without feeling like I was “on the clock,” but not so far gone that I was grabbing for the Momir Vig avatar quite yet. The game is interesting so long as it is actually fun and not “work,” a mistake very commonly made by all too many over the years. And still I was thinking about the joys of Thornscape Battlemage, White kicker against other control decks, and trying to think of a list of things a Green/White deck could do that is currently exploring unused space in the format… because honestly, unless we’re talking about Whitemane Lion and Wild Pair, these two colors do not appear together.
Wall of Roots is great at board-stall against beatdown and quick mana generation.
Hunting Wilds is quality “big mana” acceleration and a potential late-game hasted threat.
Harmonize draws cards like Green is the new Blue, just with worse creatures is all.
Thornscape Battlemage kicks in two directions to do good things.
Okay, that’s where my thoughts had taken me already… but this does not a deck make. It doesn’t even tell me why I should be playing Green spells and White spells together, when each of the cards mentioned costs Green mana only and the one that wants to splash would like both Mountain and Plains to be found with Terramorphic Expanse. What else do Green and White have, for a mid-range sort of stance that can protect itself early against White Weenie or do mean things to control decks (… like Thornscape Battlemage, White kicker, their Prismatic Lens! Yeah!)?
Magus of the Tabernacle can slow an aggressive deck, and be the nail in the coffin if you “happen” to cast Bust.
Magus of the Disk is a Wrath… sort of. Probably the best Wrath you’ll find in any White deck, unless you want to count Desolation Giant.
Saffi Eriksdotter is hot. And good against Damnation, maybe… but terrible against Split Second removal like Sudden Death and Sudden Shock. Still, pretty good for a two-drop.
Mystic Enforcer is a pro-Black Dragon, or at least he’s Dragon-sized if you can get seven cards in the graveyard. Casting spells to draw more cards and stuff like that should help, like playing two Flagstones of Trokair or just sucking your Wall of Roots dry for mana acceleration. Or, again, pretty awesome if you “happen” to cast Bust, being the Ernham to its Geddon when you gain Threshold the old-fashioned way, dropping all your lands in the graveyard.
Speaking of pro-Black Dragons, Akroma, Angel of Wrathful Boobies is hot… and is just the kind of “big mana” thing you’d want to power up to by eating your Veggies, as seen in Onslaught Block when Hunting Wilds could find you two Plains but never found you six power in hasty attackers.
Consigning myself to that special Hell Michael J. Flores goes to every time he designs a new deck for a PTQ and comes up with some awful Green/White monstrosity, I came up with the following deck and resigned myself to playtesting it:
Creatures (20)
Lands (10)
It became apparent quite quickly that a few things weren’t working out. I couldn’t get to triple-White often enough, and never really worried about not having access to Green on time or not having enough Forests left in the deck for the second or third Hunting Wilds to be functional still. The land balance was unnaturally skewing to favor Green at the expense of White, when it really wanted to be more evenly balanced. Terramorphic Expanse and Prismatic Lens more than covered the slight hint of Red mana for Thornscape Battlemage and Bustageddon so long as I had a single Mountain. Gemstone Mine wasn’t pulling its weight… didn’t need it for early Red so much, and didn’t want it dying before it could cast Akroma. Again I was mis-applying Gemstone Mine in my Green deck when in this case I wanted to have some Saltcrusted Steppes to cover Akroma’s triple-White cost if I had to get there, y’know, the hard way.
And dear God, Mystic Enforcer did nothing. Getting Threshold only ever happened when I cast Bustageddon or my opponent Wrathed, and guess which of those two things happened first more often? Mystic Enforcer’s Threshold requirement was more or less satisfied by himself being card #7 in the graveyard, which is to say that he was awful and just had awkward mana and didn’t do anything impressive against anyone despite his potential. Somewhere in here I remembered a lot of the good Green/White draft decks I’d had in Time Spiral / Planar Chaos, which is almost a sad thing because I hate drafting Green-White in pretty much any format. A few have just been the “amazing two-drop beatdown” horde of doom, fitting quick flankers next to Mire Boas and attacking muchly… but the ones I was thinking of were somehow larger and more controlling, and often featured Magus of the Disk. Having not seen Magus of the Disk utilized anywhere, and realizing that its use could make Saffi more than just a bear with benefits, I fixed the manabase and ported over the Magus into the maindeck, figuring it’s probably decent against everything even if it isn’t necessarily great against control… so long as it wasn’t too slow against aggro I could live with it.
Oddly enough, it’s a heavy Green deck without Spectral Force. I guess Akroma is probably just better, then… even if she is vulnerable to opposing Shapeshifters, and in somewhat Split Second fashion so that even Saffi cannot save her from looking in the mirror and realizing that she was no longer fairest of them all so long as her twin sister was in town. I didn’t want the deck to work, I kind of just wanted to go back to my belief that Morph and Force was the best Block deck I was going to conceive of even if somehow nobody else “got it” enough to replicate the kinds of results I was getting. There are plenty of better things I can do than playtest some mid-range Green/White deck, like read a book, watch a Law and Order marathon, or contemplate suicide. But goofing around test-drawing the deck showed it more or less did what I was asking it to do, accelerating its mana and dropping Akromas really quickly. Since the “fixed” version of the deck seemed to be at least internally consistent it seemed I would have to accept my damnation and get myself the cards I was missing on MTGO so I could actually try out this criminally-underpowered Ernham-Geddon deck I’d come up with.
Creatures (20)
- 4 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
- 4 Wall of Roots
- 4 Thornscape Battlemage
- 4 Magus of the Disk
- 4 Saffi Eriksdotter
Lands (10)
The key players, other than the obvious:
Magus of the Disk: It’s like a Wrath, if you’re drunk and you squint real hard.
Magus of the Tabernacle: Here is how you get nothing done, and fast. The last thing White Weenie really wants to see you playing on turn 3 off a Prismatic Lens, on the play.
Boom / Bust: Armageddon costs six and is Red now. Armageddon is still pretty good in a Green/White deck.
Saffi Eriksdotter: Early beatdown against control that can protect another threat from Damnation, or a fun way to annoy the opponent when you pop Magus of the Disk. Actually, I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Cloudchaser Kestrel: Wild Pair is a good card… for me to poop on.
Utopia Vow: Goes on any Akroma, solves any problem. Pro: White isn’t a big problem, but it is enough of one that the sideboard Pacifisms should be Green and Sorcery speed instead of White and Instant speed.
Stonecloaker: Not being played simply for its beatdown power, here it is a sideboard tool that is part effective threat, part graveyard hoser for Flashback cards, and part counterspell for removal spells. It does each of these things quite well, and that it somehow doesn’t have a home in the maindeck is probably a failing on my part… but my girl Saffi keeps seducing me to keep her in. This is why we playtest, so I can have a good argument for cutting her numbers instead of just drooling over her posterior.
I had to cruise around considerably to nab all of the cards I was missing… after all, Saffi is essentially unplayable on MTGO, and why would I ever have Magus of the Whatever? And no, I don’t keep four copies of Akroma lying around in case I need her for something… though I guess I do, now. And as much as I keep wanting to hold onto the Flagstones of Trokair I pick up while drafting, and probably have sold more than four of them in the past week alone, no matter how much I keep promising myself I’ll finally hold onto them, I just keep not doing it. So by the time I was done with all of this I wasn’t able to push the new deck through any eight-man queues, and as a rule I am not comfortable pushing into the eight-mans until I’ve actually played the deck a little, gotten a feel for it, and corrected the inevitable tendencies to misplay it when we go from the design I’ve created in my head to the design as it plays out when you shuffle it up.
And I was truly, truly disappointed by this deck.
Because it actually worked.
Not “well shucks, I guess that was a bad idea anyway, too bad I wasted my time and money getting those cards together.” Not disappointed because I was only doing merely “okay” but there were some things to iron out still. Disappointed because it worked even better than I’d hoped it would, in all the ways I’d hoped it would, and now I have to waste who knows how many more hours of my life working on a Green/White deck so ugly even Flores couldn’t love it. The early mistakes I made were ugly, but informative – one match saw me playing against another Green deck, this one a Green/Red LD concoction much like the avenue of approach I’d immediately dismissed as viable for the purposes of testing this deck. He had some number of Spectral Forces, ready to attack; I had Akroma, Magus of the Disk, and Saffi Eriksdotter, all untapped. When his Spectral Force attacked I activated Saffi, popped the Disk, and scratched my head when I didn’t still have an Akroma left at the end of the process… only to notice there was this “activated ability” icon that kind of looked like Saffi still lingering on the stack waiting for me to press “okay”, and that is why my Akroma was dead (and later, why I was as well). For the purposes of testing the deck, I can mark that match in the win column – so long as I also mark myself in the “idiot” column. As I said, this is why I want to get some test games in before I jump into battling under pressure, because while I expect my opponent will likely make some ineffective choices because he doesn’t know my deck very well, it’s unforgivable (and likely to lead to losing matches, and thus losing tickets) if I am making mistakes as the deck’s pilot for the same reason.
Rather than go over all of the games I played, narrowly wriggling out of the “Pickles” lock against multiple opponents, laughing off LD decks by having access to eight mana on turn 5 and doing bad things to good beatdown decks with a variety of White Magi… rather than give you a descriptive account of the laughable, pitiable details of each game or match played (in the Tournament Practice Room of all places), I’m simply having a look at the format as a whole and figuring out where this fits in with the tenor of the format.
Time Spiral Block Constructed is all about tempo. Not necessarily speed – we are not talking about the consistent race to turn 4 and then the game’s over, that was Mirrodin Block Constructed – but the speed at which you do things. The aggressive decks do very important things in the first three or four turns that make it quite possible they will just push you off of the table because you cannot resist their swarm of little White men. The control decks set up their mana and position themselves to control the game very early because they have good acceleration, and the decks that fit somewhere in between likewise deploy mana quickly and do stuff earlier than the printed casting costs on the cards would normally suggest that stuff be done.
So the format is very much focused on tempo and acceleration. Be the winner of the dance and it doesn’t matter what the opponent’s next punch was, so long as it was disrupted our outpaced long enough to make sure that it never got to land. Some decks accelerate their mana and do stuff fast, others just attack you quickly with efficient creatures. One of the difficulties to the format is how paltry the mana-fixing is compared to say the last Block Constructed format; when it comes to colored mana, we’re basically stuck in the bad old days of Masques Block Constructed, when you were mono-colored or you had to have a really good reason not to be, because the mana-fixing made it very hard not to be. It’s not quite that bad – Green can still whore itself out to whatever color of spells it wants to access, and every deck has access to Gemstone Mine, Terramorphic Expanse, and Prismatic Lens – but for the most part it is very difficult to do the complicated sorts of things people keep trying to do when you give them the mana of the Gods. We have grown spoiled by the plentiful painlands in Ninth Edition and Ravnica Block’s shocklands, Signets, and bouncelands… we’ve forgotten how to play with bad mana, or as the case is, merely mediocre mana.
When good mana is not plentiful unless you’re monochromatic, land destruction becomes a powerful method of disruption. It allows for tempo advantage as well as potentially crippling the subjected deck, and the land destruction we actually have access to can be used multiple times reasonably cheaply thanks to Momentary Blink, or worse yet actually accelerates you at the same time as it’s disrupting them. We have a very high-power format, with swingy spells like Damnation and overpowering breakers like Teferi hanging around like it’s no big deal that nothing Suspended will ever resolve, and amazingly powerful cheap creatures like Vesuvan Shapeshifter and Spectral Force. I’d clued into this previously by tossing Force, Shifter, and Teferi in the same deck and trying to make that cobbled-together collection work… and when you add high power and mana acceleration, good things happen. That’s more or less where we’re at, and it’s where a lot of the better playgroups seem to have started, which is why you occasionally see Power Glove decks and acceleration into Wild Pair to provide both card advantage and further “acceleration” by means of a second copy of your same spell or something comparable if it’s more important.
This deck somehow, miraculously, plays into the themes of the format – Thornscape Battlemage may not be the biggest or swingiest of spells, but it is correctly pointed at the metagame as it plays out. It can kill a weenie, be it a beater like Soltari Priest or any mana accelerant creature not named Wall of Roots, and takes out Lenses or Totems besides in a format where the control decks have learned to rely on them to beat the aggressive decks and each other. It can kill both an artifact and a weenie, as seen last night when I double-kicked to hit a face-down Shapeshifter and the opponent’s fresh Prismatic Lens, much to my opponent’s annoyance. (After all, it was off the top while I was playing on empty.) And it accelerates mana quickly and consistently, without opening up its first accelerant to being removed from play by the means you are most likely to see… Gemhide Slivers burn, but Prismatic Lenses don’t, and neither do Wall of Roots. The second accelerant is crippling, either because it draws three cards or jumps you right from four mana up to six. And what you do from there is your own business, but it’s usually attacking for six with Haste, either as Akroma or as the second copy of Hunting Wilds.
So we’re jumped ahead in the acceleration war – check. We have more “big mana” spells than the opponent, and we play them a lot faster, as you can see with the juicy “four-of” Akroma, Angel of Wrath (and Boobies!) who sometimes appears on turn 5 and dominates the board the same as she always does. We aren’t disrupting the opponent’s lands, or at least we aren’t until we are already ahead on the board… but a decent chunk of the exercise was based on the idea that playing an Uktabi Orangutan / Ghitu Slinger hybrid would make it so that whichever half is relevant in the matchup being faced would be good enough to play, so we’re accelerating our mana and decelerating the opponent’s. Flores, patron saint of awful Green/White decks, teaches that the secret to modern mid-range Green-White is twofold: using your acceleration to take your normally “fair” things and make them fast enough that they start to feel unfair, and finding a way to decelerate whatever the opponent is doing enough that your “fair” things win the game. Green/White plays fair, and makes the other guy play fair when he isn’t prepared to… and that’s where the interesting parts of the deck start to shine.
I threw Saffi in here because I figured she had to have value. You can’t have creatures as your win condition without playing some creatures, and you can’t have all high-curve stuff and expect it to work out. You could start with Call of the Herd as your plan here and you wouldn’t be wrong… but that’s really not how the mana curve works, in Block Constructed. Standard makes it really easy to go from one to three, making Call of the Herd your best friend. Block Constructed is not able to skip that two-drop, it uses the two-drop to jump you up to four, skipping three. Stupid Elephants (TM) might be good, but deploying them is more difficult to squeeze into your curve than you’d think. Everything we’re looking at in this deck happens at an even mana interval: two, four, six, or eight. Thornscape Battlemage says three but is actually four, so you have to go to the sideboard to find an actual “three”, and those are only there because their comes-into-play abilities fill a needed role… Stonecloaker is great against removal-based decks that use Flashback for their card advantage, letting you gum up their advantage engine while throwing a wrench in the works against non-Split Second removal; and Kestrel hits Wild Pair or even just simple stuff like Griffin Guides.
Saffi had a lot more value when I figured out that Magus of the Disk, while poop, might be the right kind of poop. Saffi turns one Magus into two, in addition to having added value against removal spells or mass removal, and this was coming up often enough that I didn’t mind her Legendary status, she could be traded for something else of value before a second copy was needed pretty much all of the time. The Magi, though… that’s where the second precept of Mike’s mid-range Green/White strategies comes into play, as more than a wet dream about Thornscape Battlemages double-kicked. One of them is a mass-reset button, meaning the deck is quite capable of Wrathing the board, clearing any enchantments or artifacts left as detritus, and follow it up with Bustageddon to obtain the Flawless Victory. That one is clearly powerful but it’s harder to see how it’s tempo-grabbing; powerful, sure, but it’s a Wrath stapled to a man with a one-turn delay, so there’s plenty of windows of opportunity for the opponent to prevent themselves from getting wrecked by him. It’s Block Constructed, you can’t always choose what your Wraths look like, and I’d say this particular block’s White Wrath has been more or less left out of the spotlight under the assumption that White can “only” be the beatdown color.
Magus of the Tabernacle, though… that’s a spicy little number. Only fliers and shadows get around him, and as a mana-gobbling 2/6 he makes it hard for the board to not just seize up right there, especially since he’s more or less intended to come down turn 3… you might have a Javelineers and Soltari Priest and that’s it before he stops the board cold, a miserable state for a beatdown deck to find itself in. It’s a symmetrical effect… except that one of these decks is relying on the early attack, and the other is packing plenty of ways to break the symmetry by recruiting more mana. Playing against more than one beatdown deck over the course of my few dozen games with a deck so ugly only Flores could love it, the game would come to an absolute crawl as the Tabernacle wrenched tempo away from the aggressor, letting me build up my mana incrementally just like normally planned… while my opponent choked on his development entirely, unable to advance his board around the Tabernacle-mage until the unfair situation saw my board be Magus of the Tabernacle plus Akroma versus some small number of creatures that are worse than Akroma.
I wasn’t impressed by the sideboard, except for the Magus… both of the White Magi are powerful tools for seizing an aggressive charge or possibly breaking out of a tough situation that would otherwise leave the opponent at an advantage, even if it’s something so simple as casting Bustageddon but having a Flagstones in play and getting to be the one who played a land before the dreaded upkeep phase crawled around. And normally I took Boom / Bust out when putting Magus of the Tabernacle in, because six-drop situational spells might be a little slow against Soltari Priest and friends… so the plan isn’t even to “live the dream,” just use the 2/6 to grind the opponent to a screeching halt while you continue accelerating. Utopia Vow goes on any Akroma or fattie, because nothing has pro-Green, but aside from that one possibility of hitting Red Akroma it’s clearly inferior to Temporal Isolation… which doesn’t answer Red Akroma but does answer actual good cards instead, like Bogardan Hellkite. Cloudchaser filled a role but not one I ran into, in my limited testing… good in theory, “whatever” in fact. Stonecloaker didn’t impress me even if he did win a few games; I don’t know if I need the benefits I’m asking him for, he kind of overlaps with Saffi to begin with, and if I’m fighting against removal it’s quite possible I want to board in the ‘right’ three-drop card to do it and have some Elephants somewhere. We already know that two 3/3’s are good, Hunting Wilds gave us the memo with its diet-Akroma performance against Damnation decks, but if it’s a battle of attrition we’re talking about it’s usually true that the proactive card beats the reactive card, and making Elephants that come with backup Elephants is more proactive than trying to save a guy from removal but maybe not being able to do so because you have to keep up mana each turn, or because that removal has split second. I found myself being content if I could just buy back Thornscape Battlemage and have a flier, so it’s quite possible that a full eight out of fifteen sideboard cards had their hearts in the right place but were doing the wrong thing entirely.
But I did learn that for some reason the deck works… it’s curved well and generates incremental card advantage, not in the Rock fashion of trading cards at small value but by actually drawing cards and getting two-for-one’s, via Battlemage, Magus of the Disk and Hunting Wilds, while trying to avoid getting two-for-one’d itself… thanks to Saffi, but also thanks to the other Legendary Creature – Hot Chick, that purple haired harlot Akroma… who beats down, defends, and plays every other zone in between, requiring that you deal with her and more or less guarantees that it’s going to cost you at least your best spell and possibly more than one of them if her gal-pal Saffi is around.
One week left to the Pro Tour… will people be eating their veggies and hanging with the hot chicks? Who knows… on the one hand, this is the kind of deck only Flores could love, big and ponderous Green/White mid-range. On the other hand, it’s always possible that you aren’t hearing about something because somebody’s not talking, rather than because it’s no good… and my initial testing suggests this might just be able to hang with the popular crowd, being the kind of Green deck that can actually beat White Weenie, and having spells of sufficiently high value to make the strategy of “that blue deck better have a counter for every spell I play, because if he doesn’t he’s toast” actually workable, and fights the other decks trying to do Big Things Fast by doing Bigger Things Faster. This might not be a blip on the radar… but I don’t think it’s a particularly poor strategy either, as there are definitely elements that have merit.
Either that, or I like big butts and I cannot lie, except to myself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a date with the girls for some more “playtesting” this weekend… I’m hoping we’ll playtest “Doctor,” or maybe Akroma will ask me to choose between her Boom and her Bust. Hard choices all, see you next week… and if you don’t see me next week, know that I died with a grin on my face.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com