This month sucks. It’s one thing to change to a new format, meaning I can produce stuff routinely and be assured it’ll be going up. I’m still absolutely honored to be up here on this day… I just wish I had more to talk about. Due to the timing of this change, I’ve been caught in limbo. Everyone wants to talk about the new set – with a good reason – but I can’t, because nobody wants to hear more than one article on a new set borne out of complete inexperience (cunningly disguised as a set review).
I can’t wait until Planar Chaos hits Magic Online so I can start doing something relevant, like talking about decks, instead of about issues. By and large, I tend to do little but be a kind of conversational hemorrhoid – leaving nothing behind but a number of inflamed – ah, well, we’ll leave that joke behind, shall we?
Suffice to say, it’s been a bad few weeks for Magic Play on my part. I’ve only been able to pick up a few new cards, and even the entertainment value I could derive from buying a Tourney Pack or two… then cracking them because “Value Added” for Limited play is easy to lose when you wind up with fewer rares, and worse rares, than if you had just cracked the boosters. And worse, I just can’t get any of the stuff I’ve been working on to coalesce. Well, nothing really.
So far, my problem is that everything in Magic I want to do costs five mana; Consider, if you will:
Casting Demonic Collusion
When I was buying Time Spiral rares, I did something pretty silly, in that I listened to The Ferrett. He’s been pretty enthusiastic about Kaervek, and well, I can dig enthusiasm. Also, Kaervek is almost certainly a mammal, so I should do what I can to play with him. The alternative would be supporting the terrorists, of course.
As I got into these rares, the card that snagged my attention was Demonic Collusion. It’s rare to get a discard engine so mana-heavy that’s any good, and so it automatically had a high mountain to climb. I’ve been giving the card a shot in the following decklist.
DECKID=20851
Yeah, it’s kinda poop, innit? The idea is so cute – using Collusion to dump guys in the graveyard, then tutor up the spell required to reanimate them. Or dumping the Dread Return and the Fattie in the graveyard, and then, you know, casting, uh, the Dread Return with the guys you got in play before you started with this Collusion Malarkey.
It’s not a hit. Just plain-out can’t be. It’s cute, it’s not good. I might wind up trying out Collusion in the next deck, though…
Activating Svogthos
Wow, I never thought I’d be that keen on Svogthos. I started playing with Svoggles as one of the last few offline cards I owned, and in my G/B Death Cloud / Cemetery deck, it’s actually quite rubbish. Seems the problem is that that deck was spending all its time helping lads into and out of the graveyard – the fixed population was generally very low, only three or four at a time. Svogthos wanted a fat graveyard.
Now, I’ve stolen from many a source before, and I’m not going to pretend I came up with this list. This is from MTGO to Frank Karsten to me, and I had to strip a lot of cards out of it before I could play it.
Creatures (26)
- 2 Llanowar Elves
- 2 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Elves of Deep Shadow
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 2 Skeletal Vampire
- 4 Greenseeker
- 4 Trespasser il-Vec
Lands (22)
Spells (12)
This deck is a lot more doable for me thanks to having access to most of the cards already; the most expensive card in the deck is probably the Overgrown Tombs, and I already got a playset of those in some very, very lucky deals. In turn, with Extended season in swing, chances are you’re going to see Life from the Loam selling well online… but overall, there aren’t any real wallet-clutchers in here.
You don’t need the Llanowar Wastes. They probably make the deck a bit better, but you already zot yourself a fair bit with your mana base, and you have a lot of mana-fixing in the deck that you were going to do anyway (Life from the Loam and Greenseeker).
Now, Frank was right about one thing – the gameplan of playing with Skarrgs and Red mana is wasteful and, in my opinion, a bit silly. You’re better off playing to your strength, and that is Moar Svogthos. Traitor’s Clutch is the trick, in this deck, that lets a late-game Svogthos punch through blockers. I had a 19/18 Svogthos charge past an opponent’s Storm Herd tokens just a few days ago…
Though, ah, since he was on thirty life, it didn’t actually win me the game. But hey, you have good days and bad days.
Grave-Trolls are there as speed-bumps. They are your Svogthos.5s – Beta Svogthos, as it were. The Skeletal Vampires are there to be Dread Returned to play, and they’re wanted over other options because they block really well. Holding the fort while you wait for the fort to swell to double-digit proportions is important. My only regret with this deck is that I often find myself wishing I just had eight Trespasser Il-Vec, instead of using Delirium Skeins as a discard outlet. However, without the Skeins what little disruption the deck does have to offer would be gone.
Also, Life from the Loam is far too important for it to be in here as a two-of. I hate Nightmare Void in this deck, because, in the casual room, it does so very little. Typically if you start hammering someone’s hand on turn 3 in this deck, you’ve deprived yourself of a chance at drawing a land drop the next turn – and while you’re nibbling their hand, they might just be developing their board and smashing you with something. Awkward when that happens. Still, I’m sure it doesn’t happen to good players.
Casting Might Sliver
Ah, Slivers. I’ve avoided the subject of these guys because I figured most everyone else would swamp them. I know that a lot of casual players view Slivers as “broken,” which is pretty funny. To those of my fan-base who cling to this particular misunderstanding, you need to look at the Slivers as a house made of glass. Yes, it’s very tall and it looks impressive, but you have to remember, every removal spell multiplies in its effect.
Slivers do make Tribal boring, I imagine, because, well, let’s face it, they’re a bit lobotomised. The trick isn’t finding ways to exploit their synergies, it’s about finding ways to just slap the critters onto the table. Get the manabase right (i.e. spend enough money) and fix your curve and you were more or less guaranteed something that would mosh over lesser tribes just by dint of the other creature types offering less synergy.
Now, right now, I have this Sliver deck, which is waiting in the wings for Planar Chaos to hit. Here, lemme pull up a decklist for you.
A Prox Upon Your House
5 Forest
9 Plains
3 Selesnya Sanctuary
4 Temple Garden
2 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
4 Condemn
3 Chord of Calling
4 Kitsune Blademaster
4 Gemhide Sliver
1 Essence Sliver
1 Harmonic Sliver
3 Might Sliver
1 Pulmonic Sliver
4 Quilled Sliver
4 Scarwood Treefolk
4 Sidewinder Sliver
4 Valor Made Real
… what, why are you looking at me funny?
Oh, right! In real life, when I did this kind of exercise, I’d use cards with the same mana cost (mana cost includes color), and just make sure that whatever card I used was god-awful. I wasn’t about to confuse Machinate for actually being a Machinate when what I couldn’t wait for was a Hinder. Shame I don’t have my notes on me as what this decklist is supposed to be…
No point making a game of it. Let’s face it, you guys are freaking clever, if Jeff Till article feedback threads are a sign. So I’m sure you don’t need any hints or guidance as to what this decklist is going to look like when Planar Chaos hits online. Still, it curves out nicely, and I’m really eager to see what happens when I have the cards to power it “properly.”
Casting Battle Of Wits
No, not really.
Using Hit / Run As Something Other Than An Edict
This one bothers me. Red/Green is a color combination with a lot of history for me, and I love modal cards. I’m a fan of the Wakefield School, the school that wants its cards to have maximum flexibility. For those who don’t remember this, the spell you’d want to think of is Creeping Mold. With Creeping Mold, one of the crucial lessons was to not think of it as a land destruction spell. If you throw it at a land, unless you’re dealing with an opponent who is already stumbling on mana, you run such a risk. Oh, don’t get me wrong, some games you’ll have a turn 3 Mold hitting an opponent’s Karoo, and suddenly that two-land hand is pretty ordinary, but you can’t think of Mold as doing that kind of thing primarily.
Hit / Run smacks of this effect to me. Sometimes it can get rid of a Simic Sky Swallower, sometimes it can inflame a ground force of 3-4 guys and turn a passive “no blocks” turn into an “OH GOD MY EYE” turn. That flexibility is tauntingly fun, and it even has a color combination you can manage on the cheap, using Snow Lands. Consider the following manabase (depending on strong leanings)
4 Tresserhorn Sinks
1 Highland Weald
3 Golgari Rot Farm
8 Snow-Covered Forest
5 Snow-Covered Mountain
1 Snow-Covered Swamp
That’s a pretty extreme example of the style I’m talking about, but it’s not an awful start for the budget-minded. Eight lands that come into play tapped is clearly not going to be the kind of deck that wants to make men on turn 1, but that’s okay. With the colors in question, you’re going to have access to removal and slower, game-grinding cards that let you build a more controlling deck that plays out big, fat men.
And we all like men, don’t we?
I wouldn’t really use Scrying Sheets in this; not because it’s too expensive, but because it’s a colorless land. In a two-color deck, Sheets is great, because you’re probably going to hit your two colors without fixing, and Into the North can operate as acceleration and as a way to get your card advantage engine online. In three colors, with a budget deck, you’re probably going to be chasing your third color a lot of the time. The Rot Farm is a bit of an ugly hack, but ultimately, it would turn on, with a Mountain, all your spells in your deck, if you built carefully.
But what do you put with it? Now, Planar Chaos only brings so much new stuff, but if you want to maximize Hit / Run, wouldn’t one of your preferred strategies be a swarm? A slow deck doesn’t swarm, but a swarm deck doesn’t tend to cast five-mana spells. Now, one avenue is a token-generating deck (and indeed, if Kher Keep could be Into The Northed up, it would be pretty sexy in this deck), that tries to grind out a slower mid-to-late game, then win with a king-hitting smash. The virtue of this strategy would be that Hit / Run can be useful before and after, and it hits hard, but isn’t essential to winning.
Alas, the only card that leaps to mind is Vitu-Ghazi. Crap, that adds another color. You can see, of course, the bind I’m in. Renewable resources that create tokens aren’t really in Red/Green’s forte. You’ve got, what, Wurmcalling? Kher Keep? Sarpadian Empires, Volume Who Cares? None of these are particularly optimal options. Thallids might wind up being my defense options – and god, I do hate using Thallids for anything… but still, we have the edges of a deck here. There’s also an emergency backup aspect in that we can use a colorless land to provide us with tokens.
Alas, the “best” avenue is Urza’s Factory. It’s not a snow land, so you have to rely on drawing it naturally. This would mean either running yet another color for card draw, or using the card draw options available to a heavily R/G/B strategy. Which is nothing, right?
Enter Harmonize.
Except I can’t play with it yet.
Watch this space. I might finally have a Hit / Run deck come Planar Chaos.
On Beta Testing and Bug Catching
Who’s a big enough nerd to read the rules FAQs for each set?
Because if you answered “Not the guys coding Magic Online,” chances are you’d be right. Now, as a player, I don’t have a lot of reason to squeak this information out of the game. I mean, I don’t go to tournaments, and I haven’t ever raised my hand for the Men In Black (And White) to swoop down to my aid, barring for an embarrassing play at the Mirrodin Prerelease*, and an even more embarrassing Mulligan To Seven against Affinity at one point. I do not read these FAQs because I should have to enforce the rules – indeed, I’ve become somewhat sloppy, having not read the recent rules Q’s from Time Spiral that are FA’d.
But when Golgari Grave-Troll was first revealed to us, the spoiler-hankering public, it was in the Rules FAQ. And there, I learned a little tidbit that I filed away – thinking, you know, this is going to be useful one day. For those of you who didn’t read it, haven’t read it in a while, or have read it and have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, the Grave-Troll’s entry in said FAQ:
Golgari Grave-Troll
4G
Creature – Skeleton Troll
0/0
Golgari Grave-Troll comes into play with a +1/+1 counter on it for each creature card in your graveyard.
1, Remove a +1/+1 counter from Golgari Grave-Troll: Regenerate Golgari Grave-Troll.
Dredge 6
* If an effect puts Golgari Grave-Troll into play from your graveyard, Golgari Grave-Troll counts itself as one of the cards in your graveyard and gets a counter accordingly.
Okay, so there’s nothing that complicated there. Is the ruling counter-intuitive? Perhaps a little. I mean, if it’s in play, it’s not in the graveyard, right? And that means it wouldn’t be in the yard to count towards its getting a counter… right? Alas, the intuitive answer it seems, is not the correct answer.
You could be forgiven for assuming that’s how it works – after all, it would not be in the FAQ if it were not a corner case – contrary to popular belief, FAQs are not usually that full of questions that actually are Frequently Asked – they’re crammed with questions that, when they will be asked, will be really annoying, and it’ll be nice to have someone to give the final say.
This little corner-case of the rules didn’t crop up, it seems, in beta-testing, despite being specifically mentioned in the FAQ. It also didn’t crop up in the year since, or if it did, nobody saw fit to mention it. Or, more likely, it was mentioned, and shuffled off in the long list of “things we can ignore.” Fortunately, it only took a year before a card to change this particular state of things to be printed (as opposed to the years that appeared between Cloister and the first of the Split cards). I’m not generally proud to do it, but there have been many a turn, I’ve found, where in order to pressure an opponent, or to guarantee a blocker, but where I have exchanged three men on the field for one of the men in my yard.
If I have six creature cards in my bin, one of whom is a Grave-Troll, and three, invariably embarrassing, non-token fellows on the field, I should be able to change that Grave-Troll from a 0/0 in a graveyard, into a 9/9 in play… and indeed, in real life play, that’s exactly what should happen, according to this FAQ.
That’s not what does happen in Magic Online, which is supposed to actually make the rules happen.
This isn’t supposed to be a singular little whine, by the by; I’ve filled bug reports and I’ve done what I can to address this problem. It’s a niche problem, but one that should never have happened. If the developers don’t read the rules FAQ and make sure that the program operates accordingly, then the alpha testers should to find things to test. If the alpha testers don’t, then the beta testers should have it at least mentioned to them.
I mean, this smacks of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. This is a document that Wizards fills out to explain to us how the rules should work – should it not be understood and observed internally? How many more of these corner cases are sitting around, untouched? How many iterations did Doubling Season go through before it became functional?
So there you are. A number of pages, where I don’t complain much at all. Except about release times. And programmers. And beta testers. And alpha testers. And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope… I’ll come in again.
Hugs and Kisses
Talen Lee
talen at dodo dot com dot au
* On that note, this was my first sanctioned tournament ever, and my first Sealed ever. Felt very much at odds with the world around me, and had made some really bad mistakes in the deck construction. One thing that struck me was that, when I reported the error to the judge, despite the situation being at that crucial position, where there was potential for the game state to be reversed without any complaint, and despite it being a prerelease, the supposedly “casual” tournament, the ruling was hard and game-ending. Ah well – they can’t all be Good Days**, can they?
** A guy I went to that tournament with was my only match win the whole day, and that was due to my Sculpting Steel meeting my Loxodon Warhammer for the first time all day. He did not win a single game all day, and it was to the credit of the judge who gave me the game-ender, when I mentioned that my friend had had such a bad day, he was given a free booster. There’s some kind of pleasant feeling there, of having helped make someone worse off better.