I will have some material for you about Block Constructed in the near future, but I’m still processing the Yokohama results and trying to figure out how the prerelease cards I saw today will impact the PTQ format.
(I will mention that I think the format changes completely with the entrance of two counterspells, especially when one of them is as awesome as Delay. Even if Teferi.dec stays the deck to play – and I’m not 100% convinced that it will – I think the decks that win PTQs will look completely different to the Wafo-Tapa or Herberholz lists.)
Instead, I’d like to talk about a funny thing that has happened to me on Magic Online over the last two weeks. I have not won product at a rate such that I can sustain myself without buying more – as the kids say, I haven’t “gone infinite” – because my draft skill is still a work in progress. However, I haven’t had to pay for a whole lot of my draft practice either. The reason for this is Momir Basic.
As I noted in Momir Basic for Fun and Profit, henceforth referred to as MBFFAP, the Momir Basic Premiere Events on MTGO are my casual game of choice. They’re not rated, and they’re relatively cheap compared to other options. Of the last five of these events I’ve played in, I have won three outright; there was a sixth event where I made Top 4, but that was a fluke because I received two wins by disconnection forfeit during the swiss. At any rate, that’s more than a box worth of product in the real world, at about one-third of the price.
Momir is interesting because while it captures that multiplayer feeling of winning or losing via completely random, unexpected cards (I won a game the other day because I hit a Planar Guide on turn 1), it can also pose you some very strategic and probabilistic situations. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have beaten an opponent who made a different drop than he should have on the final turn; i.e., he should have made a Six instead of a Seven or an Eight instead of a Nine, because the lower drop offered more outs.
As such, playing Momir is like playing in a wild game of no-limit hold ‘em – everyone is so focused on the massive swings of luck that are possible, that the skill aspect is largely overlooked. Some good profit can be made in a situation like that, if you know where to look for it.
Your Deck
Sure, you can get away with twelve of each land if you want to. However, I wouldn’t recommend it. The games in which you cross your fingers and pray the opponent doesn’t hit Sundering Titan are usually the games where he hits it. I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but the fact is that most of the lands you see in the Top 8s of Momir PEs will look the same, and for good reason.
Mountains are the best choice by far. I have won games (and lost games) where the winning side played only Mountains for the entire duration of the game. The two biggest reasons for this are Vampiric Dragon and Ashen Firebeast at eight mana, both of which can decide the game on the spot given a sufficient number of activations. However, there are any number of other good reasons for this, such as Spikeshot Goblin, Guildmages, firebreathing creatures, and others. Put simply, the majority of activated abilities you’ll ever want use Red mana.
As an added bonus, most of the Mountainwalkers are not very scary; a Gatherer search of the Singleton format lists five creatures that have Mountainwalk, and only Sokenzan Bruiser is over two power. A creature like Goblin Spelunkers needs 12 hits to finish you off, which means the game has to go 16 turns without you hitting an answer or a faster clock. I’ve never seen it happen, and I’ve won both games in which an opponent hit a Mountainwalker against me.
There are two other colors you want most of the time, mainly if you were to hit random creatures at certain drops. Black mana is important for cards like Sanguine Praetor, Pus Kami, and other removal effects. Blue mana turns on Memnarch, Temporal Adept, and creatures with The Ability Formerly Known As Islandhome. Black and Blue, together with Red, enable Nicol Bolas at Eight. However, I tend to avoid these lands en masse if I can help it, because of landwalk abilities. A Gatherer search lists 17 Swampwalkers in the slots One through Six, and Benthic Behemoth is an Islandwalking threat at Eight. What’s more, many of those Swampwalkers are 3/3s for four, or even larger, making them a more dangerous clock than the Mountainwalk guys.
As for White and Green mana, I’ve had rare occasions where I was disappointed not to have it, but for the most part you can do without. For example, the one time I hit Crowd Favorites at Seven, I was behind on board such that I wanted to make Eights and keep making them, instead of tapping down one opposing creature. Maybe if I had enough White mana to tap down two opposing men I would have felt differently, but that’s not how it happened. Green mana is spectacular in the rare cases that you hit Thriss or Sisters of Stone Death, but underwhelming otherwise.
So, here’s the distribution I’m currently going with:
18 Mountain
13 Swamp
13 Island
8 Forest
8 Plains
I cut a Forest and Plains out of the deck described in MBFFAP, because Swamps and Islands were turning out to be that important.
Your Drops
In MBFFAP I wrote, “Personally, I don’t like Ones. Yeah, you can hit some saucy stuff, but most Ones are just 1/1 guys with no evasion.” It should surprise no one that I was at best glossing over the issue, and at worst straight-up wrong.
Momir is a fun format, so if I find things getting stale I’ll try weird stuff and experiment with some odd strategic twists. After Planar Chaos came out, I had been a devotee of not making Ones, but I noticed that there were five more bomb Dragons to be had at Six, so I decided to run what I call the All-Out Ones strategy: on the play, you make every drop from One through Six, after which your hand is empty (hence, “all-out”).
What I found is that the strategy works, even though it seems like it shouldn’t. In the first PE that I won during my recent run, I made Ones in every single game I played first, and in approximately half of the games where I drew first. I didn’t go All-Out Ones in all of those games – sometimes I was in a comfortable enough position on turn 5 that I could skip my Five and Seven to get up to Eight.
As I said before, most Ones are just 1/1 guys with abilities that are irrelevant in Momir, and that is quite true. However, one thing that I did not say – that I didn’t even realize until I had a lot more games under my belt – is that very few Twos can rumble with that! Many Twos are 1/1s, 1/2s, or 2/1s with abilities that are equally irrelevant in Momir, and a 1/1 doesn’t fear any of those: it races at the same rate as a 1/2, and it trades with any one-toughness guys. As long as the opponent does not hit a 2/2 on Two, your One can still get something done.
For example, I recently had the following start to a game, on the play:
My turn 1: Land, make Magus of the Candelabra.
His turn 1: Land, pass.
My turn 2: Attack, Land, make Lord of Atlantis.
His turn 2: Land, Aphetto Alchemist.
Yes, I was pretty lucky to hit a two-toughness guy on turn 1, but even if I had hit a 1/1 my opponent would be in a tight spot. In that case he can’t block my Two, and if he attacks back I just take it and counterattack; he’ll fall further behind in the damage race. He basically just has to sit there and take the damage from my Lord until he hits a creature that can block it, and of course I will be making creatures over that time also, so there’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to stop the bleeding for the next few turns. That might not sound like much, but when there are no spells, seizing the initiative with your creatures is the key.
Now, I cannot deny the luck factor inherent in the format. In the example above my opponent’s Three was a gating creature that bounced itself, and his Four was a 1/1, while my next two drops were Primal Forcemage and Clickslither (what a miser!). So, yes, Lady Luck turned that game into a blowout. However, my opponent lost four life points that he would not have lost if we had both hit the same sequence of drops but I did not make a One. That’s a sixth of his life total, nothing to sneer at.
Another way to look at this is: Ones make subsequent mediocre guys better for you and worse for your opponent. If I’m on the draw, my opponent did nothing on One, and I make a vanilla 1/1 on One, then all of my opponent’s potential 2/1 hits on Two just got a lot worse. They could have been viable threats against an empty board, but now they’re just going to trade with the worst creature I’m likely to hit all game.
Why You Should Care
If you don’t play online, most if not all of this article may have been Greek to you. It’s not like you’ll be playing Momir anytime soon*. However, just about any format of Magic can teach you something about the strategy of the game, if you’re paying attention.
As far as the mechanics of the game go, Momir teaches you a lot about making the right attacks. The board gets very crowded with creatures and on-board tricks, especially late in the game. It’s very easy to slip up and make an imperceptible mistake that causes you to be a turn late with your lethal damage. If a card like Sanguine Praetor or Magus of the Tabernacle shows up on the opposite side of the table, the game can become extremely complex, as both players try to manage their drops and mana effectively.
Some Momir games will also teach you important things about tempo. If in a Limited game you trade a Grizzly Bear for an opposing Grey Ogre, then it’s hard to explain what you have gained in this process since on paper nothing has changed. However, in Momir Basic the Bear is the only two-drop you are likely to see all game, and the Ogre is the only three-drop your opponent is likely to see all game. So, it’s easier to realize that the player losing the Bear has lost an important amount of time, by spending more mana than his opponent just to maintain parity. Something that Mike Flores needed five thousand words to explain, Momir can show you in just a few short turns.
Plus, did I mention that I haven’t had to pay for drafts in a while? Maybe you should get online and give this format a shot. Best eight dollars tickets I ever spent.
mmyoungster at aim dot com
mm_young dot livejournal dot com
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*Actually, if you have a sizable collection of spare cards going back far enough, you could take a bunch of the creatures, sort them in piles by casting cost, and put them in a box. Then you could simulate the Momir ability by taking out the chosen pile, shuffling it up, and cutting to a creature. However, that’s a hell of a lot more complicated than the way Magic Online does it. Anyway, I thought I’d close with a list of the three best creatures at each drop:
One
1. Planar Guide. Provided you draw a Plains, you can Wrath at will… I’m guessing that’s good.
2. Sakura-Tribe Scout. You’ll miss at least one drop because of all the cards leaving your hand in a hurry, but having a Seven on turn 4 is usually worth it.
3. Birds of Paradise. There are a few mana creatures you can hit, but this one is obviously best because you could mise an activation or upkeep cost you would not have otherwise paid.
Two
1. Azorius Guildmage. If you hit him on the play, with the right mana, and lose… there’s actually no joke I could make that would properly indicate the depth of your stupidity.
2. Nezumi Shortfang. This guy is stone cold. The opponent will miss at least two drops and then take nine points of Rack damage… and that’s the best-case scenario.
3. Utopia Tree. See “Birds of Paradise,” above.
Three
1. Dogged Hunter. In round 1 of my first Momir PE, my opponent hit this in game 3. I almost quit the format and sold my avatar on the spot.
2. Fyndhorn Elder. Nice turn-4 dragon, lucksack.
3. Man o’ War. Man, was there really a time after Visions came out when people thought it wasn’t awesome in all formats? How bad were we back then?
Four
1. Desecration Elemental. When Tim Aten listed this as #1, I thought he was high. The reason is that this card saw so little play during its block that I did not know it has fear. Good luck winning against an evasive three-turn clock.
2. Faceless Butcher. Not only does he kill a guy, but he doesn’t have a face!
3. Nekrataal. By a nose over Shivan Wumpus.
Five
1. Siege-Gang Commander. Just one of many reasons why you play lots of Mountains. Four Shocks to spread around as you need them will usually be decisive… and sometimes the creatures will get to attack and block!
2. Riftwing Cloudskate. I’m usually overjoyed to hit any flier in Momir, even before you consider the ability.
3. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. Yes, you get an extra guy every turn, but you still have to hit good guys on other turns. It’s good, but it’s not #1 in my book.
Six
1. Visara the Dreadful. I mean, and I will continue to have meaning.
2. Numot, the Devastator. I mean, your lands.
3. Rorix Bladewing. I mean, with haste.
Seven
1. Stone-Tongue Basilisk. You’ll usually have threshold on the first turn he is able to attack, which means your opponent needs a giant first-striking creature to avoid losing on the spot.
2. Angel of Despair. Obviously amazing, but the Basilisk is usually either a one-sided Wrath or a crushing alpha strike. It’s hard to compete with that.
3, Platinum Angel. Beating either this or Iridescent Angel requires your opponent to do some serious mising. They can mise any trampler, or Tidal Kraken, to have a chance against Iridescent; they pretty much have only Bloodfire Colossus and Hoverguard Sweepers to beat Plats.
Eight
1. Hoverguard Sweepers. I go back and forth on this. It seems like I win every game Akroma hits, while I have lost some games after hitting this guy (mainly because the opponent followed with Akroma). Earns #1 because he will more often be your only out in difficult positions.
2. Akroma, Angel of Wrath. Avatar of Hope and The Unspeakable are the only creatures that can block her and live. Very few effects deal with her (Bosh, Sanguine Praetor, Hoverguard Sweepers, a couple cheaper creatures). Plus she plays defense incredibly well. I’m still not convinced she shouldn’t be #1.
3. Avatar of Woe. I’ve actually lost all games where I hit this guy. Make of that what you will.