Last week I took Tsuyoshi Fujita’s deck to a PTQ with practically no preparation, and posted a lackluster 3-2-1 finish. The main thing I took away from the tournament was a newfound respect for Manriki-Gusari in the war for Jitte advantage. Simply put, it is almost impossible for slow decks without Manriki-Gusari to obtain Jitte advantage over fast decks that have it. This caused me to abandon Fujita’s deck, as I predicted that over the course of the season more and more weenie decks would begin to maindeck Manriki-Gusari, and the only way I would be able to compete with them would be to maindeck a ton of artifact hate that I just didn’t have room for.
The Road to Los Angeles: Week 2 (July 10-16)
Tim Galbiati and Mike Donovan, two St. Louis-area acquaintances of mine, have been posting strong PTQ finishes with White Weenie in the last few weeks. Tim qualified on his first attempt (that I know of), and Mike has posted eight match wins between two tournaments with the deck. (He also qualified this past weekend in Kansas City – congratulations, Mike!)
White Weenie is a deck that is very, very capable of abusing Manriki-Gusari, and since not everyone has figured out how good it is yet, I think that by running Tim’s build with four maindeck Gusari, I can have the upper hand in the mirror match that I am expecting to be everywhere this Saturday. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?
I call Tim up on Monday after work and ask him about the list he qualified with. He explains all of his card choices, gives me some tips on how to beat the mirror match, and convinces me quite thoroughly that it is the deck to play. He also mentions that Gerry Thompson has a Splice deck in the works which uses Footsteps of the Goryo instead of Stir the Grave, giving it the option of recurring Yosei instead of Ethereal Haze against control decks.
The rest of the week, I assemble and begin testing White Weenie. I call up JP in New York and playtest the mirror match against him over Magic Workstation. We learn the following about the matchup.
- If you have Jitte advantage, you win.
- If you have Manriki-Gusari advantage, your opponent cannot get Jitte advantage, nor can he get Manriki-Gusari advantage.
- Celestial Kirin allows you to get Manriki-Gusari advantage by playing Otherworldly Journey or Kami of Ancient Law to blow up all of your opponent’s two-cost permanents, including both Manriki-Gusari and Jitte.
We also learn little tricks like keeping your Gusari on Empty-Shrine Kannushi whenever possible so it cannot be knocked off by Otherworldly Journey, and letting your opponent overextend on two-cost guys when you are holding Celestial Kirin and Kami of Ancient Law, then Wrathing his board and rebuilding your own with the two-drops you held back.
On the Wednesday before the tournament, my friend Rob calls me up and says that although he will not be making it to the PTQ this weekend, he would like to do some testing for the one in Arizona the week after. He’s going to play a Sway of the Stars deck, because it has a combo finish and he wants to play combo. I convince him to add in the Gifts-Hana Kami engine, because the Ethereal Haze lock will give him a good shot against White Weenie as long as he keeps his Judgments and Hero’s Demises back for Hokori and Pale Curtain. I also suggest that he try out Gerry’s Footsteps/Yosei technology in place of the usual Stir the Grave or Death Denied that other Gifts decks have been running.
Rob looks at a few of the Heartbeat decks that did well at PT: Philadelphia, and doesn’t like how few creatures they play. I suggest that he go for broke and play three White Myojin, because they will help stall against weenie decks, block North Tree with Indestructibility all day, and provide a fantastic post-Sway finisher. Rob agrees, and also decides to run with three Black Myojin while he is at it, because it is a huge beating against control decks and still an indestructible 5/2 against aggro decks. Two Time of Needs up the Myojin counts to an effective five apiece, and Rob.dec is complete.
We head down to Orange County to pick up cards and get some playtesting in against Andrej Selivra and his friends. Andrej is one of several people who e-mailed me about my Staff-Go deck for Regionals, and since he also happens to live in Southern California, I have since met up with him several times to test and discuss deck ideas.
I get in some games with White Weenie against Andrej’s TOGIT-style G/W/u Legends list, and the matchup seems to revolve mostly around Hokori and Patron of the Kitsune. When those don’t come into play, WW’s Manriki-Gusari proves invaluable in the war for Jitte advantage, and the +1/+2 boost is very helpful post-Judgment. Meanwhile Rob is sitting next to us getting taken apart by a Mono-Black Aggro deck with a heavy discard component. “I don’t really have an answer to that Sink into Takenuma card,” he tells me. “If he plays it, I just lose.”
As the night progresses I get more and more excited about Tim’s White Weenie build, and Andrej decides to play it at the PTQ as well. We part ways until the Friday before the tournament, when Rob says he wants to do some one-on-one testing against the Great White Menace. I’m game for some extra practice against Gifts Ungiven, so we meet up and start playing.
Rob quickly wins the first game, and the second. He loses the third to color screw because we had him running four Tendo Ice Bridges, and this turned out to be too few reusable mana sources to support repeated castings of 5WWW and 5BBB creatures. He goes down to two Ice Bridges and we continue the set.
Game four goes to Rob once again, and then he double-mulligans in the fifth. He thinks for a long time about his five-carder and finally decides to keep it, since it has Divining Top and Elder (but no land), and he is on the draw. His draw step yields another spell, so he misses his fist land drop. Meanwhile I have turn 1 Lantern Kami, turn 2 bear, turn 3 Lantern Kami and something else. Rob finds a land on his second second draw step, and plays it along with a Top. I keep bashing, Rob plays the Elder and then a Reach, and…goes on to win the game.
I sit back in my chair, blown away.
I am playing White Weenie, the most successful and popular deck in the format (at this time). On top of that, I am playing a highly-tuned version that has already qualified someone on its very first outing.
I have lost four of the last five games to Rob.dec, including one in which he mulliganed to five and missed his first land drop. My only win was thanks to a glitch in the mana base that we have since rectified. And this is a deck that maindecks five Black Myojins against control?
I move that we proceed to sideboarding, confident that Hokori will change things.
Rob brings in four Hero’s Demise (one of his favorite cards in the format) and takes out the three Black Myojins and the one Sway of the Stars that made the maindeck.
In the first post-board game I curve out with The Nuts: Isamaru, then Hand of Honor, then another man, and finally Hokori. “How lucky,” Rob is about to complain, until his draw step yields Hero’s Demise. He Demises my Hokori on my upkeep, then untaps and Judgments my board away. He wins that game, too.
By the end of the session, I have managed to eke out one post-board win to match my one pre-board win, which came about only because Rob double-mulligan again and missed his third land drop.
I am getting excited. What if this haphazard creation of ours is actually good? I ask Rob how he did against Andrej’s TOGIT list on Wednesday, and he tells me that it was a cakewalk. “I’d just play Heartbeat and say go. He couldn’t really do anything comparable with the mana, and even if he played a big guy and then Hokori I was only a turn or two away from Judgment because my lands all tapped for two.”
I ask Rob if I can borrow his deck for the PTQ, since he won’t be going, and he agrees. We finish our testing session by proxying up one of the Black Hand lists with O-Naginata and Distress and running it against our deck. Rob splits the set evenly, and we learn that an early Heartbeat into a Myojin of either color is the key to the matchup. We agree that a fourth Heartbeat should definitely make the board, and fill the remaining sideboard slots with extra one-ofs that might come in handy: a fourth Gifts, a fourth Black Myojin, a third Sway, a Wear Away, and a Maga, Traitor To Mortals (to be fetched with Time of Need) so that we can Fireball someone out with Heartbeat if they Haze lock us.
Brendan picks up my pilotless White Weenie deck and we head down to Costa Mesa, meeting up with Andrej and his friends onsite.
I am once again at a loss for a clever deck name at registration time, so I go with the default.
“Tinker”
**23 Mana Sources**
10 Forest
6 Plains
4 Swamp
2 Tendo Ice Bridge
1 Island
**8 Expensive Powerhouses**
3 Myojin of Cleansing Fire
3 Myojin of Night’s Reach
1 Yosei, the Morning Star
1 Sway of the Stars
**11 Mana Accelerants**
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Kodama’s Reach
3 Heartbeat of Spring
**10 Utility**
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Final Judgment
2 Time of Need
**8 Gifts Components**
3 Gifts Ungiven
1 Hana Kami
1 Footsteps of the Goryo
1 Soulless Revival
1 Ethereal Haze
1 Horobi’s Whisper
Sideboard:
4 Hero’s Demise
4 Cranial Extraction
2 Sway of the Stars
1 Heartbeat of Spring
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Wear Away
1 Myojin of Night’s Reach
1 Maga, Traitor To Mortals
So just to reiterate, I’m taking a hybrid of a difficult-to-play Gifts Ungiven deck and a Heartbeat of Spring/Sway of the Stars deck, which Rob and I came up with and tested over the course of roughly a day and a half, and which I have never actually played with my own two hands. No sweat, right?
Round 1: Black Hand
I keep a “good news, bad news” hand involving the disappointing duo of a card-disadvantageous Ethereal Haze and a Horobi’s Whisper that can’t target anything in this matchup, but with the happy combination of Divining Top and Sakura-Tribe Elder.
I Top into Final Judgment, but it is swatted away by Distress. O-Naginata makes a big attacker, then Cranial Extraction knocks the Haze out of my hand. I Time of Need for White Myojin, but without the Haze I come up one turn short of being able to lay my eighth land before I am dead.
Game two offers me two Heartbeats, both of which I play out on turn 5. I am holding a Myojin of each color and Final Judgment, so it would seem I am in a good position. My opponent attacks, floats a bunch of mana, casts Sink into Takenuma for my whole hand, and lays Yukora and Hand of Cruelty. After I scoop, he informs me that the Sink into Takenuma was the only one he boarded in. Fantastic!
0-1
Round 2: Gifts Ungiven
I am so pleased to sit down to the Gifts Ungiven mirror, you would not even believe it. Game one finds me staring down a resolved Gifts Ungiven with nothing but land on the board, and a snarling Kokusho aimed at my head. When my opponent offers me a Gifts stack that will allow him to recur Cranial Extraction, I scoop in the interest of time and keeping my deck secret for the remaining games.
Cranial Extraction for Cranial Extraction is my first play of the game on turn 4, and while looking through his hand I make note of a Kodama’s Reach and a Black Myojin. As it happens, I am also holding a Myojin, but because of the Kodama’s Reach, my opponent will be able to play his a turn earlier. I ponder my options as the land drops progress, trying to figure out how I can stop him from casting his Myojin first. My Divining Top turns up a Gifts Ungiven to go with the Footsteps of the Goryo in my hand, so I get an idea. If I can offer him a Gifts stack with Yosei in it, and can convince him to put Yosei in the bin, I can Footsteps it out to tap him down for a turn, buying me a full turn of land-laying and allowing me to play my Black Myojin first.
I cast Gifts Ungiven and show him Yosei, Black Myojin, White Myojin, and Cranial Extraction. Since he thinks he is going to empty my hand with his Black Myojin next turn, he has nothing to fear from either of the Myojin; I will not be able to cast them before he makes me discard my hand. My ploy works; he hands me the two Myojin, and Yosei and Extraction hit the bin. I Footsteps out Yosei, deprive my opponent of his next untap step, and make my eighth land drop for Black Myojin the turn after. This is too much card advantage for him to overcome, and the rest of the game is a sweep.
My opponent still does not know that I have Heartbeat in my deck, so I decide to go for a Sway kill as fast as possible in the third game before time runs out. I almost board in Maga as well, but chicken out at the last minute. He Extractions me for Final Judgment, I play some Heartbeats and some Myojin, and we go back and forth for awhile before my Black Myojins take out too much of his hand to recover. I end up winning on the last of the extra turns when he is forced to Sickening Shoal a Yosei that taps down his blockers, allowing my remaining White Myojin to come across for the kill.
1-1
Round 3: White Weenie
He does not know what I am playing in game one and overextends into Final Judgment. I start recurring Horobi’s Whisper and beat down with a White Myojin for the win.
In game two, I mulligan to five, stall on land, and get destroyed by his Nuts Draw of Isamaru, bear, bear, Hokori.
The third game is once again unremarkable. I wrath him three times or so, and Horobi’s Whisper the remaining guys that dribble out of his deck while beating down with Yosei.
2-1
Round 4: White Weenie
His hand in game one is creature-light, so I play out a Heartbeat and a Black Myojin before having to wrath even once. The Myojin hits Shining Shoal, Charge Across the Araba, Otherworldly Journey, and a land. I trade Black Myojin in combat for his only creature, then lay White Myojin and win several turns later.
Game two takes forever. He beats me down to 4, but I am in no hurry to win because I am up a game in the match. All I have to do is perpetuate a Yosei lock and I win. I start recurring Yosei, then begin adding cool things like using my extra mana to recur Footsteps of the Goryo on Sakura-Tribe Elder, allowing me to search out every basic land in my deck. I have two Heartbeats down, and so have to be very careful of mana burn, but I make sure the math works out each turn and keep my life total safely afloat. I start beating him down with a team of Sakura-Tribe Elders, but time is called before I can finish killing him. I win the match 1-0.
3-1
Round 5: B/G/W Control
My opponent leads with a turn 5 Kokusho, and I have no answer. He smacks me for five, then plays a second one, leaving the life totals at 5 to 30 in his favor at the end of turn 6. I drop a Black Myojin and empty his hand, earning the 5/2 a Sickening Shoal in response. I play another Myojin, but my opponent keeps swapping his Divining Top for his third card down each turn, and his deck keeps serving up answers. My Myojin eats a Judgment, Yosei eats another, and I have to search up a second White Myojin to deal with an opposing Yosei on the following turn. Eventually my card advantage overwhelms him, and I take down all thirty of his life points with my humongous fatties.
Game two is more of the same. He Cranials me for Heartbeat of Spring, slowing me down because I kept a draw that relied on the Heartbeat in my hand, but Gifts Ungiven helps me get going. I start recurring threats, leaving his hand once again depleted from a Black Myojin, and I eventually have enough juice left over to take down his life total.
4-1
Round 6: White Weenie
Game one is ridiculous. I keep a hand of two lands, Elder, and Heartbeat, and stall on three lands for what seems like an eternity. I play out the Heartbeat in my hand so I can Judgment away his board, and then draw into another Heartbeat. I play it, and eventually get a fourth land, allowing me to tap a single Forest to cast a third Heartbeat. I finally find a Top, which serves up a fourth and fifth land and a now-castable Sway of the Stars, but I try to finish control-style rather than risk fizzling on a Sway.
He gets an Eight-and-a-Half Tails with Jitte on it, and with me at eight life and him potentially running Shining Shoal, I decide to Sway. I float eighteen mana and use ten of it on the Sway. My new hand serves up Time of Need and some other random stuff, letting me spend all eight of my mana Time of Needing for and casting Yosei. Game over.
The second game is much easier. I Wrath him, then cast Gifts Ungiven for recurring Horobi’s Whisper action. His only creature is a Hand of Honor, which I dispatch using Kodama’s Reach splicing Horobi’s Whisper and Soulless Revival. He doesn’t think this works, because the Hand has protection from Black, and I explain that because I am splicing the Whisper onto Kodama’s Reach, it is in fact a Green spell that is targeting his creature. A judge confirms this, and I take control of the game with a White Myojin facing off against his empty board.
5-1
Round 7: White Weenie
I am paired against Andrej’s friend Navin in the final round of the Swiss. Despite losing round 1, my tiebreakers are (for once) good enough to let me draw in. We scrawl out a big ID on the results slip and head to Taco Bell with Brendan and Andrej.
By the way, how many of you thought I was going to go 0-2 drop after that introduction? Don’t worry, I wouldn’t make you sit through all that without some semblance of a happy ending.
5-1-1
Quarterfinals: White Weenie
I mulligan to five on the first game, but a first-turn Divining Top finds me some land. My opponent’s board is an Eight-and-a-Half Tails and a Hand of Honor, and they beat me down to fourteen before I find a Tribe-Elder that will fetch me a second White source for Final Judgment. On my end step, the Elder drops acid and takes an Otherworldly Journey, allowing my opponent to untap, lay his fifth land right on time, and Sweep up a Charge Across the Araba for exactly fourteen points of damage. Nice!
The second game is much less interesting. He plays an Isamaru and then just drops land after land while attacking me with it. I surmise that he is either holding redundant copies of Isamaru, or is waiting for me to tap out so he can drop Hokori or Charge for a bunch of damage without worrying about Horobi’s Whisper, Ethereal Haze, or Hero’s Demise. Since I am, in fact, holding Hero’s Demise, I decide to see if I can draw out a Charge or Hokori, and make a point of Kodama’s Reaching for a second Swamp and a Plains, lazily putting the Swamp into play tapped as though I am holding Whisper, but assume I will not need to use the second Black source immediately. He goes for the Charge, I Demise the Isamaru, and eventually Top into Gifts Ungiven to get recurring Horobi’s Whisper for the win. (As it turned out, he kept a hand with mostly land, Isamaru, and Charge, and then proceeded to draw almost solid land. Bummer.)
In the deciding game we actually play some Magic. He knocks my life total down early, I play a Yosei to block, he opts not to attack into it, and I drop a White Myojin. The Myojin holds down the fort while Yosei comes in for five at a time, and as soon as my Top serves up a Gifts Ungiven I Myojin away the board, sending Yosei straight to the bin. My opponent scoops as soon as I point at my 4/6 attacker and announce, “Gifts Ungiven for the Yosei lock.”
I stand up and stretch, then wander over to the last remaining quarterfinal match. Matt Sperling, who Andrej tells me is the best player in the room, is up a game with his insane Goryo’s Vengeance-Kagemaro-Sakashima-Footsteps of the Goryo deck, facing off against a more standard Kodama’s Reach deck. I will play the winner of this match.
Game two is taking them forever to finish. Sperling plays Meloku and makes some tokens. His opponent plays Keiga and sacrifices it with Miren to steal the Meloku. In response, Sperling scoops up most of his land to create an airborne fleet of Illusions. Both players stare at each other for awhile, as Sperling replays his lands and keeps thumbing through his graveyard of Kagemaro and other juicy legends, indicating that he is holding one of his Goryo’s Vengeances and plans to ambush an alpha strike from the opposing Meloku by bringing back a 4/4 Kagemaro. Eventually he plays a Sakashima to copy the Meloku, raising the stakes in the staring contest. Finally Sperling uses Sickening Shoal to remove the opponent’s Meloku, then makes a team of flyers using his Sakashima-turned-Meloku, and swings for the win.
I sit down across from the victor for what are to be the three dumbest games of the day.
I open by throwing back a zero-lander, then keep my next six. My first play of the match is a turn 3 Heartbeat of Spring, holding a Black Myojin that is poised to strike on the following turn. I am feeling good about this until Sperling untaps and shows that he has drawn a Black Myojin of his own, the only one in his deck. I discard my hand and lose.
The second game is longer by a full turn. I cast Cranial Extraction on turn 4, and while looking through his deck notice an Exile into Darkness. I comment that “I thought you were going to board that out,” to which my surprised opponent responds, “I didn’t?”
I ask to count his sideboard, and sure enough he has accidentally left in an extra five cards after sideboarding. The table judge awards him a game loss, and we move to game three.
My opening grip for the deciding game contains one land and not much else. I throw it back to the ocean, pile shuffle, riffle a few times, cut, and glare at my next six: another five spells and one land. I go to five, grumpily keeping four lands and a Cranial Extraction. I proceed to draw into more lands and a second Extraction, while Matt simply plays a Kokusho and kills me with it.
Sperling defeats Navin’s White Weenie in the finals after Navin gets greedy and keeps a one-land hand with Isamaru and two Pithing Needles on the draw. (He doesn’t draw the second land in time.)
I leave the tournament with a respectable 6-2-1 showing, a box of draft sets, and an excited smile. Now I have a good deck to play!
The Environment
GP: Minneapolis is wrapping up as I write this, and as with all major tournaments, I’m sure it will have leave a mark on the PTQ environment. That being said, it’s worth taking a look at what the environment looks like just before the results of the GP hit.
*White Weenie is, for the time being, still The Deck To Beat at the PTQ level. At least two WW decks made top 8 of the PTQ I went to, and one made the finals. Five of my nine pairings on the day were against WW, and the remaining four were each against a completely different deck each time.
*The Mono-Black Aggro deck known as Black Hand is probably the second-most popular archetype. I have observed that many people have been able to tune their Black Hand decks to beat either White Weenie or Kodama’s Reach decks, but not both at the same time. Since the environment seems to be split between WW and Reach decks, I would consider Black Hand one of those risky “win big, lose big” decks that Jamie Wakefield often talks about. If you come packing Distress, Cranial Extraction, and Sink Into Takenuma like my round one opponent, you’d better hope you see green decks for most of the day. If you come packing Manriki-Gusari and plenty of cheap removal, your success may depend entirely on your ability to get paired against White Weenie. (Is the middle ground something that beats both, or something that beats neither? Right now, I’m not sure.) If your pairings go well, you can win the whole PTQ. Alternately, if they do not work out, you might just as easily go home at 0-2. Then again, just because I haven’t yet seen a Black Hand list that consistently does well against the modern WW lists (as opposed to the older ones with Tallowisp and whatnot) and simultaneously holds its own against the Reach decks, doesn’t mean that such a list does not exist.
*Nobody really seems to know what Kodama’s Reach deck to play. At both of the last two PTQs I’ve been to, I have seen all sorts of different lists floating around, and aside from the recognizable G/W/u TOGIT list, they have all been pretty widely different. Maybe GP Minneapolis will change this, but for now we are lacking in a general consensus.
I, for one, have settled on my deck for the season.
The Deck
Rob.dec seems to do what all the other Kodama’s Reach decks do…except better. It plays six Myojin for its core of fatties, instead of mucking around with less powerful one-ofs like Patron of the Kitsune and Meloku, and omits entirely the surprisingly underpowered – at least since the Pro Tour – Kodama of the North Tree. It feels like those decks are all playing Alpha Myrs and Cathodions, while Rob is playing Viridian Shamans and Flametongue Kavus. His guys are more expensive, but they just get so much more done when they hit the table, the ordinary threats just can’t stack up.
Rob’s Wrath effects and the Black Myojins also have amazing synergy. If the opponent overextends his board, Rob wrecks him with a Final Judgment or a White Myojin. If he holds back and beats with one threat at a time, hoping to minimize the card advantage lost to the Wraths, Rob will lay a Black Myojin and empty his full hand for him.
On top of that, Rob still has access to the Gifts Ungiven Splice engine. He can set up a lock with Footsteps of the Goryo and Yosei, or he can Horobi’s Whisper a guy every turn, or even just splice Soulless Revival onto a Kodama’s Reach to get back a Myojin from time to time.
The best part about the deck, though, is that it doesn’t care about Jitte. Matter of fact, Jitte is quite bad against it. I didn’t pause to make note of it, but I think I won every single game in which my opponent played a Jitte against me. Rob.dec just watches the other player spend four mana playing and equipping the thing, then it plays Final Judgment or White Myojin or Horobi’s Whisper and starts beating down with a fatty. The only time Jitte counters were ever removed against me, they were killing a Black Myojin that had already served its Mind Twisting purpose, or gaining four life because my attack would be lethal if they didn’t.
I would only change a few things about this list based on my experience at the PTQ. For one, Ethereal Haze is definitely not needed in the deck. I never saw Rob Haze lock anyone in testing; it was always more productive to go for the Yosei lock or Horobi’s Whisper lock, and nor did I ever want to Haze anyone out during the tournament.
I’m going to replace the Haze with a card I liked immediately when I saw it in Matt Sperling deck, Exile into Darkness. It is easily fetchable with Gifts Ungiven, and provides a straightforward card advantage mechanism which, unlike Horobi’s Whisper, works just as well against Black Hand as it does White Weenie.
I also think that Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers is a reasonable inclusion in the deck. We deliberately excluded Shizo and Eiganjo Castle because the odds of our particular suite of legends receiving any kind of benefit from them was extremely low, and as such running them was not worth the chance of getting manascrewed by the legend rule. In retrospect, this is not true of Okina, both because losing a green source to the legend rule is much less dangerous than losing a Black or White one, and because pumping Black Myojin +1/+1 to dodge a pair of -1/-1s from a Jitte would have actually been useful at several points in the tournament.
Finally, I think Psychic Spear would be worth testing in the sideboard. It provides an answer to Cranial Extraction and Sink into Takenuma from green-hating black decks, and could have applications against other Kodama’s Reach decks as well, since in theory the only way those decks can beat Rob is by curving out with fatties when he doesn’t have a Judgment, and Spearing a Kodama’s Reach or North Tree should put a stop to that.
This is the list I’ll be testing for the following week.
Rob.dec
**23 Mana Sources**
9 Forest
6 Plains
4 Swamp
2 Tendo Ice Bridge
1 Island
1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
**8 Expensive Powerhouses**
3 Myojin of Cleansing Fire
3 Myojin of Night’s Reach
1 Yosei, the Morning Star
1 Sway of the Stars
**11 Mana Accelerants**
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Kodama’s Reach
3 Heartbeat of Spring
**10 Utility**
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Final Judgment
2 Time of Need
**8 Gifts Components**
3 Gifts Ungiven
1 Hana Kami
1 Footsteps of the Goryo
1 Soulless Revival
1 Exile into Darkness
1 Horobi’s Whisper
Sideboard:
4 Hero’s Demise
4 Cranial Extraction
4 Psychic Spear
1 Sway of the Stars
1 Heartbeat of Spring
1 Maga, Traitor To Mortals
I have no doubt this will change once the results of the GP are in, but for now that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
See you next week!
Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]