So my editor has been taking pot shots at me about not writing frequently enough lately.
"Hello Mr. Pot, my name is Mr. Kettle, and your ass is black as midnight."
Like it isn’t enough that he has Tim Aten writing weekly columns these days, he wants me to be more consistent than my”every other week or so” thang. I just want to set the record straight and say that it’s not like I don’t have the ideas floating around in my head to write about, okay? It’s just that I gots other sh*t to do, you know? Billz to pay, spellz to sling, computer games to lose myself in. I’m freaking conquering France right now, pal, so get off my jack! I mean, a man’s gotta do laundry, right? So back up, sucka duck, or you’ll get what’s coming to ya. A man’s got to have time to role deep, youknowwhati’msayin?
Luckily for you I was able to clear my schedule a bit this week, enough so that I’m going to write an article about everyone’s favorite new tech – Windborn Muse. Here we go…
I’d just like to take a moment to say that Instant Messenger has to be the most anti-productive writing tool in existence. Pop on to ask a friend a question and two freaking hours later I’m still sitting here in the same damned place trying to get into discussing the deck. Damn those talkative and interesting friends! Damn them straight to hell!
No, not you, Mr. Hat…
You know, most of the time when I’m writing I’m either at work with nothing to listen to but the tunes in my head, or sitting at home listening to some gangsta rizap, because the phat beats promote productive flow from my fingertips (or something). However, every once in a while I get the Floresian urge to toss on a bunch of angry lesbian folkies and let my mind absorb the vibes (which wasn’t a pun when I first thought of it, but now it kind of is).
It’s okay though, as I know every hetero guy really digs the ladies from the Isle of Lesbos, so I know I’m in good company. Gay guys, on the other hand, seem to have a sort of hate-hate relationship with lesbians, which mostly stems from communication problems. The gentlemen are largely into diction, while the ladies prefer to mix it up with jive and cunning lingual tricks.
So before I got distracted, I was going to tell you about Windborn Muse, and how we’ve been trying to break her for the last couple of weeks. I would do that, but Corky and The Juice Pigs just popped on the mp3 player with their hit "The Only Gay Eskimo." You just can’t hear lyrics like "Me, I’ve got this crazy fetish for rubber…" every day unless you listen to a lot of NiN and Marilyn Manson.
Speaking of Brian… who’s hotter, Rose McGowan or Dita von Teese (both one-time girlfriends of Mr. Manson)? If they were both naked and you couldn’t see their faces, could you tell them apart?
Me neither.
See, these are the types of things that happen when you get writer’s block. You just kind of ramble along, floating from topic to topic, waiting for it to go away and for your brain to lock onto whatever the funk it is that you actually want to write about this week. The ideas are there, but my brain won’t let me pay attention long enough to get them down on paper.
To tell the truth, it’s not unlike trying to carry on a conversation with me at any point when I’m more than semi-conscious. Tangential does not even begin to describe things, especially if I’m bored. Just ask the folks on the Star City mailing list, they see this sort of behavior all the time (and Ferrett steals random bits for forum topics, but he’d never admit it).
Hey, I just found out that there is not one, but two East Coast Grand Prixs that I should be able to attend in the next six months, and one of them is even Type 2. Out-freaking-standing. Now I just have to get permission…
All you single guys out there laughing can shut up right now. When was the last time you got laid, you pale, pathetic gamer geek?
Oh? Yeah, me too.
So there’s this fly-ass chick, and she’s all sorts of inspirational with the Propaganda and stuff. She’s what I’m really here to write about, since it’s my opinion that she’ll have a greater impact on U.S. Regionals than Withered Wretch. Yes, of course she’s a rare… All the good creatures are, you know. It’s not like you see a Loch Ness or Unicorn running around every day in real life either, so stop your bitching.
You see that, that was almost a segue into the actual strategy part of the article. I was literally this close >< to naturally letting the words flow onto the page and telling you exactly why I think the Muse of the aerial var-eye-ee-tay (Viva!) is muy importante, but something in me keeps rebelling. I’ll get there eventually, I promise.
You want to know the first thing that I thought of when I heard about the fire in that Rhode Island nightclub that killed all those people?
"Oh my God, people will still pay to see Great White? Are they all wasted rock rangers or something?"
Note to self: send Rosewater card specs for WRR when finished with article.
The second thing I thought about? "Wow, I wonder if it was part of some big festival of "killer" hair metal bands… I mean, were Winger, Warrant, White Lion, and White Snake on the bill too? And who’s the freaking headliner with musical acts of that magnitude?"
The third thing I thought was, of course, "Well that’s what you get for going to see Great White. I mean seriously…"
And the last thing I thought was "Dear God, I’m a bad person."
Luckily for me, there isn’t a place in hell for really mean people. Honest. I’ve read Dante’s Inferno and he talks about the sloths, the murderers, the betrayers, the suicidal, the angry (yep, angry people go to hell), the virtuous pagans (Go to hell and meet Socrates and Plato! Tour packages start at only a soul, so call today!), and the lustful (More Tour Packages right there. It would be like visiting Thailand. Or Martin Luther King Blvd after dark in every big city in America). But there’s no space for really mean people like me.
You down with A-D-D? Yeah you know me!
Speaking of angry people, it’s a good thing that Mike Tyson has that backup gig as a rapper, or else when his fighting career was over he might just have to fade into Bolivian (actual Mike Tyson quote there).
"Because I’m naughty by nay-chuh, not cuz I hate ya…"
While on the subject of O-P-P, all of this Windborn talk started because I received not one, not two, but three decks featuring the flying Muse as part of my Dead Presidents contest (shame on me for not thinking of the appropriate name before I actually posted the contest). Two of them used WBM as part of an Opposition deck, while the last one paired Windborn with another Psycho-Bitch in the form of Braids (which is just spiffy, by the way). But enough of that chit-chat; I’ll get to talking about those more next week. Back to the randomness…
Or perhaps I shall track randomly back on topic (unexpectedly, I’m sure) – I played Jose Argao’s deck two weeks ago at a local Type 2 tournament and I’m here to tell you that it’s just not good. When your only card-drawing is Merfolk Looter (translation: the most easily killed creature in Type 2), your creature engine is Mobilization, and you only play twelve creatures in your Opposition deck, you will have major problems. Being the curious soldier that I am though, I tried to get my tweak on and see if I could work the deck into something reasonably playable. I added more creatures (Sunstrike Legionnaire and Whipcorder), sacked the Looters for some Deep Analyses and Compulsions, and tried to see if it would function.
The short answer is that it failed. During my testing though, I learned three things:
1) Windborn Muse is surprisingly good.
2) Windborn Muse and Static Orb are very good.
3) Windborn Muse, Static Orb, and Opposition together is just bonkers.
Actually I learned more than three things – but all lists are supposed to be three and three alone so that’s what I, like, listed. They shall not be less than thrice one, nor shall they be more than the division of six by two. They shall most definitely not be five. Regardless, I also learned that Wall of Deceit is more easily burned out by Sligh and Red-Green than I thought, and Mobilization is every bit as bad as Ferrett told you (though Memory Lapse is not, but I’ll get to that in a minute).
Before you go thinking that I’m just picking on Jose though, let me set the record straight. It’s true that friends don’t let friends play Jose’s deck, but friends don’t let friends play Putrid Imp either. Or cards that have the phrase "Words of" in their name. Or Aven Envoy. Or Rites of Refusal. Or…
Well, I hope you get the point. After looking at the deck submissions, I’m starting to seriously believe that many of you don’t have any friends.
Here’s how bad it was – after forwarding the first batch of submissions to Jimmy Bean, I received a panicked phone call from his wife and had to drive him to the emergency room because his eyes were bleeding. That’s how bad some of those decks were. It took an extra week of prodding him just to get the bastard to send me his Top 10 decks, because he was scared to go back in. This is a man who enjoys his eyesight so much that he regularly partakes of preventative herbal therapies to keep it, and you made him fear looking at his Inbox. Shame on you!
Thankfully though, the contest didn’t say anything about being only for people who build good decks – though if I had known ahead of time, I might have requested it for safety reasons only. (Ooo, feeling comma splicey right now… maybe I’m channeling Thomas Jefferson or something. Or perhaps I’m fireballing him. Definitely not snowballing him…) Those of you who submitted bad decklists are still in the running for the fitty dollah (and we don’t give a f**k it’s not yo birfday…), as long as you had tech in it. I’ll post the decklists next week and then we’ll have a pleasant little chat in the forums about which ones you feel should win the big money, no whammies.
Anyway, the other Windborn Opp deck that I received is a piece of French lunacy, but it’s in that good sort of crazy way that the French sometimes develop. Like Audrey Tautou and Laetitia Casta are crazy hot in that French sort of way that sometimes develops.
I’m not here to talk about that deck (or hot chicks) though, as it is so crazily French that my American brain could not comprehend it. That or I’m boycotting French products because I’m a belligerent American jackass just like our president. The ends may be right, but the means are all wrong.
Nope, I’m here to talk about two different Windborn Opposition decks that I’ve tested in the last couple of weeks, one of which came straight out of Jimmy Bean’s nugget, while the other one was carefully distilled by me through hours of painstaking research and number-crunching. Or at least that’s what I’m choosing to tell you. The actual amount of pain that I took and research I did is lost somewhere along with the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, and the weight in metric tons of air freshener it takes in order to make a Magic tournament not smell like ass.
Deck Number 1, Outta Jim’s Gourd:
4 Windborn Muse
4 Opposition
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Counterspell
4 Call of the Herd
4 Memory Lapse
4 Deep Analysis
3 Static Orb
3 Sunstrike Legionnaire
1 Mobilization
1 Mirari’s Wake
24 Lands to taste.
It went 7-2 over the course of two tournaments last weekend, but it’s still not very good. By that I mean the concept is great, but the mana base was just awful and it’s trying to do too much stuff (which we knew ahead of time, but wanted to test some cards to see how they worked.) What that 7-2 really tells you is that there’s a lot of power inherent in the good parts of the deck and that we built a pretty good sideboard for it. It’s not good enough for Regionals play though, so I went back to the drawing board…
I started by looking at a few "good" Opposition decks (including Canu’s Chicago Masters winner) in an attempt to distill the essential pieces that make Opposition decks work. Here’s what I came up with:
4 Opposition
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Call of the Herd
3 Deep Analysis
3 Squirrel’s Nest
Mongrels and Calls help you not lose to early creature rushes (and the other builds desperately needed help against Sligh), Deep Analysis is the best card drawing spell in the game, and Squirrel’s Nest provide you with armies of little dudes to tap down your opponent’s board with, in addition to providing cover for most of Mono-Black Control’s removal. Pretty standard stuff, really.
Having played with Windborn pretty intensively for the last two weeks, I felt like I had a reasonable handle on how the deck wants to run, so next I thought about what elements of the Windborn design really work. Sunstrike Legionnaire is cute (and he combos well with Squirrel’s Nest), but most of the time he’s just a lazy, punk-ass tapper with strange limitations. Mobilization just doesn’t work right when you want to use Static Orb without Opposition half the time, and Mirari’s Wake was a concession we made to the fact that Mobilization doesn’t work while wondering what we could do to make it work. Sometimes it’s better to give up the ghost on certain ideas…
Anyway, here’s what I felt the essential Windborn Control elements boiled down to:
4 Windborn Muse
4 Counterspell
3 Memory Lapse
3 Static Orb
The Muse works particularly well with Static Orb in order to generate a "soft lock" that will slow your opponent down while you gain board advantage. Counterspell is a pretty obvious card to play in what is essentially a board control deck (think how nuts Slide decks would be if they had access to counters), since what you really want to do is play your lock and then protect it.
Memory Lapse probably requires some discussion though, since some people seem to think it’s "awl baaad.” (Note to self: Check Amazon to see if True Lies is out on DVD yet.) As I stated before, Opposition decks aren’t pure control decks. They don’t mind if you lay threats on the board, provided that they have the ability to deal with them. Therefore, Opposition must be considered a board control deck. The key to playing a board control deck is to buy enough time to get your lock into play, and then not allow your opponent to play anything that will affect your control while you pummel them silly.
Memory Lapse fits in the deck because it buys you time. Putting a card back on top of your opponent’s deck is generally annoying, but it’s brutal if they are mana-screwed. When you factor in the tempo advantages you gain from it when a Static Orb is on the board, the decision to play Lapse begins to become clear. There have actually been times that I’ll Lapse a bad spell that has no affect on me from my opponent, just to make certain that they draw that card again the next turn.
Now I’m not saying Memory Lapse is perfect. I can see the case for those that think Circular Logic belongs in the deck, as there will be plenty of times where you want a hard counter. You already have Wild Mongrel supplying a discard outlet for Logic, so the regular reasons for not playing Logic don’t apply. You can, however, have some difficulty getting cards in the graveyard consistently with this deck, and the last thing I want is to have a Logic in my hand and mana to cast it, but not have it do anything if I do.
Therefore, it’s my opinion that Memory Lapse is better.
Add some land to the deck:
2 Flooded Strand
2 Windswept Heath
3 Adarkar Wastes
3 Brushland
5 Island
7 Forest
2 Plains
And Voila! You have what I call the”Common Sense” build of Windborn Opposition. The name stems from the propaganda pamphlet written by Tom Paine during the American Revolution – and also to the approach I used to figure out what you should be playing. Sometimes it’s just better to not get cute by stuffing a deck with "tech" and work on building something solid and consistent instead.
For those who want to see the sum total of the parts without all the blah blah’ing, it looks lika deez:
Common Sense
4 Opposition
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Call of the Herd
3 Deep Analysis
3 Squirrel’s Nest
4 Windborn Muse
4 Counterspell
3 Memory Lapse
3 Static Orb
2 Flooded Strand
2 Windswept Heath
3 Adarkar Wastes
3 Brushland
5 Island
7 Forest
2 Plains
Warning, the continuity is starting to slip away. Trying… to stay… on topic!
Is this build better than standard U/G Opposition decks? I think it is, because it provides additional protection against aggro creature strategies essentially by making them use their mana less efficiently. Nobody wants to pay for Windborn Muse costs when playing weenies, and if they can’t remove her (which is a genuinely difficult task sometimes), then they will lose. Against control decks, you lose nothing from the stock U/G build except perhaps a bit of beating power (since you would probably be playing Ravenous Baloth or Phantom Centaur in place of the Muse).
Did you know that Don Johnson was recently caught with a suitcase containing eight billion dollars? His response to what he was planning to do with the money? "I’m going to buy a car." On a completely unrelated note, he was recently seen petting a hairless cat and hanging out with Seth Green.
Something also has to be said for the fact that Opposition, Static Orb, and Windborn Muse pose three different types of problems for an opponent’s deck to matchup against. Opponents will typically be able to handle one or two of the elements, but the third one should probably do them in.
Did you know that the Ferrett censors most sentences I write with the words "Chick,” "hot,” and "cherry" in them? He also eradicates most potshots I take at the Catholic Church and their legal troubles. I’m sure your life is suddenly much richer because you have this knowledge, and really… that’s why I’m here.
The real question, however, is whether the deck is better than Canu’s G/U/b design that won the Masters. The answer to that is probably dependent on what the metagame will be. If you are facing a sea of Tog and MBC, then you’d probably rather run Franck’s deck. It has hand destruction and spot removal to make life miserable for the control decks, whereas my version packs counterspells and Static Orb. If you have to face U/G and W/G Madness all day along with Sligh, R/G, and aggro-Black, then my guess is that you’d rather be running the Muse.
One of Word’s more annoying auto-replace elements is that it changes "aggro" to "agro" every damn time I type it, so I either have to retype "aggro" or get off my lazy ass and delete that from the auto-replace list. That seems like extra work though, so I’ll just ask your forgiveness if sometimes it looks like I’m discussing farm implements.
Speaking of words, The Holy Kanoot has officially decreed that "Fer shizzle, my nizzle" is the most fun phrase to say in the English language. Try it yourself in front of your parents sometime and peep the results, yo.
I understand all the irony in the preceding paragraph, do you?
There’s an additional benefit to putting the White in the deck that I haven’t discussed yet… And that relates to the versatility you gain in your sideboard. By putting enough sources of white mana in the maindeck to cast Windborn Muse, you get access to both sides of Ray of Revelation, Circle of Protection: Black and Circle of Protection: Red (making it practically impossible for MBC and Sligh to kill you before you come back), as well as retaining access to Ravenous Baloth and Phantom Centaur. I won’t go into the rest of the possibilities for the sideboard right now, but they appear pretty expansive. My only real regret is that I’ve lowered the White mana in the deck to the point that casting Wrath of God after sideboarding is no longer feasible.
As I write this, approximately 51 weeks have passed since Johnny "Sandra Dee" Rizzo hung up the keyboard from his full time Magic writing gig. It is also 51 weeks since I started writing my own articles on some other site. That means next week is my Magic birthday and the anniversary of Rizzo’s death. Something needs to be done about this.
So that’s the deck. Look it over, playtest the hell out of it (or don’t), and let me know what you think (or don’t). It’s certainly better than what you’ve seen out there before in Windborn Opposition decks, but is it good enough for me to play at Regionals? We shall see…
As a final note, I will be out of town until Monday, so any board comments or e-mail will go unanswered until then, but I deputize each and every one of you to answer for me. Just say what I would say and we’ll all be fine.
That’s all for this week. Until next week, remember that The Holy Knut’s sh*t is more john-blazin’ than yours.
Don Da Da
[email protected]