“I have a bad feeling about this.” — Norin the Wary
When last we left our hero — me! — I was pondering what to play for FNM’s Standard coming up at Richmond Comix. Regular readers know I’m not exactly thrilled with the format right now, especially since enough half-way decent players netdeck the usual Tier 1 suspects at the tournament so that any interesting “Tier X” decks I cook up tend to end up getting crushed along the way. I’ve tried to shame these guys, chiding them for playing all the same old boring old Lorwyn power cards but I suppose checking off enough WIN boxes on the match slips washes away any residue of guilt.
I still check out the Decks to Beat links each week and the Star City deck database to see if there’s anything of interest breaking through the monotony, so I was quite curious when I saw this posted:
Treefolk, by Chris Moen
9th Place at StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Open in Minneapolis
1 Behemoth Sledge
4 Bosk Banneret
1 Chameleon Colossus
1 Cloudthresher
1 Dauntless Dourbark
1 Indomitable Ancients
4 Leaf-crowned Elder
2 Orchard Warden
1 Ranger Of Eos
4 Timber Protector
4 Treefolk Harbinger
1 Unstoppable Ash
2 Wickerbough Elder
1 Woodfall Primus
2 Cream Of The Crop
4 Path To Exile
1 Sapling Of Colfenor
1 Crib Swap
12 Forest
2 Plains
4 Murmuring Bosk
2 Windbrisk Heights
4 Wooded Bastion
Sideboard:
2 Burrenton Forge-tender
2 Cloudthresher
3 Vexing Shusher
2 Wickerbough Elder
1 Wheel Of Sun And Moon
3 Guttural Response
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Eyes Of The Wisent
My first thought was disbelief. I mean, I’ve tried working with Leaf-Crowned Elder; the card is incredibly cool and one of the rare engines of card advantage available to Green. Lord knows I’ve tried breaking off Cream of the Crop too… So having this deck rise to 9th place in a tournament with 300 or so people just blew me away. Had the metagame shifted to the point where a deck like this was a handgrenade?
With no time to test and no promising homebrews on tap, I decided to sleeve this up to give it a whirl, with a small change to add a single Doran, the Siege Tower to the mix -because, honestly, why not? I was really looking forward to playing with the ultra-cool but underpowered (until now?) Treefolk tribe. If you had to play with linear tribal themes from Lorwyn, Treefolk felt good.
I went 1-3. Oof.
Match 1, my mana crucified me. Considering how badly I got hosed by my land at the Standard two weeks before, I thought I must have had some residual bad karma to work out of my system. The first game I had to double mulligan, tossing back a six-land hand and then a five-land hand. The third hand was workable with two action cards and three lands… and then I drew nothing but land after that. Those two cards didn’t get there. Game 2 I throw back a no-land hand and keep a questionable one land hand, but it includes green mana and the Harbinger and Bosk. Harbinger fetches a Bosk and then I don’t draw any more land until it’s just way too late. I’m playing Kithkin here so of course I’m quickly punished for my false starts.
I take a deep breath. Okay, fine. Magic has a random element to it that can sometimes destroy you no matter watch you do.
Breathe in… breathe out… hopefully that awful screwing shook off the bad karma.
Second match I play against a funky yet cool Mono Green ramp deck with Howls and Platinum Angels and Creakwood Lieges, and a nifty Scapeshift/Worm Harvest finish. He wins the first when I can’t find a way to deal with his third Platinum Angel, I win the second with a turn 3 Elder hitting kinship a couple times quickly, and the third game goes long but I managed to squeak it out before he overwhelms me with Worm tokens.
Third match I play against 5 Color Control that is more mana-ramp-ish and plays several Obelisks of Alara. Both games he gets an Obelisk out before I can get a four-drop into play as my mana again gives me fits.
Fourth match I draw decent in both games but he’s playing Kithkin (of course!) and gets a fast draw in game 1 and literally the nuts draw game 2. I don’t stand a chance.
I’m a bit stunned by just how awful I performed, and later that weekend an odd thing happened. In my column last week, I’d mentioned the Minneapolis $5K Treefolk deck, and someone in the forums on Saturday posted something to the effect of “I don’t see a treefolk deck in the Star City deck database.”
I click on the link for the Top 16 decks… and instead of Chris Moen’s Treefolk deck… it now shows Chris Moen got 9th place with… Boat Brew?! And there’s not a single Treefolk deck in the entire Top 16! Whisky Tango Foxtrot?!
I checked with Evan about it via Twitter, and he told me there was a mixup in the names, and that Moen did get 9th place but with Boat Brew not Treefolk.
The lesson here… be careful when you netdeck, kiddies!
One positive aspect of getting crushed in the Swiss rounds of FNM is that there’s a cadre of Elder Dragon Highlander enthusiasts who’ve been coming up to Richmond Comix on Friday nights, so once the Swiss is over EDH games have been breaking out. I’d recently built a new deck and was eager to try it out.
Norin the Wary EDH, by Bennie Smith
1 Norin the Wary (general)
1 Arena
1 Glacial Chasm
1 Maze of Ith
1 Zuran Orb
1 Aether Vial
1 Death Spark
1 Ivory Tower
1 Pyroblast
1 Red Elemental Blast
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Sol Ring
1 Distorting Lens
1 Fork
1 Epochrasite
1 Genesis Chamber
1 Ignorant Bliss
1 Mind Stone
1 Mogg Maniac
1 Price of Progress
1 Ruby Medallion
1 Shattering Pulse
1 Stingscourger
1 Sun Droplet
1 Aether Membrane
1 Adamaro, First to Desire
1 Cloudstone Curio
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Foriysian Totem
1 Hammer of Bogardan
1 Heat Shimmer
1 Honor-Worn Shaku
1 Jaya Ballard, Task Mage
1 Knollspine Invocation
1 Obsidian Battle-Axe
1 Pitchstone Wall
1 Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
1 Reiterate
1 Ronin Warclub
1 Scuttlemutt
1 Shunt
1 Spinal Villain
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
1 Thunderstaff
1 Urza’s Rage
1 Viashino Heretic
1 War Cadence
1 Gaze of Adamaro
1 Jester’s Cap
1 Kyren Negotiations
1 Paradise Plume
1 Rivals’ Duel
1 Skullmead Cauldron
1 Solemn Simulacrum
1 Sudden Impact
1 Tawnos’s Coffin
1 Wild Ricochet
1 Beacon of Destruction
1 Illicit Auction
1 Illuminated Folio
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Latulla, Keldon Overseer
1 Mirari
1 Radiate
1 Word of Seizing
1 Skarrgan Firebird
1 Hamletback Goliath
1 Akroma, Angel of Fury
1 Insurrection
1 Deserted Temple
1 Kher Keep
1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1 Mishra’s Factory
1 Strip Mine
1 Urza’s Factory
1 Vesuva
1 Wasteland
23 Mountain
I’ve always thought Norin the Wary was a funny card, a creature’s whose flavor was so brilliantly realized in his abilities. Abilities that make him useless to Spikes (despite the tantalizing 2/1 stats on a one mana creature) but not unlike a Siren’s call to Johnnies. I remember working the Time Spiral prerelease at the admin table, and one of guys I regularly see at the event comes up to me with some bad beat stories about his sealed deck.
“Get anything cool?” I asked.
“No, not really,” he replies. Then his eyes squint in disgust. “I did get a Norin the Wary. I mean, c’mon! What a dumb card. I told my friend I bet a dollar that nobody could give me a good reason to play this card.”
“Confusion in the Ranks,” I said. And smiled.
He paused, thinking… shuffling his memories to the stack of bad cards nobody plays. Then he looked at Norin again, laughed, and pulled out his wallet.
“No need to pay me,” I laughed and waved him off, but he insisted and pressed a dollar into my hand.
“A deal’s a deal,” he said and walked off smiling. Maybe he went to trade for some Confusion in the Ranks?
Anyway, after building a vicious, aggressive Dragon deck and winning the last EDH in spectacular fashion (raining down swarms of huge dragons across the board), I decided I wanted to play something much less threatening for the next time. On the spectrum of scary generals to play, Norin is certainly way down on the non-scary side of things. Sure, people are going to expect some sort of shenanigans, but the general himself isn’t going to dominate the table like some other generals (Zur the Enchanter and Uril, the Miststalker come to mind), and any Norin shenanigans are going to be at the least interesting.
So, when assembling my Norin deck, the first two questions had to be: Confusion in the Ranks? Pandemonium?
If I were playing in one of the 4 man EDH pods that Star City rolls out in their side events, I’d definitely throw Confusion in the Ranks in the deck since the synergy with Norin is just way too much fun. However, the EDH games at Richmond Comix tend to be pretty large (the one last Friday at 9 players) and I was concerned that things would actually get way too confusing – everyone trading around various permanents willy-nilly and somebody’s cards are going to get lost. God help us if 2-3 people had the same color sleeves… anyone, I nixed that idea based purely on logistics.
Pandemonium… in a large group game this card could just get out of hand. Sure, it would let me ping people or creatures fairly frequently, but what would that annoyance likely buy me? Somebody dropping something monstrous like a Lhurgoyf of Lord of Extinction and deciding on the “irony kill” — killing someone with their own card.
Instead of Pandemonium I decided on the slightly less impressive but much more controllable Kyren Negotiations. That way Norin can get a little sting in before ducking out for the turn.
I dug around for other cards to “mini-combo” with Norin… Honor-Worn Shaku works like Kyren Negotiations, pretty much netting me an extra mana whenever anyone casts a spell. I had a foily Genesis Chamber that gives everyone tokens when their creatures come into play, but obviously Norin would give me quite a few more. Cloudstone Curio seemed like it might be handy to bring back a creature to my hand with Norin, and I went ahead and added Stingscourger for that purpose.
Hamletback Goliath is a fun multiplayer card that can get really, really, really big in a hurry. Norin gives him a +2/+2 boost, utilizing his almost never utilized power of 2. In fact, just to be silly I decided to include Ronin Warclub and Obsidian Battleaxe, making Norin an impressive 6/3 even though he’d never attack. Then, as a flash of inspiration I added Arena; Norin could jump in the Arena, tapping down a creature an opponent controls, put damage on the stack and then play an instant to have Norin slip out the back door to avoid the consequences.
Hmm… that still left a lot of slots left open to fill.
Flipping through my Red stuff, I realized that Red had some nice graveyard recursion, starting with Squee, Goblin Nabob. I also recruited Death Spark, Hammer of Bogardan, Skarrgan Firebird, and Crucible of Worlds. To take advantage of that stuff I picked Knollspine Invocation; Latulla, Keldon Overseer; Skullmead Cauldron; and the awesome Jaya Ballard.
Looking at Jaya’s first ability — R, discard a card: Destroy target blue permanent — had me recruit a Distorting Lens and Scuttlemutt to the mix for maximum utility. I also snagged Spinal Villain as a mini-Jaya, and threw in a Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast.
One thing I noticed about this group from last game was that a lot of people played a lot of card-drawing cards, and many of them played cards like Spellbook or Library of Leng in order to accumulate massive hands of cards. Sudden Impact, Gaze of Adamaro, and Adamaro, First to Desire quickly found a home in the deck to take advantage of that.
Red has a lot of fun and wacky copy effects, so I decided to add Fork, Reiterate, Heat Shimmer, Wild Ricochet, Radiate and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker to the mix.
Keeping with the fun times, I added some of my favorite cards:
Mogg Maniac, who just dares you to swing with something large… or he just doubles up Jaya’s Inferno for some unlucky soul.
Shunt… surprise! Thanks for targeting me with the Stroke of Genius!
War Cadence… when you really need someone’s swarm to connect with a player that’s gotten out of control.
Rival’s Duel… it’s like Arena is spell form! Sadly, Norin can’t participate in this one…
Tawnos’s Coffin… an oldie but a goodie.
Illicit Auction… I’ve never actually played this in a group game but I’m dying to see how it goes! I figured it would be exceptionally handy here with my Sudden Impacts and Gazes to take someone down who went a little overboard with the bidding…
Word of Seizing… split second, gain control of target permanent; the ultimate in emergency utility methinks.
Thunderstaff… a nice way to hold off token hordes (like the one that might get created by my own Genesis Chamber), while also being able to boost my own or someone else’s on the attack.
Insurrection… expensive as hell, but will usually be good for at least a couple player deaths at the table. I’m figuring I’d need a ‘blast and a little luck to punch this through.
I had a hoot playing this deck, playing Norin the first turn and having to read him to several of the players, who were perplexed as to what shenanigans I had going on. The first time someone played a spell I nervously responded, “I have a bad feeling about this…” to much hilarity. Throughout the game, I role-played Norin to try and highlight in a humorous way when someone cast a spell or creature that I thought needed people’s attention.
Throughout the majority of the game, I never drew any Norin “shenanigans” cards, despite drawing four extra cards each turn for five or six turns due to two Fonts of Mythos and a Howling Mine. That was a shame, but it did pretty much leave me as a fun, non-threatening board presence, so people focused on the Slivers player or the guy with Uril the Mist Stalker as his general (sick!). After several hours and numerous board sweepers, we were down to seven players when the Sliver dude played Twilight’s Call. Sliver dude had a lot of slivers in the graveyard, including the poisonous one. I looked at my hand and saw what I was pretty sure to be a game-winner if things played out right. First things first though…
Of course, someone tried to counterspell the Call. Sliver dude had a counter backup leaving him two mana left open. No one else had any reactions so everyone put their creatures into play. One of the guys to my left had a Kederekt Leviathan in his graveyard, which was going to bounce all non-land permanents to everyone’s hand once his comes-into-play effects resolved. He was only at 6 life however, so I burned him with Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] and Knollspine Invocation to remove the Leviathan’s trigger from the stack. “Sorry, dude,” I apologized. “It’s late and I don’t want another board reset… having all these creatures out there ought to help conclude the game.” Sounded innocent enough, right?
The Slivers hit, hasty, poisonous, difficult to block and each destroying an artifact or enchantment when they come into play. There were a lot of available targets so luckily all I lost was a Crucible of Worlds. One thing destroyed was the Oblivion Ring that had removed a Zur’s Wierding from play, so now everyone laid their hand on the table. Sliver dude had a Negate in hand and exactly the mana to use it. I casually put my hand down and looked around but nobody paid me much attention.
Sliver dude attacked two players who didn’t have many creatures and killed them with poison counters and passed the turn to the guy on my right, who was playing monoblue craziness with no counterspells. He drew something that might interfere with my evil plans so I paid 2 life with the Weirding to put it in the graveyard. “What!” he exclaimed, and looked more carefully at my hand on the table.
“Hey – is that an Insurrection?!” It was late, but everyone perked up.
I was busted, so I grinned an evil grin. “Okay, so maybe I had an ulterior motive for keeping all the creatures from the Call in play…”
They counted my land, thinking to deny me a land draw with the Wierding if need be, but I had plenty of land. Soon enough it was my turn, during my draw step I Wasteland one of the Sliver dude’s two open lands, mindful that he was the only one showing any counterspells. I go for it – cast Insurrection. I get a lot of creatures including the dread Sliver horde. We figure out I have enough Slivers to kill two players with poison counters, so of course I send 10 of them after Sliver dude for the “irony kill.” I also send the 14/14 double striking Uril after his owner to get another “irony kill.” With the other creatures I’m only able to kill one of the two remaining guys, but he has a trick that keeps him barely alive. He’s in trouble though because if I untap with Knollspine Invocation in play I’ll kill him, so he bounces it to my hand, then during my upkeep he pops off his Magus of the Jar so I can’t play it this turn. On his next turn he plays some crazy Blue spell that lets him search my library for a sorcery or instant and play it, and he copies it with Mirari, looking for something to kill me with or keep him alive. He doesn’t find anything useful, and eventually succumbs to my Invocation.
The last man standing, Tommy, has a card that lets him not have to discard and a fistful of cards, but nothing he can do about Adamaro that swings in the next turn for lethal.
Norin Deck Wins!
I was totally not expecting that to happen…
Alright, that’s it for today. If you’re in Central Virginia make sure to come to Richmond for the Magic 2010 prerelease tournament on Saturday, it’s going to be loads of fun! I’ll be helping out at the admin table for the early part of the day and maybe jumping in a flight later on, or finding a side event. Unfortunately, I’ll not be gunslinging at the event, as they got “some guy” to do it this time, so if you’re unhappy with my replacement feel free to complain to the management.
I will however be on the scene with a brand-spanking new EDH deck, so if you’re looking for some of that action, BRING IT!
‘Til next week…
Bennie
starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com