“Venser is… not that great…”
“Venser is really lackluster. I mean, he’s okay, but for all the hype around him, I expected a much bigger ability.”
I’d like to start things off by touching on last week’s official Future Sight previews, namely the latest ridiculous Blue wizard Venser, Shaper Savant. The online response seemed mixed, with a majority of people seeming to fall somewhere between “meh” and “ugh.” All I have to say is…
“What are you, people? On dope?” – Mr. Hand
Okay, I lied – I do have more to say on this. Has Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir completely warped expectations? Take a look at a card that Wizards has indicated was a little too good at the time: Man-o’-War. I played with Man-o’-War and played against Man-o’-War. That card was really good at a time when the game of Magic was nasty, brutish, and short, when Jackal Pups and Fireblasts won out of nowhere and solitary combo could kill you before you played your second land. Flash-forward to Magic nowadays, when the games last a reasonable amount of time; now you get a Man-o’-War that can bounce any card at instant speed, even one that’s on the stack and is technically “uncounterable.” For just a single Blue mana more, and the legendary drawback.
That’s insane! Venser is one of the Top 5 cards in the set. There’s a reason Wizards kicked off their own coverage of Future Sight with this guy. Dragonstorm combo aside, Magic nowadays is considerably slower, so the extra mana is really not that much of an offset. This is a card that was “pushed” for Constructed, and the guys who did it – and presumably gave it quite a run in the FFL around their Renton offices – felt it was good enough to be their first official preview.
If you still have doubts, though feel free to trade me your Vensers if you happen to be at the Richmond Future Sight prerelease, I’ll be happy to take the bad card off your hands. Heck, I’ll trade you straight up for Tombstalkers, a card that’s “comma quote not bad end quote comma fer sure rilly period” per Mr. Bleiweiss.
Speaking of people on dope…
Senseless Textless, A Rant
I just received my Magic Player Rewards cards in the mail. Since my last name starts with “S” and I live on the East Coast, I get my cards after just about everyone else gets theirs. By this time I’ve gotten excited about the prospect of picking up a textless Psionic Blast as per the buzz online, so imagine my reaction when I rip open the pack and find two cards.
The first is Mortify. Okay, cool enough. The second…
DISENCHANT?!
“What are you, people? On dope?” – Mr. Hand
Whose bright idea was it to do a textless frickin’ Disenchant? What genius woke up in the middle of the night with a flash of insight that Magic players the world over would pump their fist and rejoice at getting a SEVENTEETH version of this boring utility card?
Yes, Wizards has given us sixteen different Disenchants to choose from before: Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, Revised, 4th Edition, 5th Edition, 6th Edition, 7th Edition, Ice Age, Mirage, Tempest, Urza’s Saga, Mercadian Masques, Battle Royale, Starter 2000, Arena promo, and frickin’ Time Spiral Timeshifted. Nearly always as a common, so there is approximately 8 Googolplex of them floating around out there. StarCityGames.com probably built their gaming center using Disenchants as foundation filler. I hear Ben Bleiweiss has developed a fear of getting buried alive under all the Disenchants from bought collections he’s had to sort through.
This is like my nightmare from Time Spiral all over again (a recurring nightmare?), where I cracked several boxes and got three Timeshifted Disenchants and zero Timeshifted Psionic Blasts.
Whoever came up with textless Disenchant for a Player Rewards promo idea needs to go find him- or herself some tasty waves and a cool buzz, and leave these sorts of decisions to more sober individuals, like whoever thought up the kickass foil Wrath of God, or even Psionic Blast. Better yet, get a sandwich board printed up sporting a big print of the textless Disenchant with the words “This was my idea” and then go on a tour of prereleases and PTQs.
Cardboard versus Ones and Zeroes
In the forums for my column last week, Evan Erwin a.k.a. Misterorange chimed in with this post that certainly jumped out at me:
As for the online collection, it really is becoming an issue I don’t think we can ignore for much longer. I honestly think within two years we’ll have an online Pro Tour (i.e. one of the stops will be ‘virtual’) and the online ratings we’ll begin to mean something when DCI finally begins recognizing them.
As we slowly migrate, some things get more important (server stability, set releases) and certain things begin mattering less (textless foils – or, rather, the paper versions). It would be fascinating to see the profit margins on both products, as I’m sure cardboard is winning by a mile, but the online world is growing year by year.
When those two begin to resemble each other, I think cardboard will be a substandard option from that point, and Magic Online will see a huge shift in player count, to 8,000->15,000+
Maybe I’m showing my age here, but I find this vision of the future of Magic highly unlikely. Magic is a collectible card game, and was designed as such from the beginning. Magic Online does its best to emulate that tabletop card game experience, with a ton of perks and advantages online gaming brings that cardboard cannot match, such as handling all the rules issues automatically, and allowing people to play each other from any point in the world, any time of day. But while Magic rocks the house as a collectible cardboard card game, it’s far from an optimal online game. Imagine if Dr. Garfield was inventing Magic today, but instead of a cardboard game he conceived it as an online-only game? The game would be vastly different.
Cardboard Magic, a “substandard option?” I sincerely doubt it. Magic Online enhances the Magic experience, and for some it’s a good alternative, but cardboard Magic has been and will remain the focus of the game. MTGO will always be an enhancement. I imagine very few people who are strictly online gamers-only who come to the Magic via MTGO first. The overwhelming majority come to MTGO after playing cardboard Magic first. I imagine people who are looking for online gaming experiences first and foremost are going to go for games designed from top to bottom as an online game experience, and MTGO doesn’t fit that bill.
That said, I am far from an online gaming guru, so if there are folks out there who have experienced things otherwise, please share your thoughts in the forums. Do you agree with Misterorange, that MTGO is the future of the game?
Getting Geared Up for Regionals
Regionals here in the U.S. hit June 9th, and that’s not really all that far away. We’ve got a new expansion that’s about to be injected into the metagame, and all the previews so far have promised another awesome and amazing set. I’ve already got a dozen or so new decklists kicking around that I’m dying to test out, but I decided to go about things a little differently this time around -different for us at any rate, as all of us tend to like to cook up homebrews for constructed events, and our time for playtesting tends to be rather limited.
Last Friday some of my Magic buddies got together and we built some Tier 1 Standard gauntlet decks, and passed them around, squaring off against other gauntlet decks for a few matches, then switching up. We had Dragonstorm, Izzetron, Reanimator Dredge, Mono-Green Aggro, and Angelfire. While this is obviously not a comprehensive gauntlet, I think it covers many of the most popular and powerful decks currently out there. The goal was for us to get familiar with how these decks played, how they won… and more importantly, how they lose. This seems like good knowledge to have in mind when putting together brand new rogue decks from the goodies of Future Sight. While we still have a ways to go in feeling out the pulse of the Future Sight Standard metagame, there were a couple of things we learned that were surprising.
First, Dragonstorm is stupid good. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s been saying that, and a lot of people know that on an intellectual level. But until you actually play it, and play against it, over and over and over, it’s easy to dismiss it down in your gut as just another fragile but powerful combo deck. Yeah, that guy in the eight-man queue just got lucky against you, right? No, he’s getting “lucky” against everyone. The deck is scarily consistent and resilient, even in the hands of Dragonstorm novices like we were. There are going to be people at your Regionals who will have logged hundreds or even thousands of games with Dragonstorm that will “lucksack” their way right on into the Top 8. The diversity of Standard means that you can get lucky your own self and just hope to avoid this solitaire deck in the Swiss, but I would recommend doing your best to make sure your deck choice has game against this beast.
Second, Reanimator Dredge is really good too. Now, for me in particular, this was a bitter pill to swallow. I’m a Dredge “purist” who was horrified by the combolicious insanity of Friggorid, and have gone on and on at length about how a true dedicated Dredge deck functions, winning by increments and its engine of action. When Dredge decks started making waves in the Standard metagame, I was irritated that they were not my dedicated Dredge-style of deck; instead they were more of a Friggorid-style combo version, looking at Dredge as a way to reanimate an early Akroma that can just win the game before your opponent can get anything going. On paper, the deck looks clunky and unstable, and far from the smooth synergistic elegance of my own Dredge builds.
Despite my Dredge snobbery, I had to admit if we ran into Dredge at Regionals, it would likely be Reanimator Dredge so I added it to my gauntlet. This is the build I picked, from one of Frank Karsten’s Online Tech columns:
Creatures (27)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 2 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
- 3 Elves of Deep Shadow
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 2 Bogardan Hellkite
- 4 Greenseeker
- 4 Fa'adiyah Seer
Lands (20)
Spells (13)
Sideboard
One change we did make was to treat Greenseekers as Llanowar Mentors, which seemed a strictly superior substitution. Llanowar Mentor was previewed in Scrye recently and added to the MTGSalvation spoiler database, but if you’re not familiar with it, here it is:
Llanowar Mentor G
Elf Spellshaper 1/1
G, tap, Discard a card: Put a 1/1 Green Elf druid creature token named Llanowar Elves into play "with Tap: Add G to your mana pool."
Now, maybe this substitution made a big difference in the performance of this deck, but from our testing whenever Dredge Reanimator started with a Llanowar Mentor and a Green mana source in the opening hand – and a Dredge card – it would just flat out win (except against Dragonstorm; in that case you also needed a Delirium Skeins and Dredge into a Nightmare Void). One time the only Dredge card I had was Nightmare Void, and with Dredge 2 it was barely filling the graveyard, but it was still enough to find the pieces to get an early Akroma out there.
The beauty of Llanowar Mentor is that while you’re using it as part of the Dredge engine, it’s creating mana critters that can also be used to flashback Dread Return. One thing we found was that you’d end up tapping the Elves to cast Dread Return, and when your opponent counterspelled the Dread Return, they could do nothing when you then flashed it back.
Now, being amazed by the deck’s performance doesn’t mean I like all the card choices. I still don’t think there are enough Dredge cards in the deck. I’m going to make some adjustments to the deck and see how this runs:
Reanimator Dredge
Bennie Smith
4 Llanowar Mentor
2 Greenseeker
3 Darkblast
3 Life from the Loam
4 Fa’adiyah Seer
1 Golgari Thug
4 Delirium Skeins
4 Stinkweed Imp
4 Dread Return
2 Nightmare Void
4 Golgari Grave-Troll
2 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
1 Avatar of Woe
3 Ghost Quarters
2 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Llanowar Wastes
6 Forest
3 Swamp
Not running Darkblast in the maindeck seems criminal since it chews up Elves and Birds and Dark Confidants like nobody’s business, and even if you don’t need it for creature removal, it combos with your spellshapers to prime your graveyard. I don’t think you need to bother with Birds of Paradise or Elves of Deep Shadow; the Mentors and Greenseekers are what you’re going to want to have on turn 1, so let’s run six of them.
I think that this deck has a serious chance when the new Standard metagame becomes live… give it a build, you may be pleasantly surprised!
Until next week,
Bennie