“Have you come with your chosen weapon?”
“I have.”
“What is your weapon?” This was the teacher’s advantage, his chance to adjust his plan of battle to the sling or spear or bah or bow.
“My weapon is David.”
— from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series
One of the coolest moments in the entire Dark Tower series was a flashback on Roland the Gunslinger’s childhood. Roland was from a noble family of Gunslingers and was being trained to eventually become one, which in this world is a sort of noble knight with bullets instead of swords. Due to some upsetting revelations, Roland decides to challenge his teacher to a duel, a rite of manhood a noble boy passes before becoming a Gunslinger with a big “G.” At 14, Roland is far too young and inexperienced to succeed in hand-to-hand combat with his teacher Cort.
Roland chooses Rogue. His weapon of choice is David, Roland’s pet falcon and hardly a conventional dueling weapon. David’s vicious talons tear Cort a new one and Roland becomes a Gunslinger.
Succeeding with a rogue choice? You can see why I really took a shine to Stephen King’s Roland character!
Back in 2006 my hometown of Richmond, Virginia was privileged to host a Grand Prix, and TO, StarCityGames.com fearless leader Pete Hoefling, asked if I would be willing to “gunsling” the event. I detailed the results at the end of this column. I was writing at the time for Magicthegathering.com and had a really good time. It was particularly fun playing against a whole host of people I’d never played before, each with a wide variety of different decks.
Flash forward three years, and StarCityGames.com asks again if I’d be willing to “gunsling” for them, this time at the Alara Reborn “big” prerelease. Since prereleases tend to draw a heavily casual crowd, I thought I’d make a good fit for it. However, I have to say it was a little surreal last week, reading the details page listing all the “big” prereleases, and seeing a column noting what gunslingers were going to be at each one, and most of them featured such Magic stars and celebs as Chapin, Turian, BDM… These guys aren’t known for casual play, so it felt strange to be included on a list with them.
The deal with gunslinging is that, if you beat the gunslinger, you get a booster pack as a bounty. I figured players like Chapin and Turian probably hold on to their bounties pretty tightly, and I was a little worried my own playskills might be such that I’d be hemorrhaging booster packs left and right.
Then it occurred to me: if you take into account the airfare some of the PTO’s paid to fly in the big name pros, I could lose boxes of boosters and still come out as a better deal, right? Still, I hoped to not completely embarrass myself and do well enough to be asked to do this again.
It was understood that my main weapon of choice would be a Sealed deck just like everyone else got for their flights: three boosters of Shards of Alara, and three boosters of Alara Reborn. I have to admit, I’m not generally a fan of Sealed deck because you get what you get, and due to the nature of random distribution you can sometimes get some really, really terrible crap that, despite tight play and a little luck, will just go down in flames to an opponent’s superior card pool. That drives me a little nuts, especially if I’ve taken the trouble of driving hours to get to the tournament venue for, say, a PTQ. I prefer Draft in Limited because you get to see more cards and you have a bit more control over your final card pool fate, which is why for years now I’ve preferred to work the Sealed events here in town rather than play in them.
Of course, I still love playing Magic regardless, so getting to work and play Magic at the same time is just about the best thing ever.
Once the flights were underway and the rush of players signing up at the admin table had slowed to a trickle, I was allowed to break away and set up at the gunslinging table. I got my packs and started to open them up. My first pack of Shards, the rare was a Death Baron… hmm, interesting! In the second pack: another Death Baron! Now, I don’t recall the zombies in Alara block being particularly stellar, but backed by Death Baron they certainly could get ugly if I had a good number of playable ones.
The bad news? My zombie pool was pretty poor. The good news? The rest of my sealed pool was off the chain ridiculous. Check this out:
WHITE (& White hybrid): Akrasan Squire, Sighted-Caste Sorcerer, Gustrider Exuberant, Oblivion Ring, Bant Battlemage
WHITE/BLUE: Hindering Light, Ethersworn Shieldmage, Talon Trooper, Offering to Asha, Stormcaller’s Boon
BLUE (& Blue hybrid): Resounding Wave, Esper Battlemage, Arsenal Thresher x2, Tortoise Formation, Cloudheath Drake
BLUE/BLACK: Tidehollow Strix x2, Soul Manipulation, Etherium Abomination x2, Jhessian Zombies, Soulquake
BLACK (& Black hybrid): Bone Splinters, Executioner’s Capsule, Deathgreeter, Dregscape Zombie, Grixis Grimblade, Death Baron x2, Sewn-Eye Drake, Skeletal Kathari
BLACK/RED: Sanity Gnawers, Demonic Dread, Thought Hemorrhage, Bituminous Blast, Breath of Malfegor x2, Monstrous Carabid
RED (& Red hybrid): Magma Spray, Dragon Herald, Jund Hackblade, Thunder-Thrash Elder, Soul’s Fire, Bloodpyre Elemental
RED/GREEN: Colossal Might, Firewild Borderpost, Mage Slayer, Rhox Brute, Gorger Wurm, Deadshot Minotaur
GREEN (& White hybrid): Lush Growth, Naya Hushblade, Cylian Elf, Mighty Emergence, Court Archers, Gift of the Gargantuan, Godtoucher, Algae Gharial
GREEN/WHITE: Qasali Pridemage x2, Sigil Blessing, Wildfield Borderpost, Sigil of the Nayan Gods, Captured Sunlight, Enlisted Wurm
BANT: Finest Hour
ESPER: Esper Panorama, Obelisk of Esper, Windwright Mage, Etherwrought Page
GRIXIS: Swerve, Grixis Charm, Drastic Revelation, Skyclaw Thrash
JUND: Necrogenesis, Dragon Appeasement, Lavalanche (foil!)
NAYA: Obelisk of Naya x2, Woolly Thoctar, Intimidation Bolt, Ajani Vengeant, Naya Sojourners
It quickly became apparent to me that the core of my deck had to be Naya – so many good cards and good mana-fixing. I could set the deck up to be very aggressive with two Borderposts and two Blades giving me the possibility of a three power beater on turn 2, followed up with a 5/4 on turn 3. Back that up with quality Exalted dudes and decent removal.
Of course, that foil Lavalanche kept winking at me, all shiny and foil. C’mon, it said, how hard would it be to splash me? Esper’s got a Panorama and an Obelisk to give you Black mana…
Then Bant Battlemage gave me a nudge from the pile of white card, pointing out that while I didn’t have too many gigantic monsters to take advantage of her trample ability, if I was going to splash Esper fixers for black I might be able to get access to blue to turn on her flying ability since I was a little light in the flying department…
*Cough*Swampcyling*cough*islandcycling* muttered Jhessian Zombies, and I was sold.
This is what I ended up running:
Gunslinger Sealed
1 Magma Spray
1 Akrasan Squire
1 Jund Hackblade
1 Naya Hushblade
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Sigil Blessing
1 Colossal Might
1 Court Archers
1 Woolly Thoctar
1 Bant Battlemage
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Intimidation Bolt
1 Obelisk of Esper
1 Ajani Vengeant
1 Rhox Brute
1 Bituminous Blast
1 Gorger Wurm
1 Naya Sojourners
1 Deadshot Minotaur
1 Enlisted Wurm
1 Jhessian Zombies
1 Lavalanche
1 Firewild Borderpost
1 Wildfield Borderpost
1 Esper Panorama
1 Island
1 Swamp
4 Forest
4 Mountain
5 Plains
So many good cards ended up in the unplayed pile, and my playables was deep enough I’m sure there are quite a few good builds you could make from this. What do y’all think? How would you build it?
I’m no Limited master, but on the back of good cards and broken rares, I ended up 16-5, even beating one guy’s draft deck.
Recently, I had bought the Divine versus Demonic duel decks and figured some people might be interesting in giving them a try (and maybe sell a few of ‘em for StarCityGames.com), and if anyone came without a deck (or their sealed deck was just too awful to run again) then we could play these pre-made decks.
I ended up 2-0 with the Demonic deck, and 1-1 with the Divine deck. It was interesting to hear people talk about these decks prior to playing… one guy would come up and swear up and down that the Divine deck was unbeatable; another guy would come up later and say there was no way the Demonic deck ever loses. Nobody seemed to feel that the decks were evenly matched, which I thought was what Magic R&D was gunning for with these decks. Four games with the decks, twice on each side, doesn’t really give me enough experience to say which is better or whether they truly are balanced, but my hunch is that they are more or less evenly matched, but that the Divine deck is a bit harder to play. The Demonic deck is the beatdown deck, and is fairly intuitive and straightforward. The Divine deck has to endure somehow, and feels like it has got inevitability if it can last long enough. My one victory involved drawing two Sustainer of the Realm, which are mighty fine blockers, holding off the Imp assault until Twilight Shepherd came down to save the day. Demonic tried to ruin things by killing the Shepherd, and then dropping a Reiver Demon, but I had an Otherworldly Journey to save the day.
I have to admit, the Demonic deck is a bit more fun, and it was just pure evil joy dropping a Lord of the Pit down with a buffet of Pacifism-wearing Imps ready for consumption. I even threw an Unholy Strength on the big Balrog.
I also wanted to have a couple Standard decks to run in case anybody wanted to rock some Constructed and weren’t interested in the pre-made duel decks. I built two “competitive”-leaning decks and one purely fun deck.
Creatures (23)
- 4 Civic Wayfinder
- 4 Imperious Perfect
- 4 Wren's Run Vanquisher
- 4 Bramblewood Paragon
- 4 Nettle Sentinel
- 3 Twinblade Slasher
Lands (23)
Spells (14)
Love me some Snakeform! The elf deck was definitely one of the competitive decks, though I threw in some Pyrrhic Revival technology just for kicks. Jay Delazier mentioned it would be neat using that card alongside Bramblewood Paragon, since the Paragon would negate the -1/-1 counters, leaving you with a (hopefully) much bigger army. I went 3-1 with the Elf deck, and got to cast Revival once, just when my Jund Ramp opponent thought he’d finally gotten rid of all the pesky elves and stabilized.
The other competitive deck was provided courtesy of our esteemed editor Craig, who sent me a Bant list he was terrorizing his local Magic scene with. It involved accelerating into Cephalid Constable or Cold-Eyed Selkie backed with Exalted for some serious fun and shenanigans. Since I only own 3 copies each of Cryptic Command and Rafiq of the Many, I ended up adding 2 copies of the tech-tastic Wings of Velis Vel for even more Constable/Selkie fun. Hopefully Craig doesn’t mind me posting this list, though if he does he’s the editor so if you see “CENSORED” below you know what happened [Don’t worry Bennie, all’s good… – Craig, looking forward to running Colossal Might in this deck soon].
Creatures (21)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Cephalid Constable
- 4 Cold-Eyed Selkie
- 3 Rafiq of the Many
- 2 Rhox War Monk
- 4 Noble Hierarch
Lands (24)
Spells (15)
I went 1-1 with this one; the first game I played with it I got horribly, horribly mana-screwed even after a double-mulligan, so I blame the loss on not being able to get the deck sufficiently randomized after it was built. The second game the deck came out slow even after a mulligan, but thankfully Islandwalking Selkie drew into a Constable who even mid-game backed with Exalted and Wings managed to lock the board up. This deck manages a nice balance between fun/rogue and competitive.
Lastly, here was my “fun” deck, a project I’ve been working on a while trying to figure out how to best break off Dramatic Entrance and Impromptu Raid:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Leaf Gilder
- 3 Masked Admirers
- 4 Kitchen Finks
- 3 Woodfall Primus
- 2 Broodmate Dragon
- 2 Hellkite Overlord
- 4 Charnelhoard Wurm
- 3 Progenitus
Lands (23)
Spells (12)
Right now the deck pretty well hinges off Cream of the Crop, so that you can pretty easily keeping chaining into big creatures paired with Raid or Entrance (digging 10 cards deep off Progenitus is pretty nuts). Of course, Cream of the Crop does nothing if you’re dropping Birds or Llanowar Elves to accelerate, so that’s why I’m using the janky (but actually pretty effective) Leaf Gilders here.
The random Soul’s Fire is there to combo with Charnelhoard Wurm, but I’m fairly certain I’m dropping the Wurms for Maelstrom Archangels in the future.
You can probably guess how I did with this deck, a mighty 0-2. The first game guy came up saying he’d built a homemade deck of his own design, which to me indicated a casual deck, so I pulled out Total Drama. My turn 1 Mosswort Bridge was hit with a Boomerang, and then he Sanity Grinding/Twincast me to death on turn 5. Wow… real original and casual, dude. I actually wasn’t exactly dead – my library consisted of 3 Progenitus at that point, and I had seven cards in hand. I considered just drawing a discarding the Progenitus over and over so that I’d never deck, but I did notice that guy had creatures in his deck like Overbeing of Myth and he’d eventually just cast it with counterspell backup and beat me down, so I decided to go for Dramatic Entrance but of course he’s got the counterspell for it. Sigh.
The second game I play Matthew, a 10-year old kid who’s been playing Magic for half his life and enjoys reading my articles (hi, Matthew!). I decide to give my fun deck another try, so of course Matthew is playing an aggressive White Weenie deck that comes out swinging quickly. Even so, I get a pretty good draw and manage to drop a turn 4 Progenitus from Dramatic Entrance to eat his attacker. Still, my life is precariously low and I’m not sure I can race him in two turns, so I pop off a Mosswort Bridge to play out my second Progenitus!
… and then shuffle them both back into my deck since Progenitus, with protection from everything, nevertheless has no protection from the Legend rule. Yes, Virginia… I forgot that Progenitus was a legend, since this was the first time I’d actually been able to get multiples into play, even while goldfishing the deck. D’OH!
Matthew drops a Battlegrace Angel to quickly end my misery and claim his pack!
So I ended the day 23-10, a respectable showing thanks in large part to my ridiculous Sealed pool. Now if I can only make sure to get something like that for the Magic 2010 prerelease…
One thing that was pretty cool, we had a blank playmat that I had everyone who played me sign, a few people ran off without signing but it still came out pretty cool:
That’s it for this week. As you read this, I should be receiving a deus of booster boxes from StarCityGames.com (fingers crossed), cracking them open and throwing them in a deck to play for FNM at Richmond Comix tonight. What am I going to play? I honestly don’t know, I’ve got a couple options depending on what I do and don’t open from the box, but stay tuned next week to see what I ended up with. Richmond’s got two PTQs for PT: Austin coming up in just two short weeks, and then we’ve all got Regionals after that so there’s not much time for teching!
Take care!
Bennie
starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com