A week or so back, Jon Mattison posted a Phantoms deck to one of the my email lists. I had been looking for a deck to play myself for a casual play session, since I had promised not to use anything with an infinite combo or anything too game-controlling…. And Phantoms looked interesting enough to spend some time thinking about.
Nick Eisel fails to recognize the dual nature of the Elf and Green in general when he says that”Elvish Warrior is hosed by two morph creatures,” and thus disputes my entire theory of tempo in Onslaught Limited… And Nick is not alone. News flash: Green is the control color in this set.
Several teams tried breaking the card, but none could build a consistent enough deck to go along with the artifact. Other players asked, on the day of Pro Tour Houston,”isn’t that card banned?” (It isn’t.) So why, at a time when Astroglide decks were burning up States, did not one cycling-centered deck appear at Houston?
Word-O-Meter: 1300/11900 words (11% complete)
This has been some time in coming, hasn’t it? Many thought that I wouldn’t get this done – but here it is, in all its glory. Be prepared for a long, long ride into the journey that is Pro Tour Houston, the new Extended, Ben Bleiweiss, and a bunch of cards with white mana in their casting cost… And we’ll be looking at who finished what, and where, before I start in on Monday.
In last week’s article, I gave you guys a untested deck I designed and asked you to playtest it, using the feedback option to let me know what you have learned in StarCity’s forums. As of the time this article was written, such feedback was only starting – but I realized that I’m thinking of a process that’s more involved than most people’s concepts of playtesting. I decided that for this week’s article, I would share my ideas on playtesting so you can get crackin’!
Last week, Oscar looked at twenty of the best Vintage decks to see whether he could afford to cut Vampiric Tutor; this week, turning towards Cunning Wish targets, he looks at all of the viable instants that can be fetched with Cunning Wish in an attempt to build his sideboard.
PT level decks are NASCAR-caliber stockcars, custom-built from the ground up and tuned to a perfect pitch. Casual decks are more akin to normal, civilian transportation – but even a ’73 Nova can benefit from a tune-up and a pair of fuzzy dice. In that spirit, here are ten things that will help every deck you build.
I looked through my binder of deck stock. I saw the four Tangle Wires. A Frozen Fish or Blue Skies variant, maybe? I kept flipping, and there were a full set of Veteran Brawlers from a recent purchase. Brawlers and Tangle Wires? Hmmm. Now that I had my deck idea, it was time to work on it – and it wasn’t Rob Dougherty’s deck.
My friend’s girlfriend had a little three-year-old son with a small Nerf basketball set in the living room. I wanted to play around with him and teach him how to dunk, but he wouldn’t let me touch the ball – all he would say is,”MY ball!” Undeterred, I set out to create a multiplayer deck that would grab everything. All the time. “MY creatures!” Also, a variant Oath deck for Extended.
Erratic Explosion
Ah, the Explosion. One of my favorite cards in the set, the Explosion is a burn spell which actually deserves to be talked about as a combo card. I mean shock, it… Shocks a creature. Woo hoo! But the explosion, it’s interesting.
Okay, why am I asking about angels? I mean, Serra was reprinted in 7th and has hardly made an appearance on the tournament scene in more than a year and a half. Don’t blame the busty one for that, though: Flametongue Kavu was all too ready, willing, and able to blow her from the sky. She had to stay in hiding until he was gone. It’s now safe for her to come back out and play.
So I started playing around with trying to move popular OBC decks to Extended. Wonder Dog (U/G Madness) and Mono-Black Control easily made the jump from Odyssey Block Constructed to Standard. Could the archetypes go further and dominate Extended? (That’s a loaded question. I wouldn’t be writing this article if the answer was”no.”) Enheartened by results at Reims, I decided to playtest and see what I got.
Onslaught Limited is not a piece of cake format, and there are a lot of things you need to have done if you want to have any hopes of doing well at Pro Tour: Chicago. And there is one card in particular that has sparked many an argument as of late among the pros regarding its worth – and, in fact, the entire approach that you should take to Onslaught drafting. That card is Elvish Warrior, and it’s been the constant subject of many debates and arguments in recent chats and drafts both in real life, and online.
The words that hit my brain tell me that whoever’s on the other end of the phone needs me to tell them something, so that things can be made”ready” for whatever it is I’m doing today. I’d really like to give them some creative profanity instead, but it’s early and I’ve practically forgotten how to talk. I hear my gravel-and-salt voice scrape together five words:”Bring me The Red Cards.”
