Second-guessing one of your draft picks? Heard a juicy rumor and want to know if it’s true? Need advice on your Regionals deck? Not sure if you made the right play at last weekend’s tournament?
Kartin’ Ken Krouner is here for you!
Unless you have been hiding under a rock for about four months, you will know that the new and upcoming net-deck is Affinity. Those of you who kept track of Kobe progress will undoubtedly notice the high Affinity concentration, and more important, Skullclamp in Affinity. If you thought Skullclamp was good before, watch what happens when you throw it in a deck that casts half of its creatures for free.
Of course, that is Block Constructed, and this is Standard. While there are similarities, there is one card that makes a world of difference.
I’ve been toying with Centaur Glade ever since it popped up in Onslaught. Anyone who played against it or with it in Limited knows how good it can be. It never made a splash in Constructed, though. It was too slow. Boy, oh, boy, does it give control decks fits, though. If you can resolve one against a control deck, you can hold all of those spells in your hand and make them deal with uncounterable 3/3 Centaur tokens. That’s nothing to sneeze at. The question remained: How can I make this card work? The answer always eluded me… until now.
The basic elements of the metagame at the moment, are first, blazingly fast Aggro in the form of Madness and Workshop-based decks such as TnT and Oshawa Stompy, as well as regular Madness; second, Workshop Prison decks; third, Aggro-Control decks that are usually Fish or Dryad based; fourth, Control decks like Tog, Keeper, URphid, and Landstill; and fifth, Combo decks like TPS, Twister.dec, Dragon, and Rector. This metagame, in other words, has five major points – and multiple axes.
As for why Tog is the best deck in the current metagame, you’ll just have to read it.
Nonbos are combos that almost work, but are either too slow or too inconsistent to win anything – at least, not every match in a long tournament. So, you ask, why should I read an article about combos that don’t work? Two reasons. First, knowing this may help you understand what a Regionals opponent is trying to do to you – at least in rounds one and two. These combos are good enough that people will try them. Second, I have wrongly called combos nonbos in the past. That means that there is a chance that I have the core of a real deck, but it just needs a little tuning.
Shunt
Okay, so Deflection and Misdirection should have been Red now? This pie business is sure confusing.
Anyway, Deflection was a chase card after Jester’s Cap back in Ice Age days, but it was just too tempo inefficient. Barring a Fireball for twenty, Deflection didn’t really do all that much for four mana, aside from having cute flavor text. Shunt, at three mana, isn’t all that different in Type I. Remember, this effect truly took off with Misdirection’s free cost.
Second-guessing one of your draft picks? Heard a juicy rumor and want to know if it’s true? Need advice on your Regionals deck? Not sure if you made the right play at last weekend’s tournament?
Kartin’ Ken Krouner is here for you!
Second-guessing one of your draft picks? Heard a juicy rumor and want to know if it’s true? Need advice on your Regionals deck? Not sure if you made the right play at last weekend’s tournament?
Kartin’ Ken Krouner is here for you!
So what you have with Skullclamp is a whole lot of people who know how good it is going to be and a smaller – but still substantial – number of people trying to figure out how to beat it. The thing is, you can’t necessarily go up against a Skullclamp and attack it directly. That’s like trying to play a G/W deck full of Uktabi Orangutans and Monk Realists in an attempt to beat Trix. Sure, you can technically destroy their relevant permanents, but you can’t do so in a timely enough manner for it to matter.
People, I’ve got Death Cloud on my mind like Georgia. A lot of the decks I’ve been cooking up lately have been trained on finding the proper combination of Magical Cards that turn an otherwise symmetrical spell into a one-way trip down Broken Street. There are two particular builds that I’m working with right now — one mono-Black and one Black/Green.
Sometimes the best advice you can give someone is the last thing you’d ever think of. I found this out pretty quick when I received an absolutely overwhelming response to my article last week on stepping up your game. Most of the things I addressed in that piece are things that are second nature to me, and what I consider to be the ground level attributes of any winning player. While they are very basic, they are also essential to winning play.
Anyway, since I only touched the tip of the iceberg last week and got a huge response from you guys, I figure it would only be fitting to go a little deeper into the topic this week.
As expected, I wasn’t able to finish a new article, and as promised, here are the answer to the puzzle at the end of my last article.
Part of the success that players have comes not only from the cards in their decks, but how well they know the deck. This finally sunk into me two nights before the tournament, when I made the fateful decision to play my old standby, Ghey Red. The deck is built around mana denial. When your opponent cannot cast anything, feel free to win with Cloud of Faeries, otherwise known as the”Most Humiliating Death in Type One.” Supporting Blue’s counter power in Force of Will and Daze (a dark horse card if there ever was one) as well as Red’s artifact destruction and burn, the deck can buy a lot of time for beatdown. It packs one of the strongest sideboards in T1 and, despite everything it does to wreck, hardly anyone sideboards against it.
So what does a kid with a 2019 Contructed rating who can’t PTQ do for fun? Well apparently he goes 17-1 last weekend, winning oodles of prizes with a beatdown deck running four Skullclamps. Then he riffs on how Limited is like Legos, gives you deck construction recipes to avoid, and tosses in a rogue Vedalken Archmage deck to boot.
I’m back with all the news that’s fit to print about Sarnia Affinity, the control Affinity deck that’s grown in popularity amongst Type Two players ever since it was first unveiled by J.M. Babin at Ontario Provincials. I’ve pretty much taken over”official” Sarnia Affinity deck development post-Provincials, first cleaning it up and putting together a decent sideboard for the first article and now, putting together, testing, and publishing the post-Darksteel edition.
