What is this multiple article doing in the strategy section? Well, as it turns out, even though the series is about multiplayer, the article is about how Stijn won his prerelease and why certain cards are just plain good. Take a look!
Dross Harvester strikes me as one of the most interesting creatures in the set. Obviously you can’t just drop this into any deck and expect to succeed, but that’s a very impressive power-to-casting-cost ratio. The cool thing about this card is that he’s interesting when creatures are involved (if you can keep it to your advantage) and he’s also interesting against passive decks (which hopefully can’t race). Using him in each situation requires some specific preparation, however.
Luminous Angel’s immediate comparison is to Verdant Force, which is larger, got you tokens more often, had no immediate method of evasion and cost one more mana. In the end though, there’s a reason that Verdant Force has been labeled the best fatty ever printed. One key difference is that the Angel does not give you something to sacrifice should a sorcery-speed Edict be cast, such as the new Barter in Blood (which wouldn’t save a lone Verdant Force anyway) or Innocent Blood, or Chainer’s Edict. The spirits, sadly, don’t come fast enough.
There are those who say that Burning Academy (also known as Long.dec) is completely stopped by a timely Duress or Force of Will. But Stephen goes to the wire against the best pre-Mirrodin control deck – Hulk Smash – to show you how to fight the first-turn disruption with the fastest deck in Magic!
Since the release of Mirrodin, I’ve overheard a number of conversations focusing on the topic of Spikeshot Goblin and its power level in comparison to the Limited wrecking ball from Onslaught that we all know as Sparksmith. Every one of these discussions has been concluded with statements like”While Spikeshot is clearly very good, he’s nowhere near as powerful or dominant as Sparksmith was.” Let me give you many reasons why those people are wrong.
A turn 1 Dark Ritual doesn’t reach you to mana you couldn’t rely on – it just gets you there faster. By accelerating a player to things like eight mana on turn 6, you get a different effect, because somewhere around this time a player would often start missing land drops. Turn 1 Hypnotic Specter is very good, don’t get me wrong – but under normal circumstances, you have been able to cast it on turn 3 anyway. In Seething Song’s case, you can cast an Obliterate on turn 6 that might not otherwise have happened until something like turn 11. That’s a very big difference.
An extremely fast red deck with a low land-count could utilize the Goblin Charbelcher’s obviously powerful ability. I can see him finding a home in a deck that utilises deck-stacking techniques, such as Scroll Rack. How about as the kill in a creature-light deck with the new pseudo Oath of Druids/Gaea’s Blessing artifact, Proteus Staff? Make some guys with Raise the Alarm, speed through your deck looking for your only creature, then stack the cards that flew past so that there’s ten cards before you see a land mountain. Activate Charbelcher at an opportune time, win the game.
Normally, if your opponent plays Auriok Transfixer, Raise the Alarm, and then gets totally mana flooded, you’re in good shape. Well, that’s exactly what happened in my third match – except this little Standard also hit the board. Soon I was facing 3/3s, then 4/4s, and 5/5s. Leonin Sun Standard transformed the game and delivered the win to my opponent.
Considering how well you’ve got to pick your issues to use Molder Slug – or Glissa, Sunseeker or Creeping Mold or Deconstruct – I have to say that I really like the way this set’s anti-artifact options were designed. Players will have quite a few options to choose from, and those that best understand their deck’s strengths and needs are going to have significant advantage over those that don’t. In the past, there hasn’t often been this kind of functional overlap with so many cards. That kind of decision-making is very good for Constructed, and I hope we continue to see more of it in coming sets.
I want to imagine a world with Myr Incubator. In an artifact-heavy deck with possibly seventy-five artifacts or so, you can use the Incubator, get seventy or so 1/1 dudes, and win in the first combat phase where these dudes can attack. Yes, it costs twelve mana – but unlike Mindslaver, this is a winning condition on its own. Add Anger or Fires of Yavimaya and you can swing that turn. This has a fairly high potential.
There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding Shared Fate, but I’m just not convinced yet. The idea that a heavy control deck with plenty of multi-colored mana can cast this to stump an opponent while allowing you to cast their spells doesn’t make much sense to me, since your deck is going to provide them with the mana to cast your spells as they draw into the deck’s mana – so then it becomes a time issue. In fact, if you’re even a little behind on tempo this card could be fatal, since the opposing deck is less likely to have the answers you need. But along those lines, the real strength of the card may be as a kind of closer in a tempo deck….
The new set is out, and I actually got some time to play multiplayer games with the new cards… And I have enough experience with it to say that one card in Mirrodin is every bit as insane in multiplayer as it seemed when we first heard about it. I think it is the best multiplayer card ever printed. Period. No question. No quibbles. No exceptions. It’s way better than Verdant Force. It’s better than Pernicious Deed. Every multiplayer deck I can think of would be better with four of this in it. Every single one.
The reason this deck performs so well versus control – and the reason it is relatively immune to hate – is because it can blitz past both hate and control answers, winning before the blue mage gets UU up. Playing Long is unlike anything before. In the ADD format that characterizes Vintage, like the events in Dragonball Z, you play a massively decompressed game where so much happens in the space of one turn. For Long.dec, turn 3 is not only a long game, it is the late game.
With only a handful of weeks to go before we all wave goodbye to Wild Mongrel, Deep Analysis, and Mirari’s Wake, and say a very big”Hello” to Skyhunters, Bonesplitters, and Spikeshot Goblins, I’ve started to put a test gauntlet together for Champs. To help out, I’ve put a gauntlet together to test the new Mirrodin-based decks against.
Last weekend, Your Move Games ran the Boston Mirrodin Prerelease. The turnout was fantastic: With a total entry count of 1,262, this event was the largest prerelease ever held in the United States. But after discovering several player complaints on the StarCityGames forums, I decided to address their complaints publicly to help show people how I run these events, that I hear and care about their feedback, and that I am working to improve things for future events.
