Last week, I sat down in a multiplayer game with a handful of opponents. I smashed them. It wasn’t even close. I pulled out another deck – a deck that was a lot weaker – and smashed them again. Then I bashed them with a deck I had drafted the day before. Why? Because I had a better understanding of how mana worked than they did…. And yes, it is that important.
Just what is the “Nick Martiniuk Maneuver”? I’ll explain.
Nick, a colorful personality and awful at the best of times, broke new ground in putrescent play when he managed to lose a match at a Prerelease by forgetting to draw nine cards with Arcanis while the game was stalemated. It was like this.
Opponent:”Go.”
Nick (untaps…pauses….looks up at the ceiling)
“FUUUUUU^%*&^K!”
I’m not guaranteeing I’ll hit every deck in the format, but I’d like to think that after immersing myself in these cards and in Magic Online Block Constructed tournaments, I have some idea of what will and won’t see play – and here are the important decks. Also, I’ll show you what the most popular Onslaught Block Constructed reader’s picks were!
Jonny Chapman’s OBC Pirates! deck was aimed at beating a very focused metagame. It has aggro elements that MBC and ‘Tog can’t really cope with – and lots of ways to kill or control green creatures, without with U/G has a real problem winning. So what, you ask? Well, have you looked at Standard lately?
If there’s a weenie that caught people’s attention and even held some for quite a while, it’s Caller of the Claw. The logic went like this: Four power for three mana is mediocre by Type I standards (look at Phyrexian Negator). Four power for three mana in green just doesn’t cut it. But six power for three mana? Things start looking up.
U/G Madness, a.k.a.”Wonder Dog,” is a deck near and dear to my heart. However, unlike most of its Tier 1 counterparts, U/G has a fair amount of flexibility in terms of different cards that can be added to it, altering it in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. So why don’t I walk you through a complete list of all the cards that have been tried in U/G Madness, and how each addition alters the strategy?
Mark Rosewater informed us that the next big expansion, Mirrodin, will not take place on Dominaria. But we’ve got a little problem: So much happened in Legions that has to be dealt with – there’s such great possibility left open to Scourge that I can hardly believe that all the ends will be tied together. I see two main possibilities that might appear in Scourge to try to bring some finality to our long visit on Dominaria… And one of them is that it might be destroyed.
At a Detroit PTQ, as Judge Shawn Jeffries asked if there were any questions, some yahoo asked something dumb in an attempt to be funny. And here’s the part I don’t get: Then, some other moe raised his hand with another question – and I stopped listening after,”If we open a Words of War, can we…” because I knew the rest of the question would be blah blah Ravenous Baloth blah blah. Why do people DO this? Also, I rank Covert Operative at 13th, and that’s no joke.
Last weekend, a local store held a Saint Patrick’s tourney where only green cards could be used. I like these alternative formats – for one thing, there are no netdecks, and the metagame is pretty much whatever you can conceive… Which is why I had mixed feelings upon seeing Abe Sargent’s article about this format a while back. On the plus side, he writes well and covers interesting topics. On the down side, now there were netdecks to copy. However, I noticed that he left out two or three archetypes…
Do you really think that you can build an OnBC deck without knowing what the final 25% of the cards will be? You’ve got your nasty Beast thing all ready to go, don’tcha? For all you know, this card will be in Scourge:
FATHER NELSON, HOSER CLERIC
Creature – Cleric Legend
W
1/1
Remove Father Nelson from the game: Choose a creature type. All opponents remove all creatures of the chosen type they control from the game. Search each opponent’s hand, graveyard, and library for all creature cards of the chosen type and remove them from the game. Set them on fire. Draw a card.
Yeah, it’s a little undercosted, but Wizards claims to be giving white some good weenies again.
I am not sure why people rush to get strategy articles out there; even Nick wanted to work on Legions stuff shortly after the pre-release. I didn’t know Legions strategy then, and I hate looking back at my articles and seeing stuff I no longer agree with… And now, thanks to Legions’ new cards, three of my earlier Dilemma stances have been flipped on their ear.
My Skirk Fire Marshall deck should have worked without a charm… But even though it was a simple two-card combo that I needed to go off, I needed so much more. Are you making a mistake in not seeing the (over)complexities of your deck?
Well, it’s about time that I set the record straight on the recent events regarding what happened to me at GP Boston. The fact of the matter is that nothing I can say can really affect anyone’s opinion on the issue, and I gave up on doing so early on when I realized this. Anybody can believe whatever they want, and I’m not going to be the one wasting my time trying to convince people to believe my side over hearsay….
I’m here to talk about two different Windborn Opposition decks that I’ve tested in the last couple of weeks, one of which came straight out of Jimmy Bean’s nugget, while the other one was carefully distilled by me through hours of painstaking research and number-crunching. It went 7-2 over the course of two tournaments last weekend, but it’s still not very good – but what that 7-2 really tells you is that there’s a lot of power inherent in the good parts of the deck…
The suggestions for changes to the Marksman, my Kamahl/Goblin Sharpshooter deck, since my last”Diary” installment have been flooding in – why not Pitchstone Wall? Use cycling lands! Wooded Foothills, dummy! Far Wanderings and Living Wish! Well, I checked out some of those changes, and here’s the next thirty games or so with this sucker as it gives people the ride to Scoopville.
