I will freely admit I simply threw a Lavaborn Muse deck together and expected it to do hideously poorly. The thing is… The deck sort of surprised me. Lavaborn Muse did its job a lot better than I thought it would. Muse range is a great place to put your opponent. So with that in mind, I playtested the other four Muses to see how they did…
After a week or two, Chris and I had played pretty much all of the decks and came to the conclusion that there was really only one deck to play. There really were only two decks that had a”just win” opening hand, and only one of them that could put a fight up against all the others.
The Graveborn Identity deck that’s been floating around for the last couple of weeks is interesting – but as Jimmy Bean said to me, it plays”Candy Ass” cards like Words of Worship that are absolutely horrid, if somehow – inconceivable as it might seem! – your Muse actually dies. Then all you have is a really bad enchantment on the board that allows you to not draw cards in order to gain life.
I am painfully aware that further writing about my Kamahl/Goblin Sharpshooter topic is silly; It is a deck no one but me will play nowhere except the”Casual Constructed” room of Magic Online. However, one thing I never get to do in my writings on Magicthegathering.com is really dissect a pet deck and follow its evolution. So how where do you go with Sharpshooters and Kamahl Mark 2?
People say that the only reason to go green is Living Wish – but Burning Wish doesn’t depend on having Astral Slide already in play and cycling cards in your hand. Your rogue opponent just surprised you with Tranquility after you overextended. How do you win immediately? Burning Wish for Earthquake or Blaze. In short, Burning Wish provides access to more answers, and each one is faster and more efficient in terms of mana cost.
Do you know how hard it is to kill those Phantom guys? A single Phantom Flock stops a flying Wurm not once, not twice, but three times. And then we’ll add Shared Triumph. “Great,” you say. “Shared Triumph makes the Phantoms bigger.” No, Shared Triumph makes Elephants bigger; it makes Phantoms invincible.
To get an idea what the environment for that tournament will look like, I decided to talk to people who play in the place that runs multiple Standard tournaments every hour of the day and night: Magic Online. I began by asking Matias Gabrenja, who finished 13th at Worlds, what he thought of the online metagame…
I’ve already heard some buzz about Seedborn Muse – and justifiably! A non-symmetrical Awakening that can swing? Sign me up! Unfortunately, all I’ve heard so far is adding him to an Opposition deck. While he certainly won’t detract from the deck, I don’t think he’s necessarily worth the slots. Sure, he combines well with Opposition but… Shouldn’t you already be winning if you’ve got an Opposition out?
It seems that my last few columns have touched a couple of nerves… Mostly in a good way, which is not always what a writer strives for. So let me respond to you all, show you the options my fans have presented, and show you a couple of new Soldier decks I’ve been working on.
I have played some standard on Magic Online lately, and my favorite deck right now is monoblack control. I have done quite well with it, winning something like 70% of more than a hundred matches. Is this good? I haven’t played a lot of Standard in Magic Online before, so I don’t know if you need like 75% wins in order to show that the deck is good. The opposing decks did seem okay, if we exclude the guy who used Cabal Ritual to power out a speedy Dusk Imp.
Slivers are one of the favorite”tribes” in Magic for a reason: They bridge the gap between casual and competitive players. A casual player can rave about Slivers, and Grumpy McTournamentman won’t walk over and smack him in the head. So let’s look at the Slivers and see which ones may be tournament-worthy and which ones are not, and then create some preliminary Standard decks to look at.
In my last article, I left off by saying that I was sufficiently confident in my Turbofog deck that I would run it in a sanctioned tournament. Well, this I did, and I have a report that verifies two things that I have recently realized:
1. Turbofog is tournament-viable
2. I am a ninny… Well, I’ve known that for a long time, actually.
By now, the cat is clearly out of the bag when it comes to the Standard B/R Reanimator deck. All right – that’s an understatement. The cat escaped the bag aeons ago and is currently shooting craps in the alley with a 40 oz. in hand. Reanimator has been making the rounds on Magic Online for a good month and a half, and the deck had a large number of disciples running it in the Masters Gateway tournament as well.
Masters players, being the best of the best, like to play controlling decks with all the answers. The feeling is that as long as the deck has the tools to make the win possible, they will outplay their opponent and achieve the victory. Tog, with its card drawing, counter magic, creature control, and game-ending Upheavals, fits perfectly into the Masters players mindset… So I created another deck, which did beat Tog…
The deck did well enough that I decided to bring it to play between rounds during FNM. After beating each U/G deck that crossed my path, and a variety of others, I started seriously considering this deck as a real contender… And since then, I have personally piloted this deck to over 80 wins in 101 games.
