This one starts as a bit of a love story; I am truly falling in love with Living Wish. I know that it’s a rare.,.. But it’s another one of those rares that you just have to get. If you’re a newer player and like green, make sure to get four Living Wishes. The toolbox effect out of the sideboard can be huge.
For those that don’t know, you need an Enchantress or Enchantress’ Presence in play and a couple of one casting-cost Enchantments out along with a Words of Wind. You play an enchantment and trigger the card drawing, then pay one to turn it into a bounce instead of drawing a card. But Deep Dog had a very hard time of losing if they got a Wild Mongrel on the table and a Basking Rootwalla in their hand….
Many people – well, a few, anyway – noticed that I didn’t do a piece last week. The reason is simple. I was still recovering from my trip to Grand Prix New Orleans! You see, the StarCity folks found out that I had gone to Tulane and hadn’t been back in fifteen years… So they thought that I’d like the trip. Plus, they wanted me to be a tour guide of sorts. How could I say no?
Hi, all; Jon Becker here. It seems that my venom bank is full, and it is time for a periodic purge of the online Magic-reading binge I have been on over the past X months. Hopefully, some of you will identify with some of this, and we can have a collective cathartic venting. Let’s take a look at Jay Schneider’s latest deck, Slideshow, which as usual should be good for about two thousand words or so – plus, the Magic Writers’ Separated At Birth Contest!
Michael Jackson’s Old Nose is a deck that I have played a lot since States, and I feel that it is fully Tier 1 in the environment. However, it is also more difficult to play than I originally anticipated, as the environment and the deck have evolved a bit since OBC season. Also, Ted’s wife takes a stab at writing, and the usual array of links to pics of hot chicks!
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’!
B/W Astral Slide doesn’t have the luxury of Lightning Rifts to burn out the little ones like its R/W cousin. It needs to survive the initial creature rush a bit better, as decks like G/W and U/G still can provide a lethal amount of heat out of the gates a bit too regularly. Also, with mirror matches now figuring in heavily as part of the metagame, the Treatment also needs a more flexibility against the other kids on the Astral playground. So the green has to be there – but in what quantity?
My friend Josh Sharp had been working on an idea for using Tainted Aether in an Astral Slide deck. Gosh, wouldn’t that just hose up someone if you could somehow **cough** **Astral Slide** **cough** find a way to make their creatures leave and reenter play a lot?
Being the lazy person that I am, and since I was playing the exact same deck that Cash won States with, I just handed in a copy of his decklist, which I had printed out from StarCity the night before.
My apologies to all people whose names I forgot, but all I have to work with here is my scoresheet. I didn’t take notes since I was only writing a report if I won – and I didn’t plan on winning after the outcome of the first match.
Okay, it’s been two weeks and we’re already all sick of AstroGlide decks. R/W, G/W, G/R/W, B/W – we’ve seen it all. Or have we? What if we told you that someone was trying to make a U/R cycling land destruction deck that Slid Aven Fogbringers for bounce and denial? THOUGHT so.
Don’t you hate tournament reports that start out with a passionless description of how the person got to the tournament and with whom they went?”Paco, Rebecca, and I hopped into the Toyota Tercel for the four-hour drive to Baton Rouge.” So I’m going to try to spice mine up a bit. Parts are true. Parts are fiction. Some parts I am simply filling in blanks where I either (a) didn’t take notes or (b) was passed out in a drunken stupor.
I played an updated (and final) version of the Beasts deck at Wisconsin States, ending up 5-3. Only one of the losses was a blowout; the other two were very close. I lost, I think, because I made minor mistakes.
As it was Thursday, and I had only two days to go, I started looking around the net for ideas. Two stood out: Sean McKeown’s B/R Control deck and Jens Thoren’s Wake deck. I played them both against each other a bit and then gave them the acid test – Deep Dog.
Jimmy Bean, my playtesting partner, wrote about Black/White AstroGlide yesterday – and today, I’m here to tell you how close I came to taking the whole damn thing. Plus, I have match coverage of the VA finals!
I thought that the R/W Astroglide deck played a lot of cards that didn’t really do anything besides cycle (which, I grant you, is the concept of the deck)… And if the Lightning Rift was ever countered/disenchanted/sent to the graveyard in any fashion, the deck didn’t do much. But Astral Glide and Mesmeric Fiend? Ouch.
