Magic: The Gathering C/D

ohhh

adding a better turn 1 kill deck to legacy isn't exactly the best way to intentionally shake it up imo

leyline of the void is the only guaranteed way to stop it, the others require you to be on the play and/or for the combo player to not have something like Unmask. obv the deck is going to lose to itself some % of the time when you're relying on chrome mox and dark ritual instead of lands, but in my experience Charbelcher is super scary to play against even if youre playing hate for it

in other Undercity Informer news, i have a cool combo deck for standard with it but i need to do a bunch of testing before i reach a shareable list

combo is looping angel of glory's rise with it and a fiend hunter to mill your opponent out, using the guy who adds RG to your mana pool to go infinite

which sounds like a lot of cards but they're all humans and you can use the informer to mill yourself into all the pieces before you start milling your opponent

played the midnight prerelease last night, went 3-1 with gruul, losing to a good player i knew in the last round who had a very Smite-heavy orzhov pool

fennel was right about bloodrush not mattering a whole lot, i only used it twice all night and both times were to lava axe someone out with a scorchwalker. in general i think with gruul you want to just be playing big creatures that don't get blocked by a 1/4, rather than burning through your hand trying to get through one. ruination wurm is a very nice thing to have access to at common.

my deck's MVPs were gyre sage, which let me get away with playing a ridiculously high curve since my pool had almost no 2-3 cmc creatures, and surprisingly gruul charm which stole me some games with both the first and the third modes.

do you think gruul will be splashing white or blue more often?

magic prerelease weekend update #1

went 4-0 to finish my playset of fnm promo searing spears with a pretty sweek rakdos good. it was a nice farewell to the format and i got to turn 4 rakdos someone for the first and likely only time

i also decided to play the midnight release with some friends and the only guild they had left was orzhov. i think orzhov is actually p nutty - the 1/2 flier and the 2/4 vigilance knight in particular seemed really good. really any of the extort creatures were better than i was expecting. i also really ended up liking both smite and the instant that exiles a card from the graveyard to make a 1/1 both as good defensive plays and as cheap ways to get multiple extort triggers. pool was super sweet as well since i got a crypt ghast, the mythic and two breeding pools. crushed an attempt at aggro simic and then beat the mirror but i just scooped to both opponents since i knew i wasnt going to stay long enough to win prizes.

then i got roped into playing another prerelease this afternoon since i had enough store credit to make it technically 'free'. went with simic solely because i liked the promo. not sure if the pool was terrible or i built it wrong or what but i lost to two boros players w/o really putting up much of a fight. i dropped at 0-2. evolve was really hard to make work, and my creatures never seemed as good as just generic M13 commons wouldve been in the same spot. i also had a pool with multiples of the same cards which makes evolving p hard - like i had 4 of the 1/4 defenders and 3 of the 1/3 reach evolve creatures in my pool and none of the 2/1 flash or the 0/1 flier or the 1/1 human. i did really, really like 3/2 unblockable that returned a creature. also i made really good use of hands of binding on both him and the 3/1 trample flier. also the enchantment that give -5/0 to a creature that you can return to your hand is a kinda cool combo with the 0/1 mind control creature. i got that set-up twice and won both games.

xp i splashed blue in my deck for the U spell that turns a creature into a 3/3 token (was very good) and the XUG X/X flier (was very very good). these cards are both good in 'big gruul' decks since you can always beat a 3/3 in combat and you often have a lot of mana but no way to get through so a giant flyer is perfect.

that was fun but exhausting

did not luck out w/ my pull - two 'signal the clans' were the only note-worthy things about my very mediocre gruul deck. almost zero early game, only removal was pit fights.

still went 2-2 cause my first two matches were against even weaker decks. got crushed after that by super strong simic deck and a gruul deck that beat me twice in 10 mins.

pulled a Gideon in my winnings at least.

feel like a very good simic deck might be the best 'strong deck'. sorta selesnya like in that if you have it you really have it.

ugh

dropped after 0-2 and can't even complain about my pull. aurelia's fury ffs. then, boros reckoner and firemane angel.

problem is i WANT to complain about my pull, as i got quite hosed by a lack of good C/U, which was the reason i went into boros in the first place. i was quite the fan of, in no particular order: mugging, madcap skills, massive raid, wojek halberdiers, court street denizen. i got exactly zero of all of the above. my curve was therefore slow and awkward; i had a hard time putting 13 creatures in there, even though i ended up with 15 or so.

to make matters more embarrassing i played against a noob in r2 and still lost. i was probably doing something untoward re: missed trigger rules when i neglected to tell him to choose his angelic skirmisher's abilities like 4 turns in a row... but still. man. if he had just chosen to turn vigilance on he could have won way faster instead of going to 3 games.

anyways, bad taste in my mouth, but ehh. that's the way magic works sometimes i suppose

magic prerelease weekend update #2

played in the morning event w/ a gruul deck that wasnt that great. i had three experiment ones in my deck but they ended up being somewhat hard to trigger since my 2-4 drops didnt have wildly varying power or toughness, so it usually stalled out @ 3/3. not even really sure what cards where good in gruul tbh since i was either completely mana-screwed or just ran over mana-screwed opponents. my last round opponent no-showed so i managed to squeak into prize contention w/o actually winning that many games.

my boros pool in the afternoon event was the total nut tho - i opened two of the r/w mythic angels and a bunch of the quality uncommons and commons. i had seven two drops in my deck. the most surprisingly good one was burning-tree emissary - being able to play two bears on turn two was often a huge boost, particularly against the mirror and gruul decks. i had mostly red two drops fwiw, i can see it being worse in lots of other builds but it was really good for me. mostly just ran over my opponents - i beat one person in 9 minutes and another in 12. i ran into the mirror in the last round and lost game one on a mull to five and game three he just curved out on the play. i probably lost the game but not blocking the 3/1 for 1W with my 1/2 and at least forcing him to bloodrush or trade. i think working out blocks in the boros mirror will was the most challenging part of the playing the deck since most good boros decks can easily kill turn 5 on the play, but trading can cripple your own ability to trigger bloodrush &c &c. mostly i was just sour to lose because my opponent didn't want to prize split which means that i could've just left after my game in round 4 instead of waiting around for another hour and then losing. :/

best play of the night was casting act of treason on an opponents 3/1 battalion minatour that gets double-strike putting madcap skills on it and then swinging with that, the 3/2 for RW and the 3/1 for 1W for 18, killing my opponent exactly.

overall record for the weekend was 9-5 which is a little underwhelming, probably didnt play my best magic in any of the events.

bloodbraid elf and seething song banned in modern

i have mixed feelings about both of these since they're both cards i enjoyed using for things other than the decks they were banned for

went 3-1 with Dimir. didn't want to play it but nobody signed up for it so I felt kinda bad. I guess they had 2 at midnight and then for the one I was at the word was out: Dimir sucks. It really wasn't that bad. Funniest loss: got Consuming Aberration out, emptied his library on the last turn, then he played Grisly Spectacle on it and I milled MYSELF to death. I also got the 4UU copy a creature rare with Cipher and abused the hell out of that. That card was a real bomb. Got into an odd discussion over what happens if you copy a Dimir Keyrune with it (neither of us knew what we were talking about). Had a good time. Those guild sheets are pretty cringeworthy though, outside of the Gruul one which did make me laugh.

i really wanted to play dimir after seeing the U/B cards in my pool, didn't have a chance to go back for a 2nd event though since they were all full on pre-regs. i did sealed deck practice with my 6 prize packs though and the best deck in that pool was dimir by far so it's not like it's unplayable or anything.

yeah I think it will be pretty playable in draft

like gruul and dimir are both winning decks w/ strong builds but the drop off is sharp

dunno how you guys could handle multiple prereleases. just one was enough to make me oversleep my alarm the next morning. tho this was 4.5 hours in a very compact playspace in ny.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1156

this is very interesting; the 15th card in Dragon's Maze boosters is not going to be a basic land, but rather a nonbasic, presumably usually one of the gates, but also potentially a shockland. awesome idea for smoothing out mana in Limited considering that the full block draft seems like it would force you into two colors.

and by that I mean = two guilds, three colors

seems like that's gonna flood the already flooded shockland market?

well it's not really known how often you get shocks. maybe once a box? maybe less? for one I don't mind the shockland being flooded - it sucks that you can only get a couple of tickets on MTGO for each one, but I'd much rather they're priced at $6 or so rather than the $20+ they were going for!

on an unrelated topic - anyone want to take bets on Bloodbraid Elf and Seething Song being in Modern Masters? and should they appear there, the level of bitching that will result?

I'd appreciate seeing more shocklands. To date, I've only pulled one in RTR and one in GTC.

thats fine w/ me, let the people have their mana fixing. dual lands always feel like the grossest things to buy when you're starting out in standard because they're kinda expensive and don't really do anything except silently up your % of not getting manascrewed

I went Orzhov at my prelease and despite opening some of the best cards in the guild - Ghost Council, Deathless Angel - my deck didn't seem to work. I'd usually play out a couple cheap guys, get in 7 or 8 points of damage early via attacking or Extort, and then wouldn't be able to close games. My cheap dudes were quickly outclassed on the board and couldn't trade for anything. Would have been nice to have some removal. Also I faced Fathom Seer in two rounds and that card is just unfair.

yeah orzhov doesn't really work without removal, its no coincidence that black and white are where most of the removal in the set is at. not getting any/enough is just bad luck i guess

how are you guys thinking of approaching drafts?

I had a mediocre prerelease weekend. The sealed environment seems incredibly unbalanced towards Boros. The bulk of the folks at my LGS wanted to run Boros with others doing Orzhov or maybe Gruul. Simic and especially Dimir got very little interest.

Ran Gruul the first night splashing some Boros stuff including Aurelia's Fury. Ended up going 2-2, which was fine since my pool was just ok. I had a lot of fun with Bloodrush and I think it will be really good in draft. Ended up pulling a Stomping Ground in a prize pack which was nice and also got a nice trade binder as a door prize, which really made my day.

Second night I did Orzhov and got a terrible pool of cards. I really struggled to make it work at all and barely won a game until the final round. Had a very difficult time holding off my opponents until I was ramped up enough to run some of my so-so big guys. Hardly had enough extort to make a difference and had basically zero removal. It was extremely frustrating.

My biggest first impression beyond liking Bloodrush is that there are lots of great cards that provide various sorts of evasion. I like how creative they got with various forms of conditional unblockable cards, and Madcap Skills may just be the superstar of these.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to draft. I'll be very happy to have a bit more control over the cards I pull.

i don't have an approach for drafts in mind - i'll probably be looking to figure out and force dimir early on since it seems like it will be wide open, and likewise avoid boros aggro

yeah avoiding boros aggro is probably a good idea

i'm also hoping gruul will be misdrafted at first and i can scoop up all the ruination wurms and verdant havens and do that sort of thing

I think boros overdrafting will prob limit gruul at the same time

Yeah, one bad thing is that Gruul cards work very nicely in Boros decks, but the opposite isn't really true.

yeah but boros drafters won't be taking the gruul cards i'm interested in

I think the prob w/ ramp gruul is that there's just so much removal that a turn 4-5 ruination wurm is pretty fragile.

my deck actually played more like izzet than anything else. sit around, get some big dudes out, do a little damage, wait for gruul charm / traitorous instinct card for a 15 damage turn. I lost to a speed gruul deck that was much better than mine, but I wonder if my archetype will be more prevalent.

yeah thats the exact plan that my prerelease deck had and it seemed pretty good

I actually came close to winning a game that I reallllly shouldn't have won against strong simic deck that was destroying me w/ the aforementioned plan. was at 1 life, could have done 14 damage to him via gruul charm. if I had / drew a bloodrush card I woulda won.

I think multiple gruul charms, multiple traitorous instincts (works great w/ pit fight too), maybe the simic wall-esque d00ds as the lobber crews. I lacked that last part of the build.

i want to try dimir aggro, the 4B 3 life cipher is just a scary amount of reach. if you stick it on a deathcult rogue that's 8 damage right there that turn and then you're hitting for 5 a turn after that if they don't have the removal right away

what would a dimir aggro deck look like?

multiple raptors, deathcult rogues. guildmage. metropolis sprite.

could that build do it w/ some decent control and cipher?

You've pretty much got it. Hands of Binding is huge for the deck too. I think it could be a very good deck, especially if Dimir is underdrafted.

one thing I found about Simic was that it may have some troubles actually winning. one match my opponent was playing circles around me, abusing the "friendly" wording on Fathom Seer and getting a ton of card advantage off the Guildmage, but not actually able to punch through much damage. it doesn't seem to have a whole lot of finishers.

im going to force orzhov because its the best

okay so Dragon's Maze prerelease is like this - you choose ANY guild, and your guild pack comes with a guild pack of that guild, plus one from a "secret" guild from the opposite set, which will share at least one color (which should only excluse one guild), plus 4 boosters of Dragon's Maze. very cool!

where did you see that?

Nevermind, found it:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1156

So does each guild always get the same ally or can it get different allies in different packs?

the way I understand it, it's the latter.

I feel already like a lot of the cards in DM are going to be about connecting the different guilds. Maro hinted in his article today that there was something that would link together Evolve and Populate (?)