Karn and the Matchups

"I want to test this deck I threw together," Jason texts me.

I should've known better than to think this would be a winning experience, but I was hopeful after the last round of changes! More card draw, better lands, more useful creatures...I really thought I had something!

Enter Nekusar, the Mindrazer to ruin those dreams.

And I didn't just lose. I lost badly. I don't care what that picture looks like, we played three matchups and I went 0-2 in all of them.

Sure, Jason got uncannily lucky, dropping a Sol Ring on turns one or two of nearly every matchup, getting Propaganda out in 3 of the 6 games and then there was the game with Vandalblast... But again, Karn had a whole bunch of not-stuff going on and Nekusar had a lot of redundancy and card draw.

I really need haymakers for Karn to work as I've currently structured it. This is clashing with my desire to keep cards like Yotian Soldier in the deck because when was the last time that card saw the light of day? It's a solid little role player, right? However, it may just be a poor fit. I really feel that Karn should be able to take on a deck like Nekusar and that it can't bothers me.

Especially when I look at times when Karn won: giant creatures or waves of Myr, as against Phenax, which Jason played later that evening.

If I want to say there's a Myr theme, then Yotian Soldier isn't as fitting as Myr Retriever is. Add in the fact that I want to add in Vehicles now that Kaladesh is on the scene, I'm going to have to make some stronger evaluations of cards that should or shouldn't make the cut.

So, I ought to take a step back. Some decks just have bad matchups against others and I know this as well as anyone. Any deck packing Vandalblast against me is going to have a Pretty Good Day. I've seen that Karn has some synergies to exploit and I'm steadily creating a better and better build to exploit them.