Thursday, February 27, 2020

Layer on Layer

MTGGoldfish has an interesting article up that has two parts. The first is about how to improve at Legacy and the advice presented there is solid, but not revolutionary.

The second half though involves examples about how layers apply, specifically on Oko, Thief of Crowns. That is some brain-turning stuff and I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the rules, because it isn't intuitive.

There's a ton of Legacy decklists, too, which is always cool for inspiration.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

We'll Take On Anyone

Ready to Die vs 4c Stuff
It was in the next series of games that I realized I had forgotten to take into account one thing: Planeswalkers.

1/1s versus Oko, Thief of Crowns is not going to cut it. That card is so cheap and does so much, that a turn two Tarmogoyf followed by an Oko is tough to deal with, no matter how many tokens I get on board.

So what does this mean?

First, it means Oko is a terrible card. We knew that, but it bears repeating.

The second thing is: I'm not sure what the future holds for Ready To Die now. I was never under any illusions that this deck was going to be a serious contender, but the disparity in power level is fairly significant. I understand why: RtD wants to ignore what the opponent does, getting enough chip damage in via 1/1s in the early game, direct damage where it can, and close a midgame with either chained Mirari spells or an Overrun.

I think it does the first part pretty well. But the drawback to Mirari was on full display in the Oko matchup, where spending 5 mana to do something that didn't alter the board state was the waste of a turn.

What I'm not certain of at this point is: Do I fix this with a sideboard-Red Elemental Blast, Choke, etc? Do I give up? Do I tweak the deck? At what point is this not fun?

It occurs to me that perhaps I'm approaching this the wrong way: what if my dead cards are Impact Tremors and Cavalcade of Calamity?  I already know what the central theme of the deck is: Mirari makes extra spells.

Impact Tremors and Cavalcade of Calamity are the only two spells in the deck that Mirari cannot bolster and do not have an immediate impact on the board. Perhaps it's just better to run some awesome spells and double up on them.

Of the two spells in question, Impact Tremors works better, since creatures don't have to live long for them to do damage. So that's the spell I'll be looking to cut, and hoping to find some good instants or sorceries to replace it with.



Thursday, February 20, 2020

One or the Other

Pleasant Kenobi has a pretty great rant (warning, language) about the availability of fetchlands, which ties into something that the Professor at Tolarian Community College has been going on about for a couple years: players need reprints.

Fetchlands are the high profile example of what players need, because the case for why they need them is very easily spelled out: They help get the mana we need to play the game.

And it leads Kenobi, and myself, to two inevitable conclusions: They either are doing this on purpose, or because they're incompetent.

Thing is: we know that they're smart and we've seen the work they do. Incompetency wouldn't hold up here.

Which leads me to believe that it's on purpose. That sucks for multiple reasons; It means that they're willing to throttle older or eternal formats in order to make money now. It means that they're happy to charge you double (or more) the price for a booster pack, if they can prey on the lottery-winner aspect of players. And it means they're willing to lie to us about their reasons for doing so, saying that it's about "playability" or somesuch nonsense, when it's really about greed. And like everything related to greed, it's short sighted and cuts off the future of the game for the now.

Because every penny I spend on singles is money I don't spend on boosters. But I'm not inclined to play lottery games, and they aren't willing to reprint cards to make such a gamble worth my time. Worse, though, every critical component that is needed to play Magic that costs more than a child can afford on an allowance is another potential player who is going to do something else.

It just sucks all around.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

We Made A Sacrifice

Let's go over the changes first:

Ready to Die vs UB Faeries
I cut all the artifacts except for Mirari, then cut Mystic Melting, Pyrotechnics, Hull Breach, Bestial Menace and Collective Unconscious.

I added another Rampant Growth, four copies of Dragon Fodder, two Impact Tremors and three Cavalcade of Calamity. I also added a third copy of Overrun, because this deck needs a way to close games out, and most of my token generation made 1/1s.

I went looking into Planeswalkers that might generate tokens in these colors, and Garruk was too expensive but Tibalt, Rakish Instigator fell right in line.

I have to say, the revamp of Ready To Die went pretty well in the first outing. It runs much lower to the ground, with plays on turns one and two coming pretty regularly. This meant I could get early pressure in, while keeping pressure on in later turns via flashback, or by landing a Mirari and then on subsequent turns easily paying to duplicate my spells.

Well, most of them. Roar of the Wurm is a card I feel really torn on: Seven mana is a lot, even with the Rampant Growths to help me get there. Even cutting down to two copies, I couldn't play them when I wanted to.

So what to do?

One piece of advice I got from Noah was: More Tibalt. So I'll run 3 of those. I also went hunting for lands that do something with tokens and it turns out there are two: Dwarven Mine and Westvale Abbey. Now, Westvale Abbey is definitely on the 'glory of cool things' list but I figure one copy won't hurt. I've also put in a couple Make Mischief, although that may just be too cool and need to be something else.

Finally, and this I'm proud of, I added in a couple copies of Assault/Battery. More direct damage or a 3/3 token as needed? That seems like a perfect fit, even if I'm using it more for damage than anything else.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Ready To Die

So, Ready to Die (named after the Andrew WK song) was something I built after getting SUPER HYPED by Wizards and the associated press at the time about Mirari. I wasn't the only one at the time: I remember pre-orders for the card on eBay for $60. Oh, to be new to Magic again...

The Mirari sucked. It cost 5 mana and then it did things, which you had to pay more mana for. That's a terrible card for 60 card Magic.I just didn't know it at the time, and by golly I was going to build that deck!

Let's check this:
4 Catalyst Stone
3 Mirari
2 Eldrazi Monument

1 Mystic Melting

8 Mountain
4 Gruul Turf
11 Forest

2 Pyrotechnics
4 Firebolt
4 Chatter of the Squirrel
4 Roar of the Wurm
2 Hull Breach
2 Overrun
3 Rampant Growth
2 Acorn Harvest
2 Bestial Menace
2 Collective Unconscious
Now, it's entirely possible that I should dismantle this entirely, put Miraris in various Commander decks, and call it a day. My first inclination was to include this in "The Retired" series.

But I had an idea: What if I leaned into the token making aspect and used cards like Cavalcade of Calamity and Raid Bombardment to improve the damage they could do, while Impact Tremors would give me more bang for the buck.

Mirari can stay: being able to copy my token making spells isn't a bad idea and since I've got a clear idea of where to take this, I'm interested in doing so!

If it doesn't work out and isn't fun, I'm more than willing to set it aside.

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

The Retired: Shrapnel

Like so many players, I fall in love with cards from time to time. One of them is Seismic Assault. What better thing to do once you have all your lands, than to pitch them into your opponent's face? And what better way to mitigate the 'drawback' to Necrologia than to pay a bunch of life, draw all the cards, and then discard down to hand size by getting rid of those pesky lands?

It all seemed like a great idea, in 1998. Once Odyssey block came out, adding cards that did damage via removing stuff from my graveyard just made sense! But Grim Lavamancer was expensive, so Organ Grinder came into help.
3 Manaforge Cinder
3 Mogg Fanatic
2 Grim Lavamancer
3 Organ Grinder

3 Seismic Assault

3 Dark Ritual
3 Incinerate
3 Necrologia
3 Scorching Lava
3 Terminate

3 Rakdos Carnarium
2 Rocky Tar Pit
4 Swamp
9 Mountain
2 Dragonskull Summit
4 Canyon Slough

4 Blightning
3 Soul Feast
There is just one problem: Another color does this better, now; green. A lot better. So I'm taking it apart, because redoing the whole thing just doesn't seem worth it. There's a R/G deck for Seismic Assault, maybe even a RGx deck, but there definitely isn't a RB deck worth the time.

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Wave 5: Titan Masters

Finally, the next Transformers set has been announced. Explanations of what the new cards types gets a deeper dive here.

The first thing I notice is that of the 46 characters, 43 will be new to the game. That is exciting to me, because it means that we aren't condemned to set after set of Megatron and Optimus Prime. The stable of characters in the Transformers universe is deep and I'm glad they're taking advantage of that.

They're also repeating what they did with Trypticon, adding a Fortress Maximus character to every box. So long as there are no Maximus-only battle cards to deal with, I can get behind this, since it won't mess with the sealed or draft games.

Along those lines, I hope that since one can mix and match head/body types, this means there should be less feel bad moments in Titan Masters than there were in Siege II with the Sixgun / Brunt cards. I hope so, anyway, as they forced things in draft or left players in sealed high & dry.

There's a lot of moving parts involved, though and that I'm a little less enamored with. Still, I'm willing to see those cards in action before dismissing it.

Stratagems are an interesting twist: I've never seen a game that allows you to effectively overwrite characters like this. The star cost is cheap, at least in the preview card, but is the value provided enough? I don't know that people were dropping Cosmos out of their decks because it couldn't hit 21 star characters. Still, the possibilities that open up are interesting.

Plus they start on the battlefield, which means you don't have to get lucky to give your character an upgrade, or dilute your battle deck. That's a big persuasion to use them.

It does seem odd to have them debut in a set with mostly new characters but I do appreciate the boost that those cards might give to older or previously unloved characters, and the acquisition of those sets. It's clever and provides some nice connective tissue, and at rare it shouldn't muck up limited environments much. But I won't know more until...well, everyone does!

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

You Gotta Pick A Direction

Time to wrap this up.

Honestly, I like the discard angle more than I like the land destruction angle for control. It's not that Sinkhole is wrong, it's just that I feel better about the ability to focus on discard, than I do about splitting up my resources to do both. Or rather: Sinkhole is for a different deck.

I got in a few games against Lauriel not long ago; I was exhausted, so I was probably not playing my best Magic but I still felt as if I had the right cards in the deck. The games played well and I felt I had room to win, even when I lost.

Trypticon vs Land Tax combo
In further testing, both Bontu's Last Reckoning and the Disk held up well as sideboard options. Combined with discard, Trypticon has enough time to get a Disk into play, something I was concerned about prior to testing. But Jason's suggestion is solid and I'm sticking with it.

It was good enough that I'm taking out the fifth board wipe I had been running, Black Sun's Zenith. There's nothing wrong with BSZ, really, except that if I have a Marit Liege on the table, BSZ will make it smaller. However, there frequently isn't much difference between attacking with a 20/20 and a 17/17, especially in Legacy where players often use their life totals for card selection. The benefit of being able to take out indestructible creatures is nice-but I don't know that it makes up for the utility of the Disk.

I don't want to run four copies of the Disk maindeck; it's too slow for that. But one in my pocket doesn't hurt.

1 Nevinyrral's Disk

4 Vampire Hexmage

4 Dark Depths
3 Bojuka Bog
20 Swamp

3 Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage

4 Distress
4 Sign in Blood
2 Mutilate
2 Mire's Toll
2 Aether Snap
3 Read the Bones
2 Beseech the Queen
2 Languish
4 Duress

 Sideboard

SB: 4 Pithing Needle
SB: 3 Nevinyrral's Disk
SB: 4 Shrieking Affliction
SB: 2 Bontu's Last Reckoning
SB: 2 Collective Brutality