Thursday, August 27, 2020

Topping Out

 

The Eliminator in a 3 player game

I'm on the right track, at least. 

That's my current takeaway from the recent batch of games, some three player matches and a few duels. The Eliminator has some resilience, which is very nice to see.

What it doesn't seem to have is that late game finishing quality and that's a shame, because The Eliminator wants to leverage those planeswalkers into the late game. My opponents agreed that Curator of Mysteries fit the deck, it just wasn't scary. 

Psychosis Crawler has been coming up for me: I've been able to make Mu Yanling's emblem happen more than once, which suggests that the Crawler could be the late game nasty I've been hoping for.

Another option has been to replace the creatures with a more faerie oriented suite, and consider Faerie Formation as a top end threat. 

Both are expensive, but both can really push an endgame strategy. The Formation is a lot more mana intensive, that's true but if opponents don't have an answer for it and I untap, that's likely game over. 

A little more testing, I suppose.


Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Backwards to forwards-and a Name!

The Eliminator vs UW Control
I recently finished Turn The Ship Around by L. David Marquet: It's a book about leadership and how to improve organizations. 

One chapter talks about 'Starting at the end'. Essentially: You find out what your goal is, then you work your way from there to lay out the path. 

I find I have this issue with a lot of decks I build: I find a good card but I don't have a clear idea of how to get it to win. Even though I know what my end goal is (in most cases, reducing an opponent's life total to zero) I don't articulate it very well.

But thinking about that might help when I come across the problems I had last week, when I was looking for cards to fit in the high and low ends. 

Before I had that realization though, I just went looking for cards that would do one of two things: First, give me more time. Planeswalkers need time to do what they're going to do. 

Second, cards that would be useful off of a discard, since Jace activations meant discarding cards.

Here's what I came up with: 

Obsessive Search for Brainstorm. 

Lighthouse Chronologist for Lord of the Unreal.

Curator of Mysteries for Tezzeret.

I also came up with a name: The Eliminator, taken from the song by Maserati. 

However, let me circle back; why did I need the cards that I need?

Because the end goal of The Eliminator is to use the abilities of the planeswalkers to create an overwhelming advantage of cards and creatures. 

Obsessive Search draws a card and can be used for it's Madness cost to help mitigate any discard effects. 

Lighthouse Chronologist meets the Hexdrinker rule; when I play it, opponents don't like that and if I can get to extra turns, that helps the planeswalkers create advantages. 

Curator of Mysteries is a solid 4/4 threat with evasion and gives me a bonus scry whenever I have to discard. It's low end synergy but it is still synergy, along with a win condition. 

So with a new name and some clarity of purpose, here we go!

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Highs and Lows

 So, the deck from last week has an issue at the top end and bottom end. 

On the top end, the sad truth is that Tezzeret, Artifice Master just doesn't do enough when it arrives. 

There's an old rule coined I believe by Zvi Moshowitz, that any card that costs five mana or more has to have an immediate impact on the board. Tezzeret doesn't have that impact with either of the first two abilities. It really needs to be in a different deck.

So that's two cards on the top end that need to be replaced. 

The other card I'm having trouble with is Brainstorm. Since I have a glut at 3 CMC, I need to focus on cards that allow me smoother early game plays. Unfortunately it's also pretty easy to cast Brainstorm and just have two dead draws coming up, especially on turn one. 

This can be mitigated through the use of Jace's first ability and Opt but this isn't reliable or ideal. 

Similarly, Lord of the Unreal is underperforming. Without the strong curve of cards like Phantasmal Bear to play on turn one, I think I need to look at something else.

I still like Krovikan Mist; as a flier that can get a boost from Jace's ability and Illusionary Servant, it seems useful whenever it shows up. 

Still, I have been looking into other creatures-pirates and spirits have come up as creature types with synergy with each other.

Lords, that is: I mean there are lord effects for those types that might be useful. Of them, spirits are most likely to have some kind of evasion. However, none of them have the same kind of raw power/toughness values. However, they do offer Spectral Sailor, a really solid one drop that could replace Brainstorm. 

There are also faeries and those have something to be said for them as well. 

But the lord is at the three spot (as are the others) and that area is so cluttered! 

Maybe I need to focus more on good stuff over synergies. I've got a decent start but it's still just a start.


Tuesday, August 18, 2020

The Retired-You Are Not An Astronaut

Another deck to set aside!
3 Simic Signet
1 Misers' Cage
1 Ebony Owl Netsuke
1 Skullcage

2 Viseling

4 Arcane Laboratory

4 Arcane Denial
4 Storm Seeker
3 Moment's Peace
3 Remand
2 Evacuation
8 Forest
3 Skyshroud Forest
10 Island
2 Hinterland Harbor

3 Prosperity
4 Temporal Spring
2 Turbulent Dreams

What's the goal here? To slow the game to a crawl via Arcane Laboratory, draw a bunch of cards with Prosperity, and then chip away at life totals with Viseling, Misers' Cage, Ebony Owl Netsuke and Skullcage before using the finishing blow of Storm Seeker.

So, why am I taking this apart? Because I have a RUG that is also doing something like this. And by 'this' I mean: it wants to win with some of the exact same cards. Which means I have two decks half-assing a win condition, instead of one deck whole-assing it.

And I like the RUG one a little more, in part because of the redundancy Red provides, so I'm stripping this one down, putting Arcane Laboratory and Remand into the RUG one (that combo is just so delightful), redistributing the lands into decks that need the color fixing and moving on.

One more deck that can hit the road.

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Untitled

What if I took some Planeswalkers and tried to get a deck out of them?

I have felt that Jace, Cunning Castaway was underused: it's a three mana planeswalker that does stuff and maybe even gets to copy itself. That seems neat! 

I own these cards: Let's use some and build something.

4 Illusionary Servant
4 Lord of the Unreal
4 Krovikan Mist
3 Hypnotic Sprite

3 Brainstorm
3 Mana Leak
3 Opt
3 Polymorphist's Jest

23 Island

2 Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor
3 Jace, Cunning Castaway
3 Mu Yanling, Sky Dancer
2 Tezzeret, Artifice Master

I don't have a title for this deck, yet. It's brand new, and it doesn't feel like it has a theme to rally around. 

What I can tell you is that initially I was running more Kasmina and zero Polymorphist's Jest. Kasmina might be a card that I really want to work, but doesn't quite. The thinking is: she will help protect all of my relevant permanents, and can help me dig through the deck, which all seems like a win-win. 

Early tests though demonstrated that I needed ways to interact with the board. My creatures are generally 2/2s or bigger: why not just make everything 1/1s? 

That was the first change and there will undoubtedly be more, but this is a good place to start.


Tuesday, August 11, 2020

The Retired-Dead Battery

Named after a song by Pitchshifter, Dead Battery was my take on the Quirion Dryad combo decks of old. Effectively, the goal was to play a QD, then all the spells you can to make the Dryad huge-and swing for a lot of damage.

My update came after Shadowmoor block came out, giving me access to multicolor spells without needing all the multicolor mana. Remember: a card has all the qualities that the colors of mana you pay for it, so Gilder Bairn counts as a blue and a green spell. I thought this was pretty clever.
3 Lorescale Coatl
2 Karstoderm
3 Simic Guildmage
4 Quirion Dryad
2 Gilder Bairn
4 Safehold Elite
3 Leech Bonder
2 Trygon Predator 
3 Fate Transfer
4 Snakeform
4 Oona's Grace
2 Simic Charm 
7 Forest
4 Flooded Grove
8 Island
3 Botanical Sanctum 
2 Hunt the Weak
And here we are.

Why take this apart? Well, first it doesn't combo like it ought to. Second; it's too cute for its own good: Fate Transfer is a Glory of Cool Things idea-

Hey wait. Ikoria has all kinds of different counters now. I could totally use Fate Transfer to-

NOPE. See, that's how it starts, every time. Never with fundamentals, but with a pie in the sky idea. And those ideas can be a lot of fun to execute, I'm finding myself wanting to really hone in on those concepts one way or another so that they genuinely work, and aren't just hopes. 

Anyway; my point is that this deck couldn't construct those Turn X = you're dead. It was a middling aggro deck with a sometimes neat trick and that wasn't overwhelming, nor was it engaging the opponent either. Is there a good deck with good cards here? Yeah, somewhere. But this isn't it. 

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Late To The Party: Control

As bad as the pandemic has been for my ability to get together to play games, it's been quite good at letting me sit on my couch and clear up a videogame backlog. 

Control is a 3rd person adventure game that I finished up recently and enjoyed quite a bit. It is as if an episode of the X-Files was imported into a videogame: mildly creepy story, slightly eccentric but likable characters, and really solid design add up to an experience that knows what it is about. 

And I'm all about that

Control falters a little bit in the combat arena: it doesn't have the snap that games like the Resident Evil remakes do and the enemies can get a bit repetitive. Control seems to like the; 'throw waves at you' measure of difficulty more than the 'work this out smartly' idea. 

But one place where I think it really shines is in the level design

Section after section of this government building manages to evoke both the mundane qualities I expected with the semi-unnerving tweaks of 'something has gone wrong, here'. That is a cool trick to pull off, making dull concrete and wood paneling start to seem warped and uncanny. And they do stick to more an unnerving feel, not a gory one-which is very fitting, thematically. 

They do a few things quietly, too-also fitting with the atmosphere. For example; when the main character, Jessie, enters the Federal Bureau of Control, you can see portraits of the Director hung on the walls. When the position is passed to Jessie (an event that happens early) those portraits suddenly have Jessie's image. There is no explanation for this. 

Control has little spices like that all over, which help bring it together in spaces where it occasionally bogs down. I enjoyed the heck out of Control and I'm glad I remembered to pick it up-I might even get the DLC, I enjoyed it enough. I'd definitely like to see a sequel.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Yeah, OK

Blot vs UG Spirits
The games felt better.

That was the first thing I noticed about the games I played with Lauriel, who agreed that I had a concept that worked-but was pretty clearly weak to aggressive strategies. 

Which is true; Propaganda is a turn 3 play, which means that on the draw, I could easily find myself within the reach of a burn deck.

But that's OK! Blot doesn't have to be perfect. 

It does push me in different directions, though: this deck rewards patience and required me to focus on my decisions. In a couple of games, I had Intruder Alarm out to help stymie attackers, building up counters on my creatures until other resources, such as Opposition or Propaganda could come online. 

Under normal circumstances, I would be concerned about Wrath of God effects but those seem to have fallen out of favor lately. I can't remember a 60 card matchup where sweeper spells have been run this year. In that case, I'd be looking for a card like Heroic Intervention at least in the sideboard. As a bonus, Heroic Intervention works as a Fog effect, in that it allows me to block without fear of losing my boardstate so it might be useful for some of the aggressive matches, too. 

With more copies of Propaganda in the sideboard, maybe even some copies of Lull, too, I think the matchup can shift towards me. (I cut the singleton Lull for a singleton Tamiyo, the Moon Sage because one card is clearly better to draw than the other.).

Anyway: here goes!

3 Thallid
4 Sporesower Thallid
3 Sporoloth Ancient
3 Thelonite Hermit
4 Utopia Mycon
2 Thrummingbird

3 Intruder Alarm
3 Opposition
2 Propaganda

4 Sprout Swarm
2 Steady Progress
4 Expel from Orazca

11 Forest
7 Island
4 Flooded Grove

1 Tamiyo, the Moon Sage