Swing for 2(6)?

In a game 3 of a matchup against Noah last night, piloting a U/R deck, I used Dark Ritual to cast Buried Alive on turn one. He played an Evolving Wilds searched for an Island and said go. I played a Swamp, cast Shallow Grave and attacked for 26. On turn two, against a tapped Island, just to be clear.

This is why I keep this deck active. The trick this time has been to make it as consistent as possible. I don't expect to do this every time on turn two...more like turn four.

What? Turn four is plenty of time. Sometimes. When I want to be mean.

Faithless Looting has been working out well though; enabling dig and discard has been a learning experience. It's very difficult to choose to get rid of resources, especially in a deck like this. I went all in on Last Rites three times and had it work out twice but every time, I had to take an extra few seconds to make sure that these were the cards I wanted to discard and I should get rid of that many. In the second game against Noah I slipped up, letting a Corpse Dance go when I'd meant to let the second Buried Alive go. That was all that was needed and I couldn't draw a win condition after that.

Similarly, with Faithless Looting, especially as a turn one play I have to decide: do I choose to let go of lands? Is there anything redundant that I won't need for a future Firestorm?

This is why Magic is difficult: One mistake and your game is over. It may not seem like the Faithless Looting caused the loss but in order to improve, I have to take responsibility for my choices or mistakes. For example:

Last night against Lauriel, I was taught again the importance of paying attention. She had a W/B deck with Deathbringer Liege and of course hideously nasty cheap creatures. When I cast a Night's Whisper with an Underworld Dreams on the board at 8 life, I appropriately went down to 4. I drew a Faith's Looting and knowing I had to win this turn, I cast it. It was a long shot but you take 'em if you got 'em.

Except I had my overbrain say: that's a terrible idea because you take 4! Which I did, conceding the game...instead of 2 because I was doing Night's Whisper math instead of Faith's Looting math. I swore and looked at the next card: the Shallow Grave I needed to swing for 26.

I won the other two games in that match though, Firestorming away thrulls, in one memorable instance casting Steam Blast then Firestorm for 2, discarding a Death's Shadow, so I could kill a Deathbringer Liege, until I could finally bring up the Sutured Ghoul. The extra card draw has improved my consistency and given me time to get the combo online. Even Brain Pry feels like it's doing more, letting me see things like Izzet Charm or Mortify in crucial games, giving me extra information even as I miss the discard, so I can fortify my combo with Fling at the ready.

The record for Children of the Grave has improved to a winning one. I'll take that.

Gut Instinct

Faithless Looting is my choice for card draw for two reasons: they won't print anything like it again (WotC has said that Red card draw will be more random-i.e., you discard before drawing- post Dark Ascension) and I can discard it to Firestorm, then use the Flashback to continue to dig. Other cards didn't give me that sort of flexibility. My next set of tests was late last night, against Jason (Karsa in the screenshots.) Yay, Friday post!

First deck...U/G wall mill. Again!
I lost game one, despite Firestorming most of his walls away, because when facing a board of 4 Doorkeepers, a Ludevic's Test Subject, and an Overgrown Battlement, I killed everything BUT the mana source and a Carven Caryaid. I thought I had a shot if I could draw a fling because he'd absorb most of the damage with the walls. Well, he proceeded to Genesis Wave for 5, drop a bunch of Axebane Guardians and lands, then mill me for 56. The lesson is: Kill the mana producers. Always. Lacking that, swing for 26 and see if you can get the damage to finish the game.

Game 2: I made a mistake, discarding Dark Ritual instead of Corpse Dance to an all-in Last Rites, but I won anyway on turn 4 by drawing the fourth land I needed to swing for 26. 

Game 3: walls didn't matter when I can Fling for 26. Seriously. I love beating through walls. I am going to just bring this deck out every time someone has bunches of walls. 

My second matchup was against a mono-green build, using Dungrove Elder, Nightshade Peddler, Ulvenwald Tracker and Predator Ooze. Game 1: the trees kill me, despite 2x Nights Whisper, a Faithless Looting I cast and flashed back, yet there was no Disturbed Burial. I checked: another 10 cards down, the first Disturbed Burial appears.

Game 2: I went all in with a Last Rites for 3 which killed my hand but savaged his too, snagging a Green Sun's Zenith amongst other things and leaving him with Forests while I used my Swamp to feed a Lake of the Dead, and we then play mana for 6 turns. But eventually, I get juice and he's got nothing to stop the 26/26.

Game 3: He gets lands and Elder, snagging a second Elder with a GSZ. This was a trick of timing: I had cast Last Rites the turn before and he topdecked the GSZ. When someone is attacking for 12 a turn, you're gonna have a bad time.

Last matchup was vs. W lifegain using Martyr of Sands. I lost game 1 to Spirit tokens flying to victory with a Buried Alive stuck 13 cards down at game's end. In game 2 I stall, hitting my Buried Alive but nothing else, not even card draw, while he Spectral Processions and Ranger of Eos ups creatures. I Steam Blast everything away, perhaps a turn too soon. The Martyr of Sands comes down next, he reveals 7 cards gaining 21 and after that came two Serra Ascendants.

Sigh. Still a rough aggro matchup. On the upside, I feel like Faithless Looting really helped me dig into the deck. On the downside, I don't know that it's giving me more juice against aggro decks. Jason suggested Tainted Pact as a search and I have to admit, that card had been tickling my brain for a bit. I'm wary of it though: I don't want cards to be removed from the game, I want them in my hand or graveyard. Still, this is a combo deck and setting that up should be paramount.

It may also be that I just don't have enough creature removal. Brain Pry has started to prove its worth, helping me knock out cards that I don't want to deal with or just replace itself when it whiffs, so I'm feeling less inclined to remove it. Steam Blast has seemed unnecessary in many matchups but I need to keep in some form of board sweep so I don't get overwhelmed. More testing!

Tired of Being Pushed Around

My first set of matches were against Fuz his W/U/G mill deck.

As a brief aside, I am sure I've mentioned a hatred of milling decks. The truth is, I'm just getting riled because I'm having to try and figure out how to win with a creature deck against a bunch of cheap walls. 0/4s that come down on turn two make for new problems that I haven't quite figured out how to solve in every situation I want to solve them. Which is all of them, because of those filthy, filthy milling bastards...

It is less of a problem with Children, though. In one turn I Firestormed all of his walls, then sit back and waited for the cards to come until I could attack for the win. Worked out nicely.

In game two however, I was caught off guard by the presence of Ensnaring Bridge. I could still win the game via a Fling, and I had a Corpse Dance in hand to make it work but before I knew it, my deck was being milled into nothing and when I saw all four Flings in my graveyard, I conceded.

The final game worked out a bit differently; I went all in early, ditching most of my hand to Last Rites, a move which binned all of his walls and left me with the time to once again bring the massive Ghoul to bear.

The second set of matches were against a G/W humans deck and I had an epic win in a lost matchup, when I attacked for 26 and Flung for another from the humble nadir of one life point.

This pattern repeated itself against thedrowningman last night: I lost 1-2 against an aggressive B/W lifegain deck with Chalice of Life but the game I won, I won at the last moment, reanimating the Ghoul and hitting for 52 with Fling.

This verse repeated against Noah's G/W landfall deck. He would drop a Steppe Lynx, Rancor and use it to beat down while ramping up his mana to cast Rampaging Baloths and then kill me. It worked out very well...for him. I didn't even make it to game three in this case.

Three aggro matches, three losses. One common thread was that in all three games, I really, really needed a Buried Alive. It makes sense: I have redundancies for every other needed card or idea except Buried Alive. Unfortunately I don't think there IS a way to make Buried Alive redundant. As far as I know there is only one other card that allows me to do something like Buried Alive and that's Entomb...which really doesn't help.

What's left then? Two things: First; more card draw. Card draw in Black is tricky, because it usually requires life and while I do play fast and loose with my life total, against aggro decks I'm taking a huge risk. I'm already eating at that total with Night's Whisper. More could be very, very bad. Things have changed though! Red now has card draw and it's card draw that encourages discard. Wild Guess and Faithless Looting both provide me with some extra oomf to help get where I'm going and they don't send me down to worrisome life totals.

Second: more disruption. The creature removal I have isn't enough, useful as it is. Plus, this removal should be something that really does Bad Things, killing 2 or more creatures or having a long-term impact. Anything to give me more time, essentially. Time means more chances to draw into the card I need. In this case, I'm going to have to do some research because there's a great deal of creature removal in Black and Red and I'd like to get the article up before February.

This just leaves the concern of which card to eliminate for space and fortunately, that answer is pretty easy. Brain Pry just isn't cutting it. Last Rites allows me to utterly decimate someone's hand, ditto Firestorm on the board. I need a different card and Brain Pry is the one I've been least happy to see in the aggro matcups. The issue here is: What happens to my matches against control if I remove this discard? And I don't know. Discard is just brutal against any deck that wants to hold onto cards and I do worry about effects like Murder which just ruin my whole day. Going defenseless against that feels too risky. My opponents are going to have creature removal and I ignore this at my peril.

So for now, I'm going to focus on the most reliable path: card draw. -2 Brain Pry, +2 Red Card Draw and I'll see if that brings my consistency up. I'll research removal behind the scenes.

Children of the Grave

First: if you're headed to the Gatecrash pre-release this weekend, like I am, I found a couple helpful articles you might want to check out.
Gatecrash Primer at PureMTGO
The Gates Come Down at Gathering Magic
Judge's Corner Gatecrash Mechanics review

Good luck! Unless you're my opponent, in which case...let's have a beer. Now on to the new deck.

Continuing the near-creatureless deck idea of last time, let's do another!

I think the intro to Children of the Grave is one of the best in metal. There's just no way to mistake it for anything else. Like galloping electric horses of doom, Sabbath rides in! This song title was a natural fit for this deck which probably looks like an old timey take on reanimator strategies, albeit with better creatures. 

4 Brain Pry
4 Night's Whisper
4 Buried Alive
2 Steam Blast
3 Last Rites

4 Fling
4 Dark Ritual
3 Corpse Dance
3 Firestorm
2 Shallow Grave

1 Sutured Ghoul
2 Death's Shadow

2 Lake of the Dead
4 Badlands
9 Mountain
9 Swamp

This is a combo deck that wants to survive long enough to put the Death's Shadow and Sutured Ghoul in the graveyard, then reanimate the Ghoul as a trampling 26/26 creature. For years, this build used Leviathan and Krosan Cloudscraper as the creatures that the Ghoul would eat because I couldn't find any black creatures with similar stats. This occasionally lead to me having a card in hand that needed to be in the graveyard but wasn't, so I would attack with a smaller Ghoul. Firestorm was the first card I had to help prevent this problem, with Last Rites coming in shortly after.

Even with those fixes, Fling has been a part of the deck from the start, effectively doubling the damage. This also had the bonus of cutting off any lifegain decks: doing twenty is possible with this deck but once that happens, if the game isn't over I've lost. A little bit of lifegain or a solid blocking creature like Fog Bank and now I had to scramble to win, if I could manage that at all. The possibility of doing forty gives this deck more reach.

Fortunately, Death's Shadow is considered to be a 13/13 in the graveyard, the modifiers only kicking in while it's on the battlefield. This provides me with two benefits: it's effective graveyard food and, should I draw the Shadow and not have a discard outlet like Firestorm or Last Rites, I can just play Death's Shadow and have it die.

Everything else is there to set up or protect the combo: Firestorm serves double duty as a discard and board sweep outlet, Brain Pry serves double duty as a discard or draw outlet, along with Steam Blast and Last Rites help clear the way. It is a Bad Time when I go through all the trouble to reanimate a Ghoul only to have it get Path to Exiled. Dark Ritual and Lake of the Dead help to accelerate everything, from a turn one Buried Alive to a turn three Shallow Grave/Fling.

At the moment, I don't see any huge flaws in this build so I'm going to run with it and see how it holds up.