Late To The Party: Outer Wilds

 I really wanted to like the Outer Wilds. A game about exploring space in a wooden ship? Yeah, OK. Let's see what we see!

But:

I think their choice of having the flight of the spacecraft really hew to how a spacecraft might work was detrimental. I could not get the hang of it, and never felt like I was improving. 

Next, I never felt as if I was progressing my knowledge, either: I went to weird planet after planet-crashing each time, but able to land...until I tried to land on an object and my craft bounced. There was no reason given for said bounce. It just bounced. 

Multiple experiences were like this: I didn't know I could heal myself, until I read it in an online guide. By then I'd already died due to accumulated injury at least once. 

I had also suffocated multiple times, due to an inability to control my movement in my spacesuit. One time I was sucked through a wormhole-no idea how I did that-and ended up thousands of kilometers from my ship, with no way to navigate. 

If failure teaches you nothing, then it rapidly becomes discouraging. 

And that is what happened to me. Instead of being fun, it was depressing to play. I didn't know what was going to happen, until I did: I was going to die and I wouldn't understand why or how to not die next time, except to not go to the place I was trying to explore. 

It's strange for me to have this experience, to do something and gain nothing from my failures. 

But I suppose I did learn something: If an experience is making you miserable, move on. 

Ain't So Bored

(Edit; meant to post this on Thursday so...no Thursday post!)

So wrapping this one up with a final tweak to the sideboard.

I forget that sideboards are good places to tailor the deck to the metagame you face: as much as Dredge might be an issue, most people I play against don't run a lot of heavy graveyard specific things.

I tend to get 3 kinds of decks: weird tribal (zombies, horses), weird old school (Let's make Scroll Rack a thing again), and Blue or Red goodstuff. 

That's not exclusive, of course but the point is that I can't plan for everything, I should plan for my own meta.

And Lauriel spent a good portion of my last playtest burning the heck out of me. That's not the first time she's taken an overlooked red card and built a deck around it, either. Which means I should sideboard for that, instead of using Tormod's Crypt. So I did a little digging and feel like Kor Firewalker would be my best option. Against a lot of burn decks, I find you need just a little more time-3, 4 life gained and you can turn the game around. Plus, the Firewalker can play defense or offense, something Dragon's Claw cannot do.

3 Patrol Hound
2 Eternal Dragon
3 Karmic Guide
3 Seasoned Hallowblade
2 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
2 Emeria Shepherd
3 Emissary of Sunrise
1 Sun Titan

3 Elspeth Conquers Death

2 Miraculous Recovery
3 Vengeful Dreams
3 Shelter

1 Emeria, the Sky Ruin
22 Plains

3 Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants

1 Wrath of God
1 Kirtar's Wrath
3 Resurrection

15 Sideboard
SB: 3 Spirit of the Labyrinth
SB: 3 Sanctum Prelate
SB: 4 Kor Firewalker
SB: 3 Deafening Silence
SB: 2 Wrath of God

A Very Silly Thing

 But it's for a good cause, I am down for these kinds of actions. 

Nope, Still On Break

 Look, Kaldheim previews aren't really a thing yet; everyone's on vacation. 

Games are hard to come by right now-so let's just start this up in January, alright?

Happy holidays

 Sorry for the late post, but I'm taking the holidays off, hope to have things next week. 

Cheers!

Only Take One

Well, the idea started out pretty good. The execution needs work.

My first time sideboarding against an aggro deck Lauriel was piloting, I made a pretty big mistake.

I swapped out the Vengeful Dreams for Wrath of God, thinking: Hey, I want more mass removal than single shots. 

I should've taken out Elspeth Conquers Death. As it was, now ALL my removal couldn't appear until turn four or later and that was just too little, too late.

It was a bummer of a lesson, since everything else felt pretty good. But I had a 'oh, I have fucked up' moment.

Still, lesson learned.

In other card tweaks, I really want to keep Devout Witness in the deck somehow, even if it's just a sideboard card. But my current metagame doesn't allow for it; Humility is control deck enchantment of choice and Witness doesn't help me there. 

And I am not holding on to things like that anymore. Witness can come back when Humility isn't worth it.

I'm also experimenting with Otherworldly Journey in the Blessed Breath slot, to see if there's enough mass removal in the games I'm playing to justify it. We'll see. 

A Pretty Good Plan

After last week's post, I did some further digging using the most popular White deck in Legacy, Death & Taxes as my guide. 

These cards came up as possible winners:

Spirit of the Labyrinth
Deafening Silence
Sanctum Prelate

Of these Sanctum Prelate seems to fit thematically, with an enters-the-battlefield ability that can be useful in multiple stages of the game and the one that could really put a hurt on Blue decks wanting to cast anything for one mana. 

Along those lines, Leonin Arbiter could be helpful, too since I don't have many search effects in my deck, similarly Hushwing Gryff could be good, turning off a lot of very good creatures but not many of mine.

I've currently adjusted my sideboard to read:

4 Tormod's Crypt

2 Wrath of God

3 each of Sanctum Prelate, Spirit of the Labyrinth, and Deafening Silence

We'll see how that takes.