The Tar Pits

Game 1 is vs a G/W deck that has us doing nothing for four turns and then...I get out five lands, he lays as Herd Gnarr(!?) and while I'm able to block with a Farhaven Elf and Lash Out to kill it, I don't draw any other action. A Bellowing Tanglewurm and a Obstinate Baloth come down before I'm able to constrict his lands and I am stomped by ugly beasties.

Game 2, I mulligan to 6 and have not much in hand but two Mountains. I keep because going to five is worse and worse goes to awful when my opponent leads with Forest, Skyshroud Ridgeback. I have an unkicked Emissary to staunch the bleeding, then a Farhaven Elf to help fix my mana and enable the casting of a kicked Emissary next turn. It doesn't stop much; an Obstinate Baloth comes out next turn, then another the turn after.

This is bad.

My Emissaries die fast-one is redshirted, the other Path to Exile'd and while I manage to cut off Green for him for a little while, I know I'm in trouble.

I manage to get a swing in with a Pangosaur and then I do something very, very dumb; I play Benalish Emissary using all my white. So because I have a Graceful Reprieve I want to make sure I can play, I drop a Plains.

Back comes the Pangosaur. I lose two full turns this way and that's just terrible. I'm blaming beer at this point. Sweet, sweet Black Butte Porter...

Although I stabilize for a bit, an Adakar Valkerie comes out and that is game. I cannot keep killing Baloth, let him have 4 life a turn and take 4 in the air for long.

The next matchup was a three player game; one player with Myr, the other werewolves. I won the die roll and on turn 4 when I dropped the 10th land for the entire table and played Limited Resources, the game was close to done.

The dilemma was this: the Myr player could continue to function due to mana myr, thus didn't want to take me out of the game because I was keeping the werewolf player down. The werewolf player didn't want to commit too many resources to killing me because that would leave him open to the myr player.

Which meant neither of them really got rolling and as I destroyed their lands one at a time, then played one of my own, their decks ceased to function and mine began to pick up steam. I stood on the edge of one life for a third of the matchup and managed to slowly suffocate the opponents out while building a tiny array of creatures to block for me. I won at one life, proving that you don't have to win big, you just have to win.

My final match was a 1v1 game against a G/W splicer/tokens deck. These games were close but the G/W deck wasn't quite tuned up, so despite flying spirit tokens, I was able to pull out the wins, thanks especially to the frequent appearance of Lash Out, which helped keep golems off my back when I needed that.

It did, however, reveal something about Sludge: My deck doesn't really do anything until turn 3, which is why it's better in multiplayer games.


But if nothing happens in the early turns for either deck, which was the case in this match, from turn 3 on I am able to do really punishing things to my opponents. In the third game, I had enough mana to evoke a Faultgrinder and then cast Graceful Reprieve on it, wrecking two Forests and getting a 4/4 out of the deal. That's the kind of thing that breaks a lot of decks and it represented a turning point in this game as well.

I don't think I'll take this deck apart because it functions really well but I also don't see myself playing it a lot because it wants to do something unfun. I'm OK with doing something unfun against opponents who are either a) prepared for it-thus making the deck fun now or b) in need of a beating. And sometimes everybody is.