I've Done No Harm, At Least To Myself

The thing about Who Can It Be Now is that it goes all in. You don't get to make a comeback.

I was playing a game against Jason's Mesmeric Orb deck and on turn 2 I had Sneak Attack out, swinging for 7 with Pelakka Wurm. He went to 13 and on the next turn, dropped Maze of Ith.

No problem: I have Gamble and 3 other cards in hand, so on my turn I dig for a Pathrazer, because once I swing with that, he'll have no permanents which is a state that most decks cannot recover from, even though it's early in the game. However, the discard part of Gamble had me losing Pathrazer and Jason goes on to set up his board lock and win.

So while that sucked it was a whimsical suck. I pick any other card from my hand and I win the game. Randomness is fickle; whatcha gonna do? I don't feel the urge to replace all my creatures with Eldrazi, that's for certain.

I had a more interesting matchup against Fuz, who was playing a Second Sunrise/Atog deck. Essentially, he wants to cast a bunch of artifacts, then swing with an Atog, eat the artifacts to make it huge, Second Sunrise brings them all back for a second helping and, if the Atog is big enough but somehow doesn't kill me, use Fling and finish the game.

It's a pretty good plan and it beat me solidly in game 2 but the match was mine.

One thing that I am finding interesting to play with is Reforge the Soul. As with the rest of WCIBN?, it's either huge or it's a massive mistake. 

I bring it up because the one card in the deck that isn't there to make mana/kill opponents is Pyroclasm. It's difficult to argue against Pyroclasm because it is so good. It's been a staple red sweeper for years with nothing really coming close to matching it until Anger of the Gods came out, mostly because Anger can take care of persist and undying creatures.

Still, the increase of consistency that a 3rd (maybe a 4th?) Reforge brings is hard to resist. Add in a third Defense Grid, and then add another nastybad to win with and the ratio of wins might go up.

The drawback: a turn 3 Pyroclasm kills so many bad things. Gaddok Teeg, Bob, every mana dork ever printed, Kor Spiritdancer (sometimes), most anything with Hexproof. It really slows down a lot of good decks. I may not be a big enough gambler to risk it...but I suppose I ought to give it a try. Worst that happens, I put the Pyroclasm back in. Let's see, eh?