Thursday, May 1, 2014

Know Your Role

I went with the Charnelhoard Wurm version against Fuz, who was playing his RB Bloodthirst deck, which is very fast and very dangerous. Cheap creatures that get bigger with damage + instants and Aether Vial? It's scary how fast this deck can close.

I won the match, 2-1.

Then we had a discussion about what to do with the deck. Fuz told me that his take on Back to the Primitive was that it was reaching for the late game and I should play to that. The Charnelhoard Wurm works along the theme and I should run with it. As a result, my concerns about the card being too expensive was missing the point.

It made me think of this deck differently. I am building to the long game, using green deck principles of mana boosting via the Familiar to help shortcut the "big spells" portion of my deck. However, if I don't get there, I can just blow everything up until I do have enough mana to finish the game out.

I've been trying to play Primitive a bit more aggressively, as though it should get out of the gate quickly and hit as hard as it can. That's not a terrible line of attack, of course but it isn't always available. This means I've been thinking about it wrong, looking for the early game instead of recognizing my strength in the late game.

What IS always available is killing a bunch of permanents and then just grinding the hell out of opponents until they are dead.

That said, recognizing early game opportunities may help give me an advantage in future matches, because I've been looking for them the whole time. If I know I'm playing for the late game but can see chances in the early one to win, then that's one step closer to playing a more complete game. That's always good.

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