Nature's Candy

I think I've come to the end of the road with Peaches--and I mean this in a good way!

It was in a game against Rebecca that she pointed out that the ninjas could get huge in a way that she couldn't interact with. In another against Noah, I had multiple copies of Ronin Warclub that had to sit in my hand because I was using all my mana to recast my creatures. 

I don't need Ronin Warclub to help accelerate my victory anymore: that's what Silver-Fur Master and Kaito are for!

In their place, removal is going in. That leaves me with this:

4 Will-o'-the-Wisp
1 Higure, the Still Wind
2 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
3 Mistblade Shinobi
3 Silver-Fur Master
3 Biting-Palm Ninja
1 Ingenious Infiltrator
1 Fallen Shinobi
4 Silent Hallcreeper
1 Prosperous Thief

4 Standstill

4 Long Goodbye
3 Collective Nightmare

4 Polluted Delta
7 Swamp
7 Island
4 Choked Estuary
1 Creeping Tar Pit

3 Kaito, Bane of Nightmares 

The one change to note comes from a lesson I learned in last night's game against Noah and Matt: Collective Nightmare seemed like a solid idea. A cheap removal spell hardly ever seems bad, right?

But the limitation of Long Goodbye (which has been doing it's job very well!) means that I need something to take care of creatures that avoid Long Goodbye. I think that I'm going to have to switch Collective Nightmare out for Hero's Downfall. 

But otherwise: I'm happy with this deck. 

 

Free Pizza: Dark Avengers Season

 I got my free pizza with this: 

Initially found at the MarvelComp subreddit, compliments to user Decent-Cold862 for the idea. 

I didn't change anything; I was just intrigued by the notion of a Werewolf by Night deck being decent! 

I still don't like the Bast/Agent Venom combo much: too often I found those cards shrinking Beast or Agent Venom and the power boost given to the other cards felt minimal. 

However; it worked: I hit level 90. So maybe it is just good to get out of my comfort zone and play something different. 

Gameplans

I really like pro football, so I enjoyed this dive into coach Dan Quinn's recent tenure in Washington. I've been a fan of Quinn since his Seattle days, and was bummed that his time in Atlanta didn't work out-though I understood why.  

Since football is one of, if not the most popular sport in America, for me there's always a fun microcosm of America in football. 

Teams are owned by billionaires, 99% of whom are unfeeling dickbags who fell into their lot in life, pursuing wins as a measure of status, who think they know how to do it all and don't want to spend money to improve things or listen to qualified folks in order to achieve their goals. Especially if they somehow went on a massive winning streak--those owners feel as though they are responsible for those wins, and not just the money managers. 

In most cases, that attitude trickles down and you get mediocre at best teams. Coaches who are yes-men, players who are squandered, all because the owners don't really care about winning; they care about the money. The Cowboys are pretty much the poster child for this form of disfunction, but you can see it recently in the Patriots, the Jets, and the Jaguars. It's all over, honestly: billionaires fucking over people because money and their ego matters more than results. 

Then you get the opposite story: New ownership in Washington, displacing someone widely reviled in the league for his awful treatment of people and skinflint attitude enables the hiring a person who lead the team that suffered the biggest comeback loss in the Superbowl and maybe one of the greatest chokes of all time. 

That person-Quinn-proceeded to hire someone to do interviews with his former team to find out what went wrong  when they lost that Superbowl. The aftermath of that loss, as well as the mistakes made leading to it. He did this while keeping up his chops, working for (ironically) the Dallas Cowboys. 

And now Quinn is getting another chance at a head coaching position, one where he emphasizes getting to know players as human beings, creating a team, and building trust. One where the players themselves are invested and have a voice in things. 

And it reminds me of another profile of the current Lion's head coach, Dan Campbell, when he took over the team. 

Hired, again, by someone who was new enough to football that she didn't know what she didn't know-and understood that. Having dumped her previous hire after a disastrous season and a half, went for someone who, again, brought in a culture of caring about the players as people, helping wherever he could. 

Which reminds me of a book: Turn this Ship Around; an insight about how one submarine captain's leadership style-one that empowered the people beneath him, instead of dominating them-took the worst performing ship in the fleet into one of the consistently top performing ships that sailors now vied to get on and prove their mettle. 

The Lions are en route to going to the Superbowl for the first time in the modern era. 

And they're going to play Washington this weekend. 

Maybe the moneyrunners should just be regarded as the moneyrunners and not bestowed by gods to be our superiors. Maybe. 

The Retired: Hun-Gurrr

I get the idea here: this is another in the line of B/W reanimate decks that I seem to be so fond of. 

3 Whispersilk Cloak

1 Helm of Kaldra

4 Greater Harvester

4 Welkin Hawk

2 Butcher Ghoul

4 Doomed Traveler

3 Ashling, the Extinguisher

4 Smother

2 Wing Shards

10 Swamp

8 Plains

2 Vault of the Archangel

3 Salt Flats

2 Orzhov Guildgate

4 Lingering Souls

2 Steelshaper's Gift

2 Repentance

It's not terrible-and it used to have cards like Oath of Ghouls and Promise of Bunrei in there. The concept is an interesting one. But the fact of the matter is: the power level just isn't high enough. Greater Harvester is a brutal card if it connects, but that happens at best on turn six. 

The other thing is that getting Greater Harvester to work means splitting this deck into a reincarnation theme, and an unblockable one. I've been doing this long enough to know that if I'm going to step out on a weird or underpowered idea, I can't spend resources that are not dedicated to that idea. 

Time to let this one go.

Sorry

 I thought I had something ready for today and I didn't! Still getting back into the swing of things for 2025. 

Land Drops

How much mana do you need to play a deck successfully? 

This video does a fantastic job illustrating what the math says, and it's not very long. Kudos to them! 

The bigger picture for me is this: how do I re-evaluate the mana bases for my decks? If the number for midrange is 24-25, WHOA. That feels like it puts a crimp on things but the math is the math. So I need to consider how I'm going to make decks work with this new knowledge. 

I'm definitely interested in how to play it out!