Project X Redux

There was an old extended deck (and every time I talk about that format and the fact that it's been defunct for more than 5 years makes me feel old) that abused a combo with Crypt Champion and Saffi Eriksdotter.

Crypter Champion would come into play, return Saffi to play, the sacrifice trigger of the champion being on the stack, you'd sacrifice Saffi and Crypt Champion would return to play, creating an infinite loop.  All you need is something to abuse it.  The deck would use creatures like Essence Warden to gain infinite life as you would keep gaining 2 life for the creatures entering the battlefield.

Infinite life is decent, but there are some decks in modern that don't care about your life total (Infect, mill strategies) and a fair amount that play Eldrazi and can subsequently never deck out.  So why not kill your opponent instead?

Project X new

4 Crypt Champion
4 Saffi Eriksdotter
4 Essence Warden
4 Impact Tremors
4 Altar of the Brood
4 Commune with the Gods
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Heartless Summoning
4 Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker
24 lands

Again, I'm not sharing my manabase because it's embarrassing and mostly consists of lands that ETB/CIP tapped.  Yeah.

So the combo can gain infinite life with Essence Warden, mill with altar of the brood and do infinite damage with Impact Tremors.  Having options is nice.

One of the things I really hate is just losing to a card.  Stain the Mind, Cranial Extraction, etc.  If all 4 Crypt Champions get exiled somehow, it feels like you can't win.

That's what the other part of the deck is for.  Shirei + Heartless Summoning + Elvish Visionary means that the elves will come into play, immediately die and you can mill or ping your opponent.  If you have Heartless Out, your Saffis and Crypt Champions are also 1/1s and you can just start doing some crazy stuff.  I was able to draw nine cards in a single turn and found the components I was looking for to win.

The deck has some downsides though.  Being a graveyard deck, there's some pretty obvious hate against it.  And the deck can be very frustrating to play online.  You have to click about a million times to pul the combo off and you have to stack your triggers very carefully.

So with some tuning, this is something I actually could see myself playing in the real world.  Maybe some Glittering Wishes here or there, who knows.

Pauper Wizards

Woahhhhh has it been a long time since we've updated the blog.  5 weeks!  Sorry!  Time can kind of slip away from you.

I haven't battled much lately, I went 3-1 in FNM and 0-2d ( =/ ) in a pptq with a standard monored deck.  Nothing too exciting.

But I play pauper on mtgo from time to time.  I really like to brew, but there are certain constraints that most constructed formats pose.  Anyway I thought I would try this out:

4 Stream of Unconsciousness
1 Void Snare
1 Negate
2 Deprive
2 Muddle the Mixture
1 Repeal

4 Lavamancer's Skill

1 Sidisi's Faithful
4 Information Dealer
4 Minamo Scrollkeeper
1 Omenspeaker
4 Thought Courier
1 Sea Gate Oracle
4 Neurok Invisimancer
3 Archeomancer

4 Evolving Wilds
2 Mountain
16 Islands

The idea is to counter early aggression with guys with big butts (Scrollkeeper and company) and eventually lock up the board with a Lavamancer's Skill on a wizard.  Wow, is this card oppressive!  You just start murdering stuff.

The counterspell suite needs improvement,but you get the idea.  I weather the early storm, start moping up the board with a Lavamancer'd wizard and counter all of their spells from that point on.  It becomes surprisingly easy to swarm with little 1/1s once all of your opponent's creatures are dead.  The Invisimancer can be good as times, but hasn't been the best so far.

Information Dealer has been MVP, choosing to draw from five cards is amazing.
Anyway, I'm currently 12-1 with the deck so I really recommend giving it a go-round.

-t.

Modern Madess: For Sparta!

Greetings all.  Sorry for my hiatus of sorts guys.  As  you know, Cheerios just dies in my meta, but that doesn't mean I don't have a deck to play.  5 Color Blink, the list that everyone sees and just doesn't think twice about, is the real deal.

Modern Blink: Stephen D.

3 Wall of Omens
3 Runed Halo
2 Aven Riftwatcher
4 Restoration Angel
2 Reveillark
2 Body Double
2 Mirror Entity
1 Gel Elendra Archmage
1 Inquisitor Exarch
2 Venser, Shaper Savant
1 Mystic Snake
2 Fiend Hunter

2 Path to Exile
3 Gifts Ungiven
1 Day of Judgement
1 Wrath of God
1 Supreme Verdict
1 Noxious Revival
1 Unburial Rites

1 Swamp
3 Island
3 Plains
2 Mystic Gate
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Steam Vents
1 Godless Shrine
1 Temple Garden
1 Breeding Pool
3 Polluted Delta
3 Hallowed Fountain
2 Celestial Colonnade
3 Flooded Strand

SB:
2 Kor Firewalker
1 Runed Halo
3 Rending Volley
2 Path to Exile
1 Thragtusk
3 Spreading Seas
1 Mizzium Meddler
1 Mystic Snake
1 Aven Riftwatcher


This deck is real.  Very real.  Now, for the love of RNGeezus, do not for one second think that you can sleeve this deck together and play it and win.  No.  I am not so kind as to build a deck that can just auto-pilot itself to a victory.  This deck wants to keep parity for the first 3-5 turns before doing anything of pure value.  Halo, Wall of Omens, Aven and our newcomer Fiend Hunter are just good cards when you need them to be, which is what is going to be exactly what you want.  You just don't want to die, is all.  This deck can wrench and pull ahead of wild scenarios if you are patient and play your cards right.  If you can put your opponent into a position where top-decking is imminent, do it.  You will win the topdeck war.  Gifts, Body Double, Reveillark: all of these are amazing topdecks that will put the game firmly into your hands.

About 95 percent of your games are completely winnable game one, and only get better afterwards.  The exception is Tron, which you can see with the Spreading Seas in the board.  Beyond that, Aggro decks can't deal with Wraths and lifegain.  Jund and Abzan cannot deal with lifegain and card advantage.  Grixis can stumble you for the first few turns, but they cannot out-card you late game.  And very few decks can out pace Reveillark.  Get back Aven and Wall of Omens?  Solid.  Get back Body Double and Mirror Entity? Lights out.  And let's not forget about Mirror Entity turning everything in super tribal X/Xs.  Sometimes all you need to do is make your team big and attack a lot.

I could tout this deck's effectiveness all day, between the matches that I have played and the matches that my colleagues have played.  From 8-Rack, Grixis, Burn, Affinity, Twin (which is bad like Tron is bad haha), RUG, Valakut, Amulet Bloom, Death and Taxes... the vast majority of the format has trouble dealing with this pile of cards.  Like, realistically, how much hate do you need to beat this thing?  In order to stop the combo, you need graveyard hate.  But graveyard hate doesn't stop a bunch of enters play abilities and flying creatures.  If you bring in removal, you have to suck up the idea of having to kill them again.  If you play both of them, your deck likely doesn't do anything anymore.  Normally, I'd be a bit more joyful in my writing.  But let's be honest.  If you could play a deck that had a very very good chance of winning every game you ever played by virtue of having access to hate game one, wouldn't you?  And even if you didn't draw the hate, you made the game very unfair with creature based counter magic?  That's how I felt.  That's why I went back.

Super Budget Modern: Zombie Salvage

Hey guys!

Some of my more popular posts tend to be ones talking about ways to play magic on the cheap.  So here's a sweet brew that I stumbled across in the just-for-fun room that I added my own twist to.

4 Zombie Infestation
4 Grisly Salvage
4 Commune with the Gods
20 Entropic/Enigma/Sandstorm/Aurora/Verdant Eidolon
4 Dark Deal
5 (black-producing) Borderpost [Mistvein or Veinfire]
5 (green-producing) Borderpost [Firewild or Fieldwild]
4 Jungle Hollow
5 Swamp
5 Forest

Man, this deck is cheap!  You can build the whole thing online from scratch for less than half a ticket and most of that just comes from Zombie Infestation.  Every other card you can find at most bots for .007-.008 tix, which is just nothing.

So - you dig to find Zombie Infestation, occasionally throwing some guys in the graveyard.  Eventually, you play a Grisly Salvage or a Borderpost and you then get back all the creatures in your graveyard to your hand.  You can overwhelm your opponent with zombies or just grind them down with the eidolons.

Dark Deal is sweet bc you can damage your opponent's hand while (essentially) drawing cards for free.

I'm honestly surprised by how much game this deck has.  I've played and beaten some real decks over the course of the day and I might do some more adjustments to this later on.

Some cards to consider if you can afford them:
-Loleth Troll
-Squee, Goblin Naboob
-any of the scavenge cards

-t

Combo Questions

orrrr just because you can doesn't mean you necessarily should.

This post is going to be a bit more theoretical than most of the lists.  Maybe not for everyone.

I saw a cool combo from a youtube channel called MTG Budget Decks.  I pondered about it for awhile and tried to see if it was viable.

Composite Golem + Nim Deathmantle

As they explain and you can figure out, you sacrifice the golem for 5 mana and use four of it to return the golem to play, using Nim Deathmantle's ability.  Infinite mana!!!

Ok, that's fair and all, but composite golem is steep at 6 mana.  I usually try to put everything into play in one turn for combo-oriented decks, leaving my opponent less time to find an answer.  So, yeah, you can spit out your deathmantle on turn 2 (and 2 mana is perfectly reasonable!), but waiting four turns is just begging to get your artifact Abrupt Decay'd or something.

Once you have infinite mana, you need to be able to do something with it.  An x spell is the obvious answer and you can Banefire/Demonfire/Blaze/Fireball etc.,etc. your opponent.

I built this deck for modern and I actually won three games in a row (of three games).  The deck was nothing but combo pieces and draw spells.  A focused modern deck would rip it apart pretty easily.

Anyway, the main problem is essentially that it's a three part combo: you need the creature (1), the artifact (2) and the spell (3).  All of the cards are (essentially) worthless without them and having something get countered/destroyed/discarded from your hand leaves you completely vulnerable and unable to do much.

So, if you want to build a sweet brew and you wonder if it's tournament worthy, there's a few questions you need to ask yourself...

1) Is it worth it?
What is your deck trying to do?  Are you working toward a reasonable goal?  Too often, I see decks on MTGO and there's so much durdling from the opponent and I have to ask them what their deck even does.  If your combo isn't working towards winning the game, it probably isn't worth it.

2) Am I going to win right away? (/will my opponent concede right away?)
Another thing I see are these decks that produce what I call "I win...OK go."  They amass a huge army, or put some giant monster on the table, or something, but then they ALWAYS give the opponent an extra turn.  This is crucial.  Consider Living End in this example.  Without Violent Outburst, the deck would only use Demonic Dread and be very prone to getting blown out by a wrath of god effect.  And if you do get your combo off, will it be enough?  This is especially important for Restore Balance decks.  Although destroying your opponent's field/hand is obviously very good, but if you don't have a creature coming into play, your opponent then has time to rebuild.

3) How easy is it to assemble to combo?
Most of the really combos in Modern are 1 or 2 cards.  Scapeshift finds Valakut so it only counts as one.  Cascade spells finding Living End/Restore Balance are technically one.  Ad Nauseam involves three cards, but it's a two-card combo since it again finds the third piece in going off.  Anything above 3 is not viable.  I have some doubts how viable three is.  That's the "sweet spot" of brewing, where a lot of people try and, well, mostly fail.

Let me give an example of something I saw on CFB/gathering magic:
Intruder Alarm + Forbidden Orchard + Voyaging Satyr/Kiora's Follower + Massacre Wurm

Wow, I hate this.  First all, it's three different colors (which means a good manabase unless you want problems).  Second, you need four cards to accomplish your goal.  And none of these cards really interact with the others (i.e. none of these cards help find the other ones).

4) How resilient is your combo?
There is a lot of "hate" that your deck can face and in modern, you should expect that your opponent isn't going to nicely roll over and die for you.  For each color, you should have an expectation of difficulties that your opponent could present you with.  So

Black - Hand disruption (Thoughtseize), Graveyard hate (Crypt Incursion), Removal (Dismember), Exile Effects (Cranial Extraction)
Blue - Counterspells (Negate), Bounce (Echoing Truth), Mill (Tome Scour)
Red - Direct Damage (Lightning Bolt), Artifact Removal (Ancient Grudge), Mana Disruption (Stone Rain)
White - Artifact/Enchantment Removal (Disenchant), Gaining Life (Healing Salve), Protection Spells (Story Circle, Leyline)
Green - Artifact/Enchantment Removal (Krosan Grip)

These ways of disruption are obviously very diverse.  Players should still pay attention to what their opponents are doing.

5) Will you survive to your combo?
Even if you have all the pieces in your hand, you have to make it to that turn first.  A good expectation in modern is that your opponent will be able to kill you by turn 4-5, sometimes sooner.  Scapeshift is in a blue/red shell, blue for countering opponent's threats and red for removing problematic creatures.  Ad Nauseam's combo piece (Phyrexian Unlife/Angel's Grace) means the opponent has to deal extra damage.

In a way, modern is defined by Affinity, Burn and Infect.  These are the decks to beat.  You, therefore, need to dedicate certain cards to keep yourself from dying on turn 4 (or even 3).

I will probably come back to this post from time to time and make it a bit prettier/more eloquent.  Right now I feel pretty awful so that's enough writing for now.

Decision Points (#1/

Welcome to Decision Points, a column where I break down magic into its most basic components and walk you through how to  make well informed choices. The inspiration for this article comes from the work by Michael J. Flores on his Make the Play Monday series on TCG Player and decision making articles from Channel Fireball authors like LSV, PV, Owen Turtenwald, and William Jensen. I will not attempt to persuade you that my articles will be better in any way than the content of those authors, but I want to offer another article to help in what I consider the meat and potatoes of playing magic, proper decision making.

Before I begin I should start with a short introduction of myself and guide through this series. I’ve been playing since 7^th edition  and am almost exclusively an MTGO Player. I really kicked my playing into high gear with the release of Rise of the Eldrazi online. RoE is my favorite limited format which might be because it ist he first set I was comfortable playing well and the set that really hooked me on Magic: The Gathering. From RoE forward I was able to play well enough to avoid putting any money into MTGO even when drafting up to 20 times a week. Yes, I know I’m a bit of a draft degenerate, but in my defense drafting is really fun

 Unfortunately around the release of Return to Ravnica I got cocky, developed bad habits, and burnt through my winnings and most of my collection. By the time Khans was released I had to put money into MTGO, and it became clear I was doing things the wrong way and needed to refocus on my Magic game. I came to realize that I was making fast and poor decisions without thinking things through when I actually was thinking at all. I was playing on autopilot and just assumed what I was doing was correct, because, after all, I had gone a long time without putting money into the game. I was wrong and I let my ego get in the way of good decision making, so I have been working to correct that flaw. Through this column I want to help you avoid the same mistakes of letting yourself go on autopilot and to help both of us develop tools to improve as decision makers.

For the first Decision Points I want to draw on my own experience in the DTK draft format. For this example you are playing the above Green/Black deck in game 3 of the finals. You’ve curved well, taking your opponent to 10 life, but they seem to have stabilized with a Noxious Dragon. Your face down morph is a Segmented Krotiq. It is your first main phase and none of your creatures have summoning sickness, so now you must decide how to play out your turn. Before reading on, you should take the time to decide on your own line and think “Why do I think this is correct?” When examining your play, the “why” behind the decision is often the most important aspect of the decision made.. If you understand why you made a correct response or error, you will understand how to improve and how to make better decisions.

Decision Making:

Human beings just can’t process everything that goes on in the world around them. There is too much sensory information for us to get through the day taking in and processing all the information around us. To get by, our brains have developed shortcuts to deal with all the information. Many MTG writers through its history have talked about the various cognitive shortcuts that people use and the biases they can lead to,so I won’t spend a thousand words explaining how your brain deals with the information.  For this article, the main point I want you to keep in mind is that human beings are influenced by the amount of incoming information we have available, the time we have available, and the amount of choices we can make.

I our current case we have multiple choices we could make. We have the ability to play any single card in our hand and the option to play two spells in this turn as well. We also have the choice of whether or not we need to attack this turn. In MTG we are also always in a time crunch, and we need to play at a pace that allows us to finish the round. On MTGO, we have just over 15 minutes, minus the time it will take us to play the rest of the game to decide on our answer. In a real life tournament, if you don’t make a timely decision you could earn a slow play warning, or worst. Being under time pressure and dealing with information overload is a great way to ensure people make poor decisions and obscure the optimal play.

What I did:

In this case, I couldn’t come up with a way to attack through the board state without allowing my opponent to get back the Dragon from the graveyard with the dutiful attendant. I chose to pinion feast, expecting my opponent to kill my morph, so I attacked for 3 and set up my opponent to replay the dragon at 7 life. I thought that put me at a good chance to deal with the dragon the next turn with press the advantage and put him to 3 life after trample damage with a 3/3 and 2 removal spells (Hunt and Coat). It took me around 4 minutes to make my play, too slow for in-tournament play, and I didn’t even make the best play. How I came to the decision was based on how much I valued board position and how bad the Noxious Dragon was for me in the long game if my opponent stabilized.

Because of information overload it was difficult to find the key interaction I missed, and if I wouldn’t have missed it, I would have most likely won on this turn or, at the worst, put the opponent to 1 life with me having 2 creatures and two removal spells. This simple change now turns this into a Duels of the Planeswalkers puzzle where you can narrow down the relevant information. I can further narrow it down by telling you to consider the interaction between trample and death touch. Do you see it? Here, let’s run through what you should have done.

What I should have done.

My evaluation of the Dragon being bad for my game play is correct as I have to “2 for 1” myself to get it off the board, and I have to “4 for 2” myself if he gets it back with the dutiful attendant. That’s rough and tough to beat, but we could all but lock up victory with what is probably the correct play.

The correct play, in my opinion, was to attack and then use press the advantage and coat with venom. This puts your opponent in a very awkward spot to survive the turn. The best block the opponent could make is to block Dragon on the 3/2 and dutiful attendant on the 3/3 morph, and even that puts them at 1 life as you Press the Advantage the blocked creatures, and use coat with venom on the 3/2 shield-breakers. You assign 1 damage to the dragon and 5 trample to the opponent. This was the key interaction: trample and deathtouch. This combo allows you to assign only 1 damager because, due to deathtouch, you only have to assign a solitary damage to any creature to kill it. Your emissary hits for 1 and your morph tramples over for 3 damage. The opponent most likely kills the morph with noxious dragon’s trigger and brings back the dragon to their hand. You are left with a 1/1 emissary, a 3/2 shield-breakers, pinion feast, and hunt the weak. However, that is the best case scenario for your opponent, and if they block the emissary at all they die.

During matches and drafts, I like to take notes on interesting decision points and I recommend you do the same. If I can I ask friends for their opinion and some may even get further opinions from their friends. I like the different points of view I get from listening to others. This alternate point of view is a great learning tool in MTG. Rarely will there be one correct line of play and there will often be several reasonable lines During this column, we may not have a for sure correct line. We can evaluate how/why we made our decision and move on from there. In this case I know I just missed an interaction that would have changed my reasoning. This took me around an hour to understand, and if, you are wondering, that is about 59 minutes and 50 seconds longer than it took a platinum pro to come to the same answer when a friend asked them their opinion. Until the next Decision Points, may the variance be with you.

-DJ

Magic Origins: the last of the core sets

Spoiler season is always fun.  Maybe because speculation is more fun than the actual cards in practice.  Some cards have a ton of hype and end up being garbage.  It happens.  Maybe you guys remember people freaking out about Sarkhan Vol?

Ok, well we stand before a precipice of great change in magic.  This will be the last core set.  Ever.  Most people associate core sets with unexciting cards and a lot of reprints.

A lot of players complain about core sets.  And understandably.  They almost never add anything to eternal formats and usually only a small slice of cards make it into standard.  Because most of the cards are underpowered.  And there's a reason for that.  We, as players, often seem to forget that we started playing this game at some point and there was a huge wall of information you have to overcome to start playing.

What about newer players?  From now on, they're going to have to immerse themselves in new sets with very complicated cards - cards without reminder text.  I have tried to teach people to play.  It's never worked out.  I usually give them the basics and then we play a few games with decks that are already built (the worst ever was trying to teach someone to play with a standard dredge deck. wowwww).  I've never been able to convince someone to play and then they've become addicted to it.  It usually works the other way around.  I meet people playing magic and then we become friends.

I have to ask: is this good for the game?  Magic is one of the most complicated games in the world and quite possibly THE most complicated card game out there, or at least the most complicated of the popular card games (such as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc.).

I picked up magic cards when I was ten (I started in Nemesis btw) and honestly, it probably took me more than a year to fully understand the intricate rules.  I have a distinct memory of playing with my cousin and saying "when you start the game, you can put as many lands as you want into play, but after that you can only play one per turn."

It is very difficult to get statistical information on magic players.  Wizards conducts surveys, but I am highly skeptical about the accuracy of this information.  Supposedly, there are 12 million magic players worldwide.  Is this the amount of registered DCI numbers?  There are people registered who haven't played in years and I know several people with multiple numbers - I've kept mine since 1999 though ;).

Do they somehow average this number based on the number of packs bought?  I think there's a huge number of magic players who play, but only casually.  In high school, there was a group of guys I played with and I was the only one who would go to FNMs or tournaments.  We would usually just draft in someone's basement.  How stereotypical.

Secondly, what constitutes a player?  Maybe there are casual collectors who go in from time-to-time and buy a couple packs, just to look at them and have no idea how the game works.  Also, there are probably a high number of people who have cards from a decade(+?) ago that just play casually together.  Again, in high school, I had a group of friends who played together who had cards mostly from Ice Age to Urza's Block, and this was during Shadowmoor (heyyy, you can probably figure out how old I am now).

Ok, but the points is, or what has been said on the internet and I have no factual evidence for, player growth in magic is slowing.  Spending by player is increasing actually.

It's hard to talk about the longevity of a game that's more than two decades old.  I doubt Richard Garfield ever imagined it would last this long.  But can it carry on indefinitely?  If that is the plan, WoTC needs some kind of plan to keep players in the game and bring new people in.

I think the new format decision for standard is another barrier to getting into the game.  This idea of a faster rotation is probably good for players who get bored with the "solved" standard format that is usually just midrange decks just slogging each other from May to July (and sometimes August if the core set is bad).

The entire set has been spoiled so far and it seems that it's pretty impressive.  The power level is a bit higher than many past core sets.  Might as well give it the last hurrah.

This post has a bit less substance than most, but I figure you've probably already heard about the potential new scry rule and you've already read through all the spoilers.

I have a bunch of exams coming up next week so we'll see how if I can come up with some sweet lists.