MTGO Tournament Report: Prismatic Open - 4x Prizes *5-8th*
(#452455, Sunday 28th November 2004)

9:30 BenNi: well, every good pris deck plays its game in 3 distinct stages
9:30 BenNi: First is mana-fixing/acceleration
9:30 BenNi: then card-drawing
9:30 BenNi: then rude awakening or decree for the kill

This is not strictly true. You can play my deck.

Prismatic (Online 5-Color) is a tremendously fun format. It's a bit like playing Type One in real life (and I suspect, rather more like playing 5-color in real life. Sadly this isn't an option in England, so I'll stick with what I know.)

Invariably there was much whinging throughout the tournament regarding the unfairness of cards from Gifts Ungiven to Skullclamp to Rude Awakening and more besides. The general impression one picks up from listening to all this is that if all of these cards and a few more besides weren't banned right away, that the sky was would cave in and everybody would die. Fortunately, being a six-year veteran of the Magic Tournament circuit I am quite used to this kind of nonsense and quietly got on with smacking people about with Elephants while the Chicken Littles ran around headless.

In my opinion, the major flaw in the format is less to do with unfair cards and more to do with the monetary value of all the best cards. Much the same as Prismatic's real-life equivalents; the requirements for building a lot of competitive decks are huge. HUGE! People complain about Type Two decks; but these are absolutely nothing compared with the cost of many potential Prismatic decks. To build my deck, I liquidated many of the non-essentials in my (not entirely insignificant) collection and still needed to borrow most of the lands. To construct the whole thing from tickets, at Trading Post prices, would cost something in the region of 800 tix (don't panic, I've included instructions for reducing this cost significantly, and omitting the Apocalypse Painlands alone saves you 200-300 tix). Note that I'm not even playing Spiritmongers, Pernicious Deeds, Vindicates or a bunch of Angels and Dragons either.

I'm playing beatdown.

Before the main event, I played in a smaller one the night before to test out my deck. I'd assembled all the most mana-efficient guys with a solid mana-base and aggro-support cards like Skullclamp, Firebolt, Reckless Charge and so on. I'd done quite well against the decks in casual, and this was my first test in a tournament environment.

Unfortunately I had failed to account for the kind of player I ran into in my first two rounds. The kind that assembles all his good draft cards from the past few years, shuffles them up with some land and hopes for the best. While this kind of thing would get ripped apart by a decent Prismatic Control deck, it was unfortunately very very good against me. They all seemed to be running 100 cheap removal spells and a bunch of big men. In four games, my two opponents drew more removal than I drew creatures and proceeded to beat me up with Noble Templars and Twisted Abominations. More than a little peeved, I dropped and went to bed.

On Sunday I set about raising the general power level of my deck. I took out some of the more suicidally fast cards (Reckless Charge, Minotaur Explorer, lots of my 1/1s) and replaced them with more powerful cards like Eternal Witness, Phyrexian Rager, Etched Oracle. I think perhaps I should have kept Reckless Charge in, I'm still undecided, but taking out all those 1/1s was definitely a good move.

The details of my matches are mostly very dull. Generally I beat the living daylights out of people while they faffed about drawing cards, putting lands into play, and putting up little more than a token resistance. My hardest match was against my round 6 opponent who had a bunch of Wraths in his deck, but I had sufficient resilience in cards like Elephant Guide, Nantuko Monastery, Skullclamp and so on to take the hits as they came.

I won six rounds straight, drew two more, then got horrific draws to get knocked out in my quarterfinal. Yes, yes, I can hear the groans already. In the first game, I mulliganed to six on the play and kept a very clunky hand that failed to get a guy into play and attack with it until about turn 6, at which point my opponent was casting Gifts Ungiven for All Suns' Dawn, Eternal Witness, Mirari's Wake, and Gifts Ungiven. In the second I kept a fine hand, but drew a land every turn for the rest of the game bar two draws, neither of which came in time to be any use. I got my opponent down to four by turn 5 or 6 but then he killed all my guys and I had a hand full of land. Remarkably, despite all this, I didn't manage to find Green mana to play my Basking Rootwalla before my opponent Thunderscape Battlemage'd me and I madnessed it out on turn 10 or so.

I do apologize for such a poor conclusion to the tournament. When I started drafting this in round 4, I had the very best intentions of winning, in which case my report would have been far more dynamic and exciting. As it is, I'm afraid you'll have to settle for mildly interesting.

Anyway, if you want to play Prismatic and feel like getting your hands dirty with some rough 'n' ready little men instead of faffing about putting lands into play, here's a decklist:

**** Prismatic Beatdown! ****
===LANDS===
/Apoc Painlands/
4 Battlefield Forge
4 Caves of Koilos
4 Shivan Reef
4 Yavimaya Coast
4 Llanowar Wastes

/Basic Painlands/
4 Karplusan Forest (4th should have been a Wooded Foothills but I was 1 short)
3 Adarkar Wastes
3 Brushland
3 Sulfurous Springs
3 Underground River

/Saclands/
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Polluted Delta
4 Windswept Heath
4 Flooded Strand
3 Wooded Foothills

/Taplands/
2 Coastal Tower
2 Elfhame Palace
2 Salt Marsh
2 Shivan Oasis
2 Urborg Volcano

/Great Lands/
4 Grand Coliseum
4 City of Brass

/Basic Lands/
3 Forest
3 Mountain
2 Island
2 Plains
2 Swamp

/Lairs/
1 Treva's Ruins
1 Crosis's Catacombs
1 Darigaaz's Caldera
1 Dromar's Cavern
1 Rith's Grove

/And our special guest star tonight.../
4 Nantuko Monastery

===MAGICAL SPELLS===
/Removal/
4 Terminate
4 Duress
4 Fireball
4 Fire / Ice
4 Repulse
4 Chainer's Edict
4 Magma Jet
4 Firebolt

/Not Removal/
4 Mana Leak
4 Fact or Fiction
4 Deep Analysis
4 Bonesplitter
4 Elephant Guide
4 Mirari's Wake

/Definitely Not Removal In Any Way Shape Or Form/
4 Pentad Prism
4 Chromatic Sphere

===FANTASTIC CREATURES===
/1-Drop Mischief Merchants/
4 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Savannah Lions
4 Grim Lavamancer
4 Basking Rootwalla

/2-Drop Beatsticks/
4 Gaea's Skyfolk
4 Goblin Legionnaire
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Blind Creeper
4 Joiner Adept
4 Wretched Anurid

/3-Drop Headcases/
4 Penumbra Bobcat
4 Phyrexian Rager
4 Call of the Herd
4 Exalted Angel
4 Ebon Drake
4 Eternal Witness

/4-Drop Powerhouses/
4 Flametongue Kavu
4 Thornscape Battlemage
4 Etched Oracle

/The Daddy/
4 Arc-Slogger

===MISC===
/Skullclamps/
4 Skullclamp
4 Steelshaper's Gift
4 Trinket Mage

/251st Card/
1 Morphling

===SIDEBOARD===
4 Jungle Barrier
4 Viridian Shaman
4 Infused Arrows
3 Nekrataal

What I Got Wrong:
On reflection, I don't think that sideboard was any good. Perhaps I should have run cards like Reckless Charge and Stone Rain to go more aggro against the Rude Awakening decks. Infused Arrows and Jungle Barriers seem okay versus other aggro decks, but I didn't meet any.

I'm not running Gift Ungiven for naughty graveyard cards, as, frankly, I couldn't be bothered to work out if it was any good or not. I don't have many basics so Wonder, Anger, etc get a bit weaker. In any case, messing about with searching and putting things in your bin seems like a really inefficient way to go about playing Magic. I probably ought to be running Head Games however, as it seems to totally kill people, especially when you have a couple of guys on the board.

Making The Deck Cheaper:
You can play more Invasion/8th Taplands and the Champions of Kamigawa depletion lands over the more expensive land, and Mirrodin's Core is playable if sub-optimal. Up the basic land count if you really must. Unfortunately having all the mana you need right from the start is what makes this deck go, and so every land you're missing hurts you. After you're done messing up your manabase, you can then start downgrading your other cards. Terminate => Terror, Exalted Angel => Zombie Cutthroat, Fact or Fiction probably becomes some kind of aggro creature or spell as it's not really in the general theme of the deck, it just happens to be insanely powerful. Proceed along these lines and you'll probably still have a half-decent deck at a fraction of the cost.

Making The Deck More Expensive(!!!):
The land is about right. There might be a touch too much painland, and perhaps sonme Odyssey filterlands have a place in here, I'm not sure. You might well want Birds of Paradise. The deck should definitely run Vindicates, and probably Spiritmongers. Lightning Angels are fine too. Skizzik might be okay, Blazing Specter, Meteor Storm, Shadowmage Infiltrator are other options and I'm sure there are more - a lot of the better Invasion rares are pretty good. You could run Braids, she's probably a bit of a beast in here, although I honestly have no idea what the probability of having BB on turn 4 is. It doesn't seem too low though.

Finally, props to timmy.od who lent me practically all the lands, also to OwenP, Lantto, "Nobby Dobscrub" (daball, not Yates) and RMoore who all helped out.

May your big decks never need to mulligan.

- Kevin O'Connor
shockeroo on MTGO - KevinO on EFnet IRC
kevino underscore 79 at hotmail dot com