“May I use your phone?” I asked the pretty young woman behind the CVS counter. Her nametag read “Sabina,” a lovely name I’d never run across before. She smiled and said sure, showing me how to make sure I’d get a line out rather than accidentally broadcast my voice across the store.
I had to impose on Sabina’s hospitality several times during the course of the afternoon because my van decided not to start as I tried to leave. I’d turn the key, the radio and air would come on, but the engine would crank – no click, no grinding sound, nothing. One call to AAA let me know I’d accidentally let my membership expire (“yes, I would like to renew by phone”); the next call went to their roadside service, where they decided to send their engine diagnostic dude to see if it were a dead battery or something easily fixed. When I told them I was still getting power to the radio and such, the woman on the line said that sometimes there could be enough juice to power the radio and air but not enough to start the car. Considering when I turned the key there was no cranking sound or anything at all I was dubious about that theory, but whatever. I could wait… baking in the hot sun beating down on the blacktop parking lot.
An hour later diagnostic dude informed me my battery was 6 years old and in bad need of replacing; in fact, there was even a crack in the thing. He confidently said my problem would likely be solved with a new battery ( “yes, since you have one with you I will be happy to buy it”). New battery installed… it still wouldn’t crank. No sound or anything.
“I’ll call the tow truck,” diagnostic dude offered sheepishly. I used Sabina’s phone a few more times, successfully reaching my brother-in-law to see if it was okay to leave the van at his shop to work on Monday, and unsuccessfully not reaching my wife to meet me over there. Even though Sabina’s been a sweetheart and not shown a hint of irritation each time I come in to use the phone again and again, I feel a little guilty and so when I notice the Tracphone display I decide to break down and buy one (obviously, I don’t have a regular cell phone).
Of course, I then need to use their phone to activate the Tracphone… (thanks again, Sabina!)
I go back outside and figure out how to use the phone features while I wait for the tow truck, baking in the hot sun some more.
By the time I get the van towed, give up on reaching my wife and take a taxi ride home, the ordeal has lasted from 11:45 until about 6:30 or so.
What does this story have to do with anything? I’d stopped at the CVS and bought a notebook from Sabina in order to keep notes on how the EDH game went, but instead of spending the afternoon playing a relaxing and fun game of Magic, I got car troubles and heat stroke.
I was so disappointed! I’d been looking forward to playing this game for weeks, having lovingly crafted a Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund deck full of dragon-y flavor and hopefully some memorable plays. My intention was to almost role-play the deck, to channel Smaug from the Hobbit, to be an ancient and cocky power swooping around looking for either prey or flattery. I didn’t expect to win with the deck – there aren’t any infinite combos or spectacular board dominating end games. But I had the ability to inflict some serious damage with my dragon hordes and had high hopes to at least make some memorable plays and credit for a few player deaths before someone becomes a modern day Bard the Bowman, dragonslayer.
Here’s the deck I was bringing with me as the van went kaput:
1 Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund
1 Arena
1 Diamond Valley
1 Berserk
1 Carpet of Flowers
1 Rancor
1 Skullclamp
1 Sol Ring
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Dragon’s Claw
1 Dragon’s Shadow
1 Golgari Signet
1 Soulbright Flamekin
1 Vexing Shusher
1 Wall of Roots
1 Coalition Relic
1 Darksteel Ingot
1 Dragonspeaker Shaman
1 Eternal Witness
1 Obelisk of Jund
1 Spoils of Evil
1 Sword of Light and Shadow
1 Taurean Mauler
1 Urza’s Incubator
1 Bladewing’s Thrall
1 Chameleon Colossus
1 Crucible of Fire
1 Decimate
1 Door of Destinies
1 Filth
1 Fledgling Dragon
1 Greater Good
1 Greed
1 Harmonize
1 No Mercy
1 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
1 Sarkhan Vol
1 Cairn Wanderer
1 Cryptic Gateway
1 Genesis
1 Hunted Dragon
1 Mana Geyser
1 Patriarch’s Bidding
1 Where Ancients Tread
1 Zirilan of the Claw
1 Broodmate Dragon
1 Dragon Broodmother
1 Flameblast Dragon
1 Predator Dragon
1 Shivan Dragon
1 Two-Headed Dragon
1 Bladewing the Risen
1 Dragon Mage
1 Imperial Hellkite
1 Inferno
1 Kilnmouth Dragon
1 Knollspine Dragon
1 Shivan Hellkite
1 Spearbreaker Behemoth
1 Violent Ultimatum
1 Bogardan Hellkite
1 Hellkite Overlord
1 Scourge of Kher Ridges
1 Dragon Tyrant
1 Banefire
1 Bayou
1 Blood Crypt
1 Darigaaz’s Caldera
1 Forgotten Cave
1 Gaea’s Cradle
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Gruul Turf
1 Jund Panorama
1 Miren, the Moaning Well
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Rakdos Carnarium
1 Rupture Spire
1 Savage Lands
1 Shizo, Death’s Storehouse
1 Skargg, the Rage Pits
1 Smoldering Crater
1 Stomping Ground
1 Taiga
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Swamp
3 Forest
10 Mountain
Yes, 22 dragons! The only dragon I was missing that I would have really liked in here was Odyssey’s Vampiric Dragon, which I’m sure I have a copy of somewhere but just could not put my hands on it before Saturday.
Alright, let’s pause for an M10 Rules Change/EDH Toolbox Card Alert!
There’s a card in this deck that I added because I felt it had dragon-y flavor; it’s a card I’ve used quite a bit in multiplayer over the years that has just gotten a huge power boost under the new M10 rules change. The card?
I rarely see anyone else use this cool Ice Age rare instant, which takes nice advantage of a player’s hopefully richly stocked graveyard in order to get a bunch of life and a bunch of colorless mana. One thing that was cool, if you had any excess mana you were unable to use, the burn you’d take was offset by the life you gained. Now, with no more mana burn, there is no downside to this card at all. You gain the life, gain the mana, and any mana you can’t use just goes poof! It’s cheap, and if you don’t have one in your EDH toolbox collection, I’d highly recommend to you pick one up.
Now back to the regularly schedule column content…
Here are a few notes on some of my card choices.
Seshiro, Daughter of Seshiro: At some point, I noticed I had a pretty high number of Shaman cards in the deck, including the Changelings (who are also snakes). Since dragons need lots of mana, I thought Seshiro worthy of a slot.
Seshiro + Karrthus + Changelings: With enough Changelings in play, Karrthus could almost become a mana engine. I thought about adding Orochi Leafcaller and finding some way to replay Karrthus to generate a ton of mana but figured that might be pushing things a bit (even if it would be spectacular to pull off).
Mana boosts (Carpet of Flowers, Sol Ring, Golgari Signet, Wall of Roots, Coalition Relic, Darksteel Ingot, Dragonspeaker Shaman, Obelisk of Jund, Urza’s Incubator, Mana Geyser): One thing I noticed while playtesting the deck a bit, it was very, very, very hungry for mana – lots of it, and lots of colored mana. In fact, I ended up cutting a good number of nonbasic lands I like to play that only produce colorless mana because of all the colored mana I needed. Carpet of Flowers is a great little mana-producing enchantment if you can bank on someone at the table playing Islands (and what table isn’t going to have someone with Islands?). Say, that’s another card that got really good from the M10 rules giving mana burn the boot! Mana Geyser is another gem of a card that is sure to provide a ton of red mana for some spectacular dragon firebreathing.
Dragon Shadow: Boosting the power and giving the creature fear is very helpful (especially with Filth out, making the target near unblockable). I used Rancor instead of Dragon Fangs, and Dragon Breath is redundant with all the firebreathing so many dragons have already.
Soulbright Flamekin: An early 2/1 creature, a Shaman for Seshiro mana, gives my fat creatures trample, and at the same time can generate a ton of red mana for firebreathing—this card is like a Swiss-army knife in this deck!
Changelings: They’re dragons, their shamans, and yes they’re even snakes! Taurean Mauler, Chameleon Colossus, & Cairn Wanderer all have nifty abilities besides the helpful Changeling attribute.
Bladewing’s Thrall: This zombie is awesome here since there are plenty of dragons to make sure he keeps popping into play. Plus, he’s perfect food to feed hungry dragons, who can Devour him as the dragon comes into play, then when the dragon actually comes into play the Thrall’s ability triggers to bring in back into play from the graveyard (I checked with a Level 3 judge to make sure this works). With Broodmother, you get a 3/3 dragon token each upkeep. See, told ya he was awesome!
Greater Good: Back before GG was a sick card drawing engine, I used it as a way to cash in my creatures when people would kill or try to control my large monsters. Since I’ve got lots of large monsters people will likely try to kill or steal, seems like a no-brainer inclusion. Even better with Rancor and Skullclamp, eh?
Greed: Dragons are greedy, and card drawing is good. ‘Nuff said.
No Mercy: Dragons have no mercy, right? Another flavorful choice that hopefully warns people away from randomly attacking me while I try and build up enough mana to bring the dragons.
Sarkhan Vol: I just recently traded for my one copy of this card… the ultimate ability is pretty impressive and certainly flavorful for the deck if I can get there…
Where Ancients Tread: Dragons are ancient, they squash things when they enter the Battlefield… and this is a sick combo with Patriarch’s Bidding. I imagined killing at least one player with Where Ancients Tread.
Zirilan of the Claw: A shaman who tutors and Sneak Attacks a Dragon? Perfecto! Preferably I’d have some sort of sac-outlet available so I don’t have to remove the Dragon to Exile… Greater Good, Diamond Valley, Miren, Devour all fit the bill…
Spearbreaker Behemoth: When you’ve sunk lots of mana into putting huge monsters into play, you hate for them to die right? I wavered on this one for a while, because he doesn’t feel at all dragon-y – who put the King Kong in my Lonely Mountain dragon horde?
If you have any questions about any of these or other card choices, feel free to ask away in the forums.
So how did the game(s) go without me? When I called Tommy at Richmond Comix (thanks, Sabina!) to let him know my engine troubles, he said there were about 16 people there. Afterwards I posted on the Facebook page that announced the game to see if anyone would be willing to shoot me a paragraph or two about how the game(s) went so I could put that here in the column, but nobody bothered to respond. Maybe someone will post a recap in the forums?
M10 Duals and Future Standard Manafixing
Speaking of the forums, we had a lively M10 rules debate in the forum of last week’s column, and Patrick Chapin even dropped in with a lengthy defense of the rules changes. One tangent was fired off by my comment about how awesome I thought the new M10 dual lands were. Yes, Forsythe and Gottlieb’s article on the Rules changes actually had some sneak preview cards including a glimpse at what the new duals would be, but apparently everyone got so worked up about Rule 5 few seemed to have noticed the new duals.
Those who did notice and posted in my forums seemed to be of the opinion that the new duals sucked because they’re weaker than pain lands, shock lands and fetch lands, or didn’t like them because they don’t really help fix Shards of Alara-based three (or more) color decks. Let’s dig in to these arguments.
First, the pain. We can all agree that basic lands should have an important role in Magic, right? In order to make basic lands a relevant and important part of the game, they need to have benefits. Those benefits include coming into play untapped and ready to use, and providing one colored mana at no cost other than tapping the land. Now to make non-basic lands “better” than basic lands in some way, there also needs to be some sort of drawback to balance it out, otherwise why would you ever play basic lands? Painlands, shock lands and fetch lands all cause pain as a drawback in order to make immediate use of its color-fixing ability. Wizards has said that lands that cause pain are deeply unpopular among the newest players to the game, so it makes sense that they’d want to figure out a non-painful way to fix your mana for dual lands in the Core set. What other options do they have? You could have some weird thing where you can play one of those lands untapped if you removed some number of cards from your library or hand to Exile I suppose, but that feels much more like an Expert expansion mechanic. Ever tried to convince a new player that Arc-Slogger is actually a good card?
Lands that provide multiple colors that come into play tapped have pedigree in constructed Magic decks for a long time. Some, like the Vivid lands, are strong enough to be viewed as being too good. Sacrificing your ability to play a card for the first turn or two because you’re playing these comes-into-play tapped lands is a price often worth paying to reliably fix your mana. These new duals fit right in with what has already a successful design. Another drawback of playing comes-into-play-tapped lands is when you draw one later in the game when really needed a fourth or fifth mana in order to cast a critical spell in your hand. You’ve got the mana… but you’re going to have to wait until the following turn to cast that spell. At this point in the game you may not have the time to wait the following turn, but that’s the price you pay for playing these lands.
With these new duals, once you’ve got even just one basic land in play, they’ll always come into play untapped. Take a look at modern Magic decks; just how many spells get played on the first turn anyway? Compare that to spells you’ll want to consistently play on turn 3 or 4 with colored mana requirements. With the new duals and enough basic lands, you should have no problem ripping a new dual off the top of your deck and playing these spells that turn.
Second gripe, the new duals don’t help Alara block Shard decks manafix. Personally, I think there are playable mana fixers galore in Alara block, they’re just not insanely good manafixers like there are currently in Standard. There should be tradeoffs for utilizing more powerful gold cards across multiple colors, and the tradeoffs include less consistent mana and more mulliganing.
Mohawkdan posted a quote from Randy Buehler blog regarding his complaints on Alara Block Constructed’s mana that several posters seemed to agree with:
“The block gives you access to very powerful spells, but in order to wield that power you pretty much have to have 3 different colors of mana available by turn 3. So it’s both faster and more color intensive than Ravnica, but the mana fixers aren’t any better. As a result there were a ton of mulligans all weekend long. The odds that both players had a playable opening 7 were depressingly small and the raw power of the cards meant that no one had any time to hiccup. If you stumbled at all you got blown out. As a result a majority of games were just blowouts.
“Things might have been better if the Borderposts allowed you to return any land instead of just a basic land. As printed they do a good job in Limited, but they add a whole new level of inconsistency to constructed manabases. Kibler went 8-1-1 with an Esper Beatdown deck that runs 8 ‘posts, but he just straight-up admits in the Deck Tech we filmed that he doesn’t actually have enough basics to support them. His plan was just to get lucky. The other break-out deck of the tournament was green-white aggro, which the Japanese ran not because it was actually good, but because it had the most consistent mana in the field and was fast enough to punish anyone who stumbled. If both players draw their mana, they are an underdog. In practice, however, they won 64% of their matches — the best winning percentage of any deck in the field with a meaningful number of people playing it.
“If I want to place 60-40 bets and then just shuffle cards and see who wins, I’ll play poker. Luckily, the mana in Standard is better and this block format isn’t being used for very much.”
To me, Randy proves my point – the G/W deck is “less good” (supposedly) in terms of raw power but due to its better mana it had great success. If manafixing in the block were better, would the G/W deck even exist? How many of the cards in the deck would sit in binders if it were easy to just go Naya or Bant instead? Because there are real consequences to adding additional colors to your deck, we’ve got more cards available that are playable in the format. That means more of the cards you open from booster packs, or draft, or Limited are playable and have value. Isn’t that a good thing?
Reading Randy’s overview, you’d think that the “less good” G/W deck just crushed and dominated the more random multicolor decks… But when I look at the list of decks earning players 18 points or better in the 10 rounds of Block Constructed I see plenty of 3, 4 and 5 color lists… and I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that they all just got extremely lucky to get there. Wouldn’t it be worth some extra mulligans to more reliably use the more powerful three-color cards? These guys weighed the tradeoff between powerful cards and shakier mana, made their choices and played the game and were rewarded with an excellent record.
Randy’s opinion seems to be that the Alara block format is less good because of those tradeoffs, but Randy’s Magic background is as one of the Spikiest Spikes ever on the Pro Tour. His gut instinct is probably to want to play the best spells in the format, and the more he can realistically cram into one deck the better. He points out that Standard’s mana is better, and qualitatively he’s right—but what is the impact of ridiculously easy manafixing the health of the game? As I’ve heard a few times recently, Cryptic Command and Cloudthresher (and, I’ll add, Cruel Ultimatum) should not all be in the same deck. Easy mana constricts the number of playable cards in a format as these best cards show up over and over and over across the various archetypes. I’d be curious to hear Ben Bleiweiss take on how easy mana fixing pushes the singles price of these very best cards higher than they would be if the number of different decks they could be played in were reigned in by real mana constraints. If Cryptic Command could only be played in Faerie and Merfolk decks (as I’m pretty sure it was intended to be), would it still be a $20 card?
I’m looking forward to Standard Magic shifting towards real tension between mana consistency and power splashing, because if we can’t so easily splash cards that have no business being splashed then we’ll see a much wider variety of cards being played, and for me that’s going to be a much needed breath of fresh air. So, again—bravo on these new dual lands, Wizards!
Before I sign off, I did want to give a public service announcement: if you have not yet seen The Hangover, find some time to see it in the very near future. Seriously, you’re cheating yourself if you don’t get to see this movie. It is ridiculously funny, and I haven’t laughed out loud in a theater full of laughing people at a movie like that in a long time. The cast is mostly a bunch of unknowns, but they do an excellent job, the writing and plotlines are superb, and the humor is top-notch. I was a bit worried that a story revolving around 4 friends in Vegas for a bachelor party might be a bit narrow, but all the women I know who’ve seen it loved it too. Excellent adult humor that thoroughly embraced the R rating (thank God they didn’t water it down to get a PG-13). Go see it this weekend.
That’s it for this week, join me next week when I go over the wacky deck I’m taking to FNM today…
Take care!
Bennie
starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com
What I’m listening to (from The Hangover’s soundtrack, naturally!)
Take It Off, by The Donnas
Can’t Tell Me Nothing, by Kanye West
Joker and the Thief, by Wolfmother
Right Round, by Flo Rida