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The summer is wrapping up for me, and I'm getting ready to head back down to Pittsburgh for my last semester at Carnegie Mellon. Unfortunately, I need to be able to drive my car to get to school, and Delta Airlines managed to leave my bag in Atlanta when I was flying back from my vacation last week, with my car keys tucked safely away inside the bag. Hopefully the suitcase turns up before I'm scheduled to leave tomorrow.
On a more Magic-related note, my article this week is going to be a bit of a round-up on the various flavors of Magic I've been playing recently. Great Britain's National Championships was something that made me quite proud, Block Constructed is offering me another chance to qualify this weekend, and SSE Draft is finally up on the live Magic Online server. So, allow me to dive in.
Standard
As far as Standard goes, I nearly managed to hand my favorite deck to the winner of Great Britain's National Championships. Instead I'll have to settle for second place. The other person I gave the deck to finished in 14th, so I think that it shows that the deck was quite solid. If you're wondering what deck I'm talking about, you may not have been around a month or two ago when I was raving non-stop about Blue/White Reveillark.
I've been playing the deck since the release of Morningtide, even in the face of massive Faerie hate. The deck still has trouble with Faeries, and Stephen Murray fell to them in the finals, but the new presence of RDW has really pushed Faeries out of the way, and so the favorable Red matchup and the decrease in the number of unfavorable Faeries matchups has served the deck quite well.
The week after Michael Jacob won U.S. Nationals with the Red deck, a few friends and I spent some time brainstorming up good ways to beat a double-Demigod draw. We had solid options like Kitchen Finks and Burrenton Forge-Tender to win the fight on the ground, but the best cards we could come up with for the miniature Rorix were Condemn and Recumbent Bliss. I didn't really like either of these solutions because they seemed like cards I'd want to use early, and they still only went one-for-one with the Demigod. At this point, someone mentioned Runed Halo, a card that I had thought about right when Shadowmoor came out but had long since forgotten, and so we shoved four into our sideboard and were off to the races.
I found myself boarding them in so often that we moved two to the maindeck. Two seemed to be the right number, as drawing one was almost never bad, but drawing two could be quite annoying against decks like Quick 'n' Toast or the mirror. They really shined against burn spells, manlands, and anyone that tried to "curve out" on you with two or three copies of the same guy. Confident that we had stumbled onto the next big thing in Standard, we went around buying Halos up for a quarter of a ticket on MTGO. The next thing we know, and the RIW crew had found the same tech (albeit in Block) and the world was made aware of Runed Halo by GerryT's win in Denver.
Just because the world knows about Runed Halo (which they should, since it's pretty amazing) doesn't make it any less powerful. Halo really gives Reveillark the ability to lock up aggressive decks and make sure that nothing slips through the Wraths and Reveillarks to swing or burn for the win. If you're looking for something to play online, I still highly recommend the deck.
Block Constructed
I've been drawn to the various Five-Color decks all season long. My near-success at my first PTQ reinforced my desire to play with Reflecting Pool, but Faeries again seemed to rear its ugly head and smash my hopes, so I moved to the deck with Reflecting Pool that seems ready-made to beat Faeries. While I've been having a good time playing Five-Color Elementals on Magic Online, I've still liked the deck less than I liked Five-Color Control.
Luckily for me, Patrick Chapin and GerryT seem to have done the legwork necessary for me to go back to playing a successful Five-Color Control deck at this weekend's PTQ. In addition to being the kind of deck that I naturally gravitate towards, Chapin/Gerry's Justice Toast has a proven track record, which is always quite nice.
A few people have asked me about the changes that I plan to make to the deck before I play it this Saturday, but I've had to tell all of them that I don't plan on making any changes at all. The only changes that I would consider making are those suggested by the deck's creators, but I always think that it's a bad idea to "tweak" a card or two before heading into battle. This stems from the fact that a proven deck may work for reasons that you don't fully understand, and the card you trim might be exactly the card you need to win a handful of matches on the day. Mike Clair wrote an article detailing his horrible experience after tweaking an Extended Goblins deck, finding himself without the tools he needed to beat a popular deck, all because he didn't think his Living Deaths were truly necessary and cut them from his netdeck before the tournament.
GerryT managed to win a Grand Prix with this deck. If he says that it really should have a second Oona's Grace (or whatever), then it could well be worth listening to him. If, on the other hand, I look at Oona's Grace and decide that it makes no sense and I want to cut them all, then I'm just going to trust in the finish of the deck and play it with the Grace, or maybe even listen to the winning pilot and add the second. I don't have the same amount of time and effort invested into the deck as other players do, so I trust their judgments far above my own. Perhaps after playing the PTQ and a handful of smaller tournaments, I will have developed my own informed opinion, but until that happens I am putting my faith in the tried-and-true deck.
SSE Limited
A few weeks ago, Wizards of the Coast added a small piece of functionality to Magic Online. Now, in the Game Play Settings screen, you can check a box and have MTGO record your drafts, similar to the old DraftCap tool that is incompatible with the new Magic Online. This option will give you a file that looks something like
C:Documents and SettingsBenApplication DataWizards of the CoastMagic Online3.0PumblesMumbles-58038-8-19-2008.txt
Application Data is a hidden folder, so you may have to do a little bit of work to get to these files, but once you do you'll have text files with all of your packs and picks laid out. While I think that this is a great thing for Wizards to have done, I think that the text file is a little bit difficult to read and understand, so I've taken things into my own hands.
At my personal website, there are a few tools that take as input the contents of these text files, and output them formatted in a cleaner way. The most important one, though, is the one that outputs images, which gives you an experience much like actually drafting the cards. As an example of this tool, which is free to use, I'll be doing an SSE draft walkthrough.
If you like the idea of this tool, please feel free to head to my site and use it yourself. If you have any questions, find any bugs, or just want to talk about it, you should also feel free to IM or email me with feedback. The pictures are the same size as the ones used for DraftCap, but if you need a larger picture simply click on the card required. Onward:
Pack 1 pick 1:
Back at the beginning of SSS, I would have opened this pack and windmill-slammed the Leech Bonder. Since that time, I've come to learn that, while powerful, the Bonder is very fragile. Sure, it can dominate games, but it can also easily be picked off by something like Scar. In addition, Eventide has brought Flame Jab into the mix, which people pick and play much higher than Scar.
The other card that jumps out at me is Power of Fire. There are those who say that Power is the top Red common, and I'm not sure I'm entirely in that camp, but I know I like it a lot. In addition, these days I find myself preferring to draft Red if at all possible, so my color preference is very likely affecting my decision. I also believe that the Bonder will give me at least one player worth of breathing room for pack two, though I don't expect the Scuzzback Marauders to go much later than third or fourth.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 2:
Getting passed Incremental Blight is something that many people consider one of the finer pleasures in life. CMU drafters, though, seem to have come to the conclusion that a second-pick Blight is almost always a trick, and that you'll either wind up with an awful Black deck that happens to include the Blight, or you simply won't see any more Black cards for the rest of the draft. This feeling that I had was amplified by the fact that the missing card was a Rare; there aren't too many rares that are much better than Blight, but it's possible that the guy to my right is already planning to draft Black.
Unfortunately, trick or no the Blight is the best card in this pack by quite a bit. Depending on how saucy I felt, I might manage to convince myself to take Ballynock Cohort here, but usually it would need to be something strong to go with my first pick (like Burn Trail) to get me to pass the Blight along to my neighbor. I didn't really spend any time thinking about Curse of Chains or Barkshell Blessing, and I came to my senses and took the three-for-one.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 3:
At this point I'm cursing my color preference and wishing that I'd taken the Leech Bonder first. I likely would have been able to talk myself into picking the Cohort in the previous pack, and then I'd get a Duo or Steel here and really be on my way to a solid Blue/White deck. However, I have a Power of Fire and an Incremental Blight in my stack, and there's not a single Red or Black card I want to third pick.
It came down to the fact that Power of Fire loves to see Pili-Pala, and that taking the Scarecrow let me get my bearings a little bit better. If the Blue/White cards keep on pouring in, then I planned to move in, but for now I wanted to ride the wave a little bit and see where I wound up.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 4:
Again, I look at this pack and I see two paths I could start down for the rest of my draft. I could take the River's Grasp, give myself a solid removal spell and a decent chance of managing to play Incremental Blight in my final deck, or I could take Tattermunge Duo and try to push the Red Aggro deck I like so much.
In the end, color preference won out again. Blue/Black is among my least favorite color combinations, and Red Aggro is my favorite deck of the moment, so I went with the Duo.
It's worth noting that I didn't spend any time thinking about taking the Devoted Druid here. I love the Druid when I'm drafting Green, but I'm just not willing to jump on it at this point in the draft.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 5:
Mudbrawler Raiders was pretty obviously the pick I was going to wind up making, though I managed to burn most of my clock thinking about taking the Spiteflame Witch. If I wind up in straight Red, then both the Raiders and the Witch are equally playable, with the Witch being slightly more aggressive than usual. However, I was liking the idea of the Raiders even more than usual because of the Green cards I'd been seeing come along and because of the possibility of double-triggering my Duo.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 6:
Mudbrawler #2 vs Hollowsage doesn't really seem like a hard decision to me. In fact, if I were going to take a Black card, it would have been Torpor Dust.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 7:
The only two cards in this pact that I might consider putting in a Red/Green or Red/Black aggro deck are Scrapbasket and Traitor's Roar, but I certainly wouldn't be happy if they were in the final build. Because I didn't think that it was worth spending a pick on a near-unplayable, and because I'd been seeing so much White and Blue go by, I snapped up the Cragtreads.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 8:
Just like in the last pack, there's nothing here that I actually want for my deck. Instead I took the Devoted Druid, and figured that it had a better than average chance of pushing me into Red/Green.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 9:
This is where, in my mind, things started to go screwy. I had expected the Rune-Cervin Rider and Watchwing Scarecrow to both be gone by the time the pack came back, but instead I was missing the Horde of Boggarts I thought I'd be taking here.
The question facing me was which of the fliers to take, and I didn't spend long before deciding on Watchwing Scarecrow. Part of the power of the Red Aggro deck is the large number of good Blue/Red cards waiting for you in the third pack, and so the Scarecrow might make the cut if I wind up Red/Green just because it has a decent chance of picking up flying.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 10:
The Red/Green trend continues with an absurdly late Barkshell Blessing.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 11:
I don't even know what happened here. All that I could think of was the time when I was drafting on the Beta server and wound up with six Dream Thiefs just because no one likes Blue. There's no way I could resist taking the Duo here, even if Juvenile Gloomwidow is a decent on-color pick.
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 12:
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 13:
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 14:
My Pick:
Pack 1 pick 15:
My Pick:
At the end of pack one, I had pretty much decided that the Blight was, in fact, a trick.
Pack 2 pick 1:
The one thing that I always try to tell my drafting buddies is that thinking of your deck as one color combination can be a huge trap. Before I saw this pack, I was thinking of myself as Red/Green, which isn't a big stretch given my three hybrids, the Blessing, and the Devoted Druid. However, if I thought of myself as White instead of Green, I'd lose the Druid but gain Cragtreads and Thistledown Duo.
The whole point of that mindset shift is the Silkbind Faerie sitting in this pack. Throughout all of the first pack I just kept getting shipped good Blue/White card after good Blue/White card, so I wanted a piece of that. I also wanted the flying tapper for my aggressive deck, especially given that it happens to be an insane combo with Power of Fire.
A few people I've talked to have said that they like the Ashenmoor Liege here. After all, it's nearly a guarantee that I'll wind up Red/X, and so the Liege will always make the deck and generally be quite strong. While I do like Lieges, especially four-power ones in aggressive decks, I thought that I would actually get more value out of the tap effect of the Faerie than the pump effect of the Liege.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 2:
I suppose that there's a Spectral Procession here to tempt me, but Burn Trail is exactly the card I wanted to see.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 3:
For the first time all draft, I felt like I was deciding between more than just two cards. I could take Ember Gale (which, by the way, I am absolutely in love with) if I wanted a card guaranteed to make the final build, or Sootwalkers as a solid Hill Giant. I could take a second Pili-Pala to combo with my Power of Fire, and further cast feelers out and hope to settle down. I could take Gloomwidow if I was ready to make a commitment to Red/Green, or I could take Safehold Sentry if I was ready to make a commitment to White.
My eventual decision was that my White cards were much more powerful than my Green cards, and that a really nice bear to start my curve off was worth making a commitment to my second color. While I do like to bounce around for a bit, the eighteenth pick of the draft is pretty far along, so I felt good about finally settling into a color combination.
In addition, when I draft an aggressive Red deck, it's the early drops that I'm most worried about. I love to have a lot of high-quality one- and two-drops so that I can really put my opponent on the back foot. Safehold Sentry might not be the absolute best bear for that job, but he's pretty high up there. Plus there's always Power of Fire.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 4:
Speaking of high-quality two-drops that put the opponent on the back foot, this pack gave me my first shot at Mudbrawler Cohort. I was so happy about being passed one of these guys that I took it without really considering my options.
The other option I'm referring to is Last Breath. While not exactly the best removal spell to have for a small aggressive deck, Last Breath is removal nonetheless, and definitely deserved to be picked here. While I'm not sure that the Breath would have made the maindeck, I do know that the power of Mudbrawler Cohort comes alongside your Red one-drops, and the fact that I didn't have any at all meant that the Cohort was also unlikely to make the final cut. Oh well.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 5:
I was realizing that the Cohort I just picked wasn't actually that strong in my deck when I managed to see another one. While playing them on consecutive early turns would likely earn me a lot of damage, I didn't think it was worth the times I played a slower Raging Goblin or a late-game random bear.
On the other hand, Kitchen Finks is a card I can definitely get behind. Red aggro decks do not have the best three-drops in the world, as the quality drops off dramatically after Tattermunge Duo and Noggle Bandit. However, a three-power attacker for my third turn seemed like just the kind of card I wanted, though I was not exactly thrilled about how my mana costs were shaping up.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 6:
When drafting Red aggro, I'm perfectly happy to first-pick an Intimidator Initiate. While this deck didn't seem to be turning into the same blindingly fast aggressive machine that Red decks often become, the Initiate gave me a good one-drop to power up my Cohort, and a nice way to force through some damage when my 3/3s started getting outclassed.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 7:
I have just one good target for the Shield, and I was no longer entertaining idea of winding up Green (and therefore picking the Gloomwidow), so my choice was between the Dragoon and the Runes. At this point I already had three hybrid Hill Giants, the Watchwing Scarecrow, and in general just didn't feel like I needed another 3/3 for four. I wasn't sure that I'd wind up with the Runes in my deck, but it seemed like a good option to give myself.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 8:
Another good bear, and another Power of Fire enabler.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 9:
With the Faerie, Pili-Pala, and two Sentrys, I thought about taking and splashing Presence of Gond. Then I saw Ember Gale.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 10:
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 11:
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 12:
I always like having one of these guys to beef up my sideboard against Enchantments.
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 13:
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 14:
My Pick:
Pack 2 pick 15:
My Pick:
Pack 3 pick 1:
Another pack with a massive number of good cards for me. Essentially, my decision was between the three removal spells and the two White creatures.
First I threw out the creatures. I already had some solid guys at both my two and four slots, so I didn't feel the need to spend my first pick on a guy, even if that guy happened to be a good one.
After that I threw out Unmake. I planned on playing more Red than White, though things seemed pretty even after I settled on White, so I didn't think I'd be able to cast it in a timely fashion. That left Flame Jab and Fiery Bombardment, and a quick scan of my creatures showed that I didn't have a whole ton of guys who would do more than a single point of damage from their sacrifice, so I went with the cheaper version of repeated one-damage shots.
My Pick:
Pack 3 pick 2:
This time there's six cards in the pack that I want to put in my deck. I stopped thinking about Riverfall Mimic and Harvest Gwyllion pretty quickly, though, since both pale in comparison to repeated taps or repeated Shocks. However, both of those options seemed to me more fragile than the simple, yet extremely effective, Puncture Blast.
Despite having come to the conclusion that Puncture Blast was the right pick, I couldn't resist taking the Blue/Red Liege. Fir |
