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jackofallgeeksSo I'm writing this because I know some of you care. I'm cutting the vast majority of it because I know that most of you won't.
Yesterday was the prerelease. We were supposed to have a vast horde going up from Monterey -- my car full, Laurel's car full, and a couple of stranglers beyond that. And, in fact, we had just about as many people show up, but Laurel didn't came; she got sick or something.
Anyways. My car was me and four Air Force guys -- Robert, Bruce, Vo, and the kid (who I call the kid 1. because I never caught his name and 2. because after listening to some of the things he said I didn't really care to -- nice guy, just not quite my sort). For the record, Robert is now one of my favorite people, partially because he reminds me so much of Zach -- they look alike, they act alike, they even walk and talk alike. Seriously, it was kind of creepy, like Mirrodin block all over again.
Robert also helped me look over my decks and streamline them a bit more than I'd had them; deck-building is what I consider my weak point.
Flight One. I get a pool with Crovax, Ascendant Hero and Torchling. I build a red-white deck looking very much like this:
1x Blazing Blade Askari
1x Blood Knight
1x Fury Charm
1x Ghitu Firebreathing
1x Grapeshot
1x Keldon Halberdier
1x Keldon Mrauders
1x Sulfurous Blast
1x Torchling
1x Rough // Tumble
1x Amrou Seekers
1x Castle Raptors
1x Celestial Crusader
1x Crovax, Ascendant Hero
1x Flickering Spirit
1x Ivory Giant
1x Pentarch Ward
1x Outrider en-Kor
1x Tividar of Thorn
2x Whitemane Lion
1x Lotus Bloom
1x Thunder Totem
8x Mountain
9x Plains
The general idea was to swing hard and fast with little white guys, preferably building them up with Crovax and the Crusader; 4/4 Seekers are nice against almost any deck. Especially then Crovax shuts down lots of the useful goblins and wizards and other little things running around these days. The red was really just in there for support, a few more beats and some removal. The Marauders are really nice and Torchling single-handedly won me a game (the only one he showed up in).
The trouble is, and I noticed this as soon as I figured out what my deck was about (before Round 1) that I pretty much had a huge blindspot named 'White.' If my opponent was playing White, my Crovax/Crusader idea was shot down pretty quick, and my Red was too weak to really make up for it. So I pulled up my other cards and started playing around with the other nice cards I got -- namely, Verdant Embrace and Retether. I didn't have anything much to Retether, aside from the embrace, so that didn't make the cut, but I had something of a shaky White-Green saproling Horde deck going with a Sporesower Thallid and a Vitaspore Thallid. Here's where Rob came in and looked at the two decks I'd made and said I could probably pull from here and there and make a nice White-Red-Green deck, with Saprolings and Slivers -- I *did* have some nice Slivers (Trampling, Haste, Doublestrike, +2/+2), but they were all expensive. Round one began befoe we could re-stitch our abomination, so I played with the Crovax Crusader and resolved to figure the rest out with Rob after the match.
I made pretty tidy work of my opponent, going 2-0 rather swiftly, but Rob had more trouble with his. I sat down with the cards we'd pulled aside and started building my second deck. It was White-Red-Green now, heavier on the green but pulling in some slivers. I had Rob look at it (after he'd had a couple relax-me cigarettes; his round 1 wasn't as neat as mine), and he said it looked pretty solid. They called the next round before I could sleave it, so it was ready to play but I was hoping it wouldn't need to be. Luckily, it wasn't -- again, Crovax Crusader took me to a fairly neat 2-0 win.
I sleaved my deck, got some food, and had finished eating just after they called for round three. My opponent was some kid's mom, but she had the look (and record, I might add), of someone who knew what she was doing. And she did. She was also playing Red-White and, Torchling notwithstanding, doing a better job of it than I was. Drop, swing, drop, bounce, swing, burn. It hurt. So when I lost and we moved into game two, I sideboarded my whole deck, grey-sleeves for blue sleeves. It looked like this:
1x Ashcoat Bear
1x Citanul Woodreader
1x Essence Warden
1x Hedge Troll
1x Might Sliver
1x Mire Boa
1x Nantuko Shaman
2x Pouncing Wurm
1x Reflex Sliver
1x Search for Tomorrow
1x Sporesower Thallid
1x Utopia Vow
1x Verdant Embrace
1x Vitaspore Thallid
1x Quilled Sliver
1x Saltfield Recluse
1x Watch Sliver
2x Battering Sliver
1x Bonesplitter Sliver
1x Fury Sliver
1x Cautery Sliver
9x Forest
4x Plains
4x Mountan
My opponent hesitated before cutting, shocked to see blue-backed cards instead of grey. She guess that I'd sidded my whole deck, and wasn't sure how to process that. I went on to take the next two games fairly handily. The first saw a 7/7 Sporesower spitting of verdant Saprolings every upkeep with an Essence Warden in play. She was able to hit the Thallid with Temporal Isolation, but my swarm of saprolings still overthrew her. The next game saw a host of +2/+4 doublestriking trampler slivers end the game, even when she used Sudden Seizing to pit one Sliver against another.
My report doesn't show it, but strictly speaking that deck wasn't ready to play until that round, which is when I needed it. Nice.
Round 4, my opponent and I are both 3-0. The prizes are 16 packs for 4-0, 11 for 3-0-1, and 6 for 3-1. He offers a draw, we'd both get 11 packs. I'm feeling pretty goo at 3-0 and wouldn't be too put-out wth 6, so I opt not to and just to play it out. Game one sees me mulligan into no land and get thrashed. It was a close game, but he just had more than I could handle without the resources. He was playing Black-Red, though, so Crovax Crusader could pull the win. I didn't switch to The Second Coming.
Game 2... Game 2 was interesting. We were both going kind of slow, then he dropped an Eye of Urborg on me when I had 3 creatures -- the Recluce, the Seekers, and the Crusader. I take a hit, maybe two, then chump with the Recluse. Then I drop the Raptors. He swings into that, and I chump with it. He goes to put the 'dead' eye in his graveyard when I point out that my creature died before it got a chance to strike. He's a little disapointed with this news actually, in part because he now has three other mean-looking creatures on the table and, I imagine, no reliable way to end the eye.
One of the creatures has a Fire Whip -- tap to do a point to a target, and sac the whip to do a point to the target. He's hit me with the whip a few times now. I'm at 7 life. He's at 10. I have the Seekers and the Crusader, he has the Eye, the Whip, and a Smothering Soot in his graveyard waiting to kill a blocker. I draw a Thunder Idol and consider my options.
I'm on a clock of at most seven turns right now, less in actuality because one I'm out of blockers the eye ends me. I can't win if I don't damage him, and I can't rely on drawing into and kind of kill, mostly because any creatures will get fed to the eye almost as soon as they drop. I cast the idol and then make a stupid moved -- I attack with the Crusader.
Now, either the flying Crusader or the pseudo-Fear Seekers can hit him, and the Seekers actually hit for more. However, the Crusader makes my creatures bigger, and if I use him to chump (or he died to soot), I lose one of my key winning points. Swinging with him does two things, neither of which I was aware of when I swung -- first it damages my opponent, and second it removed him as a blocking 'threat' to his eye. That's the dumb mistake there -- now he's free to soot the Seekers and swing for the game.
Luckily for me, he made a dumb mistake, too. Tap the Whip carrier to do a point to the Crusader, then sac the Whip to do another point and kill the crusader. I pass the turn, he soots my Seeker. He swings for 6, I announce that I'm at 1, and we sit in a kind of stunned silence. He'd read the board as well as I did, it had said I was a deadman, and now my opponent was shocked and confused by the fact that I was, indeed, not dead. He passed the turn.
My board position was better than I report it; I can't remember exactly what was on the board or how it played out, but I was able to recover my standing, hold the eye back, and eventually swing for the game with a Fury Charm'd trampler, all because he killed my creature when he could have killed me. I won because of his play mistake.
And I was terrified. I calmly noted that we were now 1-1, and would he like to just call it a draw anyways? He said yes, and I then pointed his play mistake out to him. He kicked himself a little, explained how he was more concerned with my creatures than with actually ending me, and we agreed to play out the third game to kill time until the prize line died down. He mulligan'd to 5 on the play, got mana screwed anyways, and I pulled the win. 4-0 in my mind, 3-0-1 officially.
The rest of my sideboard, that which ended up in neither deck, was:
1x Detainment Spell
1x Ghost Tactician
1x Retether
2x Revered Dead
1x Bewilder
1x Jodah's Avenger
1x Paradox Haze
2x Primal Plasma
1x Prodigal Sorcerer
1x Ophidian Eye
1x Reality Acid
1x Shadow Sliver
1x Shaper Parasite
1x Slipstream Serpent
2x Veiling Oddity
1x Vscerid Deepwalker
1x Wistful Thinking
1x Aspect of Mongoose
2x Fa'adiyah Seer
1x Groundbreaker
1x Havenwood Wurm
1x Thrill of the Hunt
1x Bog Serpent
1x Brain Gorgers
1x Corpulent Corpse
1x Dark Withering
2x Dash Hopes
1x Dread Return
1x Melancholy
2x Midnight Charm
1x Mindlash Sliver
1 Mindslash
1x Shrouded Lore
1x Waning Wurm
1x Plunder
1x Coalition Victory
In retrospect, it was a really, really good pool. Not only did I get two completely playable decks made, but the cards I didn't play are the sorts of things other people would build their decks around.
In addition to my Oros, the Avenger promo card, the spoils of was are as follows (the very first one made me a happy man):
1x Mirri the Cursed
2x Blightspeaker
3x Bog Serpent
4x Brain Gorgers
1x Circle of Affliction
3x Dash Hopes
1x Deadly Grub
1x Dunerider Outlaw
1x Enslave
1x Imp's Mischief
1x Kor Dirge
1x Melancholy
4x Midnight Charm
1x Muck Drubb
1x Null Profusion
1x Phantasmagorian
3x Rathi Trapper
2x Ridged Kusite
1x Shrouded Lore
3x Spitting Sliver
1x Waning Wurm
1x Aquamorph Entity
1x Chronozoa
1x Dichotomancy
2x Erratic Mutation
1x Frozen AEther
5x Gossamer Phantasm
1x Magus of the Bazaar
2x Merfolk Thaumaturgist
1x Primal Plasma
1x Reality Acid
3x Shaper Parasite
1x Spellshift
2x Synchronous Sliver
3x Veiling Oddity
1x Venarian Glimmer
3x Wistful Thinking
1x Calciderm
2x Dawn Charm
3x Ghost Tactician
1x Magus of the Tabernacle
3x Pallid Mycoderm
4x Poultice Sliver
1x Revered Dead
1x Riftmarked Knight
1x Saltblast
2x Saltfield Recluse
1x Shade of Trokair
3x Sinew Sliver
4x Whitemane Lion
2x Citanul Woodreaders
2x Deadwood Treefolk
3x Essence Warden
1x Evolution Charm
1x Fa'adiyah Seer
1x Fungal Behemoth
1x Giant Dustwasp
1x Groundbreaker
2x Healing Leaves
1x Hedge Troll
1x Hunting Wilds
2x Kavu Predator
3x Mire Boa
3x Seal of Primordium
1x Sophic Centaur
3x Uktabi Drake
3x Utopia Vow
1x Vitaspore Thallid
2x Wild Pair
1x AEther Membrane3x Battering Sliver
1x Blood Knight
1x Boom // Bust
1x Brute Force
2x Dead // Gone
2x Dust Corona
1x Firefright Mage
2x Fury Charm
4x Keldon Marauders
1x Lavacore Elemental
4x Needlepeak Spider
1x Prodigal Pyromancer
2x Shivan Meteor
2x Shivan Wumpus
1x Simian Spirit Guide
2x Skirk Shaman
2x Stingscourger
2x Sulfur Elemental
2x Timecrafting
1x Dormant Sliver
The second flight wasn't nearly as interesting, nor as rewarding I'll go through that one later; now, it's about midnight and time for me to head to bed.
Yesterday was the prerelease. We were supposed to have a vast horde going up from Monterey -- my car full, Laurel's car full, and a couple of stranglers beyond that. And, in fact, we had just about as many people show up, but Laurel didn't came; she got sick or something.
Anyways. My car was me and four Air Force guys -- Robert, Bruce, Vo, and the kid (who I call the kid 1. because I never caught his name and 2. because after listening to some of the things he said I didn't really care to -- nice guy, just not quite my sort). For the record, Robert is now one of my favorite people, partially because he reminds me so much of Zach -- they look alike, they act alike, they even walk and talk alike. Seriously, it was kind of creepy, like Mirrodin block all over again.
Robert also helped me look over my decks and streamline them a bit more than I'd had them; deck-building is what I consider my weak point.
Flight One. I get a pool with Crovax, Ascendant Hero and Torchling. I build a red-white deck looking very much like this:
1x Blazing Blade Askari
1x Blood Knight
1x Fury Charm
1x Ghitu Firebreathing
1x Grapeshot
1x Keldon Halberdier
1x Keldon Mrauders
1x Sulfurous Blast
1x Torchling
1x Rough // Tumble
1x Amrou Seekers
1x Castle Raptors
1x Celestial Crusader
1x Crovax, Ascendant Hero
1x Flickering Spirit
1x Ivory Giant
1x Pentarch Ward
1x Outrider en-Kor
1x Tividar of Thorn
2x Whitemane Lion
1x Lotus Bloom
1x Thunder Totem
8x Mountain
9x Plains
The general idea was to swing hard and fast with little white guys, preferably building them up with Crovax and the Crusader; 4/4 Seekers are nice against almost any deck. Especially then Crovax shuts down lots of the useful goblins and wizards and other little things running around these days. The red was really just in there for support, a few more beats and some removal. The Marauders are really nice and Torchling single-handedly won me a game (the only one he showed up in).
The trouble is, and I noticed this as soon as I figured out what my deck was about (before Round 1) that I pretty much had a huge blindspot named 'White.' If my opponent was playing White, my Crovax/Crusader idea was shot down pretty quick, and my Red was too weak to really make up for it. So I pulled up my other cards and started playing around with the other nice cards I got -- namely, Verdant Embrace and Retether. I didn't have anything much to Retether, aside from the embrace, so that didn't make the cut, but I had something of a shaky White-Green saproling Horde deck going with a Sporesower Thallid and a Vitaspore Thallid. Here's where Rob came in and looked at the two decks I'd made and said I could probably pull from here and there and make a nice White-Red-Green deck, with Saprolings and Slivers -- I *did* have some nice Slivers (Trampling, Haste, Doublestrike, +2/+2), but they were all expensive. Round one began befoe we could re-stitch our abomination, so I played with the Crovax Crusader and resolved to figure the rest out with Rob after the match.
I made pretty tidy work of my opponent, going 2-0 rather swiftly, but Rob had more trouble with his. I sat down with the cards we'd pulled aside and started building my second deck. It was White-Red-Green now, heavier on the green but pulling in some slivers. I had Rob look at it (after he'd had a couple relax-me cigarettes; his round 1 wasn't as neat as mine), and he said it looked pretty solid. They called the next round before I could sleave it, so it was ready to play but I was hoping it wouldn't need to be. Luckily, it wasn't -- again, Crovax Crusader took me to a fairly neat 2-0 win.
I sleaved my deck, got some food, and had finished eating just after they called for round three. My opponent was some kid's mom, but she had the look (and record, I might add), of someone who knew what she was doing. And she did. She was also playing Red-White and, Torchling notwithstanding, doing a better job of it than I was. Drop, swing, drop, bounce, swing, burn. It hurt. So when I lost and we moved into game two, I sideboarded my whole deck, grey-sleeves for blue sleeves. It looked like this:
1x Ashcoat Bear
1x Citanul Woodreader
1x Essence Warden
1x Hedge Troll
1x Might Sliver
1x Mire Boa
1x Nantuko Shaman
2x Pouncing Wurm
1x Reflex Sliver
1x Search for Tomorrow
1x Sporesower Thallid
1x Utopia Vow
1x Verdant Embrace
1x Vitaspore Thallid
1x Quilled Sliver
1x Saltfield Recluse
1x Watch Sliver
2x Battering Sliver
1x Bonesplitter Sliver
1x Fury Sliver
1x Cautery Sliver
9x Forest
4x Plains
4x Mountan
My opponent hesitated before cutting, shocked to see blue-backed cards instead of grey. She guess that I'd sidded my whole deck, and wasn't sure how to process that. I went on to take the next two games fairly handily. The first saw a 7/7 Sporesower spitting of verdant Saprolings every upkeep with an Essence Warden in play. She was able to hit the Thallid with Temporal Isolation, but my swarm of saprolings still overthrew her. The next game saw a host of +2/+4 doublestriking trampler slivers end the game, even when she used Sudden Seizing to pit one Sliver against another.
My report doesn't show it, but strictly speaking that deck wasn't ready to play until that round, which is when I needed it. Nice.
Round 4, my opponent and I are both 3-0. The prizes are 16 packs for 4-0, 11 for 3-0-1, and 6 for 3-1. He offers a draw, we'd both get 11 packs. I'm feeling pretty goo at 3-0 and wouldn't be too put-out wth 6, so I opt not to and just to play it out. Game one sees me mulligan into no land and get thrashed. It was a close game, but he just had more than I could handle without the resources. He was playing Black-Red, though, so Crovax Crusader could pull the win. I didn't switch to The Second Coming.
Game 2... Game 2 was interesting. We were both going kind of slow, then he dropped an Eye of Urborg on me when I had 3 creatures -- the Recluce, the Seekers, and the Crusader. I take a hit, maybe two, then chump with the Recluse. Then I drop the Raptors. He swings into that, and I chump with it. He goes to put the 'dead' eye in his graveyard when I point out that my creature died before it got a chance to strike. He's a little disapointed with this news actually, in part because he now has three other mean-looking creatures on the table and, I imagine, no reliable way to end the eye.
One of the creatures has a Fire Whip -- tap to do a point to a target, and sac the whip to do a point to the target. He's hit me with the whip a few times now. I'm at 7 life. He's at 10. I have the Seekers and the Crusader, he has the Eye, the Whip, and a Smothering Soot in his graveyard waiting to kill a blocker. I draw a Thunder Idol and consider my options.
I'm on a clock of at most seven turns right now, less in actuality because one I'm out of blockers the eye ends me. I can't win if I don't damage him, and I can't rely on drawing into and kind of kill, mostly because any creatures will get fed to the eye almost as soon as they drop. I cast the idol and then make a stupid moved -- I attack with the Crusader.
Now, either the flying Crusader or the pseudo-Fear Seekers can hit him, and the Seekers actually hit for more. However, the Crusader makes my creatures bigger, and if I use him to chump (or he died to soot), I lose one of my key winning points. Swinging with him does two things, neither of which I was aware of when I swung -- first it damages my opponent, and second it removed him as a blocking 'threat' to his eye. That's the dumb mistake there -- now he's free to soot the Seekers and swing for the game.
Luckily for me, he made a dumb mistake, too. Tap the Whip carrier to do a point to the Crusader, then sac the Whip to do another point and kill the crusader. I pass the turn, he soots my Seeker. He swings for 6, I announce that I'm at 1, and we sit in a kind of stunned silence. He'd read the board as well as I did, it had said I was a deadman, and now my opponent was shocked and confused by the fact that I was, indeed, not dead. He passed the turn.
My board position was better than I report it; I can't remember exactly what was on the board or how it played out, but I was able to recover my standing, hold the eye back, and eventually swing for the game with a Fury Charm'd trampler, all because he killed my creature when he could have killed me. I won because of his play mistake.
And I was terrified. I calmly noted that we were now 1-1, and would he like to just call it a draw anyways? He said yes, and I then pointed his play mistake out to him. He kicked himself a little, explained how he was more concerned with my creatures than with actually ending me, and we agreed to play out the third game to kill time until the prize line died down. He mulligan'd to 5 on the play, got mana screwed anyways, and I pulled the win. 4-0 in my mind, 3-0-1 officially.
The rest of my sideboard, that which ended up in neither deck, was:
1x Detainment Spell
1x Ghost Tactician
1x Retether
2x Revered Dead
1x Bewilder
1x Jodah's Avenger
1x Paradox Haze
2x Primal Plasma
1x Prodigal Sorcerer
1x Ophidian Eye
1x Reality Acid
1x Shadow Sliver
1x Shaper Parasite
1x Slipstream Serpent
2x Veiling Oddity
1x Vscerid Deepwalker
1x Wistful Thinking
1x Aspect of Mongoose
2x Fa'adiyah Seer
1x Groundbreaker
1x Havenwood Wurm
1x Thrill of the Hunt
1x Bog Serpent
1x Brain Gorgers
1x Corpulent Corpse
1x Dark Withering
2x Dash Hopes
1x Dread Return
1x Melancholy
2x Midnight Charm
1x Mindlash Sliver
1 Mindslash
1x Shrouded Lore
1x Waning Wurm
1x Plunder
1x Coalition Victory
In retrospect, it was a really, really good pool. Not only did I get two completely playable decks made, but the cards I didn't play are the sorts of things other people would build their decks around.
In addition to my Oros, the Avenger promo card, the spoils of was are as follows (the very first one made me a happy man):
1x Mirri the Cursed
2x Blightspeaker
3x Bog Serpent
4x Brain Gorgers
1x Circle of Affliction
3x Dash Hopes
1x Deadly Grub
1x Dunerider Outlaw
1x Enslave
1x Imp's Mischief
1x Kor Dirge
1x Melancholy
4x Midnight Charm
1x Muck Drubb
1x Null Profusion
1x Phantasmagorian
3x Rathi Trapper
2x Ridged Kusite
1x Shrouded Lore
3x Spitting Sliver
1x Waning Wurm
1x Aquamorph Entity
1x Chronozoa
1x Dichotomancy
2x Erratic Mutation
1x Frozen AEther
5x Gossamer Phantasm
1x Magus of the Bazaar
2x Merfolk Thaumaturgist
1x Primal Plasma
1x Reality Acid
3x Shaper Parasite
1x Spellshift
2x Synchronous Sliver
3x Veiling Oddity
1x Venarian Glimmer
3x Wistful Thinking
1x Calciderm
2x Dawn Charm
3x Ghost Tactician
1x Magus of the Tabernacle
3x Pallid Mycoderm
4x Poultice Sliver
1x Revered Dead
1x Riftmarked Knight
1x Saltblast
2x Saltfield Recluse
1x Shade of Trokair
3x Sinew Sliver
4x Whitemane Lion
2x Citanul Woodreaders
2x Deadwood Treefolk
3x Essence Warden
1x Evolution Charm
1x Fa'adiyah Seer
1x Fungal Behemoth
1x Giant Dustwasp
1x Groundbreaker
2x Healing Leaves
1x Hedge Troll
1x Hunting Wilds
2x Kavu Predator
3x Mire Boa
3x Seal of Primordium
1x Sophic Centaur
3x Uktabi Drake
3x Utopia Vow
1x Vitaspore Thallid
2x Wild Pair
1x AEther Membrane3x Battering Sliver
1x Blood Knight
1x Boom // Bust
1x Brute Force
2x Dead // Gone
2x Dust Corona
1x Firefright Mage
2x Fury Charm
4x Keldon Marauders
1x Lavacore Elemental
4x Needlepeak Spider
1x Prodigal Pyromancer
2x Shivan Meteor
2x Shivan Wumpus
1x Simian Spirit Guide
2x Skirk Shaman
2x Stingscourger
2x Sulfur Elemental
2x Timecrafting
1x Dormant Sliver
The second flight wasn't nearly as interesting, nor as rewarding I'll go through that one later; now, it's about midnight and time for me to head to bed.
