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Magic: the Gathering
Deck Resilience
by cfgt on Feb.26, 2010, under Magic: the Gathering
I’m a player who’s interested in one turn wins. However, recently, I’ve moved my focus to more resilient decks. Decks that win in a single turn usually aren’t very resilient.
Take for example, a Mycosynth Golem deck I used to play.
My slight change allowed the deck the win in one turn – but the deck is easily stopped by something as trivial as a single Essence Scatter. Unfortunately, awesome one turn wins are easily stopped – so they generally fail at being resilient. Does that mean that I should stop playing them? Absolutely not. There’s nothing quite like going from doing absolutely nothing – to doing absolutely everything.
One of the easiest ways to build a resilient deck strategy is redundancy. Four copies of every card! Multiple functional copies of the same card! Multiple combos! If each of your cards will be a problem, can you imagine drawing into multiples? Having four copies help. Having multiple functional copies = more copies of the same card. Can you imagine how consistent you’ll be at having 3 mana by turn 2 if you played 4 copies each of Birds of Paradise, Arbor Elf and Llanowar Elves? Multiple combos makes things even better – they can deal with one combo – only to run into the next one they usually can’t deal with. In addition, your deck becomes unpredictable. You can win one of many ways – but you only need to pull off one. Redundancy has its problems – there are a lot of cards you don’t want to draw too many of.
Another way to be resilient is to be able to deal with the problems other decks give you. This is what a lot of decks do. If you can deal with anything your opponent can throw at you, they’ve then got nothing. If you know that you’re weak against a 20/20 Marit Lage token from Dark Depths, then you should have an answer – be it Path to Exile or Into the Roil.
You could also just play great cards. Every deck has a finite number of answers. You can always have more problems than solutions for your opponent. If you play a 2/3 on turn one, followed by a 3/4 on turn two, and then you follow with a 4/5 on turn three, and then an Umezawa's Jitte on turn four, you’re well on your way to winning. To me, the best strategy is simply playing great cards – it’s also the easiest. Continuously playing cards your opponents have to deal with is great.
There can also be another way to have resilience – resistance to removal. If you play a lot of good cards requiring your opponents to have very specific hate cards, you can count on your threats staying on the table a lot longer. An example would be anything with shroud. Calcite Snapper is good for precisely this reason. Protection is also a bane for a lot of decks: Kor Firewalker and Great Sable Stag are both stubborn enough to stay around for a long time. It’s also why something like Progenitus is so darn difficult to get rid of. There are also other ways to be resilient against removal – a good example would be the ability to recur from the graveyard – Bloodghast and Stinkweed Imp are both ridiculously good at this. There are other ways to be dodge solutions – but that would be a story for another day. (Arcbound Ravager is an example of that.)
Having a good late game plan is also never a bad idea. Many decks have a good early game – but at the cost of their late game plan. Having cards that are equally devastating regardless of when you play it is great – especially if you expect to run into a lot of slower control decks that are full of enough answers. It is for this reason having a deck filled with 12 mana producing creatures is a bad idea – but it’s rarely a bad thing to draw a Baneslayer Angel or even a simple card like Lightning Bolt.
Why this new obsession over resilience? I don’t really know. That’s just how it is now. I decided that for now, I’d rather play a deck that can win against just about anything, rather than a deck that can win against most things.
Worldwake’s Effect on Standard
by cfgt on Feb.21, 2010, under Magic: the Gathering
Looking at PT San Diego's Top 8 decklists is kind of disappointing.
It's unfortunately, but it looks like little from Worldwake is changing anything, yet. I'm guessing me thinking people would be able to build, test and optimize new decks was a little optimistic.
All that was really new was an Open the Vaults deck making Top 8. I think. (I'm terribly outdated in this department.)
Niels Viaene - Open the Vaults
I'm not really sure how the deck works, but the idea appears to be to keep the board clear of creatures with Day of Judgment, Oblivion Ring and Journey to Nowhere while maintaining some card advantage with Courier's Capsule and Jace, the Mind Sculptor.
When you've stabilized, depending on what's in your hand, you swing with one of your big creatures – be it Sharuum the Hegemon, attacking with your Celestial Colonnade or more likely, either a Filigree Angel or Glassdust Hulk.
Although there are four copies of Sphinx of Lost Truths, I think that the Sphinx of Lost Truths and Open the Vaults ‘combo' is probably not reliable enough to count on going off often enough (especially since it's really only awesome with Filigree Angel in your graveyard or Glassdust Hulk on the table – rather situational to me).
The synergy between Open the Vaults and a lot of cards in the deck is notable – because you play it late in the game – when most people have exhausted their cards trying to deal with you.
What to do with testing information?
by cfgt on Feb.15, 2010, under Magic: the Gathering
Now that you’ve tested your deck, pre-sideboard, post-sideboard and maybe even against itself (arguably a pretty important match up), what do you do with the information you have?
You have to think of changes to make for your deck. Remember that list of key cards you should’ve made? These are the cards you should be looking at keeping – or making better by putting other cards that work well with these cards, like fetchlands for Knight of the Reliquary or Esper Charm for Bloodbraid Elf.
Too much of a good thing can be bad. If you have a lot of cards doing the same thing, they could hurt you in a different matchup. If you find yourself losing to a particular deck quite badly – think about why. It could be because you don’t have any flying creatures. It could also be because you don’t have a blocker – these things happen when your deck has too narrow a focus, and only wants to keep trouncing a particular type of deck, rather than the whole range of them.
Sometimes, you might have to trade a whole set of key cards for another, simply to give you a better chance against a particular deck – this could change your deck’s focus, or it might simply streamline your deck’s theme. Be sure to be mindful of this – I did this when I switched from Naya Ramp to Naya Zoo – and while they might share a similar mana base, the deck’s strategy, speed and methods changed entirely. This might not be to your liking.
It’s just as important to like the changes as it is to change your deck. Transforming your deck from simple Unearth + Discard strategy to a pure Unearth combo strategy could easily turn it from mediocre to awesome – but if you don’t like how a pure Unearth combo strategy plays – there’s really no point. The point to playing Magic is to have fun. If you can’t win with it, have fun with it.
There’s really nothing quite as exciting as pulling off that Luminarch Ascension – over say, simply attacking with small white creatures. It’s rewarding to make your own strategy work rather than use someone else’s tried and tested crazy token deck instead of building your own token producing engine. It’s also fun to watch your opponent’s get a sense of foreboding as your innocuous looking Khalni Heart Expedition gets ready to chop his life count via Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.
Sometimes your deck just doesn’t work out – it doesn’t matter how much testing you do, how much tuning you do – you just keep losing. Don't keep working at it – try a new deck. Sometimes the deck simply doesn't suit your play style, and sometimes it just simply doesn't work. Some decks sound like awesome ideas – but they have some vulnerability only a larger card pool could fix. When rotation came along, the deck may have lost only a few important cards – but sometimes that's enough to take it from the top to being just mediocre.
A note – if you recall, many years ago I talked about why you might want to play 61 cards. However, fetchlands provide many of the advantages of playing 61 cards – while allowing you to play a 60 card deck. Fetchlands easily provide that half-a-land effect needed for that just-right land ratio – they also thin your deck of lands for the latter half of the game – so there’s really no good reason to play 61 cards currently. So don’t. (If you’re poor like me, play Panoramas and Terramorphic Expanses – unless your deck absolutely needs to have less comes into play tapped enter the battlefield tapped lands)
The most important thing to learn from testing is how to play your deck. There’s nothing more embarrassing like playing TEPS and not knowing how to pull off the turn 1 win.
Deck : All-In-Red / Demigod Stompy
by cfgt on Feb.12, 2010, under Magic: the Gathering
All-In-Red
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This deck is a fun, fast deck that proves Magic is still an unpredictable game.
The deck aims to do two things – play Blood Moon or Magus of the Moon early enough to screw most other Extended format decks over – punishing them for their over reliance on nonbasic lands for mana and their mana fixing. The other is to drop something big and scary that costs 5 mana.
There's also always Empty the Warrens – with its Storm count being fueled with your mana spells for extra craziness.
Every once in a while you can pull off the turn 1 drop – and really wreck their day. I haven't tried the deck with Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs – but I bet in some metagames he's way awesome.
