For Public Transport!

I prefer taking public transport to work. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate the value of public transport – either that or I’m super lucky every damn day. 1. Public transport is cheap – It’s the cheapest way to get someone else to drive you places. Your total fares per day may seem high (mine is RM 8.10) – but the fact is that in Kuala Lumpur, RM 8.10 is barely enough to cover your parking charges, let alone your fuel and road toll costs. For me, RM 8.10 a day is get someone else to drive you home is a bargain! That comes up to RM 178.20 a month, considering that the average month has roughly 22 working days.

2. Public transport is faster – This may seem counterintuitive, and this is because it’s not always true. However, this holds true for me. Despite the fact that I take one monorail, one light rail transit train AND one bus home (that’s three different modes of public transport – and three sessions of waiting for something to come), I actually get home on average half an hour earlier than if I were to drive every day. How is this possible? Traffic jams. Taking two trains that can’t be obstructed by cars saves me an enormous amount of time. If the bus frequency were actually regular (which it isn’t thanks to traffic jams), I would be able to get home 45 minutes to an hour earlier on average (of course, this is an example of faulty logic, since if it didn’t jam, I could get home in 30 minutes – public transport would take 50 minutes if it didn’t jam – but if it did jam, driving would take 1 hour 45 minutes on average and public transport would get me home in an average 1 hour 15 minutes including waiting time).

3. Public transport alleviates stress – Public transport is simple. You get on the train. Squeeze with people until the desired stop and get off. Yes, this is less comfortable than a car. But getting squished by other people isn’t so bad compared to braving Kuala Lumpur’s jams. Imagine being squished in your car by other cars. And buses. And motorcycles. Then, imagine moving inches at a time. On public transport, I can be reading a newspaper, listening to music or even playing a video game. If I were in a car, I can’t do any of those – I’d then lose my spot to some crazy driver who is trying to play bumper cars in real life.

Those are the three main advantages for public transport I can think of. There are numerous others. I am aware of the many problems with Malaysian public transport, among them being bus frequency (actually a fault of the traffic jams – and is really a chicken and egg problem), reliability, overcrowding, etc. but I think the chief reason is people making excuses not to take it. There are always a few genuine excuses in there, like there’s no bus going to my housing estate and so on – but I’m highly doubtful that that many of the drivers in KL can honestly claim that. Part of public transport is finding your way around – and it may surprise you how fast it can be, despite the number of interchanges you might need to make. There’s also an impression that only lower income people should take the bus – this is incorrect. Go to any developed country and look at who takes the buses.

Worldwake's Effect on Standard

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.)

[deck title=Niels Viaene - Open the Vaults] [lands] 2 Celestial Colonnade 4 Glacial Fortress 4 Island 2 Kabira Crossroads 2 Marsh Flats 3 Plains 1 Swamp 2 Terramorphic Expanse [/lands] [creatures] 4 Architects of Will 4 Filigree Angel 4 Glassdust Hulk 1 Sharuum the Hegemon 4 Sphinx of Lost Truths [/creatures] [others] 3 Courier's Capsule 3 Day of Judgment 2 Fieldmist Borderpost 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor 2 Journey to Nowhere 1 Mistvein Borderpost 3 Oblivion Ring 4 Open the Vaults 4 Spreading Seas [/others] [sideboard] 1 Day of Judgment 3 Flashfreeze 2 Hindering Light 1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor 2 Journey to Nowhere 4 Negate 1 Oblivion Ring 1 Sanguine Bond [/sideboard] [/deck]

I'm not really sure how the deck works, but the idea appears to be to keep the board clear of creatures with [card]Day of Judgment[/card], [card]Oblivion Ring[/card] and [card]Journey to Nowhere[/card] while maintaining some card advantage with [card]Courier's Capsule[/card] and [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card].

When you've stabilized, depending on what's in your hand, you swing with one of your big creatures - be it [card]Sharuum the Hegemon[/card], attacking with your [card]Celestial Colonnade[/card] or more likely, either a [card]Filigree Angel[/card] or [card]Glassdust Hulk[/card].

Although there are four copies of [card]Sphinx of Lost Truths[/card], I think that the [card]Sphinx of Lost Truths[/card] and [card]Open the Vaults[/card] 'combo' is probably not reliable enough to count on going off often enough (especially since it's really only awesome with [card]Filigree Angel[/card] in your graveyard or [card]Glassdust Hulk[/card] on the table - rather situational to me).

The synergy between [card]Open the Vaults[/card] 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.

Thinking About Video Games

This week, February and March seems to be video game season again. Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2 and Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth come out within weeks of each other. And Final Fantasy XIII is soon to come.

Doesn't it feel like end of the year holiday season? It sure does to me. I'm beginning to wonder if some of these releases were pushed back - sometimes one would think the answer is yes.

What to do with testing information?

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 [card]Knight of the Reliquary[/card] or [card]Esper Charm[/card] for [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card].

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 [card]Luminarch Ascension[/card] – 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 [card]Khalni Heart Expedition[/card] gets ready to chop his life count via [card]Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle[/card].

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 [card]Terramorphic Expanse[/card]s – 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

[deck title=All-In-Red][land] 14 Mountain [/land] [creatures] 4 Demigod of Revenge 4 Deus of Calamity 1 Dominus of Fealty 3 Magus of the Moon 4 Simian Spirit Guide [/creatures] [other spells] 4 Desperate Ritual 4 Manamorphose 4 Seething Song 4 Empty the Warrens 4 Rite of Flame 3 Blood Moon 2 Chalice of the Void 4 Chrome Mox 1 Chandra Ablaze [/other spells] [/deck]

This deck is a fun, fast deck that proves Magic is still an unpredictable game.

The deck aims to do two things - play [card]Blood Moon[/card] or [card]Magus of the Moon[/card] 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 [card]Empty the Warrens[/card] - 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 [card]Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs[/card] - but I bet in some metagames he's way awesome.