Sunday report: Quick update

I played in a 4 round FNM. Here is how it went
Game 1 I was against UW deck. Game 1 I won with well timed thoughtseizes, in game 2 I lost to double aetherling and a bunch of detention spheres. In game 3, it went to time, and I was able to get a draw but really I would have lost because I thoughtseized an aetherling from him, but then he used elixer of immortality and got one off the top on his next draw that I couldn't deal with.
I don't know, in this match, it just seemed like I had to hope to strip aetherling and elspeth was very annoying but managable with whip of erebos.
So I drew in round 1.

In round 2 I played against RG devotion. I went 2-0, I basically killed off as much stuff as possible early and was able to hero's downfall or attack his planeswalkers, making sure his board state never got out of control.

In round 3, I played against an esper deck. I lost game 1, but after boarding in erebos's and duresses and LBZ I was able to strip BBoV and keep him from gaining life with sphinx's. Game 3 I drew timely far/away's to deal with BBoV and won.

In round 4, I went up against mono red devotion. I barely won game 1 off of whip of erebos regaining me life and nightveil specter pulling mountains and then additional blockers for me. In game 2, I drew 3 pharika's cures which helped me stall for such a long time and let me win.

So I ended up going 3-0-1. I really wish I would have considered gainsay. I think it might have been nice at countering detention sphere and aetherling. I don't know, those feel like the worst cards for me to play against.

I have been thinking of going 4 temple of silence and just playing sin collector. But I'm not sure. I don't like the fact that I essentially have 8 CIPT lands (watery grave, I feel like I usually want it to CIPT). I really like splashing a color because mono black, while powerful, feels like it has glaring weaknesses, but I don't like the inconsistency of not having blue or so many different lands that pain me or cipt. Maybe I'm just hard to please haha.
However, I do think that I will try out gainsay. I hate that I feel that UWx feels like my hardest uphill matchup every time all the time. I really just want my SB to be 4 duress 4 gainsay but I know that I need the SB slots for other things.

Thirsty Thursday: Mono black with blue splash

So last time I did a deck tech, it was right after States when I played Junk Midrange. However, as time has passed since then, I have realized that the deck had a big problem, it's mana base. I would constantly lose because of my own mana base. If I drew mana correctly, I had a 60% or better chance to win (with mono blue devotion being about 55%) according to the numbers and games I played.

So, my quest to re-do the deck went underway. I still feel that junk (with a proper manabase) is one of the strongest decks in the format. However, I went from junk to golgari midrange. From there, I have gone to mono black after seeing it's great success and the fact that every matchup is 50% or better. I like those odds.

So, I have lately been running Owen Turtenwald's GP winning list. You can view it here:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/gpabq13/welcome

However, I wanted to try to change it up a bit, based on what I've read and seen, I have taken a slight twist to the deck. Is it any good or better? Maybe, but most likely probably not. However, I thought I'd do a deck tech on it. I plan on going to FNM with it tomorrow so we'll see!

The deck at a glance:

//land
13 swamp
4 mutavault
4 watery grave
4 temple of deceit

//creatures
4 gray merchant of asphodel
3 desecration demon
4 pack rat
4 nightveil specter
1 erebos, god of the dead

//spells
2 dimir charm
4 thoughtseize
4 hero's downfall
1 ultimate price
1 whip of erebos
4 underworld connections
3 far//away

//sideboard
4 pharika's cure
4 lifebane zombie
1 doom blade
1 dark betrayal
1 far//away
2 duress
2 erebos, god of the dead

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Now let's talk about some of the cards and decisions

So mutavault is the first card I want to talk about. I think it is too integral to not run. The synergy between it and pack rat is too good, that I think running four of both is key. Additionally, it can block pro black stuff (biggest thing is blood baron of vizkopa!). It allows you to go from midrange to very aggressive and I think having four is a very good call, despite all others only running 2-3 when splashing.

Desecration demon is a great card. 6/6 flier for 4cmc. It is something that is very good and acts as pseudo removal on its own. However, with the way that the meta is shaping itself, with more white weenie, aggro, and blue devotion making itself well known, this card is not doing as well as it was a few weeks ago. Additionally, since I am not running devour flesh (to gain my self some life) this card is less good as well. It still is a great card, but that is my justification to only run 3 when most run 4 regardless of splash.

In testing, this card has been amazing. Most 2 cmc removal is conditional, and you must pick based on meta shifts, but I think right now this is a good call. In every matchup there are things you will want to hit with it. Most notably, it hits master of waves, nightveil specter, and pretty much anything from an aggro deck. Its other modes are also relevant. Countering an anger of the gods, mizzium mortars, thoughtseize can all be good. Additionally, vs control, getting to fateseal after a scry can be good as well. However, I realize there are some decks that this card is bad in (G/W comes to mind) and for this reason I only run 2 that way I can board them out and board in the correct removal.

This is a card that I constantly think if I want to cut or not. However, right now, I think it is fine as a 1 of. It gives good contingency if I decide to start discarding things to pack rat, it gives lifelink which can become very important vs aggro or the mirror match as well. Additionally, it can make pack rat token permanent when it reanimates pack rat. This would be the 4th desecration demon if it were to be taken out.

The original reason to splash blue. Being able to far something that has pro black (blood baron) is very good, it acts as devour flesh as well for 1 more mana. For 5 mana you get to take care of 2 of your opponents creatures, something that this deck I think needs. Last standard there was mutilate and barter in blood. I feel that this can act as a pseudo barter in blood that has some flexibilty. Additionally, you can use Far to unsummon your own gray merchant to recast it! Or, more importantly, to counter a detention sphere's target triggered ability.
The only thing to consider is that I have 4 in my 75, something to debate as well.

Finally, a sideboard card. This will be the only sideboard card I talk about, I think the rest are pretty self explanatory. With my changes, I feel that I lose some power to G/W (as mentioned above) and G/R devotion decks. That is why I up this card to 4. Additionally, this card can hit blood baron of vizkopa or boros reckoner. This card is essentially unblockable outside of the mono black mirror match, which is an argument to bring him in any game that you have additional slots.






Anyway, that is my standard deck in its current form. I don't know if it's better than going back to Owen's original list. In testing vs mono blue and esper, it has done very well. I will let you know how it goes this weekend though!

Casual quizzes

So, I am here to talk about something that anyone can do on MTGO. And that is Academy Quizbot! (Spelled Academy_QuizBot)

With this bot, you can trade this bot once a week. If you can answer its question correctly you get 3 free cards it has in its collection. It has tons of commons and uncommons. It's just a fun way to spend 5 minutes getting those couple of commons if you are a budget player or cards for your commander deck.

Now, here is the question I got this week,

Can you answer it? Without looking at the back of a magic card (like I did?) haha

Modest Monday: Theros sealed practice, conclusion

So, last week I showed you the sealed pool I had. Well, this is the deck I ultimately ended up with

I honestly felt like going into red was a trap. I felt like White might be a good color to go with black. I had two scourgemarks and a erebo's emissary and white had good heroic cards, blue also looked strong with the god sea's revenge and curse of the swine. But I just went with this because it seemed more aggressive and stormbreath dragon looks like it can just close games on its own. However, I want you guys to note that even though I have more red cards, I really feel like black is the strongest color in this pool.
Traveler's amulet seems really loose and bad, but oh well. It's what I went with. One thing I quickly discovered was that I like constructing paper decks over doing them on MTGO. There is a lot less space to spread out your cards, etc.

---

So round 1, I played against someone playing simic splash black

Here was the results of game 1:

As you can see, my RB aggro start was good.

Game 2 wasn't so good, I just couldnt' deal with prognostic sphinx

So game 3, I decided to take a risk and go transformative

Curse of the swine did so much work!!! It was a super board sweep with X=4

 There you can see my opponent decides not to block my triton hunter, I discard two creatures and have just enough to drain with gray merchant.

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So round 2, I had the perfect curve my opponent couldn't deal with in game 1:

Game 2 was close, I was holding most of the cards the entire game but my opponent decided to get mad and say I was lucky:

I mean most of those cards were cards I had in my hand the entire game, like the gray merchant etc. I ember swallow'd early because I was getting mana flooded and was stuck on 4 lands post ember swallower for a long time. I mean it's not like he had his own bombs of gray merchant as well or nighthowler... Oh well

---

So I played out round 3. However, I forgot to take screenshots as my second round was short and I left for a while, when I came back a few minutes had gone by and I was nervous! The guy had a white red deck that was heroic centric and had lots of combat tricks!

However, here is the results:

Theros sealed practice

So I decided to go onto MTGO and play a theros 6 pack sealed (in preperation for GP Sacramento right?)
Anyway, here is the sealed pool I opened

How would you have built this? Comment below! Think this is a good sealed pool, bad? Any and all comments!

Let me know in the comments! Next time I will show what I built and how well I did!

Link to the above picture for easier viewing maybe: http://i.imgur.com/HJk49n0.jpg

Theros Drafting for fun

So I decided to do a THS draft on MTGO. P1P1 I got a reaper of the wilds and kept getting black passed to me, I saw black was pretty open. I was pretty sure that most people were going some type of heroic.

Anyway, here is what I was left with after the opening:

There were hardly any removal that I saw! I took sip of hemlock which was like pick 6 in that pack.
I took the fabled hero because I didn't want to lose to it. It is just too good of a card. I took the asps early because if you can get them online they are hard to get rid of (dodges all burn and the lash), additionally, with all the mana ramp I have in the deck, I look like I should be able to do decently, right?


Anyway, game 1. Here was the only screenshot I bothered to get:

As you can see, I am going to play mogi's maurader on attack for just enough lethal on my turn.
However, game 2. I draw my 7. No lands. Draw my 6, 1 land. Draw my 5, 1 land. I keep that hand because I don't want to mulligan to 4. This is after I sideboarded in an extra forest. I never drew another land and he was stuck on 3 lands that whole game. It was brutal.
So the event crashed during my game 3, so I am waiting for a response from wizards on that...
Anyway, since I haven't done anything on MTGO in a while, thought I'd share. Thanks for reading!

Evaluation of Standard

Every standard season that I have ever played in, I always hear people saying how much they hate it. How much it is stale.
However, I feel like these people are complaining. Usually they are people who did well with a deck last season who are not doing well now. For example, people who loved Jund in INN-RTR who can't play such a powerhouse of a deck now, say they hate standard. However, I do not think Standard is stale. In many ways, it's a fun format because of the fact that the decks rotate every 6ish months. We

Although powerful, it was not oppressive last season

have barely had theros for a few months and people already are calling it stale! But those same people don't find modern stale! Especially at the local level, it's going to be the same few decks that everyone plays (because modern decks are 2 or 3 times more expensive), and the modern meta isn't that diverse either. BGx, UWR, Splinter twin, affinity, pod, and tron are basically the main decks that are considered tier 1. That's the same number of decks that would be considered tier 1 in standard at the moment: mono black, mono blue, esper, RG devotion, Rx aggro, and Gxx midrange.

Anyway, my rant aside, I wanted to talk about standard seasons that were TRUELY STALE. What do I mean by this? In my opinion, I think a stale environment would be one where this is a best deck. Even decks that are meant to beat the best deck don't do very well against said deck. These seasons are stale, in my opinion, because everyone is going to be playing the same deck, it's going to be a ton of mirror matches and similar games, and luck is going to play a bigger factor than it normally would.

Going backwards, the most recent standard season that was stale, in my opinion, was ROE-SOM standard. This was the infamous cawblade season.
What made this season so powerful?

AKA: Jace the wallet shredder

Jace the mind sculptor. The prior season, Jace was kept in check by jund, particularly blood braid elf (cascade into blightning? Means a dead jace and discarded cards). However, now that jace was unchecked, he was king to rule all. Everyone played this deck. Jace, on his own, was powerful. I mean you get to brainstorm every turn, and you had the worldwake fetches to shuffle away the two cards you wanted! But SOM added the powerful swords to the mix, stoneforge mystic and squadron

Ms. Anti-Jace

hawk became extremely powerful as they could easily grab and carry a sword to your opponent's face. Additionally, SOM also added phyrexian mana, essentially free spells such as gitaxian probe, mental misstep for faster decks that would try to combat jace, and such. This format even had baneslayer in it!!
This season was extremely one sided, as every match was cawblade vs cawblade.
This season also saw a lot of people leaving the format. Probably because of the dominance of the most powerful deck being so expensive (Jace x4 and baneslayer x4 meant over 400 dollars right there!)

Here is a sample list from the era:

• 4  Celestial Colonnade
  4  Glacial Fortress
  5  Island
  1  Misty Rainforest
  4  Plains
  4  Seachrome Coast
  4  Tectonic Edge
• 4  Squadron Hawk
• 4  Stoneforge Mystic
• 4  Day of Judgment
• 1  Deprive
• 3  Mana Leak
• 4  Preordain
• 4  Spell Pierce
• 1  Stoic Rebuttal
• 1  Sword of Feast and Famine
• 1  Sylvok Lifestaff
• 3  Gideon Jura
• 4  Jace, the Mind Sculptor

 So, the next big deck to talk about was faeries! This was a monster of a deck that oppressed many during the TSP-LOR season. I mean, let's talk about faeries for a minute. Bitterblossom, one of the most feared cards during the time is banned in modern for no reason other than the fact that it was once oppressive!

Combined with spellstutter sprite, it was pretty much a hard counter! Bitterblossom pretty much just

So much rage when you play this

made your army on your own, while you could spend all your resources to just countering what your opponent did. If you did, you could get to a point where mistbind clique could just lock someone out of the game, especially if you had two on the field.
This season even had damnation! Black wrath of god, to deal with fast aggro decks or for the mirror match of bitterblossom armies! Back that up with cryptic command, one of the best counter spells ever created, and you had a monster of a deck! It even had thoughtseize!
This season was essentially a field where you played faeries or anti-faeries. However, faeries for the most part was extremely dominant, with it only losing power because of rotation.


Here is a sample list from that era:

• 2  Faerie Conclave
  4  Island
  4  Mutavault
  2  Pendelhaven
  3  River of Tears
  4  Secluded Glen
  2  Sunken Ruins
  4  Underground River
• 4  Mistbind Clique
• 4  Scion of Oona
• 4  Spellstutter Sprite
• 3  Vendilion Clique
• 4  Ancestral Vision
• 4  Bitterblossom
• 4  Cryptic Command
• 4  Rune Snag
• 4  Terror

 
The next deck I am going to talk about is one of the most infamous decks in standard, affinity.
This deck was blazing fast, where anti-artifact decks could not even keep up!

The iconic card of affinity. Funny enough, it doesn't have the affinity keyword

 Turn 1 disciple of the vault, turn 2 arcbound ravager, ornithopter, and you get free frogmites with your artifact lands! Turn 3 after you attack with a buffed up army, you get to sacrifice everything to ravager so you can drain them with disciple!
The deck was TOO efficient. Thoughtcast, you get to draw 2 cards for 1 blue. You get 2/2 and 4/4 for free. Wizards had already banned skullclamp, but it wasn't enough to stop this powerhouse.
This deck was so oppressive, wizards banned so many cards for it in standard including ravager, the artifact lands, disciple, and aether vial!

Here is a deck from that era:

• 4  Blinkmoth Nexus
  3  Darksteel Citadel
  1  Glimmervoid
  4  Great Furnace
  4  Seat of the Synod
  4  Vault of Whispers
• 4  Arcbound Ravager
• 4  Arcbound Worker
• 3  Atog
• 4  Disciple of the Vault
• 4  Frogmite
• 4  Myr Enforcer
• 1  Myr Retriever
• 4  Aether Vial
• 4  Chromatic Sphere
• 4  Cranial Plating
• 4  Thoughtcast

The next oppressive deck is one called academy. This one was before my time in magic, but I had heard a lot about it from other players. It essentially was boring because it was a turn 1 solitare into a win with it's flagship card, tolarian academy.

With the craziness that was urza's saga and all the powerful artifacts that it produced, it's no wonder that the BEST deck was one that utilized the above land with synergistic artifacts. The problem was that it came down to a coin flip. Who gets to go first wins. No force of will type of effects in the format.

Here is a decklist from the era:

• 4  Ancient Tomb
  9  Island
  4  Tolarian Academy
• 1  Capsize
• 3  Intuition
• 4  Lotus Petal
• 4  Mana Vault
• 4  Mind Over Matter
• 4  Mox Diamond
• 4  Power Sink
• 3  Scroll Rack
• 4  Stroke of Genius
• 4  Time Spiral
• 4  Voltaic Key
• 4  Windfall

The final deck I'll post is necro. I know that when this deck was around, you could just not beat it.

 Necropotence, aside from yawgmoth's bargain, is one of the greatest card advantage engines ever. I think of current standard and mono black devotion, and if underworld connections was this card, it

Such strong discard

would by far be the best deck. Necro had some of the best 1 for 1 removal, had discard spells such as hymn to tourach! and had hypnotic specter, a key card in the old days! It also had dark ritual so you could do this turn 1! Decks that were meant to beat it could just not beat the card advantage that necropotence accumulated.

A final sample decklist:

• 1  City of Brass
  1  Lava Tubes
  4  Mountain
  1  Strip Mine
  4  Sulfurous Springs
  12  Swamp
• 4  Black Knight
• 4  Hypnotic Specter
• 2  Knight of Stromgald
• 4  Order of the Ebon Hand
• 1  Black Vise
• 4  Dark Ritual
• 3  Drain Life
• 1  Fireball
• 1  Hymn to Tourach
• 3  Incinerate
• 4  Lightning Bolt
• 3  Necropotence
• 2  Shatter
• 1  Zuran Orb

So, in conclusion I think that standard hasn't been stale or oppressive. There is no one best deck, the format is much more of a rock paper scissors format, which I think is healthy for a metagame in my opinion.  If anyone thinks the current format standard is stale and oppressive now, I would like for them to think of these standard seasons instead.
Instead, I think the current standard season is healthy. There is no best deck, as evidenced by the various SCG opens and GPs lately. I think it is healthy because it also is a bit more user friendly, and standard is THE format for new players to get into as it has the newest cards, and limited is usually more skill intensive and intimidating for a newer player. I hope that people embrace standard instead.