Mistform Monday: Commencing Operation Hungry Hungry Hydra

Hi again. We're back with my first impressions of the Face the Hydra deck released to the public from WotC this past Game Day. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Game Day and play in both the standard and bonus hydra event but was very happy to hear that MGR did well. Inspired by his heroic success, I decided it was time to jump into standard with a deck of my own! This would have been the perfect time to mention Wizards marketing succeeded in getting me to purchase the Inspiring Heroics event deck (which is a strong starting UW list if you want to jump in with such a deck) but that was not meant to be. Instead, with MGR's help, I am building the monstrous shard deck known as Jund. Yes, his heroic actions have set into motion a series of events that will have him facing the monstrous Ember Swallower, Erebos and his friendly whip, and (so that I may help get revenge since MGR beat the Hydra event), even a hydra or two. I will avenge you fallen hydra friend! I am but one of your many loyal heads. So let's go a-head and get started on my first impressions!

This was a cool stand. Didn't come with the deck though. :(

MGR and I met up at a very nice local Starbucks to blog (so hip!) and to play a couple games against the hydra. All I had were a couple EDH decks with me so we tested out with those. First up was Daxos on normal difficulty. This meant the hydra started with three heads out. After some solid early damage from the hydra (it's quite good at this), I was able to stabilize then dominate with the fact that all of my blink creatures like Flickerwisp and Banisher Priest were ETB: own target hydra. Once I resolved an Isochron Scepter with Momentary blink to be able to kill a hydra head every turn, it was all over. I felt this ability to blink was too strong. Perhaps I read the rule wrong about if the hydra would leave play, it dies instead. In the future I believe we'll use blink effects to do what it normally does and blink the hydra heads. Which means it'll probably be completely useless, haha.

This powerful side effect of blinking the hydra heads to destroy them meant I was confident going into hard mode in which the hydra started with 4 heads. However, that smug confidence was quickly diminished as I saw how aggressive the hydra deck could get in dealing early damage. Flipping an early elite head with me lacking a blink effect usually meant game over and this is exactly what happened. I tried a second time but was destroyed. A worthy challenge!

I'm so elite, I lightning bolt at end of turn. Mmm charred heroes.

Next up, MGR piloted the Kaalia deck with her as a general but using normal mulligan rules. As we feared, the fact that Kaalia was a stock list and was a deck meant for multiplayer EDH meant it was a bit slow and if the hydra started aggressively enough with good flips, it quickly snowballed from there. There was one awesome game where Kaalia was able to come out early and start dropping bombs though.

After we built my new jund deck, we obviously decided to play test and see how it'd fare. Here are a couple of the more memorable details:

• Whip of Erebos + any solid creature = too much damage and life gaining capability for the hydra to recover from.
• Anger of the Gods is the perfect answer to a swarm of non-elite hydra heads. At one point it was used against 4 heads and only flipped over 3 heads so it was a gain. I hope to see the day when this backfires tragically and flips over 8 elite heads.
• This match was also one of the more interesting ones as the hydra flipped over back to back Strike the Weak Spot which let me, as the controller of the hydra deck, destroy an elite head to give it an extra turn. So in the end I took two turns in a row and hoped to bury MGR in many hydra bite marks. Alas, with each destroyed elite head, I did no flip over more heads and Jund won against my now no longer elite team.

All in all, it was a very fun experience. I haven't tried team play against the hydra yet but I look forward to it. And we'll play around with the rules of the deck to see if we can improve the experience such as maybe putting more hydra heads in or taking out cards like Neck Tangle which just owned the hydra. Very sad. Be better friends, heads! Purchased at our LGS for $12, I feel this was worth it for the hours of fun it already provided.

This was exactly what MGR and I envisioned when we defeated the hydra.

As a bonus, I'd also like to introduce another feature I'm going to have for Mistform Mondays. Since the mistform creatures can take on many types, I thought I'd do a feature called Random Creature type of the week. I'll use gatherer's random card button and whatever creature type appears (ignoring repeats and non-creatures), I'll write about. Today's creature type was: Thrull.

When I first started playing around Odyssey/Onslaught block, I believe I missed the majority of thruls printed so I don't have much experience with this dopey looking tribe. It is nice that more thrulls are appearing recently. Variety is good for the game. So while I didn't have much experience with them as a tribe, I did have experience with a particular thrull:

You've got to sacrifice!

 I have a friend who loved black's theme of sacrificing life and creatures for power and fell in love with this card. Blood Pet could ramp you in ways Llanowar Elves only dream of: through the awesome power of sacrifice! So he had a deck which had 3 or 4 of these in it and would laugh maniacally as he cast these then, a turn or two later, sacrifice them to cast some big probably also life draining or sacrifice inducing big black creature. It was pretty fun in those early days of Magic as we played less removal then and therefore an early bomb was very, very tough to deal with. Alas, as what happens over time as players become more focused on finding newer, better cards to put into decks, my friend found Dark Ritual was a card and used that instead. And we learned to play more removal at some point, I'm hoping. As my upcoming deck tech on Jund will show you, playing early bomby creatures is still a joy I share to this day.

 .........

...Oh I almost forgot one last thing. MGR and I were wondering what it'd be like to command our own hydra decks to battle each other. So before MGR went and bought a deck of his own, we split the hydra deck as evenly as possible and played. End of turn hydra damage would just be redirected to a head of our choice. Let's just say one game in this quickly convinced us that this was a terrible idea. Some of the sorceries were useless (at one point I'm sure I flipped lots of Neck Tangles. Sorcery speed fogs for the lose) and once an elite head landed for one side, it had far too much defense to be taken down by the 1 damage dealing regular heads. Maybe we can make this work one day but today is not that day. $12 saved! And probably transmuted into a bbq bacon burger of some sort.*

*See MGR's great review in his upcoming Sample Saturday article to see if he also heroically conquers this delicious task.