Brews in Shadows Over Innistrad Standard

After several months of inactivity, I am back with another deck discussion! I haven’t been posting for a long time because, as you probably know already, the previous standard format for Magic the Gathering got very stale very fast. I enjoyed playing Temur White for a long time, then moved to Mardu Green after that. Since I didn’t have anything spicy to add to the stock lists of Mardu Green, I didn’t feel that it warranted a post.

But that’s all in the past, and now we have a new format on our hands! I have been thinking about MtG a lot these past few weeks since Shadows Over Innistrad was released. Probably more than the past three months combined! The result of my brainstorming has been not one but two Standard brews that I think are quite competitive. Let’s take a look at the first one:

Azorius Thopter Control
4 Thraben Inspector
4 Silk Wrap
2 Celestial Flare
2 Immolating Glare
4 Stasis Snare
4 Scatter to the Winds
4 Planar Outburst
2 Confirm Suspicions
4 Seer’s Lantern
4 Thopter Spy Network
2 Linvala the Preserver
4 Prairie Stream
4 Port Town
4 Evolving Wilds
2 Foundry of the Consuls
5 Island
5 Plains

Sideboard
4 Negate
4 Void Shatter
4 Ojutai Exemplars
2 Hallowed Moonlight
1 Confirm Suspicions

This is a basic Blue/White control deck that wins on the back of Thopter Spy Network. As long as its controller has an artifact in play, this enchantment will produce a never-ending stream of 1/1 flying tokens that draw cards when they manage to score a hit on the opponent. It seems slow and clunky but the flyers actually cause the game to quickly snowball into an unwinnable state for the opposing player. The flying army gets bigger every turn, drawing more cards to shut down whatever the opponent has going on. Eventually they will draw into more Spy Networks which will draw into more cards and produce an even bigger army.

Silk Wrap, Celestial Flare, Immolating Glare and Stasis Snare form the creature removal suite of this deck. They are all able to deal with a variety of threats and, more importantly, do not allow the opponent to draw fresh cards. I tested this deck with Declaration in Stone early on and quickly found that, while the card was excellent in aggressive shells, it was lackluster in midrange and downright bad in control decks.

Thraben Inspector, Confirm Suspicions and Seer’s Lantern are cards that wouldn’t normally make the cut in this deck if it wasn’t for the fact that they turned on Thopter Spy Network. That said, they are still pretty good. Thraben Inspector is an early play that can block surprisingly well in the format. It profitably blocks tokens and trades with many of the early creatures in the popular aggressive white shells all over the format. Confirm Suspicions can produce a lot of value in slower match-ups. Even Seer’s Lantern can provide a smattering of ramp to let you clear the board on turn four or Scry every turn in the late game so you don’t flood out.

Scatter to the Winds and Planar Outburst are the regular counterspells and board clears that you often find in control decks. They are a bit lackluster normally, but in the late game they can animate lands and serve as backup win conditions if the Spy Network is dealt with. Linvala is a nice way to stabilize in the mid-game by producing a lot of flying blockers and providing a five-point life buffer. Finally, the Thopter Spy Network itself plays the role of stabilizer, finisher and card-drawing engine all in one. If you can ever drop an active Spy Network on a clear board, it becomes very difficult to lose the game.

The mana-base is about as boring as it gets, with twelve ways to get blue or white mana and an equal number of Islands and Plains. The Foundry of the Consuls are there to serve as additional artifact sources to enable the Spy Network. Normally you would play 26 pr 27 lands in a control deck but I’ve found that 24 is fine given the fact that the deck also plays the full set of Lanterns. In a way it’s like having 28 mana sources.

The final notable thing about this control deck is that it does not play Jace. This is not a budget-based decision. I had Jace in my early testing but to be honest this is a terrible shell for him. There aren’t enough spells to flip him early on and he doesn’t have any powerful spells to flash back either. I wouldn’t suggest bringing him in even if you owned four copies.

The Sideboard has Negates to fight Control, Void Shatter to fight Control and Ramp, Ojutai Exemplars to fight Aggro, Hallowed Moonlight to counter Collected Company at a profit, and a third Confirm Suspicions just in case you need more hard countermagic in a slow match-up.

I’ve played the above deck a lot and I think it has plenty of potential. I’ve found the match-ups against aggressive decks, midrange decks and control decks to be quite good. Bant Company, the tempo deck of the format, is harder to beat but the match-up still feels fine. The problem is the match-up against Ramp. World Breaker and Ulamog make it very difficult to win any games and winning a full match is harder still. If your local metagame doesn’t have any Ramp players I suggest giving it a try.

The second list I want to talk about is also an Azorius concept, but where the previous list was a basic control deck this is more of a gimmicky midrange strategy:

Azorius Displacer Midrange
4 Thraben Inspector
4 Knight of the White Orchid
4 Eldrazi Displacer
4 Eldrazi Skyspawner
4 Reflector Mage
4 Whirler Rogue
4 Silkwrap
4 Stasis Snare
2 Angelic Purge
2 Ojutai’s Command
4 Prairie Stream
4 Port Town
4 Evolving Wilds
5 Plains
3 Island
3 Foundry of the Consuls
1 Wastes

SB:
4 Silumgar Sorcerer
4 Negate
2 Angelic Purge
2 Dispel
3 Thopter Spy Network

This is basically a semi-aggressive deck that aims to go wide and attack for the win by removing the opposing blockers. It can also sometimes gum up the ground so that attacking is difficult for the opponent while flying creatures attack for the win. The final strategy is to generate an insurmountable amount of value by using Eldrazi Displacer to flicker the deck’s creatures and reuse the abilities that trigger as a result.

Thraben Inspector is an all-star here, as it is able to block decently in the early game while setting up for future turns by providing a clue. In the late-game it can become a card-drawing engine in tandem with Eldrazi Displacer. Knight of the White Orchid helps ramp and fix the deck’s mana. It’s the loosest slot though. I can certainly imagine something like Anafenza, Hanweir Militia Captain, Hangarback Walker or Stratus Dancer being the correct choice for this slot.

Eldrazi Displacer, Eldrazi Skyspawner, Reflector Mage and Whirler Rogue form both the midrange creature package and the late-game flicker package. Displacer blocks the many 2/3 creatures in the format very well, Sky-Spawner attacks through the eye and provides a token that can make mana. Reflector Mage takes care of blockers and Whirler Rogue allows the deck to go wide while also providing reach.

Silkwrap, Stasis Snare, Angelic Purge and Ojutai’s Command form the core of the deck’s Disruption package. They are primarily there to stop blockers and key creatures like Archangel of Tithes from ruining your day. Angelic Purge in particular can take care of troublesome Enchantments and Artifacts as well. The deck produces so many tokens that finding something to sacrifice is frequently not a problem at all.

The manabase for the deck has the same 12 duals that the control deck plays, but the rest of the lands are slanted to focus on white mana production. 17 sources of white mana seem fine to me. 15 sources of blue mana are on the low side, but I don’t want to go below eight sources of colorless mana for the Displacers. So far in testing it’s been fine but every now and then blue mana becomes a bottleneck, particularly in sideboarded games when I bring in Silumgar Sorcerer. If it continues to be a problem I will cut a Foundry for an Island.

Finally, the sideboard contains a selection of cards that allow the player to focus on fighting creatures with Silumgar Sorcerer, non-creatures with Negate, or to grind better with Thopter Spy Network. Additional copies of Angelic Purge are also available for match-ups where killing enchantments is at a premium. There are also dispels to counter decks with cheap removal and, perhaps more importantly, Collected Company.

Compared to the control deck I haven’t played with the midrange deck as much. The list is probably not yet optimal. Regardless, I do believe that the concept is a good one and I look forward to playing more of it in the coming weeks. I hope you do as well!

Magic the Gathering: Temur White

Hey guys! It’s (way past) time for another Magic the Gathering update on the blog. I haven’t posted much about MtG for a long time simply because I was bored with the game. Theros block was a massive letdown for me and I just couldn’t muster the will to play and come up with interesting new strategies to write about during that time.

Well, Theros is gone now and Battle for Zendikar has been released. Overall BFZ seems to have been a complete dud in terms of competitive play and the Battle Lands combined with the Fetch Lands from Khans of Tarkir to produce the most expensive Standard format in years. That’s a massive failure on the part of WotC development but luckily I happen to really like Khans of Tarkir and I made sure to get playsets of all the Fetch Lands while they were cheaper so I was able to really get a lot of games in and brew a list that I love from the current KtK + Battle Lands format. Here’s the full deck:

Maindeck:
4 Skyrider Elf
4 Mantis Rider
4 Savage Knuckleblade
4 Woodland Wanderer
2 Sarkhan, Unbroken
2 Stubborn Denial
2 Fiery Impulse
4 Silkwrap
3 Valorous Stance
3 Disdainful Stroke
2 Dig Through Time
4 Windswept Heath
3 Flooded Strand
3 Wooded Foothills
2 Evolving Wilds
2 Mountain
2 Island
1 Forest
1 Plains
2 Canopy Vista
2 Cinder Glade
2 Prairie Stream
2 Frontier Bivouac

Sideboard:
4 Radiant Flames
3 Tragic Arrogance
2 Surge of Righteousness
2 Mastery of the Unseen
2 Fiery Impulse
1 Valorous Stance
1 Disdainful Stroke

As you can see, it’s yet another four color goodstuff list in the same vein as Jeskai Black or Temur Black. The common thread among deckbuilders seems to be based around using Jeskai to get quick flying threats or Temur to get quick fat ground-pounders and then supplementing those with black removal. What I did instead was I combined Temur and Jeskai to just have the best threats in the format.

My removal is a bit more situational because I need to make do with white and red options, but I think that this is a fine tradeoff. Because of the way the deck is built, it can play various roles in different match-ups and it’s up to the player to maximize the chance of winning by picking the right “mode of play”. The correct style will vary depending on the deck being played by the opponent and what cards are drawn on each side, but I can provide some rules of thumb to act as a rough guide:

1. Against aggro, you want to play like a defensive control deck. In game one your best threats have decent stats and vigilance so you can block to keep your life total high even as you attack the opponent. In sideboarded games they will bring in better removal so this strategy will no longer be viable. You can counter it by bringing in Radiant Flames and more cheap removal, turning into a full control deck.
2. Against midrange decks you want to grind them out. Frankly speaking your deck is comparable to theirs except you have both Sarkhan and Dig Through Time to pull ahead.
3. Against control you want to leverage your cheap threats and countermagic to play a kind of tempo game. Don’t forget that Valorous Stance can serve as a counterspell of sorts to save a creature from removal. It’s not that hard to maneuver the game to a point where the opponent needs to resolve a sweeper or an Ugin to win so try to save a copy of Stubborn Denial or Disdainful Stroke to make sure that doesn’t happen. After sideboarding you can take out your cheap removal for more countermagic and even better threats like Mastery of the Unseen.

Aside from the unconventional color combination, there are a few substitutions in the deck that might stick out to an observant reader. The biggest one is doubtless the inclusion of Skyrider Elf over Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy. It sure looks like a budget substitution, but I honestly wouldn’t play Jace in that slot even if I owned four copies (I only have two). The issue with Jace in this deck is that it doesn’t actually play a lot of powerful spells that you would want to flash back, and without the card advantage from the planeswalker side Jace is just a conditional looter. Not a terrible card but it’s not what this deck wants either.

By contrast Skyrider Elf fits really well with what this deck wants to do. You can play it on turn two as a 2/2 or on turn four as a 4/4. That’s practically a dragon already! That’s not even considering that you can live the dream with a 5/5 Skyrider by producing black mana with Sarkhan! This deck needs to change roles to suit the situation the flexibility from Skyrider Elf is an important part of what allows that to be possible.

There is also the usage of Woodland Wanderer over the more conventional Thunderbreak Regent. I have tried both cards in this deck but Woodland Wanderer has consistently shown itself to be a game-winner for me while Thunderbreak was never more than a roleplayer. Granted, a 4/4 flyer for four mana is pretty good and having an additional upside is just gravy but I can already play 4/4 flyers for the same cost via Skyrider Elf and this deck isn’t really aggressive enough to make the free damage from Thunderbreak worthwhile.

The rest of the threats in the deck are, I feel more standard choices that shouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Mantis Rider and Savage Knuckleblade are among the best three-drops in the format and Sarkhan is likewise very strong.

When it comes to the spells, this deck isn’t hurting for good choices. Dig Through Time is a great way to reload and pull ahead after a grindy start in the match and Silkwrap is a good way to deal with many of the premier threats played in Standard. Valorous Stance works both as a removal spell against midrange deck and soft countermagic against control. Disdainful Stroke is a good way to answer many of the value drops being played by grindy decks at the moment like Gideon and Siege Rhino. Fiery Impulse is a nod to the quicker threats being played in the format while Stubborn Denial is just a great card that disrupts the opponent for one mana. The configuration I posted here is tailored to handle my local metagame but if you choose to play this deck you should tweak the numbers to suit the opposition you expect to face.

Play more Fiery Impulse if you’re expecting Atarka Red. Add some Roasts if you expect Abzan Aggro. You could even play some copies of Horribly Awry to counter things like Monastery Mentor!

The maindeck isn’t really hurting for good threats, so the sideboard is mostly made up of good answers. You can go up to the full set of Disdainful Stroke, Valorous Stance or Fiery Impulse if you feel that it’s warranted. Surge of Righteousness is available to help fight aggressive red decks. Mastery of the Unseen buries control decks in card advantage and Radiant Flames can keep the board clear against decks that go wide. You also have Tragic Arrogance to sweep the board in midrange match-ups while you get to keep your best threat! I really believe that Tragic Arrogance is one of the more underplayed cards in the format given how it can turn stalemates into instant wins. You haven’t lived until you’ve played Tragic Arrogance after an opponent steals your best permanent with Dragonlord Silumgar!

Based on my experience playing the deck in tournaments, it does really well against midrange Abzan and Dragon decks as well as control. The match-up against aggressive red decks is also good. It’s not perfect, though, as the Esper Tokens match-up is pretty iffy. Still, I think that this deck is a blast to play and a contender to win any competitive event.

Hearthstone Free-to-Play: A Zero to Hero Guide

Hello again guys! Today I will be talking about another collectible card game I’ve been playing: Hearthstone. I’ve actually been playing the game for several months now but I haven’t posted anything about it because frankly I didn’t feel that I had enough experience and knowledge about the game to be able to articulate anything useful about it.

Now I do.

I have been running Free-to-Play on all three of Blizzard’s servers (NA, EU and Asia) while simultaneously helping out multiple friends and family members in their quest to efficiently play Hearthstone without paying real money. To help people that I meet online, I have also written a guide to my F2P method and posted it to several online forums. Now I am posting an updated version of that guide to my blog because I feel that it is finally at an acceptable level of polish. So let’s get to it!

So you’ve started a new Hearthstone account and completed the tutorial. You have access to the Mage class and a couple of basic cards. You have some starter quests. What do you do? Well, you could theoretically do anything you want, but here are my thoughts on how you could go from a blank slate to a decent F2P account that can accomplish daily quests and built up to an ever-improving collection as fast as possible.

You start by completing all the basic cards. Do all the default quests for newbies. You really shouldn’t waste too much time playing against other people until you’ve gotten all your classes to level 10. Just play against the innkeeper on easy mode until you’ve gotten all the basic cards. You could go with a higher difficulty setting to level up faster, if you like. Go with what is least stressful for you. Once you’re done, you should have access to all the classes as well as their basic cards. Then you build your basic deck. It should look something like this:

2 Acidic Swamp Ooze
2 Bloodfen Raptor
2 Shattered Sun Cleric
2 Ironfur Grizzly
2 Chillwind Yeti
2 Senjin Shieldmasta
2 Gnomish Inventor
2 Frostwolf Warlord
2 Boulderfist Ogre
2 Stormwind Champion
10 Class-specific Spells

Sometimes there won’t be enough good class specific spells to go up to ten. In this case you use Bluegill Warrior or Wolfrider to fill out the list because they can serve as pseudo removal spells by charging into opposing minions.

The main issues with the above deck are the three and five-cost minions. Ironfur Grizzly is basically unplayable, as is Frostwolf Warlord. They are probably the best options in the basic card pool, but still pretty bad. You will want to replace them ASAP. An easy way to replace the Grizzly from the get-go is to take the worst card you got from your initial free packs and disenchant it. You’ll get some small amount of dust, plus a bunch more as a reward for dusting your first card. Choose a common for this initial disenchant, because you might not have the skill to identify which cards are really good yet. Even if you disenchant a good common, though, it’ll be easy to get more copies later if you need them. Disenchanting a common will give you five dust from the disenchant itself as well as additional dust as a reward for disenchanting your first card. The dust will be enough to craft two Spider Tanks, which are a much better option for your turn three drop. They will be a great investment that you will continue to use for many months.

The five-drop is trickier. You won’t have much dust left after crafting the Spider Tanks, and there aren’t really any great common options for five-drops either. You might have to make do with those Frostwolfs for a bit, but if you’re impatient you could craft some Stranglethorn Tigers or Silver Hand Knights. What I actually suggest is to go for Azure Drakes or Sludge Belchers.

Azure Drake is a rare card in the basic set. You get 4/4 in stats and draw a card, plus a fringe spellpower ability. Pretty good. You could probably get enough dust to craft two of these in a week. You won’t be using them in a ton of decks after you’ve built up a collection, but they will see some play. If you want a five-drop that you will be using over and over again in many lists, you should go for Sludge Belcher from the second wing of Naxxramas. The problem with that approach is you need to save up 1400 gold to get two Naxxramas wings. You’ll have to do that eventually though, so maybe it’s fine.

Once you’ve shored up the cards for turn three and five, your basic decks should at least look respectable. Something like this:

2 Acidic Swamp Ooze
2 Bloodfen Raptor
2 Shattered Sun Cleric
2 Spider Tank
2 Chillwind Yeti
2 Senjin Shieldmasta
2 Gnomish Inventor
2 Azure Drake
2 Boulderfist Ogre
2 Stormwind Champion
10 Class-specific Spells

Among the cards you unlock for getting to level 10, here are the additions I suggest you make on a per-class basis:

Mage
Arcane Missiles / Arcane Explosion
Frost Bolt
Fireball
Polymorph
Flame Strike
Water Elemental (replacing Gnomish Inventor)

Hunter
Hunter’s Mark
Arcane Shot
Multi-Shot
Kill Command
Animal Companion
Houndmaster (replacing Gnomish Inventor)

Shaman
Rockbiter Weapon
Flametongue Totem
Hex
Bloodlust
Fire Elemental

Paladin
Hand of Protection / Blessing of Might
Hammer of Wrath
Truesilver Champion
Consecration
Blessing of Kings

Priest
Power Word: Shield
Shadow Word: Pain
Shadow Word: Death
Holy Nova
Mind Control
Northshire Cleric (replacing Bloodfen Raptor)

Warlock
Soulfire
Mortal Coil
Shadow Bolt
Drain Life
Hellfire

Warrior
Execute
Fiery War Axe
Heroic Strike
Cleave
Shield Block
Korkron Elite (replacing Gnomish Inventor)

Rogue
Backstab
Deadly Poison
Fan of Knives
Assasinate
Assassin’s Blade
Sprint (replacing one Stormwind Champion)

From this point you’ll want to concentrate on collecting the “Mech” cards from the Goblins and Gnomes expansion. They provide the best value for gold by a wide margin, and collecting them will put you well on your way to building one top tier deck (Mech Mage). Here are the initial cards you’ll want to get from packs or craft:

2 Mechwarper
2 Piloted Shredder
2 Mechanical Yeti

After some time your basic decks should look more like this:

2 Acidic Swamp Ooze
2 Mechwarper
2 Shattered Sun Cleric
2 Spider Tank
2 Piloted Shredder
2 Mechanical Yeti
2 Senjin Shieldmasta
2 Azure Drake
2 Boulderfist Ogre
2 Stormwind Champion
10 Class-specific Spells

Once you have the above list, you’ll be done with the “basic” build for each class. If you haven’t already, you should level up one of them to 20 so you can access Tavern Brawl. Depending on the week, it may be easy or difficult to win at Tavern Brawl for a beginner. You only need to get lucky once for a free pack, though, so don’t forget to take advantage of this feature!

After that you’re going to want to diversify your lists into actual decks with specific strategies. This will help you to accomplish your daily quests. Quests are assigned in class pairs, and the complete set of possible pairings is already known:

Druid or Hunter
Druid or Rogue
Hunter or Mage
Mage or Shaman
Paladin or Priest
Paladin or Warrior
Priest or Warlock
Rogue or Warrior
Shaman or Warlock

From the above, you’ll notice that you only really need five decks to be able to cover all possible pairings. This is good because you can focus on those classes that have powerful strategies which can be implemented with minimal dust spent. I suggest to build decks in this order:

1. Mech Mage
2. Aggro Paladin
3. Face Hunter
4. Warlock Zoo
5. Face Rogue
— At this point you will have a deck for every possible quest combination —
6. Mech Shaman
7. Patron Warrior
8. Control Priest
9. Midrange/Token Druid

Go online and look for budget versions of those decks to build towards. Don’t waste time crafting cards you don’t need for those lists. If you get a card from a pack and it’s not played in those decks, dust it to craft the cards you do need.

You could keep a card you like if you think it’ll be useful in a deck you want to build later, but the utility of this is debatable. Say you get a golden Antonidas (legendary card), and you want to keep it since you want to build a fully-powered Mech Mage or Waker Mage deck down the line. It’s possible that you’d be better served turning it into dust and crafting all the rares and commons you need to build decks for all your classes. This will supercharge the decks you use to complete daily quests, and maybe even result in you earning back that dust to re-craft Antonidas in the future.

Once you have your daily quest decks set up, you can start to save up dust to craft staple legendary cards. At the very least you’re going to want Dr. Boom and Sylvanas. This will take a fairly long time, but it’ll mostly be fine because your decks can win even without them. You don’t have to be so eager to dust everything at this point. You can keep the cards you like and slow down your crafting pace. The specific strategy is up to you, but personally I would err on the side of dusting cards if your collection is still small. If you’ve already got a nice selection of staple commons and rares you can start to build up your collection.

One more piece of advice: when doing daily quests if you are matched up against a slow deck and it’s not going well just concede ASAP. Don’t waste time banging your head against a wall. I could concede three times on early turns and win two games with Face Hunter in the time it takes to finish one game against Freeze Mage. As a F2P user trying to get set up, losses only matter to you in the sense that they use up your time for doing daily quests. Don’t worry too much about doing well in ladder until you’ve got your feet on the ground.

Deck Discussion: Wild Titans

Hello guys. Today’s deck discussion will focus on the very first competitive VS System deck I ever built. Way back when I was a poor student with no money to pay for expensive singles, I built this deck out of mostly commons and cheap rares and did surprisingly well with it at all levels of competition from casual play to Hobby League and I even lent it out to people who did well at Pro Circuit Qualifiers (I did not play in PCQs at the time as I was usually judging them).

While I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that this deck has aged well, I think it is still competitive even after all this time. It has a couple of troublesome match-ups but it also has some really good ones. Here is the list:

12 Wild Pack
4 Mary Jane Watson, MJ
2 Dawn Granger <> Dove, Agent of Order
2 Hank Hall <> Hawk, Agent of Chaos
2 Tim Drake <> Robin, Young Detective
4 Silver Sable, Silver Sablinovia
4 Roy Harper <> Arsenal, Sharpshooter
4 Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
1 Garth <> Tempest, Atlantean Sorcerer
1 Scarlet Spider, Ben Reilly
4 Teen Titans Go!
4 Millenium
2 Stark Tower, Team-Up
3 Press the Attack
2 Fun and Games
2 Foiled!
2 Kaboom!
2 ESU Science Lab
3 Birthing Chamber

Now that list is a thing of beauty. It was really strong at the time I made it too. I would easily consider it Tier 1 for that time period, if not for the deck’s vulnerability to Flame Trap. That weakness probably brings it down to Tier 1.5, but I think that a deck which only has a bad match-up against dedicated hate is pretty strong. I mean, Techno-Organic Virus can basically never beat Caliban and it’s considered to be one of the most powerful strategies in the game.

It’s a real budget deck too. I created the list above from memory, and it should be pretty accurate aside from the Garth. I couldn’t afford a Garth back then so I played a Human Torch, Friendly Rival in that slot. Probably a worse choice overall but in certain situations it was actually better.

So let’s talk about the deck itself. This strategy actually takes the regular Teen Titans team-attacking synergy and cranks it up to eleven by using army characters to create a bigger team-attacking force. It loses the ability to destroy aggressive decks with Terra but it gains the ability to deal much more damage when it kills. It also draws a lot of extra cards. Like, a ton of them. If you like drawing a lot of cards while stunning your opponent’s board over and over, this is the deck for you. Another important reason to play this deck is that the foil versions of MJ and Silver Sable are really nice-looking. Seriously, check ’em out. They look sweet!

Ahem.

Now let’s move on to the gameplay.

When playing the deck, you start by developing a sizable board with your army characters. This was easier back in the day when two-drops and three-drops were a little smaller, but it’s still doable. You want to play a Wild Pack on turn one, followed by another Wild Pack and MJ on turn two. At that point you can team-attack your opponent’s two-drop, draw a card, and then ping them for one more damage with your remaining character.

Turn three is where it starts to get more complicated. You need to change your strategy depending on what your initiative is. You’re going to want to recruit a bigger drop like Spidey if you’re defending and boost Hawk, Dove or Silver Sable for more card advantage if you’re attacking. If you do not have initiative you should exhaust your characters to ESU to draw cards. If you’re on the attack you should put priority on stunning the opposing board rather than card-advantage. Turn four is a flexible turn where you basically do whatever the opposite is of what you did on turn three (Spidey when you’re attacking, boosting when you’re defending). If you can, you should try to clear your opponent’s board on turn three or four. Spidey and Teen Titans Go! should make this easy, and you don’t have to worry about running out of resources because MJ will draw you more cards with every stun. You also shouldn’t need any combat pumps since Wild Packs attack as 4/3 characters with Silver Sable on the board. One trick you should remember is that if you’ve been team-attacking with all your characters but don’t need to use all of them to stun one of your opponent’s remaining characters after using Teen Titans Go! you should just exhaust them for ESU. If your board is pretty big you can draw a ton of extra cards this way.

You should recruit Garth on turn five and start recurring important plot twists (or characters if you need them!). On turn six you should be able to stun your opponent’s board with Roy Harper tricks and then attack with Garth multiple times using Press the Attack for the win. Of course, the above scenario assumes you don’t find any juicy targets for your copies of Foiled! and Kaboom!. If you do, feel free to set your opponent back a turn where they may not have an on-curve play but you almost certainly have the ability to develop your board.

The non-character cards are pretty self-explanatory. Millenium is a team-up that draws you an extra card, Stark Tower is a team-up that fixes your resource row. Teen Titans Go! and Press the Attack allow you to do fancy tricks with Roy Harper. Birthing Chamber fuels your hand. Fun and Games is a nice utility card that often catches people by surprise. The Foiled!, Kaboom! and Fun and Games slots are the most flexible ones. You can put pumps or maybe some copies of Pathetic Attempt here if you like. You could add a fourth Press the Attack. You could add Ego Gem. You could play Finishing Moves to mess up a Legend deck’s day.

So yeah. That’s the deck. If you really like the feel of Bosom Buddies but your friends are sick of Techno-Organic Virus, give this deck a try. Think of it as a “fair” version of that deck for casual play. This is also a perfect deck for those of you who think that Spidey and Silver Sable should hook up, and that MJ should be in there too. Plus some random Teen Titans and a whole mess of Wild Pack Members. Yeah, that’s totally a valid reason to play this deck. Not weird at all.

Deck Discussion: Good Guys

Most decks in VS System are incredibly aggressive, aiming to win by turn four or five with regularity. Other decks want to push the game to turns eight or nine and leverage powerful drops like Galactus for victory. Today I will talk about a deck that can be quite aggressive with the right draw, but generally aims to win a bit later than most aggro decks. Hopefully this can provide a blueprint for how to constructively deviate from established deck-building norms.

We have rules of thumb because they work, and you need to be able to follow those rules to go from a beginner to an intermediate player. To get to the next level, though, you must be able to recognize instances where optimizing on a slightly different axis can work well.

I present to you… Good Guys!

4 Ted Kord, Blue Beetle
4 Sue Dibny
4 Maxwell Lord
2 Booster Gold
4 Shayera Thal
2 Batman, Founding Member
4 Katar-Hol, Thanagarian Enforcer
2 Wonder Woman, Ambassador of Peace
2 Fire
4 Nth Metal
4 Kooey Kooey Kooey
4 Hall of Justice
4 World’s Greatest Heros
4 Hero’s Welcome
4 Bwa Ha Ha!
4 UN General Assembly
4 Magnificent Seven

Good Guys is… a weird deck. It’s a JLA/JLI crossover build that looks like an aggro deck, plays like an aggro deck and wins like an aggro deck. All while not really being an aggro deck.

As I mentioned before in my deck-building article, aggro decks generally want to win by turn five. This deck is perfectly capable of doing that, and would be happy to do so given the chance, but it has a bit more staying power and can comfortably win by turn six or seven if it has to.

In exchange for that staying power, it forgoes the usual assortment of highly aggressive low drops in exchange for a more value-oriented early game with a focus on building up resources and not falling behind. When the time is right, it expends a lot of resources in one turn to generate a sudden burst of damage that drains the opponent of endurance quite suddenly. Let’s take a closer look at how the deck works turn by turn.

Ted Kord and Sue Dibny are not among the most aggressive cards ever printed for VS System, but they are both capable of setting up the next few turns for the Good Guys deck. Either one can find the two-drop, which makes up for their average stats. Booster Gold is a necessary evil because he is the only option Ted Kord can search for, but Maxwell Lord continues the trend of average bodies that help the player to set up. His ability to search for the team-up card is invaluable for a deck with such strict demands for the resource row.

Speaking of the resource row, the Good Guys player should be careful to set it up well whenever possible. Between the team-up, Hall of Justice and Kooey Kooey Kooey it can be very easy to wind up with a lot of dead locations in hand. It’s worth taking the risk, though, because of how powerful the locations can be when active.

There is an argument to be made for putting a JLA 2-drop in the deck as an option for Sue to search for, to be able to team up earlier. However, this would make it harder to use UN Assembly and may even necessitate a shift to a different search card like Enemy of my Enemy, which would then necessitate a reworking of the entire curve to ensure that options from both affiliations are available at all cost points.

By the third turn the player would normally play out a copy of Shayera Thal, which can then fetch Katar Hol for turn four. The alternative for turn three is Batman, who conveniently can be searched out with UN General Assembly because he has both the JLA and Gotham Knights affiliation. Wonder Woman is the alternative drop for turn four. Batman and Wonder Woman do not really follow the deck’s Ally focus, but they give it access to such powerful utility effects that it would be foolish to exclude them.

Turn five belongs to Fire, who is an excellent option for finishing the game off. A flurry of Kooey Kooey Kooey activations can find multiple copies of Magnificent Seven, which power-up characters and draw cards allowing for even more power-ups.

So looking over the curve described above, you can see that the deck doesn’t actually need to deal damage continuously over the whole game like a traditional aggro deck (ie. High Voltage). It puts more emphasis on set-up, almost like an off-curve deck (ie. X-Faces). You just try to hang in there with Nth Metal and Hall of Justice activations then finish off the opponent in a sudden burst of damage.

Good Guys is an incredibly powerful deck that functions as a hybrid of several different strategies. I hope you give it a try and see what other possible hybridized concepts can succeed in this excellent game.

Ayakashi Ghost Guild: Beginner’s Tutorial part 4

As I promised in my previous post on Ayakashi Ghost Guild, I will now talk about events. In my previous posts I tackled how to get some daemons from the story mode, because that’s the most consistent way to get cards with decent stats and skills that can be upgraded all the way up to level 20. In the end, though, most of these cards will not be good enough to survive the challenges that await once you have surpassed level 81 (reminder to those who forgot: from level 82 onwards you may be attacked by players more than ten levels above you). What they are good for is to provide a starting point for the acquisition of even more powerful cards from events.

Basically, your goal as an AGG player should be to have a team of mostly 4-star daemons by the time you get to level 81, together with as many synergistic 5-star daemons as possible. In particular it would be ideal if your leader is a 5-star daemon, to give prospective opponents some pause when choosing who to attack. Remember that you don’t need to be the most powerful player to do avoid getting bullied, you just need to be powerful enough that there is usually a better target for more advanced players to pick on.

When we last left off on this tutorial series, you had already developed a basic Divina team with various 3-star and 4-star daemons collected from story mode. The 4-star daemons are actually fine to have on your team after level 81, but you definitely do not want to still be rocking a 3-star Hare of Inaba by that time. Now let’s look at the various options you have for events:

1. Sealstone/Soul Gem events – these events require you to investigate in story mode and fight in battle mode to acquire special items. These items combine into sets that, when completed, will win you a bonus prize. The prizes range from items to silver or daemons.
2. Tower events – these events require you to investigate in a special “tower” area. You get bonus prizes for defeating boss daemons in the tower as well as by collecting special items and using these items to negotiate with randomly encountered daemons.
3. Conquest events – these events also have you investigating in story mode, except instead of looking for items you are looking for random encounters with a boss enemy. The boss will get stronger every time you defeat it, and you get bonus prizes for winning certain numbers of boss encounters*.

* Conquest events are a bit special because there are two versions of this event: a solo version you play by yourself and a Guild version played by an entire guild together.

All of the events can be viable sources of good daemons, but for best results it is better to specialize in one event and set yourself up to do well in it. Sealstone and Soul Gem events are generally a bad choice because they require a high HP stat for investigating, a high AS for beating other players, and a high DS to keep from getting beaten by other players. This will leave you spreading your stat points thin among multiple stats.

Tower events are a much better option because they don’t require much more than a high HP stat for investigating the tower. In my opinion they are the easiest sources for 5-star daemons because the top floor always has one. That said, climbing towers will give you experience and level you up, bringing you closer and closer to the level 81 threshold. They also require diligence from free players because you will need to ensure that you are constantly draining your HP to investigate the tower. If you “waste” HP by not investigating when it gets full you might not make it to the top. Depending on how much HP you have this can mean having to frequently wake up in the middle of the night just to drain your HP. That’s a bit of a hassle.

My suggestion is to go with Conquest events. They require high AS and DS for fighting bosses, but as far as investigation goes you are just fine to look for random encounters at chapter one, where each investigation only gains you one experience point. This means you can maintain a relatively low HP stat and delay leveling up for a fairly long time. That in turn gives you the best chance of getting to level 81 with a decent team to defend against high level players. In addition to this, having good conquest stats will make you a more attractive player to get into a guild. If you manage to get into a decent guild you can expect to get a couple of decent daemons on every guild event.

Conquest Details

The details of Conquest events are a bit complex, but it is necessary to learn them to be really successful. In this section I will give a basic explanation of how it works and what you can do to improve your chances.

First off, you start by investigating in story mode. Every time you investigate, there is a random chance that you might encounter an enemy boss. If you beat the boss you get a prize. You can keep investigating and getting boss encounters as long as the event is ongoing, but every time you beat the latest boss it will be one level stronger the next time you face it. If you lose to the boss, an escape countdown timer will start. Until it ends, you can attack the boss again and all damage from previous attacks will still be there. Once the countdown timer ends, the boss “escapes” and the previous progress is lost. The next boss encounter will feature a lower level boss. Winning against the lower level encounter gets you back on track and the next time you encounter the boss it will be at the latest level again. If you had trouble following the above explanation, here is a simple example:

1. You win ten consecutive encounters against the boss levels 1 to 10
2. Starting on level 8, you can no longer beat the boss in one go and have to attack it multiple times to take it down.
3. The next encounter is against the level 11 boss, but you lose to it
4. The next encounter will feature a boss with a random level from 1-10
5. You randomly get matched up against a level 6 boss, and beat it
6. The next encounter is against the level 11 boss again, and this time you win
7. Now you are back on track and your next encounter will be against a level 12 boss

So that’s how the encounters work, but how does the combat work? This is where conquest events get a little complicated, but hopefully this post can point you in the right direction. This can get a bit finicky so I hope you pay attention.

1. Combat is between a team of up to ten player daemons and one conquest boss
2. The player daemons attack the conquest boss in waves of four
3. The leader daemon participates in all waves, supported by three others
4. The participating daemons are automatically determined by the game
– Each daemon requires a certain amount of AS and DS from the player to participate in an attack
– Each attack drains half the AS and DS of the player
– The game will automatically choose a team that maximizes the total stats (atk + def) of the participating daemons and stat expenditure from the player
– If the current level of AS and DS is not sufficient to field a team of ten daemons, the game will field as many as it can

If you think about the parameters of the battle, especially the fact that attackers come in waves of four, you quickly realize that it’s best to field teams of four, seven or ten daemons so that you don’t have waves with empty slots. However, the game chooses your team for you! How can you ensure that your team is always attacking at a “sweet spot”? With math of course!

The amount of AS and DS required to field a daemon depends on the ratio between AS and DS. Basically the formula looks like:

AS Requirement = (AS Max / (AS Max + DS Max)) * SP cost of daemon
DS Requirement = (DS Max / (AS Max + DS Max)) * SP cost of daemon

If that looks a bit complex, here’s a simple example. Let’s say we have Mira herself as a daemon, and we want to send her out to fight the boss alone. Mira’s SP cost is 39. Our sample stats are 100 AS Max and 200 DS Max.

AS Requirement = (100 / (100 + 200)) * 39
DS Requirement = (200 / (100 + 200)) * 39

Based on the above, the AS requirement is 13 and the DS requirement is 26. That means the game will send Mira out alone when the player has 13 AS and 26 DS assuming Mira has the highest stats among the player’s eligible daemons. Using the knowledge that AS regenerates at one per minute and DS regenerates at two per minute it should be possible for the player to determine exactly when they can send out one, four, seven or ten daemons as they see fit.

Optimization

Having explained how conquest battles basically work, I would like to take some time to discuss how to optimize stats to become geared towards conquest events. Simply put, you want minimal HP and twice as much DS as you have AS.

Why? Well, the explanation is a bit long but here ya go!

Minimal HP is the easiest to explain. Conquest battles do not require HP and can be initiated by investigating in the first chapter, where each investigation costs just one HP. Conquest battles are all about AS and DS, as we discussed. But why twice as much DS as AS? Well, it’s because DS regenerates twice as fast as AS. The requirements for AS and DS are based on the ratio between them, so we want to have twice as much DS requirements as AS requirements. That way the disparity in regeneration is eliminated. AS regenerates at half the speed of DS, but you only need half as much. If you increased your AS you would actually become less efficient at Conquest.

Guild Conquest is essentially the same as solo conquest, except the entire guild battles a boss instead of a lone player. Success in guild conquests events requires teamwork between the guild members, but the basic strategies are roughly the same. For a free player, becoming a strong Conquest player is ideal because it makes you more attractive to a strong guild, which will in turn give you more chances to get good daemons at guild events.

I hope this series was helpful to you Ayakashi players out there. Once you have a decent team for Conquest events you can start collecting 5-star daemons and building up to whatever team you might want be it Phantom, Anima or Divina. From there you can learn the rest of the game on your own and figure out your own advanced strategies. Good luck!

Magic the Gathering: Sultai Midrange

Well now, it’s been a long while since the last post hasn’t it? I’ve actually been wanting to post new content for weeks now but real life intervened and my work responsibilities have increased by an order of magnitude since I was assigned to a different project. It’s the same old story of software development projects growing out of control due to missed requirements, feature creep and the inability of those in charge to manage these things. I’ve got a bit more free time right now, but even this respite could be fleeting. For all I know I could be working 80-hour weeks again next week. For now, though, I’ve got the time to share a sweet Magic the Gathering deck with you guys.

Sultai Control
4 Sylvan Caryatid
4 Courser of Kruphix
4 Reaper of the Wilds
4 Prognostic Sphinx
4 Thoughtseize
4 Bile Blight
4 Hero’s Downfall
2 Dissolve
1 Bow of Nylea
2 Silence the Believers
3 Dig Through Time
4 Opulent Palace
4 Temple of Malady
3 Temple of Mystery
3 Temple of Deceit
2 Yavimaya Coast
2 Llanowar Wastes
3 Forest
2 Swamp
1 Urborg

Sideboard
4 Negate
3 Drown in Sorrow
3 Nylea’s Disciple
2 Dissolve
2 Unravel the AEther
1 Bow of Nylea

I’ll tell you this much: I haven’t been able to go to very many events because of work but in every event I attended this deck worked very well for me. It has a decent match-up against aggro and burn decks in game one that improves significantly after sideboarding. It has an amazing match-up against all the popular flavors of midrange. It performs decently against combo. The only black mark is a bad match-up against pure control in game one, but that becomes decent after sideboarding (and it’s not like control is tearing up the metagame anyway). Honestly I’m not sure why more people don’t play something like this. The deck plays some of the most powerful cards in the format, and it has cards that are very well-positioned against some of the most popular threats in the top tier decks. Let’s break it down…

The highlights of this deck are the Caryatid/Courser package, the Thoughtseize/Hero’s Downfall Package, the Reaper/Sphinx package, Bow of Nylea and Dig Through Time. Those are the cards that make this deck work. If you take nothing else from this post, at least know that those cards are very, very good in the current format.

Caryatid and Courser do what they do best here by smoothing out your early mana development and giving you incidental defence against some of the smaller, cheaper threats available in the format. I cannot stress enough how good these cards are at doing this job. Caryatid fixes your mana and prevents you from falling behind despite running a considerable number of lands that come into play tapped. Courser helps to prevent you from flooding out, which is one of the biggest problems faced by decks that lean on one-for-one removal to stall the game. Courser of Kruphix’s abilities generate more value if the game goes long, and Sylvan Caryatid provides the deck with a means to ensure that the game gets there.

While Caryatid and Courser smooth out the deck’s early development, Thoughtseize and Hero’s Downfall provide some relevant disruption. Downfall answers both creatures and planeswalkers, which are the premier threats available in Standard today. Thoughtseize not only proactively answers the biggest threat in the opponent’s hand, it also provides valuable information about what cards are left at his disposal. Between the two of them a deck is able to answer just about any card.

Reaper of the Wilds and Prognostic Sphinx provide a suite of threats that interact well with many of the common threats played today. Sphinx can block and kill Mantis Rider, and it can even stave off a few attacks from Stormbreath Dragon or Sarkhan if need be. Reaper of the Wilds can eat Siege Rhinos all day long and can potentially make Goblin Rabblemaster a complete joke by eating the token every turn for a free scry. Both of them work very well with Courser of Kruphix to ensure that every card you draw is live. The most important thing about them, however, is their immunity to targeted removal. This can leave opponents helpless to deal with your threats even as you answer their own threats with removal.

Bow of Nylea doesn’t see a lot of play right now, but I cannot imagine why this is so. A deck normally doesn’t want to draw more than one Bow, but the first copy provides big benefits. It has a ton of abilities, and every mode is relevant. The lifegain is often the most prominent ability, providing the deck with a way to lock up a game when the battlefield has been stabilized but the opponent is switching to the burn plan. Besides this the +1/+1 counter ability can also be invaluable. It allows Caryatids to eat Rabblemaster tokens, Sphinx to kill in four turns instead of seven, Reaper of the Wilds to tangle with Polukranos and live to tell the tale and even turns Courser of Kruphix into a large threat given enough time. The deathtouch ability allows Coursers to attack into opposing Caryatids or Coursers and also lets Sphinx eat dragons. Even the ability to shoot two damage at flyers can blank Sorin’s token ability, allow Sphinxes and Bile Blights to kill dragons/butchers and deals with Hornet Queen and her entourage given a few turns. The card is a mana-hungry legend so you don’t want to risk drawing multiples, but the first copy is excellent.

The last premier card in the deck is Dig Through Time. There has already been a lot of chatter on this card so I will keep this brief. Dig Through Time is busted. It’s ridiculous. It’s one of the best cards in Standard right now, if not the actual best card. You would be insane not to run this card in a deck that can support it.

After those core cards, which I feel cannot be cut without significantly diminishing the deck’s power, the options become a lot more flexible. I like to run the full set of Bile Blights in my main deck because I feel so confident in my deck’s long-game power that only the nuttiest of draws from fast, aggressive decks scare me. Bile Blight is a mediocre card in general, but it shines at blunting those nut draws because they frequently involve drawing multiple copies of the best threats in the aggressive deck. Drawing two or more Mantis Riders is one of the best starts Jeskai Aggro can have, but a single Bile Blight can turn what would have been an easy win for Jeskai into a complete victory for Sultai.

After the Bile Blights, the deck has four more slots available for business spells. My local metagame has a lot of midrange decks, so I like to run a pair of Dissolve as catch-all answers and supplement them with two copies of Silence the Believers. Dissolve is a pretty good card to have at your disposal and Silence the Believers is one of the best cards for fighting creature-based midrange strategies because it answers resilient stuff like Ashcloud Phoenix while also serving as a card advantage engine. If you’re worried about aggressive decks, you could run some copies of Drown in Sorrow to sweep their army. Another copy of Bow of Nylea helps against burn. Negates are great against control and not bad against midrange or aggro either because it counters Planeswalkers and burn spells.

The sideboard is a mix of anti-aggro sweepers, anti-burn lifegain, additional countermagic for control and slow midrange, and two Unravel the AEther to help against combo decks like Heroic and Jeskai Ascendancy combo. As a bonus it also kills gods.

At this point I’d like to talk about the mana base. It’s got a lot of lands that come into play tapped and no fetch lands at all. This is not a budget constraint. I have full sets of all the Khans fetch lands available to me. I deliberately chose not to run them for the following reasons:

1. Sultai wants to have multiple mana of the same color, with spells that have two green, blue and black mana in the cost. Fetch lands force you to choose which color you get access to when you use it, so you sometimes can’t do things like cast Bile Blight on turn two and then Courser of Kruphix on turn three.

2. Sultai has lots of ways to put low-impact cards to the bottom of the deck, from the Scry Lands to the Reapers to the Sphinxes to the Dig Through Times. You generally would rather not shuffle your deck and risk drawing the cards you already put on the bottom of the deck.

3. Polluted Delta is the only fetch land available to Sultai, and it cannot get a green mana producer despite green being the most important color for the deck.

Because of the above considerations, I highly suggest that you refrain from swapping Polluted Deltas into the mana base without testing. If you really want more lands that do not come into play tapped, I suggest increasing the numbers of Yavimaya Coast or Llanowar Wastes. I can’t recommend this deck highly enough. It’s great in the current Standard metagame. I hope you try it and experience as much success as I did.

Magic the Gathering: The Rise of Feel-Bad Magic

Hero’s Downfall or No?

Today’s post will be about Magic the Gathering, but rather than talk about a specific deck I’d like to focus on a phenomenon that I feel has always existed to some extent, but became extremely pronounced in the current Standard format. As you probably guessed from the post’s title, I call this phenomenon “Feel-Bad Magic”. Since this is a term that I pretty much just made up, I will clarify what I am talking about by providing this rough definition:

Feel-bad Magic is the frustrating and unsatisfying way that games of MtG play out when one’s cards are rendered irrelevant.

My first brush with the concept of Feel-Bad Magic came when I was transitioning from a strictly casual player to a more competitive one. It was around the time of Tempest block, and I had built a midrange red/white deck based around running the opponent completely out of threats. I would use burn to kill my opponent’s early creatures initially while trying to find opportunities to play creatures like Fireslinger and Soltari Guerillas. They would then serve as repeatable creature removal and then double up as finishers when I finally ran my opponent out of threats. It wasn’t a top tier deck or anything, but it was much more competitive than anything I had played before.

Oh how I hated Soltari Priest.

Almost none of my removal could touch it, and it could block my best evasive threat (Soltari Guerillas) with impunity. Basically whenever I played against a Soltari Priest it would invalidate almost all of my cards, and I was immediately reduced to topdeck mode for one of my few answers (Pacifism and Master Decoy, IIRC). I remember getting this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach with every draw step that I failed to topdeck one of them. It wasn’t even about winning or losing. It didn’t feel like I was getting outplayed by a better opponent or overpowered by a better deck. It felt like I was losing to my opponent randomly drawing this one card that kicked my ass completely.

My Former Arch-Nemesis!

Eventually I learned that Soltari Priest was not the untouchable Progenitus-like entity that I had made it out to be. It was simply a very well-positioned threat against my specific deck. I adapted to it. I built better decks. I learned to play around hosers. I wasn’t losing to cards like Soltari Priest anymore. Eventually the card rotated. The format changed, and I never faced Soltari Priest again. Despite this, the feeling of helplessness that I felt during those days never completely went away. It would pop up every now and then throughout my time playing Standard, usually when facing off against threats that demanded specific answers. When my opponent played a first turn Ramosian Sergeant and I didn’t have Foil to counter it, and I needed to dig into Rising Waters ASAP to stand a chance. When I needed to draw Naturalize to kill Engineered Plague when I was running Goblins. When I needed to find Oxidize to kill Skullclamp (and later Cranial Plating) against Affinity. When I needed to draw Pithing Needle to disable my opponent’s Jitte.

Around the time of Kamigawa I took an extended break from MtG. I came back to it a couple of years later, through the Legacy format, and it wasn’t long before I was experiencing the feeling again. That feeling when I play Dredge and my opponent drops a turn zero Leyline of the Void or when I’m running a fair deck and my opponent storms me out on turn two. I would like to emphasize that this time period covers more than a decade, and even though the feeling never went away it also never dominated the experience. It was just sort of hovering in the periphery.

Recently I got back into Standard, and ever since Theros rotated in I’ve been getting the feeling a lot.

The current format, in my opinion, is just set up in such a way as to maximize the chance of “Feel-Bad Magic” from taking place. The threats are quite good at closing out games quickly, resilient or outright immune to some of the commonly played removal, and completely blown out by the rest of it. It’s frustrating to play on both sides. Whether you’re the guy dying to a swarm of Pack Rats or getting three-for-oned with Bile Blight, someone is going to essentially lose to a single card. Sometimes you’re staring at a hexproof creature loaded up with auras, with a hand of Hero’s Downfalls and Ultimate Prices. You could play Devour Flesh instead, but then you’d be feeling pretty dumb when your opponent sacrifices an Elvish Mystic when you really need to kill a Stormbreath Dragon.

You better hope you draw Devour Flesh all the time!

Then again, maybe Golgari Charm is what you really need

You could decide to play for the other team and go with a proactive deck instead, but it won’t take long until your team of Foundry Street Denizens and Firedrinker Satyrs falls to a Golgari Charm or your Loxodon Smiter gets exiled by Lifebane Zombie. Blue Devotion is trumped by Supreme Verdict. Nykthos decks are liable to get a hand of six accelerants and one business spell, which is promptly Thoughtseized. Just look at this match between Reid Duke and Kyle Boggemes.

 

Listen to the commentary and notice how often the game hinges on Reid being able to deal with Pack Rat, or Kyle being able to deal with Blood Baron of Vizkopa. Watch the games of William Jensen in the same channel and listen to how the commentators talk about how match-ups can come down to whether one player can pluck an Underworld Connections out of the other player’s hand before it comes down. So many times they talk about how only a small subset of the cards in each deck even matters in most match-ups.

The entire match now hinges on whether you drew the right removal for this

It’s not just at the Pro Tour. It happens all the time in Standard these days. I still remember the look on the face of my opponent that one time he died to a pair of my Loxodon Smiters with two Ultimate Price staring back at him from his hand. During my extended run playing Boros Charm I have seen many dejected looks from players casting Underworld Connections against me because literally none of their other cards do anything relevant. I imagine I must have sported a smiliar look when I fell to Xenagos at JOU Game Day while holding two Abrupt Decays and a Golgari Charm. This is without even taking into account all of the Sphinx’s Revelation mirrors, where literally almost every card in both decks is worthless against the other.

I will most likely continue to play Standard until Theros rotates out, simply because I already own a lot of the cards for it. I won’t be investing into the format unless Khans changes the texture of the match-ups though. It’s just not the kind of game I like playing. Perhaps I will move on to just playing Pauper at MTGO*.

* Speaking of which, I made an MTGO account recently and have actually been fairly successful with it starting out. I managed to build three decent decks (two Standard, one Pauper) just from the proceeds of my initial New Player Package and still have 19 tickets left over after selling all my unwanted cards to bots. I might write a more positive MtG-related post about that experience soon.

Ayakashi Ghost Guild: Beginner’s Tutorial part 3

Hello everyone. Welcome to the third part of my Ayakashi Ghost Guild beginner’s tutorial. In the previous installment I outlined a series of steps to assemble a decent Divina attacking team for low level players. Today we will try to go to the next step.

Assuming you have followed the previous tutorials, you now have a maxed out Divina attacking team composed of level 1 and 3 daemons that globally increase attack. At this point you can stop farming in area 1-1-1 and progress the storyline. Your goal is to assemble a team of 4-star daemons in general, and get Lady Suzuka into your team in particular.

Lady Suzuka

Lady Suzuka starts out as a 3-star daemon with no ability, but if you can get her to level 50 she will be able to transform into a 4-star daemon with a powerful skill. Her ability, Miracle Cure, increases the attack of all other daemons you control regardless of what kind you have. As a free player, you doubtless have experienced the frustration of getting powerful daemons that just don’t fit on your team. Let’s say you were able to get a 4-star Phantom daemon with great stats and an awesome ability. This may be a great daemon in a vacuum, but since your team is Divina-based having it is of no use to you at all.

Lady Suzuka can take all of a powerful daemon you have rotting in your inventory and give it a nice attack bonus. As a sealstone daemon, you can even max out her ability fully so that she gives a massive 27% boost to the attack of all your team members. Also, you may have also noticed that Lady Suzuka is a Divina daemon herself so she will be able to get the bonuses from your Divina daemons just fine.

Of course, since Lady Suzuka is a highly desirable daemon there are many people competing for her sealstones. It can be difficult to get her initially, much less acquire the seven sealstones needed to max out her skill (reminder: don’t feed her any Lady Suzuka sealstones until after she has transformed!). One effective strategy for getting through this ordeal with minimal fuss is by waiting until an event you have no interest in is going on, and ignoring it completely to focus on obtaining Lady Suzuka magatama instead.

Once you have Lady Suzuka in your Divina team, you can move on to targets in later chapters.

Ramiel

Hljod

Ramiel in chapter 11 increases Divina defense, and Hljod in chapter 12 increases Divina attack. Both daemons are well-worth obtaining and maxing out for a free Divina player. Luckily, their abilities work only for Divina daemons so there is comparatively less competition as compared to with Lady Suzuka. The same strategies can be applied towards obtaining and maxing them out, but since they are in relatively late chapters you should be very mindful of the level 81 cutoff.

Level 81 Cutoff

Ayakashi Ghost Guild protects players from being bullied by veterans early on. You can’t be attacked by an opponent who is more than ten levels higher than you, and you cannot attack a player who is more than ten levels lower than you. This protection wears off after level 81, so your main goal is to set up a decent team by the time you get there. If your team is not well developed by level 81, you may find yourself under constant attack from high level players looking for easy prey.

The best advice I can give to keep yourself from experiencing this is to keep your investigation activities confined to chapter one. At one experience point per click, this strategy will allow you to max out the levels of your daemons while minimizing the rate at which you yourself level up. You will still need to investigate at later chapters just to get your first Lady Suzuka, Ramiel and Hljod sealstones, but apart from that you should avoid investigating at higher chapters if at all possible.

So far in this series of tutorials I have explained how to assemble an initial team of low level daemons, and how to transition from that team into one with better options like Lady Suzuka, Ramiel and Hljod. These daemons are great, but they are not enough to form the basis of a decent team. You will need to fill out your team with daemons from events, which is what the next post in this series will be talking about.

As always, if you liked this post, don’t forget to use my invite code (ukyo) so we can both get bonus items!

Deck Discussion: Forever Stall

What’s up guys! To make up for the long interval between my Press Chess and Life Model Decoy articles I decided to put up this one with a much smaller gap. As an added bonus, today’s deck features none other than the New Gods!

Ah, the New Gods. The weakest affiliation from the worst set in VS System by a wide margin, the team has almost no redeeming qualities. They have very few unique capabilities to exploit and their shortcomings are legion.

The main problem is that Cosmic, which is supposed to be the main mechanic of the New Gods, is actually a drawback. Normally you’d expect them to get plenty of bonuses to offset this drawback, but things did not play out that way at all. Imagine if Shadowpact retained its “losing endurance” theme but lost all of the abilities and effects that rewarded them for doing so. That’s kinda what happened to New Gods. Instead of being really strong with a cosmic counter and average without, they ended up being pretty bad even with their cosmic counters in place, and completely abysmal without them. Thus, I will begin this post with a warning:

The New Gods suck. They suuuuuck. Do not play them if you want to win. Stop reading now. Go back to my Quicksilver Voltage article and melt some faces off.

Still here? Okay. With full recognition of the fact that the New Gods are terrible, let’s go through my experience trying to put lipstick on this pig.

I read through the different cards of the New Gods several times but failed to get any inspiration for a mono-team list. They were just so terrible that I couldn’t even imagine hypothetical scenarios where having any of them would be good. I soon concluded that playing New Gods by themselves would not be the way to go, so I had to team up with a better team (the joke being that literally every other team was a better team).

The obvious team-up deck for New Gods is, of course, Superman Blue Abuse. One of the few useful things about New Gods is that they have an army one-drop with cosmic. If you load up your deck with them you can ensure that you’ll have plenty of cosmic characters by the time Superman Blue comes around. If you can keep cloning and reloading him with counters you can come out on top. This was actually a viable deck from way back when DGL was modern-legal, and it only got better with time because now we have Ego Gem to supplement Birthing Chamber to draw cards and we also gained Supertown as a consistent way to reload Superman’s counter.

I mocked up a few lists and tested them solo. They were fine. Maybe even good. I wasn’t satisfied with them though. Even though the deck had a whopping 18 New Gods characters, they were all Soldiers of New Genesis. I wanted to get some bigger names in there.

So I went back to the list of New Gods cards, looking for something to work with. I agonized trying to find their team. The only thing the cards had in common, it seemed, was that they were all terrible.

Then I had an idea.

What if the terribleness was actually their theme? Maybe I was failing because I was trying to pair up the New Gods with good, powerful cards. Maybe what they needed was to join forces with other cards that are an insult to the trees that died to make them!

I pored through the card lists again, this time with a focus on looking through terrible cards that I had skipped before. It took a while, but soon I hit paydirt. Ladies and gentlemen I give you: Forever Stall

4 Lockjaw
4 Ahura
4 San
4 Silver Surfer, Skyrider of the Spaceways
3 Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter-Earth
3 Serifan
4 Beautiful Dreamer
1 El Guapo
1 The Herald
1 Galactus

4 Enemy of my Enemy
4 Vicarious Living
4 Straight to the Grave
4 Extended Family
4 Forever People
4 Crowd Control
1 Stark Tower
2 Slaughter Swamp
2 Avalon Space Station
2 Coast City

OK, so I know what you’re thinking. There are only seven New Gods character cards in this entire list. Much less than what Blue Abuse is packing. I get that. I still prefer this because Serifan and Beautiful Dreamer are actual Forever People and not nameless soldiers. There’s also the fact that this deck plays Ahura and The Herald, who are so bad that they practically qualify as New Gods even without the printed affiliation. Crowd Control and Coast City round out our list of terrible all-stars. The final thing I like about this list is that unlike Blue Abuse which leans on Superman, this deck intends to emerge victorious through the (ab)use of Beautiful Dreamer. Speaking of which…

Here is how the deck “works”. It tries to set up a situation where the only visible characters are two Beautiful Dreamers and an Ahura is in the concealed area. Once this is achieved, whenever a Beautiful Dreamer is stunned her ability and that of Ahura will both trigger. You can put Ahura’s ability on the chain first, so that Beautiful Dreamer’s ability resolves first. This means you can recover a stunned Beautiful Dreamer with the other Dreamer’s ability, then put a counter on it with Ahura. From there you can reinforce them so you only lose two endurance per attack, and finally if you can make them invulnerable you don’t take any damage from attacks at all.

The above explanation is a bit complicated, so let’s work through an ideal scenario of how the game should play out.

You have even initiative. On turn one you recruit Ahura and the opponent hopefully has nothing so you can attack for a point. By turn two you recruit Franklin while your opponent recruits a 3/3 and attacks you. Franklin surges with a counter when the turn ends. On turn three you recruit Serifan and put him into the hidden area with Franklin. Once that’s done you crossover New Gods and Inhumans and use your remaining resource point to recruit Lockjaw, discarding a copy of Beautiful Dreamer to search out another Beautiful Dreamer. Your opponent recruits a 5/5 and attacks you for eight. On turn four you recruit Beautiful Dreamer, exhaust Ahura to play Forever People and get the discarded Beautiful Dreamer into play, and finally recruit Silver Surfer and put him in the hidden area with Franklin.

At this point you have “assembled the lock”. If your opponent stuns one Dreamer you recover the other and put a counter on it. They are both invulnerable so they soak up two damage each time. If you have a Crowd Control you won’t take any damage at all because you can reinforce them. Silver Surfer can search out The Herald and when you recruit him next turn Franklin can hide him and you have reinforcement forever.

Assembling the lock is only the first step of course. Once turn four ends you will end the turn with two Beautiful Dreamers, one with a counter and one without. On turns you have the initiative you can use the New Gods mechanic of “pitiful combat stats” to suicide the counter-less Dreamer into your opponent’s defender and keep up the lock. When the opponent has initiative, maintaining it is trickier because they can attack the one with a counter first.

If the opponent has no flyers or you have Coast City you can just form up with the counter-less Dreamer protecting the other one. If they do have flyers and you do not have Coast City you will need something like Extended Family to give a counter to the last Dreamer that gets stunned. You can also use a search card to find another copy of Beautiful Dreamer and recruit it, but then you’d need another copy of Forever People to reanimate the rest who will die due to uniqueness. Generally you’ll need to have planned for this before the turn comes, so you would have used San to search out a Coast City if you need it.

So anyway, assuming you are able to assemble and maintain the lock you simply coast into turn nine and recruit Galactus for the win. Simple.

Of course, the above scenario assumes you just draw everything you need. This will often not be the case. As such, the deck plays 24 cards that search for different pieces of the combo. Lockjaw, Vicarious Living, Enemy of my Enemy and Straight to the Grave find characters. San can find Slaughter Swamp / Avalon Space Station to turn on Straight to the Grave, Stark Tower to team up or Coast City to solidify the lock. Silver Surfer can find Forever People, The Herald or even Galactus. El Guapo is a global reinforcer that only costs three resource points, unlike The Herald. I tested the decklist ten times last night and was able to assemble the lock on turn four seven times, and turn five twice. Once I whiffed completely.

There is also the issue of the opponent breaking up the lock. Answers can be played in the deck and searched out, but you’ll need to shave other cards to fit them in. Pathetic Attempt and Omnipotence solve a lot of problems and can be found by Silver Surfer. San can search out a variety of answers. The Alley prevents KO effects. The Source can get rid of troublesome things in the resource row. New Genesis can be used to recover characters. Birthing Chamber can draw cards. Leslie Thompkin’s clinic is an alternative to Coast City that games some marginal amount of endurance. Moonrider and The Prophecy Fulfilled might be a faster win condition that can win before turn nine. Mr. Mxyzptlk can alleviate the discard costs and be searched by Straight to the Grave. Basically there is almost always some way to get around the many things your opponent can throw at you, but you will need to make cuts to the deck and have it be less consistent. You can decide for yourself which cards you want to shave.