Time to Pre-Release Once Again. This Time “Dark Ascension”

Friday Night Magic

I ran delver blade this week, to a pretty stock list that I think I want and need to run Porcelain Legionnaire. I disappointingly went 2-1. This was ok for 2^nd due to a smaller event due to Saturday’s tournament.

Looking back I need to really think about what doesn’t work in the matchup and sideboard more efficiently. I also need to mulligan much better. I will look at a hand and go:

“Well if I draw card X then this is a good hand.”

Wrong.

Because I need to draw a card, then I need to send it back and look for a hand that will put me in a position that will give me a chance to win.

Saturday

Big Day today:

Dark Ascension Pre-Release, Whoop! I love a good limited tournament, as it tests your ability to put together a deck on the fly. I do prefer draft as it lets you pick and choose cards, whilst sealed is what you get is what you get. I got a little greedy with my initial build and went 3 colours;

Here’s the initial deck I ran:

•           1 Selfless Cathar
•           1 Dead Weight
•           1 Undying Evil
•          1 Tragic Slip
•          1 Gravecrawler
•          1 Geistflame
•          1 Reckless Waif
•          1 Avacyn's Collar
•          1 Silverchase Fox
•          2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
•          1 Skirsdag High Priest
•          1 Harvest Pyre
•          1 Voiceless Spirit
•          1 Fiend Hunter
•          1 Midnight Haunting
•          1 Niblis of the Mist
•          1 Niblis of the Urn
•          1 Abbey Griffin
•          1 Elgaud Inquisitor
•          1 Angel of Flight Alabaster
•          1 Falkenrath Mauraders
•          1 Into The Maw Of Hell
•          1 Haunted Fengraf

Here’s a nice pic of the curve:

I somehow managed to win my first match, but after losing my second match, cut the black right down to a splash for Dead weight and Tragic slip. My Deck then turned into a White/Red aggressive build, but had very little effective removal and my biggest win conditions had to time the spots right. The Haunted Fengraf let me do a few combat tricks.

At one stage I Put my opponent on a rebuke, so still swung with a creature, and as it was the only creature in the bin, return it to hand. Not anything amazing but let me gain a slight advantage.

The few times I got Thalia to the board, was very useful. It took pace out of my opponents removal, and when I swung into his 3 open mana, I felt a little bad pointing at her when he flashed a rebuke my way. Although free information is nice enough to know, I felt a little bad playing around the known rebuke and just wait for opportune moments.

Is that morally wrong? Possibly. Players need to learn to read every card that the opponent might play. Don’t just take their word for it, if you don’t know what it does, just politely ask to read it.

One of the trickiest matches was the final round. This would either be a 3-2 or a 2-3 finish.

There did end up being a fair few flyers in my deck. However some didn’t really have the punch needed and one game I faced down a one eyed scarecrow, which let him stabilise on 2 life as he played a flyer which left my one Voiceless Spirit sitting pretty. This was then followed by the dreaded Drogskol Reaver . Brutal and there was not a lot I could do as I had already used my Harvest Pyre and 2 black removal.

Fortunately I was able to side in my 1 artifact hate card (Torch Fiend). So when he finally dropped the one eyed scarecrow it didn’t last very long. An into the maw of hell took out his last flying blocker and this then left me aggressively attack with the angel and holding the marauders in hand.

Overall I was satisfied with how my day went. I did tilt a little after one match when I got grasp of Phantasom’d 4 times in one match. But it happens and then you just have to move on.

Im looking forward to how the metagame will shape with the new releases. Will Black white tokens become a real deck? I think so, but I would also like to see a zombie deck rise up too.

Anyway see you guys next Week

Adam

Weekinmtg@gmail.com               twitter: @weekinmtg

A Brief Pre – Dark Ascension Update

Well it's been a little while since I updated my blog but thought I would just give a brief rundown as to what I have been up to.

Cube

If you've been following my blog then I've recently talked about starting a cube. Well at the moment I'm about 100 cards into the setup and I'm slowly working to getting more. I found out that Glenn had updated his list. This was interesting enough for me to evaluate mine. Now I won't be acquiring the expensive cards straight away but I will be picking up some of them. Whilst I feel that proxying is a great idea, I think I definitely prefer owning the physical cards.

Even they are only one drops I will want to foil this at some point. I'll pick up the bargain foils straight away, and the more expensive ones, again, over time. I'm looking at this as a long term investment and project.

I will be trying to get it to 288 cards so that the 8 man draft is possible. This is with 3 lots of 12 card "packs" each to make 30 card decks. Even if the cube is this large, it can still be 2/4/6/8 player drafted. This is exactly what I want it to be.


 

EDH/Commander

With the mass of token generation around, I thought I would start looking at a second EDH deck. Someone in our play group also mentioned doing commons/uncommon and I thought that this strategy might work. Well this is the deck that I think I'll be working on:

With a ton of spirit/soldier token generators about I think that shall be my starting point. This will be a lengthy project but also something that I can expand into rare and mythic (Read Sorin).


 

Dark Ascension

With the new set on the horizon there is a lot of hype about a possible Black/White tokens deck. I think it will appear and I think it will be a contender. However, even though Dark Ascension is similar lay out to Worldwake in set size and the way that the 3^rd set of the block is drafted I don't feel that we are going to end up in a Jace style price range on this chase mythic of the set.

One other mythic I am interested in seeing how it will perform is the Huntmaster. This could potentially be a real enabler in pushing the werewolves into a real deck. It's hard to say without testing, which I get little chance to do, but I have my fingers crossed for a positive outcome on that one.

Now I'm not one to cry "Mono Black Control" is back, but I am considering up a non-infect zombie variant. I'd love to have phyrexian obliterators but I don't see them appearing in my collection anytime soon, but I'll work with what I've got and see where it takes me. Patrick Chapin wrote about the deck in a recent Star City article (Premium side so can't link to it L)


 
Anyway that's all from me at the moment, but I'll try and live tweet my progress on Saturday at the pre-release.


 
Laters

Adam

Weekinmtg@gmail.com

@weekinmtg (twitter)


 
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Cubes, Decks And Blocks

Hi,

So after a bit of a break from the blog I thought I would run through what my current magic projects are. I've had a pretty unsuccessful run at FNM's recently with my last one resulting in a 2-2 7^th place finish with a poor man's R/B stensia hall. Think the Ken Adam's build from the invitational without batterskull(!!) And include a pristine talisman. Oh Dear.

From this, as much as I enjoyed playing this, I found myself just wanting to play blue, specifically the blue white builds. I really feel that it's the place to be at the moment, and with strong cards such as Snapcaster mage, Phantasmal Image and Delver of secrets in Blue alone, with the strong splashable white I can't see any reason not to be there.

Now as much as it pains me to admit, I'm not much of a deck builder. I do enjoy playing decks, testing and trying to figure out what is good and bad, and what doesn't perform overly well in the metagame that I play in. I would love to have more time to actively do this with some friends round a kitchen table, and discuss. University does not really allow me to do this, so I have to resort to the "Net – deck" and basically do Live testing at Friday night magics. This is not optimal but hey ho better than nothing I guess.

Next week back to playing the UW "Illusions" build. I do feel a bit cheap calling it Illusions as It plays something like a total of 7 illusions across the 75, but I think it plays like a blue agro J.

*Aside*

I think I'll be changing the format of the blog so that instead of having a breakdown of what I did every day of the week to more of a general overview. This seems to be a bit of a more general blog layout and one that I don't have a problem with myself. Also with having the BlogSpot app on my phone now I may be able to kind of live blog/tweet shorter and sweet updates. Keep the content on the rise.

*End Aside*

Cubes

 
To the main content of the post:

I have decided to build a cube! Now I'm not going to assume that everyone knows what a cube is I'd like to point you in this direction. There are a few tabs on there that explain what a cube is and I believe also a couple of videos. So I've talked about having a cube for a little while but could never really decided how I wanted to approach it, until I stumbled across A one drop cube. I read the article and found it interesting, a cube that is designed for a smaller playgroup(2-4 players) and can be played relatively quickly. Looking over the list I decided to make a couple of decisions;

• Set a budget for the cards – I have not settled on a maximum of £12 a card. This may seem a little expensive and should cover most cards, but there is a certain Ancestral Recall on this list – and on certain sites this card alone is £300+
  
• For the cards that are a little expensive make alterations
  
• Include Unhinged and Unglued cards! – Not overly conventional but it could add an element of randomness and a bit of fun.
  
• There is no real time limit to get this together – As a student I live on a budget, but I don't really do too much so I can spare the odd bit of spare cash that I can start picking up some of the things on a list that I've now edited. I've been able to do this as I'm in a position that I'm relatively happy with my standard collection.
  

After a fair few hours of setting up an excel spread sheet of tracking what the cards I have and need to obtain are, I started the process of sorting through cards that I own. At the end of the weekend, and picking up an additional 6 cards at a FNM, my cube currently sits at a total of 67 of 180 cards. Slow progress is better than no progress!


 

Blocks

I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I own a MTGO account that I very rarely use, but after reading a few different articles, decided to pick up a few of the decks here as they are relatively cheap to acquire (I sold some of the cards I already had so effectively cost me nothing aside from my original investment). Now as they are block they develop with the inclusion of new expansions, so I'm looking forward to Dark Ascension and see where the two decks I have built develop with the community.

I'm going to set myself a challenge. It's fairly simple but I intend to pilot one of these decks to a standard FNM and see how well I can perform with it.

I won't reveal which one it is until I've played it.

Until next week, which I believe should involve a draft at FNM,


 
Adam - P.S I picked up a Twitter exlusive to this blog: 

@weekinmtg

the email address to this is also weekinmtg@gmail.com

Merry Christmas

Just a quick Merry Christmas, or a pleasant Sunday if you don't celebrate the previously mentioned Holiday!

I received a pocket video camera so hopefully i'll have time to start doing little videos! I plan to do a Bant Pod Deck that I ran to my pre Christmas FNM!

If I don't get it up before hand hope everyone has a good new Year!

No FNM But still a magic Filled Week

Thursday 15^th December

So Today I had a brewing/deck construction day. I'm not much of a brewer, but I do look at decks from the bigger tournaments sleeve them up and then try and adapt from there. This usually depends on local meta, my play style and of course card availability.

I Started with This UW Illusions Build and A R/B Bloodhall Build. I had to make my own tweaks here and there, but fortunately they aren't major, and I also think that both these decks fit my style. I think that I will have to finally take the plunge and Pick up that 4^th snapcaster, as it seems to be a major player that I don't think will be going anywhere any time soon.

This brings me onto something that I have an interest in – Math! Now before I scare everyone else, I think that it's interesting! For all those that haven't noticed I personally feel that mana basses are particularly bad if you want to play anything that is not friendly colours and therefore 3+! So I'm in the process of building a Bant POD (Blue White green Birthing pod) with the basis being sent by a friend I made via Twitter. However he has left with me a little room for customisation for a few creatures and the mana base!

This led me to do a bit of a google search on articles and I stumbled across these:

This one is my Favorite but I also found this , this and this offering interesting outlooks on the topics. If this is of any sort of interest to you then I would recommend giving them a read.

I guess all this does is offer the amount of basics to play, the trickier part for me is selecting and playing the correct amount of Dual lands and scars fast lands.

So With 3 standard decks now out of the way, it was time to update my Modern deck. It is a very budget "Eggs" deck that I first saw many moons ago Here on the Building on a Budget Site. This deck was very in expensive to pick up so worked on it and ended up with this list. Now of course this was mid-August which was Pre Pro Tour Philadelphia. Since then the ban list has had an update. (I also believe that it's getting another update on 20th December). From said ban list I unfortunately lost 2 ponders and 4 Preordain! Gah. Oh well. From that I have taken those 6 cards out and replaced with 3 Locket of Yesterdays, and actually added 4 Creatures. A singleton Disciple of The Vault and 3 Riddlesmith. I used a list that appeared on Tcg Player, but is a natural evolution of the original deck.

I'm not sure if there are other Modern Players in Cornwall but I'm always up for a game and it can inspire me to build a sideboard. I'm always tempted to start working on a legacy deck. The beauty of the Eternal formats is that the cards don't rotate and, unless cards appear on the corresponding ban list, you will have a deck that is always playable.

 

Friday 16^th

Drinking and EDH, Do go on…..

So our shop owner was away for the weekend running a stall at a very large Yu-Gi-Oh Tournament, fortunately enough I had a friend Invite me and a few others round, for pizza, EDH and drinks. Awesome. We even managed to fit in a game of Settlers of Catan. It was only my second time playing it and I sucked hard.

EDH is a great open game. For me it lets you do very silly things, and ultimately play with cards you want to play with. I like to apply the theory "Go Big or Go Home".

I basically got banned from using the horrible combo of Hive Mind and the "Pacts" from the future sights set. It is a quality combo that lets me win, (In all honestly it's a cheapskate's way to play and win!). I do still have my one turn win combo which has won me some games with Hellkite Charger and Bear Umbra! Yeah!

All in all a solid fun night. I would heart fully recommend drinking and playing social casual games. It can help you unwind just relax whilst still playing a game you love!

Next time I hope to upload how my FNM went when running the Bant Pod list, and hopefully I'll get it up on Christmas eve but that might be a big ask. If you don't see me before that then I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays.


 
Adam


 
P.S Exsanguinate is a horrible card to be cast in a multiplayer EDH game.

Friday Is Draft Day

Friday The 9^th December

So after a fairly quiet week on the MTG front due to university, Friday rolled round and it was time for our monthly draft! Yay.

As most new players Standard (Or Type 2) was my favourite format, but if you want to play a Top Tier deck then this can cost a fair whack. I'll talk about how I budget my money whilst being all studenty on another date.

Draft is very quickly becoming my favourite format. It gives everyone a good level starting point: Nothing. You get your boosters and then have to make skill based decisions dependant on information coming from what you have previously pulled and signals being sent to and from other players. The quicker you can adapt to all of this info then the better deck you will have.

I used to be a terrible drafter but I think over time I've gotten better. Well I hope so at least.

Anyway Draft time:

Pack 1 Pick 1 and It's a bomb: Olivia Voldaren! It's always nice to pull a card that is playable in the format. Also this has gone up in price recently and I've been after a third so win win.

However my next picked turned into a Bonds of Faith. For the non-eagle eyed amongst you, this is neither Red Or Black. And is therefore not very synergistic with my first pick. Third Pick was a Chapel Geist.

Awesome. Am I in white now? Seems so

Pick 4: Stitched Drake. Now I think I need to explain this pick. I think that blue is ridiculously strong in this set. I've drafted it a few times and thoroughly enjoyed it each time. Now for me this is a strong 4^th pick card and I am very happy to try and pick up blue.

And this is where my draft started to gain momentum in kind of an odd way.

I couldn't stop picking up removal. I think I ended up with:

• 3 Dead Weight
  
• 2 Victim of Night
  
• 2 Blazing Torch
  
• 1 Grasp of Phantasms
  
• 1 Silent Departure
  
• 1 Claustrophobia
  

This did leave me a little creature light. I splashed red to play Olivia and a 12^th Creature which was an Ashmouth hound. This deck was actually insane even if a little suboptimal. Admittedly I didn't play all of the above cards but I had a blast. Even spectral flight worked well to bring home the beats in several games.

I rode this to a 3-0 and won a FNM! I've now won a few and I treating this as a development in my own game. Russian Boosters as Prize's are cool too. Very happy with the Dismember, Shrine of Burning Rage and Beast Within:

Sorry for the late update – as mentioned been a little busy but Ill try and post again on Sunday about this FNM-less week!

FNM and the Weekend

It's Friday

So after a test at University on the wonders of Partial Differential Equations, hoped on a train to St Austell to Play at FNM. I had my deck all set up and sorted, and was all set to play UW.

Then after a sudden change of heart I found myself pulling mono-black infect out of my bag, making a few changes from when I won the Innistrad Games Day.

I decided to try and go for a more creature kill style rather than hand disruption as I thought this fit our meta appropriately.

Round 1 – UW Control

Now I love coming to FNM and trying to play good decks, but do you ever sit down against one opponent, who you just can't beat. Now Jake is a good player and a friend, so In a perfect world I'd rather meet him in a later round or not at all.

Game 1 I took a hand with 3 lands, 1 being an Inkmoth, spellskite, lashwrite and a bit of removal. Jake got Land screwed and by the time he managed to set a Gideon, I was in a pretty good position with 2 lashwrithes, one equipped to a spellskite and one still on a germ. He used the Giddeon to kill the 6/10 spellskite, and as he was tapped out I dropped Skithiryx, gave it haste, and equipped to swing for game. As you can probably tell I'm not afraid to start beating down with non-infect creatures if that route is not working.

Unfortunately games 2 and 3 took similar roots involving Jake just getting Lands, and card advantage via Think twice and Mana leaks. He's basically playing an altered version of his old Caw-blade deck. One card that grows on me more and more is midnight haunting. I think I originally took it as a sorcery, but after playing with and against it I've never thought it was terrible. Watch this space for me playing a deck with Spirit tokens involved.

Round 2 - The Bye

Why does this guy play Magic? He turns up and just loses!

I hate having the bye, I come to play but when there are odd numbers someone has to have it. Oh well. At least you still get planeswalker points for the "Win".

During the round I just walked around, talked with people and just watched some games.

Round 3 – Ian – Blue Black Control

I say control but I'm not overly sure. Game 1 started with me just chipping away at Ian with Plague stinger, as I just couldn't find equipment or a pump spell. Managed to get Ian to 9 poison and then Tezzeret's Gambit did the last point of poison.

Game 2 – Started terribly, I had to Mull to 4 as none of the 3 hands before had any land. Disastrous! What made this even worse was this was land free too. Ian Dropped a typhoid Rat and started chipping away at my life – He got me down to 14 but I managed to stabilise by drawing lots of lands, playing Virulent wound and then resetting my mulligans by playing 2 Tezzeret's Gambit. I didn't go any lower than 10 life and again Skithiryx was able to finish the game off for me.

I have no idea why I was so land light in that game as the deck contains 26 land and I do try to thoroughly shuffle so my land doesn't clump together.

Round 4 – Tim – Bant Control

Not a week goes by where I don't seem to play Tim. I do enjoy our games as Tim is a rogue deckbuilder with a lot of skill. He always seems to play a different deck each week and I always have fun seeing what he has come up with.

This week was a little different. In game 1 I was on the play, passed and then Tim played Land then birds of Paradise, to which I quickly put a virulent wound onto. I managed to get Tim to 5p from I belive a Inkmoth nexus and a Lashwrithe but then I met a powerful Beast within which destroyed my only threat. Tim then started picking off my equipment but by that point I had made the decision to be the aggressor and was beating down with the beasts, which eventually killed Tim.

I didn't really see much from Tim other than a Birds and a couple of midnight hauntings, so made the decision to board in 2 Curse of Death's Hold.

Which in Game 2 I was luckily enough to start with in hand, which also consisted of 2-3 land and an early threat so I kept that hand. And then the Curse hit the board on turn 5, which slowed the game down for Tim. After that I only saw a Geist of St Traft equipped with a Sword of War and Peace. I had already dropped Phyrexian Crusader, and was beating down as I had a lashwrithe too.

Overall ending 3-1 and coming 3^rd is a good evening – however was a little disappointed that I had a bye. Oh well – Next Week booster Draft!

Saturday 3^rd December

I had to pop into University mid-afternoon so had a slow start to the day. After a quick yet productive group meeting, I popped back home and then noticed that it was a Star City Games open weekend. For those that don't know SCG host tournaments on most weekends that have a good payout structure and they broadcast feature matches. As this was a mid-American venue the time difference wasn't too bad and I believe it started around 5-6 ish. As this is broadcasted, this allows players to watch some good competitive magic, and as the metagame is healthy, we get a good variety of decks. The commentary tends to be very good and explains plays very well. If you ever find yourself with the time to watch one then I would recommend it!

I also did a little bit of work towards Judge Tests, as it is a bit of a time sink I unfortunately won't probably have the opportunity to do said test until next summer. Oh well, better late than never. Here's hoping for a British GP in 2012!

Sunday 4^th December

The Top 4 of the SCG open was on at 2pm so I tuned into that, before I found out that there was an offer on something that I've wanted to buy for a while. This resulted in me popping into town to pick that up. Turns out there are things I put before magic. When I popped back I put the remainder of the broadcast on in the background, as I went about writing up decklists, and also doing some uni work. Nothing exciting here today really. From next week I'll start putting up decklists of what I've played at FNM.

 

Today I also decided that, whilst I enjoyed playing the Infect deck, I still can't get used to the style, so will be switching it up a little bit. I need to find the balance on weather I want to be more controlling in a hand disruption style, or a creature kill basis. It will come with Time. Don't expect much from me next week. It's my last week before Christmas holiday, and Have a bit of work to be doing, but There will be a post FNM update.

So Untill next weekend,

Laters