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