MTG: ONLINE

I recently have started to play Magic Online (MTGO), which is basically just a digitized version of MTG. It cost me 10 bucks to get an account, and I bought one extra pack of cards, so I have invested about 15 dollars so far, which feels like a fairly low entry fee considering how much I've spent on physical cards. The client you play on allows you to buy cards from the main store, trade with other players, play casual games in various formats (I only play Standard), and join online tournaments.

When I first started playing I had to figure out what deck I was going to try and make, since cards essentially cost the same as their physical counterparts, and there's no realistic way to get digitized copies of cards I already own. So with the cards I started out with I began looking at trading bots that are run by players, when you start talking to one it is similar to downloading files from an IRC bot:

It took me quite awhile to hunt through a bunch of bots to find the cheapest versions of all the cards I need, but once I was done I had constructed a cheap version of my RDW deck that I talked about in my last post. (pretty much identical, just missing about 8 rare cards that I didn't want to spend the money on)

Once I had my deck constructed, I started joining casual games to test it out, below is a screen shot of the casual game finder window. One of the nice things about MTGO is there are hundreds of players online all the time, so it's really easy to play test a deck.

Once in a game you just click through the phases (playing cards and using abilities where needed) as the game progresses. Below are some pictures of me stomping on a random player pretty hard, and an example of my RDW deck winning on turn 3 (the fastest that it can win).

MTG: Mono-Black Infect

Well, I was feeling the urge to start back up with competitive play at FNM (Friday Night Magic) this week. My brother and I recently sold our bulk old/useless cards to the local card shop and I bought my second Skitheryx with my share of the money, which finished off my Mono-Black Infect deck, utility-wise anyway (I like to have promo art cards when I can, and there are a couple more that I need to top off this deck). So I took the deck in on Friday. It was fun and I did fairly well, tldr; I went 3/2, took 8th, and probably should have won my fifth round, but more on that later.

My first game was against... well I honestly don't remember, I know who I played and that he was playing White/Red/Green. I don't remember him playing anything of consequence though, because both games I played a Phyrexian Crusader on turn three, much to his dismay. Anyone that knows the card, or that clicked on that link and read what it does realizes that it has protection from Red and White, and just as a note for anyone not familiar with color stereotypes in MTG, Green doesn't really have any creature destruction spells. Needless-to-say, he couldn't do much about that alongside a cascade of temp-buff spells.

The next two rounds (the first of which I lost, barely) were both against another fast aggro deck of the same basic type "Red Deck Wins" (RDW). As the name suggests, it's Mono-Red, and it wins, a lot. The concept is to play free artifacts, like Memnite, and then use Kuldotha Rebirth to turn it into 3 goblins, then use cards like Goblin Bushwhacker and Goblin Chieftain to buff the goblins up and swing with them, it's one of the fastest decks in Type 2 competitive play currently, with a fairly regular third turn win. My infect deck sports a fairly regular fourth turn win, but that's as fast as it can win, so it's tough for me to compete with RDW, though not impossible.

Round four was against a very good player, playing a very good deck called "Caw-Go", which consists of playing small White flyers and using another creature to fetch very powerful equipment from their deck and equip them to the flyers. I ended up winning this round because of Phyrexian Crusader as well, but the funny thing about this round was my opponent. Next Friday will be the Top Eight tournament, which happens a few times a year. My opponent for round four was technically in position 9 or 10 (I forget, but he was really close) and he needed to beat me to get into top eight, so he practically begged me through the whole round to just concede. I told him no, simply (and truthfully) because I wanted to actually beat a Caw-Go deck (they're good decks!). Halfway through the round (after I was clearly winning) I told him I wasn't even going to be in town next weekend, and that I had just barely fallen out of top eight myself because of my bout of humorous decks I had been bringing. He was sad :( (but I beat Caw-Go!)

OK, so, other than my loss to an RDW deck, which is fairly cookie-cutter (disregarding that it's one of the three competitive decks that I play, heh), I had been doing pretty well. Round 5 made me mad, I got paired against a (good) Blue/White control deck (yuck) with a good player behind it (double yuck). Sure, I can accept a solid loss to a good control deck, but during the first game I made a VERY critical error, which cost me the chance at going to a third game, and a good chance to beat him.

What happened was he had me fairly low, low enough that I was going to be dead after the next two of his turns, and it was during my second main phase. He was at zero poison, I had a Plague Stinger I had just played with a Livewire Lash equipped to it, a Virulent Swipe, Vampire Bite, Virulent Wound, and a Sign in Blood in my hand, and I told him to go. Now, take note that Virulent Swipe has rebound on it and that just targeting an infect creature with a Livewire Lash on it enables me to do two infect to a target.

All I had to do was at some point during that turn or during his turn target my Plague Stinger with the Virulent Swipe and do two poison to him, and then during the next turn rebound the Virulent Swipe, cast Vampire Bite, and then swing at him, if he does nothing to prevent it that would be the original 2, plus 4 for the rebound and the Vampire Bite, and then the Plague Stinger would be attacking for 1(base)+2(livewire)+2(swipe)+3(bite)= 8, plus the original 6 is 14, way more than enough to kill him. He DID have something to deal with it, but it was just a Condemn, which targets the creature, so I get to direct 2 infect at him again cause of the Livewire Lash, so the creature would deal no combat damage, but he would still be at 8 poison. Remember I had the Virulent Wound in my hand, I could kill my own creature with it in response to him Condemning it, and the targeting effect from the Livewire Lash would activate and put him to 10 poison just from the Livewire Lash targeting effect.

Nope, I didn't do that, however, I had another chance to fix it! Remember I had a Sign in Blood in my hand, I had more than 2 health during the turn I would have been attacking, and I had quite a bit of mana (long games against control decks). If I had just used that, drawn the two cards, I would have found (I checked afterward) another Virulent Wound! I had a chance to win, missed it, then a chance to fix the mistake and still win, and MISSED THAT TOO! I was so irritated with myself... that player went on to take 4th :( as a note, the RDW deck I lost to won the tournament, maybe time I'll play that... maybe, I like my infect deck :)

NOTE: For those of you that like the idea of not playing cookie-cutter decks, please keep in mind that though I'm using a lot of important infect cards, Mono-Black Infect is NOT cookie-cutter, it's my own thing that I built, I get a lot of people at FNM telling me I should make it Blue/Black (my excuse is that I don't have the dual-lands to handle the mana issues multi-colored decks present). RDW is the only thing I really play that is cookie-cutter and even that is slightly tweaked to fit my own preferences, more on that in a different post.

Magic The Gathering: The Hilarity of Annoying Green Decks.

So one of my longest lasting hobbies is collecting and playing Magic The Gathering (MTG), I play weekly at a local shop for Friday Night Magic (FNM). I usually play fairly competitive Standard decks, but about a month ago I was starting to get angry with my decks not working the way they should (unlucky draws, etc), so I began making "fun" decks each week and have been playing them for the past three weeks.

For anyone that is unfamiliar with MTG, here is the Wikipedia article.

One of the easiest ways to make a simple/quick deck is with green cards, so the first two decks I made were both mono-green, and were basically just simple, sub-par, "aggro" decks (I make creatures, and then attack my opponent with them to do damage). I actually tried making both of the decks as a single deck to begin with, but it turned out there were two different ideas floating around, so I separated them by the two key cards that I thought made them funny decks, Primal Cocoon, and Timbermaw Larva, each of which never normally see play in competitive Standard.

The Primal Cocoon deck ended up revolving around Omnath, Locus of Mana, Sacred Wolf, Overwhelming Stampede, and a whole bunch of mana producing Elves. The idea was to get a Primal Cocoon or two on a Sacred Wolf and let it sit there for a few turns while I defended myself with Fog and a big Omnath, until I could cast a Stampede and have all my elves get +X/+X for the size of my then enlarged Sacred Wolf. The concept is actually really terrible, since most good control decks won't let me have such a narrow win condition, and good aggro decks are going to kill me before I can get very far. I ended up actually going 2/3 with the deck (I won 2 of 5 rounds), as it turns out, Omnath is very powerful by himself, since he just gets bigger and bigger, and you always have mana available to cast defensive spells, like Fog and Vines of Vastwood.

The second deck, based on Timbermaw Larva, was entirely Forest centric (green basic land). The whole idea was to use cards like Harrow and Cultivate to pull all of my Forests from my library into play, have a Timbermaw Larva in play with a Strata Scythe equipped to it. Then when I attack with the Larva it is huge, and if need be I had a few cards that could give it Trample, if they had creatures to block with. This deck ended up having an even more narrow kill condition, and it actually was a lot slower, since the creature base costed a lot more mana, I think I won a single round that night. I did however discover that Fog is hilarious, and no one likes playing against someone that can cast it over and over (I had started seeing this the previous week, and it really sunk in by this point in time). This got me to start working on the best and worst deck yet!

Last night I played something which was dubbed "Power Fog" by the end of the night by everyone that saw me playing it. Since the previous two weeks I had noticed everyone hated it when I prevented all combat damage they dealt multiple turns in a row, I decided to make a deck that... well, did nothing BUT prevent combat damage, on every single one of their turns. I came up with 7 different cards that prevented damage; Fog, Tanglesap, Blunt the Assault, Harmless Assault, Safe Passage, Haze Frog, and Soul Parry (only prevents from two creatures, but it's cheap). I ended up not running full play-sets of everything, cause there wasn't enough room in the deck, and I needed to actually have a kill condition still. I had originally intended to win purely with Haze Frog, just cause it was funny, but then someone suggested Luminarch Ascension, which was ingenious. I also found Goldenglow Moth, and since it gains you life when it blocks, and not when it takes damage (since you can declare blockers, and then prevent the combat damage with an instant), it is just a constant life-gain, which really helps prolong the game. Finally I got the deck together and started play testing with my roommate, where we immediately noticed that while I could prevent damage for quite awhile, my opponent would build up a massive army and eventually swarm me to death when I was finally out of prevention cards, so I had to add Day of Judgment. We also realized that I had very little way of dealing with direct damage and control decks, so I had to add in Leyline of Sanctity. Finally the deck was about as good as I was probably going to get it (it wasn't, there were a few changes I could've made that I found out about last night, but they were fairly minor). At the tournament I won a single game, not even a round, one game, however, everyone I played against and everyone that was around to watch each of my matches found every game to be hilarious. Mission accomplished.

The problem with the deck was I would eventually run out of cards, since I didn't have any means of gaining card advantage other than Day of Judgement, which isn't a draw spell, and the only possible kill condition was the Luminarch Ascension, which was fairly easy for people to not let me activate, or even have, often times. Still, probably one of the most fun nights I've had at a tournament in awhile :)