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.
From the sounds of it there was a lot of ups and downs and there is some good info here. For someone starting out what would be the best way to learn and best way to accumulate cards. Should I buy boosters or single cards that I want from your experience what do you prefer? Also what deck would you consider cookie cutter?
ReplyDeleteIt depends on how much money you want to spend and what format you want to play. It's kinda expensive to play in Standard because 4 sets of cards rotate every Fall, but that's what I play. I generally buy one box of every set that comes out (4 a year), which costs me about 80-120 a quarter.
ReplyDeleteIf you go the route of buying a box every quarter you generally get most of what you would need to make a certain subset of decks, a friend of mine buys two boxes each quarter to make sure he has a play set (4 copies) of each card, or close to it. Buying singles gets expensive REAL fast.
Cookie cutter decks are generally the decks that place really high in state/national tournaments. Usually when people play those decks they make personalized changes to them because they might not own all the cards, or because the people they play against play a certain type of deck.