Here is the deck I've been working on lately. It's kind of like what you would get if Mythic Bant and Next Level Bant got together and decided to be best friends, but they don't want to hang out with Jace, the Mind Sculpter anymore because they're sick of his arrogant attitude, they'd rather hang out with that new girl, Ms. Fiona Shaman because she always brings something fun to the party. It's straight-up midrange, which I seem to gravitate towards a lot, and because it lacks Bloodbraid Elf it can't recur Vengevines as reliably as Naya Shaman, but I'm hoping its protective elements and variety of paths to victory make Bant Shaman a reasonable alternative. Behold:
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Fauna Shaman
4 Knight of the Reliquary
3 Vengevine
1 Baneslayer Angel
1 Sovereigns of Lost Alara
1 Eldrazi Conscription
4 Path to Exile
4 Mana Leak
3 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
5 Forest
1 Island
1 Plains
1 Sejiri Steppe
1 Seaside Citadel
1 Tectonic Edge (too greedy?)
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Verdant Catacombs
2 Stirring Wildwood
4 Celestial Colonnade
Sideboard is in progress, but definitely includes Flashfreeze and Obstinate Baloth.
This started out as more of a toolbox deck, now the only one-ofs for Fauna Shaman to find are the Sovereigns and the plan B Baneslayer Angel (like when I have Eldrazi Conscription in hand already or really need the life gain). I tutor for Sovereigns so often maybe I should just give Mythic a try, but 6 drops are an icky thing to clog up your hand and it's nice to be able instead to dig it out when I'm ready to pull the trigger, do other things when I'm not. Since I'm not all-in on the Mythic plan, it's also less devastating to lose my early mana dorks (but it's still a freakin' annoying loss of tempo and a large part of the reason I run counter magic in this deck.) Obviously Cunning Sparkmage + Basilisk Collar is still bad for me, but I'll deal.
I might cut a Path to Exile for another Fauna Shaman target, or even a Jace, the Mindsculpter (if I can acquire one). I kept getting blown out by Baneslayer Angels I couldn't answer when I played in the PTQ with only three copies, but that may have been a bad sample. I might run a single Ranger of Eos or Kor Skyfisher that I can tutor for when I have a Vengevine or two in the yard and don't want to wait to draw a second creature to bring them back. Maybe Jace is better though because I can brainstorm for the fuel I need and the bounce ability kind of makes up for the shortage of removal.
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I was closing some browser tabs today and I still had the DCI ratings page open from weeks ago, so I logged in to take a look at my match history, as I like to do from time to time to verify all this time playing and thinking about Magic is actually improving me as a player. I was disappointed but not surprised to see that my recent mediocre performances have dropped me from my 1900+ spike to an 1837 Total rating, but it's still a pretty damn decent number. All these fluctuations of rating are kind of hard to analyze though, and I was curious about where I am in terms of win-loss percentage. I know that rating is more accurate because it's weighted to take into account whether you've been playing against people at the top of their game or just pwning some n00bs, but this is simpler. I tallied up the wins and losses, ignored ties and byes, and divided the time into one-year chunks starting from the first time I played a game of magic at the end of June 2008. Here's what I learned:
1) Wow, I play a lot of sanctioned Magic!
2) Wow, I was terrible when I started playing! Case in point: out of my first 17 sanctioned matches (Friday Night Magic and Eventide Prerelease), I had a 0-12-5 record...and I was happy about those draws!
3) Practice makes perfect, but very very slowly. At least I'm getting better.
Year One: I won 39% of the time, putting me at decidedly below average, but what do you expect from a beginner? The main thing holding me back was lack of knowledge. I was playing for a few months before I realized I could actually respond to triggered abilities (like Champion) because they go on the stack. These were also the dark ages of mana burn and combat damage stacking, so it was a little harder to pick up the game than it is now. The other issue was a reluctance to spend the money on the best cards when I didn't yet have the winning record to prove the investment would be worth it. If I had jumped in all the way instead of testing the waters for a long time, I'm sure it would be different story. I didn't run anything even resembling a netdeck for several months, and that was a 5-Color Control list with a semi-budget manabase and a few Ponders to help me find my colors. I didn't understand how crippling my warped manabase was, just that I was mulliganing a lot and sometimes having trouble casting spells on time. I still did fine against the other randoms, but lost in the mirror a lot to the good players at FNM. I also ran a stock Kithkin build (with a few tricks in the sideboard) the whole summer after M10 came out, so I did quite a bit of winning at the end of this look-back period to make up for all the growing pains in the beginning.
Year Two: 50:50, so I moved to exactly average. A spike at the beginning because I was getting pretty good with Kithkin at that point, a drop with the resurgence of aggro-hating control decks, a bigger drop when Lorwyn block rotated and I was left without a real deck. I stubbornly refused to play Jund for a while and was working so much overtime all winter, I never had the energy to put together anything really stunning. Things turned around again spring/early summer as I figured out how to draft well and resumed playing "real" decks. There's a straight month where I was at 80% just playing local Friday Night Magics, for what it's worth.
Year Three (the previous 6 weeks): 62%, nice. And not an FNM in there, solid Competitive REL events all the way.
I'm pleased with these results, but am I satisfied? NO. No one hits 100% of the time, but if you look at any 8 round PTQ, you need 6-2 (with good breakers) or better to make top 8, then you have to win all three of those rounds for the blue envelope, so that's about 80%. That's what I need to shoot for every PTQ this season, even when I open a weak pool. I especially need to work on M11 draft. I'm going 1-1 or 2-1 a lot, and I need to be able to 3-0 when it counts. Overall, my goal for this year is to win at least 70% of my matches, but I'll be playing to win every time.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Travels Continue, to Little Result
Well, PTQ Amsterdam season is over and my greatest efforts failed to get me the Q in a 4 week odyssey that took me back and forth between home in the Chicago suburbs, Pittsburgh, Detroit (with an extra day at a motel in Livonia, MI taking advantage of the wi-fi to PTQ online), GP Columbus, and GenCon in Indianapolis. The brand-new Fauna Shaman decks and unusual quantity of good (and Jund-ready) rogue decks caught me unprepared in Pittsburgh, so all I got out of the weekend was a handful of packs and a desire to innovate, but not in time for Detroit where I had the same problems and finished out of prize. Craig dreamcrushed his way to a free plane ticket after starting 0-1 though. GP Columbus was my breakout Legacy event, so I guess I'm satisfied with my 5-4 finish (8-6 including GPTs), but 6-3 at the PTQ brought me nothing but a draft set of M11 and happy memories of finally drawing a sideboarded instant-win Manabarbs against Turboland and of being totally crushed by a sick RUG brew that unleashed a steady stream of mana acceleration and countermagic culminating in a super-effective Destructive Force.
These disappointing events left me feeling really burned out on Jund, such that I woke up with a "bad feeling" about Jund the morning of the Columbus PTQ but no time to audible into UW Control instead, and I didn't enjoy either Midwest Masters LCQ I played in at GenCon. Won with turn 2 Leech again, yawn...lost to color-screw again, yawn... Luckily, I had put together a Fauna Shaman list of my own (with Craig's help) in Columbus and he lent me the cards I needed to play it in the PTQ. $24 worth of playtesting either, I can safely say that SuperFriends is a bad match-up. How do I know? Because I lost to it three times in a row! That deck definately wasn't overrepresented at the tournament as a whole, planeswalkers just have it in for me. (Damn you Spreading Seas! I thought I was safe!) I dropped from the tournament after losing to Boros Bushwhacker (remember that deck and its nut draws?) and went to the other side of the TCG room to drown my sorrows in some Spoils sealed.
The Spoils is a TCG similar to Magic, but with more skill-testing mechanics and 1000% more penis jokes. It's the perfect antidote to any magic player's case of the "poor mes" because you don't get mana/color-screwed or mulligan down to 4 at inopportune moments. You start with 2 lands (resources) in play, can play any card facedown as land and even sac it to play it as a spell later if it has an ability called "flip-up", and spells are essentially colorless, as long as you have one or more of the right color resource in play based on the "threshold" requirement for that spell, so for instance if you had a mountain and forest in play, you could still play 2 birds of paradise if they cost 1 with threshold of one G. You start with 8 or 9 cards in hand and mulligan (one-time) by shipping any number of cards to the bottom of your deck and drawing that many more. Every turn you choose whether to play a resource (land) or draw a card, and playing a resource is almost always better because you can also choose at any time to pay 4 to play a resource or pay 3 to draw a card. This makes strategy more interesting because not only does playing a spell cost you a card, but every 3 that it costs also costs you a draw. So do you want tempo here, or card advantage? Combat gives you more opportunity to gain an edge over opponents who don't think everything through, because it's a little more complicated: First, combat damage does go on the stack, second, you can have multiple combat phases on your turn (and when creatures attack together they basically have banding), third, creatures have a 3rd attribute (speed) that works like first strike, in that your 2/2/3 guy has first strike when it's blocked by or blocking a 2/2/2, but it's the other way around against a 2/2/4.
I walked out of there with a bunch of packs and I had a lot of fun outplaying opponents at a game I barely know the rules to just applying lessons learned from studying Magic strategy. I didn't have the same pressure to succeed since this was only the 2nd time I've played. With Magic, I have inflated expectations that make the game less fun if I don't go into the tournament with the right attitude. Plus, trying another game is always a good change of pace and maybe it will break me out of this rut. I had so much fun, I did a Spoils draft on Sunday, got some more packs, which I still haven't opened because I want to find someone to play a 2 man sealed game or something.
After returning to "my world" on the MtG side of the room, I did ante up one of those packs "gunslinging" against another connoisseur of fine collectible card games, Sam Black, who had enjoyed success but was denied the fruits of his success (like a free cruise and big money tournament) back when Spoils was the hot new game, before it collapsed financially. His EDH Lands deck was too much for my type 2 Bant Shaman deck (with Noble Hiearch as the general lol), but afterwards I picked his brain about some card choices and left convinced to finally move my Mana Leaks from the sideboard to the maindeck and to cut a few underperformers, and good deck construction advice is worth a Spoils pack anytime. I'll post my current list later.
These disappointing events left me feeling really burned out on Jund, such that I woke up with a "bad feeling" about Jund the morning of the Columbus PTQ but no time to audible into UW Control instead, and I didn't enjoy either Midwest Masters LCQ I played in at GenCon. Won with turn 2 Leech again, yawn...lost to color-screw again, yawn... Luckily, I had put together a Fauna Shaman list of my own (with Craig's help) in Columbus and he lent me the cards I needed to play it in the PTQ. $24 worth of playtesting either, I can safely say that SuperFriends is a bad match-up. How do I know? Because I lost to it three times in a row! That deck definately wasn't overrepresented at the tournament as a whole, planeswalkers just have it in for me. (Damn you Spreading Seas! I thought I was safe!) I dropped from the tournament after losing to Boros Bushwhacker (remember that deck and its nut draws?) and went to the other side of the TCG room to drown my sorrows in some Spoils sealed.
The Spoils is a TCG similar to Magic, but with more skill-testing mechanics and 1000% more penis jokes. It's the perfect antidote to any magic player's case of the "poor mes" because you don't get mana/color-screwed or mulligan down to 4 at inopportune moments. You start with 2 lands (resources) in play, can play any card facedown as land and even sac it to play it as a spell later if it has an ability called "flip-up", and spells are essentially colorless, as long as you have one or more of the right color resource in play based on the "threshold" requirement for that spell, so for instance if you had a mountain and forest in play, you could still play 2 birds of paradise if they cost 1 with threshold of one G. You start with 8 or 9 cards in hand and mulligan (one-time) by shipping any number of cards to the bottom of your deck and drawing that many more. Every turn you choose whether to play a resource (land) or draw a card, and playing a resource is almost always better because you can also choose at any time to pay 4 to play a resource or pay 3 to draw a card. This makes strategy more interesting because not only does playing a spell cost you a card, but every 3 that it costs also costs you a draw. So do you want tempo here, or card advantage? Combat gives you more opportunity to gain an edge over opponents who don't think everything through, because it's a little more complicated: First, combat damage does go on the stack, second, you can have multiple combat phases on your turn (and when creatures attack together they basically have banding), third, creatures have a 3rd attribute (speed) that works like first strike, in that your 2/2/3 guy has first strike when it's blocked by or blocking a 2/2/2, but it's the other way around against a 2/2/4.
I walked out of there with a bunch of packs and I had a lot of fun outplaying opponents at a game I barely know the rules to just applying lessons learned from studying Magic strategy. I didn't have the same pressure to succeed since this was only the 2nd time I've played. With Magic, I have inflated expectations that make the game less fun if I don't go into the tournament with the right attitude. Plus, trying another game is always a good change of pace and maybe it will break me out of this rut. I had so much fun, I did a Spoils draft on Sunday, got some more packs, which I still haven't opened because I want to find someone to play a 2 man sealed game or something.
After returning to "my world" on the MtG side of the room, I did ante up one of those packs "gunslinging" against another connoisseur of fine collectible card games, Sam Black, who had enjoyed success but was denied the fruits of his success (like a free cruise and big money tournament) back when Spoils was the hot new game, before it collapsed financially. His EDH Lands deck was too much for my type 2 Bant Shaman deck (with Noble Hiearch as the general lol), but afterwards I picked his brain about some card choices and left convinced to finally move my Mana Leaks from the sideboard to the maindeck and to cut a few underperformers, and good deck construction advice is worth a Spoils pack anytime. I'll post my current list later.
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