Today's artwork was chosen as the best reflection of how my winter has been going so far. It's been a rough month and a half in many ways and my Commander games have been no exception.
When things aren't going well I try to find solace or comfort in getting a win or two either in our LGS EDH league or in pickup Commander games. When things REALLY aren't going well, I can play my best decks and just get nowhere. Maybe my less-then-optimistic disposition affects my play and if I were in a more rosy, upbeat mood I'd wind up playing better, but I'll spare you the navel-gazing and just dive into the games.
Yesterday marked the beginning of our EDH League's 2018 season. We're going to be picking themes for months from February to December where our "Tubthumping" category will earn you double points if your commander is "on theme". Our February theme is going to be "hybrid mana symbols anywhere on the card", so I'm eagerly anticipating building Rhys the Redeemed. Until then I can pretty much play what I want in our 6 League games (we're skipping Prerelease weekend) in January. I decided I'd play my "best deck" - Narset, Enlightened Master. I also got to join one pickup game in between rounds, in which I played a new deck.
Round One
As I said - I'm in a rut. You know the "Midas Touch", where everything you touch turns to gold? The opposite of that is the "Poo Touch", where everything you touch turns to shit. Yesterday it felt like I had the Poo Touch and it started with my decision to play Narset in my first EDH League game of the year.
Narset, Enlightened Master is a bit of a glass cannon. She lets you cheat casting costs for as many as four cards when she attacks, which is great if you hit a bunch of extra turns and maybe an Eldrazi Conscription, but you can just as easily hit a bunch of mana rocks or even worse - lands or creatures. She only casts noncreature spells, so on a bad day if you aren't stacking your deck with Protean Staff (which I don't), you're always gambling to see what you "flop" into with her ability.
The problem with Narset Voltron is that you build the deck to play her by turn four or five in an ideal game, but if you don't get lucky you can have no blockers all the way up to turn five or later if things really aren't going well. You've gotta believe that your opponents will save a counterspell for her.
Our league decided to not allow silver-bordered cards during January. Because of that ruling, one of the guys I played with yesterday chose to play his mono-green Selvala, Heart of the Wilds deck. By turn 5 he was able to pump his commander to be arbitrarily large and while I had a decent starting hand, I had no blocker and was knocked out of the game. He didn't even wind up winning, but this has been a problem with my Narset deck for a long time. If it doesn't have blockers early enough I'm basically unable to survive unexpected early game threats. I'm well aware that means that it's probably not that good a deck. It's a glass cannon, able to blow up if it's left to its own devices but it doesn't have the ability to reliably power through other good decks. Sometimes it can get the job done, but this game was not one of those times.
That wasn't how I wanted to start my year, but I tried to keep my sense of humor and I hung out at the table for a while until another table finished its game and I jumped into a pickup game with them while we waited for the other tables to finish. We had four tables of games going, which is a great showing and definitely made me happy even if my first game was utter crap.
Killing Time
The pickup game I jumped into was a five player game with two really good decks, two midrange decks and my brand new Jarad deck that had never been played.
The two high tier decks were being played by a couple of guys who are either apartment-mates or just good friends, and they generally spend most of their energy trying to keep each other from winning. This gives slower decks a little bit of breathing room to be able to get a boardstate and maybe have some fun before the game is over, and they both seem to enjoy going at each other, so it usually makes for a fun game. I had no idea what I was going to get out of my deck, so I was happy to not have anyone focused on keeping me down (or knocking me out by turn 5).
I was able to play a couple of mana dorks and get Ondu Giant out on turn three. I kept Jarad on the sidelines for a while and spent a few turns swinging at opponents with Ondu Giant equipped with Blade of Selves. When OG enters the battlefield you get to put a land onto the battlefield, so I quickly had a really nice manabase and was ready to try to get something going.
I was able to play the best card in the deck - Death's Presence, along with Jugan, the Rising Star. Things were looking good, but my opponents weren't dumb. They realized I had some serious business going on before I even did, so when I played Jarad, gave him Hexproof with Mask of Avacyn and went to attach Blade of Selves to Jugan, he was quickly hit with a Swords to Plowshares.
I would have been able to swing with Jugan, create three copies of Jugan, have those three copies die to the legend rule, put 15 +1/+1 counters on a creature from the Jugan triggers and another 15 +1/+1 counters from the Death's Presence trigger. Then I could sac that creature to Jarad and have everyone lose that much life. At that point another creature would get the counters because of Death's Presence and I'd be able to sac it and close out the game.
Having Jugan gone pretty much limited my options. The guy who took care of that was playing Bruna and had 7 commander damage on me already. I had a Darkness in hand but he had Grand Abolisher out and was able to hit me for a ton of damage. I removed GA, but it was too late recover or mount a new threat and I wound up being the second player knocked out of the game. I suppose I can take some comfort in having been the second most threatening player at the table. It was nice to see a deck to something productive even if I wasn't able to seal the deal and get a win.
Round Two
After my moderately successful pickup game we jumped into round 2 of League games for the day. I chose to stay with Narset because it really is a deck capable of doing broken stuff and knocking opponents out. I've had plenty of success with her over the years so I figured I'd give it another chance.
I was at a four player table with a Vorinclex deck, an Atraxa deck and a Meren deck. Narset has a few major weaknesses, and the biggest is that she folds to opponents who make you sacrifice creatures.
I was able to develop a pretty decent boardstate including a land that allowed me to give Narset haste, though it wasn't a particularly fast start. I got an elephant as the result of an opponent's Terastadon blowing up my Lightmine Field and I made a Kobold of Kher Keep so I had a couple of blockers to get me to the point where I could cast Narset.
I had gotten out a Conqueror's Flail and a Fireshrieker and was able to cast and attack with Narset, flopping into some lands and mana rocks. The Meren player hadn't blown up yet, but was well on the way. The Atraxa player had a planeswalker out and had used it to force the Meren player to sacrifice a creature. My fatal error was that while I was able to attack both of my equipments to Narset and enchant her with Steel of the Godhead, I had been spooked by the Atraxa player's planeswalker. The Meren player had responded to the Atraxa player by swinging at them so I decided to see if I could knock out Atraxa and then deal with Meren. The Vorinclex player had such a slow start that he wasn't much of a concern and I had lots of mana rocks so I wasn't worried about him.
I hit the Atraxa player for 9 double-strike unblockable lifelink with Narset but flopped into 3 lands and a mana rock. Luck was not with me. The Atraxa player boardwiped and Narset was back in the command zone.
Meren rebuilt quickly. I was able to play Narset again and with 18 commander damage on the Atraxa player already I knocked him out with one more swing but didn't flop into anything even remotely useful. The Meren player then got his sac engine running and forced us to sac creatures.
I was fucked.
I should have killed Meren first, and I probably could have, but I had forgotten how dangerous that deck can be for a voltron build like my Narset deck.
Meren wound up winning. I think after such a bad first round I really wanted to get some "blood on my hands" and get a kill before the day was out. I knew I could kill the Atraxa player but wasn't sure how quickly the Meren player could get his sac engine online if I pissed him off. In retrospect I might have made the right choice but it's also quite likely killing Meren first is what everyone should always do forever... because fuck Meren.
Final Thoughts
I'm not sure what there is to take away from today's post other than the fact that I seem to drop more f-bombs here now that I'm exclusively writing about my games on this site. I can tell you that I'm again considering taking apart Narset, but it's one of my oldest and best decks even though it has its own unique issues, so I think I'd be happier keeping it.
I think I'm onto something with this Jarad deck. It's got something I used to love about my Purphoros deck - its major threat hits all of your opponents, so you don't wind up picking someone to kill first. I actually prefer that because I hate to see my friends sitting around for a long time waiting for the next game to start. I'm much happier with games where everyone that's going to lose dies at around the same time. Jarad looks like he'll probably do that, and I expect he might fly a little more under the radar than Purphoros, who is always a big threat as soon as you know someone is playing him.
I usually play the same deck all month long in our league, but I may wind up switching decks each week for January. I'm probably out of the running for the month's point total. I'm in 5th place currently, but am far enough back that it would take a minor miracle for me to catch up. I'm also going to be playing the same deck all month long for the rest of the year so I think mixing it up is what I'll be doing for the rest of this month.
Next week we'll be off, but in the following 2 weeks I'm probably going to play my Rashmi Surprise Spaghetti deck and my Ramos Villainous Wealth deck. These are old decks I had that have been tweaked.
Rashmi was built to make token creatures and use them to cheat Eldrazi into play. The ultimate goal is to get Spawnsire onto the field and use its ability to pay 20 mana and cast my 10 card sideboard of Eldrazi Titans and other big Eldrazi with useful on-cast triggers. I think it'll be both effective and powerful and it will be nice to play a deck with blue in it. I feel like i haven't cast a Cyclonic Rift in months...
The Ramos deck is my old Infect / Chandra's Ignition combo deck but with that wincon removed and both Villainous Wealth and Progenitus thrown in. The goal is to cast Villainous Wealth as many times as possible in the game. I don't yet know how fun that will be, but I'm hoping it will lead to some interesting games and some good stories.
That's all I've got for you today. You can look forward to an article from me tomorrow on GatheringMagic.com where I explore how I would build around Ghalta, Primal Hunger. It's long, expansive, and probably missing some key stuff that you guys would have thought of. I think it's a pretty thorough treatment and at the time that I started writing it, the only Elder Dinos that had been spoiled were Ghalta and the mono-black one that's terrible in Commander.
You can follow my work on GatheringMagic.com at this link: http://www.gatheringmagic.com/author/stephenjohnson/
Thanks for reading, thanks for following my misadventures in my Commander games and I'll see you tomorrow with my piece on Ghalta and next Sunday with more tales from the battlefield. Maybe I'll even have notched another win by then!