The Rivals of Ixalan prerelease weekend is underway. Unfortunately, that meant that our EDH League did not fire. Instead of playing Magic yesterday I traveled down to Connecticut to attend a LARP (Live Action Roleplay) Feast in the community I used to call home. I got to see some old friends get Knighted, got to catch up with a great many old friends, and may have caught the LARP equivalent of the "Con crud". I'm all congested and may have to spend the afternoon in bed watching football. Staying up last night to watch the Patriots crush the Titans didn't help much, but what I'm driving at is that I've only got last Tuesday's games to talk about today.
I play every Tuesday night at our LGS and two weeks ago I was the only one that showed up. Fortunately, some of my favorite folks showed this past Tuesday and we got two games in. I played my Rashmi deck in both games.
Box of Spaghetti
My Rashmi deck was originally built around playing tokens and using various cards to exile them and cheat creatures from my deck into play. The deck is full of Eldrazi with a preference for Annihilator triggers. The goal is to establish a board of big, nasty creatures and win by combat. I also run Archetype of Endurance and Archetype of Imagination in the deck, so if I could ever cheat all 13 creatures onto the battlefield I should be able to swing with lethal and my only real fear will be a Cyclonic Rift or a boardwipe.
If i can get Spawnsire of Ulamog out and can get 20 mana to trigger his last ability, I can take my 10 card sideboard of Eldrazi Titans and put them onto the field. The sideboard is full of creatures with "on cast" triggers, because Spawnsire casts them, but the deck's main strategy involves cheating them into play, not casting them.
The "Box of Spaghetti" reference is to the box I'll be keeping my sideboard in. I may even fabricate a sideboard box out of parts of a box of spaghetti just for tun. Before I jump into how the games went, you can take a look at the deck at the link below. I may eventually write up a full article on it for my blog on GatheringMagic.com.
View Box of Spaghetti on TappedOut.net
Early Results
On Tuesday night I played two games with Box of Spaghetti. I didn't have much luck that night. I don't recall the exact sequence of each game but I'll share a few findings.
I was able to play a few token generators, including Snake Pit, which creates a 1/1 snake each time an opponent plays a blue or black spell. My opponents had plenty of blue and black so the Gonti player just had to remove it. So far I think that's going to be a good card to keep in the deck.
I had Skywise Teachings in my hand in one of the games. It lets you pay 1B when you cast a noncreature spell to make a 2/2 flying blue Djinn creature token. That extra cost when playing a noncreature spell felt like too much and I didn't find myself wanting to play it. I guess in a game where things are going to go really long, I might have time to get enough mana together for it to not be a problem. My copy is a foil, but I took it out of the deck late last week.
I played Mystic Remora too early in the first game. Nobody cast any noncreature spells, I got no value out of it, and it pretty much screwed up my early game. It was the first time I'd ever cast it and I've got other draw in the deck so I pulled it out. I have a feeling I'm not giving Skywise Teachings or Mystic Remora a fair shot, so I may swap them back in later on.
In both games I never actually got to cheat any Eldrazi into play. I think I may need more of those types of cards in the deck. Natural Order. It's a sorcery that lets you sacrifice a green creature to cheat another green creature into play. I'd use it as a way to cheat in Kozilek's Predator or Archetype of Endurance but it wouldn't be able to get any of my Eldrazi. I've got a new Rhys the Redeemed deck that I'm tuning up for my EDH league games in February, so I might want to pick up two copies of Natural Order.
The bad news is that while the deck was able to create a decent boardstate, I didn't get much further than that. The other decks were too fast and powerful and without enough early mana to hardcast fatties or a polymorph spell in hand, I didn't have much of an impact on the game.
The good news is that the Gonti player picked me for a few of his many Gonti triggers. When Gonti enters the battlefield they get to grab the top four cards of your deck and take one to keep in exile and cast later on. They have to pay for the casting, but it's one of those neat cards that gives the player a glimpse into your deck. I think this strategy is a great one for curious players who like to take peeks into the decks of opponents they haven't played before.
This particular Gonti player is a judge, a great guy and a great tablemate. He also really smart and plays pretty strong decks and gets his share of wins. While my Rashmi deck didn't do much in either game, the Gonti player got a good look at some of the cards in my deck and told me he thought he knew what the deck was trying to do and that it was really "spicy". I took it as a compliment. My guess is he had the chance to look at two sets of four cards with something like Pathrazer of Ulamog and Synthetic Destiny or Mass Polymorph, took a look at the token generators I had on the field and put two and two together.
GLOW
Our EDH League is running themes for each month in 2017 from February through December. In a few months we'll have a theme of "GLOW - Golden Ladies of Wrestling" where if your commander is a female humanoid the points you get for casting your commander are doubled. It's a meager benefit but I like deckbuilding a lot, so I'll be crafting a new deck to be on theme for each month.
For the Golden Ladies of Wrestling month I'll probably be running Rashmi "Box of Spaghetti". I genuinely like my chances of winning a game at some point over the course of a month. That's pretty much the bar I shoot for, and if I can win 3-4 games I'll probably win the month. I've got some time to get the fine-tuning done. I think it's going to make for a fun month and if I can trigger Spawnsire's 20 mana ability even once, it'll all be worth it.
Final Thoughts
Tomorrow on GatheringMagic.com you can read my take on what commanders I'd consider running if I wanted to build a deck with all 6 of the new Elder Dinosaurs. Last week's Ghalta article had some issues with the formatting. My card images were supposed to be 3-wide but for some reason my editor put them in two rows. I am hoping that won't happen again, as it really broke up the flow of reading in a way I wasn't happy with. I'm lucky to be able to write for them, so I'm not complaining, but I will try to keep that from happening in the future.
Yesterday's step back into my LARPing community was a real blast from the past. I didn't get any fighting in, but it was wonderful to see old friends and the number of people genuinely glad to see me back (even for one day) vastly outnumbered the folks who didn't have a single word to say to me. I'm not sure if I'll ever really get back into it, but the temptation is definitely there and it was really nice to go back for a day.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you tomorrow over on GatheringMagic.com and next Sunday for another more personal post about how my games are going and another little glimpse at what's going on in my life.