Today's artwork is a sneak peek at one of the new pieces I've worked up for my posts over on GatheringMagic.com, where my main Commanderruminations posts are now being published. This site is now where I share my personal thoughts and game stories from the past week. I'm usually going to share artwork from the previous year, but today I'm in a pretty good mood and I decided I had to share this new mashup with you. If I had to title it, I'd probably call it "Wheeeee!!!!" It should appear later this month with one of my regular articles, with the full art credit. I'm being lazy here and leaving it out because this is just a personal blog and in my personal blog I'm allowed to be a little lazy.
So last weekend I was able to finally break out of the rut I'd been in. How has my luck fared since then? Let's see...
Tuesday Night Pity Party
Sometimes the recovery from being sick is worse than the actual time you're running a fever and stuck in bed. For the past week and a half I've been spending most of my waking hours coughing up gunk and blowing my nose. I'm not sick, but every night I'm sleeping a llittle better and every morning I'm coughing up less and less phlegm. What does all this have to do with Commander, you might ask?
I play EDH at my local game store every Tuesday night. We play weaker decks and generally try to have less of a cutthroat experience. Every once in a while a deck blows up but there are plenty of games that are longer, more durdly affairs. It's fun and those are some of my favorite games. I missed the previous Tuesday night, but I hate to miss two weeks in a row so I dragged myself out this past week to get some games in.
We only had two other players show up, but they were probably my two favorite people to play with these days. I generally dislike three player games, but I'll take a three man table over not playing at all. We wound up playing four games that night. The best player at the table (not me) wound up going easy on us all night long. Well, I should probably say that he went easy on me, because I was clearly under the weather and still feeling a little miserable. As a direct result of his willingness to not just gun for every possible advantage and play as ruthlessly as possible, I was able to pick up a couple of wins - one with my Rashmi deck and one with my Jarad deck.
Rashmi, Eterneties Crafter finally was able to do what it was built to do. It churned out a bunch of tokens, exiled them and thanks to Mass Polymorph I was able to get a board of Eldrazi. I then tutored up Cyclonic Rift, overloaded it, killed the player with the better boardstate and the other guy didn't draw into any answers. I'm probably still going to play a month of Commander League with this deck, so I'm very keen on continuing to play this deck to see if I can get it good enough to win a game over the course of a month of League play.
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord also picked up a win. The key card in that build is Death's Presence. If I can get that out, any creature I sacrifice with Jarad will do damage to all of my opponents, but I'll get to put +1/+1 counters on another creature equal to the power of the creature that was sacrificed. I think my favorite thing about Jarad is that he lets you hang back, not attack anyone unless you want to, and do damage to all of your opponents at once rather than having to pick someone. Not having to attack means I can set up a bunch of blockers and keep them up until I'm ready to go for the win. It's not going to be a particularly fast deck but if I can keep from getting mana-screwed I should always have a chance to do some damage unless someone has shot their life total up into the stratosphere.
I thanked my friends for going easy on me, and while maybe I could have won a game or two if they were playing more aggressively, it was really nice of them to not just wreck me all night long. I've done the same in the past and I firmly believe that there's a place for playing as competitively as possible, but that place isn't every single game you ever play. I'm not sure if calling last Tuesday night a "Pity Party" is entirely accurate, but I did enjoy the evening despite my being under the weather.
Narset's Last Stand
I had been seriously considering taking my Narset deck apart. It's a glass cannon and in my first League game of the year I was summarily knocked out on turn 5 for the sin of not having a blocker. These things happen, but I commit to playing the same deck each week for league, so I came into Saturday with at least two more games to play with her. If they had both gone horribly, I might have spent much of last night unsleeving her. Fortunately, things did not go horribly.
Last week I shared the game I was able to win against a Bruna player who let me live rather than kill me. Yesterday I was paired with said Bruna player in both round one and round two.
The first game had Bruna get out to an incredibly fast start. I was playing Narset and just didn't get going fast enough. I tried suggesting that he still hadn't lived the dream of killing me with both his and my copy of Eldrazi Conscription attached to his Bruna, but that argument didn't get me very far. I was knocked out first, in part as payback for the previous week's shenanigans and in part out of respect for what Narset can do if she gets in even a single attack. She isn't a guaranteed win if she gets to swing, but it can happen and it happened just the previous week.
It took the Bruna player - who gave me permission to use his name - Hi Jared!!! - much longer than expected to win the game, but eventually we moved on to a casual game to kill time while the other players wrapped up their round one games.
In the pickup game I played my Ur-Dragon deck. It's predictably slow but can come on really strong in the mid-game. I was able to get out Dragon Broodmother, make four 1/1 dragons, get Ojutai Soul of Winter out and dash in Kolaghan, the Storm's Fury when I attacked. Nobody else had flying blockers so while I wound up down at 11 or 12 life I was able to win the game just when we were ready to start up our second round of League play. It's worth mentioning that one of the players in our casual game could have tutored for a wincon (Kiki-Jiki combo) but chose not to because he didn't want to end a casual pickup game like that, so while I won - it's worth noting that someone else could easily have won long before I was able to close out the game. The Bruna player was playing a tribal Allies deck and had a great boardstate, so I suspect Jared could have won as well, but maybe that's not accurate. The fourth player was use Gishath to assemble a massive board of dinosaurs, so all in all it was a fun game with everyone participating and having a chance. Attacking with six dragons all of which get +6/+0 and let you tap down 6 nonland permanents is a really strong play and being able to do it twice was probably what let me get the win in the end.
In our second League game I was playing Narset again, and yet again I was playing against Bruna and was also playing against the player who had knocked me out 10 minutes into my first game of the year. I was really hoping to get a little payback against both of them, though the second player wasn't playing his really strong Selvala deck
In this game I was able to get out of the gate really fast, get Narset swinging on turn four or five and was able to kill the Bruna player before Bruna could kill me. I had a nice stack of equipment and auras on Narset, but made the mistake of swinging on a player with four open mana who was playing blue. He Aetherized my Narset, but the next turn I was able to cast her, attach Dragon's Breath out of my graveyard to give her haste, and swing on the other player who had just swung at me for 9 commander damage. If I hadn't done that he would have killed me on his next turn, so apparently I chose well. The following turn I was able to kill the last player to close out the game.
The funny thing about how the day went is that Jared was trying to catch the point leader for the month. As it turned out he ended the day with 90 points and the month's top player had 100. I don't know for sure but I think it's entirely possible that if Jared had played "voltron buddies" with me and raced to see who could kill the other two players first - leaving each other for last - he probably would have won both games and won the month. Narset is notorious for stringing together extra combat steps and turns but any Narset player can tell you that she's just as notorious for flopping into three lands and an an aura that gives you unblockability when you already have unblockability. The thing is, nobody remembers those flops - they only remember the disgusting, gross flops that involve Eldrazi Conscription, Battle Mastery, extra combat steps and Expropriate.
Still, I can't blame Jared one bit for killing me off. It was probably the right choice, and we'll never know if he could have won both games by playing nice with me. I am really happy to have won a game yesterday, as it puts my Narset deck at two wins out of six games over the course of the month. I don't need to win every game but I want my "best deck" to be able to win over a quarter of its games. Normally I'm happy to win a game over the course of the month, but with Narset my expectations are a little higher.
Final Thoughts
It should go without saying that I'm not going to take Narset apart. She is a lot of fun and a bit of a guilty pleasure. Nobody else particularly enjoys playing against her, but not every deck needs to be built for the enjoyment of your opponents.
While Jared has become one of my favorite people to play against, I'm not going to get into the habit of using my friends' names in my writing. I mostly don't want to drop a name and later on find out that person didn't want to be mentioned by name, so you still can expect to see a lot of "the ___ player" in my blog posts.
I have finally gotten the key pieces of my Mimeoplasm rebuild together. I still need to pick up a few more tutors, but I have successfully been goldfishing a deck that can win reliably before turn 8. The deck sports both a Flash Hulk wincon and a Hermit Druid wincon, is my first deck to include no basic lands whatsoever, and should finally represent a deck I can play to try to outrace my friends' Mikaeus combo decks. I don't run any expensive lands, but I'm vaguely proud of having figured out that the inclusion of 9 cycling lands will give me the ability to not only trigger a card draw off of a Merfolk Looter, Commander's Sphere or Cluestone but also from cycling a land. Maybe this is obvious to more experienced cEDH players but I felt pretty clever when I put that particular 2 and 2 together to make 4.
Tomorrow you can look forward to seeing an article about the Ascend mechanic. It's an attempt at a "deep dive" on the cards in Rivals of Ixalan that have Ascend to try to determine how good this new keyword really is. I slightly regret not making it a ranked list of cards, but hopefully my treatment of the topic will be both thorough and informative.
Our second month of EDH League for 2018 is going to be our first month with a commander theme. Anyone playing a commander with a hybrid mana symbol on it, either in the casting cost or in the text box, will get doubled points for "tubthumping" (casting your commander). I'm putting the finishing touches on a Rhys the Redeemed deck and am writing about that build for the following week's Commanderruminations post.
This week I should be playing on Tuesday, Thursday and next Saturday so hopefully I'll have something fun or interesting to share with you next week. Maybe Jared will get some revenge on me and will make a serious attempt to capture the February top point total for our league. I'm quite confident if he goes for it, he'll be able to do it. His Bruna deck is fantastic and he's both a strong player and an enjoyable tablemate.
That's all the navel-gazing I've got for you today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!