Sunday Games
Normally I don't play EDH on Sundays but we had family over and wound up getting a few games in. We used to make these games fairly casual affairs, where the more experienced players (myself included) would put on the kid gloves and go easy on the rest of the table. I'm happy to say that we've moved beyond that and this past Sunday I actually had a couple of pretty memorable ones.
The first game one player was playing the Titania deck they had piloted to 2 victories in the previous day's EDH League games. Because I didn't want to get left in the dust, I broke out The Mimeoplasm. The two other players were on Krenko and a very explosive Sasaya deck. I took mulligans down to 6 cards and figured I'd take my chances with two lands (Buried Ruin and Fetid Pool). I had Flusterstorm and Protean Hulk in my hand and a tutor, so I figured if I got a few more lands and drew into a green mana source I'd have a shot at winning via flash hulk. The deck has zero basic lands so it can put its whole library into the graveyard with Hermit Druid.
I proceeded to not draw any lands for what felt like forever. I did draw into Demonic Tutor, which I used to get Flash. I also drew into a cluestone that could have given me my green, but I didn't have the mana to cast it. I wound up using Flash to cast Protean Hulk and sacrificing it to go get Sylvan Safekeeper, Laboratory Maniac and Hermit Druid. I had already had to discard and had put Mikaeus, the Unhallowed into my graveyard. I had Phyrexian Delver in my hand, but remember - I was on 2 mana so it didn't feel like there was any point in keeping anything so expensive I'd never be able to cast. My plan was to cast Flash Hulk to put a theoretical wincon on the table was mostly just so I'd have the chance to at least have a boardstate before I was killed. The Sasaya player was well on the way to flipping and had Helix Pinnacle on the field, so there was already a wincon out. The Krenko player had a mess of goblins, but wasn't going after me yet. The Titania player was developing pretty slowly, thank goodness. I was still in the game, but only barely.
That's when things got interesting.
I dropped an Amulet of Vigor, keeping my blue/black land untapped.
The Titania player tried to cast Ezuri's Predation, which would have wiped out my board and everyone else's, giving them dozens of 4/4 beasts.
I cast flusterstorm, countering it. Titania passed turn and as the Krenko player started their turn, I reminded them that I had just saved their entire board of over 20 goblins. They understood and were going after the Sasaya player, who going to be able to put lots of counters on their Helix Pinnacle. Krenko attacked but failed to kill Sasaya. On Sasaya's turn they put counters on Helix PInnacle but not enough to get over 100, which would have set them up to win on their next upkeep. Then it was my turn.
I topdecked an Opulent Palace (a 3-color land that enters tapped).
I played it, and then untapped it thanks to Amulet of Vigor.
I then paid a colorless and a blue mana to play Alchemist's Apprentice, which can sac itself to draw a card.
I paid a green, tapped Hermit Druid, deposited my library into my graveyard, sacrificed Alchemist's Apprentice to draw a card and won the game via Laboratory Maniac. Nobody had open mana or any answers. The players who were less experienced were slightly astonished, as was I, but I'll take the win. It was one of the most unexpected wins I've ever gotten and it's nice to have a deck that's so dangerous that it can indeed win out of nowhere.
So that was the FIRST of the two 4-player EDH games we played. The second was no less entertaining. I played Multani. The Titania player switched to Alesha, and was largely humoring us by playing one last game. I promised to kill them first and invited them to return the favor if they were able to do so. The Krenko player stayed with Krenko and the Sasaya player switched up, now borrowing an Unesh, Crisophinx Sovereign deck.
I'll spare you the full play-by-play, but I was able to eliminate two opponents fairly easily. Multani gets its power and toughness from the number of cards in all players hands, so your first victim will get flattened and it gets progressively tougher after that. Here's roughly how it played out.
Krenko got out of hand and had lethal on the Unesh player, but I used Constant Mists to keep them in the game. I needed their hand and they had no maximum hand size. Krenko still had a healthy pile of goblin blockers and now I had Unesh on my side. Alesha was still digging for a way to kill me but wasn't having good luck with their mana.
I had Multani out and as I said - the Krenko player had just tapped to make 18 goblins. I was never going to be able to trample over eighteen 1/1 blockers but I also had Karametra's Acolyte on the field. I enchanted her with Lure and sent them both at the Krenko player. My little mana dork got flattened into a thin Acolyte-flavored paste by all those goblins, and my opponent took over 30 commander damage. One down, two to go.
The Alesha player was next. I had taken some damage, but wasn't that low. Unfortunately Multani was no longer big enough to kill Alesha with trample damage after blocks. Fortunately, there are lots of cards in green that give your creature +X/+X where X is equal to your biggest creature's power. I cast an Overwhelming Stampede and now it was two down, one to go.
The Unesh player hit me for a little more damage, but at that point it was clear (to me) that I had game. It was also clear that the Unesh player really needed to hit the road. I suggested we call it a draw and they agreed, but I was more than prepared to play Constant Mists again and again and again until either I won or they dug their way into a cyclonic rift. Either one might have happened, but it wound up being one of those draws that felt like I could have easily had the win.
The Titania/Alesha player from Sunday's games is one of the best players in our EDH league and I think they just hit a run of bad luck. The other two players are less familiar with the game but as I said - it was a family game day so we were playing to have fun. I usually wouldn't have gone into so much detail for these games but it turned out that they were both ones I'm going to remember for quite a while.
Casual Night
Our Tuesday night casual games at the LGS weren't particularly memorable. We played two four-player games and then a planechase four-player game. As it was casual night, I didn't bring and didn't play my best decks, but fun was had anyways.
In game one I played my Marath dinosaurs deck. I was going against a Rosheen Meanderer deck, a pretty strong Feldon deck and I think the third deck might have been Zacama. My deck used to be a pretty good Marath combo deck but I've been adding more and more dinosaurs with the Enrage keyword. I was able to get Marath out and tried to get Basilisk Collar attached, but that plan was quickly foiled. I got a +1/+1 anthem onto the field and in the mid-game was able to play Silverclad Ferocidons, which force an opponent to sac a permanent each time it takes damage.
Over the next few turns I pinged my dinosaur 8-10 times, and while that pretty much took two of the players out of the game, the Feldon deck was resilient and was able to recur a Myr Battlesphere so they always had something to sacrifice. Before long it was clear Feldon was running away with the game and while I tried to dig for an infinite combo I wasn't able to find an answer. It was nice to play with one of the new dinosaurs but I suspect I probably made some bad choices in the game. Regardless, Feldon won and we moved on to game two.
In our second game I played my old Mayael deck. The Feldon player moved on to play Titania and the Zacama player moved on to Oona. Rosheen kept with the same deck. I was able to get Mayael out and start tapping her to try to cheat creatures into play. I wound up establishing a decent board with Hammerfist Giant and I drew into Loxodon Warhammer to give it lifelink. I was then able to tap him to do 4 damage to each creature and each player, gaining 144 life, putting me at 180. I had a strong boardstate and was able to resolve Blazing Archon. Unfortunately, on the Oona player's turn they landed an infinite combo and won. I can't complain too much, as I was able to do some dumb stuff, but it was a reminder of how shitty combo decks can be to play against. Lots of work, effort, back and forth and you resolve a few spells and mill everyone out. I should remember that when I next play my Multani deck at a table with a combo player involved in the game. Kill them first. Make no apologies.
Game three was the planechase game. I played Ramos against an Edgar Markov deck, a Breya deck and a bird tribal deck. I was able to do a few things. I played Azor's Gateway but never got to flip it. I got a Forgotten Ancient out and got it pretty huge before someone removed it. I was able to play Ramos and create "Progenitus Mana" to actually cast Progenitus from my hand. Unfortunately, that was my undoing. An opponent played one of those shitty "you lose half your life" spells and the table chipped me down to zero. I did hit the Breya player once but honestly - it was a revenge attack and I had no intention of swinging with it again. The deck's goal is to cast Villainous Wealth and I did actually have it in my hand when my final life points got to zero, so it was pretty annoying. I would have been happy to just cast VW once, but apparently having a Progenitus on board is enough of a sin to warrant being eliminated from the game.
Not a great night for me, but it could have been worse. I got to do some dumb stuff and got reminded of how shitty infinite combos (on "casual" night) can be to have to deal with. I always struggle with the temptation to just bring my best decks on Tuesdays but so far I've been able to mostly resist that urge. My goal is for that night to be an environment where players can play more casual, durdly, midrange decks and not have to deal with that kind of crap, but I don't want to try to create rules to enforce "casual" play. I like to think that we should be able to negotiate our way to fun games without having to write out a set of "casual rules".
EDH League Sunday
This month I've been playing Rhys the Redeemed for EDH League and yesterday we had our final games of the month. February gave us our first player to ever go 7-1 in a month, but he wasn't able to go undefeated. I only had him in one game, the first of the month, and I was able to steal two kills from him before he killed me. He then went on a tear, using Villainous Wealth to just rack up the points before a player playing Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund finally won a game with him at the table.
My month hasn't been great and yesterday was no exception. I think Rhys just isn't really my style, though I can see he's good. I'm probably going to slot him back into my Sidar Kondo / Tana the Bloodsower partners deck.
I played three games yesterday. The first was at a table with a new player to our league who was on a very good Titania deck. This is not the same Titania player who I played with on Sunday. I wound up saving him from another player but paid for my efforts by being the first player to be eliminated from the game. The table went to time, but I only got a bit over an hour of play in that round before getting killed. It was kinda shitty that someone wouldn't get that I wanted a new player to not be the first player knocked out in the first game they played with us (even if they were clearly playing a strong deck), but I'm trying to take it as a compliment. I woudn't have been killed first if I wasn't perceived as at least being capable of presenting a threat. I had Doubling Season and Triumph of the Hordes in my hand and was playing Rhys, so their choice wasn't a bad one, just annoying from my perspective. Clearly, I'm a little biased against being the first out of the game, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.
Round two was a very, very quick game. Three of us stayed in the pod and we had two players from the other table join us. We didn't quite have the numbers for three tables of four yesterday. Both rounds were two tables of 5.
One of the new players was on Rosheen Meanderer and early in the game he played Tempt with Discovery. We all knew we shouldn't be tempted but we all were anyways. Two turns later he dropped a Craterhoof Behemoth and killed three of us, myself included. It took him a while to finish off the last player, but he was able to win the game. This player was the one who had picked our theme for that month, so I was genuinely glad to see him pick up the win. As it turns out he just edged me out for second place. He and I both had one win but were there for every game and generally put up decent point totals. Sometimes consistently good play can outpace someone who had one amazing game but lots of bad games.
Normally we concern ourselves with actually winning the month, but our top player set a new record for points by such a wide margin that the rest of us were pretty much vying for second place after week one.
After that quick bout we played a planechase game. I was up against the same strong Titania deck and a very good Selvala deck so I went with The Mimeoplasm. I basically drew into nothing and never really threatened to combo off or do much of anything that game. The Selvala player won. The turn before I was able to Diabolic Tutor for Traumatize and dump half my library into the graveyard, but I didn't mill anything I could really use. Some games just go that way, even with a decent deck.
Final Thoughts
It wasn't the worst week ever, but I'm glad to be moving on. When you play planechase and you're stuck on a plane for a long time, when you eventually planeswalk away you have that feeling of relief that you're finally off of that plane. With our league moving on to March, I'm getting that feeling about our Commander themes. It'll be nice to be finally on to something new!
Next month's league theme is commanders with "each player" in their text box somewhere. That means cards like Kami of the Crescent Moon, Heartless Hidetsugu and Nekusar will probably be making appearances but I'm planning on at least starting the month with Ashling the Pilgrim. My Ashling build is pretty much red goodstuff, but if I want to I can switch over and run it with Etali, Primal Storm at the helm and still qualify for the theme bonus if Ashling gets boring.
I've finally made a decision about my Rashmi deck. I had been considering reworking as Oona, but we've been seeing a lot of Oona decks lately so I'm thinking of trying to build Taigam, Ojutai Master. That will have the added benefit of letting me run it with the Enchanted Evening / Aura Thief combo, which I'm actually quite fond of. Having my instants and sorceries be uncounterable will help with making sure Synthetic Destiny or my Polymorph spells go off and it will be a good excuse to practice building around card draw. I'm pretty bad at that, so it'll be good for me to have another project where that is a main focus. Oona would have given me access to tutors, but Taigam will give me access to other fun stuff like Avacyn, Angel of Hope.
That's all I've got for today. Tomorrow I'll have an article about answers to particularly challenging deck types up on GatheringMagic.com.
See you next week!