I had seriously considered not even bothering to write a recap of my games this past week because I've been mired in a run of bad games and bad luck. On Sunday I managed to go 0-5 and on Tuesday night I added another 0-2. As I begin to write this I have no idea how Saturday will go, but I'm half expecting to tally up a string of 9 or 10 consecutive losses. Have you heard of the "Midas touch" where everything you touch turns to gold? I feel like I've got the opposite. I seem to have the "Poo touch" this week, where every deck or card I play turns to shit. As an exercise in trying to remind myself to focus on the positive, even when nothing feels like it's going right, I'm going to try to run down the positives from this recent trainwreck of EDH games. Sunday Games I brought my better decks to play with some old friends on Sunday up at MerryMac games in Merrimac, NH. It was good to see them, but the EDH scene there was... well, it was lacking. We expected some sort of organized or semi-organized Commander games and wound up just playing by ourselves for the afternoon. My first game was with The Mimeoplasm and I was just stuck on barely any lands for what felt like forever. Game two wasn't much better. I don't even remember what I played. Probably Taigam. Taigam hasn't been doing well. Game three was Multani and I was able to kill a few opponents but couldn't seal the deal. He is the king of diminishing returns, having a P/T equal to the number of cards in all players' hands. As you kill off opponents, that number invariably gets smaller. Nothing major to report. Multani is still feeling like a fun, dangerous deck that forces players to pay attention. I wound up playing game four with Narset. One of those shitty Mikaeus combo decks was in the game and I lost Narset early on to a boardwipe. When I finally got her out again and tried to at least get one swing in before the game was over, an opponent chose to Cyclonic Rift an aura she had that made her unblockable just so that he could block and kill her. I've got as good a chance of flopping into three or four lands as I have flopping into even a single extra combat or turn, but apparently my shitty day wasn't shitty enough and he just had to fuck with my combat. On the VERY next turn the Mikaeus player was able to win the game by combo because the player I swung at had wasted his removal just to keep me from getting a single decent shot in. The last game of the day actually did have something positive to reflect on. I didn't win, but I was playing Jarad and was able to do some dumb shit and kill a few opponents before the game was over. The highlight was having Karametra's Acolyte and Black Market out, giving me access to a decent amount of mana. With Jarad and Jugan, the Rising Star out, I was able to play Woodfall Primus. I then sacrificed Woodfall Primus using Jarad to do 6 damage to my opponents. Woodfall Primus has persist, so it came back to the battlefield with a -1/-1 counter. Then I sacrificed Jugan to do 5 more damage, putting 5 +1/+1 counters on Woodfall Primus. Doing that removed the -1/-1 counter that it got from its persist ability, so now it was a 10/10. I sacrificed it to do another 10 damage to my opponents. It came back and I sacrificed it again, this time for just 5 damage. It was an impressive output of damage for a deck that I don't play that often. At that point the only one left was the Omnath, Locus of Rage player who was able to finish me off.
All in all, it was a pretty bad day but that one Jarad turn was something to be happy about even if it wasn't enough to win a game. Tuesday Casual Night I went into our casual night with one basic mission - to play Taigam and either see the build finally do what it's supposed to do or come to the conclusion that it's time to again rebuild the deck. That might sound like a negative mindset, but that's where my mindset was after the games I had on Sunday. We wound up playing two games that night, though in actuality that is a bit of an overstatement. I really only played one and a half games. In the first one I got a good start finally and was able to assemble a decent board. I put out tokens and then played a sorcery that gave me soldiers equal to the number of creatures on the field. My plan was to exile them all on my next turn and FINALLY cheat out my entire library of creatures. The turn before I was about to do that, a player playing Anowon dropped a Massacre Wurm and I was dead. Seriously. He didn't even realize he was about to kill me. The game proceeded on for over an hour and I was off looking through bulk rares to kill time. Fuck my life. In game two I was able to stop one player from blowing up early with a well-timed Swords to Plowshares on his Tana, the Bloodsower. I was also able to keep an Enchantress player from running away with the game with an Austere Command that was actually fairly well cast. He had Starfield of Nyx out, making all of his enchantments into creatures, but rather than pick both creature modes, I picked enchantments and high CMC creatures for my Austere Command. If I hadn't chosen enchantments he would have bounced Starfield to his hand and kept most of his board, but instead he was set back pretty hard. When there were only three of us left this same player got out Worship and I burned my Cyclonic Rift (not overloaded) to bounce it so the other player could kill him. I was on four lands and two rocks for an incredibly long time during that game. Basically if I had any decent mana flow at all I might have had a shot. It was a pretty mediocre game all things considered. I think I'm at the point where I'm ready to declare the Taigam experiment over.
I far too often forget to attack with Taigam first, making me feel stupid and bad at Magic (which may or may not be true). I generally don't like decks where I have to hyper-focus on stuff. Cards like Sunscorched Regent and Managorger Hydra are just bad for me because I miss way too many triggers. Taigam might work for me if I played it enough but I don't and I forget to wait until my second main phase to cast my instants and sorceries. Some people's playstyles are fine for that kind of deck but I'm chatty and get distracted, try to play quickly so as not to waste anyone's time, and I just miss stuff way too often. I enjoy playing "fast and loose" and generally have more fun that way, even if it means I'm probably playing a more "sloppy" game where I miss triggers and good plays I should have made. The other problem is that my Taigam deck has had far too many chances to actually do its thing and thus far it has pretty much failed. The deck needs a commander with built-in token generation and it needs colors that give access to tutors so I can search out my polymorph spells easily. It needs Oona.
Very soon I expect to have a first draft of a rebuild of the deck with Oona at the helm. I don't yet know if I'm going to run infinite mana combos or not. I may, but mostly because nobody else seems to be holding back so there's no good reason why I should hold back on running combo. It's a shitty way to lose though, so I'm not 100% sure. I might still choose to build her as a more "fair" Oona deck. As one last side note from Tuesday - when I was looking through rares I picked up a foil Jhoira. She lets you pay 2 mana to suspend a card for 4 turns. Jhoira is a classic "cheat Eldrazi into play" commander but she doesn't meet my criteria of having a fun, convoluted process of building my board. My goal for the deck is not to win because of Eldrazi - it is to win because of Synthetic Destiny. I do expect that Oona will work better, but I also predict that eventually I will rework the deck to be a dirty, cheap Jhoira deck. I do hope that the Oona build will be so fun that I'll stick with it for a while - certainly longer than I stuck with Taigam. Saturday EDH League
With the news of the spoiled Dominaria legends having hit just the day before, EDH League was abuzz with conversations about various new commanders we would soon be able to play with. We started the day with 16 players - enough for four tables of four players each. I'm still playing my mono-red Ashling the Pilgrim red goodstuff deck and I went into the day in second place in our league's rankings.
In game one I was at a table with Pat, one of the strongest players in the league, and also with the player I was tied for second with in the league's rankings. I aim to win a game each month and week one I had already won a game, so I was in a good mood and happy to just enjoy the day.
I was able to cast my commander twice, got the game's "first blood" points for getting in the first combat damage and non-combat damage, and all in all had a pretty good game. In our league we have a running joke that the league's motto is "Kill Pat First" because Pat has a knack for winning games the turn after someone goes easy on him when they could have killed him. Just the previous weekend I had watched a new player whistle past that particular graveyard and die the next turn as a result. He had even been told the league motto. They all think it's just a joke, but in truth it's actually pretty good advice.
Towards the end of this game I was at a decent life total, Pat was at 8 and another player was at 12. I had Impact Tremors out, a good board and a decent amount of mana available to me. I could have used Siege-Gang Commander to kill Pat but I thought I would be able to get them both. I had a Grinning Ignus on the field and bounced it to my hand and tried to re-cast it but Pat countered it. I then did something else that would have let me at least kill Pat but he countered that as well. I don't even recall what it was, but Pat did a great job fending off my attempts to finish him off. I should have gone for the sure thing and just killed him, but I got greedy and as a result we all wound up dying on Pat's turn. I think the player who was at 12 also contributed a counter towards stopping me from finishing them off, and as a result I wasn't able to stop Pat. It was a long enough game and was fun even if I didn't win or remember to follow our league motto.
It's worth noting that I don't actually want Pat to think he's persona non grata in our league. The joke will continue though, as it seems every few weeks one of us has another game where we have the chance to kill Pat and for some reason (which always seems to make sense at the time) we don't and he wins on the next turn.
In game two I was not at a table with Pat, but I was at a table with Gwen, who was at the top of our league's rankings for the month (after only one week). She was playing Kami of the Crescent Moon. We had four in our pod and the other two players were a new player to our league and Jared, playing his well-tuned Bruna deck.
Prior to the game I made sure to prepare the new guy for what Bruna was going to do to us, and as it turned out I wasn't overstating how strong a game Jared plays when he's on Bruna. I was able to play Ashling and get 11 commander damage on Jared before Bruna came out, but once he had the mana to be able to keep re-casting her we were pretty screwed. Fortunately for me, the Kami player was drawing ridiculous numbers of cards each turn and Jared sensibly chose to kill the blue players first and leave the mono-red deck (me) for last. Bruna has vigilance so he had little to fear from me. He could block Ashling all day long and pretty much kill me whenever he wanted to.
Jared wound up winning and definitely earned the win. He had to fend off a late game attempt by the new player to stop him with a well timed counter.
I was able to do a few dumb things before the game was over. I cast Sunbird's Invocation and already had Kiki-Jiki out. I then cast some spell and flopped into Combat Celebrants, but Jared had another counter in hand and stopped me from landing the second part of that combo.
Jared still had another counter in hand and I think this is where I may have made a misplay. I didn't realize it at the time but as I write this I'm thinking that I might have had a way to slow him down. It might not have been enough to win, but it would have forced Jared to recast Bruna.
I had Mogg Infestation and Reiterate in hand. What I should have done is put Mogg Infestation on the stack targeting Jared, let him cast his counter and then cast Reiterate either countering his counter or just putting another Reiterate on the stack, but for some reason that didn't occur to me. I don't know what I was thinking, but with his deck I sometimes get too quickly resigned to defeat. When I get it in my head that a loss is inevitable, I don't always see potential good plays. I think this was one of those cases. I wound up casting Mogg Infestation on myself and copying it, winding up with a board of 38 creatures. It was enough to net that "biggest army" point. Jared's life total was at that point in the thousands, so my only hope was combo or commander damage and I don't think I had a realistic avenue to either wincon at that point in the game.
In retrospect it's possible Jared left me for last because I had an early Orcish Settlers out and didn't blow up his lands. I tried to play politics with it and let him choose whose lands to blow up, but he didn't fall for it. The basic play is to try to get someone else to make an obvious decision for you so that they look like the "bad guy" and you can at least share responsibility for doing something really mean like blowing up lands. Jared is pretty good at politics and declined the invitation to pick whose lands got nuked. I wound up not using it, though if I had blown up his lands he probably would have killed me first. I still like having the card in the deck but blowing up lands isn't something I take lightly. Someday I'll play a Mana Geyser and really wreck a table with Orcish Settlers but yesterday wasn't that day.
I should note that I played a few rounds of a pickup game with Oona in between rounds but it didn't go long enough to really do much.
I lost both league games but had good enough point totals that I ended the day in first place (by 1 point) in our league rankings. I like my chances to win the month, though it'll probably take another win or two and consistently good games to pull it off.
Final Thoughts
I did manage to make it to 10 straight losses, so hooray for that.
I've been watching episodes of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary lately. In it there is a point where someone comments that baseball is unique in the fact that the greatest hitters still fail 70% of the time. I think that to some extent Commander is like that. You can be a good player and by the nature of the format you can still run into a long losing streak. It doesn't help that I insist on playing bad, or as I call them, "midrange" decks a lot of the time. Losing streaks are annoying but this one will end eventually and to my credit, I think I was able to have a fun and fairly cheerful Saturday with good games and a good attitude.
That's all I've got for you today. I'm probably going to play Oona for real on Tuesday so hopefully I'll have good news to report on my efforts to finally get a Synthetic Destiny deck to work and work consistently. My Ramos deck rework is also looking like it might be done, and I may well play it for our league in a few month.
Tomorrow I'll have an article about my Multani deck on GatheringMagic.com. It feels like one of my best write-ups in a while, so definitely check that out.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!