It's been another few weeks since I last posted here. My summer has been full of drama and interruptions to my writing schedule. While I've been able to keep up with my writing for my Commanderruminations column, I have not been able to play as many regular Commander games as usual.
For my casual games I'll just sum up how things have been going.
Vacation Games
I was able to play a few games over several days on vacation down in Pennsylvania with family. Neither of my brothers are as into Commander as I am. One borrows decks and the other is getting into deckbuilding, which is actually pretty exciting. We played a handful of games the other weekend.
In the first game, my Mimeoplasm deck basically failed to do much of anything. My older brother was playing his new Momir Vig deck, which established a boardstate but didn't do much more than that. My younger brother was playing my Lathliss deck and it misbehaved like crazy, only giving him 3 lands by turn 9 or 10. My kid pretty much crushed us all and then was done for the night. That's about par for the course for her.
The second game saw Momir Vig again, but my younger brother switched to my Marwyn deck and I switched to Muldrotha. My brother-in-law joined us and played Raff Capashen. Momir Vig was the one to do nothing this time, getting mana-screwed and stuck on colors. Raff had fun countering spells, and I got a little something going, but none of us could keep up with Marwyn. Assembling infinite mana, playing your hand and swinging with three infinitely large creatures with trample was a nice change of pace from the previous game for him, and was also a nice reminder to me that my Marwyn deck is really quite strong.
The last game still had Momir Vig. I don't recall what anyone else was playing but I had switched to Lathliss, Dragon Queen. She hadn't behaved for my younger brother so I wanted to take her for a spin. She'd done nothing but win for me. I was able to get a few creatures out, play and and keep an Extraplanar Lens and survive two turns of Disrupt Decorum. Red Dragon tribal has been a blast, and it doesn't look like it's going to get boring any time soon. I won the game, but the deck still isn't fast enough to outrace most combo decks or survive against any deck that casts lots of boardwipes. It's fun, but I still think it's a casual deck at its core.
I might have left a game out but that was basically my trip to Pennsylvania. We played other games too, and had fun seeing my sister's family. I could have played EDH at my choice of two local game stores (Portal and The Encounter) on Monday night but this trip was about spending time with family, not escaping to a LGS to play with strangers.
Casual Night
We got back from vacation on the same day as our usual Causal Commander night. I had to run over to pick up our league's scoresheets anyways so I brought decks and wound up playing a bunch of games with some of my favorite tablemates.
I was really tired from having driven 7 hours earlier that day, so my games were incredibly sloppy. I was doing stuff like playing a spell that let me look at 5 cards from the top of my library and put any number of them in my graveyard. I put three cards into the graveyard, two on top of my library and then immediately played a card that resulted in my shuffling my library. I actually really wanted the cards on top that I had kept out of the yard too. It was one of those nights. I'm generally the first to make fun of my own misplays, but I definitely felt stupid after that one.
I think the first game I played was with my Muldrotha deck. I was able to get to the point where in a turn or two I might have been able to kill someone, but it was one of those games where one player had a much stronger deck than anyone else. It took everyone working together to even come close to beating him - though he wound up winning in the end.
I feel like I must have played another game somewhere along the way, but as I said - I was pretty tired. I had also missed the first round of games because I had to run the league points and that took a fair amount of time.
The last game of the night, or possibly the only other game, was one in which I played my Neheb the Eternal deck.
I don't recall what my opponents were playing, but I was able to pull out a win by playing and bouncing Grinning Ignus a bunch of times with Impact Tremors on the field. I hadn't played the deck in maybe 6 months, so it was fun to take another look at mono-red burn in Commander.
I love Grinning Ignus, so it never feels bad when I'm able to use him to squeeze out a little extra mana on a turn.
Bouncing him until I ran out of mana to kill the table felt great, and using Neheb to generate additional mana on my second main phase made it easy. I also had a dragon out that added one point of damage whenever a red source under my control damaged an opponent, so certainly didn't hurt.
It's always nice to win a game on the night, so that was a nice way to wrap up the evening.
EDH League
For our Saturday EDH League I played my shiny new Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign deck for the first time.
Results were mixed.
In round one I was able to do some of the goofy stuff the deck is designed to do. I was able to use Penance to drop a number of cards onto the top of my library before attacking and I cast Emrakul, the Promised End, Void Winnower (twice) and In Garruk's Wake for nothing. I'm way too nice because I didn't screw over the player whose turn I took, but for the rest of the game he didn't really target me for anything so it's possible the restriant I showed was worth it. I got one kill in the game, swinging with Emrakul and Yennett and casting In Garruk's Wake on the attack trigger when an opponent was at 15 life.
That was about as good as it got. I hung around and had a decently scary board, but got put to 10 life (Sorin Markov) and killed by a mono-black player. I have to say that I really hate that crap. It always feels cheap but it's a legal card and I'm never going to ban any cards in our League. I still hate them though. Not everyone has standards about how many corners they're willing to cut to win games, and that's OK. They can play those cards and maybe over time I'll get used to them enough to play them myself, but part of me hopes I don't.
The happy ending to the game was that the Animatou player whose turn I had controlled was able to kill the player who had "Sorin Markoved" me. Animatou had been killed and recast a whole bunch of times and he was able to cast Skull Storm to avenge me. Sure, it wasn't about avenging me, but I was still happy the jerkface Sorin Markov player didn't win. There are a few things that can get me a little salty, and being set to 10 life out of nowhere and then killed pretty much always does it.
Round two wasn't much of a game. We were faced with a $1,500 combo deck build around the new Jhoira. It took the entire table to keep them off of their win condition and I played a major role in keeping us from losing before turn 5, but I never really wound up doing much of anything in the game. I was able to attack with Yennett and cast a boardwipe at one point, but the Jhoira player had brought a machine gun to a knife fight and we eventually got to watch them combo off.
The high point in that game was convincing a player that I had a 1 CMC white removal spell by feigning like I was going to cast something at a point in another player's turn. I tend to react genuinely to what's going on, and it's not unheard of for me to tip my hand in clumsy ways by making to cast a sorcery on someone else's turn and then realizing after everyone saw the card that I can't. Every so often I'll pretend to consider using a counterspell or a removal spell when I have nothing useful in my hand at all and it's always fun to watch an idea get into someone's head. One of my opponents seemed to adjust their plans for several turns based upon the assumption that I was sitting on a Path to Exile when all I had was a Nazahal, Primal Tide in my hand that I'd never be able to cast.
All in all though, the day was a little disappointing but I wasn't really expecting to win a game on the deck's first day out. Hoping, sure... but not expecting.
Final Thoughts
It was nice to get some games, but I haven't had much luck with anything recently but Lathliss, Dragon Queen. I actually brought Lathliss to Commander League on the off chance that I'd want to play her, but I stuck with Yannett for both rounds.
I'm optimistic that I'll eventually steal a win somewhere along the way, but what I'm really looking forward to is September, October and November. Those months have themes for our league that I've already got decent decks for and I'm excited to actually try to compete for the top point total. Our meta has gotten more competitive over time, so there's no guarantee that I'll even wind up in the top five, but it'll be fun to really try every week and give it a shot even if I come up short in the end.
For tomorrow over on CoolStuffInc.com I've got an article about Yennett, so if you're curious about how I built her you can see my list there.
That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!