This is where I run down the games I've played over the past week. I write for CoolStuffInc.com every Monday but I like to recount both the casual and the Commander league games I've played here, where I first started writing back in January of 2017. This past week I played both on Tuesday night at our LGS for "casual" night and on Saturday in our EDH League, where I had managed to win the top spot for November, but after a week of play this month wasn't even on our "top 5" chalkboard.
Casual Night
I've had some pretty good Tuesday nights in the past few months so I was probably due for a bad night. This past Tuesday I grabbed some of my weaker decks and headed off to our LGS hoping to have some good Commander games. We wound up having enough players for a couple of tables and I wound up getting four games in. I wouldn't describe them as particularly good, but maybe I'm being too hard on myself.
Game One
In the first game I decided to play my old Neheb, the Eternal deck. I haven't played it more than once or twice in the past six months, so it was one of those games where I was constantly being reminded of what was in the list as I played it. That's not really a recipe for success but I also wasn't gunning hard for a night filled with victories. The deck definitely has some teeth but I don't think of it as a great list.
We had a five player table with me on Neheb against Arahbo, Sliver Overlord, Arixmethes, Ghave and Animar.
I got out to an OK start. The Arahbo deck was mana-screwed. Slivers, Sea Monsters (Arixemthes) and Saprolings (Ghave) all got off to a decent start as well, but Animar really started blowing up early.
I was able to get out a Nettle Drone and an Iron Myr and was then able to play Neheb and start a turn with Aggravated Assault in my hand. I had some other burn spells as well and probably could have won the game. All I should have done is played my burn spells to clear away blockers and use Neheb's ability to pay for extra combat steps. I might have eventually hit a point where I ran out of steam, but instead of playing carefully I just went for it.
Arahbo was down to a pretty low life total so I swung at him twice, using Neheb's mana to pay for extra combat steps. I used Nettle Drone to ping each opponent to increase the amount of damage I'd be turning into red mana using Neheb's ability, but my eagerness to just get the game over cost me dearly.
The Slivers player had a deathtouch blocker but no open mana. The Arixmethes player had lots of open mana but only one little blocker. The Ghave and Animar players had lots of blockers.
If I had killed the Sliver player's blocker and then hit him successively with Neheb I would have ramped up my mana enough to be able to burn away (with sorceries from my hand) the Ghave or Aminar player's blockers and then eventually would have worked my way over to the player who had open mana.
Instead I just swung into Arixmethes, who was the only player without the blockers to kill Neheb. He had open mana and flashed in a Pearl Lake Ancient, killing my Neheb and stopping the pain train I was so clumsily trying to roll to a victory.
It was my own fault, and I certainly couldn't blame him. He made a good play and I should have been more careful. Before I got another turn I was murdered pretty nicely by the Animar player, whose boardstate was only getting more ridiculous. I think Animar eventually won but I'm not sure, as I was off to another table to start another game.
Not a great start to my night, and it would only get worse...
Game Two
The Arahbo player and I shifted over to another table and we shuffled up to play a decidedly more casual game. I played my Zedruu deck and was at a table with Locust God, Saskia and Jodah.
I played an early Rainbow Vale so the table was treated to extra mana and we all just focused on trying to build a board without having to worry about early game ridiculousness.
I drew into some dumb stuff and decided to play it, even though I knew it would probably get me killed. I had some counter support in hand and hadn't been attacked much yet that game. The Locust God player had a pretty strong board but it was mostly 1/1 insects. I had bounced his Impact Tremors to his hand earlier, but he didn't seem to have held a grudge about that.
The dumb stuff I had in hand was Near Death Experience, an Immolating Souleater and a Trespassing Souleater. The Jodah player had a Duskmantle Seer on the field, and everyone had seen me reveal it and lose life equal to its CMC.
I was at over 30 life and was able to play one of the Souleaters, play Near Death Experience and then get the other Souleater out. These Souleaters are artifact creatures that let you pay life into them. Near Death Experience will let you win the game if on your upkeep you are at 1 life. The goal was to pay down to 1 life right before my upkeep to win.
On the Locust God's turn he decided to swing everything at the Saskia player. They had been going back and forth for a while and clearly he didn't seem to care if I won or not. Saskia had named him and had done a lot of damage to him, putting him down to nearly 10 life at that point.
I honestly don't remember the specifics of what happened at this point but I remember that I did something to save the Saskia player. I blew a counterspell on something, but for the life of me I can't recall what it was.
Then on the Saskia player's turn he swung everything at me.
I had a wincon on board, but my memory of it is that it was an interesting look at how the Saskia player plays the game. If I had just had myself saved by someone, even if they were about to win, I'd leave that player alone. I'd feel like I owed them, and in a casual game where there's nothing on the line it seems like the decent thing to do.
I hadn't actually made a deal with Saskia, though clearly I should have. I am assuming that my memory of what transpired - however shaky - is basically accurate, and I'm also assuming that he didn't have some way to save himself.
I had to block Saskia's attack with a few creatures, losing one of the Souleaters and Zedruu. On the Jodah player's turn he killed him and wound up winning the game.
Again, it was my fault for not letting Locust God kill the Saskia player, but it was jarring to not have the Saskia player show any sense of obligation for my saving him.
Is saving someone when you have a wincon on board somehow disingenuous? Maybe it is...
Clearly it was another misplay on the night and an unpleasant way to lose a game. I couldn't blame them for trying to stop me from having my Near Death Experience win, but it would have been nice to have made that one work.
Game Three
For game three I decided to play a deck that I had been looking forward to playing again - Mayael, the Anima. It's a fun deck that can build big dumb boardstates but can't really compete with decks that have lots of boardwipes and removal. The Locust God player switched to Lord Windgrace. The Saskia player switched to Shattergang Brothers. the Jodah player stayed with Jodah.
I was able to get out Champion of Rhonas and exert it to put an Archetype of Endurance onto the field. I also got Mayael out on time and was able to use her ability to play a Mossbridge Troll.
My game was rolling along nicely until the Shattergang player got out an Archfiend of Depravity. This demon forces players to sacrifice down to 2 creatures on their end step.
Clearly this was going to be a problem for me, so on my turn I swung Mossbridge Troll at him. He chose not to block and I was able to use Kessig Wolf Run to pump up my Archetype of Endurance, tap it, and hit the Shattergang player for 25 damage.
I still had to sacrifice down to 2 creatures, but kept my Archetype and my Troll, losing Mayael and Champion of Rhonas. On his turn, the Shattergang player blew up my Kessig Wolf Run and that pretty much stopped me from being able to kill him.
The Windgrace player boardwiped and then he was off to the races. He got out Omnath and Gitrog Monster and before we knew it he was close to having lethal on someone. I had played a Hearthcage Giant and had two 3/1 Elementals so I was able to block and only lose 10 life from a swing he made with four 5/5 Omnath Elementals. I'm not sure why I was being swung at, but sometimes you're just the one who gets picked first.
My only hope was one card in my deck and on my next turn when I activated Mayael, it was right there in the top 5. I put Blazing Archon onto the field, but had no real confidence that it was going to be enough to save me. I also had enough mana to play a Hellkite Charger and swung over the top at the Windgrace player for 5 damage. I figured I'd be dying soon so I might as well get a swing in first.
On his turn, Windgrace had removal, killed my Blazing Archon, swung for lethal at me and over the next few turns won the game.
I guess it wasn't a terrible game. I was able to play some dumb creatures and swing for some damage, but it was also a little frustrating and I had been hoping for a better outcome.
Game Four
Wanting to have at least one game with a good deck, and also wanting a faster game as it was late, I pulled out my Purphoros deck for game four. I then watched with slight astonishment as everyone scrambled to pull out the best decks they had with them, after the usual rolling of eyes and groaning. My Purph deck isn't bad but it's not like I was whipping out a cEDH build and planning to land a turn 3 win.
In slight disgust, I put Purph back and took out a crappy deck as I wasn't in the mood to try to watch the Locust God player counter my commander again and again to cap off the night.
I switched to Lazav, Dimir Mastermind. It's a deck I'm very close to giving up on and didn't expect it to do much. The rest of the table was Locust God, Wort the Raidmother and Aminatou.
In the mid-game the Wort player played a Boundless Realms, copied with Valakut on the field. I had a Sire of Stagnation out and apparently he was upset about having to exile 2 cards off the top of his library for each land that hit the field. I'd be drawing 2 cards as well. He got 13 mountains and killed me with Valakut damage... all for the sin of having Sire of Stagnation on the field.
It was a crappy end to a crappy night and my frustration was pretty evident. All I wanted to do was play Purphoros and I probably shouldn't have switched to a deck I pretty much knew was going to leave me annoyed and frustrated. My fault for that, but I still think it was unnecessary for them to have such a shitty reaction to my pulling out that particular deck.
While I wished them all good night when I headed out, I was pretty pissed off.
I don't mind losing games that much, but it felt like a particularly bad set of games. My Lazav never even got cast. I actually really like the guys I was playing with and was happy on some level to see each of them win a game. I just should have played better, made better choices and not set myself up to have such a crappy evening.
After an 0-4 Saturday I followed up with an 0-4 Tuesday night so I guess I'm officially in a rut. Hopefully this coming Saturday I can pull out of this nose dive, net a game or two and climb onto our league's top 5 scoreboard. If I have another "0-fer" Saturday I'm damn well going to play decent decks on Tuesday. I should do that more often anyways, as I certainly enjoy them more.
EDH League
I came into our Saturday Commander League games riding an 8 game losing streak and wondering if my bad fortune (or bad play) would change. I like to be "on the board" at our LGS even if I'm not in the top spot. This happens to be a month where I was going to play some of my best decks so if I were to fail to be in our top 5 by the end of the month I'd be pretty surprised and maybe a little depressed. Still, we have some great players in our league and I'm capable of having my share of bad games, bad luck, and both, so anything is possible.
I showed up really, really early so that I could sit down with Jared, our local Bruna player. I'm going to be writing a spotlight on his deck next week for my weekly CoolStuffInc.com Commanderruminations article. After chatting for over a half hour, I got lunch and eventually two o'clock rolled around and we split up the good-sized crowd into four tables to play the first of two rounds of games.
Round One
As with last week, I decided to play my Marwyn, the Nurturer deck in my first game. Muldrotha would be my round two deck. Last week I lost a Muldrotha v. Muldrotha matchup in my second round and I happened to have that same Muldrotha player at my table. While I wanted to win the game, beating him with my Marwyn deck wouldn't settle the score in my mind, but I still went with Marwyn.
The table was made up of myself, the Muldrotha player, a Lord Windgrace player, a Purphoros player and a player with a weird old legendary - General Jarkeld. This white Ice Age general costs four mana, one of which is white, and taps to allow its controller to switch two blocking creatures of two target attacking creatures. The deck turned out to have a bunch of banding creatures. The Purphoros deck was piloted by a player who hadn't played in years, so he wasn't aware of cards like Panharmonicon. I liked my chances at this particular table. The Muldortha and Windgrace decks weren't bad by any stretch of the imagination, but they probably wouldn't be able to out-race me.
Early in the game I was able to get a Llanowar Elves out and then I think I got Marwyn out on turn two. I played Freyalise next and started churning out 1/1 token elf druids. An opponent started to mill the table slowly but nothing dramatic went into my graveyard at first.
I was able to get Marwyn up to four +1/+1 counters and dropped a Buried Ruin. When the opponent who was slowly milling the table put my Staff of Domination and my Paradox Engine into the graveyard I had a moment where I was pretty worried about someone exiling my graveyard or realizing that I might have game on my next turn. It was a five player game and I had been fairly loudly announcing each play - using my "outside voice" as they say. I was at the end of a five player table and wanted to make sure everyone heard each forest and elf I played, no matter how inconsequential. That's why I didn't point out my Buried Ruin when an opponent commented that they were happy my Staff of Domination and Paradox Engine were in the graveyard. I knew I had announced my Buried Ruin loudly enough that the table heard it.
On my turn I was able to sacrifice Buried Ruin to get back Staff of Domination and then pay it and "go off", making infinite mana, drawing my deck, playing everything and swinging for the win. I had Concordant Crossroads in my hand already and made an infinitely large army of oozes with Gelatinous Genesis, dropping a Coat of Arms (and everything else) to close out the game.
Having ensured that I wouldn't go winless on a month where I'm trying to play two of my best decks, I was happy. Marwyn is a pretty nasty little deck and I've grown to really enjoy her. We shuffled up and played a pickup game with everyone on the same decks except me. I switched to my brand new Brudiclad deck, but we didn't even get to finish it because the last table still playing eventually wrapped up and we got round two started.
Round Two
As fate would have it, I was again paired up with the Muldrotha player who had kicked my butt the previous week. My hope was to settle the score and get a win against him. This other Muldrotha player is a fine tablemate so I didn't want to "settle the score" out of anything but a desire to see my own build prove itself capable of winning games.
As it turned out, I didn't draw into anything particularly helpful in the early game. I had a Lab Man in hand but didn't play it before an opponent wheeled our hands. In retrospect it would have been smart to play it and equip the Lightning Greaves I had out but I didn't do that. I'm in the habit of not wanting Lab Man on the field until the last possible moment. I did play a tutor but I had neither the sense to go get a mana rock so I could play my commnander, nor the wisdom to go get a counterspell so I could stop someone else from winning.
The other Muldrotha player's deck is really a fine piece of work. He runs clones and when he combo's off he orchestrates a fairly long series of plays in which he loses and recurs Muldotha, each time playing a new set of permanents out of his graveyard until he can achieve infinite mana and do whatever he wants.
His reliance on having Muldrotha out to start his winning turn was what led me to almost counter his commander when he first went to cast it. I don't know his combos well enough yet to know what the "point of no return" is, but I have long known that you really want to save your counterspells for things that will end you or will end the game. I let Muldortha resolve.
What I really need to do is pack more graveyard hate in my Muldrotha list. For the second week in a row if I had been able to exile this player's graveyard I might have had a shot at the win. I also need to make a number of other upgrades to speed up and smooth out my manabase just a little.
I did have a moment where I had to decide whether to counter a wheel that would have allowed the Muldrotha player to put Protean Hulk in his graveyard. I had two counters in hand at the time, and really didn't want to lose them both, but the Niv-Mizzet player urged me to not counter it. The last thing we needed was a Protean Hulk coming back every turn, so I let the wheel resolve and lost my counterspells.
I was able to play a Food Chain, hoping to draw into something that would have let me combo off before anyone else, but that was probably foolish. All in all, it wasn't my best game and when the other Muldrotha player went to combo off nobody had a way to stop him.
I am definitely going to work on this deck between now and next week, adding graveyard hate if nothing else.
Pickup Game
After our second round I was able to get in a pickup game. I played my Brudiclad deck and was up against an Atraxa deck, an Aminatou deck and a deck led by The Mimeoplasm. I had been trying to convince everyone to play an 8 player game because I had Multani with me and had never had the chance to play Multani at a table with more than 5 players. It would be pretty sweet to drop my commander and have it be crazy-big like 35/35 right out of the gate. Multani's power and toughness is equal to the number of cards in all players' hands. I was totally going to murder a buddy of mine first, but the group came to its senses and decided that two four player pods made way more sense. They were right of course.
The game started off with the Aminatou deck developing a good board of planeswalkers. My Brudiclad deck is still in its infancy, not even having a Sol Ring or any mana rocks and having some pretty simple plans for how to try to win the game. It needs work, but I wanted to trot it out anyways to see how it would do.
I got behind in lands and was able to make a few treasure tokens with Captain Lannery Storm. I was able to play Brudiclad, a 6 drop, only by sacrificing some of the treasure tokens I was making. If I had faced even a bit of removal I would have been pretty screwed. I had a few goblins as well, but my board was nothing compared to my opponents' boardstates. The Aminatou deck was blowing up with a bunch of planeswalkers and he was flickering a Peregrine Drake each turn to make lots of mana. The Mimeoplasm deck hadn't seen any great targets yet but if my Malignus ever hit the yard he would have had something to work with. The Atraxa deck was another planeswalker deck but he was about as mana-screwed as I was.
I was able to get out a Rite of the Raging Storm and start passing around my Lightning Rager token. Lightning Rager and Brudiclad might seem like an odd combination. Brudiclad lets you turn all of your tokens - even non-creature tokens - into the same token. Lightning Rager exiles itself at the end of turn. What that means is that if you have a big board of tokens and you turn them into Lightning Ragers, you'll lose them all.
The Aminatou player was blowing up so fast that when he played a Panharmonicon he pretty much sealed his own fate. We had to kill him first or he'd run away with the game. Also, his girlfriend was done with her game and was waiting for him so they could head out.
I had a Tetsuko Umezawa out, making all of my creatures with 1 power or 1 toughness unblockable. On my turn I made a couple of Goblins tokens, made my 2/1 Myr from Brudiclad, turned all my tokens into Lightning Ragers and swung for lethal. The Aminatou player was at 24 life and I had 6 of them.
So my deck did a thing, but that thing was the sort of thing I should have saved for my last opponent. It was just a pickup game, though, so I wasn't exactly locked in on trying to make the best possible plays. I often play a little sloppy, to be honest, but I am a filthy casual at heart after all.
The Atraxa player was at 7 life, thanks to the Aminatou player having played a Skull Storm, but the Mim player had forced me to sacrifice a creature and that put me i the position of not being able to kill him on my next turn. That was a little annoying, but he was trying to win the game too and I'm sure he had his reasons.
I don't recall exactly how everything played out, but having sacrificed my commander and being behind on mana, I wasn't able to replay Brudiclad and was pretty much dead in the water. Atraxa, even at a low life total, was blowing up like crazy and playing a ton of planeswalkers. He wound up winning the game handily. I'm not sure how things would have wound up if we had worked together to kill the Atraxa player next but it was just a pickup game and I definitely learned a little about what I wanted to do with my Brudiclad deck.
Final Thoughts
All in all, it wasn't a bad day. I had a real sense of frustration from having lost a second straight Muldrotha-Muldrotha matchup, but clearly I need to both be playing better and need to make some tweaks to my Muldrotha list. I suspect it's going in too many directions at once and needs to be more focused if it's really going to start performing well. Also, the other Muldrotha player is a great player with a pretty good deck.
Our monthly rankings have a local spike at the top. He's taken a "KCI" (Krark Clan Ironworks) modern deck and converted it into a Commander deck. He hasn't won every game but he's been playing at a really high level all month and has been crushing tables right and left. I haven't been at a table with him yet, but if I do play him I'm doubtful that I'll be able to stop his run for the top spot in December. The second place player is the other Muldrotha player and I find myself in third. Some of the guys who were on the board last week couldn't make it this week.
I'm happy to have seen my Marwyn deck do what it's supposed to do, even if it doesn't result in a particularly engaging or interesting game for anyone else. League is where we can play our nastier decks and while I enjoy long, interesting games, I'm leaning towards my combo decks. I suspect in January I'll play something a little less mean, but we don't yet know what the theme will be for any of our 2019 months yet.
That's all I've got for you today. I'm going to post this without going over it with a fine tooth combo, so my apologies for any spelling errors or bad grammar. I've got to jump in the shower and run off to the grocery store and this is just my weekly rundown of games i've played after all. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!