Welcome to my blog. This is where I post the stories of my games. I write about Commander ever week on CoolStuffInc.com, but try to also provide a window into my successes and failures in the games I play. I don't always play well or at a high level, but whatever happens, you can bet I'll whine or gloat right here with heaps of hypocrisy and a complete lack of self reflection. OK - I kid. I try to write with candor and honesty, and more self-reflection than anyone should probably put into this wonderful, silly game. This is my weekly exercise in navel-gazing and I'm honored if you have chosen to come along for the ride....
Casual Night
After missing two weeks in a row, I was really happy to be heading off to our weekly Tuesday night Commander games at NexGen Comics. I gathered up 7 fun, not-too-optimized decks and headed out early but still managed to miss the first round of games. It seems like the guys are often getting the first games going in mid-afternoon. Fortunately I didn't have too long to wait before I was able to jump into one.
Game One
My first game was a five-player affair. I decided to start the night with my Nikya of the Old Ways deck. It still hasn't managed to pop off with a Primal Surge, but it's won some games and usually gives me a boardstate that I can do something with. The rest of the table was made up of a Saskia deck, an Ur-Dragon deck, a Lord Windgrace deck and a Kenrith Twins planeswalkers deck.
In the early game I was able to get a few creatures out but mostly failed to do anything notable. The Ur-Dragon player got some Dragons out early thanks to the cost-savings of having a Dragonspeaker Shaman on the field, but for some reason my complete lack of flyers and reach blockers didn't result in my weathering any attacks. The Lord Windgrace player got out to a very good start. Saskia was sadly a little mana screwed and did nothing in the early game. The Izzet Twins did a little board control, but didn't get much going.
I'm writing this a few days later, so my memory of the early game is a little shaky. I know I got some good stuff out and saw it get removed. The Lord Windgrace player was the one to really blow up, putting out a ton of lands, a Sylvan Safekeeper and that Blaloth that let him create 4/4 beasts when lands entered the battlefield. We went from having a relatively balanced field to having him looking like he was probably going to run away with the game with fourteen 4/4 beasts and a number of other big threats. He was at a managable life total - somewhere in the 20s or maybe a little lower thanks to some aggro from the Ur-Dragon player.
I hadn't been attacking much, mostly just focused on hoping I could draw into something useful. I don't generally swing into bad exchanges when I can avoid it, and that can sometimes make it seem like I'm avoiding aggro. I actually love games that are won on the battlefield, but I try not to leave myself open if I don't have to.
As the Lord Windgrace player was looking like he was going to run away with the game, the Ur-Dragon player scooped.
I'm guessing he just wasn't in the mood, but it seemed a little odd. I actually enjoy games where everyone has to join together to overcome a player that has managed to get out ahead. I'm sure there were table dynamics and politics that happened earlier in the game that soured him on the idea of sticking it out to the end, but it still seemed a little premature to just scoop out of the game.
Our saving grace was that the Windgrace player didn't have a way to give his creatures haste. He dug a bit to see if he could pull into something that would let him kill someone before having to pass the turn, but came up with nothing.
The Kenrith Twins player wasn't in a great position. He had been blowing up my stuff (not unreasonably) and had already "ulted" Will Kenrith so he was going to get his instants and sorceries copied for the rest of the game. The Windgrace player had dropped a Bane of Progress a few turns earlier and I had been sitting with a Terastodon in hand and had decided to play it and blow up all three of his planeswalkers. He had been surprisingly OK with that choice, as it was a repayment of his targeting a bunch of my stuff. He was going to be able to recast the two commanders with the number of lands he had out and he had that emblem, so he seemed to understand.
Unfortunately, his three 3/3 Elephants weren't going to be a match for the Windgrace player's fourteen 4/4 beasts. He passed turn and it was up to me to see if we could stop Windgrace before he started sending his beast army at us. I had been under the impression that everyone was at a relatively low life total, so I was optimistic that I might be able to find a way to close out the game. I had a Champion of Lambholt on the field to let some of my creatures become unblock able and I had an Elder of Laurels in hand to pump a creature - hopefully multiple times.
Then I found out the Windgrace player's life total was up in the mid 70's. When I mentioned earlier that he had "dug for a way to give his creatures haste" I neglected to mention, or even notice at the time, that he had used Shamanic Revelation. That sorcery draws cards and gains you 4 life for each creature you control with 4 power or higher. He had 15 or so creatures of 4 power or greater, so he had gained over 60 life.
My chance to find an answer was looking more and more remote, but I had a decent board that included Nikya and an Archetype of Endurance and I hadn't given up yet. I had been ramping pretty well, so when I drew for turn and found myself looking at an Avenger of Zendikar I was pretty happy.
I played a Regal Behemoth so that my lands would tap for three instead of two (from just Nikya), played my Elder of Laurels and then cast Avenger of Zendikar to make 10 Plant creature tokens. All of those creatures put +1/+1 counters on Champion of Lambholt, my creatures all had Hexproof thanks to Archetype of Endurance and I still had the mana to pay for four activations of Elder of Laurels. With 20 creatures on the field now, someone was going to die.
The Saskia player, who had the audacity (or good judgment) to name me when he had recently played his commander, was at a low enough life total that I'd be able to kill him. I could also send Champion of Lambholt at the Windgrace player with an extra three activations of Elder of Laurels - each giving target creature +X/+X where X is the number of creatures I controlled. Giving +60/+60 to an attacker is usually enough to kill someone and things looked pretty good for me to win the game. I even sent a few attackers at the Kenrith player just for good measure, though it wouldn't have been enough to finish him off that turn.
The Saskia player then attempted to fog my attack.
I couldn't really blame him. Nobody wants to die, but he had named me and when you're playing Saskia you have to expect that anyone you name is going to come at you. I wasn't particularly upset, but I was a little surprised. Fogs in EDH are always a bit out-of-the-ordinary so when they come out of nowhere I can't help but be amused.
I was even more surprised when the Kenrith player countered the fog.
So was the Saskia player, but the Kenrith player wasn't going to die, and certainly didn't think he had a way to come back against three opponents.
Saskia and Windgrace both died and on the Kenrith player's turn he conceded the game, with the admission that it was either that or cast a spell that would have blown up all of our creatures AND lands. To his credit, he knew it wasn't the right time in the night to force the game to extend possibly another half hour or longer with three players already out. I can only assume he didn't think he could pull out a win in any other way, so the game was mine.
Game Two
With a win under my belt - admittedly one with a player scooping and another player conceding rather than resetting the game - I was happy to switch to another deck I've been wanting to play more often. I also switched tables and found myself playing against the three players who were all ahead of me in the month's rankings for our EDH league. I pulled out my Haunt of Hightower deck and was sharing the table with Licia, Riku and Archangel Avacyn (the flip-walker).
I was able to get Haunt out and present a decent early threat. I wound up tutoring for Hammer of Nazahn, though I had a feeling I would have been better off getting Boots or Greaves instead. The Licia player landed an early Serra Ascendant and the Riku player was able to cast a Progenitur Mimic as a copy of Serra Ascendant. That meant that he'd be making another Serra Ascendant every turn unless we found a way to get rid of it.
The Avacyn player got out a good little board of angels, but nothing too overwhelming. I wound up trading swings with the Licia player until the Riku player, who seemed to be a whimsical mood, blew up Licia's blocker but also got rid of my Hammer. He was in a good enough position in the game that he could afford to screw around and while I was able to kill off the Licia player with Haunt I soon saw my commander exiled (or killed?) and back in the command zone.
While I think i was able to cast Haunt again, we couldn't keep up with the endless string of Serra Ascendants. 6/6 flying lifelinkers are pretty hard to deal with. I had probably gained somewhere around 30 life all told, but it wasn't enough and soon we were overrun by the Riku player's board.
Game Three
Game three was one that part of me would like to forget, but I'm actually going to write about it in an upcoming Commanderruminations column. I try not to scoop out of games, but I scooped out of this one. I've got a lot to say about how it went, but I'll save that for my column, which should appear in a week over on CoolStuffInc.com. Nobody really did anything wrong, and I wasn't that upset about how the game went, but it reminded me of some things that are big and important enough that they deserve to be flushed out in a full article.
EDH League
I came into the last week of our EDH league securely in fourth place in our rankings. I had long given up any hope of being able to win the month. Najeela is strong, but my build isn't quite cEDH level and our league's better players play so much removal that it's pretty hard sledding to get anywhere with her.
Round One
My first round happened to be with the player who was in first place, playing Marath. We were joined by a player on Kumena and a player playing a budget, but still very strong mono-green Selvala deck. I decided that the Marath player was probably going to play Marath (I was right) and decided to go with Kira, Great Glass-Spinner. I figured I could probably stop one player from winning, but definitely not both. If I slowed down the game enough I might draw into something good and have a shot.
I started the game with a Rewind and a Cancel in hand and spent much of the start of the game playing draw-go and waiting for opportunities to stop the Marath player from just running away with the game early. The Selvala player was lower in the rankings for the month so I was mostly concerned with making the Marath player earn the win. If he was going to kill the table I wanted him to work for it.
I was able to Cancel Marath the first time he tried to cast it and then a few turns later I think I cast Rewind on an Enlightened Tutor. The Selvala player had a bad start so I was able to focus on Marath and not worry about a quick loss coming from Selvala. The Kumena player was regularly swinging what creatures he had at the Marath player, who managed to keep his composure for the most part - thought it was clear he was getting a little frustrated.
I was able to play a Salvager of Secrets to get my Cancel back but I wasn't seeing much of anything that would help me push for a win. I had Blightsteel Colossus in hand and drew into Darksteel Colossus but never saw any of the creatures I run that help to cheat those big boys into play. I had Great Whale in hand as well as Memnarch, but didn't see any sign of Deadeye Navigator.
I wound up bluffing that I had a Counterspell and eventually cast my second Cancel on a Hardened Scales, only to see the Marath player follow that up with a Purphoros, God of the Forge. He had gotten Marath out, but had seen his Illusionist's Bracers get blown up by the Selvala player. It was nice to not be the only playing trying to stop the top player in our rankings from running away with yet another game, and the Kumena player was kind enough to not send any aggro my way despite the fact that I was low on blockers.
Unfortunately, playing control doesn't usually work well against multiple fast, strong combo decks. The Selvala player eventually drew into a win before I was able to pull into anything that would let me combo off. I would have needed more lands and Deadeye Navigator to go for a win. The Selvala player's combo wins aren't any more entertaining for the losing parties than the Marath combo wins are, but I had lost a game to Marath the week before, so I was happy to see someone else win. With a loss on the day, the Marath player wasn't out of it, but was going to have to come up big to win the month or have his closest competitor have a bad game.
Game Two
The second round was a little weird. I decided to play Najeela, the Blade-Blossom because I didn't think I'd be playing her for quite a while. Next month's theme is +1/+1 counters and the month after that the theme will be commanders with no generic mana in their casting costs. I don't play Najeela on casual nights unless I'm really jonesing for a win. It might be months before she sees play again.
I was up against an Inalla deck, a Riku deck and a Muldrotha hug deck that I later learned was built to try to draw the game with an unstoppable loop involving the flip-Garruk planeswalker.
The Inalla player, upon learning that I was going to try to play Najeela for the last time in a while, let out a bit of a exasperated sigh.
I didn't think I was going to have a real shot at the win, given that the Inalla and Riku players are among the best players we see at our store. The Inalla player is the guy who set our record for most points ever earned in a single day and the Riku player had won the previous month and probably could have won the previous year's top point total if he had really wanted to. They're both fantastic players, so I was expecting to have a very, very hard time getting Najeela to the finish line. When the Inalla player showed his sense of disappointment that he was going to have to deal with Najeela, I definitely had a "WTF, dude - you'll probably kill her a bunch of times and combo off" reaction. I didn't say it in so many words, but I wasn't pleased to start the game against someone who should have known better and just dealt with what I wanted to play.
Full disclosure - I'm never shy about sharing how I feel so I'm sure I have let out more than my share of exasperated sighs at the start of games. I still wasn't pleased with his reaction to my deck choice, but I'm aware that I might be showing a tinge of hypocrisy.
The game played out pretty much as I expected. I played Najeela a bunch of times, never really got doing and saw her countered or removed again and again. It was pretty frustrating, but I couldn't blame them. It was the whole table keeping me in check, and there were moments where I would have been able to combo off into infinite combat steps if they hadn't had answers.
The Muldrotha deck was doing a great job of filling our hands and giving us extra land drops. I don't know if the table would have had a harder time stopping me if they hadn't had that extra draw and ramp, but I can only report on the game as it played out, and it certainly didn't play out well for me.
The Inalla player eventually went to loop into infinite turns with Timestream Navigator. We put him "on the clock", meaning he had 10 minutes to complete his turns before play would move to the next player. I actually put my watch on the table so he would have something he could easily look at to know where he was in his 10 minute window.
The Riku player and I asked him to play out his combos though he did shortcut some parts of the wincon. He took quite a while, in no small part because the Riku player had open mana and considered intervening at various points. I had mana from Treasure tokens and a Comet Storm in hand, but the Inalla player had a Glen-Elendra Archmage on the field so I could only draw out that counter.
The Inalla player actually went past his 10 minute mark. I had put my watch down rather than setting a timer with an alarm, and the Inalla player got pretty salty, alleging that we were cutting him off at the most inopportune time possible. He might have been right, but I had no idea what would have been the best or worst time to cut off his turn and the bottom line was that he went more than just a few seconds past the 10 minute mark. I had been collecting league sheets and hadn't noticed at the time he hit the cutoff. Honestly - he shouldn't have been playing that deck if it was the kind that would run into long turns like that in order to win. It's apparently his favorite deck, but he should have known better.
The turn passed to Riku, though not after a bit of complaining from the Inalla player that everyone had been slowing him down with all their interaction and their thinking about when to try to intervene. I really hadn't thought I had seen slow play from the rest of the table, but the Riku player admitted that he was using his right to consider interaction with the idea of using the 10 minute window to keep the table from losing on that turn.
The Riku player, the Muldrotha player and I weren't able to find any answers and on Inalla's turn he won the game.
Apparently the Muldrotha player was close to initiating his draw-the-game combo.
I had several moments where I had been close to doing something dangerous, but I never really felt like I had much of an impact on the game. As I predicted, the Inalla and Riku players easily kept me in check. I still don't know if they only were able to do that because of the extra draw and ramp from having a hug deck at the table.
The game left a bad taste in my mouth from having the Inalla player react so negatively at the outset from my playing Najeela. He's a better player than that and it simply wasn't necessary. I knew even if I stayed with Najeela, he'd probably win and I was right. Somehow that made the whole thing more annoying and frustrating, but there wasn't much I could do about it. The Inalla player was cranky after the game about how the Riku player had forced him to play out the win, and that the end of turn on his first attempt to win apparently came at the worst possible time.
The one real takeaway for me is that we've got to start using our phones to run a timer for these scenarios. When the buzzer on your phone's 10 minute timer goes off, the turn is over. Easy and clear, and you can put the phone on the table. The problem is basically that we don't often have players with turns like that, so we're not in the habit of having it be a big deal.
With two pretty disappointing games under my belt for the day, I ran the points and tallied votes for our league's scoresheet changes. Much to my surprise, the league narrowly voted to change our infect number from 13 to 10 to kill a player. The official rule is that 10 poison counters kill a player, so it's nice to finally be in sync with the official rules. I'll save the final month's rankings for my final thoughts, but after running the points and updating the chalkboard where we post our top 5, I got to play a couple of pickup games.
Pickup Games
I had just thrown together a deck built around Hallar, the Firefletcher. I had wanted to build Hallar for a while but simply hadn't bothered. I never opened a Hallar, but my kid had two Hallars and wasn't ever going to build the deck so i grabbed one off of her. Fun fact - Hallar apparently is a "they" in Magic Lore. I had never known if Hallar was a he or she, but apparently they prefer to go by "they". You might find that silly, but there are plenty of people out there who are using gender-neutral pronouns and I'm glad they have a Magic card that they might be able to see themselves in. Representation is important and I'm glad it's important to Wizards of the Coast.
My Hallar deck had never played a game, so I shuffled it up and hoped for the best. One of my buddies who was in the game told me that I should play a better deck as I had been hoping to get "a good game" in after several disappointing league games, but I decided to stick with Hallar. I had no idea how it would do, and I really wanted to find out.
Game One
The first game saw me on Hallar against three of my favorite tablemates in our meta. One of the guys was on Wort, the Raidmother, another was on Edgar Markov and the third was on Pir and Toothy.
I was able to get Hallar out relatively on time, get a few counters on them. I cast a Tempt with Discovery and got everyone to be tempted (it was clearly a casual game). I got Command Tower and all 3 Urza lands. It was the first time I had EVER gotten Urza's Tower, Urza's Mine and Urza's Power Plant out. Hallar is a very mana-hungry deck but I was optimistic that an extra 7 mana would come in handy.
Before long I was looking at possibly being able to win the game. I had a Biogenic Upgrade and a Triumph of the Hordes in hand.
My The problem was that the Pir & Toothy player had gotten a Glen-Elendra Archmage out, so my Triumph of the Hordes wasn't going to resolve. I got the Pir & Toothy player to let my Biogenic upgrade resolve for the low cost of putting a +1/+1 counter on Toothy. I still wasn't going to get Triumph resolve, but it turned out that it didn't matter.
Hallar was already really big and I was able to cast a pair of kicker creatures in a row. Glen-Elendra could only counter noncreature spells, so it was enough to kill the table. I had wanted to go with Triumph of the Hordes, but I was happy to get a win on the deck's first time out.
Game Two
I hate to win and just pack up and leave. It seems selfish somehow - everyone wants to get in a win so I decided to get another game in with Hallar before heading out. This game was Hallar against Wort, Tatyova and Pir & Toothy. I figured one of them would have a better game and Hallar would probably stumble. Boy was I wrong.
This time around the hero of the game was Kalonian Hydra. I was able to build up a decent board, play Kalonian Hydra and protect it with Heroic Intervention not once but twice thanks to Eternal Witness. I was eventually hitting with a 56/56 Kalonian Hydra and a Hallar with 26 +1/+1 counters. I was able to kill the Wort and Pir & Toothy players and then play a kicked spell to kill the Tatyova player with Hallar damage.
The real enabler in this game was probably an Everflowing Chalice that I was able to play off of a turn 5 Mana Geyser for 10 mana - putting 5 charge counters on it and dealing 1 damage to everyone through Hallar. This was fairly early on, and that mana rock stuck around the whole game to power out my kicker spells.
I couldn't believe my Hallar deck had managed to win its first two games, but I wasn't going to complain. The guys weren't playing their best or most interactive decks, but I also didn't think my Hallar deck would be able to keep up with a truly top-tier table either.
Final Thoughts
I was grateful to the guys for letting me get those extra games in, and I still can't believe Hallar worked so well. I'm sure it will lose plenty of games but it was nice to win a few right out of the gate.
After running the points we have a player at the top of our rankings who had never played a single game in our league before this month. That's pretty impressive, though he was playing Animar so it's not like he was piloting a janky, bad deck to the top of the rankings. It's possible he played other decks this month besides Animar, but I'm pretty sure that was his main deck for his league games.
That's me up there in the third spot. Somehow the player ahead of me had a terrible day points-wise. He wasn't playing on theme consistently, and being on theme does help a lot. I was on theme all month long.
In retrospect it's a little weird that the games I was able to win were all Gruul decks. I do enjoy the straightforwardness of many Gruul decks and I'm certainly not going to complain.
That's all I've got for you today. This week on CoolStuffInc.com I've got a pair of interviews with the winner of MagicFest Toronto, Michael Rapp, who just happens to be a regular at NexGen Comics. He mostly plays Modern but also loves Commander Cube, so we talked about both of those subjects the other weekend and I throw my notes together into a couple of columns.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!