whirofinvention-blog

[whirofinvention-blog]

The Penultimate Week

Everyone has their own preferred way to play Magic. This is true at kitchen tables where people may love to play their elf or discard decks and is just as true at the Pro Tour where you have players who almost always play control (Guillaume Wafo-Tapa and Shota Yasooka) or jam black-green decks whenever they can (Willy Edel and Reid Duke). When a new player starts the game, something pulls them in (maybe the art  or your friend plays or maybe the gameplay itself), but after they are drawn into the game, something else usually keeps them playing and for a lot of people that thing is finding a gameplay style that they love.

In general, there is nothing wrong with having a preference in how you play the game. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. If you love vintage and playing Sphere of Resistance, Thorn of Amethyst and Lodestone Golem off of your Mishra's Workshop, that's great. At the same time, if you keep bringing your vintage deck to your friend's casual kitchen table where they are playing rat tribal, then you are crossing the line into doing something that is a little uncool. This is the reason why format restrictions exist in a conceptual sense. The playing field is theoretically leveled by giving people restrictions on what cards they can use.

The existence of formats enters people into a tacit contract where they understand what other people are capable of doing and saying they are alright with them doing that since in theory both decks have the capacity to do powerful things. Wires get crossed every now and then which is unfortunate. A ten year old may show up to a modern tournament with a pile of unsleeved 6-drops and get stomped, but hopefully the community will make some effort to point that kid towards what will be better for him. Outside of those situations, everyone should be on approximately the same page about what their decks should be trying to do. The bigger the card pool, the more obvious this becomes. Standard players have to understand that Teferi, Goblin Chainwhirler, and Hydroid Krasis exist. Modern players deal with Arcbound Raver, Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Primeval Titan. Legacy players have turn 1 Griselbrands and Force of Wills. Experienced players go into the format knowing these options are on the table.

Since I started playing at my LGS, I have made it pretty clear what my preferences have been in constructed formats. Traditional creature based strategies are not my go to decks in any format. In standard, I have played UW Cycling (zero main deck creatures), UR Paradoxical  Storm (4 main deck creatures), and Esper Dovin's Acuity (zero main deck creatures). In modern I have exclusively played Lantern and Whir Prison since they began running modern events in March. Though I have played creature decks at times, I acknowledge that my weakness as a player is in knowing when to be the aggressor in creature mirrors. My strengths tend to be knowing how to block my opponent from having a line to victory with creatures. If I go to a Standard Showdown and my opponents are all on green black and are consistently losing to my Teferi, then they need to understand their deck choice might not line up against mine. Both decks can be powerful, but paper beats rock in this scenario.

My modern deck choices have been contentious at the shop. The owner of the store as well as one of the regulars have given me a lot of grief for my deck choices. They complain about how Ensnaring Bridge and Chalice of the Void are not fun cards. At the same time, they have built decks in a format where those cards exist and are relevant considerations for deck building. Maybe they represent less than 3 percent of the meta, but there are plenty of modern decks that only represent a small percentage of the meta. Even ignoring the metagame percentages, artifact strategies as a whole are always somewhere in the meta, so it isn’t like they have no ways to interact with me post-board. People are aware the option to play an artifact deck of some sort is out there. I just happen to be playing a traditionally un-fun version of one of those decks.

Two weeks ago, I promised the store owner that I would bring a deck playing zero copies of Ensnaring Bridge in the 75 to FNM. This past weekend was that FNM, and I kept my promise. Instead of bringing Ensnaring Bridges, I brought Ad Nauseam for my first run at a tournament. The list was pretty close to a stock list with a few exceptions. Rather than running 3 Spoils of the Vault, I cut 1 to run a Mystical Teachings. Also my mana base is a travesty because I do not own any Gemstone Mines or enough Seachrome Coasts, so I ran additional City of Brass. If I can pick up the lands I will change things around. The Teachings are going to stay in the deck until I actually have the opportunity to cast it.

The meta at the shop is extremely small and inconsistent. Ad Nauseam as a deck has pretty polarizing matchups. Decks that can disrupt you with tax effects, discard and counter magic are hard matchups. Decks looking to play linear games are good matchups more often than not. The decks I have personally seen at events over the past month that present problems for me are: Grixis Death's Shadow, Bant Spirits, Jund and 8-Rack. Other than that the rest of the decks struggle to interact with Ad Nauseam, but there are still decks that can beat it. Turn 3 Karn is still great on the play. If you falter even a little, Burn will Bolt you to death. Bogles can race you and sometimes forces you to go for a Laboratory Maniac win which is susceptible to Path.

So, here is a quick little tournament report followed by my initial thoughts on the deck and the tournament in general

Round 1, Bant Spirits

Sitting down, I knew I was not going to have an easy round 1. The player is one of the ones who has complained about my normal deck choice despite playing a Jund deck half the time that runs like 12 different ways to kill a Bridge post-board. This week he was on his Spirits deck rather than his Jund deck. Game 1 started out with me suspending a Lotus Bloom and him starting on a Hierarch. For the next few turns I played lands and cantrips while he played lords and Spirits. Eventually, he had a large enough Mausoleum Wanderer and a big enough board presence that I could not realistically win. Game 2 we started racing again with me suspending turn 1 and him having the Hierarch. I played a turn 2 Prism while he played a turn 2 Thalia. Luckily for me I had an Echoing Truth in hand. I resolved a turn 3 Phyrexian Unlife and on turn 4 resolved the Bloom and bounced his Thalia on end step. On my next upkeep, I killed him with Pact backup. Unfortunately game 3 was pretty one sided. He had Thalia, Stony Silence, two Mausoleum Wanderers and a Lord. It became clear to me I could not resolve my spells before he killed me. For my first match with the deck, I felt good to have taken it to game 3, especially since the matchup is far from easy.

Round 2, Green Devotion

This was the shop owner. Though I have never heard him talk negatively about people who netdeck, he is a brewer. When his brews aren't good he complains. When his brews are popular, he stops playing the format. In standard, he stopped playing his Sultai Muldrotha deck when Sultai became a real deck. Modern is not his format, but he has built three decks (UB Tempo, a weird Tron Charge Counter deck, and Mono Green). The first

2 are pretty odd but the devotion deck is pretty close to what you would expect from any big green deck. His win conditions are playing massive Genesis Hydras early to find Garrk, Primal Hunters to draw his deck and find more threats. After this he usually either plays an Ulamog or Banefires you for lethal.

Game 1 started out pretty rough for me. He played a Utopia Sprawl on his first turn and on his second turn played a second Sprawl and an Eternal Witness for a fetch. By the end of his 3rd turn he had an 8/8 Genesis Hydra, multiple creatures and a Garruk Wildspeaker. Oh and he had drawn 8 cards off of a Garruk, Primal Hunter. In the interim, I had just cantripped and played a Phyrexian Unlife. On his fourth turn, he tried to Primal Command my Unlife which I had to Pact. I then went down to 0 life while having only 3 lands in play. On my upkeep, I tap two lands and exile three Simian Spirit Guides to Ad Nauseam for all of my deck besides two cards. I Angel's Grace, play a land and discard. For some reason my opponent scooped without attacking after assuming I had a second Angel's Grace and not understanding how it interacted with Unlife. Normally, I would scoop in these situations since my opponent had the win on board, but he was tilting pretty intensely and complaining about how I enjoy Magic. We will get back to this in a bit. Game two was a quick one where I won on turn 4. Nothing else to really say about it.

Round 3, BR Discard

The other brewer in the shop is a friend of mine. All of his decks are strange, but they are usually pretty cool. Definitely not close to tier 1, but they have game against pretty much everything if the draws line up. Game 1 was a turn 4 win with no interaction. Game 2 I cannot really recall much besides keeping a hand with Leyline. After I played the Leyline, it became quickly apparent that it didn't do anything. He did a bunch of looting early and made a large lineup of Zombies via Zombie Infestation and Shadow of the Grave. He was able to blow up my Lotus Bloom on upkeep to keep me from going off in my main phase (though I didn’t draw the Angel’s Grace I would have needed) and killed me on his turn 5 with tokens. Game 3 I mulliganed and kept a 1-lander with a scry land, Serum Visions, and half of the combo. I scryed to the bottom off my mulligan, then scryed to the bottom again off the land. Turn 2, I whiffed in my draw step and off the cantrip. The turn before I was about to go for the win off of a couple of Pentad Prisms and lands, my opponent cast Burning Inquiry leaving me with nothing in hand besides a Pact of Negation and two lands. After that, he Anceint Grudged my Lotus Bloom, and there was really no line where I could stay alive long enough to draw the combo pieces I needed. If I had found my second land in the top four cards of my library, I think the game was easily mind, but you can’t always get there. C’est la vie.

In the end, I went 1-2, but still got 3rd. The spirits player was the only 3-0 and Devotion got 2nd at 2-1. Everyone else in the 6-person event went 1-2, and I just had the best breakers.

Briefly, I want to talk about the second round and how game one ended. If you are going to bring a brew into a well established format, even one as diverse as modern, you cannot expect to win every match you play. The axis your deck operates on might not be well-suited to fight the deck you are playing against. That was the exact case of the second round of the tournament. Barring a timely Primal Command or a turn 3 Ulamog, there is not a way for him to interact with me most of the time. In game 1, he had a fast enough start that he was going to win, and I was put in a position where I had to make desperate plays to stay alive. The issue was how he chose to handle what I was doing. Instead of taking time to try and figure out what exactly was going on, he opted to start insulting the deck and me for how I like to play Magic. When he said, "Why can't you just play the game? Why do you hate real Magic and do shit like this?" it does not make me want to scoop to him. It makes me want to play it out. At no point did I obfuscate any information about how my deck worked or how cards interacted. He just tilted so intensely that he didn’t care about what was happening. After two years I know him well enough to not take this stuff personally, but he was being an ass, so I took the win and felt fine about it.

Overall the event went about as well as I could expect since I am new with the deck. Both of the games I lost, I do not think I could have played differently in a meaningful enough way to change the outcomes. My Sleight of Hands were easy choices, and there was no point where I scry-ed and wished the card was in my hand later. The draws didn’t line up for me. The deck was great. Right now my goal is to keep getting better at modern and let the wins follow organically from that.

I don't plan on changing my playstyle anytime soon, but I will be bringing Hardened Scales to their last Modern event until the summer. I'm not bringing it because they are begging me to; instead, I am bringing it because I want reps with the deck. Besides, if I win with it, I am sure someone will become just as tilted as if I had put them into a lantern-lock. Oh well.

[whirofinvention-blog]

The Struggle of New Horizons

Maybe a year and a half ago, my friend who first introduced me to Lantern Control sent me an MTG Goldfish link to a new decklist that he thought looked cool. It was a prison deck like Lantern that relied on Ensnaring Bridge heavily to stay alive. The big difference between the decks was that this deck depended on Chalice of the Void and Engineered Explosives rather than Lantern/Codex Shredder to lock up the board. I doubt I was the only person who saw this deck and thought it looked bad. The prison elements seemed weaker, slower and less reliable than Lantern's. It just did not look like a deck I wanted to play.

Now we are in a completely different spot where this once rogue deck has become a real part of the metagame. Whir Prison is certainly somewhere in the top tier of decks right now and is fighting with Hardened Scales to be the best artifact strategy now that KCI is out of format. Their are various builds of the deck out there still, but the main builds right now seem to be: 4-color, blue-black and grixis. Each version has its own perks that the others lack and each of them have their own weaknesses.

Let's start with the blue-black build which has popped up in the last 2 months or so. This deck runs the most efficient win condition out of any of the builds in the classic Thopter Sword combo giving you a maindeck way to attack your opponent. At the same time, this provides you with a source of lifegain to get you out of burn range and an endless supply of chump blockers if you don't have an Ensnaring Bridge out. Other perks of this deck include having a better mana-base than any of the other builds. Now, I have never played this build, but I have to imagine the issues would mostly stem from having a substantially worse prison set up than the other builds. EE is not as effective in this deck and Whir of Invention is spread thinner.

Grixis Whir is very similar to the Thopter builds, except it obviously does not run the Thopter combo. Instead, the win conditions are closer to those of the 4-color version where you Crucible lock your opponent. This is the deck I am the least familiar with of the three options and is the least interesting option to me. The deck's mana is not as good as either of the other versions, it has worse card selection than the 4-color builds, and it does not have a strong secondary gameplan like Thopter-Sword. At this point, I can't imagine playing this deck over the other options mostly due to mana considerations as well as lack of quality card selection.

Lastly, we have the 4-color build of the deck. Popularized by Michael Coyle (susurrus), this deck is the build I have opted to play. This deck, in my opinion, has the greatest ability to actually lock the board out of the three options. Because it is running Glimmervoid and Spire of Industry in combination with Mox Opal, the deck is able to wipe the board consistently with Engineered Explosives. At the same time, Ancient Stirrings allows the deck to dig harder than any of the other options to find whatever piece it needs most consistently. If someone wanted to have a quicker deck and traditionally stronger win conditions, then I would recommend the Thopter-Sword build, but if you feel like you can consistently maximize match up, card and meta knowledge, then the four color build is definitely an option. This isn't to say the other builds don't also do these things, but the 4-color build requires a consistent level of forethought and has fewer free wins than the Thopter-Sword deck.

Recently I built the 4-color deck since there is a lot of overlap between it and lantern. At the same time, it seems like this deck would play into my strengths as a player. Hardened Scales trips me up. Games where I can just turn creatures sideways and quickly kill my opponent are straightforward, but when my opponent has a bunch of blockers or burn spells and we are racing, I struggle. I do better when I have a stranglehold on the board where whatever my opponent does is pretty ineffectual.

Unfortunately, things have not been going well for me with this deck. As of writing this, I believe my record is 2-4. When I picked up Lantern, I went 3-1, 2-1, and 3-0 in my first tournaments. With 4-color Whir, I have gone 1-1, 1-1, and 0-2. These have been free 4 man tournaments at my local shop, so they are really all positive EV if you assume the enjoyment I get from playing cancels out the fact that I am spending a couple of hours losing, then there really is no harm. Plus the tournaments are so small that everyone gets a free promo. Losing is not my favorite thing to do, but at least I am not losing money losing if that makes sense.

Now, the question becomes, is there a meaningful reason why I am having less success with this than I did with Lantern? The short answer is yes. Whir has harder decisions to make earlier on than Lantern. Both decks have hands that are pretty much always going to be keepable. In the blind, if you have a Bridge and the mana to cast it, then you can keep the hand in the blind. Lantern has the added advantage of having a pseudo-hardlock in the main deck that increase the amount of keepable hands you have at your disposal. Whir on the other hand has more disjointed hands than Lantern where you don't have a Bridge, and your gameplan develops after the game starts. If your opponent plays a tron land on turn 1, then the cards you are looking for are substantially different then when your opponent plays a Noble Hierarch. Lantern always aimed to stabilize the board and top of the deck. Sometimes, you have to work to reach to that point, but you almost always need to hit that poing to win the game (especially preboard). Whir doesn't have a guaranteed end state every game, it just has cards that make it hard for your opponent to interact.

What am I going to do about these struggles I am having? Well, first I am going to replace Ghost Quarter with Tectonic Edge. For the last two weeks in a row, I have lost to Tron despite having Crucible and Ghost Quarter. Tectonic Edge is not a card I own but would have easily won me those games over Ghost Quarter. Beyond this, I am going to just slow down and think harder about what I do. When I draw my opening 7, I have to more actively think about what my hand is capable of doing, what would present a problem for it, and what the worst case scenarios are. If I keep a five lander and draw my sixth land, will I ever beat burn? Probably not. What if my hand is a bunch of 0-drops

and an Ensnaring Bridge against a GDS player on the draw? Can I beat a Thoughtseize, probably not. More thought needs to go into these decisions to hopefully maximize my late game possibilities and chance of living.

So, let's get to the last question? What's next? This might surprise you, but I am going to take a week off of 4-color Whir and refresh by trying out a new deck. Maybe I will let a friend play lantern, whir or Hardened Scales. I am going to try something that does not lose to Tron: Ad Nauseam. In EDH, I am a combo player who likes to win in one turn and kill everyone at the table. Ad Nauseam is one modern equivalent of this. Plus it has the benefit of being more affordable. Unfortunately, my mana base is a little shaky because I don't own any Gemstone Mines and only one Seachrome Coast, but otherwise, I think the list is good enough for these events. Next week, I will write about it, but I will be back to Whir in a few weeks I am sure. Here's the tentative Ad Nauseam list:

Creatures 1xLaboratory Maniac 4x Simian Spirit Guide

Enchantments 4x Phyrexian Unlife

Artifacts 4x Lotus Bloom 4x Pentad Prism

Sorceries 4x Serum Visions 4x Sleight of Hand 1x Lightning Storm

Instants 3x Pact of Negation 4x Angel's Grace 2x Spoils of the Vault 1x Mystical Teachings 4x Ad Nauseam

Lands 1x Island 1x Swamp 1x Plains 1x Hallowed Fountain 1x Watery Grave 1x Mana Confluence 1x Seachrome Coast 3x City of Brass 3x Darkslick Shores 3x Temple of Enlightenment 4x Temple of Deceit

Sideboard 1x Fatal Push 1x Path to Exile 1x Pithing Needle 1x Thoughtseize 1x Swan Song 1x Silence 1x Spoils of the Vault 2x Echoing Truth 1x Unmoored Ego 1x Painful Truths 1x Supreme Verdict 3x Leyline of Sanctity

[whirofinvention-blog]

My Brief Encounter With the Sun

It has been a while since I've posted here, at least relative to the rate I would like to be posting and to the events I would like to be attending. To start, I guess I should come clean and admit I didn't attend GP Portland. By now I've drafted three separate posts about my not attending, but they all sounded self-indulgent. Instead of a dedicated post, here's the bullet points:

- I did not know anyone playing in the main event. When I started this blog, I knew two people locked in to the event, but leading up to the event they all dropped out. This is not the end of the world, but it is nice to have friends around to celebrate and commiserate with.

- My deck choice was up in the air. As I have mentioned before, I own Hardened Scales and Lantern Control. My results leading up to the GP with Scales were middling at best. Lantern on the other hand has a better track record, but underperforms against skilled opponents. Plus both are faced with the daunting amount of sideboard hate present for KCI decks right now.

-Lastly, and most importantly, social anxiety was the big roadblock. This is something I have struggled with for awhile. It is far from crippling, but it is stifling at times. I get in my own head about it. Though the other two points were factors, they probably could have been ignored. My anxiety just let them become excuses.

There were still silver linings. I had a great time at the event site with friends playing EDH, and I bought and sold a lot of cardboard.

Plus, the Friday of the GP, I registered for Oakland. Maybe that little bit of disappointment in myself was the perfect push to get me to register for Oakland.

If you're reading this, it means you probably keep up with Magic pretty frequently and are already aware that I did not top 8 the GP this past weekend. It was the most successful weekend (in fact it was pretty heartbreaking), but I had a great time. Friday night I got into Oakland pretty late so did not have time to go to the convention center. Instead I went to the home of my friend David and his partner Kayla who graciously housed me this weekend. We ate some dinner and stayed up way too late drinking, catching up and playing games of Scales versus Mono-Red Phoenix.

Saturday, we got up and made our way to the hall for what was going to be a long day. Before Round 1, I got my beautiful full-art Bolt promo as well as my not-so-beautiful Tigtone playmat and sat down for my first round. Unfortunately for me, I got paired against a pretty rough matchup to start my tournament: UB Faeries. If you have never read the card Mistbind Clique, I would suggest giving it a look cause it is a very messed up card. We went to game 3, but ultimately, the tempo power of his deck combined with his suite of removal and counters proved to strong for my robots.

Round 2 can be described pretty easily. If you are playing against TitanShift and your opponent fails to ever draw a Primeval Titan or a Scapeshift, then their deck looks pretty atrocious.

The following round was the one that really hurt. Most of it is a blur besides the last turn. My opponent was on Grixis Death's Shadow and sitting at 5 life with a few cards, two shocks, a fetch, and a Gurmag and Death's Shadow. I had three lands (2 Nexus, 1 Citadel), a Hangarback on 4 counters with and activation up, a Mox, and a Ravager on three counters at 15 life. My opponent cantrips main phase, plays a second fetch, and goes to combat swinging with both. I know that if he has a Temur Battle Rage, and I don't block the Death's Shadow, I am dead, so I immediately block the Shadow. He then goes to 1 life by fetching a  shock and fetching a basic and TBR's the Shadow. I activate Hangarback and the Inkmoth and sacrifice all of my permanents besides the Welding Jar and a Thopter to the Ravager. We do the math. I have a 13/13 Ravager to his 12/12 Shadow. He tramples over for 11 and deals 5 with the Gurmag for lethal. There were two mistakes I made here. The first you may have noticed. If I was going to sac the Hangarback, why not block the Gurmag first. This one felt bad. The other was that I simply did the math wrong and thought the attack put me to 14.

This round spawned the quote of the weekend when I texted Dave: "I just punted my round 3 into the fucking sun." Unfortunately for Dave, he also made a round losing misplay this round, so we vented to each other which helped. Having a friend around can really help alleviate the anger/stress/sadness from moments like this.

Round 4 is where my tournament ended. My opponent was on Devoted Evolution. Game 1 I had a Hardened Scales and Ballista and was able to kill all his creatures easily. The other two games he assembled infinite mana and a mana dump with the first four turns. The only really relevant statistic I have is that all of the games where I resolved a Hardened Scales and was able to put a +1/+1 counter on a creature while it was out, I won easily. The deck felt extremely strong in those instances, and it won a couple games without the Enchantment. Overall, I can't be too disappointed given the amount of preparation I put into things and walked away proud of the fact that even though I scrubbed out early, I took my opponents to game 3 every time and had a nice time.

The rest of the weekend was side events which were super fun. I managed to play a couple Battlebond drafts with Dave which were great, but I want to quickly tell you about my ridiculous Ultimate Masters draft. 

The draft started with me taking a Demonic Tutor and getting passed an Unholy Hunger followed by a blue card. Pick 4 I saw a Spider Spawning and went all in. By the end of the draft I had an absolutely insane U/B/g self-mill deck that's win cons were pretty much just a Spider Spawning, Rise from the Tides and a Lab Man I picked up pack 3 pick 7. Round 1 I was paired against Dave, of course, and proceeded to slowly crush his U/W Heroic deck and killed him with Lab Man in 2 quick games. Round 2 didn't go as well. I got paired against the only other competent drafter at the table who was on G/W Heroic and made a 4/4 on turn 3 both games while holding up protection for it. After the games, my opponent told me that she thought my deck was the sweetest and probably the only other good deck in the pod which was nice.

There's not much else to say about the event, except it was a ton of fun, and I am already looking forward to the next one (GPLA in March maybe?).

Before I end things, I feel obligated to talk about the bannings announcement scheduled for two weeks from now. I know most of the world will never read this, but I want to stake a claim and call my shot now.

Modern has a problem that needs to be fixed: KCI. In a typical tournament 4 of the top 8 decks being the same archetype isn't the end of the world, but KCI has been showing a dominant performance in the modern metagame for months now. No matter how many copies of Stony Silence and Rest in Peace are running around, the deck still puts up amazing results. Plus the addition of Sai has made it so some games they just attack you to death. None of this even takes into account how the deck can have 10 minute turns and is a nightmare to sit down across at your local FNM.

As I see it there are a few different permutations for possible bans and unbans that may be on the horizon.

The first, and perhaps most vocalized ban, is Ancient Stirrings. This card is probably the best card draw spell in Modern and sees play in KCI, so it seems like the logical card to target with a ban. Unfortunately, I don't think banning it would actually do too much to KCI. If it were banned, I would expect the deck to just abandon green in favor of more blue sources to take advantage of Whir of Invention. Plus, if you ban Ancient Stirrings, then you are also hurting Tron, Amulet, Hardened Scales, and Lantern/4-Color Prison. Some people might say that it is for the good of the format to take the card out of it, but I have to ask, when is it good for a format to hurt 5 different decks with one banning?

The next most likely banning in my eyes is Faithless Looting. Much like Ancient Stirrings, this card is extremely powerful and is the only other card in the running for most powerful draw spell in the format (at least in my eyes). Looting is almost never used as a fair card and has shown how strong it can be in the recent resurgence of Dredge as well as the new Arclight Phoenix decks. The only reason I write about it here is I believe you cannot ban Ancient Stirrings without also banning Looting. If you get rid of Stirrings it will make the Looting decks stronger in the format. Now, if you ban both of them, you would be hurting a huge chunk of the format. Maybe this is what WotC wants. A fairer looking field of decks in modern. Personally, I don't want to play a format where the combo decks are Storm and CoCo with the other decks all being things like GBx, UW Control and Spirits. I cannot imagine a world where they ban just Looting and not Stirrings as well.

This brings me to the card that people have been asking about banning almost as much as Stirrings. Krark-Clan Ironworks. KCI as a deck obviously couldn't exist without the card KCI. The free sacrifice outlet is powerful and maybe is too powerful for Modern. It creates the mana to cast the spells. If WotC banned KCI, I think it would be a fine decision while only impacting one deck in the format. 

Still, I don't think banning KCI is the answer. The card has potential and provides a unique effect to the format, that could see other uses. Maybe people start turbo-ing out their Emrakuls or making giant Walking Ballistas with it. I don't know, but the options are there. Scrap Trawler on the other hand doesn't really seem to have the same potential and is the card I would most like to see banned. If KCI makes the mana, Scrap Trawler is the part that makes the loops actually happen. It gets you back the Spheres and Stars to draw the cards. Plus, it is hard for me to imagine this card ever doing anything other than degenerate interactions with egg-like artifacts. Just like with KCI, banning this would have no effect on the format other than hurting KCI, but I think KCI has more potential for fair things and for that reason should be left in the format. 

A few other thoughts I have on the current ban list. Though at this point in time it is pretty much a meme, I do believe Stoneforge Mystic would be a safe unban. It is rare that I find myself in a game where Stoneforge Mystic would be too good. Though it is a powerful card and will assuredly see play in fair decks, modern has become a strong enough format over the past few years that I doubt it would be an issue right now.

The other unbanning I could see happening, and actually want to happen more, is Preordain. Green and Red should not have the best one-mana cantrips in modern. Blue is the card draw color and blue deserves the best cantrip. There are a few worries with unbanning Preordain, specifically blue based combo decks like Storm would become oppressive. That may happen, but I believe that has more to do with storm being a bad mechanic than Preordain being too strong for the format. Plus, I think this might be the best solution to avoid having to ban Stirrings and Looting anytime soon. Maybe this would make the format too combo-centric, but this isn't Legacy where we have Ponder and Brainstorm. Fair blue decks would play Preordain and be better off for it.

Also, they should unban Punishing Fire just to see what the fuck happens.

Well, then. See ya soon I guess. Next time I will probably write about an EDH deck.

[whirofinvention-blog]

The Value of Compromising

Life gets really busy. Everyone experiences this past a certain age. Sure, the average 9 year old is probably just going to go to school and maybe to football, gymnastics or dance after school. In high school, you get a little busier. Your school work becomes more straining on your schedule and the extracurriculars can start to pile on. You get your first job and your first girlfriend/boyfriend and have even less free time. College can break either way. You may be busier than ever or you may be the kid who skips class unless it is mandatory for you to attend. Maybe you get really involved in a student union or are playing college sports. If you are like me, then a lot of your free time is going to be devoted to doing your essays last minute and going to random parties on Wednesday nights (my first two years of college were not a high point for my academic career, but that's a story for another time).

After all that time, school is finally done and you are free. Infinite free time to do whatever you want. You can stay home and play the newest Elder Scrolls game all day long or take that road trip you've always wanted to go on or even sit on your couch and make spicy new Magic brews for hours. Odds are, you will do none of this. Instead, you get a job where five days a week you are doing the same thing all the time. You will realize that sitting in a desk or at a cash register is not keeping you as in shape as you wanted to be so you have to get a gym membership. Don't forget that if you want to save money you have to make food at least a few nights a week. The time just slips away. This is where I am at. It seems like it is going to get worse before it gets better. There still is more responsibility to come. Whether it is parenthood or buying a house. Things don't really seem to settle down too much for most people.

In case it isn't obvious, this post is about how life can strain the amount of time you have available to do the things you like and some of the sacrifices you have to make. Now, the sacrifice I am going to talk about today is not exactly huge but is relevant to this blog.

Portland is the home to about 10 game stores, and I don't think there is a perfect game store among them. The issues cover the full spectrum you'd expect. Bad prices. Rude employees. Horrible owners. Small selection. A weird obsession with making every order be made via computer even if it is just one card. That's not to say that they are all bad. The ones with rude employees or bad prices tend to have the best selections. The worst selections have the best communities. A few of these stores I have gone to for years and a few of them I will never step into again.

In the summer of 2017, I moved to a different neighborhood and after having signed a lease discovered my apartment was a few blocks away from a LGS. It is one of the smaller shops in the city, but the owner knows a lot about Magic and will provide advice to anyone who walks in to buy singles. Myself and a couple of others are the spikier players amongst the community. At FNM, we are there to have fun and there is a lot of table talk during the event, but we also know how to play and want to win.

Unfortunately, this shop is a little too small to run modern events. There just isn't a large enough player base in the store with modern decks at the present. I can think of four other people who have decks, one of which is a very spicy but not competitive taking turns brew. At the same time, the community is growing and events do fire pretty consistently. The first prerelease I went to there was about 12 people. The Dominaria and Guilds of Ravnica prereleases were both sold out at 32 people. FNM still doesn't fire as often as you would hope, but the first FNM of a new draft format is usually about 16 people compared to 12 months ago when it was 9.

What does this have to do with sacrifices and being busy? Well, I am busy. I work Monday thru Friday and come home everyday to make dinner with my partner. I try and go to the gym for a minimum of 6 hours a week (approximately 3 times). I need to spend time at home and with my friends. Magic is not something I can play every night and when I do go to shops, I try and go with a friend to make it a more social event than just playing games with strangers. Modern events aren't something I will go to by myself. If a friend is up to go to one I will, but I need to plan these things ahead of time because being out till 11:30 on a Wednesday with work at 7:30 the next morning is not where I want to be.

Things haven't lined up in such a way that I have been able to play modern in an event since my last post. Instead, I have been taking advantage of my local shops growing community and the kindness of the owner. These past few weeks I went to their Saturday Standard Showdown event and jammed some games with the owner's G/B/u deck (list at the bottom). This deck oozes value with there being between 10 and 13 cards that can yield two for ones. Last week, things didn't go so well with the deck due to some awkward draws and mana woes. I still went 2-2 and won my entry in store credit back as well as a foil Mox Amber out of my showdown pack. This week I showed up and did the same thing as last week where I just sat there and when an odd number of people signed up, I signed up and borrowed the same deck to make it an even number.

Here's what happened:

Round 1 - RW Angels

My opponent this round is a regular and a brewer. I have a lot of respect for him because his decks are always good, and he almost always is using his own decks. He has been playing this deck since the beginning of the format, and his original iteration was pretty close to what the Boros midrange deck looks like these days. Game 1 started out pretty evenly with him playing his early Adanto Vanguards and  Resplendent Angels with me firing right back with Plaguecrafters, Chupacabras, and Assassin's Trophys. He missed his fourth land drop for a few turns, and I felt like I had the game locked up. Unfortunately, I punted this game. I misevaluated the threat of one of his Resplendent Angels and Trophy-ed it. This gave him his fourth land and allowed him to play a Lyra Dawnbringer on the next turn. I ran out of answers and didn't hit any of my game ending cards early. He hit a few more threats and ran away with the game. The next game started out with both of us mull-ing to five. His early game was three Adanto Vanguards and mine was a Dusk Legion Zealot and Merfolk Branchwalker. I was able to hit my land drops easily and answer all of his threats with Dead Weights and Plaguecrafters. He flooded and played a Huatli and a Lyra in consecutive turns with both being met by Vraska's Contempt. In the end I just went wider than he did and had more answers. Game three was really closed at first with both of us trading resources in the early game with my removal answering his creatures. Then he played Rekindling Phoenix. I had the answer in Vraska's Contempt. A few turns later he plays a second one and I am forced to use a Trophy on the front half and a Moment of Craving on the second. Unfortunately, after giving him a few lands early, when he played the third Phoenix and a Resplendent Angel in the same turn I had no answer. The next turn I played a Branchwalker and explored into an Eldest Reborn which I leave on top. My opponent activates Angel and swings in for over half of my life. The next turn I play the saga; he sacs the angel token and kills me on the crack-back. Keeping the saga on top was a definite misplay since I was dead on board without a card like Vraska's Contempt into Ritual of Soot. Those weren't the next two cards in my deck, so it didn't matter but a misplay is still a misplay.

1-2, 0-1

Round 2 - BR Aggro

One thing to note about this tournament is there were a lot of mulligans. Last round my opponent mulliganed every game and the same thing happened this round. Also, another random thing was I lost literally every die roll so was on the draw a lot. My opener was awkward and consisted of Island and Watery Grave as the only lands. Though I had Muldrotha in hand, I don't want two blue sources ever or Muldrotha in my starting 7, but I kept because I had a Moment of Craving and Ravenous Chupacabra so was in a good spot against any creature deck and the control matchup is bad game 1 anyway so mulliganing to 6 doesn't really help my odds. Luckily for me my opponent plays a Swamp followed by Vicious Conquistador. I draw a second Watery Grave play it tapped and pass turn. Over the next two or three turns my opponent plays a few more durdly creatures like Viashino Pyromancer and I draw the second Moment of Craving and am able to just cleanly answer all of his threats. At the end of my fourth turn, my opponent made a play that made me really confident I would win the match. While I had no creatures on board, I pass the turn and on end step he Lightning Strikes me when I am at 18 life. Whenever this happens I feel so far ahead because now I know my opponent has committed a card to a game plan that I can fight against with little worry. He floods out and I stabilize at 5 life with a Muldrotha in play and many good cards to get back in the graveyard. This game was actually pretty close at one point when I had drawn all three Watery Graves, Island and a Drowned Catacomb, but I drew mostly black cards which are the better cards in the matchup. Game 2 is almost exactly the same where I 1-for-1 till I stabilize with Muldrotha and Eldest Reborn. Truthfully this just seemed like a terrible matchup for my opponent, but his plays game 1 definitely sealed his fate more than anything I did.

2-0, 1-1

Round 3 - BW Vampires

I know this player pretty well and have played him a few times in both Standard and Limited. I think we were 1-1 in Standard, 2-0 in Limited and like 1-4 in Modern (he also plays Hardened Scales and has always beaten me in the mirror but Lantern has gotten there). A few weeks ago he was playing Abzan Knights to middling results. Last week he tried his hand at a Naya Hexproof build and we went 2-1 with my edicts being stronger than his Vine Mares, Nullhide Feroxes (Ferices?) and Palladia-Mors. This week he was running back a classic. Game 1 he plays a Plains and passes the turn. The following turn he plays an Adanto Vanguard and the following turns plays Mavren and then Sanctum Seeker. Overall his curve was very good, but I had answers for most of his plays and by the end of the game I have a Muldrotha, both Vraskas and his Ajani on the battlefield. Needless to say, his vampires weren't as good as my on board removal and draw engines. Game 2 was actually disgusting. His curve was something like turn 1 Vicious Conquistador, turn 2 Legion Lieutenant, turn 3 Radiant Destiny, and turn 4 one drop and Radiant Destiny. I never stood a chance without drawing Ritual of Soot. Since I never drew it, I picked up my cards and we went to game 3. 

Before I get too far into this, I would like to say that this game had one of the better plays I have ever made in Magic happen during it. The game starts alright with my opponent playing early threats and me playing early answers. Around turn 5, I clean up the board with a Ritual of Soot at a pretty comfy life total. I pass the turn and my opponent plays a couple of vampires and ticks up an Ajani he already had to five. The following turn I do nothing but look at my completely empty board. My opponent then plays two Vicious Conquistadors and an Adanto Vanguard. I play a Muldrotha and pass the turn. On his turn he plays a Sanctum Seeker and Legion Lieutenant, pluses Ajani up to ult range and attacks with two Conquistadors and the Vanguard. I block a Conquistador with Muldrotha and go to 1. At this point I am circling the drain. I swing with Muldrotha at Ajani because I am dead on board to the attack trigger with any vamp so long as the Sanctum Seeker stays alive. Luckily he blocks with his Sanctum Seeker wanting to ult the Ajani to seal up the game - which was already sealed. I am forced to Dead Weight one of the Conquistadors and then recast it from the graveyard on the second. After playing a Merfolk Branchwalker to block and an Evolving Wilds I passed the turn. On the next turn my opponent plays another Legion Lieutenant and swings with Vanguard. I chump with the Branchwalker. He ults Ajani and passes. For the rest of the game I am forced to Dead Weight and recast my own Plague Mare from my graveyard every single turn to wipe away the cats over and over. Eventually I am able to play four spells pretty much every turn and my opponent never is able to catch up. I thought I couldn’t win the game but was proud of myself for seeing the line to keep his cat tokens at bay and eventually grind out the win.

2-1, 2-1

Round 4 - Mardu Burn

My opponent's deck this round was honestly one of the craziest standard decks I have ever played against. A friend of mine at the shop had mentioned losing to this player the round before and simply said that my opponent was on a crazy burn deck playing both Risk Factor and Sword-Point Diplomacy. I had the advantage going into the round of having some idea what my opponent was doing, so I was optimistic. Still, I didn't feel great about it. Going into the game my deck felt like it was made up exclusively of dead cards. Moment of Craving. Dead Weight. Ravenous Chupacabra even. This game wasn't even close. He cast multiple Sword-Point Diplomacys and a Risk Factor and was able to kill pretty much every single threat I played with Justice Strikes and random burn spells. At one point he just goes face and Banefires me for 5 when I was at 4 to play around countermagic. I went with the tech-y play of Moment of Craving my own creature to go to 1, but he just runs it back the next turn so my play didn't matter. The sideboard for this deck isn't designed for this matchup. I don't believe any sideboard is designed for this matchup. Fortunately for me, the sideboard is heavily skewed to beat control so I grab the copies of Duress, Negate and Unmoored Ego (which is for the Teferi matchup and I really don't like in the Teferi matchup). I pull out every copy of Dead Weight, Midnight Reaper, and Dusk Legion Zealot figuring the Dead Weight would literally never do anything (which was accurate) and that the life loss of these two creatures could be too detrimental. The other considerations were the Vraska's Contempts and Moment of Craving, but the Contempts have so much utility and the Cravings sometimes just keep you alive. Game two starts with me Duressing my opponent and seeing Banefire, Risk Factor, Cleansing Nova and four lands. I take the Banefire and pass the turn. Turn 3 I Unmoored Ego naming Risk Factor and see my opponents win cons are Erratic Cyclops, Angrath, Banefire and burn. The following turns consist of me playing creatures and him killing them. I eventually Unmoored Ego away his Sword-Point Diplomacys to put him in a position where he has no traditional card advantage. My Eldest Reborns and Contempts answer his Angraths and I stabilize in the low teens with a Vraska, Relic Seeker and Karn in play. He scoops up his cards, and we go to game 3. Game 3 consisted of a few misplays on my part but was extremely similar overall to game 2. I turn 3 Unmoored Ego away his Risk Factors again, curve out and play my lands. He kills my creatures and also hits his land drops. There was an awkward moment later in the game where I Unmoored Ego and say Sword-Point Diplomacy but almost immediately say Angrath afterwards. Unfortunately my opponent flipped his hand face-up so fast and had an Angrath already putting me in the position of not wanting to feel like I was angle shooting - I swear I didn't see his hand when I changed my choice. I do what I consider to be the right thing and take out the Sword-Points. I had an Eldest Reborn in hand anyways. The game ends with him having to regularly use his board wipes to clear my Eldest Reborns allowing my creatures to trade 1-for-1 the whole time. Once my second Muldrotha hits the table and I bring back a creature and Eldest Reborn, the game is pretty much over.

This was the coolest deck I played against all tournament. The pseudo-redundancy of the punisher cards made the deck feel consistent and, well, punishing. The game 1 matchup was probably close to unwinnable with the percentage being like 80/20 in his favor. The sideboard games though felt really hard to lose and probably flipped it to 60/40 for me. In the last game, I wonder if I should have named Angrath and Banefire from the start with Unmoored Ego to make it literally impossible for him to win assuming I can kill his Cyclops with one of the six cards that cleanly deal with creatures in the deck. If I had both Egos in my opening hand then I think that play I made was wrong but since I only had one, it was probably correct still. As a note and request to players out there, my opponent seemed like a really nice guy, but his graveyard/exile zone was super chaotic and literally just a pile of cards thrown together. Don't be like my opponent. Keep a clean play area.

2-1, 3-1

Round 5 - G/B Midrange

The two of us sat down at the table and instantly knew what the other player was on. Since I was borrowing the shop owner's deck the regulars were familiar with it, and I had been sitting next to my opponent round 1. As we shuffle he says something like, "This is a bad matchup for me. All of your Plaguecraters and Chupacabras are really hard for me to beat." The start of this game is pretty slow with him playing a Wildgrowth Walker and some explore creatures early and me playing two drops and removal spells in response. He misses his third land drop for awhile, and I continue to play lands and threats. By the time he hits his third land, I am too far ahead for him to come back. Now, I understand that casually chatting while shuffling is good form, but I would advise against saying card X or card Y is hard for you to beat to your opponent. Knowing that my sideboard plan became simple. Take out every single card that wasn't a 2-for-1. I took out the Greenseekers (since they probably are rarely going to survive the turn cycle), Moment of Cravings, and a single Dusk Legion Zealot to bring in the Arguel's Blood Fast, Find//Finality and Ritual of Soot. Every game started with both of us playing early creatures and having a back and forth of resources. Unfortunately, his creatures just slightly outsized mine, and I was put in a spot where my blocks weren't good but my life total was ticking down. He cast a Sylvan Awakening (there was a weird lands subtheme in his deck that I never really figured out) and brought me down lower than I could recover from after he played a big Vraska the following turn and started making pirates. Game 3 saw me keeping a very sketchy 7 that I probably should have thought on more. He specifically told me that his deck didn't do well against 2-for-1s that answered creatures. So, keeping a hand of Merfolk Branchwalker, Assassin's Trophy and five lands may not have been a great idea. He duresses me on turn 1 and takes the removal spell. I draw a Ritual of Soot off the top, play Branchwalker leaving a spell on top and pass. He plays his Wildgrowth Walker and passes back. A few turns later he plays a Kitesail Freebooter and sees my hand has both an Assassin's Trophy and Ritual of Soot. He's pretty much priced into taking the Ritual since it wipes his board and would get back any other card he may take. I decide to Trophy his Freebooter and get back my Ritual. Over the next two or three turns my opponent makes the mistake that loses him the game in my opinion. Since I have the board wipe in hand he decides to pass the turn doing literally nothing. No land drop. Not adding to the board. Not attacking. Nothing. I draw my card, play my land and pass. This happens one more time where he draws and says go with me responding with a draw, land, go. On the following turn cycle I draw Muldrotha and cast Ritual of Soot. He plays some threats, but I play Muldrotha and an Evolving Wilds after drawing a second Muldrotha. He obviously kills the first but when the second comes down he has no answer. Eventually multiple Eldest Reborns seal the deal in my favor.

I understand the incentive of playing around the board wipe, but this was a classic case of me not being pressured enough to need to use the board wipe. With neither player adding to the board and me hitting land drops, I don't think my opponent had a chance. He had a Find to get back the wiped creatures, but he probably should have forced me into playing the board wipe as early as possible to allow him to rebuild aggressively. I still would have won probably given my draws, but he gave me to much control of the end game. The fact that his main deck was designed to beat aggro probably helped me out a lot too.

2-1, 4-1

I'm very happy with this result. I didn't play perfect, but I did well enough to get 4th (the lowest of the 4-1 players due to breakers). The standard showdown pack had a Sulfur Falls and a foil Risk Factor in it which was nice. The deck ran smoothly, and the only meaningful changes I would make would be cutting the blue since it makes the mana a little painful and awkward. Though it gives access to a few powerful spells, I have to wonder if the Muldrothas should just be Jadelights, Izonis, or Carnage Tyrants. Let the Negates and Egos be a fourth Duress, Wildgrowth Walker, and maybe something spicy. Also I would probably swap out the Dusk Legion Zealots in favor of Seekers’ Squire since I think the body coupled with the lifeloss can really matter against aggro.

The best estimation I can give of the decklist is below. I don't have the deck in front of me so there are some things I am guessing on (specifically the number of Branchwalkers, Vraska's Contempts, and Chupacabras). If you have the cards, I would recommend building the deck. It is definitely fun.

2x Dead Weight 3x Dusk Legion Zealot 3x Merfolk Branchwalker 2x Dryad Greenseeker 2x Moment of Craving 3x Assassin's Trophy 2x Midnight Reaper 2x Plaguecrafter 2x Vraska's Contempt 2x Ravenous Chupacabra 1x Golgari Findbroker 1x Karn, Scion of Urza 2x Vraska, Golgari Queen 3x The Eldest Reborn 2x Muldrotha, the Gravetide 1x Vraska, Relic Seeker 1x Find//Finality 2x Evolving Wilds 1x Island 5x Swamp 4x Forest 3x Watery Grave 2x Drowned Catacomb 4x Woodland Cemetery 4x Overgrown Tomb

Sideboard 3x Duress 2x Negate 2x Arguel's Bloodfast 2x Plague Mare 3x Unmoored Ego 2x Ritual of Soot 1x Find//Finality

[whirofinvention-blog]

Hard Times

Pairings have been posted and the timer has started. It is time to get started, so how do I begin?

Well, I'm Joseph. This first post is going to be a little long compared to most of what I am hoping to have be regular content. Today, I am going to go over who I am, what this blog is largely going to be about, and a tournament report for my first outing with Hardened Scales. If you want to skip the background information and go right into the tournament report feel free. My feelings won't be hurt.

First and foremost, who am I? I am a 25 year old male from Northern California who has been living in Portland, OR since 2011. Besides doing the day-to-day tasks you'd expect of a 25 year old (working, cooking, cleaning, watching Netflix, etc.) most of my free time is spent either bouldering, making art, or playing/thinking about Magic. Being completely honest, Magic is really the only thing that follows me around constantly. I have friends who climb who I play Magic with. When I make art or cook dinner I usually have a stream playing in the background. Even when I am relaxing, Magic is probably on my mind.

My relationship with this game started way back in 2001 when I was 7 years old. As an only child, my interests mostly came from my friends and what they were exposed to through their siblings. So, when two of my friends' older brothers were playing Magic one day, it piqued my interests and I wanted to learn. I had already been collecting Pokemon and Digimon cards, but Magic was the first game I actually wanted to learn to play. So, for my 8th birthday, my friend Cory gave me the 7th Edition starter. To this day, I still don't know if I should be thankful for him giving me my first real introduction to the game or whether I'm secretly mad at him for introducing me to this money vacuum but either way, here we are.

Now, where I am from is a small town of about 15,000 people, so it was not like Portland or any other larger city where there are ample game stores and a reasonably sized community of players. Instead, we had one shop and that was where I spent hundreds of hours of my childhood, but this shop was a traditional card shop first and a game store second. They still sold sports cards and that was the focus of the shop. Every Saturday they held a Magic tournament but looking back they didn't know what they were doing. No one had a DCI number. There was no banlist. We weren't playing Type 2 or Type 1. We were just there to play. In a way, I feel lucky to have had this store because I got to play Magic like I was in the wild west. I might not have been able to play during Alpha and Beta when the rules were still pretty loose, but I got the best approximation I could have in the year 2001.

I won my first tournament at the shop when I was about 12 playing a Goblin deck running Sharpshooters, Matrons, Lackeys, and even Recruiters, since no one really knew what they were doing. The spice I brought to the table with the deck was running a full set of Fireblasts as well as 3 Goblin Piledrivers and 4 Flings (notice the fitting flavor text) to push through the last points of damage. To this day, I still have a soft spot for Fling but it has been a long time since I have flung a Piledriver at someone for 17 points of damage.

Shortly after winning the tournament (at least in my mind it was shortly after), I started to lose interest in the game. Ravnica had just come out, and I bought a few packs but stopped playing soon after. To this day I have no idea why I stopped. Maybe it was as simple as my friends stopped playing so I lost interest. Or maybe it was because the shop had to move to a smaller storefront and was clearly not doing well financially (they went out of business within 6 months of me walking away from the game). It could have even been that as I was approaching high school, I felt embarrassed about this nerdy hobby. Whatever it was, I stopped playing.

Like a lot of other Magic players I found the game again in college almost purely by coincidence. It just happened to be the case that my dorm was full of nerds who had started playing the game together towards the beginning of freshman year in the common room. One day, I saw them playing and a week later I had bought the B/R Innistrad vampire precon and was playing again. Later that year, I discovered EDH in pretty much exactly the same way and that took over pretty much the next 7 years of my life to now.

Someday I will write about my EDH decks, which are pretty much my children, but for now all I will say is that EDH is the reason I am  even remotely good at Magic. A lot of people look down on EDH because it is for people who aren't competitive and don't know as much about the game. What I will say is that if it weren't for EDH I probably wouldn't have all of the rules knowledge and mechanics information that I do now. Hell, when I started playing EDH I didn't even understand what the stack was or how it worked.

About a year ago, I decided I wanted to play something other than EDH. I wanted to start playing a constructed format that was actually challenging. I had built a couple standard decks in the past but had never really made the effort to play them in tournaments. A friend of mine had asked me to go to modern with him once and let me borrow his Lantern control deck and I fell in love. A few months later I decided to build the deck (as an aside, I would like to say, I was already building the deck prior to Luis Salvatto's PT win with it). It took awhile, but I built the deck at the beginning of this year and have played it in two or three small tournaments since then.

So, this is where I am going to segue into the two larger topics that this blog is about.

First, it is about modern, the decks I play in modern, and my experiences in modern. This will probably mostly result in tournament reports for small to mid-sized local tournaments. Hopefully a PTQ related post here or there, and maybe a GP once or twice a year (there should definitely be something for GP Portland in December whether I play in the main event or not). There’s a chance I might even try and get involved in the local Open Series, but I have not really thought about that.

Beyond being about modern, this will also touch on some of the challenges that I think players regularly encounter when attending events in person. Not to promote stereotypes, but as someone who played the game 17 years ago and today, Magic players have always been awkward, shy and sometimes weird. It is a hobby that draws in the intelligent who may be picked on in school by kids who are jealous of them. It attracts people who like fantasy or sci-fi, interests that have for the most part always been categorized as nerdy. This is just a facet of the game right now. Maybe that will change. I think I am a pretty well adjusted adult who can socialize well, but I still have a ton of anxiety whenever I go to an event of any size. Whether it is a small FNM or a GP where I am not even in the main event. So, part of this blog is going to focus on my facing my insecurities head on. It probably won't be a huge part of every post, but just going to a tournament can be hard for me, and I hope this blog encourages me to go to tournaments and have fun. All that being said, I really do lover modern and think with decks this fun, I would probably be forcing myself to head out to some events anyways. This will hopefully just make it more regular.

Right now I have pretty much three decks built: Lantern Control, Hardened Scales, and Affinity. As you may have noticed all of these decks are artifact based. The reason for that is pretty simple: Mox Opal. Shortly after building Lantern, the printing of Teferi coupled with the unbanning of Jace and Bloodbraid Elf, created a lot of problems for the deck. Jund was becoming more prevalent meaning Kolaghan's Command and Abrupt Decay were everywhere. Blue White had even more card draw that needed to be interacted with, plus they already had Serum Visions, Opt, Cryptic Command and Search for Azcanta which are all nightmares on their own. So, I decided to build something else. I looked at results and at the cards I already had and figured I could either build KCI or Hardened Scales. Though I probably will build KCI eventually, I decided Hardened Scales has a more proactive game plan that can be harder to disrupt than KCI. Plus, I wanted to play a deck that turned creatures sideways.

Once I put in the orders for the Ravagers, Inkmoths, Overseers, and Hangarbacks, I realized that I was now in possession of all the expensive cards for Affinity and had pretty much built that deck. I still need the Springleaf Drums and a couple of Signal Pests, but  other than that I have the deck, except I am running four Bomat Courier over Memnite in my current list. I will admit, I have literally never played the deck, but with the current state of modern, I like the late game impact Courier can have .

My long term goals are to have a large enough selection of cards to build a few more decks. I would love to be able to play Grixis Control or Jund, but I don't own most of the expensive cards for those decks. For now I am just going to be jamming the decks I have and will go from there.

So, onto the tournament report. This tournament was around 20 people and seemed to have the expected spread of tiered modern decks mixed with brews and decks that are missing a few pieces so running budget options alternatives. As is the case in every modern event I have ever played, there was a disproportionate number of burn decks.

Round 1 versus Eli

My opponent this round was a super nice guy who was playing his deck in paper for the first time which was great for me since I was playing my deck in paper for the first time. Apparently, he typically plays Burn but was sick of losing to Dredge on MTGO now that they have Creeping Chill for that free six point life swing. Game one starts with him casting a Faithless Looting turn 1 on the play so I instantly have a red flag that he is trying to do something degenerate. He discards a second Looting as well as a Flamewake Phoenix so at lest I knew what he was doing at that point. The game goes pretty fast with him being able to deploy a turn two Angler and recur the Phoenix. A few turns later he has three Phoenix, the Angler, and two Bloodghast. I scoop them up and we got to game two. Game two is an extremely closed game where we are both able to deploy our threats but I am eventually able to go wider with the help of an Animation Module and Throne of Geth. Game three was one of  the better games I have ever played. He kept an extremely reactive hand without discard or early threats. I was able to get a Hardened Scales out as well as two Arcbound Ravagers and fight through the removal with a lucky draw of Hangarback Walker. After some aggressive attacks on my end plus heavy removal draws from my opponent, I was facing a Tasigur on 6 life with an empty board and an opponent on two. I draw an Ancient Stirrings off the top and find a Ballista to seal up the win. Walking away from this round, there was one moment that I was really unhappy about my play pattern during. I had a hand of all two drops, a Mox Opal, Darksteel Citadel, and a few more lands. Turn 1 I draw a Welding Jar and go land, pass. Turn 2 I draw an Ancient Stirrings, play Jar, Opal, Citadel and Steel Overseer and pass. For some reason, I just got it in my head that I was playing a two drop on two and that was it. I completely neglected to cast the Stirrings even though I had the mana available and had the ability to play multiple two mana threats on three. It ultimately didn't matter, and I definitely lost equity by making the mistake.

1-0

Round 2 versus Scott

Once again, I got paired against a really nice opponent. Game one wasn't really exciting with him on Bant Company and a turn one Hierarch allowing him to answer my Steel Overseer with a Knight of Autumn before I could activate it. From there, he pretty much used the advantage granted by Hierarch to stabilize with a larger board. Between him getting to Spell Queller a few threats and my not hitting a Hardened Scales until it didn't  matter, I just wasn't able to keep up. Game two was a slog, I started off with Hardened Scales which is always great, but over the game he managed to get a tempo advantage through Spell Quellers and Collected Companies that was pretty intimidating. Plus he drew three copies of Path to Exile which was rough since I had no sacrifice outlet for my modular threats. Beyond that he CoCo-ed into Kataki at one point. Fortunately for me, I managed to draw enough threats, without him drawing his Knight of Autumn or Qasali Pridemage at the right time. In the end, it was his pretty sizable board against my board of two Steel Overseer and one Hangarback on ten counters. I was able to sacrifice the Hangarback to the Kataki effect and gain 10 thopters. Because I had been ramped a few times that game, I was more than able to pay for the Kataki next turn and pump with the Overseers for lethal in the air. By this point we had two minutes left in the round. We shuffled and presented. Time was called on turn two. We talked for a moment and just agreed to draw. I made some mistakes this round too that I would like to address. Nothing catastrophic, but there was a moment where I neglected to Proliferate an infect counter onto my opponent with a Throne of Geth activation. I don't believe it made a difference in him winning that game, but maybe the threat of being one counter closer to losing to infect could have made him play differently. We may never know.

1-0-1

Round 3 versus Bodhi

This opponent seemed nice once again (3 for 3, not bad) albeit slightly more awkward, but we are Magic players, so that is not uncommon. He was on a weird brew. It wasn't Bridgevine I don't think, but it was running Vengevine alongside of Monastery Swiftspear, Goblin Guide, and Hollow One. It was like a weird culmination of three different modern decks. It may be closer to what the very first Hollow Vine decks were like, but it didn't seem to be running Goblin Lore or Burning Inquiry, so I am not really sure what was going on. Anyway, game 1 he started out aggressively with a Goblin Guide and Swiftspear. He eventually hardcasts a Vengevine, but by that point my threats were outsizing his and Arcbound Ravager proved itself to be a messed up Magic card. Eventually I was grinding value out with an Animation Module and presenting a wide enough board of threats and modular potential that he could not block in such a way as to avoid dying. Game two started out similarly with him having a Goblin Guide. This game was close and not too much of note happened until the end of the game. He was attacking with a Swiftspear, Vengevine and Goblin Guide. I declared no blocks since I was at 16 life and he proceeds to play Become Immense and take me to 2. I look at what I have in hand and pack it in. I probably should have kept playing since two is not zero, but it seemed pretty unwinnable. Game 3 proceeds in much the same way as game two but I have an opener with two Inkmoth. From the start, I know the most likely way for me to win is via infect, so I chip in with the Nexi whenever I can while tryinging to deploy threats. I eventually have him at 3 infect with 3 Inkmoth and 1 Blinkmoth on board plus one Throne of Geth. I really felt like I had this game in  bag, so when he goes to attack with a Insolent Neonate and a Monastery Swiftspear, I block the Swiftspear with a Thopter and leave back the Arcbound Worker in case I draw a Ravager. He proceeds to cast Become Immense on the Neonate followed by cycling Street Wraith into Temur Battle Rage for the win. I was definitely bummed to lose this round because I felt like I should have been able to win that game, but I had only the two blockers with all of my lands tapped. The real thing that was disappointing was losing to a topdeck that seemed like a poor play. The cycling after casting Become Immense just to hit the Temur Battle Rage off the top felt like poor sequencing. The results would have been the same regardless of his sequencing, but the way he did it meant he didn’t know if he had the win when casting the pump spell and he just drew into it. The loss was inevitable after I passed turn, but the sequencing was the rub-in more than anything. I played well though and I think I correctly evaluated that I need to try and maximize damage with the Inkmoths to stand a chance due to his potential for explosive draws. You can try and play around every card in modern but in the end that will just create a paralysis where you never attack, block or even tap out. Sometimes you play around the Become Immense correctly, but get blind sided by the Battle Rage

1-1-1 - DROP

It was getting late and a Wednesday. I start work at 7:30 the next morning, hadn't eaten dinner, and live on the other side of town from the shop. I decided it would be better for me to go home than try and get a win in the last round to earn back my entry since I never go to this shop anyways.

If you've made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read through the post. I know it was a slog, and in the future they will be shorter. Let me know if you have any thoughts relating to this. Also, here is the Hardened Scales list I ran last night:

Creatures 4x Arcbound Worker 4x Arcbound Ravager 4x Steel Overseer 4x Hangarback Walker 4x Walking Ballista

Sorcery 4x Ancient Stirrings

Enchantments 4x Hardened Scales 1x Evolutionary Leap

Artifacts 4x Mox Opal 3x Welding Jar 2x Animation Module 2x Throne of Geth Lands 1x Academy Ruins 1x Blinkmoth Nexus 4x Darksteel Citadel 1x Horizon Canopy 4x Inkmoth Nexus 1x Pendelhaven

Sideboard 2x Tormod’s Crypt 1x Animation Module 1x Grafdigger’s Cage 4x Nature’s Claim 1x Pithing Needle 3x Damping Sphere 1x Evolutionary Leap 1x Dismember 1x Karn, Scion of Urza