I tell people that I enjoy my
job… and I do. But the day goes by so slowly that I spend all day
thinking about playing Magic. Whereas I
don’t get the chance to play with my deck against the best decks in the
world, like other players do, I stand around thinking about how the
cards in my deck interact with the rest of my deck. It does tend to get
boring after a while, but I can find ways to improve my deck pretty
well.For the State Championship tournament, I decided that I wanted to play a green and blue deck filled with cheap creatures that would stomp my opponent before he had a chance to react. I used Bearscape (enchantment, 1GG; 1G, remove two cards in your graveyard from the game: put a 2/2 Bear token into play) to keep my momentum going in the midgame, and Fact or Fiction (instant, 3B; Reveal the top 5 cards of your library. Your opponent puts them into 2 separate piles, place one of those piles into your hand and the other into your graveyard) because it’s SO DAMN GOOD.
I asked some people I play against if there was anything that I was missing, and the response came: Opposition. Opposition is a blue enchantment that lets you tap an untapped creature you control to tap a land, creature, or artifact.
In all honesty, I had shied away from Opposition, because I felt that it was completely unnecessary. But I traded for four of them and threw them in the deck. It is a very powerful card, as long as you have the creatures to activate it, and as long as you can protect them. So, to protect them, I threw in two different types of counterspell… the vanilla version of Counterspell and Mystic Snake.
The next step was the creatures. I had Gaea’s Skyfolk in the deck, because they fly. With the majority of the creatures in the deck being green and not having flying, a Teferi’s Moat set to “green” would completely wreck me. Not only do the Skyfolk fly over the Moat, but I also had Thought Devourers in the deck. I thought then, and I still believe, that Thought Devourer is one of the best cards in Odyssey. You get an large flying creature for four mana, with the downside being the fact that your maximum hand size is reduced by four. Sure, this card would not work in a counter-heavy deck, but in the explosive speed deck that I had built, it was very good.
But it would not last. I cut out the flying creatures for spells that I thought would make an impact. And did they ever…
You see, the most simple way to explain to somebody how to win at Magic is this: Magic: The Gathering has some simple rules to keep the games even. Players can only play one land per turn, each player only draws one card per draw phase, and so on and so forth. The easiest way to win is to break these rules.
No, I don’t mean cheating.
If the rules of Magic and a card rule text are different, the card rule text takes over. If I were to play a Howling Mine, an artifact that says “Each player draws an extra card during their draw phase,” then everybody draws two cards instead of the one mandated by the rules.
Getting back to winning: there are cards that allow you to play more than one land per turn, but they usually have horrible side effects. But green is a color that has a way around this rule as one of it’s main attractions. There are creatures in green that can tap to produce mana, most notably Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves.
If a player plays a Bird or Elf with the mana drawn from every land played every turn, they’ll have six mana available when they play their third land. Granted, that means that the player won’t have many cards left in their hand to utilize the available mana, but it’s quite a boost.
That leads me to drawing extra cards. Blue has generally had tons of ways to draw cards. One of the first cards ever restricted in tournaments was a card drawing powerhouse: Ancestral Recall (instant U; Target player draws three cards). It’s been considered the best card ever printed for the shear “getting something for almost nothing“ value of it.
One thing that playing with Invasion block only decks taught me: Fact or Fiction is wickedly powerful. That’s why a lot of Vintage tourney and Extended tourney decks use it over some of the card drawing spells from the past. Even though people have practiced with the spell enough to make good sets of piles instead of piling up all the good stuff like they used to, Fact or Fiction will, at the very least, get you the best card out of the five revealed. That alone makes it worth the mana. More often than not, however, you’ll get even more.
And now, I’m going to talk to you about card advantage. Card advantage is a term that people who think they know something about the game (like me) toss about when contemplating whether or not to put a card into their deck. One of the best forms of card advantage is card drawing engines, like Fact or Fiction. But it means more than just that. Card advantage is getting to draw more than one card for a spell you just cast, but it also means… well, lemme explain it this way:
Your opponent thinks he has you on the ropes. He casts a bunch of creatures from his hand and is set to attack you next turn. However, when you get to your main phase, you cast Wrath of God and destroy all his creatures. For ONE card, you’ve destroyed several of his. This is the truest form of card advantage, because now you have more cards in your hand to do things with, and your opponent has to find a way to make up for the creatures he just flushed away.
With the release of Odyssey, there’s a new form of card advantage in the flashback cards. You can cast spells with flashback from your graveyard, thus giving you two uses out of one spell. How important can that be? I found out at States.
Call of the Herd (sorcery, 2G, flashback 3G; Put a 3/3 Elephant token into play) and Beast Attack (instant, 2GGG, flashback 2GGG; Put a 4/4 Beast token into play) fit into my deck idea perfectly. My deck was about beating my opponent with creatures and card advantage, and both spells worked beautifully.
Call of the Herd is a great spell because of the it’s utter usefulness. It only requires one colored mana, so you can splash it in a deck that doesn’t have a lot of green mana, and the fact that you get a creature with three power for three mana is a virtual bargain. But getting another 3/3 creature for one more mana is awesome.
Quite often during the tournament, I started a game by playing a land, a Bird or Elf, another land, and then Call of the Herd before my opponent could counter it. If they were able to kill the token before I could attack with it (which happened very rarely), I’d drop one more land the next turn and cast Call of the Herd out of my graveyard for another creature. So where a normal creature would be rotting in my graveyard after being dealt with, Call of the Herd is sitting in my removed from the game pile, and I have a creature in play to attack my opponent.
More often than not, I’d pound my opponent with the token for a turn or three before he could get some defense. If he removes it… I make another. By the time that one was dealt with, I’d have drawn another beatstick to take to my opponent.
Call of the Herd is a great card, but I don’t think it’s worth the $15 it’s been selling for online. The main problem with trying to find them is that everybody is putting them in every deck that they can fit in. It’s very powerful, and it’s very good at reducing your opponent’s life to 0, but it’s not the best token creature spell in my deck.
Beast Attack is AMAZING. Where I had to cast Call of the Herd on my turn, I can hold off on casting Beast Attack until my opponent’s end step… like you would do with most non-counterspell instants. That means that I have the mana available to counter my opponent’s spells and possibly use bounce spells… or I can make a 4/4 token that will smash face as soon as I get to my turn.
Not only that, but you can cast it during your opponent’s attack phase, after he’s declared attackers. Some of the favorite looks I got from my opponents during the tournament was when they thought the path was clear, so they attacked with a relatively powerful creature… only to have a Beast materialize in it’s path and destroy it. THAT is a momentum swing.
No no, wait… my favorite look I got was the couple of times I had no cards in hand and I cast Beast Attack OUT OF MY GRAVEYARD to kill an attacking creature, and then attacked with the pissed off Beast. And that is why Beast Attack is possibly the best card in my deck. It not only makes the biggest creature in my deck, but it works in this deck perfectly because I can hold off on casting it and surprise the hell out of my opponent.
But trading token creatures for token creatures didn’t really sound like a good idea to me… so I added Temporal Adepts to my deck. Temporal Adept is a creature that returns permanents to their owner’s hand… and when a token leaves play, it doesn’t come back. Just having this creature sitting on the table kept Call of the Herd and Beast Attacks nestled snugly in their owner’s hand until they could find a way to remove the Adept. That made it a very good creature to have.
The weakness of tokens hurts these spells, but even that isn’t reason enough to keep from playing four of each spell. These cards are inherently card advantageous, and when played right they ruin your opponent’s card advantage spells. People hate it when they have to use a mass-removal spell (Wrath of God) to get rid of one creature, especially when you’ll get another creature in it’s place for around the same mana cost and no appreciable card cost…
The best part about using the token spells? I didn’t have to draw Opposition to win the game. In fact, in the next incarnation of the deck, I’m going to add red for damage spells, and drop the number of Oppositions in the deck. I’ll probably keep three in, though. The deck just doesn’t need them, but if I can get it out and protect it, it almost completely seals the game for me. Not only that, but if my opponent has a nasty little critter out with protection from green (like… oh, I don’t know… Spectral Lynx), Opposition will tap it, letting my tokens through.
But the token creatures are so good at taking over the game, I didn’t need to do much else but make tokens, attack, and protect them with counters. You kill a token, I flashback the spell, and keep attacking. You may get a bigger creature out, but by that time, I might have Opposition out… and that’ll open the road for my token. Maybe that’s why I did so well, because sometimes it just felt like the deck just played the games by itself.
During my trip to Iowa City, I lost to two decks. The first deck I lost to was a deck just like mine, but with red mana and Flametongue Kavu and Fire/Ice. The extra burn to kill my creatures was enough to get him the victory. The other deck I lost to was in the quarterfinals where, once again, card advantage ruled the day. He was able to get out Phyrexian Arena, an enchantment that lets you turn one life into a card during your upkeep. So while I was trying to force enough damage through, he was drawing two cards a turn and killing my creatures. Not a good predicament for me.
I’ve fixed my deck and sideboard accordingly, with the direct damage spells to kill my opponent’s creatures, and spells in the sideboard to KILLIFY offending enchantments.
Even more important than learning how to fix up my deck, I’ve learned not to get excited while playing in major tournaments. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. Whether I draw no lands or my opponent draws an answer to my threats every time I play one, it’s just going to happen. So why get bent out of shape?
I’m very competitive by nature, and if things don’t go my way, I lose my temper easily. Just ask the video game controls that I’ve busted over the years. But luck is a major part of the game, and you just have to go with the flow.
That’s what I learned at States.
And don’t worry Josh…I’ll get an anime review to you next week. After all, the Digital Dojo comes out next Tuesday. *evil grin*
Until then, I remain:
Nathan Loney
tenchisaotome@home.net
PS. My decklist will be available on the Sideboard Online (http://www.wizards.com/sideboard), if their Joshian webmaster ever gets more than the first five States posted… I kid, I kid. Their webmaster updates their site once in a while, as opposed to Josh.