Category: Magic the Gathering

I’m enjoying my return engagement with Magic: The Gathering lately, but it is sometimes a drag to have to organize draft sessions, and although I could conceivably go play at a nearby store, I doubt Debbi would want me vanishing for, say, every other Friday evening to do so.

So then, there’s Magic Online, which supports drafts and constructed and all that good stuff. So I could conceivably play while sitting around watching baseball or having a quiet afternoon.

Except, of course, according to the FAQ it’s not supported on the Mac. So I’d need to run Windows to play it. And besides my fundamental distaste for Windows, I don’t want to lay out money to get Windows just to be able to play Magic.

Besides which, I could probably spend a lot of money and time there, both of which are arguably better spent elsewhere. At least playing Magic with actual cards is a social activity.

Sigh.

On the bright side, Starcraft II is going to be released for both Mac and PC. And it’s probably at least a year out (no release date has been announced), so sinking time into it is not imminent.

That’s “WMDs” as in “Worst Magic Decks”. This is another geeky MTG post, so if you’re not interested in such things, move along. 🙂

Over the weekend Subrata and I went over to the house of our friends Ziggy and Laurie to participate in a little informal Worst Magic Deck tournament. The idea is to construct a 75-card Magic deck which is worse than all of the others at the tournament. The deck construction rules required a 75-card deck with exactly 30 lands, at least 20 creatures, a total power of all non-defender creatures of at least 40, and at least 10 direct-damage cards, as well as requirements about being able to play all the cards in the deck using basic lands, as well as a few other constraints. This still left a lot of wiggle room, however.

While putting together my deck, I ended up setting certain ground rules for myself: No creatures with evasion (flying, protection, shadow); no creatures with repeatable effects (especially direct-damage effects, but also tap/untap effects); creatures should be expensive, but since I expected games would go on a long time this shouldn’t be a primary requirement; be careful with effects which affect all players, since they might produce a win in certain circumstances, even if they’re generally not useful; and fill out the deck with completely useless cards. (Cards which involved snow-covered lands from Ice Age were particularly amusing.)

Despite applying some similar principles, Subrata and I ended up with rather different decks: His creature power was tied up in a few large-but-restricted creatures (Force of Savagery, Leviathan, Goblin Mutant, Orgg, etc.), filling out the balance of his creatures with walls. I also had a Force of Savagery, but I filled out my remaining creatures with weenies (1/1s, 2/1s, 3/1s) and a Norin the Wary. The more I think about it, the more I feel the two approaches are almost equal: My deck is more likely to get out useful attackers, but Subrata’s deck’s walls are also easy to get out, and are good blockers. I think over the long haul my deck is likely to be slightly worse, but only slightly.

Subrata and I both misunderstood that you only need 30 lands, not 30 basic lands; you only need as many basic lands as are needed to cast all your spells. So we could have downgraded our decks a bit that way.

The structure of the tournament is that each of us played with or against our own decks, only the other peoples’ decks. We would get a point whenever we personally won a game, or whenever our deck lost a game.

My first game lasted about an hour, as I played Ziggy’s deck against Subrata’s, and managed to take out both of the big threats in Subrata’s deck early, and then bided my time until I drew cards I could win with. Laurie, my opponent, eventually ran out of cards, although by that point I had two other tricks in the works that would have finished her off. (Subrata and I also both rigged our decks so they’d be more likely to run out of cards first, which is a losing condition in Magic. He was more aggressive about it then I was, but on the other hand you could choose not to use the spells in his deck which ripped through your library, whereas I took the subtle approach of using creatures with cantrips. I suspect my approach would be slightly more effective in the long run, but the difference is probably too small to be worth arguing about.

The best game I played was against Subrata, playing Laurie’s deck against Ziggy’s. Subrata’s initial draw included an Ankh of Misha, a Winter Orb, and a Sheltered Valley, with a Torture Chamber not far behind. Subrata said it felt like playing a standard control deck. (I had rejected both the Ankh and the Orb from my own deck for exactly this sort of reason.) This shut me down for a while, but eventually I was able to force Subrata to use the Chamber a few times to kill some of my creatures, and then I played a 4/4 flyer (with a significant but not insurmountable drawback) which managed to do just enough damage to finish him off – with me at 3 life. Subrata observed that his initial draw gave him too many options, and he played them all, and they interfered with each other just enough to let me squeak past for the win. But man, it was close!

I think both Subrata and I had weaker decks than either Laurie or Ziggy, although they were all pretty bad. When our decks faced off, my deck beat Subrata’s by one turn, because Laurie drew the right card at the right time to finish off Ziggy. That notwithstanding, I ended up winning the match, since I won 2 games and my deck lost 2 games. People also found my deck especially amusing, as I abused the format to render several cards (such as Extirpate, an otherwise really nifty card) entirely useless.

I thought the WMDs were an interesting novelty, but as I’d predicted, they made for a lot of long games without a lot of variation. I think if I were to run my own such tournament, I’d go with the standard 60 cards rather than 75, just to speed things up a little. I don’t know that I’ll feel the need to play this format again anytime soon, but it was an interesting mental exercise the one time. (And we had a good afternoon hanging out with friends and seeing their cool house.)

My friends have been playing Magic from time to time lately, but I’ve been too busy to join in, due to my extremely busy March. But last night we got five people together for a Time Spiral/Planar Chaos booster draft (TTP), and I made the time to join in.

Last time I played I had wanted to end up playing Red/Blue, but blew it completely and ended up drafting a mediocre Black/White deck. Tonight I resolved to stick to my plan. Well, sticking to two colors from the outset isn’t so much a plan as a desire, but I definitely wanted to give it a try.

Fortunately, my first pack made it easy for me to jump into Red, as it contained Jaya Ballard, Task Mage. I’ve drafted Jaya before, and she’s a terrific card: She’s relatively inexpensive, is absolutely brutal against Blue decks, is a good general-purpose card against other decks, can wipe the board clean later in the game if things have gone against you, and she’s a 2/2, which makes her harder to kill and a semi-useful creature all by herself.

Another early pick was Ib Halfheart, Goblin Tactician, which made me think I might be able to assemble a decent goblin deck, maybe picking up one or two Empty the Warrens. Alas, I never saw a single ETW, and although many Time Spiral goblins are decent low-level creatures, it’s hard to assemble a deck around them. So I ended up never using Ib, or some of the goblins I drafted.

At the end of the first round of drafting, I was feeling pretty bummed about my deck. I had some Red and Blue cards, but my last five picks were from packs which no longer contained any such colors. I ended up drafting some White cards due to lack of choice, and getting Momentary Blink and Gustcloak Cavalier made me think I may need to go Red/White, or even three colors, but I wasn’t very enthused about it.

As it turned out, the second round ended up providing me with the backbone of my draft: A pair of Keldon Halberdiers. These are very nifty creatures who can do a lot of damage, and since they have first strike (i.e., they deal their damage before their opponents do), they’re very hard to kill through mere combat. They’re also suspendable, which means they can come out quite early in the game without worrying about ramping up your mana supply. I also ended up with a variety of creature-removal spells (Lightning Axe, Grapeshot, Disintegrate), which (as Subrata pointed out) by taking them out of the draft pool helped ensure that my Halberdiers would survive. (Had I thought about that further ahead I would have taken some Black creature removal too, just to get it out of the hands of my opponents.) Fortunately no one ended up with Sulfurous Blast, which would have been devastating to my deck.

The final round of draft was from Planar Chaos, and it netted me some very useful supporting creatures: A pair of Prodigal Pyromancers (i.e., Red Tims), a Brute Force (a Red Giant Growth, one of my favorite cards, due to its efficiency), and a Body Double (which could potentially be a third Halberdier, among other interesting things).

I also ended up with Timecrafting, and Keldon Marauders (to go with my earlier-drafted Clockspinning) which gave me some nifty tricks to play with the Suspend and Vanishing mechanics. I think WotC did a good job designing these mechanics, and they yield some powerful combinations in Limited drafts.

I also ended up with a pair of Reality Acids. I’m torn about this card: Anything you really need to spend it on is going to do you a lot of damage in the three turns it takes to play out, unless you speed it up with Timecrafting or Clockspinning, or you have a card to bounce it back to your hand (of which I had none), and it’s kind of expensive to cast on its own. I think it’s just not very useful without some cards to speed it up, although it is a useful card to discard to power Jaya Ballard.

So I ended up with a deck that was 2/3 Red and 1/3 Blue, which isn’t bad. One advantage of a lopsided deck like this is that when you have cards which take two Red to cast, you’re more likely to end up with that two red when you need it. I assembled a 40-card deck with 10 Mountains and 7 Islands and started playing.

My first game was against Adam, who was playing a Black-with-some-Blue deck, designed around the Madness mechanic with some cards to search for other cards. He was surprised that it worked so well, but he had more than enough creature removal to take care of my Halberdiers, which left me stuck in neutral, and eventually he accumulated enough creatures to run me down. He did have to burn through quite a few cards to do so, though.

I then moved on to playing Daniel, who was playing a Blue-with-some-Black deck. Daniel has a tendency to draft control decks which I think of as puzzles: They’re challenging to figure out both for himself and for his opponent. Since my deck contained a lot of creature removal, this meant we played a couple of long games. The first game I ended up mana-screwed (only two land), but Daniel inadvertantly helped me out by playing Braids, Conjurer Adept. This allowed me to play Jaya Ballard on my next upkeep. No one else had known I had her, which resulted in a round of “ooooh, aaahhh” from the room. That’s always good to hear! I managed to plunk down a Halberdier as well as some of my supporting creatures, and Jaya and Lightning Axe picked off some of his big creatures. I Grapeshotted one of his morphed creatures, which turned out to be a Slipstream Serpent, which probably saved my bacon. At that point it was only a matter of time.

The second game was similar to this, although I got a Halberdier suspended on the first turn, and spent several turns Clockspinning the Keldon Marauders to keep them around smacking him for 3 – a terrific cheap combo early in the game. The game went on for a while when he killed some of my creatures, but I built up too big a lead to overcome, especially when I brought Jaya out again and between her and the Pyromancers was able to finish him off. (Disintegrate, by the way, is a very useful card to kill the Weatherseed Totem, since it removes the Totem from the game when it’s a creature, this preventing it from returning to its owner’s hand. This probably ensured my victory in the second game, since a 5/3 trampling creature might have let Daniel come back against me.)

Next I played Subrata. I’m still not sure exactly what his draft strategy was, but he ended up playing me against his reworked deck, which was either 4- or 5-color, and contained Slivers and at least one Ivory Giant. I played Subrata in two games, and basically Halberdier’ed him to death. The first game we both got out quite a few creatures, and I happened to get both of my Halberdiers out by the time my Veiling Oddity came in from being Suspended to render my creatures unblockable for a turn, which allowed me to hit him for 12 points. He retaliated, but I had two untapped creatures (a Pyromancer and a Crookclaw Transmuter that I’d flashed in during my attack to do one more point of damage to him), so he only did 6 points to me, and then I could swing again and it was over. I think the second game was similar, and Subrata was mana-screwed as well, which made it shorter.

By this time it was 10:30 and I was getting ready to leave, but my final opponent, Andrew, convinced me to play one more game. Unfortunately it wasn’t much of a game, as we both mulliganed out hands, and then both got mana-screwed. I ended up with five 3-cost cards in my hand and only 2 lands when he got his third land and just ran me over. That’s the way it goes sometimes. But by then I really did need to leave, so no rematch.

Overall I was both surprised and happy with how well my deck worked. I probably could have drafted even a little bit better, but I’m still trying to get into the mindset of thinking ahead and thinking more broadly when doing the draft. But really it’s hard to go wrong with powerful creatures and lots of creature removal, as well as two or three cards which can finish off the game (and Jaya is powerful enough that she’s useful both early and late).

Now I have to knuckle down to prep for my fantasy baseball draft (on April 1, heh-heh), but next month I should be ready to try to build on my success last night!

We’ve been playing semi-regular games of Magic lately, I’m almost sorry to admit. Lately we’ve been doing booster drafts using the two most recent expansions, Time Spiral and Planar Chaos.

We had another one on Sunday, a 7-person draft at Subrata‘s. My goal was to have a better all-around draft than I’ve had recently, drafting a deck with more possibilities and fewer limitations than in the past. For instance, I’ve read up on the color combinations and how they work in a TTP draft (a draft from two Time Spiral packs and one Planar Chaos pack).

Unfortunately, I really flubbed it this time around, and ended up drafting a Black/White deck, which is really one of the weakest combos. Heck, Black is an all-around disappointing color in Time Spiral, and Black/White together lacks both clever tricks to play, and big monsters to crush the opposition with. I ended up drafting a halfway decent deck, but mainly because I sort of backed into a couple of tricks which could lead to victory if I could stall the opponent long enough.

Nonetheless, I ended up drafting a number of cards which just weren’t as useful as they looked: Expensive but underpowered creatures, and some artifacts that look cool, but in practice don’t provide enough bang for the buck. So overall I didn’t have as much flexibility as I’d hoped. Sigh.

Practice makes perfect, I guess. But I still need a lot of practice.

One thing I probably haven’t mentioned much in 9 years of journalling is that I was once sucked into the maw of Magic: The Gathering, the original collectible card game often referred to as “gamer crack”. (See also the Wikipedia article.)

For me, it started in November 1995 when I broke up with my girlfriend at the time, and some of my friends in Madison hauled me out to Gene‘s house and introduced me to Magic. I played regularly until around 1998, and a very little bit (mostly with Ceej) when I moved to California, but haven’t really played in years. By contrast, Subrata and Mark started playing before me. This mostly means that the decks I played with were considerably newer than – and often less powerful than – those Subrata and Mark played with. So we have fairly different memories of playing. Subrata, at least, actually played in Magic tournaments, while I just played with friends.

For those of you who might be Magic geeks, when I started playing the set Ice Age had been released the previous summer, so that was mainly what I played with. The Chronicles and Homelands expansions were also available, and Fallen Empires – which had apparently been wildly overprinted – was available everywhere at deep discounts. While I played, I picked up the expansions Alliances, Mirage, Visions, Weatherlight, and Tempest, and then decided I basically had enough cards. I only ever played under the Fourth and Fifth Edition rules. I guess the game has changed rather a lot since those days.

I remember my then-cow-orker Mike and I went in on a box of Mirage booster packs, which cost us about $90 (i.e., $45 each), and we spent several hours after work going through all the packs exploring the cards and trading back and forth until we’d split them fairly evenly. Ah, fond memories. I still have all my cards, since it’s a good game, and I figured I would still play it from time to time.

Anyway, I bring all this up because Subrata put together a day of Magic gaming last Saturday: He had seven other people come over, and we had a booster draft from three booster packs (two Ice Age and one Mirage), and then we assembled decks (with whatever land we wanted) and played for a few hours. I’d never done this sort of deck construction before, and it was actually a lot of fun. I ended up with a mainly black-and-green deck, with a touch of blue.

Playing went somewhat less well, because I had a number of expensive creatures which were pretty good if I could get them out, but the deck was susceptible to faster decks. So I had a couple of successful games, but got pretty badly pounded in my other matches. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about deck construction, so I’m clearly just very rusty.

On the bright side, I did get to meet a couple of people who are still active Magic players, and they’re even on my floor at work! One of them said they sometimes get together for booster draft evenings or weekend games, and asked if I’d be interested. I said I would, as time permits. I don’t necessarily want to get on the Magic roller-coaster again, but I wouldn’t mind playing that sort of game from time to time.

Besides which, for all that Magic has the reputation of being a big money sink, I would have to buy one hell of a lot of cards for it to come anywhere close to my comic book habit! And I am curious now what some of the recent sets have been like…