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| All's Fair in Love and Magic - by Erik Friborg
Welcome to "All's Fair in Love and Magic", a series devoted to looking at and breaking down the currently accepted sterotypes about Magic, Classic, Casual play and everything in between! Expectations... Life is rife with challenges in managing expectations. If I'm playing Lorwyn Block constructed I expect to deal with creatures. If I'm playing Standard I expect to deal with a bit more control, some creatures and a little combo. If I'm playing Extended I expect Control, Combo and then creatures. But what about Classic? We have the best of the best of the best at our disposal, so what should one expect from Classic? You should expect that the guy across the table from you may go fetchland->dual, "go". But wait a second!Doesn't he know this is casual? Doesn't he care that you don't have those expensive old cards? Of course he knows that this is casual, and honestly, it's not his responsibility to know what your financial situation is. Classic is a powerful format, even in Casual. Fetchlands and Duals lands will be abound for as long as the format exists, both in casual and competitive Classic. Dealing with this expectation will make your time in Casual Classic much better. The mana bases aren't the only pitfall in Classic. Classic is not like any other format on MTGO, interactions and cards exist here that don't exist anywhere else on MTGO. As such, I figured it was a good time to go over some common foes and ways to attack them. This week? How to handle opposing fetchlands and expensive mana bases!
But first I want to level set some things for this series. First of all, this isn't a "budget" series like magicthegathering.com's Building on a Budget or like my Building a Collection Out of Nothing I wrote on www.puremtgo.com. I will of course be aware of card prices and attempt to not start decks with 4x Orim's Chant, 4x Meddling Mage and 4x Force of Will, but make no mistake; some cards for some decks are going to be expensive. I'm more worried about having fun with cards in the format as well as how to hurt certain strategies than I am about eeking out the lowest possible deck price. Second of all, I'm going to focus on 'hate' cards first and what those cards accomplish as well as what you should be expecting when you're building your deck in order to best be prepared. Each format has its own spirit. Lorwyn block, as mentioned above, is creature centric. You have to be prepared for creatures of all sizes if you want to win. Classic isn't as cut and dry as a Block format, but the more you play in it the more you'll start to notice repetitious strategies. With that out of the way, let's get to hatin'. In the world of Magic there are foils to everything... not foil as in 'shiny' foil, but foil as in an opposition to something. Control decks hate discard and fast creatures. Creature decks hate removal and combo. Expensive mana bases hate mana disruption... and that's where we start this series. How can I keep up with those expensive mana bases? My Terramorphic Expanses are no match for those Polluted Deltas! That's true. When it comes to Classic mana bases, the king of town is the five fetch lands (Polluted Delta, Bloodstained Mire,Flooded Strand, Wooded Foothills, and Windswept Heath) and the the 10 Ravnica Duals (Blood Crypt, Stomping Ground, Hallowed Fountain, Watery Grave, Breeding Pool, Godless Shrine, Overgrown Tomb, Sacred Foundry,Steam Vents, Temple Garden). There's no doubt about it. Expect to see these cards in the Casual room. But what if you can't afford those cards? That's not a huge deal, but you may need to afford some hate cards. Right now on MTGO there are a some good options to hurting those big money mana bases so lets take a look! Change them - Stealing (all your <mana> base are belong to us)- Stopping - Punishing - Destroying - Delaying - Dang, that's a lot of cards, and I didn't even list all of them. For instance, I didn't list a lot of basic Land Destruction cards there, since I'm mostly focusing on penalizing people playing non-basic land destruction. So now we have the list of cards that we can choose from to either build around or work into our deck. And just like mana bases, there are different levels of quality when it comes to mana disruption. Cards like Magus of the Moon and Blood Moon are generally more powerful than say, Weight of Spires. And you can throw Ghost Quarter into far more decks than you can Destructive Flow. Some cards are 'build around me' cards, like Primal Order and Destructive Flow. Others are cards that plug into a common archetype like Magus of the Moon or Fulminator Mage, where as others are only good if you really, really,really want to hose a fetchland->dual deck like Suppression Field or Stifle. There are also cards that are completely dead if you're not playing against a non-basic deck like Primal Order,listed above. Of course, with all the available lands in Classic, it's a pretty safe bet that there will be a few non-basics across the board.
Hate: Delay: Turbo-Delay: Backup Plan: Love thyself: This deck builds around Primal Order and hopes to just clog and delay everything else until it can either kill via the Order, or get the Squirrel Nest plus Seedborn Muse into play as a backup plan. If it can't win through Primal Order pings it's going to have a hard time winning, but that's the trade off to a dedicated hate deck... when it fights a deck that it's not out to hate it struggles. What can I say, this is the most amazing thing of MTG in my opinion; each decision you make changes things so much. Too much dedication towards one of the many things in the game and you weaken your deck to something else. Expect to see some anger with this deck. It's essentially a prison deck against creatures and slows the game to a crawl. It turns every fetchland->Dual into a two turn delay (the fetch comes into play tapped, then the land it fetches will come into play tapped as well for a double whammy. So what about taking an existing deck and just smooshing some disruption into it? That's actually a pretty easy way to go as well. For good general cards that hurt fancy mana bases and can still have game even if you don't hit your hate target, I'd recommend Stifle, Bind, Magus of the Moon, and Primal Command. They fit into many decks and have more than one use usually. For example, many decks run some sort of artifact/enchantment removal. Primal Command's top of library+ shuffle accomplishes a very similar task, subbing out the current Creeping Mold with Primal Command lets you impact the same permanents,but also gives you a little more flexibility. Since against Burn you can use it as a restock + life gain, or life gain +anti-threshold tech, or what have you. Stifle acts as 1cc LD that also nerfs storm and stops the Imprint trigger from an early Chrome Mox. Since I mentioned Burn.dec earlier I figured I'd use it as an example of hate smooshing: 4 Lightning Bolt 17 Mountain Essentially you take a deck and remove whatever the weakest, or least coherent card is from it and replace it with some sort of hate that fits the theme or compliments your deck. For this deck I feel that my best options were:
So I then start to look at the deck's purpose: win through non-creature damage. The only creature I use is one that can be sacrificed at will, which negates pinpoint removal, and nets us virtual card advantage since every removal spell drawn by our opponents is a dead draw, we like that. This means that Magus of the Moon and Zo-Zu the punisher are the first to go if we want to stay on track with that advantage. We still have a lot of non-creature options though, and some fit better than others. Cryoclasm and Molten Rain to both kill a non-basic and do some damage, we also have Lava Blister to do some major damage or cause a bad decision early game... although late game it's not as good. Also, we can't guarantee that our opponent will have an island or a plains to hit via cryoclasm which really leaves Blood Moon, Pillage, Molten Rain, Stone Rain and Ankh of Mishra. Stone rain is out because it's not doing damage, Pillage is a solid card but the wrong type of hate and Blood Moon doesn't actually do any damage on its own. Which leaves me with: Ankh of Mishra FTW. This card turns every fetchland->dual into at LEAST four damage, and six, if they need it into play untapped. The process of 'smooshing' CAN be complex and have a lot of decisions. Of course, since this is casual, you can choose ANY hate card and there's no 'right or wrong', just what you want to use versus what you don't want to use. Just a warning though, you'll get plenty of concessions and probably snide remarks from playing the burn.dec. It's seen a lot as it's a very cheap deck to build and very easy to find the pieces and fairly easy to play. But then again, the whole point of this series of articles is to illustrate that Casual is Casual is Casual, and that playing card x/expensive land x/strategy x is all okay, just be friendly while you do, and respect the other player's time and wishes. If they have restrictions play by them, if they don't have restrictions, expect anything to show up. Summary: Until next time remember: All's Fair in Love and Magic. |
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