Legacy Open and Looking Forward

This weekend was the Legacy Open in Worcester. Legacy is not my best format. I've played in Legacy in tournaments something like six or seven times in my life. I've been working on the same list for most of those tournaments, basically just a deck that's got Dark Confidant, Tarmogoyf, and Deathrite Shaman along with whatever else. I won't spell out the list I played, but basically it was Green/Black midrange with a little white for Stoneforge Mystic and Swords to Plowshares. I also added a small Green Sun's Zenith package to try and speed up the deck a little bit.

One of the advantages I try to exploit with this deck, or this style of deck, is its ability to use basic lands and not get roasted by Delver's mana denial plans. We have a pretty strong late game with Bobs and Goyfs and Stoneforges if we can get there.

I went 5-4 in the Open. My losses coming to Czech Control with Punishing Fire, Lands, Grixis Delver, and Turbo Depths. The loss to the Czech deck was not surprising to me, and Lands I think is a fine matchup but you can lose easily to their fast starts, and Turbo Depths just had two god draws. The Grixis loss was a little disconcerting to me though, and I lost a lot to it in the light amount of testing I did before the tournament as well.

I think that moving forward, I am going to cut the white splash. I think it's unnecessary. Basic lands are so powerful and the Legacy card pool is so vast that there are lots of answers to any problem you might be having in any color. I am losing more to my mana than I am winning because Stoneforge and Swords to Plowshares are such upgrades over whatever else I'd play if I stayed in two colors. Legacy is a strange place. People are trying to exploit your decks' inconsistencies, even the intrinsic inconsistencies of Magic's rules, and making your deck more consistent makes it more powerful, in this weird opposite day way as opposed to the other formats of Magic.

At my next Legacy event, I think I'll play something like this:

4 Dark Confidant
4 Deathrite Shaman
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Scavenging Ooze
4 Tarmogoyf
1 Tireless Tracker

2 Fatal Push
3 Abrupt Decay
1 Dismember
3 Liliana of the Veil
4 Thoughtseize
2 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Hymn to Tourach
3 Green Sun's Zenith

4 Verdant Catacombs
2 Marsh Flats
1 Polluted Delta
4 Swamp
2 Forest
2 Bayou
1 Scrubland
4 Wasteland
3 Windswept Heath

Sideboard
2 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Reclamation Sage
2 Phyrexian Arena
2 Bitterblossom
2 Surgical Extraction
2 Golgari Charm
2 Gerrard's Verdict
1 Toxic Deluge

Not exactly sure about the sideboard of course, but I think this is where I'd want to be at my next tournament. The white sideboard options are pretty good, but the deck is set up so you never need white mana against decks that have Wasteland, Stifle, or Blood Moon.

The next day I wasn't feeling great, so I didn't play in the Modern Classic. Instead I played in a much more casual Modern Challenge with my untuned Bloodbraid Jund deck. I loved it. I played two matches that were against fringe decks to start off the day that were pretty easy. I then played against a Jund mirror, which is a delight. Bitterblossom stole the show. I ID'd the last round.

Despite talking about how much I thought Dark Confidant was better in the post-Bloodbraid Elf world, I'm back on the Bitterblossom plan. I just keep looking at these Grixis lists and thinking "There's no way I can beat that" and playing Jund mirrors where I Bolt and Push and Kolaghan's Command three Dark Confidants and win with a horde of Faeries. They simply cannot beat it.

My sideboard is a mess. I really dislike Fulminator Mage in Jund sideboards, it just doesn't mesh with the strategy. But that leaves a gaping hole in the board and makes the board look completely different than most lists I've seen online, most notably Reid's from the MOCS. I'm still in love with Blightning, since it get so good with Bloodbraid Elf.

4 Tarmogoyf
4 Bloodbraid Elf
2 Scavenging Ooze
2 Tireless Tracker

3 Bitterblossom
4 Liliana of the Veil
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Fatal Push
2 Dreadbore
3 Kolaghan's Command
3 Thoughtseize
3 Inquisition of Kozilek

4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Bloodstained Mire
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Blood Crypt
1 Stomping Ground
2 Swamp
1 Forest
1 Mountain
3 Raging Ravine
3 Blackcleave Cliffs
1 Blooming Marsh

Sideboard
2 Crumble to Dust
2 Ancient Grudge
2 Blightning
2 Shadow Guildmage
1 Anger of the Gods
1 Duress
1 Jund Charm
1 Kitchen Finks
1 Huntmaster of the Fells
1 Thragtusk
1 Obstinate Baloth

If they had never printed Verdant Catacombs I'd probably have taken up competitive Mario Kart by now.

The 1-of lifegain fatties are all on a probationary research period. Ideally, they are all good against the Jace decks, Burn, and the mirror. Obstinate Baloth is amazing in the mirror, great against Burn, but poor against UW control. Huntmaster is solid but not amazing against everything. Kitchen Finks is at its best against Burn but only okay against Control and the mirror, and double green on turn 3 can be tricky. Thragtusk is... optimistic. Am I really crazy enough to register 4 Huntmaster of the Fells in my sideboard?

Blood Moon might be a thing again. If Red/Green Eldrazi continues to do well, and Bogles continues to be annoying and vulnerable to it, then maybe I should throw it back in the deck.

Anyways, I'm gonna stop writing before I fall into some existential Huntmaster of the Fells spiral and they find me ten years from now running through the Northwest Territories on all fours. Until next time.

The More Things Change

I spent the last week or so wracking my brain about the Jund/Abzan conundrum. Reid played straight Green/Black with Lingering Souls at Pro Tour "Goyf Sucks" and Top 8'd. The deck looked phenomenal, and made me really rethink how I envision these decks.

At their core, these are Black/Green decks with a splash, and if you don't splash a certain color, it becomes necessary to make up for it with other cards within your colors. If you lack white for Lingering Souls, you might need to make up for it with Bitterblossom. If you lack Red for Bolt and Kolaghan's Command, you'll have to play Abrupt Decay and Maelstrom Pulse to help your removal suite. The on-color replacements aren't objectively worse, but they are lacking just enough and the splash of one color is usually so cheap that it's worth it. We've seen in the past where splashing both White and Red is perfectly fine. After watching this Pro Tour, I don't think I was about to start playing Abzan, but it was certainly on my radar, and I didn't consider it to be a worse choice overall anymore.

Some things have changed in the last couple of hours here on planet midrange.

Let's just talk about Bloodbraid and hash some stuff out.

• Bloodbraid loves catchall answers. Liliana, Maelstrom Pulse, Kolaghan's Command, Dreadbore all look great.
• Bloodbraid doesn't love conditional stuff, so Fatal Push gets a lot worse, since on lots of boards it doesn't hit anything. The same is sorta true with Abrupt Decay, but it's still a fine card. Lightning Bolt gets a little better because Errbody Got Faces.
• Bloodbraid hates X spells. Engineered Explosives, Profane Command, Bonfire of the Damned, all that stuff isn't going to be a thing anymore.
• In general, Bloodbraid likes lots of three drops in your deck. They are just more powerful to hit than twos and ones. 
• Bloodbraid would rather have up front value than cascading into something that gives incremental value. Lingering Souls vs Bitterblossom, basically. We'll talk about this more later.
• Bloodbraid costs 4, and you're gonna want 4 in your deck, so watch out with those Bobbys.
• Bloodbraid loves to get cast early and often. You want to hit land drops, so you play at least 24. 
• Bloodbraid does not love mana ramp. Noble Hierarch, Utopia Sprawl, Birds of Paradise, No thanks. We tried Nest Invader in Standard, it, uh, didn't work.
• Bloodbraid likes getting cast, not getting reanimated, kinda like Battlecry in Hearthstone. Eternal Witness, Kolaghan's Command, and Liliana the Last Hope are its friends, Unburial Rites is not.
• Bloodbraid likes being aggressive. A 3/2 with haste doesn't do a lot outside of a somewhat dedicated aggro strategy.
• Bloodbraid LOVES Blightning.

About Lingering Souls vs Bitterblossom: Bloodbraid likes Dark Confidant, even though the number of 4 drops goes way up in your deck. Bob is great if you can keep the board clear, which Bloodbraid is pretty good at doing, and Bloodbraid and Bob on the same board complement each other's weak but aggressive power and toughness. The aggro plan is a lot better when your utility creatures are more significant clocks. Because you want Bob, that makes Bitterblossom look a lot worse, since you can only tax your life total so much. One of the reasons I liked Bitterblossom was the mirror, and at this point, the mirror looks to be a lot less about getting incremental advantage and more about drawing and hitting of your Bloodbraids the most.

A while ago I said that I liked my current Jund build so much that if they actually did unban Bloodbraid, I might not even play it. I even told a friend that I thought that, in a vacuum, Huntmaster of the Fells is a better card. I spent a lot of hours testing and playing and rethinking and theorizing a gatherer-scouring to get the Jund deck where it was at until 10:59 am today. Bloodbraid has so many requirements to utilize it fully that you can't just jam 4 in the current list and call it a day. However, now that it's actually happened, I'm pretty sure I'll be cascading from now on. Mostly because of the second part of the unbanning this morning:

I guess there would be no reason to have heroes without having villains in the world, right?

Haste and immediacy is going to be important, at least for the next few weeks. You're going to want your cards to match up well against Jace, but also against Supreme Verdict, which Bloodbraid into just creatures often does not. Kolaghan's Command is a must, Liliana the Last Hope looks great, Eternal Witness is an interesting one, Kitchen Finks looks great as well. Setting your deck up to beat the control decks, the big mana decks, Humans, Affinity, Burn, AND the mirror will be interesting. I'm interested to see if the white splash is what people will gravitate towards.

I can't say that I'm not going to miss my Huntmasters and Grim Flayers and Tireless Trackers. But I'm also really excited for the format. Mostly, I love playing against control decks, and finally we get to have the great Bloodbraid vs Jace battle that we've all been waiting for. It's gonna be fun. Good luck on your cascades!

Team Open in Philadelphia: Audio Blog

Hi, folks! On the way home from Philadelphia, I recorded an audio blog about my experiences playing and figuring out Standard for the Team Open. Click here to check it out:

Team Constructed Open Recap

The list I played in Standard:

4 Fetid Pools
4 Drowned Catacomb
1 Evolving Wilds
1 Desert of the Glorified
1 Desert of the Mindful
1 Ifnir Deadlands
7 Island
6 Swamp

4 Disallow
4 Censor
4 Fatal Push
4 Hieroglyphic Illumination
3 Vraska's Contempt
3 Revolutionary Rebuff
2 Search for Azcanta
2 Essence Scatter
1 Supreme Will
1 Pull from Tomorrow
3 Ravenous Chupacabra
2 The Scarab God
2 Torrential Gearhulk

SB:
4 Moment of Craving
1 Golden Demise
2 Walk the Plank
3 Duress
2 Negate
1 Treasure Map
2 Gonti, Lord of Luxury

New Plan

Whelp, some things happened and all of a sudden, Standard looks a little different.

I left you last week(ish) with a Standard list that I thought looked promising, and then 8 of the cards got banned. Here's a new plan:

4 Ravenous Chupacabra

4 Jadelight Ranger

2 The Scarab God

4 Winding Constrictor

4 Merfolk Branchwalker

4 Glint-Sleeve Siphoner

3 Walking Ballista

2 Hostage Taker

2 Yahenni, Undying Partisan

3 Nissa, Steward of Elements

3 Fatal Push

5 Forest

2 Swamp

4 Drowned Catacomb

4 Fetid Pools

2 Aether Hub

4 Blooming Marsh

4 Botanical Sanctum

2 Tetzimoc, Primal Death

1 Hostage Taker

1 Fatal Push

4 Moment of Craving

1 Negate

2 Essence Scatter

4 Duress

Even more than before, I am really excited about Jadelight Ranger. Reason one is that Rogue Refiner's absence leaves a gaping hole for a value three-drop, just not one that specifically abuses Energy. Reason two is that, since we have no Attune with Aether anymore, the land count in the deck goes up, which makes Jadelight Ranger's Explores even better. This deck skews away from the Energy mechanic, since we no longer have access to a bunch of Energy laying around. Longtusk Cub is no longer going to be a lot more than just a 2/2 on turn 2. However, Exploring on Jadelight Ranger and Merfolk Branchwalker is still a combo with Winding Constrictor, as are Walking Ballista, Yahenni, and Glint-Sleeve Siphoner. Glint-Sleeve never really was a normal Energy card, and a Siphoner with two Energy counters isn't much worse than a Siphoner with twelve Energy counters, so it's staying in the deck.

Nissa ties the room together. It's a really good three drop on an empty board that's removal-proof, and also a fantastic late game card. Scarab God blah blah blah.

4 Jadelight Ranger

4 Winding Constrictor

4 Glint-Sleeve Siphoner

4 Walking Ballista

3 Ravenous Chupacabra

4 Glorybringer

4 Longtusk Cub

2 Yahenni, Undying Partisan

2 Fatal Push

4 Harnessed Lightning

4 Aether Hub

3 Canyon Slough

4 Blooming Marsh

3 Dragonskull Summit

3 Rootbound Crag

3 Sheltered Thicket

2 Forest

2 Swamp

1 Mountain

2 Gonti, Lord of Luxury

2 Tetzimoc, Primal Death

1 Ravenous Chupacabra

4 Moment of Craving

2 Fatal Push

4 Duress

This deck goes the other direction and continues the Energy plan. We get to rock with Constrictors and Glint-Sleeves in place of our Rogue Refiners, so it's really kinda similar to Temur Energy with the blue swapped out with black. We get to kill lots of creatures, which may or may not be that great in the upcoming format. I'm kind of expecting more Abzan or Esper Tokens and blue control decks than what we previously had, due to the red cards that got banned. If that doesn't happen and killing creatures turns out to be good, this deck does plenty of it.

You'll notice the Yahenni, Undying Partisan in both lists. It's a card that I'm kind of high on at the moment. The Token decks all run Fumigate and lots of creatures that die, and against control it's a Haste creature that's Fumigate-proof. I think it's in a good place in the format, but only in creature decks that can kill their opponent's stuff pretty easily.

What I've found on Magic Online so far is lots of decks that Ravenous Chupacabra isn't that great against. I was expecting to nuke lots of Longtusk Cubs and Whirler Virtuosos, but mostly I'm hitting Hidden Stockpile tokens, which isn't awesome. When it's been good, though, it's been real good. It helps push your early threats through for damage and the body is very relevant when you are putting pressure on. We'll see how the format shakes out, but the only 4-drop in that slot that is appreciably better when Chupacabra is bad is probably Gonti, which is a card that's always on my radar.

I've yet to cast a Tetzimoc, but I really want to before I dismiss it, but I'm not playing against a lot of midrange mirrors yet.

However, I think I'll be doing more work on Modern in the coming week or so here, since I am again playing in an SCG team open, and likely going to be playing Modern again. Since we last left off, I've cut the Blood Moons out of the board in favor of another Blightning(!), a Grim Lavamancer, and an Obstinate Baloth. I'm finding that the discard is great against Valakut, so long as it's not Inquisition of Kozileks, and that Blood Moon doesn't do enough against Tron anyways. At the last team open I played, there were lots of midrange mirrors and control decks that we faced in the Modern slot, which makes sense to me. Your Modern player is likely to be someone who really likes the format and tinkers around with the list of their favorite deck a lot, not someone who just jams Tron when it's in favor. That's my theory anyways. Hopefully we won't see a lot of Tron (or Dredge, or Living End, for that matter), or if we do, then their Standard and Legacy players suck. But, we'll see, since the Standard format just took a big turn, I might be playing that instead. Wish me luck.

Initial Thoughts on Rivals of Ixalan

Magic is sweet. We basically have to take a long break from the game during December, due to family, Modo Cube, and up here in Vermont, weather. As soon as the new year starts, they draw us back in with spoiler season. There are some cool cards in this set that look to shake things up, and then some other cards that do the opposite. Let's check em out.

I really missed Pharika's Cure or Surge of Righteousness being in Standard. Moment of Craving looks like a better sideboard card than either of them, and it really shores up the Ramunap Red matchups. You still want to have a plan against Hazoret, but one of these plus a good curve should get you into the later turns.

I like overloading to beat aggressive decks with my sideboard cards. The reason is that aggro decks give you less time to draw your sideboard cards than slower decks do. Against Ramunap Red or Mardu or B/R Vehicles or whatever aggro deck exists, you've either stabilized or are dead by turn 5 or so, meaning you've looked at around 12 of your 60 cards. In this case, if you're only boarding in three cards, you're only 60% to actually draw one of them. Against, say, U/B Control or an Energy Mirror, the games last and the outcomes are undecided for much longer, meaning you have more time to draw those cards that swing the matchup. I foresee myself playing 4 of these in every sideboard as long as I'm playing a black deck in Standard and an aggro deck is at least a little represented.

Really cool design, this seems like it's the best of the Ascend cards for a normalish midrange kind of deck. I don't think it's worth it, since while its ability is card advantage, you don't get the value immediately and there's a lot of setup to make it work. Lots of times, even if you have an Ascend theme or subtheme in your deck, you still just won't have it online, and you've cast a Fighting Drake. It is a pure payoff card and doesn't help facilitate Ascend by itself, unlike...

Tendershoot Dryad also gives you value every turn, but needs less setup to get that value and just has Ascend as a cherry-on-top. I like this a lot better than Twilight Prophet in a vacuum, however, the competition for five-drops in Standard is tight. The Scarab God, Glorybringer, Liliana Death's Majesty, and Confiscation Coup are all tough cards to beat in a midrange deck, but I could be proven wrong. The Dryad looks like it's better in a G/W or Abzan tokens kind of deck, which looks to be shaping up really nicely with this set.

This card is really cool, and I think it's really good, but I really can't imagine it's going to see play until Chandra rotates out of the format. Watch out for this one being really good in the future. It does a lot of cool things that a lot of decks are looking for, but Chandra just does better.

What I said about Tendershoot Dryad holds true for Angrath, as far as the viability of 5-drop threats. This card needs to be a better inclusion than both Glorybringer and Liliana Death's Majesty. That said, I'm still at least a little high on this card, at least because it's very similar to Ob Nixilis Reginited and we've seen that card do work in the past. It's certainly a more aggressive card than Ob Nixilis, which isn't always what you're looking for, but it can still create some value each turn.

So of course this card isn't for me, but its existence is interesting. This is a really, really powerful card in a certain kind of control deck that hasn't existed for a little while. In the days of Sphinx's Revelation, Divination was good in the early turn to dig you into your answers and was still fine in the late game since all you wanted to do was rifle through your deck and find Revelations. We don't have Revelation nowadays, but the difference is that in the late game, this card is fire. This card might push the current control strategies to a more pure card advantage style deck, which changes the format quite a bit for the midrange decks of the world.

Okay, so this card is ambitious, and almost certainly not a maindeck card unless we are living in a very very strange world. However, it might just be the best thing to do as an over-the-top midrange breaker. Other options are Vraska and River's Rebuke, which are good of course. However, this card gives you a ton of options as a late game topdeck that wrecks the board. If you have, like, 9 mana in play, I can't fathom a situation where you don't just win immediately when you draw this, barring an Essence Scatter or something. I'm going to be starting with this as a one- or maybe two-of in my Sultai Energy sideboard. It's also just totally awesome, which makes it definitely worth playing.

Here is a card that I have no idea about. I think that it is a card that requires an entirely new deck than what we have seen in Standard so far, but it's at least intriguing. There are a lot of great cards to have die and come back, including Gonti, Rogue Refiner, Jadelight Ranger, and Ravenous Chupacabra. However, it's slow, might not even be as powerful than the things that are faster than it, and requires a lot to go right in order to work. It's a cool idea to try, but I think the odds that it works are low, I wouldn't be surprised if a deck came out of it.

This is a card that hasn't seen that much hype this spoiler season, so maybe I am overestimating it, but it's definitely my favorite card in the set. This card has three things that it can do that are somewhere between fantastic and good. First, you could get two lands in your hand. You might think that is a little weak, since they are just lands, but the thing is, that means that the top two cards of your library were lands, and now they are gone and you are drawing the cards that were under them. That's good! You had to draw those lands anyways! Alternatively, you can get one card and make a 3/2. That sounds a lot like Rogue Refiner to me, minus the energy boost, and I'm all about putting four more Rogue Refiners in my deck (or adding that effect to a non-blue deck). Scenario three is making a 4/3 creature and ensuring you are drawing a good card. This is the worst of the options, but the good news is that if you play with a deck that has Winding Constrictor, all of a sudden you have a 6/5 on turn three (or a 4/3 and a free land). In the process of tuning Sultai Energy, I've been waffling between my non-Rogue Refiner three-drops. Deathgorge Scavenger, XUG Nissa, and Rishkar are all solid, but I think Jadelight Ranger will settle it. We shall see, but I have high hopes for this one.

So I think this is the only card in the set that gets played in Modern Jund, so let's take a look. First, it does nothing against Tron, and the ideal scenario is that your land hate takes care of both Tron and Valakut, so that's a real strike against it. The second is that it's a cantrip, which is cool, but in the matchups where you are looking for this effect, you aren't winning via incremental card advantage, you want knockout blows to their combos. Third is that it hoses your own fetchlands and creaturelands. This is normal when you play Blood Moon in the sideboard of Jund, but it's a little easier to play with and around. You'll still be able to cast your double green and black spells, and all you have to do is cut some fetchlands to be almost entirely unaffected by it. I like that it's easier on you than playing Blood Moon, but I dislike that it has fewer applications, including the one glaring one in that Tron lands still work just fine. I don't think that it's worth it to use the sideboard slots to shut off Valakut almost exclusively, but we shall see. I do like that they are interested in making land hosers for Modern, since the big mana decks are a real problem. Well, a problem for me at least, the format is fine, I just lose to them a lot. Maybe another couple of hate cards can really turn the format around.

Woof.

I'm gonna start with this as a 4-of in Sultai Energy. I've been switching back and forth between Gonti, Hostage Taker, and Bristling Hydra in the four-drop slot, but Chupacabra just might take the cake here. It's gonna trounce the red decks, as long as you can deal with Hazoret, and it might swing the format back in favor of Sultai Energy rather than Temur. You can now go toe to toe on power level with Glorybringer much easier, and don't even get started with Scarab God and Liliana Death's Majesty. Have we gotten to the point where Fatal Push is no longer a maindeck card? Sounds crazy, but Ravenous Chupacabra is a little crazy. Magic is a weird game sometimes.

Thanks for reading. You can catch me on twitter @griffinzoth if you think all my analyses are wrong, which they might be. Who knows. Spoiler seasons is great.

EDIT: For reference, here is the list I'm gonna try out in Standard when Rivals drops - 

4 Attune with Aether

4 Fatal Push

2 Blossoming Defense

4 Glint Sleeve Siphoner

4 Longtusk Cub

4 Winding Constrictor

4 Jadelight Ranger

4 Rogue Refiner

4 Ravenous Chupacabra

2 Liliana Death's Majesty

2 Walking Ballista

1 Nissa, Steward of Elements

4 Aether Hub

4 Blooming Marsh

4 Botanical Sanctum

2 Fetid Pools

4 Forest

2 Swamp

1 Island

4 Duress

4 Moment of Craving

2 Tetzimoc, Primal Death

1 Negate

2 Essence Scatter

2 Hostage Taker

SCG Baltimore

Let me first start off by saying that Baltimore, Maryland is a long ass drive away from my cozy home up here in Hardwick, Vermont.

I teamed up with Vermonter Ze'eva Chasan and former Vermonter Jordan McCutcheon for SCG Baltimore. We decided the formats pretty early on, as Ze'eva has a lot of practice in Legacy and Jordan had the most practice in Standard, and I was pretty much a brick in both. Modern's more my speed. I played the same list as my last post with Oozes and 1 Abrupt decay. Ze'eva is a Burn master, so she played that. Jordan was really high on the Ben Stark Sand Strangler red deck, and it was really good.

It was my first ever team constructed tournament, and I had a blast. It's just a really fun experience, even though we didn't do particularly well. My teammates were awesome. I would look over and say to myself, "Wow, they can't win" and then two minutes later I'd see them shuffling up and they'd say "I won." In the team event, I actually only finished three of the eight matches we played, Jordan and Ze'eva either both won or both lost before I had the chance to.

We finished the day 4-4, and then I played the Modern Classic on Sunday. I played almost all fair decks throughout the whole weekend, including U/W or Jeskai 4 times, the mirror or pseudo mirror 4 times, and some Grixis Death's Shadow. I went 5-3 in the Modern Classic.

I am most proud of beating Abzan twice, once in the Open and once in the classic. The matchup on paper normally favors them immensely, not only because of how good Lingering Souls is straight up, but also how it nullifies your Liliana of the Veil, while making their Lilianas better. Recently, people have added Gideon, Ally of Zendikar out of the sideboard for even more midrange firepower, and it's another card that's super hard to beat. However, Bitterblossom completely overperformed here, since my 2 drop was lights-out against Liliana, but their's would just walk right into her. Also, Dreadbore was amazing, killing Lilianas, both of the Veil and the Last Hope, and Gideons, in addition to any creature that my opponents had. The sideboard plan was awesome as well. I bring in 2 Blightning, 1 Eternal Witness, and 3 Kitchen Finks, and all of those are great in the midrange battles.

As for the U/W and Jeskai matchups, I kinda went 1-2, but really I was about to lose a matchup but we lost our team match before I could. I ran into a problem that I found out about in midrange vs control matchups back in the days of Thragtusk Jund against Sphinx's Revelation control decks. Having a good game two and three matchup is great, as most of your control matchups get better after sideboard, but they have to be damn good to actually eke out the match win. Magic is just a high variance game, and if you bank too much on those two games of the match and disregard setting your deck up for game one against control, then you are setting yourself up to fail if you have awkward draws in just one of those games. This makes me want to address the main deck, mostly the threat suite. The good news, when fighting control matchups, is that since the games go long, you are going to have more time than usual to see the cards that are there to swing the match in your favor.

I also lost a match to Merfolk and had a too-close-for-comfort match against Humans in the team open that we did not get to finish. Merfolk has interestingly become something of a roadblock for this list. On paper, the matchup looks really good, but their deck is very consistent and can punish you for stumbling on lands or by drawing too many.

I halfway liked Scavenging Ooze and halfway hated it. It was solid when I exiled a million of my opponents' creatures and gained a bunch of life, but that didn't happen that often. I hit one opponent's copy of Lingering Souls before it could be flashed back, but that wasn't really even that good and didn't work that well. It was supposed to be good against Storm, but it's really just an easy Lightning Bolt or mini Grapeshot target. It also is just straight Grizzly Bears against the UW deck, never ever ever has it been problematic for an opponent's Snapcaster Mages, and outside of that it just doesn't do anything there.

Moving forward, I want to give Tireless Tracker a try. It's a little bit like Courser of Kruphix, a card that has done good work in the deck in the past that was cut for mana consistency reasons. Three of the green midrange decks I played against had them and they looked great. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, etc etc, but it seems like it's what we're looking for. Tracker is a single green, great with the high density of fetchlands, awesome in control/midrange fights, and is a good mana sink that can straight up walk away with the game later on, similar to Ooze. I have a feeling that Tracker might help out against both Merfolk, as a late game card to pull away with, and against control matchups as at least a 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 if you play it right.

I was planning on doing an audio blog post about this whirlwind of a weekend, but I've come down with a nasty cold and probably won't be doing anything voice-related for a little bit, hopefully I'll be back on the ol' stream soon to pwn some newbs. Thanks for reading!

SCG Regionals Audio Blog(s)

Hey folks! This weekend I went to SCG Regionals in Syracuse NY. I recorded a little podcasty-audio blog thing on the way there, and then another one after the tournament. First up is the pre-tournament recording, recorded the Friday before the tournament.

SCG Regionals Pre-Tournament

Here is the post-tournament recording:

SCG Regionals Post-Tournament

List, for reference, that I ended up playing:

4 Tarmogoyf
4 Grim Flayer
1 Sprouting Thrinax
2 Huntmaster of the Fells
3 Bitterblossom

4 Inquisition of Kozilek
2 Thoughtseize
4 Liliana of the Veil
4 Fatal Push
3 Lightning Bolt
3 Kolaghan's Command
2 Dreadbore

4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Blood Crypt
1 Stomping Ground
2 Swamp
1 Forest
1 Mountain
3 Blackcleave Cliffs
2 Raging Ravine
1 Treetop Village

3 Kitchen Finks
3 Blood Moon
2 Blightning
2 Shadow Guildmage
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Duress
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Eternal Witness