Killing People and Sometimes Making Them Mad

I am not dead, I've just been lazy.

In an attempt to find my writing groove again I'm here to talk about Magic, playing Magic and also possibly winning at Magic. 

You see, it's been a rough couple of months for me Magic-wise. After co-winning a big tournament just after Journey Into Nyx released my competitive results have been middling at best. Unfortunately, I can't blame my lack of success on anything but my own inability to stick with a deck that wins and ride it out.

You see, I'm decidedly a Spike (competitive, winning matters the most) with a hard to ignore Johnny (likes to do cool things) streak. This combination is pretty tough to live with since the Johnny leads me to try new decks all the time in search of elusive cool new experiences but the Spike still despises losing almost more than anything. 

If I were more of a Spike it would be easy to simply play the best deck, learn it well and benefit from the experience. 

If I were more of a Johnny I would be content with the fun of playing new decks and seeing interesting interactions. Winning would be a secondary goal entirely, a nice bonus if it happened. 

Instead I've been sort of torturing myself with all of these brews and ending up on the low end of the tournament results, if I even managed to finish the events to begin with. 

This all sounds very grandiose and overblown, especially since the majority of the tournaments I've been to have been local Wednesday or Friday nights, but I get to play so little Magic that these events are important to me. It can be extremely frustrating to spend several days building up a deck in my mind only to lose the first 2 rounds of Wednesday Night Magic in frustrating, helpless fashion. 

Now I know the actual solution to this is to spend time play testing these brews before, during and after W/FNM. Get the bad ones out of my system when there's actually nothing on the line rather than mostly nothing. Find the promising decks, tweak them and know what the hell I'm doing before battling Tier 1 decks for store credit. 

As I said before though, I am lazy. But I'm working on it!


So I've rambled on quite a bit here and complained about my own problems. Here's where the actual story begins. 

2 weeks ago, after a frustrating Modern Wednesday in which my last-minute deck choice led me to the usual 2-2 tournament results, I got home and in a fit of MCDonald's-fueled inspiration dismantled every deck in my office. No more Black White Auras. No more Pyro Loam. No more Mono-Green Devotion. 

I assembled 2 decks and decided they would be my focus for at least a week. I wouldn't take them apart, build a new deck or even look at tournament results until I'd played at least a couple of tournaments. 

Now obviously I didn't stick to all of that. Work is long and there are certainly stretches of time where I'm going to look at deck lists. 

BUT! I did stick to the same Standard deck for 3 tournaments in a row. 

Here's the list I started with 2 weeks ago on Friday:

Boss Sligh

4 Akroan Crusader
4 Firedrinker Satyr
4 Rakdos Cackler
4 Legion Loyalist
4 Foundry Street Denizen
4 Ash Zealot
3 Rubblebelt Maaka

4 Dragon Mantle
4 Madcap Skills

4 Titan's Strength
2 Shock
2 Lightning Strike

17 Mountain


Sideboard

4 Skullcrack
1 Blinding Flare
1 Peak Eruption
2 Magma Spray
1 Lightning Strike
2 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Searing Blood
1 Harness by Force
1 Mizzium Mortars 
1 Mutavault



Now this deck is pretty far from my usual comfort zone. I tend to gravitate towards decks that kill my opponent's creatures, stop them doing whatever it is that they'd like to be up to and eventually get around to winning the game. 

This has been generally Sphinx's Revelation decks but has also bled over into some Black Devotion decks that I likely misplayed horribly. 

So back to the deck, this is Tom Ross's's's (esses) SCG Invitational-winning Standard deck and I think it's actually a pretty difficult deck to play correctly. I mean, there will be games where your opponent has a slow draw and you just triple 1-drop them into the ground. But there will also be games where they kill your first 2 creatures and you have to make every card matter. 

I played the list above on the first Friday night and ended up going 3-1, losing to a Jund Monsters opponent who had actual 5 removal spells in game 1 and who played Mystic > Courser > Disciple in game 2. I don't think the Jund Monsters matchup is particularly good or bad, but I certainly wasn't winning that one. 

I fought the urge to give up on the deck right away and played it again on this Wednesday to a 3-0-1 record, drawing with Hexproof in the last round.  Small sample size not withstanding, I could feel myself getting more comfortable with the deck. I was making plays that I wouldn't have been comfortable with from the get-go and managed to defeat some quality opponents on my way. 

I was particularly proud of myself for putting an opponent on Bile Blight and not walking a pair of Rakdos Cacklers into the spell, instead casting a post-combat Ask Zealot. Not exactly intuitive play there but I'm fairly confident it was correct. 

This past Friday I stuck with deck again, making a minor change to the sideboard after seeing a couple of other people running Red, and again managed to not lose a match. Friday's tournament was very small with only 12 people, but I went 3-0 after getting paired down in the final round while the other undefeated players intentionally drew. 
My sideboard change ended up paying off when my first round opponent was also Mono Red and I got to use the Electrickery that would have been a Peak Eruption. 

I won't get to play Magic this Wednesday, instead I'll be watching The Dear Hunter perform after eating some Rosemary Cornbread at the House of Blues. 

I'll certainly be playing Sligh again on Friday though, hopefully killing people but hopefully not making them mad. At least not too mad.