The Folly of Leech Bonders
Why I Sucked Last Friday…and Why That's Good
Why I Sucked Last Friday…and Why That's Good
In college (which I completed December 2005… that long ago?), I played Magic on a near-constant basis. This was not difficult, being the three-year dictator of a sci-fi/fantasy/gaming club in an engineering-based school. (My major? History… after a fashion.) I was at the peak of my Magic powers—after a dismal showing at the Champions prerelease, I went undefeated in Betrayers. And Saviors. And Ravnica. My record in the club's weekly drafts in the final semester began to border on supernatural.
Now, astute readers might have noticed all the past tense in that paragraph. After college, I returned home to a rural enclave in Southern California that would be in the desert if not for elevation. The local population is yuppies who wanted a taste of country, and old people—not the game's demographic. The nearest store that sells Magic is 25 minutes away, and is way too small to run very good events. The nearest store (which took me over a year to find) that does run events (and it runs them very well—GMI Games in Riverside, for anyone who is curious) is closer to an hour away. So, for two years or so, the only Magic I played—at all—was at prereleases.
It shows.
My play, when I get a chance to, is far too spotty. I don't see the interactions I should, and I don't read combat tricks and counters nearly as well as I should. Mulligans have always been a weak point for me, and continue to be so. Luckily, my card evaluation skills and (to a, as it turns out, lesser extent) limited deckbuilding skills are still pretty solid. I did quite well at a Lorwyn-Lowryn-Morningtide draft about a month ago, then 3-1 at the Shadowmoor prerelease a week or two later. And the match I lost hinged on a game that, barring a rather situation-specific bomb, I should have won. I was happy with myself, thought I was finally shaking some rust off. I was excited for the release event, and was keyed-up all week waiting for it.
There's that tense again. Just last night (as I write this), I went to the Shadowmoor release event, and went 1-2-drop. One of the losses probably would have been a loss anyway—his deck was amazing—but even so, having analyzed my performance for much of the day, I am forced to conclude that I kicked my own butt.
Before going any further, here be my pool, yar.
Rawr! I's a scary dragon.
You have to play me...
...right?
Looking at this pile of cards now, it is absolutely obvious what to build. Looking at it last night, it was much less so… and to quote the Grail Knight, “He chose… poorly.”
You remind me of the babe--
What babe?
The babe with the power--
What power?
First, looking through my cardpool again, is a valuable lesson: Pay attention. I totally don't remember seeing the Gloomlance in my pool. Not sure how it happened, whether it was hidden behind some other card or mistaken for something or if I merely went quite mad. In such a removal-light environment as this, anything is handy, and that totally would have been in the deck had I caught it.
That's far from the only problem here; far from it. But the chain of poor decisions that went into this deck-like collection of cards is very illuminating.
First, I took a quick scan of 'cards I definitely want to play if possible.' This yielded the following:
Silkbind Clique, 2 Curse of Chains, 2 Leech Bonder, Incremental Blight, Burn Trail, Knollspine Dragon, 2 Power of Fire, Firespout. White was straight out, and here's the first thought malfunction: I filed away the W/U hybrids, too. I didn't actually set them aside yet, but part of my brain still thought of them as 'blue-white' cards. Considering them either-or is something fairly novel, and I hadn't made that paradigm shift yet. It's really a more format specific problem, however, where my overall suckage came in much more critical forms.
So, given that the bulk of the cards I wanted in my deck were in Red, I followed on to bad assumption numero dos: I had to play base Red. This wasn't simply a mistake; this was a beginner's mistake, one that I'm more than a little embarrassed making.
So, given that I was base Red, I figured (logically enough, for the format) that I should pair it with Black or Green. I put all the good Red and Red-hybrid cards into a pile, sadly dismissing Runes of the Deus because I only had three decent targets for it. I perused Black, and Green, but my eyes kept drifting toward the Merfolk. I was really enamored with the idea of Power of Fire and Leech Bonder, and I had two of each plus a Manamorphose and two Elsewhere Flask. Was it worth splashing?
And here, I hit not one, but two critical lessons, and learning them was worth the price of admission. But I'll get to that in a moment.
I decided to splash for the Leech Bonders, and initially was leaning to fill the rest of the deck out with Green. Presence of Gond would be another nice combo with Leech Bonder, as would Flourishing Defenses, and it would maximize Firespout and offer a few solid creatures. Plus, hey, dual land. But since I was splashing Blue—and because of Incremental Blight I decided to lean into Black to make the splash easier—I let the couple of Islands help me cast B/U hybrids. However, the flirtation with the Green splash—and its additional support for -1/-1 counters—cemented the Leech Bonders in my brain.
As I started to assemble my deck, I realized how aggressive it wanted to be. Ashenmoor Gouger, Rosheen Meanderer (aside: this is Legendary? I thought it was a 'meanderer' from Rosheen, not named Rosheen!) - the deck wanted to hit fast and hard. There's nothing wrong with that, conceptually. Even in traditionally slow formats, if the cardpool dictates speed, go for speed.
But there were two big problems here. One, those Leech Bonders. It's a fine card, particularly in combination with Power of Fire or Fate Transfer or a dozen other things, I'm sure. But they aren't particularly aggressive and splashing to play them certainly didn't make 'fast aggro' any easier.
Legendary? Huh.
The bigger problem—the one that put the Bonders in there to begin with—was myself. I saw the aggro potential in this pool, I built around it, but only up to a point. But I am not, at heart, an aggro player. Aggro-control, sure; leaning more toward control, if you please. But gung-ho-no-backup-plan Rakdos aggression? Thank you, no.
Pretend, for a moment, that I was right to be building a Red-Black deck with this pool. I was stuck in a dilemma: should I follow the cardpool and play outside my comfort zone? Or should I craft a somewhat weaker deck, but emphasize what control elements were available? A strong part of me wanted to play Cinderhaze Wretch, but I was too much in the 'this is an aggro deck!' mindset and left it in the sideboard. Of all the lessons I learned, this is the one I've yet to reach any sort of conclusion on.
Anyway, I put the lands in (deciding all the cantrips let me go a little light), shuffled up, lost, won, lost, dropped, and pondered while spectating a few matches in round 4. I rarely drop when I might still be in contention for packs—and GMI has a pretty generous prize structure—but it was clear to me how greatly I'd failed.
The folly of the Leech Bonders seems more ridiculous each time I consider it. What was I thinking? Even if I got one out, I'd still have to get a Power of Fire on it to really justify it, and then I'd still need a stable source of blue mana. Using an Elsewhere Flask or Manamorphose to cast it just left me with a 1/1 for . Sure, I might be able to Flask into Islands and machine-gun my opponent's side, but too much had to go right for it to work. I was too much in love with the idea to let myself think the execution through: Too many things had to go right for it to do much of anything. Other than screw up my mana base, that is. In my last match, I drew both Islands in consecutive games, but not Swamps in one or Mountains in the other.
Even losing, I had a good time. I made a couple of good trades, opened a couple of good rares, made some contacts with players that live closer. The foil Vexing Shusher don't hurt none, either. But I also learned (or re-learned) a lot of important things.
1. Don't handicap a deck for the sake of a particular card or combo. If I'd just gone straight R/B aggro, and not messed around with Islands, I could have done much better. If I hadn't been so biased toward the Bonders, I probably wouldn't have gone down the train of thought that landed me in R/B to begin with. This one I already knew (I love Runes of the Deus too, but correctly left it out) but reliving the days of Hermetic Study and Horseshoe Crab blinded my good sense.
2. Even with good fixing, splashing still weakens your deck. Make sure it's worth it. A splash card should have a palpable, near-immediate impact on the board. It should be something your opponent has to kill. Keiga, certainly. Ballista Squad, reasonably. But Leech Bonder??
3. It's better to play a color full of solid cards than a color with a few great ones. Red had the most cards with concentrated wallop, but it also had a lot of meh. Blue was thoroughly solid here, and if I had been more objective in analyzing my pool, I'd have seen that.
4. Consider your own strengths and weaknesses. Would you be better off playing a weaker deck, more suited to your own style? I am not an impulsive guy, and I always like to have something in reserve. I'd rather be safe behind a bulwark of blockers and prod you to death in the air; playing an aggro deck puts me out of my comfort zone. This isn't a bad thing (if anything, it means I should play aggro more often to get comfortable with it) but if I do go that route, I have to make sure to embrace it. A half-baked strategy gets your buns overdone.
5. Double-check your on-color cards for playables (and know what cards are on-color, dummy!) Not just the Gloomlance, but a quick second look at the hybrids (and remembering they aren't really two colors) would have shown me just how deep my Blue was.
So, using the same cardpool, and the lessons of a good thirty hours of thought, I would now have built something like this:
Still worth building around...
so let's actuallybuild around it!
Again skimping a little on land thanks to the Flasks. This deck is far more to my liking: it's got a more consistent strategy (look at all that evasion!) and a smoother mana base. Yes, I'm still splashing for two cards, but Power of Fire is useful at any point in the game, and often right away. Furthermore, in the previous deck, Leech Bonder was only good with Power of Fire. This deck, on the other hand, not only plays the Leech Bonders—on-color, I might add—and the Merrow Grimeblotter from my original deck, but also Silkbind Faerie, which isn't as mana-efficient a machine gun but is possibly more brutal. Plus, the Elsewhere Flasks do double duty in this build, letting you splash the Powers or supercharging the Flow of Ideas. Everything just fits together better, and moreover it fits better with my style. I'm not saying I'd have won any more games with this deck—I still probably would have lost that first round—but I certainly would have done much better.
But, that's okay. Because thanks to this, I'll do much better next time. Let's just hope that comes before the next prerelease.
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