A first place finish by DnT. Looks like 2-of for Recruiter / Prelate is working well for some. I personally run 3 and 2, but I may go back down to 2 recruiters. There are times where I want immediate action and recruiter does seem a bit slow. The canonist is a bit unusual but reminds me of when I used to run 2 main deck a few years ago.
The linked list is mine. I had been playing 3 recruiter 1 prelate for a while, with the second prelate in the board, but I made a last minute decision to cut a recruiter and go with 2 prelates, as the card has proven to be pretty darn good, as I'm sure everyone here has figured out. I might go back up to 3 recruiters by cutting the canonist, it was more of a meta call for my local scene that I probably don't need anymore. It just feels so bad to draw multiple recruiters sometimes, though.
Also, I cut the spirit in the board for palace jailer for FNM tonight, was better than expected. For the time being, I'll be keeping him.
Sorry I haven't been around much lately. I haven't really had anything neat to report regarding magic, as the Force of Will card game has grown very popular at my local shop lately. It's an interesting game, pretty similar to magic. The current "standard" format has a power level that's somewhere between legacy and modern, and the cards are cheaper than magic's standard cards, so it's been pretty easy to build competitive decks.
In magic news, still working on foiling out martyr-proc. Over halfway there in terms of cards, but marsh flats are going to be a pain. Also built Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder EDH before all the FoW hype started up. Fun deck, just focuses on playing lots of cards that demand sacrifices and throwing all the thrulls at them. Sadistic Hypnotist and contamination are my favorites.
Man oh man, these unbans in modern. As a clan that has a tendency to lean towards control, these are pretty big. ancestral vision and sword of the meek unbanned. Vision is the clear standout, but thopter sword is nothing to sneeze at. Neither of these bans changes what I'll be playing, personally, but it is nice to see control get some love.
Also, eye of Ugin is banned, which may or may not kill off eldrazi entirely, but it definitely hurts tron, and with that as one of my worse matchups, I'm ok with it not coming back.
Feel free to join in on the (admittedly slow) conversation. If you hang around long enough someone will officially induct you into the clan.
Modern tonight was something of a bust. I punted a match that should have been an easy win, left a bad feeling for the rest of the night.
However, I did manage to trade for 3 FNM promo path to exiles so I'm pretty happy about that. Ever so slowly getting closer to having martyr-proc foiled out.
Yeah, it puts shardless in a really bad spot. I find it kind of humorous because I mainly include it in my list because of Omnitell and elves, but it hates on shardless so much more. It's basically a walking counterspell for visions.
I used to run MD containment priest instead, but then everyone stopped playing sneak and show, reanimator, and dredge in my local meta.
Spirit is a decent card, mostly a meta call. There are a significant number of people in my area playing decks loaded with cantrips. Shardless BUG, multiple omni-tell lists, BUG, Grixis and UR delver, the list goes on. Slowing down their cantrips is helpful, and the occasional brainstorm blowout with aether vial can just win some games. It's not a card you'll see all the time, as it's one of those cards that's either great or useless.
How many waste'scolorless mana generators do you run in the deck? seems like the only potential weak spot. Do you have a list you can share?
fix'd. I don't have an exact list on hand, still in the process of moving stuff. I'll either update this post or make another one when I can get the list. I run 9 colorless sources currently, 4 wasteland 4 rishadan port 1 cavern of souls. Some lists have adopted extra utility lands to help the displacer work, I might end up going for that.
Also, sorry to hear about your friend. Hope his divorce goes as smooth as it can. Any kids involved?
No kids, but there is a $2000 puppy. Luckily there's no fighting going on over who gets what. It has been a pretty smooth process, just a bummer.
EDIT: ended up falling asleep but here's my current list:
As you can see, the Mangara and displacer are fairly non-committal. As much as I love Mangara, it's still a pretty slow card and only really strong in grindy matchups, so a singleton seems fine. The displacer is slightly more useful, but being a 3-drop and requiring 3 mana to activate means it's still only a 1-of for now. If it proves to be particularly useful I might bump it up.
All this talk of Mishra kind of makes me want to build him again. Was a lot of fun. You've gone above and beyond for the cause.
Sorry I haven't been around lately, I've been seeing one of my friends through a divorce. Seems he's going to be moving back in with my brother and I. At least this time he gets his own room rather than bunking with me like last time.
Legacy tonight for FNM, trying out a D&T build that picks up Mangara of Corondor again and also the new Eldrazi Displacer. It's been decent in testing, hoping it does well.
I think a big part of why people are trying to adapt is because almost every deck in our meta is so cold to martyr. Before, people just hoped that one of the 3-4 tron players at our shop would drop me to the loser's tables, but tron has dropped off entirely, so now they have to actually deal with it, and most of them can't do that very well. Kiki chord and Junk company have infinite combos that are annoying, but not unbeatable, and every other deck is either aggro or a bad control deck that can't actually beat my lifegain. One person opted to toss leyline of punishment into his sideboard, most are running grave hate, and one naya burn player is using a full playset of atarka's command AND skullcrack in the main just to try and deal with the deck. Only one person has opted to pick up the eldrazi deck, and in my testing, the only version that has a favorable matchup against martyr is the G/R version with world breaker and kozilek's return, and he's not on that version.
I imagine that once this eldrazi deck has something banned and the meta shifts back to having tron, things will be more difficult, but right now I'm sitting pretty.
It's been a while since I posted a tournament report. Friday was a decent showing, I ended up in 3rd place, with most of the matches being pretty typical. The fourth and final round was interesting though, so I figured I would share it.
I was 2-1 going into round 4, matched up against UW control. I played this matchup to a draw in the last modern event, and I had no intentions of doing that again. I realized after that night that pre-board, without some really horrible mulligans/draws on my part, he can't actually win. Racing 21 life a turn is almost impossible for him, and he'll go through his deck faster. So I sat down with every intention of winning game 1.
For the first 5 turns, all we did was play lands and pass. Pretty uneventful. I stuck a cavern of souls on human and forced through a martyr, gaining 21 life. Shortly after, I had enough lands to establish the proclamation of rebirth loop, gaining 21 per turn with no way for my opponent to interact. I made no other plays and no attempts at aggression. Soon I was over 100 life. I probably could have stopped gaining life there, but I switched to using my phone's calculator to keep track of my life total and kept going. It was also at this time that I revealed my plan and stated clearly that he could not win. I was hoping a bigger display with a ridiculously large number would demoralize him and cause him to concede, but he held on. I stopped actively sacrificing martyrs once I reached somewhere in the 200s, instead opting to only use them in response to removal to keep them from being exiled.
Meanwhile, we were basically still playing the draw-go game. I was recurring martyr every turn, and eventually started making plays to avoid discarding. I used board wipes to clear out his creatures when he had 3 or more, and I slowly started bringing in the beats with 1/1s. He exiled 3 of my serra ascendants as well as a few other creatures, but eventually it got to the point where he ran out of paths, and was forced to use supreme verdicts to clear my board, but it goes without saying that I just recurred everything slowly and kept on the feeble pressure. He grew desperate enough to use cryptic command in conjunction with snapcaster mage to tap my board and bounce the snapcaster for later use. I had no actual intentions of killing him via life total, but I wanted to force him to use his sphinx's revelations to stay alive and draw through his deck faster. By halfway through the game, there were a lot of weird situations. ghost quarters on both sides became strip mines since neither of us wanted to thin our deck. Speaking of ghost quarter, I drew all four of mine, using them only to kill celestial colonnade when he wanted to use it to block.
With 40 minutes down, 10 left in the round, my opponent had 11 cards left in his library. I was running pretty low as well, but mistveil plains meant I wasn't anywhere close to decking. At this point my opponent conceded the game and the round, as his hand was full of cards that would cause him to draw (namely sphinx's revelation and wall of omens and he knew I would deck him before the time ran out. Turns out he had no graveyard hate in his sideboard, so he had no way to win the matchup at all.
We drew quite a crowd with our match, mostly because we were the last ones going, and while my opponent (and most of the people watching) seemed bothered by the grind, I had a lot of fun. Wearing down the hopeless defenses of an opponent who never stood a chance will always be enjoyable. I can only hope that in the future he'll auto-concede. It's much more likely that he'll just change up his sideboard, as many at my shop have, but he could just try to dodge me and, failing that, scoop right away. There's at least one person at the shop who has that plan, I'd be pretty happy if that number would increase.
TL;DR: I won a round 1-0-1 at over 300 life by my opponent's concession moments before he ran out of cards in his library.
Congratulations, Rewind. Are you expecting a boy or girl?
Also, love the playmat. Do you think you could put something together for me if I sent you the images I'd like to use? I'm not great with photoshop but I've been wanting to order a playmat from them for ages.
I've been gone for far too long. Just haven't really had much to say. My time has been filled with D&D, Blade and Soul, Pokemon, and a few other things here and there. Magic too, of course. Trying to convince a friend that the sky isn't falling in modern with all these eldrazi decks all over the place.
Kizumonogatari is airing in limited theaters in the U.S. soon, and I've been trying to decide if I want to go see it. Naturally it's not airing anywhere in my state, because life is never easy. On top of that, I don't have any local friends that are into the Monogatari series to make a road trip out of it. Considering these factors, I probably won't be seeing it any time soon, which is quite a bother because I've been waiting for this movie for years. Going to have to wait for it to show up online.
In magic-related news, I recently re-built Nin, the pain artist EDH after much nagging from some of the local players. No one was investing any time into policing other players, and so games have been growing out of control very quickly. I wasn't thrilled with the prospect at first, but I have to admit, it feels nice to just say no over and over again, stealing things from hopeful timmies and smashing them with their own cards. Favorite moment so far has been using clever impersonator to copy a mana reflection, then using turnabout to generate a ton of mana and casting eternal dominion, twincast and reverberate. First grabs were ulamog, kozilek and urabrask on Turn 6 or so. Concessions soon followed.
Yeah, there are a lot of great clerics, even outside of the life gain theme. You also get to play edgewalker which is an old favorite of mine. Such a cool card.
I may or may not have been brewing something up for this legend ever since she was spoiled.
Maybe I'm just boring, but I'd have a cleric tribal theme going. Wouldn't devote to it entirely, but it pairs well with a token theme (allthesoulsisters are clerics) which would make it easy to reach the life requirement and gives you plenty of sac fodder for the second ability.
The linked list is mine. I had been playing 3 recruiter 1 prelate for a while, with the second prelate in the board, but I made a last minute decision to cut a recruiter and go with 2 prelates, as the card has proven to be pretty darn good, as I'm sure everyone here has figured out. I might go back up to 3 recruiters by cutting the canonist, it was more of a meta call for my local scene that I probably don't need anymore. It just feels so bad to draw multiple recruiters sometimes, though.
Also, I cut the spirit in the board for palace jailer for FNM tonight, was better than expected. For the time being, I'll be keeping him.
In magic news, still working on foiling out martyr-proc. Over halfway there in terms of cards, but marsh flats are going to be a pain. Also built Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder EDH before all the FoW hype started up. Fun deck, just focuses on playing lots of cards that demand sacrifices and throwing all the thrulls at them. Sadistic Hypnotist and contamination are my favorites.
Also, eye of Ugin is banned, which may or may not kill off eldrazi entirely, but it definitely hurts tron, and with that as one of my worse matchups, I'm ok with it not coming back.
Modern tonight was something of a bust. I punted a match that should have been an easy win, left a bad feeling for the rest of the night.
However, I did manage to trade for 3 FNM promo path to exiles so I'm pretty happy about that. Ever so slowly getting closer to having martyr-proc foiled out.
I used to run MD containment priest instead, but then everyone stopped playing sneak and show, reanimator, and dredge in my local meta.
No kids, but there is a $2000 puppy. Luckily there's no fighting going on over who gets what. It has been a pretty smooth process, just a bummer.
EDIT: ended up falling asleep but here's my current list:
4 Thalia, guardian of Thraben
4 Stoneforge mystic
3 flickerwisp
3 phyrexian revoker
2 Serra avenger
2 Mirran crusader
2 spirit of the labyrinth
1 Mangara of Corondor
1 eldrazi displacer
4 aether vial
1 sword of fire and ice
1 umezawa's Jitte
1 Batterskull
10 plains
4 wasteland
4 rishadan port
3 Karakas
1 cavern of souls
1 Eiganjo castle
3 oblivion ring
2 rest in peace
2 containment priest
2 wilt-leaf liege
2 ethersworn canonist
2 council's judgment
1 sword of light and shadow
1 manriki-gusari
As you can see, the Mangara and displacer are fairly non-committal. As much as I love Mangara, it's still a pretty slow card and only really strong in grindy matchups, so a singleton seems fine. The displacer is slightly more useful, but being a 3-drop and requiring 3 mana to activate means it's still only a 1-of for now. If it proves to be particularly useful I might bump it up.
As for the manabase, I might cut the Eiganjo to add either an additional cavern, a mishra's factory, or maybe a tower of the magistrate. Some people opt for dust bowl, but that usually means switching out some plains for flagstones of trokair and I'm not up for that change.
Sorry I haven't been around lately, I've been seeing one of my friends through a divorce. Seems he's going to be moving back in with my brother and I. At least this time he gets his own room rather than bunking with me like last time.
Legacy tonight for FNM, trying out a D&T build that picks up Mangara of Corondor again and also the new Eldrazi Displacer. It's been decent in testing, hoping it does well.
I imagine that once this eldrazi deck has something banned and the meta shifts back to having tron, things will be more difficult, but right now I'm sitting pretty.
I was 2-1 going into round 4, matched up against UW control. I played this matchup to a draw in the last modern event, and I had no intentions of doing that again. I realized after that night that pre-board, without some really horrible mulligans/draws on my part, he can't actually win. Racing 21 life a turn is almost impossible for him, and he'll go through his deck faster. So I sat down with every intention of winning game 1.
For the first 5 turns, all we did was play lands and pass. Pretty uneventful. I stuck a cavern of souls on human and forced through a martyr, gaining 21 life. Shortly after, I had enough lands to establish the proclamation of rebirth loop, gaining 21 per turn with no way for my opponent to interact. I made no other plays and no attempts at aggression. Soon I was over 100 life. I probably could have stopped gaining life there, but I switched to using my phone's calculator to keep track of my life total and kept going. It was also at this time that I revealed my plan and stated clearly that he could not win. I was hoping a bigger display with a ridiculously large number would demoralize him and cause him to concede, but he held on. I stopped actively sacrificing martyrs once I reached somewhere in the 200s, instead opting to only use them in response to removal to keep them from being exiled.
Meanwhile, we were basically still playing the draw-go game. I was recurring martyr every turn, and eventually started making plays to avoid discarding. I used board wipes to clear out his creatures when he had 3 or more, and I slowly started bringing in the beats with 1/1s. He exiled 3 of my serra ascendants as well as a few other creatures, but eventually it got to the point where he ran out of paths, and was forced to use supreme verdicts to clear my board, but it goes without saying that I just recurred everything slowly and kept on the feeble pressure. He grew desperate enough to use cryptic command in conjunction with snapcaster mage to tap my board and bounce the snapcaster for later use. I had no actual intentions of killing him via life total, but I wanted to force him to use his sphinx's revelations to stay alive and draw through his deck faster. By halfway through the game, there were a lot of weird situations. ghost quarters on both sides became strip mines since neither of us wanted to thin our deck. Speaking of ghost quarter, I drew all four of mine, using them only to kill celestial colonnade when he wanted to use it to block.
With 40 minutes down, 10 left in the round, my opponent had 11 cards left in his library. I was running pretty low as well, but mistveil plains meant I wasn't anywhere close to decking. At this point my opponent conceded the game and the round, as his hand was full of cards that would cause him to draw (namely sphinx's revelation and wall of omens and he knew I would deck him before the time ran out. Turns out he had no graveyard hate in his sideboard, so he had no way to win the matchup at all.
We drew quite a crowd with our match, mostly because we were the last ones going, and while my opponent (and most of the people watching) seemed bothered by the grind, I had a lot of fun. Wearing down the hopeless defenses of an opponent who never stood a chance will always be enjoyable. I can only hope that in the future he'll auto-concede. It's much more likely that he'll just change up his sideboard, as many at my shop have, but he could just try to dodge me and, failing that, scoop right away. There's at least one person at the shop who has that plan, I'd be pretty happy if that number would increase.
TL;DR: I won a round 1-0-1 at over 300 life by my opponent's concession moments before he ran out of cards in his library.
EDIT: managing to post the imagine has been a pain, think I got it sorted out but if it's broken, I dunno what to do
Also, love the playmat. Do you think you could put something together for me if I sent you the images I'd like to use? I'm not great with photoshop but I've been wanting to order a playmat from them for ages.
Kizumonogatari is airing in limited theaters in the U.S. soon, and I've been trying to decide if I want to go see it. Naturally it's not airing anywhere in my state, because life is never easy. On top of that, I don't have any local friends that are into the Monogatari series to make a road trip out of it. Considering these factors, I probably won't be seeing it any time soon, which is quite a bother because I've been waiting for this movie for years. Going to have to wait for it to show up online.
In magic-related news, I recently re-built Nin, the pain artist EDH after much nagging from some of the local players. No one was investing any time into policing other players, and so games have been growing out of control very quickly. I wasn't thrilled with the prospect at first, but I have to admit, it feels nice to just say no over and over again, stealing things from hopeful timmies and smashing them with their own cards. Favorite moment so far has been using clever impersonator to copy a mana reflection, then using turnabout to generate a ton of mana and casting eternal dominion, twincast and reverberate. First grabs were ulamog, kozilek and urabrask on Turn 6 or so. Concessions soon followed.
I may or may not have been brewing something up for this legend ever since she was spoiled.