MTG Salvation

Now that y'all have some games under your belts, what cards have been closing them out? How are these games actually ending? Combat step? Combo? Massive spells? Just curious if there are any trends developing out there.

Creatures windmill slamming someone. Stuff like River's Rebuke or Settle the Wreckage making the opponent's big attack backfire and leave them in a vulnerable position. Even basic removal spells like Vraska's Contempt is seeing use to depose bigger threats in order to make winning easier.

After having played some this past week, I found a few things. You can rarely expect to win off cards like Second Sun, Revel or Production. Those always seem to get answered. I found that while spot removal tends to be more common, there is a target saturation as people are running more creatures than normal, and therefore creatures tend to be harder to deal with late game. My token deck was so much more consistent at closing games out with just piles of creatures, even with boardwipes happening consistently.

As a counterpoint I've been playing a lot on MTGO and have won half my games with Approach of the Second Sun. I've lost all the other games, but that's just kind of how the deck was built for draft 1.

Yeah, it's definitely not going off in multiplayer. My Huatli, Radiant Champion deck usually is killing people around the time the time they have mana for it. I've also started to just see the cast trigger getting hit by disallow (even saw it get exiled by Gonti). It just feels slow and ponderous to me.

Kingmaking.
If we all play to win and don't draw River's Rebuke/it gets countered, the game goes to time.

Quote from Lumovanis »

Yeah, it's definitely not going off in multiplayer. My Huatli, Radiant Champion deck usually is killing people around the time the time they have mana for it. I've also started to just see the cast trigger getting hit by disallow (even saw it get exiled by Gonti). It just feels slow and ponderous to me.

Yeah, this is just about the polar opposite of my experience. I can't even begin to fathom how you could possibly claim to deal 30 damage to three separate players who are all doing their best to defend themselves all before turn seven. Like, that just sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. Maybe you're intentionally exaggerating here, and the intonation is just lost on me, but this sort of statement couldn't seem any farther from the truth to me.

Because 3 people aren't all trying to approach. There's usually only one player, I think maybe one game two people were running it. I definitely can drop one player by t7-t8 (maybe two if no one board wipes and Cultivator of Blades happens). Every time approach happens, that player gets burned down before they see it or the deck gets milled (Ipnu)/exiled (Gonti) or the win trigger gets countered by Disallow or Nimble Obstructionist. it sounds like your whole group is sitting down with second sun combo and not wanting to actually interact or have any other wincons? I mean, hell, Gideon's Intervention would stop all of them too. If second sun is such a huge problem, tech against it maybe?

For clarity, I never said I was winning on turn 7 or w/e, just that I was able to start dropping people, starting with pesky control decks.

Quote from Lumovanis »

it sounds like your whole group is sitting down with second sun combo and not wanting to actually interact or have any other wincons?

With Dominaria in flux, things possibly stand to change. With that said, this is a reasonable picture of what my local metagame looks like:

Azor, the Lawbringer
Azor, the Lawbringer
Grand Warlord Radha
Huatli, Radiant Champion
Neheb, the Eternal
Nissa, Vital Force
Rashmi, Eternities Crafter
Tezzeret the Schemer

So, not absolutely crawling with Approach, but enough that I can reasonably expect to play against one of the two Azor decks packing it in most of the games I sit down for.

And I don't think not wanting to interact is really what's going on here. If anything, it's the opposite. Because of how interactive most of our decks are, it's terribly challenging for any one player to gain any kind of real ground. The aggressive decks in particular (Radha, Neheb, Huatli) have it especially rough. All it usually takes to deter them is to run out any one reasonably statted creature. Even something like Thrashing Brontodon in the early game is often enough to make attacks on said player begin to be unprofitable, forcing aggressors to start spreading their damage opportunistically in an effort to get any kind of mileage out of their creatures while they can. Eventually, each player will have some hefty deterrents in play, and then whenever anything seriously disrupts the status quo, everyone's only one Fumigate away from being brought back to the stone age. Some of these decks are better at recovering than others, but generally these sorts of board wipes absolutely crucify the aggressive decks. It's why our games tend to go on for hours (and because I think most of us are probably control players at heart). The aggressive decks just can't consistently pressure multiple opponents with heightened life totals before some of their opponents go over the top of them.

This is why Approach is so hairy. Everyone, be they control, aggro, or somewhere in between, has an extremely difficult time gaining ground and closing out games. Approach of the Second Sun is just one of the best ways to bring about a victory because it's difficult for many decks to interact with. The 7 life helps buy time, and something akin to Hour of Revelation slows opponents down to the point where no one can reestablish a threatening board state before a Pull from Tomorrow or Azor digs it up again.

Quote from Lumovanis »

I mean, hell, Gideon's Intervention would stop all of them too. If second sun is such a huge problem, tech against it maybe?

Gideon's Intervention is a great suggestion, and it's something I'll make a mention of to anyone interested. Generally speaking though, everyone where I play at hates Approach to the point where we've just banned it outright. We basically all believe it's one of the best things anyone can be doing in the format (we're not even playing with hyper-competitive decks), that it's largely hard to interact with, and that it creates exactly the kind of gameplay that most of us left Commander for in the first place.

Just scored my third win with Azor U/W control against a Samut, Hautli and Raff. Essentially the Haulti and Samut decks died to a Fumigate. There's just no way either of them could put enough pressure on my life total after their boards were wiped. I don't think Approach of the Second Sun is busted or anything, but I still do believe it's one of the best ways to finish games in the format. Without other blue players at the table it's basically impossible to interact with unless you kill the player casting it (easier said than done). My testing is benefiting from the fact I'm playing, mostly, online where players are often coming in blind.

I don't know how your Huatli players are building, but they shouldn't be folding to a single board wipe. My group is spamming them and I am able to recover and outpace them. The last game I played vs Azor, he dropped a fumigate and watched as I embalmed Honored Hydra off Anointed Procession and dropped a Rhonas the Indomitable I drew that turn into 2 warrior tokens off Oketra's monument, completely refilling my hand. Majestic Myriarch is also a fantastic way to kill those control players when you have Oketra, Rhonas or Crested Sunmare with a token or two sitting next to it. I guess I'm just not having the same problems your agressive decks are, though that may be because I built my entire deck around recovering from board wipes and playing under heavy control.

When you say you're playing online, you mean 1v1, right?

No, I mean multiplayer. Why anyone would let you keep an Anointed Procession in play is beyond me. That card actually hit the board in the game I played and was quickly dealt with for the exact reason you say. It's the quickest way to rebuild a board state. The Hautli player in our game landed Procession, Animation Module and the explore enchantment in the first 5 turns, but with no way to actually draw cards all I needed to do was wait until they deployed their hand, surgically picking off the indestructible stuff, so that they had basically no gas left after the board wipe. It also helps that the other players at the table were falling behind, so I didn't even need to burn through much of my interaction as tokens player was quickly public enemy #1.

That was mainly because we had a Scarab God player that game that had dropped a Revel in Riches, and they decided (accurately) at the time that they needed to kill that so they could safely board-wipe.