Addressing holes
So I took my esper control deck to FNM again this week. As usual, I had multiple decks with me, and lent one out; Valakut. AJ didn't have a deck for the evening, so he got to use Valakut for the night. I had meant to sideboard in anti-Valakut cards, but got caught up helping two new players to the store and to Standard FNM tournaments make sure that their decks were legal for Standard, and left my sideboard cards in the car. I never ended up having time to go get them before the rounds started. Cue foreshadowing:
I had picked up or traded for some MBS cards I wanted to test out in my deck, so I sleeved them up and sat down to battle.
Cards I was testing: White, Blue and Black suns zenith. I think all are good. None of them were very useful on the night as I never drew the white one at all, and had those I did were bad against Valakut and got sided out. I also tried out Massacre Wurm as a pseudo Grave Titan, but yet Grave is still better, although Massacre is a trump to their Grave Titan, and both are good against aggro. Sphere of the Suns and Go for the Throat went in as well. I took out contagion clasp, contagion engine, duress, one venser and some doom blades. Obviously this is just testing and not an optimal list.
Round 1 - Gage (pronounced gauge) with Valakut.
This is a classic version of Who is the Beatdown, which is an amazing article by Mike Flores and a must read if you never have. In this match, despite piloting a control deck, if the game goes long, every spell in the Valakut players deck kills me. Seriously, every spell. This means I'm the beatdown, and need to beatdown as fast as possible to win. With that in mind I head into game 1, not knowing he's a Valakut player yet, but figure it out with turn one terramorphic into forest.
Game 1 - So I keep a hand where I have a threat, some acceleration and a counter. I turn 4 Precursor golem, with a sea gate oracle on the board, turn 5 Venser -1 unblockable my guys and dome him for 10. Predictably, he kills me with Valakut when he untaps, wiping my board and setting himself up to win easily from there.
Game 2 - I win this one, Grave Titan is the nuts. He's a clock that is just so hard to beat. Despite my opponent resolving a Gaea's Revenge, which is usually a beating for me, he has to chump my titan and the zombies get there with colonnade help.
Game 3 - Resolved Gaea's Revenge 1, and 2 and I'm done. I also boarded wrong, taking out my Day's despite seeing the revenges in game 2 and knowing those were my only outs to a resolved Gaea's Revenge other than massive board presence.
Games 1 - 2
Matches 0 - 1
Round 2 - AJ with My Valakut! YAY!
Sigh.
Valakut again. And since I built the deck, I know it's good, and so is AJ. This won't be easy.
Games 1 and 2 look like this:
Me - Inquisition a ramp spell. Him, lay land. Me, play land, counter ramp spell on his turn. Him play land, fail to ramp. Me, run out of counters, start trying to get a threat on the board. Him play land. Me, finally land a threat. Him, kill me with Primeval Titan or Summoning Trap into something relevant. Something relevant in this case is Thrun and later in that same game, Blightsteel Colossus hardcast. Thrun is really hard to deal with. No really. It's HARD to deal with. He's actually less of a threat, but more difficult to get off the board than Blightsteel. Blightsteel on the other hand is a clock and a half, but is easier to interact with, and therefore not as difficult for my deck to deal with. However, imagine a board state of Primeval Titan, Thrun with regeneration mana open, and Blightsteel Colossus. I had two irrelevant Day of Judgements in hand and was digging to draw a journey to nowhere for the Colossus, so I could journey the Colossus, Day the Titan away and take Thrun to the face, but not actually die because I've Dayed away my only blockers to stop lethal infect off of Colossus. Instead I drew land, and died.
Aside - Valakut got better with the rotation. Thrun is amazing vs control, Colossus is the real deal, Slagstorm deals with almost every aggro deck in the format, and is backed up by pyroclasm. The main deck pretty much doesn't need to be touched, although Gerry Thompson is advocating using Lotus Cobra main, which seems good. Be prepared for this deck. I wasn't.
End Aside
Round 3 - Bye
So annoying. I hate getting the bye. First it means I'm losing, probably a lot. And more importantly it means I am not playing magic, which is sort of the point of my weekly forays into the realm of TOGIT. So I trade a bit, and then get some testing games in against a U/W Shape Anew control deck Garret is testing. I'll say this about his deck, White isn't the color to go with blue in the deck, but Shape Anew is going to go way up in value. Black is probably the best bet to set up and protect the combo consistently, but his U/W version and my U/B/W control decks bashed each others faces in a few times. The upside is that my deck is pretty well set up to destroy non-valakut decks (although it was not a one sided affair, he won slightly less than half the games) so I'm thinking up ways to combat the valakut menace SB style.
I'll get back to you next week with my results.
I had picked up or traded for some MBS cards I wanted to test out in my deck, so I sleeved them up and sat down to battle.
Cards I was testing: White, Blue and Black suns zenith. I think all are good. None of them were very useful on the night as I never drew the white one at all, and had those I did were bad against Valakut and got sided out. I also tried out Massacre Wurm as a pseudo Grave Titan, but yet Grave is still better, although Massacre is a trump to their Grave Titan, and both are good against aggro. Sphere of the Suns and Go for the Throat went in as well. I took out contagion clasp, contagion engine, duress, one venser and some doom blades. Obviously this is just testing and not an optimal list.
Round 1 - Gage (pronounced gauge) with Valakut.
This is a classic version of Who is the Beatdown, which is an amazing article by Mike Flores and a must read if you never have. In this match, despite piloting a control deck, if the game goes long, every spell in the Valakut players deck kills me. Seriously, every spell. This means I'm the beatdown, and need to beatdown as fast as possible to win. With that in mind I head into game 1, not knowing he's a Valakut player yet, but figure it out with turn one terramorphic into forest.
Game 1 - So I keep a hand where I have a threat, some acceleration and a counter. I turn 4 Precursor golem, with a sea gate oracle on the board, turn 5 Venser -1 unblockable my guys and dome him for 10. Predictably, he kills me with Valakut when he untaps, wiping my board and setting himself up to win easily from there.
Game 2 - I win this one, Grave Titan is the nuts. He's a clock that is just so hard to beat. Despite my opponent resolving a Gaea's Revenge, which is usually a beating for me, he has to chump my titan and the zombies get there with colonnade help.
Game 3 - Resolved Gaea's Revenge 1, and 2 and I'm done. I also boarded wrong, taking out my Day's despite seeing the revenges in game 2 and knowing those were my only outs to a resolved Gaea's Revenge other than massive board presence.
Games 1 - 2
Matches 0 - 1
Round 2 - AJ with My Valakut! YAY!
Sigh.
Valakut again. And since I built the deck, I know it's good, and so is AJ. This won't be easy.
Games 1 and 2 look like this:
Me - Inquisition a ramp spell. Him, lay land. Me, play land, counter ramp spell on his turn. Him play land, fail to ramp. Me, run out of counters, start trying to get a threat on the board. Him play land. Me, finally land a threat. Him, kill me with Primeval Titan or Summoning Trap into something relevant. Something relevant in this case is Thrun and later in that same game, Blightsteel Colossus hardcast. Thrun is really hard to deal with. No really. It's HARD to deal with. He's actually less of a threat, but more difficult to get off the board than Blightsteel. Blightsteel on the other hand is a clock and a half, but is easier to interact with, and therefore not as difficult for my deck to deal with. However, imagine a board state of Primeval Titan, Thrun with regeneration mana open, and Blightsteel Colossus. I had two irrelevant Day of Judgements in hand and was digging to draw a journey to nowhere for the Colossus, so I could journey the Colossus, Day the Titan away and take Thrun to the face, but not actually die because I've Dayed away my only blockers to stop lethal infect off of Colossus. Instead I drew land, and died.
Aside - Valakut got better with the rotation. Thrun is amazing vs control, Colossus is the real deal, Slagstorm deals with almost every aggro deck in the format, and is backed up by pyroclasm. The main deck pretty much doesn't need to be touched, although Gerry Thompson is advocating using Lotus Cobra main, which seems good. Be prepared for this deck. I wasn't.
End Aside
Round 3 - Bye
So annoying. I hate getting the bye. First it means I'm losing, probably a lot. And more importantly it means I am not playing magic, which is sort of the point of my weekly forays into the realm of TOGIT. So I trade a bit, and then get some testing games in against a U/W Shape Anew control deck Garret is testing. I'll say this about his deck, White isn't the color to go with blue in the deck, but Shape Anew is going to go way up in value. Black is probably the best bet to set up and protect the combo consistently, but his U/W version and my U/B/W control decks bashed each others faces in a few times. The upside is that my deck is pretty well set up to destroy non-valakut decks (although it was not a one sided affair, he won slightly less than half the games) so I'm thinking up ways to combat the valakut menace SB style.
I'll get back to you next week with my results.
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