Tag: Lightning Bolt

Casual Friday–The Doctor is in

As a bit of a Johnny, I’m always looking for cards that need to be figured out. They aren’t simple cards like Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt that can be useful in almost any deck; oftentimes these cards can be worse for you if you don’t build a deck to suit them! I’ve been looking through my pile of extra cards and found Psychic Surgery, a relatively new card appearing in New Phyrexia. It’s a nifty card that allows you to, in a sense, control your opponent’s draw whenever they shuffle their library. It can certainly be useful against decks that try to tutor for their best cards, and with some clever deck-building, it could be a fun card to build around.

The coolest thing about this card is that it is so cheap. You can bring one of these out at turn two, ready to counter your opponent’s shuffling shenanigans. With Psychic Surgery on the field, a lot of tutor cards can be completely shut down. The second ability of Liliana Vess
Liliana Vess and the harbingers from the Llorwyn block put the chosen cards on top of the library, then Psychic Surgery activates and you can exile that top card – the one they specifically wanted – or the next card if that looks more threatening. Of course you also have the option of not removing either of those cards, if you think they wouldn’t be particularly useful to your opponent. This would naturally happen any time your opponent searches for something, whether it is from the tutors or even simple lands like Terramorphic Expanse
Terramorphic Expanse.

There are plenty of opportunities to make use of this card even beyond your opponent searching for cards. They may be putting cards back into their library, there are plenty of those cards in standard right now. The Legendary Eldrazi shuffle back into their library when they’re put in the graveyard from anywhere. Perhaps you can remove the knowledge to bring those monstrosities out from your opponent’s mind. Other heavy hitters like Blightsteel Colossus
Blightsteel Colossus are put back into your opponent’s library as well as the cycle of Zeniths. Any way these cards are put back into the library, your opponent will have to shuffle, giving you the chance to operate on them.

Of course, if your deck just includes Psychic Surgery while hoping your opponent shuffles their deck a bunch of times, it isn’t going to get too far. There are plenty of cards that can get your opponent to shuffle their library with a variety of other effects that allow you to control the game. Acquire
Acquire or Bribery
Bribery allow you to use your opponent’s cards to your own advantage, taking an artifact or creature from their own library and putting it onto your side of the field. Because their library was searched, they then have to shuffle, allowing you to choose what card they draw next turn. Polymorph
Polymorph is another similar card that can allow you to destroy a creature that they control. While they do get another creature, they also have to shuffle their library and perhaps the tradeoff will be worth it.

Outside of blue, black has plenty of spells that will have your opponent shuffling their library. Praetor’s Grasp
Praetor’s Grasp is a new card that also digs through your opponent’s deck for a card that you might like to play, then shuffles their deck. Surgical Extraction and Memoricide are only the newest of a cycle of plenty of cards that remove copies of cards from an opponent’s library to ensure that your least favorite cards are never played while still allowing you to control their draw with Psychic Surgery. Similarly, Life’s Finale
Life’s Finale will allow you to destroy all creatures on the field as well as a few more from your opponent’s library. For those that can pay the kicker cost, Sadistic Sacrament
Sadistic Sacrament can be the nail in the coffin for your opponent. With one Psychic Surgery, you get to exile 15 cards of your choice as well as one more card that they would have drawn. With cards like these in your deck, your opponent will feel like they have to shuffle their library every turn!

With so much shuffling going on, it would be wise to include other cards that have similar abilities to Psychic Surgery. Cosi’s Trickster, from Zendikar, is another cheap card that gets better the more you opponent shuffles. With some smart control from Psychic Surgery and other blue spells you may be able to keep her around to be a major threat. For an additional threat to their health, you can lay down a Psychogenic Probe
Psychogenic Probe. With all of these cheap cards out, you can start getting bigger creatures, controlling your opponent’s draw, and bringing their life down to 0 with each shuffle of their library. There are certainly some great combos waiting to be had with these cards, some mass removal like Life’s Finale
Life’s Finale, and Bitter Ordeal. Your opponent can be shuffling for each permanent put into the graveyard, also allowing you to pick through their deck for anything you don’t like.

This deck seems like it would be really fun to play, as long as your opponents don’t mind shuffling all the time. It can easily be put together with those situational rare cards that are probably overstocked at your local card shop. What do you guys think? Is there potential in a deck like this in casual play?

August 12, 2011

Deck Library – “Montoya’s B/R Vampires”: A Victory for Casual Play

This may seem counterintuitive, even paradoxical, but I’m going to take a moment on this blog to praise the decklist of the winning player at this weekend’s SCG Open Series in Denver. This isn’t unusual at all for a Magic blog, but we’re more of a kitchen-table crowd here and we like our Magic like we like our Fridays – casual.

Because this site is geared toward casual players, we’ve got a lot to say to and about those of you who don’t spend hundreds of dollars on a single deck. Obviously, there are a lot of casual players who are willing to wheel and deal (and spend big) for their playset of Jace, The Mind Sculptor, but if you’ve played in a competitive setting recently you’re probably more than sick of Jace, of Stoneforge Mystic, of Lotus Cobra, and the rest of the standard fare out there.

To fully “suit up” with all the best mythic rares can cost hundreds of dollars, which isn’t exactly an option for a lot of us, that’s why I want to highlight Bradon Montoya’s deck from this weekend’s competition.

B/R Vampires

Creatures:
Manic Vandal

Manic Vandal X3
Pulse Tracker

Pulse Tracker X4
Kalastria Highborn

Kalastria Highborn X4
Bloodghast

Bloodghast X4
Gatekeeper of Malakir

Gatekeeper of Malakir X4
Vampire Lacerator

Vampire Lacerator X4
Viscera Seer

Viscera Seer X3

Instants:
Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt X4
Dismember
DismemberX3
Go for the Throat
Go for the Throat X4

Land:
Swamp
Swamp X6
Marsh Flats
Marsh Flats X1
Dragonskull Summit
Dragonskull Summit X4
Verdant Catacombs
Verdant Catacombs X4
Lavaclaw Reaches
Lavaclaw Reaches X4
Blackcleave Cliffs
Blackcleave Cliffs X4

Sideboard:
Skinrender
SkinrenderX2
Dark Tutelage
Dark Tutelage X3
Crush
Crush X2
Doom Blade
Doom Blade X1
Arc Trail
Arc Trail X4
Mark of Mutiny
Mark of Mutiny X3

Why I like it:

It’s got great flavor: One of my favorite aspects of deck building is putting together a deck with a cohesive flavor. This deck is not only tribal, centering on vampires, but the splash of Red is consistent with the aggressive nature of the Black core.
It’s cheap: The most expensive aspect of this deck is the lands, and even they’re not bad. There are no mythic rares here, and much of this deck’s core consists of commons and uncommons. Most players, even if they’re reasonably new to the game would have little trouble doing some small-time trading with friends and assembling this deck, though perhaps with some modification to account for a limited supply of the rare lands.
It beat Caw-Blade: Most people have had it up to Squardron Hawk cruising-height with Caw-Blade. This deck does a great job answering Caw-Blade with minimal artifact and creature hate without going way out of its way to be the anti-Caw. Any deck right now that is not Planeswalker-Pals w/ Titan Support or Caw-Blade has my vote, and this deck has done that exceptionally well.
It’s creative: Okay, so maybe liking vampires isn’t the most cultural innovative thing a person can do right now, but at least it’s not the by-the-book “Competitive Magic” deck. It resists the temptation of Stoneforge, Planeswalkers, Tempered Steel, the titans, and even Infect. Not even a Phyrexian mana symbol in sight.

So, kudos to you, Brandon, from The Casual Planeswalker. Congrats on your win this weekend and thank you for doing your part to shake up competitive play in Standard just a little bit.

June 12, 2011

Good to Great – “Jedi Mind Trick: The Bluff”

Being a casual player means quite a lot. One thing it means is that Magic isn’t your sole source of income and therefore probably isn’t something that you typically spend a significant portion of your income on. In the coming weeks we’ll have some great posts on budget Magic, but for now I’d like to offer one quick bit of advice on how to save yourself a buck.

Buying two or three boxes is probably not the easiest (or most financially efficient) way to improve your enjoyment of the game and your win record. Heck, if you’re only buying three (big timers frequently buy multiple cases, packages of six boxes, for each set), your return on investment probably isn’t going to be great.

There are lots of ways to improve on the “buy, crack, repeat” model. One easy way to draft. If you’re hanging out with one friend or ten, drafting WILL result in your getting better, or at least more cohesive, cards. Cardpooling within a playgroup is an even better way to go, but to do this takes a lot of trust and a real consensus that what is best for the group is best for everyone.

The easiest way and cheapest way to make Magic a more enjoyable experience, however, is to improve your own game.Just because you’re a self-proclaimed casual player, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t always be seeking to learn from your mistakes. Being willing to learn is the foundation of becoming a good, and even great, player. An easy way to improve your game quickly is to read our FREE booklet on Deckbuilding.

If you’ve got a regular playgroup, you know what spells are most likely to be in your opponents hand most of the time. You know that you’re racing to get out a Goblin horde before he top decks a Damnation
Damnationor a Day of Judgment
Day of Judgment. One way to turn this awareness into a serious asset is to begin watching your opponents mana – seeing what he leaves open at the end of his turn and acting accordingly.

Good players, casual or otherwise, take advantage of the power of Instants, learning to hold back their Mana Leak or Go For The Throat
Go For The Throat until the last possible moment, giving them the greatest chance of playing it effectively.

There’s nothing worse than Bolting someone’s Corpse Cur
Corpse Cur at the end of your turn, only to have him top deck and play a Putrefax
Putrefax. In this situation patience would have paid off almost immediately and likely changed the outcome of the game.

Once you’ve mastered the art of effectively employing the games most powerful (and often most common) Instants, you can begin to incorporate an additional strategy that will give you an even greater advantage in your playgroup: The Bluff. MTG is typically considered a social game in a way that highly competitive games like poker are not, but any psychological strategy that applies to Texas Hold ‘Em (or even physical team sports) can be effectively applied to Magic.

Just as you (and your opponents) begin to look for and anticipate any recurring combo or strategy in your playgroup, the broader Magic world from your local FNM to the Pro-Tour has built-in expectations regarding the most universally used cards.

Cards like Mana Leak, Giant Growth
Giant Growth, Lightning Bolt, Doom Blade
Doom Blade, and Day of Judgment
Day of Judgment appear in almost every deck with the appropriate mana to play them. This means that your opponent, if he is a player of any skill, will expect you to have access to these spells, even if you don’t. This fact will allow you to effectively bluff your way through a turn in which you really DON’T have an answer to your opponent’s play.

To put it directly: It is almost always more worthwhile to hold back two Islands, or a Mountain, or two Swamps, in order to make your opponent fear you have the answer to their play than to tap out on your turn and prove to them that they are entirely in the clear.

One way to make this bluff even more effective is to go out of your way to make it look like you’re saving the mana. In my Phyrexian Mana-based deck I will pay the two life to play a Porcelain Legionnaire
Porcelain Legionnaire on turn three in order to keep a Mountain untapped even if I don’t have the Lightning Bolt in my hand.

Of course, there are two sides to every bluff. The great thing about poker is that you can use your bluffs more effectively in situations where you won’t have to reveal your cards if your opponent calls. In Magic, however, only in a “scoop” situation are you actually going to get away without showing your opponent that you had no fitting response, so your opponents are likely to catch on if you repeatedly make bad bluffs.

One great way to continue to shake things up is to throw some one-cost Phyrexian mana Instants into your deck. Cards like Marrow Shards, Mutagenic Growth
Mutagenic Growth, and Gut Shot
Gut Shot are well worth the two life when your opponent sincerely thought he was going to cast a spell/attack/block while you were tapped out.

I hope this post got you thinking. Keep innovating and keep improving. Playing casual is a ton of fun, but if your playgroup or your playstyle becomes stagnant, your enjoyment of the game may suffer.

June 1, 2011
Killer Combos – “Life and Death”

When the Casual Planeswalker Crew went to the New Phyrexia Pre-Release, some of the cards we were most looking forward to snatching up were those employing the new Phyrexian mana symbols. Cards like Porcelain Legionnaire
Porcelain Legionnaire and T-t-t-Thundering Tanadon
Thundering Tanadon (inside joke, but I hope everyone else feels as silly as I do saying this card’s name – goofiest name since Wooly Whatsit, I mean, Woolly Thoctar) are still wreaking havoc in our playgroup as we experiment with decks restricted to the Scars block.

In the sealed event I played in at the Pre-Release, my rare from NPH was Phyrexian Unlife, a card that isn’t great in a Limited setting, but has proved to be a lot of fun in Constructed. I first threw the enchantment into my “Life for Death” pre-con, then made some alterations, picked up a full playset of Unlifes and have been tearing things up with a Red/White Phyrexian suicide deck.

So far I’ve had a lot of fun with Phyrexian Unlife, and I haven’t even started making decks with the broader range of cards. My first thought about Unlife in Standard is to combine it with Death’s Shadow.

As early as the third turn (with a Dark Ritual
Dark Ritual) you can play your Unlife, attack with Immolating Souleater
Immolating Souleater, pump him to reduce your life total to nothing (or next to it), and even if he doesn’t connect your opponent will waste a spell or blocker dealing with him.

Nine times out of ten your opponent is going to Doomblade
Doomblade/Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt/Glissa’s Scorn
Glissa’s Scorn your Souleater, which will make them even less prepared for the 11/11 Death’s Shadow you play in your second main phase.

There’s a lot of fun to be had with Phyrexian Unlife. Please comment and let us know how you plan to exploit this card, or add to this combo. Melira, Sylvok Outcast, Near-Death Experience, Fling…

May 30, 2011
Replace or Double? – Considering Close Resemblances

There are many cards in Magic: The Gathering that are equivalents of cards that were printed in earlier sets or editions. These are typically called “functional reprints”, but I think that term falls short on account of the small (but significant) differences between the variations. There is also a long list of cards that are frequently updated/parodied/powered down to assure that as cards leave Standard there remains balance in your local Multiverse.

With the announcement today that Giant Spider beat out Giant Growth for the sole “Giant” spot in M12, I started thinking about how decks would change without GG and two other prominent, long-lasting spells in the Alpha “pay 1 for 3 _________” series: Dark Ritual and Lightning Bolt. As far as my decks are concerned, I think I could find a suitable substitute in Standard for Giant Growth, but what about Lightning Bolt? Surely we’re not going back to the days of Shock?

Take a look at the four cards below and let’s talk this out. Perhaps with some examples we can define our terms a little more exactly, and, if you’re willing to do some lateral thinking here, I’m sure that you can find some easy ways to improve your decks!

Now, let’s concentrate on Soul Warden and Soul’s Attendant first. Same exact card, right? Both are 1/1 creatures for one white mana, both are human clerics, both gain you one life every time a creature comes into play. Basically the same two cards, right? Wrong. There is one key difference between the two and it is the word “may”.

Soul Warden vs. Soul’s Attendant

“May” is something that is going to trip a lot of casual players up and it is something your play group should strive to call each other on if you really desire to improve as players. “May” means that this gaining of life is voluntary. It is something choose or choose not to do in response to a creature entering play. This means that if you forget to add the life when the creature pops and remember at the end of your turn, your opponent can point to that seemingly meaningless little word on Soul’s Attendant and say “sorry Charlie, I assumed you had a reason for choosing not to gain life”. Whereas, with Soul Warden the choice isn’t even there, it happens automatically.

So, Soul’s Attendant and Soul Warden are NEARLY equivalent, but to the forgetful player, or the person with a Transcendence
Transcendence in play that tiny, insignificant word could make a different. In the pure life-gain deck do you do a 2SA/2SW mix or go all out with four of each? The great thing about Magic is that there are circumstance in which every permutation would be the right thing to do, but the player who knows all their options will be able to build the better deck.

Soul Warden vs. Essence Warden

Like many other cards from the Planar Chaos expansion, Essence Warden is a word-for-word reprint of and earlier card, but transposed into a different color. Probably the coolest instance of such a reprinting was the black Wrath of God, Damnation.

I love the slight flavor-variation involved in porting a spell from one color to another. Wrath of God destroyed all creatures on account of righteous indignation – a characteristically white idea – while Damnation did the same thing, but to bring darkness rather than expunge it.

The slight difference between “soul” and “essence” indicates the similar, but not identical philosophies of green and white mages. “Soul” is a dogmatic, assertive statement about the metaphysical, whereas “Essence” is a more abstract, organic variation of the term. The righteous white mage rejoices in the addition of new persons to the world, while the mystic green mage sees their coming as the organic growth of the whole of nature.

Of course, this clever twisting of Soul Warden’s flavor isn’t what makes Essence Warden great – it’s the ability for her to do for your Saproling deck, what SW did for your Soldier deck. Also, she’s an Elf Shaman, rather than a Human Cleric, which should also provide some additional synergy in tribal decks.

Suture Priest vs. EVERYONE

With the introduction of Suture Priest in New Phyrexia the decision about which life-gaining woman-of-the-cloth to include in your latest Weenie deck becomes MUCH more complicated – as things tend to do when Phyrexians show up.

Suture Priest, though still a cleric, is no longer a human and has an additional cost of one generic mana. She also will only gain you life for creatures entering the battlefield under YOUR control. However, she has the additional ability to damage your opponent every time a creature pops on his side of the board. (NOTE: Here’s that pesky word “May” again. Know that your opponent certainly won’t be reminding you to chose whether or not he loses life.)

The Phyrexian’s nearly “compleat” domination of Mirrodin has had some interesting results, not the least of which is the twisting of Soul Warden’s classic ability.

For an extra mana, Suture Priest gives you some variety, but is a less reliable source of life and a totally unpredictable source of damage. Is she the right addition to your deck? Perhaps a worthy sideboard card? That’s what we’ll leave you to decide.

Meanwhile, I’ll be dreading the loss of Giant Growth and plotting what to do if (God forbid) Lightning Bolt leaves Standard…

This could go on for quite some time. Oh, and don’t even get me started on Counterspell(s)…

May 25, 2011

Tag: Lightning Bolt

Casual Friday–The Doctor is in

Deck Library – “Montoya’s B/R Vampires”: A Victory for Casual Play

Good to Great – “Jedi Mind Trick: The Bluff”

Killer Combos – “Life and Death”

Replace or Double? – Considering Close Resemblances