Normally this blog is about EDH and, for the most part, I want to keep it so, but I really need to get this down somewhere to get it off my chest:
I hate standard.......
.......but I want to play regionals.
This has put me into a difficult position. We've been running a gauntlet at work and, so far, I like none of the decks I've been testing. Here's the run down:
RDW has stupid "I win" hands on occasion. It also has terrible hands that require you to top-deck the win every turn and your opponent to fall flat in order to have a chance. That's just game 1. In game 2 the fact that aggro strategies, not just RDW, are a viable strategy in the format means that every Tom, Dick & Harry has some sort of hate that will splash you. If they fear Red-based decks in particular, they can crush you out of the board. Life is too short and time away from a slow Sunday with my girls too precious to put your regionals fate in the hands of the dice roll. I'm prepared to bet against the occasional "Hurp-Durp" opening hand that RDW gets, and just not play it.
One of the early decks I championed was Caw-Blade which then became Dark-Blade and Spark-Blade. I never felt comfortable playing the decks. That may have had something to do with our rogue Vampires just destroying it all day but it just simply came down to another decision about whether I really wanted to spend the day playing a deck I didn't enjoy playing.
Paris style Grixis-Tezz got bombed out very quickly in the gauntlet and was replaced by UB Tezz Infect which didn't really last much longer. There's always the terrible feeling that you're not as controlling as half the metagame requires you to be and too controlling for the other half. You feel bad sitting back and worse going for it. The metagame seems to be pretty split into Control (UW and now UB), Aggro board-Control (Caw-X and RUG) and aggro (WW/Quest/KRed/RDW) and the big elephant in the room: Combo.
My most recent audible is a combo deck of sorts, Eldrazi Ramp. It's a pretty straightforward strategy; play mana dudes, play bigger mana dudes, play Eldrazi, profit. The real issue with this strategy (apart from the availability of Ulamogs) is that it uses the red zone. There's got to be a way to circumvent adding that extra step. In addition, once you've played Valakut often enough, you can't play Eldrazi Ramp without wishing all your searches were getting Valakuts/Mountains, Hurp, Durp, take 18. When you look at both decks side by side and accept that both are essentially just goldfishing in very similiar ways to get to a very similiar point, would you prefer to be dropping Ulamog and waiting a turn or just, you know, winning?
One deck I'd love to try out (ok, one of many decks, some others being Mono-W Angel Control and UW Venser/Spine and anything that uses Mirrorworks) is anything that just goes to town on your opponent's mana base. Unfortunatly when your LD suite starts at 4 you generally have to make some calls on the start of your curve to get your mana up and running. The natural extension of getting your mana-count high quickly in current standard isn't a 4CC LD spell, it's a 6CC Titan. If your opponent can get the Titan online before you get Demolish, Melt/Roiling Terrain, then you're pretty screwed. Even then a turn 3 LD spell is probably still too late. An opposing turn 2 Overgrown Battlements means you need to kill the Battlements, not a land, as killing a land will still enable a turn 3 Battlement/Wall of Tanglecord with 2 mana open. That's an invitation for a turn 4 Titan and suddenly you need to either kill a 6/6 or destroy 2 lands per turn just to keep up. While you can't really argue with the 9 ways to destroy any land for 5 mana or less in the current standard, maybe the format would be healthier (and a lot more honest) if Stone Rain or Rain of Tears were legal. As it is, too many commonly played cards obselete a land destruction strategy in the current enviornment.
And we haven't even started on JTMS.
Valakut? >pfft!< I don't know.
EDH: The Crazy 99 An EDHer's take on EDH and MTG. (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bombs.)
Showing posts with label Magic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Magic. Show all posts
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Threat Assessment?
The Most Critical Skill in Multiplayer is Threat Assessment
(The Ferret)
There are skills that you need to either have innate or need to develop quite quickly in order to appreciate multiplayer Magic. Things like good cards and bad cards come quite quickly, either alone or through some helpful advice. How to build a multiplayer deck is another that comes up quite often but none of those are anywhere near as important as the Critical Skill posited by multiplayer genius, The Ferret: Threat Assessment. I won't be able to go into the depth that the Ferret could in his articles (click the links for some happy hours reading up on multiplayer!) but I can share a coulpe of ideas on this topic with you. Here we go:
Why is this even on a list of ideas to do with threat assessment? It seems to have very little to do with threat assessment. Well, it's probably one of the biggest red-flags you can get that someone doesn't know how to evaluate threats correctly. Oftentimes it will be "Who do I attack?" rather than "Who's going get to my Curse of the Cabal?" While there can be a thrill of having a loose cannon, or a permanent Grip of Chaos, at your table, more often than not it's going to be hideously annoying to see someone who could solve the current game-state problem fail utterly by simply choosing incorrect targets, fail to put pressure on someone who needs to be pressured or simply fail to do anything at all. There's always a best play, a risky play with potential to be swingy and a long list of sub-optimal plays. Incorrect threat assessment generally means that you either make a sub-optimal play or are forced to make a risky play. Failure to make the correct play this turn may force you to make a risky or incorrect call next turn when you are forced to choose between plays. Had you nipped the threat in the bud the previous turn, you'd be in a much better place coming into this turn. If someone at your table is randomly choosing who to attack or target, it means they are unable to correctly assess who, if anyone, should be the subject of their attention and force the rest of the table to scramble.
Who's about to make a move? Who needs to be stopped this turn? Who is slowly building up a dangerous board position? Who can stop player X or Y and will they? What is the board telling me? What resources are available to that player: Hand, Graveyard, Mana, Creatures, etc.?
All of this is fine during the current turn however one of the key elements to threat assessment is that it's fluid, always changing. Failure to re-asses the game state each turn is as much an error as initially reading the game-state incorrectly. The threat on turns 1-5 will not necessarily be the same as the threat on turns 5-10 and most assuredly not the same as the threat from turn 10 onwards. Each turn shifts the balance of the game towards and away from different players and those assessors who get stuck on one player as the biggest threat may find that some else has snuck up behind them.
A lot goes into the construction of an EDH deck and it always helps to know what strategy someone is playing. Part of the threat assessment is asking "What can player X do in the next turn?" The Sam Black Azusa deck we saw last week loves an early Primeval Titan because it allows for an early Eldrazi legend. The potential formed by a turn 2 or 3 Titan is hugely explosive and the game must revolve around killing it before it gets the 2-mana lands and Eye of Ugin into play.
Poison is another strategy that hasn't been explored much in EDH yet and the format will be sorely tested. A player attacks you with a 4/4 in the early game and has access to BG or GG. Any of your creatures would die in combat to it so you're probably just going to take the 4 damage, especially in the early game, right? And if your Nath of the Gilt Leaf opponent shows Tainted Strike and Berserk (as happened in our game at lunch today) you're already out of the game unless you have removal or a counterspell. You can never rule out the possibility that a deck previously dedicated to playing lots of little Elves won't suddenly put a Grafted Exoskeleton onto his Vulturous Zombie and kill you.
On the other side of the coin is the fear of big plays. You've seen a deck make the big play again and again, of course you're going to do what you can to stop it but is stopping it now to the exclusion of the rest of the table the correct threat assessment for this turn? Most likely not. A player puts a Darksteel Forge onto an otherwise unimpressive table, you'd be disinclined to waste a counterspell on it. Unfortunatly, the following turn Cloud Key meets Etherium Sculptor meets another host of discounted artifacts and suddenly the Counterspell you held in hand when you let the Forge through is insufficient to stem the tide and your Nevinyrral's Disk isn't cleaning up the table like is should.
You can't account for everything. In EDH the format allows for too many possibilities however good sense can usually dictate that certain plays are traps and you should be careful.
Emotion is an extremely powerful motivator. It's also excellent at helping us hide things from ourselves we don't want to accept or helping us overlook things that we should be seeing but can't because we're intent on another target. We aren't Spock. We aren't exclusively logical beings. We ceed to our emotions and act upon those impulses. However, if we're looking for the best play and attempting a correct threat assessment we need to take a step back and distance ourselves from Tit-for-Tat retaliation or prejudice be it against a player, a deck or a game action. How many times have you heard the following:
"You attacked me so I'm attacking you back!"
"You're playing Islands. 'Nuff said!"
"You always win, Sheldon, I'm taking you out!" [Yeah right! Get with it Armada Games guys!]
This is all incorrect threat assessment. Ok, you may luck out that it's the right play but, if it's for the wrong reasons, it will be the wrong play more often than not. You don't need to be Spock, but you do need to rise above these impulses and kill the right person before you can give in and indulge in some smashy-smashy.
5.) What to do?
Right, you or one of your group suffers from poor Threat Assessment, what can you do? Start with a checklist, list out the things that need to be considered and run down through them quickly. It's not fool-proof but it should help you check-down without missing anythign major (accepting that you can't know your opponent's cards in hand. Here's one I found on the EDH boards and changed up to suit my group:
2. Your opponent's generals
3. What deck-style are they & cards you've seen them play before
4. Cards in hand
5. Life totals/general damage accumulated
6. Contents of graveyards
7. Current board positions
You should be able to fly through the first three during mulliganing & while the early game is happening so that, when things start moving, you already have certain facts fixed in your head and you can concentrate on numbers 4-7 as they develop throughout the game never forgetting to drop back to #1 and start the check regularly. That shoud help avoid any "Duh!" moments as your opponent plays his forgotten Rafiq of the Many to make his dangerous dude lethal.
That's about it for my brief overview of Threat Assessment. Have a read of the articles linked above and I highly recommend that you read through these on the same topic, again all by the Ferret:
Attacking the Right Guy
How to Speak Deckese
Why Are You Attacking Me?
And when you've done all that, maybe it'll be time to talk about the Second Most Fundamental Skill In Multiplayer!
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
NPEs - Scraping the Gloss off with a Wire Brush
This is a tale of two decks.
This is a tale of two games.
And this is also a tale of two games that someone found to be very NPE (Negative Play Experiences)
Tuesday evening I got a baby-sitting pass as the good lady went out to a concert with her lady friends. Once the fatherly duties were finished, I was free to sling some cardboard with 4 other guys invited expressly for that purpose. Benoit & Arnaud#2 showed up first sporting Major Teroh/Soldiers and GAAIV/Control respectively and there were quickly followed by Antoine playing Thraximundar/Annoyances and Marc with his new "Vampire!" deck. There was some quick re-sleeving to get Anowon, the Ruin Sage into place at the head of Marc's army (though, in retrospect the Ascendant Evincar he had originally would have much more of an impact across more games than Anowon. We pointed this out afterwards and he'll probably change it. ROWR! Go Vamps!)
Facing this onslaught, I played my mono-blue artifact monstrousity "TA-DAA!!" (Thada Adel). A quick note on the deck: I've made changes to it recently, the most notible being the inclusion of Spawnsire of Ulamog. The intention was to eventually go for the 20 point shot and bring out a swarm of Eldrazi. Unfortunatly, with the recent rules change disallowing this, I have integrated the 3 legendary Eldrazi & It That Betrays to the deck. I had intended to cut the Spawnsire itself but forgot to do so before playing, something which I intend to do soon, adding it in most likely for Gather Specimens as a foil to Grave Pact.
You can see our merry group of player's here (From the left: Marc playing "Vampires!", Benoit in red playing Major Teroh/Soldiers, Arnaud top left playing GAAIV and the back of Antoine's head (he of card alter fame), bottom right of the pic. Antoine was playing Thraximundar/Annoyances.)
I had a decent opening hand into a turn 3 Vedalken Archmage. The additional draws got me an Expedition Map which got me a Tolarian Academy. With Darksteel Forge protecting my artifacts and no Wastelands in sight, a couple of turns and some artifacts later, the legendary land and Minamo, School at Water's Edge got me enough mana to drop Eye of Ugin, tutor for Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and play her even working around the in-play Grand Arbiter Augustin IV. It was about turn 7 and the game had taken an hour to get to that point. An hour of saying "TA-DAA!!" every time you play a spell can get a little old. ;o)
Here's a quick shot of my board coming up to the end of the game.
GAAIV has a Mystical Tutor that he has flashed but not played so he's an obvious candidate to be Annihilated as he can just fetch a Wrath of God effect. Major Teroh is also sporting some annoying Wrath effects and "Vampires!" has an Icy Manipulator on the table, though it's effectiveness is restricted by Minamo, School at Water's Edge being able to untap Emrakul. I decide to work counter-clockwise around the table and hit GAAIV to destroy his board. He is left with no permanents and essentialy ends the game as an observer. I can see he's not too happy about it and I offer that we go to game 2 but the table thinks it can deal with Emrakul and play continues.
I attack Major Teroh next and, after a few turns wearing him down, he's next to leave. In the same turn I kill him I play back-to-back Ulamog & Kozilek with It that Betrays already in play. One is countered but now there's a critical mass of Eldrazi and a lot less in the way of allies to help fight against them and the game disolves. One of the last few plays from Marc, the "Vampires!" player, is exiling Emrakul with an Oubliette, just to show that he could and, I have to say, Journey to Nowhere in black is generally not what you expect and is an excellent anti-Emrakul card. Cudeos for the cool play!
So, the outcome of the game was a win for the Eldrazi but a loss for fun, because one player was pretty much iced on turn 6-7, another scrabbled in vain not to be overrun and there was little that could be done by the remaining players to stem the tide. Despite being a couple of cards short of where I'd eventually like it to end up, the deck still man-handled the table playing loosely. Sure, everyone enjoyed playing Magic but there was a feeling of enevitability about the outcome from very early on and the game culminated in the sum of all it's fears as player after player fell powerless before it. (Sorry for the flowery rhetoric, I'm building up to something. Work with me!)
What am I going to do with this monster?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky: TRY AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!
Wizards are releasing a new product this month in support of their "Summer of Multiplayer" called Archenemy. In a twist on the traditional multiplayer teams, attack left, pentagon, chaos or any of the other popular variants, this product supports a Hero (or Evil Genius) going up against a host of enemies. One of the decks on offer is "Assembling the Doomsday Machine" which, during the game last night, I felt I was doing already. Now that's a concept I can get behind: Eldrazi making you weaker, making me stronger! Taking over the world!! MMMWWWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ahem.
I have no idea if it will work but I'm willing to give it a try. Just even announcing the flavour texts on the Scheme cards while doing my best "Brain - Evil Genius" impression is definitely a dream to be lived at least once and, if I get to trample the weak & meek with huge Eldrazi, well, what of it? I'm an evil genius! I'm going to talk more about Archenemy once the last deck is spoiled, but it looks like it's a set made with EDH players firmly in mind.
Shuffling up for the second game, I wanted to diffuse some of the ill-will and rather than re-playing "TA-DAA!!" or bringing out Rafiq, I had a rummage and found I had a full Phelddagrif deck so I pulled it out. If I can help some people do some fun and extravigant stuff, then everyone will appreciate it, right?
Em, maybe.
Seats and decks around the rest of the table remained as they were and we got underway for round two.
Major Teroh didn't buy the whole "I have a Group Hug deck, I'm nice, don't attack me" line and started out attacking yours truely. At this point I predicted that Major Teroh would turn out to be the eventual victor, he has a way of just pulling games out of the fire and defeating opponents in one fell swoop and I didn't fancy my chances of stopping him. The others were understandibly happy to let him have is way. My slow land start eventually developped into an Iwamori of the Open Fist (which netted zero other legends) and a Wall of Denial which I then hid behind for a few turns. My next significant play was Hive Mind which stayed until the end and ultimately resulted in the game ending play.
Now, I don't know if you have any personal experience with Hive Mind, but it's not the huggy-touchy-feely card it makes itself out to be. Probably the worst interaction is the win condition of Hive Mind + Pact: All of the pacts are free to cast so once you have Hive Mind in play you're free to throw any one, or multiples, of them out. Hive Mind's copy effect is not optional, it's obligatory, so everyone gets a Pact to put onto the stack. The Pacts cause you to lose the game if you don't pay their upkeep cost however, if your general is not in that colour, you can't generate the mana to pay the cost and you lose the game. That's a pretty low play and obviously not what a Group Hug deck runs. Only thing is, when you have Hive Mind in play, it doesn't account for other players running Pacts. Even if one player pays for the pact, the chances are that you've thinned the field enough to win in some other way quite quickly.
Luckily enough, this wasn't the case for us, our problem was more one of scale.
The second issue with Hive Mind is that every effect is magnified, causing a huge imbalance towards board control effects. Wrath of God is still Wrath of God even if it's copied 4 times however, a creature like Reveillark, which would usually net you a creature or two after a Wrath of God effect, now nets you a creature or two after the last copy on the stack resolves and you subsequently lose them both when the second-to-last copy resolves. No, the bigger problem is more the smaller spells. Doom Blade now kills up to 5 non-black creatures ("up to" because two players can target the same creature with their copy and the second will fizzle), Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile now exile up to 5 creatures, Innocent Blood becomes a Wrath of God for {B} and so on. And very soon the game dissolves into ways of trying to keep creatures in play or winning through other means.
Hive Mind is also not a good card for decks that like to counter things as all the counterspells get copied too and the chances are that one of the original spells will slip through the blanket of Counterspell flak that Hive Mind automatically generates. Obviously the player playing the original spell wants it to resolve so it's more than likely that he will direct his own copy of the counterspell towards another copy of the counterspell, thus ensuring that their spell resolves.
The Group Hug concept is to help other players: Give target player some life, give another target player some cards, everyone puts one or multiple permanents into play for free (though the deck should probably be called "escalation" rather than "Group Hug"!), but it's also true that "you can get too much of a good thing" and with Hive Mind, giving someone else too much of a good thing can kill you, and everyone else, just as easily.
Now, I have to take a moment to slap the Major Teroh player on the wrist because he had the foresight to pack a Seal of Cleansing and run it out early enough. He could have stopped the madness at any time. He didn't. He chose to kill an Underworld Dreams so he could keep drawing cards painlessly and this is the sort of action that could lead to you winning the game but not necessarily very many friends!
Bad boy!
Thraximundar thought it would be a good idea to play a Mind Funeral and everyone got targetted by the copies losing anywhere up to 20 cards into their graveyards. Vision Skeins and Truce got played, Hive Mind copying them both, filling up hands and, at EOT, graveyards. "Vampires!" then decided that he preferred the creatures in his graveyard to those he had in play and played a Living Death (though, to be fair to him, Thraximundar was about to do the same thing).
You know the moment at the top of the fairground ride where everything pauses for a moment and you have this peacefull pause before you start the terrifying downhill descent which either ends up in shrieks of excitement or the guy in the front seat regurgitating his burger and fries all over the passengers in the cars behind him? Well, Living Death on the stack with a Hive Mind in play is one of those moments.
Just resolving the 4 copies and 1 original Living Death took the best part of 45 minutes, some time during which there was a debate about the comes into play interaction of Kor Skyfisher and a Parallax Wave and how the triggers could be stacked to permanently remove creatures from the game (just fyi: in this situation they can't), Tempting Wurm was dumping hands into play and we had additional CIP triggers from 7 or 8 creatures, leaves play triggers from Reveillark and goes to grave graveyard triggers from Noble Benefactor, Veteran Explorer and Deathgreeter. And when we were done resolving the first, it was time to start again and repeat everything another 4 times.
Somewhere in the middle of it all we lost our Grand Arbiter player to complete incomprehension and confusion. I can't blame him.
When the dust finally settled, "Vampires!" passed the turn to Major Teroh who played a Reverent Mantra for black on his army and took the "Vampires!" out of the game. Not sure if it was in revenge for the Living Death turn but it was pretty final! He passed the turn to GAAIV, who simply drew and passed, completely disenchanted by the complexity of the previous 45 minutes.
With a hand of 14 cards hand and a Windfall, I was in a position to finish the game and, given the potential for everything to drag out significantly, I decided to do so. The game ended though, due to a slight oversight on my part, I managed to give the victory to Major Teroh. You see Hive Mind copied Windfall 3 times. GAAIV's copy resolved first and we discarded and drew 14 each. Major Teroh's copy then resolved with the same effect. We then resolved Thraximunder's copy resulting in GAAIV, Thraximundar and myself being decked. At this point each of our spells are removed from the stack and Major Teroh is the only one left standing with a mere 3 cards left in his library. My prediction that he would pull out an unlikely victory turned out to be accurate after all!
So, some fun was had, that's for sure. Brains aren't designed for 5 Living Deaths at midnight after a long day of work and this left everyone with a pretty dazed impression of the game and, in one case, complete bewilderment. Between being on the receiving end of an Emrakul in game 1 and having "the turn of the 5 Living Deaths" inflicted upon him in game 2, I think that GAAIV ended up not fully enjoying his evening of Magic.
So what do we take from this and where do we go from here?
Of course big plays should still be actively rewarded and attempted and generally those plays mean that someone (everyone?) is going to be on the receiving end of a lot of magical hurt. I think I'll re-align "TA-DAA!!" into my Archenemy deck as I said and try to avoid inflicting it on the unprepared.
What about Hive Mind in my Group Torture deck? I may leave it in. There's a possibility that it will draw enough hate to nullify the worst ravages or players will be a little more careful running out huge spells if they are aware that everything will happen multiple times.
As for our GAAIV player, I think he needs a deck that he has built himself, where he knows what everything does and where he can best influence the game. We've told him as much and I think he sees how he can feel more implicated. As to being crushed by the Eldrazi?
Well, there's only so much I can do about that!
This is a tale of two games.
And this is also a tale of two games that someone found to be very NPE (Negative Play Experiences)
Tuesday evening I got a baby-sitting pass as the good lady went out to a concert with her lady friends. Once the fatherly duties were finished, I was free to sling some cardboard with 4 other guys invited expressly for that purpose. Benoit & Arnaud#2 showed up first sporting Major Teroh/Soldiers and GAAIV/Control respectively and there were quickly followed by Antoine playing Thraximundar/Annoyances and Marc with his new "Vampire!" deck. There was some quick re-sleeving to get Anowon, the Ruin Sage into place at the head of Marc's army (though, in retrospect the Ascendant Evincar he had originally would have much more of an impact across more games than Anowon. We pointed this out afterwards and he'll probably change it. ROWR! Go Vamps!)
Facing this onslaught, I played my mono-blue artifact monstrousity "TA-DAA!!" (Thada Adel). A quick note on the deck: I've made changes to it recently, the most notible being the inclusion of Spawnsire of Ulamog. The intention was to eventually go for the 20 point shot and bring out a swarm of Eldrazi. Unfortunatly, with the recent rules change disallowing this, I have integrated the 3 legendary Eldrazi & It That Betrays to the deck. I had intended to cut the Spawnsire itself but forgot to do so before playing, something which I intend to do soon, adding it in most likely for Gather Specimens as a foil to Grave Pact.
You can see our merry group of player's here (From the left: Marc playing "Vampires!", Benoit in red playing Major Teroh/Soldiers, Arnaud top left playing GAAIV and the back of Antoine's head (he of card alter fame), bottom right of the pic. Antoine was playing Thraximundar/Annoyances.)
I had a decent opening hand into a turn 3 Vedalken Archmage. The additional draws got me an Expedition Map which got me a Tolarian Academy. With Darksteel Forge protecting my artifacts and no Wastelands in sight, a couple of turns and some artifacts later, the legendary land and Minamo, School at Water's Edge got me enough mana to drop Eye of Ugin, tutor for Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and play her even working around the in-play Grand Arbiter Augustin IV. It was about turn 7 and the game had taken an hour to get to that point. An hour of saying "TA-DAA!!" every time you play a spell can get a little old. ;o)
Here's a quick shot of my board coming up to the end of the game.
GAAIV has a Mystical Tutor that he has flashed but not played so he's an obvious candidate to be Annihilated as he can just fetch a Wrath of God effect. Major Teroh is also sporting some annoying Wrath effects and "Vampires!" has an Icy Manipulator on the table, though it's effectiveness is restricted by Minamo, School at Water's Edge being able to untap Emrakul. I decide to work counter-clockwise around the table and hit GAAIV to destroy his board. He is left with no permanents and essentialy ends the game as an observer. I can see he's not too happy about it and I offer that we go to game 2 but the table thinks it can deal with Emrakul and play continues.
I attack Major Teroh next and, after a few turns wearing him down, he's next to leave. In the same turn I kill him I play back-to-back Ulamog & Kozilek with It that Betrays already in play. One is countered but now there's a critical mass of Eldrazi and a lot less in the way of allies to help fight against them and the game disolves. One of the last few plays from Marc, the "Vampires!" player, is exiling Emrakul with an Oubliette, just to show that he could and, I have to say, Journey to Nowhere in black is generally not what you expect and is an excellent anti-Emrakul card. Cudeos for the cool play!
So, the outcome of the game was a win for the Eldrazi but a loss for fun, because one player was pretty much iced on turn 6-7, another scrabbled in vain not to be overrun and there was little that could be done by the remaining players to stem the tide. Despite being a couple of cards short of where I'd eventually like it to end up, the deck still man-handled the table playing loosely. Sure, everyone enjoyed playing Magic but there was a feeling of enevitability about the outcome from very early on and the game culminated in the sum of all it's fears as player after player fell powerless before it. (Sorry for the flowery rhetoric, I'm building up to something. Work with me!)
What am I going to do with this monster?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky: TRY AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!
Wizards are releasing a new product this month in support of their "Summer of Multiplayer" called Archenemy. In a twist on the traditional multiplayer teams, attack left, pentagon, chaos or any of the other popular variants, this product supports a Hero (or Evil Genius) going up against a host of enemies. One of the decks on offer is "Assembling the Doomsday Machine" which, during the game last night, I felt I was doing already. Now that's a concept I can get behind: Eldrazi making you weaker, making me stronger! Taking over the world!! MMMWWWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ahem.
I have no idea if it will work but I'm willing to give it a try. Just even announcing the flavour texts on the Scheme cards while doing my best "Brain - Evil Genius" impression is definitely a dream to be lived at least once and, if I get to trample the weak & meek with huge Eldrazi, well, what of it? I'm an evil genius! I'm going to talk more about Archenemy once the last deck is spoiled, but it looks like it's a set made with EDH players firmly in mind.
Shuffling up for the second game, I wanted to diffuse some of the ill-will and rather than re-playing "TA-DAA!!" or bringing out Rafiq, I had a rummage and found I had a full Phelddagrif deck so I pulled it out. If I can help some people do some fun and extravigant stuff, then everyone will appreciate it, right?
Em, maybe.
Seats and decks around the rest of the table remained as they were and we got underway for round two.
Major Teroh didn't buy the whole "I have a Group Hug deck, I'm nice, don't attack me" line and started out attacking yours truely. At this point I predicted that Major Teroh would turn out to be the eventual victor, he has a way of just pulling games out of the fire and defeating opponents in one fell swoop and I didn't fancy my chances of stopping him. The others were understandibly happy to let him have is way. My slow land start eventually developped into an Iwamori of the Open Fist (which netted zero other legends) and a Wall of Denial which I then hid behind for a few turns. My next significant play was Hive Mind which stayed until the end and ultimately resulted in the game ending play.
Now, I don't know if you have any personal experience with Hive Mind, but it's not the huggy-touchy-feely card it makes itself out to be. Probably the worst interaction is the win condition of Hive Mind + Pact: All of the pacts are free to cast so once you have Hive Mind in play you're free to throw any one, or multiples, of them out. Hive Mind's copy effect is not optional, it's obligatory, so everyone gets a Pact to put onto the stack. The Pacts cause you to lose the game if you don't pay their upkeep cost however, if your general is not in that colour, you can't generate the mana to pay the cost and you lose the game. That's a pretty low play and obviously not what a Group Hug deck runs. Only thing is, when you have Hive Mind in play, it doesn't account for other players running Pacts. Even if one player pays for the pact, the chances are that you've thinned the field enough to win in some other way quite quickly.
Luckily enough, this wasn't the case for us, our problem was more one of scale.
The second issue with Hive Mind is that every effect is magnified, causing a huge imbalance towards board control effects. Wrath of God is still Wrath of God even if it's copied 4 times however, a creature like Reveillark, which would usually net you a creature or two after a Wrath of God effect, now nets you a creature or two after the last copy on the stack resolves and you subsequently lose them both when the second-to-last copy resolves. No, the bigger problem is more the smaller spells. Doom Blade now kills up to 5 non-black creatures ("up to" because two players can target the same creature with their copy and the second will fizzle), Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile now exile up to 5 creatures, Innocent Blood becomes a Wrath of God for {B} and so on. And very soon the game dissolves into ways of trying to keep creatures in play or winning through other means.
Hive Mind is also not a good card for decks that like to counter things as all the counterspells get copied too and the chances are that one of the original spells will slip through the blanket of Counterspell flak that Hive Mind automatically generates. Obviously the player playing the original spell wants it to resolve so it's more than likely that he will direct his own copy of the counterspell towards another copy of the counterspell, thus ensuring that their spell resolves.
The Group Hug concept is to help other players: Give target player some life, give another target player some cards, everyone puts one or multiple permanents into play for free (though the deck should probably be called "escalation" rather than "Group Hug"!), but it's also true that "you can get too much of a good thing" and with Hive Mind, giving someone else too much of a good thing can kill you, and everyone else, just as easily.
Now, I have to take a moment to slap the Major Teroh player on the wrist because he had the foresight to pack a Seal of Cleansing and run it out early enough. He could have stopped the madness at any time. He didn't. He chose to kill an Underworld Dreams so he could keep drawing cards painlessly and this is the sort of action that could lead to you winning the game but not necessarily very many friends!
Bad boy!
Thraximundar thought it would be a good idea to play a Mind Funeral and everyone got targetted by the copies losing anywhere up to 20 cards into their graveyards. Vision Skeins and Truce got played, Hive Mind copying them both, filling up hands and, at EOT, graveyards. "Vampires!" then decided that he preferred the creatures in his graveyard to those he had in play and played a Living Death (though, to be fair to him, Thraximundar was about to do the same thing).
You know the moment at the top of the fairground ride where everything pauses for a moment and you have this peacefull pause before you start the terrifying downhill descent which either ends up in shrieks of excitement or the guy in the front seat regurgitating his burger and fries all over the passengers in the cars behind him? Well, Living Death on the stack with a Hive Mind in play is one of those moments.
Just resolving the 4 copies and 1 original Living Death took the best part of 45 minutes, some time during which there was a debate about the comes into play interaction of Kor Skyfisher and a Parallax Wave and how the triggers could be stacked to permanently remove creatures from the game (just fyi: in this situation they can't), Tempting Wurm was dumping hands into play and we had additional CIP triggers from 7 or 8 creatures, leaves play triggers from Reveillark and goes to grave graveyard triggers from Noble Benefactor, Veteran Explorer and Deathgreeter. And when we were done resolving the first, it was time to start again and repeat everything another 4 times.
Somewhere in the middle of it all we lost our Grand Arbiter player to complete incomprehension and confusion. I can't blame him.
When the dust finally settled, "Vampires!" passed the turn to Major Teroh who played a Reverent Mantra for black on his army and took the "Vampires!" out of the game. Not sure if it was in revenge for the Living Death turn but it was pretty final! He passed the turn to GAAIV, who simply drew and passed, completely disenchanted by the complexity of the previous 45 minutes.
With a hand of 14 cards hand and a Windfall, I was in a position to finish the game and, given the potential for everything to drag out significantly, I decided to do so. The game ended though, due to a slight oversight on my part, I managed to give the victory to Major Teroh. You see Hive Mind copied Windfall 3 times. GAAIV's copy resolved first and we discarded and drew 14 each. Major Teroh's copy then resolved with the same effect. We then resolved Thraximunder's copy resulting in GAAIV, Thraximundar and myself being decked. At this point each of our spells are removed from the stack and Major Teroh is the only one left standing with a mere 3 cards left in his library. My prediction that he would pull out an unlikely victory turned out to be accurate after all!
So, some fun was had, that's for sure. Brains aren't designed for 5 Living Deaths at midnight after a long day of work and this left everyone with a pretty dazed impression of the game and, in one case, complete bewilderment. Between being on the receiving end of an Emrakul in game 1 and having "the turn of the 5 Living Deaths" inflicted upon him in game 2, I think that GAAIV ended up not fully enjoying his evening of Magic.
So what do we take from this and where do we go from here?
Of course big plays should still be actively rewarded and attempted and generally those plays mean that someone (everyone?) is going to be on the receiving end of a lot of magical hurt. I think I'll re-align "TA-DAA!!" into my Archenemy deck as I said and try to avoid inflicting it on the unprepared.
What about Hive Mind in my Group Torture deck? I may leave it in. There's a possibility that it will draw enough hate to nullify the worst ravages or players will be a little more careful running out huge spells if they are aware that everything will happen multiple times.
As for our GAAIV player, I think he needs a deck that he has built himself, where he knows what everything does and where he can best influence the game. We've told him as much and I think he sees how he can feel more implicated. As to being crushed by the Eldrazi?
Well, there's only so much I can do about that!
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