Magic Afternoon
After over two years of lunchtime Magic, Mike and I finally got together outside of work to play for the first time back in November. Somehow, this post never actually got published, so I’m publishing it now. In summary, it was a great time. We started with his cleric deck against my golem deck, in the matchup of two decks we both think of as needing improvement. He took 2 out of 3 games from me. In both of his wins, he had a Soul Warden to accumulate life, Necropotence or Yawgmoth’s Bargain to let him draw cards, and a Battletide Alchemist so that I effectively couldn’t do any damage to him. My deck’s best time was when it had the Master Transmuter bouncing artifacts back and forth so that Glassdust Hulk could be unblockable.
Following this we spent some time taking apart both decks. In the Cleric deck, we tried to weed out some of the one-ofs in the deck to concentrate on the mechanics that seemed to be giving him success, which I outlined above. For the golem deck, it really seems like I have two decks, a Master Transmuter deck and a Golem/Glassdust Hulk deck. Now I have to decide if I want to spend money upgrading either or both of them.
The second match featured Elves versus Slivers. This was a new build of Mike’s Elf deck, Red-Green with Bloodbraid Elf. I have no idea how any of my decks are ever going to keep up with that monster — it is very fast, and much more focused than previous versions. It gets out a lot of elves quickly and then has enough mana to do whatever it wants, including just burning you to death with Devil’s Play. The one game that I won, I had Crystalline Sliver to give the Slivers shroud and enough Muscle/Sinew slivers to make them really big, plus the Flying Sliver for the win.
In the final game, I played my Valakut Ramp deck against his Black-Green Spike deck. The ramp deck did really well, pulling a pair of Plated Geopedes and enough land-drawing cards to pump them 2 or 3 times every turn. Finally I got enough mountains to activate Valakut and that put me over the top.
Playing Magic for four hours sounds like a lot, but actually we didn’t get in that many games. Deck take-aparts are something we’ve always talked about, and it was good to finally get one in. Overall, we both had a great time, and though I don’t expect we’ll do this very often I hope we get the chance to do it again.
