Gifts Ungiven

If you take a quick glance at the Cascade Pulse build (here), you'll see that it only loses four cards with the rotation - the four copies of Wrath of God. Hm. So what do we do about that?

What is valued in a Wrath effect differs deck by deck. In the case of Cascade Pulse, we place a premium on Wrath's ability to hit on turn four (or five with too many Vivids) to rescue us from very aggressive starts by opposing decks. Secondarily, its ability to kill anything is tremendously useful. With this in mind, how do the alternatives pan out?

Hallowed Burial - One turn slower, but otherwise it does everything we want a Wrath to do in this deck (with the bonus of being somewhat better against Lark).

Austere Command - The ability to clear pesky enchantments and artifacts is nice, but coming down no sooner than turn six means that we're going to get rolled significantly more often by various explosive aggro decks.

Planar Cleansing - Straight-up terrible for this deck. The ability to sweep permanents is significantly less awesome in a deck that wants to have planeswalkers in play.

So, the upshot is that our best bet, absent Wrath of God, is Hallowed Burial. One turn slower will mean more losses, which is unfortunate. I'm not sure if there are other modifications we'll want to make to the deck to offset that.

That said, the move from Wrath to Burial has a fascinating knock-on effect that did not occur to me ahead of time, but which became evident in play.

You can't cascade into Hallowed Burial.

In the old Cascade Pulse build, it was possible to cast Bituminous Blast and cascade into Wrath of God (indeed, Blast could cascade into everything in the deck except for Liliana, Cruel Ultimatum, and other Blasts). Is it good to cascade into your Wrath effect? Mostly, no. It's annoying to be Blasting away the one creature on the opponent's board only to see a useless Wrath kicked up instead of, say, a Bloodbraid or Garruk. There are some cases where it would be handy to be able to find a Wrath, but then you can't rely on it (since you're more likely to hit any one of twenty other cards than however many remaining Wraths you have).

Thus, now that we've been forced to push from four to five mana, we will no longer uselessly cascade into our Wrath effect. Is that good enough to offset the one-turn delay? So far, I'm not sure, but it's a fascinating and, for me at least, unexpected consequence of the core set change.

One of the cards I was most tickled to see among the spoilers was Bogardan Hellkite. Hellkite is an elegant, very effective card - effective in game play terms, as a flash critter that can clear the board or dome the opponent, and effective in card design terms, as it's a dragon that burns things as it flies in from above. How cool is that?

Knowing that Hellkites were back in, I was intent on seeing if they had a place. Given the new dual lands, the most likely home for a Hellkite is in a deck somewhere on the G/x axis, whether that's Jund (B/R/G), Naya (W/R/G), pure red-green (hm...R/G)...or in five-color control, as a means of diversifying your finishers. After all, you can recur a Hellkite with a Cruel Ultimatum, right?

At the moment, I'm happiest with a Naya take on "stuff with Hellkites." Specifically, this is a control deck featuring Hellkites and all manner of high-powered Naya goodies. Click through to the extended entry for a deck list and some commentary.

I'm not going to U.S. Nationals, either as a competitor (hey, not qualified) or as a potential grinder and side event player. Instead, I'm off to the San Diego Comic Con, where I may or may not play any Magic, but I will enjoy the company of roughly 140,000 fellow popular arts and culture fans. Which is to say it is, if you've never been there, a stunningly large event.

If I were going to Nationals, I know what I'd bring. Despite delving into various other theoretical options fueled by M10 in the past week, I am not only fond of this deck, but convinced that it, unlike some of my other pet decks, is actually powerful. I'm talking about an update of Cascade Pulse, a design of mine that I wrote about in late June.

Click through to the extended entry for an updated post-M10 deck list, and an explanation about how this deck works and what makes it so powerful.

In this week's The Claudia Rules at ChannelFireball, Claudia Nellessen points out a change to the floor rules that I missed:

One of the important changes for players is in MTR 2.3, “Pregame Procedures.” This describes what steps must be performed before each game begins and something major for a lot of people has changed; you are not allowed to “cut” your deck anymore after your opponent shuffles it.

Let me say that again. You are not the last person to change the order of your library anymore.

I never cut after my opponent shuffles, but it's good to know that that's now the rule, rather than a choice.

(I recall reading a remark once that I want to attribute to Levy to the effect of "I distrust my opponent a little bit if he takes a final cut.")

If you followed the coverage for this year's nationals in Japan, you may have already read Bill Stark's writeup of the round two matchup between 2008 PoY and eventual nationals winner Shuhei Nakamura and PT Honolulu 2009 winner Kazuya Mitamura.

As it happens, the match was also caught on video. Check out the two videos below for some very nicely done and very clean coverage of the match:

I won't be able to check on U.S. Nationals coverage during the day as I'm still out at the San Diego Comic Con (but you can follow it here).

I'm rooting for a team that includes Gindy and Robinson.

Gerry T's latest article at ChannelFireball is a nice reflection on his performance in a recent big tournament. It also includes an exchange that makes me laugh every time I return to it:

He excited took his turn, explicitly tapped Reflecting Pool for Green, and two other lands to cast Firespout. It took me a moment to realize exactly what had happened, but then I informed him that all of his guys died, as out of his eight or so lands, he tapped the one basic Mountain that he had.

Table Judge: Yeah, that doesn’t matter.

We have a series of big weekends coming up here in the (south) San Francisco Bay Area. Here they are, in order, with some relevant links:

Saturday, August 1st - Superstars August Standard $1K tournament

That's tomorrow. I plan on going, and I've put together a deck that includes an interaction that has had me giggling inside since I figured it out. I'll post about it tomorrow.

Friday, August 7th through Sunday, August 9th - Superstars Standard $5K tournament

As with the last Superstars $5K, this event features multiple flights that qualify you for the top 32 on Sunday. Note that there's a moderate discount for preregistering online, so if you're sure you're going to go, you might as well save a couple bucks and sign up now.

Saturday, August 22nd - PTQ for Austin at Superstars

This is the final Bay Area PTQ, and we're once again back in San Jose. I love PTQs, and hope to see good attendance on this one - let's not let the East Coast massively outdo us at PTQ attendance this year.

One interesting tidbit I picked up in last weekend's $1K was the appearance of Chandra Nalaar as a sideboard card in Cascade Jund decks.

Her purpose?

Killing Chameleon Colossus.

Chandra seems like a reasonable player in this role. Your opponent taps out (or at least "out enough," not having four extra mana sources up and ready) to play the Colossus, and you drop Chandra, burn it out, and then have an active planeswalker on the field that now switches over to incremental offense, pinging the opponent until they either deal with it, lose to it, or you need to cash in some of her loyalty to kill another creature.

I have no idea how this played out in practice, as the one Cascade Jund deck I ran up against didn't bring it in against me (or at least never got to play it against me), and I probably wasn't really the "target audience" for that sideboard tech, anyway. Still, I thought it was an interesting choice, and a rare opportunity to see the "worst" planeswalker in action.

For the record, I think Sarkhan Vol probably wins "worst" at the moment.

The latest Decks of the Week has gone up, collecting PTQ top eight decklists from Boston, Edmonton, Phoenix, and Portland. There's some good material in there.

This time around, the tournaments were taken down by Merfolk, Faeries, Five-Color Control, and, well, Faeries.

Just in case you thought the deck was dead.

Click through to the extended entry for some quick notables and comments from each PTQ.

I was one position off a Sunday invite in the LCQ for this weekend's $5K at Superstars. Full tournament report and deck list are forthcoming, but not at 2:30am. Good luck to everyone in the top 32 tomorrow!

This weekend saw another Standard $5K at our excellent local game center, Superstars. If you're within striking range of the SF Bay Area, I recommend coming out to the next one. It's a lot of fun, and it's great seeing what everyone has decided to bring to the table. Plus, we have the best judges around.

I went to the Friday evening early-bird qualifier and last night's last-chance qualifier, going 0-2 in the first and 4-2 (and one place out of making it to today's top 32) in the second. This saw me running two variants on the Team Elspeth build I used in last week's $1K. I thought I'd tuned it for the first tournament, and then decided to really retune it for yesterday. I'm happy with how that turned out.

Click through to the extended entry for two deck lists, and some tournament reporting as well.

Did you know that a pulse is a legume crop harvested primarily for the dry grain?

I bet you didn't.

I've recently enjoyed playing variations on my green/white Team Elspeth list, which features a number of card-advantage-oriented green and white cards, and which does remarkably well except against token-oriented builds (which is a long way of saying it gets run over by Kithkin). That issue, along with concerns about the possibility of just losing to a resolved Baneslayer due to a lack of removal in the main deck, has had me considering maindecking mass removal (ugly) or splashing in other colors.

So far, the red splash isn't working out so well, but a black splash shows some promise.

Click through to the extended for a new deck list and some discussion of the deck.

When the cascade mechanic was revealed in full, I was initially most excited about Captured Sunlight. "Hey, it makes all your CMC 3 dudes into Loxodon Hierarchs!" Most of the cascade cards seemed unexciting, but that seemed good.

Except it's not.

Click through to the extended entry for more.

I just finished sleeving up the main sixty of the deck I'll be running at the last PTQ I'll be attending for the Austin PTQ season. If you're within range, you should come, too - it's this Saturday, August 22nd, at Superstars in San Jose, being run as always by our faithful TO, Conan Blackwell of Matchplay.

I mention the main sixty as I'm still not sure exactly what I want to do with a good third of my sideboard. This is atypical for me, but I'm giving serious thought to actually scoping the decks I see on the morning of the event and making my decision then. As Brad Nelson reminds us in his latest article, the metagame changes weekly, and recent results in PTQs and online suggest a possible upswing in Merfolk and Lark.

In that vein, I'd recommend being ready for both Faeries and Kithkin, as neither one ever really goes away, regardless of what people say or how disillusioned their pro champions have become from time to time. I, for one, have decided to tailor my deck so I'm not playing something that auto-folds to hobbits.

As a final bit of pimping for someone else's work, I'll point toward the latest from Conley Woods, where he discusses the percentage that can be gained from playing a well-designed unfamiliar deck. Although that's not why I play decks of my own design when I compete - I do it because for me, deck design is one of the great joys of this game - I certainly notice that when you aren't playing a familiar template, your opponents can be thrown seriously off their game.

Also, it's just kind of fun when they have to read your cards.

I'll have more to say following the PTQ. For now, I'm going to idly ponder potential matchups and try and pin down those final five cards.

Today I attended our last area PTQ of the Austin qualifier season. I brought a variation on a deck I've done reasonably well with lately, namely the "Team Elspeth" design. I updated it to try and pick up percentage in some of the unfavored matchups, but I think, in retrospect (and honestly, part way through round three today), that was a bad idea. Essentially, I reduced my overall likelihood of winning by being unwilling to straight-up lose the occasional match.

Click through to the extended entry for a deck list, a tournament report, and a revised deck list that attempts to embrace the concept of just accepting some losses.

Following my near-thing loss to Merfolk in round two of our most recent PTQ, a couple of people talked to me about the deck. I appreciated the complements on the coolness of the design, as well as on "having the balls to play your own deck" (but really, how fun is it if you don't?). After shocking them by explaining that the original build was G/W only, and the purpose of the black splash, one of them asked the very pertinent question. "Why not red?"

Click through to the extended entry for a little insight into what I tried with red, and why I eventually gave up on it for this design.

So, if you can't make it to the Bay Area to compete for a copy of From the Vault: Exiled and you're not actually going to be in Dallas this weekend, you can still Magic it up by watching feature matches and the top eight of the SCG Dallas $5K on ggslive.com.

If you haven't had a chance to check in with what Ray and Rashad are doing on ggslive, you should go over now, check out their Ustream channel, and watch the archived videos. They have Block, Standard, Legacy, and Vintage matches from Gencon, as well as some recent PTQ top eights.

Saturday! You can head to Superstars in San Jose to play for some From the Vault: Exiled, or you can watch the SCG Dallas $5K all day live:

Free TV : Ustream

This weekend Superstars ran five From the Vault: Exiled tournaments, with a tournament win in each yielding its eponymous product. This seemed like a neat way to give their customers a crack at a cheap copy of the set as well as a chance to play some reasonably competitive Standard. I knew I was going to make it to both Saturday tournaments, and I vacillated a bit between an updated version of the basic build I've been running and my take on the Blightning archetype...so I brought both.

It was a fun day of gaming that both validated my idea about how I needed to update the Elspeth build and taught me a valuable lesson about how to properly game a tournament.

Click through to the extended entry for my deck lists from the day, two tournament reports, and some thoughts about how to game the tournament as a whole.