I think I'm going to play white tonight- there seems to be a flood of articles on the various Delvers and I have no idea what the metagame at the store is right now. My Delver build is sort of "not really Finkle's" but I'm expecting a lot of mirror or hate anyway. I'm amused by this since I was the first person running Delvers at the store about a week before I saw my first article on it. ( This isn't because I'm all special or anything, it's just because I was trying to find something to help me since I didn't have snapcasters and they looked like strategic advantage)
I might modify my sideboard to use Darwin Kastle's I don't have the shrine's of loyal legions though.
While his strategy looks like fun if I'm not brewing on my own for learning purposes I really really would like to take a shot at running one of the successful UB Zombies builds that have been floating around. There is one problem with not running my current Delver Build though. In casual and teaching games I realized that my big problem was hesitant mulliganing and working on that is done best with a deck where I'm very secure in how it works. The other thing is that sideboarding works better for me with that Delver build and that's another skill I need to work on.
But I'm not going in attempting to place today. I'm really just checking out the current meta to figure out how to prep for the Avacyn Restored season. It seems like I've missed most of the Dark Ascension period other than a few drafts and the GP. Part of it is timing: Holidays, midterms and being involved in costuming for Hairspray on super-short notice ( Hey Drinne we have 47 cast members and 6 costume changes for each, oh and 3 weeks; You're coming over now right? Yes, yes I am.) But the other thing that I can't seem t shake is this, FNM became much less like "appointment viewing" and more like "eh, whatever if I'm free" when the PWP value went down. For me anyway, I'm curious about the LGS attendance records. Part of it of course is that when I draft I'm building skills AND getting cards no matter what. Part of it is that since I realized that too little sleep affects both my gameplay and my attitude as a competitor it wasn't worth straining to get to it with no guaranteed return. It's shabbat so even though I do go, I try not to write which means my strategy has to be stuff that I am not likely to need to take notes.
I've been thinking a lot about notetaking. There's a good reference about the new tournament rules here . Working with the symbol processing disorder and recognizing that the learning curve is too high for me to deal with board states that are predominantly Scars block ( the artwork is too homogenous for associative recall to help me evaluate which cards do which ridiculous combat tricks) I've been thinking about the idea of taking reminder process notes on MY OWN BOARDSTATE when I play trigger effects, just like I teach tech workers to develop process reminders for tactile learners. But FNM doesn't really help me with that it just kind of would add a layer of guilt for being there in the first place with more writing. So between the disincentives and the other commitments I think I've been avoiding FNM since it moved down to "just another low level event". I don't know if this is just a "me" issue and avoiding social encounters or if it's really just happenstance. I'm coming out of a bunch of commitments so I'm going to make more of an effort to get to some before the pre-releases so I can evaluate it.
Bottom line though is that I'm going in unprepped for the metagame. My LGS seems to be more influenced by decklists on Wizards DailyMTG than Starcity, and our high level players when they are there are usually testing out homebrews.
What I have been doing:
I learned how to play EDH with the Heavenly Inferno precon. I picked it because I would be the most comfortable with the color combinations and Serra and the original Fallen Angel were two of my aboslute favorite cards on my first time at the rodeo. I was able to play relatively well against my friend who is literally the mythical casual gamer I didn't believe existed.
Hmmn he needs a nickname for the site, as he is easily identifiable and therefore I would be. Almost any relevant nickname I give him might actually still let people know, so maybe I'm in the rare situation where I just use his given name? Erg. No then friends who do know him will know all his deck strategies if I keep writing here. Oh I've got it. Mr. Pointy. ( ahhh the sweet, sweet irony),
Ok Mr. Pointy has a real life runs a regular and profitable business and LOVES magic especially EDH. He didn't realize that I played and some of my Facebook geekery tipped him off. I have been avoiding Commander like the plauge, I'm not really fond of multiplayer because I feel like I don't want to mess with it until I have a basic mastery of the head to head rules. Of course I'd already compromised on two-headed giant and Mr. Pointy said if I'd play with him we could play commander in a head to head style. He and I had been trying to get together for hanging out purposes for a while. So this seemed like a perfect yes. Let me tell you he has a full office with shelves dedicated to Magic, a worktable with sorted stacks, every precon deck ever and accessories. He does not however, read any of the online articles or follow the protour at all.
So apparently according to Mr. Pointy I had chosen my pre-con wisely since it was the only one out of the box that made him nervous.
Newb Note: Quick things about Commander
- you start with 40 life
- you pick one card to be your commander and it hangs out in the commander zone
- you can cast if from the commander zone whenever you have the casting cost
- when it dies you put it back in the commander zone and it just costs one more to cast next time moving cumulatively.
- You can only have 1 of each card in your deck
- there are about 100 cards.
Play Magic as normal - Glory in your Timmyflavored Timmy, Johnny or Spikiness cause you do get to play BIG cool cards.
I like angels and demons. I always have. Heck I played In Nomine. ( I miss In Nomine . . .).
It did not suck.
Rules Thing I learned:
The Phyrexian Metamorph actually changes color at the base card level so that if you have to declare "protection from" you can't use "blue" if the PM changed int a red card. I still do not know for sure if this is only with the Phyrexian Metamorph or if it is true for all clone effect cards.
It overwrites on Metamorphing. Mr. Pointy also played an odd infinite life combo that I should have written about here as soon as I learned about it because now I've forgotten how it worked.
Magic/Life Balance
I've also been playing with someone who started playing about two months ago. So the cool thing about that is that I can teach her the stuff that flummoxed me and explain why it was so hard to find out and she can learn the game on her own knowing about the scattered data sources and inconsistencies. It's very sweet of her to agree to be a case study in addition to a new friend.
The changes to OP and my reaction to them also helped my regular playgroup and I sort of work out where magic fits in our friendships and lives (we like it, we don't want it to be ALL the things because we loved ALL the things we were before we all played Magic.) And so I'll be working more on learning EDH because I think it might work better for my circle of friends and they'll put up with my obsessing about things in OP and tournaments that they are interested in but don't care about. The most important thing is that any of us will be able to say to any other one of us that we'd like to do something other than Magic right now and we'll go pick something else to do that minute or later. This is another reason that I'm going to have to break down the tiny avoidance and anxiety issues for FNM. Standard is too time-consuming and requires a constant influx of cards and secondary market expenses. My friends who came in with me when I came back now have a healthy library of cards as a base, we've really not gotten a chance to work with the ones we've got "for fun" so if we just build decks and have fun we'll take a bunch of the obsession out of it.
And I'm cool with that and switching competitive gears and "mastery" gears as long as it doesn't get too spikey. But honestly I think we're all good. We all like pre-releases : ).
Ok so I'm spending all day just working on Magic. I'll check in on Mark Rosewater's Reddit AMA, I'll design a new visual learning aid for Drafts based on Melissa Del Torro's really useful article. I will avoid political news coverage, play some Duels of the Planeswalkers on Steam and head to FNM. I have no idea what will happen there, but I've put it here so I'm not gonna chicken out and stay home.
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