The King is Dead

Long Live the King

This blog can now be found at:
http://rockpaperdynamite.wordpress.com/

Windows Live Messenger Invites

Could someone please help me out by letting me give them WLM beta invitations. Just reply with an email address that is both your passport and a valid working email that you can check.

Free speech or Life?

Just watching Hotel Rwanda at the moment.
It really puts a few universal rights under an interesting spot light. The root right that was first forgotten was that everyone is equal. When the Portuguese first came in and elevated one clan over the other and disturbed the natural economy between them it set in motion the terrible actions depicted.
But this is ancient history and hopefully wont be repeated
What has sparked my thoughts though is the radio station depicted in the film, it is used by the spiritual leaders to help incite violence. Early in the film all it is saying is that there need to be a shift in power and that the other group are worthless, does this mean we should ban any speech which goes against the basic principles we hold dear? I think yes.
But what are these basic principles? I hold dear:
Freedom of association
Freedom of religion
Personal security
Equality of all people (and their equal rights to the bounty of the world, what a pity communism doesn't work)
and such things, but you have a hard time granting them without letting people speak against them. I guess its a good thing I aren't in the position to try and change these things as I don't know the answer.

Azorious Deck

I've been thinking about this Azorious based deck for a while now, all I really needs is some dual lands, but I'm sure Dissension will have some other goodies for it.

Disruption:
4x Leyline of Singularity
3x Faiths Fetters
3x Confiscate (this is the slot I think is most likely to be replaced in Dissension, I'm hoping for a good UW permanent stealer)
3x Threads of Disloyalty
3x Pacifism
3x Spirit Link
3x Cage of Hands

Win Conditions:
4x Hunted Phantasm

Control:
4x Remand
4x Hinder
4x Remand

naturally some collection of land to let you cast this type of stuff.

This decks signature opening play is obviously opening hand Leyline with turn 3 Phantasm. The best late game play it can make is remand Fetters in response to the second copy of a bomb being played, your paying just 7WU to draw 2 cards, gain 4 life and nullify another one of their permanents. All this is trying to do is use leyline of Singularity to turn all of your 1 for 1 enchantment based removal spells turn into 2 for 1s.

So does anyone out there have any opinion of this deck?

New Look - Same Crapness

Changed the theme to the blue version because black was getting on my nerves.
Problem is that changing themes really doesn't get around the crud that is blogger. Why can't the default themes include:

• Post heading perma-link to article.

Ok actually that list was rather short, but its still annoying. Wonder how much longer till I move to rpd.cerberos.id.au and wordpress?

What am I trying to do?

I've been trying to wrestle with the question of how I'm going to create my faith community around Magic. This has been missing the point somewhat though: What am I going to create? For that matter am I going to create anything or just shape something?

I've been tasked with creating a missional team based around Magic. Kewl, I'll just go do that as soon as I know what a missional team is. (Have a glance at the NCCC website or at Signposts: Phil and Dans blog for some references on the church I'm apart of)
Careworks is probably the biggest missional team at Northern, that's a group of people who help out underprivileged and marginalised people in our wider community in practical ways (op shop, food bank, English conversation classes) and interact socially while doing it (a lot of the people working within Careworks are also its target market). So from that example I should gather a group of people who enjoy magic and start running lots of tournaments and events.
Their is two primary fruits of the Careworks at Northern though, the good works that it does in the community AND the connect congregation that meets for lunch on a Thursday. I don't see the value of just running lots of Magic events as the Melbourne Magic community is quite healthy already. There is a need for connecting with it from a Christian perspective though.

So should I try and create a congregation through the tried and true practice of starting with mission projects or by the much more post modern method of inhabiting the community and letting church happen?

Judge Test

Just letting all my faithful readers that I passed my level 1 judge test on the weekend.

Crappy Cards Suck

Couldn't find all the cards I needed for the white version of the rock above, so I had to:

-3 Mortify
+2 Faith's Fetters
+1 Last Gasp
-3 Birds
-4 Dark Confidant
+4 Civic Wayfinder
+3 Nezumi Graverobber

And the mana base was far from optimal without birds and only 7 relivant shock lands. So I managed to go a lousy 1-2 against the feild last night :(

I'm starting to think that the red option might be more aggressive, even if it has less ways to deal with a Glare of Subdual.

What Should the Rock Look Like?

There are so many options for a good rock deck these days. If your looking at an agressive version these are what I'd consider auto includes:

4x Birds of Paradise
4x Umezawa's Jitte
4x Hypnotic Specter
4x Dryad Sophisticate
4x Dark Confidant
4x Putrefy
4x Moldervine Cloak

Thats 28 slots that I consider non negotiable. These collection of cards gives you many very very strong turn three game states:
Bird + Hyppie = Hitting with Hyppie on turn 3 + relivant plays
Bird + Cloak = 3/4 flyer on turn 3 + relivant plays
Bird + Hyppie + Cloak = Hitting with a 5/5 Hyppie on turn 3
Bird + 2 Cloaks = Hitting with 6/7 bird on turn 3
Sophisticate + Cloak = Connecting with a 5/4 on turn 3

This is what a deck wants to do, the question is how to fill out the 2 non land slots, should you go with white?
4x Shreiking Grotesque
4x Mortify
4x Vitu Ghazi, City Tree

or with red:
4x Kird Ape
4x Savage Twister

The white option, has a strong late game, but forces you to play more shock lands as your running 4 copies of a colourless land. The red option has worse mana as you only have access to two shock lands.
I think the two options come down to which is better in this deck, Savage Twister or Mortify. Savage Twister is horrible for you if you haven't got a Moldervine Cloak in play, but then its completely nuts.

Should I manage to find something to cut for Sensei Diving Tops to help protect my life total from Bob? I think the risk of bob is acceptable, there is only 12 cards with a casting cost of 3, everything else is a lowly 2 or 1. I can also fry him if I must.

So thats the deck list I'll be trying to use at some standard tournaments in the next few weeks. (naturaly with some mana base costing way too much money)

Real Judging

I helped judge the Melbourne Prerelease this weekend just gone. It was lots of fun, I turned up later than requested on the Saturday morning due to the train I was meant to catch being canceled. Maybe not actually checking which venue we were using also excabated my tardiness but I was still there only 20 minutes late.

After getting handed a nice navy blue Guildpact prerelease shirt and a short briefing on how the day was going to be run and a few pointers on how to judge at a larger event I helped one of the experienced Melbourne judges, Wrobbie, register players for one of the first flights. After the first set of flights was running, Paari and I had to do the sign ups for the next flights (which ended up at around 70 players). Neither of us had all that much experience so we ended up being a little bit slow on signing them all up and got things underway not too much later than expected.

During deck construction it was decided that we needed to squeeze 5 games onto each pair of tables instead of just 2 per table. So after deck construction we had to move all the tables around and this caused some extra delay. After all of this everything went quiet well, with no further hickups.

After those flights had ended I played in the final flight of the day and went a miserable 1-2-1 (ID in the last round to get home earlier). This is my proof that Judging makes you a bad player, not the other way around.

Sunday I got to run the Two Headed Giant which was plenty of fun. But more about that later.

Gruul Themed Decks Are Easy To Build

Building Gruul themed decks is easy, take this list that i'm making up on the spot:

20x Creatures
4x Llanowar Elves
4x Wild Cantor
4x Scab-Clan Mauler
4x Giant Solifuge
4x Dryad Sophisticate


4x Enchantments
4x Moldervine Cloak

4x Artifacts
4x Umezama's Jitte

12x Spells
4x Pyroclasm
4x Savage Twister
4x Lightning Helix

20x Land
4x Stomping Ground
4x Sacred Foundry
4x Temple Garden
2x Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
4x Forest
2x Mountain

And your done, I'd like to find the room to put the Burning Tree Shaman in and probably replace the Cantors with Birds, but I'm thinking the deck doesn't realy need any mana accelerators at all.

Mark of Eviction + Nightmare Void

This pair of cards seams to be a fairly hellish combo for your opponents. Obviously the idea is to continually bounce your opponents creatures and force them to be discarded. Filling the deck with more discard would seam like a decent idea to try and deal with more troublesome permanents, and to give you something to force the discarding of when they didn't top deck a creature. Drain life for the win would probably be the play as well

Snow

Bloody snow. I have two major issues with the proliferation of snow right now:

• Its 30 odd Degrees out side so snow is not something that’s really on the books right now


• I shouldn’t be being forced to use MTGSalvation.com just so that I can find out when the release date for Guildpact is. (yes I know that the first expansion to a block comes out on the first Friday of February, but I like to be sure about things)

The silly snow effect on every page at wizards.com at the moment is bloody annoying. In Firefox it runs really really slowly, this is ok under Windows, but under Ubuntu it runs that slow that I can’t do anything (Windows box is a 1.3gig Duron, Ubuntu box is a 2500+ XP, so its not system dependant).

Holidays

Just letting you all know that the Blog will not be updated over the next few weeks till after christmas as I won't be playing any/much magic in the next few weeks.