Bu Suck!

Ok that idea sucked. Not only do all of the pieces, while they seam decent on their own, do all that much when not comboing. But they also never draw anywhere near early enough to lock the opponent down to no new cards for it to matter.

I think I need to do 2 things to this list to get it respectable, add more good cards, and more removal. Preferably both.

So how's this look?

4x Skull Collector
4x Aether Vial
2x Chittering Rats
4x Ravenous Rats
4x Distress
4x Nezumi Shortfang
3x Kiku's Whisper
4x Hideous Laughter
2x Rend Flesh
3x Sickening Shoal
2x Kokusho, the Evening Star

4x Tendo's Icebridge
4x Salt Marsh
4x Island
1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1x Shizo, Death's Storehouse
10x Swamp

Bu Lock?

Ok here's the list:
4x Skull Collector
2x Crystal Shard
4x Aether Vial
3x Fabricate
4x Chittering Rats
4x Ravenous Rats
4x Distress
4x Nezumi Shortfang
3x Kiku's Whisper

4x tendo's Icebridge
4x Salt Marsh
4x Island
1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1x Shizo, Death's Storehouse
10x Swamp

SB?

Perfect Combo Opening:
Turn 1: Swamp, Eather Vial
Turn 2: Vial counters = 1, Swamp, Nezumi Shortfang
Turn 3: Vial counters = 2, Swamp, Skull Collector, Vial in Ravenous Rats
Turn 4: Vial counters - 3 & bounce Ravenous Rats, Swamp, Ravenous Rats, Activate Shortfang, Vial in Chittering Rats, at appropriate time (ours or their turn)

opponent only ever sees 11 cards and we win on the back of damage from Stabwhisker the Odious (don't flip him in response to their draw step, only flip him when they fail to discard, making them discard the top card of their library makes them see a 12th card)

So is this any good? I have no idea, haven't even played it on MWS yet and it is a 3 card combo, but it does run at least 6 and as many as 8 copies of each combo piece. Common give me your thourghts, I know no-one is reading but I'll keep pretending someone's out there.

Saviors must be blasphemy

God must have been unhappy with me looking towards other saviors this weekend, as I went abysmally at the pre-release. Sure I averaged 4 packs of prizes per flight I entered which implies that I went 2-2 in each, but really I went 2-5 +bye across the 2 individual flights and 2-2 +bye in the team flight (as did my team). I managed to pickup 4 packs in each of the individual flights due to prize sharing 2 of the rounds that I lost.

I definitely have to blame my poor deck building in each of the flights for my poor performance. I was trying to push for what made my decks powerful at the Betrayers pre-release (where I went 13-3, with 2 of the losses being against Jittes and the third being when I was playing a silly deck, think Genju of the Realm on turn 4 silly, it did happen). With betrayers I believe what made my decks powerful was the amount of spirit/arcane interations that I managed to fit into a single deck. With Saviors I was consistantly loosing to decks that didn't have as much synergy as mine, but they just had more powerful cards.

Once playing around with things at home I found a few different color combinations that I could have used that would have given me more powerful decks by ignoreing the synergies (or at least the blatant ones that Wizards hands out to scrubs) and just using the most powerful cards I had available.

My question is now though: Was I lucky at the Betrayers pre-release and just managed to avoid the real decks in most of the rounds, or was Betrayers significantly different to Saviors in what qualities a deck should have? Thing is I wont be able to see any of the pros view on this as Champions + Saviors is not a 'real' format :(

Mmmm Leather

Just brought my self a nice new keyboard and mouse combo. A lovely MS wireless ergonomic setup. With lovely leather palm rest on the keyboard. I do like the feeling of leather. Its by far the nicest keyboard and mouse I've ever used, although the 2D mouse wheel feels rather funny and Linux doesn't seam to play nice with the second wheel axis.

So how many of you apparently non-existent readers have ever brought a computer product just because the leather felt so good?

Rumor Season

I really love these three months of the year, nothing beats trying to determine if a card is real or not. This rumor season will be the first one where I'm going to be looking at cards and thinking, which deck will that improve for regionals. I'm sure this will just make me waste even more time than usual on Magic.

Regionals

I've been contemplating my options for regionals. There seams to be several good options, namely: MUC; BG(Deathcloud); TnN and RG beats all seam like valid options. I enjoyed playing UG control at states and found it to have very solid matchups against everything except afinity (I can't build a decent sideboard), but I now feel that MUC is just strictly better with Vedalken Shackles.

BG control decks, probably including Deathclouds and Eather Vials, makes for very fun games, but really does roll over to a decent blue based control deck, and I hear there rather popular atm.

TnN is very solid, but it just doesn't come across as a fun deck to play, I just feel better about playing a game where I get to play the asshole (control) instead of cheating. The problem for me is what is the best way to deal with TnN when playing MUC? A green splash for Plow Under? Or maybe splash red for Stone Rain + Grab the Reins? But doesn't that mean I'd be better of playing a red green deck with a good control matchup game 1 and a slight chance against TnN in game 1 but an insane sideboard for it game 2/3?

Then again maybe I shouldn't make a habit of posts with 10,000 questions?

Wooo

This is my brand spanking new blog, I'll detail here my experiences trying to find the next piece of dynamite for Magic. I by no means try to think of my self as being any good, this is just being setup to make me feel more important