Nice Guys Finish Last

Played in the Two Headed Giant event at our (Melbourne) prerelease yesterday. It was a lot of fun, but was a bit tedious playing with someone as green as my team mate (second time playing magic ever). First round we lost with about 3 or 4 minutes on the clock. Second round we drew during extra turns. Third round we won during turn 4 of extra time. Round 4 we managed to win in around 30 minutes. Fifth round we lost in like 20 minutes. Pretty slow for as far as I'm concerned.

In the first game we won though their occurred a situation where it could be aledged that I was a bit of an asshole. Our opponent made a move to react to our declaration of attacker, so I stopped them and asked were they doing this during the declare blockers step, they replied "Yes" and proceeded to cast Flash Conscription and try and block with the creature they stole. When I informed them that it was too late to block they were quiet indigent. I was right it was too late to block:

309.1. As the declare blockers step begins, the defending player declares blockers

Was I too harsh? Should I have given them the chance to do things as they intended? I don't think so as they had gained more information that they should have had at the point at which they meant to cast Flash Conscription and the misplay was done due to a ignorance of the rules, not sloppiness. Then as the petty player that I am, I wouldn't let them take it back as he relay annoys me (half the reason that I draft at a particular store is so I can beat him, the other half is the easy pickings for rares I need)

Super Happy Fun Set

FWI: Ravnica: City of Guilds is realy fun!

To Jitte or to Not?

Jitte (Umezawa's naturally) is one of the defining cards of block constructed and looks likely to rule Standard for the next year. Its ubiquitous status in most decks makes all creature based decks run it, and most of them then find its important to run Manriki-Gusari to try and gain Jitte advantage. Jitte advantage has been named as the sole reason that some decks run Godo, so other than the deck warping effect that Jitte is having (which is usually reason enough to ban it) how does one get ahead in the Jitte race?
I've been thinking that having a Jitte on the table does usually decide who wins the game, which ever player has an active one the longest should win. But when looking at this list on StarCityGames.com:

Plant Zombie Death Squad
--22 Land--
6 Forest
6 Swamp
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Llanowar Wastes
2 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb

--12 Spells--
4 Umezawa's Jitte
4 Manriki-Gusari
4 Putrefy

--26 Creatures--
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Elves of Deep Shadow
3 Nezumi Graverobber
4 Hypnotic Specter
4 Shambling Shell
3 Isao, Enlightened Bushi
4 Grave-Shell Scarab

Original Article (Premium)

I started thinking that this deck doesn't really need a Jitte on the table to win, it just needs to guarantee that the opponent never has one active. This deck is probably about as efficient at that as any deck could hope to be. It has 12 different cards that can kill Jittes and all of them come online by turn 3 (turn 1, forest->mana elf; turn 2, swamp->Manriki-Gusari + equip or Putrefy; turn 3, tap mana elf to kill Jitte or Manriki-Gusari).
This just has me thinking that 12 ways of killing Jittes, even when all three are useful when not killing Jittes is excessive. So after I put this deck together and have lots of fun with it, I'm sure that I'm going to remove a few of the Jittes and put in something to help it cope in some matchups. Why would I remove the Jittes? Well compared to Manriki-Gusari it only kills 1 Jitte, not every Jittes that the opponent ever tries to play. Compared to Putrefy it is more situational, Putrefy is never a dead draw, it will always disrupt the opponent and make a difference on the game, Jitte doesn't do all that much against Hondens.dec and other random silly things (other than add 4 power to the board on turn 4+)
So when you see me running less than 4 Jittes in my B/G deck (I will not call it the rock, more likely paper or dynamite), its not because I don't like to run 4 copies of a legend, its because I think their less useful at what they do than other cards.

Prerelease This Weekend

I'm only planning on playing in 3 events this year, as I've started to find the team event is much too fun to miss. Also I'm pretty sure I've worked out how to go about building decks in Ravnica sealed Two Headed Giant: one deck is B/U based and the other is W/R based, and green gets added to which ever deck is weaker.
This seams to be fairly obvious with the way the guilds are arranged:
It's quiet likely I think that both decks will actually have some green in them. What will be more interesting will be Ravnica sealed with all 3 sets, then it will be much harder to have a plan going into the event I'm sure.

Spoiler is Full

/me does happy dance

Some of you may have noted that MTGSalvation.com has finished the Ravnica:CoG spoiler. One of the hottest rares in the set was spoiled in the last rush of information:

Moonlight Bargain 2BB
Instant (R)
Look at the top five cards of your library. For each card, put that card into your graveyard unless you pay 2 life. Then put the rest into your hand.

Its the black Fact or Fiction, i mean it digs 5 cards deep for just 4 mana. But will be better in combo decks than FoF as it garantees you the 2 cards you need. Also its the only decent instant card draw in type2 at the moment!!!

Spoiler Nearly Full

Just reminding people that MTGSalvation.com's Ravnica spoiler is nearing completion and is very good reading now.

With some of the cards that have shown up on the spoiler I've made a few untested changes to BF.dec I've added 4 of these beasties:

Trophy Hunter - 2G
Creature - Human Archer (U)
1G: Trophy Hunter deals 1 damage to target creature with flying.
Whenever a creature with flying dealt damage by Trophy Hunter this turn is put into a graveyard, put a +1/+1 counter on Trophy Hunter.
2/3

He's replaced the Gnarled Masses for two reasons. Firstly he's easier to cast with the single G in the cost and he doubles as an answer to Hunted Trolls Flyers. Increasing the number of creatures with power

Fist of Ironwood - 1G
Enchantment - Aura (C)
Enchant Creature
When Fist of Ironwood comes into play, put 2 1/1 green saproling creature tokens into play.
Enchanted creature has trample

Just trying out 2 of them to see how they go. With the increased numbers of ways to deal with the tokens I give my opponents I decided that I could cut Wildfires, which has always seamed sub par in play testing. So I replaced the with the new Wall of Blossoms: Carven Caryatid, which you should all know by now since it showed up on MTG.com. I have a sneaking suspicion that this little dynamo is going to end up as a 4 of in nearly every heavy green deck.

BF.dec Isn't Bad

Broken Fatties.dec isn't all that bad, I pulled it out last night against the guys a LURG (LaTrobe University Roleplay Group) and it surprised me. First I played it against my pre-saviors White Weenie Legends block deck. It went something like 2-2 with both decks having reasonably average draws, no mana screw or flood for either deck. Then I played it in 3 4 player games. It dominated. Completely, in games 2 and 3 there was some significant gunning for my deck but it pulled through.

admittedly this testing in the 4 player games was sub par as the guy piloting my WWL deck was discarding Jitte as he couldn't remember by verbal description of what it does (proxies due to friend having borrowed them at nationals and not having given them back yet), this can be excused because he's only just coming back to the game after several years away. The next player played several different decks in the games, but they featured such things as Farewell to Arms and Teferi's Puzzle Box, so we could call his decks 'strictly casual' to be friendly. The fourth player was playing what I'd call 'good casual' decks, his deck that I like playing with most is a pile of CITP triggering creatures with a 5 colour base, so lots of invasion kicker creatures and such with 1 set of crystal shards

All in all though the deck played out very well, I might exchange the numbers of O-Naginatas and Loxodon Warhammers, but that might just be greedy, also wondering if the Wildfires are needed or not.

Tini Tiny

Why does Wizards of the Coast insist on only realising their desktop images in 1280*960? Don't they realise that their target audience (computer using geeks who play magic) show that many of their users are likely to want images at greater resolutions?

So ok, maybe huge images might take up too much of WotC's bandwidth, so why not use some peer to peer serving of it? BitTorrent clients are not all that hard to understand and the BitTorrent model of file distribution works very well when dealing with relatively small images (people are likely to seed the file for several times how long it took them to download it, mainly as it will take nearly no time to download). Even if WotC ran the BT tracker and seeder on the server(s) that they current web serve from I'm sure it would use up less bandwidth than the desktops currently consume even if they started only providing the 800*600 image via http and only put up a 2048*1536 png image (commonly ~4meg) on BT. Then everyone (well the 0.001% of people who have screens that can display resolutions greater than 2048*1536 in a meaningful way, will still complain, but they'll be better off than they are now) will be able to get the image in a timely manner and at much higher quality than before (a png image at that resolution contains much much more data than a jpeg at 1280*960).

Please please give me some of this fantastic art that is now being produced for magic cards at meaningful resolutions!

Make Me Money

Just added some adds to this site, now I have a non-zero chance of making some money out of all this time I waste writing these messages to no one.