Hour of Devastation Prerelease 2017-07-08

Well, it's been over a week, so probably time to get some prerelease thoughts up if I'm ever going to do it.

For Hour of Devastation, I had my 3-year-old with me because the mama was out of town.  But I can't blame my poor results on watching him at the same time.  He did a good job keeping himself occupied for the most part.

My biggest exciting card was The Locust God, and I had a fair amount of green color fixing and good blue cards, so I made my primary deck blue-green with just a splash of red for the one god.  Prerelease is often a good time to play a slower deck that drops big bomby cards late, and I had plenty of those in UG.  Then I built a second deck with white-black centered around Bontu the Glorified and some zombie/swarm synergies.  Here are my A and B decks, and my leftover cards.

Deck A -- UrG fatties:

Deck B -- WB Zombies:

And the cards I didn't use:

The original build of Deck A didn't use Hour of Promise, but another player convinced me it was worth putting bad deserts in my deck in order to use it.  He was probably right, but it never actually came up.

Deck B was like some of my draft Zombies decks -- good curve but can have a hard time finding a way to win.  I never got Bontu, so that might have made a difference.  But in hindsight, I probably should have put in Approach of the Second Sun just to provide a win condition through stalls.  In one of my games, I chanced upon an unexpected combo:

Play Miasmic Mummy, discarding Steadfast Sentinel.  Opponent also discards a strong Eternalize creature (in this case it was better than mine).  Then I cast Disposal Mummy the following turn to remove the opponent's.  Not an amazing combo, but it can be done with all commons.

So how did the matches go?

Round 1 vs. J.
J almost always beats me.  This time he was playing 4 colors if I recall correctly, all but blue, or maybe just Abzan.  In our first game I had a hand with a Mountain and an Island, and I kept.  It didn't start great, as I spent my 2nd and 3rd turns cycling to try to get a forest.  I started to stabilize, but he played out the Crested Sunmare that makes indestructible 5/5 horse tokens and a Cartouche of Ambition so that he could gain life every turn to trigger the Sunmare.  I had the Locust God in hand but conceded without showing it.

Then in Game 2 I switched to Deck B on the play, thinking maybe I could get an aggressive curve-out.  He played his promo, Adorned Pouncer, and another creature.  I had a few things out too and we were trading hits.  I was holding a Disposal Mummy because I expected him to let the Pouncer die so he could eternalize it.  Well, lo and behold, he played Trial of Solidarity to pump his two creatures, then Mighty Leap to pump and fly the Pouncer, and it came over as a 5/4 double strike and I was just dead.  0-2.

Round 2 vs. R.
R was definitely playing 4 colors -- all but white.  I started with Deck A in Game 1, and I kept a hand with Locust God, a couple blue draw/removal spells, and lands that included Survivor's Encampment as a potential red source.  R played Hepatra, Vizier of Poisons on Turn 2, and she was able to attack but wasn't actually making snakes at first because I had no targets.  I played out a 2/2 drake eventually, and I was going to use it for the red mana the next turn, but then he played something that put a -1/-1 counter on it, and when he attacked with Hapatra I had to block or he would have killed it anyway with Hapatra's ability.  A turn or two later, I played Sifter Wurm, and my scry was 2 lands and a (2-drop) Naga Vitalist that would have done very little for me, so I took my chances on a blind reveal and sent all 3 to the bottom.  My reveal was a land, so I gained zero life.  On my end step, he cast Final Reward to exile the Wurm and I was again without blockers or any way to make my red mana.  I got a Traveler's Amulet, but messed up my land drop and wasn't able to play a Mountain and cast The Locust God.  Stuck with nothing, I conceded.

For the next game, my kid was starting to get antsy, so I pulled out the WB deck hoping again for a quick win.  The game got off to a good start, with the combo I showed above taking care of his Earthshaker Khenra.  I got down a Steward of Solidarity and started making warriors, but he found Hapatra and started making snakes, and soon the board was bloated and no one could attack.  This was where he played one of his two Mirage Mirrors and I discovered something amazing: Mirage Mirror doesn't stay exerted!  I even called a judge to make sure after he copied my Steward of Solidarity on my end step and then immediately untapped Mirage Mirror on his turn.  Exert says "An exerted creature won't untap during your next untap step."  Since the Mirage Mirror is no longer a creature at that point, it untaps as normal.  So basically, by having Mirror vs. my Steward, he was able to make Warriors twice as fast as me.  We drudged on a bit, and then suddenly he cast Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh, the ultimate stall-breaker.  I played another turn or two in case I drew something amazing (Cast Out would have been nice), but he was going to get to exile my entire board, so I gave up and headed out.  0-2.

So that was disappointing.  There were probably better ways to build my deck, and maybe I needed to be greedy like my opponents and go into 3-4 colors instead of making two decks.  Out of my unplayed cards, the two Obelisk Spiders seem really good.  But I also just wasn't getting the cards I needed at the time I needed them, and I probably would have been able to win a few games if I had kept playing.

For value, here are my rares and cards with potential Constructed interest and/or money value (the Act of Heroism is a foil):

Not horrible by any stretch.

Anyway, this was one of my worse prereleases, but I had a bunch of fun as always, and I was happy to find that the kid can keep himself occupied for a couple hours if I bring the right stuff and get a table to ourselves.

Thanks for reading, and I appreciate any comments!

Don't Ignore Maro!: Hour of Devastation Prerelease and Limited Primer

This is my "supplemental" primer for the Hour of Devastation prerelease and overall Limited format.

Many more experienced players have written great content already, and my intent is to supplement that by mentioning a few things that I feel have been overlooked.  Please, go and read the excellent articles by Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, Luis Scott-Vargas, and this nice compact one from Keith Capstick that was featured on the Daily Update.

Then tell me, have these guys been keeping up with Mark Rosewater's Making Magic articles?  I ask because I feel like they're not catching a major thematic point: Hour of Devastation is supposed to feel like a disaster movie.  I don't think WotC would print a bunch of big explosive cards if they didn't expect us to use them.

AKH-HOU has an unusually large number of board sweepers.  The designers want you to kill everything, and raise some zombies, then kill everything again.

Here are all the sweepers in the format, plus other cards that can feel like sweepers in the right situation:

Amonkhet

 Hour of Devastation

That's 14 cards I included, and I'm sure I left out some other 2-for-1's and cards that can cause mass discard.  Some of the above, like Nicol Bolas, Overwhelming Splendor and Torment of Hailfire, are very slow and will incentivize winning the game as quickly as you can, but most of these will punish you for playing a lot of creatures onto the board with no backup plan.  And there are so many different ones that even though they are mostly rare, you can expect to see sweepers fairly often in HOU Limited.

And that's where Eternalize comes in.  The creative team wants Nicol Bolas' army to rise, and in HOU Limited, you can have an advantage against the many sweepers if you are playing creatures that return from the grave.  Eternalize is super expensive at 4 - 7 mana to activate, but it curves out at or above the sweepers that you or your opponent might cast.

There is a lot of play around these cards, and there are obviously a number of ways to exile creatures or cards in the graveyard as well, but this is Bolas' set, and I think Bolas' strategy of destroy-and-bring-back-stronger will be important.

If you want to play the good guys in HOU Limited, you will want to tread carefully or use tactics that win fast, like Overcome, or cards that beat sweepers, like Leave to Chance.

One last little note about the disaster theme: In HOU there are even more ways to put -1/-1 counters on opposing creatures than before, so creatures with 1 toughness are extremely vulnerable.  Aggressive players should be very wary.  On the other end, I think 4 is a pretty good toughness to avoid some of the sweepers and removal (particularly against red), and 4/5 is a good set of stats because it matches up well against eternalized creatures.

Defeats

Another thing to consider for this prerelease is to build two decks to stonewall the series of cards depicting the defeat of the planeswalkers.  If you have a second deck that's playable, you can swap colors after you see a card like Liliana's Defeat or see the opponent doing a lot of sideboarding between games.  If the opponent doesn't catch on, they end up with useless spells in their deck.  Keep this in mind also if you plan to bring Defeats into your own deck.  The black, red, and white Defeats are the strongest ones, so I'd worry less about dodging the green and blue ones.

Alright, now lets all go have some fun!

Finding and Buying Magic Cards, and Standard Showdown 2017-07-01

Standard Showdown

So, first things first, I was reminded of a good lesson yesterday when I went to Standard Showdown at the local store: Sometimes it pays just to show up.  We only had 3 people, which wasn't enough to run SS, so the store employee just handed out the 4 prize packs and didn't even make us pay to enter (we rolled dice to see who would get 2 packs -- not me!).  So this was actually free:

The Fiery Temper is a foil, although it's not obvious from the photo.  Not super exciting, but a free planeswalker is never bad.  The best card someone opened was a foil Tireless Tracker.

I hung out and played a few games with one of the other guys who showed up.  My black Standard deck went 1-2 in a match against his homemade Jeskai Control.

Then I played my Modern Soulflayer deck against his mono-white aggressive Standard deck just for fun and testing, and went 1-2 again, losing when I didn't put good Soulflayers together and crushing in the one game that I did.

But I also wanted to post some pointers on buying cards for some friends who are trying to build their own decks.  So here's the as-brief-as-I-can guide to buying Magic cards for your own deck.

How to Find and Buy Magic Cards

Two important resources:

• Gatherer is the official Magic search engine.  Like many search engines, you want to be in the Advanced and not Simple if you want to narrow anything down in a useful way.
• TCGPlayer is an online store where a bunch of smaller/local sellers are aggregated.

Before we talk about singles, note that preconstructed decks are the easiest way you can get a functional Magic deck.  They're not (usually) a good investment for card value, but they are a great investment for getting started playing the game.  But with few exceptions (which tend to self-correct quickly), sealed products are never a better dollar value than buying individual cards if you know what cards you want.

Also, if you don't know a lot of cards, you might not even know what to search for.  Playing Magic with people, looking at other people's deck lists (people love sharing their deck lists, and you can find a lot just by searching the Internet), reading articles about the kinds of formats you like to play, and looking in the glass display case at your local store or in people's "trade binders" are all good ways to become familiar with what is out there that you might want.

Anyway, back to Gatherer.  If you're making any kind of theme deck, like for example a white-based Girl-Power deck, a good place to start is searching for general categories of cards that might fit.  A search for color includes white, subtype (creature type) includes angel brings up 129 results.  A search for color includes white, type includes legendary brings up a whopping 239 results (although unlike the angels, you can immediately exclude a lot of the hits).  Using additional filters like excluding unwanted colors or specifying CMC (combined mana cost -- the total numerical cost, not accounting for mana color) can improve your searches further.  Look at some of the cards you like or know, then use them as inspiration for additional searches.

One more note on Gatherer -- it always shows the most recent printing of a particular card by default (clicking on "printings" on the card page or the set symbols that appear in the search results can find other versions).  Generally, cards that have been printed with the "modern" frame will have cleaner, easier to understand, and more uniform text than cards that have only been printed with the old frame.  In all cases, the "official" text is the text that appears on the page next to the card (this is called the "Oracle text" and it is the actual text that Gatherer searches for, rather than what is written on the card, if you put in a text search).  The point being, playing with newer cards may result in less confusion.

Now that you've found some cards, you can cross reference them on TCGPlayer.  TCGPlayer does have its own advanced search that works like Gatherer, with the very big upside of being able to filter by price, but I've had difficulty getting the expected search results sometimes.

I have to give Mike credit for turning me on to TCGPlayer.  I used to use Troll and Toad for online singles purchases, but TCGPlayer is far better if you're buying cheap singles.  There are lots of other online sources, and of course local stores (although stores have so many cards buried in binders and boxes that many stores require you to make your purchase online for in-store pickup unless you're buying out of their glass display).

When you just start typing a card name in the TCGPlayer main search bar, it autofills and you can go directly to the card you want.  If it is a card that has been printed a lot, you get a results list that includes all the printings.  When you add a card to your cart, you can try to pick the cheapest one in the condition you want, but you can also optimize your cart later and have TCGPlayer do that work for you.  If you optimize into a "TCGPlayer Direct" package, the cards usually arrive almost as fast as Amazon Prime.  If you don't buy Direct, the order might take a week or two, or it might not.  There are advanced options you can choose when optimizing to make sure you get what you want (like if you prefer the sword-and-muscle Llanowar Elves over the albino wicker-head version, or vice versa).

A bit on prices:

There are a few different reasons that a card is expensive, but they all boil down to the same thing -- demand is greater than supply.  Some cards (especially certain older sets) just weren't printed in very high quantity, but usually newer cards are only expensive because they're popular for a certain format, including both competitive and casual formats.  Both Gatherer and TCGPlayer show rarity in their search filters and results, and you can also tell from looking at the set symbol on any card in the modern frame and some cards in the old frame -- black is common, silver is uncommon, gold is rare, and orange is mythic rare.

Prices range very roughly as follows:

Common:

• Unpopular or printed in huge quantity: under 10 cents
• Somewhat popular or printed in an older set only (in which case there are few good-condition copies because people played without sleeves, or their mom threw their cards in the trash after they moved out): 10 cents - $1
• Extremely popular - over $1

(Note that Llanowar Elves has been printed a billion times at common and is still 10 - 20 cents in its cheapest printings.  For a common, that shows that it's a good card and people use it.)

Uncommon:

• Unpopular: under 20 cents
• Somewhat popular or printed in an older set only: 20 cents - $2
• Extremely popular - over $2

Rare:

• Unpopular: under 50 cents
• Sometimes played or printed in an older set only: 50 cents - $1
• Played regularly: $1 to $5
• Extremely popular new cards and somewhat popular old cards - over $5

Mythic Rare:

• Unpopular: under $1
• Interesting to some players (either as a collector item, or for niche uses) but not competitive: $1 - $5
• Popular: $5 - $20
• Highly sought after - over $20

I have one last resource that's worth mentioning -- sites that let you track/build your own decks or collections.  I use MTGVault, as with the decks I linked at the beginning of this post, and Tappedout is another popular site.  I feel like MTGVault works better on a mobile phone.  You can make your own decks, share decks, and look at other people's decks on these sites.  MTGVault is also linked into data from some of the major online stores, so you can get a snapshot of the card prices.  You can even "draw" sample hands and mentally play out your first few turns to see how your deck feels.

Anyway, I hope that this is helpful.  Please feel free to comment!