Five With Flores

Concerning:

I finished Nationals this year with five losses.

One match — the first match of the tournament — I punted. I was up a game against Jund after the habitual multiple Spreading Seas opener, plus in the second game my opponent stalled on three for a couple of turns. For some reason I Mana Leaked his second Putrid Leech, but whatever.

Spreading Seas

He stalled on Forest, Swamp, and Dragonskull Summit. I drew Spreading Seas and plopped both it, and my Pyromancer Ascension onto the ‘field (it’s not like I had a Mana Leak to defend the Ascension any longer).

The problem?

I put the Spreading Seas on his Dragonskull Summit.

Ooh, that’s a nonbasic! Ooh!

As soon as I did it — playing too quickly, per usual — I realized I had lost the game. If I had simply played the Spreading Seas on his Forest, I would have been able to power up my Ascension and win over the next two turns. Instead, dead.

So I had five losses at the end of the tournament. That first round was a punt if ever there was one.

The disappointing part of the tournament was going 2-1 / 2-1 in my two M11 drafts. I put in the work on MTGO and simply expected to win both of my drafts. My first draft was a bit soft, but I played my heart out, winning with a mulligan to four against an opponent with five Lightning Bolts in his deck. Unfortunately I lost consecutive games to Overwhelming Stampede in a different pairing (after winning the first, per usual).

My second draft was the worst. I drafted literally the best M11 deck I had ever drafted… Birds, Elves, Merfolk Sovereign, three Scroll Thieves (that is a combo by the way), a ton of Foresees (eight-see you might even say), a ton of Counterspells, great curve, great high end starting with Obstinate Baloth. So playing for the 3-0 I won the first game (see any pattern here?), I kept Island, Forest, Birds of Paradise, and Crystal Ball. I mean who loses to stalling with a second turn Crystal Ball?

I in fact stalled on two until turn five. My opponent’s draw was just too fast. His deck was much weaker than mine (save a lone Mind Control), but he got out his small White creatures and had at least a pair of Pacifisms. He beat me in the third game with a topdecked Pacifism, allowing him to force in the last point when I was drawing 2+ a turn with Scroll Thief, again with Crystal Ball online.

I lost a Constructed match on Day Two, so it’s not like winning that second draft would have guaranteed me Top 8… But I know that at the time, drafting as well as I did, that it felt pretty terrible to lose to stalling on mana with a second turn Crystal Ball.

How many [more] Top 8s might you have if you could finish this sentence… “I would have made Top 8 if…”

How about “if I hit my third land drop”?

I can point to countless tournaments over the course of my life where I would have made Top 8 if I just hit my third land drop.

Can you imagine having a superpower of always hitting your third land drop? Wouldn’t you win so much more? It’s almost obvious that you would.

I never thought about it like this before.

I think that’s why we can’t vote for cheaters.

Imagine some cheater with a ton of Pro Tour Top 8s. A ton of Grand Prix Top 8s. How many of them might he not have if he didn’t have the superpower of hitting his third land drop 100% of the time [or you can replace this with whatever superpower he has]?

What if his opponents are just a tiny bit development shy, like Ryan Fuller always bragged his opponents would be?

What if his opponents don’t have quite enough time to finish a round, due to clock management shenanigans?

Do you think his number of Top 8s might be a hair inflated? Isn’t it willful ignorance, then, to vote for him?

I am not one, usually, to succumb to peer pressure in any context. Advertising, yes (“anything sexy, glossy, well designed, or yummy” according to my wife); but peer pressure, no.

But in this case I decided to fold.

A good number of good men have all pushed the same way, and I decided to revise my 2010 Hall of Fame ballot. I am going to fall back on the Brian David-Marshall rule of not voting for a player with a superpower (aka “a suspension”), at least not first class. While I still admire Saito as a deck designer, to be honest, I was only aware of the [stupid] bribery offense and not his savage attempt to get another player a cheap game loss, even if it was the better part of a decade ago.

Anyway, like Tom Martell says (“Hi Mrs Martell!”)… “Columbus wasn’t nine years ago.”

My pulling my one vote probably won’t affect the outcome of whether or not Saito gets into the Hall of Fame or not this year… And like I said the first time around, he has — resurgently shady reputation or no — proved himself more-or-less both the best player and the best deck designer the past couple of years; but I am still moving my last vote to Anton Jonsson.

Officially revised ballot:

Anton Jonsson
Brian Kibler
Gabriel Nassif
Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Chris Pikula

LOVE
MIKE

PS: You know you want it –

“I can’t believe that is the real cover.”
–Chris Pikula

So I got my 2010 Magic Pro Tour Selection Committee Hall of Fame ballot today.

In case you guys haven’t been reading for that long, the first ever post on this blog was my 2008 Hall of Fame ballot; way back on October 6, 2008. You can check that action out here (and by “here” I mean, like, this awesome blog).

Anyway there are a bunch of people eligible for Hall of Fame this year; I am not going to list them all. Instead I am just going to run out my gut-pulls:

Marco Blume
William Jensen
Scott Johns
Anton Jonsson
Brian Kibler
Katsuhiro Mori
Gabriel Nassif
Daniel O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Chris Pikula
Carlos Romao
Tomoharu Saito

I have voted for more than one of these players in the past.

They are all deserving misers but a man gets only five Hall of Fame ballot votes. Briefly…

Marco Blume
I always chuckle when I read Marco’s name. I wrote an article on Ponza ~11 years ago which was viciously plagiarized by The Pojo. You can still read “their” article, which has “Maro” Blume credited with a German Ponza deck, a misspelling I made all those many years ago, surviving still on “theirs”.

[LOL! I hadn't read the 2008 ballot before writing this, and didn't realize that I had just re-bought my own line from two years ago.]

William Jensen
Billy “Baby Huey” Jensen has a better resume than a fair number of the people already in the Hall of Fame. It’s basically silly he hasn’t been inducted yet. I’ve learned a lot from him.

Scott Johns
Ditto on William Jensen. Scott is a Pro Tour winner with five Top 8s and years of service to the community.

Anton Jonsson
To be honest I didn’t have the Limited master on my original short list but when i sorted the 2010 candidate pool and saw how many Top 8s he had, it seemed negligent not to consider him. Unfortunately I have little frame of reference on Anton’s game, but he comes very highly recommended by friends like Brian David-Marshall and Teddy Card Game.

Brian Kibler
I had already decided to vote for my old Underground and Team Red Bull teammate the Dragonmaster last year. Then he went and won a Pro Tour and Grand Prix and so on. Kibs is going to be a landslide this year and I plan to jump on.

Katsuhiro Mori
A few weeks ago I had this conversation with Zvi Mowshowitz:

Me: What are the chances someone other than Katsuhiro Mori has the MTGO nickname “Katsuhiro Mori”?
Zvi: Pretty low, why?
Me: Because I just bashed him in a queue, but I kind of don’t believe it was really him.
Zvi: No?
Me: He was playing Mono-Red.
Zvi: What were you playing?
Me: Eldrazi of course. Can’t lose; I mulled to five Game One and 2-0′d him anyway.
Zvi: Nah couldn’t have been him, but weird MTGO name.

Mono-Red? Nah, couldn’t have been him.

Katsu is super fun to play against, for fun at least (I have never played him in a tournament). He once beat me in same-deck of Pierre Canali’s U/R Wafo-Tapa deck. He was super tricky, which is about par for the course for him.

Gabriel Nassif
Hat is basically everyone’s hero (mine included). Neither Jon nor Kai (nor Bob, nor Dirk) got unanimous inductions, so I greatly doubt Nassif will. But he’s certainly got This Girl’s vote.

Daniel O’Mahoney-Schwartz
It was just Danny OMS’s birthday! Happy birthday Danny OMS! Katherine and the kids and I are going to Shake Shack with him this weekend. Dan is a good friend and I hang out with him pretty much every week. However My annual OMS brother vote is going to…

Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Should have voted him in first class. My bad.

Chris Pikula
Ditto on Chris.

Carlos Romao
There are few Constructed players I admire as much as Carlos. The Psychatog master just added a notch to his already much-perforated belt with a Planeswalker Top 8 that helped cement little Jace as a pre-emptive Staple in Standard.

Tomoharu Saito
Not only did his just win another big tournament, but he’s basically the best deck designer in the world.

This year I decided to do something different moving from the short list to the shorter list. I am just going to run all the automatic votes and see how many slots I have left over.

As I am not a buffoon I am obviously voting for Nassif, Saito, and Kibler; master, master, and DragonMaster. I think Nassif is as worthy a unanimous ballot-gatherer as ever drew breath. Saito has been around the best player in the world for some years if not the clear best. I wouldn’t have half so much glory as a deck designer if he hadn’t helped Andre Coimbra in the Extended portion of Worlds; so mise! Like I said, I was going to vote for Kibler even before he won that Pro Tour and Grand Prix because in order for the American block to start getting our O’Mahoney-Schwartz brothers and Pikulas into the Hall of Fame we have to stop fracturing our votes. That means getting our deserving boys off the ballot and into the Hall of Fame so that we can make more room for our, you know, additional deserving boys. That starts with Kibler. Congratulations old friend. The enemy’s gate is down!

With two votes left, that makes for a wonderfully convenient number of openings for SteveO and Chris.

Final ballot:

Brian Kibler
Gabriel Nassif
Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Chris Pikula
Tomoharu Saito

Much love, all around.

LOVE
MIKE

Concerning:

I am really supposed to be working on this week’s Top Decks right now, which includes some Extended analysis as we approach the 2009 World Championships… But that led me to some personal Extended exploration that I thought I would share with my faithful blog readers.

Of course, like any fan of the game, I went bananas over the Ben Rubin / Brian Kibler Punishing Fire “Zoo” deck that won Pro Tour Austin. Just a great deck, and the bazillionth implementation of the collaboration of that wing of the Underground that has produced, well, the Sickest Ever deck of all time, among others. Their Naya-based Punishing Fire Zoo deck was of course reminiscent of Tomoharu Saito’s exciting finish to last year’s Extended Grand Prix tournaments, but involving bigger thinking.

I often write about how the best deck designers are so successful by killing their darlings… You know, how Dan Paskins went Shrapnel Blast in his straight Red Goblin deck, or how the patron saint of Red Decks, Tsuyoshi Fujita, cut Goblin Piledriver for Goblin Goon… Really not-obvious stuff that distinguishes the designer, differentiates him from the mean, and proves how much more effective his design is than the default.

For Reference: Rubin Zoo

4 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Lightning Helix
3 Qasali Pridemage

3 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Wild Nacatl

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Punishing Fire

3 Baneslayer Angel
1 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
4 Path to Exile

4 Arid Mesa
1 Forest
1 Ghost Quarter
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
2 Marsh Flats
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
2 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
2 Treetop Village

sb:
4 Meddling Mage
3 Ancient Grudge
3 Blood Moon
1 Kataki, War’s Wage
3 Ghost Quarter
1 Hallowed Fountain

In this case the big thinking looks to be the interaction between Punishing Fire and Grove of the Burnwillows.

Punishing Fire

Grove of the Burnwillows

This two card combination is strong on its face; it is essentially a one damage net for three mana, and inexorable over a long game. You can give the opponent a life per turn but wipe away his ways to win (for example, your opponent is playing Faeries and has nothing bigger than a 3/1)… You can’t really be stopped over a long game without graveyard removal

Go back and read what I wrote. Not “is” but “looks to be” … Punishing Fire + Grove of the Burnwillows is among the most powerful effects in the Rubin Zoo deck, but I feel like the really big innovation was the inclusion of Baneslayer Angel in the strategy. It might not seem brave… But playing a five drop in a Zoo deck is anything but obvious for Extended. After all, this is a format where some players went Steppe Lynx and many thought Woolly Thoctar too expensive to play!

This post is really about Punishing Fire, though, not the Baneslayer Angel end of the Rubin Zoo deck.

I was watching The Magic Show, and Brian said something that really hooked me. The Punishing Fire combination is compelling on its face, sure, but the DragonMaster created an analogy to Cursed Scroll that got the wheels turning.

Cursed Scroll is a card that I have won many tournaments with (though primarily in Black)… I was a huge proponent of Red Decks for Extended a few years back… So this opportunity seemed like a decent window to revisit the strategy.

To be fair Red never really went away. We have just exchanged it for The Lightning Bolt Deck in recent years. The mighty Saito himself played a version of the Lightning Bolt deck, albeit featuring Goblin Guide over Spark Elemental. I am suspicious of a Goblin Guide in general, but it seems particularly out of place in an Extended Red deck. The advantage of the Lightning Bolt Deck over Naya Burn, Naya Zoo, or Rubin Zoo (if the Lightning Bolt Deck can be said to have one) is its ability to ignore creature removal. All of the creatures come with an expriration date (Spark Elemental, Keldon Marauders), or can evaporate at will (Mogg Fanatic); this really makes Threads of Disloyalty or in particular Path to Exile much less attractive to play. So in short, I like Goblin Guide even less than usual in the Extended Lightning Bolt Deck.

My initial design came much more closely to an update to the traditional Red Deck Wins model, while still owing allegiance to the Lightning Bolt Deck:

Punishing Fire RDW v.1.0

2 Pithing Needle

2 Elemental Appeal
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Keldon Marauders
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Magma Jet
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Punishing Fire
4 Rift Bolt
4 Shrapnel Blast

2 Arid Mesa
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Great Furnace
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
6 Mountain
3 Scalding Tarn
1 Stomping Ground

sb:
1 Pithing Needle
2 Tormod’s Crypt
3 Ravenous Trap
4 Ancient Grudge
2 Lash Out
3 Threaten

Somewhat surprisingly, this deck has more than held its own in Extended practice. I’ve actually had more problems with Standard-legal cards like Bloodbraid Elf (card advantage) and Knight of the Reliquary (sheer size) than the fast and powerful Extended strategies.

I haven’t lost to any Dredge-oriented decks yet (though one embarassing match I got my opponent to 1 in Game One right before being locked out by the Shield of Emeria); I won Game Three with a well-placed Threaten on a Dark Depths token (apparently he was hybridizing or sideboarding Vampire Hexmage… I smoked him with my sideboard graveyard removal in Game Two).

The most rewarding matchup was against a Cascade-Restore Balance deck. I won 2-1, stealing the first and winning the third outright. In the first I was dead in two to a Phyrexian Totem (he had played two if not three copies of Restore Balance in the first)… then I topdecked Pithing Needle to buy me the three turns I needed to play Rift Bolt and Shrapnel Blast (thanks for all the help, Pithing Needle!). In the third I just played to empty my hand, which made Restore Balance much less fun for him. Burn seems very good against that strategy.

Elemental Appeal was of course my Firecat, but it is a bit awkward with Blinkmoth Nexus… I decided my sacrifice lands weren’t doing enough as I wasn’t playing with Plated Geopede, and I could either run Ancient Grudge just off of Grove of the Burnwillows or not at all. Threaten was looking more and more attractive main deck, anyway.

Here is my second version:

Punishing Fire RDW v.1.1

2 Pithing Needle

4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Keldon Marauders
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Magma Jet
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Punishing Fire
4 Rift Bolt
4 Shrapnel Blast
2 Threaten

4 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Great Furnace
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
12 Snow-covered Mountain

sb:
1 Pithing Needle
2 Tormod’s Crypt
3 Ravenous Trap
4 Ancient Grudge *
4 Lash Out
1 Threaten

* Provisional… Could be a Shattering Spree or some other awesome card, like Isochron Scepter.

I was very surprised at how effecrive these decks have proved so far.

The question, really, is whether they are worth exploring since we know we can just play Rubin Zoo, which has not just the most powerful combination in this deck, but also a top end that includes Baneslayer Angel (and a bottom of the curve that includes Tarmogoyf). I talked to Ben the week after the Pro Tour, and he pointed out that unlike many other Extended formats, in the current one, his Zoo deck is actually composed of many of the most powerful cards! … That is a hard argument for a knowledgeable Magician to argue away.

That said, the combo-like double Shrapnel Blast draw might be enough to make this a viable option. We’ll just have to wait and see… and draw burn spells.

LOVE
MIKE

Currently Reading: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes