Five With Flores

I am going to be getting on a plane in about two days and going down to relatively sunny Orlando, Florida for almost two weeks. I am taking the kiddies to Disney World and also visiting with family over the Christmas holiday.

Chances of playing much Magic while I am gone are next to nada, but there is something I have been wanting to post for a couple of weeks.

Sharp readers probably recall I posted a few weeks back that I was re-reading The Hobbit. Boy is that book superb!

I had read The Hobbit previously, of course, but I remember not liking it that much (I liked The Lord of the Rings on first read, but The Silmarillion I actively disliked on first reading but loved on subsequent reading). Anyway, for some reason if you re-read The Hobbit at 33 it goes very quickly… I read it in a matter of hours and loved every second.

Now the reason I got back into all the JRR stuff is that I was actually telling Bella the story of The Lord of the Rings on a train ride home one day and she was completely captivated. This got Katherine and me to pull out the Peter Jackson DVDs and start the reels turning, but of course Bella (at five) is too young for the good stuff.

But what about the also-good stuff?

While I didn’t have a really solid memory of The Hobbit the book before re-reading this time around, I have had for as long as I can remember (before kindergarten, certainly) a very specific memory of The Hobbit the story. And that picture comes from the Rankin/Bass version from my childhood.

If you haven’t seen the Rankin/Bass version, you’re in for a treat! My mom still sings me songs from it, and it has been about 30 years since we first saw it together, when I was younger than Bella.

Because this is 2009 — almost 2010 — you can find basically anything on YouTube… Including the entire Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit… I’m embedding all of it below. If you have about 90 minutes and a hankering for a pocket full of joy, I suggest you bust out some microwave popcorn and enjoy the show.

I was medium terrified of the villainst in this version when I was in the single digits, and thirty-ish years later, I still find even Elrond creepy. The animation doesn’t look “modern” but it is still quite nice to look at… I still enjoy it, and I think they did a great job with the characters; in particular Gandalf, who is played distinctively by John Huston.

For what it’s worth, Bella absolutely loved it.

LOVE
MIKE

I made a video about B/G Elves in Standard.

It seemed like it was time! All four qualifying players from last week’s LCQ * were playing B/G Elves variants, so it seems like the deck is the real deal [again].

At first I didn’t believe that Gabe Carlton-Barnes played Elves (if you know Gabe he is much more likely to play Faeries, Fog, or even Wizards)… I haven’t talked to Gabe yet but his blood runs Blue. So if he qualified with Elves, it is probably worth the look-see.

This is the deck Gabe used to qualify (and the deck we featured in this video):

1 Nameless Inversion
3 Profane Command
4 Thoughtseize

4 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Putrid Leech

3 Chameleon Colossus
4 Civic Wayfinder
2 Garruk Wildspeaker
4 Imperious Perfect
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Wren’s Run Vanquisher

3 Forest
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
4 Llanowar Wastes
4 Mutavault
2 Swamp
4 Treetop Village
2 Twilight Mire

sb:
3 Loxodon Warhammer
4 Deathmark
3 Guttural Response
1 Chameleon Colossus
3 Cloudthresher
1 Hurricane

I played five or six matches with Gabe’s Elves deck and was relatively impressed.

I taped a great matchup against B/R where I got Fulminated down to two lands, then exposed my Mutavault with him having only one card in hand. Obviously it was a Shock and I was in the Stone Age.

I topdecked out of it and pulled it out!

The deck is relatively fast and was superb at beating random garbage decks.

However it seems atrocious against any kind of Reflecing Pool Control-type deck. I got devastated by a variety of Cruel Ultimatum and Broodmate Dragon combinations.

Anyway, the vid:

LOVE
MIKE

* I will talk about these Blue Envelope-grabbers in greater detail in this week’s Top Decks but I just wanted to congratulate Brett Blackman as well. Brett is a friend, reigning Pennsylvania State Champion, and a Top 8 Magic intern! Good job Brett

Currently Reading: Codeflesh

For you, a YouTube video about new It Deck Cascade Swans. Not just a Regional Top 4 deck anymore, Cascade Swans has just taken a Grand Prix title!

I used Parth Modi’s version of Cascade Swans, as (as I mentioned in the previous blog post) I used to make this video before the deck went and won a Grand Prix. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, here is ye olde deck list:

2 Ad Nauseam

4 Bituminous Blast
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Swans of Bryn Argoll

4 Seismic Assault

4 Reflecting Pool
4 Graven Cairns
4 Cascade Bluffs
4 Rugged Prairie
4 Ghitu Encampment
4 Treetop Village
4 Spinerock Knoll
4 Vivid Crag
4 Vivid Marsh
1 Mutavault
4 Fire-Lit Thicket
1 Mountain

sideboard:
4 Qasali Pridemage
3 Vexing Shusher
2 Volcanic Fallout
1 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Aura of Silence
2 Ajani Vengeant
1 Ad Nauseam

So a lot of people have been asking why I haven’t made a video in forever.

It is actually a different answer than why I didn’t update this blog for like half a month.

Basically remember when MTGO was super slow and it was un-possible to get a game? That short spell kind of got me in the habit of not playing MTGO for a while, and then every format got super boring due to not being in step with the actual Constructed formats due to set differences. I’d say that all of that is behind us… but instead I just hope that you like this video.

LOVE
MIKE

Currently Reading: Birds of Prey Vol. 5: Perfect Pitch