Good Gamery

Tag: JoINrbs

  • How to get into MODO on my computer

    This is an instructional guide on how to get into MODO on my computer.

  • Doping with Dolphins II: The Terrible Trinket

    Doping with Dolphins II: The Terrible Trinket

    These days, it seems like sensei’s divining top is an auto-include in a lot of decks, and sometimes it makes sense. You want it in Aggro Red for shrapnel blast, and in TEPS because of its amazing interaction with mind’s desire. However, I am constantly stunned by its inclusion in 4, 5, or more-colour concoctions which attempt to combine it with counterbalance.

    Let’s take a look at one of these decks:

    Do not go gentle into that good night, as suggested by Remi Fortier



    Basing his deck on the popular 1951 villanelle by Dylan Thomas may have won Fortier PT: Valencia, but it did not build a good deck. We can likely attribute his success to lucky draws – watching the top 8 I didn’t see him draw a second SDT a single time, unless it was to be discarded to thirst for knowledge – and solid play. The fact that a second SDT is at best a two-mana cantrip didn’t escape Fortier, who only played three, although worse players are often seen upping the number to four.

    Now I’m not going to claim that there aren’t worse decks to put SDT into, and this deck actually has some good synergies with the card. Let’s look at some of them:

    1. Can be fetched by trinket mage
    2. Can be shuffled away by trinket mage
    3. Can be shuffled away by a fetchland
    4. Can find you a fetchland or trinket mage with which to shuffle it away
    5. Artifact in graveyard for tarmogoyf if you destroy it with your engineered explosives
    6. Allows stifle to cantrip by countering the put on top of library ability
    7. Fills in the crucial 3-drop in the number of words in each card name curve
    8. Easy to take out for sideboard bullets

    That said, these are far outweighed by its detriments. The lesser offenses first:

    1. Pumps other player’s tarmogoyfs if in graveyard
    2. Low CC-card makes you less likely to cut to higher converted mana cost in a format where going first is crucial
    3. You play kataki, retard
    4. Risk of being shut down by your own pithing needle, especially under mindslaver (more problematic on modo, where you often need to turn off sensei golden-tail when you get paired against the first round random, and when you get paired against the guys in the 0-x bracket in later rounds).
    5. Burning-tree shaman
    6. Can’t be copied by vesuvan shapeshifter

    Far and away though, the problem is tempo. The ablative singular form of the latin noun tempus, English for storm (tempest, temper, and New Orleans through French), tempo plays a crucial role in Magic: The Gathering as a mechanic from OLS block. Some decks can use tempo to kill you as soon as turn two with a flurry of rituals, artifacts, and then a large mind’s desire or tendrils of corruption.

    Now this deck is seeking to not create tempo, as it can be used by your opponent to kill you, and yet tempo is the exact thing that SDT creates. With a low mana cost, SDT threatens to create one storm as early as your first turn, and considering that you can put it on top of your library to play it again the next turn, pretty quickly you can wind up with rains washing out the first day of the pro tour due to excessive testing, as happened in Valencia.

    In contrast, you could be playing another threat in SDT’s place. One of the deck’s weaknesses is the difficulty it has in finding a win condition, and if SDT was simply replaced with Sundering Titan this problem would surely be averted.

    When in doubt during deck building, just remember the rhyme: if it begins with Sensei, you’d rather have plenty. Of cabbage.

  • Doping with Dolphins I

    With christmas about to come after weeks of shoving its cock down consumers’ throats, it’s time to reflect on the little things that the year has brought us. Now I’m not going to lie, from hurricanes to music to magic, this year has been a load of shit, but I think if we pry a little deeper we’ll find that it’s full of tasty grubs and nitrogen, and if not we can post our attempt on the internet.

    The year of magic ended earlier this month when the Jews and Swiss took time out from taking our money and using it to make very precise watches to destroy us at Worlds in New York. And let me tell you, the snow outside didn’t stop the event from being hotter than a beach in Brazil. The finals came down to Uri Peleg, who once upon a time provided Nick Eisel with a rough list which Eisel fine-tuned into a killing machine that we look back on as Food Chain Goblins, defeating Patrick Chapin, the grouchy American boasting a decade of mediocrity, by a very prominent nose.

    Peleg piloted an innovative black-green-white deck which stood with history on its side as it vividly recreated the trope of a black caddy carrying a white man’s clubs on a golf course. Let’s take a look at the list:

    As you can see the deck runs the time-tested white:other proportion used by the British throughout their empire. Cards like Doran, Oblivion Ring, and Riftsweeper can provide guidance for the other, more powerful but less organized cards, as well as providing specialized services to pull the most possible out of an economy burgeoning with slave labor. Apparently Peleg went to the forest so that he could test deliberately prior to the tournament, and I’m going to give 10:1 odds that he did it on a raft in the Congo.

    Now let’s take a look at the deck he beat. Chapin showed up with the buzz of the tournament, a 75-card number with a plummeting neck-line bringing attention to mountains that could kill at a moment’s notice. Here she is, in all her glory:

    Chapin said that he based the deck on his ex-girlfriend, which is probably the best explanation for the snow-covered lands. And let me tell you, it made from some awkward chit-chat when he met Gabriel Nassif, who he had been quite close to leading up to the tournament, in the semi-finals only to find that Nassif was running the same deck with an up-to-date sideboard, although his maindeck looked like it’d put on a few pounds. The tension escalated further as Nassif made it evident that he’d been fucking all night with his abysmal play.

    The deck seeks to lure you into complacency with slow foreplay using the game’s most sexually enticing manabase, and then freak the hell out on you, throw your favorite models at the wall, and put four dragons into play. Unfortunately for Chapin, he returned home in the finals to find that Uri had had his friends over and they’d killed the cat with a shotgun.

    It was a great tournament, with plenty of celebrities attending and no crashes. But it was the exception for the year. MODO has gotten worse and one of the PTs was hosted in Spain.

    Take a moment to look back and be thankful for what we’ve had, and what we’re promised. Version 3.0 will probably be out sometime next year, and the next PT is in Kuala Lumpur.

    I mean, what could go wrong?

    Discuss this in the forums!