Well to start off, I want to say that I hope you and yours had a wonderful Memorial Day Weekend. Myself, I am still currently very, VERY sun burnt on the back of my neck, still smelling like campfire after two showers, and drifting in and out of comas recovering from the lack of sleep over the last four days. Vacationing aside, let’s get down to nitty and the gritty. Last week I profiled my very first EDH deck giving you an inside look into what thought went into deck design and different various combos and deck mechanics that I was hoping to see express themselves come game time. This week I’m going to be going through two different match-ups that I recently played at my weekly draft (shout out to First Pick Games in Seattle!!), one being a head-to-head grudge match against my friend Charles and the other being a 4-way multi-player extravaganza. Hopefully with these two different game scenarios I will be able to elaborate a little more exactly under what circumstances the deck delivers the goods and where it falls just short.

Match-up 1: Charles and His Goblins

This deck is an interesting one. It centers around Wort, Boggart Auntie as its general and uses a lot of cheap goblins and all the tribal synergy shenanigans that go along with them. Auntie is very key in this deck as the card advantage generated from her ability to recur goblins in the yard is insane and having a 3/3 creature with fear as a general against any deck that doesn’t play black is a scary scenario (as 21 points from a general will supercede the 40 life points in EDH required to take you down).

There are some really awesome cards in his deck that both seem like they are very fun to play and can be absolutely back breaking. Buried Alive is great as it basically tutors up three cards that you can recur with Auntie’s graveyard ability. Siege-Gang Commander is just wonderful, being able to convert your army into Shocks is a wonderful ability to have. Certainly worth its 10 dollar price-tag. Insurrection is the definition of a finisher, this card is inconceivably devastating and can swing tempo in such a way that I have never seen before in multi-player magic. Any red EDH deck should be running this card. Period. And last but certainly not least is Ben-Ben, Akki Hermit. While being a solid defense against attack, this creature has one of my favorite names in Magic. With a name like Ben-Ben, how can you go wrong?

Over the course of the game, I found myself running into a few problems. The first and one of the more tricky problems was my inability to successfully and consistently deal with Wort. My deck has a lot of removal that revolves around Terror effects. This however presents a problem when such a key player in my opponent’s deck avoids these effects. Sure, I can destroy all of his other creatures (the majority being red goblins) but what good is that if I’m having a problem dealing with the machine that’s bringing them all back from the yard? So a lot of the match I was focused on how to get an answer to Wort and stabilize my board position enough to recover from the onslaught of goblins.

Even after a few Damnation effects, Wort was still causing me problems. I dropped Garruk, Wildspeaker and Chameleon Colossus during the last few turns of the game, desperately hoping that an army of 3/3 beasts and a pro-black beat stick could protect me against the army across from me enough to find a way to regain some momentum, but in the end it was I who was Overrun (figuratively speaking.)

Another problem I found myself running into was the fragility of Savra, Queen of the Golgari. The difference between two-toughness and three-toughness is huge. Especially with a deck running a card like Siege-Gang Commander. Her brief appearances in the game gave me opportunities to deal with Wort in ways most of my removal couldn’t offer, however, she was so often the target of hate that these brief windows of opportunity didn’t ever blossom into tempo swinging board sweeps.

Overall, the match was a tough one. Running into Wort was a real problem and when that machine gets online, recovering from the momentum my opponent was gaining was a real struggle. There were a few cards such as Annihilate and Terror that would sit dead in my hand or be needlessly wasted on a goblin chump because of their inability to target black creatures.

Match-up 2: Four-way Fight Fest

The second match I was able to play was quite the game featuring my Savra deck, my friend Charles’ goblins deck, a first pick regular named Charlie with his deck featuring Kaervek the Merciless, and a local judge in the area named Tony and his deck featuring Radha, Heir to Keld. Charlie’s deck didn’t have much inner-deck synergy but mainly just featured some powerful cards from magic’s history. Tony’s deck on the other hand had early game mana ramping while featuring a lot of top-end power in red and green beat sticks.

The match began going along fairly normally enough. Charles was beginning the Wort recursion machine, Charlie was mana-flooded for a while, and Tony was starting a base to support his larger creatures. Tony was able to pull out Deus of Calamity on turn four which was incredibly unfortunate for all of us (especially Charlie whose lands were almost all non-basic). Charles was sneaking in with an ever growing number of Goblins while I was setting up with card-advantage enchantments such as Phyrexian Arena and Abundance.

Things started to heat up when I brought in Sengir Nosferatu. The next turn I was able to bring in Savra and start dispensing global Cruel Edicts like it was my job. At first, my opponents didn’t find this play to threatening; however when the Deus and Wort fell to the triggered abilities of Savra, things started going south. The players on the board realized that if they were to ever put creatures on the board, this problem had to be dealt with. Tony targeted my Sengir with Flame Javelin and so in response I activated my bat ability by tapping my last two open mana. Charles had his turn next and was very easily able to deal with the bat token I had in play and with me not having the mana to bring the Sengir back into play, that was all she wrote. From there on out, Savra had a huge target on her head and any time she hit the board she would most assuredly be leaving soon.

Tony got a Protean hulk on the board in the next few turns that would ultimately lead to my demise. However, in consolation, after I had been eliminated, Charlie (who wasn’t aware of Protean Hulk’s amazing yard trigger) cast Nettlevine Blight targeting Protean Hulk, eventually leading to everyone’s demise at the hands of Tony’s legions of doom spawned from the corpse of the fallen Hulk. Ahh… the hilarity that only magic can bring.

Something to note in this match was watching my opponents focus all tunnel-vision on my poor Sengir-Savra combo after it had eliminated a sizeable chunk of the board. Political finesse was something that I touched on in last week’s article and it is absolutely something that made my life MUCH more difficult in this match-up mash-up. Subtlety can often win you a game, giving you the freedom to generate board stability and wait for the precise moment in which you can successfully take the reigns of the game away from your opponents.

While I didn’t win either of these matches (cue The Cure), many more lessons in life come from losing than winning. Diversifying my removal options and flying under the radar are two important things I need to work on in terms of deck building and play style. Thanks for reading this week, next week I plan to look at some of the best multi-player cards (what few there are) to come out of Shadowmoor and some new elements that the block introduces to us.

Until Then,

Trent