Locations
As I shared last week, getting into Magic Online is pretty straightforward. Drop some change, load a deck, and go.
Obviously this isn't everything and my series of clean defeats demonstrated an ever-present fact: where there's a format, there's an optimization process seeking the best decks. While I would argue adamantly that I'm not a deck builder extraordinaire, I'm generally cognizant enough to put together a non-trivial 60 cards.
The format I'm looking at is Planeswalker, an online-only format with deck packs of specific numbers of specific cards legal only in its own format. The decks and cards are modeled after the Duels of the Planeswalkers decks you may have encountered slinging digitally there. This means two things:
- General familiarity with the cards thanks to broader interaction
- Spots of powerful interactions capped by the restricted list – just one copy of some cards are allowed
- Smaller card pool than any other format (except Block Constructed) with minimal investment
The first thing, of course, is actually looking at the Planeswalker legal cards you own. The way to do this is opening your 'Collection' tab, then grabbing the 'All Cards (Online)' drop down and setting it to 'Planeswalker' under 'Special Sets':
You know you've hit it when all the cards you see are gold-bordered.
There are many ways to go about building a deck but the general way I follow is the stereotypical "Timmy" route of:
- Find some stuff I like.
- Find more stuff like it.
- Throw some useful things to fill it up.
- Season mana to taste (from greedy to overabundant).
Now reading over cards in the Collection tab is fine, actually building a deck requires the aptly named 'Deck Editor' tab. Once you're there you'll need to select down to just Planeswalker legal cards in the same way as the Collection tab. Before I did that I took a few minutes to scout my cards by color on the collection tab to find options that were exciting for me:
- Various and bountiful white flying creatures with scant removal
- A plethora of removal in black
- Green carried a load of mana ramping and Elf creatures
- Spicy multicolored cards, like Broodmate Dragon and Blightning
Essentially, I was looking at three different deck options:
- A white-black flying with removal agro deck
- A white-green ramp into Angels/Wurms deck
- The Planeswalker equivalent to a Standard/Extended Jund deck
The Crossroads of the Blind Eternities
Deck building choices are often pretty tough in the real world. With paper, resources are clearly limited by physical interaction. Rebuilding or switching to another deck may be a non-trivial concern. The time required to do so is as well.
One of the benefits of digital Magic that I'm beginning to really enjoy is instantaneous switching to decks. There's no downtime in finding that other deck you built. With just a drop-down click I can try something different in a hurry.
With that in mind I decided to make two decks, my Magic 2011 go-to favorite of white-black flying with removal in addition to a Jund-colored midrange deck.
"White-Black Flying Removal"
- Creatures (21)
- 1 Cho-Manno, Revolutionary
- 2 Dusk Imp
- 2 Gravedigger
- 1 Nekrataal
- 1 Paladin en-Vec
- 1 Sengir Vampire
- 1 Serra Angel
- 1 Skyhunter Skirmisher
- 1 Soot Imp
- 1 Soul Warden
- 4 Suntail Hawk
- 1 Voice of All
- 4 Youthful Knight
- Spells (14)
- 1 Loxodon Warhammer
- 3 Glorious Anthem
- 4 Pacifism
- 3 Holy Day
- 3 Terror
Swinging high and blasting creature out below seems solid in theory (and worked well in practice historically). Holy Day seems fine in a format full of creature-based decks, especially with salty options like Overrun and Broodmate Dragon floating around.
Rounding out flying and removal are some critters with first strike; multiple Glorious Anthems will not only bolster the aggro but make blocking even more awkward with the hits-first ground pounders included for numbers.
"Planeswalker-less Planeswalker Jund"
- Creatures (23)
- 1 Broodmate Dragon
- 4 Civic Wayfinder
- 4 Farhaven Elf
- 2 Gravedigger
- 1 Imperious Perfect
- 2 Moonglove Winnower
- 1 Nekrataal
- 3 Sprouting Thrinax
- 4 Troll Ascetic
- 1 Nath of the Gilt-Leaf
- Spells (13)
- 1 Loxodon Warhammer
- 4 Incinerate
- 3 Terror
- 4 Blightning
- 1 Violent Ultimatum
While it's certainly not as explosive as it's Bloodbraid Elf packing cousins of Standard past and Extended present, presenting an array of land drop producing and difficult-to-deal-with creatures backed up by some removal and hand disruption is a powerful recipe for dueling.
Ensuring I not only hit land drops but fix my mana to the correct arrangement lets me draw into either Broomate Dragon or Violent Ultimatum to put the game away. Incinerate and Blighting both provide direct-to-opponent damage that should give the additional reach to end games soundly.
Both decks pack as many reasonable creatures as possible as Planewaker seems full of creature-heavy decks. Trading Sprouting Thrinax or Moonglove Winnower for bigger bodied beaters can go a long way to getting the game to go my way. At least that's the plan.
While I was itching to jump into games right away I wanted to share that there is an awesome feature for digital decks that is totally insane: a 'Stats' button that provides a variety of interesting and suggestive bits of information.
I loaded up my white-black deck and hit the button. This is what I got:
Yes. Something that I've had to manually enter into other online deck analysis tools is provided as part of the interface for Magic Online. Here I get a clear read on my deck:
- Plenty of lands which creatures taking the natural second slot in volume
- An aggressive mana curve with almost everything available by turn three
- White is the preponderance of mana costs in the deck
However this isn't all that's available. The dropdown in the righthand corner lets you check the legality of your deck (which, unsurprisingly, is only Planeswalker here but a useful tip down the road) as well as run a little hypergeometric distribution calculation to see the probability around drawing things by specific turns:
Here I added land by clicking the land button (the mountain range looking icon to the left of the cup icon) to see how easy I would have three lands. By the third turn I'm just over 80%, with a not-too-shabby above 70% on the second.
While the tools aren't the end-all, be-all of analysis they do help flag or guide some construction in advance of the actual gameplay. And the gameplay being, of course, what I'm actually after.
Vindication or Ruination
I was smarting from the brutality I received previously. No one likes loses (especially me, something that I need to keep working on) and having the chance to build my own decks to run with was reassuringly pleasing. It also meant I'd have no one to blame but myself.
I started with the generic white-black flying and removal deck (I think I need a clever name. Any suggestions?) to see if my suspicion that evasion and removal felt right. This was my opening hand:
Removal, Creature, double Glorious Anthem, and a great spread of lands. This looked promising. Soon, my Youthful Knight hit the table to swing past an obviously-not-going-to-block-here 2/2 Bramblewood Paragon. Then, like so many other games, Blanchwood Armor came down to humongify (a real word I assure you) the little dork into a massive beatstick.
To say "It's a Timmy thing." is incorrect in Planeswalker. There aren't an abundance of removal spells and board sweepers are a true rarity (and restricted). Having the massive beatstick is often sufficient to win. My deck was betting that "and necessary" wasn't necessary to add to that thought.
Of course, actually having the removal spell makes this much less scary. Taking six to the chin but untapping to drop the Pacifism and Suntail Hawk was fine. It was even sweeter when there wasn't a play on the next turn and my army was reinforced by the first Glorious Anthem. Beatings came swiftly.
However, green mages do what green mages do, and the turn thereafter yielded the self-humongifying Baloth Woodcrasher. I decided to take a risk, considering the small hand size on the other side, and swung in after dropping the second Glorious Anthem.
I would have lethal damage on the board if there wasn't another green spell (Wurm's Tooth is annoying for calculating lethal damage math), and Voice of All promised a healthy cushion of "4/4, Protection from green" to soak a ton of damage with against what appeared to be a monogreen deck.
Obviously, the land was there the next turn and eight damage sailed straight in, followed by a life-gain-triggering Elvish Piper. Dipping to six life forced me into block-mode with my first striking Knight and a freshly cast Voice of All set appropriately. I tickled with the Suntail Hawk and passed back, crossing my fingers against Naturalize and Giant Spider being the follow-up plays.
Instead, he attacked and traded the land-pumped Baloth Woodcrasher with my Knight (Voice of All providing the other four damage) and got the "GG" pseudo-concession.
While getting a "GG" in chat is certainly indicative of victory it still takes actual damage to make it happen. Fog is a real card, after all. Sending in the clowns, with a Skyhunter Skirmisher to drop if something were to happen, I was rewarded with my first positive 'Game Results' pop up:
While it's easy to chalk this up to "ROFL N00bZ Playin" it's clear that big creatures are quite good. I've consistently found myself at a lower single digit life total thanks to the power of size and trample. Many of the decks I run into are green-based to tap into the power of a slower format that's missing deep removal.
Switching over to my "Jund" deck, I was eager to see if mountains of dudes and land drops would work. My opening hand was a snap keep if one exists here:
Perfectly color fixed with a bomb I'm virtually guaranteed to drop turn five or six? How can I lose!? (Foreshadowing in full effect here.)
The opposing opening is a Forest (how quaint) and an Elvish Eulogist that would definitely be getting in there against my starts-at-three deck. The follow up was, naturally, an Elvish Warrior to up the damage quotient. Oh, and Nissa's Chosen too.
Without breaking a sweat I dropped a recently drawn Sprouting Thrinax and started to whittle the forces down, starting with Nissa's Chosen to minimize future Eulogist life gain. But like a weird mirror world where everything would conspire against me, Troll Ascetic popped it's ugly mug across the battlefield.
Ideally, I would have liked to ramp with Farhaven Elf, Civic Wayfinder was my call here to present a speed bump against the Troll, forcing either regeneration and (hopefully) no follow up play or a stay-at-home combat step. The decision was for the latter and I got a reprieve from combat only to get the first bomb to drop.
Loxodon Warhammer can take games away. Troll Ascetic is a powerful partner in crime. Straight up removal wasn't going to help me, but the fact that the second land drop was missed over on the other side was promising me at least a little time to find my only real answer: Violent Ultimatum.
My next turn gave me a for my hand Nekrataal, which was incredibly relevant here: it knocked out the Elvish Warrior on the way down and put two power of first strike up against the Troll. Even with the Hammer, my Nekrataal could hold the fort. Grabbing that Swamp was the right call.
While it may have been the right call to swing over with Sprouting Thrinax, I was concerned for the card that's in every green deck I've seen: Blanchwood Armor. I wanted enough soak to kill a reinforced (but tapped out of regeneration mana) Troll. Time was my only real hope to win so I played to not lose: winning faster wasn't an option just yet.
Right on the money. That card is everywhere in Planeswalker. My reward was another combat reprieve and I was hoping Broodmate Dragon would help deter the onslaught for one more round. It did and I crossed my fingers as hard as I could.
Forest is not Violent Ultimatum.
I opted to send the Dragons in with a follow up Blightning and Civic Wayfinder to rip another land out. A Troll Ascetic and Ogre's Cleaver dropped to the bin, making me wonder what was still packed in the remaining two cards.
With damage most certainly coming in I braced for impact. The fourth Forest was found, followed by a swift attack with a supercharged 10/6 Troll Ascetic. Sprouting Thrinax jumped in the way alone. I wanted to keep soak on the board and assume, again, that I would draw my Ultimatum (Mountain waiting in hand).
Complicating things was his post-combat follow through of a Troll Ascetic. Must be nice, etc.
I went to my draw step hopeful again.
Forest is not Violent Ultimatum.
Farhaven Elf ripping the third Mountain onto the battlefield would have to do as I kept everything back in order to block hard and donate even more life.
While dipping to two life wasn't desireable, trading away Broodmate and Token wasn't the winning option either. There was no way for my deck to race and getting that lone Violent Ultimate was the out. I said my prayers and drew.
You guessed it: Forest is not Violent Ultimatum, no matter how hard I want it to be.
With a "Good game. Nothing but blanks in my hand," I declared we could go through the motions. I passed the turn back and got stampeded by the abundance of creatures and a Loxodon Warhammer. The assessment given to me was a text-mangled message that "Green aggro seemed good."
I couldn't agree more.
The Bold and the Beautiful
I'm not sure what to make of my decks. While the white-black deck won, it's removal suite would have been worthless against the green Troll-Hammer deck I faced second. Is more testing needed before the change to slip some "answers stuff like Loxodon Warhammer and Blanchwood Armor" cards is made? Which deck should I focus on?
Obviously, this is your chance to chime in and tell me what you want to see:
- White-black with some "metagame" adjustments
- Jund with some "metagame" adjustments
Shoot it off in the comments below; thanks for the feedback last week. Planeswalker is looking to be fairly entertaining with quite a bit of room for challenge and adjustment. I can't wait to see what can be done!
