At the bottom of the glass – 4 lessons from a loser

Today we have a blog post from Flippin' Orbs host Seb Celia where he tells us about 4 very special cards that he has had the "honor" of winning during the last couple of years. Each card comes with its own stories and lessons that have made Seb a wiser man, and a better player, or at least we hope so.  /Gordon

Lesson I

Lesson II

Lesson III

Lesson IV

Lesson I – The Rag Man

The dark side of the moon

It’s a card right? I mean, you win when you play it … sometimes. Blood Moon is a deceptive card though, it gives you that warm fuzzy feeling but you are a blind fool. And a deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths. Let’s lay down some of those truths.

I sometimes use Fog as an example of a deceptive card that lets you really remember winning. You won that one time when all the stars aligned and, clearly, should’ve died that very turn if it were not for this and that. It does not, however, remind you of all the times you sat with the card in your hand, doing nothing. Cards need to do things for you to win, we could probably agree on that right? I think in many ways Blood Moon qualifies here. Sometimes it just flat out kills all opponents’ upcoming plays. Other times they have a Fellwar Stone when you decided to play with plains in your Blood Moon deck. Other times you slam it when you have an opening around counterspells and whatnots but strand a bunch of your own cards in hand due to playing three colors in your Blood Moon deck.

So for the tournament where I won the Rag Man (A price given out to last place in all our tournaments, Ed.) I played a Blood Moon deck with Savannah Lions, splashing for blue power (because I am not a peasant by position, nor by nature). To make a long story short, it did not go well. I even met a Merfolk deck where my Blood Moons just did everything that is close to nothing.

 

Lesson II – Sorrows Path

(Put the lime in the) coconut

I did not plan claiming all these trophies, to aquire them you have to be ready to be beaten a lot, like a lot a lot. But it’s also a bit like in that Fight Club scene where they are told by Tyler Durden to go out and get beaten up by complete strangers. It’s not as easy as it seems. I claimed this little gem by coming 5th place just out of range for the top4. I actually won the Sorrows Path in the raffle just before the top4 and it seemed fitting to say the least. Råberg signed it when he beat me in the win and in. Anyway, I played this:

Arabian Aggro is a great deck. Recently we have seen a lot of creature based decks popping up and in that meta, you probably win playing Swords over Lightning bolts but hey, I feel that if you put a lion and a gorilla in a cage fight… the monkey will beat the shit out of the cat. I did try playing three sylvan in the sideboard in this event because I had seen “Farsan” go unbeaten in the swiss at n00bcon, and he won against like, at least two-three The Decks (including mine) with them, as a sort of Ancestrals. But they did not serve me that well, and I don’t like that card as much as other people do. I think I had control a bit too much in mind building my deck and let that be a lesson to you all, you probably will never meet the decks you plan to meet anyhow.

Seb's Arabian Aggro

Lesson III – The Fallen

What a wonderful world

So, if you play Eureka, you lose. At least that’s what LSV says, but let’s not delve too much into what’s good or bad with the deck in general. I did some very sweet plays and that’s what you want, slinging the most badass creatures in the game, like playing a turn one Lord of the Pit. There got to be some kind of achievement unlock just doing that, right? I had a real blast the whole tournament … but I lost. I like the possibility to ramp out big dudes and to be able to live the magical christmas land from time to time playing eureka. Unload your hand, slam Concordant Crossroad and hitting for a ton. Moat is a problem though… and a bunch of other crap are problematic too, but who the fuck cares when all you want is to win more, rather than win?

(The Fallen was also the price for a last place finish, Ed. )

"So you say my Library might be too slow?"

"So you say my Library might be too slow?"

 

Lesson IV – Blaze of Glory

Where is my mind

Seb's n00bcon deck - The Machinegun

I can’t really complain that much about coming 9th place in this year’s n00bcon. The deck felt solid, I got mind twisted three times in the games that I lost that eventually put me outside of competition and that is a crappy feeling. I remember when I played against Olle Råde for the win and in and had a Library in my starting seven. “This is the first time I get to play library turn one!” I declared. Olle mind twisted me the following turn for a bunch. The bigger picture of the whole tournament for me was a bunch of really fun games and I try to keep that in mind going forward.

I love playing Atog decks. The main problem with Atog is that you really only need one, that’s true for a bunch of cards, like the ones I’ve mentioned earlier (Blood moon and Sylvan Library). But you need to make it stick which means you have to bait out a counter or two and/or keep it around. The reason why I think small creatures are, and have been good lately is that all the control decks skimp with their removal. Right now, in the age of lions, I’m playing at least 2 bolts with my 4 swords in my The Deck because those small lifepoints add up. U/R has like 8 creatures, and 4 of them are Flying Men. They are really, really good. Especially if they bait out swords so you can slam your Serendibs. And even though you might feel that the Lions get smashed by Mishras, white has both Disenchant and Swords so those factories have to dodge a lot to stay alive

Old School Tron - Viable or not?

I’m a super big fan of artifacts, in all possible formats. I even have a mono brown EDH deck, built before wastes were printed so the mana base is a bit crazy. That’s why I’ve always wanted to build a mono brown deck in 93/94 so I wanted to share my initial thoughts about this and why I actually haven’t done this yet.

Disclaimer:

But first I would like to say that what I write here will only be true if you play by the Swedish B&R. The reason for this is that there is a really big difference between the Eternal Central rules and the Swedish ones when it comes to mono brown and that is that the EC rules permit four Workshops. This will be written with the premise that only one Mishra’s Workshop is allowed.

Let's start with the mana base

The first thing that comes to my mind when thinking mono brown in 93/94 are the Urza lands so that is where I will start my build. The premise from now on is therefore that I want to play Tron in 93/94. With that said, let’s start by looking at the deck’s mana base.

After we start with the 12 Urza lands other lands we should add to our deck is of course 4 Mishra’s Factory, 1 Mishra’s Workshop, 1 Strip Mine and 1 Library of Alexandria. No deck should be without them, at least if you don’t need colored mana. And then we have the seven restricted artifact sources, 5 moxen, Black Lotus and Sol Ring. This brings us to a total of 26 mana sources which is a good starting point for any deck. If the deck has a low mana curve we could go down to 24 - 25 sources and if it’s a control deck or a deck with a really high curve we should probably go up to 28 or maybe even 29 sources. As we just added all the essential mana sources and got 26 sources we’re clearly not going to try to build a deck with a low curve because there is no mana source we can cut. Also, the Urza lands can sometimes give us us an amazing amount of mana so we absolutely don’t want to be a low curve deck because then there is no point of playing the Urza lands. That instead leaves us with 3 slots left for the mana base and I would say either 3 Fellwar Stones or 3 Mana Vaults seems good here depending on how we build the deck. We could also add three colored sources which with a mox and lotus would give us a total of 5 sources of that color, probably not enough for even a slight splash.

Trouble on the horizon

This is where the trouble begin. The whole idea with playing the Urza lands is that we can get a lot of mana. Therefore, we should play expensive spells to utilize that fact. The problem however is that the Urza lands are unreliable and we probably will play more games that not without being able to assemble the three different pieces. So if we play too expensive spells we won't be able to cast them in many of our games. That doesn’t seem that good, so what should we do about that? I only see three possible solutions for this problem so let’s have a look at them.

Solution #1

The first idea I had was to take the easy way out and not play super expensive cards. Maybe instead top the curve with a couple of Triskelions (which still is pretty expensive) and otherwise focus on Su-Chi, Icy Manipulator and things like that. The problem with this solution is that if we’re not going to go all in on expensive spells and instead play Su-Chi and Triskelion, why are we even playing the Urza lands? We could instead just play Artifact Aggro with Mana Vaults as acceleration and also then be able to play colored spells. Once again the Urza lands and therefore the deck loses it’s purpose.

Su-Chi-and-triskelion

Expensive enough?

Read more about Artifact Aggro here

Solution #2

The second solution I can think of is playing cards that aren’t too expensive to play but can act as mana sinks when we are able to assemble tron. So what mana sinks are there in the format? This is the list I came up with:

  • Dragon Engine (Not good but at least playable)
  • Rocket Launcher (Same as above)
  • Candelabra of Tawnos (A perfect card for the deck)
  • Barl’s Cage (Pretty ok with tron but otherwise bad)
  • Reflecting Mirror (Maybe in the sideboard against burn?)
  • Rakalite (Just too bad of a card)

Yeah, that doesn’t work. But we also have a couple of mono artifacts with expensive activation costs that could be considered mana sinks, as we can use them and still have mana over for other things. These are the ones that springs to mind:

  • Al-Abara’s Carpet (A little too expensive)
  • Ring of Immortals (Could be good but too expensive)
  • The Hive (Same as above but a tiny bit better)
  • Disrupting Scepter (This could work but it’s not an amazing card)
  • Jayemdae Tome (We all know this is definitely going into the deck)
  • Jalum tome (This one can also help us find the tron pieces so it may make the cut)

Ok, after having looked at this I’m not convinced this will work. Playing to many of these cards will make the deck too clunky if we once again don’t have all three Urza lands on the battlefield.

 

Solution #3

The third solution is where I am right now but it instead gives us another problem. I think the solution is to play spells with variable mana cost, X-spells. Spells like Fireball and Braingeyser are good even without assembling tron and if we do they are amazing! This is why we started to look at the mana base because if you remember we could only fit 5 sources of colored mana. So this will give us a deck the is unreliable when it both comes to assemble the Urza lands and actually getting the colored sources we need.

So how do we solve this? This is where I’m at now and I will give you an update at a later date on how the brewing has gone. But the first thoughts are to cut Mishra’s Factory (which could be considered a sin) or go up in mana sources to 31 or so. Neither seems good but we’ll see.

alpha-signed-fireball

Time to splash!

To be continued...