Decklist 8/19/2012

How excited do you think I was to see a number of new U/G Delver decklists pop up over the last week?  If your answer was anything but "finding out that Peter Jackson is doing 'The Hobbit' or "Lucas' estate turned VII over to Nolan" than you were way off.  Considering that I posted my Potting Soil decklist almost a month ago, I am ecstatic that the community is finally coming around to it.

Even better, it seems that people are still building it wrong.  I mean, seriously, the deck can consistently kill on turn 4 and has a reasonable turn 3, and you are adding more lands and Talrand?  Why?  If you can't aggro kill early, you already have enough control, and more lands plus a "late game" is the worst plan here since 'Jack and Jill' was green lighted.

Roughly comparable to Todd Anderson's U/G Delver list.

So, to help the embattled masses, who live in fear of needing 2/2 flying Drakes when you can have a 7/7 ground-pounding super plant on turn 3 instead, here is the updated version of "Potting Soil".

4 Snapcaster Mage
4 Delver of Secrets
4 Quirion Dryad

12 Creatures

4 Vapor Snag
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Gut Shot
3 Mutagenic Growth
4 Mental Misstep
4 Mana Leak
3 Apostle's Blessing
4 Ponder

29 Spells

4 Hinterland Harbor
4 Cavern of Souls
7 Island
3 Forest

18 Land

And for those of you wondering, there are several thousand combinations of hands/draw phases that get you a turn 4 kill, but here is an example of the turn 3 for the non-believers:

Example 1:
Dryad, Delver, Gut Shot, Probe, Gut Shot, Harbor, Island.

Turn 1: Island, Delver. Pass.
Turn 2: Reveal Ponder. Attack for 3. Play Harbor, cast Dryad. (Opponent 17). Probe twice, drawing Snapcaster and Island. (3/3 Dryad)
Turn 3: Draw Mutagenic Growth. Play Island and cast Ponder (4/4). Ponder finds Probe.  Probe into land. (5/5) Snapcaster Probe and draw Mutagenic Growth. (7/7) Gut Shot the opponent twice (15 life, Dryad is 9/9). Mutagenic Growth the Dryad twice.  Dryad is 13/13 and Delver is 3/2, attack for 16. 

I threw in a blank to make sure it doesn't seem like the ridiculous run-goods all-day/every day, but there are other ways to get to turn 3 with a dead opponent.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed this look at the deck, and don't stop believing.

Decklists, Decklists Everywhere

Potting Soil:

4 Delver of Secrets
4 Quirion Dryad
4 Snapcaster Mage

12 Creatures

4 Gut Shot
4 Mutagenic Growth
4 Ponder
4 Mental Misstep
4 Vapor Snag
4 Mana Leak
4 Gitaxian Probe
2 Apostle's Blessing

26 Spells

4 Hinterland Harbor
3 Evolving Wilds
6 Island
3 Forest
2 Cavern of Souls

18 Lands

Sideboard:

3 Beast Within
1 Cavern of Souls
2 Talrand, Sky Summoner
1 Island
1 Forest
4 Devastation Tide
3 Temporal Mastery


Casablanca:

4 Restoration Angel
4 Snapcaster Mage
3 Thragtusk
4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
1 Phantasmal Image
2 Fiend Hunter
3 Cathedral Sanctifier

21 Creatures

4 Cloudshift
1 Ghostly Whispers
4 Ponder
2 Vapor Snag
3 Gut Shot
1 Beast Within

16 Spells

4 Cavern of Souls
3 Hinterland Harbor
1 Shimmering Grotto
1 Razorverge Thicket
3 Seachrome Coast
2 Sunpetal Grove
4 Forest
3 Island
2 Plains

23 Lands

Tip of the Day #7: Nuts and Bolts

I'm a tinkerer, by nature, especially when it comes to building my own constructed lists or refining decks I dredge up from the corners of the internet.  In general, many competitive Magic players are constantly adding and removing cards from builds they find through coverage of professional tournaments.

The thing is, though, this is rarely the best course of action.  I never fully appreciated how well-tuned most winning decklists are until I finally gave up messing with what was working.

The truth is that a deck that takes down a Pro Tour is a honed machine, comprised of dozens of parts, assembled in such a way that it can repeat the task it was designed to do as many times as necessary.  If you imagine a deck like an engine, you'll understand that unscrewing one nut could lead to one hell of a Michael Bay style explosion.

When you are tempted to add just one Grave Titan because it should theoretically be good in the metagame you are expecting, you need to remember that you are taking something else out that had a purpose in the first place.

It can be even more problematic if you were not part of the team that originally built the list, and you swap in Rune Snags for Mana Leaks because of "the late game."  Sure, you might get away with it, and sometimes, your change may even end up being for the better, but more often than not, you just messed up the deck's basic plan.

The tip of the day is to be careful when you are re-wiring the security system of Bill Gates' house, you don't know which wires control the pirate-ninja robot butlers.

Magic and Immersion

Depending on what numbers you use, the average Magic player is between 16-24 years old.  I will have given 19 years of my life to this game in one way or another in August of this year.  That means that I've been playing the game longer than a huge portion of its audience has even been alive.  When I look back, there is nothing I would change about the role the game has played in my life.

Darwin Kastle recently shared his own Magic story and I want to continue to explore mine.  But my story doesn't involve any Pro Tour Top 8s or GP near misses, and there are barely any adventures involving beautiful women throwing themselves at me.  So instead of boring you by using an Amis-style objective correlative to build a narrative, I thought it better to tackle the subject more seriously.

Why in the name of all that is good and decent in the world have I spent so much time on a hobby that in case of a zombie apocalypse will only leave me with a rather large pile of kindling?

I would guess, three days of continuous burning.

Electrifying: A MTG Article by Ben Snyder

Electrifying

So last time I ran through a few ideas I had for the shape of post-Innistrad standard.  One thing that I definitely wasn’t expecting was the speed at which the metagame shifts now as opposed to ten years ago.  While I compulsively devour every midnight update of SCG and ChannelFireball, it’s different when you are actively trying to play in the new environments.

With that in mind, I’m going to try and publish an article every week, especially once Innistrad is online and I can actually playtest more than ten or fifteen games every five days.  For those of you who don’t remember, or haven’t bothered to check out my archives from the various websites, I take playtesting seriously.  I do not like small sample sizes.  But now, I think, I’ll have to accept that it isn’t possible to spend three to six months tinkering with a deck any more as the metagame will just evolve around it while you try and do so.