Okay so here I am with another article. I haven”t written anything in a long time because nothing has really jumped out at me as far as decks or new interactions. Don”t get me wrong, I have been brewing and I am playing with some pretty interesting cards I just don”t want to share my ideas just yet. Instead today I think I am going to talk about a couple of things that have sparked some interesting conversation lately. Mainly the bannings and the presence of a “boogeyman” in any given format, and second talk about mulligans and why not to be afraid to draw 6.
Being a rogue player I got a nice juicy bit of news hearing that Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind Sculptor were being banned effective July 1st. Now I like Jace about as much as the next person that could afford him, but building decks is incredibly hard when you have to keep a constant building speedbump in the back of your head when assembling your 75. With the release of New Phyrexia I couldn”t play my Vengevines anymore just because of Batterskull. That card turned a Vengevine deck matchup completely opposite and into the Caw Blade player”s favor. Now I didn”t want to talk about the bannings just to complain. I should be happy right? Well I”m a little bummed. I think a format is fun when you can build to “beat the boogeyman”. This philosophy is what helped me design a successful deck for the national casino qualifiers. Also when you beat the best deck in any given format you just feel good about yourself, maybe a little more that you beat the boogeyman. These cards being banned isn”t going to really effect us much anyway. FNM will still have the same amount of rogue decks and the 3 to 4 players playing Blade decks will move on to something new the interwebs told them was good. The only thing this really hits hard are big tournaments and all of those are over save for the SCG Open tournaments, and big events us locals can”t make outside of the country. So I guess just brew and think of what you want to play while the format is wide open and don”t worry about Jace anymore because he has gone the way of the Skullclamp.
Now about mulligans being an under used tool I see just laying around. Too many times I play against someone that hangs on the 2 land hand and hope that it gets there (yes I am guilty of this too). This also goes for the 5 land and rampant growth hand. Sure you might draw out of it. But what if you don”t? You are giving your opponent valuable turns to execute his strategy while you do nothing. Against RDW I have seen players keep a no removal hand that only has maybe a planeswalker or two. Why would you do this to yourself? If you get a bad hand ship it away and go for one less. So what if it”s one less card? You are getting the chance to draw the better hand that could give you a better shot at winning the game. If you are on the draw you have the advantage of seeing one more card than your opponent. If you know your hand is the absolute worst then your next 6 should be better. Why keep the horrible 7 land hand and think that you will win? Well it”s 7 less land you”re going to draw. Haha, this isn”t healthy thinking to get better at Magic. So this article was just more of a rant about things I have been thinking about lately but I hope it was a fun read. Next time I will actually talk about legal cards in a format I swear. So until next time see you at the shop and MULLIGAN!
^^^RDW was an example. I said keeping a hand with just planeswalkers was bad. It was an example of a slow hand versus a fast deck. Generally a hand like that wont win me the game vs RDW. I was talking about winning just not as direct as you expected.