Do you like my horribly dated Death Cab for Cutie reference? I just had to, because.. um.. well.. it’s the new year. And.. and.. yeah, we’ll get to that next part. I hope you all had a great holiday week for those of you that were off, and that everyone had a safe and happy New Year’s Eve, if that’s your thing. First, I want to extend my apologies, as I missed last week on account of my inability to properly use the WordPress iPad app to post from my mom’s tablet while I was spending a week in the backwoods of North Jersey. I only realized this as I actually sat down to write this week’s article (aka: this one) and went to find my article from last week to copy “Hope Eternal—” and paste it into the title for this week. Because we use em-dashes in our titles. And seriously, who has an em-dash on their keyboard? I don’t, so the only way I know how to make them is copy pasta. But anyways, it was just a bunch of links to my favorite Legacy articles from 2013, so I guess you didn’t really miss all that much. Maybe I’ll try to walk her through emailing it to me, but you know how Baby Boomers can be with gadgets, so it will probably be easier to just redo the list or wait until I pay another visit to the folks, later this month.
So what do we have on tap for this week? I was going to write about this sweet UR Omnitell list that I played at Monday Night Legacy, this week. It’s the same 75 that Max Brown used in the Legacy portion of the last SCG Invitational. For reference:
UR Omnitell
| Planeswalkers (1) 1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor Creatures (1) 1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn Spells (38) 2 Lotus Petal 4 Dream Halls 4 Omniscience 4 Brainstorm 2 Daze 4 Force of Will 1 Pact of Negation 4 Burning Wish 3 Enter the Infinite 3 Gitaxian Probe 4 Ponder 3 Show and Tell | Lands (20) 3 Island 1 Mountain 3 Ancient Tomb 1 City of Traitors 1 Flooded Strand 2 Misty Rainforest 2 Polluted Delta 4 Scalding Tarn 3 Volcanic Island Sideboard (15) 3 Leyline of Sanctity 1 Pyroblast 2 Red Elemental Blast 1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor 1 Enter the Infinite 1 Eye of Nowhere 2 Pyroclasm 1 Show and Tell 1 Spiraling Embers 1 Time of Need 1 Tremor |
Looks pretty sweet, right? I briefly tried out Burning Wish-based Omnitell decks before we were given Enter the Infinite to work with. That was back when our kill package was the loltacular Petals of Insight to generate an arbitrarily high storm count, wishing for Grapeshot, and winning. I’m a big fan of this setup, because in the old B.Wish Omnitell lists, we got to have seven virtual copies of Show and Tell in the main (with the fourth Show in the board and the Wishes acting as copies four through seven. The list often felt janky though. And then we were given Enter the Infinite, and Lejay proclaimed he broke the format with the mono-blue version that has been popular ever since last year’s Bazaar of Moxen. But going back to Burning Wish, Enter the Infinite also happens to be a sorcery. So, Burning Wish is now functioning as extra copies of two of our three combo pieces. Add in the fourth Dream Halls (most lists run three), and now you have a three card combo where you have seven copies of two pieces, eight copies of the third piece, and 11 cantrips to put the whole thing together. I personally think that the list needs a Preordain or two and could stand to trim at least one Probe, but this man just won an Invitational, so we’ll give the designer the benefit of the doubt for at least a first run. Oh, and there’s two Jaces in the 75. Sold!
Remember how I said I was going to write about the sweet list I played at Monday Night Legacy, though? Yeah, well, unfortunately, it wasn’t the above list. Our store was all out of Leylines and I could not find anyone to spot me a few for the evening, so this list will have to go on the shelf for a week or two, depending on how fast the mail is (but if someone who’s local can give me the hookup for Monday, you’ll be my hero). Remember that DCFC reference I started this article off with? I had to scramble for something at the last minute, so I “audibled” into… Miracles (and that’s the part about how “I don’t feel any different” har har). Sorry, again. I know, I know, that’s two sorries already, and we’re not even a thousand words, in! I promised to lay off writing about Miracles for awhile, so the only thing I’m going to add here is that it is NOT a deck you should play if you aren’t in the mood to play it. If you are a fan of New Girl at all (I’m not apologizing for this one; deal with the references to the terrible TV shows I watch!), there was that bit, this week, where Coach says to Winston, “You decided nothing. That story contained ZERO decisions.” That roughly sums up how I played. I decided nothing and just let my deck make all my decisions for me, which you may have gotten away with Standard Jund, circa Bloodbraid-era, but not so much with this deck. I made a questionable keep or two and mulled only when I ABSOLUTELY had to (less than two lands and no Brainstorm/Top or unable to cast the Brainstorm/Top that’s in my hand). I would auto-fetch without thinking twice about it whenever I spun top and didn’t see the exact card I wanted. There was even one time where I saw Supreme Verdict, which I wouldn’t be able to cast immediately, but had an extra turn before I would be facing lethal, and I shuffled it to find Terminus. When I already had one of my three pre-board Terminii (is that the plural? I’m making it the plural!) in hand. It was just a parade of bad plays and non-decisions. I’m glad I can recognize that now, but it still doesn’t feel good to go 0-2 drop.
The 0-2 drop feels even worse when it was the only Legacy event I entered in the last three weeks, in both the paper and digital realms (not counting a few two-mans). As nice as it was to have some time off of work and get to spend some extended time with family and loved ones, the holidays really did a number on my Legacy exposure, between the SCG break and being cut off from the Twenty Sided Store and my MODO machine (or I guess you can call it a computer? I don’t use it for anything else though..) at my parents’ house. To top it off, for the time that I did spend in Brooklyn, there was the Holiday Cube. I played a lot of Cube. Probably too much Cube. And I almost always tried to force ridiculous combo decks. And it was glorious. And.. okay, okay, I’m not gonna talk about Cube, here. How about we talk about another list that I plan on bringing out to play in the near future, instead? It’s a bit rough around the edges, but here’s what I have, so far:
UB Tezz Stax
This deck deviates quite a bit from a lot of the current Tezz lists out there, because it has a very different gameplan. Immediately, we can see that Strix is absent. The idea is to make it really hard for your opponent to play a real game of Magic, right off the bat, by getting a turn one Chalice on one (because look at that, we have no one-drops). My list more closely resembles this list that I fell in love with at first sight. I tried building it while I was still new at the format, but I a.) didn’t fully understand the deck (or format, for that matter) and b.) made some disastrous tweaks due to my naivety. I think the time might be ripe for a deck like this to really mow through an event. I will wait for further data, but if we look at last week’s SCG Open results, we can see that there are exactly 12 Abrupt Decays in the entire top 16, and it’s really more like nine, because three are in the sideboard of ANT, a matchup that I think is very beatable. I think we can look to True-Name Nemesis as a large reason for the warping of the format, to the point where people are starting to leave their Decays at home. (aside: this could also mean the time is ripe for pulling out the old RIP-Helm Miracles; I promised to start playing new decks on Mondays and online, but for major events, I still plan to bring whatever I feel is the best deck for me for that tournament.) I don’t expect this trend to quickly reverse itself. The top 16 of that Open was mostly Delver (read: True-Name) decks and decks that go off fast enough to not care about True-Name, such as Reanimator and Sneak & Show. This deck seems well-positioned (or at the very least, it has cards that seem well-positioned) against both of those, so I think there’s some merit to bringing this out on a not-so-distant Monday. Maybe even this Monday if I can’t get Leylines!
P.S. I just noticed as I was reviewing this that I made two pop-culture references in this article, and they are from Zooey Deschanel’s TV show and Ben Gibbard’s band (if you don’t know, they were briefly married and are now divorced). Unintentional coincidence, I swear!