Achievement Unlocked - Maxed-Out Gamer Score

At some point over the last few months, writing about fun decks and unlocking achievements became a job and not a fun hobby. I still loved playing them and brewing them, but the process of reporting on them was no longer enjoyable for me. Perhaps it was the lack of feedback, the difficulty in extrapolating an article from hurried and scribbled shorthand, the various stressors in my personal life or just a general boredom with the topic.

Then again, maybe I just got tired of losing and being pigeon-holed as a casual deckbuilder.

Recently I have been working on testing with a small group that includes The Eh Team’s Scotty Mac, Dan Dusang of Planeswalker Asylum and Jason Clark or Brewport Avenue. Dubbed The Angry Birds by Scotty, we’ve had a fun time working on our list and we’ve all played it to some success. I guess locally my players had grown accustomed to me not having success, because despite everything else it was the receipt of these messages after winning a mid-sized tournament that broke the back of the proverbial camel:

Geez Lansdell, when did you learn to play Magic? Or were all the good players mulling to 4 or just not there?”
“If you’re winning tournaments I guess I should come back to Midgard and start owning people.”

There were others, expressing general surprise and even shock at my victory, but these two were the ones that really hit me for some reason. I had been mediocre for so long that people had forgotten that I am actually good at this game. That or they had just never seen me win. Neither scenario was particularly appealing and it was starting to play on me. Surely I was a good player, right? I’ve played bad decks and made mistakes but that wasn’t because I couldn’t do better, was it? It was just because I wanted to have more fun…right?

Despite all outward appearances, I actually have a very fragile ego. I take many things to heart and my self-image is easily splintered. I wasn’t so sure of the answers to the questions above, ones that should have been rhetorical. I had to try and prove to myself that I actually did know how to win.

The sad side effect is that playing “known quantity” decks at the FNM level and writing tournament reports is not many people’s idea of a riveting read. If the Achievement Unlocked series was popular at all, it was because it was different and because the decks were off the wall. People who spoke to me about the articles loved the angles I took to set, then reach the achievements and particularly enjoyed the casual approach to a tournament that many take seriously. Don’t get me wrong, it was often fun for me too. But for the sake of my own sanity and to make myself a better player, I need to change what I play and what I write about.

With that in mind, this first article will serve to update you about the fun decks I played but never managed to write about. We might miss some decklists and there won’t be much in the way of round-by-round breakdown, but hopefully this will serve as some closure on one series before I embark on my next writing adventure for Mana Deprived.

Week One: Although We’ve Come To The Eeeeend of the Maaaaze

Block Pro Tours have often been touted as great harbingers of the upcoming Standard environment. PT Avacyn Restored gave us the Hexproof [card]Spirit[/card]s deck that is now EnBantments, the framework of Jund Midrange and the precursor to the UWR decks that have perennially been contenders. Before that [card]Tempered Steel[/card] ran roughshod over the Scars block Pro Tour before making up almost half of the top 8 at Worlds.

That’s all well and good, but what could it possibly offer to the guy who plays FNM for pure fun value? The Spikiest of Spike decks, the ones designed to win their pilots $40,000 and two years of being on the circuit, couldn’t possibly unlock any achievements could they? Well, I wouldn’t have thought so.

The Swedish contingent was determined to prove me wrong. Not exactly at the top of anyone’s list when it comes to international Magic superpowers (right now that list would have to be USA, Japan, Brazil, the Czech Republic and probably France) or innovative deck design, they showed up for the highest-level large event in Magic with a deck built around a card dismissed as terrible by almost every internet pundit and semi-pro. And it won. A lot. Kenny Oberg and crew came to the Pro Tour with a [card]Maze’s End[/card] deck, and the minute I saw it win a game on camera I knew I would be playing it at FNM the next week.

Well, something similar to it anyway. In Standard I had access to something stupid like 16 Fog effects and a bunch of board sweepers, so I wanted to go that route. I also wanted to play [card]Ral Zarek[/card] in the deck, since his +1 untaps [card]Maze’s End[/card] for me and the Fogs will let me ultimate, giving me uninterrupted searching for a couple of turns.

Somehow a deck running 28 land managed to get mana screwed four times in four rounds. Unfortunately all four were in the first two rounds. I managed to win the next two, despite being surprised by a main-deck [card]Demolish[/card] in one game. Highlights included taking 4 extra turns with [card]Ral Zarek[/card] and only needing two of them, being on one life and needing a four-outer to win (one of the two gates I didn’t have in play, running two of each gate) and hitting it off the top, and on successive turns casting an overloaded [card]Cyclonic Rift[/card], miracled [card]Devastation Tide[/card] and [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] for 12.

Week Two: Curse of Possiblities

Sometimes you just want to lock people out of the game. In an effort to allegedly make the game more fun, Standard has featured precious few ways to do that of late. Sure you could play [card]Knowledge Pool[/card] with [card]Curse of Exhaustion[/card], but the Pool cost 6 and was terribad on its own.

[card]Possibility Storm[/card] opened up this avenue for a whole mana less while still enabling me to build a decent deck around it. Actually putting the list together was one of the more interesting challenges I had gone through, needing to keep all my sorceries as board sweepers and avoiding X spells. I had Azorius and [card]Izzet Charm[/card] as both of them work well with [card]Possibility Storm[/card], and my kill conditions were [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] with [card]Blasphemous Act[/card] and [card]Assemble the Legion[/card]. Extort triggers off both the original spell and the one that you actually cast, making [card]Blind Obedience[/card] both powerful and useful for flipping into Assemble or a combo piece. I only went 2-3 but unlocked the combo multiple times. It didn’t feel good most of the time though, especially since some people just wouldn’t scoop and I was left drawing and drawing until I hit the combo.

I lost round 1 to Rakdos aggro when I couldn’t find a single [card]Blind Obedience[/card] in any of the 3 games. [card]Madcap Skills[/card] is pretty good when my deck is so light on dudes. Round 2 I lost to UWR when I first played my threats in the wrong order and then in game 2 he resolved [card]Assemble the Legion[/card] first. I was able to beat UR Delver and GB Ooze before dropping to Esper Control’s [card]Aetherling[/card] and keeping a 3-lander that had no more lands in the first 7 turns.

The deck felt like it could be powerful enough to compete at FNM with some tweaking (and some better draws), but the looks on the faces of my younger opponents when they realised I had locked them out were enough to ensure I didn’t want to play this again. If they concede or if you have a win condition already in play it’s not so bad, but [card]Possibility Storm[/card] makes it unpredicatble. Play this at your own risk.

Gamer Score Over Nine Thousand

There were other decks I played of course: [card]Notion Thief[/card] (never won a game, managed to get the Whispering Madness/Thief combo going but lost anyway), Modern Varolz (scavenged [card]Death’s Shadow[/card] on to [card]Phyrexian Crusader[/card] once, lost an awful lot anyway) and even a RUG Defender deck that tried to win with [card]Doorkeeper[/card]. None of these was successful, but they WERE fun.

I think all told I did pretty well with a bunch of crazy fun deck ideas, and in the process I made FNM an enjoyable experience for me and for my opponents. I will still occasionally take fun decks to FNM, and I may even write about them, but going forward my articles will be more community- and issue-focused. I hope you all enjoyed the journey I took, because I certainly did.