4-and-0

January 6th, 2010 by Ed Grabianowski

It’s been just under a year since I made my return to constructed Magic after many years away. My goal was to have fun and be at least slightly competitive. Well, at the last Friday Night Magic before the holidays, I took first place. It’s not exactly a World Championship, but it’s certainly a lot of progress. Here’s what I learned along the way.

Last February, I got back into the Standard constructed format sort of the way most people get into really cold water — slowly, with a lot of whining. I was playing on a budget, not wanting to drop a ton of money on cards that would be rotating out of the format soon. By the way, one of the things I learned is that playing a lot of Magic inevitably causes you to start using Magic jargon, so for those who don’t follow the tournament scene, Standard format is the current core set and the two newest “blocks” of three sets. Right now, that’s M10, Alara and Zendikar.

In any case, the low-wallet-impact deck I put together was a fast, aggressive deck built on red and green warriors. At my first Friday Night Magic, I went 2-2, exactly what I’d been aiming for. The deck was a broad archetype known as an aggro deck (play lots of fast creatures and try to for an early kill). It had the successes all aggro decks have, sometimes unleashing ridiculous amounts of damage and destroying opponents so fast there was really nothing they could do about it. It also suffered from the same flaw all aggro decks have — if my opponent could weather that initial storm, even if just barely, the deck tended to run out of steam. Once the opposing deck got rolling, the warriors didn’t really have any way to deal with it. It was inconsistent.

Over the deck’s lifetime, it had a win percentage just below .500. When Zendikar came out and Lorwyn block rotated out of Standard, I was a little sorry to see it go. But ultimately, it wasn’t really my style of deck, and it wasn’t really that good (although it fit my budget at the time). With the release of M10 and Zendikar, I was paying a lot more attention to Magic, and had a decent base of cards. I started building decks, some ideas working out fairly well and some not so much. In fact, once it has a few more weeks of testing, I’m hoping Joe will post his aggro deck that we built together, which is pretty solid.

When I stumbled across the Mono-Black Control (MBC) development thread on the Wizards message boards, I knew I’d found the deck I wanted to play. First of all, I’ve always loved playing black. Of course the art and themes are cool, but I also really like the interesting resource management issues black decks bring to the table. The control deck thing is more my style, too — not a counterspell type of a control, but more of a “I have a way to deal with anything you throw at me, and eventually I will beat you over the head” style. That’s MBC in a nutshell.

Here’s my current version of the deck, which is something of a toolbox. It may not be as focused as some tournament decks, but it has lots of cool stuff and ways to find the cool stuff. And it often wins with Nightmare. Seriously. You can find a really low-budget version of it here. Less than $30 from scratch, I’d guess.

//Land
2 Marsh Flats
2 Verdant Catacombs
20 Swamp
//Creatures
4 Gatekeeper of Malakir
2 Black Knight
3 Vampire Hexmage
3 Vampire Nighthawk
2 Nightmare
2 Malakir Bloodwitch
//Spells
2 Disfigure
3 Grim Discovery
4 Sign in Blood
4 Tendrils of Corruption
1 Consume Spirit
3 Mind Sludge
//Planeswalkers
2 Liliana Vess
1 Sorin Markov
//Sideboard
1 Gargoyle Castle
2 Doom Blade
3 Pithing Needle
2 Deathmark
2 Relic of Progenitus
2 Disfigure
2 x Black Knight
1 x Vampire Hexmage
It took me three or four weeks of going 3-1 at Friday Night Magic before I went 4-0 and won. Keep in mind I play at a small FNM, there’s no top 8 or 4, you just play four rounds and best record wins. And obviously, winning an FNM is small potatoes. But considering a year ago I barely remembered how to play and didn’t know anything about current tournament decks, I feel pretty good about it.
The interesting thing is, it shows what a game of skill and experience Magic is. I didn’t start doing well until I’d spent a few months really intensely following the game, reading message boards, testing decks online and just thinking about Magic a lot. Even once I’d built the MBC deck (which is essentially unchanged from it’s form circa two months ago), I wasn’t winning because I was new at the deck itself. Now that I’ve played a lot of competitive games with it, I know it inside out. I know what it can do and when, what tricks it has up its sleeve, what cards I need (and can expect to get) in a certain situation, when to mulligan, and a bunch of other intangible things that you only get with experience.
I also generally know what I’m going to face. When my opponent has played a few cards (or, sometimes, just one), I pretty much know what deck she’s using. Hardcore Magic players take that sort of knowledge for granted, but having acquired it anew over the last few months, let me tell you it makes a huge difference.
Why does this matter to you? Aaron Forsythe recently published some statistics on Magic’s growth in the last year. Bottom line? There are more active tournament players and active Friday Night Magic venues right now than pretty much ever. You can get back into the game pretty easily these days (although getting good takes time and work). Get some packs, build a deck, head down to your local FNM and get beat. Then learn, go back and get beat again. Post deck ideas in the comments of Magic articles here, or better yet, at the forums built for that purpose over at Wizards (or MTGSalvation, or any other of a dozen good sites). In two months, you’ll be issuing beat downs of your own. I say this because I’ve had a lot of fun playing Magic semi-seriously over the last year, and there’s a real satisfaction from gaining some level of expertise in something challenging (by no means would I call myself an expert, but I’m better than I was). I want to make sure everyone has a chance to experience that too.
By the way, Robot Viking sponsor TrollandToad.com has a lot of Magic singles, boxes and boosters. They often have really good prices on singles. I wouldn’t blow smoke just because they’re my sponsor — shop around, they’re usually hard to beat, even compared to ebay.

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Published by Ed Grabianowski on Jan 6, 2010 under CCGs | Post your comment now

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2 Responses to “4-and-0”

  1. Comment by FollowtheCamel
    January 7th, 2010 9:13 AM

    Congrats on the 4-0. I’m jealous because our FNM usually has three or four 4-0s but just rewards them all. Very rough to make it up there.

  2. Comment by ggodo
    January 7th, 2010 1:58 PM

    I don’t play FNMs often. Mostly because I don’t like Standard. I have a pile of cards here, and I wanna use them!I’ll go if there’s a Draft or some other Limited format, then proceed to finish one place out of prizes every time.