Table Manners #7: M12

I cannot wait until 2014 rolls around. Just sayin’.

I wrote in a previous article about the importance of moderation in playing Magic, Limited especially. I’ll recap: the idea is that you’re playing to have fun now, with a secondary goal of securing playtime later. Because Magic is a fairly high-stress activity, it is very easy to ‘burn out’ during long sessions, at which point your performance will drop and your enjoyment along with it. Ask anyone who has attended a Pro Tour or Grand Prix — it is exhausting. There’s also the rest of life to consider — you know, that stuff that happens under the big glowing yellow thing with other people? Unless you’re getting paid for it (and I mean real money, not Event Tickets or bot credit!) or are a member of the very exclusive club of people who can make rent on Pro Tour earnings, Magic should not be a priority in your life. Work, education, and family responsibilities come first, and even your leisure time should have some balance. Because balance is important. Right?

. . . right. I have a confession to make. I am a notorious binge-player for two weeks every three months or so. Everything I wrote in that above paragraph is absolutely true– it’s just so much harder to actually live by it during release periods. There are fairly good reasons for this: mainly, that the expected value (EV) for release events is really, really good. Click here to see the breakdown for the current M12 events. Compare these to the regular payouts.

The clearest example is that of the 4-round Swiss Sealed. If we go with the all-Ticket buy-in, then for two Tickets fewer, both 3-1 and 4-0 records get an additional two packs. The larger events featuring a Top 8 Draft are a bit more difficult to calculate, but for an extra six Tickets you get an exponentially higher upper limit for prize earnings. The Top 8 Drafts have a better prize spread and lower entry fee (and some fill up two days in advance, so plan ahead!), whereas the Top 8 Sealeds have a higher upper limit (1st Place wins 45 packs . . . sheesh). For the latter, the large number of Swiss rounds will be exhausting but beneficial to skilled players. Again, as iterations increase, luck loses to statistics, and winning percentages are certainly statistics.

I happen to have a bad habit. I go overboard sometimes. Still, if ever you can responsibly set aside time for Magic, release season is the time for it.

As it happens, Prereleases have some of the worst EV possible. A Swiss Draft costs a full twenty Tickets for the measly benefit of getting the cards a few days early and an extra pack if you go 3-0. Never, ever, ever enter these events, unless you happen to be a Communist pyromaniac or a writer with a deadline. Or both.

Draft

Remember, you can click the ‘quotation marks’ button in the bottom left to see my pick order reasoning.

Deckbuilding

The Draft seemed like a mess to me at first, but the quality of cards in the deck is actually quite high. Although we didn’t get much in the way of bloodthirst, the two we do have are legitimate win conditions. To that end, we also have a dragon (always nice), Drifting Shade, Sorin’s Vengeance, and random unblockable 4/2 enchanted beats on Turn 2. The deck also has a handful of ways to generate card advantage and a nice pile of removal. If this is a bad bloodthirst deck, I’m a little scared of what the good ones look like.

Six Mountains should be enough to consistently cast the dragon on Turn 6. The Gorehorn may or may not arrive on time, but we’d rather make Drifting Shade, Vampire Outcasts, and all of Sorin’s . . . stuff better than rely on the one beater. Grim Lavamancer certainly doesn’t have to be the first guy at the party, so that’s not a concern. Since we don’t care about bloodthirsting (that is a terrible verb; it is now called ‘hulking out’), ahem, hulking out in the early turns, Goblin Fireslinger is just a Tormented Soul that isn’t as good with Dark Favor. The value of most pingers is really in their capacity to control the board; burning face is just a bonus, really, and not worth too much by itself (hulking out making the exception, as well as Cinder Pyromancer). Firebreathing does everything Dark Favor does, except worse. Despite the occasional ghost rush, our deck is really more of a mid-range build, looking to establish board dominance before winning with something heavy. As such, Act of Treason isn’t especially useful to our strategy. The only mistake in building this deck was leaving Deathmark in the sideboard. Given that we’re playing neither of the target colors, any other deck at the table has about a fair chance of containing at least a few decent targets. Considering that the creatures it does kill tend to be rather large and/or flying, those odds certainly justify maindecking it. I believe I sided it in every single time I could, usually in place of Lava Axe. My deck could use the extra reach, but the sorcery is certainly the weakest card.

With its high removal count and fairly spotty curve, this deck would prefer to draw first, but it has the potential for aggressive starts when on the play.

Games
Round 1, Game 1; we’re put on the draw.

I’m never really thrilled at seeing five lands in a hand, but I don’t think this one is worth shipping back. Vampire Outcasts is one of the more powerful cards in our deck, not in the least because it will quickly bring us back from whatever early beats we take (if we can hulk it). Mind Rot is more effective on the draw, as the opponent has one fewer card to spare. Assuming he plays a land and a spell each turn starting on Turn 2, he will have two cards in hand on Turn 5, at which point our discard will effectively cut him off from the late game. If we’re anywhere near stabilized at that point, we’ll be in a great position. We keep.

Our opponent gets in some early beats with a Companion but has nothing else.

We’d rather take a few more hits from the one critter and eat it later with a 4/4 than trade a 2/2 with it soon. We lay down his last two lands with Mind Rot on Turn 5 before making a dragon on Turn 6. Unfortunately, we can’t effectively attack without putting ourselves in a precarious position, so we hold back until we can play a hulked out Vampire to hold the fort. And then he plays Arachnus Spinner. Yay. We actually do manage to kill the spider with a combined surgical strike, but lose to a couple of green fliers and Titanic Growth.

Sideboard: -1 Lava Axe, +1 Deathmark. Durr.

Round 1, Game 2; we choose to play.

This hand doesn’t do very much. Blood Seeker is maybe the worst Dark Favor target in our deck as 2 points of toughness is still easy to kill, and the Vampire Shaman likes to sit in the back. With only six Mountains in our deck and no confirmed artifacts in his, Vandal isn’t going to be great. This hand just doesn’t do very much. We’ll send it back.

. . . this isn’t better. I decided to keep this hand out of a natural fear of five card hands on the play, which isn’t necessarily incorrect. The odds of our drawing Swamps might be a long shot, but I can count the number of games I’ve won after mulling twice on the play on two hands and a foot.

If we can draw two of our eleven Swamps in the next four turns or so, we should be fine . . . but we don’t. Oh, and he has this:

We go 0-2 in Round 1. Good thing we’re playing Swiss!

Round 2, Game 1; we’re put on the play.

We’ve got a pretty good hand here. It’s rarely incorrect to keep a hand with three lands of different types, and removal makes it a keeper.

I’ll just leave this here:

Round 2, Game 2; we’re put on the draw.

This hand is a bit slow, but it’s got two of our win conditions and a way of building a third. As above, it has three lands of different types, so it’s a keeper.

He’s got the Turn 1 bear, but nothing to follow up until he Cancels my Turn 3 Tormented Soul, none of which is at all disappointing. We cast Dark Favor on our Blood Seeker instead, get in for a smack, but he has the Unsummon after untapping. We have Drifting Shade to his Aven Fleetwing, and follow with Vampire Outcasts. We’ve obviously got the upper hand by now, but the game officially ends when this happens:

Round 3, Game 1; we’re put on the draw.

There are one-land hands I would be tempted to keep on the draw; this isn’t one of them.

The single live removal spell makes this hand worth keeping, but a Mountain makes it really good. Even if we don’t hit that particular geographical formation, the Outcasts will be good enough.

Any land. Any. Land. But no . . .

Round 3, Game 2; we choose to play.

Honestly, this is the best hand we’ve gotten all day. It’s just so beautiful.

By the time he could deal with our Turn 1 Slimer, Turn 2 Dark favor, Turn 3 Sorin’s Thirst and Grim Lavamancer, we had Turn 4 Vampire Outcast.

That’s much better.

Round 3, Game 3; we’re put on the draw.

I might have kept this hand if we were on the play, but we aren’t. Being on the draw gives us more flexibility, and I’m fairly confident we can do better than this.

Though it might not seem so, this hand is actually much better. Our odds of drawing a Swamp in time for Sorin’s Thirst to be relevant are actually quite high, Mind Rot will almost certainly get value, and Gravedigger will get more mileage out of whatever creatures we might draw.

He’s got the high ground for this entire game, and we’ve got to figure out a way to win:

With his being ahead both on board and in life, we do not have inevitability. The longer this game lasts, the less of a chance we have to take it. So, what do we do? We need to cast Sorins Vengeance, but he’s got an inconveniently high life total at the moment. We can’t very well search for a land with Diabolic Tutor, as any interference on his part to remove our creatures leaves us belly-up. We need to cast Vengeance and then finish him in the next turn or so after. So we grab ourselves a dragon and, as Columbus did when his crew threatened mutiny for the third time, hope for land. He does indeed remove both our creatures, hitting us down to a single life point. And then we get there, gaining 10 life, losing 6, and swinging in for the win.

Yes, JcZest1988, “for real.”

It’s not that we got incredibly lucky — we had about a 45% chance of hitting the land. What makes those three turns the equivalent of Anakin actually landing that ridiculous front flip onto Obi-Wan’s lightsaber and keeping at least half his limbs is that we turned the game all the way around. Twenty-point life swings will do that.

Conclusion
In case it wasn’t as clear as Lady Gaga’s rampant insanity, this Draft was my first ever attempt at M12. I’d say it went fairly well. I’ve since played quite a bit more, mostly in the form of Swiss Sealed events. M12 isn’t better or worse than M11 . . . it’s just different. The most glaring difference for me is that they’ve somehow added a fifth color. In last year’s Core Set, Mountains were these things you sometimes stuck in a green deck to play Fireball (that is, if you weren’t playing all the worst cards in the format and calling it a deck, and somehow winning with it). Now, with creatures like Blood Ogre, Gorehorn Minotaurs, and Bonebreaker Giant at common along with three great removal spells, red is a real color again. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the better ones. Blue has taken a huge hit just because it no longer has Azure Drake and Foresee, let alone Jaces Ingenuity and Air Servant. White has somehow managed to get better, though I’m not sure how. Oh wait. Yes I do. With a bajillion fliers, a common protection spell, and two of the better sorcery-speed removal spells (for Limited purposes, that is: Oblivion Ring and Pacifism) ever printed in its color. Black is black. Efficient removal, crappy creatures; even when the critters are hulked, they still only trade with white’s 2-drops.

But, as I said, it’s not better; it’s different. I rather liked M11, but M12 certainly has enough depth to keep me interested.

Extra Notes

• The Dark Favor-Tormented Soul ‘combo’ seems like a really strong tool for black decks. I’m looking forward to being the guy with five copies of each and a couple of Lava Axes to round it out.
• Volcanic Dragon is every bit as good as Air Elemental, and better in some ways. While it costs a bit more, four damage in the air is a nasty surprise.
• Grim Lavamancer is, suffice to say, INSANE. Try pairing it with Merfolk Looter, serve lightly chilled. Enjoy.