The Journey of Jor Kadeen (yeah, still not pauper)

I've still been playing pauper on MTGO, and adding cards to my cube as new sets come out, but I must admit that my deckbuilding energy has all been going toward EDH/Commander for the past couple of months. I've been working on two decks: Uril, the Miststalker and Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer.

I chose Uril because he's a known quantity and there's a lot of info on how to build a good deck for him. The deck I ended up with isn't so much a netdeck as it is a combination of several netdecks. I'm not at a point where I could make an original deck for him, but I like the general and it's a good deck from which to learn the format. Yes he draws heat from the rest of the table, but it's a very straight forward and understandable strategy. Mana ramp. Clear the board. Drop Uril. Enchant Uril. Attack.

Jor has become more of a journey. I got the card from a New Phyrexia Fat Pack just at the time I was starting to consider the EDH format and knew instantly I'd found my general. I generally play red and white, metalcraft was the first Magic mechanic I'd learned, and the deckbuilding strategy seemed fairly obvious: use lots of artifacts, probably in the form of equipment, and have lots of creatures that benefit from his pump ability. I also opened a Sword of War and Peace in that fat pack, which seemed to seal the type of deck I should make. Sadly that sword hasn't been in the deck for awhile. It's fairly weak compared to other equipments, even if it fits flavor-wise.

The first version of the deck I built was ridiculous. I got some things right. White Sun's Zenith is a good card to take advantage of +3 to all creatures. Hero of Bladehold makes guys every turn who appreciate Jor's ability, and Hero gives everyone attacking +1. Good. Whispersilk Cloak is a good equipment to throw on the guy who is making your team so powerful. Phyrexian Rebirth... a wrath that makes a huge artifact that helps Jor along to metalcraft? Yee haw! But Knight Exemplar, as much as I like her, has no place in the deck. A lot of the cards I put in were just my favorites in red and white, and there wasn't much synergy at all. When I played the deck I found I was basically ignored while all sorts of crazy plays happened at the table, and then when I was the only one left to kill I was compassionately dispatched. Seeing those crazy plays was my first real lesson in EDH though. My deck didn't have any of those. Each turn I just plopped something on the table and passed the turn. It seemed some players would spread their whole deck out in one turn, put half of it in the graveyard, and then do something awesome with the cards dumped in the yard that won the game. Back to the drawing board.

I quickly discovered that in boros colors, I'd never have plays as complex as the green, blue, and black players have. But I knew that I needed a clear deck strategy, that any cards that didn't further my game didn't belong in my deck, and that it was gonna cost me some cash.

(One of my naive ideas in starting EDH was that it would be cheaper than other formats because I would only need one copy of any card, even if it was expensive. Good EDH cards seem to go all or nothing when it comes to price. There are incredible cards out there for less than fifty cents, and plenty of lands that don't go for less than fifty dollars. I tried to draw the line at not spending more than five dollars for a card, but it didn't take long to break that barrier. I bought a Sensei's Divining Top on ebay for twelve bucks (including shipping). I imagine every Magic player has that point where they have to look in the mirror and explain to themselves why they paid who knows how much for a piece of cardboard.)

When it comes to Magic the Gathering, I have a weakness for tribal. I like to make a deck that feels like a club, whether it's knights, or more recently illusions, I love me a theme. My problem is I'm not thrilled with goblins, elves, nor fairies. Yeah, I don't like the best tribes. I'm a sucker for the underdog. I'm willing to play a less than competitive deck if I get to have the cool cards I want in it, which is good, because even knights was never fast enough to go very far. In attempting to come up with some synergy for my Jor deck, I decided to go tribal. Myr probably would've been the better way to go, but I chose golems.

I stocked my deck with cool fattie golems like Darksteel Colossus and Platinum Emperion, and I put in plenty of token generators like Titan Forge, Golem Foundry, and Bladesplicer (I still like this card, and with a bounce engine it could be pretty good). I started considering an expensive (for me) golem card, Mycosynth Golem at $11. (now as I'm working with different possibilities on my deck, I still want to try the Mycosynth. Affinity for artifacts for all my artifact creature cards sounds decent) I loved the look of my golem deck. Then I played it. I was so excited to get my golem foundry going, popping out 3/3 golems every couple of turns. I had big plans to get Jor out and swing with them. Then Austere Command hit the table taking out my golems and the foundry. Not that this play still wouldn't wreck my day, but that game made me realize that all I had left to do was try to put more golems out on the table. And chances were that they'd get wiped again. My golems didn't have any evasion, the fat ones would get chumped, the small ones would get blown up, and my tribe was starting to look sad indeed. What my deck was missing was interactivity. In a multiplayer game, you need interactivity.

I started combing the net for other builds for Jor, looking for examples of interaction. I found plenty of equipment-themed decks, a lot of which seemed overcommitted to their themes. And I found myr tribal decks, which seemed cute, but not the direction I wanted to go. Then I found a deck where the builder wrote in his opening description that the only way to win with an aggro strategy, which is what Boros generally is, is to attack that which makes the other decks so strong: their land base. This Jor Kadeen deck had nine cards that destroyed all or most of the lands on the table. To counter the inherent problem of blowing up your own lands, the deck was heavily weighted with mana-producing artifacts. Aside from some other token producing and support cards, this was pretty much all the deck did. Wow. That was interactivity alright, blow up the table and then swing in for the kill.

I'm well versed now in all the opinions on land destruction. It's unfun, it's a cheap shot, nobody will want to play with you if you do it. But it lit up my imagination. At this point in my deckbuilding adventures,  I was pretty frustrated with the effectiveness of my deck. But I didn't want to give up on my general, and this seemed like a strategy that would finally give me an edge. Chatting with others, I found some support for the strategy that had me convinced.

It's a game. Land destruction cards are an element of this game. Specifically they're part of red and white's toolbox. A green player who is going to ramp to fifteen mana by turn five has no place complaining about another color using one of its more powerful weapons. Same can be said for a blue player who draws two cards during every other player's turn and then takes multiple turns until he wins the game. Same can be said for a black player who endlessly pulls cards from his and others' graveyards to use as she will. In a game, each player is trying to win. Yeah we're trying to be social, but everyone also wants to be the victor. The idea that Boros players should either accept that they're weak and won't win or not play their colors is ridiculous. It's one thing to enjoy and play a game a lot, it's another thing to take it too seriously, especially in a casual format.

The idea that it's a lame (or more offensive term) move to play a land destruction card boggles me. I understand getting angry when you have a great plan on how to win the game and someone thwarts that plan. It's going to happen to all but one of the players in any given game. It's silly to say some methods of winning are okay while others aren't. One of the great things about Magic is its diversity. There are many ways to approach a game. If someone gets upset when a player chooses strategy option D instead of strategy options B, C, or F which you approve of, then that player might reconsider their attitude toward the game. Consider the following statement: "The only reason you won that game was because you destroyed all the lands and then we couldn't stop you from attacking with your creatures."

Yeah. How about these? "The only reason you won that game was because you had fifteen mana by turn five and got a Ulamog on the table. And then on turn six you dropped Blightsteel Colossus." (this happened at a recent game) "The only reason you won that game was because you drew thirty cards and countered all our spells." "The only reason you won that game was because you got all of your combo pieces and did infinite damage to the table." "The only reason you won that game was because you put thirty creatures in your graveyard and cast Living Death."

If a playgroup decides to ban certain strategies, that is understandable, as long as everyone in the group is fine with it. But here in Portland we have a pretty large crew of EDH players and the meta can get a little crazy. I'm not sure I'm going to keep my Jor deck heavily stocked with land disruption, but I know I'll always have Wake of Destruction and Ruination in it. I'll take them out if green players take out Oracle of Mul Daya and Cultivate. If blue players take out.... you get the idea. Let's cheer on any player who tries to make his or her deck the best it can be. I, for one, intend to try to win with mine.

Praetor EDH Project, not Pauper, but still grassroots.

Along with my burgeoning interest in the Pauper format, both online and in real life, I've gotten seriously hooked on EDH. If you don't know what that is for some reason, just google it and you'll find quite the tempting rabbit hole to get lost in. I do like a lot of the non-pauper cards, and EDH is a great format to feature those cards. You only need (are only allowed actually) one copy of any card, so expense is a little less of an issue (though there are plenty of expensive cards that you'll find in EDH decks). Five of my favorite non-pauper cards are the Praetors from New Phyrexia. I've seen multiple reviews of them calling all but two unplayable because of their cost in mana, but that's okay, I'd never build a 60 card deck with any of them anyways. But an EDH deck with one of them as a general is entirely different.

Then I stumbled on choosing which one to use and quickly decided that I should make a deck for each of them. This I will eventually do, but it'll take awhile and some cashola, so I'm going to take an idea I got from a forum poster on www.mtgsalvation.com. I'm going to propose to some other EDH players that each person pick a praetor and construct an EDH deck to fit. Then I'll just hand out the praetors at the game (I couldn't help but order one of each) and we'll have a game.

The trick I think will be to build a playable deck that is true to the flavor of the corresponding praetor. I don't think it would be as fun to just plug Urabrask, the Hidden into an already built mono-red deck as it would be to take a look at cards that relate to him, either directly in Scars of Mirrodin block or throughout Magic history, and try to build a deck based on Urabrask's philosophy of ignoring the strife between the other praetors and continuing to keep the forges underground burning. This is certainly what I'm going to do when I build decks for the praetors, but I'm excited to see how other players would interpret each praetor's flavor.

Here's a link to an article on Wizards' site on the praetors: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/stf/142

I'll keep posting here to chronicle my Praetor EDH adventures.

They're Geeks and They Don't Know It

I work at a call center where there's a fair amount of down time between calls. People do all sorts of things to keep themselves occupied, from reading books, to knitting socks, to playing cards, to the omnipresent messing around on the internet. Aside from knitting, I've done my fair share of these. But recently I've been using my down time at work to organize my Magic cards, test my decks, and work on my Pauper Cube. Some people actually ask what I'm doing, but most just give me odd looks. Those that do ask usually make some comment to the effect of "still in the eighth grade?" or "interesting... um... hobby". I quickly found myself becoming self conscious about the geekiness level of my activity.

Then I took a good look around me. There are those that read and play games, but most of my coworkers are madly clicking away to stay on top of their imaginary mafia or farm on facebook. I realize these are surface level games that don't require a lot of learning or invite heated discussion. Maybe that's what makes things like Magic the Gathering a geek activity, how "into it" players get. But all those normal people playing internet games are still dedicating hours and hours of time to an imaginary world in which they interact with other real people also playing in that imaginary world. Not that different from what people playing Magic, either in the real world or online, are doing.

So what can I conclude? Perhaps just that humans of any age and stereotype like to use their imaginations, especially on an interactive level. Humans like to be entertained while being competitive at the same time. And whatever distinctions can be drawn between the various activities, ultimately I'm playing Magic for the same reasons they're watering crops on Farmville.

From MTGO making me a pauper, to playing pauper on MTGO.

Maybe it's my obsessive personality, maybe it's the depth of Magic the Gathering, or more likely it's the combination of the two, but somehow I've gone from opening an account on MTGO to just try the game out to having several thousand virtual cards, about a thousand paper cards, and a burning interest in multiple formats. Is this normal? Wait don't answer that. Doesn't really matter anyways. I'm hooked.

I'm just grateful that I discovered the pauper format on MTGO before another set came out. It's probably fairly normal for a new Magic player to think he's got some crazy new out of the box thinking that will make waves in the standard format, and it's probably fairly normal for the same new player to spend too much money on cards only to find out he's not so hot. I do have a couple of standard decks online that I came up with (ahem, came up with after reading the deck lists online) that do alright. I love playing white knights, especially with a little blue control thrown in. But that knight deck cost me... well you can probably guess what it cost me. About ten pauper decks worth. So I've been loving playing pauper online. So much so that a friend of mine and I thought it would be awesome to play the format with real cards. The only problem was when I asked around the local card shops I found out not a lot of people have paper pauper decks...

But then I discovered Adam Styborski's awesome blog about his pauper cube and I was inspired. I was interested in learning to draft anyways, so just create a commons cube and I could play pauper, learn to draft, and live happily ever after.

The only problem is, Adam's cube is formidable. He's got knowledge, and friends with knowledge, and he's worked that cube into a well-oiled machine. Me? I don't have much Magic know how, and neither do my friends. But I do know the cards in standard because I've been playing with them. And the commons in standard are pretty readily available (in fact I already had 3/4 of them). So I built a standard commons cube.

Boring...

Yeah, probably for the experienced player. But as a new player I find it approachable. I can't help but think other 'noobs' would too. So maybe I'll gather up a playgroup of new MTG initiates and we'll learn together, amass some knowledge. Maybe together we'll make my cube formidable someday.