Modern UB Shuffleupagus

Shuffleupagus is my favorite deck.  I saw MaGo's preview for Psychogenic Probe back in the fall of 2003, and immediately went about trying to build a deck that would kill people via probe damage. 

I took a UBR to a standard PTQ (Mirrodin-Kamigawa time) after a lot of work, hoping I would do well.  I felt especially good against Tooth and Nail, due to my Cranial Extractions and Bribery.  I faced Tooth in my first match, but stalled out after extracting the Tooth and Nails.  I remember getting beaten up by a hard-cast Solarion.  Ugh.  I had a bunch of fun in the lower brackets from there on out, but I couldn't keep up with the middling aggro creature decks to get back into a good position.  I did have some exciting moments.  Since I was often going through my opponents' decks, I did well with Mindblaze.  One time, I had it on the stack, certain death for my opponent.  They responded with Twincast, but whiffed on the guess.  Whew!

Mirrodin cycled out of standard, then later out of Extended.  Thankfully, Modern arrived, happily going all the way back to Mirrodin.  Psychogenic Probe is relevant again!  And just barely.  There are so many good colors to use the probe with in Modern, but I decided to go with UB.  Here's the decklist:

Main deck:
4 Psychogenic Probe (obviously)
4 Cosi's Trickster (yes!)
0 Psychic Surgery (Why does this have to cost 1U instead of just U?  Booo.)
4 Lantern of Insight
4 Serum Visions
4 Gitaxian Probe
3 Bribery
4 Remand
4 Bitter Ordeal
4 Cranial Extraction (I probably even know what's in your hand...)
4 Ghost Quarter (Combos really nicely with Bitter Ordeal)
4 Watery Grave
3 Swamp
14 Island

Sideboard:
4 Surgical Extraction
3 Blessed Reincarnation
3 Mimeofacture
1 Bribery
1 Counterbore
1 Acquire
2 Thada Adel
(I probably need some Learn from the Past in here...)

Modern is tomorrow!  We'll see how the new Shuffleupagus does!  I'm expecting there to be lots of Tron, so maybe I can Bribery up an Emrakul.

Modern R Norin: List and first Outing

Back for Lorwyn/Shadowmoor/Time Spiral standard, I ran a RW deck with Norin the Wary that included Pandemonium, Cloudstone Curio, Keldon Marauders, and other fun things.  More recently, I built a Norin EDH deck.

And then last week I noticed a card I wasn't aware of: Impact Tremors.  Boom.  I put together a Modern deck and took it to Black Moon games last night.  Here's the deck I ran:  (Quick summary: Impact Tremors, Genesis Chamber + Norin and dash creatures.)

4 Impact Tremors
3 Genesis Chamber (I couldn't find a fourth in time!)
2 Outpost Siege
1 Purphoros
4 Norin the Wary
4 Glitterfang
4 Mardu Scout
4 Lightning Berserker
3 Zurgo Bellstriker
2 Hordeling Outburst
4 Screamreach Brawler
1 Goblin Heelcutter
24 Mountain

I played 4 rounds last night:

Round 1, I lost 0-2 to a WUBR deck.  Elesh Norn kicked my butt game 1 and I sided into stuff that was too conservative for game 2.  I didn't realize how potent I could be until the next round...

Round 2: Won 2-1 to my own Spiteclasm deck, piloted by my friend Matt F.  He won game 1 handily, but I pulled off a turn 5 win to take game 2.  First turn Norin followed up by either Impact Tremors or the Genesis Chamber is very strong!  In game 3, Matt got hit by the mana screw, and I won within 10 turns.

Round 3: Won 2-1 against a Jund deck run by Nate, who was my other head in 2HG sealed last month.  (We went 2-1 to take second place of 4 teams.)  I lost game 1, but got to stack up my trigger cards (tremors, chamber, Outpost Siege, Purphoros) the next two games, which pulled the win off for me.  Turns out that Outpost Siege is really strong against Goblin Rabblemaster: the goblins have to attack and two dying Myr can kill the master.

Round 4: Lost 1-2 against Merfolk.  I won game 1 handily, but couldn't handle the onslaught in games 2 and 3.  I should have mulliganed down to 5 for game 3, but I kept an okayish 6-card hand.  I really needed to get the turn 2 Norin + support to make this one happen.  Tough.

Summary: 2-2, not too bad for a deck I threw together the night before (with essentially no sideboard).  Future plans: I heard today about the RW version, Soul Chamber, though I really want to keep the Impact Tremors and dash creatures.  Perhaps I can fit the white in just enough to fit 4 Soul Warden and 4 Soul's Attendant.  Also, Blood Moon really needs to be in the main deck, but they were sitting happily in my Spiteclasm deck, which Matt took to 1-3.

Spiteclasm Decklist

For the past year(ish), I've been running a modern deck I designed.  It's based on creatures like Spitemare and Boros Reckoner and damage-based soft board wipes, like Pyroclasm.

Some have asked for the decklist, so here is the current version:

4 Spitemare
4 Boros Reckoner
4 Pyroclasm
4 Whipflare
4 Volcanic Fallout
4 Earthquake
4 Magmaquake
1 Flame-Wreathed Phoenix
2 Skred
2 Blood Moon (I should probably have more)
4 Boros Signet
23 Snow-Covered Mountain

The board has more phoenixes, skreds, and also utility things like Yamabushi's Storm and Rolling Temblor.

The Skred/Snow-Covered Mountain combo was a suggestion by John J.

Another friend, Aaron D., alerted me to Humble Defector, which seems like it definitely needs to find a place in here. :)

This deck is super fun to play with!  In it's first tournament, it went 3-1, and most recently I nearly won a tournament, but lost in the last round to the winner, one of my students.

Modern Witch-Maw Cascade

On Tuesday night I took a new deck to Double Midnight comics in Manchester, NH.  (First time there!)  The deck is WUBG and highly relies on the cascade mechanic.  Here's the list:

2 Plains

2 Swamp

5 Island
11 Forest

2 misty rainforest

1 verdant catacombs

1 windswept heath

4 Captured Sunlight

2 Early Harvest

2 Time warp

4 enlisted wurm

4 deny reality

1 enigma sphinx

4 urban evolution

2 harmonize

2 gaea's blessing

3 unexpected results

4 search for tomorrow

4 sakura-tribe elder

The basic plan is to stall/control with captured sunlight, sakura-tribe elder, deny reality, and time warp, get some enlisted wurm and enigma sphinx out, then keep swinging while taking lots of turns.  Taking lots of turns isn't too hard if the two gaea's blessings keep the deck cycling.  The time warps and other cascade/utility cards will keep coming back and you'll have plenty of land to keep doing things.

Land is one of the exciting things about this deck.  It's very easy on turn 7 to have 15 land on the board.  There's no Explore, but the Search for Tomorrow and Sakura-Tribe Elder will help get lots of stuff out.  And, since all the lands that stick around are basics, cascading into Early Harvest can double the length of an early turn.  Unexpected Results often really nice, and whenever I played it, my opponents were actually pretty excited to see what I'd get.

Here's how it went down.

Round 1: Bye.  Dang it!  Is my rating that low?  Matches: 1-0.

Round 2: I played Green (and Red?) Tron, which gets the Urza's lands going, and then drops big things.   In game 1, I ended it pretty early, using Deny Reality to keep the Urzatron offline.  I won with two Enlisted Wurms on the board and a Time Warp to hit for 20.  Game 2 and 3 didn't go my way, though, with Urzatron sticking around and him getting him the fat beats.  Emrakul killed me in game 3.  Oof.  Matches: 1-1, Games: 1-2

Round 3: Mono-green devotion/Genesis Wave had my number.  Ouch.  Two games quickly lost.  My opponent, Thomas, was really nice and we played a bunch of games afterwards with me running my Pyroclasm-Reckoner deck.  I won them all, but he kept really trying to take me down.  Matches: 1-2, Games: 1-4.

Round 4: I played against Mono-white Hate-bears.  Unfortunately, Leonin Arbiter is really good against all my fetching and Thalia is good against cascade.  I did manage to win game 2 by paying for the searching on an early arbiter, and quickly ramping up.  I couldn't keep up on game three, however.  Matches: 1-3, Games: 2-6.

Round 5 (final): I lost two straight games to UB mill.  I thought I'd be able to win easily due to Gaea's Blessing, but Nick was quick to Surgical Extraction those whenever I cast them.  I did not think that I would ever be missing Whirlpool Warrior.  I sided in two more blessings and 3 Serene Remebrances for game 2, but his sided Leyline of the Void was too much.  Drat!  I really thought I could pull that one off.  Matches: 1-4, Games: 2-8.

The deck didn't fare as well as I'd hoped.  The big problem is a lesson I haven't learned since playing a deck based around Time Stretch and Gurzigost at the Boston Regionals in 2003: taking lots of turns isn't a great win condition.  This deck would probably be a lot better if the Time Warps were replaced with Bribery or something.  Still, this deck is a lot of fun, and it was great to get a bunch of attention when the cascades started to go off.

Planewalker Assassins

About a month ago we played a nice variant: Assassins.  We had seven, which worked out to be a good number for this format.

The rules we used are very close to those laid out in this article, with a few major changes:

• Players may target whomever they wish with spells and abilities.
• When one player kills another, they take their victim's card, getting a new target.
• Players may only attack their target.  If they have their own name, they instead may attack anyone.

The only downside is the time.  We played one game which took us nearly 3 hours.  Definitely fun and definitely worth it, though!  This is my current favorite format for 7 people.  (I still prefer Cutthroat, 2HG, Cutthroat-Star, and Emperor for 3, 4, 5, and 6, respectively.)

Cutthroat Magic

Cutthroat is a 3-player magic variant a friend taught to me that automatically extends to more-than-three variants, though it gets less fun if you have more than two opponents.

Basics

The basic rule is mostly simple: when you attack, you are attacking both opponents.  They may "combo-block" however they want (technically declaring assignments in turn order if it comes down to it) and any damage that goes through is dealt to both of them.  So, if I attack with three 1/1s, and my opponents each block one of them, then both players would take one damage.

That's it.  Targetted effects can still go in any direction (Disintegrate doesn't hit them both).  All players are considered each others' opponents for any other reason.

Details

Double-Damage?

Okay, so that's not all there is to it.  Ophidian-effects (Ninja of the Deep Hours, etc) and lifelink should only trigger once.

Unresolved question: Do prevention-effects stop the damage for one player?

Who can attack?

If a creature cannot attack one of the two players (e.g. Teferi's Moat) then that creature cannot attack anyone.

Who can block?

If one defending player cannot block a creature (e.g. landwalk) the other defender's creatures are still allowed to block that creature.


I'm sure there are other issues that would need to be ironed out.

Conspiracy Emperor Draft

Last week we did a Conspiracy Emperor Draft.  It was awesome.  I highly recommend this format.

One thing might have made it better: splashing some Khans of Tarkir packs in there along with the Conspiracy.

... or maybe including Planechase cards.

... or maybe drafting anaconda style.

... or maybe something totally different!

Either way, it was a blast!