Monday 18 May 2009

Faeries for regionals.....really bad!

By Jim Marlow

Hey everyone,

So after building and attempting to test a few decks for the weekend i settled on faeries. It is a fairly hostile environment at the moment for the blue menace, because standard at the moment is currently two types of decks.

1) decks with windbrisk heights and spectral procession

2) decks that wrath the tokens and play fat men


The problem is that both of these types of decks are quite good against fae, because obviously the current favourable wrath effects (jund charm, volcanic fallout) are pretty good against me too.

However, i am pretty good with the faeries deck, and it certainly can contain any deck that falls into the above categories, because i was pretty sure i knew how to beat them.

The spectral decks are pretty tough and i think broken ambitions is key in containing the spectrals if you can, but if one resolves it is not the end of the world, because i think jace is good here as digging for the mistbind cliques which are just ridiculous against all the white deck. If a spectral procession resolves then you can not let ajani or glorious anthem resolves, because as soon as tokens are out of infest range you pretty much have to scoop.


The other decks around, jund, 5cc, are a little bit easier to play i think because they are slower, which makes jace a lot better, and by not commiting to much to the board their jund charms etc are worse, its not the end of the world to let them charm some tokens away. Scion isnt at his best here, but obviously serves to support the sowers and bitterblossoms from getting maelstrom pulsed, which is fine.

So overall i thought that a combination of probably being on top of the way i want to play faeries today and that the field on the whole wouldnt be too strong i felt quietly confident that i can get a couple wins, and if i can dodge some bad matchups there was no reason why it wouldnt get me there.

Here is the list i played

4 x mistbind clique
4 x spellstutter sprite
3 x scion of oona
3 x vendilion clique

4 x bitterblossom
4 x cryptic command
4 x broken ambitions
3 x peppersmoke
1 x terror
3 x thoughtseize
2 x jace beleren

4 x secluded glen
4 x sunken ruins
4 x mutavault
2 x underground river
8 x island
3 x swamp

S/b

4 x infest
2 x deathmark
2 x scepter of fugue
3 x sower of temptation
2 x puppeteer clique
1 x loxodon warhammer
1 x jace beleren

Round 1) - Daniel - Boat Brew

Game 1 - The only game of the day where i got turn 2 bitterblossom, but my hand was pretty much the nuts here, as i also had a broken ambitions for his spectral procession, which i knew put me well ahead. His ranger of eos got him 2 figures, but my hand was double spellstutter sprite and double mistbind clique, so each of his figures met a sprite, and then i time walked 2 turns to bash some face.

Game 2 - I kept a 3 land hand with double infest and jace, and 1 other. I made my turn 3 jace and drew, and my opponant made spectral procession, which was ok..but i hadnt drawn another black source yet and if he made ajani i needed to deal with them pretty quickly. Another draw from jace still didnt get me there, but my opponant got stuck on 3 lands luckily, and turns 4 and 5 he played spectral processions!! Facing down 9 tokens was a bit poo, especially when he found a windbrisk heights on turn 5, so i tried a mistbind clique to at least stop the heights. Luckily for me, my opponant let the champion happen then path to exiled my clique, so although i got bashed down to 6 life i could untap and infest his guys, with the mana for my newly drawn broken ambitions to stop the 4th spectral procession of the game being played. From here i gained control, and my opponant didnt get the top decks he needed.

Round 2) - Stephen - RDW

RDW round 2, crap. Obviously winning round 1 is pretty good, but i was more happy that i would probably not face red, and almost definately not if i won round 2. I only had the warhammer as any kind of out against red, and i dint see it and was never in either of the games i played. Game 2 i kept a dodgy 6 which would have been awesome if i drew a 3rd land, but sadly i didnt draw this in 4 turns, and having to broken ambitions to clash for a land and fail isnt great, especially when you mill a demigod and 2 hellspark elementals into your opponants graveyard.

Sorry i dont have more information on the games but they were both pretty much blowouts, heres all the notes i have for game 2.

Im on the play, keep 7. Opponant mulligans to 6.

ME
16
5
Loss.


Round 3) - Dan - g/w overrun/aggro

Dan's deck was a bit weird, i cant remember if i saw a spectral procession of a cloudgoat ranger, but he was definately playing overrun but it seemed he was playing it with a g/w aggro deck with quasali pridemage, knotvine paladin and kitchen finks.

I would have been much happier to be facing g/w tokens because my infests are pretty much no good against Dan's guys as soon as he gets either a wilt leaf liege or an ajan goldmane in play. Sadly for me i could not stop turn 4 ajani goldmane in either game 2 or game 3, and this pretty much had me boned.

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So 1-2 drop certainly wasnt the droid i was looking for, and it wasnt to be 3rd time lucky. I felt a little bit unlucky because my two losses were to very hard matchups, but then again maybe it was down to my (partially known) illogical metagame choice of faeries for the day.


Congratulations to Kier for qualifying with you hilarious land destruction ramp deck, deus of calamity and especially lavalanche pulling their weight all day. I watched Kier's last round and when he won the game his opponant had ZERO permanents, awesome.

After dropping i manged to draft a pretty sick jund deck in my first Shards/Conflux/Reborn draft, sadly only managing 2-1 with it (cheers guy to my left for passing double vithian stinger, branching bolt, 2 executioners capsule, then darting into R/G late in pack 1). However, i did manage to play bituminous blast cascading into terminate, which felt pretty damn good.

Im currently investigating the 5 colour decks, with or without the use of cascade, if i manage to make it to any more regionals. I recently got my filthy hands on some bloodbraid elves and bituminous blasts, and cascade is so much fun, and it has to be said is ridiculously powerfull.

If anyone is planning on going to newcastle or london for the remaining regionals, please get in touch and we can maybe arrange getting there.

There will be another draft report coming in the next few days as well as the development of the deck that im going to play if/when i go to newcastle for the regionals up there.

Until then,

Jim

As always, feel free to comment on anything about this article, or anything unrelated to magic whatsoever. If you would like to contribute to the TLM blog, please email any ideas, articles, pictures or anything else to ss07jm@leeds.ac.uk

3 comments:

  1. I am so up for failing to Q this weekend.

    Beard

    ReplyDelete
  2. Apparently Chapin's 5 colour Bloodbraid Elf is the stone cold nuts, one of you should try it x

    ReplyDelete
  3. i have been testing various cascade decks a lot, and it is seriously broken.

    I started with chapins list but iv changed it into a jund ramp cascade type thing, and i love it.

    Its pretty much chapins putrid leech 5CB with chameleon colossus instead of cryptics, which means i can play 10 basic lands....not 2.

    ReplyDelete