The Best Laid Plans

By Norman Ralph

My first FNM with my Izzet Blitz deck was at my local games store, Travelling Man. They offer a relatively good prize structure of two boosters in the prize pool per player and will pay out store credit in lieu of boosters if so desired. They charge £3.50 for entry, so I needed to get two booster's worth of prizes to make my first profit.

The list I took to FNM was slightly different to the list I posted last time due me to having some excellent luck on eBay in the first half of the week. I managed to pick up my Steam Vents really cheaply, which meant I could also splash out on a Hallowed Fountain and a cheap sideboard plan.

+1 Hallowed Fountain
-1 Plains

My sideboard looks like this:

2 Izzet Staticaster
3 Electrickery
2 Faith's Shield
2 Turn // Burn
2 Wear // Tear
2 Shock
2 Skullcrack

Some of that is redundant, some of it is just space filling, but having tested thoroughly online for the last week I decided I needed some answers to Bant Hexprood (Wear // Tear for the enchantments and Electrickery for the Invisible Stalkers). I also found that my Jund match up was awful due to their plethora of removal. I decided to try out Faith's Shield in the sideboard to try and use up their removal before I combo'd out.

I also picked up some sleeves and a deckbox. You can see the most up to date list and transaction tracker here.

There were four rounds of standard at the FNM and I did OK going 2-2 with a bye. I only faced one T1 deck, RWU flash, against which I made a good fist of both games. My sideboard plan definitely needs to include some number of cpopies of Nevermore as in all the match ups I was dead to pretty much a single card.

R1: RWU Flash, lost 2-0
R2: BUG Control, lost 2-0
R3: Bye
R4: RG Aggro, won 2-0

Round 1
A tough match up against Warleader's Helix and Snapcaster Mage as the 4 damage is pretty much the only card that kills Nivix Cyclops. Saw all of my opponents copies of these plus saw them flashed back with Snapcaster Mage. Warleader's Helix is definitely a Nevermore target.

Round 2
This was an un-winnable match up against a hard control deck running at least 16 removal spells plus a set of Liliana of the Veil. There was no point in this game that I felt I had a chance.

Round 4
The aggro match up feels my most winnable as unless they hit their nut draw I can just combo faster than they can kill me. I got to combo twice in my 2-0 win, the second game saw me hit my nut draw and combo'd off turn 4!

Cost to enter: £3.50
Prizes: £2.50

It's an Izzet Blitz

By Norman Ralph

Deck decision made. I have decided to blow a lot of my budget on building a deck from scratch. It's likely to blow £60 ($55 on cards, plus sleeves and a deck box) of my £75 budget, which will leave me with about 4 weeks of capital to buy into events, meaning I will need to average 2 boosters per week in prizes to get through to Theros to replace about half of my deck. This, like my deck, means I am all in on this strategy.

My deck list:

Creatures (11)
4 Nvix Cyclops
4 Young Pyromancer
3 Guttersnipe

Spells (27)
4 Boros Charm
4 Izzet Charm
3 Artful Dodge
3 Feelings of Dread
4 Pillar of Flame
1 Shock
4 Faithless Looting
4 Thought Scour

Lands (22)
2 Steam Vents
1 Glacial Fortress
2 Azorius Guildgate
2 Boros Guildgate
2 Izzet Guildgate
3 Plains
4 Mountain
6 Island

I have been testing the deck online a lot and have found that Young Pyromancer is an all star - it wins a lot of games by playing nicely with the removal suite. I kill one of their guys and make one of my own with a single card spent.

The main thrust of the deck, however, is to play a Nivix Cyclops and untap with him so you can attack with an artful dodge (cast and flashed back) plus a Boros Charm's double strike mode which deals 20 damage from a creature that can't be blocked. Some of the lists online run Faith's shield instead of the 22nd land to try and protect the combo from removal, but I found that I almost never drew it when I wanted it and when I did draw it I really just wanted a charm or a Faithless Looting instead. I think it might be right to play some copies in the sideboard for games 2 and 3, but a sideboard is a bit of a luxury I can't afford right now.

Talking of sideboards, at the moment I don't have any cards for it, but I definitely need ways of interacting with control decks and protecting myself against the super aggressive match ups. For the control decks, I think a Delver based conversion might be the way to go. For the aggro decks, several copies of Electrickery are in order.

As usual, any comments are more than welcome.

Picking a Deck

By Norman Ralph

Having made my call to arms last month, FNM Hero Team Leeds style is starting to warm up. M14 has been released bringing with it the official start date for my challenge. From release day onwards, any Planeswalker Points I earn will be with my FNM Hero deck.

Talking of decks, the Event Deck for M14 has now been spoiled. In terms of cards per pound Event Decks are almost certainly the best way to go but, as with a lot of the recent Event Decks, I have been left unimpressed with the offering. Whilst there are some good cards in the deck, I feel that they could have been stronger. My thoughts on Event Decks for the last few sets have focussed on why Wizards keep producing decks that are OK but are missing some glaringly obvious cards. I want an Event Deck to be a strong deck out of the box whilst being open to improvement. I understand that Wizards won't just package up a fully powered Jund deck or similar and I would not want them to. I appreciate a budget deck that works without the more powerful additions. I would love them to make a R/G deck that plays well against the big boys straight out of the box, not because it is stuffed fall of bombs and mythics but because it is built with synergy and fluidity in mind.

Having said all of that, I am quite tempted to start off with this Event Deck mainly due to the fact that all of cards are going to be Standard legal for the whole of the coming year which means that I can focus my initial budget and any winnings on replacing cards with better options rather than having to replace cards once they rotate out. The other option is to build an Izzet aggro deck built around Young Pyromancer, Nivix Cyclops and Guttersnipe. This has the benefit of fitting my play style better as well as being relatively cheap to build. It does, however, rely on some cards that will rotate out of Standard in September.

I have created my tracking documents for people to follow my card pool and budget. You can them on my Google Drive.

As we are now fully underway on FNM Hero I will be bringing you updates on a weekly basis from now on, so get this added to your feed reader, or favourite the site, and keep up with the fun and frolics of the next 12 months.

Comments are always welcome.