MTG - The Journey

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Monday, October 14, 2013

Okay then MTG fans! We now have our first video ever on the blog. Sure, it's rough around the edges, but after all, we are new on the scene and everything is new to us. But here it is for you to check out, along with a decklist of the deck we played, our Junk ReAnimator brew, and what we plan to do to deal with these types of matchups in the future.

So in this brew we have:

Creatures: (20)
1x Armada Wurm
3x Desecration Demon
1x Giant Adephage
1x Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
4x Lotleth Troll
2x Obzedat, Ghost Council
3x Sin Collector
4x Sylvan Caryatid
1x Trostani's Summoner

Instants: (9)
3x Grisly Salvage
3x Putrefy
3x Rescue from the Underworld

Sorcery: (3)
3x Duress

Enchantments: (4)
2x Bow of Nylea
2x Whip of Erebos

Planeswalkers: (2)
2x Garruk, Caller of Beasts

Land: (23)
5x Forest
1x Godless Shrine
4x Overgrown Tomb
3x Rogue's Passage
5x Swamp
2x Temple Garden
3x Temple of Silence

Problem #1 - So one of the things I noticed during this game, is his planeswalkers shifted tons of control in this game. Without that Xenagos, he would have stalled very early and the game would have gone very differently. So I am going to be shifting to Hero's Downfall here in place of the Putrefy. It has the potential to rid them of the big time planeswalker shifts that so often got in the way here.

Problem #2 - The mana curve. I didn't seem to draw into that many lands, and sure this was one game, but with more access to land, it could have been very different. I would have really liked having those Elvish Mystic around in this game to sac to Rescue from the Underworld after having tapped them for mana. I'd even take the Satyr Voyager at this point to untap a target land of my choice. Oh, I'm missing Arbor Elf so much right now.

Problem #3 - The Whip. While I love the Whip, and it's lifelink potential. In this game, it was doing nothing for me. I didn't even want to see it. And as it was, I saw too many reanimation abilities, and not enough targets. It seemed as though I needed faster stuff early game, such as the Elvish Mystic to get the ramp going fast to get out the ability to re-animate the stuff in the yard.

Problem #4 - Keeping in tune with true re-animator, I want to splash some things outside of my color range to get rid of into the graveyard. So looking forward I will probably be ditching off the Trostani's Summoner in leu of an Aetherling, and probably ditching either Giant Adephage or Armada Wurm to the SB in favor of a Prime Speaker Zegana. Both are super powerful, and not altogether completely un-castable.

But looking forward, I am going to playtest it some more and see if it comes up against the same results. This was a rough hand, and a rough game. Hopefully moving forward we see a better balance and some steadier games. As always, thanks for checking this out, and please comment with suggestions both for the blog and for the decks! Until next time, keep brewing and we'll see you then!

Friday, October 11, 2013

Theros Standard Budget Contest (New Rules)

   Okay, so I have decided to expand on these rules and make things just a little simpler and make it easier to compete in this contest. (You will have to bear with me as this is our first MTG The Journey contest and it's just us making this up as we get feedback and see where things go)

   Okay, so the challenge is this. Build a budget deck that goes 3-1 or better at FNM. We already established that in the last Rules posting. But the way we had it worded was that to enter the contest, you had to do 3-1 or better for 3 consecutive attended FNM's. And then I realized that this might be impractical, and I want to try and get decks posted on here and featured so that we can look at them and possibly hand out some advice to what you may have overlooked to improve on them.

   So we are going to move to a point system. 1 point for entering a deck under $100 that has gone 3-1 at FNM. 2 points for entering a deck under $50 that has gone 3-1 or better at FNM. And 1 point for a 3-1, 2 points for a 4-0 or better (depending on if your FNM goes more than 4 rounds) weekly thereafter continuing through Dec 31, 2013.

    So with that being said, here are some new rules for this contest.

Rule #1:
For you to enter a deck in the contest, it has to be under $100 and have at least gone 3-1 at a sanctioned FNM event,(you cannot have more than 1 loss) and it has to be provable through screenshots of your Planeswalker Points account. (you can blur or blank everything out if you want other than your name and score for the week)

Rule #2:
Upon receiving your deck submission, we will take that as your express permission to post this deck on our blog (as having been created by you) if it is the top performing deck (has the most points so far) for the week.

Rule #3:
When submitting your deck, you must include where you played it, what state and city you reside in and your first and last name, with the name of your deck included for information when featuring decks. A picture of you is preferred, but not required. Any pictures of games or your deck are also welcome, and will be featured if your deck is featured.

Prizes: (Assessed at the END of the contest based on points gained throughout. Not weekly prizes)
There will be a top scoring $100 and a top scoring $50 deck, and a top scoring overall deck.

For the Top Scoring $100 Deck - You will receive your choice of 3 Born of the Gods or Theros booster packs, and a featured spot, for your newly brewed deck once Born of the Gods releases, on our blog.

For the Top Scoring $50 Deck - You will receive your choice of 3 Born of the Gods, Theros, Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, Dragon's Maze or M14 packs, and will receive a T-shirt from the blog featuring your deck name on the back and your win records and dates, with our MTG The Journey Logo on the front. You also will receive a featured spot, for your newly brewed deck once Born of the Gods releases, on our blog.

For the Top Overall Deck - You will receive your choice of 6 Born of the Gods, Theros, Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, Dragon's Maze or M14 packs, and will receive a T-shirt from the blog featuring you as our Contest Champion with your deck name on the back and your win records and dates, with our MTG The Journey Logo on the front. You also will receive a featured spot, for your newly brewed deck once Born of the Gods releases, on our blog. And will be the running champion to beat. You will also have the option to have your own article featured on our blog from that point on if you are interested.

To submit decks, please email us at contests@mtgthejourney.com

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Mono-Black Standard

And Now, the moment you've all been waiting for. Or maybe you haven't been waiting for it, but you're exited it's here anyways. Either way, without further ado, here is our Mono-Black new Standard build. We have playtested this build quite a bit and made a few changes along the way, and we will dictate how we arrived at this final build and why we did what we did.

The List:

Creature: (19)

4x Desecration Demon

2x Erebos, God of the Dead

3x Gray Merchant of Asphodel

4x Lifebane Zombie

4x Nightveil Specter

2x Returned Phalanx

Enchantment: (2)

2x Whip of Erebos

Instant: (8)

3x Doom Blade

2x Hero's Downfall

3x Pharika's Cure

Sorcery: (7)

2x Corrupt

2x Read the Bones

3x Thoughtseize

Planeswalker: (1)

1x Liliana of the Dark Realms

Land: (23)

23x Swamp

So there you have it. And I know the first thing you are asking. And we've answered it 90 times. Why are there only 3 Thoughtseize

? It's the best 1 drop in Standard right now. Well, the answer is simple. We saw it more than we needed it. There are only so many times you want to see that card in a game without it being not worth it. One time, opening hand. And time 2, when your opponent re-fills his hand. Which again is also why we decided to throw a couple of Read the Bones

in there. Hopefully at that point in the game we have held onto a Read the Bones

for just such a time as this. And we also hope that it nets us that Thoughtseize

we so want to see at that point. Even so, not overly critical with the removal we run as well.
So we decided to go with the Devotion aspect of this rather than the Heroic effect of Agent of the Fates

, which is an awesome card, we agree. And you are more than welcome to use it if you so desire in your own build. But we found that it didn't really do much in our build, and just ended up taking up space that could have been so much better utilized by something else. In our first version of this, we tried to run 4 of an Insatiable Harpy

, and found that Nightveil Specter

does the same thing, except with less casting cost, and more Devotion to help us out.
Along the way someone suggested we utilize Liliana of the Dark Realms

, and we looked at her. She fits, if for nothing else just icing on the cake. But we don't need her taking up any more space than she needs to, as you never want too much icing and not enough cake. Speaking of having your cake and eating it too, we thought that the Whip of Erebos

fit just that description. For games that go longer than we like, it nets us the life to stick around and keep producing threats, plus it turns all those guys in the graveyard into very useful tools when we have lots of mana or dead draws late game.
The Desecration Demon

, well, we think it's just about the best 4-drop out there right now. Every combat phase we are part of they are going to want to beat this guy down. And eventually they are going to run out of guys to sack . . . and then. Oh yeah, he's been stabbing and eating lots of guys. We want two of him out very quickly.
Erebos, God of the Dead

, we love him. He is excellent. No LG for our opponent, and we get a chance to draw some cards. Never bad, and the indestructible just makes him SO good.
And while we agree that Lifebane Zombie

may be only SUPER good against the G/W decks, he's still good any time, and that Intimidate helps out too.
And the last guy that needs introduction, the Gray Merchant

, who can do lots of damage, and is friendly to our LG strategy as well. He can be a game changer with things like Nightveil Specter on the field. So many uses both early game and late, and with the whip, just fantastic.

So let us know what you think, whether you'll use it, or what you'd change. As always, thanks for reading, and we look forward to seeing you soon. Don't forget to check out our friends at MTG Madness and take advantage of their October deals. 20% off can never be a bad thing.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Ames PTQ Experience

   So we here at MTG The Journey played the Ames, IA P.T.Q. Sealed event, hosted by Mayhem Comics. We hoped to pull some good stuff and have a great time, and we sure did. We posted some updates as to how we did throughout the day, and took some pictures of our decks we put together, and we now have them here for your enjoyment.

   Before we go into the decks though, we just want to say that this was our first PTQ Event ever, and we were a bit overwhelmed by the sheer size of the event. There were 238 people who showed up, as opposed to last year's 183 people who showed. Also we were not ready for registering our cards, and then passing them away from us and getting a set that someone else had registered, but we dealt with it. We both decided to drop in round 4, as we were not expecting 9 rounds, and had afternoon activities already planned. We both ended up 2-2 though, and the prize payout for the day was X-2, and we didn't figure that we were going to go 5 more rounds with no losses, so rather than keep playing, as it was already 3:30pm, we just decided to drop and run.

    First up, we will go through David's Deck and how it performed.

First Round:
Came out 1-2 after mana-flooding game 1, winning game 2 handily and mana screwing game 3. He is playing a R/W, Heroic based deck. He played against a U/G/W beatdown deck.

Second Round:
   So the deck did better this round, he went 2-0 against a U/B who drew bad hands. Both games were over within 6 turns, so he came over to watch my games at that point.

   It went to a 45 minute lunch break at this time, then we came back and started into the next round.

Third Round:
   David won 2-1 against a U/R deck that utilized Scry a lot. The game he lost to he drew a 1-mana hand and kept it, not very smart.

Fourth Round:
   Not so good this round, David went 0-2 due to bad hands and mana screw after mulligans down to 5. No dice.

Here are some pics of David's build, and what he ran with:

David's Sealed PTQ photo DD1_zps4eedd6e3.jpg

The Whole Deck

The Unused White Cards

The Unused Red Cards

The White Creatures

The White Support Spells

The Red Creatures

The Red Support Spells

The Multi-Colored Spells

     Not bad pulls, he also could have gone a couple of different directions with the other cards he pulled, and if you feel like checking it out, you can look at them on our Photobucket account under David's PTQ Deck.

    On to how Chuck did now!

Round 1:
   I played a R/G/W beat-down with heavy creature and burn emphasis. I went 2-0 first round after my opponent, who was playing U/W couldn't respond to my Xenagos.

Round 2:
   I went 1-2 against a guy who pretty much was playing the same deck as I was with more flying, and more emphasis on White. He won game 1 handily and game 3 was close, but he came away with it because of the flyer with a finishing life total of 6. Game 2 was lengthier due to Xenagos saving the day once again.

Round 3:
   Well I lost to a R/B/G beat down deck that just had too many answers. 1-2 on that one. Never saw Xenagos in any of the games and mana screwed hard both of the last games.

Round 4:
   So I went 2-1 this round against a B/U combat trick deck with a lot of evasion, and the last round he had to mull down to 5 and keep there. Just steamrolled over it. It was a hard choice after this to drop. But the chances of going 5-0 after that point just didn't seem likely.

Here are some pictures of Chuck's deck!


The whole deck

The Green Spells

The Red Spells

The White Spells

The Multi-Colored Spells

The Green Sideboard

The Red Sideboard

The White Sideboard

If you want to look at the rest of the Sealed pools, once again, both of them are available at our MTG The Journey Photobucket page. Feel free to check those out!

As always, thanks for reading! Look forward to our next post, featuring our Mono-Black Build.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Looking forward to playing Junk Reanimator

   So we are waiting for our card orders to come in from MTG Madness and from various trades on Tappedout to complete our Theros Junk Re-Animator deck. We can't wait to try it out this weekend, as well as a PTQ Sealed event here in Ames, IA.
   We're not sure whether or not the FNM events this weekend will be Standard or Draft yet, but most of our LGS run Draft or Sealed events first weekend of the month. So we might be able to buy some extra time to get our Mono-Black deck together and ready to run a few trial games by then as well. We are eager to see how they perform in our local meta and in other meta's as we travel to different locations to get an overall feel of what we need to tweak and mainboard.
   Look forward to some reviews of casual playtesting of Junk Re-Animator, as well as our Mono-Black decklist this week upcoming as well! We are still working on brewing an All-American-Control deck, it's just to get through with all the card sorting we've been doing lately.
   We are going through our binders and card boxes, and clearing out anything older than RTR block, and throwing together our collectors' binders of M13 and Innistrad for later use with EDH and Modern. This is eating up quite a bit more time than we imagined, and we have a ton to trade in at coolstuffinc towards some store credit. We sure do love that extra 20% store credit on turn-ins!
   As always thanks for reading, and don't forget to check out our review of MTG Madness that we did just recently, go check out their card store and take advantage of the 20% off they are offering for the month of October! You can find the links through the banners here on the blog as well!
   Also, make sure you look at our Theros Standard Budget Brew Contest we are hosting. With top deck taking prizes home in January!!

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