Monthly Archives: June 2014

Magical Monday 6.30.14

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First off i want to say thanks again to everyone that drafted Conspiracy this Saturday in support of Remmie’s medical bills. We had lots of fun and Remmie really didn’t want to leave and kept arguing with me that he was not tired even though anyone could look at him and see that he was wiped. And special thanks to Todd, for putting the boxes up to support said draft. I want to link their ebay account as they don’t have a web presence other then that and their facebook page. Please check them out, they sell a ton of different things so odds are there is something for everyone. And if you can help them you are helping us.

With that out of the way lets talk magics.

Remmie is set on making a blue/red control deck. Or was until Conspiracy came out and now he wants to just make “Conspiracy decks” for him and his friends. I personally feel that WotC should have let Conspiracy be at least Modern legal, due to the over whelming number of kids who are just tasting some of these older cards and want to go nuts with them but legacy well is just too deep for them at the moment.

Anyway i am getting side tracked.

Remmie and his blue/red control so i have been looking at things trying to develop a plan and i happen to catch this video by Caleb Durward over at Channelfireball.com and my brain starts running down the rabbit hole.

Izzet Staticcaster
Gorgon’s Head

Hour of Need
Curse of the swine

Izzet Charm
Lightning Strike
Mizzium Mortars
Spite of Mogis

Young Pyromancer
Prohpetic Flamespeaker
Battlefield Thaumaturge

Purphoros
Keranos
Chandra, Pyromaster
Ral Zarek

Trading Post
Akroan Horse

What the hell has my brain done?

Okay so lets just look at some interactions…

izzet staticcaster + gorgon’s head == deathtouch your team. (thanks Caleb i didn’t play Return to Rav so missed this gem) But one of the things that Caleb ran into during his videos was master of waves… And i suggest Hour of Need. Works on a few levels. One makes master a killable 4/4 that might also take out his team of 1/0s, also makes other problem guys into 4/4s with matching names. Aka open more things to izzet staticcaster + gorgon’s head. Can remove most of the men your opponent might try and block prohpetic flamespeaker with, also can upgrade your men to flying 4/4s…

Seems great but is that enough?

I don’t think so, enter Curse of the Swine. Curse also just happens to be one of the cards Remmie is excited about right now. Mainly when you team it up with Battlefield Thaumaturge.

Two of my pet cards are Spite of Mogis and Young Pyromancer. Seems like a natural deck for them as there is a large number of spells already add in Lightning Strike and Mizzium Mortars and Spite really is another red “Swords to Plowshares”.

Akroan Horse seems like the board stall and feed Hour of Need. Trading Post keeps things moving until we are setup and the rest are VALUE.

Lets see if i can get 36ish cards + lands here….

3 Izzet Staticcaster
2 Gorgon’s Head

4 Hour of Need
2 Curse of the swine
2 Izzet Charm
0 Lightning Strike
3 Mizzium Mortars
2 Spite of Mogis (these could be more charms or Lighting strike but swords?)

4 Young Pyromancer
4 Prohpetic Flamespeaker
2 Battlefield Thaumaturge
3 Akroan Horse

1 Purphoros
0 Keranos
2 Chandra, Pyromaster
1 Ral Zarek

1 Trading Post

Lands

4 Temples
4 Steam Vents
? (3) Mana Confluence
Islands and Mountains to hit our 24 lands thinking a few more islands then mountains but only like 1 or 2 more…

sideboard
1 Izzet Staticcaster
1 Gorgon’s Head
3 Gainsay
3 Negate
3 Anger of the Gods
2 Polymorphous Rush could be Dragon
2 Gridlock

I really like this list and i will have to see if i can get my hands on Izzet Staticcasters and Prohpetic Flamespeakers and see how it plays. But i bet it is like a warm wet happy place.

<3s

10 Hours in the ER

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Taking this Monday off of Magic, if i have something Magic related i will knock it out later this week. But i want to share for those that don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook the events of this last week.

Last Wednesday was like any other this summer. Remmie went to football practice, the wife was at work and i went in to the backyard and did the gardening thing. While i was out back i heard lots of sirens but i live on a crazy 5 lane street that intersects another crazy street a few blocks down so sirens are not real uncommon. But i was wondering where Remmie was as i could use his help.

When i finished up in the garden, i asked the wife if Remmie was home and she said not yet. And just assumed that he was goofing off with his friends after practice. It happens he is 14 after all. So i jump into the shower. With all my hair gone what was a 20 min affair is down to 5 mins. So i was practically in and out. I step out and start drying off and my wife opens the door with a look of dread i have only seen from her a handful of times, the someone is dead look.

I let her finish her call, getting ready to be all supportive husband guy, when she hands up and freaks out. I get “That was Remmie’s coach. He said some boys just told him that Remmie was hit by a car and he was taken to the hospital.” That was all we knew. Wet and naked, she tried to fall to the ground but i wouldn’t let her.

I fell into cold practical Samius mode starting to order her around. Let work know and get logged out. I started to dress but i herd her fall to the ground and start to slip into a pure panic. I few well placed words snapped her out of it. But mainly the idea that we NEEDED to be at the hospital right the fuck now got her moving.

We were ready to head out in less then 5 mins after that. We would have been out faster but the EMS called us from Remmie’s phone. Told us that he was alive, that he never lost consciousness and he asked him to call us but he would need stitches.

That really helped. Our mental images of Remmie splattered all over the road changed to him getting clipped and hardly hurt at all. That was a sweet break from the nightmares my brain cooked up.

Once we saw him we knew it was better then the worse we had been picturing but much worse then the better that we had in mind.

Now for him it went something like this.

He was riding home with his friend Jeff. For some reason Jeff has crossed Ohio (that crazy street that i live on) earlier that usual and left Remmie on the far side. He was riding like he always does to cross at the pizza hut that is right in front of out house (which has an intersection) when a woman in a huge SUV slowed and stopped in front of him wanting to turn to cross his path. He also stopped to let her pass. But she waved him to go first, he checked for traffic and crossed the street. There was a driver behind the SUV waiting, and she happened to be a former neighbor so we got the rest of the story from her. She saw Remmie start to cross just as a woman flew past her in the inside lane. This woman didn’t see him until the last sec when she hit the breaks and broad sided him in the turn lane. He flew up over the hood smashing out that cars windshield, flying over the car and smashing down on the ground sliding to a stop a few feet behind the car.

My wife wonders if the diver had not panicked and slammed on the breaks so hard wold she have avoided hitting my son as the collision happened in the turn lane. And she wouldn’t have been in the turn lain had she not hit the breaks so hard and lost control… I would rather not think about it. It would drive me super crazy.

Okay lets do some fast forwarding, Wednesday 10+ hours in the ER (not that we needed all 10 hours, just that the ER fucked up real bad in a few ways), 51 stitches in the elbow another 150ish along the shoulder and base of the head. Once that one was done he was complaining of head pain and Tonya went looking and found a 2 inch hole in his head. It just didn’t bleed like a head wound and was missed that took some number of stitches and staples. He was admitted and the doctor had me convinced that we would be out on Thursday. But my kid hasn’t be hurt like this before and was sure his pain level was a 2 so they kept his pain meds lower. But the doc looked at his heart rate for the night and decided to up his pain meds. We asked for those meds and the nurse started to argue with us about what he can have with a pain number of 2… Tonya pissed pulled out her Kindle and found the description of the pain chart, after looking it over he decided he was 5 or 6. And the magic pills rolled in and Saturday his pain management was under control and we were home.

He is asleep as i write this but he seems to be in high spirits otherwise. He even had a friend spend the night last night. It was nice to have someone keep him company. Most of Saturday he just wanted to sit but not be board. We tried to keep him company but we are not teenage boys.

If you read this please try and keep and look out for others. Had the first woman not flagged him on or just went once he was stopped this wouldn’t have happened. Had he seen the other car he wouldn’t have tried to cross. And had the driver that hit him been paying a reasonable level of attention she could have slowed and kept control of her car, avoiding hitting him. I will tell you the one thing i know for sure, you don’t want anything to do with any part of this situation. You don’t want to be hit, you don’t want to be the hitter, you don’t want to be root cause you don’t want to watch something like this. Hell the people not directly involved that saw him get hurt seem to be the most shaken. Just not believing that he is okay. Just be vigilant you really don’t want any part of all this.

Thanks for your positive thoughts.

<3s

Magical Monday 6.16.14

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Welcome to another Magical Monday, hope you are winning or a least you have a fair shot with a fair mix of playables and lands. Rocked another draft on Friday.

I had a sick deck with a ton of removal, tricks and a few kick ass men. Stand outs were a Guild, Silence the Believers, Doom Blade and Fated Return. Man, Fated Return is insane. Seems like it just wins games. The shop didn’t have enough Theros packs to go Nix, Born, Theros so we did Nix, Born, M14 and the mono white player at the table got a foil Planar Cleansing. I was on the back foot at 4 life and out maned. Back to back removal spells helped me get things simi stable along with a Bubbling Cauldron. Until he plays the 5 man 2/2 double striker. It’s name is skipping my mind at the moment. But i don’t worry because i have Fated Return in hand along with Shrike Harpy in the grave. He attacks for the win, back comes Harpy. Who thanks to Fated Return has a hard time dying. Now on tilt he Planar Cleansings to try and clear my board but realizes what indestructible means the hard way. And smile all the way to my packs.

It was a good night. I should find a standard deck for Fated Return to rock. It is just fun times. Maybe some kind of super dredge deck….

In the mean time i have been working on two deck lists this last week. The first is an updated list from a Magical Monday a few weeks back standard B/G Constellation Combo. I will try and have an updated list for you soon. But for now i want to say Kruphix’s Insight is in fact a magic card. In case you had any other notions.

No this list is my idea of a Red/Black control list

4 Young Pyo
4 Pain Seer
4 Nivmagus Elemental
2 Tymaret, the Murder King

4 Duress
4 Thoughtseize

3 Spite of Mogis
2 Bile Blight
3 Doom Blade
2 hero’s downfall
4 Lightning Strike
4 Mizzium Mortars

I have two different sideboard options at the moment, one more rounded for different matchups

4 Brain Maggot
2 Dreadbore
2 Feast of Dreams
2 Searing Blood
1 Devour Flesh or Shock or Magma Spray
2 Anger of the Gods
2 Pack Rat

And one more trans-formative in to to an agroish shell.
2 Spiteful Returned
4 Gnarled Scarhide
4 Tormented Hero
2 Eidolon of the Great Revel
3 Pack Rat

I am not sure what is better but after watching Tom Ross clean up this last weekend i have to bet being able to go even more aggressive then what i have listed would be amazing. I could see things like Seismic Stomp and Rakdos Cacklers being the way to go.

All i know is i think there is a place now for a card like Spite of Mogis. When you are heavy on removal and light on land cards like Spite of Mogis have huge value in the late game when you need to kill two guys in a turn.

So what do you think, now that Ross has shown people the way is Sligh going to make a comeback?

<3s

Magical Monday 6.9.14

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Yesterday i thought i had come upon the holy nut, i was using gatherer for standard legal cards in the colors of white and black. Like normal i had the sort on converted mana cost and was just going down the list and i hit Swords to Plowshares.

Mic drop. Nut busted. Any overly good thing you can think of as an expletive. Jump on Facebook and asked the question is it just me or is Gatherer just fucked up? Then i did a little looking and yes Gatherer is just fucked up.

Are the cards in Conspiracy legal in other formats? Some of the cards seem like they won’t or can’t work outside the confines of a draft environment.

The vast majority of the cards in Conspiracy can be played in Vintage, Legacy, Commander, (and on kitchen tables), but Conspiracy’s big twist is that each booster contains one card that cares about the fact that you’re drafting (in place of the normal basic land). The ones with the card type conspiracy need to be drafted to work and thus aren’t legal in other formats. But they’re fun additions to cubes!

Guess things like Brainstorm, Fact or Fiction, Sakura-Tribe Elder and Squirrel Nest are just too much fun to allow in Standard.

Oh well.

I haven’t gotten the chance to draft Conspiracy yet. Looks fun but i just haven’t hit it up yet. But i did get to draft trip Journey to Nyx again last night with the fam and a few friends. We just pool into a big multi-player pile and tear it up. But i have learned that i am the biggest dog at my kitchen table. I just sit some times building up other times just waiting with nothing but mana out and somehow around turn 7 the boys start saying kill Samius and then one attack two attacks and i am picking up my permanents. Almost 100% of the time after that the next most experienced player, Dan goes down and then we do a kind of judge/commentary as to how the rest of the game will play out. We all most always call it right.

It is almost as much fun as the draft part.

I think it might be time to look at some of the other formats for multi-player games that we could do. Maybe build some kind of Reject Rare Draft Cube??? Or I could start building my Cube, the boy is grounded for not doing his chores this last week i could set him on task of cube building out of my pile….

I still would like to see Wizards to print a starting cube. Gold border and maybe a unique back just to insure no tournament play. Sell it for 60-80$ have updates or new “special theme” cubes once a year and print even more money.

Anyway hope to have a few new deck lists next week.

<3s

Summer Fling, Intro

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Man it is good to want to write about DDo again, it just feels like a long time since i had a reason to write about it.

Couple of things first. I saw Jerry’s twitch stream yesterday where he ran down the swashbuckler. Looks good. I don’t know if it is good enough for my main bard to make changes to make it worth wild but i could see my lower level was going to be a tank but the Ac changes hit and she doesn’t get played no more bard might make some swaps and get a little more love again. IF you missed it you can check it out here.

This summer fling thing of Lessah’s is going to be a nice break for me i think. I am excited to make this happen. There are a lot of rules, which you can check out on DDoCockTailHour.com needless to say that there is one rule in there that happened after i decided to buy the acid green hair dye to more easily separate myself from all the other ladies in the party. Time to become a ninja passer of the hair dye or start blowing Turbine for replacement dye…. Remember better to look good then be effective. Also i am the jhealz so punishing Lessah for this rule is fairly simple… 🙂

Sam- Your blocked!
Les- No i can see you. You are waving you asshole!
Sam- Wasn’t me….

Walk of nakid shame for Lessah.

Here is my character for this group. SheSamius.

lvl 7 starting out

lvl 7 starting out 5/2 clr/rgr

Fairly hot if i do say so myself. I made her live with out a plan on my stream with input from the chat. Fairly pleased with how she turned out. But i am really excited to see how well the least dragonmark of finding will work out for our group. As we are starting out mostly nakid i am hoping this will give us a nice leg up. On Tuesday i popped into Cartamon’s to put it to the test and i was pulling +2 tmp weapons and lots of wands on normal.

Playing with stepping things up quest diff wise and it seems to make a difference in the quality of loots found. But i am still playing with it. I am real glad they added a shrine to the quest. I was mindlessly running to the bar before i realized that there was on. Oops.

Well i hope you can join us on Wednesdays noon central(we will have lots of streams covering our play), or at least i think that is the current start time. If not i will see about saving and or porting it to Youtube. That might be a real upside of Goggle buying Twitch. Easy saving to youtube channels?

Well see to all on Friday i think for another Gurobo Farm update. Until then.

<3s

Magical Monday 6.2.14

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My magic life is real good right now. The whole fam is up for drafting almost at a whim. And they are getting fairly good. My son still tends to draft around life gain but he is at least winning a good amount of time. He and the wife are planing on doing a two headed draft at Gencon this year and he already has enough tixs for like 3 drafts for times when the wife and i are doing things he is just not into, like role playing for couples. Man i wish that was an event. Maybe i need to plan it out and host it myself in a few years.

Anyway as i said my magic life is doing well we even got some friends to come over the other day for a triple Journey draft with all my packs from FNM wins (and the box we bought) and i started to notice a personal trend both at the store and at home unless there is a money rare i wont pass…

The thing is i will always go for the junk constellation build almost every time it is available. Last weeks FNM, i tried to diverge and draft blue/black agro and it was just not good enough. Ended up 1-2-drop. In my defense the wife was also “done” and i was also fairly close the end of my rope as my head had turned up to six on the old pain dial and i was not in the mood for random bullshit like calling over a judge when i attacked into a tapped-Pinned to the Earth-Swarmborn Giant and a Nyx Infusioned-Monsterous-Ravenous Leucrocota with my sryfish and a bloodcrazed hoplite that became my own 6/6 and 7/7 post blocks thanks to a Polymorphous Rush. My opponent who just won a few simi-large events tried to argue that my guys would be 0/6s. I almost strangled him. It was just a thing were he was trying to squirm out of a loss. But i was pleased when the judge came over and smashed him down. Didn’t help that before we even started this player refused to move to me because he had “to much stuff” even though i was sitting next to my wife and she was already started the match. Asshole.

Sorry for the derail, my point is that in constellation is just so much value that i can’t seem to get away. I need all the value!

Pretend that this is a pic of LSV

and it says “I don’t always draft” “But when i do it is for Value”

I watch all kinds of draft videos/coverage and i just yell at the screen what the pick clearly is and somehow most of these people find ways to win in other archetypes. I don’t know how they do it. I could draft other archetypes pre-Nix but not now. Hell we even did a draft the other week with a core set over a Born because the shop didn’t have enough Born for all the drafters and constellation was still all the value.

Soo good.

What are your top 3 uncommons/commons?

<3s