Don’t Matter if You’re Black or White
February 14th, 2012 • Games • No Comments »I was poking around the internets as most people do these days with their free time. I decided to visit TCGPlayer.com to check out some of the latest articles they had on Magic the Gathering. One of the articles I found particularly intriguing was…
http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10293
Now this was a Thursday night and I was looking for ideas on the next deck I wanted to play at FNM. Reading this article I found some nice deck ideas to try. But the deck down at the very bottom caught my eye. A BW Token deck with Sorin, Lord of Innistrad, and Elspeth Tirel (I can only assume his unwilling mistress). The reason why this caught my eye is because I have had a recent string of good luck with the Dark Ascension release. At the pre-release events I managed to win 9 boosters and happened to get a Sorin in one of the pack. Well the following weeks I bought two more boxes of DA and got two more Sorins. I didn’t have the 4th Sorin to complete this particular deck build, but I had just about everything else. So I decided to take a shot at it and constructed my own slightly altered version of the deck.
When I got to FNM, a friend of mine actually let me borrow his Sorin for play and I went ahead and got some Honor of the Pure to complete the deck. With a new BW Token deck that I wasn’t quite sure how to play, I launched into an adventurous evening of FNM.
Round 1
My first challenger was a friend of mine playing a Red Aggro deck. He immediately started bringing down Stromkirk Noble and Markov Blademaster. And while his play was intimidating, I found it all two easy to chump block his creatures with the Spirit tokens I started generating from Lingering Souls and Midnight Haunting. Unfortunately I let the game linger on to long however and my friend eventually took me down with his Shrine of Burning Rage which he had been pumping off to the side the entire time.
I shrugged off the loss and decided to side board in some cards. You guessed it. Revoke Existence, Celestial Purge, and Stony Silence found themselves in my deck. Stony Silence ended up being a waste of space as I never say the Shrine again. Revoke Existence similarly ran into the same problem although I think I may have used it once to Remove a curse. But Celestial Purge become a new favorite for me that night. I went on to Overwhelm my friend in the next to games we played with combos of Spirit tokens, Intangible Virtue, Honor of the Pure, and essentially denying my friend every awesome piece of threat that he put down with Celestial Purge and Oblivion Ring.
Round 2
Feeling slightly smug off of my wins I moved on to round two. When I found out who I was paired with a shuddered slightly and prepared for the inevitability. Michael Jiminez is a good player and a judge that frequents FNM at Portal Games. I know that Michael was not an opponent to take lightly and I prepared myself for the eventual whooping that I got. Michael played a white aggro deck taking full advantage of things like Champion of the Parish, Grand Abolisher, Gather the Townsfolk, Honor of the Pure, and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. One of the games we played looked something like this.
Turn 1: no damage
Turn 2: two damage
Turn 3: six damage
Turn 4: twelve damage
It was probably more like 5-6 turns as I’m pretty sure I managed to get a little blocking in, but the threat production was so fast, and so hard that I found myself completely incapable of responding to anything that was being done. Michael, with graciousness, admitted that he had actually managed to get the best possible hand that that deck could produce. I on the other hand seemed to be lacking the mana to do what I needed on each game. I was completely obliterated in two swift games and contemplated my deck playing choices for the remainder of the 40 minutes we had until the next round.
Round 3
This round went slightly better then round 2. I still got beat, but I played against someone who was running a similar deck to mine. I found that every time I played a Lingering Souls or Midnight Haunting, my opponent provided a similar response. The games lasted longer and I learned a couple of things that helped me in modifying the deck. Firstly, while I was playing Geist Honored Monk, my opponent was playing Hero of Bladehold. Sure, the monk produces tokens when she comes in to play, and she can become pretty powerful with all the token generating going on, but she is 1 mana more expensive (which in this deck can really hurt) and she only produces tokens the one time. Hero of Bladehold however is producing tokens everytime she swings and giving out battlecry. The combo is pretty sick when you think about it, especially on a deck that is running Intangible Virtue and Honor of the Pure.
Round 4
I went up against a RB vamp deck. I felt a little evil when putting Celestial Purge in from the sideboard. The person I was playing against had a deck similar to my friend’s in round 1. The deck design was better I thought, but still found itself incapable of handling my mass token production and creature removal options.
Round 5
Aaron Ramsby was my final opponent. Aaron and I met through a mutual friend and have shared a similar journey in playing MTG and learning how to build decks. I can definitely say that Aaron takes a unique approach to deck building. He does not focus so much on “How do I destroy my opponent?” as he does on, “How do I do really evil things to my opponent?” And the sentiment is felt in his deck designs. He was playing a solid black deck with mostly poison fliers and Lashwrithe. OMG, Lashwrithe is sick in a solid black deck. Talk about most annoying card ever. I can honestly say that Aaron and I were pretty evenly matched. Our game play experiences had been mirrored for the most part in that we both won and lost the same rounds. Even when it came down to this final 5th round of FNM I felt like it could have gone either way. Luckily for me, the game was 2-1 in my favor. It was in this game that I got the closest I have ever gotten (up to that point) of popping Sorin’s -6 ability. Unfortunately Aaron had a nice little response to that in the form of Sheoldrid, Whispering One who swampwalked past my defenses and took out Sorin in one swing. At the start of my next turn I sacrificed a creature and used tragic slip to destroy his annoying Sheoldrid. I then used a couple of other removal spells and destroyed him.
So by the end of the night I had 3 mins and 2 losses. I didn’t get any prize money but I learned a couple of things about the deck, what did work and what didn’t.
Firstly, Elspeth and Sorin were pretty much useless. I found myself playing them only when there was nothing better to do. The majority of the time I was using my mana to pump out tokens or use Vault of the Archangel to pump my life total up and ruin my opponents creatures. I found having a mass amount of tokens, being pumped by Intangible Virtue and Honor of the Pure, plus Vault of the Archangel was an incredibly effective strategy. I had some games that I would have lost flat out except that I kept getting life back. That was one of the few moments that Elspeth managed to shine. I put her down, no Vault around, but had a bunch of tokens already out, so I just started pushing her life gain ability.
Bloodline Keeper was a waste of space in my deck. I saw what the deck builder was trying to do in that the interaction between Sorin and this guy could result in a very nice, very lethal swarm of black vamp tokens with flying, Lifelink, and Vigilance to Decimate my opponent. The only problem with this strategy is that I was already winning or losing by the time I had enough mana out to play these cards. At no point did I feel like this was an effective combo for the deck. I’m considering dropping Bloodline Keeper and replacing with something like Geist Honored Monk instead which I feel presents a far more effective card in the late game with a token generating deck like this.
Hero of Bladehold will make a nice addition. I’m thinking of eliminating Sorin from the mix putting in some more creatures instead. Sad that a Doomed Traveler would probably feel more effective in this deck then a Planeswalker, but that’s just how the deck plays I guess.
Having played this deck now. I am contemplating a couple of other deck builds I would like to try. One deck I have in mind would be a full out Vamp deck which I keep being enticed by but haven’t bothered to put together yet. The other thing I would like to possibly look at is a GWB deck that takes advantage of creatures in the graveyard and some token production. I’ll post the decks here when they are built.
