Casual Magic

Welcome back to Casual Magic.

This month I’m planning on attending GASP con, which stands for Gaming Association of Southwest Pennsylvania. This will be my second time attending GASP con and I’m looking forward to it. Three days of gaming with a Zendikar sealed event on Friday. You can read my recap from last year here. I’ll be attending with Aaron who runs Buymorecards.net. He’s working on a new design for is site so stay tuned for an announcement when he gets it fully operational.

Anyway it has been a while since I’ve been to a good con and I’m hoping to get into some good non magic board games. Recently I’ve been playing a D&D campaign. My first. It has been very enlightening and a lot of fun. I’m expecting to meet some great people and learn some new games.

Back to Magic.

Last friday I attended my first FNM in a while. The first in Zendikar Standard for sure. Over the past few weeks I’d been tied up with events and obligations therefore keeping me from gaming. I probably wouldn’t have played because I didn’t have a deck together. But after looking at that weeks building on a budget I realized that I probably could put that deck together, and I was right.

The deck is essentially a cheap Jund build. Cheap meaning not all the expensive cards like Maelstrom Pulse and fetch lands. I felt that this build is just as good and terminate costing less that pulse is ok because most of the time I was only killing one creature at a time. Pulse in the current meta (at least for me) would have been irrelevant. Terminate costs one less and easily cast-able in this deck.

I went 3-0 at the FNM beating out vampires, a blue/white/black milldeck, and a goblin home brew. I felt that vampires was an easy matchup. The vampires were too slow against me and my removal was better. Yes they have tendrils but my lightning bolt, blightning and terminate keeps their hand, life and board under control. In my opinion vampires have a lot of potential but from what I’ve seen they are just too slow in a 1v1 match up. At the multiplayer table seems like a decent deck.

The mill deck was next and I felt that this was a 50/50 matchup. I won in two games, but game one he didn’t draw a blue mana until turn 10 and his wrath and white control could only hold out for so long. In that game I had to terminate my own Sprouting Thrinax to get creatures in around his Wall of Denial. Game two saw him either have mana or card trouble. I had to play around his Path to Exile and Archive Trap. Not a huge problem, just don’t search your library when playing against the Mill Control deck. This was even easier when my deck didn’t have a card that needed me to search.

The goblin matchup was also a smooth ride. My extra spells with bloodbraid elf and removal were hard to play around. In this decks defense I don’t think he was playing chieftan or instigator. But rather he was experimenting with Zendikar block goblins and some standard removal. I think this deck was red white with new oblivion ring that only hits creatures. I didn’t take a look at his deck list after the match although I wish I had now.

Anyway I had a lot of fun playing cheap jund especially with the fair amount of success I had with it. What are you experimenting with in the new standard? Next post I’ll share my own goblin homebrew deck list.