Wednesday MTG Miscellany

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Happy Hump-Day MTG peeps,

We suggest that if you, like us, are a fan of Magic: the Gathering story and love the world of Kaladesh, make digital tracks on over to the mothersite today.  Posted today is the continuation of the Kaladesh storyline 'Release', written by Chris L'Etoile, the Wizards of the Coast Narrative Design Coordinator.  We won't give very much away, but Chandra, Nissa, and Mrs. Pashiri were in a sticky situation when last we left off and things were looking decidedly grim.  To the rescue - our fav Planeswalking Kitteh.  Great story today!

Next up - Our new Scooter-Looter Overlords.
Pop over to the 'Tube and watch the Red-White Vehicles Standard Deck Tech for Magic: The Gathering—Kaladesh with Wedge of the Mana Source over at this linky.  We really love this build and were contemplating this being our first 60-card stack of the new standard format season, but with Smuggler's Copter going for around $25 locally (Ontario, Canada), we will decline.  

Instead, we've decided to buy necessities (like food), and update the Tier 2 U/W Spirits list we have.  We've got a ton of options in blue and white and feel that this is more than sufficient to get decent results at our regular Friday Night Magic events.  We already have the core of Rattlechains, Spell Queller, Selfless Spirit and friends.

The choices are a bit overwhelming, but we will eventually hatch a list out - 

All our new cards to be sorted

Some core options to consider

Some choices are easy, some not so much

Just how much control do we need?

We are emotionally attached to some mediocre cards while others are automatic shoe-ins.

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New Eldritch Moon Standard

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Happy Monday MTG peeps,

The dust has settled on the weekend's StarCityGames Open Tournament in Columbus, Ohio and the results are in as to how the newest set of Magic: the Gathering, Eldritch Moon has impacted standard format.  From the 120 decklists going forward on Sunday, it appears that although there is still a measure of variation required for a healthy format, Bant Company was a clear winner as shown below in the top eight deck archetypes.

Bant Company – 34
U/W Spirits – 18
Bant Humans – 10
W/R Humans – 7
B/W Control – 6
U/R Eldrazi – 4
G/B Delirium – 4
G/W Tokens – 3

The best card in standard appears to the anchor of the Bant Company decklist, Collected Company.  This card got a lot better with the addition of Thalia, Heretic Cathar and Spell Queller which provides a volume of control in this list.  Thalia slows down your opponent a titch while Spell Queller can now exile key components such as Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and Nissa, Voice of Zendikar, members of last season's strong list G/W Tokens.  Here are the top 16 finalists for the SCG tournament in Columbus.

Bant Company 1st Devin Koepke
Sultai Control 2nd Ali Aintrazi
Bant Company 3rd Kyle Boggemes
G/W Tokens 4th Eric Rill
Bant Company 5th Dan Jessup
G/R Goggles 6th Matthew Voltz
B/G Seasons Past 7th Kasey Walton
B/W Angel Control 8th Ronnie Ritner
G/W Tokens 9th Andrew Boswell
Bant Company 10th Tom Maney
G/W Tokens 11th Chris Robinson
W/R Humans 12th Tom Ross
U/W Spirits 13th Jeff Hoogland
Bant Company 14th Jack Fogle
W/R Humans 15th Todd Anderson
Bant Company 16th Chris Andersen

Given the new powerful cards such as Mausoleum Wander (buff and instant / sorcery counter), Selfless Wanderer (saving your bacon from a board-wipe) and Spell Queller (jack of all trades remoal) we were expecting to see a strong presence in the top 8 of U/W Spirits.  These lists did do decent going forward to day two, just not quite across the finish line, which indicates to us that perhaps fine-tuning against Bant Company may be all that is needed.  The format is still very young and what is certain is the evolution of strategies.
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Angry Ghosts

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Happy Tuesday MTG peeps,

Following up with the theme of yesterday's post on Arcane  / Spiritcraft, we wanted to get to something we've been thinking about for some time but really never followed through on - an aggro homebrew featuring blue / white Spirits.  We first thought of a more control / mill version when we saw Return to Ravnica's Psychic Spiral which allows you to dump all the cards in your 'yard back into your library while milling your opponent the same number.  To get there, we had contemplated using Gloom Surgeon and Mindshrieker along with other similar cards.  Unfortunately, we did not move forward with this.

Yesterday on Gathering Magic, we had read with interest the article 'Tokens of Appreciation' by Mike Cannon. As we have a soft spot for tokens, we were keen to evaluate Mike's Esper Tokens list.  Ever since Honor of the Pure rotated out of standard, white weenie and black / white tokens just did not have the same appeal and we were looking for a replacement.  Mike's list has some lovely anthem effects with Drogskol Captain, Intangible Virtue and Favorable Winds.  Here's our particular take on this, bent to our own individual tastes, the available cards in our collection and the local meta-game at our Friday Night Magic venue, OMG! Games, here in Barrie, Ontario. 

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4x Doomed Traveler
4x Thought Scour
4x Beckon Apparition
4x Favorable Winds
3x Intangible Virtue
4x Drogskol Captain
4x Lingering Souls
4x Midnight Haunting
3x Geist of Satint Traft
2x Geist-Honored Monk
2x Entreat the Angels

4x Glacial Fortress
3x Drowned Catacomb
1x Moorland Haunt
5x Island
9x Plains
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This is all about attempting to field as many flying spirit creatures onto the game table as possible in a short amount of time as games which run longer will likely end in a frown for this list.  Doomed Traveller is our fav one-drop providing an earlier blocker and latter a spirit token.  Thought Scour provides some limited card draw while dumping cards into the opponents graveyard to be targeted by Beckon Apparition, giving you another spirit token.

Our anthems are Favorable Winds (enchantment giving +1/+1 to flying creatures), Intangible Virtue (enchantment giving +1/+1 and vigilance to tokens), and Drogskol Captain (a creature giving +1/+1 and hexproof to other spirits).

A full book set of Lingering Souls and Midnight Haunting provide the fuel for the aggro fire here on turn three or we have the option of dropping a Geist of Saint Traft, where benefits may be provided either to himself, the 4/4 Angel token he generates or to both.

After turn three, we will welcome either a Geist-Honored monk and the two spirits that this card brings along or perhaps a miracle Entreat the Angels which hopefully by that time are finishing the game for us with several 6/6 flying / vigilance tokens.

We've not completely dismissed our earlier iterations using a mill strategy and will likely get a few more cards from MTG Mint Card to complete a list and give it a spin.
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Arcane Musings

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Happy Monday MTG peeps,

Over the weekend, two Grand Prix tournaments took place, both standard constructed formats.  Mike Krasnitski took first place at Grand Prix Verona with a 'Junk Rites' (reanimator) deck, while Jose Francisco Silva won Grand Prix Rio de Janeiro with an Aristocrats build.  Congratulations to both!

Today on the MTG Realm bloggy, we wanted to take a look very far into the past at a rather interesting card type - 'Arcane'.  Arcane is defined as requiring secret or mysterious knowledge, and in the world of Magic: the Gathering, it is a spell subtype seen on instants and sorceries in the Kamigawa Block and could be considered as a precursor to tribal spells as this subtype was often mechanically linked with spirits.  Flavour-wise, these spells are related to spirits or 'kami' within this block were typically referred to as 'spiritcraft' as there was a triggered effect whenever a spirit or arcane spell was played.

Here at MTG Realm, being the casual home-brew nutters were are, we definitely want to drop over to MTG Mint Card to dig up some older Kamigawa Block cards and get down to building a Spirit tribal deck.  Here's some choices which come to mind at the moment.

Finally, here are some other popular arcane spells which may be of interest -

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DKA Spirit Aggro

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Happy Wednesday MTG peeps,

We continue on today with developing some quirky and fun standard constructed builds with all the latest Magic the Gathering cards from Dark Ascension. Previously we had showed a B/W Token build with Sorin and Lingering Souls, next we derped around with a Delver Spirit build. (Check out our buddy Virgil's Magic Emporium on an excellent run down on U/W Spirit Delver). Today however, we want to dig deeper into all the decent spirit cards Dark Ascension has brought us.

Don't worry if you're not a fan of blue-white - we hope to make similar posts with the other Innistrad 'tribes' as well. More specifically, we want to make casual decks featuring Diregraf Captain with U/B Zombies, Stromkirk Captain with B/R Vampires and Immerwolf with R/G Wolves / Werewolves. Anywhoos - onto today's post Dark Ascenscion Spirit deck. The draft deck may be found electronically HERE at Tapped Out.


Post Dark Ascesnsion Sprits
Blue-White

38 Spells
4 x Doomed Traveler
4 x Spectral Rider
4 x Niblis of the Urn
4 x Honor of the Pure
4 x Intangible Virtue
4 x Midnight Haunting
4 x Lingering Souls
4 x Drogskol Captain
3 x Geist of Saint Traft
3 x Geist-Honored Monk

22 Lands
4 x Glacial Fortress
2 x Isolated Chapel
1 x Swamp
3 x Island
12 x Plains

Sideboard
3 x Revoke Existence
3 x Arm with Æther
3 x Divine Offering
3 x Oblivion Ring
3 x Feeling of Dread


First up - the mana base.
This may still require further tweaking. The idea however is to have just a splash of black for the flashblack cost of Lingering Souls, other than that, it's open season so fire off your recommendations in the comments below.

Doomed Traveler is the requisite one-drop followed by what we feel is an under rated card in Innistrad - Spectral Rider. For two white mana, you get a 2/2 with evasion (Intimidate) and with the meta-game as it is, loads of players are into red, green, and blue - so we're thinking we could do worse here. Honor of the Pure provides the anthem effect to the rider as well as most other creatures this build will play. Niblis of the Urn provides a decent tap down effect which hopefully will help land damage.

Midnight Haunting and Lingering souls are 'auto-includes' whose tokens will get pumped by the Honor but also Intangible Virtue. Speaking of pumps - Drogskol captain will provide another +1/+1 including hexproof to all your spirits.

Geist of Saint Traft is another spirit creature that already has hexproof and will produce a temporary 4/4 alpha-striking angel. Geist-Honored Monk will help you cash in on those tokens you've been creating and hopefully provide you with a monster to finish the game.

Again - we would love to hear your suggestions to take this build from the Kitchen table to FNM.
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Also of note - the folks over at MTG Mint Card has cracked open a few more boxes of Innistrad and has now restocked. If you've been looking for that special hard-to-get sorcery or Planeswalker, drop by.
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Geist-Delver Spirits

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Happy Friday MTG peeps,

If you are unable to get out to a Friday Night Magic this evening and get your Magic the Gathering fix, you will be pleased to know that you can still jump onto the interwebs and follow the SatrCity Games Open Series tournament in Cincinnati, Ohio or the Pro Tour Dark Ascension in Honolulu this weekend. From these two tournaments, we should expect to see what direction standard constructed will develop over the next few weeks and months.

As for us, we posted a B/W Token build yesterday and received from great comments already via eMail and post comment. We hope to refine and tweak this several times over the next while. You can keep up with the updates to this black white token build posted under 'Haunting Souls' at TappedOut.net.

For today, we wanted to take a crack at a post-Dark Ascension Delver build featuring spirits. The 'in work' decklist is posted here and is a bit more unrefined than the previous build. Again, we invite you to provide input and guidance on this. Let's have a look -

Geist-Delver Spirits

37 Spells
4 x Delver of Secrets
4 x Ponder
4 x Artful Dodge
4 x Vapor Snag
4 x Mindshrieker
3 x Runechanter's Pike
4 x Drogskol Captain
3 x Phantasmal Image
3 x Geist of Saint Traft
2 x Dungeon Geists
2 x Drogskol Reaver

23 Lands
3 x Moorland Haunt
4 x Glacial Fortress
5 x Plains
11 x Island

Sideboard
3 x Mana Leak
3 x Disperse
3 x Saving Grasp
3 x Feeling of Dread
3 x Oblivion Ring


The next day after we had compiled a rough list, we realised that we just wanted to build something with Geist of Saint Traft and Drogskol Captain and nothing too competitive. To this end, we think this will be kept at the kitchen table for fun and not taken to FNM. Having said that, should you have some great suggestions, we might must change our mind.

Anywhoos, we've yet to get any real games in with this yet but will keep you up to date on where this goes.
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