Can Magic Online Recover?

Recently there has been a huge shake-up on Magic Online.  Last weekend both the Magic Online Championship tournament AND a large Pro Tour Qualifier crashed before finishing.  Wizards rolled out the usual compensation announcements but that didn’t satisfy a large portion of the players. In particular, one Brian Kibler. See his post about the debacle here.

Seemingly in response to all this rage directed at WotC, they shutdown all major Magic Online events.  The only events running now are 8-player queues, 2-player queues, and the two makeup events for the MOCS and PTQ.  Yowsa.  It was a strong response, but was absolutely necessary.  The stability of MTGO *must* be fixed.

I remember the last MTGO PTQ I played in… Oh yeah, it crashed as well. I believe I was 5-2 when it crashed, so I didn’t have top 8 aspirations or anything, but I would have liked to play until the end.  I had to block out the entire day to play in the event, because let’s face it, every round goes to time (and I swear it’s longer than 52 minutes or whatever it should be).  I wasn’t very angry, however, because they were issuing some packs and I wasn’t in contention anyway, but I realized how upset the top 8 hopefuls had to be.

I completely understand Kibler’s frustration and anger over the recent crashes.

I think that a message needed to be sent to WotC/Hasbro that the game in its current state is unacceptable. I for one am thankful that WotC actually paid attention this time and did something about the problems. I remain hopefully optimistic that they will find the root cause and fix it. FIX IT….

FIX IT!!!

Can Magic Online recover from these problems? Absolutely. Wizards has kept their property to themselves all these years and will likely continue to do so.  Will they bring in another company or at least hire more people? I sure hope so. Other online games work with essentially no interruption these days. I played WoW back in its hay-day and we experienced the growing pains of that game, with servers going offline weekly.  I only seem to remember that happening for about a year, though, and Magic Online has been crashing like this for years.

For now I’ll continue to mess around with Standard decks casually and I’ll see what they are able to do with the larger events. I, like a lot of players, will wait out the first few big tournaments that come back and see what happens.  I’ll be back eventually because I can’t really play paper Magic anymore and I need a place to play.

Early Melira Pod Testing for GP Detroit

Initially, I did some testing without fetchlands. That led me to the conclusion that I needed fetchlands. Then, having acquired said fetchlands, and behold, I saw that they were good.

Now that that’s out of the way, my early testing may help you if you are less experienced, or force you to call me out for terribad-plans if you are more experienced. I welcome both. Here are some results from my early testing phase (including daily events and casual room matches):

vs. Bogles (one match)
Game 1: Lost, Game 2: Won, Game 3: Won. Result: 2-1
Spellskite was very important and killing Kor Spiritdancer is also top priority.

vs. U/R Splinter Twin (one match) and RUG Twin (one match)
Game 1: lost, Game 2: lost. Result: 0-2
Game 1: lost, Game 2: lost. Result: 0-2
Sideboarding Plan: +1 Linvala, +3 Duress, +2 Dismember, +1 Shriekmaw, +2 Decay.  -1 Pod, -1 Chord, -1 Archangel, -1 Spike Feeder, -1 Ooze, -1 Eos, -3 Deathrite.
In these matches, my mulligans are really what destroyed me. I guess it takes time for MTGO to warm up that shuffler. 🙂

vs. UWR Control (one match)
Game 1: won, Game 2: won. Result: 2-0
Sideboarding: +3 Duress, +1 Voice, +2 Lingering Souls. -3 Deathrite, -1 Spellskite, -1 Chord, -1 Pontiff.
This match was also uneventful, as my opponent got mana screwed in game two.

vs. Soul Sisters (ugh, one match)
Game 1: won, Game 2: won. Result: 2-0
Boarding: +2 Dismember, +1 Shriekmaw, +2 Decay. -1 Spellskite, -1 Ooze, -3 Deathrite.
Orzhov Pontiff single-handedly shut this guy down, he was an all-star.

vs. Affinity (two matches)
Game 1: lost, Game 2: lost. Result: 0-2
Game 1: lost, Game 2: won, Game 3: lost. Result: 1-2
Boarding: +1 voice of resurgence, +2 lingering souls, +2 dismember, +1 linvala, +2 abrupt decay, +1 harmonic sliver. -1 spellskite, -1 scavenging ooze, -1 metamorph, -1 shriekmaw, -1 birthing pod, -3 deathrite shaman, -1 chord of calling.
The first match was gross, as I forgot to sideboard. lolz, right? The second one was very close with me losing the turn I had the crack-back.

vs. Amulet of Vigor combo (one match)
Game 1: lost, Game 2: won, Game 3: lost. Result: 1-2
I had no idea how to play against this crazy deck. He rolled over me when I couldn’t disrupt him.

vs. UW Tron Gifts (one match)
Game 1: won, Game 2: lost, Game 3: lost. Result: 1-2
This matchup is bad bad bad for me. Not sure how to plan for it.

vs. BG Midrange (two matches)
Game 1: won, Game 2: won. Result: 2-0
Game 1: won, Game 2: won. Result: 2-0
I don’t remember much about the first one other than that it was easy.
The second was very hard-fought but I overcame a lot of his board presence to do exactly lethal one turn.

Part of playing this deck is to know when to attack, when to Pod, and when to just hold back. There were many times where I would want to Pod up an answer to something that I didn’t really need to answer. The temptation is there to simply shut down everything the opponent is doing, regardless of your own plan. This is sometimes good and sometimes a trap and knowing the difference means everything.

Going into beatdown mode is sometimes easy because you just chip in for damage here and there before activating Pod and sometimes hard because they might have resistance or creatures to attack you back.

This deck is very complex, and now that I have the completed deck I am going to test it extensively. Here’s my updated list:

 

Note: That should say “31 creatures”