More Magic: The Gathering
I don’t intend to write about every game of Magic: The Gathering that I play but it has also been something that I have only slowly been dipping my toes into and the sheen as not worn off yet. It’s a fun and interesting game and I do intend to play more and have ideas for decks to construct, but I have just been putting my time into other things and I generally want to stick with just playing with friends when I have the chance rather than going to events with strangers. I finally got a third game last weekend while visiting Copenhagen against some new opponents: My partner who lives over there and her partner1.
My partner was using a firebending-based deck with Avatar Roku, Firebender as a commander and her partner using a dinosaur deck with Pantlaza, Sun-Favored as her commander, while I was using my revised Seto Kaiba deck again. Roku struggled to get off the ground, with my partner taking several mulligans and playing with a starting hand of five cards instead of seven, but once she had a hand that allowed some decent starting mana she got going pretty quickly and played Descent into Avernus early on, which changed the entire game.
I have a lot of expensive dragons in my deck so it can be tricky to start getting things on the field (though treasure tokens from Descent into Avernus started to help after a few turns) and I used Show and Tell to put Hammerhead Tyrant out. Dino deck used it to put Bronzebeak Foragers out, immediately exiling my dragon, so I Power Word Killed it.
With Descent into Avernus in play I started hoping that I would draw Revel in Riches and the heart of the cards delivered. As such when I had changes to remove Descent into Avernus with Hammerhead Tyrant I simply left it in play, even though the Roku was starting to do some serious damage to us and was well ahead on life as all three of us were taking damage while gaining treasure every round.
So when my partner knocked out her partner and I was also one turn away from being wiped out by Avernus and some mana and treasure built up I played Revel in Riches, with Transcendent Dragon waiting in the wings to act as a counter-counter when it was immediately countered. With that played I had fifteen life, two treasure tokens and was due to gain eight tokens and lose eight life at the start of Roku’s turn. If I could survive that turn I would win on my next upkeep. I did not survive that turn. It wasn’t even close, I didn’t have any counters left and was immediately blown away.
The next day my partner’s partner also introduced me to Dandân, a Magic: The Gathering format more like Exploding Kittens than a normal game of Magic. It has both players drawing from the same deck, which has a heavily restricted composition. It’s named after the card Dandân—a fish that requires both players to have islands on the field in order to attack—the only card in the deck that can deal damage, and then various sorceries and artefacts for drawing, reordering the top of the deck, countering and various ways of screwing over the other player’s fish, including kind of weird ones like Magical Hack, which I used to kill the first Dandân that was played by making it need swamps to live instead of islands.
I did have to be coached a bit on some of the specifics of priority and “the stack” but it’s not like I haven’t played games like this before. I did get lucky in that I was able to play Treasure Cruise twice over the course of the game (once so early on that there weren’t enough cards in the graveyard to make it as cheep as it could be), both giving me a hand advantage and later in the game letting me exile cards that, if they were taken from the graveyard, could have been a threat to the two-nil Dandân advantage that I’d managed to get on the field. I was also playing kind of spitefully, doing things like forcing cards to be milled with Vision Charm after my opponent got to arrange them with Spy Network, but it worked out for me, and once I had two Dandâns out and was quite in control of blocking anything else from happening my opponent conceded.
