Monday, January 20, 2014

Monday Magic - Minotaurs!

I wasn't able to attend FNM last week, so I haven't been able to test any new changes to my standard deck.  Instead, I want to run through the skeleton of a new deck I've been toying with.

With the Born of the Gods spoilers that have been trickling in, it's starting to look like minotaur tribal might be a serious competitor.  With the two minotaur spoilers that we've seen (Felhide Spiritbinder and Ragemonger), the minotaur archetype is already getting some serious support.

With that in mind, I've thrown together a minotaur tribal deck with standard legal cards that I already own.  After the decklist, which I think is pretty straightforward, I'll comment on big changes that I think would make the deck more competitive.

Creatures:
4 Deathbellow Raider
3 Fanatic of Mogis
4 Felhide Minotaur
4 Kragma Warcaller
4 Minotaur Skullcleaver
3 Rageblood Shaman

Instants:
4 Chandra's Outrage
2 Doom Blade
4 Lightning Strike
2 Magma Jet

Sorceries:
2 Act of Treason

Land:
2 Blood Crypt
14 Mountain
2 Rakdos Guildgate
6 Swamp

Perhaps the most obvious improvement is replacing those Guildgates with additional Blood Crypts, but as of now I only have the two.  Act of Treason is also probably pretty weak, but I'm not sure what I have to replace it.  Similarly, Chandra's Outrage may be a little costly; by the time I have 4 mana, I'm probably going to want to devote it to developing my board state, not removing a random creature.  Again, though, I'm not sure what to stick in there instead.

Maybe the biggest addition to this deck would be Door of Destinies.  Buffing all your minotaurs, which likely have trample and haste due to the Warcaller and the Shaman, seems to enable huge burst damage.  If I owned any copies, I'd definitely make some room for them.

The most serious threat against this setup is clearly wrath effects, as a swift win requires having a couple creatures already on the board the turn you drop a Warcaller.  I'm not totally sure how to avoid that problem other than to try to brute force your way through it.  It certainly deserves some consideration, though.

To make this kind of deck competitive, there are some significant obstacles to overcome and a lot of tweaking to do.  At this point, this decklist is simply meant as a basic shell for revisions once Born of the Gods is officially released and we know what new goodies this kind of deck may get.  As such, I'll leave it there for now; something to think about rather than something to bust out at FNM anytime soon.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Monday Magic - Building a Standard Deck Part III

After last week's standard experiences, I didn't feel like the deck list itself needed a whole lot of tweaking.  Instead, it seemed like I needed to work on aggressive mulligans, smarter play, and better sideboarding.

Minor Sideboard Change
That said, I did change my deck list a little bit, removing Electrickery from the board entirely.  The issue is that Electrickery serves a very specific purpose, wiping tokens and possibly clearing the board in a mirror match.  I already have a set of Legion Loyalists to ignore tokens, and killing creatures in the mirror match is a defensive move, which seems like a terrible idea with this super aggressive deck.  If I'm really worried about tokens, it's worth running something that has wider applicability.  I decided to go with Weapon Surge - at the cost of an attack, Weapon Surge can accomplish the same goal as Electrickery, but it can also help deal with bigger blockers or be used for another 2-4 damage in a successful combat phase.  It has greater utility, so I think it's a stronger choice.

Aside from that change, the list that I took to last week's Friday Night Magic was the same as before:

Main Deck
Creatures:
Ash Zealot
Burning-Tree Emissary
Firedrinker Satyr
Foundry Street Denizen
Goblin Shortcutter
Legion Loyalist
Rakdos Cackler
Rubblebelt Maaka

Instants:
Lightning Strike
Magma Jet
Titan's Strength

Enchantments:
Madcap Skills

Lands:
18 Mountain

Sideboard
Act of Treason
Peak Eruption
Seismic Stomp
Shock
Skullcrack
Weapon Surge

Holy crap, life gain
Last week's FNM was an even smaller affair than the previous one, with only 8 people in attendance.  As such, we only played three rounds.  I finished with a disappointing 1-2 record, falling pretty spectacularly to a couple decks with significant life gain abilities.  Some details:

Round one pitted me against a red white deck that dominated me 0-2.  It was actually the same midrange red player I had beaten the week before, but he had made a number of important modifications.  Most notably, Spark Trooper and Warleader's Helix.  As soon as either of those spells resolved, the game was effectively over, as the six point life gain from the Trooper and the 4 life plus removal of the Helix each put him solidly beyond my reach.

In round two, I defeated a mono blue devotion deck 2-1.  Weapon Surge really shines in this matchup (and really any matchup without much spot removal), as I was able to use it to blow him out in game three.  I think his deck list was a little stronger than the mono blue deck I played a few weeks ago, but it still didn't give me a whole lot of trouble - my one loss was the result of really weak draws during the game.

The final round brought an unexpected green monster deck featuring a number of planeswalkers, which knocked me down 1-2.  Post-board, Seismic Stomp and Act of Treason do a good job dealing with Sylvan Caryatid and Polukranos, but Scavenging Ooze's life gain proved too much to handle.  In each of the games I lost, I was able to get my opponent down under 3 life, but the Ooze allowed him to stabilize and counter any burn I might throw at him.

Despite the frustrating loss in round three, I took the close games as a great sign: my $25 deck was still pretty competitive against a deck that cost well over $100.  I think that's a good indication that you don't need to drop a ton of money to succeed in a given standard environment (at least at the FNM level), you just need to have a pretty finely-tuned deck.

Lessons
The two big concerns I had noticed in the past - mid-game life gain and Boros Reckoner - are still significant problems for this deck.  I unfortunately didn't get to test any recent changes against Reckoner, so I still have some hope that more aggressive play can help mitigate the minotaur's damage.  On the other hand, the deck undeniably needs better tech against life gain.

I think there are two major options for dealing with that problem.  The first is to run more answers to those specific threats.  Stick Skullcrack and Shock in the main deck and plan to leave mana up for the relevant spells once my opponent is able to cast their unfortunate life gain spells.  A secondary benefit of such changes is that I may be more likely to win game one against Esper or Azorius control decks, but it comes with a pretty damning downside - playing like this seems like it would slow me down quite a bit, making it harder to compete with most decks.  I don't think it's a great option in its entirety, but it might be worth running a couple Shocks in place of a couple Lightning Strikes in the main deck.

The second option is much more appealing but certainly not without its disadvantages as well.  Running Akroan Crusader could help build a strong board state relatively quickly and cheaply; Dynacharge could push through a few extra points of damage or end the game in a hurry, if it reaches that point.  Really the idea here would be to lower the average converted mana cost of the deck (which is already 1.5) to try to force more damage through earlier.

While this kind of modification might be able to deal more damage more quickly, I doubt that it would work out to be as consistent as the list I've been using (I'm too lazy to work through the math on that right now).  I'm a fan of the Dynacharge bit, though, so it might be worth investigating as an alternative to something like Madcap Skills.

Basically, it seems like I need to come up with some clever way of dealing with life gain.  I'll probably only get one more shot with this deck before the next expansion, Born of the Gods, hits shelves, so here's hoping I can solve this life gain problem soon!

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Game Review - The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (Xbox 360, 2013)

Disclaimer: I don't follow The Walking Dead franchise, so this review comes from the perspective of someone who has never read any of the comics and has only seen the first episode of the show.  I'll note ways I think the experience will differ for fans of the series, but this review will primarily judge the game on its own merits.

Drawing from the massive success of the tv series, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct gives players a chance to experience the first stage of the zombie apocalypse from a first-person perspective.  While it has some exciting ideas, it's mostly a bland action game with hints of untapped potential.  Here's what you can expect:

Survival Instinct puts you in the shoes of Daryl Dixon, who is on a hunting trip at the beginning of the zombie outbreak.  Following the death of his father in the opening scenes of the game, Daryl sets out to find his brother Merle and reach safety.  Fans of the show might think this is an interesting backstory for those characters, but from where I was sitting, the main plot was dull and Daryl and Merle were uninteresting and very poorly developed.

In fact, the secondary characters you meet along the way seem to have much more interesting concerns during the zombie apocalypse, but they get so little of the spotlight that they serve only as a hint of missed storytelling potential.  Basically, for people who aren't already fans of the Walking Dead series, the storyline is really just an excuse to explore zombie-infested Georgia, and it's a pretty bad excuse.

To be fair, though, you don't really need much of an excuse for some good old fashioned zombie slaying, and the underlying mechanics are solid.  You'll take on the zombie hordes using a variety of melee and ranged weaponry to clear paths to supply caches or survivors.  You can also sneak quietly around, but although the zombies are generally only sensitive to direct line-of-sight or loud sounds, there tend to be so many of them that sneaking isn't terribly effective. The main components of the gameplay aren't stunning, but they certainly get the job done, and it's reasonably fun to kill tons of zombies, even if it is a little mindless at times.

One gameplay mechanic that really hits the mark, however, is what happens when a zombie grabs you.  If a zombie manages to get ahold of you, your only escape is to stab it in the head; doing so requires what amounts to a frantic quick time event - you must center your view on a smallish circle on the zombie's head (which is far from trivial, as the zombie's grip causes the camera to shake wildly) and quickly pull the right trigger.  If successful, you'll be treated with a gruesome close-up of the zombie's lobotomy, followed by the next-nearest zombie grappling you itself if you don't quickly push it away.  While constant grappling can get a little tedious, it does an awesome job of capturing the hectic terror you might expect from a zombie attack.

Another nifty feature is that you can send your companions out to search for fuel, food, or ammo while you're off exploring a town.  They'll get hurt or possibly die on their missions, but when they get back, they'll bolster your resource reserves.  If these bonus goodies had been necessary for completing the game (or at least really helpful), it could have been a fun challenge in resource management, but as it stands, they merely supplement the ample collection of items you can find in the field yourself.

There's also a pretty neat transition between stages.  Instead of lengthy cutscenes, you have brief voice-overs while the characters' car progresses to the next town.  During each of those trips, you can choose whether to try to take highways or backroads, which will consume different amounts of fuel and have different opportunities for scavenging supplies.  The differences between those choices is mostly cosmetic, as there are similar numbers of stops either way (and they're functionally identical but officially have different purposes), but they're still kind of cool.

While these mechanics are interesting ideas, the fact that grappling can get very tedious and the fact that your choices regarding companions and travel options have minimal effects on the gameplay suggest that it could have been a compelling zombie survival game.  Instead, they're just a few novel gimmicks in an otherwise mechanically underwhelming game.

To make things a bit worse, along with choosing the way you travel, you occasionally get to choose between two different destinations.  These options result in different stages, so it probably sounds like a plus, but those branching paths recombine almost immediately, so there's actually little variation between path choices.  Furthermore, there are only 12 missions (most of which only take about 30 minutes to complete) over the course of the plot, and only 4 of those come from the branching choices, so the majority of the game is identical regardless your choices.  The stages themselves are also pretty linear, usually having only minor side areas to explore.  The result?  A relatively short game with very low replay value; you're probably not going to get more than 6-8 hours of fun out of it.

On the more superficial side of things, Survival Instinct is decent, though nothing is really special.  Zombie models are noticeably repeated and not terribly detailed, the environments are rather bland most of the time, and the graphics generally don't compare well to the best contemporary games.  While the voice acting is likely very exciting for long-time Walking Dead fans (Daryl and Merle are apparently voiced by their actors in the show), it didn't do much for me.  The main voice actors did an acceptable job, though their spoken lines failed to make their characters any more compelling; again, secondary characters seemed to have a bit more emotional depth than the main guys, but they didn't get much coverage.  The music, on the other hand, is pretty well-designed, appropriately setting the tone for the end of days, which is a bright spot in the game's audiovisual design.

And finally, achievement hunters won't have a terrible time with this one.  Two playthroughs are needed to get a couple mutually exclusive achievements that depend on choices you make along the way, and you might need to spend some time grinding out random survivor encounters, but nothing is too difficult.  The only problem is tediously running through the same linear stages repeatedly, but it's certainly doable within 15 hours or so.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct doesn't deserve any awards, and there are certainly better zombie alternatives for sating your zombie game needs, but the first playthrough is entertaining enough.  For the reputation that pop culture tie-in games get, Survival Instinct is surprisingly good and probably a good choice for fans of the show; as an independent game, however, I'd say it's merely average.

My Rating: 5/10 - ok.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Monday Magic - Building a Standard Deck Part II

After last week's analysis of the first iteration of a cheap red deck wins setup, I made a couple small changes and took it to another Friday Night Magic event.  Here's what happened:

Deck Tweaks
The biggest problems that appeared in the first FNM experience were Boros ReckonerChained to the Rocks, and Fleecemane Lion, so the modifications should try to handle those types of threats a bit better.  That was the main focus of my first deck revisions.

On my end, one weakness I noticed was Gore-House Chainwalker- a 3-power creature for 2 mana is pretty sweet, but he's my only 2-drop permanent that doesn't do something on turn 2.  Ash Zealot swings on turn 2, Goblin Shortcutter nullifies a blocker, Burning-Tree Emissary enhances overall mana efficiency, and Madcap Skills allows for some pretty serious burst damage.  Chainwalker is a scary dude to be sure, but if I'm not securely in control by the end of turn 2, I have a hard road ahead, and I don't think Chainwalker makes that ordeal any easier.

As such, I replaced my Chainwalkers with Magma Jets.  The extra burn is a much more immediate benefit for my spent mana, but the Scry 2 effect is a big deal for smoothing out my play.  It lets me ship extra lands to the bottom of my deck if I can't use them, and it might allow me to plan the next couple draws.  I think this change makes the deck a bit more consistent, and it increases the potential damage on earlier turns.

This increased consistency may be able to avoid Reckoner altogether, as it increases the odds that I'd just be able to end the game before he can wipe my side of the board.  I think it will also help against the Lion, though he could hit the table a turn earlier.  To deal with the Chains, I think Peak Eruption is a solid choice as it frees the bound creature, deals some damage, and screws with my opponent's mana base (and it may be able to slow Reckoner by a turn sometimes, too).  Eruption fits pretty nicely in the sideboard, then.

For the rest of the sideboard, I still see some benefit to Electrickery (wipes Elspeth and Master tokens), Shock (burn is burn), Act of Treason (which might be my best answer to Reckoner), and Seismic Stomp (helps me end the game against a stalled boardstate), and Skullcrack is absolutely necessary, so I decided to include just two copies of Eruption in place of one Electrickery and one Shock.

With those small changes, here's the complete deck I took to last week's FNM:

Main Deck
Creatures:
Ash Zealot
Burning-Tree Emissary
Firedrinker Satyr
Foundry Street Denizen
Goblin Shortcutter
Legion Loyalist
Rakdos Cackler
Rubblebelt Maaka

Instants:
Lightning Strike
Magma Jet
Titan's Strength

Enchantments:
Madcap Skills

Lands:
18 Mountain

Sideboard
Act of Treason
Electrickery
Peak Eruption
Seismic Stomp
Shock
Skullcrack

Trial by Fire... Again
Last week's FNM was much smaller affair than my first, with only about 10 people playing standard.  I placed fifth overall with a record of only 2-2, but let's go through the individual matchups.

Round one put me against a black red minotaur deck, which I knocked down 2-0.  He was running a lot of cheap removal (Shocks and Pharika's Cure), which proved to be a problem, but he ended up falling to me in two games due to troublesome mana draws.  We played a couple games after the round result was officially reported, and when he wasn't starved for mana, his deck was actually pretty nasty.  The removal is obviously bad for me, but he could also play his creatures and hold them back as blockers until he was able to deal lethal damage in one blow.  I think my biggest problem in this matchup was deciding when to mulligan (which will be a common theme), because I need the power to rush through 12+ damage in the first few turns to be able to survive against that kind of deck.  It wasn't an issue in this tournament, but it's certainly something to think about.

The second round put me up against a more midranged red deck, which fell to me 2-0.  This deck seemed to revolve around burn spells and Chandra's Phoenix, though it didn't survive long enough to teach me anything important about our deck's matchups.

My deck really started having troubles in round three, where we lost to Esper control 1-2.  This matchup is one of the few that I tested with friends (though my friend was running a somewhat different version of this deck), and it seemed like the two decks are reasonably balanced.

The first two games were pretty lopsided - before sideboarding, one Sphinx's Revelation is the end for me, but after sideboard Skullcrack shuts the relevant part of Revelation down pretty hard.  Seeing that the Esper control win conditions are typically late-game players (AetherlingElspeth, Sun's Champion, and Blood Baron of Vizkopa in this particular deck), my strategy seems to get a little bit of leeway early on.  I think that's a dangerous assessment, though, because Supreme Verdict can rob me of all momentum.  Game one probably wouldn't have been such a devastating loss if I'd been more aggressive with mulligans, so super aggressive play from turn one is still essential in this matchup.

Game three, on the other hand, was incredibly close.  I ended up losing after sitting on a bunch of burn and Skullcrack for several turns - enough to end the game and prevent Revelation from saving him - I unfortunately didn't have the mana to burn and hold up Skullcrack support, so he was able to build up a ton of Elspeth tokens and overwhelm me.  I don't think there were any significant misplays or deck issues in that game; bad luck kept me from securing the win.

The fourth and final round stuck me up against what seemed to be a generic "good stuff" deck, which finished me off 1-2.  Desecration Demon made an appearance in this deck, as did the Blood Baron, but he didn't have quite the same early game control to make those creatures too troubling.  Boros Reckoner, on the other hand, ruined everything once again, and I lost each game where that minotaur wizard resolved.  I still think Act of Treason is a solid response, though I never drew it at a relevant time during the post-board games.  Peak Eruption definitely has some potential to slow the Reckoner down, though this opponent was casting the Reckoner off Plains; in this particular match, Eruption just delayed Anger of the Gods- relevant, but not nearly as important in the long run. In retrospect, I also think I probably should have mulliganed in game one (which I lost), though I'm not sure if it would have changed the outcome.

This Week's Lessons
The moral of the whole story sounds very similar to the last one: I need a better answer to Boros Reckoner, and I need to work on mulligans and sideboarding.  For the former, I'm running our of ideas; I actually haven't played Seismic Stomp, so that might be another solution, or maybe I should replace Stomp with a couple more Acts to make the stealing effect more likely.  For the latter, I may need to exchange Stomp, but I also think I should drop another Electrickery in favor of a fourth Shock.  Electrickery has a much more niche use, but extra Shocks might help seal the deal when I'm running out of steam.  And, of course, I need to figure out a way to practice mulligans specifically, as I figure I'll only get better at that by doing it.

Regardless, I have some more ideas for tweaks, and I hope to take it to another FNM this week.  Maybe I can come up with something rather consistent before the next set, Born of the Gods, is released at the beginning of February...