Hey folks, time to dust this old blog of mine off, for those that were wondering (or at all read this blog) I started to write for a couple of magic sites, a couple which turned into awesome sites for content. These included Jesse Smith's 60Cards.com and Kelly Reid's Quiet Speculation. Of course things change and I was let go of one and then left another on my own accord. So for now, its brewing time after this post and hopefully I can keep up with the posting and deck tech reports on how these decks do. Also I will try and get most of the decks I make into MTGO video's to show off the current meta. So for now the Caveman is back! Hope to hear from you guys in the near future.
-Sincerely CavemanKellen
@cavemankellen on Twitter
Friday, October 21, 2011
Monday, June 7, 2010
Hunting Party- The Fallen Part: 1
Hello everyone and welcome back to the cave. This week I decided to try and get three decks created to try out and at least have something new to play at Friday Night Magic. What I've decided to do is go through these on a weekly basis since it would take vigorous testing in order to tweak the deck and metagame seriously enough to be acceptable to play with.
In the beginning the decks were to be based on the current meta but as I thought about it more, most decks in the format will be more punishing to a newer player pocket so I thought of a somewhat budget price range no less than $250.00.
This week I've decided to start with my take on a somewhat forgotten archetype that was being developed when Zendikar first came out into the spot light and was often played by some and that was G/B Ob Nixilis, the Fallen or better known by my friends at MTGRadio as Obi Wan Kenobi. The deck was based around the potential landfall ability he has as a finisher in the deck. It was originally a mana ramp deck with the help of fetch lands and producers such as harrow and khalni heart expedition.
With the new editions of Worldwake it fell out of balance since more players decided to take Jund as the new ruler of the meta. I've decided to bring it back and try it out once more to the spot light and see how well it can do. First off I'm building the deck based off my meta since I would like to test it but more importantly besides the occasionally random decks I've encountered in the first three rounds of every FNM, the more competitive players turn up in the later rounds and top4/8. Mostly Mystic Bant, Jund, and Boss Naya have taken back the store and most of the time it stays that way, so I'm going to focus on the three decks at hand and their variants. Which are the basic jund, naya and bant decks.
To start we need a balance of how many lands we want in our deck. I've usually start with the cards and build my mana base from there however since this is a land fall type of deck I thought we should focus on that ability first. We want a total land count of twenty four lands. Its simple and we can focus on the next 51 cards. If your not following the math I added in the sideboard since most players don't consider their sideboards anything but tech and they should focus the sideboard and main deck as a whole. Since we want a land fall style deck play and to bring out some big creatures and damage, the deck is going to be on the basis of a ramp style deck list.
This is how I initially set up my deck list
X x Verdant Catacombs
X x Swamp
X x Forest
X x Evolving Wilds
X x (X)
This is the basic deck build of what a B/G deck would look like with Obi Wan in mind. To much ramp can hurt the deck in limiting other potential finishers for the deck in case someone has either disabled our path towards a win from Ob Nixilis. Now that we have an idea of what lands are going into the deck the X's are for how many we will put in after we figure out the mana cost of each card we put in.
Next up we look at removal before finishers since getting into the red zone and having board position is key. Also potential tools and tech we can use in case we are limited to the cards we draw. Looking at the top cards played and strategies based off this I came up with these cards.
Putrid Leech
Ob Nixilis
Birds of Paradise
Mul Daya Channelers
Oracle of Mul Daya
Vengevine
Lord of Extinction
Scute Mob
This is the base creature base I want to use because I found that most of these cards are going to be removal fodder but I want to have other finishers besides Nixilis and vengevine, scute mob, and lord of extinction is excellent for late game.
*Part two will be up next thursday 6/24 due to personal hiatus.
In the beginning the decks were to be based on the current meta but as I thought about it more, most decks in the format will be more punishing to a newer player pocket so I thought of a somewhat budget price range no less than $250.00.
This week I've decided to start with my take on a somewhat forgotten archetype that was being developed when Zendikar first came out into the spot light and was often played by some and that was G/B Ob Nixilis, the Fallen or better known by my friends at MTGRadio as Obi Wan Kenobi. The deck was based around the potential landfall ability he has as a finisher in the deck. It was originally a mana ramp deck with the help of fetch lands and producers such as harrow and khalni heart expedition.
With the new editions of Worldwake it fell out of balance since more players decided to take Jund as the new ruler of the meta. I've decided to bring it back and try it out once more to the spot light and see how well it can do. First off I'm building the deck based off my meta since I would like to test it but more importantly besides the occasionally random decks I've encountered in the first three rounds of every FNM, the more competitive players turn up in the later rounds and top4/8. Mostly Mystic Bant, Jund, and Boss Naya have taken back the store and most of the time it stays that way, so I'm going to focus on the three decks at hand and their variants. Which are the basic jund, naya and bant decks.
To start we need a balance of how many lands we want in our deck. I've usually start with the cards and build my mana base from there however since this is a land fall type of deck I thought we should focus on that ability first. We want a total land count of twenty four lands. Its simple and we can focus on the next 51 cards. If your not following the math I added in the sideboard since most players don't consider their sideboards anything but tech and they should focus the sideboard and main deck as a whole. Since we want a land fall style deck play and to bring out some big creatures and damage, the deck is going to be on the basis of a ramp style deck list.
This is how I initially set up my deck list
X x Verdant Catacombs
X x Swamp
X x Forest
X x Evolving Wilds
X x (X)
This is the basic deck build of what a B/G deck would look like with Obi Wan in mind. To much ramp can hurt the deck in limiting other potential finishers for the deck in case someone has either disabled our path towards a win from Ob Nixilis. Now that we have an idea of what lands are going into the deck the X's are for how many we will put in after we figure out the mana cost of each card we put in.
Next up we look at removal before finishers since getting into the red zone and having board position is key. Also potential tools and tech we can use in case we are limited to the cards we draw. Looking at the top cards played and strategies based off this I came up with these cards.
Putrid Leech
Ob Nixilis
Birds of Paradise
Mul Daya Channelers
Oracle of Mul Daya
Vengevine
Lord of Extinction
Scute Mob
This is the base creature base I want to use because I found that most of these cards are going to be removal fodder but I want to have other finishers besides Nixilis and vengevine, scute mob, and lord of extinction is excellent for late game.
*Part two will be up next thursday 6/24 due to personal hiatus.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Metagame and GP:D.C.
Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cave. This week I take a look at the current metagame and the national qualifiers around the U.S. and Grand Prix- Washington D.C. It seems a little repetitive to write one after so many great magic writers have touched on this subject this week but I like to write my take on it.
Let me start of with the following point, jund "was" the best deck in the format. This is not because Jund is dead but the problem was after a few sets, jund became too dominant due to bloodbraid elf and blightning and many magic players started to get very tired of playing against it ,including myself who's been playing the deck since Faeries was dominating the format. Although due to the rapid change of the format after the releases of Worldwake and Rise of the Eldrazi, standard took a turn for the better. We then came across new decks such as U/W tap out control, polymorph, vengevine varients, and other decks. Worldwake was the hit of the block set with the reveal of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, who made heads turn to try to fit him into any deck they can find until find homes in the U/W control and super friends, becoming one of the most expensive cards to date in this set, overshadowing Baneslayer (whom I no longer see as the wallet slayer) in the price range.
Thanks to the folks at StarCityGames, the top ten deck lists played at all of the national qualifiers were jund, mysthic consription, U/W control, Super friends, RDW's, Vengevine Naya, polymorph, grixis control blightning deck wins, and mythic. Jund being at the top at 27 percent of the field and mythic conscription coming in at 17.8 percent of the field. The rest are 10-3 percent.
Now lets take a break down of this, Jund is still the big boogie man of the format while closing behind is the new tech of Eldrazi Conscription and Sovereigns of Lost Alara.
This combo is very deadly if you are tapped out and with no blockers to consider, its pretty much game from there. I personally have played against this deck and I will always keep mana up for removal for any bant or variant of a deck looking like it runs the combo.
Now lets take a look at Grand Prix: Washington D.C. top eight shall we? We have two U/W control decks, three jund, one mythic conscription and two super friends decks. Seems to me results speak for themselves. My analysis is that after a few months ago Jund was more likely to have six of the top eight slots and thanks to players who more then happy wanted to crush the boogie man of the format came up with a healthy standard environment.
Next time, I build a couple of rogue decks that can perhaps beat the big bad monsters of the format. See you all next time in the cave.
Let me start of with the following point, jund "was" the best deck in the format. This is not because Jund is dead but the problem was after a few sets, jund became too dominant due to bloodbraid elf and blightning and many magic players started to get very tired of playing against it ,including myself who's been playing the deck since Faeries was dominating the format. Although due to the rapid change of the format after the releases of Worldwake and Rise of the Eldrazi, standard took a turn for the better. We then came across new decks such as U/W tap out control, polymorph, vengevine varients, and other decks. Worldwake was the hit of the block set with the reveal of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, who made heads turn to try to fit him into any deck they can find until find homes in the U/W control and super friends, becoming one of the most expensive cards to date in this set, overshadowing Baneslayer (whom I no longer see as the wallet slayer) in the price range.
Thanks to the folks at StarCityGames, the top ten deck lists played at all of the national qualifiers were jund, mysthic consription, U/W control, Super friends, RDW's, Vengevine Naya, polymorph, grixis control blightning deck wins, and mythic. Jund being at the top at 27 percent of the field and mythic conscription coming in at 17.8 percent of the field. The rest are 10-3 percent.
Now lets take a break down of this, Jund is still the big boogie man of the format while closing behind is the new tech of Eldrazi Conscription and Sovereigns of Lost Alara.
This combo is very deadly if you are tapped out and with no blockers to consider, its pretty much game from there. I personally have played against this deck and I will always keep mana up for removal for any bant or variant of a deck looking like it runs the combo.
Now lets take a look at Grand Prix: Washington D.C. top eight shall we? We have two U/W control decks, three jund, one mythic conscription and two super friends decks. Seems to me results speak for themselves. My analysis is that after a few months ago Jund was more likely to have six of the top eight slots and thanks to players who more then happy wanted to crush the boogie man of the format came up with a healthy standard environment.
Next time, I build a couple of rogue decks that can perhaps beat the big bad monsters of the format. See you all next time in the cave.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
The Cave:an introduction
My name is Kellen Huber, a semi-competitive magic player with ten years of playing magic. This blog is to focus on my magic experiences, tournament reports, deck building and lists. I will post regularly on ideas and my Friday Night Magic reports. Also I will post some of my opinions of current topics in forums, rumors, and spoilers for new sets. I named my blog The Cave because of my ongoing alias as the Caveman nickname from most of my magic friends. I've written articles before for a small site and the site has basically been ignored and no longer write for them so I'm excited to restart something fresh.
To give a little more information about myself, I started to play magic during classic aka sixth edition as a casual player. I tired to play in high school however we were banned any sort of card game somewhat after we had a couple of meetings. It wasn't until I starting to play with my original play group at a local Barnes n' Noble with the guys and it wasn't until I found my first gaming store I hung out at called Tate's Gaming Satellite in Lauderhill, Florida (where I later started to work at) and is still my favorite store to hang out and play at. It was a few months later that I started to look at magic in a semi-competitive way. I now play at CoolStuffGames here in Orlando while going to school at UCF. I am a heavy aggro player when Guildpact came out and my original style of play was mono-red sligh. I still play an assortment of decks archetypes but aggro is my overall favorite. My next article will be based off the current meta game and GP: DC.
To give a little more information about myself, I started to play magic during classic aka sixth edition as a casual player. I tired to play in high school however we were banned any sort of card game somewhat after we had a couple of meetings. It wasn't until I starting to play with my original play group at a local Barnes n' Noble with the guys and it wasn't until I found my first gaming store I hung out at called Tate's Gaming Satellite in Lauderhill, Florida (where I later started to work at) and is still my favorite store to hang out and play at. It was a few months later that I started to look at magic in a semi-competitive way. I now play at CoolStuffGames here in Orlando while going to school at UCF. I am a heavy aggro player when Guildpact came out and my original style of play was mono-red sligh. I still play an assortment of decks archetypes but aggro is my overall favorite. My next article will be based off the current meta game and GP: DC.
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