Comments on: Unlocking the Vault #13: Classic League Season 3 Tournament Report

By: whiffy

whiffy — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:14:17 +0000

so for everyone giving mr enderfall crap about discarding the wrong stuff. Yes these are mistakes, but give the guy a break, and on top of that, it is not always correct to be discarding all your dredgers. There are certainly games and scenerios where you don’t want to discard all your gas to just get your graveyard removed. Just saying, the only real way you can lose g1 with this deck is if you overextend into graveyard removal.

By: CSeraph

CSeraph — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:33:09 +0000

Also, you suggested that your hermit druid opponent was boarding into a lab maniac plan, and then don’t side in Firestorm, which auto-wins against that plan while also answering hermit druid and setting up your dredging.

In general, coming from legacy dredge I don’t understand the removal of careful study which seems to make you immensely dependent on mulliganing into oblivion for bazaar/vulnerable to wasteland, but if that’s what the format has determined is best I guess I’ll believe it.

By: CSeraph

CSeraph — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:31:01 +0000

Thanks for the content!

In round 6, your obsession with resolving dread return game 1 doesn’t really make any sense. You could easily have beat him down with damage if you’d just ignored the sphere effects and concentrated on chaining bridge activations into a mass of zombies and chumping with narcomoebas. Drawing Masticore when he did was fortuitous for him, but you enabled the situation by allowing him to remove your two bridges earlier by blocking the lodestone, which there was ultimately little reason to do.

By: Duck

Duck — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:21:58 +0000

You still didn’t address your discard misplays. You should always discard your dredgers to have guaranteed dredges for the bazaar. R3G1 you discard a bridge from below instead of a second grave troll. The bridge doesn’t matter since you can discard it during the upkeep bazaar, but it’s essential to have that second dredger in the yard.

By: enderfall

enderfall — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 03:42:32 +0000

I’ve watched the entire set of matches over again and want to share my thoughts, as I had promised. My mulligan strategy in Round 2 was quite sound, I believe. I clearly stated prior to the start of game 2 that I was not sure how xkorpio would sideboard for the round as he has the anti-leyline package in Lab Maniac available to him. If he boards out the dread return package, then my opening hand of 2 leylines and chaff would be suboptimal at best. So then I decided to mulligan down until I found a bazaar, which didn’t matter since he had turn 2 hermit druid online against essentially an empty board. For game 3, I knew it was a strong possibility that he would leave in the dread return package and thus I didn’t keep a hand that consisted of a single bazaar and some dredgers (i.e. – no hate) thus leaving me open to the exact same problem I had in game 2. So I mulliganed and found a hand of no hate and no bazaar, an obvious mulligan again. I then drew into a hand that just happened to have both a bazaar and a leyline, though I was mainly looking for just the leyline, the bazaar was simply a bonus. I don’t know how else I should have mulliganed there. I had a plan, and while I may not have articulated it as well as I could have on the video, the plan worked exactly as I drew it up and I pulled out a hard fought game 3 against a great player in xkorpio.

As for the Chain of Vapor’s, I knew that xkorpio had a Stern Proctor in his hand that he could cast the following turn and win, so long as he had hit his land drop. The Chain was a last ditched effort to try and out tempo him as even if he decided to chain my leyline in response, he would have 1 land in play, a useless proctor in his hand, and a full two turns before hermit druid could be online. I also had the darkblast available to dredge up the following turn to kill the hermit druid for when he recast it. The fact that his deck is so land light was a major factor in my thought process, but I certainly would have done the same thing over again if the situation presented itself. Was it clunky? Possibly, but it would’ve worked out fine, even if he decided to chain my leyline in response. In the end, he missed the land drop, as I had hoped for, and thus guaranteed myself another turn.

Thanks for pointing out my miss-use of Ichorid and Bazaar. The correct play as you mention is to activate the Bazaar with the Ichorid Trigger on the stack to hopefully dredge into something of value to the Ichorid (i.e. a Thug).

Again, I appreciate all the feedback, as there are things that I miss, even after watching the videos again in order to edit them. This feedback is certainly useful for me to grow as a player, and I truly appreciate it!

By: enderfall

enderfall — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:21:28 +0000

Hey guys, thanks for your comments. I’m going to have to watch the games over again to see where I was using Bazaar incorrectly, which I can’t do tonight because I’m on a business trip and the hotel internet is absurdly slow on my wife’s cheap netbook (long story!). I admit that I missed some upkeep triggers because I had not set my stops correctly (a symptom of playing a tournament spanning 6 weeks and playing games without Dredge decks in between rounds). Generally I fully understand how to use Bazaar, considering I wrote a two article primer on the deck. Also, I would only keep Grave-Trolls back if I was concerned with having them hated out by a relic or crypt or the like. But again, I’ll need to watch the games again to see if I did make a mistake.

That being said, I am the first to admit that I am NOT LSV, or Owen Turtenwald, or PVD. I’m just a guy who enjoys Magic and more specifically, Classic. There is not an awful lot of Classic content out there and I like sharing these with the community to help show how fun Classic is. I explained as much in Unlocking the Vault #1. I continue to try and get better, and perhaps one day I will play flawless Magic. I apologize if these videos are not up to par with those of the Pro’s and I will continue to try and get better each and every day.

By: Aigur

Aigur — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:21:03 +0000

Generally, you’re using Bazaar incorrectly. You should use it in your upkeep with Ichorid triggers on the stack, so that you dredge before choosing to RFG a black creature. This way you also guarantee that you can dredge on your draw step. You also tend to discard the wrong cards (irrelevant cards should generally be discarded last, especially in game one). You should aim to always have 2 good dredgers in your yard when your turn begins.

Despite this, I must compliment you on the mull you made against the Hermit deck where your 7 is Bazaar + 6 uncastable cards/dredgers. I think many would have kept that hand, even though it’s not going to win the game.