We Coulda Been Condenda's

As you can see from my previous entry, Justin and I did “okay” at the Planar Chaos. We had a lot of fun and got to see some neat new cards, but we went 3-3. How mediocre.

Overall, my impressions of Planar Chaos are very positive. At first light and of course with no experience in either format, the color changing and mechanic switching makes the game variable and fun, especially in conjunction with normally colored cards.

It’s fresh and exciting to think about colors in different ways. Usually when you’re playing against a red deck, for example, you don’t have to worry about your creatures getting bounced. Well, now you do. Plus, red can now trample over your blockers. Like the other changes (black and white getting counters and misdirections, green getting more flyers, etc.), it’s hardly disruptive at all. It’s a change of pace. It changes your expectations and broadens your options.

That’s the best part about these cards for Vintage too. None of the cards is stellar, but it does open up certain game effects to colors that previously didn’t have them. Dead & Gone lets red deal with Darksteel Colossus now, without the help of other colors. Black can neutralize the big guy with Vampiric Link and Urborg Trapper. Green has Curiosity in Keen Sense, and White has some interesting counterspell options like Dawn Charm, Rebuff the Wicked, and Mana Tithe.

Like I said, they’re not incredible cards, but they do open up some new options. Go ahead, try something new!

Anyway, I already talked about the cards Justin and I used in our prerelease. Emerald Charm is cool. Dead & Gone is really good. Waning Wurm fooled me terribly, because it sucks. Dust Elemental quite nifty as a 6/6 for four mana with two, count ‘em, two kinds of evasion! You know, you can read it. I even corrected most of the verb tense issues.

I figured today that I’d look at some of the cards Justin and I didn’t use that maybe we should have. You may remember that we ignored blue entirely. This may have been a mistake; I don’t know. And it’s too late anyway.

Oh, look, here’s a neat blue card:

Aeon Chronicler
3UU
Creature – Avatar
Aeon Chronicler’s power and toughness are each equal to the number of cards in your hand.
Suspend X—X3U. X can’t be 0.
Whenever a time counter is removed from Aeon Chronicler while it’s removed from the game, draw a card.

Should we have played this? Eh, probably. Drawing cards is super good in limited when you’re down and searching for answers, or when you’re up and trying to finish the game. The drawing itself is uncounterable, which is nice, and this guy probably comes in as a 3/3 or so. Sigh. If only Aeon Chronicler had flying, then I might have noticed him. Instead, he’s just a wall flower, destined for the trade binder for me.

Maybe you remember before the tournament I listed the five commons I really wanted to open at the prerelease. The blue one was Erratic Mutation:

Erratic Mutation
2U
Instant
Choose target creature. Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a nonland card. That creature gets +X/-X until end of turn, where X is that card’s converted mana cost. Put all cards revealed this way on the bottom of your library in any order.

See, Erratic Explosion was one of my favorite cards. I even built a deck around using that and Draco to Explode for 16. Wordly Tutor was amazing in that deck. On their own, both are used for removal of creatures from one to three toughness, or for doing that last bit of damage to an opponent. Check your deck’s average mana cost to see what’s up. With some sort of topdeck manipulation, it can get a little more focused.

Reality Acid is removal too, but it seemed bad enough to discourage me from playing blue at all, since it was three out of our 24 blue cards.

Reality Acid
2U
Enchantment – Aura
Enchant Permanent
Vanishing 3
When Reality Acid leaves play, enchanted permanent’s controller sacrifices it.

Three turns seemed like a long time at the time, and I still think it is. Maybe it would have been okay in a relatively slow format like Two-Headed Giant. I don’t know. I wasn’t encouraged.

Another full eighth of our blue cards were Dreamscape Artists:

Dreamscape Artist
1U
Creature – Human Spellshaper
2U, T, Discard a card, Sacrifice a land: Search your library for up to two basic land cards and put them into play. Then shuffle your library.
1/1

These guys look like they could actually be pretty good. I believe that’s Harrow on legs. It’s not card advantage (-1 card, -1 land, +2 lands) but it does thin your deck and it adds to your mana, theoretically giving you extra turns. If he came on a better body, he’d be a shoo in for us.

Looks like we would have played blue if we’d gotten more than three blue creatures with flying. Oh well.

In the current spirit of top five lists (and I haven’t even seen High Fidelity recently), here are the five cards we should have played but completely neglected to for some reason.

Magus of the Tabernacle
3W
Creature – Human Wizard
All creatures have “At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice this creature unless you pay 1.”
2/6

Boom & Bust
R
Sorcery
Destroy target land you control and target land you don’t control.
5R
Sorcery
Destroy all lands.

I’m not sure why we didn’t play these cards, other than that I wasn’t confident that we could play around them well enough. I’m sure we could have planned ahead enough to make them useful. The Magus could easily have helped keep creature counts on both sides low so that our awesome removal suite would have been more potent, and destroying all lands with a combat advantage could lock up the game right quick. Sorry I’m lame.

Citanul Woodreaders
2G
Kicker 2G
When Citanul Woodreaders comes into play, if the kicker cost was paid, draw two cards.
1/4

First of all, this guy’s a 1/4, which means he’s pretty good at stalling the ground rush early game without the kicker. Plus, if we find him later on, he gets us closer to our Bogardan Hellkite. Yeah, definitely should have played this guy.

Aven Riftwatcher
2W
Creature – Bird Rebel Soldier
Flying
Vanishing 3
When Aven Riftwatcher comes into play or leaves play, you gain 2 life.

Ugh, what was I thinking?! He’s got evasion, is cheap for a good sized body, and he has a good ability? Maybe I’ll just pretend I never saw this card. Nah, didn’t exist. No chance to play it since we definitely didn’t get one.

Muck Drubb
3BB
Creature – Beast
Flash
When Muck Drubb comes into play, change the targets only a single creature to Muck Drubb.
Madness 2B
3/3

I think I saw the 3/3 for five mana and got scared. First, though, that’s not all that bad. Second it has Madness, which means I could get it for a discount. Third, the ability could be a good defense for something bigger and better. We didn’t see a lot of beneficial creature enchantments to steal, but the Drubb definitely could have taken a Utopia Vow for our precious Bogardan Hellkite. Oh well.

Anyway, that’s it. Those are the mistakes we made before the tournament even started. I hope Justin’s not too upset. I don’t mind. As I’ve said before, I go to prereleases to have fun and get some new cards, and I did. We did pretty well anyway, so no problems from me.

I’ll be at a tournament this Sunday, probably scrubbing out in a completely different state from usual. Check it out! Stop by if you get a chance!

Sunday, January 28

RIW Hobbies
29116 Five Mile Road
Livonia, MI 48154
(734) 261-7233

For sure, now, it will cost you $15 and you’ll get 10 proxies. Use them wisely.

Registration starts at noon; round one starts at 1 p.m.
If you have any further questions or concerns feel free to contact:

www.riwhobbies.net
email: pam at riwhobbies dot net

I’ll have the report up Monday or so. Sound good? I might put up a blog about it before hand too, but that remains to be seen.

I’ll see you there!