Going Infinite, October 7th
Let's get this out of the way right now, I scrubbed out HARD with this weeks matches. I feel it was largely a matter of variance if I am being honest, but let us delve into that with a bit more detail.
Monday, we played Mono-Red Stax, and the deck was fun! It did a lot better than I had anticipated, but it has this issue of being seemingly incapable of playing a long game. In pauper, where many of the decks revolve around eking out card value over a long game, it just falls short if the starting hand isn't just right. That said, we did win several games by just resolving a threat and keeping them off of lands for the rest of the game, allowing us to close out two matches. With the nature of the deck, it felt like we wanted to stick a threat before trying to Strip Mine our opponent out of the game, but it seemed often enough that letting them have just that one or two mana was enough for them to keep us from killing them until they could stabilize. Combined with our inability to really refill our hand and a limited number of threats, the deck falls behind far too easily and ends up sitting on its hands for much of the game.
Wednesday, we took Jeskai Skred to the proving grounds and either I am bad, the list I chose was bad, or the deck has an insane variance. I know the deck posts great results and I seem to have an issue beating it myself whenever I square off against it. That said, we had to mulligan to five well over five times (if memory serves me at least). We had to keep some sketchy hands that just didn't go anywhere without a nice top deck and at the end of the day, we only pulled out a single match. When the deck did work though, the records it keeps posting make a lot more sense. With several different card advantage engines in Mulldrifter and Kor Skyfisher working alongside Ephemerate and Arcum's Astrolabe we rarely needed more cards and it quickly became degenerate when we were able to stick an Archaeomancer and just cycle our instant and sorcery spells with Ephemerate.
Beyond the two streamed leagues, I was able to sneak one more in where I did get a 3-2 record with elves, which won us a chest. This might be largely in part due to the fact I am familiar with elves and felt comfortable running it. Which brings up an excellent point; at the end of the day, if you aren't comfortable with a deck, it doesn't matter how meta it is, you need to practice with it.
Once the math is crunched, between Monday and Thursday (when I am writing this) we put in roughly $32 worth of resources and got back around $17, causing a net loss of $15. Big oof. Keep in mind this is a very small sample size and this experiment is going to keep going until the end of the year. If you'd like to join, here is the spreadsheet of results (even if I am trash at keeping track of side boarding) and here is where you can watch me mess it up even more.
Monday, barring a bombastic submission, I am going to try out a new blue aggro build using Sunken City and see if it is worth all the buzz. Wednesday, it's a bit of a toss-up, but signs are pointing to either Elves or Bogles, so I can actually get a win or two on stream and feel better. If you have a deck submission for me, send me them at jomoy9@hotmail.com and I might pick it! So on that note, I will leave you with that to ponder over and the results and the list for Monday; Faerie Ninjas!
