Going Infinte, October 28th
Alright, to start things off a summary of the weekend. I played a total of seven leagues in an attempt to earn enough pauper points to play in the format playoffs. Yeah, that's a lot. This was all with Snow-Bogles (RIP Astrolabe) and it turned out pretty well. Overall, we had four 3-2 leagues, two 4-1 leagues, and a single 2-3 league. So yeah, pretty good. The thing is, I established that just selling chests is definitely better because out of all fourteen chests we got, the most valuable thing we got was play points. Compare that to over thirty tix and it isn't even a question. To clarify, it is the same deck as last week, but it doesn't matter anymore anyway with the banning of Arcum's Astrolabe. That's just a footnote anyway, so let's move onto this week's deck, Zubera Storm.
The deck might look a little familiar, but with some added spice with the combining of paper and digital pauper lists. Before, we ran a bunch of sacrifice options that all had upsides, but we've dumped all that for Ashnod's Altar so we can potentially go infinite. What we want to set up is a pretty big number of combo pieces. We need to get a Dripping-Tongue Zubera after we've already sacrificed a few Zubera so that it makes enough mana that we can then get it back with Grim Harvest, then sacrifice all the tokens that we just made to the Altar to make a ton of mana. With all of these on the stack, we filter the mana so we can buyback the Grim Harvest before it exiles itself so we can replay the Zubera and keep going, gaining both mana and the Zubera death count. Once that's all set up, we just cycle Ember-Fist Zubera a few times to blow our opponent off the face of the planet.
Unfortunately, this plan wasn't so easily implemented. Turns out too many moving parts make a deck hard to run. Out of the whole league, we only won one match and that was because our opponent was on a slow clock. That all said, I will just summarize the entire deck by saying that the deck is just too inconsistent and needs a bit more love before it can be competitive.
Now, before we completely move on, let's talk about the banning of Arcum's Astrolabe. To be frank, I wish they'd pulled the trigger on this sooner. With it in the pauper format, it was making it viable for a deck to splash for three or four colors without losing any consistency at all. That's not okay for an all-Common format. It was allowing decks to run too many answers so that all they'd need to do is stick a few threats on the table and let them beat face. With the banning, decks will once again need to work for their mana base or be limited to one or two colors again. Now, I have no idea how the decks are going to change, but sometime in November I intend to revisit that exact question to see how the meta has been shaken up by this change.
Unfortunately, between Cardhoarder being down for a bit and me getting sick, there wasn't anything for Wednesday. So, that does mean I don't have another deck for you all this week. That all said, until next week, dismissed!
