Halloween Game Day

Yesterday, on Halloween (Monday 31st October), I went to the Game Day that a nearby shop (Chaos City Comics) was running. It was a standard tournament, so I took along a deck I had already made: Mono-Black Infect [1]. 


I had updated it quite a bit since the last time, and was taking a few things of the  evolving metagame into consideration (when I first made the deck, it was mostly for fun, and the only thing to really play against was Caw-Blade). I had taken out the battlecry aspect because, although it had a nice synergy with the deck, wasn't always going to come together (as I would need a creature with infect in order to make the battlecry relevant, so I decided to instead focus on cards that are good or at least alright on their own, as well as with others). 

Drafting New Phyrexia

I have now done two drafts using New Phyrexia, so have a little bit of a better feel for the format. The first draft was triple New Phyrexia, which was just fun, I thought I was drafting infect, but most of that was the creatures that gain infect when an opponent is poisoned... somewhat deceptive! I did appreciate the green creature that puts stuff on the bottom of your opponents library, that helped me a few times. 


The second draft I did was doing it the proper way - New Phyrexia, followed by Mirrodin Besieged, followed by Scars of Mirrodin, so will be more informative to usual drafting of the set. We had a fair few people coming along so had about 13 people in one large pod. 

Thoughts on Phyrexian Mana

Since the whole of the next M:TG set (New Phyrexia) has been spolied early, I thought I'd have a look through the new Phyrexian mana and see what cards would be worth playing with in different formats. It's a shame the whole set was spoiled early, usually the whole set is available from Wizards the day before the pre-release, (which I think is a little too close as there's not much time to absorb all the information, a day or two earlier than that would be nice), butthis was unexpectedly spoiled a couple of weeks early, which I think is a bit too early as the pre-release isn't for a few weeks. The whole set is now available on the main site, a little while after it was unofficially spoiled on the internet.

In this posting, I am going to look at all the cards that cost Phyrexian mana (PX is one Phyrexian mana of the colour specified by the standard WUBRG notation); the ones you can either pay the one coloured mana for, or two life, and some of the artifacts that have an ability that uses this mana. In Mark Rosewaters column on the subject, he said "I'll write an article soon about the impact of Phyrexian mana on the color pie—it's too big an issue to discuss today", which is a pretty big understatement, as the spilling of effects is very severe in some cases (but hey, at least there's no 'destroy enchantment' that red or black can get to play). I will be looking at limited (drafting mainly), constructed (standard, I follow it a bit and use some sort of rogue deck when I do play occasionally) and casual (fairly general, probably thinking about multi-player as it's what I usually play if I'm not playing the above two formats).

New deck: Mono-B Infect

Most of the time I have drafted since Scars of Mirrodin came out (which isn't a huge amount), I tend to be tempted towards playing infect, and have done so more often than not. This is probably also shown through some of the draft pick posts I've written. Infect is fun to play (at least I think so anyway), and I particularly like playing the strategy during the Mirrodin Besieged release, so I put together an infect standard deck. I've been putting it together for a little while, but haven't had much of a chance to play Magic at all recently, so have been unable to test it. At the draft I went to the other day I did manage to play it a couple of times between rounds, and it seemed to do OK, so I'm going to write about it here.