So Close, Yet...

... So far.

I was running along fine since reaching Platinum 4 tier and it seemed like Diamond was easily within reach thanks to the broad shoulders of the Questing Beast and friends, and then Theros Beyond Death started to impact Standard.

Right around when I was one win from Platinum tier 1 in fact. I started getting hit with Legendary Enchantment gods, Escaping Titans, Mono-white aggro decks and Mono-black devotion decks (Gray Merchant of Assholery is on my Hate list). I was forced to make some modifications to my deck like removing Midnight Reapers for some Return to Nature instants that do triple duty against enchantments, enchantment creatures, and escape creatures in the graveyard, but even with those changes I was not doing as well.

Before Theros my record was 47-27 (64%) and after is was 53-53 (50%). While I expect the record to flatten out as I climbed the ranks, it is apparent I need to go back to drawing board.

That being said, I did manage to put on a winning streak last week and got into Platinum 1 and yesterday was twice within 1 win of my goal of Diamond. Failed to convert both times and the second time had a wonderful little 5 game losing streak. With only a few more days left of this month's season I'm not hopeful I'm going to make that goal, but that's OK. I've already started planning for next month's deck...

Blue White? Blue Black? Mono-white? Mono-black? Decisions, decisions, decisions...

December Wrap Up

So the experiment with controlling decks in December comes to a disappointing end. Things were going swimmingly, I was 1 win from Platinum with over a week left and then... boom. Ended down in Gold 2.

Oof.

I went from a 60% win rate down to a 55% win rate pretty quickly. What the hell happened? Taking a look at my most played match ups gives a good hint.

The meta shifted hard in the last month to more aggro decks than I was seeing before; Red decks of various stripes, Golgari adventures, and Simic flash all were appearing more frequently and all exposed weak spots in my deck's game plan.

- Red aggro simple got in under my defenses faster than I could set up and if I didn't get a turn 5 Time Wipe or maybe a turn 5 Planar Cleansing I was toast.

- Golgari Adventures either hit me with a turn 3 (!) Questing Beast or used Midnight Rider or Edgewall Innkeeper to draw replacement cards enough to simply start over after I did a board sweeper.

- Simic flash simply got creatures on the board and then counter spelled my attempts to remove them.

All three of those matches I faced more frequently in the last ten days of December and all of them were well below a win rate to climb higher. On the upside I dominated against the mirror match up and had a good handle on any Cat Oven decks.

For the last month of Throne of Eldraine standard I'm going a new/old direction. I'm going to find a Golgari deck to use and climb the ladder with. Its going to be difficult since I only have 6 rares with which to craft a deck with so I'm going to have to leverage my existing collection more than I would like. I'll report on this experiment once I have some matches under my belt.

Back In Black

Last week I talked about how I was going to use my friend's Grixis Reanimator deck to try and climb the standard ranked ladder. It started out ok and I climbed into high silver but then stalled and fell a little. Basically, in many game I had a lot of trouble making all the moving pieces get into the right place before I died: Bond of Revival in hand, Drakuseth or Agent of Treachery in the graveyard, mana to cast it... and even if all the pieces were ready one kill spell or counter spell could spell my ruin. Don't get me wrong; when it works, it works really really well at turning games around, but lacking any life gain or ways to handle big creatures while I set up was severely hurting me. I tried some minor modifications but didn't really help the major weakness: just too slow to get going most of the time.

So I went back to the drawing board and in my RSS feed I saw this article titled Mono-Black Midrange on Channel Fireball website. Well that had my attention! I had previously made use of mono-black deck in my Dreadhorde Invasion deck which I enjoyed even if it failed to succeed like I wanted at the higher ranks so I read it with keen interest.

One of the problems of trying new decks is having the cards to make them in Arena; a deck that has a lot of rares or mythic rares that your collection is missing can be very costly to craft with wildcards, especially if the deck turns out to not work like you wanted. Crafting the missing pieces of the Grixis Reanimator deck was not too bad since I already had the three Drakuseth cards, but there were some other decks I had interest in (a Golgari and a Blue-Black reanamator deck) that would have been expensive to craft just to try out.

But this mono-Black deck in the article leaned heavily on rares and mythics I already had for the most part: Murderous Rider, Cavalier of Night, Dread Presence were all features of my Dreadhorde Invasion deck, and Liliana Dreadhorde General was a card I had from an earlier Zombie tribal deck. The only rare cards I needed to actually craft were a few copies of the perennial Gutterbones that is a feature of many black decks anyways, and the new Throne of Eldraine card Rankle, Master of Pranks.

So I put together this deck in Arena, crafted the missing cards once more, and tested it out in quick play matches to string together 6 wins and 1 loss. I was very pleased needless to say. It felt a lot like my Dreadhorde Invasion deck with the removal but was more solid on the ground with more win conditions. I could either go with the straight up beat down with creatures led by the Cavalier of Night and Rankle, kill them through incidental damage from Ayara, First of Lochthwain and Dread Presence, or curve into Liliana which almost never hits the board without swinging it in my favour.

So I took the deck into Standard Ranked and let loose the dogs of war... only to lose horribly to a defensive green deck that built up mana to a ten mana Finale of Devastation. I wish I had a screenshot of all the creatures with double digit power and toughness. Egads.

Nevertheless I persisted and won the next 9 games in a row.

Wait, what? Holy shit! Seriously, 9 wins in a row.

This deck (that I've called Liliana's Night) has propelled me into the first rank of gold and shows no signs of stopping yet. Now some of those 9 wins were extremely close and due to luck but I'm ok with that. At least the deck is working to put me into those positions right now.

We'll see if the trend continues as I've yet to face a serious control deck and only one poor representative of Red Deck Wins.