The game of Life

Commander games can sometimes be told in a three act structure.

Act one:  Introduction of characters. Plot lines begin to form. And of course, there is the knife.

Act two: The plots thicken. Enemies are formed. The knife returns and some main character is stabbed in the back. Finally, at the end of the second act, all hope seems lost...Think of when you have all your artifacts out and you play the big baddie. You think you have it all worked out and then someone plays Austere Command. All hope...lost.

Act three: Our hero ends up pulling out some kind of miracle, the ship becomes righted and good triumphs over evil! Hurray!

This is the formal structure, but what happens if we go see some greek tragedy or some epic Shakespearian drama? Those have five acts. How can we adapt our commander games into a greek tragedy? One way we can take is playing a more controlling game. This, however, is awful. Trying to play control in a commander game is like trying to bathe a cat. It seems like a legitimate idea, but it ends up being messing and everyone ends up hurt. Commander games need to play themselves out and by having one player trying to control the tempo eventually just turns into a "lets smash the control player because they are being annoying" and that is the last thing we want. We want the game to go as long as possible.

So, what is the thing that keeps everyone alive? The one thing you never want to run out of?

Life.

That is the key. We want the game to go on as long as possible for us. Now, lets build a deck with this in mind.

When I look through the possible generals, two come to mind:

Angus MacKenzie and Treva, the Renewer. Angus has a very unique play style that makes other players attack each other, funneling damage into different directions and that is something we are not looking to do. So Treva it is. Treva will allow us to prevent damage being dealt to us, along with gaining obscene amounts of life. 

Knowing who our general is and knowing our main goal is to gain life faster than your opponents can take it away, we can now start looking at cards that will help facilitate this strategy:

Beacon of Immortality - This card is exactly what we are looking for. If we are able to get it online early enough, we can put our life total into the stratosphere. 


Invincible Hymn - You want a card built for this deck? Look no further than Invincible Hymn. This card is just absurd for this deck. You can go really deep in the game, take a lot of damage and then just play this and reset your life total back to sixty or seventy. 

Essence Warden, Soul Warden, Soul's Attendant, Suture Priest - All of these do essentially the same thing. In a multi-player format, just one of these little guys can gain anywhere between ten and fifteen life by themselves. The other thing about them is that they fly under the radar. If you play one of them on turn one, your opponents will not use a removal spell on them, when really, it would be in their best interest. Also, these are the kind of cards that I like in commander. They require zero commitment after you play them and they will do all the heavy lifting for you. 

Shattered Angel and Lifegift - Like the creatures above, these cards will do all the work for you. Being able to play either of these cards in a early game scenario will make the game quickly out of hand and bring your life total far out of range.

Righteous Fury - This card has dual function and not in the way that you think. The first part of this card is something we have seen many times over (Guan Yu's 1,000-Li March, Sunblast Angel, etc). The second part of the card seems like icing on the cake. Gain 2 life for each creature destroyed this way. In a nut shell, you are wiping the board after some massive attacks and then benefiting off of it, but the real beauty lies deeper. The card wipes the board, hence, preventing the damage you might be dealt later on. So, not only are you gaining life off the creatures you destroy, but you are also gaining life in future turns from those same creatures not attacking you. 

Contemplation - Again, another card that does all the heavy lifting for us. With this card out, everytime we do anything, we will benefit. It will put us even further out of reach.

Gerrard Capashen - Oh captain my captain! Do you have players in your play group who like to abuse their hand limit? Do they just draw card after card after card and throw down a Reliquary Tower and scoff? Well Gerrard wants in on some of that action. You have twenty cards in hand? Great! I'll gain twenty! Gerrard can also beat a little face too, but he is going to be more useful as a life gaining machine.

Boon Reflection - This card may seem like overkill, and thats because it is. Throw it in!

Orim's Prayer and Righteous Cause - The one thing that I will always preach about building decks is the consistency in decks. How many cards work towards your ultimate goal and how will those cards help you achieve it. These two cards are similar, yet different. Between them, Righteous Cause is better by miles. Orim's Prayer gains you life whenever a creature attacks YOU, while the latter, Righteous Cause, gains you life whenever a creature attacks. Period. Now, in a one v one match, you don't need to worry much about the Prayer because your opponent is always going to be attacking you, but again, the Cause is better because it counts your creatures too. Prayer definitely has its benefits as well. The Prayer will make your opponents attack other players, not wanting you to gain life, in the long run, gaining you even more life. Either way, both of these cards are what we are looking for and they make the deck.  


Felidar Sovereign - Here is our sneaky win condition. Sometimes, the game just has to end and if you play him and then follow it up with a Time Warp, then that's game. GG everyone. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.


Wall of Reverence -  Not only will this thing block creatures in the air, but it will also gain you a little life each turn.

Our beaters:

Ageless Entity - This guy will be our primary beater. Seeing as how most of the cards in our deck are going to gain us life, an unchecked Ageless Entity will quickly get out of hand. There is also the "magical Christmas-land" effect with this guy and cards like Beacon of Immortality. 40 life gained? How does 40 +1/+1 counters sound? Check please!

Drogskol Reaver - This guy is a double edged sword. He can either attack your opponents and start dealing massive amounts of damage in the air, or he can just sit back and draw you a bunch of cards. 

Serra Ascendant - I consider this card completely unfair. This is why he is an all-star in my books! Serra Ascendant was not a card that was made with commander in mind and this, we can take advantage of. This will be a 6/6, flying with lifelink for one white 99.9% of the time in this deck. Completely absurd and unfair, but hey, life isn't fair.

Ajani's Pridemate - Another baby beater that, unchecked, will get our of hand quickly. In this deck, we are gaining life like mad, so it only seems right to have this guy as part of our army.

Celestial Force - Along with being a 7/7, with one cycle of turns, this guy can end up gaining us up to 12 life. Pair that up with Ageless Entity or Ajani Pridemate and you have yourself quick a formidable army.

After we add in all the cards that a traditional Bant deck would provide, we can see an actual deck form out of this. Take a gander, I hope you had fun and remember, Trade Smart. Trade Fair. Trade Here:

General:

Treva, the Renewer

Creature (23)

• 1x Avacyn's Pilgrim
• 1x Consecrated Sphinx
• 1x Ageless Entity
• 1x Ajani's Pridemate
• 1x Wall of Reverence
• 1x Celestial Force
• 1x Drogskol Reaver
• 1x Essence Warden
• 1x Gerrard Capashen
• 1x Llanowar Elves
• 1x Noble Hierarch
• 1x Mother of Runes
• 1x Phantasmal Image
• 1x Serra Ascendant
• 1x Shattered Angel
• 1x Soul Warden
• 1x Soul's Attendant
• 1x Suture Priest
• 1x Primeval Titan
• 1x Frost Titan
• 1x Sun Titan
• 1x Phyrexian Metamorph
• 1x Felidar Sovereign

Instant (7)

• 1x Hinder
• 1x Beacon of Immortality
• 1x Bant Charm
• 1x Spell Crumple
• 1x Condemn
• 1x Return to Dust
• 1x Banishing Stroke

Land (35)

• 5x Plains
• 5x Island
• 6x Forest
• 1x Breeding Pool
• 1x Celestial Colonnade
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Flooded Strand
• 1x Gavony Township
• 1x Graypelt Refuge
• 1x Hallowed Fountain
• 1x Maze of Ith
• 1x Misty Rainforest
• 1x Reflecting Pool
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Savannah
• 1x Seaside Citadel
• 1x Sejiri Refuge
• 1x Stirring Wildwood
• 1x Temple Garden
• 1x Tropical Island
• 1x Tundra
• 1x Windswept Heath

Sorcery (9)

• 1x Austere Command
• 1x Genesis Wave
• 1x Righteous Fury
• 1x Channel
• 1x Time Warp
• 1x Invincible Hymn
• 1x Hallowed Burial
• 1x Terminus
• 1x Temporal Mastery

Artifact (12)

• 1x Azorius Signet
• 1x Darksteel Ingot
• 1x Druidic Satchel
• 1x Expedition Map
• 1x Whispersilk Cloak
• 1x Swiftfoot Boots
• 1x Lightning Greaves
• 1x Selesnya Signet
• 1x Simic Signet
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Thran Dynamo

Enchantment (11)

• 1x Boon Reflection
• 1x Contemplation
• 1x Land Tax
• 1x Honden of Seeing Winds
• 1x Lifegift
• 1x War Tax
• 1x Propaganda
• 1x Ghostly Prison
• 1x Orim's Prayer
• 1x Righteous Cause
• 1x Sylvan Library

Planeswalker (3)

• 1x Jace, the Mind Sculptor
• 1x Gideon Jura
• 1x Tamiyo, the Moon Sage

Building a better deck

Hello one and all! In this installment, we are going to talk about how to build a better commander deck. I will be doing installments later on how to build a commander deck on a budget, but for this time around let's shoot for the moon and throw caution about card prices out the window. I won't/can't put in things like Moxes , Library of Alexandria or Juzam Djinn. But I will sometimes dabble in the $30-$80 price range. So be forewarned!

First off, what do I mean by better? When considering a deck, if you start looking at decks that will be good in a multi-player environment, good one on one, will take home wins and will be gimmicky, you are looking at building decks the wrong way. You will not be able to do everything at once, so let's keep things simple.

The deck I will be building today is Glissa, The Traitor. This is a deck I have been looking to build in quite some time. Glissa runs one of my favorite colors in commander: Green. This will allow me abuse mana accelerants, as well as using creatures with fantastic abilities. This deck also uses one of the stronger commander colors, but I do not play it very often, and that is black.

One goal I want for the deck is to find a way of getting Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Cabal Coffers. This way I can abuse tons of mana all at once. The deck will also have access to Gaea's Cradle. Both the Coffers and Cradle can work in conjunction with Deserted Temple. So, how are we going to gain access to these extremely powerful lands? Well, this is where green really shines. I believe that green has the best titan available in the game and that is Primeval Titan. Even if you just think of Primeval Titan being a 4GG ramp spell, it would still be one of the more powerful cards in the game. By simply playing him, you gain access to any two lands you are going to need. If you have Urborg, go with Coffer and Temple. You have Coffers? Go with Urborg and Temple. Do you have the black combo lands? Go with Cradle and Temple and really give your opponents head aches. Another card that we can abuse is Expedition Map. With the use of our general, we can use the map, get a land of our choice, kill a creature and re-buy the map. Lather, rise, repeat.

Cards that also support this theme that will be going into the deck will be:

Worldly Tutor --Searches out Prime Time
Green Sun's Zenith --See above
Fauna Shaman --And again
Survival of the Fittest -- And again
Demonic Tutor --Aaaand again
Diabolic Tutor (Side note, cool art on the Odyssey Diabolic Tutor!) --Once more

So, you can already see how a deck starts to form if you have a basic concept or goal. I set a goal to abuse a lot of mana, and that is already taking up 8 spell slots and 4 land slots. Including our general, we are already at 13 cards! Where do we go from here? Well, now that we have a lot of cards that support a generous mana base, let's add some cards that are considered staples:

Sol Ring --Going turn one: Land, Sol Ring is the start you always want to have in commander. Accelerating your game by two turns can be unbeatable sometimes
Lightning Greaves -- Protects your creatures, along with getting extra triggers off your titans and other cards that attack
Swiftfoot Boots --See above
Maze of Ith/Mystifying Maze --This card not only protects you, but your opponents attacks are incredibly valuable, so they won't spend it sending their creatures into you while you have either maze out. So this works two fold: It protects you and channels your opponents attacks into other players. Let your opponents do your heavy lifting for you!
Sensei's Divining Top -- Just a great card. Manipulation, card draw....just awesome.

And then just some staples for a dual colored deck:

Bayou -- Mana fixing is essential. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Overgrown Tomb --See above
Verdant Catacombs --This also thins your deck, getting you closer to your action.
Woodland Cemetery --See Bayou.
Gilt-Leaf Palace --See above
Command Tower -- Dual lands are dual lands
Llanowar Wastes -- These sorts of lands are not that bad. You have 40 life to play with. You can spend 5-10 life on helping your mana base. Don't be too skittish about spending life on this.

So! After figuring out a goal for the deck, getting cards to support that goal and staples for your deck, we are now at a healthy 25 cards! Let's go a little deeper into some synergy with our general.

Glissa has the unique ability of recurring artifacts at the expense of your opponents creatures. This can work greatly to our advantage if done correctly. The one thing that some newer players do when building a commander deck is relying to heavily on their generals ability. We can find some cards that not only work with Glissa, but also can help clear the path for some of our larger beaters.

The first card we are going to include is Executioner's Capsule. This card is an all-star for this deck. Because of where the colon is, you can actually sacrifice it, kill a creature and re-buy it with Glissa. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Sure it can only take out nonblack creatures, but you will have enough targets in a multi-player game that you won't have any trouble looking for something nonblack. The next two cards are are from the same cloth, and that is Mind Stone and Dreamstone Hedron. Both of these cards will allow us to draw cards, kill something, and then re-buy to put more gas into our hands. Oh, by they way, they also accelerate us. Winners in my book! The next two cards are also from the same ilk, in fact, they are from the same cycle: Horizon Spellbomb and Nihil Spellbomb. This will allow us to use some utility, along with drawing some cards. So there we go. A nice complement of cards that let us abuse our generals ability, yet not going too deep and letting us use some utility to go with it.

Now that we are at 30 cards in the deck, a bit more than 25%, lets start filling in some gaps and make this a more rounded and finer tuned deck. We are at a bit of a junction with the deck. Do we want this to be a multiplayer deck or a one on one beater? How do we win? Some might think that this two questions are separate, but I consider them quite similar. Winning in a multiplayer environment compared to winning in a one on one environment is quite different. Cards like Mindslaver may seem like a perfect fit for this deck, but I consider that to be a card that in a one v. one game is much different than multiplayer. In this case, we are making a multiplayer deck and Mindslaver is a great card for this. Mindslaver in a one on one format has a lot less tools. First, in a multiplayer game, you can steal an opponents turn and use it to attack your opponents. So, along with throwing a big monkey wrench into the plans of one player, you can also use it as a breather and just not be attacked for a turn.

Right now, this deck is like a nice steak. But that's it. Just a plain steak, sitting on a normal plate. While it is a very nice steak, we want a whole meal. We want the side dishes, a nice wine and some atmosphere. This is what I mean by a more rounded deck. So, to do this, we need to add some unexciting, yet necessary cards. Enter our one drop friends:

Birds of Paradise
Llanowar Elves
Elves of the Deep Shadow 

These are the cards that are going to help us get Glissa, the Traitor on turn 2. However, these cards will also be able to help us later on in the game once we have our abusive mana base established. They will be used as blockers or for us to help us use our next card:

Birthing Pod

This card will be able help us turn cards that aren't useful to use anymore into cards that are going to help take over a game in our favor. Further, we can start looking at cards that will be help in this strategy and tie it into our deck as a whole. Here are some great comes into play effects that will help us ramp us up:

Fleshbag Marauder
Acidic Slime
Eternal Witness
Indrik Stomphowler
Grave Titan

Now, I hope that you can see how this strategy also ties in with the Primeval Titan strategy! This is how you get a deck that performs consistently and how you get a deck that will perform the way you designed it. You stock your deck with cards that do relatively the same things.  Phew! Now that we have a few basic ideas for the deck, some good side dishes, we can start adding cards that play more to your style. This is a great foundation to a very competitive deck.

Hope this was helpful. Until next time: Trade smart. Trade fair. Trade here.

Weekly Top 5: Most fun creature types

Hello everyone and welcome to the first, of hopefully many (before everyone realizes I have no talent and I should be fired), of strategy articles for PucaTrade.com! In this incarnation, we're going to talk about the top 5 most fun creature types to play. In these articles, I am going to just touch on certain formats, but since I play commander mostly, that will be the default format. Commander is also just the format that you can really stretch your legs and say "You know what Call to the Kindred, you are going to see some play today!" So, without further ado, lets begin with number 5:


5. Elves


I am going to get a lot of flack for this one. There is always that one guy in the play group who will play a tribal deck absolutely to death. That guy will, no matter what the meta looks like, will bring Goblins to a legacy tournament. Who is this guy? Well that's me. Except I personally think the Goblins legacy deck is worse than the plot twist of a M. Night Shyamalan movie (Really? The plants did it?!). Elves will always have a special place in my heart. I would play elves in commander and I would get comments like "I see the same cards over and over again when you play that deck! You must be cheating!" Actually cheating aside, the great thing about this deck is that it may look like you are seeing the same cards, however, they are just cards that do exactly the same thing. Elvish Archdruid, Priest of Titania and Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary all do the same thing! Green Sun's Zenith, Fierce Empath and Primal Command all go get our friend Primeval Titan, Regal Force or Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger. While this may be about fun with creature types, elves, while I know you have you hands over your ears and saying "La la la! Cannot hear you!", are fun because of the consistency you get from them. Do you have fun being screwed out of mana? Do you have fun getting your face bashed in by your opponents? Do you like bashing your opponents faces? The defense rests.

4. Snakes.

After you Samual L Jackson.

Here are some fun facts about snakes. They are cold blooded. They smell with their tongue. They will beat your face in with mana, drawing cards and big bodies. They lay eggs!

Snakes have been around in Magic a very long time. Sabertooth Cobra was ahead of the curve and first brought us poison. Lotus Cobra is still an all-star in all environments. Snakes also give you great card draw such as Seshiro the Anointed, Ophidian and Ohran Viper. Snakes act a lot like elves, without all that flash and pizzaz that comes with playing elves. Snakes do what snakes do best. They lie in wait and snap at you if you are coming too close. 

So, go shed some skin, sit in the sun for a while, eat an entire rabbit and then beat your opponents faces.  

3. Human

Kill all humans you say? You know how many humans there are in the game of Magic the Gathering? Don't cheat! Take a guess...

500? Way too low.

750? Nope.

1,000?! Getting closer.

1,250?!?! Still not there.

1,385. That is how many humans you have to choose from. I heard a bunch of people say Human Frailty is not a great card. You can just say "1,385". When they ask what you are talking about, that is when you drop a piano on them and then ask them how they feel about Human Frailty. Now if we only had a piano...

Human's are by far the most fun because they interact with each other (Champion of the Parish), but they do so many different things! You can beat down with them, you can do crazy things with human wizards like Snapcaster Mage, Rasputin Dreamweaver, Zur the Enchanter or Azami, Lady of Scrolls. You can play with human werewolves! You can go with human rebels!  The possibilities are almost endless with the choices you can make with humans. Kill all humans? Just try. There are a lot of them and they all defend themselves with sticks. 

2. Zombies


"Hey, hey, hey. What's in your head, 
In your head, 
Zombie, zombie, zombie? 
Hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, dou, dou, dou, dou, dou... " -Zombie by the Cranberries

Maybe not the best song, but zombies don't care. They will eat the Cranberries brains and keep on moving through each band from the 1990's. Yes Savage Garden. They are looking at you. Zombies are the new ninjas, which use to be the new pirates, which use to be penguins. However, is there a new show called "The Walking Penguin"? Been there Morgan Freeman. Done that. 

Zombies use to be off my radar until I saw some standard decks pop up with them. Using Gravecrawler, Geralf's Messenger and Mortarpod to just shoot your opponent for a thousand damage. But when you start looking at zombies in a commander environment, you start finding great cards that also work with this strategy. Vengeful Dead and Diregraf Captain are the first that come in mind. Zombie don't just have this machine gun type strategy. Zombies are great doing exactly what they are made for: Coming back from the dead! There are hundreds of cards that are zombie related that start chucking zombies out of your graveyard and you can start commanding them to munch on your opponents brains. So what makes zombies fun? Uh, how about the fact you can just yell "BRAAAAAINS!!!" at your opponent the whole game? 

1. Eldrazi!....Wait....no....Ouphe! No....elves again! Erm...what is this....Everything? Well that must mean that number 1 is:

Shapeshifters!

Oh man. Why have to chose from one creature type when you can choose from all of them? These little guys are all over the map and some pretty wacky stuff can be done with them. One card I have been looking at forever is Call to the Kindred. This thing is combo-riffic. You can put in onto any changeling and just watch your opponents as you start flipping creatures off the top of your deck straight into play. Free Eldrazi? Sure. Primeval Titan off the top? Why not. 

 

Along with just being busted and working with everything, they have some pretty nifty cards too. Shapesharer will start transforming all of your changelings into whatever the best thing is on the table. In commander, a turn 2 or 3 Taurean Mauler can sometimes just take over a game by himself. Of course though, the shapeshifter that leads the charge is Mirror Entity. If you want to talk about fun, this guy takes the game, stands it up on it's head and says "this card is going to kill you, so do something about it now" and then people try and kill it with Eyeblight's Ending...then you just laugh. Laugh long and hard until no one is paying attention anymore. Then laugh some more.

Shapeshifters. Hands down the most fun you can have with a creature type in Magic the Gathering!

So, you heard it here folks. Jump onto your want list and start adding those Shapesharers, Mirror Entity's and Call to the Kindred's!

Hope you had fun and until next time: Trade smart. Trade fair. Trade here.

 

I didn't even know....I didn't even know....

One of my favorite things is sitting down to play a game with my buddies. It's nice, friendly, and, above all else, consistent.

But fuck them. I want some weird ass magic and for that, I turn to Magic Online.

Whenever I want to see cards that make me stop and read it, there is nothing like shuffling up (or letting the computer do that) and see what is spit out. What is some of the weirder stuff I've seen? Try these guys on for size:

Where did this thing come from!? I saw a guy go turn 1: Swamp, Sol Ring, Fellwar Stone. Turn 2: Swamp and this thing. After that, he wrecked all of our faces. We just felt awful. I don't know my other opponents, but if they were like me, they were crying. Real tears. This card is just bonkers and I didn't even know....

Want another?

Yep. You've read it and read it again. Want to know what happened? Chance Encounter + Mirror Gallery + Krak's Thumb + Copy Artifact. You see it? You don't? Let me spoil this joke for you: WE ALL LOST. Just like that. No way of knowing or stopping it. We just lost. It's dumb and it's an auto-win....and I didn't even know.

Last, but not least:

I've now played against two Norin, The Wary decks that played this and it immediately made me want to flip the table. Eventually, with Norin, you will steal all the creatures on the table. I just keep getting wrecked by this card!....and I didn't even know.

Elves and how they break a play group

Turn 1: Forest, Joraga Treespeaker
Turn 2: Forest, Level up Joraga, play Priest of Titania
Turn 3: Forest, Nettle Sentinel, Primal Command for Primeval Titan and put a Signet on top of opponents deck
Turn 4: Primeval Titan, get Gaea's Cradle and Deserted Temple
Turn 5: Dosan the Falling, Genesis Wave for 11. gg.


That was exactly how the game played out. Broke the play group. ;-)

How to draft rares

Last Monday I was able to participate in a Innistrad draft. Here is what my draft pool looked like:

White:
Doomed Traveler
Avacynian Priest
Elite Inquisitor
Feeling of Dread x3
Spare from Evil
Midnight Haunting
Rebuke
Village Bell-Ringer
Mausoleum Guard
Slayer of the Wicked
Giest-Honored Monk

Blue:
Sensory Deprivation x2
Spectral Flight
Invisible Stalker
Sticher's Apprentice
Skaab Ruinator
Selhoff Occultist x2
Armored SkaabSo
Stiiched Drake
Frightful Delusion
Curse of the Bloody Tome x3
Grasp of the Phantoms
Battleground Geist

Green:
Grave Bramble
Somberwald Spider
Spider Spawning

Black:
Stromkirk Patrol
Ghoulcaller's Chant

Red:
Burning Vengence
Curse of the Pierced Heart x2

Artifacts:
Wooden Stake

Land:
Moorland Haunt

I ended up hating the green spiders because I drafted a deck that used a lot of 1/1 fliers, so I didn't want 1/2 spiders ruining my day. But the basic concept of the deck is to just try and over run them with fliers and pushing through just enough damage.

My first game was against Andy. Game 1 he had a couple of Werewolves out early, however, I had a turn 2 Inquistor. He was able to hold back just enough of the Wolves. He threw a couple of devils into the mix, but I ended up getting a Giest-Honored Monk out and it was a 7/7. Couple swings took down that game. Before game 2, Andy said he had 1 out...a Devil's Play. Ugh. No way to stop that. Thankfully, I didn't have to deal with it in game 2. I powered out a couple of creatures early along with the Inquisitor.

1-0

Round 2 was against Dan. He got out a few Werewolves. Then played Kessig Wolf Run...ugh!!! I was just able to squeak out game 1 against him. Game 2 I was not so fortunate. He played the Werewolf that has Intimidate when he flips on turn 2. Then Kessig Wolf Run. Then lots of smash. Game 3 was more in my favor. I got my Giest-Honored Monk Traitorous Blood and got smashed a little. However, on a pivotal swing, I was able to play a couple instants and flip all his Werewolves back. Took it down with 6 1/1 fliers, a Giest-Honored Monk and Inquisitor.

2-0

My 3rd opponent and I were done playing magic, so we split.

2-0-1

So, short little report, but a little insight. Go draft!