Sunday, November 25, 2012

Some Quick Thoughts on Desperate Ravings

I've been having quite a few ideas for posts recently. Maybe that means I'm just really good at blogging (I am blossome), or maybe I'm gonna burn myself out and get sick of Magic and never write again. Thank God nobody reads this thing or I'd be freaking right the fuck out right now.

I had a thought today (!) about Desperate Ravings while playing online. It's hard to evaluate what exactly the card does to your hand. Because, you know, Variance. A lot of people write about variance. So I'll spare you my thoughts. Just know that it doesn't just mean "randomness". It refers to how random something is; how far the results are spread out. When we talk about variance in Magic, we're usually referring to the amount of randomness in Magic itself, relative to... life? I guess? There is "some variance" in Magic, which governs our lives and makes us its bitch.

When you cast Desperate Ravings, the variance... varies. There's a variety of situations. Insert stream of V alliteration here.

For the moment, we're throwing out graveyard interaction and we're throwing out mill as a win condition. Pretend, for a moment, that any card that would be put into your graveyard gets put on the bottom of your library instead. And I guess pretend Cellar Door doesn't exist (weren't you already?). How does Desperate Ravings affect your hand?

Friday, November 23, 2012

The Obsolescence of Quintessential Disparate Grandiolquence

Before we get started, one thing:

I totally called Archwing Dragon being an awesome sideboard card.

I have evidence.

I feel awesome.

The last deck I wrote about pretty clearly foreshadowed my great desire to play U/R. Mono Red is (and, more or less, has always been) a cheap and easy way to play a relevant deck in Standard, so I play it a lot. I'm cheap and I like easy things. The thing that I found interesting, though, was the staunch digital-ness of Red Deck Wins. If you're playing Mono Red, you're playing Mountains. If you have any other color of mana in the deck, you're playing a completely different deck. Maybe you're playing Boros humans. But if so, you're very white. It's at least 50/50 or even less red than that.

Our mana is very good right now. It'll be better in Post-Gatecrash Standard, but the fact is, Shocks are the second best Dual Lands in the game. So it seemed natural that now would be the time to take mono-colored decks and de-mono them. But what do I know.

Anyway, I didn't really get the Steam Vents, Sulfur Falls and Snapcasters so much for that deck as I did because I like those cards. I mean, look at them.


Mmm...

Holding a playset of each of those cards just feels sweet. If a format has red and blue in it, I'm probably trying to play them. Niv-Mizzet is the Commander of my only EDH deck. If I ever build a Modern deck, it'll be U/R Electromancer/Pyro Storm. I build Izzet whenever I play RtR limited. When I play Legacy on Cockatrice, it's U/W/R Miracles. Granted, the red is just a splash in the sideboard, but there's Volcanic Islands and Snapcasters, dammit.

Anyway, two weeks ago at FNM I decided to finally build the deck that I had been toying with for a few weeks and built U/R Delver.

I have some frickin' opinions about the state of the Delver deck. I feel like there are a couple very obvious problems with the way people are trying to pull it off, and I'm pretty sure it's a Deck. Tell me if you guys think I'm crazy.