Updates and Randomness

Updates and Randomness

On Monday night I was on my way to my favorite Indian restaurant in the Sacramento area, Sher-E-Punjab.  I was planning on playing a little MTG later that night.  There is a small shop near the Restaurant that I was not planning on going to, but I knew would have a handful of players on a Monday night.  Thinking about the Arcum deck, I decided to swing in to do some trading. 

They have a pretty big EDH crowd.  I made a few mediocre to bad trades that I didn’t care about.  I was just trading to try and get other people over.  I was fine with breaking even or even taking a few dollars hit on each trade.  This way, when I found the gem in one of their binders, no one would think twice.  This proved to be a mistake, as I looked through binder after binder of junk.

I was all packed up and ready to go when I decided to talk to the guy behind the counter.  This store does not generally carry any foil or foreign cards.  99% of their stock is inventoried in their computer system.  Having already gone through the system I knew that the shop had none of the cards from my list in the system.  I asked if any cards had come in recently that were foil or foreign.  The worker politely explained that they did not like purchasing “those types” of cards, since they were hard to sell.  Finally, he told me they had a box of foreign cards they kept in the storage room in case anyone asked.  He brought out one of the shoe box like card storage containers, filled with mostly unsleeved cards.  I looked through and found a few interesting, slightly valuable things that were not on my list.  As I came to one of the few sleeved cards in the box, I did a double take.  Sitting in the shoebox was a near mint Mana Crypt.

I was feeling pretty fantastic when I headed over to Sher-E-Punjab.  After having some freshly made samosa’s, that were free since I am a friend of theirs on Facebook, I was feeling even better.  I had some Garlic Naan and Korma that nearly put me into a permanent, food coma.  My friend and I just chatted for a bit, before I decided to head over to another card store to try out the Arcum deck.

I broke the ice with the players at this shop by playing my budget, Reaper King, deck.  This deck was built when I was unemployed and it shows.  If the Arcum deck is the “pimp” deck, this deck is the “Bum in the gutter who can’t afford his meth habit” deck.  This is the deck I would play when I want people to know that I can play just for fun and I don’t care about winning every time. 

When my Reaper King was winning more battles than he was losing, I should have kept the Arcum deck in my bag.  I was so excited about all the new additions to the deck that I just had to play it.  I played 2 games with it that lasted approximately 5 minutes each.  This was a casual crowd, so I tried to avoid the usual Disk-Forge-Lattice combo that Arcum is famous for.  My first game, I was happy to see my mana crypt staring at me in my opening hand, along with 2 islands, Artificer’s Intuition, Myr Matrix, Power Artifact and Planar Portal.  I played the Crypt and Intuition turn one, Arcum turn 2, and turn Arcum brought up the Grim Monolith.  These plays gave me infinite colorless mana turn 3.  I used the Artificer’s intuition to go get a Voltaic Key. Then, I played the Key and the Portal, to use the Portal’s search ability twice.  I tutored up a Mycosynth Lattice and a Beacon of Tommorows.  My opponents scoops, since it was now obvious, I had infinite turns, mana, and could tutor for whatever I wanted.  On a side note, whenever you play someone’s EDH deck for the first time, and they have an infinite turn combo, force them to play out there actual win conditions.  If you just scoop, you only know about the turn combo.  You really want to know as much about a power deck as possible, so that you can stop all of the routes to victory.  My second game was 1 v 1.  The specifics are not exactly thrilling.  He was able to play a Veteran Armorer and Cenn’s Tactician.  While he did that, I played Karn, The Silver Golem, Mycosynth Lattice, and Emrakul.  Emrakul is filling space in the deck right now until I collect all the cards on the list.

I feel great about the deck and awful about myself.  It felt like I was scolding a group of dogs.  The casual players didn’t really understand what was happening, but they knew they were in trouble.  I don’t particularly enjoy games that go this way, so I am more than happy to show people exactly what my cards are, how they work together, and even what can be done to stop it from happening.  I really enjoy a good back and forth while playing, so I spent the rest of the time at the shop helping out with some deck tech for the players EDH decks.

That is it for this installment.  I only got one more card from the deck list, but it was a big one.  I will update again as soon as I get more.

Thanks,

Sean