More of a slog, really, but it tickles me when I can play game mechanics out to their logical extremes, and this match had that in spades (no pun intended).
I really like Magic: the Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers. I have been playing it for several years now. It hones my skill at the game, without getting into a lot of card-buying craziness or the even-crazier tournament scene.
I enjoyed 2013 and 2014 the most; I really hate the change in monetization mechanic introduced in 2015. So I was playing some 2014 today.
I am currently working on filling out all the decks, and I was working on one of the two green decks. This one is kind of a slow-starter, not Beastie Rush like a “regular” green deck. The deck’s mechanic is built around playing extra land from the deck, and buffing creatures based on lands coming into play (or being in play). So, for this deck, a perfect opening sequence goes: Forest, Forest -> Rampant Growth (to pull a tapped basic land), Farhaven Elf (to pull a tapped basic land) +/- another Forest. This puts you at turn four with 4 or 5 lands, which is enough to play most of the heart of the deck, while you wait for the big hitters to come out.
There are some Grazing Gladhearts (give 2 life each time a land is played), one Avenger of Zendikar (puts a 0/1 creature into play for each Forest you control, then a +1/+1 counter on each of them each time a new land comes into play), one Scute Mob (gets +4/+4 per turn if you have >4 lands)… you get the idea.
Then there are a bunch of cards to give you extra lands; Oracle of Mul-Daya (play with top card revealed, play it if it’s a land, can play an additional land per turn), Primeval Titan (get 2 lands on cast, get 2 lands each time it attacks), and all the Rampant Growth, Exploration, etc. you can stand.
There are a couple of cards that reach in to pull out the creature you want (Green Sun’s Zenith, Fierce Empath, Eye of Ugin).
The “lockdown” cards are a set of very expensive artifact creatures with Annihilator (opponent sacrifices permanents every time the creature attacks — ouch). Once these come out, the game’s pretty well over.
Anyway, that’s pretty much the deck. Grab enough land to cast the big creatures, pull the Avenger to create a ton of attackers, drain the rest of the land out of the deck to pump everything up, and then lock down with a couple of Annihilators until the other guy is either out of permanents or dead or both.
Great fun.
So I was playing against the other Planeswalkers, as it’s the closest to a “regular” deck you’ll get, and picked the Circle of Life deck.
That one is a white deck built around a bunch of creatures with Lifelink, with Celestial Mantle (if you damage your opponent, you double your life total) as the main “kill” card. I put that in quotes, because essentially, the way Circle wins is to get so far ahead of the opponent in Life total, that there is no way for the opponent to survive long enough to kill you. I love Circle of Life, and have actually built a deck around it in real life. People hate to see me coming with it, because I can often get my life total above 1000 with it. yikes. In Magic 2013, I found out that the computer will max me out at 9,999 life, even if I still “double” after that. sigh.
In this particular game, the AI pulled Celestial Mantle, and got it attached to a 1/1 Flying creature with *Double Strike*, which meant he was doubling twice each time (grr), as my green deck has no way to deal with flyers (other than Annihiliation, of course 🙂 ).
With my deck slow to start, and his stupid double-striking Mantled thing doubling him up, things started to get a little out of hand. I had enough Grazing Gladhearts to make sure he couldn’t actually kill me (draw the land, get the life, get hit and lose the life, his life total doubles again, …), but he actually hit 9999 before I got an Annihilator out and took control of the board.
Unfortunately, I didn’t pull the Avenger until pretty late, and I’d pulled a little too much land out of my deck, so there were only about 5 or 6 lands left to pump the 0/1 guys, but I had 22 of them 🙂 I’d rather have had 10 of them that were all pumped to 14/15, but I had to take 22 6/7’s instead.
So with the opponent fully goldfished (he had no permanents at all, and I was stealing any that he sacrificed, so he stopped playing cards at all), it was simply a matter of whether I could do 10,000 damage to him before one of us decked out.
And this is where a fun little side effect of one of my cards came in handy.
It turns out that Green Sun’s Zenith gets shuffled back into the library as part of its effect. So as long as I played it every single turn, and avoided twiddling the library or drawing more than once, I could effectively play forever!
Infinite Life vs. Infinite Library, FTW!
Here’s the point where he would have won, if I didn’t have Zenith (note I am down to 1 in my LIbrary)
Even with every single creature in my deck in play, because of the tiny Avenger tokens, I was only (“only”, he says) able to muster about 400 damage per turn. So, it took about 25 turns to kill him, each turn consisting of:
– Draw Green Sun’s Zenith
– Cast same
– Attack
There was lots of extra button-pushing in between; I had a handful of cards that I couldn’t cast for whatever reason (extra card draws &c), so I had to skip main phases, and then wait for the opponent to say “glub glub” a little.
In the end, I was able to kill him off before he decked out, which would have been a very unsatisfying end to the contest. For the record, it *is* possible to kill a guy with maxed-out health, as long as you have a way to keep from decking out.
Thank you, Green Sun’s Zenith. I always liked you.