The Jitte
A Magic the Gathering Blog

This is a vent. Warning, this is a vent.

I played in an extended PDC event tonight with my auramancer deck. This deck fares pretty well vs. a lot of decks but dies horribly to a Cloak deck. To shore up that matchup I changed the deck to include at least 8 removal spells that are good vs. their hard to remove creatures, included CoP: Green, and put some [card]Kami of Ancient Law[/card] in my sideboard to kill their cloak. I’d say about a third of the deck is effective vs. a Cloak.dec matchup.

My opponent, Lunchbox Superhero, was very angry that I kept drawing efficient removal spells for his creatures and bitched and moaned accordingly. I really am stupefied that anybody could really bitch about bad beats. Being successful at MtG requires a bit of luck. Getting beaten by a top deck is just a part of the game.

What frustrates me even more is I remember losing to him on a separate occasions with 3 Guardian of the Guildpacts in play on his side. If I remember correctly I might of sent a smiley or two his way for having such incredible luck. Since I possess a reasonable amount of maturity and am not ignorant about the nature of card games I accepted my loss and moved on. Lunchbox was full of comments tonight like “why don’t you draw better”. You know, if I drew one of my 3 Grim Harvests that last game my engine would of kicked on and I could of burned him out. I guess my luck isn’t that good because I was on card 29 when the game finally ended after he top decked his third Ledgewalker.

Lunchbox, why don’t you draw better?

Next post is going to be on a positive note, too much black mana swirling around this blog.

A guy named Vinlock was trolling the casual rooms with his Madness deck tonight and I was the unlucky sap to be playing against him. Whenever I see a first turn careful study followed by a Basking Rootwalla I always groan. It is a favorite in the casual room because the deck basically builds itself and is full of cheap uncommons and commons. I don’t mind getting my ass handed to me by 6/6 flying worms that cost 4 mana just not 10 times a week.

The most infuriating thing about this character was not because his deck is lame and boring but because afterwards we started up a trade and asked if I would trade my Polluted Delta’s. He said I could take anything I wanted out of his 1077 commons and uncommons… ORLY? MORE CROSSBOW INFANTRIE’S!?!

MTGO cards aren’t like currency. Even though you can buy commons for 3 cents a pop doesn’t mean they are worth 3 cents. Commons, to me anyway, are worth other commons. If they are hard to find commons then they actually become worth something. This is because I’m willing to pay mtgotraders.com 3 cents a pop to just go out and buy them rather than wade through the trading binder.

You know what? I hate losing. Why? Because I’ve been addicted to learning about this game for months now and I can still look back at games I’ve played and watch myself be a blubbering moron. Why do I only use all the information I’ve absorbed outside of playing this game? Since bitching about the MTGO shuffler is so cliche I won’t mention the overabundance of land in play, and in my hand.

During a RRG 4-3-2-2 I’m playing a Boros deck. It almost felt like playing a deck from 4 months ago the dude had all of Ravincas RW goodies and almost nothing form Guildpact save a Pyromantics that kicked my ass everytime he played it. Whats worse is that I’m picking out his play mistakes while blistfully unaware of my own.

For the last 4 turns I’ve been trying to stall his beats because my only defense is a bunch of mana producers. He’s beating me down with Belfry Spirit and co. ( the tokens ), and my Starfetcher is the only thing thats preventing me from taking 3 a turn. Throughtout the game I can read his signals, taps this and that, yeah, pyromantics is coming. Oh yeah, you just “forgot” to stop my Rotwurm with your Thundersong Trumpeter; combat trick.

I know he’s got Rally.

After he does some attack declarations with only his white creatures, then red, it’s pretty obvious he wants to rally. I block the Belfry Spirit and feel like a fool when his bats swarm in.

The Fuck.

I could of survived one more turn. If he attacked with all of his white creatures he would of won. He didn’t though, and I watched the game slip away because I’m a fucking moron.

Get this though. My next draw was a Golgari Rotwurm. I have a Mortipede in play and enough mana to cast him, activate Morty, swing with my dudes, and sac some dudes to win the game.

The Fuck.