Last time I had played with a non-competitive deck and the results showed, my standings in the league suffered, and I almost never played my flagship card, so as announced in the penultimate tourney report I indulge myself, which means : control-Millstone !

Like I told in my first post, ctrl-Millstone plays a special role in my magic life. When I started playing Magic, I bought a Revised deck (and refused the last Legends booster ! 😦 ), in it were a Counterspell, a Control Magic and a Serra Angel : from that list you can infer that the only cards I remember from that deck were white and blue. It didn’t take too long before I was playing some sort of proto-control, I mean I played control I guess, with soon 4 control Magic and 4 counterspells, but it took some time before I became serious about it and went creatureless. I had been searching for a while for a non-creature wincon, until I saw someone getting decked and later saw a Millstone -we didn’t have any lists of cards back then, those just weren’t available, so to discover a card you had to actually encounter it, or at least encounter someone who would tell you about it. A light-bulb got turned on and I had my creature-removal numbing deck. For the most part of 95, and possibly about a half of 94 (I remember playing 3 Maze of Ith with 4 Wrath of God : good times !), I played control-Millstone almost exclusively (and said “thx!” when someone cast a Lightning Bolt on me). I tried stuff now and then on the side, but mostly I just owned the local metagame with that deck, so there were no reasons to change it. Also we were discovering the game, so we wouldn’t get bored with decks and strategies as fast we would today. Anyways that’s the kind of history that that deck carries with it. Oh, I almost forgot : I didn’t mind a single second if people were frustrated by playing a slow, creatureless deck filled with lots of permission : I reveled in it. I must have lost my edge, nowadays I care a bit, and almost feel sorry for my opponents if they’re bored. I’m looking for a cure.

While the deck plays two Balances and they’re crucial, they’re not incredible in this deck; the only reason they’re there -and something that was counter-intuitive to some- is because the deck has trouble finding 2 white mana turn 4. It’s just not set-up for it. In general it is a feature of the format that you generally can’t rely on having two strong colors : you can’t reliably have counterpsell and Hymn to Tourach mana for instance, unless you play a stupid amount of lands. Rainbow Vale and Birds of Paradise aren’t reliable enough, so you’re left with only the duals : you have to navigate those waters in terms of deck-building, you can’t just jam all the best card the way you can -to exaggerate a bit- in contemporary type II (Standard). I think constraints can be a good thing, and Balance is a constraint too : it will be dead late-game, and often in the early and mid-game it will cost you dearly. But you probably have to play them to survive, so here you go : several Balances maindeck !

Spell Blast probably deserves some explaining too : basically I want to counter Disenchant. For that, Spell Blast, while usually worse than Counterspell (with only 16 islands I sometime lack the second blue source), is still a reliable way to counter the disenchant (or Winter Orb) when playing my Jayemdae Tome, which is crucial. Power Sink doesn’t give me that. There are times when Po’Sink is better of course, but overall I’m not very enthusiastic about the sink in this deck, especially when using modern rules, which castrate the card.

Match 1 : vs. DFB

Dave tries to break Balance this time ! Cool. I see Hymns and Racks, everything seems to revolve around the Rack. And then, Mind Bomb. What ? Who plays that ? He does, and that’s a way to reduce his hand size real fast. I guess you gotta be passionate about it. He plays some blue and he discards an Animate Dead so I totally expect him to play Deep Spawn : the card is excellent, quite incredible for its time actually, and he has the tool to discard the beast and to put it back into play. Mind Bomb is quite the gambit, but then I play a Jayemdae Tome like a brute, counter the Balances, play another Tome and ruin it all. Second game goes much better for him, I’m stuck on mana, he has the hymn, then plays a Serra Angel. But I have a Maze of Ith and finally develop my board. I still play a Flood expecting a Deep Spawn, only to later learn that he actually doesn’t play it. He destroys my Millstone, but I get my favorite wincon : Braingeyser, and ask him to draw 14.

2-0

Match 2 : vs. Pelham Bleu

Pelham plays control, sort of, he plays 12 creatures, though 3 are Preachers, which aren’t pulling their weight against my deck . I’m stuck on two mana for a while, while he has a Mana Vault to complement his full WUB mana assortment. But he doesn’t do anything to punish me (and I have a Maze and an Ivory Tower anyway), I end up developing my game with, you guessed it, Jayemdae Tome and gets a concession the first time I use a Millstone. Game 2 we both develop our mana well, and after having disposed of two creatures on his turn 3 and four, I think I’m safe to play my Tome despite having no creature removal in hand, but he goes on to play a Serra Angel, curving perfectly a three into four into five-drop ! Serra attacks me twice, I’m on 12 when I announce a Swords to Plowshares during Pelham’s upkeep on his Serra. Now let’s describe the scene of the crime : I’ve got 3 mana available and a Power Sink. He has 6 mana, I’ve got 5, he plays a counterspell which I Spell Blast, so he’s got 4 mana, and I have two left. He plays a Power Sink, for two, and has a mana left, I have a Sink myself in hand but can only Sink for one. At that moment, DFB -who spectates-, intervenes by showing his face, making a funny face like that :

The scandalous ploy works : I laughed. And lost so much of my focus, that when I tap 2 to his Power Sink for 2, the Serra Angel still stays on the board, very much unsworded, and I don’t have anything to say about it ! You’ve got to marvel at the competence with which the conspiracy got implemented. The impeccable timing, the impossibly funny face. You can see the hand of master criminals at work there people. Be prepared, and be afraid, be very afraid. Such is the doom in recording your matches : you get to watch them and see your mistakes and their consequences. Should be a helpful tool to improve your game, but in this case I’ve done it and it didn’t help. I wish I could say their crime didn’t pay but it totally did. Masters of deception I tell you ! Of course if he had played it correctly he would have tapped all his lands, and I’d have had to play my own Sink to his Sink, StP would have resolved, so I wouldn’t have gotten down to 4 but would have stayed on a much safer 12 points total. As it turns out I end up not using my Power Sink, so here what should have happened : his Serra is exiled, instead of stealing the Serra Angel with Control Magic, I steal his Serra Angel with Control Magic

, well, the second one that is. So I wouldn’t have had to play my second StP on his second Serra. So I would have played it on his Serra, the third. So instead of trading his Serra with his Serra I could have attacked him with it, letting his Derelor connect, since my Ivory Tower + Jayemdae Tome combo effectively neutralized it. That would have left me with a full hand to his empty one, a card drawing engine to his sweet sweet nothin’, and a wincon in play. Instead, I don’t have a proper wincon left neither in play nor in the deck and needs him to play a creature for me to steal it. But he says the magical words : “I’m just gonna try to deck you now.” So I scoop. Cause his Mind Twist had caught each of my 2 Millstones and I had previously played my Braingeyser, so I was out of solid wincons. And why had I not played one of my Millstones ? Well, that would be because I was on 4 and wanted to get in Ivory Tower range asap.. So I would totally have played one, had I been on 12 life the way I should have been, on top of the stolen Serra Angel. Well played, conspiration ! 🙂

Game 3 Of course I get stuck on 2 mana, cause that’s what happens when you play only 26 mana sources, and he curves into a turn 4 Tome which I have no answer for. And that’s a turn 4 concession. Between control decks. I commend Pelham Bleu for knowing when and how to make me concede. (That’s how you do it Park 😉 ) The match took about half an hour. For three games. I don’t think those decks really are slow. It’s just people want to believe that maybe the control player hasn’t drawn shit. It can happen of course, but when time is limited while you can use the time limit to your advantage, you’re better off assuming they did when pressed for time.

1-2

Match 3 : vs. Park

Park plays a counterburn deck, though with some white too for the removal. Like DFB he uses Rainbow Vale to try to let the mana flow in his tricolor deck, but he also uses another rarely played card : Implements of Sacrifice. It’s card disadvantage, but it’s also delayed and temporary mana acceleration in the color of your choice. I recorded our games, but they were probably too long and uneventful to be shown : Park doesn’t concede, and I imagine it’s in order to put me in a difficult situation afterwards if he were to win the second game (I wouldn’t have the time to win the 3rd game, for sure) and just go on auto-pilot half asleep, but when I tell him game 2 that our time is up (with 5 turns to play), turns out, he doesn’t know about time limits in tournaments. Well that’s a downer. I don’t necessarily advocate to enforce tournament rules harshly in our small tourneys, but that one I think is salutary. Playing round matches with unlimited time could be unsavory in some cases. In fact I wouldn’t want to play too many untimed matches with my Millstone deck, and totally count on the rules to put a strict time constraint on my matches, even though they can be used against me because of its inherent slowness. In that case I had removed almost every wincon, Braingeyser excepted, cause I knew I didn’t have the time to win anyway. So it didn’t make sense to just ignore the rule and go on playing.

1-0

Match 4 : vs. Seth

Seth won the last two ogt2 tourney, he leads the 2017 ranking, and it’s not even close. Time to put an end to that domination. Turn 1 Savannah Lions is very bad news, especially as I don’t have white mana around (I do have a StP). I tutor for Maze though, which will be my undoing, since I won’t draw the white mana I need to play a Balance, and lose to a double Lion opener. My mistake then. Game 2 starts ideally though, with a Fellwar Stone into Balance, which not only relieves him of his two creatures in play, but even of one card in hand. Unfair enough. He almost kills me when he puts a Dragon Engine down. A what ?

In fact I Power Sink it, because I’m that magnanimous, and I have a lot of card advantage anyways. Control Magic prompts a Swords To Plowshares and Jayemdae Tome prompts a scoop. Last game he has the turn 1 Lion into turn 2 knight of course because why the fuck not ? Also, I’ve barely had a keepable hand so far, and I’m stuck on three mana. I’m definitely not happy with that defeat, and to think it took me days to recover from the “conspiracy win”.. I had to be defeated by a freakin’ white weenie deck right after that ! Actually WW isn’t doing so bad against control, but it’s generally a favorable matchup, at least his version is. I can be such a sore loser sometimes. But what are you gonna do ? If losing didn’t suck then what would be the point of playing ? (and ten times over when you’re convinced you should have won) But I made some sub-optimal choices, so it’s ok to lose in those conditions.

Match 5: vs. Larson

I’m more lucky this time with a turn 1 Sol Ring into Ivory Tower, which negates his Orcish Artillery, and he doesn’t have anything else to play in the early game (should have mulliganed ?). When he finally does, it doesn’t take too long until I Disenchant his Winter Orb and take control of the game with a tome. Game 2 he draws much better and I don’t get to generate card advantage before it’s too late to stop his two Derelors. Third game I get a turn 1 Ivory Tower, though it’s only granting me one life per turn since I’m on the play. He has again a poor Orcish Artillery and then another (I love the card really, but they’re just terrible when facing the Tower), that forces him to over-extend, and I end up “wrathing” three of his creatures, oh, I mean 6, since he was generous enough to play 3 Birds of Paradise too. After that I tutor for Flood, as I already have a Tome and a Millstone, cause it’s just that good, sometimes.

2-1

Final: vs. Seth

So I’ve got two losses at 3-2, but only Seth has a better standing on 4-0, and even if Larson were to win his last two matches he would only tie me on points but not on tie-breakers. Opponents’ game wins aren’t a tiebreaker in a championship situation, so the tiebreaker would be the one used in our first tourney : the one who beats the other during the round is qualified for the final, so I can get my revenge, and try to beat the white weenie deck that doesn’t deserve to win.

It’s the n00bcon day, but the n00bcon stream experiences technical difficulties and is hours late, so when I hear the guys taking about playing, I don’t think too much : let’s try streaming stuff ! No commentators, not much in the way of presentation, and very few people end up watching it live, but that’s still a good learning experience. I also have to reevaluate commentating : when I realize, that, duh, I have a mic and could commentate by just pressing a button and talking but don’t. I don’t press no button, because well it’s actually quite terrifying. I probably wouldn’t do it in my native language, but at the time I tell myself that I shouldn’t impose my accent on people (french accent sounds terrible in English), but really I think that’s just not for me.

The stream starts with the White Weenie deck and its pilot being humbled, as well as it should, by a defeat (at the hands of Larson), so things start to look a bit more fair for WW, as opposed to very flattering so far.

Game 1 I mulligan and can’t prevent him from resolving a Winter Orb, which is poison to my deck (I forgot to activate my mic for a while, if you’re watching the video), so I quickly lose. Game 2, again the turn 1 Lion : good for him. A Maze slows him down while making him overextend, and a mid-game wrath puts me in a nice position. Later come the Tome, and I get to use it several times before the critical turn when he tries to play two killer spells : Winter Orb and Armageddon. I have a Counterspell and just enough mana to sink the second so he concedes. Game 3, turn 1, Lion. No comment. Turn 2 he plays an Orb when I can’t counter it, since he’s on the play. I sword the Lion. He beats me up with a preacher, but hasn’t got anything else to beat me up with, and all my mana is untapped and developing fine. Karma. What ? Well I happen to splash black, and to have a swamp in play, so I guess I have to dispose of it. He adds an Icatian Javelineers to hit me harder. I play a Balance that makes me lose two cards in hand and a land, but gets rid of those, what’s more the sacrificed land is a tapped one of course, so it’s not exactly worth a land, really. I don’t have a Tome (in fact I just discarded one to my own Balance) so the fight is still mostly balanced, but he plays Crusades, so they sit there doing nothing. Until finally he plays a creature worth stealing (a 4/4 White Knight). When I counter the disenchant he concedes. He wasn’t in the best position for sure, and a lucky draw of disenchant into Armageddon would probably have screwed me, but he seems quite disgruntled and has had enough for the day. I guess Seth there had gotten a bit drunk on the sweet nectar of victory. Last news, he was still trying to digest the bitter defeat. It’s all right you can thank me later for helping you come down from your cloud, buddy 🙂 I’m all for justice and I couldn’t really let control-Millstone that down : I don’t think it’s the best deck, but it deserved much better than the paltry 3-2 score it got in the rounds, and I couldn’t let people think the deck was so-so.