(Last week, Ombra analyzed his Wrenlocke Control deck’s match-up against the terrifying GoreFeast deck that has stampeded over the meta for much of the past few months. After displaying he can stand toe to toe against the GoreFeast, this week he takes on a possibly even bigger threat in Blood Diamond Midrange and breaks down his chances. )

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n every constructed metagame there are some objectively powerful cards. Extinction. Vampire King. Angel of Dawn. Living Totem. Oftentimes, these are just the most expensive cards that are legal at the time. To be competitive, sometimes you can just mash these all together in a deck, toss in some commons to fill the obvious gaps, and call it a day. Sometimes there is a little more than that going on, especially in tuning a list (trimming on numbers so you have 3 or 2 of some cards and 4 of others), but that is the basic gist of it. In Hex, this deck is Blood Diamond Midrange.

The Blood Diamond Midrange deck may be just a pile of cards with no real synergies, and some pretty solid nonbos (anti combos), but it is a pile of some sweet cards. It has very powerful threats that cost very little resource in Soul Marble, Vampire King, and Angel of Dawn. It has the best removal in the game with Extinction, Murder, Repel, and Solitary Exile. It can grind out games for value with Giant Corpse Fly and Xentoth’s Inquisitor. When you can play this many awesome cards, you don’t really need awesome synergies like in the Chimes combo deck or in Gorestorm.

When playing against this deck, the most important thing to know is what cards actually matter. You only have so many removal spells and counterspells to utilize, and the Blood Diamond Midrange deck has a lot of spells that can be considered threats. Matching up answers to threats is critical here. I’m going to go over each of their cards that act as a way to end the game against us and discuss the ways to deal with it, and the ways not to.

Vampire King: Despite being the most expensive normal art card in Shards of Fate, this is one of the least scary cards in the deck. This card wants to be killed with Murder, since it is actually value to deal with it on a 1 for 1 basis. If the opponent lands a hit or two with the Vampire King, it isn’t usually an issue since we don’t run many troops. The life swing gets annoying, but we can deal with that. Murder for one, Extinction if they have at least 2 troops, preferably 3 or more. This is not a card we care about countering, so save your Countermagics and bounce effects, in general.

Angel of Dawn: Due to a small bug that I am told will eventually get fixed, despite this card merely being free to cast as the first card they drew that turn, we are not able to respond to it being cast, let alone counter it. This will weaken the card somewhat when it is fixed, though not enough to make it disappear. This is a card that we love to bounce. Most of the time they are only casting Angel of Dawn for free, because for 5 resources it is almost a last resort for them. Angel of Dawn dies to blocking Storm Colossus, which is our ideal path. It also dies along with everything else when either one of our decks casts Extinction. These are the preferred ways for us to deal with Angel of Dawn.

Xentoth’s Inquisitor: The perfect target for Zared’s ability. If we permanently give the Inquisitor -1/-1, barring static buffs like Soul Armament, it becomes a high costed –X/-0 spell that they can reuse. The 0 defense persists across recasts, so it dies as soon as it enters play, making Zared the best way to “permanently” deal with one. In a pinch, you can bounce this troop, but you really don’t want to be casting Murder on it, or letting Extinction bounce it back to the opponent’s hand. Maneuvering the board to your advantage is the only way to make these things happen consistently. I’ll talk about that in a bit, though. As with the other cards I’ve discussed thus far, don’t counter this under normal circumstances.

Giant Corpse Fly: This card is super annoying. No matter what we do, I can almost guarantee we’re getting 2 for 1ed off of him. When the Fly is being cast early on in the game, try and discard a Time Ripple or a Buccaneer to it. You’re already going to be losing a card, so it might as well be one that doesn’t have any real immediate value to it, or a ton of value in the long term. Bounce effects are at their worst in this matchup. Try and use a Murder on the Fly. Using Zared is tempting, but we want to try and conserve our charges for dealing with Inquisitor’s, since they are a faster clock. These also die to blocking Storm Colossus, which happens a reasonable amount of time in the late game.

Living Totem: Kill it as fast as possible by any targeted removal spell. This card runs away with games, and scares me more than Vampire King or Angel of Dawn because of the scaling nature. It may look like a 2/2 when they cast it, but if you don’t kill it within a few turns, this card represents a 6/6 Steadfast Lifedrain behemoth that is going to eat your soul. Murder it the instant you can. This is a reasonable target for Countermagic, though still not ideal.

Soul Marble: Now we finally get to a card that I will tell you to snap counter as soon as it hits the chain. This card represents a Soul Armament, which is nearly impossible for us to deal with, and extremely hard to win through. Soul Armament gives all the opponents troops +2/+2, Spellshield, and Steadfast. We have a really hard time dealing with Spellshield. AND, since Soul Marble and Soul Armament are both Constants, we can’t remove them once they’re in play. Our best kluge of a plan is to, exactly, Time Ripple and Countermagic. Two cards. We’re already getting 2 for 1ed from Giant Corpse fly, and likely discarding (preferably Buccaneer but likely) Time Ripple to the effect. I can’t emphasize this enough, COUNTER SOUL MARBLE.

Those are their biggest, common, threats. Obviously some decks may have some different cards, but those will also fall into the “counter as soon as it hits the chain” category. These cards are usually Relentless Corruption and/or Life Siphon. Counter them, don’t even think once. Just do it. Please. Relentless Corruption is brutal against us and makes me want to crawl in a hole and cry. Life Siphon is less bad, but if they’re casting it, it generally means it would kill us. This isn’t the Mono Blood deck, after all.

Playing to their removal is the next step in securing victory. We play Buccaneer, Archmage Wrenlocke, and Storm Colossus. These are the only ways of winning that they can prevent. They can’t affect Life Siphon besides you discarding it to Giant Corpse Fly (you numbskull) or by them tagging it with Inquisition (much more likely you poor sap). Buccaneer and Wrenlocke are likely going to get hit by a Murder or Repel at some point. Possibly Solitary Exile as well, since they only run so many of the first two. As much as it sucks, you basically can never do anything about this. I mean you can respond to them killing Wrenlocke by Peeking for an extra draw or something, but don’t try and stop them barring, as always, extreme circumstances.

Our Countermagic has to be saved for two main targets. We need to keep Soul Marble from hitting play, and we need to keep them from resolving their own Extinction if we have a Storm Colossus in play. Extinction is their only way to deal with Storm Colossus. Storm Colossus dodges every other kind of removal they have, and is absolutely our fastest way to win. Never play him without Countermagic backup. Yes, this means Storm Colossus is now a 10 resource, 2 card spell. Deal with it. If you stick one and counter their Extinction, chances are you just won the game. It may not necessarily be right now, with him, but you can Life Siphon a little way down the line for lethal so much easier if we took a chunk off them with the Big Bird.

This matchup is a very maneuvering and chess like game for us. We need to leverage all of the main axes for victory to really win. We need to have a hand. If we have a hand, it needs to contain Life Siphons, Countermagics, and a Resource or two to pitch to their topdecked Fly. This will allow us to win. We need to maintain enough board presence to bait them into casting an Extinction when we don’t yet have a Storm Colossus in play. Then we need to slam our Bird with Countermagic to tag the next Extinction they try to resolve. This will allow us to win. We need to keep our life total high enough that one turn of attacks after an Extinction has resolved, or a random Life Siphon, won’t kill us. This will keep us from losing.

[quote_center]” Storm Colossus dodges every other kind of removal they have, and is absolutely our fastest way to win. Never play him without Countermagic backup. Yes, this means Storm Colossus is now a 10 resource, 2 card spell. Deal with it.”[/quote_center]

To the best of our ability, we need to find ways to tempo the opponent into overextending into our Extinctions, likely through a sequence of Buccaneering a threat, it getting recast, chumping with our troop, and getting another troop or two cast against us. Getting to 3 for 1 our opponent is the dream in this matchup, though against a good pilot, your Extinction will likely only be dealing with one, maybe two of their troops. This is where knowing when to cast Storm Colossus matters. If you have two of them in hand, you can almost consider the first one to be another copy of Extinction mashed up with a Countermagic. If they have a better board than you (which, lets face it, should be nearly always) you can cast Storm Colossus without enough resource to even pretend to be able to cast Countermagic as well. This can often bait them into casting their own Extinction and removing some of their own troops along with your Bird.

These kind of windows allow us to stick the ‘real’ Storm Colossus a turn later, ideally with enough resources to actually be able to counter the next Extinction, if they even have it. As with every Tier 1 deck, you need to play very tight to win. Make even a small mistake, and you’ll likely be punished for it. A real control deck is threat light, so making sure to maximize on your threats is the only way to win. No matchup exemplifies this better than the Blood Diamond Midrange deck, because mainboard, they already have more Extinctions than you have Storm Colossus. You need to always play with this in mind. Do this, and always think about the best ways to answer each of their threats as they present it. If done right, you can win.

After reserves, we absolutely want to be able to resolve Chaos Key as late as possible. This should only hit the battlefield if there is already a Soul Marble in play. We only have 2, and it is our best way of dealing with Soul Marble/Armament. We can’t risk it getting hit by opposing Chaos Keys. We also want to bring in the additional Storm Colossus, and Eternal Guardian as game ending threats that they can’t Murder. Increasing the density of cards that require them to Extinction increases our chances of winning. Don’t forget that Eternal Guardian can go down to Repel, though. Be wary of that. Playing post-reserves is very similar to playing Game 1, but there is slightly less emphasis on having exactly the correct cards at exactly the correct times, because we are able to bring in spells that let our Countermagic ease up, if only slightly.

Against Blood Diamond Midrange, I like to take out the Buccaneer’s. They don’t deal with Soul Marble, die to every removal spell the opponent has, and are so bad when you have several Giant Corpse Flies or Xenoth’s Inquisitors cast against you. Polymorph: Dingler is another card that is not at its best here. The high cost is preventative to dealing with threats the way we need to, so removing one for our own threats is fine. We usually can win a little faster after getting another Storm Colossus, so ending the game in a quicker fashion lets us take out the worst removal spell and not really suffer for it.

Like I’ve said above, this is one of the tougher matchups because they have the best threats in the set, and the best removal along with it. Our singular counterspell is worked overtime dealing with the non-troops threats they have, and the removal for our own threats. Play tight, play smart, get a little lucky, and you’ll be just fine.

Shattered Destiny will be coming out soon, and I know we are all very excited for the release of the next set. It is disappointing that the release had to be pushed back a week, but if it takes them a week to get us the best possible product, then I am happy to let them have that week.

I hope everyone in our American audience had a Happy Thanksgiving yesterday, and that everyone who didn’t celebrate the holiday had a great Thursday instead. See you all in game!