POW Legacy League with Atraxa BUG

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BUG Trest

This is the second league that I’ve recorded and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve found looking over the replays extremely interesting. There were a couple of fairly egregious misplays in this league: some leading to game losses, while others that I wasn’t punished for. Here are a few of the more obvious ones:

Game Analysis: Read after watching

Round 1, game 1: I have two Force of Wills in hand and two blue cards to pitch, then counter a Cabal Ritual when my opponent starts to combo, noting that Cabal Therapy would wreck me. I think this is too aggressive on my part since I can protect myself against one discard spell by Forcing Cabal Therapy (which would obviously name Force game one). Duress isn’t a problem since they can only take one of my Forces with that. It seems reasonable to put the opponent on one discard spell — they run at least six pre-board after all. Having countered the first Cabal Ritual I think it’s definitely correct to counter the second since ritual into discard is such a common play pattern from ANT.

Round 2, game 1: as it happens, if I’d attacked with the Baleful Strix then I’d have drawn Leovold, Emissary of Trest, which *might* have been enough to prevent my opponent from digging into Griselbrand or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. I think it’s clear that they didn’t have Griselbrand or Emrakul in hand — they’ve have cast either with Omniscience if they had it. We didn’t need to leave the Baleful Strix back to survive an Emrakul attack since we had plenty of permanents and a healthy 18 life. It’s possible that we would still have lost even with Leovold, Emissary of Trest — opponent could have had Force and blue card — but I think it was worth drawing the extra card to maximize the chance of hitting a GSZ or Leo.

Round 3, game 2: casting an Abrupt Decay on the Snapcaster Mage before blockers had been declared was horrible. My opponent made the correct block (i.e. not blocking) after the Decay, which led to an awkward board stall. This should have been an easy game to win, but turned into a slightly sketchy race thanks to the time the board stall gave my opponent.

Round 5, game 1: I’m pretty sure my opponent would have cast Daze on the Sylvan Library if they’d had it, so we don’t have to worry quite as much about the card on subsequent turns. Obviously the card is still worth playing around if we have the luxury of doing so.

Round 5, game 3: I think this is more subtle than the other misplays. There’s definitely a case to be made that trying to mana-screw my opponent was far too greedy. Arguably, I should have traded the Abrupt Decay for the Vines of Vastwood earlier since it was unlikely I’d be able to get a 2-1 with the Decay. My opponent was winning on board so they had no incentive to go “all in” on the Blighted Agent. Sideboarding in a way that opened me up to Karakas and generally diluting my threat density might have been fairly stupid too. However, I think the real mistake was not casting Brainstorm earlier in the game. I ended up getting fixated on holding blue cards for Force of Will, convinced that it was a good card in the match-up. This is incorrect: Force of Will trades 2-for-1, which is sometimes necessary against an aggressive opponent, but that makes it a bad card when grinding. I think the correct play would have been to have cast Brainstorm before casting Abrupt Decay on my opponent’s first Blighted Agent. I had a shuffle effect on board and a bunch of dead or bad cards — Leovold and Force — in hand at the time. I think I was worried about the opponent Dazing the Brainstorm, but it seems pretty unlikely that somebody would Daze a Brainstorm against two open mana.

Let me know in the comments if you see anything else that I should have done differently!

Thanks for watching,

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