Weekly 3CB: #10 (entries close 12/7/07) (PMs accepted)

[freakish777]

@freakish: How do you WW against decks 16, 19, 25 (Tabernacle/Treetop/Vineyard) with Workshop/Golem/Wheel ? After they play Tabernacle, you can only deal 3 per turn, while they deal 5, and you can't deal enough damage early to win that race.

Mmmm, I'm not sure how I got that I was winning there, I think I somehow mentally substituted Chimeric Idol for Golem on my side of the board, because I had "Done the Calculations once for my first deck already and lost, so clearly that means my almost identical deck wins in that one."

So my first deck should be up 6 and my second deck down 18 (unfortunately).

[Wallace]

Would anyone have a problem with me going in and doing some of the match ups myself. I have a little bit of free time and could figure out a few of them so we can get moving on 3CB#11.

[etrigan]

Results posted.

Props:
Tabernacle
Playing against Show and Tell decks

Slops:
Winning with Chimerid Idol
Netdecking whores
Netdecking whores who merge two good decks to make one bad one

[Illissius]

Would anyone have a problem with me going in and doing some of the match ups myself. I have a little bit of free time and could figure out a few of them so we can get moving on 3CB#11.

Go ahead. Twould be appreciated.

[Maveric78f]

Anusien, your 23 deck loses against 16/19/25. Mana burn is life loss that your enchantment can't prevent. You lose life far faster than your factories could make.

[Illissius]

He can use the mana to repeatedly remove zero counters from his storage land.

[Sanguine Voyeur]

Sorry it took me so long to get to this, I've been some kind of sick, and by extension, borderline drunk.

Results for Shining Arbor
1 - LL
2 - LL
3 - LL
4 - LL
5 - LL
6 - --
7 - LL
8 - DD
9 - WW
10 - WW
11 - WW
12 - DD
13 - WW
14 - LL
15 - LL
16 - DD
17 - LL
18 - DD
19 - DD
20 - LL
21 - DD
22 - LL
23 - LL
24 - LL
25 - DD
26 - LL
27 - LL
28 - WD

Total points: A resounding 42. Quite the failure.

[georgjorge]

Having a little free time, I calculated 18. Factory, Orzhov, Vindicate for a respectable 104 points.

@Anusien: I think you get one point, not zero, against deck 18 (Factory/Orzhov/Vindicate): If you are on the play, you can drop Energy Field before he can Vindicate your land. He must Vindicate your land then not to lose, and draw.

@Treetop Village/Vineyard/Tabernacle: If I think correctly, Planeswalkers don't have to pay 1 for Tabernacle. Thus, you would lose both games to deck 3 (Lotus/Quicksand/Ajani) instead of winning both, as he would put a 20/20 or something into play on turn 3, an be able to pay it's upkeep.

@Maveric: You have WL against 24 (Reef/Factory/Chalice), as he can put down Chalice on one on the play to prevent Vineyard.



Apart from those, I think all the viable candidates for top places are in, so we might as well call it a day and publish the official Top 5 (or Top 3, or whatever) list...

[Illissius]

@Anusien: I think you get one point, not zero, against deck 18 (Factory/Orzhov/Vindicate): If you are on the play, you can drop Energy Field before he can Vindicate your land. He must Vindicate your land then not to lose, and draw.

"When a card is put into your graveyard, sacrifice Energy Field."

@Treetop Village/Vineyard/Tabernacle: If I think correctly, Planeswalkers don't have to pay 1 for Tabernacle. Thus, you would lose both games to deck 3 (Lotus/Quicksand/Ajani) instead of winning both, as he would put a 20/20 or something into play on turn 3, an be able to pay it's upkeep.

I think this is WL. On the play he can attack Ajani down to three before he can make a token.

@Maveric: You have WL against 24 (Reef/Factory/Chalice), as he can put down Chalice on one on the play to prevent Vineyard.

Seems correct.

[Illissius]

Alright, I went and finished the remaining results. I only filled in the holes at the end, so if the owners of decks #3, #7, #12, #14, #17, and #24 -- T_B, Sanguine Voyeur, technogeek5000, Mordenkain, TheCramp, and Anusien, respectively -- give a shit at all, which they apparently don't, they can double check the rest of their results.

7 vs 14 is some kind of complicated (not sure how it compares with 12 vs 24, the other brainfucker) and I'm too tired for this, so I just left that one as "X". Again, if anyone cares, they can try to figure it out.

[Maveric78f]

12 vs 24 is not really complicated:
- as 12 is not fast enough to race the factory token and once the factory token is into play it can't attack anymore,
- as 24 cannot generate mana with a factory into play, because of the tabernacle upkeep.

They are going to be stuck at this point. So the issue is DD.

7 vs 14 is complicated though. Difficult to have an idea about it. Looks like Stylus can help sometimes, and that 14 cannot lose (it's possible to block every turn without taking any burn from the tabernacle upkp). My intuition tells me that it should be WW for 14, but it's difficult to prove it.

As the 12 vs 24 is a fun game, I imagined what would have been if we replace Dreadship Reef with Saprazzan Cove instead. 12 still cannot win because 24 could stall as well as with Reef, but it can produce mana after generating the first factory generated. Basically, the idea is that player24 will wait until it has enough mana under cove and then he'll create 1 factory each turn, paying the upkeep costs at the same time. Once they are generated, he will attack with everything still paying the upkeep cost.

If t is the number of turns spent by player 24, we have :
player24's life = 4 or 6 for t>9
player12's life = 18+t (the right play is to play mishra first)
Mana inside Cove = t-9

How many factories would 24 need to make an alpha strike in X turns (keeping 1 creature in defense, difficult to decide when exactly stop keeping 1 in defense) where tf is the turn when 12 would die :
damage to be done : 18+tf
damage done by x factories in 1 turn : (x-2)*2 (1 in defense and 1 blocked)
damage done by x factories in x-1 turn (1 is destroyed each turn) : (x-2)*(x-1) + player24's life (no need to keep defense when the life is bigger than the remaining turns*2 of your opponents)
Needed mana to pay the upkeep during all this time : (x-2)*(x-1)/2 (the urza's factory can pay the upkeep too)
Needed mana to generare the factories : 7*x
Needed mana to pay the upkeep during the generation : (x-2)*(x-1)/2 (the last produced one does not need to be paid)

At this stage, it appears that player24 cannot win because the cost is superior to the damage and 1 mana = 1 turn = 1 life.

[Tao]

7 vs. 14 can not be won by the Stylus deck. The other deck has just to play City of Traitors, Epochrasite and block.

[Maveric78f]

Mmm. Right. The tech is not to play the tabernacle. So it's DD.

[Illissius]

7 vs 14 would easily be a draw if the Sites didn't have haste when they came off suspend, because then everyone just blocks, but they do. So they can get a hit in before the other guy unsuspends, which makes all the tactical maneuvering with Tabernacle and Stylus relevant again. Which hurts my brain.

In 12 vs 24, 12 obviously can't win because they can't attack once 24 has the mana to make a token. What 24 can do is charge the Reef at end of turn for the next X turns, where X belongs to the set of tremendously huge numbers, and then for the next Y upkeeps, remove counters from it to make a Factory token while paying for the Tabernacle costs of all the previous tokens. Then, for the next Z turns, alpha strike while losing a token to the other Factory, which is 3/3 on defense (optionally replacing it with a new one next turn, which is even more mana). However, every turn that the Urza's Factory player charges their Reef or attacks, the Mishra's Factory player gains one life from the Valley. So the question is whether the damage from the alpha strikes with the tokens gained from the mana can ever outpace the life gained with the Valley.

It turns out it can, but it took a hell of while before we figured it out. (Can't remember the exact amount of mana in the Reef which we showed is a win, but it was on the order of the hundreds of thousands.)

[Maveric78f]

Illissius stop just saying the contrary to what I've said. Both MUs end with double draw.

7vs14 : no one has anything to win by attacking. Attacking basically gives your opponent a turn. Eventually every player will sit in defense.

12vs24 : I forgot about the instant speed of the factory creation, but even with it it appeared to me it was impossible (cf 2 posts upper).

[georgjorge]

So since it's already been going for two weeks, here the results as based on the Wiki, taking into account that freakish7777, after his own account, has 18 points too many, and Maveric should (probably) have the same amount of points as the other two Vineyard decks.

1st (112): Anusien (deck 23):

Dreadship Reef / Urza's Factory / Energy Field

2nd (111): Cramp (deck 16), Maveric (deck 19), freakish (deck 25):

Vineyard / Tabernacle / Treetop Village

3rd (110): georgjorge (deck 5):

Chimeric Idol / Wheel of torture / Mishra's Workshop

4th (106): freakish (deck 26):

Steel Golem / Wheel of torture / Mishra's Workshop

5th (104): Mordenkain (deck 15), Illisius (deck 27):

Keldon Megaliths / Izzet Boilerworks / Energy Field


The top places are very close to each other, and it seems like the slow decks took it this time (no Lotus at all in the top 5). Congrats to Anusien, and to freakish7777 for placing both of his decks in the top 4.