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Went 3-3 drop from SCG Phoenix. My matchups were 2-1 Death and Taxes, 0-2 Death and Taxes, 2-0 UR Delver Burn, 2-0 Maverick, 0-2 Antonius on a storm brew, and 0-2 Esper Doomsday. I might do a report later, but I just got home and I'm tired right now.
And no, this is not evidence for needing to "fix the combo matchup," so let's not start that again.
At least you got to play! It was nice to meet you and hopefully I will see you again on may 5th in Tucson! The combo loses are understandable with the list I think you are playing, how did you go 2-3 against death and taxes? That is the part that confuses me!
A combination of bad draws and punting in one of the second round games. I don't remember exactly what happened in round two because I had a raging headache at the time.Quote:
Originally Posted by lavafrogg
Sorry to hear that! The top 8 was just ripe for you to wreck, minus the two combo decks, 6-8 good match-ups would have increased your chances.
The field was very stratified, and not in a good way. Once I picked up the loss to Death and Taxes, I dropped into the bracket that seemed to be rife with combo: Sneak-Show, Hive Mind, various flavors of storm, loads of Dredge, and so on. It was only a matter of time before I got ground out.Quote:
Originally Posted by lavafrogg
I'll write up a tournament report later, probably this evening. Round 2 is kind of a blur because my head was about to explode and the round went very quickly (Serra Avengers and Jotun Grunts carry SoLS tends to do that), but I remember the rest of it reasonably well enough.
Yes, I can corroborate the X-1 bracket was brimming with Combo decks. Three people out of my car ended up playing the same Show and Tell/Dream Halls deck. It was very disheartening :(
I figured I would write a report for this even though I didn’t really do well (3-3 drop) because, eh, why not. So here it is.
For the few days leading up to the tournament, I waffled really hard on the exact configuration of my Aggro Loam list. I’d played in a local event (going 3-1) but hadn’t been completely happy with my spell configuration or my manabase; despite liking Punishing Fire in my build, I was worried that I was trying to get too clever with it. In particular, in the matchups where I wanted to side out the Fires for various reasons (it was too slow, it didn’t do enough, etc.), I had no way to get rid of the Groves, and Grove without Fire is just terrible. I was also deeply unhappy with Maelstrom Pulse, mostly because the dream two-for-one scenario came up very rarely and you almost always lost on mana or card advantage when you aimed it at something else. So up until the night before the event, my spell slots were constantly changing: Terminate, Putrefies, Pulses, even maindeck Deathmarks. At one point I tried some Lilianas in the main, but after opening a hand of Grove, Mire, Mire, Crusher in my very first test game, I realized that trying to support her was too greedy.
I settled on this maindeck the night before the event:
4 Dark Confidant
3 Tarmogoyf
3 Scavenging Ooze
3 Countryside Crusher
1 Terravore
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Punishing Fire
1 Terminate
1 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Seismic Assault
4 Life from the Loam
4 Mox Diamond
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Bloodstained Mire
2 Taiga
1 Badlands
1 Bayou
1 Mountain
1 Forest
3 Grove of the Burnwillows
3 Forgotten Cave
3 Tranquil Thicket
3 Wasteland
1 Volrath’s Stronghold
As I wandered around the venue the morning of the event, I became aware of an unpleasant fact: the field was going to be full of dredge. I knew at least six people coming from Tucson with dredge decks, and found four more people testing, sleeving, or registering the deck while I walked in circles. I was worried: would people be switching to more graveyard hate? How was Faithless Dredge different from the dredge lists I’d played against two years ago, when I was last really active in the format? I had coached my friend through some dredge game ones against me the night before and had gotten destroyed each time, but I wasn’t sure if that was because I was telling him exactly the right plays to beat me, or if it was because my deck at the time had Lilis and a shitty manabase, or what. I decided to play it safe, however, and swap out a pair of discard spells for two Tormod’s Crypts, leaving me with the following sideboard:
2 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Thoughtseize
2 Ancient Grudge
1 Krosan Grip
2 Devastating Dreams
2 Noxious Revival
3 Surgical Extraction
2 Tormod’s Crypt
In retrospect, this was probably a mistake, since it seemed like many of the dredge players (at least, many of those I knew) got eliminated early on. However, at the time I was pretty worried about it, and despite Antonius’s assurances that he hadn’t lost a sanctioned match to dredge in about as long as I hadn’t played against dredge (years), I decided I was better safe than sorry.
As the event started, I came to realize that the sore spot in my neck I’d woken up with was now blossoming into a full-blown headache, possibly en route to migraine territory. I decided I would drop as soon as colors started doing weird things (always a sure sign of a migraine), but vowed to soldier on until then.
We had 158 (or was it 138?) players, for a total of eight rounds.
Round 1 against Bryce (Death and Taxes)
Game One: I sit down across from a chill-looking gentleman and shuffle up while making some jokes. He wins the roll and elects to play first; my hand has the Punishing Fires combo and a Dark Confidant, so I keep it. He opens with Plains, go, which makes me think “Maverick with a loose keep”, but I quickly realize otherwise when he gets a turn two Leonin Arbiter (buh?). It promptly dies to Fire because I want to fetch. He follows with another one, which also dies to Fire. I eventually cast Bob, who goes farming; I topdeck another one, but he goes farming too. We then enter an awkward (and fifteen-minute-long) period wherein I don’t draw an Assault or a creature and every creature he casts dies to Punishing Fire. I eventually draw Countryside Crusher and reduce him from 30 to zero in two turns.
I decide to sideboard as follows: -Pulse, -Loam, -Terminate, +2 Dreams, +1 Grudge
Game Two: My hand is stacked, so I decide to lead with a turn two Bob. Unfortunately, my opponent has the turn one Wasteland for my turn one Bayou, and I can’t draw a land to save my life for several turns. I eventually get to two mana and cast a succession of Scavenging Oozes and Tarmogoyfs, but they don’t do anything to stop his Vials into Flickerwisps plus Serra Avengers. Apparently nine power in the air is hard to beat when you only have two mana.
Game Three: I don’t remember what I kept, but I do remember him casting a turn one Horizon Canopy into Vial and then not having a land on turn two. I decide to hamstring him on mana and Dreams for one. He limps along with Vial for a while before finally drawing a land to play a second and then third Vial. Unfortunately, I’m not clocking him very quickly; my Tarmogoyf is only a 3/4 and he keeps Vialing in blockers. Eventually I stick a Scavenging Ooze, eat his (very large) graveyard, and kill him.
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Round one finished just before time was called, but in all fairness, game one took twenty-five very awkward minutes. My headache had been growing all the while, turning from simply a nuisance into a dull, throbbing ache that was making it hard to concentrate. Unfortunately, all my friends were still in the event, so there was no way I could ask someone else to go find some pain medication for me.
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Round 2 against Robb (Death and Taxes)
To be honest, this round is kind of a blur. Robb has a better build than Bryce, dropping the terrible hatebears for Mirran Crusaders and what seems like a Stoneforge Package. I have a Punishing Fire to curtain some of his game one shenanigans, but he Wastes my Grove and then eats me alive with a Jotun Grunt followed by Serra Avengers. I sideboard the same as previously. Game two I don’t see nearly enough spot removal, hold my Devastating Dreams for way too long (for reasons I can’t remember), and I die to a Crusader with a Jitte. It turns out pro: green is some good against a Tarmogoyf wall.
---
By this time, the pain had wrapped around from the back of my head, a single raging ache that went from my right eye to back behind my right ear. I’m not sure if it was exacerbated by the fact that I was mildly tilted about losing to a creature deck, annoyed with myself for punting game two, or that it was actually just getting worse, but regardless, I was now in actual pain by the time pairings for round three went up.
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Round 3 versus Donald (UR Delver Burn)
I know Donald from the store closest to my apartment in Tucson; he’s a great player and a pretty nice guy, and between my headache and his rating, I’m worried that I’ll be 1-2 drop by the end of this. Luckily for me, that’s not how it works out.
Game One: He opens with Delver; I open with Bolt. He follows with Goblin Guide, who works my life total but thankfully gives me lands. I slowly build up a board (fighting through counters as I go), and by the time my opponent’s Goblin Guide gains a happy little friend, I’ve got a grip full of removal and dudes. I stabilize on five and demolish him with Assault.
I sideboard as follows: -1 Terminate, -1 Pulse, +2 Noxious Revival
Game Two: My opponent opens with a dead Delver into Goblin Guide (again), while I open on removal into Scavenging Ooze. I lose my Loams to a Surgical, and then lose my Fires when I try to recur one on his EoT, but at that point it’s not really relevant; he looks at my hand and get a peek at Terravore and a Crusher, and his follow-up play of Sulferic Vortex turns out to be The Goggles. He scoops once it becomes clear I’m about to kill him with Terravore.
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The third round ended quickly enough, but I couldn’t remember if we’d passed any drugstores or supermarkets on the way in. The concession stand in the lobby didn’t have any Tylenol (of course), and neither did the card dealers. One of my friends had scrubbed out, but didn’t have any pain medication on him. Desperate, I walked up to the registration/main booth and asked them, operating under the assumption that there should be a first aid station and that said station should have pain medication. There apparently wasn’t such a thing, but one of the people working the booth just so happened to have some Aleve, so I gratefully took some and waited for it to kick in (which it dutifully did right before round four started).
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Round 4 against Ryan (GWu Maverick)
Ryan is another local player, also a nice guy with an impressive skill set. I receive word that he’s on dredge (ugh) and sit down to discover that there are dredge vs. X matchups raging for several tables to either side of me. Fun!
Game One: My opponent shuffles up and opens with Windswept Heath (sweet!) into GSZ for Dryad Arbor. I open with a Bolt on the Arbor on my turn and assemble the Punishing Grove combo to keep his board clear of little utility guys. He sticks a Knight with a Jitte, but I manage to whittle down his mana to just a Horizon Canopy and a Wasteland, and stick a Seismic Assault just as I’m about to die. The three Loams I’ve accumulated kill his Knight and then kill him.
I sideboard as follows: -1 Terminate, -1 Pulse, -1 Loam, +2 Dreams, +1 Grudge
Game Two: My opponent goes for the turn one Arbor again, and I have the turn one removal spell again. He uses Enlightened Tutor to fetch up a Relic of Progenitus, but I keep a steady stream of lands going to my graveyard to mitigate its tap ability. We trade removal for a while, but eventually I stick a Crusher, who promptly gets very large and then finds himself joined by a second Crusher. My opponent scoops. During de-sideboarding, he reveals that he has 1 Tropical Island and brought in Submerge against me. Interesting.
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My headache was now gone and I felt good about dodging combo matchups so far. The tournament had taken on a layered structure by this point: the top tables were relatively diverse, but just underneath them was a large cap of scary-looking non-interactives. I figured it was only a matter of time until the cap either dropped to where I was, or until I ran into it. When the pairings for round four went up and I saw a familiar name, I realized the reckoning had come.
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Round 5 versus Antonius (UB Storm Brew)
I’d met Tony (a pretty cool guy) the day before when I was watching the Legacy Challenge side event. He had wanted to sleeve up Aggro Loam for the event, but a friend had borrowed his Wooded Foothills and was nowhere to be found until a few minutes before the player’s meeting. In the Challenge event, Tony played an interesting-looking storm brew that ran maindeck Snapcasters alongside Cabal Therapy; I was incredulous, but it seemed to perform well. This was the brew against which I was now paired.
Game One: I do some stuff but do not apply nearly enough pressure. I die to a storm chain.
I sideboard as follows: -1 Pulse, -1 Terminate, -2 Punishing Fire, -1 Loam, +2 Inquisition, +1 Thoughtseize, +2 Surgicals.
Game Two: I keep a hand with Inquisition, Loam, Surgical, and some mana. It lacks pressure, but between the discard spell and the Extraction, I figure I have a few turns to draw into something. I Inquisition him and see a hand with Ad Nauseam (his only one) and some other stuff, and take...a card I don’t remember (I didn’t write it down). He goes for a nonbasic into Brainstorm and I Wasteland him in response. What follows is an awkward dance, wherein I draw stone nothing and he’s mana-screwed. I eventually Thoughtseize his Ad Noz, but I still can’t find something to clock him (hello infinite mana draw), but he rips a second LED and goes for it. I die to an IGG loop.
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Bad beats. Tony assured me that X-2 still had a good shot at prize and maybe even a top 8 slot, although I was certain my tiebreakers were not nearly good enough for that. Still, a top 16 finish would be worth it, so I decided to soldier on to see if I could get there.
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Round 6 against Lowell (Esper Doomsday)
Game One: My opponent opens with Strand into a blue/x dual and a Brainstorm, which makes me think he’s on Esper Stoneblade, but then he follows his Brainstorm with a Ponder and I become confused. Ponder doesn’t usually see play outside of RUG and combo, but combo these days doesn’t usually play white...does it? I don’t really keep track of combo lists because it’s not a deck type that really appeals to me, so I’m not motivated to learn it...but at the same time, unless he’s on a bad Stoneblade list, there’s no other reason he’d be playing Ponder. I start to get That Sinking Feeling, the one you get when you realize you’re about to scrub out. Sure enough, my opponent goes off a couple turns later, and a cracked LED reveals a pair of Doomsdays. Well, I know jack about Doomsday, so I guess that explains it. On to the next game!
I sideboard as follows: -1 Terminate, -1 Pulse, -2 Fire, -1 Loam, -1 Assault, +2 Inquisition, +1 Thoughtseize, +3 Surgical.
Game Two: This game is pretty unexciting. My opponent Doomsdays into a combo kill and I drop. Ah well.
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I wandered around a bit afterwards because my ride had joined the Draft Open while I’d been playing, and I was now waiting for him rather than the other way around. The meta had condensed quite a bit: many of the fair decks and a lot of the dredge players were gone at the start of round seven, and it seemed like most of what was left consisted of combo and L.A. players. I watched a couple of rounds, but none of them were particularly interesting: flipped Delvers doing what flipped Delvers do, 12/12 Grave-Trolls mauling people, Sneak Attacks making Noodly Monsters, that sort of thing. I sold off some of my Legacy staples to an L.A. vendor (mtgdeals.com, for those interested). I bought some EDH cards, both to pimp out existing decks and to help build new ones. I wandered back over to Tony’s table in the middle of round eight to discover him paired against the Esper player I lost to in round six, and decided to watch some hilariously exciting games that eventually ended in a...well, I don’t want to steal Tony’s thunder, since I think he’s writing a report. My friends both scrubbed out of the draft open and we left to eat some delicious pork tenderloin (courtesy of my ride’s mother) and head back to Tucson.
In retrospect, Aggro Loam was not as optimal a choice as I’d thought it would be. Following a top eight overflowing with RUG decks, I expected people to show up with Maverick and similar fair decks, and to stay off of combo. In fact, the opposite happened: a lot of RUG did well this time, and a lot of combo did well, too. I guess the West Coast is a pretty combo-heavy metagame? I know Sneak-Show and Dredge are both popular in Tucson. Either way, Aggro Loam’s prey matchups dried up pretty quickly after the first few rounds, and I would have eventually lost out to things I couldn’t beat even with a full set of five discard spells in the sideboard. On the plus side, I did get to meet Koby, Antonius, lavafrogg, and Que, who are all interesting people who unfortunately live too far away from me.
So yeah, that’s a wrap. I picked up a couple of important things from this tournament:
- I’m still really on the fence about Punishing Fire. I liked it when I had it, but the x/3 and x/4 guys in the two DnT matchups gave me fits. I could easily see cutting Fires for more removal, but none of the other options in that category really excite me.
- Maelstrom Pulse is easily the worst card in the deck. It’s just very bad at doing anything you want it to do...the problem is, because it does everything, there’s not really a very clean substitute for it. If you want to hit equipment, the next best card is Ancient Grudge, and that’s not really maindeckable. If you want to kill creatures, there’s Deathmark, Ghastly Demise, Terminate, and a bunch of other cards that are depressingly bad because they aren’t StP. If you want to kill planeswalkers...well, there’s burn spells, but Jace and Elspeth both move out of easy burn range when you activate their plus abilities. Pulse is less situational than another removal spell but pays for it by being embarrassing at everything it does.
- Terminate is not far behind Pulse in the “being bad” category. Two mana is not where you want to be. You often lose on mana, and even when killing two-drops you often lose on value because of all the CiP abilities creatures have these days. Being an instant and having no targeting restrictions attracted me to it, but the card is just very meh.
- I’m once again dissatisfied with how durdly the deck can be. Several of the games I lost were to just not being able to find the right cards, and having to make painful choices about whether or not I had the time to dredge into and then recur them. The deck really needs something else to be good, but I don’t know what it is. Sylvan Libraries might have been the answer for my build, but they’re competing with removal, albeit bad removal. The problem is, if I cut Terminate and Pulse for 2 Library, I have no way to kill large creatures in the main.
- There were plenty of times where I just wanted to cut the Loam engine and play some sort of Jund control deck with fewer mana sources. I feel like Loam, as both a card and a strategy, is bad for a couple reasons: relying on it too heavily opens you up to Surgical-based blowouts, removing Loam improves your draws by cutting down on how much mana you have, removing Loam allows you to do real things instead of durdling with cycle to draw or Wasteland, dredge, Wasteland. Most of the games I won this weekend involved Loam only tangentially, and once I won without even having them in my deck (hi, Surgical); in many of the games I lost, Loam, Moxen, and all those lands were so much dead weight that stood between me and the cards that mattered. Loam is powerful in theory, but I don’t think it’s nearly as good in practice.
We’ll see where the meta goes once Avacyn Restored hits, but unless it makes Maverick both ridiculously powerful and ridiculously good against combo, I don’t foresee this deck continuing to be a good choice. It really hasn’t aged well since the last time I picked it up two years ago, which is kind of depressing since I like it a lot. I’m not sure what they could print to revitalize it: probably a black StP, a cheap red or green planeswalker, and maybe something else that synergizes with Loam without relying too heavily on Loam (and thereby introducing the old Survival of the Fittest conundrum where Survival decks built too heavily to rely on Survival completely fell apart without their namesake card).
Hey you never got to meet me D: Come and say hi sometime at an event, I don't think I'm that hard to spot, there's two of me :D Oh also, Lowell is Mostly_Harmless on here. He's the resident storm player up here in Phoenix.
Where did you play for the local event? Showtime or Amazing D? Or some magical place I hadn't heard of?
Amazing D. Showtime isn't within walking distance, so I can't be bothered to go there.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ziveeman
Well, it was a good fight. Damn Antonius… switched to storm because he couldn’t find foothills, eh? :P
Lightning Bolt is really where you need to be at the moment. It just does so much more without making your mana base ridiculous. There is only so many Taiga variants you can support and you cannot cut down actual Taigas. EE is still good, Pulse is bad but necessary. Terminate and Ghastly Demise, I never was a big fan of. Deathmark is interesting, but it cannot kill Delver, Guide, Bobs, Snapcasters and a lot of little crap that will make your life hell. It can kill Knights and Goyfs though, which Bolt is bad at. Eh.
You only really dredge for 2 reasons: Seismic or Wasteland. It’s a pain in the ass to dredge just for a cycle-land. Yes, you maintain card-parity, but you spend 3 mana. Bad. I try to dredge as little as possible. Sometimes, I cut a Loam when I sideboard stuff, in order to make them over-estimate how much the deck needs Loam. It does not.
I also thought about jund, but losing loam and mox diamond can be an issue.
I like Liliana. I really like her, she is so good whenever I draw her. I seem to be one of the few, but I still like her. The new red cheap planeswalker is bad though, so we are probably not getting anything good in Avacyn.
I don’t think our deck needs to age well, because it doesn’t need to change that much. We are removal, good creatures, and good card advantage.
I am gonna play it again this weekend with 3 Lilianas and 6 sideboard discard. Hopefully it will work out
You could always be like me and play 6 discard and 3 Lilly's main deck!
Jokes aside, Lilliana is the absolute nuts in a loam deck, she does everything we need a card to do and her ultimate just causes scoops. One an opponent realizes that they get no hand and no creatures for the rest of her existence.... Things look pretty grim.
She is in my vindicate/pulse slot and pridemages take care or artifacts/enchantments. The only card type I cannot directly deal with is other planeswalkers but so far discard+land destruction+dudes have been enough to keep walkers off the table.
Even with 6 main deck discard spells and 3 Lilliana's, 1-2 hate cards are needed from the side. I have GSZ for teeg and a meta dependent 3-of. With that hate package the most important part of the game is landing the early goyf to make sure they cannot recover.
Lili wrecks the mana. I like Punishing Fires because it clears out the shitty guys so Lili's -2 actually has some bite, but the mana can't support Groves and the ability to hit BB before, say, turn five.
As for the discard, meh. I like discard in decks with less mana and faster clocks.
I said," be like me", which would imply that you dropped red altogether to play white and a heavie black mana base. If combo is something you are worried about, and you still want to play loam, it is proably the safest bet outside of mainboard discard and chalice(which I wouldn't recommend).
It has been stated before that the red version with assault has better matchups with certain decks than the white version, but as time goes on the differences are becoming smaller and smaller as the white version evolves.
And with discard, I don't think I could ever play a deck that could not interact with either blue or black disruption. As fun as "dumb" aggro decks are I feel that letting your opponent do whatever they want and then trying to answer is a scary feeling.
Lavafrogg, your bgw list really intrigues me...would you mind sharing it ?
It's here: http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...Junk-AggroDirtQuote:
Originally Posted by Oxmo39
Right now my list is up in the rock thread and my own junk thread(that noone ever goes into). Unless discussion takes off in the thread about gbw I will leave it over there. The aggro loam thread usually devolves into a "discard is bad" and "you need to play red" whirlwind, that I try to stay out of for the most part;)
Thank you for your interest though! I look forward to your input over there!
P.S. AggroZombies is so leet! He beat me too it!
So I played this weekend in a 40man event. Basically the changes from my previous deck:
+1 Liliana (to 3)
-1 Pulse (to 1)
These were the games:
R1: Matt with Stoneblade. W2-1, Matt conceded with enough time to draw because he was in a worse position.
R2: Tim with Stoneblade. W2-1
R3: Adam with ANT. W2-1, there was not much science with this, Adam got very unlucky, and as did I. He was short of killing me G3 by ANY card off his Ad Nauseum, and he hit his 2nd instead of anything else.
R4: Steve Wolfman, RUG Delver, W2-0
R5: ID with Galen, Painter
R6: ID with Ben, Sneak and Show
Top8: Harant with Stoneblade. L1-2
Harant uses Invisible Stalkers. Hexproof. Ugh.
So this was the most frustrating match ever. I win game one off a turn 2 Terravore. He counters my ooze, and I draw only land for the rest of the game. But, he cannot kill the Terravore that ends up being 9/9 or 10/10.
G2, I don't remember much. He was pretty behind, but I hit a stream of ONLY lands and Mox Diamonds, allowing him to come back. He counters like one or two spells all game.
G3 is even worse. He keeps a hand with plains, mishra's, and no islands.
Me:
Turn 1: Bob. Swords to Plowshares.
Turn 2: Bob. Swords to Plowshares.
Turn 3: Terravore. Swords to Plowshares.
Him:
Turn 4: Cast Invisible Stalker, with me at 25 life.
Turn 13: Cast 2nd Invisible Stalker, with me at 16 life.
Turn 18: Cast 3rd Invisible Stalker, with me at 8 life.
He countered one spell from Turn 3, and I drew only fetches, mana lands, a couple of wastelands, mox diamonds, and 2 thoughtseize, which would have been great it i drew anything.
By the end, my deck was like 30 cards or so, like 25 non-land.
Yeah.
Sounds like bad beats. Aggro Loam has some pretty shitty draws sometimes.
Ok, so I am going to try this next time:
4 Dark Confidant
4 Scavenging Ooze
3 Terravore
1 Grim Lavamancer
3 Liliana of the Veil
4 Thoughtseize
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Life from the Loam
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Sylvan Library
4 Mox Diamond
4 Wasteland
4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Tranquil Thicket
2/3 Barren Moor
2/3 Bayou
2 Badlands
2 Taiga
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Forest
1 Swamp
1 Volrath's Stronghold
Sideboard
4 Leyline of the Void
3 Ancient Grudge
3 Thoughtseize
3 Devastating Dreams
2 Something else
Might be a mistake. It's not really aggro loam anymore that much. More like Control Loam. But since there is no thread on that anymore...
Not running Seismic Assault strikes me as the mistake. There is not a whole lot of reason to run Life from the Loam as an engine if you can't kill people with it. Can you drop EE and then add a Fire-Lit Thicket and/or Graven Cairns?