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Thread: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

  1. #1

    2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    No names; for some reason I consciously decided not to deal with that, though usually I at least get them from the slip. Its possible I might've mixed up minor details from some game 1s and 2s (mostly against Thresh/Bant). Came in having not played the format for a few months with a lot of Goblin experience and some Thresh experience from times past & Extended. Anyway, this is what I was handed to sleeve up just before the tournament:

    4 Goblin Warchief
    4 Goblin Lackey
    4 Aether Vial
    4 Goblin Matron
    4 Goblin Piledriver
    4 Goblin Chieftan
    4 Goblin Ringleader
    3 Siege-Gang Commander
    3 Stingscourger
    3 Gempalm Incinerator
    1 Goblin Sharpshooter
    1 Lightning Crafter
    1 Warren Instigator

    16 Mountain (I wasn't happy when I realized how few this played, but the list was turned in by then)
    4 Wasteland

    SB:
    4 Pyrokinesis
    3 Magus of the Moon
    2 Pyroblast
    2 Tormod's Crypt
    2 Relic of Progenitus
    2 Summoner's Trap

    r1 survival
    I had t1 lackey on the draw both games, and my opponent keeps hands with no t1 play, t2 survival both games. One of the games involed a t3 goyf which got Stingscourged for superb value. I think the first game my opponent was stuck on 2 lands after waste/gempalm->bird while I had an active vial. Nothing particularly nuts here on my end, just a turn or two of unanswered Lackey.

    r2 reanimator Scott Seitz
    Combo - oops, goblins loses this one!
    Game 1 is sorta close, but he gets Iona a turn before I can try to set up vial->Stingscourger off of Matron. Its possible I could've tried to mull into a better hand with Lackey instead of Vial here, but I'm not sure it would've made much of a difference.

    Game 2 I get him with a clock & Relic.

    Game 3 I have t1 relic, t2 vial or lackey & activate, but... T1 iona on the play >>> non-leyline SB.

    r3 dragon stompy
    I keep a hand with t1 lackey... and my opponent plays tomb, SSG, 3 sphere. He follows sphere with gathan and then Mauler, while I Matron for Scourger (and have Gempalm in hand). He lets me search off of Matron, and I don't let him get the Mauler counter (hit play, i'm searching, etc). He swings, I don't block, then he plays a Jitte off Tomb. I had to think about how to deal with that one...

    I attack with Matron (mistake - should've held it back so I can block, cycle on Gathan pre-dmg and kill it, resetting Mauler with Scourger). Instead, I Gempalm the Mauler, planning to Scourge the raiders after he pitches a card to it (and deal with Jitte by overwhelming him with SGC and other stuff while I chain Scourgers). This goes as planned, and since he's been using Tomb all game I end up using (2 I think, might've been all 3) Stingscourgers to tempo him out, costing him 2 life repeatedly while I advance my board with 2 spells a turn. I drew 6 mountains this game, which is... absurdly lucky on my part.

    Game 2 I keep mountain, lackey, spells and learn a hard lesson that Dragon Stompy actually does play Chalice (at 1). I don't draw a third land for 3sphere before he gets Raiders and Deus.

    Game 3 I get t1 lackey against my opponent's morph. I Stingscourge it back (hello Akroma!), get a hit and that puts me very far ahead. My opponent didn't draw SB cards for g3 apparently.

    r4 Dream Halls
    I know he's playing dream halls b/c there was talk about someone needing Shows, and he was the guy's "friend who actually had them" or somesuch.

    Game 1 I develop into racing his combo with Lackey. On the critical "go off or die" turn, I tap my wasteland to play a Warchief - I already had lethal next turn with Chieftan in hand, and while Wasteland wouldn't have stopped the Lim-Dul's Vault, it would've killed the Underground Sea as the 3rd land for Show&Tell. (My opp said it didn't matter, still a mistake though).

    Game 2 I keep a hand involving a Pyroblast, Vial and Magus. Vial hits 3 counters and Magus kolds him. I don't recall what Pyroblast countered in this game, probably the Force he telegraphed when I Vialed in Magus.

    Game 3 my opponent mulls, Forces (Lackey or Vial, unsure), then gets his EOT Brainstorm Pyroblasted (judgement call, seemed fine as he had a fetch up and was down major cards from mull/Force). I end up racing a Shown Progenitus and winning.

    r5 UGr thresh
    Thresh is pretty simple, at least to me. Play it slow, most dorks are expendable, and just get value out of the good cards in the deck (mostly Ringleader, really). I'm sure I got things mixed up here, since I have myself taking damage in game 1 (where I believe my opp had goyf on offense with Goose on defense) but not game 2.

    Game 1 he has Fire for Lackey after EOT Brainstorm (personally I hate that play a lot), I walk Piledriver into Daze, after which I start resolving dudes. Sharpshooter pings him when he bolts one of my guys, and suddenly I can alpha for exactsies past his tapped 3/4 Goyf and Goose.
    Game 2 he has Bolt for my Lackey. Past that I don't recall; I never took a hit, and my opponent went -2, -5, -7, -1, -2, 0.

    My opponent made some strange plays, such as using bolt before I declare attackers. I believe one such situation involved 2 matrons, Piledriver and Warchief and his 3/3 mongoose on defense (goyf tapped from attacking). He bolts warchief before I declare, where it seems like letting me try to go for it, bolting my Driver and killing the Chief with Goose would've been much more productive (his life was mid-teens, so the 2 dmg wouldn't really matter there I wouldn't think).

    r6 bant id
    Would end up being my t4 opponent, but for now I'm glad he didn't want to play it out (he was already 4-0-1).

    t8 UGR thresh - Eric Dupuis
    We went to get dinner, and though I probably should've listened to the inner voice of "sitdown restaurant? its only an hour at most til the round ends" I went along anyway. We end up paired in the t8, both get gamelosses for being late, and I'm favored "game 1".

    "Game 1" I get Vial Dazed, Lackey Forced (RFG Rushing River) and then resolve the second Vial. None of this matters a whole lot, as Waste on Eric's Volcanic (leaving him with Waste) seals it when he never draws another land. Lame way to win what would've been an otherwise fun & interesting match.

    t4 bant
    Game 1 lasts quite a while; Lackey (or perhaps it was Vial) gets Forced. My Waste turns out not to be terribly relevant, as he has plenty of land and a Hierarch. I curve with Piledriver and lords, racing a 5 power Vendilion Clique which drops me dangerously low (3) until it gets Gempalmed, letting me run the attrition game and win from there.

    I almost side in Relic, but only board in 3 Magus since I didn't see Goyf and wasn't sure of the last 2 cards to take out. In hindsight, taking out Sharpshooter was relatively awful since I knew he had Vendilions and Nobles, but I wanted to minimize the number of conditional dudes in my deck. The potential use of 3 magi, 2 relic (& even Pyrokinesis, though probably overkill) had me a bit confused on what to do here. In hindsight, he would obviously have Goyf, which would make Relic very, very good against that and Knight.

    Game 2 is another go-long slugfest. One particularly interesting point involved my opponent casting Vendilion and me Stingscourging it back to his hand (via Vial), both to stall the Exalted beats for a turn and to let him cycle me into more land. The board stalls out, my Warchief, Lackey and Siege-Gang staring down his giant Knight of the Reliquary for a few turns. I rip Magus and he fetches away 2 Pondered Goyfs (I was told this after the match). He plays a Goyf and attacks with Knight, while I find another Siege-Gang to force the Goyf to block a Piledriver and burn him out next turn.

    I'm not sure my opponent played Vendilion quite well in one or two cases; I would have a hand of 3-5 drops with 2-3 lands and he'd cycle an expensive card away. I got there twice when he did this, where I was more afraid he wouldn't let me draw. Clique with all the exalted triggers was quite the beating, and made me wish I had Sharpshooter or Pyrokinesis. He also seemed surprised in game 2 where I let Knight hit me for 6 down to 6, though my plan was never to let it hit me again via the goblin attrition game. This matchup is much more annoying without Weirdings.

    t2 belcher
    Game 1 I race him decently. He gets his out on the critical turn for the lethal Belch (infernal-> belcher. Tendrils or Empty wouldn't have been lethal; I was still at 20, and had Matron->Sharpshooter to clean up a goblin mess).
    Game 2 my hand is a little weak. I drop Lackey and get Belched.


    In hindsight, while I missed Warren Weirding easily dealing with fat things there were several times where I was superbly glad I didn't have fetches to play around Stifle. Seeing my opponent's useless Wastelands was also very satisfying. Stingscourger is usually "good enough", though my attempt to play attrition against Bant in the t4 was much more difficult without Weirding. If it seems like I had Lackey/Vial a lot, I went to 6 pretty frequently, and got there on 5 in r1. Sharpshooter didn't do much, though I'm not sure what I'd replace it with. Probably another mountain, since 16+4 seems absurdly low.

  2. #2
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    Re: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    Glad to see a fellow goblins player make it one round further than I did. I faced Eric (canadian thresh) in round 5 and he dream crushed me with burn, but then I played well against NO thresh in Round 6 and got paired against Mono U folk in the first round of the top 8. Then faced Kyle (belcher) in the top 4.... If I ran sharpshooter in my 75 I would have faced you for the mirror in the finals.... I dont think he "does enough" anymore, although him nailing heirarchs or teaming up with fanatic(since I run 2) to deal with pridemage is a little techy but Im not sure worth the slot....

    Anyways congrats......
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  3. #3
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    Re: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    sorry for the double post, but did summoning trap ever actually come up for you or did you think it was wasted slots? I considered them but decided on grave hate and needles
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  4. #4

    Re: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    I never played against a deck where I felt like they had enough counters to bring it in; Bant has other ways of attacking the matchup via SB (relic/Magus), Against Thresh just Relic would come in, since postboard they'll have Pyroclasm/Spout, Fires and Bolts to make Magus pretty awful.

    I suppose its possible to board the trap in in the Thresh matchup, taking out 2 Scourgers, Sharpshooter & an Incinerator; those are all pretty bad against Shroud or Goyfs, though you may well want the Scourger effect once at some point to either alpha or connect with Lackey; in this case the Scourgers may arguably be better than the trap. Given that I'd play it like an attrition matchup, having a randomly dead Trap draw seems terrible here.

    Really, the only thing I'd think they're good against are decks with Counterbalance (or similar, counter-heavy decks) but I'm not boarding them in if a deck is only running some Dazes and FoWs. If they were Chalices or Needles I might've brought them in against the various combo matchups. Thorn of Amethyst is probably better than both, since you're aiming specifically for control/combo with those parts of the SB; having 3 or 4 seems more ideal, but I wouldn't really know what to shave for those copies.

    I guess the short version is that the traps were just useless.

  5. #5
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    Re: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    Im tempted to play the black splash next time for the sake of running perish in the board along with duress. Weirding is looking pretty good again, I think Mad Auntie has some promise as well
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  6. #6

    Re: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    Weirding & Perish are both very good against the recent rise of Progenitus, and if Iona names black for Weirding you still have outs (scourger). Mad Auntie makes fatties like Goyf and Knight less of a concern, as does Weirding... and you get Wort, who can just be absurd if its your second or third Matron target.

    I will reiterate that one of the nice things about monored was that I didn't care much at all about Wasteland or opposing Stifles on the fetches I wasn't playing, so that's absolutely something to consider.

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    Re: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    Quote Originally Posted by Derivative View Post
    I will reiterate that one of the nice things about monored was that I didn't care much at all about Wasteland or opposing Stifles on the fetches I wasn't playing, so that's absolutely something to consider.
    Agreed. The stable manabase was something I loved as well this past weekend. Although I ran 3 port and a few more mountains than you did. Port wasnt even really useful for me this time, but there are times where it will just steal you a game. Against belcher in the top 4 I had to mull to 3game 1 since I saw port/wasteland as my only mana sources for the first few opening hands. I doubt I will completely drop it from my mono red list though....
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    Re: 2nd @ DHG with Mono Red Goblins

    Quote Originally Posted by Joe_C View Post
    Agreed. The stable manabase was something I loved as well this past weekend. Although I ran 3 port and a few more mountains than you did. Port wasnt even really useful for me this time, but there are times where it will just steal you a game. Against belcher in the top 4 I had to mull to 3game 1 since I saw port/wasteland as my only mana sources for the first few opening hands. I doubt I will completely drop it from my mono red list though....
    The decision on port has two factors:

    1) Your metagame
    2) The amount of RR in your 60/75, and how reliably you want to cast those spells early.

    Port is necessary against landstill. It is good against countertop, rock, and other strategies with many colors. Multiple ports/wastes makes things interesting against any non-aggro matchup. The more aggro (specifically merfolk/zoo/goblins), the less ports you should run.

    The less ports you run, the more you should run RR cards. Because warren instigator and goblin chieftain are great in the deck and pretty much any build not playing them is suboptimal.

    That is my personal golden rule for ports. I am still running 17 mountain / 4 waste / 2 port.
    Quote Originally Posted by Nihil Credo View Post
    The first time I heard of the site, I went to www.thesource.com and was greeted with a full-page picture of some thug pointing a gun at me. I immediately realised that Legacy was the most hardcore format ever.

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