Category: MTG

It’s been a while since an MTG post, so it’s time to give my reviews of two recent releases.

The first is Commander 2013, which was released back in November of last year:

This product remains a bit controversial since one of the five decks (Mind Sieze) was – and remains – much more difficult to find than the other four. Despite herculean attempts I never saw it in any store myself, and ended up paying probably too much to get it at a convention. Wizards would eventually reprint the series with a disproportionate amount of Mind Sieze decks and yet it still remains hard to find. This is all (as is usually the case in these products) due to one single card in this deck only being in great demand for players of legacy MTG. This is the card:

Dedicated MTG players buy four copies of the Mind Sieze deck just to get four copies of this card for their decks, making it much harder to find for everyone 🙂

At any rate I eventually got all four, and over several weeks played 20 games in total, matching each deck against the others. Here’s the score breakdown:

Evasive Maneuvers (W/U/G): 3 wins, 1 loss
Eternal Bargain (W/U/B): 3 wins, 1 loss
Power Hungry (B/R/G): 3 wins, 1 loss
Nature Of The Beast (W/R/G): 1 win, 3 losses
Mind Sieze (U/B/R): 0 wins, 4 losses

In essence, it was a tie since EM beat EB beat PH beat EM! Three of the decks seem well matched with the other two being poor competition. Mind Sieze in particular failed to deliver, but my feeling playing it was that it was much better suited to multi play than 1 vs 1 (as is natural for a Commander deck).

In terms of individual decks, I like Eternal Bargain the most. The commander in particular is fun to play, and makes me want to build a lifegain deck around him (shame he isn’t W/G/B instead though). Most of the time, this deck won a game with massive amounts of health remaining.

I’ll soon split the decks up picking out individual cards for self-designed decks and absorbing them into my larger collection. At $30 each for 100 cards, these are well worth it and every bit as good as the first commander series in my opinion.

The second new product I have recently played is the new duel deck: Jace vs Vraska

I really enjoyed the last duel deck, and thought they were the best matched yet in the series. Sadly, this one takes a step back in playability.

Of the five games I played, Jace won all five and usually won them quite handily. His mono-blue deck is a weird mix of cards, dipping its fingers in many pots (illusions, counters, mill) without seeming to commit to any. It takes only a moment to look at the decklist and theorize ways to improve it, and yet ill-focused as it is it had no trouble shutting down Vraska in every game. Her deck has a green/black removal focus, with most spells and creatures dedicated to killing other creatures or removing life. While on paper her deck seems more cohesive than Jaces (and therefore I assumed it would win more often), in practice – at least in the five games I played – it was always just a bit too slow to get the upper hand. Jace’s illusions in particular were extremely effective once on the board, and one thing I took away from this duel deck was the potential of an all-illusion deck.

So a shutout in terms of gameplay, with Jace winning every time. Even with his (new) bad art, he’s still a badass 😉

Last week I got the latest Magic duel deck, called Heroes vs Monsters:

According to what I read online, duel decks not based around Planeswalkers don’t sell as well, so this one needs to get by on strong deck design and perhaps the fact that it contains preview cards for the upcoming Theros set like this one:

My experience is that this set nails the design, and the two decks are better matched than in any other duel deck I have played. In fact, in 6 games played, the scores were evenly matched with 3 wins apiece.

The first of the two decks is mostly white with a splash of red. It is heavy on creatures, with a slight enchantment theme. As with most duel decks, some of the included cards are not what I would choose, and were I to tweak the deck I would start by making more of the creatures below 3 CMC to better enable the Sun Titan that is one of the big-hitters of the deck.

The second deck is a red/green big creature based deck with a token theme. The hydra up top is one of the biggest (and best) cards in the set, but victory with this deck was often too fast for such a card to be relevant.

In the many games I played the pattern seemed to be if red/green didn’t win in the first 5-8 turns, then white/red would be the victor. In all six games I only cast the hydra once (and immediately shut it down with Bonds of Faith) and never cast Sun Titan. Red/green often won on the backs of such cards as Blood Ogre and Volt Charge, and white/red via cards such as Freewind Equenaut and Bonds of Faith (which I always cast on an opponents non-human creature).

I very much enjoyed playing these two decks. As with others, they help give an appreciation for cards I may otherwise have overlooked. In addition, there are some very good cards in here ‘for the collection’. I think overall the product may have benefitted from slightly slower decks (or at least a longer mana curve for each) but overall this product gets two thumbs up 🙂

The latest MTG duel deck to be released is Sorin vs Tibalt. I purchased it and have played the two decks against each other to see how they match up. Here’s my results…

Sorin’s deck uses the Sorin, Lord of Innistrad card from the Innistrad set, and the theme of the deck seems to be ‘tokens, vampires and lifelink’. As played, it was a fast deck with quite a bit of evasion (fliers, mostly) and some strong removal.

Tibalt’s deck uses his only appearance so far, Tibalt the Fiend-Blooded as the Planeswalker, and the deck utilizes hosted creatures, sacrifice effects and strong but optional direct damage (such as Browbeat.

In the four games I played, Sorin won handily every time. In two of the games, he won 20-0! This is as close to a mismatch as any duel deck I’ve played in the last few years, with Tibalt lacking both the speed and the removal to deal with Sorin’s creatures even if Sorin didn’t have lifelink!

In many of the games, Sorin had 2 or more flying spirit tokens out very quickly and Tibalt had little defense. A card like Lingering Souls could turn the game if drawn early, and often did.

Sometimes Tibalt gave a good fight (notable cards strong in this matchup: Vithian Stinger, Sulfuric Vortex), but usually Sorin managed to cast some evading lifelinker and turn things around very quickly.

As far as a well matched pair of decks therefore, this product gets a thumbs down!

However, as a product I’ll give this one a definite thumbs up. Personally, I owned neither Planeswalker, so it was nice to be able to get them both in one product. Secondly, a few of the other cards in the decks are nifty and I’m glad I now own copies. I’ll give a specific mention here to Phantom General, which had been notably absent from my white soldier token deck!

And of course, from my perspective, I had to get this anyway for the basic land 🙂