Classic White Trash (Or, My MTGO Update)
It’s about time that I write a blog post talking about my experience with embracing Magic Online.
MTGO is Perfect (For Me)
- I can play in the evenings after my wife passes out on the couch. There are no logistics involved.
- If I want to make changes to my deck, I don’t have to find people to trade with locally over a few weeks or order things and have them shipped or try to trade by mail.
But it’s Not Fun (For Me)
- It turns out PTQs start at like 3am and run until the following calendar year. This is actually harder for me to do, I believe, then going somewhere all day for an event. Because I am home and when I’m home, no matter what, some things are rightfully expected of me. And MTGO kind of requires you to keep paying attention around rounds, turns, timers, clocks, etc.
- I apparently do not enjoy playing competitive games of Magic where I cannot see my opponent. I enjoy that interaction, reading people’s body language, gestures, etc. It gives me a mild edge at least over average players. And the tactile feel of the cards adds to the immersion. MTGO feels much like Patton Oswalt describing the KFC Famous Bowl. I’m playing MTGO alone in my apartment on the floor at 2am with the lights out, listening to Pink Floyd’s Great Gig in the Sky. And crying. It’s like a failure pile in a sadness bowl.
- I really can’t get over how poorly the game translates into the current MTGO UI and play metaphor. It’s just awkward. Stuff feels weird and some of the interactions and triggers are just not intuitive. And that annoys me, since I work on design. It really takes away from enjoying the sport of the match itself.
- “Trading,” if you can call it that, is basically like flipping stocks. All bots basically want the same things, peg their buying and selling to a specific profit and loss ratio and at any given point there are about 4 humans “trading” who may or may not have what you want. And trading is basically buying and selling. Almost no actual swaps of cards occur.
White Trash
So I sold all my Modern stuff and got more tickets than I put into it, since nearly everything had increased about 20-30% in value. And I used all that money to buy up a Classic adaptation of a great budget Vintage deck that goes by the name White Trash. So called because the deck is mono-white and all the cards are trash. White is the absolute worst color in Vintage and is nearly unplayable, saved only by hatebears decks and a mild white splash in Fish decks for Stony Silence and a Path to Exile or two.
The White Trash deck runs Lotus and Moxen, but those don’t currently exist in Classic and so most decks on MTGO base their artifact mana acceleration on Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault (which I skipped) and Lotus Petals. I ended up settling on 4 Lotus Petals, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and 3 Simian Spirit Guide. The jury is still out on the monkeys.
Here’s what it looks like:
- 4 Leonin Arbiter
- 4 Leonin Relic-Warder
- 4 Ethersworn Canonist
- 4 Phyrexian Revoker
- 4 Glowrider
- 4 Stoneforge Mystic
- 2 Kataki, War’s Wage
- 4 Lotus Petal
- 3 Simian Spirit Guide
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Batterskull
- 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
- 4 Chalice of the Void
- 9 Plains
- 4 Wasteland
- 4 Ghost Quarter
- 1 Strip Mine
- 1 Karakas
And the sideboard is:
- 4 Abolish
- 4 Preacher
- 4 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 3 Path to Exile
Does it work? You tell me. Time to battle!
Match 1: Boros Magus/Null Rod
I 2-0’d this match. His deck is a similar kind of hatebear strategy to mine which preys on non-Basic lands and has a pretty good clock with Jotun Grunts and some other spice. Unfortunately for him, I don’t run fetches, etc. so his early Grunts died pretty fast to their upkeep cost and then I just trumped everything he did with Stoneforge targets and shutting down his Bolts and such with Chalice.
Match 2: BUG Delver/Snapcaster
I narrowly lost this one at 1-2. All the games were a long grind fighting over Chalices and such. In the end, his main deck Trygon Predators both controlled a lot of my bears and the 3 toughness was difficult for me to work around. He also played a ton of basics. The game I got there was a game where he didn’t have an early Force and I managed to get him pretty much under Glow Rider lock down with only a few lands. Post-board, I may have been able to get the game but he was able to reset with Infest and then claw back in on the back of Bob.
After this match, I actually decided to change out Preacher for Fiend Hunter and try that out. So far, so good. It gets passed all the two power blockers that are common in the Classic format and has usefulness against Blightseel and Emrakul without suffering from summoning suckness issues like Preacher.
Match 3: Workshop
I accidentally made this a single game. I open with Plains and pass. My opponent plays Workshop and I get excited. I should crush this! Then he drops a Mana Crypt and plays Chalice for 2. I scoop and think “there’s no way he can beat me post-board like that.” I plan to bring in Abolish and Metamorph and ruin his weekend. Then I realize it was a single game and it was over. Two turns. Oh well. NEXT TIME, WORKSHOPS. NEXT TIME.
Match 4: Oath
Game 1, he has turn one Orchard, Mana Crypt, Oath. I untap and use Lotus Petal to go for a Relic Warder, but he has Force. He untaps and makes a Blightsteel. I have another Relic Warder, but fail to draw a second Plains.
Match 5: RG Lands
This is another popular Classic deck that doesn’t have much of a Vintage analog. It runs an Exploration/Loam engine with a Seismic kill and has a ton of good lands backed by Ensnaring Bridge to hold off Oath players. Sadly for my opponent, I have lots of Relic Warders, Chalice on 2 shuts down most of their deck and Abolish post-board isn’t too shabby either. I 2-0’d this easily. Game one with bear beats and game two with Batterskull + bear beats.
I also ended up removing Ethersworn Canonist and am testing Grand Abolisher in that slot. I may need to up the # of Plains in my deck as a result. Canonist was not very exciting even in the Snapcaster match where it should have shined. It doesn’t do anything against Shops and not much of anything against Oath either, sadly. Classic doesn’t really seem to have a popular Storm-based deck, where Canonist is obviously optimal.
At any rate, I’m having a ton of fun with the deck and the format. You should consider giving it a try.
BONUS: My Thinking About Modern
This is from the standpoint of a biased “old school” eternal player. I’ve decided that Modern is basically a cool format full of boring decks. What’s big right now? Jund, Pod, Twin, Storm, Delver/Snapcaster, Martyr. I suspect this will improve over time as the card pool expands and more development space is covered by players, so I’m holding judgment. But I don’t find it very interesting right now.
Personally, I’m working on a deck called “Glittering Junk.” Yeah, I know, right? Thanks to BBD for that. It’s basically a Glittering Wish-board Loam/Retrace WBG deck that is similar to my Legacy Loam control deck. However, I haven’t been able to do much testing and I’m not sure I’ll actually get it together and be confident in it by March. So the jury’s still out on whether I’ll be taking a stab at PTQ season or not.
