I wanted to play a homebrew.

I really did.

I had the deck all planned out:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

3 Acidic Slime

4 Spellskite

4 Sylvok Replica

1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

2 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre

[/Creatures]

[Planeswalkers]

2 Garruk, Primal Hunter

[/Planeswalkers]

[Spells]

3 Slice in Twain

4 Nature's Claim

4 Ancient Stirrings

3 Mimic Vat

3 Quicksilver Amulet

4 Liquimetal Coating

[/Spells]

[Lands]

12 Forest

3 Verdant Catacombs

4 Buried Ruin

4 Misty Rainforest

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

4 Obstinate Baloth

4 Phyrexian Revoker

4 Summoning Trap

3 Torpor Orb

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

The sideboard’s a work in progress, but I like that deck a lot. The Liquimetal Coating + Ancient Stirrings + lots-of-artifact-removal engine started out as an idea from a Syracuse regular, Joe (otherwise known as the Joe who lent me a Grave Titan a few weeks ago), but instead of Eldrazi dorks as the win condition, his deck just had a lot of Elves. I thought Eldrazi dudes plus Quicksilver Amulet had a lot of synergy with Ancient Stirrings, so I changed the deck around a little bit to accommodate that. The thing is, I needed to borrow too much random stuff to make it work, and no one had all the things I needed, so I was stuck.

I could’ve borrowed a Valakut deck. The thing about Valakut is, everyone has an extra Valakut deck, because it’s cost-effective, and no one wants to play it because it’s mindless to play. There just aren’t enough choices involved in the deck for me to call playing it Magic. As long as you know what all your cards do, and what other cards are in your deck, your choices are pretty clear. Wins and losses boil down to about two things:

1. Did you draw good cards?

2. How much could your opponent interact with you?

The answers to these two questions are what define your experiences with Valakut.

I promise, I’m not one of those dudes who says every aggro or burn deck isn’t skill-based. That’s wrong. I’m a firm believer that aggressive decks are just as skill-based as control, if not more so, because of their lack of deck manipulation. Every burn spell is a decision: creature or face? Knowing when to press and when to hold back, and identifying a board-sweeper in your opponent’s hand, are crucial skills too, as I proved last week by going 2–2 in played matches with a deck that made the finals of a Grand Prix. Like I said, my initial impression of that deck was that some random Euro got lucky. This was obviously wrong; he just had an innate idea of how to play his deck and maximize aggressiveness without the crutch of, say, Preordain, to help you out when you press at the incorrect time and run out of gas.

Also, I didn’t wanna play Valakut because I bitched about it for, like, 1,500 words a few weeks ago, not to mention bitching about it here, so that was out. So what’s a boy to do?

I did something I kind of knew I’d have to do all along at some point. I just didn’t realize it’d be so soon.

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Lord of the Unreal

1 Phantasmal Image

2 Grand Architect

3 Phantasmal Dragon

4 Aether Adept

4 Phantasmal Bear

1 Precursor Golem

1 Steel Hellkite

4 Porcelain Legionnaire

4 Spined Thopter

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

4 Mana Leak

4 Preordain

3 Mind Control

[/Spells]

[Lands]

19 Island

1 Glacial Fortress

4 Glimmerpost

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

3 Master Thief

4 Neurok Commando

1 Stoic Rebuttal

2 Flashfreeze

2 Frost Breath

2 Negate

1 Mind Control

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

When you open a booster pack to find a Phantasmal Bear staring back at you, some small part of you feels like maybe you got burned a little bit. I have no idea how to describe the feeling of purposely buying four of them. This was not for a lack of time to contemplate; as I sleeved up the deck, I actively wondered things like, “Why am I doing this? Is there a God? Why am I even sleeving this up?”

If you’re unfamiliar with this column, I’ll save you the suspense.

The answers aren’t coming. I just don’t have them.

Round 1, I square off against a guy I’ve never seen before, Matt. I win the die roll, and he mulligans, but keeps his six-card hand.

I have to remind him to draw on his turn:

Matt: [plays Mountain] “Go.”

Me: “You have to draw for your turn.”

Matt: “But you don’t draw on the first turn.”

Me: “Oh. Uhh . . . so . . . you do get to draw on your first turn, but only if you go second. [Pause.] I went first, so I had to skip my draw step. Since you didn’t go first, you get to draw a card.”

Matt: “Oh, okay.”

He keeps having removal for my Phantasmal bullshit, but I end up getting it to a point where, on my side of the table, I have a Steel Hellkite and a Spined Thopter, while he has nothing. I’m at 8, he’s at 12. I Preordain, seeing a Glimmerpost and an Island, and for some reason I figure it’s a good idea to ship the Island but keep the Glimmerpost, put myself to 9, and attack him down to 5, putting him at dead on board.

Matt untaps and tanks for a while. I fully expect him to scoop here; one of the signs I’ve seen of inexperience these past FNMs is that if my opponent is beat, he refuses to believe it and, instead of moving along to the next game, he’ll just sit there and look at the board, then his hand, then the board again, in disbelief—not even trying to figure out his outs, just consumed by frustration at losing a tight game. I know this is a sign of inexperience because I do this aaaalllll the time.

“Act of Treason on your Steel Hellkite?”

I notice that he doesn’t have enough untapped mana left to kill me. Sure thing, bro.

“Uhh . . . Assault Strobe?”

That’s ballgame, boys! I have to laugh. I didn’t see either of those cards coming—Act of Treason because it was Game 1, Assault Strobe because . . . I don’t think he even played any creatures that game! I’m not often happy for my opponents, but it looked like he had no outs whatsoever, and he pulled it out. I dig games like that, and just because I was on the receiving end of a come-out-of-nowhere beatdown made no difference. I mean, it’s just FNM, right?

Game 2, he starts pretty slow, playing two equipment: Ogre's Cleaver and Accorder's Shield, while I have a Phantasmal Bear and not much else. Late in the game, he drops a Bladed Pinions that I have the Mana Leak for, but he has 3 mana up, so I figure my only way to win at this point is to drop all my guys and just try and kill him with two alpha strikes.

At this point, he asks me when the upkeep happens. In the interest of not pissing off GatheringMagic’s commentariat any further, I explain (nicely!) to him that a turn goes untap, upkeep, draw, so your upkeep happens after you untap and before you draw. I’m not sure he realizes his Accorder's Shield grants Vigilance, and getting all his equipment on his Kuldotha Phoenix would take him a little longer than he can afford, since he is a little stunted on mana, so I take Game 2 on the back of lots of little men.

Game 3 isn’t much of anything; he gets stuck on 2 mana and Incinerates my face the turn before I drop a Precursor Golem that I ride unimpeded to victory.

Matt knew he messed up on the Incinerate, and he confessed that he had been thinking about taking out the Act of Treason before Round 1, and was happy that he didn’t. I didn’t care to make a case for pulling it, thanks to his decisive Game 1 victory.

The next round, I play against a dude I’ve never seen before named Nathan on a B/G homebrew. He certainly has me beat in decks, but all his removal is one-for-ones, and he walks into a lot of on-board tricks—forgets my Spined Thopter is a 3/2 thanks to Grand Architect, forgets I can give Porcelain Legionnaire (worst card I’ve played two weeks in a row so far) +1/+1 at instant speed with Grand Architect—so Game 1 is a lot closer than it should be. We play off the tops of our libraries for a while, but I’m at 11 and he’s at 28, thanks to a Vampire Nighthawk, and my Porcelain Legionnaire just isn’t winning the race with his Pilgrim's Eye.

Game 2 is a lot less close; he resolves a Birthing Pod, and I don’t think that Pilgrim's Eye is worth boarding in Master Thief, so I lose in pretty short order.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t have fun. Nathan was a fun guy to play against, and I had drawn a crowd because everyone at the shop had caught wind that I had bought an event deck and was writing an article on the Internet.

I figured it’d happen eventually—people at the local shop figuring out that I was actually at work on a column while I was at FNM—but I didn’t expect it until, like, week thirty or something. I really wanted to stay anonymous for as long as I could, because, at its essence, this column is basically a weekly tournament report. Tournament reports are nice sometimes, but the problem with them is that they’ve been around since time immemorial (time immemorial = 1995), and older players are mostly sick of them.

I’ll put it this way: I am more comfortable with criticisms that consist of “Wow, you’re a jerk,” than with “What’s the point of going over plays against inexperienced opponents,” or “It’s a nice idea, but the stakes are so low at FNMs that I just can’t see the point of reading.” I personally love tourney reports, but week after week, the same thing gets a little boring, so instead of focusing on just the plays, I try to look at how Magic players interact with each other at the FNM (read: casual) level. By taking some of the attention off the games themselves, people can get a look at an aspect of Magic they’re not necessarily used to reading about.

It’s probably worth noting that I’m not gonna go out of my way to note when my opponent and I had a fun, uneventful match, because that shit’s boring and no one wants to hear about it.

Round 3, I play against a shop regular, Ryan, on Elves with Vengevine, a card I just can’t beat, especially when I lose the die roll—the deck has no way of interacting with Fauna Shaman other than Mind Control, and by that point, I’ve already gotten stomped by Vengevines.

Our second game is the only really exciting one. He keeps a five-lander with Arbor Elf and Fauna Shaman as his only action, and runs his second-turn Fauna Shaman into my Mana Leak. I proceed to draw nothing else but Mana Leaks and Frost Breaths, in just the right order to totally keep him out of the game until one of his huge alpha strikes doesn’t matter, because I have a Phantasmal Dragon (definitely one of my better cards against him) and he has 4 life.

Ryan wins the other two games. Illusionary Might has no way of dealing with a turn-two Fauna Shaman on the draw, which Ryan has all three games.

This match was a lot of fun—like the last one, I’d drawn a bit of a crowd, so I used the match at hand as an excuse to say clever things, like “Thank God for those Glimmerposts,” and, “GAH, FUCK THIS HORRIBLE DECK!”

Good times.

My last round is against a kid without sleeves named Dominic. I notice while he is shuffling that he has a 2013 class ring, which shocks the hell out of me. Seriously, when did they start giving these out early? When I was in high school, my mom handed me $300 and told me to get a class ring with it, so I took it to the mall on Senior Skip Day instead. She was not impressed.

After I am able to verify with 89% certainty that Dominic is not a cyborg killer from the future, and that his braces are actually there for teeth-straightening purposes and not just so I’ll let my guard down, making it easier for Robo-Dominic to harvest my organs, we get down to actual Magic. The games are uninteresting; he plays one land Game 1 and two Game 2. I ask Dominic if he considered mulliganing in either game. He says he did not. I tell him, “You might’ve wanted to consider it.” I am not yet very comfortable giving out advice to new players, probably because I’m not comfortable speaking authoritatively about Magic to new players. Older players can discern whether I’m right or wrong, but with newer players, if I’m wrong, they’re stuck with that bad advice. So I get nervous.

I ask him if he is going to be at FNM next week. He says yes.

His friend that he came with, probably about the same age (fifteen or sixteen), is playing in a match next to us, and has a lot to say. Very enthusiastic young man. After getting beaten in two straight games, he asks his opponent, “How did you lose a game, man? Your deck is awesome!” His opponent, a fellow member of the 0–3 bracket, patiently explains that his own burn deck is a little slow compared to some of the decks he’s seen that night. I start grinning in spite of myself. What a cool little kid.

I am snapped out of my reverie when I look up to see the kid, his opponent, and Dominic looking at me like the weirdo old man (I am twenty-two years old) that I am. THANKS FOR REMINDING ME I’M NOT COOL, GUYS.

My 2–2 record nets me 27 Planeswalker Points, and another FNM in the books. It figures—one of the first weeks that FNM performance actually matters, I’m forced to buy an event deck, and a shitty one at that. I don’t know about the other ones, but I can say definitively that Illusionary Might is not FNM-ready.

I had a great time, though. I mean, come on . . . how bad of a time can you have playing Magic?

Jon Corpora

Pronounced Ca-pora

@feb31st