So instead of continuing the mAc Chaos saga, I'll put that on hold and talk about my games with Brendan. The first game, I picked my Wild Pair/Grinning Ignus deck, and he used a vicious red aggro deck. The game was hardly even remarkable; I had asked him to make "aggro decks," and he did, killing me before I could even deal him damage, let along get out Wild Pair. My deck was just too slow.
But red aggro isn't that special. The next deck, however, was an ingenious masterpiece. Now maybe it just seemed that way since I have so little experience, but the engines Brendan manages to think up never fail to impress me. Anyway, he played a mono-green deck and I chose my mono-white Stuffy Doll deck.
I won't give a play-by-play of the game, since he never got his complete engine out (I managed to activate my combo and kill him before he could get it rolling), but I must certainly describe his deck. I didn't even see all of it, so I don't know how many other outlets there were for his particular engine, but it seemed to be a four-part system, with the four parts arranged in a square. What I mean is, the first part is related to the second and fourth parts, but not to the third part. So when I saw the first and third parts, I couldn't immediately see the connection. The first part was Helix Pinnacle. The third part was Thallids that produce lots of Saprolings. At first it seemed liked a Saproling deck with Helix Pinnacle as a backup card.
Then he played Doubling Season. This meant that Helix Pinnacle doubled in speed, and Saprolings quadrupled. (Normally, a single Sporoloth Ancient would get one spore counter per turn, allowing him to create a Saproling every other turn: 0.5 per turn. With Doubling Season, he gets two spore counters per turn, but when he removes them, Doubling Season also puts two Saprolings into play, giving him 2 per turn: four times as many.) This was totally awesome, but I still hadn't seen the key fourth piece that tied it all together.
I had won before he could get the final piece out, but he showed me what it was: Life and Limb. Then it all came together. His massive quantity of Saprolings, made possibly by Doubling Season, would all become Forests, allowing him to pump Helix Pinnacle like crazy, with Doubling Season speeding it up even more quickly. If he had gotten Life and Limb into play, with his current array of Thallids, he would have been able to complete his Helix Pinnacle in a short as two or three turns. Amazing.
This is exactly what I long to be able to do. Brendan's intimate knowledge of the cards allows him to see connections that I cannot; if I had been trying to make a Helix Pinnacle deck, I would have thought of Doubling Season, but I had never even heard of Life and Limb. The way he was able to make all the parts work together was just completely phenomenal. I was ashamed to have won with my retarded combo.
Anyway, we played again, and I switched to yet another combo deck that I had wanted to try out. He started out with a bunch of Thallids, and I played an Academy Rector. However, my deck had been shoddily constructed so that I myself had no way of getting rid of the Rector. My deck relies on getting rid of the Rector, so if my opponent doesn't do it, I literally can't win. Anyway, I explained this to him, basically forfeiting since he had a Utopia Mycon that could block my Rector forever, but he killed the Rector, probably just to see what would happen. I fetched Barren Glory, then cast Armageddon. I would have won, technically, but it didn't really count since I sort of tricked him into killing the Rector. Anyway, you can see why I needed the Rector to die: if he never did, Barren Glory would be useless, even if I played it another way. So if I decide to modify that deck at all, I'll either get rid of the Rector or add some way to kill it myself (probably just burns). I should probably just stop making retarded combo decks.
Anyway, he then switched to his third and final deck of the night, an extremely confusing black-green deck that made very little sense to me until my third game against it. I finally switched to a deck that wasn't based on inane combos: my Grinning Ignus/Cinder Pyromancer deck (the one with Flamekin Harbinger/Nova Chaser). I got a great opening hand: a Harbinger, two Smokebraiders, an Ignus, and three Mountains. I started out by fetching Nova Chaser to exploit it as much as possible, but he began dropping Imperious Perfects like there was no tomorrow, making me think his deck was a black-green Elf deck (which it was not). Anyway, he quickly got enough Perfects and Elf Warrior tokens to make my Nova Chaser useless, so I switched to the Pyromancer strategy. However, by that time it was too late. He already had a ton of Elves, and with three Perfects, they were all 4/4. I could have reduced him to 1 life, but he would have overrun my on the next turn. So I scooped.
Still thinking his deck was Elves, I switched to one of my new favorite decks: a mono-green Treefolk deck using Leaf-Crowned Elder and Cream of the Crop to spit out Treefolk en masse. Leaf-Crowned Elder is an amazing card as it is, but when I have Cream of the Crop, I can almost guarantee that Leaf-Crowned Elder will give me a free Treefolk each turn. And since Treefolk are so expensive and powerful, I'm often able to dump a dozen mana worth of Treefolk into play for free, EACH TURN. So it's really awesome.
In the previous game, Brendan had played a Nether Traitor, which was extremely confusing since I thought he was playing black-green Elves. This game, he played a Carrion Feeder, and I saw that the Traitor would be a good way to pump it up. But I still didn't see how it connected to the Elves. In any case, by the time he could do anything useful, I already had two Cream of the Crop and two Leaf-Crowned Elders, and my massive army of Treefolk just completely destroyed him.
Then we played one more game, and I switched to white-green-blue Slivers. I felt kind of bad playing Slivers, since Slivers are usually very fast and his deck seemed rather slow. But my guilt quickly dissipated as I saw what his deck was truly capable of. When he played Grave Pact, I saw that the Carrion Feeder/Nether Traitor combo had a far more sinister purpose. When he played the second Grave Pact, I just crapped myself. I had been hitting him hard with Slivers early on, and even had 8 poison counters on him, but with two Grave Pacts and a Spawning Pit, he just kept killing off my Slivers. To make matters worse, I kept drawing five-mana Slivers while stuck at four mana. Anyways, he then played The Bomb: Protean Hulk. Apparently that was the real reason for having green in the deck at all. He could sacrifice the Hulk to bring in Carrion Feeder and Nether Traitor (among others), and completely ruin any creature-based deck (such as my Slivers which had nothing BUT creatures). I died, but he showed me his other green trump card, which was Biorhythm. Hilarious. It would have been totally unnecessary against an all-creature deck such as Slivers, but quite useful against other types of decks. It turns out the Elves were just there as a cheap source of mass creatures to sacrifice, even though he was able to use them as his main force in the first game. His deck seemed a little clunky, but it was still a neat engine, albeit a frustrating one.
So that's what I did from 2 AM to 4 AM last night. I'll hold off on discussing my games against mAc Chaos for now,
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