I’m sure the process of scrambling for cards will become old hat to me someday. I say this because I can’t even count the number of times I’ve gone to a Grand Prix and seen a “name player” running around the conference hall like a chicken with its head lopped off, looking for Jace, the Mind Sculptor back when it pulled down a Benj. You’d think seeing these guys, scrambling around a sweaty conference hall at some ungodly hour in the morning, looking for $400 minutes before the players’ meeting of a premier event, would put my looking for two Grave Titans forty-five minutes before an FNM started into perspective. Hell, they always got there!

This didn’t work.

I can think of a shitload of things I’d rather be doing—watching TV, crop-dusting the nearest Apple Store, cleaning out the cat box—than worrying about a stupid thing like obtaining Magic cards for an FNM. I think those other guys relish the scramble. Clearly, they’re not eccentric artists who worry about everything, like myself.

It doesn’t matter the tournament—I just don’t enjoy walking into a Constructed event without my seventy-five already in tow. This is worth noting because I’ll be doing just what I hate a lot this coming year. I have a severely shitty collection by normal standards; I definitely don’t have the cards to support “52 decks in 52 weeks.” [Editor's Note: I'm also shortening it to '52 FNMs' for the sake of the article names. Don't be confused, "52 FNMs" = "52 decks in 52 weeks" -- Trick]

So I borrow.

I got most of the stuff I needed from a guy named Doug. He’s a Syracuse local, and probably the best, if not the most respected, player in the city. I’m pretty sure he went to PT: Kyoto. I’ll have to ask. Also, he’s the only one I know of who actually plays Standard competitively.

Syracuse, New York is home to one of the bigger Legacy scenes on Planet Earth. If this column were featuring Legacy, I would be totally fine. I’d be able to borrow fully made, competitive decks, full of duals and Force of Wills, from more than four separate people on a weekly basis, and all I’d have to do is walk in. I’ve done it loads of times before. The problem with this is that since people are so into Legacy around here, no one really owns any Standard cards. I briefly considered doing Legacy for this column, but decided against because (1), I don’t really like Legacy, and (2), more people would be able to relate to a Standard column.

Adam Barnello, another Syracuse local, briefly touched on it in his article last week, but the thing about Syracuse is that all of these very real concerns about people being priced out of Legacy, these concerns that eventually the buy-in price of Legacy will be its own undoing, no matter how much these cards will retain their value, or how “fun” the format deceptively presents itself as (if you haven’t been playing it for years, it’s definitely not fun) . . . these legitimate problems fall on deaf ears in central New York. You might as well be talking in a foreign language. Everyone here not only has all the duals but is now working on playsets of foreign black-bordered duals. Adam himself has Beta duals, for Chrissakes, which brings me to another point.

There is a prevalent stress on “pimping out” your decks around here; in Eternal formats, you are granted the opportunity to play with cards that will be legal forever, so, not content to sit around playing the same version of a card for years in a row, people seek foil/foreign versions of cards they already own. I don’t really know why this is popular, but I have a few guesses.

The troubling thing about this is that these dudes with pimped-out shit are always the same dudes who complain about money, or lack of cards for a PTQ.

Anyway, the point is that I feel pretty justified in worrying about finding Standard cards every week. This is worth noting because, despite Doug generously loaning me a bunch of stuff, I was still about seven cards short, notables of which included a Karn Liberated, a Jace Beleren, and two Grave Titans, so I had to go around and ask a bunch of people I’d never met if they could loan me some cards for tonight. One guy wasn’t comfortable letting me borrow a Grave Titan, but he was willing to trade it. I asked what he was looking for and he gave me the ol’ “Oh, nothing in particular,” so I went out to my car and grabbed my embarrassing trade folder. By the time I got back, he still hadn’t found his Grave Titan. Doug had to vouch for me with another dude, the one I was getting the seventy-fifth card I needed from. If I got this, I could pay for my entry and grab dinner (Buffalo chicken sandwich from Subway—the place I’m playing at is in Carousel Mall in Syracuse. I’m purposely not plugging them because they refused to sponsor me, but if you do the legwork, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out the name of the store.) There was a lot riding on this. The conversation went like this:

Me: Hey, do you have a spare Grave Titan?

Him: Yeah . . . 

Me: Can I borrow it for tonight?

Him: Wellllll . . . the thing iiiiiis . . . I don’t actually know you . . . [Doug is sitting a few seats down] Hey, Doug, do you know this guy? [points to me]

Doug: You mean the guy I’m loaning thirty cards to tonight? Yeah, we’ve met.

"Ali Aintrazi - U/B Control"

• Creatures (7)
• 2 Consecrated Sphinx
• 2 Grave Titan
• 3 Solemn Simulacrum

• Planeswalkers (6)
• 1 Karn Liberated
• 1 Liliana Vess
• 4 Jace Beleren

• Spells (21)
• 1 Consume the Meek
• 1 Dismember
• 1 Go for the Throat
• 1 Into the Roil
• 3 Doom Blade
• 4 Mana Leak
• 1 Black Sun's Zenith
• 1 Despise
• 4 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 4 Preordain

• Lands (26)
• 4 Island
• 5 Swamp
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 4 Creeping Tar Pit
• 4 Darkslick Shores
• 4 Drowned Catacomb
• 4 Tectonic Edge

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Peace Strider
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Surgical Extraction
• 2 Disfigure
• 3 Flashfreeze
• 1 Black Sun's Zenith
• 1 Despise
• 1 Memoricide
• 1 Praetor's Grasp
• 2 Duress
• 1 Volition Reins

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That’s a lot of one-ofs. What this list says to me, at a glance, is that it’s essentially a showcase for how powerful a spell Preordain is. If you know how to play Preordain correctly—that is, if you don’t blow it just because it’s a spell in your hand and you have a Blue mana, but you instead wait until you need it to cast it—it’s gonna be hard for you to lose. If you suck at Preordain . . . you might as well be holding Merrill Lynch stock (TOPICAL!).

Round 1 starts. There’s forty people here tonight. That’s about ten more than that PTQ in Roanoke, Virginia.

Round 1, I’m up against a nice dude named Tom. On the draw, my hand is two Creeping Tar Pits, a Tectonic Edge, an Inquisition of Kozilek, a Mana Leak, a Solemn Simulacrum, and a Preordain. I’m keeping, but I have to tank. I have no idea how to play my lands here. I have a few lines of play, all of which start with me playing Creeping Tar Pit turn one, but then, on turn two, the lines deviate. For the record, my first two draws yield Drowned Catacomb, Grave Titan. On my second turn, I could:

• Cast Inquisition of Kozilek, play Creeping Tar Pit.
• Play Tectonic Edge, representing Mana Leak.

This was my first encounter with how shaky the mana base was in this deck. Everything came into play tapped except for Tectonic Edge. This made playing a deck featuring four Mana Leaks and four Inquisition of Kozilek pretty damn awkward when you don’t win the die roll. I also realize that since I’m on the draw, if my Inquisition of Kozilek doesn’t come down before his third turn, it’s gonna be pretty useless. I guess it’s also worth noting that he cast a Bloodghast off a Swamp and a Drowned Catacomb last turn. It’s true what they say—FNM is FNM.

I end up casting the Inquisition of Kozilek and I see two more Drowned Catacombs, a Swamp, a Mana Leak, a Go for the Throat, and The Most Terrifying Creature in Standard (Phyrexian Obliterator). I take the Mana Leak, resigning myself to taking a few hits from Bloodghast, and knowing that I’d rather have my Grave Titan killed by a Go for the Throat than countered. I also have the line of countering his Phyrexian Obliterator when the time comes. I lay my second Creeping Tar Pit and pass the turn.

From there, the game unfolds like this: He draws and casts another Bloodghast and passes the turn; I sit on my hands and pass back. He tanks for a second before casting the Phyrexian Obliterator I’d resigned myself to countering 6 damage ago. He gets me down to 3 with a Smallpox, clearing the way for his Bloodghasts before I play a Grave Titan, followed by a Grave Titan, followed by a Consecrated Sphinx. I do manage to elicit a chuckle from him when I pull credit cards out of my wallet to use as Zombie tokens. I just hate using dice as creatures; they don’t tap well.

I normally sideboard by shuffling my fifteen into my deck, riffling the pile of seventy-five a few times, and just rebuilding my deck for the game at hand from there. This strategy serves this particular list well; I can just shuffle my sideboard in and pull out all the Doom Blades while leaving in hot shit like Volition Reins and Praetor's Grasp (!).

Game 2 is pretty uneventful. My Inquisition of Kozilek can only get a Mana Leak, so he draws Vampire Nighthawk off the top and plays it, and it gets in until I draw a Dismember for it. A Grave Titan and a Go for the Throat on his Phyrexian Obliterator later, and I’m through to the next round.

At some time during the second game, after I’d assumed control of the game, my friend Bryant got swept in the mono-Red mirror. He got up, and I told him, “Wait for me, I’m almost done,” so I wouldn’t have to go to Subway alone. A second later, I felt really bad about it; the game wasn’t over yet, so for me to say that in front of the dude was really shitty. The game ended up ending quickly, and I apologized to Tom before scurrying off to the Subway in the food court.

I always tell people not to congratulate me in front of my opponent during a PTQ or anything. Just ask me what game I’m on, examine the board state, and move on. If I fucking hate it when all of my opponent’s sweaty idiot friends who already 0–2–dropped congratulate him on a win he may or may not have deserved, odds are my opponent hates it, too.

The subtext of my telling Bryant “Hang on, I’m almost done” is “Hang on, I’m gonna win this game and that is clear to me, just hang back a second. Oh yeah, by the way, Tom, I’m going to win this game you think you still have a shot in. Also, I’m a dick.”

It’s something I genuinely felt shitty about, but thankfully Bryant was there to distract me with the best bad-beats story I’ve heard in a while.

“So I got swept in the mono-Red mirror by a little kid. Game 1 he plays Flameblast Dragon, attacks, and backs it up with a Geosurge. Game 2, I keep two lands, two Ember Haulers, and two Shrine of Burning Rage. He’s got the lowest curve imaginable. I can’t draw a third land, so I tap out for a Shrine of Burning Rage and he plays that sorcery for four Red that gives him a 7/1 haster, and he kills me.”

“So . . . he killed you with Blistering Firecat.”

“Sure, Jon. However you wanna look at it.”

“That’s exactly how I wanna look at it.”

Round 2, I play against a dude named Rob on mono-Red. I have no early discard or pressure at all, so his Fiery Hellhound gets in for 5 before I’m able to find a Doom Blade for it. I play a Grave Titan at 12 life, and the next turn, 6 points worth of burn comes at my face. I attack with a Grave Titan, and he untaps with two cards in hand. I’m on 6. He taps out for a Volt Charge, putting me to 3, and I swing for exactly lethal on the next turn with Grave Titan, a bunch of credit cards, and two Creeping Tar Pits.

Game 2, I Duress him on my first turn. He shows me a hand of Lightning Bolt, Fiery Hellhound, Volt Charge, Shock, and Mountain. I choose Lightning Bolt, and he chooses this moment to Lightning Bolt my face.

“Uh, it’s too late for that.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to respond to a spell.”

Hoo, boy.

We call for a judge. No one comes. No one comes for a while. I’m impatient. I take the Duress out of the sleeve (no, it doesn’t belong to me), and grab my pen from behind my ear.

“Okay, while it is true that you can respond to my Duress, you can’t wait until I choose a card and then hit me, because you can’t just play a spell while another spell is in the process of resolving.” I make a mark between the second and third sentences in Duress. “You’re trying to play your Lightning Bolt here [indicating where I marked the card]. You can’t do that. Does that make sense?”

Yes, I drew on a Duress that wasn’t mine. It was an M11 one. I think I’m in the clear here.

Rob concedes the point, and we back up; I allow him to Lightning Bolt me in response, and I take a Volt Charge. Rob goes land, go, and by the time my turn rolls around, the judge arrives. We let him know everything is fine, and a Consecrated Sphinx on turn five signals the end of Round 2.

My Round 3 opponent is a dude named Joe, otherwise known as The Dude Who Didn’t Know Who I Was But Lent Me a Grave Titan Anyway. He was on a mono-Blue Quicksilver Amulet deck featuring Augury Owl, Wurmcoil Engine, and Destroyer-of-Caw-Blade Grand Architect. We split the first two games, uninterestingly. I get to cast a Praetor’s Grasp Game 2; before I can even think about it, the words “Holy shit, you have Quicksilver Amulet in here” come out of my mouth while I search his library. He suggests I grab a Spell Pierce to make sure it never resolves. I grab Wurmcoil Engine instead. Game 3 is an interesting one.

By the end of the game, I have, in play: a Grave Titan, two Zombie credit cards, and a mess o’ land, including a Creeping Tar Pit. He has a mess o’ land including a Buried Ruin, and three cards, two of which I knew: Spell Pierce, and Wurmcoil Engine. I have a grip full of cards, notables being a Doom Blade and a Dismember.

I’m on 6. He’s on 9.

He Into the Roils my Grave Titan and casts Wurmcoil Engine on the same turn. He’s got 4 mana up after that, representing his Spell Pierce, and returning his Wurmcoil Engine with Buried Ruin.

My turn happens. I Preordain, digging for the one-of Volition Reins. I whiff. I Preordain again. I whiff again. I then cast Grave Titan.

I now have lethal on the board . . . if it wasn’t for that fucking Wurmcoil Engine. Did I mention that it swings for exactsies?

I also have three lands untapped. I haven’t played a land yet this turn.

If I play my Island now, I’ll have four untapped lands. I can cast Doom Blade on that Wurmcoil Engine with mana up to pay for Spell Pierce. Then, he gets two Wurm, plus rebuys Wurmcoil Engine with Buried Ruin, and replays it. I don’t think I can win with that line of play.

I play my Island and pass the turn.

On his upkeep, I cast Dismember on his Wurmcoil Engine for and −2 life, leaving 2 mana open for his Spell Pierce. He dutifully casts the Spell Pierce anyway, I pay the 2 mana, and he draws and scoops.

Last round, I’m playing my friend Adam, who’s at 2–0–1, on Caw-Blade.

Game 1, I win the die-roll and cast Inquisition of Kozilek, seeing Squadron Hawk, two Celestial Colonnades, a third one of which he played first turn, a Scalding Tarn, an Inkmoth Nexus, an Island, and a Tectonic Edge. I do not lose this game.

The next two games, I find myself behind all the time. His Leyline of Sanctity hurts me a little, but honestly, that seems to make little difference to me. I have to blow all my good removal on his Squadron Hawks. If I don’t counter a Sword of Feast and Famine, it is in play forever. Grave Titan sucks because there’s no ground to clog up; all his creatures have flying. I’m not sure how Aintrazi figured out how to play this matchup, but more power to him, because these two games are uphill battles that I (spoiler alert) don’t win. I really only get a game win because Adam didn’t mulligan when he very clearly should have. There is a cute bit of business in the third game where Adam brings out all his Leyline of Sanctity because he sees me sideboarding between Games 2 and 3, and figures I am bringing out my discard, when in actuality I am just bringing my countermagic back in, because I am back on the play. I never even considered bringing out my discard; he can’t draw Leyline of Sanctity every game, right?

My thoughts on the deck are that with a lot of play-testing and maybe a little tweaking, you can turn this Caw-Blade matchup into something favorable. One Consume the Meek is probably too few; I found myself digging for it every game. After revealing it to Adam after the Game 1 blowout, I never saw it again (karma). This deck seems like the type that preys on a more competitive tournament; it can do anything you want it to. When you play a deck like this, your wins and losses rest not on luck, but squarely at your feet. Some people are comfortable with that. Those less secure with themselves will probably blame luck. I’m sure you know the type.

Would I recommend it for FNM, or some other equally casual Standard tournament? No. I don’t know about your local metagame, but in Syracuse, it seems like there’s always a double-digit number of people playing mono-Red every Friday. I have no idea why you’d play mono-Red in a format of Timely Reinforcements, but I’m also coming to the slow understanding that FNM is a different kind of beast altogether.

While PTQ attendance took a nosedive in the heyday of Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic, the FNM attendance in Syracuse not only held steady, it grew. No one ever played Caw-Blade at FNM. It was strange to me, almost like there was a tacit agreement: “Hey, we’re all here to have fun tonight, let’s not ruin it with Caw-Blade.” Environments like that, where originality and thinking outside the box are stressed and encouraged, are definitely a great place to learn the game and its intricacies.

See you next week.

Jon Corpora

Pronounced ca-pora

@feb31st