FNM is starting to become a lot like Cheers . . . just without alcohol and women. Everyone knows everybody’s name. Sure, there are new people introduced into the mix every so often, but they’re integrated into the scene relatively quickly. Having an almost conspicuous absence of players who dismiss less skilled players on the basis that they’re less skilled definitely helps. It’s shocking how many tournament scenes are full of these poisonous players who frown upon new players and just look at them as money in the bank. At a big tournament like a Grand Prix or a PTQ, I am all about that mentality—but at an FNM?

What any given person at small, weekly, in-store events should be trying to do is nurture the bad players—help them with decks, go over misplays, and so on—and push the intermediate players to be better. I try to follow that model as much as I can, but what ends up actually happening is that I’m nice to the lesser players and just make fun of the intermediate players constantly, which I like because it’s fun and you can reuse the same jokes over and over again while you ignore the fact that no one else is laughing anymore when you say, “Louis went to time again? Shocking,” for the fifth week in a row.

As routine as FNM is every week, I’m still always excited about it. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I play something new every week. Maybe it’s because Magic kicks ass. I honestly have no idea.

I show up to FNM a few hours early and play a few games with this deck—the deck I am to pilot:

"Mono Green by Todd Anderson"

• Creatures (23)
• 1 Acidic Slime
• 1 Bellowing Tanglewurm
• 4 Strangleroot Geist
• 4 Birds of Paradise
• 4 Dungrove Elder
• 4 Llanowar Elves
• 3 Phyrexian Metamorph
• 2 Thrun, the Last Troll

• Planeswalkers (4)
• 1 Garruk Relentless
• 3 Garruk, Primal Hunter

• Spells (9)
• 1 Mutagenic Growth
• 4 Green Sun's Zenith
• 4 Sword of War and Peace

• Lands (24)
• 24 Forest

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Glissa, the Traitor
• 2 Naturalize
• 2 Surgical Extraction
• 2 Creeping Corrosion
• 2 Sword of Feast and Famine
• 3 Ratchet Bomb
• 3 Tumble Magnet

Buy This Deck

The games are blowouts in my favor and I get even more pumped for reasons I’ll go into later. On to the games!

Round One – R.J. Fischer

Another guy I’ve played against a billion times. The weekend of the release, R.J. strolled in to Cloud City, bought a case of Dark Ascension, and walked out.

Out of that case, how many Sorin, Lord of Innistrad did he open?

One.

In the course of a Magic game, do things—like, say, the edition of your opponent’s cards, or whether he uses a play mat, or if he has dice, or if those dice (if they exist) are in a Crown Royal bag—matter?

Let’s talk about versions of cards used in a deck. Whether they’re calculated choices or not, the kind of basic Island and the version of the Mana Leak your opponent uses can tell us certain things. For example, foils are a very superficial and non-subtle way of trying to convey to your opponent that you have cash to throw around. Whether this implication winds up being true is irrelevant. Foils can also serve a different purpose: to be aesthetically pleasing. But then again, I am not a crow, and I don’t like things because they are shiny and reflect light.

People sometimes react in weird ways to foils and other expensive cards. I didn’t know this until I borrowed a really expensive Legacy deck and received a lot of comments, however offhand, when I’d play a foil Tarmogoyf or a Beta Tropical Island that didn’t belong to me. Once, in a match of Modern, I had a foil Tarmogoyf (that I was borrowing) stolen by a Threads of Disloyalty, and my opponent noted that he was beating me down with my own $300 bill. I’m not sure if this is universal.

What I do know is that I react to playing against a foiled-out deck by always assuming my opponent sucks. I don’t know why that is. I mean . . . a hundred percent of the time, it’s true, but it’s been an admittedly small sample size.

The way I try to make my decks look, which I’ve said before, is to just find the oldest version of a card in English. There are a couple caveats; for example, Sleight of Hand was originally in Portal: Second Age. However, Portal: Second Age wasn’t a real expansion (it was never Standard, so you can’t draft it), so if Sleight of Hand were in Standard right now, I’d be playing the Seventh Edition version.

If I had to guess why I did it like that or what I was trying to convey, I think it would be some combination of aesthetics (casting an Onslaught Naturalize when you control a Strangleroot Geist just looks cool to me) and a desire to convey that I know about the history of the game; now that I play at Cloud City, a place primarily full of newer players who have been playing for maybe a year or two, conveying the latter is very important to me because I like to set myself apart from other . . . because I like attention and shit. I also like it when people are like, “What’s that card?” and I indicate my Lorwyn Oblivion Ring and say, “Oblivion Ring,” and they go, “Oh, wow, I had no idea Oblivion Ring was from that set,” giving me a false sense of superiority that I enjoy because I’m a dipshit.

Oh yeah, and R.J. and I played a game of Magic, too. For all the talk about aesthetics and shit, I don’t really remember what his Forests looked like or if he even used a play mat because our games were really short. I do remember that he was playing a green ramp deck of some sort—maybe like Conley’s from GP: Orlando. I think it may have had Primeval Titan. It definitely had Grave Titan.

In our first game, R.J. starts out with a Viridian Emissary to my Birds of Paradise. My second turn yields a Strangleroot Geist. I offer R.J. the trade, but he declines to my surprise. The reason soon becomes apparent when he taps out on his third turn to cast a would-be devastating Sword of Feast and Famine.

(I’m holding a Phyrexian Metamorph.)

I cast another Strangleroot Geist on my turn and make a seemingly desperate attack. He takes it all, going to 14, and cracks back with a Viridian Emissary holding a Sword of Feast and Famine.

And he misses his fourth land drop.

Neither of us misses that.

I copy his Sword of Feast and Famine on my turn, suit up a Strangleroot Geist, swing in, and cast a Dunston Checks Ingrove Elder. R.J. can’t keep up with that board presence and scoops.

Our second game is a little blurry for me; I remember trading Sword of War and Peace hits, and eventually we hit a stalemate until one of my sideboarded Sword of Feast and Famine shows up and makes very short work of him.

Round Two – Matt Brown

Matt is playing a really sweet deck that I’d love to play at Grand Prix Baltimore, which, yes, I am going to. MARK YOUR CALENDARS, PEOPLE.

Instead of going over the games, I’ll just show you out a rough outline of what I think his deck looked like:

"Liquimetal Wolf Run"

• Creatures (12)
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 3 Acidic Slime
• 4 Primeval Titan
• 3 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Thrun, the Last Troll

• Spells (22)
• 4 Ancient Grudge
• 2 Green Sun's Zenith
• 4 Rampant Growth
• 4 Whipflare
• 4 Liquimetal Coating
• 4 Sphere of the Suns

• Lands (25)
• 5 Forest
• 6 Mountain
• 2 Kessig Wolf Run
• 4 Copperline Gorge
• 4 Inkmoth Nexus
• 4 Rootbound Crag

Buy This Deck

Primeval Titan–based ramp decks are the best decks in Standard right now, if not the most linear and powerful. This deck is based on gaining an advantage in the mirror by being able to blow up lands every turn. If you’ve been reading this column a while, you’ll recall that I desperately, desperately have tried to make Liquimetal Coating work in the past. More than one person’s mentioned to me that Liquimetal Coating is pretty sick now with Ancient Grudge, but I ignored them; Liquimetal Coating was so great last spring solely because of the presence of Caw Blade; once that deck went away, so did artifacts.

Aside: The power levels in Scars block are very, very skewed. Some cards are flat-out ridiculous—the Swords, some good Phyrexian cards from New Phyrexia, some green cards from Mirrodin Besieged—but the power of the average card in the block is very, very low. Scars block as a whole has been very passive in comparison to the two other blocks it’s shared Standard with; most of the decks in both eras have been more dependent on synergies found in Innistrad and Zendikar, with powerful cards from Scars block thrown in. The only Scars-based deck has been the Tempered Steel deck, and that’s just a dumb linear, aggro deck that wouldn’t even have existed during Zendikar if Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind Sculptor hadn’t been banned. I hate Scars block. End Aside.

It’s not just the second coming of powerful Equipment in Standard strategies that makes a Liquimetal Coating deck so appealing. Ramp decks are based on lands, and if you can take away their land drops while also having a strong endgame, you can eke out a huge advantage in the mirror, and I think that deck is well positioned to do just that.

Matt ends up beating me in two very quick games; I just can’t interact with a lot of Inkmoth Nexuses—especially while my resources are being attacked.

Round Three – Mark Carfagno, Sr.

Mark is an older guy, and as I’d soon find out, he played veeerrry slllooooowly. He’s playing a G/W homebrew with twelve 1-drop mana dorks and Scorned Villager. The deck’s goal is to power out an Essence of the Wild or just take over with Gavony Township, which is exactly what Mark does Game 1 with the help of Elspeth Tirel. It’s not really a great matchup for me Game 1; the green deck just does not deal with more creatures well, especially when Gavony Township isn’t allowing you to crack back profitably and your Bellowing Tanglewurm is a blank.

However, Games 2 and 3 are a cakewalk against this deck, as proved by turn-two Ratchet Bomb and turn-four Green Sun's Zenith for Glissa, the Traitor.

Round Four – Nick Stogsdill

At the midnight prerelease of Dark Ascension, I split the finals with Nick, netting us each eighteen packs. I watched as he opened Sorin, Lord of Innistrad, Mikaeus, the Unhallowed, and a foil Beguiler of Wills, while I opened a Huntmaster of the Fells and some garbage. In the aftermath of PT: Dark Ascension, that’s probably fine, given that Huntmaster of the Fells was the only Dark Ascension mythic rare that actually performed, but at the time, I was pissed. And that’s my Nick Stogsdill story.

He’s playing a pretty stock W/B tokens list.

Game 1 goes down to the wire as Nick topdecks Sorin, Lord of Innistrad at 3 life the turn before he dies to a Sword of War and Peace and is able to keep making black blockers and stabilize behind a horde of tokens thanks to Lingering Souls and Gather the Townsfolk. Vault of the Archangel and Intangible Virtue wind up allowing him to start going on the offensive, I don’t draw the miser’s maindeck Ratchet Bomb, and Nick takes down the nail-biter.

The words “Ratchet” and “Bomb” sum up Games 2 and 3 very well. I hold onto Naturalizes both games just in case of Stony Silences, as Nick mentions in between games that he wished he had Stony Silences, which leads me to believe that he actually has them, but if he did, he never saw them. Maybe he was just being honest. WEIRD.

Round Five – Ryan Sullivan

Ryan and I went to the same woman’s house for daycare. We went to the same elementary, intermediate, junior high, and high school.

We’ve met.

This wasn’t so much of a game of Magic as it was a big joke. The two of us were basically just trying to make each other laugh the entire time—while I beat him down because he never had the turn-two Mana Leak for my turn-two Sword of War and Peace either game. That’s really all the games ever come down to this round.

I finish 4–1, but Matt winds up making my tiebreaks not-so-great, and I take third place behind another 4–1 player whom I never had a chance to play. Oh well.

The mono-green deck was really fun to play, and it gave me another look at a guy I never gave much thought to during spoiler season: Strangleroot Geist. It just seemed to be an unassuming card—an aggressively tweaked Kitchen Finks with little to no utility.

I am not great at evaluating cards.

Strangleroot Geist allows green to be really aggressive while still maintaining card equity. A friend of mine actually pointed out that Strangleroot Geist is a lot more like Vengevine-lite: a repeatable beater that allows a green deck to play a different kind of aggressive strategy than traditional green decks.

Phyrexian Metamorph was amazing. It was just an amazing utility card, and it not only gave me a copy of whatever the best card on the table was, but it did so at an insanely small mana investment, comparatively (usually) to whatever I was copying.

Bellowing Tanglewurm gives you free wins.

I’m playing some sort of Pod deck tomorrow, and next weekend is GP: Baltimore. I’m still not sure what I’m gonna do for that. Maybe I’ll play in a Standard win-a-box and talk about that. Maybe I’ll pass off my FNMing duties to someone awesome. What do you guys think I should do? Sound off in the forums!

Jon Corpora

Pronounced Ca-pora

@feb31st