Red Mosquito

I'm a mono black guy these days. I've been embracing the graveyard on the standard ladder and it suits my play style.

I always thought I liked blue instant speed trickery, but black removal feels like a less shitty/more humane thing to do to another player.

If I can sustain my board state long enough to break out Massacre Wurm on their wide board, it's typically game over.

Man, the market for a good Magic podcast or YouTube channel is crowded with people all saying the same thing. Never ending cycle of new sets coming out, people looking at deck lists, cards getting hyped, blah blah blah. That's too much for someone like me.

Still, I've narrowed my listening schedule down to three that stand out for content that filters through the noise...

Casual Magic with Shivam Bhatt
https://casualmagic.libsyn.com/

These are long form interviews with artists, players, game designers and content creators. I like it because it's not focused on the meta or set reviews. Just a deep dive into the unique aspects of this game worth hearing more about.

Vorthos Cast
https://soundcloud.com/user-345643028

You want lore? They've got it. Everything you'd ever want to know about the stories and metaverse of this game. Makes flavor of cards and sets much more enriching.

The Howling Salt Mine
https://www.thehowlingsaltmine.com/

Okay, this one is a guilty pleasure. I don't play commander and don't hang out at game stores, but this format gives me what I imagine is the feeling of playing cards with friends and foes. Each week brings stories about how salty someone got over their game. It's fun to be an outsider looking in on how geeky this culture can get.

I was hoping the Marvel set would be more fun to open than Turtles or Spider-Man, since it’s a bigger set (I was getting so many duplicates after opening just a handful of packs of the other ones). I bought my first booster yesterday and it had three lands in it lol (to be fair, two are rares and are pretty good).

I wasn’t feeling up to it (and was broke) so I couldn’t so it for Marvel, but I’m going to commit myself to attending a prerelease for the Hobbit set.

Really not feeling Marvel at all. I've been catching up on Strixhaven and Lorwyn, looking forward to Hobbit and the next in-universe set.

As mentioned earlier, I've been having a lot of success with a black aristocrat deck I put together.

https://moxfield.com/decks/lW4utgJQ1kqewAb8XzQ8XA

It's taken me to platinum tier last month, but I'm getting bored with it. Might try White/Blue for a change and get out of my comfort zone.

I think the overall reaction to Marvel is that there are too many creatures, which isn’t surprising. I haven’t bought any of the commander decks yet but those are waaaaay creature loaded, and if you like playing any other style, it’s gonna be tough to build.

Probably doesn't help that I'm not a big Marvel guy anyway. I loved the Final Fantasy and LOTR sets specifically because I love the lore.

Yeah and LotR has all these different creature types that make a lot of sense and bring great variety. With Marvel they can have all the different characters they want and try to make them mechanically unique, but they’re all basically super powered humans. I think the general consensus is there will be about 4 more Marvel sets, and the only one that sounds super interesting to me (based on just players’ fantasy set building, no rumors or anything) would be a space-based set so you can get all different races and creatures and stuff like that.

Borg commander deck is basically going to be artifact slivers, this is nuts.

Simple Torture wrote: Wed July 15, 2026 7:31 pm Borg commander deck is basically going to be artifact slivers, this is nuts.

Are there actually enough artifact slivers for it to be good though? I traded all my valuable slivers to a communist..

They’ve only previewed two Borg cards, but based on the comments at the panel, it seems like they’re all going to have some “All artifact creatures you control…” text. So they won’t work with slivers, but they’ll buff any and all artifact creatures.

Good. I'm no fan of slivers.

Except that Nirvana song. Great bass line.

Simple Torture wrote: Sun June 28, 2026 2:35 pm
I wasn’t feeling up to it (and was broke) so I couldn’t so it for Marvel, but I’m going to commit myself to attending a prerelease for the Hobbit set.

Officially booked for 8/7!

Simple Torture wrote: Fri July 24, 2026 11:07 pm

Simple Torture wrote: Sun June 28, 2026 2:35 pm
I wasn’t feeling up to it (and was broke) so I couldn’t so it for Marvel, but I’m going to commit myself to attending a prerelease for the Hobbit set.

Officially booked for 8/7!

First pre-release?

Please have patience with the nerds who correct you and take 7 million hours a turn

You should send a warning to the people I’m playing against, I’m sure it won’t be pleasant at first.

Simple Torture wrote: Fri July 24, 2026 11:07 pm

Simple Torture wrote: Sun June 28, 2026 2:35 pm
I wasn’t feeling up to it (and was broke) so I couldn’t so it for Marvel, but I’m going to commit myself to attending a prerelease for the Hobbit set.

Officially booked for 8/7!

Had a blast, went 1-6, plenty of room to improve!

Way to go!

This was my deck: https://deckbox.org/sets/3906331

When I play on Aren, I rarely play a blue-focused deck, but I felt totally hamstrung with this prerelease—out of the six packs I opened, plus the rare promo card, almost all of my rare were blue, something like 6 of 8/9. So that pushed me strong in that direction. I did successfully play some counter spells, so I’m officially a blue asshole.

My first opponent was playing black-red, and his deck plays very fast, so I felt like I was on the defensive very early. My deck just wasn’t fast enough to be a threat, but in the second game I was able to play defense and chip away a bit and felt like I had already learned a lot through two games. My opponent was very chill and helpful. I did sneak in my biggest card as a flash, it felt good to make one of those huge splashes, but my opponent killed it immediately with an instant (he apologized lol). Fair play. The card is Lord of the Eagles in this treatment:


My second opponent was also playing blue/white and he had a lot of the same cards as me, and he was a little less…forgiving lol. He beat me a bit more handily but clearly understood the synergies and plan of this sort of deck better than I did.

My third opponent I think was a much better match for me. We took our round past the time limit and the very last game was a squeaker. She won the first game pretty easily, but for the second match I finally had everything click, ever draw was something I could use, I suddenly had 2-3 cards triggering every turn, creatures were growing, it was just a bloodbath. She was playing red/white and seemed to have bad draws the whole game, but I’ll take it! The this game was the best one I played all night, it went to overtime. I started really strong with a lot of the same cards I had in game #2 and took an early lead. It really looked like I had it, and I had my next two turns planned out: counter her next creature (she was starting to go wide), splash out my huge eagle again, and then I could fly right over her for the win. But she played an instant instead and in thinking through how it affected my guys I forgot to play the counter spell on it. If I had, there’s no way she could’ve stopped me. I let out an “Oh no, I forgot!” but she had already changed her board state, so I understood it would be unfair for me to step back (my first opponent let me do that more than once, but he was bodying me, so he didn’t care). She then had too wide of a board for me to defend and I lost on the very last turn. But I’d rather go out in a close game than get blown out again.

Thinking about going for draft in the next couple of weeks, then maybe thinking if I’ve got the stone to try commander. By the time the next set rolls around, I may try to do two prereleases in the same weekend. It’s been years and years since I’ve had a social hobby that was this fun, even playing with strangers was worth it.

And in case you were wondering: yes, this game store did have a sign saying you had to wear deodorant in order to play.

I registered for the Reality Fracture pre-release. I had been hoping to do a few non-pre-release events during the Hobbit window, maybe for this or Star Trek.