Our mission in Raccoon City continues, as David and I continue to chronicle the tale of Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira. Last time, we managed to make it to the Kendo Gun Shop after besting the Nemesis in a rooftop confrontation. The proprietor gave us a key to the alley on the side of the store, which should hopefully get us back to the train station.

Hopefully, nothing bad happens and we escape unharmed. Then again, what could possibly go wrong.

(Credit to Sam Callahan for the thumbnail)

In hindsight, it was quite fortunately that my OBS crashed 3 times while recording this episode, because it finally gave me insight into something I’ve heard people mention a few times, but could never quite got a handle on myself.

As painful a confession as this is for me, I don’t give me content the post-production love that I honestly should, just because it’s really hard for me to set aside the required time. What I noticed is that, either through moving away from my mic while playing or my voice just naturally getting quieter, my audio is difficult to hear compared to when I test. With this in mind, I have some ideas for what I can do to solve this problem, and hopefully it’ll stop being an issue.

I’m fully aware that there’s more I could do to improve the quality of my content, and I’m hoping in time I can start building up to that. I’d like to separate my feeds, so that the game video and audio is separate from mine and my guests (so that editing and audio balancing is easier). I’m happy with my video quality from my capture card, but it’s clear my audio work leaves much to be desired. This may be a one-man production, but that’s no excuse to sit on my laurels.

As for the episode itself, it’s interesting to note how different Carlos’s segments feel compared to Jill’s. With Jill, she feels like someone who, despite having access to limited resources, is more than capable to using those resources to maximum effectiveness, handling herself better than could be reasonably expected. Meanwhile, Carlos gives off the impression of someone who is absolutely more well-equipped and organized.

So much of that comes down to the first impressions. The game opens with Jill frantically running away from the Nemesis, scrambling to have use the environment to keep her distance and land a few hits (or ram him with a car) where ever she can. Even her pistol is an object she finds rather than one she goes in with. When we finally take control of Carlos for the first time in the old police station from RE2, he literally starts out with a fully-loaded machine gun with 200 rounds of ammo to spare.

Now, it’s important to note than both of them are just as effective mechanically. While Carlos has a machine gun, it doesn’t do as much damage per hit as the pistol. And despite her initial loadout, Jill has access to a ton of ammo and weapons in the environment. The difference is purely one of aesthetic “feeling”, not of practical effectiveness. It shows how important that initial impression is, and how what happens in the story do have tangible impact on the emotional state of the player when engaging with the mechanics laid in front of them.

It’s been some time, so let us take a short reprieve from Magic the Gathering: Arena to delve back into Legends of Runeterra. Since we last entered Summoner’s Rift, a new nation, and a brand new set of cards, has made its way into the game and people have been playing around with them to great effect.

So of course, we have two new decks that make use of these mechanics in different ways. Sit back, relax, and join we for a few rounds.

As always, the deck lists I use are taken from MobaLytics.

• Scouts: CEBQCAQGCYBQEAADAYEQQAIAAEERKGQ5E4VTGAIBAIAAOAICAEAAWEQ
• Lux Karma: CECAEAQCAMEQEAQAAMEQIAICAICCSOIEAEAA6GRBFIAQCAQAAEBACAICGEAQEAAF

The first deck we plays is built around being quick and aggressive, but using strong enough bodies so that swings are almost always in our favor. We also take advantage of the new Scout mechanic. If the first attack taken on a given turn is done by units with Scout, the attack coin is preserved and the player is able to make a second attack.

One of the deck’s two champions, Quinn, both has Scout innately, and levels up when she witnesses enough attacks. Since the Scout attack is still an attack, she can bear witness to two attacks per turn and hopefully level up quickly. The Scout card we have use of is Grizzled Ranger, which can set up some awkward blocks for our opponent, since they know killing will just generate another creature.

The second champion in the deck, Miss Fortune, further takes advantage of our stream of attacks, while making them safer, by deal additional damage per swing. Like Quinn, she levels up after she’s seen us attack enough times, and if she does it’s basically game over. Not many enemies can stand up to repeated, reliable 3 damage per attack. (Shame we never once drew into her.)

And just so that we can attack even more than we already do, we make use of Relentless Pursuit, which restores our attack token. That said, I’ve played another version of this deck that instead uses Citrus Courier to both heal our army and induce that same effect, which I switched back to after the steam.

It’s rare for me to play such an aggressive deck, but this is one that feels really good to pilot. We have more than enough tools to make our attacks as safe as possible with Challenger units and combat tricks to swing the math in our favor. Our champions also feed directly into our strategy, and when they level up our attacks are even safer than they were before.

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The second deck is built around champions we’ve seen before: Lux and Karma, using them as our finishers in a control strategy.

Since similar decks have already been featured, I won’t go into too much detail, but this deck does tend to rely more on creatures than past setups I’ve run. Specifically, Radiant Guardian is an all star, allowing us to outpace more aggressive decks with careful blocks, giving us enough extra life to sustain through to our finish line. If we’re fortunate enough to pair her with an Unyielding Spirit to keep her from dying, most of what we go up against just isn’t able to handle her.

And with the density of units we have compared to a typical control deck, we can take advantage of removal options like Concerted Strike as well. Other new cards in our arsenal include Deep Mediation, which I would run even if we didn’t already use a ton of spells to trigger Lux.

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These new cards have been fun to play with, and I appreciate the variety of decks I’m seeing from the community. Such creativity is usually indicative of a healthy meta, and while the game will always be improving, it’s in a good spot after its first real expansion of sorts.

After my wildly successful run of Resident Evil 2’s remake back in early 2019, I couldn’t possibly pass up the opportunity to go do a similar playthrough for Resident Evil 3.

Thankfully, my friends David Phillips and Andre Doucet were in agreement, and together The Spooky Bois are back in town.

Special thanks to Sam Callahan for working on this thumbnail for me as well.

Before we proceed, I should make it clear that unlike the Resident Evil 2 playthrough, this is not a blind run. I had intended to make it a blind run, but eventually curiosity as I kept eyeing the copy I purchased for this Let’s Play. Not to mention that I was between games at the time, waiting for the Final Fantasy 7 remake to come out.

The thing that immediately stands out to me in this game, compared to the Resident Evil 2 remake, is just how much less scary it is overall. It’s difficult to parse exactly how much of it is improved controls/responsiveness versus my retaining skill from the last time I played a Resident Evil game (which was that RE2 Let’s Play), but I rarely felt like I was in any genuine danger even at my least powerful.

You might even to start to notice that in the way I play. Resident Evil 2 had me making tactical choices over which zombies I would even bother trying to kill rather than just leave them knowing I could easily juke them. Here, I assassinate pretty much every infected and/or undead thing that I am capable of, barely ever running low on bullets or healing items (even if I forget to take them out of the item box). By the time I had wrapped up that first section, I could have sprinted across the zone because all of the zombies were just dead.

This also extends to the Nemesis. Unlike Mr. X, who was a constant looming presence over everything we did in the Raccoon City police station, Nemesis feels like he’s barely around for most of the game. When he does deign to make an appearance, it’s usually short and heavily scripted, making him feel more like a quick-time event than an organic threat. While he’s still a persistent pursuer in the game’s story, we don’t get the same impression of him mechanically. In terms of gameplay, he punctuates individual sections, serving more as a marker of progress than a threat to be feared.

While I don’t have the window into what the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was like, David has played that version of the game, and I find his commentary on the way the remake handles translating it into a modern day game fascinating. Sounds like a ton of work went into adapting the beats of the story into something a modern presentation, especially in how they removed the elements of choice affecting the campaign and adapted characters like Carlos to be less stereotypical than they were in their original incarnations.

Hopefully, I remember to keep picking his brain about that as we proceed.

Every now and then, a deck comes to light that is so surprising in it’s effectiveness that it takes seeing it in action to truly understand how powerful they can be. This is one of those types of decks.

That’s right, we’re staying in the bike lane with a Jeskai Cycling deck. Don’t be fooled by the fact every non-land card in the main deck is either common or uncommon. In the hands of a good pilot, this deck can make miracles happen.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Decklist taken, as always, from MTGGoldfish.

This deck has several cards that can act as win conditions. As far as creatures are concerned, there are 3 out of the 4 we run that can set on opponent onto a clock, forcing them to come up with an answer or else die.

• Flourishing Fox grows stronger each time we cycle a card.
• Valiant Rescuer creates a 1/1 token the first time we cycle each turn, even in our opponent’s turns
• Drannith Stinger hits our opponent for 1 for every card we cycle.

Though it may not be a creature, Improbable Alliance also serves as yet another payoff. Since cycling draws us a card, it’s easy to get to that second card condition to trigger the creation of a 1/1 flying faerie. The activated ability is nice to have late game, but it’s not what we’re playing the card for.

And thus, our strategy is to bring out one, or hopefully more, of these cards early and then just start cycling cards like crazy. Between all the triggers going off, we should hopefully be able to quick out-value and overtake our opponent quickly, before they have the opportunity to establish a board presence or sweep our forces away. Once we have enough commitment to the board, we can start cycling extra copies of these cards as well, since each of them has a mere 1-mana cost to do so.

In most matchups, Drannith Healer would just be another card to cycle away for one of our other creatures. However, against an equally aggressive opponent he can be used to provide us the extra life we need to turn the tides in our favor.

Even if we can’t accomplish our strategy with creatures alone, we also come equipped with backups and other tools we can use to finish the game. Chief among is the alternate win-condition: Zenith Flare. For 4-mana, it deals damage to any target, and gives us life, equal to the number of cycle cards in our grave, even if they didn’t get there through cycling.

Do not, under any circumstances, underestimate the damage Zenith Flare can do. I have both hit and been hit with over 15 damage in a single cast of this powerhouse, ending the game suddenly out of nowhere. (My personal best is 18.) When all else fails, it can turn a desperate situation into an assured victory. More importantly, it’s a flexible card because even if it’s not strong enough to turn the tide on it’s own, it can be used to take out the big creature of planeswalker that would otherwise keep us from the win, gaining us a small bit of life in process. Despite the other cycling payoffs, this card is what brings the deck together.

But that isn’t the only trick we have up our sleeve. Once our fox is pumped up sufficiently, Go For Blood can be used to take care of most creatures that would either become a threat or keep us off a lethal swing. For an instant speed answer, Startling Development can give one of our creatures some extra power, or de-power an enemy combatant, to turn the tables on a bad swing. Both cards can also be cycled off if we’re digging down for other cards, or need the triggers.

The other cards in this deck, Footfall Crater, Frostveil Ambush, and Boon of the Wish-Giver, also provide some useful utility, but in all likelihood they’re just going to be cycled away. I’ve found that I almost wanted the cycling trigger, or to dig deeper into my deck, more than I wanted to cast the actual card.

Of course, since all of our permanents are 2 CMC or less, and we’re already in white, we might as well play Lurrus of the Dream Den as our companion. Played at the right time, we can use Lurrus to recast one of our fallen payoff cards after a long game, maybe more if he’s not immediately killed. It’s telling that out of all the cards we use, it’s be far the most expensive, where everything else is easier to procure.

This is a deck I would heartily recommend to anyone looking to dive into Arena either for the first time or after not playing for a while. Lands aside, everything you need to get it up and running should be easy to acquire and there’s a ton of power behind it.

Some EDH games don’t take too long, only about an hour or so. Others can be marathons where the tides ebb and flow, each player taking their turn in the hot seat until someone is eventually able to establish that final lock to close out the match once and for all.

This week, my table played both of types of games last night. The first of which was the one that wrapped up quickly. I piloted a combo deck using Gyruda, Doom of Depths, and my opponents were Vial Smasher/Ikra Shidiqi (with Obosh as the companion), Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord, Mairsil the Pretender, and Mayael the Anima.

I had the good fortune of having Panharmonicon in my opening hand, and with it my combo was made significantly more consistent. To explain, when Gyruda enters the battlefield, they mill each player (even their controller) for 4 cards. Their player may then choose an even-numbered CMC creature from those milled cards and summon it.

The hope is that we hit a card like Clone or Spark Double, that can enter the battlefield as a copy of Gyruda. Even if we have to sacrifice it to the legend rule, we’ll still get the ETB trigger and activate Gyruda’s effect once more. Ideally, we can keep this chain going forever, until all players are out of cards.

There are two ways to protect ourselves from falling into that same fate, either through a way to win the game if our deck is empty like Thassa’s Oracle or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. This deck used Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, whose ability allows us to shuffle our grave back into the library when it goes in.

And while the combo went off without a hitch, the resulting bad feels reminded the table too much of why we banned Mindcrank from going into the same deck as Syr Konrad, the Grim. It was technically a win, but I lost the moral victory. Needless to say, this will likely be a deck I never pilot again, just because it’s irritating to play against.

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After profusely apologizing to my playgroup, I promised to change decks to something less miserable for my next match. It is for that reason that I picked up my Monty Python and the Holy Grail deck. (Don’t tell me he doesn’t remind you of that movie.)

I hear you, the reader, groaning that Kenrith is an overpowered cEDH-level commander. And you’re right, if he’s built that way. I opted to go in a politics direction, generating tons of mana and using it to strike deals with other players.

Everyone else played the same commander except Jarad, who switched to Gavi, Nest Tender. That said since this game took an entire three hours, I won’t be detailing every move that happened. Instead, I’ll go over some of the best board states that occurred during that match and what happened to stop them.

The first big problem for the group came from Mayael. Like me, she also had a Seedborn Muse out with her commander. Except where I was helping other players (and giving myself a few extra draws) in exchange of favors down the line, Mayael was summoning a board that grew increasingly more difficult to deal with. Since two of them were Archetype of Endurance and Sigarda, Host of Herons, dealing with these threats wasn’t beyond my capability. (I wasn’t drawing any board clears.)

Fortunately, Gavi managed to hit the board with an overloaded Cyclonic Rift. No one else had made any major commitments to the board, so we could all rebuilt easily enough, but without a Reliquary Tower, Mayael was forced to discard over 20 cards at the end of the turn. Once I countered Seedborn Muse on recast with my own Pact of Negation, that was enough to seal her fate.

Gavi was managing to set up her own army thanks to the tokens she generated with her ability, but since she wasn’t doing much swinging in with them the real threat became Mairsil who dangerously close to establishing a combo win, constantly blinking their commander with Thassa, Deep-Dwelling to exile more and more cards for Mairsil to steal abilities from.

As for me, I was close to entering my endgame. Because I had been getting many excess draws using Kenrith’s ability and my still living (despite eating several removal spells) Seedborn Muse, I had managed to discard Meteor Golem and play Altar of Dementia. Resurrecting the Golem with Kenrith, then sacrificing it to my Altar to mill myself and set up for a Thassa’s Oracle win, I was set to start controlling the board and setting up my win.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the general fatigue that was starting to set in. After a exhausting almost three hours, Gavi was growing (rightfully) tired and seeking to wrap up the match, even if she wasn’t the winner. I don’t think she saw that I was in the middle of setting up my own victory, because if she had it’s unlikely she would have stopped my attempt to lock Mairsil out of the game by using Meteor Golem to kill it until perform it could be blinked to exile its winning combo. As I went to do so, they blinked it themselves with Astral Drift.

This allowed Mairsil to generate their win-condition and exile Tree of Perdition, with Spikeshot Elder already caged. Having had to use my resources to mass exile the token army beforehand, I was not able to establish my board quickly enough to avoid the lethal kill shot. The rest of the table was taken out in short order.

Still, I can’t be mad at my performance. With Kenrith, I was able to do what I sought to do and keep the heat off myself with everyone else used me to take care of the bigger threats. It’s easy to say that “If X didn’t happen, I could have won”, but that’s the danger of focusing on politics. Failing to manage the mood of the table just means you’ll get taken out.

And maybe I misplayed by using by mass exile spell. Though I had to sacrifice Kenrith earlier when Mairsil copied Empress Galina‘s ability, I had more than enough mana to recast him and could’ve just used my mana to gain life and dodge the Spikeshot Elder damage. Part of why I enjoy writing these posts is that they give me a space to evaluate not just my performance in the game, but also how I can help keep our meta healthy.

If you learn have any takeaways from this post, make it these two:

1. Gyruda is one of those abilities where it’s not game breaking, but it may be just annoying enough to resolve, either in Cockatrice or in paper, than it’s not worth running. In an automated UI, the feels bad would not have hit my playgroup so strongly
2. At some point, the game has to end. Even the most ardent MTG player would be hard pressed to last 3 hours in Cockatrice. And with more than 4 players, the odds of that happening just go up.

What a bitter sweet moment this is. We have completed our long journey, starting by saving dragons imprisoned in crystal and ending by rescuing the next generation from the clutches of an evil sorceress.

And yet, this means that our time with gaming’s most iconic, adorable little dragon have come to an end. Not only are we done with Year of the Dragon, but the whole Reignited Trilogy. What a ride it’s been.

While The Sorceress is the least interesting villain among the three in the original trilogy (despite having the most screen time), Year of the Dragon manages to pull of an excellent finale regardless. And a large part of that are the number of successful payoffs, both for characters and for gameplay.

• The interview with Bentley after we defeat the Sorceress the first is an excellent callback to the ending scene from the first game after Gnasty Gnorc is defeated. Doubly so when both Spyro and Bentley seem to be having genuine fun with the whole scene.
   
• Though I’ve criticized it a few times, Hunter and Bianca’s relationship culminates in a cute scene with them at the Fireworks Factory. It serves as a good excuse to have Spyro see everyone and find out what happened to them after the adventure, while also setting up an solid joke with young, 12-year old Spyro being creeped out by romance. Even better when you enter the Super Bonus Round and see that they’re both concerned about Spyro but too afraid to admit it.
• Speaking of, the Super Bonus Round is a grand callback to Gnasty’s Loot in the first Spyro game, and it’s got that same sense of doing a victory lap after all we’ve accomplished. I’m the guy that enjoys watching numbers go up, and these levels are the best at satisfying that part of my reptile brain. The rematch with The Sorceress wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t supposed to be. If anything, it’s a celebration of all the effort the player put it to making it this far.
• And most important, it feels so good to make money bags hurt: Ram him, torch him, chase him. It was an absolutely genius move to build up the resentment towards the larcenous ursine, making this moment all the sweeter. Even better watching all that money he extorted from me fall out of his pockets and back into my coffers.

It was a fun ride, and I’m really happy that I was able to share my love of this trilogy with you guys.

Next time, join me and a guest for Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

Ikoria has proven itself to be a set of intriguing and mechanically complex new mechanics, from the new Keyword Counters to the Mutate ability many of it’s non-Human creatures come equipped with.

This is the first deck we’ve played this season that makes use of one of the most controversial new mechanics: Companion. There are 10 creatures in Ikoria that have the companion keyword, each with their own unique condition that, when satisfied, allows us to cast them from the sideboard. However, we may only designate a single one of them as our Companion, and only a single copy of them.

The one we chose for this deck is a build-around, where most decks won’t be able to neatly slot it in without preparation. That said, we don’t need to warp our core strategy too great in order to take advantage of it. Yes, as the title of this post suggests, that Companion is Lurrus of the Dream Den.

Credit to MTGGoldfish for providing the deck list used in this episode.

Before we go into the deck itself, we should talk about Lurrus, since we build around them. They are a 3/2 with Lifelink for 3-mana, which isn’t bad stat-wise, but also not the reason they’re interesting. In order to have them set as our companion, every permanent card (so not including instants or sorceries) must cost 2 or fewer mana. In order words, we cut ourselves off from any other cards aside from Lurrus that cost 3 or more mana.

And in exchange for imposing this condition on us, Lurrus will allow us to cast any 1 of these permanents from our graveyard every turn that he’s on the board, as long as they cost 2 mana or less. Considering the first condition, this is a very convenient number. Given the nature of our companion’s ability and imposition, the idea behind our deck is obvious: Focus on low mana cost cards that can generate us value from dying or otherwise being recurred.

This makes the Cat/Oven combo, which we’ve talked about before in the Jund Food episode of the Eldraine season, and obvious pick for our primary strategy. Both cards involved in the combo are 1-mana cards that already exist in Lurrus’s colors. If our combo is ever broken, likely through Witch’s Oven’s destruction, then we can cast Lurrus and use them to resurrect the missing piece. It might not finish the game quickly, but it’s an ever present threat our opponent will need to keep in mind.

Our other strong synergy exists in the form of Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger, which is technically a 2-drop despite itself and it’s Escape cost. In the absence of other potent permanents in our graveyard, Kroxa will always be a solid target to recast with Lurrus’s ability. There are few decks that can deal with the strain of having to discard a card and/or lose life every single turn. When we factor in how the rest of this deck fills up our graveyard, it’s also quite conceivable that we can summon with with his escape cost and use him to truly finish the game.

Also note that although Lurrus is a White/Black creature, this isn’t EDH and we can still play Red. Lurrus’s (and every companion’s) hybrid mana cost also allows us to ignore the fact that they’re a White creature, focusing instead on using Black mana to play them.

While Dreadhorde Butcher and Robber of the Rich don’t necessarily have graveyard synergy, they’re both 2-drops with haste that can come in early and frustrate a lot of other decks. The butcher is deceptively difficult to block, because even before it gets counters from dealing damage, it can deal damage on its way out which can take care of either creatures twice its size or multiple creatures at once, depending on the situation. And if we need to, we can always ping our opponent’s face when it dies.

On the other hand, the robber can steal us cards off the top of our opponent’s deck that we can use to extend our reach, especially in a mirror match or against a similarly aggressive, low CMC opponent. I’ve had games where I played more of my opponent’s card with Robber of the Rich than I did my own cards. And like everything else in this deck, Lurrus can revive him if we need more fuel for our fire.

The last package this deck includes as far as permanents go is the Priest of Forgotten Gods, along with Gutterbones and Serrated Scorpion to act as potential sacrifice fodder. The Priest can also use any of our other creatures as a sacrifice, especially when we have Lurrus to revive them, and provides the necessary edict effect and reach to close out otherwise troublesome match-ups.

And if we need them, we can always use Claim the Firstborn to take control of an opponent’s creature to sacrifice to either the Oven or the Priest. Should Lurrus either be dead or too unsafe to cast, Call of the Death-Dweller, given the conditions we’re building our deck under, gives us nearly free reign to resurrect any of our creatures.

As someone who loves Aristocrats and Sacrifice-style strategies, this one speaks to me deep in my soul. Even in the footage, it’s easy to see that I’m having significantly more fun, even in matches where I’m losing, than I did with the previous Sultai Flash deck. It’s often a close, nail-biting finish which only adds to the tension and excitement.

Having said all that, I still can’t say I’m particularly fond of the Companion mechanic conceptually. I used to play YuGiOh, as many of you know. What of the thing that bothered me about later mechanics like Link summoning and Xyz summoning in YuGiOh was that every deck could take advantage of them, and they had no reason not to. As a result, if players didn’t use them, they would immediately fall behind the rest of their peers.

Technically, this isn’t the case for Companions as of yet, since they all have conditions that need to be fulfilled before they can be used in that manner. However, it gets dangerously close to that homogenization and power creep that turned me away from YuGiOh. Some decks, like Jeskai Fires, started just slotting in Keruga, the Macrosage as a companion because they already satisfied the condition that everything they played was CMC 3 or greater, sacrificing nothing and gaining this valuable late game card draw tool.

But even if I ignored that obvious oversight, despite the fact companions restrictions can be tight or seemingly difficult to account for, many of the current top tier decks in Standard, and even a few in Modern, Legacy, and Vintage are using them (screenshots below for posterity since the meta will invariably change), even building entire decks around them, as of the time of writing. We saw a similar phenomenon in Hearthstone with cards like Reno Jackson. Some of them became of format warping they needed to be banned.

Standard Metagame – 4/30/2020

Modern Metagame – 4/30/2020

Legacy Metagame – 4/30/2020

Vintage Metagame – 4/30/2020

Obviously the set is still new, and it could very well be that I’m speaking hyperbole. The meta may shake out such that most of these companion cards fall out of use. However, it’s not an auspicious introduction. Even if they never print new companions again, eternal formats are forever stuck with them, so we may see ramifications for years to come.

We’re back with another Commander Night Playback. And naturally, I wouldn’t be coming at you with a new build than my playgroup gracious allowed me to test out.

Thanks to the combination of Ikoria and Commander 2020 coming out at the same time, my mind has been aflutter with new build ideas. In particular, I became enamored with the new legendary creatures in Abzan (White/Black/Green) colors. For this match, I brought in Nethroi, Apex of Death, with a deck focused around making the most of his mutate ability to accrue value after every one is running low of resources.

My opponents were Sygg, River Cutthroat, Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast, and Kykar, Wind’s Fury. And before you ask, we do allow planeswalkers as commanders at my table. (One day, they’ll just be legal, but until then I’ll always be arguing in favor of them.)

The game started out well for me, with ramping with Birds of Paradise on the first turn. While it’s obviously not as good as the turn 1 Sol Ring from Sygg, none of the other players weren’t ramping at all.

Unfortunately, I otherwise wasn’t doing much either. Lukka had a Loyal Apprentice on board, but without a commander is was just a vanilla 2/1 with haste, and no one was worrying much about that. Meanwhile, Sygg managed to get on board with Faerie Vandal. Running vehicle tribal, Kykar had a couple of them out, but nothing available to crew them with. On turn 4, they were first to deploy their commander.

Sadly for them, I was playing lands and otherwise only had a Birds of Paradise on board. So when my turn up, I felt like I had to make some sort of move just to have a blocker out. The only creature I had in hand was Ravenous Chupacabra. With Kykar the highest value creature on board, it was the easy target for my creatures ETB trigger. I’d say I felt bad, but everyone who knows me would know I’d be lying.

The next few rounds were marked by Sygg’s casting of Painful Quandary. At this point, every was running low on cards in hand, making casting every spell a difficult choice. Lukka was brave enough to take a life loss on the chin to deploy their commander, and this is where the fun began. With the commander on board, Loyal Apprentice created a thopter token during combat. Using that fodder, they used Lukka’s -2 to exile the token, putting the topmost creature of their deck onto the battlefield in its place. Fortunately for the table, the card they got was Dragon Mage.

Once Dragon Mage swung in at Kykar, who let it happen voluntarily, all of us obtained a new hand, which Kykar immediately used to cast Austere Command and wipe out Painful Quandary and all 4-cmc or higher creatures. I lost my Chupacabra, but honestly I was happier with it in my grave than on board.

At this point, it was time for me to make my move. With the total of 8 mana I had access to on Turn 7, I played 2 creatures which would go on to define my playstyle for the rest of the match: Tayam, Luminous Enigma and Luminous Broodmoth. As long as their player has a decent crop of creatures on the board, their synergy is extremely powerful.

I took advantage of this synergy on my following turn by evoking a Shriekmaw, then casting Mentor of the Meek and Sakura-Tribe Elder. And while that seems scary, Lukka was making themselves and even bigger target by cheating out creatures like Utvara Hellkite and Combustible Gearhulk. Thanks to Lukka’s +1, they also had a Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker in exile ready to be cast should they obtain a combo piece.

While this didn’t really matter to me, since I had had a small detachment of flying creatures with vigilance I could bring back, including Shriekmaw to destroy any huge red creatures that dared to come after me. Sygg, on other other hand, was seeing two large forces mount around them. My tiny beaters certainly scared them, but the large flying dragons that could easily chew through their remaining life total was certainly more of a pressing concern. Combined with my pitifully low hand size, this was probably why they swung an Invisible Stalker over at Lukka, using it to Ninjustu in a Slient-Blade Oni.

The card Sygg used their oni to steal was of no consequence, but Lukka accidentally misread the effect, showing all of us their hand. What I saw made my heart drop: Mimic Vat. Part of this is due to my own misreading of the card. I had somehow forgotten that Mimic Vat can only exile one creature at a time, and that when it exiles a new creature the previous one is deposited back into the graveyard.

Now, this is still a problem because Mimic Vat could’ve exiled the cards that died before Luminous Broodmoth could resurrect them with a flying counter. But it’s significantly less of a problem than “They can now exile everything that dies”, which was the exact thought going through my head. And while Sygg was certainly growing in threat, losing my synergy made Lukka a top priority. As I kept swinging, removing flying counters from my aerial forces so that my Broodmoth would reanimate them, I was fortunately that my opponent did not realize they could negate my strategy, and allowed me to resurrect my forces while slowly chipping away at theirs.

Since I just drew it, and I had the mana to hard cast it, I decided to start heralding in the end of the game by playing Multani, Yavimaya’s Avatar. At this point, Kykar had to bow out of the game due to prior obligations, but the rest of us kept on.

Adding to my good fortunate, Silent-Blade Oni swung in again at Lukka, with a Rogue’s Passage making it unblockable. By stealing an Abrade and using it on Mimic Vat, they were, in their words, “undoing [their] mistake”. Fostering the war between Sygg and Lukka wasn’t intended, but with the sole threat to my game plan out of the way I was much more comfortable closing the game out.

When my next turn came along, I immediately mutated Nethroi onto my Multani, swinging at Lukka at kill them and mobilizing the rest of my forces against Sygg to take them both out. Without an answer, Lukka moved to surrender on Cockatrice. That was a mistake on their part, because Sygg came in with a good-ol’ Cyclonic Rift. Although an unsurrender option exists on Cockatrice, it does not save your board state, meaning Lukka was effectively out of the game.

Using my remaining mana, I played my Birds of Paradise and Sakura-Tribe Elder once more, pitching a ton of reanimation targets for Nethroi next turn, throwing him back into the command zone in fear of it getting stolen thanks to Silent-Blade Oni. Setbacks aside, I was sitting pretty… until they played a Quietus Spike on Invisible Stalker. It didn’t kill me, but it absolutely hurt even worse than seeing my Broodmoth on the enemy’s side of the board.

Fortunately, thanks to all my Tayam triggers and the discarding I had to do at the end of last turn, I had all the tools I needed to finish off my adversary. By mutating  Nethroi onto Birds of Paradise, I was able to reanimate a ton of black creatures along like my Chupacabra, Yawgmoth, and Gary Asphodel. Destroying my Broodmoth and swinging in for 5 lifelink damage was the last bit I needed in order to turn the game in my favor.

Nethroi performed well above my expectations, and I am extremely happy with the deck. Looking at the list, I realize that a ton of cards I chose to include are dirt cheap, so I feel like this is something that could be reasonably built in paper. In many ways, it reminds me of my Muldrotha deck in how easily in get make effective and efficient use of the graveyard to recur and recycle powerful effects. Additional, it’s like Muldrotha in that it doesn’t require the commander to come out frequently. Nethroi is more of a finisher than anything else, giving the deck late game reach it might not otherwise have.

It’s time for us to leave Evening Lake, and enter the final phase of our adventure. The last hub world, Midnight Mountain, awaits us with it’s vast quantities of treasure and dragon eggs.

But before we get to that, we must fight our way through another one of the Sorceress’s monsters.

In this episode, we recruited Agent 9. Out of all the secondary playable characters in Year of the Dragon, he’s the one the benefited the most from the upgrades in the Reignited Trilogy. I happen to find a clip from YouTube of the original PlayStation version of his level, and comparing it to the footage above is such a stark contrast.

This unwieldy control scheme extended even to the “You’re Doomed” section in Fireworks Factory.

Just having the ability to freely move the reticle in all directions, without being in Sniper Mode, transforms these sections, because we not longer need to sacrifice movement for more precise and accurate shooting. Comparing the Fireworks Factory sections makes that even more obvious, since I was able to quickly and easily take care of the ninjas crawling on the ceiling.

And with the added context of our conversation about how players rarely ever look up, that’s even more true when they need to take the extra step to stop moving and switch to Sniper Mode before they can access the functionality to do so.

A lot of work when into making Agent 9 feel a lot more playable. Considering how small a presence he has over the course of the game, not even appearing until the very end, that just demonstrates the care that went into this Reignited Trilogy.

It’s a new set, and a new season of decks to play around with in Magic the Gathering: Arena, with the release of Ikoria.

Since one of my favorite decks since the support for it was added in Core Set 2020, the Flash deck, got some shiny new tools, what better way to start the season off than by playing around with these new tools, even if it seems moving from Simic to Sultai.

While I must credit this deck for the core skeleton I based my own on, I ended up heavily modifying it to create my own version, which is the one used in this video.

If you’ve been with me for a long time, you’re no stranger to the Flash Deck. We’ve gone over it twice before, once when Core Set 2020 first dropped, and again with the release of Eldraine.

The original recipe I based my own on called for playsets of Cunning Nightbonder and Growth Spiral, but I found both of these cards wanting during testing. The discount on Flash spells doesn’t come into play as often as one might think is so many of our best cards required specific colored mana to cast, making it just a 2/2 with Flash. Good, but we can do better.

As for Growth Spiral, I found while playing that there was almost never a scenario I wanted to play it over a creature with flash or one of my counterspells. In a deck where tempo is the most important part of its playstyle, going shields down just for a draw and potential ramp does not feel great. We aren’t like an Uro deck where we can use it for Escape fodder either. So I scrapped both of them.

When analyzing these games shortly after the recording, one thing I noticed is that we lack a lot of answers to deal with the Jeskai cycling decks once they get online, or when the cycle a Shark Typhoon to create a token, since doing doesn’t count as casting a spell. (It’s an activated ability.) The link I posted is the deck as it existed at the time I recorded those matches, but since then I’ve removed two copies of Quench in order to complete the playset of Brazen Borrowers. With it’s Adventure half, we can both kill tokens by bouncing them to the owner’s hand, and also do the same to problematic enchantments so we have one more chance to counter them as they get recast.

I might also replace Neutralize with Sinister Sabotage as well, as the more I think about it the less sold I am on the prospect of cycling away my valuable counterspells. It seems likely that the Surveil is going to be more valuable more often.

And while Frilled Mystic, Nightpack Ambusher, and Brineborn Cutthroat among other cards from previous versions of the Simic Flash deck make a return, we have two very important newcomers joining the team. Slitherwisp has become a new win condition to along with Nightpack Ambusher. Once it’s on board, if we can keep it alive, we’ll have a reliable source of damage and card draw that can help us turn the tide in a control matchup, or stabilize after an aggressive deck’s onslaught.

The other card on our radar is Sea-Dasher Octopus. Ordinarily, a 2/2 with Flash for three mana is fine, as we stated with the Nightbonder. What makes this card special is it’s ability to draw as extra cards with combat damage. And if that wasn’t enough, the new keyword, Mutate, allows us to confer this ability onto another creature (at instant speed because of Flash), onto a creature that either wasn’t blocked or couldn’t be blocked mid-combat. In other words, we’re almost guaranteed to get that extra card, especially if we mutate our Spectral Sailor.

I think this deck has potential, but the correct recipe, and even color combo, is still something that needs to be fiddled with in this new format.