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.

What is this? Are we actually back? After spending… *checks notes*… almost half a year on indefinite hiatus, I think it’s finally time to bring Commander Night Playback back to the masses.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this series, our objective is to recap and do a postmortem analysis of the Commander games my playgroup run on Cockatrice every Saturday. This session had me equipped with one the newest commanders from Commander 2020: Xyris, the Writhing Storm.

I had run this deck in the previous session. Thanks to some bad luck with my draws, I wasn’t able to secure the land drops required to even garner a board presence, let alone win the game. It was worth running again just to see if it would perform better with a more fortunate hand. My opponents this time were running Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord and The First Sliver respectively.

And as far as performance goes, the deck vastly exceeded my expectations in the first game we played. Thanks to an Arcane Signet, I had managed to ramp out Xyris one turn early. Unfortunately, The First Sliver had managed to cast a Smothering Tithe before I was able start attacking. This meant that for every attack that landed, not only was I giving at least one opponent a few extra cards, but I was giving away mana on top of that.

Since The First Sliver was about to receive a glut of mana, but was otherwise running out of cards in their hand from land drops and the few slivers they managed to put on the board, I opted to swing in at Jarad to split the mana/card draw benefits across multiple players. Having missed my land drop that turn, I was more than happy to draw into a Gaea’s Cradle, and the extra mana allowed me to cast a Dockside Extortionist and Doubling Season, to create some treasure for each one of the treasures my sliver friend generated off of me.

Even after a few turns, the group wasn’t able to do anything to keep my board in check, and after dropping a Beastmaster Ascension with 11 creatures on board, I swing at The First Sliver with everything I had. When they went down, Jarad folded under the pressure. From start to finish, the match took about 25 minutes.

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Naturally, we all reshuffled and began a second match with the same decks. I had another fortunate hand. Additionally, The First Sliver had started missing land drops after the third round.

There’s a joke among our table that whenever the sliver deck summons a Manaweft Sliver or a Gemhide Sliver, I will always remove it before they are unable to untap. In my defense, the ability to turn all of one’s creatures into mana dorks is too powerful to let live, which is why the streak continued. I had no choice but to Pongify that Manaweft Sliver when it hit the board, missing land drops be damned.

Of course, since I wasn’t casting any creatures in the meantime, waiting to play Xyris on turn five without any mana ramp, they naturally turned that 3/3 ape onto me. This only continued when I played an Impact Tremors in preparation for Xyris’s summoning.

That said, the other problem I was running up to was the fact that I also wasn’t sure I would be able to hit my 5th land drop in time. With the mana I had left, I countered the Syphon Sliver my tribal opponent was trying to play with Mana Drain just to ensure I had enough to cast my commander even if I missed my fifth land.

And from there, the game was almost wrapped up. Once Xyris was ready to attack, I played the Purphoros, God of the Forge I had kept up my sleeve, swinging my commander at Jarad and dealing an additional 9 damage to each opponent with the combined effects of Impact Tremors and Purphoros.

With Jarad spinning his wheels, and The First Sliver going what they could with their limited mana supply, I was pretty much free to close the game, especially since I drew into Gaea’s Cradle again. Using the mana I now had ready access to, I played Psychosis Crawler to accelerate my victory. Swinging in with Xyris once more, I hit a Wheel of Fortune. With everyone tapped out, and mana to spare, I used it to wrap things up nicely.

There’s no denying that this run with Xyris was successful. In less than an hour, I had managed to take home two decisive victories. That said, it is difficult to access how much of that is due to my performance or the deck itself and how much of that was due to sheer luck. Since my playgroup does not use tutors, I was not able to search for any of my pieces: I had to draw into them. I’ll probably play this deck more, and if it becomes too strong I’ll just table it like I’ve done with other decks in my group (*cough* Yuriko *cough*).

But before I wrap up, I just want to set some expectations. Last time I wrote this series, I grew exhausted from the need to create a new deck each week, and then recap every game in my playgroup. So to make this easier on myself, I will only write up one of these playbacks when my group runs a match I really want to talk about, and only to discuss that match/those matches.

Until then, take care and stay safe out there.

Our elusive Egg Hunt continues, and today we complete Midday Gardens fully, and get as much of Evening Lake done as we possibly can before the next boss fight.

Fun fact: Evening Lake is the only hub world in the entire trilogy that has portals underwater.

This episode is a microcosm of what holds Spyro 3 back from true excellence when compared to its two predecessors. Throughout this episode we play through several challenges that aren’t backbreaking or overly challenged, but have elements to them that make them tedious.

• The Bently section isn’t difficult, but nor is there much of substance to it and it doesn’t last long enough to feel like
• The speedway races don’t take much skill to win, but they’re very basic. So simple that beating them doesn’t elicit any real emotion from me, nor do I feel stimulated while performing them.
• The boxing match is entirely random, with no real form of AI manipulation or tactical thinking that can tilt the odds in the player’s favor. If the computer decides to perfectly counter all of our moves, we just aren’t going to be able to win no matter what.
• The twin dragon mini-boss can be tedious since the dragon moves fast enough and the hitbox shrinks so much that hitting one of them for their last point of damage before they start regenerating becomes more difficult than it feels like it should be.

None of these issues on their own is bring the game down too much. Even the best games can have that one section that’s just a slog to play, but once it’s done we no longer have to concern ourselves with it.

It is the aggregate of these irritating sections, among others, that the issue arises from. While the core platforming is still has an excellent flow and feel, it is constantly interrupted these one off sections that are of varied and questionable quality. While some of them are still a ton of funny, many of them aren’t, and because there are so many of them we’re often rolling the dice and hoping the next one we find is at least free of those otherwise minor annoyances. In other words, it’s death by a thousand cuts.

That said, it bears repeating that just because I don’t like this game as much as the first two doesn’t mean that it’s bad. This is still an excellent game, and I have to applaud both Insomniac for developing it and Toys for Bob/Sanzaru Games for bringing it back in the Reignited Trilogy.

Another Runeterra stream, and another two fun decks to experiment with. And as a master of the long game, I’m naturally inclined towards those lovely control decks.

Ezreal has become one of the most well-known control finishers, so it was only a matter of time we’d try one of his variants. All we have to do is hit enough of our opponent’s units with our effects to transform him, which will allow us to just play our hand out to end the match.

But there’s another new contender on the block in the form of Corina Veraza, who can absolutely decimate an opponent if the game goes late with a powerful board clear ability. If that doesn’t just end the game, it’ll open up the way for us to close it with some of our other effects.

Thanks to MobaLytics for providing a handy list of cool decks for me and everyone else to try out, like the ones seen in this video.

Deck Codes:

• Ezreal Karma: CEBAKAICAITCSOBZAYAQIGY7EQVTIOQCAEAQIJYCAEBCKMIBAEAQENY
• Corina Control:  CEBAGAIED4TTIBYBAUOSCKBLGI2TQAQCAECDAMIDAECQCDZWAA

One of the aspects of Legends of Runeterra that I’m endlessly impressed by is how easy it is to build new decks. I haven’t had to invest any more money into the game than the $50 sum that I invested in the very beginning. While that is a hefty sum of money, it’s nothing compared to the kind of cash I’ve dropped on Magic the Gathering: Arena, Overwatch, and numerous other games of their ilk I’ve had to cut ties with.

As someone who has both the inclination and spare change to comfortably spend cash on free-to-play games, especially card games, feeling like Runeterra is designed to be much gentler to my wallet comes as a huge relief. It also makes the game far easier to recommend to other people, since I know they won’t feel compelled to spend big just to keep up with the competitive scene.

Whenever I have the desire to build or try out a new deck, which is often as you can see, more often than not I already possess the vast majority of the cards I need to build it. The ones I don’t have I will almost always either have the spare wildcards and/or shards to craft, despite not having spent any additional currency on the game in the months since release. As someone who builds a new deck to stream on Magic the Gathering: Arena each week, and has dumped a lot of money into keeping that up, that’s very literally valuable.

We’re still on the Legends of Runeterra bandwagon, and I don’t see us stopping anytime soon. This game has really caught my attention, and it’s still amazing what Riot has managed to do with the Collectible Card Game genre.

And of course, we wouldn’t be on brand if I didn’t eventually try to run some form of control deck.

As a reminder, I get all the decks I run from MobaLytics.

Deck Import Codes:

• Endure Spiders: CEBAGAIBAMLCEBYBAUSCQKZRGI2TQAQBAEAQWAYBAUHR2NACAEAQKGIBAEASO
• Mageseeker Lux: CEBAMAIEBYIBWHZUHADQCAA2EAQSQKRPGAAACAIBAAUQ

One of the things I’ve noticed is that control works a lot differently here than it does in games like Magic, even if the underlying concept is the same. All a control deck seeks to do is stall the game until they can outpace faster decks with long-term, more gradual value. Normally, but not always, in the form of bigger win conditions

In Magic, that translates into “Play enough removal and board clear to make sure aggressive decks can’t attack you down. Then, use spells to draw extra and outpace them in the long game.” The game is packed with many different ways to direct destroy or exile problem creatures and threats our opponents may be playing. Damage spells can work too, but they’re less reliable since damage is removed at the end of a turn.

Here in Runeterra, the idea carries over, but the execution is almost wholly different due to the systems at play. Direct removal and board clear isn’t something you see very often since only the Shadow Isles (and more conditional removal from Noxus) have access to that type of spell. However, damage is persistent in Legends, meaning that damage spells and units with challenger that can be protected with cheap combat tricks substitute for what would function as removal in other games.

Further, while card draw is important, and many of our spells will help us sift through of deck while damaging our opponents, the digital nature of the game allows us to generate spells and allies with our abilities. At the high end, we aren’t so much drawing cards as much as we are creating them, generating value through those type of effects.

The net result is that even decks like this feel aggressive in their own way, but instead of relying on big board clears, we use our forces to make favorable trades and take out our opponent’s units before they attack us. It’s quite dynamic, with many low-level decisions that need to be made.