On Saturday we attended the 5th instalment of our local Lega Pauper Lipsia Winter league in Pöge-Haus. This time around I brought The Heat™: BG Turbo Fog! I’ve been super obsessed with this deck lately, even neglecting my beloved UW Familiars…
To quickly summarize, we try to stay alive using Fogs (spells preventing combat damage, usually with other upsides stapled on as well), lifegain (Campfire, Weather the Storm) and also draw lots of cards with the usual black package of Ichor Wellspring/Lembas + Eviscerator’s Insight/Fanactical Offering. This is supported by Crypt Rats – and the incidental Toxin Analysis – allowing us to wipe the board. Our win-cons consist of the following:
- making heaps of Treasures with Heap Gate and replicating Stream of Thought for the mill kill,
- activating Crypt Rats for lethal
- or activating Basilisk Gate, pumping Crypt Rats and then wiping the board every turn while the Rats stay alive and hit for a bunch (in decks with few creatures this can also be done by just pumping a Khalni Garden plant).
I also incorporated some interesting changes into my list:
an argument by Zach Geraets (BabySoft on MTGO) on the Common Ground Podcast was very eye-opening: Stream of Thought is objectively the worst card in the deck, because you only ever want to draw and play it by turn 15+, effectively making it a dead card, which unfortunately is also the best available win-con (putting multiple copies on the stack protects against countermagic, compared to Crypt Rats)…this has lead me to continue his legacy by increasing the deck count even further to 69 (nice), which serves a few purposes:
- I can include a fourth Crypt Rats,
- I have a few slots open for some shenanigans,
- I have a more time until I deck myself and most importantly
- there is a lower chance of drawing Stream of Thought in the early game or having it in your starting hand.
Having a few more open slots I was able to put in one Crop Rotation mainboard and expand my suite of utility lands. This includes:
- 4 Khalni Garden (blocker + sac fodder, rarely even win-con)
- 4 Heap Gates (to progress the game and make use of my unspent mana)
- 1 Bojuka Bog
- 1 Basilisk Gate
- 1 Vault of Whispers (sac fodder, inspired by the BG Pestilence lists)
- 1 Golgari Rot Farm (just a good land, which increases my overall mana count in the deck; also can be used to prevent Cleansing Wildfire from destroying my Heap Gates by playing Crop Rotation for the Rot Farm in reaction and bouncing my Heap Gate)
- 1 Desert (mainly for Faeries, but there is a surprising amount of X/1’s running around the format)
Crop Rotation also allows for some 200 IQ gigabrain plays like sacrificing Bog as the additional cost, holding priority to shuffle your graveyard back in with Campfire and then grabbing Bog again.
A single Mycosynth Wellspring (also inspired by Zach Geraets) helps making land drops much more consistently and spares me the dread of drawing 3 nonland cards on turn three with just two lands in play.
A single Raven’s Crime in the sideboard does so much, because you’re usually flooded by turn 10 or so.
Time to get to the actual games…
Match 1: Mono U Faeries
This is an awful matchup for me. It went accordingly.
Game 1 I kept a good hand, but quickly faced 3 Faeries that turned into 3 Ninjas right away. The value was way too much to overcome.
Out: 2 Tangles (should have been 2 Respites), 2 Nihil Spellbombs In: 3 Red Elemental Blasts, 1 Scattershot
Game 2 was very similar to the first one. I even saw 2 Red Blasts, but it was over in a blur…0:1
Match 2: Bogles meets Infect
This was a rather unusual Bogles list, because it played an Infect creature (Ichorclaw Myr) and also lots of Umbras (Auras granting the Totem Armor ability).
Game 1 I was truly betrayed by my own deck. We played for a good bit, but there was not a single piece of card draw (except for a lonely Ichor Wellspring) in the top 20 or so cards. I just drew lands and fogs, which isn’t very sustainable.
Out: 1 Desert, 2 Nihil Spellbombs, 1 Campfire In: 2 Cast Down, 2 Hydroblast (in fear of Flaring pain)
Game 2 actually went very well. I drew cards and my opponent didn’t really, I was able to fog continuously and play lands. They had their bogle at 2/2 and the Infect guy at 15/13 or something, when in combat with 2 mana left over I had the brilliant idea to Cast Down the Infect guy (it didn’t have hexproof after all), only to realize it had Totem Armor due to an Umbra attached to it. Imagine how stupid I felt after receiving 12 infect damage…0:2
Match 3: Dimir Affinity
This was against an acquaintance with whom I had played a Familiars mirror in Magdeburg before. Neither of us brought the Ol’ Faithful, though.
Game 1 looked a lot in his favour at first. He played 2 Etherium Spinners back to back as well as a Pactdoll Terror and then dumped 2 Frogmites and 1 Myr Enforcer on the table, draining me down to 4 life. At this point I looked at 20 creatures on their board, but I knew my out since I had Crypt Rats and Toxin Analysis in hand as well as a bunch of mana to spin into the Rats. After I announced I would be gaining 92 life and kill the whole board – all while they are hellbent – they scooped.
Out: 1 Stream of Thought, 1 Fog, 1 Campfire, 1 Respite In: 1 Red Blast, 2 Heritage Reclamation, 1 Cast Down
Game 2 he apparently miscounted Affinity (trying to cast a Furby on turn 2 with just 1 artifact land) and was stuck like this for a few turns while I had the chance to advance undisturbed. He wanted to grab lunch and asked me how long I could keep this up and after I revealed my hand with a few fogs and plenty options to draw cards, he scooped…1:2
Match 4: Jund Wildfire
In this match I played against Luchino, who I had unfortunately tortured with The Power of the Fog on a prior matchday.
Game 1 was so long I don’t even remember much of the specifics. He was on the new Gixian Infiltrator tech, which was scary. Also, that guy knows how to be the beatdown…fortunately, I’m somewhat well suited for beatdown decks trying to bash my head in. I believe it ended with a Stream of Thought replicated 6 times.
Out: 2 Crypt Rats, 1 Stream of Thought, 1 Toxin Analysis, 1 Respite In: 2 Cast Down, 2 Heritage Reclamation, 1 Raven’s Crime
At the end of that game, we only had 8 min or so on the clock, so we were sideboarding and playing game 2 really fast.
Game 2 I kind of cheesed a little by taking as many game actions as I can, while not slow-playing in order to keep the 1:0 (Jund isn’t the quickest, but it’s the beatdown here, so it can win by turn 8 or so, while I realistically can’t win within 8 minutes). Even so, it was really close. In the last turn of overtime Luca attacked me with his army of goons and I didn’t have another fog in hand, so I just had to hope that casting down the biggest Gixian Infiltrator would do the trick and it did…phew…2:2
Match 5: Jund Wildfire
For this match we only played a single slog-fest of a game, but I was and retrospectively still am rather proud for how tight I played that game and squeezed every little advantage out of my deck by, for example, sacrificing Mycosynth Wellspring and casting Crop Rotation during the upkeep to thin out my deck or by sacrificing Lembas in response to its ETB-trigger for the single-digit percent chance to see a card deeper. This along with timing my fogs and Weathers well probably won me the game.
The game we played was nothing spectacular, but we had one big fuckup: He had cast a second Nihil Spellbomb and with it on the stack I was thinking hard about how to save my graveyard, which was like 40 cards by that point, considering both game impact and time remaining. I ended up deciding it wasn’t worth it and to indicate that the Spellbomb should resolve I said “Have it” and looked back into my hand. When I looked up at the board again a moment later, he was already scooping up his cards…turns out he misunderstood and thought I was forfeiting the game. Fortunately, he picked up his creatures, lands, graveyard and everything in sequence, so we were able to safely determine the boardstate from a moment earlier and didn’t need to call a judge (I imagine if he had shuffled his cards back in already, that could have been a very awkward judge call). We ended up in overtime again and I was making sure each of my Heap Gates kept churning out treasures turn by turn, because there were three Crypt Rats in my hand and that was my only win-con now (Stream of Thought had been Duress’ed and exiled), but I didn’t want to do it in multiple instances since that costs more, gives the opponent an immediate incentive to increase their life totals and I didn’t want to go down too much in life as well (some lists play Galvanic Blast after all). On the final turn of overtime, I managed to burn him out with only two damage to spare…3:2
Conclusion:
I had been going in thinking Jund is a difficult matchup, but I was proud to see my prep-work had paid off. Still, the Faeries matchup is abysmal. Also, I was a little bummed about losing to Bogles/Infect, but that’s the game. Deck-wise I was very happy with the 69-card-special; Crop Rotation fits in soooo well.
Thanks for reading!