Ah yes, the Castle Cup. An oldschool magic tournament in a castle, organized by people whom I like. 3 things to love, so there was no doubt in my mind that I would be going. When I heard from Johan the registration was opened, I immediately registered, looking forward to going for months ahead. Fortunately, there were some other tournaments to keep me occupied on the card playing front, and my work and private situation was hectic enough that time flew by. When I was at Dadbodcon I overheard Johan saying that the he was hoping that people would be playing something else than, for instance, the Deck, I knew I would oblige. But with which deck? I also noticed last year that uploading a deck with a story attached to it was appreciated, so I would be going for that.
As always, I don't have a standard go-to deck that I can just pull from the closet. I switch decks a lot, so although I always have some decks ready for playing kitchen table, they tend to be different decks several times a month.
I thought about playing several different decks, and was way too optimistic about having time during the workweek to think about it a lot. In the end, I wrote a little story with this deck.
The story in context with the deck was this:
Once upon a time, there was woman living in a large forest, in perfect harmony with nature. She lived among the birds, squirrels and other creations of the land, never doubting that all life big or small was worthy of respect and care. Every creature living around her was naturally part of creation. Other humans that she rarely encountered would talk about the treefolk or the faefolk as if they were different from the birds and foxes living in the forest. She never thought of it that way. All was part of the cycle of life in the forest. Neither was she surprised when an ancient treefolk learned her how to care for the forest and use the energy of life to care for everything around her. The people from the far away villages were weary of magic. She was not. Everything was in perfect balance for her. Using magic the care for a wounded animal was as natural for her as apples growing on a tree. It never occurred to her that people might want to hurt the forest for their own gain. Why would they? They could all live together and everyone's basic needs would be met. One day, large groups of men appeared at the edge of the forest, with large machines that started cutting down trees. A fox warned the Enchantress of the impending danger to the life of the forest. Distraught, she went to look and was horrified by the forces invading the forest. In panic, she fled deeper into the trees, to the darkest heart of the forest. There she sat, in the silent darkness, and caught her breath. She sat on the ground, feeling the earth and the energy of both life and death in this dark place. As she meditated, her determination grew. She would use the magic she was gifted with to defend the forest. A force of destruction to protect the life of the forest. As she pushed the palms of her hands into the black earth, she could feel the energy of death. Her determination grew. If the fire of life would not give her enough to vanquish the destroyers of her forest, she would go and sacrifice her own life and use the power of death to defeat them. The darkest of rituals. A Passover to deathless death. She rose, fire in her eyes, and she would not run. She would fight. She would try with the power of life first, but if all else failed, she would become death.
This is a deck I put together in the week before the castle cup. I ran a couple of games against Remko on Monday evening, and it seemed to be working good enough, with a couple of wins against his recurring trike deck, which might not be tier 1, but it is nasty none the less with its Triskelions coming at you over and over again. So it seemed good enough. And since the rest of the week I was left with no more time to either contemplate changes of deck, this is what I went with, with a supporting outfit. I came to the castle dressed as the guy in the dark ritual picture, with a book on magical rituals and all.
When I came in, the outfit made Johan and Fulco laugh, so that was a good a good start :)
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| the organizers, many thanks to you all! |
My first match-up was against another Enchantress deck. A good way to start. Also a good way to start was my opponents start, playing first turn land. mox, time walk. Pretty quick start there.
I quickly noticed the Enchantress on the opposite side. On my side however, even after a mulligan, no enchantress was gracing me with her presence, so I started playing some enchantments just in case I would draw into a draw 7 card.
My opponent kept beating at me with mishra's factories and drawing more cards with 2 enchantresses. Even after a braingeyser and Sylvan Library to help me dig for cards, I had no way of finding either an Enchantress or a Lich that would get me anywhere.
My deck continued to produce more lands, more Sylvan Libraries, dark hearts, but no Lich, no enchantress, no mirror universe or channel/fireball. So I just died with nothing relevant done. Oh well.
The second game I got off to pretty decent start but my opponent was also not doing bad, with time walk and ancestral recall and time walk, while I was able to disenchant his Sylvan Library.
A quick Ifh-Biff Efreet showed up, which I killed before it could started attacking. Nice to know it can be used on both sides. My deck in the meantime, was showing me cards that would be nice in a certain context, but again, not very useful right now.
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| If only I had the fireball... Oh, and red mana... |
The deck was a lot slower than in the testgames, eventually I did some more damage with my opponents Ifh-Biff efreet, and eventually could just use a fireball to finish it off since he had already sacrificed some more life to draw more cards with sylvan Libraries.
So on to game 3 it was. I mulliganed again. My opponent played an early chaos orb. That was not a good thing, my Lich does not like that.
I eventually got to the point where I knew I could win, but I was having some trouble concentrating in the noise. So when I had the disenchant for the chaos orb I played it the wrong way around, and instead of winning with the Lich/Dark heart combo I lost because of my own mistake. That was... well, disappointing. It also made me think of the earplugs I had in the car, so I got those to not be so distracted like this again.
I was paired in the second round against Dario, who was playing a black/green elves deck with nether voids. I had to mulligan down to five, but fortunately that hand had a lotus and a twister in it, and I drew into a time walk on my turn after Dario had played mox, elf, pendelhaven.
Although I got an enchantress in play, I was still taking damage from the elf and a factory every turn. I was waiting for another creature to appear to use my fireball effectively, when Dario played Nether Void, which meant there was no way I was going to play Iich before I would be dead from the factory and the Elf.
So, I lost. First note here on the deck, it should probably have another city of brass or another dark ritual to increase the chances of playing Lich. Not that I had one in hand at the time but if I had, it would have increased my chances before the Nether Void. The second game I had to mulligan down to 5. That sort of irritated me, so when I got this hand in the second mulligan I took, I just dumped the dark heart and the Library on the bottom, and played nothing and passed the turn.
I eventually (after 2 turns of doing nothing) got some black mana in the form of a Mox Jet, so I decided to try for it, played the lotus, played ancestral recall expecting to get a land (which I did not, but I got mox emerald) played the emerald and the jet, cast dark ritual and with the remaining 2 blue from the lotus cast braingeyser. That netted me mox sapphire and my first land, which I used to play sylvan Library.
Because I had taken very little damage so far I was doing okay enough, played Enchantress on the next turn and and dark heart of the wood and drew a card. I then used the enchantress to block, since I had a plan for next turn, which worked. I managed to play channel fireball for just enough to win, using the dark heart to fuel the channel.
After another mulligan, I again had a hand with no lands in it, but I decided to keep it anyway because it had balance in it. So when my opponent had played 2 creatures, 2 forest and a mishra's factory in 3 turns, I played balance and removed the factory, the forest and the creatures, figuring this would be a bad enough blow that I could then build up and win.
There was a quick recovery with a demonic tutor though.
Even though I got enchantress and Sylvan library out, the recovery on the other side seemed quick enough. I disenchanted his sol ring to prevent a djinn coming out or using the elf I had put paralize on.
Eventually though I was again stuck in an nether void, which makes playing combo really hard.
Eventually though, Dario decided to play tranquility to get rid of my enchantments. And the Nether Void. I needed to do something to prevent myself from dying to factories, so with enchantress in play I played tutor and went for Timetwister. Which gave me 5 lands, a Lich and a fireball. I suppose you can figure out how that ended.
Well, with a draw actually. We ran out of time. If the hand had produced a dark heart of the wood also, it might have been a win for me, but alas. By this time it was time for lunch. For vegans and vegetarians like me, this was organized by Fulco's wife, who makes an excellent pumpkin soup to go along with the do-it-yourself vegan sandwiches which you could make from lot's ingredients that were available.
After the excellently tasting lunch, I was paired against MJ from the flying van crew, always a pleasure. After my previous mulligan experiences, I thought it would be okay to keep a hand with 2 lands, a sylvan library and lich, enchantress and paralyze. After 4 turns, however, there were no more lands to be seen than I had in my opening hand. Hmmm..
I managed to get enchantress in play, but nothing happened after that. MJ kept attacking with his factory, I did nothing, and kept doing nothing. I got no more enchantments that I could play, no dark heart of the wood that would have possibly won me the game with Lich. Or more enchantresses. So, I just lost. Unfortunately, the second game was not much better. Now my deck decided to get into the business of producing mana. Lots of mana. And nothing else except one Lich. That is the trouble with combo decks. Sometimes you can just draw card after card that add up to nothing unless you draw one certain card. This time I didn't, and I lost again.
MJ asked if I wanted to play another game, which I must admit I almost refused because I was somewhat fed up with how the deck was working in practice. But since he is a great guy and I was there to play, we played another game. This time the deck produced a lot of enchantresses to start with. Not a lot of enchantments, but that would probably change as soon as I got one.
And it did change quite a lot.
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It still took a long, long time, eventually I managed to get the point I could channel fireball him, but I decided to get the Lich in play since it is so much cooler. It is like MJ said, this always happens, right? You lose outright without a chance, and then when you play just for fun, the deck does work.
We chatted a bit after that, which is always nice with MJ. I heard that the Flying Van cup would not be taking place next year, but would return the year after that. I am already looking forward to it.
So, with 2 losses and a draw, the deck was performing about as bad as it could. Even though one of the losses was obviously my own fault, it still felt like the deck was performing less well than I expected it could do. It sort of felt like everything was taking too much time and too much effort to get it working, but I still had hope it would work out some time. The 4th round I was paired against an U/W build with vises and Su-Chi's. So counters and disenchants. Ouch.
After a couple of turns, I had dark heart, 2 liches and dark ritual, but no black mana to cast them. And then my opponent played chaos orb.
I was not sure why, but a couple of turns later my opponent used his chaos orb on my mox sapphire after he played a Su-Chi. I would only learn in the second game why that was. But the great part about the orb being gone was that I could tap my opponent out with a power sink a turn later, and use the safe haven of not being able to run into disenchant to finally play my dark heart and Lich and though it takes some work after that, it was smooth sailing from there. I knew the deck could do this from my couple of hours of test games against Remko, but this was the first time it convincingly did it when it mattered. Fortunately, since I was starting to doubt that it could :) also, my opponent was very nice about my 10 minute solitaire game. He had just recently bought a Lich, so he was drawing a lot of inspiration from what one could do with it.
Fortunately, I had foreseen playing against decks with lots of artifacts, so I boarded in my energy fluxes for game 2. These were very good in slowing down my opponent, who had started very quickly with land, mox, copy mox. I did not have a flux yet. Fortunately, I also had some quick action, which was necessary after mulliganing down to 5 again, but with a lotus and a sol ring and wheel of fortune, that was quickly solved. I got the flux with that, but decided to wait to see what would happen. My opponent played time walk and then Su-Chi. I figured this was the time to get the flux into play.
As expected the flux was pretty brutal. I lost my mox over it, but the damage to my opponent was much worse. He decided to keep the Su-Chi so he could attack with that. He also played chaos orb.
I was fortunate enough to also have one of my 4 disenchants after sideboarding, so when he chose to activate the orb I could disenchant it, but he also did not have enough mana to keep the su-chi play. That was very good news for me, because I could get an enchantress in play, and could try to work with that. Not a lot of enchantments showed after that, but fortunately I was able to get rid of the Su-Chi he played two turns after this with chaos orb.
When my opponent played land equilibrium the turn later, I suddenly understood why he had gone for my mox on the previous game. Cool! I have played with land equilibrium a couple times, but I have never actually played against it in a Swedish tournament. Even though I think I could have managed to play everything I needed with dark heart to get under 4 lands, that still would have been very hard.
Fortunately for me, I could get rid of it with disenchant, after which my opponent played another Su-Chi and left 2 moxen, one of which white, open. I used some of my remaining life to draw cards from the Sylvan library, and got flash counter from that. Now I was good to go, so I went for it. It was good I had waited for the flash counter, since he did have a disenchant.
It took some more time than I wanted, since I needed to refill my library to have it contain more cards than my opponent had life. Otherwise, the game would have ended in a draw because the rules now work in a way that you still have to draw the cards, even though your opponent is at zero life. But it worked out, and my opponent was a perfect gentleman about it. He said he loved seeing a deck like this work. So do I, especially because I knew very well by now how easy it is for the deck to just sit there :) This was a cool board state in which both the lich and the enchantresses did good work. I was drawing cards from both of them till I got to the point where I could do this:
We chatted a bit after that about how cool his idea with Land Equilibrium was. He showed me his deck and if he had managed to pull of the equilibrium/mana vortex trick in the deck, I would have been seriously screwed :) I hope he managed to do that in the remaining rounds. On the first game of the next round, Enchantress decided to show up early, and I actually got to draw some cards with her.
Although the library was quickly disenchanted, I still had draw a card from it, so I was not too unhappy about that. Other enchantments were waiting to show up though, even after Ancestral recall. Not that I was complaining about drawing that, mind you.
My opponent played a Tetravus, I played some more enchantments, and eventually another enchantress. This was one of the few games I got to play the paralyze.
As soon as my opponent played hell's caretaker, I knew what he was up to and it made smile a lot. I love recurring Tetravuses, as you may have seen in other blogs.
Fortunately for me, the enchantress engine worked quicker than the hell's caretaker, and I managed to get out the Lich/Mirror combo.
On the next game, we both had blazing starts, with our key creatures out very soon... and nothing else :) as combo decks tend to do.
I got to play a sylvan library, which got me a chaos orb, which I played.
My enchantress was doing pretty good work with the enchantments, but there was not much to do with them yet.
Meanwhile I was attacked with Khabal Ghoul and Hell's caretaker. I decided to take damage from the Ghoul and block the Hell's caretaker with my enchantress. Now there is something you don't see every day :)
I managed to get out the lich without dark ritual (also a first today) and started drawing cards from there. Again, I had to work with Timetwister to make sure I would not deck myself, but managed to pull that off. Perhaps this deck should have a Feldon's cane as well.
My last opponent started attacking quickly. I had kept a hand with enchantress and tutor, and used that latest one for ancestral recall.
Looking back, Timetwister might have been better. I got no enchantments from the ancestral, and it took a while to get some after that. Even after regrowth on the ancestral, only a couple of dark hearts showed up, so when my opponent played The Abyss, I only had drawn 2 cards from the enchantress.
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| now where is that fireball when you need it? |
The Abyss killed the enchantress, I then I started to go into "do nothing" mode, as the day had started.
I was getting hit by factories, and I suppose I was lucky that nothing else showed up on top of that.
Eventually, 3 factories where hammering me, and I had to start sacrificing land to stay alive.
Even after an enormous Braingeyser I still had only this. If I had an Enchantress with that, I might have tried something, but this was doing the usual "absolutely nothing".
I got an Enchantress a couple of turns later, but by that time the game was already pretty much hopeless because of the amount of lands I had had to sacrifice. But I tried anyway, but to no avail. This had been a new records of "doing absolutely nothing" because I had managed to draw 40 cards in my deck and had seen a total of 42 of them due to Sylvan Library, and I had not seen one single Lich. I am not a statistician, but I if I do the math quickly, I think there is about a 97% chance of seeing a Lich if you draw 42 cards of your deck, so 3% chance or less of this happening. I think this was a new record for this deck :)
The second game I was again being hammered by factories and burn to the face, and it took a long time in which 2 of my dark hearts were disenchanted. I eventually had to just try to play mirror universe and Lich in hopes that since we were not halfway our decks yet, he had not drawn a third one. And he hadn't, so I won game 2.
The third game was again in the "doing nothing" department. Since I figured he had boarded in more abysses, I had boarded out the enchantresses and paralizes, bringing in swords to plowshares and disenchants and flash counters. That worked reasonably well, since I had kept his factories that showed up early again at bay for a while.
I never got to the point where I could play the Lich though, because I never got to 4 black mana. Eventually, the game would have ended in a draw, if not for the fact that I had only one Savannah in play. This was relevant, because my opponent topdecked a strip mine, took out the savannah, and that meant I had to use the city of brass for white mana to destroy one of the factories. But that also put me on 2, which meant the other one killed me. And since I had not drawn a single dark heart of the wood that game (apparently that also just happens :)) , that meant I was dead.
At several moments in the games, there was this moment where if you draw one card of which you have multiple copies, you would have a good chance to win, and then that does not happen. This can probably not be helped, it is just the way that combo decks work (or not). You need a single card to go off (or in these games, one of several, like the fireball in one the games would have worked, or the dark heart, or the lich in the others) and when that does not show, you just sit there. Just something you have to accept I suppose, but that won't stop me from trying more. I think the deck looks cool, and I think with a couple of changes, it might be better. But that it something for the future. We'll see.
After the rounds it was announced that Rob van Dijck had won the tournament with his Atog build which he had also used to win the winefest tournament. For my effort with this deck, the story and the outfit, I was awared a spice prize, so working up a sweat all day was awarded. Spot me in the picture below.
I bought some cards from Rudy for another deck I need to play in oldschool if I want to have played all the archtypes possible (I have not played a Banshee deck yet), and then it was time to go home. Kobus asked me if I could drop him off at home on the way back (he lives in Nijmegen, which was somewhat on the route home) so we crammed into the mini with four guys and went our way. After saying goodbye all the guys I know and thanking the organizers for a great day, which I will do here again. Thanks guys! You made this great day possible, and it was awesome.
Thanks for all who came, thanks to Fulco, Johan and Wouter, I hope to see you all next time. To close off this blog, a picture of the loot I took home from the tournament:
