Forge stories!

[RumbleBBU]

Yet another 'a picture is worth a thousand words' moment. Don't you just love it when you know Mr I-am-god-I-have-400-life is going to buy it next turn?

Note that I even had some substandard cards like Feedback in my deck - I was still finetuning this Quest deck, trying to find something that would work against the upgraded Arzakon challenge, and Feedback was a really stupid choice, I know.

The Necro was there to prevent decking myself. It took many, many turns to get to this point. The big fliers and The Hive were among the last cards I drew.

...now, what this deck really needs is a Mirror Universe. (Haven't found one yet.)

[RumbleBBU]

Finally popped my Gatecrash cherry...

And what better way to do that than in Forge Gatecrash Guild Sealed mode! (Which, incidentally, I was playtesting, committed yesterday, will be in the next beta.)

For my Guild, I picked Dimir. Always do when given the choice. Why? Look for the subtle hint in my user id...

The following contains some moderate spoilers about Gatecrash so the Gatecrash-virgins among you may not wish to open the spoilered story part.

| Open

Dimir has access to two interesting Gatecrash mechanics: Cipher, and Extort. And - OMG - those two have terrific synergy together! Case in point, a typical creature standoff situation. By all tokens, I should have lost the game by then - I had too many too expensive (4 CMC or even higher) creatures in my deck but the AI was playing stupidly and didn't realize the advantage it had because of its Battallion creatures. It had already lost game 1 because it didn't attack when it had a clear advantage, and now, although I'm at 10 life and the AI is at 18, it's content with the standoff.

What do I have?
A Keymaster Rogue I just summoned, Last Thoughts and Mental Vapors in my hand. And two Extort creatures in play (plus a couple other less interesting creatures).
From that point the game went on like this:
Cast Mental Vapors, Cipher it on the Keymaster Rogue.
Cast Last Thoughts, Cipher it on the Keymaster Rogue.
Keep attacking with the unblockable Keymaster Rogue, activate both Ciphers, then Extort the AI for both activations with my both extortionists. A total 7 unblockable damage per round + I gain 4 life + AI discards one card (its hand was empty most of the time, though, wonder why ) + I draw one. Rinse, repeat.

Ridiculous card advantage and unblockable damage every turn. Granted, this wouldn't have worked as easily in Constructed or against a human player. Just remove the Rogue -> problem solved. Or more to the point, the AI should have simply swarmed me with its superior forces long before I got the Cipher/Extort madness going!

[moomarc]

Great work on the Guild sealed mode. I had a similar situation in a Gatecrash draft, but I was playing Dimir splashed with green for evolve (I know, it's sinful). The evolvers managed to build up a decent defensive front while I got some chenanigans going with extort and cipher. Definitely a fun block to play sealed and draft modes.