Brewing in MTG Arena with Mick

Hey folks!

It has been a bit. I had some health issues and fell a lot behind. But I am back to discuss some cool standard/Arena stuff. I have been fiddling around with a new deck and shot up to diamond pretty quick with it:

Squirrelpig!

Creature (6)

3x Toski, Bearer of Secrets

2x Yasharn, Implacable Earth

1x Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider

Enchantment (8)

4x Druid Class

4x Felidar Retreat

Sorcery (18)

3x Path to the Festival

2x Bala Ged Recovery

2x Scale the Heights

4x Devastating Mastery

3x Doomskar

2x Ondu Inversion

1x Vanquish the Horde

Artifact (2)

2x Skyclave Relic

Planeswalker (1)

1x Wrenn and Seven

Lands (26)

4x Crawling Barrens

6x Plains

8x Forest

4x Field of Ruin

4x Boulderloft Pathway

Despite the deck being half lands, I was highly disappointed with the mana distribution in actual play. Four games in a row I drew two lands in my opening hand (not entirely true, in two games I got a ZNR MDFC card in addition to the other two lands, but still disappointing) I still managed to win two of them thanks to some marvelous top-decking (and the fact that half the remaining deck is land!)

The deck is very simple on the surface, control the board state until a Felidar Retreat is on board (and not miss land drops), get a Toski in play at some point to refill one's hand and everything else is pretty much gravy. With the exception of my first four games this deck has pooped out sufficient land enough to keep me playing at least one every turn.

It has been the oddball dragon decks that got me too. I once got hit for 19 in one turn by Inferno of the Star Mounts of all things (and me with no board wipes!) riding alongside a 6/6 Leyline Tyrant (that I couldn't get rid of). I had three Druid Classes out with two Felidar Retreats too. I was very disappointed with that showing.

The other dragon deck was Moonveil Regent and Goldspan Dragon. I have a minor disadvantage against haste I guess. I haven't run into a dedicated zombie deck in a while, but I have a bit of a time dealing with the Headless Rider and Archghoul of Thraben as my destruction spells only inconvenience my opponent slightly while they consistently whittle away my life total.

Early on, I toyed around with adding a third color (blue first, then red). The only blue card I added was Koma, Cosmos Serpent, which worked really well, but wasn't very consistent. Next, I tried red to add Phylath, World Sculptor and Cleansing Wildfire. I wanted the Phylath for another finisher (or finishers) and the Wildfires for a number of reasons, including mana consistency, recursive landfall hits, and deck-thinning. It can also be used in a pinch to take out an enemy man-land. I found that running that little red still manages to be inconsistent and the card seems very weak most of the time.

I eventually went back to just white/green and I like how consistent it has been. Most people forget the level 3 ability of Druid Class and it bites them in the butt quite frequently. The mass board wipes (Devastating Mastery and Ondu Inversion) don't hit my man-lands or the relics so my army is usually quite safe to run across an empty battlefield most times, and while the Retreats and Druid Classes get knocked out, they are usually fairly well spent by that time so they aren't missed.

I feel that this deck could benefit from a sideboard, but it performs fairly well in best-of-one and that works better for my schedule.

I took a break while writing and tried another game and got one land in hand (along with and Ondu Inversion and a Bala Ged Recovery) So I played it anyway against what turned out to be a red-blue snow deck. I was expecting dragons and got some weird spells thing with Sorcerer Class. Seeing that I expected counterspells...and there weren't any. So either the guy never saw how his deck looked ("if you play blue, leave some mana untapped so the other guy thinks you have a counterspell...") or he really didn't have anything and couldn't bluff. Either way, I somehow got the Retreat on the table, then Toski, then they quit.

That squirrel is a menace! There are so many ways to deal with that critter, but hardly anyone plays them (well, other than The Meathook Massacre).

Anyways, until next time. I'm toying around now with a World Tree deck that makes a lot of mythics with The World Tree, Maskwood Nexus, and Haunting Voyage, with a backup of the Prismatic Bridge to fetch mythics. It's been fun when it works, which is about 30% of the time right now...