MtG decks: Morph Mayhem

This may did go horribly wrong due to the cruft Word adds to tables....

talismancer's recent post reminded me that I'd been meaning to work out what state the few Magic: The Gathering decks I have are in. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of them have had sideboards shuffled in by mistake (which is not a good thing, as it messes with the card distribution and gives you a high chance of having a hand of uselessness). So in the interests of more NaBloPoMo filler, let's pick a random deck and poke it with a stick!

I have a slight advantage over talismancer here in that many, many years ago I went through all 9? 10? of my decks and listed them in Excel. Because I was a student back then with spare time I then bodged together some formulas to try and work out what proportion of the cards should be lands, and what colours those lands should be (through counting the number of colour-specific mana symbols and guesstimating a distribution based on that). Hence I have some fancy tables!

This particular deck started life as the preconstructed Morph Mayhem deck from about 10 years ago.

( Morph Mayhem )

Well this definitely has a sideboard, but it's a weird one - I have a sideboard containing all of 6 cards, and I have a deck that's one card short. And the deck's also a little land-heavy by the looks of things - the general rule of thumb is 40% land or 24 cards in a standard 60-card deck, but here I've got 26. I think that stems from a lot of my playing at SWARM where I tended to not have enough land in hand (note that the casting cost distribution isn't particularly useful here, as the creatures are mostly morphs with a cost of 3 to play them face-down - though the Dream Chisels help with that).

Hmm. I probably ought to make it back up to 60 - the Whipcorder looks like a good one to add. The cycling lands (Lonely Sandbar and Secluded Steppe) can go as in practice I rarely use the cycling ability so I'd be better off with lands that don't have a 1-turn delay built in to them, or perhaps I should just drop two lands and instead run the extra Glory Seekers? Otherwise it's a deck that ticks over nicely in multiplayer chaos games, because everything it does is a mystery and it sneers at lockdown decks - being a morph deck it can do anything interesting at *any* time (turning a card face-up can be done whenever I have priority, and as a bonus the resulting effect comes from a triggered ability and so is hard for other players to deal with). The main downside is there's no real win condition and any half-way competent deck will stomp it with ease... but that's rarely an issue in chaos games because the competent decks quickly make themselves into targets for everyone else.

Besides, using a Willbender to make someone else's win condition *my* win condition is always hilarious.

Games night!

Bonus post time!

Yesterday after dropping off the car The GNU and I picked up elemnar for a family games evening. I can tell you that Triforce Heroes is no more co-ordinated when all the players are within shouting distance. If anything it possibly becomes even more bonkers as everyone tries and fails to become more organised.

Still, despite the hilarious amounts of item fail, puzzle solving fail, and throwing-Links-into-pits fail, we (myself, elemnar, and The GNU) managed to not only conquer all of Woodlands and Riverside, but even complete one level in Fortress (Training Ground, I think) without using all the fairies. As a nice touch it turns out when using Download Play, all players can create costumes in the lobby - which makes sense, otherwise only players with the actual game would be able to do so. Of course that then resulted in us repeatedly trying Woodlands levels so that The GNU could get an Armos Spirit... and him always managing to open a chest with whatever the region's rare item was instead of the higher-probability Armos Spirit. The random number generator is never on your side, even when you don't want it to be.

Later on allegramente joined us for a game of Ticket to Ride (using the original North America map). It begun with myself and elemnar squabbling over routes on the east coast - I think we both would have rather been building up cards for longer routes, but choose to instead spend them on low-scoring routes to ensure that we could achieve the tickets we had. Surprisingly at the end of the game all of us had achieved all of our tickets! Anyway, that continued for a few turns with allegramente interfering here and there, while at the end of the table The GNU went very quiet as he started looking at the game from a mathematical point of view. Whatever he was doing obviously worked as he won with a score of over 100, despite me managing to claim longest train right at the end (by dropping four long trains down in the final few rounds) - I think the fact that he was the only one to pick up extra tickets helped. I can see that we'll end up playing this again.