Deck Brewings and MTGO Talk

Possible Humans update?  Or is Necromancer the way to go?  Or both?

Hey guys, it's GuitarSlam.

Sorry for not posting last week... lots of work recently and not a whole lot of Magic.  Despite that, I've still managed to do plenty of mental brewing about what changes to make to my White Weenie deck and I've also began venturing into Magic: The Gathering Online (or MTGO).

For the White Weenie deck, I've thought about three different options to change it.  My original thought, as eluded to in my last article, was a BW Humans deck with Xathrid Necromancer.  I don't like the original lists of this type of deck that ran a lot of tokens with Gather the Townsfolk as a primary card.  I understand the purpose of pumping out plenty of humans and adding in sac outlets to turn them into zombies, but if you didn't have the Necromancer out the deck functioned as a really poor tokens strategy, which is a really inconsistent way to win, in my opinion.  Instead, I thought about taking Xathrid Necromancer and splashing some B cards around him (like maybe Doom Blade or Profit // Loss) to just add more resiliency to the already fast aggro deck that I was running.

The next version of this deck that I was thinking of was the Craig Wescoe Boros build that he ran at worlds.  I was actually toying around with this concept in my head before I saw his list but I really started to consider the power of the deck when I saw what he was running.  He wrote an article about the deck here and explains it far better than I can.  You guys should definitely check out his article.

The final idea is just simply combining the two and creating a WBR version.  I don't actually like this concept as much because the lands are much more expensive and it starts to take away from the original concept of the deck.  I wanted a consistent and simple deck that had a lot of redundancy with the creatures and I feel like this version stretches the core of the deck a little too thin.  I haven't tested it much so maybe I'm wrong, but for now I would rather stick with either BW or WR.

Switching gears, I wanted to talk about my journey into MTGO.  I really dislike the idea of paying so much money to play on the computer (especially when I don't plan on giving up paper magic) but I'm trying to find ways around this.  Currently I do Phantom Drafts and New Player Phantom Drafts.  A Phantom Draft is where you pay 4 event tickets to enter (approximately 4 dollars) and you do a regular draft or sealed event. You can win packs at the end depending on your record, just like in any regular event.  The kicker is that in this type of draft you don't get to keep the cards that you pull in your packs, which is the main draw to playing drafts in the first place.  The reason that I'm playing these Phantom Drafts is that they're $10 less than a regular draft so if I bomb out of one or two drafts, it's not that bad.  I'm currently around 4-8 in matches (because I'm bad at drafts... I'm trying to learn) but I did manage to 2-0 my last New Player Draft (there are only 2 rounds) so I'm feeling pretty happy about that.  I really enjoy drafting and I'm looking to get better at it, hopefully so that I can begin winning real amounts of packs in the non-Phantom draft versions :P

Well, that's all I've got for today.  I'm going to do some playtesting tonight with my friends so I'll give an update about my Humans deck soon.  If you guys want to test out these decks, make sure that you tell me about your thoughts on them!  I would love to get your input :D

See you guys later.