Daily Dose of Standard - Ep. 5

Daily Dose of Standard

KrazyCaley

6 December 2011

1023 views

vs. todesglupsch2501

Caley's deck: Crawling Chaos. Crawling Chaos is brought to you by Hipster Nyarlathotep: "I liked Ithaqua before he was cool."

Game 1

Enemy wins the toss and plays first. Enemy keeps the opening hand.

Caley keeps an opening hand of Darkslick Shores, Island, Swamp, 2x Evil Twin, Bloodline Keeper  Flip, and Army of the Damned.

T1

E plays Plains and passes.

C draws Go for the Throat, plays Island, and passes.

Misclick. Meant to click Darkslick Shores.

T2

E plays Plains and passes.

C draws Corrupted Conscience, plays Darkslick Shores and passes.

T3

E plays Plains, casts Sword of Feast and Famine, and passes.

The first indication of what this deck might be. A lot of decks run Sword, though. So far it's interesting that this appears to be a mono-white deck.

C draws Dissipate, plays Swamp, and passes.

Draw go, LIKE A BOSS.

T4

E plays a Plains and casts Solemn Simulacrum, but it gets Dissipated. E passes.

Like. A. Boss.

C draws Swamp and taps out for Bloodline Keeper  Flip. C passes.

Should I have kept mana open for Go for the Throat so I can kill something before it gets equipped? Possibly. But one more mana and I'll steal it WITH the sword on it anyway.

T5

E casts Puresteel Paladin and equips it. E passes.

Equipment deck?!

C draws Drowned Catacomb and casts Corrupted Conscience stealing Puresteel Paladin. C passes.

T6

E plays a Plains and taps out for Elspeth Tirel. He activates her -2 ability for 3 1/1 tokens. He passes. End step, C makes a vampire.

Buying time, and something to equip the sword back onto next turn.

C draws Volition Reins. He attacks with Puresteel Paladin at E, and Vampire token at Elspeth. Vampire goes unblocked. Paladin is double-blocked with 2 1/1 soldier tokens, which both die. Elspeth dies. C passes.

Confusing choice. This seems to throw away a token.

T7

E plays Plains, then casts Mimic Vat. E then equips Sword of Feast and Famine onto his remaining soldier token. C kills it with Go for the Throat in response. E concedes.

Not as much of a problem for him if he hadn't thrown away that other token. Now he's got fatal problems. One Day of Judgment would have cleared things right up, but I presume he doesn't have one.

Sideboarding

Caley removes 3x Reassembling Skeleton, 3x Go for the Throat, 1x Evil Twin, 2x Rune-Scarred Demon. Caley inserts 3x Deathmark, 3x [[Doom Blade], 3x Negate.

Deathmark is there for that extra bit of kill, though I hesitated to do this against a deck that has F/F sword in it. Doom Blade replaces Go for the Throat since Solemn Simulacrum is present. Negate is there to stop his many likely non-creature threats. I removed Reassembling Skeleton since it is more or less redundant with so much kill, and not effective against a sword-equipped creature. Evil Twin and Rune-Scarred Demon fill out the boarded out list, not so much because there's anything wrong with them, but because I'd rather have more answers than creatures against this deck.

Game 2

E plays first and keeps the opener.

C keeps an opening hand of Darkslick Shores, Drowned Catacomb, Swamp, Bloodline Keeper  Flip, Evil Twin, Black Sun's Zenith, and Army of the Damned.

Army of the Damned has an annoying habit of showing up in my opener for a 2x card.

T1

E plays Plains and passes.

C draws Swamp, plays Darkslick Shores and passes.

T2

E plays Plains and casts Puresteel Paladin, then passes.

C draws Island, plays Swamp, and passes.

T3

E plays Puresteel Paladin. He attacks with the older Paladin (Enemy 20, Caley 18) and passes.

This is a bit of trouble, but if I can last to turn 4, I can Black Sun him to death. Hopefully he doesn't bring out any equipment that would put one of the guys out of Black Sun range until then. Notice also that he is mana screwed.

C draws Drowned Catacomb. He plays Island and passes.

T4

E attacks with both Paladins. (Enemy 20, Caley 14). Then E casts Puresteel Paladin and passes.

Uh-ohhhhhhh.

C draws Doom Blade. Then he plays Drowned Catacomb and casts Black Sun's Zenith for 2, killing everything. C passes.

Take your medicine.

T5

E draws and concedes. Caley wins the match 2-0.

A regrettable mana screw.


Thoughts

1 - Quite a run the deck is putting together, although it is against a few homebrews and not the main contenders recently.

2 - This deck never got started. I still have no idea what the main idea is, though I suspect it's Mono-W Equipment.

3 - I love Black Sun's Zenith. That is all.

This article is a follow-up to Daily Dose of Standard - Ep. 4 The next article in this series is Daily Dose of Standard - Ep. 6

Syinide says... #1

Puresteel Paladin decks seem to be the bees knees right now. A few people are running them at my local fnm. They are fun, but not really good. It's nice to be able to move all of your equipment around without a problem, but equipment just isn't that good in my opinion. There's better responses to things rather than equipment.

December 6, 2011 2:02 p.m.

KrazyCaley says... #2

First time I had run into this deck; was not previously aware of it as an archetype.

December 6, 2011 5:15 p.m.

DarasuumKote28 says... #3

deck:puresteel-with-a-side-of-cats-1 is my version. Yeah, it's fun all right, but it gets butchered by serious threats. It is too slow to be an efficient aggro deck, but if it survives AND HAS THE RIGHT DRAWS it gets out of control by turn 7. The only problem is getting there, which, as a control player myself, find very easy to prevent.

December 6, 2011 9:26 p.m.

torridus says... #4

That's why I took apart my own puresteel deck. It can be really good, but it's just not really good/consistent enough to seriously contend with most top decks. RDW is faster and more efficient if you want to play aggro.

I'm really curious as to what your opponent's deck did, though - Puresteel with Solemn Simulacrum and Mimic Vat is extremely unorthodox.

December 7, 2011 6:51 a.m.

minzart says... #5

If the opponent pulled Solemn Simulacrum +Mimic Vat , it would have been a LONG game...

December 7, 2011 7:51 p.m.

KrazyCaley says... #6

That's the truth. Once Mimic Vat comes out, all I can ever do is steal it with Volition Reins .

December 8, 2011 3:32 p.m.

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