A Return to Magic

Wordle 1,047 3/6

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The Background

About nine years ago I played a lot of Magic: the Gathering. Not competitively, but often with friends and at Friday Night Magic. My deck was an archetype called called "Tron", short for "Voltron", a byword for putting together big robots and maybe other monsters and using them to attack. This link goes to a modern version of it, but my nine-years-old version had several key differences due to changes in the game since then. It's fun for me and my personality, and it's relatively powerful too. 

A little less than nine years ago, we had a kid. Babies are tiring and demanding. Hobbies in general became harder. In theory I could have gone to FNM now and then but it wasn't worth it.

About two years ago, T. began to have more of a social life without me. It started as activism for the kid's school, or coordination for necessities made harder by the pandemic, but quickly became more purely fun. Nothing wrong with that. I began thinking of ways to do the same.

So last year, I went to FNM for the first time in about eight years or so. It was fun. I made minor changes to my deck early. I didn't do well at first, but who would? After a few more FNMs of not doing well, I ordered some cards online to make bigger changes to my deck. I spent about $50, but if I had wanted to optimize it, I would have spent more like $300. I compromised between power and expense. Powerful, rare cards can be pricey and I'm still not all that serious about this. I thought I'd try out the revamped deck last month, but I forgot my deck. Of all the stupid mistakes I could have made, that was right up there.

This past Friday I went, and this time I brought the deck.

The Event

Long story short, it went well. 

• Round One: I couldn't have asked for a better test of my deck-improving decisions. I was matched against someone playing a Tron deck like myself, but not a budget version. Were the changes I made actually improvements? Did I sacrifice too much power to stay within my budget? As far as I could tell, yes to the first question, no to the second. He won one game out of three, I won the other two. I'm sure there's an element of luck there, but I almost think the changes I didn't make, the old cards I kept, are particularly well-suited to the mirror match. The One Ring is a powerful card he had that I didn't, but its "protection from everything" effect doesn't help much against my Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre, because of Annihilator.
• Round Two: Played against an Amulet deck. Game one, I lost straightforwardly. Game two, I sideboarded in all my artifact destruction, and he never actually cast an amulet and killed me in other ways. I'm not sure if the changes I made helped or not, but they definitely weren't enough. That is a hard matchup for my deck. 
• Round Three: Another budget Tron deck like my own. He won one game, I won another, and the third game was a draw as we ran out of time. It was fun. The designers of this game have talked about "psychographics", and this was a matchup Timmy could appreciate, with multiple massive creatures getting cast and attacking multiple times before the games ended.
• Round Four: I played against Jund. I won. His deck was old-fashioned, like my own. Not much to say about this. His deck was decent, maybe less updated than mine, and he played it well as far as I could tell, I and mine did just better.

Glad to be back. Prizes are minimal at these things, but the only round I'd say wasn't fun was the second. Sometimes bad matchups happen. The rest of the time, I'm blowing things up in awesome ways.