Super Secret Sunday #11

Hey everyone, welcome back to Super Secret Sunday! The time when we reflect on underplayed cards, under the radar strategies, and under-thought thoughts. I have been playing a boat load of modo recently; holiday cubing, grinding pauper two-mans, and taking my first steps into the M:TGO Commander scene. It has been a ton of fun and I have come back with fun stories and some super secret tech.

So, Flicky is not really a stranger to the fat stacks. He has been putting in work, quietly racking up value for years, but he still doesn't see widespread play. Even I wasn't a believer until recently. I considered this a marginal value card at best and thought it was completely blanked by the printing of Resto. I'm not always right. He pulls weight in the holiday cube. Blanking blockers, resetting Treachery, dropping bombs on bounce lands and Lake of the Dead. Best of all, no one ultimate's a planeswalker without his say so.

Speaking of the pdubs, I saw this get used to restore loyalty on a Vraska, without having to use that silly +1 do nothing ability. Holy busted permanents Batman.

I was playing some casual commander duels online with my budget Edric deck (which I will be discussing in an upcoming post) and I had the pleasure of playing against some sweet tier-one decks as well, which I wish I had more of. I love competitive 1v1 Commander. You know, the kind with tons of turn 3-4 kills, broken combos, and tons of cheap disruption. In this game, I was on the draw versus a pretty tight Sharuum list and got Mindslaver locked on turn 5 or 6 I think, but I didn't concede because my opponent seemed to be enjoying himself. During the course of his arbitrarily slow kill, he showed me a card I wasn't very familiar with...and I fell in love with it. This card is not a standard inclusion in Sharuum decks (or any other tier-1 deck obviously, since Sharuum is the only tier-1 deck that can produce U and B) and I found it quite peculiar. I do love me some looting though and I rarely care about paying a bunch of life for ongoing advantages. This card can set up awesome shenanigans with Madness, Flashback, reanimating, recursion, Unearth, and it gives you great value along the way. It kind of sucks that you have to pay mana to use it, so it can cut into your board development, but I could see it really shining in a draw-go deck that wants to set up a big finish in the late game.

I recently got to play against some new random opponents at a local shop who had some cool tech. One game in particular, against a pimped out 5-color Child of Alara deck, offered up some unique interactions. My opponent won the roll and led off with a fetch land for Plateau, Chrome Mox (pitching Crime) into Birds of paradise. This is a strong opening and threatens big things. I felt reasonably confident though, because I was playing my Glissa the Traitor deck, which can respond well with quick removal and hand disruption. On his second turn he dropped a basic and slammed this bad boy into play. I was holding a Mind Twist, which now had no text. I ended up winning the game, but it required multiple board sweeps, a Sheoldred, and winning a top deck war against his Sylvan Library.

I like Cloister because it is a pretty cheap draw engine that protects you form discard effects very nicely. Quite the package. Obviously, you have to be playing a very committed tap out deck, but in his 5-color brew, with all of the best threats, you can usually afford to tap out and not worry so much about your opponent.

Well that's all folks! Come back next week for more super secret tech and make sure you tune in to TGZ this week for more discussion of the Gatecrash spoilers as they are revealed!

-Pass