With this in mind, naturally my strategy going into the prerelease was to build the best deck possible. To accomplish this goal, I had read a few articles from the leading Magic analysts on the Internet, pored over the card image gallery, and familiarized myself with the projected metagame. But the analytical side of my mind that was trying to evaluate these cards started getting muddled with the information from the various narratives I had read about the stories told by the cards. So imagine my surprise and delight when I opened a pure bomb rare in my sealed pool that was also featured in a recent official Magic story: The Gitrog Monster. As I joked to many participants at yesterday's prerelease, my plan was to open up that card and then pray I had enough black and green playables to support it.
My Black cards were fairly strong, if lacking in cheap removal (i.e. Throttle, lower-right), and at the end of the day it was the Black cards that did the most work in my matches. Specifically my three uncommon transformers (all pictured top-right): Heir of Falkenrath, a 2 drop vampire aristocrat who turns into a 3/2 flier, Kindly Stranger, an old peasant woman who turns into a removal spell attached to a 4/3 witch, and a woman who starts out as a Witch but then dies into a curse that slowly drains life from my opponent. If I were writing a movie about my deck, it would feature these three strong female characters as leads, alongside the CG Gitrog. I only had three zombies, which were all decent on their own, but not quite effective enough to combo off my other black rare, Diregraf Colossus (lower-middle). I think in 15 rounds, it never got a single +1/+1 counter and I only made one zombie token.
Green was nothing special, but also nothing terrible. There was a wolf theme with Quilled Wolf and Solitary Hunter, who is another character who could have a subplot in my script. The Human Warrior could maybe have a romantic fling with the Veteran Cathar, a Human Soldier who's usually more at home with White mana... But she does go with the human synergies from 2x Intrepid Provisioner (you brought 'er), which is a flavor win for the image of this Scout bringing a horse for someone else to ride for a turn. And with the Gitrog in the fold, I figured what I had was good enough to go on. After putting the deck together, though, I had a touch of builder's remorse: maybe neither of these colors are strong enough to work with each other and I should be looking at the other colors in my pool. So I put together half a deck in blUe and half a deck in Red (with one White card I'd be willing to splash), assuming that if my Gitrog-fueled craziness didn't cut it, I could always swap out a color during sideboarding. Here's what I came up with.
Blue had the makings of a pretty good aggro deck, with two Furtive (skulking) Homunculi who might sneak in early, two Niblises of the Dusk (i.e. evasive threats that like spells, lower-middle)), a Reckless Scholar (i.e. madness enabler, middle-left), and the seven drop Nephalia Moondrakes (top-middle), a rare you can find in one of the SOI Intro Packs. The only removal was one expensive bounce spell (Gone Missing, lower-left) and one expensive flash flier (Stormrider Geist, top-right), but there was also the Ongoing Investigation enchantment that set up an instant investigate/clue theme (to go with the other two cards with clue synergies in green). Red had five pretty decent wolves, including a prerelease-stamped Scourge Wolf (lower-right), and Avacyn's Judgment (top-right), potentially one of the best removal spells in the set, considering I also had two Red madness enablers to go with it (Lightning Axe and Tormenting Voice, top-right and -left).
In the end of deckbuilding, I decided to run out my Golgari Gitrog extravaganza until it disappointed enough to prompt a change in colors. The problem is, it never did disappoint, which is a good problem to have. I ran over my first opponent's Black/Red Vampires deck so hard in the first game (mostly due to mulligan issues) that he decided to switch to a completely new deck during sideboarding. I lost the second game to his Green/White Humans + Soul Swallower (i.e. TrampleWurm), but ended up using Accursed Witch's transformed side to win the third game (and thus the match) with more than my starting life total. The next match was against Esper Rise from the Tides / From Under the Floorboards / Thing in the Ice shenanigans, and it ended up being damn close. In fact, the ONLY reason I won the match was because Watcher in the Web could block exactly eight of the ten attacking zombie tokens, keeping me just barely alive enough for my flying vampire to save the day. Match three was no problem, as I was able to call down some Biting Rain on my opponent's werewolf army, which also had the added bonus of transforming Accursed Witch into an unstoppable draining-machine.
Maybe my problem was that I took a break for lunch in between rounds three and four, because I just didn't have the hunger I needed to win that last match. Well, that or my deck didn't have the hunger to draw me a playable hand my first or second tries going into game three. But it didn't help that my opponent was on the huge werewolves, Ulvenwald Hydra, and Westvale Abbey plan (one of at least seven copies of that card I saw in the tournament), and that's not even counting the Sin Prodder that actually ended up doing most of the work. But after reflecting on my 3-1 performance, which netted me four packs in prize support, I began to feel a crawling sensation that there was a better deck in my sealed pool that I left on the bench. I could have tried Red/Black removal heavy Vampires, but good as they are, those Black cards got a lot worse without the Gitrog. I thought maybe Blue/Green clues and flying threats, but I felt Blue and Green were my weakest individual playable colors.
Then it hit me: why not Blue/Red removal flying threats!? I pulled one of the best madness cards in the set AND one of the best madness enablers in the set, and yet it didn't strike me to put those two powerhouses together until long after the tournament had ended. I also pulled a RW dual land in case I wanted to splash a White Doom Blade. I guess I was just mesmerized by the blank, empty, and yet powerful eyes of the Gitrog Monster, driven mad and forced to play the deck IT wanted me to play. But now, after doing more reckless research, I've figured out the best Izzet-splash-Jeskai deck I could make with my pool, and it's beaten the Gitrog in both of the matches I playtested with them.
Those prize packs still sit unopened in my satchel, next to the replica of Tamiyo's Journal that acts as a deck box. It's Opening Day of the 2016 Baseball season and I just spent it rambling in a corner about Magic: The Gathering. I guess this is what happens when MADNESS DESCENDS!
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