Recent Green/Black Testing

Here’s some recent testing results I’ve had with the Green/Black Elves deck:

Playing in an 8-man Standard queue on MTGO:

Round 1 – vs. The Mirror
game 1: Loss
game 2: Win
game 3: Win

2-1 Games, 1-0 Matches

Round 2 – vs. Kithkin
game 1 Win, he concedes match (not sure why, misclick maybe)

3-1 Games, 2-0 Matches

Round 3 – vs. Faeriesgame 1: Win
game 2: Win

5-1 Games, 3-0 Matches

I also ran a few games in the 2-man Standard queue just to stay up on my game as I haven’t had a lot of time to play constructed lately.

vs. Kithkin:
game 1: Loss
game 2: win
game 3: loss

1-2 Games, 0-1 Matches

vs. 5-color cascadegame 1: loss
game 2: win
game 3: loss

1-2 Games, 0-2 Matches

As you can see, the last two matches I was out of practice with the deck. Also, 5-Color Cascade is just about the worst matchup ever. All their creatures do something ridiculous (Finks, Bloodbraid, Broodmate) and all their spells have inherent card advantage. You basically need to have just the right fast creatures, disruption, and removal. If you stumble or draw poorly it’s game over.

Kithkin is a better matchup but you still need a decent draw to outpace them. Basically if you can keep their creatures and/or Ajanis off the board you’re golden. If they have a few guys out with an Ajani, good luck.

For these last 2 matches I switced up Cloudthreshers in the board for Scattershot Archers to try them out. In the Cascade match it hurt me because I didn’t have that extra fat, instant threat to board in. But against Kithkin, in game 2 I believe he was holding a few Processions in hand because I had 2 Archers in play, so even if he played them and Ajani’d I’d still be able to take down the tokens. I think in general, though, Cloudthresher is the better option. Being an instant 7/7 is pretty powerful against decks other than Faeries/Tokens, whereas the Archers just sit there.

So, now that I’ve got this deck almost perfectly tweaked to my playstyle… I realize that the next PTQ I’m going to play in (August 22) will use M10 and the new rules! Somehow I doubt that the metagame will shift THAT much, but I’m sure some new strategies will pop up. White and Red got some buffs and green arguably got a tiny bit better, so we’ll see how it all shakes up. Once I get an official spoiler (probably not til after the prerelease), I’ll post my thoughts about how the Standard metagame will be affected by both the rules changes and the new cards from M10. So will Green/Black Elves hold up? Or will they shift like the metagame? We shall see!!

~ by Doug on July 1, 2009.