March 12, 2020
casu marzu – noun : a traditional Sardinian sheep milk cheese that contains live insect larvae (maggots)
I’m not right very often, so you’d think I’d revel in those moments when I am. You’d be wrong (like I so often am.)
About a week and a half ago my son claimed he wanted to do a new sealed deck, and he chose to do it with Amonkhet block packs. It was close to his bedtime when the decision was made, so we each took 4 packs of Amonkhet and 2 packs of Hour of Devastation and went our separate ways. I went to the home office to start up some awful music (the only kind I listen to, mind you) and take a look at my spoils. My son went to his room to ostensibly open his packs and go to sleep thereafter.
My deck was built the following evening. My son’s has yet to be made. Some possible explanations for his delinquency:
- The “sealed deck” notion was a ruse he used to get his hands on packs (this is what I initially suspected.) The kid loves opening Pokemon packs, but has never built a deck with the thousands of cards he owns, and hasn’t played more than a handful of Pokemon TCG games in his life (and none in at least 5 years.) Opening packs may very well have been the endgame all along.
- His brain seized up once he realized what he got himself into. AKH block is a total unknown to him (as it apparently is to me) so he may have been overwhelmed with reading dozens of new cards and figuring out what to do with them.
- He opened no mythic rares, and lost interest in the whole endeavor. He did admit to getting no mythics in his packs the morning after we opened them. And to my son, mythics are magical (lowercase ‘m’.) To him, opening 6 packs and getting no mythics is probably like going to Disneyworld and spending all day in line for Space Mountain. Except when you finally reach the end of the line, you somehow end up on It’s a Small World instead. And your boat stops moving halfway through. And the dolls don’t stop singing. And you really need to pee.
- He forgot.
I considered detailing my highly scientific, extraordinarily complicated deck-building process (see mythic, play mythic!) but there’s a story I want to tell about something I opened in a HOU pack. Since I’m not ready to tell that story, I’m instead going to point out a few things I noticed as I perused the cards from my packs. Bear in mind that these are essentially “new player”-level insights (see my previous post, if you don’t know why.)
Based on the cards I opened, white’s flavor is as scintillating as a stick of 1980s-era baseball card bubblegum after about 30 seconds of chewing.
I won’t play dumb and pretend I’m not aware of how much everyone has been ragging on white’s specious playability recently. I won’t flog that dead Crested Sunmare. But my total disappointment in my AKH-block white cards is not related to any of that hullabaloo. I truly have no idea how white rates in AKH or HOU. In fact, I think the best card I opened from my 6 packs is white. My grievance is purely with flavor. The best art among the 13 white cards I opened is this:
It’s…a camel. Really? Who plays Magic to beat on their opponents with camels? OK, that actually sounds pretty awesome. But still…dumb. I actually opened two different white camel cards. I suppose I get it – Amonkhet is a world based loosely on Egyptian mythology, so…deserts. And with deserts you get…camels, amiright? I could get pedantic and point out that camels were never part of Egyptian mythology in the first place, but at least Wizards didn’t create a race of anthropomorphic camel-people.
No, white primarily gets humans, which are mostly boring from a fantasy perspective. AKH block also features white-aligned zombies that are stand-ins for mummies (surprisingly, “mummy” is not a supported creature type in Magic. And yes, I’m aware there’s a single silver-bordered mummy. I’m not an idiot.)
Outside of a single bird creature, the white cards strike me as overwhelmingly bland. The art is bland (lots of whites, browns, and grays, with only a smattering of yellow to pop), the creature assortment is bland, and the cards do almost nothing interesting. My white creature base looks potentially solid, but there’s absolutely nothing about these cards that make me want to actually play with any of them. I know “vanilla” has a specific connotation in Magic, and I did end up with 2 vanilla white creatures. But these cards? These are VANILLA. I don’t know if my white cards are playable, and I have no interest in trying to figure it out.
Green, on the other hand, has so much going on I couldn’t NOT dig it. The creature base is an embarrassment of variety: jackal, hippo, snake, beast, naga, lizard, hydra, antelope, and yes…camel. If you’re a fan of tribal synergy then that mess ‘o crap isn’t for you, but I think it’s NEAT.
Beyond that…four of my green playables have Cycling, which I loved when I first saw it in Urza’s Saga 22 years ago and I have never NOT loved. The idea that I can pitch something I don’t need or can’t use to perhaps topdeck THE ANSWER (but probably just get a land, unless I’m cycling to GET a land, in which case I’ll draw a 6-mana creature I can’t play) is beautiful. Is green good in AKH-block? No idea. Does it look like it’ll be fun to find out? Hell, meet yeah.
The other colors fall somewhere between cottage cheese white and pepper jack green. To extend this ludicrous metaphor, we’ll describe my black cards as Swiss, blue as Gorgonzola, and red as Leicester. And if you try to tell me red should have been pepper jack, I will ignore you, because that would just be dumb.
Unnervingly, I get a fourth camel, in black, which naturally means it must be a zombie camel. I’m ambivalent about it, which means it’s a design flop in my eyes. Surely I should love a zombie camel, or hate it. I can’t be bothered to do either. Do you think the artist that was given this card to illustrate was elated, or mortified?
Outside of white, my biggest sorrow is that the only cat I get is an artifact. Lame. But it makes my deck anyway.
I’m quite interested to see how my deck plays. Whether I’ll get to do so depends on my son eschewing a screen for the 20-30 minutes it would take him to read his cards and smush some together. So…perhaps not likely.
Next time, a lesson in statistics from an English major!
Casual Magicking 