2024 April Monthly

Nine explorers, some veteran, some new, gathered for yet another fateful night of drinks, cardboard, and good company. While my memory of the night’s events is hazy (I am writing this report 2 months after-the-fact), I vividly recall wanting to sling midrange cards. Bringing both Dead Guy Ale (of the unplayable variety) for a friend to try, as well as Remi Ouellette/Fran’s version The Solution (of the UW variety) for me, I was ready to Tide lands and beat with bears. We often joke that the Montreal meta is disproportionately red, so I felt pretty confident with my maindeck Silver Knights and Swords.

I had spent the previous night goldfishing the junk out of Deadguy, and I could not, for the life of me, get the “traditional” manabase to work. Inexplicably, those lists run 21-22 lands, including a playset of Wastelands, multiple Tainted Fields, and hardly enough white source to cast Swords reliably, let alone flip an angel on curve. I will say that, when the deck is doing its thing, it feels unstoppable, but then there are the other 75-90% of games, so you know, variance. I eventually settled on 23 lands, 2 of which were Wastelands, and prioritized color fixing. I was under strict instructions to keep the Rituals, Hippies, and Arenas, as my friend was keen on trying that specific version. I believe I had done all that I could for that list, but as Fran astutely observed in one of his matches with P(layable) DGA against regular DGA: “DGA does Dead Guy things.” May the force live long and prosper.

In round one, I faced said friend, Armen, on said deck, DGA. From the outset, it was a real slugfest, a true battle of attrition, and a fierce struggle. I am, of course, referring to DGA trying to get lands out and build towards double pips of both colors. I, on my side, was cruising along swimmingly, hitting all the necessary land drops in the appropriate colors, Pondering into bigger things, and deploying the usual suspects: Mom, Silver Knight, and Meddling Mage. Game one ended after I had played Tide, although Armen insisted on seeing whether I actually know how the combo works. This is because, prior to our match, Mark had borrowed my Solution deck to playtest against Armen. Armen was forced to explain how Tide interacts with both Stifle and Seal of Cleansing in separate games, something that he was not particularly incentivised to do. Thankfully, I was no stranger to the necessary stack manipulation, and am proud to report that I got through the sequence with only the slightest amount of fumbling. Game two was no better for DGA, as it had a hard time fighting the opponent and its manabase at the same time. A lonely morph was never able to flip on account of a single source of white, as Armen quickly lost to a herd of bears and a pair of angels. The moral of the story: Friends don’t let friends play bad manabases.

Round two had me face off against Karl, our paradoxically tireless and exhausted organizer, piloting Lanny's flavor-of-the-week of Gro-A-Tog, a Daze-less build that went on to win the finals. Unfortunately for me, my deck still got Dazed anyways, and for some unknown reason, decided to serve me DGA-like mana. Mulliganing away a one-lander followed by a double Factory hand, Karl quickly took game one: Firing my lonely MoM while I stumbled on mana, my hopes of victory were quickly smothered by Armageddon once I reached my deck’s operating threshold of 4 lands. The few spells I could bring myself to cast were swiftly countered as I died to aggression from a Tog and a Dryad.

To say game two was a one-way blowout would be an understatement. In the previous game, Karl has seen so little of my deck that he named Mother of Runes with his Meddling Mage. My plan to stall Pikula via Factory did not last long, as his second Mage named Swords. “I’m not sure what to name because I don’t know what you’re on. My guess is Mother of Runes tribal.” Even though I would have loved to report that his remark fueled my impossible comeback, I proceeded to draw 2 MoMs and 3 Plows, got Armageddon-ed again (RIP Factory), and succumbed to a beating from the Meddling twins. Because he still had no idea what I was playing, I quipped about the kind of person who plays one-sided Armageddons. Looking back, I may have been a tad salty.

For the final round, I played Michael who had returned to play his second event that night, the first being our inaugural monthly in June of 2023. Michael was piloting mono-red Goblins, a wonderfully one-sided match-up for yours truly. In game one, as my Knights prevented his Goblins from attacking, I introduced him to the Wave side of the combo, exiling 4 of his creatures while possibly flipping an angel (like I said, it’s been a while). This was his first time seeing the combo, and he wasn’t even upset about going to game two, where I introduced to the Tide side of things. Once I showed him the Wave in my hand, he threw in the towel, and we spent the rest of the round discussing the RG version of Goblins. Meanwhile, at a nearby table, Karl took home the gold, proving that Mox Diamond, Gush, and Armageddon are good Magic cards.