Viperion wrote:
You've often said you use a "build casually, play competitively" approach - you don't build oppressive combos into your decks, and then when in game you will tend to make the optimum play when it presents itself. How much do you actually follow that though? For example, it's turn 3 and due to a random mana dork or something, you have four mana available and Creeping Mold in your hand. Your opponents have just had their turn 2, and one of them has an Izzet Boilerworks on an otherwise empty board. The "competitive" play here is to bomb them back to the stone age, basically removing them from the game for the next few turns while you can concentrate on the rest of your deadly foes.
Clearly, you don't do that, as it's a douche play of the highest order. So my question (finally) is; when does "play competitively" get trumped by "have a memorable game"? To continue that example, if you wait until turn 10 to Creeping Mold that Boilerworks, then it will more than likely have no impact on the game at all. The "right" time to play it is when it will have the most impact, and that's clearly turn 3.
Related question; when choosing who to attack, what's your priority? The guy you can do the most damage to, the guy you can kill right now, the guy who has the potential to do the most damage to you, or something else? Again, does that priority list change depending on how long the game has been going for?
To further Viperion's line of questioning: Building casually and Playing competitively, there's clearly a scale of power with some cards while the optimization of a deck can greatly impact the value/power of a card...
Aura Shards is strong in a deck with little to no token generation, but can be back breaking in a deck that focuses on making as many tokens as possible.
How would the ceiling of a card's power/utility factor into your deck building?- Would you actively avoid a card like
Aura Shards in a token deck?
- If presented with an opportunity for the following: Turn 2-3 =
Aura Shards, Turn 3-4
Sram's Expertise, would you opt to blow up as many artifacts/enchantments as possible that early in the game, regardless of your opponent's board state? (most optimal line of play) Or would you avoid it as the jerk/douche mode of play and only remove 1-2 pieces, knowing that
Aura Shards could be removed in the following turn cycle, thus reducing the value of the card you played?