Last Saturday I entered the Gold Rush Trials, a six-round event that I was interested in primarily to test my new version of werewolves. By new, I meant that the deck eschewed Giant Growth and Titanic Growth for Reckless Waif and Kruin Outlaw. The result was a total fiasco. Two wins, three losses and a draw weren't what I expected at all.
I could blame the changing metagame. There were more blue decks creeping around. In my second match, I kept eating Terminus miracled in by the opponent which wiped my board completely, negating the Full Moon's Rise that I had managed to sneak in earlier to prevent him from casting Supreme Verdict and gaining an advantage in board position. If he hadn't drawn Terminus off the top, then he would have been forced to wait for six mana and that would have been enough time to finish him off. As it turned out, my werewolves traveled all the way to the bottom of my deck and planeswalkers of various stripes came out of the woodwork to stomp my face in.
But the fault really was mine.
In the games I lost my decisions were less than stellar. I didn't think things through and the situations I found myself in couldn't be solved by topdecking Reckless Waif and Kruin Outlaw. So in addition to designing a deck that lacked power and synergy, I was not in the best mental shape. For instance, the aforementioned opponent had a Sorin Markov in play and two vampire tokens blocking my soulbonded Wolfir Silverhearts. I could have added a third creature to make sure that the vampire planeswalker would die but I didn't, scared as I was of losing to a mass removal spell. But I did lose anyway because Sorin delayed me for so long that he drew the answers he needed and eventually turned things around. I would have been better off attacking his life total and maybe changing his priorities by doing that. The irony of it was that I had boasted to my friends before that I never attack planeswalkers with werewolves. Sheesh.
Thankfully by the fifth round I had composed myself such that was able to steal games. Literally. I stole a Jace, Architect of Thought to kill it. Then to win, I took a Rakdos Keyrune to prevent him from blocking. The card that helped me do it was Zealous Conscripts which I had not used before but which I now plan to keep in for as long as the metagame is peppered with blue decks.
The final round was fantastic. I lost game one and my opponent got cocky, thinking that my werewolf deck didn't have Huntmaster of the Fells. Duh. Boy, was he surprised when two copies showed up in game two and kept me alive long enough to overrun his position even as he gained scores of life points by blinking Thragtusk with Restoration Angel. We drew in the decider as there wasn't any time left but I saw how scared he was to face me and that was a takeaway that I treasured. At least, the deck wasn't that weak to lose to some random brew.
Key observations:
1. I was right not to put in anti-graveyard cards in the sideboard as most reanimator strategies planned on beating down in succeeding games.
2. If the opponent had Terminus in his deck, it was important to combat it by not casting Huntmaster of the Fells unless I had a way to recover and kill a planeswalker that might pester me.
3. Instigator Gang needed to come back.
*I didn't post the deck here because it sucked.
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