Chaos Wins!

It's been a few weeks of 'radio silence' but I've finally found something to write about. Just to catch you up, when last I wrote, I was floundering with my Mono-white Mimic-Lifegain deck. Even with the newly found Leyline of Sanctity in the sideboard for anti-Valakut, I was still losing consistently since it appears Acidic Slime is the standard sideboard for that deck. I was also losing to the new up-and-comer UB Jace decks.

So, I finally gave in and decided to just make the deck that was my nemesis - Primeval Valakut. Unfortunately, without any Primeval Titans, and the deck probably at its peak popularity, getting a full playset set me back 150 tickets. While that was extremely painful, it is an investment I am very happy with, but I will get to that later. I also had to grab a couple other cards that were missing from my collection such as Raging Ravine, Gaea's Revenge, and Obstinate Baloth.

I tooled around a bit in the 2-man tourneys with a few wins and a few losses. Wins can basically come just from the deck playing itself, while the losses were stupid plays or lack of familiarity on my part with optimal play order, etc. Once I felt comfortable enough though, I took it into a Daily.

Lo and behold, I went 3-1! Woo Hoo!

I unfortunately don't have a tourney report but I believe I beat a UB Jace deck, a WG Hybrid Quest deck, and a Vamps deck that I can't remember whether it was RB or Monoblack. The one loss was to another UB Jace deck.

I played another daily a few days later and lost 2-2 (meaning I was 2-1 going into final round). I still don't know if my play was a mistake or the optimal choice given the info I had. Playing against a mono-white Quest deck with 1 counter on their quest, 3 cards in hand and 3 land in play, I chose to play a Primeval and start building lands rather than cast my Acidic Slime to destroy the enchantment. On my opponent's turn though, he cast Memnite, Glint Hawk (returning Memnite), same Memnite, Ornithopter. That got him to the 5 counters he needed to pop his quest and grab his Argentum Armor and that basically sealed the game as he swung in with his battle-ready and newly equipped Squadron Hawk, destroying my 2nd Forest in the progress and locking me out of my Slime. Should I have been more proactive about destroying the enchantment or did he basically just have (or draw) the perfect hand to beat me?



In any case, that did not put me off the Valakut deck, and I still play it in the 2-man tourneys when I can't get into a Daily. But I think the 'rogue deck-builder' is in my blood because I feel no real enjoyment playing the deck. Maybe because it's a 'netdeck' or because it has a somewhat narrow win condition, but playing the deck feels very mechanical to me. Whatever the reason, I felt compelled to come up with another deck. But, after sinking 150+ smackers into my Primeval Valakut, I knew I had to build something that made use of my newly acquired cards.

Enter WG Titans! That's actually what I have saved the deck as in MTGO.

Here's the decklist and a quick overview. Suffice to say, I am loving this deck right now. It has been doing surprisingly well in the 2-man tourneys and I'm about to start my first daily piloting this thing.

Creatures:
4x Overgrown Battlement
4x Wall of Omens
4x Primeval Titan
3x Acidic Slime
2x Avenger of Zendikar
2x Baneslayer Angel
2x Sun Titan
2x Wurmcoil Engine

Spells:
4x Summoning Trap
3x Day of Judgment
2x Condemn
2x Horizon Spellbomb

Lands:
2x Emeria, the Sky Ruin
4x Khalni Garden
4x Stirring Wildwood
2x Razorverge Thicket
2x Sunpetal Grove
8x Plains
4x Forest

Sideboard:
2x Devout Lightcaster
2x Gaea's Revenge
2x Kor Firewalker
3x Leyline of Sanctity
2x Naturalize
2x Obstinate Baloth
2x Ratchet Bomb


First, the deck basically tries to ramp up mana as fast as possible via the 2 Walls. I don't know why I haven't seen it more often but these seem to be in so many decks, but never together and yet they are an awesome pair. Turn 1 land, turn 2 land + Battlement, turn 3 land + Omens (cantrip!) + whatever for 3 mana (another Battlement if I'm lucky), Turn 4 land and I'm online for a Titan or a Summoning Trap!

Once my mana is online, I'm either trying to just beat them senseless with the Titans, or slowly working to get Emeria online to seal the deal. Additional synergies in the deck are the spellbombs which not only can fetch plains for Emeria in case Primeval isn't showing up, but which also can be returned from the graveyard with the Sun Titan. The Days are there for creature control, and maindeck Acidic Slimes is primarily playing around the metagame, working double-duty against both Valakut decks and Quest decks.

Sideboard is pretty standard I think for the colors I'm playing and the metagame. I'm using Naturalize over Nature's Claim just because I don't have any at the moment but I'll likely switch that as soon as I can.

So there you have it, from one rogue deck to another, with an expensive dip into netdecking in the middle :) I'll update once I get some results out of my daily, hopefully this will be somewhat more consistent. If nothing else, I definitely have more fun playing this deck.

Oh, and did anyone notice something very strange about this new deck?

NO MIMIC VAT!!

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Just a quick update, just went 3-1 in the daily. Deck performed awesomely, although I think I need to review it to see what, if anything, can be improved for the loss I had. I went down quick to a Red Black Vampires deck. Wins were against a White Green Fauna Shaman deck, a Mono-Black Vampires deck, and a Mono-Red Koth deck so I don't know if the loss was 'typical' or just bad luck (or good luck for opponent) as far as draws. In any case, not a bad way to start things off with my new rogue deck!

I have found myself at a crossroads. My first daily with my Mimic Vat Lifegain deck seemed extremely promising but I had to drop out with a 2-0 record due to personal issues that came up. I then joined a few 2-Man Constructed tournaments and have found myself in a funk of consecutive losses. A 2nd Daily resulted in a 0-2 drop.

At this point, I've reached the 50-ticket limit I had set for myself to try out rogue deck ideas and I feel like I am either expecting too much from this deck, or just need to find the right tweak to make it really competitive.

The only problem is that the 2nd option will require of course more tickets invested and if the reality of the situation is the first option, and I am trying to make a Tier 2 deck perform to the level of a Tier 1 deck, it will ultimately lead to more tickets lost in a hopeless effort.

I guess I am wondering, when do you decide to 'give up' on a deck? At what point do you stop tweaking and move on to another deck? I know this would be easy if the deck performed horribly. The problem is that when it works, it works really well. Amazingly I have had turn 4 kills with this deck, something I hadn't even considered possible. But I have been having consistent issues with Primeval Valakut decks and they seem to be gaining in popularity.

If it wasn't such a huge investment, I would simply go with my original plan of creating my own version of existing Tier 1 decks, specifically a Primeval Valakut deck. But when Primeval is going for ~30 tickets last time I checked, and me needing a full playset of 4, that is a HUGE investment for what may be yesterday's news before I can recoup the cost. Not to mention I would likely need Lotus Cobras which have been in the ~20 ticket range lately. That's 200 tickets for 8 cards. It just pains me too much to do that when I feel like I could make a viable rogue deck at a fraction of the cost!

What to do, what to do...

So in my last post, I hinted at this card as the key to my next deck. And while it's true that the next deck I built was focused around Silence, and I still am tuning it to be more streamlined and competitive, in the process I came upon another deck idea which I liked EVEN MORE and I just could not put off building it and testing it out. So I will come back to my Silence deck if this one starts to falter or I lose interest, but I am just so excited that I've actually found a 'rogue' deck that so far has proved to be VERY competitive.

So, this deck started with two cards that I've been using in most of my other decks: Mimic Vat and Culling Dais. The Dais lets me force a creature under the Vat and at only 2 casting cost and 1 colorless to activate the draw, it's actually EXTREMELY efficient card advantage.

I was using that combo to power my Silence deck and the intent was to use the Vat to generate a Mnemonic Wall every turn to return Silence back to hand and effectively lock down the opponent. The problem with that deck was that I often was too low on life by the time I could cast the Mnemonic, sac it, and then start production. So I thought of adding some creatures that give me life when they come into play.

But once I thought of that, I immediately recalled a 'Tier 2' deck that was making the rounds back in the previous Standard - a Mono-white deck built around various creatures with life gainm or benefiting from life gain. While some of those cards rotated out with Scars of Mirrodin, what was added actually made it much more viable. Here is the decklist and a basic rundown of how the deck works afterwards.

3x Mimic Vat
2x Culling Dais
4x Ajani's Pridemate
4x Lone Missionary
4x Serra Ascendant
4x Soul's Attendant
3x Sun Titan
2x Survival Cache
2x Ajani Goldmane
3x Origin Spellbomb
4x Day of Judgment
2x Emeria, the Sky Ruin
4x Kabira Crossroads
19x Plains

So it's essentially using the Pridemate, Missionary, Ascendant, and Attendant which is the previously used lifegain engine to keep me alive and get me to either 30 life (to transform the Ascendant to a 6/6 flyer) or pump up the Pridemate enough to be formidable. What is so much nicer is that I can now use the Culling Dais and the Mimic Vat to have unlimited life gain creatures and with a single Lone Missionary under the Mimic Vat I can shut down almost any offense.

The Day of Judgment lets me reset the board and also lets me use the vat to copy my opponents creatures (Primeval Titan in monowhite!). The Sun Titan is an additional big finisher as well as lets me bring back my creatures in an alternate way (as well as the artifacts if they get destroyed). The Ajani is a late addition and I swapped him in for Baneslayers since he is cheaper and gives me a little bit more flexibility.

Survival Cache and Origin Spellbomb are mainly there as cantrips with benefits. And finally the Emeria, the Sky Ruin as a third option for bringing back my lifegain creatures.



As for the Sideboard, I am still tweaking it and it is still not perfect for the metagame but I feel like my options are a bit limited. What is in there right now can be broken down like this:

2x Journey to Nowhere - Eldrazi
3x Kor Firewalker - Red Deck Wins
3x Leonin Arbiter - Eldrazi and Titan/Valakut Ramp
1x Luminarch Ascension - Any blue control
2x Ratchet Bomb - Any weenie deck
2x Revoke Existence - White mystic artifact
2x Solemn Offering - White mystic artifact (more for Boros)

Now I know in previous articles I have said the 2-man Constructed Tournaments are a horrible option from a pure financial risk/reward standpoint, but I have been loving this deck and felt so confident in it and my schedule was so out of synch with the dailies that I threw caution to the wind and started playing in the 2-Mans. Needless to say, this deck rocked. While definitely not 'broken', it has won about 70% of the time, and I would say some of the earlier losses were due to need for refinement. That may simply be from complete surprise on my opponent's behalf but I'll just pretend it's cause my rogue deck is just that awesome.

At the moment, I'm 2-0 and waiting for round 3 in the Standard Constructed Daily, so I'm hoping this will be the rogue deck I had been trying to find!

So after my poor showing in the Daily Standard Constructed, I decided to review my deck and the 'combo' at its core: Liquimetal Coating + Mimic Vat. I knew I wanted to keep this in the new deck, but I was hoping to now make it just one of the multiple viable strategies within the deck. Unfortunately, my brain seems to gravitate towards a 'free association' approach to deck building. If that doesn't make sense, please continue reading and follow along on what unfortunately is not an uncommon process when I am trying to build a deck. Now, as I write this I of course see a ton of new options and ways I could and should have gone while I was building this new version, but I want to show how my mind happened to work in this instance.

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I start with Liquimetal Coating and Mimic Vat.


Then, I add Acidic Slime, a card that continually wrecked me in games 2 and 3. Not only can it kill artifacts and lands but also supports enchantment removal, all on a 2/2 body with deathtouch! Why didn't I think of this one before?

Then, I need some way to kill it (and opponent's creatures). My red burn was fine against the white and green decks I playtested against, but it just can't get the job done against Frost Titan. So, I turn to black and opt for simple effective Doom Blade.

Now, I said that Liquimetal Coating could help with Metalcraft, so let's see what's good with Metalcraft in black and green. Unfortunately, nothing really jumps out at me in either of these colors for metalcraft. This, I would later realize, is because I was searching only against the cards in my collection rather than all legal cards in the set. I'll discuss that in my next article.

So without good metalcraft, I decide to see what would benefit just from artifacts in general. I notice that Phylactery Lich would be pretty nice, but unfortunately don't see much else that meshes well. At this point, I think these colors won't work for this deck. I still like the Acidic Slime path, so I decide to re-evaluate black. Since I went into black as an answer to Frost Titan, I could either go into white and aim to stop it once it's in play, or go into blue and aim to either prevent it from coming into play via counters, or stealing it for myself.

As a general statement, I LOVE blue and will often play blue to a fault. In this case though, I think it would help solve one of the other problems I had with the first deck in that I now have access to card draw which should help me get to the Coating and Vat more reliably. Doing a quick search in my collection for Blue cards with artifact in their text shows me a whole slew of cards that get me giddy at the visions of amazing synergy now possible in the deck.

Vedalken Certarch is an auto-include. With the ability to lock down my opponents lands, creatures, and artifacts once I hit metalcraft, I start looking at this guy as if he's the next best thing since Liquimetal Coating! Stoic Rebuttal is also a great counter if I can reliably hit metalcraft. While not a 4x include, definitely want 2 or 3 in the deck, complemented with the real 'auto-include' Mana Leak. I also can't help but notice Grand Architect which I've wanted to use for awhile any way I could. Not only can I use him to get my artifacts out earlier but he can also pump up my blue creatures. Only one problem though...I don't have any blue creatures other than the Certarch!

    

On top of that, my only green is the slime and I think I'm only going to reduce the effectiveness of my deck if I include the green just for that card, especially since it's not a game winner on its own.

So I decide to switch gears and look at going at maybe a mono-blue deck that is just built around artifacts. At this point, I've essentially lost the focus of the deck although I don't realize it. I just keep following one connection to the next. Blue + Artifacts means I start adding Riddlesmith, Trinket Mage, and Argent Sphinx. I even go back to a 'combo' I tried to make work during Zendikar block with Dormant Gomazoa except now I figure I can make it an artifact and then untap with Voltaic Key! I think my lowest point was when I actually thought "Hey, Scrapdiver Serpent would actually be bomb with the Coating!".

    
Please don't judge me

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I think this is the point when I realized I had completely lost the focus of the deck and I just wanted to call it quits. I decided Liquimetal Coating was nothing more than a red herring, included simply to distract and confound mediocre deck builders like me. Not really, of course. But I decided I needed to take a break from Liquimetal Coating and just try a completely new deck idea. Not that I am really giving up on the Coating, just that I think letting my mind rest before coming back to it will hopefully open my eyes to other potential synergies.

On a side note, this is actually one of the benefits of MTGO that I hadn't actively appreciated until now. In paper magic, when I make a deck, I have to pull out the cards from my collection and sleeve them. At that point, those cards can't be used in another deck. I would have to get additional copies, or constantly pull cards out from one deck to another, etc. Not to mention that if I wanted to have any chance at reconstructing my previous decks I'd need to maintain a separate file with each decklist. Maybe people actually do that for paper magic, but I've always been a '1 deck' kind of player (as far as paper goes).

With Magic Online though, it actually frees people up to go crazy and try out wacky deck ideas (I heard about this awesome combo...) without a large process overhead or product investment. If I don't like a deck, I just hit New in Deckbuilder and it's like my collection is magically sorted and available. I think it's something most MTGO players take for granted, myself included. Of course the downside for most people is they started with paper and the thought of trying to 'recreate' their collection in MTGO is a huge barrier to entry unless they're willing to sell their paper collection. But hopefully Magic will come up with a solution, maybe some sort of 'dual-booster' that has some increased cost over a regular booster, but each pack has a code that lets you redeem online to get 'both' versions. Kind of how DVDs now offer a 'special' digital download license in addition to the physical DVD. I don't know the financials around that or thought through the impacts to both play environments, but as a player I love the concept.

Anyways, enough rambling! To wrap up this article, let me give you a hint of what I'm CONVINCED is the key to my next deck idea...

For the low low price of 6 tickets, I have been reminded once again that I am NOT the master deck builder that I seem to think I am :) And that when playtesting in the Casual > Tournament Practice room (which I will now refer to as the TP room), I should note that Tournament Practice is considered a subdivision of 'Casual'. That is to say, what wins in the TP room should not be considered a 'winning formula' :)

So, back I go to devising a deck. I will not yet succumb to 'net decking' yet. I think I will set a limit of ~50 tickets to trying to come up with a viable Rogue deck. That allows for 5 daily tournaments and 20 tickets for card purchases. And that is starting from today, so this won't include the 9 tickets I used for the previous deck's cards, and the 6 tickets for the daily last night.

As for my next deck idea, I still want to try and build something that uses Liquimetal Coating + Mimic Vat. I think it's a highly potent combo that can allow for repeated abuse of metalcraft and versatile permanent destruction. The only question is what I should do about the other 52 cards.

It was pretty clear from my performance in the Standard Daily last night (which I'll do a write-up for later, hopefully with video) that my deck is flawed. It was obvious that lack of playtesting against Blue-Green-(White|Red) with Frost Titan was a factor as I didn't realize just how easily I was shut down. Unless I could pull one of my 4 Coatings, I had no way to get rid of the Titan. And way too often the Coating that I had managed to successfully draw and cast was simply destroyed the following turn.

I need to make the focus less on making the Coating some kind of 'killer' card, and instead make it a support card for more viable and versatile strategies. So far, the ones I'm thinking of have shifted me entirely out of red but I am going to spend a bit more time just reviewing available cards and seeing what other synergies I can find.

As I start looking over the results of the Standard daily tournaments on MTGO, I quickly see a pattern of what decks are winning. They basically fall into two large buckets: the Primeval Titan bucket and the Stoneforge Mystic bucket. There are smaller buckets that these break into but those are the key cards in the majority of the winning decks. There are of course the smattering of other deck types, such as black sacrifice or old skool Boros, and even a random green elves. But the buckets pretty much dominate.

After selling my Jace's, I had been thinking I would just find a winning deck and build that but I really hate feeling like I'm just following the pack, at least while I think I might still have a chance at coming up with a rogue deck that is competitive.

So rather than go through all the various winning decks and decide which is most likely to win, I decided to go through all my current cards that are standard legal and decide which cards I wanted to try and build a rogue deck around.

Now, when I want to build a rogue deck, I always start from the same place. I pick a card that I thought was 'cool/interesting'. I usually have a ton of cards that catch my eye, but after initial review, it becomes clear that the cards (or rather, the decks I've built around those cards) aren't viable for any number of reasons - too fragile, too difficult to get combo pieces out, too easy to work around, etc. But I still like to try and find some way to make it work, and at a bare minimum, I mentally file away that card as something to check again when the next set comes out since a new card rotating in, or cards rotating out, make it now a viable deck.

This time however, I wanted to try and stick to the most recent set, Scars of Mirrodin. I occasionally will play paper magic if I find the time, and the SoM launch party was one such event. Aside from pulling a Koth, I also happened upon a nice little artifact that created an awesome combo, but no one else seemed to be talking about it or playing it. I unfortunately did not get the combo off more than once but I had been wanting to build a deck to take better advantage of that card.

That card?

At the launch party, I used the Coating to turn the opponent's enchantment into an artifact and then promptly destroyed it with an Oxidda Scrapmelter. To me, this seemed unbelievably powerful! Not only could I destroy anything, but the amount of artifact hate in the set was naturally very high.

So, with my key card in hand, I decided to try and see what I could use to abuse it. Naturally, I thought of Oxidda, along with 'Oxidda-lite' Manic Vandal and the bare bones Shatter. I also added the dual-purpose Demolish, helpful against those pesky Eldrazi land-using ramp decks. At this point, I was pretty much going to be Mono-Red.

With the basic meat of the deck defined, I needed to add the support cards - the cards that would help me survive until I got a Coating and something to kill artifacts with into play. I went for the most efficient burn spells I could think of, Lightning Bolt and Burst Lightning. I also needed an alternate win condition, just in case I wasn't drawing a Coating or it was removed by Memoricide or something. I immediately thought of a card I had learned about recently that wasn't getting much notice and I was able to pick up on the cheap (like .25 tickets or something each): Kuldotha Phoenix. Being Mono-Red also let me make Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle an auto-add. Lastly, I added some generic good 'support' in the form of 2x Mimic Vat and 2x Ratchet Bomb.

When I build rogue decks, I start with the basic framework and playtest before I even think about a sideboard or playing with the number of copies. So, my very initial deck was the following:

4x Liquimetal Coating
4x Oxidda Scrapmelter
4x Manic Vandal
4x Shatter
4x Demolish
4x Lightning Bolt
4x Burst Lightning
4x Kuldotha Phoenix
2x Mimic Vat
2x Ratchet Bomb
4x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
20x Mountain

Off I went to the Casual > Tournament Practice room and joined a game. First match was against a mono-white Quest for the Holy Relic deck and was pretty much a wash since the opponent conceded the match after I burned his Memnite while his Glint Hawk's come's-into-play ability was still on the stack he failed to find a 3rd land.

The second match was against a Primeval Titan ramp deck. I don't know what flavor of ramp deck this was as I died pretty quickly just to his titans after being stuck at 3 land.

At this point, there were a number of things I could see wrong with the deck so it was back to the deck editor.

First, I definitely needed more land. At 24 lands, I was often stuck at 3 or 4 lands and falling quickly behind as the opponent could either drop cheap creatures, or find land very quickly. I decided to try upping the land count to 26 but in order to maximiz the effect, decided to add 2x Mystifying Maze as this could also help stave off an attacker that I didn't have an answer for yet.

I also felt I had gone overboard on the artifact hate. Too often I was sitting with a shatter or an oxidda that didn't have a target and no Coating in play. After some thought, I decided to remove the Shatters completely. While they are the quickest to cast, as well as my only instant speed artifact destruction, they were just too situational. All of the other artifact hate had a secondary use (creature, land destruction). I also found the burst lightnings to be too weak. Maybe it was because of my low initial land count, but I kept finding myself with a Burst without the necessary kicker mana.

On the plus side, I discovered some nice synergies that weren't obvious to me before. For instance, there is amazing synergy between the Mimic Vat and the Oxidda/Vandals. The first time I chump blocked with a Vandal only to imprint it on the Vat with a Coating on the table, I realized that I could now destroy any of my opponent's permanents for 3 mana! And if necessary, I didn't even need to wait to chump block, I could just use a burn on my own creature. I decided I needed to use a full playset of Mimic Vats.

I also hadn't really focused on using Liquimetal Coating's ability on my own permanents. But now I realized, I could very easily hit metalcraft with only 2 artifacts as long as one of them was the Coating! I didn't want to change the 'focus' of the deck too much by overloading on Metalcraft abuse (although that is definitely on my list of other ideas to try) but I realized I could make my Kuldotha Phoenix more useful by slightly increasing my artifact count to hit metalcraft more often. Even better, now with Metalcraft as another 'force' in the deck, I found a replacement for the Burst Lightning I removed earlier - Galvanic Blast. I had already added 2x Mimic Vats, but I figured I could do with some mana acceleration and added 2x Iron Myr.

Finally, I needed to cut 2 cards since I had added 2 lands. I decided I had enough artifact destruction as it was and decided to cut 1x Oxidda and 1x Demolish.

So then, my deck was the following:

4x Liquimetal Coating
3x Oxidda Scrapmelter
4x Manic Vandal
3x Demolish
4x Lightning Bolt
4x Galvanic Blast
4x Kuldotha Phoenix
4x Mimic Vat
2x Ratchet Bomb
2x Iron Myr
4x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
2x Mystifying Maze
20x Mountain

Back to the Casual > Tournament Practice room for some more playtesting!

I definitely saw the improvements from my changes. I never got the chance to really play against a Primeval deck but got a lot of play in against various Quest decks. Given that the metagame seems to have a large number of these decks, it's not too shabby that I am pretty much set up as an anti-Quest deck. My only concern is handling the Kor Firewalkers after sb, and of course their own artifact hate in their sb.

Despite a big improvement from the first incarnation, I still had problems with having dead cards in my hands too often. One match against someone playing an Overwhelming Stampeding deck, I lost the final game with a Coating in play and a Mimic Vat waiting for an Oxidda or Vandal, but drawing nothing but land until the inevitable +x/+x. Needing some way to ditch the dead cards, I realized, I had a perfect answer in Chandra!

While Chandra Ablaze is a bit high on the casting cost, at that point in the game, I usually have most of the combo in play and just need one of my artifact creatures. I decided to replace a Kuldotha and an Oxidda (being on the higher end of my mana curve) with 2x Chandra Ablaze.

I also started working on my sideboard. I won't go into the details of my playtesting for that but here is a quick explanation of my current choices. I am pretty sure I will need to revise this though after playing against some more competitive decks:

1x Act of Treason - I have a singleton in case I run into a ramp deck with Eldrazi.
3x Chain Reaction - It may have just been the people that were playing at the same time I was testing but I continually ran into decks that dropped a ton of small creatures quickly. This is my attempt to try and clear the board.
3x Goblin Ruinblaster - Again for Eldrazi ramp decks
3x Ricochet Trap - I hadn't played against any Blue decks so this is just my standard anti-counter sb card.
2x Lavaball Trap - Again for Eldrazi ramp decks
2x Unstable Footing - One of my sb options for white decks that will bring in Kor Firewalkers
1x Brittle Effigy - Another option for both Firewalkers as well as Eldrazi

As I mentioned, I was limited to what decks I could play against in the Casual > Tournament Practice room. I know from experience that this is far from ideal but as a first pass, it should suffice. The only way now to really improve is to test it against decks that are really competitive. And the only way to do that is to play in an event that requires tickets. While there are a handful of options, to me the only ones that make sense are the 2-Man Constructed and the Daily Tournaments.

2-Man Constructed is my option if I just HAVE to play right now and I want to play against a competitive deck. Most people won't risk 2 tickets on a real casual/fun deck. The downside is that return is horrible. At 2 tickets to enter and winner getting a pack of SoM which is currently selling to bots at 3.9 tickets, unless you are winning more than 52% of the time, you are going to lose your tickets in the long run. This is usually not the best option if I'm not completely confident in my deck AND in my knowledge of the deck and the metagame. But again, if I just need to play at a more competitive level, this is sometimes the only option if I can't align my schedule with the dailies.

The Standard Daily is the best bang for the buck and I know others have written more extensively on this. At 6 tickets to enter, you play 4 rounds and prizes are 11 packs for 4-0 and 6 packs for 3-1. Not only do you get to play more games (4 rounds for 6 tickets versus 1 'round' for 2 tickets), the payout is MUCH higher if you win. I don't know the math for this but trust me, even going 3-1 is almost a 4:1 payout (versus less than 2-1 for a 2-man tourney). And if you are good (and lucky!) enough to go 4-0, you have almost a 7:1 payout!!

Anyways, now I am in the unenviable position of all 'decked' out with no where to go. I want to play in a Daily but the next Standard Daily isn't until 11pm. I want to maximize my Jace investment as much as possible so I am going to force myself to refrain from joining a 2-man. I just hope I don't massacre my deck second-guessing card choices as I continue playing/testing in the Casual > Tournament Practice room.

And speaking of Jace investment, I did have to purchase a few of the cards I added to my deck. I kept my shopping to cards that were either cheap (<.5 tickets) or could be used in more than just this deck. That being said, my purchases for this deck were:

2x Mimic Vat (2.7 each = 5.4)
2x Galvanic Blast (.15 each = .3)
1x Ratchet Bomb (2.5)
4x Kuldotha Phoenix (.12 each = .48)
Total : 9 tickets (8.68)

With luck, I will have a nice write-up of how this performs in tonight's daily. Until then, I'll be testing, testing, testing!


Current Jace-Ticket Tally
------------------------
Initial Amount: 364
Mono-Red Coating Investment: -9
Current Amount: 355