Thursday C&Js with DuckTape

[Fishhead]

I found a Time Vault recently on sale and it's been sitting patiently on my MtG desk, waiting for its day in the sun.  I didn't have time to make a new deck before the Sunday Matchplay event and I barely had time to make one before tonite's thingy.  But I had built a custom version of DuckTape before, taking the things I liked from Dulmen (2xKarn, 1xTrike, large manabase) and mixing them with the things I liked from DuckTape 03 (1xTimeVault, UR manabase).  I scoured TMD for any last minute tech and went with this:

Fishhead DuckTape
The core: (20)
4 Smokestack
4 Tangle Wire
4 Sphere of Resistance
1 Time Vault
4 Goblin Welder
3 Meditate

The restricted list: (8)
R TimeTwister
R Wheel of Fortune
R Windfall
R Memory Jar
R Tinker
R Ancestral
R Time Walk
R Black Vise

Some guys: (4)
1 Metalworker
2 Karn
1 Triskellion

Mana: (28)
7 SoLoMox
1 Grim Monolith
1 Mana Vault
1 Mana Crypt
4 Mishras Workshop
4 Volcanic Island
2 Island
2 Shivan Reef
2 Fetchies
2 Wasteland
R Tolarian Academy
R Strip Mine

It's very close to the build in an article in the Extreme forum, but it's also almost exactly my DuckTape from last time too.  Weird how things evolve in parallel like that.  (Though I probably would have replaced the second Metalworker with some Psyduck utility like Tsabos Web instead of the Mana Vault if I hadn't read the article, leading to a further 1 card difference.  Lol.)

Anyway, there are probably 25 people including a lot of strong players.  It's going to be a good day, as long as I don't get paired against Pysduck, Tim (w/DuckTape) or Justin (TnT) in the first round.

Match 1: Psyduck (Hateful Hate.dec)
Omigod, no.  Not only is Psyduck the creator of the deck I am playing, he's playing a deck chock full of hate today.  The deck tries to abuse Guilded Drake with Waterfront Bouncer and Repulse.  Did I mention that he's got 4 MD Serenities just for the heck of it?  Uh oh.

Game 1: I get a Smokestack and 2 Welders, but make the mistake of playing the Welders out.  They get stolen by Drakes and start manipulating my artifacts to my disadvantage.  I get overrun by True Believers.
Game 2: The game starts the same way, except I can cast Triskellion to clear his board.  He plays a couple 2CC white creatures and starts attacking.  Time is running out in the round and I am in a do-or-die situation. He has multiple permenants and a hand full of cards, I have a Smokestack with 2 counters and a Tangle Wire with 1.  I am at 4 life, facing 4 damage.  I Meditate twice looking for answers and come down to a Tangle Wire or a Masticore.  A full Tangle Wire means he loses the use of 7 permenants if resolves, but I inexplicably pick Masticore which simply gets Repulsed.  Somehow he hadn't drawn a second FoW in all the cards he had, I'm surprised to find that I could have resolved either card afterwards.  Damn.  

Matches 0-1 Game 0-2.

Match 2: ?, unpowered GroTog
One of the players from the local 1.5 scene is trying out T1.  It's a brutal day, and now he's facing me with DuckTape in the 0-1 bracket.  The only small mercy is that he doesn't realize how bad this matchup is for him.

Game 1: I have crazy Ancestral action in my opening hand, but I decide to slow-play it until I find out what he's playing.  A Tropical.  Then an Underground.  Hmmm, I think I'll hold Ancestral for a bit.  I play Windfall and he choses to Gush in response!  (He wasn't quite familiar with Windfall, so I try to talk him out of this play, but he wants to do it.)  OK then, I'll draw 10.  I play humongeous things onto the board; he FoWs the first one, but I end up with a Trike and a Tangle Wire.  He can't get out from under the Tangle Wire before Trike kills him.  I might be able to win slightly faster with the 2 Welders in my hand, but I decide to save them as a surprise for the second game.  
Game 2: He gets a Fastbond and a Tog, but again I resolve Trike.  I force through TimeTwister to empty the graveyard and play a bunch of tasty artifacts off my Tolarian-Workshop combo.  Tog starts getting tapped by Tangle Wires and Trike wins for me.

Afterwards, my opponent is frustrated and wants to drop.  I try to explain how bad a matchup this is for him and how he should stay in just to get practice with the deck and the format.  One of his friends convinces him the same thing, and I wish him luck for the next round.  As the third round starts I see that he's been paired with Lurking-Evil with Ankh Sligh.  Hmmm, thats a good matchup for GroTog, but Lurking-Evil obviously is going to have the experience advantage.  You can guess how that story ends.  But at least he won his 4th round and felt a bit better about the day.

Matches 1-1 Game 2-2.

Match 3: Steven V. with Lime Parfait.
I played against this deck last time.  I discuss the idea that people are going to have to start preparing for Parfait a bit more if he is going to bring it every week.  

Game 1: I mull an all-land hand, a no land hand and then keep at 5 with no land but tons of broken stuff.  He starts with Land-Land Tax and I tell him he's not going to get to Tax for a bit as I play no land.  Hehe.  I topdeck Volcanic next turn though and start resolve broken spells like Ancestral and TimeWalk.  He's got Tax/Rack on the board, but on a single turn I drop Karn and Trike and use the floating mana to eat his Zorb, effectively shutting down his Land Tax.  He Balances and then StPs the surviving Karn before I can eat my own traitorous Mana Crypt.  I get a lot of lock pieces on the board, but am slowly taking damage from the Crypt.  He concedes when I drop the second Karn and immediately eat the Crypt.
Game 2: He sideboards massively against me, and I am worried.  Psyduck had some auto-win cards in his SB; and my opponent flips over Karmic Justice and asks how it interacts with Smokestack.  Uh oh.  Anyway, my deck makes up for the mulligan on the game before.  I've played 7 of the power 9 before he has much of anything going and I am ripping up his board.  I drop Karn and swing for 13 on two consecutive turns.  He shows me the Seal and Karmic Justice he never got to play due to Tangle Wire.

We play some more for fun, I generally win them.  He has things like Carpet of Flowers to give him free mana, but I can always eat my Islands with Smokestack if necessary.

Matches 2-1 Game 4-2.

Match 4: Tin Ly (Ankh Sligh)
We're all starting to get tired and these matches aren't pretty to watch.  
Game 1: He gets a Cadet and I pin it under Tangle Wire.  It gets thrown at me with Reckless Abandon!  Hmmm.  I get the Smokestack at 4 mana and start to eat his stuff.  Its a pretty crushing win and someone leans over and says "So, how does Sligh win against DuckTape?"  "It's not that bad a matchup," I reply.  "Its hard to hold them down in time sometimes."
Game 2: I mull to 6 and he shows how Sligh would probably have won anway.  Land, 2/1.  Wasteland your land.  Play more 2/1s and 1/1s.  Bolt you.  Swing Swing.  Smokestack is a lock eventually, but you can't outrace Sligh with a Smokestack.  
Game 3: He mulls to 6 and keeps a slow hand.  Like in the Lime Parfait match, my deck feels sorry for giving me a bad hand last time.  Again I have played over half of the power before he really does much.  He's locked under pretty quickly and we spend much of the game correcting each others play mistakes.  "I dropped another Sphere, now you need 2 more." "Dude, didn't you just tap the Tolarian for 11?  What did you do with the rest of that mana?"  etc etc.  Yay for REL -1.  

Matches 3-1: Games 6-3

Match 5: Ken (Burw Mask)
I haven't played Ken in a while; maybe I've never played him in sanctioned play?  Anyway, he's built a Mask deck modelled on the one Christiaan was so successful with at C&Js for a while.  
Game 1: I open with a Welder and he Duresses me to find a Karn, a Memory Jar, a Smokestack and a Sphere.   He mistakenly takes the Smokestack and I play Sphere on the next turn ready to Weld up Smokestack at EoT.  I do this, then draw land then Windfall and get to Windfall for 4, taking 2 Dreadnaughts from him.  This is terrible as all new artifacts will become Dreadnaughts (and then die) unless he can deal with the Welder.  I take a spare second to Weld Karn back into play and swing for massive damage with all my artifacts.
Game 2: I lock him down quickly, then spend three agonizing turns trying to decide to "win" by Time Vault.  I have an unopposed Trike on the board, a Welder and all the lock pieces.  I will just win in two more turns with the Trike, but I decide finally to go for the flashy Time Vault win.  So I have 2 counters on the Smokestack, 6 on the Wires and one Sphere.  I tell Ken to take 60 turns.  (Rules question: Can I make him take the turns one at a time?  I thought I had to activate Time Vault 60 times in response to itself.  I really should read the errata on Time Vault before playing it!)  After all of my agonizing I decided that he probably didn't have Hurkyl's Recall in the SB and so I could go for the flashy win.  (Hurkyls means I lose to Land-Lotus-Hurkyls).  But as soon as he starts drawing the cards one at a time I know that I have miscalculated.  Fortunately, the Seal of Cleansing is the 2nd to the bottom card and my mistake is not fatal.  Whew.

Matches 4-1:  Games 8-3

Ok, so this wasn't a great day from a perfect play point of view, but I escape it with a 4-1 record which isn't bad.  I resolve to eat something before I play next week, but it was either eat or make a deck -- and the Time Vault was demanding to be played.  Lol.  

Eddie H. (GroTog) and Tim W. (DuckTape) agree to draw in the finals and go get food.  I finish 3rd, Riz finishes 4th with Stasis.  

Sidelight: I gave Riz the most boring crushing of his life with DuckTape a few weeks back, I felt guilty playing a deck that smashes all your permenants and leaves the opponent saying "Draw, Discard, Go."  So imagine my surprise that he was playing Stasis today.  My guilt evaportates!  But, beyond that, imagine the DuckTape v. Stasis matchup.  Omigod.  I was tempted to play it, just to see how horrible it is, but I was sooo hungry and we'd probably still be playing the match right now.  Lol.

As always, I hope people read this report and find it useful.  Plenty of people I know played at C&Js did well (or not so well) and have stories to tell - feel free to add them here if there's not enough for a full report.

[Zhalfirin]

Nice Report.  Sorry I couldn't make it.  I injured my back badly this week and couldn't show.

As for funky timing issues with Time Vault:  I think you can use the {Skip your next turn: Untap Time Vault and put a time counter on it} ability even if Time Vault is untapped.  Thus, you can decide to take a turn if they do something nasty like Hurkyl's Recall.

Hope to see you guys next week.

[Fishhead]

Quote Hope to see you guys next week.

Yeah, sorry about your back.  Hope you're not in some crazy full body cast or something when we next see you.

Quote I think you can use the {Skip your next turn: Untap Time Vault and put a time counter on it} ability even if Time Vault is untapped.  

After reading the Oracle, I think this is right.  I could have sworn that I read someone's report where they untapped 60 times in response to untapping though.  I'd definitely be in a more comfortable position if I just told the opponent to "take turns until something happens."  

[Cartman316 _420]

http://www.crystalkeep.com/cgi-bin/magicsearch.cgi?cardName=time+vault&cardColour=&cardType=&creatureType=&expansion=&rarity=&cardText=&rulingText=

From reading this, I do not believe you can... but good job with the deck. Question, what if you run into something like a quick Pernicious Deed or Duress's from Gro a Tog?

~Cartman

[carl]

Thanks for the report, good one as usual.

I've got a few question concerning your card choices:
You never mention Black Vise. Was it any good?
What about the Time Vault? Do you think it's needed?
PsyDuck plays only 3 Spheres. Is the 4th necessary? (I think it is)
Metal Worker: isn't one a bit random?

[Fever]

Im curious about the inclusion of a lone Metalworker, how did that work out for you? It seems to me that you would want one early, so running only one seems odd. I see it as a 4-of or none card.

[psyduck]

in the extreme vintage forum, i posted that i was going to make a primer of sorts on tape, which would hopefully explain the logic behind one-of's. Although formally the explanation seems lacking, it makes sense in the "i draw a lot of cards" theory with some hand-waving. Or more abruptly, in practice, a random metalworker popping up is something along the lines of "oh thats nice, its useful right now" as opposed to "i wish i had 4 in the deck" and "I can't run without it" , or "I need to topdeck metalworker". its pretty hard to formalize, hopefully ill figure out how to say it. As a math major, in the context of a formal primer, its hard to actually say things I believe but have little precise formalizations of going about saying it.

[Gabethebabe]

One note from the rules department:

Karmic Justice does NOTHING against Smokestack.
Smokestack forces you to sacrifice permanents.
Karmic Justice triggers on effects that DESTROY permanents.

A better SB bet would be Sacred Ground.

[Fishhead]

Carl says:

Quote You never mention Black Vise. Was it any good?
What about the Time Vault? Do you think it's needed?
PsyDuck plays only 3 Spheres. Is the 4th necessary? (I think it is)
Metal Worker: isn't one a bit random?

1) I talked a bit about my experiences with Black Vise in the thread in the Extreme Forum.  The short answer is that it was totally overshadowed by Karn all night, but part of that might be what I drew - I have 3 x 4/4 creatures that finish the game in 2-5 turns , but only 1 x Vise which requires 7 turns to win.

2) I liked Time Vault a lot.  I only used it for the "win" in that last game, but it was always a nice security blanket when it was on the table.  It has a lot of nice synergies since it is an artifact.

3) I am unsure about Spheres.  With more practice, I think I'd have a definite plan, but right now I don't.  I often SB'd out one Sphere to make room in the maindeck; so I seem to be in the middle on the issue.  

Here's one thing to think about - I felt pretty confident removing a Sphere against Sligh.  Initially, it seems like Spheres should be really good against Sligh since they play light mana and use what little mana they have very intensely.  But it seemed that dropping an early Sphere to try to blunt their game doesn't help - it just pushes both players back a turn.  They make up for not being able to cast some random burn spell by just swinging an extra time with the Pup.  

So DuckTape really wants to drop a Smokestack, then a Tangle Wire and then a Sphere against them.  Which is to say that you want to assemble your combo first.  Because of all the burn floating around, the Welder's value drops a lot so Welder->Sphere isn't such a great play either.  

These are musings; I'm hoping to discover some sort of strategy in here by mulling over extreme cases like Sligh.  If anyone else has any thoughts; particularly about Spheres in this matchup please chip in.

4) One Metalworker is a bit random.  For some reason there seems to be one on everyones list right now.  I'm not that fond of him.  Pysduck had a theory he expressed as "randomly good".  If I understand it correctly, the Metalworker is nice to have but not necessary - so when you draw it "randomly", it is still "good".  

I look at Metalworker as slightly random mana-source.  He is slow, but potentially explosive.  This is probably much more key to the DuckTape 03 build with it's ultra-low land count than to the German builds with their ultra-solid land count.

GabeTheBabe says:

Quote Karmic Justice does NOTHING against Smokestack.

Ah, OK, that makes sense.  I probably should ask that and the Time Vault question in the rules forum just to be sure.

[NaClhv]

Good report, as always.  And it's good to see ducktape gain in popularity, and priceless to see a 'playing Ducktape vs. Psyduck' matchup.

As for myself, I managed to leave all my cards at home, including my trade stuff.  Faced with the prospect of being able to neither trade nor play, I decided to pick up whatever benchwarming deck my friends had and play with it, which turned out to be ankh sligh.  As it turned out, Emmanuel also forgot his deck, and was borrowing an ankh sligh deck.  

In the first match, I face off against keeper.  I lose the first game to a mess of counters and an early morphling.  Tim, who had a bye and was watching the game, says, "Ooh...  you're not suppose to lose the first game!"  And I feel like maybe I just shouldn't have played.  But in games 2 and 3, I manage to pull off wins (one of them was actually really close.  I thought I wouldn't make it, but a late-game PoP, past 2 chills on the table, while my opponent only had MisD's as his "counters", won me the game).

In the second match, I play a parfait/enchantress deck.  Again, I lose the first game, and then go on to win the next two.  Fortunately for me, my opponent never got worship/enchantress, which I can't deal with even post sideboard.  

Third match is against Tim playing Ducktape.  I lose to general ducktape brokenness.

The last match is against Psyduck himself, who was playing "paper", which is described a little bit in Fishhead's report.  Psyduck's deck is a very metagame specific deck, so when something relatively random like sligh comes along, he doesn't do too well.  (There's nothing really worth stealing with drakes, I have about as much burn as he has creatures, and PoP still hits him quite hard)  I manage to win 2-0.

There is one more match left in the round, but since my ride (Tim and Eddie) were heading home (which they could afford to do, since they were the two players in the final round and they decided to just ID), I decided to just go home too.  I would normally stick around 'till the end, but since I'm not playing my own deck, I don't mind going home early.

Overall, my impression of the tournament with Ankh sligh was generally pretty good.  I did manage to pull out a 3-1, which was better than I expected.  The ankhs never seemed to work all that well for me, though.  The one time they clearly helped was against the enchantress/parfait deck, where I got them in multiples.  But in general, ideally they would hit 2nd turn, when my opponent had 2 lands out.  Then they would deal 4 or so damage, at which my opponent is pretty happy with his 4 lands in play.  A card which can only deal 4 or so damage under ideal conditions - didn't seem too good.  But then again, I didn't draw them often, so that might be why I feel this way.

I did, however, re-discover the power of PoP.  Man, that's a good card.  Makes me want to play sligh some more.

But overall, I feel that if I had remembered to bring ABM, I would have won all the matchs that I won anyways (except it would have been easier;  some of those games were really close calls with sligh), and had a better shot against Tim's ducktape.  Nevertheless, it felt good to try out another deck and do decently with it.

------------------------------------------

With respect to ducktape's Karn/vise/triskelion/time vault debate, the question that has to be answered is "what kind of win condition do you want in the deck?"  In other words, "What's your kill?"  Now it seems to me that ideally, you win games with ducktape because your opponent shoots himself in the face because he doesn't want to play anymore.  So in this ideal situation, you don't have to win the game at all... your opponent just concedes.  Given all this, whatever kill we do run should make the deck so that it is as close to this ideal situation as possible.

This makes me stay away from black vise.  The only thing that card does is damage your opponent, which is something you shouldn't have to do.  Karn or triskelion (or tetravus) is better, since they do something else besides damaging the opponent.  Unfortuately, they're really, really expensive mana-wise.  I like time vault best of all - the card is clearly just a part of the lock, and the fact that it happens to kill your opponent is purely a side effect.  Unfortunately, they aren't helpful in multiples, so we still have to have some other options for the kill.

But I think that this is the trait to look for in the kill card of choice in the deck.  Something that works with the lock, and happens to kill as a side effect.  In this line of thought, Karn would come in second as a kill.