Matt Sperling: Solving Complex Problems through Teamwork

This guest blog comes to us today courtesy of Matt Sperling. Send him your appreciation @mtg_law_etc. If you’re interested in contributing, email me at bmoreno54@gmail.com. Now, enjoy the rest of the post.

I first need to thank Billy for letting me post here. I find Billy’s posts to be very insightful and helpful, and I’ve offered to contribute in the hopes that my thoughts appear useful by association.

As my own playtest group has been going through somewhat of an identity crisis of late, with people leaving the group or attempting to restructure how we spend our time, I’ve been reflecting on how to optimize the experience. Playtesting is basically an attempt to solve, through teamwork, a very complex problem: what deck to play. The task nearly always proves more difficult than I had expected.

Taking a step back for a second to talk about life in general rather than specifically Magic: The Gathering, I have found that among people who have truly brilliant minds for math, science, gaming, or anything, social skills and intelligence (which is of course difficult/impossible to quantify but I use to mean my own gut impression of how smart someone is) seem to be inversely proportional. I suspect the source of this trend is largely a feedback loop between social development and high-level intellectual development. People naturally inclined to spend time learning have less time to spend socializing, and then once you find yourself behind the curve socially and ahead of the curve intellectually, the incentives for how you spend your time skew towards learning and away from socializing. I aspire to surround myself with those who are smart, but not too smart to not be able to function socially.

Testing Vengevine Naya

Evan’s been pretty excited about Vengevine, as many are, and wanted to plug it into Boss Naya as soon as he saw it. For tonight’s session he got the list together, swapping out 2 Rangers, a Scute Mob, and Ajani Vengeant. Ajani seemed fine to swap out, as you can’t just go piling more 4′s in the deck without cutting some. Evan used the same reasoning in trimming some Rangers and this reveals one of the problems with Vengevine. His competition is extremely stiff. Not only is the new Mythic not as good as Bloodbraid Elf, neither is Ranger (though he’s much closer), but Vengevine probably requires you to lose some amount of one or both of these cards and he happens to work slightly better with the slightly worse option. Naya decks are facing a real clustercuss at the 4 spot, especially since Ajani Vengeant, while completely cuttable for the purposes of exploration, provides the deck with a different and effective angle of attack. It will all take some sorting out, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Vengevine ended up stuck on the bench.

Hardcasting Eldrazi

I attended GP Houston this weekend, and even though I only posted a 4-2-1 with Scapeshift Zoo, the juices are flowing again. The next round of relevant tournaments are Standard qualifiers for Pro Tour Amsterdam, so that’s what I’m going to be looking at for the near future.

Coming to the format with fresh eyes (I know Jund is good, but I don’t hate it yet), the first thing that strikes me is how awesome the mana ramp is right now. Saturday, Bdm asked me what officially-spoiled card excited me most. At the time, I said Joraga Treespeaker, but that’s only because I hadn’t seen Kozilek’s Predator yet. I’m pretty comfortable comparing this guy to Garruk Wildspeaker; it offers similar flexibility and slightly better defense, while providing a Veggies effect much more consistently and just a little less explosively. I know he doesn’t come equipped with Overrun, but if that’s the party you’re going to, his three warm bodies are more than welcome. Steve Sadin, in his column at dailymtg.com, predicted heavy block play for this card but was hesitant to vouch for it in standard. Personally, I have no doubts.