How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Moon

For the 21/22 Old School Winter Derby I decided to brew an unpowered deck that gave me the best chance to win. I’m still not sure if I accomplished that, but I did end up with a stack of cards that stands a chance of interacting with powered opposition. Also Hymn rules.

Let’s get something out of the way, Vince. Why do you own a tiny bed?

I don’t. I own TWO tiny beds. They are for my cats.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the food blogger thing where I bother you with extraneous nonsense before the goddamned recipe. I can connect the dots. I rescued these cats from the wild over the summer, while I was playing a Beasts of the Bay 1.5 event. Here was my deck from that event:

I used that can of sardines to catch the short-haired cat, Omega-3. Her brother, Colonel Sanders, couldn’t resist the original recipe. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to work fried chicken into my deck photo game. Maybe next time. Someone send me some Rukh Eggs and I swear to Bolas I’ll put chicken fingers in a deck pic.

Where’s the power?

Don’t own it. Never will. I almost pulled the trigger on some CE Moxen in 2019, but the subsequent price spikes dashed any hopes of buying in. I’m sure I could have borrowed power if I asked, but based on card values I just couldn’t put my friends in that position. I’m clumsy as hell and would probably spill coffee all over someone’s retirement nest egg. Most events are proxy-friendly now so I do just fine. Shout out to all the clubs that support that, especially my own, the Sisters of the Flame. Great people that want great games of magic. That’s what Old School is all about. I used to say “It’s not the Magic, it’s the gathering” to explain negative experiences - but now it best describes how great this crew is. This gathering rules. Alright, lovefest over. Let’s address the quartet of elephants in the room.

Four Blood Moon?!

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love the gamble. There are matchups where the card is dead as a doornail. But when it’s good, it’s really freaking good. As a player, I’m impulsive and batshit crazy when it comes to risks. Me+Moon= A match made in Urborg. Carve it into a tree.

A Knife to a Gunfight

To brew unpowered against a powered field you have to spend some time thinking about how powered decks operate. The Moxen are the grease, Ancestral/Wheel/Twister is the gas, and the wincon is the motor. Some games it all hums like a Ferrari. Balance and Mind Twist are completely different cards when they’re greased up. Balance is especially wild. It has unspoken modes. It’s Mind Twist #2. It’s one-sided land destruction. It lets you mulligan way more aggressively. The draw spells are just better when you have a bunch of zeros in your deck, and your opponent’s draw-sevens become liabilities. This is why I chose not to run Wheel of Fortune. More on that later.

If you’re going to race your Corolla against a fleet of sports cars, you need some sort of angle. The one thing a lot of these lists have in common is the following thought process:

“I have to run Balance, so I need some white sources, but I need Wheel, so I need red, but I’m not running basic Mountain so I might as well use Volcanic Islands, and oh snap Regrowth is too good not to run….”

The result? Vulnerable mana bases stuffed to the brim with nonbasics. 6 colorless auto-includes in Strip Mine, Library of Alexandria, and a set of Factories. And there’s plenty of other fancy nonsense in the card pool people can’t resist. Maze of Ith, Mishra’s Workshop, Hammerheim (see idiot above), Urborg (see idiot above), Bazaar of Baghdad; the list goes on and on.

Now remember, you’re still drag racing with a fucking Corolla. You’re still on the wrong end of the threat/answer conundrum. You will still lose the Mind Twist lottery from time to time. But every once in a while, Blood Moon changes the game.

Guess what? Ya basic.

A while back in the Sisters discord Seth made a great point about Armageddon: sometimes it’s your only answer to cards like Maze of Ith. I had never thought about it that way. I always considered it a game-ender. Cast a bunch of creatures, destroy the earth like angry Old Testament God, and go to game two. But I had never considered Armageddon’s utility. Maybe your board presence isn’t overwhelming and you just can’t beat a Maze. Maybe they are posting up with Mishra’s Factories and you can’t get through. Maybe they are fucking around with Bazaar of Baghdad and you can’t afford to let them.

I started thinking about Blood Moon this way. At it’s best it just locks your opponent out. They keep a sketchy Library of Alexandria hand and pay the price. They look at two Factories and try to ride that out until they hit colored sources. They run all the duals because they run all the restricted cards. Moon can just run away with the game here.

But sometimes you need to handle corner cases. Getting your pump knights through Factories is a pain in the ass and sometimes you tempo yourself by committing mana to pumping. Maze turns off Hypnotic Specter, one of your best chances to win the card advantage race. Remember, your shitty Corolla does not draw cards. If they get a Library online, welcome to Fuckedsville, population: you.

Enter Blood Moon. At 2R, it’s not too bad a price to have a bunch of answers in one card. And better yet, it frees up slots that would otherwise be Shatter. We’re base black, and having BB is the highest priority, so we can ditch the Factories. Normally this is wrong, but again, from an unpowered standpoint you cannot afford to miss Hymn mana on turn two. You have no way to bandage risky keeps. This list really misses the Mox Jet, so barring a Dark Ritual start, you aren’t casting business until turn two. We will talk about that plan in a second. But first, let’s talk card choices.

No Wheel? No Mind Twist? No Demonic Tutor? Are you okay?

There are some glaring exclusions here. I’m probably wrong about a lot of this. The best I can do is passionately explain my choices, but don’t interpret that as confidence in being correct. If I’m going to play 8 rounds of Magic with the same deck, it has to be a deck that gives me zero anxiety. Zero doubts. So I did what I did.

Wheel is great but in my opinion not great enough when you’re Moxless and not on a burn plan. Drawing my opponents into gasoline is very bad when my plan is to deny resources.

Mind Twist is fine, but again, without Moxen it’s too slow.

Demonic Tutor just isn’t fetching anything game breaking in this list. There’s no Balance, no Twist, no sweepers. No need to treat Blood Moon like a silver bullet when we are running a playset anyway. Speaking of which, my favorite part about eschewing all the one-ofs is I get to run four-ofs all the way down. Then I get to say cool shit like “Quad Lasers”. Pew pew motherfucker, nice mountains. Real talk though, the symmetry of the four-ofs is kind of beautiful. I never have to wonder if I ran enough Sinkholes. I’ve done everything I can in the deckbuilding phase to make my disruption plan as consistent as possible. What’s that saying about plans and getting punched in the face?

Back To The Pit

I bleed Scarlet. I am a Rutgers basketball fan. I love the way the team plays. The Knights play tough defense, get physical in the paint, get a few steals, and force teams into uncomfortable spaces. Rutgers will not win shootouts. But they will drag you into the shit and make you claw your way out to survive. It’s ugly and I love it. It’s exactly how this deck works.

You keep seven, opponent keeps seven. Your spells attempt to render their hand unkeepable. Use your cards to screw up their plan, THEN start a “fair” game of magic. Simple. Fun (for me). But riddled with weaknesses.

Here we are again talking questions vs. answers. The problem with proactive disruption is you can’t disrupt the top of their library. In powered old school, not only can they rip answers, they can rip draw spells to reset the “fair” game you tried to start. That’s why T2 Hymn, T3 Moon is so appealing to me. Maybe they recover the cards, but they need mana to cast it. Maybe they can cast their Lightning Bolts, but Sedge Trolls turn them into hand rot. Welcome to unpowered Magic, where we operate in a triage of maybes. Some goddamned certainty would be nice for a change.

Head Games

I think what’s embedded in card choice and deck style conversations is we have to play what makes us happy, and happiness is subjective. For me, happiness is avoiding self-doubt after a match. This is why I like aggro and all-in combo. I’m gonna go for it, and if you handle my bullshit, good game. I can move on and forget everything faster than a goldfish. But complicated board states make my head hurt. Spare me the Rube Goldberg decision trees. I play simple decks with simple plans. With this list, I know I’m going to run out all the disruption I can, then cast threats and attack with them. That’s it. It either gets there or it doesn’t.

Tune in later for the tournament report.

Thanks for reading.

-Vince