I'm just going to be rude and double post here to bump the thread a little.
The day before yesterday I had a 1v1 with my
Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath vs
Edgar Markov. It was the most interesting battle. It all started with a simple
Mesmeric Orb and a
Bojuka Bog somewhere in the early game.
I had a
Mesmeric Orb out with
Genesis in my hand. I also had an
Overwhelming Stampede in my starting hand. My strategy was to mill until I find a sac outlet and sac
Genesis to fish my wincons back. Then it happens: the first
Bojuka Bog. My Uro is stranded in the Command Zone when my first batch of wincons gets exiled from my grave. There goes
Triumph of the Hordes.
I do this weird maneuvre where I cast Uro three times in a turn by bouncing with
Temur Sabertooth and escaping it so that my hand is now 8 cards. Proceed to discard
Genesis at the end of turn. "Yes!!" Finally the pieces are going where they're supposed to.
"Alright", I think to myself, "I've still got
Thassa's Oracle &
Finale of Devastation in the deck and this
Overwhelming Stampede in my hand. Can't be too bad." I mill some more and don't realise the ramifications of my friend's bounce land. This time
Bojuka Bog hits ~20 or so cards, exiling my
Thassa's Oracle and
Genesis.
Guess if there's another bounce land by my opponent? You got it right: a third
Bojuka Bog. Never seen so much value from a simple land. At this point I don't even care what is or isn't in my grave since she's exiled pretty much all of my win conditions. All I know I just lost my
Eternal Witness to my own mill so there's really no coming back with anything in my grave.
"Uh-oh. This isn't good." I think about my hand, my deck and my
exile pile. Then I decide to just go for it. Switching from conservative milling to maximum draw and mill. I present:
Mind Unbound. I know this will be one of my last turns so I'm just hoping to hit something that could win me the game. I kinda
forget that I have a
Laboratory Maniac as a backup in the library and it gets milled by
Mesmeric Orb. Sadness.
At this point I'm down to almost no library, all of my wincons exiled or in the grave with no way to retrieve them. I have my commander,
Golgari Grave-Troll and a few dorks on the battlefield. I'm feeling pretty depressed. Remember my starting hand? I almost forgot about the card because I was so focused on getting my board state sorted: I look at
Overwhelming Stampede in my hand and start counting. It's lethal if she swings with everything. And she does because combat damage is her win condition. My Uro life gain triggers soak all the damage, I don't even care about my life total anymore.
My turn. I'm excited. I count my cards: mill 12 for the
Mesmeric Orb, draw 3 for
Mind Unbound...and the library is empty. Draw for turn and lose the game.
A 5-person game with
Edgar Markov vampires beatdown,
Sharuum the Hegemon artifact toolbox,
Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath self-mill,
Phelddagrif group hug and
Merieke Ri Berit untap/combo (me). This game took 4 hours so I'm just going to present you with the highlights.
First three turns:
Phelddagrif decided to drop Mikokoro,
Rites of Flourishing and
Howling Mine. A little later we also got
Shizuko, Caller of Autumn. This means lots of cards, lots of mana, turbo speed game development.
Gamestate somewhere around mid game:
Lots of huge vampires out. Sharuum had pretty much nothing because we destroyed his
Thopter Foundry +
Sword of the Meek all the time. Uro was half way through his deck with a
Fleet Swallower out,
Phelddagrif with the aforementioned permanents out and some more and I had
Aphetto Alchemist +
Illusionist's Bracers and was attempting to go infinite. Enter the first
Cyclonic Rift overloaded by
Phelddagrif and everything was pretty much
reset.
Next turn
Phelddagrif played a
Mystic Sanctuary which meant that none of us could go infinite or combo off otherwise because the board would have been
reset.
Uro decided to cast
Rite of Replication on his
Soul of the Harvest drawing 6 cards for each creature cast. Same problem as before:
Laboratory Maniac on the board would have resolved the issue but there was that looming
Cyclonic Rift that was preventing him from winning.
We made a deal with the
Phelddagrif player that I
Windfall and he recasts
Cyclonic Rift. This combination bounced our hands to 16 cards and poor Uro was knocked out due to him drawing from an empty library. First player out. We're still drawing tons of cards and playing lots of lands so it's easy to
recover from the
Rift.
Next major event:
Phelddagrif gets knocked out. Some huge vampire butts did tons of damage to us combo players and
Phelddagrif was down to 2 life. There was a trigger from the Markov player to drain 4 life from each of us.
Phelddagrif frantically looks at his hand, grave and hand again and announces that he cannot do anything. I could have done something but I decided it's best to go for the win.
I dropped an
Archivist and next turn I played
Mind over Matter. That's an infinite combo but my current live deck doesn't have
Thassa's Oracle (dumb me) so I couldn't win that turn. I was going to look for
Approach of the Second Sun. There was a fierce
counterspell war over something that escapes my mind right now but basically I'm down to 7 life, pretty much out of juice and no blockers. Guess if the vampires made it my way and ended the game for me.
Now it's down to Markov and huge vampires vs. Sharuum that
finally got his
Sword of the Meek and
Thopter Foundry. The game stalls on for another three or four turns where vampires always kill the blocker Thopters and Sharuum is in topdeck mode. He draws
Venser, the Sojourner and was able to keep his Sharuum out and alive. The tipping point was a
Darksteel Forge that let Sharuum player keep the Thopters he was making eventually overwhelming the board. Icing on the cake was
Filigree Angel that finally sealed the game.
All in all I'm pretty happy we were able to play this game. All decks got to do their thing and everyone was out of interaction and exhausted in the end. It was pretty much a perfect 4-hour Magic
festival.