Played in the 4 30 3 round FNM this week. I've been doing this about every second week since rotation and have been slowly editing my deck as the meta changes. I thought this time I may as well post an update and the changes I've made both to the sideboard and the plans.
Round 1 vs Jeskai Aggro
My opponent was missing a couple hordeling outbursts for his deck and had decided to change them up for Brimaz for this FNM, which I think actually makes the matchup a little more even, since Hordeling Outburst is a horrible card against us. He was also missing a couple sideboard cards, but I don't think that affected this matchup much.
Game 1: We have turn 1 mystic into turn 2 courser after our opponent mulligans to a pretty good 6 card hand with only 1 land, he isn't able to kill the mystic until it's too late after missing his second land drop. We land a turn 4 Polukranos and the maindeck Arbor Colossus pulls its weight, leading to a pretty easy game one.
Game 2: We keep a solid 6 with Courser into Nylea's Disciple into Nylea's Disciple. On turn 2 with 1 land in hand we play Temple of Malady and opt to scry Heroes downfall to the bottom, which was very likely a mistake. Anyway, we make our way up to 28 after making a bad block with our Courser that allowed him to kill it with Lightning Strike. Then we draw nothing but lands until we're at 8 after a huge swing when he draws the 3rd Goblin Rabblemaster. On the last turn we topdeck the Hornet Queen with nothing else going on, but he gets us to 4 and Stoke the Flames kills us. It's worth noting that in this game we drew 3 of our Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, which was pretty bad for us.
Game 3: he mulligans to an alright 6, we keep an amazing 7, curve out and kill him. nothing particularly interesting happens.
Record 1-0
Round 2 vs U/W Heroic
I'm pretty sure this is a bad matchup for us, and before this I'd never actually played it, so looking back I think our sideboard plan was incorrect. After this round I made a couple changes to it.
Game 1: We curve out pretty well, but he is able to get his Battlewise Hoplite up large enough to get past most of our big guys a lot faster than I thought it would. I have an opportunity to trade my polukranos for a trick at one point, but instead opt to go to 8 against the 7/7 hoplite and die next turn to Heliod's Pilgrim into Aqueous Form. No salt though, I think that deck is really cool, it reminds me of my old budget Bant Heroic deck.
Game 2: He has a single battlewise hoplite on turn 2, but we have very little going on after a mulligan to 6. He plays Gods Willing in his upkeep every turn from 3 to 7 giving him amazing card selection and a lot of free swings. Nylea's Disciple does a good job of buffering our life total, but all the protection spells make the singleton Hornet Nest not very good. On turn 5 I opted to play Hornet Nest and Voyaging Satyr against his 4/4 Battlewise Hoplite instead of Doomwake Giant, which would have put 2 colours of creature on the battlefield for another protection spell. We finally lose after durdling around when he topdecks the Aqueous Form for exactly lethal a second time.
Apparently Game 2 was very slow for him, so I'm pretty sure what I sided in was correct. However, he pointed out that lands are colourless, therefore I should maybe bring in Nissa, Worldwaker in place of Doomwake Giant since he goes big, not wide. Next time I'll remember that.
Record: 1-1
Round 3 vs Mardu "midrange" (Control)
After the games he called his deck Mardu midrange, but honestly all I saw out of him was removal, Butcher of the Horde and planeswalkers. The decks are similar enough to warrant the same sideboard plans anyway, so it didn't make a lot of difference.
Game 1: We land a threat every single turn of the game, he kills them one by one, but we have Eidolon of Blossoms and Whip of Erebos and he has very little card advantage, eventually we grind him out with more big dudes than he has answers.
Game 2: I make the mistake of boarding out Arbor Colossus because I didn't see any fliers out of him game 1 and wanted to board in Nissa, Worldwaker and leave Doomwake Giant to clean up Elspeth, Sun's Champion tokens. I also mulligan to 6 and stumble one turn, allowing him to play a Butcher of the Horde, I find no answers and just die to it.
Game 3: I fix my mistake and put 3 Arbor Colossus back into the deck and the game plays out much like the first, except a lot faster because he only finds burn to deal with a turn 3 Polukranos and it takes a couple chunks out of him before he can do much. See the Unwritten closes out the game no problem.
For each of these games it's worth noting I didn't see a single End Hostilities or Anger of the Gods, which may have put them a lot more in my favour than they actually are.
Record: 2-1
Wrap up: We managed to place 4th thanks to tiebreakers as our round one opponent won his other rounds and our round 2 opponent went 3-0. This got us a pretty cool promo Brain Maggot, something I've been thinking of trying in the sideboard for a while now, though it may just be worse than thoughtseize.
Changes:
Maindeck:
IN:
1x Hornet Queen
1x Whip of Erebos
OUT:
1x Elvish Mystic
1x Polukranos, World Eater
Nearly everything we want to get out early comes out on turn 4, meaning that Elvish Mystic is actually not as good as it could be, plus we really want to be more threat dense and Hornet Queen has been performing amazingly, so those got swapped. Plus I wanted to add a Whip of Erebos to the maindeck to give us some kind of lifegain that also makes our long game better. Since the deck is pretty heavy on 4 already, and polukranos hasn't been really performing, one of them got cut to make room for it.
Sideboard:
IN:
1x Reclamation Sage
1x Whip of Erebos
OUT:
1x Arbor Colossus
1x Garruk, Apex Predator
Reclamation Sage seems to be very important in the U/W Heroic Matchup, and one was clearly not enough, the second is definitely needed. Since I added a 3rd Hornet Queen to the maindeck, I don't think we need to have a playset of Arbor Colossus in the 75, as such, one got cut to for the Sage. Whip of Erebos and Garruk, Apex Predator both make our long game a lot better, but Garruk is very expensive and honestly hasn't been doing a whole lot. I think the 2nd Whip will do a better job.
Any Constructive Criticism is welcome and would be appreciated, I really like the deck, but consistently going 2-1 or 3-1 at FNM isn't really where I want to be, I feel something needs to happen to make it a 3-0 or 4-0 deck, but I'm not sure what.
