Alright so I played my first three matches and figured I should record the results for anyone who cares! First off these were all in "Just for Fun Open Play" so none of them were super competitive but I felt it was a good start for a new deck and a new player to the format.
That said, we stomped them. Two of the matches were against odd homebrews and one was against azusa amulet, nothing tier 1 but mostly in the same wheelhouse as our deck.
Match 1: The first game of modern I have ever played was up against a pretty sweet homebrew lifegain midrange deck. He kept playing threat after threat that gained him life or interacted with that lifegain in some way. The kicker here was that he managed to resolve an early Well of Lost Dreams that put in work throughout the game, routinely leaving him with more cards in hand than us! Oddly enough almost all of our burn ended up in the bottom 20 of the library and I simply had to play the control game against the opponent's endless threats. The defining moment of the game ended up being turn 15(15!!) when I was down to one card in hand and he felt it was a good time to try and flood the board. Got in a solid hit on us for 9 before we untapped. Unfortunately for him, that one card was a supreme verdict with Soulfire Grand Master on the field. after we stabilized we managed to get 3 Pyromancer Ascensions online in short order and clean up his 32 health in one turn with all the burn sitting on the bottom of our deck. The game took 20 turns and so far has been the hardest and most fun game.
So it's a real shame that game 2 he had to mulligan into oblivion and just scooped it up since he only had 5 minutes left on the timer anyways. 2-0 win!
Match 2: Match 2 was against a homebrew combo deck trying to resolve a Treasure Hunt with a Reliquary Tower on the field either while a Zombie Infestation was on the field or to find one.Apparently the deck has 54 lands so that he gets a bunch of cards to discard to infestation. Both games he came close to the combo, but when you only have to counter one of two spells and a deck is beaten, control is not what they want to see across the table. 2-0 win!
Match 3: The only "actual" deck I've played against so far, Azusa Amulet felt pretty sad. We have so much instant speed removal that multiple times a Primeval Titan hit the board, and multiple times it was immediately pathed and accomplished nothing.We actually managed to win game 2 on turn 11 without a Pyromancer Ascension on board by just playing like a burn deck and beating down with grand master for a couple turns then burning him out with helix and bolt. I never saw a Hive Mind cast during our match, but I was ready for it holding onto a counter at all points because there weren't enough other relevant threats to counter, we just dealt with them all once they hit the board. 2-0 win!
Thoughts so far: Every game ran long besides match 2 game 1 who scooped when i countered Treasure Hunt. We had control basically the entire match every time but never had the ability to end it, so I'm thinking of maybe adding Boros Charm (thanks commenter!) if i can find somewhere to put it to close it out quicker and also to protect from Abrupt Decay which ended up hurting us a lot a couple times. More or less the results confirmed what I thought, we have a great matchup against creature based decks. I have yet to run into the control mirror or a dedicated combo deck with protection and such, which I think will be our weak matchups. Also I was surprised to find that we never really got screwed by mana. We had to mulligan to 6 a couple times and even had to Ghost Quarter our own island in match 1 game 1 to get white mana, but it ended up being a good thing because the opponent didn't expect us to be able to path a threat when we did!
