The Enemy Within

Standard Knockadoon

SCORE: 4 | 8 COMMENTS | 1133 VIEWS | IN 3 FOLDERS

Feedback from results at local game store —March 25, 2015

So this does really well against creature-based decks. Out of five rounds I played against creature decks, I won four of them and lost the other one somewhat closely to a really well put together Abzan Midrange.

Against burn/control decks though it has NO hope of winning...at all, even with a perfect draw of cards. I lost three of three rounds I played against decks with Seeker of the Way, Soulfire Grand Master, and direct damage spells. My creatures just have too little health and get removed too easily by even small damage spells like Wild Slash, which lets the opponent nibble me to death with Seeker of the Way.

I had stuff in my sideboard to stop opposing spells, like Monastery Siege and Negate and even Cloudform. I lost a Hexproof Sagu Mauler and a couple Cloudform creatures to Crackling Doom, which is just a tough play to beat. So while I could hold out a lot longer playing these cards, they were still able to remove my creatures and then nibble me to death, it just took longer.

So I've made some changes. I moved two Artisan of Forms from the main deck to the sideboard along with two Elvish Mystic, and put four Hornet Nest from the sideboard to the main deck. I had those in the SB to deal with token/swarm decks, but I think they'll work well against the Seeker of the Way type burn decks. If they use Wild Slash on that I'll at least get a couple tokens out of it, which can slow down their attacks from their little Prowess creatures. I have three Cloudform in the main deck, since they naturally have Hexproof. They can still be removed by some things (Crackling Doom is basically impossible to stop), but how many of those can they have in hand over many games? And I added a third Clever Impersonator into the SB (there are two in the main deck), so if they're playing a lot of gods, enchantments, or especially Planeswalkers, I can have three in the deck to have a good chance of copying those things.

When the first game in a round shows that the opponent is more about creatures than removal, THEN I can sideboard the Artisan of Forms back in and work more on quickly copying, buffing, killing like the deck does really well against creature decks. But I think the Hornet Nest is better against more deck archetypes, so it goes into the first game, and then I can switch in from there.

The Battlefield Thaumaturge + Icy Blast combo is killer, especially with Ferocious activated, and I LOVE Hunter's Prowess when it lands. I landed one on a Sagu Mauler and doing Icy Blast for a single blue and drew nine cards after the hit.