Back In Town…

Once I have finished playing for the day, I spend some time doing maintenance. This includes visiting most of the vendor and checking a few menus for various achievements or other rewards that were granted while playing.

I kind of do most of these in one big loop for efficiency sake.

Fading Embers and Runes

• Spend all Fading Embers at Cellik’s shop on FA runes.
• Fading Embers and Runes vendor located at the Palace Courtyard
• You can convert things much later on once you accumulate a ton of them. For dailies though, I only buy the FA runes.

Iben Fahd's Sanctum

• Kill all the mobs for a chance at free Aspirant’s Keys
• For best optimization of opening the chests at the end, this video states to open all the chests in the first room only every day, then exit. Keep saving all remaining keys until you have 377 to open all the chests in the entire Sanctum.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X980SI8lD6U&t=58s
• Once you have enough culling stones to upgrade a vessel, do so. Focus first on upgrading the vessels that have the stats you need the most.

Hilts Trader

• Visit Liutenant Fizriah, located near the Immortal Overlook Waypoint
• General Tab
  • Buy Legendary Crest (1 per month)
  • Buy Daily Aspirant’s Key limit (5 per day)
  • Buy Normal Gem Limit (10 per week, buy a few a day as you are able to)
  • Buy Simple Charm (3 per week). Buy one per day or as you are able to. It’s important to get the Aspirant’s keys first
• Immortals Tab
  • I’ve not been in an Immortals clan yet, so I can’t speak into its offerings
• Limited Time Tab
  • Buy Normal Gem
• Tips
  • Buy Crests if you have the extra hilts, they will get you Fading Embers with each Elder Rift as well as chances for random Legendary Gem drops. Even the regular Crests can randomly drop Legendary Gems.
  • Only buy reforge stones if you have extra hilts and you plan to immediately use them on a piece of gear to roll a better stat. Only buy as many as you need to get a slightly better stat. You can go broke buying too many. The Hilts are better spent on Keys and Normal Gems than rolling in one more stat on a piece of gear.

Legendary Items

Identifier

• Visit identifier to identify any legendary items.
• Located to the left of the Rakkis Plaza Waypoint

Essence Transfer

• Visit Zamina (Essence Transfer vendor) on any gear you won't be using
• Break down any remaining legendary gear at the Blacksmith (we'll get to that further down)

Charms

Charms and Skill Stones are basically P2P items in Diablo Immortal. Don’t get caught up in spending resources trying to get these perfect. It’s not going to happen. Grand charms are a waste for F2P players and can only be effectively upgraded by spending money. Instead, focus on creating grand charms, converting them to skill stones, and then selling them for platinum!

Charm Craftman

• Visit Vas (Charm Craftman) to break down, upgrade or turn charms into skill stones to sell
  • Located to the left of the Rakkis Plaza Waypoint
• Simple Charms
  • Only wear one simple charm for the skill that means the most to you.
  • Keep a couple simple charms of skills your character uses. Use these as the base simple charm to upgrade to grand charms. You may get lucky and get one with multiple skills you can actually use.
  • Break all other simple charms down to raw materials (Alchemical Powder in this case) to use for making grand charms.
• Grand Charms
  • Use a simple charm of a skill you use and start upgrading it to a grand charm. If you get lucky and get one with multiple skills for your character, congrats, you got a free upgrade. Otherwise, continue on.
• Skill Stones
  • Extract a grand charm into a skill stone. This will cost 500 platinum. This may seem scary when you don’t have a lot of platinum as a F2P player, but this will be multiplied very quickly.

Sell Skill Stones

• Visit Dya (the Market vendor)
  • Located in the north side of Rakkis Plaza
• Sell your skill stones for max platinum (2500).
• If they don’t sell, then relist them at the lower suggested amount.
• Listing them slightly lower than the suggested lower amount almost guarantees a quick sale.
• Enjoy the platinum! You will need lots of Platinum for the 5-star legendary gems.

Blacksmith

• Visit Charsi the Blacksmith
  • Located on the west side of Rakki’s Plaza
• If you have enough materials for any gear upgrades, upgrade what you can.
• Tips
  • Focus on upgrading all your main gear to level 6 to gain an extra skill buff.
  • Once all of your main gear is level 6, then focus on getting one at a time to level 11 for a 2nd extra skill buff.
  • Upgrade secondary gear as able
• While at the Blacksmith, refine any Scoria if you have completed any Helliquary raids recently.

Gems

• Visit Apprentice Jeweler for any gem upgrades
  • Located on the west side of Rakki’s Plaza
• Normal Gems
  • Sell any sell-able gems on the market.
    • These are worth more in platinum vs using them for your own stat boosts.
  • Upgrade any normal gems you can.
  • Upgrade any of the normal gems in any of your gear.
    • You may need to remove a gem from a piece of gear if it makes a 3rd gem needed to upgrade two others in storage. This will also free up a slot to equip yet another gem.
• Legendary Gems
  • Craft any legendary gems to break down to upgrade other legendary gems with later
  • Use FA runes to craft 1-2 star (or random if you’re feeling lucky) legendary gems.
  • If it’s not one you will be using, sel it on the market for platinum.

Helliquary

• Click Menu→ Helliquary
• If you’ve done any Helliquary raids recently, and refined any Scoria at the blacksmith, then check this menu for any Trophy upgrades.
• If you’re not in the middle of something, do these whenever invited to do them

Battle Pass

• I can’t stress how much it is worth it to log in each day to do daily activities. This leads to Codex activities being completed, which leads to battle points being awarded to level up the Battle Pass.
• Completing the first battle pass for me rewarded me with the Fervent Fang legendary gem, which added a lot of power to my character. Subsequent battle pass completions will give you more Fervent Fang gems which you will need in order to level your first one up past certain levels.
• The other rewards are with it as well. The Hilts and Normal Gems are useful for more stat boosts, or turning into platinum later on. The crests are useful for their purpose too.
• Should you pay $5 for the Empowered Pass? This is totally up to you. Are the bonus cosmetics worth $5 to you, as well as the extra rewards?
  
• If you're trying to finish off a few more battle pass activities that require parties, then simply drop down to Normal difficulty, and you can just solo them all. Granted, you will make very little experience or rewards, but you will complete them quicker without waiting for a party and get those battle points faster. Just make sure to switch back to your preferred difficulty when done.
  
  

I am still working on the Bundles and Services, as there are a few items in there that you can't buy or trade from any other method. These items are included in bundles and advertised with extra value over the items we can calculate, so I'm working to figure that out still.

Welcome to Article 2 of 2, catching up on the last few sets that I got behind in writing about.

I'm still running strong with my Walls deck, currently sitting at 70% win rate for daily Quick Play in the Historic Queue. No, this deck does not hold up on the ladder, but for daily play, it's doing excellent.

I can't comment on the AFR or MID sets for gamplay itself, as I have long forgotten anything from that time, but currently the main two sets I run up against that I can't win against are the deathtouch decks (unless I have Tetsuko in my opening hand) or this new Minion of the Mighty Surprise Dragons set of decks that is super popular at the time of this writing. I always concede on deathtouch, and unless I have a flyer or two out to block with, I have been conceding immediately as soon as Minion of the Mighty is played.

In the past month, a lot of my losses are just me conceding against the minion of the mighty deck, which sucks but I guess a loss is a loss against a super cheaty trick deck like that. I could play it, and it does look like fun, but it looks too linear for me. I'll stick to my Walls deck.

Other than that, this deck has been treating me pretty well still. I have been playing it almost exactly one full year now with only a minor change or two. I even spend some gold to finish blinging this deck out as well. I got the cosmetics for every card that has one. It's been great fun.

I do see the mirror match of this deck every few days, and it comes down to who has the larger creatures out first and who goes first.

You can see this does pretty well against the current Historic Quick Play meta. I'll continue to play it until it proves ineffective.

Next are the rest of the stats...

As you can see, I track a lot of stats. Most of this is automated at this point, so I just enter in daily numbers as I play each game.

I typically just play to 4 wins a day, usually early in the morning, and keep my daily quests from cluttering up. I've also continued to play each of the Midweek Magic events as well, though rewards are less useless or exciting now that the FNM@ Home packs rewards are no longer a thing.

I hope you found these stats interesting. I know I always do. You don't realize how much of something you do until you start to track it all. The numbers can be amazing sometimes, even on the most mundane tasks or activities.

I am very much looking forward to the next set, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, as it holds a lot more interest for me in it's art style and themes (Cyberpunk!), creature types (more ninjas!) and other stuff.

I haven't felt motivated enough these past few sets to write any stat articles, so I apologize for those of you who actually read these. Whoever you are, please leave me a comment or drop me an email so I know someone finds these interesting or if there's some other stat you would like to see tracked.

This article is one of two, focusing on my collection growth over the last few sets. I keep track of all of these regardless of the article writing aspect. I think it's more of an addiction of stats than anything else. It's a ton of work to keep track of all of this info, and some days I just don't want to, but I've been doing it long enough now that I almost can't stop.

I really didn't find much interest in the past few sets, and with my historic deck holding strong at a 70% daily win rate, I really have no need to upgrade it or change decks, thus I really don't need any cards for game play. I didn't draft much and I only opened free packs and obtained free ICRs.

The collection growth took a big hit, but I don't really feel I'm missing out on much with all of the wild cards I hold now.

Here's what I've been hoarding the past year:

Booster Packs
All booster packs were free, earned through set mastery, mastery pass, codes and draft rewards. I did not purchase any packs for this set.

These packs were tracked independently from the draft, so all numbers reflect what can be expected if you only opened 60 booster packs for the current set and nothing else

The stats for AFR and MID were a little off for vault progress, cards vaulted and cards kept (note they are the same). I had a note next to these columns stating that the tracking data was still all broken during that time, so those couple of stats are off. The rest is accurate and was all hand tracked.

The VOW stats are all fine, as the tracking data was working again by this point.

Moving on...

Draft Stats

Since these sets weren't too exciting to me, I didn't do much drafting. As mentioned above, I didn't really need the cards. I decided to spend gold instead on more cosmetics.

ICR / Crafting

I didn't need much with my working daily driver deck, so anything crafted was for experimenting with or an event or something I did.

Keep in mind the VOW ICR's are still coming, so I'll probably obtain another week's worth from the mastery pass.

Total Collection Stats

Here are all totals from all stats combined.

The numbers from the tracker stats vs my hand tracked stats will be a little off due to opening packs on a couple of other accounts I manage while the tracker was still running. But you can see they're pretty close :) I am not tracking the Alchemy collection stats as I don't really care about any of those cards.

In Conclusion...

Well that catches us all up on my collection stats over the last 3 sets.

I am really excited for Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and will most likely be drafting and collecting a bunch of this set.

I know this article is late, being a month into the release of Forgotten Realms, but I still wanted to get it written and out there since I greatly enjoy stats.

Halfway through Kaldheim, I was destroyed by a totally off-meta surprise win deck. I liked it so much that I figured out how to build one of my own. As of this writing,  it's been nearly two set releases and I am still playing the same deck. What is this fun deck? I just call it "Walls". You can read more about it  HERE . There's a couple variants of it, but I've found mine works well enough to leave it alone. There's also been no new additions to it in the past few sets, so I just keep on keeping on.

Anyway, I am still enjoying this deck, it's still fast and fun to play and the win rate is still acceptable enough to keep rolling with it.

Since I didn't post a post-gameplay stats for Kaldheim, some of the new spreadsheet changes were missed. Since then I have added a dashboard that is fed data from each of the various pages in my spreadsheet. It gives me a nice clean look of all the data in one single place.

This is what my dashboard looks like. The following screenshots are all clips from this dashboard.

One major change I had to add to this set's spreadsheet was a Mystical Archive draft/collection sheet. This was kept separate from the regular draft sheet since the MA cards aren't actually part of the Strixhaven main set. I basically just copied my collection total sheet, and modified it for just MA cards. The MA cards were not calculated into any of my Strixhaven card totals. You can find more of all of this info in the Strixhaven Post Collection stats article.

All stats recorded via hand after each match and double checked using MTGAHelper. My customized spreadsheet then calculated the rest and all of the running totals.

My only goal was 4 wins per day, and keeping the daily quests from backing up.

I completed every event, including FNM @ Home and all other extracurricular free events that were offered.

Gameplay dates range from 4/15/21 to 7/8/21.

I was pretty happy with my 63% win rate for the Walls deck. I'm still playing it a month into Forgotten Realms. The total time was about an hour less, I think one of the events overlapped one of my other items like Brawl or something. The next table shows actual game play time.

You can see I didn't really play any other decks.

I hope you enjoyed looking over these stats as much as I enjoyed recording them and working on my spreadsheet.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me.

Strixhaven was not a set I really had much interest in. While I liked the Harry Potter movies, I am not a super fan. I've only see the seen the series one and a half times. I also hated college to the point that I dropped out to pursue a more meaningful trade.

So all of that said, this set really wasn't very exciting for me with all of it's school spirit, classroom activity and Harry Potter related themes. I thought I would like it more because of Harry Potter, but that didn't end up being the case.

For the cards themselves, another set went by with nothing I really needed. My daily driver Walls deck was still holding strong with a decent enough win rate to not bother changing it or trying something else with the current meta. More on that in my Strixhaven post game play stats article coming at the end of the set.

This lead up to the draft experience. Once quick draft went live, I started cashing in my gold to open those packs, pick my cards and see if I could win any games just from rare and collection drafting only. After mostly losses, and seeing that much of what I picked wasn't heavily favored creatures in fewer colors of the pie chart, I decided to just skip playing the rest of my drafts and just go for the cards only.

This set seemed to be more about spells and such rather than creatures. I enjoy more creature based decks than playing a bunch of spells.

Once I started to coast over the peak of the collection gathering and get into start of heavy duplicate territory, I gave it a hard stop on drafting and then cracked all my Strixhaven booster packs.

Here are the results of all Strixhaven drafts and all Strixhaven booster packs. Wildcard totals will reflect older set packs obtained from the mastery pass.

A note on the Mystical Archive cards. These were tracked separately and not included with any of these stats. This will account for a lower total collection count since quite a few MA cards were drafted and there was at least one in every STX booster pack.

All booster packs were free, earned through set mastery, mastery pass, codes and draft rewards. I did not purchase any packs for this set.

These packs were tracked independently from the draft, so all numbers reflect what can be expected if you only opened 60 booster packs for the current set and nothing else

I completed 14 quick drafts. I did not do any premium drafts for this set.

Draft stats do not include any booster pack rewards.

I only crafted one uncommon from this set in order complete a deck for the standard singleton event. All others were obtained as ICRs from regular play, free events and as mastery pass rewards.

This includes all data from Strixhaven cards collected via all methods above.

Wild card stats include 59 set booster packs18 older booster packs.

But what about the Mystical Archive? I included separate stats for this since it was not actually part of the Strixhaven main set.

I fixed a few flaws in my stats spreadsheet, had to add a completely separate tracking chart for the Mystical Archive and continued to improve on the dashboard.

More on the stats tracking improvements in the Strixhaven post game play stats article coming soon.

A couple of months back I decided it was time to start riding my bike again. I need to drop some pounds and keep active. Plus I really enjoy riding.

I have a few bikes I'll make future articles on, but the short story is  back in the early 2000's I had an old used 90's? Trek 800 MountainTrack mountain bike that I bought as my first real bike for $100 off Craigslist. I got the opportunity to take it on my first mountain bike trail sometime later on a very cool trail near Wetumpka, AL and absolutely loved it.

Recently I decided to start riding again, so I picked a paved road path I could ride from my home and not have to drive anywhere. If I made it convenient, I would go more, I told myself. This was fun for a while. Then I wanted to go faster. I swapped my off road tires out for road bike skinnies. I immediately gained 2mph on my top end and it was a much easier feeling ride, rougher, but less resistance on the road.

Now, when I wanted to go on a mountain bike trail, I was stuck having to swap wheels with my old Trek 800, which had the same size wheels and had off road tires. The gearing was a bit different, so the chain slipped somewhat on the highest gears. The price of convenience.

So, back to my wife not having a proper bike. She said she would ride a bike more if it was more comfortable to her. Makes sense. I spent an entire week scouring Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, as well as local bike shops and even Amazon. I didn't want a cheap Walmart bike, so I was determined to find an older, but in good shape used higher end bike brand. After about a week of expanding my search radius, asking dozens of people to please measure the frame size, and getting dozens of "Sorry, It's already sold!" or finding out it was too small,  I finally found a nice Trek MultiTrack 700. It's from the late 90's in a nice high gloss metallic red that was in decent shape about an hour away from me. I made the 2 hour round trip and paid $125 for it. It's a little rusty in a few spots internally, but shifts and rides super smooth. It's a hybrid style with 700c wheels.

So, I have a bunch of bikes now, and I'm really into riding again. I'll be posting up some of my more interesting adventures that I go on with some photos and write ups of the more  scenic, interesting or technical trails.

Thanks for reading! See you on the trails!

This set had me excited from the first spoilers. I like Vikings! I like building decks with Elves! The showcase art was amazing! I wasn't so crazy about the broken cards, but we have those in every set.

I continued playing nothing but Historic, plus all FNM @ Home events and any other free event. I didn't feel the Festival events were worth the cost since I don't play with any of the showcase cardstyles they had for rewards. There was maybe one or two I might play with, but currently have no plans to build decks around those.

My current Historic deck that I started playing during Kaldheim was Historic Elves. I went ahead and crafted 4x Elvish Warmaster as the only card I absolutely had to have. Once quick drafts went live, I grabbed a few of the new deathtouch creatures and built a Golgari Deathtouch Elves deck, using a couple of Fynn cards I got, and had wanted, once I saw them being played. I even snagged the Fynn showcase cosmetic.

About halfway through my draft experience, I was just playing for my daily wins when I got absolutely wrecked on turn 3 by this completely harmless deck full of nothing but 0-power creatures.  I realized I must have this deck, it looked fun, cheap (not many rares) and pretty unassuming. I crafted a few Ornithopters, Shorecomber Crabs, and Assault Formations.

I probably crafted more cards than I usually do per set, but they were cheap, I have an abundance of wild cards, and I had a lot of fun playing these decks.

Aside from these crafted cards, I collected via the usual methods of quick drafting, opening free arena booster packs and whatever the mastery pass gave me. I was able to still get a free mastery pass via previous gem winnings from past set(s).

Once I had completed drafting for this set, I decided to go ahead and open all the Kaldheim packs, track them, and continue opening/tracking only the Kaldheim packs until I wouldn't be getting any more (via the mastery pass). I still have 16 packs to open, but they are from older sets. This data will be for Kaldheim related cards and packs only.

So, lets get on with the data!

I manually track everything and double check my data using MTGAHelper.

Gameplay Stats will be my Arena Post Kaldheim Gameplay Stats article that will be written shortly before the next set release.

So, after 15 Kaldheim (KHM) quick drafts and after opening 60 free KHM booster packs, here is what I ended up with. Keep in mind all of this was free, I only spent gems for the mastery pass (which I obtained from previous set winnings) and gold was spent on drafts, cosmetic items and the gold/gem daily deals. I did not buy any packs with gold.

​

All booster packs were free, earned through set mastery, mastery pass, codes and draft rewards. I did not purchase any packs for this set.

These packs were tracked independently from the draft, so all numbers reflect what can be expected if you only opened 60 booster packs for the current set and nothing else.
​

I completed 15 quick drafts. I did not do any premium drafts this set.
​

This is a new table I created to add up anything I crafted for this set. It also adds up ICR's I received while playing, whether through events or just daily play.
​

This includes all data from KHM cards collected via all methods above.
​

For this set, I felt that my tracking tables were pretty much on point and didn't really need to adjust them any further.
Instead I decided to start consolidating the way the tables track the data into fewer places. 

I now have 5 tabs on my spreadsheet:

• Dashboard - which is what you see below.
• Gameplay Stats - which I track all of my daily game play with, wins, losses, mulligans, who went first, etc.
• Collection Total - includes a master list of all cards for the set, and feeds in data from Gameplay Stats, Drafts and Booster Packs.
• Drafts - This is just draft data. Every card I picked is tracked here, and includes rewards for each draft.
• Booster Packs - I track all booster pack openings here. Each pack for the current set that is opened gets every card tracked. Wild cards, vaulted cards and any other pack related data is tracked here.

I am working to get all of this perfected so that I can release this spreadsheet to the public as the ultimate Arena data tracking spreadsheet. I'm just very picking about final drafts and sharing them with others. Since I believe any incorrect data makes the entire set of data incorrect, I am constantly tweaking and doublechecking everything to make sure it's all correct.

Below is the data that my dashboard displays. Stats are of today's date that I wrote this. This shows 56 days of play, and there are still 30 days left in this set release.
​

I want to continue perfecting my dashboard and main collection stats so that I can be sure that everything is perfect and accurate. I would really like to release my tracking spreadsheets.

Stay tuned for my final gameplay stats article for Kaldheim to come out as the new set is released. We still got another 30 days to go before Strixhaven!

I was happily playing my Historic Elves this month when out of nowhere a similar deck to what I am about to show you surprised me. It beat me turn 3-4 and I was powerless against it. It was irritated that such jank should beat my carefully crafted Elves deck that I had to go look at my tracker to see what I just got beat by. I only saw a few cards, but quickly formed my own list that seems to work pretty well for me.

Here's what I came up with:
​

It's fairly simple. Slam down harmless 0/x creatures, then drop Assault Formation and attack all-in for the surprise win.

You absolutely must hard mulligan for Assault Formation in your opening hand. There will be games where you won't get it so just concede and start another game. This is a pretty forgiving deck. I've mulliganed down to Assault Formation and 2 lands several times now and still pulled off a fast win.

Lets go over what each card is best used for:
​

​Ornithopter is an excellent free drop, especially on turn 1. It's also our only other flyer to add some evasion in to the deck.

Shorecomber Crab and Aegis Turtle are both big beefy creatures that seem so innocent on the first turn or two. Once Assault Formation is played, they are serious threats that are hard to remove and can steam roll over most of your opponent's early creatures.
​

Assault Formation is the main card of this deck. Without it, your creatures are absolutely useless.
You must have Assault Formation in your opening hand. Mulligan until you do. If you have too few cards, just concede and start the next game. It's rare you don't get it by at least the 2nd or 3rd mulligan. Just make sure you leave yourself with at least 2 lands of different colors and you can still play Assault Formation, then just whatever creatures you draw. I've won several games with a 3 card starting hand. The deck is pretty forgiving to get you going.
The downside to this deck is that if Assault Formation is destroyed or removed somehow, you may as well concede, as the rest of the game will be spent waiting to draw another, and your opponent will have recovered by then. Players don't typically run much Enchantment removal, so you're usually safe from this. It does happen once in a while though.

Tower Defense can be used in 3 different ways.
The first is the obvious one-shot kill. If your opponent doesn't bother blocking because you don't have enough for lethal, then Tower Defense will almost always be a fast lethal strike.

Secondly, you can use it as a defensive move, both blocking and attacking. If the opponent has creatures much larger than you that you are having a hard time playing around, you can use this to beef up your big creatures to kill their big creatures. The same goes for blocking, let them attack in with their big creatures, and then play this.

Third, you can use this to avoid a non-destructive board wipe. Quite a few board wipes just do mass damage. This can boost your creatures above the minimum toughness needed to beat most of these board wipes.

Stern Dismissal can be used in multiple ways as well. Remove something in your way of attacking or an opponents enchantment, or use it to save your own Assault Formation enchantment from being destroyed, or one of your creatures.

​

Because this deck moves very fast, we want to make sure we have fast mana. 20 mana seems to be plenty for this deck to work quickly. Keep in mind 70% of your cards are 1 mana. One playset of cards is 0 mana, and then your most important card is only 2 mana. You don't need a lot.

Because you are trying to hit hard and fast and end the game by turn 4 or so, you want to make sure you always have mana available in the way of not using any tap lands.
​

So far after playing this deck daily for 9 days straight each morning, I have a decent 65% win rate in the BO1 Play queue.

What surprises most people is the odd assortment of cards. I am playing both mono-green ramp cards and mono-blue mill cards, along with some random useless blockers. Most opponents don't think twice about it and just think it's either one of the two variants, when it's really neither one. Instead Assault Formation gets dropped and all of those useless creatures are suddenly a massive threat. 

This morning I went 4-0 in just 8:34 mins. Yesterday I went 4-2 in 15 minutes. The deck is fast. Here's some examples of what to expect with good opening hands.

Game 1 - Against Shrines
Turn 1 - Island, Ruin Crab
Turn 2 - Forest, Aboreal Grazer--> Breeding Pool, Aegis Turtle
Turn 3 - Shorecomber Crab, Assault Formation, attack all in.
Opponent didn't even get going yet with their shrines and instantly conceded.

Game 2 - Against Zombies?
Turn 1 - Island, Aegis Turtle, Ornithopter
Turn 2 - Hinterland Harbor, Shorecomber Crab, Arboreal Grazer-->Breeding Pool
Turn 3 - Hinterland Harbor, Assault Formation, attack all in.
Opponent conceded with a few creatures and a saga out on the field.

Game 3 - Against Mono White Angels/Lifegain
Turn 1 - Breeding Pool, Arboreal Grazer-->Breeding Pool
Turn 2 - Hinterland Harbor, Aegis Turtle, Merfolk Secret Keeper
Turn 3 - Ornithopter, Assault Formation, attack all in, opponent didn't block
Turn 4 - Attacked all in, Opponent didn't block since I did not have lethal and he was just getting his lifegain going. I then activated the Assault Formation ability to +1 all my creatures and killed him.

Game 4 - Against Toski shennagins of some kind
Turn 1 - Forest, Gilded Goose-->Food Token
Turn 2 - Hinterland Harbor, Ruin Crab, Shorecomber Crab
Turn 3 - Forest, Merfolk Secretkeeper, Assault Formation, Attack all in with no blocks.
Turn 4 - Forest, Arboreal Grazer, attack all in. Opponent had critical mono green stuff out that he didn't want to die, and I did not have lethal showing. He did not block, so I activated Assault Formation's ability to +1 everything, and killed him.

Now the next 2 games I lost. The first loss was because the opponent destroyed my Assault Formation. I waited 2 more turns and conceded. The second loss was because I got greedy and was just loading the board with all my creatures. I was going to drop Assault Formation on the next turn for a glorious attack, except the opponent looked at my hand and discarded my Assault Formation.  Word to the wise, don't be greedy, get that thing down ASAP.

The game above was a quick turn 3 win against the hard to beat mono white lifegain angels deck.

I mulliganed down to 5 cards to get an Assault Formation and 2 lands in my hand.
Turn 1 - Breeding Pool, Aegis Turtle, Ornithopter
Turn 2 - Breeding Pool, Assault Formation, Attack.
Turn 3 - drew a Tower Defense, I figured the opponent wasn't going to let his two key pieces die, so he didn't block. I played Tower Defense for lethal.

Yes, that's a turn 3 win against that lifegain angels deck, with only 2 lands, and a 5 card starting hand. It's very forgiving!

It does not play well against full on deathtouch decks unless you have enough flyers out to outlast the opponent. If not, just concede.

It does not play well against Golgari decks that seem to find all the things to kill your stuff with, and then can also destroy your Assault Formation. Cards like Thought Seize and Assassin's Trophy is an immediate concede.

Any control that takes your Assault Formation, such as Skyclave Apparition, or other white/blue enchantments that can steal your stuff.  Just concede and start the next game.

Obviously if you don't have a great opening hand and slam out a bunch of creatures and get overwhelmed by the opponent, then you may as well concede unless you can somehow kill all their stuff (Assault Formation ability or Tower Defense).

I hit all of these examples the very next day and only got a 50% win rate. The day before I didn't see as much of these examples and ended the day with a 65% win rate.

These are just examples of perfect opening hands. Even a bad opening hand can be mulliganed a couple times to become a good one and still be perfectly playable.

I tried this deck out in the BO1 Historic Ladder, but only made it to mid silver before getting stuck with the more powerful meta decks, and that included a ton of losses. My win rate was not good in ladder play.

This deck is more of fast deck to get your daily 4 or so wins in and move on.

Anyway, I hope you found this deck tech fun, exciting and useful. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or tweaks you can think of.

​I really enjoy off-meta decks that do well.
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