So, it is time to say goodbye to my good old friend U/W Heroic. This budget deck has served me well, but its time has passed; it has to pay the ultimate price, it is roasted out of the meta-game. This post will look back at my latest run with the deck, showcasing that one CAN successfully grind value online with a budget deck. After I threw out the Seeker of the Way’s and Heloid’s Pilgrim in favor for more protection and at least 2x Treasure Cruise in the main, I had a pretty good run with it.
It’s funny that I wrote that last part of the sentence because conversely, I was doing really badly with the Pilgrim Version just as FrF was released. The huge amount of R/W and Mardu based decks was a seriously god-awful meta-game to be a Hero. Then G/W Devotion came, swept them all away, and our Hero’s time had come yet again, partially due to the fact that the decks good against G/x strategies (U/B Control, RdW, Abzan Agro) were also pretty decent matchups. In fact, depending on the draw, RdW was a cakewalk.
This last season I played 8 Dailies, and posted a 22-7 record in total: 3x 4-0, 3x 2-2, 1x 3-1 & 1x 1-2. My match losses in three of the 2-2 dailies were against RdW, and mostly due to the shuffler, mulligans, and some nut-draws. It is somewhat of a polar-opposite of this deck; extremely consistent but somewhat underpowered. I think in hindsight, I’ll have to scrape the RDW matchup as a Cakewalk. If you count up all of the entry fees (8*6= 48) and the amount of packs I won (33 for 4-0 and 6 for 3-1, so at 2,5 tickets a pack that is a total of 97,5 – 48= 49,5 tickets profit). Not bad for an initial investment of give or take 40 tickets (I bought the Hero of Iroas’s at bulk, the flooded strands at 7 each, and I ran only 2 temples which ran me 5 apiece). And of course, this is excluding all of the other events I won (In four months, the deck got me +/- 35 Qualifier points, only from dailies). Oh, and you know, entertainment! It’s a game after all (although don’t tell me that when I just lost to an RdW nut draw after Mulling to 5 being stuck on 1 Land…. *sigh*).
As far as my winnings go, I invested those in KtK fetch (they are so low! Get them while you can!) and Tasigur’s when they were down all the way to 4.5. They’ll star in a new brew I am working on called ‘The Exploitables’.
So, lessons to take home:
- It IS possible to play on a budget and win consistently!
- U/W Heroic is most likely dead as a doorknob, but it might still be worth an update. I have been thining specifically about
- Roast has gotten a lot of attention as red’s Hero’s Downfall, and with that in mind U/W/R Control might just have gotten the piece it needed to threaten U/B as the best control deck in the format!
- Be prepared for the little red men. With DtK they became faster, stronger and more resilient. If MTGO Goldfish is to be taken at face value, it was 20% of the online meta, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
- Also, Thunderbeak Regent is a thing. And I still can’t believe Shaman of the Great hunt hasn’t found a deck yet!
spikeonadiet 