For example, at a Tony Robbins event, literally thousands of people decide – probably on the spot – that they are now capable of walking across hot coals. I mean a seven-foot-tall motivational speaker with CHA 18 just told you you can. Makes you physiologically certain you can, beyond all good sense, logic, or inflammable spirit of self-preservation. In fact, you just saw 5,000 of your closest brand new brethren do it! The combination of peer pressure, social proof, altered context, and, again, CHA 18 has got to have you asking yourself if you’re some kind of coward. So the socks come off.

Or…

You are stuck at some frankly mediocre speech. But then it happens. The first person stands up and starts a slow clap. And then another. Oh my God, you think. Do you really have to stand up too? The speech was as mid as The Rock and His Millions. It’s been a long day. You don’t really want to stand up. Your back is kind of sore from… Oh shoot. The guy to your right just stood up; and the woman to your left… Is she a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’? Now if you don’t start clapping loudly up and out of your chair, it’ll basically become a political statement.

Or…

“The wave” at a sporting event. I mean who started this thing? But here’s the problem: If you don’t join in, you’re the weirdo. You probably want the away team to win.

It was the spring of 2006, and caught up in the group fervor of a veritable Parallax Wave, but with greater danger than a little Robbins firewalking… I was about to do something which, I guess at a lower price point, wouldn’t have been that unusual at a Starbucks. I pulled out my <strike>credit</strike>debit card.

The Credit Card Game

When I was growing up, middle-aged white guys in Polo tees played the credit card game every day at work. I was a golf caddie throughout all my teenage years and essentially until I moved to New York. At the ninth hole, a foursome would usually take a break before the back nine; get a drink and maybe some hot dogs. Caddies were entitled to a snack (or at least a cold lemonade) as well, and some golfer would be responsible for the whole chit. A game of chance would decide who picked up the bill, paying for both golfers and caddies. It was all (or at least mostly) in good fun, as the links have always been a hotbed of gambling. But mathematically, no country club halfway house bill could be too bad; and by dues if not definition, no one was going broke picking up a few hot dogs for their hardworking teenage labor.

Me in 2006? This was not that. It was a queer time in New York, and a queer time for me. I had just published Deckade with Brian David-Marshall and Grand Prix Champions Matt Wang and Steve Sadin. BDM was excited for me to produce another book.

The problem was that Deckade was my entire previous ten years of output! I didn’t have another book ready. But BDM – Cataclysm Arcade-creating genius that he always has been – had a great idea: Just have Jon write it.

There were two problems. The first was that Jon Samuel Finkel, the greatest Magic: The Gathering player of all time, never wrote down anything. That’s not a thing he did. So BDM armed me with a podcast recorder and told me to “just go hang out at Jon’s house” and write down anything smart he had to say. Aping Jon’s behavior became kind of a cottage industry for all of us that spring and summer. I had never heard of Red Bull before, but man did I pound them at the Pro Tour. Chocolate-covered sunflower seeds became everyone’s in-tournament snack of choice? Why? No one knew. Didn’t matter. Jon drank that; Jon munched on those.

The second problem was that Jon hadn’t picked up a Magic card with any kind of violence in his heart… In years. Even if he had, he was not the type to opine nuggets of replicable wisdom just because someone was pushing a podcast recorder in his face.

“Maybe we should just play Magic,” Jon suggested.

At first I logged into my Magic Online god account. I could make anything! Whatever Jon imagined. He didn’t want to do that either.

“I don’t want to watch you play Magic,” the GOAT clarified. “Can we just play?”

It just so happened that I was qualified for the next Pro Tour. Which was Unified Block Constructed. Jon at the time had unlimited qualifications from his first ballot induction into the Hall of Fame, but I don’t think he ever planned on using one of them. The story goes that Jon showed up at Worlds that year to accept his Hall of Fame ring, and then left without ever participating at the tables.

Wait a minute, I thought. I have to prepare for this Pro Tour anyway. And I get to do it with not just a “willing” but… JON THINKS IT’S HIS IDEA?

Fast forward about thirty seconds.

It comes out that I’m “playtesting for the Pro Tour” at “Jon Finkel’s house” every afternoon. Forget the book! Soon after, everyone is “playtesting for the Pro Tour” at “Jon Finkel’s house” basically all the time. It was during this stretch that the New York world changed fundamentally.

The book? Never got written. We were too derailed actually playing Magic to write about playing Magic.

Me? Jon’s iron sharpened mine to the best performance of my life. Had it been an individual Pro Tour, my record would have been good enough for Top 8.

Jonny Magic? The book thing never happened but the constant play rekindled Jon’s love of the game. He didn’t make Day Two of the Team Pro Tour, but was now fully back on board. Literally won the next one in Kuala Lumpur.

Which brings us now to the credit card game.

Via luck, providence, and BDM’s podcasting microphone, I was hanging out with Jon almost every day, and Jon was back in Magic circles for the first time in years. His birthday came up, and of course we all went out for a steak dinner. The specific restaurant escapes my memory, but I remember Igor Freyman ordering two seafood towers. I had the single best glass of wine in my life. Everyone agreed and we ordered a second bottle. I didn’t finish my allotted second glass so Tim McKenna’s eyes popped out at me, horrified. “You have to finish that,” said Tim. “That bottle was over $100.” He shot it down himself.

Then the bill came.

I had brought $200 in cash. This was a lot of money to me at the time. It was basically my share of the dinner bill. But then came the opportunity to play The Credit Card Game.

I eagerly pulled out my Chase debit card.

“What are you doing?” Tony Tsai (I’d be Tony’s Best Man seven years later) slapped my hand. “Put that away.”

“Everyone” was throwing their cards in. Everyone but Tony and Jon. Tony had too much good sense, and it was Jon’s birthday, so he was eating for free. Believe you me, Jon has more than made up for this in free seltzers and pizza parties over the years.

The way it worked, the waitress would pull out cards one at a time. One exhalation of safety after another. Until the last card. That guy would owe the restaurant a good percentage of what I took home in a month.

I counted the gamers at the table. Planeswalking Magicians all: Investment bankers, quantitative traders, binder grinders, and of course an assortment of sports gamblers, poker players, and Jonny’s cadre of the Card Shark Kids. I was incredibly proud to be Jon’s friend, to have just been invited, but price tag wise? In 2006 I didn’t really belong at this table.

“It’s a good bet,” I told Tony. I counted again. “I’m probably not going to lose.”

“It’s a fair bet,” clarified Tony. “Not a good bet.” To this day I’m so grateful to have learned one of the most foundational lessons of my quantitative life that night; and not in the expensive way. “Yes. You probably won’t lose. But one of your friends at this table will. And for that person, the bill will be… expensive. If it’s you? Risk of Ruin. Put your credit card away.” It was a debit card.

Risk of Ruin

Risk of Ruin concerns an outcome so bad it will – perhaps permanently – destroy your ability to continue playing the game.

A 30% investment loss isn’t necessarily Ruin. A down quarter may or may not necessitate layoffs, but in isolation, it is unlikely to sink a whole company. One bad poker hand probably isn’t Ruin, at least in cash games.

Ruin is different from ordinary variance. It’s losing so badly you can no longer participate in the next round. For me? In those years I wasn’t allowed to carry a credit card and I have no idea if we had enough in our checking account to cover dinner. Like I said, the $200 in my pocket was a lot to me; and I was carrying it in cash for a reason.

Imagine a merchant loading up his trading ship in the 1700s. If it successfully crosses the Pacific, every free sailor on board will become a de facto millionaire. Toothless and scurvy-crazed, but wealthy af. If the boat sinks, it’s beyond the fact that the merchant lost everything on the ship, and probably everyone. He’s now out of the game. He can’t finance the next voyage.

Both successful gamblers and surviving regular investors engage in bankroll management. Theoretically both win (or earn) in the long run, but any investment implies the possibility of risk. Whole departments of pocket protecting nerds ensure that funds have enough mana in the back pool to ride out bad stretches of variance, so that one wild macro trader doesn’t flip them belly up.

The wild trader with all the conviction and none of the personal stake might not think in terms of Ruin. Believe me, I’ve known some. By the same token, nor are most credit card games Ruinous; as they tend to be appropriately sized. To Tony’s point, most credit card games are fair bets. No one has edge or a particular incentive. In 2006, my incentive was to “save” $200, but my potential downside was personally disproportionate. So…

Peer pressure.

Risk of Ruin.

Mono-Blue Dreadnought in Premodern?

This is what the best Mono-Blue Dreadnought deck in Premodern looks like:

4 Phyrexian Dreadnought
1 Powder Keg

1 Brain Freeze
4 Counterspell
2 Daze
2 Flash of Insight
4 Foil
4 Gush
4 Impulse
4 Opt
4 Portent
1 Reality Ripple
4 Stifle
4 Vision Charm

17 Island

Sideboard:
4 Annul
2 Back to Basics
1 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Brain Freeze
3 Essence Flare
1 Flash of Insight
1 Hydroblast
1 Powder Keg
1 Tsabo’s Web

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen it, or a deck close to it. It’s mine. There is a main-deck Brain Freeze, and currently one Reality Ripple. The Reality Ripple could be a Boomerang, but Dave Kaplan himself convinced me to try Ripple. The cards are close enough, and do similar enough things, that I haven’t swapped it out yet.

Jon Byer switched onto my Dreadnought deck before this year’s Sacred Torch Showdown and at the time of this writing is tied as the Premodern League leader. Like Jeremy Siegel last quarter, Byer is swinging for the fences every week before the impending birth of a child.

I am not here to try to convince you that main deck Brain Freeze is something you necessarily have to play. In fact, I have the same number of total Brain Freezes main deck and sideboard as the default deck. You could move an Essence Flare or so. Even though I no longer play it, I think Accumulated Knowledge has a higher ceiling than Impulse, and just got done telling you that I’m not 100% sure whether Boomerang or Reality Ripple is the best one-of surgical tool.

But it sure as hell ain’t Chain of Vapor.

This is what the default Mono-Blue Dreadnought deck in Premodern looks like:

4 Phyrexian Dreadnought
1 Powder Keg

1 Chain of Vapor
4 Counterspell
2 Daze
2 Flash of Insight
4 Foil
4 Gush
2 Impulse
1 Misdirection
4 Opt
1 Peek
4 Portent
4 Stifle
1 Thwart
4 Vision Charm

17 Island

3 Annul
2 Back to Basics
2 Blue Elemental Blast
2 Brain Freeze
1 Chain of Vapor
3 Essence Flare
2 Hydroblast

I don’t currently play Thwart. But I think it’s fine. I’ve played Thwart. It was fine.

I think Misdirection sucks. But it at least has a high upside.

That said, I cannot cotton to playing that solo Chain of Vapor. According to MTGGoldfish, exactly 1 copy of Chain of Vapor is played in 80% of Dreadnought decks. It is a badge of honor for me that my own Sacred Torch Showdown deck, recorded in the ‘Goldfish data and one point out of Top 8, is helping to drag the rate below 100%.

Like any disciple of Dr. David Raczka, I’ve played Chain of Vapor. But why am I so violently against it now?

Simple:

Risk of Ruin

First we know when – and more importantly why – Chain of Vapor entered the Dreadnought archetype. Does anyone else remember one of the greatest Deck Pics of all time?

Raczka won the Spring Fling with a Mono-Blue Dreadnought deck that played Mishra’s Factory and a higher land count. At the time, my group were all U/W-pilled and assumed Raczka was ignorant rather than innovative. At his success, Lanny came to the pretty solid conclusion (at least if you’re U/W-pilled) that Dreadnought as a strategy is so good that even an inferior Dreadnought deck is one of the best things you can be doing.

Raczka would later teach Lanny to beat Meddling Mages with a combination of Mishra’s Factories and Powder Kegs. Another not-combo-promoting card that U/W decks didn’t play and many of us didn’t initially understand.

We know when – and again – why this Mishra’s Factory deck added Chain of Vapor. It was solely because Raczka figured out to play Parallax Tide in the Dreadnought sideboard. Chain of Vapor became kind of a compromise catch-all, taking the place of one of those Mishra’s Factories, but also kinda sorta the Reality Ripple (or in some versions, two main deck Powder Kegs). In return, it offered redundancy over Stifle for the Parallax Tide combo at the highest rate of mana efficiency.

Now when we invoke the concept of Ruin we should be very clear: You personally might flirt with Ruin every day. Any time you get into a car you risk permanent injury or even death, but the likelihood is low enough to ignore, and anyway you need to get where you need to get to. Part of that is decades of societal and technological improvements driving the risk into the ground without impacting your ability to get somewhere whatsoever. Seat belts, drunk driving ad campaigns, the fact that getting into any car in the 2020s is now like beaming into a Star Trek shuttlecraft of safety features. The 1700s merchant sailor? While Ruin was well within the possible range of outcomes, everyone knew that, and it in fact fell upon the unfortunate every year… fortunes and even empires were built upon the seas, the potential returns were so high. The goal isn’t to avoid Ruin, or risk, at all costs: It’s to consider it wisely against potential upside.

Chain of Vapor has never been good in Dreadnought.

The Ancients were well aware of Chain of Vapor. In the Before Times they played Chain of Vapor in their Stasis decks, which shared a dizzying overlap of cards from Impulse to Gush to the many free Counterspells. They rejected Chain of Vapor because it has never been good specifically in Dreadnought.

It was, however, spectacular in Tide Control. There are decks where Chain of Vapor is like a magician. There is a Mono-Blue Control deck, today, that might blow up its own Nevinyrral’s Disk, hold priority, Chain of Vapor the Nevinyrral’s Disk, and Chain-copy its own Control Magic all for one mana, while leaving the opponent devastated. A minor play in Tide Control might have been to exile all the opponent’s lands, bounce the Tide, and Chain-copy onto a significant threat that the opponent still had in play (where he would be very unlikely to ever be able to cast it again).

The problem with the card isn’t that it isn’t good in other strategies. Again, it can be dizzyingly efficient if you want to bounce your own stuff. And defensively? If all it was was a Boomerang that cost half as much mana you’d hear no complaints from me. The problem is that the same “Chain” of sacrificed lands that makes Chain of Vapor look so good in some decks allows the opponent to remove your Phyrexian Dreadnought at precisely the wrong moment. Sometimes.

This is an unwarranted Risk of Ruin.

There’s a reason that no-Tide Dave Kaplan played Powder Keg at Sacred Torch a year ago, and the Spring Fling Champion didn’t have Chain anywhere near his Mono-Blue version until himself incorporating the Tide combo.

Again, the point isn’t to never engage in any risk at all, and Risk of Ruin may be justified if the upside is high enough. When you could blow up all the opponent’s lands and put them in a position where they’d never be able to interact with your Dreadnought… That created so many frustrating losses for opponents of all stripes that Parallax Tide was eventually banned in Premodern; certainly enough extra wins to justify sometimes drawing your Chain of Vapor in the wrong order. I’d argue that without the colossal upside, it is foolish that so many people copying the MTGO deck lists are not considering other options.

We know why Chain of Vapor entered Dreadnought… If it’s so potentially Ruinous, why has it stayed?

Simple:

Information Cascades in Magic

“Information Cascades in Magic” is of course the seminal Patrick Chapin article, and his 2006 Article of the Year-winner for Star City Games. In his writeup of the 2006 Awards, then-editor Craig Stevenson recounted the story of my submitting Patrick’s article to the site (in those days Patrick would write out articles by hand, mail them to me, and I’d type them up and submit to SCG for him). The one-sentence body text of my email?

“Here’s your Article of the Year.”

Chapin talked about the Circular Mill, about army ants all following one another in a two-mile wide long loop that is so big that none of them can see anything but the ant in front of him. They go nowhere, spin around that single giant wheel, until they die. That is, of course, unless some ant wanders off and others follow him out of the Mill instead.

He talks about the Beach House, that storied proto-PT Testing House where many of the world’s best gathered in Honolulu, all convinced that a slow Abzan Control deck that won with Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree was the best option. But it was Beach House resident Mark Herberholz who “wandered off” with his Gruul beatdown deck Heezy Street, eventually taking down the Pro Tour.

Simply, Chain of Vapor in Dreadnought is the victim of an Information Cascade. Countless faceless MTGO handles are running it because the guy in front of him played it. There is a mass proliferation of deck lists as a result of MTGO.com, so Chain of Vapor gets seen over and over again, goes 5-0 over and over again, and wins Challenges over and over again, despite not being very good… All because of what Lanny said years ago after the Spring Fling.

Dreadnought as a strategy is so good that even an inferior Dreadnought deck is one of the best things you can be doing.

If this series goes 1,000 episodes, I don’t really care if you forget many or most of the details as long as you remember this: Most people think of life as a series of problems; strategists think of life as a series of games.

Being a successful strategist, almost by definition then, necessitates the ability to continue playing.

Had I lost the credit card game in 2006… I might not even be breathing now to rant and rail about Chain of Vapor twenty years later. I might have been removed from the game! Back then I answered to a higher power.

In Dreadnought, Chain of Vapor introduces a unique way to lose that simply wasn’t there before. We sometimes say that “one is a miracle” … Chain of Vapor can be miraculous for your opponent; and you simply don’t have to open the heavens for them so magnanimously by playing the card in your deck… Especially when Dreadnought players work so hard just to get the 12/12 into play. I, myself, bounced an opposing Dreadnought at LobsterCon this year using my opponent’s Chain, and it felt miraculous; I don’t know if I would have been able to keep playing that game otherwise.

The many cards you can play in this slot all have their upsides. Kaplan won last year’s Sacred Torch Showdown with two copies of Powder Keg. Powder Keg is the best card against Meddling Mage, which is arguably the most dangerous card for Dreadnought players. This year, he convinced me to replace my Boomerang with Reality Ripple; Reality Ripple has the same ability to beat a late-game Kor Haven as Boomerang… But can act as a poor man’s (or I suppose very rich man’s) Vision Charm. Boomerang is the most flexible option of them all, but in the most cynical sense, is mostly a Chain of Vapor that costs twice as much.

So it is only fair to point out that there are metagames so slanted that — even if we’re only talking about one card — Chain of Vapor might be preferable to one of the many two mana options. If you are expecting a lot of Goblin Lackeys or first-turn Hypnotic Specters, Chain of Vapor is likely preferable. In fact, given the wrong draw, Chain might be the only card we’ve talked about playing that can save you from a powerful first turn by the opponent (especially when you’re stuck on the draw).

When considering this, realize that the format might be so hostile the question might not be what one-of you should be playing, but whether you should be playing Dreadnought at all. At LobsterCon 2026, there were two Mono-Black decks in the Top 8 capable of making a first-turn Hypnotic Specter but (for once) no Phyrexian Shrimp.

The final argument is that the difference between these cards isn’t that great. I can buy that. They’re all one-ofs. But the binary risk of me losing the credit card game in 2006 wasn’t great either; rather, the Risk of Ruin – something I hadn’t previously understood – was so great twenty years later I’m telling you how glad I am to have avoided it.

People all engage in Magic in different ways and have different reasons for playing. One thing that privileged Americans often don’t realize is that international MTGO grinders are often making their livings in the Daybreak queues. Time is money, and maybe they don’t have the time to try something new when nothing appears in need of repair. After all, Dreadnought as a strategy is so good you can play no Islands at all and only two Vision Charms main deck and still win the North American Premodern Championship! Just ask my 2022 vanquisher, Flint Espil. The strategy is so good that you can get a lot wrong and it will still win Challenge after Challenge.

For Our Hero? This is just the umpteeth reason I wish I had won Sacred Torch Showdown this year. Maybe I could have been the wandering ant that set all subsequent Shrimp on the right path. But alas, all I can do now is to keep playing, hopefully a little more strategically than last time.

LOVE
MIKE

I did not then know what a great Chain of Vapor deck looked like.

… And Stewart Butterfield didn’t know Slack.

By 2011 Butterfield, already a Yahoo! veteran through their acquisition of his photo-sharing software Flickr, and his new startup Tiny Speck had spent $17,000,000 in venture capital funding his new game: Glitch. Stewart had hired dozens of employees and attracted the attention of both revered investors and the tech press before beta game play had even begun. Over the next year-and-a-half, Glitch crumbled.

Accounts vary. It was “beautiful and awesome” described Butterfield to TechCrunch in 2011. And also hamstrung by the technology of the time. Or maybe Glitch just wasn’t… fun?

Winding down Glitch’s operations, Butterfield had enough money to pay the gamers’ severance packages, and intended to give the rest back to his investors. But they hadn’t invested in a particular game. They had invested in Tiny Speck and its team, led by Stewart Butterfield himself. And along the way, as Glitch was limited by the technology of the day, Tiny Speck developed some new internal messaging tech that investors thought might have had some legs. In fact, you might be logged into it right now.

Eight years later, Tiny Speck’s little internal messaging tool had become Slack, and Salesforce bought it for nearly $28 billion.

The drug biz in the United States is positively lousy with missed swings-turned-grand slams, has always been booming with Butterfields.

Chances are, you preened, popped, or pricked one of these three failures just this week, or at least know someone who did:

1. In the 1970s a pharmaceutical company created a new oral antihypertensive. People with uncontrolled hypertension could take it, and it would lower their blood pressure dramatically. Only there was one weird side effect: Patients grew hair. Everywhere. The drug’s nasty side effects were so bad that it usually had to be paired with other drugs to mitigate the symptoms. Only… The hair growth one had some promise. What if you didn’t take it orally? What if the bug could become the feature? This blood pressure drug eventually grew up to be a topical solution applied directly to a man’s head. Rogaine was a much bigger success that turned an unpleasant side effect into a cash cow.

2. The most famous example has got to be Pfizer in the mid-1980s, where they were developing an angina drug for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. Trial patients reported its ability to improve blood flow in one culturally-transformative region in particular. Nether if you will. By 1998 The FDA approved Viagra. I don’t know how many lives were saved by this drug… But I imagine countless were made more fun.

3. Today we are in the middle of a cultural transformation whose implications will probably dwarf the rise of AI when all is said and done. GLP-1 drugs, originally geared towards controlling blood glucose in order to treat diabetes, turned out absolutely bonkers for weight loss. Recent polling says one in eight American adults is currently on GLP-1s, with specifically weight loss prescriptions doubling between 2024 and 2025. The rate of obesity in the United States has tripled over the last 60 years, but is “somehow” finally, on the decline. Once considering second-order effects, there is likely no part of our everyday lives that GLP-1s will not touch. Will we even still have fat people? I mean at scale? About one in five American dollars is spent on healthcare already; what happens when, in the absence of the obesity comorbidity… People start living longer? GLP-1 users eat about 21% fewer calories; JPMorgan estimates this will cost the food and beverage industry between $30 and 55 billion in annual sales as soon as 2030. Chain restaurants have already closed hundreds of stores in 2025 and 2026, with more planned. No, I don’t frequently eat at Jack-in-the-Box (which closed 100 locations) or Pizza Hut (250). The more interesting question is what happens to the entire commercial real estate industry. On the other hand, GLP-1s will themselves do between $70 and 80 billion in global revenue just this year. Not bad for some kinda sorta diabetes medication. And an important lesson for Magic players*.

Butterfield thought that making a game was the game; but it was his internal communication system that was the literal killer app.

Hypertension wasn’t the game; hair growth was. Angina treatment didn’t define the cultural transformation; a different kind of blood flow did. And for GLP-1s, diabetes isn’t the only application; appetite suppression may be only the first of many dominoes to fall.

If this series goes 1,000 episodes I don’t care if you remember all the details. If it’s one-in-eight Americans or only one-in-twelve; how causal fast food closures seem in the middle of 2026. What I want you to remember is this: Most people see life as a series of problems, but strategists see life as a series of games. And in all these cases, the game was to see past what looked like an abject failure to notice what could actually win.

Draw-Go in Premodern

In the second week of August, LUMINATI won a Magic Online Challenge with a highly unusual Premodern deck:

This deck is obviously reminiscent of ancestors like Randy Buehler’s 1998 version of CMU Blue, and others of the Draw-Go family.

With rare exception, Draw-Go is loath to ever do much on its own turn until the very late portion of the game. That’s where it gets its name from: Your turn is largely meant to be to Draw your card and say “Go” and not do anything else. You’re “allowed” to counter their thing; you’re “allowed” to draw extra cards, but the surest way to snatch defeat from the jaws of a slow and plodding victory is to preemptively limit how much mana you have to interact on your opponent’s turn.

I’ve always been a little dissatisfied at the absence of a real Draw-Go deck in Premodern, despite the legality of so many Counterspells. The closest thing we ever had was Tide Control; which grafted a two-card combo onto the Draw-Go shell so well that’s the only aspect of the deck we ever talked about.

Let’s imagine for a moment that sixty or seventy-five slips of cardboard can have a point of view. That a deck can, in some wise, express an opinion. What I “hear” when looking at LUMINATI’s deck is a scream for identity so loud, that the broken card was never actually Parallax Tide, but rather Chain of Vapor. Parallax Tide in the abstract used to be kind of annoying, but if you’re not doing something like Seal of Cleansing or Stifle or — yes, Yes, YES — Chain of Vapor to keep the barn doors shut, they’re just going to swing themselves open again.

Because Parallax Tide has failed! It’s pointless to discuss, having been banned out of the format! Replenish has moved on, and become stronger for it. Dreadnought just plays Brain Freeze as its Plan B now, if anything at all. But what of Draw-Go? Is Parallax Tide in that sister strategy Butterfield’s Glitch in 2011? Or a side-effect-ridden hypertension drug? How will Chain of Vapor ever get it up in Premodern again?

It turns out, maybe better than ever before. Or at least more centrally.

Draw-Go’s reputation for “never” doing “anything” on its own turn was never wholly literal. Even in 1998 Randy was playing Nevinyrral’s Disk sometimes, and the lone Rainbow Efreet. Because much of what makes this deck worth trying presupposes playing some card(s) on your own turn.

Chain of Vapor is good in the abstract here. On its face, it’s there as a fast card that you can use to defend yourself. This deck already plays a pair of Force Spikes; I don’t know what else you’d want against a Goblin Lackey or Hypnotic Specter on the first turn.

That’s Chain of Vapor Level Zero, and it’s already good enough. What is special about Chain of Vapor in LUMINATI’s deck is Slack, is Rogaine, is Senator Bob Dole doing erectile dysfunction ads only two years after earning the Republican nomination for President of the United States. It’s a transformation of off-brand uses for the card that glue a whole new-old strategy together.

The minimum bar is that Chain of Vapor is very efficient in the abstract. It is not quite Swords to Plowshares, but it’s one mana and — combined with so many Counterspells — is pretty good at keeping you from ever being hit by a Phyrexian Dreadnought. As we’ve said, it might put you a card down, but at least you’re not getting hit by first-turn Goblin Lackey.

The next step is that all the other cards are also very good.

Nevinyrral’s Disk? Is very good. Have you ever read the text on Nevinyrral’s Disk?

Wow, what a word salad, right?

The important thing is that Disk destroys itself along with other artifacts, rather than sacrificing itself to destroy whatever artifacts are in play.

So the most basic cool play is to use the Disk, and then respond with Chain of Vapor. Which is the better card? Chain of Vapor costs one mana, and is much more widely played than Nevinyrral’s Disk. But in the business of managing a battlefield — especially for a deck with very few other non-land permanents — it’s hard to argue that you wouldn’t generally rather have a Disk than a Chain, at the point that you can be casting and using a Disk.

At a minumum… Isn’t this cool? Something you didn’t realize was possible? Admit it: You thought Nevinyrral’s Disk sacrificed itself.

But there are other novel interactions. In one match last night I repeatedly put Essence Flare’s trigger on the stack, and then bounced the Flare in response. Because in the middle turns of Stage Two, I’d just rather have a Jackal Pup-killer than a Jackal Pup-bouncer (even if a Jackal Pup-bouncer is more than good “enough” on turn one).

The “chain” part of Chain of Vapor has quite a cathedral’s vaulted ceiling in this deck. Imagine…

“Activate Nevinyrral’s Disk, holding priority; Chain of Vapor targeting the Disk; sacrifice a land to copy Chain of Vapor, targeting Control Magic.”

What kind of battlefield did you have to start with to lace together those twenty-two words? More importantly, what kind of game plan will your opponent be left with, knowing you’ve got both of the four drops in your hand?”

I ran through all the changes to LUMINATI’s deck (that I didn’t make before playing it) that seemed obvious to me. Dominate is better than Control Magic. Isn’t it? Maybe not in a Chain of Vapor theme deck.

These things always seem better when you win, but I at least learned a lot in last night’s humble 2-1.

I.

Something that seemed obvious to me was that LUMINATI’s deck has a blind spot at Brain Freeze; and again, the best Dreadnought list at League plays Brain Freeze main deck. I was in fact Brain Freeze’d (Brain Frozen?) in Game One of my first round. Two Arcane Laboratories in the sideboard don’t really seem up to the task to me, especially because Brain Freeze is played in a wide variety of decks and you might be forced to blow up your own Arcane Lab with Nevinyrral’s Disk, which would be a non-bo. My opponent this round was Taylor with Mono-Blue Stasis.

I was able to take the match 2-0, but only by desperately Counterspelling individual Storm triggers, which is more luck than any kind of a real strategy. I think the deck probably wants Gaea’s Blessing, perhaps in place of the two main-deck creatures. It would not be a difficult splash.

III.

Pedro ran me over with a Neal Sacks-esque Mono-Red in Game One; but I got the next two by siding in <strike>one hundred</strike> eight cheap interaction cards in Blue Elemental Blast, Hydroblast, and Essence Flare.

Though I won both sideboard games, my opponent’s strategy was excellent. At some point he just tried to kill all my creature lands. Seal of Fire is a must-counter. Even Mogg Fanatic is a must-counter because of its ability to shoot a Faerie Conclave out of the sky! What is important to understand is that because its only way to actually win is by attacking with creature lands, LUMINATI’s deck can be forced to trade one-for-two on mana, even in the late game. This means that structurally you don’t want to miss land drops, and you probably can’t play cards like Gush even though they are so powerful in other Mono-Blue decks.

It also didn’t help that Neal’s shell plays both Barbarian Ring and Wasteland.

Rainbow Efreet and especially Morphling are clunky to the point of unplayability. I don’t know what matchup I would be happy (or even willing) to commit 4-5 of six or more mana and hope that the next seven turns would spontaneously go my way.

As such Premodern Draw-Go will probably only win in the very late game, probably by committing 2-3 mana to deal about 2 damage for as many as ten straight turns. Know ye this: Especially because the creatures suck and you’re probably going to side them out, this is a deck that can be Gear Two’d. If you want to try it, know that and plan accordingly.

At the top I said I didn’t back on New Year’s Day know what a great Chain of Vapor deck looked like. So I ask… Is this a “great” Chain of Vapor deck?

It does some novel things, has already won a Challenge, and might really be opening doors in Premodern. But I think to really be “a great Chain of Vapor deck” it’ll have to be a great deck first.

LUMINATI’s 75 has some alarming issues, but also some potential cures already.

Initially I was wondering about the Draw-Go v. White Control matchup. As another new archetype, White Control has generated a little interest, and SWB himself told me he’s been thinking about how to win the White Control mirror match.

I think outside of a single card, White Control wins every game. The problem is the one card.

If you draw Capsize at any point before it’s too late (whatever “too late” means for decks this slow)… Draw-Go has an almost inevitable likelihood of winning. If you draw it prior to turn seven, you can conceivably never be under threat because White Control is also very slow. If you keep hitting your land drops, you can eventually put them to zero permanents, maybe under attack by something like two Soldier tokens.

However if you don’t draw Capsize early enough, you’re cooked. You’re not just cooked, you have no recourse and almost no relevant sideboard cards. You have no reasonable way to interact with them, and they might just beat you with Tsabo’s Web (the previous presupposes you’re not stuck with a bunch of nonbasic lands that never untap; you’re never going to Capsize-lock them if that’s the case).

That said, it looks like you’re way ahead in 2/3 of the Big Three. Replenish and Enchantress might get all their Opalescences countered in Game One. Even in the sideboard games you have a lot of play against Xantid Swarm and Meddling Mage.

I was very pleased at the ability of the deck to recover against Burn. I was “in” Game One (until I wasn’t) but they were never really in it against so many Blasts and Flares sideboarded.

The biggest question mark being the Biggest Bad of the Big Three: Dreadnought. You probably have an excellent game plan against Dreadnought Plan A, where Chain of Vapor never has to stretch to shine… But that said, there is no realistic path to beating Brain Freeze, especially in Game One. I think if I put more work on this deck, it’ll be Gaea’s Blessings instead of the two creatures, but will require a substantial reimagining of the mana base.

We reminded everyone in You Don’t Know Dick that the Premodern format is far from solved, and LUMINATI here has given us another promising example (even if I didn’t complete the 3-0 upon first attempt). A great deck might be hiding here, and I think if we can live through a Brain Freeze, we’ll be most of the way there. Luckily there should be plenty of abandoned Wendy’s in which to practice our various controlling iterations.

LOVE
MIKE

* Many of “my” statistics and anecdotes about the history and impact of GLP-1s were sourced by Scott Galloway and his excellent newsletter “No Mercy / No Malice.” You can read a much longer take that has nothing at all to do with Magic: The Gathering here.

“Pre-modern [sic] in general is just a failed concept because it is technically a solved format since nothing new can enter the meta which usually leads to collapse and general stagnation for those that are left behind. Not fun for anyone.”

[deleted] on Reddit 

Or…

“The card pool is static and will never change, meaning that the format is mostly ‘solved.’”

Jason Dookeran, A Glossary of Magic: The Gathering Formats, for CoolStuffInc.com

Or…

“The Premodern format is a largely solved format, as several of the same decks that were good during that era of Extended format play are still good.”

Jeffery Dohm-Sanchez, Premodern Format Breathes New Life Into Older Magic: The Gathering Cards for ICv2.com

For those of you who don’t know, Premodern is a non-rotating Magic: The Gathering format composed entirely from sets between 1995’s Fourth Edition and 2003’s Scourge. Not a single Planeswalker stalks the sixties of Premodern. FIRE design and Universes Beyond were not even whispers in any ear in Renton, WA while these sets were being developed. There are currently 5,375 cards legal in the format; and while the occasional card does leave (most recently Parallax Tide in 2025), no really new card ever enters.

Now if you’re my colleague Jason Dookeran from CoolStuffInc or Jeffery Dohm-Sanchez, Managing Editor of ICv2, that seems to imply that novelty and innovation can appear only with the injection of new cardboard, rather than how we use the cardboard. But as we’ll see following (and over countless contexts throughout history) fixed rules do not necessarily imply a fixed optimal strategy. Because…

You Don’t Know Dick

As a competitive event, the modern High Jump is over 150 years old. It was formalized in British athletic competitions in the 1860s and 70s, and helped to usher in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

For the next several decades, people approached the High Jump using a variety of twists and tortions. They tried to go over straightaway or sideways, with various leg scissors, straddles, or the Western Roll. Because the intuitive approach to the High Jump is (or at least was) to get your body over the bar.

Enter Dick Fosbury.

As a teenager, Fosbury just wasn’t good at a conventional straddle. Which got worse as he got taller and the bar got higher. So he tried something else.

If this project goes 1,000 episodes, I don’t mind if you forget almost everything I write or say, but retain this: Most people think of life as a series of problems; strategists like Dick Fosbury see life as a series of games.

Constrained by an inability to straddle well, Fosbury stopped trying. But he didn’t just stop trying. He realized that people were playing the wrong game. It was never about getting your center of mass as high as possible over an obstacle. It was always about keeping the bar underneath your body’s trajectory without knocking it off. In fact, the way Dick ended up innovating (i.e. the way it’s done now) his center of mass could actually be below the bar as his body cleared it.

If you’ve ever seen an Olympic High Jump event you know where this landed by how he landed. Pun intended. 

Rather than attacking the bar head-on or sideways, Dick turned his back to the bar and arched over it. While his torso was over the bar, much of his body actually remained under it. This ended up a far more efficient way to doing things, such that fifty-eight years later, basically every competitive High Jumper everywhere has adapted to the Fosbury Flop: Dick’s “backwards” physical strategy.

Note: Very little changed.

The bar didn’t change.

Human bodies themselves didn’t change.

Nor the scoring, nor the objective. What changed was how Fosbury approached the same fixed card pool. He didn’t add resources, but rather resourcefulness.

Needless to say, Dick won Gold for himself and the U. S. of A. in 1968; but his contributions to the High Jump metagame are as eternal as a non-rotating format.

White Control in Premodern

Let’s get back to Premodern proper.

When I started playing back in 2022, the top decks were LandStill, Mono-Red Sligh, and Elves. The Rock, of course, won between 40-46% of its games; they were just different games. 

My initial favorite deck to play was R/W Astral Slide, because it was strong against all three top decks, in particular LandStill. But it was not great against Big Spell decks, especially those that could blow up its mana base with Armageddon, Cataclysm, or the now dearly departed Parallax Tide.

I ended up playing Replenish at my first LobsterCon, finishing Third with a deck where I often had to explain how the Parallax cards worked.

Let’s fast forward four years. None of LandStill, Sligh, or Elves is a Top 3 deck any more, though they all can still perform (especially if you’re Andy Voellmer or Neal Sacks recently). The top decks today are completely different: Mono-Blue Dreadnought; and a pair of Parallax Wave decks in Enchantress and Replenish. But even Replenish has gotten a dramatic makeover. The banning of Parallax Tide somehow made the deck stronger. 

With such a powerhouse mana denial component previously available, people just didn’t think to innovate the strategy; but today Replenish is locking out games with Decree of Silence, and is in particular better against its mortal enemy: Mono-Red.

That’s your “solved” format. 100% turnover of the Bronze, Silver, and Fosbury positions. And even with such change, more change is not only possible, but already here. Like I said at the top: The format wasn’t missing a card. It was missing an idea.

This is what I played at League last Thursday:

The core of the Mono-White Control deck is not so different from the R/W Astral Slide I liked in 2022. Lots of Onslaught Block. Lots of cycling. Lots of ways to dance around Counterspells and build advantages without the opponent having an opportunity to vote on the outcome of the game.

You can steal a little from top deck Enchantress with a well-placed Akroma’s Vengeance… And I think the deck is aces against Dreadnought. So many Abeyances, Swords to Plowshares, and Disenchants to break up their 12/12 combo. When all else fails, given a little time, you still have the many sweepers.

That said, what makes the deck exciting or even remotely viable is a bundle of all relatively new technology that has entered the Premodern conversation in only the last couple of months.

First, there is first- and second-level thinking around Brain Freeze. My problem was that even if I could figure out to beat Dreadnought’s Plan A consistently, a Mono-White deck could not realistically beat the card Brain Freeze. The top performing Dreadnought deck at League plays main-deck Brain Freeze.

Enter Gaea’s Blessing?

Kinda sorta.

Gaea’s Blessing can be a nice surprise, and if they just try to Freeze you out, especially in Game One, they’re going to be in for a game-losing graveyard trigger. The problem is that a cagey Dreadnought opponent can just hold Stifle (or maybe two Stifles), wait for your Gaea’s Blessing trigger, and stop it.

However if you start 4x Abeyance and sideboard 3x Orim’s Chant, the hold-my-Stifle plan becomes much more difficult to execute. They’re already committing most of their cards and mana to Plan B. Do they have Counterspell as well? Two of them even? You can just respond to Brain Freeze with Abeyance or Orim’s Chant and they can now no longer Stifle your Gaea’s Blessing trigger.

Good man and Misty Mountain Goblins Champion Mashlegs asked me on the Spike Colony Discord what cards are so important to force through Counterspells that I needed 3x Orim’s Chant. I told him that it never occurred to me to play on-label Orim’s Chant, only off-label. The purpose of its inclusion is to punish Dreadnoughts and Sutured Ghouls, or to de-tech a Brain Freeze kill. Without a card like Isochron Scepter you can’t afford to side Chant in against aggressive decks, so its Fog-like ability will rarely if ever come up.

The other two key pieces of technology come from a hodgepodge of Sam Black builds. The first being Tithe. Tithe is the card that gets this deck over the veritable High Jump bar. It’s a real and legitimate way to obtain card advantage early, recover from a mulligan, or just help you conceal why you’re really playing Windswept Heath on turn two. Later in the game it can eke out your last Plains so you don’t feel so bad about actually casting that Eternal Dragon instead of milking more card advantage.

The more important one is Scour in the sideboard. You’d think that a deck with access to green mana would go for Ray of Revelation or mayhap Tranquil Domain. But we’ve borrowed Sam’s Scour tech because it is just so dominant against two of the Big Three. If you resolve Scour on Opalescence there is a good chance that neither Replenish nor Echantress will be able to beat you, or even deal a single point of combat damage.

Of course at League I never actually got to play against any of the Big Three. 

I.

In the first round I had avonbergen with Moneyball Black. This was a toughie, in part because I have so few sideboard cards while Moneyball can present banger after banger. We split the first two games; then avonbergen opened Game Three with a first-turn Gloom, and followed it up with a Knight of Stromgald.

I cycled a ton (because what else could I do) and eventually played a seven mana Wrath of God to get the single 2/1 off of my back. I was at the minimum number of life points to continue playing, when his deck produced a second Gloom!

I had the Akroma’s Vengeance but was very greedy and waited for avonbergen to play any creature before I popped it off. It was a Withered Wretch, which of course is more poison for my strategy. My twelfth land was actually a Windswept Heath, which he Wasted, assuming that it would go to the graveyard; I cast a nine-mana Renewed Faith in order to go up to seven life so that I could break the Heath in response myself, and eventually got three-for-one with the Vengeance.

With the Glooms and Wretch off the board I just cycled a bunch and recycled my graveyard.

II.

In the second round I got WillReddy with GAT. Will spanked me in the first and I don’t even know how I made it out of the second. But in the third game my one Powder Keg showed up to get some Meddling Mages off my back and I hid behind not one, but two copies of Sacred Ground.

I wasn’t sure if Sacred Ground was right to side in, but Will had been planning Armageddon-into-Psychatog, and Sacred Ground at least kept my lands in play. Guess I was right, even if I only brought in two-of-three.

III.

I played against Matt_W with Survival Opposition, and got Game One on the back of Phyrexian Furnace, Disenchant, and Wrath of God. Matt got the second. Tsabo’s Web wasn’t doing anything and I toyed with the idea of siding in my one Exalted Angel. Is a deck full of Tradewind Riders afraid of a random six- or seven-mana flyer? Matt told me afterward he was, in fact, afraid of Exalted Angel. If you can contain Opposition, flyers become a problem. In the very late game — Tradewind Rider summoning sick — he couldn’t Survival for a solution to my Eternal Dragon and in fact had to Natural Order for a… Birds of Paradise.

The format wasn’t missing a card. It was missing an idea. There are still a lot more, and some of them are probably even better than the ones I had.

Sam says that you can take out any card at random that is not a Swords to Plowshares, replace it with a third Gaea’s Blessing, and you’ll end up with a better deck; and that the question isn’t whether the deck should have Scroll Rack, but whether it should have two. I did, in fact, lose two separate games on the night with seven basic Plains in hand.

Lanny hates main-deck Disenchant-type cards in general but has nevertheless pointed out that Seal of Cleansing is an upgrade. You can have Seal in play, blow up an opposing Decree of Silence, and then Scour the opponent’s Opalescence with great confidence. Seal is also a little better against Moneyball.

I hope you liked this, and will tell all your friends to subscribe to The Dojo and my SubStack. Remember: Most people think of life as a series of problems, but we strategists think of it as a series of games.

LOVE

MIKE

Some notes, caveats, and weasel-words before we begin:

First, all this below assumes you know how a Premodern Dreadnought deck works at a baseline, whether it’s Mono-Blue, U/W, or even a weird hybrid deck. At my first LobsterCon Flint Espil gave me the soul read and made a Dreadnought with his Hermit Druid Reanimator deck instead of using it to embiggen a Sutured Ghoul and it still killed me, just taking two attacks instead of one.

Secondly, David Razczka already wrote a much more comprehensive Dreadnought “Bible” and I have no interest in competing with or supplanting the good Doctor’s work. These are MY commandments based on playing Dreadnought decks various, to generally good results including multiple $1K Top 4s and undefeated League Thursday nights.

Third I would have come up with Ten Commandments but this is Magic and we do Top 8s, not Top 10s. Deal.

With those out of the way I present MichaelJ’s Top 8 Dreadnought Commandments.

1. Thou Shalt Plan to Jam Game One

The primary tension in Magic is not card advantage v. tempo or even beatdown v. control as you may once have been taught: It is speed v. material. No one ever taught you speed v. material because I haven’t finished formalizing it yet, but believe me when I say that Burn, like LandStill and The Rock, is a “material” deck.

Dreadnought on the other hand is primarily a speed deck.

Almost everyone can outperform Dreadnought given sufficient time. In a sense, the card Phyrexian Dreadnought isn’t even that “powerful”. It’s a dude. It’s a big dude, sure, but it does’t gain life or draw cards. The most common sorts of removal in the format all kill it; and it requires you to trade in at least one extra card to function at all.

Knowing this, as the Dreadnought player, your primary goal is to deny the opponent sufficient time to out-class your not-that-powerful strategy. 

To that end, unless you have intervening information (i.e. the contents of your opponent’s hand, their archetype, etc.) your focus should be to jam as early as possible in Game One. Ideally this should be ON turn two, or hopefully turn three if you need to rely on cantrips. But imagine you’re going off on turn four or later. You basically lose to the average Survival of the Fittest draw now. The Rock has time to set up a Pernicious Deed and live. Even Burn — your best mainstream matchup on the numbers — just races you fair and square. Random five drops are suddenly big enough to compete with you, and anyone with any amount of selection can exploit your one-for-two nature.

This means that you should mulligan most non-natural combo hands, especially on the play. I don’t know that you should strategically mulligan six-card hands, but will point out that very relatively few decks can actually beat a four-card combo hand with zero cover spells if you’re on the play.

Generally: Be very choosy about seven-card hands.

Don’t: Keep generically operable lands-and-spells hands in Game One. I once finished in the Top 4 of a $1K where the only games I lost the whole day were those where I drew six or more cards with Accumulated Knowledge. No one cares that you can touch your deck a bunch.

Consider: Any Phyrexian Dreadnought hand with one or more one mana cantrips; or any one- or two-connector hands (especially those with Vision Charm) that have two or more specifically one-mana cantrips. Think about the mulligan as six Impulses for six.

In the interest of transparency I will point out I’ve had numerous conversations with Dave Kaplan about this and he generally disagrees (Dave is much more generous with Game One hand evaluation than I tend to be) but he also comes up to me every single time he loses [which is admittedly uncommon] and says “I should have jammed.”

2. Thou Shalt Loosen Hand Evaluation in Game Two

Unlike Game One, where Dreadnought has multiple advantages on both speed and deck composition (like the fact that the average Red Deck probably can’t even remove a resolved Dreadnought in Game One), you should assume that everyone can interact with your first, or perhaps first two, Dreadnoughts in Game Two. Because they are going first, opponents will also generally have the time to accumulate some amount of resistance, or in the most horrid cases, will have read Slow Playing the Beatdown.

In sideboard games you not only can but should keep operable lands-and-spells hands, especially those with lots of card drawing. It is in these games that Accumulated Knowledge shines. This is because Dreadnought in large part has to shift to a “material” deck in sideboarding. Imagine the average Red Deck opponent:

Last night I had an opponent who sided in fourteen cards against me. Eleven or more cards is common. Almost always the opponent will be removing material (including ways to forward their own strategy) in exchange for speed, or more precisely anti-speed. By eschewing speed as your North Star in sideboard games, you actually reduce the efficacy of some of the most notorious sideboard cards. A Mogg Salvage is insane in the first two turns of the game, and a Pyroblast is always at least relevant. But given sufficient time, they are just one-for-ones and the value of their rate and flexibility recedes. You can start lapping them on spell density and card drawing. 

Despite concessions to defensive speed, the opponent will himself be less offensively fast in Game Two, reducing your reliance on cards like Counterspell to keep yourself alive early, which is great because you’re probably going second. 

Depending on matchup I will usually side out all my Dazes and at least two of my Foils because I don’t care about being fast as much but discarding 2-3 cards can be annoying if I’m trying to win on material.

None of this means that you can’t be opportunistic. By all means combo off on turn two if the opponent is begging to be un-alived.

3. Thou Shalt Daze Meddling Mage

The breaker here is if the opponent is playing Meddling Mage. You tend to have to leave in Daze because it’s one of the only interactive plays you can realistically make. You don’t even necessarily lose to “Meddling Mage on ‘Phyrexian Dreadnought’” but the fact that’s it’s a 2/2 and it might kill you.

I’m up in the air on whether you should side in Essence Flare (or how many) if you merely suspect Meddling Mage but Dave Kaplan thinks you should. The joke is that Essence Flare on Meddling Mage is “a Dismember for the price of Dismember” which is at a minimum hilarious.

4. Thou Shalt Understand — and maybe attempt to dominate -- Stage Three in Any Game

Even though our First Commandment is to try to jam on turn two, it is important to understand the structure of potential Dreadnought games. If you are prevented from winning in the first few turns, don’t worry: Mono-Blue Dreadnought — either the kind with four Accumulated Knowledge and a Flash of Insight or the Impulse build with multiple Flashes — is equipped to win in Stage Three, but only if you craft your game for it.

In Stage Two, you temporarily shift to a material deck, utilizing your cantrips to make land drops and build your hand. The opponent may or may not be able to set up a win in Stage Two. You have lots of hard counters, remember.

Later you can take one of two positions in Stage Three. One of them is to understand that even the most prepared opponents are usually gated at seven interactive spells in the late game. You are not. You can stockpile a card with Portent, and have one or two Flash of Insight flashbacks waiting in your graveyard.

At this point you go back to your Stage One “speed” paradigm. Most of your cards (not stupid Impulse but the rest of them) cost 0-1 mana. You can usually play far more than your opponent can interact with over a turn cycle. This will generally get your Dreadnought to resolve, survive their removal, or set you up for a Brain Freeze.

What is important to understand is that the progression of this sort of  game is in three distinct Stages:

First, in Stage One: You are the fastest combo deck. No one is beating turn-two Dreadnought with Daze + Foil backup.

Second, in Stage Two: You have many traditional “Control” tools, even if they don’t include much creature removal. Utilize cantrips and card drawing to build advantages and prevent the opponent from outright killing you.

Third, in Stage Three: You can potentially cast far more relevant cards in one turn than the opponent, which can include one or more Vision Charms. Your opponent will be gated not only on cards in hand, but the fact that their cards tend to cost more than one mana.

5. Thou Shalt Play More Accumulated Knowledges the Better Your Opponents

I’m currently on Impulses, but that’s probably just superstition.

At LobsterCon this year I lost my feature match to Claire Ackerman after Dazing her Meddling Mage and playing double Accumulated Knowledge. Still, I missed my third land drop and was unable to cast a Back to Basics that surely would have won the game.

Had I had Impulse I would have hit land three immediately and maybe it would have been Our Hero instead who made Top 8.

I played Accumulated Knowledge at LobsterCon because the main decks I was worried about were opposing Dreadnought decks, Moneyball Black, and Replenish; all of which are matchups where Accumulated Knowledge outperforms Impulse. 

AK allows Dreadnought to compete with Moneyball even through their baseline disruption, and enter kind of a blunted Stage Three. At least you can accumulate cards and attempt to combo off. Without net card advantage it is difficult for Dreadnought to recover and assemble the combo otherwise. Neither an opposing Dreadnought deck nor Replenish can really compete with you with four AK and the 1 Brain Freeze in your main. Both matchups become trivial. You win a lot of games just blocking opposing Phyrexians. I hand sized all four Dreadnoughts repeatedly in the Replenish matchup at LobsterCon and easily beat that deck 4-0 / 8-1 in the Saturday Consultation tournament.

However as I said I’m currently on Impulses. Impulse is the weakest card in Dreadnought. It has functional utility I suppose, but Dreadnought is a speed deck, and two mana for a search is semi-anathema to actively trying to go off on turn two. Think about that for a second. Playing Impulse in isolation puts us at odds with The First Commandment. Why Impulse when you can mulligan for zero mana? However it does dig for your third land. If your opponents are nincompoops or goobers operating at a minimal level, even if it means going off on turn four or something, that is probably good enough.

6. Thou Probably Shouldn’t Cut Brain Freeze From the Main

One is a miracle. This is your ace in the hole against LandStill, and makes Replenish almost un-lose-able if they don’t play main-deck Meddling Mage.

In reality you have a Stage Three advantage against Enchantress and Replenish anyway (just with Counterspells and Vision Charms) but Brain Freeze gives you an additional advantage in the mirror and other weirdo situations that I haven’t thought about yet. Again, one is a miracle.

What is buried in this is that Dreadnought is secretly an excellent exhaustion deck due to having 8+ hard counters against certain decks with fewer than eight ways to actually win. Understand that in these situations you are gated on mana (i.e. you can potentially fall behind Serra Sanctum). Vision Charm and Brain Freeze queer the opponent’s math.

7. Thou Shalt Unreservedly Embrace the Ethics of Dreadnought

Ponza Oath has never won an ethical game of Magic, ever.

Burn is maybe the most ethical deck in Premodern. It’s just so g-d honest.

But Dreadnought is a close second. This might seem odd given its blistering speed and litany of overpowered cards including Gush and Phyrexian Dreadnought itself, but hear me out:

Everyone knows you’re coming. No one shows up unless they think they can beat you and they all are probably heavily equipping themselves to beat you. Some decks like Enchantress and Moneyball exist in large numbers solely because they have good matchups against you.

You are the boogeyman but also a beacon of sanity. You are the pillar upon which all the Naturalizes in the room are justified. Everyone can beat you given sufficient time. And they sometimes do! Every round, for every two players grousing that they just lost to Dreadnought there is some kid who squeaked an Annul, Red Elemental Blast, Mana Short, or Abeyance in at just the right time. That makes you the sometimes-bearer of joy. You are the villain against whom [almost-] every prospective David (not Raczka or Kaplan, obviously) is building his heroic narrative.

How do we remain Goliaths when they are all bringing in a ton of sideboard cards? Again, I beat an 11-card swap last night! 

What is ethical Magic?

I’ll give you just one whisper: Don’t side out Flash of Insight. Side it in.

I’ve seen multiple players (Neon Mushroom on YouTube, 2x Eternal World Champion Roland Chang) side out Flash of Insight against incoming Pyroblasts.

Why would you do that?

You are not fast any more. Their many Blasts, Overloads, etc. deal no damage but can prevent your fastest starts. You kind of have to assume your first Dreadnought — or first two — are dealt with. The answer is to get them with the third Dreadnought; maybe in Stage Three. After a long game where everyone did something cool but someone (hopefully you) won.

8. When in Doubt, Thou Shalt Jam in Game Three

This was perhaps the biggest unlock for me, at least playing this deck. 

I was getting ready to draw in at a $1K at The Bearded Dragon and a despondent kid came up to me, complaining he had just lost to Enchantress. He just didn’t understand how to win the matchup.

I explained the exhaustion plan in Game One. Game One is Gear Two.

“There isn’t much you can do in Game Two,” I lamented. If they get their plan going, they are going to have more mana than you due to Exploration and Carpet of Flowers; your Counterspells aren’t going to do anything; and between Swords to Plowshares, Abeyance, and Seal of Cleansing, every Shrimp will be dead.

“Then we just lose again in Game Three?” He asked.

“That’s different,” I responded: “Just jam.”

The trick here is that you’re once again on the play. Your Dazes go live again. The opponent can have all the answers in the world but all the answers in the world require more mana than they have if you have a Vision Charm and even one free spell.

After the last round of Swiss, the kid came up to me and told me he was once again paired with Enchantress. “I did what you said,” he said. “And I jammed him in Game Three.” 

Victory!

I myself lost in Top 4 that day to one of the most talented Enchantress players in SWB, but the kid, still a Dreadnought player months later, went on to beat me at Sacred Torch.

LOVE
MIKE

If you don’t already know, Walls Spy is one of the best combo decks in the Pauper format. Though it only plays four lands, Spy has many cards that help search for lands, including Generous Ent, Land Grant, and Gatecreeper Vine. Ideally between strategic mulligans and a little luck, you will both have two other creatures by turn four and all your lands in play, which opens up the door for a perfectly curved Balustrade Spy:

You cast that em effer and flip over your whole deck, which should include at least one Dread Return and at least one Lotleth Giant. Unless the opponent has an instant speed way to interact with your graveyard… 20+ points of hijinks will occur and you’ll be off to Game Two.

Lanny has always joked that of course I would write Finding the Three Gears — he says I play Burn like you would play The Rock. So it’s only fitting that what I like most about Walls Spy is that its fail state is to be The Rock, or at least Limited.

With eight copies of Winding Way and Lead the Stampede (not to mention almost all creatures) you can play a heck of a Limited deck, casting five- and six- drop creatures every turn, and eventually overwhelming the opponent with size if not rate. This is especially true if you line up Sagu Wildlings (which fly and gain three life) and Generous Ents (which are bigger than Tolarian Terrors, block flyers, and make food). Your poor opponent with one mana 3/2, 3/3, and 5/5 creatures will often be overwhelmed.

The big change I made at Paupergenesis was to add a Mountain to the sideboard to accommodate arguably the best midrange creature in Pauper: Writhing Chrysalis. This would let us go super hard into the midrange plan after sideboarding, operate with a fifth land in case a mean opponent killed our mana-producing Walls or something, and block even more flyers.

The trade-off was that I cut 4-8 purely anti-red life gaining defensive creatures, mostly because I didn’t ever side them in when I won the NYCIS Trios event with Andy Levine and Dan Sondike two months ago.

Anyway, here’s a mini-report from this week:

Round One: Hendrix Neblett with Mono-Red Madness

This is a close matchup, slightly favoring Spy in Game One (at least when considering conventional Mono-Red Madness decks). Personally, I have removed Voldaren Epicure for Sazacap’s Brew main deck, which tilts the matchup overwhelmingly in Red’s favor, as Sazacap’s Brew can force Spy to draw from an empty library, winning the game instantly.

Under general circumstances both decks have a four-turn goldfish, with Spy’s being more consistent due to aggressive mulligans + Spy having natural resistance to an opposing four-turn solo thanks to passive life gain in the main deck. I got a close Game One.

Hendrix got Game Two pretty convincingly by putting me in a spot where I could basically choose which way I wanted to lose. On turn two Hendrix showed my Mesmeric Fiend a hand with no third land, but a Fiery Temper, a Lightning Bolt, and a Fireblast. I took a Faithless Looting, because her best play was Faithless Loothing + Fiery Temper, which would put a Sneaky Snacker into her graveyard while potentially improving her land situation.

She naturally drew into consecutive lands, meaning that two turns later she could cast both the Lightning Bolt and Fireblast. If I went for it, she’d just kill two of my four creatures, leaving me with fewer than three bodies for Dread Return — I’d deck. So I couldn’t do that. But did I mention she had Fiery Temper, Lightning Bolt, and Fireblast? I was just dead to damage. You know how that goes.

In Game Three Hendrix played a Relic of Progenitus one turn before I was poised to go for the Spy combo win. This ended up super awkward and I just switched gears to casting two Sagu Wildlings and two Generous Ents. I played so that even if she drew Fireblast she wouldn’t be able to kill me, whereas I was coming over with hella fatties.

We discussed this later, and I told her that I thought Relic of Progenitus is very bad in Burn, pointing out that 1) it didn’t actually affect the outcome of the game, and more importantly 2) at one point she was forced to sacrifice two Mountains semi-needlessly while desperation-sacrificing her Relic to draw a card, lest she lose Lava Dart value. Between the two of us, she was the only one that lost graveyard synergy to the hate card.

If you really insist on playing an anti-graveyard card in your sideboard, it should be Faerie Macabre. That card cannot be interacted with via Masked Vandal, and even if the opponent steals it with Mesmeric Fiend, you’re playing a Lava Dart theme deck. Can you really not deal with a 1/1 with Dread Return on the stack? Again, my preference is to just play Sazacap’s Brew main deck and call it a day.

1-0

Round Two: Wen Jie Chen Xu with Grixis Affinity

Grixis Affinity was one of my two losses at Paupergenesis, and it can be one of Walls Spy’s tougher matchups. In Game One they can just deploy a Krark-Clan Shaman and that’s kind of it. Even if it is super costly, they can prevent you from having three creatures to sacrifice to Dread Return just by sacrificing four or so artifact lands. Spy doesn’t really play creature removal, so if they play a Shaman, it’s kind of there until it kills itself while making the whole world burn.

After sideboarding, they have access to Nihil Spellbomb, which is both in-color and synergistic with their Affinity for Artifacts theme.

In Game One I just won on the combo because Wen didn’t have a Shaman whereas my deck operated normally. If the opponent is just going to make 3/3s for 1 and 4/4s for 0 you’re going to race them no problem. At one point he played a Refurbished Familiar and I just discarded a Lotleth Giant to my graveyard WHERE IT BELONGED ANYWAY.

In Game Two I exploited one of the only possible lines that can give Walls Spy the advantage. Many of the Affinity deck’s red and black lands enter the battlefield tapped, and we have four Masked Vandals + eight ways to dig to them in the sideboard games. I won Ponza-style, blowing up three red and / or black lands while making tons of big guys. At the end of the game, he showed me a full grip of Refurbished Familiars and point removal that he just couldn’t cast.

When in doubt: Manascrew them!

2-0

Round Three: Ryan Davis with Axe Red

I was worried at Paupergenesis about cutting all my anti-red sideboard cards for Writhing Chrysalis but ended up beating Rally Red twice, including on camera here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2818229374

(go to 1:09)

Rally Red is a good matchup because Spy has lots of 0/3, 0/4, and even 0/5 creatures to slow the opposing beatdown while accumulating bodies to eventually sacrifice to Dread Return.

On balance Ryan is one of the strongest players in NY Pauper League with a staggering 22 trophies and many impressive win rate decks. He added Inventor’s Axe to the Red Aggro shell, which helps small attackers knock down Walls, trade, and even occasionally actually win fights against midrange fatties. I think this goes a long way in helping the Red side of the matchup.

Game One was super tense. Either of us could have won it for maybe four turn cycles. I was at 3-4 life so he could topdeck a burn card; but I also had all the lands out of my deck and ample blockers, so one Winding Way or lucksacked Balustrade Spy would end it going for Our Hero.

In the end, I drew some big life gain to slow down the assault and eventually drew into the Spy.

Game Two Ryan had a blistering attack that ran me over when I still had two lands in play. I could have made maybe one play different, but it would have just resulted in losing a turn earlier.

Game Three I mulled to five but basically drew the best possible thing every single turn. Just an endless parade of efficient blockers, life gain, and size. As with many Red Aggro games that go sideways, I eventually had more, bigger guys than he did. On balance his Experimental Synthesizers kept flipping over Mountain or whatever.

3-0 and the trophy!

In sum, I’m really liking Walls Spy right now. How did my big changes go? I used exactly one sideboard card (the fourth Masked Vandal) all night. Rock and roll.

LOVE
MIKE

Jeremy aka Bananas was understandably excited, having minted himself as the Season Five Premodern Champion. He’d been saying for weeks that this was going to be his last hurrah. Jeremy’s second child is coming in August, and I know better than anyone what a second child does to your ability to play the desired amount of Magic: The Gathering.

“You found the workaround,” I replied. “You didn’t play Gush, so you didn’t need to have read Understanding Gush: Strategy and Tactics by Stephen Menendian to win this week. Scoreboard!”

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here is Jeremy’s deck, Gush-less TerraGeddon:

He wanted to do a better post than night-of, with less glare. Which is anything but bananas.

How did Our Hero do?

Well at the very last minute, fourth-seeded Simon Penzer had to drop out, which propelled another newly minted dad, Taylor, into the final Top 8 spot.

My quarterfinals opponent was now going to shift from Pedro to Matt W. I had Pedro on a Red Aggro deck (which put me on Dreadnought), but Matt? MATT W!?!

His range is somewhere between Tinker Fling and U/G Tradewind Survival.

Before I could figure out if I should switch to Moneyball Black or something, I had to record The Princes of Pauper with Rich Bucey (incidentally the Season Four reigning Premodern League Champion). Rich thinks it ended up our best episode ever. So if you care about Pauper and what’s going on in the format thanks to Marvel Super Heroes, or just like MichaelJ Magic podcasts, give it a listen:

Anyway after the podcast recording I had maybe five minutes to decide on my deck before I left. “Cursed Totem is good against both Tinker Fling and Tradewind Survival” I thought. So I just cut two Essence Flares from my Kaplan Jam-esque sideboard and rolled with it.

(Pretend this deck has -2 Essence Flare +2 Cursed Totem)

Round 1: Matt W with Burn

Oh lol.

I didn’t think about how the rest of the Top 8 would react to Simon being replaced and rearranged with Taylor. Matt W thought he was fighting Yosef (who was for sure going to be on U/W Control) and had brought Burn.

Phew, I guess. I had natural turn-2 12/12 in Game One.

Weird fact: I drew the Brain Freeze in Game One.

Sideboard swerve: I now had two fewer Essence Flares to bring in against the many Mogg Fanatic, Jackal Pup, and Goblin Lackey decks I’d be playing on the night.

Anyway, I had the combo for turn two in Game Two also, but waited until turn three to go Dreadnought + Stifle with Vision Charm backup, having correctly predicted Matt would have at least one piece of interaction. Game Two was super close because I delayed until turn three and Matt went first, but we slipped right under the finish line.

Matt’s metagaming ended up near-perfect. There was nothing he could do about being blindsided with Dreadnought instead of U/W at the last minute; but he was rewarded with a future Yosef pairing and the great SWB on Elves; both wins for his Burn deck.

1-0

Round 2: Dan S with Rakdos Goblins

This was a heartbreaker.

Game One I mulled two unkeepable hands into a fiver with lands and spells, and basically never got there. Per usual I drew the main-deck Brain Freeze.

Game Two I mulled to a pretty weak hand, but was on the play. I had a Stifle and nothing else proactive. Dan played a Bloodstained Mire and I broke the cardinal rule — I Stifled it. My hand had Counterspell and Flash of Insight; I just needed a little time to develop… Or so I thought.

So on turn two I of course drew Dreadnought. I’ve known not to make this play since Oxidize against artifact lands! It looks so good but it doesn’t often help you win!

On his second turn Dan made a Sulfurous Spring to Cabal Therapy me for… You guessed it. I kind of monkey tilted (why would I Stifle turn one and do nothing turn two if I had Dreadnought)… But I guess he had the soul read. I went from 1/2 to a different 1/2 to 0/2 in two turns.

So I cast a bunch of Opts and was able to put it together anyway, and squeaked out a close Game Two.

Game Three I mulled a non-functional hand while Dan developed a lot of 1/1s. Just Mogg Fanatics and Goblin Matrons, though; he was terminally unlucky on Goblin Lackeys all match.

I knew he had a Goblin Tinkerer from a Matron, and had a Powder Keg on one counter. He whiffed on a Cabal Therapy and came in with three Fanatics. I could have Keg’d them right there but decided I’d take 1/1 beats and use the Keg on the Tinkerer he was about to cast. He led on Goblin Warchief, which I Foil’d, just so I could discard a Flash of Insight. I wanted to put the Flash into my graveyard for a harder dig towards Dreadnought than just paying a few mana.

So he played the Tinkerer. I upped the Keg, and popped it for two before it committed much mischief.

I got the Dreadnought I was looking for a turn later, but was still under severe pressure from the three Mogg Fanatics. Of course I blocked one. He shot me with it and I used a backup Stifle to prevent one damage. It was that close a race.

Dan then made some big play I had to stop, so I Foil’d with my whole remaining hand (including my backup Vision Charm). I peeled yet another Stifle. In came Dreadnought. I was at five with two Fanatics left in play but no cards in his hand. This was going to be close, but I thought I had it.

Dan ripped… a Smother.

Initially I thought I would have won on any non-mulligan. Because anything — a basic Swamp, Sorrow’s Path, or The Cheese Stands Alone — would have been material enough to reserve my Vision Charm the previous turn, and save my 12/12 from the Smother.

But upon reflection, Dan could have topdecked a lot more than just Smother. A haste creature probably would have been good enough, for example. Was I favored? Probably. But not a “twenty-two points with seven minutes to go” level of analytical (if not practical) victory, or anything.

What could I have done differently? The turn I upped my Powder Keg I could have saved three damage and just Countered his Goblin Tinkerer, I guess? It’s hard for me to visualize how the game would have developed from there, though. As I would have been under Warchief or Piledriver pressure instead.

Great win for Dan! Especially on breaking serve. Heck of a soul read on that Game Two Dreadnought.

1-1

Round Three: Taylor with Burn

I’ve been really proud of Taylor recently.

I mean to the degree that I get to be proud of a grownup man who is a NYC prosecutor with tattoos and progeny and all that.

But he’s really embraced the elegance of the Burn deck and jumped in with both feet to learn it in recent months. He also has a gorgeous set of Chinese Mountains that I had never seen before in his physical deck.

Taylor, like Matt W, put Yosef on U/W Control and came with Burn as the answer. In most impressive fashion, he won through a Circle of Protection: Red and a Warmth both in play… Something I could not accomplish when I was last up against Yosef with basic Mountain in front of me.

But hey! I was on the play with Dreadnought against Burn in Round Three! Gift?

Not in Game One.

I made a strategic mulligan from seven… Straight into a landless six. Five again! Like clockwork, three matches against Red Decks; three straight Game Ones with the Brain Freeze.

No Dreadnought to kill them mind you, but the Brain Freeze.

Taylor was on the draw, missed his second land drop (he mulled also) and then showed me the front of his hand, followed by the back of his hand. Blowout loss to open the set.

Lanny is never going to let me hear the end of this.

The next two games went better. I sided out the Brain Freeze. Dreadnought did Dreadnought things. Essence Flare got a Grim Lavamancer, but not before it could poke for two. Taylor had brought in 11 (!!!) cards.

Game Three was interesting. I kept a loose mix of lands and spells. I think you can’t be “Kaplan Jam” tight on mulligans in sideboard games. Everyone has interaction, so mulling into the combo is just walking into a one-for-two against someone who has a fist full of additional ways to punish you. Sideboard games are all about land and spells and card advantage, not speed. The opponent just took out 11 cards that deal damage for 11 cards that don’t. It’s not about speed at all.

Taylor asked me later if I would have kept his Game Three hand.

“I would have,” I confessed. “But it probably would have been wrong.”

He had two Blasts and an Overload, but no one drop. From the Red Deck side, you kind of have to end the game. Two Blasts and an Overload probably stops the first Dreadnought… But I have three Flashes and four Gushes in sideboard games against Red Elemental Blast. You can get the first Dreadnought, probably, but if you don’t kill me, I’m going to draw cards until I have the next one. And maybe the next one if I need it.

Game Three ended up going to the very last life point. He drew out of no one drop, and eventually had four in play: a Cursed Scroll, Grim Lavamancer, Jackal Pup, and Goblin Vandal, all to my imminently lethal Dreadnought. His Goblin Vandal was a beautiful FBB, so I had to Scryfall it… Had to confirm one Stifle would be enough to withstand it.

Taylor had four lands and one card; which I knew was a Pyroblast. I just needed to untap with my Dreadnought.

In theory he was going to Cursed Scroll me for two, attack for three, and get the last two from his Grim Lavamancer. He’d have to see not to activate his Goblin Vandal, or he’d be one short.

If he activated Vandal, that would be his last mana, and I could Stifle. He’d be one short even though I could not now Stifle the Lavamancer; I’d keep my 12/12. But my base plan, assuming he’d try to kill me instead of the Dreadnought, was to Stifle his Lavamancer.

Do you see it? I’m dead to a Mountain. If Taylor just draws a Mountain, he can Pyroblast my Stifle and either Grim Lavamancer or Goblin Vandal wins the game. Heck, he’d have the mana to do both.

He didn’t draw the Mountain.

2-1, 3d place.

Of course I wanted to be the first two-time Champion!

But prizes-wise… I’m actually happy with third?

1. First Prize: 4 original art Meddling Mages

2. Second Prize: 1 Entomb and 2 Lotus Petals

3. Third Prize: $100 in store credit

I have plenty of Meddling Mages and Entombs and certainly Lotus Petals. But $100 in store credit? That will pay for my Premodern and Pauper entries for months, and buy an oat milk latte or two along the way. Who doesn’t want a vehicle to just play more of The Gathering?

LOVE
MIKE

I was busy last week so didn’t have a lot of time to physically assemble a new deck. High on my list of things to try are Lanny’s “perfect” GAT deck (despite my personal objection to City of Brass in non-combo decks) and Mono-White Control with all the Plains-searching and big Cycling elements. The latter especially, has structural problems that would preclude me from playing it in a more serious tournament, but the last week of League (when I was already locked for Top 8) seemed like an okay opportunity to do something different.

But like I said, I didn’t have time to put a new physical deck together. Instead I rifled through ones in hadn’t played in a while, and happened on this old favorite:

This version of The Rock was largely popularized by fpawluszmtg last year, though he has since moved on to more Graveborn Muses. Last November and December gave me some of the most fun I had had playing any deck, and I just wanted play Fran’s Rats Rock more and more, despite a close loss to SWB on Elves, and an unintentional draw with Gaunology. No trophies, though. One 2-0-1 and one 3-0 when I actually loaned it to SWB, but none in my own hands. But like I said: The most fun.

This is an extremely synergistic but lean build of The Rock. Moneyball Black is now at war with itself on Cabal Therapy… With Cadillac offensive creatures like Knight of Stromgald and Nantuko Shade competing at the two… do you even want Therapy? Whereas The Rock — with both Ravenous Rats and Wall of Blossoms — provides the many creatures you can’t wait to cash in for a Cabal Therapy flashback. In fact, getting them into the graveyard can prove nice setup for Recurring Nightmare!

Devotees of The Rock cite the deck’s ability to “beat anything” even at a low rate… but that’s not true. Almost anything, maybe. But it does let you play many turns of Magic, feeling like you are making meaningful decisions all along the way even if that’s all an illusion; so like I said: The most fun.

Vendetta is the worst card. Worse even than it usually is in my deck, being Japanese. I have a vague idea it damages me… but in a way that is better, somehow, than being damaged for the same amount when being struck in combat by a Phyrexian Dreadnought. Putting legibility aside, the rise in cards like Hypnotic Specter probably warrant swapping Vendetta out. (I didn’t before Thursday’s League.)

Round One: Pedro with G/R Madness Aggro

Pedro won the roll. His deck had a lot going on. Survival of the Fittest + Anger; Wild Mongrel and its usual merry league of Lizards and Wurms; but also a burn suite à la a Premodern Sligh Deck.

In Game One I blind Cabal Therapied Pedro for Ball Lightning (a card not in his deck); and he later made a super cool play to kill my Ravenous Baloth. I Duressed him when he had only one Mountain untapped. Pedro Incinerated my 4/4 Beast, which forced me to Duress Lava Dart, being his only legal spell in hand. Pedro then flashed it back to finish off the Baloth. Cool, but I gained four in response and had a sizable material advantage despite losing my large creature on the ‘field.

In Game Two I contained Squee, Goblin Nabob and thought that would be good enough. But Pedro used the classic advantages of Madness to overwhelm my discard and disruption. On two occasions I tried to block an Arrogant Wurm with a Call of the Herd token + Ravenous Rats, and lost both combats to an Incinerate and Lightning Bolt; he trampled for six or more. Eventually Pedro overcame me with Anger + all the Basking Rootwallas, Madness’d out the old fashioned way.

In Game Three I just ground better than he did. Naturalize got the first Survival of the Fittest despite Pedro getting cheeky with Squee against Ravenous Rats. But by the mid-game I was looping a Recurring Nightmare twice a turn while hiding behind a Baloth. Any Burn player who has let the midgame get away from him knows the pain of a stream of 4/4s against finite units of direct damage.

1-0 / 2-1

Round Two: Jeremy with Kaplan Jam

Jeremy aka Bananas won the roll (how unlucky); then immediately mulled to five (how lucky!)

Only I didn’t know he was on Kaplan Jam, which mulligans Game One like it’s nothing. I had a Duress to theoretically slow him down, but one Opt and one Gush later and we were off to the sideboards.

I took out everything durdle-y or progressive for anything that could interact with a Dreadnought… Smother, the Naturalizes, and the fourth Pernicious Deed.

Game Two I opened on Duress into Cabal Therapy into Ravenous Rats; which is the draw you want in this matchup but not really a lock. At some point Jeremy Intuition’d for Stifles but I just nickel-and-dime’d him to death with a Rats and a Treetop Village.

I understand Intuition in Kaplan Jam as “the fifth Dreadnought” but don’t think it’s very good against decks like The Rock once sideboarded. What do you even want to get? If you’re going for 12/12s you had better be certain you’re going to win in the next two turns or you’re essentially conceding the long game. Even combo pieces like Stifle have mid-game context: For example you can Stifle a Pernicious Deed. Personally, I would have sided it out.

In Game Three I had a good disruptive draw again, and sat back on two Naturalizes for most of the game. Jeremy made the excellent play of locking me under a Back to Basics. I elected to just chip away for one for several turns with Ravenous Rats rather than unlock my Treetop Village. I figured I’d be okay as long as I had double Naturalize for Dreadnought.

Late in the game Jeremy Gushed on my turn to set up, which set him back two mana on his turn. If you’re going to Gush during the opponent’s turn, you want to pay five mana. It’s not usually advisable to return lands, except on your own turn. I had double Naturalize so it probably wouldn’t have mattered, ultimately, but he couldn’t defend his combo with the Counterspell in his hand.

“I didn’t buy Understanding Gush: Strategies and Tactics by Stephen Menendian,” he solemnly confessed. “And in this game it cost me.”

2-0 / 4-1

Round Three: SWB with GW Oath

SWB won the roll (my third loss of the night) but chose to give me the play. As an Oath deck, he thought giving the opponent a chance to develop their board could actually work in his favor. Or at least that’s what he told me. SWB is a maniac when we play at the 2-0.

He once blind mulligan’d to five, gave me the play, and won in a few minutes anyway. The matchup was Elves v. Stasis, and is in the long line of me losing to SWB in the last match of the evening.

Thursday was no different. I have to say I don’t know how I could possibly win. I got theoretically the draws you want, and got a lot of value off of my Deeds, but it didn’t matter.

I could manage Terravore pretty well but he just went over the top with Exalted Angel. I saw Cataclysm and Armageddon early with my discard, so held back lands.

Late in a game I was very far behind Exalted Angel’s six casting cost as a result, and he just raced me in the sky before I could get enough lands in play to fuel my Pernicious Deed.

It wouldn’t have mattered. He Oathed a Ray of Revelation into the graveyard and triggered Sylvan Library to find Cataclysm anyway. Impossible matchup.

How do you win?

I think they literally have to draw the cards that are good against you… and then not play them. That way you can discard them from hand. But you aren’t a Counterspell deck, so are going to be bad against Armageddon-type cards; and the biggest creature in your deck is a 4/4, or small compared to a Terravore or Exalted Angel.

2-1; final League score 49 points

I finished second in League standings, but it turns out losing to SWB was the best thing that could have happened to me. Had I won, I would have narrowly taken first place and knocked SWB to 40 points… basically ensuring he’d be my first round matchup. I’d rather try to beat him two rounds in, from the opposite side of the bracket.

We’re 1-1 in League Finals. He beat me Oath on Burn to take Season Two; and I returned the favor Elves over Tide to win Season Three. I had my tumor surgery the day before the Season Four Championship, so wasn’t up to defending my title. Looking forward to trying to for Season Five later this week.

Though it probably won’t be with The Rock.

LOVE
MIKE

I didn’t run them very fast. I hadn’t run anything resembling fast in more than two years. But I ran them. I always felt it was a privilege to be able to run, and I’d trained almost every day for ten years at that point.

What was most humbling to me was how precipitously my everyday health declined, when it declined. Like I said, I ran three 5Ks, then turned 50, then was debilitated on the couch by the weekend. I literally went from training on the hardest course in NYC, despite a nasty cough; to being unable to cross my studio to the bathroom, at least on two feet. My oxygen became so low the urgent care made me sign a waiver acknowledging that I was taking my health into some very wrongheaded hands against doctor’s orders before dismissing me to get an X-Ray. I was ultimately admitted to the ER and had holes poked in my lungs before “a football-sized tumor” was first found and then removed over a miraculously short two weeks.

This is what my health indicators look like pre- and post- March:

I went from above average VO2Max and a sub-60 resting heart rate to below average VO2Max and a greater-than-70 resting heart rate; and my weight is obviously up.

I’m sure I’ll write about this more over time, but maintaining an acceptable weight after 30+ years of obesity has required essentially constant training. Like, every day. Six days is a light week, and in the back of my head, a warning to not fall into bad habits. Not that I look like an athlete or anything. But I suppose I had a football-sized tumor crowding out my heart cavity, which might have been limiting progress.

What has been humbling over the last two or three months is how precipitously my body has responded to a decline in such previously consistent training. Patrick Chapin joked I was having weight loss surgery, as my tumor clocked in at just under two pounds. That’s fucking huge next to your heart, by the way. So I enjoyed some (very) short-term weight loss, but an inability to run or really train at all caught up with me.

If I didn’t have a smart scale or fat calipers I might be more confused over some of the recent changes in my body. I’ve only gained a couple of pounds (despite that initial reduction by 1.8). But my fat percentage, which hovered between 10-13% for a decade, has now ballooned to over 24%. What’s even crazier is that maybe a five pound increase in weight has translated into a three-inch bursting in waist circumference. That’s not just mathematically flabbergasting, it’s depressing, fat boy. Clark’s new favorite pastimes now include poking my belly or pinching my left nipple, in public. This is emasculating on its face, and he makes a point to do it in front of attractive women. It’s become permissible only insofar that pinching my right nipple would hurl me into a fit of screaming; which, I suppose takes a lot of the fun out of it.

What you might not know sitting across from me at the Pauper or Premodern table is that I’m in near constant discomfort. The right side of my torso can get really upset depending on what I do to it. Shower? The left side of my body is like “ooh what a warm cascade of your favorite liquid” while the right one is like “why are you jabbing me with a thousand needles?” At one point heaving my fat boy body into bed was the worst moment of the day.

When I went to the doctor for a post-surgery checkup I learned a couple of things. One was that I’ll get to enjoy multiple CT scans for the foreseeable few years, which I actually consider a privilege. I’ve always thought that insurance companies should order more tests instead of being penny pinchers around them. Sure, a single X-Ray or CT in the short-term is an additional expense, but the reason we have problems like inoperable Stage-4 cancer is almost by definition because things didn’t get found earlier. Every time someone catches one of those, the insurance company is out $7,000,000 and the outcome is likely to be very bad for the patient. Many deadly health events can be discovered earlier, allowing for much cheaper and more effective treatment… If we simply normalized wider routine tests.

The second thing I learned is that I don’t really have any structural damage in my torso. Take a second and dig a knuckle into your ribs. Humor me. It hurts, right? At least a little? And it lingers a moment even when you’re through. That’s because your ribcage is full of nerves.

The reason my right side is always bothering me is that the nice surgeons at NYU Langone spread my ribcage out to dig around and take a football-sized tumor out of my heart cavity using some frankly miraculous robots. The doctors had to cut away a little bit of my lung, and I’ll carry ugly purple scars on my side for the rest of my life, which, God-willing, will be long. But right now? I’m left with almost no actual structural damage. They avoided breaking my sternum, and most of the stuff that is supposed to be inside me still is. My nerves just got flipped into the “on” position during surgery and haven’t quieted down 100% yet. The pain is basically the ghost of some nice surgeons rearranging a nerve-rich part of my body in order to save my life. Not a lot different from when you just knuckled yourself in the ribs just now, only magnified a thousand thousand times.

A month ago doing a single push-up was excruciating. I audibly declared it a mistake and immediately had to sit down.

But there was nothing “broken” inside my body. I grit my teeth and started doing push-ups again.

Running is like push-ups times a million. No individual foot-fall is as intense, but the process is essentially never-ending, during the run. I was kind of terrified to even try. The first half-mile was like essentially getting jabbed in the ribs by Jake Paul for a round; sucks, but by definition livable. There is nothing broken inside me any more. The pain is real but also kind of imaginary. Fuck it. We ball.

Last week I ran three 5Ks.

I didn’t run them very fast.

I was actually just happy to finish the first one. Having de-trained for more than two months (and having gained a few pounds from the last time I had tried) I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. But I did. Because we ball.

The uplifting thing at this point is how quickly I progressed.

These are the mile paces I ran:

11:19

11:14

10:48

I told you they were not fast.

Yesterday, Sunday, the first day of this week, I ran a fourth 5K, at a pace of 10:22.

That’s 57 seconds per mile faster than the 5K I ran five days earlier.

My Strava app thinks this is the fastest 5K I’ve ever run, but it’s just the fastest 5K I’ve run since downloading the Strava app.

My fastest ever mile pace is 8:45, which I achieved in a race in August of 2022. At the beginning of May of 2024 I was routinely training — not racing — in the low-9s, about a minute faster per mile than my best mile yesterday. None of us knows when my tumor actually started to become a problem. Maybe it had been growing slowly for 30 years. But if I had to guess, I’d say it got serious in the summer of 2024. I was training every day, but started getting inexplicably slower. My best race of 2024 was 9:03, which was hugely disappointing at the time because it was barely faster than my training times; my last race only three months later? 10:54, which is substantially slower than I ran de-trained just yesterday. By the spring of 2025 I started to have lingering coughs that lasted for months at a time. I’d finish a run and then nearly collapse in a fit of coughing. I wasn’t getting any faster because my heart literally didn’t have room to pump the extra oxygen I needed through a body that didn’t know how sick it was getting. I wasn’t “sick” in the way that you can catch; but running forced the tumor against my expanded lungs in a way that irritated them, and they wanted to let me know.

My good friend and fitness rabbi David Tao thinks I’m going to post a personal best by the end of the summer. I was initially kind of skeptical about this, but the progress in these first four 5Ks — the very first of which, again, I wasn’t sure I was going to finish — has given me some sunlight. The recovery hasn’t been as fast as the decline the week of my birthday, but I’ll take it.

Not that I have any choice at all.

LOVE
MIKE

P.S. I don’t really know what I’m trying to accomplish with Substack, but if I finish this week with more than 100 subscribers I’ll post a picture of my tumor in the comments (presuming you can do that?). It’s gross and huge and you know you want to see it.

“They’re all taking you out on their super-yachts now, but think about it,” she said. “You buy $1 of secret imaginary money for $1.03. Does that make any sense? Stupid. Or if it does make sense it’s only because you NEED the ‘secret’ half; you need to hide your money. You’re running drugs or guns or girls on the dark web. Criminals.”

She should know. Being a crypto influencer. She had left her backpack at Eric Schmidt’s house apparently.

Today I fell into the same kind of financial dumb luck. (stupid) But when you do it it’ll be so delicious you’ll think it should be illegal. (criminal)

I’m on my way to Mexico City. We’re mad early so Clark and I get Shake Shack AND Starbucks. We stroll back to the gate with twenty minutes to spare and find my sister Jing. And no one else.

Turns out they changed the gate and now we have to go all the way across the terminal. On the way is a LEGO store.

“Let’s get mom a LEGO flowers,” she is basically bouncing out of her flats. I’m like, “Bro we’re going to Mexico where will we put it?” Also we have to cross the whole terminal.

I joke that while we’re here she should also get a Transformers Universes Beyond-type Bumblebee LEGO set. We were playing hide and seek in 1984 and Jing lost her original G1 Bumblebee in the neighbor’s yard, so this makes sense to her. “Ooh, it even transforms!”

A wealthy aunt is funding this familial Mexico trip; in part to celebrate my recent tumor-major surgery-rapid recovery; and it’s also Auntie’s birthday. Jing piles a LEGO birthday cake onto the checkout counter’s growing collection of hermetically stackable plastic.

“Hugo,” I ask Hugo (the LEGO salesperson) “are there a LOT of lunatics buying LEGO sets in the airport at 8am?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “This is nothing.” Hugo gestures to the big stuff. Star Wars Universes Beyond spacecraft. Fully articulating Harry Potter Universes Beyond Cornish Pixies and Luna Lovegood action figures (complete with Thestral). “I wish they had a Minas Tirith,” chimes in Jing-a-Ling. “It’s their latest Lord of the Rings Universes Beyond collab.”

“You appear to have spent over $100,” interjects Hugo, my new financial planner. “So you qualify for this Airport Exclusive.”

I already don’t know where we’re going to stow three boxes of LEGO on our international flight, let alone four. But Hugo puts a small airplane set onto our growing pile.

“People keep trying to get these,” he says. “But I think you can only get them at airport retail.”

The gears start turning. My friend Lan keeps buying sand worm popcorn buckets and Galactus helmets at movie releases. No idea why, but they keep appreciating on eBay. With no popcorn at all! Basically crypto.

“Jinger,” I say: “Whatever you do, don’t open that plane. Do not make that plane.”

In sum, you can spend $100 at the airport LEGO store and get an exclusive airplane set that is currently eBaying for $175. Arbitrage. Basically crypto. Don’t say I never gave you nothing.

LOVE

MIKE