Update

Hey all, sorry for the sudden silence, again. Just got hit with a double whammy of work suddenly picking up and getting very busy, AND a resurgence in my depression and anxiety issues. And, to make matters worse, some of the last few decks I wrote about, like Feldon and the MW dragons deck, all collectively decided to have TERRIBLE runs of luck and I was losing SO badly that I had to seriously question whether those decks were actually any good at all, and my initially-good experiences were just "first time playing the deck" luck. Combined with my generally depressed state, it pretty much soured my enthusiasm for building and writing about my decks. Once again I felt like I had lost my touch as a deckbuilder and was churning out garbage.

Well, turns out I was just having a run of shitty luck, running out the wrong decks at the wrong time so my matchups were always awful, and I was keeping very iffy hands most of the time. I tend to try to "stress test" decks by being very conservative with my mulligans so that I can gauge how greedy/risky I can afford to be with each deck. So, I learned that the Feldon deck is acutally a pretty good deck, but it is definitely as draw-dependent as I feared. Fortunately it's relatively easy to get an acceptable keep with our group's "mull to 7 until you get something decent" rule, but I'd be very worried about playing that deck in an environment with "real" mulligans.

My Geth deck, which I have yet to post, really had a terrible run for several weeks, but since then I played two games with it - one I absolutely dominated, and the other it did perfectly well, but ultimately lost a VERY close race. I can certainly handle losing close games. I love close games. But games where I don't get to play Magic at all due to being completely shut out are miserable. I had a couple weekends of the latter CONSISTENTLY happening and it just killed my momentum. I stopped brewing and building, stopped caring about the decks I'd already brewed, etc.

But the bad luck streak appears to be mostly over. I have one new deck I just sleeved up - The Gitrog Monster. I'm sure I'll talk about that one eventually, but honestly, if you've seen a Gitrog deck already, mine's probably not going to be that unique or interesting. I'm sure I'll eventually go back to Meren or Savra - they're both more my style, but Gitrog is a very fun, very cool detour for now.

Shadows of Innistrad has also gotten me itching to rebuild my old Aurelia deck. I like Kalemne a good deal more than I thought I would, but she's just a tad too linear and commander-focused. I kind of hate it when I have a grip full of 6 of 7 good, playable cards, but just casting my commander just trumps those cards 99% of the time. Aurelia is very similar on paper, but the way the deck plays, the cards in your hand just matter way more.

But, again, I have just felt despondent and unmotivated. Hopefully, I can just tweak those decks that have been underperforming and get them back up to where I'm excited to play them and to share them with you. Until then I might be a little quiet here on the ol' blog, and sorry for that, but I just can't put up a list and say "look at this awesome deck, you should build it, even though it can't beat decks made entirely of leftover draft commons".

(I've also gotten re-obsessed with Minecraft. SUCH a time sink, that game!)