The magic game where I did 10,000 damage
Jul. 16th, 2010 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI'm used to seeing numbers less than "20" in magic and numbers like 20,000 only in Japanese-cartoon inspired media, but it happened here.
Liv was playing my white-angels deck, which has many medium-sized don't-tap-to-attack flying creatures, and I was playing allies (which all say "when this or another ally comes into play, put a +1/+1 counter on this" or "...do something else" or "...do X damage to target creature where X is the number of allies you control" or "...gain X life where X is..." etc).
The allies deck is weak if the opposing deck has a way to kill individual allies, or can outrace the allies in the first few turns, but very strong otherwise, and it goes on getting stronger and stronger, because although all the allies start off about 2/2, if nothing stops them, then when you have 20 allies, they're all about 20/20 and do 20 damage to target creature every turn and gain you 20 life.
Liv drew celestial mantle and put it on a flying creature before I had any of the few flying allies to block with, which doubles her life total every time it attacks and isn't blocked, and doubled her life total all the way from 20 to 32,000.
Normally, any number more than 100 would be simply unreachable, because the cards are designed to do 20 damage over the course of a game. However, this is about the perfect fodder for the allies deck as the angels deck had no further way of stopping the allies once they got bigger than 6/6, and gained me about 100 life, so the angels would have no hope of killing me before the end of the game, even if they weren't killing nearly one angel a turn which is normally faster than the angels deck can keep playing them.
(In fact, somewhere in the middle, Liv played Day of Judgement, destroying all creatures except the one with celestial mantle, which had an umbra enchantment to protect it, to see if she could race my life total back down to 0 before I built up enough life gain again. It was probably the correct decision, although we debated if she should have played it earlier or later, but in the end didn't affect the outcome.)
At this point, the angels deck had no way of stopping the allies attacking with multiple giant creatures each turn, but even less way of damaging me, so it was simply a race to see if the allies could make a dent in 30,000 life.
Normally that would be impossible, but the allies deck built up about 20 allies, including:
* 2x Kazuul warlord, which adds another counter to each creature
* An ally that makes X mana and mirror entity, which makes all allies X/X if you spend X mana
* Mursa Pyromancer, which does X damage to any creature the opponent plays
* About 15 other allies, most of which grow bigger by 3 each turn (including the effect of the warlords).
Thus, with about 15 creatures, all 30/30 (due to mirror entity, 15 mana from ally and 15 mana from land), all with about 15 +1/+1 counters on, I was doing about 700 damage a turn, which I would never have believed.
With about ten cards left in my deck, I drew Followed Footsteps, which can put a copy of an existing ally into play each turn. If I'd played that on the mana ally (or maybe kazuul warlord), the damage would go up to about 1500 per turn.
However, that still wasn't enough to kill Liv before we ran out of cards. Neither deck had ANY way of drawing extra cards, or putting cards back in the library, so one of us lost when Liv's life total had been nearly halves, and one of us ran out of cards to draw.
Liv was playing my white-angels deck, which has many medium-sized don't-tap-to-attack flying creatures, and I was playing allies (which all say "when this or another ally comes into play, put a +1/+1 counter on this" or "...do something else" or "...do X damage to target creature where X is the number of allies you control" or "...gain X life where X is..." etc).
The allies deck is weak if the opposing deck has a way to kill individual allies, or can outrace the allies in the first few turns, but very strong otherwise, and it goes on getting stronger and stronger, because although all the allies start off about 2/2, if nothing stops them, then when you have 20 allies, they're all about 20/20 and do 20 damage to target creature every turn and gain you 20 life.
Liv drew celestial mantle and put it on a flying creature before I had any of the few flying allies to block with, which doubles her life total every time it attacks and isn't blocked, and doubled her life total all the way from 20 to 32,000.
Normally, any number more than 100 would be simply unreachable, because the cards are designed to do 20 damage over the course of a game. However, this is about the perfect fodder for the allies deck as the angels deck had no further way of stopping the allies once they got bigger than 6/6, and gained me about 100 life, so the angels would have no hope of killing me before the end of the game, even if they weren't killing nearly one angel a turn which is normally faster than the angels deck can keep playing them.
(In fact, somewhere in the middle, Liv played Day of Judgement, destroying all creatures except the one with celestial mantle, which had an umbra enchantment to protect it, to see if she could race my life total back down to 0 before I built up enough life gain again. It was probably the correct decision, although we debated if she should have played it earlier or later, but in the end didn't affect the outcome.)
At this point, the angels deck had no way of stopping the allies attacking with multiple giant creatures each turn, but even less way of damaging me, so it was simply a race to see if the allies could make a dent in 30,000 life.
Normally that would be impossible, but the allies deck built up about 20 allies, including:
* 2x Kazuul warlord, which adds another counter to each creature
* An ally that makes X mana and mirror entity, which makes all allies X/X if you spend X mana
* Mursa Pyromancer, which does X damage to any creature the opponent plays
* About 15 other allies, most of which grow bigger by 3 each turn (including the effect of the warlords).
Thus, with about 15 creatures, all 30/30 (due to mirror entity, 15 mana from ally and 15 mana from land), all with about 15 +1/+1 counters on, I was doing about 700 damage a turn, which I would never have believed.
With about ten cards left in my deck, I drew Followed Footsteps, which can put a copy of an existing ally into play each turn. If I'd played that on the mana ally (or maybe kazuul warlord), the damage would go up to about 1500 per turn.
However, that still wasn't enough to kill Liv before we ran out of cards. Neither deck had ANY way of drawing extra cards, or putting cards back in the library, so one of us lost when Liv's life total had been nearly halves, and one of us ran out of cards to draw.