Beginner's Orothe

I had some fun this weekend. While I still haven't got in my second game with malovis yet, I did get in another beginner's game today. This time, it was their second game and their first with a deck of their own creation. While I am working on building my own personalized selection of decks built from commons and uncommons to play against beginners, I haven't finished much of that yet. So, I went with my restricted Paradwyn deck.

The game started with me going through the tedious process of discarding one by one all the cards in my magi pile. I made a mistake and had assigned the piles in reverse. Once that tedious process was complete, it actually wasn't too hard to get my deck and magi pile where they needed to be and the game then began after my apologies for my mistake.

Arawan flipped first and used warp driven to get the Fog Hyren, a standard opening for this deck. With the Robe of Petals and two other creatures to compliment it, Arawan made a great opening move. The new player then flipped over Orlon and fetched the ring. Now that I actually played against this deck, so this given analysis afterwards, he probably should've only drawn the Sea Barl the magi starts with and then hoped to get another or a Deep Barl in his opening hand. As it was, Arawan fetched another Fog Hyren since the first had been properly crushed and the Robe of Petals stolen. With Arawan fetching a steady supply of creatures, the Paradwyn magi took down Orlon. When the Brother's of Vengeance flipped, they played out their entire hand including the ring they had left there. This could've given the brothers massive energy advantages, but the shortage of choices and cards in the hand probably was a root cause in their eventual doom. While they got Arawan, they had very little in the way of creatures and a single Spell Pulse had left them without relics. Ookami flipped and I had a great hand going into this part of the game. So, while they were practically down to playing whatever they drew, Ookami had tons of options. Two Hardshell Weebo and two Lahalou later, combined with a Tropical Plith to replenish my hand, Ookami was set to take on the brothers in their weakened state. An Iceberg Hyren did slow things down a little, but Ookami squeaked out the win.

After the game, I offered to give them some pointers. For the most part, their brothers deck actually shared a bunch of key similarities to my own. So, I think they've done quite well with their first deck construction. A good number of relics. Almost ideal number of creatures. And, some good choices on the spells. A little more balance in their deck, better strategy, and I look forward to seeing how they'll be doing in the very near future. Great player. I think I should've written down their name for this blog. Oh, well.... It is good to play new players of late.