Planeswalkers of Steel.
Welcome to my article for the week, this is on the subject of the limited (usually) format Ironman. Ironman is the ultimate format for making people make very difficult decisions. Why? Because when anything is put into a graveyard or
removed from the game I mean Exiled form anywhere it is ripped up, think blacker lotus for everything. What does this mean, well it means that a rather large bunch of cards are going to be suddenly not as good as before or just plain useless. Also allow me to apologise for the lack of images in this article, its just so hard to find pictures of torn up magic cards.
First here are some things that you should know. Ironman is usually played as a single elimination limited format with only one game to decide the winner. Meaning that if you loose a round you are eliminated and the pool of players grows smaller as the tournament progresses. Why do it this way? Because since you are constantly ripping up anything that dies/is exiled you are going to need more cards to remake your deck after a match. Therefore the loser gives all their remaining cards to the winner of their game, who then rebuilds his deck and soldiers onto the next match. By this logic the winner of the tournament gets all the cards that are not in the bin.
Lets begin with some mechanics that are kind useless now:
Dredge: Dredge in Ironman, though it doesn’t become complete suicide since the cards that you could dredge don’t exist anymore, it just doesn’t plain work anymore.
Unearth: pretty simple, you can only have your card once now instead of twice. Shame on you for being greedy.
Flash Back: Same as Unearth pretty much you cant have it twice.
Suspend: suspending you cards in Ironman is a straight up bad idea; you can pay mana to never use a card again. Ever. This makes
Rift Bolt and
Lotus Bloom not so good.
Cycling: Still okay I guess as long as what your cycling is bad that you don’t intend of playing later.
Echo: Paying the Costs in much better in the long run.
Threshold: Don’t expect any bonuses from it anytime soon. Those cards you have ripped up don’t count for threshold.
Imprint: Not really sure how this works but you still loose the card being imprinted.
Soulshift: Is the same as Dredge and Unearth. You don’t get you things back so its not as good.
Transmute: Like Cycling its not as good as before, you really have to discard stuff that you know you wont need later.
Transfigure: Very similar to Transmute; do you really want to sacrifice this creature for a better one that might also get ripped up and thus 2 for 1 yourself.
Recover: See Dredge.
Vanishing/Fading: You really need to time when you play these cards, you Calciderm can either swing you the game if you play it right, or get bogged down by chumps and just get ripped up without doing anything useful.
Delve: Since there are no cards to remove from your graveyard this mechanic stops being cool.
Grandeur: Not good at all, especially with
Korlash who is pretty game winning, but a Grandeur situation probably wont come up in limited very often at all.
Champion: The guy you remove isn’t coming back no matter how much you want him to.
Hideaway: See Champion
Reinforce: See Cycling
Persist: since the cards with persist actually do hit the graveyard I believe that they are in fact ripped up instead of being put into play.
Retrace: See Flashback
As you can see there are a lot of mechanics that are either severely in-effective or just plain wasteful. You really have to watch what you play when you play Ironman.
One of the best things about Ironman is how vindictive you can be when you know you are going to loose. About to be Overrun next turn? Play
Morality Shift and get rid of all those pesky cards your about to have to hand to him. Gonna get killed by a pinger in you opponents next turn
Compulsive Research away that
Birds Of Paradise and
Stomping Ground because you can (true story).
Mill is not a good strategy in Ironman since unless you can pull it off by ripping up none of your own cards you are hurting your self in the long run.
There will always be some cards that you wont really want to play i.e. Planeswalkers because there is always the chance that you will actually be able to win and walk away with yours and everyone else’s hoardings.
The first Ironman I played was at the Auckland GP, a two-headed giant side event. We played with 3 Guildpact, 2 Ravnica and 1 Dissension booster. My team-mate and I made it to the second round with some sort of Gruul/Orzhov mishmash in the first and Gruul/Izzet for the second where we were beaten by what were pretty much our first round decks with better bombs.
Its interesting watching people play, and how they make their decisions of trying to keep their really good things alive and whole while also trying to kill their opponents without destroying too much of their opponents good things since they could need them later. Me? I just play to get as many cards ripped as possible, its not that I hate them its just that’s its fun to do once in a while.
All in all a lot of people will find this format a bit of a waste of money but there will always be those who will enjoy just ripping stuff up for the hell of it. I hope some of you guys go out there and give this a try if you can find anyone who wants to play.
Next time I’m probably going to write about a funny deck that I have pulled together from all the bad cards around my room. Until then have fun.
Credits: Main Banner made by
jimbyob
