What I would play at the Caster Society Extravaganza
We are a little over a week until the Caster Society Extravaganza Part 2 in Houston, Texas and a lot of people still aren’t sure what to play. To be honest with you, there’s very little information out there about the state of the current metagame because there hasn’t been coverage detailing it yet. Luckily we don’t have to wait too long to see what the metagame may look like.
As of the writing of this article, we are a few days away from the Caster Society Season 2 Championship Top 8 tournament. We know the top 8 competitors for the tournament by looking at the points standings here. By playing in season 2 I’ve seen a lot of new spellsbooks emerge from Wilderness being the new set on the block and there are quite a few really good pages from the Wilderness that will stand the test of time and become staples in this game, maybe not to the extent of pages like Bookmark, but fairly close.
One lesson that I’ve learned is to always take a look at pages from past sets when new pages are released and see if anything had gotten better, and there’s one page that I’ve advocated for ever since I realized that Water, to simply put it, just got better.
Torrential River is most definitely the page that now has a big spotlight on it from the addition of a few new pages from Wilderness.
Toxic Water, Tidal Pull and Megalodon Tooth are three pages that just turned Torrential River into a page that people talked about potentially being good, to actually making it good. Toxic Water has utility in the fact that it turns Torrential River into a Wallowa Lake Crustacean or Loveland Frogman answer. Tidal Pull allows you to cycle through your spellbook faster so that you can draw your Torrential Rivers or Flood The Earth faster. Megalodon Tooth makes another page that accelerates your available aura early and can be played to fuel more draws with Torrential River.
Mishipeshu works very well with a spellbook that plays very cheap pages due to the ability to bookmark pages until you have four pages in your hand but also has the added effect of dealing 10 damage for each page you bookmarked. Mishipeshu is also a very good beastie in Lightning matchups as well, with a attack bonus against Lightning. You can also play Mishipeshu as a trap to protect pages such as your Aurafacts. Mishipeshu is an extremely underrated page that I feel will have a very good surprise factor and that can cause opponents to make game-losing misplays.
Consistancy, synergy and utility are key to good pages and good spellbooks and Torrential River offers that in spades and the craziest part about all of this is that it’s in the aura type that absolutely dominated the pre-Wilderness metagame……Water. If the Extravaganza was tomorrow, I would play the following spellbooks.
Beasties (9)
3 Chessie
2 Mishipeshu
4 Bandage Man
Artifacts (4)
2 Mermaid Scales
2 Megalodon Tooth
Spells (12)
1 Powerup Red
1 New Beginnings
2 Bookmark
3 Torrential River
3 Tidal Pull
1 Flood The Earth
1 River of Time
Potions (6)
1 Toxic Water
5 Lightning In A Bottle
Terra (1)
1 River
Aura (9)
9 Water Aura
Yes, this is forty-one pages and I believe you can get away with playing more than that and going over the spellbook minimum is something that I fight against with every fiber of my card playing being. I feel it’s fine when almost fifty percent of your spellbook can draw at least one page.
With the addition of Bandage Man the spellbook now has a way to protect early Aurafacts to allow for even earlier Torrential River plays, you can also ramp out Mishipeshu to destroy tokens and have a better game against aggro spellbooks than your normal Water spellbooks. Bandage Man also has First Strike and Frozen (3) for any beastie it blocks and is very good against early game aggression. You can also contract it for one Water aura, which fuels Torrential River plays.
You can do many things with the side-deck for this spellbook, and that’s very dependant on your metagame prediction. Generally when you go into a blind metagame, you want to do the most broken things possible and I feel Torrential River is the most broken thing you can be doing in Metazoo right now. I would use the side-deck to solidify matchups, so you can add things like First Anniversary Celebration along with more Toxic Waters. You can also add Dampen for mirror matches as well. One thing when constructing a side-deck is that you have to remember that for every page you side-in, you have to side another page out.
In closing, this is the spellbook I would play for the Caster Society Extravaganza as I feel it’s very well positioned. I feel that Frogman spellbooks will be heavily played and Torrential River has a natural advantage against it and other midrange spellbooks like Dark, Light and Flame. Fearsome Critters can be a difficult matchups but I do feel that a side-deck with pages like Bubbling Brew can help in that matchup.
Thanks again for reading and may the ZOO be with YOU!