So, things don’t stay in my head very long, I probably have better, more truly “epic” stories than this that I just don’t remember anymore, but recently I’ve been working on getting 100% of all of Story Mode. There’s some really weird stuff in Story Mode, you guys.
Take this exercise in making things hard on yourself: the “Guardians of Meletis” fight in Origins, Chapter One has an objective that is “kill 6 or more enemy creatures”, which seemed like it would mostly be an exercise in patience, because it’s got like 60 hit points and a basically harmless deck. I loaded up Nicol Bolas and figured, “okay, I’ll just sit there and do nothing while I wait for him to play 6 creatures and pick them off one by one.” Boring but easy, right?
Well, it turns out Guardians of Meletis has literally one creature in its deck: Chief of the Foundry. One buff spell, for his one creature. No removal or interaction with my side of the board at all. The rest is all creature-buffing supports and mana-gain supports. So…must’ve been twenty minutes later, after he’s played an absurd number of bad Origins common supports, I’ve killed four Foundry Chiefs when I realize, oh crap, stupid Greg must’ve filled his entire hand with buff spells, and he won’t play them on my stuff and he can’t draw any cards so he can’t play any creatures and I can’t make him discard (wrong deck for that), and so I…can’t complete the objective.
I should’ve been smart, tossed a couple discard spells in my Bolas deck to prevent that from happening again, and just given it another shot. I am not that smart, apparently; I decided, in my infinite wisdom (hah!) that the fast way to get this objective done without having to wait for him to draw into his one creature six times is to throw together a green deck with Dubious Challenge and a couple of small-ish critters with Defender that will trade with his Foundry Chief but won’t accidentally go overboard and kill him too quickly. And I don’t want to take apart any of my good green decks for this, but he’s harmless, so I load up my level 1 Garruk that I never use for anything. So, the game’s going along, he’s played a bunch of mana supports, I want to hurry things along so I drop a Dubious Challenge and force out one of his Chiefs and one of my own chump-blockers to trade with it, and then it’s his turn.
Well, all those mana supports of his trigger a massive cascade at the start of his turn. He drops a Sigil of Valor and…then I find out what that buff spell cluttering up his hand the prior game was. Helm of the Gods. Ooops. Drops 2x Helm of the Gods on the Chief of the Foundry I cheated into play for him. Suddenly I’m looking at a 12/13 with first strike, and reeeeally wishing I’d leveled up Garruk a bit more. Steamrolls my chump blocker of course. I take a beating the next turn and then scramble to kill it, only to have him drop his own Chief and immediately hit it with another Helm of the Gods. At this point I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to actually lose to a stupid Chapter One Story Mode fight.
By the time I eventually did turn it around and regain control of the battle enough to finish him off, I was at 9 life and had killed 7 of his Chiefs…6 for the objective, and 1 more because it was a turn away from killing me!
The lesson to be learned here is clear, I think: the “ultimate battle” is the one we must each fight against our own stupidity our foolish hubris ourselves. 