Chromaticus wrote: ↑1 year ago
That's good - I was completely baffled by the wording. Sounds like you have way more control over what you get.
How do you typically go about proactive (pillowfort) protection and reactive? I haven't really ever run the pillowfort style?
Generally you set up things to defend yourself from the current threats that are also not threatening. Its true that you could use 100 tokens to block 100 threats but obviously having 100 tokens is threatening itself. I find that having a mix of proactive and reactive reactions helps me a lot. By this I mean having things like say
Fog Bank in play makes players need more threats to really attack you effectively and if they extend wide enough for that to be a problem you could then potentially utilize spot interaction assuming they push you.
I built my own list with no actual way to sweep the board but as a flip side I can build up additional defenses. I want people to be a problem but I want to also make it so that its other players problems. If you play something like
Moat it will stop opponents from attacking anyone and that forces them to deal with you before they can attack anyone. If you instead use something like
Crawlspace you just make it hard for them to turn that swarm on you. The idea of pillowfort is often to not actually deal with the problem but make it kind of hard for the problem to come at you as you just put up defenses and stall the problem onto your opponents first.
Some examples of pillowfort might be to consider:
Keep in mind these are mostly just combat based pillowfort ideas. You could also pillowfort by means of gaining life or preventing life loss. If your opponent goes into
Aristocrat tactics for instance a lot of these above ideas aren't going to work at which point you might see some lifegain to work better or even shifting to some proactive removal of the aristocrats or sac outlets.
My own personal take of what pillowfort is is propping up a bunch of defenses while keeping up spot interaction for absolute emergencies while refusing to answer most things. When I play my own mill deck I generally refuse to interact with anything that isn't going to make me lose the game essentially in the next turn. I want my opponents to be threatening and do big spooky things. If my opponents are doing big swingy things they draw the attention of the other players and I ideally only stop people from killing me. Its why I push for a lot of proactive defenses paired with instant speed interaction. In my own opinion a lot of people play control strategies wrong in that they feel like they have to interact with everything. The more you can refrain from interacting while having the option to the better off you are in my opinion. When you answer something insignificant for the next player to see you tapped out and comboing is the worst.
Some amount of building a pillowfort concept is also taking into account what you encounter in your meta and finding cards that make those strategies harder. Usually the goal is to find cards that defend only yourself and not the other players at the table and you hope to shift threats to your opponents. Any player that can be eliminated tends to help you focus any targeted milling to the leftover players.
