About Me

Hi there! If you’re reading this, you probably already know that my name is Kodie Yost, and I play Artifact-based Aggro decks in most formats. This ranges from Vintage Shops to Pauper + Modern Affinity, and sometimes Standard with decks like Mardu Vehicles. Here’s my story of how I found Magic, and then how I fell in love with Modern Affinity. (Be warned, it’s pretty lengthy!)

My Magic career began in 2009, right at the release of Core Set Magic 2010. I was 13 years old, going into 8th grade. My best friend in middle school had played his entire life growing up with his dad, and I had played Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up with my older brother, so it seemed like a fun way to spend the summer.

I had experience playing YGO competitively while my friend had only played MTG casually, so initially I had a little bit of advantage over him in terms of strategy and tactics, while he had experience and developed heuristics. For those unfamiliar with YGO, the game is pretty different from MTG in a lot of ways; for example, combat is completely different in several ways, which takes a lot of getting used to.

To start my collection, I went to my LGS and bought the Garruk vs Liliana Duel Deck when it released, and fell in love with the Green deck. After playing for a few weeks with my friend vs. his multitude of decks, I realized that what I liked about the Green deck was how quickly it could end the game sometimes. This led me to my first realization…

Aggro decks are what I love playing more than anything.

I built a variety of other decks throughout middle school, from “Mono-Blue Counter-Draw” to “Red-Blue Counter-Burn”, all before I discovered forums and competitive Magic.

And then the Fire Nation attacked.

Or, more accurately, the competitive bug bit me. I found a forum called Pojo when I was searching for help online one day (boy, those were the days), and began my journey into strategy articles and discussions. I started spending hours and hours a week on the forum, and then gradually on other forums, as I dove deep down the rabbit hole.

Fast forward a couple years and my playgroup is the epitome of “FNM Heroes”. We were the four or five guys who always took the first few places, and we didn’t even know there was a higher level so we felt unstoppable. Then one day our store announced they were hosting an SCG IQ, and our entire world changed. We found out about larger tournaments, with actual prizes. We were stoked.

The format was Standard, and the top deck was Solar Flare. I was playing the deck to pretty great success locally, and for a 16 year old I was pretty heavily invested in the game. I took the deck to the IQ and ended up getting beat in the Quarterfinals, which totally fired me up for more competitive Magic.

Over the course of the next few years, I traveled to a lot of Midwest Opens (back when they were one-day events) and never really did too well. I cashed a lot of side events, and I did a lot of binder grinding (before smart phones, this was an easy way to make a couple hundred bucks every weekend… paid for my traveling!), but never did anything significant.

Then college happened, and I sold my entire collection for a little over $5,000, which I promptly blew through in my first year with nothing to show for it before dropping out and diving into a career in sales.

Finding myself with a disposable income and more free time than I was used to, I decided to start playing Magic again. I had been pretty interested in Legacy when I quit playing, but in 2016 it felt like Legacy was pretty much “dead” to me. Goblins didn’t have the same “oomph” that it used to, and the Esper Stoneblade deck I used to play was almost three times as expensive as it used to be, so I looked into Modern instead.

I watched some video content, read some articles, talked to some friends who were still involved in the game, and ultimately decided to start with the BW Eldrazi Taxes deck because it was cheap and “competitive” that spring. Took it to an Open with intention of playing only in Side Events, and just got dumpstered by decks I had never seen before (Ad Nauseam, Death’s Shadow to name a couple).

I decided to buy into a Control deck, because I felt like I was generally “better” than my opponents, so I invested in Colonnades and Cryptics, spells that I had cast in the past and was happy to cast again. That was a good time, but I wasn’t having very much fun as Modern started to get more degenerate and UWx decks got even worse.

And this is when I started jumping around different decks, from Living End to Gifts Storm to Tron. I spent the summer of 2016 trying different decks, but I just wasn’t having a good time playing those decks. Then I read an article by an old pro about Aggro decks, and I remembered my fondness for attacking when I had first came to the game, so I started looking at the Aggro decks on various forums and weighing their pros and cons.

The one that many pros had championed (and to this day, still do) was Affinity. I had played versus it several times, but never really found it to be “impressive” from the other side of the table; its pilots often missed lethal, or overextended into board wipes, or lost to my SB cards, so I was tricked into believing the deck was bad for a very long time. I decided to watch a few Grand Prix and Pro Tour event coverage videos that featured the deck piloted by Pros, and that’s when I knew…

Affinity was the exact style of deck I wanted to play. 

I bought the deck in the fall of 2016, and in the spring of 2017 I took it to the SCG Open in Indianapolis. I barely missed Top 8/16 after going 8-1 on Day 1 (punted R7G3 to Will Pulliam), then lost to a UW Control deck and Ben Ragan on the mirror, before pummeling Benjamin Nikolich on Jeskai Control. That put me to 10-3 going into Round 14, so I had to win out to make Top 8, but I had the best breakers going into the round so I was confident.

I’m paired up against UW Control again, and I end up losing to a series of very tough decision points that ends up with my opponent at -7 life and a Gideon still in play. He crawls back into the game and I realize I had made a mistake several turns earlier by attacking him instead of the ‘Walker, which had cost me the game. Dead for Top 8, I was pretty dejected going into the last round versus Zan Syed on Humans, but I ended up dispatching him pretty easily 2-0 in under fifteen minutes due to the polarizing matchup, which landed me at 17th with the best breakers for my record.

So that’s the story of how I fell in love with Magic, and then with Affinity! If you’ve read this far, thank you — I’m looking forward to interacting with you, and hope you find this useful for your Artifact-based Aggression in the future.