Came across a kind of interesting G or G moment in my final round of a Modern Horizons sealed. I was playing a pretty complicated deck and was definitely running low on time. Low as in “starting game three with under five minutes to play, facing a hopeless-seeming board stall at 1 minute to go.

I go to make a lethal attack with literally 6 seconds left on my clock. And no response from my opponent (who still has over 4 minutes remaining)… their clock just keeps ticking.

It takes me a moment, but I figure out what they are doing. They’re sitting there and going to use their Sliver trigger at a random time to see if I AFK’d or alt-tabbed. I have 6 seconds to respond. I can’t F6 through, because I still have to approve of ‘Declare Blockers”. Unwilling to be angle-shot, I sat there for three minutes, snapped off a pass on the first sliver, waiting another minute, and snapped off the second. From there, the Aven got through.

So, genius or grifter? What I don’t like about it is that they weren’t playing the board state, they were playing the clock. And not in a “time expired, go to turns” sort of way. They were dead at the end of my turn, no way out. I asked LSV and he agreed that it was grifter-y. Case closed!