Dredge & Gifts In Modern!

And that is very generously considering Affinity and Burn decks to be beatdown. It is probably a bit fairer to count them as combo, adding up to 60% of the field!

Yes, Modern, at least Pro Tour-level Modern, really is 60% combo decks. That 40% of "everything else?" Three quarters of it uses Wild Nacatl, Snapcaster Mage, or both.

So that’s the format.

I spent a week and a half in Valencia before the PT testing. Relatively early on it became apparent that true control wasn’t really on the table, and the only appealing midrange strategies were basically blue "good stuff" decks.

I worked with Faeries quite a bit, and while the Zoo matchup wasn’t that bad (and could be made favorable), the archetype was just obliterated by Blood Moon, a card I expected to be quite popular.

Wild Nacatl decks were easy to make and to make reasonable, though I didn’t love their positioning for this event. There is a pretty high ceiling to how bad Nacatl decks can be, and you can tune them to beat any specific combo decks you want. But this looked to be a format of 60% combo spread out among a dozen different combo decks.

Deathrite Shaman being banned obviously begs the question of whether or not B/G/x can go on without it. After all, Bloodbraid Elf being banned didn’t stop Jund. My issue with B/G/x decks links back to just how diverse a mix of combo decks is out there. In a world of all combo and Zoo, it can be dangerous to play The Rock since it is so easy to draw the wrong cards at the wrong times. Of all B/G/x decks I saw at the PT, I definitely like Reid Duke’s B/G Obliterator deck the most.

Closing in on the PT, it was clear that the format was wide open and our team was unlikely to truly break it. Most of the guys on the team settled for Storm or Zoo, though only Jon Finkel was "happy" to be playing Storm and only Owen Turtenwald was "happy" to be playing Zoo. A couple played B/G, Andrew played Melira Pod, and Nassif played U/W.

Me?

I was very ready to be on board with anything the team was into, but with no deck drawing more than a third of the team, I kept looking elsewhere. I didn’t want to play Zoo or B/G for the reasons listed above, though it may also be just a case of bias. I would have been down to play either if the team felt it was the best choice, but if this many people that have all been very willing to play Zoo or B/G in the past can’t agree, that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in me.

Storm seemed a better deck than it had been previously due to the format being less strong on the whole, graveyard hate being less common, and most importantly the format being full of anti-Zoo cards (which are often terrible against Storm). I didn’t have any experience with the archetype however and was concerned about just how much different of results Finkel was able to get with the deck compared to most of the other guys that played it.

Pod could have been appealing, but it was so overrepresented on Magic Online that it seemed the format would be gunning for it (like Zoo). Finally, I didn’t get on Nassif’s U/W deck largely because he didn’t decide on it until late the night before the tournament. In retrospect, he and I should have worked more on Gifts Ungiven / Unburial Rites together, as some of the ideas in his U/W deck could have helped Gifts and I think the degenerate game plan of Gifts for Rites and Iona, Shield of Emeria or Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite could have given control the raw power it needs to compete in this format.

In the end, I was deciding between Esper Gifts and Dredge. Gifts was my preferred deck without question. It is a style I like, and while slightly more combo oriented than pure control, casting Gifts Ungiven for Unburial Rites is not all that different from casting a Cruel Ultimatum.

The Dredge deck I was considering was largely based on the deck I almost played a year and a half ago in Seattle. Unfortunately, it became apparent that everyone and their mother had Deathrite Shaman, which was enough to push the scales toward Jund.

Neither deck seemed particularly amazing, but at least they hit the format from different angles than what people were preparing for. The Dredge deck was spectacularly broken at times but fell apart at others. The Gifts deck looked like it had all the right tools at times but was a little slow at others. Both were very high-variance decks to be sure.

As an experiment, I made a spreadsheet of what I expected the metagame to be based on my analysis of previous Modern and Extended tournaments, recent Magic Online events, and discussions with top players on their perspectives of the metagame. Then I plugged in what I estimated the match win percentages for both Gifts and Dredge.

I expected the Gifts numbers to be higher, as I suspected it was more likely I was biased toward that deck. What I discovered was my estimates put the Gifts deck at just 51.2% versus the expected field while Dredge was at 55%. This realization combined with wanting to continue my push this year to overcome my biases in deck selection put me on the Dredge deck.

For reference, here is a comparison of the metagame our team predicted for this event and the actual metagame.

For the most part I am pretty happy with these estimates, though it looks like Reid Duke and a couple others that had Zoo closer to 17.5% were more on the money than these slightly overestimated Zoo numbers. Additionally, we didn’t give Auras the attention it deserved. Interestingly, Auras was also Reid’s backup deck and he correctly anticipated some increase in its use. The Faeries numbers look a little off, but that is primarily because of U/R Control occupying a similar spot in the metagame. While we did not know the form blue control with Blood Moon would take, we did anticipate it would be between 1 and 2% of the field (which proved accurate).

Going into the event, my confidence was not at an all-time high. I was confident we had a good read on the field, but I wasn’t confident in our decks. So many of the decks require so much understanding of how to play them right that it can be difficult to just switch to a new deck. Additionally, I wasn’t confident in understanding which decks beat which decks since a couple sideboard cards can make all the difference. Besides, there are so many decks that it’s difficult to get a picture of all of them against all of the others.

A few days before the PT, a bunch of people in our house were doing a fantasy draft. As always, platinum players, American Hall of Famers, and friends of the drafters were generally overvalued. I observed that while I was confident in our team compared to the field, my prediction was that the Top 8 would be much closer to a random distribution of experience of players than normal.

In fact, I predicted that less than 2.5 players in the Top 8 would have any previous PT Top 8s. Remember, only about 1.33 out of 8 players at the PT have made Top 8 of a PT before. Normally, past performance of players is a very good indicator of probability of succeeding again. This format however looked pretty clearly to have the smallest link between past performance and expected performance, or at least that was my experience in testing. When you can’t get much edge on decks and a player like Owen Turtenwald (my assessment of best player in the world at the moment) doesn’t have much room to leverage his playskill against a player like me (since there are so many combos I can play that greatly limit the points of interaction between us), you are just far more likely to see a closer to random distribution of players.

In the end, Pro Tour Born of the Gods featured just one returning Top 8 competitor. This is the first time since 1997 that this has happened to give you an idea of just how rare of an occurrence this is. Interestingly, this was also the first PT since Rome in 2009 that neither we nor Luis Scott-Vargas and company put someone in the Top 8.

This is not to say that everyone is just rolling dice. Far from it. It is no coincidence that so many of the top players in the PT already had reputations for being Modern specialists. If a Vintage Pro Tour were held, I believe several of the top finishers would be Vintage specialists.

My point is simply that the skills tested at most Pro Tours regarding adapting to new formats and building new decks are not valued nearly as highly in Modern. Instead, Modern has a metagame that is more akin to old existing Grand Prix formats. If the old format has strong dynamic elements and many points of interaction, past performance is generally a strong indicator of future results. When old formats are stagnant and feature less points of interaction, we start to see less of this correlation.

While I think Modern is moving in a good direction, I can’t help but wonder if the format would be better served by slightly less Pro Tour focus on it. Legacy is an awesome format that continues to thrive despite the last Pro Tour with a Legacy portion taking place six and a half years ago.

What if there was not a Modern Pro Tour every year but instead one every other year? Giving the format a little time to breathe might help breathe new life into it while also allowing the format more time between bannings. Modern players could get frustrated with all of the bannings that take place now, but if there was an extra year gap between Modern Pro Tours, the real world could get more time to try to solve the problems the trouble cards are causing. At some level the bans need to take place to keep things changing and interesting at the Pro Tour, but seven or eight Modern Grand Prix a year might not need as much.

Another problem with Modern is that it doesn’t showcase the new set very well. This was Pro Tour Born of the Gods, but what Born of the Gods cards saw play?

Springleaf Drum was the only one to Top 8, but that is a pretty loose use of the term "Born of the Gods card." Beyond that there was a very small amount of Courser of Kruphix; Brimaz, King of Oreskos; Bile Blight; and I think even Pain Seer, but this didn’t exactly put the brightest spotlight on the new cards.

With new cards not being highlighted, new decks infrequent, and well-known players less likely to appear at the top tables, it is very reasonable to consider what possible alternatives there could be out there.

In the meantime, it is my assessment that Manamorphose should be banned in Modern. Storm was the best performing archetype at the Pro Tour, and the archetype is highly undesirable. One could argue that the quality of players playing Storm was on average higher, but top pros did not generally average much better than the mean at this event.

Storm is highly undesirable for a few reasons:

• It is too fast. While turn 3 kills are less common than they used to be, they are not rare. Turn 4 kills are extremely common, and while turn 4 is generally an acceptable speed in Modern, Storm does it without nearly as many points of interaction as other "fast" combo decks. Twin, Pod, and Infect are vulnerable to creature removal. Scapeshift and Tron are slower and more vulnerable to mana denial and discard. Living End and Auras are slower and can still be interacted with on many more axes.
• It is excruciating to play with, play against, or  watch. It takes so long, requires so many accounting decisions that are outside the scope of interactive Magic, and is generally quite unfun for everyone involved.

Can Storm be beaten? Yes, but so can Dread Return. It doesn’t mean the game is more fun on the whole with it on top of tier 1.

Banning Manamorphose would greatly reduce the number of turn 3 kills, increase Storm’s reliance on the graveyard (making it easier to interact with), and generally decrease its power level (hopefully enough to knock it down to tier 2). Pyromancer Ascension and Past in Flames are extremely powerful cards that are likely to continue to provide a backbone to some kind of combo deck, but given how fast the deck is, how difficult it is to interact with, and how unfun the deck is, it should not be the most dominate deck in the format.

Beyond that there are a number of moves you could make; however, none are crucial immediately. Splinter Twin; Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker; Melira, Sylvok Outcast; Birthing Pod; Wild Nacatl; and Snapcaster Mage all have eyes on them, but maybe just address the Storm problem and see what the next couple of Modern GPs look like.

In retrospect, it’s possible I should have spent less time trying to break Modern and more time drafting (and just practicing Storm). Paul Rietzl made the observation that this Pro Tour more than most recently was a Pro Tour that would be defined by Limited results. There just isn’t as much edge to be gained in Modern, and frankly there is just a lot wider range of variance.

How much do you gain from three more hours of trying a new deck versus doing another draft? If you’re practicing the deck you play at the PT, that’s one thing, but if you’re trying out some brand-new deck, it’s very likely that the patterns you learn don’t apply to whatever other deck you likely end up playing. I thought he made some good points, but in retrospect he was exactly right from a utility standpoint, at least for this particular event.

This time around we took 12th, 14th, 15th, 20th, 23rd, and 26th. If any of those guys had one more win, they would have made Top 8. Jon Finkel went 2-4 in Draft. Perhaps it was just variance, but perhaps if we had spent more time and been more efficient about Limited prep, he could have eked out one more.

As a team, we had the highest Constructed win percentage at 65.35% (compared to the next two teams, which both had about 59.65%). We also had the highest overall match win percentage at 62.80% (with the next team at 59.59%). It was unfortunate to have our wins so spread out among players, but what really hurt us was our Limited performance. A win rate of 58.75% is certainly not bad, but we were clearly behind many of our peers.

1. MTG Madness: 64.91%
2. Japan: 62.96%
3. 13 Angry Men: 60.38%
4. Channel Fireball: 59.55%
5. MTG Mint Card: 59.52%

There is no profit in blaming variance, and the number of close matches teammates lost in Limited strongly suggests that better Limited preparation could have made a real difference.

Historically, my results have come from taking chances with a new deck rather than just practicing with something stock, and I don’t regret taking a chance with Dredge. There are times leading up to Pro Tours were I will advocate my teammates strongly consider a deck. Sometimes I will know a deck is awesome but not everyone will have played it enough to realize.

Before Pro Tour Theros, I knew our Orzhov deck was excellent for the event and advocated people explore it more. When I ran the blue deck through the gauntlet, however, I was convinced it was also a fantastic choice for the event. More than one person asked me if I thought it was a mistake for them to play the blue deck. I had to respond with "if it is, it isn’t by much because I believe both decks to be high tier 1 for this weekend."

This time around when asked if they were making a mistake not playing Dredge, I had to be blunt. I don’t recommend it. It isn’t particularly good compared to anything else and requires a lot of experience to pilot. Here’s my list:

Dredge

Patrick Chapin

298th Place at Pro Tour on 02-23-2014

Modern

Creatures (27)

• 2 Stinkweed Imp
• 4 Drowned Rusalka
• 4 Bloodghast
• 4 Hedron Crab
• 4 Vengevine
• 4 Viscera Seer
• 1 Skaab Ruinator
• 4 Gravecrawler

Lands (20)

• 1 Swamp
• 1 Island
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 2 Watery Grave
• 2 Steam Vents
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 3 Misty Rainforest
• 3 Scalding Tarn
• 4 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Darkslick Shores

Spells (13)

• 4 Glimpse the Unthinkable
• 1 Life from the Loam
• 4 Bridge from Below
• 4 Faithless Looting

Sideboard

• 1 Forest
• 1 Leyline of the Void
• 2 Ancient Grudge
• 3 Thoughtseize
• 3 Maelstrom Pulse
• 1 Gnaw to the Bone
• 3 Abrupt Decay
• 1 Illness in the Ranks

Most players on our team were too afraid of graveyard hate to play Dredge, but that wasn’t the real weakness of the deck. The real weakness is to fast combo since the deck lacks much interaction game 1 and is more than half a turn slower than the fast combo decks.

The gamble I made was twofold:

• Most people would not know how to play against Dredge with Bridge from Below. This is a very different deck than the Dredge decks people occasionally play on Magic Online. In testing, everyone seemed to struggle the first couple games they played against Dredge, not even knowing how or when to try to interact.
• The deck is brutally effective against people that try to interact with you. U/W/x, B/G/x, and decks full of removal spells of any sort are no good against Dredge. Counterspells are ineffective since most of your key cards are uncounterable. Discard is ineffective because most of your cards want to be discarded anyway. Creature removal is ineffective since most of your creatures come back automatically. If I got lucky and the format was heavy on anti-Zoo and anti-combo decks, I could beat up on those people, and hopefully they’d beat some of the combo decks for me.

Unfortunately, several of my opponents had played against this style of Dredge after reading this article I wrote about it a little over a year ago. If you are interested in a strategic breakdown of the deck, I recommend hopping over to the old article.

The primary game plan is to fill our graveyard with cards like Vengevine and Bloodghast and then use numerous cheap creatures and fetch lands to get them back. Viscera Seer and Drowned Rusalka give us something to do with all of our creatures that come back from the grave, and killing them turns a profit with Bridge from Below. The Zombies created by Bridge even let us get back Gravecrawlers, which can in turn jumpstart Vengevines.

Skaab Ruinator is sort of a fifth Vengevine but also serves as a way to dredge into a Zombie to kick start Gravecrawlers. That it flies and can actually block add two important elements that are sometimes weak points for us.

The best card in the deck is definitely Faithless Looting, which is sort of like an Ancestral Recall. You draw two cards, and then you get a Black Lotus (which being able to discard Vengevines and Bloodghasts sort of is). As if that wasn’t enough, it even has Flashback!

The only fundamental change to the maindeck is moving away from Izzet Charm and fully embracing Glimpse the Unthinkable. Izzet Charm was a necessary tool because of Deathrite Shaman, and it interacted with more of the combo decks at that time.

This time around it felt like we didn’t have the right tools to interact anyway, and Glimpse is the best for just goldfishing. I considered Ideas Unbound but found not being able to discard the cards as fast as I’d like a real issue, and the mana cost is far from trivial.

The most important cards in the sideboard are Abrupt Decay and Maelstrom Pulse. Some amount of one or both go in against everyone since we need to be able to interact with the opponent’s graveyard hate, whatever it is. It is not uncommon at all to board in all of them (and often much more). Game 1s are generally goldfish races, but we often look to trim copies of Bloodghast, Viscera Seer, Drowned Rusalka, Bridge from Below, Life from the Loam, and Glimpse the Unthinkable.

When we board out some number of Bridges, we should look to board out a couple of the one-mana sac outlets. When we board in tons of interaction (like Thoughtseize and removal), we should look to trim some of the cards that create card disadvantage (like Glimpse the Unthinkable). Bloodghast is the poster boy for just wanting to trim graveyard cards without disrupting things, though I would generally never cut them against reactive decks.

Forest usually comes in if we board in five or more green cards, but it’s also an important tool against Blood Moon. You could just play it maindeck, but I like being able to increase the overall mana count of the deck post-board anyway, where we often need to actually cast Vengevine instead of relying on it coming out of the graveyard.

One of the strengths of the deck is its relative ease at playing through a Grafdigger’s Cage, the graveyard hate we expected to be most common. Grafdigger’s Cage doesn’t stop Bridge from Below, and even if it does stop most of our creatures from cheating for a while, it doesn’t actually mess the graveyard up at all.

As a result, when we finally find an Abrupt Decay, Maelstrom Pulse, or Ancient Grudge, we get to do everything the Cage was stopping (as opposed to cards like Rest in Peace, Leyline of the Void, Relic of Progenitus, or Scavenging Ooze, which leave a mark even if we get rid of them). We can even dredge Stinkweed Imps with the Cage in play, stocking our graveyard for when we get around to removing the Cage.

Scavenging Ooze was unfortunately quite popular and far more effective than Grafdigger’s Cage. It is much slower than cards like Rest in Peace, but it is also quite easy for Pod, Zoo, and even some Twin decks to maindeck.

Gnaw to the Bone is a nice one-of that gives us a powerful trump against aggro. It is incredible when you pull it off, but I don’t use more since it only works when your graveyard is not being attacked (which isn’t exactly when you need help the most).

Illness in the Ranks is mostly a trace buster against Twin but also has applications against Empty the Warrens. Leyline of the Void is similarly just another good hate card against some combo decks. Yes, it is uncommon to play only one, but we don’t have room for more. The first one really is better than additional ones since they don’t stack. What if we draw it later? Well, we do have lots of looting effects.

Ancient Grudge gives us more ways to interact with hate (Grafdigger’s Cage, Relic of Progenitus), provides us with more ways to disrupt opponents (Pod), and gives us some much needed resistance to Affinity (one of our bad game 1 matchups). Similarly, Thoughtseize is a general all-purpose answer to combo decks that doubles as additional support against graveyard cards.

Would I recommend Dredge going forward? Well, I don’t think it’s the best, but it isn’t bad and does come at the format from a different angle. If reactive strategies become popular and combo less so, it could actually become a strong pick. For now, however, it’s probably not tier 1.

The other deck I considered was the aforementioned Esper Gifts deck revolving around Gifts Ungiven finding exactly Unburial Rites and one fatty (Elesh Norn or Iona). Most people can’t beat one of the two, and having a degenerate endgame is quite a bit more effective than trying to close things out with a Wurmcoil Engine or a planeswalker if you ask me. Obviously Gifts Ungiven also works well as a card advantage engine and as a safety valve when you need an answer to a problem right now. It is a strategy that has benefited greatly from the banning of Deathrite Shaman as well.

Here is my list:

Esper Gifts

Patrick Chapin

Test deck on 02-26-2014

Modern

Creatures (7)

• 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
• 2 Wall of Omens
• 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
• 3 Snapcaster Mage

Lands (27)

• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Island
• 1 Snow-Covered Island
• 2 Watery Grave
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 2 Hallowed Fountain
• 2 Calciform Pools
• 2 River of Tears
• 2 Mystic Gate
• 4 Marsh Flats
• 3 Scalding Tarn
• 4 Celestial Colonnade

Spells (26)

• 1 Wrath of God
• 1 Smother
• 3 Mana Leak
• 4 Gifts Ungiven
• 2 Spell Snare
• 1 Think Twice
• 2 Cryptic Command
• 2 Thoughtseize
• 3 Path to Exile
• 1 Day of Judgment
• 2 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 1 Go for the Throat
• 1 Unburial Rites
• 1 Lingering Souls
• 1 Supreme Verdict

Sideboard

• 1 Spell Snare
• 1 Deathmark
• 1 Coalition Relic
• 2 Thoughtseize
• 1 Negate
• 1 Celestial Purge
• 1 Dispel
• 2 Timely Reinforcements
• 2 Stony Silence
• 2 Lingering Souls
• 1 Detention Sphere

As you can see, I have it mostly set up as a control deck with a combo kill. Casting Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite or Iona, Shield of Emeria is really not that hard, either, particularly with Calciform Pool. One of the most appealing elements is the sweeper package, ensuring that Gifts Ungiven can always set up a sweeper for turn 5. This lets us get away with a little less removal than we otherwise would need. Often Unburial Rites for Elesh Norn is sufficient, but there are enough big creatures that the full-on sweeper package is a very powerful option.

Lingering Souls and Think Twice are nice random value Gifts Ungiven cards. Sometimes we get three different named copies of something and a Snapcaster Mage, but other times we don’t care what the fourth card is, so throwing a Lingering Souls or Think Twice into the mix gets us extra value. In fact, against many blue decks it is common to Gifts for Lingering Souls, Think Twice, Unburial Rites, and a land and just try to bury them under card advantage.

Timely Reinforcements is an underrated sideboard card, but I expect aggro to slightly decline in the coming weeks, so you might even be able to trim one from the board if you want. Most of the rest of the sideboard cards are pretty obvious in terms of where to apply them, though I would note that I do like Stony Silence against Pod, not just Affinity and Tron.

Celestial Purge and Detention Sphere have lots of applications, not the least of which is Blood Moon. In Blood Moon matchups, it is particularly important to find the one Plains as fast as possible since you will much more often draw into an Island.

If you can get at least one Island and one Plains, you are in fine shape and can Gifts into the combo without trouble. Celestial Purge, Detention Sphere, and Snapcaster Mage are enough of a package to let you Gifts out of Blood Moon if you have one of each, but in the event that you are responding to the Blood Moon with a Gifts, you might end up getting Coalition Relic, Island, and Snow-Covered Island to ensure you can continue to cast spells.

It is important to remember that Celestial Purge hits Creeping Tar Pit and Bitterblossom and that Detention Sphere sweeps Empty the Warrens tokens.

Other sideboard cards to consider include Leyline of the Void, Leyline of Sanctity, Illness in the Ranks, Blind Obedience, Countersquall (as another name for Negate if you want two), and more copies of Path to Exile.

While Gifts doesn’t have as swingy of matchups as Dredge, it does have some good and some bad. Melira Pod is a fantastic matchup, and in fact if I had realized that such a high percentage of the field would Melira Pod, I may have been tempted to switch back to Gifts. Most combo decks are good matchups for Gifts, with cheap discard, permission, and a fast combo kill all very effective.

The worst matchups for Gifts are blue non-combo decks. U/W/R Control, Faeries, and Merfolk all cause problems since we have some clunky cards and our combo isn’t reliable. We are also just prone to getting tempoed out by cards like Geist of Saint Traft, Bitterblossom, and Aether Vial.

Anyway, Pro Tour Born of the Gods was awesome. It was obviously disappointing to put no one in the Top 8, but we had a lot of strong showings in a tough format and learned a lot that will help us improve in the future.

Grand Prix Richmond is just a week and a half away and will give us a chance to see what the world does with the knowledge gained from this Modern Pro Tour. I will be there doing commentary, coverage, and holding a deckbuilding conference Friday focused on the Modern format. Next week I’ll be back with a look at the Modern format as a whole. Modern may not be all deckbuilding all the time, but at least we can get the kind of numbers I wish we had access to before the Pro Tour to decide which decks to focus on and practice with.

What decks do you think could be right for #GPRichmond? Let me know and we’ll discuss them next week. See you then!