Round 1: Bant
Round 2: Painter
Round 3: Jund
Round 4: Depths
Creatures (28)
Lands (12)
Spells (20)
As you can see, people still don’t play enough graveyard hate. Our opponent in the first match assembled a lot of problematic cards for us in game 1 (Batterskull return-to-hand activation actually kills an equipped Germ token and removes Bridges), but we fought through them by capitalizing on a number of judgment calls that turned out poorly for them. Games 2 and 3 were obviously rough, as Force of Will plus Grafdigger’s Cage is a really rough one to beat. When you’re facing down such a diversity of hate, it doesn’t make sense to sideboard against one element to the exclusion of others—you’re a favorite to make your deck overall worse, generating a higher probability that their unanswerable hate card will have an impact on the game.
Our other matches showcased the raw power level of the deck. This is a deck that can choose not to sideboard very easily, and you can get paid off rather handsomely for just trying to flip your deck over as fast as possible in sideboarded games. Since the deck’s game 1 win percentage is so high, it’s often worth running the risk of losing to a sideboard card in exchange for trying to get them dead on turn 3.
Since I’m at a bit of a loss for what to write about next week, I’d like to turn it over to you fine folks in the comments. Let’s say I’m interested in writing about a deck. What kind of deck would you like to see? Established deck, established archetype without a well-defined list (like I just did with Dredge), or something from out of left field? The rogue decks can’t all be as fun as Pyromancer Opposition—after all, sometimes you’re going to miss—but I’m always happy to go off the beaten path.
Until next week,
Drew Levin
@drewlevin on Twitter