Hey there! First and foremost, I should introduce myself:
I’m Eduardo Borges, a 21-year-old aspiring planeswalker from the land of Porto Alegre in the extreme south of Brazil. You’ve probably never heard of me, and since I’ve never made Top 8 of a professional-level event, I can’t say I’ve helped myself a lot on that front. Still, my MTG "career" has been very consistently climbing up—I’ve made Top 8 of every single local PTQ in the last two years (and multiple Magic Online ones). The last three years at Nationals I’ve lost the win-and-in round twice and got 9th the other year, and my ELO rating was good enough to qualify me for all the PTs in the last 3.5 years (til they got rid of it).
Now that I’ve talked a bit about myself, I’ll share with you my views about Innistrad Block Constructed, the format of this weekend; we have both GP Anaheim and the Magic Online Championship Series Season 5.
We have already seen a lot of different takes on the format: Team SCG Black, Team SCG Blue, CFB, the Canadians, etc. There were, though, a lot of lesser-known teams. Some did fairly well, like Robert Jurkovic’s and Matthias Hunt, while others didn’t, like Eduardo Borges‘, kindly named The Pinball Machine.
Here’s the brief story of how my team came about: GP Minneapolis Champion Christian Calcano and I were both looking for a team, so we decided we might as well make our own. We started with people we knew from IRC, like Chris Davis (Shyft-) and David Gleicher (GtF-). I also made sure to add Brazilian ringer José Dantas (kaOz.Zeh), while Calcano talked with the rest of us: Craig Wescoe, Christian Valenti, and James Impossibletospelllastname Rynkiewicz (Legacy GP Providence champion).
There was also the last minute addition of Caleb Durward, who was supposed to be on the team at the beginning but never managed to qualify until the pity invite was announced. The team’s name came from Shyft-‘s geniality; the guy has a love for puns that is comparable with LSV’s. The explanation follows:
[23:43] <Shyft-> We should be like "The Pinball Machine" or something lol
[23:44] <Shyft-> a bunch of grinders, bumpers and flippers, with Calcano being the "tilt"
Perfect, isn’t it?
Now onto what’s actually useful.
Our gauntlet from the first day of testing:
Boros
G/W Splash Huntmaster of the Fells
G/R Ramp(ish)
U/G/(R) Dredge
B/x Control
B/(W/G) Zombies
Those were probably the most obvious decks. Boros, G/W/R, and Dredge all were having some success on Magic Online before the release of Avacyn Restored and gained some sweet stuff. Naya had too many "good cards" not to be a deck, and Zombies happened to have the best mana of all those decks, since the splash, if you had any, was for seven cards max (planeswalkers, Restoration Angel, Grim Backwoods). Black control was also a thing because Curse of Death’s Hold supposedly deals a huge part of the format, and Barter in Blood was probably good enough to deal with the rest.
As soon as the spoilers started, we began to clash our brews against each other. Some of them looked like real contenders, while some of them had major flaws. Our conclusions about the above decks were the following:
- Boros was still the best deck. Didn’t matter what we threw against it, it just dealt some damage and finished off with a Devil’s Play. Nothing seemed to work against it.
- G/W/R was ok but nothing spectacular. It could hold its own against Control thanks to all the built-in card advantage from Huntmaster of the Fells / Garruk Relentless / Restoration Angel / Borderland Ranger / spell lands, but the mana was pretty bad in the early game, which really hurt its matchup against Boros. Also, you relied heavily on your 4CC creatures against the R/W menace, and sometimes you didn’t draw enough of them.
- G/R was too threat-light against Control and just wasn’t powerful enough. It could drag games longer with its early removal, but it would be usually outclassed.
- U/G/(R) was very good against non-white decks, but it could never beat a Fiend Hunter. We would think more about it if it were Reveillark level good, but that was far from the case.
- B/x was the only deck that could hold its own against Boros, but it needed a better way of racing Devil’s Play. Sigarda, Host of Herons was a huge step towards doing it, but you couldn’t play too many of those and even that wasn’t enough sometimes.
- Zombies was just underpowered against everything. It had some things going for it, but unless it had multiple of its best cards and not many of the not-so-good ones, things weren’t going to be pretty.
Fast forward to the Monday before the Pro Tour. That was the day we met Barcelona so we could finally have some 40-card testing battles. When we first started discussing Constructed, we figured we’d already have a deck (or at least serious candidates) so we could focus on Limited. Well…that’s not exactly what happened, since apparently no one had found a deck that was truly satisfying. That said we did have some major conclusions:
- Restoration Angel is the Tarmogoyf of this block. It is so big, blocking Hellriders / Riders of Gavony / Strangleroot Geist all day that we even had maindeck Thunderbolts in some of our brews. Various decks were built to try to maximize it (mainly Naya), but the mana wasn’t there. This left the best creature of the format without a home.
- Bonfire of the Damned is hands down the most powerful card in the format. At first when Caleb suggested it, we kind of shrugged it off since a Marsh Casualties can’t be that good, right? Turns out that sweeping all the little Humans is as good as advertised, but its applications are much greater. The card lets you ignore Huntmaster of the Fells and both Garruk Relentless and Sorin, Lord of Innistrad, which were our main weapons in the B/x Control brews we had. And this is not taking into account that, when it miracles, oh boy get out of the way because the savior is coming. We were so impressed that we didn’t really want Standard’s most loved 4VV Werewolf anymore. The Boros matchup wasn’t exactly stellar with Huntmaster, and now that R/W could easily trump Naya’s best card against it we didn’t pay any attention to G/W/R anymore.
We already had a lot of new brews in our gauntlet thanks to our inbred testing. Here were our top contenders as we arrived in Spain:
Creatures (11)
Lands (25)
Spells (24)
This midrange red deck was pretty good at dealing with early creatures, and when it stuck a Geist of Saint Traft fast enough it felt unstoppable. The problem was sticking the 1UW Spirit early enough; the mana was bad, and you had only four Geists. When you didn’t have something pressuring them, they’d eventually find their mana and stomp you.
It was very good against the removal-heavy control decks though, since those have a really hard time dealing with that much burn. This archetype needed something like Delver of Secrets for it to be good, but like most strategies in this format, the mana wasn’t there—turning on their removal wasn’t very good either, so the effort wasn’t justified.
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (27)
Spells (24)
This was our best "20 removal maindeck" control by a pretty large margin. Sigarda went a loooong way on making the deck actually competitive, since they can’t deal with it and it kills them dead pretty fast. The mana was surprisingly ok, but it seriously lacked card advantage. It had those awesome draws of removal-removal-Vessel-Curse-Sigarda, but it was pretty hard to catch up without draw spells to keep parity after you missed 1-2 turns of clearing the board.
Creatures (29)
- 3 Fiend Hunter
- 4 Champion of the Parish
- 4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
- 4 Hamlet Captain
- 4 Mayor of Avabruck
- 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 4 Silverblade Paladin
- 3 Riders of Gavony
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (3)
This was by far the best non-Boros aggro deck. It seems very simple, but that’s because it is—you just play dudes and smash. The key here is that the deck is VERY good at doing that, with a lot of redundancy and surprisingly good reach thanks to all your guys getting so big with Mayors/Captains in the late game. The mana was also as good as it gets in this format, and in fact the strategy proved itself by putting Rachid in the Top 8.
Creatures (28)
- 4 Elite Inquisitor
- 2 Fiend Hunter
- 4 Champion of the Parish
- 4 Doomed Traveler
- 4 Loyal Cathar
- 4 Silverblade Paladin
- 2 Lightning Mauler
- 4 Riders of Gavony
Lands (26)
Spells (6)
This was a way slower build that we made in order to defeat the pseudo-mirror. The deck is very resilient against other creature strategies, thanks to the vigilance guys coupled with Riders for some impossible board positions. It was a bit worse against control since it is a lot less punishing, but it’s very good plinking away their life bit by bit and eventually you’d find a Bonfire to finish them off. It was my main choice when I got to Europe, and both Zeh and Willy Edel played builds that resemble this one quite a lot. For reference, Edel’s list:
Creatures (28)
- 3 Fiend Hunter
- 4 Champion of the Parish
- 2 Doomed Traveler
- 3 Loyal Cathar
- 2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 4 Silverblade Paladin
- 2 Zealous Conscripts
- 3 Lightning Mauler
- 1 Kessig Malcontents
- 4 Riders of Gavony
Lands (25)
Spells (7)
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (25)
Spells (24)
This was our first attempt at making the Pillar + Snapcaster deck work, a play we liked quite a lot. Eventually it had the Bonfire problem, as in you can’t beat the card, so we gave up on it pretty quickly.
Lands (27)
Spells (33)
Those were our main attempts to make a miracle deck work. The first build pretty much never lost its gas, but by having worse mana sometimes you just got overrun. The second one was pretty much the inverse. Its only way of increasing velocity, Otherworld Atlas, helped opponents find their Devil’s Plays, which was a problem way too big for the archetype to solve.
Creatures (10)
Lands (23)
Spells (27)
This last deck is one we never really spent time on. You may notice it has no AVR cards, and that is because Zeh found it on Magic Online. We all agreed it was interesting, but we never really spent time on Mulch based Reanimator. This would end up being quite a mistake, since the team with the best performing deck, Jurkovic’s, played Mulch based Reanimator (average of 17.8 points for Constructed, almost two whole points above the second best performing team, Team SCG Black). For reference, their list:
Creatures (12)
- 3 Borderland Ranger
- 4 Huntmaster of the Fells
- 2 Griselbrand
- 1 Sigarda, Host of Herons
- 2 Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
Lands (25)
Spells (23)
Wescoe also tried to talk us into some sort of Bant Spirits deck, while GtF- pointed out how Invisible Stalker + Increasing Savagery might be a real thing. We quickly dismissed both since it was obviously way too gimmicky to work.
As soon as we got to Barcelona, Ben Weinburg and friends got together for drafting and some Constructed was discussed. Apparently, there were American groups with "outdated" Boros builds, just like the ones we had at the beginning of our testing. We remembered our mana being bad, but they even added Stromkirk Noble! When they left after the draft, we immediately put together a list, and it got pretty close to Rietzl’s from the PT itself. The main difference was that we had X sorceries instead of Mikaeus and Volleys. Rietzl’s list:
Creatures (26)
- 3 Mikaeus, the Lunarch
- 3 Fiend Hunter
- 4 Stromkirk Noble
- 4 Champion of the Parish
- 3 Cloistered Youth
- 4 Hellrider
- 4 Silverblade Paladin
- 1 Lightning Mauler
Lands (24)
Spells (10)
The deck was performing better than it "should" have against our W/R Humans, so we gave it a little bit more credit. Still, no one really wanted to play Boros besides me and Zeh (and I didn’t REALLY want to, but I’m usually not afraid to play the "best deck," so be it).
People around the house were mostly settling on Caleb’s deck, since it apparently had a very good Boros matchup. Boros was the best deck, so obviously it was going to get heavily played, right?
Turns out that after some more playtesting, Caleb’s deck wasn’t beating Boros anymore, thanks mostly to Devil’s Play and Stromkirk Noble surviving Death Wind on the play. Caleb just gave up on testing that specific matchup, settling on his deck quite "early" (Wednesday night). James, which ended up playing Caleb’s deck and missing money despite 6-0ing the Limited portion, said:
"People here are thinking Caleb’s deck beats Boros, but it doesn’t. They were trying it against builds without Devil’s Play, which turns the matchup around. I’m not sure on what Caleb’s deck beats anymore."
The reason on why he played the deck anyway is still unknown.
Seeing that we weren’t beating Boros anymore and everyone was either on Boros or bad control builds, James and I independently settled on building a straight U/R Control deck. We wanted it to be straight two colors in order to actually have enough red mana to deal with Champion of the Parish, which was always a pretty big deal for red based brews if it wasn’t killed on sight. Besides that, having that many untapped lands meant that our X spells were going to be that much better, and we wouldn’t need to use our digging for the splash colors, focusing on finding real gas instead.
We started with fairly different lists, him with fewer cantrips me with way too many. After an evening of tests, we both came to very similar builds.
In the end, this is what I played to a 7-3 record:
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (27)
Spells (24)
This deck was built focused on W/R and removal-heavy control, which were at the time the archetypes I felt would be most represented. Against aggro, you dealt with the most important creatures (Champion, Silverblade) while you played something that would eventually turn the tides (Fettergeist, Tamiyo, Lighthouse). Once you had spare removal, you usually started attacking with Fettergeist since the damage piled up real fast. When you had a Tamiyo you would usually wait, since her ultimate is close to Jace, the Mind Sculptor’s as in you win but it takes 3-4 turns.
I haven’t yet seen a deck that’s better equipped against other control decks as this one. Besides none of your cards being dead, while they usually have multiples, you actually have a very real LD plan postboard. The mana in this format is so bad that it actually works. Also, notice how Demolish-Tamiyo-Snapcaster is a natural curve; it might seem clunky, but if it keeps them off Sigarda it did what needs to be done.
You might notice that the list does not have many answers for Wolfir Silverheart, and the reason for that is: we completely missed it.
You see, it’s not that we thought the Wolf Warrior was bad—we never really considered the format to be "size based" enough for it to matter. Boros was too fast for it to matter, so we never even considered big guys. The problem is that once we added Bonfire, our W/R slowed down considerably (and then all of our other decks), which made the metagame a lot friendlier for Silverheart. Still, Naya’s mana was bad, and I managed to go 2-2 against it solely by dealing with their early guys to later lock them out of spells thanks to Tamiyo, the Moon Sage.
My other matchups were against a Dredge player, which ended up milling himself once his Splinterfrights were afraid of closed places, and five controllish decks. Four of them were demolished (ha!), but I managed to throw one of those matches away, which made my record barely enough to money.
If you’d like to play something along the lines of my deck, I’d strongly recommend a fourth Tamiyo maindeck since the card is just that good. You also probably want more Blasphemous Acts, possibly maindeck, to deal with those big bad Wolves.
I’d like to think that we were not a bunch of complete morons and that Boros is indeed a very good choice for Block Constructed. Both Sam Black and Alexander Hayne, the builders of the two breakouts decks from the tournament, talked about how their decks aren’t very well positioned against W/R. People don’t like to feel "out of control," and that is something that is way more usual when playing a hyper-aggressive strategy. You feel like you’ll lose if they have the answers, which is true for the most part, but what is also true is that the answers are so specific the majority of time they won’t have the right one in a timely fashion.
The last block PT had one clear best deck, yet only one in five players piloted it because of that fear. This last tournament we had a very good strategy, and it was played by only one in ten competitors. Boros might not have been the single best deck, but it was certainly a very good one and ended up heavily underrepresented if you take into account how powerful it is.
Talking about the weekend that is approaching, even if the matchup against Naya is bad, 40% is far from unwinnable. The deck is a real contender for whichever Block Constructed tournament you plan on playing in. For this first week I’d recommend the Hellrider build, since you have to kill them as fast as possible when facing Bant / U/W. But once the metagame settles on more combat, Humans / Riders of Gavony comes back as a fine choice once again.
I hope you enjoyed this little view on some of the not-so-famous strategies and ways of thinking from Pro Tour Avacyn Restored. I’m eager to know what you think, so please don’t hesitate to comment!
Peace out,
eduardobsg AT gmail DOT com
@eduardobsg on Twitter
EdB on Magic Online