But I shouldn’t be complaining. I was lucky, in that my rise from the ranks of PTQer to gravy train-er happened just when it did, in 2010. If I’d been two years late, you would not be reading this article right now. The next person who dreams of making it big on the Pro Tour circuit should heed this advice: don’t be from Australia, or Singapore, or Brazil, or Croatia, or if you can help it, anywhere outside the United States. I hope you’ll excuse me the conceit of using my own results to illustrate my point. I’m sure there are lots of other suitable examples, but I’m much more familiar with my own than anyone else’s.

These were Jeremy Neeman finishes in 2010:

• 8th at Pro Tour San Juan
• 2nd at Australian Nationals
• 1st at GP Sydney
• Team finalist in the World Championships in Chiba

It’s not a bad run, and it earned me 41 Pro Points, locking up level 7 for 2011. In terms of the Pro Players Club, level 7 is well and truly on the train. Going to Pro Tours is profitable even if you finish last, and going to GPs starts becoming a reasonable proposition as well.

So those were a fairly good set of finishes, even though I come from Australia and really couldn’t afford to fly 4,000 miles to most GPs. In fact, I played only one GP over the course of the entire year—the one in Sydney, only a couple hundred miles away. That means, over 2010, I earned a grand total of… 2,341 Planeswalker Points. Would that qualify me for a Pro Tour? Are you kidding!? I doubt I’d get a bye at a GP.

Past 2012, the future champions of Magic will be decided by how many GPs they can afford to play at. Nothing more, nothing less. It used to be that those at a geographical disadvantage still had a chance. A PTQ win could feed into a Pro Tour top 50, or a GP top 16 would keep the dream alive. Eventually, with enough results, you could lock up a spot in the Pro Players Club. The number of wins was what mattered. If you couldn’t travel, that was certainly a drawback because you had fewer tournaments to rack up those wins at. But if you were Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa and made level 6 in your first year on the train, you could still make it. Not anymore. The kid in Buenos Aires who dreamed of being the future, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, just had the cookie snatched away from under his nose. Unless he has an enormous amount of spare money and time, he doesn’t have a chance. If he’s merely enormously talented—well, maybe he could win a PTQ once or twice.

I don’t want to keep talking about this because other writers have already done a good job, and frankly the whole thing just leaves me feeling a little disgusted. If Wizards wants to make more money by encouraging higher GP attendance and not giving out plane tickets to people outside the US, well, that’s their choice. They are a corporation after all, and corporations have to think about their bottom line (although I’d encourage them to reconsider, in the long run, what destroying the competitive Magic scene in 20 countries is going to do to their bottom line). But them sugarcoating it and making it seem like we should be happy about the changes is what leaves me feeling nauseous.

Dear Wizards, if you’re reading this: no one is happy about the changes. When you changed the card face, or eliminated Player Rewards, or added damage on the stack (6th Edition), or then removed damage on the stack (M10), or all the other changes you’ve made over the years, well, most people complained because that’s what people do. We don’t like change. But there was always a core of sensible people who kept their heads and said, you know, the sky isn’t falling. Magic is still Magic, and hey, these new card faces actually do look kind of sweet. This time, no one is saying that! The sensible people who were once on your side aren’t anymore because this time, the sky might actually be falling! For me and for the entire community of Australian Magic players, this might be the end of competitive play as we know it. And we aren’t alone.

And Now for Something Completely Different

After I wrote that rant, I got off my computer, had lunch, and enjoyed the sunshine. If you need to cool off, I encourage you to do the same too.

The rest of this article will be strategy (hooray!). A lot of people commented on my last article, asking for updates to the U/B Control deck I won GP Brisbane with. It’s not easy to write this because I love Snapcastering Dissipate as much as the next Island-tapping fanboy, but the metagame has shifted to the point where I don’t recommend U/B Control in Standard anymore.

The decks represented in Brisbane were not the decks you see in the latest StarCityGames.com Open. Over the course of the GP, I played thirteen rounds of Standard (not including byes and IDs). I only lost two, to Wolf Run Green and U/W Humans. They were bad matchups, but luckily for me (and for Dan Unwin who also made Top 8 with the same deck) neither deck was a very large percentage of the metagame, and we could safely accept that those would be tough. Meanwhile, people were playing a ton of durdly midrange decks that U/B Control could beat all day long. U/W control was big, with maindeck Gideons, Wraths, Timely Reinforcements, and Dismember. Usually by turn 7 they’d have three dead cards in hand, and you’d have drawn about that many extra with Think Twice and Forbidden Alchemy. I played against a U/W Puresteel Paladin deck with Flayer Husks, Mortarpods, and Dismembers all over the shop. Hero of Bladehold and Puresteel Paladin don’t match up so well against Mana Leak and Doom Blade. Even the true control decks, the ones with Think Twice and Forbidden Alchemy, were good matchups because not everyone had caught on to Nephalia Drownyard. With four of those post-board, the long game was all yours.

Fast forward to a month later, and Wolf Run Green and U/W Humans are two of the most represented decks in the metagame. U/W Control is no more; no one plays Dismember main; and even the G/W Tokens deck, formerly a great matchup, is running maindeck Mirran Crusader. U/W Humans even runs Doomed Traveler now over Gideon’s Lawkeeper—as if four Grand Abolisher main wasn’t enough. The control decks are on to Drownyard and either play Ghost Quarter/Surgical Extraction or Drownyards of their own. The metagame has really toughened up against U/B.

There are still good matchups, but the deck’s big weakness—that it’s purely reactive and has to draw the right answer for the right threat—is being exploited. If they play Dungrove Elder, you have to have the Mana Leak, or you lose. If they play Grand Abolisher, you have to have the Doom Blade, or you lose. If you have the right answers, but they have Moorland Haunt, you have to have the Ghost Quarter, or you lose—and so on and so forth. Cards that are soft to either removal or counterspells are being replaced by cards that aren’t. Shrine of Loyal Legions is getting sideboard play; the ramp decks are starting to run White Sun’s Zenith; Geist of Saint Traft is replacing Hero of Bladehold.

If you are determined to play U/B—and it’s definitely an inherently strong deck—I’d make the following changes to my GP Brisbane-winning list:

• Play more Black Sun’s Zeniths. This is your out to the three-drops you can’t kill—Geist of Saint Traft, Dungrove Elder, and Mirran Crusader. It’s bad against ramp and blank in the mirror, but stellar against the aggressive white decks, frequently a 3-for-1 or better. Tapping out main phase isn’t great, but it beats losing to a Mirran Crusader, and hopefully your follow-up Sphinx should be able to crush their Garruk.
• Play another Edict or two. The utility of Doom Blade is diminishing with the growing popularity of Mono-Black Infect, as well as Mirran Crusader and all the rest of it. Also, consider a third Wring Flesh main. It’s outstanding against basically anything that plays creatures; killing Stromkirk Noble, Birds of Paradise, or Champion of the Parish turn 1 is nothing to sneeze at.
• More bombs, less durdling. If decks are becoming more resilient to purely reactive strategies, a good solution is to become less reactive. Answer into Think Twice into answer into Forbidden Alchemy is only good if they can’t get a threat to stick. If they can, Thinking Twice just wastes a lot of time that you don’t have. Them resolving Garruk is certainly bad, but you resolving Grave Titan is certainly better.

Extra Bonus Section—the top 5 most underrated commons in Innistrad draft

5th place: Spectral Flight

Removal is unusually bad in the world of Innistrad. Brimstone Volley is the only unconditional common removal spell. Harvest Pyre, Geistflame, and Dead Weight only kill small guys; Corpse Lunge needs a guy in your bin; Victim of Night doesn’t kill half the format; and none of the white removal works on Humans. That correspondingly makes cards like Spectral Flight (which is efficient enough that it would be playable in any Limited format) much better than they usually are. There’s really not that much that kills a huge flier—this card gets there more often than not.

4th place: Villagers of Estwald

This guy is just so efficient. There is a ton of 2/2s around, so having a guy that beats them is already very good and is part of the reason that you’ll almost never cut Selhoff Occultist from your blue decks. But Villagers has even more going for him. He’s a Werewolf, so he’s immune to Victim of Night. He comes in as a Human, so he can’t be Bonds of Faithed, and he can wield a Butcher’s Cleaver or Sharpened Pitchfork with the best of them. And later on, or earlier if they miss a drop, he turns into a 4/6 and beats their face in. Good early, good late, resilient, efficient, synergizes—he ticks all the boxes. He’s maybe a little behind Darkthicket Wolf, but from experience you can pick up Villagers much later.

3th place: Feeling of Dread

People have caught on to the G/W aggro deck that uses Travel Preparations to amazing effect. But U/W aggro gets to cast this card, and although it’s not quite as good as Preparations, it’s still a massive tempo swing. Think of it as a Frost Breath that’s much more flexible and basically superior in every way. If you’re drafting U/W and a Feeling comes 13th, you are permitted to do a little dance in your chair and sing “I Got a Feeling” by the Beatles (“I Got a Feeling” by the Black-Eyed Peas is also acceptable). In a similar vein, when casting Prey Upon, players are encouraged to do their best sonorous Mortal Combat-style “Darkthicket Wolf vs. Civilized Scholar. Round 1. FIGHT!”

2rd place: Typhoid Rats

Sensory Deprivation also falls into this category. These are cheap control cards that trade with aggressive creatures and buy that crucial time to let your deck get running. They’re to U/B self-mill in Innistrad draft what Wring Flesh and Doom Blade are to U/B Control in Standard. You really don’t have a lot of good two-drops, so you need something to stop you falling behind when they start out with Darkthicket Wolf into Villagers of Estwald. Rats is a little better than Deprivation because a) it’s a creature, so you’re happy to mill it or trade it off and trigger your Stitched Drakes and b) there are a lot of big dorky “must attack” creatures in this format. Hanweir Watchkeep and Galvanic Juggernaut both spring to mind, and Rats deals admirably with both.

And the winner is… Deranged Assistant!

Blue decks in Innistrad draft are all about finding the right balance between enablers (self-mill) and graveyard interaction (Unburial Rites, Makeshift Mauler, Skaab Goliath). In principle you want to take enablers earlier because having a deck with too much self-mill and not enough that takes advantage of it is much, much better than having it the other way around (one way, you at least still get to cast your spells). But most of the self-mill stuff is not all that impressive, with the exception of this guy. Deranged Assistant on turn two lets the blue deck come out firing on all cylinders. You’re usually quite mana-hungry and have very few good two-drops, so Assistant checks all the boxes. In self-mill, I take him over any blue common bar Claustrophobia.

Until next time,
Jeremy