I’ve recently arrived in Manila, and so far I’m very impressed. We’re staying at Avitel, a hotel owned by the family of local Magic player, Konrad Tayao. He picked us up from the airport and brought us here, and then took us to the hotel cafe where we were served amazing smoothies and fresh pineapple and mango. The fruit here is beyond epic. Seriously, I’m still experiencing some afterglow from this fruit. I realized as I was getting closer to entering this country that I didn’t actually know anything about it. I had no idea what the local food was like, no idea how easy it would be to get around in English, no idea how much things would cost. I basically didn’t know anything relevant, except I had a pretty good guess that it would be hot. So far, it’s been pretty similar to other places I’ve been in South East Asia. Hot, a lot of people on the street, English has been pretty effective, and food’s been good and cheap. I’m told that the city mostly shuts down pretty early, which is disappointing. I expect hot other places to work more like the way I understand Singapore to work, which is that people generally nap in the afternoon when it’s too hot to do anything and then stay up late at night when it’s cool. That system makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m always disappointed when other places don’t do it.
Anyway, if you’ve read my articles, you probably aren’t expecting me to spend a lot of time telling stories about my travel, and that’s not about to change. I don’t assume that’s what I’m here for. As usual, I intend to talk about Standard as I try to get a firm grasp on where the format is right now so that I can do well enough in Grand Prix: Manila to make up for my failure at Grand Prix: Sendai.
So, Sendai; let’s talk about what happened there. I played Vengevine Bant, which seems to have been the deck to play (the numbers I’ve heard, which may be entirely rumor, are 11 players with 3 Top 8 slots, which seems like one of the most ridiculous Top 8 conversion percentages ever). My version was probably the most cards off from Kibler’s winning deck, as I followed the suggestions I made in my previous article and played Nest Invaders. I’d tried the other version and I was really unhappy with how clunky some of its draws had been, and I felt like Nest Invader was really doing a good job of smoothing things out for me. Still, the Ranger package is a pretty powerful thing to give up on, and in one match against Naya I definitely felt like my deck was just underpowered compared to his (though, in fairness, his draws were excellent in both games). Maybe I just went too far, and really, one Borderland Ranger was all the deck needed. Or maybe my fairly small sample size of draws with the deck in a configuration more like Kibler’s was just too small, and I had an unusually high number of awkward draws that gave me a bad impression of the deck. Either way, I think we can safely say after that deck’s domination of GP: Sendai (and the Sunday MTGO PTQ) that Next Level Bant is for real, and should grow to be a serious part of the metagame this week.
The rest of the results from this weekend (MOCS and StarCityGames.com Standard Open) basically reaffirmed the format as we’ve known it. The real decks are UW Planeswalkers (which will usually splash for Ajani but doesn’t have to), Mythic (which will almost always be with Conscription), and Jund, followed by Bant and Naya, with Bant predicted (by me) to explode after this. Many other decks like Grixis and Red exist, but they’re not major players.
I’d like to echo some thoughts I’ve seen expressed in various places. First, this Standard format is very good right now. Jund is very much a real deck, but it’s not winning every tournament. It’s filling an extremely important role at keeping certain cards (Jace, the Mind Sculptor) in check. There is a solid established metagame that players can plan for and attack, there are a wide variety of passable rogue or second tier strategies, and there’s a lot of room for innovation.
When we see the same decks (even if it is 3-5 decks rather than 1-3) doing well week after week, one could possibly argue that I have no real basis for a claim that there’s room for innovation. I mean, how can one really know whether there’s room for innovation or not in a format? My answer to that is that I don’t believe Next Level Bant would have been “found” by the community at large. Patrick Chapin had an idea for a deck, and talked to a number of people about how to build it, and those people picked up the deck and passed it on. Eventually, a reasonable number of very good players became interested in the deck and ended up playing it in some GPs. I’m fairly confident that no one would be playing the deck right now if that hadn’t happened.
Other new strategies have also emerged and succeeded. While we were preparing for Pro Tour: San Juan, the Monument Green deck with Joraga Treespeaker, Nest Invader, and Kozilek’s Predator started to make some appearances in Standard, and we worried that it might mean more people would know about the Beastmaster deck in Block. (Seeing that list, I figured the most likely way someone would have built the deck in Standard is by porting their Block deck into Standard after working on it for San Juan. How else do you make the leap to put Kozilek’s Predator in a Standard deck?)
To make a more theoretical claim as to why I think there’s still a lot of room for innovation in Standard, I think the format is too big and there are too many powerful things to do for there not to be room to innovate. Jund has been extremely oppressive, and that has guided all creative work on the format in past months. Now there are both a lot of new tools to combat that, and enough other decks that it’s possible to make a deck that isn’t great against Jund that’s actually playable (note that I argued the opposite of this before RoE).
I believe Standard at the moment is essentially defined by what you’re doing with four mana. All the four-mana spells in Standard are so powerful right now, and most decks are really built to maximize them. Consider the most significant four-drops:
Bloodbraid Elf; Jace, the Mind Sculptor; Elspeth, Knight-Errant; Ajani Vengeant; Vengevine; Ranger of Eos; Day of Judgment.
One could, at one point in time, have made an argument for a number of other cards like Vampire Nocturnus, Rafiq of the Many, or Garruk Wildspeaker, but at the moment, I’m pretty happy with my list. Regardless of the exact list, those are some serious spells. Those spells win games, and those spells demand to have decks built around them. If you’re playing any of those cards, it’s going to inform a number of other choices made in your deck. If you’re playing Bloodbraid Elf, you’ll want to set up good cascades, ideally. If you’re playing Planeswalkers, you’ll usually want something to protect them. If you’re playing Vengevine, you’ll want to have some reasonably likely way to consistently return it to play. Day of Judgment will obviously want you to avoid playing too many creatures, and Ranger of Eos is going to need some relevant targets.
These cards sculpt decks, and some play better or worse against others. Bloodbraid Elf and Ajani Vengeant are pretty good against Jace, the Mind Sculptor, who’s pretty good against Day of Judgment, for example.
Most decks are going to be built to find new and better ways to support these powerful four-drops, or combine them in different ways than they’ve been combined before. Another option is to try to build decks to take advantage of other four-drops that exist in the format that are less expected, but still very powerful in the right deck. Examples include Polymorph and Abyssal Persecutor.
Clearly, there is no real rule that says decks have to be built around four-mana spells. This just happens to be the case for most successful decks in Standard. Mythic Conscription, I would argue, is really based more on every number other than four, and then it has some incidental Planeswalkers at four, but they’re not generally Plan A. For the most part, I’m describing the format revolving around what I consider to be its most obvious pivot point at the moment, the same way that, when talking to people outside of our playtest group for San Juan, I would describe the format as operating on its most obvious pivot point, being competing speeds. It wasn’t about which four you were building around, it was about whether you were trying to win with spells that cost two (Red creatures), four (Jace and Oracle of Mul Daya), six-seven (Summoner’s Trap, Pelakka Wurm, Avenger of Zendikar, Rampaging Baloths), or ten-plus (Eldrazi).
In San Juan, we tried to break it by stepping outside of the obvious paradigm and trying to position ourselves outside of that struggle. Similarly, in Standard, it might be possible to try to dodge question of which four to build around by trying to step into a different paradigm. Maybe the solution is to try to make fours too slow by trying to win with twos like Kargan Dragonlord. Maybe the solution is to make fours not powerful enough, and go over the top with something like All is Dust or Cruel Ultimatum. The main problem with this is that four isn’t that slow, and the defense in this format (Wall of Omens, Sprouting Thrinax) is pretty good, and for the most part, the more expensive spells aren’t really that much better than the fours. One could argue that Jund is actually trying to go over the top of the fours with extremely powerful five- and six-mana spells like Siege-Gang Commander, Sarkhan the Mad, Bituminous Blast, and Broodmate Dragon, and every now and then, it really can feel like those cards do trump any of the four-drops, but I’d say Jund is mostly a Bloodbraid Elf deck. (Actually, going bigger than Bloodbraid Elf follows fairly logically from building around Bloodbraid Elf: If you’re maximizing your cascade, you want to minimize your one- and two-drops, which means you need more mana and more big spells. If you’re playing enough mana to consistently hit four so that you can cast your Bloodbraid, you will usually hit more than that, and at that point you really want to be able to take advantage of the extra mana, particularly since you don’t really have anything else to fill out a decklist if you’re avoiding ones and twos and don’t want too many threes and fours.)
Anyway, the other way to approach this format is to solve it from within. One theoretically could have done well in San Juan by accurate predicting where along the axis that format obviously pivoted most people would end up, and positioning themselves to beat those people. Similarly, one can win a Standard tournament in any given week by playing the right 4 based deck metagamed properly to beat the other 4 based deck.
To do that, one has to understand the decks that will be played and the tools available to beat them. For the most part, I agree with the claim that Standard is largely about Planeswalkers. They are the most powerful cards, and everyone has to have a plan to interact with them, and generally have some of their own. For the most part, the best way to interact with Planeswalkers is with creatures, although there are a few other cards that interact pretty well. Blightning and Negate are excellent, Oblivion Ring is passable (Oblivion Ring is worse because you don’t really get much compensation for the fact that they’ve already gotten to activate their Planeswalker… Negate is excellent because it’s tempo positive, costing less than the Planeswalker its stopping, and it stops the Planeswalker from getting to activate at all).
I was just sent a large bowl of fruit from the hotel. How sick. I’m not generally a fan of bananas, but the other fruit here has been awesome enough that I’ll probably have to give it a shot. If that doesn’t work out, the apples and mangoes look excellent.
Where was I?
Right, interacting with fours. Vengevine is another card that requires a lot of special consideration. By itself, it’s on the verge on invalidating strategies like Grixis. If you’re going to try to plan an attrition game, you need a plan for Vengevine, as it will win all attrition wars unless it’s removed or can be consistently blocked. White is excellent at dealing with Vengevine, as Path, Journey, and Oblivion Ring all remove it, and Baneslayer Angel entirely trumps it. Even Elspeth holds it off pretty well. Vengevine is good against most Planeswalkers and traditional removal spells. It’s surprisingly bad against most creatures, as, while it does eventually beat a Sprouting Thrinax, it takes a lot of time, and invalidating a four-mana spell that a deck is built around for a number of turns is a pretty good value for a three-drop (I think I feel better about blocking a Vengevine with a Sprouting Thrinax than I feel about playing Oblivion Ring on a Planeswalker, and I’m generally pretty happy to do that). Clearly a Sprouting Thrinax isn’t most creatures, but Knight of the Reliquary and Baneslayer Angel trump it. I often see the ground get more or less hopelessly locked up, or at least there are enough meaningless blockers around that Vengevine doesn’t get to have the impact I generally want it to. Basically, I often side out Vengevine against creature decks like Mythic, the mirror, and possibly Naya, in decreasing order of likelihood of siding them out.
Bloodbraid Elf is probably best stopped by Wall of Omens, but the problem with Bloodbraid Elf is that it’s almost impossible to really invalidate its value, which is why Jund has been so successful. I think beating Bloodbraid Elf really just involves having a better plan than the rest of the deck, rather than profitably trading with that particular card. I guess Vengevine is pretty well positioned against Bloodbraid Elf in general.
Most of the dynamics like this are reasonably easy to work out. If you choose any given card to beat, it’s not hard to make a list of the cards that do that well.
If we understand that most decks right now are built to profitably use a relatively small number of cards, it should be reasonable to build a deck with a number of cards that interact well with the cards we’re trying to beat.
The most important cards to beat at this exact moment appear to be Vengevine, Elspeth, Jace, and Bloodbraid Elf. Your task should be to ask if you agree that those are the cards you’re going to be trying to beat for your next tournament based on the metagame you expect, and then to ask how you can do that. To me, UW with Wall of Omens, Spreading Seas, Oblivion Ring, ideally some countermagic for the planeswalkers and some big spells to go over the Bloodbraid seems like it could be a reasonable answer to that exact list of cards, although it’s not the direction I plan to take at the moment. Your conclusions may vary.
Actually, that’s something I meant to discuss (and here I thought I might be wrapping things up). What I really love about this Standard format is how much play there is to it. You probably don’t realize how differently that varying people play Jund. There are actually a lot of choices to make with that deck. Seriously. And that’s one of the easiest decks to play. Have you played or watched a game with Next Level Bant? Even if you don’t plan to play it in a tournament, you should really try it, just to see what’s going on with that deck. It can play aggro or attrition roles amazingly well, and switch between them instantly. It’s one of the most flexible decks I’ve ever seen, which is why I’m personally drawn to it (I always like to play decks that can take the role I want to take against my opponent, rather than those that have one thing they do so well that I’m always doing that no matter what I’m playing against).
In general, all the decks have a huge amount of play to them, and this is part of why you should be building decks to your play style if you can, which is part of why I’m really not going to recommend any deck in this article. Sometimes, there is a clear correct choice to me in a format. In this case, I don’t think there’s even a particularly clear target, let alone a particularly clear solution to it.
The question isn’t just about how cards can be answered. The question really is about how you want to answer the cards. Decks these days often play dramatically differently (and I don’t just mean better or worse) depending on the pilot.
Whatever approach you choose, good luck in your next tournament!