Originally, my plan for this weekend was to fly to Atlanta and compete in the StarCityGames.com Atlanta Standard Open. Unfortunately I neglected to purchase airplane tickets when they were $200, and somehow within a week they tripled in price. So instead I traveled to a PTQ in Erlanger, Kentucky where I battled with Polymorph as my weapon of choice.
As a Level 4 mage, my invitation to Pro Tour: Amsterdam is not awarded until the day before the event. This means I can compete in PTQs in order to earn free airfare, which in the case of Amsterdam is about a thousand dollars. So even though I am guaranteed an invitation to the event, winning a PTQ would mean I not only get to dream crush all day but I also would be able to spend my thousand dollars on something other than airfare. I’m sure I’d be able to put that money to good use in Amsterdam….
Anyway, here is the deck I played:
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (23)
Spells (30)
- 4 Rampant Growth
- 4 Polymorph
- 4 Ponder
- 3 Negate
- 3 Into the Roil
- 2 Explore
- 4 Awakening Zone
- 4 Deprive
- 2 See Beyond
Sideboard
I had been working on the list with Max Unger and was pretty confident in each of the expected matchups, except for the Mono Red matchup. The night before the tournament I did some last minute testing with Ervin Tormos, and we came up with a crazy sideboard plan for the Mono Red matchup. The problem is that they can play out an early threat or threats in the form of Goblin Guide, Plated Geopede, or whatever and then just sit there with mana open and burn spells in hand. If they do, I am on a fast clock and can never resolve Polymorph through all their cheap burn spells, which basically means I can never win unless they tap out for no reason. So the plan was to side into Overgrown Battlements and Pelakka Wurms, and just try and ramp into the fatties. Ultimately the strategy failed, and the matchup requires a better plan, but at the time we were hopefully it would pan out.
I went into the tournament on approximately one hour of sleep because for some reason the allure of 7 players in a MTGO draft queue is simply too strong for any self-respecting Magic player to overcome, even at 4am the morning of a tournament. After 3-0’ing the MTGO draft and then basically taking a short nap, I picked up Ervin and we were off to the event.
In the tournament I went 3-0 against Jund, 3-1 against Blue-White, 1-0 against White-Green Aggro, 0-0-1 against Boss Naya, and 0-1 against Mono Red with Devastating Summons.
Against Jund you basically want to Into the Roil their early threat, whether Putrid Leech or Sprouting Thrinax since this puts them in a precarious position. Either they tap out to recast the threat and risk losing to a fast Polymorph or they keep mana open and do not recast the threat and thereby give you time to draw cards and set up for a Polymorph with counter backup. If they ever tap out for something like Bloodbraid Elf or Blightning, they usually just die the following turn to Polymorph, so you will often get free wins against players who do not understand the matchup. Even those who do understand it have to know exactly what risks need to be taken and when to take them in order to beat you, i.e. tapping out for a threat and just hoping you don’t have the Polymorph yet or whatever.
After sideboard you want to bring in Spreading Seas and Narcolepsy. The Narcolepsies are great at handling the early threat and buying you time to set up for the Polymorph and the Spreading Seas will make it such that they basically can never cast a spell against you without losing the game if they do. What usually happens post-board is you make one of their lands into an Island, then draw some cards off Ponder or whatever and find another Spreading Seas and then you start casting things like Awakening Zone and Jace, the Mind Sculptor and they are confronted with the situation of tapping all their non-island lands to cast a threat or leaving mana open for Terminate and Lightning Bolt (to keep Polymorph from resolving). Eventually you are able to do something stupid like Polymorph with triple counter backup since you’re basically drawing 4-7 cards each turn. You’ll have to test the matchup for yourself to really see what I’m talking about, but trust me you definitely want to be on the Polymorph side.
+4 Spreading Seas, +3 Narcolepsy
-2 Explore, -2 See Beyond, -1 Garruk Wildspeaker, -2 Into the Roil
Against Blue-White you can do one of two things depending on how they play the game. You have as much counter-magic and card drawing as they have, so if they just want to play Draw-Go, you can focus on just never missing a land drop and accumulating counter-magic. At some point, one of you will have to cast something. If it is them, then you can untap and resolve Polymorph with counter back-up. If it is you, make it something like Awakening Zone so that if they ignore it you will eventually out-mana them to such an extent that hard casting Emrakul will just win you the game. And if they do not ignore it and choose instead to fight over it, then use it as a decoy to resolve the card that actually matters: Jace, the Mind Sculptor.
The matchup is close and slightly draw dependent, assuming they have as much counter-magic as we do, but our threats in general have a larger impact on the game than theirs. Against versions that do not run counter-magic, or run very little of it, you basically just want to ramp up to Polymorph with counter backup or wait for them to cast a Planeswalker and then go for it. If they try to Day of Judgment away Emrakul, just counter it and they’re dead. If they try to Oblivion Ring it, just Into the Roil their Oblivion Ring during their end step and attack them to death on the ensuing turn. Spreading Seas is a slight upgrade from Explore because it turns off Celestial Colonnade.
+2 Spreading Seas
-2 Explore
Playing for Top 8, I got paired against a foiled-out White-Green Aggro deck that looked very familiar. After winning a close game 1 on the back of Into the Roil targeting Oblivion Ring (unlocking Emrakul), I asked my opponent where he got his deck and he said pretty much straight from my article a few weeks ago. After the match, I talked with him about the deck, and he said he was destroying Blue-White with it all day and pointed out a powerful interaction concerning Vengevine that I had overlooked. If you cast Vengevine and they counter it, you can then cast a Student of Warfare or whatever and bring Vengevine back and attack, since Vengevine counts as the first of the two creatures required to trigger his return. This would also come up if you cast Vengevine and it dies in combat and then you just cast another creature post-combat to bring him back. It was unfortunate that I had to keep my own creation out of the Top 8, but that’s just how it had to go down.
In the quarterfinals I played against the Blue-White deck that beat me in the Swiss. This time my draws were much better than his, and I was able to stick a Jace, the Mind Sculptor both games to keep him from hitting his land drops and keeping up with my mana development. Game 1 I went Ultimate with Jace, and game 2 I cast Polymorph and Deprived his Day of Judgment for the win.
In the semifinals I played against the lone Mono Red deck in the Top 8. I would rather have played against anyone else, but at least I got to see whether our sideboard plan would work. After all, I did dedicate over half my sideboard specifically to winning this matchup. He won the die roll and crushed me game 1 with Goblin Guide, Plated Geopede, Goblin Bushwhacker, and a pair of 3/3 Elementals thanks to Devastating Summons. Game 2 I brought in the Pelakka Wurms and Overgrown Battlements in an attempt to set up some blocks and ramp up to 7/7 life gain creatures, but unfortunately I could not find any of the Wurms fast enough, and died to double Lightning Bolt with nine lands on the board and Pelakka Wurm on top of my deck.
Even though I never drew any of the 8 sideboard cards, I think I’d probably be better served by something like Fog and Vines of Vastwood, or maybe even by Living Destiny and Emrakul. Adding White to the deck is another option, though it makes the mana obviously worse. Iona is not a reasonable enough solution on its own because the problem isn’t that we don’t have a good enough threat to Polymorph into, but rather that Polymorph can never resolve in the face of cheap burn spells. Fog acts as a cheap life gain spell, and Vines of Vastwood ensures that Polymorph resolves. In theory, this could work, but I would test it out first since we all know how my last theory for the matchup turned out. Actually, this theory is more Max’s than mine, so it’s probably more likely to work out since he is a metagame genius. If anyone decides to test it or knows of a proven strategy for beating mono red with polymorph, I would appreciate if you let me know in the forums or on Facebook.
Moving forward, I believe Polymorph is a top contender. It is still the front-runner in terms of well-positioned deck for the tournament (given its ability to compete with Jund and Blue-White), but Blue-White with heavy counter-magic and White Weenie are each reasonable options as well. Mono Red with Devastating Summons is a real deck and you need to be prepared for it since strong pilots will be attracted to it and will go deep into tournaments with it. Boss Naya is fading in terms of both popularity and relative power, and Mythic Bant is likely to get supplanted by Sovereign Bant, given Matt Sperling west coast (alition) victory and its respectable performance in the StarCityGames.com Atlanta Standard Open. The only Tier 1 decks right now though are Jund and Blue-White. There is a noticeable drop-off after those two decks. So in order to win a tournament, you need to have strong game against both of them. Polymorph brings that, but at the expense of really needing to mise against the Red deck. I would recommend trying out this list and getting a feel for it. It punishes opposing misplays better than any other deck (“Oops, that’s a 15/15, I guess tapping out was bad”), and no other deck allows you to deck the opponent by going ultimate with Jace, the Mind Sculptor game 1 and then annihilate every single one of your opponent’s permanents while attacking them for 15 the next game. This happened in my quarterfinals matchup. In short, the deck is very powerful, well-positioned, punishes opposing mistakes, and is extremely fun (especially for people who love to draw cards).
Here are the changes I would make for next week:
Maindeck:
-2 Explore
-2 See Beyond
-1 Garruk Wildspeaker
+4 Spreading Seas
+1 Negate
Sideboard:
-4 Spreading Seas
-4 Overgrown Battlement
-4 Pelakka Wurm
+4 Fog
+4 Vines of Vastwood
+2 Iona, Shield of Emeria
+2 Cancel
Remember how I said I went into the tournament on one hour of sleep? After playing ten rounds of Magic, one would think that it was time to go home and go to sleep, right? Well, that’s not how we roll in Cincinnati. Instead, Ervin and I grabbed some grub at Mac’s Pizzeria, bought a couple six-packs of beer at the Shell Station, and headed over to a college party where, if I remember correctly, there were a bunch of musicians, Asian girls, a rhinoceros, and some people returning from a Ludacris concert. Actually, one of these things might not have been there, but I was pretty delusional from the alcohol and sleep deprivation at this point, so everything sort of blended together. At some time around 3am, the party was dying, so obviously we go back to Ervin’s place and hop into a MTGO draft queue and somehow we 3-0 despite being neither awake nor sober. Then I went home and finally passed out. Overall, it was a fun weekend, except the part where I lost to the Red deck, and maybe the part where I got attacked by a rhinoceros.