With Grand Prix: Boston starting tomorrow, I have been putting in as much effort as I can to get in Limited practice, be it real-life M10 experience or just MTGO tournament play to at least have a sharp Limited game (if not actually practice with the set we’re working with). Just prior to the Prerelease I had given my thoughts on the format, and those thoughts can be found here. Neatly summarized, my feelings on the format were as follows:
1. Card advantage is scarce, so cards that provide card advantage or can smooth your early draw are at a premium. Borderland Ranger is probably the best card-advantage spell that isn’t Rare.
2. Many of the colors in this format are greedy, as White, Black and Red all ask you to play a lot of these colors to get a good effect, and frankly not all of these colors are worth playing a lot of in most card-pools. Yes, Red, we’re looking at you.
3. The hazards of falling behind, as well as not having enough colored mana for your spells, both lean towards making this an eighteen-land format.
4. Barring such cards as Overrun that are clearly just amazing in the early game for shutting the game down before it’s really started, this is a draw-first format.
With several weeks of play between my first assumptions and this article, I want to take a look at the format as I thought it would look and compare it to how it actually is. We’ll also have an example Sealed pool to discuss, and another one to comment on in the Forums. First, let’s look at those assumptions of mine, because assumptions can be such damning things.
4 — “Barring such cards as Overrun that are clearly just amazing in the early game for shutting the game down before it’s really started, this is a draw-first format.”
This of course comes with the caveat of, if you know you have a play-first deck, then play first. As is, however, this requires some further exploration, because both Overrun and Sleep at Uncommon make the format quite difficult to completely nail down, as they both modify whether the format really is a draw-first format by rewarding aggressive strategies. Defensive strategies are generally favored before accounting for these two cards, in that in the fight between Runeclaw Bears and any Wall, the winner is not ‘da bears.’ The format is not hyper-aggressive, such as we see with Alara Reborn, and it is prone towards stalemating in the mid- and late-game thanks to the prevalence of defensive Walls in the format.
Overrun definitely makes this defensive plan a losing measure, however, in that drawing the game out by defensive measures only supports the defender’s deck up until the aggressor draws his Overrun. Giving him all the time in the world just gives him time to draw Overrun, after all. The same is true of Sleep, because any aggressive deck worth its salt can kill you with two unchecked attack phases just as easily as it can with one attack at +3/+3 and with Trample. Time is on your side barring these two Uncommons, but designing your deck to try to take this time is a losing proposition as many a Sealed Deck will be built around one of these two Uncommons appearing in their pool. That said, the tendency in this format is still for a lot of attrition as the removal is not plentiful and the attack phase is highly relevant, and there are not a lot of dangerous cards besides Overrun and Sleep that can keep a fast start going in the face of blockers and/or removal spells. Drawing first is thus a very valid option, unless you have valid reason to expect Sleep or Overrun and rely on blocking rather than creature removal to thin the opponent’s army.
I still think this is a draw-first format, at least in Sealed Deck, and my suggestion would mainly be to choose your Sealed Deck cognizant of the fact that you will have to face these two Uncommons (and Fireballs besides) numerous times during the day. Cheap removal goes at a premium, and Negate goes at an extremely high premium to my mind, even moreso than Essence Scatter.
3. ” The hazards of falling behind, as well as not having enough colored mana for your spells, both lean towards making this an eighteen-land format.”
Planning to draw first, as I would overall aim to do, can mitigate the need for this somewhat, as starting with eight cards is better for hitting your land-drops than starting with seven. However, the most important mana mark in this format is the four-drop, as that is where most of your ‘real’ creatures will come out to play, followed right behind by the five-drop. Missing either of these can be very deadly, and I would aim to either start with an eighteen-land deck or have multiple ways to smooth the early-game draw, such as a pair of Borderland Rangers, or a Merfolk Looter and a Ponder. Most colors have an excellent means to reward you for having more lands in play, and Blue can even just exchange those lands for spells with the aforementioned Merfolk Looter. Whether it is Armored Ascension, Fireball, Looming Shade or Howl of the Night Pack, there are plenty of things to do if you start to flood out but precious few ways to get yourself out of mana-screw thanks to the paucity of card-drawing in this format.
I would require two and prefer three or four solid ways to smooth my early game before I even considered dropping from eighteen lands to seventeen lands in this format, and once I committed myself to seventeen lands rather than eighteen I would likewise consider myself committed to drawing first rather than playing first. To look at a comparable format, Onslaught Block Limited was dominated by the turn 3 Morph and thus the three-mana and four-mana mark, where if you stumbled on mana in the early game you might as well be dead already, because it was so very hard to catch up again. This eighteen-land standard was true for beatdown and control deck alike, and included a mechanic that allowed you to spend three Colorless to cast your spells, unlike the M10 Limited format which can ask for ever-higher amounts of colored mana to make your cards worthwhile. Seventeen lands, then, should be the exception rather than the rule.
2. “Many of the colors in this format are greedy, as White, Black and Red all ask you to play a lot of these colors to get a good effect, and frankly not all of these colors are worth playing a lot of in most card-pools.”
Blue and Green are still my two favorite colors for starting a Sealed pool with, because they cohabitate nicely and don’t usually ask for a lot when it comes time to fix your mana-base around the cards. White is potent but has a lot of double-colored cards, as well as Armored Ascension that really wants you to maximize the number of Plains you play, since you want to cast it with 3+ Plains down rather than just one or two. Black is the greediest of the colors, wanting you to have all Black mana in order to make its cards work, while Red has a lot of creatures with Firebreathing, a fair number of double-colored cards, and Seismic Strike as a common removal spell, all of which ask you to play a lot of Mountains for what usually amounts to a disappointing color.
Playing more than two colors is very difficult, since there is almost no mana-fixing and most of the colors are going to have some cohabitation issues. Even Green, friendly as it usually is to neighbors, can be greedy if you’ve opened Overrun, so its normal status of ‘plays nice with others’ becomes quite the opposite when it asks you for triple Green in the mid-game to Overrun the board for victory. We’re used to a world where you are two colors, often with a dozen double-colored cards requiring you to hit both of your main colors, and then splash a third AND fourth color besides. This is NOT that world.
1. “Card advantage is scarce, so cards that provide card advantage or can smooth your early draw are at a premium. Borderland Ranger is probably the best card-advantage spell that isn’t Rare.”
These are your Common and Uncommon card advantage sources, without stretching the imagination too far:
White: Harm’s Way, Safe Passage, Undead Slayer
Blue: Alluring Siren, Divination, Merfolk Looter, Mind Control
Black: Gravedigger, Mind Rot, Sign in Blood
Green: Acidic Slime, Borderland Ranger, Elvish Visionary, Howl of the Night Pack, Windstorm
Red: Fireball, Goblin Artillery, Ignite Disorder, Prodigal Pyromancer, Pyroclasm, Sparkmage Apprentice
Other: Rod of Ruin
Note that a fair number of these are stretching the imagination, or are highly situational. Ignite Disorder is only card advantage against White and Blue creatures, and then only sometimes as it won’t always split to kill two creatures with only three damage, and Undead Slayer is only a two-for-one against a Black deck with the right creatures to target, and has to live. Safe Passage is only a card advantage source if you can trade it in combat for two or more creatures or can do something like counter a Pyroclasm or Earthquake with it, and is mostly beloved for being an answer to Overrun. Alluring Siren takes a lot of work before it does anything important, and is actually incapable of doing so if she doesn’t have sizable friends nearby. And while Fireball and Mind Control are ‘card advantage’ if you want them to be, they’re more noticeable for being game-winning spells.
So the point remains: you’re going to have to work pretty hard to get card advantage in this format, which is the danger to playing 18 lands to make sure your early game development is stable. Flooding out is not merely possible but something you should expect to happen as the game goes long, and thus the very best decks will be ones that can do something meaningful with its extra mana, whether that is swapping around Equipment or pumping Looming Shade or trading your Gargoyle Castle in for a 3/4 flier. The best thing to have is Merfolk Looter, as it usually is, as that is the main card-selection spell at Common or Uncommon and the best way to turn extra lands into useful resources.
With card advantage being the exception rather than the rule, games are going to come down to power cards and mid-game slugfests as you try to grind the game out. Grizzly Bears are quite bad at mid-game slugfests, and the stabilizing power of defensive creatures may also become a liability as Wall of Bone never attacks. Things that break through in the mid-game are well worth paying attention to, and this fact of the format is why one of my least favorite cards (Whispersilk Cloak) is remarkably effective at finishing games. I dislike this card pretty intensely, but I have to respect the fact that I see an awful lot of games being won by this equipment going unanswered, and not even necessarily on a powerful creature. Blue and White both have a fair number of fliers, and thus are excellent companion colors to whatever your main removal color is, and White even has the benefit of being a removal color itself with a surprising amount of creature elimination.
Borderland Ranger has a special place in the format, then, as it stabilizes your early-game without requiring you to build your deck to skew far enough as to aggravate this tendency to flood out as the game goes longer, and is both color-fixing and card advantage in a format that is notably lacking in either. So, too, does Cudgel Troll warm my heart, as it is a near-invincible attacker or blocker, a mighty Wall of Bone that picks off a creature per attack phase, exactly the kind of card to break through these sorts of stalemates or just make sure you live long enough to reach the beginning of that stalemate rather than die prior to it. There’s no wonder in my mind that Green is the color that most impresses me in this format, as its creatures are on average just that extra bit larger and it gets a few things no one else does to develop the game and break through stalemates.
Moving on, I wanted to take a look at a card-pool, and then dabble around a little bit to see how the toggles work on it and what it would take to make another color combination the better choice instead. The pool in question is one I have been looking at and calling ‘the nuts’, as you’ll soon see why, but it is the dabbling with it by taking portions of it out and then re-examining it that catches my interest. Here’s the pool:
Colorless: Drowned Catacombs, Pithing Needle
White: Armored Ascension, Celestial Purge, Elite Vanguard, Holy Strength, Indestructibility, Lifelink, 2x Pacifism, 2x Palace Guard, Razorfoot Griffin, Silvercoat Lion, Soul Warden, Tempest of Light, Undead Slayer, 2x Veteran Swordsmith, Wall of Faith, White Knight
Blue: Coral Merfolk, Disorient, Essence Scatter, Ice Cage, Merfolk Looter, Negate, Polymorph, Ponder, Sage Owl, Telepathy, Tome Scour, Wall of Frost, 2x Zephyr Sprite
Black: Acolyte of Xathrid, Cemetery Reaper, Child of Night, 2x Disentomb, Dread Warlock, Kelinore Bat, Looming Shade, Sign in Blood, Soul Bleed, Tendrils of Corruption, Underworld Dreams, Wall of Bone, Weakness
Red: Berserkers of Blood Ridge, Burning Inquiry, 2x Canyon Minotaur, Dragon Whelp, 2x Fireball, 2x Kindled Fury, 3x Lightning Bolt, Prodigal Pyromancer, Shatter, Sparkmage Apprentice, Trumpet Blast, Viashino Spearhunter, Wall of Fire
Green: Acidic Slime, Awakener Druid, Bramble Creeper, Centaur Courser, Deadly Recluse, Elvish Visionary, 2x Emerald Oryx, Giant Spider, Giant Growth, Llanowar Elves, Overrun, 2x Regenerate, 2x Stampeding Rhino, Windstorm
The build for this deck is pretty obvious, but we’ll be toggling that one soon enough. Red and Green are miles ahead of the other colors, and grab us immediately with a plethora of Lightning Bolts, Fireballs and an Overrun to make things miserable for our opponents. Building it as just a two-color deck, we see the following:
Creatures:
1cc: Llanowar Elves
2cc: Sparkmage Apprentice, Elvish Visionary, Deadly Recluse
3cc: Prodigal Pyromancer, Viashino Spearhunter, Centaur Courser, Awakener Druid
4cc: Dragon Whelp, 2x Canyon Minotaur, Giant Spider
5cc: Berserkers of Blood Ridge, Acidic Slime, Bramble Creeper, 2x Stampeding Rhino
6cc+:
Spells:
1cc: 3x Lightning Bolt, Giant Growth
2cc:
3cc:
4cc:
5cc: Overrun
6cc+: 2x Fireball, Windstorm
At 25 cards, this deck needs some trimming, and with two Fireballs and a good chunk of four- and five-drops I’m happy to call this an eighteen-land deck, even as others consider seventeen the standard. With the expectation that Green is far more common than anything else, I’d cut Windstorm immediately to the sideboard, powerful though it may be at defending against a board of fliers. With two Spiders and a handful of Lightning Bolts, there is no great fear of flying creatures, and this amazingly potent spell is actually a pretty poor gamble in M10 Limited as main-deck material. After that it’s mostly just curve considerations, as I call the next two worst cards Bramble Creeper and Berserkers of Blood Ridge, leaving the deck with an excellent curve and a considerable number of 3/3 and 4/4 men plus the ridiculous Red removal.
But this isn’t interesting because a nutty-good Red deck looks, well, nutty good. What is interesting is what happens when you cut the three Lightning Bolts and the Overrun, reducing Red back to a splash color and taking away Green’s “oops, I win!” so we have just Fireballs to say “oops, I win!” Replace these four with zero cards, and you see quite a different deck appear:
Colorless: Drowned Catacombs, Pithing Needle
Still of little relevance, as Blue is barely a color here and the Black has minimal reason to consider it either.
White: Armored Ascension, Celestial Purge, Elite Vanguard, Holy Strength, Indestructibility, Lifelink, 2x Pacifism, 2x Palace Guard, Razorfoot Griffin, Silvercoat Lion, Soul Warden, Tempest of Light, Undead Slayer, 2x Veteran Swordsmith, Wall of Faith, White Knight
Now serving a starring role in our deck, White gets to work with Green as the ‘removal color’ and provides some interesting additions to the creature force. It also asks us how we want to design our deck, as we can speed the game up or slow it down as we see fit by our card choices.
Blue: Coral Merfolk, Disorient, Essence Scatter, Ice Cage, Merfolk Looter, Negate, Polymorph, Ponder, Sage Owl, Telepathy, Tome Scour, Wall of Frost, 2x Zephyr Sprite
Some of my favorite things are here, as Merfolk Looter is one of the top commons of the format from my view and I really appreciate Negate for controlling those game-ending spells at a reasonable cost. Still, this color has no support and no creatures with power greater than two, and only has one of those two-power critters at that.
Black: Acolyte of Xathrid, Cemetery Reaper, Child of Night, 2x Disentomb, Dread Warlock, Kelinore Bat, Looming Shade, Sign in Blood, Soul Bleed, Tendrils of Corruption, Underworld Dreams, Wall of Bone, Weakness
Worthy of consideration, but ultimately overshadowed by the White simply due to the fact that Pacifism splashes much more easily than Tendrils of Corruption. I’d love to get to play Cemetery Reaper, as it seems like an incredibly powerful Rare, but again the creatures don’t support themselves very well, and the color is as always greedy for more Swamps than we want to give it.
Red: Berserkers of Blood Ridge, Burning Inquiry, 2x Canyon Minotaur, Dragon Whelp, 2x Fireball, 2x Kindled Fury, Prodigal Pyromancer, Shatter, Sparkmage Apprentice, Trumpet Blast, Viashino Spearhunter, Wall of Fire
Red now gifts us with two Fireballs for removal and just Sparkmage Apprentice and Prodigal Pyromancer to help out with that. For creatures of note it has Dragon Whelp, 2x Canyon Minotaur, and Berserkers of Blood Ridge, which we will have to measure against White’s offerings as we try to figure out what we are going to play.
Green: Acidic Slime, Awakener Druid, Bramble Creeper, Centaur Courser, Deadly Recluse, Elvish Visionary, 2x Emerald Oryx, Giant Spider, Giant Growth, Llanowar Elves, 2x Regenerate, 2x Stampeding Rhino, Windstorm
Still the backbone of our deck, Green has excellent creatures and a solid mana curve, even if it no longer has an Overrun.
We now compare the White, Red and Green creatures, to see what fits best:
White:
1cc: Soul Warden, Elite Vanguard
2cc: Silvercoat Lion, White Knight
3cc: 2x Palace Guard, Undead Slayer, 2x Veteran Swordsmith
4cc: Razorfoot Griffin, Wall of Faith
5cc:
Red:
1cc:
2cc: Sparkmage Apprentice
3cc: Prodigal Pyromancer, Viashino Spearhunter, Wall of Fire
4cc: 2x Canyon Minotaur, Dragon Whelp
5cc: Berserkers of Blood Ridge
Green:
1cc: Llanowar Elves
2cc: Deadly Recluse, Elvish Visionary
3cc: Awakener Druid, Centaur Courser
4cc: 2x Emerald Oryx, Giant Spider
5cc: 2x Stampeding Rhino, Acidic Slime, Bramble Creeper
We could play Red/White, Green/White, or Red/Green if we wanted to, but it seems clear to me that playing all three maximizes the removal you gain access to, even without a single fixer to assist. We then have to weigh Red versus White: Armored Ascension versus Dragon Whelp, Prodigal Pyromancer versus Undead Slayer. We can propose two different builds:
Red/Green splash White:
Spells: 2x Fireball, 2x Pacifism, Giant Growth
Creatures: Llanowar Elves, Sparkmage Apprentice, Elvish Visionary, Deadly Recluse, Awakener Druid, Centaur Courser, Prodigal Pyromancer, Viashino Spearhunter, Dragon Whelp, 2x Canyon Minotaur, Giant Spider, Berserkers of Blood Ridge, Acidic Slime, Bramble Creeper, 2x Stampeding Rhino
Lands: 8x Forest, 7x Mountain, 3x Plains
White/Green splash Red:
Spells: 2x Fireball, 2x Pacifism, Armored Ascension, Giant Growth
Creatures: Llanowar Elves, Elite Vanguard, White Knight, Elvish Visionary, Deadly Recluse, 2x Veteran Swordsmith, Undead Slayer, Awakener Druid, Centaur Courser, Giant Spider, Razorfoot Griffin, Acidic Slime, Bramble Creeper, 2x Stampeding Rhino
Lands: 8x Plains, 7x Forest, 3x Mountain
I find this an interesting exercise to explore because it raises the question: play versus draw, aggro versus control or somewhere in between? The crazy Lightning Bolt deck was clearly a control deck, in that it wanted to draw first and get that extra card to work with, since it could so very easily point Lightning Bolts at early plays for incredible tempo gains, stabilizing the board quickly and taking control with its fatties. The W/G deck is clearly a beatdown deck, with its slight Soldier theme potentially pumping a very aggressive start indeed if you lead with Vanguard into double Swordsmith. And aggressive is a good thing to be when you have the cards for it, which the G/W deck has to an impressive degree: it can play the tempo game by playing a few significant clocks and then dropping removal on the first significant blocker, and leave the late-game to a few fliers or some 4/4 tramplers.
But compare the R/G base to the G/W base. You can’t play both, and have to decide between the two, even if you decide to acknowledge both and sideboard into the other ‘when appropriate’. I’d define the G/W deck as an aggressive deck, and because of this tendency I’d even say that it wants to play first, because it has one-drops and three-drops that it really wants to get into play tapped and attacking before the opponent drops blockers to start shoring up their life totals. But what do you do when your deck lies more towards the middle?
I would call the R/G deck a controlling deck, just as a matter of course. But without those plethora of Lightning Bolts at its disposal, it is a ponderously slow controlling deck, one that has to rely on grinding the opponent’s board down with its monsters rather than having the ability to pay one mana and point-and-click four-drops dead. It has a clear advantage over the mid-game, barring untimely Overruns, in that its creatures are just incredibly fat compared to the creatures your opponent will likely be battling with, as so many of the critters fill the five-drop slot. But that is the very problem that makes it difficult for me to define, as with so many five-drops that it needs to leverage into a win, it strikes me as a necessity for this deck to play first, even despite the label of ‘control deck’ that I assign to it in my head. Because this is by no means a true control deck but a mid-range tempo-oriented deck, looking to start dropping fatties and let their sheer size ‘control’ the board.
Rules are, after all, meant to be broken. The key to knowing this format is knowing when you want to break them, and with what. Going into this analysis, I considered the rule to be ‘draw first,’ but here we have presented two decks that both want to play, each for different reasons. Between the two, then, with so many of the same cards already in common and all the removal spells accounted for in both builds, your destiny for the rest of the tournament is in your hands. Many will lean intrinsically towards the deck that fits more removal, and pick the R/G for Prodigal Pyromancer. Some would lean towards the deck that fits one more bomb, and half of that group will pick G/W for its Armored Ascension while the other half will pick R/G for its Dragon Whelp. There should be more to the decision than a personal bias, however, shouldn’t there?
The two decks play to very different roles, and the same cards in different decks work very differently. In the G/W deck, Fireball is almost certainly a finisher, killing an opponent who has managed to stabilize the ground game at a high-single-digits life total. In the R/G deck, you may almost have to play defensive Fireballs on turn three just to not be too far behind on turn four and five as you start dropping fatties. I consider the format to be in-general a controlling format, with its Walls and Palace Guards gumming up the works, and Runeclaw Bear-sized creatures being outclassed almost immediately. I’d go so far as to suggest that the Silvercoat Lion that I pointedly excluded from the list might deserve inclusion, for even if it is quickly outclassed it still serves a key role in the early turns of the game and contributes clearly to the overall game-plan. If one is going to play a play-first deck, I would rather play the one that has three-drops working towards its plan than a glut of five-drops, and while I consider an aggressive strategy to be overall weak, it is better when it has closers, be it Overrun or Sleep or Fireball.
Add that Overrun and three Lightning Bolts back in and the deck choice is “duh, obviously.” But challenge your card-pool to explore the format and a few interesting conclusions might be had, informing you more about your assumptions and practicing the trick of making a difficult decision. I’d love to open the ridiculous Overrun/Fireballs/Three Bolts deck at Grand Prix: Boston… but short of putting that card-pool in my pocket and trying to pull a fast one, I’m glad that I armed myself with the knowledge of trying to figure things out, as experience with asking the right questions to make the difficult decisions will no doubt help me in preparing for the event.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com