Prologue
In some ways it was a great weekend for me. I had a fun time hanging out with friends. I met a lot of cool new people. I went from not being qualified for Nats to winning the first Grinder of the weekend with Merfolk (a little more on this in the afterword). I ate some great food. Overall, I had a great weekend.
On the other hand, I had my worst “professional” Magic tournament since my very first Pro Tour, over ten years ago. Most of us aren’t Randy Buehler or Dirk Baberowski, winning our first Pro Tour. Most people who go to their first Pro Tour don’t do incredibly well. “Fine” is often the best it can go for them.
In the fourth round of the tournament, I was 0-3 with my Merfolk deck. I lost one harrowing match with a triple mulligan, and lost two other well-fought games that just didn’t end up going my way — though I definitely think my sideboard could have been better to have made those matches closer.
And then, I played in the final round of Standard on Day 1, paired against another player who couldn’t pick up a win: Gerry Thompson. We saw each other, and we both gave each other that kind of bemused, sad smile that one gives when a situation is kind of comical, even though it also really sucks. We were going to be fighting against each other for a singular honor: not starting out Standard win-less.
He was armed with Faeries, traditionally viewed as a good matchup for my deck, Merfolk. That’s what everyone said again and again. What a lot of people don’t realize, though, is that the world is a lot different than it was in the past, when Lord of Atlantis got to be a part of the show. It is, in fact, a lot more like Lorwyn Block, where you didn’t really see Merfolk typically beating Faeries, even though they could.
And so, I ended the first portion of the day 0-4. A key mistake in one of the matches of the draft would keep me from going 3-0, and leave me at 2-5, tied for Very Bad with many people, including GerryT and Evan Erwin. Alas.
All throughout the rest of the weekend (and even now, really), I reflected on what it was that had made the losses happen. The clutch triple mulligan, sure, but more importantly was a little card that came into play again and again: Great Sable Stag. It wasn’t for me, per se, but it could more than do the job.
The New Meta
The U.S. Top 8 consisted of:
Five-Color Control: 4
Conley Mannequin Control: 2
Red-White Control: 1
Jund Cascade: 1
Let’s look at another little feature of the Top 8, card counts:
Great Sable Stag: 32
Volcanic Fallout: 31
Reflecting Pool: 31
Vivid Marsh: 20
Vivid Crag: 19
Mulldrifter: 18
Vivid Creek: 16
Cryptic Command: 16
Esper Charm: 16
No other cards had more than 15 copies. (Full card counts will be supplied at the end of the article.***)
Brian Kowal pointed this out to me in our hotel room Saturday night.
“I don’t know how they thought they could print a card like this, and not have it be format-warping. There are 32 copies of Great Sable Stag in the Top 8. All of them in sideboards, but 32 copies.”
A few minutes later, he informed us that there were 30 maindeck Volcanic Fallouts (1 in the board) and 31 maindeck Reflecting Pool.
Now, I’ve been involved in this game for a very long time, and I don’t know that I can recall something like this ever happening. The closest that I can remember to something like this, is Pro Tour: Philadelphia, with 28 Sakura-Tribe Elder, 25 Sensei’s Divining Top, 24 Tendo Ice Bridge, and 16 Umezawa’s Jitte as their top non-basic land cards. That particularly Pro Tour’s format, Kamigawa Block Constructed, was not exactly considered the paragon of formats, either.
Current Standard and its recent predecessors have long been overwhelmingly defined by Faeries. Ever if Faeries happens to not be the dominating deck in the format, it is the deck that all other decks must contend with. I know that a few weeks before Nationals, when I expressed to my fellow Madisonian Gaudenis Vidugiris that I wanted to sit down for a playtest session versus Faeries, he basically told me it was pointless because Faeries was dead. “Even Sam doesn’t want to play Faeries.”
Sam did end up playing Faeries. Gerry ended up playing Faeries. They both ended up on opposite ends of the spectrum, probably because of some differences in their luck with matchups.
Why was Faeries dead? Sam thought it was dead because of the Stag. Why did he end up playing Faeries? Not enough people seemed to be actually playing the Stag, given the data coming out of various big events.
It doesn’t look like that is the case any more.
Power versus Synergy
The commonplace question of Power or Synergy is one that is often seen in limited formats. You’re debating between a minor tribal ability (like Veteran Swordsmith, for example) and a more potent card overall (like White Knight), and there is some element of the decision that comes from trying to balance just how good the Swordsmith becomes when you happen to have a deck chock full of Soldiers, as compared to a deck with only a very few. White Knight might win out every time, if it is powerful enough. But, the less powerful it is, the more that it starts to be worth considering Veteran Swordsmith. Horned Turtle, for example, is not that hot a card when compared to White Knight, but if you are drafting a U/W Air Force deck full of flyers, the Horned Turtle starts to look much more attractive.
These traits are not mutually exclusive by any means. Instead, they exist on two different axes. Just because a card is synergistic does not mean it is not also powerful in a vacuum, and conversely, a card that is powerful in a vacuum can also have its power augmented by its synergistic qualities with certain cards. A great example of this would be in Zoo decks. Tarmogoyf, for example, is an incredibly powerful card in a vacuum, but its power (and toughness) are quite literally drawn out of the other cards that you use in the deck. But more importantly, having such a potent creature actually increases the potency of other similarly aggressive creatures simply by virtue of creating an environment that makes those cards more attractive. In an Extended burn deck, for example, a totally fine card like Incinerate becomes all the better than it would otherwise normally be because of the synergies it exists in within that deck.
Throughout most (if not all) of Lorwyn Block, Gerry Thompson played Five-Color Control decks. For a while, he swore up and down that it was the best deck in the format. “You can play the best cards! You can play any cards.”
The Five-Color Control deck of that era and the Standard formats that followed it were generally decks that relied far more on the “power” side of the spectrum. Given that you could literally play any card that you wanted, the deck would generally end up evolving into something of the following: some number of Wrath or ‘Clasm effects, excellent countermagic, a powerful finisher, and miscellaneous card advantage and utility spells, all designed to be the best possible card choices for the expected environment that they might play against.
Compare this to the Faeries deck. Many of its cards are actually fairly ineffectual in a vacuum. Spellstutter Sprite and Peppersmoke are not incredibly inspiring. Scion of Oona is actually just bad in a pure vacuum. Mistbind Clique literally does nothing but die. Of the cards in the deck, only Bitterblossom and potentially Vendilion Clique are actually good of the tribal cards, if we are living in a vacuum.
Of course, we don’t live in a vacuum; we live in a complex space where the cards interact with each other. In this space, each successive card which furthers the synergistic traits of the other cards helps to create a lattice of ever-increasing power in each of the cards. A part of the reason that Faeries exists in the Strategic Archetype that I’ve come to call Hybrid Control is that unlike a more aggressive Aggro-Control deck, it shifts into that aggressive element of its game at a far later strategic moment than decks that seize that role usually do. And it does it consistently, largely on the back of Bitterblossom, but sometimes out of simply seizing the game with a well-timed Scion and Sower or Clique, making the game into a countdown act. Synergy is why. Rarely does the game feel like a classic control deck Milling you out, or dropping a super late game Morphling and bringing it in to victory. Instead, things increment, and then at a certain point avalanche onto you, with a timely counter holding you under the water.
These two Cryptic Command decks operate in very different ways. As Wizards of the Coast has unleashed card after card to try to diversify the metagame, each of these cards could get added to the Five-Color Control arsenal, but in general, Faeries was still a real struggle despite the help.
And then, of course, we got this list:
Creatures (9)
Lands (26)
Spells (25)
Shuuhei Nakamura’s Influence
If you’re not sure just how much the Top 8 looks like his list, consider the differences between their main deck and his:
Dumanski:
No Changes
Gindy:
4 Spells
+2 Negate
+2 Ajani Vengeant
-2 Agony Warp
-1 Hallowed Burial
-1 Doom Blade
Anderson:
4 Spells
+1 Ajani Vengeant
+3 Firespout
-1 Cruel Ultimatum
-3 Hallowed Burial
Yurchick:
7 Spells
+2 Firespout
+3 Jace Beleren
+1 Maelstrom Pulse
+1 Path to Exile
-1 Broodmate Dragon
-2 Mulldrifter
-2 Agony Warp
-2 Volcanic Fallout
-1 Island
-1 Vivid Marsh
+1 Vivid Crag
+1 Vivid Meadow
And they all borrowed 4 Great Sable Stag from the board.
What Shuuhei’s deck did was provide Five-Color Control with a card that was simply powerful enough to be able to put Faeries on notice. Here it was, a deck that was chock-full of a ton of potent cards, including good counterspells, and it was able to essentially lay down a card even more potent than Scragnoth was in its own day. Faeries wasn’t just fighting a control war. It could actually find itself in the unenviable position in which it was playing against an opponent who could easily seize both the Beatdown and Control roles of the matchup.
The Stag and the Volcano
Between 4 Stag and 4 Volcanic Fallout after board, Faeries became faced with the real possibility that there might be enough power on the other side of the matchup that its potent synergies could no longer compete. Neither Stag nor Fallout were powerful enough on their own, in a vacuum; it was more that they were so antagonistic in terms of their power as hosers that they collectively threw negative percentage marks all over the other deck.
If you’ve played with the Stag versus Faeries, you’ve probably come to know a few things about the card. It is very good against Faeries, to be sure. But it is also not nearly enough all on its own, usually. After Faeries has boarded, they often are very aware that they need to deal with the card. Ren Ishikawa’s deck, for example, ran 3 Vendilion Clique to start, and boards in Thoughtseize. Yuuya Watanabe had Clique, Thoughtseize, Warren Weirding, and Gargoyle Castle.
All of these cards might be sufficient against a deck that was only playing the Stag, but they had a full deck behind them. It didn’t matter which deck it was, either. Every deck had it. Madison’s Two-time StarCityGames $5k Top 8 player Jasper Johnson-Epstein was one of the people that had initially convinced Sam Black that Faeries was unplayable by having access to Fallout and Stag in a very aggressive Jund Cascade. Conley Woods Mannequin Control deck could start as a solid deck in its own right, with a fair share of antagonism to Faeries, but throw in the Stag after board, and things look positively dismal. I have yet to play Mark Hendrickson’s Red-White “Spanish Inquisition” deck, but it strikes me as being able to have an incredibly antagonistic plan against Faeries, as well (-2 Earthquake, -4 Hallowed Burial, -2 Obelisk of Alara, -1 Ajani Vengeant, -1 Lightning Bolt, +3 Firespout, +4 Great Sable Stag, +3 Guttural Response might be one potential board plan, though there is likely a better one).
Faeries can not simply say, “Well, the card is not good enough” or “Well, no one is playing it” any longer. The Hive Mind has eyes and ears, and they know differently now.
The Future for Faeries
Gargoyle Castle and Warren Weirding were the first volleys back in the arsenal for Faeries against the threat of Stag. It looks like it is going to need more than that, though.
Sower can go a long way towards helping, but only if they are kind enough to drop another creature to steal, and only if that Sower can actually successfully live through a Volcanic Fallout that seems inevitably tied to the Stag. Lockjaw Snapper, however weak, might be another alternate that could be used. Lurebound Scarecrow could hold off a Stag, so long as you could keep a colored permanent in play (like Bitterblossom) to keep it alive). Platinum Angel is expensive, but could be a way to dodge the entire question. Scuttlemutt dies to Fallout, but could do the necessary work.
The best in-color answer I could come up with, though, is Clone. Clone could come into play as a copy of the Stag, and hold it off, or be dropped into play as a copy of a Scion to make the whole team better. Clone’s ability to come into play as a Broodmate Dragon, Mulldrifter, or other card is also reasonably useful. Still, this seems like it would need to be used in addition to other cards like Warren Weirding if you truly hope to hold off a Stag.
The most likely result, I’m guessing, is going to be a move towards three colors. Red or White provide the best mana options, and supply Lightning Bolt, Earthquake, Hallowed Burial, and Path to Exile as possible answers, not to mention dodging the question with a card like Wall of Reverence.
The particulars of what Faeries looks like up until Zendikar throws the world into Upheaval is still an unknown. I wouldn’t count the archetype completely down for the count. Should its opponents fail to respect it in any particular week, Faeries is so powerful that it can’t help but punish you for ignoring it.
Until next week, stay vigilant.
Afterword
It was exciting winning a Grinder for Nationals yet again. It almost didn’t happen, though. My Grinder started earlier than advertised and I was still trying to get cards together for the deck, let alone the sideboard. Thankfully, a ton of people helped me find cards in the last minute. I was literally sitting down with my decklist scribbling card names onto my sideboard as Cedric Phillips ran around the room finding me legal cards for my board that might be good. In the end, I wasn’t completely happy with the board, but thank goodness Cedric had my back! At least one unfortunate player registered zero sideboard cards because they simply couldn’t get a side together in time.
All of this put me on semi-tilt, or at least on edge, and I failed to de-sideboard for my first match of round 3. I called over a judge when my opening hand contained a sideboard card. I won the match anyway, in part, I think, because my opponent received a game loss from the previous match. In the finals (covered by BDM), my opponent was my friend Matt Severa. I had driven down with him, and it was depressing that only one of us could win the Grinder. Having him as an opponent is also a little scary. Matt is one of the best players in Madison, a former roommate of Mike Hron, has a long Pro-Tour history, and a GP Top 8 to his name. Further, I knew his deck was fantastic — he’d just won a $1,000 tournament with it, and he was deeply practiced with it. In the end, I beat him 2-0, probably from a combination of luck and perhaps a small matchup advantage, but it was still a harrowing opponent to draw for the last round.
Merely qualifying for Nationals is an exciting thing in its own right. I was incredibly excited about having that experience of playing again this year, even if I did poorly. It was exciting in a number of other ways as well. Several of my friends who were playing in the tournament were playing in Nationals for the first time. Brian Kowal, Matt Severa, and Cedric Phillips were all here for their very first Nationals, and it was exciting to see them pumped about being able to have that experience.
I know I’m going to try hard to make PT Austin happen. Even though I have very negative feelings about mixed-format PTs, it still doesn’t change the fact that I love this game, and I love the Tour. Being a part of it is always so fantastic, I can’t help but go for it.
Wish me luck.
*** Here are the card counts for the entirety of the Top 8
32: Great Sable Stag
31: Volcanic Fallout, Reflecting Pool
30:
29:
28:
27:
26:
25:
24:
23:
22:
21:
20: Vivid Marsh
19: Vivid Crag
18: Mulldrifter
17:
16: Vivid Creek, Cryptic Command, Esper Charm
15:
14:
13: Vivid Meadow, Hallowed Burial
12: Sunken Ruins, Bloodbraid Elf, Kitchen Finks, Plumeveil, Putrid Leech, Broken Ambitions
11: Island, Vivid Grove, Broodmate Dragon, Anathemancer, Cruel Ultimatum, Firespout
10: Twilight Mire, Ajani Vengeant, Deathmark, Maelstrom Pulse
9: Runed Halo
8: Cascade Bluffs, Mystic Gate, Shriekmaw, Lightning Bolt, Makeshift Mannequin, Negate
7: Mountain
6: Fire-Lit Thicket, Caldera Hellion, Cloudthresher, Identity Crisis, Thought Hemorrhage
5: Forest, Essence Scatter, Infest, Jace Beleren, Path to Exile
4: Exotic Orchard, Graven Cairns, Mutavault, Rugged Prairie, Savage Lands, Boggart Ram-Gang, Agony Warp, Bituminous Blast, Goblin Assault
3: Plains, Swamp, Blightning, Doom Blade, Guttural Response, Hindering Light, Liliana Vess, Scepter of Fugue, Sign in Blood
2: Sygg, River Cutthroat, Armillary Sphere, Earthquake, Elspeth, Knight Errant, Obelisk of Alara, Snakeform
1: Call the Skybreaker, Martial Coup, Pithing Needle
0: All the rest of them…