Magic 2010 is here, and with it comes a whole host of changes. Some are small, like losing mana-burn or the change to how Lifelink works. Some are large, like the change to creature combat that comes with the removal of the previous best four words in Magic besides “you win the game,” “Damage on the stack.” For Standard, we lose 10th Edition and gain Magic 2010, and there will undoubtedly be some ripple effects from both of these as they bring secondary and even tertiary changes to the metagame. After all, previous analysis here on Magical Hack has seen cause to suggest that all of the decks in the pre-M10 Standard metagame live in a delicate equilibrium with each other, shifting in and out of favor as the weekly balance of favor adjusts the field, and sometimes not in the ways you might expect.
I have heard it said that Faeries is dead, that finally Wizards of the Coast has nailed that coffin shut. But as we all know, the dread vampire is not slain until you have cut off its head, hammered a stake through its heart, doused it in holy water, and lit it in fire in a garlicky flambé, so rumors of Faeries’ demise may be greatly exaggerated. Great Sable Stag is an excellent tool for beating down on Faeries, and one that is not yet being recognized as the true monster that it is, as the decks that are likely to play it are also likely to be Cascading for it, so it will appear far more often than a mere four-of might be expected to. But the decks that can play it narrowly fit within that certain band, basically just the Jund cascade style decks, and the other Green decks that could play it probably won’t, as they value an Elvish or Token theme too much to want some off-tribe beater. One thing that I would have found particularly awesome if Wizards wanted to really hammer Faeries would be to have named Zephyr Sprite “Faerie Rogue” instead, allowing us to finally name Faerie Rogue with Runed Halo and gain protection from Bitterblossom.
The easiest place to start looking at Standard now is to look for the things that are lost. We all know that Seismic Assault is no longer legal, nor Wrath of God, but smaller losses along the way also eat into the Constructed-playability of several Standard decks. Swans of Bryn Argoll combo may not exist anymore, but Cascading can still get you your combo deck if you want it. If you want to put all of your eggs into one shaky basket, Cascade as a mechanic still offers a combo to try, and a Cascade Sanity Grinding deck seems initially to be quite solid against everything except countermagic. Its back-up plan is to get to five mana and start dropping Dominii and Ghastlords until you submit to their suboptimal plan, but you may not need a back-up plan when Plan A is to play exactly two spells and mill your opponent for their entire deck. Restriction does after all breed creativity, and the removal of one previously-valid strategy will frequently send curious mages looking about for possible replacement strategies. Whether sixteen Overbeing-type creatures is as harsh a deckbuilding requirement as 41 lands was remains to be seen, but either way it looks a little silly and might just kill your opponent in one fell swoop. “Don’t laugh. It works.”
With the loss of Glorious Anthem, Black/White Tokens takes a hard hit. It can still exist if it tries to, such as by altering its creature base back towards favoring White creatures and using Honor of the Pure, but this is not the only hit it takes. With it goes Caves of Koilos, which incidentally also knocks out Kithkin’s ability to splash for Zealous Persecution as I have been wont to do, but more importantly to my thinking at least this is the deck most affected by the loss of Wrath of God. With an aggro-heavy metagame seeming to be first and foremost on everyone’s minds for this weekend and thereafter, Black/White Tokens loses its best advantage spell for these sorts of matchups, as its Wraths were especially backbreaking. While everyone else can pay one more mana and even get a few upsides by playing Hallowed Burial, these ‘upsides’ were against the exact sorts of creatures that Black/White Tokens was leaning on gaining an advantage from, and after that you’re at six mana for Planar Cleansing (which takes out all of the rest of the permanents it might have been trying to keep around to gain an advantage from) or Austere Command which, while awesome, still has the problem of costing six mana. Either way, six mana is too much for your primary Wrath of God, and either of these might do very well alongside other Wraths to give you a critical mass of Wrath effects, but instead Black/White Tokens just gets left out in the cold.
Any one of these changes and it’d probably be just fine. Worse mana alongside the loss of one of its most important cards for its strategy (Glorious Anthem) and its most critical defensive spell (Wrath of God) means that it can’t even capitalize on the fact that the metagame has shifted enough to be more friendly to the deck, because now it can’t even be sure it wins its previously-favored matchups because of these changes. While I won’t call this strategy dead, I will say definitively that I expect this to be the end of Black/White Tokens as a major player. It had already been under-performing for weeks now, basically ever since just after Regionals, and now under-performance is the new standard mode thanks to the changes in the card-pool for the deck.
Likewise, you get to look at Boat Brew and pronounce it dead in its previous incarnation. It too loses a crucial dual land, though admittedly it could try and lean on Ancient Amphitheater if it wanted to, it just never will. Alongside this change you also lose Mind Stone, which can be built around but was an excellent accelerator that did good work in the deck. Boat Brew also loses Mogg Fanatic, which is not as big a deal here as it is perhaps to more dedicated Red decks, but it was a very important early play that helped put Boat Brew on the side of playable in a lot of matchups, such as the Faerie matchup. And it too loses Wrath of God, which had been leaning towards even main-deck inclusion in Boat Brew lists that have been appearing still throughout the PTQ season as a way to punish aggressive decks like Elves and Kithkin, shoring up the early game and letting it rule the mid-to-late game. Could it survive these changes? If it got something back, almost certainly. Did it? Not with its current incarnation. It would need to mutate into something else if it was to gain a benefit from the M10 cards, and thus would not be Boat Brew anymore.
Cascade Swans is dead, dead, dead. Cascade combo may not necessarily be, but Seismic Assault + Swans of Bryn Argoll certainly is.
Looking at the metagame by what is negated, though, this is all I see disappearing. Most of why I don’t think B/W and Boat Brew will survive the rotation is because these were already lumbering metagame dinosaurs watching the meteor come down, still played perhaps but not still good. After all, other decks like Reveillark played some of the same cards, as I’ve pronounced Boat Brew dead with the loss of Mind Stone and Wrath of God, both cards that were played in U/W Lark as well. But the deck which still has a home in the metagame still gets my respect, while the ones that were already borderline unplayable do not seem to me as if they will be resuscitated.
To see what new things might appear, then, I’ll be going through the M10 visual spoiler and riffing on what these new cards mean to me as I look at them.
First in set-number order, we hit Baneslayer Angel. Baneslayer Angel is some kind of hotness to me, being a hyper-efficient controlling monster finisher. I’ve seen a lot of people look at the card with immediate bafflement, first at the disbelief that such a ridiculously efficient creature could even be printed, second at the disbelief that in a world with Terminate and Path to Exile even such an awesome creature as Baneslayer Angel might not even be playable, and third with confusion as they try to figure out how to place her in a deck. For the first stage of denial, I will simply state that Baneslayer Angel is the real deal. For the second, yes, she’s not immune to the very best removal spells in the format, but of those two only one is actually played right now, and that one (Path to Exile) can still be countered or overtaxed with multiple good or even just necessary targets. For the third, I give you the following shell:
4 Vivid Meadow
4 Vivid Creek
3 Vivid Crag
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Mystic Gate
4 Cascade Bluffs
3 Island
4 Baneslayer Angel
4 Mulldrifter
4 Plumeveil
4 Jace Beleren
4 Cryptic Command
4 Broken Ambitions
4 Firespout
3 Path to Exile
2 Hallowed Burial
1 Cruel Ultimatum
This is the deck I first imagined when I saw Baneslayer Angel, and the role I saw it filling immediately was replacing Broodmate Dragon and whatever else the deck was playing as its high-end finisher card. Baneslayer Angel solves the problem of having something good that helps you get out of Anathemancer range, because Ana Cer a.k.a. “The Man” is very good at keeping decks with 23 nonbasic lands ‘down.’ I haven’t posted a sideboard because a Five-Color Control deck would need to sculpt itself around the metagame in order to have a proper game-plan, and that metagame is to some degree at least untested right now. While I’ll know more by the end of my riffing on decks, I’ll still need to playtest, and the most I can tell you right now from bapping around a few test-games with this list is that this deck may in fact be for real, and Baneslayer Angel very clearly is just that nuts. A few choices here seem incredibly strange, I’m sure, but that is because I am not as pleased by Esper Charm as I could be, while I have been trying for some time now to find the proper shell into which 4x Plumeveil and 4x Jace Beleren might slot very neatly, and for now at least this is the shell into which I am trying to fit it.
Will Baneslayer Angel fit into other decks as well? I’m almost certain she will, but she favors Blue/White controlling decks, which is why the first place I thought to put her is in a deck that could basically be a Blue/White deck save for the fact that I wanted to stretch a little further to fit Firespout, and at that point it was actually easier to build a working Vivid mana-base than it would have been to merely build a three-color mana-base and so long as we’re going crazy we might as well play Cruel Ultimatum as well. Its casting-cost is at least three Vivid lands or Reflecting Pools, no more than three Filter lands (one of which has to be Cascade Bluffs) and one ‘anything’. Splashing the BBBRR into your Blue-White deck is something that was not originally envisioned with the Vivid lands, but I’ll certainly take it.
Captain of the Watch is clearly Constructed quality, despite its very high casting cost. Nine power across four bodies for six mana is very efficient and surprisingly durable. It is also just that extra bit more than Cloudgoat Ranger, who will always outshine it so long as they are playable together, and unfortunately the Cloudgoat will rotate at the same time as the Captain’s best friend, Preeminent Captain. With the Captain of the Watch we’ll also mention here Elite Vanguard, Veteran Armorsmith and Veteran Swordsmith, as they will all work together as their own little Soldier tribe, or at least they will perhaps when Kithkin are no longer eligible to be played in their stead.
Guardian Seraph seems to efficient not to be good, single-handedly neutralizing a Spectral Procession just like Windborn Muse used to be relied on to do. It might actually have been better as a 2/4, to make it work with Reveillark, but I see no cause to complain about a highly efficient flier with upsides. Instead, it means to me that this is the kind of card that will be leaned on for the Kithkin mirror instead of presented as a tool against Kithkin, as it is excellent at changing the race in your favor and relegating your opponent’s creatures to blocking duties. Likewise, Harm’s Way is a deck I see aggressive White leaning on very well, but sadly my initial playtime with the card suggested its utility was just that little bit worse than Path to Exile, because what it makes up for in versatility it loses by failing to be proactive. Don’t get me wrong, the card is basically awesome and is such a good Shining Shoal trick that I’m certain it must be playable, but since it is a combat-type trick I fear that it will mostly be relegated to sideboard duties. I wish it weren’t so, but the sad truth is that this highly powerful card is effectively balanced by the change to combat damage rules, making it riskier to try and save a creature in combat because a removal spell will neutralize both the creature and this spell. (But at least I figured out why it says ‘permanent you control’ instead of ‘creature.’ Harm’s Way saves creatures and Planeswalkers with equal aplomb.)
Honor of the Pure is so good that it is selling above the MSRP of the promo deck you can buy it in, or at least it is right now when a hundred or more people in the greater New York City area are looking for them in time for a PTQ the day after the release of Magic 2010. Every shop I know of is presold-out, and dedicated testing teams are throwing around such ideas as ‘let’s buy a case of Magic 2010′ and still not being certain that this will get them enough, because they need eight so two people can play Kithkin. Kithkin is the hot deck of the moment because it was already at the top of the Standard dogpile on qualifications in recent weeks, and on my short-list of decks to play for two months now if you recall my recent adventures with honest White creatures. Honor of the Pure is all that and a bag of chips, plus a tummy-rub and some snuggles after if you know what I mean. Glorious Anthem wasn’t that impressive to me as a dedicated Zealous Persecution-mage, but even I have to admit that at two mana it’s now almost certainly the best card in the Kithkin deck, and it’s not hard to figure out the right way to build a Kithkin deck nowadays:
4 Knight of Meadowgrain
4 Wizened Cenn
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
4 Cloudgoat Ranger
4 Spectral Procession
4 Path to Exile
4 Honor of the Pure
3 Ajani Goldmane
16 Plains
4 Windbrisk Heights
3 Rustic Clachan
2 Mutavault
This is card-for-card Cedric Phillips new PTQ deck, and it is chock-full of aggressive power just waiting to be harnessed. And waiting for a sideboard, which now no longer has to play against Wrath of God but should still try to be aware of Firespout / Jund Charm / Volcanic Fallout, as at least some people will start by seeing the rise of Kithkin and trying to beat it instead of join it, while others will decide to play Red decks anyway and others will have the cards for Jund Cascade and no Honor of the Pure to their name anyway. Almost certainly you’ll see Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender as a prime sideboard card, but Harm’s Way is excellent in exactly this sort of mirror matchup, and good against these particular sweepers, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see more than just Forge-Tenders among the possible answers. I’d also expect to see Stillmoon Cavalier as a four-of for the mirror and against Faeries, and I for one favor Elspeth, Knight-Errant as I find Ajani Goldmane to be poor against Green decks while Elspeth is incredible in those same sorts of matchups. But you can go one step further, by realizing that Combo Elves is a difficult match to win and that you have eight good Blue mana sources if you’re willing to use them, with the caveat that it becomes even more important to have a basic Plains and thus Rustic Clachan becomes unplayable in the deck: sideboarding Meddling Mage as a combo-breaker. Food for thought:
4 Knight of Meadowgrain
4 Wizened Cenn
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
4 Cloudgoat Ranger
4 Spectral Procession
4 Path to Exile
4 Honor of the Pure
3 Ajani Goldmane
11 Plains
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Mystic Gate
4 Glacial Fortress
2 Mutavault
Sideboard:
4 Meddling Mage
4 Stillmoon Cavalier
3 Reveillark
2 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender
2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
Meddling Mage comes in against the sorts of decks you just can’t beat normally, like Combo Elves (name the missing piece, be it Heritage Druid or Regal Force) or (blech!) Turbo-Fog, while the rest of the sideboard is dedicated to beating the mirror (Stillmoon Cavalier) and Wrath effects, which is why I like sideboarding Reveillarks and Forge-Tenders and Elspeth, to swap in nice resilient cards instead of clunkers like Ajani when the opponent is trying to kill all your creatures to blunt your attack. If I were to playtest Kithkin with the intent to play it at this weekend’s PTQ, this would be the list I would be gunning to test with, and the only reason I can’t say anything more definitively than that is because I haven’t actually gotten to test enough to know what I am going to play this weekend.
Open the Vaults is a card waiting for a home, and while I don’t see one at present, I do think it’s worth keeping in mind as we go into Alara/Zendikar Standard. Replenish was an innocent do-nothing card in Urza’s Destiny, a set with broken cards like Yawgmoth’s Bargain and powerful monsters like Treachery and Masticore that tugged at the Blue mage’s shirtsleeves, but once the proper number of other moving parts appeared it went from do-nothing to best-deck-in-the-format very quickly. I don’t see it really doing anything yet, but I do know at least to keep watching.
Planar Cleansing doesn’t scream ‘play me!’ yet, but that is largely because the decks I would want to try and play this in, I’d want to try and keep my Planeswalkers around too if possible. It will almost certainly have a home, but that home is not yet one that I can see clearly suggested.
I really, really want to stamp Safe Passage ‘Constructed Unplayable,’ but unfortunately I know better. It’s the replacement Fog effect for Turbo-Fog, and the sad truth is that Turbo-Fog is a valid response to everyone picking up Honor of the Pure and shuffling up their Kithkin. The deck I would nominally have said was a Turbo-Fog deck with other good matchups, Cascade Swans, no longer exists, so despite the fact that I think the deck is terrible, no really worse than that, I have to begrudgingly admit the point that it sure does beat White Weenie decks. It pains me to see Turbo-Fog back on the metagame radar, but there are plenty of things out there in the world that I don’t like, and failing to acknowledge their existence has not done me a lot of good so far. But, I seem to remember we were actually talking about a card.
Safe Passage stops damage-based sweepers like Volcanic Fallout, and is one-sided in combat regardless of whether you’re attacking or blocking. This is actually a powerful Fog effect, since it is one-sided, and it doesn’t hurt that it is a Fog effect that can be used against Red burn pointed at your face as readily as it can be used against an attacking creature swarm. It’s worth considering for the Kithkin mirror-match as a tool for the mirror and against Firespout and Volcanic Fallout, as it is more powerful but less restrictive in what it does than Harm’s Way, a card I would love to sideboard but have a hard time justifying as a sideboard addition. I want to say it’s unplayable, but I frankly know better. M10 has been pushed hard for power-level considerations, and this is one such card that is riding high on the power level curve, a Fog that might actually be worth playing in a non-Fog deck in sixty card formats.
Silence is a big leader on price for this set, because players always love their Orim’s Chant effects, but right now at least this doesn’t really do anything since so little of Standard has to do with breaking up a combo player’s turn. This is however incredibly playable in Extended, if we’re willing to look at an older format than just Standard, as it will be the key way to break up a combo player’s turn in that format. It’s at least cute enough to consider casting in response to any Cascade spell to rob them of their re-buy, but if you’re sideboarding against Cascade specifically you should be reaching for your Ethersworn Canonists before you reach for Silence.
Leaving the plentiful White cards, we reach next the desolate plain that is Constructed-quality Blue cards. The first card of interest to me is Djinn of Wishes, which is just purely outclassed in a Blue control shell by Baneslayer Angel and thus just not worthy of consideration even if he is by himself an awesome creature. The bar is set quite high indeed, and an Air Elemental with three free Browses is just not ridiculous enough to distract me from my 5/5 first striking lifelinked fliers from the same set. That makes Essence Scatter the first Blue card of interest, and is it really interesting to play Remove Soul by any other name? It’s a relevant card in Standard at present, as a secondary counter alongside Broken Ambitions in control decks and Faeries, so it’s not hard to say that Essence Scatter is Constructed quality, but instead perhaps wonder why the name had to change in the first place right after they sent out promotional copies of Remove Soul.
Merfolk Sovereign is the first truly new M10 card to discuss, then, and it is an interesting one. The last time there were two Merfolk lords in Standard, Merfolk almost won a Standard Pro Tour, and this time around it may very well be that something truly special might be in the works. Merfolk Sovereign pumps all Merfolk and makes one of them unblockable, and that one could either be Chameleon Colossus if you wanted to try to make the mana work or merely an arbitrarily large Wake Thrasher, powered up by the ability to mana-burn for free at the end of your opponent’s turn, losing neither life nor the ability to cast a counterspell after you’ve tapped out your mana supply. Since making the double Green work in your Blue deck would be rather hard, let’s look at that other idea:
3 Cursecatcher
4 Stonybrook Banneret
4 Silvergill Adept
2 Sygg, River Guide
4 Wake Thrasher
4 Merfolk Sovereign
4 Merrow Reejerey
4 Cryptic Command
4 Sage’s Dousing
3 Path to Exile
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Wanderwine Hub
4 Mystic Gate
4 Mutavault
2 Glacial Fortress
6 Island
Good enough for Standard? I don’t know, but I do look forward to trying it out and exploring. We’re looking at food for thought, and Merfolk Sovereign does provide us with that.
Ponder is a card I have been known to love dearly, to the point where I have been asked to sign Ponders (though they weren’t clear whether this was out of actual admiration or merely derisive humor). And much like Jace Beleren, an awesome card-drawing spell that took us over a year to really actually use, we’ll have enough time with Ponder thanks to it being in M10 to perhaps better understand how good it is, all of us. I suspect I’m higher on the Ponder learning-curve than most everyone else is at this point, and don’t mind trying to bring others into the understanding that maybe just maybe the cheap Blue card-selection spell might be worth playing sometimes, and I look at the 5c Control list above (with four Plumeveils and four Jace Beleren) and marvel at the fact that this wasn’t even something we tried back in Block Constructed season. Yes, Planeswalkers are generally bad against Faeries and Block season was all about Faeries, but in the testing I’ve done so far Jace has drawn me a surprising number of cards even in the Faerie matchup, as it’s only actually bad against the turn-two Bitterblossom draw, and even then you can have the Plumeveil to stabilize and put Jace to good work. May we know more about just how awesome both of these cards are before we’re not allowed to play them anymore!
And that’s Blue. Sleep may be worth a mention, since it is very good at turning a creature brawl in your favor, but I consider it to be overshadowed by Cryptic Command and for good reason. Ask me again after Lorwyn rotates and maybe I’ll have a more favorable opinion for the card.
Black doesn’t actually get interesting to me until we get to Haunting Echoes, though I should probably perk up my attention at seeing Duress and be impressed by its return. It is unfortunately overshadowed by Thoughtseize until Lorwyn rotates, as every deck I can think of wanting to Duress with would rather Thoughtseize first, and probably doesn’t want to add the fifth (or more) ‘Thoughtseize’. Haunting Echoes, however, has been a hallmark card of Black-based control decks ever since it was first printed in Odyssey, allowing the Black deck to trade, trade, trade, then kill your deck until there’s basically nothing left in it besides basic lands. There are two problems with this idea, and one of them is named Great Sable Stag. The other is the fact that Black lacks a true sweeper spell, with only Infest to clear out a team of creatures, so despite the fact that you could play a mono-Black control deck with four each of Consume Spirit and Corrupt, you’d likely rather wait for the rotation of Lorwyn Block and lose Corrupt than try to face down a Spectral Procession aggro deck with your one-for-one attrition deck. You may note, however, that in a deck such as Five-Color Control which can cast anything, Haunting Echoes may be a compelling sideboard card against certain strategies, like the mirror, and especially weird ones like Turbo-Fog where just one copy in your sideboard will be drawn over the course of a single game, and will win that game when drawn. To be fair, I wouldn’t even consider that relevant, save for the fact that it’s a powerful card to land in the mirror match regardless, and the cute fact that you can Ultimate a Jace and then use Haunting Echoes to kill their deck against any opponent. Dumb? Certainly. Does it make me happy to think about? Why yes, yes it does. I’ve loved Haunting Echoes for some time now, and am very pleased to see its return.
Sign in Blood is another good little spell, and another one that would fit in that self-same Black attrition deck. Ditto for Tendrils of Corruption, as one of the main reasons to consider a deck with a land base of 25 Swamps (or if you want to be honest, 23 Swamps and 2 Gargoyle Castle) would be to gain a lot of life with Tendrils of Corruption to buy time for hugely powerful Consume Spirits. There are just a ton of cards in M10 to support just such a deck, up to and including the freeing of Liliana Vess from the shackles of Lorwyn’s eventual rotation.
Vampire Nocturnus is a new and interesting Tribal card, for a tribe that does not presently really seem to exist. In M10 by itself, you have itself, Vampire Aristocrat, and Child of Night to pump up, and a tribe of three is a small tribe indeed. You can find a few other vampires if you really try (Vein Drinker, for example) and can always access the Changeling tribe, but my hope is that this is a foretelling of some of what Zendikar may have to offer as a potential tribe to be fleshed out, as unlike M10’s Soldier tribe this one is not ready to stand on its own just yet. The most interesting thing to me is that this is a creature that wants you to stay mono-Black, and yet rewards you for being able to tap for Blue or Red mana at least theoretically. If he only comes out at night, it is night more often when you have Borderposts in your deck.
And as much as I’d like to call Xathrid Demon unplayable chaff, I have to respect the fact that it is a Lord of the Pit variant aggressively pushed for Constructed playability. Xathrid Demon may just be a huge trampling house, even if he is incredibly expensive and right at the top end of what you think of as potentially playable in Constructed. It may look dumb, but it’s just cheap enough and has the added bonus of getting in for more than seven a turn as it asks you to feed it a creature every turn. It’s also another card that says ‘each opponent’ on it, which I am not sure is just an innocent templating change but instead might be a hint as to an upcoming Block mechanic. I’ve suspected since Alara Reborn that Zendikar may have a multiplayer theme to it, as I watched a significant number of cards that were worded to be more potent than expected for multiplayer play appear in Conflux and Alara Reborn. Xathrid Demon inflicting its upkeep life-loss on ‘each opponent’ rather than ‘target player’ just adds to my tingling spider-senses, especially since if the sky falls and we do end up doing something crazy like four-play multiplayer Constructed as a competitive format, this guy right here takes a jump up in playability. And the professional community takes a jump off the nearest suspension bridge, but that’s another story.
Black and X suggests we’re at the end of the color, and Red’s first card of interest is a doozy: Ball Lightning. I don’t know about you, but I cut my competitive teeth playing Ball Lightning in Standard, back in the day when you could actually do such crazy things as cast Ball Lightning and follow it up with Fireblast. I don’t exactly miss those days, but we do get to relive some of that fiery glory, if we can just go about building the deck right. The first attempts I see everyone making all just slot Ball Lightning into the existing Blightning builds, without addressing any of the problems inherent to those builds or even paying attention to the fact that Ball Lightning changes everything, and the fundamentals of this strategy change need to be addressed from the get-go as the deck you are trying to build works much differently than you think it does.
Starting with a bad deck, and hey at least I’m being honest and calling it a bad deck, here’s where most people seem to be dropping Ball Lightning:
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Auntie’s Hovel
4 Graven Cairns
12 Mountain
4 Tattermunge Maniac
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Goblin Outlander
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Boggart Ram-Gang
4 Anathemancer
4 Ball Lightning
4 Flame Javelin
4 Lightning Bolt
Some people try to fiddle with the mana count, or exclude pieces from this list (frequently the ass-tastic Tattermunge Maniac, but he is included as often as he is excluded). Ultimately this makes a very mediocre deck, as it lacks some of the necessary reach that makes Red decks threatening, as it is reliant on the combat phase and probably can’t ever beat another creature deck, certainly not Kithkin but probably not even anything Green-based either. The common remedy for that is to add Volcanic Fallout to the mix, but this is at best a mixed blessing as there are very few creatures of your own that live through a Fallout even if Fallout does good things for you.
Where I see Ball Lightning fitting is in a revamped Red deck built from the bottom up, because Ball Lightning has a very interesting creature type. No longer does it say Summon Ball Lightning like it used to, it now says Creature — Elemental, and building around an Elemental core allows us access to a creature curve that might actually not be embarrassing. Kithkin’s shell proves that you can play a one-drop that requires another creature of that type with only sixteen creatures of that tribe to reveal it, so with just eight other Elementals added to the deck you can use Flamekin Bladewhirl as an actually-good one-drop alongside Figure of Destiny, and build a more traditionally Sligh-type deck of creatures hugging a mana curve and burn spells to finish things off.
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Flamekin Bladewhirl
4 Stigma Lasher
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Ball Lightning
3 Ashenmoor Gouger
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Lash Out
4 Flame Javelin
2 Banefire
23 Mountain
This is a far more threatening deck, even as it looks jankier to begin with, because its curve is lower and it hugs the ground with a definite one-drop (that doesn’t stink, sorry Tattermunge Maniac) and some solid two-drop action, action that is actually relevant to the overall game-plan rather than just the best compromise Bear for the job, as the Red deck can even beat a resolved Baneslayer Angel if it has managed to hit you with a Stigma Lasher first, and ditto for any number of Kitchen Finks.
Ashenmoor Gouger gets my nod here not merely for being an Elemental but also because I see the format developing in context, and that context is one in which Firespout is the most relevant sweeper around and 3/3s will actually be pretty plentiful all around. That may be that their natural size or it may be their size after Honor of the Pure pumps them up, but it looks to me like four is the new three as far as toughness is concerned. So while the Gouger doesn’t get in for an immediate three, it is the go-to creature for attacking multiple times and doing violence in the general direction of the opponent’s creatures. You may be able to do better, though, and I want to look at sneaking Anathemancer in this slot, since it is more dangerous than either and deals its damage up front even if your opponent has blockers.
Lash Out may earn criticism since it doesn’t go to the face, or at least doesn’t do it consistently, but I would play Lash Out over Terminate in this deck if I even had access to Terminate because they’ll both kill the same sorts of creatures I want to kill, but Lash Out has two clear benefits: sometimes just sometimes it deals an extra three damage, even if that is only about a quarter of the time you cast it, but it always smooths your next draw and helps you find another spell, which benefits the Red deck that just needs to put a critical mass of spells together and suddenly you’re dead.
Stretching the mana a little lets you be an even more dangerous Red deck, as you’ll now see:
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Flamekin Bladewhirl
4 Stigma Lasher
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Ball Lightning
4 Anathemancer
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Lash Out
4 Flame Javelin
1 Shard Volley
14 Mountain
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Graven Cairns
1 Swamp
A light splash of Black mana brings The Man into the deck, and we have boatloads of explosive damage, mostly pointed at the opponent’s face. We still have exactly sixteen Elementals, the same number as Kithkin has Kithkin for its Goldmeadow Stalwarts, so Flamekin Bladewhirl should be a true Jackal Pup replacement, and rather than argue whether Ashenmoor Gouger was crap or say Boggart Ram-Gang is awesome we instead just have Anathemancer which is clearly just an awesome creature. What we don’t have is a lot of Black mana in the deck, so we don’t consider trying to make this a ‘Blightning deck’ as we’ve seen from Red decks over the qualifier season, and keeping the focus on being an aggressive creature deck that hugs the mana-curve and can deal an explosive amount of damage thanks to Ball Lightning. You probably lose to Kithkin, because the White creature deck always beats the Red creature deck, but against everything else you should prove incredibly competitive, and at least against Kithkin you still have a shot if you reach for nasty and powerful sideboard cards like Chaotic Backlash instead of ignoring the problem and focusing your fifteen cards on everyone else in the room.
I’m also assuming this loses that matchup off of zero games and pure theory, it might actually just be awesome against them because you present your own aggressive curve while using your removal to stop theirs, leaving them in burn range and on the back foot as they start dropping problem cards like Cloudgoat Ranger. We’re theorizing here today, not playtesting yet.
Bogardan Hellkite is also interesting to me, as it was an excellent control finisher last time around. This time around it has to compete with Broodmate Dragon and Baneslayer Angel, so the two decks I’d think about first, Jund and Five-Color Control, each have at least one if not more than one card I’d play first. (See more thoughts about Jund below.)
Goblin Chieftain is the next card that tickles my fancy, because even a half-as-amazing Goblin Warchief has to be pretty good and this makes me want to reconsider what a Goblin deck might look like. The mana cost reduction is actually already present in the format thanks to Frogtosser Banneret, the ‘worse’ Goblin Warchief that I still thought was good enough to play for several months last Extended season. While this deck certainly notices the loss of Mogg Fanatic, it still does have enough going on to actually think about it, and gets to be a synergistic two-color beatdown deck with perfect mana. Let’s look and see the following:
4 Knucklebone Witch
4 Intimidator Initiate
4 Frogtosser Banneret
4 Goblin Outlander
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Mad Auntie
4 Murderous Redcap
4 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Terminate
4 Auntie’s Hovel
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Graven Cairns
7 Mountain
5 Swamp
Certainly more development would be in order, as I do not feel the mana curve of this deck feels quite right, but it does have a nasty ability to explore almost out of nowhere to push a surprising amount of hasty damage in the opponent’s general direction. I fear if we want ‘explode out of nowhere’ combo-kill potential, however, we should be looking at the Elf tribe, not clan Goblin.
This brings us next to Green, and while I’d love to say that I think Ant Queen is good enough for Constructed, once again I have to look at it and then look at Baneslayer Angel and realize that I won’t be putting Ant Queen in any control decks anytime soon, and if you want a resilient Green threat for five mana I would lean on Thornling first after my experiences playing with Shards Block Constructed to qualify for the Magic Online Season 3 Championships. So the first actual Green card of note is Elvish Archdruid, who I see as having a home in two decks not just one. The first is the obvious one, Green/White Elves Combo, which I haven’t played with enough to know but can cite a good decklist update for thanks to Patrick Chapin:
Creatures (35)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 1 Burrenton Forge-Tender
- 1 Cloudthresher
- 4 Heritage Druid
- 4 Devoted Druid
- 4 Nettle Sentinel
- 4 Regal Force
- 4 Ranger of Eos
- 4 Elvish Visionary
- 1 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Elvish Archdruid
Lands (20)
Spells (5)
I also see Elvish Archdruid as the straight-up replacement for Civic Wayfinder in Black/Green Elves, and while it is not as consistent as the Wayfinder at smoothing your mana or having a positive effect even if it dies, you have to admit that the Archdruid is the more explosive card. Never mind the fact that you can get up to eight Lords on the Battlefield, because I see a format where Firespout returns to relevance and overextending like this will probably be the opposite of what ‘the plan’ actually is. Instead, I envision Elvish Archdruid fueling Profane Command kills entirely too quickly, as he adds a power to each Elf that now has fear and is attacking and adds a mana for each Elf on the Battlefield with which to Fireball your face. He’s also ridiculously explosive turn two off of a Llanowar Elf, but it’s those huge Profane Commands that get my attention. Let’s see:
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Putrid Leech
4 Wren’s Run Vanquisher
4 Elvish Archdruid
3 Imperious Perfect
4 Chameleon Colossus
4 Thoughtseize
4 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Profane Command
2 Doom Blade
9 Forest
4 Twilight Mire
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
4 Swamp
3 Mutavault
Yes, Treetop Village is a clear loss for this strategy, as it was amazing to be able to have that many threats in your mana-base to help mop up a Faerie deck even if half of your spells were countered. The point here is to show that Elvish Archdruid still neatly fills the hole left by Civic Wayfinder, and re-tooling your mana base to adjust for the loss of Wayfinder as a fixer and Llanowar Wastes as another dual land still gives you eight true dual lands to work with, which is not exactly something people traditionally cry over. Even if it doesn’t look exactly the same as before, the strategy remains effective, and quite effective at facing down against Kithkin, the presumed #1 deck going into this weekend’s PTQs and Nationals events.
Our next card of interest is Great Sable Stag, and the key problem with it in the ‘does this card destroy Faeries’ equation is that very few good decks can actually play it. B/G Elves can play it against Faeries and is probably quite happy to do so, as adding three copies to replace those Imperious Perfects gives you a beatdown deck that is far more threatening to them given how frequently they find Imperious Perfect to be irrelevant against Faeries. It gets in the way of the tribal theme, but I don’t think too many toes are stepped on and thus it’s a positive change, even if you are over-sideboarding by having both Stags and Cloudthresher to bring in, because it’s a key matchup to ‘over-sideboard’ for. G/W Tokens can play it, but it won’t even be that good for them, as it gets in the way of the rest of their strategy and just isn’t special enough.
The Cascade mechanic, however, is not just a solid Green deck that wouldn’t mind the help against Faeries, it is also a mechanic that helps inflate the number of Stags you will see if you try and play it. Every time you Cascade, after all, you have a chance of turning up Great Sable Stag, and even if you don’t find a Stag, you’ll pass by a lot of cards that aren’t Great Sable Stag and put them on the bottom of your library, increasing your chances of drawing Great Sable Stag in the upcoming turns. If this card has a home, then, it will be here rather than anywhere else. You can do this one of two ways: as 5c Blood, the Jund deck Patrick Chapin and others played at Grand Prix Seattle, or as a more traditional three-color Jund deck. Effectively the choice is between Cryptic Command and a regular Jund mana-base in your way of thinking about it, though to be honest if I were working on this I would be giving serious consideration to taking that splash-crazy mana-base and putting Baneslayer Angel in to top the curve. As long as you’re splashing for triple Blue off of Vivid lands anyway, why not double white for an absolutely preposterous creature?
Chapin’s take on a five-color design was in his most recent article, Innovations: M10 Firecracker — Continuing to Explore Standard, which if you haven’t read but enjoy looking at thought-provoking decklists would be well worth the look. He suggested the following from his work on the format so far:
Creatures (16)
Lands (26)
Spells (18)
As much as I’d love doing something crazy and tapping the opposing team with Cryptic Command and crashing with Bloodbraid Elf, Boggart Ram Gang, and Baneslayer Angel, I think the most productive new look at the archetype would be to rebuild it from the ground up incorporating just the Jund colors and see where it gets us. We’ll want to be able to beat Kithkin but unfortunately with three being the new two thanks to Honor of the Pure we’ll find that Volcanic Fallout and Jund Charm are just not as effective as they used to be, and many of the things we’d like to do (Firespout, Earthquake) don’t work so well with the Cascade mechanic. Instead we’ll be relying on the cantrip-Black-Lotus effect of Cascade to build up forces, and things that do not get in the way of Bloodbraid Elf as our main removal effects so we are always cascading up a potent creature or Maelstrom Pulses This makes me want the following as my starting point:
4 Putrid Leech
4 Boggart Ram-Gang
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Chameleon Colossus
4 Shriekmaw
3 Broodmate Dragon
4 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Bituminous Blast
6 Forest
4 Savage Lands
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Twilight Mire
3 Swamp
Here we’re talking about Great Sable Stag and the deck doesn’t even have any in it… but that piques my interest because Great Sable Stag would make an ideal sideboard card here, alongside Volcanic Fallout, giving us a post-board monster for Faeries to try and face down. The other interesting thing going on is that I am taking out the Elf core to have a more powerful Cascade core, cutting the turn-two Vanquisher and adjusting the removal base so that a Cascade will always hit an amazing creature (regardless of whether you have another Elf in hand) or Maelstrom Pulse. Never will you flip a one-for-one Terminate without a target to hit with it, and frankly if Jund Charm and Volcanic Fallout aren’t going to get it done against White creatures, I’d sooner do without them entirely and focus on more monsters and turning up Maelstrom Pulse off of a Cascade a fair bit more often.
Master of the Wild Hunt is another card I am quite impressed with for its power, but which doesn’t in my mind have an immediate home. It’s a controlling Green card, and as pleased as I am by such a thing existing in the world, I don’t see an immediate home for it, though I do consider it possible that it might be an effective card for a Jund deck to face Kithkin with, as it can very readily tap to kill a Kithkin each turn, or kill a Spectral Procession token each turn with added value when you’re done killing tokens and just want to attack with however much power worth of creatures have accumulated for free in the meantime. Casting Master of the Wild Hunt and untapping with him all but ensures that an opposing beatdown deck is going to be put in an unpleasantly tight spot, and he costs just enough to not interfere with Bloodbraid Elf in the meantime just like all the rest of the non-Maelstrom Pulse removal I put in the Jund deck.
And just like that, we’ve hit the end of things. I think Gargoyle Castle is an excellent card, just one that is going to be outshone by Mutavault in the near future and thus one that will take at least until Zendikar to really see Constructed play. It’s the end of the new cards to look at but not actually the end of decklists that interest me, as you might recall I was discussing U/W Reveillark as a possible consideration. We are, after all, looking to be re-entering the Standard metagame at approximately the point my analysis of Standard’s cyclical trends suggested would be the perfect time to play Reveillark and prey upon the aggressive creature metagame, and all we have to do (as if it’s an easy thing to do!) is build the deck up again without Mind Stone or Wrath of God. Losing our key accelerant and most powerful sweeper is not something to be shrugged off lightly, but redesigning the deck to deal with the format changes will undoubtedly prove fruitful.
4 Meddling Mage
4 Knight of the White Orchid
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Sower of Temptation
4 Mulldrifter
4 Reveillark
2 Wispmare
4 Cryptic Command
4 Path to Exile
4 Fieldmist Borderpost
4 Mystic Gate
4 Glacial Fortress
5 Island
9 Plains
I’d previously seen criticism of the fact that I played Knight of the White Orchid based off the fact that he was ‘a poor Mind Stone,’ but given the lack of that same card now in the format it may just be the only Mind Stone you have to work with. Wispmare earns main-deck inclusion to try and contain either Bitterblossom or Honor of the Pure, whichever you’re facing at the moment, as keeping those two things in check will reduce the need to have Wrath of God in the first place, and leverage your powerful incremental advantage cards while stabilizing the board. Of course, if you still need a sweeper you can go from two colors to five and fit in Firespout as your Wrath of God supplement, because it’s about the same difficulty going from a two-color Blue/White mana-base to a five color Vivid land mana-base. But once you go and put the chocolate in the peanut butter, so long as you’re not beating Faeries anyway you have to ask why you aren’t playing Five-Color Control, which is just as consistent at punishing the beatdown decks and has other versatile game-plans to work with as well. But maybe I’m just crazy and have to ask myself why it is that I am paying five mana for a White creature that is not named either Cloudgoat Ranger or Baneslayer Angel.
And this covers a lot of ground in the metagame, as well as identifying some potential new growth. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the journey along with me, because if you haven’t Craig is going to murder me for submitting an article that is twice as long as it’s supposed to be. And there will be nothing I can do to get out of it, because we’re at eighteen pages when he normally considers nine to be long-winded of me. [Don’t worry, you’re fine. — Craig.]
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com