There are five broad hurdles to cross when building a new deck for Standard.
1. How will you beat a horde of tokens backed up by pump effects?
2. How will you beat Cruel Ultimatum and Broodmate Dragon?
3. How will you beat fast creatures and burn?
4. How will you beat mana denial?
5. How will you beat Faeries?
Faeries gets its own category because it attacks on so many fronts. It has a swarm of tokens from Bitterblossom – pumped by Glorious Anthem stand-in Scion of Oona – meaning it can get draws like BW. It has mana denial in the form of Mistbind Clique. It has aggro control draws that can be absolutely merciless. It has card draw in the form of Jace. It has Sower of Temptation, and Scion to protect it from targeted removal. It’s a very, very tough nut to crack.
Besides Faeries, the rest of these have simple-ish answers. You can beat a horde of tokens backed up by pump effects by playing sweepers. You can beat fast creatures and burn with lifegain. You can beat mana denial by playing a low curve. You can beat Ultimatum and Broodmate by killing Five-Color Control before they can cast those spells, by countering them, or sometimes by stripping them out of Five-Color Control’s hand.
However, there are some problems with these different approaches. It’s fine in theory to play sweepers to deal with tokens, but in order to not be wasting your time, you have to be playing a sweeper deck that is better than Five-Color Control. That’s a tall order, as if you are going to play something like Volcanic Fallout, you will most likely be playing creatures with three or more toughness — meaning you’re either (A) playing a control deck, in which case you’re going to have a tough time being a better control deck than Five-Color Control, or (B) you’re playing a fatty creature deck, in which case you’re probably going to have a tough time beating Five-Color Control yourself.
The alternate approach to slaying tokens is simply to play tokens yourself – overrun your opponent’s army of small fry with an army of your own. The GW Overrun deck takes this concept more literally than most, literally intending to Overrun the opponent’s army with its own. B/W, on the other hand, focuses on more token generators and more pump effects, allowing the tokens to routinely outclass the opponent’s, and to sometimes end up pumped out of Volcanic Fallout range.
So where to begin? To me, the cards that define the format are:
Cryptic Command
Spectral Procession
Bitterblossom
Faeries plays Bitterblossom and Cryptic Command, B/W Tokens plays Spectral Procession and Bitterblossom, Boat Brew plays Spectral Procession, and Five-Color Control plays Cryptic Command.
Notice a missing combination here? The impending return of Meddling Mage to the format got me thinking about the best way to put him to work, and a look at this list of Most Important Cards got me thinking: why not play a deck with Cryptic Command and Spectral Procession?
The obvious answer is, “because Cryptic costs UUU and Spectral costs WWW.” However, that theoretical problem is easily solved by the fact that the Blue-White color combination gets Wanderwine Hub to help out its mana. Provided a deck plays enough Merfolk that Hub can come into play untapped a reasonable amount of the time, it should be pretty straightforward to support both cards with a manabase like this:
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Mystic Gate
4 Adarkar Wastes
4 Wanderwine Hub
2 Mutavault
2 Arcane Sanctum
1 Plains
1 Island
That’s 23 White sources with which to make Procession, and 19 Blue sources with which to make Cryptic Command – in other words, about as many White sources as BW tokens runs to support Procession, and about as many Blue sources as Faeries runs to support Command. Neither of those decks generally has trouble casting their respective Deal Breakers, so I’m satisfied with these numbers.
As to finding a list to go with the manabase, the first thing I tried was adapting my U/W Merfolk list from States to include Procession and Meddling Mage. Here’s what it looked like:
U/W Merfolk with Procession
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Mystic Gate
4 Adarkar Wastes
4 Wanderwine Hub
2 Mutavault
2 Arcane Sanctum
1 Plains
1 Island
4 Silvergill Adept
4 Meddling Mage
3 Sygg, River Guide
4 Spectral Procession
4 Merrow Reejerey
4 Wake Thrasher
3 Ajani Goldmane
4 Cryptic Command
Naturally, there were a few other updates to make along the way. Path to Exile seems superior to Oblivion Ring at the moment. The only situations where you’d rather have O-Ring are against Bitterblossom and against Planeswalkers, but Path is miles better against Five-Color Control, Blightning, and creatures in general (Mistbind Clique and Scion of Oona in particular). I am also interested in dropping my curve a bit, as I am running fewer two-drops than I was with my previous Merfolk list.
Likewise, it seems important to replace Sower of Temptation with a pump effect of some sort. Against Five-Color Control I prefer Ajani’s protection against Volcanic Fallout, and against nearly anything else I am all too likely to end up stealing some 1/1 token instead of just making my own small fry bigger.
For the record, I debated for a bit over Elspeth versus Ajani versus Thistledown Liege versus Glorious Anthem. I really wanted to pick Elspeth, as the combos with Sygg, Wake Thrasher, and (assuming he makes it in somewhere) Knight of Meadowgrain are absolutely sick. However, I realized that the odds of getting blown out by a removal spell were too great, especially with Terminate coming back in, and decided to go with a Glorious Anthem lookalike instead. Thistledown Liege seemed interesting because of Flash and because of the dual pump on Meddling Mage and Sygg. However, these just didn’t seem to stack up with Ajani’s ability to confer vigilance, the fact that his counters stuck around even if he died, the fact that he was harder to kill, provided lifegain, and so on. Glorious Anthem lost out to the lifegain and the vigilance as well.
Still, this build was not quite what I was looking for. What good is Silvergill Adept in a world where 1/1 tokens and 1/6 walls abound? What good is Merrow Reejerey, for that matter? The Merfolk themselves did not seem to be pulling their weight in this build, so I tried a version without them.
U/W Tokens
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Mystic Gate
4 Adarkar Wastes
4 Wanderwine Hub
2 Mutavault
2 Arcane Sanctum
1 Plains
1 Island
4 Knight of Meadowgrain
4 Meddling Mage
3 Sygg, River Guide
4 Spectral Procession
4 Wake Thrasher
3 Ajani Goldmane
4 Cryptic Command
4 Cloudgoat Ranger
This has more of the kind of sensibilities you expect from B/W tokens or Boat Brew, with its Cloudgoat Rangers and focus on threat quality over speed of curve-out. Against Faeries, every single card in the deck represents a substantial threat, and against Five-Color Control, everything but Knight of Meadowgrain has the potential to be backbreaking if it resolves. The deck has fewer redundant tokens and pump effects than B/W, but can compensate with game-enders like Cryptic Command and the Wake Thrasher plus Sygg combo.
Why play this over B/W tokens?
Cryptic Command is the main reason to even consider this strategy. It is absolutely unbelievable in creature mirrors. The most devastating mode is the one that taps all the opponents’ creatures, as doing so generally lets you get in an entire extra attack because you use the Command’s second mode to bounce (or counter, if you’re really lucky!) the opponent’s only untapped blocker. Sometimes you cycle it and tap their guys and it’s just straight-up Time Walk. It really doesn’t matter how pumped-up the opponent’s creatures are if you can just tap them all down to sail by with your men for a ton of damage.
The other great part about Cryptic Command is that it lets you have aggro control moments, where you simply untap with a superior board position and maintaining it by Dismissing the opponent’s next spell or two. This is especially strong against Five-Color Control, as it gives you a built-in answer to their Broodmates and Ultimatums, provided you can untap with a favorable board position before they cast the spells in question.
Meddling Mage essentially occupies the Most Powerful Two-Drop slot that would be filled by Bitterblossom in a B/W Tokens deck, leading to the question of whether he is an upgrade or a downgrade in comparison to everyone’s favorite Tribal Enchantment.
On the one hand, he is worse than Bitterblossom because he is infinitely easier to deal with. On the other hand, he can create a far greater spectrum of problems for the opponent if he sticks. Mage naming Sower of Temptation or Glorious Anthem, for example, can prevent blowouts that Bitterblossom would be powerless to stop. On the play, Mage naming Bitterblossom itself shuts down any number of Blossoms in opposing B/W and Faeries players’ hands, and by the time they find removal for him, Bitterblossom might not even be worth casting anymore. As a late-game topdeck, a situation in which Bitterblossom struggles to perform, he can be incredibly clutch, eliminating the opponent’s best out while adding another beater to the table. Turn 2 Mage naming Volcanic Fallout followed by turn 3 Spectral Procession is a potentially game-ending opener against Five-Color Control, one which BW cannot match even with Blossom.
All in all, I expect the fragility of Mage to be the factor that makes Blossom the superior card, but given the far greater blowout potential inherent to the Mage, it seems the two cards are more similarly powerful than one might expect.
Wake Thrasher is another added benefit of playing Blue. I have yet to be down on running 7/7s for three in aggressive decks, even when they are KO’d by Mogg Fanatic. When I played this guy in Merfolk, he almost immediately demanded a chump blocker every turn, and if I had Sygg to push him through or Cryptic Command to tap down blockers, he routinely won the game on his own. The fact that he is doing battle alongside the likes of Spectral Procession (three creatures to untap and pump him for the price of one) and Cloudgoat Ranger (four for one!) is just gravy, although Ajani’s vigilance ability is admittedly a nombo.
Between Wake Thrasher, Mutavault, and Wanderwine Hub, there is enough Merfolk action in town to make Sygg the best remaining two-drop. Other considerations included Knight of the White Orchid, Deft Duelist, Broken Ambitions, Negate, Remove Soul, and Merfolk Looter, but none of these seemed as productively aggressive as Sygg, particularly because Sygg plus Wake Thrasher remains an almost guaranteed win against most decks if you untap with it.
Incidentally, if this were a deck that routinely kept mana open, I could easily see Remove Soul or Negate instead of Sygg, but this deck wants to tap out far too often for that to be realistic. An actual Counterspell effect would be more intriguing, as it might help generate aggro control moments, but I can’t very well decline to play a spell in favor of leaving Negate mana open when my opponent’s next play might be Broodmate Dragon.
To Recap
At the beginning of this article, I proposed five questions that a deck must answer in order to compete in Standard. Here are my answers for this deck.
1. How will you beat a horde of tokens backed up by pump effects?
Use a combination of my own tokens and pump effects with cards like Cryptic Command and Sygg to push through damage in ways my opponents cannot, while disrupting my opponent’s unique token generators (Bitterblossom) and pump effects (Glorious Anthem) with Meddling Mage.
2. How will you beat Cruel Ultimatum and Broodmate Dragon?
Primarily through Cryptic Command and Meddling Mage, though Sygg can at least provide a way to push through multiple Broodmate tokens.
3. How will you beat fast creatures and burn?
Path to Exile, Ajani, and Knight of Meadowgrain. We’ll see if they are enough.
4. How will you beat mana denial?
I am running 26 lands, but have plenty of dangerous plays below the four-mana mark.
5. How will you beat Faeries?
By playing, almost exclusively, cards which are dangerous or highly disruptive to the Faeries as a whole.
Once I have an Internet connection again (just moved into a new apartment), I am very interested to run this deck through its paces and see what effect Cryptic Command and Meddling Mage have on the dynamics of a Token deck in practice. Will Command be the ultimate trump, or simply inferior to cheaper alternatives like the Bitterblossoms and Glorious Anthems used by B/W?
Either way, I am massively pumped at the prospect of running Meddling Mage, Spectral Procession, and Cryptic Command in the same deck.
See you next week!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]