Following up on this past weekend’s Grand Prix in Los Angeles, it seems the Extended metagame is turning another corner as a different axis of the metagame starts to come to attention. The “dirty combo deck” section of the metagame has been so far under-represented in PTQ play, with Elves seeming to be almost nonexistent, and it is this trend that was readily capitalized upon by Reigning North American Ultimate Champion Of Ultimate Victory Luis Scott-Vargas to claim the trophy in Los Angeles. Say whatever you will of the man… that he’s on a hot streak, that you’d heard he was dead, that you’d thought he’d be taller… but it’s not to be denied that Luis has been on a tear lately, what with two Grand Prix and one Pro Tour win over the last few months. This latest weapon of choice for him and many others from California was perfectly aimed to take the tournament, and is certain to make waves on the PTQ circuit.
With the rise of Faerie Wizards in the metagame, regardless of whose list you’re rocking it with (American or Japanese) it’s easy to note that it has been shaping the metagame around it. Faeries takes a bite out of Elves, stifling that deck choice near to irrelevance at the PTQs we’ve seen so far, and has a reasonable matchup against Zoo as well, so new innovations were necessary to escape the tricksy Wizard tribe and their previously-irrelevant lair at the Riptide Laboratory. With Elves down and Fae up, a combo deck that loses to Elves because it’s slower but beats Faeries thanks to the Storm mechanic just happens to be an excellent choice, and Luis Scott-Vargas was one of a good number of pilots taking UR Storm to the tournament… but was certainly the best-rewarded of them. The question to my mind, though, is what this week’s tournaments do to this upcoming weekend’s PTQs, as the season takes new information and steps forward accordingly.
As is pretty traditional, results are copied and last week’s winner is this week’s Deck to Beat. A considerable number of players are thus likely to start shuffling up UR Storm for this weekend now that we have another concrete result showing us how the underpinnings of the Extended format work, and just as many will now look at it and say that they see the writing on the wall, abandoning decks that don’t beat it very well to try and get an advantage with something else. To some the obvious answer will be Elves, and to others, the obvious answer will be “don’t play Faeries,” and these two facts together mean that while there will be a sudden and definite surge in the number of UR Storm decks played next week, it won’t necessarily lead to a subsequent surge in results obtained with the deck. At the very least, these two things will not be directly proportional, so don’t go expecting to see UR Storm winning every PTQ this weekend… but likewise you should expect the decks that beat it, like Elves, to have a sudden pick-up in playability and success as Storm combo starves that deck’s predator out of the metagame, and provides it with fresh food as well: itself.
Los Angeles shows us the emergent metagame that we have slowly but surely begun to see; never mind the blips on the radar like a 9-0 All-In Red deck, because Hall of Famer Rob Dougherty initial success was not a strong enough finish in the end to lead him to the Top 8… there is a reason that such a high-variance strategy such as that has not become popular, and the failure to close on Day 2 from 9-0 is yet another strike against the deck. What we see coming out of Los Angeles is the rise of Death Cloud Rock with Life from the Loam as a functional control strategy, after building up some early steam in online queues, early PTQ results and gaining the attention of Internet writers such as GerryT and Marijn Lybaert as we got nearer to the Grand Prix. What we see is the triumph of UR Storm in Extended, putting a new Shards of Alara card to work by abusing Ad Nauseam against those slow, discard-based control decks. What we see is the return of Affinity to the forefront of Extended as a potent strategy that attacks the de-facto ‘best deck’ going into the tournament, Faeries, turning the wheels of the metagame yet again.
Let’s have a look at some of the new contenders… starting with the winning deck.
Lands (18)
Spells (42)
- 2 Tendrils of Agony
- 2 Sleight of Hand
- 4 Peer Through Depths
- 4 Desperate Ritual
- 4 Mind's Desire
- 4 Seething Song
- 4 Remand
- 2 Electrolyze
- 4 Rite of Flame
- 4 Lotus Bloom
- 4 Ponder
- 4 Manamorphose
Sideboard
To some, this is coming completely out of left field. But tracking the information backwards you’ll see one of the “Top Extended Decklists” from the Worlds coverage is a Grapeshot/Swath Storm combo deck played by Cynic Kim:
Cynic Kim — 2008 Worlds, Extended
3 Cascade Bluffs
3 Flooded Strand
2 Island
1 Mountain
3 Polluted Delta
4 Steam Vents
2 Chrome Mox
4 Desperate Ritual
4 Grapeshot
4 Lotus Bloom
4 Manamorphose
4 Mind’s Desire
4 Peer Through Depths
4 Ponder
2 Pyromancer’s Swath
4 Remand
4 Rite of Flame
4 Seething Song
Sideboard:
4 Echoing Truth
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Firespout
3 Gigadrowse
2 Pact of Negation
2 Pyroclasm
2 Shattering Spree
There are some pretty critical changes. First perhaps is the addition of Time Spiral charge-lands to the manabase, helping against the slow-control matchups to let you hit a lot of mana without necessarily spending a lot of cards. These go alongside the fact that Ad Nauseam is the method of choice for the deck to get itself back in the game out from under a Raven’s Crime lockdown. Second is the change from Grapeshot plus Swath to just Tendrils of Agony, because the deck can easily pay for double-Black thanks to Lotus Bloom, Manamorphose, and now Dreadship Reef as well. Third and perhaps most importantly, the deck cut down the number of cards actually required for a kill, and thus found room for a utility spell (Electrolyze) to take out problems like Ethersworn Canonist or Gaddock Teeg and a little more room for early-game cantrips, a la Sleight of Mind. Fourth was cutting the Chrome Moxes due to the fact that they were serving as counterproductive mana sources… they sound good because they are acceleration, but Storm combo considers every card in its hand as very valuable and doesn’t want to squander any by giving them a one-time opportunity to play Simian Spirit Guide, at the cost of another spell.
Main-deck changes:
-2 Chrome Mox, -1 Mountain, -1 Steam Vents; +4 Dreadship Reef
-4 Grapeshot, -2 Pyromancer’s Swath; +2 Tendrils of Agony, +2 Electrolyze, +2 Sleight of Hand
One thing interesting to note is that LSV’s changes led to at least some small increase in the number of hands that just don’t work easily on the manabase, with Cascade Bluffs and Dreadship Reef being a non-bo for making Blue or Red mana with ease. However, for the most part any land plus Dreadship Reef is potentially a keeper, even if it takes extra time… at worst you just don’t get your colored mana until turn 3, or until another mana source comes online. If that first bit of colored mana turns into Rite, Rite, Seething Song, Desperate Ritual, Manamorphose, Mind’s Desire… well, that’s probably fine. You’ll note there are more hands you have to look carefully at for a mulligan, but those Dreadship Reefs gave far more benefits than they took away by making hands unkeepable.
Luis wrote a detailed tournament report of his win in Los Angeles here, and I won’t pretend I can provide any more insight than he can. Vanity only goes so far, after all.
Worth noticing as well is that Asher Hecht (aka ‘ManningBot’ to many) also made Top 8 with Storm Combo, with his list sticking more closely to the Cynic Kim list from Worlds, trading a Grapeshot for a single copy of Gigadrowse to give a game 1 threat against Blue control decks that take forever to win. Asher likewise cut the Chrome Moxes, as well as flipping around his sac-lands to include some Red sac-lands, and changed the number overall from six to five. The sixth sac-land plus the two Chrome Moxes independently became Dreadship Reefs, though for Asher’s purposes those could just as easily have been Calciform Pools as his version has neither Tendrils nor Ad Nauseam, relying on Grapeshot still for the kill and not having Ad Nauseam as a late-game reload against Death Cloud decks.
Any way you build it, so long as you stick more-or-less to the Desire game-plan, UR Storm is here in force, and its impact will surely change the PTQ metagame immediately: decks that have a hard time beating it will begin to wilt in the face of this new threat’s rising dominance, and decks that it has a hard time standing up to will start to fall back onto the radar. This week looks like a good week to reconsider the worth of playing Elves, as more Wizards die off and more Storm combo decks begin to appear… it’s always a good thing to be the faster combo deck.
As someone who never considers a deck to be absolutely finished, but instead subject to change over time and the movement of the metagame around you, I look at those Electrolyzes and suspect we can do much better. Ditto to Cynic’s Pyroclasms in his sideboard; sorcery speed is not fast enough to interact with Elves, and two damage to everything is not nearly as important as three damage to everything, in the light of Zoo’s high-toughness mark being three thanks to Kird Ape and Wild Nacatl. An unconventional card that occasionally gains new attention is Martyr of Ashes, and I would give serious consideration to making room for Martyrs either in the main-deck or sideboard for the upcoming PTQ weeks… it’s hard to prognosticate exactly what will happen, but easy to see that the changes to the metagame based on the success at GP: LA will be returning Elves to the metagame cycle.
After all, the trick is not merely to figure out what was good last week, but to adjust forward in time to see what will be good pressing forward from there. With so much of the “old” metagame being decks that sit there and let you goldfish them with the Desire deck, or just applies the wrong tools to the job, we can’t pretend that this week’s results will look like last week’s… people will cease to ‘choose to lose’ to Desire, making the environment less harshly anti-Elf and ending the focus most Faeries players had been pushing towards, over-specializing for the mirror match instead of against these new aspects of the metagame.
One key change one might expect will be for the resurgence of Elves. With Thoughtseize main to gain some more margin against retaliatory disruption and the pesky Faerie Wizards, it is very arguable that the Elves deck might be the right one to play for this weekend as some of its worse matchups face new threats and the hot new thing in the format wants to see it least of all.
7 Forest
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Windswept Heath
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Pendelhaven
4 Summoner’s Pact
4 Glimpse of Nature
4 Thoughtseize
3 Weird Harvest
1 Grapeshot
4 Wirewood Symbiote
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Heritage Druid
4 Birchlore Rangers
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Elvish Visionary
1 Regal Force
1 Viridian Shaman
1 Eternal Witness
Of course, one might also argue that instead of joining the problem you should try to be the solution, and will not aim to take either Elves or Storm combo to the table for the next PTQ, instead looking to take advantage of clear weaknesses in the format. To some degree this was what Michael Jacob did in crafting his Death Cloud-less Death Cloud Rock deck, which is secretly a very fair Dredge deck. Darkblast is quietly amazing in this format, and put to even better use in this deck than elsewhere, because in addition to getting a re-buy at his removal spell of choice, you get to Dredge. Dredging in this deck finds Raven’s Crime, Darkblast, Life from the Loam, and Worm Harvest all for free, and thus is a self-assembling means to removing creatures from play, gaining card advantage with cycling lands, stripping the opponent’s hand entirely, and even a built-in kill condition so you never have to worry about over-Dredging and the fact that skipping your draw to Dredge means you don’t draw threats. Add to that more of the Rock cards that don’t suck (as I’ve heard it put recently), and you get to have this wonderful self-assembling web of defense and advantage alongside hits like Tarmogoyf wearing a Jitte, one-for-one removal, and pinpoint discard.
Creatures (8)
Lands (26)
Spells (26)
- 3 Umezawa's Jitte
- 4 Darkblast
- 4 Life from the Loam
- 3 Putrefy
- 2 Slaughter Pact
- 3 Thoughtseize
- 3 Bitterblossom
- 3 Raven's Crime
- 1 Worm Harvest
Sideboard
For everyone who has been loving the Rock lately, this is the Rock deck you should be looking at; its angles of attack are significantly improved, what with a clear focus on Life from the Loam advantage and surprise amazing plays like Slaughter Pact from a board that has tapped low in the early game to play threats or use Life from the Loam. Nothing says love like a Fatal Frenzied all-in Atog disappearing from the board even though you’re tapped out. But most importantly this is not a Death Cloud Rock deck, i.e. a ponderously slow control deck that empties its opponent’s hand but gives them forever to topdeck their way out of it. Ad Nauseam won many similar matchups for the Storm players because they really could just let it be some ridiculous Yawgmoth’s Bargain-type card in their deck, and next thing you know a fresh shot of ten cards to the grip gives them an opening right back into the game. Attacking with meaty Tarmogoyfs and even just Kitchen Finks and Bitterblossom tokens adds up real fast, with a real and meaningful threat rather than playing the Sakura-Tribe Elder waiting game on turn 2.
If there is one thing I want to say about the Faeries decks we saw in this Top 8, it is that they certainly enjoyed a variety of appearances with no two lists looking remotely alike in function. Saul Alvardo goes for an iteration of Something Level Blue, using Tarmogoyf in a Blue aggro-control package and even stretching the traditional understanding of how much mana you can actually spend on a reactive spell in this format by bringing us our first-ever successful Extended deck with the magic words of “4x Cryptic Command”. In many other ways it resembles the American Faerie decks, just without the positive Riptide Laboratory interactions and Spellstutter Sprite/Mutavault interaction. Mat Marr marries American and Japanese Faeries, which surely throws off their air-speed velocity when unladen, but otherwise shows us the Glen Elendra Archmage interactions of the Japanese Faeries lists with the Shackles-based approach of the American lists from Worlds… but really, really looks like the Japanese lists, only with a few Vensers and some Shackles instead of Sowers of Temptation.
Considering that I love the Japanese versions and have been finding Sower of Temptation eerily easier to protect than Vedalken Shackles in this metagame, I’m doubtful that I agree with Shackles over Sower, even as I can admit that it is better game 1 in the Faerie mirror. But Marr’s deck looks so very similar to the Faeries list I myself am looking to run, but with me currently liking Ponder because I am apparently quite odd, I have to content myself with the fact that a Faerie deck that based itself very heavily off the Japanese Mono-Blue Faeries list managed to do quite well for itself.
And then there was Heezy. Mark Herberholz has been working on Trinket Mage in Faeries for a while, and having myself explored that option I’m not surprised to see it as a less-than-four-of. I would, however, have expected it to be a three-of, and in coming weeks would anticipate a greater desire for having a Chalice of the Void in the main-deck for Trinket Mage to search for, as well as more in the sideboard to put to work. Chalice is just incidentally awesome in the matchups where you have a potential for problems; Chalice on one essentially destroys Elves, not that you can tap out for Trinket Mage turn 3 against them, and Chalice on zero stops Lotus Blooms (and Pact of Negation out of the sideboard!) against UR Storm on that dangerous turn before the Suspend Lotus comes into play. I’m pretty sure a mere mortal with Heezy’s deck is going to be woefully unprepared to match his Top 8 appearance with it, however, and if nothing else should re-tool the manabase to get something that works for them instead of something with not nearly enough Islands to run its own Vedalken Shackles, meaning fetchlands are worth having and should be here, but Izzet Boilerworks and River of Tears should not… and probably neither should the second Seat of the Synod. One is great for getting with Trinket Mage, and you want some as free artifacts to discard to Thirst for Knowledge, but you need your lands to be islands.
It should not be overlooked, as well, that there were two Affinity decks in the Top 8 of the Grand Prix. It’s one of those things I’d just tend to not note very much, because it seems to me like a worse beatdown deck than Zoo and something that is incredibly vulnerable to well-aimed sideboard cards, but the simple fact is that it got to where it is by munching on the Faerie decks. It may be one of those “fair” decks that plan to munch on you by turn 4 every game through the attack phase, and be very good at doing the munching by turn 4, but the truth of the matter simply is that decks like TEPS are not really going to concern themselves with its existence because it is ill-equipped to do anything interesting like ‘actually mount a defense.’ The two decks share most of the same cards but disagreed on whether Atog + Fatal Frenzy was the plan of choice or it should just be left up to the colorless robots plus Master of Etherium, and even the Atog-bearing Affinity deck wasn’t the four-Atogs version that was actually quite scary last Extended season with its unexpectedly consistent turn 3 lethal swings off of Fatal Frenzy.
There will be robots, they will be as uninteresting as they were before… but even uninteresting robots win PTQs. It did, after all, win the Worlds PTQ in Memphis last month:
Creatures (27)
- 3 Atog
- 4 Arcbound Ravager
- 4 Arcbound Worker
- 4 Frogmite
- 4 Ornithopter
- 4 Ethersworn Canonist
- 4 Master of Etherium
Lands (18)
Spells (15)
Sideboard
It’s hard to make an Affinity deck look truly different than the rest of them, but it’s also worth noting that Weinburg’s additions of Krark-Clan Shaman in the sideboard as a tool against Elves was also in the sideboard of the GP Finalist, and should be getting extra attention if we’re discussing Elves as a potential upswing on the metagame radar. All of these decks will be played if for no other reason than that most of them represent aspects of the metagame that had until now lain low on the metagame radar, and with a drop-off in the Faeries deck that has been preying upon Elves and the metagame readjusting itself to stop hating on the little green men, it’s worth noting key sideboard cards for that matchup just as something to also make sure you’re aware of, even though it was absent from the Top Eight.
We have one week of PTQs with this format, then the Conflux prerelease and, unless I’m mistaken, Conflux itself comes out the following Friday, making it eligible for play at that weekend’s PTQs according to the latest spate of rules on the legality of sets that have just been released. It’s possible we may have nothing to talk about from the new set… and it’s possible it may just be downright awesome and require our attention for that and that alone. If nothing else I’m confident that there are a few utility cards that will make a home in Extended, and thus we’ll have not just a Grand Prix-inspired metagame shift to the Extended format but a bunch of new toys to play with as well.
Until next week…