It was always my plan to write about the StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Open in this article, and that has not changed. However, it is not the most exciting tournament report of all time, as I wound up dropping from the event after losing rounds two and three. I do believe that the deck is good and I still play it on Magic Online to great effect. Instead of a big tournament report, I’ll be taking you through the evolution of the deck I played, as that winds up being much more interesting than “I dropped after my opponent cast Wrath of God on the third turn in round 3.”
A few weeks ago, I came home to a flashing IM window from Nick Eisel saying that he’d “broken Standard.” He said that he had come up with a way to make Combo Elves work in Standard and not just Extended, and that he and his old roommate had been crushing MTGO with it. When I eventually got the list from him, I had:
4 Heritage Druid
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Devoted Druid
4 Elvish Harbinger
2 Ranger of Eos
2 Hunting Triad
3 Elvish Promenade
4 Distant Melody
1 Roar of the Crowd
2 Regal Force
1 Tar Fiend
1 Coat of Arms
4 Springleaf Drum
4 Yavimaya Coast
4 Brushland
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
4 Forest
I began goldfishing the deck, and was quickly convinced that I had a monster on my hands. However, there were two problems that I could see. First, you had a deck that was a combo deck built on creatures. In Extended, the combo was good enough that you rarely had to fall back on your creatures, and the guys were numerous enough that when you did you could often win. In Standard, the combo was much more fragile and much less impressive, and somehow the creatures were also less impressive when you had to lean on them. This meant that when you didn’t completely blow someone out of the water, you often played a bunch of 1/1s and then died. Second, the deck was extraordinarily vulnerable to Wrath effects. Not only did you need a critical mass of creatures to actually win, you often were sitting on one or two lands and three mana creatures, so a Wrath would also be an Armageddon.
While this is not the decklist that I wound up playing, I think it’s important to talk about the cards in this rough draft list so that you can understand where the motivation for the changes came from.
This is primarily a deck that wins by attacking with a massive number of huge elves or by casting Roar of the Crowd to deal lethal. This is achieved by using the Nettle Sentinel + Heritage Druid engine to power out some Elves, generate some mana, and then draw a ton of cards using those Elves and mana with either Regal Force or Distant Melody.
Llanowar Elves, Devoted Druid, and Elvish Harbinger are included mostly as mana sources, but some of them serve purposes other than that. Devoted Druid is a super Dark Ritual when combined with Coat of Arms; a 12/14 Druid can tap for more than a bit of mana, often to play more elves which just make the Druid even bigger. The untap ability can also be important when you just have one Nettle Sentinel in play to go with your Heritage Druid and need to start your combo chain. Elvish Harbinger lets you tutor up a missing combo piece or the Elvish Promenade that will win up being lethal, but is also important as a multi-color mana source to help cast your Melodies, Rangers, and Roar.
Hunting Triad and Elvish Promenade are how you go about getting enough tokens into play to really start going off. Each of them will not only give you Elves to feed your Melodies, but they’ll give you tons of mana with Heritage Druid. The Hunting Triad is obviously less impressive when you’re going off, but it’s one of the best cards you can answer a Wrath with, and the Reinforce is actually important in a decent number of games.
Ranger of Eos is the engine kick-starter; you pay four mana and you usually wind up with the Heritage Druid and Nettle Sentinel you need to get things rolling.
The actual win conditions are Tar Fiend, Coat of Arms, and Roar of the Crowd. They are supported by Springleaf Drum. Often you will find that you can generate way more Green mana than you need, but you needed to tap your Harbinger early on; the Drum will let you tap a summoning sick token for Red mana so that you don’t have to wait a turn to go off.
Before I go into the changes that I made to the deck, I want to talk about some quick hits for the various matchups I’ve run into on MTGO. Just to be clear, these were my experiences with the original decklist.
– There is just a complete lack of RDW in any form; in the 20 or so queues I played leading up to the 5k, I played against zero Red decks.
– Kithkin was a complete walk, as long as you didn’t mulligan to four or keep a do-nothing hand. The decks with Unmake were a little harder to beat because they could actually do something to you mid-combo, but none of them really killed you fast enough to stop you.
– Faeries was decent pre-board, but atrocious post-board. Game 1 you had to deal with Thoughtseize and counterspells, which are annoying but beatable, but after that you have to be able to beat Infest also.
– Five-Color Control is nearly unwinnable if they figure out what you’re doing. They’ve got actual Wraths and anywhere between two and eight more fake Wraths between their deck and sideboard.
– Other fair decks (like G/B Elves or Jund Manaramp) live or die based on how many of your guys they can kill. Without Firespout/Infest/Pyroclasm/Jund Charm, they will just be too slow to stop you, but if they draw those cards and you can’t do anything about it or rebuild from them, you will find your 1/1s unimpressive.
Evolution
At this point, the 5k is approximately one week away. I’m playtesting by running a few MTGO queues each day, but I’m also dealing with my last week of classes. I learn early that Wrath effects are the bane of the deck, and that decks without them need to try really hard to fight the combo the fair way. I decide that my main goal for the deck is to improve its matchup against Wrath of God.
To this end, I pick out the cards that are terrible topdecks after a Wrath. These cards are Elvish Promenade, Distant Melody, Roar of the Crowd, Springleaf Drum, and Coat of Arms. Cards that are great topdecks after a Wrath are Ranger of Eos and Hunting Triad. It’s also fair to call most of the deck a pretty bad topdeck after a Wrath, as all the various random Elves are just not going to get it done on their own on turn 5 or 6, but at least a Heritage Druid off the top can swing for one, where Elvish Promenade will do absolutely nothing.
While Wraths were the main way I would lose games, I could lose to a deck like Faeries simply because I didn’t do a whole lot on turns 1 through 3. It could be that against a normal deck, my first three turns of mana Elf development would turn into a fourth-turn combo win, but against Faeries, I found that they could delay me for a turn with Cryptic Command, Spellstutter Sprite, etc long enough to attack in the air a few times and kill me. In addition to wanting to trim the cards that were terrible to draw after a Wrath, I wanted to increase the overall power of each of my creatures so that single cards could actually have an impact on the game. This, of course, will also help against Wraths.
If I took my Combo Elves and went as far as I could in those two directions, I would essentially wind up playing regular Green/Black Elves. They are filled with heavy-hitters and some card advantage, but they are relatively slow and don’t really do anything broken. I knew that I wanted to settle on something in between the two.
At this point, my old teammate Steve linked me to a Combo Elves deck that had done well in MTGO Premiere Events. This list did a lot of the things I wanted to do, so here it is:
4 Brushland
9 Forest
4 Wooded Bastion
1 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender
3 Devoted Druid
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Heritage Druid
4 Imperious Perfect
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
3 Ranger of Eos
3 Regal Force
4 Wren’s Run Vanquisher
3 Elvish Promenade
3 Manamorphose
3 Overrun
Instead of trying to combo-kill the bad guy with Roar of the Crowd, this deck played the much more straightforward combo of creatures + Overrun. It also managed to fit in both Wren’s Run Vanquisher and Imperious Perfect, both cards that exactly fit what I wanted in terms of playing spells that had a bigger impact on the board.
However, I didn’t like Overrun as much as I liked Coat of Arms. Overrun is much better against Faeries, and can be much more effective against decks like Kithkin or the Black/White token deck, but Coat of Arms is much better against half-Wraths like Pyroclasm or Infest and even against actual Wraths as it sticks around, and it has the previously-mentioned interaction with Devoted Druid that I like so much.
I also didn’t like the complete lack of a one-turn kill. Overrun is great the turn after you go off and spit out thirteen elves, but doesn’t tend to get the job done with just one attacker.
Steve and I talked about the two decklists, and I moved to a list I was quite happy with:
4 Wooded Bastion
4 Brushland
10 Forest
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Heritage Druid
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Devoted Druid
4 Wren’s Run Vanquisher
4 Imperious Perfect
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Hunting Triad
3 Elvish Promenade
2 Regal Force
3 Coat of Arms
1 Roar of the Crowd
1 Springleaf Drum
I had cut most of the true combo cards from the deck, as I had been getting more and more sick of drawing Distant Melody after getting Infested. I bumped the two cards that were the best against a Wrath (Ranger and Triad) up to full playsets, giving me the best bet of being able to come back from a sweeper as well as eight ways to really move into high gear with the combo.
I focused on mana Elves and attacking Elves, and could really put pressure on with a non-combo curve of Nettle Sentinel, Wren’s Run Vanquisher, and Imperious Perfect. These changes bumped most of my matchup percentages upwards, at a small cost against the fair decks like Kithkin that couldn’t stop my combo in the old list. However, those matchups were still good enough that I felt like the real issues were still Wraths and (now) my mana.
During the queues, every now and again I would lose to a deck that was a good matchup because of my lands. I have tons of mana Elves, sure, but I only have eighteen lands and plenty of spells that cost a three or more mana. Because the tag-team of Roar + Drum had not ever proved itself necessary after I moved to this list, I cut them for Birds of Paradise, giving me more explosive potential.
This turned out to just make Wraths better against me, as I was leaning more on mana creatures than ever before, and it didn’t really solve the original problem of simply not having enough lands. Eventually, I simply cut the Birds for two more Forests.
While playing this deck, the one thing that I was always thinking about were good cards to fetch up with Ranger of Eos. There was a decent amount of time where I entertained the idea of adding a Feral Hydra to my deck so that I could Ranger it up as Wrath insurance, but eventually it became clear to me that my manabase was so built on creatures that post-Wrath the Hydra would usually only be a 3/3, which is not too impressive. However, I did stumble across Elvish Hexhunter, and immediately added it to my deck as a tutorable way to kill Bitterblossom, which was much more important now that I had cut my Roar win and was fighting a much more “fair” game. You know cards are effective when your MTGO opponents disconnect on you for playing them.
This left me with a final maindeck of:
4 Wooded Bastion
4 Brushland
12 Forest
1 Elvish Hexhunter
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Heritage Druid
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Devoted Druid
4 Wren’s Run Vanquisher
4 Imperious Perfect
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Hunting Triad
2 Elvish Promenade
The Premiere Event decklists that I had used for inspiration had a single Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender in the maindeck to stop cards like Pyroclasm, Firespout, and Jund Charm. I knew that I wanted to be able to do the same thing, though I felt that the Hexhunter was a much better silver bullet for the maindeck. I immediately added Forge-Tenders to my sideboard.
The next auto-inclusion was Cloudthresher to fight Faeries. Each of the changes I had made to my deck had made that matchup more and more a fight along normal terms; I had to attack them to win, and Coat of Arms was only good when it was guaranteed to kill them. This doesn’t mean that Coat is bad against Faeries (although it can be very dangerous against Bitterblossom if it’s not an instant win), just that it wasn’t something I could afford to run out there with no thought. Cloudthresher took my fair game and made it even better against Faeries, as it always has. It is especially effective as the Heritage Druid engine can wind up firing it into play when the Faerie player thinks they are safe to tap out. It also has Flash, obviously, but this is quite important as a way to untap your Nettle Sentinels and attack when they try to stave off death with a Cryptic Command to tap down your team.
I wanted the rest of my cards to be good against sweepers, as I had begun to feel like they were the only way for me to lose. The cards that I considered were Thoughtseize, Masked Admirers, Garruk Wildspeaker, and Reveillark. Each of them is good in their own way, so the question was which secondary effect was the most important.
Thoughtseize let me preempt the Wrath, and never getting Wrathed is obviously much better than trying to pick up the pieces after I scoop my side into the graveyard. It also let me knock out other scary cards like Condemn or Oona when a Wrath wasn’t in sight.
Masked Admirers is a card that I can play both pre- and post-Wrath to add pressure and draw some extra cards. It’s not a completely insane response to a Wrath, but it’s good at all points and can attack for a decent amount. It’s at its best against a deck like GB Elves with Infests, as it is not only good against their sweepers, it is good against their Plan A.
Garruk Wildspeaker is great against Wraths because he can be quite hard for a deck like Five-Color to remove easily, and also because he can generate cost-free Beasts even when my hand is filled with nothing. He has the added benefit of playing Overrun in matchups where that’s needed, and can even help me cast my expensive spells after my mana sources get Wrathed away.
I’m obviously just in love with Reveillark. It’s good pre- and post-Wrath, just like Masked Admirers, but it’s also quite good against people who plan to Nameless Inversion or Tarfire all of your little men away. Like Ranger of Eos, six mana can get your engine online out of nowhere, but this time that’s after your engine has already been killed. It can also regrow something absurd like two Imperious Perfects, putting you right back into the game.
Of all of these cards, I wound up playing four Thoughtseize, three Reveillark, and two Masked Admirers. The Thoughtseizes were just the best way to deal with Wrath, since they let me actually play the way I wanted to instead of just trying to rebuild after getting crushed. The other five fit into my pressure plan and also helped when my cards were getting killed by the bushel.
Obviously, to support the Thoughtseizes, I needed to play some more Black mana in my deck. Gilt-Leaf Palace does that quite well. The final seventy five, then:
4 Wooded Bastion
4 Brushland
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
8 Forest
1 Elvish Hexhunter
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Heritage Druid
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Devoted Druid
4 Wren’s Run Vanquisher
4 Imperious Perfect
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Hunting Triad
2 Elvish Promenade
Sideboard
4 Cloudthresher
2 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender
4 Thoughtseize
3 Reveillark
2 Masked Admirers
For a while I toyed around with the idea of playing the Admirers maindeck instead of the Regal Forces. The Forces obviously have much more of an immediate impact, but they cost a ton of mana and aren’t that great against a Wrath. However, if you can actually cast it, getting a 5/5 and one card is more attractive than getting a 3/2 and one card, and often you can cast it just to draw six cards knowing that you’ll be Wrathed the next turn. Even though you won’t get to enjoy the 5/5 body, you’ll at least have a full grip to start over with. If you decide to play the Admirers maindeck, I would cut one of them from the sideboard and play a third Forge-Tender.
Matchups
Here are some quick hits for the big three matchups. If you’re interested in how to play against a deck that isn’t one of those three, hopefully the ideas here will help.
Faeries – This is by far the most popular deck online. There was a two-day stretch where this was literally the only deck I played against. You are hoping to play a fast aggressive game against them, as opposed to a slow start that explodes on turn 4 or 5. Without Infest to worry about in the first game, you should just play as many guys as you can as fast as you can, and make your plays to maximize the damage you can deal. However, you should be quite careful with the Reinforce ability on Hunting Triad, as you might walk face-first into an Agony Warp in response, or a Sower of Temptation on their own turn.
+4 Cloudthresher
-2 Elvish Promenade
-1 Coat of Arms
-1 Hunting Triad
The plan is the same in games 2 and 3: hit them hard and fast. You sideboard out combo-ish cards for Plague Winds and 7/7s, which will help you fight the inevitable Infests they will cast against you. There are times when you will find yourself in a position to go all-in for a fourth-turn win; you should do it if it’s your only real way to win the game, but if you expect that you can win a fair fight then you should play cautiously. It can be correct to Ranger up two Isamarus instead of the combo engine, or two Llanowar Elves if you suspect that you’ll get Infested back to just two lands with expensive spells in-hand. Keep your eye out for the chance to Reinforce your Imperious Perfect when they Infest you, saving your lord and any Nettle Sentinels or Devoted Druids you had in play.
Kithkin – You have to worry about fast starts consisting of Stalwart, Wizened Cenn, and Knight of Meadowgrain, but the cards that you will actually lose to are their token producers. Both Spectral Procession and Cloudgoat Ranger do a tremendous job of stuffing fair attacks, so your best bet is to go for a token swarm backed by Coat of Arms. This is the exact opposite of the way to play against Faeries. If they do not kill you instantly, your goal is to come over the top of them with your big spells.
-1 Elvish Hexhunter
-2 Wren’s Run Vanquisher
+3 Reveillark
Again, you are just trying to play as many big effects as you can to come over the top of their plan. Because you aren’t trying to fight a fair fight, Wren’s Run Vanquisher is your least exciting card against them; it’s just a 3/3. It’s good enough as a quick blocker to buy you time to enact your Promenade-fueled plan, but it’s just not the card you’re really looking for. Reveillark will give you some air defense against Cloudgoat Ranger, a way to attack Ajani in Procession-free games, and the ability to regrow your Heritage Druids when you were forced into blocking with them earlier.
Five-Color Control – Depending on the specifics of their build, you are either behind by a decent amount or in an unwinnable matchup. Your best draws are the ones that are halfway between a combo draw and a curve draw. You want to put fast pressure on them so that they need to Wrath, but you want to have Hunting Triads instead of Promenades so that when they inevitably do sweep you, you can rebuild. It’s not uncommon to be able to go for the fourth turn win with an all-in play, but unlike post-board games against Faeries, you should almost always go for it against Five-Color Control. If they have the Firespout to stop you or the Bant Charm to survive until they can Wrath, then rough beats, but you’ll need to take risks to win these games.
If you think they have Pyroclasm effects:
-1 Elvish Hexhunter
-2 Elvish Promenade
-1 Hunting Triad
-2 Devoted Druid
+2 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender
+4 Thoughtseize
If you think they don’t:
-1 Elvish Hexhunter
-2 Elvish Promenade
-1 Hunting Triad
-2 Devoted Druid
+2 Masked Admirers
+4 Thoughtseize
You’re still trying to just go straight for the throat, hoping that they don’t have a way to stop you, but you’re a little bit slower and a little bit more resilient. If you Thoughtseize them and see that the coast is clear, just go full-out crazy and hope that they don’t topdeck a sweeper. If you Thoughtseize them and see that they’re holding two, then you’ve just got to take one and try to bait out the other. If you can leave them with a Firespout, then you might be able to use Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender to protect your side, but a double-sweeper draw is usually going to be a loss for you.
You should try at all points to just get a Coat of Arms into play. They will likely have Bant Charm to kill it, but an in-play Coat will make your plays big enough to really matter even if all you have are some mana Elves after a Wrath. It’s very possible that you could spend your whole third turn playing it, which you should do. Then if they have a Wrath, you might just be able to cast Hunting Triad and put nine power back into play.
The Rest – You need to identify which plan is best against them. You have the ability to play fair games with 2/2s for one and 3/3s for two, and the ability to play explosive games with Elvish Promenade. Usually, you will find yourself up against a fair deck that you plan to beat with tokens or a control deck that you plan to beat with Vanquishers. There are decks like Jund Manaramp that you can beat both ways, either by hitting for five on turn 2 or by tutoring up two Forge-Tenders and spitting out six 2/2 Elf tokens. Thoughtseizes come in against decks with sweepers that beat Forge-Tender, Reveillarks come in against fair decks with sweepers, and Masked Admirers come in when incremental advantages are impressive.
Five-Second Tournament Report
Round 1: In the first game I play three Vanquishers in a row while stuck on Llanowar Elves + Forest, while my opponent does some things with Mulldrifters. After I draw a second land and play Perfect, he scoops them up. In game 2 he mulligans to five while I play two Llanowar Elves and two Nettle Sentinels on the first two turns. He doesn’t have a third land and I do have a Coat of Arms.
Round 2: My opponent plays Firespout, Cryptic Command, Wrath of God, Oona. I put up no fight and die. In the second game, he plays Jund Charm, Wrath of God, Jund Charm, Oona. I put up no fight and die.
Round 3: The bad guy plays two Mogg Fanatics while I play two Vanquishers. When I attack and Reinforce the one he tries to kill by sacrificing his side, we go to game 2. Out of nowhere, he has White mana and Wrath of God in game 2, and I am completely unprepared. Murderous Redcap cleans up my side. I re-board, and play for a turn 4 win with Coat of Arms. He plays for a turn 3 Wrath with Mind Stone. I drop from the tournament and go draft.
Draft 1: In this 2v2 I start off with Elspeth and I am Green/White until Rhox War Monk tells me to splash Blue in the third pack. My deck winds up being insane in general and especially for a 2v2, with tons of aggressive creatures, tricks, three Naya Battlemages and two Qasali Ambushers. My teammate Steve apparently passed some unbelievable card and took a common, but in fact he picked foil Broodmate Dragon and shipped Vein Drinker. I win my first match easily, and lose my second when game 3 is snatched from my grasp by his second Sharding Sphinx. Luckily, Steve also crushes my first opponent, and even though he fully punts game two against the double Sphinx deck, he rallies back in game 3 to win the draft for us.
Draft 2: I actually sit this 3v3 out, and watch in disgust as Steve picks Sigil of Distinction, two Green cards, Agony Warp, Green card, Cruel Ultimatum. His deck winds up a mess, and though his teammates have decent decks the other team has much better ones (one even has the second Elspeth of the afternoon). I watch Steve get crushed when his five-counter Sigil is destroyed mid-combat with Bant Charm, and disappear to go buy soda and hit up an ATM. Dunkin Donuts is the only place to buy drinks, so I reappear with 25 Munchkins in tow, which the drafters quickly defeat. Steve’s team assembles the Drift of Phantasms.
Draft 3: Instead of playing against unknown opponents, my roommates and I battle against Nick Eisel and his roommates. There’s a ton of table chatter about how insane everyone’s deck is, but mine is really nothing special until I get my second Drumhunter, Realm Razer, and Where Ancients Tread in pack 3. Nick has double Infest against me in the first round, but I have something like ten enormous creatures so I take it down in three. Andrew Brown, my second opponent, is already on tilt for having instantly lost two matches to Flameblast Dragon. He goes even further on tilt when he Scullers me and I reveal Forest, Where Ancients Tread, Incurable Ogre, and three six-plus drops with just three lands and a 2/2 in play. I obviously rip a Mountain for the Tread and then a Plains to FTK everything in sight, including the Sculler, Brown’s Elspeth, and Brown’s Face. He throws his deck at me when I do it again in game 3. My last opponent mulligans both games, losing game 1 to a fourth-turn Rockcaster Platoon off Sacellum Godspeaker to go with two Drumhunters, and losing game 2 to a fifth turn Realm Razer + Oblivion Ring, again off of the Godspeaker. Brown is still ranting.
Dinner: We navigate the streets of Philly to a sushi restaurant called Ajia that I was in love with during the month I spent in Philly a few years ago. We all wind up ordering their $22 all-you-can-eat special, and while Steve and Andres barely break even, BJB and myself each manage to pack away well over $80 in value in a little under three hours.
The End
It’s been a great pleasure to write for the past two years. I’m still in love with Magic, and I might be back some day. Until then, so long.
One last time, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me in the forums, via email, or on AIM.
Benjamin Peebles-Mundy
ben at mundy dot net
SlickPeebles on AIM