I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to write about this week, as the Shards of Alara previews are good to look at but not quite informative enough to work with for the kinds of things I aim to look at here on Magical Hack. We can happily note that States has been returned to the calendar for the start of November, to reverse a policy shift that had bothered a lot of people, and we will have good reason to look at one format in particular once Shards of Alara has hit the streets. But we know so little about this world… I mean five worlds… that any efforts to put it alongside Lorwyn Block and 10th Edition will necessarily prove fruitless.
With most of Extended a ‘known quantity,’ however, the potential impact of Shards of Alara remains generally small. We have been told already that all of the creatures from the shard of Esper will be artifact creatures, regardless of colored mana cost, and thus we can expect that there will be a reasonable number of cards that deserve consideration for the ‘best deck in Extended’ (so-called), Affinity. We also now know that we will be living in a world without Sensei’s Divining Top, taking the best control strategy (Counterbalance-Top) and neutering it (Counterbalance sans Top). Shards of Alara will have an impact on Extended, however… we can tell it already.
Allow me to introduce you to my little friend:
For one Green mana, you get a 3/3 if you control a Plains and a Mountain. If Kird Ape loves Stomping Grounds, then Wild Nacatl loves Sacred Foundry. And both of these can be played in the same deck, in a deck that was already considered to be quite good: Domain Zoo. Prior to the banning of Sensei’s Divining Top, I had been looking at Duergar Hedge-Mage as a utility drop in a Zoo deck, as a three-mana creature (slightly difficult to Counterbalance) that could take out both a Vedalken Shackles and a Counterbalance, and thus have a very high impact against one of Domain Zoo’s worse matchups while also having a useful talent against Affinity, being more-or-less a Red Viridian Shaman if you wanted one.
A three-power creature for one mana is not quite unprecedented in the game, but one with no real drawbacks is. You can have a 12/12 for one mana… and sometimes, in Vintage, people do. You used to be able to get a 3/3 for one mana, but you had to sacrifice a land to get it, so it was a one-drop that was tough to love unless you really, really loved Stompy. You can quite reasonably get a two-power drop for one mana, from the bygone days of Jackal Pups to the modern era of Tattermunge Maniacs and everywhere in between, with Kird Ape more or less popularizing Taigas all by himself back in the day, and Stomping Grounds in Honolulu. But to gain access to three power for one mana is something not commonly seen, and is a commendable feat. Assembling a Zoo’s worth of creatures, you can happily dip into the following:
Wild Nacatl
Kird Ape
Savannah Lions
Isamaru, Hound of Konda
Figure of Destiny
Each has two or more power for one mana, though some careful negotiations of Lands may be necessary to get the full power out of some of these drops. With a bevy of fetch-lands and Ravnica duals at our disposal, that last point does not seem like it is a big concern. While the Zoo loses its Lavamancers, it gains a one-mana 3/3, and I would imagine this is the part where it does not complain. The late-game potential of a Grim Lavamancer to dominate the game is here replaced with Figure of Destiny’s ability to ‘go large’ with enough excess mana, able to become Huge/Huge… and while Lavamancers not needing to attack to deal damage was a benefit, it’s hard to argue with the value of Huge/Huge.
Jumping to the two-drop, you gain access to some of the best two-drops ever printed in Magic, in any context. Each of these creatures has a considerable following in Vintage, a world where players are downright loathing the concept of attacking or blocking, but ultimately anything can be forgiven so long as the price is cheap enough:
Tarmogoyf
Dark Confidant
Jotun Grunt
Ultimately, anything above two mana on the creature curve is going to be pushed out of existence due to the high efficiency of the cheaper drops. Even the most incredibly efficient three-drops, such as the recently-popular Ashenmoor Gouger, are still not going to rival their cheaper brethren for potency… you can’t really argue with Tarmogoyf, you can’t even try, while Jotun Grunt is a 4/4 that can block for a mere two mana. Grunts are just hard enough to upkeep that they limit themselves to a two-of, but happen to occasionally do good things to graveyard-centric decks as well, so it’s a happy two-of.
Putting together the best of the best Zoo creatures, we’ll assume for a moment that Savannah Lions isn’t good enough to make the cut…
4 Wild Nacatl
4 Kird Ape
4 Figure of Destiny
2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant
2 Jotun Grunt
This gives us 24 highly-efficient creatures, and will allow us to frequently have the dreaded triple one-drop opening hand… and if those one-drops are all Wild Nacatl, and you assemble nine power on the first two turns, your opponent might as well pack ’em in already unless they have Engineered Explosives for one right now. Assuming, quite reasonably, that we can keep to 21 lands and still meet all of our needs, we have room for 15 spells in our deck still, which undoubtedly will turn into burn spells. Lightning Helix and Tribal Flames are the easy additions, and to fill that odd ‘three of’ we can add a trio of Chars (formerly Flame Javelin, when Counterbalance was relevant) at the very tippy-top of the deck’s mana curve. We now then have to look at the rest of the burn spells available, and decide based on their merits which we want to use, hopefully making a decision based on mana cost, spell type, and potency in order to reach the best conclusion. We have some very interchangeable parts, like Seal of Fire / Shock / Tarfire, and a new friend returned to us in Incinerate if we want to have additional copies of Lightning Helix and can settle for the best approximation of such. After that, we have Rift Bolt to consider, and the realistic choices are Seal of Fire, Rift Bolt and Incinerate. Having already made choices to fill the two-drop, and sacrifices such as a Domain mana base, that last slot should be a one-mana dead right now spell, and thus Seal of Fire should get the nod of approval.
For the manabase, we have some slightly different requirements in order to maximize the spells we have. We absolutely require that every fetch land be able to get us a Mountain… that sounds easy, but it is a requirement, because the deck is largely Red. It’s also not hard in a deck full of dual lands. Additionally, we want to make sure that every land in the deck is either a fetchland, a Mountain, or a Plains, and we’ll need to have good reason at the time to willingly fetch a non-Mountain land, but will trust that we can balance the needs of Tribal Flames against the needs of Figure of Destiny appropriately. Two weeks ago this was much, much harder because it seemed correct to use Flame Javelin instead of Char, due to the difficulty of Counterbalancing them, but a relaxed mana requirement and reduced Dark Confidant hit seemed worth the two damage to yourself. Just don’t deal 20 to yourself with all the lands and Confidants and now Char too…)
Sacred Foundry is already an ideal land to have for Wild Nacatl, and thus we will be trying to bias ourselves to lean on it heavier than usual if we can. Other than that, we will want critical access to Red, Green and White, reasonable access to Black for Dark Confidant, and technical access to Blue to fully power Tribal Flames. Dual lands that we want only one copy of a land of that color should be Red, to go with that ‘make it a Mountain’ theme, and so we know we will be including the following:
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
1 Mountain
1 Blood Crypt
1 Steam Vents
1 Stomping Ground
1 Sacred Foundry
That leaves us 8 more lands to fill out with the remaining Fetchlands, and include a Temple Garden for those times when you want a W/G land for your W/G/R deck… a Temple Garden and a Blood Crypt can cast any spell in the deck save Char, because 2 =/= 3, and covers four out of five basic land types. A critical number of fetchlands is what makes the deck work in the first place, and thus it is very easy to include 4 Flooded Strand in the deck to supplement the fetchland count. This convinces us to add a Temple Garden, a Godless Shrine, and a second copy each of Stomping Ground and Sacred Foundry to pad the land count, giving us the following:
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Flooded Strand
2 Sacred Foundry
2 Stomping Ground
1 Mountain
1 Blood Crypt
1 Godless Shrine
1 Steam Vents
1 Temple Garden
Bloodstained Mire and Wooded Foothills get any Red dual land, and thus all five colors, while we choose to use Flooded Strand with the inclusion of a second land that breaks the ‘must tap for Red’ rule because it can get a U/R dual we are already playing, a W/R or W/G dual to supplement our main colors, and a W/B dual to work with Dark Confidant at minimal cost to our manabase. Windswept Heath could have performed many of these same roles, getting a R/G or G/W dual land, and access to Black mana with an Overgrown Tomb, but Overgrown Tomb does not ever fit into the capability to cast Lightning Helix off of only two lands, defeats the reasonable plan of turning Figure of Destiny into a 4/4 with spare mana in the mid-game, and never gets Blue mana without having to include either Hallowed Fountain or Breeding Pool. Despite the fact that this is clearly a R/G/W tri-color deck, it is clear that the W/U fetchland is better than the W/G fetchland, and thus we design our manabase accordingly.
With the current mana spread, that gives us access to the following, color-wise:
Red: 19
White:16
Green: 15
Black: 14
Blue: 13
How this develops in-game is like this: every land that doesn’t tap for Red taps for White, so we have 21 Boros-hybrid lands for Figure of Destiny, allowing the deck to regularly upgrade to mighty 4/4 if the game drags past the very early turns. Of those lands, only two don’t tap for Red, so you would need to get supremely unlucky to have to rely on non-Mountain lands. Basic Mountain, Steam Vents, and the two Sacred Foundries don’t let you get WBRG off of just two lands, so you have a reduced number of combinations that let you operate fully on just two lands, but with an extra land overall in the deck (and the fact that you’ll frequently just draw double-fetchland hands, they are more than 50% of the lands in the deck) we’re hoping to reduce that trend as it is a known point of turbulence that we have given up Overgrown Tomb for the purpose of having better access to Figure mana, with the reasonable assumption that we can be intelligent with which lands we fetch, but regardless will always want Figure active if we have three lands. The increased overall land count to 21 instead of the somewhat-traditional 20 is to compensate for the fact that we’re adding at least some small bit of strain on casting Dark Confidant and assembling the full Domain in order to relax the strain on powering up Figures.
With 19 of 21 lands in the deck tapping for Red, you’d think that Flame Javelin is just all upside, but the simple fact remains that if the deck gets to choose its first two lands, one of those two will not be a Mountain. Whether Char is in fact better than say Incinerate is an exercise not yet answered, but I’m willing to listen and would earmark those Chars for just how good they are, costing three mana and two life instead of two mana and no life, for that one extra damage. This is why we test.
That gives us the following deck, to test for Pro Tour Berlin, barring the inclusion of more potent Nayan beatdown monsters like Wild Nacatl:
4 Wild Nacatl
4 Kird Ape
4 Figure of Destiny
2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant
2 Jotun Grunt
4 Seal of Fire
4 Lightning Helix
4 Tribal Flames
3 Char
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Flooded Strand
2 Sacred Foundry
2 Stomping Ground
1 Mountain
1 Blood Crypt
1 Godless Shrine
1 Steam Vents
1 Temple Garden
Sideboarding is a bit of a futile task so far, given that we haven’t explored the metagame one iota yet really (just constructed a deck that is already known, after the rotation of Invasion and Odyssey Block, with one ‘known’ inclusion from Shards of Alara), but I can promise you that there are four Ancient Grudges. After that, things get a little tricky.
Going back into the recent past to see a deck that was similar, we dig up the following:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Mogg Fanatic
- 2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
- 4 Kird Ape
- 4 Grim Lavamancer
- 4 Dark Confidant
- 4 Tarmogoyf
- 3 Gaddock Teeg
Lands (20)
Spells (15)
Sideboard
This decklist is discussed here, in “Project Hollywood: Grand Prix Philadelphia (12th)” by Tom LaPille. Here you see some templating on my part, intentional or accidental… fourteen one-drops across both lists, more or less the same number of creatures (one more two-drop in LaPille’s list, but choosing Gaddock Teeg for disruption instead of Jotun Grunt for size). Tom has Tribal Flames and Lightning Helix as his burn, but then makes use of two rotated cards: Vindicate and Gaea’s Might. Vindicate is a good catch-all spell that can be a tempo-gainer (Stone Rain) or an actual utility removal spell, and while it doesn’t deal damage, it also isn’t limited by damage in destroying opposing Tarmogoyfs. Gaea’s Might was the worst awesome spell in the deck, by his own testimony, and thus being removed for the moment with a cheap removal spell that can point at the opponent’s face is a good choice in a vacuum. Likewise, replacing Vindicate with a thing that points at the face is a good approximation of what the deck wants to do unless it gains access to something better in Shards of Alara, or gets itself out of a vacuum.
Reading through Tom’s report of the Grand Prix is what led me to the assumption that Domain Zoo should consider 21 lands instead of 20; the desire to avoid having a dual land that didn’t tap for Red or White was the motivating force behind the second copies of Stomping Ground and Sacred Foundry over the 40th spell and an Overgrown Tomb. Figuring out which fetchlands to use to maximize your access to the Domain for Tribal Flames follows logically from there.
When designing decks for play in a format, it is critical not just to have a good first approximation of the deck that is serviceable and can be an effective playtest deck, but also to learn more about the decks in the format as a whole in order to inform your choices, so you can look at each card selected and figure out if there is something that the metagame suggests you should do to gain an edge. Going into an unknown metagame, especially one that has just been shaken up by the format not just rotating but a high-impact card in the format disappearing in a puff of banhammer-dust, there are worse fates to have than testing a Red deck… and the preponderance of White and Green creatures should not confuse you into thinking this is anything but a Red deck. My theory overall for any undiscovered format is to build the beatdown deck (in this case, the polychromatic Red deck) and go from there, since that deck will set the speed and resilience levels that the other decks need to step along to or die trying. In the previous Extended format, for example, the third two-drop of choice after Dark Confidant and Tarmogoyf was actually Gaddock Teeg, as a potent tool against the Storm spells and Enduring Ideals that can show up in the format… with no such expectation yet we have a pure attack deck, and we’d need to advance from there to see if we want to change anything.
I’ve heard a lot of competing theories about what should be good in Extended. Trawling any Extended forum will tell you that there are a lot of decks on peoples’ minds, and while these public forums are doubtlessly of a lower power than, say, GerryT’s private email group, they can still be an indicator of where the metagame groupthink is going and thus should give you an idea of the sorts of decks you should test against… just remember to use your common sense to filter the useful information from the unhelpful, because “60-Land.dec” and the thirty-point flaming red font “TEST IT!” is not going to suddenly convince me that it’s a good idea. And seeing what is in the groupthink, it seems a lot of people are feeling the new format is going to focus on a few things: attack decks, like R/G or Domain Zoo… and as of the spoiler showing Wild Nacatl, presumably the last argument against R/G over R/G/W has been completely demolished, as even if you are going to hold out on only casting Red and Green spells in your deck, it should still have Temple Garden and Sacred Foundry.
With the assumption that Tron is still going to be good in some variety, and Storm combo decks will still exist, there is at least some argument to main-deck Gaddock Teegs, so long as they don’t get in the way of anything else. (Like those Flame Javelins they would be a total non-bo with.) Doran Rock will still be a key contender, if for no other reason than that people really like it and it survives the loss of Cabal Therapy by taking away two sets’ worth of cards plus the Counterbalance/Top combo. And the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room, Affinity, will still be in the room… and if anything it gets better, with the shrinking of the format, especially since it had gone through several key explorations over the last season to do stuff like include Atog and Fatal Frenzy in some lists, so the Affinity lists that are going to develop are going to be deadly dangerous.
Expecting to face Rock, Tron, Affinity, the mirror, and Storm combo, it doesn’t sound like there is any great reason to jump to maindeck Teegs when a four-power body could fill that slot instead. Sideboard cards would definitely include Ancient Grudge as a four-of, with Affinity as popular as we might expect it to be, and good against Tron for bashing Signets and dumb animals, and against Storm combo (maybe) for breaking up Lotus Blooms before they get crazy. ‘Something to smash big monsters’ would also be wanted, to fill the role of Tom’s Terminates that are rotating out of the format, and whether Smother was the best removal spell you could want or if you need something else I can’t quite place. Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender seems like it is very narrow, as unlike this past spring there are no Devastating Dreams decks, no Goblins to fear, and no stupid mono-Red burn deck to play against. (Okay, to be fair that deck probably doesn’t lose much, and gained Flame Javelin. Add a deck to the ‘things to test against’ list.) However the Devastating Dreams decks probably play Firespout now to still-reasonable effect, so it’s not like they fade off the face of the planet… they’ve just shrunk to obscurity because they now lose the redundancy of Burning Wish to go with Life from the Loam, and now can’t even make up for it by using Sensei’s Divining Top to search for their key cards.
Still not enough to really inform us of what the changes to the format are going to be… but at least it gives us a solid starting point for bashing with animals, to see if everything else can keep up or not. I’ll be looking in on Extended from time to time in order to see where things go from here, and I suppose that the next step is probably to lock in what the Affinity deck looks like so we can see both sides of the aggressive potential in this format. I’ll hold off on the topic at least for a short while, to let the artifact-bearing Shards of Alara set play out a bit more, but if it’s a set where just one common can have a drastic impact on a format as wide as Extended, I expect good things to come.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com