Last week, we saw a look at Red through the lens of using Tarmogoyf to improve the aggressive potential of this archetype, in preparation for taking the deck to a PTQ. Having attended the PTQ and dropped out at 2-2, driving more hours in each direction than the number of hours spent in the PTQ, it was more or less confirmed that being dumb will get you killed. I’d warned about that, but didn’t really “do” anything about it at the PTQ, such as kill the right land with Avalanche Riders and win the match. First-week shakes are to be expected, of a sort, but the Red deck as a whole is not the most patient and forgiving of decks in the format. One mistake can kill you, and one mistake is very easy to make. Rather than moan on teh Intarnets about how much more favorable Wild Pair is when your opponent doesn’t win six consecutive coin-flips, we’re going to look at the deck for the PTQ that almost was.
I have for some time been in love with Magus of the Tabernacle, and have been thinking of various and sundry ways to get my man Little T (we all know who Big T is) a bit of the spotlight. While preparing to leave New York for Richmond, Virginia I was musing on an idea involving mana control and board control to punish the fact that the current batch of control decks are all sorcery-speed tap-out decks rather than actual control decks. While I can respect the big tap-out plan, part of why I played Solar Pox at Regionals, I also have to respect that it does have its vulnerabilities… it just counts on not seeing them utilized a large percentage of the time. One big one is having its mana constrained by another deck, which is why you’ll occasionally see Urborgs and Vesuvas in Green-White and Avalanche Riders in Red sideboards… or Acid-Mosses in Flores decks. Aiming to constrain that mana can be a very valid plan for the metagame, so I kept trying to work up a bevy of decks starting with four Boom/Bust.
It started out Green with Harmonize instead of Blue card draw, so I could go really far out there and have Avalanche Riders and Thornscape Battlemages, because I do loves me a Battlemage. The idea got jammed stuck there, at least in time for the PTQ, because it kept wanting to play Avalanche Riders and Green mana, which was just jamming the card count full of four-mana 2/2s and not helping win the game. By the time it got to a workable form in my head it was of course Red-White-Blue instead of Red-White-Green plus Aeon Chronicler, because it’s easier to play fewer colors. By the time I really got excited about some of the ideas coalescing… the PTQ was over already, and by the time some of the really fun selling-points were coming to mind we were hitting about 95 on interstate 95 homeward-bound.
One idea that came to mind was that you could play a control deck without Damnation, but still get at least some of the same benefits. There is, after all, more than just one Wrath in the format, even if you have to put the beer goggles on to recognize some of them. I’d already started thinking I wanted to pick me up some Desolation Giants, as this was intended to be a Red-White control deck, and there are very few regenerating creatures you need to worry about in the format… just Korlash, really. If you can conscience paying RRWW instead of BB, because the cards you want to play are Red and White instead of Black (Red attacks mana, Black doesn’t, you figure it out), it’s not the worst thing in the world.
While U/B Urborg-based control is pretty clearly the most powerful deck in the format at least as far as sheer card strength is concerned, you can aim to foil it by proactive use of mana-control strategies. We can go back in time nearly a decade to see the early roots of this truth, with various Winter Orb-based Prison decks, and “4x Armageddon” was once core to a variety of control strategies. Armageddon may be more expensive, but it can be equally devastating. The rest of the cards are somewhat cute and kind of fall into place, although to be honest I really wanted to squeeze three or four more cards into the main-deck, mainly one-ofs like Venser or Pact of Negation. Having concluded these are things I can live without, here’s how things panned out:
Creatures:
4 Desolation Giant
4 Magus of the Tabernacle
3 Aeon Chronicler
1 Bogardan Hellkite
Just twelve men, the first eight or nine of which are clearly pointed at controlling the teeming masses. (Hellkite can also be considered opponent control, as in it kills target opponent.) Desolation Giant is our Damnation with beer goggles on, and leaving behind a 3/3 body kind of makes up for costing two colored mana more. Not really, but we’ll tell ourselves that and just be glad it’s fifteen tix less than Damnation on MTGO. This week it seems Magical Hack is trading spaces with Building on a Budget.
Instants:
4 Careful Consideration
3 Mystical Teachings
3 Temporal Isolation
1 Disenchant
1 Sulfurous Blast
Good things come in packages of twelve, I guess. Teachings also gets Hellkite, giving us some overlap… we have a chunk of card-draw spells, also overlapping with the creature base thanks to Aeon Chronicler, some utility removal and at least one fun Teachings target. Black/Blue Teachings decks may be able to get Tendrils, but they still can’t get anything close to an instant-speed Wrath of God with their Mystical Teachings.
Others:
4 Boom/Bust
4 Coalition Relic
4 Prismatic Lens
The other dozen, pushing the deck ahead quickly and stopping the opponent’s progress short Armageddon-style. Bruce Willis may never have starred in a movie named Bust, but Hudson Hawk is close enough that most people would agree the difference here is slight. You pay the price of admission whatever it is, if you want to get the big land reset button on your side.
This leaves us room for 24 lands, which we would love to balance carefully to work with the Lenses and Relics to get U, UU, W, RR, and RRWW as needed. Nimbus Maze frankly stinks at tapping for colored mana, it’s the only one of the five new duals I have learned not to respect, and that glaring error is even more visible here as we’re likely to have some reasonably large number of basic Mountains in our deck. Realizing that we’ll need all three colors basically consistently we’re looking at three-colors no-fixers as the land spread, split evenly three ways. Don’t laugh, it works… or at least it has so far.
6 Mountain
5 Island
4 Terramorphic Expanse
3 Flagstones of Trokair
3 Plains
2 Tolaria West
1 Urza’s Factory
As an added bonus, this manabase is surprisingly resistant to opposing Detritivores… in case anyone starts thinking like us and trying to use him for that same purpose.
So far we have a lot of card drawing, some creature control and the occasional cute combo: Desolation Giant kills every creature out of Black/Blue save for Korlash, and Bust kills Korlash. Desolation Giant is our beer-goggles Damnation, and Bust/”Little T” is in fact Wrath-a-Geddon against basically everyone not packing artifact mana. Wall of Roots and Gemhide Sliver can get around it sort-of, but it’s not exactly a pretty work-around.
What really got me interested though was how the sideboard could look… because I knew at least one of the fifteen cards would be cringe-worthy and yet have such awesome ramifications against creature decks that it just made me giggle with glee to see.
Yes, that’s right. Dusty here goes for the dirt-cheap price of practically nothing, seeing how he’s openly acknowledged himself as Constructed-unplayable, but he’s the right man for the job when it comes to searching via Mystical Teachings and buying back both himself and Desolation Giant.
Now if only I could stop giggling with glee, I could get on with the rest of the sideboard…
… Sorry, still giggling with glee. Combine with Dust Elemental and you can use “just” mana to turn both Wraths and life-gain “infinite,” and they’re pretty good at just stopping up the game against aggressive decks to begin with. Dust Elemental also can help to soak up any number of opposing Damnations, protecting your threat with buyback so your opponent isn’t the one winning the attrition war… but he’s at his cutest when used to buy back lifegain, Wraths, or even card-draw and LD with Aeon Chronicler and The Dirty Vore. These are good at buying time against aggro and can go for much greater value in the later portions of the game when you get to cheat with them and re-buy their ability over and over.
The non-giggle-fit portions of the sideboard are:
3 Ancient Grudge
2 Detritivore
2 Venser, Shaper Savant
1 Forest
1 Temporal Isolation
1 Pull from Eternity
… Sorry, I lied. Ancient Grudging multiple Lenses and Relics in the semi-mirror match makes me giggly too, and starts with a warm tingly feeling. Detritivore comes in against the obvious control decks, usually removing one Bust because you don’t want to cast or discard one early: the only means by which your Boom/Bust should be targetable by Extirpate should be by your blowing up the world, even if it starts as a four-of. One Pull is for the obvious applications, the fourth Isolation is great against G/W, and Venser just has a wide variety of applications. Venser can be bounce against a beatdown deck, Remand against control, or just serves as all-around utility that’s better than a potentially-useless Disenchant without leaving you completely outclassed by, say, Take Possession. I’d like him in the main but not like him over any of the cards there, with the possible exception that I could see toggling one of him for the fourth Magus of the Tabernacle out of the main-deck if you expect to face more controlling decks than you face aggressive decks.
Sticking the deck-list together as a whole instead of giggling about it over the course of three pages, we have the following:
Creatures (12)
Lands (24)
Spells (24)
Red/White mana control strategies have a long, long history in the game, and this is essentially another Red/White mana control… just one that has bent the Blue cards to work for it, because it is better to draw cards than to not draw cards. Traditionally, decks of this sort have been grueling resource-control fighters, occasionally with some combo worked in like Ivory Gargoyles / Jokulhaups to outlast the competition. This can be a similarly grueling scrapper, taxing resources constantly and setting up some difficult traps for the opponent to have to navigate around, like the Magus of the Tabernacle in a deck with a dedicated mana-advantage theme pushed by powerful artifact mana and Bust. Tarmogoyf, beatdown creature du jour, has a hard time attacking past the Magus’s wide rear end, and for that matter the Green/White deck finds its late-game power diminished at least somewhat because it cannot fully act on only a little mana like it does in a vacuum. Green-Blue aggro-control strategies such as we are seeing begin to develop nowadays likewise have a hard time contending with the Magus in play. It’s hard to attack against and hard to develop a board against, letting you spend one mana a turn to defend while the opponent exhausts their resources turn after turn to negligible benefit and set up Sulfurous Blast or Desolation Giant or Bust to put them out of their misery.
Fighting the control fight is reliant upon being a good control player, and knowing what resources are important to wage your wars over. Ultimately the goal is to constrain their mana development so that they cannot accomplish anything truly remarkable, while also defending against early beatdown from Shadowmage Infiltrator or Korlash that will just happen to accidentally end the game prematurely with your unfortunate demise. It’s not necessarily an easy fight, but it is one you are generally more equipped to win than they are, especially seeing how these decks are presently completely incapable of countering a good, fast Bust. It’s not like playing the U/B Teachings control mirror, where you can both sort of bungle around trying to gain an advantage without much of interest happening, because the game will eventually end much later than now with Urza’s Factory advantage. You have a nasty set of tools that can shut the game down quickly, and the ability to gain and maintain an artifact-mana advantage to go with the land advantage, especially out of the sideboard. Many of the more popular (right now) U/B decks have fewer than eight artifact mana sources, giving you an advantage to begin with… none of them have any removal at all for your artifact mana while you start on Disenchant and leverage into Ancient Grudge after sideboarding… and you are also quite likely to have a Flagstones to again give you a lasting resource despite having cast Armageddon.
This is unfortunately going to be a significantly foreshortened article, and I hate to give the cop-out, but Fourth of July barbeque took priority over Magic Online playtesting. While I did play a few games — enough to make me feel very confident in the aggro matchup, and teach me some of my early blunders against control decks — I didn’t get enough gaming in to learn if the manabase was subtly off or if there was a single Teachings target I really wished I had access to. Unlike U/B Teachings, which merely claims to have shifted in one card and gotten a strong G/W Tarmogoyf matchup, this deck actually does have a good matchup against Tarmogoyf decks, generally because of how the mana control aspect really destroys their ability to use Horizon Canopy and Edge of Autumn to draw through land flooding to get more gas. Against you, the G/W decks should be terrified to be losing their lands and using their mana to pay for Magus taxes, meaning they don’t have the luxury of sacrificing mana for cards because their mana is already under attack. Temporal Isolation isn’t a one-of in this deck, it’s the White Tendrils being used here: play it earlier in the game and it’s like you virtually gained that life anyway, and unlike the U/B Teachings deck’s one-of Isolation you should be able to draw it reasonably often without having to Teachings for it, making the Kitchen Sink deck’s Isolations even better when you face the kind of problems you need to Isolate anyway.
I learned I am rusty against control decks, and that you never want to discard the first Boom/Bust against U/B decks… or even “just” use Boom to gain a short and quick advantage, because the matchup is downright grueling when your Armageddons get Extirpated. Fortunately errors made in playtesting mean I found out my weak spots while playtesting rather than PTQing this weekend, and I could imagine making that particular Boom/Bust mistake in an early round only to lose the match because of it… after all, I did something similar at this weekend’s PTQ in Richmond, so it’s not like I am suddenly incapable of making that mistake. Hopefully a full night’s sleep and no driving six hours to a PTQ will better arm me against brain-farts and fatigue errors, but at least some of those sorts of errors have inexperience and carelessness as their source instead of something mundanely biological. Excuses are great for shrugging things off but terrible for learning, and if I can play badly in the control mirror between now and Saturday in my online testing, I’ll consider it a testing session worth doing if only I can remember not to make those same mistakes playing in an actual event.
How did the deck feel, when I was finally playtesting it instead of designing it in the car on the ride back up to New York, with the occasional bout of serious speeding on I-95 because I was downright tired of still being in Delaware? The color balance, while atrocious-looking, worked reasonably well… I did not run into a single instance of color-screw, because the deck is staggered to the Blue to be able to cast its card-drawing spells, and between Terramorphic Expanse, artifact mana and sheer volume of card-draw, the colors have a habit of fixing themselves. Aggro matches were surprisingly easy to take on, since the deck has some very powerful tools for blunting the impact of an aggressive deck, and Magus of the Tabernacle plus Temporal Isolation keeps me enough out of harm’s way that I am not missing having Tendrils of Corruption next to my Wrath-analogue.
The deck flows well, and throws a monkey-wrench into many strategies with its mana-control aspect. Green/White likes to keep no more than four lands in play, sacrificing everything else for improved card-flow once it can flash back Call of the Herd or cast Mystic Enforcer, and even “just” the Magus can prove crippling against that plan… turning them from a deck with just enough mana to do what they want and which keeps up strength even when the game goes long to a deck that doesn’t have its operating mana, and can’t keep any threats in play against the Magus/Bust combo or repeated Wraths. Dust Elemental was a complete and total beating, as one would expect, and one that the Green-White deck is ill-equipped to defend against in any capacity whatsoever… it doesn’t have any instants that can remove the Desolation Giant from play, leaving them Wrath-locked if you can just get to ten mana and find the one Elemental with Mystical Teachings. This format’s control decks are not equipped to fight Armageddon, as they for the most part have at best negligible countermagic, and a rival deck that can attack their mana consistently and effectively leaves them trapped at a significant disadvantage… the deck was chosen specifically as a controlling strategy that might have strategic superiority in the Teachings-on-Teachings mirror, because it’s a critical matchup to have an advantage in nowadays.
There are other decks that fall in between, but just as a general thing they also like to have access to their mana and their creatures, which let me see Wild Pair Slivers, Blue-Green Tempo, and Pickles decks at a significant disadvantage as they tried to figure out how to advance their plan. The Red/White deck’s plan is to blunt the opponent’s plan and then assemble a win from there while they are crippled, even if it’s something ignominious like ten turns of Magus of the Tabernacle beats once you’ve laid the Bust down. Of the decks I faced, Wild Pair Slivers was best equipped to try and outlast the mana-control, but still has a hard time against the creature-control creatures especially if they want to try advancing their board position any while they are at it. Games were typically wrapped up with a single Teachings for the one Sulfurous Blast, a nightmare for them, especially after they’d worked so hard just to get back to parity on their operating mana. Pickles decks found it difficult to keep advancing their board against a single Magus of the Tabernacle, only to have that board wiped away by Bust. Blue/Green decks couldn’t keep up countermagic and keep a reasonable board in play, and Magus of the Tabernacle is really, really good against Thelonite Hermit. Sooner or later their board went away, either just their creatures or all their lands followed by all their creatures, because the deck is a walking monkey-wrench for the format as currently played.
More testing is necessary, as you would expect from any deck with a Teachings engine and a variable number of bullet targets you can include across a variety of colors. But I feel confident enough in the deck at least in concept that it is my planned weapon of choice for this weekend’s PTQ at Neutral Ground, and hopefully I’ll still be in contention after the first three or four rounds this time and can look at the deck in a more rigorous treatment next week.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com