I was going to limit the focus of this week’s article to my take on U/B Teachings, but I decided that was a bad idea for two reasons. One, I should really wait and see how the metagame reacts to the GP results (and subsequent internet articles) before committing to one specific list. (For example, last week I considered Pull from Eternity an auto-include in the maindeck, but now it looks like G/W might push the red decks so far out of popularity that maindeck Pull might not make sense anymore.) Two, at this early point in the season, I should really take the time to establish what I think makes the format tick, and to more thoroughly explain why I say U/B is the inevitable deck to play for anyone that is willing and capable to do so.
By the way, you should really read Josh Silvestri Monday piece if you haven’t already. You won’t get anything out of this article unless you understand why Teachings is so hard to beat, and Josh’s article breaks that down right away. (“Can’t nobody beat the Tendrils” gets the main point across if you’re the type to plow ahead despite my insistence that you go read it.)
I will never play G/W in this environment.
The reader raises a quizzical eye. “Never? That’s a bit bold, considering G/W won the freaking GP.”
Never. Not as long as the environment is anything like it is now.
G/W beats Mono Red, oh yes. Knocked it right off its Best Aggro Deck Throne, as a matter of fact. G/W does not, however, beat Teachings – or at least not without a lot of luck on its side. Celso squeaked out a victory against Paul in the finals, and now that the experienced Teachings mages have had time to adjust to the Serra Avenger approach, I have heard the G/W pairing referred to as “the bye” for U/B.
So G/W beats Mono Red, and Teachings beats Mono Red. (Fine time to play Mono Red, yeah?)
G/W has a bad matchup against Teachings, but Teachings is about even against Teachings. Point for Teachings.
G/W beats G/W around 50%, give or take tweaks. Teachings, on the other hand, crushes G/W!
Results may vary against the land destruction versions, but by and large Teachings ranges from 50-50 to a heavy favorite against whatever flavor of midrange Green you throw against it. I was pulling 50% in testing against the R/G from the Pro Tour with Mwonvuli Acid-Moss and Avalanche Riders, and I’d be surprised if G/W could say the same of its matchup against the solid Beats-And-Removal approaches to midrange Green.
It’s too early to say how much Kenji’s Pickles and Wafo-Tapa’s Slivers will impact the metagame, but I’m fairly confident I could tune U/B to have a comfortable match against both if I saw profit in it. I’m not sure that the same can be said of G/W.
So where’s the beef? Where’s the superior matchup? Where’s the pairing where I say to myself, “boy am I glad I’m playing this G/W deck instead of U/B?” I’m not seeing it, and from where I’m sitting, you need a pretty contrived situation to make G/W seem correct.
As far as I’m concerned, G/W was a strictly worse choice than U/B at the Grand Prix, and it still is for the upcoming PTQ season. And yeah, that means I think Celso Zampere, Jr. made a suboptimal choice at GP: Montreal.
“Feldman, have you lost it? He. Won. The. Tournament. He couldn’t have made a suboptimal choice by definition!”
Actually, he made a suboptimal choice, and it worked out for him. There’s a difference, and it’s a big one when you need to make your decisions without knowing ahead of time if they’ll work out for you or not.
Take the Lottery, for example. In terms of profit, it is an unequivocally poor choice to play the Lottery. If you understand probabilities, you should expect to lose money if you do, and so it is a poor choice to play the Lottery.
However, a small number of people will make that poor choice and win big from it, because a suboptimal chance of success is not the same thing as zero chance of success. That doesn’t mean they made a good choice. It means they made a suboptimal one that happened to work out for them. See the difference?
If Celso wanted to maximize his chances of success at Montreal, he should not have played G/W. The fact that he played G/W and won does not mean that he made the best choice, just that the choice he made worked out for him. Unless you have the miraculous ability to prophesize the future, your best bet is always to play the deck that maximizes your chance of success.
To be blunt – and I’m not the only one saying this – my testing has shown that the only way anything but U/B Teachings maximizes your chance of success is, well, if you can’t play U/B Teachings very well. Sorry, but I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em, and I’ve never seen an environment where the Best Deck was The Only Deck To Play before this one.
Despite this, there will probably be more Tarmogoyfs than Mystical Teachings at your next PTQ.
This is not because people are insane or uninformed, it’s because of two simple facts. First, U/B is lame. It takes a long time to win, you have to do a lot of thinking each turn, and it’s The Bad Guy that does Mean Things like chaining Mystical Teachings together to get a steady stream of Evil Evil Tendrils of Corruption going. It’s also The Best Deck, which qualifies it for automatic lameness. The other reason it won’t be the most-played deck is that little “if you can play it well” clause that comes after the “U/B Teachings is the correct choice” part.
If you’re a cutthroat, die-hard Spike, go learn how to play around Extirpate and Haunting Hymn in the mirror and get ready to play Magic for 45/50 minutes each round. If that sounds like some form of exotic torture, though, or if you don’t think you’ll make enough correct decisions to profit from the deck, then play something else. Based on these criteria, if you choose to play something else – or if you can imagine a group of people you know who would make that choice – it should become clear why Tarmogoyfs will probably outnumber Teachings this Saturday.
This brings me to my third point: If you try to hate on U/B Tendrils before everyone else does, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.
Boy, that’s a downer. Know why that is?
It’s pretty simple. Hating on U/B takes a very specific set of tools, and those tools tend to range from inefficient to downright terrible against everyone else.
Stonewood Invocation is a pretty sweet inclusion in G/W to fight Tendrils of Corruption, but it’s an unwieldy Lava Axe, by and large, in the mirror. If you pair against G/W and the other guy has Thrill of the Hunt instead, you’re that much more the underdog. Every step you take towards beating U/B is a step away from beating everyone else (see Fortress Theory and “moving cannons around” for more on this), and the only way you can do both is by finding cards that are good against U/B and still work well against the rest of the field.
The problem with that, of course, is that only a very specific few cards actually hit U/B where it hurts. The main reason I claim that Can’t Nobody Beat The Tendrils is that you have to play stupidly narrow cards to even attempt it. Greater Gargadon was the original Not-So-Narrow answer, Wafo-Tapa found that the same could be done with Frenetic Sliver, but Pull fixes the former and Sudden Death fixes the latter, so we seem to be down to Claws of Gix and Shroud-giving Instants like Momentary Blink and Stonewood Invocation to fight it these days.
The worst part is, not even the narrowest of these cards is even a hoser against U/B. It just gives you a shot, and they might shrug it off anyway if they’ve got a second Tendrils handy, cast Haunting Hymn on you first, or just drew enough Damnations to keep you down regardless. You can’t just toss in a couple of cards and expect to take down U/B; you need to pretty damn well design your deck around beating it, or you’ve sacrificed your matchup against Tarmogoyf in exchange for going 35-65 instead of 30-70 against Teachings. Blech.
More so than any environment I can remember, Time Spiral Block seems to work more like a food chain than a rock-paper-scissors configuration. You know how sometimes you have “Deck A beats Deck B beats Deck C beats Deck A”? Here we have “Teachings beats practically every single deck that is not Teachings,” and most everybody else just beats each other. The sad truth is that if I’m playing Teachings, the only thing I am scared to pair against is another Teachings player who has geared his deck more towards the mirror than I did.
The last thing you need to know about Time Spiral Block is that there is a whole sea of players and decks that are not operating on the same level as the optimized Teachings players.
A Mono-Black Control player will cruise to the Top 8 on the back of consecutive pairings against G/W, Mono Red, and White Weenie. Only five Teachings players will show up, and the two who could play it properly dropped after round 3 because they got manascrewed. (It’s the best deck, but it’s not indestructible. Magic is still Magic.) Given all this, it’ll be easy to look at tournaments and conclude that U/B is less important that it is. You might even get the impression that – because the Swiss is full of G/W, Mono Red, and Search for Tomorrow – U/B is just another shark in the waters.
It’s not. Mark my words, you should expect to fight through at least one U/B Teachings deck in the elimination rounds of any PTQ you play in. You can get lucky and hope no competent U/B players will show up, or that you’ll get lucky and they’ll get manascrewed against you (or out of the tournament before reaching the Top 8), but know that if you don’t come prepared, you’ll have to get lucky to beat them.
If the Mothership gets its act together and has some PTQ decklists for us this week, I should be tested-up and ready to talk specifics on U/B next week. (It’ll help that I’ll be done moving Maggy and our freshly-adopted kittens, Teferi and Zodiac – both Magic references, the latter to Zodiac Monkey; she climbs on everything – into our new apartment.)
In the meantime – unless the Top 8 decklists went up yesterday and the question has become trivial to answer – would you like to guess how many Epochrasites were in my maindeck in Chicago? Hint: it wasn’t zero!
See you next week,
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]