Australian Regionals was last week. I didn’t go. Something about investing three or four hundred dollars in a deck I’d never tested. Shame, Dragonstorm looks kinda like fun.
Oh, yes, I said it.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Combo Overlords
Dragonstorm has come a long way in its time in Standard. One of the Timeshifted cards that truly embraced its transition through time (more on this later), Dragonstorm has all the makings of a Timmy card – and it shows. You’re talking about a nine-mana card. We’d seen Storm combos before. Tendrils of Agony and Brain Freeze are old stand-bys in other formats. But Storm never really did much of anything in Standard in its first run. It was just there, a cute mechanic that fuelled the endgame for Wake and coerced Goblins into not running the Warchief-Piledriver draw into a Wing Shards.
The thing is, back then, Dragonstorm had to go and get the rather unimpressive array of Dragons that Onslaught and Ninth had offered us. Stuff like Worldgorger Dragon (as opposing combo pieces wave at one another across a gulf in formats), Imperial Hellkite – crappy dragons that don’t actually do much to win the game on their own.
Was the crucial component of Dragonstorm the addition of Seething Song? Was it the Lotus? What about Gigadrowse?
The beauty of Dragonstorm as a deck is that it’s composed of disparate pieces which all make complete sense to print on their own. Ignorant Bliss. Gigadrowse. Seething Song. Lotus Bloom. Dragonstorm itself. Of course, the Hellkite itself. With all these pieces coming together, it doesn’t really feel like R&D went out of their way to just throw the deck at us. They seemed to know there’d be a deck in there… but they were willing to take the risk and throw it into Standard.
Reading Dragonstorm primers, I was impressed. It wasn’t this fragile little one-trick pony. It had its tricks, and it had a mid-and-late game plan. People forget that we used to play Keiga for the same purpose that you can play a Hellkite; he holds the ground, negates a threat (or four) and kills your opponent. It’s hard to say no to a showing like that. You have to recognise when you’ll need your Gigadrowses, keep track of your opponent’s plays (and fill up your stash-land appropriately), keep your mana open for Remand, Ignorant Bliss, or whatever other tool you’ve boarded in.
It is a deck that takes measured, patient play, before orchestrating a single, titanic turn of burning resources for an effect. It explodes into play, taking the game away, but it can’t do that by ignoring you; it has to pay attention to who you are and what you’re doing. It studies and it learns even as in the back of its mind, it’s assembling Ze Formula and readying it to detonate, as it giggles, mad-scientist like, thumb nervously flicking the catch back and forth on the button.
As much as I may dislike this persistence of U/R archetypes ruling the upper tables and providing the minimum barrier for entry to Standard play, I have to respect Dragonstorm.
And yet… people whine about it.
Gruuling The Table
At this point, there’s a consensus from Mike Flores and all the people Mike Flores listens to (Mike Flores) that Flores-Chapin Gruul is the besterest-friends-for-everest-with-Heeziest deck in Standard, as its Fundamental Velocity integrates into a conjectured gameplan with complete strategic superiority over the undermined disruption of the informationally-managed decks your opponents are likely to bring to the table. Taking this with the typical grain of salt, and stripping out the love letter to the people who are nice enough to Flores to let him hang with them at the “actually win things” table, it summarises as: Kird Ape is Still Awesome.
Well, it’s always nice to know.
Gruul is a fantastic deck. The mana curve is practically a who’s-who of beefy bastards for their mana costs, with Kird Apes (a Red creature who relies on its ally, Green, to beef up and outsize almost all enemy threats that compare to his cost, and be cheaper than all removal there is), with true broad-side creatures like Rumbling Slum and Burning-Tree Shaman laughing as they smash into the red zone, content that, for all that they are simple and stupid, they are very much representative of their colors.
Gruul is not clever about what it does, but it is clever about how it does it. Green brings beef – with Moldervine Cloaks and its cavalcade of must-have-dudes, Red brings removal and a powerful end-game strategy of Think-Twice-About-Me-Charring-You. The deck requires math, it requires jockeying for position. There is strategy about what you do and how you do it; care has to be taken in playing men out in the right order, and I daresay few decks mulligan as carefully as Gruul. Gruul can’t afford to mulligan into four land and a draw spell, because it has no draw spells. Gruul, as a deck, has to live and die on its opening seven, or six; and you pound the top of your deck chanting “one time” at your peril. You don’t want to be one of those beatdown players quietly laughed at by the Wrath-toter, who snickers to himself, because, of course, you play beatdown, you’re too stupid to mulligan correctly.
It is an unforgiving deck of its opponents and of its pilots. Marshalling monkeys, degenerates, power-hungry slabs of road, and the outcasts of society, fuelling them with fire and pain, and directing them to the eventual death of your opponents is no task for the faint-hearted, and every game you lose, you spend your time thinking about what you could have done differently. What did you do wrong?
Because with a beatdown deck this potent, and yet so careful in its deployment, you have to wonder if you screwed up.
This isn’t Goblins. You can’t Just Throw More Goblins at the problem. There’s no fairy godmother in the form of Ravager, no oops-I-win triple Piledriver draw. There’s no Sharpshooter to make the entire discussion of combat a farce, no Siege-Gang Commander who simply chucks the board at your opponent’s head just in time to make Bidding all the more ridiculous. Compared to other, powerful beatdown decks like Affinity and Goblins, this is a beatdown deck that requires some serious thought, wringing every last bit of power you can get out of your opening seven and praying, oh-so-praying you can squeak out your last six points somewhere.
It is a deck that’s hard to play.
And yet… people whine about it.
Can’t Buy Me Louvre
Dralnu du Louvre is a Blue/Black control deck that warrants patience. It has a tutoring engine that requires ten mana before it gets you any card advantage; its win conditions aren’t typically evasive (unless it’s a version that still runs Murray), and it has to pretty much rule the board on the basis of its pure control elements. You remember the old expression… they can’t counter everything.
Well, in Dralnu, they have to try.
Oh, there are Damnations to try and catch the cruft that gets through, but most any beatdown player already banks to beat the Damnation. Any game can’t go too long, because there’s that persistent threat of Demonfire or some other remarkably rude thing messing up the works.
Doug Beyer compared playing a control deck to trying to start your car while the hook-wielding madman lurched towards you. He wasn’t far off. I mean, did you look at these two? You have a ridiculous pair of decks that squeeze their cards for all they’re worth. Dragonstorm runs stuff like Telling Time over Compulsive Research, not because they don’t want the extra card more, but because they can’t run the risk of drawing a Dragon if they want to try and execute their main plan.
This deck is standing in the way of chaos itself, two red-fuelled monstrosities that are trying to burn the world down in their own way, for their own reasons. It may be cruel, it may be heartless, and it may ask your soul of you to play, but really… when you consider the stakes, is that so bad?
Dralnu gets better with every turn. A turn where you do nothing, however, isn’t really a turn; it’s a semblance of one. You need to hit your land drops. You need to Remand the early spell for the tempo and the card. You need to find your answers and you need them to find the right threats. You need to know what to get, so you need to not only know your deck, but you need to know what there is that scares you in your opponent’s deck. The longer the game, the more chances you get, but you may notice that the above opponents are not particularly interested in giving you the time to fart around.
Dralnu is a tricky deck to play.
And yet… people whine about it.
SERIOUS BUSINESS
Dredge isn’t very good, because This Girl Player Flores can lose to Mark Herberholz.
The Emergent Pattern
Has anyone else noticed something here? Aside from the complete absence of White in these top decks, there’s something universal. I mean, when you look at these top three decks and one complete waste of cardboard, something keeps coming back, a recurrent theme that quietly makes me wonder about players of this game. See, we have all these decks, and believe it or not, they’re all tricky to play. They’re good — because people have been working on them. The edges of techy ideas (like Ignorant Bliss and Gigadrowse) have rapidly spiralled up into mainstays. Seals of Fire and Volcanic Hammers oust Watchwolves and Bathe In Light, manabases getting tighter and smoother, players finding solutions to problems and taking them.
Players in this environment are trying to metagame without obvious foils; besting the big three still leave you with potentially gaping holes in your armor, to some less-popular but nonetheless playable deck. It’s like skirmish, where everyone has a gun and regardless of how good the person who shot you is, if they shot you, you’ve still lost. You need to be careful, you need to play something that more than anything else emphasises your strengths, because there is no perfect foil here — or if there is, you’re probably not as good as you think you are at finding it.
These are difficult decks to play. More pleasingly to me, they’re decks that actually really represent their color combinations. They feel Green/Red, Blue/Black, and Red/Blue to me. It’d be nicer if there were a fifth color, but Magic can’t have everything, right?
When you denigrate an opponent’s deck, or complain about it as if it’s somehow his fault that he happened to “random” into a deck that beat you, or a good draw that beat you, or the hand-of-god-itself that beat you, you’re really just covering your ass and ignoring facts. Chances are you screwed up somehow, whether in picking your deck or in playing it. And if, heaven forfend, your opponent gets the Prospector/Warchief/Trips-Piledriver draw to your Artic-Flats-into-Karoo, then you take it like an adult. That kind of thing happens one time in a million, and don’t kid yourself — if you’d pulled that off, it would catapult itself into the position of your favorite war story ever, of the time you got a turn 3 kill.
This kind of arrogance, this kind of pressured indolence doesn’t help you as a player, or as a person; there are just sometimes, decks that beat yours, just as there are decks yours beats (unless it’s that skeevy dredge thing).
Am I making this clear? Is the message there? You can see it, throughout the whole article, in every sentence. I’m trying to say something here, and I can’t make it much clearer for you — it’s something you have to hear for yourself, and the thing there is that you have to be listening. You have to set aside your arrogance and your pride and look with fresh eyes at these decks, realise that winning and losing in this game is more than just some kind of side-effect of people trying to piss in your cornflakes, and is in fact the primary goal most people sit down to do. They’re not coming to a tournament with a primary goal in mind of trying to lose to you, you know. Be polite if they do, and be gracious if they don’t – because these are other players and they deserve your respect*.
Yes, what I’m trying to say is NERF BLUE.
Hugs and Kisses
Talen Lee
Talen at dodo dot com dot au
* I had a really good Legacy joke here, but when I was about to make it, Legacy’s mom called, and told me that Legacy is a precious flower and I’m not to make fun of it, because its feelings are tender and it doesn’t deserve my ridicule. In the interest of not pissing off Legacy’s mommy and having the next PTA be a real awkward situation, I have complied.