Sean McKeown, now officially terrified of Flash and opting out of Grand Prix: Columbus, turns his mercurial eye to the results from Grand Prix: Stockholm. He breaks down the successful 9-0 Sealed Deck builds, and investigates the make-up of the Top 8 draft decks in order to get to grips with the format. Limited play is an ever-mutating beast… do Sean’s statistics hold the key to the Top Tables?We’ve recently been stomping across the formats, starting with a brief overview of Future Sight cards in Limited play, then proceeding to look at Future Sight in Standard and the impact of Future Sight on the “rules” of Block Constructed play. Last week, we looked at the shift Future Sight’s Oracle update has on Legacy, and the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that is Hulk Flash… which effectively takes a somewhat slow-moving and yet very enjoyable Legacy metagame and throws 90% of the previously viable decks out the window, and which shows that Stephen Menendian’s Vintage-centric view of what counts as “interaction” might not be the same as everyone else’s:
The introduction of Flash transformed the whole Legacy paradigm. The result has been quite astounding: every deck in Legacy is moving to interact on the first turn. Some players seem to find this notion “offensive.” But the reality is that those decks that don’t interact or have the capacity to interact on turn one are disappearing from the metagame.
Stephen Menendian.
I for one liked Legacy as something other than Power-free Vintage, and thus this quote reminded me of something simpler I’d read a few years ago:
Murder is an interaction.
Marketing for the TV show “Oz”, 1997.
So instead of looking forward to a Grand Prix format I have decided to opt out on, despite having worked for the past three months or so to test, tweak, and prepare the B/G Survival deck I had been intending to play, I’ll be doing anything else instead. I’d correctly decided on Flash Hulk as the deck of choice if I wanted to make my trip worthwhile, and then correctly chose instead to stay home. So this week’s article will be a look back on a more interesting Grand Prix… Grand Prix: Stockholm, which features Time Spiral – Planar Chaos – Future Sight Sealed Deck with Day 2 draft of the same. While we’re currently in a PTQ format that uses exactly that, one can easily see how doubles play is significantly different from individual play, and this Grand Prix took an unexpected break from the 2HG qualifiers to let ‘em duke it out to the last man standing, no Zaphod Xxx need apply.
Future Sight has a very small impact on the Sealed Deck format; its greatest impact perhaps is how strongly its inclusion trivializes Planar Chaos, stripping it of its second pack and demoting it to just fifteen cards… leaving both drowned out by the Time Spiral cards. Time Spiral will still be the defining set in your deck, and thus it will still have much the same character as it did before, with Suspend spells being of high value and all those other known quantities we’ve grown comfortable with through the better part of a year of Limited play. Planar Chaos and its Vanishing cards have even less of an effect than before, so you have a few good cards you’ll maybe open but the defining character of Planar Chaos is weakened significantly. What you will note though is that Future Sight throws everything a little off, with several high-impact cards in the common slot, and it breaks the general rule that Morphs are either Blue cards or rares. Storm is more or less absent in the third set, but there are even more Slivers in Future Sight than there were in Planar Chaos, which may give you an incredibly synergistic deck. It introduces a few new tricks in the third set like Daunting Defender Sliver, who passes out Absorb: 1 a.k.a. the Daunting Defender ability.
With such a minimal impact as its destiny, Future Sight still shakes up the rules pretty well. Its mix-and-match nature can give you a very high impact if, say, you happen to get good Storm spells like Grapeshot and Empty the Warrens and one of your Uncommons is the Storm-friendly Grinning Ingus. It also sets itself out very well, with marquee cards like Gathan Raiders that go literally in every possible configuration of your sealed deck, so long as your sealed deck is being built right. It also has overpowering cards like Sprout Swarm that can rapidly see a board grow out of control. Other than that you’ve got your usual hodge-podge of removal, across four but not five colors, and the occasional huuuuuge Green monster like Nessian Courser or Imperiosaur clearly being the best drops in their mana slot as far as efficiency goes.
The rules of Time Spiral still seem to apply, and there’s plenty of Suspend action, plenty of time-counter trickery, and an overall aggressive bent with many of the cards. The colors are pretty evenly represented across all rarities, and while there are Dragon-level bombs there are also complete duds so there won’t be a lot of Sealed Decks carried by the rare from the third pack. With the colors maintaining the status quo, and not doing anything truly wacky as far as enabling multicolor play, the color combinations implied by the Time Spiral starter will still have a weighty impact on a deck’s outcome. The best colors in Time Spiral can lend to the best decks in the room… and with Red being very powerful across all three sets it’s no surprise to see at least a splash of Mountain magic in any given deck. For our first bit of analysis, then, let’s have a look at the Day 1 undefeated decks from the Grand Prix… Tim Willoughby, Coverage Monkey has been so kind as to include the unplayed cards as well, allowing the armchair planeswalkers to build along at home and maybe learn a thing or two about building a Sealed deck in this format by the choices they faced:
Deck 1 – Andre Mueller, 9-0
8 Island
8 Mountain
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Clockwork Hydra
1 Coral Trickster
1 Crookclaw Transmuter
1 Deep-Sea Kraken
1 Gathan Raiders
1 Fledgling Mawcor
1 Looter il-Kor
1 Voidmage Prodigy
1 Fury Sliver
1 Keldon Halberdier
1 Mogg War Marshal
1 Dragon Whelp
1 Gossamer Phantasm
1 Battering Sliver
1 Foriysian Totem
1 Dismal Failure
1 Eternity Snare
1 Grapeshot
1 Erratic Mutation
1 Pyrohemia
1 Leaden Fists
1 Second Wind
1 Fatal Attraction
Here we see one very clear power-bomb, with Pyrohemia throwing us back to the bad old days of Urza’s Saga Sealed Deck, when the very best decks might just have two or even three copies of the board-wrecking Pestilence. He’s playing just two colors, Blue and Red, cleverly two of the most powerful colors in Time Spiral working very nicely together. Morph smoothes the mana curve, as does Suspend, and you’ll see both here… and a mana-fixing artifact that taps for colored mana early and stands in as a 4/4 late, all something you will likely see in the most successful decks. Their benefits are very positive, such as your Totem letting you play 18 mana-sources without risking mana-flood as heavily and helping to ensure that the early-game plays have a significant impact on the outcome of the game. As we saw in Time Spiral Sealed, the first time around the early turns can be quite busy as Suspend spells start to power up an incoming play, and the inclusion of morph helps to ensure that one’s mana curve flows out nicely every time.
Looking at his mana curve, then, we see the following:
1cc: (Keldon Halberdier)
2cc: Mogg War Marshal, Looter il-Kor, Gossamer Phantasm, Coral Trickster, Voidmage Prodigy, Grapeshot
3cc: (Coral Trickster, Voidmage Prodigy, Fledgling Mawcor, Gathan Raiders, Deep-Sea Kraken), Second Wind, Leaden Fists, Fatal Attraction, Erratic Mutation, Foriysian Totem
4cc: Crookclaw Transmuter, Fledgling Mawcor, Dragon Whelp, Pyrohemia, Dismal Failure
5cc: Keldon Halberdier, Clockwork Hydra, Gathan Raiders
6cc+: Fury Sliver, Battering Sliver, Deep-Sea Kraken, Eternity Snare
1: 1
2: 6
3: 10
4: 5
5: 3
6: 4
This shows a heavy focus on the second, third, and fourth turns, with three being the most critical turn for beginning to interact… if you’re missing action on turn three, it’s not likely to end well. This is often true in any Sealed Deck format, but with the highly aggressive tones of many of the cards across all three sets and some pretty aggressive combat abilities flying around all over the place you’ll find it’s especially true in this one. The corollary to this is that stopping at two lands might just equal death, so there is a higher-than-average push to use 18 sources that is worth keeping in mind.
I’m actually quite surprised to see some of the cards he’s got in-color on the sidelines… Walk the Aeons I can see not playing, as it’s much stronger in Draft than in Sealed and even in Draft can be incredibly sketchy in the wrong deck. Temporal Eddy is a card I’d expect to see played more often than not, because it can generate a powerful tempo-positive effect if played in the early game and is at least a bounce spell with benefits to make up for its sorcery speed later in the game. Many would likely look at the Eddy before choosing to play their Eternity Snare, showing that Mueller here is looking to keep the card count in mind and not just race for aggressive potential, despite the overall low curve of his deck helping to ensure that the early-game action is plentiful and important. But what I’m most surprised to see sidelined is Empty the Warrens… until, that is, you realize that the impact we’re used to it having is more or less lost entirely in a deck that has only two Suspend spells, one of which may commonly unsuspend itself on the opponent’s turn. I’ve bent over backwards drafting Storm decks based on Empty the Warrens in T-P-F draft, and have picked Empty the Warrens as highly as first even with just the one Time Spiral pack… but then I’ve also been able to pair it with a deck that has plentiful Suspend spells and seek out cards like Coal Stoker to take higher than the people next to me were willing. Mueller’s deck, however, would be struggling to get four Goblins, and cannot really capitalize on its newfound swarm even if it pulls off a decent-sized Warrens.
Reality Strobe is a Dematerialize, bouncing a permanent with “buyback” once every three turns… requiring a lot of work, either in mana or foresight, to get right the first time, and for what in Sealed Deck at least might prove to be insufficient returns on the effort invested. Its Suspend cost interferes with Mueller’s most important drop, and when Mueller hits six mana he wants to cast an important creature, not pay six for a bounce spell in the hope that its slow but repeating nature will have a relevant effect.
Looking at the rest of the pool, we see a Dragon left unused, in the three colors he’s specifically not playing, Black-Green-White. There’s some removal around, with Judge Unworthy, Feebleness, Temporal Isolation… nope, that’s it. Blue/Red is a pretty clear decision here thanks to the spells, with multiple strong removal spells in each color, and more or less garbage in the other three colors despite the presence of a Dragon. Mueller’s deck is easy to pick out of the background noise, and aside from a few small choices like Eternity Snare over the Temporal Eddy we’d have likely played in previous iterations of Time Spiral limited the armchair planeswalker would likely find the very same deck in his hands, yay us. But looking at even that subtle choice can tell us a lot about the format: Mueller has a lot of cards that can create a small advantage turn after turn, with pingers and Pyrohemia. He can answer a lot of different threats but is at least partially limited by a creature’s toughness, and isn’t overpoweringly fast with huge monsters… he’s got some evasion creatures but nothing huge, so he’s aiming to make sure he doesn’t get overwhelmed and can trust his deck to win from there so long as it has the time to get operating. Temporal Eddy doesn’t help this plan, as the threat will just return soon… fine against perhaps Verdant Embrace, but not really helpful against a big creature like Durkwood Baloth. Eternity Snare answers a threat and draws a card, even if it’s expensive; since Mueller isn’t aiming to kill especially fast, the cantrip removal will be significant towards the card count so long as he has the time to deploy it.
Deck 2 – Samuel Korsell, 9-0
8 Mountain
8 Plains
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Amrou Scout
1 Cloudchaser Kestrel
1 Flickering Spirit
1 Magus of the Disk
1 Watcher Sliver
1 Weathered Bodyguards
1 Essence Sliver
1 Bonesplitter Sliver
1 Greater Gargadon
1 Keldon Halberdier
1 Aven Riftwatcher
1 Crovax, Ascendant Hero
1 Battering Sliver
1 Keldon Marauders
1 Prodigal Pyromancer
1 Emberwilde Augur
1 Fomori Nomad
1 Conflagrate
1 Rift Bolt
1 Griffin Guide
1 Undying Rage
1 Fatal Attraction
1 Ghostfire
For the second card-pool, we again see the Mountains well-represented, and they are paired with Plains this time thanks to powerful cards like Crovax, Ascendant Hero and Magus of the Disk livening things up. It doesn’t have Pyrohemia but there are some cards that get beat even worse by Crovax, as I learned again the hard way last night squaring off against Brian David-Marshall and his White legend versus my double Empty the Warrens / Sprout Swarm draft deck. We see a few hits here we wouldn’t expect to, like Keldon Marauders… found more commonly in piles of 60 than 40. There’s a nice little Sliver sub-theme and the powerful Greater Gargadon as well, plus a decent number of removal spells and some aggressive creature enhancers. If Mueller’s deck was a lesson in how to skew your choices for a controlling stance, Korsell’s deck teaches that beating down is not just a science, it’s an art. This deck went 9-0 with zero byes, unlike Andre Mueller… our first 9-0 deck started with three byes, while Korsell here punched nine other human beings in the face to wave the flag of victory atop a pile of bodies.
If this is an aggressive deck, then the mana-curve should be quite telling, as these are not the colors that are traditionally well at dealing with blockers named Penumbra Spider (for example).
1cc: (Keldon Halberdier, Greater Gargadon, Rift Bolt)
2cc: (Conflagrate), Amrou Scout, Keldon Marauders, Emberwilde Augur
3cc: (Weathered Bodyguards), Cloudchaser Kestrel, Aven Riftwatcher, Prodigal Pyromancer, Rift Bolt, Griffin Guide, Undying Rage, Fatal Attraction, Ghostfire
4cc: Flickering Spirit, Magus of the Disk, Watcher Sliver, Bonesplitter Sliver, Essence Sliver
5cc: Keldon Halberdier, Fomori Nomad, Weathered Bodyguards
6cc+: Battering Sliver, Crovax, Ascendant Hero, Greater Gargadon, Conflagrate
1: 3
2: 4
3: 9
4: 5
5: 3
6: 4
Some of this is a little sketchy because it can be hard to pin down where Conflagrate fits, and entirely too often you’ll find a player unwilling to spend three mana at Sorcery speed for the worst Zap ever despite it being the right play to kill a two-drop instead of hold the card and do nothing that turn. You’ll note that 20 of the 23 cards in the deck can be played by turn 4, with only the Nomad, Battering Sliver, and Crovax always requiring five mana or more. Admittedly that’s just one fewer card than Mueller’s deck had with that same capability, but overall his two-drops were more likely to attack profitably (many of Mueller’s wanted to be morphs). Much of the weight is at the four-mana mark, but it’s highly likely that the deck will spend mana each turn, starting perhaps as early as the first turn, and tapping out every turn to drop plays on the board is kind of what defined a “mana curve” in the first place. Having a few race-changers like Griffin Guide help keep the deck on the aggressive, and overall we see the balls-to-the-wall aggression extending to include even the “maybe Lava Axe” and “maybe Soul Feast” Vanishing guys, Keldon Marauders and Aven Riftwatcher.
This is the kind of strategy that we don’t usually see working out in Sealed Deck, but it exemplifies quite nicely how a strong pool without any really “bomby” cards (Gargadon and Magus both count here, but they’re no Pyrohemia) or so much removal that you only play seven creatures can succeed just by having quality drops and an aggressive strategy. Often this is the best plan you can reach with an otherwise “bad” sealed deck, to try and get your wins by gaining tempo even if your cards are generally worse than your opponent’s, but here we have it as an active plan rather than last-ditch effort.
Looking at the rest of the pool, there are no benched Dragons this time but there are cards that are usually valued quite highly in their respective colors. Fathom Seer, Looter il-Kor, and Riftwing Cloudskate all rule, Durkwood Baloth is about as good as Green creatures can get in any format, and has friends like Imperiosaur and Sporesower Thallid to make sure he isn’t lonely tapped and attacking. Again we see a pretty clear build, though, with weak Black showing that Red is the removal color here, and while you could profitably pair Red with Blue like Mueller did the Red/White build uses more of your best cards (Crovax, Magus of the Disk) even if you do have the occasional sub-standard scrapper in there trying to get a few points across.
Deck 3 – Gaetan Lefebvre
1 Coral Trickster
1 Errant Ephemeron
1 Riftwing Cloudskate
1 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
1 Viscerid Deepwalker
1 Flying Men
1 Bogardan Hellkite
1 Coal Stoker
1 Goblin Skycutter
1 Ironclaw Buzzardiers
1 Primal Plasma
1 Magus of the Scroll
1 Needlepeak Spider
1 Infiltrator il-Kor
1 Blind Phantasm
1 Veiling Oddity
1 Griffin Guide
1 Prismatic Lens
1 Undying Rage
1 Brute Force
1 Take Possession
1 Venser’s Diffusion
1 Ghostfire
Take Possession is a high-power bomb by anyone’s accounting, but at seven mana it’s only about as good as Enslave… possibly even less so, despite having Split Second, because Enslave does something else spiffy while it is at it. Bogardan Hellkite and Vesuvan Shapeshifter, however, are both about the best rares you could hope to open in their respective colors, and they’re colors we’ve already agreed are basically the best colors overall. Lefevbre likewise had the three bye advantage, but of any of the three this would be the deck I’d expect could pull off a 9-0. We have bombs, we have curve, we have some of the best Commons in the format… even if it is light on removal, it’s looking like the kind of deck that should be able to overpower anything.
Giving it the same treatment, then, we see a deck that works its mana even more aggressively than the previous two did:
1cc: (Viscerid Deepwalker), Flying Men, Magus of the Scroll, Brute Force
2cc: (Errant Ephemeron, Riftwing Cloudskate, Veiling Oddity, Infiltrator il-Kor), Coral Trickster, Goblin Skycutter, Prismatic Lens
3cc: (Vesuvan Shapeshifter, Coral Trickster), Blind Phantasm, Ironclaw Buzzardiers, Griffin Guide, Undying Rage, Venser’s Diffusion, Ghostfire
4cc: Coal Stoker, Needlepeak Spider, Veiling Oddity, Primal Plasma
5cc: Infiltrator il-Kor, Riftwing Cloudskate, Viscerid Deepwalker, Vesuvan Shapeshifter
6cc+: Bogardan Hellkite, Errant Ephemeron, Take Possession
1: 4
2: 7
3: 8
4: 4
5: 4
6: 3
Where Mueller’s deck could deploy all but four of its cards before turn 5, Lefevbre can deploy all but five of his cards by turn 3, with an awful lot of Suspend action going on to turn 2 mana now into 4/4 fliers or 3/1 shadows soon. This deck has the fast aggression, even playing some quality one-drops, and evasion all over the place with fliers and Shadow… all coupled with both Undying Rage and Griffin Guide, so it’s like Korsell’s deck but better. Other than marveling that such Sealed Decks exist, with Ephemerons and Hellkites and Shapeshifters, let’s have a look at what wasn’t played instead so maybe we can learn something by seeing what didn’t make the cut.
Looking at the in-color cards, Mystical Teachings comes immediately to mind, as it fetches out the power-bomb Bogardan Hellkite. Storm Elemental might be worth playing, especially in a deck with this much Suspend action going on, but goes against the deck’s focus of getting solid value for its cards early in the game… and even after you put all the work into setting him up, he’s no more relevant than your average Hill Giant in Limited play. Fury Sliver requires friends and has none, and so we are left to debate the splash color if we want to even attempt to argue against the deck’s configuration. The other colors don’t even hold a candle to what Blue and Red have, with one mighty Dark Withering as the playable removal not named Necrotic Sliver, and so if you want to look for other options anywhere it’s that splash color for one card that you could look at.
Griffin Guide is great, but a Green splash for Sprout Swarm might be more defensible. By the time you get your splash color, Griffin Guide is attempting to amp up your aggressive potential, but is stranded beforehand; by the time you get your splash color for Sprout Swarm, though, it’s ready to start dominating the game making two or more tokens a turn. It can help argue towards including Mystical Teachings as well if that is the avenue you want to take, cutting some of the aggressive power to add a lot more late-game inevitability. This actually provides us with the opposite of the argument we saw made in Mueller’s 9-0 deck; where one had the choice between early tempo plays and late-game answers, it chose the answers, while the other is offered the same choice more or less but went with aggressive tempo instead, building pressure with Griffin Guide instead of looking to stretch the game and capitalize on its verifiable bombs. When to apply one and when the other is the trick, I guess, and the highly aggressive curve of Lefebvre’s deck (like Korsell’s) has a few small creatures like Flying Men that are underpowered if the game goes too long, and such high-power Suspend spells in the two-drop curve that not capitalizing by being aggressive would have been the wrong play. You can even eschew Forest plus Sprout Swarm and just go with Swamp plus Teachings, able to get Ghostfire, Diffusion, Brute Force, and Bogardan freakin’ Hellkite. These are the hard-to-make decisions, and the idea of pushing the aggressive limit by playing Griffin Guide is defensible with a lot more than "just" a 9-0 winning record to show it worked, as the aggressive option is the one that best fits the remainder of the deck, which seems to want to use its bombs to mop up the game after if it somehow goes to the seven- and eight-mana spell range. “Splash White” is somewhere in that mana range off of just two sources, so using Griffin Guide to break the game open if it’s somehow stalemated is perfectly reasonable… it’s just that using Mystical Teachings at that point might also be a defensible option, and one that does not require drawing an off-colored source (or having it resolve on the targeted creature, for that matter) to function effectively.
The subtle touches, presumably, are the key. (As is opening Red cards, it would seem, as all three 9-0 decks had a strong set of Red cards to work with.) Picking a design philosophy, at least to some extent, can help solidify the remaining choices where things start to hit the border between “definitely a good idea” and “might not work out in this deck”, such as Mueller’s exclusion of the otherwise perfectly acceptable Temporal Eddy.
Without really extensive coverage during Day 2, well past the point at which it would be reasonable for Tim Willoughby to frivol away the hours of his life just to provide us with more information, we have just the one draft to analyze for Time Spiral – Planar Chaos – Future Sight drafting. We learned from looking at Sealed Deck that this is more or less a two-color deck format, and that Red should probably be one of those colors if you want to succeed; in addition to the 9-0 players, Tiago Chan played quite a nice Red/White deck to an 8-1 record, and Red seems to be standing up as one of the best colors for Limited play if not the best color across the block.
Looking at the Top 8 draft decks, we see the following:
Oliver Oks: W/r, 17 lands.
1: 4
2: 8
3: 6
4: 5
5: 3
6: 1
Average: 3.15
(This is counting Marshaling Cry as a two-drop [cycling] and three-drop [to cast the first time], and Serra Avenger as a four-drop despite “only” costing WW.)
Andre Mueller: B/G, 17 lands with Phyrexian Totem
1: 2
2: 5
3: 6
4: 3
5: 6
6: 3
Average: 3.6
(This is not counting any price breaks due to Madness costs, which in several cases cut the mana costs of Mueller’s cards down considerably, especially with outlets like Deepcavern Imp and Stronghold Rats in his three-drop curve dropping 5’s down to 2’s and 3’s. While somewhat top-heavy, it’s not as top-heavy as it looks, and a full 50% of Mueller’s cards can be used to tap for mana or search for lands.)
Klaus Jones: U/r, 18 lands
1: 1
2: 6
3: 8
4: 5
5: 5
6: 2
Average: 3.48
Bas Postema: G/R/u, 18 lands
1: 4
2: 5
3: 5
4: 4
5: 4
6: 6
Average: 3
(Here we have a very low curve but one that appears very top-heavy, as none of those 4’s through 6’es can really be effectively played at a lower mana cost save for Lightning Axe, which is represented in both slots. While Boom/Bust can be played for two mana, and thus counts as a two here, it’s generally not going to be even considered as a two-drop; the same goes for Sprout Swarm, and thus this deck starts on three and maybe has an effective early game play before then.)
Thomas Refsdal: G/R, 17 lands
1: 0
2: 12
3: 4
4: 6
5: 3
6: 1
Average: 3.1
(Again, Stingscourger counts as a four-drop here, which artificially inflates the mana curve a little… as does listing double Nantuko Shaman as both a three and a four when it is almost guaranteed to be wanted here as a four-drop exclusively thanks to having plenty of other useful things one can do on turn 3 even if it’s just another two-drop.)
Nikolay Potovin: U/R, 17 lands
1: 1
2: 4
3: 14
4: 4
5: 2
6: 4
Average: 3.35
Kenji Tsumura: W/U, 17 lands
1: 6
2: 4
3: 6
4: 10
5: 1
6: 3
Average: 3.15
(If Refsdal’s curve is inflated by counting Nantuko Shaman twice, Kenji’s is thus deflated and appears lower than it actually is because it includes the option of casting either Lumithread Field or Willbender unmorphed, neither of which is especially likely. Kenji’s deck perhaps under-performed in the semifinals because he does less on turns 2 and 3 than most of the opposition, and is more reliant on drawing a fourth land to get his spells online than the other eight decks… which likely impacted the crucial third game of that match.)
Samuel Korsell: B/G, 17 lands
1: 0
2: 10
3: 6
4: 6
5: 1
6: 7
Average: 3.63
(While numerically highest, Korsell’s expensive cards are all “optionally” expensive, even Phthisis; removing the numerous “draw a card” options like on Citanul Woodreaders and Ichor Slick lowers his curve significantly.)
If one color is just better than any other, you’d expect to see it penetrating whenever given the chance; likewise, if “aggressive” is favored over “controlling” you would expect that the average casting cost of spells in each deck would go down from round to round as the more aggressive decks won, instead of up which might suggest that the more controlling decks with the more expensive spells (like Korsell’s) is instead favored. Similarly, just for a lark, we’d try to see how the number of lands played varies over the course of the Top 8:
| Top 8 | Top 4 | Top 2 | |
| Average Mana Cost | 3.3075 | 3.3125 | 3.475 |
| Average Number of Lands | 17.25 | 17 | 17 |
| Color Share – Black | 13% | 13% | 25% |
| Color Share – Blue | 23% | 27% | 25% |
| Color Share – White | 13% | 27% | 0% |
| Color Share – Green | 26% | 13% | 25% |
| Color Share – Red | 26% | 20% | 25% |
What we do see is that the decks favoring 18 lands dropped out early, the presence of Blue and Red remained reasonably constant over all three rounds, while Green dropped off in the semifinals only to pick back up again in the finals. Black stayed minimally present in the first two rounds but pushed through into the finals to increase its percentage presence, while White spiked higher in round 2 only to fall off completely as both the White decks lost the second round. As far as colors are concerned, White failed to live up to its expectations despite surging early, and Black surprisingly pulled it together to be in one of the two best decks at the table despite starting in only two of the eight decks. Red and Blue had a solid presence and maintained it, but didn’t dominate… unlike seen previously, where their results in Time Spiral only in Grand Prix drafts showed early domination in the draft format.
And as far as mana-curves go to help define how aggressive the draft format is… well, the numbers are muddy: we go from an average mana curve of 3.3 in round 1 to 3.3 in round 2, increasing to 3.5 in the last round. The slower, more expensive decks tended to push onward… although we must admit that Mueller’s deck doesn’t play mana curve by the numbers, and Potovin’s deck is right on target for the average of the first two rounds. Discounting Mueller’s high mana curve as an oddity of counting, because of his synergistic madness-enablers, we learn nothing really by the numbers… though if you apply a price break and set Mueller’s deck to, say, 3.4, you’ll see the Round of Eight numbers minimally affected (3.28), more greatly affected in the Round of Four (3.26) and much more affected in the finals (3.38).
There’s a lot of uncertainty here because this method is more or less created on the fly and hard to pin down the accuracy of, such as “should you average the casting-cost of any spell that can be played for two costs?” I didn’t, instead counting it at each point in the curve and adding its weight in both places while increasing the number of “spells” I had to divide by after tallying the total mana costs… and it’s hard to say which would be more significant, since they’re both fudging the numbers. Choosing not to fudge Madness but fudging Suspend, and other little biases, could also have an accumulated effect… one we didn’t expect to see appear, really, but the one Madness-based deck made the finals and gummed up the math.
One thing we do learn is that the numbers don’t go down, which causes us to look again at the idea that the more aggressive decks are the ones we expect to see succeeding. At least at this Grand Prix, it seems the somewhat more expensive, rather controlling stance is the way to succeed… the most successful decks included 0/5 Walls that can block fliers and 2/4 Thicket Basilisks to gum up the ground. The more aggressive decks, like Kenji’s “Plains, suspend, go” beatdown White deck, didn’t represent themselves well in the finals… Postema beat two of the decks we’d term as "aggressive," heavy on the one- and two-drops, while Mueller took out Tsumura and Refsdal… again, both decks we would clearly term as being on the more aggressive sides of things.
Aggro isn’t the only way to keep an eye on your tempo, after all… and in just this one draft at least, a slower and more defensive stance placed two decks in the finals. However, to be fair, Oks and Tsumura both beat somewhat controlling decks in their first rounds, so we have a 50-50 split whenever aggro draft decks faces controllish draft decks. The best suggestion then is that either game-plan can succeed, and thus the decision tree is not “just” to choose one route, but to choose your stance and then draft your deck accordingly. This puts a higher value on the kinds of cards that fit with your overall goals: aggressive Suspend creatures in a beatdown deck, for example, or things like Penumbra Spider or Gorgon Recluse that gum up the ground really well and begin to turn the tempo back in your favor as the early aggressive push is blunted. If TPF is like TTP, then decks of either speed can compete, and how well you draft a deck to focus on your plan may very well be the deciding factor. But that’s all we can really squeeze out of these numbers, and we aren’t likely to get any fresh information on the format anytime soon as there are no more Grand Prix scheduled for this format… pretty much ever, as near as I can see, as this GP’s Limited format was something of a freak occurrence. So we leave off uncertain about what just happened, but reasonably confident that nothing is unbalanced in the draft format at least… not like Red in the Sealed Deck format, anyway.
With Future Sight right on the horizon, this upcoming week is an important one… Sunday is May 20th, and I for one will be playing a Standard tournament that Sunday at Neutral Ground in New York City to try and come back with a first look at the changes that the future holds for our established pre-rotation metagame. One week from today will see Future Sight released on Magic Online finally, and the long Memorial Day Weekend will inaugurate the beginning of the metagame madness as we prepare for Regionals… so look back next week when we will finally know the answer to the most pressing question of all in the weeks before Regionals:
Is Flash as dumb as it looks in Legacy?
What the hell is good in Standard anyway?
HOW DO YOU STOP AN EXPLODING MAN?!?
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com
Sylar can smell your spicy brains…