Future Sight and Flash’s recent “un-errata” gave us a host of new interactions to explore in Vintage. Ichorid has been a popular subject as of late, but I haven’t really seen the need to say much about it until I saw the spoiler for Future Sight. Steve’s article on Monday went over the basic additions to the deck, which I think everyone knows by now, but I found a number of subjects on which the info was skimping. So I’ve largely modified my original post-FS Ichorid article to go over some of the things about which Steve didn’t go into detail.
Creatures (31)
- 3 Nether Shadow
- 2 Sutured Ghoul
- 4 Ichorid
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 4 Golgari Thug
- 2 Shambling Shell
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 4 Narcomoeba
- 4 Street Wraith
Lands (4)
Spells (25)
Personal Changes
Currently my build features a few simple differences from Steve’s build.
-4 Urza’s Bauble
-3 Nether Shadow
+4 Leyline of the Void
+2 Mindslicer / Petradon / Sundering Titan
+1 Dread Return
As anyone who has seen my older list knows, I like Baubles a great deal. Despite removing them here, I will keep an eye on things to see if running a set or more is truly helpful. At the moment, I prefer Leyline as my 3rd disruption piece against nearly all non-combo decks; moreso now that Ichorid is primed to make a bigger splash thanks to Future Sight.
You might wonder about my complete lack of Unmask in the maindeck, but my reasoning is simple. I’m now running more Black cards that I’d like to see hit the graveyard than in my previous list; before, I had multiple Nether Shadow, or I wouldn’t mind throwing garbage like Golgari Thug away. Now the early dredgers are very important and can’t really be pitched, while some of the dead weight has been replaced with other more valuable cards.
The other key is Unmask lost a lot of its value when Vintage decks started to step up to the plate and attempt to go off faster. Combo typically is more worried about the three Cabal Therapy you can completely ruin them with than a random Unmask effect. Rarely will many combo players keep any hand that looks like 4-5 mana sources, a single bomb, and some garbage Draw7 anymore. The best you can usually hope for out of Unmask is that they don’t have Brainstorm and you hit a crucial mana accelerator of some sort. I rather shut off Yawgmoth’s Will with Leyline personally.
As for a sideboard, my current board is listed lower in the article.
You’ll note that I’ve removed Nether Shadow from my current build. This decision was done as more of a test-run rather than a straight improvement to the deck; there are arguments to be made either way. The main reason for Shadow’s inclusion is that it gives additional “real” creatures that could come back into play on turn two or three. The counter to this is that the creature itself is just a random 1/1 dork that really is just a warm body that’s okay to dredge up. The thing is Narcomoeba essentially replaced Shadow in that specialty, so it then becomes a question of how many 1/1 useless dorks you want in the deck.
You then have to weigh running manlands or additional disruption over another redundant creature in the deck. For this listing I’ve found them to be overkill in the creature department, so I’ve temporarily replaced them with the additional Dread Return and creatures to reanimate. Thus far I’ve found the extra utility and turn 2 impact plays were more valuable than the Shadows.
I’m still personally torn on which extra Return creature in the maindeck is best, if any. At the moment I far prefer Petradon since it doesn’t care what lands it hits, but any of the creatures are a decent choice. Mindslicer in particular is interesting, because I’ve had a number of times against Fish / Stax where I’ve only gotten a single Bazaar activation in. If I could still manage a Dread Return with only 10-15 cards in the grave (actually possible now, thanks to Street Wraith and Bridge), Mindslicer was amazing at evening the playing field for me.
Kill Choices
There are two main choices for a primary kill via Dread Return in the Ichorid deck at the moment. So let’s take a moment and breakdown the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
Pros:
Fewer pieces are required to be dredged away to win than other kills
Cons
Pieces are useless without each other
Vulnerable to bounce of all sorts
Harder hit by graveyard hate
Flame-Kin Zealot & flashpoint of creatures
Pros:
Takes up fewer slots than Ghoul
Vulnerable to only Echoing Truth via bounce
Narcomoeba and Bridge from Below are both great on their own.
Cons:
The combo needs at least six other 2/2 (One can be a 1/1) creatures in play when Flame-Kin returns to play for lethal damage. This almost always requires at least two Bridges in the graveyard, or a bit of luck with turn 1 dredging for Ichorid or hitting multiple Narcomoeba. Certainly not unfeasible, but notable.
The use of Dread Return
Currently the majority of Ichorid decks using Dread Return are only using it for one-shot kills. As I’ve mentioned while going over the kills, this sometimes isn’t a viable option if you only get a few dredges for 10-15 cards early on even though you have the requisite creatures in play. Thanks to Narcomoeba and Bridge from Below, you’ll have three creatures by turn 2 far more often than the old Mana or Manaless Ichorid builds. This means if you’re willing to devote the space, you can run Dread Return targets like Sundering Titan, Petradon, Mindslicer, etc. to cripple the opponent on turn 2.
This means instead of purely a kill card, if you up Dread Return to a full set, you can use them like super utility cards to stall the opponent until you win on turn 3 or 4. On one hand you’ll have to give up a few slots, perhaps Baubles or Nether Shadow for the extra space, but against certain decks where you need a turn 2 impact play (like combo), you have a much better shot of getting one.
From my initial testing, the extra “help” on turn 2 hasn’t been an overly important factor in a lot of games, but it clearly showed some of the value if the format takes another step forward in speed because of this deck, Flash, and Future Sight combo additions.
The Sideboard
My current sideboard is made pretty much to beat the main two hate cards aimed at the deck, Leyline of the Void and Tormod’s Crypt. This means 6-8 lands, 3-4 ways to deal with Tormod’s Crypt and 3-4 ways to deal with Leyline.
4 Dryad Arbor
3 Forest / Bayou
4 Pithing Needle
4 Reverent Silence
A few things stick out, of course. The first and most important change is the removal of the 5c lands in exchange for Dryad Arbor and Forest. The main reason for this change is to get actual use out of the lands by sacking them to Cabal Therapy and Dread Return, instead of just the whole “makes mana” trick. However, due to the summoning sickness, Emerald Charm lost some of its appeal as the main enchantment removal. The solution was adding Silence, which was a free way to hit Leyline while keeping the manland in the deck.
Pithing Needle is the common answer to Crypt and Strips, although the latter isn’t anywhere near as big a threat anymore. Other options for the board include Oxidize, Emerald Charm, and a bunch of stupidly cute combos like Doomsday, Protean Hulk into a Saffi infinite loop or other such nonsense.
Tuning the Hype’O-Meter
I can’t remember any deck in Vintage, save 2-3 months of Dragon, where a deck has done so badly and made so small of an impact yet altered so many considerations. Seriously, the results for Ichorid since its inception have been nothing short of pitiful. Not to mention the play skill and decision tree involved in the deck is close to nil.
This version of the deck is faster and more consistent than the older Ichorid builds, but it still has major issues with hate. People tend to exaggerate this into anything that kills Bazaar, but in reality it’s only cards like Leyline and Crypt that cause major problems. As I’ve stated on TMD, after a certain point I find testing the deck silly, since each match plays at in a linear fashion. There are exceptions, but a huge number of the games come down to the exact make-up of the opposing deck moreso than anything else.
After saying all that, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why write an article about the deck to go along with Steve’s earlier this week?”
The answer is simply that I like to point out the flaws in the deck along with what I think is a major upgrading for it. Pointing out that it has an amazing game 1 win percentage and all the amazing turn 2 impact plays the deck has is a bit misleading out of the context of the deck results and weaknesses. I’ve been guilty of this myself, talking about how amazing the deck is without fully comprehending how much hate was around to fight this thing.
So the best thing you can do is take all the information, process it, and take everything somebody says with a grain of salt.
Bonus Musical Aside
Last week I threw down some lyrics from the song N.G.S., since I ended up getting a number of e-mails about it, I figured I would share exactly what I was referring to.
Asian Kung-Fu Generation is a Japanese rock band that does a lot of melodic rock stuff. The song N.G.S. stands for Number Girl Syndrome and the lyrics were a rough translation from the original Japanese lyrics. If you’ve heard of them without knowing much about Japanese music, it was probably because you heard them from Rewrite, the 4th opening song to Full Metal Alchemist; or doing Haruka Kanata, the 2nd opening song from Naruto.
So now you know.
Josh Silvestri
Team Reflection
Email me at: joshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom