There was a good deal of forum discussion concerning the Walking Anthems list I proposed in my last outing, and addressing it here makes for a convenient introduction to the meat of the article. Some popular subjects included the following.
Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘n’ Waffles
(The Big One) Dark Confidant and Hit / Run
Lands: Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth; Boros Garrison; Gemstone Mine
I’ll go in that order.
I’d love to go on and on about how amazing Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘n’ Waffles is, but that would be unfair to those readers that don’t live in or near Los Angeles for easy access. In short, Roscoe’s is a restaurant that serves amazing waffles and tasty fried chicken together on the same plate, and the combination of the two will blow your mind and rock your face apart. It sounds weird – and believe me, there are a lot of skeptics – but 100% of the people I’ve taken there (or instructed to check it out) have come back and said it was delicious, no matter how weird or unappetizing they said it sounded at first. Their website has information on locations.
As to the Confidant with Hit / Run issue, I could point to Tomoharu Saito’s winning Pro Tour: Charleston decklist – which had not only four Confidants, but four Hit / Runs as well — but that would be a bit of a cop-out. Here’s the deal.
Against Gruul, where the danger is the largest, I’m throwing my Confidants away regardless. I don’t intend for them to stay on the table very long because they are a liability to my life total, Hit / Run or no. I’ll take the first one-for-one I can get, and sometimes I’ll even settle for a Call of the Herd or Burning-Tree Shaman block to effect a Healing Salve rather than putting myself further behind in the damage race. In any case, I don’t expect him to live to the upkeep — and if he does, it’s either because I’m so far ahead on the damage race that I’m okay with losing some life, or because the opponent foolishly refrained from attacking into him so that I might dome myself. (Deciding not to attack explicitly saves me the life total points that the Confidant might cost me in the first place.)
Against Dralnu, I’m fine with taking eight. Dralnu kills when it is in near-total control of the game, so if I have a Confidant down that’s drawing me several cards — and Hit / Run is a good one to draw against them — I’m okay with losing the life because there’s no way they can burn me out. Dragonstorm is a similar bag; Hit / Run is amazing against them, and I’m pretty much either dead outright to a full-blown Dragonstorm or happy I have the Hit / Run if all they have is a Hellkite.
It sucks when you take eight against Izzetron, but that’s really the only situation where it’s all that bad. Confidant tends to get Electrolyzed or blocked by a Sulfur Elemental pretty quickly in that matchup, though, which decreases the number of upkeep steps you have to accidentally see a Hit / Run.
Urborg is an interesting idea. While it provides plenty of Black mana to use with Sedge Sliver, it doesn’t do anything under a resolved Blood Moon — regardless of the order in which the Moon and the Urborg were played — so a basic Swamp would certainly be better when a Moon is out. I am a very Blood Moon-conscious deckbuilder… but is resilience to that card actually a realistic goal for this deck? The two main things to consider are:
1) If I twist my manabase so that it is more resilient to Blood Moon, how negatively will that twisting impact my mana draws in other matchups?
2) Will a Blood Moon-conscious manabase actually let me beat a Blood Moon, or will I still lose to it much of the time anyway?
For non-Green three-color decks, being resilient to Blood Moon is a hell of a challenge. The only card that comes to mind is Terramorphic Expanse. Intuitively, that seems slow and awful… but who knows? With zero one-drops, I don’t really have anything else to do on the first turn. I’ll keep it in mind.
Speaking of lands, it was suggested that swapping out some Boros Garrisons might be a good idea for this beatdown deck. Are the bouncelands really worth it in a deck like this? In short, yes. They let me hit Worship mana right on time, and play Sedge Sliver with regeneration mana open on turn 4 more consistently. A lot of people shook their heads in disgust at Olivier Ruel four Orzhov Basilicas in his Top 8 B/W deck in Honolulu, but by the end of the PTQ season most midrange B/W aggro decks had come full circle and had adopted them. When you can make use of them — and this deck can — I’m a big fan of the bouncelands. Rather than go into a page-long discussion of why they’re worth it, I’d suggest the simple alternative of trying them out.
Gemstone Mine, on the other hand, is unappealing for a midrange aggro deck – even one playing bouncelands to reset them. I tend to tap all of my 2-3 lands every turn, so I can see running the Mines out of counters in a hurry and really missing the mana they produced. Still, they’re worth considering.
So it’s the beginning of a testing session. I want to try out Gemstone Mine, Terramorphic Expanse, and Urborg. I’ve got several different combinations to try out, and I really have no clue if I should be playing all of — or really any of — these cards. What should I do?
At the beginning of a gauntlet run, I pretty much opt for the greediest choice in all cases. Why? Well, if I go for the cautious route (i.e. don’t play any Terramorphic Expanses, Gemstone Mines, or Urborg) and nothing bad happens, I’ll start to wonder if I could have gotten away with running those cards. To satisfy that curiosity, I’ll have to go back and re-test with those cards in my deck, meaning I wasted a lot of time in the first round of playtesting.
Instead, by choosing the greedy option and — this is important — watching what happens in each game, I can figure out which options do more harm than good. If something has a drawback that is causing too many problems (such as Gemstone Mine’s depletion counters or Terramorphic Expanse’s comes-into-play-tapped requirement), I can cut the card out for future playtesting. If it’s not a problem, I can leave it in and reap the benefits of its upsides.
For reference, here’s the list I started testing with. Gemstone Mines, Urborg, Terramorphic Expanse, and all.
Walking Anthems, Pre-Testing
4 Blood Crypt
4 Godless Shrine
4 Boros Garrison
2 Gemstone Mine
4 Terramorphic Expanse
2 Swamp
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Dark Confidant
4 Sinew Sliver
4 Cautery Sliver
4 Sedge Sliver
4 Necrotic Sliver
3 Sulfur Elemental
4 Castigate
4 Lightning Helix
3 Hit / Run
3 Worship
Sideboard:
4 Rise / Fall
4 Deathmark
3 Luminesce
2 Demonfire
1 Sulfur Elemental
1 Hit / Run
On the advice of Cedric Phillips, I gave Luminesce a try in the board against Dragonstorm and Izzetron. I also included a pair of Demonfires for the Dralnu matchup, as those games last awhile and my Garrisons let me stockpile a lot of mana.
Online Standard is a very open environment right now, but the four most successful decks — Dragonstorm, Izzetron, Dralnu, and Gruul — together make up the majority of Premier event Top 8 slots. My initial gauntlet will therefore consist of those four decks.
Where to begin?
According to Frank Karsten’s analysis, Dragonstorm is 20% of the Premier Event Top 8s, Izzetron is 15%, and Gruul and Dralnu are 10% apiece. I’ll get the most mileage out of having a good Dragonstorm matchup, and a horrible one will probably lead me to abandon the deck, so I’ll try that one out first.
Last week I gave you a play-by-play analysis of each game in my testing session. A lot of people liked this insight, so I decided to do the same this week for the Gruul matchup to highlight some of the intricacies of the creature mirror. However, when I got done with eight full games (four pre-board and four post-board, half on the play and half on the draw), I had so much article already that my monitor looked about ready to burst.
I thought it would be a shame to go through all that analysis for one matchup and then end with an updated list that had no explanation attached to it, so I decided to save the play-by-play for next week in favor of talking more about the deck this week. Apologies to those of you who were hoping for more play-by-play this week.
Meanwhile, back at the gauntlet, Walking Anthems knocked down a 6-4 maindeck finish against the winning Dragonstorm list from Worlds. That’s perfectly acceptable, so I know the deck is at least worthy of running through the rest of the gauntlet in its present form.
How’d my test cards do?
Gemstone Mine was just too unreliable. This deck really does use too much mana each turn to avoid tapping it, and as soon as it runs out, you’re pissed. It only took ten games to convince me that the pair of Gemstone Mines should be replaced with a Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forges[/author].
Terramorphic Expanse was fine. There was one game where I wished I could have had a land that came into play untapped, but I won that game despite the mana hiccup. Assuming it’s actually worthwhile against Blood Moon, it can probably stay.
Urborg didn’t do anything special. I tapped it for Black mana several times, but never found the need to tap a Boros Garrison, Terramorphic Expanse, or anything else for B. It could just as well have been a basic Swamp. Still, it didn’t hurt anything, so I’ll leave it in as we continue through the gauntlet.
I had the decks boarding as follows. (Always play sideboarded games against your gauntlet decks!)
Walking Anthems:
-1 Terramorphic Expanse, -2 Necrotic Sliver, -4 Lightning Helix
+1 Hit / Run, +2 Luminesce, +4 Rise / Fall
Dragonstorm:
+3 Pyroclasm, +3 Repeal
-4 Gigadrowse, -2 Hunted Dragon
I had a sneaking suspicion that I could get away with cutting a land from the maindeck to go down to 22 mana sources, but I wasn’t sure which land to cut, nor which sideboard card to put into the extra slot. As such, I decided to board out one land (here, I chose one of the Expanses) in all my post-board games when I knew exactly which cards I wanted to bring in.
I went 5-5 after boards. I think I could do better.
Luminesce was good half the time, and only delayed the inevitable the rest of the time. I realized Cedric was originally advocating it in a burn-happy Red deck, where delaying for a turn or two will give you time to burn the opponent out, but this deck doesn’t have that kind of firepower. Whenever I had a Worship or Hit / Run to combo with the Luminesce, it did well, but the rest of the time I just lost to fatty Bogardan Hellkites a turn later instead of right away.
By the way – in this first round of testing, I’m mainly searching for glaring flaws in the deck. I’m going to play more than ten games pre-board and post-board eventually, but for now I’m looking for things like “do I just scoop to Dralnu?” to find out if I need to make any drastic changes to the deck, or if I should consider abandoning it entirely.
Because of this, it’s really, really important to remember how much variance is inherent to the ten-game set. A 6-4 is one mulligan away from a 7-3 or a 5-5, so don’t ever think that such a record clearly indicates a 60% win rate. It’s more like a 45-75% win rate; that’s a big range, but you can at least know that you’re probably not an underdog. You can get things a bit more precise by remembering what happened during the games — yeah, it was a 6-4, but didn’t the other guy mulligan to four in three of those games? — but you need to play many more games, and with many different configurations of the opponent’s deck (how much worse is Dragonstorm post-board when they have Word of Seizing for your Worship?) more before you can truly know a matchup.
With Dragonstorm looking positive – I think I can swing a favorable matchup once I revisit my sideboard — our run through the gauntlet is “so far, so good.” On to the next matchup!
Ah, but which do I test next?
Izzetron is next in the popularity rankings at 15%, but I’m more interested in Gruul at the moment. See, the whole reason I’m playing Terramorphic Expanse in the maindeck is that I think it will be good against Blood Moon, a card which can stop me from casting any spell in my deck — save for some Sulfur Elementals and weak 2/2 Sedge Slivers. If the Expanse can’t save me from Blood Moon, I should probably either cut it and accept my fate or figure out what additional adjustments I’ll need to make to the maindeck to beat it, before I get too far into testing other matchups.
Gruul it is, then. I used Katsuhiro Ide’s list from the Top 8 of GP: Kyoto.
Ten games later, I’m 5-5 against Kird Ape and Friends. Game 1 goes like this: if they have a really fast curve-out, I’m just too slow to keep up. I don’t play one-drops — how can I possibly beat turn 1 Ape, turn 2 Scab-Clan, turn 3 Seal your blocker and play another Scab-Clan or Tin Street Hooligan? I’ll pretty much lose all the games where the opponent curves out like this unless I have Worship and they don’t come up with enough burn to clear my board before I find a Sedge Sliver. If they don’t have a fast curve-out, however, I can just trade until I find a Sedge Sliver and / or Worship, and lock up the game from there.
I had the two decks boarding as follows.
Walking Anthems:
+4 Deathmark, +1 Sulfur Elemental, +1 Hit / Run
-4 Dark Confidant, -1 Castigate, -1 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
Gruul:
+4 Blood Moon, +2 Krosan Grip, +2 Moldervine Cloak, +1 Call of the Herd
-4 Scab-Clan Mauler, -2 Stonewood Invocation, -2 Scorched Rusalka, -1 Tin Street Hooligan
I ended up 7-3 after boards. After 20 games, Urborg still has yet to be any better than a basic Swamp, so I’m pretty sure that’s the land I want to cut to go down to 22 mana sources in the main. Even when I draw two Terramorphic Expanses in the post-board Gruul matchup — where quick board development is the name of the game – the Blood Moon resistance easily compensates for the slowness.
Anyway, Walking Anthems passed its Blood Moon test with flying colors. Every time a Moon was in play, it hardly disrupted me at all. The only time it ever won games were the two times when the game came down to me having nothing on the table but Sedge Sliver and Worship, plus some lands that included one Urborg and one Swamp for Black sources. This allowed the Gruul player to Char the Sliver on end step and burn it again (with Char in one case and Rift Bolt in the other) after the untap, at which point I was left defenseless and died to a lethal attack. Had the Urborg been anything else — like, say, a Basic Swamp or the 4th Sulfur Elemental (which is currently the most eligible candidate for the bonus maindeck spell) — I would have won both of those games and had a freaking 9-1 post-board record against Gruul.
So was this successful Blood Moon resistance due to blind luck or a hearty manabase? Looking at the numbers, I may have gotten a bit lucky to have “beaten” it every time (assuming I’ve made the Urborg cut) – but odds are still solid overall that I’ll overcome a Blood Moon. I have one Plains, four Terramorphic Expanses, and two Swamps — a total of seven “basics,” and most of my spells can be cast off Red mana plus either Black or White mana. Also, it’s worth mentioning that there were two games when an early Blood Moon would have been game against me…but I Castigated it before it could come down. (That’s the main reason I left three of those in.)
Next up was clearly Izzetron at 15% popularity over Dralnu at 10%. I tested against Yuuya Watanabe’s winning list from GP: Kyoto.
In the maindeck, I went 1-4 on the play and 4-1 on the draw, to end up 5-5. Weird. Hit / Run was really terrible here. It seems like a good idea to kill a Signet and make them take two, but it really just puts you further behind on the ground war (i.e. the relevant part of the match) when you make that play instead of summoning another creature.
I had us boarding as follows.
Walking Anthems:
+4 Rise / Fall, +2 Luminesce, +1 Sulfur Elemental
-3 Worship, -3 Hit / Run, -1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Izzetron:
+2 Serrated Arrows
-1 Spell Burst, -1 Demonfire
Honestly, I’m not sure how I should have been boarding for Tron. I was pretty sure I should have been taking out some combination of Demonfire and Spell Burst, but with only ten games of experience, I wasn’t sure if taking out both of one and zero of the other was correct. I went with one and one, mainly so I could get used to playing against both cards, while still seeing how good Serrated Arrows was against me. (It was very good.)
I ended up 4-6 post-board.
Luminesce was lackluster. Dealing with the Hellkite’s damage wasn’t really enough when the 5/5 flyer stuck around afterwards, and I never caught a Demonfire or an Electrolyze with it. Rise / Fall was also unexciting… but more on that later.
Last up was Dralnu, where I pulled out a 6-4 matchup against the stock list from Frank’s article. That matchup, much like Gruul, seems about even despite the fact that I was technically up a game in the set.
Sulfur Elemental is awesome except when they have two Deserts or a Teferi that I can’t kill post-combat. (Teferi will be a two-for-one every time unless Necrotic Sliver is on the table, but I’m usually excited to take that trade, as an unanswered Teferi is much more dangerous than eating a two-for-one.) Worship is pretty much useless in this matchup, but Castigate is awesome. Hit is great unless they play Skeletal Vampire when you’re tapped out. If they play it when you’re not tapped out, though – unless they have Teferi in play or a counter in hand – Hit in response to the Bat creation ability tends to be a game-ending beating.
I had us sideboarding like this.
Walking Anthems:
+4 Rise / Fall, +2 Demonfire, +1 Sulfur Elemental, +1 Hit / Run
-4 Lightning Helix, -3 Worship, -1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Dralnu:
+4 Bottle Gnomes, +1 Damnation, +1 Repeal
-1 Draining Whelk (Hit / Run much?), -2 Persecute, -1 Extirpate, -2 Spell Burst
Bottle Gnomes, while chump blockers much of the time, do hold off Confidant and the 2/2 Slivers, forcing overextension into Damnation. As WA’s threats tend to be expensive, Spell Burst isn’t much use except as a long-game card, so I went down to one (tutorable) copy. Persecute seems less important to keep in than the anti-aggro cards, but I could be wrong there; that was the slot I debated over most.
The final post-board tally was 6-4.
The inclusion of Demonfire in Walking Anthems was kind of a mixed bag. It definitely let me pull out one victory out of left field, but I was lacking in mana or Hellbent to successfully close with it in two other games.
All in all, here’s how the deck did.
Maindeck records:
Dragonstorm 6-4
Dralnu 6-4
Gruul 5-5
Izzetron 5-5
Post-Board records:
Dragonstorm 5-5
Dralnu 6-4
Gruul 7-3
Izzetron 4-6
I actually think the main reason I did the best against Gruul post-board is that they brought in Blood Moons that never actually wrecked me. A lot of the time drawing them was just a mulligan, and sometimes Gruul drew two and it was a double-mulligan. Plus what happens when they draw Krosan Grip and I don’t have a Worship — or more embarrassingly, when I have two Worships? More mulligans! Pair that with the fact that I got to bring out my Confidants (essentially mulligans for me in game 1) for relevant Deathmarks, and the matchup swings a good deal in my favor. It’ll probably be less awesome for me when the Gruul players read this and stop bringing in the Moons against me, but such is life.
These numbers, while strong for the deck’s first gauntlet run-through, leave something to desired. I’m in Rock territory right now, pulling 50-60% against most everyone, and I need to win a lot more than that to make Top 8 at a six-to-eight-round tournament. I’d love to main the last Sulfur Elemental instead of Urborg — the situation of having to refrain from playing a second Elemental so as not to kill my own white two-toughness guys never came close to coming up — but beyond that I think the rest of the changes I’ll want to make will be in the sideboard.
In completely unrelated news, Blood Moon tends to be pretty weak against me.
Anyway, what card can I board to improve my Dralnu and Izzetron matchups?
Like, I tend to be just fine if the card Blood Moon is in play.
But seriously, what can I do to get some more post-board game against Dralnu and Izzetron?
Huh.
There’s a crazy thought… what if I just boarded Blood Moon against Dralnu and Izzetron myself? Sure it’s greedy, but what if it works? Guess I’ll never know unless I try it!
That leaves me with the following, more refined decklist.
Creatures (24)
Lands (22)
Spells (14)
Sideboard
I’m pretty sure I don’t want four Blood Moons, because it will take me a few draw steps to find a Terramorphic Expanse or a Swamp or Plains against Izzetron and Dralnu, so I don’t want to risk clogging my hand early with Moons that will mess me up as badly (or worse) as they will my opponent if I actually play them. Temporal Isolation is much better than Luminesce against a single Bogardan Hellkite, as it stops both the damage and the body — and neither card is likely to stop a full-on Dragonstorm from beating me, so I might as well do a better job beating the single Hellkites from Dragonstorm and Izzetron instead. The Tormod’s Crypts are literally in there because I haven’t decided how best to use my last two sideboard slots yet.
Here are my current boarding strategies:
Dragonstorm:
+4 Rise / Fall
+3 Temporal Isolation
-4 Lightning Helix
-2 Necrotic Sliver
-1 Dark Confidant
I agonized over the last cut here, and decided on a Bob because he’s one of the only creatures I’m afraid of playing out in multiples due to Pyroclasm. A pair of Sinew Slivers protect each other, as do a pair of Cauteries when I have a mana up. Sulfur Elemental comes in on the end step, making him at least hit for an extra three before dying to Pyro (if they have it). Sedge just survives on his own, and I already trimmed my Necrotic count, so that leaves Bob as the main guy I’m not interested in drawing in multiples in this matchup.
Gruul:
+3 Temporal Isolation
+3 Sunlance
-4 Dark Confidant
-1 Castigate
-1 Necrotic Sliver
I initially wanted the maximum number of post-board Necrotics because they provided an out to Blood Moon, but as I’ve learned, that’s not as important as I thought it was. I definitely liked having a couple of Castigates around. They put me further back on tempo and life when I play them instead of a board-affecting spell, but they also take early Blood Moons (the only dangerous kind, really) and swipe Giant Solifuges, which makes up for the loss of tempo; that guy pretty much always puts you on your heels if he resolves. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Castigate RFGs Call of the Herd, which is probably Gruul’s best weapon against you. The second-best is Kird Ape, who always gets in for a grip of damage before you can play Cautery Sliver with a mana open or Sedge Sliver with a mana open (to guard against Rift Bolt) to block and trade. Temporal Isolation deals with him nicely, and Sunlance does an even better job. I considered playing Deathmark over Sunlance because it’s better against Scryb & Force’s 8/8s, but Sunlance is so much better against Gruul because of Kird Ape (and Gruul is so much more popular than Scryb & Force), that I decided to keep the Laces and ditch the Marks.
Izzetron:
+3 Blood Moon
+3 Temporal Isolation
-3 Worship
-3 Hit / Run
I definitely want Blood Moon and Temporal Isolation, but Rise / Fall was unexciting against Tron in the post-board games I tested. With its many cantrips, Compulsive Researches, and Tidings, Izzetron draws a ton of cards… and a lot of them are lands. A random two-for-one isn’t nearly as potent here as it is against, say, Dragonstorm or Dralnu, because I will frequently hit lands (which they keep), Signets (which they are hardly devastated to lose), or Repeals (whose board-stalling job was done for them because I played Fall instead of a board-affecting spell). It’s worth mentioning that Hit / Run might make the cut again if Blood Moon is so successful that blowing up their Signets becomes desirable again.
Dralnu:
+4 Rise / Fall
+3 Blood Moon
-4 Lightning Helix
-3 Worship
Again, I definitely want Blood Moon. While Lightning Helix kills Sulfur Elementals from Izzetron, it doesn’t do much here. Rise / Fall is quite good against Dralnu, since a long-game strategy is critical for a control deck. If they’re planning their next three turns around being able to cast Damnation, then Teferi, then Skeletal Vampire, and I knock one or two of those out with Fall, the plan falls to shambles and the random beaters I’m using to work on his life total become a much bigger threat.
So far I’ve played this deck in one eight-man Constructed Queue on MTGO. The matches went like this:
Beat Izzetron 2-1.
Beat Dragonstorm 2-0.
Beat Dralnu w/ Pickles Combo 2-1.
That’s right, folks: this deck has actually never lost a match so far in all the online tournaments I’ve played. (We’ll see if that holds up in the next couple of weeks. Heh.)
In any case, I think I might be on to something here.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]