Lately I’ve been trying any number of decks to get out of the rut of a terrible play testing cycle. The problem with most of my block testing so far is nothing really feels powerful or overly synergistic. Decks that pack the most power like Wild Pair and slower tri-color good stuff decks suffer from the lack of cheap draw outside of Harmonize and mana problems. Then to top it off they have to try and stall out Red Aggro and WW.
Decks like U/B Teferi and U/G Shifter are going for compromises between power and not having to fun a whole lot of filler in the deck. It works well to a degree, because you end up with strong decks that aren’t tripping all over themselves getting the mana to work. Of course this means they usually give up one aspect of the deck completely. For example, U/B Teferi has nearly no effective ways to regain card advantage. It has to make the best of the top of the deck, and whatever it can fetch with Mystical Teachings.
Meanwhile, the aggro decks are a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. They don’t suffer mana problems and usually only run as much filler as the average two-color deck if you’ve designed the deck and sideboard to cover the field. Instead WW and Red Aggro’s main problem stems from specific cards in the environment.
A rough look at it goes something like this: Play WW, beat the opponents deck most of the time, but then get busy losing to individual cards like Magus of the Tabernacle, giant flying dragons, and Damnation backed by Enslave and Tendrils of Corruption. Alternatively with Blink Riders the results looked like this: A deck without aggressive one- or two-drops? Win. WW or Red Deck? Ouch. Decks like U/B and U/R/b control had some success, but we’re found to be dependent on drawing Damnation + a secondary creature killer to really stop aggro. And of course, they have the downside of being 50/50 against other controlling decks (Although Riptide Pilferer skews those results a bit.).
My initial observations after doing some testing with some of the various decks posted and floating around on MTGO are as follows.
1. Green and Blue have the greatest number of powerful effects and threats in the environment. These two are followed up (in an arguably rough order) by Red, White, and Black.
2. Tendrils of Corruption and Wall of Roots are basically the best defense you can have against aggro decks.
3. Card-drawing ends up being mostly unplayable, because it costs billions of mana in this format. Harmonize is a great investment. Fathom Seer could be reasonable in the right type of deck, but due to the increased cost of control strategies, it’s unlikely to see much play. Think Twice is close to terrible. Careful Consideration is only reasonable if you play Body Double, and even that’s a stretch for many decks.
4. Quick creature decks are doing great, because many decks aren’t willing to devote the slots necessary to deal with them. Those that do put in the cards will at least split the match-up or better.
5. Mana denial is not only a valid strategy, but makes a mockery out of nearly every single deck. Only swarm aggro isn’t really affected by multiple LD spells and in this format it’s incredibly easy to just knock out a splash color.
I know, not earth-shattering stuff to many of you, but I find that people like to be reaffirmed of basic beliefs time to time. When I first started looking at a format, I just made sure to note the patterns that every deck fell into. Now that I’ve got a better grasp on things, I can conclude it’s rather simplistic compared to the eclectic nature of the current Standard and Extended format.
However, many people don’t actually take the time to do this. Instead they like to pretend they have a clue before they’ve sat down and really played a few matches with deck they believe will work in the format. Or they’ll purely read posts, articles, and results online and then combine this with a couple of hypothesizes they’ve already conjured up. Many of these then become self-fulfilling prophecies.
When you expect a certain result and aren’t willing to invest a significant amount of time into the pursuit of finding the proper result, usually people end up getting wonderfully false theories about how things are supposed to work. Richard Feldman recent articles on his adventures with Tenacious Tron and the results of having a false theory paint a very nice picture of what I’m referring too. Richard (and many other Tron players I’m sure) went in with obvious assumptions, all of which were correct on some level, but then failed to fully consider how they held up within the specific context of how badly they damaged TT.
Here’s how a disconnect normally occurs:
Ancient Grudge is good against artifacts, amirite? OBV
Destructive Flow ruins decks with mostly non-basics! OBV OBV
U/W Tron runs falls under both categories and hence is ruined by said cards!
*Insert screeching brake sounds for the few who stopped and asked why*
Everyone else who hadn’t stopped to consider why probably had one of two reactions.
1. They gave up on the deck without a second thought.
2. They simply looked for sideboard cards to deal with the said problems.
The third option, which is typically overlooked, is asking yourself if it’s possible to modify the deck’s structure to avoid such pitfalls in the first place. Or ask if the strategy can be effectively molded to keep most of its effectiveness, but severely diminish the opponents’ effects against it.
This is actually a common stumbling block when evaluating formats / metagames and attempting to build sideboards for them. I remember Regionals in 05 where Mono-Red decks basically hit their peak in popularity before crashing back to earth (and then Boros cards got printed…). I played against multiple Blue control decks whose plans were simply using Sun Droplet and then countering the Red decks’ few relevant repeatable damage sources like Arc-Slogger. Eventually the Blue deck was going to stabilize at a life-total where it’d take at least two burn spells to kill him and then lay a huge threat like Meloku the Clouded Mirror or Triskelion into play, and that’d be the end.
The logic behind this was simple: many Red decks had switched to a type of maindeck which promoted single shot burn spells with the possibility of them coming back for more. So if you could shut down the effectiveness and eventually begin reversing the damage done to you while stopping the few sources that could bypass Sun Droplet, you would eventually win. Now to me, this was all well and good. The problem came when some people thought this would automatically stop every Red deck.
Once again, logic check.
Sun Droplet is good against Red decks and especially burn. Check.
If you stall out a Red deck, you’ll more than likely win any sort of late-game struggle. Check
I should be able to beat all Red decks via Sun Droplet, counters, and winning the late-game.
People took two conclusions they had backed up by logic and testing and then made a leap into a completely wrong theory they then passed off as a fact or an assumed truth. Although less popular, the smaller Red decks still running little red men could consistently produce a board that could overload the Sun Droplet over a extended period of time. Some realized this and had accepted it as a natural loss, while others seemed to be caught off-guard when suddenly their life-gain plan was effectively invalidated by the Red men’s simple strategy of beating on the ground.
Looking into a format, there are always certain patterns and machinations that define the format. You can tell many of these by playing decks with a valid base strategy and analyzing how matches between seemingly high tier decks play out. The other way to figure out a format on some level is to dig through the card pool itself.
What are the most prominent threats in the environment?
Why do certain decks keep popping up when they run the same strategy? Is one simply superior to the other and people are ignoring that fact, or is there a valid reason for both of them to exist?
How strong are the answers when compared to the threats?
Etc.
In Time Spiral Block, the format isn’t all that complicated, but there are a couple of basic guidelines every competitive deck generally follows. One is that practically every deck relies on a significant amount of creatures to play defense and eventually win the game. Only in a select few decks like B/R control will a deck be running fewer than sixteen creatures. This means creature removal in practically any form is just going to be good enough across the board to see maindeck usage. Again, this is just an obvious truth, right?
The key is that people then take the information, add this into their deck design, and then go, “Okay, format is full of creatures… I’ll run a couple of powerful anti-aggro cards, and Good Game.” Many times the subtleties are just trivial pieces of information, things that many of us completely blow by assuming our main assumption covers all of the bases. Take my Blink Riders deck for example.
Creatures (20)
- 4 Avalanche Riders
- 2 Bogardan Hellkite
- 3 Akroma, Angel of Fury
- 4 Calciderm
- 4 Magus of the Tabernacle
- 3 Stingscourger
Lands (25)
Spells (15)
I made this deck originally, like many others did. I ran stuff like Sulfurous Blast and Desolation Giant in the maindeck, figuring some weak Wrath effects backed by a burn spell or two would beat aggro that was fast enough not to be affected by LD. Then I actually started testing the matches against a WW build that wasn’t half Sliver or running more than 3-4 superfluous cards, and I realized the logic I had been using was terrible.
The big problem was Sulfurous Blast sucks as a Wrath variant when half the White creatures live through it without needing a trick, Red decks don’t care unless you’re using it to kill Jaya, and Green decks just mock you. This then lead me to try how many anti-aggro cards I’d actually need to put the match-up in the “Good” category. Once I did that fun little experiment, I realized there was no way to properly alter the maindeck to give the deck a consistent win against WW and Red Aggro without compromising my initial strategy.
Now the difference here is, I didn’t want to alter my initial strategy and remove LD. The deck performs amazingly well against slower decks, even ones features Wall of Roots and Mwonvuli Acid-Moss. You can stall them for a number of turns and force them to recast huge threats like Spectral Force multiple times and of course the real Wrath of God in the deck via Magus and Boom / Bust.
So following another bout of testing, I promptly switched my board around and got match-win increases across the board. The point though, is not that I managed to compromise my problem. The main point is that I went into with a false theory based on what I had thought of the format, what I had heard / seen from people on MTGO and read on various sites. This is just an example; you can easily come up with one for practically any Constructed format.
The only big observation I’ve made about the format thus far is that simplicity is usually for the best. Nearly every deck that tries to get too cute or complicated for its own good ends up failing due to consistency, mana issues, or just not being able to stand up to the simple beatdown decks. That’s part of my problem with Wild Pair at the moment. It’s clearly the most powerful effect in the format, but good luck getting it to consistently win as much as a simple red or green aggro deck. Pair needs to be streamlined as possible while still maintaining a slight sense of utility, ability to win quickly* and win without Pair if need be.
* Should be the first or second untap after Pair resolves, depending on what turn that is. Remember Whitemane Lion + Might and Reflex Sliver kills for 6-8 mana, Timbermare + Hellkite deals ten in a single shot, and Spectral Force into Spectral Force is going to kill anyone who doesn’t run Damnation.
Blink Riders falls under the same category as far as I’m concerned, that’s why I cut back on the blue so much. By running all of these cute cards like Vesuvan Shapeshifter and Think Twice, I was losing valuable room to fight simple aggro, and at the same time exposing my manabase to additional problems. Sometimes you need to just bring down the power level if your going to lose more matches over the long haul to your own inconsistencies.
That’s all for today. Next week I’ll be going over a mock tournament and the results from it. Ja Ne.
Josh Silvestri
Team Reflection
E-mail me at: joshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom
Bonus Section
Some of you may wonder if I actually had any answers for the questions I started posing earlier. Here’s what my scribbled notes from Biology say about them:
What are the ten of the most powerful creature threats in the environment?
Wall of Roots (Technically not a threat, but pretty much the defining card in the format)
Vesuvan Shapeshifter
Spectral Force
Bogardan Hellkite
Soltari Priest
Jaya Ballard, Task Mage
Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
Avalanche Riders
Akroma, Angel of Fury
Calciderm
Honorable mention: All of the Legend Dragons except Oros.
How strong are the answers when compared to the threats?
It really depends. In one sense, cards like Damnation and Tendrils of Corruption match up mostly well with all the swarm decks in the format. In another sense, there’s precious few ways to stop men like Calciderm, Spectral Force, or Akroma, short of Damnation or throwing another huge creature in the way. Sure, you can bounce or Pongify Spectral Force, but the point is that every time you see one, you must deal with it in the next turn or two or you die. Stonewood Invocation only makes this reality all the harsher, since it can sneak in thirteen damage through in one attack.
What are the best strategies at the moment?
Straight swarm beatdown is solid at the moment. Griffin Guide on a Soltari Priest or Knight of the Holy Nimbus puts the opponent in a terrible spot on turn 3. Jaya is insane in the format, and although many of the creatures suck, it’s not hard to force through enough damage where you only need to deal 4-5 via burn to end the game. Like I said earlier though, if people start to adapt, I worry about the decks ability to compete against stuff like B/R, White Control, or specialized mid-range fat decks.
U/G or UG/R good stuff decks are really solid, since they combine a many of the important threats in the format with the best mana accelerator in the format. In addition they have some late-game pull thanks to Mystic Snake, Voidmage Prodigy and Willbender; or they can just go the Intet, the Dreamer / Disintegrate route. When the mana holds up, it’s one of the most powerful decks out there that can also switch gears into an entirely different attack plan via Acid-Moss and Boom / Bust after sideboard.
Mana denial such as Blink Riders or some sort of R/G/x Ponza deck are extremely powerful, but this deck archetype probably has the biggest problems with swarm aggro. There are solutions, but you have to work on maximizing many of your slots to keep the edge against mid-range and control decks.
Normal control is valid entirely on the back of the two big Blue threats mentioned earlier, Damnation and Mystical Teachings. Decks like U/B usually need both of the latter to actually beat aggro decks on a consistent basis, because otherwise they have no way to gain CA and Teferi isn’t exactly Mr. Durability here. That said, some form of Damnation deck – be it a normal Teferi build or something closer to the Almost Mono Black control deck Sean posted last week – will definitely exist.