After last week’s apparent braggery about not having to pay tickets to play Magic Online events, due to equal parts “acceptable play skill” and “keen eye for simple economics,” the irony comes less than one week later as I poured $50 into the system to acquire a deck to play. With my seemingly dismal failure to understand Two-Headed Giant Limited sufficiently well to actually succeed at the format, and the end to an enjoyable (as a deckbuilder) but frustrating (as a player) Extended season, I’d decided to skip the usual beat and try dancing to the tune of a slightly different drummer, this one in particular being Rich Hagon of “Mox Radio” fame. Block Constructed is the muse to be chased, then, both for my own use (in any future articles) and to help a friend from the playtesting Yahoogroup I started months ago to prepare for the upcoming Pro Tour in Yokohama.
Besides, it was an easy $50 to spend… I’ve been following up on my article from last week with a bout of eBay auctions, and turned $50 from real cards I never use into a complete deck full of stuff I should probably own by now anyway (like Shapeshifters, Spectral Forces, and Teferis). At $4 a Teferi and $2 a Spectral Force, before you even count the better than 15% discount I was able to get from the dealer I’d spoken to thanks to buying in bulk from a standing PayPal balance with a verified account, it was a surprisingly good deal… if you don’t mind paying money I could have actually spent for a string of ones and zeroes. That said, I was looking at the presumed first pass of Block Constructed decks (“White Weenie is good; Teferi decks with either Black or Red for board sweepers are good”) when I realized about five seconds into it all that Wall of Roots is clearly one of the top five cards in the format. It’s not so hard for me to believe… after all I played Wall of Roots as a four-of at Grand Prix Philadelphia… in Legacy, in a beatdown deck. It didn’t hurt that my very brief scouring of the Internet let loose a trickle of information suggesting that Pat “The Innovator” Chapin was having very similar thoughts.
Ten minutes into the format-analysis exercise, I’d reached my first-pass decklist and considered myself content to start with. I was playing a long list of “top” cards and had on my hands quite a ridiculous draft deck, which is basically what most Block Constructed formats end up looking like in one capacity or another. There are a few key underpinnings to this format that can’t be neglected, and they sum up very neatly into a few short descriptive sentences about the format:
1. Beatdown decks can’t be ignored, because the controlling cards are present but generally lacking in backup. Wrath of God exists in the format, and two strong Pyroclasm effects before you even go over to weird cards like Desolation Giant or Hail Storm… but countermagic is weak and expensive.
2. “Combo” decks don’t really exist in this format, with the nearest functional “combo” being Wild Pair plus creatures.
3. Control decks love Teferi. A lot. He is clearly the #1 creature underpinning the current Block Constructed format, so being able to kill him, play him, or ignore him is very important. Better yet, being able to do more than one of those things may see success in your future.
4. Colored mana is very hard to fix, with Terramorphic Expanse and Prismatic Lens being the top two colored mana fixers available to a two-color deck. Mana advantage, either by acceleration or land destruction, can be potentially quite deadly.
In a land without Counterspells, it becomes more and more important to find some other means to control the spells that are coming your way. Teferi is a top creature, but probably the #1 creature overall is Vesuvan Shapeshifter; it’s cheap, ridiculous, and on top of everything else even kills Teferi. This little guy at worst trades with pretty much any creature in the format, and does so at a minimal cost. That said, my first pass at Block Constructed was an experiment with the following:
Creatures (24)
- 4 Willbender
- 4 Mystic Snake
- 4 Wall of Roots
- 4 Spectral Force
- 4 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
- 4 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
Lands (25)
Spells (11)
Sideboard
Much like “Snakes on a Desert”, this is a Wall of Roots-powered control deck; every ideal play in the deck is based around playing Wall of Roots on turn 2 and usually involves a turn 3 Morph with the ability to flip for 1U on the opponent’s turn. Mana advantage is key, but clever interactions are pretty good too, and this one has more than most Shapeshifter decks that I’ve seen… instead of working towards a long game in which Brine Elemental leaves the opponent under a perpetual lock, it just wants to beat down with Spectral Force and his copied buddy Vesuvan Shapeshifter. Momentary Blink works with Mystic Snake as additional countermagic, and turns a “trade” with the Shapeshifter into “I keep my Shapeshifter, you get nothing” unless we’re talking Legendary critters like Teferi… or just untaps a Spectral Force in a pinch, because beating down is fun to do.
The point of the exercise was to see how well a mid-range Green/Blue deck that wasn’t following the “Scryb and Force” plan would do, as it plays many of the best hits in the block and has a solid controlling plan thanks to Willbender backing up Mystic Snake… and two distinct nods to the fact that Teferi is considered to be the most critical creature in the format, in Wipe Away and Vesuvan Shapeshifter. Three nods, if you count “4x Teferi” as additional methods for removing Teferi from play. Testing has been interesting so far, but limiting myself to the Tournament Practice Room has mostly seen me playing against Mono Green Aggro decks (with a largely winning record, though I haven’t won them all) and various Avalanche Riders decks, the latter of which hammered home the fact that mana control may very well have a reasonable role to play in the format as we don’t have the tools we’re used to now in Standard. No dual lands or Signets, and definitely no Urzatron. The point was to break Wall of Roots, and to steal someone else’s line, Wall of Roots on turn 2 enables so many insane plays. (It’s funnier still when you realize that Stephen Menendian is the Vintage team-mate of Elias Vaisburg, for whom I am helping test Block Constructed decks for the Pro Tour.)
Turn 2 Wall of Roots into turn 3 Harmonize? It’s nice.
Turn 2 Wall of Roots into turn 3 Mystic Snake? Yeah, countermagic in this format is very expensive, thank you for noticing.
Turn 2 Wall of Roots into turn 3 Willbender, turn 3 Willbender your Griffin Guide onto my Willbender instead of your Soltari Priest? It’s nice.
Turn 2 Wall of Roots into turn 3 Vesuvan Shapeshifter, copying whatever I want? Also… nice.
Each of these is followed up by the possibility of either Spectral Force or Teferi on turn 4, and Shapeshifter / Willbender combine to lock down all the targeted removal spells, including the normally uncounterable ones like Sudden Death. In a world where Counterspell costs three and is probably a good strategy for losing the game, Willbender doesn’t sound anywhere near as janky as he does for Standard. But rather than just spout theories and hypothesize just quite yet, I wanted to take a step away from my usual dry (over-) analysis of the key components of Format X and run through a match run-through with this new weapon of choice… for a mere four tickets, which really is just some liquidated Draft commons to me, entry was obtained into a Wednesday-night 4-3-1-1 Block Constructed queue to run through a trial by fire. (It would have been Tuesday night, but Law and Order wins in a fight… sorry.)
Round 1 I got to play a matchup I would very soon come to know quite well, against the Block Constructed Mono-Red deck. Mono-Red has ruled Blocks before, but it’s done so in formats where it’s had cards like Fireblast or Arc-Slogger to rule the roost… but the burn in this format is pretty solid, and the men are not to be completely hated. I keep an opener of 2 Forests, 2 Harmonize, Wall of Roots, Willbender, and Vesuvan Shapeshifter… leading off with a Forest, to which my opponent plays ‘just’ Mountain, go. I draw Spectral Force and drop Forest plus Wall of Roots, and the opponent casts Blood Knight after laying his second Mountain. Thinking any land this turn would be nice, I of course draw a second Willbender, then use my Wall to drop Vesuvan Shapeshifter. I let two damage through rather than have my Wall killed, and he plays a Mountain and makes no play. I draw an Island, finally, then drop it and attack only to see Sulfur Elemental hit play… but he doesn’t block. I cast Harmonize, drawing up a second Island, Teferi, and a Wipe Away.
Here’s where things start to get bad, because my opponent drops another Mountain and casts Lavacore Elemental, swinging with both Sulfur Elemental and Blood Knight. My 0/3 Wall blocks the Knight and eats Brute Force, and from there the wheels fall off… I can’t draw Land and am short on mana, letting that Lavacore Elemental beat me despite my Shapeshifter copying Blood Knight to pick off Sulfur Elemental then eating the Knight himself the next turn. While I’m trying to catch up, that Lavacore Elemental is taking out five-point bites of my life, and I can’t find the fifth mana for Spectral Force… meaning I’ve learned a lesson, that blocking two points with the Wall of Roots wasn’t worth not being able to play Spectral Force the next turn, or as one could instead say, “I was an idiot”.
I sideboard out the Momentary Blinks and a Teferi for the four Magus of the Library, to maybe speed my draws up enough to fight, and I start off with two Forests, the now-useless Plains, Shapeshifter, Magus, and two Harmonizes. I lead with Forest, he Mountain; I follow with Magus of the Library, he follows through with Blood Knight again. I draw an Island and proceed to Harmonize some, drawing Shapeshifter, Willbender and Harmonize, while he Rift Bolts my Magus and attacks for two… apparently even Red decks have to care about the card count sometimes. I draw Wall of Roots and play it off the Plains, continuing by using the Wall and dropping a face-down Willbender; things are looking solid because my life total is high and the cards are plenty. Rift Bolt kills the Willbender and the Knight attacks, which I block and the Wall goes down to Brute Force… I’m running him out of cards just to keep my life up, and I won’t mind seeing Brute Force disappear when I try to kill him with Spectral Force.
The game goes long and more creatures trade, and I’m up plenty of cards thanks to the multiple Harmonizes I’ve drawn. The end-game comes when he plays Jaya and I respond with a morph, and he just lays his sixth land instead of using her ability, fearing the Willbender. Being at eight, that’s pretty bad for me, but cleverly I’ve since drawn a Mystic Snake and I’m able to Wipe Away Jaya, then Mystic Snake her on the following turn, keeping a Shapeshifter hidden (and letting him continue to believe it’s Willbender, at that.) I draw Spectral Force, and suddenly there’s two of them.
For game 3, he leads with a Mountain to my hand of three Forests, Wall of Roots, Harmonize, Shapeshifter and Mystic Snake. I play a Forest and have drawn the Magus, and he has no second land so I just drop the Magus, who is Dead at end of turn. He still misses his second land but plays Magus of the Scroll, while I draw an Island and play Wall of Roots. He draws his second Mountain and plays Blood Knight, I draw a second Island, play it and pass the turn. He attacks with both and I block the Knight, taking one; he plays a third land to follow, finally drawing into something that will make his deck actively work. I draw a Gemstone Mine but play Forest and Magus of the Library, and he end-of-turn Split Second out Sulfur Elemental, making his turn 3 “go” less suspicious. An attack with all three sees the Wall block Sulfur Elemental and Magus of the Library battle Magus of the Scroll to death. He follows up with Blood Knight but I play Mystic Snake, and he suspends Rift Bolt.
I play the Gemstone Mine and a face-down Shapeshifter, attacking with Mystic Snake. Rift Bolt kills the Mystic Snake, since it’s effectively hosed by either Morph, and the Snake dies because it’s not worth fighting over. During his attack, the Wall blocks the Knight and the Shapeshifter blocks the Sulfur Elemental… and since he doesn’t Brute Force the Knight, I’m able to stack damage on my Morph and flip into an 0/5 Wall to survive the fight. The morph turns face down and attacks on my turn, and I play a second, this one Willbender. Again at end of turn he has Sulfur Elemental. He attacks the same as he did last turn, so I block the same way, representing a second Shapeshifter; he uses Brute Force on his Sulfur Elemental, to which I reveal that the Morph was actually Willbender, and redirect the Giant Growth to my Wall in order to kill the Knight. He spends a second Brute Force to save his Knight, which seems like a fine use of a Willbender… two cards, after all, is two cards. This gives me enough breathing room to Harmonize on my turn, since again the Shapeshifter is ready, willing and able to eat an Elemental and turn into a Wall… but I draw a second Wall plus Teferi and Spectral Force, playing Terramorphic Expanse and the wall, and attacking for two. His Sudden Shock actually kills my Morph because I am lacking a Blue up, sad story. He doesn’t waste his time attacking into two Walls with no cards in hand, leaving me breathing room again.
With this breathing room I suck my Walls dry, dropping Spectral Force and a face-down Shapeshifter with him on sixteen and the ability to unmorph via the one remaining Wall on his turn. He drops a Suq’Ata Lancer and passes, so I attack with the Morph and the Force… he blocks the Morph with all three of his creatures, seven power total, not enough to handle the Spectral Force I’ve just become. Whose “doesn’t untap” ability I effectively dodge for just 1U a turn… groovy.
And so the first match is won, and a lesson or two learned, specifically “how bad Momentary Blink is against fast decks.” I’m starting to wonder if it’s any good against slow ones either, but I’m happy with all of the other cards, even the somewhat random-seeming Wipe Aways. My online Constructed rating also ticks north of 1600 for the first time ever… but not by much. I’d love to say the rest of the tournament was as interesting of a learning experience, but the next opponent mulliganed to 5 game 1 and 6 game 2 while on the play with his Red-White Sliver beatdown deck… and leads off game 1 with Gemstone Mine, suspend Rift Bolt, also known as “mulligan to four, possibly three.” Somewhere in here he attacks me for the maximum value of a Keldon Marauders, meaning I’m at twelve, but then he’s used his Mine and has two Plains… while I have two Spectral Forces. Game 3 he fails to play a second land until turn 4 and I drop three total Spectral Forces after drawing six extra cards with Harmonize. It wasn’t exactly “fair”.
Cleverly I split the finals, picking up three packs for four tickets, then jump into another queue. In actuality it’s around now that I realize I’ve been playing for two hours and haven’t made dinner yet after coming home from work, and the fiancee is starting to get grumbly about the distinct lack of macaroni and cheese in her life… but not quite grumbly enough to disconnect from the World of Warcraft in order to cook it herself. As an aside, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of any social interaction with my fiancee ever since I bought her a new wireless card to play WoW on her computer, two weeks ago… she even came along with me to the ungodly large PTQ at Neutral Ground last week to play World of Warcraft on their system for twelve hours while I played Magic, and I “had to” draft after being eliminated from the tournament proper just to have something to do while she ground level after level.
Given the choice of laughing about the tables being turned for once and her snubbing me for WoW instead of me forgetfully being inattentive to her to go play Magic, or crying about the same, I started a new Livejournal community. (Consider this your Friday dose of the Ferrett’s “Weekly Plug Bug,” so you can read some of my humor instead of The Ferrett humorous webcomic “Home On The Strange.” Star City Games has a policy of not linking to any journal-based sites, but following the humorous spirit of the “Note to Cat” Livejournal community I read instead of doing work at work I decided to start the Livejournal community “Note to WoW,” writing fictional (and humorous, rather than bitchy) notes to the World of Warcraft that has stolen my woman. Note_To_WoW dot livejournal dot com should take you to the community to read the humor of myself and others, because it should come as no surprise to anyone that I am not the only person in the world suffering from such an affliction. It’s possible I may be the only “WoW widow” with a decent sense of humor, though, because I’ve yet to meet a similar community that wasn’t very, very angry about the situation.
While my dinner boiled, the second queue began, and I got the joy of battling against Mono-Red again. Again I lose the first due to some issues, the most key of which was probably “drawing Momentary Blink.” At this point I’ve come to realize has absolutely no home in the deck at all and would be better served as three other cards and a basic Forest instead of a Plains, though I have yet to figure out which other card or cards. On the play for the second game I switch the sideboard strategy over to Ana Battlemage, because I just need a card that will do something early in the game and this can at least block and trade with Sulfur Elemental, or be an absolute beating if I hit six mana before he’s deployed everything from his hand. Wall of Roots powers out ridiculous draws, and early Willbenders got significant value; for the second game I blocked his Knight with my now 0/4 Wall, and after resolving damage he cleverly tries to Sudden Shock the Wall to death… but instead it becomes 0/3 and it is the Knight who dies instead, without even the possibility of saving it with Brute Force.
The enemy’s board is clean for my fourth turn and I’ve got four lands plus Wall of Roots, which is to say I drop the first of many Spectral Forces… and plink in for one with the now-revealed Willbender, who is proving to be every bit as good in my deck as I’d hoped he would be given the serious lack of good countermagic. Game 3 goes similarly, but since I’ll be on the draw the Battlemages turn back into book-lovin’ Magii so they might actually do something before I get overrun. I don’t have a Wall of Roots but his draw is short on land, with him stalling on two and leading with Magus, Knight, Magus, Magus. My turn 2 was also a Magus, my turn 3 was Harmonize, and my turn 4 was Spectral 8/8 Blocker. My turn 5 was Spectral Morph, which might just have to be the name of the deck now.
For the second round I see something new, and play against a Black Control deck using Gauntlets of Power and splashing Hellkites off Molten Slagheaps. I have a weak draw in the first game and just have to try to Hulk Smash him with Spectral Forces that untap every other turn, funny against a Black deck. Cleverly he hits me with Damnation before the second Force can get a swing in edgewise, then casts a Hellkite into my post-Damnation Morph, splitting the damage up to kill a Willbender but not being able to kill a Shapeshifter, thus taking the worse half of a 50/50 split (in my opinion) when the life totals are 20 – 8 in my favor. I have three turns to draw a Shapeshifter to kill his Hellkite and have a Dragon left over myself, but don’t draw anything.
For the second, the awful Momentary Blinks come out again and in come both Magus and Battlemage, letting me fight a card-advantage fight like you wouldn’t believe in the control-on-control matchup. Of course I draw none of these things for the second, but do manage to play an effective aggro-control stance with Mystic Snake into Teferi with Mystic Snake and Wipe Away in hand as backup countermagic, and after I’ve run out of counters he’s also run out of relevant spells, letting me end-of-turn a Spectral Force into play and sneak across the finish line with my last card in hand. The third is of course ridiculous because I have Magus on the draw turn 2, to which he responds with a turn 3 Stupor that misses the critical Harmonize in my hand (…and never would have hit it, because I had two anyway). Turn 3 I draw three more cards, and from there on I’m drawing two a turn. He’s out of cards to my full grip but drops Stronghold Overseer against my board of lands, Magus, and Morph, but I get myself a Shapeshifted Overseer then follow up with another Morph and an attack for seven in the shadowy air. (Seven thanks to double Gauntlet of Power, which I didn’t think really rated boarding in Seal of Primordium, perhaps because I flat out forgot about it from game 1.) He pumps once before attacking and I reveal the second Overseer of my own, prompting the concession with one card left in hand.
Ana Battlemage threatened to be huge, but was never deployed since he never kept more than one card in hand at any given time… still, I remain happy with the plan overall, as the card advantage savaging in this matchup might have shown. And for the third I again split, meaning I’m up six packs for eight tickets so far, meaning I could cash out with a profit of about 20 tix on the evening… much, much more profitable than a night of drafting, with the “low” price of investment of merely $50 thanks to a bit of market savvy and a decent deck. This was done with a mind to actually learn something about the format, however, and I did learn a few things… or at least confirmed a few, such as the ridiculousness that is Wall of Roots. Willbender is also quite excellent for controlling opposing spells, and likely much better than even a regular Counterspell could be thanks to the fact that it can affect Split Second spells that would otherwise be ridiculous. I didn’t play against White Weenie, and so don’t have a firm idea yet how well (if well at all) I stand up to the “great white hype” of the format, nor did I get to “live the dream” and Willbend a Griffin Guide onto my Spectral Force. Aggro decks seem solid and quite consistent so long as you stick to two colors, and this color limitation severely hampers any attempts at a multi-colored beatdown deck… you can’t really effectively use Terramorphic Expanse, and while I liked having the two Gemstone Mines and will happily keep them even without White cards to ever cast anymore, I’m also quite aware of the fact that more Mines add up into fewer lands overall in a deck that likes to cast a spell on turns 1, 2, and 3.
The most effective two-colored decks I saw were either about pure power (U/G Morph), a strong controlling stance (U/R Teferi), or resource denial… the latter of which might prove quite damning, as a “just” Red/White Blink-Riders LD deck seemed to be quite solid and could throw a lot of monkey-wrenches into the works by adopting Magus of the Tabernacle to go with their mana-denial strategy. Two color decks are so hard to get to work right as-is that even just a little bit of LD goes a long way, and their ability to make good use of both halves of Boom / Bust gives them a distinct advantage in a resource war. As far as finishing up Day 1 of the deck, though, I’m content with the sideboard as-is and have been puzzling over what could or should fill the three slots left open by Momentary Blink. With no clear answer I’m reasonably certain that I want a spell, but not which spell; early acceleration could be key, however, leaving me leaning towards Search for Tomorrow if not going out-and-out crazy and advancing Magus of the Library to main-deck status just as a mana elf that isn’t completely useless as the game goes longer. Momentary Blink was intended to function as a pseudo-counterspell that could also untap my Spectral Force, and in the games I was playing without it I never noticed myself to be short of either countermagic or Spectral Force trickiness, especially thanks to the Shapeshifter’s ability to attack like a Spectral Force but untap every turn regardless of the opponent’s possession of Black permanents.
Check back next week for more answers as my look into Block Constructed evolves… the hope is to find the time somewhere to hit a slightly more serious Block Constructed tournament, or otherwise manage to broaden my knowledge of the format as it continues to be played on Magic Online in preparation of the upcoming Block Constructed Pro Tour.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com