Well, I’ve still got one more shot.
I thought I’d get there this past weekend. I was playing a gassy deck of my own creation – more on it later – in the notoriously weak Little Rock field. Several of the St. Louis powerhouses decided not to take the trip, and I knew that even most of the Memphis locals hadn’t put in all that much playtesting. I couldn’t really ask for a whole lot more.
When I arrived on site, I was even more optimistic. Attendance didn’t even break 100, and from the looks of a crowd there’d be a lot of – ahem – questionable deck choices. Moreover, I’d brought BDavis out of retirement to take the trip with me, so I had a protein shake-gulping, Chris Farley-bedding “Creature – Hogbeast Tapper”-style good luck charm by my side at all times. I knew that I’d tell him to go away when I had to do Psychatog math, but other than that I was pumping the metaphorical fist.
Round 1 I obviously get paired against Richard Feldman, whom I have to play against in literally every tournament that the two of us have attended.
Now, we decide to ID at this point. In terms of EV this is a poor decision numerically speaking, obviously. However, it still meant that the both of us could afford to lose a match, so it wasn’t the end of the world. Moreover, it would give us the opportunity to scout the entire field, which was invaluable in determining mulliganing decisions etc. for the remaining six rounds, as because there were so few players it would be possible to peg every single player with a certain deck. I feel compelled to italicize every single superlative for emphasis because I am sure that y’all cannot hear the annoying cadence of my voice already.
Good choice or no, that’s what happened. I obviously bash every one of my opponents until I match up against a very good Affinity player. Even though I have been the favorite in playtesting, he beats me in three very good, very close games. I wish I had a “bad beat” story to tell here, because those are so valuable and entertaining, but the truth is that he didn’t make any glaring mistakes and I probably ought to have mulliganed my opening hand in the third game. I was slightly tilting – though I was not on Alex Kim FBT, which actually involves positioning the side of one’s body perpendicular to the ground – because I’d taken a mulligan in games 1 and 2, and thus kept a mediocre hand so that “Oh My God, Fate Must Hate Me, I Had To Mulligan All Three Games Loooooooord Have Mercy.”
I win the match after that, and get paired against everyone’s favorite pint-size Vietnamese crusader, Tuan Nguyen. Mr. Nguyen is famous for 1) being of similar size, stature, and demeanor to a “Jawa” from Star Wars, 2) opening Goblin Sharpshooter and at least one other huge Red rare bomb coincidentally and exclusively via the luck of the draw in three consecutive Onslaught Sealed Decks, and 3) refusing a prize split in the finals of a PTQ for London against Jack Cooke in the days before plane tickets, beating Jack due to bad draws, and then revealing that he had no intentions of going to Pro Tour: London at all. Jack, meanwhile, was going to be in London at that point in time anyway.
In other words, Tuan received fewer prizes than he would have received with a concession, and cakked Jack out of a Pro Tour for no reason. It was actually strictly worse for both players.
Those of you who paid attention in your English classes have surely picked up on the oh-so-subtle foreshadowing.
I was 4-1-1 and a lock with a concession. Tuan was 4-2 and mathematically eliminated from contention. While I would of course never explicitly offer a prize split in exchange for a concession, I would always reciprocate (and have always reciprocated) the generosity of people who concede to me. If someone’s scooping me into the Top 8, they’re going to get my prizes, because I couldn’t possibly care less about booster packs. I don’t expect the same treatment when I scoop to people myself, but that’s just how I roll. Obviously Tuan doesn’t scoop, bashes me in two games due to awful draws (and a potential misplay on the final turn of the second game that I’m pretty sure was correct but may not have been if he was running Putrefy – a detail I ought to have known), and ekes Alex Kim into 8th place because I didn’t make it. Kim obviously goes on to win the PTQ due to facing no real opposition, the highlight being a Scepter-Chant deck that would have lost to Kim’s mulligan to four despite a turn 2 Scepter on Chant if Alex hadn’t been on FBT and end-stepped a Gaea’s Might for no reason whatsoever because he was frustrated at his mulligan.
To recap:
Tuan received fewer prizes than he would have received with a concession, and cakked me out of a Pro Tour (potentially) for no reason. It was actually strictly worse for both players.
Now, Billy Moreno put forward a very good and convincing argument that a player can never be criticized for choosing to play out a game, since after all we ostensibly come to tournaments to “Play Magic.” However, a person can be criticized for acting irrationally. When an action you take results in a worse outcome for all parties involved, including yourself, and no tangible benefits emerge whatsoever, it can safely be considered “irrational.” At least my stalling hard-locked Tog opponent was still in contention for Top 8.
Which is why I’m going out of my way at every event I ever attend to ensure that Mr. Nguyen doesn’t receive a single favor from anybody. He’s free to call my bluff and see what happens.
So yeah. One more PTQ in some suburb of Boston this coming weekend. I’m gonna be in Massachusetts over Spring Break, so if anyone wants to tell me in the forums how to actually get to the tournament site on the 17th I would love them truly dearly. If said individual could give me a ride from the MIT campus, I might compose an ode to them in the style of Percy Bysshe Shelley in my next article complete with choral accompaniment. That’s a promise, not a threat.
I’m also pretty pleased to have made it this far without namedropping Tim Aten a single time. This is especially surprising since at the time of this writing I just finished his “Feature,” which is close to being one of the greatest things he has ever written. For a split second I had this burning desire within me to compete, and to pour my heart and soul into producing the greatest piece I could possibly conceive. However, like most disenchanted twentysomethings in today’s day and age, I quickly realized that rather than have to try and fail at something, I could just put up a veneer of apathy and act like I couldn’t care less – thereby, through my inaction, vindicating the possibility that I might just not be good enough. Wow, what a clever strategy. Denial works, right?
Okay, so. This deck I was talking about.
It occurred to me that most players are awful at what Mike calls “top down deck design” – that is, building a deck to solve a problem rather than just building a deck for the hell of it. I personally think it’s because too few people ask the question that I try to include at the very beginning of all my articles about Constructed decks:
Why do you want to play this deck to the exclusion of everything else in the format?
More specifically, what goals do you intend to accomplish by playing a certain list, and what do the individual cards in the list do to contribute to the overall whole?
Richard did an outstanding job of taking y’all through the process we went through along these lines with Tenacious Tron. If you ever need a primer on how to go about engineering an excellent decklist, I would strongly recommend that series as one of the best on the Internet. I’d like to do the same thing with my new list, but the truth is that it’s only been around for a week. I don’t have the raw data that I’d need to explain every choice, nor am I nearly as confident about every single slot in the deck like I was for Tenacious Tron (which, incidentally, was called “Robot Chicken” at first, a name that I greatly prefer). So I’m going to take you through my thought process on the initial list, and let you know what holes I’m in the process of plugging as we speak. Even though I played this list at a PTQ, it’s not remotely final. I’m trying to finalize it before next weekend, but that’s not going to happen either. I would, however, very much appreciate y’all’s input.
I read Mike’s article a couple weeks back on how the good decks in the format need to minimize other decks’ ability to interact with them. Note that when Mike says “interact with” he really means “disrupt,” because you actually really want your opponent to interact with you when you play cards like Fact or Fiction or Gifts Ungiven; it gives them more chances to make mistakes! But because every single deck right now excels at doing a number of very specific things, they aren’t all that great at handling a broad diversity of threats.
Specifically, no deck in the format has a good way to deal with an 8/8 trampling Spectral Force on turn 3 beyond two maindeck Putrefies that see play in two relevant decks, tops.
I started thinking about what the relevant decks in the format were good at doing – specifically, the most powerful things that they could accomplish with relative ease. I realized that at least one of the popular choices could do one of the following things very well:
Hose nonbasic lands (Flow, Blastminer, Ghost Quarter)
Prevent a player from casting a lot of low-cc spells (Chalice of the Void, Counterbalance)
Kill small, cheap creatures (Engineered Explosives, Devastating Dreams, Smother)
Annihilate a strategy exclusively based around the graveyard (Trinket Mage for Tormod’s Crypt)
Kill extremely quickly if undisrupted (Levy.dec, TEPS, Ichorid, Affinity, Fujita, etc.)
Blow up the world (Devastating Dreams, Balancing Act)
Nuke artifacts (Ancient Grudge, Kataki)
Therefore, if I was going to attempt to “solve” a format, I’d have to play a deck that:
Didn’t rely upon basic lands.
Had predominately high-casting cost threats.
Could utilize but not rely entirely upon the graveyard.
Quickly disrupt the opponent, or stabilize the board against creature decks.
Resisted the world getting blown into pieces.
Wasn’t hosed by artifact kill spells.
On top of all of this, the deck would have to do something powerful so as not to “just lose” to the sub-strategies of all the decks that were extremely good at the primary strategies I had just listed out.
I quickly decided that summoning a very fast 8/8 creature that was essentially indestructible was powerful enough to compete against the rest of the format, assuming that I wasn’t kold to any one of the things I mentioned earlier. To do that I’d need eight one-mana accelerants as well as Scryb Ranger to both untap and power out the Incredible Hulk. Also, I wanted something else to do at the five slot besides play a Force, so I added two Plow Unders. I didn’t want four because they’re awful in plenty of matchups, but there’s nothing better to help you pull ahead early against slower decks.
Now, I’m playing all these little 1/1s, which would naturally predispose me to being crushed by a Devastating Dreams. As I intended my principal threats to be large green men, I wasn’t overly concerned about Explosives, as by the time an opponent got three mana I’d a) have a relevant threat on the table and b) probably not get two-for-oned anyway. But the Dreams was an issue.
I’d go from 4 mana to 0 on turn 2. How could I get around this problem?
I realized I needed to be able, first, to drop a very large threat early that could survive a Devastating Dreams for any reasonable amount. Second, I needed to be able to recover from that loss of lands relatively early. What could accomplish both of these things?
Well, what does Loam do to surmount both of these problems? It plays Life from the Loam to recoup its lands and to get around the “random discard” drawback of Dreams, and Terravore as aforementioned early huge lethal threat.
Hmm. Maybe I should do the same thing.
Life from the Loam was amazing anyway, since with all my mana accelerants I could afford to just keep three or four lands on the table and cycle the rest away. Thank you Tranquil Thicket. It’d also give me a long-term card advantage engine to compete with Tog, Tron, and Scepter Chant, and would also obviously help make Terravore even bigger with Dredge. Terravore would be fine on his own if I ran eight sac-lands, because most of the format also ran said sac-lands and he could only get bigger the longer the game progressed. At the same time, I wasn’t going to base my entire deck around these cards, so I settled on three of each.
Life from the Loam would already contribute to the rest of my deck beyond simply being a reaction to Devastating Dreams, because it would allow me to do something constructive with sac-and-cycling lands. But how could I ensure that it would be a reliable engine whenever I drew it, without falling victim to the “Crypt Fallacy” and basing my entire deck around it? I should just play cards that are good anyway, and great with Loam itself, of course!
I quickly added four Wild Mongrels, as in addition to being an insane creature by himself and with Life from the Loam, he also has great synergy with Scryb Ranger. I don’t particularly care about the fact that he dies to Sudden Shock, because so do most two-drops. I also realized that in an essentially mono-colored deck I could afford to run at least two Ghost Quarters, because they’d be Wastelands against the decks that matter with the potential for a hard lock while not crippling my manabase in the slightest.
Okay, so we’ve got a skeleton. But not many of these cards help us survive against generic aggro decks. The Force is usually game when he gets going, but if they kill one of our mana producers at an opportune time he may just not be enough. Mongrel, similarly, is incredible unless he dies to a Sudden Shock, so he’s not a good enough plan by himself.
Guess it’s time for some Ravenous Baloths, then. I hear that guy’s pretty good against decks that want to turn men sideways.
It was then that I realized that 1) I’m going to be playing a whole lot of basic lands, and 2) I really need something good to do on turn 2 if I didn’t have another Elf or Scryb Ranger. Terravore is not the tightest to play on turn 3 without several sac-lands.
It turns out that Blood Moon costs three, and happens to be nuts against the best aggro deck in the format (Levy), the best control deck in the format (Tron), and the best combo deck in the format (Tings). Hmm. I might want to run that card.
I rounded the deck out with two Indrik Stomphowlers to combo with Baloth and deal with two huge problem cards, Seismic Assault and Umezawa’s Jitte. Finally, a Sword of Fire and Ice came in as additional Devastating Dreams insurance, and also because Blood Moon would necessitate Birds of Paradise and I wanted a way to turn those into threats. That left me with:
Creatures (28)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 3 Terravore
- 4 Wild Mongrel
- 3 Ravenous Baloth
- 2 Indrik Stomphowler
- 4 Scryb Ranger
- 4 Spectral Force
Lands (22)
Spells (10)
I’m still not sure about several things. The Plow Unders are awful random, and seem like they could be further engineered to solve specific problems. I’d love to be able to run more Basic Forests, and Ghost Quarter has an obvious lack of synergy with Blood Moon. At the same time, it’s necessary against the Invasion sac-land decks, and is clearly incredible with the Terravore. I’ve even hard-locked Loam players in game 1 who couldn’t stick a Birds or Wall only to mill the majority of their basic lands in the cycling process. Stomphowler is also very good at what he does, but doesn’t always seem to be enough; sometimes, they have the Assault or the Jitte or the Counterbalance, and you don’t have the draw that doesn’t care about those cards. Obviously Stomphowler is good when you draw it, but there seems like there could be a better strategic answer to those problems than simply trying to draw one of two maindeck outs.
For those of you who care about these things, I’ll also list the sideboard. I’m actually more confident about it than I am the maindeck, but how I developed it is really beside the point of the article. You really build a board to suit the needs of your maindeck, so it’s largely divorced from the top-down process (the exception being certain transformational boards that you plan to spring on people when they overreact to the strategy of the maindeck).
3 Flametongue Kavu (another big perk to this deck is that you get to play this guy)
2 Ancient Grudge
2 Krosan Grip
1 Genesis (changes the strategy and tactics of the deck against slower opponent)
1 Terravore
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Plow Under
2 Loaming Shaman
2 Sudden Shock
Anyway, hope to see some of y’all at the Boston PTQ. Take care. Soon, we’ll be venturing into the jungle that is 2HG. Man oh man, is that one bizarre format.
Zac