Survival of the Fittest is one of the most powerful cards of all time. It was
intensely popular in Extended until it was banned. For over a year, it fueled ATS, the
strongest deck in Legacy. However, Survival doesn’t see much play any more. Why is this?
People fundamentally misunderstand what Survival does.
Essentially, Survival is used in the wrong way in Legacy decks. To understand its
uses, let’s take a brief look at Survival’s history.
Rec-Sur
Built on the back of Recurring Nightmare and Survival of the Fittest, this deck
would use small creatures to power out big ones that went to the graveyard due to
Survival. This concept has been written about to death so I’m not going to waste your
time on it, only point out the important parts.
In the pre-Squee era, Recurring Nightmare gave the deck tremendous card advantage.
It allowed recursion of Nekrataal, Ravenous Baboons, or Thrull Surgeon, among others.
Later on, Great Whale and Shivan Hellkite were added, an infinite mana combo emerged and
then the DCI errata’d the combo, and that’s why we can’t have nice things. Here’s
another important thing: the deck played a lot of walls. If you read the finals report
of Selden’s
1998 win, you’ll see how instrumental the walls were in fighting Sligh. Here, we get
to our first important point:
Survival decks need to survive the early game and only start running in the
midgame and lategame.
This requires a little explanation of terms. The early game, in this sense, is turns
1-4, roughly. In this time, Selden would play mana elves, Walls, Birds and maybe play a
Survival or Nightmare out. However, it wasn’t until maybe turn 5 or so when the Survival
player could get their engine running. He or she would have set up and had enough mana
to go find and play Nekrataal, for example. At that point perhaps they would be able to
get Uktabi Orangutan to destroy a Cursed Scroll.
By the time the lategame rolled around, Survival had Recurring Nightmare out and it
was putting Spirit of the Night or Verdant Force into play, or it is recurring Ravenous
Baboons or Triskelion to repeatedly destroy anything on the other side of the board. If
Survival decks lived until the lategame, they would almost always win. Keep this in
mind, this is really important. I mean it. Write it down if you have to. Inevitability
is Survival’s greatest strength because on a long enough timeline, it will be able to
answer any threat that comes up while simultaneously advancing its own strategy, because
all of its answers are tacked onto creatures that also happen to attack.
Rec-Sur always had a place in the Extended metagame as long as Survival was in it.
It held varying positions of dominance, but was increasingly outpaced by faster and more
explosive combo decks that were immune to Survival’s slower, board control strategy.
Tradewind Survival
This was another Tempest-block deck that graduated to Extended’s field. Again, this
deck has been done to death, but the importance in it is that it shows another example
of a Survival deck that controls the board and doesn’t have a clear beatdown strategy.
Instead, it intends to contain the opponent, deny them resources and cards, and then win
with whatever is accessible. When the opponent is locked out with Tradewind Riders, it
doesn’t matter what creatures you are attacking with, they’ll do the job eventually.
TS also showed that Survival-based decks can play fine without Survival on the board
if they have enough extra support. Tradewind Riders were a formidable blocker and threat
when combined with Quirion Ranger, and could easily buy time to find Survival or just
lock out the opponent on their own. TS also showed one angle of Survival deckbuilding,
which is the integration of counterspells into the framework. TS played 3-4 Force of
Wills and up to 4 Arcane Denials (look, we both know that card is ass but it provided a
hard counter and draw for a minimal color requirement in a Green-based deck).
TS would also inspire the Legacy ATS (Angry Tradewind Survival) deck, which
supported the usual host of Riders, Birds of Paradise and counters, with a Red splash
for Anger. Anger, as we will explore later, gives Survival in Legacy the speed it needs
to actually compete. ATS would be dominant in Legacy until it was outpaced by Dragon and
Food Chain Goblins. It lost its hold on the metagame because Legacy used to be composed
of mostly combo and prison decks modeled on Vintage decks. There wasn’t really aggro to
speak of when it was dominant, so ATS could use its counters on effective targets and
then win resource wars against other decks. It wasn’t Pithing Needle that killed ATS, it
was the rise of Goblins as a metagame-defining deck. ATS had a difficult time dealing
with 10 Goblins on turn 2, thanks to Food Chain. Ultimately, ATS couldn’t adapt to beat
Goblins or Dragon because it was simply too slow.
RGSA
An acronym meaning Red-Green Survival Advantage, this deck has had varying times of
popularity in Legacy and is, I think, one of the closest decks to Getting It Right. The
deck is a midrange R/G fat deck that uses Survival and a very limited toolbox of answers
to overwhelm the opponent. The advantage was that it would work fine without Survival
and that it could kill without needing to address the opponent’s resources – a constant
stream of Troll Ascetics and Ravenous Baloths makes short work of an opponent.
RGSA has fallen out of popularity and playability because it has terrible problems
handling the rising tide of legacy combo. It has very little game whatsoever against
Ill-Gotten Gains decks and High Tide decks. The only way that it can effectively address
those decks is by diluting the aggro strategy, which slows the deck down a lot. While it
has outs in the form of Burning Wish for Tsunami or Cranial Extraction, and later decks
ran Duress or Cabal Therapy, these did not contain Combo well enough to keep it alive.
RGSA, paradoxically, also has a rough time against Goblins and some other forms of
aggro. It was best when playing against aggro-control, such as Fish decks, because the
creatures were simply bigger. With those decks going to the wayside, RGSA can’t beat up
on metagame breakers like Madness anymore.
What Can We Learn From History?
There are several lessons we can learn from these successful Survival builds:
1) Survival needs some way to get into the midgame faster than normal. It can do
this with walls, counters, disruption, or a combination of these.
2) Survival works best when it is used to create inevitability through recursion or
3) Survival needs a plan to win without Survival on the board.
4) Survival is a card used for board control.
Let’s look at that last point a little more. Why weren’t there Survival decks in
Extended that ran Jackal Pups, Albino Trolls, Skyshroud Elite, and other strong weenie
aggro cards? The answer is that Survival is a bad card when you use it like that. To be
frank, Survival needs a lot of resources to get going. It needs a lot of investment
before there is any return. If you take the time and resources to get Survival out and
running, there are better cards to get by that point than weenie cards. Survival also
was not, generally, getting out large creatures for the purpose of attacking. It was
buying back all the time it spent setting up by generating card advantage with its
creatures. This means that not only would Nekrataal kill an opposing creature, it would
cost another card to actually get rid of the thing. That’s a two-for-one trade and
Survival is built on these trades. This is another really important point.
What Survival CANNOT do
Survival, as we just saw, is not a very strong aggro card. If I were playing a
green-based aggro deck in Legacy that was meant to be fast and lethal, I’d rather
dedicate the space in my deck to aggressive creatures than take up the 8 slots that
Survival needs (4 Survival of the Fittest, 1 Anger, 1 Genesis, 1 Squee, Goblin Nabob, 1
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary – I’ll talk about these in a moment). The setup required for
Survival to work defeats the speed and purpose of running aggro decks. You just slow
yourself down. I’d much rather be casting Skyshroud War Beasts than Survival, they’ll
likely be doing a lot more damage.
This also goes for Madness creatures. As a strategy, Madness isn’t actually very
good for Survival. That’s not to say that it should be ignored; we simply return to the
idea that if you are setting up Survival, you’d better be getting something a little
more powerful than just a big dumb wurm that turns sideways. You end up paying 1G + G to
activate + 2G for Arrogant Wurm. 3GGG is a terrible price for that thing! You end up
paying more than retail to put it into play, and all it does is attack and block. Bad.
Survival is also a pretty poor combo card in Legacy. This is somewhere that you will
just have to trust me – I’ve been testing extensively on just about every form of
Survival combo you can think of. Great Whale RecSur, Kiki-Jiki and Sky Hussar Rec-Sur,
Auriok Salvagers combo, etc. In all of these cases, you end up spending valuable slots
in your deck on either running Survival or running a combo in your Survival deck. This
isn’t a case of “hey, you got chocolate on my peanut butter!” synergy,
either. It’s more like the “I like going to the toilet and I like candy bars so
I’m going to eat one while doing the other” bad ideas. You end up with this
diluted deck that when it works, works great, but most of the time draws one part or the
other and not both and just wastes time setting up for something cool instead of winning
small.
Finally, now, as before, Survival has a hard time dealing with combo. Tide just
doesn’t care if you can kill any creature that it plays. You can make your Survival
decks beat combo but you sacrifice just about all the other good matchups in favor of
it. I think the better idea is to include cards that are strong versus combo and also
fine generally. For the purposes of completeness, I will include a combo-beating
Survival list idea in the appendix.
Why You Should Play Survival
Survival is, in my opinion, the closest analog to Weissman-style Keeper that the
format has. The deck sets up for the midgame and dominates the lategame with card
advantage. Remember that the early Keeper decks would look to lock the opponent out with
Moat and Disrupting Scepter. Survival attempts to advance its strategy while answering
everything that the opponent plays, and eventually locking them out.
Speaking of card advantage, Survival is full of it. Where Keeper would run
Dismantling Blow, Survival runs Uktabi Orangutan; same basic principle of getting the
most out of your cards. Both decks can be overwhelmed in the early game or lose to
resource denial, but if they survive, it’s very hard to lose. Also, like Keeper,
Survival benefits from informed metagame card choices. Hey, Survival favors the
prepared…
Another point for it is that Survival has a very fine matchup versus random decks.
Despite what some may say, Legacy is not dominated by three or four decks. In six
rounds, you will face six different decks, and chances are, Survival has a good chance
versus all of them. This is because most decks cannot kill quickly enough or answer
Survival thoroughly, so Survival finds the one or two magic bullets that happen to end
the game. It has a great affinity for grinding out wins and is an excellent deck for
getting to the top 8 with in the Swiss rounds.
Many people don’t know how to play against Survival either. For example, Swords to
Plowshares is not actually a strong card against the deck, as most of the cards in it
are removal-proof. No lies though, I’ve had my Rofellos sent farming more times than I
can count. In another example, players undervalue the power of their removal against
mana-producers. Catching a Birds of Paradise with Mogg Fanatic seems worthless but it is
a huge setback against Survival, and one of the reasons that I dropped mana elves and
birds in favor of other accelerants. That said, you can count on an opponent making
mistakes against your deck. I know that this is a weak justification but it’s valuable
to know.
Survival, coincidentally, is in the best colors for sideboarded hoser cards.
Why You Should Not Play Survival
Survival cannot be tuned to beat something specific while still retaining a hopeful
matchup versus random and/or prevalent decks. It still dies to really fast aggro or
burn. It will most likely drop one or two games to combo in a match.
Survival is built of mostly rares as well. If one is just entering Legacy, staring
down a list of very specialized rares can be daunting. On the other hand, the deck has a
light requirement for dual lands and fetchlands and doesn’t run ultra-expensive cards
like Force of Will or Reset or Sea Drake.
There’s also this card called Pithing Needle.
Needle presents a problem for Survival because it will either cut off your Survival
or another strong card on the board. That’s bad times. With only one or two
artifact-killing cards maindeck, it’s unrealistic to think of drawing into something to
kill that Needle on Survival. The best bet here if Needle hits the table is to turn into
the efficient Green Beats deck that lies at the core of Survival. I’ve won many games
where Needle hits the table, more games than I have lost, because Needle is usually run
by the decks that you already have good matchups against. Also, let’s speak forthrightly
here: not many people run Pithing Needle at all. It’s not something to have The Fear
about walking into an event. At the same time, it’s useful to have some extra
artifact-killers on the sideboard to deal with it. In short, Needle is a pain but it
isn’t the Survival-murderer that it is painted as.
Get Your Hardhat, We’re Constructing!
Enough setup though, here’s the list:
Enchantments:
4 Survival of the Fittest
3 Sylvan Library
Artifacts:
4 Aether Vial
4 Chalice of the Void
Creatures:
4 Ravenous Baloth
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
1 Flametongue Kavu
1 Mogg Fanatic
1 Genesis
1 Anger
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
1 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
1 Uktabi Orangutan
1 Orcish Settlers
1 Goblin Pyromancer
1 Eternal Witness
Lands:
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Taiga
1 Pendelhaven
1 Gaea’s Cradle
1 Mountain
12 Forest
Now that we’ve got the history done, let’s go on to the meat of the article. I’m
going to walk you through Legacy Survival and how to build it, from concepts to reality,
strategy to tactics.
Aside: lots of people don’t know the difference between Strategy and Tactics. They
aren’t synonymous. Strategy is the general purpose or goal; “I make nine spells
and cast Tendrils of Agony”, for example. Tactics is the “if my opponent has
Meddling Mage naming Tendrils, then I need to Mystical Tutor for Wipe Away at his end
step and get rid of it.” Tactics is the nitty-gritty of the tabletop battle, it’s
the specific actions and reactions that happen when you put your strategy against
another and try to win.
First off, Survival is best in Legacy when it runs only two colors, which means
Green and something else. I heartily endorse Red, if for nothing else than Anger. If you
splash something else, run a Taiga and an Anger or you’ll lose games you should have
won. Going for more colors means you will lose to your manabase and you’ll lose to
Wasteland and you’ll lose to trying to do cool things with a bunch of colors instead of
doing smart things with two colors. I’ve found that the combination of Green and Red
offers just about everything aside from discard, so we’ll stick to it.
Survival also needs a lot of mana. That’s because decks in Legacy are very fast,
very high-power. This may not make sense – why should we dilute the deck with more
lands? The answer is that you need to make every single land drop that you can and you
also need to be resilient to land destruction. ATS died in part to running a scandalous
18 lands in four(!!!) colors. With fetchlands making up a portion of the manabase, a
single Wasteland could set that deck back a lot because it didn’t run very many actual
lands. Since Goblins is the premiere deck in Legacy and I hear it runs some land
destruction / disruption, we need to deal with that. Consequently, I think 23-24 lands
is a fine number. Selden ran 22, and most of the Extended decks ranged from 21-24 lands.
They also ran accelerants like Birds of Paradise. Survival is a very mana-hungry deck.
This brings us to Aether Vial. My thoughts on the card:
OMG.
OMG.
OMG.
Aether Vial is the best card in Legacy. Seriously.
Vial doubles your mana. It gives your creatures Flash. It fixes your mana. It lets
you actually use Survival and cast creatures in the same turn. Any Survival deck without
Vial had better have a damn good reason why running Vial would make the deck worse than
running without it. Vial, along with Anger, is one of the cards that let you compete at
the speed that Legacy demands.
When building up the lands in the deck, I like to include a basic Mountain because
it’s a good idea in the face of Wastelands. With the chunk of forests that the deck
runs, you can afford to swap a few of them out for good lands. I like running a single
Gaea’s Cradle and a single Pendelhaven, though you can increase the counts of both. You
won’t run into a lot of problems with them being nonbasics because you have so many
basics, and sometimes they let you do really stupid things (Basking Rootwalla is nuts
with either one). I wouldn’t go crazy on running a bunch though because you need
stability and they’re Legendary. You will draw the
Two-Cradle-Why-Aren’t-You-Forests-hand eventually. You can also run Wastelands or
Rishadan Ports if you feel like you need them; I’ve played around with them and found
that I really just want Forests instead. Port is nice against combo and control decks
because you can lock up two of their lands with Port if you need to force something
through counters or buy a turn.
Survival needs a bit of support itself to be maximized. I’ve mentioned Anger before
but I’ll talk about him again. It’s a seriously good card. It lets you go from having
nothing on the table turn 4 to having an army crashing in on turn 5. Anger really helps
make up for lost time spent in getting Survival set up. It should be one of the first
cards you Survival into and then discard if possible. Squee, Goblin Nabob is a no
brainer. Goes to graveyard. Comes back. Genesis gives a lot of inevitability; combined
with Aether Vial, it makes recursion a snap (Genesis recursion can be very
mana-intensive). It’s the deck’s Recurring Nightmare and it’s searchable too! Oh yeah,
it’s a 4/4 and beats in really smooth; don’t be afraid of casting it if you know your
opponent doesn’t have Swords to Plowshares (and if they run it, they always will have
one for Genesis, it never fails. Frowns.) Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary is also essential.
He doubles your mana like Vial does and lets you tutor and cast things in the same turn.
He really buys back time that you spent setting up and defending. He and Anger play
really nicely together. If there were lightning rods in Magic, Rofellos would be one;
he’s sure to draw out any sort of removal possible against competent players.
Unanswered, Rofellos will usually win the game for you.
That’s the bare-bones Survival package; beyond that, it’s malleable, but I wouldn’t
dream of dancing with Survival unless I had these cards in my deck.
Survival needs some element of mana acceleration in creature form. The format is too
fast to simply rely on Wall of Blossoms to hold off attackers for a couple of turns.
Wall of Roots is nice, as are Llanowar Elves and Birds of Paradise, but all those cards
die to removal. Smart opponents will always be aiming creature removal at your Birds or
your Walls or whatever is on the board, anything to slow you down. Because of this, I
like Sakura-Tribe Elder. He Fogs sometimes, he’s never dead and he also grabs the
critical basic Mountain against Wastelands to power up Anger. It will still result in
you hitting four mana on turn 3, which is where things get sweet. Elder also plays well
with Rofellos. Hey, synergy isn’t such a bad thing.
Our stew of Survival also needs some stalling. The Elders provide early blocking,
but sometimes you just need something a little bigger. For my money, it doesn’t get
better than Basking Rootwalla. They’re an instance where Madness creatures are actually
pretty good. They make a fine 1-drop and can block and kill most things up until turn 3
or 4. They also make really fine attackers. Rootwallas can come out from the deck after
mass removal, allowing Survival to really bounce back for minimal mana investment. You
can also deploy a bunch of them straight from the deck to buy a turn or two against
really aggressive decks while you build up your mana a bit more. If there are better
things in hand to cast though, it’s not worth it to hold back mana to pump Rootwallas
up; they’re mainly there to be a speedbump in the early game and generate some
theoretical card advantage if your opponent holds back on attacking into them.
Basking Rootwalla is about as close as I get to single-purpose creatures in the
deck. It has a bit of utility – there’s no loss of card advantage when you are
Survivaling for them, and they’ll stall or beat a little bit. Apart from Rootwallas
though, there really aren’t any other creatures that should be in the deck that don’t
almost guarantee a 2-for-1 trade.
Next up is Ravenous Baloth. What a chunk. Look at that picture! I bet Baloth burgers
are delicious. I bet the Krosan elves barbecue one up from time to time, that’s how they
gain life from them.
What Baloth does for the deck is to really pull it into the lategame. It’s going to
do something good for you, no matter what. Baloth is going to be holding guys off until
he heroically dies to save you. That lifegain is significant; it can mean another turn
to stay alive. Baloth is also Sword To Plowshares-proof. Not bad. I run 4 because it’s
the right thing to do – if you don’t have Survival out, you want to be seeing Baloths
every day of the week since they mean you can live for awhile and maybe just kill your
opponent straight up. They’re like a Wall of Blossoms that eats significant parts of
your opponent’s life total, and their size lets you kill a lot faster than you would
need to without them. There’s less need for some kind of lock like what ATS needed; you
just send Baloths in to mash things up once you have caught up with the opponent.
Now, on to the toolbox for Survival. This is where most people screw up. Survival,
it seems, makes people want to do Really Cool Things instead of good things. This is
because Survival lets you do “anything”. There are a lot of decks that I
have seen, bad decks mind you, that try to cram in twenty one-ofs to tutor for because
they might just be useful one day. Alternatively, they try to make a 4- or 5-color
manabase work to cast all the creatures that they run. There might be some sort of
really neat combo that can be crammed in – the classic one in RGSA was Shivan Wurm and
Deranged Hermit. Stay away from these, they’ll only make you angry when you don’t draw
the other part of the combo and are stuck with cards reliant on Survival to make them
work.
The deck needs to live without drawing its namesake card; you don’t want to be
drawing that really specialized answer when you really need something strong to hold
down the board like a Rootwalla or Baloth. If you’re making your own Survival deck
instead of playing the one I will suggest (and really, who would do that?) then a good
lesson is to take the Survivals out of your deck and play with 56 cards and see if you
can still win without drawing it. If you cannot, go back to the drawing board.
The deck I will present will function just fine without Survivals and I’ve won many
games where I never drew one and just used the power of Green Muscle. In a recent game
against U/W/G Threshold for example, I was able to lead turn 1 Forest, turn 2 Sylvan
Library, turn 3 Spike Feeder into turn 4 Ravenous Baloth. Genesis bit a Swords to
Plowshares on the fifth turn (like he always does) but by that time, I had enough power
on the board to ride to victory. Instrumental in that was the consistent mana curve
coupled with Sylvan Library assuring me of land drops and quality beaters every turn. In
another game against IGGy Pop, I was able to land Spike Feeder and then a Ravenous
Baloth, creating a strong enough life buffer to win without ever drawing a Survival. It
can happen if your deck is built to function without Survival.
Sylvan Library goes a long way to making the deck consistent. It represents a strong
threat in the early game as it puts you into land drops and threats. It is better than
Mirri’s Guile, Scroll Rack or Sensei’s Divining Top because it can draw multiple cards
and does not require mana. I often spend in upwards of 12 life to my Library in matches
where the opponent has a slower kill (Threshold and Landstill come to mind here).
Library is also a critically undervalued threat in today’s metagame and often, it
doesn’t draw out a counter. If it sits on the table, it will bury many opposing decks
under excellent card selection.
Library is an enchantment that can’t be Needled, which is good. Survival needs to make
every land drop and the successful decks ran something to help dig into Survival; things
like Scroll Rack. Library is the better of a bunch because it lets you draw up multiple
cards. Consider this: you see Survival in your top 3 cards, but your hand is empty! Only
Library will also let you draw a creature that same turn, which lets you get Survival
down and online a whole turn faster. Combined with the numerous lifegaining and
shuffling effects, Library can serve as a steady draw engine as well. Against discard,
it helps you draw into a stream of threats and mana continuously while saving your good
cards until you can use them. I can’t think of anything better that I would like in
their place. Sensei’s Divining Top is sort of a contender, but that it requires lots of
mana to use and doesn’t play nicely with Chalice at 1 means I don’t like running it.
Aside: Wizards is printing great three-drops for Green – Eternal Witness, Troll
Ascetic, Groundbreaker. Where are the good four-drops? We’ve got Iwamori and Hunted
Wumpus and Blastoderm, but really all they do is turn sideways and attack. Baloth is
really the only Green four-drop that multitasks. Where are the four-drops with great
abilities? What would Troll Ascetic look like for four mana? The reason that green aggro
sucks in every format is that there’s really nothing exciting past turn 3 for the color
to cast. The reason that I run Baloth is because it’s one of the few four-drop Green
creatures that actually does something.
Back to the toolbox! You need a way to kill artifacts, or more importantly, to kill
opposing Aether Vials. You can use Scavenger Folk, Tin-Street Hooligan, Keldon Vandals,
Uktabi Orangutan and more for this. I like the last one the most – it’s easy on the
color requirements, it fits the mana curve well and it’s got a solid body for defense
against decks like Goblins. Often, you will have Vial reaching three counters at the
same time that you tutor up Orangutan. Hooligan is also a fine card; when building the
deck, you should decide whether it’s more important to have a creature that comes out
early or one that is playable with Aether Vial. I find that playability off of Vial is
critical. Just be careful that your hungry hungry monkey doesn’t eat your own Vials.
Tin-Street Hooligan is quite strong versus non-Goblins decks with lots of artifacts –
Angel Stompy comes to mind here. The need to kill equipment quickly means that it might
be preferable over Orangutan.
Survival also needs a way to kill creatures, and since we’re playing Red, we have
Mogg Fanatic (more like Mogg FANTASTIC!) and Flametongue Kavu. The former assassinates
Dark Confidants and mana elves and the latter eats everything for lunch and then comes
back for more. I like running one of each. You can very easily increase the numbers on
both; the more knowledge of the metagame that you have, the better your creature-kill
tuning will be. Mogg Fanatics are great against B/W Deadguy decks, and Flametongue Kavu
is just unfair versus U/G Madness. Adjust as you see fit. Goblin Sharpshooter is also
good for mowing down fields of Goblins or Elves. Against the former, however, it usually
dies as soon as it hits play and takes some Goblins out with it. It’s amazing with Anger
but really only fantastic versus Goblins. If I am dedicating one slot to my Goblins
matchup in the maindeck, it will be for Goblin Pyromancer, the Wrath of God on legs.
There are plenty of other options as well; I’ll cover those in the appendix. At
times, there will be creatures that cannot be handled by Fanatic and Flame-tongue Kavu.
The ones that really come to mind are Mystic Enforcer and Exalted Angel. Being a good
Survival player includes knowing how to solve lots of situations with your resources,
and sometimes, you need to just go outside the threat-answer routine. Angel can be
killed with a combination of Flame-tongue Kavu and Mogg Fanatic and Mystic Enforcer can
be raced with several Baloths when combined with Anger and Genesis. They’re no walk in
the park however. If you really care about them, which you should not, you can run
Survival also needs some form of finisher, but this isn’t what you would
traditionally think of as a finisher. What I mean is that you need a card that when it
hits the table and does its thing, you’ve likely won the game. My choice is Orcish
Settlers. Combined with Rofellos or just on its own, Settlers is that nail in the coffin
that puts you far ahead. It’s how you beat just about everything. It’s an entire ATS
deck rolled into one card. Even eating one or two lands buys a significant amount of
time. The reason is that when Settlers hits, someone using selective draw like
Brainstorm or Sleight of Hand will be pulling up threats or answers instead of more
mana. You catch them with their pants down because they think they are prepared for
their mana needs. Once you Settle an entire half of the board, winning is just about
inevitable.
Be careful to avoid traditional finishers. Things like Kodama of the North Tree,
Deranged Hermit and Shivan Wurm are simply not needed; you already have Baloths and
Rootwallas to actually go in and kill. Orcish Settlers makes sure that your opponent
doesn’t try anything tricky while you are finishing the job. There’s no need for some
type of evasive, trampling ultrakiller because you’ll end up killing with whatever is
handy. In previous incarnations of the deck, I had Blastoderms and Phantom Centaurs,
among others, in the finishing slot. However, all they did was attack. Some of them were
really good at attacking too! As the deck was tuned, they were squeezed out because I
found that I would rather be getting a card that affected the board than something that
beat. They do, however, make fine sideboard cards.
Survival also needs some disruption. Chalice of the Void is simply the best card for
the job. It buys a bit of time versus combo if you set it for 0 or 1, and it has this
cute habit of absolutely shutting down decks at times. BW Deadguy rolls to Chalice at 2
– you can safely set it here and cut off your Survivals because the rest of your deck is
generally strong enough to win without Survival against BW. Threshold and Burn both cry
about Chalice at 1. Chalice represents a great deal of card advantage for you. Survival
has a varied mana curve, so it is unlikely that it will be harmed by Chalice, and with
the potential to shut down 16 or more cards in an opponent’s deck, it’s like a sick kind
of ultra-discard spell. The other important thing about Chalice is that the numbers you
will be cutting off will likely not affect you that much in the match. Chalice at 1 is
inconsequential versus Threshold, because your Rootwallas will be outclassed quickly and
Vial has either come down already or will never be hitting the table. Just be careful
about setting it blindly against unfamiliar decks; it’s usually better to wait until the
game progresses a little and see what kind of cards you need to cut off and then adjust
your strategy accordingly. Aether Vial can go a long way in ameliorating the
restrictions that Chalice puts on your board as well.
Don’t think that Chalice can make combo a good matchup for you though. It is the
best of a bad lot, and it stays in the maindeck because it has plenty of utility outside
of combo. Chalice, at best, will save you a few turns to either attack in with a lot of
creatures or hopefully find the next step in locking the opponent out. If you expect
that you are facing combo, mulliganing into Chalice isn’t a bad idea at all.
While the deck might look similar to RGSA, there are distinct differences in the
card selection and playstyle. The attempt with this deck is to make a pile of synergy
and make sure that all the non-creature cards are sources of tremendous card advantage
(Chalice of the Void being an example of this). When playing the deck, it’s often a good
idea to neutralize the opponent’s board before actually trying to attack in for a win. I
can’t count the number of games I’ve lost to Goblins because I just attack in instead of
blowing up their Vials and lands. Against most Legacy decks, you have to win a board
resource war before you can really safely commit to attacking, or the opponent will play
out Goblin Ringleader or Exalted Angel off the top of their library and you’ll be in for
hard times.
Playing Green and Red means you have the opportunity to bring in some seriously
destructive sideboard cards. The one that comes to mind immediately is Choke. Many decks
will bring in Survival-specific hate like Tormod’s Crypt or Pithing Needle and then be
absolutely demolished by Choke. I like to run three in my board, and if there’s space
and the metagame is full of Blue aggro-control, then a fourth is fine.
Survival also has access to Price of Progress, which is just about the most amazing
out-of-left-field win condition there is. Obviously, it’s impossible to lose against
Land.dec with Price of Progress. The same advantage that Choke has applies to Price; an
opponent will not be expecting it and will have planned to answer Survival instead. Some
games can simply dissolve into letting an opponent hit the necessary amount of lands and
then Pricing them out. Ouch, the price is wrong, Bob! Combined with your Green
Beats plan, Price can swing the combo match a little bit closer to fair if it hits for 4
or 8 damage. The most important part of playing Price is playing it at the right time;
the opponent won’t have seen Wastelands in the first game and will be fetching and
playing dual lands and other nonbasics in the next game. Your job is to maximize Price
when it hits, because it will only be a surprise once.
As mentioned earlier, I like to run a few more artifact-killers on the board.
Naturalize and Krosan Grip, while unsearchable with Survival, have plenty of uses. Both
can kill an Isochron Scepter imprinted with Orim’s Chant, for example. They are also
fine against Humility, which can be a backbreaking card at times. If you are more
inclined to use creatures, then check out Hooligan and Orangutan and make the decision
about what is right for you. In the current metagame, I’d be fine with one or two extra
on the board. Viridian Zealot is also a strong card, though it is mana-hungry and
doesn’t actually deal with Humility.
Against black-based decks, there are three options: Compost, Phantom Centaur and
Blastoderm. Compost is usually disappointing for me; I’d rather be laying threats than
recouping lost cards. Blastoderm is amazing with Anger or just by itself, but can still
be chump-blocked and lacks evasion or trample. Centaur is where the money is at. It
cruises in for insane amounts of damage or forms an impenetrable wall. Phantom Centaur
is also a strong general creature to have on the board; it is going to survive a lot of
creature combat and can create very advantageous board positions against aggro decks.
It’s also a bit more useful against the random decks that you will face all day long.
And what is a sideboard without Goblins answers? Goblin Pyromancer in the maindeck
is a very strong option for dealing with the Little Red Men. A second one on the board
can be useful, as can Goblin Sharpshooter or extra copies of Mogg Fanatic or Flametongue
Kavu. The latter options are, again, strong versus the wide variety of decks that you
will face, and so I favor them.
I usually don’t mess around with graveyard removal, because in G/R, that means
Tormod’s Crypt, which means a one-shot card that I cannot tutor for. There are usually
fine ways to deal with graveyard-based problems that pop up without needing to sweep
away the graveyard in any case. However, Loaming Shaman is an excellent card to have on
the board if one expects a lot of Ichorid and Threshold. Against most decks however, it
ends up being lackluster, so run it only if you have a good enough reason to devote
sideboard space to it.
In any case, I would feel very comfortable running a sideboard that started with:
3 Choke
4 Price of Progress
1 Uktabi Orangutan
1 Flametongue Kavu
I’ve compiled an appendix that lists, to my knowledge, the best maindeck and
sideboard creatures for Survival. Feel free to pluck cards from the list and work them
in as you see fit.
The Matchups, OR: Get Ready To Insult Me Over The Internet
I’m not a big fan of favorable/unfavorable dichotomies. Instead, I will be
presenting the problem cards from popular decks and your strong cards against them. I’ll
also be giving just a vague enough explanation of how the match goes so that I don’t
draw fire from henpeckers and retain my dignity.
Goblins:
The match for all time. To make it short, Goblins wins if it Wastelands or Rishadan
Ports you for a few turns while putting counters on its Aether Vials. Survival wins if
it gets basic land and Aether Vial or Survival. You must absolutely kill Goblin Warchief
and Aether Vial as soon as possible. In the long game, Survival almost always wins
because it can recur Baloths or Pyromancer. The way to really seal the game against
Goblins is to kill their Aether Vials first and then try to kill even one or two lands
with Orcish Settlers. Goblins is deceptively mana-hungry so you can completely shut them
out around turn 8 or 9 if you can make it there. Sideboard out Chalices and bring in
Goblins-specific hate and anything that’s better than a Chalice. This is a good time to
remind you that when building your sideboard, have four things to bring in for Chalice
in the matchups where you don’t need it. If you have Centaurs or Blastoderms on the
board, now is a good time to bring them in.
Threshold:
Oh wow, you murder this deck. Chalice is a beating, and resolving Survival, Vial or
Sylvan Library can all be game over very quickly. Postboard it gets even better with
Choke and Price of Progress. The key thing is to avoid their counters if you can.
Threshold is generally slow enough that you can play a turn slower to avoid Daze. For
example, play Survival on the third turn instead of the second one. I know, playing
around a card they might not have seems weak, but you have to make sure that they cannot
use their early-game advantage to slow you just enough to assure answers for all of your
threats. Postboard, you want to bring in the goodies while siding out what you can do
without; this is a real sideboarding crunch, actually. I like to board out a quantity of
Basking Rootwallas, Sakura-Tribe Elders and sometimes a basic Forest. It’s not essential
to bring in artifact-killers unless you think your opponent is wise to your Price of
Progress strategy and has answers for Choke and Survival postboard. Pithing Needle can’t
stop your sideboard cards and both of those generally translate into complete strategy
superiority.
Landstill:
This can be a tough match, and I think it goes to the better player. You are
equipped with Aether Vial and Genesis, and it will be through one of these two that you
win. The trick is to avoid overextending into some sort of mass removal trap while
putting pressure on. In a good game, Landstill will have useless Wastelands and
counterspells while you Vial out progressively bigger threats. In a bad game, Landstill
will have the answers to all of your threats while you struggle to draw something to put
you over. Luckily, the sideboard completely favors you in the form of Choke and Price of
Progress. It’s usually enough to bring in just Choke, because you’ll have to cut good
cards to run anything else. If you are facing four-color Landstill though, it might be
worthwhile to side out Baloths and bring in Price of Progress if you think it’s possible
to catch the opponent. I never side out Basking Rootwallas because they make recovering
from mass removal into a simple affair. Try to leave them in your deck until you need
them and hold off on Survivaling for cards until the opponent’s endstep so that you can
get the most effective threats.
Truffle Shuffle:
This can be a rough match. They have the right combination of discard and land
destruction to slow you down greatly. Postboard, you can plan to beat them with Price of
Progress if you think you can swing it, and Chalice of the Void at 3 cuts off much of
their more dangerous spells. Keep in mind the adage of there being only wrong answers
and no wrong threats; sometimes a consistent attacker like a Rootwalla can go the
distance. It’s essential to hold back some creatures in the face of mass removal. Think
of this matchup as Landstill but they have a lot better cards than Landstill does
against you and you can’t depend on Choke evening the score.
B/W Deadguy:
This match was a lot harder before the deck ran 23 lands. You’ll want to land Aether
Vial and Sakura-Tribe Elder early and make sure to keep a hand with plenty of mana
sources. BW has two strategies – resource denial and attacking. They cannot do both at
once. If they are ripping apart your hand and manabase, then chances are you have time
to stabilize because there’s no pressure on the board. If they are attacking, you can
set up the Survival engine and bury them under Baloths. In any case, beware of Hypnotic
Specter, which can cruise through with flying for plenty of damage and cards. Your best
scenario is an Aether Vial on the table and Genesis in the graveyard in this match.
Don’t let the doomsaying fool you though; I am confident that Survival has an even or
favorable match against BW Deadguy, because your threat density is so high. Don’t
underestimate Sylvan Library in this matchup either, as it is an almost unanswerable way
to fix your draws so you can lay more lands than they can destroy. When sideboarding,
gauge the strength of the cards you are bringing in versus Chalice of the Void. While
Chalice is not amazing here, it can be a deciding factor and can cut off a lot of cards
in BW Deadguy. If you are keeping it to set at 2, make sure that there are enough
threats left to win with. If you are taking Chalices out, then bringing in Flametongue
Kavu and Phantom Centaur will make the match quite smooth. Unless your opponent is
running an absurd amounts of nonbasics though, Price of Progress can stay on the board.
They have a great matchup against you. If you can, get Chalice for 1 down.
Postboard, try to Choke to buy enough time. The best strategy here is to not worry about
Tide because it is played less and less, meaning you will probably not encounter it in a
tournament setting. If you do, lose like a gentleman. Not the greatest thing to hear but
it’s the truth.
Dark Ritual-based combo:
Another bad matchup for Survival. Plan on getting a Chalice for 0 down and actively
mulligan into one. It will buy a few turns of time to get Baloths and Spike Feeders out,
which require two more Storm copies for Tendrils of Agony. And they attack as well! Not
a spectacular match but every now and then you can stall to Choke them out or use Price
of Progress or just apply Baloths to the target zone.
43 Land.dec:
Price of Progress, apply directly to the forehead.
Price of Progress, apply directly to the forehead.
Price of Progress, apply directly to the forehead.
Fish decks:
Scary in the sense that they have efficient creatures like you do that are also
backed up by counterspells. Not so scary in the sense that just about all of your
creatures are bigger than theirs and your sideboard beats theirs up. Flametongue Kavu is
a superstar here. Try to bait out counters with other threats before attempting
Survival, because that can make the game much easier. Have artifact removal close at
hand for their Jittes and Vials and board out Chalices because they’re pretty
ineffective here.
The Mirror and Near-Mirror:
The early game in the mirror involves who gets Aether Vial on the board. The midgame
depends on who gets Survival of the Fittest on the board. The lategame depends on who
has more mana, but really it depends on who can neutralize the opposing Survival. You
can win if you both have Survivals out by getting to your Orcish Settlers and cutting
back their mana. The opposing deck will win if it has Viridian Zealot or another
enchantment-killing creature maindecked. If they are not running Aether Vial, then you
probably win, however, because you have effectively double the mana. This match looks
like two players doing their own thing for four turns until one or the other takes a
really long turn and shuts the opponent out of the game. It usually goes to the person
who has more mana on the table. This is a match where repeatable graveyard removal is
impressive. If the opponent has black mana producers out, be wary of losing key cards
like Genesis and play your Squees effectively.
For the rest of the field, your maindeck or sideboard will generally be superior.
One solves what the other does not.
Well that’s how to build and play Survival of the Fittest decks. With this
information, you will be able to create your own takes on it if you care to. I don’t
think Survival is the best deck in the format based on its poor matchups with combo, but
unless your metagame is positively infested with combo, you’ll do very well with this
deck. It’s quite a lot of fun to play and as long as you don’t over-do your tech, you
can adjust the maindeck in subtle ways to make sure that you are prepared for whatever
will come your way.
–Doug Linn
Team Meandeck
Hi-Val on the interwebs
Thanks to my teammates and the Legacy Adepts at TheManaDrain for their help.
Appendix 1:
Sample Survival deck that has a decent shot versus combo:
2 Spike Feeder
4 Aether Vial
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Mana Leak
1 Man-o’-War
1 Eternal Witness
1 Quirion Ranger
3 Glowrider
1 Tradewind Rider
3 Force of Will
4 Sage of Epityr
4 Meddling Mage
1 Genesis
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
4 Survival of the Fittest
1 Masticore
7 Forest
2 Wooded Foothills
4 Windswept Heath
4 Savannah
4 Tropical Island
A good gameplan involves being able to stall for a little with Glowrider or Meddling
Mage and then using Survival to play more of them. This consistently locks out combo and
control decks, but it just about never wins against any sort of aggro. It does support
seven counters but they only buy time for Survival to land and do its thing. I’m
including this because it shows the flexibility that Survival has as well as
demonstrating that when you focus on a part of the metagame, the whole will suffer.
Appendix 2:
A comprehensive, but not exhaustive, list of playable creatures in Survival decks.
If I were to splash for anything, it would be for Black, which gives discard and
graveyard removal options that other colors cannot offer.
Green:
Granger Guildmage
Thornscape Battlemage
Ana Battlemage
Scavenger Folk
Elvish Lyrist
Viridian Zealot
Wild Mongrel
Phantom Centaur
Blastoderm
Dosan, The Falling Leaf
Ichneumon Druid
Spike Feeder
Spike Weaver (do not run Spore Frog. It is awful. Weaver is much better if you need a
Fog effect)
Wall of Roots
Wall of Blossoms
Brawn
Arrogant Wurm
Werebear
Glissa Sunseeker
Quirion Ranger
River Boa
Tinder Wall
Wood Elves (very helpful for grabbing a singleton Taiga to power up Anger)
Ifh-Biff Efreet (excellent against Faerie Stompy)
Blue:
Ovinomancer (combine with Anger, put comes-into-play ability on the stack and then tap
it in response)
Man-O-War
Tradewind Rider
Merfolk Looter
Gilded Drake
Ophidian
Morphling
Wonder
Black:
Ghost-Lit Stalker (channeling this thing is nuts)
Withered Wretch
Crypt Creeper
Carrion Beetles
Mesmeric Fiend
Ravenous Rats
Cao-Cao, Lord of Wei
Sadistic Hypnotist
Gloomdrifter
Coffin Queen
Dark Confidant
Plaguebearer
Thrull Surgeon
Red:
Fire Imp
Ghitu Slinger
Tin-Street Hooligan
Keldon Vandals
Avalanche Riders
Ravenous Baboons
Hearth Kami
Viashino Heretic
Grim Lavamancer
Gorilla Shaman
White:
Glowrider
Mangara of Corondor
Devout Witness
Ronom Unicorn (if only all Unicorns were this playable…)
Artifact / Multicolored:
Duplicant
Mystic Snake
Meddling Mage
Loxodon Hierarch
Triskelion
Masticore
Goblin Legionnaire