Deep Analysis - Big Mana Blue

I don’t mean big in the popularity sense (which is not to say it’s unpopular), not big in the “My Battle of Wits deck is big” sense… no, I mean big as in big effects.

Sundering Titan costs eight mana. That’s twice as much as Fact or Fiction, and nearly three times as much as Psychatog. Eight. Sideways infinity, if you will.

Eight mana is a big damn fortune in Constructed Magic, but a 7/10 that slings a free Stone Rain on his way in (or two, or four) is also a big damn deal against a lot of decks. And while recent Standard creations have had strategies that boiled down to “pile up mana and make Big Plays with it” – certainly Solar Flare and U/R Tron fit this bill – the plan of churning out mana in order to power up an entire strategy, as opposed to just a single card such as Tooth and Nail or Dragonstorm, hasn’t been popular in Extended since the days of Tinker.

I think the broad strategy one’s deck employs to win carries a great deal of weight in this Extended environment, and these Big Mana Blue (White) lists seem like a good place to start for an in-depth look into one such strategy and the decks that implement it. Before I go into specifics, though, I’m going to do a quick overview of the broad strategies that can be found in this environment, so that you know what I mean when I say “strategy.”

The Aggro Decks
Boros: As perhaps the most focused aggro deck in the format, my plan is to attack your life total as aggressively as possible with cheap attackers and burn. If I play any disruption at all, it is most likely either Molten Rain or a sideboard card such as Orim’s Chant, Pyrostatic Pillar, or Sulfuric Vortex.

Affinity: Same as Boros, except with more explosive and powerful creatures and less burn.

Ichorid: I want to discard cards with dredge and use them to fill my graveyard with Ichorids, Deep Analyses, Wonders, and more dredgers. Then I’ll flashback Cabal Therapies to disrupt you and win by attacking with some combination of 2/2 flyers (Putrid Imp), Wild Mongrels, Zombie Tokens, recurring Black Spark Elementals, and Psychatogs.

Aggro Loam: I play mana-accelerating creatures and attack with fatties like Werebear, Terravore, and sometimes Wild Mongrel to deal most of my damage. In the meantime, I use Life from the Loam to draw cards using Cycling lands, and position myself to break Devastating Dreams and / or Seismic Assault.

Goblins: I want to play lots of Goblins quickly, with the goal of dealing backbreaking amounts of damage using Goblin Piledriver and / or Goblin Pyromancer, or setting up powerful board positions via Empty the Warrens, Goblin Sharpshooter, or Siege-Gang Commander.

Flow Deck Wins: My strategy is the same as Boros, except less focused on speed and more focused on utility. I play card advantage generators like Dark Confidant, Call of the Herd, Tin-Street Hooligan, and Shadow Guildmage, and disruption like Destructive Flow and (usually sideboarded) Cabal Therapy.

Gaea’s Might Get There: Extremely similar to Boros, but with a combo twist: I play off-color Ravnica duals that power up Gaea’s Might and Tribal Flames, and Boros Swiftblades to abuse pump effects such as Might and Armadillo Cloak.

The Midrange Decks
Trinket Angel: If you’re combo or control, I want to disrupt you with Stifle, Meddling Mage, and Counterbalance long enough to let my medium-sized creatures take you low enough to be burned out or swarm-attacked to death. If you’re aggro, I want to use my assortment of anti-aggro cards (Jitte, Helix, etc.) to gain the upper hand while otherwise trading my 2/2 dorks for yours.

G/W Haterator: I’m going to accelerate out some three-power attackers or equipment for my small fry, then fight with them while setting up a hoser such as Worship plus Troll Ascetic / Vitu-Ghazi, or a timely Gilded Light or Orim’s Chant against TEPS.

Macey Rock: Same as Haterator, but with general-purpose disruption such as Duress, Cabal Therapy, and Mesmeric Fiend instead of specific hosers.

The Combo Decks
TEPS: I’m going to ignore most of what you’re doing, and just try to play a bunch of spells to generate a lethal Tendrils of Agony or Empty the Warrens around turn 3 or 4.

Tooth and Nail: I want to ramp up to nine mana using the Urzatron (which I can tutor up using Sylvan Scrying and Reap and Sow) as quickly as possible, in order to entwine a Tooth and Nail. The Tooth will usually fetch Kiki-Jiki and Sky Hussar in order to attack with infinite 4/3 hasted flyers, though I have a less fragile backup plan involving fatties such as Sundering Titan.

Dirty Kitty: I plan to play Fecundity, sacrifice a lot of Goblins to Skirk Prospector to draw cards and generate mana and Storm, and then either win with Empty the Warrens plus Warchief (and usually a Piledriver or two) or Grapeshot. Alternately, I can just play aggro with the basic Goblins strategy if I don’t have Fecundity.

The Control Decks
Big Mana Blue: I’m going to use the Urzatron or Cloudposts copied with Vesuva to generate tons of mana, then play big, game-breaking effects like Mindslaver, Decree of Justice, and Sundering Titan.

Scepter-Chant: I’m going to try and lock you with Isochron Scepter and Orim’s Chant, plus eventually Teferi. If I can’t get that, I have a backup plan of using Isochron Scepter with something else imprinted (generally Fire/Ice, Lightning Helix, or Counterspell) to put me enough ahead that I can win with just Teferi or Exalted Angel.

Rock: I’ll disrupt you and gain card advantage periodically while attacking with fairly large (Baloth-sized) creatures and / or equipment-wielding small guys that you can’t deal with because you’re still recovering from my disruption. If that doesn’t work quickly and we get to the long game, I’ll have Genesis recursion.

Sound good?

Okay, now let’s focus on Big Mana Blue. For the record, I’m lumping all the Tron and Cloudpost decks together under this category because they are so strategically similar, and I’ll mainly be referencing the popular Blue/White versions even though the archetype first appeared in Extended as (and may yet return to) a Blue/Red deck.

The upside to Big Mana Blue’s “play big effects” strategy is that you can win the game with as little as one card (Titan and Decree of Justice in particular), without necessarily having to execute an explicit combo first. This means you don’t have to devote a ton of slots to your win condition; whereas a deck like, say, Boros dedicates practically all of its nonland card choices to its win condition of attacking the opponent’s life total, Big Mana Blue needs only a handful of “this can actually kill you” cards because drawing one or two of them will usually suffice. This grants the BMB player the freedom to allocate most of his card slots to disruption and consistency instead, which is a fairly standard choice made by control decks in general.

Before Sudden Shock and Tormod’s Crypt scared many of them away, Psychatog players used this edge to great effect. If all you need are four Psychatogs in your list to win the game, the rest of your deck can be jam-packed with countermagic, card draw, removal, and anything else you need to set up a lethal Psychatog attack.

While the BMB decks’ win condition packages are not quite as efficient as “4 Psychatog,” they have a big leg up on the old Tog decks in that their midgame control capabilities are dramatically superior once they assemble their Tron or make their third Locus. That’s important because neither strategy can just Win The Game by playing its finisher – at least, not in the sense that a combo deck can. Being control decks, they need to have some degree of control over the game state in order for their finishers to close the deal; you can’t all-in your Psychatog against Putrefy mana without countermagic ready, nor does crashing Sundering Titan into Troll Ascetic tend to win you the game. It’s this ability to set up a “finisher-friendly” game state very quickly that makes BMB such an attractive control strategy, even though it demands 8-12 slots worth of colored mana production in sacrifice.

There are three approaches to BMB that are in the spotlight right now, and the list that has gotten the most press so far is Shaheen Soorani U/W Tron from Worlds:

U/W Tron

Shaheen Soorani

Test deck on 01-28-2007

Extended

Creatures (6)

Lands (23)

Spells (31)

Sideboard

Aside from the unusual pair of Solemn Simulacrums, this is a straightforward implementation of Big Mana Blue. There are several key features worth examining here.

Mana
Being a Tron deck, four of each Urza land is expected. 23 lands is the gold standard for hitting two mana on turn 2; this is important whenever Signets are involved, and Shaheen essentially played five of those thanks to a Talisman of Progress. Aside from the usual “more mana faster” benefits, the Signets accelerate out four-mana all-stars Wrath of God and Fact or Fiction a full turn early, bring Condescend online as a more reliable hard counter (even on the draw), and provide crucial colored mana to a deck sacrificing twelve colored mana spots to Urza lands and a thirteenth to Academy Ruins. Counting the lands, Eternal Dragons, Signets, and the one Talisman, Shaheen has fourteen White sources and fifteen Blue sources, each of which can be ready for use by turn 3.

Digging
Unlike Tooth and Nail, Big Mana Blue does not have the luxury of locating its Tron set or multiple Cloudpost equivalents with searchers like Sylvan Scrying. Nevertheless, these lands must be assembled, and yet the Blue deck cannot afford to sit still and play card drawers while ignoring what the opponent is doing. For this reason, cards that disrupt the opponent while drawing cards or Scrying – most notably Remand, Condescend, and Repeal – are exceptionally valuable in this archetype. Shaheen played a full four copies of Fact or Fiction for brute-force card drawing, plus supplemental diggers Remand, Repeal, Condescend, Renewed Faith, and even (sometimes) Decree of Justice and Solemn Simulacrum.

Disruption
While old-guard control decks in the style of “Draw, Go” would take complete control of the game and win with a slow, resilient finisher, modern Extended control decks tend towards managing the opponent long enough to put him away with a powerful effect. As such, Shaheen’s card choices indicate more of a desire to generate a short-term advantage than long-term inevitability. His only “traditional” control cards are Wrath of God and Eternal Dragon, although Condescend does a pretty solid Dismiss impersonation when you’ve got twelve mana on the board.

Finishers
Decree of Justice has a whole host of advantages over U/R staple Demonfire, and it’s not hard to see why having an “X” spell for a finisher that cycles in the early game is desirable in a deck like this. Eternal Dragon provides additional sources of critical colored mana in the early turns, plus the finishing and inevitability features we’re all familiar with by now. Second only to a Mindslaver / Academy Ruins lock, an unchecked Exalted Angel is Shaheen’s most sure-fire way to close against a deck playing burn. As always, the Angel brings with it the “oops, I win” sequence of turn 3 morph, turn 4 unmorph that can steal games from any archetype.

At the other end of the U/W Tron spectrum are the Chrome Mox / Thirst for Knowledge implementations, one of which Mike Flores recently showcased. Mike referenced Dan “Top 8 in Philly with Tooth and Nail” Dargenio as explaining that “Chrome Mox is a new innovation in the U/W decks to try to remedy the dismal Boros matchup by speeding things up.” However, this strategy is far from new; in fact, 50% of the U/W Tron decks that won five out of the six Extended rounds at Worlds (that is, the one U/W Tron deck to achieve that record besides Shaheen’s – Kuniyoshi Ishii’s inexplicably overlooked list) ran with this strategy.

I’d like to jump into editorial mode real quick and state that chalking up the Mox / Thirst plan as “catering to the Boros matchup” strikes me as very superficial. To me, big Mana Blue’s biggest challenge is moving from competing in a (non-Mirrodin) Standard environment to a very fast Extended without compromising the deck composition that allows it to succeed. Before Affinity was banned, no Standard deck but Tooth and Nail (and its turn 4 Platinum Angel capabilities) would touch the Urzatron when Mirrodin was legal, and Ichorid goldfishes even faster than Affinity did – while casting Cabal Therapy. TEPS also kills around turn 4 and is not very well disrupted by one or two Remands, Repeals, or Condescends. Boros is no sloth either, but it’s not like Mox and Thirst are an innovation that cropped up just for Boros. When your fastest opening is “Land, go; land, Signet, go” while Ichorid is milling a third of its library, Affinity is playing a +6/+0 Cranial Plating, TEPS is ready to go off next turn, and Scepter-Chant is already dropping its namesake, you’re being outclassed. If your deck’s strength is the late game and most of your losses are coming from “Kamigawa / Ravnica Standard-speed” draws in an unforgiving Extended environment, adding Chrome Mox and reasonably-priced card draw to compensate makes sense regardless of specific matchups. Anyway, let’s move on.

Besides the addition of the Thirst / Mox combination, Ishii’s list also plays a different suite of finishers from Shaheen’s. Although both players agreed on three copies of Decree of Justice, Ishii played one Eternal Dragon and one Meloku to Shaheen’s two dragons, a pair of Sundering Titans in place of Shaheen’s Exalted Angels, and no Solemn Simulacrums.

Variations in card choice like these underscore some interesting differences about the two decks’ approaches to the aggro matchups. Ishii plays three Chrome Mox, an extra Repeal, and the fourth Wrath to give his deck more early-game speed and a touch more disruption against aggressive strategies, while still playing only cards that are strong in nearly every matchup. He also has a more aggro-friendly countermagic suite, with three Memory Lapses replacing two of Shaheen’s Condescends and the fourth Remand. Neither Condescend nor Remand is as strong as Lapse when on the draw against Boros decks, as they will often play another one-drop on their second turn with an extra mana open in order to pay for Condescend, or to replay it should it meet a Remand, and the same is true of Ichorid’s Cabal Therapies and Affinity’s occasional one-mana Frogmites. While Ishii scrapes together a pile of minor advantages like these, Shaheen simply plays Exalted Angel instead of Sundering Titan and makes room for a pair of Renewed Faiths to give himself a leg up on the fast decks whenever he draws one of these cards.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Ishii caters more to early-game consistency than does Shaheen. While both decks have 28 mana producers, Shaheen has 23 lands and “five” Signets while Ishii has only four Signets plus a more mulligan-friendly 21 lands and three Moxen. (You can’t generally keep a hand with one land and any number of Signets, whereas a land and a Mox plus a Signet or two should be fine.) Ishii’s card drawing comes online earlier as well, with four Thirst for Knowledges elbowing their way into the list in place of a Fact or Fiction, a Mindslaver, and the two Renewed Faiths. Again, the choice seems to be philosophical; while it is desirable to maximize one’s ability to draw multiple Fact or Fictions in some matchups, it is rare that one will have enough time to cast two against an aggro deck, and Ishii’s lifegain-free list has no way to bail itself out of such a clunky draw like Shaheen’s does.

The new kid on the block where Big Mana Blue is concerned has to be the new Cloudpost / Vesuva creation that came out of Time Spiral. Mike Flores made the bold claim that “The Cloudpost decks you will see are basically improved UrzaTron decks,” but was quick to qualify it by adding “Cloudpost and Vesuva are powerful in concert but they come into play tapped; in addition you can draw Vesuva prior to Cloudpost, and it is just worse than anything else in that spot.” As Mike’s article was more of an overview of new archetypes than a detailed look into a comparison of the two decks, I’d like to discuss the implications of Tron versus Post in a little more detail.

At its simplest, the argument for Cloudpost is as follows.

4 Cloudpost
4 Vesuva
4 whatever lands you like

is better than

4 Urza’s Tower
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Urza’s Mine

Let’s take a look at Daniel Neely’s list:

U/W 8-Post

Daniel Neeley

3rd Place at Pro Tour Qualifier on 01-07-2007

Extended

Creatures (5)

Lands (23)

Spells (32)

Sideboard

This has elements of both Ishii’s and Soorani’s Tron lists (Exalted Angel, three Wrath, three Slaver, and five Signets instead of Moxen from Shaheen, but Thirst for Knowledge, Memory Lapse, and one Dragon from Kuniyoshi), but plays Triskelion instead of Sundering Titan, and the Cloudpost suite instead of the Urzatron. Because his list is, by and large, comparable to a U/W Tron build except for the namesake lands, his decision to play Cloudpost appears to stem from the simple belief that it is overall superior to the Tron.

If you draw a Cloudpost and a Vesuva, or just two Cloudposts, you have played two lands and gotten four mana, for a net of +2 mana compared to what you would have gotten from regular land drops. A third Vesuva or Post will give you nine mana from three lands, for a net of +6 mana. Assembling all three Tron pieces will get you seven mana from three lands, for a total of only +4 mana, and two out of three Tron pieces will get you nothing special at all. I’m honestly not sure how to run the numbers on which plan yields more mana on average, but there is obviously something to be said for the fact that two Cloudpost equivalents will confer a nice two-mana boost, while two Tron pieces never will.

As for the comes-into-play-tapped argument, there’s not much downside to Cloudpost coming into play tapped on turn 1 unless you’re playing Chrome Mox, as no Tron list I’ve seen has any significant number of first-turn plays otherwise. If you did manage to lay a Cloudpost turn 1, a subsequent Vesuva (or second Post) still gives you as much mana as a regular land drop would have, as the loss of mana from the newcomer arriving tapped is offset by the old one producing an immediate +1 mana.

All these potential downsides, however, jump right back into the fore when you don’t have the first-turn Cloudpost. Now you’ve got a mana-hungry deck with eight comes-into-play-tapped lands swimming around inside it, any Vesuvas you draw are little more than Coastal Towers or Legendary Land-killers (unless you hold them until a Cloudpost shows up, that is – and if you’re in a situation where you have to put them on the table, you’re essentially cutting Cloudposts from your deck), and to make matters worse, you’re already on the ropes because you’ve yet to complete the first of the two-or-three land drops (i.e. turns) it will take you to assemble Big Mana via multiple Cloudpost equivalents.

In this regard, Tron decks are much better at recovering from suboptimal starts. While the Cloudpost deck drops greatly in power level without its first-turn namesake, Tron’s topdecked lands remain perfectly functional (as in, they don’t come into play tapped or gravitate towards staying off the board like Vesuva) even if Urza’s Tower wasn’t in play on the first turn. Moreover, Tron recovers much more quickly from an incorrect sequence. If Post draws multiple Vesuvas before hitting a Cloudpost, it will have to wait until it plays that first Locus to even begin generating Big Mana over the course of the next three turns, while Tron can coil up with two Urza’s Towers and a Power Plant in play, just waiting to strike for the jugular the moment a Mine shows up.

Then there’s the issue of the Tron taking up twelve slots versus Cloudpost’s eight. On one hand, it is more difficult to assemble three distinct Tron pieces than a pair of Cloudpost equivalents, but on the other hand the two Posts – while easier to locate – only net you +2 mana to the Tron’s +4. Three Posts gives you +6 mana to the Tron’s mere +4 (for three lands in both cases), but then again it is more difficult to assemble three Cloudpost equivalents than it is three unique Tron pieces. In summary:

Easy: two Cloudpost equivalents for +2 mana
Medium: three unique Tron pieces for +4 mana
Hard: three Cloudpost equivalents for +6 mana

This is what makes comparing the two manabases so difficult; it’s easier for Cloudpost to net a small mana boost, but harder for it to get Big Mana – but then again, once it does hit that third Locus, its baseline Big Mana is bigger than Tron’s. To be fair, though, the fact that Tron players have a full twelve Urza lands in their decks means that once their Goliath is online, each additional Tron piece they draw will confer additional mana bonsues, whereas it’s unlikely that Cloudpost decks will locate a fourth Post equivalent without any kind of tutoring. So while Cloudpost’s on-paper advantage of the three Post equivalents out-producing the three Tron pieces (+6 to +4), Tron needs only an extra Urza’s Tower or a pair of other Urza lands in order to catch up with Cloudpost’s +6 boost.

The final advantage of Cloudpost is the four mana slots that are freed up in comparison to the Tron package. What do you do with those slots? Steve Locke used the extra four Blue producers to justify including Counterspell in his Big Mana Blue deck, while playing Talismans instead of Signets in order to accommodate both the Counterspells and a playset of Spell Snares.

Mark Hendrickson, on the other hand, dropped his White count below Wrath of God-supporting levels (but with enough juice left in the tank to accommodate a late-game Decree of Justice) to make room for a full ten basic Islands alongside his eight-slot Big Mana package. These allowed for three maindeck copies of the powerful Vedalken Shackles, the Blue-intensive Teferi, and a great deal of maneuverability should a Blood Moon hit the table. He also included a pair of Azorius Chanceries, presumably in order to (slowly, but nevertheless effectively) reset Vesuvas that had to be played before he’d found a Cloudpost for them to copy.

For the most part, it seems the additional slots have been put to work improving color consistency, but innovative (greedy?) uses of these four freed-up slots, such as splashing in a third color, seem to be largely untapped thus far.

Regardless of Tron versus Cloudpost, Chrome Mox or no, and Renewed Faith / Exalted Angel versus scattered aggro-friendly tweaks, all the Big Mana Blue decks have but two goals.

1) Disrupt the opponent while assembling a large amount of mana.
2) Do Big Things.

And there you have it: Big Mana Blue in a nutshell.

To me, experiments with Cloudpost are just the beginning for this archetype, and I’ll go on record as saying I don’t think the existing lists come close to maximizing this strategy’s potential. Where will they go from here? Time will settle that account at some future date; for now, I hope I’ve managed to paint you a clear picture of where the archetype stands at present, or at least brought you up to speed on one of the many, many viable decks in this vastly open-ended Extended environment.

See you next week!

Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]