Last week, Mike Flores incensed a lot of readers by suggesting (gasp!) that the decks from Pro Tour Honolulu might, y’know, suck a little. Pick your average deck from the tournament, even the deck that won the tournament, and in his esteemed opinion that deck… to put it lightly… sucked.
“But what about the large number of players who did well playing Deck X!” his critics would argue. “Aren’t all of these pros better than you, Michael J. ‘Not Qualified for Honolulu’ Flores?”
“But Ghost Dad cures Cancer!” Osyp cried, jumping to RidiculousHat’s defense before the Hat jumped on Mike like a trampoline (in a ridiculous style, of course).
In many cases the point was missed. The Pro Tour was the metagame in a vacuum. We are now asked to play the metagame in motion, and some things are just better than others. Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die… to Ebony Owls Netsuke, to 5/6 Cloaked Kird Apes, perhaps to a sufficiently large Maga coming into play looking to eat our face.
With Honolulu completed, and a fair amount of analysis under our belts as to what was good, what wasn’t, and more importantly why both of those played out that way… we discover that we don’t have a “wide-open metagame,” but instead one that is narrowing to include less than a dozen decks instead of more than twenty. Survival of the fittest is more than just a biological principle to explain the long-term mechanism of the concept of evolution; it’s also a tried and true intellectual principle as well… good ideas go forward, bad ideas go home and bulk up to try again, and good decks flourish where bad decks falter.
The concept that so incensed Mike’s readers, however, is that even the decks that made it to the elimination bracket might not be optimal, even though they proved that they were the cream of the crop in a field of 402 other decks. Going into the metagame, a specific principle was applied that defined the format, and going out of the tournament the metagame necessarily shifts to compensate the winners’ choices at the expense of the losers’. Magic is a game about life in motion, not stagnation, and standing still is tantamount to death when you should at the very least be making minor adjustments and alterations to streamline your deck to compensate for the alteration of the environment surrounding the deck.
Where to go from here, then, is the question. Playing intensively thus is the answer, and that is one reason I for one have kept a keen eye on the Magic Online metagame. Generally, the MTGO metagame is an interesting and twisted little thing, a few weeks behind the rest of the world and hopelessly inbred by the overexpression of deck-evolution tendencies. Playing the game of the answer to your answer to my answer will eventually lead to Iteration X of a deck, and the MTGO metagame continues to play incessantly towards that iteration when “paper Magic” stops well short of that point. After all, paper Magic doesn’t have a constantly-available profit motive like the MTGO eight-man queues, where the search for that penultimate list that presents the inbred answer to an inbred metagame can be worth a fair pile of packs and tickets once you find it. The old adage of the paper Magic community is that due to this incessantly inbred metagame, digital Magic is hopelessly behind the metagame developments, because the forces of stagnation and inbreeding have a profit motive attached to them while the forces of creativity and innovation have no greater chance for profit, and a much greater risk of failure.
MTGO is weeks behind paper Magic… usually. This week we enter the first Pro Tour Qualifier format using Standard in who knows how long, and the first encounter with the post-Honolulu metagame here in the real world where digital spellcasters have a half of a month’s jump on us. Then of course there is the slight fact that they are looking to use everything they want in just one deck, while “current” paper Standard is focusing on a 225-card format instead of a 75-card format with its four-of restrictions… and not all decks play very nicely together, as there can be infighting for cards in the most unlikely of places.
Temple Garden
The combination of Green cards and White cards show up in quite a few decks. Three different accepted variations of GhaziGlare exist: one with Glare, one with Greater Good, and one with Chord of Calling. Whether or not you splash Black mana for Putrefy may very well be decided by shaking a Magic 8-Ball, because the outcome is hazy please ask again later. Besides the “just” Green-White deck, you’ve also got Greater Gifts to consider, Rodoxon Hierarchy (B/W/G Control), and the full three-color Zoo deck.
Zoo is a tough nut to crack, and falls out of favor with many due to its own internal inconsistency. The benefits of slipping back to just two colors, Red and Green, are obvious, with fewer mulligans at the price of less outright explosive potential. For every win the Zoo deck gets that Red/Green would have lost by being a point or two shy, however, Red/Green picks up two or three by not having to mulligan down to five anywhere nearly as often just to get a hand that has the right colors of operating mana. Zoo has been effectively dismissed by most sane individuals wishing to play in the Team format, because its added explosiveness comes at a severe cost to a) the deck itself, with its mulliganing tendencies, and b) the team’s card selection as a whole, by eating more Dual Lands than it has a right to.
Perhaps in the real world where people are not three-headed giants, Zoo will be all in vogue, but in a format where you want consistency and not to throw elbows at your teammates’ decks you will be more likely to see Heezy Street than actual Zoo.
Rodoxon Hierarchy is the Beach House deck, and a very impressive list of players put up a very un-impressive string of finishes with a deck crammed full of high-power cards. Any of its potential gains by adding the third color are sadly negligible, as the four-drop of choice in the better-placing Black/White Control decks had Transmute instead of the Elephant Cleric’s ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. In addition to throwing elbows in terms of card selection, by asking for three dual lands instead of just one, you just don’t get anything back results-wise for your increase in colors from two to three.
Greater Gifts likewise disappointed, but unlike Rodoxon Hierarchy there is reason to believe that there is still a potential home for the deck. It can be sculpted carefully to avoid overlapping with a reasonable selection of other decks, as the key cards it asks for are similar to the Black/White Control deck’s cards but very little in addition, really just asking for some Lands and some Tops… plus one Meloku if it can be spared. Greater Gifts came prepared for much of the metagame, but I suspect was preyed upon by the board-controlling Black/White Aggro decks that can eliminate enchantments from play and force an interactive game via discard, not to mention the fact that Owling Mine is a terrible matchup for slow Green control decks like this one. It is distinctly possible that in a team environment, where a targeted metagame can be established and accommodated for, this deck may still have legs. Its placing was, on average, slightly higher than the Black/White Control decks it would be fighting for cards, and so its existence may negate the usefulness of Black/White Control.
The Ghazi-blah decks of different stripes all have a distinct purpose, and with four different varieties appearing in the Top 64 on Day 2 there is definitely cause to believe that this is something you can work with in the future. You can run GhaziGlare and Black/White Aggro and Red/Green Aggro if you really wanted to, and the fact that you can sit it down next to a lot of other decks make it a reasonably viable solution as a third deck to be added to the team. So far, Ghazi decks were not significantly present in the metagame at the Pro Tour, and have not made much of a splash after, though it is important to note that the deck has not entirely fallen off the radar at the larger MTGO events in the past few weeks… its absence could be due to lack of popularity rather than specifically due to being unsuited to the metagame.
Overgrown Tomb
Black/Green adds very little to this metagame, with the Black/Green Rock-style decks from Worlds upgraded into Black/White form. Black/Green only appears as a side addition to the decks you will be seeing in Godless Shrine, and thus shares the same role in the metagame as Temple Garden… but without being present in a deck of its own colors that is viable on its own strengths, or even present in more than one archetype that is borrowing its strengths.
Watery Grave
Perhaps a Watery Grave is present in the Greater Gifts deck, but there is no significant deck that plays Watery Grave on its own strengths. The first new archetype this dual land introduces is Eminent Domain, which had an average finish of “terrible” and a worst finish of “last place” to counterbalance its highest finish of “Top 73.” Simply put, Eminent Domain is a deck that was good at stopping two-toughness-based aggressive decks but not three, which could fight a war of mana denial with control decks as the core of its strategy. Everything Eminent Domain does, Owling Mine does better: losing against beatdown better and owning mana-hungry control decks better… and even Blue/Red Magnivore does the Eminent Domain trick better than the three-color Annex-into-Wildfire deck can do. Eminent Domain is dead, unless Adrian Sullivan has some super-secret technology he intends to unveil at Grand Prix Wisconsin this weekend… and I for one would not be holding my breath on that one making a comeback, with the high-water mark for creature toughness squeaking out of Pyroclasm range.
If it can be salvaged, expect it to do so with Wrath of God. A deck able to access both Wrath and Wildfire in its creature-sanctioning suite would be quite an impressive deck indeed, but we still require another 52 cards that work together and somehow win the match.
Sacred Foundry
Ah, at last, a Ravnica dual land that has something reasonable to contribute to the conversation!
Ignore the first fact that this goes as part of the Zoo deck, because we have already discussed the Zoo deck and included the fact that for best results one should probably be prepared to game with two colors instead of three.
Red/White begins adding something interesting, as Red/White fits nicely in Red/White/Blue, also known as the Firemane Angel control deck. It also brings into the picture the Enduring Ideal deck, but as that deck is likewise dead as a door-nail (see: Eminent Domain) we really have just the contenders that intend to use Lightning Helix for fun and profit.
I’ve been testing with the Dutch control deck for the better portion of the time available after Pro Tour Honolulu, and its selection requires at least one thing to be true about the environment and one thing to be true about the player. On the player’s side, you need to be quick enough to be able to finish your match in the time allotted to you, as it is an easy deck to pick up draws with especially if you are unfamiliar with the deck and have to think a lot about it. Its appeal for Team Standard is fairly self-evident; it is competing with U/R Tron for Steam Vents, Zoo for Sacred Foundry, any Blue deck for access to Mana Leak, Compulsive Research, and Hinder, and White-playing control decks (B/W Control, Greater Gifts) for Wrath of God. On the positive side, you need to not get mired in a quagmire of decks that not only have game 1 Cranial Extractions but somehow manage to resolve them, as was the nightmare that separated Kamiel’s excellent finish from Julien’s bottom-twenty. If Black/White Control is going to be the prevalent deck using Godless Shrine, you can expect that life may be difficult, especially if the transmuting House Guard version is the one being played.
What you get back for this is a deck that is excellent against beatdown decks, very solid against control decks, and able to lock any deck out of the game if its initial setup happens quickly. This is clearly the highest finish any deck including Zur’s Weirding as more than an incidental inclusion has ever put up, thanks to the fact that the Enduring Ideal decks of now and of yesterday only included Weirding as an after-thought to try to equalize the Epic effect, and had no intentions of casting the card by itself.
Flores called this deck “the Fungus Fires of Healing Salves,” and with the potential to cast Compulsive Research turn 3 and discard two copies of Firemane Angel for your own personal Honden of Cleansing Fire each turn this deck has definite long-game potential against beatdown decks closing with burn spells. Every turn you survive is another Shock they need to put together to finish you off, and eventually if you wait long enough they just die to an Angel while your life total has sailed safely out of reach of any eight possible cards they could have. 8 x 4 = 32, so with nothing on their board and 33 life, you can tap out to resurrect an Angel. Anything they can possibly do is worse than that, after all, and their best play is to maintain parity every turn of the game, your mana versus their three-damage spell.
Against a lot of decks in the field, even before you play Zur’s Weirding the Blue/White/Red deck has inevitability. It trades and trades and trades, keeping its life safely out of reach and finding a point of the game where it can trade without investing a card to do so, pulling up dead Angels to begin the march towards your death. Usually the Weirding will be in play by that time, ensuring the opponent has no outs… but just tapping out at that point has virtually no drawback, even without Weirding to lock the game up, unless there is a threat of Cranial Extraction or Eradicate.
However, “the deck sucks.” To update it to an established metagame, some changes have to be made. In my testing with the deck, my biggest issue came with the manabase for the deck, as I did not feel the manabase was streamlined to do what I wanted it to do. There weren’t quite as many control decks as there could have been, and the rewards to playing Boros Garrison just didn’t seem apparent to me in testing. The benefits of being able to discard Firemane Angel turn 2 didn’t convince me, the added synergy with Compulsive Research didn’t get my vote, and making it that extra bit easier to get to six or ten mana without so many lands didn’t justify it to me either. Just looking at how the mana curve played out, I kept trying to figure out when I was supposed to play those things, and never liking the answer as it became apparent, that it was best served as land number four or five in a deck with only 23 actual lands. Where Julien and Kamiel had three Steam Vents and two Sacred Foundries, I saw no reason not to start my testing with the full four of each and see how that felt.
Eight comes-into-play-tapped lands is a lot; clearly too many, as we learned to our peril back in the days of Invasion. Having the option, however, greatly increases their value, and nothing is worth more to a deck than the power of good mana-fixing. As it actually played out, the Dutch had 23 lands and four Signets, a total of 27 mana… but they are playing accelerants to good effect, ramping up their mana to allow Wrath of God as early as turn 3 or Compulsive Research backed up by Mana Leak as early as turn 4. The best time to play a Signet is turn 3, to still have two mana for Mana Leak… unless you know you’re just going to have to Wrath as fast as you can, in which case turn 2 is perfectly acceptable. However, you can only play a Signet plus have Mana Leak mana if your Signet taps for Blue, and the deck as listed splits the Signets down the middle: two you can do that with, and two you can’t.
I for one was also unenthused by Gifts Ungiven, getting the worst two of your four best cards, and the two that least accurately suit your needs of the moment. A lot of the time, it was “good,” but I wanted more from my cards; more good tempo exchanges, more contribution to my overall game-plan… more Remands than the zero being played in the deck. Whatever happened, on both sides of the deck, playing it against others and playing against it, Gifts Ungiven seemed okay but not great. Remand, however, seemed absolutely ridiculous, stalling for time or just being Time Walk, playing your game of keeping the board clear and drawing a card to help contribute to the card velocity of the deck. Eight counters seemed like not quite enough, and a bit more early game stopping power was sorely appreciated. Turning this around somehow into a decklist, I am currently at the following point with the deck:
Creatures (4)
Lands (24)
Spells (32)
White mana is a touch more precious than before, as you lose two White sources in the Boros Signets. However, you have the same number of early-game White sources, as your two Signets become two more early-game dual lands. No Blue-based deck wants its second-turn or third-turn play to be an investment in Boros Garrison, especially not in a format where more than one deck archetype is giving serious consideration to casting Boomerang (or Eye of Nowhere!) on said target land, and some people are giving serious consideration to Annexing it, some of those during game 1. In all of those situations, this land is the definition of “pants around ankles” if your opponent gets to have their way with it.
So far, this deck is clearly going to be one of the decks on my Team Unified Constructed team’s array of stunts, “even though” it costs us Zoo cards to do so… making us “have” to play the more consistent (and probably better) option by cutting down to just two colors in our Zoo-esque decks. It costs us having a Black/White Control deck with Wrath of God and a Blue/Red based deck (Izzetron, Magnivore.dec, Owling Mine), but gives us a deck that is excellent against aggro, very solid against control, and only truly vulnerable to Owling Mine as far as finding its strategy invalidated, though it’s worth noting that without the one Meloku found in the original version the deck is vulnerable to a single Cranial Extraction, thus requiring more kill conditions out of the sideboard.
With a known metagame including Owling Mine as a reasonably solid choice for a Team Standard deck, some significant numbers of either Terashi’s Grasp or Shattering Spree should be present in the sideboard, or else a new plan for beating Owling Mine must be devised. Shattering Spree does the job very nicely against Owling Mine, and anything less than three is just not enough respect for a very bad matchup. There is some difficulty against the aggressive discard Black/White aggressive decks, and a “breaker” card to refill the hand or radically change the outcome of the board is needed. I’ve been testing a switch to two Tidings in the main, but they did not prove crucial though they were good in the matchup. Going to the sideboard for Electrolyze does everything you want and more, removing threats (like Dark Confidant and a friend!) and replacing itself with another card, always vital when the opponent is trying to starve you of options. With a growing number of decks considering Hand of Cruelty in the main, Electrolyze can be a life-saver in what is otherwise something of a difficult matchup.
While fooling around with this deck, I also mashed Enduring Ideal and Eminent Domain together, to see what it looked like to ramp up to Ideal mana by Annexing opponents’ Lands, stalling them on mana and playing the Eminent Domain mana-control aspect with an Enduring Ideal end-game. Let’s just say I want that hour of my life back, thanks. It did what I asked it to do – controlling the opponents’ mana development – but it didn’t have enough action going for it and actually casting Wildfire made the rest of the deck’s plans very difficult to execute. Seven mana for Enduring Ideal is practically impossible after you sacrifice four of your lands.
We’ve covered the four Ravnica combinations, and found good decks present in two of the four so long as you weren’t strictly limited to those color combinations… and even Green/White was viable as-is, so that limitation is not necessarily damning. Onward we press to the three Guildpact lands, where we expect the core of Standard to lie at the moment.
Stomping Ground
I’m taking the cop-out and starting with the easier of the lands to work with, Stomping Grounds. Stomping Grounds is the home of aggressive innovations, and bring us Heezy Street, Zoo, and “Sea Stompy” as it was called. Three decks with Kird Ape. Sure, you can do other things with Red/Green if you want, and I’ve heard talk about Gifts/Wildfire decks with Life from the Loam, and as long as you’re doing that I hear Life from the Loam/Trade Routes can be a sick combo. Each of these decks has their own advantages and disadvantages, as we’ll go into here.
Zoo’s main disadvantage is that its mana base wrecks it about as often as the opponent does, making for a lot of difficult mulliganing decisions and frequently starting the game at sixteen life and six cards just to have the right to go Isamaru, Scab-Clan Mauler in your first two turns. Zoo packs a lot of burn, and that helps… Red cards make bad mana bases forgiving, provided you draw the Red. You have a very high aggressive power level, and very little control over your fate. In an even match, other Red decks have a decent shot of capitalizing on your mana problems, taking advantage of your diminishing life total from painful lands, your two or three cards stranded in hand because of color issues, or even just the fact that you peter out after turn 2 and can’t close the game with Giant Solifuge like the less greedy Red decks. Zoo is bad for Team Standard because it suicides on its mana base and eats up colors like nobody’s business, throwing elbows all over the place to get the cards it wants… in a deck where you can get the same amount of burn and close to the same aggressive potential with a mana base of twenty-two basic Mountains instead of $200 in lands.
Heezy Street, on the other hand, is the deck I’d expect to see the most. It’s a very solid beatdown deck, full of pleasing card synergy, and with much the same potential against decks that can’t take the quick beats. You lose a bit by dropping Savannah Lions and Isamaru, but the extra card or two every game should make up for the two or three damage lost by “only” casting Frenzied Goblin turn 1.
How to make the deck not stink, though, in a more established metagame? Specifically, the metagame of the mirror match and life-gaining control decks with Faith’s Fetters and Lodoxon Hierarch? Fortunately, Heezy Street beat up on plenty of decks like that along the way, and knowing when to leave up for Flames of the Blood Hand in anticipation of a Hierarch – or at least keep a Red open to dodge the life-gain part of Faith’s Fetters – changes things drastically. The main objection I have to the deck is how it plays out against control: tapping out for creatures for the first three turns and keeping your mana open for the rest of the game. If that’s the plan, more instant-speed burn has to be in order, and getting more fire to increase your reach can’t really hurt against anyone. Wrath of God is punished by saying “eat hot Solifuge,” while countermagic for end-of-turn burn can (surprise surprise) turn around and say “eat hot Solifuge” as you test spell them with four-damage spells.
To accomplish this, if nothing else, the fourth Flames of the Blood Hand should go in the main-deck, and for Team Standard I would go so far as to say you can do better with some of these choices to cover your bases against a wider variety of decks. While the Jitte is not an active plan for Heezy Street, an active Jitte is coming more into favor thanks to the growing popularity of Black/White decks, and so the two-drop slot may be well served by having Hearth Kami where either Dryad Sophisticate or Scab-Clan Mauler are currently sitting. Taking the decks from the Pro Tour whole cloth and just playing them is not going to lead to success, the goal is to refine your strategy to better function against the targeted metagame of the narrowing field of good decks.
Creatures (27)
- 4 Kird Ape
- 4 Hearth Kami
- 4 Frenzied Goblin
- 3 Burning-Tree Shaman
- 4 Giant Solifuge
- 4 Scab-Clan Mauler
- 4 Scorched Rusalka
Lands (23)
Spells (10)
Sideboard
With the metagame more established than before, the uses for Pithing Needle are fairly clean-cut; here, the purpose is to fill in a variety of holes that might be problematic or even just to shut down Transmute, with both Black/White Control and Heartbeat Combo looking to use the Transmute ability to further their own game-plan. With a narrowing metagame the card that was absent from the Pro Tour may begin appearing in greater numbers, as it is literally one of the best preventative tools we have ever seen for a wide variety of problem abilities.
I may have just butchered the deck by changing two cards, but it seems to me that lowering the curve a bit and adding the fourth Flames is a reasonable choice. The most expensive non-essential creature gets a drop for the fourth (ridiculous) Frenzied Goblin, in a deck that doesn’t want its creatures to get blocked anyway. Having the twelfth one-drop helps me feel secure that Scab-Clan Mauler has a home here, and having the eighth four-damage-for-three-mana burn spell gives me a warm feeling where my opponent used to be.
The other nifty Red/Green based deck is a Japanese aggro-control concoction, one that is unfortunately quite possibly too greedy on the cards for serious consideration:
Creatures (21)
- 4 Ninja of the Deep Hours
- 2 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Kird Ape
- 3 Dryad Sophisticate
- 4 Rumbling Slum
Lands (22)
Spells (17)
Again we see the industry-standard Kird Ape plus ten Forests combo, consistent across all the decks that played Kird Ape. And we see one of the greediest decks you could consider for Team Unified Standard, the deck that wants two of the three really good dual lands, the Mana Leaks, the Remands, the Jittes… but what it doesn’t want is any of the dedicated Red burn, so you can give up on life on Heezy Street and go with just Red in your Gruul Deck Wins, still have another aggressive beatdown deck, and leave the colors not touched on here, White and Black, for your third deck.
Thoughts of Ruin, however, is clearly a wins-more card, where your beatdown creatures and eight counterspells should do enough of the tempo work to let you run off with a Ninja or a Jitte and go crazy. Removing it for a fourth copy of the three cards short a copy – Dryad Sophisticate, Jitte and Electrolyze – goes a long way towards solving the “only good against control” problem… for while it murders slow Green, White, and Black-based control decks, it’s not very good against other decks that put creatures into play or burn your creatures out of play in the meantime.
Ninja of Deep Hours is out there, and it’s waiting as a possible solution to the deck-building question, which in many ways is a shell game of deciding how many aggressive, how many controlling, and how many combo decks you want to have on your team. Some teams are going to say “one, one and one”, play Heartbeat, play B/W Control, and play whichever Red, White, and Green deck they decide suits them best. Some teams are going to eschew Heartbeat for Owling Mine in that same configuration, while others are going to skip on B/W Control for B/W Aggro or Ghost Dad.
With all the dancing around that can be done, seeing a deck that is not using mono-Red cards and is not using Black/White cards but can beat down nicely is a refreshing change: if you want to have three beatdown decks, you can. Some teams will have decks that lose to aggressive decks fairly often, and having three means you only have to win one out of the remaining two matchups… and probably in pretty fairly balanced matchups, or in an aggro mirror match. Building three beatdown decks with an eye out for beating the Red deck on their team may just be a successful strategy, and some teams will try it.
For Sea Stompy however, the lack of Solifuges is disturbing, but on the play with Green acceleration it’s reasonable to think that Rumbling Slum might come down fast enough that you’ll have countermagic up for the inevitable Faith’s Fetters that seems to always get thrown on him, and a 5/5 body that cracks for six a turn is pretty impressive. If you are excluding it from your deck because it’s already on the team somewhere else, this is a deck that did well with Rumbling Slums on its side at the Pro Tour so the “non-optimal” card choice is still proven to work reasonably well. Moving the Thoughts of Ruin to the sideboard, to decimate the decks that just lose to it, gives the deck the same authentic Honolulu feel without all of the messy land destruction against Zoo that just doesn’t do anything because their game is already on the table.
Steam Vents
We’ve already discussed two key decks for this combination – Kamiel’s deck and the Japanese three-color Ninja deck – which leaves us with three previously-hyped choices: U/R Wildfire, Owling Mine, and Izzetron.
Unsurprisingly, all three of these choices are well-known, and two of the three (read: not U/R Wildfire) have very clear-cut roles they can fill. Owling Mine is an extreme deviation of the U/R Magnivore deck, exaggerating weaknesses against beatdown in exchange for strength against control, and of the three it seems fairly likely that the Magnivore deck is going to see less play than either of the other two. Owling Mine is so obvious of a decision to make, either for or against, that discussing its merits as a deck and attempts to further tune it comes across as pointless in this forum, because you will use a fifteen card actual sideboard rather than an assembly of cards that might salvage the bad matchup against Red decks.
Blue/Red Tron, however, is interesting… as it is the first deck we’ll come across trying to use some of the former best Blue cards in the format, instead of just the “new” best Blue card in Standard, Remand. A lot of players will be nervous to create a set of three decks excluding Meloku and Keiga, and so efforts will probably be made to utilize them either in Izzetron or perhaps even as a Critical Mass Update. I am not the latter convinced works terribly well, due to the absurd greediness of the gassy Mass deck, as it wants your duals, your Tops, your Keigas and Melokus, your Jittes, your Remands and Mana Leaks and Hinders, your Sakura-Tribe Elders… it gets pretty absurd as the list goes on. Certainly a list can be created that gives you the best of Blue and Green with a companion color that does not interfere with your main strategy for the other two decks, like Heezy Street and Black/White Control looking for a partner that doesn’t get in the way, and so Critical Mass splash White for Hierarchs is born, or splash Black for Putrefy… who knows, maybe both, since this is Ice Bridge plus Elder plus Wood Elves dot deck.
I feel that Osyp went to great lengths to include a discussion of the deck’s merits here, and Flores goes to reasonable lengths picking it apart (his own deck!) and saying it sucks (take a picture and frame it, ‘cause how often does that happen!) in his article Your Favorite Deck Sucks. There are definite benefits to the deck, and advancements that can be made, especially if you are going to have the benefit of a format that is reasonably clear of Owling Mine decks, and even a team with an Owling Mine deck has only a 33% chance of playing your Izzetron deck.
Godless Shrine
… And here we reach the main point of contention for the article, where three decks battle almost without fail for inclusion into your team’s decks, because it’s almost inevitable that one of the three options for Black decks will make the cut.
Ghost Dad has been discussed ad nausiam in the forums and across numerous articles at this point, but following the “Iteration X” train of thought this still bears some discussion. For anyone that has not seen this deck yet, I’ll let Ben Goodman the Ridiculous Hat pimp for himself, just like I let Flores’s ego speak for himself a minute ago. As Tom Lehrer sings, “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice / Unless you get a good percentage of her price…”
Ghost Dad is going to make a lot of teams, as it has been putting up solid results in the last few weeks, has been effectively “outed” as a secret deck at the Pro Tour by loud people like myself among others shouting its hosannas from the mountaintops. The question as it has come up in my playtesting is “how to handle the mirror match,” or perhaps more importantly the semi-mirror as players take a twist on the deck and introduce new elements of their own personal touches. Dealing with yourself and with Black/White Aggro decks, which are more likely to do nasty things like “Hand of Honor/Cruelty with Umezawa’s Jitte on it” or “Persecute you, naming Black” instead of just play an attrition game that drags on forever without any easy means of breaking a difficult board position.
In the quest for new armaments and technology, I’ve been following the sidebar discussions after all of the articles about Ghost Dad, listening to see what has been tried and what has not been tried. Poking against the “mirror” match as it were, both against Dad and non-Dad beatdown decks, I’ve been trying to figure out what cards are good enough to make a difference out of the main-deck, and what of those cards may be playable main-deck as a solution to key problems. So far, two cards that have stuck in my mind as places to explore for further innovation are Orzhov Pontiff and Celestial Kirin.
The Kirin is an obvious next step to explore after the arms race places us at Jitte plus Hand as our “solution” to the mirror, and for that reason alone is worthy of consideration and exploration. Goodman et al. have admitted that they have not actually tested the Kirin sufficiently, and especially not in the continuously evolving, fluid metagame that we are seeing develop before our eyes. But history (or at least Kamigawa Block Constructed) has taught us that the answer to Hand plus Jitte is Celestial Kirin if you can support it, and seeing how this is a Spiritcraft deck already (and one with eight variable-cost Arcane spells, playable for zero mana, on top of that) it is worthy of consideration if not anything else. The game develops slowly enough that it’s reasonable to expect to get to six mana, and it’s reasonable to expect to have three White by then if you need it, so if you are having problems with Jitte plus Hand (either in the Ghost Dad mirror, or out of a non-Ghost Dad B/W Aggro deck) it may be perfectly viable to go Kirin, Spirit and wipe the board of the dangerous cards no matter how many counters accumulate on the Jitte or how many Mortifies and Last Gasps they have in hand.
A second solution, and one that is more likely maindeck material, is Orzhov Pontiff. The Pontiff can address a number of problems, capable of wiping out whole swaths of one-toughness creatures like Giant Solifuge and Dark Confidant that have a nasty habit of swinging games entirely if left unchecked. This solution didn’t actually occur to me until I got Pontiff in a Draft, however, alongside his new little buddy Plagued Rusalka. When I got four mana out, played the Pontiff, stacked his —1/-1 ability, sacrificed him to Rusalka to target a three-toughness guy and Haunt a one-toughness guy, well… let’s just say a star was born. New pants were needed. An opponent left me sitting with sixteen minutes on his clock, waiting to appear and allow the first —1/-1 ability to trigger so I could get my cookie alongside my match win and nifty deck idea.
Haunt is a tricky mechanic, and in some ways it’s a skill-testing mechanic due to its high complexity. Cheap Haunt cards are especially useful, because cheap cards with a potential for card advantage make it in Constructed while expensive bad ones do not. (Duh.) However, for every Blind Hunter that will never be played because it is terrible in Standard, there is at least one Orzhov Pontiff waiting to be discovered, wondering when the players will finally be good enough to utilize his potential to do savage, savage things. Like clearing a board of Hands and Paladins as a personal Hideous Laughter, with a little help from his friend Plagued Rusalka, who by the way is absurd and should be present as a four-of if he’s not already.
With a growing tendency for one-toughness creatures and the inherent possibility of playing Hideous Laughter on target opponent’s board, Orzhov Pontiff is worth some consideration off the bat… either for the main deck or as a sideboard tool. However, the second part of playing with Pontiff comes up when you just have to be a bad beatdown deck in a bad matchup, like playing against Heartbeat of Spring. Let’s assume your opponent knows you can’t kill him very fast, because you’re playing Ghost Dad. You get your best possible start, Plagued Rusalka into Kami of Ancient Law/Dark Confidant into Thief of Hope (or better yet, Kami #2 and a second Bear). Ghost Dad doesn’t appear on turn 4, so you are looking very threatening for a sixth-turn kill, plus they have to kill via Maga because you could potentially kill them with Shining Shoal if they try for Invoke.
Turn 1, Rusalka. Go.
Turn 2, Bear, attack for one. Opponent is at 19.
Turn 3, attack for three, opponent is at 16. Second bear, second Rusalka.
Turn 4, attack for six, opponent is at 10. Cast Ghost Dad, Ghost Dad gets countered. They set up for their kill on turn five, so you get just one more turn to get in there.
Turn 5, cast Orzhov Pontiff. Put +1/+1 ability on the stack. Sacrifice Orzhov Pontiff to Plagued Rusalka, targeting Plagued Rusalka. Haunt Plagued Rusalka, resolve ability, get second +1/+1 ability on the stack. Resolve Overrun, hulk smash opponent.
As you can see, “dead card” is not what Orzhov Pontiff will read if you draw him in the “wrong” matchup… and there are not so very many “wrong” matchups nowadays to begin with. Every team will have at least one and possibly two “right” matchups for this kind of card, and in the third… well, you’ve still got the Overrun plan.
I’m done talking about my pet card now, but perhaps you’ll think about it. Even without trickiness, it clears out some pretty important creatures from play in quite a few matchups.
Black/White Aggro is a similar creature, in that it is metagaming to beat the other Black/White decks and take on beatdown decks of various stripes, plying the field as an aggro-control deck with reasonable beatdown and enough discard to make the Baby Jesus cry. Okiba-Gang (Bang) Shinobi is quite ridiculous against decks trying to control the game with countermagic, and can make the problems started by Castigate, Cry of Contrition, and Rats of the flying and non-flying variety quite a bit worse. Protected creatures help out however the board requires, beating down or holding the fort as needed, carrying a Jitte surprisingly well. Both are starting to show up more and more, to combat the popularity of Ghost Dad in the nascent metagame following Honolulu, but it’s important to remember that we are entering the realm of paper Magic, not digital: we’re entering week one of a metagame, and the established deck to play is the deck that finished fourth, not the deck that finished twenty-second. That a continuation and re-tuning of the Ruel deck to include more protected creatures and to shore up its numbers away from a hodge-podge of twos and threes does not favor the chances for Ghost Dad should be fairly obvious, as the most dangerous situation for Dad to square off against is protection-from-Black creatures wielding Umezawa’s Pointy Stick of Doom.
B/W Aggro also benefits from a more tuned metagame, as it can play more of the cards that affect the metagame and fewer of the ones that don’t. Both B/W Aggro and B/W Control are given the opportunity to completely re-shape themselves, as they are decks that function very much like The Rock in Extended did for years: tune the metagame, and then tune this deck to see how well it does against that metagame. With everything now known, the work can be done to make these good instead of poor.
B/W Control did not fare well at the Pro Tour, despite an excellent pedigree. Those that did best had transmuting Dimir House Guards doing the work of Diabolic Tutor, playing one turn faster and hitting the four-mana sweet spot that cards like Persecute, Nightmare Void, Cranial Extraction, Faith’s Fetters and Wrath of God occupy. For the greedy, there’s three colors and Transmuting for Elephants, but the greedy on average fared less well than those sticking to two colors. Respect for aggressive decks was played out in the sideboard with the break-away Descendant of Kiyomaro, who’s pretty good with Arena and Persecute in your deck I hear. Control decks can see Weathered Wayfarer technology out of the sideboard, matched with Boseiju if you want it.
But as one of the most popular choices in Standard going into the tournament, it’s reasonable to see how it might remain one of the most popular choices after the Pro Tour as well, even if the results were for the most part disappointing. How to tune it is effectively a nightmare, as there is no one “right” build for the deck, especially in Team Standard… where the “established metagame” will only account for so many of the decks, and the expected percentages for an individual event will totally skew what actually happens far away from any reasonable prediction… how many teams will play Owl decks, and how many times will you face it? If everyone plays an Owl deck, and you seated yourselves randomly, that’s two matches you’ve lost before accommodating for any matches that could actually go either way.
Effectively, while the metagame is known for Standard, we are entering the Twilight Zone of Standard, a world where your expectations of individual behavior no longer make sense… because we are no longer talking about decision-making processes formed by individuals that have a certain percentage breakdown of each deck you can expect to see based on the metagame. There is so much room for gamesmanship, and for over-thinking the metagaming situation, that the breakdown of decks appearing will not have an easily understood, rational chain of logic that it follows from. Groups of people behave less rationally than individuals when making decisions, and it’s possible to metagame a rogue deck selection strategy while still playing good, established decks where before “going rogue” meant striking out into uninhabited territory with a deck most would consider to be unrefined or off the radar.
Having discussed the three flavors of Black/White decks, and cited examples of where at least one is in the process of evolving towards, we have only the basic lands to cover.
Heartbeat, and Mono-Red.
Heartbeat made Top Eight playing an evolved Transmute-based list, the kind of deck that I wish I’d thought about seriously when I was working on Heartbeat for States instead of trying to do something wacky involving Legendary creatures forcing me to draw a dozen cards for fuel. I can proudly say I did not know Weird Harvest was legal, and leave it at that… but what you get when you tweak and tune the Heartbeat deck is an impressive machine, surprisingly resilient due to the ability to add countermagic to stop the relevant problems (sorceries and instants) that also furthers your game-plan (Transmute for the engine, win). Heartbeat is also conveniently the worst match-up of the up-and-coming deck of the day, Ghost Dad, by a wide margin… and it has a fair chance against most strategies, thanks to its quick approach to winning the game in a no-nonsense chain of events begun by Transmuting for Weird Harvest, or just using Harvests and Drifts and Heartbeats to your heart’s content to get to twenty points worth of Maga or Invoke the Firemind.
Sideboarding in creatures is the hallmark of not having a good means to protect yourself from the opposition, and with very few enemy counterspell decks it is likely unnecessary. What worked as a strategy at the Pro Tour turns out not to be really needed at all, and a much lighter touch can take care of problems like “disruption” quite nicely. Improving the sideboard to deal with the established good decks in the field and worry less against the bad ones that were compensated for with cards like Vinelasher Kudzu is easily done, especially if discard is the thing that ails you… a credible solution like Jushi Apprentice refuels you to shore up your vulnerability to discard, while also technically being able to kill the opponent single-handedly (and I don’t mean by attacking for three).
Some elements of the Transmute-board are quite nice, like having access to Savage Twister against beatdown decks. Others can be trimmed, like any other unnecessary fat, to make a good deck with a poor sideboard into a good deck altogether. And I can only imagine that Heartbeat versus Owl must be a massacre for the Owl player, as giving Heartbeat more fuel for the fire does not strike me as the winning-est of strategies.
Then we have mono-Red. Effectively, this is for those who want to play Zoo without the mana troubles, or while dedicating their dual lands to other decks. Mono-Red sits nicely next to Kamiel’s deck while actual Zoo does not, and mono-Red is a similar deck to Heezy Street with a longer reach and in many ways a better overall plan than the Red/Green beatdown deck. Unfortunately, the number of fat monsters in the Red/Green deck means that R/G tends to beat the “improved” version of itself, being one of the less hospitable matchups for the mono-Red deck. For more about the Red deck, which I also consider to be one of the best decks in the format, check out Flores’ take on Bennie Smith’s “Into The Aether” from MagicTheGathering.com Swap Week.
The Red deck is interesting, as it has less aggressive pressure than either of the other two decks, lacking any creature ever able to attack for two on turn two. Its creatures are flat-out worse than either of those, with no 3/3’s for two or 3/4’s for three. What it gets in return is synergy, creatures working very well towards a plan and having a secondary focus on stopping itself from getting wrecked, as most creatures would be happy to trade with another deck’s threat and sacrifice for one damage to Scorched Rusalka along the way, buying time for it to assemble lethal burn or clearing the field to ride Giant Solifuge to victory.
Red is a deck that asks questions, and the most common question asked is “Four?” The most common reply is “Damnit,” which is American for “take four” to all those Anglophiles whom I find may be editing this here article here. The Red deck is an excellent example of the Philosophy of Fire when it works, as the controlling decks are patently unsuited to containing its fire and most have a difficult time dealing with the flurry of threats and burn: Scorched Rusalka turns away Lightning Helix and Faith’s Fetters as profitable answers to your creatures, Frenzied Goblin stops Elephants and other nuisances like Dragons from blocking your bears, letting you trade three damage for five to you to your heart’s content. With the full salvo of Shocks, Hammers, Chars and Flames, we have 52 points in direct damage before a creature gets involved, and two of those creatures can trade creatures or lands for extra direct damage.
Frankly, the Red deck is playing a different game than the decks in this format, and that’s a distinct sign of an excellent choice. So long as the game is good, instead of terrible like Redemption. It’s likely again that this will be one of the three choices I’d happily run with in Team Standard, because it plays nicely with others and has a good chance against everything… except Heezy Street, that is.
Seventeen pages in, my longest article for the weekly Magical Hack series so far, and it’s possible Craig’s going to kill me. [It’s crossed my mind, I’ll admit. — Craig] If you don’t see me next week, you know what happened, alert the authorities. Imagine how much longer this would be if I’d given a decklist for all the discussions I’ve had so far… I’ve been good, only a few so far.
Now that we’ve discussed decks to choose from, taking “bad” decks and making them “better” by re-tuning them for the metagame, the question is: what are your options for groups of three decks together?
Any strategy is valid so long as you can justify its strengths, and seeing something like four Meloku on the bench does not invalidate your strategy. What you are trying to accomplish is to create a series of three decks with favorable matchups against the expected field, where about 2/3rds of the field will match your predictions and the other third will blow you away entirely: novel strategies, custom decks pointed at significant aspects of the metagame, three beatdown decks on the same team, things you wouldn’t expect as the “standard” for the Team Standard tournament scene.
It’s probably fair to say that there will be more beatdown than anything else, because the beatdown decks are very good and are solid against everything. Any bad matchup you might have on their team still has at best a one in three chance of owning them, because first you have to play them (33%) and then you have to beat them (100%? Probably not, even if it’s ludicrous). If you think everyone is going to play aggro, you exclude decks that lose to aggro. If you think everyone is going to play control, you begin to include decks that destroy control, like Owling Mine. The metagaming of the Pro Tour is thus played out on a grander scale, because even if you guess wrong against a specific team you can still lucksack your way into favorable matchups.
I would say this, however: the tendencies are very strong for a team to have at least one beatdown deck, and at least one controlling deck, either aggro/control or dedicated control. You will face a variety of strategies, so you can’t hedge your bets immediately, and there will be more than enough variation between decks that nothing will be cut and dry. Maybe you’re playing Owling Mine and you get paired against a Zoo deck, and instead of burn spells he has Might of Oaks. Your outcome is suddenly much more favorable than before… you’re up to winning 25% of the time, because his deck has no reach and can be stymied by Exhaustions and Gigadrowse much more readily than the decks that will just Char you in response to Gigadrowse and negate your hand-jamming Mine/Owl “combo” by dropping lands and cheap creatures every turn.
Groups of three people do not behave in the same sane and rational way that lone individuals do, as there are subtle internal pressures working within any group of three: pressures to follow the leader of the pack, and conform to his deck decisions despite their unfamiliarity with the deck. Unified Standard necessitates some weird decisions, as decks that would want a card have to fight over the right to use it, as you’ll notice when you think about putting two Red decks together and start to notice cards like Yamabushi’s Flame and Galvanic Arc (thanks BDM!) are in the format to fill out the burn slots of decks that want Char and Flames of the Blood Hand but can’t have them because they’ve been taken already.
In the end, it’s going to come down to this: make intelligent, informed decisions of decks to play based upon the metagame and your trio’s comfort and experience with the decks in question. Whatever you are playing, you will need to play it well, and your bad matchup may be one seat to the left of you instead of in front of your face so there is a high element of chance to the matchups. In Team Limited, there was some tendency for a Sealed Deck color combination to be placed in a seat corresponding to the player’s preference during the draft, so you could reliably see a trend as to what decks end up where. Even this was only a small trend, as teams had varying perceptions of what they wanted to draft from each seat, so two people playing decks for their draft colors might still have wildly different decks. Placing enemy matchups in those seats to reap the 10% advantage made sense, at least if the player had the flexibility to play the deck instead of the color combination they doubtlessly practices during testing.
Where will everyone seat which decks? Mike Flores said recently that the best player usually takes the middle seat, and the best player rarely plays beatdown. Perhaps this was true in Team Limited, where the center player had the easiest time “pointing” the draft, controlling the outcome and having the best vantage point to absorb information and make decisions. In Team Standard, such gamesmanship strikes me as hubris: there is no reason save for ego or pride for the “best player” to take the central seat, and no reason for the “best player” to give the beatdown deck to an underling… beatdown is hard to play properly, which is why the names you saw making the Top Eight with beatdown decks are names that are very good (Herberholz, Ruel) instead of names that you don’t recognize except that they played beatdown decks (Olwen Wee).
I for one think the best strategy is to assign decks to player based on familiarity, comfort, and play ability, gaining a distinct edge based on the tried-and-true method of “experience.” You want to have players playing the best decks well, not players playing the best decks sort-of well, or players playing poor decks well. But of all the options, you want the player to be playing the deck well, and if that means he has to play Eminent Domain because it’s the only deck he’s comfortable with, I’d say sure.
Actually, I’d get another team-mate. But that’s only because I’m pretty sure that deck is poop right now, and am holding my breath and crossing my fingers to see if Adrian Sullivan proves me wrong in his home-town Grand Prix. And if he does, I’ll be happy for him.
Whatever the decisions to be made, they should be based on one’s ability to play a deck well, and comfort with a deck, experience with a deck go a long way to make up for matchup shortcomings… especially if your opponent is playing the right deck but without the experience to back it up with the right strategies and decisions. Instead of trying to guess where the beatdown, combo, and control decks will be sitting, and making a decision based on hubris, might I suggest rolling dice to randomize seating after the decks have been selected? “Being predictable” is an easy way to get preyed upon those who are attempting feats of gamesmanship, metagaming their decks in which seats to beat those players with the hubris to put control in B, beatdown in A and aggro-control in C. To be honest, unless you are attempting such a feat of gamesmanship yourself and making an informed decision on the propensities of the assembled mass of players in the room, you can’t help yourself by specifically selecting a seat for a deck, and can quite possibly hurt yourself by those who do have such a read on the pulse of the room.
For week one at least, no one knows such things, except for those with the hubris to believe they do.
Hubris
Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance: “There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris” (McGeorge Bundy).
With that said, good luck and have fun. See you at 1700.
– Sean McKeown
– [email protected]
“Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’…”
-Tom Lehrer, “Lobachevsky”