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Tuning Basic Plains

At the end of the day, templating an existing archetype isn’t done just because you like certain cards better than the ones that are accepted in particular deck types; templating is done specifically to gain a legitimate strategic advantage in a matchup. It is successfully accomplished by understanding what threat cards are in the decks you expect, and by correctly answering those threat cards using mana efficient and consistent means. This build of White Weenie just does that by consistently holding the ground against opposing aggressive decks while providing a stronger late game via Spirit bombs. Other White decks can’t win fights, fail to remove whole classes of your key permanents even when their bombs are online.

I know that last week I wrote about Mono-Black Control and G/R Legendary Paddle, but something stuck in my head during all that testing. White Weenie is really good.


I know that is probably kind of obvious given the raw numbers, but usually the rogue decks that I make test well against the accepted Decks to Beat, and yet I struggled, matchup after matchup against even a stock White Weenie deck; even when I made decks that could win, the margins were narrow. So I thought to myself What happens when you take White Weenie and build it to beat itself? How do you gain an advantage?


What I really like about Kamigawa Block is that matchup templating makes sense; this isn’t true for all Blocks. In Odyssey Block, for example, you could tune your U/G deck to beat U/G decks, but the central cards Wild Mongrel and Wonder were so powerful that specific templating would often make little or no difference. Like you could play with Sylvan Safekeeper or Elephant Guide, switch to a Breakthrough/Werebear engine, or hybridize Madness and Threshold elements, but matches came down to Wonder advantage and early overwhelming Wild Mongrel tempo and there wasn’t anything you could do about it even if your non-core cards looked better on paper than the other guy’s non-core cards.


Umezawa’s Jitte is probably more dominating in Kamigawa Block than Wild Mongrel was in Odyssey Block, but there is still a lot of work that can be done to win the mirror match. By finding non-Jitte cards that beat the other guy’s non-Jitte cards, or ways to make Jitte less relevant, the White Weenie deck can be properly tune to beat “itself.” The most powerful card is of course Celestial Kirin, which was already “out of the bag” by last weekend, even if it wasn’t present in my Alpha White Weenie test deck (which was, as I said, quite capable of holding its own anyway). This is how I chose to bias the deck:


4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Celestial Kirin

2 Charge Across the Araba

4 Hand of Honor

2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda

4 Kami of the Ancient Law

1 Kataki, War’s Wage

4 Kitsune Blademaster

4 Lantern Kami

4 Otherworldly Journey

2 Shining Shoal

2 Waxmane Baku



1 Eiganjo Castle

22 Plains


The major changes for this deck against the usual versions:


Buttwheat says fo is da rih numbah.

It’s all about Celestial Kirin. Four. You need it to 187 the other guy’s Kirin, and when you have a Kirin, you can do things like kill Yukora and your own (first) Kirin, leaving the second. I can’t imagine playing two or three like some less carefully tuned versions.


As the deck is all about Celestial Kirin, you have to change your mana costs and bias your drops away from the accepted two-mana flashpoint. I cut ~8 non-Spirit two-drops from the deck, including all the 8.5 Tails and half the cheap Bushido. In testing, the most impressive thing 8.5 Tails ever did was avoid getting hit for 16 by Godo a couple of times. That card is really mana intensive and clogs your hand and is overall rather unimpressive. I ran random Kataki, War’s Wage as another two-drop to balance the huge culling and also provide a little Magic of the Spirit World. Everyone remembered to pay, mostly because they didn’t know what this Spirit did and had to keep reading it.


Lots of Threes. Kitsune Blademaster is about the best drop you can make against another White Weenie deck and is superlative against Black in the early game as well. The corollary to this is that you have fewer twos to die when Celestial Kirin gets going.


No Manriki-Gusari: This came to me very much like the tuning for Masques Block White decks. The Level One trump in Masques White mirror was to play Rebel Informer for card advantage. Once the games became all about Mageta the Lion and Blinding Angel, Rebel Informer became just another card in the opponent’s graveyard. Manriki-Gusari is a Level One trump. Once the trumps became about maximizing Celestial Kirin, Manriki-Gusari was no longer good enough, became just another card in the bin.


This deck tested best of all the decks I worked on for Kamigawa Block, though admittedly, I only put it together the last part of the week. I tested against the standard three decks I talked about in last week’s article and went something like 5-0 in the mirror, 4-0 against Mono-Black, and 4-1 against TOGIT Three-Color before deciding to switch at about 10 PM Friday night.


I showed my deck to Josh Ravitz, who, not surprisingly, questioned my choice of two-drops. Josh didn’t make the expected complaints, though, and just said I should play Samurai of the Pale Curtain over Hand of Honor. Even though the deck tested well against Mono-Black in the short trials that I did, I recognized Pale Curtain’s natural advantages. I particularly remembered BTape’s comment in the forums about how difficult TOGIT-style decks were for White Weenie, and how even if my initial testing was narrow, the one game loss came at the hands of the Morning Star. Samurai of the Pale Curtain turns off Yosei and helps contain things like recursive Kagemaro.


This is the deck I took to the tournament (thanks Josh):


4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Celestial Kirin

2 Charge Across the Araba

2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda

4 Kami of the Ancient Law

1 Kataki, War’s Wage

4 Kitsune Blademaster

4 Lantern Kami

4 Otherworldly Journey

4 Samurai of the Pale Curtain

2 Shining Shoal

2 Waxmane Baku


1 Eiganjo Castle

22 Plains


Sideboard:

3 Blessed Breath

1 Charge Across the Araba

4 Hokori, Dust Drinker

1 Shining Shoal

4 Terashi’s Grasp

2 Waxmane Baku


Sadin and Glasses played the same deck.


Basically we only lost to each other for a few rounds, until Sadin lost to Glasses, and a round or two later, Glasses lost to John Fiorillo (playing, again, a similarly templated deck).


I was riding pretty high at 2-0 (but undefeated in games) when I found myself up a game against Mono-Black. I played kind of badly but had Kirin and Jitte online and it didn’t take very long after that. In Game Two, I mulliganed but hit four on turn 4and had my opponent set up for a Celestial Kirin win. He had blown two creature removal spells already and I was sure he didn’t have another one. Even if he had a kill, I was golden if I got an uptap due to the spell density of my mana-poor draw. His board was an Ogre and some equipment and I was pretty sure that if I ripped land he was kold (I was holding Blessed Breath for his O-Naginata, Otherworldly Journey, Jitte, and Waxmane Baku). Of course I missed the land drop. He ripped Shoal, removed Ink-Eyes, and eventually won.


Game Three I mulliganed to five and was stuck on three forever. He had a Jitte with two counters, O-Naginata, and Hand of Cruelty (missed that on turn 2 all three games). I had 16 life, and being stuck on three, could not possibly win with my naked Blademaster despite having a great hand. If he played right, even Jon Finkel would have automatically lost. So of course he played Yukora. I showed him mid-combat Otherworldly Journey after he spent all his mana equipping and stuff but, even after stalling for three more turns with a second Blademaster and two more Otherworldly Journeys, I eventually died. This was pretty depressing because he played quite horribly and gave me multiple openings to come back (who plays Yukora there?). My next land was four deep at the time of my scoop, so I was pretty sure that I couldn’t win this one no matter what I did.


Next round I lost to the most poorly tuned Three-Color control deck I have ever seen. I mulliganed to five or six both games. He was exceedingly lucky, mising spell after spell with no Top, with lethal in play most of the time. I actually put him correctly on Hideous Laughter in Game 2 even though it made no sense given a tuned deck (he showed me Kodama of the North Tree and Final Judgment in Game One), but correctly playing around it didn’t mean much as he drew three more before the game was over.


That said, I think there were two things I could have done better in order to possibly win. Going into Game 2, the last thing I did was cut my Shoals for two Blessed Breaths because he played three Hero’s Demise in Game One and I was siding in Hokori on top of having three extant classes of Legendary creature. I figured that I could beat him low and win with a Shoal but that was narrower than just protecting my bombs against spot elim. When I finally died to his second or third Patron of Kitsune, he was on four and I had Blessed Breath in hand.


The other thing I could have done differently was not play so impulsively. With him within striking distance, I brought with Kataki into his Patron. He adjusted his life total and I said “wait” and picked up all my lands. He said he was just gaining life for Patron, and I really couldn’t argue with that. It was right to kill his Legendary creature anyway once he declared a block, but who is to say if he would have blocked there if I had actually given him the chance? Despite his being a miser the match was very close, with me having lethal several times if he had not ripped.


It feels weird losing to a bunch of manascrew draws. I haven’t complained about manascrew in six years, and actually won a couple of games going to five. I’m not sure how I feel about that, because the deck was quite good; Glasses made Top 8 with the deck and shipped me some packs for the deck consultation.


Samurai of Choice?.

Anyway, I learned quite a bit on top of what I already knew while testing at Neutral Ground. One of the matchups I ignored prior to the PTQ was Gifts because it had done poorly on the PTQ level prior to the GP. Glasses tested against Bryn Kenney with Gifts and traded games. All the games but one that he lost he would have won if he had run Samurai of the Pale Curtain over Hand of Honor (Glasses did not make the last minute switch). Hand of Honor seemed good against Black defense, but still died to Kagemaro; Samurai of the Pale Curtain, even if it died, could turn off Kagemaro recursion tricks. Interestingly, Samurai of the Pale Curtain is actually better against Black Aggro a lot of the time; Sadin won a match he would have lost if he had had Hand of Honor because Pale Curtain shut off his opponent’s Nezumi Graverobber.


Overall, this style of White Weenie is superb against the Internet stock White Weenie decks, especially those with Manriki-Gusari, 8.5 Tails, and other mana intensive two-drops, while staying serviceably competitive against everything else. People get so happy when they have Manriki-Gusari because they think that they are going to have some sort of board advantage and then get destroyed by a Kami of the Ancient Law or Otherworldly Journey; I like making happy people bury their permanents.


The funny thing I learned, that you really only learn with actual tournament experience, is the limit of testing. I found the same thing to be true in Extended when I only figured out that I should cut Quirion Dryad from the insane B/G deck after I kept drawing it in a PTQ. In testing, I strictly only fight against decks that do well from actual tournaments, never teched out in any way, even if people say that a certain card is already known. I don’t change unless I can smell a mass adoption and therefore just get really good at beating stock decks, don’t necessarily end up armed with the best proactive list. Once testing goes down the path where the changes you are making are good, you stop learning; you really only learn by losing, and the Kirin/Blademaster/Baku deck wasn’t losing… Therefore it stopped getting better after only a few changes.


Given what I learned from actual PTQ experience and the input of the players who made Top 8 with my deck, I would tune further:




Basically, you should probably have all four Waxmane Baku starting, but I don’t want to have too many Grey Ogres; I actually side up to four in almost every matchup. If the White Weenie decks that made Top 8 at the GP catch on, this kind of White Weenie is actually insane. You should not typically lose to decks with no Blademasters, fewer than four Kirin, and no long game plan against Waxmane Baku board control. In many mirrors, Waxmane is more powerful than the Kirin itself, driving tons of damage in via consecutive Alpha Strikes while the opponent never catches a point. Consider the fact that most of the White decks out there can’t even kill your Threes if they have Kirin advantage because they don’t have any Threes themselves.


If you can script your White Weenie draw, try to play like this:


Turn 1: Make a play, or don’t. It might actually be better to hold a Lantern. It can be important to trade, though.


Turn 2: Complain that your deck with 100 2-drops missed. Don’t mention that you cut 8 Twos.


Turn 3: Blademaster. They don’t attack.


Turn 4: Kirin


Turn 5: If they didn’t play a Kirin back, you just play Kami of the Ancient Law, Journey, whatever, and they throw their Gusaris, Jitte, guys, etc. into the bin.


I actually found in testing that it was fine to let the opponent have Jitte and just not let him get any counters on it. If the other White Weenie deck didn’t have Lantern Kami out, Blademaster would keep counters off of Jitte, and I won a lot of games where Otherworldly Journey would actually kill a guy, provide a counter, and keep Jitte naked until Kirin showed up.


At the end of the day, templating an existing archetype isn’t done just because you like certain cards better than the ones that are accepted in particular deck types; templating is done specifically to gain a legitimate strategic advantage in a matchup. It is successfully accomplished by understanding what threat cards are in the decks you expect, and by correctly answering those threat cards using mana efficient and consistent means. This build of White Weenie just does that by consistently holding the ground against opposing aggressive decks while providing a stronger late game via Spirit bombs. Other White decks can’t win fights, fail to remove whole classes of your key permanents even when their bombs are online; Black combat decks are similarly held in check. Three-color Control is the hardest matchup, but you have a legitimate chance to beat them as well.


That said, the deck is slightly slower than the standard White Weenie against combo and Three-color Control. You should bring in both Hokori and the extra Charge. I know this seems odd, but either late game bomb wins, so you just want to increase your chances of drawing a card that will end the game. Kirin and Blademaster are slow for their mana counts, so you cut two Kirin and all the Blademasters. If they have Jittes, you have to leave yours, but you certainly don’t need four Jittes against a non-Jitte combo or board control deck; remember you have the extra Hounds for speed. It is usually better to establish your board and try to swarm into a Charge than dedicate mana to Jitte against a slower deck (assuming you have a backup drop, of course). Every deck that is not Black or White Weenie typically engages in creature combat via one large threat, such as a Yosei or Godo, so pinpoint Waxmane Baku shines maybe better than batch Baku in the mirror. Again, the details come down to the specifics of the opposing deck, but the broad sweeps say 2/2s for one and four are better than 2/2 fighting guys for three; you want to end it fast, so here come all three Charges.


What would really be interesting would be if the format would shift again – it looks like Gifts Ungiven is back on top, in fact – but for an aggro-dominated PTQ field with significant Green decks at the periphery, this build has my current stamp of approval.


Good luck hitting four on four.


LOVE

MIKE