As observant readers may have noticed, I tend not to write about Constructed decks until we are well into the season. Usually I will give the environment time to settle down into a smallish gauntlet of decks, figure out what makes those decks tick, and then write up a deck designed to do well against that gauntlet.
I don’t have that kind of time this season. I want to qualify for Pro Tour: Los Angeles, and I want it bad.
There are several reasons I am excited about this tournament. It will be in Los Angeles, my home town. It will be the second “rotated Extended” tournament, ever. I won’t have to design my deck to be resilient enough to handle Wasteland and Rishadan Port. Nobody will be expected to reanimate Akroma, Angel of Wrath before turn 3.
I really, really want to go to this tournament. Really extra big time a lot.
It also happens to be the case that I’ve never written an article series before, and I am now presented with the perfect opportunity to remedy that. I don’t know how many of you remember Brian David-Marshall series of articles about qualifying (with names like “Walking to Houston” and “Swimming to Venice”) — but as an aspiring tournament player I read and enjoyed those articles a great deal back in the day. Over the next few weeks I hope to offer you a similar mix of storytelling and technology, as I try my best to qualify for Pro Tour: Los Angeles. So without further ado, I present to you:
The Road To Los Angeles: Week 1 (July 2-9)
So last week, I decide to something I’ve never done before, and jump into a tournament almost completely unprepared. Having just learned of a PTQ in Mesa, Arizona — a modest six-hour trek away from home in California — I decide on the spot to make the trip, with only five days to go and no testing under my belt whatsoever.
This leaves me with five workdays to playtest decks, choose a deck, obtain the cards for a deck, and learn the deck inside and out before the tournament. Good stuff!
My friends Rob and Brendan are going to make the trip with me, so Sunday afternoon finds us eating lunch at Claim Jumper and discussing the format. All throughout lunch, Rob keeps telling us he wants to play a combo deck.
“How ’bout I play… Mind’s Desire?”
“Mind’s Desire isn’t legal in Kamigawa.”
“Lame. Then I guess I’ll have to play… Mind’s Desire.”
That’s pretty much how Rob’s mind works.
We order our food and start discussing White Weenie, Snakes, and Umezawa’s Jitte for awhile, until the conversation gets derailed by a tangent about basketball. A bit later, Rob flips over his napkin and starts writing things down, saying, “Okay, I’m going to get a decklist started…”
We peer over the table to see what he has written.
4 Mind’s Desire
56 Island
His face deadly serious, Rob continues to scribble on the napkin, finally revealing the following to us.
4 Mind’s Desire
56 Island
40 Chrome Mox
10 Mana Severance
1 Time Walk
He then comments that, “I hope I draw Mana Severance,” by which time I am laughing so hard I have practically fallen off my seat. This is, without a doubt, the deck to take to your Kamigawa Block PTQs. You heard it here first, folks.
We pay the bill and Rob heads back to UC Irvine, where he’s got summer school the next day, while Brendan and I get down to testing.
After knocking a few decks around, Brendan becomes attached to Tsuyoshi Fujita’s G/u/r concoction with Honor-Worn Shaku. I am having a tough time disagreeing with him; it seems to have game against all the decks from the Pro Tour other than Splice (which is expected to have a low turnout for qualifiers), and Shuhei Nakamura beat enough Kodama’s Reach decks with it to take ninth place at Pro Tour: Philadelphia on tiebreakers.
I agree with Brendan that the deck is strong, and agree to play it at the PTQ. We head down to a smallish convention on Wednesday to pick up the cards we need. Rob, still stuck at school, orders his deck online (foolishly enough, from some non-StarCityGames.com site…. as we shall soon see) on Tuesday, under the reasonable assumption that the cards will arrive by Friday after he paid extra for rushed shipping.
Meanwhile, my car dies on the way back from our card-buying expedition, and I am informed of the happy fact that I will need a new transmission. Besides costing roughly a billion dollars and taking a full week to repair, this complication means that we will be lacking a vehicle to get to Arizona.
Luckily, my dad helps out by letting me borrow his brand new car (that’s not foreshadowing, I swear) for the weekend. He also makes some vague threat of decapitation in the event that anything happens to it.
(Again, I’m not foreshadowing, I promise.)
I get off work at 5:30 on Friday, and the three of us leave immediately for the desert.
I have a deck. Brendan has a deck.
Rob does not have a deck.
Rob’s deck is in the mail, where it will remain until Saturday morning, at which point it will arrive at his house in California just as we are waking up for the tournament in Arizona.
Rob does have plenty of cash, however, and plans on purchasing the stuff he needs to finish his deck onsite. Brendan and I have similar plans, as we could not figure out what Fujita’s sideboarded Mindblazes were for, and so did not buy any while we were in California. Having since been informed that they were an integral part of the deck’s strategy against a Splice lock (apparently you’re supposed to deal twenty with Mindblazes, Glacial Rays, and Snake beats), we plan on picking up four Blazes apiece onsite. Brendan also needs to get Kodama of the North Trees, which we decided to maindeck over Jugan in order to help out against White Weenie.
Imagine our surprise when no dealers show up to the tournament.
Not even one.
This results in Rob having no deck to play, Brendan and I being stuck with suboptimal builds of our decks, and innumerable players scampering all over the room trying to complete their sideboards.
In between repeating the words “No, I don’t have any Hokoris or Shining Shoals for trade” ad nauseum, I manage to fill out the majority of my deck registration sheet. I am at a loss for a clever title until Rob reaches over with his pen and helps me out by writing “NoDealers.dec” on top of the page.
Creatures (20)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 4 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 1 Orochi Sustainer
- 3 Kodama of the North Tree
- 4 Keiga, the Tide Star
- 4 Godo, Bandit Warlord
Lands (23)
Spells (17)
- 3 Sensei's Divining Top
- 1 Tatsumasa, the Dragon's Fang
- 4 Umezawa's Jitte
- 1 Konda's Banner
- 4 Kodama's Reach
- 4 Honor-Worn Shaku
Sideboard
Round 1: White Weenie
My opponent is a strong player running WW with maindeck Manriki-Gusari, Hand of Honor, and Celestial Kirin, but no Tallowisps. He gets down Kirin with double-Gusari on it game 1, stranding two Godos in my hand, but this is irrelevant because his draw is not particularly fast and I have Meloku. Meloku holds off his offense and eventually makes a ton of flyers, letting me alpha strike for the win.
Game 2: He gets a perfect curve-out on the play, starting with Isamaru. I lose big time.
Game 3: He draws redundant copies of Celestial Kirin, which remain stuck in his hand as I once again go to town with Meloku.
1-0
Round 2: B/W control
I win game 1 because I have more threats than he has answers, he literally never uses any shuffle effects with his Divining Top, and he draws two copies of Ghostly Prison that do nothing.
Game 2 he plays Yukora and Shizo, and just Fears his Yukora four times to come in for twenty damage. I have no removal, and he has Hero’s Demise to stop me from racing, so that’s GG.
Game 3 he opted to leave Ghostly Prison in, apparently because of Meloku… but once again it just sits there and does nothing. I play more threats than he has answers, and that’s it.
2-0
Round 3: R/G Snakes with Kumano
My opponent this round is Adam Prosak, who I am told is one of the better players in Arizona, if not the best.
In game 1, he churns out a bunch of Snakes followed by Seshiro and just races my legends.
In game 2, he plays Kumano with five red and five green sources on the board, threatening to RFG every Dragon and Meloku I play for the rest of the game once he untaps. I have Keiga in play and Top into another, then play it after attacking with hopes to steal Kumano and Seshiro.
Unfortunately, Adam is a Good Player, and uses the last of his mana to shoot the Keiga that’s in play with Kumano so it gets RFG’d and I only get to steal one creature instead. I steal Kumano, but I only have one red source of my own – so now that I’ve had to trash my two best creatures in exchange for what amounts to a vanilla 5/4, he just races me with Snakes again.
2-1
Round 4: White Weenie
I can’t recall if my opponent this round played Tallowisp, but he definitely played Indomitable Will and Cage of Hands. In any case, he only got a fast enough draw in game 2 to beat me.
My memory is fuzzy on games one and three, as they were pretty straightforward Meloku vs. weenies races, with Meloku coming out on top both times.
3-1
Round 5: G/W Celestial Kirin.dec
This guy’s combo is Celestial Kirin and Spirit/Arcane spells with varying casting costs, including the surprisingly versatile Shining Shoal. I don’t know how he does it, but every time he plays something with Kirin in play, it ends up destroying something of mine. I lose like three Jittes to that thing, and at one point a Shining Shoal with X=4 demolishes my board by blowing up Godo and Tatsumasa (because a Shoal with X=4 has a converted mana cost of six), then redirecting four damage to Meloku.
Fortunately, his draw is handicapped by cards like Otherworldly Journey and Kami of False Hope that look like they were intended for different matchups, so I finally win game 1 after literally forty minutes of getting my permanents blown up by Kirin.
Game 2, he powers out Kirin and Kodama’s Reach. I play Keiga, which he blows up with Kirin by playing Yosei. I use Keiga’s trigger to steal the Kirin, but he blows me out by stealing it back with Otherworldly Journey, giving him a 5/5 and a 4/4 to my empty board.
I play another Keiga to lay some blocks, but he has an answer for that as well with a surprise Cage of Hands, allowing him to finish me with Yosei and Kirin.
We barely finish shuffling for game 3 when time is called.
3-1-1
Round 6: Pro Dude
My tiebreakers are actually good because I beat two very good players in rounds 1 and 3, so I can almost certainly draw in if I win here. My opponent is someone who is good enough to have Q’d for Philly (because I overheard him talking with his friends about matches he played at the Pro Tour), playing R/G burn.
Game 1 he plays double-Hearth Kami, and uses one of them to blow up my Honor-Worn Shaku. I play a North Tree, he kills it with one of his own, and then he plays Kumano. Kumano domes me for a few while I play a legend of some sort, then he goes “Lava Spike you, Yamabushi’s Flame you, game.” Ouch.
Game 2: I get out Keiga with Jitte. He taps out to play Kumano, and Keiga drops him to fifteen. I play a North Tree and pass. He plays another guy, and I attack back with Keiga and North Tree for what looks like eleven, but which is actually a lethal fifteen because I can pump Keiga twice with Jitte. My opponent doesn’t realize this until it’s too late, and loses after he doesn’t block.
Game 3: I keep a hand with Jitte but no acceleration, because it seems that without Jitte advantage it will be difficult for me to race his burn, so I keep. I don’t find any acceleration by turn 3, so when he plays turn 4 North Tree I have to take six on the chin before killing it with one of my own on turn 5. He then blows up my Jitte, Lava Spikes me, and burns me out with Kumano and double-Yamabushi’s Flame.
Neither Brendan nor I make the cut for top eight, and Rob didn’t even get to play, so we pack it up and regroup for dinner. We arrive back at my dad’s car to discover that the entire contents of an unopened twelve-pack of Diet Coke With Splenda has exploded from the summer heat, covering the back seat and roof of the car with soda.
The situation was remarkably reminiscent of a certain scene from Pulp Fiction, except with Diet Coke instead of blood covering the inside of the car. Fortunately, much like Jules and Vincent in the movie, we succeed in covering our tracks with a hasty cleanup effort before reaching home.
The New Threat
The main thing I took away from this tournament was learning about Manriki-Gusari.
It’s pretty clear just by looking at him that Godo’s primary function in Fujita’s deck was to give the deck four extra Jittes in the war for Jitte advantage, but Manriki-Gusari does this so much better it’s not even funny.
An active Gusari not only gives you a monopoly over Jitte advantage, it also gives you a monopoly over Gusari advantage. As long as you keep a guy untapped with Gusari equipped, your opponent will never even be able to equip a Gusari of his own to fight back, nor will he be able to hurt you with any Jittes. Now his only remaining answer to your Jittes is playing Jittes of his own to Disenchant yours — but even if he does that, you still get to play, equip, and swing once with it on your turn to get one round of counters out of it before it dies.
As the Fujita.dec player, I could theoretically run Gusari of my own to fetch with Godo – but what creature would I attach it to? White Weenie and the shiny new Mono-Black Aggro deck are going to curve out with cheap guys and then put a Gusari on one of them. By the time I summon Godo (or anyone else I can safely attach it to), my opponent will already have a sword-breaker of his own equipped, meaning mine will get blown up before the equip ability even resolves.
Worse, this threat is equally valid against the mighty Umezawa’s Jitte itself. If my opponent plays Manriki-Gusari at any time before I play my own Gusari, I literally cannot get Jitte advantage. The best use for my Jittes at that point is as a Sorcery-speed Wear Away for any future Jittes he might play.
The Manriki-Gusari fight is one that I, as the slower deck, cannot even get into.
I don’t have a fast curve-out of creatures, I don’t have three mana to spare on turn 3 for playing and equipping Gusari, and the early creatures I do play are usually Sakura-Tribe Elders that need to hit the graveyard more than they need to stick around to hold a chain with an exploding taco on the end of it.
If weenie decks all start playing Manriki-Gusari, as more and more of them seem to be, slower decks will have to alter their strategies to compensate if they are to have any kind of shot at winning the Jitte war.
The most straightforward ways to fight back against Gusari are by playing straight-up artifact removal (Wear Away, Rending Vines, Terashi’s Grasp) or by opting out of the Jitte advantage game altogether by running Pithing Needle on Jitte instead. (Of course, wouldn’t you know it – Pithing Needle also gets blown up by common sideboard cards Celestial Kirin and Terashi’s Grasp, so even that is not a particularly strong solution to the problem.)
Half of my opponents at the PTQ played Manriki-Gusari against me, and that makes me question whether the Jitte advantage fight is one worth fighting any more for the green decks. I can’t afford to maindeck more than four combined copies of Wear Away and Rending Vines (to counter their Gusari) if I am to have a chance against the non-aggro decks, and that seems to be what I’d need to do in order to have a shot at keeping my aggro opponents from just winning through Jitte advantage backed up by Manriki-Gusari.
For this upcoming week, I’m going to try a couple of things.
For one, I’m going to continue shopping around for decks, armed with my newfound knowledge of the format. Fujita’s deck still has a lot of raw power, and it may yet be possible (albeit difficult) to augment it to work with this new environment — but between working forty hours a week and hitting a qualifier every Saturday, I don’t see myself being able to tweak the deck enough to give myself a better chance of qualifying with it than if I just switched decks altogether.
So I’m going to start testing with the fast aggro decks. If ya don’t have time to beat ’em, I guess you gotta join ’em.
Switching to a fast aggro deck should be easy; I already know how the fast aggro vs. fatties matchups plays out, and have years of experience with the fast aggro vs. control matchup, so all I should need to learn to be able to pilot these decks is how to play the fast aggro vs. fast aggro mirror-matches.
I’m going to take this Manriki-Gusari contraption out for a spin and see what it can do. It might be The Next Big Thing and it might be a giant letdown, but whatever happens, you’ll be sure to hear about it. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.
Until next time!
Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]
Bonus Section: Updating Fujita’s Deck
For those of you still interested in playing a deck like Fujita’s, here are my thoughts on updating it for the new environment.
I should start by mentioning that I can’t say enough good things about Honor-Worn Shaku. To me, that card is the main advantage this deck has over the TOGIT list. Besides being an extra accelerant – and these decks thrive on acceleration like red decks thrive on Jackal Pup – Shaku just dumps out so much mana it’s ridiculous. With a Shaku in play, a Hokori from White Weenie typically ends up being asymmetrical in your favor. Brendan and I both won games in the tournament in which WW resolved Hokori and we had no way to remove it – they were landslide victories, in fact, thanks to Shaku.
Now to the updates.
My two losses on the day were both to the deck’s inability to answer Kumano. Being able to deal with that particular Legend is not something I had anticipated needing to do, but it was quite literally the only thing that kept me out of the top eight of the tournament.
It would be easy to write off these losses as “getting randomed out,” but that is a dangerous attitude to take towards an environment as open as the current one. Off-the-radar decks will be out there, you will be paired against them, and your deck cannot scoop to them if you are to succeed in the tournament.
It would seem that in order to broaden the deck’s answer base enough to prepare it for the unexpected, red will have to be cut for some other color.
Why red? Simply put, the deck needs access to white or black, and it cannot function without green and blue. None of the deck’s strategy works without green’s acceleration, and trying to win without Meloku is like trying to win with Tooth and Nail using no 5GG Sorceries. If we’re introducing a new color, it has to be in place of red.
Now the main red component of the deck is Godo. This is fortunate, because as I was discussing earlier, Manriki-Gusari really makes a mess of Godo.
In order to maintain the deck’s threat density, Godo needs to be replaced by another six-mana fatty. Since Black is one of the colors we might be adding, we should take a look at Kokusho, which is probably the best Dragon against the fatties mirror. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about Yosei.)
The fatty mirrors seem to be punching contests. Each player is swinging with punches that deal five or six damage, connecting with four five-damage punches basically wins you the prize. Kokusho gets in an extra punch when he dies, and takes away one of the opponent’s punches as he does so, which is a pretty big swing in a matchup like that.
Yosei’s tap-out ability provides an extra punch by allowing you to get in for an unblocked punch while the opponent is tapped down — but this only works provided you have another attacker read at the time Yosei dies. Kokusho just straight-up domes the opponent for five every time he dies, regardless of whether or not you have another attacker available after he hits the bin, which is his primary advantage over his Plains-fueled cousin.
That being said, Yosei is certainly better against weenies than Kokusho is. Gaining five life is insignificant compared to how much life you will save by turning off an attack step from WW or MBA, much less the breathing room gained by depriving them of their mana for an entire main phase.
Looking at additional support cards, white gives me access to Final Judgment, while Black offers Hideous Laughter and Cranial Extraction.
Judgment is obviously leaps and bounds better than Laughter, for a thousand different reasons, in really just about every matchup… But Cranial Extraction is a different story. Extraction gives me a perfect answer to the Hana Kami lock, while playing White forces me to try and counter the lock with Pithing Needle or Hokori – poor solutions against a deck capable of tutoring up Horobi’s Whisper and Wear Away on a whim.
(On the other hand, it’s also possible to just say “damn the Splice deck – almost nobody plays it, and if they do, I’ll just let that be my one loss in the Swiss.”)
Finally, white lets me play Reciprocate and Terashi’s Verdict, while black gives me Hero’s Demise and Swallowing Plague. From where I’m sitting, Reciprocate is the best of the four. Reciprocate is both more efficient and has more targets against MBA than Hero’s Demise does. Swallowing Plague might arguably be better than Reciprocate against MBA, though I’d expect that in the early game you would save yourself more damage by removing the first 3/3 they play for the affordable cost of one mana than by waiting until you had five mana to tap yourself out in order to kill it and gain three life instead of playing a North Tree or Meloku that turn.
Overall, I’d make the tentative suggestion that the best replacement color for red would be white.
Either plan would require a bit of restructuring to accommodate the loss of Godo. Remember that four shuffle effects are leaving the deck along with the Bandit Warlord, so I think at least two Time of Needs will have to enter the mix to keep Divining Top operating smoothly. That is a bit of a downer, because one of this deck’s great strengths is that it can start playing its fatties as soon as it can afford them, rather than having to pause to cast Time of Need…. but I hardly think adding two Time of Needs will break the deck’s back.
Additionally, adding Time of Need lets you cut one Meloku. Four Meloku was definitely right against the Pro Tour metagame of dozens of Kodama’s Reach decks all playing Meloku, because extra copies served to remove opposing Melokus…. but redundant copies in this environment are completely dead against all these aggro decks running around.
All of these changes approximate to the following list.
Creatures (17)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 3 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 4 Yosei, the Morning Star
- 1 Orochi Sustainer
- 3 Kodama of the North Tree
- 2 Keiga, the Tide Star
Lands (23)
Spells (20)
Note that Shaku makes boarding in Hokori against slower decks (except maybe Snakes with Sachi) an especially strong strategy for this deck. Even if you’re not in a superior board position, as long as you have a Shaku in play you will develop faster than your opponent will under a Hokori.
It’s a shame that I’ll probably be abandoning this deck for a less flashy beatdown deck; it’s a blast to play, and if I didn’t want to qualify for Pro Tour: Los Angeles as much as I do, I’d probably just keep playing it anyway.
Wow, this article ended… Quite awhile ago, didn’t it? I’m impressed you’re still reading.
Apologies to the editor for all the extra content. I’m done now.
Really.