After setting the metagame and then breaking it down again in his previous articles, today Sean gives you three metagame decks to choose from, each one a bit off the beaten path. With so many new decks and new builds coming to the fore in the last week, can you afford not to read these articles?There is less than one week’s time left before US Regionals 2005, and the metagame has developed in an interesting fashion. We’ve looked into a lot of options, gauged their worth, and hope to have an idea of what we’ll be seeing at Regionals. The fact that this is the first tournament to feature Saviors of Kamigawa in Constructed creates a good deal of uncertainty, as it raises the question of how much we know about these cards anyway, and making any estimate of what things are going to look like with certainty is a bit difficult.
That said, last week I looked into the “why” of metagaming, and this week is more of a nuts-and-bolts approach: “how”. That said, I’m going to start by focusing on just one deck, one that I have been playing around with trying to reach a workable build of Mono-Black Control. I started with an idea, formed by the Last Chance Qualifier deck that made the Top 8, that a controlling Mono-Black deck could flourish in the Green-saturated metagame. Green likes creatures, Black kills creatures. Tooth and Nail likes the cards in its hand, Black knocks the cards out of its hand. Simple, really. Making and tuning the deck has been harder… more so than I thought, as my other approaches return me to my original set of beliefs and my original build of the Black deck.
Creatures (8)
Lands (24)
Spells (28)
First off, I hate two-ofs and three-ofs. When building a deck, I consider those to be the worst numbers, the signs of a deckbuilding mistake… but that’s how this deck builds itself, by proportion rather than directly playing four of whichever card you want the most. This is a very difficult deck to build, as unlike most decks it has to finesse its numbers very carefully, maintaining a consistent level of threats and “answers” to difficult situations, and trying not over-dedicate itself to just creature removal or discard or really any one specific kind of answer. Access to Diabolic Tutor helps, as it lets us pack in more controllish cards and singletons of more powerful cards, as well as fudge the numbers on the high-risk, high-reward cards that do powerful things but only if they are still relevant at all (like mass discard, or Barter in Blood).
This is a very interactive deck, and one that focuses very strongly on card advantage along the way. Phyrexian Arena is probably the best card-drawer in the format, so long as you can spare the life, and it asks so little and gives so much. Barter in Blood, Kagemaro, Night of Souls’ Betrayal, Culling Scales… these kill creatures and gain card advantage. Solemn Simulacrum serves a lot of purposes, and always ups your card count while he does it. Distress may not be something that generates card advantage, but it helps you live long enough to use your other cards. The game-plan is to disrupt your opponents’ plan, with creature removal or discard as needed, set down an Arena, and keep interacting and bashing their cards while the number of cards you’ve outdrawn them by steadily increases, keeping your hand full and their resources exhausted. For the most part, none of the elements you see here should surprise anyone, except perhaps the 60th card: Culling Scales, my obvious “pet” card and included because I like what it does and how it does it. This deck is all about card power, and supporting the expensive power cards with the cards that will let you live long enough to take advantage of them… Distress, Wayfarer’s Bauble, and Lose Hope out of the sideboard. Why Lose Hope, and not Sickening Shoal, and why not Sickening Shoal in general will be answered as I walk through game-plans and sideboarding for most of the matchups.
Versus Tooth and Nail / Troll and Nail
Your opponent is the most dangerous in the first few turns, when they are in danger of getting off a quick Tooth and Nail or Sundering Titan from which you just won’t be able to come back. Distress helps a lot with that, and when playing first you’ll have a decent shot at nailing them with Mind Sludge or Cranial Extraction before they get their land combo in play to actually pay nine mana for all of this stuff. After the first few turns, though, and especially if you’ve planted an Arena, their game-plan plays into your exhaustion strategy. Kagemaro is bigger than anything short of Darksteel Colossus, and while Sundering Titan may be bigger, Titan still knows that if it comes down to a fight, everybody loses. Darksteel Colossus is falling out of favor nowadays, and in the face of a Barter in Blood he doesn’t really matter much anyway. Cranial Extraction on Tooth and Nail means you never have to worry about Kiki-Jiki granting Haste, bringing the opponent back down to your Sorcery-based speed, while Night of Souls’ Betrayal eliminates everything short of the artifact creatures to win the game with.
The key is to force them to discard, or flat-out “ban” Tooth and Nail, taking away the benefits of the speed they’ve been working for and forcing an interaction between their creatures and your creature removal… which you should win. If they want to sideboard the Man Plan, bravo for them. Plow Under may be good enough to slow you down, but trying to kill you with creatures is probably the wrong tactic altogether and they aren’t likely to catch you with your pants down and lacking creature removal. When sideboarding, you can cut Culling Scales, Akuta, Born of Ash and an Arena for the 4th Kagemaro, and the extra copies of Mind Sludge and Cranial Extraction. Switch the Boseiju for a Swamp and call it done.
Versus Mono-Blue Control
This is where it shows that you really can’t just sideboard out as much creature removal as you might want to, because you don’t need everything you’ve got to square off against at best six creatures. You’ll want to pull Night of Souls’ Betrayal, Culling Scales, Cranial Extraction, Death Cloud, and -3 Barter in Blood for the extra Mind Sludge, both Oblivion Stones, and all four Nezumi Shortfang. This is a very interactive matchup, and you have to respect that they can do bad things with Vedalken Shackles, so the point is mostly to not let them play how they want to. Thanks, Boseiju! Their countermagic gets worse as time goes on, and you want to take a while anyway. I have no reason to worry about this particular matchup, as it seems to be pretty lopsided from a strategic viewpoint, thanks to Boseiju, Who Shelters All. That no one in their right mind should play it to begin with might also lend to that lack of concern.
Versus Mono-Green Aggro
They have creatures, Plow Under, and equipment. You have creature removal, mana acceleration, and the ability to lock most of their creatures entirely out of the game with Night of Souls’ Betrayal. It’s not an “academic” matchup by far, thanks to Troll Ascetic and Plow Under, but creatures aren’t special and they don’t punish you hard enough to penalize the use of Phyrexian Arena. Sideboarding, I’d suggest losing Boseiju for the sideboarded Swamp, removing both copies of Mind Sludge, and shaving off a copy of Phyrexian Arena for the 4th Kagemaro, the second Night of Souls’ Betrayal, and the extra Cranial Extraction. You do have to respect Cranial Extraction after sideboarding, but Distress helps you to cheat in that fight even though they have 4 to your 2… you can Distress theirs first, and have three Diabolic Tutors that can “count” as Cranial Extraction to boot. They can be quite fast, and can do things that definitely matter with that speed, but except for Plow Under or Cranial Extraction they can’t really do anything that you can’t just kill.
Versus Flores Red
You got me. I don’t win this one, and I don’t care. It’s that bad… but I also expect that most Red decks will use creatures rather than “just” direct damage. Paying life to draw cards is a bad plan against a deck that wants to discard cards to make you lose life, especially since actually killing them around a flurry of burn is pretty difficult. Switch the Boseiju for a Swamp, pull out the extraneous cards like Culling Scales and Night of Souls’ Betrayal, and bring in Nezumi Shortfang… it’s something he’ll have to burn, or that might make him discard a burn card, and that’s better than half the cards in the deck at that point! The 4th Kagemaro is also probably better than some miscellaneous creature removal card, but that doesn’t mean the change is going to feel anything less than hopeless. Phyrexian Arena, by the way, comes almost entirely out… you leave one to Tutor for if you get off to the kind of start that will actually profit from its use, but those are so rare against this deck that it shouldn’t really matter.
Versus Aggro Red
This is where the Lose Hopes shine, and their use over Sickening Shoal can look quite clever. Sickening Shoal is great, but this is a deck that wants to generate card advantage, not yield card advantage for some time advantage… it builds up card advantage as part of its plan, but that doesn’t make individual cards completely disposable. Lose Hope is the right cost, for an effect that is small but very important: Slith Firewalker, Hearth Kami, Vulshok Sorcerer, and Genju of the Spires all get taken down for just one Black mana, and you get to Scry as well… crucial against an opponent that will probably strain your mana base by destroying Lands. You try to stay out of danger range, and either force a discard or outright “ban” Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] before you start attacking or using Consume Spirit, just preventing them from overwhelming you early on with creatures + Stone Rains. If the game goes long enough, and you can prevent them from building up a hand full of lethal burn spells, things get very difficult for them indeed. Zo-Zu can be a pain, and is just out of the one-toughness range that makes him easy prey for Lose Hope, but for the most part they can’t catch you beneath him and cripple you entirely for too many turns.
Swap the Boseiju for the sideboarded Swamp, and put in four copies of Lose Hope and the second Night of Souls’ Betrayal for two copies of Phyrexian Arena, the Cranial Extraction, Akuta, and one of the two copies of Mind Sludge.
Versus Black/Green Death Cloud
Their maindeck is not something to worry about, save for Death Cloud and the occasional beatdown + Plow Under draw – they are trying to be a beatdown deck, by use of Terror and Echoing Decay, while they also have Death Cloud to try and gain permanent advantage with. That last part isn’t very likely, but it should at least be worth remembering that they can cause you to sacrifice creatures once you’ve gotten some sort of an advantage and it’s time to try to actually finish the game. Molder Slug doesn’t bother the Black deck, because it relies on enchantments, not artifacts, and Troll Ascetic is pretty easy to deal with: Kagemaro, Barter in Blood, and Death Cloud all remove him from play quite efficiently. Their plan after sideboarding is probably to use Cranial Extraction and Persecute to break the Black deck, and so we are going to want to do two things: vary our removal, if possible, and prepare to fight a discard war.
If they want to fight, fine… we’ll fight. Swap the Boseiju for a Swamp, as is the habit against non-Blue decks, and then shave the numbers on the rest of the deck: lose Culling Scales, Death Cloud, Night of Souls’ Betrayal, and Akuta, Born of Ash, and remove one copy each of Phyrexian Arena, Mind Sludge, and Diabolic Tutor. Replace with the second Cranial Extraction, two copies of Oblivion Stone, and the four Nezumi Shortfang.
Versus Red/Green
Red/Green has efficient creatures, good equipment, and the possibility for mana disruption. This is a pretty difficult match, and it will come down to making good decisions. You have to remove arbitrarily large Troll Ascetics, possibly square off against large monsters like Arc-Slogger when you’re still trying to catch up with land drops, and all this while staying out of burn range. Here, and against Adamaro Red, Sickening Shoal would shine… but both are smaller targets than the one we are pointing Lose Hope at. One Kagemaro should solve all your problems, but that doesn’t mean your opponent is going to let you accelerate and play him fast enough. I’d say this is the hardest aggro deck to face off against, because it isn’t vulnerable to our specific sideboard choice, Lose Hope, has better mana acceleration and access to Eternal Witness, and problematic creatures to match with their land destruction options and burn spells.
Once again, the Boseiju becomes a Swamp, and we trade Cranial Extraction, Akuta, and one of the two Mind Sludges for two copies of Oblivion Stone and the fourth Kagemaro, First to Suffer.
Versus White Weenie
Again, we see where the sideboard strategy of Lose Hope can shine, because all you need to win here is to buy time and not miss your early land drops. If they are playing Glorious Anthem, Night of Souls’ Betrayal can be kind of weak, but there are more than enough other things going on that you can make up the difference. Mass discard doesn’t matter, and neither does Cranial Extraction; kill their creatures, and don’t walk into a Shining Shoal if you don’t have to. Phyrexian Arena is nice, but you can stabilize, then play it, and certainly don’t want four… you have more than enough card advantage with everything else going on.
We’ll see some pretty extensive sideboarding to deal with this particular deck, but then it’s a simple beatdown deck with no complex moving parts (unless you want to count the occasional Shining Shoal) that can be beaten by bludgeoning their creatures over and over. We switch the Boseiju for a Swamp again, and lose both copies of Mind Sludge and two copies of Phyrexian Arena, then remove a Diabolic Tutor, Cranial Extraction, Akuta, Born of Ash, and Death Cloud. Replace those with the four Lose Hope, two Oblivion Stones, Night of Souls’ Betrayal, and the fourth Kagemaro.
Versus Erayo / Rule of Law
Not everyone is laughing at this deck, after all. Amusingly, the sideboard card I’m packing against decks that have the potential to be too fast for me also works just fine against the 1/1 flipping Legend; Lose Hope does exactly what is needed for exactly how much I am willing to spend. Even if they get you locked up, Boseiju can still save you from the “true” lock, and you can finish with Stalking Stones or even Akuta, Born of Ash if you’re locked down completely just by discarding him and maintaining more cards in hand than they have.
It has the potential to be very good, but it is relying on something very, very fragile against you. Switch out the three Barters in Blood, remove two Phyrexian Arena, and lose Culling Scales and Death Cloud, replacing all these with the four copies of Lose Hope, both Oblivion Stone, and the second copy of Night of Souls’ Betrayal.
Now, of course… when I’ve talked about how Tooth and Nail is the best deck, and the Mono-Green Aggro deck may very well be the best deck to play, why is it that I am looking at something far out of left field for my choice of deck at Regionals? Metagaming is the key to maximizing your results at a tournament, facing your deck squarely against a known field and taking advantage of customizations to beat the most prevalent decks. Tooth and Nail is the best deck, but there is very little you can really do to adjust the mirror match in your favor besides simply play better than your opponent, which leaves too much room for luck to creep in and defeat you if all you’re going to be doing all day is playing 50/50 matchups of the same deck versus the same deck. Sometimes, there is a superior strategy you can use to win the matchup, playing differently than expected with a way you have learned to win that the opponent considers unusual, such as Carlos Romao’s Psychatog strategy that won his World Championships.
We do not have one of these strategies, even though we have seen a specific change to the Tooth and Nail deck’s options for sideboarding thanks to “The Man Plan”. There is no known earth-shattering secret change you can use that will guarantee you fame, fortune, success and the hearts of women, or at least more wins at Magic, and with the color Green painting a bullseye on its forehead to the point where Rushwood Dryad / Blanchwood Armor decks are starting to sound tempting I find it difficult to the extreme for me to believe that being within the sea of Green is the proper tactic… for me. Everyone is bound to have a different perspective, but my plan is to beat the Green decks from outside rather than from within. This choice leads me to a deck that is excellent against creature-based decks, playing “as unfairly” as Tooth and Nail against the beatdown decks thanks to the powerful Black cards and their natural synergy for gaining control. And against Tooth and Nail decks, I have learned that the matchup is quite even-handed, with solid consistency for the Black deck where the Tooth and Nail deck can have mana problems thanks to its heavy commitment to a second color of mana (“colorless” thanks to thirteen Lands that do not produce Green mana) and due to the potential for the Black deck to have a superior reactive strategy, invalidating large parts of the Tooth and Nail deck by bringing the game into the late game, where mana-fixers and land tutors are useless draws.
Tooth and Nail doesn’t have very many cards that the Black deck cares about, and for the most part it’s just a bunch of Lands and non-threatening cards. Vine Trellis can be a real problem, as it doesn’t just accelerate their mana but also soaks up half a Barter in Blood, making it sometimes rather difficult to return from a resolved Tooth and Nail… as can Plow Under, because it can be used faster than the Black deck is capable of fighting against Tooth and Nail, to actually successfully use the standard Tooth and Nail strategy to win the game. The Tooth and Nail deck is not really and truly geared to beating the Black deck, and at this late stage there seems little profit to them in learning what those tools are and using them. In my mind at least, I have seen the target metagame and built a deck to attack it at its weaker points, fighting against it in a way that seems unconventional when compared to the rest of the decks currently in the format.
Looking at other decks at last, then, we’ll see some interesting advancements made to a few of the ‘theoretical’ decks I presented in my deckbuilding “jam session” of a few weeks back. Specifically, playing around with the Erayo deck I found something I liked well enough to use, ditching the Green mana and Gifts Ungiven pseudo-engine for something more consistent and better suited to taking advantage of the lock in a more profitable fashion.
Creatures (6)
Lands (20)
Spells (34)
This has the advantage of color consistency, even though it does stretch its mana a bit into the different colors to take advantage of Engineered Explosives, which is another spell that can be played for zero mana when it comes time to flip a quick Erayo as well as a board-control card that can solve problems such as the Aether Vial problem and quick aggressive rushes. That leads me to be tempted to include the fourth, and to start including Auriok Salvagers in the sideboard against dedicated beatdown decks that would surely hate to face off against Explosives every turn, but the sideboard requires an answer to Boseiju, and catch-all answers to other problems that Terashi’s Grasp and Pithing Needle provides. Presence of the Wise is for the Flores Red deck, as you don’t need much more than gaining twelve life or so to beat them, so long as you are able to protect Erayo with countermagic the one turn you plan to expose him.
A logical train of thought that follows the Tooth and Nail “Man Plan” is to revisit Flores’ Tooth and Nail deck with Magma Jet for problems like Slith Firewalker, especially as decks of that sort are likely to appear at Regionals in good numbers. What would the “Man Plan” look like if you weren’t limited to “hits” like 5/5 Tramplers and 4/6 Slugs as your Troll Ascetic back-up, but instead got to use the best creature in the format?
14 Forest
4 Mountain
4 Cloudpost
1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
4 Kodama’s Reach
4 Reap and Sow
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Eternal Witness
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Magma Jet
3 Sylvan Scrying
3 Tooth and Nail
2 Sundering Titan
2 Duplicant
2 Mindslaver
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
Sideboard:
4 Plow Under
4 Troll Ascetic
4 Arc-Slogger
3 Pyroclasm
It lacks the explosiveness that is common to the Tooth and Nail deck, losing at least one full turn thanks to using Cloudpost instead of the Urzatron; it gets back some colored mana consistency, with more starting Forests than your standard Tooth and Nail deck, and gets a benefit as well from Magma Jet. But sideboarding… you get to take advantage of Arc-Slogger instead of more “random” Troll and Nail sideboard creatures. Thanks to the Shock ability built into the Slogger, Arc-Slogger naturally trumps Molder Slug, matches Iwamori (but allows a Troll Ascetic to kill it, as well), and is outclassed by Razormane Masticore (but who isn’t?) thanks to First Strike. It may well be an avenue worth exploring if nothing else, and it seems that any deck that can squeak in Arc-Slogger ought to at least consider the thought before outright dismissing it.
Metagaming is always the right thing to do… taking advantage of a known quantity, the expected field, and increasing your chances of success by playing the field. Knowing when this means you should just play the best deck, and what if any modifications to mirror-match strategy or sideboarding plans should go with that, is as important as being able to figure out a proper means for attacking the common element. Sometimes it’s even best to grab the known best deck, do what everyone else is doing, close your eyes and run with it. Ultimately, the choice is now yours, and I only hope that whatever decision you may have reached after following this series on Standard in Magical Hack is an informed one.
Good luck at Regionals, and may the target you are aiming for be the one that is actually there.
— Sean McKeown
— [email protected]
“They say it’s the last song
They don’t know us, you see,
It’s only the last song If you let it be…”
~~Bjork, “The Next-to-Last Song”,
from Dancer in the Dark