You’re in the club and this guy walks up behind you and smacks your significant other right across the face:
What do you do?
I’m sure you’re pretty intimidated, because you’ve seen the kind of havoc he is capable of. You should just bounce and cut your losses.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is two articles in a row started with terrible and nonsensical puns.
Cheers.
When the Ball Rolls Downhill
Several weeks ago I talked about the inherent problems of Four-Color Rally and how Rally the Ancestors itself was not the reason that the deck was successful, but it was instead Collected Company and Reflector Mage. I’m fairly certain this is a known quantity nowadays and widely attributed to the previous Standard deck’s dominance.
Reflector Mage was a terrible, terrible mistake for Standard Magic. Its very printing invalidates multiple strategies, bottlenecks creatures, and acts as almost a functional Time Walk much of the time. Bounce effects are powerful enough, but adding the “you can’t cast this until your next turn” clause throws it wildly over the top.
Collected Company, magically enough, may have gotten better this rotation because it focuses the deck. Sylvan Advocate, Reflector Mage, Bounding Krasis, Duskwatch Recruiter, and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy sharpen this tool into a deadly weapon. The results from the #SCGINVI in Columbus and, slightly more tellingly, the Standard Open are troubling. There were nineteen copies of Bant Company out of the Top 32.
Nineteen!
That’s not just a ridiculous number, but one that warrants serious understanding of just how it came to this.
Bad Wizards! Bad! You did this!
I wish we could rub WotC’s nose in the rug like they were a bad dog and really drive the point home.
Traverse the Rabbit Hole
The onus on deckbuilders to neutralize Bant Company has to be swift and effective.
There are several de facto reasons that Bant Company may have produced such skewed results.
1) In the face of a new format and with such a high-stakes tournament like the #SCGINVI, players went with the previous week’s winner.
2) Jim Davis’s Bant Company list appeared to be the most fleshed-out deck of the event.
3) Many, many cards from the previous format ported over, thus making it an easier deck to put together.
While Bant was unable to take either crown over the weekend, it came dangerously close twice, boasting a pair of second-place finishes. It remains to be seen if this deck has the closing ability in a semi-hostile world, but the extremely high density of top finishes means that it’s within shouting distance. The Pro Tour in the coming days will attest to that.
The best players in the world tend to gravitate towards strong, intricate, and sometimes overpowered decks. On most metagame breakdowns, the cards that float to the top are Reflector Mage; Collected Company; Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy; and Sylvan Advocate. Coincidentally Bant plays all of those cards. This means that an already impressive deck could make an even bigger impression if it takes down a Pro Tour.
In Pro Tours that have come and gone, it has been fairly common for a Mono-Red Aggro deck to keep something slower and more deliberate in check. Clearly we don’t have that, and I’d be extremely surprised if one emerged. Instead we have this:
Creatures (32)
- 4 Knight of the White Orchid
- 4 Dragon Hunter
- 3 Kytheon, Hero of Akros
- 3 Anointer of Champions
- 2 Consul's Lieutenant
- 4 Expedition Envoy
- 4 Thraben Inspector
- 4 Thalia's Lieutenant
- 4 Town Gossipmonger
Lands (18)
- 18 Plains
Spells (10)
Tom Ross, in his infinite aggro wisdom, made a fast deck significantly faster. Maxing out on your two-power one-drops and the addition of Anointer of Champions (for delicious interaction with Always Watching) can give you the ability to kill the Collected Company deck before they’re even able to cobble together a defense.
Is this the strategy going forward if we live in a world where well over half of a given Top 32 is Bant Collected Company?
Well…
Exploit the Weaknesses. Kill the Giant.
Time to figure out what our sling is.
The most important thing to understand when battling against Bant Company is the number three.
Three.
Almost every creature in their deck has a toughness of three, and that makes killing a few of their creatures a tad cumbersome for a lot of decks. Kozilek’s Return, a default sweeper for multiple archetypes, does surprisingly little against them because it is unable to allow for a full clear, and because it is devoid, something like Pyromancer’s Goggles is unable to copy it for a huge clear. This makes it both ineffective and worse against them pre- and post-sideboard.
Another problem a lot of decks face is oversideboarding. Negate or Dispel, in theory, should be excellent against them. Unfortunately, they play 25+ creatures, which means that all the non-creature countermagic can rot in your hand. Finding the balance of bad cards post-sideboard to replace with your hard answers to their Collected Company and Negates is not only important, it will decide the pace of the match.
Here are some potential answers to Bant:
The Good: Radiant Flames is the hard three that we are looking for. For three mana it can sweep away the majority of Bant’s battlefield minus a powered-up Sylvan Advocate. With enough pressure you can bottleneck them into committing to the battlefield, which you can then wreck.
The Bad: Radiant Flames doesn’t have a home. The Goggles decks sit pretty at two colors due to the very favorable interaction with Drownyard Temple. It might be possible to add a third color like black off the backs of Battle and Shadow lands, but how profitable would that be? At the moment it’s a great answer with the large drawback of adding a color and diluting its consistency.
The Good: Don’t even act like you saw this coming. You didn’t. Overly large battlefield stalls are a huge problem in these Collected Company mirror matches, and games often go to time because of it. The exploitation of a Sylvan Advocate absolutely ends that nonsense by bouncing their entire team, paving the way for you to end the match. It’s also a very unknown quantity.
The Bad: We talk about three being a magic number, the sweet spot for Collected Company. Archangel Avacyn has colossal upside which many players employ, but sometimes your namesake spell hits it and places it on the bottom of your deck. Profaner has the same issue, but far less upside than Avacyn, making it weaker in the abstract.
I will say this, however; I’ve been testing this card in Bant Company and it has been ridiculous when it resolves.
The Good: There is very little that Languish can’t kill in Standard right now, which speaks volumes to its power. It laps up boards of creatures for a wonderful bargain. Face it, folks, this is the closest to Wrath of God we may ever get again.
The Bad: The shell has not been found yet. Esper Dragons is a good deck but hasn’t been able to gain very much traction in the face of Bant decks able to refill with Duskwatch Recruiter or Negate their big money spells. Dragonlord Ojutai doesn’t survive Languish either, so if you get behind with your win condition on the battlefield, things can get kind of sticky. B/W Control seems to be able to utilize it properly, though. A creatureless version of B/W might emerge sooner than later as a way to use Languish and with a heavier planeswalker theme may strike a killer blow against Bant.
My favorite planeswalker is one of the most dominant finishers in Standard right now. She’s flying high, killing opponents, refilling hands, and nuking creatures. Everything would be Gucci if it weren’t for this damn thing:
The sheer number of times that I have cast Chandra and swept a battlefield only to have her immediately taken away from me by Lumbering Falls is maddening. Sorry. I had to get that out of my system.
The Good: Chandra is able to handle multiple types of decks and act as the primary finisher for several archetypes. Her place in the sun is well-deserved.
The Bad: As much as I love Chandra, Collected Company for two creatures is usually enough to put the nail in her coffin. The fact that they play a creature-land doesn’t help you much either, since activating it comes after a large-scale sweep of their battlefield. The other issue happens to be Negate, and if their battlefield is full and you need to land Chandra on turn 6, it’s a rather precarious situation.
The Slingshot
After spending a week trying to figure out the best way to attack Bant, the answer came in the form of a Top 4 list from the Columbus Standard Open.
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (26)
Spells (27)
- 3 Fiery Temper
- 2 Lightning Axe
- 4 Tormenting Voice
- 4 Sphinx's Tutelage
- 4 Fiery Impulse
- 2 Send to Sleep
- 3 Magmatic Insight
- 1 Kozilek's Return
- 4 Oath of Jace
Sideboard
Noah Walker took U/R Tutelage, cut the Pyromancer’s Goggles, and reverted this U/R deck to something Michael Majors would be proud of.
Fiery Impulse passes the “three test” with flying colors as a cheap way to kill pretty much everything in Bant, but was initially overlooked in favor of Fiery Temper as the flashier choice. Send to Sleep can answer the instant-speed creatures hitting the battlefield. Oath of Jace acts as a massive trigger to Sphinx’s Tutelage and protects it from Dromoka’s Command.
My complaint with Noah’s list would be my disdain for Thing in the Ice in the current metagame. Maybe I’m just a downer, but I’ve found it grossly underwhelming. It bounces creatures, yes, but it gets tapped down by Bounding Krasis and bounced by Reflector Mage. It’s possible that it should be another Fevered Visions and, going deeper, perhaps sideboarded Pyromancer’s Goggles. His deck feels pre-sideboarded for a lot of matches, and I like that. I find his Game 1 to be very good against Bant, and just as good afterwards.
Despite a cartoonishly bad matchup against Ramp, this mill deck is capable of wreaking plenty of havoc on the huge amount of Bant decks out there and, going forward, is my pick for what you should be playing at #SCGStates this weekend.
Seriously. Can you imagine the look on your Pyromancer’s Goggles opponent when you play Sphinx’s Tutelage on turn 3? Hilarious.
I thought we were talking about how to beat Bant Company?
I’m all turned around.
At any rate, good luck battling at States and overcoming Bant Company! If you want to be successful and earn the title of Champion at #SCGStates, you’re going to have to do a lot of work beating Collected Company.
I believe in you. Unless you’re playing at the Florida Championships…in which case, I don’t believe in you one bit and am coming to crush you.