It’s unclear what the title of this article should be. There are a lot of things I want to talk about, and I’m not entirely sure where I’ll
be focusing. Roughly, I’ll be talking about my trip to Asia for Grand Prix Singapore and Pro Tour Nagoya, but those tournaments weren’t
particularly successful for me, so I’m going to try not to dwell on them too much.
Gaudenis did a pretty good job of justifying my deck choices for both events by finishing X-1 in the Standard portion of the StarCityGames.com
Invitational the same weekend as GP Singapore, ending in 9th place, and by finishing 8-1-1 with the Block deck we played. He probably also played quite
a bit better than I did.
After Grand Prix Providence, I watched Brian Kibler test an aggressive metalcraft Tezzeret deck he’d built, which he wrote about
here, and I was pretty excited about what he’d done with it. He found a much more aggressive home for my Vedalken Certarchs that made a lot of sense
to me. I asked him to keep me posted on the list as he worked on it, which he did.
I really didn’t want to play a Standard tournament full of Caw-Blade mirrors because I really just don’t feel like I’m good enough at
playing them, and I hadn’t played the deck since New Phyrexia came out. I didn’t think I’d know basic things like how to value
Batterskull compared to Sword of Feast and Famine, and excellent players were telling me conflicting things about it.
I felt more comfortable with Steel Overseer and Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas. The list, for those of you who haven’t memorized it from Kibler’s
article, was:
Creatures (27)
- 1 Leaden Myr
- 4 Steel Overseer
- 4 Etched Champion
- 2 Argent Sphinx
- 4 Vedalken Certarch
- 4 Phyrexian Revoker
- 3 Spellskite
- 2 Hex Parasite
- 3 Phyrexian Metamorph
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (22)
Spells (7)
Sideboard
I sent that list to Gaudenis the morning of the tournament, but for some reason, he decided to replace Argent Sphinx with some random four-mana
planeswalker that didn’t have any special interaction with artifacts.
Despite my failure to make Day Two, I was pretty happy with the deck. I won a couple matches, drew with Shuhei playing Caw-Blade after he beat me by
drawing three maindeck Divine Offerings in game one. I lost to G/W Fauna Shaman by getting stuck on two lands through endless draws in both games, and
I drew with a mono-white Puresteel Paladin deck.
That second draw is easy to gloss over, but it actually says a lot about where I am with Magic right now.
I haven’t earned a Pro Point since Pro Tour Paris, and I’m getting disheartened. Not depressed—I’ve been happy with other
things, but “the fire” isn’t especially bright with me right now, let’s say.
I was behind in the third game, and the life totals were something like 42-12, but I’d just played a Vedalken Certarch and Argent Sphinx, and I
had metalcraft, meaning the pile of Equipment my opponent had would no longer be able to really accomplish anything. Thinking about it after the match,
I’m pretty confident I would have won eventually, but for the previous few turns, I’d been struggling to stay alive. When time was called
and I hadn’t died, I immediately filled out the match slip with a draw. I didn’t even ask my opponent if he wanted to concede, since both
of us were eliminated with a draw.
I’m not really trying to get into the ethics of concessions in tournaments or anything, but I definitely would have stopped to talk about it in
previous years. In this case, I was just willing to let it be over, I guess.
I spent roughly the next forty waking hours testing Block, taking a short break every day to eat Indian food. I’d never used Cockatrice before, but we used it for almost all of our testing in Singapore. It’s an amazing resource,
primarily because it makes testing games against yourself dramatically easier and more convenient than anything else I’ve seen. If I can get
myself to spend most of my travel time for events testing with that, I think it would be a huge help.
For most of the week, I had no idea what I wanted to play. I was just playing decks against other decks, recording results, paying attention to which
cards were working well, and slowly improving all of my lists. Ultimately, I think I had a very good grasp of the format. I knew how to make the
Tempered Steel deck extremely resistant to hate; I knew exactly what was required to have a reasonable matchup against it anyway (much more than one
might think, is the answer); and I felt like I was getting pretty good at predicting how matchups would go.
I didn’t know what I wanted to play, but I knew which decks were and weren’t realistic, and I had several options that I considered
reasonable.
At one point, Gaudenis emailed us (I was staying and working with Alex West, Raphael Levy, and Adam Yurchick) to say that we should try out his
mono-black poison deck because it had been doing extremely well for him. This request happened to come while I was working on Puresteel Paladin decks,
and my testing basically showed that the black deck was weak to Mortarpod, and I stopped working on it.
When I finally got to Japan and went to the site, I heard people claiming that their decks could beat Tempered Steel, when, looking through the decks,
I knew there was no way they would be favored against a prepared Tempered Steel opponent. People didn’t seem to get it, and I was very tempted to
just play the bad guy and take advantage of that.
I felt like people were modeling their Tempered Steel decks on Hawkward, our deck from Paris, but that wasn’t correct for this format. Without
Steel Overseer and Contested War Zone, random cheap attackers have a lot less value, and when everyone’s deck is built to kill your artifacts,
you need to build a deck that assumes they’re usually going to die. My Tempered Steel build was designed to go long, with four each of Origin
Spellbomb and Shrine of Loyal Legions, and it had been testing very well against red, green, and blue decks.
The problem with switching to Tempered Steel is that I didn’t feel like I knew enough about the mirror.
My plan at this point was to play Raphael Levy’s deck: mono red with maindeck Into the Core, splashing Consecrated Sphinx off two Islands,
Mycosynth Wellsprings, and Sphere of the Suns.
Gaudenis arrived later and said he was still going to play his mono-black infect deck because it had been beating everything. I watched him play some
games against Tom Martell playing Tempered Steel to see how that matchup played out and to make sure Gau wasn’t insane, and the black deck was
really impressive. It felt like it was barely stealing all of its wins, but it did it a lot. Thinking about it, it actually felt really well
positioned. I was onboard.
We played:
I was very happy with the deck, except that the Marrow Shards should have been either three Skithiryx, the Blight Dragons or two and one Necropede. We
had too much removal and needed to be able to bring in more creatures against the decks full of removal. It’s possible we needed access to one or
two creatures beyond that.
Also, Marrow Shards is really bad when you have that much removal, especially since the main thing you want to do with your removal is get rid of
blockers.
Saturday morning we were running slightly behind getting everything ready to take to the site and meeting up with Tom Martell, so Tom convinced us to
take the subway even though Gau wanted to walk. Tom led us two stops too far, and by the time we realized what had happened, turned around, got back on
the subway, and then ran to the site, we had almost no time, and I was dripping with sweat—more than any time during my stay in Singapore (which
is very hot, for those of you who haven’t been there).
I’d pulled the cards I owned and several other cards I thought I might want to have available for people into a box that I brought with me, but I
hadn’t actually put my deck together, and I was still missing almost ten cards. When I sat down to the player’s meeting, I still
didn’t have my full deck. I had it by the time I sat down for my first round feature match against Akira Asahara, but I hadn’t even begun
sleeving.
Akira had a cheap removal spell, then a Mirran Crusader, Hero of Bladehold, and other powerful cards both games and beat me pretty easily. I
don’t think many people were playing maindeck Mirran Crusader in the all red and white format, but sometimes that kind of thing happens in the
first round.
Round two I played against Puresteel Paladin, and game one he had no hand and was dead on board unless he drew one of a few cards, and he drew the
Mortarpod to exactly kill me. Game two he drew several Mortarpods, and I couldn’t get anything going.
At 0-2 I was paired against Christian Calcano, and before the match, talked about how I’d already given up at this point, so after I won the
first game, I proceeded to make several mistakes each in games two and three to exactly lose both of them in a very good matchup against his mono red
deck.
I won my next two rounds, drafted a deck I was very happy with, which was basically just tappers, card draw, and Consecrated Sphinx, and proceeded to
get crushed by Matt Sperling’s double Treasure Mage, Wurmcoil Engine, Heavy Arbalest, Vedalken Anatomist deck, which had plenty of removal for my
few relevant creatures. My ability to draw a lot of cards and slow someone down when they’re trying to attack just wasn’t useful against
his cards.
I dropped without even thinking about the fact that I could win out to finish 4-4 and hope to top 200, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten
it even if I had won out after starting 0-3.
Saturday morning, I watched people put decks together for the PTQ, and just as the PTQ was about to start, I thought of a Standard deck I would have
loved to have played in Singapore. I tried to get someone to play it, but with only a few minutes left, no one had the cards on them, even if I could
convince them to stick a bunch of questionable cards into their Caw-Blade decks.
I’m actually a little disappointed that Stoneforge Mystic will almost certainly be banned soon because I would love to get a chance to play with
this deck in a tournament:
Creatures (11)
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (26)
Spells (17)
Mortarpod + Basilisk Collar is amazing with Puresteel Paladin, and Mortarpod has just been a reasonable value card in this format. This deck was
basically inspired by my work with Puresteel Paladin in Block, where I was consistently amazed by how powerful his interaction with Mortarpod was. I
think Basilisk Collar really pushes it over the top.
The problem with Puresteel Paladin decks in Block is that they weren’t that great when they didn’t have the Paladin, but they were always
insane when they did. This just adds another more explosive two-drop to Caw Blade, which is great at finding the combos thanks to Gitaxian Probe, Jace,
and Preordain. It’s possible the deck still wants Squadron Hawk, but I think the other things you can do are better.
Anyway, I won’t get a chance to really take advantage of this deck, but I hope someone else gets to in the short time I suspect it will still be
legal.
Thanks for reading,
Sam
@samuelhblack on Twitter