Occasionally, a deck catches your eye and you just can’t leave it alone. During the English Championships this year, I saw a version of the deck that John Ormerod would later play at Euros… And I loved it. I got home and started putting builds together, trying to work out the configuration that had done so well. I shouldn’t have bothered – since only a month later, John made Top Eight and we could all see the listing. Here it is:
John Ormerod’s Euros 2001 Standard Deck:
Creatures (18):
4x Thieving Magpie
1x Temporal Adept
3x Glacial Wall
4x Merfolk Looter
4x Spiketail Hatchling
2x Blind Seer
Other Spells (20):
4x Counterspell
4x Opposition
4x Thwart
4x Static Orb
4x Sleight of Hand
Land (22):
20x Island
2x Rishadan Port
The addition of Static Orb and Opposition back into Standard earlier in the year had sparked some discussion of whether Orbosition could make a comeback and – in the Blastoderm and Nether Spirit-filled environment of Euros – it did. I put this deck together and played with it, much to the frustration of my friends and playtest partners… Who likes to try to fight out of a lock? Not me for sure.
At the time I believed that CounterRebel had all the tools to beat the deck: Counterspells, creatures cast at the end of turn, main deck Dismantling Blows to kill the Orbs (which pretty much shut down searching for rebels altogether) and Wrath to stop the Oppositions from having any creatures to use to tap things. I carried on playing CounterRebel until Rebels rotated out and, at the time, thought this deck was dead too.
The loss of Rishadan Port wasn’t so important, but the loss of Spiketail Hatchlings and Thwarts meant that you couldn’t protect an early Opposition or Magpie. Any new version of the deck would have to be much slower. Enter Mr. Kai Budde and the Magic Invitational. Someone else apart from me thought Orbosition wasn’t dead yet either, and threw some good cards into a new version of the deck to play in South Africa.
Kai’s Invitational 2001 Deck:
Creatures (17):
4x Nightscape Familiar
3x Vodalian Zombie
4x Shadowmage Infiltrator
2x Thieving Magpie
4x Merfolk Looter
Other Spells (21):
4x Duress
4x Opposition
4x Sleight of Hand
3x Static Orb
3x Memory Lapse
3x Counterspell
Land (22):
4x Salt Marsh
4x Underground River
9x Swamp
5x Island
Obviously, the moment I saw this I built it up, proxying for the Infiltrators. I liked it and started playing against our Red/Green, Domain, and Control decks.
Red/Green killed it stone dead.
I was gobsmacked! What had gone wrong? I went straight back to the Invitational and had a look at who had won what. Kai had gone 2-1 in the Standard section, beating Gary Wise G/B/U control deck and Dan Clegg’s Finkula, then losing to Chris Pikula R/G/u deck. I wasn’t imagining things: Red/Green won the matchup, even if an Orb hit the table, purely because all the creatures were too fragile. Even the Familiar is fragile unless you wait until later in the game to play him, and you have to keep mana open all the time to regenerate him – not what we want to do.
I immediately started looking for creatures that would help and went straight back to Ormerod’s deck for a look. Glacial Wall jumped out at me. If it can stop Blastoderms for three turns, then Skizziks and Flametongues are no real problem. Dropping the Familiars for walls helped, but I still wasn’t happy. With only four walls and the rest of the world geared up to killing three-toughness creatures – especially Infiltrators – I often only had one or two creatures out when Opposition and Orb got on the table together. You really need three to sustain a lock and keep casting spells, and four is enough to lock someone down.
The Vodalian Zombies were helping for as long as they lived, but with Glacial Walls they weren’t as necessary and I started looking for alternatives. I soon spotted their 2/2 gold cousin Galina’s Knight and began to wonder: What if you drop black and go Blue/White instead? What happens then?
Sure, you could go three colours, but I like consistency and I’m not a big fan of eight or more painlands in a deck. I knew that I’d have to drop the Infiltrators, but I still have Magpies – and Blue/White has some very interesting creatures indeed.
I started by identifying the core of the deck:
4x Opposition
3/4x Static Orb
4x Sleight of Mind
3/4x Glacial Wall
4x Counterspell
3/4x Merfolk Looter
You also seem to need:
2-4 other counters
9-10 more creatures
22 land
That’s around sixty cards with a few gaps. I picked out Meddling Mage and Galina’s Knight as the next creatures to go in, along with Thieving Magpie and a few Absorbs and Memory Lapses to fill in the gaps. The Magpies seemed necessary against control decks to give you more threats than they can cope with, and both John and Kai’s decks had some in. The Meddling Mage, although quite fragile, helps against many of the control decks and really forces people to kill them before they keep going – slowing them down a turn. Galina’s Knight fits in perfectly with the theme of hard-to-kill creatures, as pretty much everyone is using red removal of one sort or another.
With those in mind, I took a leaf out of Kai’s book and decided to try out some Invasion dual lands – Coastal Tower – and some of the new lands from Odyssey. Here’s the deck:
PhatBeats U/W Orbosition.
Creatures (18):
4x Galina’s Knight
3x Glacial Wall
3x Merfolk Looter
4x Thieving Magpie
4x Meddling Mage
Other spells (20):
4x Opposition
3x Static Orb
4x Sleight of Hand
4x Counterspell
3x Memory Lapse
2x Absorb
Land (22):
4x Adarkar Wastes
4x Coastal Tower
2x Skycloud Expanse
6x Island
6x Plains
I played around with this against a number of decks, and some issues quickly became apparent. Firstly, you don’t want to play with Coastal Tower or Skycloud Expanse in this deck. It’s just too annoying when you draw a Tower with the Orb out, but no Opposition. The Expanse can’t be tapped on its own, and is also a royal pain in the neck with just the Orb out.
I also found that the Meddling Mages were good, but not against many decks – mostly, they just got killed. They’re worth keeping in, but I’m not sure there should be four of them. One final point was that I wanted to see a little more deck manipulation and so the Mage became an Opt. I ended up with the deck I posted a few articles ago – here it is again for reference.
PhatBeats U/W Orbosition v2.
Creatures (17):
3x Meddling Mage
4x Galina’s Knight
3x Merfolk Looter
3x Glacial Wall
4x Thieving Magpie
Other Spells (21):
4x Opposition
3x Static Orb
4x Counterspell
2x Absorb
3x Memory Lapse
4x Sleight of Hand
1x Opt
Land (22):
4x Adarkar Wastes
11x Island
7x Plains
This deck started off doing very well against Red/Green, Green, Red/Green/Black… Pretty much any pure aggressive deck. A wall and a Knight is enough to slow them down until you can lock them out. Against control decks like SnakeTongue, the deck has to be careful to look out for Aether Bursts, but otherwise handles it quite well; the trick is to drop an early Orb when they’re tapped out, and your deck is designed to run on a lot less mana. If they leave a Looter alive, the quality of cards in your hand alone is enough to beat them.
Two decks I did start to have problems against were U/W/R control (Mages, Lightning Angels, counters, burn) and a U/G aggro control deck. I lost against the first deck if they saw a turn 2 Meddling Mage and named Opposition, because I couldn’t stop or control a Lightning Angel if it hit the table. I lost against the Aggro control deck due to turn 2 Gaea’s Skyfolk. If a Skyfolk hits and they use all their mana to counter Opposition, I’m in deep trouble unless I can overload them somehow.
I also noticed that I was winning games without the Thieving Magpies – in fact, I was losing games more often when I cast them, as I was casting them and fighting to keep them alive. With only a few counterspells, I had a real problem having anything left over to counter other threats.
So, there’s one more version of the deck for you. No Magpies, a few more counters and a few more changes:
Traffic Jam
Creatures (16):
3x Meddling Mage
4x Galina’s Knight
4x Merfolk Looter
3x Glacial Wall
2x Spectral Lynx
Other Spells (22):
4x Opposition
3x Static Orb
4x Counterspell
3x Syncopate
3x Memory Lapse
4x Sleight of Hand
1x Angelic Shield
Land (22):
4x Adarkar Wastes
10x Island
5x Plains
1x Underground River
2x Caves of Koilos
Black makes it back into the deck to give you a chance to regenerate the Lynx; an Early Lynx with some black mana really slows down most aggressive decks. They also slip under many control player’s noses, giving you a very aggressive deck yourself if you want to play it that way.
No more Magpies means no more extra card drawing, and so I’ve gone up to four Merfolk to help me dig for the cards I really need. The mana curve of the deck is a lot cheaper, though – again helping the deck to live under an Orb.
The Opt isn’t needed so much with the extra Merfolk, and has bit the dust for one more counter spell in the form of Syncopate, which has replaced Absorb entirely. Syncopate can be cast turn two and makes a right mess of players trying to work with one or two free mana under an Orb.
An Opt or two may make it back into the deck, dropping the Shield and a Syncopate, but the Shield gives you hope against decks that can play out a threat before you can deal with it. If you still have a big problem with fliers, I’d suggest looking at Wall of Air, as at only 1UU to cast it replaces the Glacial Walls and stops Gaea’s Skyfolk forever. At only 1/5, any block will kill it in conjunction with a Flametongue; the Glacial Wall blocks two power guys, and doesn’t care about FTK. It’s a trade-off that you’ll have to decide based on your own metagame.
I’m now working on a sideboard for the deck, and it currently includes Gainsay, Disenchant effects, Hibernations, and a few surprises. I’m even playing with the idea of finding space for four Fire/Ice in the deck to give it a maindeck way to tap down the Orb without an Opposition out, or kill a Spellbane Centaur or a Meddling Mage. If so, the Shield will come out – and probably some counters, too.
There’s life in this deck. It beats half the field straight away, but don’t take my word for it try it yourself – knock it up, proxy it out, play it against your friends. If you’re the kind of player who enjoys being in complete control of the board, give the other control decks a miss and play something that really gums up your opponent.
Competition:
The last thing to mention is the name of this column. As several people have now mentioned, it needs to be changed, as my year-long dash for an 1800 composite ranking is over. A few suggestions have come my way already, but I thought I’d open up the question for everyone. If you have an idea, please send it my way and the lucky reader whose suggestion is chosen will receives some foil goodies, including a foil Rout and a few foil cards from the last four expansions – not all commons, either.
Don’t send your name and address straight away – I’ll email you if you win and ask you for your address. I’d like to let this run for a few weeks before I have a look, but I’ll keep you all up-to-date on each article until then.
Cheers,
Jim Grimmett
Team PhatBeats.