For the 2005 Deck Challenge, I chose some pretty cruddy jobs: mono-Green, Green/White, these are not the things you looked to play when you saw Ravnica and the shiny toys like Circu, Dimir Lobotomist and Lightning Helix. While I worked on those decks, I was brewing an idea: using the tools at hand, figuring out what a truly nasty Green deck could be capable of. There’s actually more of a prelude to this story, which actually started somewhere in the middle of the Block Constructed season when people started playing tricksy Heartbeat of Spring decks. The exact moment was when Ninth Edition hit the streets, and I sat at work perusing the card list only to stumble on something I didn’t expect to see.
Brain: “Hey, that’s odd, I didn’t expect them to reprint Early Harvest. I bet that’s pretty good for Green along with that Mana Flare they’ve got.”
Self: “Yeah, I saw. Might be good.”
Brain: “I’m getting four of each as soon as I can.”
Self: “Dude.”
Ravnica wasn’t even out yet, and I already knew what I really wanted to try and make work. Because in the whole lecture about playing fair, the gist of it really is “don’t do it if you don’t have to”. Then, of course, Ravnica hit the streets a few months after, and things started to sputter and spark in my brain as I put the pieces together, slowly but surely, looking around to see the metagame developing so I could figure out the best approach for winning with the deck. While writing said articles for the 2005 Deck Challenge, I also volunteered for the Week Four “Build Your Best Deck” week, saying flat out it would be Blue/Green combo. I participated a bit on the Star City forums about the deck, asking questions and getting hacked to bits by forum trolls who don’t believe in small sacrifices just to get something as nebulous as “good mana”. The very notion of playing cards like Sakura-Tribe Elder and Sensei’s Divining Top just continued to get me into trouble there, because clearly when you are going off every card in your deck must enable Eye of the Storm, because this is an Eye of the Storm deck, pwnd. (Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but my ideas didn’t seem terribly well-received.)
One part of me wanted to swing back and give my credentials at working on combo decks like these, having worked towards building a better combo deck in numerous formats over a wide span of years with very good success, like the Bargain deck or High Tide during the bad old combo years. The older, more mature part of me realized that these particular individuals may have been in diapers at the time, so why waste perfectly good ammunition I might need later? Building the deck isn’t the hardest thing in the world, when you get down to it; some things suggest themselves, and your perception of what you are trying to accomplish will shape the deck as you go along. Some very good work got done in the Star City forums on the deck by individuals like Gush, but some very closed minds were there as well. I tried to get them to look at the seventy-five card approach rather than the sixty, and they definitely talked about sideboarding tools they wanted access to, but otherwise missed the point entirely.
The point I vainly attempted to make is that you can’t build a deck in a vacuum, or at least you shouldn’t, and the resistance you expect to face will shape your counteroffensive. This isn’t a world where you get to just ignore your opponent because nothing they do is relevant; this is a world where you need to be the man with the plan and accomplish your goals if you want to win. Facing off against things like Persecute, which Black/Green decks should be packing if they’ve got ’em, and a world where Islands can still technically tap to counter spells, there has to be some interplay in the cards you choose to respect the format around you. It’s week four, and the State Championships are this weekend, so the excuse of not knowing what your opponents might be bringing to the table just isn’t good enough anymore.
The deck was crafted with the following assumptions:
1) You don’t need to have Eye of the Storm in play to win. You don’t have to be a bad deck with Weird Harvest for Drifts of Phantasms either.
2) The most common opponent will be White Weenie, and you ignore him at your peril. They race very consistently, and can close the deal with burn spells entirely too effectively.
C) Your face will be Persecuted before it will be Cranially Extracted.
4) If you worry about Ivory Mask, go strap some rubber bands around your ankles so the ants can’t climb up your pants leg and eat your candy ass. Worry about Hokori instead.
E) Counterspells exist. MichaelJ’s “best deck” this week is going to involve spells saying “counter target spell”, and it’s probably pretty good at tearing up the Rock and White Weenie metagame.
6) The mirror will happen. Enough people are thinking about this deck, which isn’t crafty or sneaky enough not to have suggested itself to people pretty early on, that you can expect to have to figure out what to do in the unfortunate event of a mirror match, and how to win when you’re staring at each other trying not to flinch.
The corollary to (1) is that if you’re using Eye of the Storm as a crutch when you want to finish the combo with some extra leg-room for stretching and ten minutes less of your life wasted trying to figure it out, rather than as the fundamental core of the deck (which is Heartbeat / Early Harvest, for those who may have forgotten), that you don’t have to play a deck crammed full of Instants and Sorceries just so your crutch works that little bit better.
I also made the very reasonable assumption that I could live in a world where my four Yavimaya Coasts didn’t untap to Early Harvest, because this is the sacrifice we make to have good mana instead of all basic lands in proportions that look terrible for actually casting our spells. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve never been in a situation so far where I’ve had to try and combo off with more than one of them in play, and that one land not untapping was something accommodated for in the plan, not hobbling my attempts to win the game by limiting me on my mana. Sure, I’ve drawn multiples, but never had to play the second one before trying to kill my opponent.
That said, I tried to pick the most versatile version of the deck I could, and went with Myojin of Seeing Winds for ridiculous power. Even moreso than Eye of the Storm, kicking off a Myojin should make it pretty much impossible to lose the game, as that is an awful lot of cards we’re talking about here. When I’d gotten the rules question I’d asked answered in a way that satisfied me, I threw in a bit more Legendary goodness, and added one copy of Sakashima the Impostor along with the Time of Need base I’d built into the deck from the ground up. Just to disseminate the information, if you cast Sakashima copying the Myojin, it counts as coming from your hand, and thus gets a Divinity counter in addition to the ability gained when removing that counter. Time of Need also allows for other Legends to be added, if I want to, and with the belief that I’d need to sideboard into a fatty beatdown deck to beat Blue control decks, I’d definitely want. More Myojin can’t be bad either, right?
“Stormy Weather”
by Sean McKeown
Creatures (10)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 2 Myojin of Seeing Winds
- 1 Dosan the Falling Leaf
- 1 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
- 1 Maga, Traitor to Mortals
- 1 Sakashima the Impostor
Lands (22)
- 10 Forest
- 1 Swamp
- 7 Island
- 4 Yavimaya Coast
Spells (28)
For the longest time, I had a random Meloku in the main and Arashi in the side, but after playing against White Weenie enough to realize it was a tougher match than I’d thought, the tutorable Wrath went into the main and the man, the myth, the legend met… the sideboard. It was effectively an empty slot anyway, and got filled by a card that advances the gameplan: buy time to build up your resources, using anything you can reasonably spend (life, turns, et cetera) advancing your position until you are ready to go off. White Weenie is a crucial matchup, and the one Arashi can show up often enough to change the nature of the matchup pretty consistently, buying a full turn at the very least and more often two. It doesn’t hurt that it can answer a Hypnotic Specter, either, and without relying on a creature in play living… as is the key problem with relying on Drift of Phantasms for blocking Lord Hypno against decks packing Putrefy.
I’ll assume you aren’t exactly certain what’s going on with all of the cards here, but the gist of it is this: Early Harvest and Heartbeat of Spring make mucho mana. Eye of the Storm copies every Instant or Sorcery played (Remand, Telling Time, Early Harvest, Time of Need, and Kodama’s Reach) and casts each of them repeatedly, providing an arbitrarily large amount of mana so long as you keep fueling the Eye. For the technical kill, three Black off of the Swamp and however much you need casts Maga for your opponents’ life total. Things happen in between, which is what the subtler cards take care of, and you don’t need the Eye to win… but without it you’ll need a lot of cards, hence the Blue Myojin.
With all the cards present in the deck, there are also a lot of them absent that would nonetheless make sense. Rampant Growth and Farseek both make sense, if you want to focus on the Eye, and Ideas Unbound is hard to exclude from the deck. The further into the world of Instants and Sorceries you get, the more likely it seems that Peer Through Depths fits well, and if you can afford the cost Tidings comes with good payback for the investment. The downside is that Sakura-Tribe Elder and Sensei’s Divining Top are just better than Rampant Growth/Farseek and Ideas Unbound/Peer Through Depths, and the only real reason to cram those in there is to work with the Eye. The Eye is a crutch, not a fundamental necessary part of the deck that the rest of the deck has to work with, and even if it’s an excellent crutch it’s nonetheless one that is dangerous to use. Some versions have been crafted to use Instants or Sorceries to kill the opponent, like repeated use of Glimpse of the Unthinkable, and if you try and go that route then you’ll open yourself to getting your combo jacked right at the end by a single instant, giving them multiple draw effects, untapping their lands, and otherwise other Very Bad Things. One Maga will do, and anyone who needs more is being greedy. You can choose a lot of different cards for the deck, but part of its strength comes from the quality of the cards you are using, not just their favorable interaction with a 5UU (broken) Enchantment.
And pretty much anything is better than Farseek in a deck that will miss the ability to search for Forest, and that doesn’t have the benefit of using a nice saucy Island Forest that we won’t see for a few months yet.
The best card not in this version is Drift of Phantasms, which has the ability to transmute into several of the key components of the deck: Heartbeat of Spring, Early Harvest, and even Maga if you have enough of everything else. A different iteration of the deck changing from a Legendary tutor engine to a more compact focus on Drift of Phantasms is the backup plan, as it were, in designing the deck, and looks a good deal more like a streamlined deck fixated on the Eye of the Storm plan:
4
“>Heartbeat of Spring
4
“>Early Harvest
4
“>Sensei’s Divining Top
4
“>Telling Time
4
“>Remand
4
“>Drift of Phantasms
4
“>Sakura-Tribe Elder
4
“>Rampant Growth
3
“>Eye of the Storm
2
“>Tidings
1 Maga, Traitor to Mortals
1 Swamp
4
“>Yavimaya Coast
7 Island
10 Forest
Unfortunately, I think this deck loses a lot of the interesting complexity that gives it interplay against discard decks as well as the potential to come back from behind against a fast start by White Weenie / Boros Deck Wins. Either way you cut it, you don’t want to face a dedicated permission deck, but at least the Legend-based version has a few more spells that actually require a counterspell of some sort, just based off of their ability to attack. While the second deck is more streamlined and thus more consistent at pulling off the same game-plan over and over, with redundant two-mana accelerants, I’m not as sold yet as I’d like to be on its overall plan… the legend-focused deck has outright more powerful cards, if more expensive ones, and a main-deck base that allows for tutorable interactivity with the opponent: Arashi to Wrath your opponents’ flying team, or Dosan to close the door on the opponents’ game for that one big turn.
So what if two cards isn’t a lot of interactivity, it’s more than the “streamlined” deck is capable of, and while you can tutor for Dosan with Drift of Phantasms, doing so won’t let you cast him before your opponent has had at least three turns, and thus is effectively guaranteed access to Hinder mana to counter your spell. Repeated looks at the advantage between the two tutoring engines continues to convince me that fundamentally the Legend-based version has a better toolbox, even if its tools can’t ever Transmute into Early Harvest of Heartbeat of Spring. I’m not convinced you’ll have that kind of time available to you in every matchup, for starters, and that relying on the Top with your shuffle effects is the better plan. The second key is that the Time of Need base provides for the beginnings of the sideboard strategy, bringing in the Man Plan against control decks. Between Vinelasher Kudzu and Jushi Apprentice you have some seriously dangerous two-drops, and in the five slot you get Meloku and Kodama North-Side, which you have Time of Need to assist with.
That said, I possessed a certain luxury that most testers haven’t had access to: a chance to play the deck in true tournament setting with a safety net of it not actually being States yet, to learn more about the deck and its interaction with the opponent than is generally learned by anything short of trial by fire.
…
(pretend for the home reader that a day or so has passed in the article.)
…
With some more information gained, most of what I learned is the utter complexity of playing the deck correctly. I’d hoped to gain some more information about the deck for the purpose of playing at States, and my key insight is that I’d probably own any counter-light matchup so long as I didn’t screw it up from not being good enough with the deck yet. At least one match was thrown away on the basis of spending all of my turn’s mana getting out Eye of the Storm and Early Harvest out of order, not realizing I had ten mana (I counted nine off my lands, I had mana floating from earlier effects) and another off wasting and cards looking for anything at all when I could have spent six mana and one card to copy my Myojin and draw fourteen or so cards. Because of that alone, I’ve asked Ted to bump this article up as far in the weekly roster as he can arrange, because it will take a lot of time playtesting to use effectively.
The playtest group put together on the fly by Mike Flores and Brian David-Marshall a week before States accidentally included me, on the simple basis of my being at the right place at the right time. The testing pool was the above-listed deck, as well as copies of Boros Deck Wins, FungusFire, Flores’ Blue control deck splashing Black, Critical Mass (or is it Critical Kudzu now?), Blue/White Ninjas, Gifts Ungiven, and an eighth deck I missed entirely (though it was initially a second copy of Critical Mass, I think). After playing myself into the 0-2 bracket, losing a tight set against Critical Mass and a similarly tense matchup against White Weenie, I had the joy of playing FungusFire. We went to draft instead, concurring that I would beat him 0-6 in our best of five matchups.
Now, I said I lost these two key matchups, and yet I’m still fairly certain that this deck is still a viable and valid choice for this upcoming weekend. The reason is that now that I possess the information gained from playing, I’ve gained enough experience with the deck to not make the ‘obvious’ mistakes I blundered in those matches, and more importantly learned how to play the matchups as well as how to sideboard for the match with Critical Mass.
Against White Weenie, game one is a simple race, and nothing can punish you for playing Heartbeat of Spring turn 3; they just aren’t designed to take advantage of that rapid influx of mana, and the first few turns won’t deal enough damage to you for them to capitalize with a torrent of burn spells. If you fall behind against the air squadron, you can get Arashi and kill their team, ending the difficulty. Be aware of their ability to imprint stuff on your Eye of the Storm, but don’t lose sleep over it as they still have limited resources: they can untap their lands, but this doesn’t give them more Red mana, as they are living off of nonbasic lands for serving up the heat, and so they only get so much Red mana to try and hijack your Eye with. Effectively, it’s not going to happen, so don’t play like it is all of a sudden.
After sideboarding, they can do a lot of things, but the most relevant is to play Hokori. Dropping Heartbeat of Spring now has a credible threat to punish it, but at least under Hokori you’d get twice as much mana to work with. Keeping tempo from building up too quickly is now matched by the desire to keep Hokori off the table while you work, so using Remand on later turns rather than earlier ones should prove profitable. Some decks (such as the version I’d play) sideboard into Kami of Ancient Law to kill enchantments, and that’s something to be aware of, especially if they are using it on the proper target (Heartbeat of Spring) rather than trying to be greedy and blow up Eye of the Storm with it, which doesn’t work well for so many reasons, starting with the fact that they don’t need to use it to kill you in the first place. You don’t sideboard any cards against them, and I’m fine with that, I don’t think anything they are bringing to the table changes the matchup fundamentally enough to require you to square off with a different deck. Not having to sideboard against White Weenie when you’re going to a tournament expecting to face it all day is a good thing, in my mind, rather than a failing on the deck’s part.
The match played against Critical Mass showed me that the deck isn’t as susceptible as it first seems against decks without truly dedicated countermagic, as Critical Mass only plays four hard counters (Hinder) which can be answered in various ways depending on how much mana you have, and how much they have. They try and develop their board early on, like you, and you get as much time as they show you to develop your board before you have to go off. More expensive threats like Meloku and Keiga can’t be cast anytime reasonable without stranding their countermagic in hand where it’s useless. Amusingly, Dosan isn’t the be-all answer I’d expected, as it can be killed by Umezawa’s Jitte. In the two pre-sideboarded games we played, getting a turn 3 Dosan was the game that was lost, when it died to Jitte, while just developing mana and advancing the board led to winning the pre-sideboarded game.
After sideboarding, for the remaining three games I tried to figure out the proper sideboard plan, as did he. I lost the match 3-1 (of 5) attempting to kill him by sideboarding in the full fifteen card sideboard, and for the last game I had of his time I won the sideboarded struggle with the maindeck configuration.
With Flores Blue facing (and beating) White/Blue Ninjas in our tournament’s finals, it seems that countermagic is a viable strategy at least in parts for the States metagame. We had an obvious shortcoming, in that we excluded Black/Green from our testing pool, but with this deck at least I accommodate for Black/Green a good deal more than other versions of the Eye combo have, being more capable of playing a fight for enough cards to win the game with through Myojin of Seeing Winds and its presence in the deck, allowing for a continued fight for positional advantage against decks playing cards like Persecute and Hypnotic Specter. Keeping a Top active in matches like that is crucial to success, as you struggle to get more lands in play, search your deck to put the proper cards on top, and fight with limited resources until you’re able to go off. The opinion has remained very solid throughout playtesting that the Black/Green decks are (so far at least) losing to the Boros deck, making control a valid option and this deck’s life harder… so that leaves us one more significant avenue to look at, the matchup around which the sideboard is dedicated.
Mono-Blue based decks can be rather a pain to beat, especially since they have a surprisingly valid game-plan against you thanks to your inability to easily overwhelm their mana or their hard counters. For them, there are fifteen cards in the sideboard, and the fifteen I take out are:
4
“>Early Harvest
4
“>Heartbeat of Spring
2
“>Eye of the Storm
2
“>Myojin of Seeing Winds
1
“>Maga, Traitor to Mortals
1
“>Time of Need
1 Kodama’s Reach
This changes the matchup entirely, especially if they play the game of bobbing and weaving trying to figure out if you are sideboarding heavy or light. Just bringing in four Nightmare Voids requires them to take out anything that just affects creatures in play, like Threads of Disloyalty, or risk having dead cards against a deck trying to skip its draw step after a certain point to strip any remaining counters from their hand. Bringing in the eleven creatures if they are expecting none leaves you with a dangerously aggressive deck with large threats and a light dose of countermagic and discard to protect them with. If they don’t know about the potential to sideboard into the Man Plan, they can be caught entirely off guard, and if they are aware of the potential and guess wrongly then they are in just as much trouble.
It’s not a match I’d want to play regularly, but it’s one that isn’t as hard to work with as it could be. For the truly random, we have the mirror match: competing Eye decks trying to win without getting their combo jacked from under them halfway through. For game one, the only one who can win is the person whose turn it is, as at some point during that turn they get to cast Maga at sorcery speed, something their opponent doesn’t get the luxury of doing. The plan is to go off as fast as you can, the same as against White Weenie, but keep up Remand whenever possible to disrupt the first Heartbeat of Spring, to prevent them from going off. When you’re good and ready to, drop Heartbeat and ignore target opponent, as it’s only Remand that allows for you to pretend there’s anything interactive about the matchup at all.
For sideboarding, you can either keep your plan as-is and go blindly for the throat, or you can side in Vinelasher Kudzu and Nightmare Void to add an aggro-tempo theme to the deck, buying more interactive cards and advancing a credible threat which limits the number of turns your opponent gets to work with. These can be bought at the cost of the combo elements of your deck, and if you want you can sideboard exactly as in the Mono-Blue matchup. The tools you want to take out to face the mirror are most of the same tools you don’t want to provide them, such as Eye of the Storm and Heartbeat of Spring, and the residual combo cards. I’d advise skipping the five-drops, leaving Kodama North and Meloku, and putting Dosan as far from the deck as possible, to keep Early Harvest. It’s within reason that they might try to go off with Eye of the Storm, and clever use of the stack and imprinted Remands can be used to stop the early push if you have more Instants to respond to their cards with.
I’ll be playing my heart out with this to get the rust off of me between now and States as far as playing this deck goes, as it’s a difficult combo deck to play and requires advanced planning as well as careful understanding of the rules to use properly… not to mention book-keeping, in case your opponent stops you mid-way through the combo to accuse you of drawing an extra card or something. I’m sure judges were pleased to see a card that makes the game as innately complicated as Eye of the Storm does see print, and tickled pink to see it actually being used in a combo deck trying to abuse its so-called “symmetry”.
Until then, have fun, and remember… don’t play fair if you don’t have to.