If you had asked me one week ago, I would have told you that the deck featured in this article was my 100% recommendation for Champs. That was before I finished working on the Blue deck from last week’s article, tuned that up a bit, and played in the Neutral Ground mock tournament over the course of the last four days… but you’ll have to wait for F. Friday for the 2005 Championship Deck Challenge Finale (from my perspective anyway).
In any case, the deck below is still quite awesome, and if it isn’t the best deck in the format, I think that it’s still Tier One, and would be my backup deck for Champs. Rather than posting 100 iterations of the deck as it has gone through testing, relating it to the original Critical Mass from Block or whatever, I’ll just post the most recent listing and deck matchups:
Critical Mass Update – Now with 100% fewer “critical” Gnarled Masses!
Creatures (21)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 4 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 4 Wood Elves
- 4 Keiga, the Tide Star
- 1 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
- 4 Vinelasher Kudzu
Lands (23)
Spells (16)
Sideboard
This is the version I tested and tuned going into the Neutral Ground mock tournament (again, more on that on Friday), and it is quite good against what I think will be the top of the Champs metagame. This deck is about a 7-3 favorite over White Weenie or Boros, and it beats Gifts Ungiven consistently, if not thunderously. As our general strategy is to approach the metagame from opposite ends and then squeeze and tune towards the middle, them’s some nice numbas.
From a top-down perspective, the fundamental strategy of this deck is just better than that of any other strategy in Standard, better than Mono-Blue, better even than Gifts Ungiven. Put simply, it has all the best cards, uses them to pressure the opponent in a mana consistent way from the early turns, and can back them up with support cards long enough to win. Best threats? Jitte, Meloku, check. Best mechanics? Sakura-Tribe Elder, Sensei’s Divining Top, check. Overall archetype? CounterSliver.
Traditionally speaking, CounterSliver is best in formats where Control and Combo are the top decks, and Gifts Ungiven is probably going to be the top deck of Champs, regardless of how many people show up with badly tuned Golgari or Boros decks. CounterSliver in the past was weakest against true creature/beatdown decks, but that all changed when U/G hit the scene in Odyssey Block. From SickestEver.dec to Deep Dog, U/G decks have replaced the dorky Lord of Atlantis and other Blue creatures with beautiful Green drops and never looked back. Critical Mass – now with 100% fewer “critical” Gnarled Masses – doesn’t quite have Wild Mongrel, but it does have Quirion Dryad’s creepy cousin, Ravnica’s Vinelasher Kudzu.
If you haven’t played with it yet, let me tell you that Vinelasher Kudzu, especially on the play, is probably the best offensive two-drop available at the moment. Like Arcbound Ravager and Wild Mongrel before it, the Lasher profitably grows as your strategy progresses. Like both of those cards, it is powerful for its cost, but requires careful play to be maximally effective. Usually you play lands and spells after the attack… With Vinelasher Kudzu, you’ll want to play land and Wood Elves and even break Sakura-Tribe Elder prior to crashing. As such, the rest of the deck is geared to support this two-drop; the Kudzu generates an agnostic advantage in the early game and is usually cracking for 6 or 7 in short order. The Blue cards are there to keep it hitting, either by stifling the opponent’s development or his ability to deal with a significant threat before it makes the game academic. In the unlikely event that Kudzu is dealt with through even one counterspell, Critical Mass – now with 100% fewer “critical” Gnarled Masses – has the best late game threats in the game to mop up the last few life points in the air.
Plans and Playing
White Weenie (WWr)
You can win this matchup one of two ways, depending on what version the opponent is playing. On the play, the best strategy is probably to curve Vinelasher into Wood Elves and other accelerators and just bash with Lasher and Jitte. There is nothing in the WW or WWr deck that is realistically going to run with Vinelasher if you keep ramping mana, so eventually the opponent is going to be on the wrong side of a two-for-one. You just use Meloku as the finisher. The less desirable strategy is to make sure the opponent doesn’t have Jitte advantage and just block until you hit six mana; then it’s Keiga time! Meloku is generally the better threat, but Keiga is the card that WW can’t get through. In the unlikely event that the opponent “wins” the fight, you steal their best guy. Basically because the opponent doesn’t have a lot of card advantage elements, you always win if you can maintain a reasonable life total going into your high drops.
Gifts Ungiven
If you’re not good at this deck, you might not be beating Gifts… but that’s not the deck’s fault. The matchup is highly interactive and improvisational, and it is impossible to script exactly how to play in a single paragraph. The A plan is to come in with Kudzu and make it big enough to knock down Carven Caryatid, or even a string of Caryatids as some decks require. Gifts is a powerful deck, but also full of flaws and holes. One misstep and the U/G will be all over it. Shadow of Doubt works best here, and Hinder is mostly present to hold a lead once you’ve established it. Generally you can expect Gifts to come back with a bomb, but with counters, more counters out of the board, and control of early game initiative, you should be able to win with 1-2 attacks from one of the late-game Big Blues.
Don’t expect to have many cards left or a very pretty board when you’re done, though.
Combo Decks
Critical Mass – now with 100% fewer “critical” Gnarled Masses – is a nightmare for Standard Combo decks. It has Shadow of Doubt to beat mana ramp and Time of Need engines, and fast enough aggression to put the opponent on his heels and force him to go off prematurely. Nothing out of the ordinary against a deck like Heartbeat/Maga… Just make sure you don’t let Eye of the Storm resolve if you can help it.
Other Decks
Regardless of your preferences or what deck you like or what synergies seem fresh and interesting to you, you have to concede that U/G uniquely combines better cards overall than basically any other deck and can deploy those cards more rapidly than they can in general. What other deck has an effective Top engine and breaks Umezawa’s Jitte… and closes with Meloku times four? Every mainstream matchup I test, I just feel like the opposing sixty is outclassed, either playing out ineffectual 2/2 creatures against a team of all two-for-ones and Kudzus, or fails to bust through Wall of Meloku when I have two counters in grip. After boards, the mana acceleration allows U/G to play a better control game than most control decks, while at the same time exploiting early turn initiative and hitting all its land drops. This deck doesn’t have Guild synergy and can’t take advantage of the cool new Gold cards… but that almost doesn’t matter. Most decks have either Jitte or Meloku whereas Critical Mass Update – Now with 100% fewer “critical” Gnarled Masses – exploits and combines the disparate strategies effectively, and that’s usually enough to beat up on the oddball strategies you’ll see in a new metagame.
Us v. Them:
Us:
4 Shadow of Doubt
This card is there as a two-for-one in the (former) Hiskoka’s Defiance slot. It is mostly present to trump Gifts Ungiven and Kodama’s Reach, but can easily be substituted with a different quick permission spell if you are comfortable against polychromatic Green. This card is much better against Gifts Ungiven whereas a card like Mana Leak would be better against White Weenie. We went with Shadow of Doubt because White Weenie was already a favorable matchup and Gifts Ungiven, though belonging to Critical Mass even more on the numbers, was usually defeated by razor thin margins as narrow as Blue Skies’ back in 2000-2001.
1 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
Once we discovered Vinelasher Kudzu, that pretty much spelled the end for Kodama of the North Tree in this archetype. That said, I only wanted to play 23 land with 4 Tribe Elders, 4 Wood Elves, 4 Tops, and 4 Clouded Mirrors of Victory (replay the same land on 5 or more, natch), so we went to Arashi. Interesting note, 1 Arashi was in the initial versions of Critical Mass, before the Mass that became Isao, and this was kind of like the return visit for him. I like this card because it curves at the same spot as North Side. 5/5 for five is great (I considered playing Kavu Titan for a good deal of LA testing), and Arashi gives you an out against quick Hypnotic Specter, which makes it a marginally more useful random one-of than an admittedly powerful 6/4 for five.
Them:
Hypnotic Specter
This card is still the main limiting factor in Standard, but I don’t think it wrecks Critical Mass – now with 100% fewer “critical” Gnarled Masses – as much as it would a Blue Control or combo deck. In a lot of my testing, Lord Hypno just bought it to Jitte counters, even after hitting a few times, and Arashi is randomly good at killing it. Hypnotic Specter isn’t game over against this deck the way it is against a real Blue deck because U/G actually plays out its hand and can lean on Sensei’s Divining Top for selection even after it’s been cleared; I still wouldn’t want to start off fighting this card, but I also didn’t want to metagame against it heavily given how good the deck was against WW (WW/r) and Gifts.
Suppression Field
BDM calls this “haggling.”
“I want to use Meloku.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Well that’s not a Damping Matrix, is it?”
“No…”
“How about I pay three?”
“I still don’t want you to use Meloku.”
“Well I’m offering three.”
“… FINE. Jerk.”
“Kill you.”
Most of the time in testing, I was just like “Whew! Thank God that’s not a Jitte!” and won. If you don’t get overrun by 100 quick drops, you always win. Lasher and the accelerators have to hold the ground. Suppression Field makes a lot of plays sticky, but if you focus on hitting 5 and 6 mana, all that hardly matters. The decks that have Suppression Field tend not to be able to beat Meloku and especially Keiga in the late game. In our testing with the various good Blue decks, most WW/x players just threw their Fields away in Games 2 and 3.
Tuning for the Inbred Metagame
In the Neutral Ground mock tournament, Rich Fein played exactly the version of Critical Mass – now with 100% fewer “critical” Gnarled Masses – as posted in this article. Mark Schmidtt played a version that tried Mana Leak over Shadow of Doubt; he lost to Steve Sadin WW/u early while I ended up fighting Rich in the second round. I actually thought the U/G deck would have the edge, as it had in Block, but I “won the sideboard war” against Rich and ended up making a lot of his traditionally correct choices useless.
Now we just talked about how Suppression Field isn’t very good against this deck, but when I built the sideboard, I was still worried about a big portion of the metagame packing Jitte/Anthem/Field, so I wanted to be able to handle those cards agnostically and profitably, which is why there is a mix of Naturalizes and Rending Vines (usually I’d just use the Naturalize). Given the results we had this past weekend, Rich and I are thinking -1 Keiga/+1 Arashi, -1 Naturalize or Rending Vines/+1 Arashi side to fight Mono-Blue… but that’s pretty inbred (how many Mono-Blue do you think you’ll be up against?). Arashi’s great against White Weenie too, though, so losing an artifact kill probably isn’t too bad… but Keiga is better against both White Weenie and the field, so the conjectural main deck swap is probably a wash; I just wanted to throw that suggestion out there.
Rich was dissatisfied with Rewind in the sideboard, and asked if a different permission spell might be better. To maximize the deck’s ability to deal with Hypnotic Specter – and make it marginally better against White Weenie as well – you can try Mana Leak + Remand in the main, siding Hinder or Shadow of Doubt over Rewind. In an unknown metagame where I assumed the people I had to beat would have reasonably good decks, I would play the deck as posted above, but would consider something along these lines if I knew my opponents were going to skew heavily towards aggression and/or flying offense, or if I thought the opponents would come out as they did last Saturday:
Inbred Critical Mass
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
3 Keiga, the Tide Star
4 Mana Leak
4 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
4 Remand
2 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Vinelasher Kudzu
4 Wood Elves
5 Island
6 Forest
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Miren, the Moaning Well
1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
4 Tendo Ice Bridge
4 Yavimaya Coast
Sideboard:
4 Jushi Apprentice
4 Threads of Disloyalty
2 Shadow of Doubt
1 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
4 Naturalize
This version is narrowly devastating but has a weaker agnostic long game and less disruptive capacity against anyone who is paying attention… But I’d be surprised if it weren’t good enough to win Champs, especially with the world’s most dangerous players all testing a different format for the subsequent weekend.
Good luck this weekend whatever you choose.
LOVE
MIKE