When last we left our intrepid readers, we had looked at mono-Green for possible consideration for the State Championships. While there are definitely some good things to be said about the deck, they require the right kinds of things to happen to justify playing a deck fixating on Blanchwood Armor, and the presumption seems to have been that both Gifts and conventional White Weenie would tear a deck like that a new one. While I’m not sold on the latter, it always did raise the question, “Why aren’t you just playing White Weenie instead?”
And so we move on to our next discussion point, and the opening shot for my look at the colors of Green and White together, better known nowadays as the Selesnya Guild. The obvious starting point is to take White Weenie and throw a few other cards in it, and benefit from the good mana making two-drop Elephants possible. Rather than question immediately why we’re looking at the Selesnya Guild instead of the Boros Legion, we’ll presume that good beats may yet prove to be worthwhile enough to make this a viable consideration. Fat beats burn sometimes after all, and so the G/W deck might beat the W/R deck, for all we know. Nobody knows until they play.
The obvious first step is pretty close to a last step, as far as figuring out what beatdown G/W should look like:
4 Lantern Kami
4 Suntail Hawk
2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Hand of Honor
4 Watchwolf
4 Leonin Skyhunter
3 Viridian Shaman
4 Glorious Anthem
4 Otherworldly Journey
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Brushland
4 Temple Garden
2 Tendo Ice Bridge
1 Eiganjo Castle
12 Plains
We aren’t close enough to figuring out what’s going on to look into a sideboard list yet, and that’s probably about right so far. This is a pretty direct effort at porting the White Weenie deck from Kamigawa Block over with a little more fat and utility, with Viridian Shaman excellent in a Jitte-fight and Watchwolf excelling at, well, being large and in charge for two mana. Surviving Hideous Laughter prior to a Glorious Anthem doesn’t hurt either. Seeing whether this is worthwhile at all, I threw it at its old nemesis the Gifts deck, to see how it balanced out. Ten games later, three of them in the White Weenie deck’s favor, I was still wondering how exactly those three got there in the Win column. Maybe adding Hokori, Dust Drinker to the main would change that, but then again maybe it wouldn’t. The question we were trying to answer is, what does White Weenie gain by adding the Green to it? The answer is, not as much as it gets for adding the red to it.
Of course, you can go crazy from there and decide you’re going to play all three colors, which might give you something like this:
4 Sacred Foundry
4 Temple Garden
4 Brushland
4 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
2 Tendo Ice Bridge
4 Plains
4 Lantern Kami
4 Suntail Hawk
2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Boros Swiftblade
4 Watchwolf
4 Leonin Skyhunter
4 Hand of Honor
4 Glorious Anthem
4 Lightning Helix
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
Sideboard:
4 Char
4 Viridian Shaman
4 Hokori, Dust Drinker
3 Naturalize
If you want to do that, then you have more balls than your average spell-slinger, and that’s all right. You also will need a bigger wallet, with eight Ravnica dual lands complementing eight Ninth Edition painlands and four Jittes, but it can be done and so it will be done by someone. Whether it’s better than R/W Weenie, well, they may or may not actually think about it, and that would also depend on how aggressive their opponents are to penalize them for their hundred and fifty dollar mana base. It’s certainly better than Green/White, though, because it can close a match against Gifts… or anyone else for that matter. Green/White aggro requires something truly special to make the cut in Constructed, and contrary to appearances it doesn’t seem as if Watchwolf by itself does enough. Having access to a new almost-Plow helps considerably as well, but it’s a costly one and thus not best suited to a beatdown deck.
Having learned the lesson to dodge Green/White for beatdown, however, we’re only on page two of the article and there’s more to learn and to explore. So we can’t look to Watchwolf as the renaissance of modern beatdown? So what?
…
Green/White Control has been known to exist sometimes, as has mid-range beatdown. The latter has existed mostly when there’s Armageddon to be found, but this was also seen as recently as the last Block Constructed season, and lessons can be learned from Deck X perhaps to advance G/W into a form that can actually square off against Gifts Ungiven (and other creature-oriented control decks) to the deck’s advantage.
And then of course there’s Enduring Ideal. But my efforts to fit that into a Green/White construct continue to fail, as there is something that just seems right about Seething Song into Form of the Dragon as a backup plan that slower Green mana can’t offer. Losing some Mirrodin artifact acceleration hurts, but replacing it with Green cards didn’t prove the solution. Green is great for long-term acceleration, or possibly degenerate acceleration once you have a few Lands in play, but not the kind of mana the current iterations of the Enduring Ideal deck are looking to find after it’s gone missing.
With the obvious course of action taken and aborted, we’ve got some work left to do. We’ll be looking at a more difficult deck than a straight beatdown deck, and that requires having a sense of what’s going to be going on in the format. The consensus after week one of the Challenge is that you can’t really expect to see a mono-colored deck, though I noticed a distinct absence of discussion from the crafty Blue mages as to whether their Blue control deck still existed or not. The silence could mean that nobody wanted to give up their secrets, or it could mean that the death of Mono-Blue Control was considered to be so astoundingly obvious that it did not bear mentioning. Either way, the silence was deafening, and I don’t trust Blue to go into hiding so easily.
Deck number one: Osamu Fujita’s Deck X, from GP: Taipei:
4 Cloudcrest Lake
2 Island
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Eiganjo Castle
15 Plains
4 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
3 Yosei, the Morning Star
4 Hokori, Dust Drinker
2 Kentaro, the Smiling Cat
4 Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
2 Sensei Golden-Tail
4 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
2 Pithing Needle
4 Honor-Worn Shaku
2 Konda’s Banner
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
2 Blessed Breath
Deck number two: TOGIT Green/White, from PT: Philadelphia:
1 Eiganjo Castle
1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
1 Island
2 Tendo Ice Bridge
4 Yosei, the Morning Star
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Orochi Sustainer
2 Kodama of the North Tree
1 Patron of the Kitsune
1 Myojin of Cleansing Fire
2 Hokori, Dust Drinker
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
3 Final Judgment
4 Kodama’s Reach
3 Time of Need
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
2 Genju of the Cedars
Now, we aren’t looking at exactly the same metagame as Kamigawa Block Constructed, but there are some obvious similarities. The best “good” deck that is well-known is the Gifts deck, even if no one knows what the heck it looks like with access to good lands and another two large expansion’s worth of cards. White Weenie is still existent, albeit more brutal thanks to the ability to play with burn spells, and there are potentially similar aggressive decks that can capitalize on a lot of the same cards or ideas as a traditional beatdown deck of that sort. “Black Hand” is now effectively the Black/Green deck, and unfortunately for the deck here there is an actually useful combo deck in the Heartbeat of Spring deck where before there was a pseudo-combo that was slow at gaining positional advantage and capitalizing on their ability to make the Mana Flare work for them rather than for everyone.
So, besides Meloku, neither color really needs Blue for anything. Maybe it’ll make its way in, maybe it won’t, but either way we want to focus on the core and look at what the decks have in common, and more importantly how one might progress from the TOGIT build to “Deck X” in a logical fashion. Replacing “the Gifts matchup” with “against Control decks” directly, assuming that vulnerabilities between control decks will be essentially similar, we’d assume that the things that worked became more focused over time with the Fujita deck. Let’s progress with some numbers:
TOGIT: 4 Yosei, 2 Hokori, 3 Time of Need, 3 Final Judgment, 4 Umezawa’s Jitte
Deck X: 3 Yosei, 4 Hokori, -, -, 4 Umezawa’s Jitte, 4 Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
We’ll stow the differences in mana acceleration for the moment, as one was intended to use Snakes and Reaches to get good mana, while the other uses Legends and the Paddle. Deck-X lacks Sensei’s Divining Top because it lacks shuffle effects, more content to Pithing Needle an offending Top than try to match it, or simply make its use impractical with Hokori Dust-Drinker. What makes both of these function are the opportunity to present difficult problems to the opponent, some of which do not bear correct solutions; what works on Hokori to free up your mana creates a difficult problem when it’s Yosei knocking on your door, and the Dragon opens the door for the walking Winter Orb if it’s dispatched before it kills the opponent. White can be called upon for a mid-range set of creatures that allow for an aggressive stance and work towards board control, which can be paired with Green elements rather well. The key seems to be the effectively aggro-control stance of the creatures, a mix of early aggressive beaters to set the tempo of the game, and creatures that struggle for board advantage and affect the flow of answers to back it up. Looking at a mix of aggressive decks and controlling strategies as the probable States metagame, it is unlikely that there will be any significant number of decks with non-interactive strategies, and so a strategy such as this mid-range Green/White deck might present is not at its base invalidated.
Creatures (20)
- 1 Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 4 Hokori, Dust Drinker
- 3 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 4 Yosei, the Morning Star
- 4 Watchwolf
Lands (24)
Spells (16)
This may not seem like very much, and I do hope I can be forgiven for spoiling the Green/White heart of the deck with the solitary Island to cast Meloku, but this presents a solid mid-range beatdown deck that is unexpectedly difficult for controlling strategies to handle. The interplay of Yosei and Hokori allow for some significant maneuvering of advantage, and the deck is fully capable of killing the opponent without resolving a single threat spell. While Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree hasn’t been showcased as central to any deck so far, it is an excellent tool here, providing another means for overwhelming a control deck by means of a varied array of threats that are not easily nullified. While its interaction with Hokori may be atrocious, it’s no worse than any other land, and if the game is being played on Hokori’s terms then the loss of a few Saprolings can be forgiven.
Against aggressive decks, you have a difficult problem for them: committing to the board leads to Wrath of God, while not committing to the board is a sure way to get run over by Dragons. At its heart this deck is still an aggressive deck, but it has the proper tools to get far enough into the game that its expensive spells can take over where the weenies left them off. Admittedly, this is something probably best addressed, as upping your reactive speed to deal with the Boros Legion is a necessity, but we also want to keep in mind the tempo of the game out of the sideboard against dedicated control decks, as well as the suite of cards to be used against them.
Proposing a method for dealing with the Boros Legion is pretty easy; the greatest difficulty is when you have to play fair, and fall far enough behind that their burn spells become relevant. Holding up mana for a Circle of Protection or for Story Circle is a bad prospect for a deck looking to deploy expensive threats or possibly Winter Orb, and something that can protect your life, prevent your creatures from being eliminated unfairly after you’ve invested so much to get them, or serve as creature elimination has to be handy to keep around. Asking what this would cost is of course a tricky question, as the card I’m proposing is Shining Shoal… all it costs is something you may have more of than you can use quickly, cards in hand. Additional Wrath effects, if there is room, might also be quite helpful, and there you’ll see Final Judgment squeak into the list again.
As good as Carven Caryatid can be, it doesn’t solve the problems I’m expecting to be most relevant. The key White Weenie creatures fly, and the few non-fliers that have been making their way in there, like Hand of Honor, still don’t fall to the Caryatid. It won’t get you anywhere, might do nothing, and is useless against anything besides dedicated beatdown. While this card may shine in other decks, unless the nature of the aggressive decks changes soon I don’t think this advances the goals of this deck very well, while more board sweepers or super-fast free spells does. Likewise a piece of White Weenie mirror technology might prove better than a 2/5, with Opal-Eye, Konda’s Yojimbo also stepping in for damage control in a key matchup while having broad applicability in different situations.
Naturalize is key for disrupting unknown strategies and long-term card advantage effects like Phyrexian Arena, and can also handle the two most probable non-interactive cards, Heartbeat of Spring and Eye of the Storm. That it works on Jittes as well is clearly icing on the cake, but nobody said that was a bad thing. Ideally a more specific card for attacking the opponents’ mana capabilities would be handy, but nothing seems to really suggest itself here. Pithing Needle can prove handy, as it did in Deck-X, and should practically be an auto-include for its versatility as well as the impact it has on key matches like the Gifts deck matchup, or against some of the utility creatures Green/Black presents.
Speaking of Green/Black reminds us of the need to contain a Hypnotic Specter, but Shining Shoal does that excellently, while Opal-Eyes can supplement it nicely. These are not the days of Ritual-Hypnotic, but even if they were those days Shining Shoal would be fast enough to deal with it before it demolished you. Two cards is a lot, but it’s not too much, or at least that’s what anyone who’s ever been destroyed by Hyppie before would say.
The proposed sideboard, then, is:
4 Shining Shoal
3 Pithing Needle
3 Naturalize
2 Hand of Honor
2 Opal-Eye, Konda’s Yojimbo
1 Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
This gives us the tools to modulate our tempo as high as it needs to go when facing against a creature rush, the ability to interact with noncreature permanents that prove difficult, and up the clock a little better when it comes to beating down against a more controlling deck. Hand of Honor and 8.5 help fill out the two-drop curve while also hopefully being at least a trifle annoying to remove, that latter quality being the reason 8.5 made it into the main-deck at all… to protect things more important than itself, and to help change the nature of the game. The twenty-fifth land didn’t seem as relevant as the ability to alter your opponents’ ability to stop your threats, and a second after side boarding can’t hurt against the kinds of decks you’d want a stronger aggressive stance against.
My testing with the deck, while by no means as complete as I’d hoped it might be, suggested that the deck didn’t fall on its face like I expected a Green/White deck to. I never picked up the TOGIT deck, and admittedly the resemblance to Deck-X stops after Meloku, Yosei, and Hokori, so I can’t say I’ve even mastered the subtle interactions the deck has with itself much less how to interact with other decks, as the metagame forms itself out of a vacuum. Test runs against White Weenie did what was wanted, playing the controlling role long enough to survive the first wave and begin to dominate the skies, but a well-timed (*cough*lucky*cough*) Jitte or two may have been instrumental in that plan working out. Shining Shoal out of the sideboard was just the right tool against those annoying Lightning Helixes and Chars, and in a deck with possibly redundant copies of four to six mana Legends I didn’t mind the cost, especially given the benefit.
If you thought casting Psionic Blast with Red mana instead of Blue was odd, Deflecting it with White cards instead of Blue cards feels stranger still… not to mention immensely satisfying somehow, causing someone to clock themselves in the face for six life when they thought they had you dead or had turned the tide by offing Meloku.
Gifts is hard, and finding someone with a decent list who knows what they’re doing harder still. The preliminary knocking-around I did was mostly to make sure that the tempo of the deck functioned like I thought it did. Seeing Putrefy out of the Gifts deck made me wish I had access to the full four Hands of Honor after sideboarding, and with a potentially large number of Black creatures in Black/Green decks I wouldn’t regret that change, especially since the one Eight-and-a-Half-Tails met the one Hideous Laughter more than once and never got the chance to save anything from Putrefy or Sickening Shoal. I would say that the presence of 8.5 was surprisingly disappointing, but as a one-of I can’t say I drew it enough to know whether I wanted it or could “settle” for a mere Bushido knight. My suspicion is that the 8.5 can be done away with, and the cleanliness of the deck improved by having four copies of Hand of Honor between the maindeck and sideboard.
The good news was, though, as inexperienced as I was with this deck and the Gifts players with their decks, I got the kind of information I was looking for: that the use of Hokori and Yosei presented the difficult interaction I’d hoped for, leaving room to play and to feint back and forth for position. Where the simple concept of “there is no such thing as wrong threats, only wrong answers” is pretty easily understood, the threats presented here are very good at generating “wrong answers” from decks looking to control their aggressive stance. Yosei makes whatever answer actually kills him the wrong answer, while Meloku and Vitu-Ghazi make one-for-one removal the wrong kind of answer to a potential army in a box. (Yes, the City Tree is much slower than Meloku, as was accentuated every time I picked up a City-Tree to make an Illusion token. But we can’t all be Meloku.)
Tempo, fat, and mana disruption has come a long way from the times of Ernham-Geddon. The Dude Ranch has gotten considerably worse since the days of Kjeldoran Outpost, requiring twice as much mana and of two colors besides on a land that taps for colorless. The best thing that can be said about it is that it doesn’t eat a Plains, but I’d happily play Outpost instead of the City-Tree, as would most people without an inhuman love for Saprolings. The Swords to Plowshares isn’t quite good enough to want to use, and the “Geddon” is short-term only and happens if they kill your Dragon. But it’s still something in the neighborhood of a functioning game-plan, and four Outposts are good against control decks even if they are more expensive to run. All in all, I’d say the experiment was a success, especially compared to the first-step Green/White beatdown deck that Watchwolf first suggests.
Next week I’ll be tackling an easier assignment than trying to present a playable Selesnya Guild deck, but then… next week I won’t be writing anything for you, focusing on testing some more for the Week 4 of the Championships Challenge 2005 instead.
— Sean McKeown
— [email protected]
“Too late to turn back now, I’m running out of sound
And I am changing, changing…
And if we died right now, this fool you love somehow
Is here with you…”
–the Smashing Pumpkins, “Galapagos”