I got back from Grand Prix Portland and was ready for a bit of a break from competitive Magic. The next Pro level events all use Scars of Mirrodin, so there wasn’t a lot of preparation I could do. I could relax without feeling like I was wasting time.
At least, that’s what I thought until I saw that I could still get a reasonable flight to Baltimore for the StarCityGames.com Open, so I immediately went back into the fray.
Until Scars of Mirrodin is available, Limited is less important, so now is a good time to get back into thinking about Standard.
While doing commentary for the finals of GP Portland, Brian Kibler made an observation that Martin Juza has an extremely different style of play than Brian does. Martin tries to play around everything all the time, while Brian tries to play more aggressively to give his opponent less of a chance to have something. I strongly believe that neither player is incorrect.
I’ve felt for a long time, in Limited, that the correct pick in any given pack depends a lot on how you plan to draft from there. How you plan to draft should change a lot depending on whether or not you – on the draw – are likely to block your opponent’s Silvercoat Lion with your Stormfront Pegasus when it attacks you on turn 3. Clearly, that will depend on the rest of your hand and what you know of your opponent, but some people are much more likely to block there than others.
The same is entirely true of building Constructed decks. This becomes more apparent to me the more familiar I am with a deck, so it’s most obvious for me with Faeries. Specially, Peppersmoke – my pet card – changes in value greatly depending on what you want the deck to do. With a deck like Faeries, a deck that has several different defensible lines of play in most games, Peppersmoke’s value can change a lot. I know that in the mirror, I want to try to be as aggressive as possible, since I want to win by having more life and more 1/1s than my opponent. There are other players who prefer trying to win the mirror by going long and trying to set up a situation where they can end up with two Scions of Oona in play at the same time.
Earlier this week,
Michael Jacob wrote an excellent report about Pro Tour Amsterdam
. The thing that I liked most about his report was that he listed his plan for the matchup in each of his rounds. It’s important to be aware of how you’re trying to win any given game, and it was valuable to see what his intended line in any given matchup was… Especially with a control deck that has a lot of options for locking up any given game. In the future, I plan to try to steal this tournament reporting method, but here it can also help explain what I mean.
For me, in a Faerie mirror match, my plan A is to focus on the opponent’s life total and push as much damage through as I can whenever possible. Ideally, this means sticking Bitterblossom - but if I don’t have it, it can just as easily be accomplished by protecting a Spellstutter Sprite. For others, their plan A may be to trade defensively to reach the late game, then force a counter war at the end of the opponent’s turn over a Mistbind Clique or Cryptic Command, then untap and play two Scions of Oona. I side out my Mistbind Cliques in that matchup, but for someone who’s on the second plan, it can be one of his more important cards.
The simple conclusion is that when you see a deck, you should think about what your plans are to defeat that deck. If you find yourself frequently coming to the same plan, make sure your deck is set up to accomplish that plan as often as possible.
My deck from US Nationals is a perfect example of this idea.
I played four Fauna Shamans and four Vengevines. But in most matchups, I’d say that my plan – if I had Fauna Shaman – was to find Knight of the Reliquary and Admonition Angel, which meant the Vengevines, which were there to make Fauna Shaman better, were relatively useless.
One week before Nationals, I’d have said my plan was to chain Vengevines and then find a second cheap creature to get all the Vengevines back. At that point, Vengevines made sense - but when the plan is Admonition Angel, the Vengevines become entirely superfluous.
Note that the fourth Vengevine isn’t even part of the plan to chain Vengevines, but all four were included because that plan is so much better when you start by discarding a Vengevine that you drew naturally. As awesome as that is, it barely matters when you’re on the Admonition Angel plan anyway, because the Angel doesn’t care about an extra 4/3 attacker. If it sticks, it’ll win the game on its own.
Those Vengevine slots could’ve been any number of other cards that would’ve helped more with my plan.
Anyway, somehow Kibler’s statement about play styles got me thinking about Preordain.
When Preordain was spoiled, I felt like people thought it would be a weaker Ponder. It would allow decks that
really
wanted to Ponder to
Ponder even harder
. After playing with it, I think it’s pretty clear that most of the time, Preordain is actually better. Very often you’ll Ponder and see one card you want and two cards you don’t want, but you can’t really shuffle them away because you really want the one card. You always have to ask if the cards there are better or worse than three random cards, and often you find yourself keeping them even though they’re actually worse than three random cards just to decrease variance. The ability to choose individually to keep or discard each card is so important.
Considering that I hadn’t played Standard since Nationals, I wanted to try throwing together something new - perhaps something with a fresh eye - before doing any serious investigation into where the format had gone. I was excited about the selection offered by Preordain, and I wanted to see what I could do with it.
Mythic was awesome in Standard the last time I checked, so the other card I was excited about the idea of playing was Forked Bolt. The obvious direction here was just to play Pyromancer Ascension with Lightning Bolt and Forked Bolt where other lists played Burst Lightning. This would lose some value against planeswalkers, manlands, and Putrid Leech, though, so it might not be ideal.
Next, I thought about a U/W/r control deck that could find Forked Bolt. When I went to build it, I realized that I would lose a lot of long-term value from my Preordains by playing all the fetchlands needed to support the red splash, so then I decided to try building straight U/W.
Once I’m working that hard to make my scrying as good as possible, I wanted to try Foresee. The card is extremely powerful, and I’ve been happy in the past with direct card draw over reliance on Jace, the Mind Sculptor.
The list I threw together was:
Creatures (7)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (26)
Spells (23)
I was pretty happy when I managed to win my first match against Mono-Green Eldrazi Ramp with Summoning Trap, which should be a very difficult matchup.
Time Warp is an extremely powerful card that makes decks a little more inconsistent. You don’t want to draw it early when you need business, but any time you can cast it and your opponent can’t punish you for temporarily tapping five lands, the card is all upside. I feel like the increased consistency I buy by playing all those scry spells can be spent on Time Warps – and so far, they’ve been playing quite well, even with the low number of planeswalkers.
Speaking of which, this list doesn’t contain Elspeth, Knight-Errant, which is probably a mistake. I feel like protecting a Baneslayer is just what I want to be doing most of the time - but again, when I have so much card selection, a single copy of a powerful card like Elspeth is almost certainly worthwhile.
This list isn’t a recommendation for a particular tournament; this is an early experiment in taking as much advantage of scry in this archetype as possible.
An actual recommendation for any serious Standard tournament right now would probably look a lot more like:
Creatures (26)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 1 Sovereigns of Lost Alara
- 1 Baneslayer Angel
- 4 Lotus Cobra
- 1 Admonition Angel
- 1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence
- 2 Vengevine
- 4 Fauna Shaman
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (6)
I think squeezing a couple of Preordains into this deck makes sense. They’re good with Jace, and the deck is enough like a combo deck that some ability to smooth draws makes a lot of sense - not to mention the fact that the deck has a lot of cards you really don’t want to see late.
On the other hand, the toolbox nature of Fauna Shaman means that you want as many slots as possible for different tools, so it’s very difficult to fit a full set of Preordains into the deck without moving away from planeswalkers.
The sideboard is pretty straightforward. The Roil Elemental is basically just there because I think it’s the best way to reliably beat Soul Sisters. It
was
just going to be another Admonition Angel, but Roil Elemental seems more effective in this matchup and having the option to search for either one depending on the mana I have available will often be valuable.
Garruk Wildspeaker is a lot better now than he was before Mana Leak was printed, and I don’t think people have taken advantage of that properly. If you realize how Preordain makes Time Warp a better card and think about the excellent interactions between Time Warp and planeswalkers, then I think there’s a reasonable area of design space to be explored in combining Garruk with Preordain and Time Warp. Turboland is the obvious shell for such a deck - but I’m not entirely convinced that Turboland maximizes the power of Garruk, who’s at his best when his ultimate is a real threat. This pushes more toward creatures as the acceleration.
Matt Nass and Tom Raney played a Mythic deck with Preordain and Time Warp at US Nationals. Time Warp as a card doesn’t make a lot of sense to me in conjunction with a Sovereigns of Lost Alara game plan. Some people defend the inclusion because Time Warp is good at skipping from five mana to six, which allows for faster Sovereigns kills - but when the deck plays so many accelerators (and particularly when one of them is Lotus Cobra), the curve just doesn’t really work that way. Too often, the first time you hit five mana you’ll actually have less mana the next turn because the mana comes from cracking a fetchland with Lotus Cobra in play.
At the same time, Time Warp does work reasonably well with the rest of the deck. The problem is just that, with such a vulnerable mana base, increasing the number of expensive spells that can get stuck in your hand isn’t really what you should be looking for.
This line of thinking is what led to the next deck that I threw together on Magic Online, which is:
Creatures (20)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 3 Baneslayer Angel
- 4 Lotus Cobra
- 1 Primeval Titan
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (25)
Spells (10)
The sideboard here actually allows the deck to become much more of a U/W Control deck to maximize the power of Jace, the Mind Sculptor - and because I generally like to be able to make decks become more controlling after sideboarding when I know exactly which answers will be valuable.
This deck gives up a lot of Mythic’s explosiveness, hoping to gain strength by being more resistant to having its creatures killed. All that the creatures are really doing here is accelerating into planeswalkers - and if the opponent is taking time to kill them, the deck still easily has enough lands to cast the planeswalkers consistently. So if your opponent is spending early turns killing your creatures, it shouldn’t be too late for the planeswalkers.
Where I’d really expect this deck to shine is when the control sideboard is at its strongest. I haven’t tested it yet, but this deck might actually be exceptionally good in a full match against other Noble Hierarch decks based on its ability to fight other Linvalas and protect its own.I mention battling over Linvala as the key to Noble Hierarchs somewhat offhandedly, but maybe this is something I should talk a little more about, just in case some people are unaware.
Every matchup between two decks that both have Noble Hierarch, in my experience, comes down almost entirely to Linvala, Keeper of Silence. This is a huge part of why I think Fauna Shaman is so important in Mythic and Naya matchups: it’s the most consistent way to find Linvala. When Linvala’s in play, the opponent can do almost nothing. Being on the play is huge because Linvala almost always turns off or substantially delays the other person’s ability to cast Linvala, so the legend rule is rarely an out.
Now that I think of it, the U/W Control deck should likely be sideboarding in Linvala.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is land counts and sideboarding.
Looking at the numbers on this makes me reasonably certain that Magic players as a whole still have no idea how many lands are supposed to be in their decks.
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Sometimes people write sideboarding guides. Occassionally, those guides suggest that you might want to sideboard differently depending on whether you’re on the play or the draw. What those guides very rarely do is suggest siding out land when you’re on the draw, or siding in land when you’re on the play.
Let’s look at some numbers to see why this is important.
When you have a deck with twenty-five land, you’re 76% likely to have your fourth land on turn 4 on the play. You’re 84% likely to have it on the draw. I think it’s not unreasonable to guess that the real reason you’re playing the amount of land you’re playing (even if you don’t know it), is that you want to hit your fourth land on turn 4 a certain percentage of the time (or maybe your third land on turn 3 or whatever).
What is that percentage? Is it 76% or 84%? Is it somewhere in the middle? That would make sense, since we don’t know if we’re on the play or the draw.
It looks like we wanted to be about 80% to hit our fourth land in this deck (assuming we have no card drawing spells). If we’re on the draw and we side out a land, we’re 81% likely to do that, which is still substantially more likely than if we were on the play with all of our lands. In fact, we can side out two lands on the draw, and we’re
still
more likely to hit our fourth land than we would be on the play with all of our lands. If we play twenty-five lands because we want to be 76% likely to hit them, and we’re on the play, we should be siding out two lands. If we want to hit our fourth land roughly 80% of the time, we should be siding in one land when we’re on the play, which would get us there exactly.
It would stand to reason that, in Constructed, we should try to have two more lands in our deck on the play than we do on the draw, and in Limited, we should try to have one more. Somehow, as far as I can tell, people – myself included – almost never do this, and I don’t think there’s a good reason not to.
Seriously. Ask yourself what you want out of your mana base, and make sure it’s set up to give it to you in the game you’re playing. If you had a ten-card opening hand, I
know
you’d learn to build decks with fewer lands… but somehow, we can’t learn to do that when we only have eight. That’s all I have for now.
Thanks for reading,
Sam