Let’s pretend I know what you’re thinking.
"This is just another brew, with no validity in a format of Delver, Primeval Titan, and R/G Aggro."
Trying to give a rogue deck list to competent friends playing with Pro Points and thousands of dollars on the line is a difficult task. You can’t be the boy who cried wolf, claiming to break the format every week. I have been known to get overexcited over decks that are more fun than good before, and occasionally I have difficulty telling the difference.
But who doesn’t?
This isn’t really about Grand Architect, a card which is often dismissed as being bad and limited to FNMs and kitchen tables. When you jam Mindslaver, Ichor Wellspring, Molten-Tail Masticore, and other barely playable artifacts in a deck simply because you have a few copies of Grand Architect, you’re asking to lose.Â
Ok, let me back up. A few weeks ago, Team SCG Blue was testing in my living room, and I was feeling a bit of the odd-man-out as I wasn’t qualified. So when they had eight qualified players, I’d be playing League of Legends or Magic Online. Not liking Champion of the Parish / Gather the Townsfolk in my Delver deck anymore, I started here:
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Ponder
4 Vapor Snag
4 Delver of Secrets
4 Snapcaster Mage
4 Grand Architect
2 Sword of War and Peace
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
4 Phantasmal Image
4 Phyrexian Metamorph
1 Batterskull
2 Wurmcoil Engine
2 Mana Leak
The deck was a couple of cards over, as I wanted to play 22 or 23 lands including four Buried Ruin. After playing a few games and messing with a couple of card slots, I realized a couple of things:
- The Ponder/Probe/Snag/Snapcaster package is the reason Delver decks win and is the engine behind the best deck in the format.
- Swords and equipment in general were not very good.
- Delver of Secrets does not play well with a heavy creature count.
- Phantasmal Image and Phyrexian Metamorph were always good, no matter when you drew them or what matchup you were playing against.
- No one could beat Wurmcoil Engine.
I immediately upped my Wurmcoil Engine count and cut the Delvers, Swords, and Mana Leaks. This left a deck that could effectively play the aggro or control role very well but also had a very distinct inevitability against almost every deck—as the game progressed, Wurmcoil Engine and Buried Ruin would end the game.
Vapor Snag felt stronger in this deck than in any U/W Delver deck I had ever played. This may seem strange, but with a virtual twelve "Lords" the clock adds up quickly even when you don’t see a Wurmcoil Engine. However, if you do have a Wurmcoil Engine (again, which usually translates into an endless stream of Wurmcoil Engine), Unsummon just buys one turn of staying alive. Unless the opponent is directly killing you, you often start casting 2-3 Wurmcoil Engines a turn for multiple turns in a row. Connecting for six or more lifelink is yet another way of just getting one more turn.
This is the reason that the deck isn’t overly reliant on Grand Architect. If you don’t find one you are more than comfortable with playing draw-go, keeping parity, and cloning their best cards until your Wurmcoil Engine plan comes on the "hard" way. Grand Architect is "just" a way to turn all of your creatures into Sol Rings.
The primary game plan against any slower deck in the format is to build your own Silvergill Adept as often as possible. Against decks with multiple Oblivion Rings, Sever the Bloodline, or Revoke Existence, you can very easily play the Merfolk role while exchanging resources. Even against these decks, all of your permanents (other than Grand Architect) come with card advantage, leaving you winning the late game in a way that isn’t directly related to attacking with 6/6s. You’re winning the card advantage war even against the Forbidden Alchemy / Think Twice decks.
Only two people played the deck this weekend, to a combined record of 24-4-1.
Creatures (24)
- 3 Merfolk Looter
- 4 Wurmcoil Engine
- 4 Grand Architect
- 4 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 4 Phantasmal Image
- 4 Snapcaster Mage
- 1 Dungeon Geists
Lands (23)
Spells (13)
Creatures (24)
- 3 Merfolk Looter
- 4 Wurmcoil Engine
- 4 Grand Architect
- 1 Spellskite
- 4 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 4 Phantasmal Image
- 4 Snapcaster Mage
Lands (23)
Spells (13)
There were definitely some differences between the two lists. I was working at the SCG booth in Minneapolis so I didn’t get a chance to play in either event, but I am very lucky to have such talented friends. If I had a chance to sit down with both Brad and Lewis, I would have tried to convince them to play this list:
Creatures (20)
Lands (23)
Spells (17)
While the deck is very good, there is a certain loss of power from the deck being a known entity. Brad doesn’t think the deck in its current form will be good next week, and that’s definitely partially true. Wurmcoil Engine is not nearly as difficult to beat when people are prepared for it, but that just means that we’ll have to adapt our list as well. The deck is mostly a function of many very synergistic, powerful cards. It’s much less gimmicky than it first appears.
New Archetypes
As we are in an era in which there are large-scale Magic tournaments happening around the world more frequently, metagame trends occur faster then stagnate for longer. People find a good deck or archetype they like, and after the decks posts good results over a few weeks tend to stick with that deck when they don’t have time to explore new options. If there is a tournament every weekend, the highest EV decision is usually to play a deck you’ve played before that you know is good. This leads to the same players on Delver or Wolf Run week in and week out, often using their other time testing for formats other than Standard.
Playing a deck that hasn’t been established yet is a higher risk/reward line of play that feels like a bad decision when you’re "grinding."
Cards have different power levels; it’s pretty easy to see that Snapcaster Mage is a better card than Coral Merfolk. No matter what deck you’re playing in any format, if your goal is to win you should be playing at least one of the cards that you believe is among the most powerful cards in the format. For example, Primeval Titan, Snapcaster Mage, Delver of Secrets, Lingering Souls, Phyrexian Metamorph, Strangleroot Geist, Huntmaster of the Fells—just to name a few. While each deck has a different supporting cast, playing the best cards is something you want to be doing. It may seem like there are many exceptions to this rule, but even a deck like Zombies has Gravecrawler and Geralf’s Messenger, a significant step above the curve (even if the deck requires a supporting cast of real pooper-scoopers like Blood Artist and Highborn Ghoul).
However, the idea of a Constructed playable card can be a bit detrimental to deckbuilding in general. Look at the deck that won Pro Tour Avacyn Restored. Hayne played four copies of Feeling of Dread maindeck and an Angel’s Mercy in his sideboard! I’m not claiming that Angel’s Mercy is becoming a Standard staple anytime soon, but the Hayne knew he needed lifegain against Boros and thought it was the best card to do that task against Boros. (Or he lost a bet with a friend that he wouldn’t register the card Angel’s Mercy in a Pro Tour; we may never know.)
Other than this, you should be playing cards which you know are gigantic trumps against most matchups. Primeval Titan also fills this role, as against the majority of decks an unanswered Titan will win a game. For last weekend Wurmcoil Engine was that card, and so Grand Architect was the supporting cast that made our power card as strong as possible.
For some counterexamples, Dredge as a deck seems like it doesn’t really play any singularly powerful cards and focuses solely on weaker cards interacting in unfair ways. While this looks true, the real power of the deck comes from cards like Lion’s Eye Diamond and Breakthrough. Dredge is a deck that does what it takes to turn Breakthrough into the equivalent of U: Draw 4 Cards and Lion’s Eye Diamond into Black Lotus.
My point with all of this is that there is so much more room for new "best" decks than people think. The "best deck" is a term that can only apply to a single tournament, unless there are cards that are truly broken and need to be banned. For example, Caw-Blade:
Caw-Blade was far and away the best performing deck for months. The deck was so strong that the Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic got banned in Standard. However, even when the deck was at its peak, there was a different "best list" for each tournament. One week it was Gerry Thompson version that splashed red for Arc Trail and Cunning Sparkmage. A different week it was splashing black for Doom Blade, and other times it played three Gideon Jura or none at all.
Christian "3 Sulfur Falls" Calcano
A huge congrats to Calcano, and though a few of his numbers are…unique, there is a reason he didn’t lose a match this weekend. The problem for U/W Delver against G/R Aggro is its inability to effectively take the control role in a given game. This is why I went to Wurmcoil Engine and Clones, whereas Calcano stuck with Delver and found Bonfire of the Damned. Bonfire is a card that, especially in Calcano’s list, lets you play the control role in games even if you don’t Ponder into the miracle and are simply casting it for X=2.
Early on Sunday, Calcano showed me his list and said, "All I do is board into control every game, and no one can beat it." This is because while playing against Calcano in game 1, his opponent would see a U/R Delver of Secrets deck, expect a lot of burn, and sideboard (correctly) to stay alive against a quick Delver draw. Postboard, Calcano had a diverse mix of threats that each could individually take over a game. Burn spells doubling as removal helped him get to this point in a way that Geist-Stalker U/W Delver decks could not.
Sure, these decks were rogue, but with the metagame as inbred as it was (with only three decks making up the majority of the tournament), it wasn’t hard to find the right mix of cards to beat those three decks.
Legacy
I haven’t played a game of Legacy since the last StarCityGames.com Invitational, so I don’t know a whole lot about what I’m going to be playing at the next one in Indianapolis or GP Atlanta. However, I think two Avacyn cards that are going to become focal points of the metagame are Griselbrand and Temporal Mastery. Time Walk is no joke, and there are many, many ways of manipulating your library in Legacy.
There were two Griselbrand decks in the finals of the SCG Legacy Open in Orlando, and I doubt that will change next week. The card is Yawgmoth’s Bargain that is easier to get into play and better once it is in play. It is easier to kill, sure, but the "better than Yawgmoth’s Bargain and easier to get into play" aspect is game ending. I would honestly be surprised if he doesn’t get banned by the end of the year.
Temporal Mastery, on the other hand, is going to require a lot of dedication. Sure, you could jam-pack your deck with Sensei’s Divining Tops, Ponders, and miracles, but what do you think is going to happen against the Spell Pierce / Stifle / Wasteland decks? It’s going to be rough, and cutting back on Snapcasters to add Tops is a way Merfolk can sneak its way back onto the top tables.
Thanks for reading!