If I were to hearken back to my prior writing “career” as a Magic: the Gathering writing “celebrity”, I would start this piece with my oft-maligned song lyrics that used to spring up all the time when I was writing A Neutral Eye for Neutral Ground, Oaf of Mages for Star City Games, or one of the other things I used to write forever ago (like, when the Dojo was still up)… those lyrics would be from “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, “The old familiar sting / try to kill it all away / but I remember everything…”.
I have recently decided to return to the game of Magic: the Gathering, having decided that while it served me to give it up for a time, there are elements of it (and friends within the game) that I would prefer not to exclude from my life anymore. I’ve walked the path which led me to leave and found it brings me to a point where I would be comfortable returning, a different person than when I left. Those particular lyrics come up because I submitted said “first article back actually playing Magic again” to Ted Knutson and got a terse denial, saying that it was for a dead format that was off-topic and not of interest in publication. Oh, to return to the days of having my name be the magic stamp that would get anything published, instead of actually having to “work” and not relying on my name alone to see it in print… It was a reminder of a sort I didn’t expect, and a painful one, as I can’t recall the last time I’ve gotten a rejection of one of my ideas or articles, at least in the realm of Magic.
Sure, it was about an Extended PTQ I went to, and the process I reached in building a deck for it; admittedly, the format is incredibly banal, and my decision to play Affinity wasn’t the most inspired decision even if the decklist is interesting. It was also, however, a starting-point into a segue about deckbuilding, the modern age of Perfect Information, and the road to this year’s U.S. Regional Championships. If you want to read that report, and thus the starting-point of the wandering exploration of deckbuilding and Standard in general that I intend to embark upon, it can be found in my journal, since Knut didn’t deign it worthy of publication simply upon the weight of my once-considerable laurels. [Sadly due to site policy, we cannot link to personal journals either. – Knut, not making the rules on this one]
Of course, these laurels were admittedly for being something of a jerk, which is now Mike Clair’s article series, and for being a deckbuilder who affected formats but was not himself a “pro”, for which you can read Mike Flores and actually think he is on the ball about what he’s talking about. Other people have those jobs now; I’m just not “me” enough anymore… which is all well and good, as I am not actually that person anymore to begin with. My personal resume of Pro Tour experience is a long story of near-misses and interesting collaborations and experiments in deckbuilding very publicly presented in article form for all to see, until I quit the game two-and-a-half-years ago to start running a Vampire live-action role-playing game in New York City instead… and in the time after quitting, playing in two Pro Tours (my first) for the Team Limited season with fellow writer Seth Burn and our friend Kevin An as “Scarecrow”, the second of which saw us make Day Two. Not exactly an impressive resume, but my record has always come as a thinker rather than a player; decks I have built have clearly had a better impact upon the Magic tournament community than I ever have, or could even really aspire to at this point.
The reason this is at all relevant and worth discussing is because I started my musings on the Extended season at its very beginning, and started working on an Excel spreadsheet to get an image of the Pro Tour upon which the format was originally based and actual matchup numbers from pros in action, rather than me and a friend sitting at a table at Neutral Ground in NYC and knocking off ten or twenty games against each other. It’s my belief that if you have perfect information you should take advantage of it; there were about ten players whose decks weren’t listed in the Decklists A-Z section of the coverage, but any of them who made Day Two at least had their archetype listed in the coverage and so the error value of all the match results was going to be within 2-3% – accurate enough to consider it an excellent starting-point for a format analysis. I was working steadily on that project (as an article for Ted and the Ferrett, thanks to my longstanding good relations with them and their boss, Pete Hoefling, which cannot be said for any other “active” Magic website) with the intention of finishing the stat analysis of it the weekend of GP: Boston, and write a “Part Two” follow-up article to watch the metagame in motion for Extended based on the matchups I’d statistically analyze from the Boston coverage.
Two things happened that weekend, one more relevant than the other. The less relevant thing was my realization that I wasn’t going to be able to attend any PTQs until the end of the season, at which time the foundation work would have already gone to waste due to metagame shifts… and the more relevant thing being the utter lack of information present in the Boston coverage, at least for the purposes I had in mind. My choice of Extended deck in that article was a mix of innovation (Cabal Therapy is good in Extended, right? Therapy and Meddling Mage is good enough in Extended that it has kept the “Dump Truck” deck afloat for way longer than it deserves to exist, and would probably work better in an Affinity deck, right?) and statistical analysis of the information presented in the weekly Top 8 lists maintained by Wizards of the Coast, and explored thoroughly by Michael J. Flores for all to read. [And in BDM’s articles here on SCG during the Extended season, which were outstanding.] Having all 27 Affinity decklists to have made the Top 8 that season, to do math on it and figure out exactly how many artifacts you need to have in the deck to run the Affinity mechanic and keep both Cranial Plating and Arcbound Ravager at the same high power level (the average consensus was 42.7 Artifacts), how many Lands I should play and which ones, and otherwise find out the tolerances on the “Affinity” deck before I started meddling with it.
Sure, that’s all common knowledge to anyone who played through the last year of Standard, but I wasn’t one of those people. I have a degree in Engineering besides, so the habit of taking something apart and fiddling with it until it breaks is something I was taught is a useful thing, not to mention that my job nowadays as an assistant R&D Chemist for Estee Lauder Cosmetics basically sees me fiddling with numbers and percentages to make something work better, or at least learn what makes it work and what makes it break… pretty fitting for me I think, given what I used to do semi-professionally for Magic decks, a mix of methodically trying to learn the boundaries of something mixed with abstract creativity and pulling things out of my ass.
This method of approach, then, is what I want to do to the upcoming Standard format, starting with good information and twiddling with the numbers and the interactions on everything here, starting with statistical analysis and proceeding to fuddle until something broke or an unusual answer had been reached. That it took an article and a half to say it and tell the story of how I have reached that desire to play with the new format is just my good old propensity for verbosity kicking in again. The question, then, for those who are astute about paying attention to the sources of one’s information, is “where do I intend to get this information?”
I don’t want to knock the decklists for the foreign Regionals, especially considering the quality of players you’re seeing attached to some of these results. Top 8 decklists, however, do not statistics make; they’ll be good for trends, to figure out what is working the best or at least winning the tournament, but I’m looking for more meat and potatoes to the information I am working with, and the foreign Regionals coverage we have available to us does not provide that. We do have a wonderful opportunity coming up very soon, however: the Last Chance Qualifier for Pro Tour: Philadelphia. The reason this is about Type Two and the Road to Regionals, rather than the Road to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is our starting point, and six weeks of manipulation (and the release of Saviors of Kamigawa!) leading up to the big day, the U.S. Regional Championships.
I can’t guarantee that Wizards of the Coast or the MagicTheGathering.com writing staff will present us with the base information I’m looking for; it wasn’t present at Grand Prix: Boston, and that was the main event… this is technically a side event, and one for a different format than the Pro Tour format. Fortunately, I live in New York City and am content to do strange things at strange times for strange reasons, and so I intend to high-tail it on the train to Philadelphia for the Last Chance Qualifier… but to do coverage, rather than leave it in someone else’s hands, and get a copy of the pairings each round and a list of deck archetypes for all players in the tournament, hopefully working with the MTG.com and judging staff but just sort of trusting I’ll be able to pull it off even if I’m not “official-like”. If I want to be really crazy about it, or just not care about the rest of the Pro Tour, I could even be back in the city in time for work Friday morning! Huzzah!
Innovation is an odd thing, however. As important as this starting-point is, the release of another set into the Standard format before we play it for Regionals will mean we are on our own, well and truly, with this format of ours… and so it is seeing how one transforms into the other, with the addition of another hundred-plus cards and the completion of the Kamigawa block, that will be truly interesting, and the place where fiddlers and musers will come up with the real bulk of the metagame shift. Even finding the target metagame to aim at, if you don’t want to modify your deck to include anything from the so-far unknown Saviors of Kamigawa expansion, will be a delicate task, and who knows? Maybe by the end of June the “standard version” of Tooth and Nail will be less like we’re seeing right now…
(Julien Steenkiste – Top 8 Regionals Paris, France)
1 Darksteel Colossus
1 Duplicant
1 Sundering Titan
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
4 Eternal Witness
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Vine Trellis
2 Mindslaver
3 Oblivion Stone
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
2 Plow Under
4 Reap And Sow
1 Rude Awakening
4 Sylvan Scrying
4 Tooth And Nail
10 Forest
1 Okina, Temple To The Grandfathers
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Urza’s Tower
Sideboard:
1 Oblivion Stone
1 Sundering Titan
1 Triskelion
1 Mephidross Vampire
4 Kodama’s Reach
3 Naturalize
2 Plow Under
1 Rude Awakening
1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
And more like a version that tries to point at something else entirely, requiring a different set of tools out of what we’re able to use right now, and looks more like this…?
13 Forest
1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
4 Cloudpost
2 Swamp
1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
1 Stalking Stones
1 Mirrodin’s Core
4 Eternal Witness
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Solemn Simulacrum
1 Leonin Abunas
1 Platinum Angel
1 Darksteel Colossus
1 Duplicant
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Sylvan Scrying
4 Tooth and Nail
3 Cranial Extraction
2 Rude Awakening
Sideboard:
4 Plow Under
3 Genju of the Cedars
2 Duplicant
1 Cranial Extraction
1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
1 Sundering Titan
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror-Breaker
1 Triskelion
1 Mephidross Vampire
Sure, this version looks like it would be worse in the format we’re playing right now, as it’s playing an entirely different game-plan and following a different philosophy about its role in the format, but does that mean it’s wrong in six weeks with so many unknowns? It’s this exploration that is interesting.
For example, I have been working on the notion of Standard decks right now, trying to figure out what the “holes” are that might be filled in later. If the format is going to be defined by creature decks, let’s say, thanks to the release of more cards in Saviors, we’ll probably see a lot of fighting over Umezawa’s Jitte, just like Quentin Martin is very obviously describing for the upcoming Pro Tour format for CoK Block Constructed. Like the Snakes deck in his recent article_, playing Godo to find more copies of the Jitte and win the Jitte-fight by having Time of Need able to find it in his Legend chain rather than just Legendary Creatures, having things that find you more Jittes will probably be good; White Weenie with Steelshaper’s Gift, for example, is an obvious thought… but what about a mono-Blue creature deck? Would you expect the following to be even halfway plausible?
18 Island
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Spiketail Hatchling
4 Soratami Cloudskater
3 Temporal Adept
3 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
4 Hoverguard Observer
2 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror
4 Serum Visions
4 Mana Leak
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Vedalken Shackles
2 Sword of Fire and Ice
Sideboard:
4 Carry Away
4 Hibernation
4 Hinder
3 Spectral Shift
Sure, this probably isn’t a deck. Who’s to say it’s not a solid creature and a solid spell from away from being one? If the Jitte is king, things like Serum Visions in a Blue-based creature deck might be worth that little extra bit of advantage, trying to find one. Veldaken Shackles is clearly insane against creature decks, as the Mono-Blue Control deck currently floating around doing very well is doing so more or less on the back of that card alone, eschewing the more traditional board-sweeper effects you’d expect to see in favor of this continuous threat against the opponents’ creatures. Squeezing Jitte and Shackles into the same deck has to be pretty good at breaking up other peoples’ Jitte-Weenie decks, and Carry Away wins Jitte-fights that aren’t answered with enchantment removal. If you think this potential development is so implausible, how do you explain the following?
(Sebastien Lamoliate, 4th Place, Midi-Pyrennees, French Regionals)
Creatures:
4 Troll Ascetic
4 Birds Of Paradise
2 Solemn Simulacrum
3 Viridian Zealot
3 Thieving Magpie
4 Eternal Witness
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
Spells:
2 Sword Of Fire And Ice
2 Vedalken Shackles
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
3 Condescend
4 Echoing Truth
Sideboard:
4 Engineered Explosives
4 Plow Under
3 Genju Of The Cedars
2 Creeping Mold
2 Viridian Shaman
See? Jittes and Shackles and Swords of Fire and Ice, oh my!
If assembling a lockdown is more your bag, who’s to say how far this deck is away from being a real deck based on cards that might fit into it that are in Saviors, and therefore currently hidden from view?
10 Island
2 Plains
4
“>Coastal Tower
4
“>Cloudcrest Lake
4
“>Chrome Mox
4 Talisman of Unity
4 Crystal Shard
4 Icy Manipulator
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Ghostly Prison
4 Veldaken Engineer
4 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
4 Hokori, Dust Drinker
3 Leonin Abunas
1 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror
With Ravager-Affinity gone, there’s a lot of ground to cover that has just never been considered before, and the coming of Saviors should make things even more interesting if it’s anything like third expansions we’ve seen in prior blocks, where some true Constructed bombs didn’t appear until Worlds…
…
If I were to go to Philadelphia and play, I would be testing the following right now:
13 Island
4 Stalking Stones
3 Mirrodin’s Core
2 City of Brass
2 Plains
1 Mountain
4 Wrath of God
4 Vedalken Shackles
4 Condescend
4 Mana Leak
4 Hinder
4 Wayfarer’s Bauble
4 Serum Visions
4 Inspiration
2 Trade Routes
1 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror
Sideboard:
4 Boomerang
4 Temporal Adept
3 Blood Moon
3 Oblivion Stone
1 Trade Routes
A lot of Mono-Blue players are trying to find solutions to Boseiju from the Tooth and Nail deck, and enabling Blood Moon to turn it off automatically and forever might be better than the Time Stops they are considering. Said Mono-Blue players are kind of tired of being gnawed to death by a Troll Ascetic that slips under their countermagic, to the point where they are considering very extreme measures to get rid of it, like basing their game-plan around Bribery getting them something big enough to block when the Green player sneaks the Troll past countermagic and refuses to play other creatures, thus preventing Vedalken Shackles from stopping it, as the Mono-Blue deck has no outs save to race at that point… something Blue decks are notoriously bad at, at least when they are control decks.
The same splashes that can be used to turn on Wrath of God can be used to turn on Blood Moon out of the sideboard, which is especially helpful since you probably won’t need both at the same time and therefore won’t mind your pretty nonbasic lands being turned into Mountains… save for the Stalking Stones, that is, since those are your primary win condition. Winning with just one Meloku against Tooth and Nail is possible, even if it’s not as easy as having Stalking Stones as a crutch; those who are nervous about this prospect can fit a second Meloku in the sideboard, for when they have to actually have a spell resolve to kill the opponent. Four Veldaken Shackles means they can’t just play creatures without expecting they might get beaten in the head by them instead, and can cause them to reconsider each Eternal Witness, as their key card has already been permanently neutralizes… Tooth and Nail and Rude Awakening are counterable spells, instead of uncounterable ones. The mana base – thirteen Islands plus four Baubles plus four Serum Visions to smooth the early draw – shouldn’t interfere with Veldaken Shackles much, especially since the format-standard creature to steal in the early game is either two power (take your pick) or is a 3/2 you can’t touch. This deck wants to have time for itself, so the stalwart Inspiration makes it over Thirst for Knowledge, as the tools we’re using should help prevent us from having to do something reckless and cost ourselves card advantage we could otherwise shore up safely while we’re at it… and Trade Routes is just really, really damn good when you’re playing 25 Lands, 29 mana sources in total, and like protecting Stalking Stones when you’re trying to kill your opponent, meaning your card-quality-advantage spell (Trade Routes) can turn off an arbitrarily large number of removal spells you might otherwise have to waste Counterspells on.
It’s also probably a good deal better in the mirror, not trying to use Magpie as part of its plan, and not investing in main-deck bounce spells, especially when the commonly-used bounce (Echoing Truth) can’t even be used on a land for a tempo advantage in the mirror. But I am not going to be playing in Philadelphia, so while I intend to test that deck anyway, the immediacy of the thing doesn’t strike me as something with a deadline of just two weeks.
So… keep watching. I might do a trick. You won’t hear from me for a week or two, but then the fun begins.
— Sean McKeown
— [email protected]
“They say it’s the last song, They don’t know us, you see It’s only the last song If you let it be…” — Bjork, “The Next-to-Last Song”, Dancer In The Dark