If it hasn’t become obvious to y’all by now, I hate netdecking.
I don’t hate the concept of it, nor do I get upset when my opponents lift their decks off the Internet and play them card-for-card. Usually, in fact, that gives me an advantage. It makes perfect sense not to try and generate something from scratch, instead using the combined data of several dozen PTQs and online premier events to weed out the bad ideas for you. For whatever reason, though, I have this weird personal aversion to playing “the best deck” or “the most obvious deck” that has probably cost me more than one blue envelope.
I feel compelled to “innovate,” whatever that means. For some reason I don’t think I can have the edge necessary to win a big event unless I’ve done something revolutionary. Never mind that 90%+ of people take their envelopes or make their GP Top 8s simply playing tuned lists of established decks very well. I always think that I can find some hole in the format – or at least pin down that format’s determinate factors – and create a solution that deals with all those problems.
The reason I bring that up is that sometimes the most obvious deck has natural resistance to a format’s biggest problems, and any “innovation” that might take place pales in comparison to the fairly-well-oiled machine that was readily apparent from the outset.
I’m talking, in case it’s not clear, about White Weenie in Time Spiral Block Constructed.
Now, on one hand I hate writing articles about a Pro Tour format right before a Pro Tour. This will go live two days before Yokohama starts. Everybody’s got their lists established by that point, so nobody is going to straight-up run card-for-card anything I post even if it’s the most savage rogue creation or the most tuned, well-polished mainstream deck. On the other hand, if I’m wrong, my cute little mug will still be staring people down on StarCityGames.com front page as the format pulls a 180 from every single thing I’ve said, and the evidence of my obvious stupidity is hung out to dry for everyone to witness. So, detractors, ready the rotten vegetables and cruel epithets.
What I want to examine is why White Weenie is so good right now in the context of the format. Flores always does this really well with his decks. It’s one thing to create a deck and post positive percentages against the entire format with it. I mean, if you can do that, you’re really good / lucky. At the same time, you don’t really know if you could tune your deck to make it even better, or (if it’s early on in a format) whether or not you can isolate the factors that make your deck win and create an entirely new deck that also abuses those same factors.
I’m going to start out by explaining what appears to define the format, and how even the basic, stock White Weenie strategy manage to operate really efficiently within those confines. I’ll also point out why I think my list in particular has an edge over many of the other WW decks out there. Hopefully, in doing so, I can paint a picture of how to 1) identify the “questions” that a format asks, and 2) create decks that answer those questions.
For reference, my current White Weenie list:
Creatures (28)
- 3 Soltari Priest
- 4 Icatian Javelineers
- 4 Benalish Cavalry
- 4 Knight of the Holy Nimbus
- 3 Serra Avenger
- 4 Calciderm
- 3 Shade of Trokair
- 3 Stonecloaker
Lands (22)
Spells (10)
Sideboard
The specific card choices are another article in and of themselves, but I would wager that this particular list isn’t all that revolutionary. I might ought to have Sunlances to kill Sulfur Elementals, but I’d just as soon attack in the air with a bunch of doesn’t-die-to-Elemental flying creatures.
Okay, so the obvious first question is – when I say “the factors that define the format,” what am I talking about?
1) Damnation. Most of the time “factors” in the sense I’m talking about right now aren’t single cards, but in this case, said card is just soooooooooo good. If you’re going to build an aggressive deck, you have to be able to deal with all of your guys dying. It’s that simple.
2) Tons of “investment” cards. By this I mean not only mana acceleration – of which there is a lot – but several high-quality spells that do almost nothing the turn you play them, but will probably win you the game over the next couple of turns. I’m talking less in the “Jayemdae Tome” sense of “investment” and more in the “Mirari’s Wake” sense. Right now, we have Prismatic Lens, the Totems, Search for Tomorrow, Hunting Wilds, Mwonvuli Acid-Moss, Wall of Roots, Aeon Chronicler, Wild Pair, Gauntlet of Power, and Mystical Teachings.
3) A lack of good one-drops coupled with the omnipresence of Terramorphic Expanse. The only things I want to do on turn 1 are put a land into play tapped or play a creature that is capable of tapping to deal direct damage.
4) A lack of early countermagic. Any Blue-based control decks aren’t really going to be able to do a whole lot about the first couple of men an aggressive deck plays. Because of that, they’ll have to kill said men at some point, meaning they’ll have to tap mana and allow you to play something else. It’s also fairly easy for said aggressive deck to cast multiple threats in a single turn, but countering multiple spells in a turn takes much longer to do.
5) Good evasive early White creatures. If you’re going to play White Weenie as opposed to some other aggressive deck, it’s important to have the tools to do so. It’s not easy for the opponent to block any of your guys, and you’d very much like to keep it that way.
Alright, so how does this list take into account those defining characteristics of the format?
1) It has natural resistance to Damnation. Throughout the history of Magic, the best things to do in response to a mass removal spells were to a) counter it, b) minimize the damage, or c) drop a threat immediately afterwards that they have to kill again.
This deck can’t do a lot about b, but man oh man does it have a and c covered. Mana Tithe is the best counterspell in the format, and it’s even sicker that it fits so naturally into the curve of a well-polished aggressive deck. If you have W open, Black decks have to wait another turn to kill you. Even then, you can completely and totally end the game by showing them two Mana Tithes. Countering a Lens or Totem can often have the same effect, too, delaying the Damnation by a turn. Even more importantly, though, Shade of Trokair, Serra Avenger, Griffin Guide, and Calciderm ensure that you’re not down for the count after the D-bomb gets dropped. You’re perfectly safe playing out three threats for them to have to Damnation knowing full well that you have two full waves to go before you’re out of gas. Drop five-power worth of guys, let those die, drop a Derm or Shade, let him get dealt with, and then play out the rest of your hand. That’s a lot of removal they have to show you.
2) “Investment” decks necessarily sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term gain. Notice that I don’t use the term “control” deck in this case, because the two (though similar) are not quite the same thing. The best example I can think of along these lines is Tsuyoshi Fujita’s deck from Pro Tour: Philadelphia. It never really tried to “gain control” of the game, strictly speaking; rather, it just cast a bunch of Reaches and Shakus until it was able to drop a 5/5 creature with flying onto the table every turn. In this format, the “investment” decks plan on converting a Wild Pair into a win with a Whitemane Lion or some Slivers, or converting a Gauntlet of Power into a huge Disintegrate / Wurmcalling / Spectral Force / whatever, or even to an extent chaining Mystical Teachings into Teferis (though these decks are more along the lines of True Control). This is important because, if you’re a traditional control deck, you have to have a long game that can either nip these investments in the bud or stop them before they start.
If you’re the beatdown, though, you can exploit the fact that these decks take so long to get their game off the ground. Furthermore, the beauty of White Weenie in this particular format is that its Force Spikes allow it to jack the critical turn of most investment decks back by around ½ (not a full turn because of the mana required to represent a Tithe) while its evasion creatures give it a reasonable range even after the opponent has “set up.” Against a Green deck post-Hunting Wilds, for example, Calciderm is still comparable to whatever threat they can muster, and all the Spectral Forces in the world won’t block Stonecloakers and Serra Avengers. If the opponent’s trump plan is to accelerate out Bogardan Hellkites, well, Griffin Guide on a Soltari Priest still has ‘em.
3) The elegance of this deck’s early game plan is almost artful. Mana Tithes are in many ways like Chrome Moxes, in that they’re pretty awful in the late game but cement your advantage when you’re playing first and put you back into the driver’s seat on the draw. The best most decks can muster on turn 1 is a Terramorphic Expanse or maybe a Magus or Shadow Guildmage. This deck can Spike on the draw – which is always insane – deploy a Mogg Fanatic, or suspend a giant dude. If you’re being aggressive, you want to maximize your early plays, obviously. This deck is the only aggressive deck in the format that offers you a variety of reasonable turn 1 options. Now, you might say to yourself, “Shade of Trokair is not exactly ‘reasonable’ unless there are forty cards in my deck,” and that’s sort of correct. But the beauty of Shade (and to a lesser extent Mana Tithe in this deck) is that he accomplishes several goals. You want seven or eight giant guys to play after a Wrath of God, and Shade accomplishes that objective. You want a Haste creature to get around that same Wrath of God, and Shade wears that hat as well. He’s also a giant in the mirror, and (in the late game) can even trade with some of Green’s monsters. So, in a format with a very center-heavy mana curve, White Weenie cranks out just a smidgen more efficiency.
4) Again, this principle applies to aggressive strategies in general, but White Weenie’s creatures in particular make it very difficult to control via countermagic. You drop some flank knights early, and once those are killed you have Serra Avenger, Soltari Priest, and Calciderm to get through the finishers that control decks will present to serve the double duty of killing your guys and killing you. Avenger is particularly adept at drawing counterspells without investing enough mana to Time Walk yourself.
5) Well, what can I say: good White creatures are good in White Weenie.
You’ve also got access to this beautiful catch-all sideboard. Sacred Mesa is one of the most objectively “powerful” effects in the block, providing a difficult-to-remove steady supply of evasive threats capable of killing in just a few short attack steps. Against all the non-Sulfur Elemental control decks, it’s not that difficult to engineer a situation where you can force this onto the table through a counterspell and literally ride it to victory through whatever they throw at you. The Riftwatcher / Gating Guy combo is seriously insane against all possible aggressive strategies, since Riftwatchers contribute to the “Race in the Air” plan while gaining you giant quantities of life. The best part is that the Stonecloakers and Whitemanes would be good in an aggro mirror even without the Soul Feast plan, because they assist in playing the card advantage game through well-engineered “trades.” Temporal Isolation and Disenchant, meanwhile, provide cheap precision solutions at a very reasonable cost, while Serra Avenger helps the post-Wrath game by speeding up the recovery process.
The point of all of this is that if I were to set about trying to “break” the Time Spiral Block format, I would try to find a deck that has natural resistance to Wrath of God and takes advantage of the abundance of investment decks by striking quickly and resiliently. Even though most of the White Weenie decks that were developed early on in the season didn’t have these goals explicitly in mind, it turns out that they’re better at doing them than anything I could come up with by design. The lesson to we wannabe rogue designers is this: make sure that we’re actually accomplishing something by departing from the norm. Given the choice between “innovating” and winning – getting my name in print rather than signing it on a paycheck – I’d rather make the bank.
Zac
P.S.: Just for reference, I owe the design of the “Splitting Headache” deck making the rounds online largely to my roommate, Cody Peck. A bunch of people on MTGO have actually accused him of lying when he claimed the deck to be his. Although I did first publish the deck and come up with the Dark Confidant and Giant Solifuge sideboard (much of which is probably outdated – I’d run Leyline of the Void on the suggestion of Nick Novak, for example, and maybe even Greater Gargadon, though I think the Hit / Runs are probably still necessary), he was the one that thought about foregoing Dragonstorm entirely and just killing with broken Rituals and Tutors. He even thought of Brain Pry. I think something like 57/60 cards of the maindeck I published were his, so I’m here to give credit where it’s due. For once.