Pro Tour: Geneva has come and gone, and I’m simultaneously disappointed and unsurprised. Disappointed, because obviously I felt I was good enough at Magic to justify a roughly $1,000 investment for a plane ticket and hotel room, only to proceed to miss Day 2 courtesy of my own bad drafting. Unsurprised, because in the middle of a PTQ season and very busy school and work schedule, I’d done nowhere near the amount of testing that I ought to have.
I faced, out of 388 players, my for-Geneva roommate T-Galbs and his absolutely ridiculous Sliver decks in the first round, and then fell to Bram Snepvangers’s double-Strangling Soot / Pyrohemia / Firemaw / Bogardan Hellkite / Greater Gargadon deck in the next round. When I asked how on earth he lost the first round with the best deck I had ever seen, he replied, “Mull to five, mull to six, and manascrew.” In other words, I was really in that one.
I wasn’t too disappointed, though. I fell out of contention in round 5, and in round 6 I was paired up against Marijn Lybaert. Marijn and I had faced one another on Day 2 of Kobe, and he was one of the best players I had ever seen. In fact, before Geneva started he was one of my picks to win the entire event, as I have actually never seen him make a play error in a game of Magic: The Gathering. He is also a genuinely cool human being and one of the best non-Tim Aten draft partners a man could want. So I scooped him into Day 2 rather than dream-crushing, as I normally would, and he proceeded not to lose another match until the Top 8. He generously offered me a split after the tournament, and I was none too disappointed to accept.
I still, however, have absolutely no idea how to pronounce his name.
The second day I battled in a 2HG PTQ with perennial good man Adam Yurchick. We quickly 0-2ed courtesy of some questionable play decisions that we back-and-forthed on for awhile before making the incorrect choice, but I felt the knowledge I gained of the format was easily worth the $30 entry fee. I do owe Adam an apology, though, for savagely no-showing our sixth round because I was watching H-Ron vie for a Top 8 slot. Apparently he paged me over the speaker system no less than five thousand times and I just straight up stone did not hear it. Sorry about that, bro. I knew I needed new pair of ears.
Blah blah I am real loose nobody should ever team with me etc.
I can’t decide if I’ve barned my friends enough just yet, so on the off chance that I haven’t, Ervin Tormos Shaheen Soorani Taylor Putnam Billy Moreno Chris McDaniel Luis Scott-Vargas Paul Cheon Joey Bags Ben Fargas Sam Black Brian Kowal Nick Novak and okay Alex Kim.
Oh yeah, and grats to America finally.
Obviously, due to my testing for the Pro Tour – fruitful or no – I don’t have any new mad technology for this week. I also don’t want to force down the U/W Tron list down your throat more than I already have, except to say that I’m probably playing it in St. Louis. For all the fans of the deck, I would probably board some Disenchants in favor of an Arrows and the Trinisphere if you do decide to run it, just to beat Flow decks in the Swiss. It’s rather nice that no Flow decks made Top 8 last weekend, so they’ll probably decline in popularity – especially with the apparent prominence of other random Decks Full Of Dudes. Also – and I know Richard drove this point home, but it really does bear repeating – please do not cut Razormane Masticore from the deck!
Take out your notepads, class, because we’re going to do a little bit of a review session. Let’s take a look really quick at what happens when a Razormane Masticore deals three damage versus when a Triskelion deals the same amount.
Masticore: five mana has been spent. You have a five mana first striking creature.
Triskelion: six mana has been spent. You have a Fugitive Wizard.
See, tapping a substantial amount of mana during the main phase involves a commitment. By the time you’re willing to tap down that low, you should be well on your way to winning the game. Now, the argument can be made that Trike plays defense just as fine as Masticore, because none of their guys kill a 4/4 and if they burn it then you proceed to three-for-one them. But Trike isn’t really going to start swinging any time soon, because just as soon as he does then they come back across the table and you have to sacrifice your man to avoid taking a significant amount of damage. Masticore turns the table strategically, though. Now, not only do they have to find a way to avoid losing all of their guys, they have to find a way to kill you before they die in a couple of turns. You have an answer and your biggest threat all in one card. Boros, or Flow Deck Wins, or Affinity, or whatever are not designed to play defense. Yet, with Masticore, all of the sudden they have to.
Trust me. He may not have a suggestively-styled cannon in his mouth like his buddy cousin from Urza’s Destiny, but his mane is made out of razors. That’s got to be insane, right?
Aside from that, however, I do feel it would be useful to delve into some of the other less typical decks that have surfaced as of late, and see if they’re worth a second look. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to narrow down your choice of decks and avoid wasting time on a creation that turns out not to be all that tight.
The first choice will obviously be Luis Scott-Vargas California PTQ deck, as I think it represents the more or less final evolution of the originally-awkward but nevertheless potent Aggro-Loam archetype into the well-oiled machine that CAL was last year. Here is the list, for those of you who are unfamiliar.
Creatures (15)
Lands (25)
Spells (20)
We’ve been seeing a gradual trend away from bad do-nothings like Lightning Helix and Firebolt in general, but this particular list is the first to draw more from last year’s CAL brands than to any of the other Aggro-Loam decks we’ve seen so far. A couple of lands were cut in favor of Birds of Paradise, Terravore largely supplanted the Confinement lock under the justification that there’s no real need to lock the opponent if you can just kill them first, and Devastating Dreams was added because that card is just the high stone cold.
A few of the numbers merit examination, because I think they are brilliant. Two Devastating Dreams, in particular, makes perfect sense. Why? Because as insane as the card is, you don’t really ever need to turn 2 it! That seems obvious, but with the standard 3/1 +4 configuration it would seem that the emphasis is only on Burning Wishing for it if it’s not in the opening hand. Furthermore, there’s nothing worse than redundant Dreams, and you’re rarely going to ever cast it more than twice in a match. Therefore, Vargas frees up a slot in a place where most people never even thought to look!
Next, of course, we have Dark Confidant. Playing this card demonstrates a realization that, once again, I think lingered in the back of a lot of players’ minds but was never really allowed to rise to a head:
You never really want to win with a card other than Terravore or Seismic Assault.
This deck is a Life from the Loam deck. Realistically, we’re not going to win a lot of games unless we get that card going, and the best threats to combo with Life from the Loam are Terravore and Seismic Assault. Therefore, rather than include other sub-optimal cards like Wild Mongrel or Kudzu or Werebear, that are potent in their own right but nevertheless incompatible with the deck’s premier plan, LSV wisely added something that eschewed the worse options and helped the deck do more of what it wanted to do in the first place: cast Life from the Loam. Bob gets us there, and he swings a couple of times while he is at it.
Ghost Quarter is self-evidently brilliant, and there’s not really any need to talk about how great it is. Gotta love those Birds for being such fine mana fixers after all.
I don’t particularly understand the miser’s Engineered Explosives except that it’s never really a bad card to draw, and it’s nice to have an “I Win” spell against a board of Moxen / Chalices, or a random maindeck out to Tormod’s Crypt or the Boros Pro-Red nut draw if they get it.
There’s also this little cutie:
Creatures (23)
- 1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 4 Voidmage Prodigy
- 4 Patron Wizard
- 4 Grim Lavamancer
- 2 Shadow Guildmage
- 4 Dark Confidant
- 4 Sage of Epityr
Lands (18)
Spells (19)
I only bring this up because it’s just so adorable (for lack of a better term) that people might start playing it, and ergo your aggro decks need to have some sort of out against Vedalken Shackles. While I might go off on a baby-punching tangent should I lose to this thing, it doesn’t mean that the deck is actually bad. Pretty much everything in the format, for example, is kold to a turn 2 Patron Wizard.
That said, I think three Shackles is too many. For one, there are a lot of decks that it just has no text against. Also, you’re playing *eighteen* lands! Shackles is going to top off the curve, and there is no realistic reason why you’d want several of them in play at once. Rest assured that one is going to be good game a good portion of the time.
I am also at a loss as to why the Wizard deck doesn’t play the best Wizard in the format, Trinket Mage. The deck is fully capable of using Engineered Explosives, and actually probably wants it pretty bad to deal with a Chalice. I don’t really understand Clearwater Goblet, either, seeing as how Sun Droplet is in the format and can also, you know, actually get cast.
Those objections aside, however, I do think this deck is for real. Dismissing it as silly is just asking to get tromped by it at a tournament because your deck is stone unprepared for one of its game-defining bombs.
Finally, I don’t think now is the time to be playing Ichorid. Whispers of Aggro Loam being the best deck are becoming more and more validated with each iteration of the deck and each blue envelope it takes home, and that just makes more and more people want to play Tormod’s Crypt in multiples. I understand that Ichorid can deal with the Crypt; in fact, it’s not even all that difficult. But why would you want to fight that battle at all? Ditto on Affinity: there are a lot of Ancient Grudges running around. There is no reason to walk into splash damage when there are at least ten truly viable archetypes. Just because the format is wide open doesn’t mean that every single option is valid.
I’ll see y’all next week after the St. Louis PTQ. Until then, good luck.
Zac