Stop. Do not collaborate, do not listen, do not pass go, and certainly do not collect yourself two hundred dollars. If you have a Premium membership and you care about Regionals, what you ought to be doing right now is clicking on Richard Feldman baby-smooth beardless mug and reading his article from Tuesday.
No, I don’t recommend playing his deck – not because it’s bad, but because I haven’t tested it at all and can’t say one way or another whether it’s good or not. Nor am I telling you to read it because I, like a lamprey caught in the current and forced to feed, cannot avoid leeching off my friends’ trickle-down successes*. Quite simply, this article is the best non-Paskins piece we’ve seen this year, and it’ll help you win a Nationals invite.
I could go on and on as to why, but I’m stockpiling material for an article on playtesting based on Richard’s methodology and I don’t want to drain myself of content too early. Can’t be writing about Ninth Edition again, after all. So, instead, I’ll talk about my favorite leprechaun, Robert Larrabee.
It is well known** in the Magic writing business that there are two ways to deal with someone who criticizes your articles. The first is to listen to that criticism, evaluate it, employ it constructively, and produce better content from that point forward. The second is to namedrop that critic as flagrantly as possible to stroke his ego, thereby warming him up to your style and alleviating his concerns.
Take a guess at which method I’m about to use.
I think most of the people I play with regularly would agree that Memphis isn’t your typical Magic scene***. I don’t know what your average gamer hovel is like, but the way we battle usually goes something like this:
1) The wives leave town.
2) Webter’s Dictionary creates new adjectives to describe exactly how plastered/hammered/wasted/inebriated-ness-qualifer-of-your-choice we get over at Aaron White’s house.
3) ?
4) Alex Kim winds up face down on the carpet with Sharpie inking his entire body, Magic cards litter the living room in a hurricane-like display of the theory of entropy, no one can explain why there is a giant hole in the wall, and David Glore starts singing a senseless song.
Now, obviously we here at StarCityGames.com don’t condone underage drinking; Alex Kim is simply asleep on the floor because he is physically exhausted at the tremendous beating he’s received at the hands of AWhite’s Solar Flare deck (or is simply tired of 6-0ing 2v3 handicapped Team Cube Drafts with me against Larrabee, Dave, and Aaron). But sometime during step three, Larrabee utters the following sentence:
“You know, Chatter, your last couple of articles haven’t been up to par. I’m really disappointed in you.”
Well, that’s the English version of what it sounded like. The actual sounds emanating from McLarrabee’s mouth sounded like a combination of guttural three-toed-sloth mating snarls, and the masculine huffs blasting forth from the women’s tennis match playing on the TV behind me as I type. Nevertheless, I was distraught.
You see, Larrabee’s been like a mentor to me – except that instead of providing subtle, consciousness-affirming, life-altering wisdom, he’s just sort of been that old guy who hangs around all the time and used to scare my parents. In fact, let’s take a brief Robert Daniel James Patrick Flanagan Fitzwilliam Larrabee pop quiz for a second.
WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS FALSE:
1) Our protagonist has been incited to violence because someone attempted “to go after me Lucky Charms” (a direct quote).”
2) His two children are named after his favorite alcoholic beverage.
3) He was the recipient of the “1998 Domino’s Delivery Boy of the Year” award for all Domino’s pizza chains nationwide.
4) I was once barred from attending a PTQ because, at the ripe of old age of fourteen, my mother came to pick me up from a draft at Larrabee’s house only to find Robert sprawled out on the hood of a Ford Mustang with a Martini glass in hand, attempting to construct the following sentence over the span of about eight or nine minutes: “Miss Hill… your son… is so… nice. He’s just… nice… so… good kid. Zac’s such… a good kid.”
5) He really enjoys when I wear sweater-vests.
Answers will be posted whenever someone feels inclined to Private Message me, at which point I will wade through that morass of untruths to find some semblance of factual accuracy****.
Oh yeah. Um. Regionals.
A lot of people in the forums last week said that the Dredge list I was testing against was garbage, so I’ll go ahead and post the Dredge deck I’d recommend for Regionals if someone for whatever reason absolutely refused to play Dragonstorm.
Creatures (30)
- 1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
- 2 Flame-Kin Zealot
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 4 Lore Broker
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 3 Drowned Rusalka
- 4 Magus of the Bazaar
- 4 Simian Spirit Guide
- 4 Narcomoeba
Lands (18)
Spells (12)
Sideboard
It doesn’t look all that revolutionary, but man have we been through ten million varieties of Dredge lists. We originally had Fetch, something like 2 Brokers, some Thought Couriers, Life from the Loam, and one maindeck Darkblast. Then we tried Llanowar Mentors and Breeding Pools in the maindeck because it was tight to get up to five mana to actually cast Golgari Grave-Troll. Then it became apparent that Darkblast was insane against the Regionals field, so we decided to include as many of those as possible and, reasoning that other good players would figure out the same thing, moved up to 4 Brokers so that we had resistance to the DBlast and could even Blast our own guys to start Dredging if necessary. The sideboard was originally much more “cute,” but I really wanted Delirium Skeins against Dragonstorm and Slaughter Pact against Magus of the Moon, so I cut down on the extra lands and Rusalkas, switched Extirpates in for the Leyline of the Voids to try and blank other people’s Krosan Grips, kept the Archon for value and, six hours and eight pitchers of sweet tea later, was satisfied with my list.
Did you catch “the sentence” in that last paragraph?
I don’t mean either of the savage run-ons, because those are so commonplace in Zac Hill articles that they are hardly worth mentioning anymore. Nor am I referring to the “but man,” which has become about as overused and ubiquitous in my material as the various forms of the verb “to mean.” No, I’m talking about, “Then it became apparent that Darkblast was insane against the Regionals field…”
Notice there is a claim, but there’s no evidence***** to back it up. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but some time over the last year or so a few writers just started expecting their readers to believe whatever they said because they said it. I expected an outcry, but short of PV’s forum posts and a few disbelieving remarks Richard and I would exchange around 11:00pm Central Time once a week, the community remained largely silent. Apparently, even if you have not done anything relevant for years in the world of Magical Cards, people still listen to you because of who you are. That’s awesome.
In case you’re thinking I’m just being snarky so I don’t have to defend my own claim – and you’re probably right, I’m not above doing that – I’ll go ahead and explain what I mean.
In my experience (I’ve played in I think seven or eight Regionals by now) the tournament is more or less a representative sample of the field, but a few trends tend to take hold. First, people love “cute decks.” It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean by that, but maybe you’ll get what I’m saying. Trendy decks. Decks that are a rage on the internet but people are trying to keep “hush-hush,” or decks that do one thing really well and can be classified in the form “______________ decks” (land-destruction decks, discard decks, etc.) or decks that are competitive while being a departure from the norm. A couple years ago it was White Weenie with maindeck Damping Matrix and mono-black “Rats” with Jittes and the Chitter lock. Now it’ll be Dredge and Mono-Black “The Rack.”
Dredge just has “it.” A lot of people are excited about it. It can get huge, blowout finishes where the opponent just has no chance, and when it does it looks real pretty. Also helping, of course, is the fact that the deck’s fairly good, and has around a fifty percent matchup against Dragonstorm. Rack, meanwhile, is very straightforward, and it plays a lot of cards that Regionals players just “like.” I don’t say this to try and be condescending, but, for whatever reason, playing Mindlash Sliver into Cry of Contrition gets a lot of people up at my local gaming store very excited. I think it’s because it’s a non-boring, atypical strategy that can nevertheless be moderately effective.
The second major trend is that you’ll run into all kinds of random midrange decks packing Llanowar Elves and 4/4s. A lot of people who come out to Regionals only play in a few tournaments a year, and while they keep their collections more or less up to date it’s refreshing to be able to play the same type of deck. Cheap Green accelerants into fat creatures and powerful effects is rarely an awful strategy; in fact, it’s exactly what I played at Regionals last year. This is because Birds and Elves are some of the most inherently powerful cards in a given Standard format, and it’s usually possible to assemble some sort of aggro-Rock-type strategy around them. The existence of Dragonstorm mitigates this strategy somewhat, but I doubt it’ll be enough to rid you of the midrange Green men entirely.
Finally, people will play the hyped cards. This isn’t just because Wizards knows how to advertise, but usually also because the cards are somewhat powerful and because people want to justify their investment. There’ll be Damnations and Wraths. There’ll be Hypnotic Specters. In fact, there will probably be a fair share of Shimian Specters, because people love themselves some Specters (just look at the forums of the Suicide Squad) and because Cranial-ing someone every turn seems insanely powerful. Hell, Doomsday Specter was hyped beyond belief when it was released, and it seems like garbage nowadays.
Getting back to the point, Darkblast is really good in the mirror, and perfectly fine against Llanowar Elf decks. It’s also perfectly reasonable against any sort of aggressive White strategy or against Gruul. Seeing as how it’s also a turn 1 Dredge outlet and is only actively bad in two or three matchups, I definitely wanted to play three copies.
Alright. So it’s too late to give a complete run-down of how to play and sideboard Dredge, because by the time this is posted everybody ought to know that by now. Instead, I want to talk about what I think the field will look like, what people will be playing, what you ought to worry about, etc.
First, I think the most popular decks at the tournament will be Gruul, Dragonstorm, and Dredge. Dralnu will be at the top of the standings but not that many people will be playing it, and Signet decks will compete with Project X for a combined 15-20% of the field. Why? Well, the perception is that Dralnu has a bad matchup against Dredge, and while I think that’s a surmountable hurdle the Gruul matchup is not all that tight either. Also, it’s sloooooooooooow, which is a problem for Regionals’ comparatively short rounds. As for Signet decks (Tron and Solar Flare), well, there’s just not a whole lot they do that’s screaming out to people as a reason to play the deck. Everyone who wanted to reanimate Akromas can do that by playing Dredge – and do it much faster, too, in all likelihood. You’ve got access to Persecute, sure, but I don’t know how good that card is in a comparatively random, open field. Tron shares many of the same problems, and without access to Black mana it’s even more vulnerable to Dredge.
What does this mean? Well, in my Gruul list, for example, I’m not maindecking either Sulfur Elemental or Tin-Street Hooligan. I think Burning Tree Shaman might randomly be an asset in a field likely to be full of 3/3ish animals (though Sulfur Elemental might still be correct because it stops Martyr of Sands, who belongs to another very cute deck).
Really, though, I think the key pieces of technology to find at this tournament are 1) a good way for Dragonstorm to get an edge in the mirror, 2) a way to incorporate some kind of transformative sideboard into Dredge so that it doesn’t have to chill out waiting around to draw a Krosan Grip for a Leyline (or even worse, get blindsided by an Extirpate), and 3) a refined list of Project X that can reliably combo out on par with Dredge and Dragonstorm. I have yet to see a Project X list that I like, but the fact that none of the lists are on MTGO suggests that there’s plenty of room for innovation there. Of course, my not liking something doesn’t make it “bad” by any means, but it does seem like if you’re trying to gain infinite life or make infinite guys you want to be playing more than two copies of one of your combo pieces – especially since people know about the deck.
Okay, they’re kicking me out of the building. Good luck to everybody this weekend, and I’ll be back next week with something (groan) much more theoretical.
Zac
* Though this is obviously the case.
** I can’t think of anything to write in this footnote that isn’t already evident by virtue of the fact that I’m creating a footnote after this statement.
*** Nor is it an arms race.
**** Wink Wink.
***** As in, “a reason that in and of itself would imply the point of view advocated by the claim.” Though I still maintain, Richard, that the Reuben at Carl’s Deli is far superior to the hot pastrami on wheat, because when I was eating there with Erik Lauer in 1995 he was like, “Dude, this Reuben is so much better than this pastrami,” and I was like, “Yeah, for real, pastramis are kold to mayonnaise.”