Enough people wanted a primer that I decided to go through with it. This won’t be your typical primer, though, because the list I played the first week of PTQs is obsolete, and I wouldn’t recommend it card-for-card to anyone. At the same time, I think it’d be extremely useful to work through the process of how I arrived at that list, what the individual cards in it are designed to do, and how you’re supposed to play those seventy-five cards in a variety of matchups. Because U/B is a fairly customizable deck, doing so will help y’all recognize what can be cut given the current metagame, what needs to stay, and what sacrifices can be made to streamline the deck and keep it current as the season progresses. In a sense, my goal is just to give you an insight into my thought process, and apply them to your individual development of the deck.
At the same time, I will explain where I think the deck should go given the results from the second week of PTQs and the list from the GP. I’ll recommend a few changes, talk about some of the cards you’ll have to be prepared for that I didn’t have to worry about, and make some attempt to anticipate a few trends in time for Saturday.
First, though, I received a lot of responses to my last article and answered a lot of questions from individual readers. One in particular about Coalition Relic seemed to be worth reproducing. Because many of you may have the same question, I’m going to go ahead and copy/paste that e-mails to various readers in the hopes that it might cover some important ground.
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Both of you asked about Coalition Relic so I decided to just reply to both of ya 🙂
First of all, the Standard Korlash and Block Korlash decks are completely and totally different, but I’m sure you know that. Just don’t let your experiences playing one compete with your intuition about the other.
I am also assuming a metagame choice of -2 Aven Riftwatcher +2 Imp’s Mischief, just because you don’t need Riftwatcher to beat the aggro decks and Mischief is so insane in the U/B mirror. (***NOTE I DON’T RECOMMEND THIS ANYMORE***)
I am the world’s biggest fan of Coalition Relic. It’s one of the most powerful cards they’ve printed in years, from an objective standpoint, and I’m currently trying to break it in Standard. That said, I don’t think the Block Korlash deck needs it. I actually talked with Paul a lot about the deck prior to the GP, and in truth it’s probably a lot better in his list with Consideration/Episode falling neatly into the "6 mana on turn 4" that Relic gives you. The problem with Relic is that you have to cut actual lands for it, and this deck really wants to be making land drops basically every turn of the game. Both Tendrils and Korlash demand TONS of lands, not just mana.
That said, I don’t think you e-mailed me just to have me tell you that "derf derf the cards that count Swamps require a lot of Swamps in play," so I’ll try to go a little more in-depth than that. Put simply, the fact that you really have to play 4 Urborg means that you really have to have about 28 land in your deck. Think about it this way. You can’t play just a couple of Urborgs and 4 Tolaria West because it’s not like you only want Urborg in play in the midgame, and against G/W (for example) you’re not going to have time to tutor one up. For one thing, you usually don’t tutor off a Tolaria West until something like turn 8 or 9, because it’s not that easy to have that many Blue sources. Adding Relic would sort of give you more Blue sources in the deck, but that means you’d have to have at least three lands + Tolaria West and you’d have to tap one land in addition to the Relic so you wouldn’t be Damnating that turn. Second, people are playing a couple of Vesuvae, and it’s very realistic between that and Boom/Bust to have your Urborgs destroyed. If you’re running 4 Tolaria West 2 Urborg, and they’re running 4 Boom/Bust 2 Vesuva, they actually have parity with the most important card in your deck.
You obviously don’t have to have Urborg in play to win games, but it’s the single best reason to play this deck. Tendrils for 3-4 and a 4 mana 3/3 or 4/4 regenerator are perfectly acceptable creatures, but "Kill a guy, gain 11" is just a tad better. So I think we can take it as a given that we want 4 Urborgs.
Let’s assume that we have 4 Urborgs and 3 Coalition Relics for a total of 25 lands. We still have a number of problems at this point. It’s not unreasonable to assume that we’ll draw an Urborg in our opening hand… in fact, it’ll happen about forty-odd percent of the time. So let’s start thinking about mulliganing decisions. We really want to make land drops for the first six turns of the game, but let’s take into account Relic and say okay, we only really want/need to make five land drops. This makes it much more difficult to cast Whelk, but that’s a separate issue. Now, if we draw Urborg in our opening hand, that means that we only have 21 other lands that we can actually play left in our deck, or about two out of every five cards, and it doesn’t matter how many lands are actually in our opening hand. Once we draw that first Urborg, it’s like we’re playing a 22-land deck plus some Signets and Relics. To put that into perspective, most of the aggressive decks actually play a comparable amount of mana sources (23 + 4 Edge of Autumn, 26-28 including 4 Zoetic Cavern from the Red Decks, and White Weenie trailing behind at a "conservative" 24… bearing in mind that most aggro decks in other formats max out at around 22).
Also, there is the matter of what lands we can afford to cut. Pull from Eternity/Temporal Isolation are both very, very important White cards, and you need them early enough that cutting a Plains is obviously out of the question. Now, we can cut a Calciform Pools, but not having access to storage lands severely hampers the control mirror because it basically demands that we become the player to take the first action – particularly if our Relics get countered or Disenchanted. Cutting Tolaria West is bad for the same reasons that cutting Urborgs is bad, especially since it also gives you "additional" copies of Ruins and Factory. We can’t cut Factory and we can’t cut Ruins for obvious reasons, and ditto on 4 Expanse. With 6 Swamps, cutting those would make us more reliant upon Urborg than we already are, and I’m not particularly comfortable with that.
We have 1 Island and 3 River of Tears as "cuttable" lands. This, I suppose, you could do – probably the Rivers – but it makes your Prismatic Lenses much worse. The reason is that Lens often allows you to cast a Careful Consideration or Foresee on turn 3, which is much preferable to Damnating or Tendrilsing on turn 3 because it allows you to sculpt the game from that point on. You rarely want to Damnation a couple of random guys early because they just drop an Enforcer or whatever their other trump spell happens to be (Calciderm, Goyf, etc.) With Relic in the deck you have the same number of Blue sources, but you have access to them a lot later, and against aggressive matchups there is really only a 1-2 turn window when you can actually afford to cast card-drawing spells without them costing you too much tempo in the first place. It’s going to be hard to have UU for Careful Consideration and BBX for Damnation/Tendrils/Korlash. Obviously you could cut a CC for a Foresee, but that’s a host of other problems. You’d be surprised at the amount of time you have to go out of the way for a single Blue source without River of Tears in the deck. There’s also the Mana Tithe problem… specifically, with only 25 lands (3 of which are colorless) it’s actually a giant blowout to have a Relic Tithed. Furthermore, it’s turn 3, which is the most apt time to get something Tithed if you’re on the draw. On the play it’s not that risky, but it’s hard to lose any aggressive matchup when you’re on the play anyway.
Just some things to keep in mind.
As for relevant pointers, the absolute most important thing to keep in mind with this deck is to not get greedy. You crush, crush, crush G/W as long as you pay careful attention to what you’re doing. Boom/Bust isn’t even that big of a problem… Boom, in fact, is more annoying than Bust if you don’t open yourself up to it. Don’t tap out for a Korlash, etc. But don’t use Damnations if you can’t answer an Enforcer or a Tarmogoyf. They’re going to beat down with sh**ty 2/1s and 2/2s, and you have to sit and take it if you can’t handle the trump. They have no range, remember. Take the opportunity to two-for-one their Griffin Guides with Snapback/Isolation, and be patient. The longer the game drags on, the more of an advantageous position you’re going to be in. The games you lose against aggressive decks (well, White Weenie can just beat you, but nobody plays that deck apparently, even though I think it’s insane) are games where you lose track of the big picture. Every single point of life matters, as does every single piece of card advantage you can squeeze out of a Damnation.
Think of it this way. Your opponent has a Riftsweeper and a Mire Boa or whatever, and you’re at twelve or so after an attack. You could end step Tendrils the Sweeper and gain 3-4, or you could Mystical Teachings for something (doesn’t matter what) and see what happens. Assuming you can play a Swamp next turn, you’re actually only going down -1 life because of the extra life you gain if you kill the Sweeper next turn (ignoring things like Stonewood Invocation, which you do need to play around… but it’s not that hard to do so) and you open yourself up to ripping an Urborg or cards which will give you more information about how important certain threats are (e.g. another Tendrils). Furthermore, if you do all your setting up when you’re taking damage but are not in danger of losing, your initiative will be so much more decisive the turn you choose to act. For example, suppose you Mystical Teachings for a Slaughter Pact, and draw a Damnation or Mystical Teachings or Temporal Isolation or Prismatic Lens. Then you Tendrils the Sweeper – don’t care about the Boa yet – and you have outs against their best possible trump (they have to increase their clock past two damage) in Saffi plus Enforcer.
Hope some of this helps!
Zac
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Note that I didn’t say Coalition Relic is bad. For the theoretical post-GP metagame, I actually think you’re going to need to be running Relics in any control deck to be able to have a chance against 1) all the land-bouncing coming from the Kenji-style Blue decks and 2) to be able to out-mana the mirror. However, Coalition Relic is bad in this specific deck for the reasons stated above. You’ve got to add Take Possession, Boom/Bust and Haunting Hymn are awful attractive, you want more card-drawing, you can’t afford the same number of actual lands so Korlash and Tendrils are both worse, etc. The conclusion that all of that leads me to is that something like Olivier’s deck, or a less Teachings-oriented more proactive design more focused on abusing the Relic is the way to go, assuming that everybody is taking the GP results as a given – anticipating less Mono-Red and White Weenie, placing Green/White as the default agro deck, and expecting a fairly high number of Kenji-style Mono-Blue and Da Rosa-style G/U decks. However, the read that I’ve been getting suggests that those two latter decks are just not all that popular, and that G/W or G/W/r Goyf decks are everywhere. This, along with the fact that I still believe White Weenie and Mono-Red to be extremely good, tells me that I don’t want to give up on the Korlash and the Tendrils just yet.
For reference, again, the list:
Creatures (8)
Lands (27)
Spells (25)
A couple of people in the forums mentioned that there seemed to be a “core” of the deck – certain cards that absolutely needed to be present no matter what – and the rest of it was more variable dependent upon the metagame. While that certainly seems true for a deck with as many tutor targets as this one, it turns out that it’s just not the case.
The reason is that you’ve got to behave completely differently depending on whether or not decks in your environment are going to be countering your spells and bouncing all your lands with Cloudskates, Vensers, etc. If they aren’t, then you have the luxury of running a billion lands and a billion tutor targets and having the versatility to answer every single question the opponent presents in an incredibly efficient and streamlined manner. Furthermore, in that type of metagame you’re going to have a vast majority of the same tutor targets as this exact list, because it’s designed to optimally answer specific questions.
It’s not a matter of “oh, I expect a lot of U/B control decks without Aeon Chroniclers and very few Red Decks, so I’m going to cut the Snapback, a Tendrils, the maindeck Pull, and maybe the Isolation for a Teferi in the maindeck, Imp’s Mischief, and a Cancel or a Disenchant for Relic and Take Possession.” No, you can’t simply change your tutor targets around depending on what you’re going to play against, because at some point you’re going to have to adopt a different strategy. Tutoring for different answers is not going to deal with your getting systematically out-mana-advantaged by Coalition Relic, or having Take Possession cast on your Academy Ruins, or having your early enablers sent to the bottom with Psychotic Episode. Relic and the ensuing options it brings with it are absolutely essential for a control-or-Fish-oriented metagame, because they are changing their method of interacting with you and you have to strategically respond. The way the Korlash deck is set up is that it is very capable of dealing with non-interactive solely-clock-oriented creatures, and also the requisite first-layer defenses like Saffi and Griffin Guide. Once Cloudskates and Vensers and Cancels and Delays enter the picture, though, you’re going to die before you resolve a spell because a land will get bounced and your first Damnation or Tendrils will get counterspelled.
To use Richard’s model, you’re building massive granite walls on the West Side, plastered with cool Djoser-like murals involving the smiting of many enemies. Hell, you’ve even got some trombone players playing your theme song Wrestler-Entrance-Style just for value. The trouble is that all of the sudden the enemy’s snuck around to the East, and all you’ve got there is a lazy guard eating a bologna sandwich and fumbling through the words of “Auld Lang Syne.” Changing up your tutor targets would be like leaving all those other walls in place but just sending a few archers over around to the other side the castle to shoot a couple of arrows in between cigarette breaks. You gotta have more artillery than that.
To sum it up: if your metagame is going to be a lot of G/W lists, some Mono-Red, some White Weenie, some Japanese style U/G Pickles, some R/G, and some Cheon-style Korlash, then you’re just fine playing this list with some small changes depending on what you specifically think you’ll see in your region. I’d replace a Snapback and a Foresee in the main with a Venser and a Teferi, and the Riftwatchers, second Pull and Venser in the board with three Psychotic Episodes and an Imp’s Mischief, but other than that I think you’re gravy. If, on the other hand, your metagame will have a lot of Teferi, Wild Pair, and Fish decks – and you still insist on playing control – I’d switch to a model based on Olivier’s deck with Spell Burst in the main and a slight bit more creature removal.
For those of you who live in a place where this deck’d be appropriate to play, here’s the run-down:
4 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
4 Tendrils of Corruption
4 Prismatic Lens
4 Damnation
I group all the four-ofs together because they’re basically reasons to play the deck. You’re running this list because you want to maximize the value of the format’s defining cards: Damnation and Tendrils. You’re running Korlash because you appreciate powerful cards in the abstract, you want to finish games quickly, you think the Explosive Vegetation effect is completely nuts, and you don’t want to have to answer every Calciderm with a Damnation.
Four Korlash is not nearly enough ways to gain initiative after a Damnation. You want to be able to have Tendrils-able creatures after mono-Red stops playing guys, and you want at least the possibility of presenting a threat that can win you the game against non-Black decks for a very reasonable mana cost. As discussed last week you do not want four of these guys, but they’re extremely powerful in the midgame and that justifies their inclusion as a two-of.
2 Careful Consideration
2 Foresee
I disagree with those who say that Careful Consideration is just a better effect because it lets you discard excess Urborgs or whatever. Think about it rationally for a second: that is only relevant if at least three of the four cards you draw off the Consideration are quality spells, and you need each of those spells on the turn you cast Careful Consideration. In my mind, if every spell on the top of my deck is gaseous, then I do not need the Careful Consideration to win games. I’m not saying the card is bad; I’m clearly including two. Drawing four cards is powerful, and you want two of them because in many longer games you actually will tutor for both copies. At the same time, though, Foresee is exponentially better when you are losing the game, because if you’re digging for a particular spell (usually Tendrils, Damnation, an answer to Griffin Guide, or a counterspell to protect against Boom/Bust) it lets you see six cards as opposed to four. All things considered I usually err on the side of the spell that’s better when I’m losing, because I don’t need any extra help when I am ripping gas. The 3U versus 2UU is also not the trivial difference that most people treat it as. For one thing, lots of the time you simply don’t have access to double-Blue with a given hand. Even when you do, though, it hurts real bad to either Expanse for an Island as opposed to a Swamp (weakening eight cards in your deck assuming you don’t have an Urborg… and yes, usually when you have an Urborg, you are winning) or a Plains so that Isolation and Pull only cost what they are supposed to cost.
I don’t want four of these because you never want to draw two until the extreme late game, and you don’t want to be kold to an Extirpate on your Teachings.
1 Temporal Isolation
1 Snapback
Like I said, the Snapback probably ought to be a Venser, but either way these spells are grouped together. These are your answers to Griffin Guide and to Mystic Enforcer. It’s only two cards, but I have no fear of either the Guide or Biggie with these in the deck. Not only do they deal with the threat; they usually gain you tempo in the process. Isolation is better in most situations, obviously, because it removes the threat permanently (well, more or less) while costing the same amount. At the same time, sometimes you need to tutor up an answer and you don’t have White mana, or you fear a Disenchant/Kestrel, or your opponent has Gargadon and you absolutely cannot afford to Isolation anything without the fear of getting potentially blown out. Compare the awkwardness of Isolationing a nine-power guy with that of simply bouncing it, for example.
Snapback is also important because if people are stupid and Take Possession of your guys as opposed to your broken lands, you can trump your opponent’s trump card for a mere two mana, without having to maindeck awkward cards like Disenchant that are just garbage in a whole lot of situations (though it sure is nice to be able to answer Wild Pair, Take Possession, and Coalition Relic).
Though you sideboard this card out in most aggressive matchups, it’s actually stone nuts game 1 against basically everything. The reason is that most aggressive decks will sandbag around Damnation, and so usually you can cast this spell and hit four cards while your opponent only has something like four of five power worth of guys on the table. You take that hit, go down to the single digits, but then clear the board and kill with Korlash in a couple of turns. Obviously this is rarely part of your plan, but G/W players will do things like keep Edge into Enforcer hands, and Hymn really punishes them for that. Clearly it’s great against all the slower control decks, and is your only real proactive answer to Wild Pair. The existence of Imp’s Mischief clearly makes this card a lot worse, particularly since you have to fear it even if they don’t have it in their list. At the same time, Mischief is a little worse against you than it is against most U/B builds because Hymn and Consideration are your only real targets, and you can play around it if they’re telegraphing. I mean, holding six mana up at all times for Teachings/Mischief is a little obvious. Furthermore, with the proposed changes above, you can just try for Teferi and then you won’t have to worry about it.
Again, it’s normally there so that you can answer Triskelavus/Academy Ruins, or beat a bad player who has stranded his Mystical Teachings, but it’s also very important against Boom/Bust decks because they’re going to cast a Boom early and then you don’t have to deal with it (though it’s still relatively easy to play around the card because you have so many lands and so many ways to be proactive with Infiltrator, Whelk, and Triskelavus). If Bill Stark Mono-G list gets big, too, Extirpate is essential for dealing with Deadwood Treefolk.
I also can’t overestimate the importance of trying to cast this game 1 no matter what if you possibly get the window. Whenever I know I’m just kold game 1, I shift my priority over to casting Extirpate at the expense of anything else, just because knowing your opponent’s exact deck list can be so valuable.
You have to have this for Greater Gargadon and to give yourself a spell to tutor up with Tolaria West, but it’s also just generally good to draw in most situations. It’s not quite Sudden Death against Teferi but it might as well be, because if they counter your zero mana spell on your main phase you ought to have some way to punish them for it. Also, it’s yet another answer to Griffin Guide, which I am very paranoid about as you can see.
Aeon Chronicler obviously, Detritivore obviously, Gargadon obviously. Also, though, it’s important to have outs against random decks that might maindeck Epochrasite, and sometimes in order to keep tempo against White Weenie you’ll have to Pull a Shade at the end of the turn so you can afford to Damnation without tapping out and taking six or eight damage. It’s also a good answer to some of the more metagame-oriented White Weenie builds with Riftmarked Knight and Duskrider Peregrine – and you never know, somebody might finally break the Suspend Spells/Fury Charm Storm deck. In fact, now that more people are taking Teferi out of their lists, that might be an incredibly powerful option, nudge nudge wink wink.
This guy was the last card I added, and I couldn’t be happier. I wanted even more ways to gain severe initiative, and I also wanted to have an answer to Haunting Hymn and Boom/Bust while also having access to a tutorable way to end the game should time be running low.
This is your ticket to control matchups that aren’t prepared for it. Ruins can also get back counterspelled Epochrasites, which is very tight, and Triskelavus is basically a large beating every time you cast him. I suppose that was self-evident to some of you, but I honestly thought the guy was just a dumb overcosted Air Elemental for awhile, with the ability being weaker both than Triskelavus and Pentavus. Turns out that sometimes I’m wrong. Who knew?
I explained the manabase in the earlier e-mail.
Sideboard:
You absolutely have got to have this for the U/B mirror so that you can gain Triskelavus or Factory advantage. Half of the time you’ll just be taking back whatever they took from you earlier. It’s also crucial as an answer to Mystic Enforcer and White Akroma against the Reanimator decks.
He was in here initially just to be objectively powerful, but it turns out he’s sheer insanity against other Korlash decks, the mono-Black discard decks, and mono-Red decks – particularly the builds with a ton of creatures. I see a lot of people boarding it in against generic G/R and G/W decks with the logic “he chumps once and then kills everything in their deck except (Red Akroma/Tarmogoyf/Calciderm/Mystic Enforcer/Big Gathan Raiders/Duskrider Peregrine/whatever)," but that’s poor reasoning. You don’t have a problem dealing with random dorks; you have a problem dealing with the giant difficult-to-kill threats that the opponent is going to be using to trump your strategy. The last thing you want to do is bring in more cards that don’t deal with the opponent’s trump. That’s actively bad Magic.
These were in there to ensure that I absolutely never ever lost to Red decks, but it turns out that barring an act of God you actually don’t lose to Red decks regardless.
He deals with Take Possession, Griffin Guide, hugely-built-up storage lands, Boom/Bust (for a turn), Enforcer (for a turn), Hymn (for a turn), and is generally never bad in any circumstance. I boarded him in for every matchup – granted, for different cards, and he does cost four, which is very annoying – but he’s probably good enough for the main regardless.
This was in here because I knew some people would have the “Hardy Har Har Four Detritivore” plan against control decks, and I didn’t want to fall victim to those people. I also didn’t know how well-received Epochrasite would be, but it’s important to be able to deal with that guy as well. Finally, I didn’t want to lose to the Suspend builds of White Weenie, particularly since those cards (and their Protection from Black) are a large problem anyway.
Teferi, more removal against generic Pickles decks, something to side in against all non-Red aggressive strategies and random decks that I didn’t know what else to do against.
Coalition Relics, Sacred Mesa, Take Possession. Good enough for me.
A lot of the time you’ll want this guy on the play to try and eke out free wins against slower Green-based decks, and also he’s really good in the mirror for two reasons. One, he insures they don’t cheese you out with Riptide Pilferer or some such nonsense because you correctly boarded out most of your removal. Second, he allows you to do basically the same thing to your opponent.
This other last-minute Steve Sadin addition was central to two of my victories. It helps you push through threats in counter-wars, gives you additional trumps against Boom/Bust and Mystic Enforcer, ensures (along with Draining Whelk) that Disintegrate can never get you, and activates your surplus Tolaria Wests in the event that you’ve got to sideboard out Slaughter Pact.
As for some of the stuff that’s not in here and that I don’t recommend: I don’t understand Momentary Blink. While I guess that’s real cute with Draining Whelk and if an Isolation is on your Korlash or something, those situations seem too narrow to warrant a sideboard slot from an off-color card. I don’t think Vesuva is possible even though you want Ruins advantage, because you already have eight Comes Into Play Tapped lands, and that number is definitely “pushing it” already – though it could be a valid sideboard slot, I suppose. Aeon Chronicler is inferior to Foresee in a deck that doesn’t need another massive body on the ground (and that can’t EOT suspend it), and going Red for Detritivore when it’s so easily trumped by a single Pull seems very greedy.
I don’t want to write a “sideboarding guide” because sideboarding is so dependent on the exact cards in your opponent’s deck. To take just one example, normally you want to bring in the third Shadowmage on the play against G/W because he blocks a relevant number of their guys, while potentially just winning the game for you outright if you have enough spot removal in your hand to keep up with the threats that they present. However, if your scouting report says that your opponent has Sunlance, and he knows you’re bringing in another Shadowmage, (or even if he doesn’t but randomly suspects it anyway) it’s garbage to keep in Mage, even though bringing in Lance against you seems stone awful. The reason is that you can easily win the game without him at all, and you’re certainly going to win if they have four dead Sunlances – but you could easily lose if you Time Walk yourself only to have your Finkel answered for a single White.
At any rate, the plans for individual matchups (or at least your options) should be evident from the card-for-card guide.
So what do you do after you’ve read this article on an admittedly obsolete list? Well, find every card that you figure will be relevant for your metagame and keep it, knowing when to side it in and out based on what cards I’ve said are good in what matchups. Everything that doesn’t seem good anymore, replace! I think I’ve talked about most of the relevant changes you could make to this list and the relevant cards you might add, so if one of them seems to shore up a particular problem, customize as necessary. Hopefully I’ve made it evident whether or not this is a good choice for a particular PTQ in your area.
Regardless of what you choose to play, good luck!
Zac