I would like to begin this article with a few words about Magic theory. Devoting an entire article to theory is something I don’t normally find myself doing. For those of you who know me, I’m an extremely practical person. I try to find the easiest route or solution to every problem I encounter, and thus tend to approach the world like a mathematician as opposed to a philosopher. Articles devoted to theory can occasionally enlighten a reader or inspire various new ideas, but I find they usually carry little weight in actually improving on practical aspects of the game. That is where I usually come in. I am the Yin to the philosopher’s Yang. I am the producer of materials where Theory is the architect. I am the implementation of design. With that said, I like to actually ‘play’ Magic. On the other hand, Magic theory makes for very interesting discussion, and I feel I have much to say about many topics.
Talking about Magic can be a very healthy process. You tend to learn a lot from friends while traveling to tournaments just by simple discussions on draft theory, pick order, or deck construction. Differing viewpoints can help you form your own theories on the subject of discussion, eventually turning you into a stronger player. These talks can open new doors for you, often influencing future decisions you make on the aspects you may be discussing. However, these chats mean absolutely nothing if not applied in the literal sense. What have you learned when someone talks of a particular mistake they made, only to make them again yourself? What can you learn when you first pick Sharuum the Hegemon in pack 1 of an SSC draft over Oblivion Ring, only to find your next pack has Woolly Thoctar (a clear signal that Naya is open)? The biggest mistake I see people making in draft is incorrect pick order. They tend to value cards in Shards of Alara based on solely on power level and rarely on consistency. I honestly believe that a tri-color bomb is worse than a solid removal spell that is a single color when opening your first pack (excluding Broodmate Dragon). This is untrue for the 2nd pack of a draft, as you have generally defined the archetype you are drafting. Of course, this is a narrow example. My point is that people tend to relentlessly make the same mistakes without the realization that they are doing something wrong, and this is only reinforced in limited where you have the ability to make a mistake more than 30 times in a draft prior to actually playing a game of Magic! That is why talking about the game with other players at equal or higher skill level is nothing short of incredible for the development of your game. If you tend to make the same mistakes time and time again, you should probably ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish by playing. If the answer is: fame, money, fast cars, and women… then you are living a pipe dream. Go play poker!
When playing Magic at a competitive level, ask yourself why you are playing. Am I trying to win the tournament? Sure. Everyone who enters the tournament hopes that they win, but just ‘hoping’ isn’t good enough. The best players keep winning time and time again because they know what things are important and what things are not. Many aspects of Magic theory and gameplay can be assessed similarly in these two categories. For example, playing with Dark Confidant gives you two effects: drawing cards and losing life. At each point in the game you should decide which of these is more important. At the beginning of the game you think: ‘Drawing cards is important and losing life is not important.’ While this may be true for the most part, there are plenty of occasions where Dark Confidant’s life loss will become important. You can draw a direct line of correlation to the drawback versus your life total. At each point in the game, you can assess where drawing a card is worth more than the risk of losing life. As your life total comes closer and closer to zero, his drawback is much more apparent and relevant. The same is true when deciding whether or not to chump block that 4/4 creature with your Vithian Stinger. The closer your life total gets to zero, the more likely you are to block.
Virtually every card in Magic can be divided into two categories when you are building a deck: good, and not good enough. When designing your particular strategy, you must first assess the overall goal of your deck. Obviously your ultimate goal is (or should be) to win the game, but how are you trying to achieve this? Do you have incredible late game spells that can’t be dealt with easily? Do you have an aggressive strategy where you try to overwhelm your opponent in the early game? Do you have inevitability, so that you are almost guaranteed a win if you make it to turn 6? Are you trying to combo out as quickly as possible so that your opponent never has a chance to set up? With each of these ideas in mind, you begin the process of card selection.
Card selection is possibly the most important process when building a new deck. Looking at similar archetypes can help you mold your deck into an efficient machine built to do exactly what you want it to do. While we are all victims of variance, often your deckbuilding decisions will leave you feeling either A) amazed, or B) lacking during playtesting. If you are on the fence about a card’s quality in your deck, then I would lean towards option B, as you can usually change the card to a more efficient choice. Certain decks are trying to do certain things, and what’s right for one deck is not necessarily right for the other. Often, people will find themselves playing with a card that has a niche, if only because that card has been particularly good in the past. However, the best deckbuilders will often vary on archetypes or even individual card selections within the same archetypes when moving from tournament to tournament in the same format! This sort of maneuvering is what we call “metagaming,” where ideas are in constant flux, and what was once good is no longer good enough.
Evolution happens often in today’s gruesome tournament formats since the seasons run for so long (with fewer Pro Tours each year there are more qualifiers for each). Since the beginning of the newest Extended metagame that started last October, the various higher level tournaments have been dominated by a multitude of different decks, and even nuances of the same decks! I find it amazing to watch, over time, the evolution of Faeries from Chrome Mox, Bitterblossom, and Thirst for Knowledge variants transition into more lands, Vedalken Shackles, and Ancestral Visions. Each tournament brings new technology and evolution for each archetype. Even now, after 5 months of molding and an additional set added to Extended (Conflux), we see the same archetypes but with small variations based on the expected metagame. In the aftermath, we see how Elves dominated Berlin, Faeries performed best at Worlds, TEPS won a Grand Prix, and now Elves comes full circle to win Grand Prix: Hannover. This is a surprising feat, seeing as most thought the archetype was dead. You can see over time how great deckbuilders will often shape their ideas and decks based upon what they expect their opponents to play, learning from past experiences or events. The best deckbuilders often play cards you have forgotten exist, as they have found an unexpected treasure that fits a specific role in their deck.
I find it amusing to watch masters of the game like Luis Scott-Vargas and Gabriel Nassif play Magic. They often admit they are not the genius of their hive-mind behind whatever deck they have just won with, which proves a lot about how important playskill is at the top levels. Being a solid deckbuilder can be important, but often people rely on players better than themselves to craft their decks for them. If you are not part of a collective that constantly pushes technology further and further ahead, then often you will be left behind wondering why you got blown out by Future Sight in the Faeries mirror. You will also forget that some decks exist (like Elves) until you lose two rounds in a row to “Chord of Calling for Mirror Entity” at the Grand Prix, throwing all of your hard work out the window.
Being part of a collective that strives to achieve results is very important in tournament Magic. Communities of strong players constantly help each other become better. For example, Gabriel Nassif recently won a Legacy Grand Prix with cards like Sower of Temptation and Vedalken Shackles maindeck. While these seem amazing in Extended, who would have thought that the winning decklist for the Legacy Grand Prix would feature both? The minds that discovered what tools were necessary to accumulate a winning strategy made a decision to include these cards based simply upon what role they played in the deck. They were ‘good.’ When determining whether or not a card belongs in your deck, just ask yourself: “Is this card good?” Or, more importantly, “Does this card do what I need it to do?” This is much easier to determine within a group of strong players, as groups tend to quickly weed out bias. Unbiased testing is one of the better tools for sharpening your constructed skills and achieving victory at the highest levels.
Taking all this into consideration, I wanted to stress that I find 9/10 people who play Magic aren’t actively doing everything in their best interest to win each game they play. A resource that I find a lot of people openly ignoring (as if their pride prevents them so) is the internet. ‘Net-decking’ has often been thought of as something only ‘hardcore tournament players’ tend to do in order to achieve cold victory. It takes the fun out of deckbuilding, and often can take the fun out of smaller local Magic tournaments. While I am not asking you to take LSV’s Token Deck or Gabriel Nassif Five-Color Control from Kyoto and copy their exact 75 (or Nassif’s 76), I do ask that you, at the very least, take them into consideration when choosing what cards you put into your own deck. For any given tournament, there is always a “best deck.” Whether you are building a deck for FNM or Pro Tour: Honolulu, often you will ask yourself what others will be playing. For example, my local FNM store is filled with Blightning Beatdown and Five-Color Control. In this scenario, my goal should always be to play a deck that can (potentially) beat both strategies. However, I find that most of my friends tend to play the same strategies over and over because they simply don’t care enough to evolve. While I do not recommend this, I also do not condemn it. At its core, Magic is supposed to be a fun experience! If you are not having fun, then often you will not have the drive to win, ultimately leading to failure. Playing familiar cards and familiar strategies can be therapeutic, as most people are not subject to change. To many, ‘change = not fun.’ However, I come from the school that teaches ‘winning = fun.’
Possibly the most common phenomenon I see in Magic players is something that happens more often in poker players: Tilt. When a player goes on “tilt,” this often refers to them getting extremely emotional over a mistake or unlucky event that has just befallen them. Most players who go on tilt will remain there for the entirety of the game, match, or sometimes even the tournament. When playing Magic, you must always learn from your mistakes. This is something that I find myself struggling with on a constant basis. Learning from simple mistakes, and eventually eliminating them, is what separates good players from the game’s greatest masters. Each mistake compounds infinitely over time, similarly to the ripples in a lake when a stone is thrown into the water. When you make a mistake, it creates a divergent point in the game state, and each decision afterwards is slightly affected due to the presence of the previous mistake, and can eventually end up costing you the game. This in turn can cost you the match, which can cost you the tournament. Learning to eliminate every mistake is enlightenment: the key to perfect play. I believe that Luis Scott-Vargas has nearly reached an ultimate point where all Magic players strive to be. I call this state: “Budde-ism,” as Kai Budde is somewhat of a legend in tournament Magic. He dominated the game unlike any other, and no one has yet to achieve his level of greatness (in Pro Tour wins), but that does not mean it is impossible. After all, no one thought LSV would be in the finals of back to back Pro Tours.
With each passing day, I find myself growing as a player and as a person. I find that Magic, unlike any other game I have played, shapes aspects of my mind in ways I never thought possible. Through constant battling, I am virtually exercising parts of my brain more so than any other point in my life thus far, causing me to enter states of mild euphoria. Winning a game of Magic can be compared to eating a slice of cheesecake: both stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain. When comparing small victories of Magic to winning a tournament, the effects of this euphoria tend to compound, culminating in something greater and far more meaningful.
Playing Magic can help you hone skills that are applicable in everyday life. Aspects such as resource management, assessing the gamestate, aggression, and bluffing can all increase your skill level for use in other fields. Poker, like Magic, is much more of a psychological battle than physical. You tend to use things like statistics, psychology, and aggression to gain an advantage at poker, where the same is true for Magic. In every stage of life there are signs of evolution at work, and the term “fittest” no longer applies to a human being’s physical presence, but to the mental state. The frontal lobe is the new bicep, and Magic is a game that forces you to constantly upgrade your grey matter.
I find that building a deck can be a fairly difficult task, and I should implement a bit of my deckbuilding theory with you in order to give an example of a few thought processes to identify when constructing a new deck. While new deck designs don’t mimic the same 75 as someone else, generally they are spawned from an existing idea. In the past, we have seen Doran the Siege Tower be a solid player in Extended. But with the loss of cards like Vindicate and Cabal Therapy, the deck became much worse. Also, with the prevalence of Elves at Berlin, the deck could not facilitate its maximum winning percentage in a field full of bad matchups. Bad matchups tend to skew results for any given deck in a format, allowing good ideas to fall to the wayside when the format evolves. Since Pro Tour: Berlin, the Extended metagame has undergone infinite mutations, but still is not centered around a single deck or strategy. Blue control decks continue to splash various cards to answer their inherent problems, while Zoo decks go from 5-color Domain to Naya in order to create more consistent draws. Both of these are attempts to limit variance, giving the player the maximum chance of winning the tournament. Instead of rehashing card choices on an established archetype, I will instead focus more upon the ‘efficiency vs. effect’ aspect of the deckbuilding process.
When building this deck, my ideas began with an older version of Doran that played cards that were often considered powerful, but really only “fair.” Allow me to explain; cards like Tinker and Mind’s Desire are “unfair” because they form decks that have a single, ‘unfair’ goal: limiting interaction with the opponent. Cards like Thoughtseize or Path to Exile are “fair” because they are powerful, yet still interact with the opponent. Doran is a deck that uses the best creatures and best “fair” cards in order to overwhelm other “fair” decks. Combo decks can be a problem for Doran because they tend to limit the interaction with your deck as much as possible. However, Doran can still win if it uses its resources to interact enough with the opponent to disrupt their plan for victory.
When building the new version of Doran, Birds of Paradise came to mind as an accelerator and a good mana fixer. In the past, it has worked wonders to help cast spells like Doran, the Siege Tower, Loxodon Hierarch, and even Cabal Therapy. However, later in the game it was always used as a means of sacrifice on Cabal Therapy (or as an efficient chump blocker). Since Cabal Therapy is no longer legal, that leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Mana accelerators cannot be dead later in the game. If they are, then that will limit your interaction with the opponent, causing eventual defeat due to useless or dead resources. For this role, Noble Hierarch was the ‘perfect’ answer. When I say perfect, I mean absolutely perfect. He also helps you splash blue into your deck, making additions such as Rhox War Monk and Bant Charm easy replacements for older versions like Loxodon Hierarch and Putrefy. With access to incredible manabases in Extended, often you will find yourself arguing to NOT play a 4th color in your deck.
Older staples in the deck can be determined as either ‘good’ or ‘not good enough.’ Cards like Dark Confidant, Tarmogoyf, and Thoughtseize are great example of ‘good,’ while other cards like Profane Command, Putrefy, Eternal Witness, and Slaughter Pact are categorized as ‘not good enough.’ When looking at cards in this way, you have to determine their roles in the deck, and whether or not these cards can be replaced by more efficient spells. Bant Charm is an auto-include over Putrefy, as it does virtually the same thing but it can also counter instants. Eternal Witness seems slow and relatively clunky in a deck featuring Doran the Siege Tower, as it will often be attacking and defending for 1 damage while Doran is in play. A similar card here would be Tidehollow Sculler, as it creates virtual card advantage, disruption for the opponent, and has 2 power (and toughness) at a cost of only 2 mana! He is a fantastic addition to the deck.
Next up, we need to take a look at our removal suite. At the moment, we know we’re playing some number of Bant Charms, but its difficult casting cost means playing 4 is probably the wrong number. I would say 2-3 is a better number, limiting the times you draw it in excess, but still yield an appropriate number of draws that it proves effective in a match. An overlooked removal spell that has fantastic potential is Path to Exile. While playing this card last weekend in a PTQ (and virtually every deck as of late), I can safely mimic Cedric Phillips in saying “this card actually has no drawback.” There was never a point where removing their creature and giving them a land felt “bad.” Extended is a very tempo-oriented monster that has the most important spells being cast on turns 1-3. If a deck reaches 4 or 5 mana, it generally will leave mana untapped every turn, making their gift of a basic land a blank. Costing 1 mana in a deck so amazingly curved as Doran will often lead to perfect game scenarios, where cards like Slaughter Pact or Smother would often cost too much mana or have too much of a drawback (tapping you out the next turn or not killing a creature you need to kill). With Doran, tempo is everything. Playing the most efficient spells at each cost of 1-2-3 is definitely what the deck wants to do.
One last addition that should probably be in every aggro deck is Umezawa’s Jitte. This card defines aggressive mirrors, and the player controlling it will often gain an overwhelming advantage. It has been proven in archetypes ranging from Zoo, Doran, and Bant, but is also found in decks with fewer creatures like Faeries. To say the card is ‘good’ is an understatement.
So currently we have this configuration:
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant
4 Tidehollow Sculler
4 Doran, the Siege Tower
4 Rhox War Monk
4 Thoughtseize
3 Path to Exile
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
3 Bant Charm
These 37 spells are approximately the best 37 spells combined into a “fair” extended deck at your specified curve fitting your colors. You have ample disruption, removal, and the format’s best creatures stuffed into one basket. This method of deckbuilding is similar to that of Sligh from olden days, where you tried to curve out in a ridiculous manner to overwhelm your opponent’s slower deck. While this is mostly true, you also have incredible power from these spells, and hopefully enough to generate a win with perfect gameplay.
Working the manabase shouldn’t be too difficult. You want to maximize the efficiency of your lands in order to produce the right colors at the right times. Early in the game, you are relying more on Green and Black mana, while on turns 2-3 you delve into the other colors you need like White and Blue. Green is the most important color in your deck, as it is represented by most of your creatures, but only a few utility spells. Since the utility spells are generally cast later in the game, we can deduce that having Green early is the 1st priority, while having Black and White mana are a close 2nd and 3rd. Blue is not needed until at a minimum of turn 3. Therefore, we should construct our manabase in order to have Green, Black, and White mana efficiently on turns 1 and 2, and Blue on turn 3. Additionally, we want a few lands to function outside of mere manasources, and should occasionally attack. Treetop Village is much better than Mutavault in our deck, due to the intense casting requirements of some of our creatures. Here is my proposed manabase:
4 Windswept Heath
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Treetop Village
1 Forest
1 Plains
1 Swamp
2 Godless Shrine
2 Overgrown Tomb
2 Temple Garden
1 Breeding Pool
1 Watery Grave
With this land configuration, we can confidently say that we have 18 sources of Green, 16 sources of Black, 15 sources of White, and 12 Sources of Blue mana. With Noble Hierarch, the sources increase slightly, but not enough to warrant full inclusion when developing the manabase. The requirements for the deck to obtain White and Black mana are almost equivalent, and having at least 15 sources should be enough. With a solid manabase and a spectacular looking maindeck, we can now look to the sideboard to figure out how to improve our matchups against ‘unfair’ decks.
Traditional ‘unfair’ decks can gain an overwhelmingly large advantage in a short period of time, but have significant weaknesses to certain cards or strategies. This is also true for Extended’s current list of ‘unfair’ decks. Affinity is a synergistic monster that creates a large board presence in a very short period of time, and can often win by attacking for 20+ damage on turns 3-5. Cards like Cranial Plating, Thoughtcast, and every creature in the deck form a coalition of the definition of ‘unfair.’ The deck’s synergy is unmatched in the format, and often steals wins from the opponent on the back of a topdecked 10/10 for 2U that gives your entire team a Glorious Anthem effect. Seems good, right? On top of that, the deck can cycle through plenty of cards for a small mana expenditure via Thoughtcast, as well as accelerate and color fix through cards like Springleaf Drum and Chromatic Star. On top of this, even the lands in the deck generate an unfair advantage, tapping for a virtual 2 mana on spells with Affinity for Artifacts, in addition to pumping Master of Etherium and Cranial Plating. Artifact lands have always been the root of Affinity’s unfair advantage. However, there are a few cards in the format that can trump or devastate this entire strategy. A few that we can possibly include in our sideboard are Krosan Grip, Fracturing Gust, Seal of Primordium, and Kataki, War’s Wage (among others of course). These cards are all good at destroying their best threat(s) and are fairly powerful. However, Seal of Primordium and Fracturing Gust seems a bit underwhelming and rather dull in other matchups. On the other hand, Kataki is just the stone blade against Affinity, and will definitely get the nod. Its efficient cost of 1W fits the curve of the deck, while maintaining its status as “best card against Affinity ever.” Krosan Grip is a special exception to our rule of efficiency, as it has a niche of being amazing against Affinity, as well as one of the format’s most popular decks: Faeries. Their biggest bombs against you are cards like Threads of Disloyalty, Vedalken Shackles, Umezawa’s Jitte, and Engineered Explosives. If you’re lucky, you can catch them off guard with a well-timed Krosan Grip, and can even destroy their Engineered Explosives if they decide to wait until your turn to activate it. Both of these cards deserve inclusion in the sideboard due to sheer power vs. cost.
Another card that has been getting a lot of spotlight lately is Ethersworn Canonist, and for good reason. At the same cost of Kataki, it is an amazing sideboard card that makes combo decks play ‘fair.’ They can’t really function by only playing one spell a turn, while you have no problem dropping a Doran or Tarmogoyf while they struggle to find an answer. You have ways of disrupting their gameplan besides Ethersworn Canonist, but having those disruptive spells in conjunction with Canonist can buy you enough time to snag easy wins. I think this card is an auto-include, as it fits the bill on every level. With all these cards so far in mind, the current sideboard configuration includes:
3 Krosan Grip
3 Kataki, War’s Wage
4 Ethersworn Canonist
Now that we have 10 cards that help shore up the more difficult strategies, we can look for cards that are both cost efficient and useful in multiple matchups. A perfect example would be Oblivion Ring, as it is an answer to any problem permanent (ignoring shroud). It can come in against a variety of strategies where other cards in your deck are poor, so playing a few in the sideboard is a great idea. I wanted to originally split this last slot into a 2-1 configuration, but I eventually decided that the Life from the Loam matchup needed a little more work, as just having Ethersworn Canonist wouldn’t do. Relic of Progenitus has been the best proven sideboard card against them so far, so it gets the nod. After all things considered, our entire deck should look like this:
Creatures (24)
- 4 Dark Confidant
- 4 Tarmogoyf
- 4 Doran, the Siege Tower
- 4 Rhox War Monk
- 4 Tidehollow Sculler
- 4 Noble Hierarch
Lands (23)
Spells (13)
Sideboard
This sideboard can help out on the matches that don’t play ‘fair,’ while also upping your percentages against other ‘fair’ decks. When building a sideboard, your overall goal should be to maximize its potential for use, while giving you the best chance to win any given tournament. Generally speaking, your bad matchups should be the focus of card choice for sideboards, and questionable/good matchups should be secondary. This should also be correlated to any given deck’s popularity at a tournament. If you plan on having to play against Affinity 5 of 8 rounds in the swiss, then you should probably have more artifact removal in the sideboard. But, in a normal metagame, you should prepare for a variety of matchups. In this case, we have Ethersworn Canonist and Kataki against the tougher strategies, while also having Krosan Grip, Oblivion Ring, and Relic of Progenitus against other likely matchups. This style of deckbuilding theory tends to focus on card relevancy for a format based on logical, likely opponents. While this process might not be the most popular when it comes to casual players, it should be of great importance and value to a tournament player’s preparation. Innovation is always respected when it does well, but usually disregarded when it does poorly. While this is not a reason to avoid innovation, you should test your theories and decks rigorously against the best players who are playing established archetypes in order to validate your ideas. If you fail at this, then you will surely fail at whatever tournament you are attempting to win.
With all of these things in mind, my endgame is to become a better Magic player. Even after finishing this article, I feel as if I’ve poured out pages and pages of my soul in an attempt to better understand myself, as well as this amazing game we all love and enjoy. I know for a fact that many of us use Magic as a way to gain friends, knowledge, and hopefully some amount of wealth over time. But, the result of our efforts rarely culminates in what our hearts yearn for: victory. At any tournament, there is only 1 winner, and the rest of the players are tied for dead last. If you don’t win the biggest prize, then you’ve failed. But, you should not get discouraged at this outcome. Each loss gives you insight as to where you have failed, and how it can be corrected. Each mistake can make you a stronger, better player. While we are all victims of variance, usually we fall prey to our own shortcomings and stubbornness while blaming losses on luck. Hopefully you will think about these things next time you shuffle up. After all, there are only two kinds of people in this game: those of us sitting at the table with our head in our hands, and those of us carrying the match slip to the judge.
Todd Anderson
“strong sad” on Magic Online
[email protected]