With the Block and Legacy Grand Prix over, the next major event coming up for you, John Q Draftsalot, is Regionals. This means slogging back into the Standard metagame, a place largely unexplored since GP: Kyoto and yet untouched on MTGO thanks to the terribly slow release of Future Sight. Thanks to these circumstances, the Standard metagame is a bit of a jumble right now.
However I’ve been doing a running test log in an attempt to build around the basic structure of the format. These are the basic tenets of the format I’ve followed thus far when creating or tuning my decks.
1. If you play control, be prepared to deal with Detritivore, Blood Moon and Magus of the Moon.
When you play control, Detritivore is the elephant in the room that steals your wallet and sleeps with your girlfriend. No, I haven’t the slightest what that means either, but what I’m saying is any deck with a good Detritivore plan is going to ruin your mana and leave you in a hopeless situation more often than not. Normal Tron builds are largely unplayable because they just lose to this guy, and the average B/R/W or Dralnu list folds just as quickly with two-thirds non-basics in the deck and no clock.
The number of Blood Moon effects floating around will also stay rather high if people continue to preach the goodness of Gruul, even if running the cards aren’t optimal. This is because they have a flashy effect that you can actively see ruining opponents that aren’t prepared, or at worst forcing them to warp their deck structure to keep up. That’s something a lot of people tend to overlook even if something doesn’t pay off after extensive testing. Those who only put in something like ten matches (or less in some cases) might not get to the point where they realize something better fits in the slot.
This means even if somehow all these cards became invalidated (which might be true for the latter) you’ll still end up seeing them all at Regionals. Hence you better be packing a mostly basics manabase, or some answers like Wall of Roots / Sacred Ground. My friend summed up the Tron versus Detritivore match-up thusly, “The match is so poor against any deck with an accomplished Vore strategy that any normal Tron decklist (Straight U/R, U/B, and most U/B/R) may as well consist of 60 unplayables, 4 Detritivore, and 11 more unplayable cards.”
2. You need to be able to disrupt (I guess you’d say “interacting” or what have you) your opponent in a relevant fashion or ignore him completely. Dragonstorm, Dredge, and Dralnu essentially mandate this as law.
Dragonstorm is unique in that it can only be pressured or stopped in one of two real ways, unless you have a massive excess of mana and counters at your disposal. The first is to use discard like Castigate, Stupor, or Persecute early enough to severely disrupt any attempt at an early Dragonstorm. This method is very hit or miss, as not only does it largely ignore the Blue search / draw cards that might find Dragonstorm, many DS players are already prepared with Ignorant Bliss or Delay. In addition, a single counter can stop the whole plan of a turn 3 Persecute on the draw saving you from a fiery demise.
The other option is to assault the mana of the DS player by disrupting Lotus Bloom and destroying any charge lands they may be playing. By tanking Lotus Bloom and a land, it takes a near perfect DS hand to get the necessary storm and mana to go off. The alternate type of mana denial from Grand Arbiter Augustin IV also provides a near auto-win when backed by another form of disruption. Mana denial isn’t necessarily reliable against DS in the short term if that’s all you’re offering up in the way of defense. However, if a game goes past turn 4 or 5 and you buy a little time, then LD can completely cripple DS’s ability to raise an offense (Gigadrowse) as well as get its win conditions online without investing all fast mana into the effort. It’s not that mana denial against the lands is a particularly good investment in the short term; rather, it’s a way to ruin the deck if you can live to a late enough turn to take advantage of a lull in the action.
Dralnu says if your deck is midrange, you need a recurring threat or some way to get by up to sixteen counters and very large flyers in Tombstalker and Skeletal Vampire. People love to pretend they can just "overwhelm" this assortment of counters with threats, but even Green decks featuring such platinum hits like Call of the Herd and Sprout Swarm are going to have issues trumping these. Not to mention the fact that every time you feel comfortable with having a deck slower than Gruul, somebody uses that extra time to Mystical Teachings for Tendrils of Corruption to ruin your day.
I find one of the biggest issues in testing is when people tend to bring over certain habits or trains of thought when testing similar decks against Dralnu. For example, when I was testing this tri-colored abortion of an aggro deck against it, I was losing a lot because I simply couldn’t attack fast enough before Tendrils or Tombstalker got online and beat me. I expected my Glare deck to put up similar results, and so my first few matches were some sad attempts at me going balls out aggressive for no real reason and getting the same results.
My friend Jesus took a look at the list, shared some tidbits about why his Gruul list was doing fine, and then queried me about why I had certain cards in the deck if they weren’t working against Dralnu. This questioning process made me take a moment and check over why cards like Selesnya Guildmage, Detritivore, and Vitu-Ghazi weren’t getting the job done. I retested the match with a much more flow-styled view of the game. Instead of burning through my resources early on, I made the control player work to get anywhere, and if he refused to budge I let Vore do much of the work for me.
With the change in play-style my results quickly switched around from having mediocre match to one solidly in the favorable column. Again, it’s not just how you can play ball with the opponent; it’s how you assign your resources to that task as well.
3. If you’re playing creatures, be prepared to beat life gain or just bigger creatures that come down as fast as your own.
This seems so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said, but when it seems like every Gruul or B/W deck gets rolled by Loxodon Hierarch or a quick Korlash, Heir to Blackblade, you take note. The paradigm at the moment seems to be set-up for aggro to be clearly aimed at control, combo, and possibly other swarm aggro if any room is left. A good mid-range deck, or even a grinding type of control deck with long term resources like Firemane Angel or Sacred Mesa, can easily cause these decks to over-invest in killing one or two big men or walk into Wrath of God.
Yet some people really think that the majority of G/R or B/W decks are just going to absolutely roll through 8-10+ round tourneys. I get that Hierarch’s have fallen completely out of vogue, but to just hope no good decks get built featuring any life-gain or mid-range creature deck gets built seems questionable at best.
4. Don’t play freaking Hatching Plans unless you’re a crazy genius. Or just crazy!
Pretty self-explanatory, I think.
5. You WILL have an auto-loss matchup. Live with it.
This is one my friend gave me after doing some testing (probably more than me) with various control builds for some time now. Realistically I can’t think of a single deck in the format that doesn’t have an awful match against something. Sure, you could blow your entire board on trying to get that match to 50-55% or so, but why bother?
Dragonstorm is the one deck that you might claim has a favorable match against nearly every popular deck in Standard, but even that’s a stretch considering how loose the lists are for decks outside of the most popular three or so. DS may have seen very little change or additions from FS, but that’s simply not true with the majority of other decks. This means you have a good chance of playing against old versions of decks along with their updated counterparts. .
Considering these general notes and guidelines, this is one of the main decks I ended up testing.
Creatures (21)
Lands (23)
Spells (16)
The key differences between this and normal Glare decks of old is the use of Glittering Wish, and hence a cornucopia of mana accelerants, shock lands and basics. Detritivore was a card I knew I would want in the Glare deck, because it’s not out of the question to drop it at two or three on turn 4 or 5 and just immediately start punishing people. In addition, being able to drop it so quickly gives the opponent the option of either Wrathing away one threat and a mana creature or trying to wait and hope they rip more lands to keep Wrath up at all times.
Sprout Swarm is a fun addition from FS that I wasn’t sure would just be cute or very useful. Turns out it becomes ridiculous in a few turns, making the whole running out of gas problem non-existent. Make two men, then three and then a quadrillion. Very annoying for decks to deal with an army after a few turns, especially because of the deck’s namesake making blocking or attacking nearly impossible. Quagnoth is rather self-explanatory; he doesn’t lose to Persecute, practically requires a Wrath to get rid of, and due to Shroud is great against decks like B/W and Gruul (who can’t beat a 4/5 without being able to target it).
The Wish board showcases many of the benefits to running multi-color, namely that you can now beat DS. Hide / Seek has the dual benefits of being tutor friendly anti-enchantment utility; as well as buying you a turn or more against a Dragonstorm player after he goes off. If you have a resolved Glare and flash them H/S the DS player is practically dead already. Grand Arbiter was another addition purely to help with the DS match and give me a tutorable out in game 1.
Everything else in the board is pretty self-explanatory, although I really need to work on ironing out what cards I really want in certain situations. The manabase looks funky, but part of that is because I actually use Edge of Autumn and Horizon Canopy to cycle through the deck later in the game. This tends to keep the card quality for the late-game a bit better than in your normal Green deck, and is worth the drawback of a few Canopy pings.
At the moment I’ve had a good deal of success with the deck against Gruul and Dralnu. As expected, my auto-loss match is Dragonstorm, but H/S and Arbiter mean I actually have a decent shot at the post-board games. Still bad overall, but at least it’s got a chance. Finally, Dredge is the deck I’m testing against now and have had a few issues with, largely from the nuts draws they sometimes have with Magus of the Bazaar, but otherwise it’s looking pretty solid overall.
Next week I should be able to show some in-game notes from my recent testing log to show how the games generally play out. Until then!
Josh Silvestri
Team Reflection
Email me at: joshDOTsilverstriATgmailDOTcom