I’d like to start this article by thanking everyone for the feedback I got from the mock tournament article. There was quite a bit of it and I enjoyed going over why I picked certain cards, and got a bit of information about cards / decks I may have overlooked. The next mock tournament will certainly take what we’ve learned into account from not only the results, but from what we learned after the tournament when we started testing more refined builds.
With that out of the way, today I’ll mainly be focusing on observations from the tournament and general information my friends and I have picked up on after some testing and MTGO play – when it’s not crashing, anyway. As last time, some of this will be obvious, but that’s what you get with this sort of format.
Observation #1: If you can’t split with WW, get a new deck
White Weenie is like the Goblins of the format. For those who think it’s a drastic position to take for a “fair” aggro deck, you really need to try this format out. Not only does WW have great evasion creatures (Soltari Priest is the best aggro two-drop in the format) and Calciderm, it also gets two of the best cards in block, period. Griffin Guide is pretty much this block’s version of Empyrial Armor / Moldervine Cloak. It simply allows the WW to get far more damage in than it should. To top it off, the deck gets the best counter in the format, i.e. Mana Tithe.
Also take note that part of the reason WW does so well is because it plays against a lot of decks that can’t inherently deal with swarms of hard-to-kill evasion creatures. For example, my Blink Riders and U/R/G Spectral Force decks were built to smash control and mid-range decks and take care of WW post-board. This was the wrong approach, because of how many WW decks there are and how significantly worse the hate gets when the WW boards get more refined.
Cards like Stormbind, Dead / Gone, Magus of the Tabernacle, and Tendrils of Corruption are amazing against WW, but only with qualifiers tacked on. Like “Stormbind, assuming they don’t run Kestrels or Disenchant maindeck, is the biggest beating ever,” or having a Mana Tithe to prevent the four-mana aggro killers from dropping on time. Relying on creatures to do the dirty work is also a pretty ballsy proposition considering men like Wall of Roots and Call of the Herd only stop half the guys in the deck.
So much of the removal people play is one-for-one trades that cost more mana than the creature they are killing off, and they usually can’t get around Griffin Guide. In fact I tend to rate Snapback higher than the vast majority of removal spells, just because it beats those Griffin Guides, is equal or cheaper than the men I’m bouncing, and it usually buys me more time because the creature in play only gets one shot.
Summing all that up, make sure your deck at least can go 50/50 with WW or be sure you find a way to get paired up versus Teferi and B/R control all day.
Observation #2: Most Green decks aren’t very good
It’s not that I hate freedom or all of the Green decks I’ve seen; it’s just that the vast majority aren’t that good in the current metagame. One of the big problems goes with #1; the majority can’t compete with WW in any reasonable sense. The majority either (and this is at best, my own results have been a bit worse in many cases) go 50/50 pre or post-board, but not vice versa. Usually they have like a 35-40% match win rate against WW, which is just terrible. Using lists from MTGO, and some of the ones floating on the net, has produced even worse results in some cases.
The problem stems from the cards not providing enough of an early defense to consistently stop WW, while at the same time not necessarily giving you enough reach to consistently beat control. Now, you can get around one set of problems: just take a look at my U/R/G Spectral Force deck for an example. The problem then stems from trying to beat both types of decks; and this isn’t even taking into consideration the outlier type of decks, like Balance.
All of the cards they play are limited in scope, and the same goes with many of the removal spells they typically access. They get Wall of Roots, Harmonize, and Spectral Force sure; but what else is after that? In fact, back the truck up and double check if Spectral Force is even that great in a format full of Damnation, men that don’t care, and finishers that either can copy it or fly.
In reality, Wild Pair is an passable base-Green deck, but other than Pair itself, Wall of Roots, and Harmonize, the rest of the deck is a bunch of utility and garbage taped around a three-color manabase. That’s not to say it’s a bad deck, but even for a block deck the thing is woefully underpowered at times, considering the mana and card investment involved. I know you’ve had draws where you’ve had either terrible Slivers, or Riftwing Cloudskates and Whitemane Lions just sitting in hand mocking your inability to find the piece to make things work.
*ahem*
Basic point: most Green decks aren’t built to deal with a more refined metagame (this includes most of mine), and they suffer over the long-term for it.
Observation #3: Control decks are highly vulnerable to non-board threats
Have you ever seen a control deck in this format actually enjoy playing against another deck with Boom / Bust, Haunting Hymn, Sacred Mesa, or Aeon Chronicler? Even a cursory glance through MWS or Gatherer will show that you have a very limited set of options when dealing with these types of threats.
My Teferi and other Mystical Teachings decks all make sure to run at least one Haunting Hymn, if not more, simply because tutoring it up and resolving it puts you in an incredibly advantageous situation. And it will resolve a lot, believe me – take a look at the Teferi builds running around on MTGO. Most of them max out at six counters; even the “Fish” deck running around has more counters than that! Even before Hymn comes online, certain builds use Stupor, which is just a real beating for many decks. Surviving a Stupor plus threat combination is a lot easier said than done.
Aeon Chronicler is another beating straight out of Standard. In this format the Chronicler works overtime, because no deck has easy access to card-drawing without running him or Harmonize. Zac Hill B/R control deck, which was basically only splashing for Chronicler, was a good example of that. The best comparison I can make is that it’s an uncounterable Phyrexian Arena in these types of decks. Unfortunately the only way to prevent the advantage in the control mirror is limited to one of three ways.
1. Play your own first (or at least on the opposing turn)
2. Pull from Eternity
3. Destroy them before Chronicler advantage takes full hold
Again, very limited in what you can actually do plan-wise for the mirror.
Blink Riders success in the mock tournament came largely because control decks have no answer to LD past resolving Prismatic Lens / Phyrexian Totem, or getting their few Cancels online in time. This isn’t anywhere near good enough if you ever expect to beat these types of decks, but there’s precious little you can do about it. Even the manabases don’t support enough land to properly fight these decks. Many times my hand would be dead to Damnation, but they simply couldn’t resolve it due to being stuck on one Swamp while getting beaten up.
You want to wreck a control deck in this format? Make them play against threats they can’t deal with on the ground or at sorcery speed. It makes them work twice as hard to beat it, if they can at all. The worst part may be that even with that stipulation, cards like Sacred Mesa and Phyrexian Totem make the control mirror against certain builds a nightmare anyway!
Observation #4: The trials of making a tri-colored deck are immense
Many of you have probably realized the difficulty in making a true three-color deck. While a number of two-color decks with small splashes for a card like Aeon Chronicler, Void, or Bogardan Hellkite exist, it’s rare to see a true three-color deck in this format. This creates a big hole in the format for cards like the Dragon Legends and Lightning Angel, creatures that certainly have good enough stats and abilities to be played.
Now the U/R/G deck we made was pretty easy to get the mana functional, because we were running Green. Search for Tomorrow makes finding the proper land base so much easier that we were able to by cobbling together the manabase in a few minutes. But when you play W/R/U or a similar color configuration, suddenly things aren’t so easy. The storage lands let you cheat on second splash colors, but the delayed effect makes it risky against aggro.
The key to balancing these types of manabases is out is to take stock of how your deck expects to curve out. I’d also forget about how you’re going to try and keep your splash colors intact against LD, because most decks can’t afford to run that many off-color basics. The model everyone is copying from the tri-colored control variants don’t work for almost any other model of deck, because they practically have no curve to begin with.
Observation #5: The entire format is all about one-upmanship
Let me give an example so you can understand what that means. Originally the Teferi control mirror was all about who resolved Teferi first. Then it became whoever could resolve Haunting Hymn to decimate the other guy’s resources first. Soon after that, Phyrexian Totem was established as a method of winning before the resource / Teferi war mattered. Some people responded to this by adding answers to actively try and wipe Totem’s / Prismatic Lens out via Void, Ancient Grudge or Krosan Grip. Today revolves a good deal around who gets Aeon Chronicler (or in some Teferi versions, Shadowmage Infiltrator) online for a significant period of time to simply bury the opponent.
Or, you know, all of the above. Man, that’s a lot of back-and-forth strategy-wise for a pretty simple mirror match. My basic point is that a lot of the decks that aren’t WW basically just want to trump whatever the opponent can do. Spectral Force was scary until I started running into Dragons, Greater Gargadon, and Akroma on a more consistent basis. Green decks suddenly started annoying me with things like Wurmcalling to give them a fattie not once, but multiple times! Wild Pair sure doesn’t care about what you do, it’s just going to lock you down and beat you with a stick anyway.
One of the keys to the format, I find, is that if you can’t answer something subtly, say with a toolbox or ability built into one of your men, the only other answer is brute force. For example, as it stands, pretty much no Teferi deck can actually beat a resolved Sacred Mesa. The only answer they have is either not letting it resolve or bouncing it and then trying to counter it / force a discard. Not a very effective plan. There are times when you can win around it via Hellkite or other fatties plus removal, but it’s a rarity.
That is a subtle answer to the problem. The force method would be what my U/R/G Spectral Force deck did – play another fatty or use a way to bring the dead ones back to life. Figure out if you want to try to be subtle or blunt and play to that strength.
Nuts and Bolts
Now we move onto some of the updates I’ve made to certain decks since the mock tournament. The Balance deck was probably the most interesting deck I showed off in the tournament, but it needed some refinement before I was going to recommend anyone taking it on the road. At the moment the two slots worth serious consideration for altering are Errant Ephemeron and Temporal Isolation. Right now these are the changes to the list I was considering.
-3 Errant Ephemeron
-4 Temporal Isolation
+4 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
+3 Mana Tithe
These alternations are mainly to try out cards that can just do more for the deck than the previous ones. Shapeshifter doubles as Teferi removal and can generally buy more time than Ephemeron could, while acting as the secondary win condition. Mana Tithe could at least help the tempo against aggro decks in the early game and prevent the turn 5 Teferi from hitting ASAP.
As for the sideboard, Chronozoa is the main consideration for the aggro matches while Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, or Psionic Blast takes care of Teferi decks. The other seven cards fluctuate, but currently we’re trying out this sideboard.
4 Chronozoa
3 Jaya Ballard, Task Mage
4 Cancel
3 Dismal Failure
1 Island
We basically figured that the seven counters combined with Mana Tithe provided a great incentive for Teferi to not hit play early. Like I said, right now we’ve got Jaya, but people seem to love leaving in at least Damnation and Void for us, so that may change to Psionic Blast to make sure we can hit the vaunted 3/4 without issue.
Now we shift gears to a B/U/W control deck I didn’t feature in the mock, because I wasn’t quite sure how to pull it together, but now I think I have a sufficient answer.
Creatures (4)
Lands (26)
Spells (30)
- 4 Sacred Mesa
- 1 Disenchant
- 4 Stupor
- 1 Haunting Hymn
- 3 Mystical Teachings
- 4 Phyrexian Totem
- 1 Pull from Eternity
- 3 Temporal Isolation
- 4 Damnation
- 1 Imp's Mischief
- 4 Mana Tithe
Sideboard
Mind you, the deck isn’t perfect, but the manabase finally worked well enough to get the basic strategy running consistently. You’ll notice effectively thirteen sources for the main secondary splash color in Black, and nine for the Blue splash color (of which the cards only require a single U to function). The only thing I’m debating at the moment is if a second Island would be more helpful than the fifth Swamp.
Against Teferi control you have multiple avenues of attack via discard, abuse of Negator early, or slipping Sacred Mesa into play before the counters come fully online. In addition the toolbox can stop opposing Totems or Aeon Chroniclers without needing to devote a huge amount of space.
Versus WW, W/R, and Red aggro, your plan is entirely based around stalling them out. Temporal Isolation can take out significant threats, Mana Tithe helps prevent Calciderm from hitting play, and the discard prevents any sort of a late-game from taking place to trump Chronicler or Mesa.
Green aggro, on the other hand, is all about who can best use their resources. You have Disenchant for Stormbind and your removal is great against the type of creatures they employ. That said, I feel much more comfortable post-board when I have eight sweeper effects compared to a measly set of Damnation.
The basic key to the deck is that it revolves around beating the opponent’s board plan while disabling future resources via discard and the toolbox.
There are other options for the deck, of course… here’s a short list of cards I had considered either in the main or board:
Merieke Ri Berit
Akroma, Angel of Wrath
Sengir Nosferatu
Snapback
Vesuvan Shapeshifter
The idea is that because of Teachings and Chronicler answering draw and search options, you have free reign over how the main deck strategy flows. As long as the core of the deck remains, this type of build can be very customizable.
*Main Core:
25-26 land, 4 Totem / Lens, 4 Damnation, 4 Chronicler, 2-3 Teachings, 3-4 Sacred Mesa
That’s all for this week! Hopefully next week I’ll have a second mock tournament completed; or at least more breakdowns on the upgrades we’ve since made to the decks. After that, we get to see what PT: Yokohama brings to the format, so enjoy the uncertainty in the format while it lasts… Or not, depending on how much you hate WW. Cheers.
Josh Silvestri
Team Reflection
E-mail me at: JoshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom
Written to Nine Inch Nails, M.O.V.E. M-Flo and Teranoid… Year Zero is great.
Bonus Section: Judging from GP: Mass
I had a bunch of friends attending Grand Prix: Massachusetts, and as a result I ended up with a number of odd judge stories to share.
Situation #1:
Team 1 is beginning its turn with an Avalanche Riders in play, with the echo cost going on the stack. While player B is contemplating paying the echo cost, Player A proceeds to draw his card for the turn while this is going on. Player B then pays then draws, this is when Team 2 notices because player A didn’t draw at the same time.
Team 2 then confirms that player A drew before echo was paid. A Judge is called; and obviously they got to keep the Riders.
Situation #2:
Team 1 has an active Magus of the Arena and uses it on an opponent’s creature. They choose targets and the ability resolves. Suddenly on the players on Team 2 tries to regenerate the creature with Evolution Charm. They already let the ability resolve, so their creature is dead… right?
OBJECTION!
The judge comes in and rules they can keep the creature. Timing rules? Paying attention? Bah, who needs those?
Situation #3
Team 1 is caught trying to trade lands in play with one another while trying to resolve a combat situation (presumably for a trick of some sort). Judge comes in and simply hands out a warning to team 1.
So far from four different parties I’ve heard basic judging stories that sound like game losses (which of course are match losses in this format) not handed out because the judges wanted to be friendly.
My friend Mike summed up a lot of what was happening at the GP with this:
“A bunch of the rules / judging situations at the GP were handled under some really terrible assumptions. I heard a judge during the day basically go, ‘I’m going to assume your opponent knew what they were trying to do and…’ which just seems so wrong.”
I’m not saying that all the judging was awful or that this was super common, as I wasn’t there; I’m merely relating what I’ve been told by people. Draw your own conclusions.