With the Worlds results in, we now have a brand new Standard metagame to look at featuring a legitimate combo deck. Unfortunately, it’s far smaller than the diversity we saw at Grand Prix: Krakow, to the point where MTGO has become a cesspool with everyone selling their grannies to the local glue factory just to come up with the tix for Pyromancer’s Swath and Dragonstorm. All the B/G and B/G/W players rejoiced, as not only could they copy a better version of the decks they were running, but a bunch of mediocre to even matches left the metagame because they all packed up their ball and went home in the face of “The Gassy Knoll.”
My favorite deck, U/B Faeries, unfortunately takes a hit from this development. Although I can win against B/G decks of the Elvish and Rockish variety, the match was not a fun one to have to face more than once a tournament, and the Worlds results basically insure that you’ll see the deck multiple times over the course of a tourney. That said, the match isn’t bad, and as long as you watch out for Cloudthresher they have no other major bombs to play against you. Many of these designs aren’t configured to drain your resources like TarmoRack decks, so barring amazing draws; you have a chance for your combat tricks to make an impact on the board.
Dragonstorm, on the other hand, is a much bigger issue for the Faeries deck, as game 1 is a practical bye for the DS player if they aren’t busy punting the game away (it’s always amazing how much easier it looks to play a deck when the players featured always do the math right), as you have very few ways to meaningfully stop them. As for the overall match, even with proper boarding it’s pretty much in favor of DS.
I’ve also received a few e-mails reporting success with Faeries versus DS, and I think for the most part that’s due to people not understanding how to play storm combo. The only way you have a chance of consistently winning against someone competent is boarding in ways to take Spinerock Knoll out of the equation (likely answers being Pithing Needle and Venser, Shaper Savant) and Thorn of Amethyst to take care of the rest of the deck in the short-term. You absolutely need Thorn just so you don’t get blown out by a small Grapeshot or Dragonstorm before you hit the midgame. Remember that your deck is effectively a bunch of X/1 dorks against a deck that’s literally burn, storm and mana. That doesn’t really fare well for you, so you have to try and tilt the turns they try to go off as far in your favor as you can. Bouncing a Pyromancer’s Swath back to hand, or a Lotus Bloom on a turn they attempt to go off, can buy you the time you need to win.
Oh, and finally let me remind Faeries players using Pestermite to tap Knoll or Bloom at the appropriate response time can stall a turn. Practice so you can learn to recognize when the DS player is attempting to go off or clear the board. Once you know this, then you attempt to leverage your instant speed resources in a more meaningful way and be disruptive instead of just adding to the storm count for the turn. This is especially true with Cryptic Command, where I see people essentially using it like a Repeal or Counterspell + cantrip. Remember if the opponent only pulls off a Dragonstorm for 2-3, you can let a copy resolve and then counter another copy while bouncing the Hellkite in play. The same goes for using Cryptic Command to bounce Swath or Knoll in response to the last burn spell on the turn. Be careful with this though, you don’t want to do this to their supposed last Shock for the turn and get hit with another one in response.
As for what beats Dragonstorm, it really isn’t difficult if you dedicate yourself to the job. The problem is the rest of the metagame, with B/G Elves and Doran decks along with various aggro-control decks, doesn’t really lend itself to these kinds of strategies flourishing. Discard is the obvious weapon to use, followed by mana denial in general usefulness. Boom/Bust is one of the best tools any Red decks has to take out a Storage land or Knoll early on. As others have pointed out, Riftsweeper and cheap LD can kick the legs out from under the DS player before he has a chance to do anything useful. The only other real option is to set up a counter package into a lock or quick win, but considering the control decks we have, that doesn’t seem incredibly likely.
Otherwise a large number of decks in the metagame basically get invalidated by the new Dragonstorm deck being in existence and relatively cheap to build. How fun. That’s really it for my report on Standard, because MTGO is flooded with them and I expect City Champs to do the same soon enough.
Moving on now to the upcoming Constructed season… as far as Extended goes, there are far too many decks for me to break down exactly where they’d clock in on almost any metagame scale. As a result here’s a more applicable breakdown for the commonly seen decks on MTGO and the Worlds PTQ results. Essentially there are four types of decks in the current Extended format.
1. Decks casting a huge “I just destroyed your soul” card while ignoring you. This would include decks casting cards that give you a sound thrashing for the rousing amusement of all* because their decks can reach the 8 mana mark before turn 6 and yours can’t. This would be basically any deck featuring the following: Enduring Ideal, Tooth and Nail, and Mind’s Desire.
2. Decks which play many small dorks and attempt to kill you before the decks with plans get their act together. This is better known as ‘Tribal Flames you for five.” RDW, Domain Zoo, and Flow decks generally all fall under this field to varying degrees.
3. Decks trying to shove forty dollar cards** down your throat while making sure your limbs flail around uselessly in the meantime thanks to counters and Duress / Thoughtseize. Did I mention the evil look they give while wearing a monocle and top hat?
4. Decks that take a rock and bash your head in. Failing that, they grab a bigger rock and try. Failing that, attaching a rock to the end of a club of sorts. You get the idea. The rebuilt Junk deck featuring Doran, Sword of Fire and Ice, and other various big men is probably the best example, although in general Rock decks fall under this category.
* Ah, Zero Punctuation, you rock.
** Goyf, you twit.
{Veggies} why not make a meta hexagon
{Veggies} OR A PINEAPPLE
{BrassMan} lol
{BrassMan} the metagame pineapple
{BrassMan} it sounds delicious
I could say control, aggro-control, cookie, pencil, etc. but I felt it’d be easier to relate to exactly which subsection of decks I’m referring to, especially this early in the season where realistically the metagame isn’t even close to set. If you’ve been following MTGO lately, or playing the premier events lately for Extended, you know how bad the metagame fluctuations can be. After the Remi.dec phase, people have jumped on multiple different bandwagons ranging from any all flavors of beatdown as long as it featured Tarmogoyf, to Gifts Rock and beyond. Ever since they cracked down on the bots on MTGO for reporting event results while disabling replays, it’s been far more awkward keeping track of what’s winning on there and what isn’t.
Realistically I think that covers the field, with the sole exceptions possibly being Dredge and Cephalid Breakfast. However, both of those decks are so strong that if there was an active amount of people playing them (if the board hate ever died down), I believe they would need their own sub-classification anyway. Speaking of which, these decks have largely gone from seeing some play to near nil in the normal 8-mans, at least for those times I’m able to get on MTGO and friends largely report the same thing. This is interesting if only because typically the abusive combo decks in the format, even if not the absolute best choice, typically have followers adapting the deck. Either these decks just really are far more fragile than anyone ever could have anticipated (I doubt this just based on the testing before PT: Valencia) or people are just choosing to go with interactive decks.
That said, most games break down pretty quickly if you get a trump permanent or strategy in play before the opponent. Gifts Rock gets Genesis recursion going? Game is probably over already. Counter-Top? There goes half of most people’s decks, if not more. Vedalken Shackles plus Islands in MUC? How do you think the deck ever beats aggro without sacking out Meloku the Cloud Mirror each and every game? Speaking of Shackles, the card is ridiculously good and largely overlooked right now. Threads of Disloyalty seem ridiculous in a Tarmogoyf fight until somebody shows up to the party with a couple of these and starts robbing aggro.
Speaking of which, the deck I was most surprised to see in the Top 8 of the Worlds PTQ was the Mono Blue Control by Brain Kelly. At first glance it looked completely out of place by comparison to what’s been doing well over the past few weeks, but MUC is actually at a good spot in the meta. Against slower decks like Gifts Rock and company you can control the flow of the game off counters and Vedalken Shackles. Unless they can sneak their recursion engine into the grave and keep it there, well… have fun with a deck full of dorks against Meloku. Quick decks like Zoo and RDW w/ Goyf I expected to chew the deck up, but once again Shackles came through amazingly well, and even Spire Golem played a huge part in it. Spire Golem is a cheap threat in the long control mirrors, but also is a solid blocker on turn 3 or 4 depending if you want to keep counter mana open or not. Although the numbers seem a bit scattershot, the list is a good starting point for a number of control decks in the metagame. Or even the aggro-control Remi.decs running around to take a page or two in the configuration used here.
As for aggressive builds that are aimed at winning with weenies and burn rather than fatties and equipment, there’s still hope, but success with these decks hasn’t shown itself outside of Takayuki Koike’s with Zoo and Sam Stein with Affinity at Valencia. At the moment these decks haven’t seen a lot of play online, in large part due to the popular decks being mid-range decks. Although they’ve fallen out of favor, the act of throwing 8-10 points of burn at someone’s dome is a valid strategy still, especially because manabases are frequently becoming 7-9 fetches, 7-10 duals and maybe six lands that don’t actually hurt you. Tribal Flames is always the most obvious, but Shrapnel Blast and Char make for a powerful 1-2 punch that seems to be lacking in decks nowadays. Maybe someone can take a page out of Legacy and roll out Dragon Stompy featuring artifacts, burn, and huge guys like Fledgling Dragon, Rakdos Pit Dragon, and Arc-Slogger to relive the glory days of Mirrodin Block. Since at this point in time “faster” doesn’t seem to mean “better.”
Sadly, there’s very little else to say at the moment until more testing is done and the replays are back up to stare into the abyss of the MTGO premier events. With that, I’m open to all suggestions for potential decks, so feel free to share. See you next week.
Josh Silvestri
Email me at: joshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom
Team Reflection