In seasons past, I’ve turned to Standard on MTGO to get my Constructed fix when the PTQ format was Limited. I tended to play as competitively as I would at the PTQ level, aiming to stockpile tickets more than anything else.
This time around, I’m trying something new. See, I’ve always been more of a deck mechanic than a deck designer. I’ve had a good track record of taking other peoples’ decks, modifying them, and ending up with something stronger… but I’ve never had much success building brand-new decks from the ground up. I felt especially fortunate to have qualified for Pro Tour: Honolulu, the first Standard PT in years, because I had an established (Standard) metagame to guide my playtesting. If I ever qualify for a Block Constructed PT, I don’t know what I’ll do.
With no Constructed PTQ in sight, now seems as good a time as any to work on that deficiency of mine. As such, my New Year’s Resolution — er, what month is it? April? Whatever, it’s all good — is to dedicate this off-season to inventing at least one successful, competitive Standard deck. Unlike my Tuesday Premium Partner, Martin Luther Green, I don’t usually have the guts to insist on winning on my own terms; this time, however, I’m making a rule for myself: no playing anything I didn’t come up with on my own.
In MJF’s last article, he discussed the Traits of a Great Deck Designer. A Great Deck Designer is something I am nowhere close to being at the moment, but also something I’d like to consider myself one day. Looking over his list of traits, I was satisfied with myself on numbers 1-5, thought I had a ways to go on number 6 (finding short-term solutions to common problems at a specific tournament), and flunked both 7 (“Breaks the most broken cards in the format in the most broken possible way”) and 8 (“Identifies the most broken card for a format”).
Finding short-term solutions to problems won’t really come up until GP: Columbus or Regionals, and it’s a bit late in the day to be breaking the most broken cards in Standard with Future Sight right around the corner. Nevertheless, I can still work on Mike’s implied Trait Number Zero — “Designs His Own Decks” — while I wait for FS to arrive.
I haven’t played a Standard tournament since States, so naturally I have some catching up to do before embarking on my quest. There’s a five-step process I go through in the weeks leading up to States or Regionals, through which I learn what everyone’s been up to since I last knew what was going on in the world of Standard. That process should serve nicely here.
Step 1: Scout out the Enemy
My target environment is MTGO’s Standard, and Frank Karsten’s most recent results show Izzetron bursting with popularity since GP: Kyoto. Dragonstorm remains a consistent finisher, and Dralnu, U/RB Tron, U/G Tron, and Dredge trail those two in popularity.
Watching replays of the most recent Standard Premier Events confirmed some of this, but also indicated that Gruul is on the rise — no doubt munching on all the tasty Tron decks that have cropped up — and that Brine Elemental strategies as a whole seem to have fallen off the radar. It’s important to note, by the way, that this data is taken from Top 8s only. For all I know, the Swiss of these Premier Events is swarming with Scryb & Force decks that keep getting beaten down by all the Dragonstorm players… but having not yet played in an actual event, it’s impossible for me to say.
On record, I suspect there is still a disproportionate Dralnu following in the Swiss; it was the most successful deck before the GP, and I think its decrease in Top 8s is more due to “people are playing it and losing to Tron” than it is a decrease in the number of people playing it. That may change if its waning results cause players to jump ship, but right now my money’s on it still being a Deck To Beat in the Swiss.
As I see it, here’s the bio on each of the most popular decks.
Dragonstorm — Blue/Redhead that goes off around turn 4, but sometimes can only muster a Hellkite instead of an outright kill. Often misunderstood to be vulnerable to such sideboard duds as Trickbind and Shadow of Doubt, which seem to be run in complete ignorance of DS’s four (maindeck, for crying out loud — you can’t miss ‘em) Gigadrowses. She actually is vulnerable to these cards when backed up by Rewind, and is also susceptible to hand disruption backed up by a clock. However, since these cards and strategies are on the decline right now, she has my vote for Best Deck in the Format.
Dralnu — Blue/Black deck that likes long walks on the beach and even longer mirror matches. Mystical Teachings finds silver bullets like Extirpate and Sudden Death, and Skeletal Vampire or Dralnu once Teferi is in play. Vulnerable to Blood Moon.
Izzetron — Another Blue/Redhead that keeps Bogardan Hellkites for pets. Also enjoys Elemental companion made of Sulfur, which infuriates other control decks off to no end. Also vulnerable to Blood Moon.
Gruul — Green/Redhead who dislikes writers that tastelessly joke about the “once per month” Blood Moons in the sideboard. (Because, you know, they are boarded in much more frequently than that.) Not at all passive-aggressive; just aggressive, typically starting with Kird Ape and Llanowar Elves and ending at Giant Solifuge.
The only other decks I saw repeatedly in the replays I watched were Zac’s Splitting Headache deck and U/B Tron, but they were far less common than the first four.
Step 2: Find an Angle of Attack
Now I know my enemies. How do I defeat them?
Well, Dragonstorm seems like the most resilient. Let’s start from there. How can I modify Dragonstorm to —
Oh, right. I’m on a diet here. No more starting with other peoples’ decks; too many saturated fats. Sigh.
So what kind of deck am I creating here? Well, combo decks take inspiration to come up with (due to that whole “needing to think of a combo” thing), and I’ve got nothing brewing at the moment. I am frankly terrified by the thought of scratch-building a midrange or control deck that could beat anything else and still go toe-to-toe with Dralnu, so it looks like we’re headed down the aggro path.
The default aggressive curve right now is “Kird Ape, Scab-Clan Mauler, Call of the Herd, Giant Solifuge.” The sad part is, you actually need a better draw than that if you’re to outrace a fourth-turn Dragonstorm, even if Gruul has the first turn. The only post-board disruption I’ve seen from the G/R end of things comes in the form of Ancient Grudge on Lotus Bloom, which isn’t much, considering DS brings in both Pyroclasm and Repeal.
Therefore, if my initial impression of the format is that Dragonstorm is the top dog, and if I want to beat it with an aggro deck, I must be able to disrupt it somehow.
That means either aggro with Blue, aggro with Black, or land destruction. Fielding a land destruction deck against Remand and Lotus Bloom sounds about as appealing as getting shot in the gut, coated in honey and thumbtacks, and buried alive with snakes, bears, and radioactive fire ants… so I guess that narrows it down to beatdown with Black and / or Blue.
Looking at Blue’s disruption options, I don’t like what I see. Other than Spiketail Drakeling, everything is vulnerable to Gigadrowse, and often requires me to keep mana open on the opponent’s turn for fear of him going off, even when I’d rather play a threat in my main phase.
So my chosen angle of attack is Black/X aggro. Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying a Black/X aggro deck is the only way to approach this format. Far, far from it. I’m just walking you through the thought process that led me to the first deck I’m going to experiment with as I work my way into this unfamiliar territory.
Step 3: Try Something Out
I actually happened to have done a bit of testing before I had completely worked out Step 2, so things are a little out of order here.
The testing took place a couple weeks ago against JP Smee (grats on 11th at GP: Mass with T-Galbs!), in the back seat of a PTQ-bound car. At the time, I had a similar snapshot of the environment in my mind, except with Mono-Green Aggro supplanting Gruul as the beatdown deck of choice. On those grounds, I tried out a Rakdos deck against Dragonstorm and MGA. Le List is as follows.
4 Rakdos Carnarium
4 Blood Crypt
8 Swamp
6 Mountain
4 Martyr of Ashes
4 Dark Confidant
4 Rakdos Guildmage
4 Sulfur Elemental
4 Sedge Sliver
4 Rakdos Augermage
3 Giant Solifuge
4 Char
3 Hit / Run
4 Rise / Fall
The sideboard included Blood Moon and the fourth Hit / Run and Solifuge, but I wasn’t sure where to go with it beyond that.
Essentially, this list had three plans.
Against Dragonstorm, the plan was to lay men and attack, pausing only to cast Fall and to hold Hit mana open once I’d gotten the opponent down to eight life. The two chief disruption spells were Fall and Terry Soh, in theory. In practice, Fall was awesome, but Terry just got Gigadrowsed almost every time; I only got two activations off in the dozen games we played. Then again, the fact that the opponent had to blow Gigadrowse preemptively to stave off Terry often allowed me to keep Hit mana open on the critical turn, so he wasn’t a complete loss.
The plan for Dralnu was to avoid playing my spells in a way that helped out my opponent. Sitting on a Dark Confidant to outdraw him until he cast Damnation or tutored up Sudden Death, Flashing in uncounterable Sulfur Elementals end of turn, and following up Damnation with Giant Solifuge or Rakdos Guildmage, gave me plenty of ways to mess with the opponent’s gameplan. A Martyr on the table alongside Rakdos Guildmage or Sedge Sliver also precluded Teferi from intercepting mid-combat. Post-board shenanigans included Blood Moon, naturally.
The MGA matchup proved to be all about Silhana Ledgewalker, so having Martyr of Ashes or Hit primed on the third turn was often the deciding factor of the game. Without Ledgewalker, my Sedge Slivers, Augermages, and Martyrs gave me a significant advantage in the matchup… but more often than I would have liked, JP had the Ledgewalker and I did not have the answer.
We played about a dozen games against MGA and Dragonstorm, and I split both of them. Great. We didn’t get to the Izzetron matchup, but reasoned that Sedge Sliver and sideboarded Blood Moons would have been my strongest assets there.
I was happy when MGA begat Gruul (no more Ledgewalker!) in the following weeks, so I put a lot of thought into how to update this deck to make it better against Dragonstorm. The more I thought about it, the more unreasonable it seemed that I could get where I wanted to without the aid of Castigate — at least in the board, if not maindeck.
The problem with that was, splashing in White would have made Blood Moon an unreasonable sideboard option. Losing Blood Moon would have, in turn, wreaked havoc with my plans against Tron and Dralnu. That made me wonder if it was worth it at all to dip into White, even though the next-best substitute for Castigate (probably Brain Pry) was miles away from its level of effectiveness.
Usually I hang out in Step 3 here, puzzling about some problem I can’t solve, until…
Step 4: Inspiration
And now for a tangent that will seem entirely off-topic, but which — I assure you — is not.
Historically, if a deckbuilder wanted access to Red on his first turn, he’d play at least 14 mana sources. Having said that, here are two interesting facts about mana ratios.
1) With 14 Red sources in your deck and a seven-card hand on the play, you have an 86% chance of having Red on turn 1.
2) Under the same circumstances, if you have only 12 Red sources instead of 14, your chances drop from 86% to 81%.
A 5% decrease is not a lot. It’s significant, but should only tax you somewhere around one extra mulligan per tournament; it is not so much of a dip that you must take drastic action like reducing your Red commitment to a mere splash. In other words, if you have some compelling reason to cheat down to 12 sources from 14, you won’t be hurting yourself too much.
Craig Jones nearly won a Pro Tour running Kird Apes with 10 Forests in his deck, at a 74% chance of having a Forest on turn 2 on the play. If I were to cheat down to eight instead, my chance of attacking with a 2/3 Ape on the second turn (on the play) would drop only slightly, from 74% to 71%. Again, seems worth it as long as I get something sweet in return for dropping to eight.
Where am I going with all this? Well, the inspiration that struck me was to play four colors, splashing white into Rakdos for Castigate and Lightning Helix, and green (using eight Ravnica Forests, mind) for Kird Ape and Watchwolf. Pillar of the Paruns would be the glue that would hold this beast together, leaving me interested in playing the following spells.
Kird Ape
Shadow Guildmage
Dark Confidant
Watchwolf
Sedge Sliver
Sulfur Elemental
Giant Solifuge
Hit / Run
Lightning Helix
Castigate
Rise / Fall
Fiery Justice
After I came up with this list of contenders, I realized that Boros Swiftblade made a lot of sense for this deck. In conjunction with Sulfur Elemental or Moldervine Cloak, I could hit for four or eight damage on turn three with him, and his mana cost made him eligible for PillarPay.
When I laid out the mana for the deck, I realized a pretty glaring problem. If I have 14 Red sources (counting Pillar of the Paruns)… well, that’s awesome for a four-color deck! However, because of Pillar’s restriction, I have only 10 Red sources with which to cast my Kird Apes and Sulfur Elementals. It’s one thing to cheat on Kird Ape-pumping Forests — I still get to hit for one, and the problem might rectify itself within a turn or two anyway if I topdeck one — but it’s quite another issue to have no mana with which to play my one-drop at all. I could try and get away with cheating on land even more here… but then how can I expect to hit Confidant on turn 2 with only eight non-Pillar Black sources, and then Cloak on turn 3 with eight Greens?
The bottom line was, with the 4 Pillars in there, I could not fit enough non-Pillar lands to be able to reliably cast monochrome Black, Green, and Red spells. Somehow, I had to re-work things to get twelve Red producers (out of 22 lands) that would let me cast Kird Ape on turn 1, and I had to do it with the restriction that I also play at least eight Forests for Kird Ape and eight Swamps for Sedge Sliver. Oh, and at least twelve to support the other three colors as well. Awkward.
For four-color manabases, I’ll often lay out a color table to help me tweak things around. This was a tremendous help here, and led me to the following.
| W | B | G | R | |
| 4 Pillar of the Paruns | (4) | (4) | (4) | (4) |
| 4 Stomping Ground | 4 | 4 | ||
| 4 Overgrown Tomb | 4 | 4 | ||
| 4 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] | 4 | 4 | ||
| 2 Sacred Foundry | 2 | 2 | ||
| 2 Godless Shrine | 2 | 2 | ||
| 2 Blood Crypt | 2 | 2 | ||
| Totals | 12 | 12 | 12 | 16 |
Making Red my only monochrome color was the only way I could support each of my “five” colors (White gold, Green gold, Black gold, Red gold, and monochrome Red) with 12 or more mana producers, and still keep the eight Forests and eight Swamps in there.
This new direction for the manabase cost me Moldervine Cloak, which would eat into my percentages against aggro and control, and Dark Confidant, who was strong against combo and control and a mixed bag against aggro.
Since Dralnu was waning in popularity and I was pretty sure I’d have boosted my win rate against it anyway by transitioning from Midrange Rakdos into Zoo On Crack, I wasn’t too saddened by the loss of Confidant. Cloak was kind of a bigger deal to me; I was still looking for angles to eke out wins against Dragonstorm, and one of the biggest ways I saw myself doing that was by playing a Moldervine Cloak on a Boros Swiftblade and crashing for a mammoth eight on turn 3.
In searching for a Cloak replacement, I stumbled upon the Raphael Levy all-star Boros Swiftblade companion, the humble Brute Force.
Force was clearly worse against Gruul, but made back some of the difference by helping turn around a rout. (You know the times when you’re up against a wall, facing down multiple attackers backed up by a steady stream of burn for your blockers? A one-mana pump spell gains you a surprising amount of ground in that situation.) Brute Force might actually be better against Dragonstorm because its pump comes after it is too late to Gigadrowse, it costs less to replay if it is Remanded, and it can be played alongside a Fall or a Castigate in the same turn.
With my new focus on monochrome Red, Brute Force over Moldervine Cloak, and Swiftblade over Confidant, the only non-Red spell remaining in my deck was Watchwolf. (I chose to maindeck Fall, but not Castigate, both because the potential two-for-one sounded a lot more appealing in the beatdown mirror, and because playing more than four two-mana discard spells main seemed like a recipe for disaster against aggro.) This enticed me to put Martyr of Ashes back in from the original Rakdos deck, which was the finishing touch on the following list.
Creatures (23)
- 4 Kird Ape
- 4 Boros Swiftblade
- 4 Watchwolf
- 3 Giant Solifuge
- 4 Martyr of Ashes
- 2 Sedge Sliver
- 2 Sulfur Elemental
Lands (22)
I initially had four Sulfur Elemental and zero Sedge Sliver in the main, but realized that Sulfur Elemental — while great against Dralnu and Dragonstorm — could get me into trouble against Izzetron and other Red decks. It’s amazing when he turns Swiftblade into a 2/1 Double Strike against Dragonstorm, but much less so when Izzetron or Gruul plays a second Sulfur Elemental and pumps the Swiftblade a second time, to 3/0. Rather than encouraging this situation, and also because Sedge Sliver is stronger in his own right against Izzetron and Gruul, I moved two of the Elementals to the board in order to add a pair of Slivers to the starting lineup.
The deck is ready for playtesting, but naturally, I have some concerns. I have made numerous “reasonable” cheats here and there; I justified them individually, but they have the potential to add up to something significant. One five percent dip in consistency isn’t a big deal, but five such changes might be. Also, it’s a lot easier to mulligan a two-color deck into hitting the right mana than it is a four-color deck.
On the other hand, Pillar of the Paruns innovator Olivier Ruel made the bulk rare work for him back in Ravnica Block with 24 total lands to my 22; I can take some comfort in knowing that if the mana doesn’t work out, bolstering the land count a bit might be all it takes to repair the problem.
Notice, by the way, how “That’s the craziest foggin’ monstrosity of a beatdown deck I’ve ever wanted to throw up on” isn’t one of my concerns? Comes with the territory, I guess; I can’t very well say I came up with a new deck if the list was expected.
In any case, I’m excited to see how this thing fares.
Step 5: Playtest!
See you next week.
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]