Two weekends ago I played in the St. Louis PTQ. I knew I was going to play Teachings, but as a lot of people were bringing either Iron Man, U/W Blink, or Pickles, I wanted something with both Coalition Relics (Korlash is not so strong against U/W Blink) and the ability to beat Iron Man, the deck I’d been developing all season. Gerry Thompson had the solution in a Relics/Blessings deck that had only Venser, Shadowmage Infiltrator, and Urza’s Factory as maindeck win conditions. I kid you not.
It took awhile, but a combination of Gerry and Tom LaPille convinced me to audible into the deck. I went 5-1-1, but my tiebreakers did not hold out — I suspect my round 1 opponent, who was a very nice guy playing in his first Constructed tournament with U/R Fish, and who said he would probably stay in through the whole Swiss to get experience, may have had something to do with it — so I did not make Top 8. Eventually a Teachings deck took the ticket.
I stuck with Gerry’s deck last weekend in Nashville, but after four hours of sleep the night before and five the night before that, I punted my way out of the tournament in short order. Fortunately, Alex Kim, the third member of our carload — besides Zac Hill, who already won his ticket with Teachings — won the PTQ with Teachings.
However, this is not an article about U/B Teachings. See, on the way home from Nashville, I had an idea.
The reason Gerry’s deck was so good in the mirror match was that it focused on the Factory war. Urza’s Factory is the toughest threat for Teachings to deal with, so Gerry just planned to get two of them online and handle all the other guy’s threats along the way. If the opponent tried Take Possession, Gerry had Venser and Blessings to recur him. If the other guy also got two Factories going, Gerry could deck himself with Careful Consideration and Gaea’s Blessing, and eventually just recycle removal spells every turn so as to push through Factory tokens. It’s not pretty, it does take a long time, but it works. If you don’t believe me, just ask this guy.
If long-game multiple Urza’s Factory superiority is a viable way to beat Teachings, I mused, what if I tried such a strategy in a non-Teachings deck? This Block has been so boring for so long, it’s about time someone tried a control strategy that didn’t revolve around Mystical T.
One thing led to another, and Monday night saw me excitedly testing out…
Creatures (12)
Lands (25)
Spells (23)
I’ll come clean. I wouldn’t actually label this G/B/r Control deck Rock except that I really wanted to title this article “Rock in Block.” You got me.
The first question I asked myself when I started developing this thing was, “Is this really going to be better than Teachings?” I mean — let’s be honest here — the odds that I’m going to actually discover a better control deck than the 800-lb gorilla of the format are miniscule at best. Still, there have been damn well no innovative new control decks since the Pro Tour, and it never hurts to reevaluate your assumptions about what is viable and what is not.
The obvious ways in which this deck is worse than Teachings are that it has no Teachings, no Tolaria West, and no potential for an Academy Ruins plan. The upside to this configuration is that you dodge Ancient Grudge, can play Korlash without relying on Urborg, and put Void, Yavimaya Dryad, and the surprisingly excellent Citanul Woodreaders to good use in a way that U/B Teachings cannot. The question, then, is “Are these upsides worth the cost of losing Teachings, Tolaria West, and the others?” I’d love to have an answer for you right now, but as I came up with the list less than 24 hours ago, it’s too soon to say.
I can, however, lay out the case for Rock.
The Deck
Against the Venser/Cloudskate decks, Yavimaya Dryad is actually an upgrade over Coalition Relic. Getting Relic bounced is a big tempo hit, but Vensering a Dryad is about the worst thing in the world for the Blue player. More importantly, Dryad accelerates mana and trades with all those random 2/2 donks (Venser, Riftsweeper, morphs that can’t flip into anything bigger), or chump blocks Tarmogoyf to keep you out of Psionic Blast range.
It is exactly that combination of acceleration and blocking that makes Dryad shine against the Red decks and G/W. She holds off Saffi, Thornweald Archer, and Riftsweeper, and puts you ahead on mana. Even if she chumps a Tarmogoyf, the difference between one mana source and an extra four life and one-and-a-half mana sources (as you get with Relic) is hardly significant.
In the mirror, Dryad’s defining advantage is that she is, well, not Coalition Relic. Relic is great in game 1, but one of the most common ways to fall hopelessly behind in the mirror is to have your artifact mana hit by Ancient Grudge or Return to Dust, at which point you instantly wish those artifacts had just been lands. When Dryad passes on, she graciously leaves the land behind. Most importantly, the fact that you have no two-cost or three-cost permanents that you care about lets you thrash your opponent’s artifact mana with Void in game 1. Not much in the format stings more than Voiding away a Finkel and two Relics for five mana and one Sorcery.
The rest of the deck is straightforward control, and remarkably similar to a Teachings list. Instead of Careful Consideration we have the somewhat worse Harmonize, instead of Teachings we have the faster (but less devastating in the long game) catch-all of Void, and one of my new personal favorites, the versatile Citanul Woodreaders. An old Mono-Blue Control trick from Kamigawa Block trick was to board in River Kaijin (also a 1/4 for three) against aggro to just block the early beaters. Blocking an Elephant token negates it just as well as a removal spell, but Woodreaders is just golden post-Damnation. Not only does it block the next Call token or 2/2 that comes your way, it also plows you ahead on card advantage for the late game. Best of all, he’s actually fine against Teachings; six mana to draw two cards is no bargain, but two more cards are two more cards… it’s not like they’re putting pressure on you.
The deck is rounded out by usual suspects of Damnation, Tendrils, and spot removal. After some lengthy debate, I chose Strangling Soot and Sudden Death as the maindeck spot removal spells primarily because they can both hit Finkel. Intuitively, maxing out on four and running zero of the other would look better, but maxing out on Strangling Soot leaves me with only Damnation, Void, and Tendrils to answer bigger creatures like Teferi, Brine Elemental, and Tarmogoyf, and those are all spells I want to cast whenever they’ll put me ahead, rather than stockpiling them for bigger threats. Sudden Death just needs to make an incoming Tarmogoyf a 0/1 to kill it if I have a dork handy, so it can remove all of the aforementioned threats just fine. On those grounds, I could max out on Sudden Death, but Strangling Soot is one of the best sources of brute-force card advantage available to a non-Blue control deck, and without the Teachings chain, I need all the help I can get in that area. With all these factors in mind, a two-two split on Soot and Sudden Death seems optimal.
I have grudgingly come to the conclusion that Edge of Autumn is better for this deck than the obvious alternatives of Prismatic Lens and Search for Tomorrow. Though it’s an awfully disappointing topdeck in the late game against Teachings, you rarely need more than eight lands against the beatdown decks, and often welcome the chance to cash one of the extras in for a fresh card off the top. Search for Tomorrow has a mark against it because it is vulnerable to Riftsweeper, but far more importantly, the deck has only eight Green sources to support its casting on the first turn of the game. When you bring Terramorphic Expanse into the equation, Edge of Autumn can be consistently cast on turn 2, but if Expanse is your only Green source, you won’t get your Search for Tomorrow land until turn 4, which is very slow. Lens dies to the extremely common (and potent) play of Void for two — reason enough to exclude it already — but compared to the simple Edge into Mountain, it is much worse to cast Void a full turn later than normal because Lens requires an extra mana to produce Red.
I started off with 27 lands, four Dryads, and four Edge of Autumns, but dropped two lands and an Edge when I found myself getting miserably flooded against beatdown. The Summoner’s Pact sideboard plan comes in against Teachings, where Ana Battlemage provides tutorable card advantage, and Riftsweeper provides removal for Aeon Chronicler and Detritivore. I had no Island or Battlemage when I played some test matches against Josh Silvestri, but Pacting for Woodreaders to get card advantage was mediocre enough that I decided to gobble up the extra sideboard slot for a basic land and a vastly superior, Haunting Hymn-esque tutor target. The matches against Silvestri also convinced me that I should max out on Woodreaders in the maindeck (where I was trying Gaea’s Blessings previously), because recovering from Haunting Hymn quickly is of the utmost importance in the first game.
Sideboarding
Since I’ve had less than 24 hours to test this deck, I’m probably going to get some things wrong here. The list is a rough draft, after all, so bear with me.
Versus U/G Beats, U/W Blink, and U/G/w Blink
+2 Strangling Soot
+2 Slaughter Pact
-4 Void
These swaps combine for a decent upgrade, but I don’t think any drastic changes are necessary to win this matchup. Void is the slowest removal spell in the matchup, and they board in a lot of countermagic. Besides, Death by Speed is a more common death than Death by Not Enough Card Advantage against U/G, so I would rather have more early ways to slow them down than more expensive sources of card advantage.
After all, the best way for control to beat aggro-control is to just one-for-one their early guys until they run out of steam, because if you’re still at twelve life in the midgame and entering a topdeck war against a deck packing Grizzly Bears and five-mana 2/2 flyers while you’re topdecking Harmonize, Tendrils of Corruption, Citanul Woodreaders, and Korlash…it’s not tough to figure out who is the favorite.
Versus G/W and G/W/r Kavu Predator
+2 Strangling Soot
+2 Slaughter Pact
-4 Citanul Woodreaders
I love me some Woodreaders, but G/W will have Thrill of the Hunt to make blocking uncomfortable and the Kavu deck has too many large men that can just attack past it. The loss of Woodreaders is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I keep in Void, so I can get card advantage by nicking spare Enforcers and Stonewood Invocations that are sitting in the opponent’s hand when I cast the wrecking ball.
By the way, this deck would probably be unplayable without Void. Not just because it kills artifacts and gets two-for-ones (and better) against beatdown, but because it answers two of the biggest threats to this deck: Mystic Enforcer and Bust. Granted, there are fewer Enforcers around these days, and I haven’t seen a Bust actually cast in a PTQ in over a month, but having a way to deal with problem cards without the inclusion of Mystical Teachings in your deck is extraordinarily valuable when you actually get paired against the problem card.
Versus Slivers
+2 Strangling Soot
+2 Slaughter Pact
-4 Citanul Woodreaders
Void is awesome against this deck. If you cast it when they have a Frenetic out, and they guess you’re going to name three, they have to flip a coin and suffer a 50-50 shot of losing their guy… and then you’ll just name something else. If they don’t flip, then you just name three when the spell resolves, and their Frenetic dies. Ideally, you want to name two with Void when you cast it, as this will strip out any copies of Boom/Bust and Delay in their hand. The other way to stop them from casting Bust is to just kill their Gemhide Slivers. They don’t play enough lands to cast Bust without the aid of Gemhide, so keep that guy off the table and you should be safe.
Versus Pickles
+3 Riftsweeper
+2 Strangling Soot
+2 Slaughter Pact
-4 Citanul Woodreaders
-3 Tendrils of Corruption
I always board in as many Pulls from Eternity as I’ve got when I’m playing Teachings against Pickles, because nearly all the draws that beat me start off with a suspended card on turn one or two. The way I always explain the Pickles matchup to people is, “if they’ve got The Draw, or if you get stuck on land, then that’s it. Otherwise, just watch out for Willbender on your Carefuls, remember that they can bring in Teferi plus morphed Brine on any given end step, and you’ll out-control them in the long game.”
By the way, the Pickles Versus Teachings matchup is far closer to 50-50 than Pickles players will have you believe, provided the Teachings player has Relics and Spell Bursts post-board. In the St. Louis PTQ, I played two Pickles players. One did not suspend any cards before turn 3 in either game, and was crushed easily. The other one got The Draw in game 1, and I got stuck on three lands in the third game. He was my one loss in the Swiss.
Having said all that, I’m not sure how Block Rock Versus Pickles will go. Being able to counter Teferi with Pact of Negation before was important, but then again, Riftsweeper and Yavimaya Dryad should be excellent against them. I guess time will tell.
Versus Relic Teachings
+3 Ancient Grudge
+2 Summoner’s Pact
+1 Deadwood Treefolk
+1 Riftsweeper
+1 Ana Battlemage
+1 Island
-4 Damnation
-2 Tendrils of Corruption
-2 Sudden Death
-1 Edge of Autumn
The plan here is straightforward. Ancient Grudge blows up their mana, Summoner’s Pact gets us either card advantage or Riftsweeper for Detritivore or Chronicler. Detritivore doesn’t have many targets in this deck, but Urza’s Factory is important enough to make it worth packing an answer. Cutting an Edge of Autumn for the Island actually ups the deck’s effective mana count by a bit, because this is the one matchup where you actually do want all those late-game mana sources, and Edges become poor when cycling it will put you further away from sixteen lands and double-Factory status.
Versus Non-Relic Teachings
+3 Ancient Grudge
+2 Summoner’s Pact
+1 Deadwood Treefolk
+1 Riftsweeper
+1 Ana Battlemage
+1 Island
-3 Tendrils of Corruption
-2 Sudden Death
-1 Edge of Autumn
Grudge isn’t really worth it if they don’t have Relics to go with their Lenses, and if they don’t have Relic, chances are they have Korlash. Damnation stays in as the only reliable answer to that guy besides the Legend Rule.
Conclusion
I probably won’t have time to test this before GenCon this weekend, so I’m not sure if I’ll have a tournament report with it coming for next week. Still, I hope this deck will provide a playable breath of fresh air to mages who are sick of casting Mystical Teachings with their control decks day in and day out.
See you next week!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]