A big part of preparing for a Constructed tournament is figuring out what your deck’s good and bad matchups are. You achieve this by playtesting against the known decks in the environment, and must usually deduce (without testing) how you’ll do against the “random” decks that will be played even though they lack a strong history of success.
If you think the matchups indicate that you have a good chance of succeeding with the deck, you’ll obviously bring it to the tournament. On the other hand, if you look at the deck’s matchups and don’t like your chances, you may scrap it and play something else, or you may stick with it anyway on the grounds that you don’t have time to learn something else before the tournament starts.
So let’s assume you feel confident you understand your deck’s matchups against the field. How do you decide if they’re good enough that you should play the deck, or that they’re so poor that you should pick up something else? Where do you draw the line?
The Rules of Engagement, as I call them, are the guidelines for what makes a deck an acceptable choice for a given tournament. There might be several decks in your arsenal that fit the bill – in which case you can choose from among them – but anything that fails to conform to the Rules is simply not worth taking.
Sometimes the Rules are easy to figure out. Take Mirrodin Block, for example: Big Red won the Pro Tour, and Affinity was the most powerful deck. Thus, the Rules of Engagement at the beginning of that PTQ season were as follows.
1) You must be prepared to beat Affinity multiple times at a given tournament.
2) You must be prepared to beat Big Red multiple times at a given tournament.
There was some Tooth and Nail floating around, but you didn’t have to play a deck that beat it, because it wasn’t a given that you’d run into it. Big Red and Affinity, though, you’d expect to hit at every single tournament. And while it would have been great to have favorable matchups against both of these decks, achieving that was a pretty tall order.
So that was the challenge of the format: these two decks were so popular, you knew you could expect to get paired against both of them, and likely more than once, at a given tournament… so you had to be prepared to beat both of them if you were to have a chance at doing well. No matter how good your Big Red matchup was, if you scooped to Affinity, odds were good that you would run into it twice, lose to it twice, and go home.
Mind you, it’s never out of the question that you’ll do well at a Magic tournament, no matter what you bring. Even if you broke the Rules you’d laid out and showed up completely unprepared for the two Big Dogs of early Mirrodin Block, you could still Top 8 or even win the tournament if you were fortunate enough to dodge those pairings (or get paired against them, but pull out the necessary wins anyway) for the duration of the event.
Any time you saw a Top 8 list from a Mirrodin Block PTQ and wondered, “I don’t see how this deck could ever beat Affinity or Big Red – how did it make Top 8?” it’s not necessarily the case that the deck actually had a strong matchup against both of them, and that you were just missing something. More likely, its pilot either didn’t get paired against Affinity, or managed to steal wins against it in the Swiss. It happens. Still, if you went to a Mirrodin Block tournament with a deck that lost to both Big Red and Affinity, you really shouldn’t have been surprised if you failed to do well.
As a season progresses and metagames change, so to do the Rules of Engagement for that environment. The G/R deck known as the Freshmaker entered the scene in Mirrodin Block, boasting a favorable matchup against both Affinity and Big Red. It became a new Deck to Beat, but its popularity – compared to Big Red and Affinity – varied by region. How did this change the Rules of Engagement?
If the deck was very popular in your area, to the point of matching or exceeding the popularity of Big Red and Affinity, you were suddenly faced with three mega-popular decks to contend with. While it would have been great to find something that beat all three of them, doing so was probably an unrealistic goal. If you couldn’t come up with some miracle solution to all three, your next-best bet would have been to shoot for two out of three, while trying to scrape together victories against the third despite the unfavorable matchup.
Why would you stop at two out of three – 66% – when the rule for pre-Freshmaker MBC was two out of two – 100%? Because if you establish a rule that your deck must beat three out of three to be worthwhile, and can’t find a deck that does so, then the Rules tell you to choose no deck. That’s not helpful; if this happens to you, then your rules are too strict. You have to relax them a bit, and accept that your chances of victory with a deck that only beats two out of three of the top decks are not as good as they were back when you could beat two out of two. If two out of three is the best you can do, it’s better to settle for that and make the trip than to conclude that no deck is good enough to take to the tournament, and just sit home and eat potato chips instead.
In this Big Red / Affinity / Freshmaker scenario, the Rules of Engagement would have been:
1) You must be prepared to beat two out of the three following decks multiple times at a given tournament: Big Red, Affinity, and Freshmaker.
To reiterate, this means that two out of three favorable matchups is just the baseline spread you must achieve in such a three-deck environment if you are to have a good shot at doing well. Any favorable matchups you can swing against the fringe decks in the format are icing on the cake, but if you cannot at least get two out of the Big Three, your chances of doing well are unacceptably low.
But enough about Mirrodin Block. Today, we have a more wide-open (some have said “healthy” – I’ll say “wide-open”) Extended environment than any I’ve ever seen, and there has been much discussion about how to approach such an environment. Lots of conflicting advice has been offered on the subject; pearls of wisdom like “You just have to play the most powerful deck,” and “You just have to know your deck inside and out” have never been bandied about as often as they are now.
Of course, nothing in Magic is simple enough to be solved by a single sentence. The complicated question of how to approach a format of such unprecedented variety could use some distilling, and I think figuring out the Rules of Engagement for the format is the best place to start. Having said all this, I pose a simple question.
What are the Rules of Engagement for the current Extended environment?
In other words, what are the matchups a deck must be favored in, minimum, if it is to have a good chance of doing well?
If we apply the Mirrodin Block model of “you have to be prepared to defeat the most widely played decks,” we’d get an absurdly unrealistic set of Rules:
1) You must be prepared to beat Aggro Loam at a given tournament.
2) You must be prepared to beat Trinket Tog at a given tournament.
3) You must be prepared to beat TEPS at a given tournament.
4) You must be prepared to beat U/W Tron at a given tournament.
5) You must be prepared to beat Midrange Flow at a given tournament.
…
…
12) You must be prepared to beat Affinity at a given tournament.
13) You must be prepared to beat U/G Opposition at a given tournament.
14) Ditto for Boros
15) Ichorid
Pretty much everything is widely played. Unlike early Mirrodin Block, there are no Big Two decks of the format. You can easily go a seven-round PTQ, pair exclusively against popular and expected archetypes the entire day, and never play against the same thing twice. The problem is that you can’t “settle” for fourteen out of fifteen and hope to find a deck that meets your criteria, nor can you say “two out of fifteen is plenty for a Top 8” with a straight face.
Further complicating the problem is the fact that all the decks are playing strategies that must be attacked from different angles, meaning Splash Damage is not nearly as effective these days as it once was. Tormod’s Crypt and Ancient Grudge are probably the splashiest of the sideboard all-stars, but even they are unspectacular across matchup borders. Grudge is excellent against Affinity and Crypt is amazing against Ichorid, but where else are they actually hosers as opposed to merely strong? Scepter-Chant can defeat a Grudge by laying Teferi before dropping the Scepter, and Aggro Loam can play around Crypt by keeping a cycling land in hand and a mana open in order to get the Loam back and restart the engine. Grudge and Crypt also have applications against TEPS, Tron, and equipment decks, but they get less and less exciting the further away from Affinity and Ichorid they get.
Destructive Flow is the most widely applicable hoser in the format, but only decks specifically constructed to play it can do so. I played a midrange Destructive Flow deck at a PTQ and at GP: Dallas, splashing Blue for Trinket Mage on the logic that most decks were vulnerable to either Flow or Mage. My losses were to the mirror (unchecked Confidant advantage for several turns in game 1, and a one-outer Putrefy topdeck in game 2), to a hybrid Aggro Loam / CAL deck, to Goblins, and to Wizards.
Besides the mirror, none of these were expected decks; I played to beat the popular decks and got knocked out in the first few rounds by the unexpected. I almost certainly would not have done this had I taken the popular Tenacious Tron deck Zac Hill and I built, as Tron is much better at overpowering unexpected decks. (Tim Aten, in Dallas, told me that “I think I speak for anyone who’s ever read one of your articles when I say, “You played the wrong deck, stupid.”) It’s impossible for me to say whether I would have put up a quality finish even if I had played Tron, because of Cause and Effect and all that, but I think it unlikely that I would have dropped out as early as I had if my deck had contained Sundering Titan instead of Trinket Mage.
This experience has led me to confirm what I think is the first Rule of Engagement in Extended right now:
1) You must play a deck that is at least powerful.
This Rule is not to be confused with the incorrect maxim that you must play the most powerful deck available. Trinket Tog is not nearly as powerful as alternatives such as TEPS, Affinity, or Aggro Loam, but it still has enough punch against the unknown decks to expect to beat them if its bullets are ineffective. Even if the opponent’s deck is not concerned about Trinket Mage (for Crypt, Needle, or Explosives), nor Divining Top plus Counterbalance… well, pretty much everybody is vulnerable to an enormous, attacking Psychatog backed up by Counterspell. All my Flow deck had to offer in the power department was Iwamori and equipment, which is more “Standard powerful” than “Extended powerful,” if you catch my meaning.
A side effect of the “print exclusively Tier 2 cards” strategy that R&D has embraced lately is that the Tier 2 and Tier 3 decks are much closer in power level to their Tier 1 competitors. At every Extended PTQ you attend, some number of people will just play Birds, Elves, and random big guys like Loxodon Hierarchs and / or Ravenous Baloths. They might also toss in some Jittes, Duresses, and Deeds, and then finish the list off with some Vindicates, blissfully oblivious to the consequences of a TEPS, Aggro-Loam, or Scepter-Chant pairing. Still, if you can’t beat accelerated 4/4 life-gainers and the like, you may very well pack it to one of these decks in the first few rounds of the tournament, no matter how prepared you were to smash the top tier to pieces.
So play decks that are at least powerful. I think we can all agree on that one.
What, then, is the second Rule of Engagement?
That’s the problem – I’m not sure. Are there any Decks To Beat right now, aside from the bevy of comparably successful Tier 1-2 decks? Brandon Scheel opined that Trinket Tog and Luis Scott-Vargas Aggro-Loam (with Confidants and Ghost Quarter) were the strongest decks at GP: Dallas, and that everything else was a tier below them. Assuming that’s the case, what do you do if you don’t play one of those two decks at a PTQ?
You could make it a Rule that you must be prepared to beat them, since they’re the two best decks, but is that even helpful in an environment like this? Alex Ledbetter made Top 8 at Dallas with a deck that he says probably has trouble with Aggro Loam, and which has an abysmal Tron matchup – and those were the two most popular Day 2 decks at the tournament! However, while Loam and Tron were the most popular, they still only made up 17% and 12.5% of the field, respectively, so it’s not hard to see how he could have avoided those pairings over six rounds and still make the elimination rounds.
But even if you do make Rule of Engagement number two be “You must be prepared to beat Trinket Tog and Aggro Loam” – and also maybe Tribal Flames, which might pick up in popularity now that it has had a good showing at a major tournament – where do you go from there? I don’t think any deck, or couple of decks, will be so overwhelmingly popular that you can profitably stop at two Rules, predicting success for yourself as long as your deck is powerful and beats those few key matchups. Instead, I think that those few key matchups will, together, comprise no more than 35% of the field at a given tournament, meaning your chances of doing well if you don’t prepare for the others are still quite poor. If you don’t stop at the top three contenders, though, where do you draw the line? Which other decks do you add to the list? Like I said, I’m not sure.
These “All Tier 2 Cards” environments present a whole new set of challenges for the Constructed Magician, and I don’t think anyone has figured out how to consistently succeed in them yet. Ever notice how every Top 8 is comprised of a bevy of different decks? They always look like “one TEPS, one Affinity, one Tron, one Loam, one Flow, one Scepter-Chant, one Tog, and one Opposition.” Think about it – how does this keep happening? Wouldn’t you expect something more along the lines of one archetype doing noticeably well at a couple of different PTQs in one week, and then its foil doing well in the following week?
I submit that this trend is because a lot of people bring decks that have about a 70% chance of sitting down across from a favorable matchup, and then those players that happen to sit down across from the correct sequence of opponents continue to win until they slip and hit a bad pairing. (This percentage can be offset somewhat by playskill, but if your TEPS deck runs into someone who sticks early Destructive Flows in two games during the match, playskill won’t help much.) This is a huge generalization, of course, and obviously there are a lot of case-by-case exceptions, but I think it’s a reasonable explanation for the overall trend in the makeup of PTQ Top 8s this season.
That’s no way to compete, though. There’s got to be a better way to approach this environment than to just beat a bunch of the decks and hope to get paired against the right ones.
So far I’ve come up with one Rule of Engagement for this Extended season, and suggested a potential second. What are the others? Where do we go from here? Sound off in the forums. Let’s get some ideas going.
In any event, I hope the discussion has been helpful to your deck selection process.
See you next week!
Richard Feldman
Team Tok-Tok, Volcano Born
[email protected]