The U/B Teachings mirror is the subject of today’s discussion, and it is a matchup that has become more and more complex as the season has progressed. As such, I’m going to start from the simplest aspects of the matchup and then introduce more and more complexities as I progress.
The Fundamentals: Threats and Answers
At its simplest, winning the mirror match is as basic as any game of Magic: you must find a way to kill your opponent before he kills you. Simple enough.
Here’s the reason the Teachings mirror takes about five hundred times as long as a normal game of Magic:
I summon Bogardan Hellkite and plan to kill you with him. This plan will work out beautifully as long as you aren’t holding Tendrils of Corruption, Temporal Isolation (or its sometime-replacements Spin into Myth or Pongify), Slaughter Pact, Mystical Teachings for any of the aforementioned, Tolaria West for Slaughter Pact, or Damnation.
Yes, as long as my opponent has none of these answers available, my Hellkite will go all the way.
Would you believe me if I told you he usually doesn’t get there?
The most basic thing you must realize about the mirror match is that both players have more answers than the other guy has threats. Teferi, Brine Elemental, Venser, and Draining Whelk all die to the same things as Hellkite, and the first three bite it to Sudden Death too. Even Korlash, who is immune to almost all removal — save for Damnation and countermagic — can be thwarted by Urza’s Factory, the Legend Rule, or some sequence like “Venser your only Basic Swamp, then put a second Urborg on the table to make him 0/0.” Getting a finisher to stick around in the Teachings mirror is just a very daunting task.
But just how daunting is it? Let’s take a look. I’ve listed here the common U/B finishers, and the common maindeck removal spells that deal with them. (I’m not counting answers that can easily be reversed, such as blockers, bounce spells, and Take Possession.)
- Aeon Chronicler (10-23 answers) — 4 Damnation, 0-2 Pull from Eternity, 1-4 Tendrils, 2-4 Teachings, 1 Slaughter Pact, 1 Pact of Negation, 0-1 Draining Whelk, 0-1 Spell Burst, 1 Isolation/Spin/Pongify, 0-4 Cancel/Logic Knot/Psychotic Episode. Maybe Sudden Death, too, but I wouldn’t count on it.
- Triskelavus (10-22 answers) — 4 Damnation, 1-4 Tendrils, 2-4 Teachings, 1 Slaughter Pact, 1 Pact of Negation, 0-1 Sudden Death, 0-1 Draining Whelk, 0-1 Spell Burst, 1 Isolation/Spin/Pongify, 0-4 Cancel/Logic Knot/Psychotic Episode.
- Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir (10-22 answers) — 4 Damnation, 1-4 Tendrils, 2-4 Teachings, 1 Slaughter Pact, 1 Pact of Negation, 0-1 Sudden Death, 0-1 Draining Whelk, 0-1 Spell Burst, 1 Isolation/Spin/Pongify, 0-4 Cancel/Logic Knot/Psychotic Episode.
- Venser, Shaper Savant (10-22 answers) — 4 Damnation, 1-4 Tendrils, 2-4 Teachings, 1 Slaughter Pact, 1 Pact of Negation, 0-1 Sudden Death, 0-1 Draining Whelk, 0-1 Spell Burst, 1 Isolation/Spin/Pongify, 0-4 Cancel/Logic Knot/Psychotic Episode.
- Bogardan Hellkite (10-21 answers) — 4 Damnation, 1-4 Tendrils, 2-4 Teachings, 1 Slaughter Pact, 1 Pact of Negation, 0-1 Draining Whelk, 0-1 Spell Burst, 1 Isolation/Spin/Pongify, 0-4 Cancel/Logic Knot/Psychotic Episode.
- Shadowmage Infiltrator (9-21 answers) — 4 Damnation, 1-4 Tendrils, 2-4 Teachings, 1 Pact of Negation, 0-1 Sudden Death, 0-1 Draining Whelk, 0-1 Spell Burst, 1 Isolation/Spin/Pongify, 0-4 Cancel/Logic Knot/Psychotic Episode.
- Korlash, Heir to Blackblade (8-18 answers) — 4 Damnation, 2-4 Teachings, 1 Pact of Negation, 0-1 Draining Whelk, 0-1 Spell Burst, 1 Isolation/Spin/Pongify, 0-4 Cancel/Logic Knot/Psychotic Episode, 0-2 Bust
- Urza’s Factory (0-2 answers) — 2 Boom/Bust
Obviously, I’ve left out some of the specific situations where these cards can be answered (if not removed) for brevity’s sake. All of these threats go down to an unanswered Take Possession (for example), Korlash can be shrunken to irrelevant proportions if Urborg is removed from the table, and all the ground animals can be stalled or trumped by active Korlash or Factory on defense. To make matters worse, one Teachings generally represents three or more removal spells by itself, and I was counting those as only one removal spell above. (To be fair, Triskelavus is a recurring threat if Academy Ruins is in the picture, so it’s not all bad news for the threat side of the equation.)
Take special note of the fact that Urza’s Factory is the most difficult-to-answer threat on the list. To deal with an active Factory, you really need a Take Possession, a lethal or near-lethal Korlash on the offense (such that he requires constant chumping), or an active Factory of your own. This is precisely why so many mirror matches come down to Factory Wars — it’s the only threat that both decks have a legitimately tough time answering. The fact that Triskelavus can actually race a Factory by flying over the tokens (and blocking/trading with Triskelavites at the same time) is one of the main reason it’s a valuable asset in the mirror.
The Next Level: Overcoming the Multitude of Answers
Sad as it is, the easiest way to win the mirror match is to just get Urza’s Factory active when the other guy doesn’t have one. However, Factory Advantage is hardly something you can count on — if the other guy draws one to trump it, or Vensers your Take Possession on his Factory, you’re back to square one — so what else can you do to overcome the fact that the opponent’s deck is rife with answers to your small clump of threats?
Overwhelming card advantage is the simplest answer. The fact that he has more answers in his deck than you have threats in yours is immaterial if you have more threats right now than he has answers in his hand. The reason Haunting Hymn is so much more devastating than Tidings would be in this matchup is that it pretty much always knocks 3-4 actual threats or answers out of the opponent’s hand. Imagine if you’re holding Korlash and Hymn clears all the Damnations out of your victim’s hand. Next turn you play the big guy. What’s the opponent going to do about it? Unless he has a Teachings to flash back, he’s got maybe three turns to topdeck another Damnation or a Factory or something — otherwise he’s just stone dead. It doesn’t matter that he’s got seven more answers in his deck if you clear out his hand and give him only a three-turn window to find one.
Countermagic (and Psychotic Episode) is great in the mirror because it works as either an answer or a threat, depending on which is more profitable at the time. In the previous example, let’s say I Hymn away my opponent’s hand and play Korlash. He topdecks Damnation and casts it. If I counter it, I get to keep my Korlash; it’s like I had two Korlashes in my hand when I cast the Hymn (except better because I didn’t have to wait a turn to summon the backup copy). The other reason countermagic is strong in the mirror is that it provides an answer to game-breakers like Haunting Hymn and Mystical Teachings; stopping the flashback that would have kept the Teachings chain going is a big deal. Because my deck is so light on threats, I prefer to use countermagic to stop only game-breakers (especially Hymn and Bust) and removal spells that would destroy my threats, and to rely on my abundance of dedicated removal spells for killing the other guy’s troops.
Take Possession answers an opponent’s threat while presenting a threat of your own. It’s nice when you net a Korlash or something, and make the opponent burn a Damnation on his own guy, but it’s absolutely deadly when you use it to get a Factory. If I’ve got your Factory, and the only way you have to beat my Factory is with one of your own, then how can you beat me? This is precisely why successfully sticking a Take Possession is so amazing in this matchup, and why it’s so important to have a way to remove Takes. A lot of players have also taken to playing two Factories, or a Factory and a Vesuva, or even both. Doing so lets you Tolaria West for another copy if the one you had got stolen by a Take.
A subtler way to pull ahead in the mirror is to simply alter the threat/answer density of your (or your opponent’s) deck. Adrian Sullivan plays Gaea’s Blessing in his Baron list in order to shuffle business spells back into his deck. As the game wears on, his chances of drawing a threat come closer and closer to the opponent’s chances of drawing an answer, and eventually the scales are tipped in his favor. Alternately, he can shuffle in removal spells and widen the gap between his answers and his opponent’s threats even further.
The opposite approach to Sullivan’s strategy is Extirpate, which carves out the opponent’s best answers (or best threats) from his late-game arsenal and gives you one fewer spell to play around. It generally makes more sense to go for the opponent’s answers (particularly Mystical Teachings, which not only fetches several answers on its own, but also turns into game-breakers like Hymn) than to aim for his threats. Erasing his threats just means he’s stuck on getting Factory Advantage to beat you, but if the game gets that far, you’ve done very little to put yourself ahead in the Factory War itself. Erasing his answers, on the other hand, gives you a better chance of pushing through his defenses before the Factory War even begins.
Technology: The Mirror Match “Plans”
A great place to start off learning about how the Teachings mirror plays out is to watch the semifinals matchup at PT: Yokohama between Guillaume Wafo-Tapa and Mark Herberholz. The games illustrate some of the key cards in the mirror match, and many of them are just as good post-Future Sight as they were at the Pro Tour. They are:
– Haunting Hymn
– Countermagic
– Extirpate
– Mystical Teachings (naturally)
– Triskelavus/Academy Ruins
– Detritivore
Since then, Take Possession and Boom/Bust have been added to that list, and the suggestion of Stuffy Doll has been brought up. There are a couple of different “plans” people tend to go for in the mirror.
The Detritivore Plan
This one isn’t so much a plan as it is just a card. Turns out lands are important in the control mirror, and if you get to blow up four or more of the opponent’s best ones, you’re probably winning. The Yokohama strategy was to bait the Pull from Eternity with Aeon Chronicler and then drop the Vore with impunity, but these days you probably don’t need to bother. Unless you play Chronicler in the maindeck, chances are your opponent won’t have Pull post-board against you anyway — after all, why should he? — so you can just run the Vore out there as soon as you have the mana to suspend it for a profitable amount. (He’s probably going to get Pulled in game 3, though, so watch out.)
The main downsides to Detritivore are the high mana requirement — if you want him to actually win you the game as opposed to just putting you a little ahead — and the fact that you have to play Red mana to support him. Unless you have 4 Lens and 4 Relic from which to draw Red, you’ll need a basic Mountain for sure, and that’s no small request in a deck whose manabase is as demanding as this “U/B” deck’s real estate.
The Extirpate Plan
Herberholz ran this one at the Pro Tour in addition to a pair of Detritivores. The idea is to board in multiple Extirpates, eradicate your opponent’s two or three best cards, and win on inevitability. Almost no one has been running this plan at the PTQs, and I suspect their reasoning is the same reasoning I use to justify playing Korlash: time. I’ll go on record as disliking the Heir to Blackblade in a theoretical “perfect” U/B list, but I’m maindecking four copies because I’ve only got 50 minutes to win a match, and he seems to be the most qualified man for that job.
The Academy Ruins/Triskelavus Plan
This is the mirror’s ultimate inevitability combo, disruptable only by the very narrow answers of removal for Academy Ruins or Extirpate on Triskelavus. Wafo-Tapa had Teferi so that he could Teach for Triskelavus once he’d found the Ruins; I have no Tef, but do have four copies of Tolaria West to tutor up the other half of the combo, and Cheon and LSV had both Tolaria and Teferi at Montreal to give them access to this combo even earlier.
Any way you slice it, the mirror match is probably going to drag on for a long time. The longer the game goes, the more tokens Urza’s Factory starts churning out, and the more difficult it gets to find topdecked answers to match topdecked threats from the other side. Triskelavus provides three or four (all it takes, usually) topdecked threats in a row, which conveniently negate the opponent’s Workers as well, making it one of the matchup’s best finishers.
The Take Possession Plan
The Take plan became popular as soon as Future Sight was printed. When it was relatively new, people didn’t bother to pack Aura removal for it, but these days every Teachings list can be expected to include one or more Vensers and Disenchants (sometimes in the main) to combat the threat of Take.
The Countermagic Plan
To my knowledge, Adrian Sullivan is the only person who advocates a countermagic overload plan for the mirror. He boards up to three Draining Whelks and three Pacts of Negation, and plays aggro-control as soon as he gets the opportunity.
The upside of this plan is that countermagic has such great value as a dual-purpose threat and answer, and maxing out on it both decreases the opponent’s chance of blowing you out of the water with a game-breaker and increases your own chances of getting a threat to stick. Draining Whelk is perfect for this strategy, providing both a flexible threat-or-answer with its counterspell effect and a guaranteed bonus threat in its (usually) large body.
The downside to the countermagic plan is that a Factory War — should the game get that far — makes it difficult to keep countermagic mana open, as eight lands must be tapped every end step to make an Assembly-Worker. Skilled opponents can find ways to exploit this weakness, but many will not realize what they are up against and will simply walk right into a Whelk. Once resolved, the Whelk will be defended by other Whelks, Pacts, Vensers, Spell Bursts, and so on.
The Boom/Bust Plan
Only Coalition Relic decks attempt this, as it requires an awful lot of mana to execute properly. Simply put, Bust lets you drop a threat and then invalidate the opponent’s ability to answer it by clearing out all his lands. If your finisher of choice is a cheap threat like Tarmogoyf, you can do this as early as the eight-mana mark, but pricier threats require more mana on tap. This, in turn, makes the task of catching the opponent tapped out (so that he can’t just remove the threat in response to Bust) more difficult. Bust can also be cast without an accompanying threat if it looks like the “manascrew you” win might be possible, but this requires a significant amount of artifact mana or stockpiled lands in the hand, as well as confidence in the opponent’s lack of similar reserves.
The Haunting Hymn Plan
I think I’m the only advocate of boarding up to three of these, though I’m hardly the first to bring in a second copy. My reasoning is simple: I see Haunting Hymn as the most devastating card you can resolve in the mirror match, and I want to cast it every game — even when I don’t have a Teachings handy to find one. I’d play four if it weren’t for Imp’s Mischief, whose existence forces me to back up my Hymns with countermagic before I can attempt them. It takes me some time to set that up, during which time extra Hymns are dead weight that can get me in trouble if the opponent starts playing threats.
The Stuffy Doll Plan
As far as I know, no one has posted any PTQ or GPT success with this technology yet, but it bears mentioning because you may run into it even if you’re not interested. The simple principle behind the Doll is that Korlash, Finkel, Venser, and Assembly-Workers cannot productively attack into it, and only a few select spells can actually remove it. While it is blunting the opponent’s offense, it also plinks away at his life total and turns your own Tendrils of Corruption into an actual Corrupt.
The Doll survives Damnation, Tendrils, and Slaughter Pact, but falls to Sudden Death and Serrated Arrows. (It is only “removed” and not “stolen” by Take Possession, because of the way it’s worded.) Although it makes attacking with a lone Assembly-Worker a losing proposition, Urza’s Factory can easily overwhelm a Doll if left unchecked: “you take two, I take two; next turn you take four and I still take two; next turn you take six, I still take two,” and so on.
My List: Iron Man Updates
As for me? I’m still sticking to my Iron Man strategy for the PTQ this weekend. In my view, U/B Teachings is a dish best served with a hearty helping of consistency, so I’m maxing out on all the power cards but Teachings itself (which is clunky in multiples) and cutting easily-trumped cards like Finkel and Take Possession for Logic Knots, extra Teachings targets, and a Haunting Hymn-centric sideboard strategy.
My list for this week has the same maindeck as last week except that I cut a pair of River of Tears for extra Islands. It turned out being able to cast Logic Knot and Venser on my own end step came up more often than needing an extra Black source early.
The sideboard changed in a couple of minor ways and also in one big way. After it was pointed out to me in the forums that boarding up to 2 Venser seems correct against G/W, I didn’t have room to bring in the icing-on-the-cake Serrated Arrows anymore, and so cut them; Venser is a good enough answer to Dervish in my book. I used the extra slots to improve my Pickles matchup a bit by adding a fourth Sudden Death and second Pull from Eternity, and Pull is a good card to have on hand in multiples against a number of the Tier 2 decks. I also replaced the sideboarded Spin into Myth with a Pongify, I often found myself wishing I could tutor for a more mana-efficient answer to Enforcer or Dervish, even at the expense of leaving the opponent with a replacement beater.
The last change was the addition of 3 copies of Sengir Nosferatu to the board. This little dark horse replaces the previous Draining Whelk/Teferi plan against G/W and also makes the cut in the mirror match as Korlashes #5-7. In the mirror, not only is it another threat that can only be answered by Damnation (well, and Sudden Death, if they have the stones to bring it in — but even then, nobody but me seems to board more than one of those), but it actually just crushes the Factory War, flying in for four each turn and intercepting an enemy token as the situation demands it. Against G/W, Sengir can attack into everything but Mystic Enforcer, and then threatens to intercept anything but Enforcer or Dervish with a 4/4 blocker as long as you can brandish 2BB during their attack step. Even better, unlike Korlash, the Vampire shakes off Temporal Isolation and remains at large even when Urborg bites it to Vesuva.
Barring any last-minute tweaks, this is what I’ll be PTQing with this weekend.
Creatures (6)
Lands (27)
Spells (27)
My updated sideboarding strategies are as follows.
Versus G/W
+3 Sengir Nosferatu
+1 Pongify
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-4 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
-1 Extirpate
Versus Pickles
+3 Sudden Death
+2 Pull from Eternity
+1 Imp’s Mischief
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-4 Damnation
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Triskelavus
Versus Poison Slivers
+3 Sudden Death
+1 Pongify
+1 Pact of Negation
-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Extirpate
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
Versus U/G Shifter
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Pull from Eternity
+1 Disenchant
-1 Extirpate
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Sudden Death
Versus U/G Tempo
+3 Sudden Death
+1 Pact of Negation
-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Extirpate
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-1 Spin into Myth
Versus Mono-Red w/ Gargadon
+3 Sudden Death
+2 Pull from Eternity
-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Extirpate
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-1 Pact of Negation
-1 Spin into Myth
Versus R/G Big Mana
+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Disenchant
-1 Extirpate
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
Versus The Baron (U/B Teachings with Blessing)
+3 Sengir Nosferatu
+2 Sudden Death
+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Imp’s Mischief
-4 Damnation
-3 Tendrils of Corruption
-1 Slaughter Pact
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Extirpate
Versus Ruel-Style Teachings (4x Coalition Relic, Take Possession, and Tarmogoyf)
+2 Sengir Nosferatu
+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Disenchant
+1 Imp’s Mischief
-4 Damnation
-2 Tendrils of Corruption
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Spin into Myth
Versus Classic Gerry Thompson Teachings (Korlash and Shadowmage Infiltrator)
+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Imp’s Mischief
-1 Tendrils of Corruption
-1 Slaughter Pact
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Extirpate
Versus Yasooka-Style Teachings (Cancel and Aeon Chronicler)
+3 Sengir Nosferatu
+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Imp’s Mischief
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Pull from Eternity
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-4 Damnation
-2 Tendrils of Corruption
-1 Slaughter Pact
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Spin into Myth
That’s all for this week. Next week I plan to have some demonstrations of the U/B Mirror, with play-by-play action along the lines of last week’s article.
Stay tuned!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]