Last week I presented a largely objective overview of the Big Mana Blue archetype, but didn’t really take a stand on how I thought it should be built. This week will be different.
Let’s cut to the chase: Zac Hill and I have tuned U/W Tron into what we consider the best deck in the format. Our only bad matchups are decks on the extreme fringes of popularity; for the first time in my life, I went into a PTQ feeling confident that, as I sat down for each round, I had about a 95% chance of pulling a good matchup. Sound overconfident? Read on.
The list’s first outing was at a 150-ish large PTQ this weekend. Between the two of us, Zac and I had 11 wins and 2 losses in the eight rounds of Swiss. We each started out 4-0 and intentionally drew with one another in order to eat, and moved to 4-0-1. My loss in the Top 8 involved a turn 1 Destructive Flow from my opponent (land, Mox, Mox, Flow, no jokes), while Zac missed the elimination rounds only because he ran out of time in the critical Swiss match to end up 5-1-2 instead of 6-1-1. (He had Slaver-locked his opponent in game 3 and was one Sundering Titan swing away from victory as the last extra turn expired; the opponent wouldn’t concede.)
Zac and I agreed on 73 out of 75 cards (more on this later); here’s the build I prefer.
Creatures (3)
Lands (21)
Spells (36)
Where to begin?
I’ve been trying to find a polite way to write the paragraph that describes my feelings on this card, but…
…oh, screw it. For the love of God, play this card.
Play four, play them in the maindeck, and crush with them.
Scepter-Chant is essentially inoperable with a Chalice for two in play. Boros is crippled by a Chalice for one in the first game, and then by Chalice for two after they bring in Ancient Grudge. Without Duress and Therapy to even the score (Chalice at one), Rock is laughably underpowered against a Big Mana Blue deck. Chalice for two nearly blanks the entire Aggro Loam deck, save for Terravore and sideboarded Krosan Grips where applicable. Chalice efficiently disrupts TEPS at one, at two, or even at zero if a Lotus Bloom is suspended, as it also hits all the Chrome Moxen they’ve been holding for the critical turn.
Chalice does suck in the mirror, though, so I can see why you’d want to maindeck only one copy and Trinket Mage for it. (You can’t see from where you’re sitting, but I’m rolling my eyes.)
Looking over the whole decklist, you might be asking yourself where the Fact or Fictions are. Truth is, those cost DI and all we had were these Gifts Ungivens…
Heh. Okay, so seriously – why no Fact? The short version is that the fast decks of the format won’t let you get away with playing both four-cost draw spells, and Gifts is the better of the two. Naturally, though, that last statement will require a good bit of explanation.
It’s been my experience that this archetype doesn’t really play Fact or Fiction for the extra cards. The card advantage is nice, sure, but mainly you just want to look at five cards and find one or two that combine with your hand and board to do broken things. Gifts cuts out the middleman and just gives you broken things.
Hey, Boros! Gifts for Wrath, Explosives, Chalice, Razormane Masticore.
Hey, Rock! Gifts for Mindslaver, Academy Ruins, Crucible of Worlds, Petrified Field. (Yeah, that’d be the full lock from one card.)
You get the idea.
Granted, sometimes Fact will serve up better juice than anything Gifts could have given you. If you absolutely need the last Tron piece, for example, Facting into it (and eating the four-for-one split) is much faster than having to put Crucible of Worlds, Petrified Field, the piece you need, and some fourth in a Gifts stack, as you’ll most likely end up paying three mana or a land drop to retrieve it next turn with Crucible or Field.
Overall, though, Gifts Ungiven is more consistently powerful than Fact or Fiction, as it provides you with much more control over which cards you’ll end up with. If you cast Fact and no card in the top five will solve your on-board dilemma, or if you need a finisher and all you hit are lands and support cards, you’re simply out of luck. Gifts gives you the whole library to work with; as long as you can pick the right four cards to offer the opponent, you’re in business.
I’ll talk more on the Gifts suite we played later on, but first there are some fundamentals I need to clear up.
Mox and Tron
I alluded to my thoughts on Chrome Mox in “Big Mana Blue,” but in case the full four copies in the above list didn’t give it away, let me set the record straight on my feelings regarding Mox:
"Yes, please."
Tron is very slow compared to the format’s speed benchmarks of TEPS, Ichorid, Affinity, and Boros. Its late game is phenomenal, but common starts like “Land, go; Land, Signet, go” are outright pathetic compared to what the average opponent is capable of in those same two turns. On the other hand, leading with a land and a Mox while holding Condescend or Remand, or – God Forbid – playing a land, a Mox, and a Chalice for one (Zac and I believe the blind turn 1 Chalice to be correct, and consistently broken, in game 1 against an unknown opponent) is a powerfully disruptive opening in practically every matchup.
Turn 1 land, Mox, Signet, gives you access to four mana for Gifts Ungiven as early as the second turn, and even just accelerating out Thirst for Knowledge a turn early can make all the difference in Extended. As I said before, this deck is not so much about the card advantage as it is finding broken things to do, and pitching the least useful colored spell in your hand in exchange for a speed boost plays right into that strategy.
While other Big Mana Blue decks pack as many as “five” copies of Azorius Signet (four Signet, one Talisman) for acceleration, I consider the Signet merely the deck’s third-best thing to do with two mana, behind Remand and Condescend for one. Having only two possible plays with two mana (because, let’s face it, not everyone plays a Repealable one-drop) is unacceptable in an environment so unforgiving of early-game inaction, and while I find Signet largely unexciting on the whole, it does bolster the deck’s slim colored-mana source count while providing a degree of acceleration.
Tron versus Cloudpost?
For this deck, Tron. The big reason is that Post takes longer to get Big Mana, and Big Mana is this deck’s number one priority. As I mentioned in my last article, the following relationship is true.
It’s easiest to assemble two Cloudpost equivalents and net +2 mana.
It’s harder to assemble three unique Tron pieces and net +4 mana.
It’s even harder to assemble three Cloudpost equivalents and net +6 mana.
Think about it in terms of Sundering Titan. Sundering Titan costs eight, but if you have the Tron out, you need only tap four lands to play him. If you were playing a fair deck, it would be as though he were a mere four-coster – a reasonable price in Extended, and actually a real bargain for his effect. With a pair of Cloudposts, however, Titan still “costs” six mana in this analogy, which is quite a lot for Extended. Even Spiritmonger has been omitted from most Rock lists this season, as his mana cost of five has proved prohibitive despite his powerful effect.
Now if you have three Cloudposts, Titan only “costs” two, which is pretty much the bargain of the century. The thing is, I am more interested in putting reasonable price-tags on my unfair (but expensive) bombs quickly than I am in having to wait longer to get my discount online, in exchange for a bigger discount once it does arrive. That is, I’d rather consistently pay four for my Titans than sometimes two and sometimes six. The game state I want to get to with this deck is a fat mana boost (+4 or more) in the midgame, and that’s more important to me than a minor upgrade in the early game or an even fatter boost later on in the game (or rather, less consistently by the midgame).
There are a few other issues this list has with playing Cloudpost. Comes-into-play-tapped lands do not play well with Chrome Mox, which is especially relevant when first-turn Chalice is such a strong play. Also, the awkward Cloudpost draws (multiple Vesuvas before seeing a Cloudpost) are much harder to recover from than the awkward Tron draws (multiples of one piece, but zero or one of the other two), as comes-in-tapped lands are at their the worst when you can’t throw them down on the first turn because you need to hold them in hopes of topdecking their counterpart and making them worthwhile again.
If you don’t have turn 1 Post, you are always at least three turns away from Big Mana, starting with the turn you topdeck an actual Locus. With Tron, on the other hand, finding one piece means you are only a minimum two turns away from Big Mana, and finding two pieces means you could topdeck into Getting Big at a moment’s notice. Finally, it’s worth noting that Tron hits the random “oops, I rawdogged all three” more often than Post does.
So while the Post does periodically confer mana boosts in the early game, and allows the deck to play more colored sources (which is strong, but doesn’t outweigh the downsides in my view), I’ll take Tron’s early game every time whenever Post doesn’t lead with turn-one Locus. Since that mathematically won’t happen in a majority of games, and since I also prefer Tron’s ability to recover from an awkward draw, its “synergy” with Chrome Mox, and its ability to hit Big Mana in the midgame, I’m sticking with Urza for this deck.
Finishers
Simply put, this list plays a ton of one-ofs rather than bricks of more focused cards in order to break Gifts Ungiven. This construction does make the deck harder to play, as you have to improvise a lot with it; you’ll frequently draw bizarre combinations of one-ofs that may not have come up in playtesting, and will be charged with figuring out on the spot how to use them together to win.
Intuitively, a scattered suite of finishers looks like it must be suboptimal because it is unfocused. However, in this environment the only finisher that is consistently powerful across virtually all matchups is Decree of Justice. For every time you play Rock and wish you had more than one Sundering Titan, you’ll be glad there’s only one that you might accidentally topdeck when you pair against TEPS.
To reiterate, the maindeck finishers are as follows.
2 Decree of Justice
1 Razormane Masticore
1 Platinum Angel
1 Sundering Titan
1 Mindslaver
Yes, Mindslaver is a finisher here; using Gifts to set up a Slaver lock is actually a pretty common play. I’ll briefly mention that Sundering Titan crushes Rock and all the midrange decks, and is the hitter of choice against Scepter-Chant, but those things are probably not all that difficult to figure out if you know how his wording interacts with the Ravnica duals.
Every Big Mana Blue list I’ve ever seen has had three Decrees, and I’ve always thought that was one too many. Sure, it cycles if you haven’t made it Big yet, but spending three mana to discard one card and draw a new card is – let’s be honest here – just slow as hell. It’s nice that you can do it if you need to, and intercepting attackers with a cantrip Raise the Alarm when you hit five or six mana can be effective if the enemy doesn’t have much going on, but you don’t want to draw Decree until the late game. Why play three copies in a deck that draws as many cards and has as many other finishers as this one does?
Razormane Masticore is an absolute ace against fair (non-Affinity, non-Ichorid) aggro. “It kills all their guys and then kills them” is a pretty good synopsis against Trinket Angel and U/G Opposition, and against Boros and Flow Deck Wins as well – provided you have a Chalice down (set to one or two) to make burning it out unreasonable. The five power with first strike makes him the most undercosted combat monster in the format; in the second round of the PTQ this weekend, I chuckled at the fact that I could have declined to counter a Spectral Force from Opposition because it would have just chump blocked the Core anyway. We board up to three copies against every aggro deck but Affinity and Ichorid.
Speaking of Affinity and Ichorid, the decidedly un-fair aggro decks require a heavier hand to defeat. Enter the “You cannot lose the game” creature. We swing a favorable pre-board Ichorid matchup on the back of the singleton Platinum Angel, because even if you have to pump a full Gifts and a ton of mana into getting her out (the worst-case pile is Angel, Ruins, Field, Crucible), game 1 is literally over as soon as she hits the table – regardless of how low your life total is.
Affinity is better disrupted by Wraths and more susceptible to non-Angel finishing strategies, but you can’t rely on the 4/4 by herself unless you have Chalice for two or a Condescend ready for Shrapnel Blast. The same is true of Ichorid post-board when they have access to Ancient Grudge, but tripling your Angel count and adding Tormod’s Crypt is plenty strong enough to compensate.
One of the two differences between Zac’s preferred build of this deck and mine is that he boards a Trinisphere instead of the second Angel, largely in order to bolster the TEPS matchup. The logic is that although Affinity and Ichorid are worse matchups, you get more mileage out of improving the TEPS matchup because it’s probably more popular than Ichorid and Affinity combined at this point, and certainly has a better chance of appearing in a critical Top 8 match (with a skilled pilot, no less) than do either of the two aggro decks.
Lands and Crucible
I think I’ve probably given enough Gifts examples by now to demonstrate why Academy Ruins, Petrified Field, and Crucible of Worlds are in the deck, but I should mention that the other difference between my build and Zac’s is that he plays a Nomad Stadium over a Skycloud Expanse in order to enable powerful maindeck recursion against aggressive strategies via Crucible of Worlds.
My argument against Stadium is that we board out Crucible against the (non-Flow) aggro decks anyway, blue mana producers are precious, and I never want to put it in Gifts piles anyway. (It doesn’t help that I was playing for Top 8 two weeks ago in San Diego with an earlier version of this deck, and fell to Pat Sullivan with Boros explicitly because Stadium pinged me to death in game 3 as I assembled the otherwise-devastating Chalice for two and Masticore.)
The colored mana sources, again:
3 Hallowed Fountain
2 Skycloud Expanse
1 Flooded Strand
1 Island
Since the only one-mana spells we have are Explosives for one and Repeal targeting a zero-coster (Lotus Bloom and Chrome Mox being the big ones), Skycloud Expanse tends to play like a Tundra that charges up Explosives for two by itself. If drawing them in multiples weren’t so conducive to mulligans, we might play three copies or more.
The Flooded Strand is in there to interact with Crucible in slow matchups, allows you to Gifts for White mana in an emergency (Fountain, Expanse, Strand , X), and acts as a second basic land source against Blood Moon. (To be fair, I have yet to see the Moon cast at a PTQ this season.) None of these situations come up all that often, but then again the one extra point of life compared to a fourth Hallowed Fountain has literally never come up, so make of that what you will. It’s possible that this should be a Polluted Delta for purposes of throwing the opponent off – after all, it can only fetch Island or Fountain anyway – but then again there’s also a similarly minor value in representing that you have access to basic Plains.
Supporting Cards
4 Remand
4 Condescend
3 Wrath of God
2 Repeal
1 Engineered Explosives
Again, I hinted at my feelings toward Remand and Condescend in “Big Mana Blue.” Simply put, they’re the two counters that dig us closer to Tron, so they’re the two we’re most interested in playing. I definitely like the full four Condescend, as a lot of games come down to defending a bomb creature such as Platinum Angel or Razormane Masticore from artifact destruction, and “stall” counters like Remand and Memory Lapse are not nearly as suited to the task.
We don’t play enough White sources for four Wraths to work, and honestly, we’re light even for three copies. Nevertheless, in most games it’s important to have access to the card at some point, even if it’s not always castable on turn 3 or 4. Affinity and Boros have to meter their offenses out of respect for it, and no other card is versatile enough to remove Decree tokens, Teferi, Exalted Angel, and assorted plodding beaters like Troll Ascetic and Loxodon Hierarch by itself.
In fact, even though Wrath and Decree of Justice are the deck’s only White cards, we couldn’t get U/G versions (how sexy is Sylvan Scrying in a Tron deck, and Life from the Loam over Crucible in a Gifts stack?) to pass muster, simply because we couldn’t deal with Teferi or an offense of a couple medium-sized beaters without access to the four-mana creature reset.
Repeal, on the other hand, is just awesome all the time. I think one of the best reasons to play Big Mana Blue in general is that it’s one of the only decks that can effectively play Repeal; it’s a maindeck answer to Isochron Scepter (“But dude, they’ll just replay it” – “Yeah, holding a second Orim’s Chant, too?”), it facilitates stalling the board to let you make more land drops, it combos well with Chalice (“Chalice for one; Repeal your Kird Ape.” – “Well. This is awkward.”), and once Tron is online, it’s practically cantrip Boomerang that costs only two or three land taps to play. I wish we could fit four copies into the main, but there’s simply no room; the two sideboarded copies come in against practically everything, but different cards come out for them each time.
The one maindeck Explosives partly caters to Gifts Ungiven (“Dear Boros: Wrath, Chalice, Masticore, Explosives”), and partly offers a recursive way to deal with small permanents via Academy Ruins. Boros and Flow Deck Wins, for example, are in a big kind of trouble if you start recurring the Built-to-Booms. Explosives also takes out Cranial Plating, trades with Beacon of Creation or Decree of Justice for two mana, destroys all of Ichorid’s non-Psychatog discard outlets – even Zombie Infestation – and, most importantly, kills Dwarven Blastminer and Kataki without making you hit four mana (as Wrath does), which is a tall order while your mana is under attack from those two nuisances.
I’ve already mentioned where the sideboarded Razormane Masticores, Platinum Angels, and Repeals come in, and Serrated Arrows, Tormod’s Crypt, the fourth Gifts, and Engineered Explosives shouldn’t be altogether difficult to figure out. I’m not going to do a matchup-by-matchup sideboarding guide, as Zac will be covering how to play the deck in-depth in his Thursday column. I will, however, discuss the inclusion of the remaining four sideboard cards:
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Mindslaver
1 Academy Ruins
The Ghost Quarters are best in the mirror, but they have applications against TEPS and Affinity as well. In those matchups, they are a straight-up Wasteland except for the expansion symbol. Taking out one of TEPS’s sixteen-ish lands in exchange for zero mana and a land drop is mighty fine, and the otherwise unkillable Blinkmoth Nexus falls in a big hurry to a Quarter activation. If you have no appealing targets for it against Affinity, either because they have drawn no copies of Nexus or do not appear vulnerable to mana screw, the extra lands facilitate the seven mana required for Platinum Angel if you don’t have Tron. That’s important, as Chalice for two into Angel is your preferred route to victory against them.
We ran two copies of Ghost Quarter because we didn’t plan on bringing in a third against anyone. Even in the mirror, where it’s at its best, you don’t want to activate one early and get behind on land drops if the opponent has a basic, and if you aren’t activating it early, three copies is getting a bit mana flood-ish. We weren’t keen on boarding out colored sources either, nor were the Quarters so devastating against TEPS or Affinity that we actively wanted to devote a third sideboard slot to one, so that was that.
The second Mindslaver comes in wherever it is either backbreaking or critical to success. In some (very, very slow) matchups, the Slaver lock is such a common Gifts pile that you don’t want to be caught with your pants down if the opponent happened to board in Tormod’s Crypt. With access to a second Slaver, the first Gifts pile will set up Academy Ruins, the Slaver itself will get Crypted, and then it will be merely a matter of drawing another Gifts (you’ll likely have boarded up to four) or the second Slaver itself to go infinite. It’s also just great to have a second one on-hand one against the mirror and TEPS, where one rawdogged activation can be devastating by itself.
Finally, the Academy Ruins is useful against two types of decks: the ones that are hurt greatly by recursion (fun fact: Trinket Angel moves to Frown Town if you tap Academy Ruins to summon Razormane Masticore), and also the decks that also play Academy Ruins. If the opponent Legend Rules your Ruins off the table, Gifts can go get another one as long as you have a copy in your deck, but otherwise (“Gifts for Crucible, Petrified Field, and, um…”) you’re out of luck if recursion is needed to beat the board.
PTQing With The Deck
On Thursday, Zac will be going over how to play the deck, what to do in specific matchups, and specific sideboarding strategies. In the meantime, the best thing to do if you’re interested in PTQing with this deck is to start running the maindeck through the gauntlet. It is not an easy deck to play, it does take a lot of practice to realize its potential, and you do need to start before Thursday if this Saturday is your goal.
Would I recommend this deck for the PTQs? Unless the environment shifts dramatically from where it was last week, I couldn’t possibly recommend anything else.
Whatever you choose to play, good luck at those PTQs!
See you next week.
Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]