Deep Analysis – Zooming in on U/B Teachings

As I see it, three Schools of U/B Teachings have emerged since Grand Prix: Montreal.

There’s the Shouta Yasooka school (I’m naming it after him because he’s the only person so far to place highly with this approach in post-Future Sight Time Spiral Block) where U/B looks a lot like it did at the Pro Tour, with Chroniclers, Cancels, and a small number of Urborgs and Tendrils.

Then there’s the Ruel school, where you play 4-5 colors, max out on Coalition Relics, and include a hearty helping of 3 Take Possession in the maindeck. Ruel also played the quirky finisher of Tarmogoyf, but the ‘Goyf is hardly necessary to the archetype.

The Gerry Thompson school takes the opposite approach to Yasooka’s, cutting slow cards like Chronicler and Cancel to lower the deck’s curve and load up on U/B’s power cards. The classic G.T. list plays 4 Urborg, 4 Tolaria West, 4 Tendrils, and 4 Damnation, with 4 Careful Considerations and 3 Mystical Teachings for backup. People have been calling this Kowalash, as that’s what Zac Hill named his PTQ-winning variant of Gerry’s list, but the original core is all G.T.

Gerry and Neil Reeves also came up with the Korlash/Shadowmage Infiltrator package, and the two of them crushed a couple of Premier Events on MTGO with their list before Gerry brought it to GP: Montreal. Besides Gerry, Rich Hoaen, Gadiel Szleifer, Paul Cheon Luis Scott-Vargas played the deck at Montreal. All of them finished in the Top 64.

I mention all this because when I started testing TS Block, the “stock” U/B list I was referred to was Gerry’s “maxed-out” U/B/w. I did not realize that, at the time, most people were apparently testing against updated Chronicler-based lists from the Pro Tour. The conclusion that Zac and I have come to is that when people think their G/W decks beat U/B (while we think the opposite, and by a lot), it’s because they’ve been testing against clunky Yasooka-style lists.

I tell you what, testing against Gerry’s U/B as my first taste of the format was miserable. When the other guy is packing 4 Urborg, 4 Tolaria West, 4 Tendrils, and 3 Teachings, you have a Tendrils for 6+ cast against you basically every game. Then, a few turns later, another one comes to seal the deal for 10 or more points. Against that kind of firepower, you can really only beat down for the win if something goes wrong for the opponent. “We’ll get ‘em every time they miss that fourth land drop, though!” is the rallying cry of several aggro proponents, but hoping my opponent’s 27-land deck screws him in two out of three games is not my kind of win percentage.

Still, I love to start playtesting formats by exploring the weak points of the best deck, and so I continued to pit my creations against Gerry’s deck. I lost game after game, match after match, and no matter how much I warped my decks to try and beat him, I could never break 50-50 by any worthwhile margin. Eventually the realization dawned on me that nothing else was close to as powerful as the Urborg/Tendrils combination, and it would take more stubbornness than I’ve got in me to pass it up.

Somehow, in all this time, I never paused to take a look at what kind of U/B everyone else was playing. Whenever I saw a decklist that didn’t at least have the decency to max out on Tolaria West, I just kind of rolled my eyes and kept moving. “I’m not going to bother with that,” I’d mutter. “They’ll figure it out sooner or later, and then I’ll just have to re-test.”

I mean, you can make a case for dropping some Urborgs or Tendrils… but running fewer than 4 Tolaria West just makes no sense to me. Having tested against it and observed the comes-in-tapped downside causing no problems whatsoever and the effect being monumentally insane for U/B, I thought the default count would inevitably reach four within a couple of weeks. You know those stories about when Necropotence was legal but people hadn’t figured out to play four yet? I was certain that by July we’d all be playing four Tolaria West and having a good laugh about the Dark Ages when we only played two.

Awkwardly, it appears we are still in the Dark Ages. Two Tolaria West seems to be the norm outside GerryVille, and I just have no idea why. If you draw two and need the mana, you can play one tapped. It’s not going to slow you down noticeably when you’re the slowest control deck in the slowest Block Constructed format I’ve ever seen, and topdecked Island doesn’t Transmute for Slaughter Pact. The cost/benefit analysis is way on the benefit side on this one.

By the way, I am so sick of people chickening out about criticizing excellent players’ choices because of their “pedigree” or whatever. Obviously the Player of the Year knows what he’s doing, but I’ve seen the 4 Tolaria West formula crush way too many skulls in the playtest arena to look at Yasooka’s zero copies and run the “you’re beautiful just the way you are” lie when Slaughter Pact was in his deck. Sorry, but that was just wrong.

Speaking of cards Yasooka plays and Gerry and Ruel don’t, Aeon Chronicler is sl…

Oh, before I forget — maxing on Tendrils and Urborgs and such doesn’t make Gerry’s style of U/B an “anti-G/W” or “anti-aggro” build in my book. Tendrils, Urborg, and Tolaria West are insane against almost everyone. They’re merely solid in the mirror, but whenever I see their copy counts trimmed down from four, it’s rarely for cards that are any better in the mirror.

… ower than a pile of bricks. It’s so slow, I actually had time to write a whole new paragraph before my Chronicler-related sentence got where it was going.

The Chronic gets Pulled a lot in the mirror, but when he sticks, and when you’ve got the time to play him — i.e. in an attrition war against something like R/G Big Mana or U/G Shifter — he’s admittedly an ace. In fact, without Chronicler, those Green deck attrition wars would be…oh right, way in your favor anyway because you have Haunting Hymn on tap and the Mystical Teachings chain. I heard you get bonus points if you Win More, though, so he should probably stay in despite the fact that his slowness and vulnerability to Riftsweeper is actually a liability against aggro. Heh.

The only thing I like about the Yasooka lists is that testing against them apparently gives beatdown players the impression that they have a good matchup against U/B. Seriously, I can only attribute Yasooka’s Top 8 performance to his own sheer mastery at Constructed. I think the Ruel approach was a fantastic choice for last week, but for my money, it’s a lot more vulnerable to disruption now that it’s in the spotlight and people are ready for its Take Possessions.

By process of elimination, you can figure out which school I subscribe to for my own list.

My List at Chicago

The Chicago PTQ I attended was on the same day as GP: Montreal. Mono Red was really big at the time, only a few people knew about the G/W deck, and Coalition Relic was still on the down-low.

I never liked Shadowmage Infiltrator in Gerry’s deck because I felt I had little control over how well it performed. Sometimes it wins you the game by itself, sometimes it Cycles, and sometimes it’s practically worthless. Finkel will eat a burn spell from Red every time, and playing him early against G/W either draws an Isolation (which, admittedly, I’d rather have on Finkel than on a Korlash later on) or only nets me a card or two because I have to Damnation soon.

One of the most illuminating pieces of Magical advice I ever got was from Gadiel Szleifer just after I’d lost in the finals of a PTQ in GenCon. The format was Kamigawa Block Constructed, and Gadiel told me to play his Gifts list. The most noteworthy change was that he had cut the usual singleton Ink-Eyes for an extra land. The reason? “This deck only loses when it gets manascrewed.”

In other words, you have enough finishers to win without Ink-Eyes; what you need is consistency. I look at Finkel the same way: sure I’ll win some games when Finkel goes all the way — Gerry’s best argument in favor of Finkel is that he can dig you out of a mull to five better than anything in the format — but a lot of the time I find myself playing Finkel in the hopes that he’ll dig me to the answer I need. If I’d just played Cancel instead, I could have stopped whatever threat it was in the first place (well, okay, unless it was Take Possession) and wouldn’t have to hope the digging led me to the answer I needed.

Besides, if my win condition suite is Korlash and Finkel, my opponent’s otherwise-lame Tendrils and Sudden Deaths will suddenly have a happy target in Jonny Magic. The only way I’ll actually land hits with him is if I lay him turn 3 and they have drawn no removal for him, or if they’ve been aggressively pitching removal to Careful Consideration the whole game. Most of the time, though, it’s been my experience that he just gets shot.

If my win condition suite is just Korlash, though, I’m creating a whole bunch of blank cards for my opponent in the mirror. Tendrils, Sudden Death, and Slaughter Pact have no targets but Factory tokens. (I later added the Triskelavus/Ruins package and Teferi to fetch Trisk with, but honestly activating my opponent’s removal by casting Teferi is worth being able to tutor for Trisk when Ruins is out.) I liked this, and I prefer playing for consistency over blowouts, so I cut Finkel for three Cancels and a maindeck Temporal Isolation.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Most Korlash lists can’t afford Cancel (or Teferi) because the UU is hard to get early on when you’re playing that many swamps. However, I’d already cut Korlash.

Er, what? Cut Korlash?

Again, I was still under the misinformed impression that everyone was testing against Gerry-style U/B. I figured I could get by the first few rounds with Korlash, but pretty soon I’d be into the territory of the Mono-Red or G/W players who knew how tough U/B was to beat, and who would have Vesuva in the main to kill Urborg.

Losing my Urborg against an aggro deck is a huge deal, as those matchups are cushy strictly because of Tendrils. Against Mono-Red (much more so than against G/W), you often need to run Korlash out on turn 4, with Urborg, to block. That means I’m exposing my Urborg way early, and am primed for a blowout if he has the Vesuva — especially if I don’t have a basic Swamp out, as Korlash will die, too. The other big deal was Word of Seizing. Urborg gives everyone Swamps, and getting punched with a nine-point Korlash in the late game was an excellent way for Red to turn around a game I thought I had in the bag.

Equally important was the Mono Black Rack deck. I hadn’t had time to test against it, but I’d heard it was very popular on MTGO, and was a house against U/B. Gerry’s tech against it was to bring in Epochrasite for inevitability, as they had no countermagic, Pull, Riftsweeper, or Teferi to stop it from coming back over and over again. Again, since I expected a lot of backlash against this powerhouse deck, I decided moving Epochrasite to the main over Korlash would give me more game against Mono Black and Mono Red (the most popular deck at the time), would be about even against the midrange Green decks (which were always blowing up my early Urborgs with Acid Moss), and would only be somewhat worse in the mirror match.

To mise a little extra punch in the mirror, I went with only three Epochs in the main, and devoted the fourth Korlash slot to a singleton Take Possession. No one was running Venser or Disenchant main at the time, so I figured I could get a leg up in the drawn-out mirror matches by (eventually) drawing into the singleton and slamming it down to turn the game around.

Here’s where I ended up.

4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Tolaria West
4 River of Tears
4 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Swamp
7 Island
1 Plains
1 Urza’s Factory
1 Academy Ruins
1 Calciform Pools

4 Prismatic Lens

3 Epochrasite
1 Triskelavus
1 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
1 Take Possession

4 Careful Consideration
3 Mystical Teachings

4 Damnation
4 Tendrils of Corruption
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Temporal Isolation

1 Haunting Hymn
1 Pull from Eternity
1 Extirpate

3 Cancel

Sideboard:
3 Take Possession
3 Draining Whelk
3 Aven Riftwatcher
1 Pact of Negation
1 Disenchant
1 Pull from Eternity
1 Epochrasite
1 Temporal Isolation
1 Venser, Shaper Savant

One G/W guy had Vesuva post-board, the G/R Big Mana guy had Mwonvuli and Avalanche Riders, and besides that, no one tried to blow up my Urborgs all day. I went 5-0-2 into the Top 8, lost immediately to double mull-to-deathsies, and that was that.

Then GP: Montreal happened. Four Riftsweeper in the main, you say? Heh, so much for Epochrasite.

There’s a dangerous argument to be made for ignoring the Riftsweepers, as a natural reaction to their inclusion would be for people to skimp on Suspend cards, making them Grizzly Bears a lot of the time. Thus, with the mirror and U/B being so popular, all the G/W players will cut their Sweepers for Mire Boas and Thornweald Archers, right?

There’s a little thing I wrote about, a long time ago, called Last Week’s Tech. Riftsweeper might be (or might not be, to be fair — I’m no G/W expert) Last Week’s Tech, but you’ll still get paired against people who didn’t get the memo all the way through the tournament. That they “shouldn’t be” playing a card that wrecks you is little consolation after they’ve wrecked you with it, so don’t be surprised when they don’t play into your expectations.

Besides, pretty much nobody played Mono Black or Vesuva, and Epoch is much less awesome against G/W than against Mono Red, so it seems like Korlash is the way to go for now even without Riftsweepers in the picture. Honestly, I’m not even interested in boarding Epochrasite at this point.

The maindeck Take Possession is too easily trumped by maindeck Venser, Disenchant, and the suddenly-popular Riftwing Cloudskate at this point, so out it goes as well.

Change number one is -3 Epochrasite, -1 Take Possession, +4 Korlash.

Now that I’m playing Korlash, I need a few more Swamps. I always want to be able to activate his Grandeur ability, and I also want to “randomly” draw at least one per game so that he won’t die if Urborg dies. (He can then play Drudge Skeletons until I find another Borg and turn him into Spiritmonger again.) I think 4 Swamps is the bare minimum I can play to support Korlash, and the bare minimum is really what I want. I need all the Blue sources I can get, with 4 Tolaria West that wants to get Transmuted on turn 3, 4 Careful Consideration that really want to be cast turn 4, and Logic Knot still in the mix.

While I want to make sure the other guy doesn’t have a Factory before I do in the mirror match, I don’t want to add any more colorless lands to the deck. Vesuva doubles as a second Blue source in the early game, and if my opponent’s got a Factory and I draw Vesuva, then I have one too. The same goes for Storage Lands, which I would play a dozen of if they tapped for blue right away instead of colorless mana. (Then again, who wouldn’t?)

Change number two is -4 Island, +3 Swamp, +1 Vesuva

Before Chicago, I originally had Delay over Cancel and multiple Teferis, but Gerry pointed out that Teferi is a poor draw a lot of the time. While two mana is much better than three, it’s not worth investing the slots in the Mage of Zhalfir. I agreed with this logic at the time, but after Chicago, I figured out that Logic Knot is actually the best of both worlds. Nobody leaves mana up in the early game to play around Force Spike, so you can counter as early as turn two if you’re fortunate enough to have the mana ready. You can also use it to shrink Tarmogoyf and, most importantly, it’s just Counterspell in the midgame. There are all sorts of turns where you can easily keep UU open but not 1UU, and Knot is absolutely wonderful then.

By the way, I prefer countermagic to Psychotic Episode because countermagic makes the opponent spend his mana on the threat I counter, and because Episode doesn’t solve problems that arrive from the top of the opponent’s deck.

My intuition says that the graveyard can’t support more than two Knots in the deck, but that’s fine with me because it’s come to my attention that Pact of Negation is insane enough in the mirror to make the maindeck. See, one of the best maindeck plans for the mirror is to set up Haunting Hymn and Pact of Negation. You don’t want to get caught by Imp’s Mischief – or even just a counter — when you cast the Hymn, so it’s important to have Pact backup ready when you go for it. (Obviously if they’re tapped out it’s a different story.) Although Pact and Knot are less useful on turn 3 than Cancel is, I rarely found myself casting Cancel then anyway. It was more of a late-game security measure, and Knot and Pact do a better job of that.

Change number three is -3 Cancel, +2 Logic Knot, +1 Pact of Negation.

With the new Poison Slivers deck running around on MTGO (more on this later) and U/G aggro-control (see DeRosa’s deck from Montreal) becoming more popular, I would love a Sudden Death in the main because it dodges Frenetic Sliver from the former and Delay and Snapback from the latter. It also kills most G/W beaters (including Mire Boa), as well as morphs and Teferi from Pickles. In fact, really the only reason I didn’t have it in Chicago was that I didn’t think I had room for it. However, with Riftsweeper cropping up everywhere and Greater Gargadon fleeing the metagame battlefield, I think I could get away without maindeck Pull from Eternity. I also don’t really need Teferi to fetch Triskelavus — his main function in the deck — now that I have the faster finisher of Korlash available, so he can go to make room for a maindeck Venser. (The miser’s Trisk for long games, especially in the mirror match, is still worth it if you ask me.)

Not only is the Shaper Savant a handy answer to Take Possession and Temporal Isolation, he also gives me a long-game out to the odd Wild Pair and Sacred Mesa, plays Remand when I’m going the Korlash beatdown route, and is much less dead than Disenchant against U/G beats and Pickles.

Finally, I had to re-evaluate an old favorite: Temporal Isolation. These days, everyone is packing Aura removal; G/W boards Disenchant or Kestrel in anticipation of Isolation and Take Possession, U/B has Venser and Disenchant for the same, and all the other Blue decks have Riftwing Cloudskate and/or Snapback to get their dudes back. Isolation is an amazing answer to Mystic Enforcer, Korlash, and damn near everything else… if it sticks. However, if my opponent is boarding in Aura removal anyway, and the only target I ever present him with is Isolation, he’s going to get his hit in and convert a dead card into a mise. The two potential replacement Korlash/Enforcer-killers are Pongify (blech) and Spin into Myth (also blech). One of these is way expensive, and the other is a one-for-two that leaves the opponent with a substantial beater. Given the speed of this format, I’d prefer the added expense to the card disadvantage.

Change number four is -1 Teferi, -1 Pull from Eternity, -1 Temporal Isolation, +1 Sudden Death, +1 Venser, +1 Spin into Myth

My Current List

Never has a Constructed decklist of mine changed so often in such little time as my U/B build has in the past week. I thought I had it nailed down when I gave my list to Craig so he could go win his PTQ with Logic Knot, but between then and now, I found out about the new Virulent Sliver deck, heard that U/G Beats is suddenly popular in Southern California, Reanimator got more press, and Osyp told everyone to board in Disenchants instead of Kestrels against U/B.

All these things conspired to make me update my list to the following experimental build. I’d love to have tested this inside and out, but in the span of a week, there just wasn’t the time. Previously, I had Temporal Isolation over Spin into Myth main (like everyone else), Disenchant main over Extirpate, and Serrated Arrows for Dervishes and Mire Boas in the board over Premature Burials. Next week’s article will be all about playing the deck, and between now and then I should have figured out for sure if these changes were worth it.

At any rate, if I were PTQing tomorrow, I’d PTQ with this.

Matchups

Gerry-Style U/B/w

Most of the time, game one of the U/B Teachings Mirror is decided by one of three things:

Urza’s Factory superiority
An unanswered beater goes all the way (Korlash, Finkel, Trisk)
Someone gets manascrewed and just dies

A common occurrence for the mirror match is for a Factory Fight to take place. That’s where each of us has an Urza’s Factory and is making a token every turn with which to block the other guy’s attacking token. You can then gain Assembly-Worker Advantage in such a fight, in one of several ways. The easiest way is just to start production before your opponent; crank out a 2/2 on his end step when he doesn’t have a Factory yet, and he’s taking two every turn until he kills your token. If he immediately drops a Factory and passes back the turn, you’ll make a second 2/2 on his end step, but as soon as you attack with it, he’ll make a token and block it. The two of you will likely be trading tokens this way for the foreseeable future, but you’ll still be connecting for two every turn because you got that one critical activation out before the other guy’s Factory was online. Thus, you have Assembly-Worker Advantage.

If you’re way behind on Workers, you can cast Damnation to reset the table, but unless you have twelve mana up (counting a Factory), the other guy will just make a token on your end step and continue to have an extra Worker on you. If you cast Damnation with Factory mana open, on the other hand, you’ll actually restore Worker parity.

Another common occurrence is casting Tendrils or Slaughter Pact on the other guy’s Worker, to put yourself ahead by one. Adding dorks like Finkel and Venser to the table also puts you ahead on “Workers” (as far as attacking and blocking goes, they might as well be 2/2 tokens), but Korlash and Triskelavus really tip the tables. Korlash is, as Gerry put it, “like having two Factories active.” He requires chumping basically every turn, allowing you to build up tokens because they aren’t being traded away each turn like they normally would. Triskelavus just flies over and ends the game immediately, which is why I think the Trisk/Ruins package is worth it in the long game, even without Teferi to fetch him earlier.

Before the Factory Fight starts, the most important advantage you can get in the mirror is resolving Haunting Hymn on the opponent. Not only is it a four-for-one, it also puts you in a position to go for that lesser-used win condition of “random beater goes all the way.” After the opponent dumps his removal spells, you can just drop a Korlash and see if he topdecks Damnation in time. If he doesn’t, then mise! You win without even having to mess with Factory shenanigans. If he does, then you’re still ahead on artillery for the impending Factory Fight. (Another reason countermagic is worth playing in this archetype is that you can sometimes play counter-Sliver with Korlash: bash, Knot the Damnation, bash, tutor for Pact on the Legend Rule attempt, bash, win.)

Because some people maindeck countermagic and Imp’s Mischief these days, you should try to back your Hymn up with a Pact of Negation if possible. (If the guy taps out and hasn’t tutored for Pact, then just go for it.) Teachings naturally lets you search up both Pact and Hymn, but a spare Tolaria West can get the Pact and save you some mana. Being able to chain Teachings together is quite valuable, so you only want to Teach for Pact and then flash it back for Hymn if you have lots of action in your hand and can follow it up with multiple threatening plays to put the game away. If you can’t do that, then take the extra time to Teach for Teach first, so that you can spend your post-Hymn mana setting up the late game with further Teachings while the opponent struggles to recover from the loss of his hand.

Extirpating the opponent’s Teachings also gives you a leg up, both because it makes it very hard for him to Hymn you and because it gives you lots of information. There are many different U/B Teachings lists around, and knowing whether the opponent has such things as Cancel, Pact of Negation, Temporal Isolation, Korlash, Finkel, and Aeon Chronicler can not only help you play better, but also makes your sideboarding decisions much more informed. You want to bring in Pull against Chronicler lists, for example, but Pull is terrible if they don’t have the Chronic, and sometimes they won’t draw it in game one because they only play one or two copies.

Some people Teach for Teachings without casting the new one right away; if this happens, you can effect a Split Second Cabal Therapy by aiming Extirpate at the graveyard and stripping the other one out of his hand. Others will cast Teachings for the card they need right away and then flash it back to get a new Teachings, keeping themselves safe from Extirpate in the process. If they do that, you can punish them with Logic Knot, Pact, or Venser on the flashbacked copy, countering it and breaking up the chain.

Sideboarding:

+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Imp’s Mischief
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant

-3 Tendrils of Corruption
-1 Slaughter Pact
-1 Sudden Death

There are a lot of different schools of thought regarding how to board for the mirror. First and foremost, there’s the Take Possession plan. If you cast Take Possession on an Urza’s Factory — or even just a Korlash (especially if you then activate Grandeur) — you get ahead in a big way, and can often ride that massive advantage to victory.

Take is easier to resolve than Hymn, and more back-breaking if it sticks on a Factory, but the opponent generally has several turns to find an answer. Since a lot of decks run two Factories, an answer can be as simple as Transmuting Tolaria West for the other one, and since Venser and Disenchant are now popular board cards to take out Take, Mystical Teachings is another answer.

Adrian Sullivan advocates a heavy countermagic plan, including multiple Draining Whelks, Pact of Negation, and Vensers. This lets him not only control what the opponent is doing (including the uncounterable Take Possession, which he’s got Vensers for), but also to opportunistically win on the “counter-Sliver with one beater” plan — usually Draining Whelk, in his case.

My plan is to make the game all about Hymn and Teachings superiority. With three Hymns, I will not always even need to tutor for one of the combo pieces, so the opponent won’t even know if he needs to be defending himself. I can also Hymn multiple times per game, and still retain Extirpate for his Teachings, making the rebuilding process even harder if I hit one with my Hymn.

Imp’s Mischief is really just an extra counter in this sideboarding plan that can lead to blowouts. Stealing an early Consideration is strong, but not back-breaking, while Misdirecting a Haunting Hymn is devastating. Don’t wait around for the opponent to walk a Hymn into the Mischief, or you may be waiting a long time — he might not even go for a Hymn this game. If you see an early Consideration to steal, go for it. Finally, Mischief is just fine as a Counterspell in a counter war, and should absolutely be used as such if you’re fighting over an important spell.

Ruel-Style U/B

After losing to Ruel in a feature match at Montreal, Gerry spliced the Coalition Relic/Take Possession/Bogardan Hellkite formula into his Tolaria West/Finkel suite, and immediately won the Indianapolis PTQ the next weekend with Relics, Finkels, Takes, and Tolarias main. While I think Ruel’s approach was brilliant when no one was prepared for it (i.e. last week), I don’t like it for the upcoming PTQs now that the word is out that it’s good.

Anyway, don’t bother Extirpating Teachings in game one. Instead, wait until you knock out a Take Possession with Venser and then Extirpate those instead. As I said before, Take Possession is devastating if it sticks, so the trick is to make sure it doesn’t. The good news about this matchup is that these U/B variants go “all in” on Take Possession in the mirror. They devote so many slots to mana producing and Take Possession that if you Extirpate their Takes, it’s pretty much their Urza’s Factory against the rest of your deck.

Sideboarding:

+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Imp’s Mischief
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Disenchant

-3 Tendrils of Corruption
-1 Slaughter Pact
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Damnation

You know these guys have Take Possession, and lots of them, and ways to power them out very early. Furthermore, with the exception of the Indianapolis-winning list, they don’t have Finkel, so there’s no need to max out on Damnations.

The big thing to watch out for in post-board games is Bust. Be careful of overextending on lands when you can’t counter Bust, because it can be profitable for the opponent to clear all the terrain away and leave himself with Coalition Relics and Lenses to your Lenses and nothing, especially if he’s been sandbagging some lands to this end. It’s still a control mirror, and having lands out is very important, but just be mindful of what will happen if the opponent chooses to cast Bust next turn.

Yasooka-Style U/B

This and Adrian’s Baron list are really the only times you have to worry about countermagic from U/B. Other than that, there’s not much to say here that hasn’t already been said about the other two matchups.

Pull comes in for Chronicler, naturally.

Sideboarding:

+2 Haunting Hymn
+1 Imp’s Mischief
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Pull from Eternity

-3 Tendrils of Corruption
-1 Slaughter Pact
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Damnation

Kenji-Style Pickles

This is a very tempo-oriented matchup. Kenji has Ancestral to your Careful Consideration, Venser and Cloudskate to your Prismatic Lens, and all sorts of countermagic to keep you on your heels. You’d be surprised how much of a detrimental effect a couple bounced lands can have on your ability to play your game.

The key is to keep from getting too far behind on whatever angle Pickles is attacking. If he’s going for your lands to keep you from winning countermagic wars later on, concede the countermagic war and just counter the Riftwing or Venser to keep your land in play. If he’s got multiple Suspend spells queued up, he’s probably going to try and protect them with Teferi. If those are what are important to him, don’t Teach for Sudden Death in anticipation; he’ll just bring in Tef on your end step and protect his upkeep step anyway. Instead, try to load up on countermagic — especially a Pact, since a Cancelled Pact is completely free for you — or just start setting up for the turns following the de-suspend.

Whenever you have Korlash out, consider the possibility that Urborg might get bounced. This is more important than ever in this matchup.

Sideboarding:

+1 Imp’s Mischief
+1 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Pull from Eternity

-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Triskelavus
-1 Venser

In this matchup, you basically take out all the really slow stuff for some cheaper tricks and Teferi. Remember that Imp’s Mischief doesn’t do anything against Venser or Cloudskate, and cast Pull from Eternity pretty much the very second a target presents itself. If you think you can Mischief the Ancestral, you should go for it.

G/W Aggro

Here ends the section on Pickles and the mirror match and begins the section entitled Decks That Die A Horrible Death To Tendrils of Corruption. G/W is the first of those decks.

The first thing to know about G/W is the damage math. You know they don’t have any actual reach, but they can deal you more damage than the power and toughness on the table suggests if they have Stonewood Invocation, Thrill of the Hunt, or pre-combat Timbermare (which, remember, does stop all their other potential attackers unless they have Scryb Ranger). This matchup is excellent for you as long as you don’t let them blow you out.

Playing around Invocation is simple in theory, but complicated in practice. The obvious part is not playing spot removal in the opposing combat step. The complicated part is gauging the importance of actually landing a Tendrils soon versus managing the damage on the table. If the other guy is clearly holding back Invocation as a Split Second Avoid Fate against Tendrils, it might be correct to just go get Hymn and clear out his hand so that you can Corrupt with impunity. The faster, but less advantageous route is to Tendrils on the end step, clear the Invocation, and untap and send another in to go up on life. For thoroughness, I’ll mention that another (rare) way to get around Invocation is to let the opponent think he’s attacking for lethal if he Invocations one of his guys, then Tendrils the other to put yourself back in the driver’s seat. Careful G/W players won’t fall for that, though, so don’t try it except when you’ve exhausted all your other options.

Most G/W players will make you use a Damnation on Mystic Enforcer, and so will play out a number of non-Enforcer beaters and/or Griffin Guides, in order to draw out a Damnation before they play Big E. There are a couple of ways you can handle this. One is to play Damnation with counter backup for the Enforcer, another is to answer the Enforcer the old-fashioned way, by removing it with another Damnation or Spin into Myth (or Isolation, if you’re sticking with that version), and yet another is to just Hymn the Enforcer out of their hands before playing Damnation. That last option only works, obviously, if they don’t have much pressure on you.

The other two cards to watch out for are Stonecloaker — which I’ve heard may be some up-and-coming mirror match and anti-Teachings technology — and Thrill of the Hunt. Thrill really only comes up when the opponent is attacking for two short of lethal damage, when you’re blocking with Korlash and don’t have regeneration mana up, and when you’re casting Tendrils for a low enough amount that a two- or four-point toughness boost could allow the creature to live. Stonecloaker is similar to Invocation except that it can smoke your Teachings before you can flash them back. You don’t want to be paranoid in playing around these cards, just try to keep them in mind before making the kind of play that might get you blown out when there was a perfectly fine alternative you could have chosen instead.

Oh, and while racing with Korlash is always an option, don’t go for it if an Isolation will muck up your plan. The opponent doesn’t have many other targets for that card besides Korlash.

Sideboarding:

+2 Draining Whelk
+1 Spin into Myth
+1 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir

-3 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
-1 Extirpate

Post-board, you can expect them to have Whirling Dervish and/or Mire Boa, plus Vesuva. This changes everything; playing Korlash early opens you up to losing the Urborg you need so badly for Tendrils, and he’s not so good at racing when a Dervish or Mire Boa can just jump in his path. The Whelk/Teferi plan lets you get to a stable board position and defend it with the threat of Cancel Dragon or Teachings into Teferi and then Triskelavus. On record, I’m not sold on this being the best possible boarding strategy against G/W, but it’s the one I like best at the moment.

Pact of Negation stays in not only because of Mystic Enforcer, but also because some G/W lists splash red and Bust post-board. (I would especially watch the Kavu Predator/Fiery Justice builds.)You need to have an answer to that if they go for it, and Pact is the safest answer there is.

White Weenie

This deck isn’t terribly popular anymore, but I’ll briefly go over it alongside G/W because the matchups are so similar. Here, you definitely have to watch out for Stonecloaker (but not Stonewood Invocation), and most of what I said about Mystic Enforcer applies to Calciderm as well. The main difference is that you can actually block Calciderm with Korlash or Factory a couple times to get it out of your hair.

White Weenie is easier to beat than G/W in that it doesn’t have Enforcer or Saffi, but harder in that you have to play around Mana Tithe and in that Sacred Mesa can blow you out. Your best answers to Mesa are Venser into countermagic, Triskelavus recursion, or ramming Korlash and Factory into it long enough to find one of the previous two answers.

Sideboarding:

+4 Premature Burial
+1 Disenchant

-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Extirpate
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-1 Pact of Negation

As their main way to beat you is by getting an extremely fast start and your not being able to set up in time, Premature Burial is excellent at kicking their legs out from beneath them. All you need to do is buy time to set up; the late game is yours, and this deck has even less “reach” than G/W.

DeRosa-Style U/G Beats

I have to admit, this and the new Poison Slivers deck are the two New Kids on the Block in terms of popularity, and I haven’t had time to run them through their paces yet. The inclusion of Premature Burial in the board over more focused anti-G/W cards like Serrated Arrows and the inclusion of maindeck Sudden Death is in anticipation of these two decks.

The way I plan to attack U/G is the same way a control deck attacks any aggro-control deck: one-for-one them until turns 3-4, at which point the matchup changes from “aggro-control versus control” to “weak topdecked threats.dec versus control.” And I like that matchup.

I don’t want to give advice here that isn’t backed up by testing, but I will say that the anti-Tendrils card to watch out for here is definitely Snapback. You may need to wait on casting Tendrils until you have countermagic backup, or else risk not connecting at all. Also remember that this deck actually has reach in the form of Psionic Blast, and countermagic in the form of Delay.

Sideboarding:

+4 Premature Burial

-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Extirpate
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-1 Spin into Myth

I may want to bring in the other Pact of Negation, but I’m not sure what it would come in for yet. I don’t see any post-board blowouts in DeRosa’s list, just more countermagic in Cancel and Mystic Snake, but I suspect the extra Pact may be worth it as an answer to Snapback even if it is extremely slow for an anti-aggro card.

Poison Slivers

Again, this is the other matchup I haven’t tested against yet. It was basically a choice between “finish the article” and “playtest the new decks”, and as you’re reading this, you can figure out which I chose.

If you haven’t heard of the new Sliver deck, it won two consecutive 2x Premier Events on MTGO, and is one of the few decks in the format that successfully plays actual one-drops. From what I saw, the maindeck looks something like this:

4 Grove of the Burnwillows
4 Terramorphic Expanse
5 Forest
6 Island
2 Mountain
3 Gemstone Mine

4 Virulent Sliver
4 Screeching Sliver
4 Two-Headed Sliver
4 Gemhide Sliver
4 Firewake Sliver
4 Homing Sliver
4 Frenetic Sliver
4 Dormant Sliver
1 Telekinetic Sliver

3 Summoner’s Pact

The board definitely has Boom/Bust in it.

As with U/G, the key here seems to be managing the early rush so that my strong late game can take over. As such, my preliminary sideboarding plan is as follows.

+4 Premature Burial

-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Extirpate
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-1 Spin into Myth

I’m not sure if Extirpate should stay in or not, but until I do some testing, I can’t be sure. Again, sorry I didn’t have time to fit in more testing in the last minute.

Mono Red w/ Gargadon

This matchup was easy as pie when I had three Epochrasite and one Pull main (and another of each in the board, along with Aven Riftwatcher); now it’s merely favorable. Now if they have a Gargadon in game 1, your best bet is to race it with Korlash, using Tendrils on your own Korlash to pull ahead in the life totals if you have to. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to just kill all their guys and manage the burn with a Logic Knot or two until the Gargadon runs out of time, more power to you, but that’s not altogether likely.

You’ll still win pretty much all the games where they don’t have Gargadon, though. The only alternative to stop Tendrils is burning out their own guys, but you can stop that with Logic Knot, Pact of Negation, or putting them in a position where they need to tap out to burn your face. The big one to watch out for is Dead/Gone, as they have access to it anytime they have a red open.

+4 Premature Burial
+1 Pull from Eternity

-1 Haunting Hymn
-1 Extirpate
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant
-1 Pact of Negation

Again, the name of the game is staving off damage so that you can make it to the late game. Especially on the draw, Burial is the cheapest versatile one-for-one removal spell on the market, and it will do a great job holding off Red’s early-game creatures for you. Remember that if you’re going to cast Burial and then a Damnation on turn 4, aim for the War Marshal himself instead of one of his tokens.

R/G Big Mana

This matchup is all about the Land Destruction. The more copies of Avalanche Riders and Acid-Moss they draw, the better shape they’ll be in. Never pitch extra Urborgs to Careful Consideration, and never play Korlash without an actual Basic Swamp in play in case Urborg gets blown up.

Their late game consists of Stormbind, Hellkite, and Molten Disaster. The important one here is Disaster, as you can’t counter it and can only race it. Not only can you not counter it, you can’t respond with Tendrils to gain some life, so if you’re in range, blowing a Tendrils on your own Korlash is far from a foolish play.

Sideboarding:

+2 Draining Whelk
+1 Haunting Hymn
+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Disenchant

-1 Triskelavus
-1 Extirpate
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant

Whatever you do, do not get owned by Bust in this matchup. If you’re casting Haunting Hymn, make sure you either have Pact backup or are clearing out the opponent’s entire hand. Triskelavus only comes out here because Academy Ruins gets destroyed so often, and because he dies to Bogardan Hellkite while Korlash does not. You mainly win the post-board games with either Korlash or Draining Whelk.

Disenchant comes in for Stormbind, in case that wasn’t clear.

U/G Shifter

In my opinion, U/G Shifter quietly made out like a bandit when Future Sight entered the mix. Take Possession, Venser, and Delay fit perfectly into this deck, and just because the list that made Top 8 at Montreal didn’t play them, Llanowar Reborn and Pact of Negation seem like good fits as well.

It’s tough to suggest how to play against this archetype, because so much depends on how much the opponent’s list adheres to Ootsuka’s Top 8 list and how much he leans toward the lists of old. The big question is whether or not to play Urborg around Acid-Moss; I think, in general, that you should. If Top 8 lists start cropping up with no Acid-Moss, though, you can probably stop playing around it and enjoy an easier matchup.

Like Pickles, this matchup is mainly about tempo and counters. The good news is that Shifter’s counters are both less plentiful and more expensive than Kenji’s. The bad news is, their threats are bigger — particularly Chronicler, Thelonite Hermit, and Take Possession. Remember that any given morph might be Thelonite Hermit, and that Venser is still around to bounce Urborg and blockers.

Save Venser in game 1 for Take Possession or Stormbind — you can bet they’ll have one or the other.

Sideboarding:

+1 Pact of Negation
+1 Pull from Eternity
+1 Disenchant
+1 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir

-1 Extirpate
-1 Spin into Myth
-1 Sudden Death
-1 Venser, Shaper Savant

Embarrassingly, Ootsuka’s version is full of targeted effects and bereft of Imp’s Mischief targets. (Besides, even if you see Acid-Moss in game 1, it’s not really worth it to bring in the Mischief just for that.) Expect Delay or Cancel post-board.

The Wrap-Up

Well, that’s twenty pages in MS Word; I guess the play advice is going to have to wait until next week.

In the meantime, yes, I still recommend U/B over everything else, no, I don’t think it’s close… and check out the Bonus Section, won’t you?

Until next time!

Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]

Bonus Section: Is That One Good?

For the better part of a year now, some friends of mine and I have been working on a massive project. It’s a powerful website that (we hope) might someday change the way people use the Internet to discover new and exciting things. We had a small group of handpicked beta testers working with us for most of the year, but now there’s an invite-based beta that was launched as of… tonight.

I’ve set up a special invite code that will admit SCG readers to try it out — the code is, intuitively, starcitygames — so any of you that give it a shot will be getting in on the ground floor of the Big Beta, as we developers call it. If you’re already interested enough to give it a whirl, head to www.isthatonegood.com and check it out.

Otherwise, I’ll explain how the site works.

The original idea behind the IsThatOneGood website (ITOG for short) was that movie recommendations from friends and critics never take into account your personal tastes. Oh, so the New York Post says “the dialogue in Transformers was trite,” does it? Thanks for the help. Were there freaking giant metal robot battles? Were said battles totally freaking awesome? Because that’s what I’m looking for in a movie like that.

How does ITOG solve that? Basically, you log onto the site and rate a bunch of movies you’ve seen, one to five stars. One star means it sucked, five stars means it was great. Now let’s say you’re trying to figure out if you’ll like Transformers or not. You bring up its page, and the site instantly runs all sorts of complicated algorithms to look at people whose tastes are similar to yours (that is, they’ve given similar ratings to things you’ve rated) and see what they — the users on the site most similar in taste to you — thought of Transformers.

Then voila! A prediction for what you’ll think of it pops up, such as “four stars” (go see it!) or “one star” (stay away). If you want more specific feedback than that, you can read reviews written by other ITOG members, and you can see what their percent similarity in tastes is to yours before you decide whether or not to trust what they’ve written. That’s the simple part of the project.

Since we started in September, there have been a couple of other sites to do similar things. Flixster does exactly what I’ve just described, and iLike does the same (with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down system instead of star ratings) for music.

The reason our site is so much cooler? We don’t just do movies. We don’t just do music.

We do things.

Already we let you rate and get recommendations for Movies, Books, TV Shows, Games, Albums, Songs, and even Graphic Novels. If you feel like it, you can also rate Actors, Directors, Authors, Recording Artists, and Game Systems. Our system is designed to be flexible so that we can add more things as time progresses; we’re in the process of branching out into new areas like Soft Drinks, Alcoholic Drinks, Fictional Characters, and even Countries and Cities (as travel destinations).

If that’s not enough for you, there are social networking features like friend lists, clubs, discussions, polls, lists of things you like (or hate, or think are funny-looking – whatever you want, really), and private messaging.

Sound cool? Give it a shot, for ol’ Feldman’s sake. Just use the invite code starcitygames to register your account at www.itog.com and you’re all set.

Hell, even if it sounds lame, do me a favor and try the thing out. (And tell your friends!) We’ve worked our asses off on this project, and we really want it to spread. Plus, I never do shameless plugs… so let’s make this one count!

Thanks for reading all this, and remember… Brian Kowal is cool, but Gerry Thompson is the real Korlash innovator.