I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Dragonstorm is simultaneously the best and most underrated deck in the format. Despite the fact that DS has consistently held the most or second-most Top 8s in Magic Online Premier events, very few people I’ve talked to seem as concerned about beating it as I do.
Why is this? I think a lot of it has to do with playtest partners. If the Dragonstorm player in your group is a dedicated combo player, that might actually be to his detriment. Strange as it may sound, Dragonstorm is only a Dragonstorm combo deck around half the time. The rest of the time it’s a crude, opportunistic beatdown deck, and not everyone has a proper grasp on that.
Anyone can win the games where their turn 4 Dragonstorm births Hellkite quadruplets, but that’s a minority draw for DS. It’s the games when you have to raw-dog a single dragon and navigate it to victory that make the deck’s results vary so much by pilot. A lot of combo players I know treat the aggressive hardcast as such a last-ditch backup plan (to be used after all methods of drawing into a Dragonstorm have been exhausted), they miss the window of opportunity during which the hardcast would have actually worked.
Here’s a simple question: has your playtest partner (or have you) ever hardcast a Hunted Dragon against aggro?
The thought of it might make you queasy, but it’s exactly the type of risk you must be willing to take to get the results I’m talking about. When I was playing Walking Anthems on MTGO, a Dragonstorm player Remanded my Castigate and then went into the tank on his turn. He eventually decided to hardcast Hunted Dragon off a Seething Song, even though I was clearly going to win the on-table race. I resolved the Castigate next turn, saw two Gigadrowses and lands, and understood why he did it: unless I had a removal spell for his Hunted Dragon, it would only take one of the two Gigadrowses to tip the damage race in his favor. With a post-mulligan hand that miserable, he figured out that the unpalatable all-in on the Hunted Dragon was his best chance at victory, and he went for it.
He worked with what he had available, deciding that his combo for that game had to be simply Seething Song, Hunted Dragon, and Gigadrowse. Is that a fragile combo? Sure, but that’s only relevant if I have the removal spell; I didn’t, so his choice to seize the day and go for the jugular stole a win for him. As I took the second game and he the third, he specifically won the match because of that choice… yet plenty of Dragonstorm players will look at that hand and say, “I can’t throw down Hunted Dragon here! I’ll get wrecked! What I need to do is Fog with Gigadrowse so I can topdeck a Hellkite or a Dragonstorm to go with this Seething Song.” He might never have drawn the Hellkite or DS in time, though, and I might have found the removal spell I needed – or another Castigate – while he was off searching.
If your opponent is playing Dragonstorm with the right attitude, it’s a very tough deck to design against. The problem is that all of its supposed “hosers” – Shadow of Doubt, Trickbind, etc. – are all easily nullified by a single Gigadrowse prior to going off. Since the only card that really counters Gigadrowse is Rewind, you either must play Rewind, or else some kind of disruption package that is not trumped by Gigadrowse. That means the only cost-efficient disruption spells that Dragonstorm cares about are Castigate, Rise / Fall, turn 3 Persecute, and Rewind. (Nightmare Void isn’t at its best when the opponent is playing with Suspend spells, Telling Time, and Remand, especially when you’re doing nothing but Dredging and tapping out for a four-mana Coercion each turn.)
That about sums up the most important deck in the format. Granted, I could have just said that Dragonstorm is a high-Velocity multidimensional combo strategy against which most apparent hosers are false trumps due to the tactical maindeck inclusion of Gigadrowse. However, as that sentence is From Concentrate and this is a Premium restaurant, I thought it appropriate to add enough water to make it drinkable before serving it to you. I hope no one minds.
Like I said, as far as DS is concerned, Castigate, Rise / Fall, turn 3 Persecute, and Rewind are about it. If the Dragon player screws up or mulligans into oblivion, you can win that way, but otherwise you’re fighting a losing battle without one of these cards. I’m not okay with my best way to beat an opponent being “he screws up” – the distinction between “he screws up” and “I outplay him” is that I can practice my way into being able to outplay him, but I can’t practice his skill level down.
Of the top-tier decks, Gruul has the fastest aggro clock of the bunch… but it struggles against DS precisely because it plays none of the four disruption cards that DS cares about. Without them, Gruul is forced to race a combo deck that goes off turn 4-5 and frustrates the Gruul player’s clock with Remand and Gigadrowse along the way. It’s not fair.
So where does Gruul fit in?
Well, not everyone plays Dragonstorm because not everyone can get results with it. (Or because they think it’s boring.) When you enter into a Magic tournament, your life is not on the line, so you can play whatever you want, even if your chances of winning are not great. I would never take Angelfire to a tournament, for example, because I don’t think I could ever beat a competent Dragonstorm player who said the word “mulligan” fewer than twice per game – and I know I’m going to run into DS if I make it to the Top 8.
Some people play Angelfire, some play Izzetron, some play Gruul, and even though none of these decks have any winning strategy against the format’s top deck that I can spot, so many people play them, they can make the Top 8 by defeating one another throughout the Swiss. That’s a pretty pessimistic view of this Standard environment, but I call ‘em as I see ‘em.
I wanted to follow Walking Anthems up with a control deck. I was playing by the same rules as before: rather than taking someone else’s list and altering it, I was forcing myself to come up with my own, from scratch.
This rule makes life tough for me because it’s not acceptable to me to have a losing record against the top deck. As far as I’m concerned, if I’m pulling less than 50% against that deck, I should just play that deck and take a coin-flip mirror match along with the best overall matchups against the rest of the field. Thus, I had to be playing either a Rewind deck or a Castigate-plus-Persecute package; I already tried Castigate plus Rise / Fall with Walking Anthems.
Those restrictions led me to the following list.
Creatures (10)
Lands (23)
Spells (27)
The format’s most ubiquitous flying finisher is Bogardan Hellkite, so I designed this deck around not getting two-for-one’d by it. Because Angel of Despair gets to blow up a permanent, she technically one-for-one trades with it, and whether you lose the Angel’s 5/5 body or your opponent loses the Hellkite’s 5/5 body depends entirely on which one is unfortunate enough to hit the table first. Teneb’s toughness puts him out of the Hellkite’s burn range, so a combination of some sort is required to take him out – either Hellkite plus Sulfur Elemental, a Hellkite that shoots and blocks him, or Hellkite plus a burn spell.
It’s a Cardinal Sin in some circles to play Spectral Force without a way to untap it, but it’s a damn fine finisher even without devoting slots to cards that do little or nothing to control the board or gain you card advantage. Think of Spectral Force as a 4/8 Haste for 3GG: the turn after you play it, it’s attacked for eight, and three turns after you play it, it’s attacked for sixteen, just like a 4/8 Haste would have. It’s not quite that simple, but you get the idea: it gets in for a lot of damage and is nigh-impossible to remove in combat due to its enormous toughness. One of the reasons the Force is better than a 4/8 Haste is that nothing blocks it without taking lethal. Not even Bogardan Hellkite.
Temporal Isolation, which has quickly become my favorite removal spell in the format, stops Hellkite’s damage and efficiently answers any of Gruul’s creatures short of the Solifuge. As to the rest of the list, Harmonize is deliciously-priced card draw, Damnation is Damnation, discard is discard, and Bob’s your uncle.
How’d it do in playtesting?
I pulled a 50% win rate against Dragonstorm and threw my hands in the air in disgust. Four maindeck Persecute? Four maindeck Castigate? Four maindeck Temporal Isolation backed up by Damnation? How far do I have to go to get a winning record against this thing?
Walking Anthems went 50-50 against everything, and I’m not about to go down that road again. There’s got to be something besides Dralnu that can beat Dragonstorm consistently without dedicating its entire existence to mashing on the opponent’s hand. (I’m looking at you, Mono-Black Rack.)
Next up with the Castigate / Persecute package was a W/R/B configuration.
Creatures (7)
Lands (23)
Spells (30)
I was really pumped to try out this particular dragon against Gruul. That’s some nice ability against a G/R deck with mainly three-toughness creatures, yeah? Phyrexian Arena the best card draw that comes to mind in these colors (Moonlight Bargain anyone?), and its downside is mitigated by Firemane Angel and Faith’s Fetters. Firemane Angel is vulnerable to Extirpate, but that doesn’t bother me. Dralnu is the only Deck to Beat that can play it, and they only use it to stop her from dominating the late game. I still get a two-for-one if they have to counter, Damnation, or Sudden Death an Angel and then Extirpate it, unless I’m holding another one when the Extirpate hits. (Remember that I never discard them to Compulsive Research.) The bigger deal is that Gruul can’t remove them without boarding and drawing Tormod’s Crypt, so I can expect to gain a solid amount of life from them in the aggro matchups and give me some late-game inevitability against non-Dralnu decks.
Then I realized something. I had the same anti-Dragonstorm package as the Teneb list, so how could I expect to do any better than 50-50 again? Blech. Back to the drawing board.
I can’t seem to get Castigate and Persecute to work. How about a Rewind deck, then?
The trick about Rewind working against Dragonstorm is that you need not only a Rewind to counter their Gigadrowse, you also need another counter to stop them from going off on their turn. However, that’s not as specific an order; If they don’t have too much mana, a well-timed Mana Leak or even just a Remand on a Seething Song can keep them from reaching the nine-mana mark and fizzle out.
The next deck I came up with was a Flash-based aggro-control list featuring Rewind… something like this.
Creatures (20)
Lands (22)
Spells (18)
The idea is simple: tap mana in the main phase on turn 1, and hardly ever again after that. All the deck’s threats besides Kird Ape come in on the end step, allowing you to keep countermagic mana open at all times.
Make no mistake, Gruul – the second-most-successful deck in the format – will walk all over this thing. However, aggro-control decks like this tend to smack down slower Blue decks… er, well, except for Dragonstorm. See, Dragonstorm will just wait ‘til you’re flashing in one of your cute guys like Sulfur Elemental, and will take that opportunity to summon a Bogardan Hellkite at instant speed that will Wrath your team, crush your dreams, and kill you by itself. “A” for effort, though.
So… Rewind control, then?
If I were to build a Rewind control deck that was aiming for Dragonstorm, I’d want it to use the main phase essentially… never. I need to have four mana open at all times to Rewind Gigadrowse, meaning my ideal finisher would be something that cost me little to nothing in the main phase. Sacred Mesa would be fine if Sulfur Elemental weren’t so commonly played, and any strategy involving monolith finishers like Akroma, Simic Sky Swallower, etc. are right out unless they’re preceded by Teferi so I can use the end step. Guess I’m playing Teferi, then.
I also need to have Rewind consistently, which means Mystical Teachings. So I need Rewind, Mystical Teachings, and Teferi… sounding like Dralnu yet?
Man, whoever that crazy old man was who said “Go forth and scratch-build decks, Feldman,” was a jerk. I mean, I went with it because he offered me candy, but he made it sound so easy!
At any rate, I like the direction this final list is headed – for Regionals, that is – but it’s not something I came up with from scratch so much as it is a port of Dralnu to U/W. It retains a touch of Black for Extirpate and Teachings flashback, but is solidly White so that I can play Crovax, Temporal Isolation, and Pull from Eternity.
Creatures (4)
Lands (26)
Spells (30)
Pull From Eternity is in the board somewhere. (Screw Detritivore and the horse it rode in on. Aeon Chronicler too, while you’re at it.)
Crovax is a fantastic finisher for a deck like this. Unlike Skeletal Vampire, which is merely difficult to kill, Crovax is damn near impossible to kill. Although a Vampire with a pair of Bats can block a Hellkite, it can’t productively attack back. Crovax can’t block a Hellkite, but – perhaps more importantly – the Hellkite can’t productively block him. Best of all, he blanks a lot of Gruul’s topdecks – Llanowar Elves, Scorched Rusalka, and by far most importantly, Giant Solifuge.
As far as I know, the best play in Standard you can make when four copies of Dragonstorm are on the stack is to resolve Swift Silence. I’ll stop your combo and Tidings myself, thanks. (It’s a great way to finish a counter war for the same reason.) Mystical Teachings for Condemn is leaps and bounds more mana-efficient against Gruul than anything Dralnu can tutor for. Temporal Isolation is dead against pretty much nothing except (kinda) Dralnu, and allows you to maindeck several two-mana spot removal spells against Gruul.
Now, while I can hardly claim to have scratch-built a deck that clearly derives so much from Guillaume Wafo-Tapa Dralnu list, this deck does, at least crush Dragonstorm. A dozen playtest games with only two losses confirmed this. That said, it’s not terribly exciting unless you’re in the market for a control deck for Regionals; depending on what Pact of Negation does to the format, I might be playing a variant of this myself at that tournament. Time will tell.
This weekend I’ll be in Columbus for the Legacy Grand Prix, so next Tuesday I’ll be taking a break from Standard to share some thoughts on that format. In the meantime, I’ll be off testing one of these three control decks – Teneb, Oros, or Crovax.
I’ll let you guys pick which. Of Teneb, Oros, and Crovax, which deck are you the most interested in seeing developed? Hit the forums and let me know which one I should zoom in on.
See you in Columbus!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
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