Well, we’re well and truly into new territory now. Ooodles and oodles of articles about new decks are all over the web. Oversold Cemetery got you interested? There’s a couple of articles for you. Grinning Demon, Undead Gladiator? Step this way, sir. All in all, the amount of innovation going on is astounding and that’s great because it means that – no matter who tells you otherwise – you’re going to run into new decks at States. Sure, all the pundits have their”decks to beat” and their”well defined metagame”… But don’t believe them too easily and make sure whatever you plan on playing it can deal with the unexpected.
A couple of interesting things have happened in the last month or so for Team PhatBeats. First we invited Adam Reynolds, a regular testing and drinking partner, to join the Team. For a new member to be invited, we all have to agree… And now that one of us is in Canada, another in Antigua, and one in Belgium it’s getting more difficult to meet up. Email, of course, is the answer and no one had any objections. Team PhatBeats’ membership is now up to eight.
The second thing of note is the introduction in the UK of County Championships. In the last couple of years, we’ve watched States with more than a hint of jealousy: At the end of States’ weekend, there is a Standard metagame… And it’s the US that’s made it. Now, for the first time, we get to try out our new ideas on the same weekend. It gives us a chance to try out new decks and new ideas before we know what everyone will be playing. I’m really looking forward to it. Hopefully I’ll be giving you a Somerset County Champion’s report next week – but there are a lot of good players round here, so keep your fingers crossed for me.
So. What’s all this got to do with Snakes?
One of the most interesting decks in Standard before Onslaught rotates in has been Hunting Grounds. There have been several well-publicised versions, but my favourite one won Grand Prix: Taipei. Here’s the deck listing:
Grand Prix Taipei Winning Deck played by Sheng Hsun Hsai
Creatures (5):
1x Mystic Enforcer
1x Genesis
3x Mystic Snake
Spells (31):
2x Exclude
3x Memory Lapse
4x Counterspell
4x Absorb
4x Fact or Fiction
3x Deep Analysis
4x Repulse
2x Hunting Grounds
2x Living Wish
3x Wrath of God
Land (24):
1x Forest
1x Plains
5x Island
2x Brushland
2x Skycloud Expanse
3x Sungrass Prairie
3x Coastal Tower
2x Adarkar Wastes
2x Nantuko Monastery
3x Yavimaya Coast
Sideboard (15):
1x Phantom Nishoba
1x Nantuko Tracer
3x Meddling Mage
3x Tangle
1x Mystic Snake
1x Aven Cloudchaser
1x Thornscape Battlemage
3x Seedtime
1x Circle of Protection: Green
The deck behaves much like a standard U/W control deck, splashing Green for a few extra counterspells… But once threshold is reached and Hunting Grounds hits the table, it’s an entirely different beast. Free counterspells, free creatures, and masses of card advantage, the deck is difficult to beat once it gets close to control.
I liked the deck because it had so many tricks up its sleeves. No Snakes in hand to counter a spell? Well, I guess I’ll Repulse the one in play, draw a card, and counter your spell for free. If you need to cast Wrath of God, Genesis makes sure your Snakes pop right back into your hand where you need them. It’s a great deck, and one I never got to play at a tournament.
Hunting Grounds stays in though, so is there anything we can do with it? Can we rebuild the deck without the Invasion block? Lets start by looking at what we’ve lost.
The first, and very important, card to mention is Mystic Snake. Not only does the snake bolster the number of counters in the deck, taking it up to eleven, three Memory Lapses, and two Excludes (and that’s a lot of counters) but later on the Snakes are free counter spells that can be reused thanks to Repulse. Replacing this is going to be hard.
We also lose Repulse. Repulse served several purposes. It could bounce an early creature to slow down your opponent. It’s a cantrip, allowing you do dig a little deeper into the deck. It also lets you bounce your own Snakes back. Aether Burst can go some way to helping out with early creatures, but it’s no cantrip.
Fact or Fiction is a big loss in every control deck, but not such a problem in this one. We have plenty of mana and already play three Deep Analyses. Although we’d like to be able to cast it in our opponent’s turn, our biggest loss is how quickly it helps us get to Threshold, enabling Hunting Grounds. We’ll certainly need to add something to replace this in our new build but what?
Losing Absorb is another kick in the teeth for us. Absorb is one of the best counters or U/W control decks has, as it not only counters a spell, but gives the deck a little more time to gain control. There really aren’t that many spells we can look at to replace this, but the best counter we have lying around is probably Circular Logic… And it looks like we’ll have to hard-cast it, too! If we can get cards in our graveyard, the Logic will be good.
Finally let’s look at the land. I lent a copy of this deck to a friend of mine for the last Bath tourney, and he had real problems with the land.”Too many filter lands, Jim” was the main complaint. The other being”Not enough lands.” I can see why the deck is running five, and it may be something we have to stick with as we lose Yavimaya Coast and Coastal Tower. The Towers really help the deck, giving us painless White and Blue, and the Coasts help get us a little green when we need it. We might be able to use some of the new Search lands to help us out… But we’ll always need land, and so stripping them out of our deck might not be the best idea.
We lose 23 cards from the main deck in total, but we’re not finished yet. We also loose a good deal of our sideboard. Tangle, good as it is, is easily replaced by Moment’s Peace… But Meddling Mage is a one-off. Losing the Mage will hurt, quite how much I don’t know, but it will.
So how do we fix the hole in our deck?
First we want our free counter spell, and that’s where the problems start. There is nothing like Mystic Snake and there probably never will be. When it first came out people moaned about its cost… But, to be fair, if it had cost 2UG, people would have splashed Blue to play it. If it had cost 1UG, Blue/Green decks really would have been close to unbeatable. Looking at what we can play with only two creatures even come close: Daring Apprentice and Voidmage Prodigy. The Apprentice won’t work, as he’ll have summoning sickness when we put him into play for free… But Kai? Kai’s never too sick to counter a spell. If we have UU untapped, we can put Kai into play for free and counter the spell, and we can’t be countered back. Sure, he’s not free, but he’s another counter in a very bare cupboard.
That brings us to the counters themselves. We’re losing six; four Absorbs and two Excludes. Exclude is another great cantrip in a creature-heavy world and it only needs one Blue mana – something we can be grateful for in a three colour deck. The only counter we have that can really help is Circular Logic with a few Complicates thrown in. The Logic has the bonus that it too only needs one Blue mana, but we do need to try and fill our graveyard.
With the loss of Fact or Fiction, the first thing we do is to go up to four Deep Analysis. The second thing I’m going to do is add two Compulsions; Compulsion will help fill the graveyard, help us get rid of land we don’t want to see later in the game, help us dig for Wrath of God, and will give us an outlet for occasional Circular Logics by Madness, rather than hard casting them. Sure, we need more Blue mana to do that, but we won’t be losing a card doing it.
I’m going to move on to talk about the land a little before I fill up all the spaces in the deck because I think I’m going to need more of it. Sheng’s deck played seven card drawing spells and six cantrips – and so far, we have only four card drawing cards and our two Compulsions. The cantrips allowed Sheng to run less land, so we’ll probably have to add cantrips or increase our land count. We’ve also lost a couple of mana fixers and I think I’m going to have to play a few Search lands… So more land is even more important. Even so, if we can get away with using some of the new cycling lands, we’ll have a few cantrips of our own.
So, I’m going to try about twenty-six land to start with and try to use four Lonely Sandbars. If I add in four Aether Bursts, that leaves me room for one more spell Given that we’ve lost the card parity of Repulse to the Bursts and card drawing, we need as much card advantage as we can get, and so I’m going to add a fourth Wrath of God. That makes our main deck look like this so far:
Creatures (5):
1x Mystic Enforcer
1x Genesis
3x Voidmage Prodigy
Spells (29):
2x Compulsion
4x Deep Analysis
4x Counterspell
3x Memory Lapse
4x Circular Logic
4x Aether Burst
2x Hunting Ground
2x Living Wish
4x Wrath of God
Land (26):
4x Lonely Sandbar
…
Now we need to add the rest of the land and, as we’ve changed the balance of spells it worth looking at the original deck to see how Sheng built up his mana. When looking at spells I list them by how much coloured mana of each colour they need. The breakdown for Sheng’s deck is as follows:
U 16
UU 11
G 9
W 7
WW 3
As you can see, he needs lots of blue mana, but many of his spells only need one Blue. We only ever need one Green really… But must we keep in mind that later in the game, we might be using one a turn with Genesis in the graveyard, and might be using some to activate Nantuko Monastery. Even so, we don’t need it early on. We don’t have many white spells, but we do have some that need two White, and we might need to cast them early on. All of this affects the mana base of the deck, and here’s what the number of land Sheng used which could produce each colour:
U 15
G 9
W 13
Colourless 2
As we can see, he’s made sure he has lots of Blue mana, but also made sure he can get to two White mana quite early on. Sheng has quite a bit of Green mana, but he probably won’t see one too early, and will see the two or three he needs later in the game.
So what about the breakdown in our build? The spells break down like so:
U 17
UU 7
G 6
W 3
WW 4
Losing the Snakes has dropped the amount of Green we need; we can probably get away with eight sources. Although it looks like we’ll need less Blue mana, as we have less spells that require two Blue, we’ll need it to dig with Compulsion – and we’ll need it to use Voidmage Prodigy. At the very least, we’ll need three Blue to use him (cast him Morphed, Morph him and sacrifice him) so if we can get an extra Blue source, it’d be handy. We’ve also upped the number of spells with two White mana, so we can’t really decrease the amount of White mana producing lands.
I’m going to use a few search lands to help our mana base out, but I don’t want to use too many. I’m also wary of using five filter lands, as in the original, after my friend’s comments. Here’s my first try at the mana base:
2x Forest
2x Plains
4x Island
4x Lonely Sandbar
2x Windswept Heath
1x Skycloud Expanse
2x Sungrass Prairie
3x Adarkar Wastes
2x Flooded Strand
2x Brushland
…and two Nantuko Monasteries. That gives us the following mana-producing breakdown.
U 14
G 8
W 14
Colourless 2
I’ve assumed that the search lands can get either colour of mana… But in practice they’ll get the one you really need – quite often, it’ll be a second White mana. It’s not the best assumption in the world… But for now, it’ll have to do.
Finally we have to look at the sideboard. The first, and very important addition I’m going to make is a second Genesis. Unlike Snakes, Voidmage Prodigies have to be sacrificed, and so they’re going to end up in the graveyard a lot more often than Snakes did. One Genesis main deck may not be enough to get them all back, especially if someone is prepared, and so I’m going to add a second that I can fetch if I need it. We swap the Snake in the sideboard for a fourth Prodigy.
Moment’s Peace goes straight in instead of Tangle – and that leaves us three slots. Given that we don’t know much about the environment yet, I’m going to choose a little more enchantment and artifact removal in the form of two Disenchants, leaving me one, last slot. So far we don’t have much to help us out against other control decks, and we have eight spells that might end up dead against them (although we can use Compulsion to swap them for something more interesting) so I’m going to add a third Compulsion as the last sideboard card.
PhatBeats Hunting Grounds (version 1):
Creatures (5):
1x Mystic Enforcer
1x Genesis
3x Voidmage Prodigy
Spells (29):
2x Compulsion
4x Deep Analysis
4x Counterspell
3x Memory Lapse
4x Circular Logic
4x Aether Burst
2x Hunting Grounds
2x Living Wish
4x Wrath of God
Land (26):
2x Forest
2x Plains
4x Island
4x Lonely Sandbar
2x Windswept Heath
1x Skycloud Expanse
2x Sungrass Prairie
3x Adarkar Wastes
2x Flooded Strand
2x Brushland
2x Nantuko Monastery
Sideboard (15):
1x Phantom Nishoba
1x Nantuko Tracer
3x Moment’s Peace
1x Voidmage Prodigy
1x Aven Cloudchaser
3x Seedtime
1x Circle of Protection: Green
2x Disenchant
1x Genesis
1x Compulsion
Now, I could just leave it there and say”There you go, go off and play with this deck” but that’s not really fair. I know from reading articles myself that I want to see hard data. Mind you, even then I don’t really believe the”70%” against this and the”auto-win” against that. I put the deck together and got some testing in.
I tested against Kai’s UZI, a promising Black/Green Oversold Cemetery deck, a Wake deck and a few others. I won a few games – but, to be brutally honest, I lost a lot more than I won.
I noticed that I never had White and Blue mana when I needed it. The search lands seemed okay, but not great – I always wanted extra land. I also noticed that Voidmage Prodigy seemed to be a lightning rod. If I put one into play, it got killed pretty damn quickly. They did work as a bad replacement for the Snakes, but weren’t as good. Aether bursts saved my ass a few times, but couldn’t help me out bouncing Kai like Repulse used to. Compulsion was amazing, and Circular Logic was very good, too.
Basically, when the deck works and you see the right mana, a couple of counterspells, a bit of card drawing and a Wrath of God, it’s great. More often than not the mana base messed me up and I didn’t draw what I wanted. So, one last version:
PhatBeats Hunting Grounds (version 2):
Creatures (5):
1x Mystic Enforcer
1x Genesis
3x Voidmage Prodigy
Spells (29):
3x Compulsion
4x Deep Analysis
4x Counterspell
3x Memory Lapse
3x Circular Logic
4x Aether Burst
2x Hunting Grounds
2x Living Wish
4x Wrath of God
Land (26):
2x Forest
1x Plains
3x Island
4x Lonely Sandbar
1x Windswept Heath
2x Skycloud Expanse
2x Sungrass Prairie
4x Adarkar Wastes
2x Flooded Strand
3x Brushland
2x Nantuko Monastery
The sideboard stays the same, as do most of the spells except that I’ve dropped one Circular Logic for a third, main deck Compulsion. If we need to see the right spells we need a way to dig for them and Compulsion is as good as it gets right now.
I’ve dropped one Plains for a fourth Adarkar Wastes, giving me a touch extra of Blue, and one Island has gone missing for a second Skycloud Expanse. I’ve also dropped a Windswept Heath for a third Brushland. These changes mean that I’m filtering the land out of my deck slightly less, and I have a little extra White and Blue mana, rather than having to choose between them.
I’ve changed only four cards in the main deck, but it should mean that the deck is more consistent. It will mean a little more pain, with seven painlands now, but the extra consistency should more than make up for it, plus we’ll get more chances to throw land away to Compulsion anyway!
All in all I feel that this deck, as it stands, will not win a Grand Prix. It’s certainly not Tier One, and I wouldn’t play it at States, but it is a solid deck to test against… And if you can beat it, you can probably beat any Blue/White control deck with counters and Wrath of God. More than anything, it underlines just how big a loss the loss of the Invasion lands is. Before November 1st we could make nearly any mana base work; now we’re being pushed more towards two-colour, aligned decks. Mind you, as Wizards R&D keeps telling us, the pendulum swings from side to side so at some point I’m sure we’ll see multi-coloured decks made easier at some point in the future.
Next Week: Somerset County Championships: What will I take? How will I do? Will there be any big surprises?
Cheers, Jim.
Team PhatBeats,
Level 2 DCI Judge.