I played in my first StarCityGames.com Open Series since Washington, DC last weekend. Both of my decks were good but not perfect, and I wore a dress on Saturday. Clearly it made for an interesting weekend.
Fellow SCG writers Brad Nelson and Brian Braun-Duin hopped in a rental car with me to make the nine-hour trip to Birmingham, Alabama. We were all set on my updated Esper Delver list for Standard.
Creatures (8)
Lands (22)
Spells (30)
We didn’t expect real life to mimic Magic Online. That meant the Solar Flare trend on Magic Online was likely irrelevant. Instead, I expected a lot of Delver and some amount of aggro decks like Zombies, G/R, Pod, and various white-based beatdown decks. All that information led us to play the token version rather than something else, like equipment Delver or Solar Flare.
Since SCG Open Series: Baltimore featuring the Invitational, I’d been testing and tuning the token deck on Magic Online and was very confident in my list. Looking at the differences from my SCG Invitational list to my list for Birmingham, we have:
-3 Blade Splicer
-2 Mana Leak
-1 Gitaxian Probe
-2 Darkslick Shores
+ 1 Intangible Virtue
+1 Gather the Townsfolk
+1 Timely Reinforcements
+2 Midnight Haunting
+2 Drowned Catacomb
+1 Vault of the Archangel
I tried several different builds, but I ended up with a shockingly similar list. I added the extra Virtue because the best draws of the deck involve Virtue, even to the point of me nearly playing an Honor of the Pure. The extra Gather, Timely, and Haunting made the cut because of the Virtue but at the expense of Blade Splicers.
Splicer is a fine card in its own right, but it’s not as good with Virtue as Haunting or Timely and Gather fits better on the curve. It also doesn’t flip Delver; after I made that change, I had the best Delvers of any variant!
With less ramp decks in the environment, I felt like I could cut some Mana Leaks. For the most part, I wanted to tap out on the majority of my turns. I certainly didn’t want to draw multiple Leaks and sit on them. Against most decks I sideboarded them out anyway.
One thing to keep in mind is that we had the same theory regarding Mana Leak at Pro Tour Dark Ascension and failed to sideboard enough hard countermagic for the tough matchups: Wolf Run Ramp and control. Since then, I’ve been sure to not make the same mistake again. Some amount of Negates and Dissipates will always be in my sideboard, especially at a tournament like a SCG Open Series where I can only take one loss.
As a hedge I played two Timely Reinforcements and two Midnight Hauntings, but I could see a 3/1 split in either direction depending on what you expect to face more.
The extra land was fine but not entirely necessary. Vault is certainly awesome when you’re in a racing situation or when they have Anthem advantage, but playing 21 land might be fine. I was playing less cantrips than at the SCG Invitational, but the Vault could be the tenth cantrip again.
I tweaked the mana base slightly. I took a page out of Javier Arevalo’s book and split Darkslick Shores and Drowned Catacombs. Obviously playing Scars lands on turns 1-3 is optimal, but when that doesn’t happen, there are few situations where you can draw an untapped black source in the midgame to flashback Lingering Souls.
Usually it’s not that big of a deal, but you don’t need black early so Drowned Catacomb is usually worse than Darkslick Shores. Our PTDKA deck should have had this split as well.
For the sideboard, I re-added Hero of Bladehold, which I used to great success at Grand Prix Baltimore. At the SCG Invitational, I didn’t expect many players to have Corrosive Gale or Ratchet Bomb, so I didn’t need a different kind of threat. However, after Tom Martell made Top 8 of another Grand Prix with a terrible deck, the hate came back.
Hero was very solid, and I recommend playing it if you expect those types of cards. You’d be surprised at the sketchiness of hands people keep just because they have a Corrosive Gale.
We dropped the Jaces because they are mostly good against U/B and the control decks were typically of the Esper variety. Lingering Souls makes the mill plan less good, but Jace is still good against them. Against decks with Lingering Souls, you have to +1 Jace for a few turns until you have enough defenses that milling them into a Lingering Souls won’t kill your Jace.
I’ve found that normal Delver can only beat you in a couple of ways. The typical way they’ll beat you is the way they’ll beat everyone else—by Delver of Secrets or Geist of Saint Traft continually hitting you. The second way is via equipment. Basically, if you keep these things off your back long enough, eventually your token army will take over.
Phantasmal Image does a mean Geist impression, so I like having at least two of them in my sideboard. A third might be extraneous, but I didn’t want to give them any free wins with Geist. In game 1 Geist is usually a blank, as evident in my round 1 camera feature match, so it might seem like you don’t need Images. However, if they do have Corrosive Gale or Ratchet Bomb, you’re going to wish you could just kill that guy ASAP.
For Swords, we have Steel Sabotage and Revoke Existence. Divine Offering is what most people choose, but it’s not very flexible. Sabotage is great vs. Ratchet Bomb and cards like Wurmcoil Engine, which makes it valuable in other matchups as well. Revoke Existence is necessary if you expect any Intangible Virtue mirrors, so you don’t have enough sideboard space for Offerings.
Sabotage might be worse than Offering against Delver, but sometimes it’s a little better. Even if it were worse 100% of the time, I’d still play it just because of how good it is against other artifacts. If this were Magic Online, I’d probably find room for another Revoke.
In the SCG Standard Open in Birmingham itself, I started out 4-0, beating Esper Spirits, Naya Pod, U/B Control, and U/W Delver. I lost a game I could have prevented against Naya Pod, but other than that my record was pristine. Then I ran afoul of double Top 8er Chris Boozer.
Chris has been playing some fantastic Magic of late, and if I ever saw him more than one state away from Georgia, I’m sure you’d already know his name. We were playing mostly the same deck, although his was fashioned after Magic Online superstar Hyper’s decklist.
I’m a pretty big fan of Hyper’s work, but in this case I think he’s got it all wrong.
Creatures (8)
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (22)
Spells (29)
His maindeck has three Gut Shots and four Vapor Snags. If you ever come up against a Delver deck, that’s seven cards that effectively target Delver and nothing else. That’s way too many!
Additionally, you don’t care about Gut Shotting things like Birds of Paradise. You’d rather have any ole card and some information via Gitaxian Probe than kill their Birds for free. In a few turns, you’re going to overwhelm them with tokens, so you probably don’t care about the tempo boost the Birds gave them. The only time there’s an exception to this rule involves Sword of War and Peace. That speaks more towards the "I have to kill that" factor of Sword than Birds though.
I tried Gut Shots, and every time I used it on a non-Delver creature I felt like I was mulliganing. Either it was a significant creature with evasion or it wasn’t worth throwing away a card to kill. This deck creates a lot of virtual card advantage by assembling an army. Why give up that advantage by using one of your resources to kill their irrelevant permanents?
I think there are things I can learn from Hyper/Boozer’s mana base, such as the addition of Shimmering Grotto. Chris said it was good for him, and I’m not one to turn down the opportunity to play with Shimmering Grotto. Moorland Haunt is nearly worthless though, and as I said, I’d rather have the Darkslick/Drowned split than going hard in one direction or the other.
Anyway, our match was close, but in the end it came down to some timely top decks. In the first game, I assembled Anthem advantage and made some pressing attacks. Sure, I was letting him "trade up" by double blocking my 3/3s with his 2/2s, but I was getting in damage. Then a horrible sequence of events happened.
First, a Snapcaster Mage enabled a flashbacked Midnight Haunting, which made my attack less crippling. The next turn, a Lingering Souls gave him a significant token advantage, and then I died to an alpha strike on the last turn.
I’m sure I could’ve sat back and played a longer game but we were both out of gas, and if I drew as well as him or better I would win easily. If he drew better he might stabilize but was only in a good spot if I drew nothing. It didn’t work out.
Second game, I landed Hero of Bladehold on an empty board and could see the horror on Chris’ face. He had no answer. You see, normally I wouldn’t sideboard in Hero against this matchup, but Chris is the perfect opponent to do this to. He plays great Magic but doesn’t get too fancy. He knows what I probably have in my sideboard and boards accordingly for that and the matchup in general.
This means he probably boards out all the Snags and becomes very vulnerable to something like Hero. A few semi-complicated attack steps later I won the game, all thanks to Hero. After that, he quickly reached for his sideboard.
I like the Dissipates against anything with Lingering Souls, and that’s doubly so when he’s trying to Snapcaster Midnight Hauntings. In the third game, I could tell he was caught off guard by the presence of my Dissipates and Negates, but that didn’t rattle him. He simply absorbed the information and filed it away.
He led with a turn 1 Delver, a card I typically side out in these token matchups since it doesn’t do much. However, he was able to Leak my attempts at making Spirits, and I was lacking black mana to flash back Lingering Souls or activate Vault of the Archangel.
I knew his hand contained Snapcaster Mage, Lingering Souls, and Intangible Virtue, but he didn’t stray from his plan of protecting Delver. He kept mana open Snapcaster/Mana Leak, which meant that I couldn’t Snapcaster my Lingering Souls.
In the end, it took far too long for me to get to seven lands so that I could Snapcaster Haunting and then Negate his Leak. His Delver took me to four, then one, and a Vapor Snag finished me off.
After that loss, I beat up on another Delver deck before taking my second loss to W/B Tokens. In game 1 he out-Anthemed me but made some aggressive attacks he didn’t need to. That gave me the out of drawing Vapor Snag or Snapcaster Mage to kill him on the spot, but it never materialized.
In the second game I had a great draw, but I wasted it on his mulligan to five. In the third game, I couldn’t beat his triple Lingering Souls draw and that was that. I dropped in order to get some rest for Day 2.
In testing for Legacy I tried a fair number of strategies, but none beat RUG consistently. Stasis had some good things going on, but the Stasis plan didn’t work against RUG. I took some games off Brad Nelson because of Propaganda and Back to Basics, but the rest of my deck could’ve been something entirely different.
I decided to just go with RUG.
Creatures (12)
Lands (19)
Spells (29)
I made a few deckbuilding errors. First of all, there was no reason to have five green sources and only three red. In game 3 against Goblins, I blind Thought Scoured away one Volcanic, had the other two sources Wasted, and couldn’t find my Life from the Loam in time.
My rationale was that you want to naturally draw green in order to deploy threats, and I could search for red later. However, that creates situations like the one against Goblins where I could realistically run out of red sources.
Second, Spell Snare is becoming increasingly worse. While Tarmogoyf is the most important card in the mirror and it’s one of the few cards that deal with it without two-for-one-ing yourself, I think you could cut one. Daze, on the other hand, performed admirably, and I wouldn’t have minded a fourth.
The sideboard was good but heavily geared toward beating decks that I didn’t play against. A Sulfur Elemental could potentially go, and maybe some of the Maverick hate could disappear as well.
My second loss came at the hands of Jerrod Werr with Dream Halls. Games 2 and 3 he had turn 2 Show and Tell with Force backup, and there was nothing I could do.
I wanted to stick it out and play more Legacy, but Brad convinced me to hop in the Draft Open. I was rewarded with my first Draft Open Top 8, but I couldn’t quite get that plaque.
***
I think that’s my last tournament until AVR comes out. Personally, I’m looking forward to a few new challenges, namely figuring out how to beat the Sun and Primeval Titan powered decks that will surely pop up because of Cavern of Souls. I’d say that Tamiyo looks sweet in the Esper Delver deck, but that deck probably won’t do too well against rampaging Titans.
As for Legacy, I think I’m going to stick with RUG for now. It felt too good not to play.
Next week: putting Cavern of Souls into practice.
GerryT