Shortly after the conclusion of round 3 at StarCityGames.com Open: Cincinnati…
“I think I’ve lost my edge. Over my last two StarCityGames.com Open Series weekends, I’ve won more matches on camera (three) than off camera (two). Factor in the seven losses I have in that time, and my round 3 win on camera doesn’t excite me the way it normally does. I’m really just going through the motions with some random deck. I’m not even playing Brainstorm! I just hope I get my second loss sometime before the dinner reservation at seven PM.”
Well that second loss never came. It’s funny how eleven straight match wins changes things.
For those of you that don’t religiously follow my personal life, I moved from Arizona as of the StarCityGames.com Invitational in Charlotte last December. I eventually settled in Cincinnati, mostly due to the awesome people that live here. While the move has been awesome, the spellcasting routine takes a little bit to get used to. In Arizona, I would probably play in two or three different tournaments a week, plus some casual drafts. In Ohio, much of the playing is not done in tournaments. I don’t really like testing, as I feel tournaments are the best way to improve your play. This means that I haven’t been playing much Magic at all. Since the Invitational, I have probably played Magic in less than a half dozen tournaments. I have wanted to write an article for a while, but I had little to write about.
It’s funny how eleven straight match wins changes things.
I don’t really want to say much about my awesome Standard deck, which features the combo of Sorin Markov pluse Sorin’s Vengeance. Snapcaster Mage on Sorin’s Vengeance is adorable, but getting to that point is a little too difficult. Lifegain is tough to beat when all your cards do exactly ten damage. Too bad Huntmaster of the Fells is a card (and Sword of War and Peace). There are actually quite a few incidental lifegain cards in the current Standard. On top of that, creature removal could not be in a worse spot in Standard right now. The cards are so diverse that it’s very difficult to have the right answer at the right time. If you insist on an exercise in futility, here is what I played in the Standard portion of the StarCityGames.com Open: Cincinnati to a spectacular 1-2 finish.
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (27)
Spells (28)
Somehow, I not only sabotaged my own tournament, but I also convinced Peter Johnson to play the deck as well.
Aside on Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson is my new favorite person. I’ve only gotten to know him in the past few months, but my vocabulary does not contain the words to accurately describe the talents of Peter. Peter is a phenomenal podcaster, an unbelievable wordsmith, an excellent Magic Online copilot, and quite the namer of decks. For the record, my deck names this weekend were U/B Vampires and Faith Hell, thanks to Peter Johnson. My life is enriched because of playing Dailies, Spire Monitors, and the Wall of Ice.
Unfortunately for Peter, we agreed to play the same 150 cards this weekend. While he mirrored my fantastic 1-2 finish in Standard, some late night festivities on Saturday made him unwilling to come share in my Legacy experience. I am deeply saddened that I was unable to have a dredging partner in crime on Sunday.
End Aside on Peter Johnson
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Let’s talk about Dredge baby!
Creatures (21)
- 4 Putrid Imp
- 2 Ichorid
- 1 Flame-Kin Zealot
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 2 Golgari Thug
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 4 Narcomoeba
Lands (14)
Spells (25)
A few years ago, I needed to find something to trade for, so I traded for a Dredge deck. I wanted a second Legacy deck to be able to loan to friends, and it was really cheap. I never really played it myself, outside of a few local tournaments. You see, I had a pact with Brainstorm that we would never abandon each other. I feel like Brainstorm is the best card in Legacy by a mile, and that it’s very difficult for non-Brainstorm decks to approximate the power and consistency of Brainstorm. Based on Drew Levin excellent series of articles, I felt the time was right to change my stance on Brainstorm. I wanted to give a non-Brainstorm deck a spin in a major event.
I’m glad I did.
Number of StarCityGames.com Legacy Opens played with Brainstorm in my deck: 9
Number of StarCityGames.com Legacy Open wins with Brainstorm in my deck: 0
Number of StarCityGames.com Legacy Opens played without Brainstorm in my deck: 1
Number of SCG Legacy Open Wins without Brainstorm in my deck: 1
In my quest to build a non-Brainstorm deck, I was having some card availability issues and wasn’t particularly motivated to fix them. At first, I wanted to play the B/G Pox deck (Mono Corn beatdown) that Ali Aintrazi and I had built. Ali had played it to a good finish at StarCityGames.com Open: Baltimore. However, the rise of the burn decks—we could not beat a burn deck in a million years—and my lack of access to The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale complicated things. Next, I tried to find an Enchantress deck, as I felt it had a natural great matchup against Burn. No luck. Finally, after looking through Peter Johnson’s binder and unexpectedly finding three Bazaar of Baghdad, the subject of Dredge came up. We quickly built a list of all the cards we wanted and started cutting from there.
I simply cannot understate how good Faithless Looting is for Dredge, but it does change how you want to build the Dredge deck. You definitely want Lion’s Eye Diamond, as Faithless Looting does a very good Deep Analysis approximation. With an LED, a Faithless Looting, a land, and a dredger, you can dredge upwards of twenty cards on the first turn. It shouldn’t be too hard to win from there. Even if you don’t have the Looting in your opening hand, LED still has a ton of added value as you will often eventually dredge a Looting, and LED provides the mana for two additional dredges.
The other aspect where Faithless Looting impacts building the deck is the fact that you now have eight copies of your best enabler, Careful Study. Other than Careful Study, your enablers are either good as your first discard outlet (Putrid Imp, LED) or your second discard outlet (Breakthrough, Cephalid Coliseum). Careful Study was unique in that it was both good at drawing cards and discarding cards. Faithless Looting gives you 8 copies of Careful Study, simply making the deck both more consistent AND more powerful. You rarely get stuck dredging once per turn with Faithless Looting in your deck. Careful Study was the best card in the deck, but now you get to play eight.
All of this comes at a cost, and it’s in deck space. With the desire for extra mana sources and additional discard outlets, there isn’t much room to spice up the list. In fact, you have to cut into some otherwise core functions of the deck. I decided to skimp on the Dread Return package, opting for only two and a single Flame-kin Zealot as a dedicated Dread Return target in the main. I even shaved a Cabal Therapy, which was likely a mistake, but then again I don’t have the tournament success and expertise with Dredge that some experts have.
The other major thing about my list is the lack of true anti-hate in the board. I want my cards to be functional from the graveyard, even in sideboarding, which is why I opted for Darkblast and Ancient Grudge. The fact that Ancient Grudge can kill a Grafdigger’s Cage from the hand is not why I played it. I also did not play a single way to beat a Leyline of the Void in my 75. Think of it this way. If you think people will play these cards, why are you playing Dredge? It’s nigh impossible to resolve an anti-hate card then still have enough left over to get your engine going without a perfect draw. Richard Feldman wrote one of the greatest articles of all time directly concerning dredge here, and it remains relevant even in the face of new cards and new metagames. If you don’t feel like reading his article (and I probably should’ve before the Open!), here are his major points:
-You always lose when you fail to dredge. Thus pre-dredging consistency trumps post-dredging consistency. If you are going to play a card that is dead in your graveyard, it better help you put cards in the graveyard.
-Anti-hate rarely works, because of the first point.
–Tormod’s Crypt = Wrath of God. Wrath of God is beatable, even if you have nothing but creatures
-Play 4 Golgari Thug and 4 Ichorid in the 75 (whoops! he is right, and I would’ve changed my deck had I reread his article beforehand)
As for the matches themselves, I played nine rounds of Swiss plus three Top 8 matches. I played against one copy of Grafdigger’s Cage and zero copies of the Leyline of the Void. Nearly all of my opponents had some other sort of graveyard hate, primarily Surgical Extraction or Tormod’s Crypt. Two of my opponents had cards that were central to their strategy that were very difficult for me. One was a White Stax list with Ghostly Prison and Trinisphere and such. The other was a Mono-White Taxes deck with Thalia, Guardian of Thraben (who is insanely good for the record). So over the course of twelve rounds, I faced an average of three-to-four cards per deck that could forcibly interact with my strategy, and most of these were from the sideboard. I was much faster than all of my opponents save for arguably one. (My Belcher opponent made 14 goblins on turn 1 and lost convincingly.)
At no point in the tournament did I feel like I was going to win the tournament. Maybe it’s my preconceived notion of Brainstorm winning Magic Tournaments, or maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t been doing well or playing well lately. I never felt like I was running good, or the highs that normally come with a huge winning streak. I simply kept playing until there was nobody left.
Maybe that’s what it feels like to be the enemy. After all, it’s funny how 11 straight match wins changes things.