Creatures (29)
- 1 River Boa
- 4 Lotus Cobra
- 4 Arbor Elf
- 4 Wolfbriar Elemental
- 4 Joraga Treespeaker
- 4 Kozilek's Predator
- 4 Nest Invader
- 4 Vengevine
Lands (24)
Spells (7)
Sideboard
As the Beastmaster player, you will frequently make close decisions. The deck is both highly robust and highly redundant across all of its cards, with multiple creatures at every point in the curve each performing similar functions, and two Crusade effects to push them through. The sideboard is a tuning sideboard. Rather than providing the deck with hate or a new strategy, most of the cards allow you to alter your card choices to suit the situation without altering the fundamental strategy of the deck. It often won’t be obvious what should come out or even what should come in, especially without prior experience.
In general, the goal of the Beastmaster deck should be to assemble a game winning army while playing around as many potential responses to that army as possible. Against most decks you are racing against time, either to deploy creatures and stabilize before you die or to kill them before they can do the same to you with mass removal. When you are the beatdown, you generally have a massive speed advantage and often will have the opportunity to slow down or hold back to become more robust. When they are the beatdown there is usually no reason to hold back and the key decision is when to turn from defense to offense.
Rather than give general guidelines, it is more useful to go over the matchups one at a time, starting with the deck that comprised a quarter of the field and that is quickly reclaiming its dominant status online alongside Beastmaster:
White/Blue Control
When playing against White/Blue your goal is to ask them questions that are as hard as possible for them to answer. Your greatest enemy by far is Day of Judgment. Without access to Day of Judgment even a relatively poor draw will quickly overwhelm a White/Blue Control player especially when they lack a full complement of Gideon Juza. The key is not to spend more of your resources than necessary to draw out Day of Judgment without your holding back giving them more time to find one, or to shut them out of Day of Judgment entirely with Eldrazi Monument. River Boa and Vengevine are both resistant to Day of Judgment and Beastmaster Ascension can force them to sweep any board with three or more creatures on it, and often boards with two.
Using these resources, it is usually possible to assemble both an army capable of forcing a Day of Judgment and a second wave that will force them to have strong secondary answers. They can’t win quickly, so you have a long run to exploit Vengevine and that makes Journey to Nowhere a scarce resource for them. The need for them to match these two cards can often be a reason to hold Vengevine if you would happy to be forcing Day of Judgment despite holding it back. Every time they burn a Journey to Nowhere on anything else, that makes it unlikely they can stop your Vengevine.
Eldrazi Monument is a strange card in this matchup. It can shut them out of the game completely, as it nullifies Wall of Omens and Day of Judgment and turns Gideon Juza into a minor speed bump. However, it also represents a continuous tax that you must pay, and they can have a large number of counters to stop you from casting more creatures. They can potentially have Oust, Into the Roil, Journey to Nowhere, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor to exhaust your creature supply in addition to countering them, so it can be scary to deploy the Eldrazi Monument later in the game after the first Day of Judgment. It’s usually better to play it sooner rather than later on the margin.
Sideboarding:
+2 River Boa
+1 Beastmaster Ascension
+2 Naturalize
-4 Lotus Cobra
-1 Eldrazi Monument
If you choose to have access to the fourth River Boa, which at this point is almost certainly a good idea, then you would leave the second Naturalize in the sideboard. Naturalize is not a perfect card since it will generally have only six to eight targets, but killing Journey to Nowhere will get you back a River Boa or Vengevine and that will often be the game.
Sideboarding out Lotus Cobra guards Beastmaster against being forced to overcommit resources to the board while maintaining your mana curve. It’s a great card, but unless it leads into Wolfbriar Elemental it will tend to get caught in board sweeps without contributing that much to the threat index or providing that big a boost to your speed. Arbor Elf and Joraga Treespeaker are both massive speed boosts that you can’t consider cutting here, in contrast to Lotus Cobra which mostly contributes to playing straight into Day of Judgment. The correct Eldrazi Monument count is a good question, but given how it can backfire I believe that here we are better off staying down at three, especially with Beastmaster Ascension being so strong.
Their sideboard has Kor Sanctifiers for Ascension and Monument, and they might pick up an All is Dust and/or an Into the Roil, but mostly there is little else that can help them and nothing that they gain that much value out of cutting, although they shouldn’t have trouble finding cards they can safely take out even if they don’t run Spreading Seas. The matchup doesn’t change that much after sideboarding, as both decks are better at their jobs but not doing anything different. The exception comes if they have relegated the fourth Day of Judgment to the sideboard, which is crippling to them in game 1 and allows them to get rid of that handicap. Lists that don’t have that access at all are in a lot of trouble.
Beastmaster should win a majority of the game 1s and a slightly larger majority of the game 2s if they pack all four Day of Judgment maindeck. If they don’t have the fourth copy, that makes things substantially better. I will never understand decks that rely on board sweepers to this extent refusing to even have access to four copies, although having a full quarter of the field be mirror matchups could potentially justify a maindeck sacrifice of one copy.
If you want to improve this matchup, shifting more copies of River Boa into the maindeck is the most effective practical way to do that. It is difficult to improve much on the core cards without damaging the engine that makes this deck tick. The mana cannot take an additional color.
Red
For a long time during testing, we didn’t believe we could run Beastmaster because we couldn’t find a solution to the Red matchup. It turns out that ‘hope they don’t build it the way that beats us’ is sometimes a valid strategy. In many formats, a properly equipped opponent can turn around almost any one matchup they want to if they’re willing to sacrifice enough to do that, which means that often a matchup you think of as good is only as good as your opponent has decided to allow it to be. This block is different because the inherent RPS of the other major decks (Red as Rock, W/U as Paper and Eldrazi as Scissors) is unusually difficult to break, but the Red matchup comes down to how much the Red deck wants to win which makes the difference between the hardest of the major matchups and a comfortable one.
Red has three ways to beat Beastmaster. Method one is to overwhelm Beastmaster with so much quick damage that they are in burn range. Plated Geopede can hit on turn 3 for five, and Goblin Guide takes a turn or two to even try to block, while Kiln Fiend, Zektar Shrine Expedition, and Elemental Appeal all hit hard if given the chance. Even when you get Leatherback Baloth into the deck, it can’t stand up profitably against these cards. Racing such an attack is extremely hard, since creatures must be held back and your mana acceleration is unreliable against so much burn, so the most purely aggressive draws tend to beat you.
The second way to beat you is to take out your men with burn. Even if not that much damage is done, a burn heavy draw can wipe out your board and leave Beastmaster without the base of creatures to use Ascension or Monument. Forked Bolt is deadly for this purpose, and how many copies of it they have is the primary determent of how difficult things will be. With Forked Bolt, Burst Lightning, Searing Blaze and Staggershock, they can usually keep all your mana acceleration off the board, and that will force you to play the game from behind, which is especially dangerous when paired with the third way you can lose.
This goes hand in hand with whether they have the Devastating Summons package. If they choose to spend seven or eight slots on Summons and Bushwhacker, those slots have to come from somewhere, and at least half of them must involve the sacrifice of burn. All of them involve making their attacks less reliable, and when they do fire off the combination often it is not that difficult to deal with through chump blocking or Eldrazi Monument.
The third and most frustrating road to victory they have is Kargan Dragonlord. Only Eldrazi Monument can allow Beastmaster to block the Dragonlord. If they have four Mountains and a Dragonlord, you are dead in three turns in the air and usually they can afford to hold the 8/8 as a blocker without losing a turn. Given how much their burn can slow you down, this is a deadly threat, and even Monument sometimes won’t be enough because of the combination of trample and Firebreathing.
Games where they have a Kargan Dragonlord they will win the majority of the time since a solid supporting cast makes the situation extremely difficult to deal with. Games where they don’t have a Kargan Dragonlord they will need an otherwise abnormally good draw. Game 1 varies from unfavorable against a non-Summons version with Forked Bolt to a slightly advantaged situation if they have none and a full package.
Sideboarding involves bringing in what we call the “Red package” to retool the deck to deal with the situation:
-2 Wolfbriar Elemental
-4 Joraga Treespeaker
-3 Beastmaster Ascension
+1 Forest
+2 River Boa
+4 Leatherback Baloth
+2 Gigantiform
There is nothing wrong with Wolfbriar Elemental, but it is the only third card you can realistically cut in order to bring in Boa, Gigantiform, and Baloth. The Forest helps make up for the lack of mana coming from your creatures and solidifies Leatherback Baloth. The curve wants to stay as low as possible, and you no longer have Joraga Treespeaker or that many surviving copies of Lotus Cobra or Arbor Elf. Joraga Treespeaker gets cut because they have a lot of burn and therefore it is very difficult to untap with an enabled Treespeaker. Often you don’t dare level one up because you’re worried they will kill it in response and cost you the entire turn.
Beastmaster Ascension is poor here. They will attempt to kill your men and often your men will want to hold back to block. If you get to attack seven times it usually means you have won while drawing Ascension can prevent you from being able to keep another creature alive. Monument by contrast is very good because it prevents them from removing your creatures and gives you free reign. When you have a Monument, the goal of the game becomes to spam creatures fast enough that their burn falls behind and you can get a Monument safely onto the table at which point their deck is powerless. If you don’t have a Monument, you will have to out-power the enemy in other ways.
Gigantiform was a late addition and is an excellent card in the matchup. It is especially strong as an answer to Kargan Dragonlord. Dragonlord poses several unique problems as discussed above but it also forces them to tap out and opens the door for a 0/1 to become 8/8, or sometimes a River Boa to lock them out of any removal outright. This also solves the time problem. You die so quickly from Dragonlord that cards like Elemental don’t have time to be effective, but Gigantiform hits hard and it hits right away through even a fully powered Dragonlord. If they ever tap out and you have access to five mana, this provides a way to overpower them out of nowhere.
Green Eldrazi (and G/W Eldrazi)
This matchup is highly favorable due to the nature of the two strategies. They are trying to do gigantic things and you are trying to overwhelm them quickly. That is not a combination that usually ends well for a deck attempting to go over the top of control decks. In many ways their deck consists of one card, and that card is All is Dust. Their Eldrazi are not going to show up in time to matter without the assistance of a board sweeper, which they have Ancient Stirrings to find and therefore will have more often than not. It takes a while for the Eldrazi themselves to win the game against you, since you will often be able to survive at least one and often two annihilations while as blockers they can only eat one attacker each per turn.
Your game plan is to think about two possibilities. If they have All is Dust, can I win afterwards? If they don’t have it, can I kill them before giving them more time to find it? The biggest tragedy is when they don’t have it but you give them time to find one, or the required mana, so it is almost always a mistake to not force them to have it on turn 4 or 5, if you have that ability. The only exception is if they found it with Ancient Stirrings and you know they have it, but you should also be thinking about recovery. Getting your board swept is not that bad. Eldrazi Monument and Spawn stay on the board, so often you can set things up such that the Monument remains and you can creatures in reserve. Another way to make them cry is to deploy Vengevine and hold back creatures to return it, and often there will simply be enough ammunition for two good waves especially if Wolfbriar Elemental is involved.
If they don’t play All is Dust, there is little in their deck that can put up a fight and they will usually be dead within six turns. Often you will win on turn 4 or 5, and they won’t be able to reach seven mana, or they will die on a swing back from Vengevine. If they do sweep the board the first time, you can usually force them to have a strong follow-up at a minimum.
Sideboarding gives you a silver bullet for the ages along with more reach:
+3 Tajuru Preserver
+2 Gigantiform
+1 Beastmaster Ascension
-1 River Boa
-2 Nest Invader
-3 Wolfbriar Elemental
The exact mix of cards to be taken out once the Boa leaves is an open question. These are my current instincts. Nest Invader can provide a Spawn to help a Monument survive All is Dust and is two creatures for Ascension and Monument but is the weakest card and you want to guard against draws that are too cheap and force you to overcommit to the board into All is Dust. Wolfbriar Elemental is too slow as your biggest goal is to shut them out of the time for All is Dust, although one is left in to help the deck have the ammunition to recover if they sweep the board successfully. It could easily be right to have two copies or possibly three still in the deck. Gigantiform is a riskless way to get a ton of hasty damage and makes it much more likely they won’t get the fifth turn they usually need for All is Dust. Tajuru Preserver of course is the superstar. They can’t annihilate or All is Dust while he is in play, and without a second color, no good removal for him is available. You don’t lose games he gets involved in, and if this deck is popular you can pack a fourth copy. Thanks mostly to Preserver, sideboarding takes the matchup from merely good to excellent.
Green/White Eldrazi is a similar matchup with the primary difference being that they could potentially run Day of Judgment so getting Eldrazi Monument on the table is that much better and Tajaru Preserver is not as strong. If they do have Day of Judgment access they are substantially better off but the underlying dynamics do not change all that much. You have to watch your back more but as compensation they are slower. Gideon Juza buys a turn but is unlikely to live for long.
The Mirror
I did not test the mirror before the tournament, but it is not a hard matchup to figure out. Both sides will deploy creatures and attempt to get a Beastmaster Ascension or Eldrazi Monument to bring them home as quickly as possible. Most games should end or effectively end within five or six turns as one player gets the faster or more powerful draw and the other is helpless. Mulligans should be taken aggressively as mediocre draws will have no chance against good ones and time is of the essence. Opponents that play other versions are usually going to be at a disadvantage because they will have less than your seven copies of Ascension and Monument and often end up bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Sideboarding raises the question of how much you want to try and plan for the situation where neither player can deploy Monument or Ascension.
+1 Beastmaster Ascension
+2 Naturalize
-1 River Boa
-2 Nest Invader
Speed is vital, so for now I am thinking that Nest Invader wins out over River Boa, but that could be wrong. I am sure you want the full eight crusade effects and Naturalize is the best sideboard card because it is vital to take out the enemies’ crusade effects as quickly as possible and doing this at instant speed can save you from a blowout and result in one of your own in return. If you want to win the mirror more often more copies of Naturalize are almost certainly the way to do it and there is no realistic number that would cause me to consider not having all eight crusade effects in the deck after sideboarding.
The blue version doesn’t change the matchup dynamic much, but provides enough of an excuse that I would run River Boa over Nest Invader, especially to get to Jace.
Red/Blue/Green (Comet Storm)
They are counting on burn to stabilize the board. Their counter suite is minimal and for the most part it can be ignored. The best card they can potentially have is Chain Reaction, since that can be a stand in for Day of Judgment, and they can complement it with other burn to try and buy time to win the game off of Oracle of Mul Daya and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Unfortunately for them they are much worse at keeping your side under control than the Red deck because you don’t have to worry about them trying to kill you at the same time. In time they are capable of far more with cards like Avenger of Zendikar and Sphinx of Lost Truths but they don’t have that kind of time. They have no real answer to Eldrazi Monument if they can’t counter it, which they usually can’t even if they stay untapped, while Beastmaster Ascension forces them to wipe the entire board including Eldazri Spawn. The version that got Paulo Vitor Damo de Rosa into the Top 8 is especially weak against Beastmaster, because it has no access to Chain Reaction and only two copies of Comet Storm; if you know this you can safely play out all your men even after sideboarding. Quickly pose a question they don’t have a good answer to, which includes Monument or Ascension with any reasonable creature set, and usually you’ll be able to deploy your creatures so that you can survive Chain Reaction.
Sideboarding calls for the Red package, but going for the full package would be a mistake because, unlike Red, they can’t hope to keep you from keeping creatures on the table all that often, so you want to keep some copies of Ascension in the deck to make sure you draw at least one Crusade effect:
-4 Joraga Treespeaker
-1 Beastmaster Ascension
-2 Nest Invader
+2 River Boa
+4 Leatherback Baloth
+1 Forest
After sideboarding your creatures improve dramatically and you have a much easier time guarding against Comet Storm. Most of the time your game will be strong enough that you can afford to play with that card in mind. They will also bring in more and better burn, but it won’t be enough to keep your creatures in check.
Red/Blue/Green (French Monument Build)
I haven’t played this matchup at all, but it is clear they will be playing from behind. They spend valuable time tuning their hand and seeking to play Unified Will that you will spend playing out threats. The only serious threat is Awakening Zone combined with either Ascension or Monument, which won’t be fast enough to deal with a similar draw and given how unlikely Unified Will is to work they don’t have any way to stop you. This is likely a very one sided version of the mirror, with their biggest advantage being that you may think they are playing the Comet Storm deck during the early turns.
Sideboarding allows you to treat this matchup much like the mirror, since the cards that would stop you are impossible for them to run without messing up their side of the board.
+2 Naturalize
+2 River Boa
+1 Beastmaster Ascension
-4 Nest Invader
-1 Wolfbriar Elemental
It’s still possible that they will find a way to play Chain Reaction now that they know we are out there, and between that and Islandwalk I am willing to buy the insurance that River Boa can provide. With a full decklist I would not find them necessary.
Koros
Koros can generate power and inflict damage faster than any other opponent. That makes them dangerous. The flip side of that is that their deck is rarely operating at peek efficiency. They can only use their mana properly for four or five turns and once they run out of spells to cast and lands to play they are defenseless. Your goal is to contain the damage and stay alive until that happens. Spawn are used as chump blockers here more often than anywhere else and it is vital to be on the lookout for giant Kor Duelists and multiple landfall triggers that often fall on creatures with Adventuring Gear. There’s little point in trying to find a way to overcome their best draws because their best draws are both unstoppable and rare, so it makes sense to assume they will run out of ammunition. Forcing them to use their fetch lands without getting the maximum amount of power is often the key to victory, and they can be treated as spells you are willing to trade your creatures for rather than triggers that are incidental. They’ve given up a lot to get those benefits, so you can give up a lot to stop them. The matchup is worse the more burn they pack in their deck. The white versions splashing red are good for you while the red versions splashing white are bad especially if Forked Bolt is involved.
Sideboarding is similar to red but without the fear of Krogan Dragonlord. That means that Gigantiform is unnecessary and is replaced by Naturalize to defend against equipment but the rest of the strategy remains the same:
-2 Wolfbriar Elemental
-4 Joraga Treespeaker
-3 Beastmaster Ascension
+1 Forest
+2 River Boa
+4 Leatherback Baloth
+2 Naturalize
After sideboarding there is the threat of Cunning Sparkmage backed by Basilisk Collar. Without the Collar this deck should be configured to render the threat mostly harmless and if you have a Monument you should be able to get there before the Sparkmage can lock you out. If you don’t and they draw both pieces it will be unfortunate but otherwise they can only win with a quick knockout.
Adventuring Jace (Jeremy Neeman deck)
Without Red to disrupt your mana, the White creatures are unlikely to make it home in time to kill you before your army can be assembled and Deprive is unlikely to be able to stop you from getting either Ascension or Monument. With Cunning Sparkmage the major threat, putting in River Boa can be skipped over especially since they only pack three Islands.
-1 River Boa
-1 Wolfbriar Elemental
+2 Naturalize
Naturalize protects you against much of his sideboard but otherwise your maindeck provides everything you need.
Vampires
They can use Vampire Hexmage to strike down Beastmaster Ascension temporarily but otherwise they can’t do much to interfere with your plans and they also aren’t good at assembling a lot of power fast enough to beat you. If they have it Abyssal Persecutor is their best creature, forcing a crusade effect or a massive army, but one of those is usually available and the rest of their army is undersized for the situation. The biggest risk is Mind Sludge taking out your hand before you can finish setting up, so keep that in mind as they approach five mana.
Sideboarding brings additional danger in the form of potential Marsh Causalities so you have to guard against them lashing out at your board in addition to your hand. Beastmaster Ascension carries the danger of being struck down so you limit the number of copies to one or two but it’s very easy to get into a situation where a lot of creatures attack but the enemy fails to die so I am unwilling to pack only four crusade effects. With the need for quantity of men strong to fuel Monument, Ascension and their forces sacrifices and Smother around to answer Gigantiform, the maindeck should stay mostly intact except for reducing the amount of one-toughness to guard against Casualties:
-1 River Boa
-1 Beastmaster Ascension
-3 Lotus Cobra
+4 Leatherback Baloth
+1 Forest
There are a few other unusual decks out there but none of them present a challenge that is of a fundamentally different type. This guide should be all the information anyone needs to play this deck in any future tournaments, and illustrate what it can do and what the cards are all for.
Until next time…
Zvi