For anyone who got around to reading my old Limited Information articles, you’ll know what the most important thing in Limited is. Blue does it better than any of the other colors. Mulldrifter is possibly the best ever common at doing it, ever since they ‘solved’ the power levers of cards (Rolling Thunder and Pestilence are probably the best other examples). I’m talking about card advantage.
It’s one of the main reasons why mulliganing is such a blow (not the least because it means you might have an awkward mana distribution or a bad curve). Assuming that the rest of your deck is built and drafted correctly, if you draw more cards than your opponent (or take out two of their cards with one of yours), then you will almost certainly win.
This is the main reason bombs are bombs — because they tend to generate card advantage (much like Martial Coup); the other reason they are so powerful is because they can be threats that very few cards can actually deal with it, which generates a kind of inverse card advantage as almost ever card they draw will be a blank. When your opponent casts Broodmate Dragon, the game suddenly changes and becomes very simple: you have to either draw a direct answer to it (very few exist) or you have to race it.
Today, and maybe it’s my inner philosopher coming out, I’m a fan of cute nicknames. I’ll call this kind of card advantage ‘Redundancy.’ Dampen Thought, a Limited archetype in the past that won through decking and often didn’t play a single creature, gained a lot of its power from redundancy because every removal spell your opponent drew was a blank; if they drew more cards, then they simply sped towards their doom. Incidentally, the guy in the picture looks a lot like Jeff Fung.
Limited games tend to be played in one of two ways. You can be the control player (my preferred method), where your aim is to keep your life as high as possible in order to make the game last as long as possible so that all your deck’s card advantage and expensive spells can kick in; or you can be the aggressor. The aggressive player comes out of the gates kicking and screaming. They throw everything they have into a fast start backed up by removal for the opposing blockers with the sole purpose of reducing their life total to zero before they can stabilize.
When you look at these to ways of winning, they both treat card advantage in very different ways. The control players, once they’re playing the correct amount of ‘stay alive’ cards, are all about drawing more cards. They overwhelm you because the answer to the question “How many cards do you have in your hand?” is always “More than you.” However, the aggressor almost ignores card advantage or, rather, generates it incidentally. It aims to end the game as soon as possible, this means that all your opponent’s expensive cards become redundant; cards like Covenant of the Minds lose them a whole turn which will set them back almost certainly more than they gain (whereas Kiss of Amesha’s life gain counterbalances this and lets the control player dig with impunity). They also force the opponent to make double blocks which are either straight two for ones because everything dies in combat, or it turns your instant removal and pump from direct trades into card advantage.
The aggressive player tries to win games through ‘Tempo’ and Redundancy. The problem that faces them is that they always have to have an aggressive start, with enough juice to back it up, they have to curve well every game. If they miss their two drop, they are in trouble. Mulligans hurt them because it denies them the consistency to explode out of the gates with every hand. However, their main problem is simply if they get held up by a good defence. The moment their tempo runs out and the opponent untaps in a solid position with a reasonable amount of life, they are dead in the water to the actual card advantage the control player is sure to have.
Most Limited decks aren’t quite this simple because they tend to have a lot more midrange cards, and even the most aggressive decks dilute some of their pool for card advantage. Likewise, even a completely controlling Esper deck can often be capable of a speedy flying start. Completely aggressive decks can only exist under three circumstances. The first is if the Limited pool simply does not contain enough control cards (this will almost certainly never happen). Second, and this is the point that most players manage to grasp, if the Limited pool possesses enough purely aggressive cards that you can virtually ensure a completely aggressive deck. Third, and this is the point most commonly overlooked, there has to be the element for Redundancy.
Redundancy is caused by cards that possess a certain inevitability. They say “No matter what you, no matter how many cards you draw, or huge men you cast, if I draw/cast this card, you are dead.” Falter is the original card to work because of redundancy. Once the aggressive player’s start has whittled the opposing life total to a small number, it can sit back safe in the knowledge that even though the opponent has stabilized, they are dead the moment you cast Falter. However, Falter does virtually nothing if they are not already on a low enough life total, or if you don’t have enough men left, so there is definitely such a thing as too many Falter effects.
The next form of Redundant cards deal the damage themselves. Classically, these are cards like Devouring Greed and Searing Flesh. Rather than rely on creatures (that need to survive) to deal those last, crucial points of damage, they do it themselves.
When you put these two elements together and fuse them with the classic aggressive deck with a low curve and cheap removal, you have a very powerful archetype. At the moment, I’m not sure if this works well enough in Alara/Alara/Conflux draft, but I know that there are enough cards and, more importantly, time to do it in Sealed.
Alara Sealed is slow. Like all Sealed deck formats, it is about successfully building the best control deck you can put together, generating the maximum card advantage possible, digging to your expensive game-winning bombs, and using your removal to stop your opponent doing the same thing first. This means that there is a lot of time to do what you want. These are ideal conditions for Redundancy to work its Magic.
The easiest way to analyse this is to look at the Sealed deck I had in Grand Prix: Rotterdam. I piloted it to a 5-2 post-bye record and only lost the two matches as a result of four rather unlucky mulligans to five cards:
3 Absorb Vis
1 Onyx Goblet
1 Bull Ceredon
1 Predator Dragon
1 Resounding Thunder
2 Fiery Fall
1 Executioner’s Capsule
1 Resounding Wave
1 Blister Beetle
1 Shambling Remains
2 Goblin Deathraiders
1 Kederekt Creeper
1 Fatestitcher
1 Blood Cultist
1 Vectis Agents
1 Undead Leotau
1 Viscera Dragger
1 Scourge Devil
1 Rockslide Elemental
2 Rupture Spire
1 Plains
1 Island
1 Unstable Frontier (side note: really bad)
6 Mountain
5 Swamp
The deck is divided into three perfectly harmonic sections. The first section is the creatures. I would have liked to have had more two-drops, and I had to make do with the Ruptured Spires as fixers that frustrated me a fair amount when I drew them at the same time as the Goblin Deathraiders, but c’est la vie. The creatures are there to deal the first twelve or so points of damage. The fact that a lot of creatures in this format have Unearth is even better, as it’s like they come with Lava Spikes attached to help the Redundancy plan. Here I tried to keep the curve as low and as aggressive as possible because the odds of a creature getting through unmolested in the late game decreases the closer they stabilize.
Next we have the removal. Most decks save their removal for the choicest of targets so that they maximise everything so that nothing catches them unawares. Not here. You kill the first few creatures that draw breath so you can sneak as much damage as possible through as soon as possible.
Finally, we have the finishers. Here is where the beauty of the deck comes in. This deck will almost never ever cycle the Absorb Vis. Throughout the game you’ll have a mental note of what the opponent’s real life total is (current total minus the amount of burn in hand), and that’s the target your creatures are aiming at. Once you reach that target, you’ll have all the time in the world to cast your finishers as all of your creatures (assuming they can no longer punch through damage themselves) will be on blocking and chump block duty as card advantage no longer matters to you. Your deck has already done all it needs to do — now you just need to buy enough time to cast (or draw) all of your finishers. The beauty of Absorb Vis is that it gives you more time to win. I had never played Onyx Goblet before this, as it is generally a very weak card, but it wound up being one of the best cards in the deck, reliably dealing at least six damage every time I cast it.
I’m not sure whether this exact deck works in draft, where you have less time to for your finishers to kick in. However, understanding Redundancy and the role of individual cards in a deck such as these is important whilst drafting such an aggressive archetype. Dan Paskins invented something many years ago called the Rule of Fire. It concerns the building of RDW. Every card should serve the purpose of dealing the maximum amount of damage possible. It is evident today in Naya Burn rather than Zoo, in card choices such as Flames of the Blood Hand and Seal of Fire over Oblivion Ring and Umezawa’s Jitte. If you combine these two theories, it will drastically improve how you draft the near-suicidally aggressive Red based decks.
Understand that you need a very aggressive curve with a multitude of two-drops as you cannot ever afford to miss making a creature from turn 2 onwards. You will need cheap removal to punch through their first few creatures and deal as much early damage as possible before they begin to stabilise. Then you need to generate critical mass for an overlapping alpha strike and then back this up with your Redundancy cards.
As far as deck composition is concerned, you’re looking for approximately five two drops, four three drops and then a bunch of creatures that are capable of getting damage through in the late game, so mainly evasion based. You want, as with almost any deck, as much removal as possible and you want it to be as cheap as possible so you can hammer through the damage without too much of a tempo loss. I’d consider about four finishers so long as not all of them are exclusively finishers and have no other effect on the game.
I hope that this look into the effect that certain types of cards cause and perform has been useful. For now, I’ll take a quick look back at the Extended Fae deck I wrote about recently.
Extended Extensions:
I’ll start off by saying that I finished 9th on tiebreakers after a 6-1-1 performance at the PTQ this weekend, so I’m very, very happy with how the deck performed. I got a mix of matchups, most of which your average Fae deck wouldn’t consider favourable, like Tezzerator, two Naya Burn decks and two mirrors (one even sporting Bitterblossom maindeck), but had little trouble with them.
The only change from the list I posted in the article was -1 Ancient Grudge and +1 Relic of Progenitus in the sideboard; as I find that Affinity is a very easy match up with four Sower of Temptation and four Cryptic Commands. I would play even more Cryptic Commands if I could as they were my MVPs all day long.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the two Stifles I play maindeck. They fulfil so many purposes that they are very hard to evaluate. Not only do they provide you with an easy card to board out (ironically though, this is never a good thing), but they fulfil many little functions main that sideboard cards do afterwards. I certainly beat one Zoo player from a Stifle and against Elves, a match up where Stifle is next to useless, I countered a lethal Mirror Entity activation allowing me to kill a lot of his attackers and then Sower the Entity before using it to attack back for a lethal twenty four damage of my own a turn later.
I think the main reason for playing them is obvious: TEPS. It’s pretty difficult to lose if you draw one in the maindeck, but the match up is still incredibly difficult anyway. To add to this, I’ve seen a massive decrease in the amount of TEPS decks out there and so I’m tempted to not bother too much with it. However, whenever I contemplate this train of thought I am reminded that it is still a significant part of the metagame and would be very foolish to ignore. Stifle also covers your bases against such cards like Decree of Justice. If you have two Stifles maindeck, it allows you to go up to four anti-TEPS cards after sideboarding, which is an additionally strong incentive.
If I were to cut them, I think they would be for either Disrupting Shoals, taking a leaf out of Pat’s book, or Engineered Explosives. I’ve not tested the Shoals, but they seems fine in practice. The Explosives are a nod to such decks like Slide, where a resolved Lightning Rift can cause a lot of problems and because it is a coverall that deals with what few things slip through your counters. It’s not there for Zoo (which I have been thoroughly trouncing recently), although it will probably help there, even though Stifle is often stronger against them anyway.
If the Stifles were to go, I’d probably then replace the Trickbinds with Telemic Performances. Although these are, for me, completely untested and might be completely awful when the TEPS player has both Negation Pact and Remand, I think that if I am going to have just two cards for the TEPS match up, then I want them to win the game for me immediately. Having said that, however, Trickbind does much the same thing, so this might not be the soundest of advice, heh.
There is one more thing I’d like to mention about Fae though and that is a matter of land. I’ve played twenty five land for a long time and it simply isn’t enough. Against beatdown decks, if you stall, you die. You have plenty of stuff to do with all the additional land in the late game thanks to Mutavault and Riptide Laboratory. I went to twenty six land ages before I’d added all of my four drops (I had three at the time, not nine) and I definitely haven’t looked back.
It’s nice to have posted a good performance again, even if it was only 9th in a 148-player PTQ. When you’re on tour, it’s all about continually putting up solid performances. If you’re good enough, you keep finishing in the Top 64 of the Pro Tours, and every once in a while you’ll make that elusive Top 8 again, but for the most part, you won’t. I haven’t felt as happy in Magic as I did when I won my last match of that PTQ in a long time, and I didn’t win the tournament or even make the Top 8! It felt good to know that I’m back.
Until next time…
Q