On the heels of my loss in the finals at New York States, it was time for me to take a long, hard look at Extended and figure out what was going on. I had a lot of ideas, and a calendar of the upcoming tournaments that required my attention: online PTQs, a trip to Boston for the first ‘live’ event of the new PTQ season, and weekends my girlfriend would conveniently be otherwise occupied. The online PTQs inevitably just didn’t work out for me, as I like sleep too much to be up at four in the morning for the start of an event, and entirely too many of them are just not an option for people who have to go to work instead of just play cards all day. The first PTQ of the season, I made the trip but didn’t play the event… I’d failed to remember the fact that Jenny would be crossing the international date line on her flight back from Japan, and found out I was off a day in my calculations and decided I’d rather see her than play cards.
Not a fortuitous start for the season, but at least I made the right play, and that does count for something in both life and Magic
With all of this time on my hands watching events unfold around me instead of getting to game myself, I had a lot of time to design and tweak, and a solid idea of where the format was going so that I could follow the metagame as it unfolded and aim to meet it once it got there. The season started strangely, with neighborhood gamer Christian Calcano snagging the Blue Envelope at the very first online PTQ with a Doran deck too ugly to love, but the lack of focus and direction that was present at the start of the season meant all a deck had to do to win was be competitive and well-designed, and even a Rock deck can meet those standards even if it does ‘play fair’. But the season would not last in such a sunny childhood as that: soon, the “fair and balanced” decks like Rock and such were to learn that unfair things are better things to do, and token creatures far better than Tarmogoyfs as turn-two plays.
When the format becomes dominated by combo decks, control decks trend towards the forefront as it’s often better to try and interact with a combo deck by means of control spells than by the “brute force” method of the attack phase. Even Tomoharu Saito benched his Wild Nacatls for Grand Prix: Oakland, following the old adage of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” And control can aim to beat one combo deck, or even a few of them, but in Extended you have your pick of more than a few: Dark Depths (with or without Thopter Foundry, but at this point why go without?), Elves Combo, Hypergenesis, Living End, Dredge, Scapeshift (with or without Blue, but again, why go without?). All of these are entirely viable without even scraping the bottom of the barrel, as every single one can be played with a straight face and solid metagame reasoning. They have little enough in common that you can’t try to control them all and expect to do cover your bases, leaving us with a largely Aggro-versus-Combo metagame.
In this world of ours, then, you will see some spectacular things as mages race against each other trying to do something unfair and degenerate, and even the aggressive decks can start to look like combo decks as evidenced by Petr Brozek’s Top 8 deck from Oakland, a theoretically-fair deck along the same lines as Boros Bushwhacker that just happens to do nutty things with Landfall and occasionally kills the opponent on the third turn. The aggressive decks that don’t start to look like combo decks instead start to look like control decks, with the idea that perhaps a single counterspell pointed the right way will make the difference between death at the hands of a Marit Lage token or victory on the backs of Wild Nacatl and friends. Pure aggro doesn’t flourish in this metagame, a turn slower than the combo and not naturally playing the right cards to interact with the opponent when it could just play Lightning Bolts instead.
I began my foray into this world as one might expect I would: with four copies of Lord of Atlantis and an unshakeable certainty that this would be my future. In a combo world, it is the Fish who is king. Thankfully, as I have gotten older and more curmudgeonly I have found myself turning into a rational objectivist, and such a thing as “unshakeable certainty” is an irrational emotion with no basis in a rational reality, for that which must be taken on faith is best not taken at all. Instead of being set in my ways and pushing forward with the Merfolk tribe, I set out to explore the boundaries of what is possible in Extended by pushing the mana as hard as you can. In classic Tim Gunn fashion, I set myself an impossibly lofty goal and aimed to meet the challenge: “Tribal Flames, Wild Nacatl, Cryptic Command… MAKE IT WORK!”
You would be surprised the things you learn when you set to explore the format. Just prior to Worldwake, I managed to play in my first PTQ of the season… though as with the week before when I ended up driving home from Boston at the earliest available opportunity to see my girlfriend instead of PTQ, despite showing up for the event I very nearly didn’t play, as the owner of the cards I was borrowing for the event arrived only barely in the nick of time to the event and I was poised to drop if he were only two minutes later. I sleeved up the following and attacked a metagame that was just beginning to wake up to the Dark Depths–Thopter Foundry double-combo deck:
Aquarium
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Arid Mesa
3 Temple Garden
3 Steam Vents
2 Island
1 Breeding Pool
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Watery Grave
1 Sacred Foundry
4 Wild Nacatl
4 Kird Ape
3 Steppe Lynx
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Meddling Mage
2 Vendilion Clique
4 Mana Leak
4 Tribal Flames
4 Cryptic Command
3 Path to Exile
Sideboard:
1 Path to Exile
1 Vendilion Clique
2 Negate
3 Tormod’s Crypt
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Threads of Disloyalty
The name “Aquarium” of course comes from the fact that the deck is a mix of a Zoo deck and a Fish deck… and where do you go if you’re going to a zoo for fishes? That’s right, an aquarium. The tournament went adequately for me, but as the deck was far from perfect there were games lost to that fact as its weaknesses were exposed: it mana-flooded at inopportune moments, found itself unable to deal damage to the opponent with multiple Steppe Lynx in play, and had a good balance of cards but not the perfect one as everything mostly worked but not harmoniously so. Of course, my play-skills can’t have helped… I am at a point in my Magical career where it is more important for me to spend time with my girlfriend than attacking for two, so skills which were a little creaky at best have not improved from infrequent use.
But though I do not get to play enough to scrape the rust off, I still have one distinct advantage, and that is how much of my skills are applied on the front end before a pen ever graces a deck-registration sheet, and reaching the proper design is something that is immediately transferable to you, the reader. Some parts of the above deck were awesome. Others didn’t work. Worldwake plugged a hole by giving us a better one-drop than Steppe Lynx, whose variance in size was a liability more often than it was an explosive boon in a deck that could not take advantage of it with anything more than fetchlands. With time to spend testing and the release of Worldwake to compensate for, a new version was built, addressing the changes to the format and card-pool as well as the innate frailties of the original design. Logic and reason applied repeatedly and unflinchingly started to plane away at the deck to rebuild it as a functional tool, bastard child though it was of a Bant deck and a Zoo deck.
I kept the parts of Bant that I liked: the ability to interact with the opponent via permission, the tricksiness of the color Blue with cards like Vendilion Clique and Meddling Mage, things that made the opponent’s life difficult indeed if used properly. And I kept the parts of Zoo that I liked: the aggressive creature curve, the fetchland-Domain mana base. But as I planed away at the deck, it started to look more like the other Tribal Zoo decks, as the other Tribal Zoo decks likewise morphed to fit into the same metagame niche that I had determined I wanted to occupy in the first place. This time last week, I had the following:
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Arid Mesa
3 Temple Garden
2 Steam Vents
2 Island
1 Breeding Pool
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Watery Grave
1 Sacred Foundry
4 Wild Nacatl
4 Loam Lion
2 Kird Ape
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Meddling Mage
3 Vendilion Clique
4 Mana Leak
4 Tribal Flames
4 Bant Charm
4 Path to Exile
Sideboard:
4 Kor Firewalker
4 Negate
4 Kitchen Finks
3 Celestial Purge
Further application of logic and deductive reasoning after about twenty test-games showed a small change should be made, as it was still possible to improve the manabase now that Cryptic Command was no longer warping it. By taking the ‘worst’ fetchland in the deck (Scalding Tarn, as unlike Misty Rainforest and Arid Mesa it cannot get both halves of the ideal opening, Temple Garden/Steam Vents) and mixing it up with its nearest twin (Marsh Flats), the annoying ‘double Scalding Tarn’ hands might now between the two of them get the right lands into play. Another step of logic later and an Island became a Plains, not to play around Blood Moon but to give the deck a little less pain in its normal functioning, as fetching an Island after Temple Garden + Steam Vents may be pain-free but it doesn’t cast Bant Charm, while a Plains would.
But as finished as I felt the deck was in preparation for this past weekend’s PTQ, it’s important to realize one’s own fallibility, and the fact that I was emotionally attached to the deck as-designed and thus not applying the full faculty of reason. Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, it is all too often right to kill your darlings… and I gave the deck to a frequent car-mate on my PTQ adventures, Josh McGhee, longtime veteran Zoo player and thus the perfect person to seek out for a fresh perspective. Unexpectedly, Josh loved the deck, and this is a man who at one point was ready to marry Woolly Thoctar… he grumbled about not having Lightning Bolt and was less convinced that you couldn’t fit Knight of the Reliquary in there somewhere, but it fit and it worked. A twenty-game set against Thopter-Depths later and he was up eighteen to two, which I felt was more likely to speak volumes about the Depths pilot than the infallibility of my design, and Josh made a key suggestion: cut back significantly on the sideboard cards for that matchup to address the Zoo “mirror.”
I didn’t want to listen to him. It was my baby after all and he was telling me that at least part of the deck was an ugly baby, and I wanted what I wanted what I wanted. Thankfully, his urgings to build a proper sideboard were paired with a timely XKCD Valentine’s Day cartoon that reminded me that it was more important to be right in my deck design than in love with my deck, and a frantic bit of re-tooling later gave us this finished deck design:
Creatures (21)
Lands (21)
Spells (18)
Sideboard
The reasons for picking this deck as opposed to a more streamlined Zoo build, and pack Mana Leak over Lightning Bolt, was straightforward: a pure aggressive strategy was not one that could readily interact with a combo-playing opponent, and every combo-playing opponent was well-prepared to topple a stream of Zoo decks with their sideboarding strategy. Grand Prix: Oakland bore these thoughts out fully, as the well-prepared Depths players transformed into a U/B Control deck with just the Thopter Foundry combo to beat them, and there were just too many different combo decks that required too many angles of attack for “just” Zoo to defeat them.
Playing in the same weekend as Oakland, and thus presumably with the same metagame snapshot at the start of the day, I found myself warming up quite nicely… and glad that I was not just a traditional Zoo deck, as my first and third round pairings were against what looked to be the only two Martyr players in the room, both playing U/W Martyr with a Reveillark / Body Double / Mulldrifter shell to their deck and looking ready to munch on a nice soft Zoo pairing when I led off with a Loam Lion or Wild Nacatl. The Bant/Zoo hybrid I was piloting, however, had just enough disruptive game to buy me the time I needed to win, with Meddling Mage doing hard work by naming the right cards or a timely Mana Leak to win the game. In one of the hardest matchups for Zoo, I squeaked out of both rounds with a 2-1 win, and for the second match my opponent had to have been peeved when I figured out enough about what he was trying to do in Game One (from a turn one Chrome Mox imprinting Body Double and casting Martyr of Sands) to play Meddling Mage turn two naming Mulldrifter with three of the card in his hand!
Unfortunately, in between winning these two nightmare matchup rounds, I dropped a match to a U/W Tezzeret deck largely in the face of mana-flood, and at the end of each game could only say “I still had all these!” if I were to finish the sentence with “… lands”. Mana-flood is a realistic enough possibility that I have to look long and hard still at land #23 (the third Temple Garden) and weigh its benefits against another Kird Ape. The results remain inconclusive, as I’ve little reason to think the tipping point between mana-flood games where I draw eight lands and “regular” draws where I get 3-4 is as small as just one land, and cutting land #23 might mean more two-land games. I do know that my failure to draw lands and spells in a more reasonable assortment meant I had about five spells a game to try and defeat my opponent with, and my failure to do so would reverberate through not just my own tournament but that of car-mate Luis Neiman’s as well, who lost to him in the Top 8 (and might have won the PTQ if I’d beaten him).
From there, I exited Bizarro World for a while and didn’t get any more cold sweats from seeing Martyr of Sands resolve. Thopter-Depths and U/B Thopter (no Depths combo) were my next two opponents and they fell readily in turn, only to see me lose my first and only Zoo matchup on the back of his game 1 Blood Moon… and worse yet, a game 1 Blood Moon I misplayed into, as I had the option of playing the right land (Marsh Flats) or the wrong land (Hallowed Fountain, tapped) as my third land and chose the wrong land knowing it was the wrong land as I did it, only to find out just how wrong it was when I couldn’t fetch a basic Plains in response to the truly unexpected. For the second game I reversed my round-two predicament and got stuck on two with an awesome hand full of Finks and Rangers, effectively ending my day and leaving me little to salvage but my dignity as I wished my opponent the best of luck in his first PTQ and offered to help him figure out tiebreakers in a few rounds to see if he could safely draw. (He couldn’t, but won through anyway, for quite a showing at his first PTQ.)
For the final two rounds, there was nothing left to play for besides my own amusement, and I played accordingly. Osyp Lebedowicz had to look away as he saw me (incorrectly, as I well knew) leave a Dark Confidant in play from my Doran Rock opponent, because I’d gotten him down to three and wanted to see it kill him even if I had to wait a good long while for it to happen. These were after all the “funsies,” and after a day of seriously trying to murder my opponents, I was ready to let one of them do the work themselves for once… I could use the smile. Said opponent also presented a 59-card deck with a Chrome Mox as card sixteen on top of his sideboard for game three, with neither of us knowing how and him not noticing until counting as he mulliganed to six, and while I tend to think of myself as about the nicest guy in the world when it comes to these things, mid-mulligan is the wrong time to be trying to go back and present a legal deck, so I offered him the option of penalizing himself the game-loss or letting the judge do it.
That’s more of a jerk than I usually am, and the justification of “it was found during the mulligan to six” feels like a poor paint-job to salve my conscience, but the truth perhaps is that I was ready for the day to be over and his game-loss was as convenient as anything else to end it. If I’d cared about winning or losing once the Top 8 was out of my grasp, I’d probably have left my brain plugged in during the previous round and found the right play instead of the exact wrong play against Mike Flores disciple Spencer Reiss, and chosen the line of play that was clearly right instead of the one I made that was exactly wrong. But the faults remain my own, and not the deck’s… one mana-flood match loss sounds about right for any Constructed deck per tournament, and for the rest of my matches, I could only be beaten if I gave some of my well-earned percentage garnered in deck design back to the opponent. And I did.
I may not be the best player, but strategy and tactics during deck design is one of my stronger points, and going forward from here into the future it seems even more evident to me that the Zoo decks are going to need to respond if they want to play in this format. We live in an unfair world of broken decks doing unfair things, and “attack with Wild Nacatl” is not one of them. Going forward, you can either speed up to have some combo motion yourself, or you can slow down that half-step to make sure you’re still alive on the turn that Wild Nacatl would have killed the opponent. Game-one Meddling Mages and countermagic is simply the best way to try and force that necessary interaction if you want to survive, and following that logical decision to its ultimate destination is what Aquarium is designed to do.
There is another option, however: Brozek Boros is an excellent combo-style Zoo-like deck, and its “combo motion” with Steppe Lynx, Plated Geopede and Zektar Shrine Expedition hitting far harder than one- and two-drops were meant to do is something we now see and can perhaps take forward even further by refining the design. Removing some of the burn spells and marrying Brozek Boros to a Zoo design could yield the following, after all:
Brozek Naya
4 Arid Mesa
4 Flagstones of Trokair
4 Ghost Quarter
3 Sacred Foundry
2 Marsh Flats
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Temple Garden
1 Stomping Grounds
1 Mountain
1 Forest
1 Plains
4 Goblin Guide
4 Steppe Lynx
4 Plated Geopede
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Knight of the Reliquary
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Path to Exile
4 Searing Blaze
4 Zektar Shrine Expedition
2 Lightning Helix
There is work to do still going forward from this Grand Prix, and resting on the laurels of the Top 8 from Oakland is a great way to be playing last week’s tech. As hard as Petr Brozek pushed to make his Red deck work for this format, his loss in the Top 8 shows that there can still be room for improvement especially when the combo deck he was less prepared to beat won the tournament and will inevitably gain attention for events going forward from this point. After all, now that it is a known element it can itself be attacked… and something as straightforward (if effective) as Brozek’s Boros deck can be aimed at readily, especially as it and Conley Woods Bant deck gather attention to themselves as quite possibly the best decks of the tournament even as Elves won the event.
In the world of Extended, stagnation equals death, and for this PTQ season especially it is new designs and new innovations that are the key to success, pointing at a metagame that is large and diverse but still to some extent predictable while trying to minimize your own utter predictability so that you are attacking an opponent’s weaknesses without offering them the same opportunity in return within their own 75 cards. Aquarium was an excellent deck to choose for this past weekend’s PTQs, and I expect with the results of Oakland that its chosen prey will thrive even more in coming weeks.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com