The buzz about Five-Color Control is thick, and appropriately so. More than with any other deck, a Toast tinkerer gets to pick the best cards from any color to do the jobs that need doing. The mana fixing available is basically cost-free, and just as flexible as that in Extended. In Extended, with no Wasteland, no non-basic punishment but the Blood Moon effects, the biggest incentive to mana discipline is the attempt to spend less life fixing your mana. But, for the most part, that pressure is overwhelmed by the need to keep up. Extended decks don’t have the luxury of playing comes-into-play-tapped lands, and they can’t really give up card power to support less painful manabases. Finally, because of the diversity of Extended strategies, decks focused on answers have a much tougher time keeping the format honest and slowing it down. Firespout is a mulligan against TEPS, as is Ethersworn Canonist against Zoo; and, generally, the cards that are relevant at both poles are only weakly so.
In Standard, however, a Toast deck can play the catch-up cards (like Kitchen Finks; Wrath of God and Firespout; Cryptic Command; et al) without watering down its match-ups across the board. So, even though Kithkin, Mono Red, and Jund decks do exist to punish slow starts, a Five-Color Control pilot can still afford to spend two turns establishing his mana, confident (because he can run so many of these cards) that he will begin catching up on all metrics starting on turn 3, continuing to make up ground with every play, until finally pulling ahead. Long story short, and without any earth-shattering revelation — even though there is an obvious cost to playing as many as ten comes-into-play-tapped lands, the benefits far outweigh it because no one can effectively take and hold the advantage of the two free turns a Toast deck often hands out.
At the end of Block Constructed season and during the last Nationals season, Demigod Red looked like it had the appropriate tools, being able to put pressure on early and maintain it late through Five-Color Control’s defenses, but the adoption of Runed Halo (a move that required little mana adjustment) showed clearly how powerful and flexible the Toast toolbox was.
If you paid any attention to Block Constructed, you’re probably itching to point out that between equally-matched opponents, the Faerie player had an edge over the Toast one. While it might have been true before the rotation, Gerry Thompson pretty concisely showed why that’s no longer the case, feeling confident to cut Cloudthreshers from his latest list. I’d like to add that when Faeries did and does beat out Five-Color Control, it’s typically not because it takes great advantage of those early turns. The only relevant play a Faerie deck usually has on the first two turns is Bitterblossom; a strong play, indeed, but not nearly redundant enough that Faeries can be said to plan to capitalize on turns 1 and 2. Even when it had Ancestral Visions available for turn 1, it was a non-interactive play that had nothing to do with a Toast deck being tapped out. Faeries succeeds in the match-up because it can play mana-efficiently and at the end of the turn. Faeries is like the Elgin Baylor of the current standard format. Toast is Larry Bird, with maybe just a little bit of hops (Cryptic Command is obviously a big deal, but there are also the charms, Condemn, Negate, Broken Ambition, etc.).
So what does this mean for those of us who want to figure out how to beat Toast consistently? Between our experiences with Demigod Red and Faeries, we can distill the following successful strategies:
– If you can consistently make plays on turn 1 or 2, you will almost always have the initiative.
– To win off early pressure, you need follow up plays that are effective in the face of Wrath and Firespout, Cryptic Command, and Kitchen Finks.
As far as I can tell, everything else is only slightly relevant. Of course, it’s important to know how to handle Cruel Ultimatum and Cloudthresher among other things, but it seems like those problems are solved as by-products of the real work.
In his article earlier this week, Gerry mentioned that he’d be worried about the Reveillark match-up when someone figures out how to “build a Lark deck that will beat most of the decks that Five-Color Control is good against, while being able to play some insane trumps against Five-Color Control,” so I figured that was probably the best direction to start looking in. Here’s my most recent take:
Creatures (16)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (23)
Spells (19)
On the play, Fulminator Mage and Esper Charm can sneak into play before mana is available, but the backbone of the early game is the trio of Tidehollow Sculler, Boomerang, and Thoughtseize. All three are meant to extend their initial set-up time, so that you can make your midgame plays unimpeded. Ideally, you want any of those three cards clearing the way for Fulminator Mage into Mannequin or Ajani, but pretty much any play you make (besides Reveillark or an evoked Mulldrifter) puts them in a hole.
The fliers let you maintain pressure through their mass removal. Kitchen Finks are a minor annoyance; basically your Scullers don’t like facing them very much, but none of your other men really care. The lifegain isn’t irrelevant, but only really matters if you run out of action and it buys them the extra bit of time to recover from your attacks on their resources. If you’re not abnormally flooded, there’s enough card advantage in this deck to sustain your pressure. As far as Cryptic Command is concerned (theirs, not mine… I’ll get to them in a second), there’s enough cheap and instant speed action, and enough lack of concern with the combat step, that the card can be played around; also, Thoughtseize and Sculler can sometimes take it out of commission.
Notes on this deck:
– I’m worried about it’s lack of tools for the maindeck fight against Kithkin, Faeries, and other decks that can generate pressure quickly.
– Fulminator Mage has been called a bad Stone Rain because he is often (and correctly so) sacrificed immediately after being played. It’s usually right to do so against Five-Color Control to keep them off of Finks and, to a lesser extent, Mulldrifter; but you also need to anticipate when you’re going to be playing around Cryptic Command, and when the Mage can help by taking out one of their untapped lands.
– Ajani seems particularly exciting for the match-up, and relevant elsewhere, but I haven’t gotten to really see him in action yet.
– Cryptic Command is awesome but the deck wants to play a turn 2 Sculler whenever it has one, so Fetid Heath seems like the first choice in filter lands. I’m sure the mana can get to a point where it supports 4 Cryptics, but until then, the deck’s priority is to avoid stumbling so it can take advantage of those unimpeded early turns.
Due to my concerns about the aggro match-ups with this deck, I tried coming up with another that had a more well-rounded game plan, while still being focused on beating Five-Color Control. The initial inspiration was the Little Kid GW deck Flores talked a lot about during the last Block Constructed season. With the move to Wrath of God over Firespout (as the four-of), there seems to be a Gaddock Teeg-sized gap in the format. Interestingly, due to the welcomed pressure of supporting Shield of the Oversoul the other two-drops in the deck are nothing special, just bodies really, but Teeg turn 2 immediately puts the Toast player in a huge hole, requiring him to have particular cards in his deck and his hand. Here’s that deck:
Creatures (20)
- 4 Gaddock Teeg
- 1 Kitchen Finks
- 3 Safehold Elite
- 4 Wilt-Leaf Cavaliers
- 4 Rhox War Monk
- 4 Steward of Valeron
Lands (24)
Spells (16)
As I mentioned above, the secondary two-drops in the deck (which are essential for putting some early pressure on the Toast player) are nothing special, but they both have abilities that are relevant in the match-up. The Elite sticks around, post-mass-removal, to pick up a Shield and immediately gets back to work. It also swings into Kitchen Finks twice. The Stewards not only provide a little extra mana that can go a long way in operating around Cryptic Command. They also help conceal Barkshell Blessing, setting up blowouts like saving both Teeg and himself from a turn 3 Firespout. The three-drops are pretty awesome in the aggro match-ups, but the important points here are that they survive Firespout and, while you’re on the play, sneak into play fast enough and large enough that you can generate a significant board presence with just one or two men. This is important because if they didn’t, it would be suspicious when you passed the pre-Wrath turn without playing another guy. But, because they are big enough, not only do you not need to invest more cards to a board that may be quickly going bye, bye, but your opponent also has no reason to think about Negate.
Even though Shield and Blessing might be more dominating in aggro matches, all of the spells in the deck were chosen because they’re relevant here; specifically, Shield, Negate, and Blessing let the deck continue to operate in the face of mass removal, while all 8 blue spells fight a mana-efficient fight against Cryptic Command. Bant Charm clears a Finks out of the way if it’s stifling the part of you offense that’s bear-based, while Shield invalidates Finks as anything but lifegain, and then, only if you decide to block it.
It might seem odd that there’s only one Finks maindeck, but the creatures that are included (besides Teeg, and he can carry a Shield) are all naturally strong in the same places that the Finks are, and better at maintaining a board position by themselves.
I’m much more comfortable with how this deck turned out than I am with the Lark deck, because I feel like the all around match-ups should be stronger, and I do feel like this deck succeeds in attacking the weakness of the current Five-Color Control decks. But, I also have a very strong urge to see if I can stretch the mana more to support cards like Ajani Vengeant (either main or in the board) and Firespout for the Kithkin match-up. Faeries doesn’t seem like a particularly strong match, but this deck has access to both Cloudthresher and Wispmare.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see how even strategies that are looking attack Toast in the early game, still run a large amount of comes-into-play-tapped lands, because there just really isn’t anything worth doing on turn 1 (format-wide, the only real turn 1 plays are Figure of Destiny and Thoughtseize… everything else, Toast is built to recover from effortlessly). The question seems to be then: are the turn 2 plays available powerful and relevant enough to base an anti-Toast strategy on? Hopefully they are, otherwise this format will turn into something resembling the mindflayer city Drizzt Do’Urden gets trapped in Exile. Each ultimately insignificant deck will poke and prod at the only real power around, a mass of power and intelligence undulating in response to the desperate massaging of the peons, who only want to be noticed, thanked for the stimulation they’ve given the mother brain, and finally crushed.
Ever an optimist, I do really think Tidehollow Sculler and Gaddock Teeg both will shake things up decently.
Until next time…
Billy
PS – I realize some people are going to ask how to play the deck, or what to do in such-and-such situation, or whether or not I considered some certain card, etc. Do your best to make any questions recognizable as questions, and I’ll do my best to answer. Because I think dialogue and give-and-take really is the best way to flesh out these ideas.