Flow of Ideas – Battle Royale: The Process, Deck, and Results *WINNER!*

“That should do it,” I muttered. As if on cue, a box informing me that my opponent had conceded from the game popped up, followed by
another box which displayed a coveted five Scars of Mirrodin packs. I froze for a moment in disbelief:
my budget 2-ticket deck had just won three consecutive Magic Online 8-man events…

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When Ted announced the Battle Royale was returning, I was ecstatic. Memories of the past Battles flickered in my head like hovering fireflies, and I immediately signed up for the competition,

More importantly, I resolved to win it.

To me, this event held great significance. For many viewers, this would be their first taste of the Battle Royale. For others, it would be the reopening of a grand series. In either case, a golden trove of pride was on the line.

This strength and will must’ve been what the early gladiators of Rome felt so long ago, fighting down in the pits as heads rolled and spectators screamed. Everybody would know who won this challenge. The games would be watched and picked apart, and the standings would go down in the Battle Royale archives.

There would be only one survivor. It was going to be me.

When the deckbuilding constraints were sent out, the fire to test for anything else dimmed. Playing Sealed to test for the string of upcoming PTQs didn’t seem nearly as enticing as thinking about the Battle. I flew toward the flame that was lit higher.

The route to victory wasn’t going to be easy. Max, Todd, and Matt were all strong adversaries. I figured my strongest asset was putting time and dedication into exploring an unknown format, so I decided to press my advantage to its maximum and playtest.

The format? Standard — with the restriction that you had to be able to build your deck with under thirty Magic Online event tickets.

The process

The very first thing I did was to look down the lists of Standard-legal rares and see what caught my eye as single cards that were way underpriced (ticket-wise) for a strong effect. My initial pass led to the list of:

M11:

Birds of Paradise
Day of Judgment
Chandra Nalaar
Conundrum Sphinx
Destructive Force
Fauna Shaman
Nantuko Shade
Sun Titan

Scars of Mirrodin:

Argent Sphinx
Genesis Wave
Grand Architect
Spikeshot Elder
Sunblast Angel
Tempered Steel

Zendikar:

Emeria Angel
Emeria, the Sky Ruin
Oracle of Mul Daya
Sphinx of Jwar Isle
Sphinx of Lost Truths
World Queller

Worldwake:

Admonition Angel

Rise of the Eldrazi:

Awakening Zone
Consume the Meek
Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief

In light of that, I made a list of strategies that could fit within the budget limit and were easily ported over from past and current Standard. They were:

Allies
Elves
Fauna Shaman
Merfolk/Grand Architect Beatdown
Mono-Red
Mono-White Control
Myr Beatdown/Combo
Poison
Pyromancer Ascension
Quest for the Holy Relic Beatdown
U/B Control
U/W Control
Vampires

And so the testing process began.

The Playtesting

I built stock lists for each deck to have a gauntlet and tried to build some additional decks showcasing the rares I plucked out. I spent a while playing games against myself with each deck, and it quickly became apparent that the frontrunners were Mono-Red, Poison, Pyromancer Ascension, Quest for the Holy Relic Beatdown, an interesting spin on U/W, and a unique Vampire deck I had. The other decks all had the following issues:

Allies didn’t have a consistent enough mana base to play the three colors it really wanted. Furthermore, I knew going in that a major building constraint to keep in mind would be that strong, common spot removal (Doom Blade, Lightning Bolt, Pyroclasm, and so on) as well as Day of Judgment would be popular because of how strong and versatile they were for their ticket cost.

Elves became a lot worse, to the brink of unplayability, when you removed EldraziMonument and Vengevine. It just shows you how well those cards can hold a deck together.

Fauna Shaman had most of its baseline cards, like Birds and the Shaman itself, but was missing Vengevine and too many good targets.

Neither Merfolk nor Grand Architect Beatdown was advantaged against the better decks, and the latter was unplayable without Eldrazi Monument.

Mono-White Control was just worse than U/W and had no chance against Pyromancer Ascension.

Myr Combo was cute, but, as with Allies, the removal issue turned out to be its downfall.

Traditional U/B and U/W required too many cards that were out of range. The largest problem was that a playset of Everflowing Chalices was six tickets alone, hampering the already expensive deck.

The one variant of U/W I managed to get to work was a variant on a list that Kevin Boddy and Brian Six worked on before the 2010s this year. I tested it before the event and came close to playing it at my 2010s, so it was fresh in my mind. The core of the deck was this, and it was mostly budget:

4 Thrummingbird
4 Trinket Mage
4 Wall of Omens
2 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

4 Preordain
4 Everflowing Chalice

4 Contagion Clasp
4 Tumble Magnet
1 Brittle Effigy
1 Chimeric Mass

You don’t get to play with planeswalkers, unfortunately, but you can play some Days of Judgment and potentially some other cards such as Luminarch Ascension instead. The general idea is that you proliferate your Chalices up over time and eventually cast Emrakul. If I had any extra tickets around, I’d play some Lux Cannons as well.

Unfortunately, this deck fell for two reasons. First, I figured artifact removal would be popular. Similar to the removal problem that Allies and Myr had, cards like Naturalize or Nature’s Claim were cheap and easy to sideboard. Secondly, I just couldn’t keep the deck in reasonable form while Everflowing Chalice was sucking up six tickets. Even when I swapped the Wall of Omens out, it still didn’t help enough. I eventually got it to the point where I could’ve played the deck… with a fifteen-basic land sideboard.

Perhaps that one is best saved for another day.

Anyway, late in testing I began trying a pretty strange Vampires list. Gerry Thompson had built something similar pre-2010s, and I had played some games with it at the time and liked it. Instead of looking back at his list for reference, though, I built mine entirely from memory and decided to play some games before comparing the differences. The Vampire deck kept winning in my gauntlet, so I built it on Magic Online to get some testing in.

I decided to playtest my deck, budget and all, in the Tournament Practice room. I didn’t expect to win a ton of matches, but I kept my deck budget for playtesting purposes, all the way down to an all-Swamp mana base despite owning fetchlands. I figured I’d play enough Quest for the Holy Relic, Mono-Red, and Pyromancer Ascension to get some reasonable practice in.

That’s where things started to go way differently than I expected.

At first, I started winning almost all of my Tournament Practice matches. Aggro decks were beat down, control decks were attritioned out, and Titans were stolen by Captivating Vampire. Surely something was going wrong. So I joined some two-man queues…
and just kept winning.

So I kicked it up a notch and joined some 8-mans.

Three 8-mans (and a handful of miffed opponents) later, and I had three victories. I played several more 8-mans, and, while I didn’t win all of them, I made the finals every time but once.

After a few more days of refining before the Battle commenced, this is where I ended up:

 

I’m sure it looks like an untamed pile of draft chaff. However, it’s incredibly synergistic and far more powerful than it looks. In fact, a similar deck has been making waves in queues after Tom LaPille talked about a similar decklist from a Daily Event in his article last week. (His list had some significant changes from mine, though.)

I wouldn’t only recommend this decklist for budget purposes, but I’d recommend it to serious players playing Standard right now. The only change I’d make with an open budget would be Verdant Catacombs and Marsh Flats over Swamps, and potentially Doom Blades maindeck over Urge to Feed.

After looking over and finalizing my final list, I had an extra six and a half tickets to spend. Why do I mention this? Because that’s where the added value singleton Verdant Catacombs comes from! Simply put: mise.

The creatures

Twelve one-drops give you fairly aggressive starts. Yes, some of you may scoff at a turn 1 Viscera Seer, but even without that, you have eight essential, “two power for one mana” creatures you can lead off with. (On a side note, I’ve liked Pulse Tracker as a beatdown card since he was released and am glad he finally has a home.)

Viscera Seer is actually deceptively strong. In combination with Bloodghast, he ensures that you never run out of gas. Additionally, eight creatures with the — don’t laugh — ability to let you sacrifice your own creatures is quite powerful.

For one, it means your Bloodghasts never get hit by cards like Brittle Effigy and Condemn so they can always come back for some extra reach later on. But, most importantly, it just allows you to Fireball your opponent out with Kalastria Highborn. A lot of games you can just deal eight to ten damage over two turns with a sacrifice outlet and Highborn. Each Bloodghast in your graveyard makes a land drop worth two points of drain — and I can only imagine what it’s like if you’re not playing budget and were playing the full set of fetchlands!

Bloodghast and Highborn are probably the best two cards in the maindeck. They give you reach and allow you to win out of nowhere. You don’t always want them after sideboarding, but you definitely can’t cut any from the maindeck.

Bloodthrone Vampire is underwhelming at times, but helps you maintain a board after Pyroclasm and is good with Highborn and Bloodghast.

At the top end of your creature curve is Captivating Vampire. If unanswered, many decks cannot beat him. His lord status is great on its own, but his ability is deceptively amazing. I played against ramp decks of all varieties, and whenever they would smugly cast a Titan, my Captivating Vampire would turn the tide far in my favor.

The spells

As far as the spells go, the Urges to Feed were Doom Blades until I realized that, with a budget restriction, I didn’t expect many of my opponents to be playing creatures with more than three toughness. Furthermore, the pump ability of Urge is very relevant in creature mirrors, which I expected to have to play.

Additionally, one of the upsides to playing Vampires is that Doom Blade, a spell I expected a lot of, was worthless against your deck. If anybody else had figured out that Vampires was good, I didn’t want to be stuck with useless cards against them.

If I were playing Vampires in an event this weekend, I might consider swapping the Urges for Blades, or perhaps making a split. Urge definitely has its merits though, and can be a complete blowout if your opponent has to enter the combat step.

Dark Tutelage was the one main thing I stole from Gerry’s list. In retrospect, it’s pretty genius. The life loss is often negligible, and a lot of decks just can’t beat an active Tutelage. The stream of card advantage in a deck with plenty of pressure is often insurmountable.

The two discard spells are because I figured there would be one Pyromancer Ascension deck (which there was) and potentially one deck with Day of Judgment (which there wasn’t). I wanted one Inquisition maindeck, not because I wanted a fifth Duress, as you might guess from the four Duresses already present, but because I wanted to have a less likely chance of drawing Duress against creature decks. The fact that I ended up sideboarding three Duresses anyway was coincidental.

The sideboard

I wanted to make sure I could have plenty of cards to bring in against all of the obvious decks. Gatekeeper and Doom Blade are excellent against creature-based decks, and Marsh Casualties ranges from mediocre to phenomenal depending on the kind of beatdown deck.

Duress turned out to be pretty strong (much better than the Bloodchief Ascensions I tried at first) against the control decks. Additionally, early on, I found Mimic Vat to be a big issue. By the time the Battle actually happened, the Vat’s price was high enough to remove it from feasibility, but when I played against Vat decks in queues, their namesake card was very hard to beat. Duress helped a lot against plucking Vat from their hand. As an aside, I tried Ratchet Bomb for a while but, 3.50-ticket cost aside, it just was too unwieldy and took too long to be good against the mimic-maker

As for Jinxed Idol, it just so turns out that Idol is awesome in this deck. That makes me happy, not just because I’ve been advocating Idol since I heard it was coming back, but because it’s the perfect card you want against control and combo. U/W, U/B, and Pyromancer Ascension often find ways to stabilize at a low life total. Between Bloodghast and Jinxed Idol (a combo, if you didn’t notice), you can always pull through the last few points.

One game in an 8-man against U/B, on the play, I cast nothing on turn 1, followed up by Jinxed Idol on turn 2, and my opponent laughed at me. I cast a Bloodghast the next turn, and the game wasn’t remotely close — I demolished my opponent with over ten points of Idol damage. I cut it down to three because the one issue is when you draw too many early on, but I’m very happy to have it in the sideboard overall.

Here was how I was sideboarding against the major archetypes in my 8-man experiences. Since my experiences on testing this deck on Magic Online are pretty broad and general, I’m going to take about sideboarding versus general styles of decks and then elaborate on what to do against certain archetypes of that category in the area below the sideboarding guide.

Control Decks

-4 Urge to Feed, -3 Bloodthrone Vampire, -1 Captivating Vampire

+3 Jinxed Idol, +3 Duress, +2 Doom Blade

On the draw, sometimes I’d take out more Captivating Vampires and leave more Bloodthrone Vampires in. It just depends on what their build is like. Sometimes the extra damage and ability to steal their trump creature is really important; sometimes being able to keep Bloodthrone after Pyroclasm or Fireball them out fast is what’s most crucial.

In general, I felt like a lot of the matchup depended on how many Bloodghasts, Duresses, Jinxed Idols, and Dark Tutelages you drew, versus how many sweepers they drew. However, I was winning most of my control matchups.

Beatdown decks

-4 Bloodghast, -1 Dark Tutelage, -1 Duress

+4 Gatekeeper of Malakir, +2 Doom Blade

Bloodghast is generally pretty bad against aggressive decks, since you want to block and attrition them out. Tutelage is great against beatdown decks without reach since it gives you ammunition to kill all of their creatures, but against decks with burn or Elves, you want to cut the last two and a Bloodthrone Vampire for Marsh Casualties.

Fauna Shaman felt like a bad matchup the one time I played against it. Elves and Mono-Red felt pretty close. The other beatdown decks, such as Quest for the Holy Relic, felt favorable.

 Pyromancer Ascension

-4 Urge to Feed, -2 Captivating Vampire

+3 Jinxed Idol, +3 Duress

I felt this matchup was very good. The sideboarding is fairly straightforward. Demolish their hand, provide a quick clock, and don’t walk into Pyroclasm.

Ramp decks

-3 Bloodthrone Vampire, -2 Urge to Feed, -1 Duress

+4 Gatekeeper of Malakir, +2 Doom Blade

Often you just want to keep the pressure up and kill all of their creatures. This is the matchup I have the least experience in because I didn’t test it at all on my own for the Battle Royale, and it seems to be waning in popularity on Magic Online. I felt ahead in the matches I played, though.

 

Now, to finally answer the question I’m sure you’re wondering by this point: how did the Battle Royale actually go?

The Battle

I’ll describe the games in minor detail below, but if you want to watch all of the replays yourself, check this out.

There is a trick you can use to view others’ replays if you have a Magic Online account. I used this in one article before, and it seemed to work for everybody. Here’s the description of how you do it:

“You can share games with your friends by opening the %AppData%Wizards of the CoastMagic Online.0.mygames file on your computer. Simply find the line(s) that contain the game you want to share, copy the entire line, and send it to your friend. Your friend can then insert that line into their .mygames file and your game will appear under their My Games tab (I suggest doing this while their MTGO is shut down to ensure it works correctly).”

Here are all of the replays for the matches I played. If you have Magic Online, follow the directions above (if your computer doesn’t know how to open the mygames file, as mine didn’t, open it with Microsoft Word or a similar product), and paste all of the matches below into your mygames file.

97557534#40799299#11/2/2010#16:53:11#cstandard#rabon#SCGGreen (W)

97560178#40799299#11/2/2010#17:06:29#cstandard#rabon (W)#SCGGreen

97561238#40800711#11/2/2010#17:12:36#cstandard#rabon (W)#GuiIJoe

97562062#40800711#11/2/2010#17:30:47#cstandard#rabon#GuiIJoe (W)

97564536#40800711#11/2/2010#17:38:26#cstandard#rabon (W)#GuiIJoe

97566248#40802395#11/2/2010#17:47:50#cstandard#rabon#strong sad (W)

97566946#40802395#11/2/2010#17:58:57#cstandard#rabon (W)#strong sad

One game against Todd (Strong Sad) and one game against Max (SCGGreen) seem to have been lost somehow. Otherwise, the other seven games are all there.

A quick recap:

Round one I played against Max. He was playing Mono-Green Poison.

Game one I kept an iffy hand and ended up drawing a bunch of Bloodghasts, which were overly poor against his deck. I managed to stabilize, but he found Canopy Cover to deal the final poison.

Game two I had a very aggressive draw with double Gatekeeper to lock him out. I killed him fast.

Game three, I make a gigantic mistake. I lead on Vampire Lacerator instead of Pulse Tracker, so when he played a turn 2 Blight Mamba, and I played my Tracker, my Tracker ended up trading with the Mamba. Later on, I ended up one Vampire short of turning on Captivating Vampire and stealing his creature the turn before I won. Fortunately, Max was only able to deal nine poison with his creature, and I won the next turn.

Round two I played against Matt with Pyromancer Ascension.

Game 1, he got mana-screwed, and I had an aggressive start with several Bloodghasts and beat him.

Game 2 I opted to play a turn 1 Lacerator instead of Duressing away his Ascension. I stripped his hand eventually and began to beat down with my Bloodghasts, but he ripped a draw spell and started assembling a defense of Calcite Snappers to hold me off despite being at two. I dug for an Idol while forcing him to burn my Bloodghasts as I hit land drops each turn, but eventually he found double Bolt to kill me.

Game 3, I had a strong start, but he managed to fuel up Ascension again. This time I stripped his hand, and while he drew some gas again afterward, I managed to eventually attrition him down.

Round three I played against Todd with Vampires.

This match was blisteringly fast. Game 1, his only plays were Viscera Seer, Blade of the Bloodchief, and then Captivating Vampire, while I pretty much had my nut draw and killed him on turn 5.

Game 2 I showed off my nut draw again, but he had Marsh Casualties to wipe my board. All was not lost, however, as I scryed four lands to the bottom with Viscera Seer… but I ended up drawing three straight lands anyway while Todd rebuilt his board and killed me.

Game 3 I hurt Todd a lot with an early Urge to Feed, then stole his Captivating Vampire with mine. From that point, the game was pretty much on lock.

I had done it! Won the Battle Royale!

It’s great to say I’m a StarCityGames.com Battle Royale champion! But even more than that, I had a blast! It was fun to try a new format in a competition against fellow writers. I look forward to participating in more Battle Royales in the future. It’s going to be exciting to see what challenges Ted will cook up for the next round of participants!

That’s all for this week. If you have any questions about the deck, post them in the forums, e-mail me at gavintriesagain at gmail dot com, or send me a tweet @GavinVerhey. I’d be happy to answer any of them, and I highly recommend you give the deck a try.

Talk to you soon!

Gavin Verhey
Rabon on Magic Online,
GavinVerhey
on Twitter, Lesurgo everywhere else

www.DesignSpaceBlog.com