Elves, eh?
It’s Pro Tour: Berlin, and combo Elves has its breakout performance. People not paying attention to the format are completely caught off guard by the deck, and people paying attention to the format are caught off guard by its popularity. The tournament comes and goes, and Elves clearly asserts its dominance as the deck to beat. Pleas for emergency bannings are had, and Elves clearly seems as though it is the only deck to play. So what happened? The format overcorrected itself.
Did you try to play an Extended 8 man queue on Magic Online the week after Berlin? It was pure bloodshed. There were two kinds of decks: Elves, and decks overgunning for Elves. I fondly remember one such queue when I wanted to try Elves out and my opponent had played three Chalice of the Void, a pair of Pyroclasm and Firespout, a Jund Charm, and an Ethersworn Canonist. Oh, and he was playing Faeries. It was just as close as it sounds.
Let’s speed up a bit to more recent times. Grand Prix: Seattle is the weekend after Cascade Swans makes its format-shaking debut at Grand Prix: Barcelona, and the format turns out to be extremely hostile for Swans. Not only are decks packing sets of cards like Pithing Needle, Runed Halo, and Thought Hemorrhage out of the sideboard, but a lot of players fell back to Faeries: a deck which was naturally advantaged against the Swans deck.
Why do I bring all of this up?
The pointy-eared forest dwellers captured six Top 8 slots between Australian, Japanese, and Spanish Nationals, and the metagame is already abuzz. Sure, the deck was known about before, but few took as such a serious contender, and even fewer played it to the point where they could see how good it was. With U.S. Nationals this weekend, players are no doubt scrambling to respond to the change, and, whether you are playing in the main competition or looking to grind in, if you want to survive you need to react to the metagame accordingly.
You see, there are two universal truths about combo decks: people love playing combo decks, and people absolutely hate losing to combo decks. There are few things more wretched than being removed from the realm of interactivity while you sit and watch the opponent go off. With so little time to react from last weekend people are going to overcorrect rather than undercorrect, especially at the level of Nationals grinders.
Even if all of the sideboard hate wasn’t enough to talk you off of Elves, look at what happened with Swans in the exact same format just a couple of months earlier. Swans made a splash, and the very next weekend Faeries was out in full force. No matter how many Great Sable Stags and Scattershot Archers you can cram in the sideboard, Faeries is still not a good matchup for Elves, and not to mention that Faeries will also be sideboarding cards specifically for Elves now that the deck has increased in popularity. Before you wave this all off as prospective hogwash, look at what happened to Cascade Swans. Cascade Swans was in the same exact situation, the same kind of deck archetype, and Faeries was the answer several people chose to run with. Elves’ issues are only further compounded by the fact that Zealous Persecution is a problem card and some players might decide that the death of B/W Kithkin was heralded a little too soon.
What am I trying to get at here? Don’t be the guy who obliviously switches to Elves and plays it. Even if you’ve been playing Elves all along, I still recommend switching to something else. Elves is a very dangerous choice, especially for the grinders where a single loss will send you right back to the events registration booth and down fifteen dollars.
Right. Winning grinders. Let’s talk about that.
By the time this articles go up, the U.S. Nationals grinders will be a paltry fourteen hours from beginning. Grinders are a very particular kind of tournament, in that your goal is to win five rounds straight. A single match loss will spiral you out of the tournament, and the only worthwhile prize is given to first place. In essence, a grinder is like the Top 8 of a PTQ except with two extra rounds. This fact means two very important things: you can’t play a deck that expects to give up a loss on the way to the top, and you have to play a deck that can beat the best player in the tournament.
Let’s focus on the first of those two facts for now. There are many decks which have stupendous matchups at the cost of having certain very soft matchups against a few decks. Over the course of a PTQ or a Grand Prix, these decks can expect to pick up a loss. In Nationals, playing a deck that has those kind of percentages is alright because you can take multiple losses in constructed and still be fine. In a grinder, not so much. If you’re playing a deck that has, say, a bad Elves matchup, you either need to find a way to fix the matchup so you can consistently win, or bail on the deck. The reason is that you are very likely to play against one Elves deck per grinder, so if you are playing a deck which cannot beat a very popular deck, then it’s going to be difficult to grind in with it. At this particular tournament, I would also say the same for Faeries, especially because of the players that will play them.
You see, most grinders have a couple of ringers. That is, players who are fairly good on the PTQ level and might have even had some Pro Tour success but missed the cut to Nationals for whichever reason. In a PTQ there is no guarantee you will have to face them; PTQ’s are longer tournaments with much more variance to them. Grinders operate differently because there are less rounds and less people. The ringers will often cut through the first couple of rounds with ease, only facing rough opposition in the last two or three rounds: right where you’re most likely to be if you are also doing well in a grinder. To win the tournament, you have to get through these people. When I say that you have to play a deck that can beat the best player in the tournament, I mean that these ringers are the people that you have to be able to beat. If you want to beat them, you have to either fight through them or fight around them. If you think you’re just as good or better than all of the players in the tournament (and are probably one of the ringers yourself) then you can fight through them, in which case proceed playing whatever deck you think is appropriate. If not, then you’re going to have to take some deck-selecting precautions and fight around them.
The general rule about fighting around people is that you have to find a way to leverage an advantage besides your playskill. If you determine Faeries is the right deck to play and you switch to it with minimal experience, you’re going to likely succumb to a more experienced Faeries pilot. In essence, you can’t expect to win a fair mirror match. You either have to sideboard a significant amount of mirror match ammunition to overpower them, or choose a deck which has a matchup advantage on them. For example, a deck like Taichi Fujimoto’s R/B Blightning deck from Japanese Nationals last weekend is a deck you could play if you wanted to try and overpower the better players on inherent matchup advantage.
“But,” you might be asking, “how do I even know what decks these ringers going to be playing in the first place?” Typically, grinder ringers choose to play a control deck so they can try and maximally outplay their opponents. Now, there are definitely a ton of exceptions to this, especially if the ringers have a beatdown deck that is well positioned (just look at the four qualifying G/B Elf decks from the Honolulu grinder!) but on the whole, ringers will often lean toward control decks. Additionally, ringers are often in tune with the metagame. Knowing these two pieces of information, I feel as though Faeries will be a popular choice of ringers this weekend. It’s both a control deck with the capability to win a variety of matchups, and it is well positioned to defeat players still operating on last week’s metagame assumptions. Additionally, Five-Color Control is another popular choice by players that fall into this category and operates on a lot of the same assumptions, making it a deck I would make sure I could beat.
Of course, that leaves one last question. If you grind into Nationals (or are just qualified anyway) and have experience with a wide range of decks, what should you play? Well, here’s how I see the metagame falling for this weekend. Elves is going to still be played because a lot of people were planning to play it, but its going to be overreacted to and the metagame is going to shift. As a result, Faeries is going to be popular. Faeries is a control deck, advantaged against Elves, and a deck popular with a lot of pros because they have a lot of experience with it. Additionally, Five-Color Control will be popular for the same reasons. (Not to mention Shuhei took down Japanese Nationals with it!) But what of the Kithkin players? Kithkin has been a popular deck for the past several weeks and taken down numerous PTQs, so surely people will continue to play it. The problem is that Mono-White Kithkin has a fairly wretched matchup against Elves. Only two of copies of the deck cracked the Top 8 between three Nationals, no doubt due to Elves’ and Five-Color Control’s resurgence. What is a Kithkin player to do? Even though Caves of Koilos is no longer around, I feel like it has to be correct to try and fit Zealous Persecution back in somehow. Even though Elves gained Archdruid from M10, Persecution is still excellent against them and it gives the deck a very strong tool to use against Faeries.
Nationals is shaping up to be an interesting tournament, and I’m excited to see how the format reacts. I wish I could be there this weekend, but my poor finish in Honolulu unfortunately knocked my rating under the Nationals cutoff. I hope all of you who are attending have fun, and if you try and grind in, let me know how your experience went and what strategy you employed. As always, you can e-mail me at gavintriesagain at gmail dot com or post to the forums if you have any questions or comments. I’d be happy to answer any questions or thoughts you have about the format before the grinders begin, and I’ll be repeatedly checking the forums as well as my e-mail Wednesday night and all of Thursday to help you guys out with any last minute preparation questions you may have. See all of you in the forums!
Gavin Verhey
Team Unknown Stars
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else