A couple of months ago, I got an excited e-mail from Neutral Ground regular Elden Lee. He had stumbled upon an exciting new deck on Magic Online that a Japanese player had beaten him with. I have no idea who this player was – but as far as I know, he is the originator of the deck that came to be known as Tight Sight.
Elden and I have collaborated on a number of decks in the past, and he also knew that I was dying to break Future Sight, so we set out to develop the decklist – potentially for Regionals. The original list looked approximately like this:
4 Early Harvest
4 Far Wanderings
3 Dwell on the Past
3 Moment’s Peace
4 Mental Note
4 Careful Study
4 Obsessive Search
2 Quiet Speculation
3 Deep Analysis
1 Traumatize
3 Future Sight
2 Cunning Wish
8 Forest
15 Island
The sideboard at that point was something like 25 cards that constantly rotated in and out as we tried to discover the deck’s strengths and weaknesses. I proxied up a decklist and began testing at Neutral Ground with Don Lim, Sayan Bhattacharyya (they are the two fellas that broke Replenish in half a few years back), Mike Short, and Steve Sadin. A few things became apparent in short order: The deck could not possibly win without a Future Sight in play so a fourth one (duh) was added. At the time, the deck won by either continually Deep Analysis-ing your opponent until they could no longer draw a card, or by using Traumatize on them over and over and finishing them with the Deep Analysis. We did not like the Traumatize, and hated letting our opponent get all the cards off of Deep Analysis before the deathblow.
We eventually arrived on Predict. Predict was good to use early-absolutely insane with Future Sight in play-and allowed us to deck out opponents without letting them draw any extra cards that might give them a disenchant or a Counterspell. Plus, it was cool to kill your opponent with a Predict; you can name odd cards like Psychic Allergy and Camel. If you want to challenge yourself, you can try to never name the same card twice.
But I digress. The Obsessive Searches became Predicts. We knew that we wanted more Rampant Growth effects so we added Rampant Growth and replaced Dwell on the Past with Krosan Reclamation and added a couple of fetch lands. By now, the deck was starting to look something like this:
4 Careful Study
4 Mental Note
4 Predict
4 Rampant Growth
4 Far Wanderings
4 Early Harvest
4 Future Sight
2 Krosan Reclamation
3 Cunning Wish
2 Moment’s Peace
3 Deep Analysis
1 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
9 Forest
11 Island
With our twenty-five-card sideboard in tow, we were ready to begin testing in earnest and pillaged Don and Steve’s lockers for the necessary cards and built an actual copy of the deck – a major commitment in poker-deck-happy Neutral Ground. This was just prior to Pro Tour: Houston and a number of local pros were around testing for the Gateway/Masters.
Gerard Fabiano was locked in a grueling playtest session with the world’s most deliberate Magic player – Jon Sonne – when he heard us guffawing about our deck that killed with Predict. With several hours available to him before Jon entered his drawstep, Gerard asked us to explain how the deck works.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the deck that would eventually be come to known as Tight Sight and one of them is the idea that it takes a long time to play out a game. I don’t know how anyone arrived at that conclusion. The deck uses its blue cantrips to gain threshold while accelerating its mana with Rampant Growth and threshold enabled Far Wanderings. The turn after Future Sight hits the table – as early as turn 4 – the game takes off at a blistering pace as you”draw” so many extra cards that you mill away your entire deck. I have won the game as early as the fifth turn many times.
Since you keep using Far Wanderings, you end up with most of the land in your deck hitting the table. Once your deck is milled away, you set up an infinite loop with two Krosan Reclamations, an Early Harvest, and a Predict by shuffling them back into your deck and being able to play them off of the Future Sight. You use the Predict on your opponent, naming a card you know is not in their deck – drawing two cards could be fatal. Rinse and repeat adding the conditioning treatment of an Early Harvest whenever you are running low on mana.
Anyway… While Jon Sonne was still contemplating the ramifications of passing priority during his first main phase, we demonstrated the combo for Gerard a few dozen times. He liked the deck and asked if he could shanghai the copy we had just built. Despite the fervent protests of Jon and the rest of the CMU/TOGIT Mafia, Gerard decided to give the deck a shot a qualifying him for the Masters. He made some modifications to the deck and the end result can be found in the Gateway decklists and looked like this:
4 Careful Study
3 Cunning Wish
3 Deep Analysis
4 Early Harvest
4 Far Wanderings
4 Future Sight
2 Krosan Reclamation
4 Mental Note
3 Moment’s Peace
3 Predict
2 Quiet Speculation
2 Rampant Growth
1 Flooded Strand
9 Forest
11 Island
1 Windswept Heath
Sideboard:
2 Delusions of Mediocrity
3 Mana Short
1 Memory Lapse
1 Moment’s Peace
1 Naturalize
1 Opportunity
3 Ravenous Baloth
1 Ray of Revelation
2 Roar of the Wurm
During the Gateway, Gerard came within a land of winning game three of his match against Mark Zeigner. I don’t know whether or not he could have ridden the deck all the way to the $2,000 payday of the Masters but I am pretty confident that Tight Sight’s chances of tournament success ended when Gerard failed to draw his fourth land. I don’t think there is any conceivable way the deck can survive in the coming Regionals metagame.
It is pretty simple: The deck cannot win if Future Sight is countered or Disenchanted. With the looming threat of Astral Slide decks, almost every sideboard should have some resistance to enchantment based strategies which should splash onto Tight Sight’s chances.
Withered Wretch also presents an enormous challenge to the deck. While Reanimator decks have many ways to deal with a Wretch before putting an angry Visara within reach of a Doomed Necromancer, Tight Sight can only whimper in the presence of the Zombie Cleric.
It’s quite sad, actually, because the deck is enormous fun. Sayan has continued to tinker with the deck and replaced either the Careful Studies or the Mental Notes – I’m not sure which – with False Memories, which allows the deck to mill though its chaff even faster. Remember that False Memories says that the you remove cards from your graveyard”at end of turn” which means you can do it after your opponent’s end of turn effects and have the cards available in your graveyard until the end of your turn.
Hopefully, someone will prove me wrong, but I don’t think Tight Sight will be in anyone’s playtest gauntlet after Regionals. I’ll be back next week just after Jon Sonne’s second main phase to look at some of the decks from the Grudge Match finals at Grand Prix Boston. It will be the first significant Standard tournament to include Legions. If I don’t see you there, I can be reached at [email protected].