Let’s get the introduction out of the way.
It’s important to explain that I don’t write for everyone, but I would guess that just about anyone can find something in my articles that they can benefit from either digesting or refuting. I don’t write for the caliber of player who play the game as natural process, or those whose skill has grown to the point that they can merely sit down at the table and assess every situation with ease. Nor am I writing for the casual player. It’s for those of us in between.
I’ve been a semi-competitive, competent player since ’94, and while I’ve never won a Pro Tour, or even a States-level competition, I enjoy competing at the higher levels and challenging myself between seasons.
This article has two parts: an expansion of an aspect of Magic theory I’ve been working on for a long time, and a section for those of you who enjoy my decks.
I’d start with the theory, but you would probably just skip to the decklist, so let’s have fun with some post-Guildpact Standard.
Spells (40)
You’ve all seen this deck by now, but let’s go over it one last time.
If you have a Guildmage in play, when turn three rolls around you can cast Seething Song, adding five Red mana to your pool.
Use one Red mana to cast Lava Spike, splicing Desperate Ritual for two more Red mana.
Now, use the last two Red mana to cast the Desperate Ritual. This gives you enough to activate the Guildmage to copy the Lava Spike (which has a spliced Desperate Ritual attached too)
Let the copy resolve. Use the three Red mana from the spliced Desperate Ritual to copy again, and go crazy by targeting your opponent with the infinite Lava Spikes.
This happens about three times in every hundred on the play. On the draw, you have about a five percent chance.
I would like to take a moment to say that it is better than you probably think. The combo itself starts to get consistent on turn 4 or turn 5 — a little over fifteen percent here – but if that fails, you’ve got an incredibly solid back-up plan in the form of Hunted Dragon and Leyline of Singularity.
You want more, don’t you? I have more. Pages and pages of notes since the Guildmage was first spoiled. Alright, I’ll share.
Against Ghazi-Glare: 17 out of 20 games.
You are probably shaking your head, but take a moment to read the Ghazi-Glare decklists that float around the ‘net. They have limited ways of stopping you from winning at will aside, from a Pithing Needle on Izzet Guildmage (or an active Umezawa’s Jitte). With three maindeck ways of destroying the Needle and Jitte (and random artifacts in the Wildfire decks) you should not be able to lose. Oh yeah, and they should literally cringe if you start the game with a Leyline in play.
At this point, I need to address the fact that I don’t believe Standard will look the same at all post-Guildpact. Mono-Blue Control is dead, for the most part, and for all intents and purposes the same can be said of most of the Control decks that are currently running rampant over the environment. For that reason, I have been hesitant to play too many playtest games against decks like Greater Gifts (which pretty much autoloses to the black Leyline) or MUC. Granted, the results of the MUC match-up are not pretty, but I have a hard time being convinced that there will even be a MUC match-up post-Guildpact.
Against Mono-Blue Control (MUC): 8 out of 20 games.
Like I said, it isn’t pretty. Generally, you have one turn to combo out before they dominate you, so if you have the god-draw, you can steal a victory. Otherwise, you fall back on a burn strategy that is fairly limited. Assuming none of your burn spells were countered, you can deal twenty-eight damage (plus the Invoke) if you were to draw your whole deck.
I’m not going to say that the match-up is unwinnable, especially if your sideboard is heavier on both solid, large creatures and burn (which mine is right now). However, it is important to mention how difficult it really is to beat any sort of countermagic deck with this kind of combo.
Against Greater Gifts: 13 out of 20 games.
This should probably be higher. They have no real way of stopping your combo, but if they get lucky with a Putrefy, or other removal spell, and mulligan correctly into aggressive Yosei draws, you will be hard-pressed. We have a number of dead cards in this match-up, including the Leyline, which does little against a deck that thrives on playing legends anyway. But nevertheless, stay aggressive and try to keep the pressure on and you’ll be fine.
Against RDW or Boros: 11 out of 20 games.
Your Leyline is useful again, but they have an awful lot of burn to hit your Guildmage with, especially given the fact that he dies to all of it. Normally, I fall into the “Cast a Dragon on turn three and hope you scoop” mode, but sometimes you can get lucky and combo off.
Against Good Stuff decks like G/B/u: 5 out of 10 games.
It all depends how aggressively they attack your hand. Because we need so many cards to effectively complete our combo, Hypnotic Specters ruin our day. We don’t have a lot of blockers to deal with either Hyppie or Dimir Cutpurse, and therefore we don’t particularly want to see those cards. They will almost always have one on turn 2, which means we have to have Pyroclasm or Char or risk losing rather quickly.
Against the Good Stuff Post-Guildpact: 3 out of 10 games.
The builds of this vary wildly. Generally, post-sideboard, we’ll be fine, as Goblin Flectomancer is an effective blocker/attacker who also counters those annoying creature-kill spells.
Additional Notes:
The information about Desperate Song is actually a little dated, for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, I actually had another list for the deck, even as I sent this one in. With the opportunity to revise this before publication, I thought I needed to justify the deck a bit more. This list is much more consistent, and has better numbers overall against the field (you’ll see this list again in my next article).
Creatures (8)
Lands (15)
Spells (37)
Also, my apologies to Josh Edwards; a very similar build of this deck appeared under his column at Londes.com, literally as I was finishing editing my next article. I hopefully won’t steal any of his thunder, but since he seems to discount the deck as viable, I hope that my updated version of my earliest attempts at this deck will prove far more valuable. That being said, you shouldn’t underestimate this deck, it has the potential to win on turn 3, and will usually combine repeated burn with the Dragonauts to deliver the fatal blow by turn 5 or 6.
Once the more popular decks emerge and are exposed around the ‘net, we can revisit this simple, yet effective, combo build and revamp it with new considerations paid to the revamped metagame.
As yet another bonus section, for those of you who like new decks, here are two decks, chock full of post-Guildpact goodness.
Creatures (36)
- 4 Goblin Cohort
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Kird Ape
- 4 Burning-Tree Shaman
- 4 Dryad Sophisticate
- 4 Rumbling Slum
- 4 Scab-Clan Mauler
- 4 Tin Street Hooligan
- 4 Ulasht, the Hate Seed
Lands (12)
Spells (12)
Creatures (19)
- 4 Hypnotic Specter
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Elves of Deep Shadow
- 4 Ghost Council of Orzhova
- 3 Graven Dominator
Lands (18)
Spells (23)
“The Haunting” is probably the better of the two decks, but playing with thirty-six guys is just too much fun to ignore. It also has remarkable utility and staying power (although top-decking a Goblin Cohort isn’t a great feeling, using Killer Instinct once Blue is dead will facilitate maximum ass-kicking).
As with “good decks,” you usually look to a select few pros to provide elaborations or “supposed” new theories on the actual “theoretical” concepts surrounding the game. What I intend is not revolutionary, nor is it as related to gameplay and specifically Magic play as is most of Flores work. My last article explained a basic concept of the theory I have been developing, in explaining why I play Combo whenever possible; I addressed the issue of playing ability and emphasizing manipulation of the Limit of Skill.
To begin this more intensive description of my more expansive theory, I want to examine a simple illustration. The world of poker has grown considerably in the last few years, and fans are experiencing the kind of parity that most professional leagues could never offer. You can, and yes, you really can, and will, win tournaments against hardened professionals. By contrast, in a professional sport like golf, you will never beat the worst player on the PGA tour. You have no chance (unless you are the second worst or better).
The difference lies in the inherent randomness of the games. Where poker is, broken down into the most basic level, approximately sixty percent luck and forty percent skill*, golf has been (over the years of televised tournaments) more or less proven to be over ninety-eight percent skill and less than two percent luck.
I’m assuming you see where I am going with this. The average Magic player is participating in a game that is roughly sixty percent skill and forty percent luck. It’s a good time to talk about luck, and what I mean when I say it. Luck is the physical manifestation of statistically random events in ways that are either extraordinarily beneficial, or extraordinarily detrimental. There is no way to actually affect one’s “luck.” Rather, by attempting to reduce the impact of “luck” on the game, we are attempting to minimize the ways in which luck can affect our wins and losses. To use the unfortunate poker metaphor, our goal is to play in such a way that we net positive EV over a course of seven Swiss rounds or a Pro Tour Qualifier season. Pros do this, and we want to do this.
The problem lies in that the way the pros do it cannot be replicated by everyone. In poker, again, Chris Ferguson has a genius intellect that allows him to calculate EV in such a way as to utilize hundredths of percents to determine particular plays. For us, as was introduced in my other article, we actually need to decrease skill and increase randomness.
Hence, Why I Don’t Play Control.
Control decks are inherently designed to limit the randomness of the game. Control decks draw lots of cards, increasing their options on any particular play, and they use redundant cards (multiple draw spells, multiple counterspells, multiple board control mechanisms) to ensure that over the long run, the player with the most skill will succeed the most — he’ll win more games than random Joe PTQ.
We can see and utilize these kinds of concepts, but if we truly want to build a quantifiable advantage, we would do well to look elsewhere than a traditional Control deck. Which leads us to Aggro and Combo. I have never been a proficient Aggro player, as I struggle with its inherent limits. While you have, with a traditional Aggro deck, reduced the game to Who’s the Beatdown? Which, along with utilizing a more or less simplified plan, combines to simplify the game itself.
So, all of this metagame (in the actual sense of thinking about the game) theoretical bull-spit is great. How do we actually apply it? It’s not as easy as I would like, but the framework has been successful for me in recent months, so I will share it anyway.
Essentially, you apply the basic rules for increasing randomness in Magic. For example, expanding your decks versatility is usually simple. At the most simple level, you substitute Roc of Kher Ridges for Hill Giant. You present your opponent with at least three questions instead of one:
Can you deal with a 3/3 for four?
Can you deal with a flying creature?
Can you deal with a flying 3/3 for four?
Although pundits might argue that synthetically you are still asking only one real question… can you deal with a flying 3/3 for four? The fact is that while the pros may be asking each other the simplest question, you are not doing the same thing.
Obviously, this kind of theory is most applicable to deckbuilding. We can evaluate cards for inclusion based on their abilities to increase randomness. A card like Hypnotic Specter is “good,” because it poses so many questions and has additional lines of text not printed on the card. For example, the full text of a Hyppie is probably something like this:
“Target player chooses and discards a counterspell, or discards a creature removal spell, or discards a utility direct damage spell. If that player does not, put a 2/2 creature with flying into play. Whenever that creature damages a player, that player discards a card at random from his or her hand, and loses the game.”
This goes back to the Aggro segment above. Aggressive, creature-based decks are frequently those that create the most random games for an opposing Control player. Control decks are at a disadvantage in a random state, because they operate under principles of card advantage that the Aggro player ignores in favor of the Philosophy of Fire.
For a Control player, the game is about “burying your opponent under card advantage”. This operates under the principle that Magic is a resource management game where “cards” are the most important resource**. After so many years, it has become clear that this is most likely the case. For those of you interested in what I am trying to communicate, it is only necessary to understand that we are attempting to reduce the opponent’s card advantage. Ergo, for us, discard cards are superior to card drawing. While we are not necessarily incapable of using the options that extra cards give us, we are definitely fully capable of capitalizing on our opponents having less cards and less options.
Because I am in danger of ranting for far too long on this subject, let me summarize it here.
1. This theory works for those of us who are, if we are honest, not the greatest players in the world, but we are interested in competing with those players who are.
2. We attempt to create more randomness in our games and game states, in order to lessen the impact of ability and test the Limit of Skill.
3. We use creatures and discard, rather than counterspells and card drawing effects.
The next time I write, I will elaborate on incorporating this theory into Combo decks and Aggro decks, and illustrate how we can use these techniques to be more effective in Pro Tour Qualifiers and other highly competitive settings.
Thanks for joining me on my return journey. Post-Guildpact Standard is looking incredibly exciting, and Ravnica-Guildpact Sealed is intriguing as well, so I will try and write a lot more in the next few weeks.
As always, send your questions and comments to [email protected].
A Note on Friggorid
This is a somewhat random aside. I just have to point out that Friggorid is neither as original nor as revolutionary as people seem to believe. By way of evidence, this is a deck that I built and played (and posted on the Brainburst forums) way back when Torment was first released (the name found its origins in the fact that there was another deck at the time which employed Tolarian Winds known as Drano):
Liquid Plumr
4 Nantuko Shade
4 Psychatog
4 Mesmeric Fiend
4 Ichorid
3 Braids, Cabal Minion
1 Possessed Aven
4 Buried Alive
4 Tolarian Winds
4 Careful Study
4 Fact or Fiction
1 Zombie Infestation
4 Underground River
1 Tainted Isle
3 Salt Marsh
9 Swamp
4 Island
2 Cephalid Coliseum
There are several other decks like this one that you can still find if you search the ‘net. I’m do not intend to discredit the deck. Merely, I am trying, and struggling completely in vain for some time now, to point out that these “format-defining” decks that pros embrace are frequently the matter of a subconscious general consensus. Meaning, mainly, that if the pro community decides it likes something, you will see considerably more of those decks than anything else.
For a number of other examples… when I wrote about Orchard-Alarm combo in Standard, it was ignored. When I ported it over to Extended, nobody cared. When Ped Bun Top 8ed with it during the same season (a decklist that differed from mine by a mere five cards), all of a sudden it became a real contender for honors as one of the better Tier One decks (according to Mike Flores‘ column on MagictheGathering.com). When I wrote about Elvish Succession combo a number of years ago, it got a decent response. When Rob Dougherty wrote about it on the same website, it was heralded as one of the best unknown decks in that particular Standard season.
My point for you, then, is that your pet creation may in fact be the best deck in the format, but no one will ever find out about it because you haven’t won a Pro Tour, or made yourself enough of a name otherwise in the Pro community. In the end, Rizzo’s deck was tested over and over again by several big-name pros, and the final result was a fantastic deck. Had someone more obscure been the one to publish about the exact same deck, you probably would never have seen it at Worlds or a Grand Prix.
This is quite a lot of text to waste on a mere footnote, but it illustrates a problem I’ve noticed since Dempsey and Adrian and a number of other successful players keep producing fantastic decks, but they are sometimes ignored because the elite group of American Magicians doesn’t embrace them. (Cabal Rogue’s G/R deck from Affinity/Tooth and Nail Champs comes to mind). This cliquey-ness is something I see as being largely responsible for the so-called decline of American Magic, especially in comparison to the considerably less fragmented (apparently) Japanese community.
I don’t know what we can do about that, or if it is even a real problem. It’s just frustrating that a deck like Friggorid can be hailed as the second coming, when in fact it is merely a jumble of cards with inherent synergies that happened to have enough potential to be noticed.
-Ben
…
*Don’t worry, I know you don’t believe this, especially since you are probably playing poker on some online site as you read this article. Because I know you don’t believe this, I offer the following evidence: in the year 2005, using CardPlayer’s tournament archives, amateurs or relatively inexperienced tournament players won or made the final table in 100% of events in the WSOP or WPT, and won events approximately two-thirds of the time — the cap on this pot is 21 year old Nick Schulman winning Foxwoods. I will concede that a professional poker player, with fully proficient skills in psychology, mathematics, and sociology will probably be playing the game with 54-60% skill, and 40-56% luck. However, you do not have the kind of skills I’m talking about — these go way beyond nunchaku skills — and therefore the game consists of far more luck and much less skill for you.
**This actually helps explain why land destruction is almost never good. The land destruction player is operating based on the principle that lands are the most important resource in Magic, which is certainly not the case.