I suppose I can’t put it off any longer. I haven’t played any Magic for the last few weeks other than Block Constructed. So unless StarCityGames.com is in the market for beeble related fan-fiction (they weren’t the last time I asked) I guess I’ll have to talk about the smallest of the Constructed formats.
Or I could talk about how I’d like to horrifically gut and dice every reality TV contestant that’s ever been. Or maybe just nuke the Netherlands for inflicting this neural pollution on the planet. I know my country has a highly sordid past when it comes to the whole Spice Girls atrocity, but surely the Dutch should be prosecuted for violating the anti-memeological weapons treaty.
Yes, I was at home for the Easter break. Without net access…
I think about the only bearable thing on British TV at the moment is Doctor Who, and that’s even with the odd Russell T. Davies penned clunker.
It wasn’t all bad, though. I told my brother’s girlfriend’s seven-year-old daughter that I’d caught and eaten the Easter Bunny. That was fun.
What…?
I’m evil. Have we not established this already?
Now some secret tech:
Uh… Craig, how do you actually kill someone?
Kill someone? What’s the point in that? I just want to find out what’s in their deck. My PrintScreen button has been working overtime for the last month.
Yeah, but we should at least, you know, try and win a game.
Okay okay:
Happy now?
No? Well, how about this:
Creatures (16)
Lands (22)
Spells (22)
Sideboard
This was one of the first decks I built for Block. I even splashed out extra to pick up the Magi and Harmonize during the post-Planar Chaos release period on Magic Online before cards actually settle to their real prices. I didn’t do too badly. The Harmonizes I picked up for two tickets each seem to have held that value (or at least were when I last checked a week ago), although I suspect Magus of the Library will end up being worth a little less than the two tickets each I paid for them.
I won’t bullsh** you. When I sit down to play my first round at Yokohama, it’s highly unlikely that my deck will contain all – or indeed any – of these cards. With a Pro Tour just around the corner it doesn’t make sense to put myself at a sizeable disadvantage before I even play a game. My shocking inconsistency does a good enough job of that anyway. While receiving plaudits for designing a format-defining deck is great, I’d rather reap the benefits of that deck first if you don’t mind. Both Richard Feldman and Zac Hill can attest to that after the last Extended season.
That doesn’t mean this is a bad deck. I had a lot of fun trying it out on MTGO, and I’m sure other people will have fun playing it. It’s also interesting to look at as an early stage in deck development.
I like building decks for Block Constructed, and one of the first things I look for is good synergy. In this case the card I focused on was Magus of the Library. The Magus is an interesting card because his abilities are at odds with each other. On the one hand he’s the standard two mana “elf” that is pretty much de rigeur for most Block formats (we were spoilt last year with both Elves of Deep Shadow and Birds of Paradise for Ravnica block). The point of mana accelerators is to… well, accelerate out threats. However, this is completely at odds with his other ability, in that the Magus is greedy and wants you to hoard cards in hand so that you hit the magical seven and start drawing even more.
On the face of it, Stormbind is an odd choice to pair up with Magus of the Library. One wants to keep the hand nice and full, while the other wants to throw all the cards away as Shocks.
If you play the game right, it is perfectly possible to marry both of these divergent themes and keep that Stormbind nicely fuelled.
The beginning game will largely depend on which cards you draw and whether you are on the play or draw. If you have the Magus and can stay at seven cards, either because you were on the draw or also have a Harmonize, then you try to take advantage of your undercosted Jayemdae Tome for as long as possible.
The other plan is the good old-fashioned “bust out a turn 4 Spectral Force and Hulk Smash!” Spectral Force is an absolute monster for his mana cost, and will batter an opponent to pieces in very short order, especially if he’s joined by his partner in crime, Scryb Ranger.
And because we like synergy in our decks, a careful look will realise just how much of an all-star Scryb Ranger is in this deck. Early on you shouldn’t be worried about playing cards from your hand. Both Scryb Ranger and Harmonize can refill the hand up to seven for the mid to late game. And also why draw an extra card with the Magus when you can draw two a turn instead?
Of course you won’t always hold the ideal state of active Magus and seven cards in hand, but in a pinch Scryb Ranger can quite happily rip up Forests to fuel Stormbind.
He also blocks Blue monsters forever, in case the other abilities aren’t enough.
The important thing with the deck is to recognise that you can go back to seven cards. I had a few games where the Magus looked fairly innocuous when I was stuck at two cards in hand, but within a couple of turns and a Harmonize later I was back at seven and drawing like a demon.
The deck only really needs five or six land in play. After that point, mana producers should be held in hand to either get back to the magic seven, or to be used as Stormbind fuel.
Unfortunately it’s not all plain sailing though. It’s a nice deck, but if it was really PT-winning calibre you wouldn’t be hearing about it now, but a week later. Although who knows, you still might. Metagames have a habit of moving in mysterious ways.
Back when I was trying this out online, it seemed like every second deck I ran into was Scryb and Force. It is actually physically possible to kill a Spectral Force with Stormbind (as in I’ve done it), but is not recommended if you have any long term plans of, you know, actually winning the game (and no, I didn’t win that game). The Scryb and Force decks are at a massive advantage here in that they actually have a possible eight Spectral Force to your four because of Shapeshifters.
Not good odds…
I did try to work Blue into the deck for Vesuvan Shapeshifters and Cloudskates, but it felt awkward and played like a brick.
Still, at one point I was convinced that every Green deck should begin with this skeleton:
4 Magus of the Library
4 Wall of Roots
4 Harmonize
4 Scryb Ranger
4 Spectral Force
I liked the idea of using the card drawing, as well as the late game superfluous mana-acceleration / fixing that has clogged up every green deck since the beginning of time, to fuel Stormbind, but the Sudden Shocks and Dead / Gones are a bit… well… underpowered.
The biggest concern I had with the deck was that it felt a little too much like faffing about.
I’ve built decks like this before and to begin with they seem fine. They beat the other decks around them, and beat them with style, mainly because it’s the start of a season and people haven’t had a chance to tune them properly. Unfortunately as the season progresses the other decks get better, and the cool-stuff decks start to crack under the strain.
In this case the weak point is the actual Magus himself. Against a well-tuned deck you rarely get the breathing space to get up to seven cards, as you have to play out cards to counter an opponent’s threats. In this situation, the Magus is a bad “elf” that only taps for colorless and is awkward to cast.
Even if you get a full grip, the Magus himself is actually quite fragile. I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying Serrated Arrows will probably occupy a spot in most deck’s sideboards and the Magus rolls over to a single “Thunk!”
It’s not all gloom and doom though. I stopped playing the deck after too many thrashings dished out by blue-green decks, but as Craig S has observed in one of his online roundups, the initially popular Scryb and Force combo has become something of an endangered species in recent weeks. Currently the format looks like it’s caught in a vice between Teferi Control and White Weenie. Whether this will be the story of the Pro Tour is too early to call in my opinion.
While Magus of the Library is probably too awkward for a role in the starting line-up, he may find a role from the bench against the control decks. Sean McKeown has already talked about that plan in his Blue/Green control deck here, and while I haven’t tried out the deck the theory seems sound.
I regard this listing as an initial experiment that didn’t pan out. As it stands the deck is cool and fun to play, but probably not tier one material without some improvements. I do have some ideas on what those improvements might be, but I’m not at liberty to divulge them at this moment in time. Next week or maybe the week after I’ll give the full low down on all the testing I did for Yokohama.
Until then, I feel it’s time for a little rant and I think I’m going to have ditch my happy-slappy, “everything smells of roses in the state of Denmark” image and enrol in the Jeroen Remie school of “what the hell is R&D smokin’?”
Happy? Didn’t you say Coldsnap was a festering corpse you’d like to kick until the eyes popped out of its sockets?
Well, yeah. But that was only the collect-em-up theme for draft. How they handled the snow mechanic was fantastic and…
Haven’t you also been bashing Two-Headed Giant fairly hard recently?
Well that was mainly because of Amsterdam. The format just has a few teething problems and…
So you’re really just another one of those cold-hearted pros (correction – alleged pro) that whines about everything, and completely undeserving of being included in Eli Kaplan list of Top Ten Magic Salespersons.
Look! Wizards R&D is a highly talented bunch of people, but they’re still human and prone to the odd screw up. My gut feeling is that they might have dropped the ball on this guy:
We’ve already seen him ad nauseam in such Standard delights as Dralnu, and I don’t think I’m giving much away by saying he’ll probably have a big impact on the format in Yokohama. Like Skullclamp, he might not post big numbers in the final Top 8, but you can bet the decks that make it to Sunday will have devoted an unhealthy amount of energy into beating him.
But Craig, Skullclamp was a ridiculously busted card. You can’t honestly be putting little Teferi in the same category.
No, he’s not Skullclamp. He probably isn’t Lin Sivvi, or Cursed Scroll, but I don’t think he’s far off.
The thing I find most irritating about the card is that it completely invalidates an entire mechanic… as an afterthought. I don’t object to hosers for mechanics. If only we’d seen Kataki a little earlier I might have actually played more Magic that year, but Teferi isn’t a narrow-use hoser. He’s a good card in his own right that also just happens to make a bunch of other cards not work. At all.
“Teferi is a bad-ass planeswalker so he needs a bad-ass card.”
“Let’s give him Flash, so he can be played as an instant.”
“Better, why don’t we make it so he gives all of your creatures Flash?”
“Wow, but we need him to be more bad-ass.”
“I know, I know. Why don’t we make it so that he forces your opponent to play all of their spells as sorceries?”
“Wow, awesome. That really ties in with him being the master of time and all that.”
Ah, but suspend cards unsuspend at the beginning of a player’s upkeep. You can’t play sorceries in your upkeep so, whoops, you can’t play the card at all. You can’t even play the cards even if they would unsuspend during your main phase (like a Gargadon, for example) because sorceries can only be played when the stack is empty, and you always have that “remove the last counter, you must play this spell if able” trigger blocking the base of the stack.
Except it isn’t blooming possible. Not when you’ve got the Blue “bad-ass” poster-boy staring at you from the other side of the table.
Did no-one spot this?
I ask because I remember reading that one of the most popular cards of all time, Meddling Mage, didn’t come back as a Purple because he was too good against the new suspend mechanic. Well, Teferi is like a Meddling Mage set to every suspend card ever printed. (He doesn’t like madness much either.)
Like I said, I think someone dropped the ball here.
What do I know anyway, most of you are shaking your head and saying, “we built up U/B Teferi and smashed it to pieces.”
Sure, you took a stock listing no one bothered to tune and played some matches against someone who didn’t really want to play the deck anyway. Everyone makes that mistake.
You’ll fly off to Yokohama happy in the knowledge you’ve got game against the deck everyone thinks is the best in the format.
But, are you really sure you beat it…?
Still sure you beat it…?
Really sure…?
It’s round one, you’re sitting opposite Kenji and he’s just made Island, then Dreadship Reef.
Now I’ll ask you again.
Are you really sure you beat it…?
Thanks for reading,
Prof