From The Lab — The Perils of Fancy Deck Syndrome

First off I’d like to thank all the people who responded in the forums and emailed me directly with deck lists for Grand Prix: Columbus. Last week’s article really didn’t come out as I intended (and kept our long-suffering editor up until 2am while I tried to hammer it into some kind of sensible shape. Which also means I probably should apologise to people in the 8 man who had the misfortune of being on the receiving end of a very angry Stevenson Gruul deck while he was waiting) and I was a little worried I might get lynched.

As you can see from here, my insane little gamble was only partially successful.

Let’s recap my choices as I saw them before the event.

GP: Strasbourg.
Close, but expensive to travel to.
Static metagame favoring control decks I don’t like.
1000+ players, meaning even with 3 byes I’d need to 4-2 Day 1 and then 3-3 Day 2 (or better) to make money and pro points.

GP: Columbus
Much further, and more expensive to travel to.
Simple metagame dominated by one broken combo deck.
400-500 players at most, meaning with 3 byes I’d only need to 3-2 Day 1 and then be guaranteed money and pro points whatever the result on Day 2 (as cut is to top 64).

After booking a flight and doing some testing with the Manchester Legacy group, option two is modified to:

GP: Columbus
Much further, and more expensive to travel to.
A complex metagame warped around multiple variations of a broken combo, with many decks designed to prey upon it.
400-500 players at most, meaning with 3 byes I’d only need to 3-2 Day 1 and then be guaranteed money and pro points whatever the result on Day 2 (as cut is to top 64).

Then I arrived.

Holy sh**, where did all these people come from?

In reality, the Columbus option became:

GP: Columbus
Much further, and more expensive to travel to.
An open metagame with Flash and anti-Flash dominant, but with a lot of players playing pre-Flash archetypes as well.
900 players, meaning with 3 byes I’d need a 3-2-1 record at least to make Day 2, and then need the same record again to make money.

The gamble was only partially successful in that although I made Day 2 (mainly because 3 byes is just BAH-roken) there were so many competitors I finished outside the Top 64 and failed to pick up both money and pro points.

“Partially successful” is actually another way of saying “near-total failure,” in case you’re not aware.

Oh well. Sometimes you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Personally I prefer to lace them with strychnine. That really deals with the brats. Hyuk-hyuk.

Despite failing to make up any of the £500 cost or more in getting there, Grand Prix: Columbus was still a lot of fun. It was the first time I’ve ever attended a U.S. Grand Prix and it was great to finally meet people I wouldn’t normally get a chance to see. I got to drop in on the StarCityGames trade stand, meet the legendary Ferrett, get filmed by Evan “The Magic Show” Erwin, and talk tech with Richard Feldman. Thanks to everyone who came up to chat for making me feel so welcome. I hope to…

*CRUNCH!*

Lab notes 25/05/07.
This clone is defective. Shows an overly positive world outlook. Have to presume subliminal programming failed and that the subject did not carry out the infection of the corn belt with modified genetic material.

Recommend termination.

Right, before you run off, this isn’t going to be 9999th article on Flash or the fallout from GP: Columbus. The Legacy metagame as of Columbus is a single snapshot in time. Now we have another seismic shift in the addition of Future Sight (and the addition of the Green and Blue pacts to turbo-charge Flash), and in all likelihood the format is going to go through another seismic shift on June 1st with the next round of alterations to the banned list. Talking specifics about a metagame that doesn’t exist anymore is not exactly productive.

Instead, I’m going to talk about a little problem I seem to be suffering from in Constructed at the moment. I appear to have contracted Fancy Deck Syndrome. This perfidious affliction seduces the victim into playing overly clever decks that don’t stand up under rigorous tournament conditions.

You may hear this a lot during the course of this article:

ALWAYS PLAY THE BEST DECK, DAMNIT!

Just to make sure, I’ll paint the words on the wall and then head-butt the wall repeatedly until the words percolate into the shrivelled black piece of gristle that is my brain.

ALWAYS PLAY THE BEST DECK, DAMNIT!

There are some interesting parallels that can be drawn between PT: Yokohama and GP: Columbus. Before both tournaments there was a massive amount of hype on one particular archetype, and as a result there were excessive levels of hate for that archetype.

I fell prey to it in Columbus. All available information pointed to an optimal version of Flash-Hulk as being the best deck in the field. Zac Hill made a comment that Flash-Hulk, perversely, might have been good for the format as it whipped up additional interest and also gave people who don’t normally play Legacy a busted deck they could throw together fairly easily and kid themselves they had a shot.

Sound familiar?

It got me there.

While I don’t think I’ve actually played Legacy as it exists in its current incarnation, I used to play Vintage back in the day (when it was Type 1), and I also have a lot of experience with Necro-Trix (a.k.a. the most broken Extended deck ever). Having a lack of knowledge about the format is of less relevance when it’s just got nuked. When you’re playing a deck that kills around turn 2 or 3, your opponent’s deck is divided into cards I need to Duress / Force of Will / bounce, and everything else (which I don’t care about).

Yet somewhere along the way, my deck morphed into a ghastly Fish hybrid with the Flash combo in the board!

How on earth did I end up in such a mess?

This is where Fancy Deck Syndrome comes in.

In poker you might be familiar with Fancy Play Syndrome. Instead of making the obvious correct play, a player tries an unnecessarily tricksy manoeuvre in order to try and obtain more value from the pot. A lot of the time it backfires, and the player ends up losing money. Anyone who’s ever lost a game by playing round a trick that wasn’t there knows the same thing can happen in Magic.

You can equally apply Fancy Deck Syndrome to deck construction.

For reference, here is the deck I played at Columbus:

As I said in my blog, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Every man and their dog is going to play Flash, so I may as well be Fish to beat it game 1 and morph into Flash after boarding to beat everything else.

A few people told me how much they loved the deck after seeing me completely bushwhack Cody Mannion in round 14 with the Flash combo after losing game 1. Unfortunately what they failed to notice was that I was playing on the bottom-most table in the tournament with no chance of making money even if I won out.

That’s the thing with fancy decks. They always seem like a really good idea and when you win them it’s like, wow dude, how cool is that!

People remember the cool decks, but don’t always remember the records.

While people were talking about Dragonstorm and the Egg decks at last year’s World Championships, it was boring Boros and plain old Goblins that ran off with 6-0 records in the Swiss.

But back to Columbus.

In round 13 I’m playing Antonino de Rosa. I’m running my Fish-Flash hybrid and de Rosa is running the Bigger Fish deck designed to beat both Flash and eat all the other Fish decks gunning for it. I’ve just been sodomized for two rounds in a row by Goblins, and the little Red men have also just dished out a beating to the former U.S. champ. Looking around there are all kinds of decks around us: Goblins, Flash, Landstill, Fish, Threshold.

“The metagame is far too open for our decks,” I said.

“It always happens,” de Rosa replied. “People just play what they want.”

Remember this quote. You should paint it proud and head-butt the wall until the words are indelibly beaten into your sodden grey matter.

PEOPLE JUST PLAY WHAT THEY WANT.

After losing to de Rosa I get paired against Mannion’s Faerie Stompy deck (Wow, Sea Drakes are big. Hadn’t seen them before). On the table next to me, an Iggy Pop player is going off against what looks like some form of mono-White control deck with Martyr of Sands and True Believer.

PEOPLE JUST PLAY WHAT THEY WANT.

Remember those words, because now the rule comes back:

ALWAYS PLAY THE BEST DECK, DAMNIT!

It always seems so tempting, and you see it all the time.

“Everyone is going to play deck X, so I’ll play deck Y because it beats deck Y.”

Ah, but remember:

PEOPLE JUST PLAY WHAT THEY WANT.

Best decks are best decks for a reason. They are the "best" deck because they beat most of the decks in the field. There are decks that beat them (or just think they beat them – and that’s a much worse place to be), but these decks don’t have as good a record against the rest of the field.

Just because there is a "best" deck it doesn’t necessarily mean everyone will be playing it. Sure, you might get good pairings and spend most of the tournament beating up the deck you decided to target, but you could just as easily meet it only twice and then have to play the rest against "normal" decks.

Hate-drafting, especially when you deny yourself a decent pick, is usually regarded as a fairly common noobie mistake. Wasting a pick to deny a card to someone you might never actually get to play against is not the most optimal of strategies.

Now let’s look at playing the hate card in Constructed. As widely hyped as Flash was, it only made up around 35% of the field of GP: Columbus. Does playing the deck that slaughters Flash but loses to everything else seem quite so tempting if you only get to play against two Flash decks in six rounds?

Didn’t think so.

So yeah, I was an idiot.

ALWAYS PLAY THE BEST DECK, DAMNIT!

Especially when it’s not always that difficult to modify the best deck to fight back against the hate. That’s the other thing to remember – the target isn’t necessarily going to remain stationary.

Look at the Top 8 Flash decks from Columbus:

Billy Moreno is a Constructed genius. I got as far as Dark Confidant and vaguely thought about Sensei’s Divining Top and possibly even Counterbalance, and then rejected it without testing as it obviously must be too slow for Legacy. We already know Top is already nuts with sac lands… throw in Dark Confidant and Counterbalance and you have two combos that complement each other. If the hate gets too much then the Flash combo can always be shifted to the board and replaced with Quirion Dryad and Bob beats with Counterbalance for maximum disruption.

We already know Gadiel is a seriously smart kid, and his maindeck Peek and Cabal Therapy are really nice metagame additions. Peek cycles for a card, and either gives you information as to whether the way is clear or targets for Cabal Therapy. He also has the ability to duck excessive levels of hate and simply smash face with Negators and Dryads.

Ryan Trepanier was like a kid in a daze for most of Day 2. As he kept racking up the wins from an X-2 record, he kept coming up to tell me how he was doing and it was nice to see that level of excitement. To be honest, I initially placed him in the role of the lucky kid and expected to see a bad listing crammed with Mystical and Worldly Tutors. When there’s a broken combo deck you can always guarantee they’ll be someone who sails through with the most stone-age version possible.

Except that Trepanier had correctly worked out you can’t run a strategy of successfully fighting against the Fish decks when your search puts cards on top of your library rather than in your hand. Their card advantage just buries you.

After all the hate, the end result of the tournament was that the best deck triumphed, beating the former best deck in Legacy in the final.

That happens a lot, you know. Just ask Oysp from Venice, or Canali from Columbus, or even Mihara from last year’s World Championship.

Here’s some more words. I recommend engraving them into a cricket (okay, okay, baseball) bat and repeatedly hitting yourself over the head with them.

OFTEN THE BEST DECK JUST WINS.

I played Dragonstorm at Worlds. I didn’t want to because of the normal stupid worries about hate… people having better versions and other feebleness. Rich Hagon finally talked me into playing it. I met one outright hate deck and lost, and four other decks I beat to a pulp (and another deck I think I probably should have beaten had I played correctly). That was a good call.

PT: Yokohama was odd. In this case the deck hyped up before the event was the 4x Premier Event dominating White Weenie deck. I think this is actually a bit of an aberration. I suspect the White deck did so well early on because it often takes a while to get the build right for the control decks. In this case it wasn’t so much the hate as the White deck only being the pretender to the throne of "best" deck. The real power was hiding behind the throne in the form of Blue/Black Teferi control.

Our team didn’t even look at Blue/Black Teferi decks, reasoning that everyone else would be expecting them.

Guess what? It won.

*SMACK!*

OFTEN THE BEST DECK JUST WINS.

*SMACK!*

OFTEN THE BEST DECK JUST WINS.

*SMACK!*

Tweet-tweet.

…

…

…

I am the apocalypse come to ignite the world and drag all the souls to the fiery depths of hell.

Ooh, excuse me, don’t know what quite came over me there.

The deck I actually played at Yokohama was a Stuart Wright concoction that turned out to be too clever-clever for its own good. It didn’t help either that I seemed to think it was a control deck and randomly threw in cards like Draining Whelk and Brine Elemental. That was a bad call.

In Columbus I built a clever-clever deck that… you guessed it: That was a bad call.

While I was being severely molested by Goblins I could just picture Dan Paskins shaking his head at home. Fish…? Fish…?

Fancy Deck Syndrome is a real problem that can seriously damage your tournament chances. Symptoms include trying to pack too many cool cards in the same deck and trying to hate out the best deck instead of just playing it.

Fortunately, there is a cure.

The next time you feel yourself wavering, just break out the basic Mountains and point burn spells at people’s faces. After being beaten senseless at more FNMs than I can remember, I took this to the last Block Constructed FNM and got the warm feeling of attacking for two (or rather 9!) and burning people out to a 5-0 record.

Basically, I’m a monkey and listed 64 cards when I included it in the Red article two weeks ago. This is the fixed list, although it could still do with improvements.

Keldon Megaliths are really really good. The jury’s still out on Gathan Raiders, while Ghostfire didn’t feel too exciting. Epochrasite felt very useful in the mirror after boarding.

Updates I’d make would be to up the Gargadon count to four. It’s absolutely essential in the mirror, and the risk of drawing multiples is worth the extra chance of at least seeing one.

I’ll probably return to this later after playing with it some more.

Ah, Red spells.

Actually, the reason that people tend to play just what they want is that often you stand a better chance with a deck you’re familiar with than switching to a new deck that might have a few percentage points advantage. Familiarity is invariably worth more than a few percentage points, but be aware that it’s not worth more than a lot of percentage points.

Currently, Standard has a best combo deck (Dragonstorm), best control deck (Dralnu), and best aggro deck (Gruul). My advice to anyone playing forthcoming Regionals is to pick whichever one of those best suits your style and playtesting the crap out of it.

If you feel yourself coming down with FDS, and feel strange urges to try and beat decks out rather than play them, then carve these words into a concrete block and head-butt it repeatedly.

PEOPLE JUST PLAY WHAT THEY WANT.

And

OFTEN THE BEST DECK JUST WINS.

So,

ALWAYS PLAY THE BEST DECK, DAMNIT!

Until next…

Er, weren’t you supposed to be talking about Future Sight Blue and Green this week?

Well, you know I said I was going to throw them in a pit and let them fight it out? Well… er… they’re still at it. It’s a bit violent actually, and I’m… er… scared to go in and break it up.

Last I saw, Jamie Wakefield and Talen Lee were beating Devin Low around the face with a Quagnoth and shouting things like “Trample!” and “Should be 5/5!”

It’s not pretty, I tell you.

Ooof.

I’ll just wait until everybody’s killed each other and pick over the corpses next week. (When I might actually have built and tested some decks).

Until next time.

ALWAYS PLAY THE BEST DECK, DAMNIT! MOUNTAINS!

Prof