From The Lab – Time Spiral, One Month On

Righty-ho, what shall I talk about this week?

Last weekend we had Grand Prix: Massachusetts. I didn’t attend as it’s a long way from sleepy England and we all know how terrible / clueless / cursed / insert-as-appropriate I am at Limited formats. For all of its teething troubles, 2HG seems to have done a good job at dragging the dinosaurs out of retirement. One of them even won the whole thing.

I remember seeing Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz’s face on the cover of very old European Sideboard magazines back when the Grand Prix circuit was taking off. Before the super-team of Antarctica (with Finkel and his brother Dan) Steve was one of the first players, maybe even the first – BDM, Master of all things Pro Tour Historicalhickey, I summon thee! – to win two Grand Prix tournaments. Back then having repeat winners was good for the game as it suggested that there was indeed some skill involved rather than just being lucky.

Then some German player came along and battered the rest of the world into submission…

It’s also interesting to see that the U.S. fought off some strong European and Japanese teams for an all-American final table. I was also interested that those European and Japanese actually coughed up money to travel considering the initial perceptions of the 2HG format were a little negative. Those Pro Points be a powerful draw. And the format is fun, if a little anarchic at the moment.

My next foray on the Grand Prix circuit won’t be until Stockholm in early May, where I hope the Time Spiral format will finally show me a little loving with the addition of Future Sight.

Before then we have PT: Yokohama and the puzzle that is Time Spiral Block Constructed. As pretty much all I’ve done Magic-related over the last few weeks is run various decks into 8-mans on MTGO I thought I’d share some of my…

*WHACK*

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

.

.

.

.

Ouch. That. Hurt.

What’s that sticky sensation by my right hand? It feels like…

Blood

Ohmigod! It’s blood. Am I bleeding? Am I dying? What happened? I don’t feel any pain…

Jesus!

Some sick f*** has chopped the head off a Rottweiler and left it on my desk! What kind of…

Wait, there’s a message on my machine.

Dear Craig,

While we were thrilled by your random luck-sackery in Honolulu and admire your witty ramblings every Friday on SCG, if you reveal any TSP Block tech we will take off the top of your skull with a blunt hacksaw and scoop out your brains with a rusty spoon.

Yours sincerely,

Misetings.

Yikes, and there was me thinking Sti and Jecht Murray only signed them up for the light relief.

Guys, seriously, don’t you think hacking off the head of a dog is a little extreme?

Oh wait. I remember now. That was me.

Damn thing kept me up all last night with its barking.

I hate dogs.

So anyway, I can’t talk about block just yet for obvious reasons. I have played a lot though, so you can expect to see my thoughts in a couple of weeks including real decks that actually stand a chance of winning an MTGO 8-man (or at least making the final).

Quite a few weeks back I went through most of Planar Chaos in an attempt to identify the cards that were of interest and what decks might appear in the new Standard. Now it’s a month later, Planar Chaos has been incorporated into the Standard format and we’ve even had a major tournament, GP: Kyoto, to give us some data on how the metagame has changed.

So what did I get right (erm, there must be something), where did I go wrong (is the list really that long?), and more importantly where does Standard go from here?

But first a deck:

I was going to write a full article on this, but someone already beat me to it here. Dave Meddish, you have been officially added to my list.

My original intention was to build up a number of new decks with Planar Chaos and give them a twirl, so to speak. In the end university work and testing for Yokohama devoured most of my time, plus the fact that Breeding Pools are over 20 freaking tix online.

However, I did manage to get this little Black number together and tried it out at a number of local FNMs. My approach to FNMs has always been that my ranking doesn’t mean spit and I’d rather play something fun and interesting rather than the latest tuned version of something like Dragonstorm or Dralnu.

Maintaining a healthy FNM scene is actually an important duty as far as I’m concerned. Beating the snot out of someone with a razor-tuned version of Dralnu off the Internet while simultaneously telling them how awful their homebrew deck is might make you feel like more of a man, but it’s a sure-fire way to end up with no people to play against in a few months time.

I probably ended up playing this deck longer than I should have, mainly because I was a little lazy in tracking down the cards and building other decks.

The deck performed reasonably okay. I won one FNM, but picked up 3-1 records in two others. One of those losses was to a Tron version of Dralnu (mainly because I hadn’t been able to find Ghost Quarters to put in my sideboard) and the other was to Dragonstorm in the classic Remand / Ignorant Bliss response to Persecute, kill you next turn kind of way.

Unsurprisingly the deck is pretty strong against aggro, although mono-Green aggro can give you issues because of the number of haste monsters. I won a match against a Primal Forcemage deck by the skin of my teeth and mainly by casting Damnation to kill… wait for it… a single Bird of Paradise. I correctly guessed he had Stonewood Invocation and would have died next turn. While I’m still not massively sold on Groundbreaker, turns of Groundbreaker and Stonewood Invocation meet the definition of game ending. Nice Sudden Death in hand, take 11. Ouch.

I can’t remember the exact listing, but it looked fairly funky. Something like:

Back to Snow Black and the Persecute, Muse Vessel, and Nightmare Void are in the board against control decks. The numbers are a bit weird because I didn’t know (and still don’t) which would be better out of Muse Vessel and Nightmare Void.

Dragonstorm has dropped a little off the radar at my local tournaments, but the Shadow of Doubt are in there just in case. And countering a Mystical Teachings and drawing a card is quite tasty against annoying Teferi decks.

Ghost Quarters are a necessity as even with the traditional Black hand disruption Tron decks can still break your back by assembling full Tron and randomly flopping powerful cards off the top of their library. You may as well have something to replace those Deserts anyway.

Mono-Black control does hark back to a bygone era when decks, and in particular manabases, were a little more simplified. The snow package is very cute, but with all the fantastic mana-fixing from the Ravnica shock lands, why restrict yourself to one color? I spotted this when I played against a similar deck that also had white for nasties like Sacred Mesa and Story Circle. It shouldn’t have been a fair matchup, but I managed to get lucky and win despite any number of cards my deck didn’t have an answer to.

What finally retired the deck was a disastrous FNM where I started out 0-3 and only picked up a win off the poor soul with a moderately tuned Sealed deck. That guy deserves a bravery medal for persistence. These guys are the heart and soul of any successful FNM. If there are plenty of them around then you know your local scene is healthy. But if their numbers drop then it becomes much harder for the ones remaining as turning up every week to get savagely beaten in every single match by a razor-tuned net deck loses its appeal fairly swiftly.

Think of that next time you drag out Dralnu or Dragonstorm with the aim of beating poor Timmy and Johnny to a bloody paste. Maybe it might be a better idea to break out that Reality Acid / Cloudstone Curio deck instead.

Or you could you keep mashing Timmy and Johnny until they reach the constituency of a fine jam you can spread on your sandwiches later. It is fun after all.

Well, this tourney I got to be Johnny Jam-to-be. I ran into Scryb and Force decks and bad things happened. You can’t really beat those decks, but we already know this as Solar Flare learnt that lesson a while back. The sad truth is that Mono-Black control is a bit like Solar Flare, but with way fewer options. Maybe once Ravnica goes away, although the rumors are we’ll see the lands in Tenth Edition. I hope so. [As do I. – Craig.]

So has Damnation had that impact on Standard? Has Mono-Green Aggro run rampant with the new tools on offer?

Let’s look at some decklists from the last major tournament, Grand Prix Kyoto.

Project X is the Standard equivalent of the invisible man. The deck uses the interaction between Crypt Champion and Saffi Eriksdotter to generate either infinite life with Essence Warden or infinite men with Teysa. I say invisible because MTGO currently has no way to handle infinite loops (macros for MTGO III please) and so anyone playing the deck is probably going to time out rather than beat anyone.

The only change Planar Chaos provides is to change the color of Soul Warden into the more conveniently green Essence Warden. I suppose the deck could play Harmonize if it wanted some extra card drawing. Having never played the deck I can’t really confirm if that’s a good idea or not.

Ooh wow, there’s some fun and games in here. It’s morphs, but with Tron as well. I hear Naoki’s got an article scheduled to go up on this sometime soon and I suspect that will be an interesting read.

Even though he already has Blue, Shimizu opted for Harmonize for a bit of card-fuel drawing goodness. The other Planar Chaos card is the deceptively good Deadwood Treefolk. I overlooked this card thinking that six mana put it in the Limited only category. In here it provides a means of fetching back any useful critter that might have been accidentally offed at some point. While expensive, Deadwood Treefolk has an impressively big butt. Although it’s in here as a singleton, multiples do give you a kind of way of going infinite so that you never run out of creatures. I imagine Shapeshifter can duplicate the effect if you really need it.

Unfortunately you’ve got to cast the Treefolk past their counters first.

Four Planar Chaos cards here. In the main deck one of the Dragons shows up. The dragons are all fairly solid win conditions. Numot happens to blow up opponent’s lands for fun. Traditionally this color combination plays hell on aggro with Wrath and Lightning Helix, but Wada’s listing also looks geared up to attack the manabases of other control decks. Instead of the traditional late game of Demonfire his deck looks to prevent the end-game from arriving by blowing up the world with Boom / Bust first. With four Flagstones his deck can actually get maximum use out of both sides of the split card. Early on he has a two mana Stone Rain, while late on he can still play out the classic old school Angel (or Dragon) followed by Armageddon.

The sideboard continues the land destruction theme with Detritivore. Hmm, now what did I say about Detritivore.

I’m not sure where to evaluate Detritivore. On the one hand it is an uncounterable source of land destruction. On the other it’s painfully slow and needs a lot of mana to get started. Extended may be slightly more welcoming with all the Onslaught sac lands floating around, but even there he’s just a shabbier Terravore.

Sigh.

That was me clearly not thinking through how the control matchups go. Both players build up a ton of land while their control elements neutralize each other’s threats. Of course there’s going to be time to suspend him for a whole load of time counters and then watch as he chews their manabase to shreds. Tron… mmm, Detritivore likes eating Tron, and none of their counterspells will stop him.

I imagine Pull from Eternity may start seeing sideboard play to stop this guy.

The other sideboard card is the very nasty Riptide Pilferer. In control mirrors he’s a shiv stuck through the ribs before your opponent gets a chance to draw breath. Control decks aren’t about little guys. They’re about late games and big fat Dragons. A Pilferer on turn 2, on the play, is going to make swiss cheese out of someone’s hand before they finally get round to Wrathing him away.

Another Angelfire control deck. This one has the more traditional Demonfire end game, although there’s a single Boom / Bust floating around.

Detritivore again makes a sideboard appearance, but we also have his Blue counterpart in the main deck. Aeon Chronicler was another card I had problems evaluating. I have no idea why. Uncounterable card drawing with a hasty Maro at the end of it, sounds good when you put it that way.

Tomii also won a trial with the same deck, so he was extra busy over the weekend.

Body Double as Zombify. Yay, I got that one. Other than that it’s the typical Solar Flare. Ramp up to Angel of Despair, blow up what you don’t like and then beat down with 5/5 angel. The advantage Body Double has over something like Zombify or Dread Return is he gets to copy the Dragon you just Persecuted from their hand.

More fun with morphs but nothing new here.

Gruul, that’s so like early 2006. Every man and his dog uses Boros as the aggro deck of choice nowadays.

Or used to. There’s a certain Planar Chaos card in Ide’s sideboard that has a lot to say on that matter. I’ll talk more about it in a minute.

Four Blood Moon is pretty spiteful, but also a sensible choice in the current environment. They’re not exactly going to Wrath or Damnation your critters away when they’ve only got basic Mountains to play with. Sure, Detritivore eats them totally and leaves you with a critter at the end of it, but Ide’s Gruul deck really isn’t in any mood to be patient.

Gruul. Smash now. Rarghh!

I have no idea what the single copy of Gaea’s Anthem in the sideboard is for, to be honest. It probably means I should get back to the Standard 8-mans.

And now we come to the eventual winner and what a peach of a deck it is too.

Yes it’s a Blue/Red Tron deck, and yes they’ve been kicking around the format since the South Africans caught everyone napping on Day 1 of Worlds 2005. The win conditions have changed as various cards rotate out, but the strategy remains the same. Assemble Tron then cast monstrous big dragons, or burn them out with an X spell where X is somewhere greater than their current life total.

Despite the prohibitive mana cost Bogardan Hellkite is fast establishing itself as one of the greatest fatties of all time, perhaps nearly in the same league as Akroma or Verdant Force. Against most weenie decks he’s a Wrath with a built in 5/5 body attached.

Against most White Weenie decks, Sulfur Elemental is a Wrath with a built in 3/2 body attached. Not even Soltari Priest is safe.

Okay, this is where I put my hand up and admit I screwed up. This is what I had to say about Sulfur Elemental while going through the Red cards.

Sulfur Elemental can’t make up his mind whether he’s hating White guys or pushing them over the edge. On one hand he gives Red a way of killing Soltari Priest (on the off-chance they haven’t seen Desert), and on the other he can help White’s myriad assorted bears to come in for extra damage. He’s an option for the budget conscious, anyway.

Hmm, is that all? Admittedly I was in a hotel just across the border from Geneva wondering what the hell I had to do to get a better record than 1-2 in a Time Spiral draft, so I might have been a little distracted.

What happened here was I got fixated on one of his many abilities, namely the +1/-1 for White, and forgot about the other two keywords.

Flash, as in can be played at any time you could play an instant.
Split Second, as you know… uncounterable.

That’s a formidable combination of abilities and rather dumb of me not to pick up on it. Watanabe did, and is a couple of thousand dollars better off because of it.

Sulfur Elemental is a fantastic weapon against control, especially for another control deck. He’s a reasonably sized threat that can be cast as an instant and straight through all the countermagic in the world. The fact he also sends Savannah Lions, Soltari Priests, and Icatian Javelineers straight to the great Plains in the sky gives him an extra added dimension.

Fantastic against control and fantastic against Boros, it’s no real surprise that Sulfur Elemental has established itself as the hit of Planar Chaos. Online they go for over 2 tix, and this is an uncommon.

The one surprise is that Watanabe doesn’t have Detritivore in his sideboard. Maybe he didn’t have the tech at the time or testing revealed that Annex was still better.

So what happened to Damnation? Not a single Black Wrath to be found in the Top 8 anywhere. Does that mean the hype was completely unjustified?

And what about Mono-Green Aggro? People were positively drooling at the potential Planar Chaos offered, but neither Timbermare or Groundbreaker put in an appearance in this Top 8.

The Top 8 decks of a tournament don’t always tell the full story. Perhaps the Dralnu decks simply got hated out. Same with Mono-Green, although the advance word seems to be that it isn’t living up to expectations. Heck, when even Jamie Wakefield starts putting Islands in his deck then you know something isn’t quite right.

Dralnu decks are still around. This updated one took one of the trials before Kyoto:

And Dralnu is still a part of the online metagame, as is Dragonstorm apparently according to the Premier Event results our editor reported recently. Aggro looks to be struggling, as witnessed by a lonely Gruul deck in the Top 8 of Kyoto.

So where does the metagame go from here?

Sulfur Elemental appears to be the early hit from Planar Chaos, and a perfect aggro-control card. While he’s popular, Savannah Lions and Javelineers are going to have to warm the bench for a while. Control decks are also going to have to evolve to be able to deal with “end of turn Sulphur Elemental, untap and sit on counters for anything you try to do to stop it.”

Detritivore is the other big card to come from Kyoto. With Aeon Chronicler starting to increase in popularity as well, then I expect that Pull from Eternity might start showing up in sideboards.

For me, the coolest deck is easily Shimizu’s PickleTron deck. There’s just so much going on there, and all of it looks like fun. I don’t know how viable the deck actually is now that the metagame is probably going to move towards Sulfur-Go, but it just looks like so much fun.

If only Breeding Pools weren’t so stupidly expensive.

Thanks for reading,

Prof