Threshold, as a mechanic, is one of the most interesting to build a deck around. The concept behind it is essentially like racing against the clock to change the rules of the game: Once you hit threshold, your whole deck transforms. You aren’t running 1/1s or 2/1s, you’ve got 4/4s and up. Some of the threshold cards burst into the air, some of them just get bigger, some of them behave dramatically different… But generally, it’s a paradigm shift. Instead of being small and weak, your creatures are big, threatening monsters that thrash your opponent into the ground in no time.
Or so that is the plan.
I played a fair amount of Odyssey Limited, and while I would say my Limited skills had not progressed that far throughout the time I did, I was always the master of using threshold to my advantage. Tempo just hasn’t been my strong suit over the years; only after being drilled on it repeatedly through Onslaught Block am I finally getting to truly understand it. But changing the game state, suddenly pulling a trick on my opponent and reversing the rules in my favor? I’m good with that. How many times did I gain threshold in response to blocking with my Dirty Wererat, kill the attacker and suddenly slam into offensive mode led by a 4/5 regenerating rat? I have no idea, and it’s not like that made me a better player… But damn if it wasn’t fun.
We all develop attachments to certain cards and mechanics. Rogue deckbuilders sometimes get consumed with the idea of using a certain card or a certain style of deck, struggling to force those concepts to work in their favor: If I just keep playtesting it, I’ll get it right. This deck can work. Even high-level professional players admit to showing biases. Read through the interviews; you’ll find that even they can show an emotional attachment or repulsion towards certain concepts. It’s a struggle sometimes to find those decks you magically love, and yet also manage to win with. I love White weenie, but I have not had a chance to really play an enjoyable White weenie deck since Exodus. (Punisher doesn’t quite count.)
But threshold? This is one of my favorite mechanics and, naturally enough, a favorite deck style of mine. A while ago, I came up with a deck list that utilized threshold. This isn’t what I’m really going to talk about, but it is something that gave me some ideas for later on.
Hunting Sound
4 Circular Logic
2 Upheaval
3 Hunting Grounds
3 Read the Runes
4 Living Wish
4 Mental Note
4 Anurid Brushhopper
3 Mystic Enforcer
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Werebear
1 Nimble Mongoose
2 Sungrass Prairie
1 Skycloud Expanse
4 Windswept Heath
4 Flooded Strand
3 Island
4 Forest
2 Plains
2 Brushland
2 Adarkar Wastes
Sideboard:
3 Naturalize
1 Wonder
1 Phantom Nishoba
3 Spellbane Centaur
1 Silver Seraph
1 Arcanis the Omnipotent
1 City of Brass
1 Silklash Spider
3 Compost
The idea behind this deck is to hit threshold with Hunting Grounds on the table, and then Living Wish for a fat creature. I came up with it a bit after Onslaught was released, since I had been tinkering with Hunting Grounds/Mystic Snake decks for a while. I was fond of the deck in general, though I don’t believe that combo was very good.
I didn’t test Hunting Sound a lot. Frankly, I wasn’t really all that interested in it, I probably only remember it because Hunting Sound just sounds like such a cool name for a deck. The basic theory behind the deck is probably improved by Legions, and would definitely be improved if I set it up to be a real control deck and not a weird mishmash of cards. It’s improved by Legions because I can Wish for Akroma, Angel of Wrath, who is a very scary card.
But it probably wasn’t an idea I was going to play with much… So I shelved it after a while, generally disinterested in it besides it’s great name. If you’re saying,”It’s a bad deck,” well yes! It is a bad deck. It was never really tested all that much, and I came up with many bad decks during the summer and fall. I had quit playing for a while and it, for some reason, really screwed with my Constructed skills. (Or maybe I just didn’t have any to begin with.) But the point was, I learned something from it.
First, I really like hitting threshold still. I mean, the deck didn’t consistently do so, but if it did there was nothing quite as fun as wishing up a Silver Seraph and beating face with a 8/8 Mystic Enforcer. Maybe it was the fact I was getting to play with giant, stupid cards that are utterly unplayable, or maybe it was the fact I really like filling my own graveyard up. I’m leaning more towards the later; giant stupid cards are fun and all, but hey. Eventually, you have to get real.
Second, the mana base. Oh the glorious mana base! Three-color threshold decks were so aided and comforted by their mana base it was just wonderful. Not only were your lands pushing you towards threshold – a miracle in and of itself – they actually generally worked well. Invasion may have been the era of multi-colors, but let’s get serious here for a second: Fetch lands kick the snot out of”comes into play tapped” lands. If I had remembered how much I liked the mana base for this deck, I might have gone back to tinker with an actual aggressive strategy later on… But instead I played a lot of Onslaught Limited, which I’m generally terrible at and then I got into the Extended season, where I missed every PTQ I was to attend due to insomnia or weather problems. Yeah, woo, I’m really glad I brought those memories up.
At the Chicago Masters, Ken Ho played a threshold-madness hybrid deck. When I saw that, it gave me pause. Now it didn’t win the event – which doesn’t really matter since the Masters is pretty random anyway – but it was an interesting list. I thought back to my previous deck then, and then plain old forget about it.
What? I was building U/G/b opposition, not U/G thresh-madness at the time, and I guess I was more interested in tweaking Canu’s wacky twenty-two land deck into a better version against the aggro decks that show up so much more at the local scene. For every one Tog deck, there’s six U/G decks. In fact, there’s more than six U/G decks.
As of late, I haven’t really been playing Magic, personal issues and all that, but eventually a wonderful article hit my radar. I am instantly interested whenever Mister Flores writes an article – and this one was not only written in Mike Flores‘ ever-excellent style, it was also on a topic truly near and dear to my scrubby heart.
(Whatever is left of it. As Ferrett can attest from listening to me on AIM, February to March have not been the greatest days for my heart – but enough personal notes.)
Captivated first by the brilliant writing, which I’ve read a couple of times, I then gave the deck lists a few spins on Apprentice. I wasn’t immediately impressed – but then again, threshold just doesn’t seem as cool without the giant pile of cards sitting beside your library. If you’ve tried out this deck list, you will definitely realize that it can absolutely motor through it’s library. I’ve played test games where my opponent’s Withered Wretch can simply not keep up with my ability to churn through cards; that’s pretty impressive.
So, of course, I assembled the deck list’s physical components. Taking my as-yet untouched Flooded Strands out of the binder, I was struck by a sudden thought: Holy mother of all, this deck requires a lot of shuffling. My hands are going to fall off if I play this at Regionals, because I will have shuffled so much over the day that they will simply snap at the wrists. I will be disqualified for spraying blood all over my opponent’s cards after I fetch one land too many.
I also thought about how I was going to be marking up mint fetch lands, but more so I was chucking over the image of spraying blood on someone’s precious deck. Oh no, he would cry out, my Exalted Angels are all covered in blood! My sleeves are sticking together! And so on. Yeah, that’s a weird thought, but I’m a weird guy. Especially when I’m sick. My head is full of glue.
I took the deck down to the local shop and gave it a couple of runs against a black aggro deck. Now, the basic wisdom learned from that matchup was that the deck was really inconsistent and weird at times. Maybe I hadn’t quite shuffled it up enough, but after three games I had seen one game involved Werebear and Roar of the Wurm beatdown, and then two games where Withered Wretch screwed me around as the deck basically spat out clumps of land. One thing about Fetch lands we’ve all noticed is they seem to behave the opposite way they should, and instead every fetch causes you to draw three more land.
Withered Wretch, however, while a wonderful foil to this deck list, exists in the totally the wrong color. I do not truly expect, given what I’ve seen, to see black decks sporting Wretch at Regionals. Certainly you might see a handful – but as of now I’m doubting it will become a major component of the metagame by then. Black is simply not that great an aggro color, and aggro-control strategies rotating around using B/x are generally foiled so completely by Compost that it’s sad. MBC can make up for the card advantages, and Tog isn’t totally Black… But B/x decks that rely on such crucial one-for-ones as Duress and Smother react poorly to being Composted. Duress is great if you’re nailing cards he needs; it’s not so good if you’re nailing cards, only for him to draw more.
I discussed the deck with a friend of mine – a better player than me, whose name I expect to be entering into the deck database quite often if he ever gets off his ass and plays more. He immediately showed off his then threshold build, at the time. His decklists tend to evolve very rapidly, but this does tend to turn out highly-personalized decklists that he favors while playing.
4 Windswept Heath
4 Flooded Strand
4 Island
5 Forest
1 Plains
1 Adarkar Wastes
1 Brushland
2 City Of Brass
3 Basking Rootwalla
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Werebear
4 Nimble Mongoose
3 Roar Of The Wurm
3 Wonder
4 Anurid Brushhopper
1 Genesis
4 Careful Study
3 Mental Note
3 Breakthrough
2 Deep Analysis
Sideboard:
2 Compost
2 Upheaval
2 Worship
2 Circular Logic
2 Ray Of Revelation
1 Ray Of Distortion
1 Naturalize
1 Genesis
2 Free slots
My immediate reaction? Rootwalla is stupid in this deck.
Of course, I said that right off the bat like the complete jerk I totally am – but I agree with a lot of the other changes. Brushhopper is, frankly, better than Seton’s Scout. Yes, it’s great that the Scout becomes 4/3 for 1G post-threshold, but an extra W on the cost gets you a better body – 3/4 is better than 4/3 against R/G, and it’s better than Scout against Slide both before and after threshold.
Still, somewhere between Flores’ deck and his, I think, lies the answer. Or maybe the answer is maindecking Glory. Glory would answer R/G’s burn with an air of countermagic. I believe, in case you’re wondering, that he cut the Rootwallas and put in Circular logic, which seems to get sideboarded in”every single game.” I trust his testing more than I trust my own.
I took Flores’ decklist nearly card-for-card to a local type tournament. I only got a chance, in four rounds of Swiss, to play other aggro decks. But it gave me a lot of thoughts as to the various flaws in the decklist and how it matches up. I played against U/G, R/G and W/G decks, winning a fair share of games and generally losing because frankly, I’m still new to this deck and not that great with it.
This is the build I took, same maindeck, with the sideboard slightly altered by time concerns:
4 Wonder
2 Genesis
4 Nimble Mongoose
3 Seton’s Scout
4 Werebear
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Breakthrough
4 Careful Study
4 Mental Note
4 Roar of the Wurm
1 Ray of Revelation
1 City of Brass
4 Flooded Strand
6 Forest
7 Island
4 Windswept Heath
The sideboard wasn’t really as good as it should have been:
4 Compost
2 Krosan Reclamation
2 Ray of Revelation
2 Upheaval
2 Worship
2 Phantom Centaur
1 Plains
I made a lot of mistakes in considering the sideboard. I really didn’t give it a lot of thought; I just threw it together as Flores stated it and ran with it. You might have noticed that I am lacking the Turbulent Dreams. This was frankly one of the worst problems with the deck, with the Centaurs basically being dead cards in a format that contains no Mono Black Control and I never faced the Tog deck. I also added them because I worried in a random format I might run into a Black-Aggro deck, which as mentioned, can be quite dangerous because of Withered Wretch weakening your deck. I can often run threshold ahead of their ability to cast spells and use Wretch, but you can’t put Wonder or Genesis in the yard for long with Wretch around. Centaur however provides an out; few black decks can effectively deal with a Centaur that gets down on the table.
After the tournament, I discussed the deck with my friend again. On one hand, I wasn’t too impressed with the deck; while powerful, it proved to almost overwhelmingly inconsistent, constantly throwing out draws with nothing to work with. I would take poor hands hoping to just dig into what I needed, and then have to wait too long against the aggro decks to really take control of the situation.
However, I was also put off by how badly I played during the day, basically throwing away game after game for really no good reason. I know how to use Fetch lands properly and chastised myself repeatedly for making the mistake of not going for the white due to habit, but it’s just one of those things that costs a person games. Watching mental note eat my only plains lost me a game, but I don’t blame the note. I blame myself for screwing up that fetching.
Still, with what Flores had written, and the theories I had discussed with my friend in mind, I set out to ‘improved’ the deck by changing it a bit. First, I think White should be a main-deck color. You are already essentially running 9 sources of white mana in the main-deck, with a single plains added and perhaps an additional city of brass, between the deck thinning and manipulation, getting the white mana wouldn’t be too tough. The ability to use Ray of Revelation’s for its white cost would be good and adding Brushhoppers over Seton’s Scouts would probably make the deck stronger overall – and especially in the Slide matchup. The sideboard slot lost to the plains was a needless waste; I have found the deck to be extremely finicky regarding its mana supply and the extra slot could be made more useful by being a real card.
So with these thoughts in mind, Hunting Sound is reborn. Granted, I’m not running the Hunting Grounds, but I still love the name”Hunting Sound.” For some reason it really sums up the deck for me, though you might not agree. That’s okay; you can call it UGWAthreshold and tell me that sounds better.
//NAME: Hunting Sound 2k3
1 Ray of Revelation
2 Genesis
3 Breakthrough
4 Careful Study
3 Mental Note
4 Wonder
4 Roar of the Wurm
4 Anurid Brushhopper
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Werebear
4 Nimble Mongoose
7 Island
5 Forest
4 Windswept Heath
4 Flooded Strand
2 City of Brass
1 Plains
Sideboard:
2 Upheaval
3 Ray of Revelation
2 Krosan Reclamation
2 Mystic Enforcer
4 Compost
2 Worship
So, this is the untested new build, which doesn’t feel like it’s changed a lot. There is twenty-three land in the deck now, which makes me feel a little better about the Upheavals in the sideboard. I’ll talk about that in the moment.
Changes in the maindeck:
+4 Anurid Brushhopper
+1 Plains
+1 City of Brass
-1 Forest
-1 Breakthrough
-1 Mental Note
-3 Seton’s Scout
So that’s six cards changed overall. It makes the deck somewhat less likely to reach threshold initially, but somewhat better if it doesn’t. I really can’t look at Anurid Brushhopper in a bad light. Seton’s Scout was letting me down in the R/G matchup, and just not impressing me like a card I’m running purely for post-threshold should be. I can’t lay them against R/G or Slide before I have threshold, and if I’m pumping them after threshold they might as well be Ravenous Baloths or Call of the Herd or any other random, good green card. Let’s get this straight: Genesis recursion pulls back the best creature in your graveyard. That’s going to be the Mongeese or the Bears; the Scout is never going to win that popularity contest.
I am not totally sure I like the maindeck the way it is. I’m thinking that four Wonders as delightful as they are, is just not worthwhile. I know Wonder is dead on important in many, many matchups – but unless you’re getting the absolute poo-poo draw where you don’t go through any of your library, at all, you should be able to hit a Wonder in short notice. If you cast a Mental Note and a Careful Study, as well as fetch a land, those seven cards came from somewhere. You’re that much deeper into your library on average, and I was finding that I was hitting two or three Wonders, which isn’t really that great. The first Wonder is a Wonder, the second and third have more in common with Dreamborn Muse than I’d like to admit.
I’m thinking one of those Wonders should be a Breakthrough, a Mental Note, or even a Deep Analysis. I cut to three Breakthroughs because while the card is basically a way to draw insane amounts of card quite cheaply – if your hand is empty, 3U for draw 4, discard one is awesome; admit it! – I wasn’t liking them in the early game. This is where I think I play the deck wrong, perhaps. Am I too conservative because I won’t Break for two on the third turn? I really don’t know; that depends on what I dumped in the first two turns.
Deep Analysis is nice… When you’re not drawing too many. It’s generally going to be good against just about everything, though I feel edgy losing three life against R/G. Breakthrough is the same number of cards for about the same amount of mana, but I can’t discard it to Careful Study or pop it off through Mental Note. So it’s different, but not necessarily better.
The maindeck Ray of Revelation is good against so much I really can’t dislike it. Against Tog, it nails Compulsion. Many builds of MBC run maindeck Engineered Plague. Elephant Guide is freaking scary and I need not mention you will use Ray against Opposition, Slide, or Wake, right? The only deck it’s generally dead against – and”dead” is a loose term in a deck that Studies and Breaks through so many cards – is U/G madness. With the maindeck white mana count boosted, you’re even likely to cast it twice. That’s good stuff all around, so I’m not cutting that.
Genesis, like Wonder, sometimes feels like it should be cut down. The thing is that the recursion makes your late game very threatening instead of quite meek. Untargetable flying 3/3s for 2GG? That’s not that bad a deal, now is it? You want that to come up in games against Tog, Slide, and occasionally Aggro matchups. Also, bear in mind you can actually cast Genesis. You do not need two in ‘yard; you’re never going to get that much mana. If you need more threats, then cast the 4/4 and let your opponent spend cards dealing with it. I’ve watched players discard this thing to Mongrel with no other threats in their hand. Don’t do that! It’s a 4/4 for five, it’s not a freaking Hundroog.
I admit it: I did that just to watch the Ferrett respond. I’m tempted to type the ‘droog out five or six times just to watch him hit it each time. I bet he’s using a macro. (Hundroog! – The Ferrett)
The sideboard has generally nothing remarkable. Having remembered Krosan Reclamation can be used to target, oh I don’t know, Wonder in the other player’s graveyard, I don’t feel I need Turbulent Dreams quite as much. Granted, I probably do need some way to deal with opposing Ensnaring Bridge. As you can tell, my friend has the pricey-but-potent Ray of Distortion in his board – As well as Circular Logic. Both would be good against Wake and the bridge, so maybe I’ll make that move later as well.
Mystic Enforcer is another threshold dork, replacing the errant Phantom Centaurs. It’s honestly going to be better against Tog, where Alter Reality only works well if you don’t have threshold. Against the random black aggro decks (and strangely enough, Slide), it’s a better creature than Roar of the Wurm. I don’t know if it deserves the slot, but I want to try it out anyways. 6/6 fliers for four mana can’t be bad, especially one’s that can’t be smothered.
So now it’s time to take paper to reality and test this new version out, right?
Immediately in testing, the deck seems both better and worse. This is a deck that can do little to disrupt an opposing control deck. Psychatog doesn’t look for or build a combo; it’s based around disrupting you, so this is not that threatening a match up overall. Wake and Slide though… Oh my! The sideboard contains nothing to seriously disrupt Wake, so clearly, it definitely should. My friend suggested siding in (or just maindecking) Circular Logic, I may go so far as to do that.
Perhaps, with the maindeck white increased, it should go for Ray of Distortion? Disenchant is nice, yes, but you aren’t going to be nailing their”quick” permanents to lock you out. You’re going after the Mirari, since the Mirari is the only thing that can truly end the game. Genesis, Brushhopper, and flashing back Roars answering Wrath of God quite fine when they don’t have Astral Slide.
I’m still frustrated by the R/G match up, Brushhoppers or no Brushhoppers. I think I need to learn more about playing the deck, though, as I seem to make mistakes during playing. I may bump up to four Worships in the board, as they allow the threshold deck to stabilize. You don’t need many turns to win; one or two extra and the R/G deck is facing too many flying threats to handle you.
I will probably continue to play this deck over the week and sum up my thoughts next week. This is a work in progress, but I think it has some potential. Either that or I’m going to try building a U/G/W beasts deck. Because that will work magically!
Until next week,
Iain Telfer (Taeme)
Feel free to tell me the changes you think should be made to the deck… But do it in the forums. I definitely don’t know if I’m pushing ahead when I change from Flores’ build or if I’m making the deck worse overall.