When deckbuilding, I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that there are no “good” cards or “bad” cards, but merely cards that do what you need them to do. What you need a card to do is shaped by the environment in which you are playing. This is why I hate set reviews; it’s difficult to look at a new set and know precisely how the environment will shift to incorporate it. Instead, most writers are stuck analyzing efficient creatures and spells. “Oh look, Plated Geopede is a two-mana 5/5 with first strike. It might find a home in aggressive Red decks.”
Environments matter.
Patrick Sullivan has said that, rather than asking “Is this card good?” we should be asking “What conditions would have to arise for this card to be good?” This is the sort of philosophy that leads people to mention Plummet and Combust in set reviews; the presence of Baneslayer Angel makes two-mana Red and Green answers to Angel quite attractive as sideboard candidates when they would otherwise be essentially Limited cards.
Similarly, Sun Titan is obviously a powerful card that generates considerable value, but you have to consider the environment as well as your deck. You can’t really jam Sun Titan into an aggressive deck to rebuy early drops without having a seriously messed up curve, particularly in a world where your opponents won’t be hitting you with Path to Exile. Sun Titan, therefore, will probably have to slot into a midrange or control deck, probably in a role rebuying Wall of Omens, Sea Gate Oracle, or other sweet creatures with enter-the-battlefield effects. Okay, sure, that’s fine, but there’s a limit to how heavy your top end can be, and now you have Sun Titan battling for slots with Gideon Jura and Baneslayer Angel. Note also that Angel will probably get better as Maelstrom Pulse and Path to Exile leave the format, because most spot removal spells can’t kill her as long as she stays on defense.
Still, there are some inferences that can be drawn from looking at a set. Consider Phylactery Lich and Steel Overseer. Wizards has been trying to seed sets with cards that play well with future expansions. Given what we know about Mirrodin, Phylactery Lich isn’t as subtle as Knight of the Reliquary was, but it’s not as though Wizards would burn two M11 rare slots to troll the rumor mill at MTGSalvation. I expect both of those cards to be quite powerful when Scars releases, particularly Steel Overseer; Overseer’s ability implies that modular might be making a comeback, which pushes him even further as a pretty sweet lord. It’s also worth noting that because of how fast base sets now rotate, Wizards can put potential problem cards in base sets; if they prove to be an issue, the cards will be out of Standard after fifteen months instead of two years.
We can also look at how Wizards has sculpted the deck for Constructed play. Looking at the past few years, it appears that Wizards has been trying to mold Standard more and more towards a creature-based format where midrange decks thrive. If you look at the M11 spoiler with that in mind, the Titan cycle, already eye-catching, becomes even more significant. All of the Titans are excellent at the top of the curve of midrange decks, and their abilities add even more value to their stats. Note that while Baneslayer Angel could almost defeat midrange deck solo last year, all of the Titans beat Angel in a fight. Further, the Titans’ powerful enters-the-battlefield effects are also a check on Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Clearly, these are cards that Wizards has intended to be good, so what is a format full of six-mana 6/6s going to look like after Shards rotates?
We already have some results coming in from the last Amsterdam PTQs and various Nationals, but they’re a little tainted; because of how defining Bloodbraid Elf, Sovereigns of Lost Alara, and Path to Exile are, it’s hard to get a feel for what Zendikar-Scars-M11 Standard will look like. Still, we can glean some information from the decks that are running minimal Shards cards and are using a ton of ramp to quickly power out Titans and Destructive Force. Other variants have eschewed Destructive Force, instead using the ramp to fuel Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. It looks like, in the future, you can afford to have minimal board presence in the first few turns if you are playing Primeval Titan on turn 4 and unloading the rest of your hand on turn 5.
However, that’s not by any means the only valid strategy; Fauna Shaman has also been making waves. Now, given the obvious synergy between Fauna Shaman, Vengevine, and Bloodbraid Elf, it’s hard to say exactly what a Fauna Shaman deck will look like after Elf is gone, but it seems reasonable to assume a Green shell with a solid clock and decent utility. The deck will likely require an answer to other Titans and Destructive Force, but using Shaman to tutor up a Titan is an excellent answer to another Titan.
However, Mana Leak provides a natural check to the Titans; getting your six-drop Leaked is pretty crushing, especially if you’re already behind on the board. Note that even though Leak is back and is very good in this Titan-based world, Leak is at its best in an aggressive shell where you can take advantage of the tempo you get by Leaking their turn six instead of their turn two. Historically, using Mana Leak or Remand to ensure a neutral board on turn 2 was to the control deck’s advantage because the control deck was working towards an endgame that involved threats that totally outclassed the aggressive deck. If you tapped for Wildfire; Keiga, the Tide Star; or Meloku the Clouded Mirror, there was no way the other guy was going to do anything better.
In the future, you can Leak a Fauna Shaman, use Day of Judgment to clear the rest of a board, and use Jace, the Mind Sculptor to start getting incremental advantage before tapping out for Sphinx of Jwar Isle, only to get completely wrecked by Devastating Force.
An aside: it makes a lot amount of sense for Wizards to take this approach. Curve-based beatdown decks along the lines of Sligh can be beaten by lowering your curve and leaning on mass removal, and as long as the slower deck can survive into the midgame, they can lean on their (presumably) superior card quality to win the game while the opponent sits there topdecking the equivalent of Goblins of the Flarg. Wizards could conceivably make beatdown better simply by making one- and two-mana creatures more powerful, but that starts some power creep issues. 1/1s usually don’t generate enough positive interactions to play them in Constructed, so you need two-power one-drops or something like Figure of Destiny to help out the curve-based decks. Most of those cards need some sort of drawback to distinguish them from the two-drops, but now you probably need some three-power two drops and three-drops with good abilities, and pretty soon a 4/4 for four with an ability starts to look like a bad deal. With Shards, cards like Rhox War Monk and Sprouting Thrinax could be pushed because of how hard they were to cast, but that’s not a long-term solution. Having beatdown decks “go bigger” is a considerably more elegant solution; kudos to Wizards for what they’ve done.
Still, the presence of Mana Leak doesn’t just cause big-mana decks to dry up and blow away, particularly since there are so many four mana bombs that Mana Leak decks also have to be worried about. Leak is good, no question, but it’s stretched pretty thin if you’re relying on Leak to protect you from everything.
In a world of Titans, then, which ones should you play? It’s hard to just list Titans in some perceived order of “goodness” given the confines of colors, etc. Primeval Titan is getting the most hype right now; he’s the easiest to ramp into (being Green) and is also the most obvious engine. You can use Primeval Titan to ramp into Eldrazi Temple and Eye of Ugin and start tutoring up gods, or you can get a bunch of manlands and start battling, or you can get Tectonic Edge and make sure that the other guy can’t ever cast his Titan. Sun Titan and Grave Titan are very good at generating incremental value. Using Garruk Wildspeaker to ramp into Grave Titan is particularly attractive. (Nineteen, not twenty; hopefully they crack a fetchland.) Inferno Titan is severely underrated; his enter-the-battlefield trigger kills Jace, and if you play Destructive Force with Inferno Titan in play and attack, you break Titan parity. Also, firebreathing means that the Titan is probably a two-turn clock.
My favorite Titan, though, is Frost Titan. Frost Titan is essentially Angel of Despair, except for an inability to hit planeswalkers. Frost Titan is particularly powerful if you can ramp into it and lock down your opponent’s land before he can play his Titan — and once they do reach seven for Titan, you can start locking their animal down instead. And don’t even get me started on what happens if you have a second Frost Titan. Frost Titan is also a natural trump to all of the other Titans. I am pretty sure that people are going to eventually wish that they’d bought Titan at $10; for reference, the last mythic that I bought over thirty of was Jace, the Mind Sculptor.
Actually, the fact that the Titans are mythics is noteworthy. Almost all of the M11 mythics look to have potential for tournament play, and I was curious to see what affect that would have both on prices and on rarity breakdowns of top decklists. Wizards, obviously, is in this to make as much money as possible so that Hasbro will keep letting them make Magic. Still, high barriers to Constructed play is bad for the game, and it’s almost as bad when a player quits due to the secondary market. (A player who quits might return, after all, but someone who never played Magic in the first place won’t.) Wizards, therefore, is in a position where they’d like for players to tear through cases looking for cards but they also want anyone to be able to battle. I think that, for Wizards, an ideal format would consist of a few decks that are heavy on rares and mythics, one ‘budget’ deck that is still reasonable (think Red Deck Wins) and one deck that is very good but still has a moderate rare count and relatively few mythics. Jund, for example, usually has about a dozen rare lands, but only plays six or eight additional rares, and few if any mythics. Jund has also always been on the shortlist for “best deck in the format” even though decks with over twenty mythics and/or almost forty rares have been popular the entire season.
I was curious to see how the Titans impacted the rarity distribution, so I looked at the rarity distribution of sixty-seven winning PTQ lists from Shards-Zendikar-M10 Standard and compared them with lists from two post-M11 PTQ top eights as well as the top eight lists from Australian, Canadian, Finnish, and French Nationals. The comparisons aren’t quite perfect, but without data that you’d need to glean from MTGO, it’s probably the best that can be obtained. I suspected that I wouldn’t be able to create a model that could predict a rarity distribution given certain inputs without considerably more data (and I was right) but I hoped that a simpler regression might be fruitful. Unfortunately, I only had sample sizes of sixty-seven and forty-eight, and I suspect that you need a sample size on the order of two thousand for a model that will allow you to make any sort of inference.
Still, I have the descriptive statistics:
Pre-M11, the mean number of commons in each deck, including sideboards, was 16.40. For uncommons, 13.82. Rares, 26.05. Mythics, 9.64. Basic land, 9.09. The mean number of rare lands is 12.65. The median numbers: commons, 17; uncommons, 15; rares, 24; mythics, 11; basics, 9; rare lands, 13.
(For those curious, the maximum number of mythics was 22, with 39 for regular rares. The minimum on mythics was zero, and the minimum on rares was 10.)
Post-M11: Means: commons, 18.35; uncommons, 14.33; rares, 21.25; mythics, 10.25; basics, 10.79; rare lands, 9.85. Medians: commons, 17.5; uncommons, 15; rares, 20; mythics, 11; basics, 10; rare lands, 10.5.
(Maximums: mythics, 20; rares, 38. Minimums: mythics, 0; rares, 8.)
Note that I counted cards by their rarity at their most recent printing. Thus, Time Warp and the Lorwyn planeswalkers are counted as mythic.
Most of the median numbers are determined by Jund or other archetypes that are particularly highly represented.
It appears that M11 caused a slight uptick in commons, uncommons, and basics with a slight downturn in rares. The downturn in rares also extends to rare lands. Mythics are slightly up. I suspect that the downturn in rares (and rare lands) is driven by the Primeval Titan decks that require Mountains and common ramp effects to fuel Valakut, but on the whole, it appears that the M11 mythics aren’t affecting rarity distributions of winning decklists.
The Titans are going to shape Standard for the next fifteen months, and I suspect the best Titan deck may end up as the best deck in the format. Go do some brewing.
Max McCall
max mccall at gmail dot com
Bonus: Frost Titan decklist! I got a Blue-Black-Green list from E_McKenzie that featured an eight-pack of ramp and Planeswalkers topping out in Primeval Titan. I took it over to Steven Birklid’s place to test for a Mox tournament where we brewed a variant with Frost and Grave Titans and a different sideboard and removal package.
Then, we decided to play Trivial Pursuit until four in the morning rather than drive an hour and a half to battle for a Mox Pearl. We sent Corbett Gray to battle in our stead, and he won the tournament fairly effortlessly.
Creatures (5)
Planeswalkers (8)
Lands (28)
Spells (19)
Sideboard
I like this list for Standard going forward quite a bit. The split on Pulse and Doom Blade in the main is a nod to the need to kill both planeswalkers and manlands. Grave Titan is useful in the Naya matchup where the Zombies come in handy. The X-spells are breakers against other Titan decks and control decks. The slightly odd configuration on Halimar Depths and Khalni Garden is mostly a nod to not being able to afford that many ETB-tapped Green sources.