New Extended: A format that is both
captivating
and challenging, full of promise and uncharted land.
This article outlines the thought process behind the Grixis deck that Michael Jacob used to
top 8 Pro Tour Amsterdam
. You may have been playing Extended before the rotation, since the format was pretty awesome — but I hope to show you the reasons why we chose the cards we did.
Before we begin, you might be asking: “What makes Extended such a good format?” Well, aside from how much fun it is, it’s also very skill-testing. Obviously, that top 8 was insane — but what about the entire top fifty players? That’s even including the Limited portion being M11 Draft (which you have to admit is actually surprisingly decent). I was super-pumped about the new format — but little did I realize just how awesome it would turn out to be…
Preparation began pretty much the moment they announced the new rules for Extended. I read the announcement at midnight and could hardly sleep, with visions of wild concoctions swirling around in my head. Just imagining what was possible was a pleasure in and of itself. I’m often asked what my favorite format is, to which I reply, “A new and different one.” It’s not about Block, or Standard, or Extended, or Legacy, or Vintage…. To me, the best thrill in deckbuilding is coming up with decks for new premier-played formats.
(I’d would be all about building more EDH or pauper or whatever — but at the end of the day, if the format’s not supported by Wizards, then to me it feels like playing poker with pretend chips.)
I realize that many might think I’m missing the point — you can just play “for fun.” My response is the exact reason I
play
is “for fun.” For me to get the satisfaction that I desire, I like to know that others are properly incentivized to be as Spike as possible.
This may throw you for a loop, but to me, playing Magic against Spikes is
way
more fun than playing Magic against Johnny or Timmy. Now, obviously there are Spike-Johnnies and Spike-Timmies, but at the end of the day, if someone’s not primarily a Spike, they just aren’t as much fun for me to play with.
Now, I love gunslinging at events — which often involves battling players without much Spike in them at all. There is a difference, though. When I gunsling, the game I am really playing is a bit different than when I compete at Magic. When I gunsling, the game is more about the social interaction: chatting, sharing an experience with my opponent, being a part of the event. Gunslinging is expressly
not
about competition, removing the possibility of achieving satisfaction by “conquest.” Just as so many EDH players don’t like playing EDH with Spikes that “take the game too seriously,” I’m not a big fan of competing with people who “aren’t taking the game seriously enough.”
Anyway.
Visions of 5-Color Control, Faeries, Jund, Reveillark, Doran, Mono-Red, and a million combo decks danced in my head. By the time the next morning, June 19th, rolled around, I liked the idea of Grixis. Why play 5-Color Control, other than Esper Charm? I realize Vivid lands are great, but they still enter the battlefield tapped. Grixis would surely mean far fewer tapped lands — plus, I really liked the sound of Creeping Tar Pit.
This was my first draft:
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (27)
Spells (27)
Obviously, we didn’t know about Mana Leak yet — hence, the use of Broken Ambitions. It took hundreds of hours of playtesting to come to the realization that every single deck people talked about was pretty bad. My early testing was primarily with Madison’s darling, Brian Kowal (most famous recently for his work on the Boat Brew deck).
We tried Faeries, U/W Lark, 5cLark, Ad Nauseam, R/U/G Tempo (R/U/G Deck), Hivemind, Scapeshift, Doran, Kithkin, Elves, Living End, Dredge, Jund, Boat Brew, U/W Aggro, Restore Balance, R/G Aggro, Swans, Pyromancer Ascension, Bant, and a lot of Mono-Red decks, among others. As we tried deck after deck, a number of elements of the format started to materialize before us. This learning the nature of the format is thrilling — this wasn’t a simple update of a format, where you could start by fitting new cards into old decks. We literally had to start from the ground and build up.
Using these deck shells gave us building blocks — but as time went on, more and more we found that updated Standard decks just weren’t nearly as effective as decks that used cards spread throughout the sets. It isn’t about the power level of the cards — it’s about the number of interactions. The more cards there are, the more potential interactions there tend to be. The more interactions, the more times you find extreme synergies like Aluren + Imperial Recruiter, Vampire Hexmage + Dark Depths, Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek, Punishing Fire + Grove of the Burnwillows, and so on.
While a larger card pool generally makes for more potential interactions, which leads to faster and stronger combos, it does
not
necessarily mean more cards see play. In fact, as Legacy players can attest, there are generally a much wider variety of cards played in Legacy tournaments than Vintage — since if some options are just
so
much better than the others, then having more options just leads to less options.
This is actually similar to how
losing
the ability to sacrifice Sakura-Tribe Elder after you put damage on the stack actually made a greater number of relevant options. The old rules made it so that there was only one real option, despite having a number of terrible ones legally available to you. Now, there is one fewer option — but there are actually a variety of plays possible, like “block the Elite Vanguard and don’t sacrifice,” or “block and sacrifice to get the land while preventing some damage,” or even “not blocking at all so as to gain information over the next turn to use to make your next decision.”
The new Extended format obviously had a lot fewer interactions possible than the old Extended, so we tried to evaluate what mattered. With the banning of Hypergenesis and Sword of the Meek
and
the rotation of many of the best combo cards, we tried to figure out what the extremes of the format were. We knew that we liked Punishing Fire with Grove of the Burnwillows for its ability to invalidate a number of archetypes entirely (including the alleged Faerie menace). As far as fast combos go, we were finding a variety of reasonable combos, none of which seemed particularly fast and degenerate.
Living End is a good baseline strategy — but at the end of the day, it’s still a graveyard combo, and graveyard combo decks are pretty freaking vulnerable to graveyard hate. Various two-card combo decks all sort of end up as the same basic deck, meaning one is generally the “best” in the abstract — which seemed like Ad Nauseam, given its synergy with Mystical Teachings (compare to Hive Mind + Pact of the Titan). The role of Storm Combo may no longer feature any actual storm spells, but it
is
alive and well with Pyromancer Ascension. As far as Big Spell combos go, Scapeshift was certainly near the top of our list. Valakut + Scapeshift was clearly a very powerful interaction… though without Ravnica duals, it was hard to imagine a particularly consistent and interactive build.
Faeries was always in the rotation; honestly, it was our absolute baseline test for new decks. Faeries did a good job of weaning out the weak from the strong. If our crazy brews couldn’t beat Faeries, we generally wouldn’t even give them a shot against Mono-Red or combo (our other extremes of the format).
While we were having a blast coming up with deck after deck, all signs pointed back to the where we started. Keep in mind that before we actually arrived in Amsterdam, we didn’t yet have the Treehouse Doran deck, and I hadn’t seen Nassif’s White Weenie in action. We didn’t think we had broken the format by any stretch of the imagination…. but I knew the Grixis deck was good, and I was just trying to come up with the best decks I could to bring to the table when we all got together in California, at Nationals, and Amsterdam.
My problems with the combo decks were that they were either not quite fast enough, or not quite resilient enough in the face of the hate. My problem with the aggro decks were their weakness to Punishing Fires (a weakness that Kibler and company cleverly sidestepped by taking out the Noble Hierarchs and adding — of all things! — Loam Lion).
The strange thing was that so many of the decks all seemed to be vying for the same position in the metagame. With so many people trying to be the beatdown or the combo deck or the mid-range deck, control seemed a fantastic place to position yourself… As long as your control deck was proactive enough to not lose to random decks.
Obviously, I have a history of somewhat of a
predilection
for control decks, so it’s hardly surprising that I’d be spending so much time working on one for this event, but it wasn’t just bias, as there was no denying the results the deck was getting. Most players tend to avoid building control decks early in the life of a format, as it’s very difficult to react to a format unless you can accurately predict what most people will do. Once you understand what most other people will do, you can react to them a bit and position yourself to get consistent edges against their strategies and tactics.
For this format, I wanted to be the Punishing Fire deck that didn’t lose to Punishing Fires, as well as feature a variety of creature removal in the maindeck — which also included plenty of fast defense. I realized early on that a control deck was very likely going to either be a “loses to creatures in game 1” deck or a “loses to spell-based decks (combo, but also control) in game 1″ deck — and I wanted to be the “loses to spells” deck, since I anticipated far more random creature decks than spells decks.
Additionally, losing game 1 to spells isn’t as bad, given how effective your sideboard options are. A good sideboarding plan can actually lead to post-sideboard game win percentages north of 80%. For instance, we considered Ad Nauseam a good matchup, despite being around 20% game 1. Some key permission, discard, and Extirpate, combined with cutting the dead cards, can actually make the post-sideboard games extremely favorable.
Whereas losing game 1 to creatures is dangerous — because any reasonable control build that is completely tuned against creatures will tend to defeat them nowhere near as reliably as an anti-spell deck against spells. If you can’t win more than 65% per game after sideboarding, then auto-conceding game 1 is rocky.
That’s not to say that we didn’t respect spell decks, as we generally thought the spell decks were better than the low-technology, early creature decks. As such, it was pretty vital to have permission. The combination of Mana Leak (once it was spoiled) and Cryptic Command was surely going to provide the backbone of the permission, just as these twin strategic concepts of Punishing Fire and permission provided the backbone that the rest of the deck was built around. For clarity, let me show you the list we ended up with:
As you can see, the core of the deck has remained relatively intact — though there are a number of crucial changes in strategy, in addition to just cleaning up the mana base and what not. In an effort to provide some insight into the thought process behind the deck, I’ll attempt to explain the rationale behind the initial ideas, as well as any changes that were made to those elements.
Mana Leak was an obvious replacement for Broken Ambitions, but I did try a number of some Brokens in addition to the Mana Leaks. But they were really just not powerful enough to pull their weight. The more interesting change was the Spell Burst becoming Logic Knot. I have been a fan of Spell Burst since day 1, as it is nice reliable hard counter late — and the possibility of gaining card advantage or even locking someone out makes it a particularly juicy Teachings target. As testing went on, Spell Burst was okay, though a bit clunky and unwieldy. The buyback just wasn’t coming up often enough to matter, since we were rarely short on stuff to win games going long. Negate, Countersquall, and Logic Knot were the other primary possibilities.
Cryptic Command needs no explanation as my love for it is surpassed only by my love for my girlfriend, my parents, Jace the Mind Sculptor, fried chicken, and life itself.
It took me one game to appreciate how little the two life mattered compared to being able to cast Negate off of Grove of the Burnwillows — ruling out Countersquall. Negate looked decent, though admittedly lackluster in a number of creature matchups, and design philosophy was to beat the creature matchups. Logic Knot is an oft-overlooked option that can often start serving as a hard counter on turn 2. They certainly get much weaker the more you play, but the first one is a pretty big free-roll, especially once we added the Preordains. Having a hard counter that you can hold up when you cast Cruel is huge, especially with Teachings. Spell Burst was just not reliable in this area.
The Teachings package was certainly not a given, and many iterations of the deck didn’t feature it. There’s no shortage of card advantage available to a blue mage, so it wasn’t like we
needed
it. We actually cut when MJ pointed out that Jace and Cruel were drawing most of the cards. We never even Teachinged for Careful Consideration (which we pretty much always wanted to be Jace).
He pointed to a general weakness of the deck that it was a bit top-heavy and did not mulligan well. The solution? Those Preordains that I love so much! If they were too good not to play in Standard, why not Extended?
My first response was to point at the seven tapped lands, five filters, and only six lands that could even
cast
a turn 1 Preordain. When would have time to Preordain? Surely not on turn 2, since we want to be able to represent Mana Leak. MJ’s reply was subtly brilliant:
“We play them on turn 3. What else are we doing on the third turn?”
Wow. The man made a good point. We still had two Mulldrifters at that point, as MJ had initially fought the Teachings. His thinking was that Preordain was providing our selection, so we wanted our card drawers to just give raw card advantage, plus Mulldrifter was nice with Cruel. Eventually PV and LSV talked us off the ledge, as Mystical Teachings was still in our sideboard and we boarded it in almost every matchup. The ability to Mystical for Extirpate and Consume the Meek proved too good an option to pass up. Besides, we weren’t really losing very often after playing Cruel, whether a creature was in the yard or not.
Still on the explanation of Teachings, let’s look more closely at those two bullets that swung the card for us so much. First of all, Consume the Meek was a surprising choice for a lot of people, but it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider just how many creatures Smother kills. In over 90% of circumstances, Consume the Meek is at least as effective as a Damnation, with the primary exception being Living End — a matchup we were finding favorable anyway on account of our cheap permission, access to sweepers, Cryptics to tap, Extirpate, a stable mana base, and sideboarded Relics. So often they would force their combo through, and we just wouldn’t care.
I believe it was Tom “@SemiSober” Martell who first suggested Consume the Meek maindeck… and when I finally got around to trying it (i.e., when GerryT told me to), I immediately fell in love with it. The key was to stop comparing it to Damnation and to compare it to Volcanic Fallout. Often, we were using Volcanic Fallout just as a sweeper that we could Teachings for. The problem? Volcanic Fallout is pretty bad against most decks that aren’t Faeries. I mean, obviously it’s good against Elves (the definition of an easy game), as well as being fine against White Weenie — but against almost everyone else, it was pretty awful. Punishing Fire really lessens the need for such a tool, and Faeries is a good matchup for us anyway. Why not just put the Fallouts in the board, and rely on Consume the Meek in game 1 to catch up if we fall behind a Bitterblossom?
Adding a Consume the Meek was a huge increase in the amount of sweeping we were really able to do, as now we could functionally Teachings for Damnation by turn 4-5 most of the time — especially with the Preordains, which
really
make one-ofs like Damnation and Grave Titan feel like a lot more. I know I’ve written a lot about Preordain, so I’m trying to avoid beating a dead horse — but seriously, it
is
the blue Lightning Bolt. You don’t have to play it, but that should be the default.
In the words of Michael Jacob: “Not playing Preordain in decks with at least three Islands is a mistake.”
Hyperbole aside, keep in mind that we’re only talking Extended on up. Eternal formats have so many more even more powerful options that Preordain is sometimes (but not always) drowned out. You may be asking: why all this fuss when Ponder is available? Well, Ponder is better for looking for one card — that Yawgmoth’s Will, that Pyromancer Ascension, that Polymorph. Preordain is better for just getting a little value. If you just want to clean up your draws and smooth things out, Preordain is unbelievably efficient. Just try it. If you are playing blue spell decks (not creature decks, like Mythic), then suspend your disbelief. I can’t tell you how many people have already written to me thanking me for suggestions like, “have you tried Preordain instead of Everflowing Chalice?” once they win their FNM that week. Every opening hand looks
so
much better with a Preordain in it. With decks like these, your mid-game and late-game often end up pretty insane, so finding a way to gain a percentage at the beginning is a huge boon.
Using so many cheap reactive cards and potent game swinging effects like Consume the Meek, Extirpate, and Punishing Fires, meant that selection was more important than card draw, especially when we could just rely on Jace the Mind Sculptor and Cruel Ultimatum to win any games where we live long enough to use them. Why do we need to draw 2 at a time, when we can just have all the right answers at the right times, then rely on a single Jace or Cruel to carry us?
Speaking of Extirpate, we added the Extirpate when we realized the prevalence of graveyard combo decks (not to mention hitting Punishing Fire, which it really does much of the time despite the Grove of the Burnwillows trick and other Teachings decks). Even against aggro decks, nearly every deck had a reasonable target, whether it was Vengevine, unearth creatures, a copy of a creature once we’d bounced another copy with Jace or Cryptic, and more. Even Faeries got annoyed by our snatching their Cryptics at a key moment. This bullet gets boarded out a lot (including against Faeries) — but it is such a remarkable bullet at the right times that having one maindeck literally swings match-ups by double-digit percentage points.
MJ’s other chief complaint about my deck after seeing it in action was its lack of a finisher. He pointed to the Broodmates we used in Kyoto, and wondered where they were in this deck. He was speaking of Grave Titan — a card I had often considered, but hadn’t actually been using lately in Extended. We tried two of them… and while we did shave one, it was a very hard-working card that won many games (we wound up cutting a Cruel for it).
It’s not just that it can be Teachings’ed for with Teferi out, since that doesn’t really come up that often. It’s more about Preordain and its ability to significantly increase your chances of just randomly mising. Additionally, it makes it feel like you have three Cruels in your deck on percentage, but without getting stuck with two in your hand.
A random Grave Titan is often game-winning; even when it’s stopped, the value it produces can be tremendous against creature decks. This is not even to speak of the fabled Nut Draw of turn 3 Coalition Relic, turn 4 Grave Titan. Mostly, the value it adds is that of an entirely new dimension: it gives us another tactical weapon to use in specific board states where a Cruel or a Damnation would not suffice. While Cruel is better, it is generally way better to have one of each than two Cruels (and by a lot).
When you play these blue decks with tons of library manipulation, playing lots of seemingly random cards can actually give you a very versatile array of tools for combating the opponent that make it nearly impossible to play around (as opposed to play against someone who has four Mana Leaks, four Path to Exiles, four Day of Judgments — a configuration that’s often very easy to play around), as well as making your card filtering that much better (by having so many radically different options).
A minor change we made was switching Slaughter Pact to Lightning Bolt when MJ pointed out that Slaughter Pact always looked terrible in the new format (which was only in because it is a Teachings deck, you’re supposed to have a Slaughter Pact…. right?) Additionally, we cut the Careful Consideration (which was also grandfathered in from prior Teachings decks). Our reasoning was that we really just never Teachingsed for it, and we just liked drawing Jace naturally most of the time.
The mana base improved with a better understanding of what so many basic Mountains does to your mana base. Initially I had more Sunken Ruins, figuring that we didn’t have that much black…. so it was nice to have a single land that makes double black. What I came to find was that with Preordain, it was generally pretty easy to get double black, and that getting stuck with a Sunken Ruins and a Grove of the Burnwillows was a much more common occurrence. Adding Cascade Bluffs to a deck that already has too much red seems strange — but the key is that it’s actually like adding blue mana. Picture, for instance, two Groves, Cascade Bluffs, and Crumbling Necropolis. This makes it very clear why we preferred Bluffs to Ruins.
The Urborg was another suggestion by Paulo. I think he drew the Swamp and asked why it wasn’t an Urborg — though he may have just been watching a game.
The snap answer is Path to Exile, but that’s not realistic. There aren’t very many Paths in the environment, let alone creatures in this deck
to
Path— and even if it comes up, just get an Island. Urborg works super-well with Scalding Tarns (when you’re low on life) as well as turning out Grove (making your Sunken Ruins better).
A Reflecting Pool that became a Graven Cairns was another change that tried to mitigate the drawback of playing Grove of the Burnwillows in a deck like this. When we got screwed by the double-Grove draw enough, we actually cut the fourth — a move that’s
still
disputed in our testing circles. The use of Preordain really does make it easy enough to find a Grove — though the increase in Tectonic Edges that’s sure to come would surely make a fourth more appealing (if anyone played this format before it rotated).
Why a Creeping Tar Pit? With the removal of a Sunken Ruins, we wanted to re-up the black count a little and Creeping Tar Pit just wins games against Faeries. It is often fine, providing random blocking, or clocking people with Bolts and Cryptic to tap their team — but you haven’t lived till you have faced Faeries playing turn 1 Visions, turn 2 Bitterblossom, and you just attack with Tar Pit every turn till they die.
Many players are quick to speak of Jace in this format, claiming the format is too aggressive — but it’s not just my unnatural love for the Mind Sculptor that has me advocating it here. What creature decks are there? White Weenie and Doran are both super soft to Jace, as neither have hasty creatures, and the bounce ability can be a total blow-out in both. Jace is actually awesome against Red, as it just soaks up so much damage — plus, your usual way to win is to just fateseal them until you Ultimate them out.
Jace isn’t at his best against Punishing Fire, but at most points in the game, he can actually get quite a bit of card selection and mana advantage before they take him, often involving a seven-point life swing and a fair bit of scrying and Brainstorming.
Playing super-cheap and efficient reactive cards is a great way to get enough tempo to really capitalize on Jace. Remember: when you’re Jaceing, what other card advantage do you need? Instead, just focusing on staying ahead of the board enough to have such a luxury is paramount.
The last big question for the maindeck is: why Cruel Ultimatum? The blue and red cards have been explained above — but couldn’t Damnation be Wrath and Terminate be Path? Cruel is awesome to be sure — but Baneslayer Angel, Disenchant effects, and plenty of other great options meant that white would bring advantages of its own.
At the end of the day, though, black offers much better mana. Try to build the mana base with U/W/R, and you’ll see what I mean. Crumbling Necropolis could be replaced by Vivid Creek — but that really is a pretty big downgrade. What about Creeping Tar Pit? Celestial Colonnade is nowhere near the same thing. Additionally, flashing back Teachings and casting Extirpate are a must.
The sideboard starts with the anti-spell suite of three Negates, two Thoughtseizes, and a Duress. Both permission and discard are potent tools and they actually work better together. If it was all discard, you’d be more at the mercy of the top of their library — plus, you miss opportunities to steal tempo when they cast their powerful spells. If you use all permission, then they can systematically pick apart your permission and build towards a critical turn where they bottleneck you on mana.
Additionally, discard makes Extirpate five times more effective — though using Extirpate as a Counterspell is an important tactical maneuver (such as when you have two Counterspells against Ad Nauseam, they go for it with a million Pacts, you counter, they counter back, you Extirpate their Pacts and that’s game, boys).
The miser’s Duress was just because I wanted to have another card to bring in against Mono-Red. Flashfreeze often served as an anti-spell card, but it had a lot of overlap with various aggressive strategies, as we wanted help against both Flame Javelin and Scapeshift.
We had three Relics for a long time, but switched one to a Thought Hemorrhage at the last minute to gain added value in some matchups where we were a little short on cards to bring in. Graveyard decks are alive and well, and being able to fight them is clutch. Obviously Living End hates a Relic, but we’re good against them anyway. It is more about the Pyromancer Ascension and Dredge matchups that we need the Relics.
Volcanic Fallout as a two-of is actually very important, as it generally takes exactly two to beat Faeries without any help. This means that a single Mystical Teachings provides a plan that, if undisrupted, will beat them (while they are focusing on attacking our Punishing Fire). They can also be brought in as sweepers against miscellaneous creature decks — which, when combined with an extra Damnation and an extra Consume the Meek, make our creature match-ups quite good.
(Yes, the White Weenie matchup is quite good, despite Rietzl 3-0ing MJ — as Rietzl would have 3-0ed Kasparov in Chess that Sunday.)
A basic element of this Grixis list that can’t be stressed enough is the use of reactive cards as Time Walks. We don’t play Mana Leaks to take control; we don’t play removal to stop each and every threat. The point is to give us the tempo needed to make it long enough for Punishing Fire, Teachings, Jace, and Cruel to take over the game. We’re actually a very proactive deck — since if we don’t have to use our resources to buy time, we can actually present a steady stream of powerful card advantages engines that attack from a variety of angles, not to mention a large number of incidental damage sources, like Tar Pits and Bolts. When you’re making a control deck for a new format, a proactive plan to take over the game is invaluable. Rather than just getting ahead by two cards and protecting a millstone, we want to play cards that can win the game by themselves.
While our testing group was split between White Weenie, Doran, and Grixis, in the end, we all felt vindicated, as it appears we were all right. Having all three of these decks involved in our preparation process helped bring all three up, as they all continued to adapt and find new technology, such as Paul’s last-minute Mana Tithes, Kibler’s seven maindeck discard spells and cutting of creatures that die to Punishing Fires, and our sideboarding up to six sweepers.
What makes this not inbreeding? We aren’t talking about leaving us vulnerable to something, but rather removing a vulnerability to some previously unknown danger. Most deckbuilding errors that people call inbred playtesting is actually connected to manufacturing a weakness where there was previously none. If you instead focus on removing weaknesses, you’ll generally have little risk of such so-called inbreeding — which is really just a colorful way of saying, “over-compensating for recent information.”
Stay tuned for crazy stories from Pro Tour Amsterdam! Until next time, may you always find a way to do what you love.
Patrick Chapin
“The Innovator”