Grand Prix Orlando was a weird tournament for me. I’d done quite a bit of preparation for the event and really liked my deck. Things didn’t really go my way, however, and I found myself sitting on the sidelines after only seven rounds. I even managed to lose the very first round of the Win-a-Box side event that I entered—and was late showing up for, so I suffered the misfortune of the entire tournament hall and GGsLive crowd hearing my name called to please report to the side event area.
But that’s Magic. Sometimes you just don’t win. All you can do is try to ensure that you give yourself the best opportunity to do so, and frankly I can’t say I did that. I liked my deck going into the event, but in retrospect there were a number of changes I could have made to improve it. I felt like I played well overall, but there was one incredibly boneheaded play that I made during the event. I’m not sure if I would have won the game in which it happened otherwise, but I still can’t claim that I did everything I could have done to give myself the best chance of victory.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
I’d been playing a lot of Standard in the weeks leading up to GP Orlando. For a while, I really liked my B/R Infect deck. It had some powerful things going on and matched up well against Illusions in particular, thanks to the effectiveness of tons of removal alongside Contagion Clasp, Whipflare, and Chandra, the Firebrand. I liked the deck’s matchups against Wolf Run and U/W Humans as well, with control decks being what I didn’t want to sit down across, but even those were winnable.
That was before SCG Open: Atlanta, however, and Gindy’s win completely changed the face of Delver decks everywhere. And that’s not even an exaggeration. Before SCG Open: Atlanta, the typical Delver deck I played against online had Phantasmal Bears and Images and the like. Some might have had Midnight Haunting and Runechanter’s Pike, as well, but they were still a deck full of creatures that were fragile against removal, with the exception of Geist. After Gindy’s win, there was scarcely a Phantasmal Bear to be seen in the Magic Online queues, and all of a sudden Invisible Stalker and Sword of War and Peace were everywhere.
This was a big problem for my B/R Infect deck, which relied upon Chandra and spot removal to take over the game against Illusions. Sure, I had Whipflares, but their Stalkers and Geists outnumbered them, and if an opponent was savvy enough to play out a Sword and wait to play their hexproof creature until they could equip, I was as good as dead. The creature base of Crusader, Vatmother, and Skithiryx looked even worse against unblockable creatures than it already did against a playset of Vapor Snags. I knew I had to look somewhere else.
That somewhere else was Daybreak Ranger. Sure, Daybreak Ranger doesn’t deal with an equipped Stalker either, but it does handle all of the rest of the creatures in the deck and can block and trade with Geist in a pinch. Being able to gun down flipped Delvers and Spirit tokens gives you serious power against the non-hexproof portion of the Moorland Haunt decks. On top of that, it’s absolutely devastating against U/W Humans, against which it can singlehandedly win games by eating every non-Mirran Crusader creature in their deck, and I expected Hero of Bladehold and friends to make a strong showing.
Some people have accused me of trying too hard to make fetch happen, but I’m convinced that Daybreak Ranger is going to ultimately prove to be one of the best cards in Innistrad. I don’t particularly care about the value of the deck box I have full of them, and I certainly don’t care about my reputation as a Magic finance prognosticator; that’s just not what I do. Daybreak Ranger will be one of the defining cards of Standard. It’s just a matter of when. That said, one of the problems Daybreak Ranger has had for a long time is a lack of proper support. Ranger clearly wants to be in a deck with Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves because it’s at its most devastating when you can play it out on turn two. Standard isn’t exactly teeming with quality green three-drops these days—Daybreak is as good as it gets. There isn’t even so much as a Trained Armodon to be had—the only 3/3 for three mana is Glissa, and using both her and Daybreak Ranger in the same deck is making some serious demands on your mana base.
The two-drops aren’t the best, either. Of the available options, Viridian Emissary stands tall amidst a very short field. I was hot on Skinshifter in the old Standard, but the prevalence of Gut Shot and Vapor Snag make him a poor choice these days. I went so far as to try out Garruk’s Companion, but he failed to impress.
Not everyone in Daybreak’s supporting cast is a slouch, though. While Emissary is merely passable, Thrun is downright outstanding right now. It was actually Thrun that sold me on wanting to play G/R at the Grand Prix, which says a lot about the shift in the metagame over the past few weeks. Back when the Lord of Illusions version was the most popular Delver deck, Thrun was terrible, since every opponent had a full set of Hero’s Demise waiting for you to tap out for your troll. The recent versions, though, tend not to play any Phantasmal Images in their maindeck and have at most a few in the sideboard. That makes Thrun not only an excellent threat that can punish them for keeping lands open for Mana Leak but also a solid answer to Geist that they can’t easily push past with Vapor Snag.
Here’s the list I played at the Grand Prix:
Creatures (18)
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (23)
Spells (13)
This probably looks familiar to those of you who follow the Magic Online “What’s Happening” page (and if you don’t, you should really start because it’s a great resource for information), since I played a very similar list to a 3-1 record in a Daily Event the week before the Grand Prix. The big change from that iteration was the addition of Batterskull, which I moved to the maindeck from the sideboard in the last couple days before the event.
Batterskull may seem like it’s poorly positioned in a world of Vapor Snags, but in my experience that’s only true in a control deck that doesn’t have many other creatures to equip with it. When you resolve a Batterskull against a Delver deck, they pretty much have to Vapor Snag the token to avoid the huge life swing. The next time you equip it, you’re effectively getting a 4/4 lifelink haste creature for the same cost as your original investment. And if that creature is Thrun, they’re in some serious, serious trouble. Oh, and have you ever had the pleasure of equipping Nightfall Predator with Batterskull? “Attack you. Before blocks, fight that. Gain eight. Damage? Gain eight. Your turn!”
Sword of War and Peace is also pretty awesome, especially in a deck with mana creatures. Against control or W/U Human decks, a sequence of “Bird, Sword, equip it, attack you three times, win” happens more often than you might think. This deck doesn’t get quite as many free Sword wins as Blade Breaker used to, since that deck had Lotus Cobra to power out turn three Sword/equip without even stunting your mana development, but you can still take huge chunks out of your opponent’s life total incredibly early in the game. It just so happens that Sword is extremely powerful at any point in the game against Humans, too, letting Thrun or whoever else sneak by their entire team for the killing blow.
The burn suite is aimed mostly at Delver decks and Mirran Crusader. Incinerate gets the most playing time because it can kill a Mirran Crusader with Honor of the Pure in play, which is a situation that comes up often enough that you need to be prepared for it. Galvanic Blast gets the nod over Gut Shot and Geistflame because it can kill a flipped Delver, and Arc Trail has the most all-around blowout potential. The single Devil’s Play can burn small creatures early, medium-to-large creatures in the midgame, and opponent’s faces when things go late.
Of the two Garruks, I like Relentless more right now, since getting on the board faster is generally more important than going bigger. When you’re ahead, Garruk Relentless is excellent at solidifying your advantage by eating opposing creatures, and when you’re behind, he can often at least trade with a Delver rather than just make a token and die. The maindeck Primal Hunters were my least favorite part of my Grand Prix deck—they were more of a relic of an earlier build that I had gotten from Martin Juza that I didn’t get around to finding a good replacement for in time for the tournament.
As far as the tournament itself, I lost in the first round I played to a G/W Token deck. I won the first game convincingly and then flooded out severely in game two and stalled on lands in game three. That mana flood game was where my ridiculous blunder of the tournament came in, however. We were in something of a stalemate situation, although he had a Shine of Loyal Legions with quite a few counters and had just played an Elspeth that he ticked up. I had a Batterskull Germ with Sword of War and Peace on it, while he had Batterskull and Mortarpod equipped to a Golem token. I drew Garruk, Primal Hunter for my turn and played it and activated the -3 ability to draw six cards. In response, my opponent Dismembered my token, making it a 1/1. I then drew another Garruk as my single card…which I proceeded to play and activate immediately, only to realize that my token was still, in fact, 1/1. Oops.
I then went on to beat a Tempered Steel deck with my unintentionally hateful sideboard and then lost to a U/W Human deck when I couldn’t beat the third Hero of Bladehold off the top in game one and drew only one burn spell for his three Mirran Crusaders in game three. After commenting that I just hoped to dodge Wolf Run for the rest of the day (since that was the one matchup I really didn’t like), I of course immediately played against a Wolf Run ramp deck and picked up my third loss, knocking me out of the tournament. To rub it in, I went on to lose to a G/W Swords deck in my win-a-box tournament when I stalled on land against a turn-three Hero of Bladehold. Sweet.
Still, I was happy with my deck, and I sought out people to play me throughout the weekend. I ended up with a very positive record in pretty much all of my games played outside of tournaments—but more importantly, learned some things about how I might improve the deck moving forward.
The biggest problem I had with the deck was its consistency. While the deck has a number of solid ways to stop a Geist of Saint Traft, for instance, you can very easily get hands that have only mana creatures, lands, and removal and die to it very easily. Similarly, you can have a strong start and then draw into a clump of lands and elves and just peter out and lose. This is obviously something that can happen to any deck but is more of an issue for midrange decks with mana acceleration than for most others because you have a higher density of mana.
The most obvious answer to this problem was Green Sun’s Zenith. I’d originally dismissed it because I didn’t have good creatures at every casting cost and didn’t go higher than Thrun but realized that it was easily worth shifting the contents of the deck around to plug what had proven to be a significant hole in the deck. Green Sun’s Zenith could give me more virtual copies of all of my mana creatures, my early game defense, my Thruns (albeit counterable copies), and—yes—even my Daybreak Rangers. I shifted around some of the numbers to accommodate the demands of the card and ended up with this:
Creatures (18)
- 2 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Primeval Titan
- 3 Thrun, the Last Troll
- 3 Viridian Emissary
- 4 Daybreak Ranger
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (23)
Spells (15)
Primeval Titan gives the deck a more powerful top end in games that go long even with just a single copy, and Acidic Slime provides answers to artifacts and enchantment in game one. Zenith also allows me to shave the numbers on the Llanowar Elves and Viridian Emissaries without dramatically reducing my ability to have early plays, ensuring I have a greater density of high impact cards as the game progresses.
I like this version of the deck a lot and think it has a lot of game against any of the other creature decks in Standard and holds up well against control as well. That said, if ramp experiences a resurgence in the wake of Conley’s GP Orlando win, I’d be hesitant to sleeve this up for a major event. Daybreak Ranger is not who I want on my side when I’m staring down opposing Titans in the early turns of the game. If the field you expect is one full of Delvers, Memnites, and Champion of the Parish, though? I can’t imagine a deck I’d rather be playing.
That’s it for this week. I’ve started to dip my toe into Modern, so I’m likely going to start exploring that in my articles between now and PT Honolulu. If there’s anything else in particular you’d like to see me cover, please post in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.
Also, for anyone who likes watching Magic from the comfort of your browser window, I’ve begun to stream Magic Online regularly at www.twitch.tv/bmkibler. I typically post on Twitter whenever I’m live, so be sure to follow me there @bmkibler. See you on the interwebs!
Until next time,
bmk