Sean’s journey through the murky waters of the Extended metagame takes a surprising turn today. Instead of honing his No Stick deck into oblivion, or picking up on an established archetype, he turns to a couple of strong decks and mashes them into a new build that promises power on numerous fronts. Looking for something special for Grand Prix: Dallas? Maybe Sean has the deck for you…A few weeks ago, in my review of Planar Chaos for Constructed formats, I included a build for a post-Planar Chaos Psychatog deck that I was working on at the bottom of the article. I was enthusiastically looking forward to not playing Scepter-Chant anymore, because despite the high quality of the deck I was just running into random troubles with it and getting beaten down by 1/1s until I died sometimes… or staring down multiple Rotlung Reanimators, wondering why I was about to lose to some terrible Black/White deck. While I didn’t doubt the deck’s overall quality, I was starting to have doubts about my desire to play it, when I could play my goofy super-greedy four-color Madness deck instead:
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Meddling Mage
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Vexing Sphinx
4 Psychatog
4 Circular Logic
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Careful Study
4 Stifle
4 Gemstone Caverns
4 Polluted Delta
4 Windswept Heath
2 Breeding Pool
1 Godless Shrine
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Temple Garden
1 Watery Grave
1 Hallowed Fountain
3 Island
2 Forest
Frankly, I was looking to do anything other than stick with what I’d had, because I had a bad feeling about it… for the first time in a long time in thinking about playing the Scepter-Chant deck I wrote about in Carry A Big Stick, I was feeling nervous because I felt stagnant, like somehow I’d stood still and failed to innovate while the metagame around me innovated and changed into more vicious and deadly forms. While I was thinking about it, the day before the PTQ in Edison, New Jersey, I was thinking about the numerous deck innovations you see all over the place with Trinket Mage. It started in just one deck, Nassif’s Trinket-Angel deck, but at this point was seen in G/W decks, and U/W Tron sometimes, and all over the place. I wasn’t very happy with what I had, and I kept wishing I could have my sideboard back… ironic, because I was giving up eight of the fifteen slots because I was Wishing for those eight targets. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to have Trinket Mage in my Scepter-Chant deck, and came up with the following:
4 Trinket Mage
3 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Isochron Scepter
4 Orim’s Chant
4 Counterspell
4 Spell Snare
4 Fire / Ice
3 Chrome Mox
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Tormod’s Crypt
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Snow-Covered Island
2 Hallowed Fountain
2 Snow-Covered Plains
1 Academy Ruins
1 Steam Vents
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Ancient Den
1 Seat of the Synod
1 Great Furnace
Sideboard:
4 Meddling Mage
4 Descendant of Kiyomaro
3 Kataki, War’s Wage
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Pithing Needle
1 Tormod’s Crypt
I was really, really enthusiastic about playing this deck… I like hybrid theories to begin with, and this was just far enough out into left field to somehow please me. I kept trying to figure out how to squeeze everything from one version to the next, with the obvious cuts being the “spare” Teferi, the Cunning Wishes, and the Lightning Helixes I was playing in the main-deck of my “standard” Chant deck. There was also the one or two extra lands I was sneaking into my version of Scepter-Chant to help fight against aggro decks with land destruction sub-themes under the logic of “they’re good in the mirror too!” I could even run the snow-lands and gain and edge in the mirror match off name reputation alone, under the presumption that my opponent would “know” that they’d have to play around Mouth of Ronom for their Teferi. But Friday night as I was coming up with the deck, disaster struck in two ways…
The first was presumably an easy way, I kept trying to squeeze and squeeze until only the elements I considered important were left, and I was stuck with a 61-card deck and no solidly discernable sideboard plan. (The 61st card, the main-deck Pithing Needle, went the way of the Dodo when I asked myself what it was that I really, really needed to Pith game 1 anyway. Problem easily solved.) The second problem was harder, and a matter of confidence: I could maybe, maybe talk on the NYC Magic list that Brian David-Marshall set up, to try and arrange for the last-minute loan of all of these cards for the PTQ… but there was no chance that I’d get to playtest even a single game with the newborn hybrid creation. Feeling already as if I’d gone further and further down a descent into madness with my list of Scepter-Chant, first cutting Fact or Fiction from the main and now even murdering the sacred cow of Cunning Wish in order to squeeze in the maybe-suboptimal / maybe-gassy Trinket Mage, I wasn’t quite ready to make that leap of faith to the new creation and assume that everything would work out.
Sacred cows make tasty hamburgers, or so I was told Monday morning when I read Mark Rosewater article this week. By then, however, I’d chickened out and “stuck to my guns” with my normal list, performing my first-ever 0-2 drop at a PTQ since coming back from having quit the game… at this point something like two years now of at least doing better than going 0-2. A deck died stillborn, and I bemoaned the fact that Planar Chaos had not yet rotated in so I could play Damnation ‘Tog like I’d been building.
But decks are like a virus. They seethe in the darkest corners of your mind and intermingle, swapping parts and trading elements to create a “best” deck. One with all the combined strengths of those elements you had lying around in the deep nether-cockles of your cold, black heart, drawing the strength to defeat and humiliate your opponent from that inky blackness and learning to be immune to whatever forms of resistance they might put in your path. Like any other virus, it is present in many forms all across the world. While this deck was on my mind – Counterbalance-Tog cross-breeding with the bastardized Trinket-Chant deck I am now at this point destined never to play – Trinket-Tog decks were rearing their ugly head online in the Premier Events, chronicled by Craig “Scouseboy” Stevenson in his first article of “MODO Bandit Warlord” “The Online Outlook” and presented with a handy-dandy little link to a Deck-O-Pedia entry in this week’s Online Tech by Frank Karsten.
The deck floating around online in one version or another was this one:
Creatures (11)
Lands (23)
Spells (26)
- 3 Sensei's Divining Top
- 4 Counterspell
- 3 Smother
- 3 Thirst for Knowledge
- 2 Fact or Fiction
- 1 Tormod's Crypt
- 1 Engineered Explosives
- 1 Pithing Needle
- 2 Remand
- 3 Spell Snare
- 3 Counterbalance
Sideboard
Somewhere in here, I stayed home from work on President’s Day because I was home alone, and my fiancée Nicole had the car out in New Jersey visiting her mother, leaving me to navigate to work by public transit from our new apartment on the north shore of Long Island out in Suffolk County. This recent move sadly leaves me cut off far away from any other Magic-playing souls (and thus part of the recent difficulty in testing these madcap innovations of mine, with no real access to real-life testing partners and no God account like Mike Flores has to while away the hours testing whatever strikes his fancy on Magic Online). On that particular day, not wanting to have to leave the house to go to work when there was four inches of ice on the ground absolutely everywhere, I stayed home I played a lot on Magic Online. I drafted for several hours, and somewhere in there I had a brief conversation with Brian David-Marshall. Brian is a mad inventor of unusual and exotic things, a lover of Slivers and odd bits of string that other people don’t have figured out yet, like figuring out that Vesuvan Shapeshifter “might be good in Constructed.” When Brian talks, it’s a good idea to unclog your ears, and he was echoing my thoughts about putting Trinket Mage everywhere and how Psychatog might be good for Grand Prix: Dallas this weekend. Brian was talking about how much he wanted to put Trinket Mage into a Psychatog deck, now that Trinket Mage and Cabal Therapy were apparently “good enough” to add to a Green/White deck but somehow not good enough to play in their own main colors. I confessed that I tried to squeeze Trinket Mage into Affinity, earning much ridicule on the StarCityGames.com forums for that particular article by asking what they presumed to be an incredibly stupid question… and that I nearly worked out how to squeeze it into Scepter-Chant, but wasn’t quite there yet.
Like a virus, kernels of the deck were spreading far and wide, and like everyone else my runny nose and bloodshot eyes were just indicative of the transference of information. Pieces floated about everywhere as I tried to assemble them, taking my core build from the foot-notes of “Chaos Theory” and adding Trinket Mage instead of Cunning Wish, cutting one Tutor engine for another and seeing where it took me. Like with Structure and Force, it should come as no surprise that a U/B deck playing Counterbalance and Sensei’s Divining Top would likely want to play Dark Confidant, especially if one is to run with Brian’s theory and run with enough creatures to actually play Cabal Therapy as well. Slowly but surely the deck re-formed, absent of any Planar Chaos cards and taunting me for my initial hesitation in “doing the work” prior to the Planar Chaos rotation, waiting to see what came out of Grand Prix: Dallas since my upcoming PTQ wasn’t till two weeks afterwards. With a little less laziness and a little more thought, I might have actually played a deck that had advanced with the times to my PTQ this past weekend, instead of feeling stagnant and going 0-2 for whatever self-defeating reason one might want to pin on my performance that week. (Forum poster’s note: It could however be that I am just terrible at Magic. Brought to you in advance by Kenneth Nagle, formerly known as Norryt.)
My list didn’t come off too differently than the “online” yardstick, just with more four-ofs and no Fact or Fictions anywhere in the list because I felt two already-synergistic card engines (Trinket Mage finds artifacts, Thirst for Knowledge discards artifacts for three cards…). Sensei’s Divining Top and Dark Confidant really made me feel as if trying to squeeze in more expensive card-drawing spells would be a waste of time. (Maybe I’m crazy, but with all these new decks splicing in Destructive Flow technology, my faith in four-mana card drawing spells went from low to nonexistent.)
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Vault of Whispers
1 Swamp
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Academy Ruins
2 Watery Grave
3 Seat of the Synod
4 Island
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Counterspell
4 Dark Confidant
4 Trinket Mage
4 Spell Snare
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Smother
3 Psychatog
3 Sensei’s Divining Top
3 Counterbalance
2 Chrome Mox
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Pithing Needle
1 Tormod’s Crypt
But the question that had to be asked is… if this is where everyone else is at, can you go further? Following the modeling for U/W Tron, which started with the “standard” version and then advanced to U/W Trinket-Tron before becoming something else… can we push further in our design to try and find this mythical “something else” and make the Tenacious Tog version of Tenacious Tron? What’s next in the chain of events following up after the Trinket Mage addition to “Structure and Tog”?
Creatures (12)
Lands (24)
Spells (24)
- 3 Sensei's Divining Top
- 4 Counterspell
- 2 Smother
- 3 Gifts Ungiven
- 1 Crucible of Worlds
- 4 Thirst for Knowledge
- 2 Engineered Explosives
- 1 Pithing Needle
- 3 Counterbalance
- 1 Damnation
Sideboard
Now, I won’t go off and say this is the Best Deck Ever In Extended… that is the purview of other writers. I won’t even go so far as to say this decklist is as tuned as I would like… there is a very broad card-pool in Extended, and one card in either direction makes a huge difference. It is, of course, possible I have merely forgotten the existence of a single card that I would love to include, considering we have from Invasion to Planar Chaos to work with. But for control elements we are limited away from some of the powerful choices of Tenacious Tron by the fact that, well, we aren’t running the Tron, and while we shy away from direct countermagic in order to put more powerful elements in for Gifts Ungiven packages, we also have better colored mana to work with that allows us to use the powerful Counterbalance lock-down elements instead.
In some ways, this deck is insane; I don’t mean that as in, “THIS DECK IS INSANE!!!!11!!!one!!!eleven!!!1” as you may see in the occasional Forum post. I mean that this deck is cracked in the head because it is trying to take every good “advantage” engine and mash them all into the same deck, and I mean every good advantage engine (like, including Psychatog, duh). Just look at it:
1. Sensei’s Divining Top + Fetchlands
2. Sensei’s Divining Top + Counterbalance
3. Sensei’s Divining Top + Dark Confidant
4. Thirst for Knowledge plus Artifacts / Artifact Lands
5. Gifts Ungiven, period.
6. Psychatog, period.
7. Academy Ruins, period.
8. Trinket Mage plus Silver Bullets
9. Crucible of Worlds plus Utility Lands (Fetchlands, Cabal Pit / Cephalid Coliseum / Ghost Quarter)
10. Kataki, War’s Wage
11. Damnation!
12. Razormane Masticore!
13. Engineered Explosives (… plus Academy Ruins to recur it!)
When a deck fits together just right, it’s a thing of beauty. You can customize it as needed out of the sideboard, slotting in additional tools against beatdown or control as appropriate, then ride the multiple interlocking card-advantage engines to some sort of victory. Admittedly I “cheated” on this one and did actually use one Planar Chaos card, three copies after sideboarding… but seeing how the 20th was yesterday as of the writing of this article, I was no longer under any time pressure to try and pull this one off in time for a specific Pro Tour Qualifier.
This is a complex deck, and some of the numbers might not make a lot of sense… after all, one key theory of mine is that two is the worst number in Magic deck-building. Four is often right, and one is often right as well… four copies are something you want to draw lots of all the time, and one copy is there to Tutor for when you get your Tutor engine online. Three is kind of like four, insofar as you get your threes as cards you want to draw but don’t want to draw two copies of, because the second copy is worse than the first or because you don’t need it until later in the game. (In this case, the first explanation justifies Gifts Ungiven and Counterbalance, while the latter explains the absent fourth copy of Psychatog.) But two just feels wrong. It’s not something you’re going to draw very often, and you clearly want it there as more than just a Tutor target, so it feels like a tuning error. In the case of the two Smothers in the main, there because they were all I could still fit in after putting the rest of the pieces together. You often want to have four, after sideboarding, and there are times when you don’t need more than just one to put into a Gifts pile. It’s an important tool against aggro, so I filled the deck with the rest of the slots I had to put towards Smother, wanting four but being inflexible on the land count and the numbers of the other cards.
Two Engineered Explosives is specifically for Gifts piles, instead of just the one copy to Tutor for, because then you can put both Trinket Mage and Engineered Explosives into your Gifts pile without invalidating Trinket Mage as a potential “extra” Engineered Explosives. Tog is already a solid strategy against most players because it’s so powerful, but try Gifts Ungiven for Trinket Mage / Engineered Explosives / Damnation / whatever else you want (Razormane Masticore?) against aggressive decks. Your real-life opponent may in fact just disconnect… but you’ll need something else before you get there, probably, like Counterbalance to cover your butt or early Smothers to keep enough pressure off you so that you don’t just roll over and die. It’s nice that you have such powerful cards, but if you don’t play the early game your “late game” cards will be just that: late.
Essentially, this deck has everything I’d be looking for… powerful card drawing, the ability to lock the opponent out of the game (Counterbalance / Top, Explosives / Ruins, or Crucible / Pit), a broken Tutor engine (thanks to Gifts Ungiven) and everyone’s favorite smiling wonder, Dr. Teeth himself.
Its advantage over its predecessors are unique: compared to “traditional” Trinket-Tog, which is just a funny concept because it’s existed for all of a week and a half or so now, it gains the power of Gifts Ungiven into hard-to-handle board positions, like the Crucible of Worlds advantage engine with your choice of Ghost Quarter (breaks up Tron and other tricksy manabases), Cephalid Coliseum (draw three, k thx), or Cabal Pit (kill your man with Buyback). There’s also the inevitability of finding it, even against opponents who are trying to break it up, because the pieces of the “combo” protect themselves and assemble independently once you reveal them with Gifts Ungiven regardless of what your opponent actually gives you. Compared to “traditional” Tenacious Tron, you lose some of the vulnerability to Destructive Flow and greatly improve your colored mana, letting you play around more with the Crucible of Worlds part of the “engine” as another means of gaining advantage. Oh, and you’ve got far more card advantage cards, and don’t have to worry about assembling the Tron before you can focus on interacting with the opponent to specifically outplay them. Just stay alive and cast Gifts Ungiven, and the rest should more or less cover itself. You have similar lock-down processes, and swap out some of the more expensive kill conditions for Dark Confidant and Trinket Mage… and get to play Psychatog, too.
It may be a bastard half-breed of a deck… but it’s a good one, and it’s got its bases covered. Have fun at the Grand Prix…
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com
“I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do ain’t nice…”
Wolverine