Last week, we took a quick look into the world of Time Spiral Block Constructed, as I dipped into the format briefly to try and figure out what is going on. Looking at the inherent possibilities of the format, I built a deck… but did not really explain why some cards made the roll-call and others got left behind. This week, we’ll be looking at two different formats from two different perspectives, following up on the first-person experiences I’ve had so far with Block Constructed leading up to the Pro Tour in Yokohama in a few weeks, and having a look at the recent Standard-format Grand Prix as a “first look” at post-Planar Chaos Standard.
When we left off a week ago, I was reasonably certain that Momentary Blink had to go, from a Blue/Green “Best Of” deck that had some sketchy inclusions… as well as some pretty questionable holes missing, like the Scryb Rangers that apparently married Spectral Force a few months ago. With one week of online play under my belt, I’ve padded my MTGO account considerably… my net profit took me from sitting around on MTGO with one draft set and about ten tickets plus half a Red deck (the expensive cards like Char were present, but borrowed) to owning everything I’d borrowed, picking up a Momir Vig avatar because I’m told it’s fun, three draft sets of Ravnica-Guildpact-Dissension if I feel like goofing off, and two dozen tickets. I’d say that churning profits with the deck has gotten me about 60 tickets pure profit since last you heard from me, and I haven’t touched the deck since Sunday night for playtesting purposes.
A lot of suggestions were made about filling the Momentary Blink slots… Scryb Rangers, Search for Tomorrow, I’ve heard a lot of reasonable arguments. One argument, however, is more or less responsible for those large profits… and its name is Serrated Arrows. The deck in its current form:
Creatures (24)
- 4 Willbender
- 4 Mystic Snake
- 4 Wall of Roots
- 4 Spectral Force
- 4 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
- 4 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
Lands (25)
Spells (11)
Sideboard
To some, this would seem to be a mish-mash smattering of some of the best Blue and Green cards you could cherry-pick from the format. Spectral Force? Check. Teferi? Check. Vesuvan Shapeshifter? Check. Wall of Roots? Check. Harmonize? Check. After those, however, the card choices get a little bit weird… which is where we have to stop looking at the deck as an abstract thing and start trying to fill in the spaces surrounding the deck. We got by last week without understanding what was going on besides the thin rumors of good White Weenie beat-down decks and Block Constructed analogues of Dralnu du Louvre. This week we’re going to have a look at what’s actually going on and shaping all of these decisions, so that the unusual stance this deck takes on the format can be explained better.
Control, control, you must learn control!
Countermagic is good, but it can’t do everything. The countermagic in this format is more effective than some we’ve seen, as many say “Counter target spell” and have benefits like getting a 2/2 body, picking up a free Dragon, or forcing the opponent to discard a card. They all have disadvantages, because the only way you’ll counter a spell for anything less than three mana is by Spell Bursting it, and you can only profit on that exchange in the early game by picking off a Morph. The countermagic is not less effective… but it is certainly slower, meaning this is a format that is all about the mana. Fortunately, there is good mana development readily available – Wall of Roots works both the mana angle and early defense, charge-lands let you ramp up to very powerful late-game turns, Prismatic Lens is available to everyone and four out of five colors have a Totem besides. Green picks up some extra benefits everywhere, but that’s what makes it Green – Wall of Roots, Gemhide Sliver, Mwonvuli Acid-Moss, Search for Tomorrow, Hunting Wilds.
The control cards are expensive. The aggressive cards are cheap. The control cards are quite excellent, however, so the faster you can get there, the better they’ll be. Mana acceleration and early-game attrition are key, but that’s not really anything unusual. There is something very unusual about some cards in the format, though… the Split Second mechanic has a very large impact on the format, from what I have seen so far. Split Second cards are very hard to contain. Spend all the time in the world setting up Teferi – all the countermagic in your hand won’t help you when he’s targeted by Sudden Death. Sudden Shock, Sudden Death, and the rest of the Split Second crew make a traditional pure control strategy ineffective, meaning you have to work harder to secure your position against these cards (say, by forcing a discard first, via Haunting Hymn) or find a way to survive their impact.
Enter the Willbender.
When I designed the deck I was working on for the format, I was aware of the Split Second problem… and to another degree, the Teferi problem. Many of the best cards in the format force a non-interactive state on the game, where someone can do something to you and there’s nothing you can do about it… Teferi may as well give all of the opponent’s spells Split Second along with giving the creatures Flash, and the ‘actual’ Split Second cards are pretty good too, with even Sulfur Elemental having at least some home in the format so far. One card and one card only can interact with these otherwise non-interactive cards… and that is Willbender. I’d realized the countermagic in the format was weak, and so tried to exploit Mystic Snake and this little Morph dude to ward off key spells, figuring that Willbender + Vesuvan Shapeshifter might just effectively neutralize more “must counter” spells than a traditional countermagic theme would.
What I didn’t know at the time was that of the two, Willbender would prove (at least in the short term, so far) to be the better counterspell of the two. Nothing says loving like Jaya Ballard punching herself in the face and costing the opponent a card besides, and I’ve had opponents disconnect when I’ve set up with an early Wall of Roots into Morph opening… only to see their incoming Avalanche Riders destroy their land instead, followed by an unmorphed Shapeshifter getting a second land with the upkeep Momentary Blink. Mystic Snake would have had nothing on that, and time after time I’ve found Willbender to be the stronger of the two control creatures I’d hinged my plans around.
Sacrificing to the Mana Gods
The colored mana in this format is very hard to come by. Some of the early leaders in the format are monochromatic decks – mono-White beatdown, mono-Red beatdown, mono-Black control, practically mono-Blue control. If you want to play a deck with more than just the one color, you’re going to realize this is not the happy bouncing world of Ravnica Block mana bases anymore… if you want a land that can get you a second color of mana, it’s going to be Terramorphic Expanse, Gemstone Mine, or your allied color pair charge-lands… the last of which requires a significant investment before you can even tap for a single colored mana. Prismatic Lens can help, too, or Search for Tomorrow / Gemhide Sliver if you’re a Green mage… but that’s where the short list stops. Each of these has at least one problem for its use… charge lands and Terramorphic Expanses are generally thought of as too slow for a beatdown deck, while Gemstone Mine blows itself up too readily to really fit in a low land-count beatdown deck… the kind of deck that needs its colored mana now and doesn’t care about three turns down the line is the kind of deck most vulnerable to its sudden disappearance, because bad mana may disappear when it comes into play but three taps later you’re back where you started.
Since the mana is so bad, mana acceleration is in turn so much more powerful… and so, presumably, might mana denial effects be likewise more potent. Two-color decks are already a risk… stretching further still to fit a third brings us into the Evan Erwin “Classic Matchups – Zoo Versus Its Manabase” territory, as anyone who’s ever played Blink-Riders can likely attest. Sure, it can be done… but done consistently, when just getting two colors to work right is hard enough?
In this case, Morph and Force has a few solid advantages designed in. As a more tempo-oriented deck, it doesn’t need its one-drop slot, so it can play Terramorphic Expanse to its heart’s content… it was originally stretching that third color in there, and the mana works very smoothly for two colors. As a two-color deck that doesn’t always use all of its mana every turn, but does have more than a few color-intensive spells, it can lean on a little bit of Gemstone Mine, and thanks to its reasonably high land count it won’t be crippled when it goes away so long as we keep to just a few of them. Wall of Roots can be relied upon for the second Green mana, meaning that a hand of two Islands and a Forest can usually cast both double-Blue and double-Green spells reliably… and in addition, some of its best cards cost colorless mana, easing the problems of drawing enough lands but not enough of each color. The deck can operate reasonably easily with just one Blue mana (no Teferi, Snake, or Wipe Away, but everything else still works) or with just one Green mana (Wall of Roots turns it into two)… and four copies of Harmonize smoothes your mana draws.
Beating Down Is Hard To Do
So far, some of the most consistent decks I have seen so far have been mono-White and mono-Red beatdown decks. Mono-Green Aggro exists as well, but is basically a one-trick pony with a bad mana curve, which lives or dies based on its ability to race you or your basic willingness to kill Primal Forcemage on sight. (Hint: do it.) Mono-Blue Aggro is a farcical notion, despite the fact that you could probably make a reasonable Wizard-tribe Fish deck, and if mono-Black beatdown is anywhere close to viable I haven’t seen it tried yet. Mono-White you’re probably familiar with, it’s been spotlighted more than once in the past few weeks: Josh Silvestri deconstructed it this past Wednesday, and a few weeks ago saw a basic primer on Block Constructed by Benjamin Peebles-Mundy on the Premium side. What is less spoken of at this point is the Red aggro deck, which seems to be a reasonably challenging match for most of the decks seen so far… and one that plays not one but two Split Second spells, with Sudden Shock and Sulfur Elemental, further displaying the futility of traditional countermagic in this format. The curve is short on one-drops, as is basically a given for this format, but I’ve seen versions of the deck playing a reasonably varied cast of creatures – Magus of the Scroll, Blood Knight, and Keldon Marauders seem to be the standard one- and two-drops, but for the three slot you see some competition: Jaya, Lavacore Elemental, Suq’Ata Lancer, and Sulfur Elemental all have some support, and usually three out of the four appear in some quantity.
My first Block Constructed experience had to do with mono-Red, and I remember casting Suq’Ata Lancer with fond memories back in the day… but that deck had Fireblast, and this, well, does not. From what I have seen so far, playing against decks of this sort a dozen times or so, is that it tends to not really play enough land to really effectively deploy three-drops all the time, and like White Weenie this is one of the clear archetypes that can both afford a bit of colorless mana in its manabase and benefit from the speed boost of Gemstone Caverns, suggesting to me that it might make good use of the card that seems to have everyone else scratching their heads in confusion right now. If I were to try and gun for mono-Red, I’d be looking at the following:
4 Magus of the Scroll
4 Blood Knight
4 Keldon Marauders
4 Jaya Ballard, Task Mage
4 Suq’Ata Lancer
3 Orcish Librarian
4 Brute Force
4 Sudden Shock
4 Rift Bolt
2 Disintegrate
4 Gemstone Caverns
19 Mountain
Jaya Ballard and Orcish Librarian both effectively solve the “drawing multiple Caverns” problem, and with 23 lands you’re more likely to get to three mana at a reasonable pace. I’m tempted even further to go up to 24 lands and run out the Librarians and Disintegrates entirely for another Mountain and four Avalanche Riders, just based on the strength of land destruction in this color-strained environment, but haven’t played with the deck enough to be truly knowledgeable about it… only played against it enough to analyze where its weak points were against me, that being its difficulty in dealing with Wall of Roots and its own mana causing it to stumble, not due to color issues but simply due to not having enough lands.
Morph and Force isn’t quite a beatdown deck so much as a tempo deck, but it is able to play the beatdown role adequately – despite many people complaining that without Scryb Ranger, Spectral Force seems awfully lonely. In this case, I am quite certain that Scryb Ranger is unnecessary – this is a deck that wants to play out its lands, not fake having them, and the role of “untapping Spectral Force” is held by Vesuvan Shapeshifter, who also fills the role of “Spectral Force #2” at the same time. (Attack with morph, become Spectral Force, deal 8; turn face-down during upkeep, repeat as necessary.) It’s not an “unmorph” trick deck, despite Vesuvan Shapeshifer’s strengths sitting next to more morph creatures, because he is already doing plenty of jobs without needing to be Brine Elemental or Fathom Seer sometimes… he’s a Willbender lock, stack-damage-and-become-Wall of Roots in early combat, looks like Spectral Force when it’s time to attack, and with Teferi out he can even be Mystic Snake before he turns into something else more useful. He also picks off opposing copies of Teferi, meaning that a significant portion of the deck is dedicated to “things that can handle Teferi,” with eight creatures that invoke the Legend rule and four Split Second spells.
Against beatdown, well, the opening of Wall of Roots into face-down Morph with the ability to flip over on their turn is too strong to ignore, as is the possibility of too many Spectral Forces in the way too quickly for creatures to effectively bash into. And so the deck is an aggro-control deck – ready to flip into an aggressive stance against slower control decks, and able to control the board by putting fat blockers in the way, controlling the spell flow and gaining card advantage against aggressive decks. It’s not “just” a mish-mash of some of the best creatures in the format – it’s what happens when the best creatures in the format team up to work together, which is where you notice those powerful interactions like Vesuvan Shapeshifter filling the need for a Scryb Ranger effect but with a frankly better card used instead.
Speaking Of Control… Damnation!
Speaking of control decks, there are a few floating around out there. The most prevalent, or at least the most visible, is Blue-based Teferi control. Another key one of note is Black Control, full of creature-kill and discard. Both seem to use Damnation to its fullest extent, though in different ways… one likes to work on softening up your hand, forcing you to commit to the table then sweeping everything away with Damnation, while the other uses Damnation to shore up its early-game weakness as it develops its mana enough to use countermagic effectively then letting the Dralnu du Louvre flow of end-of-turn effects carry the game from there. Dralnu decks are already known, and there is some debate as to whether they are better with Red for Sulfurous Blast or with Black for Damnation, but given the fact that Dreadship Reef exists I think it is pretty clear that the allied color combination wins in a fight unless the Red is giving us more than a Wrath analogue… especially with Mystical Teachings also dragging us into Blue/Black as well.
More interesting perhaps is some variant of Black Control… one opponent I picked up Friday was none other than Pierre Canali, trying a Black Control variant, who seemed to do quite well, both against me and in general in the eight-man queues. His deck is not mine to talk about, but seeing it did give me ideas… and it’s possible that Blue/Black control will work just fine without the heavy focus on Blue countermagic and Teferi, instead focusing on the Black Control elements and supplementing them with a light dash of Blue just for really good cards.
4 Dreadship Reef
4 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Island
13 Swamp
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Phyrexian Totem
4 Magus of the Coffers
4 Twisted Abomination
4 Stupor
4 Sudden Death
4 Damnation
4 Mystical Teachings
3 Tendrils of Corruption
2 Null Profusion
1 Haunting Hymn
1 Imp’s Mischief
1 Extirpate
I have seen Black Control decks playing expensive Tutors to power up their draw, and would not be terribly surprised to see something like this… packing a powerful punch and enough creature removal to shut down creature-based decks, and able to fight a card-advantage war against Teferi control of various stripes thanks to the plentiful discard. What I have not seen is Mystical Teachings in an otherwise mono-Black deck, refilling on Sudden Death, Tendrils, or the one-of silver bullets… or additional copies of itself, to win your average attrition war. It is because of these kinds of attrition wars that Morph and Force is aimed to win card advantage fights after sideboarding, with Magus of the Library and Ana Battlemage having both long since proven their worth to me in the sideboard.
Amusingly, though, Magus of the Library in the main-deck proved to make my deck worse; my first testing was to fill those three Momentary Blink slots with Magus of the Library, put the fourth in and move the fourth copy of Teferi to the sideboard… but I found that drawing the Magus required too much Green mana for general use, as it skewed me into wanting to search up a Forest with a turn-one Terramorphic Expanse when I already had one in hand, in a deck that is already somewhat hungry for Islands. Playing a card that let me draw two cards a turn, or at the worst served as a turn 2 accelerant, actually made me play my deck wrong… and I was losing accordingly. Thankfully, I’d realized that with three empty sideboard slots Serrated Arrows might be good to have sometimes, and with the sudden awareness that Magus of the Library was making me play worse I switched them back to the sideboard, put Teferi #4 back in the main-deck, and added Serrated Arrows.
Serrated Arrows isn’t exactly an unknown card… after all, it’s one of the two or three cards from Homelands. (No, not one of the two or three good ones, there were literally only two or three cards in the set. You can trust me, or you can look up Koskun Falls or Dwarven Sea Clan yourself.) Its effect on the format is perhaps subtle… offering removal to colors that don’t usually have it, and having a solid application across a field of matchups. Spectral Force versus Spectral Force is usually pretty clear-cut, both go to the bin or someone decides to take eight and swing back. But if one Spectral Force is a 7/7… well, the math is somewhat different. Against control, instead of useless it makes Teferi less of a relevant blocker, and murders Draining Whelk in response to becoming a real Dragon… and its applications against beatdown are clear, as well as making the Shapeshifter versus Shapeshifter action work a little bit differently.
In addition, it takes the Wipe Aways I was already quite content with and makes them better, and not just a little. I’d already gotten good mileage with them… in the late game they can usually be turned into a counterspell of some sort, or clear a problem that really needs to be solved with only Willbender getting a say in the matter, like an opposing Teferi. Against aggressive decks they invalidate the Griffin Guide plan, though hopefully not so much that they never try to Guide a man up… after all, I still want to “live the dream” and Willbender it onto my Spectral Force some day. Some Red decks run Lavacore Elemental and they can get very much so out of hand if you let them; Wipe Away on an attacker has already killed more than its fair share of Lavacore Elementals… and of course there’s always the strange stuff like Wild Pair that is just too dangerous to let sit around. While seemingly random, harnessing the power of Split Second is still good even if “only” on a bounce spell, and I have grown to appreciate Wipe Away a lot.
Now, if nothing else interesting is going on, I can turn it into three more counters on a Serrated Arrows… making both of these cards better. For the environment as a whole, Serrated Arrows is key, taking out utility creatures like Magus of the Scroll or hard-to-block threats like Soltari Priest… and for this deck’s overall plan, to gum up the ground, gain advantage and overwhelm with a critical mass of 8/8 tramplers, having a bounce spell that all but completely forbids any possible responses to it is key. It’s a little bit of utility that’s basically guaranteed to always hit its mark, trumping Griffin Guide and Teferi both. Working alone, I’d be content with either in the role the deck needs filled, but working together they’re even better.
The format has some key limiting factors – color and quantity of mana being high on that list. Card advantage is key because there are a lot of good ways to gain it – one mana can get you three cards with Mindstab, or three will get you two, or six will get you four… if you’re Black, that is; it only gets you three plus a 2/2 with U/G mana. Mystical Teachings can turn an arbitrarily large amount of mana into a solid four free cards of your choice, searching out copies of itself as well as the spell you actually desire, and cards like Fathom Seer and Harmonize are surprisingly plentiful if you want them. The card advantage opportunities are plentiful, but the colored mana is not; the beatdown cards are powerful, but so too are the control cards, perhaps the best of which is an innocent 0/5 wall that blocks all day and casts spells all day too. There is one other deck of interest floating around out there, or at least one significant deck kernel I’ve seen different brains trying to parse, based around Wild Pair… but the complexity of figuring out how that deck will work hurts many a brain, able to completely overwhelm the board with Slivers, turn two-drops into mighty Dragons, or put into motion enough of a combo to kill you: Whitemane Lion fetches Primal Forcemage, returning himself, then fetches Bogardan Hellkites with each successive investment of 1W to perform a slow-motion Dragonstorm if that’s what you want to do.
Working with the limitations, you can see how the beatdown decks might prove to be quite powerful… or trying to exploit them, you might work with a land-destruction theme instead. Blink-Riders does just that but perhaps uses too many colors for this color-strained format, but that doesn’t mean the concept is any less fundamentally sound… especially when cards like Magus of the Tabernacle can take an aggressive deck and make it cry while you do your regularly-scheduled land destruction “thing” in their general direction.
But looking at a somewhat different format, we’ve seen the first real turn of the Standard metagame in some time, with Grand Prix: Kyoto looking a little bit different than many people expected, based solely on the strength of the Magic Online Standard metagame. One theory I have put forward repeatedly in the past few months is that Magic Online is now the driving force of metagame change, as opposed to paper Magic… in many cases, the innovations you see at the card table were likely put forward to succeed or fail in online Magic first, for the simple reason that an infinite number of users playing an infinite number of games during an infinite number of hours while you sleep will probably get more done than you. Unlike the infinite number of monkeys tapping away right now on Act Two of The Tempest, or an infinite number of rednecks firing an infinite number of shotguns at an infinite number of road signs to write the entire works of Shakespeare in Braille, the arbitrarily large number of fellow mages playing Magic Online are quite cognitive of the purpose towards which they are working… and much like yourself, as a potential driver of metagame changes.
Japan, however, is a very different culture – one where very few of the knowledgeable players get their information from “the Internet,” be it Magic Online or general strategy from this here site here. This is not to say there aren’t a lot of Japanese MTGO users – there seem to be more than a few, after all – but instead states simply that the Japanese metagame is bound to be independent of the Magic Online metagame trends, and based more off their local metagame and the preponderance towards control decks that seems to be the status quo there. Dralnu du Louvre, the leading Standard deck on Magic Online by a very comfortable percentage margin, was more or less unrepresented in Kyoto… while Battle of Wits went undefeated on Day 1. This is not the Magic you read about in “Online Tech”, but instead a very different flavor very local to Japan… and thanks to the results at a high-level tournament, now bound to intermingle with the existent online technology and hybridize the existing decks and metagame to point more towards the land of the Rising Sun.
One thing significant to note is that a decent proportion of the Japanese metagame seems to involve “Project X,” an infinite-life, infinite-damage combination deck using a few exploitable loop-holes tying Saffi Eriksdotter and Crypt Champion together inexorably for life. This deck quite simply does not function online, as you do not have the ability to set a loop in motion and allow it to iterate an arbitrarily large number of times, generating infinite anything… and this deck is potentially one of many reasons that the Sulfur Elementals won the Grand Prix. The online metagame will likely adjust the winner’s deck accordingly, in between dismissing the results of the Grand Prix entirely due to the absence of the MTGO “best decks” Mono-Green Aggro and Dralnu du Louvre in Kyoto… but even without snuffing out an infinite number of tokens generated by Teysa, Orzhov Scion, Sulfur Elemental has a lot going for it. Split Second makes it a solid tool against control, while the mix of Instant speed and color-hosing makes it an effective answer against the “presumed” best aggro deck coming out of the World Championships, Boros.
Other innovations previously unseen were Dralnu du Pickles, the Japanese hybrid cross-breed of Dralnu du Louvre and U/B Pickles, and the resurrection of Solar Flare. For brand-new archetypes we see an unusual Blue-Green Pickles Tron, focusing heavily on playing eight copies of Simic Signet – four actual Signets, and four Wall of Roots, which might even be better than the original given the deck’s Chord of Calling engine. Perhaps more unusual is that a beatdown deck did make the cut to the Top 8… but not one that looks anything like the beatdown MTGO tells us to expect, instead being the reincarnation of Heezy Street, mashing the Red of Boros into the Green of Mono-Green Aggro to get a Gruul-flavored beatdown deck full of efficient early monsters and difficult problems like Giant Solifuge.
Without anything outside of the Top 8 decklists, we can’t make a more complex analysis of the metagame from Kyoto, can’t back-calculate the interaction of the different decks as they battle each other in the scrum to make it from the start of Day 2 to the elimination rounds at the end of it. We can however note some rising stars – like Detritivore, touted as a Dralnu-killer but probably pretty good at picking off the Urzatron as well, played by two out of eight decks in the elimination rounds. Six of the eight decks in the Top 8 played a combined total of eighteen basic lands, averaging just three basics each, with the other two hovering somewhere just north of the 50% mark. Detritivore was initially received with very little praise, recognized as a very specific tool perhaps for sideboarding against a specific deck, but its presence here may be the beginning of some real respect for the card. Boom / Bust took the initial spotlight as a land destruction choice par excellence, when it is perhaps the uncounterable one-sided Armageddon variant that should be making a real impact on the format in coming weeks.
To many, the time between the release of Planar Chaos and Future Sight is downtime as far as Standard goes; Magic Online and the City Champs tournament series try to encourage Standard play prior to the big push to Regionals, but to many it’s a vague curiosity to watch from a distance as we wait for the Future Sight previews to begin in a little over two weeks’ time. The metagame seems broad in some places – take Kyoto – and all too limited elsewhere, as you can see with 23% of the Magic Online Premier Events Top 8’s featuring some flavor of Dralnu decks, and another 13% Dragonstorm. My personal suspicion is that the Kyoto results will necessitate some type of change to the Magic Online metagame, as Japan is highly renowned to be the best country in the world as far as Constructed deckbuilding is concerned at the moment… presumably finding some middle point between the subtly inbred MTGO metagame presently seen and the more wide-open results from Grand Prix Kyoto.
But in the meantime, one parting shot… to remind us just how very strange the world may be in one month’s time, for those who care little for the Pro Tour: Yokohama Block Constructed format and look forward perhaps to a summer of full Control-Alt-Delete Block Constructed… or a Standard format perhaps turned on its ear away from the current metagame, which in many ways the release of Planar Chaos only seems to have bolstered thanks to the most powerful card in the set (Damnation) slotting neatly into the pre-PC “best deck in the format” (Dralnu du Louvre). Look on and realize just how odd our future may be…
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com