Last week, we had a look at the current state of Standard with an eye on the future Regionals metagame, and looked through the mirror darkly as an April fools joke… both by pretending to be the illustrious Michael J. Flores (and I didn’t even know mine would be the only representative of Flores on “Flores Friday”… how rich!) and perhaps by playing Torchling in Constructed. The lessons learned included that Torchling was just “some guy,” good against beatdown decks but mana-intensive… or, to put it another way, I was stretching too far to find something nice to say about him that I ended up looking at him through rose-tinted glasses and only through that particular perspective of wanting him to be good.
I’ve been testing online, essential now because my other option of “paper Magic” has more or less been closed off as a realistic avenue for testing any format at the moment. While my collection has been growing somewhat steadily thanks to spending my time profiting in the Time Spiral Block Constructed queues playing “Morph and Force,” my interest in the format has waned and I’ve moved on to looking forward to Regionals and the excitement of the coming pre-release event in just two weeks’ time. I still don’t have quite the liquid assets there that it would take to buy some of the more expensive cards, and so had to hit up my lawyer friend Jim to borrow eight cards that average about ten tickets each because testing without Steam Vents and Shivan Reef doesn’t sound like a successful strategy to testing Blue/Red Tron. You can get away with completely falsifying one weekly article’s worth of games (verily!) but only thanks to the humorous spirit of April Fools Day. To do more would be irresponsible. Fortunately for all involved, it will literally be a year and a half until my Friday column naturally falls on Talk Like A Pirate Day, and I don’t get near April Fools Day again until 2011. Rather than attempt to rest upon my comedic laurels, then, it was time to shuffle up some electronic cardboard and get to work.
Much of my testing with Blue/Red Tron began with the Torchling version ran last week, it’s true. An awful lot of bashing with that particular man taught me that he did have some definite strengths and weaknesses… specifically, he could dominate the board against an aggressive deck, but the previous conception that he’d work “just fine” without the Tron to back him up was a little bit naive. I liked all of the other changes that I had made, or more accurate I guess would be to say that the style of Tron deck that I was reaching for was very internally consistent with the choices I’d made, with Wildfire working nicely on the top-end to supplement the tempo-stealing Remands and Repeals against aggressive decks, and being the second half of the one-two punch that is Detritivore into Wildfire. I was actually quite happy with the list, even if Torchling was basically “just a man,” because he did what I wanted to do: picked a fight with aggro decks, and survived Wildfire with panache and aplomb. I was even happy with the Prismatic Lenses, because I wanted Signets that would make Red mana, and ran into multiple situations where I’d have to cast an emergency Wildfire but not have another land to play afterwards… or got hit with a Boom / Bust I wasn’t expecting out of an Angelfire deck and was glad that I could still tap a Signet and a Lens for two mana, a feat Izzet Signet and Dimir Signet have yet to replicate.
Now, my friend Jim asked me an odd question, hearing that I was already going “against form” with the deck and packing in the Suspend guys with three mighty ‘Vores. Seeing me suspend the men in test game after test game, even in one game against Mono-Green Aggro in which the opponent drew Gemstone Caverns and Pendelhaven as two of their three lands, he asked if I was Suspend-happy enough to go up to the full eight Suspend guys. I laughed and called him crazy, and didn’t think too much about it… after all, I had some Aeon Chroniclers going on in the sideboard, but I only had two of them and basically considered them to be uncounterable slow-motion Tidings to bring in against control decks, replacing those stupid “counterable” Tidings to gain an advantage by out-drawing my opponent thanks to the Tron.
Over the next few days, that thought kept nagging me, so I tried playing a lot more test games with the Chronicler in the deck to see how he felt. There was one game when I drew both of them and a Detritivore, and had +3 card advantage a turn suspended just sitting there… in three turns I’d have some gigantic men, it’s true, but in the meantime I was crippling my opponent’s manabase, drawing a ton of cards, and completely blowing him out of the water.
Thinking about the silliness of Suspend, I was vaguely amused with the notion that three men coming in (and, well, the amazing flow of cards already present… remember, I was drawing three cards a turn) would make for an awesome Storm turn. It felt almost combo-like, and because I’d timed things so carefully and set everything into motion just exactly so… proper prior planning led to an opponent with zero permanents getting bashed for twenty. I chose to stop short of the “bring in Empty the Warrens” plan, or reach for cards like Ignite Memories, Volcanic Awakening, or Dragonstorm… but I did think about the fact that giving up on Tidings for good and cutting Torchling for The Chronic would free up main-deck space, sideboard space, and I wouldn’t be playing the Torchlings people kept watching my MTGO matches just to see. (I mean, they weren’t watching because I am good at Magic, so I assume they wanted to see someone awkwardly try and bash a fellow mage about the head and shoulders with the Red Superman.)
It was easy to switch those Torchlings out for The Chronic. It was even easier to realize that I now had sideboard space and could play Annex like a regular human being (or at least a regular Tron player, though I suspect those two things are probably nothing alike), and that Tidings was now the worse Tidings in my deck, and if anything I wanted another threat to go with my possibly-ridiculous card-flow. I’d surmised Torchling would be great, as you could do many board-controllish things with it without requiring the Tron to activate it. Essentially I needed about as much mana to work it as I did the Hellkites I’d chosen them over, and that with the Chronic online I was often playing for a very explosive, more aggressive end-game with my Tron deck, often pulling a Suspended Chronicler on turn 4 thanks to a Signet, and casting Wildfire turn 5 keeping a land and a Signet while my opponent lost their entire board and ate hot 7/7. These more aggressive starts wanted another threat and something that would either wipe the board like Torchling sort of did or end the game quickly… which is to say, Hellkite wanted back in.
Frankly I doubt the Annexes are truly necessary – after all, with seven of eight possible Suspend men in the main and the eighth in the sideboard this deck felt as if it was already light-years ahead of your average Tron deck as far as technology goes. I don’t mind having them, though, as they push the mana advantage aspect of the deck even further and can even complete the Tron in the mirror match at the same time… though I noted I didn’t know how to play against B/G Dredge decks to the same advantage all the other U/R Tron decks seem to have in that matchup, and was having a hard time often against Dragonstorm decks even though there’s no real reason they should pose such a sticky problem. With a hundred or so playtest matches under my belt, and Chronic technology already starting to hit the Net thanks to Pat Chapin’s look at Block Constructed, I took the following into battle against a hundred or so fellow mages in an IPA Standard qualifier. So we begin…
The Adventures Of Bluntman and Chronic
Creatures (9)
Lands (20)
Spells (31)
- 1 Mountain
- 2 Island
- 3 Wildfire
- 4 Mana Leak
- 4 Compulsive Research
- 4 Remand
- 4 Izzet Signet
- 4 Repeal
- 2 Demonfire
- 2 Prismatic Lens
- 1 Spell Burst
Sideboard
This is my years-before-Regionals test-list, which still somehow feels as if it’s a significant leap ahead of the MTGO metagame… which is about a week or two ahead of the paper Standard metagame, where it’s played out in the tail-end of the City Championships this month. I say “years before Regionals” because Regionals will be played including Future Sight, which we are beginning to learn really will feel like it shifts the metagame by several years… I’m sure if you watch Evan Erwin “The Magic Show” today, he’ll have a visual preview of the “Future Shifted” card frames that will be present in the set, which are even more jarring than the disconnect between the main Time Spiral set and its old-framed “Timeshifted” cards. While this list is very advanced for a post-Planar Chaos metagame, what with its experimentation in ridiculous Suspend X-spells powered up by the Urzatron, as far as Regionals is concerned, well, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
I cleverly managed to go 5-2 at the IPA Qualifier… which is neither impressive nor really satisfying, finishing 14th and only staying in at two losses out of frustration and a desire to get some more games against serious competition so long as I’d already paid for them. Following an interesting series of misplays round 1, I found myself in the 0-1 bracket after losing to Vore, nervously aware during game 1 that I didn’t really like my chances against Dragonstorm with the hand I had on the draw after he led with Steam Vents into Sleight of Hand. Somewhere in there we passed turn 4 with some Compulsive Researches Remanded on each side of the table and I hadn’t taken twenty, so it appeared I may have been wrong about my initial estimate of playing Dragonstorm. Still, I was caught unawares by the opponent’s deck and didn’t play as tight of a game against him as I could have, if I had been aware that just blatantly tapping out would not be immediately followed with Rituals enough to power a Dragonstorm dealing twenty to the face-hole. Down 0-1, I sided to be more aggressive and seize tempo, though I kept in a few Wildfires still under the expectation that if I got out ahead with a Chronicler early in the game I could use Wildfire to nail that early lead home for sure. We quickly evened the game-score at one apiece, then played a third for all the marbles, in which I drew inadequately and found myself backpedaling with Repeals against multiple hasty Magnivores, needing just one more turn of setting up before they murdered me to swing my */*’s to kill him instead of his */*’s killing me.
Considering it was even close, and I’m playing a deck with twelve lands that don’t tap for colored mana against Stone Rain.dec, I felt somewhat accomplished… and regretted losing the die-roll, as I’d have had a lot more freedom to be the aggressive player in game 1 even against the presumption that my opponent was playing Dragonstorm, and getting to play first is such a huge advantage for the Magnivore deck in general.
Mightily, I hit 0-1.
The next opponent also won the die roll, and opened with Steam Vents into Sleight of Hand. That opponent, unlike my first, suspended a pair of Lotus Blooms while he was at it. When the crucial turn came I cast Remand on the first Bloom, hoping to draw another Remand / Repeal / Mana Leak to contain the second, but only ended up adding another spell to the Storm count as I didn’t get there and my opponent’s stacked hand of Rites and Songs powered out the Dragonstorm he needed, proving I was really never in this one.
Fortunately, I was certainly knowledgeable of the fact that anything “fair” intended to contain a creature-based brawl was going to be highly ineffective, as would be “slow” cards like Detritivore that gain their edge by slow and grueling resource denial. “Slow” is not what I wanted to be here, after all. Sulfur Elementals and Spell Burst came in, slow cards came out, and I was able to die the exact same way I did the first game, by not drawing Blue cards to interrupt the combo with. This time I took 21, as he’d drawn a Hellkite naturally and needed a Hunted Dragon to finish with.
I’ve had a bad habit of hitting 0-2 in Constructed events recently, having paired my last two PTQs in the Extended season with the mighty 0-2. There’s really no reason my first Constructed PE since the “Snakes on a Desert” experiment should go any different, and when Round 3 saw me getting the bye it became readily apparent that the other 25% of the starting players who hit that depressing low note dropped from the tournament as there was nobody for me to play and no chance of playing for anything besides the learning experience. While I had the Bye I cruised the top tables, watching match replays to get an idea of what I was doing wrong… and couldn’t really find anything in the abstract. I saw another U/R Tron deck suspend Detritivore in game 1, and U/R Tron was one of the more heavily played decks. I hadn’t neutered the version that badly, just gone off a very specific deep end toking The Chronic, and if this is “wrong” then I don’t want to be “right.” At this point I am still stuck at home pet-sitting while my fiancee is out visiting with friends 500 miles away, too far from anywhere to want to walk to the train and do something else and too limited in time to reasonably consider it anyway… after all I’m stuck dog-sitting this weekend, and it’s 7pm on a Saturday night.
Yay for having an exciting life… in the 0-2 bracket.
After feeling somewhat down on myself and still not sure what if anything I was doing wrong, I get paired against an opponent at the 1-2 table. And I swear, my opponent might as well have introduced himself by saying “Hi, welcome to This Is Your Life, and I’ll be your Dragonstorm opponent at the 1-2 table!” Fortunately I’m on the play this game and I keep a powerful hand, with the full Tron and a Signet plus Vore, Remand, and Repeal, so I led off with a Tron piece before my opponent went… no surprises here… Steam Vents, Sleight of Hand. I played a second piece and the Signet while he played a Dreadship Reef to start charging up, and I use my RU6 on turn 3 to suspend Detritivore for four… if I’m getting to the point where I’m worried about him recovering because Detritivore is killing lands of my choice after I’ve had three full turns with unrestricted access to Tron mana as of turn 3, well, I deserve to lose. My opponent’s next land is a Tron piece, meaning I’m playing the somewhat obscure Dragonstorm Tron variant, and he has Compulsive Research to try and dig out of the hole ‘Vore is about to kick him into.
I take out Steam Vents naturally, Research myself and play a fresh basic Island, setting up to counter if needed on his turn and have The Chronic to set next to Bluntman next turn. Things are going well… I may not have much luck against run of the mill Dragonstorm decks, but this deck was intended to be hell in the U/R Tron mirror match. Game 2 goes similarly well, he tries to go off but fails in the face of a key Mana Leak preventing him from ever getting to nine mana, capping him off at eight at the most, though he uses that eight mana to suspend Detritivore… when I’ve already got an active Chronicler coming in the following turn, and follow up the attack with Wildfire, leaving me with Island + Signet versus his choice of any of his five nonbasics, doomed to die during his upkeep.
The remainder of my three matches are similarly satisfying, with an impressive reversal of fortunes for a Mono-Green Aggro deck, going from looking good by attacking me to eight with a bunch of guys in play including a Cloaked Ledgewalker to “taking six a turn with zero permanents in play” with but the removal of a single time counter from The Chronic, the turning of sideways and Wildfire resolving. Against a mono-Red “Goblinstorm” type deck my opponent wins the first game with Ignite Memories luckily dealing ten when I needed to only take nine or less from the resolution of the Storm copies, which required Ignite to miss my Bogardan Hellkite three times out of three cards, or at least hit Hellkite / Land / Land instead of Hellkite / Land / Demonfire. The first two revealed were Land and Demonfire, the third was of course the Hellkite, making me wonder just how “random” the “pick a card at random” function was when it pulled not just one copy of each card but in order from left to right in my hand. Random happens, however, and I quicken up for game 2, popping in Pyroclasms because I had already seen he’s playing just about every Storm card, with Grapeshot, Ignite and Empty the Warrens all in there in some fashion or another.
For game 2 he “goes off” again, but I’ve taken out eight-cost Hellkites and added one-cost Spell Bursts to try and contain him by fighting against Rituals and / or cleaning up the mess after I survive the initial barrage of Storm cards. He pulls off a mighty Ignite for six copies while I’m at twenty and the most expensive card in my hand is Remand (two copies) versus everything else in hand (four copies costing either RX or UX). I go to sixteen, he goes to game 3. Game 3 is patently ridiculous – he leads with Scorched Rusalka to my Tron piece, and on turn 2 attacks for one, then Rituals a bunch of times, plays a second Scorched Rusalka, and follows up with another eight power in Goblins. I topdeck a Pyroclasm, take one for my Shivan Reef, and even get to say “Nice deck” while I’m at it. (If it wasn’t game 3 and I wanted to send him on tilt, I’d have told him I topdecked it. And lied, to say it was my only copy. Obviously.)
The last match I get to suffer through in the vain hope of somehow salvaging a miniscule globule of pride was another easy one, playing the Tron mirror at the 4-2 table. I won the die roll and suspended Detritivore for two on turn 4, starting with Steam Vents, Tron Piece + Signet, Tron Piece + Signet #2, Remand for Compulsive Research. He only had one Tron piece so tapping out was presumably a non-lethal play, as the only cards I couldn’t live with being cast all cost more than the five mana he had access to. I followed up with a Compulsive Research of my own, keeping up Remand to buy more time for my little pet to go to work, and used said Remand trying to keep him off a Compulsive Research. He cared about it, forced it through with Mana Leak, and a Wildfire while he was tapped out left him with just a Signet in play and facing the attack of a 5/5 Detritivore who survived Wildfire thanks to, well, Wildfire.
The conclusion of the sideboarded cards was more or less irrelevant; nobody drew Tron, and the first person to attempt an Annex was the first person to have Annex resolve on them. He went first, he blinked first trying to push the early lead on mana, and he had four Annexes to play with while I had four Annexes and four Detritivores. The competition wasn’t necessarily harder than the hours I’d spent crawling the Tournament Practice Room trying to see if the deck fell apart under pressure, and thus would benefit from any slight changes along the way, but it did have a larger Dragonstorm contingent than I’d managed to playtest against – which should come as little surprise, it being a high-caliber tournament deck and most of the players playing it being generally well-versed in its use and thus not trawling the practice rooms looking for games against whatever’s the modern technology.
And the Suspend men are just as powerful as they felt when first I took out Tidings to try The Chronic, giving the Tron deck an overall more powerful feel as well as complementing its core strategy of mana advantage, card advantage, and big swingy turns pushing both of those points over the tipping point of your opponent’s ability to respond. This I already knew, having played against a nameless, faceless plethora of decks in the Tournament Practice Room, losing more to damage from sideboarded Underworld Dreams from those terrible Black Rack decks you see inevitably played for no good reason than I did from the Rack decks that are normally core to their strategy, because I was outracing their discard with card draw from multiple Chroniclers to outdraw them two or three cards to their one every turn.
Is this necessarily the best version of Tron? In the choice of the main-deck sixty I’d at least like to think the reason behind each card present in each quantity is solid and clicks together well; the four-ofs are the engine that make the deck work and start gaining positional advantage in the early to mid game, which powers up the three-ofs and two-ofs quickly enough that you draw them like they were four-ofs when the deck is working right. Normally I hate two-ofs and consider it to be the one least correct number in any given deck, except for the possibility of any deck ever designed by Jim Roy… and only because then every number is wrong, not just the two-ofs. The flow of cards is steady and often furious, meaning a kill card that not only draws you cards but also happens to attack as Maro would is usually swinging for lethal in three turns minimum and always gets at least one good lick in before most removal spells can have a say in the matter.
Fighting a control battle is pretty easy when you’re gaining a card’s worth of advantage or more each turn with no option of them ever countering the source of that effect to stop that effect, unless you’re seeing Pull from Eternity in many decklists. Even if Teferi winds up in play and counters every Suspend spell, by the time Detritivore or Aeon Chronicler is ready to come into play, their damage is already done in that matchup – winning a control battle is pretty easy with both twice as much mana and twice as many cards to work with. Fighting an aggressive battle is easy when you can spend your early cards keeping them from mounting significant early pressure, then choose a turn to set aside your kill spell and follow that turn up with Wildfire to erase any progress they may have made trying to get back into the game, and any chance they have of making significant future progress before The Chronic kills them dead.
Combo… I haven’t figured out yet. But no deck is truly capable of having an overpowering stance against all three archetypes, and the metagame for Regionals may very well move on to forget about Dragonstorm entirely for all we know about the contents of Future Sight. In the meantime, assuming a varied metagame in two months’ time and no truly disgusting revelations in the meantime invalidating the notion of “fair play,” I’d like to believe that this has been an effective early look at the future wave of Standard. The Chronic has gotten some attention in Block Constructed – but by the time the dust settles in Yokohama, the notion will be out that maybe, just maybe, this guy will be good enough for 60-card decks including cards from a wider field of play than just Block Constructed.
And that, dear reader, is no April Fools joke.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com