Last week, we had a brief introductory look at a new Block Constructed deck, one that takes a somewhat different approach on the Block Constructed metagame by introducing mana-control elements to punish the development of beatdown decks and the no-counter “tap out” strategy that seems to be prevalent in the more controlling decks in the format. Unfortunately last week’s article coincided with the end of my engagement to my now-ex fiancée, in a difficult series of events that forced me to exit our relationship, so last week’s article was unfortunately cut short because of “technical difficulties”. This week, fortunately, I’ve had more of a chance to put the deck through various trials, from light impact online testing (“trawling the Tournament Practice Room”) to trial by fire (“the Neutral Ground PTQ”). Also fortunately, the deck responded well to the rigors of trial under pressure… unfortunately, the same could not necessarily be said of the pilot.
To recap, here is the deck I played at the Neutral Ground PTQ this past Saturday, which is 74 of the same 75 cards listed in my article last week:
Creatures (12)
Lands (24)
Spells (24)
With the change to include a third Detritivore at the expense of the third Ancient Grudge in the sideboard, the lone Forest is no longer of any particular relevance, and for future weeks I will be looking to replace the one Forest with another card as yet undetermined. As of this week however the change was somewhat last-minute, and I played the PTQ with a Forest in my sideboard with very little objection. Future technology developments may also shift to include Return to Dust in the current Disenchant slot, although maybe not (two mana is better than four, even if killing two cards is better than killing one). Also in the “developmental” front, Aven Riftwatcher is currently on notice for being generally useless, as it seems simple to say that the kinds of decks I felt it would be needed against are not presently existent in the metagame.
The tournament started out well, which is actually uncharacteristic of me in Constructed PTQs in the past six months. I’ve had a lot of events where I take early losses and end up 5-2, with a variety of decks that I would like to believe were very good. Last week’s PTQ was a return to that form, starting out 1-2 again, which is one of life’s ways of telling you that you picked the wrong deck, doofus. But between Regionals and this past weekend’s PTQ I feel reasonable justification in my belief that I can’t be wrong all of the time. A proper mixture of theoretical work in designing the deck and preparatory work actually learning how to play it will reverse the first half of this year’s trend in which only one of these two factors was reasonable to obtain, and not always the same one for that matter.
The tournament in a nutshell would be that I started out 4-0 playing against aggressive decks and control decks, then fell to 4-2 after playing good players with aggro-tempo decks. Whether the weakness is to the “good player” aspect, as I lost to Matt Boccio and Josh Ravitz (at least one of whom should be reasonably well-known to readers here at StarCityGames.com), or to aggro-tempo decks… is the subject of this week’s continued analysis. Two matches I had the joy of winning were against the Green/White splash Red Tarmogoyf beatdown decks, and the remaining two wins were against Wild Pair Slivers and U/B/w Teachings. My two losses came at the hands of the U/G aggressive tempo deck and mono-Blue Pickles, and in a 180-person tournament in the summer heat I didn’t feel it was the wisest course to stay in the two remaining rounds to push for a 6-2 record with zero chance of a Top 8 berth… there is cause to be jealous of Craig’s 30-person PTQ win this same weekend. [Come on now, get it right… it was a twenty-nine person PTQ… – Craig, amused.]
Of course, trying to find a “casual” game on Magic Online that can count as effective playtesting can be a crapshoot. Trawling in the Tournament Practice Room for games meant I got to play against an awful lot of terrible Virulent Sliver decks, and worse yet found I was completely unprepared to face off against this deck… or at least I was if they are always going to get the two-Virulents-by-turn-2 draw. I traded my sideboarded Riftwatchers for some Rough/Tumbles while thinking about how very badly that deck would have to get mauled by any Red deck, which I’m told was more or less held as true at this past weekend’s PTQs as this online-only Block deck trickled into the real world only to get stomped by Fiery Justice out of the G/W/r Tarmogoyf decks. Just because my #2 deck-choice would destroy a deck based on poison slivers doesn’t mean it’s suddenly a good matchup for the deck I am testing, however. No sooner did I sub out the Riftwatchers than I actually ran into one of those rare matchups where they’d be useful, as I found a mono-Red deck that apparently was starting to come back into favor based on just how many people actually play the stupid Sliver deck online. I took my drubbings and wondered whether he could beat Riftwatcher plus Dust Elemental as a plan, and lost to a Gargadon hitting me out of nowhere when he drew Mogg War Marshal to actually have enough permanents to sacrifice.
Considering I felt I had a reasonable handle on the sorts of decks I was facing already, and looking to specifically learn more about Blue-based aggro-control decks in my matchup analysis, I was suddenly very sad that I don’t have a dedicated MTGO partner for playtesting. You can bang on Mike Flores till the cows come home about how he’s mis-playing Dredge or on the current level of inebriation of his playtest partner, but at least if he wants to target a matchup he has a few people he can sit down with and knock out some games. For me, unless our illustrious editor is a) online and b) has the cards in the deck to be tested that I myself am missing, I’m more or less out of luck… no God accounts here, and the small network of interested parties I’ve been developing are only occasionally available and/or don’t really have much in the way of MTGO accounts.
So in the one useful matchup I was interested in, I learned that it can be a very close match indeed… and my games seemed to succeed or fail based on how quickly I accelerated. A turn 2 Prismatic Lens would more or less give me the burst of speed needed to get my big cards moving quickly and the card drawing pushing forward and/or getting countered, and a turn two Lens plus a turn three Coalition Relic wouldn’t necessarily leave me a lot of cards to work with but it would send my mana into the very-explosive range. Getting explosive mana tends to give the deck cards to work with and it seems to be able to go from there. As far as sideboarding goes I found the Magus of the Tabernacle to be of limited use, so I was sideboarding two Magii out, one Boom/Bust because it can be difficult to get working, and the obviously-useless Disenchant to bring in two each of Venser and Detritivore… the latter because they tend to have just enough nonbasics to make him worthwhile, between their Deserts and their charge-lands. Pull from Eternity would be hemmed and hawed over depending on whether they showed me Aeon Chronicler; I brought it in against Josh Ravitz because I saw Chronicler (I think) game 1, but left it out of my online testing matchup because I didn’t see Chronicler or anything to suggest he might be in their deck.
Ultimately I lost the one playtest match I did find, because drawing neither Relic nor Lens just left me too slow in the third game… and it didn’t help that since I tend to lose game 1, even if I win game 2 my opponent will always be on the play for the third game, making it even more crucial to draw the artifact accelerants or face the consequences. So for my testing session as a whole, I learned an awful lot… just not necessarily what I had expected to learn.
With the presumed focus on the metagame being Blue-Black Teachings-style decks, either with or without countermagic, new predators are emerging to “solve” the known metagame. Some of these decks may seem absolutely godawful at least on paper, like the Virulent Sliver deck, but there are enough of them combined to keep life in Time Spiral Block Constructed very interesting indeed. Some are Fish-like aggro-control decks, though they vary on the shades of gray between aggro and control; U/G is very aggro, while Pickles is much more controlling… after all, U/G’s favorite Counterspell is actually Snapback, while Pickles favors both Delay and Cancel. Enough of these sorts of decks will ultimately shift the metagame from where it is currently stuck, where you can go to a 30-person PTQ and apparently 25 of those 30 people will have four copies of Korlash in their deck.
Unfortunately, it seems for the most part you’ll see an overwhelming number of decks playing either Korlash or Tarmogoyf. Both of these are in the fifteen-to-twenty range both on MTGO and slowly but surely are getting there in real life as well… so there seems to be a definite barrier to entry unless you want to play a “substandard” deck or an unusual choice like my Bust-A-Move above or Mono-Blue Pickles. Some of these decks are playing Korlash and Tarmogoyf, and Coalition Relics besides, which are looking up to be the most expensive “spell” card from Future Sight. And some decks need at least four if not more than four Future Sight dual lands, and we haven’t factored in the $20 Damnations yet, meaning that there are very high barriers indeed to playing this format, both online and in real life. We had a 180-man PTQ in New York City this past weekend, and it would seem pretty safe to say that probably 140 of those 180 were playing four copies of either Tarmogoyf or Korlash. Six hundred copies of $15 rares were present in the room, give or take, as the current trends have been playing out.
My experiences in testing so far have led me to a path where I feel I have two realistic options for the development of the Bust deck. Either wait and see if Red decks begin to bounce back into the format as awfully vulnerable decks like Pickles and VirulentSliver.dec appear to prey upon the metagame, or find an alternative sideboard plan where I currently have four Aven Riftwatchers. Four Riftwatchers could become Tarmogoyfs (and I keep the basic Forest) to greatly modulate the speed of my deck for dealing with the aggro-control and dedicated control matchups, or if I can expect to see Red decks finally again I can keep my Riftwatchers but ditch the now-unneeded Forest in favor of another bullet target, as-yet undecided between Pact of Negation, Logic Knot, and Snapback.
Block Constructed remains an interesting format, and I expect that the presumption that Blue/Black is definitely the best deck is something that will be shifting in coming weeks. The top tables after the first few rounds here in NYC had literally zero Teachings decks, while G/W, G/U, Pickles, and R/W/U Control sat at the first four tables as of round four and five. Teachings can claim to beat G/W all it wants, on the Internet, but in actuality I think the numbers being split between those two big decks of the format are a lot closer than the B/U mages think it is. The online metagame sees B/U running twice the numbers of G/W Tarmogoyf … but if you add another 5% for the G/W/r deck it’s 16% to 22%, and another 8% for U/G plus another 5% for the Kowalash decks puts them neck-and neck more or less with each capturing a quarter of the Top 8 berths.
With this weekend’s tournaments being dominated by the Tenth Edition release events in real life, it seems my PTQ madness has temporarily abated because no matter how far I am willing to drive, I can’t hit up a PTQ this weekend… meaning I have another week in which to figure out just where the metagame is cresting next, and to practice more with my Bust-A-Move deck to settle on a plan that I am very comfortable with before the next bout of PTQs. With Tenth Edition coming out this weekend, we’ll finally know what tools we get to play with in Standard; what we do know, however, is already going to have a very high impact on the format… both by what is not returning, with combo-enablers like Seething Song getting the axe and cards like Treetop Village appearing virtually out of nowhere to change the tools with which we interact.
I tend to want to avoid spoilers for core sets, if for no other reason than that I already know what all of the cards do so I’ll only need to learn what’s in the set, not what’s in the set and what every card does, making it more valuable to me to get an accurate card-list after the fact than a head start of a couple of weeks. The spoiler on MTGSalvation.com has been complete for several weeks at this point, long enough that other writers on this site are starting to write Xth Edition articles based on it. Compared to the complete lists Pat and Mike are running through for their topics, though, I’ve just been kind of thinking about what you can do in the format and thinking about a few cards as they come out… which has led me to want to build at least one deck, because it’s been clearly confirmed that every card in the deck is going to be in the rotation.
For a short while, Life from the Loam and Seismic Assault are going to be legal in Standard together, and with access to the newly-printed Horizon Canopy you might not even notice that the deck is a lot less powerful than in Extended without cycling lands. If everyone’s less powerful than an Extended deck, after all, you can make do with your still-good analogue to the ridiculously potent Loam engine. I basically was picking and choosing between a few different ideas and concepts I saw put into decks with good effect recently, at least some of which came from the “BillyStorm” deck that Billy Moreno came up with on the fly just before Regionals and which Brian David-Marshall played in New Jersey to come up just short of the Top 8 by a match win or so. It’s a deck that uses Flagstones of Trokair plus Edge of Autumn as a deck-thinning, deck-shortening, and color-fixing engine, letting you have more virtual dual lands to fix the colors you need while also playing a significantly smaller deck, letting you draw more copies of your power cards. All of this also feeds Tarmogoyf nicely at the same time as letting you draw your Tarmogoyfs more often than the other guy, giving the deck a lot of churning power to draw its good cards and aggressive power because, well, Tarmogoyf is good.
And so long as you’re fixing your mana so freely and looking for benefits for playing some of your placeholder cantrips, like the Flagstones color-fixing in tandem with Edge of Autumn, I don’t really see why you should limit your colors to the merely sane when you could go out on a limb and stretch that little extra bit further. Just coming up with a list of best-of creatures I wanted to play, Tarmogoyf wanted to hang out with his friend Troll Ascetic and cross-color buddy Dark Confidant, while Bob reminded me that he has done good work for years now with Loxodon Hierarch and reminded me that Bob used to be short for “Beats On Blue,” also known to most of the rest of the world as Treetop Village. Treetop Village is an excellent “answer” to the occasional problem of your Loam-based strategy milling past your threats, because playing a Treetop Village every turn for the rest of the game is probably a good way to beat opponents who are trying to remove your creatures from play.
The following deck excites me, even though I doubt I will even so much as play a single match of Standard for a tournament that has any relevance before Llorwyn comes out. The cards all seem to fuel each other and work well together, all while shrinking the deck or otherwise drawing extra cards to draw more Tarmogoyfs or assemble the combo of Life from the Loam plus Seismic Assault. It excites me enough to want to change my plans for the next few weeks to try and grind into Nationals, despite knowing that ultimately it is a futile goal as I have a business trip requiring me to fly out of JFK Airport in Manhattan around noon on Sunday the 29th, presumably the same time as I would be attempting to leverage a last-chance-qualifier performance with Standard Aggro-Loam into a Worlds qualification. My focus for 60-card decks remains Block Constructed, but I can’t wait to see where this develops in the future:
4 Flagstones of Trokair
4 Karplusan Forest
4 Stomping Ground
4 Treetop Village
3 Gemstone Mine
3 Horizon Canopy
2 Sacred Foundry
1 Godless Shrine
1 Temple Garden
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant
4 Troll Ascetic
4 Loxodon Hierarch
4 Life from the Loam
4 Seismic Assault
4 Edge of Autumn
4 Chromatic Star
2 Fiery Justice
The color balance looks off… after all, we have a two-drop Black spell with exactly four lands capable of tapping for black… but Chromatic Star and Flagstones plus Edge of Autumn both easily allow for a good deal more Black sources than one dual land and three Gemstone Mines seems to be implying. Triple Red is likewise a funny splash in a deck that otherwise seems to be Green-White, but ultimately this is a four-color Green deck, happening to splash White for Hierarch and a dash of Fiery Justice, Red for the aforementioned dab of Justice and triple-Red for Seismic Assault, plus splash Black for Dark Confidant. Otherwise we have the best of Green men and the best of Green spells, one of which is mistakenly confused as a land despite being a 3/3 trampler that is nigh-unkillable in this deck. A high land count, especially for a less-than-sixty-card deck, ensures that there will always be enough lands around to go crazy with Seismic Assault, while also being very good at casting the right spells and, um, attacking for three.
This is what I came up with based on the knowledge of exactly three cards in Tenth Edition… Treetop Village, Troll Ascetic, and Seismic Assault… and based on the knowledge that Dragonstorm shall now be leaving us at least in its powered-by-Seething-Song form. For the rest of the 350+ cards in the set… I expect just as many creative juices will flow, but they won’t flow until after Release Day because there are some things I read on the Internet that I’ll believe when I see it and not before. It’s just not worth getting worked up about minor errors, like the host of players who complained that Giant Solifuge was far worse as a 4/1 than as a 4/3 before just casting him anyway and realizing the as-printed “fairer” version is still very, very good. Why waste that much thought and effort today wondering whether the rumors I’d heard placing Siege-Gang Commander and Goblin Piledriver in Xth Edition together are true, when I can just wait to last past the traditionally-unlucky Friday the Thirteenth and just find out “for real” and brainstorm from there?
See you next week with a whole lot more ideas…
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com