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Magical Hack: Choose, but Choose Wisely

My goal for this week is to weave all of these things together for a look at the States metagame and the choices that are going to be present and inherent in each archetype. I’ll also give a few hints as to how the key contenders match up against each other, and we can go from there into creating an assumed picture of the metagame as well as the suggestions that can come from it as to how to succeed. I like looking at the whole picture and figuring out the so-called “rules of the format”, and that’s something that may be profitable here as well. It may also be highly premature, so we’ll see how firm our conclusions are before taking that particular step.

Last week, I attempted to begin an interactive column spurring debate on the Forums about a variety of archetypes presented half-built and begging for discussion about the cards already included as well as those absent and looking to claim the remaining slots. In it, I vowed to return this week with the results of the interactive session, except that much to my chagrin nobody played along, figuring they’d done all the commentary work on their own separate forums and an attempt to stir new conversation was instead just starting over on progress that had already been made.


Well, I can’t make you play along, but neither do I need to take my football and go home either. There’s no need to disrespect the groundwork that has been laid beforehand by these numerous forums, as well as a fairly wide variety of playtesting groups working on different assumptions and different designs, and my goal for this week is to weave all of these things together for a look at the States metagame and the choices that are going to be present and inherent in each archetype. I’ll also give a few hints as to how the key contenders match up against each other, and we can go from there into creating an assumed picture of the metagame as well as the suggestions that can come from it as to how to succeed. I like looking at the whole picture and figuring out the so-called “rules of the format”, and that’s something that may be profitable here as well. It may also be highly premature, so we’ll see how firm our conclusions are before taking that particular step.


Everybody and his brother has been working on a Red/White deck, and we’ve gotten to a pretty solid understanding of what’s going on. What we haven’t got is a view of the world around us, to figure out which of the excellent cards we have access to we’ll actually want to play, and what the plan should be with the other fifteen cards they let us use too. Ted Knutson, this here edits this here site guy and all-around lovable ragamuffin of metagame madness, recently ragged on Char in favor of Shock, “because Birds of Paradise must die”. I won’t be one to disagree with this, quite yet, especially given how the words echo those of my erstwhile team-mate and oft-times mentor Seth Burn, who knows how to build himself a Red deck. I will say however that the option isn’t quite so clear-cut and simple as that, because you need to balance a few different factors:


1. Maximizing the deadly reach of your burn spells, all other things being equal; getting more bang for your card.


2. Maximizing the effect of your burn spells per mana invested; getting the most tempo out of each card invested.


3. Maximizing your ability to negate key problem cards; killing the right things with the fewest number of cards invested.


This is not so easy a game as it sounds, especially since we actually aren’t talking about “just” Shock, Lightning Helix, and Char, but their interaction with a seemingly unknown metagame. That said, there are three real options, excluding one burn spell each from the mix, and a fourth option that is acceptable but currently undiscussed in your overall game-plan, removing Glorious Anthem in favor of more burn.


Option A is to remove Shock, giving you a very long reach (28 points of burn from 8 cards) and the plausible ability to burn your opponent out from the neighborhood of double-digits life totals if you have just three of these eight cards. You can kill Meloku every time he shows up, but you can’t kill Birds of Paradise without sacrificing your own tempo as well, meaning that by the time you can do so it’s probably not worthwhile to bother about.


Option B is the option seemingly more common in recent discussions, ditching Char in favor of the tighter mana-cost packages. The argument that you can kill Birds is a lot weaker than the argument that this configuration is probably the best one for the mirror match, with the mana cost of your removal spells shaved aggressively to match the size of the creatures you’ll need to be killing. [This was also stated clearly in the article Sean is referring to, but it wasn’t done in spiffy graphical form. – Knut] Its presumed excellence against Black/Green is only icing on the cake from that perspective, because you can honestly expect to see a lot of White Weenie, and can get a fair guess of what it’ll look like regardless of these presumed unknowns. You have the shortest reach (20 points of burn from 8 cards) and have to invest two cards to kill Meloku every time he shows up, and your ability to kill a controlling deck in double-digits life totals is effectively impossible without some more guys breaking through.


Option C is the controversial one I don’t think anyone has honestly thought of, which is ditching Lightning Helix in favor of Shock and Char. You keep your tight one-mana tempo package, Shock, and keep some of your long reach (24 points of burn from 8 cards), and thanks to burn that hits for four you’re back to conceivably killing an opponent with half or more of their life left over. But you’re ditching Lightning Helix, meaning you’re probably playing the wrong burn for the mirror match, even if you have some of the right burn available. The question to be answered is whether the long reach and the ability to kill Meloku with a single card is an acceptable compromise for losing the best burn spell in the mirror match.


Option D is the weird one that I don’t think has been discussed anywhere so far, losing Glorious Anthem as a “weak link” card that is a dangerous proposition based simply on how it is that the White Weenie deck gets stymied. While Anthem ruled in pre-Rotation Standard, it was due to its complementary interaction with Damping Matrix where other options clearly conflict, with the Anthem pumping your men regardless of a temporary ban on the use of activated abilities that nullified Swords and Jittes. At the moment, it’s the inferior creature pumper, as ditching Jitte in favor of Suppression Field is looking less and less like the proper configuration. The Field is an excellent sideboard tool, but the decks being played do not seem especially vulnerable to it, or unprepared to face off with its existence.


In my mind, the best way to look at this option is to look at it as a means to play both Shock and Lightning Helix, which are great for the mirror match, and still have more than enough burn to smoke a Gifts Ungiven deck that halts the initial rush and makes future use of creatures unfavorable, as well as a single burn spell capable of taking down The Clouded Mirror by itself. Both serve as a means to close the deal quickly against a variety of decks, being an excellent turn 3 play following a drop on both the first and second turns, and can be good in multiples…


… so long as your men are still around.


The options here are a lot more varied than people are giving credit for, and the importance of Glorious Anthem in addition to Umezawa’s Jitte is hard to see. In the mirror, at least, replacing Anthem with Char seems strictly poor, unless you don’t mind paying two life and three mana to kill a 2/2 dork. Glorious Anthem has just been assumed to be in the deck from so many pundits advancing the deck that considering excluding it seems wrong somehow… but it is an option, especially if you are playing Jitte.


You are playing Jitte, aren’t you?


Of all the options discussed, the least conventional is the one I find has the most appeal, and is the most dangerous version of the deck even if it isn’t necessarily the most consistent at ending the game quickly. It’s the most unforgiving deck when it comes to being caught with your pants down, and can ignore Hokori shenanigans because it really just wants to hit your face with some burn. I’d say the following is the best version to test against for the purposes of adversarial testing, and may be the best version to play at States if things shake down how I expect they might.


Boros Deck Wins

4 Lantern Kami

4 Suntail Hawk

4 Leonin Skyhunter

4 Hand of Honor

3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda

3 Skyknight Legionnaire

4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Shock

4 Lightning Helix

3 Char


4 Sacred Foundry

4 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]

2 Mountain

13 Plains


Sideboard:

4 Bathe in Light

4 Suppression Field

4 Kami of Ancient Law

3 Manriki-Gusari


There are more than a few decisions being made here, and none of them are necessarily the right ones for the metagame that will show up at States in your particular area. One assumption is that losing Glorious Anthem is acceptable in the mirror match, which effectively requires the matchup to be about Jitte, not Anthem. The use of Manriki-Gusari in the sideboard to negate the Jitte advantage makes up for some losses from Glorious Anthem’s removal, as entirely too many decks are weeks behind in their metagame development to realize that this tool is still useful and can be as crucial as it was in the Block season. (That an argument can be made for replacing Anthem with Manriki-Gusari is true, but it’s not one I’m making at the moment. Think about it for yourself and get back to me.) Siding for the mirror, which is the best way to see if we’ve screwed things up irredeemably by tanking the Anthems, when sideboarding we’d do the following:


+4 Bathe in Light, +4 Kami of Ancient Law, +3 Manriki-Gusari for


-4 Hand of Honor, -3 Char, -3 Skyknight Legionnaire, -1 Isamaru


This of course would require some more fooling around with, to see if we’re taking out too many creatures, and replacing Hand of Honor with the Kami is based entirely off the assumption that your opponents’ Anthems will be worth wanting to kill at some point. Hand of Honor’s Bushido ability should rarely matter in the mirror, as you’re not looking to make combat an interactive experience in any case. Without Anthem this is looking to be more controlling, as Bathe in Light is less deadly than in other versions, and thus one more reason why this is the best deck to throw at your non-White-Weenie decks to gauge how much trouble you can be in with this matchup, but not necessarily the deck to play. If you don’t have a plan against weenies this fast backed up by this much burn, you had better go back and make one.


So… four different versions of White Weenie, four different world-views on what you’re going to look at for the rest of the metagame.


Building up the rest of the world around this benchmark, you get some interesting results. One deck being looked into fairly commonly on numerous bulletin board and forum services is the Eye of the Storm deck, intended to quickly accelerate the latest highly-expensive broken Blue enchantment that creates long and degenerate turns, this time using Green’s mana acceleration and the dynamic duo of Heartbeat of Spring and Early Harvest to create an arbitrarily large (but not infinite, just “lots”) amount of mana and poke through your deck long enough to cast Maga, Traitor to Mortals for your life total plus a bit extra to be on the safe side, maybe 50 or so. None of them will lie to you and tell you that White Weenie is a good matchup, and the more burn you squeeze in the less happy they are with their chances, as they need more time to get running than you are likely to give them.


Common versions look something like this:

10 Island

11 Forest

1 Swamp


4
“>Early Harvest

4
“>Heartbeat of Spring

4
“>Rampant Growth

4
“>Farseek

4
“>Telling Time

4
“>Drift of Phantasms

4
“>Ideas Unbound

4
“>Sensei’s Divining Top

3
“>Eye of the Storm

2
“>Tidings

1 Maga, Traitor to Mortals


I disagree with several aspects of this deck, but with it being my deck choice for Regionals, to find out more you’ll really have to look for my article this week on the Premium side of this very same website. There’s too much to talk about to give a simple treatment, from its all-or-nothing approach to its out and out noninteractivity with decks that can beat it, like the Boros beats deck, and that without hijacking Eye of the Storm with its own Instants. I’m even giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that gaming without the Divining Top is a mistake that they will soon rectify, instead of the less-than-stellar Peer Through Depths that misses entirely too many of their cards. My other objections can be read about here.


Simply put, this is a deck that is all about getting one card into play and abusing it to an absurd degree, with 22 cards that trigger the Eye, and eight more that either Transmute to one directly, or can be cashed in for one with very little effort (the Top, silly). A piece of paper keeping track of the turn for spells cast and mana in pool might look like this:

























Mana


Spells


1G1U


Early Harvest


7G5U


Ideas Unbound Early Harvest


11G11U


Rampant Growth Ideas Unbound Early Harvest


Why are you still playing you moron?


15G17U2B


Farseek Rampant Growth Ideas Unbound Early Harvest


23G23U4B


Telling Time Farseek Rampant Growth Ideas Unbound Early Harvest




Maga you for two hundred, for making me write down all this stuff on my piece of paper in case a judge came by and had to reconstruct the turn to make sure I didn’t sneak an extra card off the top, you jerk. If you think I’m giving you enough time for game two, you’re a moron.


As far as book-keeping goes, this deck is a nightmare. No, really, it’s that bad. An Eye of the Storm with six cards imprinted on it has cast 6! spells, or 6+5+4+3+2+1 spells, for a total of 21 spells cast. This one card with just a little investment – like an Early Harvest and a Telling Time – can generate so much resource advantage that it becomes nearly impossible to not win with the avalanche this sets off, with the saving grace being that if your opponent takes too long to do their thing you can always jack their combo out from under them with any Instant in response and getting like seven spells of your own cast while you’re at it. Their kill comes at Sorcery speed, thanks to Maga, so a little burn can go a long way as their self-perpetuating cycle becomes your own if, say, the next card they have to add to the stack is a Sorcery rather than an Instant.


Of course, that doesn’t in and of itself make this a good deck, but if you can pull it off fast enough the symmetry of the effect pretty much disappears. And the above-listed deck has two very clear frailties: a susceptibility to countermagic, and a vulnerability to discard. It requires a certain amount of resources to get started, even if it’s just Heartbeat / Eye of the Storm / Early Harvest / Ideas Unbound, or just Ideas Unbound and a little luck drawing into Early Harvest before it’s too late. Go ahead and count the number of spells you have to counter if you want to have a complete advantage in the matchup and prevent them from killing you:


3 Eye of the Storm (trying to counter their spells with it in play gives them access to countermagic of their own, and an awful lot of resources)


1 Maga, Traitor to Mortals


Yep, four spells, and everything else can resolve. Counter Heartbeat of Spring or early mana accelerants if you want to do something with your Mana Leaks before they turn off, but even just a little real countermagic can fight past this deck as it’s listed at the moment. I’m sure someone will solve the problem by States, either on purpose or by accident, or just get lucky and miss the part of the metagame that has countermagic entirely and just play White Weenie (and get a little lucky) and Gifts (a walking bye) all day.


Speaking of other decks we’d have reason to believe exist, there’s the Gifts deck. The tools you have to bring to bear for this deck are pretty astounding, since you get to have the cream of the crop of two otherwise very strong colors (Black and Green), plus anything you can squeeze in from other colors with your numerous dual land options (you’re not limited to the usual 4 Gifts Ungiven, 1 Meloku in your splash color if you choose not to be), plus the entirety of the Golgari guild cards. Pretty nutty for a deck that was already acknowledged as the best in its format, and which has been accused of being even more metagame-dominating than the Affinity deck in its heyday.


Of course, this is also one of the most difficult decks to tune correctly, as it can with good reason play anywhere from 0 to 4 copies of pretty much any card, and unlike most decks it is very, very sensitive to the difference between 1 and 2 copies of a card thanks to the tutoring and the plan of shuffling and Topping all game. Building it up piece by piece, let’s look at the new cards. Recollect is too good to exclude a single copy of with the rest of the Gifts engine in place, and of the Dredge cards it would seem that Life from the Loam, Grave-Shell Scarab, and Nightmare Void are all too good to exclude. Nightmare Void gives you a potential for crawling out of the hole that traditional counterspell decks can put you in because of the fragmented nature of your game-plan, and the paucity of actual spells you try and win the game with (rather than search up more Lands, et cetera), while Life in the Loam lets you get tricky with your special Legendary lands and Grave-Shell Scarab is clearly too insane to leave out. Plague Boiler should also be present, and the good mana your dual lands buys you is likewise invaluable. Then you’ve got Lands, and are pretty much done with Ravnica’s additions.


So far:


4 Sensei’s Divining Top

4 Sakura-Tribe Elder

4 Gifts Ungiven

1 Life from the Loam

1 Nightmare Void

1 Recollect

1 Grave-Shell Scarab

1+ Plague Boiler


Figuring out whether or not you wish to include the Hana Kami-Splice tricks this deck can accomplish seems pretty silly, as even with a fairly low number of Arcane cards you should still be able to pull off the trick with just a single Gifts Ungiven and maintain it surprisingly well. Because of the difficulty against countermagic, it’s Soulless Revival and not Death Denied that should get the nod for the deck. While Death Denied is clearly the more powerful card, Soulless Revival is the sneakier card, and can turn otherwise forgettable spells like Kodama’s Reach into cards worthy of a Counterspell. Hana Kami and Soulless Revival get the nod; along with Recollect, you’ll get one of the three, and thus be able to recur any Arcane or creature card at your whim.


Some number of Kagemaro will more or less shore up the deck’s game plan against creature decks, as riding Kagemaro hard against critter decks makes life very unpleasant. Three is likely sufficient in the main, with a fourth in the side for when you have to worry about it. From the rest of the cards, you want some more creature removal and the usual host of Legends, plus the rest of the mana acceleration you aren’t playing so far. As many of these that can be Arcane should be, and we want to keep an eye on the mana curve to keep things affordable. We’ve used 19 slots with automatic includes so far, and can use more Plague Boilers if we let ourselves, as there is no clearly good way to make use of it repeatedly. We’ll want 23-24 lands, depending on whether we go past 4 Reaches and 4 Elders and dip into some number of Farseeks. As many as 43 slots have been dedicated thus far, then, and so 17 cards fill out the deck.


(1 Hana Kami)

(1 Soulless Revival)

4 Kodama’s Reach

3 Kagemaro, First to Suffer

2 Hideous Laughter

1 Exile Into Darkness

3 Putrefy

3 Sickening Shoal

1 Cranial Extraction

1 Wear Away

1 Myojin of Night’s Reach

1 Kokusho, the Evening Star

1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni

1 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror


By my count, that gives us 41 cards we’d like to include into the main deck, and some of it is going to have to go. The four clearest candidates for cutting are Plague Boiler, Life in the Loam, Cranial Extraction and Exile Into Darkness. Wear Away already covers the technical problems presented by artifacts and enchantments, so Plague Boiler doesn’t do anything special that Kagemaro and Hideous Laughter don’t already cover. As far as Artifacts go, Putrefy can make up some of the difference when it comes to threats that require quick answers, like Pithing Needle or Jitte during an especially aggressive draw. Life from the Loam lets you fight over the Legendary lands, and so may warrant inclusion as a definite sideboard card for that specific purpose, as if nothing else it lets you deny opponents the use of key assets like Shizo, Death’s Storehouse. Exile Into Darkness is situational, as it requires the right matchup to really do anything at all, and against tough matchups we’re already pretty wary of having cards that do nothing. Cranial Extraction is the hardest last cut, as it clearly has a home against difficult problems, but I think Nightmare Void answers the problem much more succinctly most of the time without having to worry about missing, and with the extra bonus that it is quite saucy against counter-based decks that normally are quite a problem for the Gifts deck.


Putting it all together without testing gives us a deck that has been well-reasoned out, but doesn’t have solid playtesting behind it to confirm the fine details of some of these numbers. Other cards would also make excellent additions, like Goryo’s Vengeance, but that powerful tool can be relegated to the sideboard (and may be the focus of the sideboard strategy, if late-season Gifts mirror match technology stays with us here in Standard). It’s hard making a sixty-card deck that can play anything it wants to after all.


The 37 cards we want before adding lands are:


4 Kodama’s Reach

4 Sakura-Tribe Elder

4 Sensei’s Divining Top

4 Gifts Ungiven

3 Sickening Shoal

3 Putrefy

3 Kagemaro, First To Suffer

2 Hideous Laughter

1 Recollect

1 Soulless Revival

1 Wear Away

1 Nightmare Void

1 Hana Kami

1 Grave-Shell Scarab

1 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror

1 Kokusho, the Evening Star

1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni

1 Myojin of Night’s Reach


This leads to a total of five Blue mana, seventeen Green mana, and twenty-nine Black mana. We have a deck that is greedy for Black mana but that doesn’t want to cut any of its Green mana, and so it’s a good thing that we get to have eight Black/Green duals to give us as much Green as we need to run Reach and Elder consistently, while not making our mana so painful that we can’t keep up with the fast decks because of life spent trying to have a “normal” mana base running our abnormally greedy colored mana costs.


4 Llanowar Wastes

4 Overgrown Tomb

1 Shizo, Death’s Storehouse

1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers

1 Island

2 Yavimaya Coast

5 Forest

5 Swamp


There’s pretty simple reasoning behind most of these choices; this gives us 15 Black sources and 17 Green, minus two of each if we need to use it a second time, and if we can avoid doing without green mana in our earliest turns then we’ll have a smooth, pain-free mana base from there on in for even our most taxing colored mana needs. Yavimaya Coast sneaks in there as a way besides basic Island to cast Gifts Ungiven, without resorting to excessive use of Tendo Ice Bridge, which just isn’t as good as the real-deal dual lands.


Looking to the sideboard, we have room for fifteen cards, in which we want to put more than fifteen tools. The fourth Shoal and a third Hideous Laughter should be pretty easy to see, as is an Exile Into Darkness for the various weenie matchups. Three cards eaten, and possibly others want to go in depending on what’s going on. Cranial Extraction should be an automatic inclusion, and for the mirror we’ll want at the barest of minimums 2 Kokusho, the Evening Star and 2 Goryo’s Vengeance, as this was the kill method for the mirror that was hardest to disrupt and used the most powerful tools. If you want to go Godo and search out a Jitte, you go right ahead.


For the mirror, at least one Ghost-Lit Stalker should be present, which is fine since Blue decks effectively require at least one anyway. Three for starters should be sufficient, if not downright excessive if you get Nightmare Void running to strip their hand anyway. So far we’ve dedicated the following:


1 Sickening Shoal

1 Exile Into Darkness

1 Hideous Laughter

1 Cranial Extraction

2 Goryo’s Vengeance

2 Kokusho the Evening Star

3 Ghost-Lit Stalker


For the clever, we’ll temporarily add one copy of Boseiju and one copy of Life from the Loam, which can make life unpleasant for those trying to prevent Splice-based card advantage. But we’ll also be wanting something to stop all those nasty burn spells that give the Boros Deck a chance of pulling the game back after you’ve gained control, or at least gain some life so you have more time to race their accumulation in hand. Miren, the Moaning Well seems like another possible inclusion for that reason, since you can literally take as long as you want killing them so long as they don’t assemble your life total in burn in the meantime… and as a pain-free land, can be considered for main-deck inclusion. I’m not sold on the use of it, however, as I’m not certain it’ll actually do anything before turn 7, or in common parlance “a few turns after you need it to”. I’m definitely certain I don’t want to try squeaking a colorless land in the maindeck without cutting a spell, and I don’t think the 24th land warrants inclusion at the cost of any card listed so far.


Three sideboard slots still remaining, and the problem of random burn spells needing to be answered. Honestly, I’d say this will come down to playtesting to figure out what you can get away with in this matchup and how much breathing room you need to buy. If the matchup against aggro decks works out unfavorably enough that you need to sideboard something to protect against end-game burn spells, Vital Surge and Joyous Respite stop looking so bad. As much as I might wish it could be easy to pull a Gifts deck out of nowhere, you can’t dedicate all seventy-five cards without playtesting more than I have for this, which has a lot to do with theorizing potential builds, a fair bit of watching other peoples’ Gifts lists struggle against varying decks, and zero testing of this matchup from the Gifts deck’s side of things. I’m happy with the maindeck list and content with the first thirteen of fifteen sideboard cards, and I’ve also been the Boros deck trying to burn out the Gifts deck just often enough to know that a weak start for Gifts can be pretty messy and end in a flurry of burn. Whether this will come up often enough to require seemingly-weak dedicated lifegain Arcane cards to work up a life bubble and keep out of burn range is something I can’t say I have a strong enough opinion on. At the moment I’d toss Vital Surge in as a one-of and debate the fifteenth sideboard slot heavily.


If all you want to do is beat White Weenie, you can play the following deck, which I advise you from the get-go is 100% guaranteed to make Dan Paskins cringe in the horror of the pollution of his beloved Red cards.


“Red Deck Gains Life”

a.k.a. “Peace of Crap”

4 Peace of Mind

4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Searing Meditation

4 Shock

4 Lightning Helix

4 Wrath of God

4 Shard Phoenix

4 Firemane Angel

4 Descendant of Kiyomaro


4 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]

4 Sacred Foundry

8 Plains

8 Mountain


Sideboard:

4 Terashi’s Grasp

4 Char

4 Pyroclasm

3 Mindblaze


Don’t laugh. Someone’s going to play this. They might even win. You’ve been warned. [Those with Premium memberships are more likely to play Richard Feldman better version from yesterday. – Knut]


For the purposes of deciding what Mono-Blue deck will make up the metagame, I really think it’s best just to leave you to Flores; I’m not so confident that it beats the Boros Deck, especially when his playtesting results talk about outmoded cards like Hokori, Dust Drinker from the White decks and he’s laughing off last week’s Hunted Lammasu, which of course dies to the “Danger of Cool Things” problem. Beat White Weenie with enough dedicated removal to keep Jushi Apprentice off the board, the ability to smack a Meloku into next week with a single card, and enough burn to take you from twenty and I’ll believe you’re the real deal. My theorizing with Mono-Blue was the following, but I won’t vouch for it in a world with as many flying cheap drops and burn spells as is likely to be common from the White decks.


4 Jushi Apprentice

4 Telling Time

4 Mana Leak

4 Remand

4 Rewind

4 Hinder

4 Plague Boiler

4 Threads of Disloyalty

3 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror


4 Golgari Rot Farm

4 Quicksand

1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds

1 Minamo, School at Waters’ Edge

15 Island



The only sideboard card I am certain about including is Shadow of Doubt, which serves as a true counterspell against cards that search decks (Gifts Ungiven, Kodama’s Reach, and “stifles” Sakura-Tribe Elder, too!) while also working as a partial counterspell against cards like Cranial Extraction. Its merits are not quite strong enough to warrant main-deck inclusion in my mind when compared to the benefits of Remand in its place, which is less strong against some cards (Gifts Ungiven) but absolutely certain to have some effect in the early game besides the “draw a card” effect. Just using it turn 2 to boomerang + draw a card a Leonin Skyhunter is pretty sweet as a tempo play… but after sideboarding the more powerful tool can be correctly applied as it comes up. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another Island out of the sideboard, as another land for squaring off against similar matchups, but that’s just a suspicion as far as how many sideboard cards you’ll actually need. Likewise, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some number of Pithing Needles in the side, mainly against Vitu-Ghazi but with applications against a large number of problematic cards, especially Ghost-Lit Stalker.


So we’ve had a look at U/G Combo, mono-Blue control, a good R/W deck and a bad R/W deck, and built ourselves Gifts Ungiven. To really complete the metagame peek, we’ve got a few more bases to cover. One such is Flores’s “Critical Mass” deck, now even more Mass-free than the original version thanks to Vinelasher Kudzu, and its particular approach to the aggro-control archetype. I haven’t seen an actual list for the deck, and so I may very well be mauling it, but building it up from the beginning we again look to find an obvious crossover from the original deck:


4 Sensei’s Divining Top

4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Hinder

4 Hisoka’s Defiance

4 Kodama’s Reach

4 Sakura-Tribe Elder

4 Kodama of the North Tree

4 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror

4 Keiga, the Tide Star

1 Isao, Enlightened Bushi



1 Minamo, School at the Water’s Edge

1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds

1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers

4 Tendo Ice Bridge

7 Island

9 Forest


Tricking this out for Standard is a completely different experience, and I’d start with the following blocks of cards:


4 Vinelasher Kudzu

4 Sakura-Tribe Elder


These two seem to stick together, being the main plan for a turn 2 play, and happily they seem to complement each other. One rewards you for the other’s efforts, which was already quite worthwhile.


4 Mana Leak

4 Remand

4 Hinder


The cheap countermagic, and only the cheap countermagic. We’re looking at a tempo deck rather than a dedicated control deck, and the hope is that you can run all twelve and still have enough creatures to run Jitte… which would require at least sixteen, in keeping with the regular listing.


4 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror

4 Umezawa’s Jitte


Your board-controlling power cards. Skimping on these is unacceptable. I’m fairly sure that your average matchup will see you not wanting to tap out to cast six-mana Dragons, when your basic plan is to have your two-mana guy be your virtual Dragon. With twenty-eight cards named, my plan would be to respect part of what got the deck its success in the first place, and fill it in with 4 Sensei’s Divining Top and 4 Kodama’s Reach. We’re short on creatures, though, and really want to have a high-impact gameplan to go with all of these controlling spells. We want a strong aggro-control bent to the deck, letting you do important things for the first few turns and then play your game while keeping up countermagic quite effectively. To fill in the slots with more creatures, we have to cut cards, and Remand is the easiest one to relegate to the sideboard. Gnarled Mass makes a return appearance to the deck, then, giving us the following:


4 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror

4 Sakura-Tribe Elder

4 Vinelasher Kudzu

4 Gnarled Mass

4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Sensei’s Divining Top

4 Kodama’s Reach

4 Hinder

4 Mana Leak



4 Tendo Ice Bridge

4 Yavimaya Coast

1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers

1 Minamo, School at the Water’s Edge

1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds

8 Forest

5 Island


Sideboard:

4 Remand

4 Threads of Disloyalty

4 Jushi Apprentice

3 Naturalize


I have reason to believe Mike’s list is vastly different than this, but then I also disagree with his plan of using six-mana Dragons as tempo devices in the upcoming metagame. If you want to again sideboard the highly specific counterspell device, you can put in Shadow of Doubt instead of Remand, but it loses a good deal of the necessary utility you’d want, like actually defending your spells against another control deck, or stopping a turn 2 Leonin Skyhunter. Aggro-control decks do exist, and may make a splash at States, but if nothing else you should be aware of their existence… they fill out the metagame and serve a distinct purpose, even if it may be a narrow niche squeezed between true aggro and dedicated control decks.


And here I am, having gone this long without talking about the deck most likely on everyone’s mind ever since the early previews, Black/Green. Despite all the hype about the deck, and a long string of forum posts on numerous bulletin-board sites (like Star City Games’ Forums) I haven’t seen a Black/Green deck that I’ve liked yet. Let’s take a quick step into the why of that, and go from there.


For starters, you can build Black/Green two ways. You can build an aggro deck, or you can build a control deck. The aggro version is an aggro-tempo deck, and is fundamentally worse at that than the aggro-tempo yardstick of the format, the Boros White Weenie deck. Even inaccurately built for the metagame, using the wrong burn spells, it still has an advantage: better evasive weenies, and creature removal that can double as direct damage that goes straight to the face. The Red burn is also cheaper and more efficient than most of the options you get for the Black/Green deck, so even from the get-go Black/Green is going to have to do something unusual to stand out of the crowd. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Black/Green Control is strictly inferior to the Gifts Ungiven deck, and so technically we have found a good Black/Green deck, it just has five Blue spells in it. Hopefully you can deal with that and digest that, and keep wondering why you’re trying to use Plague Boiler in a Black/Green deck that is based on board control. As cute as “at end of turn, put Gleancrawler’s ability on the stack, in response pump the third counter on Plague Boiler” can be, if you want to clear the board you have no reason to want anything of yours on it. Carven Caryatid is a giant trick card, in that it commits you to playing a control-oriented anti-beatdown strategy… but it doesn’t advance your own plan, while it lures you into the security of believing you’re a control deck. The weenies fly. The Caryatid is useless in most of the rest of the matchups, and if you say it’s useful in the mirror, well, Hypnotic Specter flies, too.


Committing to a dedicated beatdown plan, we see the following instead:


4 Llanowar Elves

4 Elves of Deep Shadow

4 Dark Confidant

4 Nezumi Shortfang

4 Hypnotic Specter

3 Iwamori of the Open Fist

4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Putrefy

4 Blackmail

3 Persecute


4 Llanowar Wastes

4 Overgrown Tomb

1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfather

1 Shizo, Death’s Storehouse

1 Tomb of the Urami

7 Forest

4 Swamp


Sideboard:

4 Nezumi Graverobber

4 Arashi, the Sky Asunder

4 Viridian Shaman

3 Nightmare Void


I’m not saying that Black/Green can’t win, but I haven’t seen a version of Black/Green that I actually like yet, and to accomplish that feat you’d have to take advantage of the mana creatures you have available, capitalize on the good mana provided by two real dual lands in your color, and use the card advantage available to you at low cost: Shortfang, Lord Hypno, and Bob Maher. Nothing costs more than four, a lot of things cost one or two, and you have some Lands in there that are free draws. Sure, Bob doesn’t have any obvious support cards here (like Sensei’s Divining Top), but you also have the potential to gain life from Umezawa’s Jitte if you’re really worried about it. In the meantime, it’s an aggressive, discard-heavy deck using the powerful discard cards in the format, including Persecute, which is looking like it will kill some decks dead. Arashi does double-duty in the metagame, answering Meloku decks as well as White Weenie, while Graverobber stops the nonsense you’ll see from Gifts decks. Viridian Shaman breaks the Jitte war, which is already in your favor thanks to Putrefy, while Nightmare Void bats clean-up against blue-based and combo-oriented decks, taking their best card turn after turn.


I’m still not positive that this deck beats White Weenie with any regularity, but at least it’s giving itself a try rather than being a bad control deck that isn’t Gifts Ungiven. White’s damage sources pile on fast, but you can kill their Jitte while they can’t kill yours without another Jitte. Blackmail is Shock-like, in that it’s a quick spell that affects the development of the game, and fits in perfectly in the mana curve. Either you don’t have an accelerating Elf (Blackmail turn one), or you have an Elf and can cast Blackmail plus a two-drop turn 2, or you play turn 2 Hypnotic Specter and squeeze a Blackmail in while it’s still relevant thanks to your very, very low mana curve.


If you’re going to look to game with Black/Green at all at States, know your role: beatdown or control. Mid-range, able to work both ways, can operate but probably shouldn’t be tried, because this is an aggressive metagame and you don’t want to be sitting back reacting all the time, as that is a key way to misassign your role in an unknown matchup. If you’re looking to be Black/Green control, do yourself a favor and play Gifts Ungiven instead, as it’s more likely to be the proper build of the deck. If you’re looking to be Black/Green aggro, make sure you’re using the proper tools, and tweak out your mana curve as tightly as you can for speed’s sake as well as consistency’s sake. This is not a time to be caught fooling around, just a little bit slower than the rest of the field.


Elves of Deep Shadow are an obvious inclusion to the deck, and Llanowar Elves less so. In this case they get the nod over Birds of Paradise, by the way, because they can attack for one, and between the eight dual lands you have to open turn 1 with in addition to your Forests, if you have a turn 2 Hypnotic Specter, you can play a dual land and an Elf, and a Black source on the second turn to cast the Specter. Birds of Paradise do nothing, and in fact exacerbate part of the problem this deck has with White Weenie, as it’s a mana accelerant that otherwise does nothing for the game. You can get the same deal and leave a small but useful body contributing to the team, and having truly good mana makes this both possible and quite reasonable as far as planning the deck to consistently follow the same plan is concerned.


Hopefully this has proven useful in your practicing for States, and stirred up some thought as to what is actually going on leading up to this weekend’s first clash between the new Standard decks we’ve been working so hard on. The pace has been set by the beatdown decks, and the challenge issued to those who would seek to control the game… or avoid the question entirely by legalized cheating with their sixty-card decks, dispatching their opponent without ever actually playing Magic “with” them instead of “at” them.


Sean McKeown

— smckeown@livejournal.com


“Time here all but means nothing, just shadows that move ‘cross the wall


They keep me company, but they don’t ask of me, they don’t say nothing at all


I need just a little more silence, I need just a little more time…”


– Sarah McLachlan, “Time”