With two articles in a row dedicated to a pet-deck strategy of delving into The Rock in Extended, I feel as if I’ve wasted enough of my readership’s time on a strategy that will in all likelihood prove to be second-rate. While I’m content to still play with the deck and test it in the meantime, hearing about it is not going to get anyone else the kind of insight that playing with it is getting me… so to discuss Extended, I’d rather move on to different pastures. I have my theories as to what tweaks I would like from different decks to get me to play them, but they are the kind of things that bring up the danger of inbreeding in deck design and it doesn’t help anyone to hear about my maindeck-Finks Domain Zoo experimentation when I can chase a different question instead.
The question on my mind is actually brought to us not by anyone looking into Extended, but by that well-loved proponent of older formats, Stephen Menendian. This week he looked into Legacy and basically reached the conclusion that not playing Ponder in the format was likely a mistake when it came to choosing what deck to play, and so I’ve been musing on a lesson that I recall quite well from my preparations for Regionals this year and the Standard Pro Tour. In testing for that format, I started with Faeries, ended with Faeries, and the main technological improvement I made over time was the realization that my Faerie deck should be playing four Ponders. I’d started wanting Ponder as a means to see my turn 2 Bitterblossoms at least slightly more often, but found in testing that the number of times I found turn 2 Bitterblossom without one in my starting hand or directly on top of my deck thanks to the use of Ponder were very small indeed. I also found that I was winning a significant percentage more of my games because I was running four Ponders; the mid- and long-game selectivity that Ponder brought to me was excellent and in playing the 56-card mirror-match I was winning something crazy like 60-70% of the games, because I had four Ponders and they had four other cards fleshing out their deck.
I sent Robert Seder, a local player who has been on the Pro Tour frequently but with little success, to the Pro Tour with Ponder in Faeries, after proving to him with testing and through the application of logic that four Ponders alongside your four Ancestral Visions was just better than zero Ponders next to your Ancestral Visions. I also wrote an article that was published on midnight the night before the Pro Tour, breaking the results of my testing and tuning, but to the best of my knowledge Rob was the only person Pondering in his Faerie deck. We are back, now, at the point where Faerie decks with Ancestral Visions are good again… and I feel I must wonder, is it time to consider Ponder as well? Having played around with the Faerie decks of different stripes by now, I feel it is an excellent candidate, even if I have been letting myself stay strung along by the lure of fair cards in a Rock-like design for the past few weeks. Might those months-past testing results for an entirely different format still hold validity, because a deck with Ponders is just better than a deck without?
To choose a Faerie deck, first I have to choose a camp. There are two distinct ones, American and Japanese, and they play very differently. In my experience so far, the American camp is most likely to be paid attention to for the PTQ season, but the Japanese camp is the one I myself most want to be in. I’ve found I like the Japanese school of thought for Faeries in Extended much better than I like the American camp’s deck, and I just flat-out prefer the Ancestral Visions card-engine to the Thirst for Knowledge card-engine. It helps that the Visions/Ponder plan works so well next to each other, as either way you’re planning on paying one Blue mana at Sorcery speed, but even before that I frankly just prefer the Blue-Black “mono-Blue Faerie” lists of the Japanese players to the five-color yet Bitterblossom-less “mono-Blue Faerie” lists of the American players. I’d rather have access to Bitterblossom than to Vedalken Shackles right now, and some of their other decisions like going heavy on the Sowers just seem correct to me as well. More abuse of Riptide Laboratory is better, right?
Looking at the Japanese decklists from Worlds, however, you’ll note they didn’t all agree with each other. So to reach the core of the Japanese Faeries list from Worlds, I think it is actually accurate here to apply the Frank Karsten methodology to see what is critical to the deck and what is flexible, as ultimately the point of Ponder is that it lets you play more copies of the critical cards and cut the “flexible” last four cards, gaining card selection and some mid-game strength as you get to manipulate your draw instead of just plucking from the top of your deck. Taking all of the Japanese decklists and processing them accordingly gives us the following numbers:
28 Island
16 Secluded Glen
16 Mutavault
15 River of Tears
8 Riptide Laboratory
7 Polluted Delta
3 Watery Grave
3 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Flooded Strand
1 Academy Ruins
16 Glen Elendra Archmage
16 Spellstutter Sprite
16 Vendilion Clique
13 Sower of Temptation
3 Azami, Lady of Scrolls
16 Ancestral Vision
16 Mana Leak
16 Spell Snare
12 Stifle
8 Umezawa’s Jitte
6 Engineered Explosives
3 Threads of Disloyalty
With four decks of note within this category, we divide and get this as our “ideal sixty cards”:
7.0 Island
4.0 Secluded Glen
4.0 Mutavault
3.75 River of Tears
2.0 Riptide Laboratory
1.75 Polluted Delta
0.75 Watery Grave
0.75 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
0.25 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
0.25 Flooded Strand
0.25 Academy Ruins
4.0 Glen Elendra Archmage
4.0 Spellstutter Sprite
4.0 Vendilion Clique
3.25 Sower of Temptation
0.75 Azami, Lady of Scrolls
4.0 Ancestral Vision
4.0 Mana Leak
4.0 Spell Snare
3.0 Stifle
2.0 Umezawa’s Jitte
1.5 Engineered Explosives
0.75 Threads of Disloyalty
Ideally we would just want to round to the nearest whole number, but instead I am going to apply playtesting results to get the numbers I desire. I’ve found that the utility of Minamo and Oboro in my deck doesn’t come up often enough to be worth the risk against a Blood Moon for my liking, and I’ve also found that Threads of Disloyalty is great overall but can be fine as a sideboard card; after I shave things down to the proper numbers and add in my Ponders, if I have a slot or two I will add some in, but not really worry about it otherwise. Stifle I am willing to cut entirely, relegating it to the sideboard if even there, because I keep finding it difficult to actually employ it the way I want to in this deck and the sorts of decks that it is really good against are a vanishingly small percentage of the metagame… I can put it to some effect, it’s true, against pretty much anyone, but I don’t want it as a Blue Stone Rain, I want a useful card in that slot, so this is the most drastic change from the Japanese lists that I am going to put into place here. I also want a full three copies of Engineered Explosives main and the fourth in the board, and would be quite happy to put an Academy Ruins in my deck as well to use with them. And Azami gets the bullet because I’m adding in a draw-manipulation engine already, and don’t want the clunky legendary one-of win-more card anywhere near what I am getting at.
But to effectively employ the turn 1 Ponder plan, we have to look very carefully at what lands can cast a Ponder on turn 1, and make a few decisions. River of Tears is clearly of high value to this deck, but Polluted Delta with a Watery Grave is a vital option that not all of the Japanese decks had fully explored, and one that I feel is important to this deck: I don’t want a lot of copies of River of Tears getting in the way of playing Ponder and Ancestral Vision on turn q, so I’m going to find myself limited in how many Rivers I get to play based on how many colorless nonbasics I end up having… I want no less than sixteen lands able to tap for Blue on turn 1 to Ponder and play Visions with, and that means I’m likely to use Polluted Delta and a Watery Grave and not four copies of River of Tears. Working with the mana, I’ll still want 25 sources; I could shave one, but then I’m considering Academy Ruins to be sort of a spell, and this is a deck that likes to draw its lands… those utility lands add some serious bonuses, so we don’t need quite as many actual spell cards to get some spell-like effects. I’m not going to go down to 24 just because I’m adding cantrips, this is a deck that in my testing needed to hit its fourth land on turn four every game in order to fully function and I was considering the 26th in its normal shell, so I’ll be happy with 25 plus four Ponders. Those 25 lands, then, are:
Lands that don’t tap for Blue on turn 1:
4 Mutavault
2 River of Tears
2 Riptide Laboratory
1 Academy Ruins
(9 in total.)
Lands that tap for Blue on turn 1:
7 Island
4 Secluded Glen
4 Polluted Delta
1 Watery Grave
(16 in total.)
There is at least some argument behind playing Ponders in a deck with more than four fetch-lands, so I issue one of my little playtesting mental notes to decide if the 5th (or more) fetchland would seem good to me, but at present I am sticking to four copies because I don’t want to take too much pain from my manabase. That is one of the advantages to playing the Faeries deck in the format, after all. I’d also like to consider turning basic Islands into Chrome Moxes, as another mental note, because that added speed boost is present in the American-style Faeries decks and I am not sure that just because we’re not running Thirst for Knowledge that some number of Moxes might not be acceptable regardless. Certainly not 4, probably not even 3, but some number such as 2 or 3 feels intuitively right at this point and I need to consider the specific needs of this deck over a long series of playtest games to figure out whether any of these potential changes might be improvements. As with my prior look into Faeries, I am loathe to make too many alterations all at the same time, because we don’t learn the value of each change; I’m making the bulk of these changes to add Ponder and work the manabase around the fact that I want to Ponder, not because I like making changes and think I’m clever.
We want these 21 spells:
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Ponder
4 Mana Leak
4 Spell Snare
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
The creature base ends up being 14 creatures, cutting the fourth Sower, fourth Archmage, and first Azami that the Japanese were playing:
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Vendilion Clique
3 Glen Elendra Archmage
3 Sower of Temptation
It is very hard indeed for me to get behind four copies of Archmage. Frankly, I’m just biased against the card, but thankfully playtesting time is getting me more on its side, so I’m not cutting the Archmages just because I am stubborn and crotchety. (I am stubborn and crotchety, but that’s not why I shaved an Archmage.) I had two key problems here: I was finding I couldn’t really get behind seven four-drops, because I didn’t want to draw a hand full of them, but with the added draw selection of Ponder, I have been finding that I still have plenty of Archmages even if I am not actually playing the maximum number of copies. After all, in this deck three copies almost feels like four to a regular deck, so this is a virtually invisible change to how the deck plays out simply because we’ll still see about the same number of Archmages. I would love to just reap the benefits of just trusting a reasonably-sized group of Magic players who are well-proven to be better than I am. (Hi, Kenji!) But the critical thing is, when we get to the end of the deck with everything I want, it’s 61 cards, not 60. Cutting the excess cuts the seventh four-drop, and I’d sooner cut the fourth Archmage than the second Sower.
We are now using Engineered Explosives and Umezawa’s Jitte as our only targets for Academy Ruins recursion, but “indestructible Jittes” and “reusable Explosives” are good things. That one Academy Ruins will come up more than a one-of would in most decks because we draw extra cards and Ponder a lot, and to me this is a happy thing.
We now have to look at the sideboard, where I definitely want Bitterblossoms, and the rest we can go with from there. The bulk of the Japanese players with this deck had 12 Black sources to access in order to get Bitterblossom online, while the copy that finished 6-0, played by Masaya Kitayama, only played seven. I’m content to have eleven and four Ponders in my deck, rather than dip below the sixteen turn 1 Blue sources I really wanted in order to fit in the twelfth Black source (the third River of Tears), and don’t want to shave the last one-of land (Academy Ruins) for it, so I’ll just have to settle in comfortably with the fact that I’ve tried as hard as I need to in order to get Black mana in the deck for Bitterblossom and as a second color for Engineered Explosives. Looking at the sideboards for these four decks, we see the following:
2 Annul
3 Bitterblossom
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Hurkyl’s Recall
3 Negate
1 Stifle
1 Threads of Disloyalty
(3 Threads/Stifles main-deck; 0 Explosives.)
4 Bitterblossom
1 Engineered Explosives
3 Negate
3 Thoughtseize
4 Threads of Disloyalty
(2 Explosives main-deck.)
4 Bitterblossom
1 Engineered Explosives
3 Negate
2 Thoughtseize
4 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
(2 Explosives main-deck.)
4 Bitterblossom
4 Negate
2 Thoughtseize
4 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
(2 Explosives main-deck.)
Summed up again that is:
15 Bitterblossom – 3.75 per deck.
15 Negate – 3.75 per deck.
13 Threads of Disloyalty – 3.25 per deck.
7 Thoughtseize – 1.75 per deck.
5 Engineered Explosives – 1.25 per deck.
2 Annul – 0.5 per deck.
2 Hurkyl’s Recall – 0.5 per deck.
2 Umezawa’s Jitte – 0.5 per deck.
1 Stifle – 0.25 per deck.
We can make some very simple modifications right off the bat. Engineered Explosives can be considered a one-of or a zero-of, because it certainly won’t be more than that. Hurkyl’s Recall and Annul can be taken off the list of options entirely, as the metagame does not presently give us any benefits for really considering them… and the need for a third copy of Jitte that half of the Japanese players felt is pretty neatly squared away by adding the “slightly more” Jittes main-deck that our Ponders represent, as well as we gain the utility of with Academy Ruins as slightly more than a one-of alongside them. We can figure that the two and only two copies we have main-deck will turn up enough to matter, and we don’t need any more in our sideboard thanks to the fact that our main-deck gives us slightly more of them to begin with. Having made those arguments, let’s see what’s left:
3.75 Bitterblossom
3.75 Negate
3.25 Threads of Disloyalty
1.75 Thoughtseize
1 Engineered Explosives
This totals 13.5 sideboard cards, so we have some rounding left to do. Round Bitterblossom and Threads of Disloyalty up to a four-of, and we have nine locked-in cards and six slots to share between Negate and Thoughtseize… and an interesting question still to be asked, because we have removed Stifles from our deck so far, and we might actually want them back in some matchups. Storm Combo does exist, and they had positive utility in a few other instances as well, so I don’t want to write them off entirely even as I wonder whether Thoughtseize is a critical addition to the sideboard in small numbers. The highest-finishing deck had none in his sideboard, while Kenji and Shuhei each played two and the coverage doesn’t give nearly enough information to tell us whether they found the Thoughtseizes in their sideboard specifically critical at any point in time. To keep at least some access to the things that have been cut from the deck so far, I’m far more comfortable cutting the Thoughtseizes that didn’t prove crucial in order to find room for the Stifles that still are absolutely necessary when they are needed at all, and leave the fourth Negate up for debate against the fourth copy of Engineered Explosives in the sideboard.
This gives us the following deck, as we take the thought process of adding Ponder to Faeries and follow it to its natural terminus:
7 Island
4 Mutavault
4 Secluded Glen
4 Polluted Delta
2 River of Tears
2 Riptide Laboratory
1 Academy Ruins
1 Watery Grave
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Ponder
4 Mana Leak
4 Spell Snare
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Vendilion Clique
3 Glen Elendra Archmage
3 Sower of Temptation
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
Sideboard:
4 Bitterblossom
4 Threads of Disloyalty
3 Stifle
3 Negate
1 Engineered Explosives
We also have some playtest notes to follow up on with it, the results of which I hope to bring to you next week after taking Ponder Faeries for an extensive spin:
1. Some number of Chrome Moxes might be appropriate. I would like to earmark two to three basic Islands as potential Chrome Moxes, and see whether I feel I am happier with them as perfectly mundane basic Lands, or if I would gain a real and noticeable benefit from having had access to that acceleration anywhere over the course of the game. While it is not necessarily very potent game 1, it should be worth noting that Chrome Moxes would be even better for sideboarded games, where it would allow for first-turn Bitterblossoms.
2. Four fetchlands might not be the correct number. While I doubt that I truly want fewer, it is possible that I would gain a benefit for playing more, based on the positive interaction between Ponder and fetchlands. While it’s not as large of an interaction as Brainstorm plus Shuffle was, it’s still a positive interaction to be able to take the best one of the top three cards, then shuffle. There is no obvious utility for these all being Polluted Deltas – there is no basic Swamp to fetch, so Flooded Strands are effectively identical. Potential vulnerabilities to a Pithing Needle on Polluted Delta is a small but nonzero argument for splitting them to 2 each of Delta and Strand, and even argues that since the U/B deck would be “expected” to be Polluted Deltas, that the 5th Fetchland if we play any should be the 3rd Flooded Strand if we do in fact split the fetchlands down the middle. The fifth Fetchland would also give us a twelfth Black source, but at the price of the seventh basic land and thus at least some vulnerability to Blood Moon effects.
3. Notes 1 and 2 do not get along well with each other. Cutting basic lands for Moxes, and then cutting basic lands for more Fetchlands, leaves us with entirely too few lands to actually find with fetchlands. We probably don’t want to do both of these things, as they are obviously at tension with each other, and in fact adding Moxes to our manabase makes us want to start cutting fetchlands down to fewer than four, not adding a fifth copy.
4. The mana count may actually be too high now that we have 25 lands and four Ponders. This should be tracked to confirm or deny over time, and corrected if we do in fact have too much land and should be playing 24. Part of the justification is that we have a lot of spell-like lands, so we don’t mind, but it does need to be watched for… while the deck is mana-intensive and can do impressive stuff with mana as time goes on, we don’t want too many action-light hands.
5. The loss of the fourth Glen Elendra Archmage should be paid attention to, and if it is truly missed, more room may need to be found at the expense of another card. We want the deck to still feel like the successful decks that Kenji et al. piloted at Worlds to good result.
6. The impact of losing Stifle from the main-deck needs to be considered. While I have maintained access to it out of the sideboard, I have not done a truly thorough cost-benefit analysis to placing it in the main-deck versus taking it out. The same decks that Stifle is good against, Vendilion Clique is good against, and access to Ponder to draw slightly more Cliques over time might not place us at a significant disadvantage even in the matchups where we would like to have Stifle the most.
7. The overall benefit of gaining Ponder to the main-deck needs to be considered. Its effect will likely be subtle and only visible over time, but the games in which Ponder is drawn it should have a positive effect on the rest of the game because of its card-selection prowess. How often we’re Pondering and how well it fits in with the rest of the deck’s design requires noting; most people hate it in Standard, but this Extended format more nearly maps up to Standard as of Regionals 2008 where Ponder was secretly amazing in the deck and most people were unaware of it than it does to the current Standard format where Ponder actively interferes with the deck’s curve. “Whether this was worth doing at all in the first place” is an excellent question to ask, but I’m sure that as long as the deck doesn’t trip on its Ponders like it would in Standard, it will have clear benefits.
Next week, we’ll look into answering some of these difficult questions.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com