The name of this column is a triple-edged pun… first we have the obvious level, that plenty of people in the world feel that I am a hack writer. We get the laugh out of the way and move on, because some people will pour derision on you no matter what you do, so you might as well laugh about it rather than take it seriously. On the second level, we see the more common approach: I like to hack through data and tournament results to provide you, the reader, with insight and analysis to help place you (and, frankly, myself) nearer to the cutting edge of Magical technology. And then there is the third level, where sometimes just sometimes I hack the format and come up with something new and unexpected that is quite awesome. And today, rather than provide you with a pre-Regionals run-down of all the decks that are worth knowing about in the metagame, we get to enjoy a story about meaning number three.
Last week, I was discussing the decks I was working on, their roles in the format as I was discovering it through my playtesting, and card choices as they changed over time. The decks I presented were still rough-hewn things, as can be seen by the fact that I completely neglected to realize that Ancient Ziggurat would be pretty amazing in the base-Red Bloodbraid/Anathemancer aggro deck, so long as you didn’t mind it getting in the way of a pumped-up Figure of Destiny, which clearly means it was good enough for two slots I just didn’t think to give it. (Thanks to the forums for reminding me of that card’s existence and possible implications here.) But thanks to the fact that you get a delay of a few days between when my column is handed in and when I actually have to figure out what I am playing the following weekend, the real gem of an idea that was to be forthcoming for this past weekend’s PTQ had not yet even germinated in my mind… and for those who caught the Top 8 results that were put up on the front page here at StarCityGames.com as of Monday, you may have caught a hint of it since then.
Previous analysis for the Conflux Standard format showed that Cedric Phillips‘ Red/White Kithkin deck was pretty much awesome, and one of the highest-competing decks in the format by the numbers. Success rates were dramatic for the few people who chose to play the deck at Pro Tour: Kyoto, though as the metagame developed over time and led us into the Magic Online Season One Championships it was pretty clear that the deck started to get stymied when it entered into a format that was heavy on token creatures such as G/W and B/W Tokens. It also wasn’t especially favored against Faeries, in my experience playing that matchup from the other side of the table, as it could run into those same problems against a Bitterblossom and leave the opponent with enough time to stabilize thanks to the fact that the deck was very light on reach. But with the change of the format to include Alara Reborn, I asked a very simple question: what happens if we cut the Red for Black, and play Zealous Persecution? There is the immediate argument of why the deck is distinct and different from Black/White Tokens, as you now have to justify the comparison between one-drop and two-drop Kithkin from the Bitterblossoms and Persist creatures that are starting to be the norm from B/W Tokens lists thanks to LSV. You play many of the same cards, after all, and thus the question has to be why one list might be valid in comparison to the other in the same metagame.
The answer, from my perspective, is simple: Black/White can work up and down the speed spectrum with equal validity, and you can make a choice about where on the deck-speed clock you want to be based on what the metagame is going to look like. Standard B/W Tokens circa Nassif’s win in Kyoto is a different animal from what we now see as the ‘standard’ list with Kitchen Finks and Murderous Redcaps, so the deck’s speed ranging up and down based on its card choices isn’t necessarily surprising. This past weekend, Calloso Fuentes, Asher Hecht and co. were all playing B/W Tokens with a few main-deck copies of Wrath of God, with four total after sideboarding and a few extra Wraths besides, with Austere Command present in their lists as well to allow for Wraths that answer Bitterblossoms too. By the end of the weekend I was listing this matchup as “BW Slowkens,” as it intentionally slows itself down to be a more controlling deck, using its cards to keep up on the board and push the opponent into overextending, at which time they Wrath and then drop more armies in a can fresh out of their hands, or just push the advantage with Bitterblossom. But before the weekend even began, I was looking to speed it up… starting off with Goldmeadow Stalwart into Wizened Cenn before casting Spectral Procession, to their tapped-land plus another tapped land start before they really began to play spells and affect the board. The faster deck had the greater chance of capitalizing on the swingy cards like Ajani Goldmane or Zealous Persecution to just push the other guy off the table entirely, and we’d found that whichever direction you chose to go, faster or slower, was an equally-valid decision you could make. If you went faster and they went slower then you were disadvantaged, but if you went either direction and they stood still, you were distinctly advantaged. And frankly there is a distinct advantage to being an aggressive beatdown deck in any format, giving you extra wins when your opponent stumbles or mulligans too much, which was the dealbreaker in my mind.
I didn’t design the deck, or at least I certainly didn’t design it by myself. But I did pass the initial seed of the thought-virus, playtesting variants of Kithkin decks and trying to see what changes were positive and what was just poop flung at the wall, and asking the important first question: Why are we playing Kithkin without Zealous Persecution? From there, that starting-point was enough to start a reasoned discourse between myself and the remainder of my car-mates for this PTQ, all of us starting with our own experiences and perspectives and trying to trade these back and forth to reach the proper deck design, and all of us agreeing on the basic core of the deck and just trying to make the rest of the tweaks and tunes to the deck and the sideboard in order to reach our ideal decks. I can’t claim credit for the deck as my own creation, since every bit as much of that work came from Josh McGhee, and the same results would not have been obtained without the long and winding discussions had as well with Miles Rodriguez and Axel Jensen on the long ride from New York City to Richmond, conversations which I feel benefitted all of us as well as the deck, honing card choices, mana-bases, sideboard plans and overall perspectives on what we were trying to accomplish through several hours of debate and spirited negotiation. We all had things we were unwilling to budge on, such as my “we are playing FOUR copies of Zealous Persecution main-deck” and Josh’s “… But not without Ajani Goldmane we aren’t” to temper it. Ultimately the things that needed to be sacrificed were sacrificed, and the things that needed to be preserved were preserved. None of us played the exact same 75 cards, either due to card availability issues, orneriness on remaining committed to their pet ideas in the first place (a key problem I tend to suffer when I think I am being especially ‘clever’), or simple disagreement on what was more valuable than what and what matchups you actually had to worry about.
I had initially begun the weekend by keeping track of match results and statistics, but unfortunately failed to actually keep these results somewhere between the start of the tournament on Sunday and arriving home in New York at far-too-early-o’-clock on Monday morning. Instead, we can cite the following results:
Day One PTQ:
Sean McKeown – 4-3 drop (failed to play 8th round due to a need to return borrowed cards for one of the teammates out of contention and off-site… and failed to play well 7th round due to tiredness mixed with apathy, a deadly combination for one’s rating).
Miles Rodriguez – 7-1 to reach the Top 8, lose in the quarterfinals.
Axel Jensen – 6-1-1 to reach Top 8, lose in the quarterfinals.
Josh McGhee – 3-2 drop (beer!).
Day Two PTQ:
Sean McKeown – 2-2 drop.
Miles Rodriguez – 0-2 drop.
Axel Jensen – 6-2 to reach Top 16.
Josh McGhee – 6-1-1 to reach Top 8, lose in the quarterfinals.
Combined record for the deck amongst the four people who started round one Saturday with it: 34-17-2. Even counting my somewhat dead weight playing the deck, the deck posted exactly twice as many match-wins as it did matches lost, against a pretty varied field. Many of the matches played were against the Black-White decks of various flavors, and while we found that we were disadvantaged against the Wrath-plentiful “B/W Slowkens” deck we were clearly able to overcome the more standard decklists that were generally plentiful in the room overall… and we all won at least one game in that matchup, so it is not as if we were sorely disadvantaged, just the underdog due to the fact that their directional shift in speed allowed them to sandbag Wraths to beat us with more often than our fast starts followed up by Zealous Persecution allowed us to beat them. And to my defense, before those who might want to play the role of my detractors are concerned, my personal record was seriously impacted by the fact that I had literally played zero matches with Kithkin in my deck lifetime before I sat down for round one, and on top of that have been continuing to suffer stress-related insomnia issues as I have unfortunately for several months now. Sometimes, just sometimes, you don’t fall asleep, when you’re stressing yourself out over life the universe and everything, and the fact that I recovered from a long night’s driving with at most four hours of actual rest was sure to affect my chances just as having to shift from Faerie-player for a year to newly-minted Kithkin-player likewise must have been working against me. In choosing to be realistic about my outcomes, I figured on the weekend as an expensive but necessary Regionals playtesting session, or at least I did when I woke up Saturday morning and realized that simply from the matters of my own physiology the chips were stacked against me… so my failure to post an impressive finish says less about the deck than it does about my inexperience at attacking for two, or my ability to play Magic well when I myself feel run down and exhausted.
Magic strategy articles frequently fail to properly address the sheer physical aspect of playing cards, which I know to be one of Mike Flores‘ recent fixations for Constructed-deck tournaments. It is hard enough to make the optimal play in a complicated board position when you aren’t overclocking your Magical processing-centers by playing decks of undue complexity against the field for eight rounds, and harder still if you have to be the control player who weathers the attack and squeaks into control at five life or less by orchestrating the perfectly-timed Wrath or setting up the Cruel Ultimatum that breaks their back. I’ve had a recent refresher in this in recent months simply due to the fact that it’s been almost all year now that I have had some element of sleep problems, and not even for a good reason like work stress in this uncertain economy… no, my pretendy fun-time games hobby has a few egomaniacal head-cases who have decided that I am evil and awful and need to be attacked within that community because I don’t just roll over and give them what they want, and this combined with relationship troubles and a few other uncertainties (hey, here’s where the economy shows up at last!) have seen me living through a crisis of self-confidence and wondering why it is that I do what I do with my time, and think of these people as ‘friends’ or at least ‘people I spend my luxury time with.’ It’s silly, I know, but you can’t really control what keeps you up at night, and the simple fact is that a large portion of resolving this problem has remained out of my hands to the present day… so sometimes I sleep at night perfectly fine and get to go play Magic quite well the next day, and sometimes I barely sleep at all and realize in the middle of round seven that I’m exhausted, starting to suffer from doubled vision, and really just don’t care about the game that I am playing, so I should stop. For the second day, I’d realized at 2-2 that despite the fact that two losses could theoretically make Top 8 it was unlikely that any who did so would even be me rather than the person who went 5-0, 5-2, 6-2 into the Top 8… and that while I had actually slept somewhat reasonably well the night before, I was better spent conserving my brainpower and energy for the long ride home as the only driver. In the terminology of spoon theory, I was only possessed of so much get-up-and-go before it got up and went, so it was better to conserve my spoons and get home safe than to enjoy a four-round playtesting session with some packs at the end of the rainbow.
But I have been a rude host so far to those who came looking for deck technology… here are the three lists with which my three car-mates made Top 8:
Creatures (20)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (12)
Josh was our most experienced Kithkin player, and the dominant head in our Four-Headed Giant team. While I stubbornly battled for a few of my card choices, like “4x Zealous Persecution, no negotiation!” and the inclusion of Ranger of Eos somewhere within our 75 cards even if it didn’t make it within our 60, it was largely Josh’s past year of experience attacking with the Kithkin tribe that we relied on, and thus it is very fitting that we have a look at Josh’s list. Sadly, card availability kept his list from being ideal, as he wanted one more Identity Crisis than we ourselves owned, and we had in fact just bought StarCityGames.com out of the card to put it in the rest of our lists. That one Identity Crisis in his sideboard was the last one StarCityGames.com owned on-site, and should have had a friend for those Five-Color Control and Reveillark matchups. Note the Oblivion Rings in his sideboard where most of the rest of us had Wispmare; by the end of Day Two’s PTQ and the discussion back on the ride home, we had more-or-less agreed that the Oblivion Rings were not just correct but might very well be main-deck worthy, and Josh’s experience with the card and his ability to utilize it expertly to maximum advantage informed us a great deal of just what we didn’t know about playing Kithkin but he did.
Creatures (21)
- 2 Burrenton Forge-Tender
- 3 Cloudgoat Ranger
- 4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
- 4 Knight of Meadowgrain
- 4 Wizened Cenn
- 4 Figure of Destiny
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (11)
Creatures (20)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (25)
Spells (12)
Miles and Axel inevitably won’t get nearly enough credit for working on the design of this deck, and unfortunately a good portion of this is likely going to end up being due to the fact that, of the four of us, I’m the one with the weekly column, and thus when an arbitrarily large number of people talk about Black/White Kithkin, a disproportionate number of them are going to have my name attached to it. This is where I’d like to give credit where credit is due; Miles is Josh’s playtest partner and helped to battle things out with Josh in the week leading up to the PTQ, and was clearly a contributor to the deck-design discussion that ultimately hammered all of the cards into their near-final configurations for the PTQs this past weekend… a fact which earned Miles his first PTQ Top 8 with our deck. Axel Jensen served as a key partner in acting as my playtest partner earlier in the week, though I was testing Reveillark and U/W Kithkin when he was testing R/W Kithkin… none of us were playtesting the B/W deck together, but the discussion we had about the format led to the inception of the idea, and the minute I said “Kithkin with Zealous Persecution” he was totally on board and committed to finding a way to make the aggressive deck with the two-mana blowout spell from the new set work. Again, most of the heavy lifting for deck design was performed by myself and Josh McGhee since we are just the more-experienced Magic players and overall better deck engineers… but this was well and truly a four-way discourse that led to three Top 8s for our deck, and Axel’s name on the Top 8 page was not simple due to the fact that we handed him a decklist and said “get ’em, Ray!”
We knew, all four of us, that something special had to be going on with this deck, when four players who just a few weeks before were very happy to be Affinity players, Next Level Blue players, Naya Zoo players, and Japanese Faeries players found themselves unequivocally agreeing together on a deck choice give or take five cards out of seventy-five. With more time and playtesting, we’d likely have come to agree to 75 out of 75, but that time did not suddenly create itself between the first conceptualizing stages of deck design and the round one players’ meeting Saturday… deck technology moves fast, but not that fast sometimes.
Following up on the deck into the upcoming weekend, this was the list we became most comfortable with after the long PTQ weekend:
Creatures (19)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (13)
Those two Oblivion Ring spots during the PTQ were either the two Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders or the fourth copies of Cloudgoat Ranger and Path to Exile, but our shared experiences together have led us to conclude that we are happiest with the two Oblivion Rings there to answer Planeswalkers, Bitterblossoms, or just awesome creatures in general, while we are happy to negotiate on the fourth Path, the fourth Cloudgoat Ranger, and whether or not we feel we are more advantaged against the metagame with or without two main-deck Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders in the list. Sideboard card number sixteen is the third copy of Mutavault, while we also waffle between the 3/2 spread of Reveillark and Elspeth, Knight-Errant to suit our desires from moment to moment, as again these depend a good deal on which matchups we feel are going to be most prevalent, and what tools they will be bringing to the table in order to combat us. Also on the list of things we waffle about is the Rustic Clachan count… Josh both loves and hates the card, and wants to minimize the copies he plays while the rest of us enjoy having it around perhaps since we don’t have a year’s combined experience of painful accounts of drawing it when you need a fifth land that comes into play untapped… and the presence or absence of one Swamp in the decklist. I’d felt as if I wanted the ninth Black source initially, and the option to fix my mana off an opponent’s Path to Exile, and in fact I still do… but likewise I’ve seen my fair number of hands that would have been unplayable if I had a Swamp instead of that Plains, so the argument has not yet been settled and requires a lot of intensive work to truly answer the cost-versus-reward question.
The main-deck is very straightforward. You play some creatures that are quick, you push some damage across the table and put Windbrisk Heights to good work cranking out threats, and in the White on White semi-mirror you take advantage of Ajani Goldmane if possible to overcome the opponent where straight-out attacking doesn’t work right off the bat. The sideboard, however, is less straightforward… and is dedicated to the fact that there will be plenty of games post-board where you have to grind out incremental damage against players who are trying to gain incremental advantage, relying on the powerful White cards like Elspeth and Reveillark to consistently make the opponent’s reactionary control cards difficult to leverage. Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender is our catch-all answer to everything, as many times we had to ask ourselves how do we deal with Card Xx and the answer was, “Forge-Tender.” Volcanic Fallout, Jund Charm, or Firespout? Forge-Tender. Playing against a Red beatdown deck? Forge-Tender. Opponent playing their own Figures of Destiny? Forge-Tender, if we’re bringing in our Rangers of Eos. The fourth Path of Exile is there to help deal with Persist creatures and potentially stop Five-Color Control from stabilizing the early game with a Wall, and frequently just has excellent application against decks that try to biggie-size the board with things like Chameleon Colossus. The fourth Cloudgoat is there for the fact that he is important against other Token-based matchups like G/W or Boat Brew, and while we’re content to shave one from the main-deck we are certainly aware of the fact that there are matchups where you will need access to four copies. Ranger of Eos is half-married to the Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders, in that we bring them in alongside the Forge-Tenders whenever they come in, but Ranger is also half-married to Reveillark in that if we’re considering riding the Lark to weather Wrath effects, Ranger of Eos is likewise an excellent card for providing a creature advantage that doesn’t have to sit all on the board at once if you don’t want it to, as you can fetch up two Figures of Destiny and ride them one at a time to 8/8 size later in the game against these slower Wrath of God decks. We’ve had as many as four Reveillarks and as few as two, but have overall found that Larks and Rangers and Elspeth and Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders in the sideboard each performing differently against various Wrath effects, as well as having applications in other matchups as well.
Where the main-deck is designed to be straightforward and provide direct aggressive pressure, the sideboard allows you to re-position the deck against the appropriate opponent. With Identity Crisis, you have the potential to threaten their hand, or for added resilience to Red decks you apply an arbitrarily large number of Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders and change the matchup steadily in your favor against either mass removal or just their game-one plan of attacking with Red creatures and killing you with burn spells. And the remainder of the sideboard is focused on the various and sundry ways to beat board sweepers as that is the best counter-strategy to your game one plan, and we split these between cards that increase the number of tokens you are able to generate in order to bring the deck closer to its shared heritage with that other B/W deck by means of Elspeth, the fourth Cloudgoat Ranger, and Ranger of Eos all providing additional Army-in-a-Can cards, and Reveillark to ask the traditional question of “how can you get out of this without it sucking for you,” to which the answer is generally “you can’t.”
Now, why should you be considering the deck to play for Regionals? Well, frankly, if you want to be playing Kithkin at all, you should absolutely be making the switch to this version, as it is the best version of Kithkin you can play in the context of our Windbrisk Heights / Spectral Procession metagame going into Regionals. We are in a heavy White metagame, though not necessarily a heavy beatdown metagame, because I find it impossible to stomach the concept of B/W and G/W Tokens being “beatdown decks” when they play main-deck Wrath of God effects. In these White on White battles, the mighty power of Zealous Persecution in combat provides more than its fair share of wins as it adds to the deck’s sheer explosiveness even against heavy interference by the opponent. If you want to run Black/White Tokens, this deck was conceptualized as the Black/White version that was the most punishing of poor draws and the version that was best able to capitalize on its Zealous Persecutions, but it is not itself “B/W Tokens”… so if you are looking at this decklist and considering it, aren’t comfortable with the fact that it plays Black but no Thoughtseize, and want your Glorious Anthems and Bitterblossoms back, then by all means play B/W Tokens and not this, as you can’t go half-way and have this deck’s strategy still work. Kithkin rather than Tokens has the advantage in that it is less-vulnerable by its intrinsic nature against Zealous Persecution and will tend to have more bodies in play by the time it should be coming up, meaning we get far more blowouts out of this blowout-producing card than the standard B/W Tokens deck does. As an aggressive deck it has its base core of aggressive potential and its somewhat-unfair explosive cards like the Planeswalkers, Windbrisk Heights, Figure of Destiny, and Zealous Persecution, but by design we have also sought to make it less vulnerable to board sweeper and better able to recover when the fight comes down to surviving Wrath effects and still getting in for damage, which is why you’ll note hits like Ranger of Eos and Reveillark that tend to come in against various flavors of Wrath of God decks, and Elspeth as a potent threat you can play against board control decks that they cannot have an easy time removing.
By the numbers, we put up some awesome results in our first appearance, and I dare say the deck has only improved for the experience as our perspectives on the card choices became better-informed as we learned the deck’s potential and its needs, and better tuned to the metagame as we tested ourselves in that first crucible of fire that brings the deck from the concepting phase it started in last week to the victory phase it achieved over this weekend… three out of four players with the deck Top 8ing is pretty impressive right off the bat, even if none of these Top 8 appearances was able to convert into anything more past that. Its home in the metagame is as an excellent aggressive deck with explosive potential, and should be aggressively nosing in on the beatdown-deck slots as one of the better beatdown-deck choices. I only really see three acceptable choices for being the beatdown, and those are B/W Kithkin, R/x with some combination of Anathemancers and Bloodbraid Elves or preferably both, and G/B Elves. While a Bant Aggro deck did in fact win the same PTQ where our deck put two copies into the Top 8, I’m somewhat nervous about calling any deck featuring Shorecrasher Mimic ‘playable’, and I see both G/W Tokens and B/W Tokens slowing themselves down intentionally to take a more controlling path, even if one of those two does play Overrun as a “combo” with its token generators and Windbrisk Heights that might confuse it as a ‘beatdown’ deck instead of a Windbrisk Heights aggro-combo deck. That said, Standard is pretty wide open and still welcome to innovation… just remember, if you’re not playing Cryptic Command or Windbrisk Heights, you had better have a pretty good explanation as to why.
Good luck to Regionals, and may this look into the world of the tricksy little hobbitses have served you well before it.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com