In Extended so far, I have found I have a very high variance in my results: either I am very much on the ball and am pushing up around the top of the leaderboards, or I am not quite able to wrap my head around the game and make a ‘trivial’ mistake which costs me a match. By the dictates of Olivier Ruel “levels of Magic player” view of things, this means I am right at the gestation stage between one level and the next. Some days, I’m able to play at this higher level, and enjoy the benefits of Next Level performance: appearing in the finals of a PTQ, for example. Other days, I forget to remember my opponent playing TEPS has a mana floating when he cast Seething Song, not just two lands untapped, so when given the choice between playing Mana Leak or Spellstutter Sprite with two Faeries in play, and not enough mana to play both that turn, one is clearly the right play and the other is clearly the play I made round 1 at this past weekend’s PTQ. It’s interesting to note that my solid results this season have all been events that were strung together while my two poor results were each in isolated tournaments, so the amount of playtesting I have done in the week before has a solid correlation to how well I play at that weekend’s PTQ.
We’re now at the tail end of the Extended season, and what started out as a pretty insular metagame has diverged into a wildly interesting format thanks to a whole host of innovations along the way, to the point where we have four distinct Zoo archetypes (Domain Zoo, Naya Burn, Saito Naya Zoo, Ranger Naya Zoo) and what basically amounts to a Standard deck just won this week’s New Jersey PTQ. Boat Brew with Lightning Helix was able to triumph, and I had the joy of cheering him on through the later Swiss rounds as I watched him win two difficult matchups in a row to sneak into the Top 8. While I am very happy with the concept of the Ponder Faeries deck, and I believe I have been moving with the times to keep up with metagame technology shifts, I also feel like I have learned enough about the format to home-brew a new and perhaps interesting deck as well. While many of us in the New York City area enjoy a good laugh at the expense of one Nate Tankus, who frequently IMs me goofy Workstation decklists to critique, the simple truth is that if you throw enough things at the wall, sooner or later an idea will stick. This week he was gaming with a Blue-Green concoction featuring Wild Nacatls that attacked and became Ninjas of the Deep Hours, and while I feel his list was deeply flawed, it did get my own motors running trying to figure out what it was about Blue and Green together that was so intriguing to me.
Something intrigued me with its potential, but then I tend to love Blue-Green decks, and thus I found some kernel of thought nagging me afterwards wondering if something could be advanced further to reach a good conclusion. And then the thought hit me. Here in the Northeast, thanks to Josh McGhee’s second-place finish in the Sunday PTQ down in Roanoke a few weeks back, we’ve been seeing a startling number of Naya Zoo decks playing main-deck Naya Charm. Josh played this in Roanoke on Day 2 and made the finals, calling Naya Charm his MVP and enjoying the ability to re-buy Tarmogoyf or a Path to Exile for an opposing Tarmogoyf, be a removal spell for a mid-sized dude, or sometimes just Cryptic Command the opponent right out of the game and attack with animals around what would otherwise have been blockers. If Green decks were playing poor mans’ Cryptic Commands to good effect, what happens if you play actual Cryptic Commands in your Green deck?
Another Northeast trend is “Levitt Level Blue,” which is to say that a local player named Adam Levitt had a Faerie deck with both Spellstutter Sprite and Tarmogoyf a few weeks before the Japanese Grand Prix results. These sorts of decks, and Naya Zoo decks sporting some small but significant number of Naya Charms, were the two most populous decks at this last week’s PTQ, and watching these two things battle it out by the truckload left me wondering whether some hybridization between the two strategies was possible. On the ride home, I started thinking about the Bant Aggro decks and what I did and did not like about them, and one of the marks against it was that it could really fall behind in creature battles against the latest flavor of Naya decks, and needed something like Naya Charm to help it win the race. And if Naya Charm is there to play Cryptic Command in the Red-Green-White deck, then perhaps Cryptic Command could be made to work in the Blue-centric Green deck.
Writing down a list of cards I wanted to play, I had the following:
CREATURES:
Noble Hierarch – 4
Birds of Paradise – ~2 (just enough to make sure most of my opening hands will have a Bird or Hierarch)
Tarmogoyf!
Rhox War Monk – 4
Vendilion Clique – Probably 3, access to 4 after sideboarding
Troll Ascetic – ZERO
SPELLS:
Path to Exile x4
Cryptic Command x4
Umezawa’s Jitte x2
Spell Snare – sprinkle to taste?
Vedalken Shackles?
The question, then, really came down to whether I could make the manabase work for a Blue-heavy deck that still wanted to have plenty of White and Green mana, so I would have to rely heavily on Fetchlands into Breeding Pool and Hallowed Fountain to really get the deck to work. I’d also need to have a lot of basic Islands filling out the rest, because I don’t want to have four mana but not be able to cast Cryptic Command, and I want Vedalken Shackles to reliably take three- to four-power creatures… a harsh requirement for a deck that also wants to cast Green and White spells. Because of Shackles this means a strictly limited number of non-Island lands, even if Flooded Grove and Mystic Gate might otherwise meet my colored mana requirements for Cryptic Command. This unfortunately also meant no Treetop Villages or Mutavaults, and thus I would need to get the mana balance of the deck right on the first try to avoid flooding out… I won’t have lands that do spell-like things to lean back on, unlike the rest of the decks I’ve been playing lately.
It’s not that I hate Troll Ascetic, or Sword of Fire and Ice, but my main quibbles with Bant Aggro have been the fact that it could have equipment-heavy draws and do nothing some of the time in the face of just a few removal spells, and that Troll Ascetic was just all-around poor except for the few times he was absolutely amazing. Sure, it’s great if it resolves against Faeries, but there just wasn’t enough of a hefty creature there to impress me, and there were a lot of times when I’d fall behind against Naya because Troll Ascetic is a terrible blocker for the first turns of the game. Kitchen Finks, however, could excite me… and so, with some tweaking and tuning, a list was born.
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Rhox War Monk
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Vendilion Clique
3 Kitchen Finks
2 Birds of Paradise
4 Cryptic Command
4 Path to Exile
3 Spell Snare
3 Vedalken Shackles
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
1 Chrome Mox
1 Gemstone Caverns
1 Snow-Covered Plains
1 Temple Garden
1 Hallowed Fountain
2 Snow-Covered Forest
4 Flooded Strand
4 Windswept Heath
4 Breeding Pool
5 Snow-Covered Island
Sideboard:
4 Trickbind
4 Wilt-Leaf Liege
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Kitchen Finks
1 Vendilion Clique
Worth noting, for the home audience, this deck has six spells total in the main-deck that can be Spell Snared, an intentional choice and one of the benefits of the Hierarch-into-Three-Drop model that Bant Aggro has been putting into place. I am intentionally seeking to out-class Faeries by blanking their Spell Snares and making Spellstutter Sprite work really hard to actually counter a spell, giving them just Mana Leak to stop an early threat… and with Spell Snares of my own to work with, it’s quite reasonable to push anything I want past a counter, and as the game goes late it is me and not them who has hard permission, as I have four Cryptic Commands while they have fewer-than-four if any at all. Mana acceleration was going to be crucial, and this led to the one Chrome Mox and one Gemstone Caverns sneaking into the mana-base to give me a total of eight accelerants I might find in my opening hand to speed myself up with. I split the difference between Moxes and Caverns because I found I didn’t always want to give up a card just for the right to tap for mana, and thus Gemstone Caverns’ ability to tap for colorless when I choose not to play it on turn zero, am myself on the play, or draw it outside of my opening seven meant it had a slight edge as a situational accelerant.
Based on my experience playing Faeries for a significant amount of time, I felt I had a good idea of what I did and did not want to see out of an opposing aggressive deck, and tried to cram as many of those cards into this deck as possible. Vedalken Shackles, after all, is frequently thought of as a “pure control” card, and thus we’ve never really seen it in an aggressive frame before… but in a very Blue-Green sort of way of thinking about the game, it makes excellent sense as to why it might be worth including: it’s a “creature removal” spell that gives you another threat and thus unbalances the game state in your favor, and one which gives you the aggressive initiative while also providing a late-game effect that continues to provide an advantage, allowing you to grind out hard games that otherwise an aggressive deck might not have. To be fair, I’m playing it where other similar decks play Sword of Fire and Ice, but I’ve found the Sword to be very swingy: either it owns the game on literally any creature, or it is a potential tempo black hole if they have the ability to deal with the first target or two, and even when it was working it might just be shut down by Mutavault and Riptide Laboratory. This last fact was especially relevant as the Sword takes a decent chunk of mana to get working, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the opponent to contain it just with lands, or worse yet work you over with Vedalken Shackles if the creature you’d equipped to didn’t happen to be one of those Troll Ascetics.
In contrast to those downsides, Vedalken Shackles doesn’t offer that same dark void of tempo being opened up beneath you, because you’re stealing their creature, not equipping yours. Those Riptide Laboratory tricks become much harder to perform when you have the ability to steal their creature in response to its use, allowing for stacked damage to resolve but Lab’s effect to fizzle thanks to the fact that it can only successfully target a Wizard you control. It’s a solid card to prevent your opponent from stabilizing a game he might otherwise be able to claw his way back into, and like much of the rest of the deck, a good card that becomes ridiculously good by having acceleration to power into it even sooner in the game. The highs aren’t as high as Sword of Fire and Ice, but likewise the lows aren’t as low either. Your first investment of five mana does something meaningful and doesn’t rely on you having a creature still in play, so long as your opponent is playing a deck with creatures… and frankly both cards are poor against TEPS, so that last part is hardly relevant even if Sword of Fire and Ice “does something” against a deck with zero creature spells.
Troll Ascetic is solid against control decks and likewise a black hole you could lose yourself in playing against another aggro deck, and so I was content to swap them for Kitchen Finks, who are excellent both early and late against other Green beatdown decks, even if it isn’t anywhere near as invincible as the game goes late. Most of my qualms with the Bant Aggro deck was in how the games were very draw-dependent, a concept Adrian Sullivan recently dismissed on its face as a “cop-out” but in this case it means something very specific to me: based on the matchup you were playing against, the same card could either be dreadfully poor or absolutely amazing, case in point being Troll Ascetic. Against something like Astral Slide or Faeries, its untargetability and nigh-invincibility (just add mana!) made it an excellent beater. But against Zoo decks full of Thoctars and Tarmogoyfs and 3/3s for one, you’d find you just had to trade it immediately because trying to gain value by waiting to regenerate led to losing the game as you got beaten down. In trying to build the deck anew, then, I wanted something that was always very solid and never poor, and that meant solving the “draw dependency” problem by choosing new cards that would always do enough rather than trying to solve the problem while playing things like Sword of Fire and Ice and Troll Ascetic that could undo all of your initial tempo gains from having a one-drop mana creature by opening a tempo abyss for you to fall into as you waited for your cards to come online to full strength. This meant I wanted Kitchen Finks: it’s not as hardy as Troll Ascetic, but it is still quite durable, and was very good against both Faeries and Zoo… the sort of compromise I was looking to make, with some extra bits of lifegain added in besides to beat generic Red strategies that might be floating around out there.
What I found most interesting was my attempts to cover a lot of bases with only fifteen sideboard cards. There were at least six critical matchups, and fifteen divided by six is not very many sideboard cards for each. In each matchup, I had to identify the weak cards I’d be looking to improve upon, and then try to figure out a reasonable strategy to face them with after sideboarding. I wanted stuff against Faeries, stuff against TEPS, stuff against Zoo, stuff against Elves, stuff against Astral Slide, and stuff against B/G Loam. If these cards happened to accidentally be good against Affinity as well, then bonus, but after its peak in the metagame well over a month ago Affinity has been on a steady decline, and if mana critters, Path to Exile, Vedalken Shackles and the potential to chain together Cryptic Commands while attacking with big creatures couldn’t win me the game, a couple sideboard slots for Kataki, War’s Wage that were narrow and never going to come in otherwise wasn’t going to sway me.
Against Elves, I found that Vedalken Shackles was frequently too slow to be of relevance, I had at least one too many Cryptic Commands, and sometimes Umezawa’s Jitte was difficult to really get working against Wirewood Symbiote. That left me about five cards I wanted to replace, and they had to work quickly because Elves can be quite explosive. Ironically, the first card that came to mind was Explosives, and its proficiency for destroying one-drops made it a multi-purpose card to bring in against Zoo decks as well. Ethersworn Canonist was something I wanted at least a few copies of somewhere against TEPS, as I could use both it and Stifle effects to disrupt my opponent while he was faced with my quick clock, and despite it not being ideal against Elves thanks to the fact that it is preyed upon by Viridian Shaman, it might do enough to slow them down and thus warrants a few copies.
Against Faeries, I found that Umezawa’s Jitte was giving them value back on their Spell Snares that I had otherwise stolen by playing so few two-drops, and was also hard to get moving against Shackles and Riptide Laboratory. It was one of those swingy cards that was either amazing or a blank depending on what else was going on, and thus I could comfortably pull them against most lists. Against Faeries, my turn-one mana creature was going to live, and every creature I had in my deck had to matter. I found I was quick and sturdy enough with just the four Noble Hierarchs, and those two Birds of Paradise were liabilities I could readily trim. I’d also found that if I could contain Ancestral Vision I would generally win, eventually if not necessarily soon, so I’d picked Trickbind as my sideboard card of choice: uncounterable in the Blue semi-mirror, and able to do all sorts of damage like stop a fetchland or a key Shackles activation in addition to its intended role.
Against TEPS, I clearly had seven dead cards: Shackles and Path to Exile. To some extent Umezawa’s Jitte is dead as well, but it still adds to the damage race or provides a life buffer to stop Tendrils, so I wasn’t opposed to keeping them if I had to. I’d already planned on four Trickbinds, which is key in that it provides a Stifle effect that can’t be played around with Remand or Pact of Negation, only Gigadrowses which they may or may not be able to afford playing against a beatdown deck siding Canonists to at least some degree. Canonists were clearly desirable as well, and are better here than they are against Elves, and I’d also clearly want the fourth Vendilion Clique to work their hand some… and for turning on dead cards, the fourth Finks can come in from the sideboard and shore up the beatdown curve, since even if I draw too many three-drops the Finks is still better than a Jitte would have been. Unless I cut a card from the sideboard to make room for another Canonist or something else, that leaves me with one Jitte still in the deck after sideboarding, which isn’t ideal but also not terrible either.
Against Astral Slide, I don’t have any real clear cards that I want as hosers. Engineered Explosives on three can contain their enchantments, while Vendilion Clique can contain their Loams, or at least they can a reasonable amount of the time alongside Spell Snare and Cryptic Commands. Like against Faeries, the only cards that were truly dead were Jittes and Birds of Paradise, though a case could be made for the third Path to Exile as being unnecessary, giving us five slots to work with. Again, Kitchen Finks fills the fifth hole, being a solid creature that can live through a Wrath and thus not one I minded over-extending with in my efforts to actually beat down the opponent. I don’t consider Astral Slide to be a major player in the metagame, but it is one that keeps showing up, like it or not… so I can’t choose to be blind to it, I just have to come up with a plan, even if the Engineered Explosives-on-3 plan isn’t exactly perfect (most of my creatures just happen to cost three as well).
Against B/G Loam, I found my Vedalken Shackles count to be about one too high against most versions, due to their creature-light approach, and likewise I had about one too many copies of Path to Exile and Spell Snare, unless I was playing against a version that had a good number of two-drops. Umezawa’s Jitte wasn’t as good as just another threat in the first place, especially against Ancient Grudges that were likely to come in from the sideboard, and due to the length of the games I frequently found Birds of Paradise could be cut as a liability as well… my cards needed to do something more than that, and the game went long enough that I couldn’t afford to spend cards on creatures that can’t attack. Here the most intriguing trick was to double up on sideboard cards with that last four-of slot, as Wilt-Leaf Liege was solid against Zoo for its frequent double-Anthem effect as well as its prodigious size, but could be downright devastating against B/G and their Raven’s Crime strategy. Ethersworn Canonist could come in to contain Crime and Loam, as it limits them from gaining too much of an advantage when the choke-point becomes how many spells per turn they can cast, and the fourth Clique is clearly quite solid against a Loam deck. Unfortunately, due to the fact that there are a wide variety of Loam decks, what was dead and what I wanted to bring in from sideboard was very variable… for example, I want zero Jittes and Shackles in against an opponent who is bringing in Ancient Grudge, and I do want all of my Paths and Spell Snares against a version playing Tarmogoyfs a la the Jacobs list from GP LA. Against Death Cloud, I also wanted the full complement of Kitchen Finks, and so on and so forth.
And against Zoo, I found Vendilion Clique to be overall poor against the Mogg Fanatic deck, and Vedalken Shackles to be difficult to capitalize on when the opponent is bringing in Duergar Hedge-Mages or Ancient Grudges. Shackles was of course an all-star game one winner, but its vulnerability to artifact destruction meant I mostly wanted it in Game Ones and against other Blue decks, which left me six cards I was content to sideboard out. The fourth Kitchen Finks was obviously quite desirable, three Engineered Explosives also do good work, and two Wilt-Leaf Lieges were quite meaty coming in from the sideboard, turning my Kitchen Finks into Wooly Thoctars with Persist. I could alternately sideboard in all four and cut Umezawa’s Jitte, and whether I did so would largely depend on my opponent’s exact list and whether I wanted to gain further immunity from artifact destruction effects, or whether I was content playing Jitte as a Seal of Jitte to destroy their own Jittes and do nothing else. This last potential swap, to take out Jitte, was largely a judgment call that would vary against opponents, and whether I was on the play or on the draw, or even just on how many Mogg Fanatics my opponent had to turn an attempt to attack with a Jitte-equipped creature into a fruitless effort. Usually they stayed in, but not always, as I found Wilt-Leaf Liege to be quite enticing and overloaded the opponent’s Paths to Exile.
Proceeding from the decklist stage to the playtest stage, then, was the next stage in this chain of events, and was in part Proof of Concept work to show that the deck’s spells and creatures gelled together in a good balance, I had enough accelerants to be relevant, and that the power level of the deck was sufficiently high. The latter part I didn’t truly worry about, from a deck with Shackles, Cryptic Command, and Tarmogoyf, but it’s that Power Level question that makes me nervous every time I see a Bant deck playing Bant Charms and Troll Ascetic, and thus a relevant one to be asked. After all, Pro Tour Legend-keeper Jeff Cunningham has a very different take on Troll Ascetic’s place in the deck, and the functional role of equipment in the deck: he wants six, I want two. Clearly I’m warping myself entirely around some of the choices I’ve made, and will in a vacuum regret not being able to game with Treetop Village among all the rest.
A good dozen test games in, it was pretty clear that the mana wasn’t off. My Island count was high enough to accommodate Vedalken Shackles, my non-Island count never caught me at a problematic time to stop me from casting Cryptic Command, and like Jeff I had decided eight mana accelerants was solid… I just took a different path to get there. The one Chrome Mox was even better than I thought it would be as Birds of Paradise #7, as it was very solid at accelerating my plays and had the unexpected upside of being a non-Land land in my hand that I could cycle with Vendilion Clique in the mid- to late-game. The one Gemstone Caverns was in fact Unluckyman’s Paradise; it was pleasantly invisible in the games where it appeared but didn’t start in my hand, tapping for mana but never actually interfering because it was ‘only’ colorless… and the occasional game where I got to start with a “So Lucky!” counter in play, it was absolutely amazing. More importantly, I got to play as many accelerants as I wanted but not over-commit slots to them; 24 lands plus six mana dudes felt better than 24 plus eight mana-dudes, though to be fair traditional Bant can make up some of those slots again with Treetop Villages. Sacrifices were made to the altar of Cryptic plus Shackles, and boy… sacrifices indeed.
Let me tell you, I had my reasonable doubts about the Shackles here, because precedent is set: no one plays this card in aggro, it’s a control card. But viewed from the perspective of a tempo card, it was absolutely destructive, swinging tempo wildly in my favor, clearing the beatdown path and giving me control of the game. Cryptic Command likewise had some game-ending potential, even if it wasn’t as much as I’d hoped it would be… apparently with a deck full of Jitte, Finks and War Monks, unless your opponent plays Sulfuric Vortex in their Zoo decks still, it’s actually hard for the “Fog” side of the Command to be critical to your survival, because your life total should remain bloated enough that you’ll be using it to alpha-strike, not to dodge one. And for that it would have worked just as well as a three-of in the Green on Green matchup, but four has its benefits in other places. For “proof of concept”, I was able to start convincing my playtest partners of the moment that an active Shackles was a good thing for a beatdown deck, even if I did have to stretch a little harder to work it in than they were comfortable with.
While I have more hours to log in the playtest chamber before I’d say it’s a deck I’m comfortable taking to my Hail Mary last-chance PTQ, I think I have solid ground to stand on when I say that maybe, just maybe, a deck with four each of Tarmogoyf, Cryptic Command, and Path to Exile “might be good enough.”
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com