The Internet was on fire.
All of the buzz on the few days leading up to Regionals was somehow about Turbo-Fog. A Japanese Regionals tournament was won by a deck that confidently played 4x Holy Day, and the imagination of players everywhere was seemingly throwing off all sorts of sparks. Never mind that it was only a thirty-person tournament, and thus had maybe half as many rounds as your regionals was going to have. It was Japanese, and that makes it better. From the country that brought us U/R Swans and Ghazi-Glare came the metagame solution everyone craved: cast Angelsong in a sixty-card format, where you cycle it with your 40’s.
Never mind past history and precedent. This is, after all, something that has been tried before: play a bunch of Howling Mines and cast a Fog every turn your opponent would want to attack you, then somehow victory must be yours. Instead let’s look at the rational decision to play such a deck and what the metagame would have to look like in order for this to become a wise decision.
Like any Howling Mine deck ever, from Turbo-Stasis or even further back to Baxter’s Winter Orb / Stormbind deck from the prehistoric days before the Internet, it didn’t work if you didn’t let them have their Howling Mines. In a world where you will not have to worry about your fueling mechanism being disrupted, and thus allowing you to wastefully commit a card a turn to the sole purpose of being a Fog, everything is peachy. In an actual lock deck, which is what the Stasis decks were, the rules of the game changed such that limited resources starved your opponent’s kill mechanism to the point where literally their deck was incapable of dealing 20 damage anymore. As a soft-lock deck, however, you don’t starve your opponent while you feed them a feast of fresh cards off of Howling Mine, but instead attempt to put into place a semi-soft-lock that makes it just as impossible to kill you with creature damage, but leaves open other avenues of approach from noncreature spells.
I would have to imagine that from playtesting against Black/White and Green/White Tokens decks, the Turbo-Fog matchup vaulted way ahead of them, to the 80%-or-better game percentage before anyone gave serious consideration to playing the deck. Dreaming of an easy road to Nationals paved with the fallen corpses of Kitchen Finks and Spirit tokens, who knows how many players whipped up a Turbo-Fog deck to play at Regionals. By first accounting, it sounds like as much as 10% of the field might have been Turbo-Fog, though that sounds high: averages seem to be at or around a dozen players per tournament, with tournament sizes from 150 to 300-ish players to contend with. A dozen out of a hundred and fifty is still not 10%, and while I have heard tales of tables covered in Fogs as far as the eye can see, I’ve taken that to be hyperbole rather than literal fact. After all, that is a lot of lemmings.
“Playing the metagame deck” is a wonderful idea, and one that has been quite thoroughly explored in the I hope now-classic “The Glass Cannon” article by Richard Feldman. If the metagame is warped to the point that you can literally expect the pairings to go your way in most of the rounds, well, you look like a genius and ride that glass cannon to victory. It was done quite successfully at Pro Tour: Honolulu, the first and hopefully last time that Ancestral Recall was cast in a Pro Tour Top Eight match. And in the week leading up to Regionals, every report insisted that the metagame was that warped: seven out of eight decks playing Windbrisk Heights is an impressive result for a Top Eight. But unfortunately, while there is certainly some initial dominance by B/W Tokens in the present metagame, and a good number of appearances as well by related strategies (G/W Tokens and B/W Kithkin), the metagame is unfortunately far too healthy to bear such blunt-toothed predator decks from surviving. Case in point: as happy as the Fog decks are to play against Windbrisk Heights decks, it is quite a challenge to survive against any deck casting Mistbind Clique, and the ones that ‘play fair’ and just cast Maelstrom Pulses at your Howling Mines are no picnic either. Holy Day and Angelsong can answer a seemingly-infinite number of Cloudgoat Rangers and their Kithkin Soldier tokens, but just one Glen Elendra Archmage might be your undoing.
We tend to think of Magic players as rational actors, one that make intentional choices that are backed up by tournament results or at least in-depth playtesting. Rational choices are harder to make on a short timeline than they are on a longer one; the longer you get to see your results playing out, the more likely they are to match up with actual reality and thus create statistics that match fact instead of numbers that match what you want to see. I guess you could say it’s a pet peeve of mine to refuse to see what is instead of what you want to be, and so the insistence that Turbo-Fog was an awesome deck choice for Regionals was one I found especially difficult to stomach, going into the event. My view on reality was that it did not have a home in the metagame, and neither would it warp the metagame… if you could go two or three rounds without playing a Fog deck, you wouldn’t have to worry about playing against them anymore, because you’d be in the winner’s bracket and they wouldn’t.
I’ve chosen to limit myself to discussing the U.S. Regionals results only, because the Regionals results went up late on Wednesday, and my article is due not-late¬ on Wednesday, so even after the obvious and necessary time extension from Craig I was going to have to pick how much work I was going to be able to actually do to get usable statistics for analysis. Sticking to just the US Regionals means I have fewer data points to compile… but it also includes the potential for a point of bias, as I could very reasonably argue that eliminating the Canadian results skews the viewpoint to prove the point I want to prove rather than objectively view reality. The Canadian Regionals are after all generally smaller than the US Regionals, and thus you would expect a disproportionately larger number of Turbo-Fog decks making Top Eights in these tournaments… and thus shrinking the number of victories the deck can claim, painting it to look bad. However, it is this rule of small tournaments that very likely got a lot of people into this mess in the first place: the more rounds you have to play, the harder it is to coast on the backs of the few decks you do succeed against, because that’s another round the pairings have to swing your way before you catch a bullet. Considering that we are swinging into high gear with not just a continuing PTQ season but also two Grand Prix in this format in two weeks, “small tournaments” are not what we have to concern ourselves with. By all means play whatever you want at your Friday Night Magic… but for the purposes of this article, we want to know what happens when you face stiff competition round after round.
There could also be no Turbo-Fog decks in the Canadian results, and thus I’ve just wasted my over-analysis of why I chose to exclude them. At the time of this writing, I frankly don’t know: maybe it’s full of qualifiers won by Turbo-Fog, and maybe everyone decided to play DanBock.dec to show off just how awesome the Hideaway lands are: it must be ridiculous when you have twenty of them.
Black/White Tokens: 25 Qualifications, 41 Total Top Eights
Out of 190 Top Eights, B/W Tokens claimed 41 of the top seats, or 22% of the available seats to play at the top tables for an invite to Nationals. Once there, they won 61% of the time, considerably better than a coin-flip (though one might imagine it literally was a coin-flip, for the mirror match). Largely, the B/W Persist Tokens version with both Kitchen Finks and Murderous Redcap was adopted as the standard; only five of those 41 players were gaming without Murderous Redcaps, and everybody that had them had at least two, though after that the numbers wildly disagreed, split pretty thoroughly between the two-of, three-of and four-of camps. Of those five dissenters, two qualified, while three did not; we have small numbers to work with, but splitting them into two camps tells us that 23 / 36 B/W Persist Token decks qualified for Nationals after making the Top Eight for a conversion percentage of 64%, while only 2 / 5 B/W non-Persist Tokens converted a win in that last round, or only 40%. Beware small numbers, but beware also leaving home without your Murderous Redcaps.
Black/White Kithkin: 5 Qualifications, 6 Total Top Eights
My deck of the moment and a solid little number that is earning some respect as weeks advance, Black/White Kithkin didn’t appear in force but it did convert when it appeared. Three other Kithkin decks were listed, one Black/White splash Red as well for Ajani Vengeant in addition to Zealous Persecution, and two mono-White. Of those three only one of the mono-White decks converted a Nationals invite out of the deal. As much as I’d like to claim an absurd win percentage for the deck, we have small numbers to work with, so it is simply worth noting that it appeared and won five Nationals berths for US Regionals players.
Green/White Tokens: 13 Qualifications, 24 Total Top Eights
The large chunk of G/W decks making it to the Top Eight were doing so with the MTGO Season One Championships-winning archetype, G/W Tokens. Many, but not all, updated to include such hits as Qasali Pridemage, and at least one re-modeled the deck to play more like B/W Tokens by packing in Ajani Goldmanes in bulk. 12.5% of the Top Eight decks were G/W Tokens, averaging to exactly one per tournament… and once there converted that appearance to a Nationals invite 54% of the time, not quite as well as the B/W Persist tokens deck did but still beating 50% and thus respectable. There was one similar deck that also won itself a qualification in its only appearance, stretching to add Blue mana for Meddling Mages but otherwise hewing pretty closely to the G/W Tokens strategy.
Rafiq Bant: 4 Qualifications, 7 Total Top Eights
This is for the Shorecrasher Mimic / Rafiq / Finest Hour deck, which like my pet Kithkin deck has numbers too small to meaningfully discuss. There were also two Dark Bant decks, extending the mana even further thanks to Ancient Ziggurat and including Doran the Siege Tower amongst its starting line-up of animals; one won and qualified for Nationals, the other did not.
Little Kid Green/White: 1 Qualification, 1 Total Top Eight
This is not quite as “Little Kid” as that seems to imply, with its Shields of the Oversoul making creatures indestructible flying monster threats. Instead, it is simply a G/W aggressive deck that leans very heavily on Gaddock Teeg in the present metagame, and it cast animals and attacked you in the earnest expectation that you would then promptly die.
Red Decks: 11 Qualifications, 23 Total Top Eights
Red decks come in a few stripes, so let’s break this down some more. Seven of the winning Red decks were Red/Black with the Black mostly being for Anathemancer, generally lacking in Terminate since it doesn’t burn the face or at least lacking Terminate as a four-of¬, since it can still serve an excellent role when you are trying to get at least some of your damage through the attack phase. Of the eleven winners, four played Green as well for Bloodbraid Elf, and only one of these 11 played Blightning in their deck. (It was one of the three-color decks, just to note.) Of the twelve also-rans we have a disparate bunch: four dedicated R/B decks, one of which had Blightning and another of which had a convoluted creature-based plan that also involved Torrent of Souls. Two more Bloodbraid Elf-plus-Blightning decks which I was so enamored of a few weeks ago, when largely the rest of the format had passed that choice by as seen by the rest of the Red decks. Three total Bloodbraid Elf R/g/b decks, and then some oddities: three R/G beaters, one R/G/W beatdown deck, and a mono-Red deck round out the remaining 12. Of these 23 decks, exactly two ran Jund Hackblade, with the more tried-and-true Goblin Outlander filling the needs of the deck much better in the other designs as a rule.
Red decks maintained 50% penetration from the Top Eight to the Nationals invite, and made up about 12% of the metagame at the top tables, rivaling G/W Tokens in both Top Eight appearances and follow-through averages.
Boat Brew: 1 Qualification, 10 Total Top Eights
This is the other White-based token deck, this one focusing on Reveillark and Ranger of Eos interactions alongside the Windbrisk Heights / Spectral Procession part of the deck. I’ve dismissed the deck as too slow and a largely do-nothing deck in the current format, and wonder at how quickly the metagame changes that Kyoto’s top deck is reduced to such a low point. It represented 5% of the Top Eight decks, and won just one Nationals qualification, with a dismally-low 10% conversion rate. Figuring you’re 50/50 before you even sit down and figure out who you’re playing, to suddenly drop to a 90/10 matchup because your opponent sat down too in that killer +1 round in Swiss +1 makes me wonder why anyone even bothers to play the deck anymore.
U/W/x Reveillark: 2 Qualifications, 11 Total Top Eights
The other Reveillark deck in the format. U/W Reveillark was nine of these 11 decks, with the other two being U/W/B EsperLark. EsperLark won once and didn’t win once, matching the 50% you get before you sit at the table, but much like Boat Brew, U/W Lark had a dismal conversion rate once it got to the top table, winning one out of nine opportunities to make it to Nationals. I’m suddenly very glad I gave up on the deck when I did, because right now its good name is being dragged through the mud and I’d hate to have been dragged with it.
Faeries: 4 Qualifications, 8 Total Top Eights
Speaking of good names, we have last season’s (or is it last year’s?) #1 menace, Faeries. Faeries showed up only infrequently, largely (I’d assume) due to low popularity and the perception that the deck doesn’t fit into the more aggressively-leaning metagame, and that Zealous Persecution combined with Alara Reborn’s overall deck speed is just the last nail in the coffin that we’ve hoping to see shut for some time now. However, this result seems to put this so-called truth to the test, and shows it to be a lie… unlike other contenders that really are unsuited to the field, Faeries had a 50% conversion rate in the Top Eight, suggesting that even if it isn’t especially well-suited to the metagame, it does fit well enough within it. Rumors of its demise are likely premature, and this hearkens to me the prognostication that those who have been faithful to their Faerie decks may reap success with it at this weekend’s Grand Prix.
B/G Elves: 4 Qualifications, 11 Total Top Eights
B/G Elves has been one of the quiet up-and-comers of the metagame, possessed of some of the best inclusions from Alara Reborn and able to stretch if you want to for a few more… one of these ten played Bloodbraid Elf in its Elf package, a fair share of them played Putrid Leech as an aggressive two-drop, and all of them benefited from Maelstrom Pulse. While it doesn’t seem as if it is specifically targeted at the metagame, it does seem to succeed at least somewhat, showing it has its own little niche of the metagame to call its own.
Jund Ramp: 3 Qualifications, 9 Total Top Eights
This is the other nascent “control deck” in this metagame alongside U/W Reveillark, the new archetype that is being touted as the way to go if you want to play a ‘control deck’ in this format. Others argue that casting Lavalanche in Constructed can only end in tears, but in the meantime you’ll see it did put a reasonable number of people into the Top Eight and earned the qualification slot 33% of the time once there, which is hardly indicative of a deck we’d like to play but also still not nearly as bad as some of the choices there were out there. Worth noting is that only one of these nine copies of the deck were the Mike Flores-designed lists that espouse Gift of the Gargantuan and Civic Wayfinder; the rest seemed content to rely on Fertile Ground to go with their Rampant Growths. In addition to these there were also two more Rock-like builds, leaning on Maelstrom Pulses and good efficient creatures, embracing the Jund colors but not the “Ramp” style of play even if they were themselves sort of mid-range-ish aggro-control decks. Of those two, one qualified, and one did not. (So seems to be the trend: two men enter, one man leaves.)
Swans Combo: 4 Qualifications, 5 Total Top Eights
Three of the four qualifications were the U/R Swans list that matches the Japanese lists from PT Kyoto, or at least the concept behind them: play a control deck with a powerful card-drawing engine that is incidental to what you want to be doing anyway, ride cards to victory. The last was the lots-of-land Cascade-heavy Seismic Swans combo deck, which was basically just Cascade cards and combo pieces plus 40-or-thereabout lands, meaning if you assemble the two-card combo you basically just win on the spot, no additional recursive pieces even needed, not even so much as a Dakmor Salvage analogue. You just throw lands at your Swans and draw two cards, and over the long-term this will lead to enough lands to throw at your opponent instead for the kill, simply due to their density. Swans decks had an excellent conversion rate, but again, we’re talking small numbers, not solidly-cemented statistics.
Five-Color Control: 5 Qualifications, 9 Total Top Eights
All five of the qualified lists were the long-game Vivid Land control decks, while three of the four that failed to get there more nearly matched Patrick Chapin recent Jund-plus-Cryptic Command offering ‘5c Blood.’ I can’t imagine that Five-Color Control was really well-played anywhere in particular, but it has seemed to prove true so far that it is one of the decks that can compete with the big dogs right now, and thus I would expect to see more of it in the future. I’d expect also that the 5c shell would morph back to a control deck rather than a card-advantage-and-tempo deck such as 5c Blood, which did not put up even a single Top Eight conversion out of its (admittedly, only) three tries.
Sanity Grinding: 2 Qualifications, 2 Total Top Eights
The de-facto “combo deck” of the format, as it is the oddball deck that tries to mysteriously race and kill you but not with damage. Two out of two appearances qualified the deck, but only two appearances out of who knows how many players trying to qualify with the deck got what they wanted out of it. The deck is notoriously bad against other decks with countermagic, like Five-Color Control, U/W Lark or heaven help us Faeries, and this likely didn’t help it along the way. Neither did its known susceptibility to very aggressive decks; it uses Evacuation as a stop-gap maneuver, to buy a few turns, but falls down dead when the number of turns it is actually buying with the spell equals one. “To be avoided”, perhaps, but it’s worth noting that it seemed to do well enough in the Top Eight once it got there.
Fog.dec: 1 Qualification, 4 Total Top Eights
The story you’ve all been waiting for, since the title of the article. Let’s approximate for a moment: we have 23 normal-size qualifiers and one small one (Hawaii, where the already-small tournament attendance was impacted by college graduations that day). Of those 23 tournaments, exactly one has returned to us a metagame spread, in this case at Dallas/Fort Worth thanks to TwinFu.com.
Those numbers were:
B/R Blightning 24
Bant Aggro 21
B/W Tokens 21
Boat Brew 17
Jund Ramp 12
B/G Rock (Elves) 12
Bloodbraid Jund 11
5-Color Control 11
G/W Tokens 8
Turbo Fog 8
Naya Aggro 7
Turbo Mill 6
Swan Flu 6
R/G Aggro 6
Dark Bant 6
U/B/R Control 5
Faeries 5
Esper Lark 4
W/U Lark 4
Transmuter Control 2
Merfolk 2
QuickNToast 2
Mono-White 1
R/G/B Blightning 1
ElfBall 1
Quillspike Combo 1
Warp World 1
Faeries /w White 1
Mono Black Control 1
Out of 207, eight played Turbo-Fog. This sounds like a little under the experiences elsewhere, so I’ll estimate us at about twelve Turbo-Fog players per tournament. (Let’s ignore Hawaii, just for fairness’ sake, and call it a day.) This leaves us with 276 Turbo-Fog players, of which four made Top Eight, and one qualified. Compare to another archetype, its food: B/W Tokens. 21 of 207 played the deck, so assuming that same number we instead get 483 players playing B/W Tokens of various stripes and flavors, of whom 25 qualified. One in every 20 B/W players qualified for Nationals in this approximation, compared to one in every 276 for Turbo-Fog players… an entire order of magnitude worse return-on-investment for your time and money just by choosing a different deck. Maybe this is unfair rhetoric on my part and I am choosing my examples poorly and in a biased fashion… so let’s look some more. 21 Bant Aggro players per tournament gives us 483 total players, of whom seven made Top Eight and three qualified. It seems more likely that Bant Aggro is highly over-populous here, but let’s assume somehow that this is representative of the field. One in 161 players with Bant Aggro qualified, then, which is still twice as good as Turbo-Fog, and there’s no way that 10% of every tournament was playing the Bant Aggro deck as it seems to have been nearly invisible in a lot of other metagame breakdowns I’ve seen.
So let’s just look at the best decks. BW Tokens made their pilots an order of magnitude more successful at qualifying, but maybe it’s a fluke. Using these estimates, one in every 50 Five-Color Control players qualified, five times better returns than Turbo-Fog. One in every fifty for R/B decks, or one in every 80 for all the Red archetypes combined using these estimates. Still way better than one per 276. One in every fourteen for G/W Tokens, which is nearly twice as good as B/W Tokens was, and thus twenty times better at qualifying its pilots for Nationals than Turbo-Fog was. Sanity Grinding was admittedly a failure at putting up a finish, and even it approximates to one out of every 69 players qualifying for Nationals, four times better than Turbo-Fog. The only deck that performs worse than Turbo-Fog is Boat Brew, which estimates to one in every 391 players qualifying for Nationals, and given its one-out-of-ten success rate in the Top Eight I just have to wonder if that one was a mirror match so someone had to win it because they couldn’t both lose. Swans decks were at one per 34.5, eight times better. U/W/x Reveillark decks, no great contender either, estimates to one win per 92 played, three times better than Turbo-Fog. Faeries, a deck off the metagame radar at this juncture entirely, clicked through one out of every 29 players using this estimate, again an entire order of magnitude better than Turbo-Fog.
Numbers don’t lie. They may cheat and only approximate things, but I don’t think anyone would really say that Turbo-Fog was an unheard-of choice for Regionals, so half a dozen to a dozen players choosing to play it for each event of approximately 200 people or so sounds about right. It had one success once in a small tournament, and exactly one success despite being played in twenty-three large tournaments as we’ve just chronicled. Rational actors making rational choices would in the future shy away from the deck due to the fact that they no longer have the excuse of not knowing its proper home in the metagame; that home is down at the bottom of the barrel along with the rest of the things you only scrape off when you have to clean up messes. Irrational actors are welcome to play whatever they want, but I’d give just as much credence to crazy theories about wearing tin-foil hats to protect from mind-control satellites if we’re going to start going into irrational beliefs like “Turbo-Fog is a good deck choice in the post-Alara Reborn Standard metagame”. I don’t often attempt to write persuasive arguments simply to shut down one deck choice, but the verdict is in: good deck is good, and bad deck is bad. It’s the simple identity principle of Magic decks, and Turbo-Fog is bad deck, not good deck. How this wasn’t seen coming by everyone who decided to shuffle up some Holy Days, well, frankly I don’t know. But for the future, this knowledge is certain: you don’t want to try betting on being the one guy who goes home happy instead of the other 275 slobs who realized they just played the worst deck ever to have Cryptic Command in it.
After all, just because you can do THIS once per thousand times to no ill effect, doesn’t mean you should.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com