We’ve seen the Prerelease come and go, and excitement was had by all. At least one faithful reader noted that my advice from last week’s column (play first!) was a big help in his going 4-0 in his Prerelease flight, much to my delight as I also saw more established players who were coasting in to rely on their overall experience to carry the day then choose to draw first and then lose some matches. (But we ought not take delight in that, however… that’d be schadenfreude, and while it feels so very right it’s also sort of wrong!) But with the latest expansion in our hot little hands, we get to prepare for the upcoming PTQ season and Regionals, building decks and bashing them into each other as we figure out what is going on.
Bennie Smith has long been lamenting the fact that Lorwyn Block beats up Alara Block, and we’re seeing nothing but Cryptic Commands and Tribal creature decks bashing each other into the dust. I haven’t really considered it a valid argument, as both Boat Brew and B/W Tokens have a distinct lack of tribal associations to their design, but then I remember the fact that Faeries is a Tribal creature deck that plays Cryptic Command, and since I’ve been playing Faeries pretty much exclusively for the past year I can’t exactly argue this point. But with Alara Reborn, the power level of Alara Block cards just got amped up a lot higher, so this may be the final push Bennie has been looking for in order to break the stranglehold of Tribal synergies and Cryptic Command both. Others have stated that they absolutely loathe Alara Reborn and can find no redeeming qualities about it, even as most of the rest of the Magic-playing world bounces with glee at the sheer enjoyment of playing with this particular new set… and these people should be extra-careful while they shave for the next few weeks, and just to be safe go ahead and avoid any bridges while you’re at it. Some people are hopelessly pessimistic, and the simple fact of the matter is that Alara Reborn is the most powerful single set we’ve seen since Future Sight. And much like Future Sight, its packs are surprisingly worth cracking to get at the juicy rares and uncommons inside, full of Meddling Mages and Maelstrom Pulses.
Going into the Prerelease, and at least theoretically practicing for the first Magic Online Worlds qualifier tomorrow, I was playing the following, to much success:
4 Spellstutter Sprite
3 Scion of Oona
3 Vendilion Clique
3 Mistbind Clique
3 Sower of Temptation
4 Bitterblossom
4 Terror
4 Cryptic Command
4 Broken Ambitions
3 Jace Beleren
4 Underground River
4 Sunken Ruins
4 Secluded Glen
4 Mutavault
3 Swamp
6 Island
Sideboard:
4 Infest
4 Thoughtseize
3 Peppersmoke
3 Scepter of Fugue
1 Sower of Temptation
I felt comfortable dealing with the Volcanic Fallout problem, and was reasonably confident that I could beat any deck that wasn’t specifically a base-Red attack deck. Kithkin, be they Vengeant or otherwise, were well within my ability to overcome. Boat Brew, well, it took me a while to learn how to beat it, but then I figured out how to apply the right kind of pressure to their hand and learned to beat them pretty reliably with their own creatures stolen via Sower of Temptation, and it didn’t matter that they were a Red deck, because they weren’t a Red Deck. But there’s just one problem with deciding to play Faeries in the new Standard… and that is that the Red decks have suddenly gotten very, very good tools to catch up to the rest of us, with things like Anathemancer and Bloodbraid Elf that pile on damage and overcome defenses very quickly. Without the ability to sit on my ass and just play Faeries, it was time to work on some new decks.
First things first, I’ve been keeping my eye on U/W Reveillark for some time now. Forget EsperLark, as I suspect it will go the way of the Dodo in a field that is punishing it for playing three colors, I’m talking U/W Lark thanks to the fact that Meddling Mage plays ball at least as well as Tidehollow Sculler does and thanks to the fact that having more basic lands rather than more Arcane Sanctums and Sunken Ruins is preferred in a world with Anathemancer. For the record, I love Anathemancer, because I had been quietly crossing my fingers and hoping for Price of Progress to appear somewhere in Alara Block, and while I didn’t expect it to show up in the one set that definitely couldn’t print a mono-colored card, I find I can live with the version they went with: one-sided, less damage but on a Grey Ogre, and with the Blue Mana-hating Unearth mechanic besides to either get two uses or just dodge counters, either way. We have lived too long in a Standard format that lets you get away with playing three basic lands, and I think it is wonderful that we have something on the other side of the “play all nonbasics” argument providing tension and capitalizing on greed… we’ve needed something like this, and I’m happy to start by acknowledging Anathemancer and building a deck that doesn’t die to one, putting me a few weeks ahead of the curve perhaps, and doing so at a vital time as we start a new PTQ season.
Reveillark does some awesome things, and as I started sketching out a deck I knew I wanted the following:
Lands:
4 Borderpost
4 Adarkar Wastes
4 Mystic Gate
12 Basics (8 Plains, 4 Island?)
Spells:
4 Mind Stone
4 Knight of the White Orchid
4 Meddling Mage
4 Reveillark
4 Sower of Temptation
4 Mulldrifter
Filling out the rest of the deck from there, then, is the challenge. I like the accelerated control aspect of the deck, able to ramp up mana quickly, and this ability all but begs for us to include Wrath of God. While we are playing predominantly creatures, we’re playing ones that have inherent card advantage (some of whom are named ‘Reveillark’, which I am told is French for “how can I do this without it sucking for me,” the answer to which is “You can’t.”) and stopping an aggro deck with a Wrath and then proceeding from there works great. Four each of Wrath and Path, then, bring us up to 32 of our 36 cards, and you’ll notice we aren’t gaming with Cryptic Command, we have a stronger White bias to our mana in order to use Knight of the White Orchid… Cryptic Command tends to not fit in decks like this one very well, and I’m trusting the instincts of predecessors such as Ben Peebles-Mundy in the belief that Cryptic Command + Reveillark is not in fact chocolate + peanut butter. (Or, if you require a gaming reference in your analogies, Love + All You Need Is Love.)
Working on those last few slots, I found I really liked Negate as the counter of choice for the deck, as it was able to stop dangerous spells from resolving to do bad things to my board, and helped to fight through Cryptic Commands from the opponent. I’d originally gone with Broken Ambitions, because I always initially go for Broken Ambitions nowadays, but with this deck wanting to do a lot of things on its own turn with its mana, the scaling X-spell was just not the counter I wanted… and I found the deck is solid enough against creatures with Sowers and Wraths and Paths that I don’t need to be able to counter a creature spell just as a general rule. I didn’t, however, want four Negates… so with some trial and error I arrived at the following:
Creatures (21)
- 4 Meddling Mage
- 1 Mistmeadow Witch
- 4 Mulldrifter
- 4 Sower of Temptation
- 4 Reveillark
- 4 Knight of the White Orchid
Lands (20)
Spells (19)
Sideboard notes include a desire to game with that fourth Negate after sideboarding, and four Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders, but otherwise are currently somewhat vague and requires more bashing against opposing decks to see how it plays out against all the major matchups. This is, by the way, Deck #1 for my pleasure and enjoyment, as it is the deck I find I am enjoying playing the most in the new format, thanks to its mix of power, synergy and mana acceleration. Fieldmist Borderpost makes Knight of the White Orchid into quite an amazing creature indeed, while also being a dual land that doesn’t count as a nonbasic land for Anathemancer.
But my love affair for the Meddling Mage, even if the new picture unsettles me thanks to the fact that it does not look like Chris Pikula, it is somewhat unbounded… and I was wondering what would happen if you took that Meddling Mage and put him into a Kithkin deck. Cedric Phillips played Kithkin splashing for Ajani Vengeant to excellent success at the last Standard Pro Tour, and results analysis showed that while mono-White Kithkin was nothing special, the Cedric/Japanese mash-up of two small circles both of which independently decided to play R/W Kithkin instead of R/W Boat Brew happened to be the best-performing archetype in that format. Ajani Vengeant plays disruption or removal depending on your needs, but was the only Red card in the deck main-deck… so I have to wonder what would happen if Kithkin splashed Blue for Meddling Mage.
It takes a lot to get me to consider playing what is basically a White Weenie deck. There is an outstanding promise circa 2000 or so that I would never play White Weenie again, and so far I am pretty sure that promise has been kept. I frequently play Merfolk, which is why I am completely allowed to play Faeries: they’re just really good, flying Merfolk that mostly get played at instant speed. (The irony is, some of the best actual Merfolk ever printed are in Lorwyn Block… and here I am, playing Faeries, because they are better.) But Kithkin… that’s not an easy sell for me. But rather than dismiss it out of hand and assume I know what is going on, just like how you should actually pick up that Planeswalker and RTFC, before I decide I can’t play Kithkin it’s time to TTFD. Testing the deck is just smarter than dismissing it out of hand… my promise for never playing White Weenie was based off of the fact that I used to do it too much and it was never right; the numbers suggest it may very well be right, at least before accounting for Alara Reborn. I don’t argue with numbers, I just use them to decide what deck I should play because I figure as a rule I should be playing the best deck, and so I came up with the following:
Creatures (27)
- 4 Meddling Mage
- 2 Burrenton Forge-Tender
- 4 Cloudgoat Ranger
- 4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
- 4 Wizened Cenn
- 2 Thistledown Liege
- 4 Figure of Destiny
- 3 Ranger of Eos
Lands (25)
Spells (8)
And for the record, yes, just sixteen Kithkin is a little bit anemic for Goldmeadow Stalwart, but I found as the deck played out it always had another Kithkin to reveal, simply due to the fact that most hands you keep have multiple one-drops or one-drop, two-drop, and most of these hands let you reveal for a Goldmeadow Stalwart. To be fair, the last two cards added (Thistledown Liege) were added based on the fact that they were the best Kithkin to do the job I had in mind for them, upping the damage count and potentially being another surprise card in the face of Volcanic Fallout, so it is pretty clear there is some tension in the deck’s own design thanks to the fact that I replaced Knight of Meadowgrain with Meddling Mage.
So far, I’ve tested the deck enough to learn I wasn’t as unhappy with it as I expected I would be, but we’ll see how long I can delude myself into attacking with this season’s Savannah Lions. Meddling Mage is awesome enough that it makes me want to do some peculiar things, however, up to and including playing a White-based attack deck.
But enough of my affair with Chris Pikula… though with this new picture it’s not as creepy, instead of being an awkward man-on-man love-fest the likes of which only John Rizzo ever gave, well, you can look at this hot wizard chick and think it’s not so strange. I didn’t know Chris did the reverse Michael Jackson, going from a white man to a black woman, but if I close my eyes and don’t look at the Adam’s apple, I won’t regret it if I remember it in the morning. Alara Reborn does have other cards after all, and so far the only other one I’ve decided I’d game with is Mistfield Borderpost. Let’s check out some of the other ideas brewing up there!
Another awesome card well worth building a deck around is Lord of Extinction. Enormous B/G monsters like Spiritmonger tend to prove themselves very well in Standard, thanks to the fact that a Black/Green controllish strategy with powerful finishers has aged very well over time. Lord of Extinction is the most recent inheritor of that mantle, and sadly appears at a poor time to be himself… both Terminate and Path to Exile kill him very easily indeed, and a creature so easily removed from play either needs countermagic to go with him, disruption to make sure the way is clear, or enough friends to serve as lightning-rods to the removal spells if possible. With a mid-range-ish Black/Green deck you’d want creature control, some early beatdown of your own, and Lord of Extinction at the top of the curve… and these are the things I’d want to play with the Lord:
Lord of Extinction
Chameleon Colossus
Kitchen Finks
Wren’s Run Vanquisher
Of course, getting enough Elves to actually play Vanquisher is a challenge, meaning we’ll want some more Elf in our deck… which was likely true anyway simply due to the fact that Gilt-Leaf Palace is excellent as a painless dual land for such a B/G deck as this. Stretching our definition of playable, we choose Nameless Inversion and Eyeblight’s Ending as our additional removal suite, and put Elvish Visionary into our deck to help feed the Lord, slow down the early game, and count towards Vanquisher and Palace’s Elf requirements. If we want acceleration, again we lean on Mind Stone, since it replaces itself and this is not a deck that wants to mana-flood with so many one-for-ones, and thus becomes +1 to your Lord in a pinch.
Creatures (20)
Lands (24)
Spells (16)
Unfortunately, this deck is probably a dog to a dedicated Red deck even though it has Kitchen Finks, requiring four Infests in the sideboard to try and play catch-up against the early game rush that such decks now provide, Infests it wanted anyway against Kithkin and might even sideboard in against Faeries as well. But it’s at a disadvantage because of the power of Anathemancer against it and its inability to necessarily end the game before it faces multiples and/or an Unearth on Anathemancer, though it can at least put the pressure on quickly enough that some of the games will see the big fat Green monsters tapped and attacking rather than backpedaling to catch up. Civic Wayfinder would also be an excellent Elf to consider, and could quite possibly replace Elvish Visionary, but I found the list was getting too glutted at the three-drop and much of the time a turn 2 Visionary will help just as much to get the fourth or fifth land on time as a turn 3 Wayfinder does. Ideally the deck will curve out with Thoughtseize into Vanquisher into Finks followed by Colossus, but the rest of the choices I am making to get to play with Wren’s Run Vanquisher in a non-aggro deck that is not chock full of other Elves leaves me wondering what the deck will look like the rest of the time, when the draw is not that obviously awesome creature curve.
Speaking of awesome creature curves, it’s impossible not to notice the fact that Red/Black or Red/Green beatdown gets some powerful tools for Standard. You get to choose between Anathemancer or Bloodbraid Elf as your Hackblade companion du jour, and if you want to be really greedy, trust the mana will work somehow and not worry about your opponent potentially playing Anathemancers, you can go whole-hog and play both yourself. Let’s look at three possible builds: R/G, R/B, and the full-on three colors.
Creatures (24)
- 4 Boggart Ram-Gang
- 4 Tattermunge Maniac
- 4 Figure of Destiny
- 4 Naya Hushblade
- 4 Jund Hackblade
- 4 Bloodbraid Elf
Lands (24)
Spells (12)
The mana-fixing for R/G is slightly weak by comparison to other combinations you might want, so the Forests are only fine if you draw a Fire-Lit Thicket as well when you’re trying to biggie-size your Figure of Destiny, while Ancient Ziggurat frankly stinks and doesn’t exist when trying to size up your Figure or cast Flame Javelin. These are trivial issues by comparison to not having the mana to cast your turn-two play, and this deck focuses on playing the right cards in the right sequence so the rest is irrelevant by comparison. Bloodbraid Elf will never flip over a Flame Javelin, but every other card is business, and the ideal flip would be Elf into Ram-Gang or Hackblade to really pump the damage race. Next up:
Creatures (24)
- 4 Boggart Ram-Gang
- 4 Tattermunge Maniac
- 4 Figure of Destiny
- 4 Goblin Outlander
- 4 Jund Hackblade
- 4 Anathemancer
Lands (24)
Spells (12)
The mana-fixing and Goblin sub-theme fit beautifully next to each other here, as every land taps for the right colors with no weird requirements to work right if we want them to, leaving us to judge the merits of including basic Swamp to have an opponent’s Path to Exiles potentially tutor up a color-fixer versus having all 24 lands work with Flame Javelin and Figure of Destiny. While the thirteenth Black source is not technically necessary, it doesn’t hurt; the Path-as-fixer argument is worth considering, and with just one land that is not absolutely perfect with a Figure of Destiny it is easy enough to mask its impact with Graven Cairns… enough of the times that this might come up, you’ll also have a Graven Cairns to filter Black into Red, fixing the problem.
Moving on to three colors, we see:
Creatures (24)
- 4 Boggart Ram-Gang
- 4 Tattermunge Maniac
- 4 Figure of Destiny
- 4 Jund Hackblade
- 4 Bloodbraid Elf
- 4 Anathemancer
Lands (24)
Spells (12)
A pleasing mix of damage and utility. Flame Javelin has unfortunately gotten the axe due to the fact that our three-slot has gotten a little full and it is very Red-intensive for a deck that now has eight pain-lands powering eight filter lands. Lash Out makes it back in the deck even though we’re being greedier and playing three colors simply due to the fact that the three-color list cuts the curve-hugging second two-drop to allow it to fit both Anathemancer and Bloodbraid Elf in the deck, and I’d prefer to replace that two-mana spell with something else to do on turn two, thus returning Lash Out to us.
Between the three decks, I actually really like the third, though I worry that the Goblin count is not quite high enough to support Auntie’s Hovel as an always-untapped land. Red decks of this style, however, have survived with Ghitu Encampment in its arsenal for some time now, and correct mulliganing decisions as well as careful planning of the first three turns will allow the deck to operate properly even with only twelve Goblins to power the land… unlike our previous example with the B/G deck where we had only sixteen Elves to go with our minor Tribal theme, we aren’t trying to power up a two-drop with it, just play a land. We can live with twelve Goblins, or at least add it as a design note to state we have seen a concern, and look at the possibility of playing Tarfire over Lash Out. However, Lash Out is the superior burn spell in a creature-on-creature battle, even better than Incinerate in such cases, so I would require a fair bit of convincing about Tarfire’s merits before I was to replace Lash Out for it.
All of these designs pour damage on quite quickly, either with Cascade to push things to crazy extremes or with Anathemancer dealing a bunch of damage to the opponent… or both as the case may be. Curiously, none of the decks have Terminate despite two of them being Black/Red, and the reasoning behind this is that Terminate is generally poor as a main-deck card in Red decks that want to deal damage… I imagine it would be an excellent sideboard card perhaps, but not the removal spell of choice for main-deck inclusion, as Lash Out has significant value in man-on-man fights simply due to the added damage you get when you win the Clash and the fact that Red decks tend to gain more from clashing than non-Red decks do. Against decks that are already drawing cards, a little added manipulation to the top of their deck is practically invisible compared to what is already going on, and against decks that aren’t, the Red deck profits on the exchange simply thanks to the Philosophy of Fire: Red cards drawn can add up to equal dead opponent, while Kithkin and Elf cards have to interact with the opponent via the attack phase to attempt the same, not just duck a counterspell.
I’ve got to say, the Red decks are surprisingly tempting. But then I might just be trying to talk myself out of playing White Weenie, even as I accept it may be my fate to be attacking for two.
The sheer fact that such Red decks may be popular, either due to their quality or even simply disproportionately popular due to the appeal of things that are new, means to me that while it may be premature to nail the coffin shut on the Faerie deck, there is a clearly a competitive metagame besides Faeries versus Non-Faeries. Alara Reborn widens things up very nicely to a broad spectrum of colors and ideas, even letting us consider crazy things like eight-Borderpost aggro-Esper, gaining added value on the Borderposts thanks to the fact that you can use them as eight Artifact lands that are legal for Standard, and thus eight lands that pump your Master of Etherium without getting you Anathemancered out of the game. As a high-powered set, Alara Reborn is the miracle cure for the doldrums of Standard… it shakes things up very nicely by providing powerful tools to new decks, potential tools for existing ones, and does so without aiding the Lorwyn-block Tribal themes that are otherwise currently predominant.
Buckle your seat-belts, it’s going to be a wild ride.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com