In recent months, playtesting for Magic has become more and more difficult — moving in with a fiancee was one part of it, and moving an extra hour away from my would-be playtest partners was another. Faced with these conditions, there’s only one sane thing to do… In recent months, playtesting for Magic has become more and more difficult — moving in with a fiancée who has good reason to suggest that she get at least some portion of my non-working, non-sleeping time was one part of it, and moving an extra hour away from my would-be playtest partners in New York City made it more or less impossible to play Magic in real life except on weekends. Faced with these conditions, there’s only one sane thing to do…
Quit? We seem to have differing views of sanity. Why, I sloughed off all my “real life” cards I didn’t need (which, by definition, is almost all of them) and moved online!
Admittedly, it feels wrong to trade money for electronic pixels that looked as if they somehow represented the Steam Vents and Demonfires I’d grown so fond of. But considering that I’m much more likely to see those cards in their online form than in real life, kept as they are in my locker at Neutral Ground where I might actually be able to use them and not need to truck out there with them in my bag first, an electronic collection had its benefits. Fortunately, excepting for the Battle Royale a few months back, I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve had to spend money on Magic Online; for the most part I’ve stuck to drafting, and do so in the “safety net” zone that is the Time Spiral 4-3-2-2s. While the 8-4s are more profitable, they’re also a bit harder, and I for one like the safety net of only needing to win one round before I’ve more or less reimbursed my entry. This, of course, necessitates some tactical rare-drafting, and a reasonable knowledge of what goes for how many tickets, but I’ve been able to pad a nice little profit margin just from drafting… an entire mess of commons that can presumably be liquidated at some point in order to acquire spare tickets, and enough starting capital to actually get close to building a Standard deck… so long as that deck is reasonably cheap, or I can borrow pieces from my friend Jim Halter whose account is orders of magnitude better than mine.
Fortunately, this means that I’m drafting much more often than I was before, and at even less of a cost to do so than my usual routine of having a box or two following the pre-release and just dipping into them as needed to fulfill my draft cravings. I’ve more or less gone comfortably infinite, with a very small profit margin overall leaving me with about fifty tix earned and invested in spare packs and cards for Constructed. When you’re playing a draft and you get Lightning Axe fifth-pick, and worse yet don’t take it because you’d rather have the Phthisis to go with your currently mono-black deck, you can get the idea that this isn’t the stiffest of all possible competition. What this doesn’t mean is “I can play whatever I want in Constructed,” making it much, much harder to playtest for real-life formats of interest as they come up. My Extended testing basically amounted to two days of actual testing at the start of the season, and whatever tournament experience I was able to acquire through various PTQs and any testing that could come after the event on the same day.
Fortunately, there’s a different online tool available if you want it. I do greatly love Magic Online — but playtesting my “Tenacious Tog” deck there would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of eleventy billion dollars, or at least quite a pretty penny more than I am ready to churn into the system to pick up Polluted Deltas and the other missing parts. Having finally accepted that there was no way I’d be able to use MTGO to test the deck I want to play this upcoming weekend, I poked around and downloaded Magic Workstation. For years I’ve been hearing Magic Workstation ridiculed because of the low level of competition on it, and as a former Apprentice user I can understand that. About the only advantage I saw of this program over the Apprentice software is that this program had a means of finding opponents by itself, meaning I didn’t have to use IRC at the same time.
Biases are an interesting thing. I’ve heard Workstation lambasted by anyone wanting to do “serious” testing, but how many times have you been reading a Mike Flores article and hit up against the fact that he often does a fair bit of testing in the Magic Online Tournament Practice rooms? More times than you can likely remember, as it’s been a tool he uses thanks to the double-edged nature of his MTGO God account “SwimmingWithSharks.” Mike has access to every card programmed on MTGO… but he can’t use that account to participate in events that require tickets, meaning that the level of competitiveness he can reach using that account has an upper ceiling that is lower than what one would really desire. To test in the eight-man Constructed queues, he’d need to actually own the cards on a personal account first; it’s far easier to just arrange for a consistent playtest partner of known quality and duke it out from there, or at least a good deal cheaper.
Thus I was willing to dive into this with an open mind… I’ve heard that Magic Workstation users are worse at Magic than Magic Online users, which is funny because many a Magic Online user makes obvious mistake after obvious mistake when disconnected from their electronic lifeline of automated triggers and big, descriptive red arrows keeping track of everything that’s going on. If nothing else, getting used to Magic on a different interface would make it more likely that I’d still be able to play Magic when disconnected from any interface, and keep my critical thinking skills “in practice” instead of settling for the “good enough” autopilot that other MTGO-heavy writers such as Craig Stevenson and The Ferrett have at some point or another described. And really, if MTGO is the place where I can get a fifth-pick Lightning Axe in a draft, should I really believe that I was about to submerge myself in a dark place where nobody knows how to play Magic, thus making myself worse in the progress?
Probably not.
In the defense of the Magic Workstation users, I’ve seen similar ranges of Magic Workstation users as I’ve seen when trying to test (or draft) on Magic Online. On Magic Online, I’ve seen some amazingly competent players… and received fifth-pick Lightning Axes, not to mention sat through who knows how many matches playing against Mono-Green Aggro in the Tournament Practice room… back before it was considered any good, because at the time it frankly wasn’t. And on Magic Workstation I’ve participated in a StarCityGames.com Forum-centric tournament, where I’m testing “Tenacious Tog” with a so-far undefeated record, and while trawling looking for some more test games just to have some more experience with my deck I’ve run into players looking for an opponent playing “SERIOUS DECKS ONLY 1.X REAL DECKS PLEASE!”… who was playing Ravenous Rats, Braids, and Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni in Extended.
I should have disconnected; for the truly sarcastic, saying “Sorry, didn’t you hear me, I said serious decks only” and dropping the connection is the greatest form of justice with which one could conclude the situation. Instead I battled on, considering it an interesting stress-test of my deck, and ate hot Ink-Eyes stealing my dead Trinket Mage and fetching up a Pithing Needle naming Psychatog, like I was winning this game somehow anyway. (I even played a post-sideboard game to finish off the match; I’m a nice guy, after all. I ate hot Servant of Oni… twice. It does not, in fact, taste like chicken.)
Both are different forms of Magic, and all things being equal I prefer Magic Online… but that could simply be because some of my actual real-life friends are on Magic Online, and I can borrow cards from Jim or joke around with Craig and offer to lend him Teferis I don’t actually own, or even josh around with Talen Lee (who’s on my Friends list, after all I love the name “Tact or Friction”) if the time-zones align right and it seems like there’s actually something to say. Magic Online is able to offer me some of the lost sense of community that has been displaced now that I am finding real-life Magic desperately vanishing from my life, and while there is a Magic Workstation community, it’s not one I’m part of… but I’m trying in good spirits to participate and see what happens, by playing in the StarCityGames.com Forums tournaments. (That, and it’s also the only way I know of to playtest Legacy for the Grand Prix in May without having my deck physically built and in hand… so really, why not?) The hope is that in time, maybe just maybe my bias will disappear.
In the meantime, though, I’ve been on a hot streak on Magic Online and felt like actually doing something with it. I’ve won three of the last four drafts I’ve played in, all while tactically rare-drafting Flagstones, Teferis, Lotus Blooms, and various Timeshifted beauties in order to pad the virtual wallet while collecting my four packs. (Even the draft I lost, I still had eight tix in Rares, so it didn’t sting so badly.) My method of drafting is disjointed; I try to have a deck that is “good enough” while keeping a firm eye on the monetary value of the cards that are passing, and there’s a decent chance I’ll rare-draft anything worth a ticket or more so long as I don’t have to pass the nuts to get it. My last deck was a mono-White beatdown deck, splashing three Islands for half of a Momentary Blink, and two Urza’s Factories because really, why not… and I don’t even like White anymore in Time Spiral draft. But I have been able to pad the account enough to actually start playing Constructed some, though sadly I was only able to afford this after borrowing four Cryoclasms and three Chars from my friend Jim… I couldn’t afford the fifteen tix for Chars, nor find Cryoclasms available for any price.
Creatures (19)
Lands (22)
Spells (19)
Sideboard
I didn’t realize going into this that it would be deathly trying to actually find four Ghost Quarters, nor that Avalanche Riders are in the three-ticket range. (Fortunately, I opened one in the draft I won with my mono-White deck; did I mention that pick one pack one was Flagstones of Trokair?) The idea behind this deck is simple: you lose out on the two-power one-drops from either true Gruul or true Boros, but make up for this with the ability to play Ghost Quarter in your land base instead of a complicated manabase full of dual lands. Or you could try Snow lands and Scrying Sheets, but I like the early disruption plan instead of the late-game draw power plan. If Mono-Green Aggro is somehow a good deck, why not Mono-Red Aggro, keeping to a consistent strategy and preying upon control decks with their early-game beaters riding the tempo wave to victory?
I’d loaded the deck into Magic Workstation as well as purchasing everything but the Chars and Cryoclasms on MTGO, and proceeded to test on either platform to test the theory that one is innately superior to another. The overarching plan is to test it and tune it to go cruising in the 8-man queues and burn me up some extra tickets, turning a current hot streak in Limited into the beginnings of an actual collection… and while I’m at it, test for Standard, giving me a better grounding in the “current” format because all too many players are going to glaze over it entirely in the span between the World Championships and their Regionals, just adding Planar Chaos and Future Sight to the Worlds mix and going from there. That this also lets me test for City Championships events I might want to attend… well, that’s just gravy… mostly I just want to burn people and pillage their tickets.
Magic Workstation as a means for playtesting for this weekend’s PTQ has been at least something of a disappointment so far; besides InkEyes.dec, I just haven’t gotten a lot of solid experience beneath my belt, just enough to recognize the fact that I do in fact want to switch in the Chrome Moxes I hadn’t been certain of before when last you saw Tenacious Tog, subbing an Island and the second and third copy of Seat of the Synod for Chrome Moxes. I’d like to say I’ve learned something from the StarCityGames.com forum tournament, but at this point I’ve played two somewhat uneventful games… once against a Tron deck, which was informative of how to play in that matchup but was more or less ruined by the fact that I exacted the correct play (Gifts Ungiven for the Ghost Quarter / Crucible of Worlds package) but didn’t actually follow up (by, um, actually casting Crucible of Worlds), turning a certain win into a nail-biter I barely won on the back of having drawn the one Cabal Pit at exactly the right time in the matchup I’d least expect it to be relevant in. The second round I played against Affinity and somehow got him to zero permanents in two separate games; Kataki explained the second, but managing it in the first was impressive and involved a Ghost Quarter for his one artifact land when it was the only thing keeping a Glimmervoid in play.
Round 3 I haven’t gotten to play yet, but I have confidence in my deck in a variety of matchups, though I haven’t been able to get a whiff of what my opponent is playing. If I win this one, I don’t play for the next two rounds, meaning that I almost have a vested interest in losing just so that I get to play a bit more Magic testing my deck; honestly, I can accept either result, and will already know the outcome by the time this article goes up. Round 4, if I win, would be against another Tog deck; we have no reason to play, and no inclination to either I suspect. So participating in this event just as a testing tool isn’t necessarily helpful… the correct thing to do here would be to gauge my opponents’ strengths and try and maintain a relationship online with a decent player, to get a testing partner I can game with of a reasonable skill level and test a couple of different matchups.
My actual hope was to follow up Two-Headed Giant State Championships this past weekend with a Sunday appearance at Neutral Ground for an Extended tournament in their City Champs series… or, as I call it nowadays, “playtesting.” Trading after I was eliminated on Saturday was reasonably fruitful, considering how much of my deck I was missing, but I was still missing a decent chunk of the deck with little expectation of having them magically appear the next day… and that was before accounting for getting home at 4am, then having to get up at 9:30 just to make it to the tournament on time, contents of my deck as yet uncertain. I decided to test online instead, because testing online doesn’t ask you to sit on a train for an hour and a half first, nor hit you up for $10 each way for the train plus another ten to play the tournament. With that lazy decision my hopes of actually wrangling City Championships points to make the cut at the end of the season died, but it’s okay because I went back to bed and snuggled my fiancée and a kitten with no bones, and followed it up with an afternoon of online Magic-ing across different platforms.
And the notion of the metagame is very, very different across the two platforms, that much at least I can tell right now. Having been a user of Magic Online since Kamigawa Block and now a Magic Workstation “newb” as well, I think I can point my finger very succinctly at why this is… the level of competition on Magic Online is artificially inflated, but not by the wit or the superiority of the players using MTGO; neither is the competition on Magic Workstation unnaturally depressed due to the troglodytic nature of its denizens. It is not a difference between Heaven and Hell… just a place where anything goes, versus a place where in the end at some point or another an upper echelon exists due to the fact that you can play Magic there with a profit motive attached, increasing the competitive drive far beyond that found on Workstation. The Workstation users have it almost right to begin with; they have figured out the first half of the puzzle by trying to give a solid incentive to win the tournament, something given away by the organizer or somehow making the “victory” more impressive by being able to say you’re the most recent tournament champion.
What they don’t have, mind you, is an entrance fee.
If you want to lose on Magic Online, it can be a very expensive habit. The learning curve for drafting is steeper; you can draft using a NetDraft program on Workstation, or at least I presume there is some means of doing so, because there was when I was an Apprentice user nigh on a dec(k)ade ago. You have paid no money and receive no award for doing so, just your own validation, meaning you’ve stretched your mental muscles… but unless you can do it against opposition that actually strains back against you, you’re just going to learn bad patterns that may actually decrease your level of skill, or at least artificially disconnect your awareness of your own skill by causing you to think you’re better than you are. On Magic Online, well, losing the first round of a draft is a $14 or so proposition, using real money in some fashion or another. A few weeks ago, on President’s Day, I decided to stay home that Monday instead of face the four-inch sheet of ice I’d have to manage my commute through, and do so using only public transportation. It’s days like these that corporations invented “floating holidays” for, and so I stayed at home and charged up MTGO, and spent most of the day drafting in the Time Spiral queues running through the 4-3-2-2’s making a small profit. Mostly I was just playing for fun, because I don’t get to do that often enough, and if I don’t play Magic I don’t suppose I can really keep up a weekly column about it… not really, no.
I played one opponent who seemed very irritable… I was clearly the highest-rated player at the table, with my rating at the moment being around 1760. Nothing well and truly impressive, so I didn’t expect to get hit with “ratings snobbism”… but my first-round opponent had a 1560 or so rating, and over the course of the match he got more and more irritable about the unfairness of being paired against someone with a rating 200 points higher than his. The match went pretty quickly — I had drafted an aggressive deck and beat down accordingly, while he stumbled on lands a bit and got attacked to death as I played to capitalize on the initial disadvantage, forcing him into bad blocks and turning off a variety of cards until the number of possible outs were so small they weren’t even in his colors anymore. We then paused for a debate, it would seem, as I was in the process of winning the second game — my opponent asked me if I felt there should be a filter preventing higher-rated players from drafting with or playing against lower-rated players.
It’s an interesting question… it seems my opponent assumed that the 8-4s were for the higher rated players, and the 4-3-2-2s the “newbie drafting table.” From the outside looking in, it’s completely laughable that someone should be so afraid of playing me that they’d feel they need an element of the MTGO hierarchy to protect them from me. I argued very simply that no, no such filter was needed… and my rating really wasn’t very high anyway. After all, I’d seen people in prior drafts with that same two hundred points over me with my quaint little 1760 rating. The reason I think that you don’t need an artificial buffer to prevent such things is because I think there is already a very natural buffer – the cost of entry. Losing is not cheap, and it’s most definitely not “affordable,” as far as the grand scheme of things go. My opponent was playing for fun that afternoon, and just wanted the satisfaction of winning the first round of a 4-3-2-2 to validate him before he was done for the day; if you try four drafts and only win the one round of the last one, you’ve blown ten packs and eight tickets for whatever you happened to pick up while you were drafting, so about $50 altogether for some electronic product and that warm sense of satisfaction that comes with finally winning a match.
If playing for prizes is a great motivator for winning… having to pay to enter the tournament is an even better motivator for not losing. If there’s a steep learning curve, those who can cut the mustard do… and those who can’t afford to keep failing stop trying. Your responsibility is to know whether you are competent to actually be playing when you have to pay for the right to do so, just like going to any other tournament — and if you aren’t competent, chasing the skills you need in order to become competent if you’re going to insist on playing with your entry fee slapped down first. It’s just like real life, you see… the thing that protects the under-qualified is their own knowledge of their shortcomings, or better yet a willingness to actively learn from those who are better than them. If you aren’t having fun, and you aren’t winning, you need to learn how to correct at least one of those two hardships, and preferably both.
I wouldn’t say that I was better than my opponent, though I will say I drafted a more consistent deck… my creatures cost less mana, and I had some card drawing to smooth out my draws in the shape of two Fathom Seers. I was more than happy to friend my opponent with the willingness to continue the discussion in order to advance his knowledge of the game; clearly he learned at least something about drafting in this format. When I asked how many lands he was playing he had 18, which helps to smooth your early-game mana draws in this tempo-centric format at the expense of flooding out slightly more often in longer games, and it’s not like he was casting Chimney Imps against me.
Then my opponent disconnected from me, leaving me hanging for ten minutes before the computer gave me the win; I may not have thought I was much better than my opponent at Magic, just higher on the knowledge curve because my prior experiences have taught me how to play and I actively sought out knowledge that would make me better at this game… but I do think I am a better person than him, after that, because having a mildly heated difference of opinions is no reason to be outright rude. Of course, I un-friended him. I don’t have spare time to waste educating people I won’t even like after I’ve finished helping them out. And of course I won my next round, but lost the finals, recouping my expenses and jumping in another draft for fun, where I ended up with a mono-Blue beatdown deck and lost the first round. And I jumped in another, because really that’s the point of spending a lazy afternoon at home… kept warm inside and protected from the four inches of ice that surrounded my little apartment, drafting to my heart’s content because I’m looking to have fun and at least break even. I’m picking up rares that others don’t want because I don’t need an especially ridiculous deck to win the draft, but would like that extra insurance against bad luck or poor draws in case I don’t win the first round.
And that’s what I was doing differently than my opponent, of course… I was leaving less and less up to luck and chance, drafting a more consistent deck, leaving off double-colored cards in both colors and picking the less expensive mana-costed card (or the more expensive ticket-costed card) whenever that’s a reasonable option. I was even doing it on an entirely higher level than he was, because I viewed the draft itself as a game and was trying to even out the potential outcomes… I didn’t need a very high “high”, I just wanted to avoid very low “lows” because I don’t want to put money into the system to play, I just want to have some fun and draft. I won my first round, and in the second round… there’s the same opponent. I congratulated him on reaching his objective, because clearly he had succeeded at winning the one first round that he’d so hinged his success upon. And then I beat the snot out of him, because it was the right thing to do.
Looking at that example, I am at the point where I can basically play for free because I am taking pains to make sure that I always at least break even in the long run… I’ve “gone infinite,” as they say, by playing in the easier queues (lower overall highs, but lower overall risks as well… to this day I have still never played in a single 8-4 draft) and by adjusting my drafting to accommodate for the fact that there is an entry fee and I must apply some awareness of the need for a profit motive. My opponent is not the best at Magic, but not the worst either; he was reasonably competent, and wasn’t playing terrible cards, they just didn’t hang together as a deck as well as my deck did. But since he refused to learn how to get better, and seemed in many ways to be allergic to receiving an education alongside with his beatings, he’ll have to face the one thing protecting bad players from good ones: the financial barrier.
I suspect if you had to pay to play in tournaments in Magic Workstation, you’d see a lot fewer Ink-Eyes played in Extended over that medium. The logistics are arguably quite simple, so long as you have a reputation for honesty and prior experience: every player PayPals the TO a $5 entry fee along with their contact information and deck security code, and you can run the tournament from there so long as everybody is working on the honor system and keeping an eye out for Workstation cheats like drawing extra cards or using a different deck than the one you registered with the TO. In the meantime, I consider it a useful testing tool, and an asset to my arsenal now that I am so far from the nearest outpost of real-life Magic play. I don’t have to worry about electronically owning the cards to play on Workstation, I just have to worry about whether I am actually learning anything in my experiences, something I can estimate reasonably well based on how representative of the metagame my opponent’s deck is and how well they seem to make different decisions as they play. But then, you have the exact same problem with Magic Online, which is why I can discount the games I played last night with The Red Deck as non-representative of the impending metagame. I played in the Tournament Practice Room, not in an eight-man queue, and the quality of my opponent’s deck showed accordingly.
I played a total of three matches — one against a mono-Black Rack deck, which I ended after losing game 1 because I did not think it very interesting or relevant to my purposes, which is to learn if the deck I’ve designed and traded for can “cut it” in an eight-man queue. The second I played against Dragonstorm and lost by inches, winning one game 1 on turn 4 after he took a few points off of his own Shivan Reef to Sleight of Hand into more Lands, losing one game on his turn 2 to a Ritualed-out Hellkite, and losing the third because he drew a second Remand that saved his life from a key Avalanche Riders. And the third I played against Goblinstorm, which I lost on the back of a misplay.
That misplay was what I’d just spent the last hour of my life testing in the tournament practice room to make, because that was the stress-test that would well and truly teach me lessons about how to play my deck. To replay the situation:
My opponent has two suspended Lotus Blooms, one with one counter and another with two. He has seven Goblin tokens in play but cannot reasonably attack, as he is at six life with two Gruul Guildmages on my side, and a Seal of Fire meaning he was actually at four, and I am still around fourteen life and kept my Guildmages back to block once it was evident that they wouldn’t get damage across by attacking. I have three Mountains, a Ghost Quarter, two Gruul Guildmages, and that Seal of Fire, and my hand is Sudden Shock and Avalanche Riders. My plan was aimed to keep him from comboing me out the next turn, so I had somehow decided the proper play was to cast the Riders and destroy that Island so he couldn’t combo off on me the next turn.
Keep in mind that I’ve just gotten off losing to Dragonstorm, so I was somehow feeling threatened by his combo despite the fact that as near as I can tell he’s just got Empty the Warrens and can’t actually burn me out of the game with the five cards in hand performing some sort of combo motion. The actual correct play is the one I was identifying for the turn following the Avalanche Rider turn, sacrificing a Land to the Guildmage on one turn and finishing off with the Sudden Shock for the last two points. Considering I had only the one play sequence to end the game with, I have to choose between two courses of action — try and disrupt him now with the Avalanche Riders and give him an extra turn unless I draw a second copy of either Seal of Fire or Sudden Shock, or resign myself to using the Guildmage at end of turn and killing him on my following turn regardless of what I draw.
I mis-assigned the threat level of his combo and gave him an extra turn; I died accordingly. This was a valuable lesson, as it has been a long time since I have truly played a Red deck and the last time I was playing one religiously, well, Cursed Scroll was still in it and I was Fireblasting people. My opponent’s deck was not really representative of the metagame… it looked a lot more like Olle Rade’s Worlds deck featuring Ignite Memories than it did Makihito Mihara’s Worlds-winning Dragonstorm deck… but giving the combo deck extra turns because you’re afraid of the combo is all too often a losing proposition. The Tournament Practice Room may not be the best place to figure out how to beat the tournament metagame… but it’s a perfectly acceptable place to learn how to play your deck, presumably comparable to Magic Workstation and a random user there. To get better competition on Magic Online, you’d enter the eight-man queues, because the profit motive and / or cost of entry force players to step up to a higher level if they’re going to recoup their investment. And to get better competition on Magic Workstation, I’m learning… you’d just establish a relationship with a testing partner, and arrange to test online using that interface to test whatever matchups you want. Both are different aspects of the game, and you could find an analogue in real-life Magic… playtesting with friends on proxied decks, destroying draft commons via sharpie, as compared with “trial by fire” playing your new deck at a Friday Night Magic or higher-level tournament.
That said, now that I’ve finished musing about the different aspects of online Magic, there is a little bit of thinking behind The Red Deck that I’d like to explain. My supposition going into Planar Chaos is that the metagame will change only gradually from its current form as featured on Frank Karsten’s “The Week That Was”, with the main contenders being Blue decks (Tron, Dragonstorm, and Dralnu du Louvre), Boros (currently being crowded out of the metagame, more or less), and Mono-Green Aggro and its cousins or miscellaneous variants. If any key shift is likely to happen, it will be to allow multiple Blue-Black builds to compete for the same portion of the metagame pie, not really affecting my aim. The card choices are in many cases obvious — Blood Knight, Seal of Fire, Scorched Rusalka… this isn’t rocket science. (I’d know — my sister is a rocket scientist, or at least was before she got interested in tanks and submarines instead.)
Sudden Shock has a clear benefit at the moment, however… against the expected metagame, it’s uncounterable (great against Blue) and can’t be responded to with either pump effects or regeneration (great against Green, especially Mire Boa). Cryoclasm is a dedicated gamble, but is based on the desire to accurately point the deck as a predator against control decks — you lead with an early start in the game and have both Avalanche Riders and Cryoclasm as damage-dealing mana disruption, giving the opponent a pair of bad choices. Either they don’t counter it, losing a land and presumably taking damage (three guaranteed from Cryoclasm, presumably two from Avalanche Riders) but getting to spend their mana to kill earlier threats… or they counter it, leaving the early threats unmolested for yet another turn, against a deck that just wants to deal 20 somehow. Otherwise the cards are chosen for a specific kind of utility, dealing 20. Gruul Guildmage restocks burn spells in addition to being a Grizzly Bear, Frenzied Goblin can help against cards like Loxodon Hierarch to push damage across, and Rift Bolt has the option of sometimes being cheaper than Volcanic Hammer. (And imagining this deck with Mogg Fanatic back makes me smile with glee…!)
The tricky point is angling the deck at the metagame it’s attacking. Mono-Green Aggro can be a difficult matchup, but the “new” MGA with Groundbreaker is even more vulnerable than before to a Seal of Fire in play… and every argument you want to make about Red decks being unable to burn an 8/8 out of the way is completely invalidated by Threaten, who not only borrows your man and clocks you for eight, but either lets you sacrifice the threat to Scorched Rusalka (… or Greater Gargadon, if that’s your fancy) or at the very worst leaves it tapped the next turn, not dealing damage to you and firmly out of the way as far as blocking is concerned. Sudden Shock mauls Mire Boa, as does the sideboarded Serrated Arrows, which I am told might be “decent” against Soltari Priest as well.
And against control decks, well, that’s why I’ve run with Avalanche Riders instead of Giant Solifuge, and not just because I’m afraid Evan Erwin might talk about my deck next week and call him “Cap’n Tickles.” Arguably the 4/1 untargetable man is better against traditional control decks, following up a Wrath with four to the face they’ll be unlikely to solve through most conventional methods… but all this deck wants to do is ask difficult questions, and the leading control-type deck of this sort likes to spend its mana countering threats at instant speed rather than Wrathing at the moment. Asking difficult questions that will tax their resources (via not just Avalanche Riders but also Cryoclasm) forces them to respond to your current threat, leaving the prior threats tapped and attacking for two, just like they’re supposed to do. If instead you play the removal-heavy Wrath-style decks that some are postulating might do well, well… that’s what the Viashino Sandstalkers are doing, being their own janky selves and dodging Damnation while they deal four all Ball Lightning Groundbreaker Giant Solifuge style.
Pointing the deck accurately to control mana is part of the argument behind playing Mono-Red instead of Red/White or Red/Green or Zoo or Dark Boros or R/B Sand Burn; we get to follow up the Cryoclasms and Avalanche Riders with uncounterable disruption when lands are truly what ails ye, using Ghost Quarter as if it were Wasteland against at least a few decks in the metagame. And we more or less shrug off Blood Moon, letting us play it as a hardcore hoser against strategies like the Urzatron or to further disrupt the mana of bad decks like Beach House B/G/W. To pay our respects to the rare occasional Boros matchup, well, that’s why Richard Garfield put the universe into motion in such a way that it intelligently designed Greater Gargadon, an excellent tool for winning Red on Red battles of attrition. Serrated Arrows answers the one threat the Red spells can’t, Soltari Priest, and does it multiple times per copy of Arrows… which is to say, the current metagame is currently respected and targeted for its weaknesses, all while also building on a budget — Chris Romeo should be proud, and a good deal less angry than his routine of the past few weeks has been heading towards.
Only time, and more runs through the eight-man queues and Magic Workstation testing partners, will tell.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com
How much is real, so much to question
An epidemic of the mannequins, contaminating everything
When thought came from the heart, it never did right from the start
Just listen to the noises… no more sad voices
Before you tell yourself it’s just a different scene
Remember it’s just different from what you’ve seen…
Stone Sour, “Through Glass”