This week, I could try to be one of the “cool kids” and tell you how 1337 my Extended deck is, and that Scepter-Chant is one of highest-quality decks to play in the current Extended field. After all, PJ talked about how Boros is great for the third or fourth week in a row, and Flores will tell you that his Green/White deck must be great because it won someone some PTQ somewhere… but not him. Instead of following the trend of padding the article count as 2007’s tournament season begins its slow crawl forward, we’re going to look at progress in motion and the herd mentality.
I don’t particularly care for being just another member of the herd. I do things a little bit weird, in most avenues of my life, and instead of specifically trying to play “the best deck” I try to play “the best deck I can play well.” I try to pad out my strengths and talents to be good enough, overall, that I’m not specifically hindering my deck-choice just because the deck I should be playing is a deck I couldn’t play well. For the start of Extended, I pegged Scepter-Chant as the best deck to play, and it just so happens that despite never having played it or its progenitors in previous Extended seasons, I do have the requisite talents to perhaps play it well. My particular little touches were to tweak it better for facing off against Boros and the mirror match, with all the Lightning Helixes I could lay my hands on and the potentially laughably bad “technology” of adding Snow basic lands and Mouth of Ronom to the manabase. Otherwise I just started with Roel van Heejswick’s successful Worlds decklist, then applied my biases (hopefully gained by trying to understand the format as a whole).
But the herd mentality is something that can be followed, tracked, and predicted… and it is generally those who distinguish themselves from the herd, turning cannibal to prey upon their fellow mage’s weaknesses, who succeed at any given tournament. Being just another Boros player may win you the blue envelope, if you’re the Boros player who draws the best or gets the lucky pairings or otherwise has a twist of fate clearing the path to the top for them. Otherwise you can distinguish yourself from the herd in two ways: advantage on “play skill,” and advantage on “deck,” as MichaelJ has been saying for a while now. Play skills you have to cultivate, and you can even spot them out beforehand and determine what you need to know to succeed. If you’re playing Boros, I’d suggest playing the mirror reasonably extensively beforehand, and try to look for the ways in which you can gain an advantage. “Deck,” however, requires something more than just taking the stock lists and running with them. To gain an advantage on “deck,” you have to part from the herd who didn’t learn the philosophy behind their deck and how it plays out very extensively, so you can learn how to toggle the numbers or the choices and make new numbers and new choices based on changing currents in the ebb and flow of the metagame.
You also have to learn what everyone else is going to do, and once you’ve figured out what direction they’re pointing in, strike out ahead of them and prepare to ambush them. The most useful way to go about this is to look at the steadily increasing library of online resources, like the PTQ Yokohama Top 8 Decks from week to week… and the Magic Online articles, both Frank Karsten’s and StarCityGames.com own Blisterguy’s, which can be useful for getting in ahead of the developing metagame to figure out not just what’s important right now but what’s going to be important a week from now. Compiling all of the PTQ Top 8 data that has been collected so far, with only two out of seven North American PTQs accessible at this time, we see the following percentages:
| Deck&ntsb; &ntsb; &ntsb; | &ntsb; | |||
| TEPS | * | * | 12.5% | |
| U/W Tron | * | * | 12.5% | |
| Affinity | * | 6.25% | ||
| Aggro-Loam | * | 6.25% | ||
| Friggorid | * | 6.25% | ||
| Scepter-Chant | * | 6.25% | ||
| Trinket Angel | * | 6.25% | ||
| Domain Zoo | * | * | 12.5% | |
| Flow Rock | * | * | 12.5% | |
| Flores G/W | * | 6.25% | ||
| G/B/W Beach House | * | 6.25% | ||
| U/W 8-Post | * | 6.25% |
With only two of seven data points, it’s not yet worth looking back over the past several weeks of “Online Tech” articles, to correlate how the PTQ Week 1 most closely correlates online Extended developments following up from Worlds. When we’ve gotten all the results in for this week’s PTQs, we’ll compare this all against the motion of the metagame between Worlds and Week 1. However, this is just one more way in which the real-life metagame motion is slower than online, were perfect information is more readily available… information moves like molasses by comparison, waiting for tournament organizers to publish decklists instead of just going into a Premier Event and watching the replays.
Having compared PTQ Week 1, we can then predict what PTQ Week 2 might look like, and gauge how the developments at the two North American PTQs in Oklahoma and Texas stack up against the week before… and approximate the development time difference between IRL Magic and Online Magic. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever literally clocked the two metagames, PTQ season and online Premier Event season, to compare development against each other. (We’ll be looking at exactly that, in case you’re curious, but it requires more than just this first week’s analysis… which we don’t even have accessible yet anyway. So we’ll really take a look at it after the Planar Chaos pre-release in a little over a week’s time. Hold that thought!)
Looking at the wide world of Extended, we’ve entered the PTQ season and put things into motion officially; after the gears are set in motion, usually decks begin to evolve to face the metagame and beat what’s out there… and new decks appear to prey upon those already established. Week 1 innovations were reasonably few and far between. Sure, some people played Boros with maindeck Armadillo Cloaks, but most instead “stayed the course” and used the tried-and-tested lists from Worlds instead of trying to get an edge. Some small modifications can have big ramifications — “my” Mouths of Ronom killed Teferi in the mirror-match, and helped to take down an Exalted Angel or two, and other players using the same list as mine this past weekend had similar success by murdering Silver Knights that were beating them down. Bigger modifications, however, can have a much larger effect.
The most enlightening thing I saw all this week was Paul Jordan “Concentrate on the Boros Mirror,” an account of going 2-2 with Boros at the Philadelphia area PTQ last weekend… specifically, this portion:
It was only a matter of time before I was in a mirror match. I was hoping I would have a chance for my Battlemages to shine. He was on the play in game 1, also down a card. He opened with Silver Knight on turn 2, and Armadillo Cloak on turn 3. Well, that was quick.
For context, Paul was trying to figure out ways to improve the mirror match, and ended up shaving a burn spell and a one-drop to fit in two maindeck Umezawa’s Jitte, “for the mirror.” His opponent likewise added cards “for the mirror,” dropping Armadillo Cloak on a pro-Red guy turn 3 of game 1. Paul then goes on to discuss how he didn’t learn anything from his mistakes, because he couldn’t see any… and speaking from technical play, I’m sure there weren’t any. But he did make one key mistake: he tried to improve the mirror match by focusing on the wrong cards anyway, because pretty much nothing matters in the mirror except for pro-Red guys. Everything’s very interchangeable, there’s very few ways to gain actual card advantage, and everything gets burned to a fine ash unless it has protection from Red. His choice of additions was to add cards that went well with his pro-Red guys, making a two-card combo of “pro-Red guy” plus “pointy stick of doom.” He doesn’t stop his opponent from having his own “cards that matter,” and he even makes his deck worse against non-mirror-match decks in a noticeable way by adding a card generally considered to be too slow to matter, or focusing on the wrong things that do matter, against control decks and the combo matchup.
For reference:
At this point, everyone is familiar with this list — pro-Red creatures, lots of two-power creatures for one mana, and “the usual suspects” among the burn spells. It’s a recipe that has worked time and time again, but the truth is that there is room to gain an edge if you are looking for it. Frankly put, the biggest concern for the Boros player is the mirror match, which is why eight pro-Red creatures is the new industry standard and some players are trying to do things like put Jitte in the main or run around with Armadillo Cloaks on. But look at the standard-issue list… here’s the list, broken down into its constituent parts:
1. Jackal Pups — 10 Interchangeable Parts (4 Savannah Lions, 4 Kird Ape, 2 Isamaru)
2. 4x Grim Lavamancer — One-drop, renewable burn source.
3. 8 Pro-Red Guys (… because we can’t have 9 without paying 3 or getting DQ’ed. 4 Soltari Priests, 4 Silver Knight)
4. 4x Molten Rain — Burn spell that counts as disruption.
5. 12 Other Burn Spells (4 Lightning Helix, 4 Sudden Shock, 4 Firebolt)
6. Lands
Sideboard:
4 Double-Use Shatter
4 Umezawa’s Pointy Stick of Doom from Heck
4 Combo-Deck Breaker
3 Backup Mirror Match Pro: Red Enhancer
Presumably if you start shaving the numbers you dilute the deck’s consistency, and it’s definitely not winning matches because it’s overpowered. It just happens to have a superior strategy while “playing fair,” and executes it with remarkable consistency because all the similar parts back each other up. Diluting the consistency by adding two Jittes instead of one of the ten Pups and one of the twelve “other” burn spells is cutting into your normal draws by adding the often-clunky Jitte to an otherwise well-crafted hand tuned to win by the fourth turn against no disruption… and with disruption of its own, via Molten Rain. And while Jitte is good in the mirror, you can replace one of the “similar” cards in the maindeck to get a similarly strong effect on the mirror match without diluting the deck’s consistency. The creatures aren’t actually that replaceable, you only have so many options for one-drops with two power, Lavamancers are obviously excellent as well, and then it’s the eight pro-Red’s. Similarly, Molten Rain is an excellent burn spell, sometimes being a Time Walk in addition to a Shock, in a deck that just wants to run away with the early turns of the game as quickly as possible.
Imagine, then, if the burn spell of choice for the mirror match was Pyrite Spellbomb. Admittedly, it’s a little janky and at least a little clunky, requiring you to keep up a Red mana any time you think you might want to use it. It’s not quite as good as Seal of Fire, which is a solid card in the Red on Red mirror but clearly not as good as either Lava Dart or Firebolt (by the card choices as they seem to be playing out), but it does kill Priests and Knights with an aplomb otherwise not seen in the Boros mirror nowadays.
Looking at what to replace, well… it’s clearly not Lightning Helix, because it’s too good to pass up in so many matchups. This brings us to the choice between Sudden Shock and Firebolt, and no Boros deck should automatically require that they can never, ever kill a creature on their first turn with access to just one mana, letting Elves that should be dead live, or Savannah Lions attacking for 2 instead of being Lion fricassee. That it often comes back a second time to do the job twice, against control decks or in the mirror, is also much desired. Look, then, at Sudden Shock, and realize what it’s good against: Arcbound Ravager, Wild Mongrel, and Psychatog. The last of these three isn’t even played nowadays, except for very rare occasions, and the other two are not played with amazing frequency either. The first is easily destroyed by the four Grudge sideboard plan, killing not just the Ravager but his little dog, too… while the latter is currently only played in decks that are very reasonable matchups for Boros, such as Flow Rock, and do not specifically require Sudden Shock on a Mongrel to beat.
If your careful analysis tells you that you are more likely to need to kill a Silver Knight or Soltari Priest than need to Sudden Shock a Mongrel, Tog or Ravager, swapping your burn spells leaves you with a still-functional main-deck that is perhaps a little weaker in a few matchups (losing instants for effectively sorceries doesn’t help against Scepter-Chant, for example)… but one that can murder opposing Silver Knights to death, letting yours attack unopposed. Do remember, more decks are adopting Silver Knights every day, like Nassif’s Trinket Angel deck and the sudden surge in Black-White “Good Stuff” beatdown decks that seemed to have popped up for the first week of PTQ play. It’s one of the metagame-defining cards right now, due to the popularity and aggressive strengths of Boros, and thus having a plan for opposing pro-Red creatures may be better than other cards you are currently playing. But of course, there are obvious exceptions… just ask Dr. Teeth.
The herd mentality seems to be to add Cloaks or Jittes to the main… not to focus on what actually matters, while keeping the rest of their game-plan the same. The predatory player who wants to cull the herd and get a full belly (… of sushi, in Japan…) would instead focus on the things that matter, and pay attention to Silver Knight and Soltari Priest, the damage sources that actually deal more than two or three damage over the course of a game. Not making yours better, specifically; making theirs worse does a much better job, as it doesn’t rely on you drawing yours first (… or your opponent playing like a donkey).
You could go steps further and play a different deck that beats Boros while still being good against what Boros is good against, which is why I ran with Scepter-Chant tuned against Boros decks and the mirror. But not doing anything at all, or worse yet the wrong thing, doesn’t help. Paul hit on something exactly right in his article, pointing out that Thornscape Battlemage is a mini-FTK that can kill a pro-Red man, kill an Umezawa’s Jitte, or do both.
“The herd” will make a wide variety of decisions more or less all at the same time… and often these decisions will be wrong, like tossing in Armadillo Cloaks into your Boros maindeck. (If PJ’s Pointy Sticks of Doom were wrong, well, Armored D***o Cloaks are wronger. At least PJ kind of focused on the Things that Matter, because a Jitte can kill a pro-Red man, even if it may cost you your own pro-Red man in the process sometimes.) At lots and lots of tables, I saw “the herd” playing Black-White Orzhov Aggro, none of which I saw so far making Top 8 at Week 1 PTQs:
Creatures (19)
Lands (22)
Spells (19)
A lot of players seemed to have decks very much like this one for the Week 1 PTQs; everyone in my car played against very similar decks piloted by a very disparate group of players. One of the people in my car was Elias Vaisburg, who apparently did very well with a deck like that on E-League the week before. It had very quietly been picking up over the non-MTGO online crowd, like things used to do back in the Stone Age of online Magic, before MTGO came around. Even by his own admission, after advocating the deck among the Neutral Ground Mock Tournament play-group, if Boros is underpowered, these decks are criminally underpowered. Sure, they use good cards that fit a beatdown curve. But they don’t seem at all threatening… they’re working off the theory that Black/White can beat Boros by having the better focus on “the things that matter” in the semi-mirror, like being able to kill their Silver Knights while you can’t kill theirs (… unless you’re moving on to Pyrite Spellbombs, in which case their entire deck strategy is invalidated). They figure if Molten Rain is good as a Stone Rain, Vindicate is better, because it can kill anything.
In actuality, if Molten Rain is a good Stone Rain… Stifle is better. If you’re going to prey upon a format’s weaknesses, at least do it right. When every deck is playing fetch-lands in reasonably large numbers, paying U to destroy a land is better than paying 1RR (maybe) or 1BW (definitely). Admittedly, TEPS only uses fetch-lands in some versions… but I suspect extra Stifles will not go to waste against the Storm-based combo deck. I was theorizing a deck in the car-ride down, happy to play Scepter-Chant as the “right” deck for the Week 1 PTQ but wanting to be greedy and go crazy when trying to figure out what the possible response could be for 4xStifle.dec. Car-mate Luis Neiman went on to play a WW/u deck running four Stifles main, after I finally convinced him that four three-ofs was a sin compared with three four-ofs… and while his “fair” beatdown deck may have been underpowered, the quality of Stifle did manage to prove itself even if the quality of his deck did not.
Creatures (22)
Lands (22)
Spells (16)
This is a hateful, hateful deck… and if you didn’t notice, it’s also an amazingly greedy one. Two colors (U/G Madness) splash two other colors (Black, and White), and splashing another deck’s strategic power cards entirely (“Dump Truck” and its Meddling Mage-into-Cabal Therapy play). To say the least, I intend to further explore the possibility of playing this deck… after all, I love me my Merfolk decks, and this is kind-of, sort-of Merfolk-esque. It also shows an Extended card I expect to pick up in both power and popularity as its relevance is brought more to the forefront: Threads of Disloyalty. If Boros can just lose to Silver Knights and Soltari Priests, stealing theirs has to be an excellent play, and I expect if nothing else that Trinket Angel-style decks should be boarding this if they aren’t already.
But enough about Extended… I’ve said everything I’ve come to say so far, and made some pointed suggestions about how to properly get in front of the herd in order to best swallow them whole. And I’ve poked a bit of fun at Mike Flores (awful Green-White deck) and Paul Jordan (for “not learning anything about the Boros mirror” when I think the information was clearly there to suggest possible room for improvement on the deck tactics he was employing)… now it’s everyone’s turn to poke fun at me for a while.
As the title of the article suggests, somewhere in here you’ll be asked to chime in on the Forums and suggest a deck name. That moment is swiftly approaching, as after exiting the PTQ in West Chester at 3-2-1 (and embarrassingly heading back north to play in a Vampire LARP, though I wasn’t embarrassed about the LARP part so much as the “leaving before sunset” part) I made it to Neutral Ground the next day just in time for the first City Championships tournament there, playing Standard. If you recall from recent weeks, I have been enamored by a deck I’ve been calling “Snakes on a Desert,” a Blue-Green Control deck I would have played at States if I’d gone to it, and suggested might be good for the upcoming City Championships. It didn’t do as well in MTGO testing as I’d hoped, and with that being the main platform for actual testing (instead of crapping decklists out and claiming they’re good based solely on theory, which works if you’re good enough at it but still gets better with playtesting) I was up a creek without a paddle.
So I decided to try something different, and try to have fun while I was doing it. And thus the goofy Gargadon deck was born:
Creatures (28)
- 4 Nantuko Husk
- 4 Shadow Guildmage
- 4 Mindslicer
- 4 Greater Gargadon
- 4 Magus of the Scroll
- 4 Mogg War Marshal
- 4 Nether Traitor
Lands (24)
This deck is very, very goofy. But like a lot of other tricksy little decks I try to work on, it’s got a hidden turn 4 kill (one drop into Nether Traitor into Husk into War Marshal, with some tricksy sacrifice action going on) and might be the modern descendent of the Black/White Husk/Promise decks after you knock some of the clunkiness out of it. It’s very solid against other Red decks (read: Boros) because Gargadons are 1000/1000 Yu-gi-oh! monsters as far as burn spells are concerned. The choice of Split cards is clearly goofy, instead of “real” spells, but Black/Red has very real problems facing down cards like Akroma, and really getting your Husk and Gargadon to work right requires a very high density of creatures… thus the choice of utility one-drops, providing creature removal and potentially even a bit of reach, to make up for the fact that true removal spells are somewhat lacking in this deck. Hit is pretty exciting, able to knock deadly dragons right out of the air, and thanks to Gemstone Mine you can cast both Run and Rise… both dangerous spells in a deck like this one, which really just wants to get back Mogg War Marshals to feed to things if by any chance Hymn to Tourach doesn’t look like a good card.
I for one thought this was a pretty exciting deck, cheap and effective, pointed very ably to win Red on Red matches (note the two Deserts sitting there, ready to take down any Soltari Priests that Shadow Guildmage may have missed). With variants of cards like “Hymn to Tourach” and “Mind Twist” among its arsenal, it’s hopefully packing enough discard to regularly put Dragonstorm combo decks off of their turn 4 kill… and bringing in more two-for-one discards, the Cry of Contritions, to help make sure. Of course, it well and truly sucks to get Greater Gargadon Remanded, but you can always try to set it up with Mindslicer first to prevent that from being even remotely possible. And if nothing else, well, it’s goofy and fun and lets you say things like “P.S. GARGADON YOU!”
How could you not like saying “P.S. GARGADON YOU!” You have to say it in all capitals, or you’re pronouncing it wrong. Trust me on that one, I’m an expert.
The City Championships tournament was pretty small… but by no means miniscule. Twenty-six players meant four rounds of play, and while some of the decks were weaker than they could be, it was often due to a stylistic choice rather than picking up your draft deck and adding another twenty cards. In the first round I squared off against The Panda Connection, and got to win my first match in any format via Greater Gargadon shenanigans. We talked briefly about Mike Flores, who just randomly came up somehow in recap of the day before’s PTQ, but clearly being the other Friday StarCityGames.com writer somehow let me fly under the radar. I don’t actually like to talk about myself and my writing in real life (… the Internet was created for bragging, didn’t you know that?) so I wasn’t about to clue him in, it’d be kind of embarrassing to ask “Do you know who I am?” and have him say “I’m the Juggernaut, B*TCH!” instead of “Sean McKeown, beloved writer of my favorite Friday strategy column, Magical Hack!”
(… Deck name equals Ghost Hack?)
Panda Connection wasn’t very hard, for the third game after he ate hot Gargadon he determined he had to take the controlling role instead of the aggressive one, and decided running Savannah Lions into Mogg War Marshal was not actually “the plan”. For the second I got to play against the Saffi — Champion — Soul Warden infinite life deck, and drew no utility creatures game 1, then faced off against an opponent beating me down with the patented Three Stupid Elephants while at eleventy billion life. The second game was looking better, having forced the opponent to discard the remainder of their hand and started to peck at his combo with utility creatures, aiming to take down Dark Confidant, then Soul Warden, then Saffi with my Magus of the Scroll. Saffi saved Bob, he flipped the Champion and suddenly he’s at eleventy billion again, but he’s used Chord of Calling twice so I can theoretically deck him if somehow over the boundaries of his deck (… with Glare of Subdual out, no less!) he can’t deal me the last eight damage. Time is called while he’s still got about thirty cards in his deck, so despite not actually killing me, he wins the match. I’d somehow convinced myself that I’d won the second and we were drawing, but my boundless optimism was very soon crushed as it was noted that I’d just taken a loss, not a draw.
For the third round, I faced a Boros deck with the standard spells and a less-than-standard set of creatures, with a reasonably casual player piloting the Boros Soldier-themed deck, including Coldsnap’s Field Marshal pumping up Boros Swiftblade. I lose the first to too much burn targeting the face, as my creatures were unable to respond quickly enough to preserve my life total. Game 2 I got to Gargadon him, which led to him sideboarding in Hide / Seek and Seek-ing me off his Gemstone Mine. Fortunately, with a second Gargadon pointed at him and the war cry of “All in!” I raced 28-8 and won before he could pluck the fourth burn spell to finish the deal. And for the fourth I got to pair off against Gruul, who likewise was destroyed by annoying Goblins into hard-to-manage Husks leading into OMG FRICKING HUGE Gargadon to the teeth. This set me into the Top 8 with margin for error, where I beat a R/W/G Stormbind home-brew, then lost a carefully calculated match against Scryb and Force when Scryb Ranger appeared at what was really, really the most inopportune time ever, losing me a match I thought I was going to win before my opponent Flashed me.
I thought it might be fun… and it was. I’d thought it up kind of hoping I might be able to sneak into the Battle Royale queues before Planar Chaos came online, despite my initial disappointment at Craig instituting an actual cost for Snow-covered Basic Lands despite being commons, but figured while I’m playing “real” Magic I might as well use a “real” (read: $100 or more) manabase… and did pretty well in the meantime playing an unusual beatdown deck that probably has some legs as far as further developing it goes.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com
P.S. GARGADON YOU!