Last week, we had a look at a new development I was curious about, advocating the addition of Ponder to the Japanese version of the Faeries deck that caught my eye at Worlds during the Extended portion. Four players did very well with the deck, one of whom was Kenji Tsumura himself, who rode its success into the Top 8.l I wanted to take its basic shell and re-tune it to the metagame as I feel it presents itself nowadays… and add Ponder, while I was at it. While my previous musings on the Faeries archetype changed a lot of things at once, going so far as to jump over entirely to using Trinket Mage and half a dozen other significant changes all at once, for this experiment I wanted to make a smaller set of changes and see how the deck felt. Ultimately, other than tuning the list with slight changes here and there, the main difference was cutting Stifle from the main-deck and adding Ponder in its place, as my experiences going into Regionals last year suggested this was a distinct improvement.
This week, then, the goal is to present the results of my week-long inquest in figuring the deck out, as well as advocate another round of changes to fine-tune the process of reaching the right design. Where last we left our intrepid hero, he was battling with the following:
7 Island
4 Mutavault
4 Secluded Glen
4 Polluted Delta
2 River of Tears
2 Riptide Laboratory
1 Academy Ruins
1 Watery Grave
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Ponder
4 Mana Leak
4 Spell Snare
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Vendilion Clique
3 Glen Elendra Archmage
3 Sower of Temptation
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
Sideboard:
4 Bitterblossom
4 Threads of Disloyalty
3 Stifle
3 Negate
1 Engineered Explosives
This is a list that I am quite content with overall, as my playing around in this metagame has led me to strongly desire Engineered Explosives in any even slightly controlling deck I play, as could be seen from my Rock deck full of two-drops that happily played Engineered Explosives as a four-of, to at least moderate success. This is a solid porting of the Japanese U/B Faeries deck from Worlds with minor updates (changed number of Explosives, cut Azami, slight change to the mana-base) and one key change: -1 Glen Elendra Archmage, -3 Stifle, +4 Ponder. I had found Stifle to be generally weak against a reasonable portion of the field, even when I had it turn-one on the play against an opposing fetchland, because I would try so hard to actually trade it for value only to ultimately wish it were some other card… except in the matchups where it is an all-star not to be neglected, such as against combo decks playing spells with the word ‘Storm’ on them. I had also felt there was good reason to try using Ponder in this deck, as my prior experiences with Ancestral Vision-packing Blue-based decks told me that such might ultimately be profitable.
Ultimately, I proved very happy indeed with the changes I’d made, and am presently looking at this as my #1 PTQ deck of choice. You don’t have to twist my arm very hard at all to convince me to play the best Blue control deck of the format, especially when the best version of the best deck is still under debate and you can escape from Mirror Match Hell by facing competing archetypes against each other. I have in the past shown trepidation at playing ‘the best deck,’ but with almost a year’s experience now shuffling up Faeries in Constructed formats, I do not feel I am at the lower end of the Bell curve when it comes to skill in the mirror match, and merely must adjust the deck design accordingly to provide me with the proper tools. It’s almost strange to tell myself “shut up and play Faeries already,” instead of chasing my other flights of fancy, but for once I won’t stubbornly argue at choosing a good archetype for the season instead of building something off the radar that may or may not do well.
I’ve spent the last week cramming in a lot of games with this deck, and thus first of all I’d like to address my “design notes” from last week, to provide an update to the deck before I start discussing the major matchups and the feel of the deck.
“1. Some number of Chrome Moxes might be appropriate. I would like to earmark two to three basic Islands as potential Chrome Moxes, and see whether I feel I am happier with them as perfectly mundane basic Lands, or if I would gain a real and noticeable benefit from having had access to that acceleration anywhere over the course of the game. While it is not necessarily very potent game 1, it should be worth noting that Chrome Moxes would be even better for sideboarded games, where it would allow for first-turn Bitterblossoms.”
I state very simply that, after a full week of playing, I am content to have zero Chrome Moxes in the deck. With the aid of a few local players, I’ve tested the most dangerously fast matchups (Zoo and Elves) and found zero desire to add Chrome Mox to those matchups as the deck keeps up on an even keel with them and doesn’t need a speed boost at the expense of a card in hand. The addition of Chrome Mox would thus if anything just make the mana less stable, as now some of your lands require the additional investment of a card in hand, and give no noticeable benefit while we’re at it, just added weakness and vulnerability to stuff like Smash to Smithereens that otherwise frankly doesn’t matter.
“2. Four fetchlands might not be the correct number. While I doubt that I truly want fewer, it is possible that I would gain a benefit for playing more, based on the positive interaction between Ponder and fetchlands. While it’s not as large of an interaction as Brainstorm plus Shuffle was, it’s still a positive interaction to be able to take the best one of the top three cards, then shuffle. There is no obvious utility for these all being Polluted Deltas – there is no basic Swamp to fetch, so Flooded Strands are effectively identical. Potential vulnerabilities to a Pithing Needle on Polluted Delta is a small but nonzero argument for splitting them to 2 each of Delta and Strand, and even argues that since the U/B deck would be “expected” to be Polluted Deltas, that the 5th Fetchland if we play any should be the 3rd Flooded Strand if we do in fact split the fetchlands down the middle. The fifth Fetchland would also give us a twelfth Black source, but at the price of the seventh basic land and thus at least some vulnerability to Blood Moon effects.”
I would like a fifth Fetchland, but find that this is about the upper limit on actually gaining a benefit from adding fetchlands. I would in fact like a twelfth Black source, so a basic Island turning into another fetchland would suit my purposes… and I have found I have actually been using the Ponder-draw-shuffle trick a reasonable amount of the time, while I never go and get an untapped Watery Grave with this and thus can barter away a single life point towards this purpose. I have also actually seen a few Pithing Needles going around recently, and thus am content to diversify the fetchlands as 3 Flooded Strand and 2 Polluted Delta. The worry of vulnerability to Blood Moon is not a concern I find very worrying. While it is growing in numbers as other decks adopt it, it is not doing so in a multitude of decks that can all play it on turn 1, so I’m still reasonably confident I will be able to have a basic Island or two in play under Blood Moon, even if I draw none in my opening hand. I’m content to trade this smidgen of added vulnerability to Blood Moon in order to gain an overall increase in deck synergy and color consistency when I want it.
“3. Notes 1 and 2 do not get along well with each other. Cutting basic lands for Moxes, and then cutting basic lands for more Fetchlands, leaves us with entirely too few lands to actually find with fetchlands. We probably don’t want to do both of these things, as they are obviously at tension with each other, and in fact adding Moxes to our manabase makes us want to start cutting fetchlands down to fewer than four, not adding a fifth copy.”
We have resolved that Chrome Mox is undesirable, resolving this tension.
“4. The mana count may actually be too high now that we have 25 lands and four Ponders. This should be tracked to confirm or deny over time, and corrected if we do in fact have too much land and should be playing 24. Part of the justification is that we have a lot of spell-like lands, so we don’t mind, but it does need to be watched for… while the deck is mana-intensive and can do impressive stuff with mana as time goes on, we don’t want too many action-light hands.”
The land count is in fact not too high, just higher than it is in Faerie decks with 25 lands and no Ponders. It plays like a solid 26 lander, and with conscious choice can feel as high as a 27-land deck, which is key in that the Blue on Blue matchup largely just wants to keep playing out lands for a good long while.
“5. The loss of the fourth Glen Elendra Archmage should be paid attention to, and if it is truly missed, more room may need to be found at the expense of another card. We want the deck to still feel like the successful decks that Kenji et al. piloted at Worlds to good result.”
The deck does, in fact, still feel like that successful deck, with the key difference being it draws its good cards more consistently and never draws Stifle, since Stifle is no longer present in the main-deck. The fourth Archmage, while excellent, is not actually missed, likely because the number of Archmages in the deck is only 3, but is inflated by the addition of early-game card selection and thus I am still seeing plenty of Archmages, frequently drawing two over games that go long, and having a reasonably higher chance of getting an Archmage and a Riptide Laboratory due to the Ponder/Shuffle options and interactions that are added to the deck… we see more cards and have better card selection than before, so while we have (say) 3.5 Archmages instead of the 4 present before, we also have 2.5 Riptide Labs instead of the 2 present before.
In fact, the key difference between this design and that played at Worlds is its heavy commitment to playing Engineered Explosives, which I have found improves the deck’s consistency in the early game against creature-rush decks and can even lead to an ironclad late-game against decks like Zoo and Elves as we have not just Archmage / Spellstutter recursion but also the ability to recur Engineered Explosives with Academy Ruins.
“6. The impact of losing Stifle from the main-deck needs to be considered. While I have maintained access to it out of the sideboard, I have not done a truly thorough cost-benefit analysis to placing it in the main-deck versus taking it out. The same decks that Stifle is good against, Vendilion Clique is good against, and access to Ponder to draw slightly more Cliques over time might not place us at a significant disadvantage even in the matchups where we would like to have Stifle the most.”
I am quite content to move Stifle to sideboard duty only; I felt it underperformed against a wide variety of decks it wasn’t specifically pointed at, and have felt much more confident in my matchups in general with Stifle absent. While I have run into decks Stifle would be good against in the main-deck in my journeys, you still play a larger percentage of your games with access to your sideboard, and I am content to make the trade-off both in sideboard space and loss of main-deck access, as my overall win percentage feels like it has gone up due to replacing Stifle with Ponder in the main-deck.
“7. The overall benefit of gaining Ponder to the main-deck needs to be considered. Its effect will likely be subtle and only visible over time, but the games in which Ponder is drawn it should have a positive effect on the rest of the game because of its card-selection prowess. How often we’re Pondering and how well it fits in with the rest of the deck’s design requires noting; most people hate it in Standard, but this Extended format more nearly maps up to Standard as of Regionals 2008 where Ponder was secretly amazing in the deck and most people were unaware of it than it does to the current Standard format where Ponder actively interferes with the deck’s curve. ‘Whether this was worth doing at all in the first place’ is an excellent question to ask, but I’m sure that as long as the deck doesn’t trip on its Ponders like it would in Standard, it will have clear benefits.”
I do not feel, even after a hundred games, as if I can specifically point to Ponder and say it definitely has had a hand in contributing to my win percentage. I can clearly point to several key games where Ponder fixed my hand and gave excellent selection, and can definitely say that Ponder has helped my deck to be the most like itself as it can be, adding consistency and draw selection in a subtle fashion that helps to get more of “the good draw” and less of “the bad draw” overall. The effects of Ponder are subtle but meaningful; I’m content to have it, and glad I made the space for it, but can’t point to wide swings in matchup percentages like I could circa Regionals 2008… there is no wild increase of 10% or more to the mirror match, because frankly I’ve had a hard time convincing anyone to sit with me and test the same-deck 56-card mirror to really mark that trend. I have however found that it enables the deck to be more consistent and draw better, and thus is less vulnerable to the effects of variance.
All of these points, then, combine to leave me resolute in my belief that Ponder is in fact quite good in this deck, as I’d noted I was able to just overall draw a little bit better with Ponder than I would have otherwise, giving me more of an advantage in matchups I played a significant number of times, like Elves, where I feel I dropped fewer games due to the fact that my own deck was now more consistent but can only really gauge it because I have played 20 or more games pre-sideboarded. One thing I have found key is that I do in fact want another fetchland in my deck, to bring it up to five, and would like to have access to a third color of mana, to bring Engineered Explosives up to X=3 for cards like Vedalken Shackles. After a hundred plus games with the deck, I’m content to put forward the following list:
5 Island
4 Mutavault
4 Secluded Glen
3 Flooded Strand
2 Polluted Delta
2 River of Tears
2 Riptide Laboratory
1 Academy Ruins
1 Steam Vents
1 Watery Grave
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Ponder
4 Mana Leak
4 Spell Snare
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Vendilion Clique
3 Glen Elendra Archmage
3 Sower of Temptation
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
Sideboard:
4 Bitterblossom
4 Threads of Disloyalty
3 Stifle
3 Negate
1 Engineered Explosives
The biggest point of contention remaining, then, is which of Hallowed Fountain/Steam Vents/Breeding Pool I should be playing to get access to the third color, and ultimately I have decided that both Hallowed Fountain and Steam Vents have benefits. Hallowed Fountain, if shown to an Affinity player, might cause them to sideboard against Kataki, or a Burn player to sideboard against Circle of Protection: Red. Steam Vents, if fetched in the early-game by a deck with fetchlands and Ponders, might cause my opponent to mistakenly believe I am playing the Swans combo deck during game 1, if I don’t play River of Tears/Secluded Glen/Riptide Laboratory too early. The potential for an early-game mis-read by my opponent regardless of their deck seems significantly more valuable than threatening a few matchups into maybe mis-sideboarding.
Now, how the deck plays… that is, after all, the key question.
Playing against Elves, well, it’s already a good matchup, made even better by the fact that you’re more likely to have Engineered Explosives and a turn 2 counter, and while I wouldn’t call the testing rigorous, I was winning a sizable percentage of them. Elves basically needed to have the nuts on turn 2 on the play if they wanted to win, and every game they didn’t was basically a game where I would overpower them somehow and make their lives miserable. Considering my last deckbuilding effort considered this a problem matchup, this is happy news.
Playing against Mono-Red Burn, well, others have gone and explained how poorly that matchup favors the mono-Red deck… the lack of repeating threats makes it a simple game of which burn spells you allow to resolve and which you counter, and so long as you don’t give your opponent forever you’ll find it’s an easy match to win. Of course, just when you think things are too easy, people go and write articles about how you should stop making it so easy on me, and next thing you know people are testing this harder matchup in the queues. Thankfully this new design meets somewhere between Zoo and Burn, neither of which are problematic, and this design in particular is well-suited to blunting early creature assaults.
Zoo is a very reasonable matchup, and one that this deck is well-positioned to blunt the attack of. One of the advantages of the Faeries deck in general is that it has a reasonably favorable matchup against Zoo-style decks, especially when your version packs significant quantities of Engineered Explosives. While it’s by no means a cakewalk like SparkElemental.dec, Faeries is generally favored in the matchup, and the onus is on the Zoo deck, not the Faerie deck, to have something interesting and special technology-wise to gain an advantage. Affinity likewise suffers for being an aggressive deck facing down against a control deck that is prepared for it, which is why in my testing so far (about 4 matches) I’ve not yet broken a sweat against Affinity, and only lost a very few games. Thus the humor of suggesting I should pick an off-colored Ravnica dual based on tricking them into mis-sideboarding, when this is already a reasonably solid matchup.
All-In Red is a tricky matchup that reverts to us wishing that there were Stifles in the deck, as you would be surprised how often their plan can fail if you Stifle a Chrome Mox activation. Like many other decks, you are within the host of decks that don’t want to play against All-In Red on a regular basis, but facing it in small numbers is not problematic because their own inherent inconsistency can give you the match a startling amount of the time. Similarly, playing against Storm combo made me wish I had Stifles main, but at least there they weren’t playing ridiculous things on the first turn… even without Stifle, you can deal with crazy Storm-fueled turns, so long as it’s ‘after the Vendilion Clique turn’. Neither seem prevalent, and those really are the only matchups I’m liking the Stifles in, and they are only so-so against All-In Red in the first place… just a bit better than the garbage you had otherwise.
Like Storm Combo in general nature, but unlike it as far as this matchup is concerned, Swans Combo is a dog to this particular control deck just like it is against most versions of Faeries/Wizards/Some Level Blue. Stifle comes in for dodging Gigadrowse and because it’s better than Explosives, but even with Gigadrowse in their deck they are vulnerable to being Cliqued out of the game. None of the changes to the deck’s configuration should alter this matchup, as everything you really want to Stifle comes out of their sideboard.
And then there was the ‘mirror.’ I’ve found Ponder to be awesome in the mirror for making sure I hit more and better land-drops, especially as I add more fetchlands to the mix to give me better selectivity of whether or not I actually have to keep the second and third cards from Ponder. The mirror is actually two completely different matchups, the true mirror (us versus another Japanese Faeries deck) and the semi-mirror (us versus American Faeries decks). The mirror is as the mirror does, and the only point of interest we can claim is that we have fewer Stifles (which aren’t bad but aren’t stellar either, as you use them as Stone Rains or to try and counter Spellstutter and Archmage activations) but have Ponder instead, which generally sets us up just that little bit better over the course of the game and therefore presumably is helpful overall even if it is stealthy at making its impact known to the game as we play head-to-head.
But playing the semi-mirror, American Faeries versus Japanese Faeries, the simple truth is that the difference in draw engines makes a huge impact, as does the difference in the cards that are run. Utility lands are again key, so the addition of Ponder is somewhat crucial, but on top of that… they throw away cards to Chrome Mox just to be able to work, and our draw engine fires off when we’re fully untapped while theirs fires off when they’ve tapped three mana, making ours more likely to resolve. Vedalken Shackles is a key aspect of the matchup, and frankly is the entire reason I want to be able to set off an Explosives on 3 rather than the previous limit of two, but while it is key it is also something that can be offset short-term with Riptide Laboratory… most of the game-states I’ve run into in this matchup, at least where a resolved Shackles was involved, included repeated Riptide Lab use to negate a Shackles and nothing really being problematic due to Shackles until a second one resolved.
Ultimately the difference in that matchup comes from the standard Japanese-on-American Faeries matchup advantage; the deck that has Bitterblossom after sideboarding wins the Bitterblossom fight, seeing how the other guy brought a knife to a gunfight. No matter how you play knifey-spooney, you get shot, and I can’t claim it was the Ponders that made the matchup better.
So after a hundred games, I’m happy they are there and really like the build… but can I prove that they did something to my win percentage? No, unfortunately I can’t, because their effect is subtle and requires a lot of games tested… and then just as many again, without Ponder, to really know.
To take the experiment for a slightly different twist, I took an unusual approach. With the recent closure of Neutral Ground in New York City, I find myself with no local store I’ve a lot of experience with for playing Magic anymore, and in my explorations I found a store on Long Island, Comic Book Depot in Wantagh, NY. They happened to have Standard for Friday Night Magic, and I happened to want to go play an unusual Faeries list in Standard in a tournament setting to see how strongly I felt about a certain change… the addition of four Ponders, where generally it is considered ‘correct’ to play zero.
This list, to affront your eyes and your senses, destined to be loathed by GerryT:
4 Scion of Oona
4 Spellstutter Sprite
3 Mistbind Clique
3 Sower of Temptation
1 Oona, Queen of the Fae
4 Bitterblossom
4 Agony Warp
4 Cryptic Command
4 Ponder
4 Broken Ambitions
1 Oona’s Grace
4 Underground River
4 Sunken Ruins
4 Secluded Glen
4 Mutavault
6 Island
2 Swamp
Sideboard:
1 Jace Beleren
1 Sower of Temptation
2 Terror
3 Peppersmoke
4 Infest
4 Thoughtseize
Standard isn’t a format of relevance, and let’s be frank, this wasn’t necessarily the idealized Faeries list I’d be running either: I just don’t own more than the one Jace, and some of the one-ofs in the main-deck were so I could analyze the impact of Ponder on the frequency of drawing low-number cards, so one Grace, one Oona, and one Jace in the sideboard. With five rounds of Swiss and one round of Top 8, I got to play six matches with the deck and see if an otherwise-good deck exploded under the weight of SUCK that is Four Ponder Faeries. I cut my trademarked sketchy Faerie Conclaves and moved Thoughtseize to the sideboard in full because I wanted Ponder to be my only one-drop, so I could see accurately how often I was playing it on the first turn, not adding it as part of a complex group of other, possibly better, turn 1 plays.
And you know what? People will tell me this list sucks because it has four Ponders, but it played out just like a regular Faerie deck. I didn’t trip up my mana curve or find myself doing anything I didn’t want to be doing, and much like I’d learned before, I didn’t find myself somehow having a significantly larger number of turn 2 Bitterblossoms than I normally do. The last time I tried examining this effect in a shell like this, six months or so ago, I determined I only got a turn 2 Bitterblossom I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise about one game in twenty, and even that sounds like probably too much.
Much like before, I noted that the deck topdecked a little better in the mid- to late-game, and much like above this was a hard effect to quantify as it could be due to any of a number of different things. But the point was: I tried four Ponders in Faeries in Standard, and I didn’t hate it, nor did I suddenly stop winning matches because I had Ponder in the deck. Its effect is smaller and smaller the further you get from Vintage, where it piles on with broken cards and high power to make its effect drastically noticeable to the point where it is restricted. Its effect in Standard is thus almost vanishingly small… but even if it wasn’t amazing, it didn’t suck either. For the purpose of porting this lesson over to Extended, it showed me that I’m not going to be able to accurately quantify how effective Ponder is in the deck because the effect is subtle… but if it feels right, I should trust that intuition.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com