Regionals is always an interesting challenge, as the role of the savvy player or designer is to accurately estimate the upcoming metagame and position themselves either to dodge the brunt of the incoming attack or to pick at the weak flank that is left revealed with a surprise assault. This is the distilled essence of everything fellow Friday writer Mike Flores believes in, when it comes to picking a deck for a tournament, saving you several thousand words to bring the essential lesson: know your enemy, so that you may better defeat them.
Picking your own trusty weapon of choice is a personal process, especially now that we live in the era of Tier 2 decks. Nothing is so eminently unbeatable that you have no chance, as even the most powerful and least fair decks have gaping chinks in their armor you can attack: Dredge needs its enablers, Dragonstorm needs cards in order to up the storm count, and so on and so forth. While the purpose of this article is not to “sell” you on any one specific deck, it is intended to showcase just what’s out there, including the advancements I myself have been working on. This time last year I was talking about a Blue/White control deck of an unusual build, taking the then-sideboarded Descendants of Kiyomaro and putting them main-deck to excellent effect. The deck I will likely be playing is included in the list of decks I am going to show you, but I’m taking my personal preference (or some might say “bias”) out of the picture when it comes to arguing in favor of my trusty weapon. I’m trying to sell ideas, not a deck, and shaping out the metagame and what is going to be the main drivers pushing the shape of the metagame this weekend.
Well-informed mages the world over have been watching Regionals blipping across the globe, from results in Australia to the latest German technology or what the Britons are putting in their Red decks… always a crucial thing to know, even when the Red deck has not been bequeathed with the Blessing of the Paskins. One after another, metagames form, evolve, and disappear, each in their own little corner and each weekend affecting the next. We begin on May 26th on our jaunt across the globe, picking up trends and noting habits as we go… last week’s Magical Hack did exactly that, identifying the big winners in the “visible” tournaments seen so far. It was hoped that by the time this article goes live, Mike Flores‘ Swimming With Sharks or Frank Karsten’s Online Tech will have presented for us a tally of last weekend’s Regionals breakdown, to further set the stage upon which this shall all develop in our own neck of the woods tomorrow… but it seems while Mike was able to present Regionals deck technology and Frank had some playtesting results for us, neither had a firm metagame-by-numbers look at what’s going on “out there.” We have hit the home stretch before Regionals tomorrow and are all kind of wondering what everyone else has on their mind.
What we have noticed so far is a metagame driven initially by combo decks, where the “fair” decks have to learn to exploit weaknesses and choose the right avenue of attack to beat back the powerful things loosed by way of the Storm and Dredge mechanics in the largest Standard card-pool we’ve ever seen. The “fair” have positioned themselves accurately to dog-pile on the offenders, annihilating the main plan of the Dredge decks and applying sheer weight of numbers to take down Dragonstorm: you may beat me, but can you beat us five times? If Dragonstorm is favored against Gruul in a 60-40 matchup, we’re looking at a 3-2 record, which last I checked led to drafting, not trips to Baltimore. To battle the potentially explosive game-winning turns these decks can have, Red decks tick like clockwork, doing the same thing over and over again to the tune of a turn 5 kill, saying to the opponent “you’d better have it, or you’re dead.”
We begin our trip through the metagame by looking at Dragonstorm, to see what it can do and choose our weapons wisely… after all, I would find myself hard-pressed to disagree with anyone who felt that Dragonstorm would be an excellent choice for their metagame, especially if backed up by skill earned through playtesting and prior experience. Numbers have been dropping off recently for Dragonstorm, as decks learn to adapt towards it and blatant hate-decks aim at it among its list of offenders. This can be seen with the sudden spike in decks playing Martyr of Sands just as a random life-gaining one-drop in solution-based builds of Orzhov as suggested by Richard “The Beard” Feldman. Dragonstorm has to adapt to fit the metagame, but that’s okay… it has the technology, and a reasonable boatload of power as well.
Here There Be Dragons
Creatures (6)
Lands (22)
Spells (32)
- 4 Sleight of Hand
- 4 Seething Song
- 4 Dragonstorm
- 4 Remand
- 4 Telling Time
- 4 Gigadrowse
- 4 Rite of Flame
- 4 Lotus Bloom
Sideboard
There is nothing surprising in this Dragonstorm list, at least as far as the main-deck is concerned… it’s effectively the “stock” build from Worlds, with no Planar Chaos or Future Sight cards added. Even the sideboard would have been available then, save for Detritivore, but is only correctly pointed now: ready to take on Gruul and wipe Dredge decks off the map if needed, and win a fight against any control deck by choosing “mana” as the avenue of attack. Against aggressive decks and the surprisingly vulnerable Dredge decks, Martyr of Ashes shines… he can Pyroclasm for three damage, the high-water mark for toughness in a Gruul deck, and both clears play and clears Bridges from Below with a minimal investment. For the control fight, the plan turns to mana advantage, with charge lands enabling the potential use of Gigadrowse to turn this mana into an entire turn left unmolested, while also taking advantage of its ability to tap out for Detritivore without fear of just disappearing. The opponent must still respect the fact that if they try a similar trick there may be a smoking crater next turn where their butt is planted this turn. At the same time it is also negating the main avenue of counter-attack (Teferi stopping Gigadrowse) by turning their key strength into a game-losing liability, as you would quickly see if the opponent cast Word of Seizing and you didn’t have a morphed Willbender handy.
Pact of Negation doesn’t fit the deck as well as had been originally perceived, although it is possible that Dragonstorm could afford to run a few copies of Tolaria West and a singleton Pact to search for when the time is right, and also get a slight bit of complexity by adding Urza’s Factory as an alternate plan if you need to deal more than 20 damage against a particularly hateful deck. The second Hunted Dragon has been cut to minimal loss from versions I have seen, making room for the spell, and it is a small matter to turn 2 Islands into the nonbasic Island-with-benefits version. One could even argue that just one Tormod’s Crypt suddenly becomes worth finding room for in the sideboard, if you could trade a single slot, and this advancement has low cost (two lands coming into play tapped) that can generally be planned around as you look ahead to the intended combo turn.
Facing off against Dragonstorm, however, is an incoming avalanche of aggressive Red decks, looking to push Dragonstorm away from its mantle as a “safe choice” by presenting a minimally-favorable matchup over and over again. It accepts a slight disadvantage against Dragonstorm under the logic that many Dragonstorm players will realize you don’t always beat the Red deck. Advancing technologies keep making Red decks faster and faster, requiring Dragonstorm to have “it” on time, and a single Bogardan Hellkite might not cut “it” and stem the bleeding as Gruul’s creatures keep getting bigger… and more consistent.
Packing Heat
This deck is very painful for Dragonstorm to navigate past, and utterly destroys Dredge builds with frightening regularity, leaving them with literally no good plan when it comes to finding a way to stay alive and make any forward progress against you. It’s templated off a Red Deck Wins strategy I discussed initially a month ago, using a few peculiar card choices to keep to the mana curve that worked and keep everything at or near the “critical mass” of what I liked about the Red deck… but with more three-power two-drops, and the same low and tight mana curve but with access to Kird Ape as a one-drop as well.
Gruul has its obvious benefits, but most of the lists seen so far have been championing three-drops and Llanowar Elves, which is frankly the wrong strategy for a Red deck… do you honestly think Dan Paskins would consent to pollute his Red deck with a namby-pamby Elf that tapped for mana? I frankly doubt it. Call of the Herd is fine, but it’s a three-drop who only gains a benefit if you use it again on four, which is for the most part too slow against Dragonstorm… and its detractors will note that Remand and Repeal are frankly quite common from the “control” half of the metagame, which is why you will not find three-mana 3/3s anywhere near this list. 3/3s cost two, and are sometimes bigger than that. Atop the curve as the lone more-than-two you’ll again see Gathan Raiders, which hugs the curve as a three-mana 5/5 and helps to put missing card-types such as “land” into the graveyard for Tarmogoyf.
Continuing down our romp of deck after deck, we can merrily switch from our peculiar Gruul list to the deck it is aimed to defeat, the infamous Dredge deck. Two weeks ago we borrowed the expertise of one Keith St. Jean, who showed off the “turbo” Dredge version; this past Wednesday we saw Frank Karsten going 16-4 in testing with what was essentially Keith’s list with four lands in the place of the Simian Spirit Guides. I have been working on something else entirely, starting with the concept that you can cut out Spirit Guides without affecting the speedy potential of the deck by replacing two-drop discard outlets such as Thought Courier with one-drops like Greenseeker and Llanowar Mentor, and skip out on really thinking about Black mana in its entirety save for the technical ability to cast Stinkweed Imp. Weeks of testing shows the deck is equally explosive as the “Turbo” version’s average draws, without the drastic instability or card disadvantage that comes with excessive mulligans and reliance on Simian Spirit Guide and Gemstone Caverns. Dredging with Green one-drops is slower, but can get started faster, and provides key resources along the way… neither is drastically better, each are just different.
I Never Need To Draw Another Card
Creatures (31)
- 2 Flame-Kin Zealot
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 4 Drowned Rusalka
- 1 Bogardan Hellkite
- 4 Greenseeker
- 4 Magus of the Bazaar
- 4 Llanowar Mentor
- 4 Narcomoeba
Lands (18)
Spells (11)
Sideboard
This list is highly peculiar, but the natural extension of where the deck that qualified at Japanese Regionals is going… check out this week’s Swimming With Sharks for a better look at that particular snapshot. Two weeks ago, we saw U/B “Turbo” builds similar to Keith St. Jean Simian Spirit Guide-boosted version doing well in British tournaments and a G/B “Fair” beating the plentiful hate in Germany (while dozens of his friends seemingly did not beat the hate). One week ago, these two are swapping saliva and we’re seeing Greenseekers, Llanowar Mentors, and Magii of the Bazaar all shaking hands and hanging out together, melding the two archetypes… in a Black/Green frame, with the same Delirium Skeins that typify the Black/Green design.
Once you get past the hang-up of ever wanting to tap a Swamp to cast a spell, it’s pretty obvious where you’ll end up… but not why you’d want to go there in the first place. Black frankly isn’t needed for anything, despite the heavy Black casting-costs of numerous cards. Stinkweed Imp costs only a single Black in there, but Dread Return asks for two Black and Bridge from Below costs three, in the grand old tradition of truly ridiculous Black enchantments that can win the game by themselves practically. Of these Black cards, however, only the Imp is ever really expected to be cast, and really he’s just there to bend over and abuse the Dredge mechanic, so it’s an “incidental” Black card. The Bridge offers less than zero benefit for actually casting it, with its in-play rules text being “plays on table”, and Dread Return is actually more profitable for this deck to cast for free with its “expensive” flashback cost than it would be to spend four mana on the “fair” way.
So if you get past the Swamp issue, you can just admit you’re a Blue-Green deck and have good mana, dropping Overgrown Tombs and Watery Graves for the more intuitively obvious Yavimaya Coast. You can also skip out on ever wanting (or needing) Simian Spirit Guide to play a turn 1 enabler, as they now cost G instead of 1U and thus fast-cast themselves. The feel of the deck is entirely different… after all, Greenseeker and Llanowar Mentor don’t draw cards, so you are limited to the draw phase when it comes to dredging with them… but different isn’t necessarily worse. Llanowar Mentor after all provides a different benefit that can help speed up the game, and Greenseeker provides lands, which anyone can tell you is a key resource that is all too often lacking in sufficient quantity from decks of this sort. Its best draw spends fewer cards to play out quickly, because using Seal of Fire on Llanowar Mentor is a one-for-one, not a two-for-one, and requires fewer other cards to deploy: Mentor + Land is a simpler combo than Thought Courier + Land + Simian Spirit Guide. Adding this consistency means the deck is reasonably fast but spends less to get this speed, card-wise and mulligan-wise… but it’s still middle-of-the-road, and I see no great reason to be convinced. Even if the deck plays out reasonably the same, you’re giving up huge chunks of options by giving up on Black cards. You need something back… and that’s where the sideboard comes in.
A lot of Dredge decks are relying on cards like Krosan Grip to answer Leylines and Tormod’s Crypts, which spend one-for-one to remove the offender and can do nothing at all about multiple Crypts or a Crypt and a Leyline. Add your Blue and Green together and you gain access to a card that can theoretically answer any number of Crypts and Leylines, though realistically it can’t answer more than nine copies of such cards before your opponent runs out of life-points to fuel your Disenchanting ways… Trygon Predator is the answer-to-the-answer if decks are going to just pull out answers to threats in play (because your deck is full of 1/1s… let’s be honest) to put in graveyard hate cards.
Continue this plan further and you’ll note that Gruul isn’t necessarily a problem because they Crypt you over and over again, but instead is a serious threat because they can use cheap burn spells on your discard outlets to shut off your ability to dredge effectively. Swap in not Bonded Fetch as some have been considering (“It always works at least once!”) but Vexing Sphinx, and you have a 4/4 flier that puts it all in one package… discard one Dredge card during the first upkeep to Dredge your draw away; discard two Dredge cards during your second upkeep and dredge your draw away, leaving one in the graveyard. But wait, there’s more! Upkeep #3 says “draw three cards”, allowing you to dredge mightily indeed, putting up to 18 cards off the top of your deck into your graveyard as it expires, with a draw phase left of dirty work as needed before you enter the main phase and can use Sorcery-speed cards like Dread Return.
Did I mention it attacks for four, allowing it to be a contributing part of a transformative sideboard plan that asks your opponent how prepared they are to keep you honest, while also asking how prepared they are to face the beats?
Green also contributes to that plan, with undercosted man Tarmogoyf acting as an effective backup plan. Even if your opponent has you trapped under Leyline of the Void, at some point or another they are going to play cards… and those cards may very well end up in their graveyard, still fueling your Tarmogoyf. Same with Tormod’s Crypt, except this time their sacrificing the Crypt puts an artifact in the graveyard as well… so even if they are hating your graveyard, the ‘Goyf probably still works just fine, even if he’s not as big as he could be if you were fueling him yourself. Contributing also to the overarching plan is Ghost Quarter out of the sideboard: put a land in the graveyard for Tarmogoyf, put more lands in your deck so you can survive the “burn your enablers” plan, maybe just go buck-wild crazy with Life from the Loam if your opponent doesn’t do an effective job of containing your graveyard. And card fifteen in the sideboard is Blazing Archon, who wins the creature fights and contains any number of threats from Gruul or the mirror until they manage to burn his somewhat inflammable derriere.
Let us present the partial-transformation sideboard maneuver, and we’ll see:
OUT:
4 Bridge from Below
4 Magus of the Bazaar
2 Flame-Kin Zealot
1 Dread Return
IN:
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Vexing Sphinx
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Blazing Archon
… This would be a fairly standard maneuver against Gruul, giving up the fight that doesn’t work (speed-Dredging into zombies and Flame-Kin Zealot) and picking a hybrid strategy. They can’t ignore your Dredge enablers because they still have to respect your ability to use the Dredge mechanic to gain mana through Life from the Loam and power out large Grave-Trolls, and worse yet they have to keep you honest because your reanimation package doesn’t lead to hasty bouts of immediate death but still brings out large fliers that destroy their ability to attack, namely Hellkite and Blazing Archon. While they have to worry about and respect this standard plan, you’re bulking up the plan with Vexing Sphinx, who also blocks 3/3s quite nicely and attacks for four in the air, whichever is the more critical part of the plan right now… and adding a new dimension, that being “undercosted fattie” a.k.a. Tarmogoyf. This last plan has gotten a wee slight bit weaker now that they are catching on to the ‘Goyf and running him themselves, but you have Stinkweed Imp to block while they have to resort to burn spells, and them not attacking and just giving you more time is fine too.
Dredge already has a workable “Plan B” against this sort of thing… now it has an integrated sideboard that partially transforms to face the strategies that can actually beat it. This transformative plan works fine without even worrying about their graveyard hate, as it addresses the Things That Matter from the matchup while basically not caring whether they draw Tormod’s Crypt or what-not.
But as to the main question, “but how does it run”…? A lot of people, Dredge enthusiasts included, look at these enablers and ask the first question, “But doesn’t casting a one-drop Green enabler stop you from casting Magus of the Bazaar turn 2?”. Yes, yes it does… but not if they kill it. Any Dredge player can tell you now that the thing they worry about most is not graveyard hate but a deck that is actually designed to keep up with their early drops, so while conventionally playing a one-drop that requires mana to activate during the upkeep would stop you from playing Magus turn 2, I haven’t found that to be a problem… half the time the one-drop gets smoked immediately, freeing up your mana for the turn 2 Magus, and the other half of the time you get to Dredge normally with your first-turn enabler, which means boo-hoo you can’t cast Magus until turn 3 and win in ridiculous fashion until turn 4, woe is me. However, no matter how good Magus of the Bazaar is in other Dredge decks like the “Turbo” Dredge version, and thus is worthy of inclusion here as a four-of, he’s still not the most powerful Blue dredge enabler in this deck. Let’s play a goldfish game walk-through here and you’ll see.
Opening Hand: Yavimaya Coast, Breeding Pool, Drowned Rusalka, Llanowar Mentor, Golgari Grave-Troll, two unknown (and presume irrelevant) cards. Let’s get a laugh and call them Magus of the Bazaar and Gemstone Mine.
Turn 1: Breeding Pool plus Llanowar Mentor, I’m at 18, go.
Turn 2: I’d play Magus of the Bazaar this turn, but you didn’t kill my Llanowar Mentor, so he’s not as good as just doing what I do best. Discard Golgari Grave-Troll during upkeep, Dredge 6 while getting an Elf. Yavimaya Coast plus Drowned Rusalka, I’m at 17, go.
Turn 3: You still didn’t kill my stuff? You must be new here. Make an Elf and dredge 6 before I draw, using the first Elf to pay for this ability. Play Gemstone Mine (… I guess it wasn’t that irrelevant after all), activate Drowned Rusalka sacrificing Elf token to Dredge 6. Sacrifice second Elf token to Dredge 6. Sacrifice Llanowar Mentor or Drowned Rusalka to Dredge 6.
On the second turn we skipped our draw and Dredged 6 cards; on the third turn we skipped our draw and Dredged 24 cards. Magus of the Bazaar sits in our hand as a cheerleader, while the work-horses went to town. In those 30 cards dredged, we’d need two Bridges, two Narcomoebas, and one each of Dread Return and Flame-Kin Zealot to win the game, and with only 23 cards remaining it’s fair to say more often than not that the opening of Mentor + Rusalka is far more abusive than anything a Magus of the Bazaar would have done there.
But the other benefit of the deck is its lessened reliance on the combo and its improved ability to fight the “backup plan” fight, as its “lesser” Dredge cards are exclusively Life from the Loam to help power up Golgari Grave Troll by actually getting to five mana. If you want to stop the combo and keep them honest by Extirpating Bridge from Below or sacrificing a Rusalka that’s well and good, but if the target is Bogardan Hellkite and not Flame-Kin Zealot the outcome might not be as in your favor as you thought it was. And if you want to hide behind a wall of Counterspells, well, Life from the Loam will eventually resolve no matter how many times you can counter it, and when it does it fetches up Svogthos, the Restless Tomb, Destroyer of Blue Mages Everywhere. Yes, the overall effect of the deck is a more consistent middle-of-the-road approach to the combo, never as blisteringly fast as it can be but always consistently fast with improved mulliganing ability because it throws away fewer cards randomly as part of its game-plan. But when everyone’s aiming at you as the top deck they’re terrified of, and everyone is fondling their Leylines and Crypts and calling them “my Preciooooooous,” having multiple avenues of attack and a cohesive plan for what happens in the games after is better than just bringing in some answers in the form of Krosan Grip and hoping you win one of the two games that follow by having the right answer to the right question. Sometimes you can just ignore the Tormod’s Crypts, and the decks that pack Leylines are vulnerable to Trygon Predator to begin with and have to face the fact that packing their Leylines is going to influence their mulligan decisions if they want them to do anything. The games where they will both start with Leyline in play and be able to deal with Trygon Predator before he gets a hit in are going to be somewhat rare.
But this isn’t The Dredge Article, Part Two, so let’s move on. Next up, we’ll note that the trends seem to be continuing and place Solar Flare in the “Rising Star” category. Last week we saw a bit of work on a Solar Pox list following through on the thought that it was the proper response to a world where control decks try to ride just one threat to victory, and aggressive decks try to deploy threats as early as possible but are very vulnerable to the back-breaking tempo-destroyer that is Smallpox. I’d only tested a limited number of games with the deck as it went to press last week, but since then I have tested a good deal more and am confident in the ability to present the following as a tuned Solar Pox version going into Regionals:
Diseases and Damnation
Creatures (9)
Lands (24)
Spells (27)
- 2 Persecute
- 4 Compulsive Research
- 4 Dimir Signet
- 4 Remand
- 2 Azorius Signet
- 1 Phyrexian Totem
- 4 Smallpox
- 4 Damnation
- 1 Pact of Negation
- 1 Slaughter Pact
Sideboard
This is last week’s adventures, with a better-tuned manabase and proper sideboard just for variety’s sake. I was testing it reasonably extensively and found it has a strong matchup against Gruul and Dredge just thanks to its powerful interactions, the always-interesting trap where holding back threats leaves you vulnerable to Persecute but playing them out means you overextend into Damnation. That, and Smallpox may just be absolutely stupid insane in this format, which likes to lead off with turn 1 creatures and generally isn’t playing enough land to cast spells if you take one or two of them out early. It’s also pretty good against control decks that try and play a single creature and win the game with it, like Korlash, and is carefully set up to beat Dralnu-style decks by winning the land war thanks to more copies of Tolaria West to find the actual win condition and an actual copy of Ghost Quarter to answer an opposing Ghost Quarter. Its tough matchups tend to be Detritivore-based (thus Sacred Ground) or involve Storm copies of Ignite Memories targeting you, which is fine sometimes (if you can keep lands in your hand) but terrible if you perhaps drew two copies of Angel of Despair and have not yet been able to deploy her.
If I can bring myself to play a control deck at Regionals, it’ll be this one; for obvious reasons, however, I have not fully decided between the combo, control, and beatdown stances for this format, and have all day today to pick up missing cards for my Top 3 decks: Gruul, U/G Dredge, and Solar Pox. It performed excellently at the Top8Magic Mock Tournament on Tuesday, finishing 3-1 after losing to that same Ignite Memories while holding Angels situation, not that it mattered since there were nine Storm copies and everything in my hand cost at least two. Along the way I won the Dragonstorm matchup twice on the strength of resolved Persecutes – occasionally set up first with Castigate to check for Remands or Ignorant Bliss – and mauled a Project X deck that as-advertised did not much like fighting a war of resource attrition where they got Smallpoxed multiple times a game, and in which I never lost a creature and always had Flagstones of Trokair to sacrifice. Solar Pox is admittedly my front-runner, especially after I learned that the Dredge matchup is actually quite solid game 1 even without a singleton copy of Tormod’s Crypt, playing against reasonably experienced players who just happened to get viciously mauled by Smallpox game after game. (Of course, Tormod’s Crypt is still useful, so it’s not like I’m going to take them out of my sideboard… and while they are there, I might as well board ‘em in against Dredge, I guess.) But just because it’s my front-runner and has performed excellently well doesn’t mean I have set up a final choice, and intend to get one last shot of playtesting in this afternoon to make my final decision.
… Or at least that’s what I’d like my opponents to believe if they recognize me from my articles. I’ll probably just play Solar Pox and see what happens. Unless nobody has Crypts or Leylines or Seals of Fire at all, in which case I may be tempted to walk off with the entire cookie jar under my arm and see y’all in a month for Nationals.
Next on the list of control decks is probably the best Detritivore deck in the format, in that its softest matchup of the big decks to note is the Dredge matchup, and even that has at least some hope of forestalling doom. Dragonstorm has you at a disadvantage, but not so much of one that you shouldn’t play out the cards; Dredge, however, just sort of does stuff and maybe kills you through a Remand and a Mana Leak turn 3 anyway.
Izzet Can Be Regionals Tiem Now?
Creatures (9)
Lands (24)
Spells (27)
- 3 Wildfire
- 4 Mana Leak
- 1 Tormod's Crypt
- 4 Compulsive Research
- 4 Remand
- 4 Izzet Signet
- 4 Repeal
- 2 Prismatic Lens
- 1 Spell Burst
Sideboard
To be honest, I put this deck at something of a disadvantage, as it’s really solid against control decks and quite reasonable against beatdown, but has a gaping hole in its overall plan for the control matchups that seems best filled by trying to nab their resources faster than they can recover from… playing a Pilferer and letting it hit a few times, all while pinching their lands with Annex and Detritivore and hoping somehow the plan comes together. At least Perilous Storm can be faced effectively, on the sole fact that they don’t play nearly enough lands and might just lose to Wildfire, but more importantly because they don’t have Gigadrowse and thus can have their Storm turn interrupted, and its most common result can be defeated with a lone Pyroclasm.
Of course, this is not your usual Tron list, so I can understand why there would be some surprise that this deck can take on Gruul and win a reasonable chunk of the time. Your usual Tron deck tries to counter or bounce things long enough to push through Sulfur Elemental a few times, then closes the deal with Demonfire or Bogardan Hellkite. Your usual Tron deck doesn’t even usually have four copies of Repeal, which are excellent in the Gruul matchup even if you’re not cheating and bouncing Call of the Herd tokens, because bouncing a creature in the early game is almost just as good as killing it would have been. Your usual Tron deck doesn’t have Wildfire, which allows you to turn the tides entirely from “You control a Kird Ape, Scab-Clan Mauler and Burning-Tree Shaman” to “You control zero permanents.” Yes, it’s a little counterproductive to have Wildfire as your key play after you’ve just gone to all that work putting the Tron together in the first place, but “doing the work” tends to be a self-supporting thing that involves drawing quite a few cards, at which point you can trade four of your lands for four of your opponent’s and come out miles ahead, even if you can’t keep the Tron active.
But really, the big difference is the Chronicler. Aeon Chronicler comes out fast and large here, and is a pain to attack through… especially when, as we’ve noted, Remands and Repeals are working to prevent there from being too many friends coming in from the other side of the table.
However, we are now reaching the nebulous and blurry horizons of the “control decks,” and those do not drive the metagame. The strong responses to Dragonstorm and Dredge seem to be pushing everything in the driver’s seat, and the fact that Gruul is a reasonably good choice against both those and the control-heavy decks like Dralnu du Louvre that were the prior response to Dragonstorm in the format. There is a broad spectrum of decks that you can talk about in here… from Flores’ Go-Slow (previously “Go-Sis”) and Chapin’s Korlash Control, to rumors of Angelfire not caring how badly they get smashed by Dragonstorm because the pilot thinks they can dodge it and play Gruul all day for the win. There are a few things worth noting, though… such as traditional Solar Flare’s use of Body Double to perform the Compulsive Research-into-Akroma maneuver, and Project X’s entire combo: people are prepared for graveyard-oriented strategies, so even if yours is only a minor element, it may just be left better off alone. Just because the main-deck Crypts and Leylines aren’t intended for beating you doesn’t mean they won’t wreck a few of your cards, like Body Double, or worse yet negate the entire combo trick your deck is built around and leave you with piles of dead cards in the form of awful 2/2s. The phrase usually thrown around for this concept is “splash damage,” and being vulnerable to splash damage on graveyard hate is a bad idea for tomorrow’s Regional Championships, as it seems the hate is out in force to bash the brains out of the Dredge decks. Don’t be the unintended but still quite acceptable victim, after all of your preparations have been done to bring you to this point… you may be a cute puppy, but you’re still going to get kicked.
And that’s most of what’s going on. There are variations to the tune, but there’s not so big a difference between Zoo and Gruul anyway; one takes more risks on its mana and the high cost of getting the right color right now, but gets to be slightly more explosive for doing so… the other can laugh at Watchwolf because it is playing a perfectly serviceable Keldon Marauders, and not needing to play a whole third color just to get a critical mass of three-power guys for two mana, while shrugging off the “But I gain life!” argument behind Lightning Helix because they didn’t pay four life for those untapped dual lands over there. Beatdown is more or less dominated by Red burn and the occasional Green man, but really it’s the Red cards that are important… while there are numerous serviceable combo decks, and a lot of controlling decks that people are hoping can weather the field of aggro and combo. If you have the luxury of already having a solid matchup against combo decks of a variety of stripes and aggressive beatdown, then your next focus should be on not losing to Detritivore as the key means to win the control-on-control fight.
If you’ve got all that covered, well… respond in the forums and tell me how it’s done, so we can laugh about it together in Baltimore next month.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com