As the year draws to a close, we have a lot to look back on if we want to… but the myopic lens of the tournament calendar has us looking ever forward to the next week, the next event, the next format. Focusing on the final PTQ of the Kuala Lumpur qualifier season has a rather small interest group at the moment, which sadly does not include myself as I have opted out of the drive to Delaware to PTQ on my birthday for one last chance. I had my chances and I blew some of them, tossing two of the three PTQs I attended away in the late rounds with critical mistakes, and that’s just how it’s going to be this season. Digging into the year-end budget when I don’t know quite where I’ll be working come January 1 ’08 makes attending that one last PTQ another way to get one year older and deeper in debt on the same day, when instead I could turn my focus to the format beginning one weekend from now and try Extended on for size.
I’ve been goofing around a lot lately, building and designing decks for the Extended format, largely because I have no other way to occupy my mind as I sit for eight hours a day with literally nothing to do at my “job,” which has told me I must put in eight hours a day until the end of the year and yet haven’t given me a single thing to do in three weeks. I could go insane, or I could occupy my mind elsewhere, and it’s possible that those two things might be somewhat related in their fundamental nature. In brainstorming last week we came up with a varied set of decks to look at, with a peculiar Counterbalance-Tron deck and an approach at “Dragon Stompy” for the Extended metagame. I didn’t like the Red deck, as its game-plan seemed to succeed or fail based on how well it drew the right balance of cards without any good way to control its draw, and efforts to improve the Red deck with cards like Sensei’s Divining Top ultimately proved awkward. Abandoning the Red deck, I felt we should look more closely into exploring the Counterbalance-in-Tron concept to see where it went, and that has taken me some interesting places indeed.
For reference, when last we looked at the deck, we had the following:
Creatures (5)
Lands (24)
Spells (31)
The one thing it is most obviously lacking is Ponder, as an early-game deck manipulation spell with late-game value still that could just smooth things over so well and be another good tool for finding the early Urzatron combo. Working to get enough Blue early and on time led to me wondering if you could manipulate things to get more Blue mana in, which would allow you to not only play Ponder but also to make four of those pseudo-Islands into Tolaria West. Ironically enough, working with things and cutting the Tron lands to three-ofs to fit in Tolaria West to support Ponder seemed to improve the ability to complete the Urzatron… it’s just that cutting cards to fit in Ponder was a tad nightmarish, suggesting that perhaps the deck should be re-conceptualized from the bottom up.
Looking at the “fast mana” options, it’s clear we have a few choices if we don’t focus on the Urzatron specifically by themselves. Cloudposts remain an intriguing option worthy of exploration, as two ‘Posts is not hard to get in a deck that starts with Vesuva / Cloudpost / Tolaria West, and the biggest problem literally comes down to the fact that, well, half your lands come into play tapped. Urborg / Cabal Coffers is another option to explore, and one that takes far fewer land slots than the Urzatron while also providing colored mana — and considering that we stepped away from White (and Wrath of God) as is traditional in Urzatron decks, having a look at Black (and Damnation) should prove interesting.
But in toying with the deck otherwise, I’d run into quite a few interesting things. I’d found that cutting a little to fit in a Mindslaver was an obvious decision once you start adding Tolaria West and thus could make excellent use of Academy Ruins, and you could even get a virtual second copy at minimal expense if you added a single Fabricate instead of some other artifact at the moment, which leads towards the path of wanting to add Vedalken Shackles to the deck as well. Further brainstorming and imaginative deck construction brought back the Mirrodin-era complement to Sensei’s Divining Top decks, if we’re playing one anyway, and some of those Oblivion Stones started wanting to be Culling Scales while I was at it… a powerful way to lock down creature decks and keep them held down while focusing on other things, at a very low cost. That Culling Scales also helped to harass an opponent’s Counterbalance lock, while also working well at enforcing yours, suggested that this should be looked at further.
While working with each of these potential avenues for construction, however, choosing the right path would likely come by getting the best manabase out of the deal, and very clearly it was the Urzatron versus Urborg-Coffers vying for “best option.” Putting each into place we saw the following:
3 Urza’s Tower
3 Urza’s Mine
3 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Tolaria West
3 Flooded Strand
2 Polluted Delta
3 Island
2 Steam Vents
1 Academy Ruins
versus:
4 Tolaria West
4 Watery Grave
4 Polluted Delta
3 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Cabal Coffers
2 Flooded Strand
2 Island
1 Academy Ruins
1 Swamp
Both are advantaged over the prior manabases, but comparatively it seems to me that borrowing the page from fellow StarCityGames.com columnist Zac Hill and his team’s workings for Valencia gives the better manabase. Six to eight slots is a good deal fewer than nine to twelve, in a manabase, and a two-card combo is a good deal easier to complete than a three-card combo given the same set of tutors and card-draw to work with. Either is customizable enough that we can add just one more land to the mix — Petrified Field — and have a potential Gifts Ungiven package in the deck if we want to go that route… but it fits better in the deck with fewer colorless lands, even if one of those other lands is a potential “do-nothing” Cabal Coffers that might be hard to ensure provides any mana at all sometimes. After all, you need three Swamps to even get Cabal Coffers to provide a single mana earned out of the land itself, in a deck we are shooting to have as a primarily Blue deck.
Choosing the manabase twists the rest of the choices accordingly, and it looks to me as if the Urborg-bearing deck is the favored choice, just with four Urborgs instead of the first-pass “three of each” plan as multiple Urborgs strand a land in hand. Multiple Coffers can just do nothing in the early game, not even tapping for mana, so we can “do the work” to find that particular land in order to turn on the mana-ramp engine. It also doesn’t hurt that Sundering Titan has obvious synergy with Urborg, improving your ability to decimate an opponent’s manabase by enforcing a land type on each of their lands… or that starting with Urborg gives us Damnation to work with instead of relying on Oblivion Stones for early creature control, which was spotty at best.
Going on to Gifts Ungiven doesn’t necessarily add a significant value to the deck, but it does warrant attention so we will be looking at it from both a “with Gifts” and “without Gifts” options. We can presumably cut to 23 lands if we add four Ponders, which was kind of the starting point of this exercise if you recall, so things will likely now get interesting as we deviate further from the above-proposed manabase:
4 Tolaria West
4 Polluted Delta
4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Cabal Coffers
2 Flooded Strand
2 Watery Grave
2 Island
1 Academy Ruins
1 Swamp
This occupies 27 slots, leaving us 33 “action” slots to now fill. Some of them are reasonably obvious, and start the core of the deck off right, while we try and see where the rest is going to go:
4 Ponder
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Remand
4 Condescend
3 Counterbalance
3 Thirst for Knowledge
That eats 22 of our 33 slots, which is why things start to get really tricky now. We’ve even shaved a Thirst for Knowledge we’d like back, just figuring that the raw power of Ponder will find us enough card draw when we want it, so really we only have 10 slots we want to fill and plenty of contenders to fill it with.
2 Sundering Titan
2 Aeon Chronicler
… Because you want to supplement the card-draw and suppression elements of the deck, thus choosing Chroniclers for card-draw and eventual win condition, and Sundering Titan to suppress the opponent and win in one fell swoop. Six slots left… seven if we accept the loss of that fourth Thirst.
Damnation, these slots go fast. Three, not four, because we already know there are plenty of times this won’t be needed, and we’d rather tune from the sideboard to get the fourth when we already get plenty of Damnations from peeking with Top, casting Ponder, and scrying with Condescend. Four slots left… and it’d be awfully nice if we could get some help with the Gaddock Teeg problem in there.
1 Mindslaver
1 Oblivion Stone
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Fabricate
Whether the first Fabricate is better than the fourth Thirst for Knowledge is a question that sorely needs to be answered, as we fill slot #60 in the deck. It seems pretty evident that we’d like to have a second virtual copy of “things we want,” when shuffling and searching for help, as that Fabricate customizes into whatever is needed at a reasonable speed. It may very well be awful — but I’d like to try it and see where it goes.
Previously I had branched out into a third color for mana to provide for Engineered Explosives, but so far I am learning that the three-mana spot is really not a big enough issue to require attention specifically for Explosives. It exists for the juicy two-slot, and even at that it does so primarily to get around opposing Counterbalances. I’d originally had it in the sideboard but it seems a waste not to be able to turn Tolaria West into at least one spell, even though I’d initially thought it “cute” to use that same slot for a Culling Scales like I want after sideboarding instead. I do expect a copy of Slaughter Pact will be in the sideboard, with Gaddock Teeg’s name on it, but doubt that is a thing that requires a precious main-deck slot. Starting in on the sideboard we see:
3 Culling Scales
2 Venser, Shaper Savant
1 Damnation
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Academy Ruins
1 Mindslaver
Ten slots make good sense to include, with aggro-locking Scales to be tested against the aggressive decks post-sideboarded with Ancient Grudge to see how things fare compared to the Threads of Disloyalty plan. After all, it’s a lovely idea, but how well does it work?
So far, everything makes good sense, but we haven’t used up all of our space… I’m half-tempted to toss in a Steam Vents and three Detritivores if I can’t come up with something I really like better, because those proved absolutely nightmarish to face down against Rock-style decks, and we still have room to work with as we continue conceptualizing. It’s time to turn this deck over to testing anyway, which unfortunately lies outside of the scope of today’s advancement of the technology — it’s come a long way, already, from its origins as a “well what if I try mono-Blue Tron with Counterbalance?”, which first drifted away from mono-Blue to the Izzet guild and now has drifted further over towards the Dimir as we go away from the Tron aspect, too.
Next up on the agenda is to have a look at another “So, what if I add Counterbalance…?” deck, this time having a fresh look at the flagging Scepter-Chant archetype to see if improvements can be made by giving it multiple avenues of approach for locking down the game. This one is a bit wackier… and it kind of has to be, seeing how Scepter-Chant is a significantly underpowered deck archetype in today’s modern Extended. The hope was that a little bit of manipulation might change that, making it more of a multi-faceted “Prison” style deck that can attack one’s ability to cast spells from multiple angles. Have a look and judge for yourself about how successful that approach was:
Creatures (5)
Lands (22)
Spells (33)
The basic idea is to have overlapping functionality between the different parts of the deck. Both Counterbalance — Top and Scepter — Chant can lock down the opponent’s board; one has the advantage of countering any (cheap) spell regardless of when its cast, while the other limits the opponent to instant-speed spells but also deprives the opponent of their attack phase. Counterbalance/Top can help protect Scepter/Chant, helping to solve part of the problem behind the deck’s post-sideboard vulnerability to Ancient Grudge, as does the slightly random but not useless Leonin Abunas… present as technical victory condition, overall protective element, and 2/5 Wall to block all but the beefiest of creatures.
The game of interlocking parts is an interesting one, after all… Sensei’s Divining Top can help find either Scepter plus Chant or Counterbalance, being an excellent overall tool for providing card selection, and is the kind of tool that should have been working its way into Scepter-Chant decks some time ago regardless of the printing of Counterbalance. Cunning Wish can provide the Chant half of the combo, or Muddle the Mixture to transmute for either Scepter or Counterbalance, or even Mystical Teachings into Teferi to lock down the instant-speed window that Scepter plus Chant leaves open to the opponent. Cunning Wish for Dismantling Blow provides a reasonable egress to Counterbalance, as either side costs three mana, one of the somewhat rarer costs to find in your average Counterbalance deck… while the deck can also afford a few comes-into-play-tapped lands, providing extra support on Engineered Explosives at minimal cost by means of Tolaria West and even Academy Ruins to set up recursion as needed.
With the Ancient Grudge problem addressed about as well as you can expect it to be… after all, you can set it up beforehand with either Teferi or Leonin Abunas to never expose Scepter plus Chant to Ancient Grudge or protect the combo with Counterbalance plus Sensei’s Divining Top… the next focus was on the overall sideboard plan. You clearly need about half the sideboard for Wish targets, from the generally-useful to the somewhat extreme corner-cases; you don’t need a Mystical Teachings but it’s useful, either to find Teferi or to set up a chain of card-drawing if you’re stalled out that long in a control mirror match. You don’t need a Hurkyl’s Recall, but good luck against Affinity without something that powerful to disrupt the opponent long enough to give you some breathing room there. You’d probably like two or three more cards, like Wing Shards or Brain Freeze or, or, or… you get the idea, designing decks with Wishes isn’t exactly new.
With the ability to use eight sideboard spaces without compromising my overall ability to Wish for things I want, it seemed apparent that I could also answer potentially problematic situations by taking out the Scepter-Chant portion of the deck as needed and morph into something different when Scepter-Chant as a strategy was underwhelming in a particular matchup. Switching things around to take out that particular part of the lockdown combo and have a deck still that functioned well together, the eight-Wizard sideboard plan came into being, letting you focus on the Counterbalance-Top portion of the deck and complementing their overall utility and strategy with Dark Confidant and Meddling Mage. Thus, after sideboarding, you could retain as much Scepter-Chant functionality as was deemed appropriate, while having the option to change into an aggro-control “Chase Rare Control”-style Fish deck, just without the Tarmogoyfs.
Early testing showed the main-deck was weak in the true control mirror, as was unfortunately learned through a reasonably extensive portion of testing against Patrick Chapin Next Level Blue, another odd Counterbalance strategy deviating from the overall mainstream. Against decks less well-equipped to fight these particular fights, Counterbalance Scepter-Chant proved well-equipped to lock the opponent out of the game, and it seemed to have an overall advantage against aggressive decks due to the multi-faceted combos of lockdown cards quickly coming into play to lock down their resources and their options. But against a competing Blue Counterbalance deck, complete with some slow-as-molasses Cryptic Commands that just happen to be awesome against all parts of the deck, things were patently unfavorable with the main-deck configuration unless you could somehow get Teferi to stick in play (… on your side, naturally). Post-sideboard, they gain access to Threads if they suspect the Wizards and Krosan Grip against any of the sides of the overlapping blankets of spell disruption, while you can entirely re-tool your plan to a more aggressive plan rather than fighting a slow and ponderous control battle against a deck better designed to win such slow and ponderous battles in Extended.
This difficult fight likewise suggested Next Level Blue to be a deck worthy of considering for the upcoming qualifier season, and it’s quite possible that Chapin’s words of wisdom on Ponder (quick summary: “Play it you fools!”) are as worthwhile of a lesson to impart upon the student of deck design or Magical theory as the deck itself is. Unfortunately Ponder is the new kid at the table, and thus didn’t get respect in the Counterbalance-Scepter Chant deck as we are as-yet un-used to including it as an automatic four-of in every Extended deck with Blue in it… when you start building without it, you can run out of room awfully quick, and a Blue deck without Ponder seriously demands potential re-tooling to correct for such shortcomings. Just look at the re-tooling of the Tron deck from last week, whose main substantial change besides potentially changing colors was finding room for the four Ponders. It’s distinctly possible that a future update of the Scepter-Chant deck will likewise require exactly that re-tooling, for exactly that card in exactly that quantity: four, obviously.
And that said, with another interesting nugget of Extended technology brought forward and hopefully to be analyzed soon in time for the PTQ season, I’d seek to move on to another interesting thing. Building a deck in Extended is almost like a walking history lesson; the better you listen, the better prepared you are for the all too immersive look that is needed to build a good deck in the format. Just because virtually any strategy can prove viable if designed and tuned properly, as there are too many factors in the metagame and too many different decks to truly impose a narrow set of rules necessary for success, doesn’t mean there is an unlimited supply of good decks. Instead, you have a broad but limited supply of good deck kernels, and a student of Magic history can present new ones that had previously gone neglected. In the case of my next deck, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to even hear of its existence in the first place, at a playtest session at Neutral Ground a day or two before Regionals this past year. Between one iteration of Dragonstorm and the next there was an innovative and powerful deck called “BillyStorm,” a Billy Moreno-derived kernel of both genius and madness as you sometimes see if you sit around Kyle Sanchez main man-crush long enough… an extreme re-tooling of the otherwise commonly-known “Perilous Storm” UR Storm deck. That deck played all the colors of the rainbow and did some crazy things with an artificially-shortened deck, but was derived originally from the “normal” Perilous Storm deck. To get at the “BillyStorm” version of the deck, I’d first attempt to produce the “un-shortened” version and go from there… an interesting game of engineering and re-engineering.
Lands (14)
Spells (46)
- 4 Sensei's Divining Top
- 4 Burning Wish
- 4 Seething Song
- 2 Claws of Gix
- 4 Chrome Mox
- 4 Hatching Plans
- 4 Perilous Research
- 4 Rite of Flame
- 3 Grapeshot
- 2 Ignite Memories
- 4 Lotus Bloom
- 3 Pyromancer's Swath
- 4 Ponder
Sideboard
Presumably the move to Extended would allow for the use of Burning Wish to make the deck more consistent, though its overall game-plan of “draw a bunch of cards, use cards to Storm and win” is already a pretty consistent plan. A dash of Spinerock Knoll to perhaps get Storm-happy with seems reasonable, though not absolutely necessary, and whether it’d be a two-of or a four-of or whatever seems of little relevance when it’s already known it’ll end up getting cut from the ‘final edit’ when we ship the deck over for re-tooling and Billyfication as per the deck Brian David-Marshall played at Regionals, list available in the article here.
“BillyStorm,” 37th Place at NJ Regionals 2007, as played by Brian David-Marshall
1 Breeding Pool
4 Flagstones of Trokair
1 Gemstone Caverns
2 Gemstone Mine
1 Godless Shrine
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Sacred Foundry
3 Steam Vents
1 Temple Garden
1 Watery Grave
4 Storm Entity
4 Street Wraith
4 Chromatic Star
2 Claws of Gix
3 Edge of Autumn
3 Empty the Warrens
3 Hatching Plans
2 Ignite Memories
4 Lotus Bloom
4 Mishra’s Bauble
3 Perilous Research
4 Rite of Flame
4 Seething Song
Sideboard
4 Dark Confidant
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Gemstone Caverns
1 Ignite Memories
4 Pacifism
4 Tarmogoyf
Taking some of the same lessons, we will be cutting some cards and adding others to give us an unusually large number of Rituals to work with and sheer power to Storm with, and will be using the “short deck” concept to get around the need to improve consistency with Burning Wish. Perilous Research will stay as a four-of however due to the positive interactions we’ll be aiming to have, and we can just go from there and see where whimsy takes us. First the mana… 20 sources, as you’d find in BDM’s deck:
4 Flagstones of Trokair
4 Chrome Mox
4 Lotus Bloom
2 Steam Vents
2 Flooded Strand
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Temple Garden
1 Godless Shrine
Then the necessary Storm components, such as cantrips, card draw, Rituals, Storm spells… you know, the cards you’d normally expect to see in a deck of this sort. It counts to 28, leaving us room for twelve cards as ‘shortening’:
4 Ponder
4 Perilous Research
4 Rite of Flame
4 Seething Song
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
3 Empty the Warrens
3 Hatching Plans
2 Ignite Memories
And then we have the “shortening.”
4 Street Wraith
4 Edge of Autumn
4 Mishra’s Bauble
Edge of Autumn on Flagstones of Troikar helps to fix mana as well as you’d need instead of fetch-lands, powerful because it fixes the mana just as well as the fetchlands would but also shortens the deck, giving a smaller effective deck size and thus a more potent ‘punch’ to the package… and yet another avenue for digging deep for Lotus Blooms on the first turn, alongside or better yet with both Ponder and Sensei’s Divining Top plus Mox draws. Flagstones and Sensei’s Divining Top both work amazingly with Perilous Research, alongside the otherwise-customary Hatching Plans, helping to keep the deck’s hand full and powerful. Moving to the sideboard, we see what those pesky Lands are for:
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant
3 Orim’s Chant
2 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Ignite Memories
1 Empty the Warrens
Orim’s Chant is any combo deck’s best friend and worst enemy, and serves to pave the way for a lethal Storm turn as well as disrupt the same from an enemy deck… while those two Crypts go an awfully long way when your deck is full of card-drawing, card selection, and is 48 cards instead of 60 to begin with. Both are there to give the deck at least some interactive tools against opposing combo-style decks, regardless of their natural method of opponent-dissection, and are present in the quantities proscribed because the deck is shortened and can find those copies ‘in time’ often enough to matter.
The extra copy of Empty or Ignite is to tailor the “kill” as appropriate against each opponent, as you want a bunch of Goblins against aggressive decks and many copies of Ignite Memories against slower decks with access to Pernicious Deed or Engineered Explosives. With eight slots left you have room for two four-ofs, Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant. Both have this habit of letting you stop being the “passive” combo player and take the initiative for yourself, providing a very different game-plan and thus helping you dodge any “Storm hate” that may accidentally be in your way.
That list, for those who like it all in one place and “purty-like,” is here… or at least it’s all in one place, because no amount of make-up can make a deck this ugly “purty,” I know, I criticized its predecessor just on how ugly it was before seeing it play out.
4 Flagstones of Troikar
4 Chrome Mox
4 Lotus Bloom
2 Steam Vents
2 Flooded Strand
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Temple Garden
1 Godless Shrine
4 Ponder
4 Perilous Research
4 Rite of Flame
4 Seething Song
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
3 Empty the Warrens
3 Hatching Plans
2 Ignite Memories
4 Street Wraith
4 Edge of Autumn
4 Mishra’s Bauble
Sideboard:
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant
3 Orim’s Chant
2 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Ignite Memories
1 Empty the Warrens
Having seen the original on paper, it looked awful; having seen the original at work, I was duly impressed. Likewise I think this requires some shuffle-up-and-play time, as an aggressive Storm deck, perhaps a competitor to the currently existent Storm-combo decks such as Heartbeat and TEPS because of its high power level and strong resistance to discard elements. That said, I’m sure it has frailties as well, and thus would require extensive testing against aggressive decks before stating decisively that all those Ravnica duals and the painful-to-cycle Street Wraith are indeed the right cards in the right quantities for the job.
I was skeptical when I first saw the “treatment” given to the deck; having seen it in motion, however, I think it is quite potent and thus deserving of further testing time.
Check back next week to see where all this has gone… and what, if anything, came of this week’s Neutral Ground Mock Extended tournament, in case you haven’t otherwise heard it from Flores first.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com