Magical Hack: Snakes on a Desert In… “Trial By Fire”

Last week, I had said my goal for this week was to get into a Premier Event, and try my hand at playing my theorized City Championships season deck “Snakes on a Desert” in a Standard tournament of at least some worth or impact. Lacking in other recourses during the holiday season, it seemed that Magic Online with its ever-in-motion Standard tournament cycle was to be the plan. My saying that this was my goal for the upcoming week in the first place was with the presumption that my friend Jim Halter, known to some online as Faceless Butcher instead, would let me dip into his extensive MTGO collection (… after all, he’d offered to let me borrow Extended decks to test with, and Standard’s an easier format to build a collection for online…) and come up with a MTGO version of the deck for less than, say, the hundred bucks or more I’d have to pay for four Call of the Herd, four Breeding Pool, four Yavimaya Coast, and four Ohran Viper. It also presumed that one of the numerous tournaments on the schedule would fit my plans, and that could be said to be true so long as my plans didn’t fixate on “going to bed at a reasonable hour.” An 8pm start time here on the Eastern Seaboard is better than it could be, but still likely to keep me up till two or three in the morning.

Fortunately, after explaining my scheme and how I’d already more or less planned upon his expected generosity, Jim decided to graciously allow me to borrow the cards I wanted from his Prismatic deck, instead of laugh at me for my foolishness and watch as I somehow tried to scramble and find four duals, four of the best Coldsnap rare, and four of the most highly valued Timeshifted card currently selling on MTGO. Having set myself up for potential failure, having most of the cards I needed provided for me by my new MTGO online team captain was of course a relief… but it’s not like he had everything, and there was still work to do. Fortunately, my brief stint with the Battle Royale taught me a thing or two about MTGO trading, and I was able to pick up the remainder (four Mystic Snakes, Call of the Herd #4…)

Of course, just because I was able to do it doesn’t mean it was exactly easy. I’d had a nice windfall when drafting in the 4-3-2-2s recently, and sold off a bunch of the cards I’d picked up while churning packs into more packs during the Thanksgiving “Nix Tix” break, leaving me with 26 tickets and four Time Spiral booster packs. My method of playing on MTGO basically fixates on drafting all the time in 4-3-2-2s with the same one draft set plus or minus a little, so that if I get a bad deck I can still usually somehow muster one match win and slink away with two out of the three packs invested plus a few Rares or Timeshifted cards to hopefully make up some of the shortfall. This means when things are doing well I’ve got as many as six packs and more than a dozen tickets, and an untouched stock of rare-drafts and other miscellaneous things just sitting there ready to be called upon for those rainy days when things are going less well. I knew all of those tickets would be needed to procure the things I was not able to borrow, and then six more tickets besides just to join the Premier Event. In short, unless I wanted to turn my draft packs into tickets (bad idea) I was going to need to not only liquidate all of my usable assets rare- and Timeshifted-wise, but pick up some more tickets besides.

The Battle Royale did teach me a thing or two however, so I was peeking on the Sellers’ section of MTGO and found someone I could Paypal funds to in order to get tickets at a discount. The rate was even better if it wasn’t being drawn from a credit card, because Paypal takes more from you then, and I’ve been carrying a decent balance on PayPal nowadays because I’m doing a lot of Magic auctioning. For $26 total I was able to get 25 tickets and a Teferi that Jim didn’t have, plus a spare booster pack because I’d dropped two drafts in a row with “just” one match won, so those four packs had dwindled to two and would need a third before I could draft again.

With some shopping around to try and get decent deals on everything, assembling the deck broke down like this:

(This is a slight change from last week, when I found out just how hard it is to beat Martyr-Tron decks with my current configuration, and learned that Jester’s Cap isn’t enough if they’ve found a Chronosavant before I can get the Cap off. Muse Vessel, however, changes the entire dynamic of the mid-game, letting me actually break up the Proclamation engine and thus perhaps be able to go with a plan other than straight decking via Compulsive Research… or at least putting a reasonable limit on the opponent’s resources.)

Now that I had the deck on MTGO I got to get some test games in, and spent a decent chunk of time spread out over the Christmas weekend to get some playtesting in. Boros was a difficult but winnable matchup; game 1 is hard, but very winnable on the play, but nearly impossible to stabilize in time and actually kill the opponent (… after all, the average power of my non-Legendary creatures is a mighty “1”…) before falling to the early swarm backed up with burn. Martyr-Tron type decks were still pretty miserable, because game 1 is hard to win if you can’t carry the game away before they get Martyr online, as your new plan is to somehow mysteriously survive until you can point four Compulsive Researches at them to deck them out, requiring them to have eleven or fewer cards in their library first, and it’s worse yet if you’ve spent any Researches on yourself to draw cards in the meantime. That matchup is made more salvageable by the addition of Muse Vessel, changing the dynamic of the mid-game where you still have a reasonable advantage… but fortunately we’re talking about practicing for a MTGO metagame, and thus one in which the opponent has thirty minutes in which to beat you in two games, or lose because they run out of time. Proclamation-based decks are probably more viable in real life than online, and a general weakness to that kind of strategy is acceptable so long as it’s not extremely populous wherever you’re playing it… which my real-life gaming area doesn’t seem to be, either.

Dragonstorm testing was interesting, because I basically learned that they can’t win if you play first and keep a reasonable draw, and usually end up complaining about how lucky you are to draw as much countermagic as you do over the course of a normal game. On the draw, however, is quite a bit scarier… they can do bad things with Gigadrowse and then murder you to death, and getting to play first makes it all the more likely that a Voidslime on the Storm trigger won’t be enough to have mana for a second counter that is hard enough to matter. Post-sideboarding, you have access to Rewind and thus can further help pull the teeth out of their most potent tool, giving you both Rewind and Teferi to break the end-of-turn Gigadrowse strategy… but that still doesn’t make it much more comfortable to be on the draw. You definitely have the tools to play against Dragonstorm, but considering it a bye is downright foolish as it’s still very explosive and reasonably aimed at beating control strategies. And the mono-Green aggro matchup is very favorable, as I learned when trying to test Standard in the Tournament Practice room, or at least refresh myself as to how the deck works… and you can’t practice there without some idiots trying to Blanchwood Armor up their Silhana Ledgewalkers. Other control decks seemed to be reasonable, so long as they weren’t Proclamation-Martyr decks, because four of your counterspells are kill conditions and planting an Ohran Viper unopposed is basically game over… but to be honest I didn’t see very many “control” decks in my practicing – plenty of Boros and MGA with the occasional smattering of other stuff like Dragonstorm and Martyr-Tron.

So the difficulty of getting into a Premier Event on Magic Online was kind of impressive… I’d planned on sneaking in on Christmas evening at 8pm, only to find that I’d missed my train home by about a minute and instead of getting to play when I’d wanted to, instead I got to wait in the chilly rain in southern New Jersey until the next one came an hour later. Somehow “getting engaged” the night before didn’t add up to getting my way when I said I wanted to actually be home early enough on Christmas to get to see some of my family, instead of just Niki’s, and my plan to spend a bit of holiday time with the family and then zone out while gaming didn’t work out. I wasn’t even on a train out of southern New Jersey till 6:30. It also didn’t help of course that somewhere in there my internet connection had gone out entirely, leaving further endeavors frustrated for a good while.

After some finagling (and a test-run of my connection in a draft, which I won with a deck I didn’t think was very good) I finally managed to get into the Wednesday-morning 2x Standard event… and of course the bad beats continue onward into the start of the tournament, as I mulliganed to five both games in search of more than one land against a Boros deck packing main-deck Cryoclasm. Winning game 1 against Boros while on the draw is already a little difficult; doing so while short two cards, and getting hit with main-deck Cryoclasm on turn 3, doesn’t make life easier.

Welcome to Magic Online, I guess. I don’t remember my first opponent’s name, but it might as well have been TheShuffler. (I may not ascribe to the belief that there is anything unusual or non-random about the shuffler, but I do play plenty of lands, so double-mulliganing both games just in order to get a hand with more than one land was not a happy introduction to “competitive” Constructed on MTGO. And making jokes about the shuffler is apparently the online form of wit.)

Round 2 started much better… paired against an U/B Snow deck, I took the first game with an early lead created by Ohran Vipers and defended it with at least as much countermagic as my opponent possessed. Game 2 was more interesting, with an Ohran Viper trying to trade with Phyrexian Ironfoot and failing thanks to getting hit with Darkblast, and with some complicated Teferi battles on both sides. I baited Teferi at end of turn only to see it countered, then one of his snuck in play but destroyed by a second Teferi sneaking in while he was tapped out, and his second hit with Mouth of Ronom.

The back-and-forth of this match was amazing, with a Phyrexian Ironfoot grinding inexorably into play and nudging my life down dangerously low, only to be Repealed and chomped by a Mystic Snake on the way back down, in a mammoth counter-battle that left the mana tapped and just one Snake marching along, doing his inexorable chomping two points at a time but still getting to the same place. Double Darkblast tried to kill it with just two Swamps going, which is the perfect time for a Remand of the second one, and slowly but surely the stage was being set for a titanic counter-battle.

The game ended in a flurry, with Phyrexian Ironfoot trying to sneak in only to be the target of Rewind… which was responded to with Remand, which was responded to in turn with Rewind… which was responded to with Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, who met Remand, letting me untap eight lands, countering the Ironfoot, and sneaking my own Teferi into play with two Mystic Snakes and a Rewind left in hand still, and the opponent at a precarious five life with just one island untapped facing down Mystic Snake and Teferi.

Throughout the second game I’d found myself wishing I’d sideboarded in more lands, instead of straight-up replacing Deserts with Mouth of Ronom, wishing that I’d taken the last two Compulsive Researches out to go up to 27 lands for this particular fight, while I was sliding in Rewinds and Muse Vessel for two Repeals, two Researches, and a Wall of Roots. Fortunately I snuck this one out somehow anyway, possibly because my win conditions were my counterspells, and because after the whole messy fight setting up for the first Teferi I finally caught on and picked the timing of my fights more intelligently.

Round 3 saw me faced against Dragonstorm, and winning the first after the slightly ballsy play of Mystic Snaking a lowly Telling Time. Since my opponent had Suspended a Lotus Bloom the turn before, he was not actually going to kill me on turn 4 if his Telling Time didn’t turn up exactly the right stuff, and this let me start getting a clock going. Turn 4 rolled around and I didn’t die. I got a fifth turn and that let me bait in Teferi, only to get Remanded when cast at the end of my opponent’s turn. The Snake did its duty and ground in for two, two, two, while all the positioning was set up, and Teferi made it in on the second try (thanks Remand!) to hold off what were now two impending Lotus Blooms. An Ohran Viper made its way in as well, though not long afterwards my Dragonstorming opponent did his thing, though Voidslime on the Storm trigger kept things from getting too hideously messy. A Hellkite came in and killed two Snakes, but the opponent was so low that he couldn’t race Hellkite versus Teferi. A turn later an Ohran Viper Flashed in and started attacking by himself, drawing a few extra cards and bleeding the life out of my opponent slowly, setting me up for an eventual end-of-turn Repeal of the Dragon, attacking with Teferi and Snake to drop the opponent to just one or two life remaining and Remanding the Dragon on the way back in. (Or Voidsliming it, or Mystic Snaking it, your choice really. Remand was funnier.)

For the second game I had to mulligan to five just to get the hope of a workable hand, and kept Island, Wall of Roots, Call of the Herd, Repeal, Remand on the draw. Luckily I drew a Forest for the second turn straight-up, though Wall of Roots was Remanded. I drew an Island for the third turn, and looked like I was going to Wall of Roots with Remand backup on his turn, only to see Wall of Roots get Repealed. Clearly at this point something is up, as it’s turn 4 and he’s cantripped twice now keeping Wall of Roots out of play and used a first-turn Sleight of Hand. I might just disappear in a puff of dragon-smoke right here… but I don’t, so I get to cast Wall of Roots again, having drawn a Rune Snag. I also get to Rune Snag his turn 5 Hunted Dragon, then follow up on my turn with the Call and actually maybe make some forward progress, which in this case was Remanding a second Hunted Dragon. For the following turn I’d drawn another land finally, and had the plan of letting the Dragon in and Repealing it so I can get my beats on, so I send in the Herd to bring him to eleven. I let the Dragon in the next turn, which he follows up with Pyroclasm… only to meet Voidslime.

This let me sit a turn waiting to Repeal the Dragon at end of turn, rather than send in the team and force that as my next play, and this led to my opponent trying to Gigadrowse my four Blue sources. Cleverly I’d anticipated just such a plan, floated four mana and let the first three resolve, then cast Rewind on the last copy to untap said four lands. Another Dragon is countered, meaning I didn’t get my window to Repeal, and I decided to stop being a wimp and start forcing the issue, attacking with the team and losing my Elephant to drop the opponent to five. End of turn I get to Repeal the Dragon successfully, and my attack for the kill is Gigadrowsed two turns in a row while the opponent waits for the stars to align right to actually pull off his combo. On the last big turn he starts with a Sleight of Hand and a Gigadrowse for three, so those three lands tap. He casts a Rite of Flame and it occurs to me that if I just counter it, regardless of whether my counter resolves or not, he can’t do “the worst” to me and actually pull off a Dragonstorm, he won’t have enough mana… having wasted four Gigadrowses he’s a little short of spare cards, so I just Mystic Snake the Rite of Flame and the best he’s able to do with what he has is cast Teferi. Teferi while at five and facing off against four 2/2 creatures isn’t quite good enough, so he dies.

Of course, in standard tournament mode he then complains about how lucky I am because I mulliganed to five and won by drawing six counters. I of course, then informed him that I’d boarded in three more on top of my main-deck sixteen, so there really wasn’t so very much in the way of luck involved in drawing six. I’d taken out all four Compulsive Researches, two Repeals and an Ohran Viper for four Calls and three Rewinds, then swapped Deserts for Mouths of Ronom because Desert clearly does nothing while Mouth of Ronom might do something if Teferi is in the sideboard or he gets the anti-Glare “emergency” Dragon, the 4/4 Niv-Mizzet who dies just fine if you drop a glacier on him. Drawing six counters by turn 10 or so shouldn’t really be impressive, especially when I’d cantripped twice already (Remand, Repeal) and so had to draw six out of nineteen counterspells out of seventeen chances in a sixty-card deck. Admittedly, one of those counters had to be Rewind, but he didn’t even gripe about that so I’m not worrying about it. Math like that may be messy, but it’s not exactly the textbook definition of “unlikely.”

So in my first effort so far I’d managed to squeak my way into 2-1, at least doing okay after the too-fast first round against Boros. For round 4 I got to face Boros again, and got quickly outpaced by multiple Knights of the Holy Nimbus while I was scrabbling to find colored mana off of a mulligan while on the draw… not exactly a good place to be. Taking two to four a turn while backpedaling just to get any mana into play doesn’t help, and I lose the first game pretty readily. This is pretty standard for Boros on the draw. I can keep up just fine with it while on the play game 1, but game 1 on the draw is very much in their favor. I sideboard my Calls and Ironfoots for four Voidslimes, one Teferi, and two Compulsive Research, and as always from this new configuration it’s nerve-wracking and very close… basically my plan has stopped being the Blue deck and started being the Green deck, and it is a much more favorable plan but still not a guaranteed thing by any measure.

The first game starts reasonably, with their one-drop contained by a Wall of Roots, and we develop normally for a while, me taking a little damage but getting a key creature into play as Ohran Viper gets in a few attacks. I’m down to twelve, but starting to make up for the double mulligan I started with, and I’m able to reverse the flow of damage at least initially until Soltari Priest shows up to start eating away at my life until I am able to contain it. The opponent has for some reason boarded in Worship, but it’s not relevant. I can attack for lethal damage and Repeal the Worship. I can’t quite get enough power into play and attacking, though, because while I’m “only” facing Savannah Lions plus Scorched Rusalka plus Icatian Javelineers, I’m doing so from something like five life. This leaves my Calls and Mystic Snakes on defense since I can’t afford to lose even a single life point. Thus I peck across with Ohran Viper several times, drawing Walls and Calls and all sorts of good things that let me up my clock, but no hard counters. With the Voidslimes in the board this is not necessarily surprising, but at that point pretty much anything would have been worthwhile. Instead I saw a wealth of lands and, admittedly, creatures like Ohran Viper and Call of the Herd, definitely things with value but still not necessarily enough as I’m trying to give the opponent as few turns as possible to draw a burn spell or creature that will land and kill me messily.

Unsurprisingly, after getting lucky for a few turns more than anyone really has a right to, the opponent drew another Scorched Rusalka when my only viable plan was “cross fingers and hope.” This is not exactly a good plan, so it’s not really surprising that it didn’t work. Because I gave him so much time, he’d drawn eight mana (six regular lands plus a Boros Garrison) and so even a four-point Rune Snag doesn’t let me survive another turn. I don’t have enough mana to Repeal my Mystic Snake… leaving me to Repeal a Call token and hope the top card is Mystic Snake, which it isn’t, or get another Remand or Rune Snag to at least give me a turn before I die, now requiring the top card afterwards to be a third copy of Repeal. Regardless of whether the next card down was or was not a Repeal for Worship, I didn’t draw anything to hassle his new spell, and thus I died.

The fifth round went by in a flurry, or at least it felt that way in between the repeated lost connections and crashing software, facing off against Dragonstorm. It’s a very different experience on the draw than it is when playing first, and a much scarier one. I lost the first quickly to turn 1 double suspended Lotus Blooms, and on the fourth turn Dragonstorm did what Dragonstorm does, and does so around the one counterspell I am able to play. I’d have needed to get Wall of Roots to stick on the second turn in order to even really begin to compete there, and it got Remanded. The second was as academic – no suspended Lotuses and me on the play first, countering the turn 4 Seething Song with Mystic Snake, and nothing from the opponent on turn 4 let me sneak in Teferi. Things are vastly more simplified from there since they can’t really abuse Gigadrowse anymore… I had two counters in reserve when the Snake and Teferi dealt the killing blow.

Game 3 was another grab-the-ankles game, short on countermagic and lacking Wall of Roots to get me the accelerated start I really crave, and targeted on turn 5 by Gigadrowse for four while lacking a Rewind. I put Teferi into play and figured I was a goner, and I was. Sad story. I’d need to win the last round just to get to 3-3… and John Rizzo would come down from Maine and kill me if I dropped, so I’d stayed in to see what happened in the last round and how this sort of thing worked.

The lesson so far is that as good as the deck should be in theory against Dragonstorm, getting to play first is still a pretty solid advantage. They should almost never win if you play first, but when they get to play first things can be scary, especially in Game 1 when Gigadrowse is much more likely to have the desired impact. Boros is likewise very much a different matchup depending on who is playing first; while I am comfortable with it overall and think it’s a reasonable matchup, with a solid sideboarding plan, it’s still not a matchup where you pump the fist at the lucky pairing, and neither is Dragonstorm though your tools there are significantly better.

Of course, after deciding to try and Rizzo it and stick in the last round, my opponent blinked off and conceded after thirteen seconds. Back to drafting, I guess, if I want to actually feel like a winner on MTGO.

The lesson to me at least was that this deck does have the tools to compete in the Standard metagame, with reasonable matchups against the biggest decks from Worlds and very few truly awful matchups. The biggest one against is the Martyr-Proclamation deck… one which may very well be an acceptable blind spot. It’s excellent against other control decks, even ones packing Demonfire, because it has more counters than most other control decks and gets to pair the latest Ophidian with a plethora of counterspells. The creature-control strategy seems solid against the current metagame, as I’ve gotten an awful lot of mileage out of my four copies of Desert and can hold the fort nicely with the creatures the deck plays while still having them perform well against other matchups. It’s a bit of a strange control deck to play, the theory driving it is still a little unusual for a “regular” Blue control deck… but I remain confident that with a little give here or there I’d have been able to break into the elimination rounds. It’s a solid deck with a good strategy that seems to be well balanced, and while it is not “overpowering” in the way Dragonstorm or even Tron decks with a good draw can feel, it isn’t underpowered either, and the turn 2 Wall of Roots draw can feel very overpowering as it lets you go crazy doing whatever you want on your turn while still having countermagic on the opponent’s turn.

My first try at a PE Top 8 was not a success, but neither was it a complete and total failure, as any of the matches lost could have gone another way if things worked out a little more favorably. Another day, another try, and perhaps you’ll be able to read about it as an emerging archetype from somebody other than me for once.

Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com