The Star City Games $5K Standard Open is this weekend in Richmond, and it is bound to be the most influential Standard tournament of them all when it comes to reshaping the States metagame. But what shapes its metagame? Information warfare is at the core of succeeding at a new metagame, that or being the one who can build the most awesome of decks. Most people aren’t That Guy… let’s face it, even as I build myself up I tear myself down, publicly stating I was going to play a base-Blue mid-range control deck sans Mulldrifter at my first encounter with Standard over this weekend!
The war for information will reach about for anything that has been battle-tested, and that is what I am here to discuss today. I could of course say “Play Bant Shardly Wait,” but I couldn’t do it with a straight face without suggesting changes… or worse yet, suggesting the changes being “change your deck” if the format really is going to be all about the Faeries and Five-Color and none of the aggressive decks like BR Tokens or Kithkin or BG Elves that it is poised to conquer. I found out the hard way that without an actual card-advantage card instead of mere card selection I was digging my way into a long-game that I’d inevitably lose, and being a dog to Five-Color Control is not my suggestion for fun and profit. Giving myself credit for the match-win when I was running out of time against an aggro deck, I still only went 1-2 at the tournament… and so did the rest of the decks that looked anything like mine, as the numbers will tell.
I attended the Neutral Ground $1k First Anniversary Tournament, celebrating the first anniversary of Neutral Ground in its new location. So did thirty other players. Moreso than mine, this is their story. Rather than individuals, however, we are looking to tell the tale of the decks they played… get that first sweet taste of statistics that tell us what is good and what is not, to start properly metagaming for the larger tournaments to follow.
For this event, we had the following show up:
Bant Control — 4
Bant Aggro — 2
U/W Jank Aggro-Fish — 1
Exalted White Weenie — 1
Kithkin — 1
G/W Aggro — 1
G/R Devour — 1
“Seismic Swans” Retrace.dec — 1
Five-Color Control — 13
Faeries — 7
All told, it’s not exactly a “varied metagame.” Certainly not one that favored my choice of deck, one that believed in a world where The Red Deck might exist.
I’m just going to do a quick play-by play, if for no other reason than to have it down on file where I can manipulate it and tally it rather than just presenting all the results of the Swiss and tallying win percentages. Round One played out as follows:
Five-Color Control gets the Bye
Bant defeats Bant Aggro
Bant defeats Bant Aggro
Bant defeats G/R Devour
Five-Color Control defeats Bant
Five-Color Control defeats Seismic Swans.dec
Five-Color Control defeats Kithkin
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control (ditto… I imagine we’ll see this a lot!)
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats G/W Aggro
Faeries defeats Exalted WW
Faeries defeats Faeries (big surprise there!)
U/W Jank Aggro Fish defeats Faeries
After Round 1, the 32nd player joins with a round 1 loss, so the 13th Five-Color Control deck enters the field. Round Two plays out thusly:
U/W Jank Aggro Fish defeats Faeries
Faeries defeats Seismic Swans.dec
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Bant defeats Faeries
Bant draws with Bant Aggro (Hi!)
Bant Aggro defeats Five-Color Control
Bant defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Bant
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
G/R Devour defeats G/W Aggro
Exalted WW defeats Kithkin
Round 2 was a literal beating for the Five-Color Control decks, they mauled each other and got mauled by Faeries, and went 1-2 against the various Bant decks floating around the field. Round 3 plays out thusly:
Seismic Swans.dec gets the Bye
Faeries and Five-Color Control intentionally draw
Faeries defeats U/W Jank Aggro Fish
Faeries defeats Kithkin
Faeries defeats Bant Aggro
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Faeries
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Bant
Five-Color Control defeats G/R Devour
Bant Aggro defeats Five-Color Control
Bant defeats Bant
Bant defeats Faeries
Exalted WW defeats G/W Aggro
Again the Five-Color Control wins are against the mirror… and to give you an idea of how things played out, one of those Five-Color Control-versus-Faeries matchups was at the 0-2 table, as was one of the Five-Color Control mirror matches. The Bant mirror match was at the 2-0 table… go figure. Faeries and Five-Color Control decided to draw themselves into the Top 8, only realizing after the fact that they now both have to win to make it in and would have had a better chance of both of them making the Top 8 if they’d just played it out so only one of them had to win their last round. (Both make it in, so the ‘tournament misplay’ didn’t catch them.)
Five-Color Control gets the Bye
Bant and Five-Color Control intentionally draw
Faeries defeats Faeries
Faeries defeats Seismic Swans.dec
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Faeries defeats Five-Color Control
Five-Color Control defeats Faeries
Five-Color Control defeats Exalted WW
Five-Color Control defeats G/R Devour
Five-Color Control defeats Bant Aggro
Bant defeats Five-Color Control
Bant Aggro defeats G/W Aggro
U/W Jank Aggro Fish defeats Bant Aggro
For the cut to the Top 8 we see the following:
3-0-1: Five-Color Control, Five-Color Control, Faeries, Bant
3-1: Faeries, Bant, U/W Jank Aggro Fish, Faeries.
Tied for 9th and 10th we see Five-Color Control and Faeries, for “virtual Top 8s.”
This breaks down pretty easily to do statistics, thanks to the fact that there are so very few decks really in the tournament. We’ll look at the performance of the smaller decks, then the Big Two. First things first, near and dear to my heart… Bant Control-style decks. Four entered the tournament of 32 players, two entered the Top 8, so unlike me they must have been doing something right.
Bant versus Bant Aggro: 2-0-1
Bant versus Rogue: 1-0 (G/R Devour)
Bant versus Faeries: 2-0
Bant versus Five-Color Control: 3-3-1
Bant versus Bant: 1-1
Bant Aggro versus Five-Color Control: 2-1
Bant Aggro versus Faeries: 0-1
Bant Aggro versus Rogue: 1-0 (G/W Aggro)
Bant Aggro versus Bant: 0-2-1
Bant, as a tempo-oriented controllish deck, does pretty well here… respectable performances against Faeries and Five-Color Control decks, if “soft” against Five-Color Control (most of which was my fault, I imagine) and subject to small numbers to be really definitive. As an aggro-focused deck, which is to say without countermagic, it lost to the other Bant decks, couldn’t win its one match against Faeries, and actually did a little better against Five-Color Control (but again: small numbers).
Looking at the Rogue’s Gallery, we see two interesting things and two ill-fated things. The G/W Aggro deck didn’t win a match, and the Devour-based deck pulled a match win out of thin air solely because it got randomly paired against the G/W whipping boy. But looking at the interesting things, we have one that is successful and one not. The unsuccessful experiment was a W/R/B land-heavy deck focusing on Retrace and Seismic Swans interactions, the latest efforts at exploring the format by up-and-coming local designer Matt Ferrando that tried to put Ad Nauseam to good work in Standard. The successful experiment (and we’re still wondering how) was built on the train on the way in out of commons and uncommons, plus that player’s stock of Rares he actually carries with him to tournaments (so yes to Cryptic Commands, but that’s about it). Apparently Knights of Meadowgrain and Kitchen Finks work well with countermagic, like some strange “Fish” deck, and keeping up mana for Broken Ambitions hurts an awful lot less when you can use it to advance your Figures of Destiny at end of turn if there’s nothing worth countering.
And now for the moments you’ve all been waiting for: an analysis of the Faeries versus Five-Color Control matchup, backed up by tournament play at a reasonable caliber at a 32-person tournament.
Faeries versus Five-Color Control: 10-2-1
That’s an impressive number, don’t you think? It’s also a miserable one if you are planning on rocking with the Five-Color and haven’t whittled the playskill edge in that matchup like GerryT and The Innovator have.
An unlucky number of players, thirteen, brought Five-Color Control to the table… and spent most of the day playing each other, both in the winners’ bracket and the losers’. Two made the cut to elimination, with a third out of the Top 8 on tiebreakers after winning his last match… you’d have expected three just by sheer weight of numbers if the deck just tread water at the tournament, but as you’ll soon see the Five-Color Control decks that were being played (most if not all with Cruel Ultimatum) were largely a dog to the Faeries decks in the room. Both the Five-Color Control decks that made the Top 8 had to beat a Faerie deck to get there, and one of the two dodged a bullet apparently by intentionally drawing and going 1-0-1 in a matchup that the numbers suggest should probably have been an 0-2 for him.
Unfortunately the Top 8 Decklists from the event were not available to me by my deadline, so hopefully you’ll be able to find them here on NeutralGround.com by the time this article goes live on Friday. Thus sadly I cannot specifically say what it is that made some Five-Color Control decks actually able to beat Faeries at least sometimes, that was absent in the other decks, but I suspect it has to do with Esper Charm. I know at least one of the two Top 8 Five-Color Control decks was Charm-happy, with the full boat of Esper Charms and some Bant Charms besides, but can’t vouch for the second list until it is published on Neutral Ground.
Faeries in this tournament split down the middle when it came to splashing for Esper Charm, but Five-Color Control seemed to do best when it adopted that change, outperforming in both the mirror and against Faeries (where otherwise it seems it had no hope). The simple fact remains, though, that 20 out of the 32 decks in the room were either Five-Color Control or Faeries, and what few aggro decks were present lost to both pretty consistently. But with a sitting-duck metagame like this one, how can you not aim at it and expect to profit? For example, neither Five-Color Control nor Faeries wants to play against a Red deck that is prepared for them, attuned to the fact that it can’t play expensive spells and the creatures that have the greatest value are the ones that are either too inexpensive to not play or have an immediate effect rather than leave a window of opportunity for Wrath of God to turn them off. To my mind, that means Demigod of Revenge is a sideboard-only sort of tool, and Ashenmoor Gouger loses its charm thanks to the fact that it walks into mass removal. There are other options, after all, as I am reminded by the fact that I prognosticated just such a deck as this in my preview article for Hell’s Thunder.
If everyone is looking at control-on-control fights, I have to say… I’d rather zig than zag like everyone else is, and an aggressive Red deck can easily destroy anything thrown in its way if only it is properly designed.
Creatures (20)
Lands (24)
Spells (16)
Sideboard
The main-deck is well-aimed at the Five-Color Control/Faeries metagame, fast and vicious right out of the gates and with a decent shot at shutting down Kitchen Finks at minimal loss to its forward pressure: Stigma Lasher might just make the lifegain irrelevant, while both Puncture Blast and Magma Spray kill a Finks without possibility of Persisting. The sideboard is aimed at everything else, since I figure I wouldn’t want to sideboard against either of those two matchups save to address specific problems… GerryT’s Story Circles out of Five-Color Control, for example. Firespout and Caldera Hellion make life miserable for decks that try to keep a reasonable board presence, while Demigod of Revenge is great against removal-heavy decks such as Doran or Elves that trade one-for-one rather than try to blank multiple copies of a card with Runed Halo.
We also, of course, would like to update the Bant aggro-control deck I’d been working on, as all of its losses in my hands were “near things” and the failure was not in the deck as a concept but instead in the obvious oversight of “hey, this Blue deck might want Mulldrifter!” Changing out Ponder removes a decent chunk of the need for first-turn Blue sources, meaning we end up with more filter-lands and fewer painlands. We are going to be able to use more Flooded Groves now and thus can afford more Treetop Villages to go with them, especially as I’d found I could happily add the last one anyway as I worked with the deck. If Five-Color Control can afford as many as eleven Vivid lands, I think we can deal with eight comes-into-play-tapped lands now that we aren’t trying to use Ponder. Also worth noting is that with a better-defined metagame we are looking at very little reason to stick with the Austere Commands I had previously felt were worth having around, and I’m going to go with Negate in that spot instead to give us that extra chance of keeping Bitterblossom off the table in the early-game and a mana-efficient counter for fighting Five-Color Control.
Creatures (18)
Lands (26)
Spells (16)
Sideboard
Against Five-Color Control, the overall gameplan is to gain an early positional advantage with three-drops and stop the forward progress of the game with you in this advantaged state, holding off relevant spells with countermagic and using mana at end of turn only. To assist with this concept, the sideboard plan against Five-Color Control is to sideboard out the four Stoic Angels (they might just get in the way, and require four mana on your own turn… yuck!) for +2 Negate, +2 Cloudthesher. This streamlines the deck to drop early creatures, protect them with plentiful counters, and use either Cloudthresher or Oona’s Grace at end of turn if counterspell mana wasn’t necessary that turn.
Against Faeries, the gameplan is to apply pressure rather than sit there and die, playing out a Fish-like gameplan that lets you trade damage with the opponent because they are paying life to Bitterblossom and Thoughtseize, while you are gaining life from Rhox War Monk and Kitchen Finks. Targeted removal doesn’t really help, against a deck that plays the instant-speed game so much better than we do, so Bant Charm is sort of a lost cause: it’ll only walk itself right into a Scion of Oona, unless you’re able to use it when they tap low for Mistbind Clique. It’s not so lost that we cut all of them but we don’t want to draw two while they are being awkward to use, so I look to cut half of them to make sure we don’t draw two while it’s being hard to use. Stoic Angel is actually quite nice here because it holds down Bitterblossom advantage and wins a fight against everything but Mistbind Clique, but even at that it’s the turn-four drop that is most likely to be shut down by Mistbind Clique, so it’s worth shaving at least one copy after sideboarding. I’d sideboard +2 Cloudthresher, +3 Wispmare for -2 Bant Charm, -2 Negate, -1 Stoic Angel, and aim to take an aggressive stance early in the game because the difference between a defensive Cloudthresher and an aggressive Cloudthresher is astounding.
And against the rest of the world… well, we’re already well-aimed against Red decks, with lifegain creatures and eight spells (after sideboarding) that trade one-for-one with any creature and put them where they can’t be resurrected by the next Demigod of Revenge. Negates and Cloudthreshers turn into Condemns. Against creature decks like Kithkin we add Wrath of God, but we’re already well-aimed at them so this is an addition after sideboarding to really mop them up, they shouldn’t have a chance to begin with.
Worth noting is the lamentable fact that this deck has all Green creatures save the four Mulldrifters, so a resolved Story Circle is a pain in the butt and requires careful setup to work around. Mulldrifter can attack for the remaining life, it’s true… just not likely. We look then to the end-of-turn Cryptic Command bouncing Story Circle, and also Wispmare out of the sideboard, so it should be worth noting when playing against Five-Color Control that Story Circle may be present in their deck somewhere and you should try to figure out whose list they are using: GerryT advocates Story Circles that are a pain, while so far nobody else does.
But seeing how everyone is steering, hard, to the Fae or Five-Color Control decks, a question comes to mind. With the road to States being paved over with Reflecting Pools, will trusty basic Mountain make a dent this weekend?
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com