This weekend at Pro Tour Eldritch Moon I took a shot at a predicted metagame and missed badly. I loved my deck and managed a 5-5 finish with it despite it being terribly positioned, but this meant that I ended up missing an invitation to Worlds by a single win as well. It’s not all bad; I personally finished 5-1 in Limited, Team UltraPro/CFB had the best Limited record of any known team, and I cashed my seventh Pro Tour in a row, maintaining my streak of cashing every PT with my current team. But it’s important to understand what we did wrong.
As I’d expect everyone else to do, we started by testing against Bant Company. We tried various G/B Delirium decks but felt like they just weren’t quite good enough, and in all of our early testing with Emrakul, the Promised End, we felt like it didn’t do enough by itself to win a game, as it just doesn’t do enough to stop a battlefield full of creatures.
We were generally impressed with the lists that came out of The SCG Tour®, including Bant Company and B/W Control, and we basically stopped taking Emrakul seriously. We also didn’t work much on ramp because we felt like the combination of Spell Queller for Explosive Vegetation and Selfless Spirit for Kozilek’s Return was too hard to overcome. Given that we thought that Bant Company was genuinely great, we felt like we were obligated to either genuinely beat them or join them.
Early on, beating them looked promising. B/W Angels seemed to have a very good matchup against them, and we were also impressed by Voldaren Pariah against them. When we started testing sideboarded games, the tables turned. Bant replacing Dromoka’s Command with Negate was just too much for almost any control deck to handle. We concluded that it was just the best thing to be doing, but that a lot of people would decide to do something else because they didn’t test sideboard games enough. From there, my teammates started tuning the Bant Company deck, especially with an eye to winning the mirror as often as possible.
Meanwhile, I was focused on beating Bant. While the control decks didn’t work because they folded to Negate, I was still impressed by the decks that could quickly cast Voldaren Pariah. I tried a slower G/B Midrange deck with Voldaren Pariah to see if the card was just good enough to win the matchup by itself, but it proved horrible there. If you’re not very great at using Voldaren Pariah, it’s not the way to go, but if you are, it’s great against Bant Company.
There were two paths I was interested in. One was G/B Company, very much like the deck we played at the previous PT with Zulaport Cutthroat and Loam Dryad, but adding Cryptbreaker, Dark Salvation, and Voldaren Pariah. The other was U/B Madness. Both decks felt better than anyone thought a deck could be against Bant Company, but both seriously struggled to beat most control or black decks.
I guessed that U/B would have a better chance of fixing that, and I liked the deck more, so I focused my efforts there and didn’t fully develop the G/B deck.
My first draft started here:
Creatures (21)
- 4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
- 1 Sanitarium Skeleton
- 4 Voldaren Pariah
- 4 Wharf Infiltrator
- 4 Haunted Dead
- 4 Cryptbreaker
Lands (25)
Spells (14)
Corey Burkhart started posting early that he really liked Wharf Infiltrator, which none of the rest of us had pegged as a playable card. Despite the fact that he tried to explain it to us, most of us didn’t realize that you could pay two mana to make a 3/2 if you discarded a card to something else. When I played against it in Limited and my opponent combined it with Advanced Stitchwing, I decided I needed to give it a chance in Constructed.
Sanitarium Skeleton is a card I’d been playing in a Mono-Black Madness deck with Call the Bloodline earlier that I’d liked, but fairly quickly realized that it’s just too low-impact to compete with the kinds of late-game plans other decks had, so it was cut quickly.
Haunted Dead wasn’t great, but it worked well enough with Voldaren Pariah that it seemed fine at first. When we started playing against control decks, it became clear that we couldn’t afford to throw extra cards to get it back when we’re not getting Prized Amalgam with it, and I didn’t like Prized Amalgam and Haunted Dead without more self-mill to assemble the combo because I felt like both were too bad on their own. I decided to try Gisa’s Bidding instead, and I was really impressed by the results. It’s a much better card to discard, and the fact that it makes two Zombies makes it much better with Cryptbreaker and Dark Salvation.
After Osyp’s win on the SCG Tour® we started testing against G/W Tokens. We’d previously dismissed G/W because of Spell Queller, but the addition of Tragic Arrogance to the maindeck made a lot of sense for addressing that problem.
At first, my teammates reported that U/B was losing to G/W, which would be a reason to give up on the deck given its other vulnerabilities, but I tried adding Liliana, the Last Hope to the deck to deal with the tokens, and it really turned the matchup around, and a large portion of games ended with Liliana’s Emblem.
The list we settled on was this:
Creatures (16)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (16)
Sideboard
The idea with the deck was to take advantage of an expected shortage of removal that would allow our utility creatures to live, and that the card advantage generated by each of them drawing cards with madness converting their looting into pure card advantage would let us take control. This plan works beautifully against decks without too much removal.
All of our spells are cheap, but if one of our twelve cheap creatures lives, they smooth our draws so that we don’t miss land drops. We have plenty to spend mana on between all the extra cards we’re drawing, Dark Salvation, Jace’s Flashback ability, and Wharf Infiltrator’s trigger.
Madness allows the deck to play at instant speed, which is extremely important against Bant, and the removal matches up well against opposing cheap creatures.
People have expressed surprise that I missed the graveyard decks in this format because they seem like the kind of thing I’d build. The reality is that this deck is one of the most “me” decks I’ve ever played. It basically does everything I’d ever want to do.
It wins with individually low-impact, cheap creatures that primarily aren’t about attacking. It grinds a slow advantage on balanced exchanges rather than going way over the top. It establishes a battlefield presence and maintains an advantage there. It makes use of small creatures by sacrificing them for a big effect. It can change between an aggressive and controlling position smoothly in the middle of a game, or even more radically in sideboarding. It has a lot of options and a lot of play to minimize the extent to which it’s at the mercy of the order of its library.
The problem is that all of the card advantage is attached to creatures, and the madness cards are very bad when you can’t discard them, which means the deck is extremely weak against opponents who can consistently kill its creatures.
Because eight of the twelve important creatures die to Liliana’s +1 ability, it’s incredibly bad against that card specifically. We accepted that weakness because we thought that it would be a small portion of the field, as the card is very bad against Bant Company (it’s the only card we sideboard out against them), but it didn’t play out that way.
In hindsight, we probably should have realized that Bant would be a little less-represented than we expected because around 25% of the field deferred their invitation; due to visa issues, Wizards offered any player the option to skip this PT and take an invitation to the next PT. The problem is that, if you don’t have Pro Points, it’s much better to play in a Pro Tour at the beginning of a season when the points you earn can help build levels for the next season, rather than the last PT of the season when they’ll just be erased immediately.
This meant that any PTQ winner with aspirations of earning Pro levels was kind of value-locked into skipping this PT. Realistically, this means a much larger portion of players in the tournament would be on pro teams that would be more likely to build something new rather than players working on their own, who would be more likely to build familiarity with the best deck.
We also just didn’t do enough work on decks that combine Grapple with the Past, Kozilek’s Return, and emerge creatures, and fundamentally didn’t realize that we should be building delirium decks as combo decks rather than midrange or control decks. We did have G/B Delirium, but we just didn’t think it was good enough.
Seeing the world as it is now, there’s a good chance that U/B Madness will just never be well-positioned, but there’s some chance that Bant really is just better than these Emrakul decks and the field shifts back to them. In that case, U/B might be a reasonable foil if it’s hedged properly.
While I don’t expect to play this again, if I were to, it would look more like this:
Creatures (15)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (17)
Sideboard
Against G/B Delirium I needed to sideboard out Wharf Infiltrator and Voldaren Pariah because they’re so bad against removal, but that makes winning very difficult, as those are my best threats. Liliana’s Emblem isn’t realistic against them because they have removal and a lot of their own creatures, so a better way to win is absolutely needed.
Dragonlord Silumgar is the best option, and the one I had just wasn’t enough; it has to be a reliable gameplan (otherwise, the plan is just to win with Zombies, which can work, but it’s a stretch, especially since they sometimes have Virulent Plague).
Just the Wind is outstanding when your engine’s working, but it’s just too bad against control decks to play in the maindeck, and Transgress the Mind can fix a lot of the deck’s issues since it can prevent Liliana, the Last Hope or Kozilek’s Return.
I wish I’d realized how different the PT would look from the SCG Tour® had in advance, but I think it’s important to be able to take shots at a metagame when you’ve found an answer to a deck that you think might be everywhere, and I think this easily could have been the right time for it based on what I knew. I’m disappointed that I won’t be playing in Worlds, but I did love playing U/B Madness, even if a lot of my matches were a lot harder than I wanted, and I was kind of dreading each of my pairings as soon as I saw how the field broke in the first round.
As always, there’s always the next event and the next season. I fully expect to play in Worlds again.