“Can’t say that I like the deck at all. It seems too slow in a format defined by aggro, and its worst matchup is probably one of the most popular decks around. Plus, Owling Mine probably auto-wins, as you won’t be able to cast your spells fast enough.”
– SCG Forums (on J Evan Dean Ghazi-Chord deck)
Every once in a while, you run across a forum post silly enough that you just have to respond to it. Sometimes they are dumb, and you just want to point this out; other times, they feature contradictions inherent inside the post itself; and still other times, they display widespread misconceptions about a format or a deck that need to be refuted in order to make the general public smarter. In fact, this post just hit the trifecta, giving me an actual reason to write a Pro Tour: Honolulu recap two weeks after the event completed. (Sorry for the delay – the wife and I were busy enjoying paradise last week and I had a print magazine deadline to hit.) Now this is a slippery slope… answering forums is time consuming and frequently useless, especially for someone who has too little time for just about everything in life. However, understanding the new Standard format requires understanding why a large chunk of the post above is either misleading or incorrect. So today, I’m going to explain what I took away from Pro Tour: Honolulu, and how that should affect your Standard environment for months to come, while highlighting some of the cooler decks that you may have missed.
First I’ll give you the background material, in case you are lazy, busy, or both and haven’t done all the assigned reading for today’s discussion. Here’s the original article from coverage where I discussed what the archetypes were and how many people played them. Here’s the info in the Day 2 blog that shows the Day 2 rate for each archetype and the Day 2 metagame, and then here’s Sean McKeown take on the whole thing. Note that Sean and I have different archetypes listed – this is at least partly because I had three hours to do the breakdown and Sean had the comfort of doing it at home (or at work, or wherever he does things), and also partly because Sean and I disagree on some levels. In my mind, there is no such thing as Red/Green Zoo (they are all varieties of Gruul – Elves are perfectly capable of beating down!) and Sean probably cut things a bit too fine for my own preferences, but I respect his work nonetheless.
It seems too slow in a format defined by aggro…
Let me first say that I don’t care about The Mouth of the North’s deck (J. Evan Dean for those of you who somehow haven’t heard his friendly jabbering all the way from Canadia), but this statement is clearly incorrect. Yes, there were two aggro decks in the finals, but that’s far from the whole story. At the Pro Tour, the format wasn’t defined by aggro… it was defined by control, and one archetype that ate the control decks alive.
Take a look at the Day 2 Blog again and look at the percent of decks in each archetype that made it. Just over 33% of the field made it to the second day, so consider anything around there average. Now look at how the Zoo and Gruul Beats decks did. The numbers from that analysis show 27% and 22% respectively, which can be translated to “below average” or “pretty bad,” especially since these decks were highly represented.
Now look at the more aggressive Black/White decks. Aside from Ghost Husk (which I’ll discuss in a bit) and Warmenhoven’s deck, almost none of the Orzhov strategies are truly aggro… they are much more aggro-control or midgame. I mean honestly… can you really call a deck whose average goldfish is turn 6 aggressive? This includes Olivier’s deck, which is designed to win via card advantage and attrition – beatdown is purely incidental. With that in mind, now take a look at the advancement rates of regular Orzhov Aggro (~29%) and then Orzhov Descent (55.6%). Adding a card that beats aggro decks to your maindeck (Descendant of Kiyomaro), thus providing you more control, let you advance at nearly twice the rate of your Black/White cousins.
It’s likely true that Heezy Street and Jones/Moreno Zoo are the two best builds of the aggressive decks out there, but I think if you talked to either player, they’d likely tell you that their desire to play against Orzhov Descent decks all day long resides somewhere between slim and none. These guys got to the top (including a match win each in the elimination rounds) by demolishing all the Owling Mine decks that they got paired with at the end of the tournament. The control and aggro-control decks were good enough to take these decks down two weeks ago, and they will just get better now that they know what the targets look like.
In other words, expect there to be a lot of aggro decks seeing play, but control decks and control cards will still be the ones that define the format, particularly as the season progresses.
Rock, Paper, Scissors is back… or is it?
If you assume that many players will be running the aggressive decks for a while, you will find yourself in a metagame where Owl decks are non-existent because they just can’t beat Zoo or Gruul, and where tight control decks piloted by good players are winning. This will generally be true across the FNM landscape, and it would have been true at the Pro Tour level if some very clever players hadn’t decide to take the metagame gambit and run a deck with an autoloss to about 25% of the field. The Owl deck is utterly brilliant, and full props to the guys who ran it in Honolulu, but it might be one of those rare instances where it can only exist in a Pro Tour metagame.
The more control decks you know will exist (and Pros love to play control decks), the better Owl looks. If, however, you know that 40-60% of the kids will be running the hyper-aggressive decks this weekend, Owl suddenly looks really bad. The worse Owl looks, the better the control players will fare, which in turn makes the aggro decks worse decks to play. Unlike at the Pro Tour, there are always going to be lots of little kiddies playing beatdown at FNM, and the finals between Heezy and Jones just gives them more reason to think their choice is a good one. I love an Owl deck more than most, but the matchup percentage of most decks against this one is largely irrelevant and probably will be for a while.
Additionally, I’m pretty sure that even the control decks can beat Owling Mine now that they know it exists. Owl players utterly blindsided people in Honolulu. In fact, I can practically guarantee you that from now on, when someone sits down across from a French or Japanese player who casts a turn 2 Howling Mine, they will be much more likely to say “Oh sh**, what am I in for this time?” than “Nice deck, n00b.”
Decks You Might Have Missed
With 410 people playing and something like thirty different archetypes represented, it was easy to overlook some of the cooler decks at the tournament. I’m going to briefly discuss a few of them today, and I’m also going to let the readers choose which one I take for a test drive next week so that I can write an article about it, so peep the forums if you want to have a say in this.
Aside from Owling Mine, perhaps the two coolest decks to come out of Hawaii were the Heartbeat Combo update and Michael Diezel’s Ghost Husk deck. StarWarsKid is rumored to be writing about Heartbeat for next week, but you might have missed Diezel’s deck.
Creatures (26)
- 4 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
- 2 Savannah Lions
- 4 Kami of Ancient Law
- 3 Nantuko Husk
- 4 Dark Confidant
- 2 Ghost Council of Orzhova
- 3 Orzhov Pontiff
- 4 Plagued Rusalka
Lands (22)
Spells (12)
I’m not sure why everyone missed this deck, but Diezel was the only person at the entire Pro Tour to run anything like it. The synergy between the early beatdown plus Promise of Bunrei, Orzhov Pontiff, and Nantuko Husk is both obvious and startling, and I found myself growing more and more attached to the deck the more I saw Diezel play it. Michael didn’t quite have enough gas left in his tank to make the Top 8, but the deck deserves credit for being cool, rogue, and very good. There’s still a chance that Diezel himself will be writing about this deck for us soon, but if not, I’ll be happy to battle with it for a while in his stead.
Another deck very high on the cool factor but without a sterling finish to back it up was Ninja Stompy. The deck is mislabeled in the StarCityGames database, and deck designer Tomoharu Saito’s 56th place decklist appears to be one of the ones that was missing from the Sideboard, but I’m reasonably certain that 27th place finisher Soo Han Yoon played an identical list to Saito. I didn’t see enough of the deck to even know if this archetype is particularly good (the players were rarely playing at the top tables), but the idea of attacking with a Bird of Paradise into a Ninja of the Deep Hours, and later into a Rumbling Slum, while actually casting Thoughts of Ruin in a competitive deck should excite at least a few folks out there.
Creatures (21)
- 4 Ninja of the Deep Hours
- 2 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Kird Ape
- 3 Dryad Sophisticate
- 4 Rumbling Slum
Lands (22)
Spells (17)
The last two decks I wanted to mention today are control decks. Before the Pro Tour, I predicted there would be a lot of Wildfire decks running around. I honestly thought the deck was quite good, and assumed most of the players knew this as well. For whatever reason, Wildfire went largely unplayed, but I feel at least moderately vindicated by Nikolas Nygaard’s 10th place finish with the same version of the deck I thought more people would default to. This is what it looks like, and it’s been popular (and successful) on Magic Online for some time now.
Creatures (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (33)
- 1 Genju of the Spires
- 3 Pyroclasm
- 4 Stone Rain
- 3 Tidings
- 4 Sleight of Hand
- 3 Wildfire
- 3 Mana Leak
- 4 Eye of Nowhere
- 4 Demolish
- 4 Compulsive Research
Sideboard
Nygaard has a brief discussion with Aaron Forsythe on MagictheGathering.com today, so if you want to see more of his comments about the deck – plus its good and bad matchups – you might want to hop over to the mothership and click on coach’s headline.
Finally, we get to a deck that you cannot play fast enough to win with… unless you are Kamiel Cornelissen. I dubbed it Firemane Control when I did the deck breakdown, because that’s what it is – a control deck designed to abuse the lifegain from Firemane Angels, and Zur’s Weirding in order to lock opponents out of the game. Julien Nuijten also played this deck and started something like 0-1-3 with it before calling it a weekend, but it was still good enough to earn one of the consistently best players in the world a Top 16 finish, and therefore deserves some notice.
Creatures (5)
Lands (24)
Spells (32)
As I said above, I’ll be writing about a Standard deck a week for the next month or so, and I’ll start with whatever one you guys choose from our forum poll this week. There are actually more cool decks beyond the ones I noted here, but they have either already been talked about on this here site here (Ghost Dad, Ghazi-Chord), or stand a good chance of having someone more notable than myself write about them in the next week or two (Heartbeat Combo, Mizzet Control, Izzetron, Hand in Hand). Whatever your preference, Standard is an amazing format right now, and I highly recommend you play some in the very near future.
So there you have it, my take on the Standard format going forward, and also some decks that you might have missed if you weren’t lucky enough to attend the Pro Tour. Next time, I’ll be back with a new Kitchen Sink section and the inside scoop on one of the decks discussed above. Until then, I hope you never lose to color screw unless you’re playing Zoo.
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