When last we left our hero, he was strapped to a large metal table and the busty, incredibly hot villainess was threatening to cut short his playboy ways – quite literally – with one swipe of her laser-powered circumciser. Will he ever get out this precarious position and escape the femme fatale’s dungeon to rise again, or will Teddy Card Game be forced to change his last name to Bobbitt? Find out on the next exhilarating edition of… Mixed kNuts: The Skeleton Bones of Standard!
If the rest of this article is half as thrilling as the lead-in, we’ll have a real winner on our hands.
The Obvious
Time to bring the ruckus. Quietly.
Yesterday we discussed the ridiculous dominance that Gifts Ungiven decks held over Kamigawa Block Constructed. I contended that, at least at the Grand Prix level, the deck was more dominant than Affinity. You replied that…
well, you…
it appears that you sat there silently nursing your crush on Joss Whedon, letting my pelting of words wash over you like so much rain to be toweled off later. That’s fine. I know you are reading. I do not demand your worship, nor your obedience, nor even your agreement. I merely demand your attention, and since I had that (and presumably do so once again – thank you), we can move on.
White Weenie
After Gifts, the next obvious deck you will be encountering is White Weenie. The Men (and cats, and dogs) of the Pale Schwanz seemed practically determined to make the CoK Block moniker their own during the PTQ season and there is plenty of reason to expect more of the same for States. Leonin Skyhunter and Glorious Anthem (how good would this deck have been with Crusade? Huh? Foolish mortals!) practically demand that you play with the weenies, to the point that I fully expect at least five sexual harassment suits to be brought against Tournament Organizers on Monday, October 24th.
What we really want to know is: Are the little Whities tight? Are they fully capable of mising savage tings? Was this entire section one giant excuse to vent all the Magic penis jokes I’ve been responsibly avoiding for the past year. The answer to all this questions is a resounding yes.
Straight White Weenie certainly probably maybe will not be the best deck in the field (remember, White Weenie was terrible against a good Gifts player during Block season – it has to gain a substantial bump just to be competitive against the best control decks and I’m not sure if Anthem, Skyhunter, and Suppression Field are enough), but it will see a lot of play and it is perfectly capable of winning. As for whether or not some splash puts White Weenie over the hump (ahem, so to speak) into pure tier 1 territory, well you’ll just have to wait until next week for the answer to that one. Obviously the basic decklist is going to be simple to figure out and I expect most tech on this particular deck to be in the open a week or two before States comes around.
Black Aggro
I’m skeptical about whether or not straight Black aggro decks will exist in the next season in any form. First of all, White Weenie will be popular and Hand of Honor exists, so you have problem #1. Second of all, Black Hand wasn’t exatly awesome in Block Constructed, and while Black is a house in Ravnica, most of the best cards from that set not named Dark Confidant involve a G or a U in the top right corner. Putrefy actually solves a host of Black weaknesses, so while I think there will be Black cards played at States, they aren’t likely to be in aggressive Mono-Black deck.
Sadly for my sanity, I continue to find the Rat Pack at least moderately intriguing to build decks around. Don’t get the reference? Picture Nezumi Graverobber and Nezumi Shortfang as Deano and Sammy, the overworked and underespected Ravenous Rats as Joey Bishop, and the always welcome Ink-Eyes as a strange, ratty Sinatra doppleganger. Extremely stretched metaphors aside, I think Rats are probably dead without Aether Vial around to make them useful. Maybe we should just switch subjects before this gets too weird, eh?
As for Black Control, I can definitely see that one happening, but once again, doesn’t the deck just get better if it splashes something, particularly when you have eight on-color non-Basics to make life easier?
Mono-Red Aggro
Allow me a brief moment to tell you a tale. When I was a wee Magician, barely knee-high to a toadstool and not yet three apples tall, I smurfed a Red deck as hard as a young fella could smurf. The apes of kird gilded my loins, floating goblins clothed my chest and arms. Bolts of lightning were my sword and a Blood Lust shone in my eyes.
I was a pretty f***ing scary smurf, let me tell you.
Then one day, something happened. All my playthings disappeared and when I came back, I learned to hate what I once smurfed. These newfangled Jackal Pups weren’t fun, nor were the Wastelands and Tangle Wires that invariably nipped at the dog’s heels. Perhaps worst were the Rishadan Ports that spelled “m-a-n-a-s-c-r-e-w” more completely than keeping a one-lander on the play ever could. Something had tainted my former unadulterated joy in Red aggro and I knew not when or how it could be recaptured.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. This fellow named Arc-Slogger (who looked nothing like Nathan Lane), combined with a much smaller fellow named Slith Firewalker (who sounded nothing like Zero Mostel) to reinvigorate me. Soon I was once again playing almost nothing but Red, and I returned to my previous joyous state (which may or may not had everything to do with minor exuberance from never having to face “Red Deck Wins” in Extended again, but whatever).
What am I trying to tell you? Like Master Paskins, I too know and love a Red deck. Also like Master Paskins, I hate a White Weenie deck. Sadly, the rotation of Mirrodin block guts aggro Red strategies. You get no Slogs, no Slith, no Magma Jet, no Molten Rain, and no joy in Mudville. There were tears of fire shed at many a prerelease this weekend, let me tell you. Stealing good Blue cards still wasn’t enough to ease the pain of our loss. Unfortunately, after looking over what’s left in Standard for Red, it appears that the only way Red is going to be good in aggressive form is to combine forces with the little White bastards in some Boros abomination.
Mono-Red is dead baby… Mono-Red is dead.
Mono-Blue
During Kamigawa Block season, this was the deck that gave Gifts Ungiven players the most trouble. A full complement of maindeck Pithing Needles plus counterspells, Threads of Disloyalty, and the best draw engine in the Block made it difficult for both aggro and control decks to find enough offense to take Blue players down before card drawing and Meloku put the game away. The deck obviously gets better when you add 9th Edition and Ravnica to the mix (as does everything else), but one of the major questions I have is whether it will remain pure or choose to absorb either the traditional White or Black complements to the counterspell and card drawing suite. Mana Leak is a better two-mana counter outside of Block than Hisoka’s Defiance, and almost anything would be better at the four-mana slot than Minamo’s Meddling, so those are obvious upgrades, but there are problems here that you may not be able to solve.
For starters, the block draw engine is clunky. Do you really want to run seven creature draw spells anymore, particularly in a format where every deck is better equipped to kill them? I’m thinking the answer is a definite no. Yes, Telling Time is an automatic include in any deck playing Blue and not running Tops. Unfortunately, Telling Time is a card quality spell, not a card advantage one and you still lack an obvious replacement for Thirst for Knowledge (Tidings seems a smidge expensive when you are gasping for breath early and need good stuff right now), while Azami still costs five mana before she rolls deep. Compulsive Research is like the ugly sister of Thirst for Knowledge that your wingman gets saddled with so you can mack on the goods all night without feeling bad. Sorcery speed? Life’s too fast for that, baby, especially when it wants you to discard your most precious resource in order to make it not suck. Additionally, how happy are you going to be when White Weenie slips in a turn 2 Suppression Field when you don’t have mana yet to counter it. Does Disrupting Shoal become a necessity at that point? The list of unknowns here makes me almost as uncomfortable as the time I was stuck in the middle seat on a flight back from Japan between to two old ladies that apparently had never heard of deodorant nor recently had baths. No I would not like to snuggle for warmth, thankyouverymuch. [Worst. Flight. Ever. – Knut]
The bigger problem, however, is the more obvious one… can this deck even compete in Standard without Vedalken Shackles? The counterspells and the card drawing, they ain’t what they used to be and without some form of creature control beyond Threads of Disloyalty (Hint: Consuming Vortex isn’t it), methinks Mono-Blue will have a fundamental turn that ends up overwhelmed more frequently than it is able to stabilize. My guess is that this deck will end up looking wholesale for another color in order to be able to compete in Standard, and that other color will probably push it into the Dimir guild or into an aggro-control form like Flores’s Critical Mass. Then again, Mono-Blue strategies are surprisingly adaptive… it’s possible I’m missing something.
The Ringer
This is going to sound weird, especially coming from me since I’m typically pretty harsh on Timmy decks in my metagame predictions, but one of the hottest archetypes for the upcoming Standard season is almost certainly going to be enchantment-based. The Norwegian Good Form deck (originally detailed by Thomas Gundersen on this very site) will almost certainly have legs in some different form, but there’s more to the story than just Enduring Ideal. Wizards made a big push on enchantments in Ravnica and that’s always one of the crucial areas deck designers want to focus during a new season, since it often leads to oh-so-fresh brokenness.
Enduring Ideal still represents the route most likely to succeed, but Three Dreams is just filled with potential, as is Auratouched Mage. Good Form itself has lost a substantial chunk of acceleration, but that doesn’t seem terribly difficult to overcome if you want to run some extra Green cards. Can the new and the old combine their powers to form something more impressive than a pail of cold water? Time will tell, but there’s definitely something here, and States players love to play the Hondens deck almost as much as they love running Green/Black or White Weenie. When you are all honest with yourselves, you’ll admit that Good Form is really just a competitive Hondens deck and you like it that way, don’t you?
Engine, Engine Number 9
Thus far I’ve covered the decks we have left over from the current Standard season, but another important item to examine at the beginning of a new season is what engines exist that may deserve breaking. I’ve already discussed the enchantment engines and the Mono-Blue draw engine, but there are a couple of other pre-Ravnica engines that may warrant some playtesting as well.
The first thing to mention is simply that Weathered Wayfarer is once again in the format as are the Urza lands, meaning you can create a ton of mana again simply by activating the nomad cleric land searcher three times at most. Last time this was the case we were forced to deal with a hellacious amount of Mono-White Control decks in Standard, but those decks killed with instant speed token generators, recurring Dragons, and lifegaining angels. What would these decks kill with now and do they have enough mass removal to make that a viable strategy? Blazing Archon is strong like bull, but he dies to every Banish in the game – not what I want from a creature that is ostensibly worse than Akroma while costing one mana more. The art’s better though, so, you know, bonus.
The second thing to mention also deals with Weathered Wayfarer, but takes his potential in a completely different direction. Your appetizer course looks like this: Wayfarer + Sensei’s Divining Top = combo. It’s cheaper and less restrictive than Journeyer’s Kite + Top (another available advantage engine), though it’s admittedly more fragile as well. At least you now know you are cooking with gas and you have the option of adding Gift of Estates to Plains-fix.
The main course smells more like this: Is there a Five-Color White deck somewhere in our future? Or maybe you just run the G/W cards and use the little man to fill in holes in the domain…? Some of the costs on the White cards certainly feel as if they are designed for a format that once again has a lot of mana available, and though we’ve lost Sylvan Scrying and nine-mana Green sorceries, it’s certainly possible to play a one-mana White one-drop and end up with similar results. There’s something here children, I’d bet my chocolate salty balls on it.
Other specific cards in the metagame that deserve note as possible core strategies are: Wildfire, Battle of Wits (damn the lack of aura!), Early Harvest, Slate of Ancestry, and the rest of the Epic cycle.
That’s all the strategic pondering I have for this week, folks. I’ll leave it to the rest of the writing staff to try and break off a little somethin somethin in the next four weeks, and then I’ll be back to tell you exactly what your States metagame will look like, including suggestions on which decks you should be playing.
The Kitchen Sink
Alright, I’ll make y’all a deal. I’ll keep writing this section just like I always have, provided – and this is where you come in – you guys actually make a comment about the article itself along with whatever else you want to say about the fun stuff. It’s a little disconcerting to have 12 pages of legit text ignored in favor one random comment that inspires a bout of rampant Whedonism from the fanboys. Quid pro quo, little Clarice.
That said, I am never bringing up Joss Whedon in an article I care about again. Even if he is the genius that brought “Smile Time” and “Hush” into my home.
I swear to God, when StarCityGames.com fires me I’m going to become a musician and the first hit song I write will be called “Wake Me Up When People Stop Playing That F***ing Green Day Song.”
My 29th birthday is about three weeks from now (completely unaffordable birthday wishlist to follow on my journal sometime soon), so I recently added yet another project I will never finish to my writing “to do” list. Sometime between now and the end of the year I hope to complete the Knutson Top 150, detailing the 150 most influential songs in my life and to be doled out in 25-song increments in future Mixed kNuts articles. (And to be updated once a decade, though that presumably has no relevance whatsoever to you folk). Recently added to the list of contenders was “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, IL” by Sufjan Stevens, which may be the most beautiful song I’ve heard in the last two years. I keep thinking of it as being in the same category as Peter Gabriel’s mindblowing and completely unknown song from Up called “Signal to Noise.”
It rather freaks me out that the strange speech impediment and sayings that originated with Virginia Magic legend Jon Lewis (known to pretty much everyone as “Mush”) has quietly spread across the nation and can be found in various and sundry Magic forum signature files. It was just white noise for a long time until I noticed JSS children in Baltimore discussing the requirement of “more goblinsch” for their “goblin grenadesch.” Even more alarming is that Mush showed up at the prerelease in Richmond this past weekend, marking the first time in years that any of us had seen the myth in perthon. I was discussing this particular phenomenon with Pete Hoefling recently and he noted that it’s one of John Sorrentino’s legacies. The origin story apparently comes from the following chat and certainly predates when I got involved in VA Magic back in 2000:
Mush: “My deck isch scho schick… I drafted, like, twenty Ghitu Schlingers!”
Sorrentino: “So, how’d you do?”
Mush: “Well… I loscht.”
Sorrentino: “How?!?!”
Mush: “I couldn’t draw a Schlinger!”
Thus from this point forward, whenever small children are overheard commenting that “The only thing better than goblinsch is more goblinsch,” I shall liken it to an angel earning its wings.
Except if Sorrentino is involved, it’s probably dramatically more entertaining than that.
I hope you enjoyed today’s preponderance of prognostication. Feel free to chime in on the forums and tell me what I missed. I’m sure the list is probably extensive.
Cheers,
Teddy Card Game
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I used to be underrated.
Now I take iron.
Makes my sh*t constipated.
I’m more concentrated.
–Fugees, How Many Mics