It was a great eleven days on the road, but man is it good to be home. My trip consisted of the Season Two Invitational in Columbus and Grand Prix Charlotte (with a week in Roanoke, VA in between), where my win percentage was well under 50%. It was one of the worst trips for me as far as my win rate is concerned, and I’m not quite sure how that happened.
Last week, I talked about how I was playing worse than I ever have at the Invitational. For Grand Prix Charlotte, that didn’t seem to be the case. I knew my Jund deck was threat-light, which was intentional, and maybe that caused my downfall. However, Brad Nelson, who finished in 23rd with the same 75 as me, was 11-1 at one point. Whatever shortcomings the deck had did not appear to hinder him.
Here is our deck:
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (24)
Spells (19)
It looks weird, but that’s because it’s highly metagamed against the top tier. Typically that can be a mistake, especially in Modern, because there’s no guarantee that you’ll play against the decks you prepared for. However, Brad and I made an effort to not reduce our chances against normal Modern decks while also trying to get ahead against the “good” decks.
In my Round Three feature match, I mulliganned a bunch, but me being threat light definitely bit me. I treated cards like Choke and Night of Souls’ Betrayal as threats in the Twin matchup, but Choke was definitely awful in practice. Then again, I also sideboarded in stuff like Thragtusk, so maybe I wasn’t as threat-light as the games would suggest.
There’s still plenty I could have done differently though. In hindsight, I don’t like how passively I played game three, especially considering that I expected my opponent to have two copies of Keranos, God of the Storms after sideboard. If I jammed Tarmogoyf on turn two and Liliana of the Veil on turn three, the game likely would have been very different. Either way, the game would have been much easier had I drawn a turn-one discard spell, but that’s not something I can realistically blame.
I did appreciate Cedric and Patrick making fun of my opponent’s Blood Moons though. Blood Moon has defeated me exactly twice lifetime, and both times it was my fault. While I may have made mistakes, losing to Blood Moon with Jund is one that I tried to make not happen again and it worked out well in that match.
The rest of the tournament consisted of me losing to B/W Midrange, Affinity, and defeating a Naya Collected Company deck. That’s a lot of Mirran Crusaders and not a whole lot of what my Fulminator Mages were supposed to be good against, but that’s Modern. I made it a point that I didn’t want my deck to be too inbred because it would be too difficult to beat the random decks, but I ended up losing to the random decks anyway. That doesn’t seem to be 100% a product of my deckbuilding since the games were often very close, but it’s still a valuable lesson to learn.
There were a lot of excuses. If I were independently wealthy, I would have probably gotten my own hotel room and gotten a good night’s sleep. Maybe I needed to test more on Magic Online during the week instead of railbird the real life Mortal Kombat X VS Video featuring Todd Anderson VS The Boss. Maybe I should have done some laundry before I left so I could have worn my comfortable StarCityGames t-shirt instead of the StarCityGames polo that was less comfortable. Maybe I suck at Magic. Maybe my hair is too long.
Who knows.
Either way, I’m happy to be taking a break and hopefully I’ll be in a better mindset at my next tournament.
Jund wasn’t what I was definitely going to play. The week leading up to Grand Prix Charlotte, I had become disenchanted with the notion of red cards in my B/G deck. Lightning Bolt was the real draw, but that actually just meant I wanted cheap interaction against decks like Affinity and Burn.
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (25)
Spells (17)
Chad Kastel won Modern States with this deck earlier this year, but I went behind his back and played Jund at mine which was actually what got me hooked on the deck in the first place. I knew straight B/G was a viable option, so with red losing its luster, I decided to revisit it.
This deck uses Courser of Kruphix as an engine instead of Dark Confidant and aims to play a slightly longer, grindier game. In a Kolaghan’s Command world, that’s not entirely viable though. Whether your opponent is Grixis or Jund, you will likely be on the receiving end of a Kolaghan’s Command, and that typically beats out the incremental advantage gained from Courser of Kruphix.
Night of Souls’ Betrayal is a great card in Modern, as a lot of the cheap, efficient creatures only have a single toughness. Splinter Twin also can’t combo you out with the card, so it’s a nice way to be able to tap out and not have to fear anything.
The manabase is great since it has a bunch of basics and you get to play Treetop Village instead of mopey Raging Ravines. Twilight Mire is phenomenal at fixing your mana for both Courser of Kruphix and Liliana of the Veil. Disfigure is a fine Lightning Bolt replacement if you’re trying to play a more controlling game, but being unable to use it against planeswalkers is certainly depressing at times. Overall, it’s a simple tradeoff for consistency over power. In some Modern metagames, that might be exactly what you want, but I don’t think that time is now.
I liked Dark Confidant in the more aggressive Jund deck, but didn’t think it made a lot of sense in the grindier Courser of Kruphix version. Lots of people were moving onto decks like Grixis and Jund where killing Dark Confidant was of the utmost priority. Perhaps with that in mind I should have stayed away from Jund entirely, but I had been winning more than enough online to convince me that Jund was pretty good regardless.
After a couple pre-board and post-board games against Jake Mondello and his Grixis Control deck, I threw my deck in the figurative trashcan.
The next deck I worked on was what I probably should have played.
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (25)
Spells (17)
Noble Hierarch and Knight of the Reliquary don’t make too much sense in a shell with discard and Liliana of the Veil, but the logic train made sense. I didn’t care for red but wanted something that could interact early. For some people, that means playing Lightning Bolt, but it could also mean accelerating your mana into earlier three-mana plays.
Having a one-mana accelerator opened the door for Knight of the Reliquary to be a playable card, which meant I didn’t have to devote as many maindeck slots to pure hate for Amulet Bloom or G/R Tron. It also functioned as more Tarmogoyfs (read: must-kill threats) in the B/G/X mirrors. This build seemed to solve a lot of problems, but no one was willing to take the plunge with me.
There’s a part of me that’s scared to take that plunge because I feel like it might sabotage my tournament and everything I’ve been working on. However, there’s a larger part of me which knows that everything I’ve been working on has led to that point, where I know the deck I was working on was no longer the best choice and that better options exist.
My Jund deck was likely good and my Abzan deck was likely untuned, but even if I was off by ten cards, it was still probably better than the best Jund deck. There used to be times when I’d see a deck that night before the tournament, have a huge urge to audible but ultimately refuse to the pull the trigger. I’d see copies of those decks make the Top 8 and be left wondering what could have been. I need to get better at recognizing that urge as something to be listened to, as it is rarely born out of irrational fear.
Anyway, one thing I really liked about this Abzan deck was the Voice of Resurgences. This is something I’ll likely cover in-depth in the future, but by tuning my deck to be good against G/R Tron and Amulet Bloom (granted, I only did somewhat, but not fully), I get a little bit of leeway to include cards that are good against the rest of the field. If, at the top tables, I expected Jund and Twin, Voice of Resurgence would be a great card to have.
So where do you go from here? There are Modern PPTQs all over the place, and that’s probably the best place to get started for any Pro Tour hopeful. The best advice I can give is to not get too creative or inbred. The Top Sixteen of Grand Prix Charlotte was incredibly diverse, even moreso than we’ve come to expect from Modern, which is very impressive considering I thought the format was actually narrowing.
People tend to stick with what they know, which is a good move, but it’s also one that is borne out of necessity. Switching decks last minute isn’t something that most players can do, so expecting metagame shifts to take place at a local level in response to a big tournament isn’t the wisest course of action. You should play what you know and tune it to beat the expected metagame.
Looking forward to the StarCityGames Open in Indianapolis or Grand Prix Providence this weekend, everyone’s eyes have turned back to Standard. I was impressed by the thrashing I received at the hands of Rob Vaughan at the Season Two Invitational, so I decided to start looking there.
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (26)
Spells (17)
Instead of what appeared to be a great choice in a field of green decks, I was actively disappointed in how the deck did for me in the Standard Super League. Then again, I lost round one in each of the last three weeks, so maybe it wasn’t the deck’s fault exactly.
Still, there seemed to be a big issue with needing to cast Dig Through Time in order to win. There are a lot of backdoors to get there with Satyr Wayfinder and Den Protector, but it never seemed to come together. When playing against Rob at the Invitational, his deck seemed to operate on a Fish-style level, controlling the game while also sneaking in some points here and there with Den Protector and Deathmist Raptor. Conveniently, those cards also add to your engine, so if your opponent doesn’t have those cards themselves it’s pretty easy to get buried before the game even really starts.
When everyone else has that package and a bigger endgame, it can be difficult though. Disdainful Stroke, Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver, and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon are supposed to be the big trumps there, but it’s far from foolproof. With all the morphs and manifests running around, Ugin doesn’t necessarily wipe the board clear, so sometimes it’s a Crux of Fate-style sweeper that almost certainly leaves their board more intact than yours.
While Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver can potentially run away with a game, if your opponent is able to break through your defenses Ashiok does little more than soak up some damage. Disdainful Stroke is supposed to help you trade efficiently, but is often pretty bad against Thoughtseize, the morph package, and Dragonlord Dromoka.
Overall, there are numerous issues, but that’s hardly enough to stop Sultai Control from being a viable deck– it just means Sultai Control will likely not become a dominant force. I appreciate the attempt to build a green deck that is hateful toward mirror matches, but unless your cards line up perfectly against theirs you will wish you were playing some of the more proactive, powerful cards.
I’m going to give Sultai Control another shot, but if that doesn’t pan out, I guess I’ll try my hand at Abzan… just like everybody else.