I know that if I hadn’t been qualified for Pro Tour Amsterdam, I
probably
would have ignored the event entirely and gone on with my life. If that’s your plan, this article is probably one to skip — but if you’re even the least bit curious about what transpired at Amsterdam, you should read on.
First, let me introduce you to Extended.
A) The format for the Pro Tour included the following blocks and sets: 10
th
Edition, Magic 2010, Magic 2011, Time Spiral, Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, Shards of Alara, Zendikar.
B) The format was largely irrelevant to those not qualified for the Pro Tour, since Extended won’t be a PTQ season until Scars of Mirrodin rotates in, and hence Time Spiral rotates out, which will drastically alter the Extended landscape. Very few articles were written on the format, and very few Extended events fired in the weeks leading up to the Pro Tour.
C) The main sources for decklists from the “general public” came from Magic Online, Magic-League, and some Japanese websites. None of these sources represented what the actual metagame would be — but they provided some hints.
I watched Magic-League in particular for signs of metagame shifts. From what I could observe, the major forces in Extended were Punishing Fire/Grove of the Burnwillows, blue-based control, Faeries, and combo of various sorts. Out of these, the Punishing Grove combo was the defining interaction of the format and dictated what decks people were willing to play.
You had to respect the Grove combo in order to have a real chance. It felt like almost every deck was either running, or splashing, Punishing Fires. Every deck from R/G Scapeshift, to U/W/R Reveillark, to Teachings Control, to Mono-Red, to Pyromancer Ascension, to Ad Nauseam combo had put in some portion of the Grove combo.
But just because Grove was a large part of the format
didn’t
mean creature or weenie decks were invalidated. You just had to find a way to cleverly decrease the relevance of having the Grove combo active, and take advantage of the fact that the combo is pretty slow in the early turns of the game.
There are definitely a few particular cards that people shied away from playing because of the prevalence of the combo — cards like Tidehollow Sculler, Fauna Shaman, and Lotus Cobra. All are very powerful cards that have seen lots of play in formats without the Grove combo. I imagine cards like Figure of Destiny, Student of Warfare, Kargan Dragonlord, Magus of the Moon, Sower of Temptation, and Scion of Oona also saw a lot of splash damage from the Grove combo’s ubiquitousness.
When trying to figure out whether a creature is worth running or not despite its weakness to Fire, you have to think of the initial investment you put into each card. The more you have to invest in a card to make it good, the worse it is against Punishing Fire’s cheap, repeatable removal. But sometimes the advantages are worth it. Fauna Shaman is a good example of a card that — in most decks — just won’t act fast enough to be worth running, since the activation of the ability, as well as casting whatever creature you just Tutored for, will take much additional time and mana investment.
An interesting exception seemed to be
Terry Soh deck
, which ran Fauna Shamans in combination with hasty creatures like Vengevine, Demigod of Revenge, Bloodbraid Elf, and some utility and mana creatures. Discarding a Demigod or a Vengevine in order to find a Bloodbraid Elf does a lot to minimize the time/mana wasted on Shaman.
There are some other directions one can go in a Punishing Fire format: we’ve already seen how the ChannelFireball crew handled it with their Doran deck, which they just stuffed full of three-toughness creatures, eliminating Noble Hierarchs and adding Loam Lions. Obviously they avoided Tidehollow Scullers and just opted for big beaters in Tarmogoyf, Putrid Leech, and Knight of the Reliquary. And instead of vulnerable creature-based disruption, they went with more discard spells. (And it worked!)
The other breakout deck was White Weenie — which I honestly suspected would be a non-entity solely because of Punishing Fire and Fallout. I was wrong. The way it evaded Punishing Fire was by having a couple plans against it:
a) dealing massive amounts of damage with early but large beaters, like Steppe Lynx or the “levelers”;
b) Honor of the Pure, which put most of its creatures at three toughness;
c) Using well-timed cards like Brave the Elements and Mana Tithe to delay a burn spell until you could pump the creatures past the point of vulnerability;
d) Just dealing enough damage in one turn to make Punishing Grove quickly irrelevant.
Elves combo also is known for being very weak to an active Punishing Fire — and in game 1, the Elves player can only hope the opponent doesn’t have the combo early. If the opponent doesn’t have it, elves can either win quickly, or set up multiple Elvish Archdruids or a Joraga Warcaller. (Pendelhaven also helps.) Post-board, Elves has more options with Leyline of Vitality and Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender.
Hunter Burton also had Eldrazi Monuments in his sideboard — if you just get one turn where you can produce five mana, it can come down and dominate against red decks. It can get even more dominating when you throw in Primal Command, which has a tendency to produce massive advantage against many decks in the format — especially when you can cast it on turn 3. Joraga Treespeaker on the play is also fast enough to level up once before a Fire can smack it down.
Faeries seemed to have a particularly hard time against Fire, but Faeries still showed up amongst the top decks. I particularly liked the addition of Shadowmage Infiltrator to some Faeries builds, as it seemed like a very easy and effective draw-engine that had three toughness to evade Punishing Fire and Fallout. The other tech was to include Tectonic Edge to eliminate the Groves. Pendelhaven also could protect the 1/1 Faeries from an active Fire.
Some builds also had Relic of Progenitus somewhere in their seventy-five, and presumably for more than just the Punishing Grove combo; it provided a way to eliminate the Fire in the graveyard, if given an opening.
The deck I played (along with Zvi’s entire team) seemed weak to Punishing Fire when taken at face value…. But in testing, we found otherwise. Zvi will discuss the deck extensively in a future article, but let me quickly relate what our plan against Punishing Fire was. The decklist was as follows:
Creatures (30)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 4 Baneslayer Angel
- 3 Iona, Shield of Emeria
- 4 Lotus Cobra
- 4 Nest Invader
- 3 Primeval Titan
Lands (26)
Spells (4)
My particular list was slightly different — this is what Gaudenis Vidugiris ran to a 26
th
place finish. Some of us had small variations, like Terastodon instead of a fourth Iona, or a fourth Primeval Titan over the fourth Baneslayer Angel. But for the most part, we ran the exact same seventy-five.
The deck obviously looks and operates very much like Mythic in Standard — but goes even bigger with the help of Summoning Trap and hideaway lands. The lands really made the deck work.
The fear of Punishing Fire could’ve kept us from running cards like Lotus Cobra or mana dorks, but we could invalidate Punishing Fire in a few ways. Our deck could quickly go big — big like Knight of the Reliquary or Baneslayer Angel, at which point killing all the small dudes wouldn’t do much to help our opponent. Or it could simply force the opponent to keep Firing small dorks just to keep a hideaway land from activating, which would distract them long enough for us to play more lands and get to our larger spells. Being able to hit one guy at a time generally wasn’t devastating for us; we were much more afraid of Pyroclasm effects (thus, Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tenders and Ranger of Eos from the sideboard).
All three lands from the sideboard could also help mitigate Punishing Fire in their own way — Tectonic Edge probably being the most effective. For a long time, we considered putting a second Edge in, but found we didn’t have the room in the end.
One of the interesting matchups we tested was our deck post-board versus a burn-heavy R/G aggro deck (with no Scapeshift). The burn deck post-board ran cards like Flame Slash, Fallout, Punishing Fire, Rift Bolt, and possibly even Lightning Bolt (I forget). In any case, there were a million burn spells, and we
still
managed to win some games (Zvi had the best record at 50-50). We considered this our worst-case scenario, and we figured most people wouldn’t be running so many burn spells from the sideboard. By testing this way, we realized that our weakest matchup was not unwinnable, and we just needed to play a certain way to maximize our chances of victory against removal-heavy decks.
I feel our deck could’ve done a lot better. Many people have come up to me saying, “Your deck looked terrible.” But that’s the same thing people said to me after seeing the Mythic deck. It wasn’t our best choice for this tournament, but it certainly wasn’t a
terrible
deck; otherwise, we wouldn’t have been winning games with it in testing. Our deck could be considered terrible, perhaps, in comparison to some of Zvi’s other creations, which have all done a lot better in events… But even people with the best track records stumble from time to time. Zvi will tell you why things turned out the way they did for this event, once we do some more testing with the deck.
The lesson I learned here and with Mythic and with Elves combo (which I also tested) is that fast mana can be very powerful, even when you’re fighting harsh elements like burn spells. If the mana is fast and resilient enough, you can quickly advance past the moment where you are vulnerable to certain spells and into another stage of the game where those same burn spells no longer do anything.
The way Zvi builds his decks is not to fear the elements and just go big. He will push his decks to the limit until they’re doing such powerful things that he is no longer playing the same game as his opponent. In a way, he is a deck building idealist — and sometimes idealists fall like Icarus, burned by their own ambition. And sometimes, you just get there…
Don’t tell Zvi I said that, though.
<3,
Mulldrifting