Last week, in the Philosophy of Fire, I talked about the death of one of my pet decks. Though I had put considerable effort into the Big Red deck, its burial ended up being bearable for me because I had another Rogue deck that I liked even more. This deck was the culmination of dozens of hours of testing and tuning and theory in working with another designer for whom I have a lot of respect.
He spilled the beans as it were in his own column on another site, so I figure, especially if I am not playing the deck anyway, I’d write a more exhaustive article, talking about the development of the deck and how we came to the conclusions we came to.
“I believe you gave up the Big Red deck first.” –Seth Burn
The deck started off like this:
4 Detonate / Shatter
4 Starstorm
3 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
4 Eternal Dragon
3 Pristine Angel
4 Silver Knight
4 Worship
4 Wrath of God
10 Mountain
14 Plains
2 Temple of the False God
We tested both Detonate and Shatter. Josh liked Detonate more, but the versatility of Shatter as an instant was better against Skullclamp, at least as far as I could tell.
This deck is obviously very deliberate. It assumes a three-archetype metagame of Affinity, Goblin Bidding, and other White decks. It is fundamentally very good against Affinity. It can stall with the two-mana spells, into a Wrath of God, into a potential turn 5 Akroma’s Vengeance.
Against Goblins, the deck does not have a great fundamental game. It is almost purely a combination deck. It plays for the Worship and has ten creatures that combine for a soft lock against Goblins with that Worship. This plan has some holes… but it was good enough for a generally favorable game one against the little Red men.
The deck was weakest against White opponents. In game one, it would be overpowered by their superior control spells, so it would have to fall back on a Dwarven Blastminer sideboard plan. The theory on the Blastminer is this: Look at Nate Heiss mono-White listing. He has all of seven Plains in his deck. His fastest response to a turn 2 Blastminer will be turn 4, and unless he has three Plains before then, he might never get to four mana. Your Blastminer will buy a ton of time to get Akroma online so you should be able to win before they recover their mana base. It didn’t always work out that way, but it was good enough in theory.
Losing to another White deck in game one would be reasonably acceptable if the deck always beat Affinity and Goblins, but the deck didn’t always beat Affinity and Goblins. The proactive plans of the deck were very good, and both matchups were favorable if not routs. The deck seemed to lose to itself more than anything else. For instance, there were games with Worship out against Goblins where the deck hit eight mana… but didn’t have sufficient White for Akroma. There were games where, with a Vengeance in hand, this twenty-six land + four Eternal Dragon deck would miss the critical drop to de facto win the game immediately before losing.
So in the spirit of focusing on the positives of the R/W build but bolstering the mana somewhat, we tried a B/W version:
2 Decree of Pain
4 Smother
4 Twisted Abomination
3 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
3 Eternal Dragon
4 Silver Knight
2 Wing Shards
4 Worship
4 Wrath of God
14 Plains
9 Swamp
2 Temple of the False God
1 Unholy Grotto
The reason the next color complement I went to was Black should be obvious from our previous deck’s analysis: I could sideboard in Cabal Interrogator against another White deck. Again, I was not aiming to beat White in the main, but instead focusing on anti-beatdown elements overall and a Worship lock for Goblin Bidding.
This version traded Detonate or Shatter for Smother, which was good because I had no discipline against opposing artifact lands, and Starstorm (which was good against an opposing Decree of Justice or Patriarch’s Bidding) for Decree of Pain (which was generally better against both). The deck gave up an Eternal Dragon but got a ton of Twisted Abominations. With the Abomination in, the B/W version had much better mana. It could play a Swamp less but feel like it had more overall land. In very long games, it could use the lone Unholy Grotto to recover a huge threat against another control deck or just not get decked. Despite what some writers will tell you, Twisted Abomination in play is a fierce threat – even if it is a little pricey – and seemed a worthy replacement for Pristine Angel in the Worship redundancy spot. A little worse against Goblins, maybe, Twisted Abomination was nevertheless better in almost every other way.
What this deck taught us more than anything else was that Wing Shards is good.
Taking a step back, let’s look at how these decks differ from what you might automatically play in a White-based control deck. Neither one plays with Decree of Justice; neither one plays with Exalted Angel.
Decree of Justice is just bad. It’s totally worthless against a beatdown deck, and is useful against another control deck only if you play it perfectly (more on that later). Exalted Angel is just not good enough. It costs a million mana and isn’t as good as some of the other potential plans against beatdown. It does not help very much against Affinity and seems overall inferior for a straight Worship play against Goblins. The problem with Goblins is that you have to win outright. You can’t pussyfoot around with them. If you go to thirty, They Still Kill You. The Worship plans win outright; early Exalted Angel just gives you false hope.
Against another control deck, Exalted Angel is actually a liability (again, more on that later).
These decks were, however, missing something. That something was life gain. Worship is kind of a dead draw against Affinity, and many of the cards in general are not great against that great deck. Many, like Silver Knight are good speed bumps for Arcbound Ravager while you develop into Wrath of God and Akroma’s Vengeance mana, but because of Disciple of the Vault, Worship itself is not good enough to ever save you from the last point.
Seth did a study over the course of the first thirty or so matches we played between the various White decks and Affinity. The matchups were favorable for White, and of course because I lost to missed land drops, I complained that they were the only reason I was losing. He pointed out that I had a lot of dead cards, and that I had only ever attacked with an early Silver Knight prior to his board development, or a late game Akroma. The other creatures seemed incidental.
More than that, the splash colors, despite their ability to overcome White potentially, were not overall synergistic. Seth said that clearly the correct splash would be green.
This is the deck that I tested most for many weeks, and was, up until this week, my very likely choice for Regionals:
4 Oxidize
3 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
4 Eternal Dragon
2 Pulse of the Fields
4 Silver Knight
4 Wing Shards
3 Worship
4 Wrath of God
4 Elfhame Palace
3 Forest
13 Plains
4 Temple of the False God
4 Windswept Heath
What does this deck gain over the previous two?
Two. More. Lands.
Two. Temples.
Better. Mana.
This was the best deck we had touched to this point against Affinity. The first game was between even and eighty percent based on build. I never meant to be unreasonably hard on Aether Vial – and lord knows I respect Zvi as a designer a great deal – but playing a deck with four Oxidize, four Wrath of God, and four Akroma’s Vengeance against various Affinity decks teaches you what is important. Against decks with four Welding Jar and four Shrapnel Blast, the deck was barely favorable (depending on how tight the Affinity player was, of course). But against Aether Vial Affinity, the deck was almost unbeatable. Aether Vial was just another lost permanent and put down more permanents to kill with a huge Akroma’s Vengeance.
The advantages of this build over Affinity are many. First of all, it has Pulse of the Fields. Affinity is amazing at dealing twenty. In fact, it can deal twenty in three turns sometimes. It is a lot worse at dealing twenty-four. Worse yet at dealing twenty-eight. Forty? Good luck with that, especially if a Wrath and a Vengeance resolve. Silver Knight and Worship remained the worst cards, but in sideboarded games when we brought in four Naturalize and additional Pulse of the Field, the matchup became a total rout.
The more I played, the better I got at Pulse of the Fields. The Pulses – both of the Forge and of the Fields – are extremely skill intensive routes to card advantage. If you play them right, you can overcome incredible lapses of development on the board. If you play them over dozens and hundreds of games, you know when to attack, and when to let your opponent develop. If you screw up and lose a Pulse, or gain a life lead you might not want, you can lose the game on just that action. As I got better at Pulse of the Fields, Affinity got worse and worse in the testing. So we moved on.
Pulse of the Fields is also really strong against Astral Slide. The games against Astral Slide go to maximum length, with the winner decided many times via decking. The worst card in the matchup is Exalted Angel. If you play a build of G/W like this one, Let Them Hit You With Exalted Angel. If the opponent goes to twenty-four or for the love of God twenty-eight, You Win. If he has a huge life lead, all he is doing is giving you a more and more insurmountable reservoir of virtual life points that he has to try to overcome. He will have to lay more and more permanents in order to overcome your life lead. He has to be the beatdown. He can’t be. You are optimized to fight – and beat – turn 3 kill decks. His slow Angel development into Lightning Rifts is not going to beat you if you have Pulse online and he has carelessly gone to a huge life total.
The games that I lost against Slide were hard, and based on mistakes on my part. But as Worth used to tell me, that’s why we test. During testing we learn; during tournaments we show how well we have learned.
These games went to the last cards in our libraries, so every card counted. When games go that long, you have more and more stacks, more and more turns, more and more opportunities to screw up, and little screw ups that don’t seem that bad can cost you everything if you screw up on the wrong card. I learned that you do not cycle Akroma’s Vengeance. It matters. Every one. It is better to discard. It is better to miss a land drop. You will catch up. You have a better long game; don’t worry about that. Don’t cycle Akroma’s Vengeance, even to get a Dragon advantage. Additionally, play Pulse of the Fields precisely. I lost a game where if I had mana burned to one life I would have narrowly won, but because I was on two life, I could not buy back my Pulse of the Fields sufficient times to beat his alpha strike and his two Lightning Rifts. There was another game where if I had not attacked with Akroma, I would have just decked him, but because I had put him on fourteen, I could not longer stack my Pulse of the Fields a sufficient number of times to beat a complex board situation.
The Slide matchup is about keeping a level head and not worrying about short term card economy. The game will go long. You have to maintain your two most powerful resources – Akroma’s Vengeance and Pulse of the Fields – with an outlook of playing one or both as late as the last turn of the game. If anyone wins a beatdown game, it will be you. You can lay a Dragon, for instance, and if he decides he wants to race, you smash him with Akroma for eleven. He might have a bunch of Damping Matrixes in his hand. He has no commensurate counter-play. Don’t play for a board like this – you have inevitability if you want it – but don’t let him bully you into thinking that he is the beatdown (or at least the effective beatdown).
The Goblin matchup was something else. I had it at 60% in favor of G/W. I would run ten games, G/W would win six of them. I would run another ten. G/W would win another six. But then again, I am a miser. The game would look over, with Goblin Bidding on the precipice of a huge turn… and G/W would rip the Worship. Mise. Mise again. Over and over.
No one else could replicate the results. Seth put G/W on 30%. He said that the matchup was nothing more than a math problem. How likely was it for G/W to assemble Worship and Silver Knight or Akroma before, say, turn 6? That was your matchup.
We found that though G/W could win without the cheesey combo kill, it tended not to. For one thing, Goblin Bidding could effortlessly do forty or sixty damage in games that it won. Patriarch’s Bidding reads”Akroma’s Vengeance just killed you.” The bigger problem was that it had City of Brass. Not only was it restricting its own life with Bloodstained Mire and City taps, Bidding could just tap the City in response to a Pulse of the Fields. Sorry White. No buyback for you.
This was infuriating in the face of the Paskins matchup. The Paskins deck was good. In fact, it was close to the perfect beatdown deck for Regionals in my opinion. It was not, however, good against G/W. Game one against Silver Knight – with or without Worship – Pulse of the Fields, and even off Oxidizes messing up its mana, yielded about 80% in favor of G/W. The Paskins deck is better at dealing twenty quickly than Goblin Bidding, but it has no long game against an active Pulse of the Fields and can’t just tap City of Brass to prevent a buyback.
There were also some question marks in the White and B/G department. Though G/W had more obvious synergy than B/W or R/W, it didn’t have a turn 2″I win” play. Instead, Seth went for a completely out of the box solution. Why not just side into Tooth and Nail?
Here was our initial sideboard:
2 Darksteel Colossus
4 Naturalize
4 Tooth and Nail
1 Pulse of the Fields
4 Scared Ground (yeah, that’s right)
We kind of needed Scared Ground. Because we were (I was?) scared. The G/W deck always goes long. You don’t have counters, so if they cast Flashfires or Death Cloud, you kind of lose all your lands. I wasn’t planning on siding Scared Ground in any matchup but B/G unless I knew what was coming, but I felt is was nice to have them there for game three, if need be.
White decks got mauled by Tooth and Nail out of the side. Not only were they surprised, but they typically had nothing better than an Exalted Angel to race.
Against B/G we went for Tooth and Nail and Scared Ground to own the long game.
But the Goblin Bidding matchup still loomed.
I’m on 60%, I thought. Is that good enough?
If I was beating everything else it might be. But I had only a cheesey sideboard strategy to take a lot of matchups. Only Affinity was the sure thing. I could definitely be overwhelmed – at least in game one – by Mindslavers and Weathered Wayfarers, and the worst deck in the format would be guaranteed sufficient time to get its horrible mana online to kill me with its even more horrible x-spell.
Last week, I made a major change to the deck in the hopes of shoring up all matchups.
4 Oxidize
3 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
4 Eternal Dragon
2 Gilded Light
4 Pulse of the Fields
4 Wing Shards
4 Wrath of God
4 Elfhame Palace
3 Forest
12 Plains
4 Temple of the False God
4 Windswept Heath
Sideboard
2 Darksteel Colossus
4 Naturalize
4 Tooth and Nail
2 Gilded Light
3 Scared Ground
It actually took me a while to drop the twenty-eighth land. But with almost all the new cards being cycling or faux cycling, the deck was becoming unacceptably mana flooded at twenty-eight.
As predicted, the Goblin Bidding matchup got worse. I no longer had a combo kill. With no Worship fallback, more than ever, the power of City of Brass became apparent in fighting Pulse of the Fields. I had theorized that Scrabbling Claws would be enough to win – stopping the initial damage rush was never an issue – but the problem with Bidding was that it could fill its graveyard all in one turn, so that the impact of Scrabbling Claws would be minimal. Dead. Dead. Dead again. The matchup fell to perhaps 15% game one, with little lift out of the board.
But that was fairly acceptable given the bolstering of other matchups.
Apparently, the loss of Silver Knight didn’t hurt the Paskins matchup as much as the last two Pulses helped. The matchup remained extremely favorable in game one.
With no horrible Worships and sub-optimal Silver Knights to draw but instead a higher frequency of Akroma’s Vengeance draws, the Affinity matchup was obviously better. Just make sure when you sideboard, you favor Gilded Lights over Scrabbling Claws as your random cyclers – even if he has Myr Retriever. There is not big difference between the two, but while Scrabbling Claws can cost you some life against Disciple of the Vault, you can sometimes lucksack the opponent out with a hard cast Gilded Light. It doesn’t come up very often because the matchup in three is so good, but with Affinity once again wielding Mana Leak to fight your Vengeance, the best deck in the field just got better against even you. No matter what the numbers say, you have to respect Affinity and make sure each and every spell is doing its job.
The Slide matchup went from tough but favorable to absolutely stupid. In many previous matches, the Slide player would discard Damping Matrix and the G/W player would discard Oxidize and that would be fair enough for both. Now, with well placed Scrabbling Claws dominating its precious Dragons, the Slide player would sometimes try to devote a Damping Matrix prior to cycling. This did nothing but turn on Oxidize. Even better, the G/W deck had earlier Pulses and no chance of screwing up by going beatdown with Silver Knight – a key error I made in initial Slide testing.
The Mono-White matchup was oddly favorable. In a sense, game one depended on how well the Mono-White player executed. If he randomly cycled a Decree of Justice, he typically lost. If he carelessly laid a Mindslaver so that G/W could snag it with an Oxidize, he lost. He literally had to play Mindslaver and Decree of Justice for twenty in concert in order to overwhelm G/W’s Pulse of the Fields and creature sanction. If the Decree was too small and the G/W deck survived, it would recover with Pulse. Especially given the Scrabbling Claws advantage, if Mindslaver missed due to Gilded Light, Mono-White might have insufficient kill cards to win. With excellent execution and total awareness of the G/W deck list – something that you would not typically expect from a random Regionals opponent – Mono-White nevertheless ALWAYS won game one.
The sideboarded matchup on the other hand was unwinnable. G/W lost a total of one sideboarded game in this matchup, over the course of some large number. That game, Mono-White drew and hard cast two Darksteel Colossuses from its sideboard before G/W played a fifth land. In general, Scrabbling Claws dominated Dragon development and Gilded Light was always waiting for Mindslaver. With these two fronts shored up, and Mono-White incapable of ending a game quickly, it came down to land drops and the eventual Tooth and Nail every single time. Mono-White was incapable of beating G/W’s sideboard of cheesey combo plus four Gilded Light and four Scrabbling Claws. It is important to note that G/W had no Wing Shards in the game that it lost to Mono-White sideboarded. I was testing a number of different switches without the assumption that Mono-White would bring in its own Darksteel Colossuses and didn’t want to give Mono-White an opportunity to Mindslaver me into killing my own Colossuses in the case that I had already gone Tooth and Nail. I think that was wrong, but I’m not sure.
Macey asked if we actually needed the Tooth and Nail sideboard. The games were won and lost on Gilded Light and Scrabbling Claws and the sideboard space could have been devoted to anti-Goblins cards. The problem was that against the correct Mono-White strategy in game one, G/W was not just not favored, it consistently lost. That first game would take thirty minutes to lose. G/W needed to win two in twenty… and Tooth and Nail won in a single turn. Like Scared Ground, it became a necessary evil.
As for B/G… How are they scary? With Scrabbling Claws in, I wasn’t sure how they could possibly win a match. Previously G/W had to mete out every response card, measuring against two strong card drawing engines. But with four Pulses and four Scrabbling Claws? B/G doesn’t have any Arcbound Ravagers, Shrapnel Blasts, or Siege-Gang Commanders. It can’t reasonably kill an Akroma. All it can do is play Death Cloud… into a likely disadvantage on the board. Especially with a heavy sideboard protecting the G/W deck’s lands, I didn’t think it was worth testing.
The problem was Tooth and Nail. I was fine with losing to Goblin Bidding. I had a good plan against everything else and a very reliable game against Affinity. But Tooth and Nail taught me my lesson.
As I said before, I am a miser.
I would routinely be staring down a pair of Darksteel Colossuses and a Solemn Simulacrum with no appropriate response card.
But I am a miser.
Yus! I would think. Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!
I drew the Wing Shards.
Oxidize that Solemn Simulacrum. Eat Storm, Colossus twins!
I got it. I mised. But every single time – I’m talking like seven consecutive games here – Tooth and Nail would rip Tooth and Nail off the dead Jens draw. Double Colossus again? Who mises times two? Sigh.
What kind of mising is that? What point is it to be a miser with a control deck, where you get the exact card you need… To Live Another Turn? When you mise with a proactive deck, the opponent dies. When you mise with G/W, you just don’t die until next turn.
Obviously I never mised a second consecutive Wing Shards, and even if I did, it might not have killed both copies of Darksteel Colossus.
So I tested sideboarded. In Gilded Light. In Tooth and Nail cards. Result? 50%. Exactly 50%. That’s a huge jump from never winning… but is it actually good or bad?
I think it’s bad. Here’s why: G/W’s cards never mattered. Every game G/W won, Tooth and Nail had a Solemn Simulacrum and nothing bigger for beatdown. Entwined Reap and Sow? Yep. Any relevant man? Nope. G/W won with quick Akroma, G/W won with Eternal Dragon, G/W won with its own Tooth and Nail; G/W never won a game where Tooth and Nail so much as drew a Tooth and Nail.
So that’s it. That’s why I dropped my last Rogue deck. When you mise, when you get lucky and still lose, you gotta look in the mirror and pack it up. In a sense, it’s very sad, because I spent a lot of time tuning a couple of decks I really liked. In another sense, all that testing – which is more than I have done for any Constructed format in years, I think – was productive: I didn’t end up playing one of my decks with potential holes in it.
If you are dead set against not playing an archetype deck, the G/W is an excellent option. If you practice your Pulses you will mop up a lot of opponents, and you have a hateful, hateful game against Affinity. You have an awesome game against Paskins, but have to respect any deck with a turn 3 kill – let alone three different ones. You will probably lose to Goblin Bidding, your White matchup will be based on skill, and your Tooth and Nail matchup will be based on luck. But you’ve got a shot across the board, and have the most powerful answer in the format – Akroma’s Vengeance – on your turn five beck and call.
So the obvious question is… What am I going to play on Saturday?
The answer is… Probably nothing. I was really gung ho to play in Regionals this year, which is why I’ve done so much testing. But the fact of the matter is, I’m moving to my new apartment (woo hoo, home ownership!) the Friday before, and it’s not so nice to leave my eight months pregnant wife (woo hoo, impending adulthood!) all alone to sort through our stuff. Not that I wouldn’t anyway, but I am also banned from air travel for the month of June (as Katherine might deliver at any time), so I can’t play in Nationals anyway. Regionals isn’t even fun. This year it will be about eleven rounds of Swiss in New York, and the games are going to be ultra-violent, with the most mana consistent and environment aware decks not necessarily doing the best. It’s a lot of outlay for not that much reward in my particular case.
But I f***ing love Magic, so I might show anyway. Let me give you a hint… In the case that I show, I plan on summoning Goblin Warchief. And attacking with him. On The Same Turn. Can you believe it? How unfair.
You’ll have to wait until next week to find out how that goes.
–m