Welcome to another article! Today, I’ll be explaining how to netdeck with intelligence. Along the way, Olivier Ruel will also give us his opinion on the subject.
Netdecking is something that seems really easy. People who don’t want to lose time in play-testing just pick one of the most successful archetypes and play it at their tournament. With a mere click of the mouse, they can have access to the best decks from the best minds in the game. However, this plan shows its limits when people actually find the same decklist as you choose, build their deck to beat yours, and possibly have more insight and understanding into how your deck works.
That is why netdecking is not an actual replacement for playtesting. It should only been used as a support effort to playtesting, so you know what other players will play, and as an aid to help find a good deck to play around them. But there is actually an intelligent way to netdeck and to play something original, even though “originality” may not appear in most players’ netdecking dictionary.
When choosing what to play the options are not limited to:
A) Playing a popular deck you’ve found online, or
B) Running your own creation.
A third option, one that’s actually as complex and exciting as Option B above, is to wander onto the web searching for a great deck to which nobody has paid much attention.
The first deck we would like to use as an example is “the CAL,” back from 2005. Makihito Mihara used following list to make Top 8 at Grand Prix: Kitakyuushuu:
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Eternal Witness
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Burning Wish
4 Cabal Therapy
3 Life from the Loam
3 Seismic Assault
2 Solitary Confinement
2 Zombie Infestation
3 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Barren Moor
3 Bloodstained Mire
2 Forest
4 Forgotten Cave
2 Mountain
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Swamp
4 Tranquil Thicket
4 Wooded Foothills
Sideboard:
2 Moment’s Peace
2 Putrefy
1 Chainer’s Edict
2 Cranial Extraction
2 Duress
1 Hull Breach
1 Life from the Loam
1 Nostalgic Dreams
1 Pyroclasm
1 Sickening Dreams
1 Solitary Confinement
Even though that deck did well, players didn’t give it much credit at first… Except for Olivier Ruel, who actually adapted the deck and won the following Grand Prix in Bilbao.
Olivier Ruel – CAL
GP: Bilbao ’05: Winning Deck
4 Barren Moor
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Forest
4 Forgotten Cave
2 Mountain
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Swamp
4 Tranquil Thicket
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Dark Confidant
3 Eternal Witness
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Burning Wish
2 Cabal Therapy
2 Duress
3 Life from the Loam
2 Seismic Assault
3 Solitary Confinement
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
Sideboard:
1 Cabal Therapy
1 Chainer’s Edict
2 Cranial Extraction
1 Duress
1 Hull Breach
1 Life from the Loam
3 Loxodon Hierarch
2 Overgrown Estate
2 Putrefy
1 Pyroclasm
Of course, Olivier himself is the best person to talk about his process…
Olivier: Just before GP: Bilbao I was looking for something original, as I was tired of playing Affinity and Psychatog. Therefore, I decided to search for some new ideas from the Internet. I had played hundreds of games in the format and I knew it very well, but I wanted to see if I could find something new, a deck people wouldn’t know about. In cases such as this, I don’t really consider the process as “copying,” more as “treasure-hunting.” Your goal is to find the Golden Deck, the perfect deck for you to polish. If you manage to find it, not only will you have the satisfaction of playing an original deck, but you will also have an advantage over people who don’t know what’s in your deck, when you know what’s in theirs. This is one of the best advantages to running an original deck; a matchup that should be 50/50 usually turns to 60/40 in your favor if you know the matchup when they don’t.
Manu: How were you able to tell that the deck has a lot of potential in the metagame? and what was missing to make the deck stronger?
Oli: I had played hundreds of games in the format, and I had came to the conclusion that Duress/Therapy/Confidant based decks were great against most of the field, but they were also pretty bad versus Boros, which was the most popular deck back then. And when I saw Mihara’s list, the day before GP: Bilbao, I immediately felt like the deck had all the qualities you could ask for:
– It was stable.
– It had a great card advantage engine.
– It was good versus the most popular deck in the format.
– It was unexpected.
And, the most important:
– It was the perfect frame in which to play the Duress/Therapy/Confidant engine
Manu: It seems very hard to adjust such a deck, as there is a core engine, which you are not allowed to touch, with several cards to support that. It actually needs a lot of knowledge about the metagame to adjust those cards to make the deck great. In this case, it is the addition of Dark Confidant over Zombie Infestation. Zombie Infestation is cute, but the deck’s engine doesn’t need it, and it is not that great a support card.
Oli: Exactly, and same goes with the sideboard. Most people think that, because they have a toolbox (Burning Wish here), they have to put lots of tools in it. Many cards didn’t seem necessary, and the deck could definitely get even better against Boros. Without the sideboarded Loxodon Hierarch and Overgrown Estate, I would definitely not have done that well.
Manu: And for GP: Beijing, even the Sensei’s Divining Top had to go. I guess they went for the same reason as stated above – it just wasn’t needed for the deck, and it was not a good enough support card. It is very important to know which cards are needed for the deck to work, and what is tunable for a stronger replacement.
Oli: I was able to improve the deck just before Bilbao only because I knew the format so well, but I actually played my first games with the deck during my three byes on Saturday. It’s the experience that I gained before Beijing that actually led to my strongest optimization. And this is the way it usually goes: intuition and experience in the format can help you pick the right deck, while only playing the games will tell you which cards truly shine.
It is true that, when copying decks verbatim even when they look cool and original, it doesn’t always work too well…
This is a list Oli and I came across during the testing period for Grand Prix: Barcelona. You might already know it:
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Deity of Scars
4 Deus of Calamity
4 Devoted Druid
4 Doomgape
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Primalcrux
4 Impromptu Raid
4 Overgrowth
16 Forest
4 Mosswort Bridge
There were three things we loved about that decklist when we first saw it. It was original, it has done pretty well, and – probably the most important point – it had done pretty well despite many apparently useless cards! The deck won a 53-player tournament on magic-league. Doomgape and Impromptu Raid seemed like cards you could easily replace to make the deck shine.
The most expected decks wouldn’t run to much removal main deck. This was before some Black/White lists started to run Wrath of God. So a turn 4 Primalcrux actually was a really big threat. We have tried several cards to replace them, such as Cloudthresher and Garruk Wildspeaker, but in the end we couldn’t come up with anything really good. The problem was that the “core engine” of mana fixing and huge animals was not stable enough. You often end up with draws including only mana fixing, or only big guys. And if you get a mix, it is still very vulnerable to your opponents’ removal.
We did make a few changes to the deck to try and make it better, but we gave up on it pretty early. When the actual core of a deck is not reliable, persisting with it only means losing valuable time; you must just search for something else. But the reason why we actually liked this deck list was that it reminded us a lot of the time when, a month before Pro Tour: Berlin, we had gone through this process with a similar deck, and had a lot of success. That’s right: Elves in Extended.
This is the first list that Oli and I found:
4 Birchlore Ranger
4 Heritage Druid
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
1 Regal Force
1 Taunting Elf
4 Twinblade Slasher
1 Viridian Shaman
1 Viridian Zealot
4 Wirewood Hivemaster
4 Wirewood Symbiote
2 Chord of Calling
4 Glimpse of Nature
1 Roar of the Crowd
4 Weird Harvest
1 Coat of Arms
15 Forest
1 Pendelhaven
I know Oli would love to go to bed right now, but I’d love him to share his impressions on the deck we built from this frame.
Oli: Your article’s not done yet? Of course I’d be glad to help…
Manu: Thanks! It actually was pretty complicated to figure out the core of this deck.
Oli: “dv8r,” if you read this, congratulations! You played a great role in building the winning deck from Pro Tour: Berlin! Indeed, this version of the deck has some power and synergy, but the presence (and the absence) of some cards strike from the first look at the list.
Manu: Twinblade Slasher, Coat of Arms, and Taunting Elf are cards you know you can cut immediately. The hard choices are Chord of Calling, Weird Harvest, and Wirewood Hivemaster. The obvious support cards are Viridian Zealot and Viridian Shaman.
Oli: Is the deck a combo deck? An aggro combo? How fast can it kill? Is it consistent? It’s pretty hard to answer all those questions without trying it out. But still, the deck has quite a unique concept (Glimpse of Nature), and it wins despite all those imperfections, showing great potential after improvement. One of the advantages in net-decking a combo deck is the ability to playtest it on your own. You don’t need to build the Tier 1 decks in the format to test against them; you can just play the goldfish until you know how fast your deck can go.
Manu: We instantly added 4 copies of Summoner’s Pact, a card that seemed to be a 0 mana Demonic Tutor. After changing the Twinblade Slashers for Boreal Druids and the other bad cards for Elvish Visionaries, we had a hard time discovering the strength of Weird Harvest and Chord of Calling. We did cut Weird Harvest at the beginning, and used it as a proxy for Chord of Calling, until we always wanted to actually have the Harvest.
Testing such as this, to confirm or deny the strength of any particular card, can go down different roads. Other testing teams figured out that Chord of Calling worked better for them, and ended up playing a more reactive version of the deck with Wirewood Hivemaster as a key card. We didn’t even run it.
Even though our final ratings were disappointing (I finished 74th, and Oli placed 42nd), it was a great pleasure to see LSV win the event with the decklist we had been playtesting so much.
Olivier Ruel/Manuel Bucher
Pro Tour: Berlin, Day 2
10 Forest
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Pendelhaven
4 Birchlore Rangers
4 Elves of Deep Shadow
4 Elvish Visionary
1 Eternal Witness
4 Heritage Druid
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
1 Regal Force
2 Viridian Shaman
4 Wirewood Symbiote
4 Glimpse of Nature
1 Grapeshot
4 Summoner’s Pact
3 Weird Harvest
Sideboard
1 Mycoloth
1 Naturalize
1 Overgrown Tomb
2 Thorn of Amethyst
4 Thoughtseize
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
2 Viridian Shaman
On Friday, Oli and I will talk about the latest “Intelligent Netdeck,” TurboFog. Antoine, Oli, and I played the deck at GP Barcelona, and we are going to discuss why we made that choice, what changes we made, and take a deeper look into the matchups. Until then, thanks for reading.
Manu (and Oli!)