I originally planned to make this one a tournament report of the events I played last week in Prague when I managed to organize a rather spontaneous trip to the event with basically two days remaining. As a result, I missed out on the Friday trial this time around and given my mediocre performance in both the Legacy and Vintage main events (4-3-1 and 2-3 respectively) I don’t think anybody will be too interested in how my matches went exactly.
As such, I’ll start today’s Eternal Europe out with a short look at how my days went (including the decklists I used) and then talk a little more about the actual well-performing players of the event and my personal impressions of both of the formats in question.
My Legacy
Prague was the first reasonably large event in quite a while that I didn’t actually just try to count to ten. If you’ve been following my column since back in February, you know what replaced my trusty Storm deck for this one: the U/W menace, Miracles. I honestly played a rather standard four Ponder list without much tech to crib. For those interested, here’s the list:
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (21)
Spells (35)
I consciously decided to skimp on the graveyard hate – decks like Reanimator you can fight just as well on the stack with Flusterstorm and I expected basically no Dredge to be around – and was never punished. Instead, my losses came down to a couple of tight games not going my way and one round during which I realized how much of a problem it can be for your tournament preparedness when you drive Delver close to extinction in your local metagame.
I’ve mentioned before that I really wanted to beat the Delver decks when I went back to playing Miracles and the sideboarded Path to Exiles reflect that. The tiny problem with that is that Europe’s BURG Delver players have figured out that – at least with Dig Through Time in their deck – there is no need for them to actually try to play a tempo game against Miracles. They can comfortably sideboard out their Wastelands and Lightning Bolts and just stock up on an overload of cheap countermagic. When that meets a Miracles player who has simply overloaded on spot removal like I tend to do in Delver matchups, that whole plan of “just beat you by casting Dig Through Time a bunch and kill your Counterbalance with Abrupt Decay” becomes essentially impossible to beat. That’s exactly what happened in round three, the one round where I actually realized why I was losing badly.
My other two losses came against Reanimator in the last round where I drew only crap after a decent opening hand in game one (I ended the game with two copies of Terminus as my only cards in hand) and a game two in which my opponent’s draw was so good that they had a leftover Force of Will even before activating Griselbrand in an extremely tight match against the Japanese Mentor Miracles list as seen in the GP Kyoto Top Eight. That deck looks really sweet, actually, but more on it when discussing what actually did well in the event.
I drew round five against Infect after a grueling game three in which I think I’d have easily won with another ten minutes on the clock. Maybe I shouldn’t have sideboarded out both of the Entreats but with fifteen minutes left on the clock I felt rather safe as long as I didn’t die to the Infect shenanigans. Turns out fifteen minutes is a little too short to Jace-ultimate your opponent when you have to not cast said Jace for 6+ turns because otherwise you’d shuffle away the floating Terminus – my only answer to their Inkmoth Nexus at that point.
My three wins happened against Jeskai Delver (he was still playing midrange-tempo after sideboard), Solidarity (my opponent wasn’t too happy that I actually knew how to play against the deck and didn’t cast any more spells into his double Brain Freeze turn in response to my Counterbalance), and Omni-Tell (where game three came down to them having Omniscience on the battlefield but nothing left in hand while I was beating down with Vendilion Clique and Force of Will on a Ponder sealed it).
Overall, I’m unhappy with my loss to BURG-Delver but other than that I honestly don’t think there’s much I could have done differently in the other rounds. Sometimes it just isn’t your day to win the tournament.
My Vintage
Sadly, after a couple of Fridays where time-issues prevented a majority of our Vintage players from taking part in Vintage FNM, the event has quietly died at this point, sad as that is. It also means I didn’t really get any testing in for Sunday’s Vintage event and instead decided to play what I love – Gifts Ungiven combo control, this time around with an all-new Repeal plus Sensei’s Divining Top plan to try and replace the missing Merchant Scrolls and Brainstorms from back in the day.
Creatures (1)
Lands (15)
Spells (45)
- 2 Sensei's Divining Top
- 1 Tendrils of Agony
- 1 Brainstorm
- 3 Mana Drain
- 1 Vampiric Tutor
- 1 Mystical Tutor
- 1 Yawgmoth's Will
- 2 Duress
- 4 Force of Will
- 1 Mana Vault
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Demonic Tutor
- 1 Hurkyl's Recall
- 1 Time Walk
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 4 Gifts Ungiven
- 1 Merchant Scroll
- 1 Thirst for Knowledge
- 1 Chain of Vapor
- 1 Tinker
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Recoup
- 1 Lotus Petal
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 3 Repeal
- 1 Ponder
- 1 Thoughtseize
- 1 Dig Through Time
Sideboard
The event itself isn’t too hard to summarize. I won rounds one and two against a Jeskai Mentor deck and Oath reasonably easily with my deck doing exactly what it’s meant to do, lost round three to Doomsday in, I think, three grindy games and round four showed me I wasn’t supposed to win this one either.
It seems like I missed the big Vintage memo on what the actual best secondary draw engine is in the format – Mystic Remora – and man was that card a beating in round four. I kept an acceleration-heavy hand with a Gifts and two lands in game one, my opponent started on Remora and I decided to try to wait it out. The turn after he finally missed a land drop, he topdecked Mana Crypt and I decided going for it now was better than allowing him to have untapped colored mana. He correctly buried the Tendrils off my Gifts Ungiven and the last two draws he got from Remora were Misdirection (for my Thoughtseize, forcing me to disable my Force of Will backup for the Yawgmoth’s Will in my hand) and the Force of Will for the Will itself. I didn’t really expect to get there trying to go off against an active Remora but it didn’t have to be the last two cards he drew did it? Game two is much less close and Remora buried me again in spite of my attempts to get things back to even with the sideboarded Balance (my opponent had white mana so I suspected Mentors).
I then lost the last round – and with it the possible shot of sneaking in at X-2 – to Doomsday again, this time by getting killed on turn one in game one, then my opponent screwing up the turn-one kill in game two and being unable to win through my Mana Drain once I got to untap, and for the third game, I died on turn two against a perfect hand of disruption into a win. Doomsday feels quite impressive in Vintage, a lot like Legacy ANT in play style and consistency actually.
Successful Legacy
Here’s what the actual Top Eight looked like:
Creatures (11)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (20)
Creatures (12)
Lands (19)
Spells (29)
Lands (14)
Spells (47)
- 2 Sensei's Divining Top
- 2 Tendrils of Agony
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Cabal Ritual
- 1 Duress
- 1 Island
- 4 Dark Ritual
- 1 Grim Tutor
- 4 Cabal Therapy
- 3 Lotus Petal
- 4 Lion's Eye Diamond
- 4 Infernal Tutor
- 1 Empty the Warrens
- 4 Ponder
- 2 Thoughtseize
- 4 Gitaxian Probe
- 2 Past in Flames
Sideboard
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (20)
Spells (33)
Creatures (13)
Lands (19)
Spells (28)
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (23)
Spells (22)
Creatures (14)
- 4 Delver of Secrets
- 4 Deathrite Shaman
- 3 Young Pyromancer
- 2 True-Name Nemesis
- 1 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
Lands (18)
Spells (28)
Lands (15)
Spells (45)
This is an amusingly non-European-looking Top Eight, isn’t it (well, other than Storm still taking two spots)? Lots of Delver, only a single Miracles deck and the Japanese Mentor version at that and even a pre-Cruise Esper Deathblade doing well – this isn’t the kind of metagame I’ve gotten used to on this side of the pond at this point.
That isn’t the most unusual thing though: the winner of the whole event is the only player in the Top Eight not running any blue cards! Niklas Kronberger won a BOM with basically the same Aggro Loam deck if I remember correctly and he sure makes Life from the Loam look good. Ironic, seeing how I pointed toward that cards potential after my experiences with this years You Choose The Brew.
So what’s going on here? Why is the winner’s metagame so different from what we’ve come to expect here in Europe? Well, I think, the main point here is that people are finally figuring out how to break Dig Through Time. Note how all those Delver decks are of the BURG variety with Deathrite Shaman and all sport three copies of Dig. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Where Treasure Cruise was the perfect tool to fuel an approach of maximum aggression from the Delver decks (leading to U/R Delver), Dig Through Time is still obscene card advantage at a ridiculously low cost in a heavy-cantrip, low-curve tempo deck. However, instead of rewarding extreme redundancy and moving resources from zone to zone ASAP, Dig rewards you for taking a little more time and deploying flexible answers just because it digs so deep for them when they’re needed. Given the fact that BURG was already the most controlling of the Delver strategies, it shouldn’t be surprising that Dig is ridiculously good in that shell.
BURG has always had an excellent combo matchup – you have eight relevant one-mana threats and a super-disruptive setup both before and after sideboard – and easy access to Abrupt Decay to help the deck deal with the threat of Counterbalance from Miracles. Add the ability to easily out-card advantage the opposition with Dig Through Time now and you end up with a blue tempo deck to rule the other blue decks.
I’m far from claiming the deck is totally busted after this little exposure to it, but if someone made me play Delver right now I’m pretty sure this is the shell I’d be looking towards. This doesn’t mean we should all be jumping on the Delver bandwagon, mind you, but it does mean the old strategies of dealing with Delver – deal with their creatures and you win eventually – need to once again be reworked to compensate for the presence of Dig Through Time.
One way to do that? Play a heavy midrange deck with powerful hate-options in Chalice of the Void and Gaddock Teeg (plus Green Sun’s Zenith to find it), Punishing Fire + Grove of the Burnwillows to get rid of all the pesky small creatures, and planeswalkers and lots of card advantage to overpower the other midrange decks.
So essentially here is my theory of what’s going on in the metagame once you’ve boiled it down: Dig Through Time pushes Omni-Tell, Miracles, and BURG Delver, with BURG Delver now having the tools to both disrupt Omni-Tell and out-grind Miracles thanks to the Delve spell. This in turn opens the door for decks that are simply too good at grinding out fair strategies (and hating on one-mana cantrips) like Aggro Loam or Lands.
That leaves Storm’s success – and looking at the successful lists, we get even more indications that grindier matchups are afoot. Both of these lists sport the double Past in Flames set-up Kai Thiele used in Kyoto, and both of the also have access to multiple Storm spells (three Tendrils and two Tendrils and an Empty the Warrens, respectively). Why does that point towards grindy games? Well, simply put, one of the better ways for Storm to fight through massive counterwalls like those Dig Through Time allows players to put up are natural Storm kills.
Initiate a battle with discard spells and mana acceleration and once the spell count reaches ten due to both players’ efforts a single Tendrils is a very hard-to-counter instant win. Similarly, just reaching eight mana with a low Storm count can easily mean death when you have double Tendrils in hand. Looks like I have to brush up on my natural Tendrils math!
Successful Vintage
So what did well in Vintage? Take a look:
Creatures (1)
Lands (13)
Spells (46)
- 1 Sensei's Divining Top
- 1 Tendrils of Agony
- 1 Brainstorm
- 1 Fastbond
- 1 Vampiric Tutor
- 1 Mystical Tutor
- 1 Yawgmoth's Will
- 2 Duress
- 4 Force of Will
- 1 Demonic Tutor
- 3 Doomsday
- 1 Time Walk
- 1 Dark Ritual
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 4 Gush
- 1 Merchant Scroll
- 1 Night's Whisper
- 1 Misdirection
- 1 Rebuild
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Lotus Petal
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 1 Ponder
- 1 Thoughtseize
- 4 Preordain
- 3 Mental Misstep
- 3 Gitaxian Probe
- 2 Flusterstorm
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (20)
Spells (25)
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (14)
Spells (37)
- 1 Sensei's Divining Top
- 1 Brainstorm
- 1 Vampiric Tutor
- 1 Yawgmoth's Will
- 4 Force of Will
- 2 Swords to Plowshares
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Demonic Tutor
- 1 Hurkyl's Recall
- 1 Time Walk
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 3 Gush
- 3 Mystic Remora
- 1 Misdirection
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 1 Repeal
- 3 Mental Misstep
- 1 Flusterstorm
- 1 Treasure Cruise
- 2 Dig Through Time
Creatures (5)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (16)
Spells (30)
- 1 Brainstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 2 Swords to Plowshares
- 1 Hurkyl's Recall
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 1 Mana Leak
- 3 Gush
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 1 Spell Pierce
- 4 Mental Misstep
- 2 Flusterstorm
- 1 Wear
- 2 Dig Through Time
Sideboard
Creatures (5)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (14)
Spells (39)
- 1 Sensei's Divining Top
- 1 Brainstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 2 Swords to Plowshares
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Hurkyl's Recall
- 1 Time Walk
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 3 Gush
- 1 Pyroblast
- 3 Mystic Remora
- 2 Misdirection
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 1 Repeal
- 1 Ponder
- 4 Mental Misstep
- 2 Flusterstorm
- 1 Treasure Cruise
- 2 Dig Through Time
Sideboard
Creatures (9)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (14)
Spells (35)
Creatures (23)
- 4 Lord of Atlantis
- 4 Silvergill Adept
- 4 Cursecatcher
- 3 Phantasmal Image
- 4 Master of the Pearl Trident
- 4 True-Name Nemesis
Lands (20)
Spells (16)
Creatures (12)
Lands (20)
Spells (28)
One Workshop deck, one Merfolk, one Doomsday, one U/R Delver splashing white for the sideboard, and one Sultai Fish as established archetypes – plus a bunch of Monastery Mentors that I probably would have known about had I taken more care to read up on the format lately!
Either way, that Gro-looking Monastery Mentor deck (complete with fair Gushes without Fastbond like way back in the day) looked quite impressive, mainly on the back of a card I wish I’d been clever enough to play that weekend: Mystic Remora.
After having faced the darned thing, I’m not sure how I haven’t long ago fallen in love with the card and used it as the obvious replacement for my lost Brainstorms and Merchant Scrolls in Gifts – no matter if that would actually give me a better deck than those very Gro-looking lists that seemingly ran through the event.
Just from a theoretical point of view, I love those three Mentor lists – especially the one greedy enough to splash for Yawgmoth’s Will – as they basically represent Gro decks that, between Dig Through Time and Mystic Remora, have an even stronger draw engine to compensate for the low cantrip count we’re forced into with Brainstorm and Ponder on the restricted list. I could easily imagine myself picking something similar up next time around, even if that means I have to play without my beloved Gifts Ungivens – or maybe I can just adapt the engine to fuel Gifts instead of Mentor, we’ll see.
The other deck that I hadn’t seen in action in capable hands that impressed me very much during the event is Doomsday. Now, I can see how that deck would have huge problems against Workshops – there’s so little acceleration to try and overtake the Spheres with – but against other blue decks, it seems ridiculously good. And from everything I’ve seen, that’s what you should expect to face in a Vintage event at least nine times out of ten these days.
With Doomsday, you get to play the same kind of game Legacy Storm does but, thanks to Vintage powerhouses Gush, Black Lotus, Yawgmoth’s Will and Ancestral Recall, you don’t have to spend half your deck space on mana sources, allowing you to instead have an overwhelming amount of disruption against anybody who is trying to stop you with spells rather than permanents. I can’t really say I’m surprised to see Pascal crush through the Top Eight with the deck.
Aftermath
So I scrubbed out in Prague but I still wouldn’t want to have missed the trip. Lots of fun was had in those things I tend to keep out of my Magic articles – the discussions, the hanging out and the simple good times to be had when taking a little trip with friends. I also truly enjoyed every single game I played during the weekend, as even the ones I lost or got blown out in where interesting, tense affairs that demanded my opponents play well to actually reap the rewards of beating me. I could imagine plenty of much worse states for things to be in.
As far as the Eternal formats are concerned, it’s becoming clear that we’re finally learning to use Dig Through Time in the correct shells and that doing so represents an awesome amount of power. Only more time will tell if Dig has to join its sibling Treasure Cruise on the Legacy banned list or if the format can successfully adapt to the slightly slower metagame pushed by the other delve spell.
As for Vintage, I should really prepare better when I intend to participate in my original format again but I just can’t get myself back to netdecking in Vintage. There are so few times I get to play the format, I want to be doing something sweet even if that means I might not be doing the best thing possible. I do need to keep up with the tech, though – missing out on playing with Mystic Remora (and the concomitant ridiculous amount of cards I’d get to draw) is my one real regret for this Prague Eternal.
In short – I’m already looking forward to the next one!