I was reading Flores’ article on [author name="StarCityGames.com"]StarCityGames.com[/author] this past Friday, and was pleasantly surprised: not because of the quality or clarity of the article’s strategic analysis of how one can best go about winning at Magic, but because it clarified thoughts and behaviors that had long been important aspects of my deckbuilding career. The first and foremost rule of my deckbuilding career has generally been a concession to my skill level as a player:”don’t play mirror matches, ever.” In a mirror match, the better of the two players should frequently win, and while I don’t think I am”bad” at Magic, I have never had the notion that it was something I as a player was especially good at; my skills for analyzing the situation and the right play have always helped me on the journalistic approach to the game, but that level of insight pretty frequently goes away when I’m the one playing the cards on the table.
By refusing to play mirror matches, I have signed my mission statement to be rogue, and preferably to do so without being bad. I’ve probably played most of the same decks as everyone else along the years; the difference is mainly in when I’ve chosen to play them, picking the proper time for the proper deck and watching the metagame instead of”the good deck I’m playing.” Watching the metagame is awfully difficult to do when you’ve quit Magic, but this year around, at least I have a personal incentive to still be playing at this particular moment just before Regionals, as the terms of my absence as a spellcaster of the Magical cards has been simply that I would not leave my friends and team-mates, Seth Burn and Kevin An, high and dry for the Team Limited season. I don’t much care whether I play Magic or I don’t, but I’ve made both a promise and a commitment, and the best way to not be awful in time for Grand Prix: DC or Pro Tour: Seattle is frankly to play as much as I can. Somehow, this has led to me testing for Regionals on the side, despite the fact that I’ll almost certainly have something better to do that day.
The reason Flores’ article compelled this response is not just because Flores was outlining how rogue decks refuse to play bad cards, and how the goal of a rogue deck should be to carefully craft a predator/prey relationship with the targeted metagame, but because I felt I had an object lesson or two I could share, given my long experience with”going rogue.” And, more importantly for all you Regionals-watchers, a modern example of the rogue playtester.
When Darksteel came out, I (like everyone else) looked around and tried to figure out what the metagame was going to look like, and so far I’d say the metagame is right on track for the projections I’d made, with early advances for the aggressive decks (specifically, Goblin-Bidding and an aggressive Affinity build; I can’t say I”saw” the Ravager deck, but I did see the critical mass of Affinity pushed over the top), behind which the control decks are inevitably forced to play catch-up. When Darksteel came out, I made a metagame prediction for myself, and I created a deck that looked like this:
4 Obliterate
4 Darksteel Ingot
4 Serum Powder
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Myr Enforcer
4 Sculpting Steel
3 Hammer of Bogardan
2 Furnace Dragon
2 Darksteel Pendant
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Stalking Stones
4 Great Furnace
4 Forgotten Cave
9 Mountain
Now, the main problem with this deck is, frankly, it’s chock full of bad cards. I wanted to test an Obliterate deck, because Obliterate and Indestructible mana sources are”cool” together. I played the deck, and played the deck, and it never worked out… worse yet, it never even came close to achieving the goals I’d designed for it, which meant that the deck was working against itself. There was too much nothing going on, and the more I played it, the better the Affinity deck got. Goblins were a problem too, because they were playing cards like Goblin Warchief or Skullclamp to advance their game, but somehow I was relying on Serum Powder and Sculpting Steel to do my work for my board position. One of these things is not like the other.
I realized quickly that I hadn’t even chosen the correct kill card for the deck, as the Obliterate/Myr Enforcer combo wasn’t even good whenever I Obliterated with Indestructibles in play. There was just something inherently wrong with what I was doing, in the control cards I was playing, in the threats I was trying to commit to the table, and even to the number and type of those threats. The Turbo-Obliterate deck I was trying to make had the potential to be good, but I hadn’t yet put good cards into it, so why should I expect it to win more than once in a while? But as all Timmy’s know, that once in a while was enough to inspire further work into the deck, because if it’s bad and it’s winning sometimes, imagine what it could do if it transformed into a good deck!
I happily watched Pro Tour: Kobe from my home computer, and something about it kept tickling in my brain; the Affinity deck came into its own there despite the fact that it was predicted to do so by Jarrod Bright, but also successful counter-strategies made themselves known as well. And I saw this curious little Red deck that won the whole thing, which looked at first kind of silly, but within a week’s time had latched onto my brain, as was required to actually, um, make that silly deck good. Given that some silly March of the Machines/Indestructibles deck was purportedly doing well somewhere, and might even be an effective second-rate deck that would win once in a while, I figured this superior Indestructibles strategy was likely to eventually turn itself into a firm kick to something’s groin.
The next thing I came up with was the”Version 1.5″ of the deck, transitioning it from where it was, to where it wanted to be, but I will follow it with the”2.0″ of the deck (its current and likely final state), after I explain how it got there.
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Stalking Stones
4 Great Furnace
4 Forgotten Cave
9 Mountain
4 Darksteel Ingot
4 Seething Song
4 Obliterate
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Culling Scales
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Arc Slogger
4 Solemn Simulacrum
2 Furnace Dragon
1 Electrostatic Bolt
This was basically the”well, why don’t I put all those cards I had in the sideboard into the main deck” version, as Culling Scales was advanced from the bench as a serious control card, as I noted it was just incredibly good to start with, and could function as the closest Type Two equivalent to The Abyss at the moment, given the deck was already committed to Darksteel Ingot as part of its chief Obliterate plan, and its general desire to have additional mana sources and mana acceleration. The Hammers I never recursed and the Myr Enforcers that sucked ass were turned into the”Big Red” core compliment of threats, namely Solemn Simulacrum and the board-controlling Arc-Slogger. Moment by moment, the bad cards left the deck, and I kissed Sculpting Steel, Serum Powder, and Darksteel Pendant goodbye. Admittedly Serum Powder really is a good card, but it didn’t suit the purposes of this deck as I’d hoped it might, as I figured the deck would like both cheaper mulligans and additional mana sources. Frankly, for this particular theoretical construct, the mulligans weren’t made so very cheap that I was required to play the card for that advantage, and there are plenty of ways to accelerate your mana without relying on a card that”just” does that: the Sad Robot has proven himself much better at both the goals I’d set down for Serum Powder, since he actually filled the role I had given that card in my mind.
So all I had to do now was sit down and actually play this thing some to note the change in the deck’s cohesive ability to pull off the strategy I had chosen. What better way to do this than sit down against the best deck in the format and let it pound me into gristle twenty or forty times? Playing against Ravager-Affinity until I was blue in the face, sitting there and losing most of the time, is the best way to learn how to beat that deck: learn what it does well, and what it is vulnerable to, and you will learn how to turn its role as a predator around by preying upon the deck’s weaknesses. I won’t go on about how, exactly, this relationship came about by around game ten or so, because that story is not yet finished, but I will tell more of an example that did prove itself worthy.
There are two conditions around which I am no longer required to abstain from Magic. The first is that I still practice and”be in shape” when Team Limited season rolls around, and in Boston this year that level of preparation helped see my team, Scarecrow, make it to the second day of the Pro Tour. My Day Two PT activities usually involve sitting at home, because I didn’t go to the Pro Tour, or working in some journalistic capacity for all the Pro Tours around New York City whenever I could… which was much easier when we had a Pro Tour in New York instead of Boston. The second exception is that I must be playing a Merfolk deck, as astute readers who remember my article from the conclusion of the Extended season might remember. Shuffling up a deck with Merfolk, card drawing, and free countermagic brings me back to a tournament that felt like my glory day, if I had to pick just one day in my life as a Magic player to identify what it is I enjoy about playing Magic for, and inevitably that is winning or losing with my own deck on my own terms, challenging the game as a battle of intellect rather than leaving games to the element of chance.
Regionals 2001 was a very good year, if you liked enchantments. The best deck was undoubtedly Replenish, thanks to Donald Lim among others, and the second best deck was probably the Bargain deck, if you could play it well (which almost nobody could do). Now, Donald is my frequent playtest partner, or at least he was before I quit Magic, and our two conflicting approaches to the game saw us as an interesting pair: often enemies trying to thwart each others’ intellectual experiments of the day, and as often co-conspirators to sharpen the right deck for the right metagame. I’d decided a variant of The Rock had the proper tools to defeat the Replenish deck, and for a month prior to Regionals I hit Neutral Ground four or five times a week to test, tune, and talk about the deck I’d chosen to make it work. I sculpted this Black/Green board-control deck into a Replenish-killing tool, honing the razor’s edge of the deck by which I intended to attack the metagame. And, frankly, at that rate I couldn’t even have cut myself shaving, because that was one dull edge: I got stomped, then I shuffled and got stomped again, and then I got angry and insisted I keep getting stomped until I understood why I was being so frustrated by my chosen nemesis. Ten games didn’t do it: I still hadn’t won one yet, and so I hadn’t learned what my deck was doing wrong specifically, I just knew that the approach was wrong somehow. Twenty games didn’t do it: I’d won one, but I didn’t know why, it was just an aberration of the Replenish deck’s occasional performance anxiety.
At thirty games, I knew why the Replenish deck was winning, and it was because the deck I was playing was an absolute, misguided piece of crap. So I went home, and I sat and pondered everything I had done wrong, each and every blow that had landed upon my head while my poor little Black/Green deck was screaming”Not the face! Not the face!” In that simmering, intellectual anger, the Fish deck was born. Aggro-control with the proper tools for combating Replenish, thanks to playing the most number of counterspells in the format at the time and the”correct” predatory relationship of advancing my board position with creatures, and exhausting my opponents’ decks with Rootwater Thief, all while covering my ass with Daze and Thwart. Counterspell was the worst card in the deck, and that was saying something, as I was happily running Sandbar Merfolk, but at least Counterspell was something I’d have time for around turn 4 or 5 and, well, it did counter Replenish pretty effectively.
I had successfully crafted a metagame deck aimed at the broad side of Replenish’s barn, and the week or so I had to test it and spread it across the Internet among those”in the know” led to success on my part: I went 6-1-1 with it at Regionals that year, with an intentional draw in the mirror match to get us both away from the slightest hint of any deck that could beat the Merfolk deck.
The loss was to Michael J. Flores, who was casting spells like Vicious Hunger and Yawgmoth’s Will, and it was a fine moment for both of our creations, even if mine would never, ever beat his. I finished ninth on tiebreakers, missing the cut for Nationals by .4%, but finishing in eighth was my playtest partner, Donald Lim, with his signature Replenish deck. While I was not to be playing Nationals that year, I still did what I came to do that day… as I can fight the metagame, not tiebreakers. (I would later learn that in tenth place was my future teammate, Kevin An, but that’s just part of how the story goes.)
That experience with the Fish deck taught me a lot about crafting a predator for a known deck, and it’s relevant to the story because me getting my face bashed in repeatedly happened again with the Red deck. I sat down for a match of twenty with Tim Gillam at Neutral Ground to test my”upgraded” deck’s mettle, pushing the”Hit Me!” button against Ravager-Affinity twenty times in a row. I won five out of twenty, and I drew Furnace Dragon five times out of twenty, so there seemed to be a definite relationship to how the matchup would play out: if I had a Dragon to play on turn 4 or so, I won the game. If not, well maybe I’d be able to stall the Affinity deck with my board control cards, but sooner or later something went wrong, and he killed me with Shrapnel Blast more often than I want to recall.
That feeling from the Merfolk experience remained: my face had been bashed in repeatedly, and I’d learned something valuable from my beating even if it wasn’t what I’d hoped to learn. We didn’t playtest with sideboards, mostly because I wanted to get a sense of how much trouble I was in before I committed sideboard space to the matchup, as I firmly believe the deck is properly configured to have the correct strategy against non-Affinity, non-Goblin matchups. (Those would be the control decks, and I’ll tell you a dirty secret: they don’t like Obliterate. They don’t much like seeing four Culling Scales in the main deck either, when they are trying to obtain control with permanents like Lightning Rift and Silver Knight.)
After all, while I was”targeting” Ravager-Affinity as the matchup my control strategy obviously has to focus on, I wasn’t allowed to play a jumble of bad cards and call it a deck. Add twelve Shatters/Echoing Ruins/Detonates and I think you’ll probably do okay against Ravager-Affinity so long as you’re doing something else while you’re at it; instead, I chose to target Ravager-Affinity and its effect on the metagame, obviously sacrificing a bit of Ravager-stomping to have a cohesive deck that functioned no matter what sixty cards the opponent came packing. That’s where the quiet star of the deck comes in: Culling Scales. Besides attempt to win before I take control, what can, say, a White Weenie deck do about a Culling Scales that will sit in play and eat everything in sight for the rest of the game? Generally you could wait for it to go away, but in this particular deck it will be locked to remain in play for rather a long time. This leaves the reserve plan of overwhelming it by saving a handful of creatures that need to be played out in bulk to get around its once-per-turn restriction, leaving it vulnerable to attack with Simulacrum, Sloggers, and so on.
Ravager-Affinity’s effect on the metagame (coupled with the rest of the Skullclamp decks), is that if you’re not playing inexpensive cards, you’re not playing a deck that will win. Thus, a lot of decks have permanents that cost three or less mana, and it was including Culling Scales in the maindeck that really did the trick. It gives you extra redundancy against aggressive decks to go with the Oblivion Stones I added, and delivers an active board control sweeper with Damping Matrix on the board, which Oblivion Stone obviously has a problem with. Any good rogue deck, by definition as a rogue strategy (rather than a”hate” deck filled with a conglomeration of cards that will demolish just one deck), intelligently works the metagame to its advantage, analyzing trends and altering its strategy to work against the grain of the metagame and exploit common weaknesses. In this case, it is Culling Scales that really works against the entirety of the metagame, whereas the rest of the deck is a reasonable facsimile of a lot of deck-types very much like it that would be classified as”Big Red.” I went back to my testing, and I had a lot more game against Ravager-Affinity, but I still only pulled off 25%.
My face hurt, and I’d learned my lesson, so very quickly I reached this final version for the deck:
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Stalking Stones
4 Great Furnace
4 Forgotten Cave
9 Mountain
4 Darksteel Ingot
4 Seething Song
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Culling Scales
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Arc Slogger
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Furnace Dragon
3 Obliterate
Winning every time you draw a Dragon is a pretty good justification for more Dragons. Seth Burn taught me that one, and we were just talking about the creature type”Dragon,” rather than the Furnace Dragon I know and love. With the Dragons, the matchup is much more nearly 50%, which is to say you’re as good against them as if you were playing the exact same deck as them. Draw Dragon, play Dragon, win with Dragon is a very straightforward route, where the rest of the cards are just there to buy you time to get one into play or to draw one. It’s mathematically possible to get a Dragon into play on the third turn, reasonably likely with a Seething Song and a miscellaneous collection of the other cards in your deck that a Dragon can come down on the fourth turn, and everything after that is more or less easy to pull off, should you for example succeed at resetting the board with Oblivion Stone before things get too bad for you. With the maindeck complete, the only task left was to craft a sideboard.
Sticking with the predator/prey relationship I had been trying to craft all along, it was clear to see that Affinity would remain the top dog until Regionals, and throughout Regionals as well. What the sideboard should include then, is the correct answers to problems that would come up time and again, hopefully overlapping as much as possible. The problem with the Affinity matchup was the early game, obviously because they seem pretty intent on not letting you survive to see the mid- or late-game. The best tool I could guarantee I wanted four of was Electrostatic Bolt. It’s also extra creature burn for the Goblin Bidding matchup, where your main concern is maintaining your life total early and establishing control fast enough to do something about it before they just Bid you to death. The only cards set in stone from the first version were the following:
4 Electrostatic Bolt
3 Pyroclasm
(I’d consider Flamebreak for the deck, but with”only” seventeen Red lands, getting RRR on turn 3 won’t be consistent enough, and the extra mana and three damage are worse for me than the occasional Goblin Sledder problem with Pyroclasm. I can presumably kill one Goblin with Pyrite Spellbomb, Electrostatic Bolt, or Culling Scales before I cast Pyroclasm.)
I also had some other bad cards for a long time, like more Furnace Dragons that should have been in the maindeck, and the Darksteel Pendants I told myself had to be good against control, because obviously playing a board-control Obliterate deck doesn’t take care of the control matchup well enough already. Given I had to cut something I cared about to squeeze that last Dragon in, the eighth card for the sideboard is clearly:
Now, the rest of the sideboard is mutable: there are things I want, things I want to squeak in, and Shatters if I end up needing them in the Ravager-Affinity matchup. More importantly perhaps is”not dying” to Goblin Bidding, which means doing something about the Goblin Warchiefs in their graveyard before the haste killed me. But looking at the deck, all I really want to take out against Affinity is the Obliterates and maybe a Culling Scale or two if I really needed to, as the point of the deck was to play really good control cards in the proper configuration to fight Affinity without compromising my deck’s status as a deck against the rest of the field. Having a plan for what I was going to do against Goblin Bidding (become cheaper and faster and remove everything I could that cost billions of mana before I died, though maybe I could justify keeping a Dragon or two because they’re big, red fliers), the next card is clearly:
There is a minor synergy issue with its interaction with Culling Scales, which will often prevent it from doing much with its normal”tap” ability if I’ve got a Scales going, but the only really big problem is everything coming back with Haste, and so the Claws most definitely make the cut. The only other reasonable option is Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author], to turn their aggressive nature back at them with a single card, and I’ll even reserve the right to change the next three cards in the sideboard to Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] if I actually get to playtest stuff like the mirror match and against a wide variety of control decks. As of right now, the last three cards I’d commit to the sideboard are:
2 Mindslaver
1 Temple of the False God
Something about Ritual-Mindslaver sounds good, and this is the control deck with the most mana acceleration in the field except for whatever variant of TwelvePost comes to play, so popping off a Mindslaver on turn 5 thanks to Seething Song has to be a good thing, right? It’s pretty reasonable to think that Ritual-Obliterate to their Mindslaver plan”might be good enough,” and I expect that by posting this article, a good chunk of playtesters will appear out of the woodwork and might actually find out for me, since aside from the cerebral exercise, this deck’s impact at Regionals doesn’t have any personal allure to me. So, the decklist with sideboard is either of the following:
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Stalking Stones
4 Great Furnace
4 Forgotten Cave
9 Mountain
4 Darksteel Ingot
4 Seething Song
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Culling Scales
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Arc Slogger
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Furnace Dragon
3 Obliterate
Sideboard 1:
4 Electrostatic Bolt
4 Scrabbling Claws
3 Pyroclasm
2 Mindslaver
1 Obliterate
1 Temple of the False God
Sideboard 2:
4 Electrostatic Bolt
4 Scrabbling Claws
3 Pyroclasm
3 Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
1 Obliterate
Frankly, I am thinking the Pulses of the Forge will do a lot more for you at Regionals, by turning Goblin Bidding into a winnable matchup instead of a matchup where you have to worry you don’t have the proper tools available, but it is distinctly possible that Mindslaver might be worth the effort, as it is reasonable to say that as the upcoming month progresses, control decks will begin to make more and more of an appearance, as they learn to use the proper tools to combat the initial metagame response of aggressive and powerful decks bearing Skullclamp.
Hopefully this long and rambling example of what michaelj means when he says that rogue decks don’t play bad cards, and a detailed example of a story or two about crafting your ‘rogue’ deck to beat your target thanks to the strategy you are implementing from deck design on up.
Have fun at Regionals, if you can. The sky is falling, after all, isn’t it? And if this deck ends up getting named by the Internet-reading populace, would you at least do me the favor of not giving it a dopey name like”Raffinity?” Normally I wouldn’t let something like this out of the bag with a month to go before Regionals, but having quit Magic really does alter my priorities in life as of late.
— Sean McKeown
— [email protected]
“I was born under the sign of Cancer
Like brushing cloth, I smooth the wrinkles for an answer
I’m always closing my eyes, and wishing I’m fine
Even though I’m not this time…”
–the Indigo Girls,”Love Will Come To You”