Hello everyone, and welcome to the pilot edition of “Challenge Raph: Break The Format!”
“Challenge Raph” is a new interactive column concept where you, the reader, will be able to… well, to challenge me. So, in a few words, what is it all about?
1) First, folks in the forum choose an original Constructed format. It could be something like "commons only," or "uncommon only," or even "rares only." Any mix, any sets, one-of-each-card, or just about any wacky thing that you can think of. The only regulation is that it has to be a format that hasn’t been played before with any combination of sets.
2) A challenger is chosen (in a manner yet to be decided… get your names down in the forums!). We then have a limited period of time to come up with a viable deck. The time limit can change, depending on the complexity of the format, but generally it’ll be something around the thirty to sixty minute mark.
3) The best-of-five match between the challenger and I will be played on Magic Online, so you can support your champion live… or simply watch the replays.
4) After the match, we will both report on the deck construction process and the games themselves.
So, what is the point of this exercise? Simply put, it’s to help hone our skills in format definition. It’ll help us figure out a format in a limited period of time, and help us work toward finding a best deck. Sure, the formats we’ll be playing will be dead as soon as our match is over, but nothing stops you from playing more games with your friends afterwards, of course. But what’s interesting is to see how we can, in about an hour, discover what the best cards of a given format are, what we think your opponent will be playing, our processes in metagaming that information, and how we answer all of the deckbuilding puzzles we usually have to face when we’re preparing yourself for a Constructed event.
For the pilot article, and as a test to see if you, readers, are interested in trying such an experience, I challenged Jaybee to an “all-common Time Spiral / Planar Chaos” battle. The format is quite restrictive, so we limited ourselves to a 25-minute period of deck construction. We will both share how we approached deckbuilding and how the match progressed. Of course, you’re welcome to discuss the format and share your thoughts about our builds in the forums.
Jaybee versus Raph
Format: Commons only from Time Spiral and Planar Chaos
Time for Deck Construction: 25 minutes
From Raph’s Perspective
Let’s take a first look at the format:
Where are the cards that provide card advantage?
Blue, Black, and Red seem to have them all. At least, they have the most efficient ones: Fathom Seer, Think Twice, Strangling Soot, Mystical Teachings, Grapeshot, Empty the Warrens, Looter Il-Kor, Mindstab. Amrou Seekers seems a bit slow and unreliable, as it will probably be dead by the time it’s active.
Where are the good creatures?
In such a limited format, you won’t find better than suspend creatures. Errant Ephemeron is by far the best one. Viscerid Deepwalker, Keldon Halberdier, Corpulent Corpse, Durkwood Baloth, and Ivory Giant also shine. Fathom Seer is the best non-suspend creature, thanks to its ability to draw you cards, and draw you cards again with a Dream Stalker or a Snapback.
What tactics should we try?
The suspend mechanic works great with Storm, and it seems that there is only one card able to deal with Empty the Warrens… Subterranean Shambler. If you manage to pull an Empty the Warrens for 3 or 4, you’re very likely to win the game.
From there, and given the time limit, I decided to go for a Red/Blue Suspend Storm deck.
The options I have to build the deck:
Blue
Errant Ephemeron
Fathom Seer
Looter il-Kor
Viscerid Deepwalker
Think Twice
Snapback
Spiketail Drakeling
Dream Stalker
Red
Coal Stoker
Keldon Halberdier
Empty the Warrens
Subterranean Shambler
Lightning Axe
Grapeshot
Rift Bolt
Brute Force
Fury Charm
Dead / Gone
Colorless
Chromatic Star
Terramorphic Expanse
This format seems obvious, and I suspect my opponent to go for the same strategy. That’s why I have to find the good version for the mirror.
Spiketail Drakeling doesn’t seem to fit the theme. It’s too slow, and it doesn’t counter the key spells like Ephemeron or Empty the Warrens.
Dream Stalker – I don’t plan on playing more than 22 lands, and seems that it doesn’t do enough. When you are to cast Empty the Warrens, it’s unlikely that you’ll bounce this guy more than once to itself to increase the storm count. As a 1/5, it can block the Deepwalkers a few times. It can also bounce Fathom Seers, in the very late game. But in an explosive Storm / Suspend deck, I don’t think you want him in your hand too often.
Looter il-Kor is a 1/1 evasion creature. In a format where it can be taken care of by just about any removal spell – Grapeshot, Dead / Gone, Rift Bolt, and even Lightning Axe if necessary – it’s not a card you can rely on. In fact, looting is not an ability you’ll want to use in this deck. Trading a card for another, unless you’re drawing too many lands, is going to be mostly irrelevant as you have no real way to take advantage of the discard ability, like madness spells for example. Unless you’re running Think Twice….
Think Twice is a card I usually like a lot, but it seems a bit slow, especially here. You will want to be tapped out every turn, and committing two turns for one extra card doesn’t sound right.
Coal Stoker is a bit like Dream Stalker. It will basically increase the storm count by one, and has a bigger body than Dream Stalker, which is what matters. However, four mana, or five if you want to cast an Empty the Warrens in the same turn, seems too much.
Chromatic Star – you will want to have the correct mana on turn 1, and the Star doesn’t provide that. I’m pretty sure that any hand that doesn’t provide the land needed to suspend my creatures is a hand I have to mulligan. And the Star doesn’t really help that.
Terramorphic Expanse has the same problem as the Star, in that it doesn’t help your one-drop if you’re missing the right color, and it bugs you when you’re waiting for the 4th land on turn 4 or 5 to cast your Empty the Warrens. I’d rather play 11 Islands and 11 Mountains instead of 9-9-4.
Then there are some cards I didn’t think about:
Brute Force, Fury Charm, Subterranean Shambler.
All these cards have a use, if I play the mirror match. I kept all these in the sideboard and played more reliable cards maindeck, such as Rift Bolt (which doesn’t do much in the mirror except kill Deepwalkers). Fury Charm can save your Ephemeron in an air battle against one of its peers, and it can bring it in as an attacker two turns earlier. In the late game, it’s just better than a Dream Stalker, as for only two mana you’ll increase your storm count by two if you have something suspended. Brute Force saves your Ephemeron from Lightning Axe, and Subterranean Shambler kills all of your opponent’s goblins; yours too, but I suppose that if you’re holding one, you wait for your opponent to play his first.
My deck ended up like this:
4 Errant Ephemeron
4 Viscerid Deepwalker
4 Keldon Halberdier
4 Fathom Seer
4 Empty the Warrens
4 Rift Bolt
3 Dead / Gone
3 Lightning Axe
4 Grapeshot
4 Snapback
11 Island
11 Mountains
Sideboard
3 Fury Charm
4 Subterranean Shambler
4 Brute Force
1 Lightning Axe
3 Stingscourger
From Jaybee’s Perspective
Raph challenged for the pilot of his new series "Challenge Raph: Break The Format!" and I happily obliged. The rules were quite simple – a virgin format is discussed, and we have twenty-five minutes to break it and come up with the best deck.
Choosing the Deck
I have played some weird formats in the past, and in a common format – where supposedly you won’t get any "degenerate" cards – the most important thing is card advantage / long term advantage. You have two options to build your deck: you either find a very synergetic theme that generates powerful effects or recurring advantage, or you just put together the most powerful cards and all the card advantage you can find.
In this format, two obvious synergies spring to mind:
Slivers
The problem is there are not enough good common Slivers to make it worthwhile. Only Bonesplitter Sliver and Sinew Sliver boost the others for strength, and that’s probably not enough to make up for the bad ones you’ll have to play.
Rebels
This would be one of the playable decks in the format, as it generates card advantage by pumping out creatures. I’ll explain why I didn’t choose that one later in the article.
So now we’ve identified the synergy decks. In order to get a good "grasp of the format," let’s look at the other route we can go: the Power route.
Let’s identify the potentially most powerful cards in the format (that is, cards that can generate victory conditions all by themselves):
The most obvious one: Empty the Warrens
The other one: Icatian Crier + Fortify combo
For card advantage:
Fathom Seer
Looter il-Kor (it’s not technically card advantage, but it ends up the same here)
Think Twice
Mystical Teachings
Grapeshot
Rebel Searchers
Strangling Soot
Mindstab
As one would have easily guessed, the better card advantage can be found in Blue.
The Icatian Crier combo can perfectly be integrated in the rebel deck, and that would be a great argument in favor of the rebels. First, let’s give a closer look at the other deck, since it seems we are going to have to decide between the two builds. We’re supposing that our opponent will probably come to the same conclusions (unless we totally missed something, in which case let’s hope our deck still beats his), so let’s see if it looks like one deck dominates the other.
The Empty the Warrens deck will be Red/Blue, because we play the most powerful cards with the most card advantage possible. As you noticed, that is the Blue role. The deck will revolve around suspended cards that can interact well with Empty the Warrens. Grapeshot is an easy integration to the deck. And Fathom Seer will be the second axe of the deck, with Dream Stalker being a good added bonus for both Storm and Seer.
The rebel deck will be Black/White, relying on 1/1 and 2/1 creatures (which is going to be a problem against a deck supporting Grapeshots and possibly Subterranean Shambler). In the case a Crier survives, the 1/1 citizens generated by the Crier may even be outnumbered by the Empty the Warrens goblins. So we’re faced here with an easy choice – one of the two playable decks seemingly has a very good matchup against the other. Let’s hope our opponent didn’t come to the same conclusion… hehe!
Building the Deck
We want to build a deck taking advantage of the storm mechanics, so we’re going to be playing cheap (possibly free) spells and abusing the suspend mechanics too. So the staples in the deck for the "power" part will be:
4 Empty the Warrens
4 Grapeshot
4 Viscerid Deepwalker
4 Errant Ephemeron
4 Rift Bolt
3 Snapback (we’ll see later how many we want to be playing, exactly)
Adding in the card advantage:
4 Think Twice
4 Fathom Seer
4 Looter il-Kor
2 Dream Stalker
We’re up to 37 cards so far. The deck is cheap enough that we can probably get away with 20 lands. So what are the cards we can possibly add?
Lightning Axe
Dead / Gone
Coal Stoker
Cancel
Spiketail Drakeling
The above seem like the best maindeck choices. Coal Stoker helps the storm mechanics, and is a 3/3 body to beat with, but is a bit expensive to use. Lightning Axe deals with Errant Ephemerons that Raph may play, and also deals with nasty Rebel Searchers (Dead / Gone does that too, but it doesn’t deal with Ephemeron). Cancel… we probably won’t have much mana available to play those optimally.
So the maindeck should probably include a mix of Stokers and Lightning Axes. Let’s try it with two Axes and one Stoker. The other cards belong in the sideboard, along with Subterranean Shamblers, giving us a way to deal with outnumbering Warrens and to deal with nasty rebels, so it’s definitely a four-of. In case we totally missed a very good beatdown deck, we can always include four Aetherflame Walls to stall the early game. Dead / Gone also seems like a good inclusion against rebels, in case he decides to play that deck. And let’s round the sideboard with more Lightning Axes and Snapbacks.
Sideboard:
4 Dead / Gone
4 Subterranean Shamblers
4 Aetherflame Wall
2 Lightning Axe
1 Snapback
Okay, we have what we think is the best deck of the format… let’s see how our build performs in the games!
…
Note: Describing how our three games progressed is quite boring… but next time you’ll be able to watch the games or replays, and it’s going to be a lot more exciting!
As expected, we both played Red/Blue with Empty the Warrens. The maindeck Halberdiers, even though they fitted the strategy fine, didn’t end up being very good. They died to about every burn spell, and especially to Grapeshot. The first game was decided by who drew his Fathom Seers first, and who made the most Goblins. Jaybee won that game.
My sideboard plan, in the form of Fury Charms, worked great in game 2, as they brought two Ephemerons into play earlier than scheduled, that attacked for sixteen points of unexpected damage.
Game 3 was decided on Jaybee’s turn 6. His Ephemeron hit play, and attacked. During the attack, I Lightning Axed it, hoping he would follow with Empty the Warrens. He in fact Lightning Axed his own Ephemeron too (poor thing…) to power up his spell count. With 8 tokens in play, and one card left in hand, he couldn’t recover from the Subterranean Shambler I player the turn later (that he hadn’t seen in game 2, but I suspected he knew about my plan anyway).
Final score: Raph 2-1 Jaybee
…
I hope you enjoyed the pilot, and I hope we’ll be able to play in many crazy formats in the future!
Please, let me know on the forums if you have any suggestions for wacky formats… and get your name down if you’d like to Challenge Raph!
Raph