So, Faeries… yet again.
Since Bitterblossom was released, Faeries has changed very little. Some Nameless Inversions here, some Vendilion Cliques there, swapping Thoughtseize from the sideboard to the maindeck — this was mostly it. And, in all this time, I believe it has always been the best deck in the format. Right now, I don’t think it is anymore. I don’t know what the best deck in the format is, but it’s probably not Faeries.
This article is going to talk about Alara Reborn and how it affects what has became my signature deck this season.
For many sets, we Faeries players had to watch while awesome cards were added to everyone else’s decks but ours. If you check the list I advocated in my last article, you’ll see that the only card from Shards of Alara is the single Agony Warp, and there are exactly zero cards from Conflux. Still, it endured — it survived the printing of cards such as Banefire and the devastating Volcanic Fallout. However, I’m not sure it is going to survive now.
Don’t get me wrong — Faeries, as a deck or strategy, will always exist and remain competitive as long as Bitterblossom is in the format. No matter how many cards the Reveillark players get, they’re still not having a good matchup against you, and you can still expect to at least have a fair match against all the token decks, depending on how you build your Faeries. When I say survive, I mean survive as what is (in my opinion) the optimal deck to play. I believe that, after Alara Reborn, you can still play Faeries, but it’s not the best choice anymore.
The thing with Alara Reborn is that it doesn’t kill Faeries by itself, but it’s just the final straw. All those cards could exist and, if Volcanic Fallout didn’t, it’d probably still be the best deck. However, when you add all those cards to an already somewhat hostile environment, it gets a little bit too much.
The first thing about Alara Reborn is that I believe it doesn’t add anything to the deck. The deck is already so perfect, so tight, that the only way you’d get something new was if it was a strict improvement of something you are already playing — such as a better creature that counters to replace Spellstutter Sprite, or better removal to replace Terror, or better card drawing to replace Jace — none of this happened.
It can be argued that Soul Manipulation is better than Remove Soul. I can see myself playing it over the one Remove Soul I was maindecking. After all, you have plenty to do on turn 2 that is not Remove Soul, and you want it against the decks that play bigger guys anyway, so you’ll have mana by then… On the surface it seems better, but there is a reason I was playing Remove Soul over Cancel – I’ll have to see what becomes of the format before I have a definite opinion of which is better (though right now I’d say Soul Manipulation is better, in a vacuum). Even if you do play Soul Manipulation(s), I’m not a fan of switching your deck to accommodate it. If you manage to use it and recur a Spellstutter or a Scion, great, but playing cards such as Shriekmaw over Terror just because of it is not worth it — I don’t think it’s that good that you should play inferior cards (because, in this deck, Shriekmaw is much worse than Terror, and even Agony Warp) because of it. So, in short, I can see playing the card, but leaving the deck as it is — if it’s not good enough for the deck right now, it’s not going to be good enough. Faeries is not like Five-Color Control, in that you can change fifteen cards to accommodate a card such as Bloodbraided Elf. Thirty-ish of the cards are set in stone, and the other five are going to be picked from a very narrow selection.
Even if Soul Manipulation gets to be the card of choice, it’s not relevant enough to push the deck when it wouldn’t otherwise be good. It’s one of those cards that might be slightly better than what you are already playing, but the deck is not going to become viable or not because of it.
Other than the new Counterspell, there is not a single card I can see that has a slight chance of seeing play in the deck as it is, unless it so happens that I’m underestimating Soul Manipulation by a lot and they make the new U/B Cycler guy playable by themselves, like Chapin suggested. I don’t think this is happening… In that regard, I share Sam Black view.
There are, however, many new cards that are pretty good against Faeries. The first one is Bloodbraid Elf.
Bloodbraid Elf is a very, very troublesome card for Faeries. First, he is a hasted beater that brings another guy and is hard to counter. Second, he makes Red decks actually good. This is actually the biggest problem with him — he makes it so that people will want to play aggro strategies, and they’ll be good against something that is not Faeries. Before, it was fine to have a bad matchup against Red, because it wasn’t very common (and, honestly, it was very bad), but I expect its popularity to rise, be it RG, Blightning, or a mix of the two. Jund Hackblade certainly doesn’t help here either. Even though it might be that no one actually plays him, since the aggro decks of our time aim for consistency over speed. You just don’t see decks like “Frog in a Blender” any more…For that, I blame Tomoharo Saito. If they do decide to play, him he is very good against you, and he can’t even be Terrored.
The Elf is also pretty good in control against you. Playing turn 3 Kitchen Finks and attacking four times with it while letting their Bitterblossom kill them has been a valid strategy for the matchup numerous times, and the Elf increases the times in which this happens. He is another card that finds Fallout (though, granted, at Sorcery speed) and he even hits for three right after that. It makes it so that the waiting game is less attractive, and you have to go more aggressive, thus being more vulnerable to cards such as the Fallout. It’s also a fine answer to your Jace, which is a trump card in the matchup.
Another card that is good against you is Anathemancer, though not as good as against Five-Color Control. Faeries has its share of non-basics, and sometimes an Unearthed one will just deal infinite damage. It’s a much better card than Banefire, that’s for sure, though it’s not that problematic in my opinion — Faeries is a deck that can kill out of nowhere, and it’s not hard for you to do that before they get to seven mana in most games, which is the reason I don’t even think Banefire is that good against you. If a deck such as Five-Color Control plays him, though, it’ll be a problem — you usually can’t kill them that fast. This, coupled with Bloodbraid Elf and Volcanic Fallout, should bring you a lot of trouble, and it gives them an alternative game plan to win — just burn you out instead of trying to have more mana and more cards and just overwhelm you with spells. I still don’t think the matchup is bad — it’s still probably favorable for you — but it’s not favorable enough that playing this deck is an attractive to “hunt” on opposing Five-Color Control players, since you might as well just lose. I’d strongly consider playing Puppeteer Clique nowadays in your Faeries sideboard, as it really does punish Five-Color Control players playing Cloudthresher and this new guy.
Another card that might be problematic is Putrid Leech, again not as much for the card itself but for what it represents. BG aggro is a reasonable strategy against you (though I disagree with Sam that it’s your worst matchup — I don’t think it’s even a bad matchup, it’s pretty winnable), and this guy is pretty good in there. He trades with Mistbind Clique, but other than that, he is not dying anytime soon against you, and if you get to Sower him he is not as good on your side as he is in theirs. It might be that this card, along with Jund Hackblade (if it sees play), Bloodbraid Elf and the ton-of-hasted-creatures archetypes that it’s going to spawn make it so that Agony Warp becomes better than Terror. The problems with that are that you don’t get to deal with a big Figure of Destiny, with a resolved Thresher or with a Mistbind Clique (at least not that easy with the Clique). Both have pros and cons, and even though I thought Terror was better before, I think this is the time for Agony Warp. If you play Warps, you also get a lot worse against an eventual Nassif Five-Color Control build that shows up, but I think you can survive that to get better against the new popular decks.
Another card that might get better is Plumeveil. I didn’t like it originally in Faeries because of the mana, but now it might be worth adapting the mana for (and running the gamble). Plumeveil is pretty insane against haste guys — the main problem with Plumeveil is that you don’t want to commit three mana during their attack phase, because you don’t know what they are going to play (they might even remove the Plumeveil), but when they tap out for, say, Bloodbraid Elf, and then attack right away, you always get value of your Plumeveil because they can’t do anything else for the turn.
Next, comes what I think is the best card against the deck — Zealous Persecution. Unlike the previous cards, its problem doesn’t come from the fact that it encourages other builds, but from the fact that it’s so intrinsically good against you in the existing builds. Scion is a very key card in the BW matchup, and this card just deals with it plus all your tokens, while dealing you damage in the process. It also happens to completely blank your best card against them, Stillmoon Cavalier. It costs only two mana and is an instant, so it’s very hard to play around (though Spellstutter will always counter it) — at some point you will have to tap out, and this card will be a blowout. If I was going to play the BW deck, I’d certainly play a number of those in the maindeck, and I expect mostly everyone will, which might alone change the matchup from even to non-favorable. It’s still not going to be awful, but it’s not going to be a good pairing, and they are adding up. The other card that might be added to the archetype, Identity Crisis, seems to be irrelevant against you.
The last card I’d like to mention is the Maelstrom Pulse. I think Pulse is a pretty strong card against Faeries — it might appear to be bad, since it’s weak against both Scion and Mistbind Clique, but it kills Bitterblossom on the play, and it kills all the tokens whenever you want. As some of the other cards, it’s not going to beat the archetype by itself, but it’s going to increase their win percentage a bit.
I think most of what I said holds true to Five-Color Control as well, at least in this incarnation of it. Anathermancer looks like such a problematic card that I’d rather change decks than try to change my build to beat it, unless it’s a very radical change on the whole focus of the deck, like Chapin did (which basically means changing decks).
I’ll leave a list for reference here, though it’s basically the same list I had before with a few changes. I’m going to Barcelona soon, and, though I don’t really know what I’m going to play, there is a high chance it’s not Faeries or Five-Color Control… but if it is Faeries, it’ll be something close to this:
4 Bitterblossom
4 Mistbind Clique
3 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Scion of Oona
2 Sower of Temptation
4 Broken Ambitions
4 Cryptic Command
4 Agony Warp
2 Soul Manipulation
3 Thoughtseize
1 Jace Beleren
4 Secluded Glen
4 Sunken Ruins
4 Underground River
4 Mutavault
2 Swamp
7 Island
Sideboard:
1 Thoughtseize
3 Plumeveil
1 Jace Beleren
2 Puppeteer Clique
2 Murderous Redcap
1 Remove Soul /Soul Manipulation
3 Vendilion Clique /Infest
2 Sower of Temptation
I cut one Jace from the maindeck because it’s just worse now, since even the control deck runs more guys. There is one more in the sideboard, for those decks (since it’s still not bad), as well as the mirror and stuff like Swans, and it’s possible that cutting them entirely from the maindeck for the Remove Soul (or a third Soul Manipulation) is correct. I think Scepter of Fugue is not good in the sideboard if people start playing the Elf in control, since it’s pretty bad to go turn 2 Scepter, turn 3 activate it, and then be hit by Bloodbraid who puts Kitchen Finks into play — it makes it so you have to be reactive, and you can’t spend time discarding their cards because you are dying on board.
Zealous Persecution made Stillmoon a lot worse, to the point where I think it’s better to try and look somewhere else. There isn’t anything very good as I see it — right now I’m trying Murderous Redcap and Sowers, but maybe Loxodon Warhammer is a good answer? I still dislike Infest against BW, even without Stillmoon, because the new BW builds have fewer Tokens and more controllish cards (like Redcap themselves) — which is good for you, if I might say, though they might just go back to having more token guys with Persecution and then Infest is good. Infest is also pretty good against the new GW deck, because it not only kills their tokens but also their mana sources, and if that deck becomes popular I’d remove the Redcaps and another card (probably a Vendilion Clique) for at least three Infests, or the three Vendilions altogether. To be honest, I don’t really like Vendilion Clique right now (all the decks are more aggressive, and the Red decks don’t have slow cards you want to take out, like Siege-Gang and Demigod), so it might be that Infest is just better than it even if you don’t board it in against the Persist versions of BW, just because of GW. The problem with removing Vendilion is that now you have many bad cards against Five-Color Control and not much to bring in, but since they’ve also changed their approach maybe some of the cards (e.g. Agony Warp) aren’t so bad anymore, and you can live with them.
Redcap and Plumeveil give you a good plan against Red, both being essentially counters to Bloodbraid, and Puppeteer gets sided in against them as well just for being a body that blocks, allows you to race, champions for Mistbind, and gets rid of Anathemancer. The sideboard as it is doesn’t have much against BG, but there isn’t much you can play — Sam Black suggested Zombie Outlander in his article, and if Pulse becomes the standard removal over Nameless/Eyeblight’s Ending (or Terror, for that matter) it might be good. Extra Terrors would also be good in the board, for the Manlands, Vanquisher, Liege, Cloudthresher, and you’d also board them in for Agony Warps in some matchups, so they are a consideration.
I guess this is it. As I said, this is getting to the point where I’d rather just give up than keep fighting against the tide, but if I’m to put up a fight, it’ll be with something very close to this build.
I know it feels awkward to have a whole article on the subject “why you should not be playing this deck,” but I got asked an incredible amount of times whether I still thought Faeries was the best deck after Alara Reborn, and this article is the answer. If you already didn’t like Faeries, I hope at least the reason behind my decision is useful to you in some way. I promise I’ll have something more positive next time.
Thanks for reading.
PV