After Brian Kibler won Grand Prix: Sendai with an innovative (if not upgraded) Next Level Bant version, it was only natural that we would test the deck against one of the most popular decks in the format. Antoine will be piloting the UWG deck, while I’ll be playing a classic UW Tap Out deck. Here are the two decklists:
Creatures (24)
- 2 Birds of Paradise
- 2 Ranger of Eos
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 1 Borderland Ranger
- 1 Scute Mob
- 2 Sphinx of Lost Truths
- 4 Sea Gate Oracle
- 4 Vengevine
- 4 Wall of Omens
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (24)
Spells (5)
Sideboard
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (26)
Spells (23)
Maindeck Games (11-13, 46% games won)
On the play: 7-5
On the draw: 4-8
The main deck matchup seems rather close, but the results show it is slightly in Antoine’s favor. I thought two things would be bad for me: Vengevine and the acceleration that means his Planeswalkers arrive more quickly than mine. One of my assumptions was wrong, if not both. Indeed, Vengevine was rarely decisive (which surprised me), and the acceleration was much more than merely “annoying.” To put is simply, the match-up is 100% about the tempo. Getting our planeswalkers in play as quickly as possible is the only thing both sides should worry about. So, how do you do that? After all, NLB is the deck with six one-drop mana accelerators, which mean you should, in theory at least, be unable to compete in that kind of race. However, you have several weapons to handle the one-cost mana drop. First, you can kill them (obviously). For that purpose, you have three different options, but you should only use them in order to prevent Next Level Bant from reaching its fourth mana.
1) Oblivion Ring. You should almost always play this on the first small guy you face. It would be good to hold a removal spell for Vengevine, but you have many answers to the card anyway (Path to Exile, Oblivion Ring, Baneslayer Angel, Martial Coup, etc.) so you should be able to deal with it at some point. And this is a reason why the card, even though it is good once in a while after a Day of Judgment, is good but not great. Also, whenever NLB reaches four mana, he will almost always rather cast a Planeswalker.
2) Day of Judgment. This is better used to deal with Ranger of Eos/Scute Mob, and is often too late to slow the accelerators down. However, if you play first and open with a turn 2 Chalice, and/or if you feel like they are missing mana, go ahead and kill the little guys.
3) Path to Exile. This can be played on the upkeep of turn 3, as it will often save you one turn.
As the match-up is about getting your mana as fast as possible, Chalice will be great, but as this list only runs two, you can’t really make it a plan. What you will need is to screw up their mana, which you will achieve by doing more than merely killing their early drops. Spreading Seas and Tectonic Edge will be your other weapons. You have to remember that Planeswalkers require double Blue or double White. Therefore you will, as we saw earlier, have to kill the little guys, but you’ll also have to try to control their lands as much as you can.
Spreading Seas is a card you will almost never play on Forest, as it goes against the goal to keep them from reaching UUWW. However, you will play it instantly on Celestial Colonnade, and on White lands when they already have a Blue land up. Then the question of taking the risk to give them their second Blue mana in order to deal with one of their two White sources (and hope they are not holding another one) mostly depends on whether you can deal with Jace at this point in the game. If all Planeswalkers are as just as much trouble, you should try and stop the White mana as they have one more White planeswalker than Blue planeswalker.
Tectonic Edge’s first targets will obviously be manlands. However, if, by destroying Seaside Citadel or Sunpetal Grove, you can save yourself a turn, feel free to do so. Also, concerning Tectonic Edge: remember the important thing is that your opponent has four lands when you activate it, not when it resolves. Therefore, if you have two copies of the pseudo Strip Mine in play and your opponent has four lands, you can destroy two of them if you activate one Edge in response to the other.
All those things may look like details, but they are what make you win the match. All these situations don’t happen in every game; they may only help you win one game out of thirty. But they are what make the match-up closer than it seems in the main deck: +3% here, +3% there, and so on. Of course, you should try not to waste all of your resources in order to destroy your opponent’s mana. And that’s why this match-up is pretty difficult to play: you must, at every single moment, ask yourself how to screw them up, while in the meantime keeping a little backup for their guys. Therefore, you need to constantly anticipate or gamble on their future plays before you decide your own.
One final word about the preboard games, concerning the two X spells: they are both good, as NLB is not running Negate in the main deck… but Martial Coup is more than good. It is simply your best card maindeck. Every time I’ve cast it, it won all by itself.
However, I knew Antoine’s decklist, and this changes things a great deal. When you see a new deck performing well in a tournament, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is great. Indeed, the results it gets are often due to the surprise effect it causes. Take, for instance, Boss Naya. The deck was nothing great when LSV went undefeated with it, but this is what happens when, in a match-up pitching A against B, A knows the match-up while B can’t guess more than 30 cards in A’s deck. Usually, the difference will be about 10%. Next Level Bant wasn’t good in Sendai – it was fantastic – but soon it might simply drop back to “good,” simply because people will play around every single one of the 60 cards Brian piloted to his GP title. Also, when Player A uses specific sideboard strategy but Player B doesn’t, you can add another 5 to 10%. This explains how a deck like Naya, which shouldn’t be over 50/50 against most of the field, ended up having such great results at the PT.
Sideboarding:
In
1 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
1 Jace Beleren
1 Martial Coup
4 Negate
1 Oblivion Ring
Out
1 Gideon Jura
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Wall of Omens
1 Mind Spring
1 Path to Exile
2 Everflowing Chalice
1 Spreading Seas
I’ve tried several sideboard plans, and this was the most satisfying.
Postboard games (9-17, 35% games won)
On the play: 5-8
On the draw: 4-9
Why are games so much harder post-board than they were pre-board? The thing is that, while Antoine’s deck gets reinforced by Negate and Deprive, mine doesn’t really get better. Indeed, the deck was, in game 1, relying on the addition of its worst cards in order to win. Now that I obviously have to take some of them out, he can move a little more freely.
Also, his counters are a lot stronger than mine. Not only do they deal with all of my deck when mine can’t stop all of his threats, Deprive is also the perfect weapon against Spreading Seas. Indeed, the counterspell makes the aura an advantage, as it can now fix their mana instead of ruining it, and as it means Antoine can now bounce back his Islanded Celestial Colonnade.
The X spells were still good, but not nearly as good as they were in the main deck. When they were a precious support in the pre-board games (screw his mana then win with planeswalker, or play an X spell to take definitive control over the game), now they are just expensive spells, and it takes only two mana to play around them.
I thought about cutting all Spreading Seas in order to force Chalice back in, but unfortunately that is not an option. If I did so, I would lose far too many games to Celestial Colonnade.
Options to Improve the Match-Up
There is obviously room for improvement, but it is not so easy to find. The difficulties caused by Noble Hierarch and Birds of Paradise are not easy to overcome, as they come too early to be dealt with. Oust could help, but do you really want to play several copies of a card which will be useless in most match-ups? Another simpler option would be to run Chalices number 3 and 4 in the main deck.
Sideboarding isn’t easy. Once again, the problem doesn’t come from the spells he plays, but from the fact that the 0/1s always set him one step ahead. He is the player who dictates the pace of the game, and there is not much you can do about it. You could try and run more counters, but then a card like Vengevine would be excellent, and you wouldn’t be able to play spells during your turn when you feel like doing so. Maybe Oust would actually be good at this point, simply as a sideboard card. You could hardly run more than three of them, but they could do a good job combined with another one or two more Jace Belerens. But anyway, all these changes won’t make the match-up good, only a little better. This 35-65 stat reflects a very uneven match-up post board, and I can’t really think of a sideboard plan which could possibly help you win more than 40 or 42% of the games.
Until next time, have all a great week, and good luck at the StarCityGames.com Open Series weekend in St. Louis!
Oli