As someone who likes to play stuff that’s not really on the mainstream radar, I cook up a lot of decks and different strategies based on what I learn about a format through testing. For example, I could tell you that the best Red cards I’ve tested when trying to design a”metagame deck” are Electrostatic Bolt and Starstorm. They’re both great against Affinity and Goblins obviously; EB rarely goes dead in this creature-laden field and Starstorm is an easy cycle when it’s gumming up the works. I have also found Annul to be pretty ridiculous, even if it is in a color that nobody in their right mind will be playing on Saturday unless it’s for Thoughtcast. Okay, so there we go – I’ve got one third of a deck already!
Haphazard blending is pretty much a recipe for disaster, and unfortunately its how a lot of rogue and pet decks end up in the Bean Bracket. A lot of the decks that I’m going to list below resemble this remark, but first I want to talk about the tier two stuff that at least some people will be playing at Regionals tomorrow. If you’re seriously considering qualifying for Nationals, then you would do well to stay away from the following criminals:
R/W Control
4 Eternal Dragon
4 Lightning Rift
3 Damping Matrix
4 Wrath of God
2 Akroma’s Vengeance
3 Slice and Dice
3 Renewed Faith
3 Spark Spray
2 Decree of Justice
3 Wing Shards
3 Pulse of the Fields
4 Secluded Steppe
4 Forgotten Cave
3 Temple of the False God
8 Plains
7 Mountain
This is a list that’s lifted without shame from Ted’s article yesterday, given to him by Phil Samms. I don’t know the list is any good or not since I’ve only tested others, but my general feelings on Slide or R/W Control are thus: If you’re going to play with the White cards in the format, you may as well do it right and go all the way to MWC. This format gives you precious little time to be dicking around with stuff like cycling while a 4/4 that you can’t burn down beats your face in. It also doesn’t have the big mana engine behind it; three Temples of the False God do not qualify. All that said, it’s really not a bad deck – I actually think it’s kind of viable, but that’s more on the strength of the White cards that it plays rather than the whole Lightning Rift parade. I just can’t see why anyone would choose to play R/W Control or Astral Slide (notice the absence of the card in this list by the way, quite rightly) when they could just step up to MWC. The matchups are similar, and it’s a better deck overall. Boggling.
B/G Cemetery
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Skullclamp
3 Smother
3 Oversold Cemetery
2 Withered Wretch
2 Viridian Zealot
4 Rotlung Reanimator
3 Viridian Shaman
4 Bane of the Living
4 Ravenous Baloth
3 Death Cloud
4 Chrome Mox
8 Forest
8 Swamp
3 City of Brass
This is a version that I’d been using based on one of Jarrod Bright’s lists. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but it should be fairly representative of what’s out there. Now, Jarrod is perhaps the most vocal advocate of B/G Cemetery on the net and has done more work with the deck than anyone, but I still couldn’t see taking it with me to the dance. Why? The Mana. Is. A. Huge. Problem. Adding Chrome Mox to the deck was the key to making Bane of the Living an actual playable card, but Mox locks you in to decisions that you may end up regretting later – whether choosing B when you need G or vice versa or simply weeping when it gets crushed because your opponent got the two-fer-one gleam in his eye. A deck that needs BBB and GG to operate is not one that I want to pilot through a ten round tournament. No way, no how, no chance – get the picture? Oh man, Gary Coleman was good times.
The other huge snafu is that if you see a Goblin on the other side of the table when playing this deck, you’ll have to fight like hell and play perfectly to win. I guess that’s true of any version of”The Rock”: the deck scratches and claws for every inch just to gain control of the board. Until it has an absolute iron grip on things with Ravenous Baloth recursion or something else equally retarded, The Rock’s position is always tenuous. Save yourself from a day of anguish and bad beat stories and just skip this deck.
Death Cloud
4 Talisman of Indulgence
4 Skullclamp
3 Solemn Simulacrum
3 Greater Harvester
4 Ravenous Rats
4 Chittering Rats
4 Electrostatic Bolt
4 Death Cloud
3 Infest
3 Dark Banishing
15 Swamp
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Mirrodin’s Core
2 Mountain
Blue version:
4 Talisman of Dominance
4 Skullclamp
3 Solemn Simulacrum
3 Greater Harvester
4 Ravenous Rats
4 Chittering Rats
4 Mana Leak
4 Death Cloud
3 Infest
3 Annul
15 Swamp
4 Polluted Delta
3 Mirrodin’s Core
2 Island
I have no less than twenty-five different Death Cloud lists, likely proving that I have done more work trying to break this card than any other one person. In fact, I’m ashamed to even unveil some of my lists because they have cards like Chain of Smog in them – proving that I will, in fact, try anything once. I was so sure that there was a dominant deck based around the card. If someone manages to find the elusive Death Cloud Deck and qualify with it in the USA, I will be the first to congratulate him/her. The lists above are my versions of the deck (one Red, one Blue) and they bear some resemblance to one that made Top 4 in Chile. I really wish I could talk about all of the things that I tried to make these decks work; that actually might be a good topic for another article, come to think of it.
I was flat out shocked at how well the U/B version was doing. It was even beating Goblin Bidding easily, which I couldn’t really believe. Here’s a sample of ten random games that I played on Magic Online with this deck. No, it’s not the best testing, but it’s what I do to find out if a deck is worthy of putting through my usual ringer. If I can post a seventy- percent winning record against a random sample of ten decks, I’ll take the deck into the lab. Here are the results in the order that I played the matches:
vs. Tooth and Nail – W 2-0 (I guess I should win this matchup anyway)
vs. R/G LD – W 2-0 (LD can’t keep up with clamp card advantage)
vs. U/W Control – W 2-0 (U/W can not beat this deck, ever)
vs. MWC – W 2-1 (he got so angry he conceded G3 when I Annulled Mindslaver)
vs. Goblin Bidding – W 2-0 (surprising)
vs. Lynch Mob – L 1-2 (couldn’t kill Supplicant and he got it turn 1 both times)
vs. R/W Slide – W 2-1 (why should I win this matchup when he can kill all my stuff?)
vs. Boomerang Isochron – W 2-0 (no contest)
vs. Goblin Bidding – W 2-0 (should I look at this more closely after beating Bidding TWICE 2-0?)
vs. Ravager Affinity – L 2-1 (couldn’t Annul turn 1 Skullclamp going second)
Not too bad, right? Well, unfortunately when I subjected the deck to the more rigorous testing (using myself as an opponent, per usual) it fell flat against Ravager. It felt like everything had to go right in order to win a game, whereas Ravager could just play out normally and just win excepting the worst of draws. So, with a bad matchup vs. the best and most populous deck, Death Cloud got the gate.
R/U March of the Machines
(Fabricate version)
4 Electrostatic Bolt
4 Starstorm
4 Talisman of Impulse
4 Darksteel Ingot
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 March of the Machines
3 Fabricate
3 Oxidize
2 Darksteel Pendant
1 Duplicant
1 Culling Scales
1 Damping Matrix
1 Mycosynth Lattice
15 Mountain
3 Island
3 Mirrodin’s Core
2 Forgotten Cave
1 Stalking Stones
(Counterspell version)
4 Starstorm
4 Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
4 Darksteel Ingot
4 Damping Matrix
4 Mana Leak
4 Electrostatic Bolt
3 March of the Machines
3 Thirst for Knowledge
3 Culling Scales
3 Annul
14 Mountain
7 Island
3 Mirrodin’s Core
The first version was a little more tricky and slowish with Fabricate in the deck, but it could do some pretty gross things. The ability to tutor up whatever artifact fit the situation was quite cool, but the deck lost to Goblins frequently because I couldn’t draw March when I needed it or I didn’t have a Starstorm within the first eleven cards. Most control decks die to Goblins if they don’t have a reset within the first eleven cards anyway. The deck was a beating against Ravager Affinity though, having all kinds of maindeck artifact hate, March of the Machines, point removal, and mass removal. Unfortunately, it couldn’t really race Skullclamp if it got out. The second version (heavily based on Joey Bags’ list posted a while ago) was weaker against Ravager, but it was much better against other decks in the field because I could cheese my way through a match with Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]. The Culling Scales soft lock also helped control the board a bit better. I ended up shelving both of these decks because when I came to my senses, neither made sense to me. Each played a lot of cards that were dependent on other cards to be useful, and that’s no way to tackle a field as wild and crazy as Regionals.
Aggro Black / Zombies
4 Rotlung Reanimator
4 Withered Wretch
4 Cabal Archon
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Ravenous Rats
4 Smother
4 Skullclamp
4 Death Cloud
3 Oversold Cemetery
1 Echoing Decay
1 Dark Banishing
4 Chrome Mox
9 Swamp
4 Polluted Delta
3 Unholy Grotto
3 Blinkmoth Nexus
1 Island
The deck above is [author name="Richie Proffitt"]Richie Proffitt’s[/author]“Lynch Mob” Black build, which is the gold standard as far as aggressive Black decks go. The major roadblocks I had with this deck in testing were, as he indicated, any deck with Goblins in it. Goblins just flat out destroy Black creature decks. Goblin Sharpshooter, Sparksmith, Gempalm Incinerator, Siege-Gang Commander… they’re just simply too much for */2 toughness creatures to handle. Lynch Mob also had difficulty against any Ravager deck that drew a Skullclamp. As anyone who’s tested the matchup knows, that happens quite frequently.
The problem with using Death Cloud as a master strategy for removing the large men of the Affinity trade is that they always are ahead on cards because of Skullclamp crankage and always have a creature that’s Clamped up when you go to cast Death Cloud. Then they get two cards off of your board clearing Death Cloud and your life total is probably not in great shape. Smart players also leave their Welding Jars / Pyrite Spellbombs on the table so that when they do draw a land against a Cloud deck, they’re frequently right back in the mix with a Frogmite or similar dork. Shrapnel Blast is also the mortal enemy of Death Cloud, so I was catching that to the face quite a bit in testing, too. The deck is great against a control-oriented metagame, but with a sketchy Ravager matchup and a questionable Goblins matchup, I don’t think it’s runnable. The same is true for the decks that run the Dark Supplicant / Scion of Darkness train and for old school Zombie Bidding style decks. They don’t work.
Big Red
4 Electrostatic Bolt
4 Shrapnel Blast
4 Damping Matrix
4 Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
4 Starstorm
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Fireball
4 Detonate
4 Slith Firewalker
16 Mountain
4 Darksteel Citadel
I may have had Cloudpost in this deck to fuel the Fireballs, but I think I might have been having an aneurysm at the time. I’m not even sure if it belongs in the maindeck anymore, but my”good” Big Red list is on my work PC, which is currently being shuttled away by movers. If anyone has found a way to make Red control in Standard work, then my hat is off. It would seem natural to take a successful Mirrodin Block deck and attempt to adapt it to Standard as the fix for the Affinity-laden metagame, but no. Things are just a lot different in Block play, and a focused deck like this does a lot better against a smaller card pool than it does against the vast miasma of Type II. The other big-time gotcha is that the deck expends its cards and doesn’t really draw any more, so you get behind really fast against Skullclamp bearing decks without some kind of refill mechanism. The thing that most proponents don’t understand is that a good player will not leave a Skullclamp on the table for Big Red’s artifact removal to crush. A good player will hold Skullclamp like it’s a sorcery – waiting until you’re tapped out and then he’ll draw six cards. Then, you lose. I like Big Red as a chewing gum only.
R/G Land Destruction / Beasts
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Vine Trellis
4 Viridian Shaman
4 Stone Rain
4 Creeping Mold
4 Ravenous Baloth
4 Starstorm
3 Molder Slug
3 Pulse of the Tangle
3 Plow Under
9 Forest
7 Mountain
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Contested Cliffs
This deck seems like it might be good, but it really isn’t. It doesn’t do very well vs. Goblins or Ravager, but it smashes Tooth and Nail. Hmm… one out of… three… ain’t bad? No. There’s nothing worse than drawing a hand of all mana accelerants and one LD spell and one creature and this deck does that. A lot. Next.
White Weenie
U/W Control
Red Ponza
Seething Desire / DNA
The four decks above are extremely unplayable, and I’m surely not going to give any lists for them. White Weenie is simply outclassed; if the Equipment is destroyed or the deck doesn’t draw any, you’re left with a lot of crappy creatures that don’t do anything. Oh, and both Tooth and Nail and MWC eat your lunch. I don’t think the deck beats anything. U/W Control has a serious problem with Skullclamp and can’t ever get ahead on cards. The counterspells are actually not too terrible if you only run Mana Leak, Annul, and the occasional Vex (I dare you!), but U/W has no way to remove artifacts outside of Akroma’s Vengeance and diluting the deck with Blue makes it worse when all the best spells are White. Just play MWC instead. Red Ponza has problems similar to Big Red. Seething Desire is the poster child for”splash damage” if there ever was one. And DNA… my poor, poor DNA… If there were only no Goblins in this format, we could consider you. Actually, that artifact removal that everyone’s packing maindeck complicates things as well.
So, there you have it. That’s the format. And hey – remember, if you’re playing just to have fun, play what you want. Don’t let me or anyone else tell you what to play. But if you want a shot at winning that slot to Nationals, please at least heed my advice. I’ve been through too much pain for you not to.
Jim Ferraiolo
jmf2n@virginia dot edu
Dobbs on MODO and IRC