Saito’s Visions

Jace’s Sanctum, among many other cards (covered by GerryT on the Premium side of SCG), I found myself awestruck by one deck in particular, which I must say is quite unlike anything I’ve seen in this format.

It is actually pretty rare in Magic for me to look at a pile of decklists and just have to stop cold to take one in. I’ve been playing Magic in tournaments since very, very early on, and it has been a long time since I’ve seen a deck like the one that Tomoharu Saito took to a top finish in Minneapolis. One of the things that made me take pause was seeing one of my favorite cards in Standard showcased: Fevered Visions.

In both Draft and Sealed, I’ve found Fevered Visions to be an utter bomb when you’re at all aggressive (so long as it doesn’t come late to the party), and with that sometimes comes the moment where you need to check in on a card in Constructed to see whether it has any merit. Early on, it seemed like it might.

I’d loved this card in playtesting leading into Pro Tour Shadows over Innistrad, though I hadn’t really found any deck that used it that I was excited about. This was in part because I slowly became disillusioned with every build of U/R-anything that I tried to put together, but it was also because every deck that played it ended up in the gauntlet versus Nahiri, the Harbinger and was essentially dismantled. Ultimately, I walked away with a healthy appreciation for the card, albeit without finding any deck in particular that I liked that played it.

Now, though we have Saito’s U/R Flash deck featuring Fevered Visions:

This is pretty classic as an aggro-control deck in many ways, albeit not nearly as fast as a classic aggro-control deck like Counter-Slivers or the counter-builds of, say, Merfolk.

The deck has sixteen cards it can cast that can put on a clock early (if you count Fevered Visions, which I do). Once the clock is out, it can protect the clock with eight actual-factual counterspells, and full playsets of Stratus Dancer and Rattlechains as the occasional quasi-counterspell (if you have a Spirit in danger). In the sideboard are even four more counterspells in Negate. Once the deck gets out any degree of clock, it can be quite difficult for an opponent.

To finish out games, Exquisite Firecraft and Goldnight Castigator supply the reach to get in the last points. It doesn’t really need much in this department, though, because excepting the Wandering Fumarole, the deck is actually very capable of doing damage because of the nature of its threats: fliers and Fevered Visions just mean that the deck is going to be able to reliably be putting forth damage that the opponent can’t successfully interact with in a meaningful way.

I love this combination of cards together, as well. While Jeskai decks could sometimes play the role of the aggro-control deck by putting forth the aggressive clock and backing it up with some countermagic, since Standard rotated, we have neither seen the cards out there that have that offensive capability nor have we seen that combination of strategies really be employed in general. Saito’s deck is particularly nice in its ability to play out this strategy because of the natural synergy between the flash-fliers in Dimensional Infiltrator and Rattlechains and the counterspells otherwise in the deck.

One of the things that also made me want to look closely at this deck was its decision to dedicate space to so much to counterspells. One of the big experiences I had with Blulamog was that countermagic was just incredible. This is, in part, because there are so few cards that actually have a huge impact, so if you can just blunt someone for a few turns, a really big play could just wipe the remainder of the game off of the map. In Blulamog, the big play casting Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, but I still found myself feeling like simply having a few counters was often enough to really keep the opponent from executing the majority of their plan in any meaningful way.

Saito’s deck doesn’t try to make that big play, but rather works the air and chops the opponent’s life total down while they are kept off of their game by the counters. In fact, the deck is apparently so confident of its ability to do this, it is even willing to play the full set of Goldnight Castigator, which I think is quite telling. Woe be to the player who ends up facing this deck down when it already has a threat on the battlefield and mana up!

When you’re able to successfully pressure the life total in this way, you don’t even actually need to counter “everything” or even many things, for that matter. You only need to counter the things that are going to keep you from winning the game or make you fall behind in a race. Anything else is acceptable. This also means that if the opponent doesn’t do anything that you deem worthy of a counterspell, it is entirely likely that a flash-flier will add to the clock.

While Fevered Visions was the card that drew me in, it is incredibly important to note that the card actually plays out quite well in this deck’s plan. Fevered Visions is a card that is looking towards a short game. If cast on turn 3, the card will likely deal damage every turn for the remainder of the game, and with the short-game plan including Exquisite Firecraft and Goldnight Castigator, it is easy to imagine some turn 6 or turn 7 wins.

When I talked about Prison decks last week, one common factor for several of those decks was countermagic mixed with massive card draw like Howling Mine. One of the reasons that this combination is so effective is that Howling Mine and other mass card draw spells usually influence play such that the counterspell player nearly always has a counterspell but the opponent often only has a handful of cards that actually have a significant effect.

Counterspells, unlike discard, contribute to the loss of time associated by actually being forced to cast the spell in question, and thus, in the decks that are choking an opponent out on that time metric, they can be dangerous indeed. If you’re looking for an example, check out this:

If you’re looking for another, try this:

In both cases, one of the true strengths of these decks was that even the smallest amount of countermagic just ended up being wildly oppressive. The clock is ticking down with Ebony Owl Netsuke and either deck might just end it all with Runeflare Trap or its non-Trap progenitor, Sudden Impact.

For Saito’s deck, it actually just captures all of that in the single card of Fevered Visions, which will end up dealing damage to nearly all decks that don’t include the word “Humans” in their title. That touch of counterspells that we see in the other decks is actually downright overwhelming here, and even if Fevered Visions isn’t ticking an opponent down, probably a swarm of fliers is, and if not, then some burn can take care of the last few points.

The sideboard is interesting in what it is saying. Roast and Seismic Rupture show that the deck simply can’t ignore the most aggressive of decks, and it has to alter its strategy accordingly. I would guess, most likely, that Goldnight Castigator and Fevered Visions are the first cards to go here, with excess room for Goblin Dark-Dwellers probably being made by trimming the counterspells. This degree of a shift, though, is practically in the realm of “switcheroo sideboarding,” and while it might be necessary versus very aggressive decks, it is important to not go too far overboard and run the switch versus too many decks.

Goblin Dark-Dwellers is particularly exciting in a deck planning on running Exquisite Firecraft. This amounts to a lot of damage, and it isn’t all that much of a stretch to imagine the sideboard plan quickly turning from “I’m controlling this game” to “I’m going to see about killing you right quickly.”

Negate almost feels like overkill with so many counterspells already in the mix. Even so, it is powerful and efficient and probably helps make the controlling decks all the more nightmarish.

Likely we end up with two primary configurations of the deck: the builds that cut or shave Fiery Impulse for Negate and the builds that cut or shave for the eleven-card control package. In an appropriately narrow metagame, this can be quite effective.

The natural strengths of this strategy versus a deck like G/W Tokens seem apparent: you can get down actual damaging threats before a Gideon, Ally of Zendikar or Archangel Avacyn would enter the mix, stop those spells with countermagic, and eat up a Nissa with incidental flying attacks. Meanwhile your burn can either mop up the remainder of the creatures that matter or help finish off the opponent.

The deck also feels like it would be a nightmare for any of the controlling decks, where the natural power of a true aggro-control deck versus control comes into play, and the only massively lopsided matchup of strategic archetypes puts Saito’s deck in the driver’s seat. The extra Negates from the sideboard serve as the nail in the coffin.

A truly aggressive deck might be a problem, and the metagame in Minneapolis was chock-full of them, with five decks featuring Humans in the Top 8. Were it not for the more aggressive bent of the metagame in Minnesota, perhaps we’d have actually seen Saito in this Top 8 instead of being a mere match out.

I’m excited to see another deck in the metagame that likes to counter what the opponent is doing. I’ve been pumped about decks that behave like this one since the 1990s, and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of legs his deck will have moving forward into the Standard metagame.