Yes, it’s the final day of the Godo-a-Go-Go. Thanks to everyone for reading, and also for posting in the forums.
It’s kind of odd, but the best use of Godo that I’ve seen since the start of writing this series had the namesake legend hidden in the sideboard. I’m speaking, of course, of the “Godo Gifts” deck piloted by Katsuhiro Mori to a first-place finish at Grand Prix: Niigata:
Creatures (14)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
- 1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 2 Kokusho, the Evening Star
- 1 Myojin of Night's Reach
- 1 Hana Kami
- 1 Ghost-Lit Stalker
- 3 Kagemaro, First to Suffer
Lands (23)
Spells (23)
Here Godo serves the purpose of “winning the sideboard war.” You have to imagine that the Oiso/Tsumura/Mori team expected a lot of Gifts Splice decks to show up; GP: Minneapolis had been the week before, and the decklists were out there on the web for all to see. Two things that the Gifts mirror had not featured much of to that point were artifacts and creatures targetable by Horobi’s Whisper; if I were playing Herberholz’s and Lieberman’s decks against one another in a testing session, Wear Away and Whisper would be the first cards sideboarded out, just about every time.
Enter Godo and Tatsumasa (and, to a lesser extent, the Jitte). First of all, Godo is a creature that the opponent would not be expecting. One problem faced in your typical Gifts mirror is that the same creatures are in both decks after sideboarding, most of them are legendary, and there’s not much variation in their numbers. The mirror often boils down to which player can get one of these guys to stick. Even if opponents were expecting secret tech creatures in the mirror, Godo would not have been at the top of the list.
As good as Godo is, you’re not especially worried if he gets killed, either. Just resolving him leads to the crushing threat of Tatsumasa. If the unsuspecting opponent sideboarded out his artifact removal – and how many of Mori’s opponents did so, I wonder? – then the Dragon’s Fang becomes absolutely unstoppable, birthing a new 5/5 Dragon just as fast as the opponent can kill the last one. If I were running the deck, I might even include a copy of Miren the Moaning Well (cutting Okina, most likely) to get even more utility out of the infinite winged lizards. Of course, I also have an unhealthy addiction to running Miren in this Block format, as you might have noticed from my decks earlier this week.
The nice thing about Godo Gifts is that even now, when everyone knows about it, you can still play some mind games with it. Much like the “man plan” for Tooth and Nail decks in Standard, sometimes you can fake that you’re bringing in Godo and Tatsumasa, to get your opponents to leave some substandard cards in their decks (in this case, the Wear Away and any other artifact removal they might have in the sideboard). In a mirror match as tight as the Gifts one can be, just those one or two wasted slots can make all the difference.
I might even suggest that should mislead your opponent into thinking that your Gifts deck is running Godo, even if you aren’t – but if you aren’t running Godo, I’ve clearly failed, haven’t I? At any rate, I’m currently testing a copy of Mori’s maindeck with the following sideboard:
1 Mountain
2 Godo, Bandit Warlord
1 Tatsumasa, the Dragon’s Fang
4 Nezumi Graverobber
2 Hideous Laughter
1 Exile into Darkness
1 Horobi’s Whisper
1 Rending Vines
1 Wear Away
1 Ghost-Lit Stalker
This allows you to do various degrees of transformation in the mirror, depending upon the mind games you want to play with your opponent. You can bring in only Godo, or only Nezumi Graverobber, or both, or neither – the only card that is a must-board for the mirror is the lone Ghost-Lit Stalker.
You would take out many of your Arcane spells to pull this off, including Cranial Extraction. At this PTQ, I had an interesting conversation with eventual winner Chris “Star Wars Kid” McDaniel about how players overvalue Cranial Extraction in the Gifts mirror; SWK is of the opinion that the most important thing in the mirror is to get a fat guy to stick, and I tend to agree with him. The only “combo” that you really need to have in the mirror is “Hana Kami + Death Denied” to recur your fat men; if your opponent has the full set of Graverobbers coming in, you might not even want that much.
I was going to respond to some forum questions I received earlier this week, but one of them inspired me to write a new theory article, and I’m working hard on that, as well as a Nationals matchup article that should be coming out next week or so. So, I’ll just say goodbye, and hope that I don’t pale too much by comparison to Patrick Sullivan fantastic work last week or Chad Ellis next week.
Later.