Scrap That, I Want To Play RUG

So guys, I literally had a 3000 word article written for this week already. It was a satirical piece, meant solely to entertain while providing some
insight into my decision leading up to the Star City Games Invitational. I kept going back and forth on whether I wanted to play Grixis or Esper
Control, and styled the article after a shoulder angel/devil, conscious vs. temptation style while also talking from the perspective of my inner
thoughts. If that’s something you guys would like to read every once in a while in the future (a purely satirical piece meant to entertain), please let
me know in the comments.

However, the decision ended up being scrapped because of the fact that I can’t run both Timely Reinforcements and Arc Trail in the same deck while also
having what I consider to be an acceptable manabase. I don’t want to lose to my own manabase, which is the main reason I wasn’t high and mighty on
Esper Control.

After testing last night with a local buddy Rob Beard, I realized that even my good draws would sometimes just be kold to a Moorland Haunt. The thing
about Illusions (and U/W Humans and any other Moorland Haunt deck) is that they hit you hard and early, and then are able to just grind you out in the
end. Esper could deal better with the late game, as Gideon Jura is incredible and Consecrated Sphinx can block all day. Olivia Voldaren was good in
this role as well, but you hardly ever wanted to drop her early for fear of countermagic (she’s far too important to throw away) and by the time you’re
able to safely deploy her, you’re essentially relegated to blocking a Geist of Saint Traft (then dying to Gut Shot since you only had one red mana) or
they can use that Phantasmal Image they’d been saving all game just for Olivia. Grixis had a better early game due to Arc Trail and Snapcaster
(coincidentally flashing back the Arc Trail), but late game was rough without Sorin’s vengeance.

So where did this leave me? Lost. Completely lost. I read GerryT’s article on the Premium side
and it almost had me sold (as I’m very impressionable when I’m this lost); I just think I want to be proactive here, as I really don’t like
the prospect of facing round after round of Moorland Haunts and Shrine of Burning Rages.

So proactive, eh? What does that mean? Illusions? Mono Red? U/W Humans? U/r Delver?

I have no idea yet. I’m afraid this is going to be bad juju if I can’t come up with something soon!

So as I’m wavering as I’m unsure of what to do, I think back to the coverage of the StarCityGames.com Standard Open: St. Louis. Something I’d thought of long ago
when people were putting their respective spins on the Wolf Run Ramp archetype was adding Blue to the mix for countermagic and Ponders, since you have
more than enough shuffle effects in a deck like this.

Then I went a while without playing a Standard event, so my brewing bone got a bit rusty and the idea got pushed to the proverbial back-burner.

However, one deck tech with the Rookie of the Year later
and the back-burner idea has been pushed back to the front burner. And I think it may be time to bring it to full boil!

You see, I like the idea of Wolf Run Ramp. I really do. Play a Titan, with the game. Boom! That just happened.

However, there’s always going to be the issue that you are forever chained to the top of your deck. If you don’t draw the right mix of
lands/spells/then fatties, you lose.

I don’t like that. I like consistency!

And as those of you who have followed my writing exploits for an extended (read: prior to me writing for this here website) period of time know, I love
me some RUG! It is, by far, my favorite color combination. It’s like Ali Aintrazi and his U/G decks or Pat Sullivan and his R/R/R/R decks. Sometimes I
accept that I should probably just play something else (think: TwinBlade in Baltimore, which coincidentally Ali had the same epiphany, only he won
whereas I got to Top 16).

However, the more I think about this deck, the more excited I get! Ponders, Rampant Growths, Sphere of the Suns, Solemn Simulacrum…

These are all cards which will increase consistency of a deck. Now I just need to build around the core concept of a Wolf Run Deck.

I think people start getting a bit off track when they lose sight of what’s important in a deck. Reid Duke wrote an incredibly informative article a couple
of weeks ago on the Premium side in which he talked about red herrings and avoiding trying to be too cute. If you can win the game without the extra
riff-raff, then do so. Winning in a spectacular fashion with a bunch of bells and whistles attached accounts for just as much in the standings
department as a win you scraped out, “Conley Woods in the Top 8 of Worlds” style.

So when I see lists with less than four maindeck Primeval Titans, I shake my head a bit. Sure, the reason behind the idea may be sound, but what is
your deck trying to do? Win the game, right? If you feel the Kessig Wolf Run/Inkmoth Nexus endgame is unnecessary or an afterthought, then why run
Primevals/Wolf Run/Inkmoth to begin with? Why dilute your manabase with so many colorless lands and Primeval Titans?

My thought is: either you’re a Primeval deck or you’re not. And I want to be a Primeval deck.

So my core should revolve around curving directly into Primeval Titan. I want to make my opponent have the right answers and I want him to have to have
them quickly. Don’t have one?

That was it; you were dead!
(You’re welcome)

Now that I know what I want to start with, here’s my initial shell:

4 Rampant Growth
4 Sphere of the Suns
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Primeval Titan

Obviously with Inkmoths and Kessig Wolf Runs appending those cards within the manabase.

That’s it. That’s my “core.” I just want to hit six quickly.

I don’t want mana dorks simply due to the prevalence of Gut Shot. We need to adjust accordingly, and I like Sphere in that regard.

Now we get to append that plan. What are we worried about? Well, for one, Gut Shots are everywhere. Luckily, Ghost Quarters aren’t ubiquitous because
right now people are trying to answer the various U/W and Red decks with decks that have bad mana, meaning you just can’t afford the colorless land.
However, if we’re planning on killing them via Inkmoths, what are our options for making sure that happens?

Negate
Mental Misstep

Here’s the problem I have with Mental Misstep in this deck; the only one-mana spell we really care about is Gut Shot. Sure, it’s cool to counter Delver
of Secrets and Stromkirk Noble, but we’re able to add answers to those in the form of Arc Trail and our own Gut Shots. However, having the ability to
counter Day of Judgment, Oblivion Ring, Doom Blade, Devil’s Play, planeswalkers, etc…at any point in the game is huge. Obviously if we curve
straight to Primeval Titan and they have the Wrath immediately, you can’t counter that, but you’ve given them a one-turn window to answer that card.
Also, after the first Primeval Titan, you have the mana to cast a titan with Negate mana up.

Also, you can attack/pump Inkmoth with counter backup. Seems good!

What other problems do we face?

Illusions! (And, to a lesser extent, U/W Humans)

Pressure backed by countermagic?! Scary stuff to be sure!

What could we possibly do here? I mean, the deck is just so dominant, so good, it’s…

Wait, still had all these Arc Trails and Gut Shots!

Seriously, Arc Trail is amazing against any kind of aggressive deck, as I’m sure we all know. And if we’re playing blue, we get to play…well,
we’ll get to that soon enough.

Gut Shot should be obvious as to why it’s being played at this point, and it’s even better here, as we really want to use all of our mana early, and
Gut Shot allows us to slow down our opponent without doing the same to ourselves. Arc Trail is some-good, but it still requires us to use mana in a
manner that isn’t ramping us ahead.

What else?

Well, we’re going to have all kinds of control decks showing up as well, from Grixis to Esper to U/W and U/B. What’s good against Control?

Planeswalkers!

Garruk Relentless is where we want to start here. First off, he’s good against both aggro and control, allowing you to pick off a guy or provide a
steady stream of threats. When he flips? Providing as many titans as it’ll take or just providing 1/1 deadly wolves seems like it’ll get the job done
sooner rather than later.

Plus? He costs only one green mana. Another great spell that’s not going to stretch the manabase.

You know what other planeswalker we can play in our colors that costs one colored mana?

You’re right, Chandra the Firebrand!

If Gut Shot is good, a repeated Gut Shot (albeit at sorcery speed) has to be good! In all reality, I cut one when trying out Grixis and regretted it.
While I loved Olivia Voldaren, there were games when I didn’t have the double red to cast her and use her immediately, meaning I ended up doing
something else for that turn whereas Chandra could be played and still ping even with one red mana, and I could also “do that other thing” that I
would’ve ended up doing otherwise with the mana I saved by not having to pay two to ping.

Not to mention we get to double up on our spells. That’s not to be overlooked while we build around that blue card that…well, we’re going to get
into that in a bit!

So…we have a proactive plan revolving around winning the game as fast as possible. We have answers for aggro and control, and we even have ways
to protect our “combo”. What am I missing here?

Oh yeah! One of the main reasons I want to play the deck! That blue card! The one Matthias didn’t run!

You guessed it: Snapcaster Mage!

I know, I know, groundbreaking stuff here.
Yeah yeah Michael, we know Snapcaster Mage is good; every writer out there keeps jamming it down our throats!

I know, but I’m going to jam him down your throats using a different shell! That’s better, right?!

*crickets*

Seriously; if I’m running blue, I’m running Snapcaster Mage unless I have a good reason not to (meaning I don’t have the spells to back it up).
However, in this deck, it’s more than easy enough to get the spells necessary to make Snapcaster good. Let’s start by looking at our main game plan:

Two-Four-Six. Ramp-Ramp-Titan.

You may be asking yourself how Snapcaster is helping us out here. Well, we have plenty of “twos” (Rampant Growth and Sphere of the Suns) but at the
“four” spot, we’re limited to Solemn Simulacrum or just casting another “two”.

Guess what? In addition to the multitude of other cool things Snapcaster does in this deck, he also plays a mean Solemn Simulacrum on turn 3 after
you’ve cast Rampant Growth.

You remember what I said about loving consistency? This is what I mean; Snapcaster does whatever I want to do, but it also copies an effect I want to
be doing every game on turn 4. Obviously if we’re on the Sphere plan, Snapcaster doesn’t really look as spicy (in this regard), but we still have a
full set of Solemns regardless.

That’s not to say I plan on playing four; I don’t think we even want to play enough spells in the deck to make that feasible. I do want a couple though
for sure.

Snapcaster also allows us a buyback on our Arc Trails and Gut Shots, giving us added percentage in our aggro matchups.

So now, let’s look at the amount of “twos” we have:

4 Rampant Growth
4 Sphere of the Suns

Now, the “fours”:

4 Solemn Simulacrum
2 Snapcaster Mage

Now, the “sixes”:

4 Primeval Titan
2 Inferno Titan

That’s 20 cards so far. What else do we want?

4 Garruk Relentless
1 Chandra the Firebrand
4 Gut Shot
1 Arc Trail
3 Ponder
2 Negate
1 Devil’s Play

Which brings us up to 36 cards with 4 Sphere of the Suns.

Now, the manabase!

What are our “considerations”? Well, we need to hit two open mana, one being green, on turn two. Then, we need to hit a fourth land being untapped and
then a sixth land untapped. Colors should feasibly be fixed through the various ramping methods, and all of the M10/11/12/Innistrad type of lands
should come into play untapped assuming you planned properly while fetching out lands.

So we need early green essentially. We know that, as we’re mostly a green deck “splashing” red and blue, with red slightly more than blue (at least in
the maindeck; I’ll be running Frost Titans and Flashfreezes out of the board, for what it’s worth, with Ancient Grudges taking up some red space as
well).

So, we want early green. Copperline Gorge allows us to run out an early dual without having it come into play tapped, so we want to run the full boat
of those to try and hit them early. Now, we need to figure out how many forests we’re going to need to run in order to ensure we hit turn two green
mana. Hinterland Harbor and Rootbound Crags also play into the equation a bit, as we can play them on one tapped and play a basic/Gorge on two,
but we really want to hit an early forest to make our Crags and Harbors hum. We’re probably going to want to run 7-8 forests as a starting point.

So we’re at:

4 Copperline Gorge
8 Forest

We have 12 more slots. Obviously we’re going to need to include the Inkmoth/Kessig Wolf Run package. I’m going to go with:

4 Inkmoth Nexus
1 Kessig Wolf Run

Reason being, I don’t want six colorless lands in this deck. If Ghost Quarter were more prevalent, I’d definitely run 3/2 instead of 4/1 because I’d
want “backups.” However, I think we can feasibly rely on having our Wolf Run surviving in the majority of the matchups, especially considering the fact
that people usually hit the Inkmoth instead of the Wolf Run anyway.

So we’ve filled 13/24 land slots, giving us 11 more slots to fill out our manabase.

I don’t want many lands that don’t produce green mana; this is, after all, a green deck. We already have five lands that don’t produce green. So Sulfur
Falls may have to be relegated to a one- or two-of.

We are going to want Hinterland Harbors and Rootbound Crags though; however, we still need to consider basic lands as well. We already have four red
sources with the Copperline Gorges, so let’s go ahead and pencil in:

1 Rootbound Crag
4 Hinterland Harbors
2 Sulfur Falls
2 Mountain
2 Island

This gives us a distribution of:

17 green sources
9 red sources
8 blue sources
5 colorless lands

Which is about where we want to be at. If your sideboard tends toward a specific color (red or blue) you can change the manabase accordingly; however,
remember that you’re going to get a lot of mana fixing through Rampant Growth, Solemn Simulacrum, Sphere of the Suns, Ponder, and obviously Primeval
Titan if you still need it. As long as we’re hitting our green mana early and building a solid foundation for our mana, adding layers on top of that
foundation is pretty easy to do.

As for the sideboard, we’re going to take a look at what we need to be concerned with in Standard right now:

Mono Red
U/W Aggro (Illusions, Humans)
Wolf Run Ramp (all of its variants)
U/x Control

With our main concerns being:

Getting burned out
Shrine of Burning Rage
Moorland Haunt
Removal spells
Being tempo’d out
Geist of Saint Traft

For the first part, we’re in green, so we have access to Tree of Redemption. That guy is ginormous for what you want him to do. We can also easily run
Batterskull and Wurmcoil Engine, possibly one of each to diversify.

For Shrine, we’re already planning on running Ancient Grudges (namely for Shrine, but also Tempered Steel, Birthing Pod, and Sword of Feast
and Famine).

For Wolf Run Ramp, we want to be bringing in Frost Titans and Flashfreezes. Possibly even a Phyrexian Metamorph or two (as Wolf Run can easily target
Phantasmal Image, and Metamorph allows us to steal their titan or make another one of ours).

Against Control, we’re already sitting relatively pretty with our planeswalkers and Inkmoths, but we want to probably bring in some more Negates and
Thrun, the Last Troll.

We have no real way to remove a Geist in this deck; sure, we can quickly outclass it, but what about when we’re already on the back foot and can’t
afford to just “drop a titan”? Once again, we have Phyrexian Metamorph (another reason I like this over Phantasmal Image is the sheer number of Gut
Shots seeing play right now).

As for being tempo’d out by Illusions/UW Humans; we’re going to bring in another Arc Trail or two. With the full set of Gut Shots and two or three Arc
Trails, we’ll have plenty of time to get our game plan going.

So what does that translate to in regards to the planned sideboard?

I’m not sure yet…

In all actuality, I’m going to be having a ton of discussions from now until the Invitational with ‘the crew’ about what the expected metagame is
going to be and what I should run. The reason I’m not posting a specific sideboard and instead giving some ideas about how to get ready is simply
because I myself am not sure of how many numbers I want of each card. I’m simply providing you with ideas for how to improve certain matchups.

Remember, this is a deck that wants to hit Primeval Titan and win. Do that first. Everything else comes second, because your plan is probably much more
powerful than theirs, assuming you have the time to execute it.

Here’s to hoping you have already seen my list by the time this article comes out (obviously because I won)! There’s something to be said about coming
out of left field, even if it’s only slightly off the radar. Even hitting them with a surprise Negate can have monumental effects on the outcome of the
game, and having the added consistency of Ponder and Snapcaster Mage helps.

Here’s where I’m at in the maindeck right now (putting all of the article together) leading up to the Invitational in Charlotte!

Wolf RUG Ramp

Michael Martin

Test deck on 12-11-2011

Standard