If you read the articles on StarCityGames.com Premium last week, it should’ve come as no surprise to you that Grand Prix Baltimore was a sea of U/B Control decks around the top tables. Patrick Chapin, Brad Nelson, and Reid Duke all suggested the same direction for the tournament. When that many well-respected players and writers are all saying the same thing, you simply have to sit up and take notice.
Even if you’re not interested in playing the deck they’re advocating, you have to realize that others will be. I realize that I’m preaching to the choir here, but it’s precisely why I tell everyone who considers themselves a competitive Magic player that they’re a fool if they don’t have a subscription to StarCityGames.com Premium. A yearly subscription costs less than the price of entry to a single Grand Prix, and even if somehow you get absolutely no value from the content yourself (which is, frankly, impossible—I find ideas all the time in my fellow writers’ articles), you have to recognize that others are paying attention to what’s being said here. The front page of StarCityGames.com and the “What’s Happening?” page on the Magic Online site are the best resources out there for anticipating what the metagame will be like among informed players at the next big event.
At the risk of sounding like a corporate shill—I really don’t get it. Players are willing to spend hundreds of dollars traveling to tournaments, pay a $40 entry fee to play in Grand Prix, and shell out even more than all of that for the cards to actually compete. Yet somehow they aren’t willing to pay an incredibly small fraction of that for a Premium subscription to gain access to information that improves their chances of winning in these events.  Â
Knowledge is power, as the saying goes. Sure, there’s free content out there for those who aren’t willing to pay for it, but there’s advantages to be gleaned from having access to everything that’s out there. You may be able to read the headlines and see that Chapin and Reid and Brad are all advocating U/B Control, but details matter. Knowing whether the players who listen to them are going to be playing Grave Titan or Consecrated Sphinx or Karn—these are all valuable bits of information that can inform not only your own deck building decisions but your gameplay as well.
Seem like a stretch? Here’s an example Ben Stark brought up just this past weekend at GP Baltimore. He was playing the U/B mirror match, and he was in a position in which his opponent had a relatively stocked graveyard in the middle of the game. Ben played a Nihil Spellbomb, and after the resulting counter war had two mana left untapped. With a Negate and quite a few removal spells in his hand, he had several options:
- Pass the turn and keep the Negate up, which would allow his opponent to use one of the Forbidden Alchemy in his graveyard when he cracks the Spellbomb at the end of his opponent’s turn.
- Use the Spellbomb immediately, but don’t pay the mana for the trigger. This would cost him a card but would allow him to keep up Negate.
- Use the Spellbomb immediately and pay to draw a card.
Ben’s thought process was that option #3 allowed him to extract the most value, and the only way it could really go wrong is if his opponent both had Karn in his deck and had drawn it already. Since he wasn’t completely familiar with what peoples’ U/B lists looked like these days (and in his previous experience, it hadn’t been very common), he decided to play the percentages as he saw them and fire off the Spellbomb and pay for it. Unfortunately for him, his opponent untapped and played Karn, turning the game around completely.
Would Ben have made that same play if he knew this would be the starting point for most of his opponents’ U/B control lists?
Creatures (3)
Planeswalkers (1)
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Spells (29)
Probably not.
I have a greater point here than simply patting existing subscribers on the back and telling them how clever they are for reading my articles. Yes, knowledge is power, but only if you can figure out how to use it. What does it mean if you can deduce that a great deal of the competitive Magic world is likely to be playing U/B Control? Well, you certainly don’t want to be playing a deck like Wolf Run, which is precisely the deck that those players are hoping to prey upon with their Dissipates and Drownyards.
If you’re Charles Gindy, you might take that information and do something like this:
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Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (27)
Spells (25)
Gindy went nearly undefeated the entire tournament, going into the last two rounds with a 12-0-2 record before taking a pair of unfortunate losses when all he needed was a draw to make the Top 8. For anyone who has been keeping up with the various writings on U/B over the last few weeks (and if you haven’t been, I hope you’ve learned that you should be by now!), it should be obvious why this deck might thrive in a field full of mirror matches. Gindy chose to play the full four Nephalia Drownyards in his main deck, the count of which is by far the most important factor in determining who wins game one. Not only that, but he also had a pair of Liliana of the Veil, which was another departure from the norm that skewed the mirror match in his favor.
Gindy knew that U/B Control was going to be a major player in the field because of its good matchups against Wolf Run and other popular decks, so he went one step further and played a U/B Control deck specifically tuned to beat the mirror match! Sure, he may have lost a few percentage points here and there in other matchups due to his changes, but he put himself in excellent position to beat the other top players in the tournament.
That detail is an important and often misunderstood element of deck selection in a predictable metagame. Let’s say you anticipate a field to consist of the following:
40% Deck A, “Rock” which is a favorite over Deck C
30% Deck B, “Paper” which is a favorite over Deck A
20% Deck C, “Scissors” which is a favorite over Deck B
10% Other
Which deck do you want to be playing? The gut reaction for a lot of players is that they want to be playing Paper because it is a big favorite over the deck that makes up the biggest percentage of the field. But you’re often better off going a level beyond and playing the deck that beats the deck that beats the most popular deck. As the tournament progresses into the later rounds, Paper is going to be beating Rock at a substantial clip, so you’re actually more likely to play against Paper despite Rock being more plentiful at the beginning of the tournament. Even though Rock is the most popular deck, you’re better off playing Scissors!
A good example of this is the Owling Mine deck from the first Pro Tour Honolulu. Zoo was the most popular deck in the field, and a large number of players constructed control decks featuring Loxodon Hierarch, Faith’s Fetters, and similar cards to combat them. Owling Mine was an underdog to Zoo but tore those control decks apart. It was on the backs of these control decks that Tiago Chan and Antoine Ruel both piloted Owling Mine to the Top 8, while not a single Loxodon Hierarch deck made it to the Sunday stage.
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- 4 Howling Mine
- 4 Sleight of Hand
- 4 Exhaustion
- 4 Boomerang
- 4 Eye of Nowhere
- 4 Sudden Impact
- 2 Evacuation
- 4 Ebony Owl Netsuke
- 4 Remand
Sideboard
This was what I was thinking when I decided to play G/R beatdown in Baltimore. I knew that I had a bad matchup against Wolf Run Ramp, which was certain to be popular—hell, some idiot just won the last Pro Tour with it—but I felt like it was a strong choice against U/B Control. Given that I was going into the tournament with three byes, I figured if I could avoid playing against too much Ramp, I’d be able to prey on the U/B Control decks on my way to the top of the standings.
I was not so fortunate. I lost to a Wolf Run opponent immediately after my byes, and then split two close matches against Unburial Rites Reanimator and beat U/B Zombies before being eliminated from day 2 after some poor draws against Humans. Jackie Lee, on the other hand, tore through U/B Control deck after U/B Control deck on her way to finish the Swiss rounds as the number one seed. Once there, she dispatched Humans in the Top 8 before narrowly losing a semifinal match against David Shiels in which she nearly came back from a mulligan to four in the deciding game.
Creatures (24)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Thrun, the Last Troll
- 3 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 1 Daybreak Ranger
- 4 Strangleroot Geist
- 4 Huntmaster of the Fells
- 2 Hellrider
Lands (24)
Spells (12)
Jackie’s deck was clearly focused on beating down quickly and often, with only Galvanic Blast and lands that don’t attack or bolster an attacker. This minimalistic approach to removal is key against control, since the easiest way for U/B to beat a deck like this is by killing all of your creatures while you sit with nearly dead removal spells in hand. Strangleroot Geist is the best in the business against that strategy, and Jackie played not only the full complement of Geists and Zeniths, but also three copies of Phyrexian Metamorph to ensure a never-ending stream of hasty undying attackers to keep the pressure on. Sword of War and Peace may not give protection from either blue or black, but it does ensure that any creature is a potentially lethal attacker. And we haven’t even gotten to the Manabarbs in the sideboard, which are nigh unbeatable for U/B if they ever resolve.
I don’t know what the whole of her matchup schedule looked like, but I imagine that once she started off with a few wins, Jackie was able to avoid the Wolf Run decks that were losing to U/B and instead play against those same winning U/B decks. Certainly, Jackie fought through many U/B decks before falling to Dave Shiels in the semis, and her opponents were no slouches either—she took out both Paulo and Gindy along the way.
How do you go into a tournament playing a deck with a bad matchup against the deck most likely to be the most popular in the field—and win? Information! Since Honolulu, the Magic info-factory has been churning out ways to beat Wolf Run and Spirits, and sure enough, not a single copy of either deck made it to the Top 8 of GP Baltimore. All the Wolf Run decks were beaten down by U/B, and all the Spirits decks were blown out of the skies by Corrosive Gale. And, if it weren’t for a triple mulligan, those U/B decks and old school Delver decks packing Corrosive Gale may have all been taken down by Jackie Lee R/G Aggro deck, which was set up perfectly to take advantage of a the popularity of Rock—by playing Scissors.
So study up, my friends. What’s going to be the Rock, Paper, and Scissors of StarCityGames.com: Tampa this weekend? And what side do you want to be on?