This week, I’ll be trying out a new article format. It’s aimed at people who play casually as well as competitively, although the first few iterations will
skew competitive. My goal is to discuss the deckbuilding process more analytically and purposefully, and to carefully examine common assumptions about
format staples.
What I would like to do is take a single card — today, it’s Counterbalance — and talk about it. Where it’s good, where it’s not. What it always goes
with, what it never goes with. How to build with it, how to build against it. A successful version of this article is one where you, the reader, feel
better-equipped to think and talk about deckbuilding (and its close cousin, metagaming) afterwards. With that out of the way, let’s hop in.
Playing With Counterbalance
Since its printing, Counterbalance has been a powerful card in older formats. It almost always rides shotgun in decks that want four Sensei’s Divining
Tops, and there have been times where a tempo deck has found occasion to sideboard in three Counterbalances and two Tops. In general, though, decks tend to
play four Counterbalances and four Tops.
At its best, this combo functionally wins games. The second ability on Sensei’s Divining Top allows for a sort of one-sided Chalice of the Void on one, and
several top-tier decks can’t beat that. Storm is a prominent example, though there are surely instances where they’ve maneuvered around it. Temur Delver is
another example. Against very low-curve decks that rely on cantrips to find important spells and/or have important one-mana spells, Counterbalance is a
knockout punch.
As I said earlier, Counterbalance has seen play in tempo decks that are willing to play a slower game after sideboarding. The philosophy there is that
cantrips fulfill some of the functionality of Sensei’s Divining Top, making Counterbalance a potent draw even without a Sensei’s Divining Top in play to
reorganize your top three cards multiple times a turn.
It’s important to keep the varying power of Counterbalance in mind since it does need help to be really good. Unlike attrition-oriented cards like
Counterspell or Spell Pierce or Spell Snare, Counterbalance is an investment. You play it, nothing happens, and sometimes nothing will happen for several
turns after that. In order to make it worth playing, you have to be doing some pretty specific things to help it out.
The first thing is obvious: You want to be fidgeting with your deck a lot. You need a really good reason to play fewer than four Sensei’s Divining Tops,
and you’re obviously playing four Brainstorms. You’ll play eight or more fetchlands to clear away unfavorable deck-tops, and you should save those
fetchlands as long as you can. Being able to clear away three dead cards in a neutral situation can be the difference between winning and losing — think
of it as an effective Brainstorm since you’re not drawing three bad cards and get a chance to draw three entirely better ones. Not bad, right?
Beyond just Brainstorming and fetching, though, you should strongly consider Ponder. Philipp Schonegger has long championed a build of Miracles that plays
Ponders, and his results back up his deckbuilding choices: He has two Legacy Grand Prix top 4s with basically the same deck in wildly different formats:
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (22)
Spells (31)
Creatures (3)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (21)
Spells (33)
Ponder is good in the deck for the same reason that Sensei’s Divining Top is good in the deck: It wants to find situationally-powerful cards, and it cares
about the order of the top of its deck. Ponder finds Counterbalance and Top, it’s another card that shuffles your deck with Counter/Top established, and it
pitches to Force of Will if you really don’t want to cast it. Miracles master Joe Lossett has eschewed Ponder for as long as I can remember, though, so the
jury is still split on whether to play Ponder in Miracles. Regardless, when you have a core card that cares about a specific zone, you should consider
every powerful option that interacts favorably with that zone.
I alluded to an important strategic element of Counterbalance-focused deckbuilding earlier — it’s not an out-and-out attrition deck. Between
Counterbalance and Top, you aren’t going to be trading one-for-one until both players are out of cards and then casting a big draw spell. Your cards have
pretty steep diminishing returns — your second Top is okay, your second Counterbalance is almost useless, and a lot of your cantrips get worse when you
have a Sensei’s Divining Top in play to do the heavy lifting. You are building a deck that wants to engineer a specific gamestate, and that gamestate
involves Counterbalance and Top rather than a fist full of counterspells. There are times where you’ll have those too, but more often are the times when
you’ll use those counterspells to stop what slips through your Counter/Top “soft lock.”
The practical upshot of this insight is that you don’t want a deck with a ton of one-for-one removal spells and counterspells. Have some, sure, but it’s
pretty loose to play three spot removal spells and then Top into a Terminus. Similarly, you don’t want to slam down three Counterspells in a row and then
cast Counterbalance. When you play with Counterbalance, you’re making a choice to cede material and tempo in exchange for superior position. If you play
chess, think of the Queen’s Gambit: You go down a pawn in exchange for a stronger pawn structure and better development into the center of the board. By
playing Counterbalance, you’re intentionally falling behind early. That’s part of why the Miracles–Terminus and Entreat the Angels–are such perfect
companions. Both cards create huge swings in tempo and material, plays that complement the downsides of Counterbalance very well.
A hugely important but often-overlooked aspect of building a deck that plays Counterbalance is its mana curve. This came up a lot back in the days where I
wanted to play Enlightened Tutor in all of my Counterbalance decks. I had a lot of torn-up pieces of paper that started like this:
22 lands
The problem with that kind of deck is that Enlightened Tutor skews the curve so much toward the one-drop slot that it’s hard to reliably stop two- and
three-mana plays. If you want to use Enlightened Tutor as a combo-counterspell with various enchantments and articles, that’s cool, but a lot of your core
functionality is lost. Don’t get me wrong, I will basically always go in for Enlightened Tutor in a Counter/Top deck, but the curve is a mess.
And that is where we run into the biggest tradeoff that Schonegger makes in his deckbuilding when compared to Lossett’s Miracles list: the mana curve.
Check out these decks, side by side:
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (22)
Spells (29)
Creatures (3)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (21)
Spells (33)
(Yes, these are decks from hugely different formats, I know. The payoff is coming, just wait.)
Lossett plays one more land than does Schonegger. From there, here’s a comparison of their mana curves:
Schonegger is basically never countering a Show and Tell with Counterbalance. Ditto Vendilion Clique, Monastery Mentor, Krosan Grip, and so on. He has two
Entreat the Angels and no Vendilion Cliques, making his three-spot a real vulnerability. In exchange, his Counterbalances are more reliable at countering
one- and two-drops than Lossett’s.
You may have noticed that Schonegger’s decklist is from Grand Prix New Jersey, a deck overrun by U/R Delver with Treasure Cruise. With the addition of that
context, his decision makes a lot more sense — the best deck in the format played upwards of twenty one-mana cards between all the cantrips, Monastery
Swiftspear, Delver of Secrets, and the burn spells. Countering one-drops — even and especially without Sensei’s Divining Top in play to reorganize the top
three cards of your deck — was hugely important. Lossett’s list from that past weekend, on the other hand, has to account for a resurgence of Omni-Tell
after Grand Prix Kyoto, it has to account for the popularity of the mirror, and it has to care about slower midrange decks that might play True-Name
Nemesis or Lingering Souls.
This brings me to my final broad point about building a Counterbalance-focused deck: You have to know the format. It is absolutely not enough to build a
generic Counterbalance deck. Your answers have to be tailored that much more because the core of your deck is so varyingly powerful. You incur tempo losses
at several points in the game — when you cast Top and Counterbalance, every time you activate Top, and every time you don’t crack a fetchland to preserve
a shuffle for later in the game. You must have cards that regain tempo in order to allow for your survival, and you need to pick the right ones. Sometimes
it’s Spell Pierce, sometimes it’s Pyroblast, and sometimes it’s innovative sideboard choices like Izzet Staticaster. No deckbuilding choices are made in a
vacuum, and Counterbalance is an inherently reactive card that lends itself to inherently reactive deckbuilding. Research is important. You have to know
what you’re reacting to.
On the more specific side of things, I can offer some best-practices tips about various deckbuilding elements:
-
You want at least seventeen blue sources, and more is better. This number should go up if you’re playing Ponder, as you want to be able to Ponder
into Counterbalance on turn 3. Note that Philipp Schonegger plays nineteen blue sources. Lossett plays seventeen. -
Don’t cut Force of Wills. Your deck is so tempo-negative and Counterbalance is so bad in multiples that you can’t be cutting down on a zero-mana
counterspell in a deck that wants to buy a lot of time in the first few turns. - Both Lossett and Schonegger play nine fetchlands. Like I said before, the minimum is eight, and more is definitely better.
-
Have a way to win that isn’t Jace, the Mind Sculptor. You’re going to play long games, you may even lose game 1, and you need ways to win that
don’t require resolving a four-drop and having it survive for six turns. Vendilion Clique is good, Entreat the Angels is good, Stoneforge Mystic is
good, Monastery Mentor is good. -
Build your sideboard with both the matchup and the matchup’s curve in mind. If you’re siding out all of your three-drops against Show and Tell, you
have to have a good plan for if it resolves.
I can also offer you some decent tips for gameplay situations:
-
Against a deck with discard spells where Counterbalance is going to win you the game, if you have Top and Counterbalance and Brainstorm and two
lands, don’t play Top on turn 1. Instead, lead with your fetchland (if applicable), Brainstorm to protect those two cards in response to a discard
spell, and play Counterbalance on turn 2 with Top underneath to counter a followup discard spell or creature. - Against Show and Tell, just float a three and a four. Yes, Jace is good, but countering their Sneak Attack is better.
-
Play your second Counterbalance if you don’t have a way to reorganize your library — you can use fetchlands to reset your deck between
Counterbalance triggers and try to blind-counter a spell again.
Playing Against Counterbalance
For those of you who don’t want to play Counterbalance: There are a lot of ways to beat it. Here are just a few that have a proven track record.
Play a deck that wins before Counterbalance shows up
. The most successful combo decks in the old days of Counterbalance control decks were turn-1 and turn-2 combo decks that took advantage of
Counterbalance’s paucity of one-mana interaction. Oftentimes, the combo deck could count on only having to fight through Force of Will if Counterbalance
wasn’t in play. Being able to counter with a simple Cabal Therapy or a bunch of red rituals into Empty the Warrens would be game-winning.
Don’t cast spells
. Dredge decks have always had great matchups against Counterbalance decks. Dredge is fast, gets on the board early, and doesn’t rely on casting spells
into a Counterbalance. In fact, plenty of Dredge’s wins come without needing to cast a single spell!
Mix it up.
Remember what I said about mana curves? If you start going up the curve a bit, your spells are going to do a lot better against Counterbalance. Rather than
relying on Delver of Secrets, try relying on Natural Order. Make them have one of their Jaces on the top of their deck. Alternatively, cast Green Sun’s
Zenith for four. You don’t have to actually get a four-drop, although I would recommend Thrun if you’re going down that road. I wouldn’t recommend getting
a second, but the first one is quite good.
Play Abrupt Decay
. Back in the day, Krosan Grip was a Legacy sideboard staple. If you wanted to fight Counterbalance, a split-second Naturalize was the best you could do.
Nowadays, Abrupt Decay does all that and kills Tarmogoyfs. Being able to pick off Counterbalances without the muss and fuss of worrying about getting your
answer countered is a great feeling, and it opens the door for the rest of your disruption.
The other best card against Counterbalance strategies? Liliana of the Veil, which is both a difficult card to hit with Counterbalance and punishes a
Counterbalance deck’s lack of focus on raw card advantage. There’s a reason why Shardless Sultai has a real edge against Miracles, and it has everything to
do with how their key cards line up.
Fight their best cards
. In the case of Miracles, Gaddock Teeg is a hoser for Jace, Terminus, Entreat the Angels, and Force of Will. As long as you can protect it from Swords to
Plowshares and Karakas, your Miracles opponent isn’t going to be up to much. Against a low-curve Counterbalance/tempo hybrid, Chalice of the Void shuts off
their cantrips, their Tops, and probably a good number of their threats. Find a second one, and you’ll have the game all locked up.
Whether you want to play with Counterbalance or are just sick and tired of losing to it in Miracles, I hope this taught you something useful. Moving
forward, let me know what you think of this type of article. I had a blast writing all of those Legacy brew articles and making those videos — if you all
want to learn how to approach deckbuilding on a card-by-card basis, let me know what you want to learn about!