Two weeks ago, I said that if everything went as planned that last week I would write about snakes. Life decided that all would not go as planned. It went better than planned, and I’m very happy with the way things turned out, but those events made it impossible for me to write. Today’s main topic is as promised: Snakes.
I started out with the following list:
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Time of Need
1 Sosuke, Son of Seshiro
4 Sosuke’s Summons
3 Seshiro the Anointed
3 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
4 Orochi Sustainer
4 Orochi Leafcaller
1 Jugan, the Rising Star
4 Commune with Nature
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
4 Tendo Ice Bridge
1 Island
2 Mountain
1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
15 Forest
Sideboard
4 Wear Away
2 Tatsumasa, the Dragon’s Fan
2 Sosuke, Son of Seshiro
1 Seshiro the Anointed
1 Myojin of Life’s Web
1 Myojin of Infinite Rage
1 Kumano, Master Yamabushi
3 Genju of the Cedars
There are some good things about this list and some things I did not like. As usual I decided to rebuild the deck from the ground up starting with the mana.
Snake decks are going to be mostly Green, with Green mana sources and mostly Green spells. The natural tendency is to overload on Green sources to make sure it is never a problem, but that tends to be a mistake. If you make sure you always have something, it means that you overpaid for the privilege if there was a viable alternative. Instead the deck should almost never have a Green problem. The flip side of that is that there is no point in having more sources of a second or third color than you can use. I would also consider the following cards to be automatic:
4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
4 Orochi Sustainer
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Sosuke’s Summons
3 Seshiro the Anointed
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
1 Okina, Temple of the Grandfathers
4 Tendo’s Ice Bridge
18 Other Lands
You can argue twenty-three versus twenty-four lands and that decision will likely come down to exact builds. Most of those other lands will be Forests, with how many determined by how much you need other colors. The twenty-three spell cards should need little explanation. Sakura-Tribe Elder to me is a natural automatic four as it gives you a cheap snake, safe mana acceleration and color at virtually no cost. It is even a shaman, which makes it excellent if Sachi hits the table. The point of the Snake deck is to generate obscene amounts of mana with Sachi while Summons gives you a way to productively use that mana without making your deck topheavy.
The next step is to agree on Time of Need. Snake decks get a ton out of Seshiro and Sachi, both of which are well worth searching for, and it generates a lot of mana that can be taken advantage of with other legends like Meluko. Time of Need is therefore both gas for the endgame and fuel for the early game even if you couldn’t support it with extra legends beyond those three. Once you put Time of Need into the deck, the next question becomes legends. Sosuke, Son of Seshiro and Meluko of the Clouded Mirror are obvious, and I think that a third is as well: Kodama of the North Tree. No matter how important the snake engine is that card is too efficient not to have it on call. The Blue also locks in an Island, leaving us here:
4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
4 Orochi Sustainer
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Sosuke’s Summons
3 Seshiro the Anointed
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Time of Need
1 Meluko of the Clouded Mirror
1 Kodama of the North Tree
1 Sosuke, Son of Seshiro
1 Okina, Temple of the Grandfathers
4 Tendo Ice Bridge
1 Island
17 Other Lands
There are now seven remaining slots, only one of which will be a land. I think the deck should run twenty-four lands because when it runs smoothly you should never run out of uses for your mana. Even if you do, there’s little question that the deck offers massive amounts of raw power so I’m not worried about a mana glut. Commune With Nature offers a counterargument that you can search up Elder and Sustainer instead, but you don’t want too many of those if it means missing land drops and that makes me very wary of the card. To hit true gas with Commune you often will need to miss Elder, Sustainer, Leafcaller (if you use him) and Sachi (because you have her) and that leaves the odds stacked against finding a good creature.
The cards you’ll add after the land to fill out the last six slots fall into one of three categories: Big Legend, Big Spell and Orochi Leafcaller. Orochi Leafcaller feels like a lousy card at first because it provides mana that your deck should rarely need and is otherwise a vanilla 1/1 but that description is deceiving. Being a shaman makes a huge difference due to Sachi, which you intend to run every game, and having a one-drop of some kind is vital to getting the most out of Jitte. With as little as a Summons a one drop can’t be that bad. Playing four risks drawing two, and that seems like something you want to avoid since you’d rather be playing the two mana shamans starting on the second turn and you only need a mana filter once. I’m going to endorse three copies of Leafcaller for now. That gives you good support and a good chance to draw one without risking too much. I’m confident in the three and won’t rule out a possible fourth if it proves important enough. Time is the thing Snakes need most.
Those last three cards are going to be big. Really big. The deck needs something mana intensive to fill those slots. You can give serious consideration to everything up to the ten-drops Myojin of Infinite Rage and Sway of the Stars, modifying your mana base accordingly. Sway of the Stars seems like a win-more card to me, as its use requires about twelve mana at a minimum. The last thing I’m worried about is whether I’ll win that many of those games. I expect my opponent to either die, kill off my mana or to get rid of Sway of the Stars before I can cast it if I’m under a threat like infinite fog. Besides, you have several other fine answers to such a threat. Why would I lock you out of the game and sit there forever while you draw the one card that gets you out? Much more likely is that I’ll get a little ahead on mana or draw redundant cards that give me some free mana for a turn and use Cranial Extraction to end the game.
Decision one is to include a card you can search for with Time of Need that will get you out of such a lock. There are two choices here that make sense to me: Myojin of Infinite Rage and Kumano, Master Yamabushi. I don’t want to rely on my guy living, so the Myojin wins. That leaves two more slots, and here the question is more open. One of my favorites is a little odd: Gifts Ungiven. To me the snake deck’s main theme is Summons with a guy who enlarges your tokens. Gifts Ungiven will get you Seshiro the Anointed, Sosuke’s Summons, Time of Need and Sosuke, Son of Seshiro as your basic plan. They then will likely give you Summons and Sosuke. Either way, you’ll get the Summons you need and a card that can take advantage of it. A nice little variant is to make the fourth card Umezawa’s Jitte as a sort of “poisoned pill” just because it’s that powerful. Alternatively you can get two mana sources, and it gives you room for creative sideboarding to answer various problems. I’m not going with it, but the decision was close. Instead I’ve decided that the deck need not rely as heavily on Summons as playing Gifts would have you believe. My choice instead is Godo and something to search out with him, both good ways to use a lot of mana.
Adjusting the mana for all of this, we get this listing:
4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
4 Orochi Sustainer
3 Orochi Leafcaller
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Sosuke’s Summons
3 Seshiro the Anointed
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Time of Need
1 Meluko of the Clouded Mirror
1 Kodama of the North Tree
1 Sosuke, Son of Seshiro
1 Myojin of Infinite Rage
1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
1 Tatsumasa Dragon’s Fang
1 Okina, Temple of the Grandfathers
4 Tendo’s Ice Bridge
1 Island
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
2 Mountain
2 Pinecrest Ridge
1 Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep
12 Forest
You have nineteen first Green sources and with Elder and Sustainer I’m not worried about being able to extend that into additional Green. The deck never needs Blue more than once so this mix is sufficient there and picking up the legendary land abilities is a nice bonus. You’re set up for Gifts in several subtle ways and I chose not to try and see if I could get some tiny gains by removing those options. That has the bonus of letting you try out Gifts without having to reconfigure. The problem with Gifts Ungiven in the end is that while it is good it costs mana to a deck that always can use more mana and it ends up being the soft card when sideboard time comes. Something has to come out and that something tends not to be able to come from the core. If it can’t come from the core then cards like this tend to look rather vulnerable.
I won’t pretend to know enough to construct the sideboard properly, but there are some things that are easy to pin down. You will never be taking out the core of the deck, so the basic questions will revolve around what to do with the rest of your slots. There can be little doubt that you’ll want some number of Wear Away to deal with good old Jitte. You have your own set of them, but in matchups such as the one against white you have little else to fear and plenty of other targets to hit if their Jittes don’t show. Gifts Ungiven raises the possibility that you may wish to diversify those answers to be able to search up one at will, but you will likely be boarding it out due to the nature of such matchups: If you can contain their deck then you can win from there so there’s no need to leave in what is essentially a card drawer.
Godo is likely to be the best other answer to Jitte, letting you get one of your own to self-destruct it. This isn’t the cheapest solution but it gets the job done and if you also have the option to get Tatsumasa, the Dragon’s Fang then this is a good additional option to have with Time of Need and not that bad a random draw. I also agree with one copy each of Myojin of Life’s Web and Kumano, Master Yamabushi. Due to mirror considerations the fourth Seshiro and second Sosuke are tough to pass up. That’s ten cards and other than Wear Away I see no need to duplicate.
Those last five don’t seem to have any automatic needs, so you could even do something like a Swamp and four Cranial Extractions. That’s probably not your best choice because of some mirror technology I haven’t found yet, and there are other possibilities as well such as Hisoka’s Defiance and Minamo’s Meddling for obvious purposes with the obvious second Island as part of the bargain. I like Defiance as a good stopgap card. You can also just pack an extra copy of a legend like Meluko or Kodama. However, there is one card I think is too good to pass up here: Shizuko, Caller of Autumn. Being able to Call up the Caller is a great option for Green decks that can use large amounts of mana, because there are matchups in which this mana is far, far more valuable to you than them. For example White decks try to shut down all the mana with Hokori and have only one good mana sink: Umezawa’s Jitte, and you have a turn to play your own or remove it before they can use it to remove Shizuko. You can even cast Godo off of Shizuko and remove the Jitte that way.
That left the candidate decklist as follows:
4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
4 Orochi Sustainer
3 Orochi Leafcaller
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Sosuke’s Summons
3 Seshiro the Anointed
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Time of Need
1 Meluko of the Clouded Mirror
1 Kodama of the North Tree
1 Sosuke, Son of Seshiro
1 Myojin of Infinite Rage
1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
1 Tatsumasa Dragon’s Fang
1 Okina, Temple of the Grandfathers
4 Tendo’s Ice Bridge
1 Island
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
2 Mountain
2 Pinecrest Ridge
1 Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep
12 Forest
Sideboard
4 Wear Away
1 Seshiro the Anointed
1 Sosuke, Son of Seshiro
1 Myojin of Life’s Web
1 Myojin of Infinite Rage
1 Kumano, Master Yamabushi
1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
4 Hisoka’s Defiance
1 Shizuko, Caller of Autumn
I hope to be able to give this subject more attention. The trip to New York took a lot out of me and my time, which reminds me of last year when the move to Denver got me into trouble testing for Kobe. If and when I know more, you will know more. In fact, I do know a little more and I have realized (as I’m sure everyone else has too, but I’m one guy and no one’s given me an offer on Betrayers that seems like anything but highway robbery given the market) that the mirror is key and that the most important card there is Hero’s Demise. That makes a lot of sense, because the deck wins off of several key snakes and all are Legends. If you have Summons and I have the legends, there’s little question I will win that war. That means clearing five sideboard slots for that and a Swamp. Taking away all the cards that you don’t really need, I’d modify to this:
4 Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
4 Orochi Sustainer
3 Orochi Leafcaller
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Sosuke’s Summons
3 Seshiro the Anointed
4 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Time of Need
1 Meluko of the Clouded Mirror
1 Kodama of the North Tree
1 Sosuke, Son of Seshiro
1 Myojin of Infinite Rage
1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
1 Tatsumasa Dragon’s Fang
1 Okina, Temple of the Grandfathers
4 Tendo’s Ice Bridge
1 Island
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
2 Mountain
2 Pinecrest Ridge
1 Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep
12 Forest
Sideboard
4 Wear Away
1 Kumano, Master Yamabushi
4 Hisoka’s Defiance
4 Hero’s Demise
1 Swamp
1 Shizuko, Caller of Autumn
The board is now highly focused rather than giving you the ability to tune. You can’t get the exact cards that you want but you can instead hit your opponent over the head with a sledgehammer before beating him to death with sticks. The fourth Leafcaller seems like it should be in now to help the sideboard so something should probably go to allow that to happen. An alternate version posted here uses a ‘real’ amount of black to get better legend options, creating what I would almost consider a Legend/Snake hybrid. In that build, the snakes are around mostly to provide extra mana.
Response to the Alternate Build
Black is an interesting proposition, but it is also an extensive one in terms of color if you take it as seriously as has been proposed – and you don’t have a depletion land to help out. You do have to put your mana in a little jeopardy, but that is one of the places this deck should be most prepared to sacrifice. What do you get in return? I think that by using a lot of high-end legends you’re giving up a lot of the synergies that you get by focusing on snakes themselves. It also all but forces you into Kodama’s Reach and that leaves you with a lot of mana sources. That might not be all that big an issue, but once you pass a critical mass of mana sources decks stop having the reliability to win tournaments. You don’t want to turn Snakes into another Domain deck. If there’s one big thing I’m confident is wrong with his build, it’s missing the fourth Time of Need. A snakecentric build can think about that, but a legendcentric one cannot.
Hana Kami/Soulless Revival for Decklist: Four (Three?) More Copies!
What is with all of you wimps? I say that with love. I have nothing against Gifts Ungiven, but why would you want to only use one of each of these great cards? Neither is a poor natural draw even without the other, as Soulless Revival will often get back an Elder at little or no cost on the back of Kodama’s Reach or enable a Horobi’s Whisper. Hana Kami can fizzle Jitte for a turn, which buys you valuable time while getting back a kill spell or Reach. These are cards you want to play four copies of, not one copy, which also gives you a respectable shot at the engine without Gifts Ungiven. Other problems with the lists are left as an exercise to the reader.
Talking Tech
Want to talk block tech? With lots of testing on Magic Online, it seems logical enough to have a discussion either there or at a place with better chat technology. Let us know in the forums if you’d be interested in such a discussion later this week. I’m thinking Wednesday evening if the support is there and I’ll moderate the discussion and help use that to mold things for next week.
An Idea for Magic Online: The Replay Queue
When I was informed earlier this week that this was a new idea, I found it odd but not impossible that no one had proposed it earlier. If I am being unoriginal, which is a distinct possibility, then I apologize to whoever thought of it first. To me, one of the biggest problems with Magic Online drafts is that they don’t let you get the most out of drafting. When you’re done, you have a draft deck that often you’d like to keep playing with if you could. This happens all the time in real life too, with similarly poor results. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a chance to keep playing? I’m not suggesting that there be a prize involved, although that would be great too. Perhaps we could finally have a use for that twelfth pack that got taken out of our prize pool, perhaps not. The point is, suppose we created a new queue.
This queue is free to all. To register, you bring a draft deck rather than packs with which to draft. It can be any deck drafted in a sanctioned draft. When two players in the queue who have not played within the specified boundaries are waiting with decks that have similar records, be they 0-1, 1-1, 3-0 or 5-4 – since the queue counts previous results from this queue – they get paired up and play a match. It’s that easy.
Would you use this queue? I know that I would. By getting to play extra matches, even if they were against different tables, I could get a far better picture of whether my decks are any good. This is especially true of the below-average drafts. At the Pro Tour it is a vital skill to be able to save a bad deck from going 0-3 and try and salvage some points but it is very hard to get good practice at this. I’d also be able to get extra matches in with the decks that have new or interesting concepts, or rares I want to see in action. Perhaps I just want the thrill of trying to go 10-0 with my masterpiece or try to finally win a match with the Worst Deck Ever™. Along the way, I’ll face a lot of other bizarre decks which should be loads of fun. If it gets popular enough, the queue could even try to pair people with similar ratings.
This queue has three obvious problems. Problem one is motivation for the players. Without anything to play for, often players don’t try that hard to win. The good news is that with only voluntary participation, a minimal incentive should be enough to (as George Carlin urges us) Keep People Alert if one is needed at all. If you’re not going to try, why show up? The flip side of this is that it will depend on a critical mass of participation to work, but I don’t think that will be a problem given how often the draft queues fire. You won’t need many people interested to make it work.
The third problem is that obviously Wizards makes no money off of the replay queue. It is a service to the players, and while they’re replaying they’re not redrafting, reopening and responding. My response is that playing is quick and if you are paranoid then cap the number of matches per deck. By providing these players with a way to be happy with their draft, Wizards will be encouraging repeat business which in turn is very, very good for business.
In short, I think it would work and it would go a long way towards advancing the value of Magic Online as a testing resource for Limited. Testing for Limited in general has never been handled well, and I could write much about both things I’ve tried in the past and things I’d love to see tried in the future.