I struggled long and hard to try to make a deck that I enjoyed to play for the PTQ season — at least up until I discovered there was no way I could even attend Amsterdam if I wanted to because of obligations with my teaching load for the fall. Boo! Alas, the perils of Real Life sometimes get in the way of the enjoyment of Magic. Still, I spent a huge amount of time playing Magic Online when I could, even if I was no longer really able to play in Qs (except for fun).
At the end of the PTQ season, I could be found playing one deck: Blue/White. It just struck me as the best option among all of the decks that were out there, and I’d found a build that I liked: Shaheen Soorani Blue/White deck, which was just a thing of beauty. As I noted last week, this deck was the eventual champion at Finnish Nationals, nearly verbatim from his original list, with only the modicum of updates. Here is that list;
Creatures (10)
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (25)
Spells (18)
- 2 Condemn
- 2 Mind Spring
- 1 Martial Coup
- 2 Path to Exile
- 2 Day of Judgment
- 4 Spreading Seas
- 3 Everflowing Chalice
- 2 Deprive
Sideboard
The reason that I really love this deck is that it just is constantly throwing down threats of one form or another. The deck runs 14 bona fida threats, not counting Celestial Colonnade or Mind Spring. Essentially a quarter of the deck is dedicated to doing scary things. The deck is packing 28 mana and 8 cantrips on top of it, so if you take out those, you have 14 threats out of 24 cards. Its ten other cards are reasonable answers/disruption: Path to Exile, Condemn, Day of Judgment, and Deprive, with Mind Spring rounding it out. This deck is basically designed to do something very simple: tap out and lay something important down, and keep doing it while knocking out occasionally cards of yours, until it has overwhelmed you.
And it is very good at that.
The minimal inclusions from M11 are exactly the sensical calls I had called for last week, too: find room for Condemn, but don’t knock out all of the Paths. Other than that (and changing a Day to a Martial Coup, a move I’m not sure that I agree with), this deck is Shaheen Soorani deck.
Nothing wrong with that.
When I think about ways that I might attempt to improve this deck, really, the best that I have is thinking about going back to what Shaheen himself was running, and making room for Emeria Angel in the sideboard over Firewalker and Negate. There really isn’t anything in M11 that makes me want to make room for it, here, as I’ve already talked about. Sun Titan is the closest, but, for what this deck needs, and how it is built, I still prefer the Sphinx.
On the other side of the spectrum is, of course, Guillame Wafo-Tapa’s Blue/White deck, which not only takes on a ton of M11, but philosophically embraces a more modern philosophy of Control, where tapping out is something that you only do occasionally; I find myself imagining Gerry Thompson slathering over this list, and tweaking it or being inspired by it to make something new.
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (9)
Lands (26)
Spells (19)
- 4 Mana Leak
- 2 Condemn
- 1 Cancel
- 2 Oblivion Ring
- 2 Path to Exile
- 2 Essence Scatter
- 2 Day of Judgment
- 2 Deprive
- 2 Jace's Ingenuity
Sideboard
In comparison to Soorani’s deck, Wafo-Tapa’s runs 8 bona fida threats. With 26 land and 4 Wall of Omens, this means that that is 8 spells out of 30 that are intended to be scary. Of course, even these change in character when they are in this deck; a Jace, the Mind Sculptor in the hands of a player who is playing out other cards is much more aggressive than a Jace, the Mind Sculptor in the hands of someone playing a controlling game. If we don’t put these things in mind, you could think of the Soorani deck as more than 30% more attuned to aggression than the Wafo-Tapa deck, an amount that is quite noteworthy.
As for Wafo-Tapa’s performance, he went 6-0-1 in the Swiss, a very impressive performance, then beat out the Vengevine Naya 3-2 before double scooping to his next two opponents, Guillame Matignon and Antoine Ruel. I have to imagine that either Wafo-Tapa can’t attend Worlds, or that the value of membership on the French National team was more important to his opponents (and friends?) than to him. What this basically means, though, is that we’re talking about an undefeated Standard deck in a very competitive National event.
This deck is incredibly ready to wait things out. Very little that the deck does is necessarily going to happen on its own turn unless it is either fairly cheap (like Wall of Omens) or really damning in its potential power (like Day of Judgment and Jace, the Mind Sculptor). Where Soorani’s deck is like the Weissman deck of 1994, this deck is more like the Blue/White Control of Mowshowitz, circa 2000.
What this means is that this minimizing of effects on one’s own turn is coupled with cards that work well with this mode in mind. Nine counterspells isn’t really a lot, but, these days, that’s a whole slew. There are four more in the board to potentially add into the mix, plus two elbow drops in the form of Gather Specimens (doing this to someone’s Titan just seems beautiful).
For a lot of people, so many twos and threes might look slapdash, but if you look at the history of Wafo-Tapa decks, it’s been clear that he’s generally been a proponent of very sculpted decks, and he has a real talent in producing control decks. These numbers are certainly not random.
If we look at the counterspell suite, we have the full 4 Mana Leak, supported by 2 Deprive, 2 Essence Scatter, and 1 Cancel. These last five cards are the ones I’m sure some would question. Of course, there is always the question of diminishing returns to consider; Deprive, by its very nature, is self-limiting. You simply can’t have too many of these cards without it causing you problems. Cancel, unequivocally, is a crappy card. But it does accomplish a solid purpose: the certain countering of nearly everything it targets. Deprive and Cancel are near analogs, and the 2 and 1 numbers, respectively, make a lot of sense, particularly when they exist to support the 4 Mana Leak. Essence Scatter, while limited in its scope, does the job it needs to do incredibly well, and this is a creature format, currently, so doing this job is still valuable.
The anti-board suite (4 Wall of Omens, 2 Path to Exile, 2 Oblivion Ring, 2 Day of Judgment, 2 Condemn, 1 Gideon Jura) also makes a lot of sense, under close examination. The Path/Condemn split is, I think, totally appropriate for a traditional control deck, which would generally prefer to cast Condemn, but certainly needs, at times, to Path some target or other. Oblivion Ring becomes all the more valuable because of the Sun Titans that this deck is going to be building up to. A lot of decks are only running three true sweep spells, but with this degree of board handling, combined with the other instants that can take care of the problem, two seems completely reasonable. Only one Gideon, again, seems completely reasonable for a deck that would prefer to not have to tap out, and yet might find the card useful in the latter aspects of the game.
The 8 Jace cards and the 2 Sun Titans round out the deck, and just seem like well-found numbers. Early Jaces are there to take over in control mirrors, and Mind Sculptor are there to finish out games. The 2 Sun Titans represent the deck’s “big finish” moment, and are mostly used to recycle the Jace Belerens that have been dropped out for the express purpose of dying.
I have to say I disagree greatly withAntoine Ruel analysis of the difference between the two Blue/White archetypes; he claims that counterspell version are “strictly better,” but I don’t know what the verdict is in on this yet. The Soorani build was already an exemplary deck (perhaps the best one in Standard for a few weeks), and it certainly hasn’t been too impacted by these changes. It lost to Turboland before, and now, perhaps it loses even more. It still beats Red and Jund handily, and beats any old thing quite well. Until we see what happens with the Hive Mind and their handling of the M11 decks that were initially rogue (such as Pyromancer’s Ascension), we really can’t easily measure these two decks too much. My instincts are pretty sure that one will emerge as better, for the most part, than the other, but it won’t dominate (from a game theory sense) the other such that there are no incentives to play it compared to the other.
When we think about what these decks are, they are very different approaches to control. As far as strategic archetypes go, Wafo-Tapa’s deck is much closer to a true control deck, whereas Soorani’s deck is somewhere in the range of midrange control (though closer to the control end than the midrange end). There are values to be gleaned from both portions of the curve of strategic archetypes, but their respective values are all contextual; midrange control tends to flourish in a world of little combo and a lot of creatures and true control decks. More pure control tends to flourish in a world of combo, and less pure aggression. Both fall prey very badly to aggro-control (like Merfolk) or hybrid control (like Faeries), but neither of those decks are really here to prey on both very different archetypes of Blue/White.
As more data emerges from various events, it’s quickly becoming clear that decks like these two are going to be sitting on the top of the standings as events continue, whether they are strictly Blue/White or they splash in for Ajani Vengeant or Esper Charm and friends. In whatever case, the old king, Jund, is mostly deposed, standing in exile, but waiting to return if people let their guard down. Fighting most of these decks requires something a little different in each case, but there are basics to look at:
– Path to Exile / Condemn
– Day of Judgment
– Wall of Omens
– Jace(s)
– 2 to 9 counters, with Mana Leak most likely, and 2 Deprive very, very common
– Fat Finisher(s)
– 3-5 other Planeswalkers
– Blue mana
– Other colors of mana
Essentially, what you’re going to have to expect that is the same from these decks is this: they will have access to a Planeswalker; they will have big threats. They will have a fair amount of relevant instants, particularly to deal with your creatures. They will have sweep.
Fighting against this with, say, a Red deck is a different proposition that fighting against, say, a Jund deck. If you’re going to be taking your time fighting a Jund deck with Red, you really want to dedicate your time to reducing their life total as quickly as possible. Against a deck like Blue/White, even if they don’t have Baneslayer Angel, this isn’t the kind of plan that you can expect to get you there, because they will be so good at blunting its effectiveness. Particularly important is the inclusion of Condemn over a few Paths, which total destroys your ability to use Path to ramp up to increasingly scary spells.
I looked at an old sideboard plan that I had had that was devastating to Blue/White (pre-Firewalker) in the past, for inspiration. Here was the deck, after board:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Plated Geopede
4 Obsidian Fireheart
3 Elemental Appeal
3 Punishing Fire
3 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Chandra Nalaar
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Burst Lightning
2 Earthquake
One of the basic plans was making the deck be able to be a control deck in the matchup, so that they were playing catch-up to you. With some of the new Planeswalkers (Gideon being a big deal), this might not be nearly as possible as it once was.
Note, this deck is just a brainstorm, but I think this is the kind of Red that might be more appropriate to a Blue/White heavy metagame.
Creatures (20)
Lands (12)
Spells (28)
Sideboard
Fire Servant just spits in the face of Baneslayer Angel and Kor Firewalker, particularly when you are running 26 lands and 3 Banefire. Other than Banefire and Fire Servant, you are essentially running a lot of utility cards against various potential opponents. Searing Blaze is a great card in the right matchup (creature-heavy), as is Forked Bolt. Siege-Gang is one of my favorite go-to cards when it comes to dealing with random problems, as it dishes out a ton of damage unless the opponent Wraths. Basilisk Collar is a great way to gain life in certain matchups, and combines with Hauler and Siege-Gang to make assassinations possible. Cyclops Gladiator is there to overwhelm decks that run smaller critters.
Since I haven’t tested this at all, it is most likely in some need for tweaks. Just looking at it, for example, I’m confident that this deck is not a happy camper against Jund — at least, as Jund looks in this moment. But I think this is the basic direction that you might need to think about going, caring less about Jund, and more about Blue/White, if you’re going to be trying to win events.
I’ll be in Columbus this weekend for the Grand Prix. Wish me luck!
PS – I’m trying to figure out if I want to play an update to my Stasis deck which I gave to Gary Wise and Tony Dobson for the Masters Series (which is itself an update to the Pro Tour: Chicago era Stasis deck of the Norwegians) or something else.
Here is what I have, and I’d love Legacy players’ input:
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (7)
Spells (50)
I probably won’t play it. But it does speak out to me to play it.
We’ll see.
Wish me luck!