We’re on the brink of our first major accounting on Standard: the Pro Tour that will be getting underway in the next few days. The metagame for the event seems largely well-understood by most people. With my ear to the ground, currently the big contenders sound like they are the following:
Faeries
Five-Color Blue (or Five-Color Control, or Cruel Control, if you prefer)
Mono-Red Beats
Boat Brew
B/W Tokens
Blightning Beatdown
Vengeant Weenie
There are other decks, to be sure, but they aren’t getting nearly the notice that the above decks are getting. As usual, Faeries is the ubiquitous Simple Minds deck (“don’t you/forget about me”), put so well by Patrick Chapin on the Game in the Gulf Cruise, covered by Evan Erwin, as roughly this:
“The deck can go turn 1 Thoughtseize, turn 2 Bitterblossom, turn 3 Spellstutter Sprite, turn 4 Mistbind Clique. It doesn’t matter what your hate is — that is a hard draw to beat.”
It doesn’t even need to go so perfectly, either. Make the draw a little less perfect, throw in a Vendilion Clique or another Spellstutter Sprite. Add in the odd Cryptic Command. Whatever the case may be, Standard Faeries, like Standard Affinity before it, has the capacity to just push over people that thought that they could beat it, riding that wave of synergistic power that makes ostensibly more powerful decks (like Five-Color) fall down.
The big card that, perhaps more than any other, has people agog in reconsidering the value of Faeries is without a doubt Volcanic Fallout. With so many people adding it into any Red deck that might potentially face off against Faeries in Extended, its unsurprising to see the same phenomena happening in Standard. While some people are pooh-poohing its effectiveness, all it takes, I think, to understand its value is seeing how it plays out statistically
Turn / BB-Life / You
1 / 19 / 20
2 / 18 / 19
3 / 17 / 17
4 / 16 / 14
5 / 15 / 10
6 / 14 / 5
7 / 13 / -1
The first column represents the turns that Bitterblossom has been out, the second, the Bitterblossom player’s life, the third, you, the opponent’s life. Over seven turns, if nothing else happens, a Bitterblossom player might lose a third of their life, but they’ve killed their opponent in return. Now, obviously, things do happen. A more common set of life totals will include, at some point, a linear return on life to the Bitterblossom opponent, as the newly summoned Faerie token chump blocks some reasonable creature, like Demigod, for example.
If you start adding in Volcanic Fallout, things quickly go bad. Since it is uncounterable, there really is no need to play the “end of your turn”-game, and you can cast it as profitably as possible. Check out the following example:
1 / 19 / 20
2 / 18 / 19
3 / 17 / 17
4 / 14 / 15 *** Cast Volcanic Fallout during Combat
5 / 13 / 15
6 / 12 / 14
7 / 11 / 12
8 / 10 / 9
9 / 9 / 5
10 / 8 / 0
Here, you are still dead, but instead of them losing one third of their life, they’ve lost two-thirds of it. A second casting of Volcanic Fallout is even more damning:
1 / 19 / 20
2 / 18 / 19
3 / 17 / 17
4 / 14 / 15 *** Cast Volcanic Fallout during Combat
5 / 13 / 15
6 / 12 / 14
7 / 11 / 12
8 / 8 / 10 *** Cast Volcanic Fallout during Combat
9 / 7 / 10
11 / 6 / 9
12 / 5 / 7
13 / 4 / 4
14 / 3 / 0
The game has become incredibly close, with you doing nothing more than casting two Volcanic Fallouts. Imagine if you aren’t just a goldfish, though. Pretend that you have even a single resolved creature that can survive a Fallout, like, say, a Boggart Ram-Gang:
1 / 19 / 20
2 / 18 / 19
3 / 17 / 17
4 / 13 / 14 *** Boggart Ram-Gang resolves (not blocked)
5 / 12 / 10 *** Chumping begins
6 / 9 / 8 *** Cast Volcanic Fallout during Combat
7 / 5 / 8
Now, obviously, there is a lot of interplay going on besides the Faerie player merely casting a single Bitterblossom. But it does become reasonable to say, “Hey, the Faerie and the Red player nullify each other, except for the one Ram-Gang, and then the intervention of a single, uncounterable Volcanic Fallout. In the above example, it might not be the same Ram-Gang, but imagine it is some critter that survives Fallout, or another Ram-Gang that comes out after the fact. The Faerie player is largely neutered, forced into chumping unless it can change the board drastically. All on the back of a single reasonable-sized creature and a Fallout. This is pretty deeply impressive, and begins to drive home just why people are so excited by the card.
It boils down to this: people remember the moments that are dramatic. Even if the above scenario doesn’t happen very often, it does happen. When those moments happen… wow, do people remember them.
I expect that this is going to have a dramatic impact, then, on people’s imaginations, when it comes to their working on decks that they hope to have beat the Decks to Beat. It’s the way it always goes, with tinkering on the old decks and attempting to graft new tech onto pre-existing archetypes, slugging them out against slowly iterating versions of those decks.
I’m still not entirely sure what makes people want to even play some of the decks out there. To my mind, the decks worth considering can be reduced a little bit, from the list, above. Both Black/White Tokens and Vengeant Weenie just seem like weaker variants of the Boat Brew (though Vengeant Weenie is less so). A glance at the matchup between Aaron Nicastri and Gerry Thompson reflects much of what I see happening in that matchup: Thompson gets rid of every non-land card in Nicastri’s hand and in play, and Nicastri just smashes him anyway. With Ranger of Eos, Reveillark, and Siege-Gang Commander, it’s easy to see how Nicastri could just push back over the top. Perhaps newer versions of B/W are more resilient, but those versions aren’t currently public.
If we look, then, at the path of Boat Brew since it’s adolescence (which I’m marking with Brian Kowal’s Cruise-winning performance with the deck, regardless of whether his version was more inspired by fellow Madisonian John Treviranus or Frenchmen Pierre Canali, who appear to have worked on the deck in parallel), and compare it to Nicastri’s undefeated performance at Worlds with the deck, and Tomohiro Saito’s The Finals win with the deck:
* Conflux cards that neither Nicastri nor Kowal had access to.
One of the big things to note is the near-exact similarity between the original Kowal version and the Saito build, marking the second time that a Wisconsin deck has been played to domination in The Finals. Saito, like Nicastri, takes Osyp’s suggestion on running Spectral Procession, though he doesn’t double-team it like Nicastri does. Other than that, the deck is only a slight nudge from Kowal’s. Kitchen Finks becomes Spectral Procession, Murderous Redcap becomes Path (to better fight Mistbind Clique, among other cards), and the 3/4 split between Siege-Gang and Ranger becomes a 4/3 split instead. Kowal’s 61st card, the single metagamed Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender, is shaved completely off.
Nicastri’s deck is interesting in that it completely eschews the two-drop (excepting making a 2/2 Figure or dropping a Mind Stone). He certainly proves that you don’t need to be trying to build to an aggressive curve to make the deck work, so long as your deck is resilient otherwise. This seems like a good lesson. He also deeply reduces the number of Siege-Gang, a move that strikes me as a likely consequence of his cutting of Knight of the White Orchid without adding extra land – perhaps when testing of the deck spurred on by reports of Osyp’s Knight of Meadowgrain build made the Siege-Gangs clunky, he just cut them down? He maintains a high Redcap count, despite Osyp’s suggestion to cut them, leading me to believe there is likely still some value there. Nicastri, reportedly, viewed Stillmoon Cavalier as a quasi-analog, essentially pre-boarded by one card versus White Weenie variants and Faeries, though I have to say, I’m not sure that I see it like that.
All told, then, it seems as though there is room to play with the build since Saito played it. For me, I know that I’m still expecting it to be a Volcanic Fallout world. In fact, I expect it so much, I’m imagining it being in the main of many a deck. In my testing, I found something very frustrating coming out of that: Spectral Procession felt quite weak.
What to do, what to do!
After a lot of testing, here’s the build I’ve come to:
Creatures (23)
- 4 Mogg Fanatic
- 3 Siege-Gang Commander
- 3 Reveillark
- 4 Kitchen Finks
- 2 Murderous Redcap
- 4 Figure of Destiny
- 3 Ranger of Eos
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (24)
Spells (9)
Like Nicastri, I’m dodging the two-drop, but I’m not making up for it with Spectral Procession. Rather, I’m upping my land count, and playing for a longer game. Like Vengeant Weenie, I have the burn to be able to reach out and kill someone. In essence, this deck is one that is built with the expectation that Volcanic Fallout is going to be out in force, and it is built to be able to persevere through it.
Here are some details about the card choices:
Flame Javelin – While still potentially tapping me out, Mistbind has an answer here that is also very hard to Spellstutter. You don’t particularly care if they’ve tapped you out, though; what you care about is that they don’t pull the devastating “Time Walk/Terror”. Added value for going to the dome is great. Without being a huge beatdown deck, you aren’t missing Path to Exile.
Banefire — With a “real” mana count of 28, Banefire is here to put the lights out versus any control deck that has managed to stabilize, while adding to the point-and-click elim versus the purely aggressive decks.
Siege-Gang Commander/Murderous Redcap — Everyone I know who has tested the deck back when it ran Murderous Redcap often finds themselves missing it in their builds that don’t run it. Especially in a world where there is liable to be a lot of Boat Brew, Redcap is a very good way to gain an incremental advantage that you can grow into a bigger lead, be it holding the board, or dropping the opponent’s life total. Remember, these guys are the real deal, and have seen play in a ton of competitive aggressive decks, like the Japanese Elves deck from just recently. Redcap is no Siege-Gang, so we definitely want to privilege Siege-Gang, but it is really good both against Siege-Gang, and in conjunction with your own Siege-Gang.
Mana — While normally, I’d prefer to go with 3 Mind Stone, just based on the historical success of stones in past decks, it does bear mentioning that the curve and the board really do want to have a bunch of these. Ghitu Encampments provide a sink against possible flooding, and a heavier Red base to support Flame Javelin. Without Spectral Procession and Knight of the White Orchid, the White base can definitely be cut down a wee bit.
Sideboarding, of course, is a real question. I really like my sideboard, if we agree that the top decks are likely to be the following:
Faeries
Boat Brew
Five-Color Blue
Mono-Red Beats
Vengeant Weenie
Versus Faeries
+2 Rise of the Hobgoblins, +1 Flame Javelin, +1 Murderous Redcap, +1 Banefire
-4 Ajani Vengeant, -1 Mogg Fanatic
Mogg Fanatic is, actually, pretty good against Faeries, but what you really want from it is a tutor target for the Ranger of Eos to make Stutters and the occasional Scion less good. Overall, dropping a turn 1 Mogg Fanatic is deeply unexciting. Ajani is also unexciting, providing the occasional massive blowout in return for many, many games where it just feels like an expensive dud. In their place, Flame Javelin provides both extra capacity to control Mistbind Clique and the ability to just end the game. Murderous Redcap does a surprising amount of damage to a Faerie player, resists Infest, and provides more insurance against Sower. Rise of the Hobgoblins is quite effective as the opener in a double-threat versus counters, and can totally dominate combat math should it get out there — a real reality versus Bitterblossom or other Faeries. Banefire number three is a great card against any counter-deck, giving you the ability to just end games where they’ve been building up any resistance.
Grade: B- to C
Versus the (near)-Mirror
+4 Galepowder Mage, +2 Rise of the Hobgoblins, +1 Murderous Redcap, +1 Siege-Gang Commander
-3 Mogg Fanatic, -2 Banefire, -3 Flame Javelin
In many ways, the mirror is largely about just being a greedy version of the same deck. Galepowder Mage is an absolute beating at that, doubling up your comes-into-play abilities, while destroying their tokens, and resetting any Figures that threaten to get out of control. A single Mogg Fanatic remains as a tutor target in case you decide you need it. Upping the Redcap and Siege-Gang Commanders also contributes to the “win more” plan, and attempts to overload the opponent’s Path to Exile targets (Galepowder and Siege-Gang being the primary culprits). Rise of the Hobgoblins is just an utter beating in the mirror, supplying an army, as well as making the combat math go exclusively your way. (Thanks, Teddy Renner, for this little gem…)
Grade: B-
Versus Five-Color Blue
+2 Chandra Nalaar, +1 Banefire, +2 Rise of the Hobgoblins, +1 Siege-Gang Commander, (+1 Burrenton Forge-Tender)
-3 Flame Javelin, -3 Mogg Fanatic, (-1 Mogg Fanatic)
If your Five-Color opponent is packing Firespout and the like, I generally enjoy access to a single Forge-Tender, but more than that seems much. One of the things you’re basically doing in this matchup is just increasing the card counts on deeply problematic cards. Five-Color doesn’t generally enjoy fighting against Planeswalkers, so adding in Chandra can be a great way to mess them up. Rise of the Hobgoblins is a great card, as versus Faeries, to begin a double-threat against their counterspells. Siege-Gang is another such threat, and Banefire is just a great finisher for them. Out go the cards that only deal small packets of damage.
Grade: A
Versus Red Beats
+3 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender, +2 Rise of the Hobgoblins, +1 Siege-Gang Commander, +1 Murderous Redcap
-2 Banefire, -4 Mogg Fanatic, -1 Ajani Vengeant
Much of this matchup is the quest to remain alive, and keeping a Demigod (if they run it) from taking you out. Forge-Tender is an excellent stop sign for the ground, and the extra Goblins are both speed-bumps, and a way to take control of the board. The loss of one Ajani Vengeant is largely because of the fragile nature of the card in the Red matchup. You want access to it, certainly, but you rarely want it in your opening hand — even gaining the life, at four mana, it is a lot to spend, especially given just how many creatures it actually can’t kill. If using it as an ex-post-facto Icy, it just pales…
Grade: B
Versus Vengeant Weenie
+4 Galepowder Mage, +2 Rise of the Hobgoblins, +1 Siege-Gang Commander, +1 Murderous Redcap
-3 Flame Javelin, -1 Mogg Fanatic, -2 Banefire, -1 Mountain, -1 Reveillark
This matchup often revolves around simply killing trading with their cards, while attempting to get a Mage into play to make a mess of the board, or a Rise to make non-flying combat nearly impossible, or a Siege-Gang to just clear everything up. You need to be respectful of their ability to Windbrisk Heights into really dangerous positions, but if you can keep the skies clear, the ground often mucks up, and then your superior late-game cards take the game.
Grade: B+
One of the things you’ll note is that in each matchup, two Rise of the Hobgoblins come in. In a more streamlined metagame, this might mean that Rise of the Hobgoblins should be main-deck, but as it stands, the only common card that comes out versus all five decks is one Mogg Fanatic. In many ways, this is because the deck boards into an “upgraded” version, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable going to a 3/1 Fanatic/Rise count. The second Rise is generally swapping out for a different card in the matchups. This makes it much like Rorix in OBC, back in the day. Rorix literally came in against every matchup. However, when “smart” people decided to start Maindecking their Rorixes, they found that their win percentages fell. Why? Because the main of Goblins was best just being a Goblin deck, and Rorix was subbing in for different cards depending on the matchup.
Overall, I think that the Pro Tour will be largely dominated by Boat Brew-based decks. They will, in varying degrees, win or lose to Faeries, depending upon the configuration of each of the respective decks, but in the end, I would be very surprised if any deck is as successful as Boat Brew.
As an aside, I wanted to comment on this year’s Pro Tours.
I know a lot of people that are excited by the new split-format of the Tour, where each of the three Pro Tours will be held as half-Constructed, half-Limited, much like Nationals are run. There are a number of reasons that I actively dislike this:
1) Measurement of the format
When we look back on either format, what will be able to say about it? Honestly, we won’t really know. We won’t know what the best draft archetype is. We won’t know what the best Constructed archetype is. The nature of split formats raises the best overall performing player to the top, not the best archetype. Someone could go 7-0 with their deck and face much weaker resistance than the deck that went 5-2, and yet we might not ever find out about John Smith’s decklist, because it gets buried under the more hyped (but not necessarily actually better deck) that does more noticeably well. This is always the case to some extent, via bad luck or bad play, but remember, those factors are still not going away, and so they’re hardly unique. All we’ll have is a further watering down of information, which is too bad for everyone.
2) Players within the format
Sometimes people just get a format. Not enough people give the Sliver Kids (Jacob Van Lunen and Chris Lachmann) the proper credit for their overwhelming victory at the 2HG Pro Tour — they overwhelmingly understood the format more than the rest of the field. The Mike Turian and the Zvi Mowshowitz of the world both get hurt here. These players absolutely could play both formats, but there was no denying that they were deeply better at one side of Magic than the other. I’m all for helping the Jon Finkel and Bob Mahers of the world, but how much help do they really need?
3) Hurting the new PT player
For novice PT players trying to make a name for themselves, the task of trying to master two formats is incredibly daunting. For the poor GP qualifier for the PT, the question of going to Japan can become a really difficult one: without the plane ticket being paid for, how worth it is it? There will be new players who won’t make the trip, given this added burden. That’s a loss for the game. Every person who goes to a Pro Tour is yet another walking advertisement for Wizards of the Coast — you can bet that most everyone who knows them will learn a little bit more about Magic than they probably knew before.
As a deckbuilder, I think the thing I hate the most is a less effective measure of decks. Looking at Nationals and Worlds is a notoriously poor way to get a real sense of a format as compared to looking at a previous years’ PTs or even a large GP. I know that with an odd number of Pro Tours, this solution may be the appropriate, contingent one, but I really hope that they change back in 2010.
Best of luck to everyone playing at the PT!