Sullivan Library - Thanks For All The Fish

It was a strange week for me, all told. I had walked into the beginning of last week fully thinking that I might be writing one article, but ended up just drifting away from it. I was thinking about starting a real dissection of where our new Extended would be heading, and sharing my version of Brian Kowal’s awesome combo deck in these waning days of Extended before Zendikar arrives. A part of the drift away from that article came initially from seeing several knowledgeable writers say some things that just don’t jive with my understanding of the game from a purely theoretical level. As I started delving into my initial forum response, I realized that I had barely skimmed the surface. This deserves to be an article in and of itself, I thought…

Of course, by the time I started going into it, I realized that it might actually be better served by being given even more dedication than I was going to give it by a mere rebuttal article. I’d come back to the topic, I thought, after I won the PTQ in Iowa.

Ah, Iowa. I have super secret tech for tournaments that are in and around Des Moines. One of my friends has a magical house that if you sleep in, the next day one of the people sleeping there will win. This last time, we stayed in Des Moines, and in Kansas City the next day, me and Matt Severa would meet in the finals of the Last Chance Qualifier for Nationals. I would win, and he would win his next LCQ. The time before that, me and my friend Ben Rasmussen would meet in the finals of a PTQ in Des Moines.

This time, unfortunately, we did not get to stay in the magical house of win, and instead a small crew of us were in a small motel. And, no, none of us won it.

I was playing my build of Fish, only slightly updated. In the first round, I played what looked to be a carbon-copy of Thaler’s Germany winning list. I beat him in a pretty excellent two games, having a Sygg early in game 1, and then following up with two Syggs in the next, the first killing his, and the second one sticking. In the next round, I played against Brian Kowal.

Brian was also playing Thaler’s list, card-for-card. He joked that if things played out like they did the last time we’d played, one of us would have to win the tournament for sure. I joked back that it would be good for me, then, since I had won that last time. He got me in three, Sygg making each game.

Brian and I walked around the convention center after that round. We’d finished three games relatively quickly, just because of the sheer blowout nature of the games. I was hopeful that he could win the event, not only because he had a great deck, but also because of a semi-superstitious thought that maybe he was correct, maybe the winner of this match was just going to be the one to take the whole thing.

“Well, that last time, I’m pretty sure I had the best deck in the tournament by a mile,” I said. BK and I have always had this habit, I think, of getting ahead of the metagame in the early days of a format. These days, though, people are pretty on top of the metagame, and neither my teched-out fish nor his prepackaged 75 really had that same kind of edge. If I’d had an edge, it was a few weeks earlier, when no one was playing Fish, and I lost the final game to four Great Sable Stags in Five-Color-Blood (and he needed them all to stay alive at 2 life). That was the day I was ahead of the curve. Today was a day full of Fish, and the little â€˜folk were everywhere. BK would start out 5-0 before losing to two other Thaler lists in a row, in a matchup he called “degenerate”.

The Flavors of Fish

If we’re to look at the Fish lists of the last several years, I think that we have to examine the basic roots of Fish.

There are basically three major threads:

1 — “Countersliver” Style — This version stays low on the curve, doesn’t necessarily kill incredibly quickly, and has a package of powerful counters that it leans on over many turns. Nicolas Labarre’s second place Pro Tour: Rome deck from 1998 is a good example of this type.

2 — “Madness” Style — This version is less concerned about playing a larger number of counters, and instead actively tries to kill an opponent very quickly, so that in theory it will only need to use even a single counter or two to lock out a game. Richard Feldman Fish deck from the last State Championship season is of this kind, with Colin LaFleur picking up a Wisconsin State title with his card-for-card copy of Feldman’s list.

3 — “Controlling” Style — This version often has some element of the deck that sits quite high on the curve, but often has a powerful effect. It often tries to win on the overpowering strength of its cards. Decks like Adam Prosak Merfolk deck (piloted by LSV to a third place finish in California States) is an examples of this type.

Of these, the “Countersliver” style is one that is the most difficult to actually come across these days. There simply aren’t enough good counters to make this happen. A deck like Mike Donais’s classic “George” (piloted to Grand Prix: Austin victory by Gary Krakower) could lean on actual Counterspell and Forbid (fueled by Curiosity) to have a near infinite amount of counters. Labarre could run Counterspell and Force of Will (also fueled by Curiosity). The kinds of counters needed to make this happen simply don’t exist in Standard right now. The best card draw to make this happen is probably Cold-Eye Selkie, but I know that my attempt to go down this path was lackluster, even if it did smash certain matchups like I wanted it to. It just didn’t have the card to really be respectable.

The other two styles, though, are definitely worth thinking about. Here are representations of both:

Merfolk

Collin Lafleur

1st Place at States on 11-09-2008

Standard

Creatures (25)

Lands (24)

Spells (11)

Sideboard

Merfolk

Luis Scott-Vargas

3rd Place at States on 11-09-2008

Standard

Creatures (26)

Lands (24)

Spells (10)

Sideboard

As you can see, these decks have a wildly different approach to the game, even if they do share a good 24 spells (of their 36) in common. The differences between Feldman’s (played by LaFleur) and Prosak’s (played by LSV) are as follows:

Feldman:
4 Knight of Meadowgrain (also known as Two Drop Monster)
4 Wake Thrasher
4 Oblivion Ring
(Special note: 6 Man-lands and 4 Windbrisk Heights)

Prosak:
4 Merfolk Looter
1 Glen Elendra Archmage
3 Reveillark
3 Ponder
1 Stonybrook Banneret
(5 Man-lands)

Looking at them, it is easy to see the difference. Feldman wants to kill you with a monster; Prosak wants to draw the best cards and win with better cards. Of the many, many approaches to Merfolk for that era, only these two have empirical successes.

When we look at these decks, it is easy to see where Sebastian Thaler was parking his car: firmly in the middle.

My Complaints with the Thaler List

If you’ve played against Merfolk lately, it is likely that this is the list that you’ve played against. It is a far cry from the list that inspired me to pick up Fish. More on that soon — here is his list:

Merfolk

Sebastian Thaler

1st Place at Nationals on 08-16-2009

Standard

Creatures (26)

Lands (24)

Spells (10)

Sideboard

I’m not going to lie; I don’t like this list.

It has a large number of cards that make me want to play Fish: it has the Reejerey, it has the Syggs, it has the Cryptics, it has the Silvergill, and it has the Wake Thrashers. These are the cards that make me excited about Fish. And then, on top of that, it has a bunch of other cards that I don’t like.

Here’s the thing, though. Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that I’m right, and this list isn’t optimal. It doesn’t matter. It still is a total beating. Improve the list by a few cards, and it might be more of a beating, but, hey, look up Fat Man and Little Boy, and tell me how much it mattered to the people hit by them which one packed more megatons…

My biggest problems with this list effectively boils down to one card: Stonybrook Banneret.

Stonybrook Banneret is one of those cards that can do a lot to power up Merfolk. They come out of the gate a little faster, but the question I’ve kept asking myself is this: is it good enough? Feldman, I know, looked at this same question when he was working on his build of the deck. Ultimately, he cut down to 3 Banneret because of the combination of diminishing returns in the card.

The Bannerets are what make the Sage’s Dousings even playable. But in this current metagame, full to the brim with Volcanic Fallouts, the Bannerets can just turbo your deck out into a dead board. Further, they virtually demand help. No one (or nearly no one) dies from Banneret beatdown; they die from Bannerets being helped by something. This just pushed you into a conundrum: Banneret can make you win (more) against many a deck, but it hurts you when you’re actually being resisted.

If Banneret is putting you into a position where you’re being essentially set up to lose several guys at a time, a card like Reveillark does become nearly the best card that you are looking for to solve the situation. It doesn’t provide the total destructive lockout that it gives in Elementals. It doesn’t provide the ridiculous card advantage that you’ll see in a more dedicated Reveillark-control decks. It just refills the board with the most relevant creatures you’d seen thus far.

In other words, it’s fine.

Standard is not a place for “fine.” We have a metagame that easily has 10 relevant decks, if not more. This is a world where what you want to be is as close to unfair as possible. If you’re playing in a PTQ, only #1 gets it. If you’re playing in a $5K, you won’t have any buys helping you out. The bar for excellence is high.

I was worried that I had thought myself into a corner, so I called Brad Nelson to talk to him about the situation. I knew that he would be an excellent person to go to on this, because he’d been playing Fish online a lot lately. He was the one who had talked Brian Kowal into playing Fish this weekend.

He reiterated much of the same things I’d already thought were the case about the problem cards. Dousing is only good with Banneret (but he still wasn’t confident that it was good enough even with Banneret). Banneret did seem like a win-more, be-exposed-more card. And Reveillark was there, largely, to just play recoup, so that you could be more aggressive with your creatures that actually mattered, like Thrasher, Reejerey, and Sygg. He definitely agreed with me, though, that it wasn’t the bee’s knees, just that it was good.

After talking with him, I left thoroughly re-convinced that Thaler’s list was powerful despite what I perceived of as mistakes.

My Path to Fish

My inspiration came to come back to Fish was spurred by Australian Nationals, with Aaron Nicoll’s list.

Merfolk

Aaron Nicoll

8th Place at Nationals on 06-21-2009

Standard

Creatures (27)

Lands (22)

Spells (12)

Sideboard

Nicoll’s list had a fair number of cards I disliked (Banneret and Cursecatcher), but was deeply exciting. Harm’s Way! Wow! Harm’s Way!

It only had a few of the other card that had me excited: Wake Thrasher. Seeing the card in a list, I immediately thought about Feldman’s list, and how insane the Thrashers had been in it. With the M10 rules changes, my mind boggled, and I realized just how crazy the card had become. There was definitely something here that could be worked with.

Immediately, I decided to marry Nicoll’s list to Feldman’s list. Even with some preliminary playtesting, it seemed really, really good. I was shocked at how potent the mana base could be, even with 4 Windbrisk Heights to “slow” it down. I had never really liked Feldman’s inclusion of 4 Knight of Meadowgrain, even as I realized how useful they could be; it just seemed like it hurt the mana too much. I replaced the card with the much more “fishy” Meddling Mage.

Immediately I was struck by the results. I started playing against everything I could with the list and was impressed by what the little Pikula could accomplish. Against Cascade lists, I’d name Putrid Leech to get the Leech off of my back. Against Kithkin, I’d name Spectral Procession early or Cloudgoat Giant late to keep them from over-establishing on the board.

The real selling point, though, was when I sat down to play against Red and discovered that what used to be an overwhelmingly terrible matchup was wildly shifted around just because of the power of Harm’s Way. I was sold.

I called up Feldman to see what he thought of the path I had taken. After talking it all out, we grudgingly maintained a list including Sage’s Dousing even though we weren’t completely happy with it. It did the job of just countering stuff, and the deck needed a little more of that. Without Banneret, it was particularly underwhelming, and one of the first cards to come out against any deck that you might happen to play against. Eventually, though, after playing the deck more, the experience of U.S. Nationals led me to just cut the card altogether, in favor of a split of cheap counters.

With all of the lessons of Nationals behind me, I’d gotten to this list:

Sulli-Merfolk

Adrian Sullivan

Test deck on 09-06-2009

Standard

Creatures (24)

Lands (24)

Spells (12)

Sideboard

In his coverage of my LCQ win, BDM called my list Sulli Merfolk, and when people would message me for help, they would inevitably refer to it as that, so I’ve let it stick.

As compared to the Thaler list, we’re playing several different spell change-overs.

Meddling Mage over Stonybrook Banneret.
Harm’s Way over Path to Exile.
Sower of Temptation over Reveillark.
Negate and Essence Scatter over Sage’s Dousing and the extra Sygg and Reveillark.
Windbrisk Heights over Glacial Fortress and Plains.

The Harm’s Way/Path to Exile choice is perhaps one of the least major of them all. You could easily make the switch to Path in this list and still have the deck the same at its core. The other choices, though, are a nod to a desire to have more opportunities to interact with the opponent.

Meddling Mage is just one of those fantastic cards in the game’s history. People have always, always, always struggled with how this card works. This is not a card that you should be using to try to get a read on your opponent and just “get” them. Unless they accidentally show you a hand of 3 Lightning Bolt, Meddling Mage is not there to try to blank their cards. Rather, you are trying to use it to blunt their strategy so that they don’t come out of the gates in the way that they want. Yes, they will kill your Meddling Mage more often this way. But so what? If you’re using your Meddling Mage to try to blank your opponent’s cards, you’re often also blanking your Meddling Mage, fearing to get it into combat lest it die and unblank their cards. No, the correct choice, generally, is to name what you don’t want to see. Try to slow their deck down, because every turn that you spend where your opponent isn’t doing what they want to do to advance their game is another turn that you spend getting a clock on the table with a counter back to finish them off with.

Sower is a card that very well could be cut for something else, but works so well in blunting an opponent’s beatdown, stifling their tempo even when they eliminate the Sower, or turning on your Windbrisk Heights. Sower is there to make sure that your late game is more potent, in the same way that Reveillark is for most decks.

Speaking of Heights, Sower is one of those cards that absolutely get a huge pump-up when you put it out for a mere two mana. Other cards that are often ridiculous here are Cryptic Command, Sygg, or Reejerey, all of which can simply make a single activation of Heights into a game breaker. There are reasonable concerns about Heights from a speed perspective, but the returns on the card is just so good, I can’t help but want to run it.

Differing counters are relevant so often, not the least of which in the way that they are consistently able to do the job you want. Dousing is great, when you can get it off (which is fairly often). But as games drag to a late stage, this can often mean you’re struggling. Here, Dousing can just become expensive dead weight. Similarly, in an early stage of the game, Dousing can just sit in your hand, unable to be cast. I’ve been very happy with the 2/2 split, and definitely recommend it.

The Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender, Mark of Asylum, Sleep, and Glen Elendra Archmage are all there to do simple jobs. Forge-Tender is anti-Red. Mark of Asylum is great as a one-of to stymie nearly all of the popular anti-Fish strategies. Sleep is great in a race situation. The Archmage is wonderful against anything with counters and against the Blightning-style decks.

The biggest card of note in the sideboard, I would have to say, is Baneslayer Angel.

I came to the conclusion that Baneslayer belonged in the board after losing in the finals of a PTQ in Chicago. I’d felt largely pretty good about any of my matchups that didn’t include a combination of both Anathemancer and Great Sable Stag. As I was brainstorming what could have been done, I realized just how incredible a Baneslayer Angel could have been. It could take my life out of range of Anathemancer and at the same time laugh off a Great Sable Stag. It seemed far more potent than Reveillark, which I’d already considered for this problem.

I got talked out of the card before the next PTQ. Patrick Chapin and Brian Kowal made convincing arguments about how the Jund Cascade matchup was just a war of attrition. I tried sideboard Angel against Patrick’s Five-Color Control, and I was deeply underwhelmed by it in that matchup (never mind that that wasn’t a matchup I needed much help in, nor one that probably even wanted a Baneslayer brought in). Their arguments were good, but I still should have simply listened to my gut and went with the Baneslayer Angels; literally three lost matches would have become wins if I’d had Baneslayer instead of Reveillark.

This led me to thinking about the Thaler list, and the Reveillark’s in it. If I were to run a “Thaler”-style list, what would it look like? Reveillark was there to increase the late game relevance of the deck. After playing some sideboarded games, I was confident Baneslayer Angel was just simply better.

Here is what I would do to make such a deck:

Baneslayer Fish

Adrian Sullivan

Test deck on 09-06-2009

Standard

Creatures (23)

Lands (24)

Spells (13)

Sideboard

I still actually deeply prefer “Sulli Merfolk” to “Baneslayer Fish” (they are largely the same deck, in different stages of sideboarding). Baneslayer Fish is a great call, though, for those people who are just a wee bit more conservative, and really want to be leaning on more powerful cards overall, rather than cards that might have stronger synergies.

If you don’t feel confident in your abilities with Meddling Mage, you could cut them, but if you did, I wouldn’t cut them for Banneret. Instead I’d place the much less exciting Puresight Merrow into the deck, and perhaps the fourth Sygg. Puresight Merrow works like a Merfolk Looter that is better in a race. I also don’t mind running a singleton Aquitect’s Will. All of these options, though, I feel are simply worse than Meddling Mage, which, properly played is a true beating.

One of the best things about either list is the access to Baneslayer Angel in numerous matchups. You can simply steal away games when you untap with a Baneslayer in play. I think about one game where I was beaten down to a low life total, dropped a Glen Elendra Archmage with a pair of mana open, and didn’t die. I untapped, top-decked a Baneslayer, and easily won, despite a very solid board presence on the other side; first strike and lifelink are simply fairly ridiculous, especially on such a big body.

Merfolk of any variety are just a fantastic call right now. I think I missed my window for when they would have been the best call, and I’m kicking myself that I hadn’t figured out that Baneslayer Angel belonged in the deck’s board. Right now, Merfolk is fast becoming the stealth “best” deck, and yet, week after week, most people wouldn’t even mention the archetype. If you look, article after article, the vast majority of them barely even mention Merfolk. Even now, as people are really coming to see it as “the best,” most people really haven’t playtested against it, and even if they do, aggro-control is notoriously difficult to get good results with, in playtesting, because it is such a difficult archetype to play well enough to get the “proper” results with.

Soon, Zendikar will shove this deck into something new. Fully two-thirds of the spells in the deck are going bye-bye. M10 made Fish, in my opinion, and now it seems like we’ll be saying au revoir to them all too soon. I know I can’t really afford to travel out for the $5k, but if I were, I’d be playing Sulli Fish, fully confident I could take it down.

Best of luck, everyone.

Adrian Sullivan