There are men and women in this role of mine – writers, we’ll call them – who thrive on freedom. They sigh, staring out the window, wishing that the Big Mean Editor would just let them do their own thing. They have an opus, a novel, a magnificent article, and they just can’t wait for the opportunity to let it out… just as soon as they’re done with this tournament coverage.
I am not one of these writers.
Give me structure! Give me ideas! The more work you do, the more you tell me I have to do, the less of it I have to do! I can just insert a few scatological jokes, the odd swear word, insult you, then pester you on messenger programs to publish me. It makes things so much easier for me.
I work even better if there’s something you want me to do that I don’t want to do. You’d be surprised how many articles I produce as an assessment task or important appointment draw near. And if I’m on a timeline, the production goes up. I was like this in high school too. Two days before a major assessment task, you’d find my room so clean you’d wonder how I cleaned the window on both sides.
Okay, you wouldn’t, since I had a balcony. On the other hand, you’d wonder why the hell I was doing it, since I’m notoriously untidy.
We are entering now, a twilight of Standard. For the next month or two, the “normal” Standard environment is going to be sitting in stasis. Some people are tinkering with Coldsnap cards, hoping to break them, but for the rest of us, we’re generally sitting on our hands, in anticipation of that mystic thing that will be… Future Sight.
Then those of us who are strictly online will quietly whine that we have to wait an additional month. Oh, woe is us! Man, wasn’t I just, like, two weeks ago, whining about not having Planar Chaos?
There aren’t any major Constructed tournaments, either, so the normal blossom of innovation isn’t happening; nobody wants to engineer a Brand! New! Deck! From the components of the current Standard, only to see it melt like sugar in the rain as the new set arrives. There’s a strong temptation to claim that if any set is going to whizz on some bonfires, it’s Future Sight, but that’s giving in to the hype.
Future Sight is going to feature more mediocre, unimpressive, uninteresting cards than any other, if Fleshwrither is a benchmark. Remember Greater Mossdog? He existed just to show us that the Dredge mechanic existed. He didn’t do anything cute with it, and you were only glad of the fellow in Limited (because, hey, sometimes you could do worse than draw a Hill Giant this turn). Now imagine a set with fifty Mossdogs.
I can’t say I’m feeling that excited by the idea. It’s like they worked hard at making sure Fleshwrither wasn’t going to be good – after all, he can’t be sacrificed in response to anything, he’s an unimpressive creature himself. He might see some use and all that, but I don’t expect to be wowed by him outside of the casual room. Of course, that was my thought on the Dimir House Guard, too – and the House Guard is quite good. Ultimately, though, the House Guard wants you to invest three mana, then four – while the Writher wants you to invest four, then three – so ignoring that the curve’s bad, you actually have to resolve the spell before the ability – not an entirely annoying thing.
On the other hand, there are some real platinum hits in Future Sight. I’ve been actually checking out the spoiler this time around, but really surprised to see that West of Tolaria’s really interesting, and, well, okay, shows an area where Blue and Green overlap. Green can do it for cheaper (indeed, West of Tolaria might show a new direction – land-search moving into Blue, since by costs, it seems to be a fair bit better than Sylvan Scrying could hope to be). Unless, of course, they print a Land Creature with a converted mana cost, though lords, that’d be complicate to handle. Remind me of this later when they do it, to stop complaining – since if I understand things correctly, a Land Creature would in fact, never see the stack, and be uncounterable.
Regardless, Future Sight is, well, the Future. And the Now is nothing. Now is a lull – the time to produce little bits of would-be, perhaps-won’t, can’t-be articles. Mourn the Standard past, talk about decks that Woulda Just Been Awesome (Zac?), if just for some factors, or perhaps, sillier still, post decklists for this “dead format” as if they’ll break the metagame. Nobody really minds, anyway – we don’t, generally speaking, read Magic articles to get better as players, we read Magic articles because we like reading about Magic.
Everything in the world is composed of smaller things. Those smaller things are in turn, composed of smaller things. Just as Flores’s latest Amazing Idea is composed of five thousand iterations of “By the way, I, Mike Flores, am awesome,” or Tim Aten amalgam of ipod lists and “Cut Cut Cut Cut” somehow synthesizes itself together into “Best Article EVAR, Would read again, A++++.” Even now, the notes I scribble down to turn into an article Later, are themselves being done as part of thought exercise while I search for my shoes.
Make That Shoe
I don’t approach deckbuilding the way many of my fans do. I found this after talking with Simon. I simply rattled off cards and assumed “These are good for what you want.” The response: “I don’t have any of those.”
Well, I hit that wall, too. You know, getting Sacred Foundries is a lot of effort and money. A playset will set you back… well, if you buy boosters, you’re going to take a while. Hang on… when’s the last time I bought boosters for cards and not for Limited?
Huh.
Sitting back, I looked at the cards I have in my MTGO collection and realized that my simple goal of acquiring four of each common of a set for a bargain price – usually 3-4 tickets – was a good policy, but actually not very doable in real life. Real life players do not necessarily have draft tables to chase, don’t have bots that will spit out cards at a 32/1 rate. These are the players who buy a few boosters, crack them, and gleefully build a collection in the exact opposite way in which you eat a gobstopper.
One thing many of my fans seem to want is a step-by-step analysis. It’s like they want the second coming of Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar. I don’t disagree with the desire for that; I love Jay’s articles, and I am not above stealing somewhat judiciously as an author, from those people I enjoy reading. So here we go.
Oh, god, Chris Romeo doing this precon too?
Asfdsgjhfdg.
Ahem.
Step 1; Purchase And Peruse
Now, in the vein of Morgan Spurlock, there are going to be some rules here. Five games must be played before I can make any changes. My cardpool changes can’t be more than eight cards at a time (oh, that’s going to bug me), with five being the expected number. And most importantly, I can’t buy any single card that’s worth more than a ticket on its own to add to the deck. This includes cards from my actual collection.
Also, I reserve the right to reshuffle basic lands at any point without checking that rule. We don’t want to take forever on this, after all.
I purchased a Time Spiral Tournament Pack, three Planar Chaos boosters, and an Endless March preconstructed deck (I knew I wrote the name down somewhere). I made this purchase because it should leave me with a little over a hundred or so cards… a small card pool, but without turning into what amounts to a Sealed deck. In an attempt to get a reasonably random pool of cards to used, I figured I’d use a precon to start with. Since I want Harmonizes and a Teneb, I figured I’d invest in the Green-Black-White precon, the precon so distinctive that I didn’t bother even remembering the name. Seriously, I don’t share the typical man-love-in that other writers seem to have for precons. I dunno why, but I think I just got distressed about the point I realized I was paying eleven dollars for three dollars of cards. Still – I wanted structure, and I figured this precon would give me the basic bits and pieces – and most importantly, a reasonably good three-color manabase.
So, the cardpool:
Creatures (56)
- 1 Mystic Snake
- 1 Aetherflame Wall
- 1 Amrou Scout
- 1 Celestial Crusader
- 1 Chronosavant
- 1 Clockwork Hydra
- 1 Cloudchaser Kestrel
- 1 Dementia Sliver
- 1 Drudge Reavers
- 1 Durkwood Baloth
- 1 Durkwood Tracker
- 1 Fathom Seer
- 1 Foriysian Interceptor
- 1 Greater Gargadon
- 1 Jedit's Dragoons
- 1 Keldon Halberdier
- 1 Magus of the Mirror
- 1 Mana Skimmer
- 1 Sidewinder Sliver
- 1 Thallid Shell-Dweller
- 2 Two-Headed Sliver
- 1 Urborg Syphon-Mage
- 1 Viscid Lemures
- 1 Zealot il-Vec
- 1 Aether Membrane
- 1 Aven Riftwatcher
- 1 Battering Sliver
- 1 Blightspeaker
- 2 Deadly Grub
- 1 Fa'adiyah Seer
- 1 Hedge Troll
- 1 Kavu Predator
- 1 Magus of the Tabernacle
- 2 Merfolk Thaumaturgist
- 1 Mire Boa
- 1 Muck Drubb
- 1 Mycologist
- 1 Prodigal Pyromancer
- 1 Rathi Trapper
- 1 Revered Dead
- 1 Shade of Trokair
- 2 Shaper Parasite
- 1 Simian Spirit Guide
- 1 Spitting Sliver
- 1 Stingscourger
- 1 Teneb, the Harvester
- 1 Tidewalker
- 1 Uktabi Drake
- 2 Veiling Oddity
- 1 Vitaspore Thallid
- 1 Whitemane Lion
Lands (2)
Spells (31)
- 1 Coalition Victory
- 1
- 1 Aether Web
- 1 Careful Consideration
- 1 Chronatog Totem
- 1 Clockspinning
- 1 Detainment Spell
- 1 Griffin Guide
- 1 Ignite Memories
- 1 Lightning Axe
- 1 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
- 1 Orcish Cannonade
- 1 Premature Burial
- 1 Prismatic Lens
- 1 Psychotic Episode
- 1 Snapback
- 1 Sprout
- 1 Strength in Numbers
- 1 Dust Corona
- 1 Evolution Charm
- 1 Imp's Mischief
- 1 Kor Dirge
- 1 Mana Tithe
- 1 Midnight Charm
- 1 Reality Acid
- 1 Saltblast
- 1 Serra's Boon
- 1 Shivan Meteor
- 1 Sunlance
- 2 Utopia Vow
Yeah, this is much, much longer on my screen than I imagine it is on yours. Still, it’s a honking huge wall of text and we should all put a pause in place to spare a thought for poor Craig, who probably has to feed it into some kind of annoying macro, like kittens into a woodchipper. Because, you know, sometimes you don’t have any better options for kitten disposal.
Step 1: Preliminary Build
I was hoping something like this wouldn’t happen. I was hoping that I wouldn’t be pulled towards Teneb, but there you go – I wind up and get a second one. As a crowning achievement for a deck, Teneb puts forward a good case, since you don’t need too many of him, and he can be a strategy unto himself. However, he is something that’s kind of expected; but I didn’t get a better option, so it seems my fat 6/6 flier – of which I have now got two – is my lot for this precon. Le sigh.
Going with these colors, I was very able to simply strip away the other two colors – bye Red! Bye Blue! That obviously hoiked out Coalition Victory, along with Mystic Snake. Two of my Planeshifted cards, which was a bit of a shame, but Mystic Snake is his finest when he can thrive in multiples. Only one Mystic Snake is a scooch lame as a centerpiece for a deck, and he does require a fairly stable manabase.
There simply weren’t enough playables in each color of Green, White, and Black to make a deck that essentially splashed for Teneb. But I was able to make a good start at it – trimming down colors to the essentials. Fortunately, there are a lot of decent cards in here, cards that just fall a little shy of what most consider the standard. The main problem is going to be one of populace – I might find myself easily frustrated with the thin numbers of some of the cards when I really want them.
10 Forest
4 Plains
5 Swamp
1 Saltcrusted Steppe
2 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Sengir Autocrat
1 Spike Feeder
1 Twisted Abomination
1 Wall of Roots
2 Essence Warden
2 Greenseeker
1 Hedge Troll
1 Jedit Ojanen of Efrava
1 Kavu Predator
1 Mire Boa
1 Mycologist
1 Rathi Trapper
1 Revered Dead
2 Teneb, the Harvester
1 Thallid Shell-Dweller
3 Dread Return
4 Evolution Charm
1 Griffin Guide
2 Harmonize
1 Imp’s Mischief
1 Kor Dirge
1 Mana Tithe
1 Midnight Charm
1 Prismatic Lens
2 Rebuff the Wicked
2 Search for Tomorrow
1 Sunlance
I’m not so hopeful about it, but I did make some clear decisions. Right now, the deck wants to hide behind a fatty that’s winning the game for you. It has plenty of ways to recover those fatties if they die – Dread Return and a full compliment of Evolution Charms, plus, well, Teneb, and you have a decent assortment. Something else you might notice is that the deck is quite thick on regeneration and creatures that really exist to block. My current fear is a combination of mana flood (with something like 28 virtual sources), and the stiff color requirements. Hedge troll regenerates, but he can’t when you need GG for a turn 4 Harmonize, or BB for a turn 4 Dread Return. White is the color being squeezed here, and I’m not sure it should be.
We’ll see what we learn.
Step 3: Testing the Pile
Shuffle up and go, in the casual room. It’s late, I’m playing fast, and I took the deck for a few solitaire runs to see if I had the manabase right. I think I do – or at least, as right as it can be, right now. I’m too lazy to get too mathematical about it at the moment.
Test Game the first:
Opponent played two Remands, and Compulsive Research to pitch two Firemane Angels. Unsurprisingly, I was eaten alive, eventually wiped out by a twofold returning Bogardan Hellkite and a Blaze To The Face. I couldn’t do much of anything to him; I couldn’t force damage through, even with Teneb. No way to actually affect my opponent – something I found myself hurting for. Slow and steadily, he just built up mana, then killed me with it, as control is wont to do.
Mire Boa did what it could – but it couldn’t do it fast enough. Ultimately, I shouldn’t be too phased by this. Angelfire is a deck designed to chew on aggro, and he did it well.
Test Game the second:
He plays a turn 3 Thelon, but I get out of the gates with a Suspended Search followed by a Evolution Charm followed by Harmonize. Then a morph! Wow, I wonder if that’s a Thelonite Hermit? The ground gets gammed up, and Kor Chant kills a Hermit, but he plays another. I die, drawing far too many lands, and he does me in with a Coat of Arms based Saproling alpha strike.
This was pretty cool, actually – I just wish my opponent had been a little more smooth in his play. I liked his deck, I just wish it had been handled a bit differently. But hey, Aaron Forsythe loves Thallids, and supposedly, so should you.
Game 3!
Test Game the third:
The early turns are defined by nothing; his Stinkweed imp holds off my Kavu Predator. I recruit a Greenseeker and hard-cast Search for Tomorrow get my Teneb colors online, just in time for me to draw Jedit, and play him. Nice times. I’m already noting the efforts you have to go through to support Harmonize or Dread Return draws. My opponent strands on four lands, and seemingly has more expensive stuff in hand. On the other hand, I have a 5/5 Forestwalker, who spits out 2/2 Forestwalkers –
– Hey, what?
Check it out! The tokens Jedit makes are 2/1s. They’re 2/2s because of some metaphysical alteration, but their unmodified power/toughness is 2/1. How weird. Is it beyond the programmers to actually make a 2/2 cat token? What the hell? There has to be some serious cruft in that code….
Anyway. Jedit takes the game more or less on his own. I don’t like that he costs so much and is at his finest against Green, but much as Karstenbot could maindeck Cryoclasms and rely on hitting something in every decklist, Jedit seems to be just fine in most situations. Worst case scenario, he’s a 5/5 who blocks someone, gets removal-spelled, and leaves you with a 2/2. Not an entirely awful deal, I suppose, though it doesn’t feel very exciting.
Hmm. He does combo well with Yavimaya Dryad, though. Something I will think on more.
Oh, hey, I won a game!
Test Game the fourth
Opponent leads with Scorched Rusalka, Tin Street Hooligan (which I taxed into the yard with met Mana Tithe), and Burning-Tree Shaman. Hrn. A mana flood on my part lets me spit up a Teneb, and to my glee, he accidentally forgets to attack one turn. I hold the ground by recurring a Mycologist, then drop a Hedge Troll in an attempt to slow the bleeding. Teneb gets through – happily – and my opponent seems to be at a bit of a loss. I fear he’s holding a grip of bloodthirsters, perhaps?
Teneb goes the distance on his own. A Rumbling Slum and Giant Solifuge don’t save him, as my reanimated army – both mine and his – can just stall the ground forever. Hedge Troll, Mire Boa, Mycologist – Thallid Shell-Dweller… I imagine it’s very tricky for him to bust on through. He eventually manaburns himself to death, on one life, rather than make me go through the motions. That’s two wins.
Game 5!
Here we go! Last one before we start making some changes here!
Test Game the fifth
Opponent leads with a Mogg War Marshal, but I meet it with a Mire Boa. I then slap a Griffin Guide on it and hit twice. My opponent does the disrespectful thing that is killing the Griffin Guide, but hey, you can only do so much with the cards you get. The ground stalls as I wait to see if I can find a flier or a Forestwalker.
My opponent makes a Sporesower Thallid, and I die, under an onslaught of an Undying Rage and a Vulshok Morningstar. Such is life sometimes.
2-3
That’s better than I expected, actually. My initial assessment was that my unfocused pile would be left unable to make any clear decision on where it was going, so I’d wind up losing when I Don’t Draw My Dragon. On the other hand, Teneb showed up in basically every game, even if in one of them he showed up way too late to make his presence felt. He’s a big, burly fellow, and I’m not too ashamed of using him as my basic win condition. Prior to his showing up, the deck wants ways to stall the game. Well, my options in that regard are pretty expansive. So let’s look at the deck and see where I’m going to make my changes…
Step 4: Be Glum and Make Changes
Now, this is a point of direction. Right now, I’m considering two major directions to go in. The first is to go green-black and splash white for Teneb, which is probably the simplest option, and will probably resemble my Dredge decks by the end of it, at least in mana base. I know from experience that Terramorphic Expanse can back up Life From the Loam and support a four-color manabase on just basics. Green/Black also has a bunch of cards you can use again if you play along at home.
I’ve done that a fair bit, though. I think, between Mycologist and Thallid Shell-Dweller, and omg omg omg omg omg Hedge Troll, that I’d actually rather explore Green/White, and splash the Black for Teneb. With that in mind, the most logical things to cut are some Black cards, so let’s see what we do…
-1 Imp’s Mischief
-1 Midnight Charm
-1 Rathi Trapper
-1 Sengir Autocrat
Easy cuts to make – the only one of the potential chopping block cards that intrigues me is the Kor Dirge, which is a pretty solid trick, but in Green/White I’m not going to be hurting for that kind of option. The Sengir Autocrat has synergy with Dread Return, but right now, I don’t need Dread Return for my strategies – I haven’t cast it yet. I’m going to hang onto it for a while to see if it still works out, but I can’t promise anything, since I’m already eyeballing replacements for that. But for now…
This choice is to emphasize the usefulness of Mycologist, who I found a pretty interesting card – the potential to gain 4-8 life at a time with the chumpblock on the stack was pretty cute. I might even go with other Thallids if I go into Green/White heavily.
So the list, at this point:
Creatures (20)
- 1 Spike Feeder
- 1 Twisted Abomination
- 1 Wall of Roots
- 4 Selesnya Guildmage
- 2 Greenseeker
- 1 Thallid Shell-Dweller
- 2 Essence Warden
- 1 Hedge Troll
- 1 Jedit Ojanen of Efrava
- 1 Kavu Predator
- 1 Mire Boa
- 1 Mycologist
- 1 Revered Dead
- 2 Teneb, the Harvester
Lands (22)
Spells (18)
Tune in next time for more of the same. This should have a benefit of keeping me from getting all pissed-up about whatever the Developer of the Week says that annoys me, too, huh?
Hugs and Kisses
Talen Lee
talen at dodo dot com dot au