There are an awful lot of articles out there that deal with Constructed decklists. They explain what a deck does, why certain card choices were made, and how to sideboard against the top decks.
If I were to write such an article about a Psychatog deck right now, no one would care. Extended season is over!
But this is a different kind of Constructed article. This is the story of a decklist: how my team started with one Psychatog list at the beginning of the season, tuned and updated it as the season progressed (resulting in fully one-third of the people who played it Top 8’ing at their respective PTQs), and what we learned about innovation and deckbuilding strategy along the way.
Our tale began in Little Rock, AR. It was the beginning of a fresh, new, Extended season, and nobody knew what was good yet. Troy was playing Boros Deck Wins, Zac was playing MadTog, and JP and I were playing Antoine Ruel U/B Psychatog deck pretty much card-for-card.
Creatures (5)
Lands (23)
Spells (32)
I chose to play this deck after watching JP pilot it in our test games, because, well, it seemed to beat pretty much everything. As per Making a Battle Plan, I had resolved to open this season with whichever deck I thought was the strongest, rather than trying to metagame against an undefined environment. My Battle Plan worked a bit too well, as I won the first PTQ of the season. Needless to say, this turned Troy and JP on to the deck, and they both resolved to play it at the following PTQ.
Right about now, I should stop and mention what the metagame looked like at this point in the season.
For the week of November 6-12, I predicted the top five most popular decks in the Midwest area would be the following, starting with the most popular first.
Dredgeatog
Boros Deck Wins
Affinity
MadTog
U/B Tog
Having no statistics to work from, I based this list on the impression I got from talking to various people about what they’d seen being played in tournaments and at their respective shops. It wasn’t the most scientific approach ever, but you’ve got to have some idea what decks are being played, and in what proportion, if you’re going to know how to tweak your deck.
Going down the matchup list, here’s how U/B Tog stacked up.
Dredgeatog: U/B Tog beat Dredgeatog as long as it applied pressure quickly and did not give the Life from the Loam engine time to get going. On the turn a Dredgeatog player cast Gifts Ungiven for his draw engine, he got a negligible +1 card advantage from putting two cards into his hand; U/B’s Fact or Fictions, on the other hand, dumped an arsenal of weaponry directly into the pilot’s grip. That was the main advantage the U/B deck had going for it; at the time, that was enough to make the difference.
Boros Deck Wins: U/B Tog beat the hell out of Boros. That was why Tsuyoshi Fujita actually boarded out lands against Antoine Ruel in the Top 8 of the Pro Tour, hoping that in doing so, he might mise enough gas to win.
Affinity: U/B Tog had a poor matchup against Affinity. This was duly noted, but not fretted about; you can’t win ’em all.
MadTog: U/B Tog beat MadTog, provided they didn’t draw The Nuts in two out of three games.
U/B Tog: U/B Tog went 50-50 against the mirror, give or take a player’s competence at playing blue-based control mirrors.
This was pretty much exactly the type of deck I like to take to PTQs: favorable matchup against the top two decks, an acceptably poor matchup against the third-most-popular deck, and 50-50 or better against the Number Four and Number Five decks.
Having chosen their weapon for the next tournament, Troy and JP sat down with me to start making modifications based on our collective experiences with the deck, to transition it from Pro Tour deck to PTQ deck.
Aside: Decks from the Tour
A lot of players seem to miss out on the fact that decks that have come from the Pro Tour were tuned to do well at the Pro Tour. That’s not the same as decks being tuned to do well at the PTQs. Consider the field Ruel beat, for example. There were lots of Balancing Tings decks floating around, a good deal more Rock than the marginal smattering of loyalists that you’ll find at PTQs, Domain, and probably some Madness as well. None of these decks were even remotely as well-represented at the PTQs that followed as they were at the Pro Tour itself. Why? Because none of them made Top 8, so nobody netdecked them.
Really, at the outset of a PTQ season, you should be looking at how a Top 8 deck fares against the other decks in the Top 8. After all, those decks are what people are going to be playing in the PTQs.
Most importantly, don’t leave your sideboard alone. Just because it was right for Ruel to run 2 Darkblast and 1 Skeletal Scrying at the Pro Tour, doesn’t mean it’s right for you to do the same at the very different environment of the PTQ. Look at his Duresses and Ghastly Demises; did he play those because they were the best answers to the top decks (that is, the other ones in the Top 8), or because they were more versatile answers to the wide-open Day One and Day Two fields he had to slog through to reach the single elimination part.
End Aside.
In any case, before making any changes to a deck you’ve taken from a tournament at which it performed well, you should first take a look at what makes the deck tick. It’s critical that your changes do not mess up any core elements that are necessary for the deck to function; much like tinkering around with your car or your computer, you have to make sure you’re not removing anything important like the engine or the processor when you’re making room for your modifications.
Luckily for us, most controllish Psychatog decks have the same fundamental structure: counter things, remove whatever obstacles to victory slip through the counter wall, and connect with a lethal Psychatog for the win.
So why play it like Ruel did? Why not play Cunning Wish, or Life from the Loam, or Upheaval? The PT Champ himself had the following to say about these fancier – or perhaps just less minimalist – approaches to the archetype.
“You say it ‘bouiboui’ in French – you draw, you are doing all these beautiful things, it’s cool, it’s funny but it is not efficient. With my deck I am just drawing, countering, and killing my opponent. It is more than enough.”
In a nutshell, you don’t need the extra trimmings to win with the deck as Ruel constructed it. Cards like Life from the Loam, Cunning Wish, and Upheaval are just slower versions of what his deck already accomplishes using Fact or Fiction, Boomerang, and Wonder. That’s what makes his deck tick. Just drawing, countering, and killing the opponent. It’s important that, having now determined what makes the deck tick, you don’t change any of the core elements unless you are absolutely sure it is safe to do so. That means don’t cut half of his draw magic just to fit in a card you like; those draw spells were important! And don’t cut things like Boomerang or Wonder unless you’re sure you can get away with it; those are important for killing the opponent when Pithing Needles and chump blockers stand in the way of your Tog.
Anyway, on to the deck. First up on our tweaking list is the land-to-spells ratio.
At Pro Tour: Los Angeles, Antoine Ruel played 23 lands and six one-mana cantrips.
7 Island
4 Polluted Delta
3 Watery Grave
1 Swamp
2 Cephalid Coliseum
2 Stalking Stones
2 Seat of the Synod
1 Vault of Whispers
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
4 Mental Note
2 Opt
According to the Alan Comer Rule of Cantrips (or whatever it’s called), every two early-game cantrips you play counts as roughly one land, because roughly every other one you cast will put a land into your hand instead of a spell. That’s important to remember; cutting Opt for, say, Smother, is a change that affects not only the deck’s card-drawing package, but its mana base as well. So although Ruel technically played only 23 land, a low count indeed for a Blue control deck, he really played something closer to 26 because of the cantrips.
Having a pre-balanced mana base is one of the niceties that comes with having a successful deck as a starting point; Ruel has already done this work for us, so as long as we don’t mess with his already-tuned mana ratios, we won’t have to worry ourselves too much with manascrew. (That is, when we do get mana screwed, we can feel fairly secure that it was just “one of those draws,” and not because the deck’s mana base needs an overhaul.)
So we want to keep that the same: 23 lands and 6 one-mana cantrips. But can we change which lands and one-mana cantrips we want to play? Sure we can. As it so happens, JP and I played Peek instead of Opt at the Arkansas PTQ due to card availability, and found the extra information supplied by Peek vastly superior to the marginal card selection provided by Opt. Even having the option of playing either card, Troy and JP both chose to run Peek at the next PTQ.
Subbing in Peek for Opt was, actually, the first change we made to the deck. It wasn’t on purpose, it wasn’t premeditated…but it was better. If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this article, it is this:
If It Works, Play It.
Remember that. If the tech sounds totally random, and you try it out, and it sucks, then it’s not random – it’s bad. But if it sounds totally random, and you try it out, and it’s good, then play the thing. Don’t let yourself be bothered by how janky it sounds, or by the fact that you discovered it by kicking over a pile of cards and having it land on your shoe, or by the irritated looks people give you when you wreck them with it. If it works, play it.
So Troy and JP ran Peek. Looking over the lands, there wasn’t really anything else we were dissatisfied with except for the lone Vault of Whispers, which we grudgingly agreed was necessary to help out Thirst for Knowledge. Drawing non-Blue producers was a huge pain, and we only tolerated the lone Swamp because it was important in some matchups to get a Black source untapped from Polluted Delta without taking damage from a Watery Grave.
The two Coliseums and two Stalking Stones were extremely relevant in testing, and their downsides were rarely an issue. The Mental Notes were also fine, since they added Tog damage, brought Circular Logics and Coliseums online faster, and sometimes flipped over a Wonder or a Deep Analysis. Oboro’s “downside” was negligible, and it had the pleasant upside of giving you more available on-table mana production without sacrificing Tog damage; when the time came to “go lethal,” you just bounced Oboro and pitched it to the Tog as if you had held it in your hand all along.
Next up was the card advantage suite:
3 Fact or Fiction
2 Thirst for Knowledge
1 Deep Analysis
1 Gifts Ungiven
This was the first part of the deck we found ourselves genuinely unhappy about after having tested and played the deck at a real tournament. Neither JP nor I had been pleased with Thirst for Knowledge, since, with only three artifacts in the deck, it usually proved to be an expensive one-for-one. In fact, one of JP’s early pearls of wisdom for the U/B Tog mirror was, “Let Thirst for Knowledge resolve. It’s not worth fighting over.”
In short, we loved Fact or Fiction and hated TFK. We were also never happy about drawing Deep Analysis, which was really only strong against heavy-discard decks like The Rock, a deck that had fallen off the radar since the PT. We ultimately decided to make the following adjustments for our expected Psychatog-heavy field:
+1 Fact or Fiction
+1 Smother
+1 Peek
-2 Thirst for Knowledge
-1 Deep Analysis
All three cards we added were cards we’d rather see in our hands at any given moment than TFK or Deep Analysis against the expected top five decks of Dredegatog, Boros Deck Wins, Affinity, and MadTog. The Peek gave us an extra half-a-land-drop and some excellent reconnaissance in the mirror match, the Smother took out everything from Psychatog to Arcbound Ravager to Savannah Lions, and the Fact or Fiction was the one card advantage generator we were always happy to see in our hand.
This was the first point at which we “messed with Ruel’s engine.” We cut three card advantage generators and replaced them with one card advantage generator, one removal spell, and one cantrip. It’s important to note that this was a conscious decision; having had a good deal of experience with the deck, we felt that there were too many expensive card drawers (TFK and Deep Analysis) overall, yet not enough Fact or Fictions – we always wanted to see a Fact in hand, and were rarely unhappy to see two – so we adjusted the ratios accordingly.
That brought us to the countermagic suite:
4 Force Spike
4 Circular Logic
4 Counterspell
2 Mana Leak
Truth be told, we were all very satisfied with this package. The Force Spikes were amazing for punishing a low curve, the Logics were almost always hard counters, and the two Mana Leaks made sure we never drew too many once they became easy to play around. We went with “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and played it exactly as Ruel had at the Pro Tour.
Next we came to the removal package.
We toyed with the idea of playing Echoing Truth instead of Boomerang, but couldn’t come up with any realistic situations in which the Truths would be better. Besides, we wanted to be able to Boomerang our opponents’ Togs out of the way when ours needed to attack for the win, rather than sending them both back to our respective hands. We did add a third Smother to this group, but not because we felt the deck was lacking in removal. Really, it was because we didn’t want to play Deep Analysis anymore, and were almost always happy to see a Smother in our hands in this environment.
That left the win condition group:
We’d have played five if the DCI would let us. Alas, four was the limit. The two Stalking Stones and Wonder provided contingency plans in case of bizarre circumstances that precluded a Psychatog-based victory, so we were fine with having only four Togs as the mainstay of our offense.
Finally, there was the sideboard.
4 Duress
3 Ghastly Demise
2 Razormane Masticore
2 Darkblast
1 Smother
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
1 Skeletal Scrying
1 Stalking Stones
We were happy with all of these except for the two Razormane Masticores, the two Darkblasts, and the lone Skeletal Scrying.
Frankly, we couldn’t figure out what matchup the Masticores were for. I suggested that they might be good against Affinity, but Troy and JP decided if they wanted the Affinity matchup to improve, they’d prefer a fourth Ghastly Demise to the pair of upkeep-heavy 5/5s. Then there were the Darkblasts. None of us liked those. They were only good against Boros, which was…oh right, our best matchup. Devoting sideboard slots to increasing a 75% matchup to 80% seemed efficient to none of us, so we cut them and made plans to find a replacement later on. Last to go was the lone Skeletal Scrying, which we all confessed we had never boarded in, and were not sure what it was supposed to do. (An efficient counter to Haunting Echoes? An extra way to pump a midgame Tog into the lethal range? We may never know.)
This left us with four sideboard slots. JP wanted a second Meloku as a redundant threat for the mirror (which also trumped opposing Togs), and Troy and JP tested (and then fell in love with) the humble Jushi Apprentice to fill the last three slots. That finished things up nicely. Our final changes were the following.
+3 SB: Jushi Apprentice
+1 SB: Meloku the Clouded Mirror
+1 SB: Ghastly Demise
-2 SB: Razormane Masticore
-2 SB: Darkblast
-1 SB: Skeletal Scrying
The PTQ was in Chicago, so the night before the tournament found us over at Pastimes looking to pick up some of the cards we had added to the list but did not yet own. Everything worked out except for the Fact or Fictions; the only ones they had left were of the foil persuasion, and they cost approximately one hundred thousand dollars apiece.
We retreated to the hotel room, where Troy and Dustin (another St. Louis player who made the trip with us, but who was not running U/B Tog) continued to playtest while JP sifted through our box of “good stuff,” searching for a replacement for the Fact or Fictions. After awhile, he turned to me and said, “Okay, I’ve decided to run either Vedalken Shackles or Hypnotic Specter. Which do you like better?”
“Shackles,” I said, laughing. “Definitely.” After all, those things were sweet back in Mirrodin-8th-Kamigawa Standard, right?
When neither of them could find any Fact or Fictions on the day of the tournament, both Troy and JP registered a singleton copy of Shackles for the PTQ. They were actually quite excited about the change, and hoped to blow out unsuspecting opponents each time the one copy showed up.
The end of the day saw Troy lose in the Top 8 and JP falling out of contention due to a ludicrous series of punts (“The worst Magic I’ve ever played in my life”).
I don’t have an exact list of the matchups they played, but I do recall Troy playing against five (!) Dredgeatog decks on the way to his Top 8 berth, and that he defeated four of them. I don’t remember what caused his loss to the sixth (!!) Dredgeatog deck he played against in the Top 8, but I do recall that he was extremely angry about it and felt he had been “robbed” by a topdecked one-of that was his opponent’s only possible path to victory. Still, 4-2 against the format’s most popular archetype vindicated our choice of deck.
Both Troy and JP had one thing to say to me by the end of the tournament, and they said it loudly, with huge grins on their faces, several times.
“Shackles was insane.”
Every time they drew it, it blew somebody out. Especially in the Tog mirror. Though it didn’t look it on paper, the card turned out to be the most dangerous three-mana trump imaginable against a Psychatog deck.
You: “Play Vedalken Shackles.”
Opponent: “Sure. I’ll play a Psychatog.”
You: “Okay, end step I’ll take it.”
Opponent: “Yeah, right. What’s that you’ve got, five Islands? I’ll pump my tog +5/+5. Thanks, B.”
You: “Okay, my turn. I’ll untap my Shackles and attempt to take your Tog again.”
Opponent: “Right, like that’s happening. How ’bout another +5/+5 for your troubles? Nice card.”
You: “Okay, your turn.”
Opponent: “No blockers, huh? I’ll attack for the win, sucker.”
You: “For the win? You have two cards left in your graveyard.”
Opponent: “Uh oh…”
As further testing quickly revealed, you really couldn’t lose the Tog mirror when you had a Shackles in play. They even trumped Dredgeatog’s Llawan, Cephalid Empress technology by turning the dangerous Legend around and shutting off her master’s Blue-creature-playing capabilities instead. Let’s not even get into how good they were against aggressive decks like Affinity, Boros, and MadTog.
Troy and JP wanted a full three Shackles for the next PTQ, but now we were in a pickle. Recall that our intended list for Chicago played zero Shackles and the full four Fact or Fictions; when starting from that list, we still had three cuts to make in order to make room for the incoming Shackles.
The easy cut was the third Peek we had squeezed in over a Thirst for Knowledge earlier. We had only played that because it helped out in the mirror match by smoothing out early-game land drops and providing key information about the opponent’s hand, but Shackles was infinitely better in the mirror match in that it prohibited the opponent from winning the game. It was better than Peek against the aggro decks in the format as well, so that left us with two more cuts. After much deliberation, we settled the following changes.
-1 Peek
-1 Gifts Ungiven
-1 Wonder
+2 Vedalken Shackles
+1 Fact or Fiction
Taking out Wonder and Gifts Ungiven was the second core change we made to the deck, and it was not made without some discussion. Ultimately, we realized that what Wonder did for the deck (and the Gifts Ungiven that came with it; without Deep Analysis in the deck, Gifts’s only remaining purpose was to fetch Wonder and add some Tog damage), Shackles did a better job of. We discussed the situations in which it was useful to have a flying ‘Tog, and realized that it was almost always when the opponent had 1-3 creatures on the table, and we wanted to attack past the chump blockers without having to eat a lethal counterattack.
Shackles solved that situation just fine; when the opponent had exactly one blocker, we could just steal it and swing for the win. Even when he had as many as three, we could steal one, attack with the Tog, let him chump block to go down to one remaining dude, and then dare him to counterattack his last guy into the blocker we had just stolen on the previous turn.
It was around this time that Zac Hill, expert breakdancer, all-around ladies’ man, and Star City’s newest Featured Writer, suggested that Cremate might be a consideration for our one-mana cantrip slot to help fight Genesis from Dredgeatog. However, we were happy enough with that matchup now that we were bringing three completely unfair Shackles to that fight, and declined to make the change.
At the next PTQ, Troy and JP got paired against each other in round 1. Strong! They then proceeded to crush faces (including at least one Affinity player that had his Myr Enforcers stolen by a certain Vedalken gentleman) until they each needed exactly one more win to make Top 8. They then immediately both lost to the new Aggro Rock deck featuring maindeck Withered Wretches that had just begun to rise in popularity.
Ouch. That loss stung, but at least we were confident that the Shackles were maindeck-worthy. Zac suggested Dark Confidant over Jushi Apprentice in the side, and we adopted them after a few playtest games validated their superiority.
The next PTQ was in our home town of St. Louis. Troy made Top Four, losing in three games to a Scepter-Chant player who was better at resolving and unmorphing Exalted Angels than Troy was at drawing Shackles or Boomerangs, even after drawing half his deck with Bob. Bummer.
A week or so later, I learned that Tim Galbiati would be captaining the Chiefalier (his Chevy Cavalier, which contains a… small amount of decorations devoted to the Kansas City Chiefs) from St. Louis to Charlotte for the Grand Prix. Having personally played zero Extended games myself since Little Rock at the beginning of the season, I had to find a deck in a hurry.
The metagame at this point was vastly different from what it had been at the season’s outset. CAL had punched its way into the limelight thanks to Olivier Ruel, Astral Slide was gaining in popularity, and Aggro Rock now gripped a decent-sized slice of the metagame pie. Tog mirrors were way down, Boros was on the decline, and Affinity was still somewhere around 3rd and 5th place in the popularity rankings.
I considered switching decks, but the odds that I would be able to pick up one of the new decks and learn how to pilot it during the one week of preparation I had (which was already cramped by the final exams I had coming up right after the tournament) were not good. I settled on playing ShackleTog, and set about revising the deck for the expected GP metagame. The predictions?
Ichorid
CAL
Astral Slide
Aggro Rock
Affinity
With that in mind, I went through and took a second look at every aspect of the deck.
A week before the Grand Prix, we were still at 23 lands and 6 one-mana cantrips, just like Ruel had been at the Pro Tour.
10 Island
4 Polluted Delta
4 Watery Grave
1 Swamp
2 Cephalid Coliseum
2 Stalking Stones
4 Mental Note
2 Opt
This was the first place where I decided it was time for some revisions. I still liked the counts of 23 land and 6 cantrips, but now that Wonder and Deep Analysis were gone, Mental Note’s quality had become dubious. Now the +2 cards in the graveyard served only the following purposes:
- One point of damage to the opponent’s dome via Psychatog pump.
- Circular Logic and Cephalid Coliseum come online a little earlier.
- When you run out an early Tog against Boros, it’s harder for them to burn it out.
Compare these marginal upsides to those of, say, Zac Hill Cremate technology from earlier in the season:
- Counter the relevant half of Eternal Witness for 1 mana, then draw a card.
- RFG a Life from the Loam belonging to an unsuspecting or careless CAL, Slide, or Dredgeatog player
- RFG a Genesis or Ichorid.
Seems better, no?
I questioned the ability of the deck to get early Black mana, so when I gave my hastily-updated list to a friend to play in a Chicago PTQ, I recommended 3 Peeks and 3 Cremates.
As for the land base, I was wary about the Stalking Stones. Too many bad things could happen when tapping out on the opponent’s end step to activate them in the new environment: Slide could resolve a Boil, Dredegatog could resolve a Gifts Ungiven, Scepter-Chant could resolve a Cunning Wish for Urza’s Rage…there were a lot of risks that made this already-narrow card even more narrow.
I cut one at first, but left the last one in as a last-resort win condition in case a Tog-based victory became out of the question for some reason. As a nod to the early-game black requirements of Cremate, I swapped out a pair of Islands for a Bloodstained Mire and a Flooded Strand in order to up my effective Swamp and Watery Grave counts.
Now it was time to revisit the card advantage package:
4 Fact or Fiction
3 Vedalken Shackles
I wasn’t sure whether to classify the Shackles as “card advantage” or “win condition,” but I was damn sure that “removal” didn’t do them justice. This package had been working well all season, and after considering and dismissing several other options, I decided it was fine the way it was.
Again, Ruel’s original countermagic suite…
4 Force Spike
4 Circular Logic
4 Counterspell
2 Mana Leak
…gave us no cause for complaint. It held up through the third round of changes as well.
Next up was the removal group:
Here I dropped a Smother in order to free up a maindeck slot, because there were far fewer mirror matches floating around at this point, and I really wanted to have a maindeck Meloku for the Aggro Rock and Slide matchups. Nothing dominated the board like the Clouded Mirror of Victory against Aggro Rock, and Tog was not the most reliable path to victory when an Astral Slide or two had reached to the table. (And while Meloku was fine in game one against Slide, he was less efficient in game two when his five-mana casting cost became an issue due to Boil.)
Finally, the sideboard:
4 Ghastly Demise
4 Duress
3 Dark Confidant
2 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
1 Stalking Stones
1 Smother
This required a complete overhaul. Because of the aforementioned decrease in Tog mirrors, I decided a second Smother could go for some Annuls. Besides being efficient counters against CAL, Slide, and Scepter-Chant, they would allow me to set up situations in which I tapped down for a Meloku or a turn-three Confidant and represented only one mana for countermagic, thereby walking my opponent into an Annul when he thought the coast was clear for everything but Force Spike.
I also decided to make some trimmings in order to accommodate three copies of Stabilizer, a potent hoser against the newly-popular CAL and Slide decks. To make room, I removed both Melokus (well, one was really relocated to the maindeck) and a Confidant.
I gave the final list to Aaron “Darth” Hauptmann to test out at a Chicago PTQ. You can see the final list, with all the changes included, here.
Darth confirmed that this new version of deck was strong, and had two comments. First, the early-game Black mana was not a problem; we could safely run 4 Cremate and 2 Peek at the Grand Prix. Second, those silly Stalking Stones were now completely unnecessary. The last copy could go.
Removing the final Stalking Stones reminded me that we had cut Oboro a long time ago in order to keep our Island count high. Now that we had removed the two non-Island (and non-colorless mana producing) Stalking Stones, I realized that Oboro was prime for a comeback. At the same time, I also came up with the addition of Petrified Field, which worked essentially like a second Oboro in that it let you “return it to your hand” when you were ready to attack for the win. (Just like Oboro, after having activated Petrified Field, you have the same number of cards in your graveyard, one more card in hand, and one fewer in play.) The Field also had the additional upside of a pleasant interaction with Cephalid Coliseum whenever they both showed up in the same game.
The presence of Ichorid, the new kid on the block, convinced me to cut a maindeck Shackles for a Haunting Echoes (and to board a second Echoes), and to finally make the switch from Boomerang to Echoing Truth. With Haunting Echoes having more game than a third Shackles against CAL and Slide anyway (and a comparable amount against Dredgeatog), and Echoing Truth being markedly better than Boomerang against everything but the now-scarce mirror match, these were easy changes to justify.
It was interesting to see how frequently the one-of maindeck Meloku and Haunting Echoes came up in testing. The six cantrips and four Fact or Fictions certainly contributed to this; it was never surprising to see one of those game-enders show up in the early part of the late game, even against the hyper-aggressive Ichorid deck.
As for the sideboard? After discussing it at length with JP, we agreed that the broad answers (I’m supposed to say “agnostic” here like the cool kids, right? I guess I never was one of the cool kids) of Duress and Ghastly Demise would be better served as bullets for the expected hot decks at the Grand Prix. We ended up with the following.
3 Dark Confidant
3 Stabilizer
3 Shred Memory
3 Annul
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Vedalken Shackles
This board gave us lots of juice against all five of the decks we were gunning for. (Ichorid, CAL, Slide, Aggro Rock, Affinity) Unlike Ruel at the Pro Tour, we no longer had Ghastly Demise against Affinity, but we did have Annul and Shackles – a comparable, if not explicitly superior, boarding plan. We were pleased that Aggro Rock would have to deal with three Shackles and two Melokus post-board, and that any graveyard-reliant decks, of which we expected many at the GP, would receive a swift kick in the junk from the simple-yet-very-effective Shred Memory. Dark Confidant boosted our win percentage against every slow deck in the field, and with that final touch, we had more or less everything we wanted.
The final list:
Creatures (5)
Lands (23)
Spells (32)
I wish I could link you to a Top 8 list here like I did with the previous iterations of the deck, but unfortunately only two people (JP and myself) played it at the GP, and neither of us made Day Two. JP went in with zero byes and was in contention right up to the last game of the last match of Day One, where his opponent topdecked his way to victory so savagely that he actually apologized for it. (The guy had no cards in hand and no cycling lands in graveyard, facing down JP’s similarly depleted hand and on-table Dark Confidant. The opponent immediately topdecked a cycling land, cycled it into another, and cycled that one into Life from the Loam. Seismic Assault turned up shortly thereafter.)
Me? I learned what Mike Flores meant when he talked about “playing with follow-through.” In one of the earlier rounds of Day One, I was in my third game against a Scepter-Chant player who had not yet seen a Vedalken Shackles from me. I had boarded in my third copy in order to steal one of the Exalted Angels I saw in game two, and was holding a Shackles in my hand when he resolved a morph on turn 3. Naturally, my plan at this point was to let him unmorph the Angel turn four, then steal it with Shackles and beat him about the head and shoulders with it.
Everything went according to plan; he immediately tapped all his mana in his main phase to unmorph it, leaving him no way to counter my Shackles. I shuffled the artifact to the front of my hand to show Zac, who was watching over my shoulder, what I had in mind.
Then I cast Echoing Truth on the Angel.
Wait, what?
Why did I do that? That wasn’t the plan!
Honestly, I have no idea why I did that. Maybe I was tired or something. It was literally, and quite easily, the dumbest mistake I’ve ever made – certainly in Magic, and possibly in my life. In any case, I earned the loss pretty thoroughly.
I later got paired against a friend and scooped to him to pick up my second loss, then made a miscalculation against Ichorid later on to end Day One at 5-3. (The miscalculation, in case you’re wondering, was this: I knew my opponent had no spells to play with the cards that were currently in his hand, and that on his next draw step he was just going to Dredge a Golgari Grave-Troll, which he also couldn’t play. This led me to reason that there was no need to play my Watery Grave untapped to allow myself sufficient mana for Counterspell, since he couldn’t possibly end up with a spell to play next turn. Then he Dredged into a Deep Analysis. I felt dumb, and then lost because it resolved.)
All in all, watching this deck grow taught me a lot.
Watching Peek and Vedalken Shackles vastly outperform the cards they had replaced taught me the value of experimentation, and not to discount tech that was stumbled upon, rather than calculated beforehand.
Removing Wonder and Gifts Ungiven and never once missing either of them showed me that even core elements of a deck can be removed… provided they have either become unnecessary, or are compensated for with something else (like Vedalken Shackles).
Bringing in Echoing Truth for Boomerang and Cremate for Mental Note after having consciously opted to do neither in the earlier stages of the season reminded me that it’s always a good idea to revisit old tech. File that stuff away; don’t throw it out altogether.
Finally, the relevance of the one maindeck Meloku and Haunting Echoes in testing gave me some insight into how to balance a deck. I’ve never before tried adding a one-of to a deck and planning on just drawing into it except in a control mirror, but now I’ve learned that this is a reliable strategy in a deck that draws a solid number of cards.
And now you’ve learned all these things as well. Hopefully they’ve been as useful to you as they were to me.
Until next time!
Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]