With apologies to Nick Eisel
There was something I was supposed to write about today… what was it again? Barning Daniel Negreanu? No, between efro and Nick, I think we’ve already got that covered. Vermin? Well yeah, but I’ll get to the Hall of Fame and Mike Long a bit later. What the hell was it then? Ah yes, Rats. After playesting it for the last week, I can tell you without reservation that I hate this stupid deck.*
Sort of.
You Know A Deck Is Underpowered When…
You are splashing un-allied colors in a deck that should want to be Mono-Black. Most of the better Rats lists I got from friends and around the net are now splashing cards like Viridian Shaman to help win the equipment war or to KO cards that wreck Rats like Vedalken Shackles. This isn’t actually a bad idea, per se, it just feels… well you know how Dan Paskins gets all prissy about sullying Red decks with impure colors like Green or Black? Splashing for Shaman feels like that, except less nose-in-the-air Englishy.
The problem with these stupid little rodents is that they don’t do anything. Nezumi Shortfang, which appears in the maindeck of the majority of the Rat lists that I’ve seen, just chills while using some mana each turn to make your opponent drop a card. Last I checked, the format we are playing is Standard. When I play a Standard deck, I want active cards. You know, cards that bash, or swing, or burn, or kill, maim, destroy, bring ruin to the hearts of millions. Cards that crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and that let you hear the lamentations of their women. That’s what I want to be playing when I shuffle up a sixty-card deck. What I don’t want to be running is a piddly 1/1 that costs me two farking mana each turn and doesn’t even give me a choice of which card I want them to discard. Shorty belongs in the sideboard at best.
Speaking of lazy rats, how about killer-for-hire Throat Slitter. Like Linda Evangelista, that [censored] rat won’t even get off the couch for less than $10,000 and I don’t have that sort of scratch lying around, not even if I could pay him in Canadian dollars, eh. Scratching the laziest of the lazy crew gives you six open slots to fill in most lists, so let’s see what I ended up with from there:
Creatures (23)
- 2 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
- 4 Ravenous Rats
- 3 Nekrataal
- 4 Nezumi Cutthroat
- 3 Viridian Shaman
- 4 Chittering Rats
- 3 Skull Collector
Lands (23)
Spells (14)
Sideboard
I’ll tell you up front that I think there’s probably a very solid Rat Control deck out there that uses Death Cloud as a partial finisher, but I didn’t have time to find it before I stopped testing this deck and moved on. There is no other deck out there that trades resources as well as this does during the opening game. That said, it is inherently weak in the late game. (Death Cloud might fix that.) It can’t dig for new threats with Sensei’s Divining Top, it can’t tutor up a damned thing, and it really needs to get the lock online in order to seal up a game or it can get topdecked right out. In short, Rats decks are designed to win in the hands of good players, but will probably lose in the hands of mediocre or bad players.
The decklist above has removed the largely useless ninja engine but includes the somewhat janky Skull Collector because it gives you the late-game lock that you need. I also found myself really appreciating the pinpoint discard and two Persecutes together, and as has been mentioned before, Ink-Eyes gets along pretty well with those two spells. With 4 Distress in the main though, you don’t want any more than the two Persecutes or you run into discard glut, especially when combined with Ravenous Rats. Looking at the decklist Seth produced on Wednesday and the one that I ended up with, I actually think he oversells the lock a bit and may love Ink-Eyes too much, and he also included 4 Chrome Mox while I felt you simply couldn’t recoup enough of the threat count in the later game to go with that plan and that you probably don’t the speed, provided Vial stays online. If Vial gets shut down, then Rats has a hard time winning. Such is life.
The sideboard is a nod to the fact that most of the metagame will be Red or Green or Tooth. The extra removal is for the first two (assuming the Red is creature-based), the Extractions are for Tooth, the Sun Droplet is for decks that want to burn you out, and the Pithing Needle is there for everything else. Night’s Whisper should actually be an XXX slot where you salt to taste, since I couldn’t figure out what else I wanted to play in that last spots. The last Pithing Needle, the fourth Viridian Shaman, extra equipment (Manriki-Gusari perhaps?), or even Nezumi Shortfang all make sense. I tried Okiba-Gang Shinobi in various numbers both in the maindeck and the board, but they never quite worked the way I wanted them to.
You shouldn’t lose too much to Green decks with this list, you’ll lose to Tooth and Nail just as much as everyone else but never more, and Red decks will be a major problem, but we all knew that going into the lab before we started the experiment, right?
*Thanks to Thomas Rosholm, Phil Samms, and Seth for providing me some decklists and chatting about the deck.
The Skullhead Shifter
When I wrote my article two weeks ago, I felt the winds of change a’brewin, but I didn’t know quite which way they’d blow. Since that time Jamie Wakefield (and friends) has skewed Mono-Green Aggro towards fast beatdown to try and smite the evil Tooth and Nail players, Mono-Blue Control has received a boost from the Japanese, and writers on this very site have given a stiff push to Black decks. Additionally, you’ve got people like Chris Romeo pushing the Tennessee White agenda, and Chad Ellis + Richie Proffitt serving up a Marco Blume-sized serving of rogue decks which may or may not be good. People also know Erayo exists, but they don’t know what he looks like or whether he’s actually any good. Sounds more like ninja than Soratami to me.
The crystal ball has grown decidedly hazy folks, but here’s how I see it breaking down this weekend, with the admission that the margin for error is greater than it has been in some time.
Tooth – 15-20%
Mono-Green Aggro (fast and slow)- 15%
Red Decks – 15%
Green/x (including Gifts, Belcher, B/G, and R/G)- 10%
Black decks (MBC/Rats) – 8%+
Mono-Blue – 7%
Rogue With Potential – 15%
Bad Decks – 10%
What Would I Play if I Were Playing?
There are three or four decks that I’ve flirted with over the last few weeks, testing them for feel and viability, and shifting as I felt the metagame change. I actually think the Rats list I posted above is a pretty reasonable choice, though a well-tuned Mono-Black Control list may actually be better. Finding the right balance of mana acceleration and removal is one of the toughest tasks facing MBC designers, but as Sean said yesterday, MBC once again seems like a very good metagame deck.
The other two options for me would have been Jim Ferraiolo Mono-Green Belcher deck – which I like for the acceleration and the dual gameplan – and a tweaked version of one of the Red decks. I actually think it doesn’t matter at this point which version of Red you play. Both the fast and the slow seem to have about the same advantages overall against various sections of the metagame, and both kick the living hell out of any Black decks that arise as the result of an anti-Green metagame shift. I’m not sure exactly how concerned Red players should be over the rise of fast Joshie Green decks (there are better versions than the public lists – poke Seth Burn for his latest tweaks), but Trolls clad in Blanchwood Armor can’t be a pleasant sight, even if it isn’t a bowel-moving one either.
Knowing that I tend to skew rogue for both Regionals and States, I probably would have ended up running the Mono-Black this weekend (I promised Becker I wouldn’t post my own list, though I’m sure he’s already pissed at all the press other folks have given the deck this week). Unless of course someone sent me the best Erayo list I’d ever seen a couple of days before the tournament. Then I would have run that bad boy.
The Plans of Attack
I often find it useful to look at the big decks in the format and figure out what the best ways to attack them are. This is what I came up with last week while I was driving up to NYC for Mike Flores baby’s birthday.
Tooth and Nail
You can attack their hand or you can attack their lands. If you attack the hand, they can end up Topping into top decks and wreck you anyway. If you attack their lands, you can stymie their development for a while, but they eventually get out of it, so your clock better be reasonably quick. Top once again helps them fix their mana here, so maybe it’s just better to shut down the Top instead?
Green Decks
Plow Under ist der suck. Beacon of Creation ist auch der suck. Eternal Witness makes der suck times two. Cranial Extraction fixes at least one of these problems as early as turn 3 or 4. Top is an annoyance here as well, so you can Pith or Matrix to stop the silliness. Aside from that, this color generally beats you with creatures hopped up on swords and swordbreakers, therefore if you can keep the creatures dead or keep the equipment dead, you stand a chance at a fair fight. Minus Plow Under shenanigans, of course.
Red Decks
There are 2.5 varieties of Red deck out there right now. The first one goes for the early rush backed up with LD. The second one sits back and plays control, while it waits for the right time to Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] you right out of the game. The third one picks some combination of the two and relies on better than average playskill to maximize the situation or it goes Donald Sutherland from Backdraft on you and buuuuuurns you. Beating all varieties of these decks within the same decklist is a royal pain in the ass.
White gives you access to Circle of Protection: Red, which should help at least a little. Some Japanese Rats decks went so far as to have CoPs in the board that they could play off of Tendo Ice Bridge and City of Brass. Clever, but I’m not sure it helps enough. Aside from that, a lot of the Green decks are either playing untargetables or fatties that are hard to burn out, or creating fatties that are hard to burn out with Blanchwood Armor and Sword of Fire and Ice. These are all solid ideas that at least complicate the board for Red players, especially when you have enough acceleration to negate their land kill.
Against the burn decks you probably need a fast clock and some life gain. Shutting down Arc-Slogger also helps, but you need some fast follow up or you’ll die regardless. Good luck with that.
Blue Decks
Boseiju, Who Shelters All seems like a spicy sideboard inclusion for every deck that wants to resolve instants or sorceries, which is basically every deck. Red decks get Genju of the Spires and Boil, Green decks get whatever they want if they want it bad enough, and Black decks get a heaping helping of discard plus Aether Vial. Blue decks don’t scare me, but they can still beat me.
Black Decks
Burn them, burn them all. Flames, fire, hell and damnation. Bring the noise and the Black mages can’t handle it in the end. In fact, they are so masochistic that they’ll often help you help them along the way. Untargetable creatures and powerful artifacts are also not their friends. Although they have the tools to deal with both, they aren’t necessarily the most efficient answers in the toolbox. You can use a screwdriver as a chisel, but not for very long.
Techie Cards That May Make a Difference This Weekend
Pithing Needle
Damping Matrix
Night of Souls’ Betrayal
Kodama of the North Tree
Goblin Charbelcher
Auriok Champion
Memnarch?
Persecute
Gifts Ungiven
Adamaro
Shock
Erayo
Fractured Loyalty
I have a million other articles left to edit and get out the door, so I have to cut the strategic portion of this article off right here. Best of luck to all of you, and I’m sure I’ll see more than a few of you in Baltimore in August.
My Final Hall of Fame Ballot
Three of the names I discussed last week are still on my ballot, but one has changed and the final name is now locked in. I actually decided to turn in my ballot a month early so as to forego further discussion of my ballot with my friends and writing staff, almost all of whom have very loud opinions about how they think the ballot should go. I appreciate their candor and their willingness to “share” (or poke, prod, cajole, verbally berate, physically twist my arm, kick my shins, spit at my feet, curse the ground I walk on, etc), but the choice of which names end up on my ballot is made by me and me alone. Hell, half of you have your own ballots to fill out, and you don’t see me throwing rotten tomatoes at you because my opinion differs from yours, do you?
Anyway, Jon Finkel, Hump, and Hovi were locks, and their spots on my ballot remained secure.
As for Mike Long, that one takes some further explanation. You all can throw your hands up in the air and scream bloody murder about how Mike was a cheater, how nothing he did was good for the game, how he nearly ruined Magic, and how if Mike gets into the Hall of Fame you’ll quit the game. I don’t care. Maybe I did at one point, but not anymore. Welcome to the land of cognitive dissonance, where the ratio of signal to noise is effectively approaching zero. To all of you that have strong opinions about this, I’ll note that the Hall is a created institution that Chris Galvin explained would “enshrine the most significant and influential competitors of the game.” There’s a country mile of room for interpretation in that sentence (just as there is for most of the Hall of Fame guidelines), but let there be no doubt that Mike Long was in fact one of the most significant and influential competitors in the game.
That said, he lost my vote recently and is not on the final ballot I submitted to Greg Collins last night.
But it’s not because Mike is a cheater.
I’ll admit to you right here and now that I will put names on my Hall of Fame ballot who have cheated at Magic. In fact, as is often the case when it comes to celebrities, the more you dig the more dirt you will find, even on people whose public personas are widely considered to be clean. I’m not going to further sully anyone’s reputation in this article, but the volume of shenanigans that occurred in the early days of the Pro Tour – the period that all of these names came from – was practically deafening. It’s nearly impossible to comprise what most people would consider “a good ballot” and not end up choosing people who should have received mild to serious demerits in integrity and sportsmanship at some point in their careers. Were they all caught, suspended, or banned? Absolutely not. Magic is a game played by brilliant men and women, and back in the day the tie certainly went to the cheater. Like it or not, that’s part of the history of the game, kids, and for many it is a bitter pill to swallow. Wizards of the Coast is certainly to blame for this, but they took steps to clear it up as the Pro Tour and the game matured and deserve credit for that as well.
We are not dealing in the present with this ballot – we are mostly dealing with events that happened five to ten years ago. The game, the rules, and the players have changed since then, and anyone who comes back onto the Pro Tour via their Hall of Fame will need to adapt to what is a considerably cleaner game.
No, Mike lost my vote because I was delivered a reminder of who he is in the magicthegathering.com forums, and that reminder made me immediately cross his name off my ballot. Most of you probably don’t know that I have an extended history with Mike stemming mostly from the fact that in 2000 I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, home of Mike Long and Pete Leiher’s former game store The End. I’ve seen first hand what the man is like in public and in private, and I am well versed in the charm and the villainy of Mike Long.
If you follow the link above, and click on the “Spoiler” button Effovex’s post, you’ll see how Mike “answered” BDM’s questions to Hall of Fame nominees. When I first read that, I was like, “What f***ing planet is this guy from?” Then I remembered that Mike doesn’t operate by any rules that normal people understand – that’s the entire crux of who Mike is. If he’d just answered Brian’s questions normally, with the standard responses about being happy to be nominated and the hope that maybe people would look at the best parts of his career and give him the nod, he’d still have my vote. Instead, he served me a pointed reminder that most things Mike does are not attached to a reality that I understand Thus I’ll be voting for one of the other very deserving names on the ballot instead.
The game can deal with cheaters. The judging staff won’t tolerate nonsense these days and the scrutiny on former players that cheat and return to the Pro Tour is tremendous, plus cheating remains part of the game’s history, whether we want to remember it or not. Now gifting crazy folk permanent invites to the Pro Tour… well, I can’t be party to that.
The last two spots on my ballot go to Darwin Mess and Scott Johns. Darwin gets extra points for Top 8 achievements, the money list, and Pro Tour points plus career longevity, while Scott has the Team PT win, four other Sunday appearances, and years of piloting some of the best Magic websites around. I do that job, and I know exactly how hard it is. Congrats guys, I hope to see you in Yokohama this November.
Random Question before I go: Would Darwin even get be a “maybe” on any ballot if The Claw had remained viable in Onslaught Block Constructed after Scourge rotated in? People would be all like “Screw Kibler – Darwin invented a whole freaking deck full of Dragons. Darwin rocks!”
Or perhaps not.
How about another one: If Bram Snapplebangers was willing to scoop Chris Pikula, Igor Frayman, and Josh Ravitz into the Top 4 at Seattle last year giving Chris 4 PT Top 8s, 4 GP Top 8s, and a career as one of the cleanest and funniest people ever to play on the Pro Tour, would Chris be first ballot material?
Regardless of how the first Hall of Fame vote turns out, ya’ll need to simmer down, ya hear?
Quoteable Quotes
BDM says:
I looked up “Batsh*t Insane” in the dictionary and Mike tried to get me involved in a ponzi scheme
[JelgerW] yeah, obv you’re better 🙁
[JulienN] i mean…
[JulienN] 1 Chicken Ranch 1836 Leuven, Netherlands
[JulienN] 2 von Dutch 1834 Tiel, WA , Netherlands
[jeroenr] …
[jeroenr] von dutch has kamiel and jelger
[jeroenr] gg
[JulienN] the rating list does not lie sir
[jeroenr] you don’t listen to me, so i cant be your guardian
[JulienN] i listened to you at worlds team drafts
[JulienN] when you picked that pulse of the forge
[JulienN] and put it in your board
[JulienN] 🙁
[JulienN] good to hear this from a bunch of people who put me in a trash can regularly
1:42 Angelus: Ted Knuttson was in my draft the other day, was kinda cool
[JakeS] 11:42 Lupan: i saw ted knutson cheat at a pre release
[JakeS] 11:42 Angelus: lol, really ?
[JakeS] 11:42 Lupan: he traded cards with his friend
[JakeS] 11:42 Lupan: i called a judge but they said they couldn’t do anything
[JakeS] 11:42 Lupan: the chick across the table saw it too
[JakeS] 11:43 Lupan: guy’s a total cheat
[JakeS] 11:43 Lupan: actually used to read his articles too
[jeroenr] gotta love the modo crowd
[Speaking of cheaters, I’d certainly like to know what prerelease this supposedly occurred at – Knut, who apparently only does coverage now because he’s so bad he needs to resort to cheating at prereleases]
[rhoaen] this new bsb cd is not meeting my expectations 🙁
[jeroenr] backstreet boyz..:)
[Riptide-] not surprised really
[rhoaen] yeah
[rhoaen] its turds
[rhoaen] not the high quality i was expecting
[jeroenr] fair
[jeroenr] wont dld it then
Oh, and this is insane. Me main man skrike gave me the hookup on that as well as on so much other stuff.
Teddy Card Game
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