Hey, don’t get me wrong. I loved Chris “Star Wars Kid” McDaniel’s primer on the U/G Combo deck with Mind’s Desire. Judging from the forum response to that article, you loved it too, and that kind of surprised me. It was in response to Chris’ Top 8 performance at PT: LA that I heard about a competing version of the deck, one which runs Ideas Unbound instead of Desire.
Some people even went so far as to say that Mind’s Desire is an “awful” card, and that Chris battled to the Top 8 on the back of pure playskill and experience with the deck. Having seen Chris play at States the week before the Pro Tour, I can vouch for the playskill part. However, after playing some games with the Ideas Unbound version, I began to agree with the anti-Desire people too.
Obviously, I don’t have the same degree of experience and results with the deck that Chris does. I think that the Star City Premium subscribers do deserve an alternate viewpoint, however, and I intend to provide it. Here is a decklist for the sort of build that I am talking about:
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Rampant Growth
4 Heartbeat of Spring
3 Early Harvest
4 Ideas Unbound
4 Nostalgic Dreams
4 Cunning Wish
3 Fact or Fiction
4 Gifts Ungiven
2 Moment’s Peace
1 Brain Freeze
1 Revive
1 Deep Analysis
Lands
Sideboard
3 Brain Freeze
3 Mana Short
2 Moment’s Peace
1 Seedtime
1 Words of Wisdom
1 Echoing Truth
1 Memory Lapse
1 Naturalize
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Early Harvest
Not too much different than Chris’ current list, right? What this goes to show you is that the Mind’s Desire version is not bad. You’ll win matches with it. Depending upon the metagame at your PTQ, you could win a plane ticket with it. The deck has a very strong core and can win without even casting Ideas or Desire (in fact, if you want to beat Scepter-Chant or Psychatog, you’ll need to know how to do just that). It’s just that I think the Ideas Unbound version gives you a slightly better chance against the typical wide-open PTQ metagame. Here’s why.
1. The Uncounterability of Mind’s Desire is not relevant.
Since the format right now is dominated by Blue-based control decks (Psychatog being number one, with Scepter-Chant possibly making a move after the results of GP: Kitakyushu), the effect of having Desire or Ideas against these decks is probably the first thing we’d like to look at.
One thing that is always mentioned about Mind’s Desire by its proponents is this: Mind’s Desire is pretty much a win when it resolves, because it can only be countered by Stifle and Orim’s Chant. Clearly, there’s not another card in the format which can make that claim. The problem is, that claim is completely irrelevant.
Generally, if a Blue-based control deck gets an awful draw – say, counter-light or zero card-drawing effects – then you would have won that game whether you were playing Mind’s Desire or not. You just have too much card-drawing for them to keep up.
However, if they have a normal draw, where they would stop cold your first attempt at Heartbeat, then an odd paradox occurs: you usually won’t win with either Desire or Ideas. Instead, you’ll try to sculpt a good hand and win at instant speed during the opponent’s end step. For example, when Psychatog taps out for its namesake, you’ll want to have about six land in play and an Early Harvest plus other instants in hand. Then you can lead with one of your instants (say, Fact or Fiction or Cunning Wish) which they’ll really want to counter (because Fact or Fiction would put you too far ahead on cards or Cunning Wish would fetch the crushing Mana Short).
If they tap out to counter one of your instants, you can respond with Early Harvest, allowing you to cast some more instants end hopefully end the game with double Brain Freeze. If they counter but you can’t kill them in your endstep, they’ll usually be tapped low enough to win during your next main phase.
In these case, it should be clear that Mind’s Desire is inferior to Ideas Unbound. Neither one can be played EOT, of course, but in the “sculpting my hand” phase, Ideas can help load you up with instants and allow you to discard land or useless Moment’s Peaces. Should your opponent counter your attempts to go off during his turn, Ideas is also more helpful when you try to go off during your own turn. This is because walking spells into countermagic during your end step will usually mean that you will be unable to build up much of a storm count during your own turn, which in turn makes Mind’s Desire none-too-hot.
Plus, Nostalgic Dreams becomes all the more important when you play against countermagic, which leads us to our next point…
2. Ideas Unbound + Nostalgic Dreams = Total Brokenness
“[Nostalgic Dreams] is your Yawgmoth’s Will,” McDaniel says, and he’s exactly right. It’s one of the most underrated cards in the deck; it is the card which turns Gifts Ungiven into a one-way tutor, it is the card which allows you to continue going off when you might otherwise run out of gas, it is the card which restocks you in the face of countermagic or discard disruption.
However, in the same way that it would be foolish to cast Yawgmoth’s Will with an empty graveyard, you have to have the proper hand size to enable your Nostalgic Dreams. Here, again, I found Mind’s Desire to be okay, but to come up a little short compared to Ideas Unbound. You spend a lot of cards out of your hand getting a Desire for five or six onto the table, and sometimes you don’t want to discard the cards you put in your hand via a post-Desire Fact/Gifts. The end result is that your post-Desire Dreams are usually for an X of one or two; sometimes that’s all you need to win easily, but sometimes it really puts a cramp in your style.
When you run Ideas Unbound, believe me, you never have this problem. Your Ideas will inevitably reveal some useless lands, Rampant Growths, Tribe Elders, and even spare copies of Heartbeat of Spring. Those cards will then turn into more Early Harvests, Ideas Unbound, and Fact or Fictions, which will then make your later Dreams even bigger. When I first started running Ideas Unbound, I was amazed how huge my storm counts became; in some test games I could easily have decked a Battle of Wits opponent.
The first time I did a Dreams for X=7, I put my Mind’s Desires back in my Extended binder and never looked back. Think of it this way: you’re running Yawgmoth’s Will except that it also checks your hand size, and Mind’s Desire doesn’t fill up your hand or your graveyard as well as Ideas Unbound does.
3. Ideas Unbound helps smooth out your bad draws and Mind’s Desire does not
A good example of this is game 5 of the McDaniel-Moreno match, in which Chris died with three copies of Mind’s Desire in hand. Had those been Ideas, he still would have been in bad shape, but he could have simply cast Ideas as a super-Careful Study to optimize his hand.
That’s an extreme example, though, and I bet that Chris would point out that he still could have won that game had Moreno not drawn the turn-5 Cephalid Coliseum–Psychatog kill. So, for a set of more normal examples, I decided to test out the new Starting Hand Generator on the Wizards website. I drew from Chris’ LA deck several times, treating the Echoing Truth as a third Rampant Growth as Chris suggested in his Star City article. Here are some of the results:
Moment’s Peace
Sakura-Tribe Elder
2 Gifts Ungiven
Fact or Fiction
2 Forest
This is a pretty amazing hand, and as long as the Tribe-Elder resolves, you could probably win whether you’re running Desire or Ideas. Either way you just get up to four mana, draw/tutor up a boatload of cards, win. This is the sort of hand that you can even beat Scepter-Chant with.
3 Nostalgic Dreams
Cunning Wish
2 Island
Forest
This hand probably goes back, to be honest: no mana acceleration, only one Wish for card-drawing, and three Dreams is just one too many. If it were kept, Ideas Unbound would be a slightly better topdeck than Mind’s Desire, because if you drew lands or other chaff off of the Ideas, you could pitch them to one of the Dreams. However, the lack of mana acceleration and Wish as your only card draw makes this hand pretty stainy regardless of which money card you are running.
Forest
2 Island
2 Nostalgic Dreams
Heartbeat of Spring
Brain Freeze
Another multiple-Dreams hand! Apparently the Wizards website uses the same shuffler that I’m always hearing people complain about with MODO. This one probably goes back if I draw it in a tournament, but here in the quiet of my home, it’s a lot more tempting to keep when Ideas Unbound is a possible topdeck than Mind’s Desire. The reason is that if you were to keep the hand and start turn 4 with a Heartbeat on the table, Ideas Unbound would give you an immediate three cards and plenty of mana left over, with a good possibility of being able to go off that same turn.
If the slot is filled with Mind’s Desire, then you have to rip some more spells to pump up your Storm count. You probably also have to rip an Early Harvest before you try to go off with Desire; with Ideas in the deck, you can see three cards deeper and if one of them is Harvest, you’ll most likely win right there.
2 Forest
2 Island
Rampant Growth
Moment’s Peace
[Desire/Ideas]
I’m honestly not sure if this hand stays or goes back, but again, having Ideas Unbound helps you more. All you have to do is topdeck a Heartbeat of Spring (or a Gifts Ungiven, to tutor up a Heartbeat), and then you’re in the same place as the last hand: start turn 4 with a Heartbeat down, play Ideas, win.
With Mind’s Desire, however, you not only have to find a Heartbeat, but you also have to dig up some more spells to improve your storm possibilities, which are even worse here than in the last hand.
3 Forest
Island
Heartbeat of Spring
Fact or Fiction
Deep Analysis
This hand was pulled during a test game against my slightly modified version of Julien Nuijten Psychatog deck. This is another “win with anything” hand; you just crush the opponent with card advantage. However, when Ideas Unbound was subsequently topdecked it allowed the U/G deck to go off in the same method as described in the last two hands – untap with Heartbeat in play on turn 4, Ideas into utter gas, win easily against the Tog deck’s countermagic-light draw. Even with a hand this good, I’m not sure Desire would have gone off on turn 4.
2 Island
Forest
2 Sakura-Tribe Elder
Early Harvest
This hand was pulled off of a mulligan against Nuijten.dec. Desire is generally at its best when you can improve to a point where you go “Heartbeat, Harvest, Desire” all in one turn, with some other spells in between to pump up your storm count. Starting hands that lead to this generally include at least one mana accelerant and an Early Harvest, like this one does. I’d imagine this hand is better off with Mind’s Desire in the deck.
2 Forest
2 Nostalgic Dreams
Sakura-Tribe Elder
Early Harvest
Gifts Ungiven
Another pull from Nuijten.dec testing, and yet another double-Dreams hand. One thing that I noticed when I was testing Desire is that I almost never wanted to keep a hand with multiple Nostalgic Dreams; you might use the first Dreams to get a Heartbeat of Spring out of the graveyard from Gifts Ungiven, but the second one is only useful after Desire has resolved and you’re clearly winning. With that second Dreams, it’s almost like you mulliganed to six. As is usual with this deck, that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but I found it applying more often than not.
Ideas, however, makes hands like this one into 100% keepers. This is because your combo takes a different shape with Ideas; instead of revolving around one bomb spell, you have a series of stages, where a flurry of spells fuels a Dreams which then lets you start all over again.
As I was finishing this article, I got to see some early PTQ results, I have to say that people so far have been preferring the Mind’s Desire version – with the exception of this deck, which has zero Mind’s Desire and ONE Ideas Unbound!? WTF?!
So if you were to say that I have no idea what I’m talking about … well, it’s the Internet. You can say whatever you like. Just remember that nobody would have expected Dimir House-Guard to be playable in Constructed either, but this deck says otherwise. I can be right at least some of the time.
Until next time, may your Brain Freezes never be Stifled.
This article written in between chapters of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen.”
mmyoungster at aim dot com
mmyoungster on AIM
Later.