As promised last week, I’ve spent all week thinking about Block Constructed and now I have an article chock-full of decklists for you to think about. No more introduction, let’s just get right to it.
Red/Green: Do You Believe in Magus?
Magus of the Vineyard is the wild card (puns, derf). This guy could bust up the hammerlock that Teferi and Mystical Teachings have on the format, or he could end up as a casual player’s card. There’s no real in-between.
The biggest impact that a turn 1 Magus has on the format is the possibility of a turn 2 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss or Avalanche Riders. The control decks of the format have to jump through a lot of hoops with storage lands and Urborg to assemble UUU and BB, and land destruction can really shaft their game plan… but in the pre-Magus era, getting that land destruction to resolve was tricky. Stormbind is also a fine way to sink your Magus mana, as well as being one of the few cards in the format that Teferi just can’t beat by himself.
However, the Magus may turn out to be more trouble than he’s worth. A Magus may enable a turn 2 land destruction spell, but he can equally help your opponent into a turn 2 Tendrils of Corruption or a turn 2 Mystical Teachings to tutor for same. The control decks do have plenty of ways to use the mana on their own turn, from Prismatic Lens to Damnation to simply sinking the spare Green mana through storage lands (for those of you who don’t know the storage land trick, you can pay one to activate the storage land’s second ability, and when it resolves you choose to remove zero counters).
So, with that in mind, here is a (technically) Red/Green deck that might benefit from the Magus. The heavy lifting of this design was done by Brian Kowal, who built the original Mono-Green version of the deck for Pro Tour: Yokohama. Additional modifications were done by Brian David-Marshall and Mike Flores, who asked me to keep the deck’s existence on the down-low before the PT, as it was thought some of their qualified friends might be playing it (didn’t happen).
The original version used Gauntlet of Power to enable Citanul Woodreaders, Verdeloth, and other sick big-mana plays. However, I found the matchup with other big-mana R/G decks to be difficult, since they piggyback off of your Gauntlet of Power to cast Bogardan Hellkite and Akroma, Angel of Fury (much the same way that I piggybacked the deck off of Kowal and BDM and Mike). So I thought about using the Magus to enable a big-game turn 2 play, like so:
My sideboard is unfinished, but it includes Seal of Primordium for the White Weenie matchup – otherwise Temporal Isolation can be a total blowout. Gauntlet of Power is also in my sideboard, to be brought in against non-Green opponents; in fact, if Green decks were not so popular in the Tournament Practice room on MTGO, I might question whether the Magus or the Gauntlet belongs in those maindeck slots.
Mono-Red: A Burning Sensation
Among block formats, only Onslaught and Tempest featured Red decks as good as the ones we’re seeing today. Onslaught had the explosive starts due to Goblin tribal synergy, but Tempest-era Red was pretty similar to today: some efficient creatures, some decent one-shot burn spells, and some powerful repeating burn effects to finish the job.
I think the big temptation that you have to avoid with Future Sight entering the format is to try and do too many Cool Things. Ghostfire probably belongs, and Molten Disaster is almost certainly better to finish off an opponent than Disintegrate, but most other cards in this block just seem too loose. For example, I said in my (link to) Future Sight review that I liked Arc Blade, but subsequent review suggests that it’s simply too slow: by the time it would tell, most Red decks in this format should either have a dominating position or be completely crushed.
Future Sight doesn’t add any bigger problem for Red decks than already existed: most decks which lost to a Wall of Roots before will still lose to one now, and most decks which beat Mystical Teachings Control before probably still do now. I would definitely run Greater Gargadon in my main deck for the PTQs, both to get an edge on the Red mirror and to avoid Tendrils of Corruption. I would probably run Molten Disaster instead of Disintegrate, and I might run Ghostfire alongside Rift Bolt or even instead of it. So a decklist might look like this:
Creatures (20)
Lands (25)
Spells (15)
Sideboard
Another way to go might be to try a Madness-type strategy. The main reason we can even think about trying this is because Graven Cairns is the best of the Future Sight dual lands in terms of actually fixing mana. If Antonino De Rosa can get away with running Suq’Ata Lancer in his Red deck at the Pro Tour, then surely we can run a flying version that enables Fiery Temper, right?
Creatures (24)
- 4 Dauthi Slayer
- 4 Greater Gargadon
- 4 Magus of the Scroll
- 4 Blood Knight
- 4 Keldon Marauders
- 4 Deepcavern Imp
Lands (23)
Spells (13)
Sideboard
I’ll mention this later in the article, but I was totally sleeping on Bridge From Below. It could be quite awesome in this deck, but I’m not sure how to fit it in yet.
White Weenie: Not Dead Yet
Many people have already mentioned this, but you should not disregard the White creatures. The Magic Online Premiere Event on the weekend before the Pro Tour, with an all-White Top 8, featured a crowd much more similar to your typical PTQ. There are a lot of players trying their own home-grown tech, and a lot of cases where card availability might have been a factor. In the first round of that event, for example, I faced a Blue/White control deck designed to crush beatdown via Teferi’s Moat and Sacred Mesa. I can’t imagine that deck beating a tuned U/B Control list, but that kind of foresight is not common among the people that you face in the early rounds of a PTQ.
However, White decks do have a serious problem: the Pro Tour let the combo of Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth + Tendrils of Corruption out of the bag. Most people had picked up on it, those who hadn’t picked up on it probably lost to it, and everyone who follows these things probably read about it in the coverage. Sulfur Elemental is bad enough for White decks, but the Tendrils is a downright disaster as the lifegain undoes several turns’ worth of beatdown.
One out against Tendrils is Intervention Pact, but that seems a very narrow card to run. Another might be to run Blue cards on the splash: Delay could easily buy you enough time to kill someone, and Psionic Blast gives you a little reach that Griffin Guide does not. There’s no way around it, though; there’s just too much creature hate in this block for me to imagine that White will do well in the Grand Prix circuit.
To be honest, I can’t give you an original decklist for this section. I think that White Aggro could still do well at some PTQs, because not all of the control decks there will be piloted well. However, my own local area is filled with tough competition. If I were to make Top 8 of a PTQ I’d probably have to battle someone like Morgan Douglass, Mike Patnik, or John Moore, playing a decent control decklist; I have no version of a White Aggro deck that I think could win that. Instead I’ll just bring you the highest-finishing mono-White deck from the Pro Tour, and let you add Future Sight cards as the spirit moves you:
Creatures (26)
- 4 Soltari Priest
- 4 Icatian Javelineers
- 2 Benalish Cavalry
- 4 Knight of the Holy Nimbus
- 4 Serra Avenger
- 4 Calciderm
- 4 Shade of Trokair
Lands (23)
- 23 Plains
Spells (11)
Sideboard
Teachings.dec: The Blue Meanies
The interested thing about this block – and it only gets more interesting after Future Sight hits the mix – is how well the Blue cards work with one another. Some sort of Blue control deck is going to come out of most blocks, simply because the ability to say no to stuff is a good thing. With this block, though, there’s so much synergy! Teferi and Nix both turn Delay into a hard counterspell. Pact of Negation is a fine way to defend Teferi or Draining Whelk. Not much is lost by discarding Think Twice to Careful Consideration.
Finally, of course, all of those are searchable via Mystical Teachings. If there’s one thing to be learned from Mark Herberholz‘ deck at the Pro Tour – which ran only one copy of Teferi – it’s that Mystical Teachings is what makes all the synergy work, and nothing else is quite as important. I’ll give you a decklist later in this section, but the fact is that you can go several different ways with the archetype because Terramorphic Expanse lets you splash lots of colors and Teachings lets you easily dig up any ability you can think of, as almost all of them appear on one instant or another.
The only big problem is how to avoid draws with other Blue decks. They had longer rounds at the Pro Tour, and even then draws were an issue for players such as Kenji Tsumura, who was eliminated from Day 2 contention by a draw in the Teachings mirror. You could almost finish a pair of PTQ rounds in the time it took Mark Herberholz and Guillaume Wafo-Tapa to complete the first two games of their semifinal match. Some weapons to avoid draws include:
*The Pact of Negation + Draining Whelk combo. It’s not much of a “combo,” actually; the idea is simply that if you have enough mana to Whelk something, you should also have enough mana to pay for the Pact. So, there’s relatively little risk in, say, Whelking an opponent’s end-step Mystical Teachings if you can protect it from Damnation on the following turn with the Pact. In fact, going beatdown with a Whelk is exactly how Wafo-Tapa won game 4 of the match with Herberholz, which not-so-coincidentally was the shortest game of the match.
*Triskelavus + Academy Ruins, as demonstrated by Wafo-Tapa in game 1 against Herberholz. It’s not a great plan for post-board games because some number of Extirpates will be boarded in by your opponent. An interesting thing about this win for the PTQs is that playing out the first game until you deck the opponent via Academy Ruins will take a long time. Then it will be difficult for the opponent to avoid a 1-0 match decision. The downside, of course, is that putting all of the pressure on winning game 1 can lead to some bad turns of luck knocking you right out of the tournament. It’s worth keeping in mind, though.
*Urza’s Factory advantage. From what BDM tells me, just about everyone in the building thought that this would be the deciding factor in Wafo-Tapa’s semifinal match: Herberholz had two Factories, Wafo-Tapa only one, and everyone expected all games to run long enough for that difference to tell. Future Sight is especially important here because it provides Tolaria West, to tutor up your Factories. Tolaria West actually might be the most busted card in the block. In addition to Factories, it hunts up Urborg, or Ancestral Vision, or your splash lands (like a Mountain for Detritivore), or any of the rare or uncommon lands from Future Sight that you might need.
With all of this in mind, here’s how I might build a Mystical Teachings deck for the PTQ season:
Creatures (6)
Lands (25)
Spells (29)
Like Wafo-Tapa, the main deck is simply Blue/Black; since I’m already running several nonbasic lands in a block where Detritivore exists, I tried not to have a splash color. I could not fit in Pact of Negation, but that’s mainly because I think Delay is the better card in this type of deck; in the time it takes for a Delayed card to come off of suspension, it’s child’s play to find Teferi and keep it suspended permanently.
The sideboard is still under construction, but I think the Pro Tour suggests that Red is a little overrated because almost everyone will packing Pull From Eternity to beat Aeon Chronicler anyway, so Detritivore suffers from that. In turn, I would probably go with White as the only splash in the board, for multiple Pulls and bullet copies of Temporal Isolation and Disenchant. There would also be the obvious Extirpates and additional Tendrils of Corruption for the control and aggro matchups, respectively.
Other Stuff That Doesn’t Quite Deserve a Fancy Section Title
1) At one point a few weeks ago, I suffered a ridiculous beating at the hands of what I thought was your basic Teachings deck – his first few turns were land, Prismatic Lenses, and Looter il-Kor, which I assumed was some sort of main deck technology against other Teachings decks. He actually had a quite different plan, not involving very many instants at all:
Creatures (13)
Lands (26)
Spells (21)
Possibly the first deck in the history of Careful Consideration that is designed to cast that card at instant speed, the idea here is similar to Solar Flare. There is actually very little graveyard hate that is being played right now – pretty much only Extirpate – so a reanimation strategy can work. Kyle Sanchez Premium featured article also suggests that Bridge From Below might make for some sick combos with Dread Return, but to be honest I overlooked Bridge From Below and I haven’t had a chance to investigate that card yet.
2) I have a decklist that tries to win via Restore Balance and Greater Gargadon, with an additional backup win possible via Lost Auramancers and Barren Glory. That list was entirely too ugly for me to present here with a straight face, but those combos might actually work. They key card is Timecrafting, which can let you play Balance (or get rid of an Auramancer) at instant speed when the control decks tap low for Mystical Teachings or whatever. This deck also gains Dust of Moments from Future Sight, but that card can be a little awkward because of its fixed casting cost; it’s much harder to get it out of your hand for Barren Glory.
3) This article written while reading Brian Michael Bendis’s comic Alias (unrelated to the television show of the same name). Given fan reaction to what Bendis has done in the Marvel Universe since then, you might think he was the devil incarnate. However, I actually think Alias is one of the better books I’ve read in some years.
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