“I warn you, the gods granted me the speed of Mercury.”
Wonder Woman
“Oh, I’M sorry. I thought you were FAST.”
The Flash
Mister Editor Man Craig Stevenson IM’ed me recently and told me that he had made the Top 8 of a Premiere Event on Magic Online the day before. I asked him what was the format of the event, and he said it was Time Spiral Block Constructed.
This got my gears turning, because although I would like to play Constructed on MTGO, I don’t have the cards to play Standard (not nearly enough Ravnica dual lands or Ninth Edition rares), and I can’t even dream of being able to afford the cards for Extended. However, I have done a boatload of Time Spiral drafts, so I figured I might be able to either assemble a deck or trade for what I needed.
As it turns out, I was right. Craig had made Top 8 with U/G Scryb Ranger plus Spectral Force, and I was lacking the necessary copies of Call of the Herd, Spectral Force, and Psionic Blast for that deck. However, I was then motivated to track down this Frank Karsten article, where he had a list of possible decks, and it turned out I had every card needed for this one:
Creatures (11)
Lands (26)
Spells (23)
[Yup, I know this is down as a “potential deck for Standard.” We’ll be adding the Time Spiral Block Constructed option ASAP. Thanks for your patience. – Craig.]
According to Karsten, this deck won a 4x Premiere Event about a month ago. The sideboard is Karsten’s approximation; I’ve found that you’ll usually want the full four Riftwing Cloudskates against Green/Red or White beatdown decks, and the one-of Trickbind seems a little odd.
Now, I should note that I was big on Teferi plus Mystical Teachings as soon as Time Spiral was released. Top8magic.com guru Mike Flores and Top8magic.com rugrat Julian Levin are witnesses: when I traveled up to New York for a PTQ in early October, I brought with me a U/R deck that was trying to get an Ophidian Eye attached to Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind. I had an article half-done about the deck, but testing with Mike showed that it just wasn’t yet ready for prime time, so the article went on the scrap heap. Guillaume Wafo-Tapa eventually showed the correct way to go: forget about Red and run Black instant-speed removal alongside Dralnu, Lich Lord. GWT’s “Dralnu du Louvre” deck from Worlds is currently one of the strongest Standard decks on Magic Online.
If you’ve played against Dralnu du Louvre or any similar deck in Standard, then you know the basic strategy of the TSP deck listed above: Teferi is awesome. A comparison to The Flash is no joke – not only does he speed you up by allowing you to Teachings for creatures, but he slows the opponent’s game to a crawl. Considering what Teferi does for your game, even speedsters like Scryb Ranger are left in the dust.
Teferi is the reason that you can have a control deck that has only five maindeck slots devoted to countermagic (and one of those counterspells costs six mana). Cancel is not very impressive; much like Hinder in Kamigawa Block, you run it because you need some counters and there are no better options. Teferi, however, will turn off large chunks of opposing decks. For example, say your opponent is playing White Weenie, a popular deck in TSP Block because it is fairly cheap to build. Once Teferi resolves in that matchup, the aggro deck has to depend on its men to win, because their tricks are no longer very tricky. Fortify and Honorable Passage lose a lot of value, and other cards like Angel’s Grace and Momentary Blink basically lose their entire text boxes, when forced to be played at sorcery speed.
I split in the finals of the first 8-man queue I played with the above decklist (against an opponent who appeared to be running the same deck), which might have been a curse instead of a blessing. That result might have led me to think the deck was better than it actually is. The reality is that the deck has some flaws, and chief among them is that its removal spells don’t actually remove many popular creatures in the format. Sulfurous Blast only kills a Teferi if your opponent makes an unwise block and doesn’t have a counterspell; Strangling Soot doesn’t kill Teferi at all. All you can do to a Spectral Force is counter it or bounce it, and neither of those plans is guaranteed to work if the Green deck hits its mana acceleration the way it wants to.
Eventually, I was getting manhandled in the 8-man queues by a different type of Teferi deck, one which played the control game better in just about every way: its mana is better, it has more countermagic, and it draws cards or tutors for Teferi just as well. I don’t have an exact decklist, but it goes a little something like this:
Creatures (15)
- 4 Mystic Snake
- 4 Wall of Roots
- 1 Brine Elemental
- 1 Draining Whelk
- 1 Fathom Seer
- 3 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
- 1 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
Lands (25)
Spells (20)
Sideboard
This deck has eliminated me from contention in just about every 8-man queue since that first finals split. I always like to say that control begins with mana; thus my opponents would seize the advantage on turn 1 via a suspended Search for Tomorrow and never let go.
Now, I like this sort of deck against other Teferi decks, but it strikes me as slightly weaker against the field. Against White aggro you have absolutely no removal; if you don’t have turn 2 Wall of Roots there can be problems. Against Scryb and Force you can actually take a ton of damage from Scryb Ranger, which is unblockable, unbounceable, and can’t even be locked down by Brine Elemental due to its special ability. Again you’re drawing to one out, and this time it only shows up in post-board games (Serrated Arrows).
I had a version of this deck that tried to abuse Momentary Blink, in concert with Mystic Snake, Riftwing Cloudskate, and even Wall of Roots as needs be. It was destroyed in consecutive 8-mans by another popular cheapie, the Sliver deck. No removal means that each Sliver is almost guaranteed to provide its bonuses until the end of the game, and Teferi isn’t much use when all of your opponent’s tricks are played at sorcery speed anyway by being attached to a Sliver’s body.
Eventually I moved back to the U/B deck, cutting Sulfurous Blast and Bogardan Hellkite altogether in favor of Sudden Death and more morphs to combo with Vesuvan Shapeshifter:
Creatures (11)
- 1 Willbender
- 1 Brine Elemental
- 1 Draining Whelk
- 3 Fathom Seer
- 3 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
- 2 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
Lands (24)
Spells (25)
- 4 Cancel
- 1 Careful Consideration
- 3 Mystical Teachings
- 2 Phyrexian Totem
- 4 Prismatic Lens
- 4 Snapback
- 3 Sudden Death
- 4 Think Twice
Sideboard
Let me tell you, Sudden Death is hot. Once you’ve killed all of your opponent’s copies of Teferi with it you’ll never look back. Sometimes, after a game where it was particularly insane for me, I hallucinate a little and start thinking that I wouldn’t even want Damnation in the deck if it were available.
However, the deck still is not that great against U/G Teferi. Dandan was supposed to be my hot secret tech against opposing Teferi decks, but Wall of Roots can block it all day long. Phyrexian Totem was supposed to shore up the mana acceleration, but you can hardly ever turn it into a creature without allowing the opponent to resolve Teferi. Plus, this decklist is just outgunned against Mystic Snake; it is near impossible to force a threat through.
Obviously, the format in which I played these decks is already irrelevant in the “real” world, and will be irrelevant on MTGO in six days. However, one thing that I have learned about the new format with these misadventures is that Teferi is ridiculously busted, even more so than I thought going in.
Having Damnation might seem like a way to kill the legend, but my experiences suggest that it is not a cure-all. Most Teferi decks, if they untap with him in play, can defend him against non-Split Second effects all day long. His resolution will end the game against most matchups, so not only has Teferi become an axis-pole of the format, but so have the cards that can kill him outright (Sudden Death, Lightning Axe).
In fact, the biggest blowout loss I suffered during the preparation of this article was to a Green/Red Scryb and Force deck that had both Stormbind and Lightning Axe to answer Teferi. The full Time Spiral Block Constructed will be a PTQ format later this year; if you want to take notes on what’s working best, it’s best to start now.
This article written while watching “Hellboy: Sword of Storms,” an animated movie recently released on DVD. I like how Mike Mignola has independently turned the Hellboy character into an industry on its own by finding the right creative mind (Guillermo del Toro) to help him into the movie business; given the tepid reviews that the Ghost Rider movie received, Marvel Comics should be taking notes.
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