There was a PTQ in Rockville, Maryland last Saturday. As I rely on public transportation, it is difficult for me to get to qualifiers anywhere other than Rockville (or, ironically, New York City), so this was basically my first Extended PTQ of the season.
I went 0-2 and dropped to play a City Champs event (in which I finished second, so the day wasn’t a complete loss). You might think that there’s not much to be learned from an 0-2, and sometimes there certainly isn’t. However, if I can’t learn something even from the ugly tournaments, then StarCityGames.com probably ought to be paying somebody else for this slot. My lesson learned comes in two parts.
Part 1: My Deck
I had planned to run Affinity, because I thought that it was clearly the best beatdown deck – “Aggro” Loam is clearly misnamed, and I don’t trust the mana on some of these Zoo decks – and people don’t seem to be planning for it. My last Extended PTQ Top 8 had come via beatdown, a couple years ago when I was running Vial Goblins, so I thought going back to aggression would get me back to glory. Plus, I do have some experience with the Affinity deck. So I walked into the PTQ venue on Saturday with this deck:
Creatures (20)
Lands (20)
Spells (20)
Sideboard
Nothing spectacular, as you can see. Pretty much identical to the list that Bill Stark made Top 8 at a PTQ in Indianapolis with – you can check out this Flores article on MagictheGathering.com for Stark’s list. I just wanted to continue the recent trend toward Shrapnel Blast-heavy Affinity builds doing well in PTQs.
However, there is a clear mistake in my Affinity list. (We’ll set aside the question of whether or not playing Affinity was itself a mistake.) It might not be obvious, especially if you have not been seeing a lot of Affinity in your local formats. It probably was completely irrelevant to Stark, as his PTQ was early in the season before it became clear that people weren’t planning against Affinity. However, turns in the metagame and a little bad luck in the pairing system laid my mistake bare for a large number of Maryland PTQ regulars to see.
Put simply, Krosan Grip was a bad choice. I had immediately recognized what purpose it was supposed to serve in Stark’s board: it could destroy an Isochron Scepter without fear of being countered, with useful splash damage on Pernicious Deed, Seismic Assault, Umezawa’s Jitte, and the mirror. However, the metagame had shifted between Stark’s event and mine, and a very large number of players showed up in Rockville thinking exactly the same way I had. Affinity was everywhere, and eventually took one slot in the Top 8 in the hands of Don “The Dragon” Huang.
In round 1 I faced an Affinity deck with Somber Hoverguard – a fine weapon for the mirror, as both sides will usually draw into Arcbound Ravager and / or Cranial Plating but the ground will be stalled. My opponent also had Pithing Needle maindeck, which was surprisingly useful as he could just Needle whichever of the Ravager / Plating pair would be worst for me to play on my next turn. I won the first game by piling Ravager counters on an Ornithopter which might have gone all the way by itself, but I topdecked Shrapnel Blast just to make sure my opponent didn’t get a chance to deal with the ‘thopter.
That would be the last win for me in Constructed that day. The Krosan Grips were virtually useless in the post-boarded games; while I was waiting to obtain three mana including a Green, he built up a powerful board. He matched my Arcbound Ravagers on the ground while the Hoverguards smashed me in the air. In round 2 I faced Maryland-area pro Sam Wasserman in another mirror match. Sam whipped me in two quick games: I simply drew fewer creatures, although knowing I had a bad sideboard for the matchup caused me to play quite poorly also.
Now, you might say that two matches is too small of a sample size to make a definitive judgment about Krosan Grip being unfit for the board. That’s a fair argument, and I don’t entirely disagree. However, the format is simply too wide open to get large enough sample sizes in every matchup. There are too many decks, and the Top 8 lists are available for free from either MagictheGathering.com or here on StarCityGames.com, so any one of those decks could suddenly take the format by storm. You have to get what testing in that you can, and otherwise you just have to make some strategic assessments of your deck and exercise some good judgment.
The Grip’s inferiority was that it was too slow to solve those problems that it’s supposed to solve. It was a clear case of strategic inferiority, evident from the first game I played with it and not ever going away. It was not the sort of thing that you could put off on bad draws, bad luck, or other low-probability events that would result from a small sample size. Even when I drew it and played it, it didn’t get done what I needed it to do. In my book, that’s a strategically bad card.
Ancient Grudge is the correct card for these slots; I’d say that it’s the best artifact hate in the format, even surpassing Kataki, because it does everything that you needed Krosan Grip to do against “enough” of the format. Being an instant that is basically castable twice in the same turn is good enough to stop Isochron Scepter in most cases. Umezawa’s Jitte will get their four life, but they’ll also be leery of playing a second Jitte as long as that Ancient Grudge sits in the graveyard and Green mana is possible.
Not hitting enchantments hurts a little, but a large percentage of the enchantments you need to worry about (Deed, Assault, Opposition) can be handled by other cards in your sideboard, such as Pithing Needle. This is what I mean about Ancient Grudge being the right card for “enough” of the format; sure, you might run into some rogue Enchantress deck in the first round and want to kill yourself for removing the Grips. However, the percentage you gain against other more popular matchups will make up for that fairly low-probability event, especially if as much Affinity turns out in your local events as did in mine.
Of course, you might also say that I could not have known that so much Affinity was going to show up, and that the format could have been such that the Grip would be better. That’s also a fair argument, and it leads into my next point…
Part 2: The Road Not Taken
Although I was prepared to play Affinity, as often happens, some other deck popped up late in the preparation game and threw a monkey wrench in the works. In this case, it was the newest creation from Mike Flores, which I received via IM. You might think I was talking about the “Bests” deck, or the Flow Domain deck, but no. The thing you need to know about Mike is that he builds decks the way that the Japanese produce animation – he had already moved on to a new creation, which he told me was the best of the three. Actually, it wasn’t much of a “new” deck if you’ve been listening to the top8magic.com podcasts; Mike has mentioned “the Blue/Green deck” on and off for a few weeks now, but apparently it wasn’t quite ready for prime time until now.
I don’t have permission from Mike to give the decklist, but he can give it in his article if he likes – it was basically a U/G control deck with Trinket Mage, Gifts Ungiven, and a Living Wish package. The deck has a lot of cards and combos I like, especially Trinket Mage plus Chalice of the Void, and Life From the Loam plus cycling lands. However, I was a little leery about playing a mid-range deck in this format. Most decks either have a strong early game – Affinity is an obvious case, or Aggro Loam setting up a giant Terravore by turn 4 – or they play defense into the late game, as U/W Tron decks often do. Some formats allow you to be in between those two states, and some don’t; for this one, between seemed a dicey location to be in. You couldn’t get me to play The Rock if my life depended upon it (sorry, Jeroen), and my experiment in the City Championships with the Flores G/W Haterator was highly disappointing.
I didn’t play the U/G deck because Mike claimed that it was good versus everything except Big Mana Blue, “and nobody plays that anymore.” Well, maybe not in New York, but I was concerned that Maryland would be a different story. Morgan Douglass was testing U/W Urzatron at the PTQ venue on Friday night, and a couple of other players were looking for the same cards. Last year, Shaheen “Shawn” Soorani won a PTQ with his trademark U/W control deck with Temple of the False God, and eventually upwards of twenty people per tournament were playing it by the end of the season. I fully expected Shawn’s U/W Tron deck from Worlds to have the same level of adoption.
As it turned out, two players took U/W Tron into the Top 8 of the PTQ, including Morgan. However, the deck appeared to be widely under-represented in the tournament field, which tended toward Affinity, Boros Deck Wins, and beatdown decks of varying colors and dependence upon Gaea’s Might. There were a few people summoning Solemn Simulacrum (a hallmark of Soorani-worship), but not a scary number when you consider that it was a 137-person tournament. By contrast, a field full of mirror matches and decks with access to Ancient Grudge is not exactly what I am looking for when I play Affinity.
It’s true that I can only say that Krosan Grip was bad, and that Flores U/G would have been a decent choice, based upon hindsight. Typically you don’t want to draw conclusions from hindsight, since you don’t have the benefit of hindsight when you have to make a decision. In this case, though, it’s not hindsight as much as it’s realizing that I had put a bad read on the metagame… if I want to be the sort of player that can win a PTQ, that’s one of the skills I’ll have to develop.
This article goes out to Geordie Tait, recently banned from the StarCityGames.com forums. Having read the offending post, I definitely think that its owner would have deserved banning no matter who he was. That doesn’t mean that I won’t miss GT’s unmistakable forum voice.
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