You know that Mono-Blue Urzatron deck that everyone and their dog has been playing at Friday Night Magic and on Magic Online? Well Mark took the idea and ran with it, trying to see if it was possible to come up with something incredibly saucy just in time for Regionals. Did it work? There’s only one way to find out!People often ask me about my qualifications. Well, I may not have a lot of “credentials.” Or “training.” But I’ll tell you one thing: I am a Ph.D. in pain.
–From “The Simpsons”
I should make that my bio. Even if people don’t get the reference, it’s no worse than that “dedicated Spike” crap. I don’t know if Knut would go for it, though.
Anyway, I liked Quentin Martin article in which he introduced the mono-Blue Urzatron deck, but as Martin’s GP: Bologna Top 8 shows, he’s a bit more into the Limited play these days, and the article was not entirely in-depth. So, while I may not have Mr. Martin’s qualifications, I hope that the enormous amount of pain that I have experienced from this deck – both inflicting and receiving – can make up for it, as I show you the ins and outs of this bizarre new Standard archetype.
Chris “Star Wars Kid” McDaniel claims that he pioneered the deck, and this article suggests that he has been slinging the Triskelions for many, many moons. Martin credits two MODO accounts whose users’ names I do not know. Other people tell me that it’s a Japanese deck, although they may be thinking that simply because the deck manages to win while also being really weird.
Whoever was responsible for coming up with it, the idea is the same as it has been throughout Magic history: control starts with mana. In this case, the mana provided by Urza’s Power Plant, Urza’s Mine, and Urza’s Tower. Here’s the decklist I started with:
Tramampoline! v1.0
4 Serum Visions
4 Condescend
4 Mana Leak
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Aether Spellbomb
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Solemn Simulacrum
3 Arcbound Reclaimer
3 Triskelion
3 Mindslaver
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Tower
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
9 Island
When I first saw a version of the deck from Alex Majlaton (GP: Seattle T20), I was skeptical that he could deal with Slith Firewalker often enough to beat a major tournament field. Alex indicated his maindeck Aether Spellbombs as the proper answer to this threat. It was only later that I realized just how hot the cog is in concert with Triskelion; this deck’s name comes from the fact that it usually ends games by bouncing its fattest man once or twice with a Spellbomb.
A few games in some non-essential matchups suggested tome that the deck still needed work; however, I will still show you how those matchups went, just so you know what to expect if/when you play against them.
Mono-Red
I tried against Mike Flores‘ Control Red deck first; the Slith Firewalker matchup will come later. Tramampoline posted only a 4-6 record in ten games, including a stellar 0-5 in the first five duels. These games suggest an interesting paradox: although the Blue deck has more countermagic, better card drawing, and Oblivion Stone, it should play as though it is the beatdown in this matchup!
This is because game will develop to a point where the Urzatron deck will eventually have to “go for it,” tapping low to play a Mindslaver or a Triskelion. At that point the Red deck will throw a flurry of burn spells straight to the head, hoping to overload whatever counter mana left open. The sooner you go for it, the higher your life total will be, and you can withstand this flurry of burn.
In those first five games, I tried to wait on going for it until I had countermagic backup, which proved to be a disaster because the Red spells are all at instant speed (and because you’re only running eight counters in the first place). It was only when I changed my strategy, playing Mindslaver and Triskelion as soon as I reached six mana, that the games started to swing in the artifact deck’s favor.
Beacon Green
Good lord, Plow Under is good; mainly on the strength of that one card, the aggro deck posted a 4-6 win in the series. If the Green deck was able to force through a threat and a Plow Under through the countermagic – which is not as difficult as you think, as the Blue deck runs so few counters – then it would win.
In fact, the Blue deck’s light countermagic poses a serious problem well into the late game, because the longer things go on, the bigger each Beacon of Creation (or Eternal Witness, to retrieve earlier countered Beacons) becomes. In a couple of games, the Blue deck would be able to get an O-Stone activated to stop the early rush, but fortunate Divining Top action would lead to “Beacon + Plow Under” to seal up lethal damage. The Blue deck could only sit idly by and watch this happen, its hand full of artifacts.
The best way to win is to get Oblivion Stone recurred a few times, forcing the Green deck to keep spending cards to commit to the board. Once they’ve run out of cards in hand, then you can drop your Trikes and force them to have a fast answer.
Black/Green Control
I wanted to play at least one deck with maindeck Cranial Extraction, so I threw the following decklist onto the Tramampoline:
4 Hana Kami
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Kodama’s Reach
4 Eternal Witness
3 Haru-Onna
3 Kokusho, the Evening Star
3 Death Cloud
3 Soulless Revival
3 Rend Flesh
3 Cranial Extraction
I’ve been fooling around with this deck a little; it was inspired by this article from the Affinity Era, so if you like it, Mr. Klauk deserves all the credit.
Yet another 4-6 loss for the Blue deck, mainly because the Hana Kami engine allows the G/B deck to fight well into the late game. In one game, G/B was targeted with Mindslaver and topdecked Cranial Extraction on the Slaver turn, whereby it was forced to remove all copies of Kokusho from the game … and still won. Back-to-back topdecks of Soulless Revival and Hana Kami later in the game led to recursion of that same Cranial Extraction, simply removing every possible win condition from the artifact deck.
Plus, it’s not only in the late stages where this deck poses a problem. One concern is that in the early game it’s hard to know which spells to counter and which to let resolve. You’d like to let all of the Kodama’s Reaches and such resolve, saving your counters for Extractions and Dragons and such. If you do that, however, the green deck can quickly develop enough mana to force its spells through all but the largest Condescends. In one game a turn 5 Kokusho resolved despite Condescend, and smashed face to the point that an O-Stone activation would lead to lethal life loss.
Making Some Changes
One problem that I noticed from a lot of games, regardless of matchup, was that I sometimes had trouble drawing into my gas. Thirst for Knowledge wasn’t helping with this problem, because there’s so much chaff in the deck that even multiple Thirsts weren’t always finding a win condition. So, I decided that I could avoid Gifts Ungiven no longer; it needed to go into the deck. Much thanks to StarWarsKid for showing me his decklist, which inspired me to cut Thirst for Knowledge and make room for Wayfarer’s Bauble, whereby I arrived at:
Tramampoline v1.5
4 Mana Leak
4 Condescend
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Wayfarer’s Bauble
4 Aether Spellbomb
4 Gifts Ungiven
2 Triskelion
2 Mindslaver
1 Memnarch
1 Skeleton Shard
1 Arcbound Reclaimer
1 Myr Retriever
1 Swamp
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Tower
4 Urza’s Power Plant
9 Island
I cannot emphasize enough how much faster the Gifts and Skeleton Shard version of the deck is over the previous list. Provided you can tutor up the Shard at will, it allows you to dictate the game with the threat of recurring Trikes or Mindslavers. In concert with Myr Retriever, which I had completely overlooked it until I saw SWK’s list, Gifts Ungiven allows you that tutoring power.
The basic Gifts stack to get this is (Artifact X, Arcbound Reclaimer, Skeleton Shard, Myr Retriever), where Artifact X is the first artifact you plan to play. However, plenty of other Gifts plays can be made, derf. On more than one occasion against aggro decks, my first Gifts was simply (two Urza’s Pieces, Solemn Simulacrum, Wayfarer’s Bauble) or even (Island, Swamp, Minamo, Urza’s piece) so as to obtain “play O-Stone + activate” mana by any means necessary.
Yes, that’s Memnarch you saw in the box up there. After the disastrous performance against the G/B deck, where Cranial Extraction naming Triskelion equaled game over, I decided to add Memnarch to the deck as an insurance policy. They’ve added some Regionals this year, but mine still could have upwards of 500 people present; that’s simply too big a tournament for me to risk all of my opponents not having Cranial Extraction or not knowing what to name if it should resolve. The ‘narch seems like the best creature for my insurance slot; something tells me that a five-toughness monster who has a reusable Blatant Thievery ability is pretty good. However, you could also try Clockwork Dragon if you like.
Sadly, the results were not much better. I tested this list against a couple of the titans of the format in a couple more ten-game matches, and against a pair of 4-6 records were posted. Let’s see why.
Mono Red Beats
The problem here is simple mathematics: the Blue deck gets to the midgame by accelerating its mana beyond the point where Molten Rain matters. One of the weapons to do that is Solemn Simulacrum, which costs four mana, and Molten Rain costs three. You don’t have to have a beautiful mind to see where this is headed.
I can’t give you the Red deck that I tested against, because there is certain technology that was shown to me under the condition that I “keep it on the DL.” I can say, however, that it had four Molten Rains and three Zo-zu for land disruption, and that it was not running Arc-Slogger as an attempt to go with a lower mana count. This is a nightmare Red deck configuration for Tramampoline; the Blue deck would actually like Arc-Slogger to be present, clogging the opponent’s hand until it runs into a counterspell or an Oblivion Stone. The “Red Weenie” type builds are worse because every nonland card can be a threat on turns 1-3, when the Blue deck is most vulnerable.
Another interesting stat from this series is that the deck going first posted a record of 8-2, and that the Red deck won every time it went first. Furthermore, the Red deck had the turn 1 play of “land, Mox, Slith Firewalker” only once, in a game where it went first (and obviously won). These issues may be the biggest ones pulling me away from playing Tramampoline on Saturday: as much fun as the deck is, there are few ways to lose as frustrating as “turn 1 Slith, turn 2 Molten Rain, turn 3 topdeck Mindslaver.”
If you do face this matchup, it pays not to get fancy, especially since you likely won’t have a lot of land to spare. Just summon guys as soon as you can, block with the Simulacra, and smash face with the Trikes and Memnarch. If you try to pull off such plays as “Trike + Spellbomb” or “steal all your land with Memnarch” you’re likely to run into the wrong end of a lethal burn spell.
Tooth and Nail
I imagine this is the matchup most of you are wondering about anyway. I used Terry Soh list card-for-card, and the Green deck’s advantage is exactly where you would expect it to be – it can tutor for its Urza lands, while the Blue deck cannot. The Blue deck can Gifts Ungiven for three Urza lands and card X, but obviously the opponent is not going to give you the Urzatron if he can help it, so that tutoring won’t always help.
I’ve heard some folks rave about Crucible of Worlds; if you have one Urza’s piece in play you can make the Gifts stack (Urza’s pieces #2 and #3, Crucible, Reclaimer) which will eventually force the Urzatron into play. This allows you to race Tooth with mana, and of course it’s also good against Red decks. The problem was that in most other matchups the Crucible ended up being an utterly dead card; I ran the Crucible in a recent four-round Friday Night Magic event, and I did not have a need to draw or tutor for it in a single duel. Still, considering how popular Tooth is, Crucible probably belongs in the deck as a one-of.
If you believe the anti-Tooth ranters in various locations on this site, then the problem with that deck is its speed. Jamie Wakefield recent articles seem to suggest that every time an Urza land is played before turn 2, Tooth and Nail is guaranteed to resolve on turn 4 or 5. That’s not quite true; the reason why Tooth is so good is that the deck consists entirely of land-searching, tutors, and win conditions. It has a single-minded focus on getting sufficient mana into play and then breaking the opponent in half with its bombs.
So, while that can lead to turn 4 Tooth, it can also lead to draws where the entire Urzatron is put into play quickly but the Green deck has no action. Tramampoline gives up some of the single-minded devotion for some extra card drawing and control elements, so it rarely has the “no action” problem. In exchange, it has the “no Urzatron” problem a lot more often, which is bad news in the Tooth matchup. The four games that Tramampoline won, it won because it drew into the Urzatron very early, whereby the Blue decks higher-action draws were able to take over the game.
The single-minded focus also gives Tooth tremendous late-game staying power. In more than a few games, the Blue deck was able to use O-Stones or Mindslaver persuasion to remove Duplicant and even Sundering Titan, but a topdecked Tooth for “Kiki-Jiki + Eternal Witness” would led to the control deck getting infinitely Mindslavered right out of the game.
Tramapoline does have equivalent hard locks: “Reclaimer + Shard + Mindslaver,” or “Memnarch + sufficient blue mana + untap phase” are two of them. While both of these will usually lead to a easy win, obtaining them is far from easy, so unless you can establish those board positions against Tooth, they will always have chances for an instant win.
Sideboarding, and the Bottom Line
So, I’ve managed to create a deck that goes 40% versus the field. What an uncanny master I am!
All joking aside, I would not interpret these lackluster testing results to the deck having inherently low quality; it’s more likely that I just haven’t found the right build yet. Crucible of Worlds may well belong in the maindeck so that the Urzatron may be tutored up against Tooth and Nail; Sensei’s Divining Top may also belong to improve your draws against the faster decks in the format. A version of the deck running Trinket Mage took first place at Chilean Regionals; maybe that extra tutoring power on a 2/2 body is just what the deck needs. So, if you’re looking to play this deck, then customization for the expected metagame will be a big factor.
Another factor to beware of is the slowness of the deck in terms of the time on the clock. You are playing a lot of cards, like Gifts and Mindslaver, which are very time-intensive. Draws are a real danger. As mentioned above, I took the deck to a recent Friday Night Magic event, where I went 2-0-2. I defeated a Rats deck and a bad version of Beacon Green, but I drew with a good Beacon deck and a Blue/Green control deck. In both of the drawn matches I had established easily won positions in game 3, but I could not actually finish in time, even with Triskelion in play.
So, why then would you play this deck? Well, for one thing, the Gifts Ungiven version is pretty strong against non-Red Weenie, non-Tooth decks. The bad records against Green/Black and Beacon Green were posted by the much-inferior Gifts-less version, and the speed of the Gifts engine improves those matchups quite a bit, although I did not have time to get in full ten-game series here.
A second reason to play the deck is to give yourself a chance to outplay people; as Martin pointed out, the more decisions that you offer your opponent, the more likely they are to go wrong. A third reason is that it is simply a ton of fun to play with all of these powerful spells and broken interactions; few things are as enjoyable as the look on an opponent’s face when you throw Memnarch down onto an empty board and they don’t have an answer.
Of course, if fun is what you are looking for, then you’d have to do something about the notorious fun-killing Slith Firewalker, which is where the sideboard comes in. Three Echoing Truth are a given, to answer troublesome cards like Beacon of Creation, Pithing Needle, or Damping Matrix. Three Annul are probably a wise choice, to stop Tooth and Nail’s Mindslavers and Oblivion Stones (as well as for the mirror).
Most people recommend Sun Droplet against Red, which has the bonus of being invulnerable against Pithing Needle and Damping Matrix. However, once Slith Firewalker gets big enough – and even with all of your countermagic and bounce effects, he’s got a good chance – not even the Droplet will save you. So I’ve been experimenting with Bottle Gnomes lately, and they are good enough to at least consider. One thing to keep in mind is that the Gifts stack of (Gnomes, Shard, Retriever, Reclaimer) will lead to Gnome recursion, which is nice against just about every aggro deck in the format.
I run a couple of Duplicants in my board; no matter what Tooth and Nail brings in against you, Dupes is a solid answer, and it’s not bad against other decks either. Between main deck and sideboard I think you want a total of three Crucibles, because you have to draw them against land destruction but you very rarely want to draw two copies.
The remaining slot is customizable for your metagame; for example, if you were expecting a lot of mono-Blue control, then you’d probably want another Mindslaver or Memnarch or other anti-control card. I prefer Clockwork Dragon, as an answer to Cranial Extraction and Mono-Green Aggro decks.
So here is the list which I am considering for this weekend:
Tramampoline v2.0
Creatures (9)
Lands (24)
Spells (27)
- 4 Mana Leak
- 4 Gifts Ungiven
- 1 Crucible of Worlds
- 4 Oblivion Stone
- 1 Mindslaver
- 4 Wayfarer's Bauble
- 4 Condescend
- 1 Skeleton Shard
- 4 Aether Spellbomb
Sideboard
Sideboarding in most matchups is fairly self-explanatory. However, I’m sure that looks like a ridiculous number of cards to bring in against creature-based Red decks, so let me explain how you would board in that matchup:
-1 Mindslaver
-1 Memnarch
-4 Oblivion Stone
-1 Gifts Ungiven
-1 Myr Retriever
-1 Arcbound Reclaimer
+4 Bottle Gnomes (or Sun Droplet, if you choose to go that way)
+3 Echoing Truth
+2 Crucible of Worlds
The Slaver, Memnarch, and O-Stones are simply too slow. Skeleton Shard is your fastest form of recursion, and it’s good with the Gnomes, so it’s the only part of the combo that stays in. You cut one copy of Gifts Ungiven simply because your preferable four-mana play is Solemn Simulacrum almost every time, so you can get away with cutting one Gifts.
Until next time, here’s hoping you have good luck at Regionals.
This article written while listening to Common’s “Be.”
mm underscore young at yahoo dot com
Later.