The first time someone in my playgroup made a PTQ Top 8, the format was Mirage Block Constructed. My old friend Marcus Eakes (who was still qualified for U.S. Nationals on rating as of 2004, but couldn’t travel much outside of the Midwest) was playing a W/R control deck of his own design. It was built around the Sands of Time / Equipoise combo and finished its opponents off using Bosium Strip to rebuy Incinerate and some other burn spell that I have forgotten, maybe Fireblast. In the finals, Marcus seemed a big favorite against a completely unknown opponent.
This opponent piloted an ungainly-looking control deck that seemed to feature every color under the sun. He used Undiscovered Paradise to bring forth Memory Lapse, Incinerate, Disenchant, you name it. This opponent had whipped me earlier in the Swiss, but my deck was awful … it shocked us all when he also rolled over Marcus in the finals. Both Marcus and I believed that this fellow was stacking his deck, but two judges were watching the supposed deck-stacking during the finals*. We ascribed the opponent’s victory to big cheats, but neither of us followed Magic on the then-youthful Internet. If we had, we would have learned that his deck actually might have been good.
A year or two later, the five-color control decks arrived. The idea was to use Wrath of God, Swords to Plowshares, and Wall of Blossoms to stop early beatdown, and let Blue counterspells and card advantage spells take over later on. I forget what the key Red and Black spells were, but they were probably well worth splashing for. Sometimes a lone giant flier would provide the win, but some of these builds simply stalled the game out and decked the opposition with Gaea’s Blessing. Mike Flores wrote an article about this concept when Krosan Tusker got printed, since he thought the Tusker’s cycle ability and Onslaught fetch-lands could enable a five-color strategy, but that article was for the now-defunct Sideboard website and has vanished into the aether.
Lots of people got excited about the four- and five-color strategy with the reprinting of Whispers of the Muse and Gaea’s Blessing in Time Spiral, but it didn’t quite work out; during our testing at the Time Spiral prerelease, Mike Flores was concerned about tapping low for a Whispers and having the opponent respond with Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir. However, Block Constructed has shown the way, first with Olivier Ruel’s Coalition Relic deck from Grand Prix: Montreal and later with Adrian Sullivan’s Baron deck from the Chicago PTQ that same weekend.
All of that long-winded intro is really just to tell you what I was thinking when I assembled this decklist:
Lands (21)
Spells (39)
Yes, there are some obvious similarities to Pat Chapin’s list from Monday — I usually start my articles over the weekend, and when I saw Pat’s deck my hope of stealing the Innovator title for a week was dashed. We were both clearly influenced by Sullivan’s Block deck; I’ve also wanted to play Gaea’s Blessing since it was reprinted. After reading about Pat’s intensity regarding U.S. Nationals, I assume he has tested his deck a lot more than I have mine; Westside is still in the planning stages as I work on Time Spiral Block Constructed for a PTQ I may be attending this weekend.
Anyway, the big difference with my deck is that I am not trying to use Coalition Relic. Don’t get me wrong, I love that card in a major way, but I have no desire to run it into a Rune Snag in the control mirror. It also doesn’t do much in the way of enabling a turn 3 Damnation or a turn 3 transmute into Urborg for Damnation. As the deck’s name might indicate, I am simply trying to abuse Tolaria West. Against control matchups drawing a Lens is nice, and a Mind Stone even better, but best of all would be this sequence:
* Play Crucible of Worlds.
* Transmute for an Aqueduct and play Tolaria West out of the bin.
* Next turn, play the bounceland and return Tolaria West to hand.
* Repeat.
I admit it, two Crucibles may be too many. Chapin says he is considering cutting the Crucible from his deck entirely. I just can’t help myself; synergies like this are so exciting. Hell, just playing Tolaria West out of the bin after transmuting seems so exciting. This is actually a big drawback of designing around Careful Consideration; you get lazy on the numbers of certain cards in your deck (the Crucibles, in this case) because you figure you can just discard the extra copies to CareCon. Anyway, the ability to transmute for land, and then guarantee that you hit your drops for the next several turns, is so good for a control deck that I think it may be possible to have a creature-free win condition. Well, nontoken-creature-free win condition, I guess.
First, you have the ever-reliable two copies of Urza’s Factory, which will keep coming back for an encore thanks to Crucible. Next, there’s Beacon of Destruction, which fills a nice spot as both spot removal and as a path to a win. You have to draw quite a bit of your deck to see the Beacon multiple times, but this deck will draw a very large amount of cards as long as it isn’t dead by turn 5. Normally my only real concern would be some other control deck countering the Beacon, and then hitting it with Extirpate, but even that’s not much of a problem thanks to Research/Development.
R&D is a last-minute, but very exciting, change that was suggested in the forums to Pat’s article; originally this deck was five colors, and this slot was filled by the goofy Beacon of Immortality. Half of the split card allows you to skirt Extirpate and other RFG effects, as well as recycle used Mystical Teachings as needed (for example, it can be quite awkward to use Gaea’s Blessing to shuffle in a one-of like Pact of Negation, and then have no Teachings left in your deck to tutor for it). The other half is either a win condition, or a way to increase your amount of extra cards drawn from “impressive” to “embarrassing blowout.” In the late game you will be recycling R&D over and over with Gaea’s Blessing, and your biggest concern will be preventing yourself from being accidentally decked.
You might click away from the article when I admit this, but I actually considered Cancel over Remand. The reason is that being able to say a hard “no” is a much bigger issue in Standard than in Block. For example, decks like this one can have a very hard time beating Project X unless they can deny the Crypt Champion, or at least draw Castigates away from the Tendrils of Corruption that you would like to target the Champion with. However, I’m going to try Pact of Negation as the lone hard “no” in the deck for now, since you can Teachings for it and play it in the same turn. The fact that Remand is yet more card-drawing was a big factor in this decision.
The sideboard is even more a work in progress than the maindeck, because of the last-minute addition of Research/Development. There’s a temptation to build it almost like a Wish sideboard in Extended. The other two copies of Tendrils of Corruption are guaranteed, and more copies of each of the maindeck Pacts seems like a good idea. Three Tormod’s Crypt are likely: although I wouldn’t expect to see a ton of Dredge decks at Nationals, everybody and their brother seems to be testing a deck with Life From the Loam, Seismic Assault, Goblin Lore, et cetera. Krosan Grip provides an uncounterable answer to problematic permanents, and Extirpate does the same for sorceries and instants. So, the first draft of my board might look something like this:
3 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Tendrils of Corruption
1 Pact of Negation
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Putrefy
1 Krosan Grip
1 Extirpate
1 Draining Whelk
4 Repeal
You might ask why I’ve given you this deck, when it’s so clearly in the early stages. First of all, for many of my readers there’s not much point in getting the deck out there after U.S. Nationals. Certain aspects of my life, both Magical and non-Magical, may keep me from giving you an article next week. Thus, if I want you to see the power of the Tolaria West plus Crucible of Worlds engine, which received almost no publicity in Chapin’s article, then this is my last best shot to do so.
Second, I decided the concept of this deck was much more important than a tuned decklist. The core of the deck is the Westside transmute engine and the Mystical Teachings package; beyond that, it’s infinitely customizable thanks to the possibilities offered by Research/Development. For example, let’s say that you were concerned about the deck being too slow to win 50-minute rounds for you. You could run a single Teferi in the maindeck (let’s face it, at least one of those Crucibles is ripe for the axe) and have cards like Skeletal Vampire or Triskelavus in your sideboard. In fact, why stop there! With Research/Development you can give yourself access to entire combo finishes that end the game in a turn or two: Niv-Mizzet/Ophidian Eye, Brine Elemental/Vesuvan Shapeshifter, or Djinn Illuminatus/Pact of the Titan/Angel’s Grace. Don’t be afraid to experiment like this on your own; it may require some tinkering with the manabase, but it also may prove to be a winner if you can get it to work.
Still, the deck is still a work in progress, and seeing Chapin’s list has motivated me a little bit: I love his maindeck Putrefy, and I had forgotten about running snow-covered basics and thus being able to transmute for Mouth of Ronom. I present it to you so that you can see there’s more than one way to bring the four- and five-color decks back. I just hope that deck-stacking fellow isn’t playing Magic anymore.
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* He was clearly laying out his deck in piles of spell/spell/land, and he appeared to be “breaking the bridge” while shuffling the piles, but judges were more naive about such tactics in those days, at least in Kansas.