Interesting thing, the metagame. People used to watch the U.S. Meatgrinders with sweaty palms for their Standard Constructed highs and lows, but in an age where Magic Online and foreign Nationals give us an almost constant stream of tournament information, the metagame can shift, on an almost constant basis, with greater swings than ever before… The non-Tooth and Nail bits, anyway.
A little less than a month ago I built what I figured would be the Ultimate Deck ™ for U.S. Nationals. Basically I took a regular old Blue control deck and tuned it to crush Tooth and Nail.
Creatures (5)
Lands (21)
Spells (34)
- 4 Hinder
- 4 Quash
- 4 Mana Leak
- 4 Boomerang
- 4 Vedalken Shackles
- 4 Thirst for Knowledge
- 2 Bribery
- 4 Wayfarer's Bauble
- 4 Chrome Mox
Sideboard
Generally, I have a moral objection to four mana permission spells. I come from a school where we like to counter threats with reactive cards that cost less mana than the threats that are coming at us. This basic belief is that counter decks should keep things like nine mana sorceries in check, but in this format, that just hasn’t happened. Why? Similar to Why Dave Price Goes Second, the Tooth and Nail deck just has more “stuff” than the average Blue Control deck. It is easiest to think about this if we look at a non-templated Blue Control deck and any old Tooth and Nail deck.
Any Old Tooth And Nail Deck (i.e. Terry Soh Troll and Nail from the Invitational)
10 Forest
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Urza’s Tower
2 Duplicant
4 Eternal Witness
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
2 Sundering Titan
4 Kodama’s Reach
3 Mindslaver
3 Oblivion Stone
1 Plow Under
3 Reap and Sow
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Sylvan Scrying
3 Tooth and Nail
Sideboard:
2 Iwamori of the Open Fist
2 Molder Slug
3 Plow Under
2 Razormane Masticore
4 Troll Ascetic
2 Vine Trellis
The Original Blue Control (i.e. My Deck from the 2004 Championship Deck Challenge)
4 Relic Barrier
4 Vedalken Shackles
4 Annul
3 Condescend
4 Echoing Truth
4 Hinder
2 Inspiration
1 Keiga, the Tide Star
4 Mana Leak
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
18 Island
4 Stalking Stones
Sideboard:
2 Duplicant
2 Oblivion Stone
2 Bribery
4 March of the Machines
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
4 Temporal Adept
Look at how these decks line up. The Blue deck has a lot of ways to say hells no!: 3 Condescend, 4 Hinder, 4 Mana Leak, and conditionally 4 Annul.
Now look at the threats presented by Troll and Nail. The only real “must counter” cards are Sundering Titan, Mindslaver, Tooth and Nail, and conditionally Eternal Witness… but that’s not how it works out, is it? In the early game, the Blue Control deck will take any opportunity to shoot down a Sakura-Tribe Elder, Kodama’s Reach, or certainly – and quite worriedly – any Sylvan Scrying. Condescend and Mana Leak get worse as the game goes by, and get particularly worse against a deck Thawing out more lands. These aren’t “must counter” cards so much as “gotta counter” cards, because the long-term ramifications of not countering the cards can be dire.
Moreover, the only legitimate hard counter in the above version of Blue Control is Hinder. Notice how Hinder does exactly what you want it to do and screws over Eternal Witness… But doesn’t actually exhaust the Troll and Nail deck’s resources as both decks advance turn to turn. Over the course of the game, even while drawing extra cards, the Blue Control deck can run out of relevant counters whereas the Troll and Nail deck can eventually draw the same Tooth and Nail that got shuffled away two turns ago. The long and the short of it? The Blue deck (typically) needs time to win, and given time, the Troll and Nail deck can draw out of reactive one-for-ones.
This understanding is where the new version of Blue Control has its origins. Any halfway decent Deck Game aficionado would be able to tell you that the main modification of the deck in question is the removal of poopy Rewind from Gabriel Nassif Invitational deck for the much better four mana counter, the unusual Quash. Quash does something that hard-counter Rewind doesn’t: it disrupts Tooth and Nail’s long-term plan. Instead of just postponing the reappearance of a threat card like Hinder does, or going completely obsolete in the face of superior mana acceleration like Condescend, Quash Guts The Tooth And Nail Deck. It comes in, cuts out a vital organ, and throws it in the corner for the remainder of the game.
The main goal of Troll and Nail or any similar variation is to Entwine the big nine and have at it with giants. One Quash aimed at a Reap and Sow or Kodama’s Reach can prevent that from happening before the game is essentially over, while a Quash sent at the deck’s namesake spell itself completely devalues the potential of the opponent’s draw quality; you resolve Quash on Tooth and it’s more-or-less smooth sailing from there. Just counter the hard-cast artifacts and Thieving Magpie should carry it.
Another way to look at Quash in this most important matchup is the interplay, the dance, between threat deck and answer theory. In the mid-game, great players consistently outmaneuver control players by sequencing their threats correctly, exhausting either the control deck’s tenuous blue mana count or simply running them out of counters. Resolving Sakura-Tribe Elder or Kodama’s Reach in the early game is a key element in overcoming the former, and stray mana accelerators make great permission bait later. You know how the threat deck is just waiting for that perfect turn, where he busts out, seemingly loses a battle of attrition only to reveal that his last card was an Eternal Witness?
Against even a single resolved Quash, those beautifully orchestrated turns just don’t come up. The reason? The threat deck – in this case the Tooth deck – doesn’t have the threats to bait with anymore, let alone to close.
You can probably tell that I had a lot of success in testing this matchup. It shouldn’t be surprising, of course. Nassif’s core deck had a lot of nice things going for it, and a deck equipped with 4 Boomerang, 4 Quash, and a pair of Briberies really has no fear of Tooth and Nail. Boomerang is the unsung hero of the matchup; it can be used to break up the UrzaTron, to go Stone Rain on turn 2 if the opponent hasn’t made a land drop, or to foil Reap and Sow with Entwine (my favorite). This card buys the Blue Control deck the time it needs to establish Thieving Magpie snake advantage, which pulls the Hinder– and Quash-heavy Blue Control deck into a position where Tooth and Nail can’t compete at all, and very quickly. Chrome Mox and Wayfarer’s Bauble aren’t as good as Sakura-Tribe Elder or Kodama’s Reach, but because the Blue deck’s answers are all so much faster than the Tooth deck’s big time threats, they’re good enough as long as Thirst for Knowledge or Thieving Magpie keep the cards flowing. Finally, Bribery at seven or more mana is usually game. I like to go for Eternal Witness first, picking up Bribery again, then setting up for the Kiki-Jiki long game (i.e. a hand that’s never without a Hinder). This plan is fantastic for loose games or games where you’re way ahead due to Boomerang or Magpie already, but there is no reason why a man with a Counterspell in his hand can’t just grab a giant and work to end the game but quickly.
The matchup against Tooth was so good I even cut the Temporal Adepts from the sideboard. You’ll remember that I have been advocating Adepts not just since the Standard LCQ in Columbus, but as a Replenish-breaker since Grudge Match and even Regionals 2000! And really, Tooth and Nail is just a poor Replenish deck.
As for the other matchups, I tested, not surprisingly, against my own Red Deck quite a bit. The matchup was, too, a blowout in favor of Quash Blue. If Quash is good against Tooth and Nail, it is great against Kuroda-style Red. My Red Deck, though probably the second most powerful deck in Standard in terms of overall card quality, lacks renewable resources. Consider a deck like Joshie Green. Joshie Green is low on the power scale but has respectable speed and many renewable resources. A single Rushwood Dryad has a time delay of one turn but can attack for 2, 4, 6, or more damage. A Magma Jet is very quick and has a vital role to play, but can only deal 2 damage the entire game. Quash’s best destiny is to imprint Chrome Mox when facing the Green beatdown speed of Joshie Green, but it is the death knell to a deck like Kuroda-style Red.
Have you ever had one of those hands that is very hot? The kind that you can’t really hold, but have to lay down, because your fingers are smoldering as you wait for your opponent to pass? Sometimes you have two Beacons and a Shrapnel Blast, and are working the Top, and you want to start test-spelling at the end of the opponent’s turn. Your Top is going to give you all the fire you need, so you don’t even care if your spells resolve… That’s your theory until you hit Quash. What happens when you not only lose the Beacon you cast, but the Beacon you are holding, and access to all future Beacons? What happens when you get stripped for multiple burn spells? Quash is worse than a Hymn to Tourach against Kuroda-style Red. It forces desperation. It makes Red Decks do stupid things like – gasp – try to play creatures. Here Vedalken Shackles… Here Boy… Something not very nice inevitably happens, Arc-Sloggers betray their paps and mams, and it’s off to the boards with crossed fingers.
To be fair, the games between my Red Deck and Quash Blue were quite close, much closer than the Tooth and Nail games on the numbers… but that is just because barring Tooth and Nail itself, the big Forest deck doesn’t post a lot of offense whereas the Kuroda-style Red deck is perfectly willing to burn the Blue Control to 4 or 2 or even fewer life points before completely petering out of threats. It’s just a matter of deck composition; in terms of overall game counts, Tooth actually did a little better, though it ended way behind.
The last matchup I tested was Medium Green, essentially the Blackman deck from the Philadelphia LCQ. After mauling Big Red and Troll and Nail consistently, Quash Blue merely beat Medium Green about 2 games out of 3. This opening trio of results obviously had people excited for Nats.
Sadin and Teddy Cardgame (for his sub-vassals rather than his journalistic self, natch) of course pledged to go with “whatever I said” after last year, and Josh started branching out into more opposing decks in the metagame. We didn’t actually get around to testing Aggro Red, but figured that 4 Threads out of the board would go a long way in a historically favorable matchup. 4 Annul was a must for Blue Urza, and I would have started them to be honest, but eight distinct counters that only took out specialized threats didn’t seem like a recipe for consistency. Blue Urza actually looked scary until we realized that it could really only win with three cards or so, and that a couple of Annuls and a hard counter would put them into “deck me” range.
That’s how the sideboard listed above came together. Annuls for general hate, Briberies to shore up the Tooth matchup, Threads for Aggro Red and other little men matchups, Boseijus to counter the Big Red sideboard strategy. I never approved of Spectral Shift, but it looked, increasingly, like Boil was going to be a non-issue, so I decided I wanted a card for Troll Ascetic. Mono-Blue posted only two measly invitations to Nats at all, one third those of a minority deck like Kuroda-style Red. Boil seemed like a waste of sideboard space for decks that could run Zo-Zu anyway… ultimately meaning that a new, sneaky, Blue deck could catch the metagame unaware.
And then France killed my deck.
Blue Urza we knew about. That was fine. But three more Islands-based decks in the Top 8? That kind of threw a wet blanket on the whole “surprise” theory. Quash Blue is a lot less good with Boils gunning for it full blaze instead of at half-mast… Tapping out for that Threads of Disloyalty early looked a lot less exciting.
Worse was the prospect of Actually Having To Fight Another Blue Deck. I was quite happy with Quash Blue as it had been tested against the extremes of the metagame, but at no point did I consider having to beat a deck with – GASP – Jushi Apprentice main. Just look at Christophe Peyronnel’s deck from the French Top 8:
Creatures (6)
Lands (21)
Spells (33)
Assume for a moment that all things equal, two similar decks split games evenly, that any given “mirror” ends up about 50/50. What would throw a monkey wrench into that? Why don’t the percentages really fall that way? Let’s use simple numbers: In games on the play, Christophe’s deck is going to have Jushi Apprentice a little more than 35% of the time. Since Chrome Moxes cancel, that means that roughly 18% of the time, my deck loses to Christophe’s deck automatically. He gets Apprentice, I either answer it immediately or lose; I am down probably two cards even if I can successfully bounce and counter. You can get into arguments about draw quality and the net effect of bouncing stuff and dueling with instants and mana flow, but in broad numbers, if the matchup plays exactly 50% for the rest of the games (including games on the draw where Christophe is almost 40% to have Jushi Apprentice), then without testing a single game I can tell you that the best matchup percentage Quash Blue could reasonably expect would be around 41%. Best case scenario Quash Blue ends up down 1-2 cards in a matchup where Quash is quite mediocre…
I’m guessing the games would not split right down the middle.
Michael Remlinger’s deck is even worse! He has three Jushi Apprentices too, but his beaters are free long game and he has four more lands… and he made his National Team.
Creatures (6)
Lands (25)
Spells (29)
Who wants to play under these conditions?
Don’t get me wrong, I think Quash Blue could be competitive even in a format where Blue is back on the radar, where Boil is once again an automatic sideboard option, and even where other Islands-driven decks are jockeying for the same space… But at the end of the day, being clever, being different, just didn’t seem worth it. When you play a somewhat underpowered rogue deck, your motivation is to crawl into the cracks in the format, find the spots where no one is gunning for you, take someone by surprise. Maybe he didn’t test. Maybe he didn’t sideboard properly. Ideally, you’ve caught the room off-equilibrium and the opponents gunning for the wrong guys go down like dominoes. When everything is falling into place, people are playing around counters that aren’t in your deck while you bash them with 3/1s, they are siding in a million enchantment control cards and end up facing turn 1 Phyrexian Negator, or they are trying to figure out how in the hell they are supposed to play against your Ramosian Sergeant when you have UUW open, a fist full of permission, and a grin on your face; basically, you look like a genius. When one or more of those things is no longer the case, or when none of them are, you are just another guy with a donkey deck. hee effin haw.
As I write this, several days before the Standard portion of U.S. Nationals, I am guessing there will be zero Quashes in the main decks of this year’s participants. Probably that is exactly correct.
LOVE
MIKE