Players will regularly tune their maindeck within an inch of its life and then throw together their sideboard five minutes before the tournament without much regard to details like color requirements and mana curves that are key considerations for the maindeck. The post-sideboard decklists must be considered as decks to be built! Once the requirements of the post-sideboard configurations you want are known, finding the right maindeck from among the 75 cards you want after sideboarding is usually possible with very little sacrifice. There are exceptions where there is a card you want in game 1 everywhere and games 2 and 3 almost nowhere due to the fact that your opponents are sideboarding too, but this is relatively rare.

#TeamSCG’s Bant deck for San Diego was an excellent candidate for the Elephant. It’s a tuner’s deck, where between games you are choosing the tools you want against a particular opponent with a particular decklist and style of play rather than reaching to the sideboard for silver bullets or other hate, so it’s important to give careful thought to what configurations the deck wants. Cards that seem good can end up proving to be minimal upgrades when they’re compared to the cards you’re taking out, and in other places having one more solid card can be a much bigger upgrade than it might appear to be.

When we were getting ready to depart Portland for San Diego, I’d played a lot of games against Bant by this point, so I had a good idea which cards each of the other decks in our gauntlet would least want to see Bant play even though I’d never shuffled up Bant myself. There were several very different lists running around, none of which had all the cards I was interested in, but I could see that Bant had the tools to handle everything in the format.

The deck started to click into place for me, as I was able to picture a configuration for each matchup that I felt would have the advantage after sideboarding. Voice of Resurgence would compensate for Esper Control’s Sin Collectors and the ability to blank Supreme Verdict in game 1 (at the time we didn’t know they would all maindeck creatures anyway), and after sideboarding that would cease to be an issue and you could beat them at their own game.

In many places, I was particularly interested in the dilemma of Plasm Capture versus Advent of the Wurm and the option to move between Angel of Serenity and Aetherling as our endgame creature. When we passed the turn with four mana available, opponents would have to guess which card we were holding, if any, and even which of them we had in our deck at the time.

To see if those configurations were realistic and what the resulting deck would look like, I sat down to use my time on the plane to Elephant the Bant deck. At the start of an Elephant process, it’s better to be greedy and list too many cards rather than too few so for each matchup the configuration is the best case you could possibly get; each matchup gets to act like it is the most important one.

The Mana Base

The mana base comes first. Plasm Capture was a card I knew I’d have at least two of and at the time wanted access to three of since that was my plan in some matchups, so it was important not to have more than one Plains. At the time, there was minimal worry about casting Voice of Resurgence on turn 2 since that seems like a much easier card to cast, but Bob Maher reported after the tournament hating basic Island due to a potential lack of untapped lands available for turn 2 and in particular the problem of drawing Temple Garden with Island and not having access to GW when not having it could easily cost the game.

I’m unsure whether an adjustment was called for, but it’s very possible since we only ended up playing two copies of Plasm Capture and it frequently got sideboarded out. However, with the mindset that the important thing was to have only one Plains, the land base didn’t offer that many choices and looked like this:

4 Temple Garden
4 Breeding Pool
4 Hallowed Fountain
4 Forest
3 Island
1 Plains
3 Azorius Guildgate
2 Selesnya Guildgate
1 Simic Guildgate

On rare occasions the mana base’s needs are sufficiently different across matchups to justify spending additional slots on alternate or additional mana sources, but this wasn’t one of those decks. Gabriel Nassif went with a Maze’s End in the sideboard, but I believe that reflects a misunderstanding of the post-sideboard dynamics; you’d want the card in game 1 against other control decks, but it’s not clear you would even want it at all in game 2. It is a common trap to bring in cards that would have been good in game 1 rather than cards that will be good after sideboarding.

There was discussion about whether the third Azorius Guildgate should have instead been a third Selesnya Guildgate, but between Aetherling issues and the abundance of counters one wants in some post-sideboard configurations, it’s clear to me that the extra blue is correct. If anything, we were likely one blue too low rather than too high, and this was likely due to our basing our mana base too much on game 1’s mana needs.

Every choice matters.

The Selesnya Matchup

At the time, the matchup we considered most important was Selesnya. I believe this was a cascading effect that was due to a combination of my style of deckbuilding—which caused us to attempt to go creatureless or all creatures in as many decks as possible—a lot of early success with a relatively well-tuned Selesnya build, and the feeling that the deck was "obvious" and thus likely to be everywhere. It also presented us with several unique challenges. Detention Sphere was highly overtaxed since you have to worry about regular creatures, tokens, and also Gideon, Champion of Justice, which can be highly problematic for a deck with three copies of Gatecreeper Vine.  

The best card in this matchup is Cyclonic Rift. Early on it can bounce a token, so it helps bridge to your larger threats, and with overload it provides a devastating blow. Each copy buys a lot of percentage, and it provides an out against a lot of things that otherwise are impossible to answer. Many teammates had access to a copy, but I decided not to because I didn’t want to put in Cyclonic Rift anywhere else, without which the decklist would end up looking like this (at the time, I had access to an Agoraphobia, which was later cut under the "better cards are better" theory slash realization).

One Aetherling felt like the right amount of big stuff to bring in in order to ensure you had the late game advantage, and the fourth Jace, Architect of Thought felt like it would be bad because you didn’t want to have to rely on Jace as your plan. Dispel is excellent here because it protects your Supreme Verdict from Rootborn Defenses as well as counters Advent of the Wurm.

So while the first version I wrote down had three Cyclonic Rifts, that quickly became two, then one, then zero, and once we swapped out Agoraphobia for Selesnya Charm, my planned configuration going into the last few days looked like this:

26 Land
3 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Voice of Resurgence
4 Loxodon Smiter
4 Detention Sphere
3 Jace, Architect of Thought
3 Dispel
4 Supreme Verdict
4 Sphinx’s Revelation
3 Angel of Serenity
1 Aetherling
1 Selesnya Charm

The Mono-Red Aggro Matchup

Mono-Red Aggro was another key matchup. Due to its popularity online and its ability to present unique challenges, it was important to be ready for it. The key against red is to make sure that all your cards help keep you alive early on, giving you reliable early plays. You don’t need to worry about the late game because you have more than enough ways to take them apart should you get to that point, and each card you’re forced to keep in that you don’t want is very bad for you. This was a key constraint on the Elephant as we were making our later changes. The deck looked like this before last-minute changes:

26 Land
3 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Voice of Resurgence
4 Loxodon Smiter
2 Centaur Healer
4 Detention Sphere
4 Supreme Verdict
4 Sphinx’s Revelation
4 Jace, Architect of Thought
2 Azorius Charm
2 Advent of the Wurm
1 Selesnya Charm
SB:
3 Aetherling
3 Angel of Serenity
2 Plasm Capture
2 Syncopate
2 Cancel
3 Dispel

The sideboard is listed here because it’s important. Those are fifteen cards that you very much Do Not Want (although on the play Syncopate is acceptable if not great), and making it sixteen would have been very bad. Many of the things my teammates did at the last minute added a sixteenth or seventeenth card to the Do Not Want pile, and I wanted to be very careful not to do that. In matchups where there are plenty of cards that are fine to play, listing the fifteen that are out is much less important.

The Simic Matchup

I didn’t expect other people to play Simic, but it’s still worth asking what your decklist will look like against a variety of opponents to see which cards are important. It turned out there were an abundance of cards to choose from. My preference was to go heavy on Plasm Capture to generate huge Sphinx’s Revelations or get to Angel of Serenity quickly, which would make this matchup into a true nightmare. Jace is very hard to protect, so it seemed not worth playing here given we had a better route to victory. All those cards except the third Plasm Capture were in no danger of being cut, so the list was more of an exercise in "no, you don’t need to care about this at all," and I moved on. Here’s what it would have looked like with the third Plasm Capture:

26 Land
3 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Voice of Resurgence
4 Loxodon Smiter
4 Detention Sphere
2 Azorius Charm
1 Selesnya Charm
3 Plasm Capture
2 Advent of the Wurm
2 Syncopate
4 Sphinx’s Revelation
2 Aetherling
3 Angel of Serenity

The Jund Matchup

Jund was a deck that we thought was important but that turned out not to exist. This was very bad for our metagame predictions because Jund was supposed to be the deck that crushed Esper and U/W/R Control, which would keep them in check. Without Jund, they were not kept in check, and Esper in particular was everywhere. Our Jund deck was all haste and regeneration with no removal at all, which proved a nightmare for control decks. Luckily, they were forced to play out their threats pre-combat, which made Advent of the Wurm very good here, sufficiently so that it was a good argument for including a third copy.

Trying to protect a Jace against such decks is futile, but you need to keep drawing cards, so without access to enough alternative good cards it looked like it was necessary to keep one of them in. In all my emails, I had us keeping Aetherling as the primary late-game weapon, although I listed myself as unsure about it, but that seems on reflection to be bonkers. Obviously, you’d want Angel of Serenity even if they can often kill it, but unsurprisingly it never came up. Another dilemma is Centaur Healer since it’s lousy at stopping their attack but you still need to have cards to keep you alive, so given how good Centaur Healer is against Mono-Red Aggro, we decided to suck it up and play it here as well. Here’s what I was thinking I would do:

26 Land
3 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Voice of Resurgence
4 Loxodon Smiter
2 Centaur Healer
4 Detention Sphere
2 Advent of the Wurm
1 Plasm Capture
1 Jace, Architect of Thought
2 Azorius Charm
1 Selesyna Charm
4 Supreme Verdict
2 Aetherling
3 Sphinx’s Revelation
1 Angel of Serenity

The B/W/R Matchup

Dega (B/W/R) decks were a staple of the Magic Online Block Constructed format before Dragon’s Maze, and several team members were convinced the deck would show up at the Pro Tour. I was highly skeptical from the beginning because I believed that the deck was inherently not very good and could not create a 75 that could handle the format’s three problems (Mono-Red, Selesnya, and Esper) all at the same time, let alone a 60-card maindeck that could do that and that Esper could now beat you due to Aetherling.

Aetherling did in fact turn out to largely be too strong for such decks, and we dominated against it in testing due to Plasm Capture, so much so that this was the biggest motivation behind us thinking about sideboarding up to three copies. Their game plan requires playing into Plasm Capture, and once you Capture into an Aetherling or Sphinx’s Revelation, the game is pretty much over, while Advent of the Wurm kept a check on Blood Baron of Vizkopa.

Here’s the list I was thinking of, although Patrick Chapin informed me that Angel of Serenity was kind of bad here and you want more early pressure instead:

26 Land
3 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Voice of Resurgence
3 Loxodon Smiter
2 Detention Sphere
2 Advent of the Wurm
3 Plasm Capture
2 Cancel
2 Syncopate
4 Sphinx’s Revelation
4 Jace, Architect of Thought
3 Aetherling
1 Angel of Serenity
1 Selesnya Charm

The Golgari Matchup

Golgari was a deck I refused to believe in despite its Magic Online presence because every time I played it or built it the deck seemed miserable. Either way, the plan was clear that you wanted to hang your hat on Angel of Serenity and not rely on Jace. This seemed mostly redundant with the anti-Jund configuration, so it never got its own listing.

The Esper Control Matchup

Finally, and most importantly (other than the maindeck), there was Esper Control, although it wasn’t clear at the time how much more important it would be. At the time, we made the classic romantic mistake of thinking about how to beat the pure maindeck configuration of their deck rather than how to handle the real Esper enemy in the real world. This plan is an example of what not to do!

We set up to play pure control, but we also had the greedy aim of setting up Plasm Capture without realizing how important Jace wars would be. Plasm Capture is very bad at winning those when going second. Between that and the need to keep removal, I ended up sideboarding out Plasm Capture rather than bringing it in, which at the time involved the following plan (note the sideboard being listed here as well since if you bring out all the removal then you’re going to have a very full bench):

26 Land
3 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Voice of Resurgence
4 Loxodon Smiter
4 Jace, Architect of Thought
3 Plasm Capture
2 Advent of the Wurm
3 Dispel
2 Syncopate
2 Cancel
3 Aetherling
4 Sphinx’s Revelation
SB:
4 Supreme Verdict
4 Detention Sphere
2 Centaur Healer
3 Angel of Serenity
2 Azorius Charm
1 Selesnya Charm

The goal then was to select which fifteen cards would be in the maindeck and which fifteen would be in the sideboard, which resulted in this list that I at the time intended to run:

4 Temple Garden
4 Breeding Pool
4 Hallowed Fountain
4 Forest
3 Island
1 Plains
3 Azorius Guildgate
2 Selesnya Guildgate
1 Simic Guildgate
3 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Voice of Resurgence
3 Loxodon Smiter
3 Jace, Architect of Thought
2 Plasm Capture
2 Syncopate
3 Aetherling
1 Angel of Serenity
4 Sphinx’s Revelation
4 Supreme Verdict
2 Azorius Charm
3 Detention Sphere
SB:
1 Plasm Capture
1 Cancel
3 Dispel
2 Centaur Healer
1 Loxodon Smiter
2 Angel of Serenity
1 Jace, Architect of Thought
1 Selesnya Charm
2 Advent of the Wurm
Wishes:
2 Azorius Charm
1 Selesnya Charm
2 Cyclonic Rift
1 Advent of the Wurm
1 Cancel

I also kept a list of wishes, which were cards that I would like to have access to; at the time it included two Selesnya Charms because I had none of those, instead running Agoraphobia (which as I mentioned above I later cut out). I was going down to only one Cancel in order to get the third Plasm Capture, which I later realized was an error, so I used that slot to get the second Cancel back once it was obvious how important it was to counter Jace, Architect of Thought.

The Endgame Process

Bant Control

Zvi Mowshowitz

90th Place at Pro Tour on 05-19-2013

Return to Ravnica Block

Creatures (14)

• 3 Gatecreeper Vine
• 3 Loxodon Smiter
• 2 Angel of Serenity
• 4 Voice of Resurgence
• 2 Aetherling

Planeswalkers (4)

• 4 Jace, Architect of Thought

Lands (26)

• 4 Forest
• 1 Plains
• 3 Island
• 4 Temple Garden
• 4 Breeding Pool
• 4 Hallowed Fountain
• 3 Azorius Guildgate
• 2 Selesnya Guildgate
• 1 Simic Guildgate

Spells (16)

• 2 Syncopate
• 2 Azorius Charm
• 4 Supreme Verdict
• 3 Detention Sphere
• 3 Sphinx's Revelation
• 2 Plasm Capture

Sideboard

• 2 Cancel
• 3 Dispel
• 1 Loxodon Smiter
• 1 Trostani, Selesnya's Voice
• 1 Angel of Serenity
• 1 Detention Sphere
• 2 Centaur Healer
• 1 Selesnya Charm
• 2 Advent of the Wurm
• 1 Aetherling

You’ll notice a few changes that took place in the last few days. As with all the players on our team, my list had some slight differences from the standard model, in particular my use of Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice. What was the thinking behind each of the changes?

The third Aetherling moving to the sideboard was based on the team’s widespread belief that we would face less control battles than we did. I went against my better judgment and agreed to only run two since the second Angel was a big win in other places, but this was on reflection an unforced error (although unrelated to the Elephant process).

The fourth Sphinx’s Revelation became the fourth Jace, Architect of Thought in the maindeck. I hadn’t wanted to run four copies of Jace because of the places where it is weak or where you don’t want to have to rely on it and because of the value of being able to burn or chain Sphinx’s Revelations, but two things became clear late in the process.

First, Jace was extremely important to the control wars, much more so than Sphinx’s Revelation. Second, the fourth Sphinx’s Revelation after board was never a substantial upgrade over the alternative cards because post-sideboard games were much faster. Control decks spent game 1 with many answers and few threats, giving time for Sphinx’s Revelation to take over the game, but after sideboarding players died or gained large advantage quickly far more often and had more counters when the Revelation wars started, so big Revelations were far less likely to resolve.

There was also the possibility of running into Notion Thief. Even if only some opponents had it, did I want to build my deck in such a way that I would be forced to walk into an auto-loss to that card? That seemed like an awful way to spend a card slot, even though it made me very uneasy to abandon such a powerful card. In general, abandoning powerful cards like this is usually overthinking, and this may well have been one of those cases.

A need that this created was for a quality last card against Mono-Red. A lot of us were using cards like Selesnya Keyrune that I respected but that I felt could not fit into the Elephant because of Mono-Red; I hated the card in such a spot since it doesn’t accelerate you into anything relevant, especially after sideboarding, and implies an all but dead turn 3. Even without the Keyrune, there were now fifteen bad cards stuck in the sideboard, so whatever replaced Sphinx’s Revelation had to serve that purpose while also being of high value elsewhere. For a while, I felt that no such card existed since an explicitly anti-red card would have few or no other uses, but then William Jensen had the idea of using Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice to break Aetherling mirrors.

The thing about an Aetherling mirror is that once the Aetherlings hit the game changes dramatically. An unanswered Aetherling is game, of course, but by playing and using it you give the other player the chance to resolve neat stuff like Sphinx’s Revelation, which can potentially be used to catch up by Fogging the Aetherling long enough to win.

One of our deck’s biggest issues was that we were often far more vulnerable than Esper to resolving an Aetherling first then losing to tempo plays, which was why I wanted to sculpt my Esper configurations to retain cards like Azorius Charm in case we got into an Aetherling race endgame while also smoothing early mana development thanks to the cycling option. This in turn put less pressure on the Elephant since it gave us more cards we wanted against Esper.

However, what if there was a way to blow them (or another Bant deck, or a U/W/R) out of the water? If you resolved Trostani, every blink would earn you five life—more if you wanted to pump up the Aetherling’s toughness—and you could bounce on both players’ turns. Given that long term an Aetherling will kill them every time, that’s flat out unbeatable. There was also the free wins if you manage to get populate going; if there’s an Elemental or Wurm still around and Trostani starts activating, things get ugly quickly, and even an army of Knights is pretty good.

The key thing I loved about the idea was that it is a great card against Mono-Red as well as an upgrade from the fourth Sphinx’s Revelation. It does everything you want it to do there as the card was originally intended without any need to engage in Aetherling shenanigans. It didn’t work out in the tournament, but I still think it was a great idea.

In the end, the Esper Control matchup was radically different than we imagined due to them being far more active and having far more weapons than we anticipated, forcing us to keep a variety of cards—including Supreme Verdict—in in order to answer what might come out of their deck. Given that need, Esper becomes far less of a drag on the Elephant than we thought it was; having options on what to put in is great, but this was clearly overkill.

Misjudging the strength of Esper, both against us and in its numbers, was our team’s fatal mistake, and while I felt able to outplay my control opponents on day 1 (except for Matt Costa in the mirror, where we both had the same plan and I simply outdrew him), on day 2 I felt at a big disadvantage because we didn’t go the next step and prepare for our biggest opponents’ real plan.