The Final Snake Update

This is a bittersweet article to write. It’s Core Set 2019 preview
season, otherwise known as my last ever chance to think about new Magic
cards in the context of Winding Constrictor. It’s almost a tradition at
this point, writing an
article
about the new
prospects
for Constrictor strategies with each new set. But Core Set 2019 is
the last set before the Standard rotation that will take Winding
Constrictor away from us, so this Snake update article will be my last.

But in some ways this is a good thing. To be frank, Winding Constrictor
isn’t very good right now. There’s exactly one build that is seeing
success, and not very much of it.

G/B Constrictor

JeffCunningham (8-0)

0th Place at Online Event on 06-23-2018

Standard

Creatures (32)

Lands (15)

Spells (13)

Sideboard

Jeff Cunningham has been winning a lot online with very aggressive,
Adventurous Impulse-centric builds of Snake like this, but that success has
failed to translate to strong paper results for anyone. My take is that the
deck is very close, but not quite good enough and needs a little bit of
help. Let’s take a look at what Core Set 2019 has to offer.

Ajani, Ally of Snakes

As is tradition, I’ll start with the boldest of the new potential Snake
friends:

Earlier this week,

Matt Severa

wrote a great
piece
about white aggro in the new Core Set 2019 world. As you might
imagine, Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants featured heavily in his article. The
card is obviously powerful and its focus on creatures gives it a clear
aggressive bend. The card seems very likely to see a good deal of play
during its time in Standard, and if you’re at all interested in attacking
with white creatures, I highly recommend checking out Matt’s article.

I, of course, am about to take this new Ajani in a completely different
direction. Cover up the top right corner of the card and you have a
picture-perfect Winding Constrictor planeswalker. Ajani literally does
everything I could ever want. After all, it’s no secret that I thought
Nissa, Voice of Zendikar was the best card in the Winding Constrictor decks
of the last Standard rotation. And Nissa only had one ability that
synergized with Constrictor, while Ajani has two.

Ajani’s +1 ability compares favorably to Nissa’s -2 ability. No, the word
favorably in that last sentence wasn’t a typo. Sure, Nissa’s ability
affected your whole team and Ajani’s only gets two creatures. That is
absolutely a downgrade, I won’t deny it. However, Ajani’s ability can be
used every turn of the game that he’s on the battlefield if you so desire.
Chaining Nissa’s minuses together took time and set-up, as you had to
build-up the necessary loyalty. That’s not a problem with Ajani and makes
his ability to develop your battlefield more imposing than Nissa’s.

But if Ajani’s +1 was all he had, I wouldn’t be this excited. That second
ability of Ajani, the ability to rebuy a dead Winding Constrictor, is what
has me in this frenzy. Look, I get it. Ways to put counters on your
creatures are out there. We sure haven’t played Oath of Ajani before. And
there’s also ways to rebuy your Winding Constrictor already. Claim is even
a very mana efficient way to do so, but I haven’t played that before
either. These effects aren’t novel, but we haven’t had both on the same
card before.

Ajani’s ideal play patterns go so well in a Winding Constrictor deck. Most
of the time, Ajani wants to be using his +1 ability. You make your
creatures bigger, you threaten your ultimate, you make your battlefield
more and more threatening. Using his -2 ability represents weakening your
Ajani substantially. You are three turns further away from using his
game-winning ultimate and his loyalty is reduced enough to make him
vulnerable to attacks or burn spells. When you choose to use this ability,
you really want the creature you return to the battlefield to have a
dramatic impact, but there’s not many creatures with converted mana cost
two or less that have that effect in the late stages of the game. There’s
not many, but Winding Constrictor is one of the few.

And Ajani’s -2 isn’t just an extra Winding Constrictor, it’s a zero mana Winding Constrictor. The current G/B Constrictor builds
have access to a lot of copies of Winding Constrictor through Adventurous
Impulse, but not any that cost zero mana. Getting a free Winding
Constrictor is a huge deal, as it lets you sink all your mana into
Constrictor synergies before your opponent gets an untap step. If you pick
your spot correctly, it’s very easy to use such a window to put the game
away, whether the agent of the end is a Verdurous Gearhulk, a Rishkar,
Peema Renegade, or just a Walking Ballista.

All-in-all, Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants seems custom-made to play well with
Winding Constrictor. There’s just one slight problem: it’s time to uncover
that top right corner.

Hammering Out the Mana

So, Ajani’s mana cost includes two white mana. Winding Constrictor requires
black and green mana, which means we now need to play three colors. What do
we do?

If Ajani only required a single white mana, I would be inclined to splash
white for him as blue was splashed for Hadana’s Climb in Sultai
Constrictor, but that’s not the world we live in. Instead, if we want to
play both Ajani and Winding Constrictor, the most realistic course of
action is to splash either green or black.

On one hand, this is a tad unfortunate. Winding Constrictor is the heart of
the deck after all, and splashing for it isn’t really what we want to be
doing. On the other hand, turn two Winding Constrictor is often not the
right play. Sure, we probably won’t play Rishkar, Peema Renegade in our
list since we’re throwing away the chance to play Constrictor on two into
Rishkar on three, but that start’s a little worse these days than it used
to be anyway. We lose a little of our free-win equity, but Ajani might be
worth it.

So, the question becomes whether we should splash green or splash black.
Because the deck wants to be very lean, I really want only Winding
Constrictor to require our splash color and to play as few sources of it as
we can get away with. Since we’re doing this to play Ajani, I want to think
about which color combination Ajani would prefer to be in.

Ajani is an aggressive planeswalker who can’t defend himself in a
traditional sense. Sure, you can technically block with the creature you
bring back with the -2, but you really don’t want to be using the -2 on the
turn you play Ajani. The best play pattern is to use the +1 on two
creatures when you play Ajani on turn four, which means we’re playing a
deck with a high creature count. To me, that means we’re playing green and
splashing black.

I’m excited to play mana creatures alongside Ajani. The traditional problem
with mana creatures is that they fall off late in the game and become
irrelevant, but Ajani is a great way to keep them relevant as the game
progresses. On the play, you can even protect a turn one Llanowar Elves
from a turn three Goblin Chainwhirler with Ajani, which is quite enticing.

Here’s where I plan on starting with Abzan Constrictor with Core Set 2019:

Abzan Constrictor

Jadine Klomparens

Test deck on 06-26-2018

Standard

Creatures (23)

Planeswalkers (4)

4 Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants

Lands (18)

Spells (15)

Sideboard

Right off the bat: yes, playing only two copies of Llanowar Elves is weird.
I have a lot of reasons for doing so, and I still think it looks weird.
First, getting the mana base to have a truly proper number of untapped
green sources to enable turn one Elves is impossible if you also want to be
as heavy in white as I want to be. Second, eight mana creatures is a lot,
and I think Servant of the Conduit is more important to the deck. Lastly,
Llanowar Elves is a liability right now with all the Goblin Chainwhirlers
running around.

Most of the rest of the decisions were made to highlight Ajani, Adversary
to Tyrants. History of Benalia guarantees two creatures for Ajani on turn
four, Knight of Grace complements History and provides an additional
creature that is resistant to removal to help lock-in your battlefield
presence in some matchups. I wanted four expensive Winding Constrictor
synergy pieces to use after an Ajani -2 and chose to split Shalai, Voice of
Plenty and Verdurous Gearhulk in this role.

Alternatively, Business As Usual

Look, I can’t in good faith tell you that I am 100% certain that Abzan
Constrictor will be the face of the Snake game going forward. I’m really
excited about the power that Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants brings to Abzan
Constrictor, but I can’t guarantee that adding the extra color will be
worth it. Determining that will take some time and some tournaments once
the set comes out, and I could see it going either way.

So,in the meantime, it behooves us to explore all the angles and look at
what we can do to improve G/B Constrictor with Core Set 2019.

The Adventurous Impulse build of G/B Constrictor has been far and away the
most successful variant since the release of Dominaria, and that’s
good news for Graveyard Marshal. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t expect
Graveyard Marshal to make it anywhere near the maindeck of Snake builds,
but I think it’s an exceptionally powerful option out of the sideboard.

Adventurous Impulse has done a lot of good for the G/B Constrictor deck,
letting it effectively play more copies of its synergy pieces and utilize
small bits of excess mana to gain access to some card selection that it
never had access to in the past. This is great, but unfortunately,
necessitates a hugely-creature centric approach that makes the deck a
little one-dimensional. This is fine most of the time, but is a definite
liability against control strategies.

To fight back against control, G/B Constrictor relies on Lifecrafter’s
Bestiary and Shapers’ Sanctuary as ways to stay in a prolonged game where
control can kill wave after wave of your creatures. The problem with them
is that they are not creatures themselves and Adventurous Impulse isn’t
able to help you access them. Enter Graveyard Marshal.

The Marshal is my favorite kind of creature against control: a source of
efficient early pressure that doubles as a must-answer threat in the mid-
to lategame. If you cast this on turn two and get one or two attacks in,
you’re happy. If you cast it on turn five and make a Zombie, you’re happy.
If you cast it on turn eight and make two Zombies, you’re ecstatic.

This is a creature that, once the game has exited the early stages, forces
their hand. They can’t afford to sit back and play the game they want to
play, as you will do nothing but turn your dead creatures into Zombies
until you win the game, which will happen in short order if they let your
Graveyard Marshal exist unchecked for a couple of turn cycles.

As a source of continual pressure, Graveyard Marshal is worse than either
Shapers’ Sanctuary or Lifecrafter’s Bestiary. It won’t outright replace
those cards in the G/B Constrictor sideboard, but it will supplement them.
An army-in-a-card that can be found with Adventurous Impulse and that is as
aggressive on turn two as any other creature in your deck cannot be
overrated.

Next up is another sideboard card, but there’s nothing wrong with a good
sideboard card. To the contrary, good sideboards are what makes great decks
excellent, and hyper-focused decks like the Adventurous Impulse G/B
Constrictor lists are often hard-pressed to use their sideboard effectively
while maintaining the laser focus of their maindeck. Spell effects on
creatures are highly valuable to the archetype, and out of the sideboard,
Reclamation Sage is a large upgrade to Thrashing Brontodon.

Thrashing Brontodon is an awesome card, but only if you’re interested in
the 3/4 body. Using Thrashing Brontodon as Naturalize is an expensive
proposition, and you aren’t getting anything for that extra mana you pay if
you never attack or block with the card. This means that against decks like
God-Pharaoh’s Gift where you really need the Naturalize, your Brontodon is
not really what you want.

A 3/4 is good against the red decks, but it’s a lot better game one than in
the sideboarded games, which limits Brontodon’s effectiveness as a
sideboard card. Further, it being a 3/4 is less relevant to G/B Constrictor
than to any other deck that might play Thrashing Brontodon for the simple
reason that G/B Constrictor already plays so many reasonable bodies that
are reasonable against red decks. A few more doesn’t really change
anything.

Reclamation Sage, on the other hand, is excellent. It’s a sorcery speed
Naturalize that you pay one more mana for, but it’s one that you can find
with Adventurous Impulse and three mana is a whole lot less than four.
Further, you get to keep the 2/1 body after you get rid of an artifact.
Excellent against Seal Away, phenomenal against Heart of Kiran. If the
format shapes up in a way that makes Naturalize effects desirable,
Reclamation Sage will be the direction that G/B Constrictor wants to go.

On my first read, I did not much care for Hungering Hydra. Sure, it
technically synergizes with Winding Constrictor, but none of its early
modes are inspiring. A two mana 2/2 isn’t a great deal, nor is a three mana
3/3 or a four mana 4/4. Protection from double blocks is fine, but much
more relevant to Limited than Constructed.

Still, X spells often play a little better than they look because of how
flexible they are. Being able to use Walking Ballista counters to grow the
Hydra is a cute interaction and is extra damage if you have a Winding
Constrictor on the battlefield. The threat of that interaction might force
your opponent to actually block the Hydra, which is when the card actually
starts to become threatening. These are all little bits of power, but they
do add up. Still, I wasn’t convinced that they added up into a card worth
playing. And then, I thought of one final point:

Having a Hungering Hydra bigger than 1/1 actively punishes your opponent
for playing Goblin Chainwhirler. Again, this isn’t a huge thing on its own,
but we’re starting to have a lot of small positive interactions
with this Hydra. Overall, I think the card has enough minor points in its
favor that playing one or two to fill out the curve in spots sounds okay.
Recent builds have played two copies of Merfolk Branchwalker, and I’d be
interested in trying out a couple Hungering Hydra in those spots.

As sad as I am to see the final days of Winding Constrictor upon us, I’m
still very interested in seeing how this final chapter unfolds. Core Set 2019 has presented us snake aficionados with one last
puzzle, and I mean to solve it. Happy Snakeing, everyone.