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The INN Crowd: A Who’s Who Of Innistrad Block Constructed

Everyone knows Block Constructed is the best way to go infinite on Magic Online, so what are you waiting for? Ben Friedman will be your guide to playing Innistrad Block.

Along with “Bolt the turn 1 Llanowar Elves,” “mulligan one-landers,” and “play Jace, the Mind Sculptor when it’s legal,” one of the time-tested maxims of competitive Magic players is that “Block Constructed is the best way to go infinite on Magic Online.” Math has shown us that playing Daily Events in Constructed formats is a +EV proposition, and with Block generally being the cheapest Constructed format, it should come as no surprise that INN Block Constructed is your best bet for generating tickets in your spare time. In fact, my good friend Jonathan Sukenik highly endorses Block Constructed as the best way to get into Magic Online for cheap and has even written about some of the important fixtures of the format.

“All this is well and good,” you may be saying, “but where can I get a handle on this awesome format and its best decks before I jump in and start grinding like a seventh grader at a middle school mixer?”

“Nice simile,” I’d reply, “and fear not! This page has decklists galore, and yours truly will delve through them to sort out what you should and shouldn’t be playing!”

The format has been evolving over the two months that it’s been online, and some of the less intuitive strategies have overtaken the obvious linear strategies as the premier decks of the format. Jund midrange and Boros aggro are on the rise, taking their place among the top tier of the format along with G/W Tokens, U/R Tempo, the faux-Dredge deck, and B/U/G control. Take note, however, that one of the many wonderful things about this format, along with its cheap price tag, is the fact that you can win with anything, so don’t be afraid to brew up something new.

As for well-established archetypes, the first big deck of the format is what I personally play when I have the time to fire up a Daily Event on MTGO. It’s a nice, simple deck with a long history of being one of the best archetypes in new formats with small card pools. Even though I love the blue spells, I grew up with Isamaru, Hound of Konda and Savannah Lions, and attacking for two is a refreshing change of pace for me. As a bonus, this deck doesn’t contain any expensive mythic rares, making it a perfect choice for a player with a limited budget. Meet the newest member of the Boros clan!


This deck is a pretty obvious starting point when looking at Innistrad for the first time, but despite the fact that it’s so straightforward, it’s surprisingly powerful and resilient. Usually the only games you lose are from either drawing too few or too many lands, and you’re very often drawing live against everything. Having access to a card like Devil’s Play gives you a ton of extra reach, and end-of-turn Midnight Haunting into Instigator Gang is often good enough to put the game away as well.

As a side benefit, this deck is a great teaching tool for newer players who want to learn how to better manage their burn spells in an aggro deck. Often, it is a tough decision whether to use a turn-two Devil’s Play on the opponent’s turn-one Avacyn’s Pilgrim or Champion of the Parish, or to save it for a game-ending pair of Blazes down the road. Conventional wisdom would encourage us to use the burn spell to set the opponent back a turn of development, but depending on the contents of your hand, it might make more sense to apply more pressure with a two-drop and use that burn spell later to kill the opponent. This may sound totally obvious to the more experienced players out there, but decisions like these set the tone for the whole game and are a hugely underappreciated part of Magic strategy.

One example of a scenario where I consciously used my burn spells as reach rather than removal is in a game against G/W Tokens, where I was on the play. I had an opener of Champion of the Parish, Cloistered Youth, Midnight Haunting, Devil’s Play, Plains, Clifftop Retreat, Clifftop Retreat, which is a great opener, especially playing first. I thought that I’d be able to finish my opponent off with a fast curve rather than delaying both of our curves by a turn, so I just piled in there with creatures. I had my opponent down to 13 before he could play a Garruk Relentless and kill my Champion of the Parish, and after attacking him to 8 the next turn, he was just drawing dead to the Devil’s Play in my hand. If I’d burned the turn-one Avacyn’s Pilgrim, I’d have been playing off-curve the whole game, and that Cloistered Youth would have been much less effective.

To generalize this example, moderately experienced players will often just blindly follow the pre-set dictum of the “correct play” without thinking about a specific plan to win the game. They almost always lose winnable games because of this poor planning. Almost as much as from brain farts, sequencing errors, and botched combat, many players lose games because of their failure to formulate a game plan based on the cards they’ve drawn and what they think their opponent has drawn. This strategic element is often lost in Constructed, where the decks are almost always clearly either the beatdown or the control in a given matchup. It’s much more relevant in Limited, especially when figuring out the right time to spend that removal spell or whether to trade Grizzly Bears in combat on turn 3, and it’s part of the reason Limited is a very pure form of Magic. So next time you’ve got a hand with a good mix of removal and creatures and your opponent drops a turn-one mana accelerant, think about exactly how your cards are going to fit into a specific game plan before you go casting all your spells automatically.

Back to the deck, though, one other secret benefit of R/W is the fact that it gets to play the most underrated card in the Block, the little one-drop that could. Of course, I’m talking about Doomed Traveler, one of a select class of creatures who are better dead than they are alive. The card is surprisingly good because no matter how your opponent chooses to interact with it, he is going to come out behind on either cards or mana. Geistflame and Dead Weight are awful against Doomed Traveler, and bigger trumps cost enough that the Traveler has done his damage by the time they come down. Bravo R&D for making a format where such an innocuous card can be good.

But enough of the benefits of this deck, let’s get to the weaknesses you can exploit to crush silly Boros players! Obviously the first and best card against this and other white-based aggressive strategies is the format’s go-to wrath effect, in this case Blasphemous Act. Most good players, however, will see it coming and be able to minimize its impact while still forcing you to pull the trigger on the sweeper. After all, they only need to get enough damage in there to make the sandbagged Devil’s Play a game-ender. Another clear way to get ahead of the little white men is to play a strategy that curves out nicely with cheap removal and powerful three- and four-mana effects. Jund Midrange does this best with its Dead Weights, Geistflames, Sever the Bloodlines (play around this card!), Liliana of the Veil, Garruk Relentless, Bloodgift Demons, and Olivia Voldaren. B/U/G and R/U/G control do this to some extent as well, but it’s the Jund deck that gets to play all the best removal and the best threats. All we need is a Bloodbraid Elf reprint in Dark Ascension, and we’ll be back to partying like it’s early 2010!

Now, it may be fairly obvious to most of you that the Jund deck lines up well strategically against the Boros deck, but one of the less intuitive trumps you can use to beat Boros is Witchbane Orb. I’d say the most frustrating moment with this deck is getting surprised by a Witchbane Orb that just blanks my hand of Devil’s Play and Brimstone Volley. Players ahead of the curve have started to play a few of these in their decks, and you should too, if you want to have a nice way to ensure you reach the late-game against Boros.

I’ve been talking a lot about Jund, so let’s get straight to a list:


This list is a great starting point, playing all the best black and red removal spells and creatures while splashing Garruk Relentless. The particular choice of trump that iammrj0j0 chose to play, Curse of Death’s Hold, also gives me nightmares as a Boros player and makes those Silverchase Foxes all the more important. Notice the three sideboarded Witchbane Orb and Blasphemous Act? With Witchbane Orb answering the burn spells and Curse of Death’s Hold and the plentiful removal keeping the creatures off the table, I’d hate to play against this particular list with Boros. Tellingly, there were actually about five Boros decks at 3-1 in this Daily Event. It wouldn’t surprise me if iammrj0j0 beat three hapless Boros mages on his way to 4-0, and I’d gladly play this list if I had any Garruks and Lilianas.

That leads me to my only major criticism of this deck, which is its price! If you want to go infinite, you’d ideally like to start with a cheap deck, and that’s what Boros can offer that Jund can’t. If you have the tickets, then by all means, play Jund, but for limited budgets, Boros is an excellent choice.

The next deck that’s been making waves lately is U/R Tempo, which hooks draft star Invisible Stalker up with sweet enchantments like Spectral Flight, Furor of the Bitten, and Curiosity while bouncing and burning the opponent’s creatures that would otherwise successfully race the Stalker. Reckless Waif and Stromkirk Noble help by providing more of the early aggression necessary to exploit a slower draw by the opponent.

Here’s a list, inspired by several Daily Event winners.


This list is also pretty sweet, and if it draws an Invisible Stalker, it seems like it would have a hard time losing to most of the control decks, but I worry that it will be unable to deal with an aggressive Boros draw. The sideboard looks packed to the gills with Geistflames and board sweepers for exactly that reason, though, and it seems like the post-board games can go your way with careful management of sweepers and Stalkers. It has Stalker-Cleaver post board, too, and if the deck can get one of those going, it will beat Boros silly.

Without Mana Leak to blow out control decks, I worry about U/R being able to handle a removal-heavy deck like Jund, especially if the Jund player is packing some number of Curse of Death’s Hold (man is that card a blowout), but it does do a great job of smashing them if they miss on the turn-one removal spell. If you have Snapcaster Mages, give this list a try because I get the feeling that, like its progenitors Merfolk and Illusions before it, people (including me) underrate this deck. Show us why we’re not giving this deck enough credit!

The next deck on the chopping block is the classic G/W Tokens, which trades off Boros’s reach for access to Mayor of Avabruck, big daddy Garruk, and a lot better synergy between all of its spells. Intangible Virtue makes G/W’s Midnight Hauntings much better than R/W’s, and Mayor of Avabruck is just a powerhouse if it flips. Here’s a list that torikabuto used to 4-0 a recent Daily Event.


I like this list, but I think I’d rather play something else over Champion of the Parish. Other lists have had Mentor of the Meek, which seems pretty sweet, but maybe the curve does need the ten one-drops to be aggressive enough against the midrange decks. Garruk proves his worth here, as he is basically the centerpiece of the whole deck. Again, more than other aggressive decks, this one is extremely vulnerable to the plethora of removal in the Jund and other multicolor midrange decks, especially Curse of Death’s Hold and Blasphemous Act. Play cautiously against these decks because you can’t afford to lose to a single board sweeper.

Cards like Geist-Honored Monk and Kessig Cagebreakers are your best friends here, as army-in-a-can cards like these enable you to demand a sweeper turn after turn from a single card. Doomed Traveler and Midnight Haunting are also at their best in this deck, what with their ability to present more than one removal spell’s worth of creatures at a cheap cost. I’d have to test it out more because from my own limited experience, Boros with Geistflames in the board has a fine matchup against G/W, but by all means, if tokens are your thing, this is a great deck and a lot of fun to play.

But let’s say all these non-blue decks are giving you a headache. You just want to cast some combination of Desperate Ravings, Snapcaster Mage, Think Twice, and Forbidden Alchemy. Fear not! The Jund deck has been adapted just for you, cutting pesky red cards for sweet blue ones:


Now, this deck gets to run Snapcaster Mage, which is awesome, but the loss of Blasphemous Act, Geistflame, Olivia Voldaren, and Devil’s Play is a lot to give up just to gain Dissipate, Think Twice, Snapcaster, and Forbidden Alchemy. I’d certainly say that the Jund deck has a better matchup against the aggressive white decks of the format than this pile of good cards, but the fact that this deck can go long against Jund and come out ahead from all of its card advantage means that it could be really nice in the slower matchups. Plenty of players have been trying to bridge the gap and move into four-color territory, to gain Desperate Ravings, Geistflame, Olivia and Blasphemous Act while still keeping the late-game card advantage that blue provides.

This particular spot, from my perspective, is where most of the best brewing can still be done. Figuring out how much more controlling you can get with a deck and still have game against Boros and G/W will certainly pay off in Daily Event victories. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t like my chances playing any unwieldy four-color control deck against the next offender on this list, my nomination for the most fun deck ever to be played in single-set Block Constructed.

I know there are some of you out there who just love doing unfair things with your cards, and for you, the closest thing this format has to a combo deck is the graveyard synergy deck. Meet the deck that made “turn 1, Dream Twist myself” a scary play.


This deck is super fun but a bit inconsistent. Getting your Deranged Assistant or Avacyn’s Pilgrim removed with a quick Geistflame or Devil’s Play can set you back enough that the aggressive decks can run you over. Your only recourse is a powerful Gnaw to the Bone, which is fine, but not if you’re dead before it can gain you the 8-10 life it needs to really turn it into Time Walk. To make matters worse, the aggressive decks can flood the board with dorks fearlessly, since you don’t have any sweepers. Also, cards like Dream Twist and Mulch are high variance and can sometimes be absolute blanks.

The upside to playing an inherently high-variance strategy like this one is the fact that once you’re rolling, your synergy is just awesome. Casting a Gnaw to the Bone for fourteen, having a Kessig Cagebreakers swinging with five Wolves, and making boatloads of Spider tokens are all a ton of fun and super powerful. When you play a turn-two Mulch for two lands and two creatures, a turn-three Splinterfright, and a turn-four Armored Skaab, swing for six, you’re going to feel on top of the world, and that’s part of what makes Magic great. I would definitely recommend this deck if you want to play a fun, synergistic, cheap graveyard deck, but I personally don’t think it’s got quite enough raw power or consistency to make up for its vulnerabilities to an aggressive curve backed up by the right removal. After Dark Ascension comes out, though, I’d be surprised if this deck didn’t shoot straight to tier-one status.

So what does all this mean for you, the aspiring MTGO grinder? Well, you have a format here with aggressive white decks that are acceptable but not great against the multicolor midrange decks, but those control decks have a hard time beating the synergistic graveyard deck, which in turn loses more often than not to the aggressive decks. Additionally, price is a significant concern, which means that you should play one of the two cheaper decks with your starting budget, Boros or “Dredge,” and see if you can play one Daily Event a day.

My third choice for someone just starting with the format is U/R, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I jumped over to it in the next weeks. You can build it without Snapcaster if you want, and it seems more consistent as a gimmick deck than the faux-Dredge build. If you can 3-1 half of your DEs, you can be profitable, and after a while, you’ll be able to afford Garruks and Lilianas and try playing one of the other decks. Or stick with your cheap deck, since the format doesn’t require you to play expensive planeswalkers to win, and invest your winnings in Modern staples! Nothing says “savvy speculator” like a pile of fetchlands before the Modern PTQ season!

Hope you all had a great holiday, and here’s to an even better 2012!

 

Best wishes,

Ben Friedman