The Long & Winding Road – Questing at the SCG Invitational

Have you ever stopped doing something for an extended period of time, and upon trying it again, wondered why you ever stopped in the first place?

That’s me and the Standard format. At the StarCityGames.com Invitational, I was absolutely a fish out of water (in more ways than one).

Much to my surprise, though, I really enjoyed the tournament, and I’m actually excited to keep playing Standard for the first time in a few years, even if this specific tournament wasn’t that successful.

Part of what made my preparation for the Invitational so difficult was that almost none of my Magic friends play competitive Standard events of any kind, and those that did play in the last PTQ season have been out of it for a few months and are already looking forward to Extended. Even worse, I’ve kept up almost no network for Magic decks beyond those of the Eternal variety, which meant that my early attempts to relearn Standard were done mostly through online research.

I hadn’t really kept up with Standard at all after June, and the closest thing I had to a Standard deck was two Zendikar Block decks I never took apart after Gen Con.

Essentially, I was learning this format from scratch, outside of Jace, which I’ve had plenty of opportunity to play with in Vintage.

Yes, he’s that good.

Based on what I saw online, I built a number of decks: Valakut, U/B Control, U/W Control, RUG, a few different versions of various red decks, and so on. My snap impressions looked basically like this:

Valakut:
This deck seems super powerful, and the format is soft on answers; this one asks you to be a good shuffler (which I’m not); ramp decks aren’t my thing as a general rule.

RUG:
Super fun pile of many of the best cards in the format that has weird do-nothing draws that make you feel like you’re doing something exciting, but really you aren’t doing anything. I still think this deck is just an excuse to play Lotus Cobra, Jace, and Titans together in your 75 rather than a particularly good strategy.

U/B Control
: I thought I would hate this deck, but it turns out that it’s actually rather awesome to play with. It feels like I
liked
the deck more so than I thought that it was actually a
good
deck. Mimic Vat is one of the coolest cards I’ve played with in years. Random thought: can we play Mimic Vat
against
control instead of in it?

Mono-White Quest:
Seemed a bit too gimmicky to me but an intriguing idea. I like cheating things into play (see: my Vintage articles). Note that I mean cheating via game mechanics, not literally.

U/W Control:
There are so many options available to this deck, and Ratchet Bomb seems like it should be all over between the main and sideboard, as that card isn’t seeing nearly enough play. I had no clue how to optimize this strategy, though, based on limited knowledge of the format, and so, decided to pass.

Various red decks:
Barf. Awful. Terrible. The whole thing made me more than a little bit sad because I love red decks. Note that the Boros decks I looked at weren’t quite as good as the ones played in the Invitational, and I hadn’t yet really played much with Squadron Hawk when I snap-dismissed base-red in this format. Random thought #2: how insane is Arc Trail? That’s a really strong card right there.

As you can see, early on, I wasn’t doing so well at finding something I felt I could be both comfortable with and which gave me a reasonable chance of success. I went back and read over some articles on the format, looking for something that didn’t end in “U/G” and eventually found some references to G/W Quest. I messaged some folks that had played the deck, chiefly Greg Weiss and Josh Silvestri, to get impressions on the deck and specific lists. When I finally sat down to play some live test games on 11/20 at the Edison PTQ, I was already leaning towards the G/W Quest deck, for a number of reasons.

You see, I like aggro decks, especially those with more than one plan, and this deck has a number of methods of winning a match.

Plan One: Quest for the Holy Relic

The first plan with this deck is to get out a Quest for the Holy Relic on turn 1 and then blow out the opponent on turn 2 or 3 with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. For those of you reading who normally don’t play Standard, you can get hands like this:

Turn 1: Play Plains, play Quest for the Holy Relic, play Ornithopter, play Memnite. Quest has two counters.

Opponent turn 1: Play Creeping Tar Pit, pass turn.

Turn 2: Play Forest, play Birds of Paradise, play Glint Hawk bouncing Ornithopter, replay Ornithopter. Quest has five counters. Remove counters, find Argentum Armor, and equip to Memnite. Memnite is now MechaGodzilla. Attack with Memnite for seven damage and destroy Tokyo, I mean, Creeping Tar Pit.

Opponent turn 2: Grumble grumble grumble, game 2?

Of course, you don’t always fire off Quest that quickly, nor do you need to have games like that to win with the deck. The Quest plan is surprising capable of firing more than once or firing from nowhere in the mid-game. Creatures like Glint Hawk, Kor Skyfisher, and Squadron Hawk let you maximize your chances of firing off a Quest.

At the end of the day, Quest decks have the nuttiest nut draws in the format. That’s appealing if you’re not immersed in the format, plus for me, it’s sort of like getting to play Tinker in Standard. However, going all-in on that plan like the mono-white version does isn’t quite impressive enough for me.

Plan Two: Fauna Shaman and Vengevine

The second plan with this deck is to win with Fauna Shaman and Vengevine, preferably together. If you can stick a Fauna Shaman and untap, your chance of winning becomes pretty high. Besides the simple plan of tutoring Vengevines out and adding one to your board every turn, you can also pull out a Squadron Hawk to keep up a supply of creatures for Shaman; you can also go for value out of a Stoneforge Mystic or find a singleton. My list included a single Molten-Tail Masticore to give me some range as well as a quasi-removal spell. I like this plan because it feels like I’m playing Survival of the Fittest in Standard.

Here, we’ve got a deck emulating both Tinker and Survival. That got my attention in a hurry.

Vengevine alone is enough to steal some games when supported by Glint Hawk and Squadron Hawk. A great option with this deck is to over-tutor on Squadron Hawks to give yourself a chance to discard Vengevine(s) to your yard.

For example, on the draw, you might play turn 1 Quest for the Holy Relic (leaving you with six cards in hand), turn 2 Squadron Hawk, and find three Hawks. That moves you to your end-step with eight cards in hand, letting you discard Vengevine. Against some decks, you might even pass on the one-drop if you have two Vengevines, letting you put together a really impressive turn 3.

Even without Quest, unless an opponent has a Lotus Cobra-powered draw, they usually can’t race this deck if Fauna Shaman is allowed to operate on the board.

Plan Three: Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds

The third plan is to just beatdown with Birds, pretending that you’re playing the aggro Bird deck you might have made when you were seven.

Birds everywhere, with razor-sharp beaks and talons!

While it sounds loose, and honestly, it is, you’d be surprised how many games you can win by doing a little chump-blocking when you need to and attacking for five or six in the air each turn. You can support this plan in lot of ways: Stoneforge Mystic plus Sword of Body and Mind support this plan, as does Masticore. Additionally, you can beef up this plan with something like Ajani, Garruk, or even Beastmaster Ascension.

I’ve also seen builds that sideboard into multiple Mystics and additional equipment to support the aggro plan. While I never got to work on it, using Kor Skyfishers in the deck definitely supports this plan as they live through Marsh Casualties and Pyroclasm and are ideal carriers for Sword of Body and Mind or Sword of Vengeance.

Tuning a List

I played one grinder as a test tournament, to try to learn about sideboarding, but all I got was a one-and-done match against Boros. I won game 1 but flooded out in game 2 and mulled to oblivion game 3. Not particularly encouraging.

Still, testing the deck the better part of the night made me more comfortable, and I got a feel for the field from the grinders: Valakut, RUG, and Vampires seemed likely to be popular. In actuality, this ended up being a super-accurate read, but I wasn’t really in a position to use it to as much advantage as I would’ve liked.

From what I understood of the deck, my matchup against two of the three was pretty decent. I retooled the sideboard to include less singletons based on Fauna Shaman and more duplicate copies to attack specific matchups.

Here’s the deck I registered:

Again, big thanks to Greg and Josh for shipping me lists that were the basis for this one.

While I tested various configurations with Ajani, Masticore, Beastmaster Ascension, and Kor Outfitter main, I ultimately settled on a set of singletons in Molten-Tail Masticore, Stoneforge Mystic, Sword of Body and Mind, and a Kor Skyfisher replacing one Birds of Paradise.

The Skyfisher was actually quite good, providing rebuys on Vengevine from an empty board, serving as a way of playing two two-drops off three lands, sneaking a Razorverge Thicket into play untapped by going back to two lands in play, and also rebuying Journey to Nowhere, Kor Outfitter, Devout Lightcaster, Kor Sanctifiers, and Stoneforge Mystic. With that many uses, I wish I could fit another somewhere in the deck, but space is tight since the deck is hybridizing so many plans together. I think it’s worth investigating though, as I was never upset to see Kor Skyfisher.

There were a few things I wasn’t happy about with this list after playing eleven rounds of Swiss (not including byes). The big one was the mana didn’t feel right to me. I flooded out a lot; while it’s neat to hard-cast or hard-equip Argentum Armor and I did win some games that way, I lost more games to flood than I won by that route.

Probably the worst part of the mana was actually Stirring Wildwood. Several times, I had to mulligan hands on the draw that were perfect except that they had Sunpetal Grove and Stirring Wildwood as the lands. This is a fast format, and being on the draw with no meaningful action until the third turn of the game is unacceptable. I believe I dealt approximately three damage with Wildwood during the course of the tournament.

Against Lotus Cobra, Ramp, and aggro decks, it’s too slow. Against control decks, you probably have half as many Wildwoods as they have Tectonic Edges, so using your turn to animate a guy you know will die to Tectonic Edge or Condemn isn’t all that exciting. The potential upside stacked against the drawback just isn’t worth it, in my opinion. I’m pretty sure running one more Plains and Forest is all upside when you look at what this deck is actually trying to accomplish; cutting down to 22 lands to put a fourth Birds of Paradise in might be even better, provided that the mana is still functional.

Refraction Trap was really good in testing, serving mostly to protect Fauna Shaman but also messing up opposing Pyroclasms and generally being a sweet card. Devout Lightcaster was meant to attack Vampires but also proved solid against decks with Grave Titan and, especially, Abyssal Persecutor. Journey to Nowhere was there as an out to Baneslayer Angel, which is otherwise really tough to beat. However, an alternate option there might be to add an extra Stoneforge Mystic and a Sword of Vengeance.

I moved Kor Outfitter to the board as a singleton, along with Kor Sanctifiers. I could see playing Outfitter main and even having another in the board, as it’s so good against Doom Blade decks, but I often found myself wishing I had stronger singletons for tutoring and just straight-up drawing in hand, thus the Sword/Mystic/Masticore package. And, I ran a lot of Kor Firewalkers in the board because I lost to Boros in the grinder.

I never brought them in all day.

The Invitational – Day One

This is obviously not a super-exciting tale of victory, so I’m going to gloss over the tournament itself pretty quickly.

I ended up in 40th place with a record of 7-6, having done everything possible to prevent myself from winning any money. Let’s look at how I did that.

Round 1 – Bye

Winning a StarCityGames.com Open tournament really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Round 2 – Sam Black

Sam was playing RUG, which theoretically was a good matchup, but RUG decks seemed more prepared for aggro due to the presence of so many Vampires decks. On the draw, I won game 1 easily, mulled to a somewhat loose hand game 2 and mulled myself to five game 3 and was never in it at all.

Round 3 – Craig Wescoe

Craig was playing another U/G deck, BUG, which was also a relatively good matchup, although Doom Blade is obviously more annoying than Lightning Bolt. I took another mulligan game 1 and was on the draw again but won anyway with a super-fast Quest. Game 2 went on forever thanks to a loose keep on my part, but my Bird squad did an admirable job pecking Craig to death over a billion turns before finishing things off with Sword of Body and Mind.

Round 4 – Mike Nyberg

This was a relatively brutal round. Mike was on Eldrazi Green. In game 1, Mike mulled to what seemed like a loose hand on the play, basically just dropping a few Forests on the first several turns, and I had a very good draw, making this a blisteringly fast game. In game 2, Mike’s hand was much better and full of ramp cards. Unfortunately he couldn’t seem to find any action; I had to work around a Mystifying Maze with Argentum Armor; Mike finally found a Trap but whiffed, and I milled away a bunch of his action cards with Sword of Body and Mind. Ugly match; everything seemed to go wrong for Mike.

Round 5 – Alex Hon

Alex was playing RUG, and again I was on the draw. I kept a decent hand game 1 but ripped four consecutive lands off the top of my library on turns 1 through 4. Game 2 saw Alex mulligan, and a quick Sword of Body and Mind on a Vengevine made quick work of things. Game 3 I got to try to save a Fauna Shaman with a Refraction Trap, but it was countered by Mana Leak. Still, down a Bolt and a Mana Leak, I was free to start doing whatever I wanted, and the various deck engines took over.

At 4-1, I was feeling pretty good, despite being woefully unable to win a die roll. This can only mean one thing, of course.

Round 6 – Alex Bertoncini

Alex was playing RUG and was also better at rolling dice than I. Game 1 he mulled to five, and I had a fast Quest hand, which is complete overkill. Game 2, he went all super-loose, keeping a hand with just Island for mana, but his Preordain dug into fetches, and his double-Cobra hand went berserk from there. Game 3, I kept a relatively loose hand, hoping Alex had only one Lotus Cobra, but Alex’s hand was insane, obviously. I used a Journey to Nowhere on his first Cobra, feeling better about my mediocre keep, but instead he just played another and crushed me with another double-Cobra, double-Bolt, Jace, Titan draw.

Round 7 – David Glore

David was playing straight-up U/G, which seemed more popular than I expected at this tournament. His build seemed better than most of the ones I saw. I won my first die roll of the day, David took a mulligan, and I was up 1-0 very quickly. Well, actually not that quickly – game 1 took forever because I didn’t have a Kor Outfitter in my maindeck, but it didn’t matter as I was in control of the game, just took forever to actually close it out. Game 2, David’s deck gave him the goods, including Ratchet Bomb to make my life miserable. Game 3, I mulled to five and was quickly staring down Ratchet Bombs again. My build had literally nothing to stop Ratchet Bomb. I was talked out of playing Naturalize, Nature’s Claim, or some other such card; I think those may be necessary.

Round 8 – Erik Johnson

On the play, I had the nut-draw against Erik game 1 with a turn 2 Quest. Game 2, I kept a loose hand that I should’ve shipped back. Notice a pattern here? Erik did all kinds of nonsense with Elspeth and Sunblast Angel, and I scooped the game in the interest of time. I might have been able to win using Molten-Tail Masticore and probably should’ve tried. A draw wouldn’t have been so bad here, as it would’ve locked me for Day 2. Game 3, my hand was decent but slow, possibly one I should’ve sent back, and I flooded out again.

I ended up 0-3 to end Day 1, and I was sure I’d missed the cut, as people were dropping at X-2 and X-3. Standings posted, and I was in… 57th! Unexpected, to say the least. I was out of contention for Top 8 obviously, but possibly still alive for Top 16. That made it silly to drop and play Legacy, even though I was more excited for Legacy than Standard.

After Day 1, I got a lot of testing in, and I did well.

Really well.

I was smashing everything. I chalked up some of what happened to bad beats, loose keeps, and lost die rolls, and generally got myself back in an optimistic frame of mind instead of the downtrodden one I was in previously.

I realized some food would help immensely, so we set out in search of sustenance. We ate dinner at the Capitol Ale House. It’s a German-themed place with lots of pretzel items, cheese items, and sausage / bratwurst items. The beer menu was like twenty pages long.

It was sweet, sweet heaven.

I got a couple people to order The German, which is a hamburger on a pumpernickel roll with havarti cheese. Oh, and on the burger is a grilled and split bratwurst.

I settled for a pretzel and brat sandwich and a few beers. It was some good eating.

After dinner, we set about building Legacy decks for people playing tomorrow, by which I mean we built as many Ooze Survival decks as our cardpool allowed.

The Invitational – Day Two

Round 9 – Bye

Yes, you read that correctly. I believe it was Adam Prosak who dropped from 64th place, meaning one lucky sap at X-4 – me – got a bye to start the day. So far, everything was coming up Milhouse!

Round 10 – Alex Tamblyn

Alex was playing an interesting Bant deck, but luck wasn’t on his side. I started off the day winning a die roll, and Alex mulled to six. I won game 1 easily. In game 2, Alex started out on the offensive, but I got Fauna Shaman going and turned things around in a hurry.

Round 11 – Conor Moran

Conor’s an 0-2 Drop guy, and I recognized him from events in my area. We had a pretty interesting match, Mono-Black Vampires against Quest. Conor was on the play, and we both spat out some creatures. I tried my best to punt game 1 by failing to attack with an extraneous Squadron Hawk and almost incorrectly equipping a Sword of Body and Mind, and that one point gave Conor another turn. Luckily he couldn’t topdeck what he needed, and I won game 1.

Game 2, Conor stomped me. My keep was way, way too loose and had none of the Devout Lightcasters I brought in from the board. Marsh Casualties blew me out.

Game 3, I mulliganed to a decent six. A Lightcaster showed up, then I set up a turn to rip into a Quest activation for Argentum Armor to steal the game, which was exactly what happened. Elation! In fact, I was so excited, I proceeded to promptly equip it on the wrong creature and then destroy the wrong target with the trigger when I attacked. That turn could very well be my new record distance for punting.

Round 12 – Lucas Siow

I drove Lucas to the tournament, and we tested a bunch the night before. During those games, I was surprised at how many I was winning, as I wasn’t generally excited for this matchup (mostly due to Ratchet Bomb). Game 1 seemed unwinnable to me, as I kept a somewhat loose hand and did nothing until resolving a Squad Hawk on turn 4. The game went on long, but eventually I stuck a Molten-Tail Masticore, and that caused some havoc to ensue. Ultimately the game came down to an Argentum Armor sitting on an empty board, staring down a Jace, the Mind Sculptor. My objective was to find and stick two creatures. After forcing Jace to keep bouncing Ornithopter for a few turns, I played out a Memnite and Ornithopter and thought I was going to get there, but Lucas played Preordain and found Venser, the Sojourner. Venser’s ability reset a Ratchet Bomb, which had one counter on it, and that Bomb blew up my team of zeroes, not heroes. Unfortunately Lucas didn’t find more removal, and I got another two creatures into play a couple turns later, equipped the Argentum Armor, and won the game, somehow.

Game 2 was even stranger. I mulliganed. Lucas was mostly in control early with a fourth-turn Jace; eventually, I had six lands in play, a Quest with no counters, Vengevine in the yard, and two mystery cards in hand. Lucas fatesealed and let me draw a Journey to Nowhere. He had a Contagion Clasp to power up Jace quickly. He fatesealed me again, seeing Ornithopter, and let me keep that also; he played out a Baneslayer Angel with two cards in hand. My only hope here was that Lucas would see Thopter or Memnite and let me keep it……… because the two unknown cards I had in hand were Glint Hawks I’d been stuck with almost the entire game.

I drew the Ornithopter and rejoiced (internally, as is appropriate, as Lucas is a friend and all-around good guy). I led out with the Journey targeting the Baneslayer Angel. Lucas countered with Spell Pierce. I paid. He countered again with another Spell Pierce, and I let the Journey get countered; he now had no cards in hand.

I played the Ornithopter, the Hawk, returned Vengevine, played the Ornithopter again, played the other Hawk, and the Ornithopter. Out of nowhere, Quest was at five counters, and suddenly Vengevine was a 10/9 haste creature with Vindicate attached. I attacked, destroying Jace. Lucas didn’t draw an out, and I somehow stole this game too.

Improbably, despite a comedy of errors on my part throughout, I was still in position to make Top 32.

Round 13 – Gerard Fabiano

This was it, one match for $500 that would let me free-roll the weekend with a bit extra on top or make me go home disappointed in a tournament that kind of resembled a “tour of the writers of the internet.”

Gerard was playing BUG. I still think it’s a good matchup. Unfortunately, he smashed me. My game 1 hand was decent, but he raced me with Cobra into a fourth-turn Avenger of Zendikar that I couldn’t attack through as I was on the Vengevine plan. An early Doom Blade on my first Shaman bought him enough time to win pretty easily.

Game 2, I kept a pretty loose hand banking on a Journey to Nowhere killing his Lotus Cobra. That part went okay, but he had a second Lotus Cobra and raced me anyway, with a Molten-Tail Masticore and a Wurmcoil Engine. Another trend here: as fast as this deck is, racing double-Cobra draws is nearly impossible.

 

All in all, it’s hard for me to be overly disappointed in the deck and easy to be disappointed in the pilot instead. I think the mana could’ve been better; this was an example of me believing I had a read on a mana issue but second-guessing myself because no one else had complained about it. My sideboard was okay given the make-up of the field, but Vampires overall did better than expected, and while I saw it all around me, I only played it once, and even there, I punted the match. I mulled out of a few deciding games and also kept far too many loose hands in game 2 when I was up 1-0 in matches. Sadly, that’s a weak part of my game I worked hard to eliminate in 2009 and early 2010, but that appears to have come roaring back.

I think all I was missing to Top 16 this event was a bit more time in the format and a few more games to convince me that I was right on my read on the deck’s mana.

Most importantly, at least for me, I honestly think this tournament has given me back the itch to play Standard (and, dare I say, even Extended, with Pro Tour Philadelphia in 2011).

Regardless, don’t sleep on the G/W Quest deck; not a lot of people played it in this event, but it’s a powerful strategy and not as gimmicky as you might think.

Ratchet Bomb is a real problem, though.

As much as I liked this deck, I absolutely would’ve played Gindy’s Boros deck had I seen it before the tournament. I believe I would’ve had a money finish if I were playing that deck, as it does everything I like my aggro decks to do, I’m familiar with all the cards, and I and Goblin Guide are like best friends.

As someone largely outside the format, it seems like this Standard format has a
lot
of blowouts, but it’s also an awful lot of fun. My only real concern is that Valakut seems rather Jund-esque in that people want to pretend it isn’t that good, but really, it seems like it could become dominant.

Bonus Legacy Antics

I was really excited to see two Storm decks made the Top 8 on Sunday but disappointed when they both lost immediately in the quarterfinals. What Storm needs to kick it into gear in the US is a win at one of these StarCityGames.com Legacy Open events.

Regarding Survival: the deck was
everywhere
in the Legacy Open on Sunday. I also felt like I saw more combo decks than in other recent Legacy Opens, so perhaps the message Max and I are putting out there is resonating at least a little bit. I’m still hopeful that Survival is granted a stay of execution until the next Banned and Restricted announcement; Storm just needs to
win
one of these tournaments for the meta to start to shift a bit. Or, at least, I believe that could be the case, and three months isn’t really that much longer to wait.

Regardless of what happens with Survival, I finally found an Affinity deck that I don’t hate. It’s less gimmicky than the Glimpse versions you’ve seen floating around this website. I spent a day over Thanksgiving weekend goldfishing a number of different versions until I found one that seemed like it could actually function and then tuned it from there.

The coolest card by far is stolen from the results of online Legacy Daily Events from MTGO: Etched Champion.

This guy seems a bit weak for Legacy I’m sure, but in actuality, the card single-handedly beats almost any other traditional creature strategy. You can move all-in with Arc Ravager counters pretty recklessly by swapping them over to Etched Champion, thus avoiding worry about pesky Swords to Plowshares. There’s no better guy to equip with Cranial Plating as you know he’s getting in there for a huge chunk of damage. With Mox Opal and Springleaf Drum in the deck, playing him on the second turn of the game is pretty reasonable.

Here’s what I was gaming with while waiting for the rest of my car to wrap up their weekend activities:

Note that the Engineered Plague slot could really be anything, depending on what you’re trying to beat. Nature’s Ruin / Perish might be a good choice, for example.

Testing against an ANT deck post-board, the matchup felt more than acceptable by siding like this:

Out: 4 Ornithopter, 4 Etched Champion
In: 4 Mindbreak Trap, 1 Duress, 3 Tormod’s Crypt

Tormod’s Crypt takes the Tendrils deck off the Ill-Gotten Gains plan, and Disciple of the Vault is awfully good against Lotus Petal and Lion’s Eye Diamond. The matchup against TES is probably slightly worse, though, since that deck is perhaps a half-turn faster, and Orim’s Chant is actually a time walk there.

We also played a lot of games against Goblins, and while Goblins never ceases to amaze me with its ability to beat anything, the Affinity deck felt like it was favored; it was faster and had inevitability by way of Etched Champion.

The real problem with this deck is that hands with Mox Opal are probably twice as good as hands that don’t have it.

Well, that, and you auto-scoop to Null Rod.

We also started brainstorming a version with white that could use Glint Hawk and Quest for the Holy Relic, which starts to get interesting when you realize that even Quest into Cranial Plating is pretty good in this deck, and white gives you Ethersworn Canonist…

One last thing: huge props to the staff, judges, and organizers of the weekend in Richmond. That was one smooth tournament, with an all-star cast of judges.

I cannot wait to play in the next Invitational.

Matt Elias

[email protected]

Voltron00x on SCG, TMD, and The Source