Introduction
Welcome to the latest installment in the Speed Demon series. I was baffled when I read last week that a common complaint at StarCityGames.com is that there aren’t enough non-American writers. How can anybody have such a misconception? Star City is about as international as you can get, even if you forget aboot Canadians and consider them American, which they essentially are.
Then again the misconception is somewhat understandable. American culture pervades most of the Universe, and no-one in the developed world can escape it. I’m highly amused that Knut was dumbfounded by my use of the expression “y’all” in my last article, considering my writing contains more pop culture references to (American) TV shows like Futurama and South Park than those shows do themselves. I may call a sidewalk a pavement but deep down my writing is highly schizophrenic and doesn’t know whether the spell checker should use “English (UK)”, “English (US)” or “English (Canada)”, and I assume it’s the same for most non-American writers, though I never really notice.
It could, however, just be me, as my passport says “Nationality: United States of America”. This annoys me to no end because Nationality really wants to be followed by an adjective. Can you hear my teeth grinding? At this point I want to make a note about my spelling of the word colo(u)r. In my opinion, blue is the sky’s colour, but it is Fact or Fiction’s color. [For the record and unlike MTG.com, we tend to Americanize all spellings. – Knut] I noticed reading Scott Wills article last week that he talks about colours when referring to Magic and was wondering what all y’all Brits (and wannabes) think about this. How would you spell it? You surely don’t listen to the spell checker when it suggests spelling it “manna” either.
Yadda yadda yadda. Yes, I know that for a Speed Demon I take to long to get to the point. Roll on Ravnica and the telling of the joyous event that is the marvellocity of a grandiose pre-release. Yes, I know that for a Speed Demon I am too sesquipedalian.
Archetypes revisited
After reading Sean McKeown article that I referenced a lot last week, I thought there is no way that Limited boils down to playing one of the four guilds, perhaps splashing another, but after playing with the set that’s what it actually boils down to. I can see RRR draft getting boring much quicker than your average 3x Big Set draft. The arrivals of the small sets however should be all the more glorious.
Coming back to the quest of figuring out the format, having only four archetypes to consider instead of the usual 8-10 should make things a lot easier. Some people might argue that within the guilds there are more archetypes and that three-color decks that mix two guilds will be the norm, leading to six archetypes. In fact, there you are, the usual ten archetypes. From what I can see so far though it will be an exception not the norm that a deck moves away from the single-guild-with-maybe-a splash formula. It’s time to have a closer look at the guilds. Again.
The Boros Legion – keeping the others honest
That is not a reference to the flavor of these filthy whities; it’s to do with tempo. By first impressions this set is slower than those that came before it and as such there is a clear temptation to skimp on the early plays and go straight for the late-game-kicks-in-the-teeth. Not with ye olde R/W boys around, keeping law and order and winning before 17,000-mana monsters remove your library, your home and all your possessions from the game. There is no consensus on how good the R/W archetype is, but it is the fastest one around, and if the deck isn’t entirely awful the game will usually be poised on a knife’s edge. I don’t think I played a game all weekend against R/W that I didn’t end at less than five life. This may or may not be exaggerated. Unashamed aggression is what the Boros do best, that’s for sure.
However, there is a misconception that any R/W deck needs to be lightning fast and can’t afford to run 5+ mana spells if it wishes to succeed. Slower R/W decks can work if you have the right cards, and leaving out a game-winner because it costs six mana is just silly.
The Selesnya Conclave – slogging out the war of attrition
G/W has a few fast creatures and more pump effects than is strictly healthy, but it will rarely be able to keep up with the Boros in a race. On the other hand, the Selesnyans have much better mid and late games, especially when they produce so many saprolings that you end up with your entire sideboard face down on the table. Convoke turned out to be exceedingly powerful. G/W isn’t that strong in the early game, but convoke lets it run right past it and start the mid-game before the opponent even knew what hit him. The marquee card here has to be Siege Wurm, nothing beats a 5/5 trampler on turn 5 that won’t be disembowelled anytime soon.
House Dimir – the vile temptress
There was an article last week claiming that U/B control was awful and hence U/B as a whole was ignorable. This seems to stem from the belief that, because there are so many control and milling cards in Blue and Black, U/B has to be a control deck. In my experience, however, those cards are just there to tempt you, and a real U/B deck is an aggro-control deck full of evasive creatures and removal. Everyone I’ve seen this weekend trying to make the milling deck work failed abysmally, especially in Sealed as there never seemed to be enough control cards to stall long enough for the decking victory. The problem is that most of the cards that mill you don’t help you stay alive and if you don’t stay alive it doesn’t matter that you got them down to six cards in library.
Under the right circumstances I’m sure the milling deck can work, but it requires a lot of good defensive creatures and plenty of Black removal. Fortunately the Black removal is better in this set than it has been in a long time.
The Golgari – the big enchilada
This color combination is the most obviously powerful and seemed somewhat overrepresented at the top tables of the pre-release. It’s slower than the other archetypes and tends to play better as the control rather than the beatdown. That being said, I haven’t actually had a chance to play this archetype myself, and there were many decks about that were hard to identify as G/W/b or G/B/w. I was playing G/W/b and many people went: “Oh, B/G again!” As a general rule splashes have become much harder to identify.
Tempo and Mana Bases
Unlike last week, I actually have something to say here. This set is actually slower on the whole than Kamigawa block, and it isn’t all about tempo unless you’re playing R/W. While there are, as I said last week, a substantial number of bears, there aren’t enough aggressive three-drops to keep the pressure up most of the time. The exception is of course a good R/W deck, which makes things difficult when you try to gauge how many expensive, powerful cards you can afford to play when attempting to make use of the slower format.
It’s interesting that the format seems to lack a focus that spans all archetypes, it feels like the R/W deck is designed for a different environment than the G/W deck, which in turn seems at odds with U/B and so on. This tension makes it difficult to decide exactly what direction to go in with your build and adds a lot to the fascination of the format. Sideboarding should be a lot more relevant in this format than usual.
I have found constructing mana bases, especially in decks with more than two colors, to be a nightmare in this block. There are many cards around that can fix your mana and, apart from the rare dual lands and Civic Wayfinder, none of them are straightforward. How many Signets do you need to play before you can start cutting lands? Should you even ever cut lands? How do hybrid cards affect your mana distribution? Can I afford to play the colorless “guild lands” in a 3-color deck? I really need more time to play around with these things before I can answer these questions.
Then there are the new common lands. Scott Wills suggests that they themselves can be enough to let you skimp on lands, though I’m not too sure about that. These lands are awful for tempo and, crucially, if you are forced to play one on turn 2 on the draw without a one-drop, you end up discarding. An aggressive R/W deck will usually not want the tempo disadvantage, on the other hand if they have an inordinate number of two-drops relative to three-drops, then that tempo may well have gone to waste anyway and you’d be better off with a more stable manabase. I think the jury is still out on these lands and just how useful they will be.
Instant Review Revisited
Last week I did a review of sorts of the instants in the set and abandoned it halfway through because most cards were pretty self-explanatory and I couldn’t really add anything from personal experience. Now I have some experience let’s revisit some of them.
Transmute spells
A lot of people played Perplex against me. It tended to either counter something inconsequential or it made me discard my inconsequential hand. If you’re hell-bent on playing counterspells in this format, try to find Convolute. Perplex is only good if you have better things to transmute it into. Dizzy Spell is quite useless on the whole, but I just want to mention that there were several times I wished I could transmute into Disembowel, and Dizzy Spell is just the man you want for the job. Finally, I’ve heard many people say how they usually transmuted Brainspoil into something else. By my experience that can only really mean that their brain has been quite severely spoilt.
G/W pump effects
There are several pump spells in Green and White and many of them are rather good. I did a draft and had 2 Seeds of Strength, 2 Wojek Siren and 1 Gather Courage and I felt it was a tough decision which ones to cut. In the end I cut the two Sirens because they aren’t as mana efficient as Gather Courage and not as versatile as the Seeds, but it felt somewhat wrong in a deck that could churn out the Saprolings like nobody’s business. Then again, this has been the problem of G/W decks since time immemorial.
Disenchant effects
It’s been a while since we’ve had a format like this, where there aren’t enough artifacts and enchantments around to warrant playing disenchant effects like Sundering Vitae and Seed Sparks. The only commons that show up usually are the enchant creature auras with come into play abilities, and their not usually worth destroying as they’ve already done their job.
R/W finishers
I’ve heard someone say that Rally the Righteous isn’t particularly good, which made me wonder what he’d been smoking, it is one of the better cards R/W can use to finish off an opponent. Other good ones are Boros Fury-Shield, Wojek Siren and Incite Hysteria. Boros Fury-Shield, as I said last week, is not a particularly good card in general, but it fulfils a vital role in these aggressive R/W decks and is hence an auto-play.
Focus on U/B
Now I’ll take a closer look at the events and decks at the pre-release. On Saturday I spent most of the day judging before I eventually entered the team sealed event. The problem with pre-releases is that they bring a lot of people out of the woodwork who usually never play in tournaments and hence don’t have a strong grasp of the basic rules. Most of the questions I got asked were so trivial I couldn’t even imagine what kind of person could have these problems. Oh well, at least I didn’t have to judge the two-headed giant tournament. I think the rules they decided on for THG are possibly the worst ones imaginable. You can look at your team mate’s hand and freely discuss any actions you want to take in your simultaneous turn? Only one player needs to have a defence? Why? I think this is a wasted opportunity to make a good sanctioned multiplayer format.
No worry, though, there still good old Team Sealed, easily the best sanctionable format ever (okay, Team Rochester is up there, but how often do you find people playing that outside of PTs, GP Day 2s and PTQ finals?). So I grabbed my two mates Dan and Matt and we got a reasonably nice cardpool. We made a R/W deck, a U/B deck and a G/W/b deck. This color split is extremely obvious, when you think about it. One deck gets all the Red cards, one all the Blue cards, one all the Green cards and the White and Black cards get split however necessary. I will say no more about the format, as it has no direct relevance to GP Nottingham (eye on the prize, eye on the prize!), but there are a few insights to be gained from my deck and how it played. Here’s the deck I played:
Creatures (16)
1 Surveiling Sprite
1 Dimir Infiltrator
1 Roofstalker Wight
1 Dimir Guildmage
2 Stinkweed Imp
1 Dimir Cutpurse
1 Keening Banshee
1 Circu, Dimir Lobotomist
2 Snapping Drake
1 Undercity Shade
2 Tattered Drake
2 Helldozer (!)
Other Spells (7)
2 Disembowel
2 Brainspoil
1 Clinging Darkness
1 Strands of Undeath
1 Dimir Signet
Yeah, I know, double Helldozer? How lucky! Getting to the point, this deck contains very few control elements, apart from copious amounts of removal, and no milling or library manipulation apart from Circu. Of course, being team sealed and all, this deck is somewhat better than you’d expect a draft deck to be, let alone an individual Sealed deck, but I think it shows the direction to go in with regards to the Dimir archetype. Don’t bother with counterspells and milling, pick up as many flyers and as much removal as you can and deliver hard beats. A few defensive creatures are fine, since you need a way to avoid getting run over by the R/W boys, but don’t use their library as your first line of offence. Or any line of offence, for that matter.
This deck has four rares in it, and they are all awesome. After my first match against another U/B deck I came to doubt whether Circu really wanted to be in the deck, but he is great against R/W because they have so many 2/2s that he can take care of with his three points of toughness; and he is likely to draw a removal spell away from more important creatures because he is perceived to be a greater threat than he is. I don’t need to say much about Helldozer – it is one of the best cards in the set, hits hard and screws your opponent good. I didn’t think much of Dimir Cutpurse at first, but when you’ve got enough removal to clear a path, then he’s absolutely incredible.
In the four rounds I played with this deck I faced two R/W decks and two U/B control decks. The pseudo-mirrors were never even close, they just couldn’t handle all the creatures with removal backup, and if a Helldozer ever resolved, that was game over right there. Always blow up their lands before you start serving the beatdown that hell brought to you. U/B decks really don’t like having all their land blown up. And the award for the most obvious statement of the year goes to… me! I would like to thank the academy…
Playing this deck against R/W beats is one of the most exciting ways to play magic. Every game is on a razor’s edge. In six games I only once finished it on more than four life. I lost one match against R/W because I played the wrong removal. I could’ve disembowelled Firemane Angel, but instead I played Brainspoil, and ended up losing to Razia, Boros Archangel. Those angels are rather good, and they let the R/W decks finish. This set really could do with more burn, considering the number of games I’d sit at two life for seven turns until my opponent succumbed to the flying beatdown. It is more exciting this way, though!
Focus on G/W
That’s enough about Team Sealed, time to get to the actually relevant. Preparing for a GP requires looking at both Sealed and Draft, at least if you intend to make Day 2, which I do. So let’s take a look at my experience at the pre-release in High Wycombe on Sunday. Of course this still isn’t the right format since it uses an additional booster, but never mind.
Sealed
So I started off the day with the main event, seven rounds of sealed deck with 72 other players. Here’s my pool:
Red
1 Barbarian Riftcutter
1 Ordruun Commando
1 Viashino Fangtail
1 Wojek Embermage
1 Goblin Fire Fiend
1 Goblin Spelunkers
1 Sell-Sword Brute
2 Viashino Slasher
1 Torpid Moloch
1 Cleansing Beam
1 Dogpile
1 Smash
1 Reroute
1 Surge of Zeal
Black
1 Sewerdreg
1 Mortipede
1 Stinkweed Imp
1 Roofstalker Wight
1 Golgari Thug
1 Brainspoil
1 Ribbons of Night
1 Vigor Mortis
1 Nightmare Void
1 Empty the Catacombs
1 Clinging Darkness
1 Disembowel
1 Darkblast
Blue
2 Snapping Drake
1 Spawnbroker
1 Terraformer
1 Surveilling Sprite
1 Grayscaled Gharial
2 Stasis Cell
1 Induce Paranoia
1 Convolute
1 Muddle the Mixture
1 Quickchange
White
1 Oathsworn Giant
1 Dromad Purebred
1 Wojek Apothecary
1 Nightguard Patrol
1 Gate Hound
1 Veteran Armorer
2 Courier Hawk
1 Faith’s Fetters
2 Conclave’s Blessing
1 Flickerform
1 Leave no Trace
Green
1 Bramble Elemental
2 Greater Mossdog
2 Golgari Brownscale
1 Civic Wayfinder
2 Transluminant
1 Elvish Skysweeper
1 Overwhelm
1 Sundering Vitae
2 Farseek
Gold and Hybrid
1 Boros Guildmage
1 Boros Swiftblade
1 Rally the Righteous
1 Szadek, Lord of Secrets
1 Dimir Infiltrator
1 Lurking Informant
1 Twisted Justice
1 Consult the Necrosages
1 Golgari Germination
1 Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi
1 Loxodon Hierarch
1 Pollenbright Wings
1 Congregation at Dawn
1 Seeds of Strength
Artifacts and Lands
1 Bloodletter Quill
1 Grifter’s Blade
1 Golgari Signet
1 Boros Signet
2 Dimir Signet
1 Boros Garrison
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
This pool contains one bomb in Szadek, Lord of Secrets, who can easily deck the opponent in just a few hits, or he can strike once and then sit there as a 10/10 flying blocker. However, neither Blue nor Black really have enough creatures to be a main color and Szadek isn’t very splashable, so that one had to go and warm the bench. I considered a R/W deck, but it didn’t have enough oomph, and was just like a version of the G/W deck with worse creatures. The Green four-drops, with double Greater Mossdog and Loxodon Hierarch, are just awesome so I settled on the following G/W/b deck, stressing again that the Black was a bit thin for a main color.
Creatures (16)
1 Boros Guildmage
1 Veteran Armorer
2 Courier Hawk
2 Transluminant
1 Golgari Brownscale
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Nightguard Patrol
1 Loxodon Hierarch
2 Greater Mossdog
1 Mortipede
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Oathsworn Giant
1 Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi
Other Spells (8)
1 Seeds of Strength
1 Pollenbright Wings
1 Golgari Germination
1 Faith’s Fetters
1 Ribbons of Night
1 Disembowel
1 Golgari Signet
1 Boros Signet
Lands (16)
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Swamp
5 Plains
7 Forest
Golgari Germination, Pollenbright Wings and Svogthos, the Restless Tomb were cards I wasn’t particularly convinced by, but just wanted to try to see how good they are. Pollenbright Wings was superb for me, so it is definitely an option. The other two seemed quite inferior, though that may have been in part due to fact that black was just a splash. I would quite definitely advise against playing Svogthos in a three-color deck, though.
Here’s a quick run-through of my matches in this event.
Round 1 vs. Jeff Hymer, U/B milling control
As I said numerous times before, this archetype doesn’t really work in this form. Game 1 I overran him with bears and a first striking Mortipede (thanks to Boros Guildmage), game 2 he almost decks me because I’m helping his cause by dredging a Mossdog twice, but in the end I managed to kill him before he could find a way to get rid of the last six cards in my deck. 1-0
Round 2 vs. Keith Davies, R/W
He had a surprisingly slow and controlling version of the archetype. I got him down to 3 with a Mortipede-driven alpha strike, but then he dropped Ghosts of the Innocent and all my Saprolings became useless and unable to finish the job. I keep playing because all I needed to win was to topdeck Disembowel. Alas, it was not to be, and ten million years or so later I died to his Screeching Griffins. Game 2 and 3 I was utterly dominant but was one turn away from finishing him off game 3, so the whole thing ends in a draw. 1-0-1
Round 4 vs. David Burke, U/B/G
My round 3 opponent had actually dropped, so I had a bye. In this match, I died horribly to a Woebringer Demon game 1. Game 2 he plays the Demon again, but only has Elves of Deep Shadow to cover it, so I Disembowelled the Elves, forcing him to sac the demon in his upkeep. I won that game comfortably from there. Game 3 I have a quick start with turn 4 Loxodon Hierarch and he’s screwed for Blue mana, so when I stop his Gaze of the Gorgon by Disembowelling the creature in response that’s all she wrote. 3-0-1
Round 5 vs. Iain Taylor, U/B control
In game 2 he had counters for all my major threats, and in the end he had the choice between killing me by attacking with flyers or letting me draw out my library. Unsurprisingly, though, I win games 1 and 3 because his deck just can’t handle a quick start. 4-0-1
Round 6 vs. Joseph Lever, G/B
His deck was definitely superior to mine, but I managed to outplay him in game 1 by attacking into his Vulturous Zombie with small creatures, bluffing a trick, and later tricking him into letting through a Courier Hawk that I Seeds of Strengthed for the win. Games 2 and 3 though he got huge monsters out quickly that I just couldn’t handle. Remember people, Moldervine Cloak is a bomb and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 4-1-1
Round 7 vs. Kevin Blake, R/W/B
Game 1 I have the Oathsworn Giant out who looks kinda good, but doesn’t really help enough. Especially not against the Hunted Dragon that did me in quite quickly. In come Elvish Skyweeper and Flickerform from the board. In game 2 the early creatures all die, then nothing much happens while we both draw too many lands, then he kills my Skysweeper and drops the Dragon again and again it kills me, though he only survived thanks to Chant of Vitu-Ghazi. That card definitely has its uses. How sweet would Flickerform have been, though? 4-2-1 (12th)
Most people play either G/B/x or G/W/x these days and that is largely due to the fact that Green is the creature color that has more creatures than Blue or Black and better creatures then Red or White. This seems to be particularly emphasized in this set.
Draft
I’ve only done one draft so far and it seems to suggest that getting enough creatures will be tough. This can be a real problem in G/W as more or less all of the non-creature spells require you to have creatures on the board. Anyway, my draft was definitely helped by opening three on-color bomb/near-bomb rare creatures. First pick Twilight Drover put me into G/W immediately, followed by Seeds of Strength and several Gazes of the Gorgon. Like a complete lucksack I opened Gleancrawler in my second pack and Loxodon Hierarch in my third, but was still scrambling for creatures. This was the deck I ended up playing:
Creatures (16)
1 Votary of the Conclave
1 Selesnya Evangel
1 Selesnya Guildmage
1 Veteran Armorer
1 Benevolent Ancestor
1 Twilight Drover
1 Nightguard Patrol
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Sandsower
1 Mortipede
1 Loxodon Hierarch
1 Scatter the Seeds
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Gleancrawler
1 Siege Wurm
1 Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi
Other Spells (7)
1 Gather Courage
2 Seeds of Strength
2 Gaze of the Gorgon
1 Faith’s Fetters
1 Golgari Signet
Lands (17)
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
1 Swamp
8 Forest
7 Plains
Relevant Sideboard
2 Wojek Siren
1 Privileged Position
1 Goliath Spider
1 Gaze of the Gorgon
1 Seed Spark
2 Sundering Vitae
2 Rain of Embers
It’s still early days, but it seems that G/W has more useful synergies than any of the other guilds. The whole Saproling thing is immensely powerful. Just look at the interactions of Selesnya Evangel, Selesnya Guildmage, Twilight Drover and Sandsower. I thought Sandsower was going to be late-pick possible-filler card, but it is actually really good in this archetype. Beware of creature sweepers, though, I’m so glad I hatedrafted those two Rains of Embers!
In the quarterfinals my opponent was playing U/B and took three mulligans in two games, in which he dealt a grand total of five damage to me. In the semi-finals I played Michael Bungey who attempted to draft a R/U deck, though the deck he ended up with never seemed to run properly unless he had white mana available. He couldn’t handle my swarm of Frenchmen backed up by Seeds of Strength. Frenchmen, by the way, are Saproling tokens, because I picked up several Pro player cards depicting Frenchmen and used them as tokens. For this reason Twilight Drover is now my favorite card.
Conclusion
Ravnica: City of Guilds is truly the new Invasion. Not since that great set has a new set brought so much new enjoyment to the game. The set has as much strategy and as many tough decisions as any other, even though there are only four proper color combinations to choose from instead of the usual ten. I for one look forward to exploring this environment further.
Until next time, when I’ll be looking at some proper (2 booster) sealed decks!
Martin
martin underscore dingler at hotmail dot com