Hi everybody. It’s been a long time since I’ve written for StarCityGames.com, and it is a complete pleasure to be once again picking up the pen and bringing some of my thoughts on the game to everyone. I’ve been very busy plugging away at the seemingly endless slog that is graduate school, and as a result I simply haven’t been able to do the kind of writing that I wanted to so I had to take a break. But now, with the summer here and a few more degrees under my belt, I’m happy to return to the SCG fold and once again bring my thoughts on the game to everyone.
Before I get to the main point of this article, since it has been several months since I’ve written I think it is worth briefly reintroducing myself to everyone. Many of you probably know me for my work bringing commentary to the StarCityGames.com Open Series as one of the founding commentators. I’ve been playing Magic for a long time, and though I’ve been more renowned as a thinker within the game than as a player, I’ve had enough success playing to get in my share of first place finishes in smaller events.
A long while back I managed a tie for Top 8 in a Pro Tour, though I’ve never managed to make that fabled Day 3. Last year, I made the honorable mention section of Patrick Chapin Top 10 Deckbuilders of All-Time, coming in at #20—an honor I’m deeply appreciate—and though I feel like I’ve still been making good decks (working on the very successful update to BluManji comes to mind), “real-world” responsibilities have definitely made applying myself to Magic be a slightly lower priority than it has been in the past.
Thinking about Magic has been something I’ve been unable to stop doing since I first started with this game, but especially after I first dangled my toes into the waters of tournament Magic. Analysis and theory have always been my bread and butter, and it’s this kind of analysis that I’m going to reopen my over-decade-old column with here today.
The Dominance of Blue-White;
(or Should We Ban Delver or Ponder or Snapcaster, Oh My!)
For the record, I definitely don’t think that the current Standard has proven a need for a ban in Standard. That said, it is pushing right up against the edge of making that feel like it is true (if we get there, my guess is Ponder is the card to axe). Delver-based blue-white decks have been an overwhelming presence in the SCG Open Series for some time now, with the most recent event in Nashville basically paving the way for discussion of bannings with Gerry Thompson and three of his buddies in Team SCG Blue placing four people in the Top 8 with essentially the same list. Out of over 400 people. Yeah.
If you don’t realize it, that is absurd. Here is Gerry’s list from that event:
Creatures (15)
Lands (22)
Spells (23)
Essentially, the question marks for the list among the four players were:
(a) Do we run Sword of War and Peace or Sword of Feast and Famine?
(b) Do we run an Angelic Destiny or a Phantasmal Image?
The answers to these questions determined whether the other players were 72-card copies of Gerry’s deck or 75-card copies.
Again, this kind of result for a decklist is absurd.
But let’s dial this back a little bit. It is undeniable that the members of Team SCG Blue that were running the tables in Nashville were easily among the best players in the room. It is also the case that the specific choices in Gerry’s list that made it innovative (a “slow ‘er down” sideboard plan and an aggressive reliance on Restoration Angel) were largely unprepared for by the players in the room. Finally, as an early deck in a very new Standard with very little innovation possible from The Magic Hivemind without the cards available for long on Magic Online, preparing a well-honed version of what was already considered the best deck is a really good path to victory in a room that is more likely to be filled with either brews or decks that aren’t updated yet.
Gerry’s deck set the new standard for Standard. He spent some time talking about the performance of the deck and its matchups, but one thing that wasn’t in his article is where to go from here with the deck. Opinions, it turns out, seem to vary.
One thing that seems to be the consensus for decks that are based off of the GerryT shell is this: Restoration Angel changes everything.
Why Restoration Angel is Flametongue Kavu
A long time ago Flametongue Kavu was printed, and a whole slew of cards in the game became, in essence, wallpaper. The efficiency of Flametongue was just so insane for the time that if you were playing a creature that cost four or more, unless you were Flametongue you were unplayable unless you could survive a Flametongue.
That eliminated most of the creatures that were legal that would have otherwise been completely incredible creatures at a different moment in the game.
Restoration Angel is no Flametongue Kavu, per se, but it is a cousin to good ol’ FTK in behavior, perhaps by way of Mistbind Clique. The Mistbind Clique set up a frustrating bind in conjunction with Cryptic Command that made an opponent facing four mana from a Faeries player suddenly feel like they had a conundrum: attacking could set them up for a devastating 4/4 wrecking their dreams, but trying to cast more spells could set up Cryptic Command working as Dismiss. The Faeries opponent wouldn’t always have both cards, but being faced with the dilemma was problematic for everyone else.
Restoration Angel in this case pairs with Snapcaster Mage, who with a little help from either Vapor Snag or Mana Leak creates the “Cryptic Command” effect (without even going into the obscenity of Restoration Angel with Snapcaster already in play). One of the things that makes me go back to FTK, though, is that we’ve seen a real change in the creatures that are seeing play in Standard because of the Angel, much like the push that we saw from FTK. Mistbind Clique, as a potent part of the Faeries deck, absolutely influenced card selection, but I don’t recall it pushing creatures heavily out of the format, where the Angel does seem to be accomplishing that.
How so, you may ask?
As I was covering the SCG Standard Open in Worcester, MA, a ton of decklists crossed my path over the course of the ten rounds of the tournament. One thing that was exceedingly common was a reduction in Huntmaster of the Fells in the red/green based decks of all stripes. Previously, Huntmaster was one of those cards that actually could get a lot of work done against Delver-based decks. The extra 2/2 body was a real thing, the lifegain was a real thing, and the threat of it Wolfing out was a real thing. But now, a new situation was a part of the mix: a 3/4 body was jumping out of the clouds to ambush the Huntmaster with alarming frequency. Other small green creatures were similarly afflicted by Angel attacks.
For other decks, surprising cards were also being pushed out. Take the older versions of Delver that opted for the ultra-aggressive Runechanter’s Pike path. I spoke with Charles Gindy about the Pike lists (which he had piloted to success in the past only a few months ago), and according to Gindy these lists were actually no longer playable because equipment could be so fragile either to keep in play or to get onto a creature.
The essential problem was that Restoration Angel kept allowing the flickering of Snapcaster Mage which in turn was recasting potent removal spells, whether they were “merely” Vapor Snag or they were more permanent removal spells, and that was without even getting to the potential for Divine Offering in the mix. Without any of the card advantage shenanigans, Restoration Angel itself was trumping Delver, and so his Runechanter’s builds were finding themselves reliant on actually landing both an Invisible Stalker and an equipment but taking out space in other cards in order to do so. Trying to also jam in Angel just taxed the real estate too much; the returns simply weren’t worth it.
Angels just ended up as a card that would be the new center of the deck, making Delver itself more incidental.
Angels and Insects
Once you go down the path towards Angels, the questions begin to emerge, with several different answers posed by different players.
(a1) Just how many Angels are there?
(a2) Do Angels like to play with Swords?
(a3) How big do you go when you go big?
(b1) Are we still with Geist, or are token-Angels irrelevant?
(b2) Do we want to maximize Angel shenanigans? (Think Blade Splicer)
And a final, minor question:
(c) What are our Snapcaster targets?
Let’s hit these questions one at a time.
GerryT started us down this path with three Angels, but a lot of the reason he ran three was that he could reasonably suspect that Angels weren’t going to be a huge part of the metagame. Gerry wasn’t the first person to play Angel by any means, but his finish absolutely settled in the minds of tournament players that Angel was the real deal. Gerry was limiting his Angel count at the time to take into account the constraints of mana cost, as well as simple deckbuilding space: there really are only so many card slots available.
At four mana, Restoration Angel is one of the easiest cards to Mana Leak. At the same time, because it is an instant it can end of turn be used to tax the opponent of their mana, something that they may not want to do out of fear of a main phase spell that punishes them for doing so. In the moment GerryT was living in, three was probably sufficient to get the results you were looking for. But what about now that we can expect a ton of Angels from practically every Delver list?
It does seem as though the question of Angels and Swords are interrelated. At this point four copies of the Angel seems nearly ubiquitous, but if you look at decklists that are out there, the decision on the numbers, three or four, hinges largely on how many expensive spells are in the deck.
Take a deck that is still a Delver deck but goes big: Larry Swasey build of Delver for the SCG Standard Open in Worcester:
Creatures (16)
Lands (11)
Spells (33)
Here you see only three Angel from Swasey, but what it also has going on that is worth paying attention to is the large number of expensive drops in the form of two Sword of War and Peace and a maindeck Consecrated Sphinx. According to Swasey, this deck is focused entirely on defeating the mirror. Sword is a huge part of this, but also, the game can drag out, so having the singleton Sphinx in the main can really push things over the edge. Even with these potential edges, though, Swasey still only felt that this was a deck with an edge in the mirror, not a deck that overwhelmed the mirror.
Ultimately, Swasey fell to Grand Prix Champion David Shiels playing for Top 8.
Creatures (16)
Lands (12)
Spells (32)
Like Swasey, Shiels had access to six big spells, though his Sphinx was in the board rather than the main. After sideboard, both of these players fought over a slower control war, and though some people definitely advocate keeping the aggro in the deck, a common plan is to drop out Delvers.
This plan has been so prevalent that we actually saw someone take this to its logical conclusion: dropping Delvers from the main. More on Sam Black deck in a moment.
Essentially the question of the top end of the maindeck of these decks is simply the question of how much effort you want to give to winning in the mirror. By adding to the top end, whether it is Restoration Angel or any of the other choices, you are slowing your deck down in favor of adding in more power. The cost of this choice is a slow shift away from the natural advantages of an aggro-control deck.
The biggest advantage of an aggro-control deck against other controlling decks is that, of all of the strategic archetype pairings, aggro-control decks like Fish, Madness, and RUG Delver put on the pressure and then control the time elements of the game such that a control deck tends to crumple. NO other matchup of strategic archetypes is so lopsided. Giving up the speed shifts you bit-by-bit from being this archetype and opens up a lot of opportunity for slower decks to get back into the game.
We can see the reality of this with the back-to-back appearance of Esper Control (“Solar Flare” some will say) in the finals of an SCG Standard Open. At Columbus Esper won, and Jeremy Dombek took down Worcester with it this past weekend. The older, faster builds of Delver were much more suited to winning in this style of matchup, particularly the essentially defunct Invisible Stalker/Runechanter’s builds.
Going big, then, has costs. But the reward is that you are even better against the most popular, otherwise most powerful deck: the “regular” Angel-Delver builds. The biggest of these, at least right now, is Sam Black deck, which has built up quite a pedigree already by showing up in back-to-back finals of American WMCQs and winning a PTQ in the capable hands of Ben Rasmussen.
Here is the list with which Ben won the PTQ:
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (10)
Spells (32)
The logic of Sam’s deck is quite simple: since you’re planning on slowing it down every time any way, why not just start slow and move from there?
One potential argument against this is that you are even further moving away from aggro-control. As Sam notes, the deck is no longer able to consistently create the aggressive draws backed up by time control that mark an aggro-control deck. In the place of Delvers and other more aggressively posed cards, Sam finds room for four planeswalkers and a singleton Day of Judgment. Ben’s sideboard of Sam’s deck is a bit more conventional, with only seven singletons in the board (as opposed to Sam’s twelve), but essentially supplies a way to shift the deck in any number of directions depending on the opponent. Where conventional Delver decks start small and go big, Sam’s Delverless Delver starts big and goes bigger.
Sam lost to Ramp in the finals of his WMCQ, with Cavern of Souls pushing Ramp over the top in that matchup. One can’t help but wonder if Sam would have even made it to the finals with Delver in his deck, but on the other hand, it would have been a really good card to have in the deck once he made it there.
Sam’s deck, while Delverless, does highlight another way to truly abuse Restoration Angel besides Snapcaster Mage: Blade Splicer. Sam’s is not the only deck that runs Splicer over Geist. We can also see that choice in Matt Costa deck from Worcester:
Creatures (18)
Lands (22)
Spells (20)
Matt, you’ll note, is making the near opposite tack of Sam, maintaining the Delvers in the deck and running only four “expensive” cards in the deck: his four Angels. This is a deck still trying to hang onto the aggressive side of the spectrum in the first game. The sick thing about Angel/Splicer is the crazy way that you can just add six power to the table at the end of the turn. Splicer also has a lot of power on the defense as you’re trying to establish the momentum to move to the offensive versus truly aggressive decks like G/R Aggro.
Costa’s and Black’s decks represent the “extreme” edges of what now seems to be the Snapcaster-Angel archetype rather than the Delver archetype. Sam shifts the deck far enough out of aggro-control that he might be slipping all the way up to Caw-Blade land and essentially is closer to a midrange control deck, whereas Costa is still living in the lands of aggro-control, albeit only barely. These are the big-picture elements of these decks on a macro level.
The final other question is what to do about the micro level design elements: what are your cards that work as your “utility” cards? These are, generally, Gut Shot, Vapor Snag, Divine Offering, Dismember, Mutagenic Growth, Surgical Extraction, and other such cards. Really, to my mind, the decisions on this count are entirely based on a combination of personal preference and a mind for the metagame, constrained by the number of slots that you manage to make available after you’ve fit in your collection of big cards (Angels/Swords/bigger things).
One card choice that I do think is something that people should be doing more of is going back to the GerryT decision to run only three Gitaxian probe and two Thought Scour. Thought Scour, again and again, just seemed to make these decks be able to do so much more with their Snapcaster Mages than Probe. Probe, while important for gaining information and as a cantrip, simply doesn’t supply the same fuel to the deck as it looked like Thought Scour was doing. All of the singleton cards that these decks often run are far more palatable when you actually have a way to quasi-Tutor them onto the stack.
Overall, it strikes me that there really is a lot of play to the way you can go with what is, as I said, really a Snapcaster/Angel deck now. The question I keep going back to is whether or not this shift towards power at the cost of speed is something that can be readily exploited now, and, if so, where these blue/white decks dial back the power level to in order to not be so vulnerable to decks like Jeremy Dombek Esper Control (which didn’t lose a single time to these decks in Worcester despite facing them nine whopping times). I expect that faced with this kind of answer, Snappy-Angel will have to do something new.
There is always a push and pull with metagames that are live and new like the one we’re seeing in the current Standard. It could be that we’re entering an era of Rock-Paper-Scissors, or it could be that we’ll see a new Snappy-Angel deck emerge that is ready to respond to controlling decks. The next weeks will see.
See you next week,
For those of you who want to keep up with my random musings about Magic. I’ll be posting something to this Facebook page on my new Big Red deck that I brewed up for fun at Worcester as well as most other things Magic-related that I’m up to. I hope to see you there!
For those of you who don’t mind hearing about what I ate for breakfast. ;)