“Where have you been?”
“Puerto Rico. I just got back!”
“Man, that’s awesome! Where’s your tan?”
“…”
You can expect Magic players to come back from a Caribbean island with no tan. However, I didn’t expect to look as pale as Lestat, or to throw away my shoes as they didn’t survive the torrential rains. While I had planned to prepare for the Pro Tour as much as possible, I didn’t think that it was my only option. My crew and I did manage to go out for a tour around San Juan, and we had a trip to the rainforest and beach, but we spent most of our time on the island preparing for the PT in a dry place: the hotel lobby. Sad, very sad.
The good part is that it became the perfect setup for a proper preparation: an internet connection, sets of RoE cards to build decks, four days to get ready, and seven high level Magic players together, featuring Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, Olivier and Antoine Ruel, Yann Massicard, Manuel Bucher, and Guillaume Matignon.
We flew from Washington on Monday and got to business almost right away. Patrick Chapin shared Guillaume’s room on Monday night. He had a brew of his own (or maybe it was someone else’s deck, I can’t really remember), and he really wanted to try it out. It was a Green Eldrazi deck (not Eldrazi Green. Green Eldrazi= Ramp with Eldrazi, while Eldrazi Green=Stompy with Eldrazi Monument). The deck looked very consistent, and ramped quickly to Eldrazi thanks to Growth Spasm, Skittering Invasion, and 4 Eyes of Ugin. It faired really well against UW but failed to win many (any?) games against Red, with no real sideboard plan, especially against Kargan Dragonlord. This became the main issue of the format. How do you deal with Mono Red and Dragonlord without losing all chance to beat WU?
Most of the cards that deal with Kargan Dragonlord also deal with Red’s cheap creatures. However, almost none of them are useful against UW.
Wafo worked hard on Patrick’s Green Eldrazi deck, and tried to fix the Red matchup. He ended up with this (this is the latest version of the deck):
4 Eldrazi Temple
4 Khalni Garden
3 Eye of Ugin
4 Tectonic Edge
9 Forest
4 Expedition Map
4 All is Dust
4 Nest Invader
4 Kozilek’s Predator
3 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
3 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
4 Ancient Stirrings
Nest Invaders and Kozilek’s Predator provided chump blockers that saved you enough time to set up your strategy and find an All is Dust to deal with the threats in play, and eventually annihilate your opponent’s board. The deck was finally doing well against Red, and doing fairly well against UW. Patrick’s deck was built to beat UW, but the more we added cards to deal with Red, the more our chances against UW decreased (a format issue). It was also quite hard to play the latter matchup. You had to manage your mana very tightly, plan a few turns ahead using math you don’t use very often in a game. You had to figure out the best time to crack your Expedition Map (spending your 3 mana wisely), keeping in mind your Eldrazi Temple and Eye of Ugin could get Strip Mined by a Tectonic Edge. A problem we had with this deck, as with many decks focused on ramp or combo, was that there was no real sideboard plan. There’s no card you really want to take out from the main deck (as that would decrease the overall stability of the deck) for more specific sideboard cards… and since you don’t really have sideboard options, except maybe for random Naturalizes and Ondu Giants, which still sound very suboptimal.
This was definitely a deck I considered playing.
I had been working on a Vampire deck for some time, but whatever I had never had a better chance than 30-70 against UW, which was not acceptable. At first, I thought Mind Sludge was a real issue for UW. But as the testing progressed, I realized that it was far from relevant. You would need to play at least 25 or 26 lands, and it didn’t really fit in an aggressive strategy. When you finally reached your fifth land, you likely had nothing on the board and the Mind Sludge would basically do nothing. It wouldn’t deal with Jace or Gideon, and if UW draws either one of these afterwards, you’re in trouble again. I cut Mind Sludge from most of my Black decks. Here is a deck I ended up with:
4 Overflowing Chalice
3 Seer’s Sundial
4 Consuming Vapors
4 Smother
3 Grim Discovery
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Sorin Markov
4 Malakir Gatekeeper
4 Vampire Hexmage
4 Abyssal Persecutor
1 Ob Nixilis, the Fallen
4 Verdant Catacomb
4 Marsh Flat
4 Tectonic Edge
12 Swamp
This list is not optimal and still needs a lot of work. There are a couple of interesting things about this deck. I haven’t seen many lists that include Abyssal Persecutor. I have tried my hardest to find a way to play it. It is rather sad to see that 6/6 flyers for four mana aren’t good enough these days. His drawback says that you have to play with Gatekeepers and Consuming Vapors in your deck, something you would have done anyway. Most decks, including UW and Mono Red, need to get rid of it in order to kill you. UW can’t really damage you when it’s untapped, and needs to set up an army backed up with Gideon, which takes a while since you can deal with Sphinxes and Celestial Colonnades easily. Red needs to burn you out before you find a way to kill it yourself, or you can push the draw by blocking a pumped Dragonlord if you couldn’t find a way to deal with the Red leveler. You can also use it as a blocker for a while; that may sound lame, but a 6/6 flying wall saves you a lot of time against Red, until you finally have control of the board and can attack safely. The Overflowing Chalice allows you to play a Persecutor on turn 3 and take advantage of Seer’s Sundial which, while being very costly, provides you a much needed card advantage boost in the long games against Control. The synergy with fetch lands and Grim Discovery makes it a reliable drawing engine that’s very hard to handle. The matchup against Red gets better after sideboard, when you replace the Dials with either more removal or Vampire Nighthawks.
I wanted a late game threat that would deal direct damage. I was not sure whether Sorin Markov or Ob Nixilis, the Fallen is better. In any case, both cards work much better than Mind Sludge, against both Aggro and Control matchups.
Even with the anti-UW arsenal, its results against UW were not satisfying enough, and I had to give the deck up. With a little more work, it could probably have been a fine choice. Try to improve it if you have the time to work on it. The solution might come from the Blue splash some players added —I invite you to check those lists on the “top block decklists” on the Mothership’s coverage, and see if a mix between those lists and this one is possible.
On Tuesday, Jérémie Dezany arrived with his own decks. One of his decks had an interesting mix of tokens, Beastmaster Ascensions, and Eldrazi Monuments along with Jace and counterspells. The deck was original, but the mana was very shaky. R was necessary for early removal, UU for Jace and Cancel, and G for token generators.
This is what Jérémie’s deck looked like:
3 Cancel
4 Unified Will
4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Nest Invader
4 Kozilek’s Predator
3 Emrakul’s Hatcher
4 Awakening Zone
4 Burst Lightning
3 Beastmaster Ascension
3 Eldrazi Temple
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Raging Ravine
4 Khalni Garden
1 Mountain
3 Island
4 Forest
It did passably against Red, and Jérémie said the UW match was tough… I still wanted to try it out. It was actually a very one-sided matchup. UW could just not win. On paper, it seems that UW doesn’t have to counter anything but Beastmaster Ascensions and Eldrazi Monuments. The rest of the deck is just a bunch of overcosted 3/3s and 0/1 token generators. In reality, what happens is that UW can’t tap out to play a threat, while the token deck piles up more and more Spawns. Day of Judgment doesn’t do much since the spawns come back almost instantly. The token deck will eventually be able to resolve an Ascension backed up with a counterspell, and the game would end soon after.
The deck definitely had some potential, and room for improvement. Olivier and I worked on the deck for some time, while Guillaume Matignon insisted that we focus on “actual decks.” We pushed the testing further, and little did Guillaume know that the deck would take him to the PT’s Top 8 four days later. Here is the deck Guillaume, Olivier, and Antoine played at the PT:
1 Evolving Wilds
3 Forest
3 Island
4 Khalni Garden
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Mountain
4 Raging Ravine
4 Scalding Tarn
1 Emrakul’s Hatcher
4 Kozilek’s Predator
4 Nest Invader
2 Sea Gate Oracle
4 Awakening Zone
2 Beastmaster Ascension
1 Bestial Menace
4 Burst Lightning
2 Eldrazi Monument
3 Flame Slash
3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3 See Beyond
3 Unified Will
Sideboard
2 Deprive
1 Eldrazi Monument
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Jaddi Lifestrider
3 Spell Pierce
2 Staggershock
1 Unified Will
3 Vapor Snare
The deck changed a lot in two days. More cheap removal, and fewer useless and hard-to-cast counterspells. See Beyond was necessary to fill the two-mana spell slot, and allows you to replace useless removal spells against control decks. I really pushed for the deck during testing, but ended up giving it up myself. The reason for that was that the deck was really unstable. I often use the terms “stable” and “unstable.” It’s a way to express how often the deck will lose to itself. An easy way to see how stable a deck can be is to draw a sample of 50 hands (or 100 hands) and see how often you would mulligan, and how often you wouldn’t have got there when you kept. It takes about 10 minutes and reveals a lot about the deck.
This is a three-color deck with a lot of dead cards in the early game: Beastmaster Ascension, Eldrazi Monument, Red removal in the wrong matchup, Unified Will on the draw. The manabase is okay, but not good enough to support UU and R/G in the early game. I found out that I mulliganed one game out of three, and that mulliganing hurt the deck a lot, costing you the game more than half the time, and you would have to fight hard the other half of the time. I guess that could be alright in a six-round tournament, but in a ten-round tournament, this is a chance I am not willing to take. In the eventuality that it was indeed the deck that beats everything, you would still lose at least two rounds against any deck (but more likely 3 or 4).
For four days straight, Guillaume Matignon was confident he would play his Red deck. I liked how Red performed, but was scared by people’s sideboards. I did not like the fact that everyone knew about the deck, and that if you wanted to beat Red, you had to stuff your deck with cheap removal or pack 10 cards in the sideboard. Since it was successful and popular online, I knew I would run against countless Kor Firewalkers too.
Guillaume knew that too, but believed his sideboard plans featuring Hellkite Chargers, Overflowing Chalice, and Obsidian Firehearts would beat Firewalkers and opposing sideboard strategies. After an hour of sideboarded games against Wafo, his confidence was lost and he started looking for an alternative. I was confused and frustrated, and I couldn’t figure it out. I came up with the conclusion that any deck would be okay. While speaking with people at the players’ party, Eldrazi Green came up many, many times. The only reason players would not play it was because they wanted to play “spells.” That is not really an issue for me, so I decided to give it a try. Per Nystrom shared his list with me, and I put my fate in the hands of my Swedish buddy from Goteborg:
Nystrompy
4 Arbor Elves
4 Joraga Treespeaker
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Nest Invader
4 Mul Daya Channeler
4 Vengevine
4 Leatherback Baloth
4 Leadstone Golem
4 Eldrazi Monument
4 Verdant Catacomb
4 Misty Rainforest
16 Forest
Sideboard:
3 Naturalize
4 River Boa
4 Tajuru Preserver
2 Basilisk Collar
2 Mold Shambler
There are other versions of Eldrazi Green with Beastmaster Ascensions that might be better than this list. Current French Champion Gilles Mongilardi played Eldrazi Green with Blazing Torches and Mold Shamblers maindeck. The deck is very stable and had a 50% matchup against pretty much everything. I really wanted to play the Green Eldrazi deck, but Wafo decided to play WU instead. He was the one who played it the most, and if he didn’t trust the deck enough, I could only believe that was not the deck to play. I didn’t believe in it enough to be the only one playing it. The whole Swedish team including GP: Copenhagen winner David Larsson played Nystrompy, so I could only assume that since good players put their faith in the deck, it had to be good.
Day 1 Summary:
Round 1: UW : Loss 1-2
Round 2: MonoW Allies: Loss 1-2
Round 3: Oracle/Ob Nixilis: Loss 0-2
Round 4: Comet Storm: Win: 2-0
Round 5: UW: Win 2-1
The first two matches could have gone either way, just like the fourth and fifth matches. The third round was an unwinnable matchup. At 0-3 I felt I had picked the wrong deck. The rest of the Swedish team was doing better than me (they can’t really do any worse!), and Per posted a 7-3 overall record with the deck. Matignon ended the Block Constructed portion at 5-0, and it made me think that maybe I should have played the token deck. He eventually finished the tournament undefeated with it. Then I spoke to Antoine and Oli, who told me they wanted to trash that piece of garbage… so that reassured me somehow. Somewhere deep inside, I felt I should have gone for the Green Eldrazi deck, with UW never being an option at any point during testing; I know it’s an awesome deck… it’s just not my style.
I had to post a 3-0 in the draft to make Day 2. I ended up drafting a passable UB level up deck, featuring double Champion Drake and Coralhelm Commander, which would have been awesome had I seen Venerated Teachers during the draft. I lost my first round, and with it any hope to make Day 2, to a very solid RB deck running a thousand removal spells, Surreal Memoirs, and double Wrap in Flames (which killed most of my guys). I played another round, and it was worth it. The only game I won in the draft saw my opponent absolutely puzzled at my play. He had a bunch of Red and Green creatures staring at my Escaped Null. Only his Pelakka Wurm attacked to push some damage through. I went from 15 to 8, and kept all my creatures back, including my Cavern Imp (he didn’t have any way to block it). On his turn, he attacked again with the Wurm. Knowing that I would die anyway to a burn or a pump spell, I decided to take it again, going down to one life. He tapped out to play another guy. On my turn, I tapped 7 lands and cast Repay in Kind, lowering his life from 17 to 1, and sending my Cavern Imp for the win… I had to make up for the bad day, and it almost single handedly made my day. I proceeded to lose the next game and drop.
Repay in Kind is a fine card in UB and BR. It’s a whole different game you are playing while you’re holding it, and if your opponent doesn’t know you have it, he is in for a big surprise. Since everyone overlooks this card, it shouldn’t be too hard to conceal it until the decisive turn.
This concludes the first half of the season, and it’s definitely the worst six months of Magic I’ve had in years. The next big tournament I am attending will be French Nationals at the end of July. This means I don’t have tournaments for a while. I have a few ideas for articles, but if you have any suggestions, or want me to write about specific topics, let me know.
Until next time!
Raph