Draw 7
Stephen Menendian
Draw7s:
4 Diminishing Returns
1 Timetwister
1 Tinker
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Windfall
1 Memory Jar
Ridiculously Broken Spells:
1 Necropotence
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
Tutors/ Remaining Business Spells:
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
Land:
4 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine
1 Glimmervoid
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Underground Sea
Accelerating Mana Sources:
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
1 Black Lotus
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
Facilitating Mana Sources:
4 Dark Ritual
1 Fastbond
1 Crop Rotation
1 Time Walk (Can be Hurkyl’s Recall)
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond (Can be Tendrils #3)
Finishers:
2 Tendrils of Agony
Sideboard
4 Xantid Swarm
4 Hidden Guerillas
4 Chain of Vapor
3 Hurkyl’s Recall
Background:
I built this deck in the ashes of my failure to convert Long into a Death Wish build and piloted in Columbus in early February (http://www.morphling.de/coverages/top8decks.php?id=94 ) The idea was that instead of relying on tutors, what I took the complete opposite tack and tried to abuse the draw7s?
This is the premiere Tendrils deck in Type One at the moment – abusing an undercosted and unrestricted draw7 while it still can.
How does this deck play out?
The basic game plan is that it tries to cast about two to three Draw7 spells or Tutors and then play Tendrils for the win. More specifically, it really wants to play a turn 1 draw 7. There are nine of them and four cost UU – which is why Chrome Mox and Crop Rotation are so important. If they Force of Will your first turn Draw7, then you either Force their force, or you go for another draw7. If that is countered, then you usually Force of Will it or Brainstorm into another threat for turn 3. If that is countered, winning is tough unless you can topdeck some key threats while they have wasted their juice to stop you. Alternatively, the deck casts one of the”uberbroken” cards: Desire, Necro, Bargain, or Will and wins via disgusting card advantage leading to Tendrils.
Just looking at the deck for a moment, you can see that it is redundant and perhaps understand why it should be theoretically so powerful. 55% of the deck is mana (if you cut the Chain and the Hurkyl’s for Chrome Mox and LED into the maindeck). It has twelve artifact accelerations (including LED), four ESG, and four Rituals on top of eleven lands. That mana, if spread anywhere near random, should provide the perfect ratio of mana to play Draw7s on turn 1 and 2 and potential pure brokenness as well. The deck has nine draw7s, four truly sick cards (Bargain, Desire, Yawg Will, and Necro) and two tutors for a total of fifteen excellent business spells, or about an average of two in any given hand (and more if you use Brainstorm). The Brainstorms and Force of Will rounding out the deck make resilient to counters and hate as well as making sure things go smoothly.
If things go as planned, this deck should be practically unstoppable. Mulliganing doesn’t change the ratios very much and casting a draw7 after mulliganing to five or worse is likely to completely recover your game. The only conditional cards are LED and Crop Rotation/Fastbond – but these simply facilitate your acceleration in the process of comboing out, rather than accelerate your first draw7 (although all but LED can do that). Then after sideboarding you can move in Swarms for control and Chains/Hurkyl’s for Null Rod or other hate and only marginally slow down the deck.
Difficulty
This deck is in the upper reach of difficult levels because it requires a lot of experience in terms of goldfishing, but also knowing how best to play tough matchups, and also how to micromanage your mana in tight games. The trick to doing well with this deck is being able to think of your deck wholistically – keeping in mind which cards you are likely to see, which cards you want to see, and being able to plan for when a card might come up. For example, suppose your opponent is locked under a Xantid Swarm and you have draw7ed your way through three/fourths of your library, removing some with Diminishing Returns, and having moved the rest into play and your graveyard, and you have the option of casting another Diminishing Returns or Memory Jar, but you have not yet seen Yawgmoth’s Will, then that fact should weigh towards casting the Jar because you have a really good chance of seeing it despite the fact that Jar costs one more mana – it will be more likely to lead to the win. This of course is an obvious example, but far more subtle and minor things to keep in mind will arise in the course of piloting Draw7.
Strength
The deck’s strength is its power. The fun of Draw7 is that you get to play with the very best cards in the format: Yawgmoth’s Bargain, Mind’s Desire, and Wheel of Fortune, among others. This is a real competitive advantage, because it means that your spells are bombs that must be answered. The deck is also extremely resilient to countermagic because it can simply play another draw7 the next turn and its win condition is uncounterable. Third, the deck is extremely fast. It wins on turn 1 at least 15% of the time – and that is not by forcing it, but through careful play.
If you remove the maindeck Chains and Hurkyl’s you can accelerate the deck even further with Chrome Mox and Lion’s Eye Diamond. Also, the deck almost always goldfishes on turn 2, waiting until turn 3 only to abuse Necropotence. The deck is filled with good answers to hate. Chain of Vapor and Hurkyl’s Recall double as storm-count-increasers and hate answers. Chain can bounce Pyrostatic Pillar, Trinisphere, Chalice of the Void, Null Rod, etc. Hurkyl’s does the same job. Elvish Spirit Guides help evade Trinisphere lock and make sure your Hurkyl’s is castable. Sadly, Chain of Vapor is actually more broken than Hurkyl’s at doing disgusting plays. In a tournament, I cast Chain on my Moxen and sacked all my lands to copy it to the rest of my Moxen. I then cast Yawgmoth’s Will and replayed all my lands with Fastbond to perform the same play over again, generating even more mana and storm so that my Mind’s Desire ended up being for thirty-four.
Something most people don’t realize is that if you sit down and carefully practice the Hulk matchup, you can improve it dramatically – in fact, you may get to the point where you have a slight advantage. It takes testing – and being able to see the matchup from both players perspective.
Don’t forget, this combo deck also runs Force of Will.
Weaknesses
The Deck’s Weakness is the singularity of game plan. Certainly going Elvish Spirit Guide beats while casting three to four Time Walks in a row (Time Walk, Timetwister, Time Walk, Diminishing Returns, Time Walk, Timetwister, Time Walk, Yawgmoth’s Will, Time Walk) is nothing to laugh at, but this deck really doesn’t have much outside of playing Draw7s/ broken spells and Tendrils. As such, if that plan is disrupted, it needs to wait until it can find a Chain of Vapor. Thus, it is sadly too vulnerable to cards like Chalice or Trinisphere – despite having Force of Will. Workshop decks are the worst matchup and control is right behind. Trinisphere + Chalice + Force of Will from Workshop Slavery is a real party killer. Gorilla Shaman is also a very unfriendly card. Additionally, inherent in the game plan of playing many draw7s is the flaw that you give your opponent the tools to stop you – Orim’s Chants, Force of Wills, Mana Drains, and the like. It requires that you draw more mana to play more threats than they can counter – not implausible, but something that needs to be done carefully.
Conclusions
In testing, this deck has a solid advantage over control decks such as Tog and splits with the Slavery deck – essentially winning a huge proportion when it goes first and losing when it goes second, except the rare situation in which it can Force first. The problem though is that Slavery has an uncanny ability to get two Chalices with just one Thirst. This deck can’t beat decks like Stax without being very careful and hoping to draw Elvish Spirit Guides and Hurkyl’s Recall. The deck also has good matchup against most aggro decks. The problem is that despite having an unusually high percentage win over Tog (60%), it simply lacks the level of consistency of other decks, and despite having an excellent matchup in thirty games, it could easily lose a match because of inconsistency. Moreover, decks like Fish and Landstill could pose real problems by Forcing the first spell and then Wasting my first land, denying me the capacity to get to UU. On the other hand, resolving a draw 7 on turn 1 is egregious card advantage, and Force of Will provides the tools to defend yourself. This is a solid deck and will post solid results in the future. Experience is required, though this deck is not as difficult to play as the Belcher deck.
EBA
by Seth Levy
2nd Place, 2003-01-18 Waterbury
2 Exalted Angel
4 Meddling Mage
3 Ophidian
3 Phyrexian Negator
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
1 Fact or Fiction
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Time Walk
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Duress
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Swords to Plowshares
2 Vindicate
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Sol Ring
1 Strip Mine
4 Wasteland
1 City of Brass
2 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
4 Tundra
3 Underground Sea
1 Island
1 Plains
Sideboard
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Exalted Angel
1 Moat
1 Disenchant
1 Serenity
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Energy Flux
1 Blue Elemental Blast
2 Stifle
1 Ebony Charm
3 Damping Matrix
Mint Skittles:
Jonathan Patch:
4 Meddling Mage
4 Exalted Angel
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
4 Duress
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Time Walk
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mind Twist
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Vindicate
2 Damping Matrix
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
4 Tundra
4 Underground Sea
4 Flooded Strand
2 Island
1 Plain
1 Strip Mine
3 Wasteland
Sideboard
1 Moat
2 Swords to Plowshares
3 Blue Elemental Blast
3 Dust to Dust
1 Serenity
2 Hibernation
2 Damping Matrix
1 Vampiric Tutor
EBA’s reemergence was one of the more interesting phenomena this year. At Waterbury, I sat in amazement as Seth Levy climbed his way through 190+ people to make it to the finals running EBA. What I quickly realized is that the key card in his deck was Exalted Angel. Exalted Angel is an extremely powerful win condition that crates a serious headache for the Tog player trying to go lethal. Moreover, it presents almost unrecoverable tempo advantage against aggro decks, since they can’t do anything about the evasion. Jonathan’s deck straddles the line between well-metagamed W/U/B Type One Dump Truck, and genuine Type One archetype.
How Does it Play Out?
This deck is not among the harder decks in the format to play – most of the decisions are timing – to play a card now or later, and almost always, the answer is now, because you need to get that Matrix into play or that Angel swinging.
The more difficult aspect of this deck is that one might actually need to test matchups to see what is most effective to name with Meddling Mage.
What are this deck’s strengths?
The deck’s strengths are that it has a number of solid metagame cards available to it that it may be able to simply drop a broken hoser, and win the game quickly with Angel. The deck’s strength comes in playing in a well-defined metagame to abuse Mage as any potential hosers such as Matrix, as well as being able to abuse the Angel. The Angel is one of the top creatures in Type One – although she is not perfect. She is a clock, but not particularly fast at that. Even worse, unmorphing her is a Time Walk mana investment for your opponent. Meddling Mage isn’t particularly fast, even if it is effective – and most of the best decks have multiple threats that you need to name Mage for, which requires multiple Mages in order to have a real impact on the game.
The deck’s weaknesses are its lack of draw, which tends to result in a lack of cards in hand, and its being generally underpowered as a metagame deck. I wonder if this deck should take a page out of Extended and run Seal of Cleansing maindeck. Running Black is also probably not a good idea for a deck like this, since it doesn’t presently solve the key problem of having no real draw engine.
Conclusions
This deck was underplayed. The deck is a good metagame deck that can beat aggro because of the raw power of Angel. Nonetheless, this deck has no real draw and isn’t as disruptive and other decks with as weak of a draw engine. It’s a playable deck that can win in certain metagames. I wouldn’t want to play against Drain Slaver or Tog regularly with this deck, although it would be very good against Aggro Control decks, Aggro, and has plenty of hate for pure combo, so long as it can get it on the board by turn 2. Matrix stops Belcher and Mage is better than Chalice.
Carl Winter has been working on an update of this deck that is very cool looking and I think his update will provide a radical revision of how one might construct this deck.
Food Chain Goblins
by Jason Zheng
6th place, 2004-03-21 Newington
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Goblin Recruiter
4 Goblin Ringleader
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Goblin Piledriver
2 Skirk Prospector
3 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Goblin Matron
3 Gempalm Incinerator
1 Goblin Tinkerer
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
4 Food Chain
2 Mirri’s Guile
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Emerald
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Strip Mine
3 Wasteland
3 Wooded Foothills
4 Taiga
6 Mountain
Sideboard
3 Root Maze
2 Artifact Mutation
2 Naturalize
4 Red Elemental Blast
2 Blood Moon
2 Rack and Ruin
As a background note, I playtested with the build described in the Mana Drain primer on the deck. It’s worth noting out the outset that this deck was designed for the Extended Pro Tour as a deck that can combo off relatively quickly. The result was that Goblin Recruiter was banned in that format, and Goblin Lackey was banned from the Worlds Extended format that had preceded that Pro Tour. Somewhere along the way, the Red men became very broken indeed.
How does this deck play out? The deck is fun to play and a good deck to test with because it has decent chances against most of the best decks – it won’t be a total slaughter. The deck’s game plan is basically to play Food Chain, then Recruiter to stack your deck, then sac the Recruiter to play Ringleader and use the Ringleader to find put more Ringleaders and various other Goblins into your hand and into play, generating plenty of mana. Then with seven mana or so, you drop a Goblin Warchief and four Goblin Piledrivers to attack for lethal damage in one turn. Alternatively you can continue to play Goblins, and once you have five, you can use Goblin Sharpshooter and thirteen goblins to do twenty damage.
Realistically, a part of the combo will be disrupted, so your game plan will come down to the fact that you are playing men at the same time you constantly threaten to overwhelm your opponent. A turn 1 Lackey is an amazing play against many decks in Vintage such a Tog. You can attack with a Lackey and drop Siege-Gang Commander or Piledriver on turn 2. If your Food Chain doesn’t resolve, you can still use Prospectors and other cards to generate mana to continue to play threats. Matron and Ringleader provide excellent card advantage and your have Wasteland for disruption.
What are this deck’s strengths?
First, this deck can overwhelm the opponent very quickly. It has the potential to combo out on turn 2 and likely on turn 3. Even if it doesn’t combo, it has enough aggression to win by turn 4-6. The point is that the deck is not reliant on a single plan – it has many paths to victory and is well built to deal with opposing threats. Incinerator kills Welders, Wastelands slow down the game, and Piledriver walks through Togs. The sideboard is also very strong. Artifact Mutation gives you great chances versus Workshop decks, Red Elemental Blast and Blood Moon are not small threats, and the deck is well equipped to challenge any deck. If you are playing in a five proxy tournament, you should seriously consider this deck as an option. Moat isn’t even a problem for this deck.
What are this deck’s weaknesses?
While this deck may have some insane card advantage, it is used to find Red creatures. This is Type One after all, the broken format. Red Creatures require this anachronistic rule called the”attack step.” If you have heard of it, you probably have played other formats. One other weakness is the deck’s lack of disruption in terms of instant speed cards. It has no Duress or Force of Will. The deck relies on Incinerators and Wastelands for disruption. Imagine having to face a turn 1 Phyrexian Dreadnought while you are playing this deck. Moreover, it isn’t particularly fast for a combo deck. At best you can combo out on turn 2 and more likely turn 3-4. This deck would have to cross its fingers to have a chance against Belcher or Draw7, or even Rector Trix. And while this deck has a good draw engine, it is heavily reliant upon getting some good mana, because it can’t draw any more lands except on the draw step. Even against Tog, you risk having to deal with cards like Pernicious Deed and Berserked Tog.
This deck has chances against most decks and has a decent shot at getting to the top 8 no matter where it goes, because Type One players tend to underplay hardcore combo decks. The trick is actually winning once you are in the top 8 – and that is a more difficult proposition.
Next week, in part two we’ll take a look at GroAtog, Hulk Smash, Keeper, Landstill, a Madness deck, and Rector Trix.
Stephen Menendian
Smmenen at lycos dot com