Hey everyone!

Let’s not beat around the bush. Australia had a pretty poor showing at the Pro Tour this past weekend. Our combined record in Standard was just about 50%, and not a single Aussie made day 2. It’s a shame because we put a ton of work into the Standard format but never really came up with a great deck—at least not the way we did for PT Philadelphia and GP Brisbane. There were a few decks that we thought were good but not “storm through the Pro Tour” good. The Australian team ended playing R/G ramp but without the Huntmaster of the Fells that broke open the creature matchups for Brian Kibler and the rest of the ChannelFireball team. Our list was decent enough—it was really the 55% choice; it had solid matchups across the board without actually crushing anything. The main problem with the deck was that it didn’t afford you a ton of play. Occasionally other decks would outdraw you, and when that happened, you couldn’t really do anything about it.

Anyway, I won’t dwell on failures ’cause who wants to read about that? ;) There were a few decklists that we built for the Pro Tour that didn’t quite end up making the cut for one reason or another. All these lists exploited some synergies that have a ton of potential to be built around, even if we didn’t quite figure out how to do it. Standard is still undefined right now, and the metagame is only in its first stage of development—sooner or later some variant of these lists could well be good enough in the near future.

Synergy #1: Birthing Pod + Strangleroot Geist

OK, this one isn’t exactly a secret. I wrote about it two weeks ago, as did plenty of other writers, and Lukas Blohon made top 8 this weekend with his well-tuned GW Pod brew.

The thing that makes it more exciting is incorporating Phantasmal Image. Image is an absolute workhorse in this deck. After all, your whole deck is value creatures, some of which even come back after they die. There’s nothing quite like playing Phantasmal Image copying Strangleroot Geist, sacrificing it to Birthing Pod, having it come back as a 4/4 Dungeon Geists, and getting Aether Adept to deal with their two best creatures in one fell swoop. Even as just a second Strangleroot Geist, Image more than pulls its weight—playing a Titan is risky for them, since if you can target your 2/1, you’ll suddenly have one of your own. A Geist of Saint Traft can’t ever get past a Phantasmal Strangleroot Geist; as soon as they Vapor Snag the Image, it’ll come back as their creature and trade with it.

Here was our starting list:

Birthing Pod

Jeremy Neeman

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (23)

Lands (25)

Spells (12)

This deck was extremely powerful but had a crucial flaw—it leant too much on its Birthing Pods. When you drew Pod, you were a favorite in any matchup, but in the games that you didn’t, you risked doing absolutely nothing. You’re running a ton of lands and mana dudes because otherwise your three-color manabase is rough, but besides Pod, you have very little high end. If you can’t Ponder into it somehow, good luck beating their Hero of Bladeholds with your Strangleroot Geists.

Another problem was that you were running, well, bad cards. Young Wolf is pretty cute to Zenith up somewhere around turn 5 and then turn into multiple Phantasmal Images, but it’s miserable to draw in any game you don’t have a Birthing Pod. Stormbound Geist is rarely a good topdeck, and Inferno Titan is very hard to cast. Skaab Ruinator is even worse, even if it’s a necessary evil in this style of deck—turning Strangleroot Geist into a 5/6 flier is a big part of how you win games.

We updated it to the following version:

Birthing Pod

Jeremy Neeman

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (20)

Lands (25)

Spells (15)

Which was a pretty big upgrade. This deck had a few things going for it:

It didn’t have nearly as many bad cards. Instead of drawing Stormbound Geist and Young Wolf, you were drawing Solemn Simulacrum and Primeval Titan. In the games you didn’t draw Pod, you could still function like a bad Ramp deck, which is a lot better than not functioning like any sort of deck at all.
Kessig Wolf Run made Strangleroot Geist relevant well into the midgame and even the late game. Often in control matchups, having a Kessig meant you could keep playing even after they Wrathed you multiple times and did their Forbidden Alchemy. Skaab Ruinator is a major threat that is very hard to permanently deal with.
The mana was better. Rampant Growth is a lot better than Llanowar Elves for two reasons—it produces different colors of mana, and it’s not vulnerable to removal spells. You relied on your mana dorks too much with the previous version, and you’d generally struggle if they died to a couple of Gut Shots.
It still had the broken Pod draws. Turn 1 Birds, turn 2 Strangleroot Geist/Green Sun’s Zenith, turn 3 Pod Geist into Skaab Ruinator just beats most decks. If your Pod survives a turn, it’s definitely all over.

So why didn’t we play this? The main issue was time. We built the initial Pod list more than a week before the tournament, and when its issues became apparent, we discarded it and worked on other things. We put the new improved Pod list together two nights before the tournament. Testing showed it was fine, and maybe with a week’s concentrated work, it could be more than fine, but we didn’t have a week to work—we had less than 24 hours.

What were its matchups like? What did we even want in the sideboard? Should there be four Mana Leak main? We didn’t know the answers to the most obvious questions, and with Ramp, we’d spent quite a bit of time working those out, so Ramp was the safer choice by far. The core concept of Birthing Pod + Strangleroot Geist + Phantasmal Image definitely has potential though, and I hope a few people reading this get to work on it.

Synergy #2: Thought Scour + Lingering Souls

A few people actually got this list off us before the tournament and played it. I don’t know their overall record, but I suspect they did better than us—I know Jason Chung from New Zealand managed a 4-1 from the Standard rounds before losing to both PV and Ben Stark in draft and missing day 2.

Here’s the list we were looking at:

Esper Control

Jeremy Neeman

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (6)

Lands (26)

Spells (28)

This deck has tons of synergy and has lots of little value interactions, which I love. It’s very cool that Thought Scour lets you play four Snapcasters in a control deck, when most Solar Flare builds don’t have enough cheap instants to play more than two. Thought Scour itself has ten cards to mill, which give you value between Think Twice, Forbidden Alchemy, and Lingering Souls, so approximately one in every three Thought Scours will be awesome. When the other two are still cantripping and filling up your yard for Snapcaster and Runechanter’s Pike, those aren’t bad odds.

What this deck does beautifully is get ahead by inches. It’s all about value. Think Twice gives value, Lingering Souls gives value, Snapcaster gives value, Thought Scour gives value—all these cards are getting you between a card and a half and two cards. We found the Humans matchup to be very favorable because you have enough stuff to deal with their early pressure that they can’t stop you grinding them out. Tempered Steel is another matchup that’s quite good—two 1/1 Spirits might just trade with two of their creatures. Delver is really interesting and has a ton of play to it; it’s a matchup that greatly favors the player who knows what’s going on and what resources are important.

But these decks all have one thing in common—they care about 1/1 fliers. Some other decks don’t. Mono-Green Dungrove, for example, goes right over the top. Sword of War and Peace doesn’t care if you have all the Spirits in the world, and Dungrove just sees them as so many chumpers. Thrun in particular is terrifying—you have nothing that deals with it; you just have to chump until you can find Runechanter’s Pike or Elesh Norn, and Sword of War and Peace puts paid to both of those strategies. Esper Control is another terrible matchup. You don’t have enough pressure to really frighten them before they start resolving Grave Titans and Sun Titans, and the 6/6s don’t really care how much cute value stuff you’ve been up to.

In the end, while this deck did a lot of cool stuff, it didn’t do anything particularly powerful. Put simply, it doesn’t have a nut draw. Sometimes you’ll draw the Mana Leak and stop Ramp playing a turn 4 Titan, but other times you won’t, and consequently you’ll just lose; there is nothing your deck can do that seriously challenges that. You’re a little too slow to be a Fish deck and a little too small to be a control deck. Runechanter’s Pike is a crucial piece of the puzzle, and it’s scary to know that this deck can kill you out of nowhere—nine instants in the bin, equip to Inkmoth, swing for lethal is a pretty normal play. But even that never happens before turn 8, and that’s just not good enough to really worry the Titan guy.

At some future point, could this deck be a player? Absolutely. It has a lot going for it, and there wasn’t much Mono-Green or Esper Control at the Pro Tour—maybe 1/1 Spirits could be relevant again. There are a few directions you can go with the core shell of Thought Scour + Souls + Snapcaster. It’s possible to cut Elesh Norns, run Delvers, and be that much quicker, or you could equally well go in the other direction and add Grave Titans. It depends on whether you think of 1/1 fliers as good blockers or as evasive beatsticks. Dissipates go a long way towards solving the “go over the top” issue.

The deck we played:

Wolf Run Ramp

Jeremy Neeman

Test deck on 02-19-2012

Standard

Creatures (14)

Lands (25)

Spells (21)

Sideboard

In the coming Standard, ramp lists will be mostly influenced by the deck that both won and came second at the Pro Tour this weekend. Huntmaster of the Fells was definitely a card we didn’t spend enough time on—we considered it, but it seemed like too often it didn’t synergize with your main plan, to play six-drops early and often. That said, he’s excellent against decks like Delver that just want to attack and say go against you past turn 3, and the stats are reasonable even if he doesn’t flip straightaway.

Mostly I want to say a few words for Faithless Looting. This card helps ramp decks a ton with their major issue—consistency. Too often, you end up with hands that are all ramp, no Titan, or the opposite. That’s the fundamental flaw of decks that play Primeval Titan, tracing all the way back to Valakut. Faithless Looting solves that issue very cleanly. It costs you a card, but when the cards you’re playing are so powerful anyway, it’s more than worth it. It also lets you toss superfluous Slagstorms and removal against control, and excess lands in the late game. I think this card goes in a lot of places, and not just in decks that care about their graveyard—I wouldn’t be surprised to see a couple copies showing up in Mono-Red, for example.

That’s it for this week. Next week I’ll discuss the Limited part of the Pro Tour, and how I got lost in the woods in Hawaii. Until then,

Jeremy