The early game is the die roll
The midgame is the mulligan
The lategame is the first turn
Mark Rosewater, talking about Pro Tour: Rome
Legacy is home to several decks that can win the game on the first turn, and none has higher chances of it than R/G Belcher. Either activating Goblin Charbelcher with no lands left in the library or making twelve goblins from Empty The Warrens, Belcher is able to put an incredible amount of pressure on the opponent before they even get an opportunity to play their cards. I ran it against U/W/B Fish to see how Belcher fares against the deck most able to stop its combo. Fish has a withering array of counters and disruption, and if it got a turn, I was sure that Fish could just about shut out Belcher from ever winning.
R/G Belcher has proven itself as a Legacy deck, making an array of Top 8 appearances since its unveiling several months ago. It is a fairly inexpensive Legacy deck to build, and when playing against unsuspecting opponents, one has the potential to blow them out completely. U/W/B Fish is a popular alternative to Threshold, and both play in similar styles. Because Fish was so popular at the Grand Prix, I have confidence that it will continue to be a force in the metagame.
This article is framed on the assumption that both players will know what the other is playing. This is a fine assumption to make in small to medium tournaments. In any case, trying to test while acting like we were unaware of what the other player’s deck was would be unfeasible.
First, here are some tips and clarifications for those who are new to playing with or against Belcher decks.
If you have no lands left in your library, then Goblin Charbelcher does damage equal to the cards in your entire library.
Neither Elvish Spirit Guide nor Simian Spirit Guide add to your storm count when channeled.
Xantid Swarm triggers as soon as you announce it as an attacker. It doesn’t actually have to survive for its effect to go on the stack.
You can cast Burning Wish and then, without passing priority, activate Lion’s Eye Diamond for three mana. Then you can resolve Burning Wish and cast the spell you got with it using the mana from Lion’s Eye Diamond.
You can cast Chrome Mox and not imprint anything if you just want to generate storm.
You cannot announce a spell and then pay for that spell with Lion’s Eye Diamond. This is because it can only be activated whenever an instant could be played.
Goblin Charbelcher’s ability may be paid for with Lion’s Eye Diamond.
Goblin Charbelcher will count Taiga as a Mountain for the purposes of doubling damage.
Land Grant will get dual lands like Taiga, as long as they are a Forest.
Land Grant’s alternate cost is paid for when the spell is announced, and the player’s hand remains revealed until the spell resolves.
Let’s get to the decklists.
U/W/B Fish
4 Tundra
2 Underground Sea
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
1 Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]
1 Island
1 Plains
4 Meddling Mage
4 Dark Confidant
3 Jotun Grunt
3 Mother of Runes
2 Serra Avenger
4 Serum Visions
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Duress
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
3 Stifle
3 Daze
Sideboard
4 Leyline of the Void
4 Engineered Plague
3 Vindicate
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Duress
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
This is the decklist from the Top 8 of Grand Prix: Columbus. The maindeck and sideboard are both still relevant and aren’t outdated by Flash’s banning. It remains a solid board, so this is what we’ll be using.
G/R Belcher
4 Goblin Charbelcher
4 Burning Wish
3 Empty the Warrens
4 Lotus Petal
4 Chrome Mox
4 Simian Spirit Guide
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Land Grant
2 Taiga
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Street Wraith
4 Rites of Flame
4 Desperate Ritual
4 Seething Song
4 Tinder Wall
3 Pyroblast
Sideboard
3 Red Elemental Blast
2 Pyroblast
4 Shattering Spree
1 Seeds of Innocence
1 Simplify
1 Cave in
1 Pyroclasm
1 Taiga
1 Empty the Warrens
The most controversial thing about this list seems to be Street Wraith’s inclusion. To put it simply, Dark Ritual isn’t worth splashing for. Or, more in-depth, we have a deck with basically 51 slots already filled. The only things in contention are Wild Cantors, Bayou, and Dark Rituals. Removing the Bayou makes room for Taiga and without Dark Rituals, we can fit in another Tinder Wall. Cantors can stay or leave for something else. In this build, I have swapped them out for Pyroblasts. In testing, we found that having two Taigas wasn’t a crippling problem and being able to draw or Land Grant into more made midgame comboing a bit easier.
What we have now are 56 cards. I honestly cannot find anything in Red or Green that would make a worthwhile and combolicious 57-60th slot. In this case, Wraith fills in those slots. While Street Wraith theoretically changes the mulliganing decisions, I have not found it to be a problem. If you’d like to compare Wraith and Dark Ritual, simply mentally substitute it in when it comes up in the example games below and tell me what you think in the forums. If there were any good red or green card to run in Wraith’s place, I would do it in a heartbeat; Wraith is not in here to improve consistency, it’s just there because nothing else fits at the moment.
Belcher’s Mulliganing Decisions in this Match
The quote from Mark that I led with really sums up a lot of how to approach playing Belcher. Winning the die roll is amazing because it gives you two chances to go first. However, we aren’t able to control that roll, so there isn’t much strategy to discuss there. Similarly, because Belcher is a fairly simple deck to play out, the first turn isn’t too difficult to master. It is in making mulliganing decisions that we really see the hard work come out.
Deciding on mulliganing for Belcher is straightforward. If your hand does not contain Empty The Warrens, Goblin Charbelcher, or Burning Wish, you must mulligan. You cannot hope to pull into a win condition when only roughly one in four drawn cards will lead to it. Going lower than five on a mulligan is quite risky, so you may have to settle with an imperfect five-card hand. The second consideration to make is whether you have enough mana in the hand to do something spectacular. Remember that Land Grant poses its own risks against decks with Force of Will, as they now have perfect information and can counter the prime cards. Sufficient mana sources to make around four mana on the first turn (or another good plan), along with a win condition in hand, means Belcher has a good hand.
When Belcher is on the draw, it is critical to evaluate the opponent’s mulligan. Pyroblast really changes the way hands play out. For example, one sample game had Fish mulligan to five on the play while Belcher had the following hand:
Elvish Spirit Guide
Tinder Wall
Seething Song
Lotus Petal
Burning Wish
Pyroblast
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Now we know that Fish either has a terrible hand and we win, or it has a showstopper of a card like Force of Will in it. They could have Meddling Mage or Daze or Stifle or Duress. We can’t do much about the last one, but there’s less of a chance of them having that than having Blue spells. In this case, Belcher slows things down a little due to the Pyroblast. They likely only have one card that will bother Belcher after mulliganing to five, and being blown out when you have a great hand and the opponent mulligans is frustrating.
In this example, Belcher played Lotus Petal to Fish’s land, go. The next turn it saw Tinder Wall Dazed with Elvish Spirit Guide paying for it. Two turns later, Belcher Land Grants against four cards in Fish’s hand and is able to hold up R for Pyroblast through the entire combo. Fish turned out to be holding Stifle, which would have neatly handled a first-turn combo. If Fish mulligans, especially down to five cards, I think it’s acceptable to slow down just a little, especially if you have Pyroblast in hand.
Fish’s Mulliganing Considerations
Fish has some serious questions to consider when mulliganing. If Fish is going second, it must consider the strength of Belcher’s hand. Stephen Menendian writes about this when discussing Vintage Belcher in a classic article. If the Belcher player does not mulligan at all, Fish must seriously consider looking for Force of Will; the game is all but unwinnable without it while on the draw. Alternatively, if the Belcher player drops down to five cards, the Fish player’s hand opens up a little. While the threat of a turn 1 Empty the Warrens for six is still dangerous, it might not happen. This is where reading the other player’s mannerisms can come in handy. Holding a hand with Mother of Runes and Swords to Plowshares can be quite acceptable when facing a mulliganed Belcher player with Empty the Warrens as their primary threat. With a Daze or Brainstorm or Duress, the Fish player can make it through the first turn and then take control of the game. It’s even acceptable to keep a no-land hand with two Force of Wills, though it hurts whenever it happens.
If Fish is going first, you are presented with another sticky wicket entirely. You do not have the Belcher player’s mulligan information, and so it is critical to find Force of Will or Duress. It pays to take an exploratory mulligan to six, and going to five is feasible as well. If you have one or two pieces of disruption, the rest of the hand really doesn’t matter a whole lot, because Belcher has a low threat density and isn’t going to rebound quite so quickly after a failed combo attempt. Good players are going to try to play around Daze, but when their gameplan involves having to combo on the first turn, their playing options are limited.
In all these mulliganing cases, it is vitally important to let the opponent finish resolving mulligans before you start resolving your own. Both players are trafficking on the information gap of what their hand is versus what their opponent thinks it is. Giving away clues can be very detrimental. Imagine you are playing Fish and are on the play; your only business card is Daze and a Meddling Mage on the following turn. The Belcher player grouses and sends their hand back immediately, then does it again. What would have been a hand worth mulliganing now becomes quite a bit better, all because the Belcher player screwed up in giving you that information.
For example, consider this game; Belcher has an opening hand that has no kill cards, so it sends it back for another hand with no kill cards, bringing it to a starting hand of:
Chrome Mox
Simian Spirit Guide
Burning Wish
Elvish Spirit Guide
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Now the Fish player has let the Belcher player resolve all of their mulligans. They look at a hand of:
Serra Avenger
Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]
Tundra
Mother of Runes
Duress
Underground Sea
Umezawa’s Jitte
The hand is conspicuously absent of Force of Will, and Fish is on the draw. Normally, that’d be a hand to send back against an opposing grip of seven, but now it looks pretty solid. The Belcher player has only a few possibilities here; they have Charbelcher and a combination of cards that get up to seven mana in hand (Rite, Rite, Land Grant, Charbelcher, Lion’s Eye Diamond for example), and then Fish is just dead. That is a relatively specific combination of cards though, so it is probably not worth worrying about. Belcher could also have a couple mana cards but be short of a threshold of doing something this turn. That would make Duress a superstar here. Belcher can also Storm out a maximum of ten Goblins, but probably closer to four or six. Belcher can also slow-roll their hand, hoping to build up a critical mass. This is a generally bad strategy against Fish, due to their incremental constrictions on the combo.
The Fish player’s hand has the surprisingly good Mother of Runes in it as well. While Mom doesn’t really do much to stop a full Belcher assault, in these situations, it is fantastic. If you are facing down six goblins, you can keep Mom around protecting herself while eating a goblin every turn. That generally buys a lot of time to find other answers. If the Belcher player Storms out on their turn, Fish plays Mom. Otherwise, it Duresses and hamstrings Belcher. The Serra Avenger is a blank here, but with the lands Fish has in hand, Jitte will come down on turn 2 and equip on turn 3. That makes it almost impossible for Belcher to win, thanks to the lifegain and -1/-1 counters.
The preceding hands resulted in Belcher passing the turn without doing anything, Fish Duressing out Burning Wish and then drawing into a second Duress to take out Belcher’s topdecked Burning Wish. If it hadn’t had that Duress, Belcher would have made eight Goblins on its second turn, which is nothing to slouch at. Later, Belcher went up to hand of seven, facing down Mother of Runes with an equipped Jitte. Fish was in a dangerous position, however; it cast several cantrips and had not seen Force of Will, meaning that a Charbelcher off the top could have killed it. Fish eventually prevailed, however, with Umezawa’s Jitte and Jotun Grunt sealing the deal and Fish sitting with two Force of Wills and a Stifle in hand. This is an example as well of how poor the strategy of slow-rolling Fish is.
Here is another example of how much mulliganing matters. Belcher opens up a pretty fantastic hand of:
Land Grant
Burning Wish
Desperate Ritual
Seething Song
Tinder Wall
Pyroblast
Simian Spirit Guide
Which gives the potential for twelve (!) goblins on the first turn.
Meanwhile, Fish opens a hand of:
Swords to Plowshares
Meddling Mage
Daze
Stifle
Duress
Polluted Delta
Underground Sea
Fish is on the draw here. Were it on the play, it would have an almost-perfect anti-Belcher hand. However, the Fish player has seen the Belcher player sit on seven cards. This is quite dangerous. Fish has to mulligan into Force of Will and hits it on the first attempt. The fish player mulligans into:
Umezawa’s Jitte
Serra Avenger
Force of Will
Meddling Mage
Stifle
Flooded Strand
When the Belcher player casts Land Grant, the Fish player now has perfect information and counters the Burning Wish after Seething Song, making Belcher either have to Pyroblast and then mana burn for three or lose the Burning Wish. The Fish player starts next turn with Stifle up, putting it in a fine position. The Belcher player might have tried to turn that Pyroblast on by waiting a turn and drawing another mana. However, Fish would have had Stifle up along with Force of Will, so it would have been stopped in any case.
The Combo Turn: Plays and Counter-Plays
The combo turn, in this match, will likely happen on the first turn. Belcher’s plays will depend on their supplemental spells in this match. A Pyroblast is a great thing to see, as it can kill Meddling Mages and stop Stifles on slower hands. Lion’s Eye Diamond really forces the Belcher player to commit to a win or get Force of Willed right out of the game. This is not prudent against blue decks unless you really have no other options. In that case, the best advice is to just go ahead with the combo; if you lack the stones to get in there, you shouldn’t be playing Belcher in the first place!
On the draw, the Belcher player should consider playing Lotus Petal out before anything else; it’s excellent insurance against Daze and won’t be the target of the aforementioned spell. Speaking of Daze, maximize Spirit Guides so that you use Tinder Walls and Lotus Petals before channeling Spirit Guides. They can really surprise a player who Dazes, and having the knowledge of them in your hand when the opponent doesn’t can force them into greedy, boneheaded moves (like Dazing when it is their only Blue card for Force of Will). In one game, I had Dazed a critical spell, only to have it paid for with Spirit Guides and Daze helping the Storm count!
For Fish, it must aim a Force of Will where it will do the most damage. It does not pay off here to be greedy. There’s no sense in sitting back hoping to catch the Burning Wish because it may never come. The Storm mechanic makes it even harder to sit on counters because it can invalidate them. I found in testing that the optimal play is to counter the spell that will put the Belcher player at three mana. The reason is that with eight Spirit Guides in the deck, they have a good chance of just channeling out the fourth mana and casting Empty the Warrens. At three mana, Belcher can push through a Seething Song up to five mana. This can let them put a Charbelcher or Warrens out with Pyroblast backup. It’s much better, though less glamorous, to take what you can get and stop the Rituals.
Midgame and Lategame Considerations
If the dust settles in the early turns, the Fish player needs to actually consider how to win. The greatest threat that can come from a Belcher deck after the first few turns is Goblin Charbelcher itself. In several test games, Fish had Meddling Mage holding down Empty the Warrens and a Daze in hand. However, Force of Will was nowhere in sight, and the Belcher player ripped enough mana off the top to play and activate the Belcher. All that hard work for nothing! My best advice here, other than to hope to have Force of Will in hand, is to put Meddling Mage on Charbelcher basically any time past the second turn or so. Empty the Warrens can usually be handled because Fish will have Swords to Plowshares or Stifles in hand or dudes on the board.
I wouldn’t recommend Belcher players sit on their hands in order to make them perfect in the midgame, either. The only disruption that Belcher has is its distorting speed; the other player must deal with that instead of handling their own gameplan. Going in for a midgame Empty the Warrens for six tokens is not amazing, but it’s a decent play and can buy turns until you hopefully draw a Charbelcher.
Fish players should be aware of small things. Though this probably goes without saying, playing a Dark Confidant after getting bashed down to eight life by Goblins may not be the smartest idea. One thing that really surprised me was to pay attention to Rite of Flame. The second or third one are far stronger than the first; be aware of whether Rite will turn on Pyroblast or hardcast Charbelcher by itself.
Unless blown out by a Charbelcher, Fish will probably win if it gets into the midgame with a few lands. Empty the Warrens loses a lot of punch when it has to contend with x/2s and x/3s and possibly Umezawa’s Jitte.
A Heuristic Analysis of a Complex Game
Fish and Belcher are going to have a lot of lopsided games. Often, Fish will have the crucial counter or two and stop Belcher and then proceed to win at its own pace. Other times, Belcher will outright win on the first or second turn. However, sometimes games like the following will come up…
Fish opens a hand of:
Force of Will
Brainstorm
Force of Will
Island
Duress
Jotun Grunt
Swords to Plowshares
While Belcher opens a hand of:
Land Grant
Taiga
Street Wraith
Goblin Charbelcher
Lotus Petal
Lotus Petal
Empty the Warrens
Fascinating hands! Fish has to keep, because it isn’t going to see anything better. It is on the play, so the Belcher player knows that they are against a Force of Will, at the least. They keep; the hand, especially with one Taiga and access to another, looks quite smart.
Fish can only play out the Island and pass the turn. Hopefully, Belcher is not going to do something scary and it can Brainstorm at the end of their turn. Belcher draws a Desperate Ritual and cycles Street Wraith into Burning Wish. It plays Taiga. Now there are some options available. Belcher can:
Play both Lotus Petals and then Desperate Ritual and Land Grant, resulting in ten Empty the Warrens Tokens. This plan loses to Stifle, which Fish may be holding. It also bungles if they have Daze in hand. Since they kept a seven-card hand, we can assume that it has Force of Will, at least, and probably something else juicy.
Do the same plan as above, but cast Goblin Charbelcher instead.
Do nothing and try to combo off later
If the opponent has a counter, they will aim it at the Desperate Ritual, especially with two Lotus Petals on the board. Now we have the possibility that the Fish player will Daze or not Daze if there are two Petals on the board. It depends on how much they think we value the Petal versus how much we actually value it. In this case, Belcher really wants that Petal out because it will put it at the critical fourth mana. If Fish Dazes the Desperate Ritual, we have to lose Petal to pay for it or lose Desperate Ritual. Both are sad times.
Fortunately, Belcher can run out Desperate Ritual to test the waters a little bit. It will only cost a Lotus Petal to basically Duress the opponent. Going through with this plan means that Belcher won’t be able to combo off on this turn.
Belcher casts Lotus Petal and then Desperate Ritual. Since the Fish player cannot handle ten Goblins on the first turn, it has to stop the Ritual. Here’s the dilemma though – does Fish Brainstorm into a Blue card, hopefully… or does it Force of Will, tossing out Brainstorm? The other Force of Will is Park Place-level real estate to have in hand, so ideally, we’d like to hold onto it. Here are the options:
Fish Brainstorms and hits a Blue card and a Black mana-producing land. This draw is great guns. It has twenty-two Blue cards in the deck, with only nineteen in it currently. That means it has roughly a 35% chance of hitting a Blue card per draw, which is bad, but we do get three draws.
Fish Brainstorms and sees no Blue cards but a Black-producing land. This is also pretty low on the “likely” scale, but it is a possibility. If this happens, Fish can Force of Will and then Duress the next turn, which isn’t bad at all.
Fish does not Brainstorm. It has another Force of Will in hand the next turn, but has to count on drawing off the top to Duress. This has the least amount of gambling to do now. However, we’d need to see several cards, possibly, for another Blue card.
In this situation, we know that Fish can Force of Will at least once. I think the best option is to Brainstorm and see what comes up. We’ll get a Black-producing land or a Blue card or both. So Fish Brainstorms and sees:
Umezawa’s Jitte
Polluted Delta
Serra Avenger
Ouch.
Fish puts back Jotun Grunt with Serra Avenger on top. The Avenger is a bit harder to cast but it can stay around and swing while it plays defense against Goblin tokens. Fish is forced to Force, pitching Force. Belcher uses this time to cast Land Grant, getting it through while the opponent is low on cards. The Land Grant really has to go through now because Belcher is going to need permanent mana to grind out the win conditions in hand.
Fish untaps and Duresses. It sees:
Burning Wish
Taiga
Empty The Warrens
Goblin Charbelcher
What do you take?
For starters, it cannot take the Taiga, and the Burning Wish is pretty inferior to Empty The Warrens in hand. So it comes down to the Stormin’ Sorcery and Big Belch. Belcher does not have other storm-producing cards in hand, making Empty the Warrens and Burning Wish less powerful. The correct play here seems to be taking the Charbelcher. They could draw any sort of Ritual next turn and get it on the board, and that’s way dangerous for Fish to deal with. Fish takes Goblin Charbelcher and passes.
Belcher draws Rite of Flame. What an intelligent move with Duress! Now, it can Empty the Warrens for four tokens or hold back and pass. It really gains nothing other than hopefully another storm copy by passing the turn, so Belcher casts Rite, breaks Lotus Petal and plays Empty the Warrens for four Goblins. Remember that Fish is down to three cards here. If the Belcher player could see Fish’s hand, they’d really get a sense of how four puny goblins can mash up Fish.
Fish untaps, draws Meddling Mage, and casts Jitte for want of other plays. Belcher untaps and draws another Empty the Warrens and swings in for four. Fish is really hurting on land right now.
Fish draws a Jotun Grunt and passes the turn. Belcher then draws Elvish Spirit Guide and knocks Fish down to a precarious ten life.
Fish draws Dark Confidant! It plays it out. The Belcher player draws Tinder Wall and attacks. Fish has a decision here – toss Mascara Bobby into the fray with Goblins, or hold it back and go down to six life with an Umezawa’s Jitte on the board to take out Goblins on the next turn. The second play looks more dangerous but it gives a lot of room for the Fish player. Jitte can swing little incremental games like this. Fish holds back, only to see Belcher channel Elvish Spirit Guide into a Tinder Wall into four more Goblins. The Fish player safely draws Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author] with Dark Confidant and vanilla draws Daze. Now that Fish has White, it can cast Jotun Grunt, Meddling Mage, and Swords to Plowshares. Not bad. Let’s look at the possibilities again:
Cast Meddling Mage and pass the turn. This puts two Invitational Wizards on the board, but Fish will still take at least six damage next turn and die.
Cast Jotun Grunt. See above.
Equip Dark Confidant and Swords to Plowshares a goblin. This has a bit of merit. We get two charge counters and we can even Swords our own Confidant for lifegain. We wouldn’t get Jitte counters in that case, so it’s better to point it at the Red guys.
Fish equips and swings in. As a Belcher player, do you block or not? I want to keep Confidant alive because at such a low life total, he’ll probably kill the opponent. Belcher lets it through. Fish Swords a Goblin token and puts two counters on the Jitte.
Belcher draws Pyroblast and then swings with seven goblins. Fish has two options – kill goblins or gain life. Killing Goblins puts it at one life, ready to die to Dark Confidant the next turn. It could gain life, putting it at ten briefly and then back down to three life. This seems the better option.
Fish untaps and on Dark Confidant, flips Force of Will.
Laissez les bon temps rouler!
This game shows how Fish has to Force of Will what’s relevant and not be greedy. If it had not stopped the Desperate Ritual, it would have faced a storm count of five and only would have been able to Force of Will one copy of Empty the Warrens, putting eight goblins on the table. This leaves Belcher with business cards in hand. The point that Fish had to Force of Will with another Force of Will was crucial. It gave Belcher the information that not only did Fish not have any more blue cards in hand, it would not draw any more for the next two turns. That gave Belcher free reign.
Another note: had Fish gone down to one life with Confidant on the table, Belcher would have Burning Wished for Cave-In and ended the game on the spot. How silly.
Sideboarding
Sideboarding is out of the scope of this article, generally because there are so many options. Fish players must be especially careful if they lose the first game, since they will be on the draw if they win the next game. Fish will bring in fewer cards than Belcher likely will. Belcher will have to contend with an extra Duress and possibly a Stifle, but not much more. It has plenty of options for cards to bring in. I found Xantid Swarm to be a very powerful card off the sideboard; it lets the Belcher player out of the first-turn-or-else hole and it can win sideboard wars (a Flores topic!). The Fish player has to consider how dangerous the Bees are and then evaluate whether they should keep Swords to Plowshares in. It also makes mulliganing decisions far wonkier when Belcher has Xantids in hand or Fish has Swords in hand, as now the player has to decide just how much they value those cards compared to what the opponent might have brought or kept in.
After board, Belcher will play a slower game. It will do this with a panoply of Pyroblasts or Xantid Swarms. Fish players must prepare tactically not only for the turn 1 blowout, but for the turn 4 controlled grind into Goblin Charbelcher.
One option that I’d like to test but was out of the scope of the article was bringing in Tarmogoyfs off the Belcher board. I’m all about transformational sideboards, so the prospect of 5/6 beaters for 1G against a deck that no longer has Swords to Plowshares intrigues me. You probably board out the Street Wraiths for them, retaining a powerful combo shell and a solid secondary plan. Consider the Fish player that keeps a hand with Force of Will and Stifle, only to run into a player who casts Tarmogoyf after the initial attempt! What a solid beating that would be, indeed.
Can I Has Conclusion?
Belcher is going to have a bye against a shocking portion of the field, but it really runs into a tough match with Fish. The speed of the deck is fascinating; look how much it warps the game before the first turn even happens! If the Fish player is unaware of what the Belcher player is actually playing, they will probably lose game one and then have a very difficult time winning two sideboarded matches, since Belcher brings in a lot of very relevant cards after sideboarding.
I wonder if Belcher isn’t simply too good. With Empty the Warrens, it has a far higher “win” percentage on the first turn, and going down to “Force of Will or no?” doesn’t seem like a great thing for the format.
Doug Linn
Hi-Val on the Interwebs
Special thanks to Spencer Hayes, MattH on TMD and the folks at #mtgjudge