Was SCG Open Series: Nashville A Fluke Or Is Delver That Good?

You already know the fundamentals of why Delver is the best deck. It plays the best cards, it has the most seamless and efficient card advantage, is among the fastest clocks, and has the best reactive cards and the most mana efficient threats and answers; it’s actually the best strategy by almost every metric. But now there’s more.

I used to try to beat Delver by cutting off its relatively few lines of attack and then overpowering it. All of its spells are cheap, so all of its effects are small. If you can live through them, you should be able to outclass them. All you needed was cheap removal for Delver of Secrets, a good answer to Geist of Saint Traft, a little artifact removal for their equipment, and a long game plan that couldn’t get ground out by Moorland Haunt.

That’s a tall order by itself. You need different cards for each of those roles, and then you have to draw the right ones in any given game. I wanted to say that it’s not surprising that successful decks have fought it by just racing and executing their own game plan instead, but for the most part that isn’t true. For example, G/R, one of the most effective weapons against Delver, has all of the tools. Cheap burn for Delver, Huntmaster of the Fells and Strangleroot Geist (or Solemn Simulacrum for Wolf Run Ramp) to block Geist of Saint Traft, Ancient Grudge, and a real clock.

But this is no longer enough. Restoration Angel offers them yet another line of attack that has to be respected and approached differently, already fits perfectly into their game plan, and has the exact right stats and strategic implications to trump R/G (and a number of other previously effective strategies, like Day of Judgment and Curse of Death’s Hold).

Restoration Angel ambushes almost any creature that can be attacking by turn 4, killing it and living. It lets you pass with four mana up and put the opponent in "the classic Faeries fork" where they can neither attack into your large flash creature nor play spells into your open counterspell mana.

It’s extremely difficult for G/R to kill Restoration Angel without resorting to paying four life against your aggressive deck or having a narrow sideboard card like Combust, and your tempo spells make it very hard to race.

Maybe the solution is to play a different kind of control game against them, but if so, you’re going to have to learn some new tricks. If you tap out to play Curse of Death’s Hold to kill my Snapcaster Mage and shut down my Moorland Haunt and I drop Restoration Angel in your end step and then untap and play and equip a sword, you’re probably dead. Even the mighty Elesh Norn is likely to be too slow and ineffective against Restoration Angel.

Beating Delver’s old plan A was hard, beating their new plan A, attacking with Restoration Angel back, is even harder, but the bad news for their opponents is still far from over.

Restoration Angel is a powerful enough effect to push Delver up the mana curve a little bit. They want and can use a little more mana than they used to be able to, and they have more high impact cards. This has a secondary benefit when it comes to the second game. Delver’s cantrips allow its sideboard cards to have a particularly strong impact in a way similar to how Jund’s cascade amplified its sideboard cards.

Delver can now seamlessly transition between strategic archetypes from game to game. If you side in Arc Trails and Gut Shots, they might be siding out their Delvers for Day of Judgment and Consecrated Sphinx and suddenly, on turn four of game two, you find out you’re playing against U/W control and now even your Huntmaster of the Fells is embarrassing.

All of their cards demand narrow, specialized answers, and any that you board in answers for might not be in their deck or a serious part of their game plan after sideboarding.

And worse yet, you won’t even know which tools they’ll have access to. Delver’s sideboards are all over the place. Even the maindecks are highly varied. I’m not talking about a single exact decklist when I say Delver; I’m talking about a surprisingly diverse strategic archetype, and that makes it very hard to plan for.

I currently believe that Delver is not only the best deck but also the best aggro deck, the best midrange deck, and the best control deck. Other decks aren’t just worse overall; they’re generally worse at doing whatever they’re trying to do. It’s embarrassing.

I’d like to think I can’t be right. It can’t literally be that good. There have to be other decks that present different kinds of threats that are better in some real and meaningful way. Maybe I’m wrong overreacting and panicking. Birthing Pod, for example, is a uniquely powerful card. Maybe it has relevant places where it’s strategically better, but I don’t, at this time, have strong evidence that Restoration Angel doesn’t push Delver to entirely new heights.

It occurs to me that you could get to this point in this article and still not really understand why I think this card is so good. After all, saving Delver of Secrets turns it back into a 1/1, and the deck doesn’t have that many enters the battlefield abilities. But the one it does have, Snapcaster Mage, is amazing. You can also play Blade Splicer over Geist of Saint Traft to really push it, but even if you don’t you’ll find spots where Geist couldn’t attack but because of the Angel you can attack and then Blink him and still hit for four with the token.

Stapling a Fireblast to your 3/4 flier for four isn’t the worst you could do. Even if you don’t have anything, a flash 3/4 is amazing in this deck; the card is powerful enough that I’ve seriously considered playing it in decks where it can’t even Blink anything. The most important part is probably just that it’s a four toughness flying creature at a reasonable cost, so it can block opposing Delvers and most ground creatures.

I do plan to keep looking for decks that beat Delver without joining them, but it’s hard since I can’t really imagine not playing Restoration Angel, and then I’m halfway there.

I don’t want to be the first to go overboard (though I’m sure I’m late to be the first anyway), but we’re getting close to the point where we have to seriously look at banning something. I assume that would be Delver of Secrets.

Delver might be a more fair card than Snapcaster Mage (it’s close), but I think it’s actually Delver, not Snapcaster, that breaks the cheap instants. Unsummon was never a great card, but when there’s a three power flier taking advantage of the tempo, that effect becomes a huge constraint on the format. Mana Leak was a card that could be reprinted because it’s often played in control decks, which go long, and then the Mana Leak becomes dead. The opponent often has the option to just wait on their spells to play around it. When Delver of Secrets, or rather, Insectile Aberration is attacking you, you can’t wait three turns to try to defend yourself.

If Wild Nacatl was good enough to ban in Modern, the flying Wild Nacatl looks pretty easy to ban in Standard.

Note, though, that I think this deck is so good that if Delver is banned, U/W Snapcaster will still probably be the best deck.

If you hate to be the bad guy and you want to play something else than can beat Delver, my best advice is to start over. Don’t try to beat new Delver decks with pre-Avacyn Restored wisdom. It’s a different game. Huntmaster of the Fells won’t do enough; Hellrider’s probably unplayable; Curse of Death’s Hold and Elesh Norn are probably the wrong direction. The tools are there for Delver to beat you if they know what you’re doing, and those aren’t even the right trumps to their current game play the way they used to be.

Mana Leak was always pretty bad against Delver, but now that they have an important four-mana spell it might be a good tool against them (this is mostly just relevant for figuring out the mirror match). Eaten by Spiders or Combust are probably better sideboard cards than smaller removal since they kill Delver of Secrets but also deal with Restoration Angel (or in Eaten by Spiders’ case a Sword or Consecrated Sphinx). It’s too bad Eaten by Spiders can never kill a Sword of Feast and Famine.

Phantasmal Image is still a great answer to Geist of Saint Traft, and now, if you have a creature with an enters the battlefield trigger, you can get additional upside by copying their Restoration Angel with it.

I wish Sigarda, Host of Herons was a good answer. They can’t Vapor Snag her, you can make her uncounterable with Cavern or Souls, and she blocks all their creatures, but it’s awkward that any Sword gets past her. Still, backed by artifact removal she might be a valuable tool (possibly out of a Birthing Pod shell).

Dungeon Geists is basically unplayable since it matches up so badly against Restoration Angel, but Lingering Souls, particularly backed by Intangible Virtue, might still be a reasonable plan. Delver is much worse at dealing with several creatures than dealing with a single one, and Lingering Souls even fights counters. But you need to make sure that the tokens actually do something rather than just get outclassed by larger fliers and/or bypassed by Sword of War and Peace.

The exactly list Gerry Thompson won the StarCityGames.com Open Series: Nashville with will become the default Delver list to test against. They put several people into the Top 8 with nearly identical 75s. It’s fine to use that as a starting point for your gauntlet, but don’t let yourself start thinking, "Delver doesn’t play card X," just because it wasn’t in their particular list. Flexibility and unpredictability are among the many strengths of Delver, and you need to be prepared for the widest possible range of cards from them. I can’t even say you should be prepared for anything you’ve seen before. If that was all you were ready for, you probably wouldn’t imagine that they might have Amass the Components, Ghost Quarter, or sometimes Act of Aggression. It’s very hard to play around everything possible, but Gitaxian Probe can help (yet another reason to just play Delver).

I wish I could advocate more specific cards that are good against Delver. Most of the awesome new cards, like Wolfir Silverheart, Tamiyo, the Moon Sage, or Consecrated Sphinx are really bad against Delver. Wolfir Avenger might be kind of sweet against Geist of Saint Traft, but it’s pretty bad at attacking into Restoration Angel and they might just have Blade Splicer instead of Geist of Saint Traft.

Birds of Paradise. That might be the best card against Delver. Something that can actually pull you ahead in a way they generally can’t profitably interact with. They might have Gut Shot, but it’s at a relative low in terms of how much play its seeing. If a Bird of Paradise lives, it can cut off their ability to stay ahead of you, weakening their Vapor Snags which are further weakened by the simple fact that you have more mana to use to replay your creature. The trick is to find relevant cards for Birds of Paradise to cast. I think Birthing Pod is the best you can do, but then you still need to be careful not to fill your deck with random bullets that you might draw that underperform against Delver.

It’s also possible that the best approach is to just do something unfair and hope they aren’t prepared for it. Maybe you can find a deck that can Unburial Rites Griselbrand with enough cheap, interactive cards to draw that that matters and hope they happen to not have found room for Surgical Extraction (which seems to be pretty unpopular at the moment anyway) in their sideboard.

Really, you should just learn to play Delver.

Thanks for reading,

Sam

@samuelhblack on Twitter