Wherefore Art Thou Quirion Dryad?

A few years ago I had a lot of luck in the Extended format. After chatting a bit with Sol Malka, I was able to take his deck to a GPT win, an unexciting 5-2 at the GP for which I had earned the byes, but acquitted myself with a PTQ win the next day. A few weeks later, I played in a $250 Extended tournament at Neutral Ground and ran, rather than The Rock, a version of Miracle Grow that I built with Lan D. Ho and Don Lim; after taking down Don in the Top 8, I won that tournament too (no splitz :)).

Lan played in a GP the same weekend, but switched Miracle Grow decks at the last minute. That’s okay. As a member of the Underground, a loose “Superfriends” cadre of murderers and neerdowells that has included over the years Brian Kowal, Brian Schneider, Brian Kibler, and other people not named Brian, such as myself and Ben Rubin, Lan was privvy to the Rubin/Kibler deck for that weekend. At first I chided Lan for switching at the last minute (especially as I had won with our version)… but I guess the Kibler/Rubin deck was better, given their much more significant and lasting finishes.

sickestever.dec

4 Tropical Island

4 Tundra

4 Flood Plain

1 Grasslands

2 Island

1 Savannah

4 Meddling Mage

4 Werebear

4 Merfolk Looter

4 Quirion Dryad

3 Mystic Enforcer

4 Land Grant

4 Force of Will

3 Winter Orb

4 Brainstorm

4 Gush

4 Swords to Plowshares

2 Foil

Sideboard

1 Winter Orb

2 Mind Harness

3 Legacy’s Allure

3 Annul

2 Wax/Wane

3 Hidden Gibbons

1 Submerge

Ben finished fourth and Brian finished second at GP: Houston. The same Top 8 included Alex Shvartsman version of Miracle Grow, which tried to break the mirror with cards like Withdraw and Legacy’s Allure. Miracle Grow was great because it had deck advantage if not strategy superiority over both the dominant natural deck of the format (Donate) and the number two deck (The Rock). The success of Miracle Grow against the dominant decks of the format made templated Miracle Grow decks like Shvartsman’s and sickestever.dec premium, provided that they could hold Miracle Grow’s existing matchups. In fact, with its Swords to Plowshares, Mystic Enforcers, higher land count, and replacement of Curiosity, sickestever.dec was even better against Bob Maher’s Red Deck than straight Miracle Grow; the Houston quarterfinals saw Kibs beat The Great One in two.

Subsequent to the success of sickestever.dec at GP: Austin, a mass adoption of the Super Grow strategy followed. The most notable beneficiary has to be Alexander Witt, who appeared at PT: Nice sans qualification but weathered the single-elimination Gateway and won the Masters event itself without dropping a match. Witt used this slightly modified version:

4 Flood Plain

2 Savannah

4 Tropical Island

4 Tundra

4 Meddling Mage

2 Mystic Enforcer

3 Quirion Dryad

4 Werebear

4 Brainstorm

3 Daze

2 Foil

4 Force of Will

4 Gush

4 Land Grant

4 Sleight of Hand

4 Swords to Plowshares

4 Winter Orb

Sideboard:

4 Chill

2 Legacy’s Allure

2 Submerge

2 Waterfront Bouncer

2 Wax/Wane

3 Seal of Cleansing

You may recall I mentioned this deck a few weeks ago, but never really went into what made Super Grow so SUPER. This deck, more than any of the pretenders that came after it – Deep Dog even – successfully combined interactive and solitaire elements to generate inevitability across almost every matchup. What do I mean by this? The Miracle Grow family, with its Odyssey Block reminiscent Werebears and Wild Mongrels and certainly Quirion Dryads was a tier one beatdown deck. It had a very fast clock with fundamental offensive strength. This is something that, prior to Deep Dog out of Odyssey Block, we had never really seen before. Think of the great aggro-control decks… Labarre’s Rome deck, Counter-Sliver, and so on… They had Force of Will, sure, and even Duress, but these decks didn’t exactly clock with 6/6 creatures for four mana. But on top of that, Super Grow was also a very good interactive deck. Together, the interweaving of aggression, control, pure speed, and “Why Dave Price Goes Second” enabled the deck to break new ground.

Super Grow’s centerpiece permanent took advantage of [typically] non-interactive elements (card drawing) and twisted them in such a way that they affected the board (making Quirion Dryad and Werebear bigger). At the same time, Super Grow had powerful interactive elements like Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares that could answer threats, protect permanents in play, or just force more damage through. It is a great example of a deck that that possessed a powerful threat – faster than a Donate combo if not lethal quite as quickly – and interactive elements that no deck could ignore. Consider how hard Red Deck Wins has to work to force mana denial with its Rishadan Ports, then compare against Winter Orb, a glacial strategy that no opponent could easily ignore, that simultaneously erased the drawbacks of mediocre cards like Daze, Gush, and Foil.

Many decks have tried to follow in the footsteps of Miracle Grow or sickestever.dec. The most successful without a doubt has been Deep Dog, an aggro-control deck sporting many of the same threats and themes as the Miracle Grow family, albeit without the benefit of Winter Orb. Recently, GAT has tried to step up and fill sickestever.dec’s shoes. I will be the first to admit that I have never really given GAT a chance (for reasons that would better fit in another article). GAT tries to win with essentially the same plan as sickestever.dec, but with a much worse mana base, erratic interactive elements, and, again, no Winter Orbs.

For now, though, I would like to dial the clock backwards a season or two and look at a different pretender to Miracle Grow’s throne, Black Thumb. This is a version BDM played a couple of years ago that I pulled off of Google:

4 Quirion Dryad

4 Faceless Butcher

2 Spiritmonger

1 Thrashing Wumpus

4 Pernicious Deed

4 Vampiric Tutor

4 Tainted Pact

4 Duress

3 Cabal Therapy

4 Diabolic Edict

1 Haunting Echoes

1 Smother

1 Skeletal Scrying

4 Llanowar Wastes

4 Tainted Woods

14 Swamp

1 Wasteland

Sideboard

1 Massacre

2 Vicious Hunger

1 Engineered Plague

2 Terror

2 Naturalize

3 Choke

1 Cursed Totem

1 Perish

1 Smother

1 Stronghold Taskmaster

Tired of the same old stock decks and Columbus archetypes, a lot of players have actually asked me to do a writeup about Black Thumb and how I think it looks in the current Extended. Now keep in mind the above deck was designed by BDM and myself for a very different environment than today’s Extended. The top decks of that era, for instance, was U/G Madness, and we had to deal with control from Oath of Druids. Black Thumb crushed both those decks, and posted good numbers overall, even if it wasn’t really tier one in the way that Turbo Land or Tinker was (being a “fair” deck and all).

While both decks have the same base goal, to plop down a Quirion Dryad, grow it, and bash the opponent to death in short order, the difference between Black Thumb and Miracle Grow is fundamental in its methodology. While Miracle Grow and Super Grow have a powerful threat (Quirion Dryad) that they grow using primarily non-interactive means that they have to go through, Comer style, Just To Get Their Lands, Black Thumb is a fundamentally interactive deck. Your opponent doesn’t have a hand? A guy to kill? Your Dryad doesn’t get any bigger.

Miracle Grow/sickestever.dec/Super Grow has other fundamental strengths. It has a lower overall land count, allowing it to beef up its resources with ten or more slots of “stuff.” Its interactive measures are permission, agnostic, whereas Black Thumb needs Cabal Therapy against combo, Diabolic Edict against Reanimator, and never wants to see Duress when facing Goblins. A Winter Orb and a couple of counters are all Miracle Grow needs against anyone while its Quirion Dryad clocks in; while the Winter Orb stymies the opponent’s mana, a Force of Will can alternately halt Spiritmonger (preventing damage prevention), Pernicious Deed (protecting permanents), or Donate (breaking the combo).

Just for kicks, I decided to do an update to Black Thumb this past week and test it against a couple of the format’s potential opponents. I messed around with the slots and numbers quite a bit. As anyone who has ever played a “weird numbers” deck will know, tweaking even a single copy of a card can radically change the deck’s chances to win in any given matchup. Here is a fairly representative build:

4 Cabal Therapy

4 Diabolic Edict

4 Duress

1 Engineered Plague

1 Haunting Echoes

4 Night’s Whisper

4 Smother

4 Vampiric Tutor

1 Visara The Dreadful

4 Pernicous Deed

2 Spiritmonger

4 Quirion Dryad

14 Swamp

4 Llanowar Wastes

4 Tainted Wood

1 Wasteland

Sideboard

1 Choke

4 Oxidize

2 Chainer’s Edict

1 Cranial Extraction

3 Engineered Plague

4 Vicious Hunger

I really wanted to make Lose Hope work. The first version I played had Lose Hope instead of Smother, which worked fine against Cephalid Brunch, but was useless against Psychatog. When I took Tainted Pact out of the deck, I wanted a card that could simulate the kind of “velocity” that Miracle Grow’s cantrips give it, while maintaining the creature-hostile theme of Black Thumb’s own growth tactics. Despite its uselessness against Psychatog, I am still not sure that Lose Hope isn’t better than Vicious Hunger against a deck like Goblins.

Testing every matchup is even more impossible today than it was when I was messing around with Red Deck Wins, White Weenie, and so on before the format kicked off in earnest. There are probably 20 different decks capable of producing Blue Envelopes, so maybe it is more important to test against broad groups and hope you can predict trends based on colors. I tested against a couple of combo decks, the control deck that won the most recent GP, and some aggro. The results were surprising.

Cephalid Brunch – a little over 70%

Not much to talk about here. Cephalid Brunch has two combo kills, neither one of which is very impressive against Black Thumb. The Life combo is pretty meaningless. “You have nine million life. Great. So now what?” The G/W or B/W Life decks have legitimate kill cards, kind of, but none of these decks is particularly good against Black Thumb’s defensive measures. Even when they ostensibly combo you out, you still have inevitability, and will probably just deck them.

All three of Brunch’s wins came, not surprisingly, from lightning fast Sutured Ghoul kills. I was surprised at how resilient the Cephalid side of the deck could be. Brunch nearly won a game from a double mulligan that involved the wrong side of both Duress and Cabal Therapy in the first two turns. From a position of being up five cards against a manascrewed opponent, I actually had to think the last two turns out very carefully, because the wrong Vampiric Tutor target would have put me on dead (Diabolic Edict is great… as long as the other guy doesn’t leave a Nomads en-Kor). The matchup, while scary because of the raw power of Cephild Brunch, is not actually bad on the numbers.

Aluren – about 80%

Oiso’s deck from Boston proved not a hard matchup at all in game one. Black Thumb has every card Aluren hates, Duress, Cabal Therapy, Engineered Plague, even Pernicious Deed in combination with a relevant threat. I know Aluren has Stern Proctor, but in the games I tested, it didn’t seem like he would do anything… another one of those “so now what” situations. Clair says that Wirewood Savage is a “win more” card, but in at least one game, Aluren would have won with Savage access, and instead got creamed by a topdecked Engineered Plague.

Roux Psychatog – between 60% and 65%

Psychatog really impressed me this week. Winning a Grand Prix is significant to begin with, but Dr. Teeth has also been tearing up the PTQ circuit, with old Laurence Creech quietly racking up a couple of Tog Top 8s on the PTQ side as well. You gotta figure the deck that just beat a thousand Germans and Dutchies is going to be the Deck to Beat, so I tested that one out too.

I was surprised how good the “bad” cards were in this matchup. All the kills but one came down to Masticore, and Boomerang was legitimately game over at least twice. Nothing like getting your Spiritmonger lifted consecutive turns for the double Fireblast-style 4+4 from a clunky ‘Core. Black Thumb’s advantage comes from Tog being unable to consistently deal with Duress + threat sequences and the inherent vulnerability of Psychatog against a deck with Cabal Therapy, Diabolic Edict, and Smother, plus Masticore against hand destruction and the aforementioned Edict.

The margin might seem tight, but half of Psychatog’s wins “felt cheap” with the control deck playing off the top, whereas most of Black Thumb’s came from a position of board advantage.

Goblins – a little under 25%

I tested against Bas Postema’s deck from the Grand Prix. This deck combines the raw synergy of mono-red Goblins with the most difficult element for a control deck to deal with out of its sister Red Deck, the inclusion of both Rishadan Port and Wasteland. Ultimately, this matchup was a mess. I actually only played four games before throwing in the towel and going to boards. I say “a little under” 25% because Black Thumb won one out of four and I don’t know if it would have won another if we went to eight. The one game Black Thumb won, I saw double Goblin Matron with a Duress (whiffed of course), Goblins drew Goblin Matron, and Black Thumb got three-for-one with Therapy on turn 2. Congrats on that one.

Sideboarded was a coin flip that favored Goblins by a little bit. The way I boarded (-Vampiric Tutor, leaving Night’s Whisper) left the matchup about 45%. I tested a couple of games leaving in Vampiric Tutor instead and it felt a lot better. That said, if I knew I was playing Goblins every round, I would pick another deck, no lies.

Goblins was winning post-sideboard on two strengths. The first one was that Thumb’s mana was uneven. If it had Lose Hope for turn 1 or turn 3, the games would have been a lot better, soaking up maybe three damage. The other reason was that Goblins wasn’t winning with guys. Come mid-game, it was just Vortex damage. Thumb had to find a Spiritmonger fast, and do two damage to itself along the way. Sulfuric Vortex, incidentally, costs three, the same as Engineered Plague relevant to Pernicious Deed.

I tested RDW way back around PT: Columbus and remember the matchup being maybe worse than Goblins (bad either way). I decided to ask myself if this deck were worth playing if it beat everything that wasn’t a Red Deck. The only way to really figure that out was to run Black Thumb against a different aggro deck, but one without burn. I decided on White Weenie.

Imagine my surprise at getting my tail handed to me repeatedly by Neil Reeves’s (outdated) White Weenie deck from Columbus. The matchup looked only a little better than a coin flip. I switched up to a more recent deck list, a Blue splash version from a PTQ Top 8 last week. This White Weenie deck was also surprisingly rough, but I think I got better at the matchup as time went on. The numbers say between 55 and 60%, which is flat out weird if you ask me, but I think a lot of it had to do with how I played.

Like I approached White Weenie like it was U/G without counters, that is a deck with good creatures but no reach. The fact is, White Weenie has reach. I’d go to one life from Vampiric Tutor and Skeletal Scrying and then lose to a topdecked Parallax Wave, Cursed Scroll, or even Benevolent Bodyguard. The wins came to Black Thumb more in later games, where I was less reckless with life total. That said, the little White men were really annoying, especially Whipcorder.

At the end of all these games, I actually rekindled my love for the B/G Quirion Dryad deck that had never so much as won a single GPT. I think it is a decent rogue choice… if you can conscience never beating a Red Deck. I’ve played in one GPT, one GP, and one PTQ in this format. These were my enemies:

Pirates

RDW

Desire

West

Deep Dog

Pattern

Goblins

RDW

Aluren

Aluren

Temporary Solution

Reanimator

G/W Life

Affinity

The Rock

You can pick six or even eight decks of a Swiss out of that list and not hit a Red deck. The problem is that I only played two different kinds of decks twice so far, and one of them was Red Deck Wins, Black Thumb’s worst enemy.

Here’s the thing. I only have one PTQ, really, this season. I made a RDW that won the GPT I played in, placed two players out of three in Day Two of GP: Boston, made Top 16 of said GP, and then was appropriated by no less than Dan Paskins. Do I play the beloved Red Deck, probably make Top 8 and lose to Mind’s Desire?

Certain friends say that there is maybe one good player with Mind’s Desire at a PTQ in the Northeast. That’s actually bad if you are RDW. The good players all know how to race you without Sphere of Law, but the donkeys all play it because they can’t beat you without it and you can’t beat them if they have it. The other problem is that if you want to WIN a PTQ, you might just have to face off against that best player in the Top 8 and take him out. You can’t hope to dodge the best guy with the best deck, not if you want to WIN rather than just make Top 8. If you want to go 5-2, sure, you’ll probably never face the tight player who can draw his deck on turn four. But unless you plan on his getting manascrewed in the second-to-last round of Swiss, don’t expect to escape with the Blue Envelope on anything other than luck. In a nutshell, that is my problem with beloved RDW. I’d actually rather not make Top 8 and just draft the Betrayers of booster. Gotta have something halfway intelligent to say during that live webcast next week, ya grok?

Anyway, it’s between first turn Jackal Pup and first turn Spiritmonger for me. Okay, maybe not first turn.

LOVE

MIKE

Attacking for two since 1994.