Okay, so the Richmond Mega-Magic Double PTQ Weekend is in the books and… it looks like White-x token decks are everywhere! Not much new there, is it?
Or is there?
I’m sure many of you have already run across Tommy Ashton’s Finest Hour Bant deck that won the PTQ on Saturday, and most of you have likely scratched your head in wonder. Jhessian Infiltrator? Shorecrasher Mimic?
I came in a little early in the day to help Pete Hoefling sell some singles for those players looking to fill out their decks at the last minute, and this guy came up to me asking if we had any foil Jhessian Infiltrators. I admit to being bemused at the time by the idea of someone playing that card in a Constructed deck, much less wanting to call attention to it by running foil copies. After checking with Pete, it turns out they did not bring any copy of the uncommon, foil or otherwise.
I’m guessing that guy was Tommy Ashton and, despite the lack of foils, he took home a blue envelope for Pro Tour: Austin, and has done a pretty good job of getting everyone’s attention.
Or has he? A few days after the event, I’ve been scanning the net looking for buzz on the deck, and other than a few mentions of it winning everyone seems to be high on the token decks – about how good Zealous Persecution is in B/W Tokens, or how good the W/B Kithkin variant is against other B/W decks, running a lot of actual creature cards with toughness larger than 1 so opposing Persecutions aren’t nearly so devastating.
Has Finest Hour Bant been dismissed by the Magic community at large as a fluke? Or are people “in the know” keeping it on the down low to spring it on people at Regionals? My guess is the former, and I feel that’s a mistake.
Creatures (30)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 2 Kitchen Finks
- 4 Shorecrasher Mimic
- 4 Jhessian Infiltrator
- 4 Rafiq of the Many
- 4 Rhox War Monk
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Dauntless Escort
Lands (20)
Spells (10)
Personally, the deck feels well suited to battle in this metagame. It’s muscular and fast, capable of running over the W/x token decks and winning in a hurry. I like how the unconventional Exalted standard-bearers Tommy selected – Jhessian Infiltrator and Shorecrasher Mimic – are pitch-perfect choices against a field of infinite weenie chump blockers. I like how the deck wins by using the premier acceleration creatures to power out fast beatdown, and protects from mass-removal with the awesome Dauntless Escort.
I like that this deck isn’t really trying to react to the W/x token decks like everyone else seems to be doing; it’s got it’s own plan, a mighty fine plan, and it’s got the tools to execute that plan incredibly fast and efficiently.
I got in touch with Tommy to see if he’d be willing to share some thoughts on his deck, and if he had anything he’d change after playing it.
Tommy wrote:
“I’d 100% take out the Kitchen Finks from the main, replace them with Elspeth – the Finks stink. I was also siding in 2 Negate in most of my matches, but taking out different things, so I’m not sure if Negate belongs in the maindeck or not. Against Five-Color Control and decks with Wrath of God, Volcanic Fallout, or Zealous Persecution, two Birds of Paradise came out for the Negates; against token decks two Bant Charms came out for Negate, so maybe cut 1 Bird and 1 Charm to add the Negates. Or, of course, just keep them in the board!
“The rest of the maindeck (except for the mana) is fine I think; apparently people play Cryptic Command in the deck, but they’re dreaming if they think they can consistently cast it and the other spells in the deck.
“For lands, I might change it to [see the decklist below] and then try it from there; whenever I drew two Mystic Gates it was miserable, and whenever I was Pathed, I wished I could get some basics other than Forest. My friend who played it at the Sunday PTQ wanted to run zero Adarkar Wastes, but I don’t know if that’s possible… there is a lot of pain in the deck though, so it might be better just to have 3 Pools and just 2 Mystic Gates.
“Sideboard-wise, the Cascade lifegain never ever ever came in, but I never played against a Red deck. I always boarded the Finks out and never boarded them in, for the same reason. The Cloudthresher sucked. Sower of Temptation is really nice in the mirror and against the B/W Kithkin deck. I’d like to run 3 of them and just 2 Paths but I was told Path is necessary against Faeries.
“About playing the deck: know how to bait out / play around Fallout, but also know that the Five-Color Control deck doesn’t have the answer they need as often as you think. Test a bit to get the handle of when to play turn 2 Mimic or War Monk, and also when to play Treetops and when not to. The most important card in the R/W matchup is Ajani Vengeant, so play with that in mind. And don’t settle for mediocre hands. Good luck!”
Here’s the deck with Tommy’s suggested revisions:
Creatures (28)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Shorecrasher Mimic
- 4 Jhessian Infiltrator
- 4 Rafiq of the Many
- 4 Rhox War Monk
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Dauntless Escort
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (19)
Another interesting deck from the same Top 8 was my friend Zach Jesse take on Five-Color Control, an archetype considered to be a dog in this format currently:
Creatures (12)
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (22)
Spells (25)
At the beginning of the tournament, Zach came up to me with no time to spare. “You’re gonna love my deck – it’s basically Highlander.” I laughed and was indeed intrigued; Zach is friends with Daniel Sale, the guy I wrote about who rocked FNM about a month ago with his Highlander G/W, so I figured Zach took a page from Daniel’s rogue playbook. “You’re also going to hate it – it’s a Blue deck.”
I was intrigued. “A Blue Highlander deck? What is it, some sort of Mill deck?”
Zach said it wasn’t, but pairings went up so I was unable to investigate further, and as the day wore on Zach romped undefeated through the Swiss. Turns out Zach wasn’t playing a Blue Highlander deck at all… it was a Five-Color Control deck sporting 4 copies of Cryptic Command, 2 copies of Cruel Ultimatum, and a manabase fueled by Reflecting Pool and Vivid Lands. Hardly revolutionary… and yet, while other Five-Color Control decks struggled and fell along the way, Zach barely lost any games (and no matches) on his way to the Top 8.
Even though nearly all the “stock” versions of Five-Color Control dating back to Quick n’ Toast sport less than 4 copies of a lot of key cards, Zach’s version goes way beyond, with 16 non-land singletons and a fair number of two-counts. To be sure, anyone relying on Runed Halo, Meddling Mage, or Thought Hemorrhage to take the steam out of Zach’s sails was going to be sadly disappointed. So why did no other Five-Color Control decks make the cut to the Top 8, on either day? One thing you won’t know from looking at the Top 8 decks is that Zach played the same deck with a few card tweaks to a 9th place finish on Sunday. Why was Zach so successful?
I’m thinking the element of surprise played a big part.
Think about where competitive Magic is right now as compared to the early days, when information was relatively scarce. Everyone now is so hyper-connected, information is so readily available that, if you have the time and desire, you can study up and really know what’s in all the top decks, how they play, and how to beat them with whatever deck of choice you bring. Unfortunately, in the later rounds of a tournament, your opponent will often have that same knowledge regarding your deck (because of course you’re also playing one of the top decks), negating your advantage and boiling the match down to play skill and a bit of luck. In competitive Magic nowadays, the element of surprise is really minimized.
Which makes a deck like Zach’s, or Daniel’s GW deck some weeks back, an interesting foil to the stock competitive decks. Running lots of different cards doesn’t have to mean running bad cards; Wizards has done a great job of late in making a huge amount of cards that are at the very least solid utility, and often just as powerful as cards we’ve already been using. As someone who enjoys deckbuilding, it’s delicious agony to have too many good cards to choose from, to sweat and wrestle with do I cut or keep this? Or do I split the difference?
It ties back to why I so love rogue strategies, which truly employs the full power of surprise. The classic example from my own experience is when I ran a dedicated Dredge deck to 5th place at Virginia Champs when everyone else considered Dredge a relatively bad Limited mechanic. As I threw Stinkweed Imps and Greater Mossdogs at my opponents, they were at a loss on how to deal with what was happening and often couldn’t figure out how to stop me. It’s a powerful feeling to know the player across from you just doesn’t know what to do against you.
I suspected playing the unexpected might have given Zach an edge to push his deck a little further than it might have, especially considering how poorly the other Five-Color Control decks did this weekend. So I asked him about it.
“I am, on the whole, a much better Limited player than I am Constructed,” Zach said. “This deck feels like a very powerful Limited deck, which may sound like an insult, but it is not. Part of the power intrinsic in a deck like this is that your opponent can hardly put you on anything… I often feel like I have a very good grasp of what people have in their hands by the way they’re playing or, similarly, I know what cards to look out for when my opponent is in topdeck mode. That can hardly be done against this deck.”
He added: “If you’re looking to play a deck with consistency, this is not the deck for you. If you do decide to play a deck like this, my advice to you is that your biggest asset is the power of surprise. Your opponent’s inability to accurately or consistently guess what you have is one of the reason I liked this deck.”
For those of you who might pshaw this notion and his deck, I’d like to remind you that Zach went undefeated in the Swiss on Saturday, making Top 8 out of a field of 187 players and 8 rounds of Swiss. He beat B/W Tokens, G/W Tokens, Planeswalkers, and B/W Kithkin before drawing the last two rounds into the Top 8. He then lost to G/W Tokens in three games the first elimination round.
He played nearly the same deck (with a few tweaks) on day 2, 130 players and still eight rounds, beating Doran, Merfolk, Boat Brew, Five-Color Control, Jund Mana Ramp, and G/B Elves but losing to Boat Brew and Sanity Grinding and missing the elimination rounds for a 9th place finish on tie-breakers.
For those who are interested, Zach wrote up his thoughts on his deck choice, and you can check it out at the end of the column. In the meantime though, I know at least some of you are wondering, maybe even talking to the screen:
Bennie, what the heck did you play this weekend, and how did you do?
Last week I wrote about a couple of decks, and I pretty much had settled on two, one of which was the Black/Green “Neo-Elves” Rock deck, with the only change from the list last week being moving the Scepters of Fugue to the sideboard and adding a fourth Lord of Extinction and a fourth Profane Command.
The other deck was a Cascade deck. I’d conceived of the notion of cramming as many Cascade cards together in one deck to see what crazy stuff it could do, with the thought that, while many of the cards Cascade was attached to were distinctly mediocre, the mechanic itself was so powerful as to more than make up for the cards’ deficiencies. Again, my experience with Dredge played in to this – on the face of it, Stinkweed Imp, Greater Mossdog, Moldervine Cloak, and Nightmare Void were Limited-quality at best. But throw them all together with obvious quality cards like Life from the Loam and Darkblast, and suddenly you’ve got something wicked good cooking up. Might we find the same sort of thing happening in a dedicated Cascade deck?
A couple of my friends jumped on board with the idea. In fact, they put so much more work into the deck than I was able to that I didn’t feel right about “outing” the deck before they got a chance to play it this weekend, so that’s why I didn’t write about it last week. The deck had tested well and we all felt pretty good about… but I had a few doubts, namely in my ability to pilot the deck to its best ability. The BG deck was so much more my style.
What sealed it though was Mike Flores article on Magicthegathering.com last week, where he built an incredibly sub-par take on Cascade and pretty much came to the conclusion that a dedicated Cascade deck just didn’t have the snuff to compete. A lot of people read Mike’s stuff, and if the conventional wisdom was that Cascade decks sucked, then people wouldn’t test against them and wouldn’t be prepared to face them. Which, of course, meant that our good Cascade decks would have the element of surprise.
I was decided. Here’s what I played Saturday:
Creatures (18)
- 2 Chameleon Colossus
- 4 Kitchen Finks
- 1 Caldera Hellion
- 1 Madrush Cyclops
- 4 Enlisted Wurm
- 2 Enigma Sphinx
- 4 Bloodbraid Elf
Lands (20)
Spells (22)
My concept was to use a five-color base to make use of all the playable Cascade spells, and to use ramping spells to more quickly cast them, since they all tend to be a bit more expensive than you’d generally like in a Constructed deck. Also, Cascading into a ramp spell wasn’t bad because it would basically ensure you had the mana to cast your larger Cascade spell next turn. I’m sure the three-mana spells make sense, so I won’t rehash them here. At four mana, the Madrush Cyclops was chosen because your larger Cascade creatures are “big and dumb,” often sitting there stupidly for your opponent to untap and kill them with the plethora of removal available. The Cyclops gave these big dumb guys some pep in their step, often swinging for significant damage out of nowhere. Let me tell you, casting Enlisted Wurm into Bituminous Blast to kill your blocker into Madrush and swing with your Wurm and Cyclops and any Finks you had lying around can end a game in a hurry.
For a similar reason I ended up going with Stormcaller’s Boon over Captured Sunlight as another way to make your big and dumb guys be able to get past the sea of chump blockers and dish out some real damage (or letting your Finks jump up and take down some Spirit or Faerie attackers).
Last minute adjustments came as I was talking with Jay Friday night, and he was mentioning how much trouble he was having with Chameleon Colossus against this deck, and I said “why don’t we put Colossus in our deck?” We often have tons of mana lying around… Jay agreed it was a perfect solution. I also stumbled across Pollen Lullaby as a nice surprise out of the sideboard against W/x token decks, especially in response to a Windbrisk Heights activation for an Overrun – surprise! Fog you, and maybe lock down your team for another turn. The overall high cost of the cards in the deck meant that you’d very likely win the clashes, and being able to adjust the top of your deck felt pretty strong with Cascade.
Sadly, things didn’t pan out too well for me Saturday. Round 1 I was paired against a Blightning deck, an archetype I’d struggled with in testing. Game 1 was incredibly tight, and at the end he was at 1 life, I was at 2 life and we were both in topdeck mode. He topdecked the burn before I could draw a Finks or some action. Game 2 I’m on the play and have to mulligan my first hand, and when I draw my new seven… I realize I have too many cards in my hand. I tell my opponent that I accidentally drew an extra card, and we call a judge over. I get a warning and go to five cards on the play. It’s playable, but Erik has a great draw and just runs me over.
I feel really dumb about the mulligan mistake, but vow to plow on, try to take the “low road” to the Top 8, right?
Round 2 I’m paired with Chris, who’s playing Five-Color Control. I have to mulligan once but have a keeper, but those four non-land cards and the one non-land card I draw after that don’t get there against Cruel Control. Seriously, the count was 11 lands and 5 non-lands. Game 2 I get a normal draw, get to show Chris a little Cascade action, and easily win the game. Chris stalls for a long time on 4 mana and I have a feeling he’s got a fistful of cards that cost 5 or more at the end. Game 3 I have to double mulligan and get crucified by Chris… he actually hits me twice with Cruel Ultimatum. I draw 10 lands and 8 non-land spells during the course of the game, which is an improvement from game 1, but honestly completely unacceptable from a deck that’s running 62% creatures and spells, many of which Cascade into other creatures or spells.
I fight down the near overwhelming impulse to fling the deck across the room in a rage, but I do vow to never, ever play a Cascade deck again as I check the Drop box.
Interestingly, Kyle Sanchez posted his take on a Five-Color Cascade deck in his column this week, and it is quite different than what we concocted; while I love the Runed Halos, we’re all a bit confused how he gets away with only three cards that cast two mana or less and no mana rampage at all, especially given the speed of the format.
Sunday I went ahead and rocked the Neo-Elves, went 2-0 before clocking my first loss to David Irvine and his brutal GW deck (he ended up 4th place both days). I won the next match against Jund aggro, and then lose to BW tokens and Faeries to end my day at a very average and disappointing 3-3.
After pondering lessons learned from the weekend and bouncing ideas off Adrian Sullivan and some of my local friends, this is where Neo Elves stands currently:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Civic Wayfinder
- 4 Wren's Run Vanquisher
- 4 Chameleon Colossus
- 3 Fulminator Mage
- 3 Kitchen Finks
- 4 Putrid Leech
- 3 Lord of Extinction
Lands (20)
Spells (16)
The singleton Eyeblight’s Ending may look weird, but I used to run more in order to help keep the Elf/Changeling count high enough so that you can reliably cast Wren’s Run Vanquisher on turn 2 and Gilt-Leaf Palace untapped when it matters. As I tried to work more cards into the deck, various things got cut and the Endings count diminished to where it is now. I’m stubbornly holding on to it to keep my tribal count at 17 (and I really do like to have an instant speed answer to Mistbind Clique on occasion).
Fulminator Mage answers a lot of problems, with his main mission to drive Windbrisk Height Cadillacs right into the ditch before they run you over, but also doing a nice job of taking down enemy Treetops, Mutavaults, and Faerie Conclaves. He also conveniently gives a +2/+2 bonus to your subsequent Lords of Extinction. Hurricanes crept into the main deck as a great two-mana answer to an early Spectral Procession, and with a little more mana does a great job of sweeping the skies of even pumped Spirits and maybe, just maybe, knock out a Planeswalker too. For those decks were Hurricane doesn’t make too much sense, I can go back to 4 amazing Profane Commands from the board.
Rite of Consumption is a nifty card to pair up with Lord of Extinction, doing a nice Necro-drain finish if he’s big enough and skipping the necessity of making it unblocked through the Red Zone.
So for Regionals, I find myself again with two deck choices: my BG Neo-Elves… and Tommy Ashton’s kick-ass Finest Hour Bant deck. I’m gonna run the Bant deck at FNM and see how it fares under pressure — and, more importantly, in my considerably less skillful hands. We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, my friends have been tempting me with a couple of other very intriguing deck ideas, so who knows what I’ll be sleeving up late Friday night before I put my head down for some rest before the big day.
Good luck to all of you who are playing this Saturday, and I hope the results bring us better news than BW decks just ruling the day, and I also hope there are more Alara Reborn cards making some noise!
See you in Kansas City…?
Take care!
Bennie
starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com
Zach Jesse on his “Miser’s Five-Color Control” Deck
Here is how I built the deck, and why I came to think of it as a highlander deck:
Twenty minutes before registration closed, I still didn’t know what deck I wanted to play. I had been having a lot of success online with a G/B/r homebrew token deck, but I actually didn’t want to change the maindeck much with any cards from Alara Reborn. I eventually borrowed a Five-Color Control deck from Daniel, a horrible Bloodbraid Elf themed monstrosity that I hated.
In the spirit of doing things my own way, I decided to rebuild the deck. Daniel and I had been talking the night before about how I should just build a Five-Color Control highlander deck with just 4 Cryptic Commands, and when he decided to rock the PTQ with a highlander deck himself, I decided to do something similar. However, while I do like doing silly things, I also like to win, and to do both, I felt that I needed to accomplish a couple things: draw cards, and stay alive. The multiple Mulldrifters supplied the former; the four Finks supplied the latter. In retrospect I should have kept the fourth Mulldrifter in there and dropped an Esper Charm.
So with 4 Cryptics, 4 Finks, and 3 Mulldrifters as a starting point, I basically just starting removing cards from my binder that I thought would be fun to play with. The reason I had an Agony Warp was that I had opened a foil one, and it was in my binder. The reason I had a Soul Manipulation was that I just happened to have one on me.
While “building a highlander deck” was my motivation for building this, I didn’t want to feel like I had to locked in to having just one of a card. If I liked a card enough, I went ahead and added another one. I’d like to note an interesting phenomenon that happened though: once people found that I was playing a “highlander” deck, they would sometimes seem insulted that I would cast a second copy of a spell, as if I was breaking the rules in some way!
Here are my thoughts on specific cards – good and bad – throughout the tournament:
The Good
If there was one card that absolutely blown away by how consistently good it was that was Agony Warp. That card went the distance the entire day. I think I made plays like this several times throughout the tournament where my opponent would pump their Figure of Destiny on the third turn to duck any counter magic and I would kill it in response, or my opponent would attack with two Treetop Villages and I would take no damage. My favorite play of the day (which I was able to do twice against the same opponent) was against a G/B Elves player. He played a turn 2 Wren’s Run Vanquisher, and followed up with an Imperious Perfect. Agony Warp was much better than a counter in that scenario, especially when I had a Kitchen Finks on the board game 3. The ideal two-for-one.
Pyroclasm was by far probably the worst card in my deck. I only cast it once or twice, never on turn 2. Wait, wasn’t this the good part?
Makeshift Mannequin was a stellar card all weekend. It didn’t matter what I was getting back, although it was more often than not a Mulldrifter. People already know the power of this card I feel, so I won’t delve into it in any great detail, although I will say that Patrick Chapin third list from his article this week (Monday May 11) is a very, very good direction to take a deck. One of the first things I would do is immediately add a third Mannequin, which I hope speaks to the power of the card.
One card that I added to my Day 2 list, which I was very happy with, was Naya Charm. I can confidently say that in no less than 5 games drawing it single-handedly won the game. I only ever used it for its Regrowth ability (I was sad, because I wanted to tap my opponent’s guys with it and blow their mind), and 3 out of the 5 times I got a Mannequin back. The other two I got a Cryptic Command returned to my hand and, my personal favorite, a Cruel Ultimatum. Naya Charm is a very fun card.
New cards! I ran a few cards from the new set in my deck both days, and both days I was very happy with them. The first, Soul Manipulation, was everything I had hoped it would be. It is almost always going to be a two-for-one. Even if you don’t have a creature in your graveyard, it acts as merely a counterspell, which Five-Color Control decks tend to like. It also lets you make otherwise terrible plays like chump blocking with your Kitchen Finks against an early Figure of Destiny, confident in the knowledge that you can always get it back.
The other new card that I played and liked was Enigma Sphinx. I had wanted my friend to play this card in his Five-Color Control deck when I saw it, and when I ended up playing it myself, I took it upon myself to try out the Sphinx. I’m very much a person who loves having fun while playing, and frankly nothing is more fun than slamming card after card down on the table eagerly anticipating what is to come. I don’t remember every card it Cascaded into, but I do remember that it got me, at the very least, the following: Ajani Vengeant, Cryptic Command, Wrath of God, Pyroclasm, Kitchen Finks, Maelstrom Pulse, Mulldrifter. I also flipped a Broodmate Dragon once. Living the Dream. The Sphinx also has the great ability of being able to die and come back, making it almost ideal to run out there even when you have a Wrath in hand. It also happens to have a power of five, a not insignificant fact when it comes to gaining life off a Wall of Reverence. The Sphinx was not all upside, however; it did cascade into two less-than-impressive cards that just happened to be in the same game: Condemn and Soul Manipulation (the latter of which actually would have been fine if I hadn’t died the next turn). Nonetheless, I would definitely run the Sphinx again.
The Bad:
Pyroclasm: does not hold a candle to Agony Warp.
Maelstrom Pulse was a card that was very inconsistent for me. Sometimes, it was indeed was I wanted it to be: a catchall for anything my opponent might be running. It rarely was, however, the token-hoser that I wanted and expected it to be. The number of times my opponent Path to Exiled their own token in response to the Pulse was infuriating, and in fact, that very play absolutely won my opponent game 3 of round 6 on Sunday. Yes, Pulse dealt with tokens sometimes, but I don’t want to have to worry that my opponent can outplay me and/or have a surprise for me. Maybe keeping one maindeck is still the way to go, but I would certainly remove the one from the board. You know what else is good on planeswalkers? Pithing Needle. You know what is pretty good again Figure of Destiny? Pithing Needle. You know what is pretty good at stopping Windbrisk Heights? Chameleon Colossus? Siege-Gang Commander? And so on. Needle impresses me more than Pulse.
Shriekmaw is actual a very good card, but I cut the maindeck number down to one for the reason that the room, and especially the higher tables, were packed with B/W Tokens, against which he is sub-par.
Oona… I feel like I can’t talk badly about her. She undoubtedly won me a game with her milling ability, but I’m a little bitter about naming the obvious wrong color to lose in Top 8 on Saturday. In any case, while Oona is certainly a very powerful card, she is also very fragile. Her ability is nigh unbeatable against B/W Tokens… that is, if they don’t have a Path to Exile. If you’re looking to go with more diversified threats, I feel like Oona is a solid contender. In the end though, Broodmate Dragon is quite awesome. I’m still on the fence about this one.
Faeries, as a whole, is pretty much dead. As such, Jund Charm is infinitely better than Fallout. The number of times I added two counters to my persisted Kitchen Finks is staggering, especially in response to something like my opponent’s Volcanic Fallout. Plus, removing your Lark opponent’s graveyard is very nice indeed. I imagine that with the rise in popularity of Mannequin decks, this card is going to be seeing more and more play.
There apparently is this debate about whether Cruel Ultimatum is too expensive to run two copies. I won every game in which I cast it. I won games I should not have won off casting it. ‘Nuff said in my book.
Filigree Fracture is an incredible sideboard card against B/W Tokens. It kills their Scullers and Blossoms (two very annoying cards) and draws you a card at instant speed. I like that. It also kills their Anthems.
Firespout… I’m on the bench about. The problem with running so many Red removal spells (Fallout, Jund Charm, Pyroclasm, etc.) is that it makes the opponent’s Forge-Tenders that much better. I began to actually side out my Red removal suite if I felt that my opponents were bringing in four Forge-Tenders. By slowing themselves down by playing less-than-optimal cards, it meant that I could play more powerful removal like Scourglass. Perhaps a risky choice, but I was also afraid of Mark of Asylum, against which I have few answers. Firespout is, in my opinion, at this point probably better than Fallout. Having Fallout in hand while a Boggart Ram-Gang beats you down is pretty awkward.
One thing about Scourglass… turns out it doesn’t kill Sculler.
Why no Plumeveils? I couldn’t find any.
The deck that I played Sunday was essentially the same that I played Saturday with a few minor changes, all of which I was very happy about:
-1 Shriekmaw; -1 Negate; -1 Volcanic Fallout
+1 Naya Charm; +1 Wrath of God; +1 Wall of Reverence
I also messed with the mana a little bit:
-1 Vivid Crag; -1 Vivid Grove
+1 Reflecting Pool; +2 Vivid Meadow
You’ll notice that this exchange is uneven. I indeed added an extra land, bringing the total card count to 61. I suppose it’s not unorthodox after Nassif’s win supposedly lending some sort of credence to the notion of 61 cards. I did it for the same reason as he – Saturday I consistently felt like I was a little pressed for mana, but I didn’t feel that cutting a card for a land was the right decision.
One of the issues with this deck is that, at times, the mana can be quite annoying. I definitely lost a game, and subsequently the match in round 6 on Sunday because of not being able to cast a Maelstrom Pulse in hand off an Island, Flooded Grove, and Mystic Gate, though just to be fair, he did Fulminator Mage me on his turn 3, killing my Vivid land.
There was only one slight sideboard change.
-1 Wrath of God (moved it to the maindeck)
+1 Firespout
While I can’t play in Regionals again this year, I’m hoping to attend Grand Prix: Seattle, and I feel fairly confident playing this deck there, especially with a couple of byes.