Magic the Gathering

Constructed

Off the Beaten Path – Foot and Mouth

By Sam Feeley ⋅ January 8, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Happy New Year all!

Hope you didn’t get too blasted that you for­got that the Extended PTQ sea­son is upon us. Ah yes, Extended sea­son, the glo­ri­ous three months of the year where we dust off our Tar­mogoyfs and Ravnica dual lands in the name of a free plane ticket (bag­gage fees sold sep­a­rately). I am one of many play­ers who has a love-hate rela­tion­ship with this won­der­ful time of year. We love the huge card­pool and the wide range of decks, com­bos, and cre­ativ­ity the for­mat gives us, but we hate the mass quan­ti­ties of money cards that restrict us in our fea­si­ble options. Do I have to fork over $200+ for a set of Banes­layer Angels or Tar­mogoyfs? Do I have to play a dozen fetch­lands or Ravnica duals? Do I have to resort to play­ing a strictly infe­rior deck because I have to pay off my stu­dent loans?

The answer to all of these ques­tions, thank­fully, is no. Banes­lay­ers, Goyfs, fetches, and duals are expen­sive not because they guar­an­tee you the blue enve­lope, but because they are qual­ity cards with reach in mul­ti­ple for­mats and arche­types. Your suc­cess does not depend on the extent of your bank account, but rather your play skill and abil­ity to find a deck that can trump the play­ers who think it’s all about the Benjamins.

Know­ing that I don’t have all the money in the world to work with (Thanks, hor­ri­ble job mar­ket!), I set off to find a deck that could play with the big boys but wouldn’t break the bank. I perused the deck­lists from Pro Tour-Austin and Worlds for the glass slip­per and redis­cov­ered Ivan Lopez Garcia’s Tooth and Nail list from Austin. I retooled the side­board and came up with this for my first batch of testing.

In gold­fish­ing, the deck could churn out a turn five Iona + Painter’s Ser­vant with great reg­u­lar­ity. But when it came time to play against humans, as I tested against every deck imag­in­able from All In Red to Zoo, I found that while the deck is a blast to play, it lacks five cru­cial things that would oth­er­wise make it viable.

Speed

This deck does not race at all. A turn five win seems impres­sive until you look at all the other decks that can lock it down turn turn five or earlier:

• All In Red – A turn one Deus or Demigod does not bode well for a deck that wins with a nine-mana sor­cery. God for­bid they bring Blood Moon into the pic­ture as well.
• Zoo – Domain, Naya, or Rubin? Pick your poi­son. It’s still not going to end well for you with that onslaught of crea­tures and burn spells, or in the case of Rubin Zoo, Banes­layer Angels.
• Burn – The fol­low­ing is a list of cards that do not hurt you in any way, shape, or form in Burn decks: Moun­tain. Yeah, you heard me. Just the basic land. Every­thing else either hits you directly or facil­i­tates some­thing even more painful.
• Scapeshift – The win may come turn five on aver­age, just like Tooth, but Scapeshift has a good amount of con­trol to back it up.
• Dark Depths – Turn two 20/20? Kitchen Finks is not going to be much help.
• Dredge – I really under­es­ti­mated the speed of this deck. Turn 3 swing with a bunch of 3/3 hasty guys? Yeah… can’t deal with that.

Card Draw

Har­mo­nize? That’s it? Sure, you can thin the deck with Sakura-Tribe Elder and Syl­van Scry­ing, but that doesn’t do nearly enough. You’ll see over the course of the game at most fif­teen or so cards, and you need to ensure that one of them is Tooth and Nail.

Pro­tec­tion

Thought­seize Tooth, Iona, or Painter’s Ser­vant; Med­dling Mage nam­ing Tooth and Nail; Venser your Tooth and Nail cast with Boseiju mana; Mist­bind Clique you on the upkeep you were sup­posed to go off; Ghost Quar­ter your Boseiju… yawn. As Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes fame would say, you can present the con­trol deck the mate­r­ial but you can’t make it care.

Resiliency

Sorry, but you’re going to have to wait until game 2 for that Krosan Grip with that Blood Moon that just shut off your tron. Sorry, but you’re going to have to wait until game 2 for that Relic of Prog­en­i­tus to deal with that Thopter Foundry-Sword of the Meek combo that put the game out of reach. Sorry, but… I think you get the picture.

Removal

Obliv­ion Stone seems like a good fix-all to your crea­ture, Blood Moon, and Thopter Foundry issues, until you real­ize you need eight mana to pop it right away. You could play it one turn and pop it the next, but that gives just the win­dow they need to Pithing Nee­dle it or oth­er­wise make it irrelevant.

I talked with some friends about how I could over­come these issues. The most com­mon sug­ges­tions were to splash white for Day of Judg­ment/Wrath of God and Path to Exile, or blue for Peer Through Depths, Con­de­scend, Remand and the like. And while those could work in the­ory, the blue ver­sion dies more quickly, and the white ver­sion slows down your Tooth even more. Another workaround was to cut every crea­ture except for the ones that Tooth and Nail was to fetch, but that ren­dered the deck even more vul­ner­a­ble to aggro.

Instead of try­ing to force any­thing more into some­thing that clearly wasn’t work­ing, I hung up the Tooth and Nail hat and decided to look for a deck that had every­thing Tooth didn’t. Some­thing that was a blast to play. Some­thing that peo­ple may be expect­ing or not expect­ing. All these signs pointed me to…

Scapeshift

More on that next week.

Until next time, look before you leap.
–Sam

Sam Fee­ley is a Timmy-Spike and PTQ semi-regular orig­i­nally from Con­cord, Mass­a­chu­setts. He enjoys Magic, sports, cook­ing, and writ­ing. He maintains two blogs, Samurai Entertainment on news, games, and nonsense; and Samurai Sports, about interior decorating. And by interior decorating he means sports.

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