Magic the Gathering

Theory

Project 2308 — Exploration of Block Constructed

So, as I noted in the first arti­cle of this series, I feel there are some very spe­cific decks that should war­rant test­ing both for poten­tial playa­bil­ity and for pre­pared­ness in a tour­na­ment set­ting. The num­ber one deck in Lor­wyn/Shad­ow­moor Block is Faeries by a long shot, the next best deck in terms of per­for­mance is Kithkin and the num­ber aren’t even close. If you are plan­ning on attend­ing a Block Con­structed tour­na­ment some­time in the next two month, I would sug­gest that you either pre­pare to lay or pre­pare to play against Faeries.

I am cer­tainly going to be tak­ing my own advice, focus­ing exclu­sively on decks that I feel either have an advan­tage in the Faerie mir­ror match, or decks that are tuned to defeat faeries. There are three decks that I am cur­rently inter­ested in play­ing in Lor­wyn block, and I will spend some time in this arti­cle to explore the strengths and weak­nesses of each and dis­cuss spe­cific choices that can be made when build­ing these decks.

Part I: Faeries

First up is the ubiq­ui­tous Faeries. Last time I showed you Gavin Verhey’s build from Van­cou­ver, but for ref­er­ence here it is again:

This is an inter­est­ing build as I men­tioned last week as it com­pletely eschews the sec­ond set of coun­ter­spells in favour of an addi­tional land and addi­tional crea­ture removal. There have been deriv­a­tive builds sim­i­lar to this one in the past cou­ple of weeks since Gavin’s vic­tory, but rather than focus­ing on lists that will ulti­mately just look a lot like the list I pre­sented ear­lier, I want to take a closer look at Gerry Thompson’s list from Kansas City.

Unlike the other lists that I have been pre­sent­ing, this one did not win its PTQ; but I feel it is inno­v­a­tive and just plain inter­est­ing enough to give it a look despite its fail­ure to win out on its first real try.

Ger­ryT wrote about this list in his StarCi­tyGames arti­cle on Fri­day July 25th, but some of you might not have access to SCG Pre­mium ser­vice. In real­ity this list is just out­right odd com­pared to the Faeries we’ve been see­ing in the PTQs for the first half of the sea­son. His­tor­i­cally, the num­ber one spell that decks have been using to fight Faeries is Fire­spout; in what biz­zaro world does Faeries use it to com­bat those decks?

In Ger­ryT Faeries, we see 7 coun­ter­spells com­pared with just 4 from Gavin, we main­tain 4 Name­less Inver­sions but add 2 Fire­spout in place of Gavin’s 2 Pep­persmoke. Gerry cuts two Thought­seize and the Vendil­lion Cliques to run a sin­gle Oona and the Bro­ken Ambi­tions that Gavin had so quaintly referred to as trash. As Melissa DeTora knows all too well, Oona is a mas­sive beat­ing against Faeries. Not just being a 5/5 flier, but also pro­vid­ing a major breaker in the Bit­terblos­som race is enough to give a UB oppo­nent fits. Imag­ine the beat­ing in a Faeries deck. Fire­spout and six mana sor­cery speed crea­tures in Faeries, huh, what will they think of next, Wisp­mare in the board?

What? Wisp­mare in the board? Four of them? Not even ele­men­tals or Doran/Assassins runs four Wisp­mare in the board (yet: read on)! Not just that, but he fills up to four Fire­spouts and also has three cribs swaps to bring in against the deck’s pri­mary prob­lem cards: Chameleon Colos­sus and Doran the Siege Tower. Gerry is extremely focused on ensur­ing not only that he has no sig­nif­i­cant dis­ad­van­tages against the decks that have been devel­oped to beat Faeries, but he has just ded­i­cated infi­nite space to gain­ing pre­cious per­cent­age points against his most impor­tant matchup: the mirror.

Unfor­tu­nately, things are not just peachy all the time in 5-Colour Faeries world, as we can see by the greedy man­abase. 8 Vivids, and 4 Reflect­ing Pool is a hall­mark of Toast and Ele­men­tals decks of yore, but to date we have not seen these in even the most inno­v­a­tive of Faerie builds. Accom­pa­ny­ing those Five-Colour spe­cial lands, we see 6 Hybrid duals from Shad­ow­moor 4 Secluded Glens from Lor­wyn and 4 (COUNT EM) Mutavaults just in case the mana was not shaky enough already.

Let’s com­pare this to our sam­ple 2-Colour UB Faeries list:

Gavin runs 12 Basic lands, and only 9 lands that tap for more than a sin­gle colour. Both mana bases are built from 26 lands, we can see just how greedy Gerry truly got, cut­ting all twelve basic lands in favour of lands that not only hin­der his abil­ity to play an early Thought­seize, but also that force him to topdeck incred­i­bly well in order to stay on curve. This is the kind of trade­off you can expect when look­ing at play­ing all five colours (though only Green as an inno­cent bystander attached to a G/R sor­cery), you can play any card you want, but you have to get a lit­tle for­tu­nate in order to be able to play them when you want.

I would think that four Mutavault might be a lit­tle extreme con­sid­er­ing the invest­ment he is already mak­ing in hav­ing access to all the colours, but he is Ger­ryT and I most cer­tainly am not. In his arti­cle, he notes that the deck can replace Graven Cairns with Cas­cade Bluffs, and I think this is a great idea. The deck does not need dou­ble black or dou­ble red, while hav­ing access to hybrid red mana using blue is more func­tional than being forced to have access to black (your sec­ondary colour) in order to have easy access to your ter­tiary colour. Other than Cas­cade Bluffs, and per­haps cut­ting a Mutavault for some kind of coloured lands, I can see no changes that can even be made to the mana base. It is greedy, but it looks very elegant.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the side­board choices that Gerry made:

Now, some of that is just plain bor­ing. Fill­ing up to four sow­ers, and four fire­spouts (Fire­spout!) is both wise and obvi­ous, and peo­ple have been Pup­peteer Clique-ing for over a month now; but it is the exclu­sions that really throw me.

Shriek­maw has been a sta­ple in Faerie side­boards, up until today I hadn’t seen a UB side­board with­out Pep­persmoke, and I was sure that Gavin’s Faerie Trickery’s would be a keeper. Gerry shrugs his shoul­ders and just advances his own plan of just out­right crush­ing the mir­ror match while using selec­tive choices to help shore up some oth­er­wise unfavourable matchups.

Ger­ryT flies in the face of all Faerie the­ory with this star­tling and inno­v­a­tive list. He made top8 in Kansas City defeat­ing 132 other play­ers just falling short of the win. Clearly there is some­thing to this con­cept, rede­vel­op­ing a tier one deck can be risky but it can also be reward­ing if the devel­oper has the abil­ity to truly make it worth­while. I think that while only time will tell if Ger­ryT was right, or if he was for­tu­nate to do as well as he did, but for now I will cer­tainly be keep­ing Ger­ryT Faeries in mind as I design and develop my block deck.

Part II: Elementals

Next on the chop­ping block is per­haps the most flex­i­ble and fluid deck of the sea­son: 5-colour Elementals.

We have seen dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions of Ele­men­tal con­trol decks, but there have been two that have won PTQ events, and so I will focus my atten­tion on the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between the two. Of these lists, I dis­cussed Brian Six’s list last time; but for ref­er­ence, here it is again:

And here is the new list that recently won a PTQ in Louisville Kentucky:

Now, these two decks share a LOT in com­mon; in fact, they only have a few real dif­fer­ences: Brian runs 3 Fire­spout, Nick runs 0; Nick runs 1 MD Ful­mi­na­tor Mage, Brian runs 0; Nick runs 3 Incan­des­cent Soul­stokes, Brian ran only one (as a tutor tar­get for Flamekin Har­biner, clearly); Nick runs four Reveil­lark, Brian only runs 3. Other than those four cards and their mana bases, their main­decks are identical.

They both run sin­gle­ton Wisp­mare, Fes­ter­creep, and Horde of Notions, they run the exact same changeling removal spells, and they both run 3 Cloudthresh­ers. Their mana bases dif­fer, and their side­boards are almost noth­ing alike, but they seem to be headed in the same direc­tion, just run­ning along dif­fer­ent streets.

Nick runs 8 Hybrid duals, 8 Vivid Lands, 4 Pri­mal Beyond and the Ubiq­ui­tous 4 Reflect­ing Pool.

Brian ran only 6 Hybrid duals, 8 Vivid Lands, 4 Pri­mal Beyond, 4 Reflect­ing Pool and shock­ingly 3 Basic lands (1 Swamp and 2 Moun­tain). Do these three basics give him an edge that is almost imper­cep­ti­ble? I can imag­ine that hav­ing the 25th land was impor­tant, and when I build a ver­sion of Ele­men­tals, I will be cer­tain to run 25 lands min­i­mum. But Basics? That seems like an enor­mous risk for a deck that depends so heav­ily on its abil­ity to access all five colours of mana in a hurry.

I think that post–Even­tide those basics will be gone right away as the enemy-paired hybrid duals will help stream­line the mana base fur­ther enabling a greater con­cen­tra­tion of Red/X duals giv­ing the lead to more non-basics to spring­board per­haps a rev­o­lu­tion in Ele­men­tal Control.

…

More likely they will just end up run­ning more duals, and their duals will all cost Red to activate.

What is notable about these Ele­men­tal decks is not their sim­i­lar­i­ties or dif­fer­ences but the spe­cific choices they made. Let’s take into con­sid­er­ing a sam­ple of decks that made the finals of their PTQs but fell short for one rea­son or another.

The win­ning lists did not include a num­ber of cards that were included in some of the sec­ond place decks: Aus­tere Com­mand, Cryp­tic Com­mand, Kitchen Finks, Spite­bel­lows all appeared in at least one deck that made the finals of their PTQ but did not win. Does this indi­cate that those decks that included those cards were sig­nif­i­cantly worse than those that did not? It is impos­si­ble to say, but it is worth not­ing that these cards did have a lot of suc­cess in their builds: Aus­tere Com­mand, Kitchen Finks and Cryp­tic Com­mand made the finals of a 176 player PTQ, while Spite­bel­lows found itself at the fin­ish line in a Neu­tral Ground GP Manila Trial just falling short in the face of Faeries.

So, despite the con­sis­tency we see in the two win­ning lists, it is clear that there is a lot of flex­i­bil­ity when we are will­ing to explore other strong fin­ishes. Maybe it is that con­sis­tency that pro­vides the capac­ity for suc­cess in the face of such a hos­tile metagame, and these alter­na­tives have a very par­tic­u­lar weak­ness when we look at the for­mat as a whole: but one can­not dis­count suc­cess in any form, and for many of these play­ers the dif­fer­ent between first and sec­ond place is a sin­gle land drop, or a sin­gle mul­li­gan or a sin­gle lucky topdeck; to com­pletely dis­count the alter­na­tive builds is to weaken the pool of knowl­edge from which you can develop your own builds, and it is vari­abil­ity that truly makes the Ele­men­tals arche­type excit­ing to a player like me.

Part III: GB/w Assassins

Finally I want to take a look at what I think is the most inter­est­ing diver­gence from a pre-established arche­type: Assas­sins. In the first arti­cle, I took a brief glance at Ian Woodley’s GB Elves build and for ref­er­ence I will repli­cate it here:

This is a very intrigu­ing deck­list as it basi­cally plays an Elves early game, which evolves nat­u­rally into an end game that gen­er­ates enor­mous amounts of card advan­tage using a resource that is mighty com­mon in this metagame: dead crea­tures. This is a deck that can run out a turn two Van­quisher, turn three Kitchen Finks, turn four Chameleon Colos­sus and just win the game out­right on turn five; but it also has a rea­son­able late-game thanks to the dynamic duo of Mur­der­ous Red­cap and Scar­blade Elite.

Being able to get mul­ti­ple cards’ worth of value for a sin­gle invest­ment has always been good. It is in many ways why card draw­ing spells trend towards com­pet­i­tive playable, why Bit­terblos­som is a tier one enchant­ment, and why Tar­mogoyf goes for the large wads of cash that he does: they all gen­er­ate or cost your oppo­nent more cards and greater expense than you invest in them. Scar­blade Elite is per­haps the most under­uti­lized card advan­tage engine in block, a sit­u­a­tion which looks to be chang­ing as PTQ weeks progress.

This past week, three Assas­sins deck made top8s in PTQs: two in Den­ver, Col­orado; and one in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. The two Den­ver lists are shock­ingly sim­i­lar to Ian Woodley’s ver­sion with a few minor tweaks, but Bryant Cobar­ru­bias in Wis­con­sin did some­thing that I am really excited about: Dorassassins!

No, it’s not very well devel­oped. Yes, there are things that I would LOVE to change about it. But heck yeah it excites me to no end! I think that com­bin­ing the vir­tual card advan­tage of a turn three Doran with the long-term attri­tional advan­tage you gain with an active Elite on the board makes for a very potent sort of strat­egy. I just wish it did more tricky things. I don’t love Incre­men­tal Blight main­deck, but I can under­stand it. I think I’d run Mur­der­ous Red­cap over it though. I don’t love Fes­ter­creep main­deck in here, but I under­stand it. I’d prob­a­bly run 2 Name­less Inver­sions and 2 Shriek­maws over it though.

I think that there are a lot of things going on in this deck that the more tra­di­tional straight BG ver­sion can­not brag for: turn three Doran, Crib Swap your guy, tap Scar­blade remove Crib Swap Scar­blade your guy. Even Kitchen Finks seems fine in here, as it gives a lot of the same ben­e­fit of Masked Admir­ers, except being cheaper and juts a touch more resilient. They also give a bet­ter kind of card advan­tage when we talk about some newly emerg­ing red-based aggro decks on the hori­zon (that is for another Article).

The white splash costs a lot of oper­a­tional ben­e­fit, how­ever; the mana base looks a lit­tle slow for what the deck is designed for, and I have no real love for the side­board (but that’s not the white splash’s fault, entirely). I would like to talk about the mana base first.

Wood­ley runs a mana base of 10 basics, 10 five-colour lands (6 Vivids and 4 Reflect­ing Pools), and four Gilt-Leaf Palaces. 24 land seems a lit­tle sparse for a deck that seeks to go long like this one (Chameleon Colos­sus can run eight mana in a sin­gle turn if you let it), but he is the guy who won. Alter­na­tively, the Doran deck runs 9 Basics, 8 Five-Colour Lands (4 Vivids and 4 Reflect­ing Pool), 4 Gilt-Leaf Palace and 4 Mur­mur­ing Bosk. 25 land feels bet­ter, and trust me when I say that the one land can make a huge dif­fer­ence. Cobar­ru­bias would be sug­gest­ing that adding one land, cut­ting two Vivids and one basic lets you run a full on White splash for three-mana instants and three-mana creatures.

This is some­thing I don’t par­tic­u­larly agree with, and I would sur­mise that it might have been mana issues more than any­thing else that cost him a blue enve­lope. If I were to fix this man­abase, I would sug­gest fewer basics, more Vivids (up to six cer­tainly), and maybe a cou­ple of Hybrid duals to flesh out the white splash. I feel that this will be an eas­ier propo­si­tion with the release of Even­tide, as these kinds of decks really do need all of the help they can get, mana-wise.

Back to the side­board. I think that Wood­ley was look­ing to firm up the matchups he felt were ‘impor­tant’ at the time, while not diverg­ing much from the estab­lished the­ory of con­sis­tency being supe­rior to flexibility:

I dis­like a lot of these cards, pri­mar­ily Gut­teral Response and Rak­ing Canopy. What would be bet­ter in those spots? That I’m not 100% sure of, but I think that the Doran deck might have a few suggestions:

Nope! Look at that, 4 Gut­teral Response and 3 Rak­ing Canopy! He is actu­ally increas­ing the num­ber of ‘cards that I hate’ as the weeks progress. This might indi­cate some­thing wrong with the way I am per­ceiv­ing this for­mat, or it could be indi­cat­ing a dif­fi­culty with the deter­mi­na­tion of impor­tance in the Faeries matchup. The thing to under­stand is that it isn’t espe­cially impor­tant when Faeries is attack­ing you, it is that they are capa­ble of attack­ing you on so many dif­fer­ent met­rics: they have the capac­ity to gen­er­ate more card advan­tage and bet­ter tempo than any other block deck in recent his­tory (short maybe Pick­les from last year), and they are able to abuse that tempo with a horde of 1-toughness fly­ing men.

What is impor­tant in the matchup? Is Cryp­tic Com­mand impor­tant? With­out a doubt! I would argue that it is one of the three most fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks to a suc­cess­ful Faeries deck. Does this make Gut­teral Response good, how­ever? I don’t think that it does, and here’s why: a deck that seeks to defeat Faeries con­sis­tently should be look to attack them and not defend from them. You are not look­ing to ‘sur­vive’ a hugely advan­ta­geous Cryp­tic Com­mand, are you look­ing specif­i­cally to pre­vent them from gain­ing the posi­tion to make that back­break­ing play in the first place. Apply early pres­sure, force them to make dif­fi­cult choices, make them pay mis­er­ably for their desire to over­whelm an unpre­pared opponent.

The mis­er­able Cryp­tic Com­mand becomes impor­tant as the Faeries board begins to clog, as their Bit­terblos­soms start to steam­roll, as their Mist­bind cliques turn off your defense mech­a­nisms, as their Scions of Oona make your tra­di­tional defense mean­ing­less. It is when the rest of the pieces fall into place that the sin­gu­lar threat of Cryp­tic Com­mand becomes all to real. If a deck can find a way to pre­vent a Faerie’s oppo­nent from estab­lish­ing the kind of board pres­ence that makes Cryp­tic Com­mand such a sin­gu­lar threat, then Gut­tural Response truly becomes obsolete.

What else is impor­tant in this matchup? Are Bit­terblos­soms and Mist­bind Cliques impor­tant? With­out a doubt! I actu­ally feel that these two cards might com­bine for more back­break­ing opens than Cryp­tic Com­mand wins late-games. Being able to gen­er­ate the kind of card advan­tage that BB pro­vides and the insane tempo of Mist­bind Clique is unknow­able out­side of the Faerie expe­ri­ence. But how you you fight those things? Do you fight them with Rak­ing Canopies? No, you cer­tainly do not, and here’s why.

Do you remem­ber why Cryp­tic Com­mand becomes so great in the late game? Because with a clogged board, Cryp­tic Com­mand can sin­gu­larly defeat an oppo­nent from 20, tap­ping impor­tant block­ers, coun­ter­ing a vital reac­tive spell, bounc­ing a fun­da­men­tal defen­sive non-creature. These things cre­ate the space for a Faerie deck to really over­whelm an opponent’s estab­lished defense, which grants them the oppor­tu­nity to defeat an oth­er­wise pre­pared oppo­nent. Unfor­tu­nately, Rak­ing Canopy does one thing very well: it pre­vents your Faerie oppo­nent from attack­ing you. This might seem like a good thing in the sense of life preser­va­tion, but unfor­tu­nately what it actu­ally accom­plishes is forc­ing your Faerie oppo­nent to build up their board aggres­sively in hopes of cre­at­ing an oppor­tunis­tic games­tate where they can Cryp­tic Com­mand you out of the game.

Rak­ing Canopy does noth­ing proac­tive, and instead forces your Faerie oppo­nent to play a slower, more con­trol­ling game where they can truly uti­lize the abu­sive ele­ments of their card advan­tage and tempo syn­er­gies. This is a card that trends your oppo­nents to play­ing cor­rectly, and it does so at an oppor­tu­nity cost that far exceeds the mea­ger life points you might pre­serve in the short term.

If I’m look­ing for a side­board that I would feel com­fort­able tak­ing against Faeries, I would start with Jason Henry’s board from Denver:

No, I don’t think this is per­fect, and it leaves some room to still punt games against both Faeries and Kithkin; but it pro­vides the best pos­si­ble lever­ag­ing tools against those decks that you absolutely must defeat at least 5 times over the course of a 7-round PTQ.

Cloudthresher gives you a few things that Rak­ing Canopy never will: proac­tive capac­ity to alter the board state, while doing so at instant speed which allows you to cre­ate inop­por­tune sit­u­a­tions for your Faerie oppo­nent. Being able to act at instant speed is a pow­er­ful medi­a­tor in the Fae matchup and being able to do some­thing so poten­tially back­break­ing at instant speed forces your oppo­nent to make dif­fi­cult deci­sions about when they want to be able to stop you from act­ing out your plan. The fact that when it resolves for the full effect you get a very large reach crea­ture on top of the semi-wrath of God effect can be mon­u­men­tal in cre­at­ing an impor­tant swing of momentum.

The Wisp­mare is the side­board card I was look­ing for from the pre­vi­ous two side­boards; it pro­vides that capac­ity to defeat one of the most fun­da­men­tal pil­lars of the Faeries deck, but it does so while also pro­vid­ing a real­is­tic threat to their capac­ity to ‘aggro you’ which becomes their plan B fol­low­ing the destruc­tion of their plan A Bit­terblos­som. With­out Bit­terblos­som, the Fae deck has a hard time build­ing up aggres­sive resources, being forced to play one-for-one crea­tures like Mutavault, Scion of Oona, and Spell­stut­ter Sprite. The sin­gu­lar tie that binds these? None of them can break past a Wisp­mare (Mutavault can with the help of a Scion, but there are things that can solve that issue). This supremely effi­cient defen­sive pos­ture helps you when you are look­ing to be the con­trol deck.

Note that I deter­mined that Wisp­mare puts you on the con­trol while Gut­teral Response does not; the large dif­fer­ence is that Wisp­mare does some­thing proac­tive to force your oppo­nent to change his plan, which allows you to repo­si­tion for a longer game. Being able to take your oppo­nent off their estab­lished solid foot­ing is what makes games against Faeries winnable. It isn’t the capac­ity for some­times doing some­thing that might not lose you the game this turn; that is how you lose the game next turn to some­thing you weren’t expecting.

Henry also does some­thing more inter­est­ing than the other two decks: he side­boards in Lil­iana Vess. Cer­tainly a one-of isn’t going to be that fore­see­able in a given game, but there are matchups where you will be run­ning long (ele­men­tals, toast, mir­ror) and against those decks, hav­ing the abil­ity to gen­er­ate single-investment long-term card advan­tage can play a huge role in decid­ing whothe vic­tor will be. Being able to ulti­mate her on turn eight can also be a major turn­ing point, get­ting back all man­ner of Mulldirfters, Shriek­maws, Colossi and Van­quish­ers can just turn a stale­mate into a check­mate in one lit­tle activation.

The rest of his side­board is unsur­pris­ing: his Incre­men­tal Blights are where they should be (as opposed to the main­deck Blights of the Cobar­ru­bias deck), his Crib Swaps help to ease the deck into phase two against the mir­ror and Faeries, and his Faerie Macabres are excit­ing and effec­tive against the rush­ing tide of Reveillark-based decks com­ing to the fore­front of the tier two hierarchy.

I know I spent a lot more time with the Assas­sins arche­type than with the other two; but I feel this was entirely war­ranted, as it is a pre­dom­i­nantly unex­plored arche­type and really needs to be cracked open before peo­ple can really begin to under­stand it. I would have liked to go into more depth with the Ele­men­tals deck, but I assure you I will go into depth with that one next time. I feel that Faeries is still a very flex­i­ble arche­type, and if Ger­ryT proved any­thing it is that even the best deck can have heavy devel­op­ment time taken to cre­ate some­thing excit­ing and new.

Next time I’m going to take these three arche­types and look specif­i­cally at Even­tide, as these next few weeks will be all about rede­vel­op­ment of the estab­lished metagame and dis­cov­ery of the design space afforded us by these new cards and abil­i­ties. All of this is lead­ing up to the stun­ning cli­max of the Sea­son on August 23 when I go head-to-head with the best in my region for shot at the Big Game. Join me next time as I look at where I think the metagame is headed and how I think it will get there.

– Matthew