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Quiet Speculation — Card Advantage

By Kelly Reid ⋅ December 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Extended sea­son is right around the cor­ner, and most peo­ple are still scram­bling for cards. As usual, there will be a rise in demand as Jan­u­ary 2nd approaches. While strat­egy is not nor­mally the focus of my col­umn, a brief metagame dis­cus­sion is nec­es­sary to under­stand which decks are most pop­u­lar and thus, which com­bi­na­tion of cards is most eco­nom­i­cal while still being competitive.

The extended metagame can be bro­ken down into a few basic arche­types. There are the aggro decks; faster and slower ver­sions of Zoo and the Bant vari­eties. There are con­trol decks like Tezzer­a­tor and Dark Depths (which can turn into a combo deck with­out much stress), and then there’s straight-up combo. Hyper­ge­n­e­sis is still a legit­i­mate threat, as is Dredge. There are other fringe decks like All-In Red and some burn lists, but the 7 main decks that occupy the metagame are Fast Zoo, Slow Zoo, Bant, Tezzer­a­tor, Hyper­ge­n­e­sis, Dredge and Dark Depths. The top-placing lists of each arche­type from Worlds will fol­low the article.

The Lands

Run­ning the num­bers, the most pop­u­lar Ravnica dual lands are listed below. This should serve as a rough guide for the most-demanded lands in the for­mat, by quan­tity included in the decks below.

1. Hal­lowed Foun­tain: 6
2. Watery Grave: 6
3. Breed­ing Pool: 5
4. Tem­ple Gar­den: 4

All of the other dual lands were used in quan­ti­ties of 3 or fewer. As far as fetch lands are con­cerned, you may have them from Stan­dard sea­son, but if not, these are the ones to focus on.

1. Ver­dant Cat­a­comb: 13
2. Scald­ing Tarn: 12
3. Misty Rain­for­est: 9
4. Arid Mesa: 8
5. Marsh Flats: 0

If it’s even pos­si­ble, Ver­dant Cat­a­combs are going to be in even more demand. Not only is it a sta­ple in Stan­dard, it’s a sta­ple in Extended too. How about a few top cards from the non-lands? The cards marked with a * are shared between the two Zoo ver­sions, which is not a full arche­type dif­fer­ence and is thus some­what mis­lead­ing but over­all should be considered.

1. Med­dling Mage: 12*
2. Chal­ice of the Void: 7
3. Engi­neered Explo­sives: 6
4. Chrome Mox: 7
5. Noble Hier­arch: 8*
6. Umezawa’s Jitte: 9
7. Tar­mogoyf: 12*
8. Vendil­ion Clique: 6

Even fac­tor­ing in the big/little Zoo split, Med­dling Mage and Tar­mogoyf are by far the most pop­u­lar non-land cards. Tar­mogoyf is no sur­prise, but see­ing the for­mer chase rare there amongst for­mat sta­ples is rather sur­pris­ing. Med­dling Mage appears an awful lot in the X-1 and bet­ter bracket at worlds, so its prob­a­bly time to get your play­set, and a few to trade in January.

Despite there not being a Faerie deck in sight, Vendil­ion Clique con­tin­ues to do work and deliver the busi­ness. As a 3/1 flier that can dis­rupt combo decks at instant speed, Vendil­ion Clique might be one of the most under-played cards in the for­mat for how excel­lent it is against the field.

Umezawa’s Jitte, once an essen­tial card to almost every extended deck, remains strong but mostly rel­e­gated to side­boards. Although unlikely, any oppor­tu­nity to snag one on the cheap should be taken quickly.

With a good idea of what the most pop­u­lar cards are, let’s take a look at what that means for build­ing a deck. Med­dling Mage and Tar­mogoyf are both very pop­u­lar cards, and share a deck with some of the other pop­u­lar cards. For the pur­pose of this exer­cise, we’ll con­sider the two Zoo decks to be essen­tially dif­fer­ent. One is much closer to the Sligh model than the other, so they occupy dif­fer­ent space in the metagame while being acces­si­ble to those learn­ing the for­mat. A deck like Zoo is far more for­giv­ing than one like Dredge or Tezzeret. It seems that Zoo is a good place to start.

Of the lands, Zoo uses Ver­dant Cat­a­combs which is on “the list”, as well as a pair of Scald­ing Tarns. Unfor­tu­nately, it doesn’t use either Watery Grave or Hal­lowed Foun­tain. Grove of the Burn­wil­lows aren’t even in any other decks, nor are Stomp­ing Ground. It seems like we should look towards Tezzer­a­tor and Dredge to get the most out of our mana base. The non-land pack­age gives you access to Tar­mogoyf and Noble Hier­arch, which are also played in Bant. Knight of the Reli­quary is also in both zoo decks and is some­times played in Bant.

Mov­ing away from the Aggro decks, and towards the “blue” decks, we see Chal­ice and Chrome Mox as the top plac­ers. Those two cards include Tezzer­a­tor and Dark Depths decks, which share none of their mana base. They do also share Engi­neered Explo­sives, but unfor­tu­nately that’s about it.

Hyper­ge­n­e­sis is an odd­ball deck in this list. Most of the cards the deck requires are not in any other deck, and are rel­a­tively expen­sive nonethe­less. Hyper­ge­n­e­sis is a combo deck that’s easy to stop, but remains pop­u­lar and effec­tive nonethe­less. If you plan to build this, under­stand that you’re not get­ting any extra value out of your cards.

That brings us to Dredge. Good old Dredge. Unlike Hyper­ge­n­e­sis, Dredge isn’t all-in on one plan. While Hedron Crab might not “get there”, Dredge play­ers are plucky enough to play around a Turn Zero Ley­line of the Void. Thus, it seems like a sound choice for the metagame. Shar­ing 2nd and 3rd most pop­u­lar fetch lands and the top 3 fetch lands, it seems like Dredge gives a fru­gal player the most ver­sa­tile mana base for build­ing other decks. Despite the fact that Dredge’s non-land cards are in no other decks, it seems that the diverse mana base is worth it. Not much in the main deck or side­board really com­pares to $400 for Banes­layer Angel and Tar­mogoyf play­sets, and is really quite cheap over­all. Given the power and proven con­sis­tency of the deck and the way the num­bers line up, Dredge seems like a very good choice for the upcom­ing sea­son. The deck is not easy to play, so only ven­ture into the world of the dead if you have the time to com­mit to testing.

The rough math done above does not take into account each deck’s metagame share, but with equal con­sid­er­a­tion to all decks. Con­sider your play style and your local metagame when decid­ing upon a deck. And now, the lists used:

Kelly Reid, editor of financial news site http://www.quietspeculation.com, has been playing Magic the Gathering since 1994. With 15 years experience in the game, his goal is to teach others to fund their gaming through proactive speculation and intelligent trading.

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