Magic the Gathering

Constructed

Trial and Error – Swan Song Revisited

By Sam Feeley ⋅ May 2, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Two weeks ago I got on the Swan Song band­wagon and came up with a highly pre­lim­i­nary list. To me it looked like a good list, but then again, only half the cards in Shad­ow­moor had been revealed up to that point. With the pre­re­lease com­plete and the set now fully in the pub­lic eye, the Type 2 metagame is once again ready to mutate. I was dis­cussing Swan Song with a friend of mine, Grif­fin Cor­ri­gan, and he gave me the accom­pa­ny­ing list.

Grif­fin Who?

Grif­fin Cor­ri­gan is a high school sopho­more, fel­low Boston­ian and Your Move Games patron. He has a his­tory of com­ing up with effec­tive mod­i­fi­ca­tions of pop­u­lar decks. Among these changes are exper­i­ment­ing with Mar­alen of the Mourn­song in Doran Rock, and per­haps the most awe-inspiring one of all, Gristle­back in the side­board of red-green aggro as Project X hate. (You’re gain­ing infi­nite life? So am I.)

Card Choices
The mana base is pretty self-explanatory, Eleven of the twenty-three lands (I’m not count­ing Dak­mor Sal­vage as a land for all intents and pur­poses) pro­duce green on turn one, which is cru­cial to set­ting up the combo as fast as pos­si­ble (read: Birds of Par­adise). On a per­sonal note, though, I par­tic­u­larly like Man­amor­phose in this deck; cantrip aside, you can’t count on your deck feed­ing you the right mana every game you play (espe­cially con­sid­er­ing you need to come up with RRR for Seis­mic Assault and then 2WW for [card title=“Swans”]Swans of Bryn Argoll[/card]), and some­times that Syl­van Scry­ing is best left to fetch­ing the Salvage.

Per­haps the most impor­tant card in this deck not named Glit­ter­ing Wish or Swans of Bryn Argoll is Saffi Eriks­dot­ter. In the forum thread for the first Swan Song arti­cle, folks were quick to point out that spot removal such as Name­less Inver­sion make the deck very man­age­able. Saffi, though, forces your oppo­nent to go through her first before the Swans.

Then there’s the inclu­sion of Brion Stoutarm. Upon first exam­i­na­tion, my reac­tion was “Why?” Then there’s the obvi­ous answer: combo decks must have alter­nate win con­di­tions, espe­cially in a for­mat with Extir­pate. Plus, if you have Brion and Swans on the board and you have no other way of sav­ing your Swans should it get Inverted, how’s an eight-point life swing sound?

The side­board can be bro­ken down into two parts: the Glit­ter­ing Wish suite and the faerie hate suite. It must say some­thing about the metagame when half of Griffin’s side­board is ded­i­cated to beat­ing ONE DECK (or two if you count rogues). I don’t blame him, either. Bit­terblos­som? Scion of Oona? You gotta bring out the high-powered fly swat­ters for those nasty crit­ters. Don’t think he’s for­got­ten about other decks, though. He’s got addi­tional board sweep­ers such as Fire­spout and Fiery Jus­tice, as well as the late-game fin­isher Over­soul of Dusk (which, may I add, laughs in the face of a 20/20 Coun­try­side Crusher). Har­monic Sliver acts as pro­tec­tion against Obliv­ion Ring and Pithing Nee­dle, among other things.

Cuts
Grif­fin also told me about some cuts he made. Ini­tially he did not have Syl­van Scry­ing in the deck, but after telling me how it “ran­domly wins games,” he put it in three copies over sin­gle­ton Runed Halo, Prison Term, and Pris­matic Omen. Of those three, the lack of Pris­matic Omen may be the biggest dif­fer­ence in his per­for­mance should he play this deck. Why? Cer­tain ichthy­oids in the for­mat may have some­thing to do with my reasoning.

Burn­ing Ques­tion: Is Swan Song for Real?

At last year’s Orlando Region­als, Bridge from Below came in like a lion and out like a lamb. It seemed to be all hype, and going in it was the top deck, but play­ers ade­quately tuned their decks to hate it out of the for­mat. What about this year? Is Swan Song all hype? Or does it have stay­ing power? (At least until Time Spi­ral rotates out.) Dis­cuss in the forums; I’ll be sure to check out what you guys have to say.

–Sammy Time

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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