Thursday, 18 May 2017

Pro Tour Coverage and brews for Standard


Pro Tour Coverage and brews for Standard 


Hey Rabblemaster readers! Simon's been up late, watching the Pro Tour. Who else has been, and what's your favourite part of the coverage? 

Mine has got to be the draft, where they follow a player and each of their individual picks. Martin Juza drafted a particularly sweet deck on day 1 of Pro Tour Nashville; red/blue spells, with two Enigma Drake, and I watched him kill opposing players in a single hit, twice, through the use of Insult to Injury, Enigma Drake, and a graveyard full of spells. I've also seen a few players around the store testing blue/red "spells matter" decks for Standard - and this has been a viable strategy in pauper for a little while now, with decks featuring Kiln Fiend, Nivix Cyclops and similar cards. 

In the last few Standard-legal sets, this "spells matter" theme has been very much the default strategy for the blue/red colour pairing, and it's a very card-rich Standard environment, covering seven sets. With these things fresh in mind, I'm wondering what a competitive "spells matter" Standard deck looks like.

Many of the Standard decks I've seen tested around the store in these colours look like adopting a more controlling strategy, but I have no interest in the long game. Wizards of the Coast have once again given us that pair of broken mechanics - cost reduction and variable power & toughness - and we'd be a fool to ignore the availability of these!

* is the most dangerous power for a
creature to have in Magic, because  
the power remains defined while the
creature is in the graveyard                
We've got a few basic low-cost big-hitters available to us in a deck like this; Amonkhet brings us the one with the highest potential ceiling - Enigma Drake - plus the one with the highest straight-up potential power to mana cost ratio, Cryptic Serpent. Stormchaser Mage, an evasive prowess creature for two mana, printed back in Oath of the Gatewatch, can hit for a fair amount and gets going very quickly. Bedlam Reveler, from Eldritch Moon, has the same ability to cost two mana that Cryptic Serpent has, but the ability to discard your hand and draw three cards can suddenly fuel a very large Enigma Drake.

In a deck like this, our offensive power comes from our ability to keep the spells flowing. This means we need to ensure a couple of things. Firstly, we'll need a relatively low land count, to ensure that we don't flood out - but of course we don't want to miss any land drops either. We'll also need a high spell count, and a lot of draw power. Not dying before the deck's fundamental turn is, of course, essential, but Stormchaser Mage has three toughness for two mana and Enigma Drake has four toughness for three mana - they both block very well, and can be pumped simply by playing an instant.

This means cantrips will form most of the core of the deck, along with one and two mana action spells and cheap cyclers. Enigma Drake is a fine rate as a 2/4 flyer for 3, but we aren't interested in a fine rate here - we want to bring the pain, as a 6/4 for 3, or even better! Slip Through Space and Expedite will assist with attacking sooner and hitting harder while keeping the cards flowing; Jori En, Ruin Diver also assist with this goal, effectively granting an additional card draw each turn - you'll be trying to cast as many spells as possible, and are unlikely not to cast two spells each turn. You'll need cheap interaction to deal with other aggressive decks in the format; Magma Spray is ideal, exiling important metagame creatures such as Scrapheap Scrounger and Dread Wanderer - you can safely expect zombie decks to form a large part of the metagame coming up after their high Pro Tour finishes, and the red & white humans deck is no slouch either.
Censor is also ideal for this deck; cheap interaction early, graveyard filler late.
Pull from Tomorrow can give us a huge burst of cards to cast, plus a free discard to boost Enigma Drake's power level and reduce Cryptic Serpent and Bedlam Reveler's mana cost, but it's expensive - we certainly don't want four. The final card we are looking for is Cathartic Reunion from Kaladesh, which can dump three spells in the graveyard for two mana, while refilling your hand with a fresh three.

Once you've punched the opponent in the face a few times, they'll be vulnerable to a sudden finish. Insult to Injury doubles damage dealt this turn, and in a sense, so does Fling. Flinging a 5-power Enigma Drake after casting Insult to Injury is ten damage to the face - if you attacked with that drake this turn, that's a clean twenty!

Let's have a look at what we can do with a blender and these ideas. Whizzzzzzzzzzz!!

Surprise - you're freaking dead. Enigma
Drake can easily have seven power by turn
five; an attack combined with Fling can
represent as much as 28 damage. Ouch!

U/R Thaumaturgy

Creatures


Spells


Lands


The strategy itself is fairly simple. Don't keep a creatureless hand, then fill the graveyard with your twenty seven instant and/or sorcery spells. Eight of these draw you a card while adding one to the graveyard - but they need a creature to target; four of them draw you three cards while adding three to the bin, and six of them can cycle for a single mana. If Stormchaser Mage is in play, you can pump it up each time you cast a spell - it frequently attacks for 3-4 on turn 3. When Enigma Drake, Cryptic Serpent or Bedlam Reveler enter play, they benefit from every spell you've cast or cycled this game.

The deck can hit for a ton of damage from nowhere. Picture this:

Turn one - cycle Censor
Turn two - Stormchaser Mage, swing for one
Turn three - Enigma Drake, swing for one
Turn four - Expedite, Insult, swing for twelve
Turn five - Cathartic Reunion, discarding two instants and drawing three, Slip Through Space, swing for nine, Fling the Enigma Drake for another six - a total of fifteen damage

or this:

Turn one - Magma Spray opponent's play
Turn two - Stormchaser Mage, swing for one
Turn three - Stormchaser Mage, Slip through Space, swing for four
Turn four - Enigma Drake, Expedite, swing for seven
Turn five - Cathartic Reunion, discarding Magma Spray and Censor, draw three, cast Bedlam Reveler for two mana, discarding two spells, Expedite the Reveler, swing with two Stormchaser Mages (six) and Enigma Drake (nine) and hasted Bedlam Reveler (four) - a total of nineteen damage!

It looks like spells really can matter, and Enigma Drake can become incredibly large in the course of what can amount to a very short game. The deck seems viable - maybe one of you would like to take it to our Game Day on Sunday the 21st of May!

While watching the coverage of the constructed portion of the first day, I was very pleased to note that a more refined version of Shadowy Perspectives was brought to the Pro Tour by several players! It's very much like the version that had run 5-0 in a MTGO league in the week leading up, and features Approach of the Second Sun as the win condition rather than my choice of Faith of the Devoted, and more cycling lands.
Personally, I'm not a fan of this, um, approach - it's very much "all-in" and Faith of the Devoted helps provide game against both aggressive decks, thanks to the life buffer, and control decks, as it's much easier to resolve a three-mana enchantment than a six-mana sorcery. Once you do, that's basically game - when the control player has to Disallow the Faith of the Devoted trigger to stay alive, that's when you're winning!
The most important addition to the deck, in my opinion, is Traverse the Ulvenwald. It does two important things for the deck; firstly, it finds an untapped basic land for casting New Perspectives on the turn you have the mana for it. The deck runs a fair amount of lands that enter the battlefield tapped, and you can't afford to take that critical turn off. Secondly, if you've cast an early one, delirium becomes a virtual guarantee while going off, and you can use it to find that essential Vizier of Tumbling Sands or Shefet Monitor. It's also great for finding Manglehorn, which serves the purpose of slowing down Aetherworks Marvel decks - it's by far this deck's worst matchup, as losing twenty cards off the top of the library can spell death - or the inability for your deck to deal it - very quickly. Note that Traverse the Ulvenwald is the only sorcery in the deck; if your opponent hasn't destroyed one of your enchantments (you don't want this to happen anyway) and you haven't cast an early Traverse, you won't have delirium.

Here's a new, more refined list, that will be close to the one I'll recommend playing on Game Day:

Extra copies of Vizier of Tumbling Sands,
plus an untapped land when you need it.
Can you ask for more than this for just a
single mana?                                         

Perspectives of the Shadow Forest

Creatures


Spells


Lands

5 Swamp

 It's likely that I won't be playing on Game Day and that Tom will be running a deck similar to this - expect his to contain more than a few additional cycling lands, and Sweltering Suns to deal with the new aggro menace fresh from the pro tour. Sweltering Suns also adds the sorcery type to your graveyard for delirium, increasing the power of Traverse.

Braaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiinnnns!!


Forget any sort of brewing here, for reasons I'll explain shortly. There's basically two choices available to you:

 1) play a copy of Chris Fennell's B/W zombie deck. It's great at flooding the board, which means Wayward Servant is great at keeping your life total high, allowing you to draw stacks of cards with Cryptbreaker without risking a swift death. Maindeck Anguished Unmaking was a great call for the Pro Tour, taking care of problem permanents like Aetherworks Marvel, Ulamog, and New Perspectives. A 14-1 swiss record speaks for itself.

2) Play the pro tour winning deck, mono black zombies. It's just as good at flooding the board, with a better mana base, but has less maindeck answers to problem decks and your life total stays lower. Just know that everyone will be gunning for it - if you can face down four maindeck Magma Spray, keep your fragile hordes away from the Sweltering Suns, and still keep those Relentless Dead coming, you'll be laughing.

 The important thing to note about fiddling with and brewing around the zombie decks - both versions - is that there isn't a lot of room to move with card choices. Do you really want to play other one-drops than four Cryptbreaker and four Dread Wanderer? Do you want to cut Diregraf Colossus - especially in the white & black version - for anything? Less than four Wayward Servant? In that case, why are you even running white in the deck?
Play four-ofs of your best cards!

 Both versions of the deck are a style of aggro deck I like to refer to as "lords and hordes" and you simply cannot remove too many of either class of cards. Cut too many lords (cards like Lord of the Accursed) and your hordes are ineffectual; cut too many hordes (cheap creatures and token makers) and your lords have nothing to pump. This is why Liliana's Mastery is the best Glorious Anthem ever in this deck (it does both) and why Merfolk decks remain playable across multiple formats - 90% of the creature base is lords. There's a little wiggle-room on the removal spells, but that's about it, and again, Dark Salvation isn't really a card you're looking to cut.
Not recommended in quantities less than four.
 Play four of this dude.
Don't think about this one too hard. Make zombies, smash face.

Before you play the deck, read Zvi Moshovitz's primer here and note two important pieces of advice in particular. Firstly, the deck is not an early rush aggro deck, despite the presence of eight one-drops. Over half the deck buffs your creatures or deploys multiple zombies - the goal is to overwhelm the opponent with a zombie apocalypse in a couple of huge attacks, not to inflict a death of a thousand cuts. Second, despite the first piece of advice, you can't delay said apocalypse too long, or you'll be on the receiving end of a board wipe and have to do it all again. Zvi states - and is very likely correct in saying -that "When you have a choice between attacking and drawing off Cryptbreaker, you almost always want to draw until you’re doing over 5 damage by attacking" and I saw far too many pilots of the zombie deck during the pro tour declining to deal 6-8 damage in order to draw a card, followed by receiving the warm end of a Chandra, Flamecaller board wipe and winding up much too far behind. The deck rebuilds well, but you don't want to do it over and over again!
Keep that advice in mind, and you'll do fine.


Sam Black's token flood special


Oh god; this deck, and the board states it creates, is utterly disgusting. If you're going to play Hidden Stockpile and Anointed Procession, do everyone a favour and either bring token creatures with you, or pick up a stack from the common box out the back. I don't want to see thirty two dice representing creatures scattered across the table. Also, record your life total using pen and paper, because you'll run out of life dice. I've seen sixty four gained in one turn!
Sam's got an article up on www.starcitygames.com about the deck, but it's unfortunately a premium article. If you've got a premium subscription, it's well worth a look, as Sam Black writes about his own decks very well. If not, maybe drop into the store and ask nicely if you can take a look?

R/W humans


This deck is fast. Very fast. It has the potential for a 5/5 lifelink on turn 3, sometimes attacking alongside another creature for eight damage, but it's just as likely to go wide, with turn one 2/1; turn two, two of them; turn three, Always Watching and swing for nine.

I've seen it played around the store, and played against it, and trust me on this - every game is a race, and this deck is likely winning it thanks to the incidental lifegain from Glory-bound Initiate. Also, Hanweir Garrison and Metallic Mimic or Thalia's Lieutenant is kind of disgusting. It's like playing against Hero of Bladehold all over again, except this deck exchanges the "creatures enter tapped and attacking" ability for a permanent pump instead. Ugh.


Here's the list James, one of our customers, shared with us the other day - although I'm not sure about the Aether Hubs, as they don't cast a second one-drop on turn two:

Creatures
The key to this deck.


Spells


Land


Sideboard


The format is, in fact, wide open, despite Marvel taking four of eight top-eight slots.
Mardu vehicles took only 30% of the metagame, and Wizards of the Coast seemed to avoid it for most of the coverage, thinking we might have all seen enough lately. But the deck is not dead yet!

Thanks again for taking the time to read - we'll see you down the store later, and look forward to seeing your Pro-Tour-Inspired brews.

Until then, may his return come quickly, and may we be found worthy
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