Mana Tutors – Page 5

DEPTHS TENDRILS HELM (DETH)

Meet DETH

I am most well known in the magic community for designing this deck. So far, it hasn’t exactly made waves in the legacy format, but there has been a ripple or two. My first two live tournaments I made top 16 (CFB 4k) and split top 4 (Forgotten Path Games 1k) respectively. My List combines 3 well known (or long forgotten) combos all in one insane amalgamation I have named DETH, an acronym that represents the ways it can win while clearly explaining what happens to your opponent when any of those modes are implemented. I have nurtured it, watched it grow and am proud of the deck it’s become. However, it wasn’t born as the glorious work of art you see today.

It all started in 2018 when I was reading through some old cards and stumbled upon Ill-gotten Gains. I thought to myself, “wow, this would be pretty sweet with Leyline of the Void.” When I voiced this idea to my dear brother, he agreed, that it would indeed be “sweet” but followed up with a question I was not yet prepared to answer, “yeah, but how do you win?” I toyed around with this idea until I landed on Helm of Obedience. I then built my deck, which, at the time, consisted of Leylines, Helms, Ill-gotten Gains, a bunch of discard spells, baubles and infernal contracts. I took it to my local legacy weekly tournament and got destroyed. Turns out, my “sweet” idea wasn’t so great in practice. One pithing needle, Disenchant or Assassin’s Trophy (just to name a few) completely locked me out of the game.

Instead of becoming discouraged (despite the taunting and teasing of my friends) I went back to the drawing board, a Lone Ranger facing terrible odds. After a few weeks of tweaking the build I had; testing cabal rituals, trying various mana bases and transformative sideboards (which may or may not have included Doom Whisperer), I finally conceded that the deck, as it was, couldn’t hang with the big boys and gals. By big boys and gals, of course, I am referring to the Tiered decks we all know and love (or hate). Even with the baubles, the discard and the card draw, I just couldn’t assemble my combo fast enough, and sure I stole some matches, however, if I didn’t start with a Leyline in play the game rarely went my way.

I decided I needed a more efficient way to get the card I needed when I needed it, and decided I would give Infernal Tutor and Lion’s Eye Diamond a trial run. I cut the baubles and exchanged them for lotus petals, I was going all in. I took it back and started to see instant results, posting my first winning record at my local event. After additional testing I realized I had a very relevant piece of the Iggy-pop shell already in my main board. So, I figured, I may as well throw a Tendrils of Agony in and see what happened. It was great! It gave the deck another way to win, I could finally play around a Pithing Needle, a Disenchant AND an Assassin’s Trophy.

As the ancient riddle goes “what is better than two combos?” Three combos! I jokingly suggested that I should jam the Dark Depths combo into the deck as well. The response, “why not?” Yes, why not indeed? So, that’s exactly what I did. I then had my triple threat deck, DETH. DEpths Tendrils Helm. I went to work testing various copies of Vampire hexmage, Thesbian’s stage and Dark Depths and ultimately decided to run 3 of each land and 2 hexmage.

That week, my friend Jay Trojan asked me if I was going to the Legacy 4k at Channel Fireball the following weekend, and told me that he had a deck I could borrow should I want to attend. I remember deciding that I would go, and that I would be bringing my homebrew. I ended up surprising the field (and myself) that day stealing match after match. I started 3-0 and lost round 4 in 3 games to my friend Isaac Sears who knew and had played against my list. Then I was 4-1, then 5-1, for the last round I got the CFB feature match and again was paired against a friend who knew my list, Marshall Janakowski. I was bested in 2 games. I finished 5-2 and 15th overall. Channel Fireball brought me into their streaming booth for a brief interview about the deck. It was then that I decided I would continue to refine the deck and begin streaming it.

That more or less brings us to today, I am still streaming the deck at traswidden on Twitch and I am still refining the build and sideboard.

My Two Cents: There are a ton of undiscovered competitive decks out there, and a lot of great ideas. A good idea by itself does not equate to a good deck. With enough time, care and patience some of these ideas can become competitive decks. I took a ton of learning losses to find the right combination of cards to make this deck competitive. Is it the best deck of all time? Maybe not, but if you ask me, it’s the most fun.

THE COMBOS

Leyline of the Void/ Helm of Obedience.

This is an old favorite of mine. Leyline of the Void causes your opponent’s cards to be exiled rather than placed in the graveyard, while Helm of Obedience states that you must place X cards into your opponent’s graveyard until a creature is placed there or X is reached. The result, of course, of having both of these cards on the battlefield together is being able to mill your opponent’s entire library with X being equal to 1. Since a card is never placed in the graveyard, the condition is never satisfied, thus winning you the game on your opponents next draw step due to them being unable to draw a card. Naturally, getting two cards that take 4 mana into play is no small feat. Being able to start with a Leyline in play is a huge advantage for this particular combo and is generally good against the field. It shuts off reanimator shenanigans, dredge nonsense, snapcaster mage trickeries, as well as Life from the Loam strategies to name a few. The graveyard is a huge resource in legacy and sometimes taking that away is enough. However, this deck also works proactively to win with Leyline of the Void in addition to thwarting your opponent’s game plan. In addition to running 3 Helm in the main deck, there are also 5 cards that can tutor for it.

Ill-gotten Gains is another all-star when paired with Leyline, it doesn’t immediately win you the game if you resolve it, but often your opponent may concede. Since your opponent can’t place cards in their graveyard, Ill-gotten Gains effectively exiles their hand while allowing you your choice of any 3 cards from your graveyard to come back to your hand. Mind Twist? SOLD.

Dark Depths/ Thespian’s Stage/Vampire Hexmage

I’m sure many of you are familiar with this combination of cards, being able to make a 20/20 flying, indestructible creature on turn one is pretty great. Hexmage is also useful on its own as a way to take out planeswalkers or clear counters off of a chalice of the void when you need it. Similarly, Thespian’s stage can copy many of the utility lands your opponents control that the deck can’t afford to play. Two of my favorite targets : locus lands versus Eldrazi post and Karakas against Death and Taxes, also, every once in a while you can get away copying a Dark Depths controlled by an unsuspecting opponent.

Tendrils of Agony/ Ill-Gotten Gains

This is the third and final win condition. Storm. This can lead to some tricky lines in actual gameplay, but the math and theory behind it are simple enough. Cast 10 spells and then cast Tendrils of Agony. In order for this plan to work, you need a six mana loop. The simplest way to achieve this is with 2 mana, 2 Lion’s Eye Diamonds and one Infernal Tutor. Cast Infernal Tutor with your 2 mana, sacrifice your 2 LEDs with your spell on the stack floating 6 black mana and tutor for Ill-gotten Gains. Cast your Ill-gotten Gains with 4 of your six floating mana targeting LED, LED, and infernal tutor from your graveyard. Use the last 2 floating black mana to cast Infernal Tutor again sacrificing the LED’s in the same fashion. You can repeat this process until you have cast enough spells to tutor for your Tendrils of Agony and end the game. Similarly, you can run this combo the same way with 3 mana, 1 dark ritual and 1 LED. Since this loop only nets you 5 mana, you are -1 mana for each loop you do, so in order to get to 10 spells you would need the third land to cast the dark ritual leaving you with exactly 4 mana after casting infernal tutor and sacrificing LED.

The General Idea

Having three distinctly different win conditions in the deck is difficult for your opponents to navigate, but it can also be challenging to pilot. Often times, I have discovered that you need to pivot between game plans as your opponents shut one path of victory off. For Instance, Thalia makes it impossible to win by storm, where Karakas makes your Depths combo useless. The ability to adapt and innovate is crucial. What deck are you playing against? Which combo is most likely to beat them? Which combo are you closest to assembling? There are a lot of moving parts in all magic games, which is what makes the game so great, but it is especially true with DETH. If you’d like to see the deck in action I stream it often under the handle Traswidden. Next time I will go a little more in depth about the deck’s good, and not so good match ups and general sideboard strategies and answer some of the questions I posed above.

It’s Karn’s World. We’re Just Living In It.

Image result for karn, the great creator

On April 9th, Karn, the Great Creator was spoiled. When I first saw this card, I was sure it would see Vintage play. All of its abilities are incredibly powerful. Null Rod is already a pillar of Vintage, to the point where decks entirely consisting of artifacts with activated abilities will have a playset in the sideboard. Karn, Silver Golem has seen Vintage play in past eras because of its ability to destroy moxen, so the +1 ability is relevant, although less so because the static ability already turns off moxen. The -2 is obviously the reason to play this card though.

My first shell was in a traditional Smokestack deck, using Karn to find situational lock pieces out of the sideboard, and it did not prove to be very successful. Karn was difficult to cast for a few reasons. The first being that Mishra’s Workshop, the most powerful unrestricted card in Vintage, could not cast him. The second being that I was often locking myself out of getting close to casting him because of my Sphere of Resistance effects. I put down the idea at first, and let people much smarter than me build some lists.

In this article I’ll be covering how to evaluate Vintage decklists before evaluating said lists, and then talking about changes I made to the deck and the future of both Karn Shops and Vintage.

Evaluating Vintage Decklists
Vintage is a complicated and intimidating format to evaluate. Because of the nature of the restricted list, lists are made up of a lot of 1 ofs and can feel impossible to parse.

How I like to look at and build Vintage decklists, is in terms of ratios. So rather than being 1 Black Lotus, 1 Mox Pearl, 1 Mox Sapphire, 1 Mox Jet, 1 Mox Ruby, 1 Mox Emerald, 1 Mana Crypt, 1 Sol Ring, 1 Mana Vault etc. it is 9 pieces of fast mana. Rather than being 4 Wasteland, 1 Strip Mine. it is 5 land destruction lands. The same can be done with removal, counter spells, threats, tutors, engine cards, etc.

Another important thing to consider with Vintage decklists, is the nature of the format. There are certain “pillars” of the Vintage format, and is important to keep these in mind. The current pillars of the format are greatly contested, but traditionally they were considered to be Dark Ritual, Null Rod, Mana Drain, Bazaar of Baghdad, and Mishra’s Workshop. The format has changed and sped up a lot since then, and I consider the current pillars of the format to be Mox Opal, Mental Misstep, Bazaar of Baghdad, and Mishra’s Workshop. In order to compete in this format, you almost certainly need to casting one of these cards. Keeping that in mind can explain odd choices of cards. For example, some lists play Sorcerous Spyglass over Pithing Needle because it can not be countered by Mental Misstep.

The premier Vintage decks within these pillars over the last few years in Vintage have been Paradoxical Outcome combo, “Xerox” which is usually URx Control or BUG Control, Dredge, Survival of the Fittest, and Workshops, either Arcbound Ravager Shops or Karn Shops.

The Evolution of Karn Shops

In the first tournament in which Karn was legal on Magic: the Gathering Online (MTGO), three interesting shells appeared.

This list from Andy “Brassman” Probasco Top 8d this Challenge. He used Karn TGC to fuel the Painter’s Servant/Grindstone Combo as well as finding Mycosynth Lattice out of the sideboard. Metalworker tied this all together, and allowed you to cast Karn and make other big mana combo plays.

Pilot TheYostWithTheMost took a Stacks focused prison build of the deck to a 22nd place finish. Grim Monolith is an interesting addition to the deck, that can enable Karn off of Mishra’s Workshop. In this build, Karn was used as a prison piece that could also find other lock pieces out of the sideboard.

The final list, from innovative deckbuilder Saturn played four total Mycosynth Lattices in the 75 and focused on casting powerful planeswalkers with Jhoria’s Familiar to reduce their costs.

All three of these lists were interesting and provided several options to make Karn actually castable in a Workshops shell.

In the following Vintage Challenge, only one Karn TGC deck appeared, and it was in the shell of a previously fringe deck in Eldrazi. The Eldrazi threat package is very powerful, but the deck had always struggled with a few things compared to Workshops. The first being that without Mishra’s Workshop, you can struggle to break the symmetry of the Sphere of Resistance effects. Your lands just do not tap for as much mana, and the deck is slower out of the gates and can struggle with mana problems. The other major flaw of these decks is they struggle heavily against Workshops because their threats do not line up well against the traditional Affinity suite of Ravager Shops. Null Rod was often seen as a solution to this problem, but it made the mana in Eldrazi even worse because it turned off their own mana rocks.
Karn, the Great Creator is able to act as a one sided Null Rod, improving the Shops matchup, and all of the lands in the deck are able to cast Karn, so the downside of not playing Mishra’s Workshop is mitigated. You can see this list takes advantage of Grim Monolith to cast powerful spells early, which will be a key factor in future lists.

Here we have the winning list from that Challenge in the hands of Vintage legend Ryan Eberhart (Diophan) which I understand was created by his teammate Matt Murray.

The next iteration on Karn Shops was the addition of Grim Monolith and Voltaic Key as a mana engine to the deck. This allowed the deck to have more consistently broken hands, as the Grim Monoliths often acted like Lotus Petals, and when you draw the two cards in conjunction, you can powerful things turn after turn. The other addition to the deck was Time Vault in the sideboard. This allowed Karn, the Great Creator to wish for either half of the Time Vault – Voltaic Key combo. This deck was able to consistently cast a powerful 4 drop threat in the first few turns of the game, while also still abusing the most powerful cards in the Workshops deck.

Then the exact same 75 won the Challenge the next week in the hands of Wordy333, with the following challenge being taken down again by Karn, the Great Creator in the hands of Logarythme with KarnDrazi, and then again in the hands of Ecobaronen with a further iteration of Karn Shops.

Changes To The Deck

After Karn, the Great Creator won 5 consecutive Vintage Challenges, I took notice. I was dead set on playing a Tendrils of Agony deck for SCGCon, but the power level of Karn TGC was clearly higher than any other strategy in Vintage.

In my initial runs with the deck, a few things stood out to me. I felt the land count was a little low. Despite all the artifact mana acceleration, the deck is trying to cast a lot of expensive spells. I decided two Mox Opal was not necessary, and cut one for a City of Traitors. There is a chance the deck might want to be playing four City of Traitors to enable more broken starts, but it is still a big mana deck that wants to hit all of its land drops.

I also was not in love with the Inventor’s Fair package. Playing with the deck quickly showed me this deck is not trying to do slow and durdely things. This is a combo deck. I also felt the risk of drawing multiple Legendary lands in a deck trying to cast very expensive spells was too high. I cut two of the Inventor’s Fairs for 1 Buried Ruin and 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth.

I had been impressed with Buried Ruin when I played Krark-Clan Ironworks in Modern, and I felt it could be a good mana sink for the deck. The idea of Urborg was so the Mishra’s Workshops could tap to cast non-artifact spells or activate the abilities of Walking Ballista, Grim Monolith, or Voltaic Key. Urborg also allows you to tap Ancient Tomb for mana at a low life total.

I was struggling against the control decks in the format, as well as Paradoxical Outcome. Mirrors also felt like Karn TGC was the only card that mattered. With the realization that Karn Shops was a combo deck, I also wanted a way to further protect my combo. Karn Scion of Urza was underperforming. The first copy is nice to have, but it is situational and I rarely want to draw two. I removed one, and the Inventor’s Fair tutor targets of Crucible of Worlds and Ensnaring Bridge were replaced with three Thought-Knot Seer. This card is a powerful threat against control, while allowing you to strip Storm of their Hurkyl’s Recall or the mirror of their Karns. It also ignores artifact based hate, can pressure opposing planeswalkers, and protect your own planeswalkers. The card is also fairly easy to cast in a deck designed around casting an early Karn TGC.
Here is the list I settled on and took to a third place finish in the Vintage Challenge, and a top four place in the Team Trios Eternal tournament at SCGCon.

Core Set 2020 Updates

Core Set 2020 brought two new additions to Karn Shops, Mystic Forge and Manifold Key. Mystic Forge is basically an artifact based Future Sight. This gave Karn Shops the critical mass of cards to essentially be a pure combo deck. Karn, Scion of Urza wasn’t quite fast enough to be a stand alone engine, and Thought-Knot Seer made the mana awkward. Manifold Key is powerful as essentially a strict upgrade to Voltaic Key, that also allows you to play more than four Voltaic Key in the 75.There are currently two builds of Karn Shops. Players are split on Sphere of Resistance, which can be awkward with Mystic Forge.
This first list from aooaaooa on MTGO is essentially a pure combo build, using Defense Grid to protect the combo.

Here JdPhoenix further iterated upon the deck, and added the Spheres back in. Notably, this deck also includes Sensei’s Divining Top which is very powerful with Voltaic Key and Mystic Forge.

The Future of Karn Shops and Vintage

Since its inception, Karn, the Great Creator has been a powerhouse in Vintage. It is a one card combo that also acts as an asymmetrical lock piece shutting down the powerful restricted artifacts in Vintage and acting as a toolbox to get you out of an situation. With the addition of Mystic Forge, the deck has slanted more towards combo and less towards prison. Builds featuring playsets of both Foundry Inspector and Sensei’s Divining Top to create a combo with Mystic Forge have been popping up, and look like they may be the future of Karn decks.

Vintage has long had a stigma of being a turn 1 format. This has not been true for many years, as the average turn of Vintage tended to be longer than both Modern and Legacy in my experience. Karn has changed this. The format has essentially been reduced to a three deck format with Karn, Dredge, and BUG decks rising to the top and vying for dominance. A lot of matches last only a few minutes, and come down to comparing opening hands. I generally dislike restrictions, but it may be needed in the future. That is a discussion for a different article though!

Thanks for joining me to talk about Magic’s oldest and greatest format, and the impact of Karn, the Great Creator has had on it!

Rainbow Game – The Best Political Multiplayer Variant. Period.

Primer on an ancient and fantastic multiplayer format.

A Rainbow Game – The Quintessential Multiplayer Experience

I want to start by assuring you that while I love the tight play and serious competition of a GP level event, I ALSO love the wild, chaotic, and memorable events that unfold around a multiplayer table.

I have heard it called by many names: Star Magic, 5-Player, Color Wheel, 5-Point Magic, Pentagram… but for the last 25 years we’ve called it a Rainbow Game – and for my money it is by far the best multiplayer variant for Magic, full stop. It is the measure that I compare all other multiplayer experiences against and I will explain why you and 4 of your closest friends (or enemies) should definitely have this format in your rotation.

My history with this variant starts waaaaay back in 1994. Back in those days, when the internet screeched to life through a modem and most of our news came in the form of pieces of woodpulp thrown on our doorstep, I had read about this fantasy-based collectible card game called Magic: The Gathering and knew this was something new and groundbreaking. I wanted to know all I could but, frustratingly, all we had access to was the card-sized revised rulebook. (…and even you, Bilbo, won’t need me to tell you tales of that black sorcerer.)

We were happily building decks and battling away with our Craw Wurms, Nightmares, Shivan Dragons, Serra Angels, and many a Giant Growth. When one day at the local shop I saw a magazine with a mesmerizing cover:

Inside I found an interview with Richard Garfield, as well as one with my favorite artist, Anson Maddox, but the real treasure was an article by Mose Wingert titled “Five Player Magic”. I recently unearthed my original Duelist #1 and re-read Wingert’s article (though it appears to not exist online) and I can confirm that all the variants you can find online these days are missing some key components of the original format as Mose described it.

Here are things that all 5 color / Star/ Rainbow game versions seem to have in common:

You need 5 magic players – one for each color.
Each player’s deck contains only spells of their chosen color. All lands and cards in that deck only produce mana of that type or colorless. (This concept has also become a staple of the commander format)
Players sit in color order (WUBRG) so you have a White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green mage sitting in that order around a table.
You are allied with your allied colors (the two players on either side of you) and your enemies are the enemy colors (the two players across from you).
You win when both of your two enemy colors are eliminated from the game.

And here are the two things that I think are required and that help make this version great:

Turns go in a star pattern.
- After each player’s turn, their enemy to their left takes a turn. White plays first, then black, then green, then blue, and poor red goes last.
- This tension and balance is critical. Two allies are not able to take their turns simultaneously and gang up on an enemy. It also means you have to consider Enemy, Ally, Ally, Enemy as the turn sequence you must survive before you can untap again.
You can share mana with your Allies, and steal mana from dead allies.
- You can request mana from your allies and if they agree, that mana is moved from their mana pool to yours. This allows big things to happen sooner than normal. I’ve seen 7 mana spells hard cast on turn 4 or even turn 3.
- It requires you to make interesting decisions. Do I spend this extra three mana making another blocker that I dont really need or do I save it for my ally who can then have access to 9 mana on their turn?
- Also, if a player is eliminated, their untapped lands stay in play and can be used by either ally. Since the removed player never gets an untap step this only happens once, but can lead to some interesting betrayals.

As a game designer and student of good gaming, I think this set up allows for some great dynamics to develop naturally.

Distinct Roles

Each player has two allies and two enemies. Everyone has their color identity and that tends to put them in fairly distinct roles and create interesting imbalances. Certain players will have access to different tools. You can see which players have larger creatures, which players have easier access to sweepers, and which players will be using their annoying instants to draw sweet sweet cards and counter spells. When you are playing red, you may have to rely on your green ally to remove enchantments that are hurting you, but you may be the best at taking out problem artifacts.

Of course the larger your card pool, the less restrictive this color limitation can be. If your group can play with just a core set, or just a pauper cardpool, you experience some very interesting deckbuilding restrictions that showcase the color pie and the strengths and weaknesses of each color in lovely and challenging ways.

Clear Heuristics

Your victory condition is clear and creates objectives that drive the game forward. All you have to do is just eliminate those two pesky enemy color players. In a lot of free-for-all multiplayer games players can get bogged down by indecision or information overload. Or worse, there is often a strong incentive to do nothing. Avoid conflict at all costs – if you can just outlast everyone and fly under the radar that is sometimes a solid route to victory but it is also a solid route to a lackluster play experience.

This is why many multiplayer games add “attack left” or the Monarch which encourage interaction and give clear direction on who you should be attacking.

Furious Politics

There is an elegance to the Ally / Enemy structure in a 5 player game. You are enemies with each of your allies’ allies. As the white player you lean over to blue and whisper sweet battle plans in blue’s ear for defeating the chaotic red mage, but your other stalwart ally, the green player is now worried that you are paying too much attention to defeating her Red ally and not enough time focusing on that Black mage.

Now imagine that enemy-ally tension with the ability to share mana. The red mage convinces the green mage to lend her 2 mana that Green probably doesn’t need and she assures Green that this will spell doom for the blue mage. Once the green mana is in her pool though, it allows her to power out a magmaquake for 6 which wipes the board of creatures except for Red’s Skarrgan Hellkite

Side note: I’m not sure if your playgroup has ever played a “share mana” format, but it can create some very over the top begging and horse trading. As youngsters it was serious petitioning and pleading every turn for mana from both sides of you. As we matured as gamers, it became clear that the Catan rule was in effect. Do not share unless you were not going to use that mana and are getting a clear benefit and everyone became very efficient about it. We have a lot more interactions like “Can I have 2?” “No.” “ok.”

Season to Taste

“Variety is also the spice of death.”
Cevraya, Golgari shaman

As with any game variant, you should definitely adjust the parameters to fit the goals of your playgroup. The point of gaming is to enjoy the experience and that means different things for different folks.

Color Hosing: Some groups like to ban or limit the amount of effects like “Protection from [Color]”, “landwalk”, “Destroy all [Land type]” that are allowed. You can accomplish this by limiting the format (use Standard Legal cards only) or by specifically banning a list of cards. Other groups like to play with all the punching and kicking allowed by the original Dr. Garfield and Pals.
Victory Conditions: Some groups enjoy the threat of ally betrayal or watching it dissolve into a free-for-all. If that’s your style you can award 1 victory point for killing an ally, 3 victory points for killing an enemy and 5 points if both of your enemies are eliminated from the game while you are still in (no matter who kills them). This keeps the big reward on removing your two enemy colors yourself but adds a betrayal element. If you see an opportunity to take out an ally you have to weight the victory point vs. the help you are giving to an opponent to achieve their aims.
Additional Layers: While we usually feel the game is just right as described, you can always add in other MTG flavors like Planechase cards, type 4 rules, etc. to enhance or change up the experience.

As always, I’d love to hear your favorite tweaks to this format or if you have an awesome story to share.

Thanks for reading and please remember to follow Mike’s rules of multiplayer:

Loudly point out how powerful that other player at the table looks compared to your meager position
Always send your creatures into the redzone with vigor and purpose
Always game responsibly.
Be a good friend – bring new people to the table and show them the joy of casting spells and attacking for two.

If players are new to multiplayer magic, I definitely encourage folks to read some of Abe Sargent’s excellent Casual Nation articles. They do a great job establishing concepts that help create a language to discuss and analyze multiplayer formats.

Further reading:

MTG wiki: https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Star

Kelly Diggs ‘09 article: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/serious-fun/numbers-2009-03-30

Wizards – ‘08 Casual Formats: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/casual-formats-2008-08-11

The medium guide to metagames

Every time something new happens in magic, the community goes through a predictable cycle finding out what the best decks are, and content creators spend a great deal of time shouting from the rooftops what the best decks, how you should build them, and how you should sideboard with them. I intend to similarly yell advice at you in future articles. First, however, let’s break down what the cycle is, and find some ways to take advantage of this cycle.

I am reminded of one of the best magic articles of all time, which still gives an excellent description of how magic players act in groups. If you haven’t given “information cascades in magic” a read, I highly recommend doing so. If you don’t know what “ghost dad” is, don’t worry about it, just insert the name of a bad deck that people love to play and will defend to the death (think of the rock or merfolk in modern). We have significantly more information about deck percentages, meta percentages, and conversion rates, but much of the information regarding how players tend to follow blindly is still very evident in tournament magic.

Ok, so we’ve got this cool new format due to cards either entering or leaving a format. Usually it’s because a new set just came into standard (War most recently), but maybe it’s because a set just came into modern (horizons), or maybe they just implemented the London mulligan rule AND IT’S RAINING GRISELBRANDS! BAN THE DREDGE MECHANIC!

Take a deep breath. Things are probably going to be fine. Here’s a simple timeline of any given first month of standard:

Week 1: Many show up with THE DECK that everyone is afraid of (nexus of fate, rw angels, bant flash, esper control), it generally does not go well for them. The good aggro decks (mono red/white) probably win the first tournament of the cycle or are heavily represented. Something like 10 different decks are represented in the top 16; 8/10 will never be spoken of again.
Week 2: Now that we know aggro is good and brews are bad, fewer people show up with aggro and the true midrange deck of the format emerges (gb/bug midrange). Aggro dies to a wave of life gain and sweepers.
Week 3: The midrange arms race begins. Decks become tuned and start cutting obviously bad cards. Opponents are now set to grind mode (esper midrange, gw tokens). By the end of the week an unexpected hero emerges to dumpster midrange (mono blue); this hero probably has a bad time against aggro.
Week 4: The midrange arms race has reached its peak. Ramp decks come out of the woodwork (gates, ug ramp) to tron themselves all over midrange decks. Control might be part of this arms race, depending on how they match up against hate cards.
Week 5-bored: If the format is healthy, the balance of aggro->midrange->midranger->combo->control->aggro will cycle indefinitely, probably with no more than 3-4 decks in tier 1. If the format is bad, everyone is playing rb vehicles because the midrange decks are killing too fast to be taken advantage of by bigger decks. The best deck is probably a midrange deck with either a transformative/strong sideboard, a combo finish, or is more aggressive than it has any right to be while still grinding.

If your format of choice is modern, double the amount of time and replace the word “midrange” with “combo.” If your format of choice is Legacy, quadruple the amount of time and remember that “midrange” in this context means “fair blue deck.” If your format of choice is Vintage, octuple the time, replace your 4 non-restricted list flex slots with the cool new planeswalker(s)/draw engine, rename your deck if your draw engine changed or was restricted, and call it a day.

Based on the assumptions from our week by week breakdown, we can draw a few conclusions. This all assumes that the goal is to maximize win rate; an obvious assumption, but not always a true one. This also assumes one can switch decks with some regularity; this is true even less often, but we can address that a little later.

Aggro is almost always best in week one when people are trying to brew; this is repeated ad nauseum and hardly worth going into. Basically just be wary of the dangers of doing cool things during week one when everyone knows to burn you out. There’s also an argument for bringing the thing that beats aggro week one, especially if there is a midrange deck well-tuned for doing this from last season (g/b midrange); this assumes that something actually beats aggro, which is not always the case (mono blue of pre-war).

Week two is when you’re likely to play against the remnants of aggro and the up and coming midrange deck; now is probably the time to be going over the top. Week two is also when the rules of engagement start to become defined; this season it’s the hunt for the best planeswalker deck, last season it was a race to see who could draw the most cards, preferably with hydroid krasis, before that it basically a matter of finding the best deck that could contain aggro (golgari, thanks to find // finality).

Week three is deep into arms race territory; now is probably the time to zag and try to do something that abuses midrange decks: combos, ramping, mono blue, etc. Previously this was around the time when the pro tour took place. This is no longer necessarily the case, so it is harder to find a single event to answer the simple question: what am best deck?

By the time week 4 hits there’s usually a pretty good idea of what the “best deck” is, if it exists. The best deck often checks more than one of the archetype boxes. If it’s the best aggro deck and the best midrange deck, it’s probably busted (rb vehicles); if it’s the best midrange deck and the best combo deck (4c command the dreadhorde?), probably not a bad choice. This standard season there are an unreasonable number of decks that have an excellent fair plan backed up by a combo finish. Command the Dreadhorde, bolas’s citadel, and bontu all allow a player to win in a position where they are significantly behind on board. This is somewhat unique to just-before-rotation cycles and older formats, usually the deck that best interacts while still enacting its own consistent game-plan is the best deck (think phoenix decks in modern).

I’ve pretty much laid out how level 0 and 1 work out for the first month of a cycle. The level 0 solution to metagames is: play aggro, then play midrange, then tune midrange to be midrange-ier (in many ways control is the midrange-iest midrange of all), then keep tuning midrange to actually win once we’ve found the midrange-iest deck. Level 0 is the safest bet and will probably give you the most consistent good-but-not-winning-the-tournament results. The level 1 solution is one step faster than level 0; play midrange, then make it durdlier, then find a combo or trump, then probably go to aggro or combo to finish out the season and punish durdlers; in short, try to be one step ahead of the level 0 players. Level 1 is mostly likely to win or very quickly lose you the tournament; i.e. playing to the winner’s meta. Level 1, if you can manage it, is where you’re supposed to be if the goal is to spike a tournament; I usually end up somewhere in level 0 and as a result I have a ton of top 16s. Just don’t be on level 2; don’t play ramp/durdly midrange versus a sea of aggro, and don’t play aggro into slightly more interactive aggro decks.

If you don’t have the ability or desire to repeatedly swap decks, that’s fine, we can use these results to select 1 or 2 decks in a cycle that let you keep playing magic without continuously changing things. In general, if you can only get one deck, and the goal is to minimize win-rate, you should probably pick up an aggro deck. Aggro decks are cheaper, good week 1 and week 4+ and usually aren’t too awful in the bad weeks, as you can always catch a stumbling opponent.

If you have access to multiple decks, but not all the decks, I would still recommend having an aggro deck for the start of any given season, followed by the most obvious midrange deck with a good endgame and tools to break up combo (duress, spell pierce) and aggro (shock, cry of the carnarium). For the last 6+ months or so this would mean carrying around mono white or red, coupled with gb/bug midrange or drakes. No matter the meta, one of these two decks will be close to correct, and they persist across different metagames with minimal changes; naturally the gb midrange deck will run you up a pretty penny, especially if you had to buy Hydroid Krasis at the wrong time, but it is a reasonable long term investment given how long it has been a player in the format.

Anyway, after all that rambling there should probably be a conclusion. Metagame cycles are predictable and magic players follow information cascades in a repeatable fashion. Doing what everyone else is doing will give good but not great results but takes significantly less effort; being one step ahead of the cycle is ideal, but only comes with a great deal of testing work and is very punishing if misjudged. This applies to all magic formats (including limited), but that will take further discussion in the future.
Good luck out there!