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In case you were unaware, there was a Pro Tour this weekend that hailed the arrival of a format change in Extended. For the first time in three years, the Extended block rotation occurred, chucking all sets before Invasion to the dusti and aligning the metagame of the real world with that of Magic Online. There is a ton of information available in the coverage on MagictheGathering.com, so much so that it might be overwhelming for you to figure out where to start (though if you are like most players, you’ll start directly at the Top 8 decklists and move on from there). Thankfully you have me to unpack it all for you and highlight the relevant information that you may or may not have seen during the course of the weekend.
The Force is Strong in That One
For starters, big ups to me main barn StarWarsKid, who has surely graduated to hull status at this point, though he is still free to barn whenever he likes. His tale is a long and goofy one and since I know he’ll be writing I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say that it’s surprising how well you can do at a Pro Tour when your favorite deck ends up being good in a particular format. He obtained Level 3 status at the PT and will be headed to Worlds, so here’s to hoping that we’ll see and hear more from him in the coming months.
While on the subject of young SWK, please watch his semifinals match against Billy Moreno since the text coverage doesn’t do it justice. For those of you short on time, just fast forward to game 5, since that’s where the series of screwups happen that quite possibly screwed the Kid out of a Finals appearance and a shot at a Pro Tour title. I have to confess that I absolutely don’t understand this new “be nice about mana burn” policy that’s been getting play among some judges I know, particularly at the Pro f***ing Tour level. Obviously if both players pass on an empty stack the phase ends. That’s what happened, and yet Moreno was still able to cast Naturalize on the Heartbeat of Spring? Boggle. If I was Chris, I would have been standing on my f***ing chair calling bullsh**, you know what I mean? Chris was later informed of this as well, since passivity certainly hurt him in that situation, but this was his first Top 8 and he learned a valuable lesson there. Head Judge Gis Hooglkjadjjdalanf should at least have been called to the area to adjudicate the situation.
Of course, all of this is made much worse by the fact that Moreno didn’t actually have Green mana in his pool, so the play was illegal. The way he tapped his mana meant that he had Blue, Black, and colorless in his pool, even though it clearly could have been otherwise if he’s wanted it to be (he would have needed to take damage from his painland in order to make that happen). Aaanyway, this is the third time something like this has happened in the Top 8 of a major event I attended this year (Pro Tour: Atlanta, U.S Nationals) and that doesn’t include the madness that occurred in the finals of Japanese Nats, where they actually reconstructed and replayed a game, thus setting a very uncertain precedent. There’s clearly a problem here, even if we aren’t sure exactly what it is and haven’t quite figured out what will fix it. It just seems weird to me that the staff this weekend was particularly rough on dinging people for sleeve infractions (this is fine, by the way), but when a player can’t keep track of the freaking status of the game in the Top 8, we suddenly baby the player. I don’t want a return to draconian penalty days for silly stuff, but it would be nice if REL 5 continued to have significant meaning even with a table judge present, especially since some table judges seem to be having trouble following everything that is going on in an admittedly complex game.
The Search for the Best Deck
If you look at this page, you can see the compilations I did regarding how decks fared across the field and the tournament. I’d parrot them here, but I’m on the road and my editing rig is not a fan of table conversions, so you’ll just have to like, you know, click and stuff. Ruel’s deck won the Pro Tour, and that’s what everyone will pick up as the Deck to Beat, but I’m reasonably secure in the believing that it’s not the best deck in the format. It’s certainly not as bad as Mike and Randy were bagging on it during the Top 8 commentary (and Antoine was aware of this and let them know), but Ruel is ridiculously skilled and aside from Ruel, Peset, and Fabiano (all three good players), most people who played pure Tog decks this weekend scuffled. The question of whether or not the Life from the Loam engine is or is not good will have to remain unanswered for now, but I’m thinking that if you just make Dredgatog perhaps a bit more controlling while maintaining most of the explosiveness, you’ll end up with a better deck. Tog decks in the hands of good players are still probably going to be the best decks at the PTQs.
However, looking at the numbers and also at Billy Moreno’s run to the Finals in spite of some very sketchy play, you have to believe his deck was probably the best deck at the Pro Tour. There are two sides to the Constructed game: deck design and playskill. MadTog 20/20 (as BDM later named the deck) is so good at the former that not being great with the latter wasn’t relevant for most of the weekend. In case you missed it, here’s what Moreno’s deck looks like:
| Madness Tog An Extended deck, by William Moreno 2nd place at a Pro Tour tournament in Los Angeles, California, United States on 2005-10-30 | ||
Artifacts 3 Chrome Mox Creatures 3 Aquamoeba 4 Arrogant Wurm 4 Basking Rootwalla 1 Merfolk Looter 3 Psychatog 4 Wild Mongrel 1 Wonder Instants 4 Circular Logic 1 Darkblast 2 Gifts Ungiven |
Legendary Artifacts 3 Umezawa's Jitte Sorceries 4 Careful Study 2 Deep Analysis 1 Life from the Loam Basic Lands 2 Forest 2 Island Lands 2 Bloodstained Mire 1 Centaur Garden 1 Cephalid Coliseum 1 Lonely Sandbar 2 Overgrown Tomb 4 Polluted Delta 2 Watery Grave 4 Yavimaya Coast | 3 Engineered Plague 4 Naturalize 4 Smother 4 Cabal Therapy |
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| Download this deck in Apprentice format! |
Download this deck in Magic Online Text format! | |
The aggro package for this deck is solid or better, Life from the Loam delivers a spicy card drawing engine, and Umezawa’s Jitte still gives you an “I Win” factor that many players could not account for this weekend. The three colors of the deck also provide for a versatile set of sideboard answers that can be diversified if you think you need it at the PTQ level. Even the manabase isn’t that painful, since Moreno generally wiped the floor with PT Jank decks this weekend on the back of Msrs. Mongrel, Psychatog, and Arrogant Wurm. In short, I think this is absolutely the deck to beat, and if players can actually find the cash to splash in building it, you will see a lot of these decks show up on the Top 8 decklists page for the rest of the season. Also note that Moreno said he misbuilt his deck slightly and that there should be at least one Golgari Grave-Troll in the maindeck to boot.
The other three decks to really be aware of are the Siron/Jones/Da Costa Cabral deck we called Golgari Madness, No Stick, and the many varieties of PT Jank. Golgari Madness clearly very strong, but players still don’t understand the dredge mechanic very well and even the deck’s designers felt the deck was really freaking hard to play well enough to win every match. I like this deck a lot and feel that it has enormous potential plus some excellent design choices (how sexy is freaking Brawn?), but it may be so hard to play that it won’t impact the format as much until next time around when players have had more practice.
No Stick is basically the same deck it was last time, just updated to compensate for a slightly slower environment and the loss of older cards. It still has its ubercombo and a swell complement of control elements, but I’m not sure it’s going to be a good deck in a field filled with smiling atogs. Then again, PTQ players are bad... maybe you run it simply to take advantage of that fact.
PT Jank is the larger category of fast Red/White decks that includes Fujita’s Boros Deck Wins (which he apparently built on the fly the week of the event) through decks like the Peebles-Mundy/Tormos creation that Ervin piloted to a Top 8 berth. Essentially, this is the new Red Deck Wins, with a splash of White for better animals and access to Lightning Helix and Disenchant. I love Fujita’s deck, but the matchup against Tog is so bad that Fujita sided out three lands in his match against Ruel simply to give him a better chance to mise. When the chances of beating one of the more popular decks out there is so bad that the best deck designer in the world has to go to these lengths to give himself a glimpse of hope, you either need to fix the matchup or play a different deck. Of course, PTQs are a different world than the Pro Tour or Grand Prix Top 8s, so mileage on these decks may vary. The one rule we have learned from the last few years is that players absolutely love The Rock and Red Deck Wins in Extended and will play those decks regardless of where they rest on the metagame tier.
The last deck I wanted to highlight is Jeff Novekoff’s Red Rock deck, which is just packed with tech. Withered Wretch is an amazing card in the format and the rest of the maindeck is heavy with disruptive elements plus problems for aggro decks. I don’t think The Rock is awesome overall in this environment (the numbers seem to bear that out) but Jeff’s deck is definitely something to toss into your testing gauntlet and should probably be the version of choice for Rock players at the PTQ level. In case you haven’t see it, here’s a copy:
| Red Rock An Extended deck, by Jeff Novekoff 31st place at a Pro Tour tournament in Los Angeles, California, United States on 2005-10-30 | ||
Creatures 4 Birds of Paradise 2 Eternal Witness 4 Flametongue Kavu 4 Ravenous Baloth 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder 3 Spiritmonger Enchantments 4 Pernicious Deed Instants 2 Putrefy |
Sorceries 4 Cabal Therapy 2 Duress 1 Farseek 4 Living Wish Basic Lands 3 Forest 1 Mountain 1 Swamp Lands 2 Bloodstained Mire 4 Contested Cliffs 3 Llanowar Wastes 3 Overgrown Tomb 1 Sacred Foundry 4 Wooded Foothills | 1 Dwarven Blastminer 1 Eternal Witness 1 Genesis 1 Goblin Pyromancer 1 Silklash Spider 1 Spiritmonger 1 Viridian Shaman 1 Withered Wretch 3 Engineered Plague 1 Kataki, War's Wage 2 Duress 1 Blinkmoth Well |
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| Download this deck in Apprentice format! |
Download this deck in Magic Online Text format! | |
Other Notes
Meloku is awesome regardless of format. It would be wise not to forget this fact.
The decks you should absolutely not be playing unless you have a crazy death wish or cannot build anything else include Goblins and straight U/G Madness. These decks are clearly last year’s tech and are incapable of doing well in a field that knew they existed and were prepared to face them. Affinity ran into a similar snag and I honestly don’t think they can find a good answer to Kataki, War’s Wage. You either get lucky with your pairings and mise past decks with Kataki in them, or you pick up your loss and move along. That said, don’t stop packing some deck hate for either Affinity or Goblins or you’ll find yourself in the loser’s bracket with plenty of time left to go eat.
Dave Williams’s performance this weekend more than justifies his Sponsor’s Exemption. The feedback on this new program was positive back when we announced it, but a Top 24 performance and a trip to Hawaii in March should make people more comfortable that neither Wizards nor the exemptee are taking these things lightly. In other news, rumor has it that Dave has kicked Summer Altice to the curb in search of a hottie to be named later.
The format is still in its infancy. It will be very interesting to see what decks come out of the Extended Grand Prix this coming weekend, and also to see what tech the best players bring out at Worlds for both Standard and Extended. This first version of Extended is incredibly diverse and features a ton of cool and fascinating decks for players to try on for size. Will it continue to be this way for the next couple of months, or will pros settle into more of a “Psychatog or No” mode? BDM pointed out that one card that remains problematic for Togs that didn’t see as much play as expected this weekend was Pithing Needle, so keep that in mind. Randy Buehler and I were talking about it and we both feel that it will probably take six months to a year for the format to fully shake out, though MODO has been accelerating such things recently.
The fact that Ravnica had a major impact on this weekend’s proceedings shows just how powerful the set actually is. This weekend would seem to give players even more reasons to buy the set that is practically leaping off shelves, and its appearance on Magic Online should just further whet players’ appetites for dual landy goodness. It’s a fine time to be a slinger of Magical spells.
I’m going to cut it off here so that I can edit the rest of the site before I trek to Australia this evening. Ask the Judge editor Seamus Campbell will be filling in for me, so be polite and if you have something to say, let us hear it.
Ted Knutson
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