Last week, I talked about the metagame enemies of the moment in Extended as Elves, Wizards, and Zoo. In general, I think this was definitely true — these were the decks you had to be prepared to face if you were going to walk into a tournament with any hope of success.
What a difference a week makes. Grand Prix: Los Angeles has now come and gone, and the Top 8 leaves us with a very different take on the meta:
B/G Midrange-Beatdown (with Loam) — 5th
Affinity — 2nd and 6th
Wizards — 4th and 7th
Desire — 1st and 8th
Blue/Green Control — 3rd
The most popularly played decks, in order, from Day 2, were: Wizards (29), Zoo (19), Affinity (11), and Death Cloud (11), with Burn, Desire, and Elves following close behind. From this list, we really can’t tell whether the Death Cloud lists were more like Michael Jacob more aggressive version, or whether the were more similar to their more controlling cousins. We can’t distinguish between “classic” Affinity or Weinberg-style no-Thoughtcast Affinity. Certain deck’s are list differently, Zoo versus RGW Zoo, or Swathe versus TEPS (both of which I’ve lumped into “Desire”), but essentially, it seems clear that the metagame is incredibly diverse and wide open.
Right now, if I were to make an Enemies List, it would include Wizards, Zoo, Death Cloud, and Affinity, though I definitely wouldn’t want to forget about the combo possibilities that TEPS, Swathe, and Elves can provide. Elves, especially, is a scary one to forget about. Sam Black may have only gone 3-3 on Day 2 with Elves, in a field that was likelier to be prepared for him, be he started out Day 1 undefeated in fourth place, just a draw behind Rob Dougherty. Elves is one of those decks that you absolutely can not forget about, lest it punch you in the back of the head while you ignore it.
As for Burn, only one decklist got any coverage that I could find: Jake Woods’s Spark Elemental-free version:
4 Keldon Marauders
4 Mogg Fanatic
3 Flames of the Blood Hand
4 Incinerate
4 Lava Spike
4 Magma Jet
4 Rift Bolt
4 Seal of Fire
2 Shard Volley
4 Shrapnel Blast
3 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Blinkmoth Nexus
2 Darksteel Citadel
4 Great Furnace
12 Mountain
Sideboard
3 Blood Moon
3 Boil
3 Pyrostatic Pillar
2 Shattering Spree
3 Smash to Smithereens
1 Sulfuric Vortex
Woods managed to win a Last Chance Trial with this list, running sixteen Red sources, but a shockingly small (20!) number of lands to support his six three-drops. At the end of Day 1, he was sitting solidly in sixteenth place, but an unexciting Day 2 dropped him to 108th. Ouch.
Still, though, his sideboard is wonderfully simple. Boil and Blood Moon to mess with the mana of those opponents who were truly greedy for it; Pyrostatic Pillar to thwart combo of any sort (or potentially as an aggravation against an opponent who might not ever put him on the rope); Shattering Spree and Smash to Smithereens for Affinity and other artifacts (like Jitte, presumably); and Sulfuric Vortex number four to acknowledge the real problem that lifegain represents. While I don’t think I would have the courage to run such a greedy manabase, it initially worked out really well for Woods, and while his eventual fall might have come from that greedy base, it just as well could have come from antagonistic archetypes like Wizards, or deeply dedicated anti-Burn that might have existed at the top tables.
Trying for Sligh
One of the things that LSV did last week in pointing out the opportunity that Red/Green has in Extended right now is to note how valuable the burn package is in the current Extended, but also how valuable creatures can be, if you’re trying to make Wizard-based decks struggle. One of the things I don’t like about this kind of build, though, are the real ways the deck loses out on immediate damage. As Zac Hill notes Haste is a trait that most spells tend to have. It’s why they’re good. Bringing some of this back to a more critter-based Red deck made me come to the following Sligh deck.
Here is where I came to with that:
Creatures (20)
Lands (7)
Spells (33)
Sideboard
In many ways, this deck is like a marriage of Adam Prosak Burn/Zoo list and Owen Turtenwald old “Chocolate Rain” (i.e., Red Deck Wins).
Maintaining a single color does come at a price. You don’t have access to cards like Tarmogoyf, which are otherwise deeply potent. You end up needing to lean on Flame Javelin as an additional burn spell, rather than a much better spell like Lightning Helix. In theory, you could instead queue up Volcanic Hammer in that slot, to help with the Slith Firewalker in the mix; having a few extra cheap burn to clear out the potential blockers is always valuable.
A big return you get from playing mono, though, comes from the Blistering Firecat, the Magus of the Moon, and Flame Javelin helping out Shrapnel Blast. The sheer damage that you can push out with the deck can be quite shocking, at times. I’ve had many games won on the back of only three spells, typically a Blistering Firecat/Shrapnel Blast combination. Slith Firewalker is (rightfully) almost archaic right now, but in a mono-Red deck, getting a consistent/threatening basher on the cheap is quite difficult.
Magus and Molten Rain work double-duty as potential damage sources and mana-disruption. Keeping an opponent off-balance can make things incredibly difficult for many of the manabases right now. A Magus of the Moon is not a Blood Moon, and so it is far more vulnerable to elim, but it can seriously blunt a deck’s ability to play the game they want to play. Pre-boarding against Wizards might seem like a cheap out, but in a deck with all of this potential mana-stunting, just providing a random bear while disrupting is great. Further, though, as a deck capable of dealing massive amounts of damage in bursts, making those also uncounterable can turn around an otherwise difficult matchup.
Wizards
This is the current Big Bad, if you ask me. Game 1 largely revolves around Jitte and Shackles. With your main-deck Shusher, it takes on of these artifacts to make it a real game. This is still eminently doable, of course. They have access to Engineered Explosives, and when they do clear a Shusher via some artifact, they can just own the game from there on in. Much of the boarding depends on if you’re on the play or draw. You simply cannot expect to get much mileage out of a Slith Firewalker on the draw, without a Shusher out, setting you up for the two for one. Further, Threads can be a real threat, so take care about keeping Firewalker in unless you can set up the Turn 1 Slith/Turn 2 Magus/Molten Rain.
On the play: -4 Incinerate, -2 Flame Javelin; +3 Smash to Smithereens, +2 Boil, +1 Umezawa’s Jitte
On the draw: -4 Slith Firewalker, -2 Incinerate; +3 Smash to Smithereens, +2 Boil, +1 Umezawa’s Jitte
Take out an additional burn spell for an extra Smash if they are particularly artifact-heavy.
Zoo
Zoo has more potent creatures than you do, but your mana attack is generally quite powerful against them. Getting and sticking a Jitte can be huge, but you have to remember just how disadvantage your creatures often tend to be. You can absolutely win by just pounding into them with some Firecats, and Shrapnel Blasting them out, but you don’t want to get caught by the swarm that they can produce, either. The Firewalker is only going to be at all effective if it can regularly get through, so dropping any removal would be a bad call. Shusher, on the other hand, is just a 2/2 here, so you can shave it off a little bit. Blastminer just tries to help out the job that Molten Rain is already doing. While slow, it does demand being killed or else.
-3 Vexing Shusher; +2 Dwarven Blastminer, +1 Umezawa’s Jitte
Death Cloud can be a somewhat scary matchup, at times, because depends on the build, they can have all of the weapons they need to answer any threats that you push at them. Sometimes, here, the best thing you can do is hope that they don’t end up making it to that Death Cloud, and instead are stuck being a regularly controlling deck. Here, the pre-boarded Shushers are useless, and you can bring in Trinisphere as a kind of Stone Rain-like effect. This is especially helpful in making Blistering Firecats all the more likely to be untouched by Darkblast. Burning someone out in this matchup is completely reasonable if you can get a Firecat to stick.
-4 Vexing Shusher, -1 Mogg Fanatic; +3 Trinisphere, +2 Dwarven Blastminer
Affinity
Seemingly the default beatdown deck, Affinity can be crazily fast. Typically, a burn deck just can’t keep up, but there are some nice constraints that this deck can bring to the mix: actual creatures that can stay on the board. Still, you need to, essentially race. Jitte can’t be counted on to do much work, because of Ravager, but it still serves at least partly as a place-holder. This is exactly the matchup where you shouldn’t be afraid to use Smash to Smithereens as a Molten Rain++, IF you can get in some extra damage from attackers as a result.
-4 Vexing Shusher, +4 Smash to Smithereens
Desire
Here, you’re really in a foot-race. You don’t have much time to kill them, so you have to make the most of it. Shusher, while not great, can stop a Remand, and sometimes that is all you need. Bringing in Smash to Smithereens might stop a Bloom, but it is the only real target. Like Death Cloud, your best answer can just be in messing with their mana.
-2 Umezawa’s Jitte, -3 Mogg Fanatic; +3 Trinisphere, +2 Dwarven Blastminer
Elves
Elves is the main reason for Sharpshooter, though it could be replaced by another card like Martyr of Ashes, if you think that Zoo is a bigger part of your meta. Both do the trick, where Martyr is weaker against Elves, it is stronger against Zoo.
-4 Vexing Shusher, -3 Flame Javelin; +3 Goblin Sharpshooter, +1 Umezawa’s Jitte, +3 Trinisphere
And now, some bonus parting thoughts, inspired by Wizards R&D, past and present…
Rosewater on Multi-Color Limited
In the most recent The Magic Show, I stopped the player and rewound it a bit, just so I could hear Mark Rosewater say something again.
“While Invasion was awesome, it’s manafixing was really bad. One of the biggest complaints we got from pros, you know, people that really understood what they were doing, man, the mana, is so random, like you could get in really bad situations because you were forced to play lots of colors but there really wasn’t support for it.”
Wow. This is so, so, so wrong. It’s deeply, incredibly wrong. At this period in time, Madison was probably at its strongest when it came to limited. Typical drafts would include fourteen players, split among tables, who had a minimum of five Pro Tours under their belt. Bob Maher was at his prime. Heck, we had people fly into Madison from all over the world to practice for Worlds that year, where IPA (Invasion-Planeshift-Apocalypse) was the draft format.
Five-color decks were not just well supported, they were the best archetype in the format. Easily up to three decks could be supported at a draft table, and sometimes, a fourth player could make it work, too. In Madison, we had identified six clear archetypes of Five-color. We probably even missed some. When I look at Ravnica, and now Shards of Alara, these draft formats have nowhere near the support for a many-colored deck that IPA had. It’s not even close.
I imagine when people were complaining about the mana fixing being really bad, they were talking about cards like Reef Shaman.
Reef Shaman may look bad, but it was actually completely nuts. It could act like a mini-Rishadan Port. It was a Birds of Paradise. It made land-walkers unblockable. It was great. People that didn’t like the mana-fixing in the format didn’t know what they were doing.
This isn’t the first time that Pros miss the boat. For Pro Tour: Berlin, a ton of Pros didn’t recognize the power of Elves. For Pro Tour: San Diego, not only did nearly no one see the power of Slivers (other than the champions, the Sliver Kids, Jacob Van Lunen and Chris Lachman, who dominated that Pro Tour like a Pro Tour hasn’t been dominated since the first Tokyo by Team A.B.U.), but tons of Pros didn’t even know that counterspells like Delay were bombs. It happens. In general, the hive-mind finds the answers, but individual member of the hive mind don’t necessarily find those answers.
I think what happened with Rosewater was the same thing that happened to Mike Flores and I when we were running the Dojo: we listened to those noisy voices raised in complaint, and imagined that it was somehow representative of the whole reality. But that doesn’t make it so.
For Worlds, back then, a ton of Pros besides Madison caught onto the Five-color draft craze. The English Court Palace crew (Ben Ronaldson and John Ormerod), Turian, the OMS’s, MikeyP, and many, many others. Heck, among the people we had practicing in Madison for Worlds that year, Bob Maher, Dave Williams, and Neil Reeves all went 5-1 with back-to-back Five-color drafts. I went a measly 4-2, but only because Reeves and Maher beat me with their Five-color decks in the self-same draft, though they both said they thought I had the best deck at the table.
If this isn’t enough to see where, maybe, Rosewater is wrong, how about this quote from Worlds coverage that year:
“Jon ‘Johnny Magic’ Finkel’s draft was the talk of the press room once reports of it came back. The Machine himself had somehow managed to draft Four-Color Non-Green. When asked about his rumored shaky manabase, Finkel replied “People say that only because they don’t understand the format.””
On Grand Prix and Tiebreaking
There has been a lot of talk about the new X-2 cut policy among players who go to GPs. This policy is a huge boon to all players that go into Grand Prix without the benefit of numerous byes. Had a few less players showed up, the Grand Prix would have cut to 64, leaving 35 players below the cut. If you’re interested, those 35 players made $4,200, had three Top 16s, and a Top 8 (Carl Hendrix).
Because of attendance, these were not people that would have been below the cut, but they very easily could have been. The problem with the way that the old-school Grand Prix had that this new policy is trying to address is twofold: first, the question of fairness; second, the element of marketing. These go hand-in-hand, but essentially boil down to this: it sucks to have few to no byes, do pretty damn well, and not make Day 2 when another player who played less than you does. The big concern about the change can be summed up as this: it will make the largest events far more player-packed on Day 2. Take GP: Paris, with 1838 players. Under the new policy, 189 players, instead of 128, would have made Day 2. Overall, this concern seems kind of small to me.
A little more can be done, though. Currently, one of the big reasons why X-2’s without any byes used to be cut was because their Opponent’s Match Win percentage was almost certainly going to be much worse than someone with byes. The minimum that an opponent is allowed for their OMW is 33%. In other words, even if an opponent loses every match, DCI Reporter pretends that they win a third of their matches. By raising this number just a wee bit, to 40%, you give a very small extra nudge to those players who are actually performing very well, but didn’t have the benefit of byes, without drastically skewing tie-breaks. Especially as we look to the upper end of how Day 2 pans out, this little bit can give a player who actually outperformed another player who had byes a little bit less of a disadvantage when they are measured head-to-head for prizes.
There still seems to me to be a little more that can be done. Take this comment from Randy Buehler, from the year’s first episode of The Magic Show:
“Magic tiebreakers suck. Kinda random. There is no good tiebreaker system that is actually accurate.”
There is something to this, but it is fairly overstated. It comes from things like this:
2008 Worlds, Round 18 Standings:
8th. Jamie Parke — 40 points — OMW 57.7756%
9th. David Irvine — 40 points — OMW 57.0782%
64th. Mattias Kettil — 33 points — OMW 50.7025%
65th. Christian Flaaten — 33 points — OMW 50.5915%
There really isn’t much difference here, between the results that these players received. There is a huge amount of difference between what comes out of it to reward each of these players.
The big problem is that the tiebreakers are too accurate. Do we really need to be going to the ten-thousandth percentile? Heck, even a single percentile is getting pretty wishy-washy. When we get to a place this accurate, the only time we ever, ever actually have a tie on this tiebreaker is in the very smallest of events. Anyone who has ever looked at a standings sheet or worked DCI reporter knows that there are other tie-breaks! If we simply reduce the so-called “accuracy” of these measures, we can move onto including other tie break measures as well, and actually get the kind of accuracy we’re looking for. After Opponent’s Match Win, a “less” accurate system could then check Player Game Win percentage, and then, finally Opponent’s Game Win percentage. While the difference between Parke and Irvine, or Kettil and Flaaten, in the current means of reckoning, might be an opponent who got mana-screwed in a later round, or someone not dropping earlier for the hope of gaining back a few DCI points, these other measures tend to further help differentiate, and if we’re talking about percentage points, rather than fractions of percentage points, the differences are actually meaningful.
Combine this with my earlier idea of raising the minimum OMW value from any given opponent, and I think you’d see a much more fair set of results. There never has really been any drive to do this, largely because the results are so subtle, but if you go through any big event, it is typical that thousands of dollars and many, many PT Points change hands because of these subtle inequities.