I obviously have quite the story to tell from Pro Tour: Austin but my report from that event is going to have to wait while I get my bearings. It's not every week you win a Pro Tour and I want to be sure that I say everything I want to say correctly. So this week is going to serve as a prologue – I'm going to talk about my preparation for the event and go through how I ultimately ended up playing a deck with Baneslayer Angels in Extended by giving you a peek behind the scenes of our mailing list.

My playtest group for Austin was an impressive one. We had much of the same group from Honolulu minus Jelger Jamie Parke and Noah Boeken all of whom were skipping the event. We picked up Patrick Chapin Michael Jacob and Matt Sperling. I'd never worked with Patrick for an event before and didn't know what to expect. He certainly lived up to his reputation as a wildly creative deckbuilder. Most of our communication was done via an email thread and any given day my inbox would be full of lists built around newly spoiled cards.

We started working even before a single card had been spoiled. Our initial lists were just old Extended minus Onslaught block which led to a few weeks of testing before the Zendikar fetch lands were spoiled. Here are the earliest decks from our mailing list in the introductory post:

Posted by Brian Kibler September 3rd

Dredge

4 Greenseeker
4 Llanowar Mentor
4 Golgari Grave-Troll
2 Life from the Loam

1 Darkblast
4 Blood Extractor
4 Stinkweed Imp
4 Bridge from Below
4 Dread Return

3 Mulldrifter
4 Narcomoeba

1 Flamekin Zealot

2 Chrome Mox

1 Island
2 Swamp
2 Forest
2 Dakmor Salvage
4 Gemstone Mine
4 Breeding Pool
1 Yavimaya Coast
3 Overgrown Tomb

Hive Pact

4 Ponder
4 Serum Visions
4 Remand
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Hive Mind
4 Pact of Negation
1 Ethereal Usher
2 Gigadrowse

4 Seething Song
4 Pact of the Titan
1 Pyroclasm/Firespout

2 Slaughter Pact

1 Chalice of the Void
1 Engineered Explosives
2 Talisman of Dominance
2 Chrome Mox

4 Steam Vents
4 Shivan Reef
3 Tolaria West
2 Dreadship Reef
2 Seat of the Synod
1 Island
1 Snow-Covered Island

Faeries

4 Spellstutter Sprite
3 Remand
4 Vendilion Clique
2 Venser Shaper Savant
2 Teferi Mage of Zhalfir
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
2 Vedalken Shackles
2 Thirst for Knowledge
2 Engineered Explosives
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Cryptic Command
3 Threads of Disloyalty
3 Chrome Mox
4 Mutavault
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Steam Vents
1 Watery Grave
1 Breeding Pool
1 River of Tears
10 Island
3 Seat of the Synod

Aggregate Affinity

4 Arcbound Ravager
4 Arcbound Worker
1 Atog
3 Chromatic Star
4 Cranial Plating
1 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Fatal Frenzy
4 Frogmite
3 Master of Etherium
3 Myr Enforcer
4 Ornithopter
1 Soul's Fire
4 Springleaf Drum
4 Thoughtcast
4 Ancient Den
2 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Great Furnace
4 Seat of the Synod
1 Tree of Tales
4 Vault of Whispers

Loam

4 Raven's Crime
4 Thoughtseize
4 Dark Confidant
4 Blood Extractor
4 Smallpox
4 Life from the Loam
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Darkblast
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
3 Llanowar Wastes
4 Overgrown Tomb
3 Twilight Mire
1 Urborg Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Mutavault
9 Swamp
1 Ghost Quarter

Rock

4 Kitchen Finks
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Eternal Witness
4 Darkblast
2 Umezawa's Jitte
2 Garruk Wildspeaker
2 Crime / Punishment
3 Damnation
4 Thoughtsieze
4 Duress
3 Maelstrom Pulse

4 Treetop Village
4 Overgrown Estate
4 Twilight Mire
7 Swamp
5 Forest

Ad Nauseam

4 Ad Nauseam
4 Angel's Grace
4 Chromatic Star
3 Chrome Mox
3 Grapeshot
4 Lotus Bloom
4 Manamorphose
1 Pact of Negation
4 Peer Through Depths
4 Ponder
4 Rite of Flame
4 Seething Song
1 Boseiju Who Shelters All
4 Gemstone Mine
1 Godless Shrine
2 Hallowed Fountain
2 Island
2 Steam Vents
2 Sunken Ruins
1 Swamp
2 Watery Grave Boros Burn

4 Figure of Destiny
2 Mogg Fanatic
1 Loyal Sentry
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Magus of Moon
3 Ranger of Eos
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Path to Exile
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Lightning Helix
2 Magma Jet
2 Isochron Scepter
2 Oblivion Ring

4 Sacred Foundry
3 Battlefield Forge
4 Rugged Prairie
2 Mountains
9 Plains

Naya Aggro

4 Wild Nacatl
4 Kird Ape
3 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Qasali Pridemage
4 Woolly Thoctar
3 Ranger of Eos
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Path To Exile
4 Lightning Helix
2 Demonfire
4 Stomping Ground
4 Temple Garden
4 Sacred Foundry
3 Horizon Canopy
3 Rootbound Crag
1 Karplusan Forest
1 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Plains

Obviously our early testing was mostly rebuilding old decks with new manabases but there's a few interesting things going on there. Patrick was a big fan of the Hive Pact combo in our initial testing. It was a fast combo deck that could kill very quickly. I was initially a big fan of Rock style decks since it seemed like Duress and Thoughtseize would make a powerful disruption package and let the traditional Rock card advantage and removal mop things up.

Even before Zendikar was revealed and the format really began to shape up in our testing we learned a few things. The most prominent to me was actually just how bad discard spells had become. Even in a Rock-style deck with Eternal Witnesses the 8 discard package just didn't seem like enough disruption to get the job done especially against combo decks. I was convinced that the best combo decks in the format would be Hypergenesis and Dredge (Vampire Hexmage had yet to be revealed so Dark Depths wasn't on the radar) and I was repeatedly unimpressed by the effectiveness of Duress and Thoughtseize against them. The redundancy of the cascade cards made anything but mass discard or Lobotomy style effects almost useless against Hypergenesis and the basic nature of Dredge essentially playing out of its graveyard made discard seem almost counterproductive. I shifted my focus away from Rock style decks fairly early on as a result.

As Zendikar was slowly revealed new cards jumped out at us as potential major players. Bloodghast seemed like an obvious inclusion in Dredge and we also tried out some Smallpox decks that used it as a recursive threat along with some aggressive Black decks. We quickly found that it didn't make sense to play any beatdown deck that wasn't Zoo or Affinity almost no matter what. There are no creatures at comparable mana cost that compete with Wild Nacatl Tarmogoyf Arcbound Ravager and Myr Enforcer. Even if Bloodghast comes back a dozen times and Gatekeeper of Malakir nets some card advantage you're still starting out so far behind when your opponent plays a 3/3 with no drawback on the first turn. Even Bant decks with Rhox War Monk and mana creatures felt like they were fighting from the back foot especially against Zoo decks with Steppe Lynx which could make creature-based defense particularly difficult.

I tried to put together a number of Tron decks particularly after Explorer's Map was spoiled and it seemed easy to assemble the Tron consistently but couldn't seem to find a build of the deck I was happy with. I couldn't find a list that felt like it had enough powerful threats. I wasn't playing during Tron's reign in Standard and Extended but when I looked at old decklists the card that really stuck out at me as being the missing lynchpin was Decree of Justice. Decree seemed like the sort of card that could serve as both offense and defense creating a swarm of blockers when you needed to buy some time or an army of angels when you were ready to end the game. As powerful as Mindslaver and Sundering Titan are a Tron deck cannot live by those cards alone. Triskelion Platinum Angel and Grim Poppet just didn't seem impressive in the world of Wild Nacatl and Kird Ape as threats with Path to Exile as an answer.

Much of the latter stages of our testing after Zendikar was widely known took divergent directions which revealed a great deal about the different processes the members of the team took when building decks. Patrick seemed set on finding the best way to leverage particular powerful combos in the format like Thopter Foundry/Sword of the Meek Dark Depths/Vampire Hexmage or Punishing Fire/Grove of the Burnwillows creating any number of decks set up to take advantage of the combos in different ways. Ben Rubin and I spent most of our time looking at what we expected the field to be like and trying to build decks specifically targeted at that field. For a while we were both fixated on Lotus Cobra decks mostly Bant decks that tried to turbo out Glen Elendra Archmage or Baneslayer Angel with Noble Hierarchs Lotus Cobras and fetch lands.

Here's the relevant list post:

Posted by Brian Kibler

Played a good deal last night and was reasonably impressed by two different Lotus Cobra decks - more by the Cobra than by the decks I guess. One was G/W/B with a bunch of discard Dark Confidant etc with Knight of the Reliquary / Kitchen Finks / Loxodon Hierarch and a few Baneslayer Angels. The discard remained fairly unimpressive but the core of the deck seemed solid. I'm convinced that Baneslayer despite Patrick's protestations is actually quite a good card in the right deck and Cobra seems like the perfect way to play a deck that doesn't commit much to having Baneslayers in it but can leverage them very powerfully.

The other deck was G/R/W with a semi-Zoo base and Boom/Bust and Bloodbraid Elf. Bloodbraid seemed unimpressive because it simply didn't seem to do enough for four mana though I was impressed by Boom/Bust since you can Armageddon with it very quickly with Lotus Cobra or Stone Rain people with fetch lands without stunting your own development that much. In both decks Knight of the Reliquary was awesome so I got to thinking about more Cobra/Knight decks.

This is my most recent brainstorm:

4 Noble Hierarch
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Rhox War Monk
4 Knight of the Reliquary
3 Glen Elendra Archmage (with Cobra/Fetch you can play this turn 3 with a mana up to counter which seems pretty insane)
3 Baneslayer Angel
4 Path to Exile
4 Remand (with Cobra out you can leave a Fetchland up and be able to counter off just one land)
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
23 Lands

End Post.

After that I got a lot of flack for the number of decks I posted with “X Baneslayer Angel” with Mark and Patrick in particular harping on how Extended is such a degenerate format and that a creature like Baneslayer just can't compete. With a few weeks out from the tournament Patrick actually called me to talk about the directions we were going in our testing and we spent a lot of time discussing the value of different styles of deckbuilding. He suggested we try to focus on the unfair decks with straightforward game plans while I argued that I felt the format was more solvable and we should do our best to address the most important decks we'd play against. Here's a post of mine from the list defending that direction when it was suggested that “Baneslayer decks” wouldn't cut it in Extended:

Posted by Brian Kibler September 30th

These aren't "Baneslayer decks" - they're decks with Baneslayer in them. I think the most played deck in the format will be Zoo and I think Baneslayer is an excellent card against Zoo decks. My current angle for brewing is looking for creature decks that have sufficient aggression and disruption to be competitive against combo while having a great matchup against Zoo. Perhaps that's a flawed approach but I think it's worth exploring.

End Post.

I spent the next weekend testing with Paul Rietzl and Matt Sperling at Paul's apartment in Santa Monica. The results are best summed up by this post to the list:

Posted by Brian Kibler October 5th

So I played a lot with Paul/Sperling over the weekend. Patrick and Mark will be pleased to know that I have mostly given up on the Bant Cobra deck in large part due to underperforming against Zoo. I'm not sure what list of Zoo you guys are using to test but this is what I put together to run everything through the ringer:

4 Wild Nacatl
3 Kird Ape
4 Steppe Lynx
1 Goblin Guide
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Ethersworn Canonist
3 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Ranger of Eos
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Lightning Helix
4 Path to Exile
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
23 land including 12 fetchlands and 2 Treetop Villages

Steppe Lynx is pretty insane making creature-based defense against the deck very weak because you're being attacked by Ernham Djinn from turn 2 onward. Rhox War Monk is certainly not a card that does enough in that sort of situation especially if it doesn't come down on turn 2.

We played around with the Dark Depths deck and Punishing Fire. I was more impressed by Dark Depths in the matchups we played though we spent more time testing versus Zoo and Affinity than control decks. The Punishing Fire deck felt a bit slow - it had a hard time coming back from a fast start out of Zoo and seemed largely dead to Knight of the Reliquary if it resolved. Treetop Village alone could be a big problem but a Knight that could search out Treetops and attack on its own was pretty much always game over. Many of the decks the game won were incredibly close and many of the games it lost were games that it seemed like it had control but just couldn't handle something like a Treetop or a few burn spells. I'd be inclined to try to speed the deck up some like BR suggested. Ancestral Vision seems like it would be better than Thirst given your grind-out plan and where it fits the deck curve-wise. I'd consider fitting Tarmogoyf as well so you have an alternate defensive measure.

The Dark Depths deck felt much more resilient against creature decks but I can definitely see how it would struggle more against control. The deck can also get some really awkward draws and again it feels like it could stand to bring the curve down a bit and tighten up some of the countermagic. Thoughtseize seemed very good in the deck both for the actual effect and the information.

After getting some action in with Dark Depths I was thinking of more ways to use the combo. Gifts for Hexmage / Dark Depths / Grim Discovery / Nature's Spiral (Or Eternal Witness) is a guaranteed hit on the full combo. I wonder whether playing something like that might not be better than using the Tolaria West package to search things out - while Tolaria West can let you combo faster you have to naturally draw Hexmage. Granted you need Green to use Nature's Spiral and they can give you Hexmage / Grim Discovery and force you to have BBB. You could have Loam / Crime in the deck too to give you extra game against control decks.

The last thought led me to thinking whether a Blue shell might not be the best way to build it - maybe you could try a skeleton like Loam from last season and add the combo to it along with Gifts - maybe something like this:

4 Tarmogoyf
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Vampire Hexmage
2 Eternal Witness
4 Crime/Punishment
3 Damnation
1 Darkblast
2 Life from the Loam
1 Raven's Crime
3 Gifts Ungiven
4 Thoughtseize
1 Worm Harvest
1 Grim Discovery
2 Dark Depths
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Verdant Catacomb
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Breeding Pool
1 Watery Grave
2 Overgrown Tomb
2 Urborg Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Twilight Mire
4 Swamp
2 Forest

While this is obviously just a sketch this sort of build seems like it has a ton of resilience to creature decks. Darkblast is a card that may be really strong again if people are playing Steppe Lynx since it's super powerful against Faeries and can slow down Lynx Zoo a huge amount. Ghost Quarter is an amusing trump against other Dark Depths decks since they can never go off while you have it in play. This deck almost certainly rolls over to Hypergenesis but maybe there's something that can help it out there.

End Post

The Dark Depths and Punishing Fire lists I refer to were lists Chapin had posted the day before after our long phone call. At that point the decks were as follows:

Punishing Fire

2 Vendilion Clique
4 Glen Elendra Archmage

3 Spell Snare
3 Repeal
4 Mana Leak
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Cryptic Command

3 Punishing Fire

2 Firespout

3 Engineered Explosives
2 Vedalken Shackles
2 Chrome Mox

1 Miren The Moaning Well
1 Cascade Bluffs
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Seat of the Synod
2 Tolaria West
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
4 Steam Vents
10 Islands

Hexmage Depths

1 Slaughter Pact
4 Thoughtseize
4 Vampire Hexmage
3 Damnation

3 Repeal
1 Condescend
1 Spell Burst
1 Spell Snare
1 Remand
1 Muddle the Mixture
4 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Cryptic Command
2 Glen Elendra Archmage

1 Chalice of the Void
2 Engineered Explosives
3 Chrome Mox

2 Dark Depths

2 Urborg Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Misty Rainforest
4 Tolaria West
4 Watery Grave
1 Breeding Pool
4 River of Tears
1 Sunken Ruins
3 Islands

At that point I wasn't a big fan of any of the decks we had. The Gifts decks felt clunky the Dark Depths deck (in that form) felt extremely fragile especially against permission and none of the creature decks really felt like they had what it took to compete with both Zoo and Control. At that point I started trying to convert some of the elements I liked about some of the decks into other forms:

Posted by Brian Kibler October 5th

Thoughts on a possible rework of the Punishing Fire deck:

4 Tarmogoyf
2 Vendilion Clique
2 Glen Elendra Archmage

3 Spell Snare
3 Repeal
2 Remand
4 Mana Leak
4 Ancestral Vision
3 Cryptic Command

3 Punishing Fire

3 Engineered Explosives
2 Vedalken Shackles

4 Misty Rainforest
2 Cascade Bluffs
2 Scalding Tarn
1 Tolaria West
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
3 Steam Vents
7 Islands
2 Breeding Pool

I’m also wondering if a more proactive discard/disruption route might be a better way to make Dark Depths. Maybe Cryptic Command is too good to lose in the various roles it plays and maybe making your ability to Chalice for 1 worse hurts the value of Duress main. Vendilion Clique seems pretty sweet though - it can play some amount of defense and give you information or let you cycle. Is there any reasonable card draw to play other than Thirst for Knowledge? I found it very unimpressive in the deck before.

4 Thoughtseize
3 Duress
3 Remand
3 Repeal
3 Damnation
3 Engineered Explosives
1 Chalice of the Void
1 Slaughter Pact
4 Thirst for Knowledge

4 Vampire Hexmage
2 Vendilion Clique
2 Glen Elendra Archmage

2 Dark Depths

2 Chrome Mox

2 Urborg Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Tolaria West
4 Watery Grave
1 Breeding Pool
4 River of Tears
1 Sunken Ruins
3 Island

End Post.

I felt like these were a bit more in the right direction though obviously not yet to truly competitive levels. My next post to the list:

Posted by Brian Kibler October 6th

I played some MTGO versus Nassif and BR last night with the Tarmofire deck I posted earlier against various Green creature decks. It felt strong and I definitely appreciated the defense from Tarmogoyf and the smoother card draw with Ancestral Vision though I was drawing a lot of turn 1 Visions so my experience was likely biased by that. Repeal felt fairly weak in those matchups. Punishing Fire as a card felt extremely powerful when I drew Grove and not terrible without it though obviously fairly inefficient. Knight of the Reliquary was a definite problem card still though Tarmogoyf provided a good answer to Treetop Village and other random creatures (including opposing Tarmogoyfs). Glen Elendra felt okay but unamazing along with Vendilion Clique.

End Post.

October 6th was the day that I left for a week in Las Vegas before heading to Austin for the Pro Tour so my remaining contributions to the list were few and far between. It was in that week that the Michigan contingent (Patrick Herberholz and Nassif who was in town visiting) came up with the Gifts / Fire / Foundry deck that they ultimately ended up playing. Their early testing numbers sounded amazing and when I arrived in Austin I was excited to try out the deck. My testing of the deck didn't show quite the same results and while I was certainly excited about what was going on with it I just didn't feel comfortable playing it in the Pro Tour. I was certain that Zoo was the most important deck in the format and felt like playing a deck that wasn't a convincing favorite in that matchup just couldn't be the right choice for the tournament.

I kept working on my Tarmogoyf / Punishing Fire Blue deck since it seemed to have a solid core along with the powerful combo of Grove/Fire but was never really happy with it. I threw together and tore apart at least three different Dark Depths decks in the span of a few days and never really found one that I was happy with. I knew Ben Michael Jacob and Matt Sperling were in the same boat – none of us were really happy with the Gifts deck but we didn't really have anything we felt more comfortable with either. It wasn't until Wednesday night that I saw Ben proxying up Knight of the Reliquary Punishing Fire and Baneslayer Angel that I finally started to get excited about a deck.

The idea was simple enough – play a deck that crushed other creature decks and just sideboard against the combo decks. There's two ways to beat other creature decks in Magic – go faster or go bigger. The “Go Bigger” plan is exactly how the Naya Zoo decks from last season ended up usurping the Tribal Flames Zoo decks that came before them. In a battle between two creature decks unless the faster deck can actually kill the slower deck before they can bring their more expensive more powerful cards online the slower deck is generally at a huge advantage. Ben decided to forget about cards like Kird Ape and Goblin Guide – which are not only bad in the mirror but were also what the field was preparing for with cards like Engineered Explosives and Firespout – and go bigger with Knight of the Reliquary and Baneslayer Angel. The Punishing Fire/Grove Combo is another example of going bigger as well since it's a long term plan that provides a kind of inevitability. As long as we're fast enough to stay alive against the other beatdown decks once we get to leverage our more powerful cards we should win.

The major kink in that plan was combo decks. As Patrick points out in his article this week every deck I threw at him with Baneslayer Angel seemed to lose horribly to the combo decks and for that reason he largely dismissed them. Thankfully that was only a problem in game 1. Extended is remarkable not only in the power and speed of the combo decks in the format but also in the power of the hate cards that exist to fight them. Blood Moon in particular is a card that we'd tried to find a way to get into our decks through the entirety of our testing but we just couldn't find a suitable home for it. Any deck that we built as a Blood Moon deck was simply powerless against decks that weren't crippled by Blood Moon. The problem was that we were building Blood Moon decks not finding decks that could profitably play Blood Moon.

When we were looking for sideboard cards against combo the card I brought up again and again was Blood Moon since the typical Hypergenesis decks simply could not do anything with the enchantment in play. Ultimately our sideboard shifted from Silences Chalice of the Void Gaddock Teeg and Tormod's Crypt to Meddling Mage and Blood Moon giving us not only more flexibility from the slots but also what turned out to be easily the most powerful sideboard card in that matchup. Extra Ghost Quarters gave us a ton of game against Dark Depths as well as enabling Wasteland draws against Hypergenesis and turning Knight of the Reliquary into a land destruction machine. The final tweaks to the sideboard didn't go in until 3am the morning of the tournament but every minute of lost sleep was worth it.

The rest as they say is history – history that I'll share with you in the upcoming weeks.

Until then…

bmk