While last weekend’s top eights show that we’re moving in the right direction diversity-wise; blue-based control, midrange, and tempo decks have been at the forefront of the format ever since Mental Misstep was banned. As a result, people have been complaining, and those blue-based strategies have been called dominant. The thing is, these decks aren’t all that hard to beat. They have very exploitable strategic weaknesses and are quite prevalent, so it is very surprising to me that most people still don’t seem to have adapted to their increased presence yet.
The most plausible explanation I have for this—aside from a large number of players preferring to run blue decks anyway and duking it out in the blue on blue mirror—is that the majority of players don’t know how to effectively hate diverse strategies*. This is completely understandable, considering that most players see “hate cards” as sideboard cards that you bring in against a particular strategy and that, if resolved, will tear the opponent’s game plan apart. Unsurprisingly, that kind of hate doesn’t exist for diverse strategies—the simple fact that it rips apart the whole game plan of a multifaceted deck would mean that the card is in fact good against a multitude of strategies and therefore not what we generally refer to as hate.
Because diverse strategies are exactly that—they rely on a large number of different cards—removing a single piece from the puzzle by deploying a hate card is rarely going to stop them from winning anyway. This is why Vexing Shusher hasn’t made countermagic unplayable and why Chains of Mephistopheles isn’t a good card against most of the so-called Brainstorm decks: it’s dead against just about everything in the deck that isn’t Brainstorm. Instead of just dumping a playset of Leylines (of the Void) into your sideboard as you might for Dredge, hating diverse strategies demands that you go further. You need to find a way to make your deck perform well against their overall strategy, find tools that deal with most of what they can throw at you, or choose a different deck that does. There are a few different ways to do this, and these different approaches are what I’m going to talk about today.
Overloading
This one is the most natural way for many decks to deal with diverse strategies and one of the most aesthetically pleasing ones, as it attacks their very nature. Flexible strategies are by definition jacks-of-all-trades; that is to say they’re good at doing a multitude of different things. The flipside here is that they aren’t exceptional at any of them, and as a result relentlessly attacking from an angle that needs to be answered in the same way again and again will overload their defenses at some point.
A perfect example for this being put into action is G/W Maverick:
Creatures (23)
- 4 Mother of Runes
- 1 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Scryb Ranger
- 2 Aven Mindcensor
- 1 Tarmogoyf
- 1 Gaddock Teeg
- 3 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 2 Qasali Pridemage
- 3 Stoneforge Mystic
- 1 Scavenging Ooze
Lands (23)
Spells (14)
The deck has a multitude of endearing qualities for those who enjoy midrange decks, but what we’re interested in is the number absurd standalone creatures as well as the tendency of its low-impact creatures to Voltron into a big threat anyway. Between Knight of the Reliquary, Green Sun’s Zenith, and Stoneforge Mystic, the deck has a lot of creatures that need to be dealt with ASAP, as otherwise they tend to take over the game while dominating creature combat. They also are cheap enough and powerful enough to come online before mass removal is a viable option (as far as there are truly viable mass removal spells in Legacy currently anyway), leaving you with a deck that taxes the amount of spot removal an opponent can provide significantly. Add four Mother of Runes as well as the fact that even the deck’s small creatures provide a significant offense when taken together (a Scryb Ranger backed by two Noble Hierarchs also deals three a turn), and trying to stop Maverick becomes a nightmare for most diverse strategies.
The problem with this approach is that it necessitates a large number of high-quality threats that all attack along the same axis and enablers that can also serve in an offensive capacity. That kind of setup just isn’t that easy to find, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that Maverick has only come into its own now that white and green creatures have had a few years of power creep to accumulate ridiculous cards that bring them up to the level of classic answer spells (like Counterspell or Swords to Plowshares)*. In short, Maverick is the kind of deck you should always be looking for but that you’ll rarely actually find.
This process also works on a smaller scale, by doing something as simple as running Nimble Mongoose in Canadian Thresh. That deck’s original Nacatl aims to overload a much more restricted set of answers: those to creatures with shroud. Once a Mongoose is on the battlefield, much of the game tends to shift into a war for answers, the opponent trying to stick something big enough to trade for or stop the 3/3 or kill it directly, while the Mongoose’s master can ignore everything that doesn’t stop the inexorable clock. This refocusing is a big reason I’d usually much rather play against the more modern versions of the deck (as you probably know, there’s a strong probability I’m on some form of hard control deck, and those have quite a bit of trouble with a 3/3 which they have maybe two or three answers to, total).
Outrunning
This approach actually works in a similar way to overloading, just with a different focus. Instead of just trying to run the opponent out to answers to a certain angle of attack completely, they try to implement their attack fast enough to make most answers irrelevant. This is the approach a hyper-aggressive Zoo deck like this takes:
Creatures (23)
Lands (17)
Spells (20)
By running sixteen aggressive one-drops (Lavamancer is good but not exactly aggressive), the deck tries to start the game so blazingly fast that the opponent doesn’t have time to actually find his answers before the damage is done. The backbone of this approach is consistency. You win because your opponent won’t have as many answers to your plays as early, as you make them because their deck is less consistently able to come up with a way to stop the squad than you are able to present the squad in the first place.
This is one approach that has lost a lot of luster with the printing of Snapcaster Mage, in my opinion. Before Snapcaster, you simply didn’t have room to pack your deck with enough cheap spot removal to consistently answer three one-drops by turn 2 without taking excessive amounts of damage. Now that white decks have not only Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile but essentially run another playset in the form of Snapcaster, successfully answering the hyper-aggressive push has become a decent possibility.
This in itself wouldn’t be as much of a problem if trying to outrun the opponent didn’t come at a cost: by running the many cheap spells necessary to create your early clock in just about every game, you sacrifice most of your late game capability (in this case reducing it to throwing a few burn spells to the head, which is excellent if your early creatures manage to do their job but horrible if the opponent is still at 15). As such, if you don’t get there early, you’re likely not getting there at all. Once the opponent has a decent chance of outlasting your early efforts anyway, trying to outrun diverse strategies becomes a very risky proposition. I don’t think we’re at a point yet where this approach doesn’t work at all, but it is much harder than it has ever been.
While both approaches above work, they are somewhat unsatisfying in that they force you to go all in on a particular strategy you might not enjoy particularly much. This is because they treat diverse strategies as a set of varied answers and threats that will have trouble if fighting is concentrated on one particular field of battle.
Attacking Common Game States
Luckily there are ways to deal with diverse strategies that aren’t as strategically limiting. All of these rely on identifying linear characteristics in diverse strategies and attacking those. To start with, here’s one that MOCS champion Reid Duke (who brought us NO RUG, if you need further recommendation) brought to the Invitational:
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (25)
Spells (29)
- 4 Hymn to Tourach
- 3 Cursed Scroll
- 4 Dark Ritual
- 1 Nether Void
- 4 Sinkhole
- 1 Pox
- 1 Spinning Darkness
- 3 Innocent Blood
- 4 Smallpox
- 4 Inquisition of Kozilek
Sideboard
The linearity he identified was a particular game state the common good stuff blue decks would recreate again and again: few lands (holding back lands is important to maximize Brainstorm), a single threatening creature, and a card or two in hand. You know what is really ridiculous in that kind of game state? Smallpox. Smallpox may not look like a typical hate card, but if the above game state comes up again and again, just casting Smallpox is likely to end up being an insane blowout.
That isn’t where the deck stops, though. Just about every card in Reid’s Pox deck is going to be great against that game state. Innocent Blood? Excellent removal. Hymn to Tourach? Gets rid of the few cards in hand and disables building hand size for Brainstorm. Nether Spirit? Neutralizes a creature on its own usually. Liliana? Ridiculous again. It first kills their only creature, then starts eating up their hand. All in all, the Pox strategy is incredibly powerful against decks that regularly get into board states as described above, and a lot of diverse strategies end up playing out that way.
A more limited way to use this principle is something like Cataclysm (a massively underplayed card, by the way) in G/W/B Loam decks. The card provides a trump against a number of strategies when you have a Knight of the Reliquary or Tarmogoyf on the board and/or Loam online but is particularly vicious against a game state that diverse strategy decks of a more controllish bent like to get into: a board full of lands with a Jace. Cataclysm gets rid of the otherwise hard to kill Jace while also bringing the opponent’s resources tumbling down (no playing a new Jace off a single land) and being powerful when it doesn’t find its target (Jace or no Jace, nearly Armageddon-ing a control deck is good times—well not for me generally, but I know my opponents usually seem to enjoy themselves).
These examples only scratch the tip of the iceberg, and many common sideboard cards already work in this way (Perish is good against boards full of green creatures—you don’t say). In the context of attacking diverse strategies in particular, it is important that your hate is flexible. It shouldn’t attack one particular element of the strategy but be effective against as much of their deck as possible. One of the key factors that makes a good card or strategy against these decks is additional utility. If they don’t have what you were attacking, the card still has to be able to significantly impact the game. There are many options—from something with a comparatively minor impact like Scavenging Ooze dealing with Snapcaster recursion while beating down (and providing maindeck hate against truly graveyard-centric decks/managing Tarmogoyf sizes) to Sylvan Library functioning as Ancestral Recall (against controllish decks, which often won’t have pressure on the board) to something as ridiculously powerful as Sulfuric Vortex (nice lifelink on that Batterskull)—effective cards to punish diverse strategies that have fallen a little too much into the trap of linear-like game plans exist. You only need to fit them into the correct shell.
Attacking Overlap
Instead of searching for linear-like game states to attack, there is also the option of abusing linear-like properties of diverse strategies as far as deck construction is concerned. In that case, the question is what all those diverse strategies have in common and can’t do without. The second part of the sentence is the important one here. If you attack something they all share (let’s say Brainstorm, though there are diverse strategies not running blue) but which isn’t essential to their actual strategy, your “hate” plan is doomed to fail. You’ll spend cards trading for non-essential elements of their strategy while they develop only marginally hindered. That’s the reason trying to hate Brainstorm the card isn’t ever going to work out well. All it does is to make their deck play out smoother, so fighting Brainstorm in and of itself won’t keep them from implementing their strategy (a big reason Chains of Mephistopheles is in fact not the ideal answer to a metagame heavy on Brainstorm).
Instead you need to hit something that is really necessary for them to function. Chalice of the Void for one is solid against some of these decks (depending on what you’re trying to do) because it usually takes out most of their removal and some library manipulation but is only truly backbreaking against a limited number of decks (the tempo decks with roughly thirty one-mana spells). Not to mention it doesn’t have a consistent shell to use it in (yet?).
Generally the easiest way to attack overlap between different incarnations of the diverse strategies principle is to attack their mana, as that is something they all share. Null Rod in Vintage serves exactly that purpose. When a third of your opponent’s manabase is likely to be artifacts, casting a two-drop that shuts them off is usually pretty crippling.
As far as the current crop of Legacy blue decks is concerned, attacking the mana will mean attacking dual-fetch manabases. This seems like a very promising strategy considering most linear decks are also likely to rely on a manabase heavy on fetches and duals, meaning your “hate” is actually very efficient elsewhere, too.
Blood Moon is the poster child of that angle of attack (and lo and behold, there is a Blood Moon deck in the Top 8 of both the last Open and GP Amsterdam—Imperial Painter), but there are other devastating ways to punish people for using fancy manabases. Fetchlands in particular aren’t seeing enough hate. Let’s just take a look at a few cards with massive potential:
Ankh of Mishra: How is there no burn heavy red aggro deck using this? With an Ankh in play, every land is two damage (reasonable), but every fetchland is five (5!). That’s a quarter of the opponent’s life total! I’ve played Ankh Sligh in Vintage years ago, and turn-two Ankh is a ridiculous beating, especially on the play. And that was Vintage—a format in which almost all opponents have access to a bunch of artifact mana to mitigate Ankh’s effect, at a time when Jackal Pup was actually the best red one-drop.
Root Maze: This is an all but forgotten goodie that can be ridiculously powerful against opponents sporting fetchlands. If you play this on turn one, they’ll be able to get mana out of a fetchland by turn 3 at the earliest! Playtesting back in Vintage, I managed to race actual combo decks with something as simple as 10-land stompy on the back of just Root Maze and a bunch of crappy green creatures. Double Time Walk for G is that good.
Sadly I don’t have good shells for either of these cards, though I suspect Root Maze might fit into Berserk Stompy.
You don’t have to go all in on the fetchlands, though. A less evident example is the build of Nic Fit Caleb Durward brought to the Invitational. It does profit from exploitable deckbuilding in diverse strategy decks, too, though it’s a less obviously hateful interaction he abuses. Instead of directly hating on opposing non-basic heavy manabases, he runs Veteran Explorer. If the opponent doesn’t have the basics to accelerate thanks to it, that card is yet another kind of double Time Walk. Clearly not a hate card in the traditional sense but an incredibly efficient way to get an edge by seeing linearity in opposing deck construction.
It doesn’t have to be non-basic hate either. Just look at those Chokes in the Maverick sideboard above. Have you played against Choke with a blue deck? It isn’t pretty, that’s for sure. Or how about Pyrostatic Pillar? If your deck is almost always going to have a life-total advantage, Pillar will be a ridiculous beating against any kind of Delver deck because the race to zero is generally going to be in your favor if every spell deals its caster two.
Those are the kinds of interactions that you have to pursue if you want to beat diverse strategies. Do something that is powerful anyway but becomes ridiculous against your target audience. There is no clear, obvious hate for their strategy, and finding something that beats their best card alone isn’t going to get you anywhere. By finding the areas in which these decks behave somewhat like linear decks gives you something to aim your hate at, and by using something that is actually reasonable against most of the format, you get a good deck instead of a steaming pile of hate.
Trump
Finally, there’s another way to beat diverse strategies—by figuring out which base they haven’t covered and giving yourself a way to attack there. Reid Duke Cursed Scrolls received a lot of commentary in the coverage of the Invitational for exactly that reason. The U/R Delver deck doesn’t have a single creature that will live through an active Cursed Scroll and has no way to get rid of it. Essentially, just by playing a Cursed Scroll, you give yourself absolute inevitability. If they win, it’s going to have to be early so if the rest of your deck will keep them from doing so, things are looking good.
Another example of this is the Punishing Fire/Grove of the Burnwillows engine. Assuming you get it online (and have some way of fighting opposing Wasteland), how is any of the common blue tempo or control decks ever going to beat it? Just about all of their creatures die to Fire (with the exception of Goofy), be they Stoneforge Mystics or Delver of Secrets; Jaces and Elspeths get Fired, and at some point even their life total is going to succumb to continuous pinging. They can interact with it marginally with Wasteland, but as soon as you also have some graveyard recursion (say Life from the Loam), they’re essentially cold.
Academy Ruins (plus Engineered Explosives), Volrath’s Stronghold (plus either a threat or a Shriekmaw), or Thrun, the Last Troll all give you ways to present a threat a lot of the flexible decks are simply not prepared to deal with.
You could also go all out and just build your deck to ignore most common interaction that diverse strategies have access to. Dredge is obviously the master-strategy that relies on this kind of loophole (Can’t deal with the ‘yard, huh? Bad luck, bub.), but simply ramping mana to hardcast Emrakul also works.
End of Angles
That’s it; those are the main angles I can think of to attack diverse strategies other than just building a more powerful diverse deck (and these approaches help even there). I hope this was instructive for some of you; next time you feel there is a deck that needs beating, don’t just open the pages with the designated hate cards in your binder. Instead find flaws in the strategy you’re facing and exploit them.
If you keep hitting them in the same spot until you reach a breaking point or if you just attack from an uncovered angle, it doesn’t matter—what matters is that you chose the right angle or point. With diverse decks more so than with any other style of deck, these old wise words ring true: Know thy enemy! There may not be obvious flaws, but flaws there are.
Until next time, hit them were it hurts!
Carsten Kötter