Tooth and Nail, the Finale

After the release of 9^th Edition, a lot of people were wondering how much the loss of Plow Under hurts the Green monster deck. Well, certainly, without Plow Under anymore, Medium Green has lost its strong position in Standard, which spells good news for TNN. But the bad news is TNN now has lost four essential spells against those annoying Blue decks, which is a huge drawback. It also made the transformational sideboard a little bit more awkward, since you can never have the turn 3 Iwamori, turn 4 Plow both your lands, gg. And to make things worse, the popularity of BlueTron also had weakened TNN because of the loss of Plow Under in Green and the gain of Annex in Blue. Red players have Sowing Salt or Fractured Loyalty against Tooth. In case some of you are not sure what the Loyalty does, you will know it when your own Iwamori or Molder Slug start trashing you from the wrong side of the table.

The biggest question remains: Can Tooth still prevail in such heavy hate environment against it? The answer, obviously, relies on your build. Lately, I’ve noticed the importance of Viridian Shaman in any deck that could produce Green mana. Even Rats took the trouble to play them. Rats has a fine and stable mana base, but now they were playing with Tendo Ice Bridge and Llanowar Wastes in order to splash for four copies of the Green 187 dude. Every deck has a target for the innocent Shaman in this metagame. He kills stuff like Mox, Jitte, Shackles, Mindslaver, Memnarch and the list goes on. In fact, I would go as far as Viridian Shaman is almost the substitute for the loss of Plow Under in the post 9^th Edition Standard. It’s funny that it wasn’t anything significant to the metagame when Plow Under was still around, but as Plow leaves, Viridian Shaman was the next best choice to take the slot, although it can never beat Plow Under in terms of raw power and advantage.

The conclusion is pretty straightforward and simple: if your deck could produce Green mana, you have to play Viridian Shaman. Now, I’ll present you the last and final version of my TNN: TNN v3.

Troll and Nail v 3.0

Terry Soh

Test deck on 09-04-2005

Standard

Creatures (14)

Lands (12)

Spells (34)

Sideboard

Sundering Titan vs. Darksteel Colossus

Note that if you had followed my series of Tooth and Nail, you will find a huge difference in the original deck and this version. The original version contained two copies of each Sundering Titan and Duplicant, and I emphasized each of their importance in the deck. But now, they no longer warrant even a single slot in the deck. They no longer belong in the current environment as well. There is no 5CG anymore. Bribery has left as well, which means your Darksteel Colossus would never appear at your opponent side of the table as early as turn 4.

Sundering Titan is not even good against BlueTron even if you managed to resolve Tooth and Nail. However, a Kiki Jiki with Colossus deals 22 damage within two turns and it is really important to have access to Colossus in the any Tron matchup, since it trumps Titan. Titan used to be the better card, but since the metagame now has changed with the addition of 9^th Edition, I do think Colossus is the better card now.

Triskelion vs. Duplicant

As for the Duplicant and Triskelion dilemma, it is a harder choice to decide. Duplicant is overall a more solid card if you’re able to draw it. Triskelion, on the other hand, is a little weaker compared to Duplicant, but it offers the one-sided Wrath of God combo with your Tooth and Nail. Now that the environment is filled with WW, Rats and Red decks, the Trisk-Vampire combo seems to be making sense to be in the maindeck.

On the flip side, it added an additional redundant card to the Tooth deck with the Mephidross Vampire, which means there are more chances to randomly draw a Kiki-Jiki or Mephidross Vampire in your opening hand, which equates to a mulligan. You can’t deal with Arc-Slogger as well if you did not cast your Tooth and Nail or Oblivion Stone, unlike Duplicant which you can hard cast it to fight opposing Sloggers. Triskelion just couldn’t do that.

Overall, I think now that the environment has a healthy mixture of between creature and control decks, the Trisk-Vamp combo is needed in order to have a good chances against the creature decks. Sometimes, Kiki-jiki with Duplicant is just not enough against a horde of fliers.

Chrome Mox

I remember how I did criticized this card when someone played it at U.S. Regionals. After the addition of 9^th Edition, it totally changed the card selection of the Tooth cards. Sure, your ultimate goal is still resolving a Tooth and Nail, but beyond that you still have a lot of non-Tooth factors to consider. When I thought that Birds was a better choice than Mox, it was simply because the presence of Plow Under. With Birds, you can consistently cast Plow on turn 3 or turn 4 without losing any card economy, unlike Mox. In fact, all the debate going on between Mox and Birds (or Llanowar Elf now) is about the one card loss from Mox, and the flexibility it offers.

In a control matchup, the battle of resources and card advantage is so important that losing a card to achieve speed is not something that’s acceptable for me. Birds or Elves give you the same boost as Mox will, so why bother losing an extra card? In this scenario, I give the credit to the one-mana men.

However, in the creature matchup, speed is essentially important to achieve, and you will have to burn cards for pure speed. You don’t have much time and space to maneuver against creature strategy. In fact, I would say that as long as you don’t lose the game, you will win the long game. It’s because your deck is designed to capitalize on the long game, and the creature strategy hopes to end the game as fast as possible. They will try to overwhelm you with speed. In order to have a fair fight with them, you have to have a fair share of speed as well. Mox is definitely better here than Elf, because you can achieve speed anytime you draw the Mox rather then the creatures that you will have to wait for a turn later to gain the additional mana.

The conclusion for Mox is pretty simple: in control matchup, the one-mana men shine. In the creature matchup, the Mox is better. Mox has a different value in Tooth and BlueTron. They have no choice of playing mana men – their only choice is Mox. Tooth has a choice in between them, so choose wisely, depending on your metagame.

Kodama’s Reach

A lot of Tooth lists don’t run this card anymore. They choose Vine Trellis instead. I beg to differ. Now that Vine Trellis is gone for good, if anyone still does not run this card, I would recommend that person play another deck instead. [The Japanese say thee nay! – Knut, just providing the 411] This card is too good not to play with 4 copies. Card advantage, additional library manipulation with Sensei’s Divining Top, and acceleration is all you can get from this card, making it the ideal card you’re looking for at control matchup, where battle of attrition matters most. A must-play card.

The Sideboard

Some people have opted to run the more conventional Tooth sideboard plan as though the creature plan never existed. They run additional high-end artifact creatures, Cranial Extractions, Circle of Protection: Red and such. For me, I still prefer my old friend Troll Ascetic. The importance of outthinking your opponents can’t be denied for the TNN deck. If your sideboard has the creatures, your opponent might make the wrong sideboard choice. If you do not have the creatures, your opponent knows exactly how to board against you, which I think is a huge disadvantage. Despite the fact that the transformational sideboard is nothing new these days, it still works wonders if you managed to trick your opponent into the wrong cards to play against. Sideboard cards always have two different targets; either they are good against creatures or they are good against the slow decks. Your opponent has to choose a plan to stick to.

4 Troll Ascetic, 3 Iwamori of the Open Fist

They are your regular beatsticks. It is important to be able to draw a Troll or Iwamori in the opening if you changed to the beatdown mode, so I upped the number of Iwamori to 3 instead of 2. Troll, as always, takes up 4 slots in the sideboard. Nothing much needed to be explained about their efficiency to support the beatdown mode as I covered them in the previous articles.

2 Oxidize, 1 Viridian Shaman, 1 Molder Slug

If Iwamori is not a legend, I would have run 4 copies of it in the deck. Unfortunately, it is a legend. The one Molder Slug basically acts as the fourth Iwamori in the sideboard. I always prefer to have Iwamori instead of Slug because he hits harder and he comes out a turn earlier. That said, Molder Slug is still a very solid card in the deck. It serves the purpose of a beatstick while ensuring no good artifact will stay on your opponent’s side. The purposely choose to run only one Slug is because the deck already has plenty of artifact destruction cards that could be cast earlier before the Slug. Viridian Shaman destroys early Mox and Jinxed Choker and trades with Zo-zu or Slith. By the time Slug would appear to destroy those, it would be too late.

Oxidize is the unorthodox card that I love here. It kills those annoying Blinkmoth Nexuses that you can’t handle. It kills equipment at instant speed when your opponent casts a Jitte/Sword of Fire and Ice and tries to utilize them that turn. Imagine your Red opponent casts Seething Song, then a Sword of Fire and Ice, equips it to his 2/2 Zo-zu and attacks into your Troll Ascetic while you only have one mana untapped. He attacked with confidence, but the confidence was shattered by your one-mana Oxidize. I don’t see the reason to run Naturalize over Oxidize, since the only deck that makes your Naturalize worthwhile is White Weenie, and you still have Oblivion Stone to deal with those pesky enchantments.

4 Creeping Mold

I do understand this is nothing significant compared to the good’ old Plow Under, but really, this is your best choice available right now. It is still pretty decent against mirror and BlueTron. You don’t really have much choice. I believe those who run Creeping Mold will always have an advantage in the mirror or BlueTron compared to those who did not run it. This will leave you with eight reasonable land destruction cards after board against any other deck with UrzaTrons. I do not recommend you to board in Creeping Mold against creature strategy decks because it is too slow. Moreover, you already have a healthy amount of efficient artifacts removal. Therefore, Creeping Mold is not needed here.

Overall Tooth can still be played, but it is not the best deck anymore with the lost of Plow Under. It has indirectly boosted the Blue deck, since their common enemy now has lost their four most important cards against them. I strongly recommend you to play the transformational sideboard as there will be a lot of Sowing Salt running around due to the growing popularity of BlueTron and its vulnerability against it.

It is really hard to tell you how the deck fares against each deck in the format, because in my opinion every deck has a chance to win depending on card selection and the quality of players you are facing. It is the nature of the game that WW should beat Red, but this is not what we need to know here. TNN is overall pretty neutral and has no nightmare matchup, at least with the Trolls on board.

In a few months time, Tooth and Nail will no longer exists in Standard, and I hope you guys enjoyed your time casting your nine-mana sorcery in game 1, and casting Troll Ascetic in game 2.

Good luck.