Please hold while we load your cart...
[SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE ARTICLE!]
Become a StarCityGames.com Premium Member and receive exclusive access to top-level strategies, new decklists and entertaining reports from many of the best players and writers that the game has to offer! This includes "The Innovator" & Worlds finalist Patrick Chapin, 2010 Player of the Year Brad Nelson, Classic Theorist Mike Flores, Hall of Famer Brian Kibler, GP and SCG Invitational Champion Gerry Thompson, StarCityGames.com Director of Sales Ben Bleiweiss ...and many, many more!
PLUS! StarCityGames.com Premium members now have an EXCLUSIVE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER sent just to them with the latest tech, exclusive content and exclusive deals along with unprecedented access into America's largest Magic: the Gathering sales database, and can view lists of StarCityGames.com's top-selling items - broken down by category, format legality, and rarity - in real time! When it comes to trading, increased knowledge equals increased profits - and increased knowledge is just one click away for our Premium members!
A StarCityGames.com Premium Membership gives you exclusive access to the best Magic: the Gathering content available and is an amazing bargain for just pennies a day! When you're ready to start getting more out of this game, click here to join StarCityGames.com Premium today!
If you are a valid StarCityGames.com Premium member and still cannot view the article, please consult this FAQ.
Once upon a time we had this awful year (two years of Standard really) when Wizards of the Coast released a sequence of dizzying sets called Invasion Block. At the time single Invasion was released, noted deck builders like Brian Kibler and Zvi Mowshowitz were saying it was the best set for Constructed of maybe all time, Gary Wise was extolling the virtues of breaking the two-color mold in Limited with Harrow for added flexibility, we all laid garlands and leis and ceremonial headdresses on one another while braiding each other's hair thanks to the reprinting of Lobotomy (which had apparently Addled us all, no relation), revelled at the impending cleverness of a kicked Probe, and all in all were very excited. However, once the juggernauts of Planeshift and Apocalypse were released in full, especially in Block Constructed, I personally observed all this invading to be a cluster bomb of color-screwed good players killing themselves with Yavimaya Coast taps while being overrun by God knows what small children.
I was particularly frustrated at how the power level of the multicolored cards dictated Standard deck design choices with some kind of martinet's crop, epidemically stifling the ability of, say, Black decks to react in any wise to Red/x starts beginning with Llanowar Elves. It was a testament at the time that the rogue decks that stood out like sore thumbs were Dave Price's mono-Red beatdown deck (a version of which eventually took Mike Turian to his World Championships Top 8) and Adrian Sullivan's homage to Alan Comer, Manascrew Blue (a mono-Blue deck so named by Adrian's friend Brian Kowal because, as you can probably figure out, anyone playing it was always manascrewed because it had, how shall we say, no land).
I am not just randomly hating on Invasion Block because I didn't "do well," by the way. While Invasion Block was relevant and in print, I actually personally took my greatest concentration of money tournaments maybe ever, effortlessly won a sequence of PTQs - including an Extended one with Spiritmonger-powered The Rock (thanks Sol!) - and had my best Pro Tour finish to date, in Limited. I just hated the mana situation and design constraints, and to this day will cry out that the naked efficiency of the multicolored cards over everything but Flametongue Kavu and Fact or Fiction (the paragons enabling the single-color Price and Sullivan decks) made deck design very stagnant and tournaments - in which I participated on a weekly basis, at least - less fun (I don't complain about sets very often, but personally I would much rather figure out Red Decks and the G/W Deck to fight full-on Ravager Affinity with Disciples and Vials and play Mirrodin Standard than Invasion Standard). There was a reason why every little kid won with Fires... Fires of Yavimaya was that good, and not playing it - specifically with certain fading cards - was folly (I was very apprehensive about Ravnica Block because of these multicolored strictures, but Ravnica Block in each and every iteration has turned out to be awesome). Deck designers were faced with a one-two punch of a) playing or not playing the most powerful and synergistic available multicolored cards and b) having to stop such combinations and synergies with relatively underpowered strategies, unless they adopted similarly scripted multicolored anti-strategies.
Now Invasion Block, for its quirks and color-screws, was full of flashy cards that people loved and even I remember fondly, like Gerrard's Verdict, Goblin Legionnaire, and Terminate. These cards just have the word awesome stamped on them in giant letters. They aren't Time Spiral or Yawgmoth's Bargain, but they are good for what they cost and you know you are supposed to play them and they help make good decks that could compete with Fires (okay, so Terminate couldn't, but it was still cool). Because of their color requirements, certain elements of your deck would always be dictated for you if you wanted to play cheap and beautiful cards like these, so you ultimately accepted certain patterns based on the previous Block or Standard, meaning that you might simply miss or dismiss new cards because they didn't fit into those patterns, despite also being good.
"It probably could have been a pretty good tournament card, except they printed a different creature in the same
set for the same mana cost that is basically better in every way."
Jon Finkel
Everyone knows that Shadowmage Infiltrator, It! Girl! of early Odyssey was quickly overshadowed by the Greatest Creature of All Time (tm), but do you realize that the flashy Green spells in Odyssey were Call of the Herd and Beast Attack? People kind of saw Wild Mongrel as a potentially powerful card, even extolled it as such, but the Savage Bastard didn't end up in Tier 1 decks for months. Judgment was almost on us before Deep Dog as we know it showed up in Standard - and Ken Ho had already won the Block Pro Tour with his Tarnished Citadel deck!
I actually talked with Mark Rosewater about the secret power of Odyssey, and he chuckled about it. The Odyssey cards were not immediately flashy. It took a few months for people to realize how nigh-broken - not just "synergistic" - Psychatog's mechanics made it, or even how the then-underplayed Wild Mongrel could completely shut down Jonny Magic's allegedly fearsome offense. The Odyssey cards - specifically the ones that worked with Torment's Madness mechanic - formed an unbreakable core of synergy that led to unfair Magic: The Gathering. Regardless of the fact that individual cards might be able to stand on their own merits, players were unable to see that they were actually more powerful than the Invasion Block options until they were all linked arm-in-arm.
Think about it: Today we tremble at the thought of an Upheaval into Psychatog, but coming out of Invasion Block Constructed, most players were still tuning to seven instead of nine for the Desolation Angel sequence, despite it being more vulnerable, less reliable, and, um, not Blue. Awesome builds of U/G would eventually surface, the forerunners of National Championship decks and Masters winners, but many of us - even very good designers - were stuck in an Opposition alley based on Satoshi Nakamura's deck, maybe incorporating some cool new Beast Attacks, but missing the format's potential speed entirely. It took months, another Block Constructed Pro Tour, and at least one Standard Masters tournament before players realized that the brightly colored Invasion cards were in fact not the ones that were going to rule bigger formats for years to come.
It is in this spirit that I have noticed a giant blunder being made by many if not most Standard Magic players. It took me a while to grasp that Sakura-Tribe Elder was no longer the best card in Standard, but between Heezy and Jeroen I now buy that it might not be Top 5 even (Jeroen made the argument that there are several very good - even polychromatic - Green decks, and that only Heartbeat plays or even wants Tribe Elder). Okay, I'm slow and the best card from Champions of Kamigawa no longer makes Top 1... I Josh already figured out that Spell Snare is was the best card in Standard. The reason Spell Snare is so good is that every deck has critical two drops, from Counterbalance to Lightning Helix, and for one mana the 'Snare can contain even the most explosive 'Vore opening on the draw. It is unspectacular and unassuming, but like the tiny bubbles in a poorly-prepared syringe, it can topple a strategy fifteen turns before the end, with the opposing player maybe never understanding why he lost. Spell Snare is the straw that broke the camel's back, the missing scale in Smaug's armored underbelly, the one mana fulcrum, the tipping point. It doesn't win the game by itself, it merely invalidates the single Maher hand that inspired the other guy to keep, or buys the lone turn required to massage away any and all momentum from the opponent's planned sequence of dominoes. Still great, it is no longer the best card in Standard.
Rather than creating any more drama (and I'm sure astute readers have already figured this one out), I think that one of the best strategies available in Standard today is simply not being played (or not being played to its potential), and that the best card in the format - certainly the best card in Coldsnap - is Skred.
Many of you are, without even reading the next several paragraphs, moving to click to the forums. You have probably not played enough with Skred.
Like Spell Snare, Skred is not the kind of card that wins the game by itself. All it does is completely redefine the format.
Since October 2005, the Standard including full Kamigawa Block and every incremental wave of Ravnica Block has been defined by one best strategy: the Blue Legend top-end. I am not interested in arguing about the best Champs era deck. It's obvious on the results what the best statistical strategy was, which led to the decks that were played most in the Standard portion of the World Championships. Come Pro Tour: Honolulu, the details changed, with UrzaTron becoming the structure by which Blue Legends hit the board, and they hit more quickly. While it was a Gruul deck that won that tournament, many pundits say that had Osyp Lebedowicz not "mis-clicked" against Mark Herberholz, there may have been a different winner eating his Hawaiian chicken dinner. Meanwhile, the massive statistical success of the Owling Mine deck (never to be seen again in the winner's bracket) can be attributed to the predator-prey relationship keyed specifically on beating Blue control. Past Dissension, a new coat of paint was added to the same strategies with decks as seemingly different as Solar Flare and White Wafo-Tapa. These deck were not always "the best" each and every week - we are not saying that, make no mistake - but instead that they were the critical tent pole that held up the structure of the metagame, just as Kird Ape decks - and the Lantern Kamis before them - defined the equal and opposite bound. With Skred, the whole notion of trading one-for-one with Spell Snares or Volcanic Hammers or Remands, topping up with a Compulsive Research, Jushi Apprentice, or Tidings, then tapping out for a Keiga is over. Should players adopt Skred, the idea that Iwamori of the Open Fist is a reliably trump sideboard card against other Red/x beatdown decks is shaky at best. The dominance of Green fatty decks over little Red men is a thing of the past.
Once upon a time there was a Pro player and champion of charisma and quiet gravity whose fame for beatdown would never be challenged, and whose popularity in victory would never be questioned until Maher. He won with Lava Hounds in 1997, and defined what Magic was for young boys and their basic Mountains for at least two years. Riding the months after his Los Angeles 1998 win, David Price's Deadguy Red deck would define and rule Standard, earning Price himself a U.S. Nationals Top 8 in the face of the ascendant Oath of Druids deck, and his teammates Jon Finkel and Chris Pikula similar berths at Worlds later in the summer; variants on this deck would reward scads of players, not the least of whom was the inexorable Ben Rubin and his Mogg Flunkies. Deadguy Red was fast and powerful and simple to play (if not play perfectly); it could consistently compete with Cadaverous Bloom, and won consistently interesting battles with Draw-Go and Forbidian variants. Due to its simplicity and popularity, it was always competing, and the bane of the haughty if hard working deck designer, would consistently put less talented amateurs at the top tables, such was its force.
But with the stupidest strategy yet suggested in the old Usenet boards, Jamie Wakefield and his 7/7 Saproling engines could consistently squash mighty Deadguy Red like a bug. Raphael Levy would eat Price himself for dinner on the Pro Tour with Legion Land Loss. Seth Burn's Stupid Green would oust Dave from the U.S. Nationals Top 8 in a flurry of Uktabi Orangutans, Spike Feeders, and Stampeding Wildebeests. If there is a truism in Magic, it is that if you want to beat little Red spells, you do so with big and dumb Green animals.
... Unless they are fighting Skred.
Skred is the Snow Plow. It is Swords to Plowshares 2006, a card secreted in Ice Age Block to the present day. It is powerful beyond easy understanding. It costs one mana.
Why is Skred the best card in Standard? Easy: It screws everybody (well, almost everybody, seeing as it does not screw Heartbeat and is only okay against 'Vore). For a long time I was playing decks reminiscent of Sand Burn, and in matchup after matchup, I was substituting Skred for Volcanic Hammer. Why? Because it kills Birds of Paradise on turn 1, Rumbling Slum on turn 4, and Angel of Despair whenever. Skred is not a card to be trifled with. As it is one mana, it resolves. Don't try to protect your Meloku with Remand or Mana Leak. This is Skred. If people bend their bases to Snow, the age of the attrition-Blue Legend will officially be over.
In case you are interested, here is a B/R deck that I have been working on:
| Snow Burn Featured by Mike Flores on 2006-09-10 (Standard) | ||
Artifacts 4 Sensei's Divining Top Creatures 4 Dark Confidant Enchantments 4 Seal of Fire Instants 4 Char 4 Skred |
Snow Artifacts 4 Coldsteel Heart Snow Creatures 1 Stalking Yeti Sorceries 4 Cryoclasm 4 Demonfire 3 Persecute Basic Snow Lands 8 Snow-Covered Mountain 8 Snow-Covered Swamp Snow Lands 4 Scrying Sheets 4 Tresserhorn Sinks | 3 Pithing Needle 3 Stalking Yeti 3 Cranial Extraction 4 Deathmark 2 Sowing Salt |
 |
 | |
| Download this deck in Apprentice format! |
Download this deck in Magic Online Text format! | |
Since Charleston, and especially Johan's B/R deck that I wrote about a few weeks ago, I have been all about winning with Demonfire. Chapin and I were talking about it and the amazing thing is that once you decide you are going to win with Demonfire; the mana just comes. Your world changes from worrying about the minutiae of fighting, and instead you are just drawing lands and sculpting your game and looking four or five or ten turns ahead, once you establish the minimum amount of mana you need to survive. You are playing for a while, and all of a sudden you are playing these strategic long game dances and POW! you are winning with remainder on the heels of a Hellbent Demonfire, and the opponent had no idea it was coming. Clueless players are continuously commenting about terms that they overheard, like "burn range," like these terms mean anything. You are Demonfire.
The abuses of this deck are based on the triumvirate of Sensei's Divining Top, Dark Confidant, and Scrying Sheets. The first two are fine alone, and Sheets is surprisingly good blind. When you have Top and either of the other two unchecked, you will generally only lose to a non-interactive victory path (Heartbeat or Cranial Extraction) or an unchecked Jitte, especially when combined with Paladin En-Vec (which this deck admittedly has troubles beating, even with all the burn); when fighting this deck, it is virtually impossible to win a fair fight based on trading cards. The only thing I don't particularly like about the Maher interactions is that once you have Bob and Top online, you will often just ignore Sheets and do "other stuff," like trading cards with the opponent.
This is my favorite story from playing this deck:
I was high on Snow immediately (as you probably know from the Icicle Chronicles), but once I decided that I didn't need Into the North to play Snow at all, I was fine with Mono-U and U/b Snow decks. If you play these decks don't be surprised if your opponents hee-haw all over Counterbalance. I don't know what people are thinking with this card sometimes. I've had players run Savannah Lions against Counterbalance / Top, express surprise when their Lions are cantrip-countered... and then play Isamaru immediately after like it is going to resolve. I once got in a counter war (if you can call it a war) over a threat, where the opponent Remanded me, I showed Counterbalance on top with the Top, and then he attempted to Mana Leak the same threat.
Anyway, as you know from Japanese Nationals, Counterbalance / Top is awesome, and I played versus a lot of it with this deck on MTGO the past couple of weeks.
My opponent was a very good player with Rating exceeding mine by over 100 points.
I had Top / Sheets from the beginning so I got my minimum game. He had Top for his minimum game, but we killed each other's Bobs so I had the Sheets advantage but for his Court Hussar. The game kind of plodded, with him hitting me for one a turn about eight times when he played Counterbalance. My board was about nine lands due to Top / Sheets and one Seal of Fire. I let it stick. He chanced the Meloku with two up because - let's be honest - I wasn't really going to die to his Court Hussar. I said okay. Top produced another Snow-Covered land, and I untapped.
For my first trick, I played the land, then asked the innocuous question "Seal of Fire?"
He looked at his three cards and decided that getting +1 by countering the Seal with flip-Top was probably better than getting +1 by losing his Clouded Mirror of Victory. I responded with a Skred with the flip on the stack, then let the flip resolve to counter the Seal. With the Top (i.e. a "1") safely on top of his deck, I played two Chars to the nug. He may have made one Illusion, but it doesn't make the story any more or less interesting so I don't care about that part. On his turn, the relentless Court Hussar put me to nine or whatever. He passed with six or seven in hand. End of turn I just looked at the top of my deck.
Top gave me the 11th land. Six cards in hand, eh? My final card was... You probably already know.
What I realized was that cutting Volcanic Hammer, a superlative slayer of Watchwolves to be sure, for Skred was that I wasn't really giving up so much margin against control. The Skreds were important to destroy Adarkar Valkyries and so on, exclusive of doming for three with a Hammer. Because the goal of this style is to win with Demonfire anyway, the tension becomes one of mana rather than Philosophy of Fire-style card advantage... and both Scrying Sheets and Maher are solid producers of extra mana while a deck is playing the standard attrition game.
After cutting Volcanic Hammer, it became increasingly easy to cut other burn and removal spells for effective disruptive elements like Persecute. Overall I would rate the deck as "very good." I don't think it's the "best" deck, but it is very serviceable, solid at fighting on MTGO, runs a nice primary game, and has a lot of powerful cards. I am very partial to Sheets engine decks, so I think this deck is more fun than you might. The main thing that just "bugs" me about the deck, even though Bob is a card drawing engine and Demonfire does the bulk of the grunt work, is that the tempo is a bit off as a Cryoclasm deck with only four two drops leading in.
This deck hates: Paladin En-Vec, a Jitte.
This deck loves: Control, straightforward trading strategies.
The deck I like even more is a very similar style, but has Into the North to better set up its engine. At various points in the past week I have had as many as four Rumbling Slums and three Moldervine Cloaks, but I streamlined the deck more and more towards its core competencies and really like where it has ended up:
| KarstenBot BabyKiller Featured by Mike Flores on 2006-09-10 (Standard) | ||
Artifacts 4 Sensei's Divining Top Creatures 4 Llanowar Elves Instants 4 Skred Snow Creatures 4 Boreal Druid 4 Ohran Viper 2 Stalking Yeti |
Sorceries 4 Cryoclasm 4 Demonfire 4 Into the North 4 Stone Rain Basic Snow Lands 8 Snow-Covered Forest 5 Snow-Covered Mountain Snow Lands 4 Highland Weald 1 Mouth of Ronom 4 Scrying Sheets | 4 Seal of Fire 1 Naturalize 4 Umezawa's Jitte 2 Stalking Yeti 4 Wreak Havoc |
 |
 | |
| Download this deck in Apprentice format! |
Download this deck in Magic Online Text format! | |
The name comes from some inside joke between BDM, Billy Moreno, and the eponymous Fanatic. Apparently it involves a hapless Frank being confined in an enclosed space with the aforementioned New York Bees and some tasteless ugly American humor. Rumor has it that Jeroen Remie is going to "big burgle" the name of this deck if not the deck itself for Dutch Nationals because, honestly, if you had to win in the Top 8 of the second hardest National Championship in the world, wouldn't you want to be armed with any kind of KarstenBot BabyKiller you possibly could?
Anyway, I took the most explosive elements that I could from 8StoneRain.dec, but streamlined to only two colors in order to accommodate a consistent Snow manabase. The major incentive is that you have the insane turn 2 options of Stone Rain, Cryoclasm, and Ohran Viper, and you can fall back on Sheets / Top for the middle turns. This deck dominates if the Vipers get in (with Skred really excelling of course), but you are fine going mana / Sheets / Top to set up a long game Demonfire plan, or just Stalking Yeti loop mana. The losses from the switch are big Slum and the holy Blue trinity... and Jitte. In return you get the Top engine, Ohran Viper over Ninja of the Deep Hours (the Snake being a better card in the abstract in my opinion) and real elim... Oh, and the Demonfire endgame of course.
Any apprehension I have about the deck is that it doesn't have a lot of late game punch (no undercosted 5/5 or even Trygon Predator managing the board). This is balanced by the dominating presence of Stalking Yeti. I was initially cool on Stalking Yeti, but it turns out this card is quite insane. You would think that Stalking Yeti is best against Kird Ape and co., but apparently he really shines against mid-range Control. As such I have found that with the Sheets engine, two copies is the precisely correct number versus the field main. Basically you draw one Yeti, he kills every creature they draw (Skred mops up the Legends).
The mana is both great and a little meh. I think we've just been spoiled by Ravnica lands in general, and everyone forgets that you can run a deck on a bunch of basics and Green manipulation plus Top, like Heartbeat does to reasonable consistency. That said, you will sometimes get dodgy opening hands with Highland Weald and three one-drops (including Top) that you can't ship. You will probably lose a lot early because you forget that Boreal Druid makes S rather than G; you really have to pay attention to what drops you are making... Snow mana is not as forgiving as Ravnica.
I tried everything from Boil to Flashfires in the sideboard to reinforce the land destruction theme, but I eventually found that Wreak Havoc to be the best option. There are a lot of matchups where what you really want is another way to eat an Orzhov Basilica, and Wreak Havoc on four is something that most Blue decks are not playing around right now. This is actually quite a poor Jitte deck (it was previously a mediocre Moldervine Cloak deck), but even though I was beating Jitte decks more than I thought I would given my experience with the Black versions, I wanted a card to kill Jitte. I tried Pithing Needle, and hated using the glacial Wreak Havoc for this purpose, and eventually figured that I could just Jitte their Jitte and sometimes mise. I mise.
You've probably guessed that I switch decks a lot on MTGO. Excepting a bad run of tournaments with an "experimental" Chapin deck, I mostly still run 8StoneRain.dec in queues, but KarstenBot BabyKiller is my favorite deck to play right now.
Pros: This deck is fun to play and powerful.
Cons: I lost in a Casual Room "fun" match to... Talen Lee.
This article is about how great Skred is and Snow as the only way we can facilitate Skred, how Skred will out-last Scrying Sheets and Counterbalance once Top rotates out of Standard, but that is not to say that the rest of the Snow cadre is not awesome and Odyssey-underappreciated. Everyone knows that the mighty Katsu Mori took Japanese Nationals with his Kaji Structure & Force deck, but you probably didn't know that the nearly-as-mighty Terry Soh, a fake Dutch player covertly operating halfway around the world, played the updated Karsten version of the same to win his Nationals:
| Counterbalance Featured by Frank Karsten on 2006-09-10 (Standard) | ||
Artifacts 3 Sensei's Divining Top Creatures 3 Court Hussar 4 Dark Confidant Enchantments 2 Counterbalance Instants 3 Condemn 4 Hinder 2 Muddle the Mixture 4 Remand 1 Remove Soul 4 Spell Snare Legendary Artifacts 2 Umezawa's Jitte |
Legendary Creatures 3 Meloku the Clouded Mirror Sorceries 1 Compulsive Research Basic Snow Lands 6 Snow-Covered Island Lands 1 Adarkar Wastes 3 Godless Shrine 3 Hallowed Fountain 4 Underground River Legendary Lands 1 Miren, the Moaning Well Snow Lands 2 Boreal Shelf 2 Frost Marsh 2 Scrying Sheets | 2 Orzhov Pontiff 3 Threads of Disloyalty 2 Last Gasp 1 Umezawa's Jitte 1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni 2 Deathmark 2 Govern the Guildless 2 Persecute |
 |
 | |
| Download this deck in Apprentice format! |
Download this deck in Magic Online Text format! | |
Terry suffered some sort of mis-registration snafu on his Islands, but that didn't stop the former Invitational Champ and bluff-god from taking first. Frank really pulled out all the stops on the Structure & Force update. Not only does the deck play the Top / Counterbalance and Top / Bobby combinations, but adds a thin Snow sub-theme. Terry's deck doesn't have as much Snow as you might expect from any kind of Sheets deck, but as we said before, when you have Top / Bobby, you just ignore the Sheets draws a lot of the time because you are doing other things with your mana. By cramming nearly every possible Sensei's Divining Top-synergistic combination into one deck - and playing only three Tops - I can comfortably say that Terry Soh (and Frank Karsten) wins the award for greediest deck of the week.
Have fun killing anything and everything for one mana (or drawing two cards a turn or whatever).
LOVE
MIKE
So you’ve been slinging the paper cards for awhile, but just downloaded the Magic Online software. You might be under the illusion that Magic skill will... 
Chris submits his entry for the Longest Article Name competition, with a natty little piece discussing a Standard deck based on... 
Welcome back to the series of articles where I explore all of the various types of decks in the Casual Deck Framework. Today we are going to explore the... 
Sean investigates Time Spiral, with the aid of the Orb of Insight, and predicts what trends the coming set will introduce for Limited play. Can the information revealed thus far serve as a sufficient barometer to predict the... 
