Magical Hack – A Tale Of Three Cities

We’ve reached about the middle of the season for the Pro Tour: Austin qualifier season, and I thought I would take a look at the trend in recent events to see where things are going and have a gander at figuring out the twists and turns of this particular metagame. Every one acts differently, even if they tend to work in more-or-less the same sorts of ways, and since we have an excellent assortment of high-quality data to look at in analyzing the trends, I thought I would focus on the flow of the metagame from Barcelona through to Seattle and finally to Sao Paulo, to tell the tale of three Grand Prix and see the metagame shifts. We might presume to know all of the major players on the field, and shouldn’t really expect anything to change until the release of M10 changes the cards in the environment, but knowing which deck is right to play at any given moment is key information.

First we have Barcelona:

That same week, we have six Pro Tour Qualifier results with decklists known, which likewise showed Cascade Swans starting to explode on the scene… this is effectively Week One of the real Standard metagame being revealed, now that all the players were known and the argument for attacking the White creature-based metagame shifted from bad combos (TurboFog) to good ones (Seismic Swans).

PTQ Top 8s:

Eleven Top 8s for B/W Tokens with zero wins is pretty dismal, and a severe disappointment considering its high effectiveness at Regionals as the most-successful archetype for both making Top 8 appearances and converting that into a Nationals invite. B/G Elves, a deck we would expect to see everywhere just one month later, is barely even a blip on the radar… one Top 8 in the GP, and two PTQ Top 8s is just not very many. Cascade Swans and Jund-splash-Cryptic are both the top performers this week, breaking out onto the metagame scene one week before their ‘popular’ debut in Seattle, and B/W Kithkin snuck in a slot while people still weren’t quite paying enough attention to it. We see a lot of signal, and a lot of noise… and how awesome is it that a Warp World deck made Top 8, in retrospect, now that Wizards has announced they are closing the “Warp World loophole” of token ownership?

Then there was Seattle:

Rumors of Faeries’ demise from the metagame have been greatly exaggerated, or so it seems. Five-Color Blood goes from lesser-known PTQ deck to Grand Prix Top 8 competitor, though I suspect it will in the following weeks begin to decline due to heavy adoption… it is a deck that manages its life totals and Vivid counters on the razor’s edge, and many of the people who will have seen its success will be unaware of just how much of a resource-management game that deck choice is before they run with it.

PTQ Top 8s:

This covers the “old news” of the PTQ season, and mostly shows you what is “hot” and what is “not”, as we can see what is in the fringe and what is showing up steadily at PTQs and pushing through to make Top 8s. The week in between Sao Paulo and Seattle, I would have reported on last week… save for the fact that a more pressing topic appeared, and I felt it pertinent to spend the week discussing the M10 rules changes (and why the sky is in fact not falling). Pro Tour: Honolulu was on but that format is thankfully dead and buried for serious competitive play, so it’s not like I would have reported on it anyway… “Cascade mechanic dumb, decks that attack and don’t have bad mana secret metagame choice”, there’s the article right there. So the most recent twists of the metagame look like this:

Weekend of 6/6/09 PTQ Top 8s:

When we compile all of this together, I am not going to distinguish too heavily between a few archetypes… for example, B/W Kithkin and Monowhite Kithkin are the same deck, disagreeing only on the use of Zealous Persecution and that card’s place in the deck in the present metagame. We want to compile the broad strokes of things, not niggle over individual card choices of basically one spell, so we’ll even combine Jund aggro decks and 5c Blood, as the main point of difference between those two decks is Cryptic Command… some people think it’s worth playing the Vivid manabase for, and others sideboard it out because it didn’t seem to suit their gameplan. We’re also going to choose a signal-to-noise filter, and if a deck archetype didn’t put together five or more Top 8s out of all the data we have to look at, I’ll be considering it ‘noise’ rather than ‘signal’. Sorry, Warp World.

First we have Sao Paulo:

Weekend of 6/13/09 PTQ Top 8s:

I’ve added as much of a sixth event as I can, from my having attended the 300+-person PTQ in Philadelphia which was won by Matt Boccio (Monowhite Kithkin) and saw two out of four people in my car also make Top 8, so I definitely had to stick around and watch even though my 6-3 record clearly had me well out of the elimination rounds. This week seems to be especially high in beatdown decks, so it is the surprise choice of Reveillark that performed exceptionally well, with its game-plan of “dodge Faeries” and “beat Aggro” being especially effective this week rather than a blip on the radar as we’d seen in weeks before. Now, filter all of this through our signal-to-noise filter and we get the following:

NOT REAL DECKS:

Four hits across four weeks of play:
5c Control / 5c Planeswalkers / 5c Cascade; Bant Crasher; Doran.
Three hits across four weeks of play:
None.

Two hits across four weeks of play:
Merfolk.

One hit across four weeks of play:
Bloom Tender; Sanity Grinding; Dark Bant; Little Kid Bant; Warp World Combo; Turbo-Fog… and we’re still wondering how.

One could argue that “decks with Doran” equaled five, by adding Dark Bant to Doran, but I think there is a bit more of a change here besides just ‘the deck has Doran in it’. Likewise, you can add Little Kid Bant or Dark Bant to Bant Crasher to equal five total, but again since there is only the barest of overlaps in how the decks play out I haven’t taken that liberty and instead have left these archetypes on the cutting-room floor.

Now let’s look at what the real decks are:

1. B/W Tokens: 31 total instances.
2. Faeries: 26 total instances.
3. 5c Cascade Aggro decks (5c Blood / Sanchez Cascade): 19 total instances.
4. B/G Elves: 17 total instances.
5. G/W Tokens: 16 total instances.
6. Kithkin (B/W Kithkin / Monowhite Kithkin): 15 total instances.
7. Cascade Swans: 14 total instances.
8. B/R: 12 total instances.
9. Reveillark Decks (U/W, U/W/R, 5c Reveillark): 10 total instances.
10. Jund Aggro: 8 total instances
11. Ramp Decks (Naya Ramp / Jund Ramp): 5 total instances.

One could argue that Boat Brew is a Reveillark deck and boost Reveillark over B/R to tie with Swans, but the remaining Reveillark decks all had Blue as a core fundamental of their deck’s design while Boat Brew, well, doesn’t, and instead Boat Brew is lost in the noise as we filter for signal. Likewise you could argue that Jund Aggro is just 5c Blood minus the splash for Blue cards, but I see a significant divergence at least on the PTQ level (Jund Aggro is far easier for non-experts to play correctly, and has an insanely high skill curve to get as much out of it as you’re supposed to).

But if we wanted to reorder this to see who qualified for the Pro Tour, which is ultimately the goal (I’d assume!) when playing in a Pro Tour Qualifier, you see the leaderboards change dramatically:

This is all just different ways of parsing the data, but it does tell us something very interesting. You have to perform differently to earn a qualification in different tournaments… in a Pro Tour Qualifier you have to go X-1-1 or better and then 3-0, and at a Grand Prix just making the cut to elimination rounds is enough to earn the qualification, so here we’re not distinguishing anything special for coming in first at the GP instead of eighth. (If we did, Kithkin, Cascade Swans and the lost-in-the-noise Doran deck would all get an extra nod.) Comparing number of Top 8s versus number of qualifications yields us the following ratios:

1. Kithkin (One qualification per 2.5 Top 8s)
2. Cascade Swans (One qualification per 2.88 Top 8s)
3. Faeries (One qualification per 3.25 Top 8s)
4. Reveillark (One qualification per 3.33 Top 8s)
5. B/G Elves (One qualification per 4.25 Top 8s)
6. G/W Tokens (One qualification per 5.33 Top 8s)
7. B/W Tokens (One qualification per 6.2 Top 8s)
8. 5c Cascade Aggro (One qualification per 6.33 Top 8s)
9. Jund Aggro (One qualification per 8 Top 8s)
10. B/R (One qualification per 12 Top 8s)
11. Jund/Naya Ramp (Zero qualifications out of 5 Top 8s)

What’s truly interesting, though, is to watch all of these things moving over time. I’m going to cut Ramp decks entirely at this point under the fair assumption that it’s just going to be a flat line and thus uninteresting to look at. While I’m at it, I’m going to combine 5c Cascade Aggro and Jund Aggro into one package, as they have a lot of overlap and we’ll just leave off the “Cryptic Command or no?” question for later. (For those curious, this gives the two decks combined into one a qualification rate of once per 6.25 players, still 8th on that leaderboard, four qualifications total, making it 6th on that leaderboard, and 27 total Top 8s, second place based on sheer appearance alone.) This gives us nine decks to track, over four weeks of play, which is still enough data to choke a horse!

Now we can see some real trends in action, and try to figure out what makes these pieces move. You can see five classes of trends, three easily understood and two that take some looking-at. First, there’s Nothing: a deck didn’t change significantly over the course of the four weeks. One deck behaved that way, B/R, which just seems to do its own thing and not change over time. Whether this is because the deck is not making enough Top 8s for us to note a statistically-significant change over time, or because the deck is not a coupled part of the metagame, I can’t really say… so I am just sort of going to give it a pass. B/R decks will appear, they will win or lose based on the randomness of their pairings, and generally they won’t win the event they are playing in (or even qualify unless we’re looking at a Grand Prix). Then there are the two sharp changes: the deck went from high to low, or from low to high. Cascade Swans goes from high appearances to no appearances, cycling out of the metagame as the rest of the decks adjust to a new equilibrium to face it. That’s the one high-to-low change. Reveillark decks and the three dedicated aggro decks (B/G Elves, Kithkin and G/W Tokens) all behave in a low-to-high fashion, and since they are all behaving the same way it seems as if they are sharply coupled together: play Reveillark in a beatdown metagame and you’ll succeed; play it without its ‘prey’ decks and you’ll fail.

The other two types of movement are oscillations, and they’re actually only one type of movement (oscillation) but they’re in two different cycles, going from low to high back to low over this four-week period or high to low back to high in the same period… sine waves versus cosine waves, same motion, but they are clearly different stacked next to each other. Black/White Tokens and Cascade Jund Aggro both start high, drop off during Weeks 2 and 3, then finish starting to mount back up that curve again. Faeries, on the other hand, starts off not even really on the radar, mounts impressive numbers during Weeks 2 and 3, then drops back to low numbers for Week 4.

This gives us four moving parts for the metagame, and we classify them like we see them: Control, Combo, Aggro-Control and Aggro. In actuality it is five moving parts, Control, Combo, Aggro-Control, Aggro and Anti-Aggro, with Reveillark being the anti-Aggro deck: it succeeds if and only if Aggro is at its prime that week. Combo is obviously enough Cascade Swans, Control is Faeries and only Faeries… Reveillark is Anti-Aggro instead of Control because Reveillark can’t beat Faeries, even if Reveillark is clearly the control deck against aggro matchups and thus what we would tend to think of as ‘a control deck’. B/W Tokens and the various flavors of Jund decks are the Aggro-Control decks; B/W Tokens has evolved to play Persist creatures and Wrath of God in its 75 if not its 60 in order to increase its ability to play the control game, while the Jund decks largely have control mechanisms as well: Jund Charms, Volcanic Fallouts, Wrath of God or Cryptic Command, and usually some combination of these things instead of just one… just because it plans to attack with Putrid Leech into Boggart Ram-Gang does not make it an ‘aggro’ deck. B/G Elves, Kithkin and G/W Tokens all fit the Aggro category very well, and as mentioned Reveillark is the bizarre fifth style of deck, Anti-Aggro.

Where we stand right now is an aggro-dominant metagame, which is bringing the aggro-control and anti-aggro aspects of the metagame back to the forefront. Success in the metagame as of last week meant playing an aggro deck or playing an aggro-control deck, as the control deck was not succeeding very effectively in such a heavily aggro field. Going into the StarCityGames.com $5000 Open weekend, then, you can expect to see the aggro-control decks rising in popularity, with Jund Cascade variants and B/W Tokens rising in popularity and starting to munch on the aggro field that has cycled to the forefront of the metagame. This is effectively the same as our Week Zero metagame: mid-range-ish decks high in popularity, in an aggro metagame. And thus the best choices to make would be the same ones that were made in Week One or Week Two, depending on whether you want to ride the metagame curve or ride ahead of the metagame curve. We have a reasonable understanding, then, of what the metagame is going to do as we iterate from here into future weeks… after all, last week’s Top 8 decks are this week’s PTQ metagame, and we seem to have a full cycle already of what beats what in a given cycle.

For those who are trying to gain an edge over the metagame, this means that the time is ripe for Cascade Swans to make a comeback. The hate cards have more or less left the sideboards, and the decks that can effectively interact with Cascade Swans are on the wane. However, you can’t just expect to be able to do whatever you want and just race everyone successfully every time; a different design may very well be the key to success instead of failure. I would suggest the following for consideration:

4 Seismic Assault
4 Swans of Bryn Argoll
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Bituminous Blast
3 Wrath of God
1 Primal Command

4 Treetop Village
4 Ghitu Encampment
4 Vivid Crag
4 Vivid Grove
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Fire-Lit Thicket
4 Rugged Prairie
4 Karplusian Forest
4 Sulfurous Spring
2 Vivid Marsh
2 Wooded Bastion
1 Mountain

As far as sideboard plans are concerned, it would be criminal to go anywhere without 2 Wickerbough Elders and at least two Maelstrom Pulses, I would favor a significant number of Volcanic Fallouts as part of the anti-Faeries plan plus the fourth Wrath of God against the creature decks of the format… which I count as eight cards that are the minimum required to make the deck work post-boarding. This leaves room for some sideboard cards for the mirror (a few copies of Aura of Silence) and an additional threat package to play against Faeries… in which case I favor Chameleon Colossus over Countryside Crusher, as it is immune to their removal rather than both targetable and small enough. I’d run the following sideboard:

1 Wrath of God
2 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Wickerbough Elder
2 Aura of Silence
2 Vexing Shusher
3 Volcanic Fallout
3 Chameleon Colossus

This eschews Captured Sunlight and Ad Nauseam in the deck in favor of main-deck Wraths, which is a concession to the fact that some of the most popular decks in the metagame have at least some semblance of a plan against you such as Thoughtseize + Maelstrom Pulse + Clock, or Clock + Qasali Pridemage. The interactive disruption that you actually care about is pretty minimal, but the price paid is one worth paying over a long enough tournament, especially with the choice of favoring Bituminous Blast over Deny Reality… Bituminous Blast is perfect for an open metagame that is creature-based and largely unaware of the deck, while Deny Reality is the card of choice for the narrower and informed metagame that we do not seem to be living in right now.

Having to choose between surfing the wave and riding in front of it, I would actually be making great pains to play the best deck to play against this week’s Best Deck, and thus be gaming with a Faerie deck heavily metagamed to be able to face the beatdown metagame. In my mind that means having access to many Plumeveils, and having access to them Game 1. We’ve recently realized somehow that Jace is awesome, and thus I would be trying to position Faeries a little more in 5c Control’s home to maximize Jace’s use, relying on Plumeveil and plentiful removal spells and designing the deck to trade one-for-one with opposing creature decks, set up Walls and steal tempo, and let Jace do the heavy lifting. I’d also be trying to at least theoretically minimize my Anathemancer footprint and how much damage my lands cause me, which is why I have been exploring a variety of different options lately and come to the realization that comes-into-play-tapped lands are perfectly acceptable to the deck as long as they are used in very limited quantities. I played an FNM this past weekend to just playtest a new mana-base, seeing how often I regretted the inclusion of a land that came into play tapped, and I found consistently I could plan around it if I needed to or just didn’t have a play that it cut into, so I’m content to at least experiment with taking Underground River out of the deck both to reduce how painful my draws are (even moreso now that I am adding another Blue-intensive card to the deck) and to increase the number of basic lands I will have in play if (or as the case too often is, when) my opponent has an Anathemancer come into play.

Experimenting with many different things at once, this is the deck I would be playing this weekend at the StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Open in Boston on Saturday, expecting Cascade Swans to make a resurgence now that the metagame is vulnerable again to it:

Faeries

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 06-21-2009

Standard

Creatures (14)

• 4 Mistbind Clique
• 3 Scion of Oona
• 4 Spellstutter Sprite
• 3 Plumeveil

Lands (18)

• 2 Swamp
• 4 Terramorphic Expanse
• 4 Secluded Glen
• 4 Mutavault
• 4 Sunken Ruins

Spells (28)

• 8 Island
• 4 Broken Ambitions
• 4 Cryptic Command
• 4 Jace Beleren
• 4 Bitterblossom
• 4 Agony Warp

Sideboard

• 2 Infest
• 2 Razormane Masticore
• 1 Loxodon Warhammer
• 4 Deathmark
• 4 Thoughtseize
• 2 Vendilion Clique

I unfortunately will not be in attendance, due to the fact that I have other plans that require my presence on Long Island and have known about these plans on this weekend since long before I knew anything about the SCG $5k that was going to be scheduled at this time. Hopefully everyone in attendance will have fun at this great event without me, and I look forward to checking in next week to see what happened… and how well, if at all, my predictions match reality.

Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com