“What are you at?”
Yurchick was smiling the confident smile of a blue mage that had slow-played his hand to extract maximum value against the Skred Red deck he could tell he was up against. Without even a glance to his board of four untapped Islands left after casting his first morph, Yurchick smiled and replied, “Twenty,” motioning towards his morph upon the tapping of one of the six Snow-Covered Mountains on the other side of the table.
“Shock… you.”
It was in that moment that Adam Yurchick’s soul began to leak out of his eyes and puddle on the floor next to him. The hollow shell of a man he had become looked into my eyes, trying to make sense of the world, of me. What possible Universe could there be in which this was happening? It is one thing to realize you’re about to lose a game. It is another thing altogether to lose your grip of reality, to no longer have any indicator of your current level of sanity. He sat motionless, looking deep into me (the trauma from this event awakening his latent telepathic powers), searching my mind for the answer.
I am just a man. I couldn’t help it. His Xavier-esque explorations uncovered a region of my brain I had been intentionally avoiding remembering the existence of. The corner of my mouth began to migrate north, ever so slightly. It was hint of a smile that released him from the hell he had found himself in. He knew it was over; he wouldn’t last another turn, but at least up was up and down was down. A loss at the World Championships isn’t pleasurable, but the beginnings of what was certainly a smile seeking to escape my lip brought closure to the nine-hour ordeal that had just taken place inside of his skull. Acceptance. Relief.
It isn’t so important to understand how I won on the next turn with the Mono-Red Dragonstorm deck I’d been playing at the time, though it is interesting to note that I ended this game with Pyromancer’s Swaths and Grapeshots, rather than Dragonstorms themselves. This left me with continued advantage on information going into the later games, as the deck I was playing was an unknown entity and benefited greatly from the element of surprise.
In fact, understanding this element of surprise is the crucial part of this story to examine. Word began to spread like Wildfire about Nassif, Heezy, and my brew, but without proper to time to playtest or prepare, few were able to uncover the correct way to combat our unexpected combo deck. Let’s look at that Yurchick matchup for a moment.
Adam was piloting a Mono-Blue “Pickles” deck looking to lock me out of the game with Brine Elemental and Vesuvan Shapeshifter. Keep in mind, Yurchick is a fantastic player, and at the time, Skred Red, a Mono-Red deck featuring primarily Snow-Covered Mountains was known to exist, so it was very reasonable to put me on it. Against such a deck, tapping out turn 3 to play a morph would do nothing but draw a Shock, Incinerate, or Skred from me. The prospect of losing so much mana was a losing one, to be sure. In addition, I could just untap and drop an annoying threat putting Adam behind on board. Instead, Adam could wait until quite a bit later, so as to ensure he never was without the protection of countermagic. Skred Red decks often contained Stuffy Dolls, Chandra Nalaar, and other expensive threats, making them especially vulnerable to Cryptic Command.
As we have seen, it turned out I wasn’t really the control deck he thought I was, but actually a combo deck in disguise. If he had just played his morphs on turns 3 and 4, he could’ve had three extra mana open on turn 7, in addition to putting me on a clock. More likely I’d spend the burn spells on his creatures, not wanting to face a Brine Elemental reveal on my seventh end step. This would leave me with two less Shocks to send at his dome. With my relatively slow draw, this certainly would’ve given him a lot more percentage.
You can gain a significant advantage by showing up to a tournament with a totally different deck than most of the competitors realize is possible, beyond just the inherent strengths of the cards and synergies you’re playing. Both control and aggro are played in almost every format, leaving the ability to completely blind-side people greatly diminished. However, combo is most definitely
not
viable in every format. As a result, it is a not altogether uncommon event for a new format to arrive and a general consensus to be arrived at that there’s no combo in the format, or at the very least, nothing that’s like what some savvy deckbuilder brings.
Sometimes, these unexpected combo decks turn out to make almost no waves at all, like Open the Vaults at Pro Tour San Diego, earlier this year. Other times, they can catch the format by surprise and dominate until the metagame digests the new information, leaving you looking like a genius instead of the corker that you pretty much have to be to pull such a move (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Fortunately, decklists are locked in at the beginning of a tournament, so at the very least you always get to finish the event before people can begin to slant their sideboards.
Mono-Red Dragonstorm had one of the best performances of Pro Tour history, that weekend, but the deck quickly fizzled out, in the real world. It wasn’t just Pithing Needles, Riftsweepers, Trickbinds, and various white enchantments; it was learning the pacing of the deck, getting experience against it. Everyone had played against Dragonstorm just one year earlier. It had even won the last Championship, but a new format meant new decks. Partly the Dragonstorm deck looked much different, but partly the new decks people had built weren’t tuned with it in mind.
Flash to today
We once again, find ourselves in a Standard format that seems to have no combo decks. Instead, mana ramp decks have taken their place, providing a relatively stable equilibrium along with control and aggro. If I had a mana for every Standard format where people thought there was no combo…
The new, post-Scars Standard isn’t even two weeks old, but it’s already shaping up quite nicely. The strategies people are playing look fun, interesting, and deckbuilding possibilities are open and exciting. Still, I couldn’t help the nagging suspicion that I was missing something. Days before the State Championships, Twitter was abuzz with activity. Everyone seemed to be discussing: what to play?
@g3rryt
had revealed his latest U/R update, which has since been updated to this:
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (10)
Spells (43)
- 1 Pyroclasm
- 3 Mountain
- 12 Island
- 4 Mana Leak
- 4 Jace Beleren
- 2 Negate
- 3 Burst Lightning
- 2 Into the Roil
- 2 Spell Pierce
- 1 Deprive
- 2 Flame Slash
- 1 Jace's Ingenuity
- 4 Preordain
- 1 Destructive Force
- 1 Stoic Rebuttal
Sideboard
This is definitely a list after my own heart, and I made no secret that I’d suggest either playing my U/w/r Venser list, Gerry’s U/R list discussed
here,
or a Pyromancer Ascension list, if you had a good list.
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (25)
Spells (23)
I didn’t have a Pyromancer list, as I’d not actually gotten around to working on it, yet (the format was just days old!), however
@FiveWithFlores
had been discussing Pyromancer Ascension. His intuition had told him that it seemed a strategy that should’ve been able to survive the rotation, yet no one was talking about it. Here’s the list he had going into States:
Lands (8)
Spells (52)
- 4 Lightning Bolt
- 7 Mountain
- 7 Island
- 4 Mana Leak
- 4 Archive Trap
- 4 Into the Roil
- 4 Pyromancer Ascension
- 2 Ravenous Trap
- 4 Trapmaker's Snare
- 3 Treasure Hunt
- 4 See Beyond
- 4 Preordain
- 1 Call to Mind
Sideboard
How could I have been so foolish? Not working on Ascension the week before States was proof that I ain’t got the sense that God gave a goose. Still, all three of us were actually exploring the same sort of space: spell-based U/R decks, card draw, burn, and permission. The Ascension kill may look a bit katty-wonkered, but imagine what happens when you play Trapmaker’s Snare after successfully Ascending. This searches up two copies of Archive Trap, each of which will be doubled, resulting in 52 cards milled, generally enough to defeat anyone not siding with Alien Eldrazi. Flores wasn’t content to have to rely on the Lightning Bolt plan against Eldrazi, so two Ravenous Traps are used maindeck as a counter-measure. Flores’ deck additionally has built in strength against unprepared U/W and Valakut players that do not know what he’s up to.
See, the correct strategy with U/W against Flores’ build is actually to tap out to deploy threats as fast as possible, as he actually doesn’t have a quick clock as long as you don’t search. Similarly, Valakut can actually aim to end the game with Avenger instead of Primeval Titan, bottlenecking the PA player on mana (Archive Trap at five is sometimes jokingly referred to as Lava Axe).
States was an excellent opportunity to catch players unaware, not realizing they were facing down a grip full of Archive Traps building up in PA’s hand. Moving forward, however, the kill has added problems, especially if more people return to the miser’s Ulamog in the sideboard.
Flores gave me a rundown of his experiences with the deck and agreed that it might be better to use a different kill, mentioning he had not yet had time to test many alternatives and was already having success with the mill plan. I set out to test some plans.
See the Mill-kill still will fulfill,
Vict’ry pretty risky degree,
Decree foresee sixty easy,
SB Frosty, we be icy,
GP Nashville refills nil thrills,
PC instills real chill standstill.
I sat down to playtest with one of Madison’s world-class deckbuilders, Brian Kowal. I started with Flores’ exact 75, whereas Kowal was armed with Cedric Phillips‘ Red.
The most non-traditional inclusions in Cedric’s list are Flame Slash and Molten-Tail Masticore, but I’d like to get one thing straight. Spikeshot Elder is really good in any sort of Mono-Red list that isn’t trying to kill turn 3. Cedric wisely plays four, however it seems that not everyone is on board with this plan. Personally, I think you’d have to be half a bubble off plumb to make such an omission unless you’re Assault Strobing in
your Mono-Red. Cedric’s card choice explanations can be found
here.
You may or may not be on Team Koth, but know thy enemy!
Immediately we saw some pretty impressive results, and by game 3 it was clear Kowal’s interest had shifted to PA. One thing we were finding, however, was the abundance of traps that don’t affect the board (basically ten), leading to a lot of games that felt like double mulligans. It was also clear that once we Ascended into Pyromancy, we were in pretty damn good shape. Now, to be fair, Mono-Red has to be one of the worst non-Eldrazi matchups for the Archive Trap kill, and it was still fine, but our suspicion was that we could take a page out of last season’s playbook and just play a U/R deck that functioned somewhat like a control deck. Last season, a common maneuver was to board out some or all of the Time Warps and move towards a more controlling build that buried opponents under a torrent of card advantage, rather than take all of the turns.
When you think about it, what did the PA strategy lose anyway? Time Warp and Ponder. Time Warp was sideboarded out quite a bit anyway and can be worked around. Ponder, on the other hand, now that is a painful loss. Without Ponder, PA is much less consistent featuring less good ways to find your key enchantment as well as less cheap cantrips to trigger it. With no easy replacement, the solution began to come into focus.
Brute force.
We may not be able to Ponder to our enchantment, but you know what digs even deeper than Ponder? Foresee. Some lists last season even began to incorporate this most exotic Divination in the format. We removed the Trap paraphernalia and added four Foresees, four Burst Lightnings, a Call to Mind, and an Island. Immediately, we found the Red match to be quite favorable. The package of Bolts, Bursts, Leaks, and Into the Roils gave us a ton of tools to buy ourselves time to draw some extra cards or trigger an Ascension.
One of the first observations we had with this new list was that triggering an Ascension was just as game winning, often ending in a flurry of Bolts immediately. A common play against an opponent using fetchlands was to activate Ascension, Bolt your opponent for six, Call to Mind two Bolts, then Bolt them for twelve more. Even if they don’t have a fetchland mana base, the massive surge of cards, burn, and more gives you pretty incredible tools for “establishing control.” Really, though, it just feels like you are 6’5, 225 lbs, and there are two of you.
One thing that was bugging me, however, was how much Treasure Hunt continued to under-perform. As you know, I’m guy that has hunted for more than a little Treasure in my day. All too often, I was finding that Treasure Hunt was never giving me extra cards that I need or wanted. Additionally, they were so slow; they might as well just be Jaces. The theory behind them is that you need a critical mass of cheap cantrips to trigger the Ascension, but I kind of suspect that the extra cards from Jaces would make up for this. Besides, I wasn’t really having any trouble at all triggering my Ascensions.
I ended up talking to Gerry, who agreed that Ascension sounded like it could be sweet, but shared some reservations with
@osypl
and myself regarding the ideal kill. He helped pull me ever closer to the U/R deck that he and I keep building every time we build decks these days (Okay, this month, I guess).
Lands (7)
Spells (53)
- 4 Lightning Bolt
- 7 Mountain
- 9 Island
- 4 Mana Leak
- 4 Foresee
- 2 Jace Beleren
- 4 Burst Lightning
- 3 Into the Roil
- 4 Pyromancer Ascension
- 2 Deprive
- 4 See Beyond
- 4 Preordain
- 2 Call to Mind
Sideboard
Tell me that isn’t a budget deck!
This deck forms the bridge between Flores’ Pyromancer Ascension deck and Gerry’s U/R, and like Gerry always says about U/R decks, so much of the play is figuring out the pace to play the game. We aren’t talking irl time, we’re talking in game tempo. These U/R decks are sometimes a dance, setting up scenarios to bottleneck people on mana or gain advantages at opportune moments.
There are basically two types of games, ones where you draw an early Pyromancer Ascension and ones where you do not. If you do, go ahead and play the deck exactly like the old Ascension decks. It’s easy to trigger it early, and though you don’t get to start taking extra turns, doubling Preordains, See Beyonds, and Foresees is crazier than a June Bug in May. The games you don’t draw Ascension are not a frantic race to the card, however. You can actually do a very respectable imitation of U/R control.
Eleven “removal” spells and half a dozen counterspells with tons more in the sideboard, fueled by a healthy chunk of card draw give you lots of potent tools to play a control game if you have to. As a matter of fact, every single non-Pyromancer card in the deck makes for a good control deck, so if you don’t draw the Ascension, you
are
playing a control deck (at least until you do draw one). You even have the ability to sideboard in Frost Titans to complete the transformation into U/R control. I’m not suggesting taking out the Ascensions, but it’s nice to have options, like not losing to Memoricide and making Celestial Purges and War Priests of Thune look quite silly.
Why is Ascension so good, now? Well, outside of the fact that it’s basically the same U/R shell we’ve been discussing for weeks, it’s also a combo deck full of good cards in a period where no one is gunning for it.
Relic of Progenitus– Gone
Esper Charm– Gone
Oblivion Ring– Gone
Maelstrom Pulse– Gone
Mythic- Gone
Jund- Gone
Most of the best cards against Ascension are gone, plus the mainstream decks that it had the hardest time with are defunct. This is the perfect time to strike! What were Ascension’s best matchups? Ramp and U/W? Wait a minute… That isn’t even factoring how effective having such an increase in interactive elements is against the aggressive strategies currently seeing play.
The aggro matchups have actually been the best, so far, as they just don’t do enough that you care about fast enough and are all so vulnerable to our U/R Control nature. The ramp decks shrug off our removal and can actually do okay just “racing” us, though the games go from even towards a heavy slant in our favor post-board. Once we cut down on cards like Burst Lightning and Into the Roil and increase permission and win conditions, we can gain a reasonable advantage. Add to this that we’re attacking from an angle that most won’t expect or be prepared for.
Incidentally, I can already tell how many people will immediately ask for a sideboarding guide. Look, a sideboarding guide can be a useful tool, but there’s a time and a place for everything. We won’t always have a sideboard guide available to us and developing the understanding of how to properly sideboard is worth much more than knowing the exact number of Negates to board against Valakut.
This isn’t exactly a subtle sideboard, anyway. It’s mostly counterspells that spell out what they counter. Arc Trail? Just guess which matchups those go in for. Frost Titan is the biggest question mark, and honestly I’m not sure yet who it goes in against, or even if it is the right transformation to have available to you. I just know that my intuition is suggesting it’s worth trying, though it’s still untested. Additionally, I suspect that there’s a lot of value to having a transformation of some sort, which often lends itself to scenarios where you bring them in sometimes, but not always, even against the exact same opponent or list.
In general, I am a big fan of shuffling all fifteen into your sixty, with decks like this. Then search through and pick out fifteen cards to cut. This can give you so much perspective, as well as hiding the quantity of your sideboard changes.
Our U/W matchup is a radical departure from the PA versus U/W matchups of old. The U/W decks these days still don’t have that much permission maindeck, but Ratchet Bomb and Volition Reins add new elements that we have to be prepared for. Fortunately our Into the Roils and increased permission help here. The sheer number of dead cards in most U/W decks helps us generally get “the easy one.” We even have some maindeck Jaces to get more free wins.
If game 1 is the easy one, the post sideboard ones will not be, assuming they are built correctly. Now we are looking at a huge influx of permission, potentially Purges, and no dead cards. Here we find ourselves in the somewhat Dredge-like predicament of “just needing to win one out of two.” Our game 1 is nowhere near as good as Dredge’s, but our post sideboard games don’t get anywhere near as bad, either. This is one area where Pyromancer Ascension is going to lose ground in the weeks to come. The amount of effort it will take for them to adapt to us is not so great that it can’t be done. Additionally, a little practice against a PA deck goes a long way.
My advice? Well, this weekend, it’s unlikely many of your opponents will have logged in any games against Ascension, so plenty of time to worry about that next week. Additionally, I’d strongly consider varying numbers on cards like Spell Pierce, Dispel, and other “techy” cards, especially in your sideboard, but don’t let the world know first. It’s important not to spice the maindeck up too much, as Pyromancer Ascension wants your cards to have the same name, in general. Still, a little sideboard spice can go a long way towards adding a little flavor to your brew. These cards are good anyway, but the added value of opponent’s not being able to properly play around them is higher than average.
If you’re thinking of playing a control deck, whether U/W, U/B, U/R, or U/R/W, I can’t stress enough how valuable some playtest games would be. Actually, my first advice is to play Ascension, but if you don’t like the cut of its jib, it’s still a good idea to play a few games against it to prepare yourself. It is tricky to test against, however, as a fairly reasonable percentage of people playing Ascension this weekend will have Flores’ Traps, whereas others will be more in line with the control elements of mine. As such, it’s especially important to try to extract information from your opponent. Often a little conversation can help reveal where they got the information they have, their feelings on the deck.
So many players want to talk about themselves and their deck so bad, they’ll actually open up and explain to you all sorts of card choices they made, even including such intimate information as the number of counterspells in their deck! Look for clues. Did they cast a Treasure Hunt? Then they’re certainly not playing a card for card of mine. A Trapmaker’s Snare? Pretty sure they are nearly exact copies of Flores’ old list, then. Of course figuring out what cards are in a U/R deck is a tricky game anyway. An opponent that plays only Islands and Mountains for the first six turns could have
anything.
Think about it for a minute.
Destructive Force
Frost Titan
Molten-Tail Masticore
Wurmcoil Engine
Pyroclasm
Into the Roil
Negate
Flame Slash
Burst Lightning
Archive Trap
Jace’s Ingenuity
Chandra Nalaar
Venser, the Sojourner (yes, Venser)
Pyromancer Ascension
These are some pretty wildly different directions they might be going. It is always helpful to naturally look to understand what your opponent is playing and planning, but current Standard U/R is a particularly important beast to grok the jive of. Study your opponent. What is he looking at? What are his eyes doing, his lips? What does he seem to be concerned about with regards to you? What were the changes on his life pad from earlier matches? Does he seem to have tokens in his deck box? If he accidentally revealed any of his cards or if he leaks information about his deck, but can you extrapolate from that?
Conversely, if you’re the one with Ascension, talking with your opponent can be very revealing as to their familiarity with the various possible lists. It’s certainly not worth focusing on this element of the game at the expense of your technical play, but awareness in this area can provide valuable information. Knowledge is, of course, power.
Patrick Chapin
“The Innovator”