To prepare for Pro Tour Dark Ascension, I left for Honolulu on February 1st and stayed in a house with most of the group pictured here:
Before leaving for Hawaii, I was interested in Mono-Black Zombies, and I worked on the deck a little with Jasper Johnson-Epstein. He ended up playing the deck and recorded a deck tech here.
Skirsdag High Priest was extremely impressive, but I didn’t love the rest of the deck quite as much as I was hoping. I tried to build some other decks with him, but didn’t really find anything I liked and quickly moved on.
The deck I spent the most time on was a G/W deck based on creatures that my opponent couldn’t profitably interact with. It started as an Overrun deck and ended up looking something like this:
Creatures (28)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
- 4 Doomed Traveler
- 4 Strangleroot Geist
- 4 Loyal Cathar
- 4 Young Wolf
Lands (22)
Spells (10)
This deck was a nightmare for some control decks, and Sword of War and Peace gave it a lot of power. Angelic Destiny in the sideboard was amazing against any Red/Green deck, and Daybreak Ranger was awesome against Tempered Steel and Delver. Ultimately, I just couldn’t get it to the point where I was happy enough with it against Delver (I wanted to be a substantial favorite), and I had to move on.
I tried a few other decks—Heartless Summoning combo and Thraben Doomsayer Humans, but nothing really stood out.
By this time, everyone who wasn’t seriously committed to something was about ready to give up and play Delver. I was happy to play Delver of Secrets, but I didn’t want to just play a stock list. I felt like it was easy to have a big edge on Delver matchups after Grand Prix Orlando, and it was important to me to find that.
The deck that people wanted to play was just a stock Delver deck with Porcelain Legionnaire and Sword of War and Peace, with no Invisible Stalkers or Runechanter’s Pike.
Game 1 of the Delver mirror feels like it’s all about tempo, and Vapor Snag is an awesome card that you really want to draw. In my experience, game two changes significantly.
When both players get to bring in all the right answers—as many Mental Missteps and Gut Shots as they have available, some artifact removal, maybe some Timely Reinforcements—the games tend to go a lot longer and often largely become attrition battles.
This fits my general philosophy of deck-building and sideboarding, which is that I always want a deck that has a clear plan it can execute in game 1, but in game two I expect to become a lot more controlling as I can have access to the right answers for whatever my opponent is doing.
In Orlando, I planned to win the mirror by having more 1/1s than my opponent. I had Doomed Traveler, Midnight Haunting, and Timely Reinforcements, and Mortarpod meant that I could always trade one creature for one creature until I was ahead.
My deck from Grand Prix Orlando, which I loved, got a lot better with the printing of Gather the Townsfolk. So much better that Denniz Rachid was able to make it to Sunday with an updated version of the deck. Personally, I was worried that the deck would find itself worse positioned in the new format. I expected Ratchet Bomb to be everywhere, and I was worried that my plan to make more 1/1s than my opponent could easily find itself trumped by Lingering Souls.
I wanted to find a way to grind Delver out without losing to Lingering Souls. My solution was just to go bigger.
I knew I wanted Phantasmal Image, because clone effects had generally been amazing in all of our testing largely thanks to undying, but also because there are a lot of important legends. Phantasmal Image plays terribly with Geist of Saint Traft but amazingly well with Drogskol Captain.
Drogskol Captain would allow me to play Dungeon Geists, a card I saw in Ben Isgur’s sideboard from StarCityGames.com Open: Richmond that looked like it would be amazing in the mirror and most other matchups.
I knew all along that I wanted to try to avoid playing Sword of War and Peace. While everyone else touted it as one of the best cards in the deck and I often saw it win games, I felt like it was too expensive and could often become a liability. While it would take some games by itself, I felt like it was a high-risk card that could set you really far behind if they had a Vapor Snag or a way to actually kill the Sword. Ultimately, I think of Sword of War and Peace as a green card. It just plays so much better with Birds of Paradise than without them. If I just played artifact removal instead, I could make the games about creatures rather than equipment, and I could count on my creatures to be much better than theirs.
I drew up the following list as a starting point for what I wanted to try:
Creatures (17)
Lands (22)
Spells (21)
Initial testing against Delver went very well. People watching were extremely impressed by Dungeon Geists and Phantasmal Image, but they weren’t so sure about Drogskol Captain and cutting Sword of War and Peace.
Next we played the deck against a Red/Green Aggro deck that Matt Sperling and Tom Martell had been working on that had done very well against Delver. Drogskol Captain and Dungeon Geists gave the deck significant game against Daybreak Ranger, and we were winning that matchup as well. People started to come around on Drogskol Captain.
After playing the deck, Jon Finkel’s major complaint was that it didn’t have enough to do with its mana on turn two. Bluffing Mana Leak was something, but the curve felt slightly off. The problem is that without playing artifacts, our best options were Merfolk Looter and Mindshrieker, and those cards were much weaker than what we already had. A fourth Phantasmal Image wouldn’t really count, since you often couldn’t play it on two (I wish we played it anyway). If we were willing to play artifacts we could play Mortarpod, Spellskite, or Porcelain Legionnaire. Spellskite was an interesting way to set up multiple Drogskol Captains, but it didn’t feel quite worth it. It might be better now that people expect the deck to not have any artifacts, so there should be less artifact removal in general.
We all agreed that it was a problem, but the deck was doing well enough and our options were limited enough that it felt like we should just ignore it.
Gerry Thompson got into town the night before the Pro Tour and when Michael Jacob talked to him about the deck, they came back with a list that had a mana base that could support Lingering Souls.
We knew that it was weird to play Drogskol Captain without Lingering Souls, but I just felt like it pushed the curve too high and I couldn’t find a mana base that offered everything I wanted. Gerry incorporated Evolving Wilds, and somehow it made the numbers perfect. The fact that it had to come into play tapped wasn’t that bad because it just meant we could play it on turn two, since we generally couldn’t use our mana then anyway.
We tested the deck with Lingering Souls a little, and the power level of the card felt like it was obviously high enough to be worth working for. Gerry had only one Moorland Haunt, but Finkel refused to play less than two and most of us settled on cutting Gerry’s sixth Island for the second Moorland Haunt.
We had several meetings to discuss which three of our seven utility spells we could keep after adding Lingering Souls and to figure out our sideboard. I insisted on playing two artifact removal spells main, which was probably more than we needed because I expected a lot of Swords and a fair amount of Tempered Steel. The last slot went to either Mutagenic Growth or Gut Shot. I started on Mutagenic Growth, but somehow I was convinced to change it. Jelger stayed on Mutagenic Growth, which I suspect is probably correct now that the world has Wolf Run with Huntmaster.
Before we had even started working on this deck, Finkel said he’d play whatever I played for this tournament. I didn’t take him seriously, but we did end up playing the exact same 75:
Creatures (17)
Lands (22)
Spells (21)
Demystify was the worst card in our sideboard by a lot, and I would immediately change it for Flashfreeze or Mutagenic Growth going forward. Expecting a number of Delver players to switch to this deck, I think it’s reasonable to cut both artifact removal spells and the Gut Shot from the main deck. I think the fourth Phantasmal Image should definitely be in the main deck, and from there, I’d play any two of Mana Leak, Mental Misstep, Mutagenic Growth, Dungeon Geists, Faith’s Shield, or maybe even Sword of War and Peace now that people won’t expect it.
The sideboard probably looks very scattered, but I wouldn’t recommend consolidating it. It’s hard to side a lot of cards out in any given matchup, and you have a lot of cards that play off each other. Snapcaster Mage gives you extra access to whatever card you bring in, so you just want to be able to adjust your few utility slots to be whatever is best for the matchup you’re playing.
We only had access to five counterspells because we planned to tap out a lot, but now that control knows what its targets are and ramp will be more popular, I think you might want access to up to seven after sideboarding.
Surgical Extraction is a narrow card that doesn’t come in a lot, but it’s absolutely devastating against decks like Raphael Levy’s Reanimator deck discussed here that put up very good results in the Pro Tour despite not making the Top 8. I think I’d still want those unless you have a specific reason to believe that deck won’t be played.
Hawaii was an awesome trip. It was a pleasure to work with a number of players I hadn’t worked with before, and I felt like we were able to come up with a really great deck. Overall, I’m delighted with our performance as a group as well as my performance individually. I started the tournament off with three losses, but clawed my way back losing only one more round out of the next thirteen. I ultimately drew into the top 25 with Gerry Thompson, qualifying him for Barcelona and putting me in easy striking distance for hitting Platinum this season as well as earning me another free flight.
I’ll be interested to see how this deck fares and how it changes as the season develops now that it’s out in the world.
Thanks for reading,
@samuelhblack on Twitter