Please hold while we load your cart...
Rule 3: Does it beat the Tier 1 decks and (almost more importantly) the best deck?
What is a Tier 1 deck? Well - if you look at any tournament report that Kai writes about, you will almost always find him talking about the metagame and what he considers to be the four or five"Tier 1" efforts out there. Tier 1 is created from a mix of the best performances of your decks in testing, combined with the amount you actually expect to see in the field you are visiting.
What is the best deck? It's hard to put personal preferences aside here - but in the current type 2 format, the best deck would seem to be Tog. Oh sure, there are loads of contenders out there such as red/green and blue/green, but really - the Tog deck is one of those versatile decks that can be tuned one way or the other to deal with what you expect. Only recently, Budde himself turned up to that Nordic Championship thingy with a Tog deck main-decking Duresses, as he expected control. (Another hint at what the best deck there might be is, incidentally, to see what Kai played last.)
So why am I writing this article? Well, Jose Emmanuel Argao's latest article on his U/W Windborn Opposition deck included this little doozy:
"Psychatog. This is your hardest matchup."
Now, this is the kind of sentence you really don't want to find yourself saying about your deck. Please don't get me wrong: I thought the article he wrote was an interesting read and really quite thorough, but you just can't gloss over the"best deck" matchup with such reckless abandon. History shows that you cannot really hope to avoid the most common deck played by good players and still win a tournament. (I was constantly amused by people turning up in the Trix environment with a deck that could not beat Trix. Part of the reason Trix continued its dominance right to the end of the Extended season was that all the other decks in the field that were built to beat it lost to these random idiots who played a deck that couldn't.)
In fact, I might go further and suggest that people have actually managed to win tournaments with a deck that was only specifically designed to beat the best deck - and that just happened to be good against most of the field. A reasonable example of this might be Zvi Mowshowitz playing"The Solution" in Japan - a deck with four Crimson Acolytes in the main to deal with the tier 1 decks - a card that was otherwise horrible against a Wildcard.
Anyway - this is the key: Make sure your deck beats the best deck or decks - then see how it does against everything else out there. In other words, your first port of call should be Tog and maybe one or two others, then see how it does against the rest of the field. 70% of the time, if your deck beats the fast creature decks and Tog, then it is likely to do pretty well across the board.
One thing you find really easy about Extended testing is that you can throw a deck together and see if it beats the"Red Deck." The games are fast, you get results really quickly, and you can move on from there to see how it does elsewhere. You can afford to spend the time doing this, because red is, and (if you ask Dan Paskins, will always be) tier 1.
You can do this in T2 as well, since the R/G deck is a fairly fast matchup - but you really do have to move on to Tog next.
Here is the U/W decklist that Jose Emmanuel Argao was suggesting:
Creatures:
4 Merfolk Looter
4 Wall of Deceit
4 Windborn Muse
Spells:
4 Counterspell
4 Force Spike
4 Memory Lapse
4 Mobilization
4 Static Orb
4 Opposition
Land:
4 Adarkar Wastes
4 Flooded Strand
6 Plains
10 Island
In his article, Jose listed a number of reasons why White was better than Green in an Opposition deck. The points he made were valid and well put (aligned colors is actually quite huge), although I really have to stand next to Squirrel Nest when placed next to Mobilization. If Squirrel's Nest was 1WW I think we would find four in those U/W decks, and we would be looking for Judge rulings about squeezing a fifth in there somehow.
Unfortunately for this decks chances against Tog, the change from green to white is not favorable as this decklist from Franck Canu's Masters deck will show: The threats against Tog come thick and fast and they are cheap. Duress, Cabal Therapy, early creatures and the card advantage generated by Call of the Herds means that the opponent does not have time to Compulse into his defense and such is the speed that tapping out for Deep Analysis can prove quite risky.
The white deck does have its share of threats, but it has some quite serious issues where a control matchup is concerned:
1) Land.
Jose's deck has but twenty-four lands, and four of them thin out the land in the deck. Yes, the Looters do help the land situation, but I feel like a 25th is really in order. In comparison, Franc has twenty-two lands - but packs seven other mana producers, and the ability to Quietly Speculate and cast Analysis on turn 3 for the elusive third land.
2) Creature Threats.
In comparison to the green deck, if you do not manage to force your combo pieces through with white, the creatures in this decklist just don't pack enough punch for the Tog deck to care what is happening to its life total.
3) Counterspells.
As Jose admits, the counters in this deck do not quite stand up to the U/B player - although it is close as they really do want to counter a fair number of things. The problem is really that the Memory Lapses are solid in a counter war, but this deck will rarely have the mana to force and win that war. For example, trying to force an Opposition on the table with a Memory Lapse requires six mana on turn 6 or 7 (before they just get too far ahead with Compulsion). This leads me to point 4...
4) Speed.
Those Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves can really shine in this matchup when you whip out a turn 2 nest or a turn 3 Opposition. Failing that, on turn 4 you can resolve a Duress or Therapy before slapping the threat out. Yes green/blue may well seem boring, but the ability to have part of the combo on the table before you cast the Opposition (those Birds actually work really well with Opposition in those first turns) is just too important.
5) Mobilization.
I'm sorry, but I do have to mention how much I dislike this card in this environment. Mono-black is not such an easy matchup if they are running Engineered Plague, as suddenly those Cabal Coffers are making the Static Orb look a bit redundant, and all those Innocent Bloods and Chainer's Edicts are actually taking out the only things you have left to deal with Opposition. Against control, six mana for a 1/1 dude is a dangerous amount of mana to be using in the early game, as it means you are doing little else - and we have already established that the decklist as is probably loses the late games to card advantage problems.
So. I'm not meaning to play Devil's Advocate here, but I did want to enforce just how important it is to be able to beat Tog. What can the U/W deck do then? Well I guess that card advantage and/or speed is one way forwards, and it does force the question: 'Should Quiet Speculation be played in this deck?", as speed seems to be difficult to accomplish in this build. If, as Jose suggests, it has favorable matchups against the creature decks out there, could the deck afford to take a bit of pain from Deep Analysis? As I am sure many of you have seen, various build of U/W Opposition have had Battle Screeches with Quiet Speculation and Deep Analysis, but this only really works if you have a fair number of other white guys in the deck. Jose obviously did not want to build his deck with the Screeches, but I don't think this means that Speculation/Analysis is necessarily wrong.
Oh - and a friend of mine, Chris Clapton, would also like to wish all you U/W Opposition players luck against the Tog when they board in their Duresses. Bah. Maybe the only way to beat them is to splash black for your own.
- Ben.
