So it's an average Tuesday morning in an average summer. It's sunny outside, high 70s, a tad on the humid side, and I'm cruising StarCityGames.com. In recent months, I've become aware of a new and rather startling opinion: Workshop Aggro is no longer able to beat Fish. Whether it's the playset of Swords to Plowshares lurking between the maindeck and sideboard, Wild Mongrels growing to epic proportions, or Chalice of the Void sending us back to the Stone Age for mana, apparently we no longer have what it takes.
Wrong. Dead wrong. For the love of God, we're playing the most broken pile of absolute savagery this side of Tendrils! If we're losing to a bunch of cute little fishies, we're doing something wrong.
Since we're playing relatively similar archetypes, in the sense that a good Workshop build is just as much Aggro-Control as a good Fish build, we should smash them, on account of our superior acceleration and brokenness. The fact that we aren't indicates two things: Either we're playing bad builds or we're bad players. I'm inclined to think the former. So, to kick things off, let's analyze a recent Workshop Aggro build that finished outside of the T8. I present to you:
It's a pretty solid list.... so why did he end up sitting just above MaskNought and U/W control? That's an easy one - because it's a bad list. Solid, yes, but bad against what the field had morphed into.
I've never met the guy, so I apologize in advance to Frank if he reads this, but I'm going to tell you exactly why it's a bad list. The following cards are why:
3 Glimmervoid
1 Vampiric Tutor
3 Chains of Mephistopheles
Now that may not seem to be much; I mean, how much harm can a few metagame cards, a lonely Tutor, and a couple of lands do?
The answer is simple: They lose you the tournament. Glimmervoid is easily the worst of these. Ever gone "Glimmervoid, Goblin Welder, go?"
I thought not. Just the fact that it doesn't do that makes it automatically too weak for the deck. There's no reason this card should be needed when we have City of Brass and Gemstone Mine. Anything that lets your opponent cripple your mana base simply by getting rid of a Mox or two is a strict no-no.
Vampiric Tutor is a bit of a gray area, but I've never found it all that difficult of a choice: The card is disadvantageous. Trading one for zero is just not good. Vamping for Ancestral Recall is one of the sillier plays this particular deck could possibly make, and Vamping for anything else still ends up leaving you with card disadvantage. If nothing else, I want to keep my one- and two-drops as light as possible to emphasize not only the lopsidedness of Chalice, but also to keep the deck focused on getting its midrange threats out immediately and to hell with the early curve.
To this end, Chains in the main is bad. Chains can be amazing in Stax, but is vastly overrated in Workshop Aggro. It doesn't actually do anything for you. More importantly, it barely does anything to other decks. It's just another bad prison piece against storm-combo, accomplishing virtually the same thing as Chalice except without the built-in protection. Against control it can be pretty painful, but not only can it backfire against things like Control Slaver, an extremely important matchup, but it also weakens your Chalice for two, which is really your strongest play against them.
The other reason those particular seven cards are so painful is because they are effectively replacing seven better cards that could easily have taken Frank a lot farther than he got. Rarely are two decks exactly alike - even within the same archetype. This gives you a certain amount of leeway when it comes to deckbuilding.
Still, Workshop Aggro, despite appearances to the contrary, is a very tight deck. Some of those slots are certainly up in the air, but he's missing at least two absolutely vital inclusions: the fourth Chalice and Mana Vault. I don't care how many past lists I've posted that include three Chalices; you need four. There's no question about it, and no metagame that'd be an exception. It's pretty much the only major lock piece outside of Trinisphere that's equally solid against Aggro, Control, and Combo. The ability to rip whole chunks out of your opponent's mana curve is just too good. The fact that it also protects against similarly priced removal (which all seems to be conveniently clustered in the one-to three-mana range) is just the icing on the cake. I've ran a full playset ever since I realized that I always wanted the extras on the sideboard and always seemed to board them in when I had them.
Additionally, though I won't go into it as much, the deck needs Mana Vault. With Welders and everything, I just can't ever see myself not wanting this card in every variant of Workshop I design.
This also leaves us with five extra slots. You can always go back and devote some of these to hate (like Chains) or extra mana if you feel that twenty-five sources (including the Vault I added) is too few. Otherwise, you've got a little bit of freedom to shore up your other weaknesses.
He obviously valued Tutor power to include Vampiric... and what better artifact tutor is there but Intuition? With an active Welder, it pretty much reads "I win," and with Crucible it just solves all your mana problems outright. Even just as an emergency tutor, it can easily find you a Workshop or a beatstick, which goes right into your hand.
A Mindslaver probably wouldn't kill him, especially since he seems to be focusing on Tinker with the extra tutor, and I really love having this card to dig me out of virtually anything I've gotten myself into.
Another card I've really come to enjoy is Yawgmoth's Will. Even for the versions that lack Gilded Lotus, it still lets you crap out an extra land, a couple recently-deceased Moxen (especially potent with more people starting to run Gorilla Shaman and Karn, Silver Golem again), and maybe even a beatstick or two. Gilded Lotus itself wouldn't hurt, but I can't exactly claim to be objective on the issue.
Other than that, I can't really critique his play skill, and the sideboard is always up to the builder - though seeing Nevinyrral's Disk in an Aggro deck always makes me cringe. Arcane Laboratory is pretty suboptimal from my experience also.
So, how does this all help you defeat your new arch-rival Fish? That is merely lesson one: you can no longer afford to waste space on anything even remotely suboptimal.
Now that your deck is back up to full throttle, your play skill must follow. Beating Fish is much more difficult than it once was. You can no longer count on a lot of random players playing bad, budget builds. Fish has gone from a niche budget deck to a hugely popular mainstream deck played by some of the best players in the format.
In order to defeat the enemy, you must first come to know the enemy. This is the hard part. You see, Fish is no longer a deck; it's hardly even an archetype anymore. You've got U/W Fish, U/R Fish, U/R/W Fish, WTF, Fish with Null Rod, Fish with Chalice/Aether Vial, Fish with Old Man of the Sea, Fish with Tinker/Darksteel Colossus, and a million other unholy variations. The biggest reason I've seen Workshop Aggro getting torn apart is that they simply have no idea what to expect from Fish anymore.
Even I'll admit to falling victim to this: I was at a small Vintage tournament down in Illinois (with Gilded Claw, of course), and I lost to WTF in the finals. It wasn't the fact that I never saw a Chalice or Triskelion through either game that beat me, or that he played three maindeck Magus of the Unseen, but that he had Tinker/Darksteel Colossus in game one (equipped with Umezawa's Jitte, no less), and stole not one but both of my Sundering Titans in the second game with Gilded Drakes. Even drawing into my Trinisphere both games didn't help, since by the time I drew and played it he had Aether Vial on the board.
To put things further in perspective, I resolved Tinker in both games. It didn't help.
Darksteel Colossus? Magus of the Unseen? Gilded Drake? How many of those were in Jacob Orlove's WTF list? If you answered "zero," you are correct. The tweaking and teching out that everyone seems to have done to their own personal Fish builds ruined all those careful preparations I had from the original Gilded Claw list, which allowed it to butcher Fish like no other. Way back in the day when Fish was a normal deck.
The second step to beating Fish is this: accept that you are going to randomly lose to Fish sometimes. It's just going to happen. If you face down eight different variations of Fish in a tournament, you can expect to steamroll at least half, and just overpower a couple more, but at least one is likely to be packing just the right tech at just the right time to defeat you. As soon as you can acknowledge this fact, and aim your deck and play style at defeating the majority of Fish, instead of every single one, your results will improve.
For example, I took my current build of Gilded Claw, and modified it very heavily to take on Fish. I then tested both versions against five good variants of Fish, including ones pulled from StarCityGames Top 8s, discussions, and even the WTF list that beat me in Chicago. I tested 3 matches against each of them with each deck. Lo and behold, they did pretty much the same. Both came out 10-5 in overall matches, though the modified version had a better game record, and both performed similarly against WTF and "normal" Fish.
I noticed that while the newer Claw was more resilient to the random hate like Gilded Drake and Energy Flux, it performed poorly when confronted by oddball things like 9/9 Wild Mongrels, ten-counter Jittes, and Darksteel Colossus (I had a fun time resolving Tinker, then remembering that Duplicant had been moved back to the sideboard of my new deck in favor of a second maindeck Triskelion).
It also got hurt worse by Force of Will, though it almost never got manascrewed, even by Strip Mine-heavy Fish hands. Overall, I would have to say that if I expanded the testing into hundreds of matches against a million and one Fish variants, I think my modified version would come out on top by a hair.
That's not a lot of improvement for radically altering the face of the deck to combat Fish. I really doubt that any sort of modifications could improve my record to 15-0. The fact is, losing to Fish is not the end of the world. Fish has, historically, ebbed and flowed, and I can definitely foresee a rise in Oath driving Fish back down. In general, making the cut to the top 8 or 16 of a major tournament requires a record of X-1-1 (unless you're Kevin Cron), meaning that one bad match out of a whole day is not going to send you home.
In case you're wondering at this point, "accepting that it's going to beat you" is not, in fact, my secret strategy to beating Fish. The third and final step to beating Fish, is to beat the Fish player at their own game.
The new Fish decks require a new strategy to defeat. As always, the single most important card you pack for this match is Chalice of the Void. In the past, resolving a Chalice for two has been almost a must-scoop-to for Fish. It simply shut down their entire deck. Coming down off a Workshop on the first or second turn, they were left with almost no win conditions, little disruption, and no solid bodies.
Nowadays, Fish packs a single vital card to defeat Chalice for two: Aether Vial. Chalice for two still prevents them from casting a third of their deck, but the Vial lets them slip the creatures into play with impunity. The fact that a first-turn Chalice for two prevents you from following up with a Chalice for one to prevent Vial is just rubbing it in.
Because most of us are not lucky enough to resolve two Chalices within the first couple turns, picking what to set Chalice can often decide the game. Obviously, against more traditional builds of Fish that still run Null Rod over Vial and Chalice, there is no reason not to set it for two if you are able to. However, knowing that your opponent is playing Vial Fish - mainly WTF - the correct play is to set it for one. Whether or not they have the Vial, it is still better safe than sorry.
Neutralizing Vial is deathly important, as much for its ability to put in disruption and blockers at instant speed as its ability to circumvent Chalice for two. Setting the one-counter Chalice effectively shuts off their first turn, and as a Time Walk it is equally effective, since it also cuts off Basking Rootwalla and random things like Black Vise and Ancestral Recall that they may have in store. Forcing them to throw down their threats one at a time pretty much takes the initiative that they so highly prize and plants it squarely in your hands. It also, if nothing else, makes their Wastelands significantly more costly to themselves in the first and second turns, owing to WTF's tendency to go on mana-light hands, counting on either a first turn threat or a first-turn Vial to let them keep up. (Against non-WTF Fish that still plays Vial, Chalice for one still prevents things like Swords to Plowshares that get in your way.)
Obviously, if they play the Aether Vial before you play your Chalice, there is little reason not to play the Chalice for two, unless there is a specific card you need to prevent.
The second most important card for the matchup, after Chalice, is Crucible of Worlds. Like Chalice, it is not universally played in Workshop Aggro, and like Chalice, should be a requirement. An easy first-turn play off a Workshop, it can easy affect the game as much as Chalice can. Allowing you to keep the threat-heavy hands you need to defeat Fish without opening yourself up to an untimely Wasteland is key. Shutting down their Factories and non-basic colored sources though your own Wastelands is also pivotal. One of their favorite things to do is to use Aether Vial to resolve threats, while focusing all their mana on disruption. It's much easier to defeat the one threat per turn coming out of Vial when you don't have to worry about the rest of their deck. Again, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of the shift towards looser, basic-light mana bases in Fish.
After those, your important drops are Sundering Titan and Triskelion. This honor used to go to Su-Chi/Juggernaut, but with the new trend of Fish decks either packing efficient removal like Swords to Plowshares or relatively fat creatures like Wild Mongrel, that's no longer viable. Even Basking Rootwalla trades with Juggernaut if you're not careful. Sundering Titan and Triskelion are about the only threats left to you that you're going to get card advantage out of, so use them wisely.
Triskelion is really your best weapon, but even the almighty Fish-killer can get out-muscled by a beefy Mongrel. Getting something fat out to hold the ground while keeping your life total stable enough to recover and overwhelm them is pretty cliché, but pretty darned effective. The most important thing to remember about their threats is that while, you can't block their flying creatures for the most part, their flying creatures can block you. Make them.
So congratulations! You're now equipped with the tools to defeat Fish. What do you do now?
For starters, try not to lose to everything else.
Since I've already shown you the folly of engineering your deck specifically to defeat Fish, make sure you don't do the same thing to your play style. No matter how popular it is, Fish is still just going to be one deck among many you're likely to face at your average tournament. Testing against Fish is tedious bordering on outright boring, but necessary. Testing against Combo is convenient for discovering that mulliganning into a Chalice is good.
Testing against Drain actually wins you tournaments.
Mana Drain-based decks are, and most likely will continue to be, the decks to beat. With a minimum of eight solid counters and several entire archetypes worth of strategies, there's no easy way to beat them all. Only testing will tell you which ones you need which additional cards sitting on your sideboard or even taking up vital slots in the maindeck against.
Test test test. I can't say it enough. I lost my only match at StarCityGames: Chicago to Kowal's Gifts Belcher - the one Drain deck I hadn't extensively tested against. Even goldfishing with Workshop Aggro is beneficial, as it lets you get a good perspective on how often you can expect the broken openings, if your deck is relying too heavily on one aspect or another (my general rule is that if you're relying too heavily on Goblin Welder, you're playing the deck wrong), and if you need to retool some part of it to avoid the kind of heavy mulliganning that often afflicts these type of decks.
As for Stax, well... Stax is just a free victory. Unless they get the nuts draw and a Crucible, you're going to win. Savor this, but not so much that you get too arrogant.
Ah, heck, trashtalk all you want - you're going to beat Stax anyway. Prison is bad.
For reference, this is my most current list for my prized build of Workshop Aggro, Gilded Claw, designed for a neutral metagame with an eye towards the new Gifts Ungiven decks everyone seems to be talking about:
Good luck and happy beatings!
Dan Carp
Team ICBM
Still IP-banned from TMD
Now unbanned from SCG
*huggles Bleiweiss*
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