- Classic Magic theorist Mike Flores
- "The Innovator" Patrick Chapin
- Level Six Mage & 2007 Invitational Champion Tiago Chan
- Deckbuilder extraordinaire Adrian Sullivan
- Limited expert Nick Eisel
- Vintage expert Stephen Menendian
- Pro Tour deck designer Benjamin Peebles-Mundy
- Fan favorites Richard Feldman
& Kyle Sanchez
... and many, many more!
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Frankly, your favorite deck sucks.
Thanks for the money, Pete.
What? That's not enough? I mean, it's true.
Fine...
Here are the reasons your favorite deck sucks*:
* If your favorite deck does not appear in this list, it sucks for one of the following reasons: 1) If it were any good, it would appear on the below list, 2) It sucks so much I grouped it in with similar decks rather than wasting the time and effort to discuss such a sucky deck, or 3) author oversight.
Heezy Street
I would conservatively estimate that no less than 58% of all Team PTQ (GP) matches will include at least one copy of Heezy Street, so this is an important deck to understand. It is important to understand that despite the fact that it sucked less than 407 other decks for the purposes of one weekend, Heezy Street still sucks. However it sucks significantly less than other G/R beatdown decks.
The attention Mark paid to the details shows several important instances of templating:
Llanowar Elves -> Scorched Rusalka
This change reduces the effectiveness of cards like Faith's Fetters. Those who have been paying attention for the past several weeks know how much I love the Rusalka. In a deck that can get creature damage to stick quickly (specifically via Dryad Sophisticate and Giant Solifuge), Rusalka can play Disciple of the Vault, allowing for an uncounterable outlet of direct damage.
Rumbling Slum -> Giant Solifuge
This creature can't be targeted by Faith's Fetters, one of the most dangerous spells for Heezy Street to face. Despite its toughness of one rather than the erroneously leaked three, Giant Solifuge is, according to Mike Turian, the best aggressive card since Ball Lightning.
That said, Heezy Street, like whatever your favorite deck is if it isn't Heezy Street itself, flat out sucks; the main reason is its burn suite. Flames of the Blood Hand main deck is superb, and gave Mark a great out against Loxodon Hierarch (especially with Frenzied Goblin). However, he only has four sources of true direct, and it is the clunky (expensive) and self-damaging Char. Generally speaking, the Gruul-flavored decks with more creatures are better against other Gruul decks and the ones with more burn are better against control, but, that said, Mark has no Hammers for opposing 3/3s. Excepting a favorable Scorched Rusalka board, he can't necessarily finish what he started, and he can't really kill a giant. The biggest creature Mark can stop is a Meloku (which is fine, of course), but even with its skilled templating, Mark's deck has difficulty winning games where his early and middle games didn't develop according to plan.
Luckily, he hit first turn Kird Ape 100% of the time.
Zoo
Zoo is the much better, but much more inconsistent Heezy Street. There isn't much Heezy Street can do that Zoo can't, but what does that mean, given how badly Heezy Street sucks? At least Heezy Street gets stuck on Skarrg much less often than the Zoo's mana base eats it alive.
Osyp was 2-0-1 against Zoo at the Pro Tour (with the one being the draw that locked Craig Jones into first place), but he said that his other matches - and the other matches he watched - developed the same way. Zoo would blow him out one game, he would win one game by the skin of his teeth, and Zoo's mana base would let it down in the remaining game, which would not be a game at all. This seemed a recurring theme, with even the best players going to four cards (or perhaps because they were the best), then shaking their heads in disbelief.
You can't really indict Zoo on the merits of its cards - they are some of the best creatures and burn spells at every drop - but the mana base makes it the kind of deck that Zvi taught me never to play. That is, a sucky one.
Multiple top finishing players (Jones included) credited Billy Moreno with their Zoo builds. For reference and contrast, here is Billy's (sucky) deck:
Moreno told me that he built his sideboard to beat other Zoo decks' sideboards. He said that most players "go large" boarded, so he wanted to go another direction: Check out that 3 Glare of Subdual / 2 Vitu-Ghazi, the City Tree sideboard. Billy's deck is essentially Japanese, going for a completely different plan against other creature decks so as to invalidate their plans. He used the Ghazi switch to beat Ben Goodman (whose Ghost Dad deck claims Zoo as one of its best matchups) in essentially a blowout. Though the games looked close on life total, Billy was able to use his Watchwolves, Glare of Subdual, and a backup Lightning Helix to win a race that never came down to the Red Zone.
And yet... With no (room for) Umezawa's Jitte, Billy's deck still sucks. How can he win a Jitte war just by tapping whoever is wearing the pointy stick? Ex-actly!
Owling Mine
You probably already know that Owling Mine sucks. I decided to pick Tiago Chan's list because I feel it sucks more. The massive success of this deck - two copies in the Top 8 with a much smaller representative population than, say, B/W - can be attributed to only one thing: the suckiness of other decks.
I am not talking about players running unrealistic control decks that could not defeat the Owl so much as the lack of interactive elements in decks in general. The last time Howling Mine decks were at the top of the pile - probably US Nationals 1996 - the successful metagame call of Turbo Stasis was predicated on the prevalence of Black decks (White decks in those days packed a mix of something like four Disenchant and four Divine Offering). The Black decks could not draw a card and then remove their Howling Mines (humiliating for the Stasis player), nor even untap their Nevinyrral's Disks. Had White decks been the norm, Turbo Stasis would have been a weaker choice.
Now look at how decks with not just one, but three colors of artifact removal can deal with Howling Mine. Scroll up to Craig Jones's list. He has all of two Tin-Street Hooligans. No Seed Sparks, no Naturalizes, nor innovative copies of Sundering Vitae. How could Craig possibly have defeated Antoine in his Top 8 match? It boggles the mind.
Tiago's deck has a real sideboard against beatdown decks, and posted an impressive win against Heezy in that one game. The bet on Owling Mine is whether a player is willing to devote almost all his sideboard to changing the aggro matchup into about a 60/40 or if he is willing to accept a completely unwinnable one (as Antoine played). Ultimately Owling Mine sucks because this kind of choice actually has to be made. Its viability is predicated entirely on the metagame and good pairings. Did you read I Did It! yesterday? Did you check out Mark's pairings? Poor Raphael Levy's journey at Honolulu can be represented mathematically as one over negative Heezy.
B/W Aggro
In testing, I found B/W Aggro to (surprise, surprise) suck. I had all kinds of difficulty beating straightforward beatdown decks with evasion and burn, but apparently that wasn't the norm. I didn't play sucky creatures like Descendant of Kiyomaro and certainly didn't figure out, um, Tallowisp plus Shining Shoal. Over the course of Honolulu, watching Olivier Ruel, I found myself liking his version of B/W Aggro more and more. Never before had I seen Hand of Cruelty Hand In Hand with Paladin en-Vec, nor Paladin en-Vec stack two points only to transform via the magic of Ninjitsu into a spontaneous Hymn to Tourach for five.
Then I saw Oli's list.
In a word - okay, two words — it sucked.
I can't stand decks that don't know which cards are good, and Oli's is all twos and threes. Some seem forgivable (Teysa, Orzhov Scion), but others inexplicable to me (three Mortify). I think the main thing I didn't understand was the numbers on Shrieking Grotesque and Paladin en-Vec. Two of each? The Paladin seemed so consistent, especially against U/R or another B/W... but then why play only two? The power of Castigate plus Ravenous Rats plus Shrieking Grotesque gave me the same feeling of synergy, especially in its maximization of (the one) Descendent. Again the numbers!
Basically, what I don't understand must suck... so I'm going to move on to a B/W list that I do understand better.
Jacob Arias Garcia's B/W deck took him to basically the suckiest of all finishes, ninth. Sucky finish notwithstanding, Arias Garcia's deck seems one deserving of a second look. It rides much higher on the power curve than most other B/W decks, and plays the full four Umezawa's Jittes. Inexplicably, it sucks in the decision to play only three copies of the scariest B/W card. The synergy between Dark Confidant and Ink-Eyes seems moderately sucky, but then again, I can't recall a lot of times where I've connected with the Servant of Oni and managed to lose. Sorry Jacob; I feel your pain.
Heartbeat
When viewing the Top 8 from the ivory tower of my commentator's booth, I noted that Maximilian Bracht had either the best or second best sideboard of the Top 8. My revised opinion: It sucked.
I still like about 58/60 of Maximilian's main, but upon further reflection - and this is going to seem ironic coming from me - I don't know if you are going to get a lot of people with Vinelasher Kudzu. The transformative sideboard probably served Bracht brilliantly in the Swiss, but I think that for the wider arena of Standard and Team Standard, you will have to go back to the drawing board if you want to play Heartbeat.
My guess is that (should you elect to play it) your Heartbeat deck will have a greater than 50% chance of playing against a deck that has legitimate interactive cards (B/W with disruption; U/R/x decks with counters, Annex, or superior card drawing; land destruction), therefore the deck needs to have a more robust card drawing engine and/or disruptive suite to remain competitive now that the cat is out of the bag.
Sucky as its existing sideboard may be, I think it should be noted that Heartbeat has the highest card quality of all the decks in Standard right now. Of my former Top 10 cards, Heartbeat plays three of the top four (Sakura-Tribe Elder, Umezawa's Jitte, Sensei's Divining Top) and "the best threats," by definition, as defined by Joshua Ravitz (look it up). Heartbeat additionally plays Remand, the #3 Standard card according to World Champion Mori.
Still sucks.
UrzaTron
Believe it or not, this deck sucks.
Certainly it doesn't suck as much as other 'Tron decks (being much more consistent and resilient), and I think that if you want to play 'Tron you should play 60/60 and 13/15 of Osyp's listing, but I don't know if URzaTron is good enough overall to play at present. Certain writers such as MixedKnuts or lcdcow will tell you that the Hawaiian strength of this archetype choice was predicated on a correct read of the metagame; this is not correct. URzaTron simply had (and continues to have) the highest starting hand of the available decks, as well as the most powerful and multi-faceted proactive long game. As Osyp put it, tapping out for Keiga or Meloku was fine because it wasn't likely that whatever the opponent was going to do would be remotely as good, certainly not better.
In Honolulu, URzaTron could expect all manner of less powerful and generally slower control decks playing insufficiently focused answer cards. It was built to beat two Cranial Extractions (which would have been correctly aimed at Keiga and Meloku), whereas most players played a single one, named "Blaze" and lost to Invoke the Firemind. In the more well informed current metagame, these decks are either more developed or non-existent, meaning that URzaTron can't exploit them as much. Also, "true" Draw-Go style decks like Jushi Blue (easy prey for URzaTron) seem to have vanished. In their wake is a much less friendly field.
Heezy stated it yesterday, and it is generally true, that URzaTron is behind against a first turn Kird Ape; the prevalence of Stomping Ground decks in the wake of Mark's victory is no boon to URzaTron. I think that it is quite possible to play out of, say, 1/3 Heezy Street/Zoo decks in real tournaments, but it would not be a picnic, and isn't necessarily the kind of thing that I want to subject myself to in single-elimination 8-man queues online, hence the deck's non-recommended status. Specifically, the main problem URzaTron has in the current metagame is stopping cheap toughness three creatures (Kird Ape, Scab-Clan Mauler, Watchwolf)... There is no good solution. You can't really play Volcanic Hammer in lieu of Pyroclasm and maintain dominant position over B/W decks, and Pyroclasm is randomly good against Stomping Ground decks anyway, despite how annoying the x/3 team can be.
See? No easy answer. Frankly, that sucks.
The other main source of "sucks" is that URzaTron isn't half the deck it was in Honolulu if you don't play Giant Solifuge in the sideboard. This will obviously be a conflict in Teams.
Greater Gifts
Talk about a deck that sucks!
Arguably the best player on the planet, Masashi Oiso, finished 97; Player of the Year Kenji Tsumura did him six worse at 103; World Champion Katsuhiro Mori dropped even further to 214; while the deck originator and Worlds Finalist Frank Karsten checked in at 140 himself. With a list of true masters that long, it is clearly the fault of the deck. Was Greater Gifts a surprise hit for Karsten at Worlds? Was it simply the fact that after the big show, every test group used Greater Gifts as a punching bag, preparing their weapons of choice (assuming they prepared) specifically for the deck? Mori claimed during a drunken late night draft that the Japanese "didn't prepare for this one."
You know what sucks? A complete, utter, and undeniable domination of the game... that lasts for one tournament.
Admittedly the aforementioned Mihara finished Top 16, in essentially a tie for 8th place.
The inclusion of Selesnya Sanctuary and Golgari Rot Farm may seem sucky at first glance - you might just have to discard if you are on the draw - but that is the reason they are in the deck. Mihara would go to 8 and drop Yosei, speeding up if not super-charging his combo.
B/W and B/G/W Control
Despite Ant's 0-4 start to the tournament, I think that the B/W "expensive" deck and the somewhat disappointing "House" deck got a bad rap. Sure, sevens suck, but they probably don't suck quite as badly as I may have claimed in the past. That said, For Whom the Knell Tolls and the "House" deck certainly didn't have finishes commensurate to the skill of the players behind them. The B/W cadre boasted all GP or US National Champions and the B/G/W a list of resumes to rival Greater Gifts.
Ultimately, what sucks most in my mind is the placement of the creatures in these decks. As I said in Into the Aether, Dimir House Guard seems like he would enjoy a spot in B/G/W, a natural pairing with the even sweeter four spot (Loxodon Hierarch) as well as a Delicious curve into Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni.
Sucky finishes notwithstanding, it is important to note what was done well in these decks given the general development of constructed formats over time, naturally towards more board control. I quite like how the B/W doesn't play Castigate. The progression from turn three House Guard into Nightmare Void seems to do much the same thing (except, I guess, against Greater Gifts), and with more consistency. Additionally, the House Guard engine really seems to have helped sucky0-4.dec to have gotten the fours right (excepting Persecute, which seems a bit off).
Ghost Dad
Ghost Dad reminds me of Deadguy Red... 1997, the 6-0 deck, rather than the Top 8 1998 version. Dave brought his Lava Hounds because he didn't think that people would play Freewind Falcon, and anyway, he thought that after the initial 4-8 haste in, Swords to Plowshares would offset collateral damage (long term). Meanwhile he was beating people with cards that they thought unplayable while they were trying to "get card advantage" with Thawing Glaciers. Dave never thought that Deadguy Red was going to define the next year - next two years - of American Magic, but the rest of the country had a collective different idea, and his legend was born.
Is it true that this deck has become the most popular on Magic Online? I haven't played in a queue in three or four days, but Ghost Council of Orzhova seemed 2-1 behind Kird Ape to me when last I played (by population). If it is true that any and all manner of Ghost Dad decks have grown to the role of The Rock, then by all means sign me up for queue after queue. For truly, this deck sucks.
Generally speaking, I question the ability of Ghost Dad to profitably interact with a prepared opponent. Certainly at the Pro Tour, few players - and no one on Day One - would have been playing around Shoals; meanwhile they would have been misplaying the Pillories.
That said, I don't understand Goodman's assessment of the URzaTron matchup as "quite... favorable." The Pro Tour version of Ghost Dad has literally five relevant cards main deck. The deck has to operate as essentially a tactical beatdown deck, and it is woefully slow when compared to the "real" (if generally sub-Heezy/Jones) beatdown decks URzaTron was designed to beat. Besides (both sides of) Strands of Undeath, the deck simply doesn't have many scary cards. In fact, Goodman drew two copies of his best card, hit essentially the nut high double maximum Shining Shoal on a "lethal" Blaze, dealing Osyp eight... and still managed to lose.
Respectfully, I think that the assertion were based on sub-optimal versions of URzaTron, lacking the templating (specifically the attention to early game mana consistency and card drawing) of Osyp's deck. I point this out not to toot my own horn as it were, but because realistic assessment of the matchup has to be made assuming that the default 'Tron opponent will copy Osyp's deck rather than a lower finishing one. Osyp's deck hits the 'Tron much more quickly than most versions because all his 1-3 mana spells say "draw a card," and some of them (Remand and Electrolyze) have profitable mana and card advantage interactions in the matchup, regardless of stage.
Ben is correct when saying that Osyp doesn't have any true hard counters, but the counters are hard enough - and fast enough - to answer the only cards that really matter (Ghost Council and the other four mana Black cards). That is, Ben's deck lacks the ability of, say, Oli's deck to play a heavy disruption game with discard and serious combat creatures early game; if Osyp has counters, he'll often still have them on turn four. Ben's advantages are generally predicated on URzaTron caring about cards like Kami of the Ancient Law, Plagued Rusalka, and Thief of Hope that can be profitably removed with Pyroclasm or Electrolyze, or exposing one of the monoliths. Because of Osyp's increased likelihood of having a mana advantage on any monolith turn, he will often have counter backup (for Sickening Shoal) or just not care (about Pillory).
Definitely Ghost Council itself is an amazing card, but I think in the absence of real control elements, the card advantage of Ghost Dad is ephemeral when facing a deck with more powerful elements (Osyp, Nygaard, Wafo-tapa, B/W, House), especially as those decks all have dedicated and exceptionally powerful draw engines. The latter two decks can just focus on Cranial Extraction on Ghost Council of Orzhova and win long with Phyrexian Arena. Pillory kill just doesn't seem impressive against Loxodon Hierarch, Vitu-Ghazi, or Dimir House Guard, though, admittedly, Kami of Ancient Law more than proves his merit.
None of this matters, of course, as those decks all suck, so Ghost Dad will never be playing against them.
Mitigate Suckiness - Know What Your Cards Do
