Five With Flores

Concerning:

I’M SO GREAT.

In fact, “I’m the Best!” [-Toad]

Okay, that’s out of our system.

Let’s move on, shall we?

I was planning to play Naya Lightsaber at next week’s New York State Championship, but now that the cat’s out of the bag… Yadda, yadda, yadda. Naya Lightsaber was for sure the best deck to play at the World Championships (just read the coverage… I told Andre I was “100% sure” this was the case), but I am not likely to be sleeving it up next weekend.

Okay: Full disclosure: Like you, I might have problems picking up four copies of Baneslayer Angel in time. So… Time for an alternate way to win.

I immediately switched, mentally, from Naya to Red Deck Wins when I realized a paucity of Baneslayer Angels was going to be a possibility. Right after setting foot back on American soil, Evan Erwin called me, and when I said I was switching gears to Goblin Guides, he steered me in the direction of Petr Brodzek’s deck, which was a 5-1 perfomer on the first day of Worlds:

4 Ajani Vengeant

4 Burst Lightning
4 Earthquake
4 Goblin Guide
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Plated Geopede
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Hell’s Thunder
4 Zektar Shrine Expedition

4 Arid Mesa
7 Mountain
4 Naya Panorama
1 Plains
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Terramorphic Expanse

sb:
2 Chandra Ablaze
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
3 Quenchable Fire
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Path to Exile

The first thing that you probably notice about this deck list is its insane mana base. Four Terramorphic Expanses, four Naya Panoramas, not a Teetering Peaks in sight.

Having played this deck about 30-40 matches at this point, I can say that I am quite happy with Petr’s mana base; the deck shell is quite excellent. My main point of customization was / is the inclusion of Act of Treason to the main. You can read why I feel like this is the right thing to do, and a tasty way to do it, here.

Barely Boros

3 Ajani Vengeant

3 Act of Treason
4 Burst Lightning
2 Earthquake
4 Goblin Guide
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Plated Geopede
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Hell’s Thunder
4 Zektar Shrine Expedition

4 Arid Mesa
7 Mountain
4 Naya Panorama
1 Plains
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Terramorphic Expanse

sb:
1 Ajani Vengeant
1 Act of Treason
2 Earthquake
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
3 Volcanic Fallout
4 Path to Exile

Here are the incentives and so on as I see them.

1. This deck always beats Jund.
2. This deck always beats Fog.
3. This deck has action against most of the reasonable decks in the metagame.

I have been batting pretty well with Barely Boros [BDM came up with the name, in case you hadn't already guessed]. My original theory was that it would be a decent, if not fantastic, choice against Naya Lighsaber (smash them for a ten-point swing when they tap for Baneslayer Angel)… But even when you pull that off you don’t necessarily win. So far, Naya Lightsaber seems like it might be the worst matchup for this deck.

On the other hand, Jund is super easy. If people persist in playing Jund in “one-third of the metagame” numbers, that actually paves quite an easy road for the deck. BDM was kind enough to humor me in some Barely Boros testing earlier this week, which you can check out over at Top 8 Magic here (plus, all the surrounding Podcasts).

Every session I do with the deck has been pretty encouraging; though none have been flawless (one of the defining characteristics of Naya Lightsaber early on was its long streak of “never losing”)… The down side of this deck is that when I have one black mark on a session, it is often the result of Naya Lightsaber, itself.

Anyway, here are the stats from the last go-round:

Vampires

Game the First:
He opens up on Lacerator; I play Goblin Guide and elect not to attack. My attacking can just be a profitable exchange for him, but if he doesn’t attack and I don’t attack, I am “winning” thanks to the Lacerator’s Carnophage-ness. He figures this out and attacks (obviously I trade with the +1). He follows up with Lacerator; I follow up with Guide. Same dance.

There is a little stumbling on my part, after which I play a Plated Geopede. Annoyingly he has a Gatekeeper of Malakir. I was actually sandbagging him, so this is super annoying. He follows up with a Bloodghast, but I Earthquake the pair before there is any attack.

So… Zektar Shrine Expedition.

I pull the trigger, fully expecting I will have to Lightning Bolt it to avoid some kind of embarassing life swing. But somehow Somehow SOMEHOW… It connects. Really? How the heck does that happen?

You can’t really lose if you connect with one of those.

Game the Second:
I have a burn heavy hand that keeps him off guys and kills him as a kind of dirty combo deck.

It’s all Volcanic Fallouts and Lightning Bolts, you know. Dan Paskins would be proud (plenty of overload). Not a lot of interactions this game.

RDW

El Primero:
I stall on two but have a pair of Goblin Guides (and no Lightning Bolts). All my Guides give him lands. Did I mention I was stuck on two? Dead dead dead.

El Segundo:
Just demolished him on tempo. I chose to go first.

El… Whatever three would be:
He drew three Hell’s Thunders. Hell’s Thunder is like the third best card in the mirror. I have Blightning as #1 because I never beat it Red-on-Red, and Ajani Vengeant has to be the second best (due to the life swing, especially when you can snare a guy and steal an attack). But Hell’s Thunder is probably the third best. Obviously if you can stick a Zektar Shrine or Elemental Appeal, that has a high hand-in-hand with the dubya, but that isn’t really very easy to do with all the Lightning Bolts, Burst Lightnings, and Volcanic Fallouts that the opponent is sandbagging until the end of turn. Hell’s Thunder on the other hand is a somewhat smaller packet of damage that is very hard to stop. Like I said, he had three of them. Man down.

Archive Trap Trap Deck

Game One:
He set off two Archive Traps on a second turn Path to Exile… Which just set up a bunch of Hellspark Elementals (very embarassing); the Path not only gave me the “card advantage” but the mana to realize it. I won with about seven cards in library.

Game Two:
He sided in Deft Duelist, which was super awkward because I didn’t go all out with the Volcanic Fallouts. I actually always forget to do that! Why!?! It is good against Blue, right? Anyway I gunned one of the two Earthquakes I left in so I looked like a genius &c. (which is really what we’re going for here). The game was closer than it probably seemed from his side of the table. Deft Duelist!

G/W Allies

Game One:
I just about packed on turn one when he played a Soul Warden and I had no Lightning Bolt. Then he ran it into my Plated Geopede. I have never done that, but I have certainly run guys into Vampire Hexmage. Gotta read the Firstest Strikesies, paps!

Game Two:
This match didn’t really count because… Well, among other things, he left in Luminarch Ascension. As you may have guessed, it hit the battlefield on turn the second… and failed to ever accrue a counter. I really didn’t know what was up so I waited to kill him in response to Angel’s Mercy.

It would have been mad… um… irony-ic if I had packed to that Soul Warden.

Grixis Control

First:
The first was a kind of a nice fencing match. I juked him with a super fast 7/1; he tapped his Crumbling Necropolis to respond, and I stuck Ajani Vengeant.

We went back and forth for a while, but he peeled back-to-back Blightnings to empty my grip (the second one actually stole a Lightning Bolt and a Burst Lightning when I had 5-6 mana in play), plus the Ajani!

However I had a sufficient life lead to eke out the last two points of damage. Probably from an unchecked topdeck.

Second:
I actually got off ultimate on Ajani this game!

YUS!

I kind of wasn’t paying attention, though. He floated in response and had Magma Spray, which ate my Unearthed Hellspark Elemental. I was watching Notorious out of the corner of my eyes, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have fallen for it.

I couldn’t really lose after blowing up six lands, though…

So anyway, that was the last five. And no Jund this time around (though like I said, Jund couldn’t be easier); okay, the G/W deck probably doesn’t count.

Good deck, though.

And 100% Baneslayer Angel free (if not Baneslayer Angel resistant).

LOVE
MIKE

Currently Reading: THE HOBBIT (The Lord of the Rings)

P.S. Why not Black?

One of the first things I tried to test was Black instead of White in this strategy. I mean if Act of Treason is good, Slave of Bolas has to be super good, right? Blightning, as well, seemed like a huge upgrade to the spell palette. The problem was… White does quite well across the board, whereas Black never wins (ever). I lost multiple fights in a row to the Fog deck (unlikely at best)… But multiple in a row? You can’t necessarily argue with that action. As BDM pointed out in the Podcasts, the Barely Boros deck is quite servicable against Fog, if for no other reason, the ability to consistenly blow up all their lands.

Concerning:

I know I have hinted at this notion of bending Nissa Revane a couple of times… From Top Decks to here on the blog. The joke is that you can’t really break Nissa (she isn’t that good)… But you can certainly try to break her, and get halfway to your goal; hence, the bend.

Most of what I have to say about Nissa pre-dates her spectacular finishes at the recent Star City $5,000 tournament by the Andersons et al, so you can actually make the argument that Nissa is breakable. My original position, though, was that even if she is good, she has some undeniable problems. Consider Blightning.

Start scratching your head.

Think about Blightning, or Lightning Bolt, or… whatever. Nissa can be a profitable 2/3 machine (kind of like “make a 2/3, force the opponent to discard a very good card”) but her super normal vulnerability makes it very difficult to keep her on the table. Ergo, difficult to really “break” her.

If you are dead set on playing a Nissa deck, you would probably consider Kali Anderson’s deck before the one I advocate later in this post, but there are still some interesting things to talk about (especially the history surrounding this deck in time, and the domino effect it created for me and eventually Andre Coimbra).

For Reference: Eldrazi Green - Kali Anderson

3 Eldrazi Monument

3 Ant Queen
4 Elvish Archdruid
4 Elvish Visionary
3 Garruk Wildspeaker
3 Great Sable Stag
4 Llanowar Elves
2 Master of the Wild Hunt
4 Nissa Revane
4 Nissa’s Chosen
2 Noble Hierarch

20 Forest
4 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood

Sideboard
1 Eldrazi Monument
3 Pithing Needle
4 Acidic Slime
1 Great Sable Stag
1 Mold Shambler
3 Mycoloth
2 Windstorm

This straight Green version is much more focused on Oran-Rief, the Vastwood and all relevant jones than my deck.

Here is my Nissa deck (or at least “the” Nissa deck that BDM and I used for some telling testing the week before the Nashville 5K):

Naya Elves:

3 Ajani Vengeant
4 Bloodbraid Elf

4 Elvish Archdruid
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nissa Revane
4 Nissa’s Chosen
4 Turntimber Ranger

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Baneslayer Angel

6 Forest
2 Graypelt Refuge
4 Jungle Shrine
2 Kazandu Refuge
1 Mountain
1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
1 Plains
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Sunpetal Grove

sb:
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
4 Acidic Slime
4 Great Sable Stag
3 Path to Exile

This Nissa Revane deck might be a little outdated based on two different implementations of separate strategies that have come since (the Eldrazi Green deck as an alternate Nissa Revane deck, and Naya Lightsaber as a better Naya deck), but the reason I figure it is interesting to talk about (still) is the notion of dependencies.

I think that for the past 16 years we have been approaching the idea of deck design — all of us, or most, anyway — from a fundamentally flawed perspective. I have been developing an alternate theory for how all decks are built (which sheds light on what should be the best decks, I think), but that is a topic for another time; I just want to focus on one principle of deck design for now, that of dependencies.

Dependencies are the tax that get tacked onto decks for the privilege of playing certain cards. For example the cards Flooded Strand, Arid Mesa, Ranger of Eos, and Nissa Revane are all compelling cards, and all have certain dependencies attached to them. The first two cards do almost nothing without a Plains to find, and the latter two don’t do quite nothing, but they are certainly below the power curve if they don’t have some kind of Mogg Fanatics and Nissa’s Chosen to work with.

Dependencies are why Marsh Flats and Verdant Catacombs are so much worse in Standard where you have to play actual Plains, Swamps, and Forests, relative to Extended, where you can actually get a Mountain of sorts with either card; just look at the mana base of a Domain Zoo deck: It might have fewer than ten mana producing lands, total… But will rarely, if ever, get caught with its pants down on the mana dependencies. Each non-mana producing land can get a variety of different lands in the deck, with tremendous overlap; even if there is only one Blood Crypt, say, a variety of differnt lands would be able to find it. In Standard, we have a much more difficult time tuning mana bases built around these lands because if we have four Arid Mesas, we probably have to play a bare minimum of four to five Mountains and Plains to justify… and even then, we will often get caught napping on mana. The games in Standard simply take longer, so we are more likely to draw deeper, and therefore, see more of our decks, et cetera.

Any Nissa deck has a fundamental set of dependencies on Nissa’s Chosen. Even if you don’t play all four copies of Nissa Revane, you probably play all four Nissa’s Chosen, because otherwise, Nissa is even less bendy than ususal.

In this deck I elected to try to go for a very explosive Ultimate on Nissa, and crammed my deck full of Elves that I thought might help do the job.

Playing Red was important to me because of the potential to his all my Elvish Archdruids and all my Bloodbraid Elves in a single turn. The possibility for that combination is arguably the strongest of all the reasonably costed Planeswalkers: 20+ damage coming in from a single effect. That was what had me geeked on Nissa… So I invested in Elves well beyond Nissa Revane’s fundamental dependencies.

The result was a playable but far from optimal Naya deck.

I originally tried straight G/R until I realized that I was just going to get blown out by Baneslayer Angels if I didn’t have them myself. However at the same time, I realized I could play arguably the strongest of the Planeswalkers, Ajani Vengeant, in my Nissa Revane deck (go figure). While the Nissa deck itself was not ready for prime time, it certainly set the stage.

I was quite excited about this deck and ran a several hours long playtest session with Brian David-Marshall at Top 8 Magic. You can listen to much of it. These sections have specifically to do with the Naya Nissa deck:

• Standard Nonsense: Part Three
• Standard Nonsense: Part Four

Later in this same session we played the Conqueror’s Pledge deck that Evan Erwin was advocating at the time. I loved Evan’s concept but disliked the implementation, and somehow decided that I was going to go from a creature-based Conqueror’s Pledge deck to a nearly creatureless Planeswalker-Tokens deck. Here is another look at Nissa Revane:

G/W Planeswalkers

4 Armillary Sphere
2 Wildfield Borderpost

3 Garruk Wildspeaker
4 Nissa Revane
4 Nissa’s Chosen

3 Ajani Goldmane
4 Baneslayer Angel
2 Conqueror’s Pledge
4 Day of Judgment
1 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
2 Martial Coup
1 Oblivion Ring

6 Forest
4 Graypelt Refuge
1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
3 Path to Exile
8 Plains
4 Sunpetal Grove

sb:
4 Great Sable Stag
4 Celestial Purge
4 Luminarch Ascension
2 Martial Coup
1 Path to Exile

I wanted very much for this deck to be any good.

I played it and played it… But it wasn’t.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t learn anything. Between the two decks we actually learned quite a bit… Which resulted in the now-wildly successful Naya Lightsaber.

From the Naya Nissa deck, we got the double-up land destruction package (still BDM’s favorite bit), which eventually helped Andre Coimbra win the World Championship.

The second deck actually taught me to be less fancy. The G/W Nissa deck is so motherloving fancy. By the time I pared down to what became Naya Lightsaber, all the frills were gone. The G/W version showed me what a dead end a Nissa deck with no exciting Ultimate could be; this, in a sense, transformed into Ranger of Eos, which has its own dependencies, but especially in the case of Wild Nacatl, bore dependencies with very low costs indeed. Ultimately I just pared down to the best cards, trying to deploy them in the fastest, most consistent, way possible. The end result: The best deck and a World Champion in my friend Andre Coimbra.

If you dial back to the podcast referenced above, hit up Part Seven (I told you the session was some hours long). BDM and I finish playing with Mono-Cascade (Black Baneslayer) and BDM of course loves it (what’s not to love)… But the last thing we talk about is Andre calling me up for a deck for Worlds. At that point, I hadn’t yet designed Naya Lightsaber… and I don’t know that I would have if not for hanging out with Brian that night. It was really a combination of things… Mostly testing out ideas that weren’t good enough — but were in compatible colors, doing less broken if somewhat more consistent things with Bloodbraid Elf — that got the ball rolling.

I hope you’ll join me in congratulating our 2009 World Champion!

(According to him, I’m “the man”).

And for reference:

• Standard Nonsense: Part Seven

LOVE
MIKE

Currently Reading: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes

Concerning:

I am really supposed to be working on this week’s Top Decks right now, which includes some Extended analysis as we approach the 2009 World Championships… But that led me to some personal Extended exploration that I thought I would share with my faithful blog readers.

Of course, like any fan of the game, I went bananas over the Ben Rubin / Brian Kibler Punishing Fire “Zoo” deck that won Pro Tour Austin. Just a great deck, and the bazillionth implementation of the collaboration of that wing of the Underground that has produced, well, the Sickest Ever deck of all time, among others. Their Naya-based Punishing Fire Zoo deck was of course reminiscent of Tomoharu Saito’s exciting finish to last year’s Extended Grand Prix tournaments, but involving bigger thinking.

I often write about how the best deck designers are so successful by killing their darlings… You know, how Dan Paskins went Shrapnel Blast in his straight Red Goblin deck, or how the patron saint of Red Decks, Tsuyoshi Fujita, cut Goblin Piledriver for Goblin Goon… Really not-obvious stuff that distinguishes the designer, differentiates him from the mean, and proves how much more effective his design is than the default.

For Reference: Rubin Zoo

4 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Lightning Helix
3 Qasali Pridemage

3 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Wild Nacatl

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Punishing Fire

3 Baneslayer Angel
1 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
4 Path to Exile

4 Arid Mesa
1 Forest
1 Ghost Quarter
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
2 Marsh Flats
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
2 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
2 Treetop Village

sb:
4 Meddling Mage
3 Ancient Grudge
3 Blood Moon
1 Kataki, War’s Wage
3 Ghost Quarter
1 Hallowed Fountain

In this case the big thinking looks to be the interaction between Punishing Fire and Grove of the Burnwillows.

Punishing Fire

Grove of the Burnwillows

This two card combination is strong on its face; it is essentially a one damage net for three mana, and inexorable over a long game. You can give the opponent a life per turn but wipe away his ways to win (for example, your opponent is playing Faeries and has nothing bigger than a 3/1)… You can’t really be stopped over a long game without graveyard removal

Go back and read what I wrote. Not “is” but “looks to be” … Punishing Fire + Grove of the Burnwillows is among the most powerful effects in the Rubin Zoo deck, but I feel like the really big innovation was the inclusion of Baneslayer Angel in the strategy. It might not seem brave… But playing a five drop in a Zoo deck is anything but obvious for Extended. After all, this is a format where some players went Steppe Lynx and many thought Woolly Thoctar too expensive to play!

This post is really about Punishing Fire, though, not the Baneslayer Angel end of the Rubin Zoo deck.

I was watching The Magic Show, and Brian said something that really hooked me. The Punishing Fire combination is compelling on its face, sure, but the DragonMaster created an analogy to Cursed Scroll that got the wheels turning.

Cursed Scroll is a card that I have won many tournaments with (though primarily in Black)… I was a huge proponent of Red Decks for Extended a few years back… So this opportunity seemed like a decent window to revisit the strategy.

To be fair Red never really went away. We have just exchanged it for The Lightning Bolt Deck in recent years. The mighty Saito himself played a version of the Lightning Bolt deck, albeit featuring Goblin Guide over Spark Elemental. I am suspicious of a Goblin Guide in general, but it seems particularly out of place in an Extended Red deck. The advantage of the Lightning Bolt Deck over Naya Burn, Naya Zoo, or Rubin Zoo (if the Lightning Bolt Deck can be said to have one) is its ability to ignore creature removal. All of the creatures come with an expriration date (Spark Elemental, Keldon Marauders), or can evaporate at will (Mogg Fanatic); this really makes Threads of Disloyalty or in particular Path to Exile much less attractive to play. So in short, I like Goblin Guide even less than usual in the Extended Lightning Bolt Deck.

My initial design came much more closely to an update to the traditional Red Deck Wins model, while still owing allegiance to the Lightning Bolt Deck:

Punishing Fire RDW v.1.0

2 Pithing Needle

2 Elemental Appeal
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Keldon Marauders
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Magma Jet
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Punishing Fire
4 Rift Bolt
4 Shrapnel Blast

2 Arid Mesa
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Great Furnace
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
6 Mountain
3 Scalding Tarn
1 Stomping Ground

sb:
1 Pithing Needle
2 Tormod’s Crypt
3 Ravenous Trap
4 Ancient Grudge
2 Lash Out
3 Threaten

Somewhat surprisingly, this deck has more than held its own in Extended practice. I’ve actually had more problems with Standard-legal cards like Bloodbraid Elf (card advantage) and Knight of the Reliquary (sheer size) than the fast and powerful Extended strategies.

I haven’t lost to any Dredge-oriented decks yet (though one embarassing match I got my opponent to 1 in Game One right before being locked out by the Shield of Emeria); I won Game Three with a well-placed Threaten on a Dark Depths token (apparently he was hybridizing or sideboarding Vampire Hexmage… I smoked him with my sideboard graveyard removal in Game Two).

The most rewarding matchup was against a Cascade-Restore Balance deck. I won 2-1, stealing the first and winning the third outright. In the first I was dead in two to a Phyrexian Totem (he had played two if not three copies of Restore Balance in the first)… then I topdecked Pithing Needle to buy me the three turns I needed to play Rift Bolt and Shrapnel Blast (thanks for all the help, Pithing Needle!). In the third I just played to empty my hand, which made Restore Balance much less fun for him. Burn seems very good against that strategy.

Elemental Appeal was of course my Firecat, but it is a bit awkward with Blinkmoth Nexus… I decided my sacrifice lands weren’t doing enough as I wasn’t playing with Plated Geopede, and I could either run Ancient Grudge just off of Grove of the Burnwillows or not at all. Threaten was looking more and more attractive main deck, anyway.

Here is my second version:

Punishing Fire RDW v.1.1

2 Pithing Needle

4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Keldon Marauders
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Magma Jet
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Punishing Fire
4 Rift Bolt
4 Shrapnel Blast
2 Threaten

4 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Great Furnace
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
12 Snow-covered Mountain

sb:
1 Pithing Needle
2 Tormod’s Crypt
3 Ravenous Trap
4 Ancient Grudge *
4 Lash Out
1 Threaten

* Provisional… Could be a Shattering Spree or some other awesome card, like Isochron Scepter.

I was very surprised at how effecrive these decks have proved so far.

The question, really, is whether they are worth exploring since we know we can just play Rubin Zoo, which has not just the most powerful combination in this deck, but also a top end that includes Baneslayer Angel (and a bottom of the curve that includes Tarmogoyf). I talked to Ben the week after the Pro Tour, and he pointed out that unlike many other Extended formats, in the current one, his Zoo deck is actually composed of many of the most powerful cards! … That is a hard argument for a knowledgeable Magician to argue away.

That said, the combo-like double Shrapnel Blast draw might be enough to make this a viable option. We’ll just have to wait and see… and draw burn spells.

LOVE
MIKE

Currently Reading: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes