Five With Flores

Concerning:

Primeval Titan :: Tournament Performance :: Joraga Treespeaker
Zvi Mowshowitz :: Conrad Kolos :: … and Primeval Titan

Primeval Titan

So the third deck I played around with coming back from US Nationals was a variation on Mono-Green Eldrazi Ramp as played by Conrad Kolos.

This is the deck list I played with:

Modified Conrad Green

4 Everflowing Chalice

4 All is Dust
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
2 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre

1 Ancient Stirrings
4 Cultivate
4 Explore
4 Joraga Treespeaker
1 Obstinate Baloth
4 Primeval Titan
4 Summoning Trap
1 Terastodon

4 Eldrazi Temple
2 Eye of Ugin
13 Forest
2 Khalni Garden
1 Mystifying Maze
3 Tectonic Edge

sb:
4 Relic of Progenitus
2 Autumn’s Veil
1 Back to Nature
2 Fog
1 Nature’s Claim
3 Obstinate Baloth
2 Pelakka Wurm

The main difference between the deck that I played and the one that Conrad used to make the US National Team is the presence of Joraga Treespeaker in the main. If you don’t know the story, I was lamenting the randomness of Ramp mirrors. It seemed that if one player got two accelerators and the other only one, then the one with two would always win. It had very little to do with play skill.

Zvi chuckled.

“Why don’t they just play Birds of Paradise?” he asked.

I was pretty confused. I wasn’t really questioning the master of mana acceleration when I asked why they would want to play Birds of Paradise.

“If the limiting factor is acceleration, why not add a kind of acceleration that not only can they not interact with (the Valakut decks are going to take out their Lightning Bolts, which don’t do anything), but that can allow you to break serve? I mean you will be able to play Cultivate on the second turn!”

For that matter, why not play Joraga Treespeaker?

I ended up having dinner with Conrad the night before Nationals and told him about breaking serve with Joraga Treespeaker. He went crazy and added it to his sideboard as a “Sol Ring”. I didn’t take credit for the one drop tech for very long, and quickly owned up that I had gotten the idea from Zvi. Anyway, Joraga Treespeaker ended up being an All-Star for Conrad and he mentioned to me after the tournament he would consider playing it main deck, over the weaker cards.

I quickly evaluated that I wanted all four copies of All Is Dust, and Conrad told me he wanted another Fog given how half the decks in the metagame only attack. So that’s how I came to the above deck list.

Conrad explained how even though the Mono-Green deck is weaker than the Valakut Ramp decks in terms of being Primeval Titan decks, it is a stronger Summoning Trap deck. Watching him play over the course of the National Championships, I could see how strategically he played the deck. He used the Primeval Titan as a toolbox rather than just a mallet. Defensive Primeval Titan; grinding Primeval Titan; Mjolnir-to-the-skull Primeval Titan, too, make no mistake… But more than the superficial superstar.

So how did I do?

Unfortunately, the Mono-Green Ramp deck did not perform as well as the other decks I liked this run.

I played it in eight MTGO queues (the last four being just tonight), and went 1-7.

Briefly…

• Valakut Ramp, Lost; -8 Points
• Naya Fauna Shaman, Won; +9 Points
• Terrible Red Deck, Lost; -9 Points
• Jund, Lost; -6 Points
• Mono-Green Ramp (mirror), Lost; -7 Points
• Soul Sisters, Lost; -8 Points
• Soul Sisters, Lost; -7 Points
• U/G Eldrazi Monument, Lost; -6 Points

The matches had varying degrees of eventful-ness.

The Mono-Green mirror was basically an abombination. I had a Joraga Treespeaker in my opener in the first, but my only Green source was Khalni Garden, so I ended up way off curve. He was on the play anyway and drew multiple awesome threats; I had a Primeval Titan but was way behind to his better acceleration draw-into-Primeval Titan and opted for a Hail Mary Summoning Trap to try to mug the Titan and get back in the game.

Like clockwork I got Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre.

Of course he just drew his Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre and got full value along with the Legendary deuce.

He also just drew Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, which went very well with all the lands his Primeval Titan had gotten him

In the second game I ramped to third turn Summoning Trap… and whiffed. Just that kind of match.

I felt like Soul Sisters should be a good matchup. The first match I lost to a mis-click, but the deck just never came out for me. I was always just a little bit shy in both matches. Other than the mis-click I felt like I was managing my resources correctly but the dominoes just didn’t line up. For instance over the three games of the first match I never saw even one All Is Dust; in the second I drew all four All Is Dust in Game One and two in Game Two (sadly a mulligan to five)… but stalled just under its cost both times around (Soul Sisters seems pretty soft to All Is Dust).

I guess that is just the problem with Ramp decks in general. Your cards are so expensive that you can lose very thin margin games on just getting to an Incredible amount of mana when you need low Amazing, or maybe Monstrous.

The Fogs were good. They bought time against the U/G deck’s Eldrazi Monument and Overrun, but again, I was just shy of what I needed cards and mana-wise.

Of course it could just be me.

Before finishing this blog post I decided to play a round with Joshua Utter-Leyton’s Mythic Conscription deck (my MTGO file for that deck is “Utter Beatings”). In the first game I played Noble Hierarch; Lotus Cobra + Noble Hierarch; third turn kill. He got the first Linvala, Keeper of Silence in Game Two, and by the time I played mine he had already disrupted me enough with his Cunning Sparkmage that I couldn’t Recover. With one or two more mana I would have flat-out won, but he had two Fauna Shamans running, after all; in the third, I played a Noble Hierarch into a Knight of the Reliquary; into third turn Linvala; into Elspeth, Knight-Errant.

You know, average draw.

Or… Nope, not just me.

This isn’t an indictment of Primeval Titan; that card is a game changer that allowed the Green decks to build in a less profligate fashion. But I don’t really know what to say… It hasn’t been performing on the same level as Eldrazi Conscription.

LOVE
MIKE

Concerning:

Felidar Sovereign :: Soul Sisters ::Super Secret Felidar Sovereign Mirror Match Tech
Teenage Heartthrobs :: Losing at Magic: The Gathering :: … and Felidar Sovereign

Yesterday we chatted a bit about my post-Nationals enthusiasm RE: Utter-Leyton’s Mythic Conscription deck. However I was very excited and showed interest in three different decks that came out of that tournament. I felt Mythic Conscription was the strongest (especially after playing all of them), but it wasn’t the first I tried.

Teen Heartthrob Gavin Verhey (and my co-conspirator at new project http://FloresRewards.com) sent me his Soul Sisters deck list. As you probably know, Gavin finished Top 32 at US Nationals with Soul Sisters elevating his life total turn after turn… Better yet, he had some sideboard tech for the inevitable, impending, “shiny new deck” mirror matches: Felidar Sovereign.

Shhh… Don’t tell anyone about Felidar Sovereign

“I think you just want to get into the position where you play Sovereign and hold two Brave the Elements. I don’t think you will be able to race very often… but we never tested it.” -Gavin

This is the deck I tested:

Soul Sisters – Gavin Verhey

4 Ajani’s Pridemate
4 Brave the Elements
3 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
4 Kor Firewalker
2 Oblivion Ring
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Serra Ascendant
4 Soul Warden
4 Soul’s Attendant
4 Survival Cache

4 Kabira Crossroads
15 Plains
4 Tectonic Edge

Sideboard:
1 Celestial Purge
3 Felidar Sovereign
2 Linvala, Keeper of Silence
4 Luminarch Ascension
2 Oblivion Ring
3 Path to Exile

I cut one Celestial Purge, the Sun Titan, and the War Priest of Thune from Gavin’s original deck list. My reasons were basically that the deck is already hard against Red Deck and Jund (ergo less necessity for Celestial Purge, even if it is better than Oblivion Ring against Pyromancer Ascension); Sun Titan is whatever… I don’t know when I would play it, really; and War Priest of Thune — while a beating in decks that can actually clock Pyromancer — primarily gains value only against monkeybrains when you are presenting a sad 10+ turn clock.

So how did I run?

I played Soul Sisters in eight tournaments over about two days. These were the results:

• Jund – Won flip, won match; +10 points
• Mythic Conscription – Lost flip, lost match; -8 points
• Mythic Conscription (same guy) – lost flip, won match; +8 points
• G/R – lost flip, lost match; -10 points
• Naya Fauna Shaman – lost flip, lost match; -8 points
• RDW – lost flip, won match; +6 points
• Four-color Ramp – won match; +6 points
• Jund -lost flip, lost match; -10 points

Basically I ended up dead even, and down a couple of points. I know that MTGO points are not really indicative of anything (heck, they aren’t even public) but I have a personal goal of attaining and maintaining a 1900+ rating on MTGO. I have read this is the rough equivalent of Pro-level execution, and that seems as fine a goal as any… But of course experimentation with decks rather than a single-minded focus to maximize points is at odds with that goal. Clearly my performance with Gavin’s Soul Sisters is nowhere near my post-Nationals performance with Mythic Conscription (or, for that matter, my performance levels with Mono-White Eldrazi, Esper, or Pyromancer Ascension… the decks I liked coming into Nationals).

So what happened?

My opening match with Soul Sisters was a classic case of Exhaustion and profitable trading. My Jund opponent was able to deal with most everything, but I always netted something along the way. Game Two I lost to three Jund Charms (basically a Wrath of God for your guys but not his Putrid Leeches)… but the match in three more or less went according to book.

I split matches with Mythic Conscription (same guy). My only notes for this one are “same guy” in the second row; ha. I remember the second match just trying to Overwhelm him with the grind. Everything I did was more value (generally life) and he had to respect my little Ajani’s Pridemate. Calls could be close but I remained outside of Sovereigns of Lost Alara range… at least most of the time.

The first time around I remember being completely out-classed. Soul Sisters is best of breed when everything is going according to the Cliff’s Notes… Serra Ascendant is Baneslayer Angel; Ajani’s Pridemate is Tarmogoyf; so on, so forth. But when you are one square peg out of a round hole  you can be completely dominated by the Mythic Rares in a Conscription deck. All of his cards represent so much mana, so much incremental cardboard, it can he hard for the little White men to compete.

The G/R deck I wasn’t pleased to lose to; not at all. I was basically manascrewed both games, and he got two if not three Cunning Sparkmages; it’s not like I was planning to roll over to a Nest Invader.

The Naya Fauna Shaman matchup was extremely frustrating. I was again dominated by Cunning Sparkmages in the first game but had Linvala in the subsequent ones. Linvala is a house against a deck that relies heavily on Knight of the Reliquary, Noble Hierarch, &c… Or at least it is supposed to be. In the third game he just had some Knights and drew a ton of dual lands to make them big. The problem was that even though he was locked out of Cunning Sparkmage, he had Basilisk Collar and Knight of the Reliquary was so big he could keep pace with my lifegain. Late in the game he got the Stoneforge Mystic and applied a second Basilisk Collar to a second Knight of the Reliquary and eventually bowled over the so-called “race” we were in, eventually going completely over the top. I don’t know what I could really have done better… My deck was executing, I got my sideboard card, and he still beat me, and with his third-string plan.

The RDW match was probably my favorite of the set. He revealed a Kor Firewalker with Goblin Guide on the second turn and packed on the spot. Moral victory!

No clue how I beat the four-color Ramp deck. His crushed me Game One and also had everything… which is unsurprising four a four-color deck that can cast every super expensive (as in secondary market value) spell. But what can I say? Sometimes Ajani’s Pridemate is just bigger than Primeval Titan. Too bad.

Unfortunately we finished the set with a loss to Jund. This was another case of just being out-classed on power level and card versatility.

Post Script

One of the reasons I was interested in this deck at this stage is that I was looking ahead to the TCGPlayer.com $5K tournaments here in New York City come October. Mythic Conscription is obviously going to lose its current flair with the disappearance of Sovereigns of Lost Alara (though it is possible that a Planeswalker-heavy classic Baneslayer Angel build might be just fine); I was just looking for a way to get a jump on the playtest process.

I failed to win all my good matchups, and even if I stole the Ramp match, I don’t think that I was really well positioned in the queues. For example, I was all excited to run out Felidar Sovereign tech, and… No mirror matches.

If there is one thing that I would note it is that I never felt like I had enough land. Gavin’s deck plays only 23 lands, but when I played against Tom Ross’s build at US Nationals, it always seemed like it had an unending amount of land for a deck so deep in one-drops. Just something to think about: Remember, Conrad Kolos’s deck from the all-Jund Pro Tour had about a billion lands, and still mono-one-drops.

Good luck to my peeps in Amsterdamn; bad luck to not my peeps.

LOVE
MIKE

Concerning:

Sovereigns of Lost Alara :: Keeping Track of the Numbers :: Soul Sisters (kinda)
Mono-Green Ramp (even less) :: #FloresRewards :: … And Sovereigns of Lost Alara

You might not know this about me, but I keep fastidious records on my MTGO tournament play statistics.

That is how I know what decks are good!

So after coming back from US Nationals last week, I was very excited to try out some of the breakout decks from that tournament.

Specifically, I looked at three decks:

1. Mono-G Ramp, a la new TCGPlayer columnist Conrad Kolos
2. Soul Sisters – in particular because teen heartthrob Gavin Verhey clued me in on the mirror match sideboarding tech
3. Mythic Conscription because Utter-Leyton’s deck looked so sick I had to take a personal day at the mere prospect of playing it.

Overall, the most impressive deck of the three was Mythic Conscription. I will detail the other two (less exciting) decks [or my experiences with them, anyway] in blog posts later in the week (probably), but for now I wanted to talk about Utter-Leyton’s Conscription deck.

Sovereigns of Lost Alara is a centerpiece of the Mythic Conscription deck.

Mythic Conscription

2 Eldrazi Conscription

4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Mana Leak

4 Knight of the Reliquary
4 Sovereigns of Lost Alara

4 Birds of Paradise
2 Explore
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Noble Hierarch

3 Elspeth, Knight-Errant

4 Celestial Colonnade
5 Forest
2 Island
1 Marsh Flats
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Plains
1 Sejiri Steppe
3 Stirring Wildwood
3 Verdant Catacombs

sb:
2 Jace’s Ingenuity
2 Spell Pierce
2 Obstinate Baloth
4 Celestial Purge
4 Linvala, Keeper of Silence
1 Bojuka Bog

Some Notes:

I wrote a lot of my ideas about this deck in last week’s edition of Top Decks. Those didn’t really change based on my playing the deck. In fact my respect for the version just increased.

Overall I was enchanted my the success of such a no-frills deck. I had been mesmerized by all these Fauna Shamans and Squadron Hawk engines and only one copy of Eldrazi Conscription, loading up on Primeval Titans, and so on. But Utter-Leyton’s deck bucked recent trends, uncompromising in its refusal to, you know, compromise. Great deck, and worthy of the very deserving champion.

The card a lot of people have pointed out in this deck is Explore.

I didn’t really know what to make of it. Yes, there were times when I had a Lotus Cobra followed by a third turn Explore and things went absolutely bananas… But when I was reaching for sideboard slots, this was also always the first card I considered cutting (and to be honest, I won an awful lot of matches with one Explore in my deck!) Sorry, ffej

Match rundown:

• Soul Sisters – Won flip, lost match; -9 points
• R/G Valakut – Won flip, won match; +10 points
• White Weene (regular, not Soul Sisters) – Won flip, won match +7 points
• B/G Ramp – Lost flip, won match; +9 points
• B/G Ramp (same deck) – Lost flip, won match; +8 points
• Mono-Green Valakut Ramp – Won match; +6 points
• Mythic Conscription – Won match; +7 points

Overall, 6-1; +38 points

I try to keep track of whether or not I win the flip but I only remember about 2/3 of the time; I don’t know if it is useful to keep track of this if you don’t remember 100% of the time. As you can see over the first seven matches I played with Utter-Leyton’s Mythic Conscription deck I only remembered to record this 5/7 times.

Regardless, the performance was pretty wicked — 6-1 — and the points more than made up for my performance with Soul Sisters, Mono-Green Ramp, et and cetera.

At this point Utter-Leyton’s Mythic Conscription is my best win percentage of any deck over the 166 lines of my spreadsheet for the current Standard format! Huzzah!

A few months ago I wrote about the so-called Danger of Eldazi Conscription. Some paps on Twitter pointed out that the approach I suggested in this blog post might not be optimal for fighting Mythic Conscription decks. For example, given all the Lotus Cobra mana-making gas in a Mythic Conscription deck, it is possible that the opponent might just play an Eldrazi Conscription that he draws.

It has been said that sans Eldrazi Conscription, a Mythic Conscription deck is just a clunky Mythic deck with Sovereigns of Lost Alara instead of more efficient threats like Baneslayer Angel (or Rampaging Baloths).

But when you do get the Conscription combo… it is, as they said back in the 1990s, some good.

I don’t remember how I lost the Soul Sisters matchup… As a Soul Sisters player in different points in the post-Nationals testing process, I did a fair amount of losing to decks with Forest / Noble Hierarch.

Most of the other matchups I won with a combination of card quality, tactically devastating Mana Leaks, Planeswalkers, Sovereigns of Lost Alara, and math.

To wit:

• Card quality – Have youseen the awesome sauce of cards in this deck? The moron threat is Jace, the Mind Sculptor. A lot of games your opponent is playing clunky style and you are doing three or four different insane things. For example you play out a turn one Birds of Paradise or Noble Hierarch, a second turn Lotus Cobra, and like 100 things on turn three thanks to Explore and two copies of Misty Rainforest or Verdant Catacombs.
• Tactically devastati Mana Leaks – I am the kind of magician who runs out a Mana Leak basically whenever I have two mana, but some Mana Leaks are made differently from others. For example you Crash with a small animal after powering out Sovereigns of Lost Alara, but seem otherwise tapped out. Your opponent goes for his Big Play (™) in response and you pop off your Knight of the Reliquary with the best two drop ever printed in play. Oh no, you hear the opponent mouth. That’s right, buddy; you’ve been swindled. Mana Leak.
• Planeswalkers – I initially found it weird that so many of the threats in this deck are Planeswalkers (I originally considered Jace a non-strategic card that wes mostly good at suppressing opposing copies of Jace, the Mind Sculptor), but they were okay. Soldier production on the part of Elspeth, Knight-Errant is a little odd against Soul Sisters, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. That said, it was pretty fun to make my Soul Sisters opponent pick up Ajani’s Pridemate on six consecutive turns, especially as it was always bigger than a 3/3
• Sovereigns of Lost Alara – Playing this version of this deck I often felt like Diamond Dallas Page in the late 1990s… Biding my time, looking for my spot, trying to stick my Diamond Cutter. In this deck, your Diamond Cutter is actually connecting with Eldrazi Conscription twice. Like sometimes one big hit will not be enough because you don’t get the Annihilator benefit and they will attack you to death on the bounce back. Or you might think you have an open but you can smell the Path to Exile a mile away. That is when you have to be clever.
• Math – I found Mythic Conscription to be surprisingly cerebral to play. Yes, there are games when it is reminiscent of Critical Mass. Namely you play the “U/W Control” game of Jace, the Mind Sculptor + Counterspells even better than U/W does because you can get your mainline plan online a turn faster with Birds of Paradise, Lotus Cobra, or Noble Hierarch; that’s kind of fun. But the really rewarding games are the multi-turn offenses, I think. Turbo out Elspeth, Knight-Errant, go to the air for about 4-5 points, set up Sovereigns of Lost Alara + Exalted + Elspeth evasion for a lethal strike the next turn. You know, math.

Approach:

Mythic Conscription exemplifies the decks of the Tier One metagame. Basically this is all really good cards laced together by some mana acceleration (and some of those cards are themselves really good cards) and Mana Leaks. Therefore who’s the beatdown equations occur a little bit differently than they do in traditional Magic. Whether you are the beatdown or the control is less a matter of what deck you are playing against than the circumstances surrounding the cards you draw. So if you draw Birds of Paradise, Knight of the Reliquary, Lotus Cobra, and Sovereigns of Lost Alara… All things held equal you are probably going to try to cram Sovereigns of Lost Alara down the opponent’s throat, possibly defending with the Knight. If you draw Birds of Paradise, Jace the Mind Sculptor, and Mana Leak, you are probably going to play a “U/W Control” type game… and it doesn’t matter than you were paired against what should nominally be the “control” deck in both cases.

I played against a mess of decks with Primeval Titans. My approach there was largely borrowed from Zvi Mowshowitz. Basically he has a six and I have a six. I can disrupt his ability to accelerate to six… It is a lot harder for him to do the same. If his six hits, I might be annoyed. If my six hits, he gets crushed for 11+ damage in a single turn. If that damage is coming from a Birds of Paradise, it might be tantamount to dying on the spot. Good matchup, as far as I can tell.

The one thing I never got was when to play Jace’s Ingenuity.

As you can see from the tournament statistics, I played against ramp decks a couple of times; I often found myself siding Jace’s Ingenuity in against those, especially when I was going to drop a copy or two of my Planeswalkers. I often felt I’d rather have a 3/2/2 split of Jace, the Mind Sculptor; Jace’s Ingenuity; and Elspeth, Knight-Errant against decks that couldn’t deuce my Planeswalkers with their own copies, but no idea if that plan would be co-signed by the man who took all the names with this deck.

I held back on writing this blog post (my Mythic Conscription matches all took place around 8/26) because of my article on TCGPlayer today. I wrote about how Pyromancer Ascension was the best deck — and gave a lot of really good reasons that I certainly believed in at the time — and didn’t want to conflict with that article before it came out. I still think my Pyromancer Ascension choice was fine (and would probably play my same 75 again), but the solid results from even seven matches with Utter-Leyton’s Mythic Conscription certainly impressed me.

LOVE
MIKE

PS – In the unlikely case that you haven’t seen or heard about Flores Rewards, check out this video. I think you will like it

You can also check out the new Flores Rewards blog at — you guessed it — http://FloresRewards.com!