Five With Flores

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!

So I got my 2010 Magic Pro Tour Selection Committee Hall of Fame ballot today.

In case you guys haven’t been reading for that long, the first ever post on this blog was my 2008 Hall of Fame ballot; way back on October 6, 2008. You can check that action out here (and by “here” I mean, like, this awesome blog).

Anyway there are a bunch of people eligible for Hall of Fame this year; I am not going to list them all. Instead I am just going to run out my gut-pulls:

Marco Blume
William Jensen
Scott Johns
Anton Jonsson
Brian Kibler
Katsuhiro Mori
Gabriel Nassif
Daniel O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Chris Pikula
Carlos Romao
Tomoharu Saito

I have voted for more than one of these players in the past.

They are all deserving misers but a man gets only five Hall of Fame ballot votes. Briefly…

Marco Blume
I always chuckle when I read Marco’s name. I wrote an article on Ponza ~11 years ago which was viciously plagiarized by The Pojo. You can still read “their” article, which has “Maro” Blume credited with a German Ponza deck, a misspelling I made all those many years ago, surviving still on “theirs”.

[LOL! I hadn't read the 2008 ballot before writing this, and didn't realize that I had just re-bought my own line from two years ago.]

William Jensen
Billy “Baby Huey” Jensen has a better resume than a fair number of the people already in the Hall of Fame. It’s basically silly he hasn’t been inducted yet. I’ve learned a lot from him.

Scott Johns
Ditto on William Jensen. Scott is a Pro Tour winner with five Top 8s and years of service to the community.

Anton Jonsson
To be honest I didn’t have the Limited master on my original short list but when i sorted the 2010 candidate pool and saw how many Top 8s he had, it seemed negligent not to consider him. Unfortunately I have little frame of reference on Anton’s game, but he comes very highly recommended by friends like Brian David-Marshall and Teddy Card Game.

Brian Kibler
I had already decided to vote for my old Underground and Team Red Bull teammate the Dragonmaster last year. Then he went and won a Pro Tour and Grand Prix and so on. Kibs is going to be a landslide this year and I plan to jump on.

Katsuhiro Mori
A few weeks ago I had this conversation with Zvi Mowshowitz:

Me: What are the chances someone other than Katsuhiro Mori has the MTGO nickname “Katsuhiro Mori”?
Zvi: Pretty low, why?
Me: Because I just bashed him in a queue, but I kind of don’t believe it was really him.
Zvi: No?
Me: He was playing Mono-Red.
Zvi: What were you playing?
Me: Eldrazi of course. Can’t lose; I mulled to five Game One and 2-0′d him anyway.
Zvi: Nah couldn’t have been him, but weird MTGO name.

Mono-Red? Nah, couldn’t have been him.

Katsu is super fun to play against, for fun at least (I have never played him in a tournament). He once beat me in same-deck of Pierre Canali’s U/R Wafo-Tapa deck. He was super tricky, which is about par for the course for him.

Gabriel Nassif
Hat is basically everyone’s hero (mine included). Neither Jon nor Kai (nor Bob, nor Dirk) got unanimous inductions, so I greatly doubt Nassif will. But he’s certainly got This Girl’s vote.

Daniel O’Mahoney-Schwartz
It was just Danny OMS’s birthday! Happy birthday Danny OMS! Katherine and the kids and I are going to Shake Shack with him this weekend. Dan is a good friend and I hang out with him pretty much every week. However My annual OMS brother vote is going to…

Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Should have voted him in first class. My bad.

Chris Pikula
Ditto on Chris.

Carlos Romao
There are few Constructed players I admire as much as Carlos. The Psychatog master just added a notch to his already much-perforated belt with a Planeswalker Top 8 that helped cement little Jace as a pre-emptive Staple in Standard.

Tomoharu Saito
Not only did his just win another big tournament, but he’s basically the best deck designer in the world.

This year I decided to do something different moving from the short list to the shorter list. I am just going to run all the automatic votes and see how many slots I have left over.

As I am not a buffoon I am obviously voting for Nassif, Saito, and Kibler; master, master, and DragonMaster. I think Nassif is as worthy a unanimous ballot-gatherer as ever drew breath. Saito has been around the best player in the world for some years if not the clear best. I wouldn’t have half so much glory as a deck designer if he hadn’t helped Andre Coimbra in the Extended portion of Worlds; so mise! Like I said, I was going to vote for Kibler even before he won that Pro Tour and Grand Prix because in order for the American block to start getting our O’Mahoney-Schwartz brothers and Pikulas into the Hall of Fame we have to stop fracturing our votes. That means getting our deserving boys off the ballot and into the Hall of Fame so that we can make more room for our, you know, additional deserving boys. That starts with Kibler. Congratulations old friend. The enemy’s gate is down!

With two votes left, that makes for a wonderfully convenient number of openings for SteveO and Chris.

Final ballot:

Brian Kibler
Gabriel Nassif
Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz
Chris Pikula
Tomoharu Saito

Much love, all around.

LOVE
MIKE

Concerning:

Well, at least that’s what my Twitter bud @Triphos asked me to say

But who can say no to someone with a Patsy Walker crafted by Colleen Coover as his Twitter icon?

Anyway, even though seemingly every article on the Magic Internet two weeks ago was about Titans (and then every article this week was about actual Titanic Titan performances) there has been relatively little practical comparison of how the Titans really roll. And by “roll” I mean… How much effective mana do these Titans tally?

Inferno Titan

Let’s break down the Titans. Basically they mirror the Kamigawa Dragon cycle… They all cost six and have the same frame; rather than being 5/5 flying creatures, these are all six mana 6/6 creatures. In addition each Titan has some kind of superpower that 187s the battlefield not just when the Titan comes into play, but every time it attacks!

Yes, you heard it here first.

Sun Titan
We talked about Sun Titan back when it was “merely” the It Girl-to-be come M11 Prerelease time. Now… Actually a contender for the best Titan performer. When we originally wrote about Sun Titan, we didn’t yet know about the competition in the cycle… What about Sun Titan’s 187?

Whenever Sun Titan enters the battlefield or attacks, you may return target permanent card with converted mana cost 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield.

This ability has a variable mana effect. It can be as little as one (getting back some kind of one mana doodad that is actually worth one mana) and as much as a free Jace Beleren (probably an immediate mana value of, again, one… But with the promise of more one mana packets of “drawing one card” value). In case you were wondering, buying an untapped land directly into play is worth slightly more than two mana; for reference: Rampant Growth.

It may be worth noting that among all the Titans, Sun Titan’s ability may be the least reliable. That is, if you haven’t got a saucy target in the bin, no dice.

Frost Titan
Originally I was a seller of Frost Titan, but the Big Blue of the Titan Team has grown on me. You may recall that in my first speculative article on TCGPlayer.com I suggested a U/G/R Titan / Destructive Force strategy including Garruk, Jace, some obvious cards like Cultivate and a less obvious duo of Frost Titans.

Well lo and behold!

I mean some of the details are off (Lightning Bolt and Mana Leak over beloved Spreading Seas for instance), but the old girl still has some gas in her.

Okay! What about Frost Titan’s 187 ability?

Whenever Frost Titan enters the battlefield or attacks, tap target permanent. It doesn’t untap during its controller’s next untap step.

Despite the ability to trump another Titan going long, or lock down lands after a Destructive Force, I put Frost Titan’s ability at a value of one mana (about a Twiddle).

It may be worth noting that between the regular keyword abilities like Vigilance and Trample, Deathtouch and “Firebreathing” … Frost Titan probably has the best of the bunch; it is the most durable besides…

Grave Titan
Wow!

How are you supposed to kill a 6/6 Black creature? Yes, yes… Martial Coup or the equivalent still works just fine… But Grave Titan is yet quite the durable army in a one-man package.

And its 187?

Whenever Grave Titan enters the battlefield or attacks, put two 2/2 black Zombie creature tokens onto the battlefield.

This one’s mana is a bit difficult to evaluate on a single-ability basis. Sun Titan is not exactly comparable to known effects, but the value of what you are actually getting back is a fine clue. Frost Titan is like a Twiddle or an activation on an Icy Manipulator… But what makes two 2/2 creatures?

I would shudder at calling it a Grizzly Fate because I don’ t know if anyone would pay five mana just for the two 2/2s (though they are Black, which is a durability upgrade generally). I think that a more reasonable approximation would be WW, though I would be willing to take some input on this.

Inferno Titan
And we return to the best card in Standard!

[not really]

Inferno Titan’s 187 is very familiar to many of us, and hearkens back to one of the most skill-intensive periods in Magic’s history. The aforementioned ability basically attaches an Arc Lightning to a firebreathing 6/6:

Whenever Inferno Titan enters the battlefield or attacks, it deals 3 damage divided as you choose among one, two, or three target creatures and/or players.

So what is this worth?

The easy answer is 2R — exactly the cost of an Arc Lightning. That might be defensible on the basis of Arc Lightning’s rampant popularity back in 1999 and the fact that we would probably pay 2R for the effect now in 2010. [Firestarter: How does Arc Lightning, in your estimation, compare to Staggershock?]

However I think that a more reasonable estimation of its value is R + .5 mana. I feel like two damage is worth about one mana, and this makes three, or one-and-a-half mana worth of value. That you can split it across multiple bodies is gravy.

Primeval Titan
Primeval Titan is probably as good as the hype. Not only does it have Trample (Josh Ravitz’s favorite keyword slapped onto an animal), but this impressive 187:

Whenever Primeval Titan enters the battlefield or attacks, you may search your library for up to two land cards, put them onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle your library.

How much is that one worth?

More than four.

More than “I win” mana according to the Zvi Mowshowitz scale!

Not equal to “I win” mana… More!

Why is it worth more? Is it because we earlier referenced Rampant Growth saying that was worth (unsurprisingly) about two mana? Nothing so fuzzy around the edges my dear students.

Don’t forget that in previous formats we had Block-dominating effects for G3 that weren’t as good as a Primeval Titan’s repeating 187.

Don’t forget that Explosive Vegetation was an absolute monster and that the venerated team in Renton, WA changed the Legend Rule partly because Billy Jensen failed to win the Pro Tour due to Osyp Lebedowicz’s playing Akroma first when Billy otherwise had a highly likelihood of winning. Primeval Titan can do everything we would be willing to pay four mana to do with Explosive Vegetation… But can do even more! Can Primeval Titan get a ho-hum Forest and Mountain like Explosive Vegetation did? Sure? But it is more interesting when it is getting cards like Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, isn’t it? Or perhaps when Valakut is already online a pair of Mountains? Isn’t that kind of like twice as good as Inferno Titan (which we have already decreed the best card in Standard)? Dealing two different packets of three damage instead of splitting up one (as good as that can be)?

Well at least we know why Primeval Titan has the price tag it does.

LOVE
MIKE