Joraga Treespeaker / Don’t Try This At Home

Concerning:

Joraga Treespeaker :: Scars of Mirrodin :: Not Testing
Really, Not Testing :: Not Testing at All With, You Know, Scars of Mirrodin :: … and Joraga Treespeaker

I came up with a pretty spectacular strategy for Scars of Mirrodin Standard.

And by “I” I mean Brian David-Marshall came up with it. Well, he came up with a card idea and I ran with it. “The Champ” Andre Coimbra started brainstorming with us, but elements all conspired to my deciding to abandon it for this weekend’s TCGPlayer 5K in New York.

First of all, none of the lists I came up with had the right number of “4” … Lots of “2” … Which means garbage. With no metagame to test and no very good frame of reference with, you know, no metagame so far… I… Did I mention “garbage” yet?

Second of all, Andre pointed out to me that the reason Naya Lightsaber was the best was that all the cards were awesome and even though they worked well together, none of them were over-reliant on any others. He pointed out that even if I (and by “I” I mean BDM) were right about the new format, we were highly reliant on a card that was at this point completely unproven.

So I decided to counter-brew.

And by counter-brew I don’t mean Counterspell but rather turning back the clock. I basically cribbed two or three different Zvi Mowshowitz lists and came up with this:

Zvi Zvi Wannabe (dot dec)

4 Birds of Paradise
4 Joraga Treespeaker (there he is!)
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Primeval Titan
2 Rampaging Baloths
4 Summoning Trap

4 Baneslayer Angel
3 Iona, Shield of Emeria

1 Arid Mesa
5 Forest
3 Misty Rainforest
3 Plains
4 Stirring Wildwood
4 Sunpetal Grove
4 Tectonic Edge
3 Verdant Catacombs

sb:
4 Nature’s Claim
4 Obstinate Baloth
3 Celestial Purge
4 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

The “unique element” of this deck is obviously Joraga Treespeaker.

Joraga Treespeaker

The shell is a 16-accelerator mold in the vein of Zvi’s Amsterdam deck.

There are lots of different cards you can use for the last four accelerators… In Amsterdam the Team Mythic-2 crew played Nest Invader. However that version played Windbrisk Heights, so the extra weenie was worth it to help set off the powerful Hideaway land. In Standard Joraga Treespeaker just helps hook up the fastest ramp deck in the room. You probably know from Conrad Kolos’s US Nationals tournament reports that Joraga Treespeaker was his way of breaking serve in the mirror… The accelerators in this deck are twice as fast as those in a mono-Green Eldrazi Ramp deck, so you can go off slightly faster, even if the deck in total is less powerful than the Eldrazi Ramp end game.

Tom Martell asked me why I would rather play a Baneslayer Angel than Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre… In addition to being slightly faster than a more common Ramp deck, I think this deck has a better chance against RDW. As you can see, half my sideboard is devoted to the devotees of Goblin Guide.

I was inspired by how good I found Joshua Utter-Leyton’s no-Fauna Shaman deck, the best of the pre-Scars of Mirrodin Standard decks. The notion of playing full-on Bant without Knight of the Reliquary was frightening. So it was U/G or G/W.

G/W tested a lot better.

I don’t want to Jinx myself but I tested tonight and won five straight matchups. All my opponent’s decks were jazzed with Bloodbraid Elf or full-on Howling Mine + Temple Bell + Font of Mythos combo kills… I even beat the Red Deck 2-0! Just, you know, didn’t die 🙂

So this is basically terrible testing; and probably all the testing I am going to do for this tournament. I am super busy writing this week (I don’t even know how I pulled back the time to write this blog post to be honest), and as you know, except in rare events when I am hanging out / preparing with my IRL friends, the days off all-Sunday playtesting-while-babysitting for the Apprentice Program largely evaporated with the coming of Clark. So 99% of my playtesting these days comes on Magic Online… And as awful as the testing for this one was, I feel like the entire Alara Block + M10 has to be more powerful than just Scars of Mirrodin.

I think the deck must be pretty self-explanatory, but I will talk about one other card you may not have anticipated: Rampaging Baloths.

I feel like this guy is a monster, and I chose to play it over Sun Titan. Sun Titan is okay, but nothing spectacular in this deck, unless you are looping Tectonic Edges. That just isn’t consistent enough in my estimation.

That’s it!

If anyone has any comments on the mana base in particular, you know where the comments go.

Firestarter: What should I cut, if anything, for Bojuka Bog?

LOVE
MIKE