This is a picture of Fracturing Gust. That is about all this blog post has to do with Fracturing Gust 🙂
Part One:
You might have seen this response RE: the previous blog post about Primal Command:
For those of you who don’t know, oscar_liebowitz is my alleged friend Osyp Lebedowicz.
I called him back asking what he meant by that. He said that once upon a time I was a great deck designer but now I am making decks that are “awkwarder and awkwarder.”
This is interesting for a couple of reasons (speaking of awkwarder)… and because Osyp was the last friend I called before what happened on the walk home.
Part Two:
So I was walking up 8th Avenue tonight. I often walk from my office on about 39th Street to 59th Street – Columbus Circle on the way home, just to gather my thoughts and stretch my legs before holing up to my “second job” which includes blogging, analyzing decks for the mother ship, making awesome Magic videos, and of course writing my new book on PPC Marketing for Wiley-Sybex.
But that walk home takes me past the Port Authority.
For those of you who don’t know, the Port Authority is a bus station, but also where anything miserable and slimey goes to die. There was a time when BDM and his wife would not eat anywhere within two blocks of the Port Authority. My wife has been on juries adjudicating undercover cop drug busts that took place in broad daylight right in front of the motherloving Port Authority. Tonight I saw the awkwardest fight ever… in front of the Port Authority.
I don’t know exactly why what will eventually be deemed the awkwardest fight ever took place, but as far as I can tell, the conflict erupted between a cabbie and a [potential?] customer and his girlfriend. I am not sure why they fought but my wife speculates the couple didn’t want to pay? I dunno. All I know is what I saw.
AND WHAT I SAW WAS THREE PEOPLE THROWING DOWN!
I mean they were trying to kill each other.
Really.
And it was motherloving awkward.
The non-cabbie guy (he had a nice shirt, by the way) and the cabbie were flailing at each other with open-handed head shots, but really undisciplined-like. It was like they were playing motorboat, but instead of a girl’s boobies, they were trying to motorboat each other’s noggins. And instead of fighting like grown men, it was all these limp-fingered open-handed noodle arms.
Yet it was also like a tag team battle, with guy + girlfriend v. cabbie, but really chaotic.
All I was thinking while I walked by was I am pretty sure I can take either of these guys.
In Magic terms it’s like he Ninjitsu-ed Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni into play in order to reanimate Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni. Hi-ya!
Of course that guy was on his back about a second later and open-handed motorboat cabbie was all over him, but instead of a Matt Hughes-like finish the cops appeared and broke it up. So we will never know who really would have won.
Oh well.
Maybe tomorrow I will write about Rhox Meditant 🙂
Part Three:
Oh so what did any of this have to do with Osyp?
He was the last person I had called on my cell phone, and I had to call and tell somebody about this while it was still fresh in my mind.
Osyp convinced me to blog about it instead of, you know, Rhox Meditant.
I convinced him (I think) to game with Jund Mana Ramp (not awkward at all) on basis that it is basically the URzaTron deck we made for the last Honolulu 🙂
I was trying to figure out something compelling to say about the two Cascade decks that I have been working on this week, and I guess the answer is Primal Command. It’s funny… I was telling BDM how much I liked playing these decks and he reminded me that we spent a long time (originally) bagging on Primal Command. It has turned out quite the Command… But this isn’t really about Primal Command but some Cascade stuff.
My initial motivations were somewhere between wanting to play with Steward of Valeron and playing with a Red Deck (I think I might have specifically been thinking of playing with Ball Lightning alongside Bloodbraid Elf at the time)… Which explains my Flame Javelins.
From a separate angle BDM has been telling me that he thinks that you might as well play Naya Charm in a deck like Pat Chapin’s five-color Bloodbraid Elf deck… None of us like the UUU requirements in that deck, though everyone of course respects the Blue cards Cryptic Command and Cruel Ultimatum. My theory was that I could just cheat and play all the Bituminous Blasts and that would be kind of like having Blue cards.
I understand people like a Sygg but Steward of Valeron makes for more explosive potential draws. You know, turn three Bloodbraid Elf into Boggart Ram-Gang and all that. It doesn’t come up that often, but Steward of Valeron is a very high quality card… Easily the equal of Putrid Leech in terms of quality if not offensive capability.
Volcanic Fallout is kind of super stainsy… at times. Half the time I don’t want to play it when it comes up on a Cascade. I was thinking about playing with Jund Charm (which is worse against Faeries) but my mana right now is only a very slight touch for Black, and then relatively high on the curve, which is much different than having to play exactly Jund Charm, especially under pressure. For now it’s Fallout, but that is my least favorite spell in this deck.
As for the sideboard I keep wanting Aura of Silence, thinking to myself how much easier a lot of these matches would be with Aura of Silence… and then winning anyway, without it or Maelstrom Pulse. “See next deck,” I suppose.
Here is a rundown of the matches I’ve had with Base-Naya Four-color Aggro so far:
1. Kithkin Apparently Kithkin matters. Tonight I am working on Top Decks for the week, which of course includes Kithkin in the Top 8 of the most recent Grand Prix but also a win by my old teammate Matt Boccio (easily the most dangerous Vs. player ever in terms of batting average) with Mono-White Kithkin in Philadelphia. Like I said, apparently Kithkin matters.
Well in this case it was a super easy win for Base-Naya Four-color Aggro. Woolly Thoctar was very big and useful and I got money with Volcanic Fallout.
1-0
2. Esper Something This deck was lots of Borderposts and a variety of artifacts, Tezzeret, etc.
Game One I won on tremendous tempo. It was just like bam, Bam, BAM… Bam again, kick, wham, stunner… Hello! His like only meaningful play (and I use the term “meaningful” loosely given the configuration of this deck) was to play Pithing Needle naming Anathemancer.
Game Two was the reverse. First of all he juked my brains out with Esper Panorama. I had like Reflecting Pool, Steward of Valeron, Exotic Orchard… it slowed me down a bit. Then Esper Panorama was like his only nonbasic the whole game. This one he used Tezzeret to gather many and more copies of Vedalken Outlander and Scepter of Dominance. Basically he just kept tapping down my Stewards and laughing at my Red men. Eventually he got enough counters on Tezzeret to go Ultimate on quads Outlanders (and whatever else) for a blowout.
Game Three I was like desperately trying to figure out how to win. Because my Game Two strategy was atrocious. That is I flipped Anathemancer (Red spell) on a Cascade and he had no nonbasics on board. And I had like two more in grip that I ran out there (you know, ran onto the Battlefield) and they were nothing. Less than nothing.
So I thought very hard about how and what I should sideboard. I put all the Cloudthreshers in. I just wanted something that could damage my opponent through his mighty Outlanders. But I decided to keep one Anathemancer in with my four Primal Commands. This game he ran out quite a few nonbasics (probably thinking I had sided out my Anathemancers, which I had… but one). Last turn was Primal Command for the Anathemancer + scoop. Great match for Tournament Practice.
2-0
3. Four-color Bloodbraid Beatdown He had the Madrush Cyclops version, which is a lot more common than I would have thought. This was a L-W-W for the good guys. He had the early Cascade advantage but I mised into Naya Charm and realized I could Naya Charm race him through… Which only didn’t work because he had Naya Charm too 🙂
Primal Commands demolished him in the sideboarded games. The combination of gaining seven life to race the opponent’s Anathemancer and setting up your own (sometimes bonus) Anathemancers makes Primal Command a compelling addition to the Cascade strategy.
Typically in these matchups (quite common) I have been siding…
Siding out Steward… I dunno about that but it is the weakest card in the deck when it comes to both players sending overhand rights at each other (Anathemancers and Primal Commands in my case, along with the nonstop Cascade blowout cards from both sides); Flame Javelin is just weaker -4 than Primal command +7.
3-0
4. G/W Elves I played against a super nice opponent who was a former WotC designer, which explains this tight quote when she mis-played and ran out post-combat Noble Hierarch to miss a point of Exalted:
“I’m roleplaying as a blond, apparently.”
LOL. Gamer humor.
It went all three games. Game one she blew me out; game two she got blown out by Cloudthresher and Fallout to erase her mana accelerators. Game Three I had a commanding lead but elected not to attack Garruk Wildspeaker… I just blanked for a second because I didn’t realize that I was going to be ninety percent kold to her on-board (on-Battlefield) Behemoth Sledge. This almost got her out, but not quite.
4-0
5. Esper Artifacts Game One he opened with a super fast Salvage Titan on Chromatic Stars and thereabouts, but I had Flame Javelin and Woolly Thoctar (he stalled).
Game Two I got smoked by four copies of Master of Etherium in the first 14 cards. I beat the first two but the next couple of 8/8s got me.
In the third I had the sick tempo starting with Boggart Ram-Gang. Then I had this awesome play with Glaze Fiend on the Battlefield, with him playing Master of Etherium. I timed it to kill the Fiend with Fallout and got the then-little Master two-for-one. Bloodbraid ran into 5/4 which ran into a concession.
5-0
6. R/W Brew His Jungle Shrine saved me! I had a slow draw but Exotic Orchard hooked a brother up. No idea how I beat his Redcap + Ajani but I did.
6-0
7. Jund Aggro My Thoctar ate his Ram-Gang, etc. However one too many F2s cost me six points on a Bloodbraid Elf + Boggart Ram-Gang of my own though 🙁
His Anathemancer pounced but I had lots of Naya Charms to keep him out of the Red Zone. Same sideboarding as before:
8. Some Domain Brew This was a pretty weak Brew that had lots of good cards and also synergy but maybe wasn’t fast enough. I just sided in Primal Commands for his Fertile Grounds.
8-0
9. G/W Little Kid In the opener he had Troll + Shield of the Oversoul. Which was not very impressive against multiple Ram-Gangs. Is Troll Ascetic more-of-less unplayable now?
He had Wall of Reverence which I somehow beat.
Through Game Two he just kept regenerating his Troll as I attacked a bunch with my 5/4s; I kept his mana busy and then went Primal Command, Bloodbraid Elf, go off.
9-0
10. Mirror I lost a close one when I thought I had the Naya Charm kill but he in fact had the Naya Charm to stall and then topdecked Anathemancer for eight!
Game Two I got with turn two Knight of Valeron, Elf, Elf for Kitchen Finks and Woolly Thoctar; he conceded and I had Bituminous Blast backup.
Game Three he gave me just a little too much information. I sent my Bloodbraid Elf into the Red Zone and he traded for everything. We had no board nowhere. He played Naya Charm for Bituminous Blast (which is what I probably would have done). So I just didn’t play any guys. I played Primal Commands for life and Anathemancers to go over 23 and then just killed him with Anathemancers from a distance.
10-0
I made another version at this point, which will be detailed in probably the next blog post. It was based on a large proportion of Bloodbraid Elf based decks showing up in the Tournament Practice Room.
That said I returned to this version and played another two or so matches (both against the Madrush Cyclops version) and won those as well. My analysis is that if you draw more Cascade spells you are at the advantage in the mirror. Naya Charm being quite good.
At about a 12-0 at this point I can say that the weakest card in the deck is Volcanic Fallout purely based on the composition of the metagame (it would be invaluable if there were all Faeries again) and the sideboard is full of great cards. What to cut for Aura of Silence? Celestial Purge is the obvious weakling at this stage but I love most of the other cards. Kitchen Finks and Anathemancer have to come in for the mirror and Primal Command is too outstanding to cut. It’s hard to say what I would want to change given the fact that I haven’t lost yet 🙂
Features two new decks (kind of), an update to G/W Mana Ramp, and my recommendation for this week’s PTQs… which includes, unsurprisingly, 100% more Chameleon Colossus!
In playing the Elves strategies from Standard Elves and then working on the subsequent Top Decks (premiering tomorrow on the mother ship) I realized that I really wanted Chameleon Colossus in… decks. Not just the G/W Mana Ramp deck, but other, say, mana ramping decks you may have seen here or say in the Pittsburg Regionals Top 8 🙂
For the G/W Mana Ramp deck I decided to move away from the original sort of G/W Tokens-ish model, re-contextualizing my threats. Out went Twilight Shepherd in order to help make room for Chameleon Colossus. I also changed the mana acceleration package, moving away from Rampant Growth and adding Wildfield Borderpost and Knight of the White Orchid, replacing Cloudgoat Ranger.
This made for a deck that was much less capable of exploiting Ajani Goldmane… So I also reconfigured the Planeswalker situation. This is what I ended up playing:
I played about five matches, but they felt much less relevant and conclusive than the previous night’s work with the first version of G/W Mana Ramp.
Five Color “Bounce”?
His mana base was very expensive (as many of them these days are)… But he didn’t do anything outstanding with that mana. Sure he played a Cryptic Command, but like sending Boomerang at my Wildfield Borderpost several consecutive turns was not beating anyone. Then I got Knight of the White Orchid card advantage and it was a mess for him, more-or-less.
1-0
Dominus Deck Wins
This was like a deck I suggested for Block Constructed PTQs last summer… U/R Mimic, Clout of the Dominus, and even the big Dominus itself!
His guys on the board were very good but I just stalled out of getting killed, got a little life back with the Behemoth Sledge, and won with Martial Coup and ‘walker card advantage. Dominus is pretty cool… I didn’t realize he could steal things like my equipment and a Planeswalker.
2-0
U/W Fog
Obviously this is a horrendous matchup but I felt like I could win either game, especially Game Two.
Game One I made a college try of it but eventually conceded when it looked like he wouldn’t make any truly catastrophic mistakes. Game Two was the annoying one. He played a Howling Mine on turn two and I missed four consecutive land drops anyway. I had to run Knight of the White Orchid for no value, stuff like that.
Anyway he drew all four Cryptic Commands in the first 34 cards which is why I lost, ultimately. I was very close to burning him out with Cloudthreshers and I was able to completely suppress his Howling Mines. On the last turn he played a Broken Ambitions that didn’t even resolve but he showed a four, trumping my Borderpost, and I got milled for my library (he had no Fog and no remaining Mine at that point).
2-1
Shorecrasher Mimic / Finest Hour Deck
We traded the first two; third game I just made a gigantic error that seemed like a cool play at the time. He had Elspeth and was launching Rhox War Monk at me. I blocked with a Spectral Procession token and sent my token to Exile to mise a card. I was going to Martial Coup with a ton of gas left — Spectral Procession, Chameleon Colossus, etc. — but then I realized that he would just kill me with Treetop Village + Elspeth!
I had no recourse but to string out blockers until I could find another Path to Exile or my own Elspeth; I found neither. He won by a mile but if I had played correctly, I would have won by a mile.
Funny… while I was making the play it seemed like a brilliant one!
2-2
Some Kind of ‘brew
It was a homebrew of some sort.
3-2
I quit at that point… This version of the G/W was not / is not ready for prime time yet.
Some people have been asking Will Price on Twitter if G/W is for real (I guess they didn’t want to ask me directly) … I think G/W can be good but neither of the decks I presented is likely to be the best deck. If I were playing this weekend, I would 100% play this:
Yes, this is our Jund Mana Ramp deck, minus one Makeshift Mannequin, all the Gifts, and replacing those with one Swamp and four copies of Chameleon Colossus.
Will is also down with this swap.
He says that the great thing about this is that all the people who didn’t like Gift of the Gargantuan will now feel vindicated, even though this isn’t a change based on what they have been saying at all. We just analyzed the metagame and saw a gap for a very good threat.
B/W Tokens – Already a good matchup… Chameleon Colossus makes it even better.
G/W Tokens – Awesome matchup… The change yeilds very little difference (but arguably makes things worse as it reduces our ability to set up devastating Shriekmaw plays); should still be a great matchup.
Cascade Swans – Our worst matchup… that no one plays. Change is arguably better because speed matters here.
Faeries – Good matchup where Chameleon Colossus is just our best threat 🙂
Elves – Good matchup where Chameleon Colossus is a nearly unbeatable threat for them.
So for most of the matchups in the format, Chameleon Colossus is a net positive. Ergo, welcome back, buddy!
LOVE
MIKE
P.S. I started testing yet another new deck and it has actually been really awesome! I will blog about it tomorrow-ish 🙂 See ya then and all that.
By the way Rucka is one of my favorite writers (Checkmate, Queen & Country and all that) and Lark is one of everyone’s favorite artists… I think I read somewhere that they both consider Half a Life the best story they’ve ever worked on. Just sayin’.
So I was working on this week’s Top Decks and my good friend Paul Jordan insisted that I write about the G/W decks that did so well in Honolulu (sorry – you will have to wait until Thursday to read about those if you haven’t seen them yet).
However as you know I am a crazy lunatic when it comes to building decks, and the thought of summoning Thornling was pretty insane to me… I mean imagine Thornling wearing a Behemoth Sledge! I couldn’t get that image out of my brain. So of course I procrastinated tonight and have not as of yet completed my Top Decks article… But I did produce a new deck!
As you can see Thornling did not actually make the cut, unfortunately 🙁
The mana might need a little bit of work… I’ve had some issues getting my Green when I need it, but nothing serious so far.
The sideboard probably needs lots of work. Rhox Meditant and Captured Sunlight as a combo are probably better than the insane number of overcosted Wrath of God sweepers I have been consistently trying to side in. Hallowed Burial, now that I think of it, is probably kind of dumb relative to good old Wrath of God… I mean I am the one going for the persist combo, right?
Another thought is to reduce the curve a little bit to play Knight of the White Orchid and a set of Borderposts… But I haven’t thought that far into the future yet.
The deck is like halfway between a Jund Mana Ramp deck (note the Garruk Wildspeaker + Fertile Ground goodbadness and G/W Tokens. The Jund side allows me to play Jund-expensive super pricey cards like Martial Coup and Twilight Shepherd; from Tokens side I trade in the Overruns for some more expensive board controlling cards, while completing the Garruk package.
And what about Twilight Shepherd? She hasn’t been seen since G/W Little Kid!
Basically I wanted to integrate the Murderous Redcap-style B/W Persist engine into my deck, and Twilight Shepherd has persist. Meanwhile it is also a nice spell in general! This card has elicited numerous on-the-spot concessions.
Okay, quick testing…
Only five matches tonight (I do have to finish Top Decks, after all).
1. Some Kind of Beatdown
He was playing some kind of beatdown cards. I don’t really know the difference between these decks sometimes. Was it Jund Aggro? It didn’t look like Five-color Blood, anyway. Regardless, super easy.
1-0
2. G/W Tokens
This was a W-L-L.
Game Two I got stuck on three comes-into-play tapped lands (Treetop Village and double Heights) and a Fertile Ground and he was able to play two Spectral Processions and two Cloudgoat Rangers while I was diddling around trying to make my first Planeswalker.
Game Three I think I just screwed up. I had active Garruk and he had some Cloudgoat action (maybe two). I could have played my second Ajani (he had previously attacked one down) and instead I played a Cloudgoat Ranger. He of course had an Ajani and super-sized his squad and squashed me. I blocked to be able to have lots of mana the subsequent turn in case I drew Martial Coup but instead I just lost. Pretty sure I had that one if I understood the deck / matchup a little more.
Interestingly he played two Paths Game One and I played two Game Three and you can see how that went. Those of you with more experience… Is Path to Exile terrible heads up? I figured I needed it in case of Gaddock Teeg.
1-1
3. Jund Cascade
Some kind of a not memorable win. He had cards like Bituminous Blast rather than Broodmate Dragon. I just played the tempo game against his Putrid Leech and eventually he was going to be kold to me Windbrisk Heights and Behemoth Sledge… he just was.
Now that I think of it, I should probably just play four Chameleon Colossus in this deck, especially if Elves is the popular deck right now. Chameleon Colossus is great v. Jund, Faeries, Elves, Five-color Blood, and Mono-Black Rogues all.
2-1
4. Bant
This was the Noble Hierarch / Rhox War Monk kind of deck.
Game One I milked his board and set him up for Martial Coup into Kitchen Finks + Ajani Goldmane lock.
Game Two he shocked me with a Negate for my turn three Garruk Wildspeaker… but I was still able to dominate his little guys. A little tense because he can sometimes play a little close to the life total, but a win in two.
3-1
5. B/R Aggro
I could have lost either game. In fact one of them I pumped all my guys instead of realizing I was one eight and could have died to double Flame Javelin… But I was lucky and just didn’t. In general if you stick Ajani and some guys they are in miserable shape. I even shipped to six in Game Two, with no Green Mana for about eight turns, and pulled it out without a ton of difficulty.
4-1
So there you have it – Super scientific 4-1 including wins over every deck (Faeries, Cascade, etc.). So look no further!
🙂
I think the deck is worth a little more time, though. With some Chameleons I think it could be a good time.
It seemed like it was time! All four qualifying players from last week’s LCQ * were playing B/G Elves variants, so it seems like the deck is the real deal [again].
At first I didn’t believe that Gabe Carlton-Barnes played Elves (if you know Gabe he is much more likely to play Faeries, Fog, or even Wizards)… I haven’t talked to Gabe yet but his blood runs Blue. So if he qualified with Elves, it is probably worth the look-see.
This is the deck Gabe used to qualify (and the deck we featured in this video):
I played five or six matches with Gabe’s Elves deck and was relatively impressed.
I taped a great matchup against B/R where I got Fulminated down to two lands, then exposed my Mutavault with him having only one card in hand. Obviously it was a Shock and I was in the Stone Age.
I topdecked out of it and pulled it out!
The deck is relatively fast and was superb at beating random garbage decks.
However it seems atrocious against any kind of Reflecing Pool Control-type deck. I got devastated by a variety of Cruel Ultimatum and Broodmate Dragon combinations.
Anyway, the vid:
LOVE
MIKE
* I will talk about these Blue Envelope-grabbers in greater detail in this week’s Top Decks but I just wanted to congratulate Brett Blackman as well. Brett is a friend, reigning Pennsylvania State Champion, and a Top 8 Magic intern! Good job Brett 🙂
As you might have read on Top 8 Magic, Bloodbraid Elf is probably going to be a very popular card in the Constructed portion of this weekend’s Pro Tour Honolulu.
The tournament described there (and mentioned again in my column Top Decks at the mother ship) included four copies of Bloodbraid Elf in every deck in the Top 8, plus a gigantic percentage of “four Bloodbraid Elf” listings in the decks of the Top 96. As far as starting points go, this is a profound one. I’ll tell you why…
(And by the way this is a theory I put forth both at movie night at Jonny Magic’s on Wednesday and again at lunch today with Matt Wang, Will Price, Becker, Mark Young [happy birthday!], and the duo of Seth Burn and Zvi Mowshowitz… pretty much everyone agreed on both occasions).
In most formats we have beatdown decks, and they try to do something pretty quick.
Then we have combo decks, and they try to do something pretty dumb.
“I’m still with you!” -Zvi
Then we have control decks, and they either try to slow down the beatdown decks or prevent the combo decks from doing something dumb, but they’re not usually particularly good at both at the same time.
Now in some formats we have another kind of deck called The Rock.
The Rock is not usually fundamentally good, but it can be good against some of the other decks in the metagame.
The Rock is characterized by being slower than the beatdown decks (but typically full of creatures), less controlling than the control decks, but either via disruption or progressive card advantage, capable of competing with two if not all three of the other decks types we have described.
One thing to remember for purposes of this discussion is that The Rock is not Not NOT (necessarily) a B/G big guys and discard deck. It can be that (of course!) but Zvi taught me that The Rock is a way of thinking. A mono-White deck might be The Rock; a B/U/R tempo-oriented Block deck can be The Rock too (especially if it is about getting a bunch of two-for-ones instead of actually controlling and dominating the game).
The reason the 32 Bloodbraid Elves are interesting is that — maybe for the first time ever — we are approaching a format where The Rock is the default.
What does this mean?
It’s pretty interesting, actually!
When a mid-range creature deck is the default deck, typically the best deck is the slowest version.
Do you remember an Extended Pro Tour a few years ago where The Rock was one of the most popular decks? Which was the best version?
“I’ve got four Spiritmongers!”
“I’ve got four Spiritmongers and a Visara the Dreadful.”
Which is the best deck?
The guy with four Spiritmongers, two Visaras, and another one in the sideboard!
So how does that intersect with the initial discussion of Bloodbraid Elf?
My idea was that in order to trump in a world where everybody has Cascade two-for-ones, the best strategy would be to go big — as big as you can.
You’ll notice that a fair amount of the Jund-colored Bloodbraid Elf decks have Broodmate Dragon… Why not play a couple of copies of Karrthus main deck?
That’s not enough for me… If the mana is good enough for every deck under the sun to splash for Bloodbraid Elf, then it’s good enough to stretch to play Cruel Ultimatum!
I don’t know exactly how I would have laid out the mana, but I think I would have played only Terminate and Maelstrom Pulse for low curve (then I could ensure that my Bloodbraid Elf and/or Captured Sunlight would always hit removal), Traumatic Visions to counter other people’s bombs and keep me drawing lands, a couple of copies of Voices of the Void to exploit the card advantage inefficiencies of the format, and then top up on the big threat bombs… Broodmate Dragon, Karrthus, Cruel Ultimatum, and Nicol Bolas.
Bolas might not be as silly as he sounds… Think about it like this. A lot of the decks out there play Obelisk of Alara. For eight mana they get five life, a -2/-2, you know. For eight mana I GET NICOL MOTHERLOVING BOLAS.
I haven’t seen any of the decks from Honolulu yet…
And to be perfectly honest, I haven’t tested very much Alara at all…
It’s like I said on Twitter today… any excuse to pat myself on the back 🙂
Sorry for the short / lame update today… Kind of behind in my other writing (but I have it on good authority that the last two posts were very good). More later this week.
If you just want to get to the part about how to cheat, please raise your left hand and say “I solemnly swear I am up to no good,” and click the matching text below (but only if you promise to come back to understand the context)…
If you haven’t seen this episode of The Magic Show, I am embedding it here for you to watch (thanks good old YouTube!):
First of all I want to say that I really enjoyed this episode of The Magic Show and I don’t want this blog post to in any way be considered an attack on Evan or the Show. In fact, I generally liked his theme this week and can see players really improving their tournament performances by focusing on especially one skill at a time.
My motivation on this is about shuffling and how Evan suggests players shuffle only. I am working under the assumption that Evan is repeating something that someone represented to him as having some basis in mathematics (it doesn’t) and that person just thinks he smarter than he is, and that Evan is good-hearted and has no background in wrongdoing so didn’t realize what he was saying.
Unfortunately I am going to pull back the curtain on this one and it might not be pretty for a lot of you at home.
Let’s start at 2:20; Evan begins with…
One of the facets of this skill that I believe is much overlooked is actually randomizing your deck…
(And here Evan appropriately positions a picture of someone riffle shuffling a deck of regular cards.)
He goes on with an…
If you’re not OCD about it, then GET OCD about it!
I’m there!
My old playtest partner Scott McCord even argued that poor shuffling in playtest games was the number one source of bad playtest data!
I am personally a relentless shuffler and have practiced the mechanics of shuffling for hours, trying to figure out the best way to randomize my deck between rounds. I have done table shuffles, practiced riffling really well, and certainly studied every type of set formula (table) shuffle that cheaters use to set their decks (and see below!) that I have ever heard of. I actually spent several years doing 7-14 sets of pull shuffles in between five- or ten-pile table shuffles in addition to 7-14 riffle shuffles, which fascinated the top end of the Pro Tour.
Zvi Mowshowitz, for example, was very intrigued by my pull shuffle technique that he went on to study it himself back when his hobbies included “Magic and thinking about Magic.”
Pull shuffling, by the way, is very similar “mathematically” to riffle shuffling except 1) it takes about twenty times more time, and 2) a perfectly executed pull shuffle doesn’t actually randomize your deck; rather it simply mixes your deck base-two (like a riffle), albeit in a less predictable way than a perfect table shuffle (but almost equally not random to a table shuffle).
Anyway, Evan goes on to criticize players who don’t shuffle sufficiently between mulligans, which I can get behind.
The troubling bit comes up around 2:47, where Evan suggests:
At least two pile shuffles, if not three, with plenty of side / riffle shuffles to go along with it.
I would point out that even if pile shuffling randomized your deck (it doesn’t), these are not “OCD” numbers… But I’ll waive opinions / definitions this time for facts.
The really bad part is at 2:56, when he suggests in particular 5- or 7- card piles for table shuffling due to some mathematical word that I don’t know but that certainly doesn’t lead to randomized table shuffling.
I am going to approach this issue with three major points:
1) Table shuffling is a waste of time
2) Table shuffling doesn’t actually randomize your deck
3) Evan actually just told you to stack your deck
1) Table Shuffling is a Waste of Time
First of all, yes, I table shuffle almost every match.
I will typically do a five- or a ten-pile table shuffle (depending on how big my play area is) to open up my shuffling regimen, then do seven to fourteen superb riffles (I am an excellent riffle shuffler because I bothered to practice ten years ago when I realized I was losing to considerably worse players due to manascrews), then I do another five or ten, then another seven to fourteen. In fact I will keep riffling if my opponent hasn’t finished yet, and I don’t typically present unless I have done over 21 sets of riffle shuffles or my opponent has already presented.
“Mathematically” it takes just north of seven riffle shuffles to randomize a Magic deck.
By the way there was a point in the rules where players were forced to “end” shuffling regimens with at least three riffle shuffles but unfortunately that specific stricture has been removed from the books (I think it should be returned — but at seven rather than three — and I think that policy makers and judges who disagree with me simply don’t understand how shuffling works).
Remember we are tasked to randomize our decks, not separate mana clumps. Most arguments for “shuffling” styles other than riffle shuffling advocate separation of mana clumps when no one other than your imaginary guardian angel (who apparently doesn’t know math) is looking for that, certainly not the rules.
Remember I said it takes north of seven riffle shuffles to randomize a deck? Well as you randomize a deck more and more, guess what? Your mana is actually better and better distributed!
I am not up to speed on how judges today try to catch cheaters but I know if I were the policy maker I would do it like this:
Players would be penalized strictly based on technique. I am 100% sure a well known Japanese pro who has money finishes this year and impressive wins over some local GP and PT champions is a gigantic cheater. He stacks his deck, apparently every match. The problem is that some judges don’t understand how shuffling works (and he does) so he keeps getting away with it and they keep failing to see his pattern.
At the last Pro Tour I played in (Charleston teams), I, Josh Ravitz, and Morgan Douglass all separately caught him stacking and all called Judge! on him. I will say with complete confidence that if I say my opponent was stacking, he was stacking. End.
I am that sure I can recognize stacking when I am looking. When I was a more active PTQ player I had judges in multiple regions all commend me on how good I was at catching cheaters. I played in a Grand Prix where I caught a player stacking two matches over (against my friend edt), raised my hand, and he conceded the match on the spot, before the judge got there, because he knew he was kold; I actually got paired against him the next round so it was awesome 🙂
But for me, Josh, and Morgan to all catch the same Japanese player has to be something. He of course appealed to a Japanese judge and got a pass all three times, feigning an inability to speak English. The Japanese judge was either in his pocket (which I doubt) or (more likely) didn’t know what to look for and refused to recognize my arguments. By the end of this blog post you will not.
The unfortunate reality is that most judges — at least when I have encountered stacking but not gotten the penalty to stick, which is usually — look for a pattern but fail to find one. Here is my simple rule: The fact that my opponent is not very good at cheating, or that you couldn’t see how he was doing it, should not be the measure of whether or not he should be punished. The measure should simply be that he was stacking, intentionally cheating, sayonara.
I have been able to show judges how the patterns fall — with the cards face down even — and amazingly not gotten the call. I remember one PTQ where I was up a game with two rounds to go (undefeated) and my opponent cheated going into game two. I called the judge, he didn’t see the pattern; I set aside eleven face-down cards and told him to look at them. All eleven were sideboard cards!
… And no game loss.
Predictably I went manascrew, manascrew; manascrew next match, 12th. My opponent made the finals, cheating the whole way.
I didn’t mean this to be a rant about how cheating should be dealt with regarding shuffling. Sorry.
Think about a jar that can contain a little more than 1,000 marbles.
You put 500 white marbles into the jar.
You put 500 black marbles into the jar (these marbles are indistinguishable from the white but for their color).
What do you have?
A full jar of white marbles topped with black marbles.
Now shake the jar once; what do you have?
A full jar of white marbles topped with black marbles.
But shake it again and again, and they start to mix.
Shake it enough and what happens?
The marbles mix and mingle more and more.
This is how randomizing works: The more you shake, the more mixed they become! You can’t shake Shake SHAKE and come out with all 500 white on the bottom and all 500 black on top as you started. The system just gets more chaotic; it never becomes more orderly.
This is the problem with judges looking for a pattern, unfortunately: A perfectly randomized deck looks stacked.
Read that again: A perfectly randomized deck looks stacked.
The essential crux is that you actually get a more “stacked” [looking] deck by correctly randomizing (think of more and more repetitions with our jar) whereas you never randomize by table shuffling (the primary method of stacking).
Because as we saw with the marbles, the more you randomize, the more mixed the cards become. If you randomize really, really, well… No land clumps. Spells are distributed. Et cetera.
Riffle shuffling is a form of randomization. In fact, it is the best form for card games!
Table shuffling is “bad” for two reasons, and you already know them. The first is that it is a waste of time.
I am going to be generous and say that it takes you 30 seconds to pile shuffle your deck one time. In actuality it probably takes you 45 seconds if you are very good with your hands, but I am going to say that it only takes you 30 seconds. One pile shuffle doesn’t even distribute your mana clumps.
On balance, given 30 seconds you can riffle shuffle your deck 15 times. It only takes seven riffle shuffles to randomize your deck. You have now done twice what you had to do to randomize your deck in the time it would have taken you to do one pile shuffle, which not only doesn’t randomize your deck at all… it doesn’t even do what you wanted (even if you didn’t know you wanted out loud), which was to separate out your mana.
Why would you pile? Isn’t it stupid?
A better question: I’m not stupid. Why do I pile shuffle myself and my opponent?
Simple: Free wins.
I get free wins by not presenting some number of cards other than 60. I can recall being caught presenting non-60 one time. I lost the match for that; fixed my deck and won the next six, had to play the last round due to a first round loss, and finally lost one fair and square (raced by three Disciples of the Vault and a Ravager in the deciding game). My playtest partner with same 75 won the PTQ. I never want to go down for that one again. Ever.
On balance I have advanced from Top 8 to Top 4 because my opponent presented 59, and I wouldn’t have known but for the table shuffle; he was a 70/30 favorite to win Game One by the way, but I stole it; then I got to play two games with my sideboard. Just lucky he screwed up. In fact, I have advanced to Top 8 over a multiple Grand Prix winner because he presented non-60.
A compelling reason to table shuffle (counting)… But it is not a reason that randomizes your deck.
Now that you know that it is much less effective — even for separating out your mana — than riffle shuffling, you should also know that relying on pile shuffling for any other action than counting is tantamount to cheating.
But why?
2) Table Shuffling Doesn’t Actually Randomize Your Deck
The most common table shuffle numbers are 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Why?
Those are all numbers that are pretty convenient for 40- or 60-card decks. Simple. People look for patterns, and even piles of 30, 20, 15, or 12 cards make us happy.
Happy… but ignorantly so.
The worst thing about pile shuffling is that it is a waste of time. But it is also self-deceptive in that there is nothing random about it. It’s just a really bad way to separate out your mana (as we showed in the previous segment, simply riffling enough will get you to the point that you are nearly stacked).
Say you are doing a three-pile table shuffle.
One…
Two…
Three…
   One…
   Two…
   Three…
      One…
        Two…
      Three…
And so on. You are on card number three. How many positions can this card fall into?
Wait!
Don’t answer that.
Say you are doing a four-pile table shuffle.
One…
Two…
Three…
Four…
    One…
    Two…
    Three…
    Four…
        One…
        Two…
        Three…
        Four…
Same question: How many positions can card number three fall into?
One of three in the first, one of four in the second, right? Simple! Right?
Nope.
In both cases, card number three will always fall into position three. Now card number four will be in position one or four, respectively, but card number three will always fall into position three, and card number four will… um… always fall into position one in the first example and position four in the second example.
Have you figured this out yet?
If the cards always fall into the exact same scripted positions, with those positions varying only insofar as the number of piles, the system is itself not random.
Ergo, it is not just a poor but completely inappropriate system for randomization.
Sorry.
3) Evan Actually Just Told You to Stack Your Deck
I am fairly certain Evan didn’t know it at the time, but he just told you to commit a “shuffling” technique that has launched more than one Hall of Fame eligible career – The Double Nickel.
The double nickel is one of the simplest card cheats in the history of tournament Magic. When Evan told you to pile shuffle in a five because of a so-called SSS Prime… I don’t know who told him that was any kind of random, but as we saw in the previous section, no patterned pile shuffling is ever random, so I don’t know what kind of bogus bullspit math logic says that fives or sevens are somehow… I don’t even know how to say this other than poor Evan was misinformed by someone who thinks he is much smarter than he really is.
Instead I am just going to teach you a basic cheat.
This cheat always works because pile shuffling is not random.
It’s called the double nickel because you do two (“double”) five-pile table shuffles (“nickel”) and you have a perfect mana weave. It is a particularly effective cheat against those who think that table shuffling is random because they won’t call the judge on you. You can do some poor riffle shuffles or “side shuffles” which simply redistribute your perfectly stacked deck into different perfectly stacked positions and you will never be manascrewed; in fact you will always have a perfect draw.
Because pile shuffling is not random, and five pile shuffling is deviously not just not random, but the best known cheat.
Anyway, here’s how you do it with a Limited deck:
First let’s start off with forty cards numbered 1 through 40. The first eighteen are aquamarine to indicate they are land cards:
Now let’s do ye olde five-pile table. Our cards look like this:
We chunk them together into one forty card pile again, which looks like this:
Now we do a second five-pile:
When we chunk them back into one forty card pile, our, you know, “deck” what do we see?
That’s right! A perfect distribution of land and spells! It gets really dumb when we do the same thing for a 60-card deck with a paltry 20 lands 🙁
Opening stack, with 1-20 being marked as lands:
First piles, five-card pattern:
Deck looks like this:
Second of two nickels:
Final deck:
Now if you — like too many judges — didn’t know what to look for, you would miss the pattern. After all, there are several stretches of consecutive spells that seem — at least from far away — like they could be barren.
I want you to use different criteria.
Cut the deck anywhere.
There is no stretch of seven cards in a completed double nickel that that doesn’t have either two or three lands. In fact (and this could be obvious) there are literally no mana floods because there are no stretches where you get four lands and only three spells.
All you get, every time, is a perfectly distributed deck that doesn’t look to a less experienced judge like there is a mana weave pattern in play.
Take a deck — forty or sixty cards — and try it yourself.
There are equivalent cheats at different numbers that do different things. Four and eight, for example, allow you to reset an already stacked deck when you do them correctly.
But what I wanted you to get out of this blog post is that no pile shuffling is random (we already covered that it is inefficient). You use the table to count your deck. You learn to riffle shuffle to randomize your deck.
Evan, I love you man, but when you tell the readers to do “at least” two piles (read: two) and then tell them to do a five-pile or seven pile (read: five)… Don’t be surprised that their mana is suddenly coming out perfect. It’s because they were doing the double nickel, literally the oldest cheat in the Magic books.
LOVE
MIKE
PS And that’s game boys!
I’m sure a lot of you are clapping your hands together and proclaiming Halleluia! A return to old school michaelj!
There is an even easier way to access the aforementioned old school michaelj, of course. Saunter over to Top8Magic.com and grab yourself a copy of Deckade… It’s just ten years of my life, and about 700 pages of stuff like you just read.
Deckade – Because you know you want to.
PPS I am pretty sure I am going to get criticism for “teaching players to cheat” but the fact of the matter is, Double Nickel is the oldest stack in the book, and I hope I taught a judge or two something, too. This post was more a result of my wanting to respond to Evan’s video. I love The Magic Show, but in this case, Evan was accidentally teaching his viewership to do something I doubt he wanted to teach them. That said, if players really wanted to cheat, I doubt they waited until tonight to learn from me. They could have just gone and bought Penn Jillette’s book or whatever: How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard
So a couple of weeks ago, I presented the following You Make the Play:
This is a seven card hand. You lost the flip so there are 53 cards in your deck and you are playing second. The deck list is the one we have been bandying about the past week or two — Jund Mana Ramp.
So… Keep or no?
The responses were interesting and varied. I was using this You Make the Play as a lead-in for some basic statistics (which we will get to) but my intrepid readership took typically galvanized positions as well as the opportunity to stand on soap boxes.
When the dust cleared (out of nineteen responses), we had a little under 2:1 ratio in favor of keeping the hand… and a handful of people who just don’t like Gift of the Gargantuan 🙂
* Zvi, by the way, said that he didn’t have to look at the hand, and if I were asking, I should mulligan it.
However, like I said, I wanted to use this as a lead-in for some basic statistics rather than a critique of the deck.
When we make plays we often do things on “gut” or fear that end up being terrible decisions. One of the worst mistakes in my entire career was in a Feature Match at US Nationals 2000.
I was playing trusty Napster in its best tournament, and riding a 2-0 open on the day, I found myself in the Feature Match area in a semi-mirror against Donnie Gallitz.
I opened on Swamp, Dark Ritual, Phyrexian Negator and Donnie started with a Duress for my Vicious Hunger. I Duressed Donnie back; his hand was all garbage – Unmask, Stupor, Masticore, and Skittering Skirge. Skittering Skirge was the best card in the hand but I couldn’t take it; Masticore was borderline unplayble in the matchup but happened to be good against my Phyrexian Negator (again I couldn’t take it), so I decided to take the Unmask.
Donnie dropped the Skirge to defend, then mized into Ritual + Persecute. I responded with Vampiric Tutor for Vicious Hunger and got in more and more.
Donnie played his unplayable Masticore (which nevertheless prompted me to sacrifice my Phyrexian Negator). Then I Eradicated the Masticore via Vampiric Tutor, then Tutored again to set up Yawgmoth’s Will.
Ritual + Vicious Hunger to start, smashing Donnie’s fresh Skitting Skirge, then I set up a Phyrexian Negator. Donnie mized into a Yawgmoth’s Will of his own, but if you go back and read the cards they were pretty pointless so all he did was make a dude.
Okay here’s my mistake.
I topdecked a Skittering Horror.
Now of course I played it pre-combat.
My plan was to smash Donnie with my Negator and sacrifice down to just the Negator, and then just kill him the next turn. But the Horror gave me another permanent and another option. So because I drew the Horror and correctly played it, I smashed in and sacrificed down to the Horror and one land instead. I figured if Donnie drew a Vicious Hunger he could make me sacrifice down to nothing, but the same wouldn’t be true of a Horror.
Instead Donnie — no cards in hand — picked up a Skittering Skirge that held me (down to essentially no permanents) off until he came back to win the game… From about three life.
In the same spot I would have just trampled him to death.
I had what Dan Paskins calls The Fear, and made a terrible decision.
I should probably have sacrificed down to double guys; next best would have been Negator and land (which was my original plan).
Dave Price described this as bad because of probability. Donnie had what? Forty cards or more in his deck? What were the chances of his drawing a Vicious Hunger (bad for two permanents if one is a Negator) versus any creature that could stop a Skittering Horror?
It gets worse.
Donnie played his unplayable Masticore (which nevertheless prompted me to sacrifice my Phyrexian Negator). Then I Eradicated the Masticore via Vampiric Tutor, then Tutored again to set up Yawgmoth’s Will.
Eradicate allows you to look through the opponent’s entire deck.
… Where I could have seen that he played no Vicious Hungers at all main deck!
I won Game Two in dramatic fashion, but just had no resources in Game Three whereas Donnie got the fast Persecute. But the fact is: It shouldn’t have gone three games.
So how does this come back to our discussion of whether or not to mulligan this hand on the draw?
The deck plays 23 lands and four Rampant Growths. I was operating under the idea “If I have three lands untapped on my third turn, I can basically make my land drops all the way to six without interruption” (six land being Broodmate range). I understand some of you think this hand is not strong v. Tokens, but you probably haven’t played the matchup as much as I have. Tokens is often a Batman / Vs. System battle where you just play something better than what they play, top up on your six, and then play sixes every turn while they are still piddling around with three 1/1 creatures (which actually get soundly stomped by some of your sixes).
So…
How do we get to three untapped lands on turn three?
1) We can draw any land on turn one or turn two.
2) We can draw Rampant Growth on turn one or turn two.
3) We can topdeck one of 13 comes into play untapped lands on turn three.
So here are our probabilities.
Turn One – 25/53
Turn Two – 25/52
Turn Three – 13/51
You have twenty-five options on turn one – any of the twenty-one remaining lands, plus any of the Rampant Growths.
You have twenty-five options on turn two (assuming you did not already fulfill your minimal requirement on the first turn) – the same twenty-one lands and the same Rampant Growths. Note that this only works because you have two lands that come into play untapped in your opening hand; the math changes dramatically if you have a different land configuration… For example if both lands came into play tapped, you could not count Rampant Growth without an intervening untapped land pull (which itself would have fulfilled what we need fulfilled).
Turn three you still have options but they decline sharply. You lose eight of your lands (Treetop Village and Savage Lands come into play tapped, so drawing them on turn three is useless in the short term; ditto on Rampant Growth).
Most players can evaluate a situation like this one and look at the first turn. You are under 50% likely to pull a relevant piece of mana on turn one.
You are similarly less than 50% likely to pull a relevant land on turn two. But what about the fact that you get turn one and turn two both?
Turn three is much less likely than turn one or two, but you still have a nice lift… That is an “advantage” of going second in this hypothetical.
So how likely are you to pull the right land?
You start with 25/53, or about 47%… That’s yours, that slight dog / coin flip.
Of the remaining 53%, you get 25/52 (or about 48%), an addition 25%.
So here is the super tricky part. Of the 75% of that lost 53%, you get there another 13/51 (~25%) of the time… about 7%.
Ultimately you’re in at about 79-80% likely to have three untapped lands on turn three.
A faster and arguably easier way to come to the same conclusion is to figure it out in the negative. How unlikely are you to have the land you need on turn three? Your likelyhood of actually having the goods is whatever is left.
Relative likelihoods of drawing non-relevant cards:
28/53
27/52
38/51
Multiply all those together and you’re a hair over 20% not likely to get there… Or 79-80% to have the mana you need (just like we said).
So what happened?
80% is a pretty good bet, so I kept.
It turned out that my opponent was Reflecting Pool Control, one of the deck’s best matchups, and of all the matchups in Standard, the most vulnerable to this type of hand (incremental card advantage via small threats).
So of course I missed my third three times, discarded, and lost one of my best matchups 🙂
For you, a YouTube video about new It Deck Cascade Swans. Not just a Regional Top 4 deck anymore, Cascade Swans has just taken a Grand Prix title!
I used Parth Modi’s version of Cascade Swans, as (as I mentioned in the previous blog post) I used to make this video before the deck went and won a Grand Prix. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, here is ye olde deck list:
So a lot of people have been asking why I haven’t made a video in forever.
It is actually a different answer than why I didn’t update this blog for like half a month.
Basically remember when MTGO was super slow and it was un-possible to get a game? That short spell kind of got me in the habit of not playing MTGO for a while, and then every format got super boring due to not being in step with the actual Constructed formats due to set differences. I’d say that all of that is behind us… but instead I just hope that you like this video.
I was trying to figure out something compelling to say about the two Cascade decks that I have been working on this week, and I guess the answer is Primal Command. It’s funny… I was telling BDM how much I liked playing these decks and he reminded me that we spent a long time (originally) bagging on Primal Command. It has turned out quite the Command… But this isn’t really about Primal Command but some Cascade stuff.
    
