Anything But: A Casual Challenge

 

I often find myself suffering from foot-in-mouth disease. In one particular case I even put together an admittedly flawed article talking about the Midnight-Presence Combo in which I made multiple mistakes regarding how cards worked. This was not a bright moment in my writing career; however, I always try my best to right my wrongs and own up to the fact that mistakes are indeed made. In the past few articles I discussed a lot of things relating to Return to Ravnica, which I have deemed as the most impactful set to Pauper in a long time. There are several fun things that we’ve been introduced to, from new cards to new mechanics. I’ve discussed one of these mechanics many times in a negative light, basically saying that the cards were essentially unplayable in Pauper. After having looked at these cards again, I realized I may have been wrong… very wrong. But first I’m very excited to present our new Competitive Corner!

We’re finally back at it! It seems like it has been forever between the transition from PureMTGO to my new home here at MTGO Academy and then the period of reinventing the Competitive Corner’s concept after Wizards implemented their new policy on Daily Event listings. I want to take the opportunity to drill it in once again that this section only gets better with your help! Feel free to leave comments below regarding changes and suggestions, and we’ll see what we can do!

Daily Event Results 11/22 to 12/5

Well it has been quite a few weeks since we last saw a competitive report and even with some missing data there really isn’t much in the way of change. The big three are still sitting pretty atop our list with Storm in a clear lead, which remains unsurprising. What is at least comforting at some level is that the distance between these three decks isn’t nearly as wide as we’ve seen in the past. As part of our new approach to the Competitive Corner we’re going to be keeping all decks on this chart instead of classifying some as “rogue/homebrew”; however, you might notice some of them missing off of our chart for the sake of space. If you take a look at the table, you’ll find the remainders listed out.

Moving on from there we see that beyond the top three, things are finally getting a bit more interesting than they have been in some past weeks. Coming in at a shocking number four is Mono-Blue Control (MUC), which had its biggest showing since I began tracking Dailies. I can only assume that the uptick is a result of the deck having some favorable matches against a lot of the formerly overwhelming decks. As we go further down the list, we continue to see other great things such as FissureStorm getting a big week with 12 showings, a resurgence of Goblins, and even the reappearance of DimirTrinket.

One change to nomenclature this time around would be the alteration from “Red Deck Wins” (RDW) to “Burn”. Just last week I was talking about interactions of RDW and trying to see if the deck could possibly be tuned any more than it already was. Here is the deck I presented as RDW…

After a quick note regarding the classification by Alex Ullman and a bit of looking around on my own, I’ve changed the classification to correctly represent the deck type. The best way to describe the difference between a deck that should be considered as Red Deck Wins and one that should be classified as Burn was best summed up by Alex, who said, “Burn decks are just that, RDW attacks.” So this week I’ve gone through and made a reclassification, and from here out we’ll be correctly noting these decks as Burn as opposed to RDW. If you’re interested in what a RDW deck might look like, then you can check out a Pauper version here and an examination of what a Standard version of it looked like not too long ago here.

Those of you who are new to this may be wondering about a couple of decks as we get further down on the list. The first one that I’ll point out is going to be classified as Simic Defenders, as titled by its creator, which I’ll be talking about later on in our new Weekly Spotlight. The other is an oldie, but goodie that shows up from time to time as run by MakingSmartPlays. The list takes advantage of a number of creatures with “enters the battlefield” effects in addition to Momentary Blink to get maximum usage. The deck is a lot of fun to play and can create a decent aggro base while protecting your creatures off of Momentary Blink and being able to do a decent amount of control as well.

The last thing I’ll add here is that this section will be a bit short for a couple of weeks because I want to add in some additional information, but based upon a longer stretch of time in order to see some of the trends over that period of time.

As part of our new Competitive Corner I now present you with the Weekly Spotlight! There are going to be two basic parts of this new section; the first in which we take a look at a specific Daily Event that was not featured in Wizards’ Daily Events listings and then the second where we focus on a specific rogue/homebrew deck that managed to end up in the money (the latter being completely situational based upon whether or not there were actually any decks of note). Let’s start with this week’s Daily Event…

Fast Stats!
Daily Event: 4669806
Number of Players: 55
Deck Types Represented: 13
Packs Won: 117

There were 55 players who showed up for this event, which started in the early east coast hours on the 5th. Of those players there were 13 different deck-types represented with the most prevalent being Infect with 10 players. Here’s the full breakdown…

Infect – 10
Storm – 9
IzzetPost – 8
DelverBlue – 7
MonoWhite Aggro – 4
FissureStorm – 4
Goblins – 2
MonoBlack Control – 2
Stompy ?2
MonoBlue Control – 2
WeeFiend – 1
Burn – 1
Hexproof – 1

By the end of the second round, there had already been ten players who had been eliminated thanks to a 0-2 start. Another ten players would be forced to drop from the tournament at the end of the third round with no hope of ending in the money. There were two of players, MastahDisastah and Mazza, who started out with wins in both of their first two rounds only to drop the ball in rounds three and four, which would keep them from breaking even on the event. Here’s a look at how all the decks matched up…

WeeFiend ended up with the best showing of all the decks, as his deck won 75% of its games. In a not-so-distant second place was DelverBlue, which managed to win 61% of its games, a much more impressive showing considering there were more games played by DelverBlue than by WeeFiend. On the other side of things, it was a tough week for Infect, a usual contender, as the deck only managed to win 34% of its matchups.

Only three players managed to capture that 4-0 record, walking away with the top payout for the event; however there were fourteen other players who ended at 3-1 for a total payout of 117 packs of Return to Ravnica. Let’s wrap things up here by taking a look at one game that stood out from the rest in this week’s commentary…

Simic Defenders

Almost by default, this particular deck won its way into our hearts and onto the center stage, seeing as it was the only new rogue list to make a showing this week! With the release of Return to Ravnica, we were re-introduced to a set of creatures that focused on this concept where having defender mattered. In previous sets we’d seen this on creatures such as Overgrown Battlement and Vent Sentinel, which were not only strong cards with this new ‘mechanic’, but fell under Pauper restrictions as well. In Return to Ravnica we received yet another defender that produced lots of mana in Axebane Guardian, as well as a new defender win condition in Doorkeeper. When you build a deck based upon ‘defender matters’ you have three basic choices for your win condition; Vent Sentinel, Doorkeeper, “burn for X”. While red seems appealing at first, blue has made a great argument for replacing that strategy thanks to the cheaper cost of Doorkeeper and the ability of Drift of Phantasms to search out walls and other important cards. It is perhaps odd that this list doesn’t technically use any of these win conditions…

Now if I were shown this list without the knowledge that the deck had managed to win in a Daily Event, I would say that it couldn’t be done. This deck uses a lot of odd one-offs alongside a solid creature base. The win condition for this deck also goes a bit old school, as it brings in Freed from the Real in addition to Viridian Longbow, which gets fueled off of the huge mana generated from Axebane Guardian. In order to create infinite mana, you only need Axebane Guardian with Freed from the Real attached to it and only one other defender creature. The combo is a bit fragile, as it can be finished off by a Disenchant on the Viridian Longbow, but there are a few options to protect it through countermagic. Personally I think the deck would benefit from the addition of a Doorkeeper or two in order to provide that alternate win condition, as well as from tightening up the list to reduce the heavy single counts.

I think in the future this deck can only go uphill from here. With the pending release of Gatecrash, we’re going to be visiting the remaining five guilds that were not a part of Return to Ravnica. In those five is Simic, which would at the very least provide this deck with the in-color guildgate. It’s still too early in the prediction game to know what we have in store as far as the guild-specific mechanic and whether or not they will again add some “defender matters” spells, but I’m going to hold onto an ounce of optimism that this will turn out to be the case. If you’re interested in joining the discussion on this deck feel free to check out the PDCMagic forums where JediJay started a discussion about his deck.

So let us take a step back for a minute and talk about my first two articles here at MTGO Academy. About the same time as my transition between sites, we were just starting to get a taste for what Return to Ravnica had to offer us. The first article took a look at the release of guildgates, and I decided to throw my own thoughts into the buzz around these cards. In the second, I continued my examination of these new lands by putting together five different decks, one for each of the five guilds. Now in addition to my thoughts about these specific cards from Return to Ravnica, I offered up some passing opinions on other commons from the set and came to a few general conclusions.

One of these was that the set would be the most impactful release for Classic Pauper that we have encountered for awhile. The guildgates are the biggest reason behind this, but there were some other very impactful cards such as Electrickery and Ethereal Armor. Another thing that you may have seen me talking about in passing was the playability of all the new, guild-specific mechanics…

In Rakdos we found the power of unleash, a new mechanic that allows us to sacrifice the ability for one of our creatures to block in order to have it come into play with +1/+1. This can create some great fast creatures and also gives you some utility in the fact that you have the freedom of choice between whether or not you need to be the blocker or the aggressor. While these cards haven’t found a home just yet, I felt there was a lot of strength as well as speed in creatures such as Splatter Thug. On its own this creature provides a great 2/2 body thanks to the first strike ability, and with a reasonable cost, but when you add in the unleash mechanic it can no go toe-to-toe with a number of Pauper’s most powerful creatures (and live!).

With Azorius we found the detain mechanic, which allows you to prevent a permanent from attacking/blocking as well as activating abilities. I felt that this too was a mechanic that held a lot of potential and was eager to see what cards might beckon back to it when we finally reach that third set of the block. I also felt that we had once again gotten one or two spells with this mechanic that could be playable, but the choices for Pauper beyond Azorius Arrester were uninspiring. While being able to both detain and draw a card from Inaction Injunction is nice, as a blue control player I think I’d much rather simply draw more than one card off of a Think Twice or even Accumulated Knowledge.

The Izzet mechanic was overload. This new mechanic allows you to pay a larger cost for the spell in exchange for changing the wording from “target” to “each”. For example, the spell Electricery normally would do one damage to only one target creature that your opponent controls, but when you decide to pay the larger overload cost, you’re able to change it so that it does that one damage to each creature your opponent controls. While I think it’s obvious at this point that we were all correct in seeing the power behind this card for competitive levels of play, I felt that some of the other cards would make a fun casual deck. In fact, in that second article, where I built guild-specific decks, I showed what I thought would be fun… using Goblin Electromancer in order to reduce the cost of overload spells in an Izzet Control build.

As we continued to move down the line and talk about the scavenge ability from Golgari, things were looking less and less playable. The scavenge mechanic allows you to pay the cost in order to put a number of +1/+1 counters on a creature in play while exiling the creature that was in your graveyard with this ability. While I do see where Wizards was going with this mechanic and appreciate the flavor, the associated spells were unimpressive. Most of these scavenge costs were very steep, which turned cards like Korozda Monitor from playable to outright clunky when you compare it to how they decided to cost out the scavenge ability on Sluiceway Scorpion for example. Sure the scorpion requires you to be playing two very specific colors, but I’m not sure how you then compare the fact that Korozda Monitor and Drudge Bettle have the same costs. Ultimately I could see an argument for play on these based upon an environment that is very unfriendly to creatures, but the odd costing makes one hesitate when it comes to competitive play.

Finally we get to the one guild to which I was probably the biggest opponent. The mechanic we got with Selesnya was populate, which allows the player to put a copy of a creature token onto the battlefield. While I would say that this was very guild-flavor friendly, I had some big things to say about why this wouldn’t work. Most of these ramblings against populate came as I found myself playing against other players in the casual room who were trying to make this mechanic work. None of these players were successful, and these were easy wins. Here were the two major arguments I made as to why populate could not work in Pauper…

1. Pauper lacks a solid creature token creation spell.
When looking at green and white in Pauper there are quite a few spells that do allow you to generate creature tokens, but most of these new tokens would be inconsequential. We’ve already seen a creature token deck take center stage in Daily Events using the creation of a mass of saprolings alongside the life gain from sisters such as Soul Warden. While this is an effective strategy, the new populate mechanic does not fit. Why would you pay such a large amount to create a single 1/1 token when you can do that in many other ways more efficiently. In a similar issue, most of the white-specific tokens would be 1/1 soldiers, which suffer from the same problem. If I’m going to be copying a token creature, then I want that creature to be worth it. Prior to the release of Return to Ravnica, there wasn’t much in the way of creature token creation of any size.

2. The cost of populate spells is too big.
Let’s start by taking a look at Eyes in the Skies. For the cost of four mana you create two 1/1 fliers. While it isn’t a far stretch to pay 2 mana for a single 1/1 flier, you usually find yourself facing an additional benefit such as on Squadron Hawk. In the case of Trostanis Judgment, you can exile a creature for half that cost when playing something such as Unmake or Exile, so you need to determine whether creating a single token creature is enough to justify doubling the cost. As we get further down the line and look at Horncallers Chant, we’re finally creating a creature that we want, but we now have to be at a point in time where we have 8 mana available to play this spell.

With this conclusion firmly set in my mind I proceeded to move on with my Magic life. I worked on videos, I wrote articles, and basically gave this no more thought. I had made my decision and that was the bottom line. Or was it? With my mind now occupied on other tasks, I had found myself at a point where I was eager to build something new and fun, but couldn’t decide on what. As I scanned through the new Return to Ravnica cards for inspiration, a new thought crossed my mind. Could I be wrong about populate?? I was mostly uninspired by anything else and looked at these Selesnya cards wondering whether or not I had leapt off the bandwagon without looking. Was the issue that populate spells were unplayable in Pauper or had I just been facing opponents who didn’t quite understand how to manipulate the drawbacks to these spells? So I decided to re-examine what I felt were the biggest drawbacks of playing populate.

1. Pauper lacks a solid creature token creation spell.
As I said above, before Return to Ravnica there weren’t a lot of spells that generated creature tokens of any reasonable size. While a majority of the spells in Magic did generate only those useless 1/1 tokens, I wondered what spells exactly did offer us reasonable creature tokens. So I opened up my game client, searched for green and white spells that made tokens, and created a list of anything that made a useful or formidable token…

As you can see, the options were indeed few and far between. Some of these could be eliminated right away such as Golem Foundry, which requires an artifact-heavy deck in order to create tokens. I debated the use of Giantbaiting quite a bit. What you may not know about Giantbaiting is that while you are required to exile the token that Giantbaiting creates, the actual token does not contain the “exile at end of turn” text, so when you populate that 4/4 giant token, the new creature you’ve created does not get exiled at end of turn. What ultimately led me to think this wouldn’t play well is that, once again, it is mana heavy. In order to abuse this, you need to populate in the same turn since the token gets exiled, which means that you’ll probably need a minimum of 7 mana available (4 for Eyes in the Skies and 3 for Giantbaiting unless you find an artifact/enchantment for Sundering Growth or simply use Druids Deliverance as a populate-only spell) in order to make this happen. The remaining cards seemed relatively playable with the only exception maybe being the splicers.

When it came to the token creation spells from Return to Ravnica, there were a number of great options. In fact all of these cards were decent options for creating usable tokens. Not a single one of these was going to create those useless 1/1 tokens! The smallest token that would be created would come from Knightly Valor, but it would be a respectable 2/2 with vigilance or from Eyes in the Skies with evasion to make them useful as something more than chump blockers. Most of these tokens were a more reasonable size such as 3/3 centaurs or 4/4 trampling rhinos. Even the use of Centaurs Herald would generate a creature token worth of play. So things were starting to become clearer… maybe the situation wasn’t as dire as originally thought. If we were going to try and put together a deck that was focused on this new populate mechanic, we would be able to find enough playable creature token creation spells. So could we fix the other issue?

2. The cost of populate spells is too big.
Have you ever had one of those duh moments? When the answer to something you may have killed yourself over was right in front of you all along? That moment when something you’re looking for is literally and obviously right in front of you, but you overlook it? This was one of those moments. When talking about populate, this was perhaps the biggest of the two arguments that I made for why this type of deck wouldn’t work. I was making the point that in order to generate the big mana needed to play these populate spells, you’d be wasting space in your deck running land fetch, mana enchantments, and so on. Well, this was partially true. If you were trying to ramp into these spells through any of these typical mana ramp spells, you would be wasting a lot of card slots for spells that didn’t actually win you the game. You’d be at a disadvantage because you would be able to ramp into plenty of mana, but it would result in you dropping most of your hand in order to do so, and then you’d never be able to generate decent card advantage since these two colors do not draw well. However, there was a simple solution to this problem… so simple in fact that I kicked myself when I realized it.

How could I overlook this? Put aside the fact that we have DimirPost, IzzetPost, and any number of other 8-post decks showing up on a regular basis in competitive play for a minute. Assume that I get a pass for ignoring that. The biggest error is that I spend probably more time looking at and talking about Cloudpost and Glimmerpost than any other player. For months now, I’ve been putting together a series on my YouTube channel about the impact of these locus lands on Pauper, and you would think that would be enough to have these drilled into my brain, haunting my nightmares! By using these lands, a player would be able to generate the heavy mana needed to consistently play 6- to 8-mana spells turn after turn, while at the same time wasting few if any spell slots for mana ramp.

The simple addition of these locus lands was the only missing piece needed to really bring this whole idea together. Once you know that you’re going to be building an 8-post deck, then the remaining cards fall right into place. There is a very simple selection of cards that make up the core of an 8-post list and the populate spells would work in quite nicely around it. With the strategic focus of the deck being creature tokens, it’s obvious that I was going to need to build it as a variant that was more similar to GreenPost than more controlling lists like IzzetPost. I wasn’t going to waste any space with a bunch of unnecessary control spells and instead focus on the creation of tokens and use of the populate mechanic. I quickly threw together a list with every populate spell I could get my hands on and here’s what we were looking at…

I decided that this week instead of bogging you guys down with a bunch of videos of me testing, I’d instead simply tell you about my experiences with the decks and save us all some time watching an unfinished product at work.

This particular list was put together in a similar way as our Red Deck Draws list was during last week’s article, taking an examination to the extreme in order to best identify weaknesses and strengths within the strategy. I’ve really become a fan of this testing strategy because it allows you the ability to isolate problem areas before working on a compromise, and man did this deck have some problem areas. Before we get too much into that, let’s go over a few of the card choices. While the focus of the deck is the populate mechanic, I also thought this was a decent place for extra lifegain off of Aven Riftwatcher and Centaur Healer. One of the strengths of IzzetPost is the fact that it can gain a significant amount of life off of Glimmerpost, which allows the deck to get to the mid-to-late game where it can finally gain tempo and control the game. In a similar way, most 8-post decks need the time that is granted by the Glimmerpost‘s lifegain in order to shore up the mana base and get the those big spells cast. The mid-to-late game plan for this particular deck is creating a mass of creature tokens of reasonable size. The addition of the centaur and riftwatcher would allow this deck better access to the necessary lifegain and increase the creature count. Most of the populate-related card choices, I feel, are pretty obvious. The only spells missing from the deck are Sundering Growthand Rootborn Defense, which would probably be used as sideboard options for Affinity and MonoBlack Control, respectively. I felt that Druids Deliverance was a better choice for the maindeck over these other two spells because the current meta seems to favor more aggro decks such as Mono-White Aggro, Stompy, Infect, and Hexproof, all of which can be slightly disrupted thanks to Druids Deliverance. The last thing I want to mention is Trostanis Judgment. While I did say that this deck would not be looking to be a control variant, I did feel that to ignore control entirely would be irresponsible, and Trostanis Judgment does provide us with that important populate mechanic.

Now, one of the drawbacks of populate that I may not have already touched on is the fact that in order to make a strategy based around creature tokens work, you kind of need to have… well… creature tokens. Based on this, spells such as Druids Deliverance lose some of their effectiveness because you don’t want to play them without having a token on the field. That being said, Mono-Black Control can be a difficult match thanks to the fact that the deck runs a heavy package of removal spells. If a removal spell is played in response to a populate spell then you may find yourself with no creature tokens to copy, therefore wasting that populate. Unfortunately the only quality answer for heavy removal comes in the form of Rootborn Defenses or even a couple Prismatic Strands, but I feel that because of where MBC is located in popularity, these cards are better saved for sideboarding. This can result in a few interesting play situations. Most of the time the populate spells that not only populate, but also create a creature token will be more important to you than those that simply populate because if you are sitting on a populate spell with nothing to copy, it could become a wasted card.

In testing this became an issue once or twice, but I wasn’t sure what could be done about it. Oddly, the biggest offender was often Eyes in the Skies because it did create its own creature that could be populated, but I always wanted something more than a 1/1 flier. Without much in the way of direct control spells in the deck, this deck, much like Stompy or GreenPost, would rely on creatures and combat in order to control the board. That cannot be done in most cases with a 1/1, and yet I found myself reluctant to reduce the count. As I said earlier, the only missing populate spells were very situational and the cost on this spell was reasonable for those starts where you’re just a bit slower than what 8-post decks are capable of. That aside, what I felt the deck was really missing was a big finisher. In IzzetPost, you’re playing a list that is full of tempo control and draw spells, all of which help you find the Rolling Thunder or Kaerveks Torch that you need in order to finish the game. In GreenPost or the 8-post version of Mono-Blue Control, you use big creatures in order to finish off an opponent. While this deck does have the ability to make difficult creatures it gains power from quantity instead of quality. To answer this remaining hurdle, I turned to an old 8-post favorite with Ulamogs Crusher, which not only creates a difficult attacker, but can work as control as well thanks to the annihilator ability. With the changes in place, here’s what the deck looked like…

Now I know that the deck started out as a casual challenge, but I did feel the need to build a sideboard for this deck because I feel it not only has potential to compete, but also because some of the best illustrations of how populate can work are through seeing all the spells. Check out the video to see/hear my additional comments about the deck…

And of course let’s finally take a look at how the deck performed in testing…

So… final thoughts?

Well I’ll start off here by saying I”m not perfect and I’m not too proud to never admit when I’ve made a mistake. After playing through several games in testing and working to get this finalized list, I found myself not only being successful with a populate deck, but actually — dare I say it? — enjoying myself. One of the biggest issues that the deck had was in matches where the opponent managed to clock up faster than we could get our mana base stabilized. It wasn’t so much an issue that they would get damage in too fast because we have that issue resolved thanks to all of the lifegain, but it did come down to more of those decks like Hexproof and Stompy, which can get large creatures fast. Because this deck doesn’t have a lot in the way of hard removal, it struggles to find answers to large threats once they finally do hit the board. While there is a bit of sideboard help available, there is little that can be done. One of the reasons that IzzetPost is the most successful of the 8-post decks is that it works efficiently with the early game control. A few fast Lightning Bolts or Flame Slashes can work wonders to balance the early game, and then the deck is further complimented by countermagic options such as Condescend to keep those threats from even hitting the board in the first place.

Well guys, that is it for me for this week and what a week it was! As always please feel free to leave comments, especially with regard to my new format for the Competitive Corner. As you know, I’m always open to discussing and implementing changes as necessary and I’d like to still provide decent content despite the restriction of information as provided by Wizards.

Until next time, check me out on Twitter @MTGOJustSin.
Also you can find additional content on my YouTube channel.