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Main » Articles » Persistence

Persistence

Andrew Jessup
Posted on June 6, 2017
 Reddit

If you’ve been reading my articles recently then what I’m about to tell you may not come as much of a surprise, I’m burnt out. I’ve been rather vocal about the amount of hours I’ve been putting in the past few months, and while my results have certainly improved, I still haven’t really gotten the hang of balancing it all out. Magic is hard enough when you’re feeling 100%, so trying to succeed at 60% may as well be impossible.

So going into the SCG Baltimore Modern Open, my plan was to take it pretty easy. I hadn’t played a match of Modern in months, but I was content just throwing some Death's Shadow variant together, calling it a day, and hoping it worked out. That was until my teammate, Brad Carpenter, became rather adamant that the Abzan Company deck he won the Modern Classic with at SCG Louisville was quite good. He convinced me to give it a shot, I ran it through a league, and I killed a lot of people on turn three. I was sufficiently convinced. I played a couple more leagues with the deck, killed even more people on turn three, and settled on the following list.

Counters Company ? Modern| Andrew Jessup

The only significant changes I made from Brad’s original list were to the sideboard. I realized pretty early on that most of the silver bullet creatures were way too low impact. Most of the sideboard cards I was interested in playing were spells, but that can get pretty awkward with Collected Company as you never really want to go below 25 creatures. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that having real sideboard cards and only boarding a few in against most decks was better than just sideboarding a handful of mediocre cards.

Unfortunately, for me at least, I only won two games on turn three in the actual tournament and didn’t do very much in any of the games where I didn’t win on turn three. I ended dropping from the tournament in round 6, and it was by far my worst result in months. But obviously I only have myself to blame, and Brad, of course. I acknowledged I was running well above average in testing, but likely still overestimated the deck. I think it’s exactly fine, but I don’t expect it to survive in its current iteration. Because while the deck is only all right, the Devoted Druid/Vizier of Remedies combo is the real deal, and there is almost certainly a better shell for it than this deck.

If you are interested in the playing the combo, Kelvin Chew’s list is the best place to start.

Bant Company ? Modern | Kelvin Chew, 29th GP Malaysia

I seem to run into Kelvin (Hyper) on MTGO fairly often and there are very few players I’ve been more impressed with than him, so it’s no surprise to see him do well with a deck he’s been playing forever. And while I’m sure he got a lot of leverage out of his skill and experience with his deck, the list looks quite solid. The biggest problem the Counters Company deck had was how anemic its draws can be, but by playing actual creatures this problem is severely mitigated. And if the deck that won SCG Baltimore, Grixis Death's Shadow, ticks up in popularity, casting Reflector Mage sounds pretty good. Reflector Maging a Gurmag Angler has to be backbreaking.

Another spot to look is Martin Juza’s Elves list from GP Copenhagen.

Elves ? Modern| Martin Juza, 16th GP Copenhagen

Longtusk Cub
To the surprise of many, I’ve always hated this deck. I’m known for playing Elves in Legacy, and it’s by far my favorite deck to play, but there’s not even a comparison to be made here. There’s some finesse required to play Elves in Legacy, and the Modern version is essentially just Green Merfolk. And that was the problem with the deck, it was a one dimensional beatdown deck. By adding the Vizier combo to the deck, it adds an element to it that it was previously lacking. Previous iterations of Elves typically goldfished on turn four, but increasing its goldfish speed by even just a single turn is huge for a deck that’s completely lacking any sort of interaction. This deck was already on the cusp of being a reasonable choice in Modern, and I wouldn’t be surprised if adding the combo pushes the deck over the top.

After my underwhelming performance at SCG Baltimore, I was very much looking forward to having a week off. It was supposed to be perfect. I was going to relax and enjoy doing literally anything but play Magic, but then my secretary, Dan, informed me that there were actually two online events I should play in during the week. The first was a Standard MOCS Monthly on Friday and the second was Standard PTQ on Saturday. I had forgotten about the monthly and didn’t realize that the new season of MTGO PTQ’s had started, so it was time to test some Standard.

I expected my testing to be fairly simple though. My deck list was going to start with 4 Aetherworks Marvels and 4 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, and I had a two days to figure out the rest. It seemed easy enough. Things got a bit more complicated from that point though, as I started losing an abnormal amount with Aetherworks Marvel. My lists felt clunky, I was playing horrendously, and all of my opponents seemed overly prepared for Marvel. The only match I could still stomach playing at this point was the mirror. Everything else was just far too miserable.

I’m generally a big advocate of just playing the best deck, and I think deck selection bias is one of the most common pitfalls among tournament players, but I was just way too burnt out to care at this point. I was content with being a hypocrite if the alternative was continuing to play a deck I hate poorly. Because of my complete lack of life time management skills, I only left myself with two PPTQs to play to qualify for Saturday’s PTQ. I had already bombed out of the first one with Marvel, so I had to pick a random deck to play in the last one. I decided to play Matt Tumavitch’s Temur Energy deck, and fortunately was able to 4-1. The deck felt all right and I was pretty much ready to throw in the towel, so I decided to make a few changes and play it in the MOCS Monthly the following day as well.

Temur Energy ? Amonkhet Standard ? Andrew Jessup, (6-2) Standard MOCS Monthly

After starting 1-2 in the tournament against three Marvel decks, I was hoping I just picked up my 3rd loss soon and could stop playing. But after a pretty absurd string of luck and some medium to solid play, I rattled off the next five to pick up two leaderboard points and qualify for the MOCS Playoffs. While I managed to put up a respectable record with the deck, I had no intentions of playing it the PTQ the next day. The deck was okay, but the only reason I won most my matches was because my opponents were hitting below .300 on their Marvel activations.

The fish plan out of the Temur Energy deck was fairly effective against Marvel, but I was often running into the problem of not putting a fast enough clock on my opponent. I lost a game where I won two separate counter wars over Aetherworks Marvel, but ended up giving my opponent enough time to draw out of the hole they were in. So when I started looking for a deck to play the next day, I was intrigued when I saw this list.

Jeskai Vehicles ? Amonkhet Standard | gg4Avian, (5-0) MTGO Standard League

Unlike the Temur Energy deck, this deck seemed like it could get under Marvel and really leverage its use of counterspells. And against the opposing aggressive decks, the classic vehicles plan of just boarding into Planeswalkers seemed like it would be effective. I put the deck together on Magic Online, quickly 5-0d a league, and was completely sold. The deck felt great. After spending some time theorycrafting and tinkering with the deck, I was now looking forward to playing this tournament that I was previously dreading. I ended up settling on this list.

Jeskai Vehicles ? Amonkhet Standard | Andrew Jessup, 2nd MTGO PTQ

Glint-Sleeve Siphoner
My tournament was pretty insane. As it turns out, the margins are pretty thin with this deck. I played countless games that just kept going back and forth, and I kept narrowly pulling all of them out. I was running well, and I was playing the best Magic I had played in weeks. I felt great and really liked my odds of taking the whole thing down. I played against a smattering of everything in the swiss, and my only loss to a Pummeler deck because of poor sideboarding on my part. I cruised into top 8, and was ready to take down my second consecutive PTQ. In the quarterfinals, I had a rematch against the Pummeler player I lost to in the swiss. I quickly went down a game, but fortunately had revised my sideboard plan from earlier and was able to pull out games 2 and 3. I had roughly a 30 minute break in between the quarterfinals and the semifinals. I was just focused on staying calm and winning my next match. I played against noted MTGO PTQ end boss, Jonathan Sukenik, in the semifinals. He was playing the same deck I was, but some unfortunate mulligans on his part made the games fairly one-sided. I was onto the finals.

I really wanted to win this one. Qualifying for the first Pro Tour of the next season this early on would really take a lot of pressure off of me. I was running well, I was playing well, I was going to win. I had played against my finals opponent a couple days earlier and they were playing Temur Energy then. If they were still playing that deck, I liked my odds. When they won the die roll and lead with a Hissing Quagmire, my heart sunk a bit. I had played bg once and narrowly beat it the last round of the swiss. In that match, I got absolutely crushed in Game 1 but was able to takedown the postboard games. I liked my plan for the matchup, so I felt like if could just win Game 1 here then I would definitely win the match.

I won Game 1.

I was trying not get ahead of myself, but I really thought I had it at this point. But in Game 2 an unchecked Glint-Sleeve Siphoner forced me to deploy a Fumigate prematurely, and I was left cold to their follow up. I would finally get to be on the play for Game 3 though, and I was still feeling confident. My opening hand sucked, and I was forced to ship it.

This was my six card hand. I kept and bottomed a Fumigate. The hand obviously isn’t perfect, but if I got a bit lucky I could still win. I picked a Spirebluff Canal on turn three, but my opponent had already stuck a Glint-Sleeve Siphoner. So they were able to sit back and accrue card advantage, while I held open rebukes and desperately hoped to pick up a 4th land for the Chandra and Nahiri in my hand. The fourth land would unfortunately come several turns too late, and I lost.

It was definitely tough to swallow, but I’ve had some practice with this before. I still have plenty of time to qualify for Pro Tour Ixalan, and I’m still incredibly confident that I will at some point. But in the meantime, I’m just looking forward to taking a break.

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TAGS articles, constructed, analysis, standard, decklist, andrew jessup, amonkhet standard

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