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Main » Articles » Something Old and Something New

Something Old and Something New

Chingsung Chang
Posted on April 23, 2012
 Reddit

Today, I want to take a look at the upcoming format for Avacyn Restored, and with it, how you go about looking for strategic space inside a new format. Playing old decks is always an option, but frequently, creating new strategies can give you a substantial advantage in the early weeks of the format. Still, how do you go about analyzing a format? In general, there is a three-part process.

Identifying the Major Decks of the Format

This is, perhaps, the most important part. In order to prepare for a format, you have to identify what the established format or metagame is. This is frequently fairly easy around the second and third set releases, as the format has had time to stabilize. However, if you are looking after a rotation, you will almost always be building a format from scratch. That is a completely different animal. There are some clues to draw on (mainly Block Constructed), but as a whole, a rotation is such a major even that you can basically view it as starting from ground zero.

However, right now, we are around a third set release, and therefore, we aren’t starting from ground zero. The format has had six months or so to stabilize, and we definitely have an established metagame. The key here is not to bite off more than you can chew. Preparing for every deck is not possible, and thus, the strategy is to target major archetypes.

Here’s the format as it stands right now:

  • Top Dog – W/U Delver

  • Major Players – Strangleroot Geist decks (R/G, Naya), Wolf Run Ramp, Esper control

  • Other – Zombies, W/U, U/B, Solar Flare, Frites, and more

I chose to move Esper into the Major Players category because the deck is picking up steam, and given the spoilers for Avacyn Restored, its position only seems to be strengthened. Tamiyo in particular seems very good for the deck. Anyway, let’s take a look at each of these archetypes as they exist right now in slightly more detail.

Delver

Fundamental Strategy – Delver is an aggro-control deck that relies on protecting and enhancing a single threat to win the game. It focuses Vapor Snag, Mana Leak, and Snapcaster Mage on disrupting opponents’ development while attacking with Delver of Secrets, Geist of Saint Traft, or Invisible Stalker, frequently equipped with a Runechanter's Pike or Sword of War and Peace.

Strengths – Delver is extremely good when it is able to deploy a threat quickly and have it go unanswered. Geist in particular is a huge culprit because of the amount of pressure it can apply by itself unenhanced. Runechanter's Pike also adds an element of explosiveness to the deck. Delver frequently uses this fact to counterattack and win races, buying time with Vapor Snag and Snapcaster Mage.

Weaknesses – Like most aggro-control decks, Delver is pretty bad at playing catch-up. If you can force Delver into a position where it is forced into a defensive posture, you will usually win. Delver’s individual threats are also relatively fragile and low-impact without Pikes or Swords, thus, if you can handle those cards, handling the other cards becomes much less of an issue.

Strangleroot Geist Decks

Fundamental Strategy – Most Strangleroot Geist decks are aggressive, midrange decks which seek to take advantage of the resiliency of Strangleroot Geist combined with strong cards such as Huntmaster of the Fells and/or Green Sun's Zenith to overwhelm opponents. In general, the decks center around Strangleroot Geist and the pressure that card is able to apply. Geist decks can present a variety of threats, but almost all of them are creature-based.

Strengths – Geist strategies are fairly resistant to attrition and disruption due to the presence of Green Sun's Zenith and their namesake card. As a whole, Geist decks generate a lot of value and have a ton of game in most matchups due to the highly consistent nature of the Zenith/Geist pairing.

Weaknesses – Geist decks are highly linear. They rely almost entirely on the combat phase to accomplish anything, and they run very little removal or disruption. Overall, they lack variety in the way they can attack an opponent.

Wolf Run Ramp

Fundamental Strategy – Wolf Run Ramp uses mana acceleration to quickly power out big spells, primarily a Titan, which it will use to take over the game. A usual smattering of defensive spells allows the deck to survive the opponent’s onslaught while doing so. The combination of Primeval Titan, Kessig Wolf Run, and Inkmoth Nexus (in addition to big creatures) is very threatening, as Wolf Run is capable of killing an opponent with poison damage very quickly.

Strengths – Wolf Run Ramp is capable of generating a lot of mana very quickly, thus it is capable of bypassing one of the primary defensive measures in this format: Mana Leak. Wolf Run’s ability to power Titans out early is troublesome for many decks, as is its ability to attack with very large Inkmoth Nexuses.

Weaknesses – Like most ramp decks, Wolf Run is a bit clunky. It will have draws where it has a lot of ramp and very little gas, and it will have draws where it draws a bunch of Titans and not much ramp. Green Sun's Zenith and some midrange creatures can remove the awkwardness of these draws, but they don’t always do so. In addition to draw awkwardness, Wolf Run relies on a relatively small group of threats to actually win the game. If you can deal with them while applying pressure, Wolf Run can fall apart very quickly.

Esper Control

Fundamental Strategy – Esper control appears to be rising to the top as the format’s control deck. There really isn’t anything special about Esper. It relies on spot removal, counterspells, sweepers, planeswalkers, and Elesh Norn/Titans/Consecrated Sphinx to win the game. It plays phenomenal defense and generates card advantage until opponents stop moving. There are as many Esper builds as there are players, but they are all very much built on slow, grinding games.

Strengths – Esper perhaps has the highest card quality in the entire format. The individual defensive spells it plays are all very strong, and the threats it presents frequently generate large advantages even if they are dealt with quickly. The deck’s ability to use and protect planeswalkers for extended periods also feeds into its ability to generate an overwhelming board state.

Weaknesses – Simply put, Esper control is slow. The vast majority of its really good cards cost 5 or more mana, which can be awkward. Day of Judgment also is not what it used to be. With Strangleroot Geist in the format, the deck cannot lean as hard on Day of Judgment as control decks are used to being able to. The card is still effective, but its power is greatly reduced. Esper’s primary weakness is in the fact that the deck takes a while to get going. Its early defenses can be overwhelmed, and in those situations, Esper will die staring at Gideons, Elspeths, Titans, and Elesh Norns, wondering how it got there.

Attacking a Format

After coming to a basic understanding of a format, the key is to try to create a deck that can exploit the various holes in the format. Let’s talk about that.

Exploiting Delver

Exploiting Delver is simply a matter of getting ahead of it consistently. This is the best place to be strategically. If you can be aggressive and force Delver on its back foot, you will have a lot of success in this matchup.

There is, however, an alternative way of beating Delver. Because Delver is a deck focused on time control, it can also be beaten through overwhelming card advantage. If you select this strategy, you need to be able to present a defense that is resilient to hexproof creatures and Equipment, but it is not inconceivable to simply try to grind Delver out. Moorland Haunt gives Delver more long game than a lot of tempo decks, but in the end, Delver doesn’t have what it takes to hang with a true, card-advantage-based, midrange control deck.

Exploiting Strangleroot Geist

Strangleroot Geist decks have huge problems with the following:

That is simply the best place to be against Strangleroot Geist. Failing that, because Strangleroot Geist is the core of an aggressive strategy, you can beat it through a different means: going big.

One of the rules of aggro mirrors is that, assuming similar speed, the “bigger” deck (i.e. the deck that plays larger creatures) is the one that tends to win. The key here is the fact that you have to maintain a similar speed. If you are bigger and faster, great; if you are bigger and the same speed, also great. You can actually afford to be a little slower because by going big, you plan to give yourself the ability to take advantage of your larger creatures in a controlling fashion.

How does this work? Well, larger creatures in aggro mirrors act as card advantage and are good on the defensive. First, they require multiple of the opponents’ cards to take down. Second, they act as a deterrent and buy time for you as you play more and more creatures—it is difficult for the opponent to attack into them profitably. Thus, if you are the bigger aggro deck, you use blocking to your advantage to take control of the gamed. It’s shocking, I know . . . people block in Constructed?

Exploiting Wolf Run Ramp

There are two main ways of winning against this deck: Kill it before it sets up or exploit its low threat density. This means that we want to be a fast deck or running countermagic or some other way of cutting off Titans and Nexuses. Being fast isn’t the best against Wolf Run because of the existence of Slagstorm and Whipflare. Both are very strong sweepers right now and do a number on aggro decks. Thus, ideally, some sort of blue deck against Wolf Run is good.

Exploiting Esper Control

Like U/B, Esper can have a lot of trouble with Strangleroot Geist. The aggressiveness of the card in combination with the slow deployment speed of Esper can sometimes result in problematic defensive positions. Due to the fact that Strangleroot Geist can survive Day of Judgment, Esper can have issues handling the card.

Being an aggressive deck to apply pressure is a good place to be against Esper; however, you have to make sure that you are resilient to sweepers; otherwise, Esper’s more powerful cards will simply beat you in the long game. Failing the ability to apply pressure, Esper tends to run a light countermagic suite. This can also be exploited by going to the other end of the spectrum: playing a pure control deck with a heavy countermagic suite.

A Bird’s-Eye View

The key here is to do one of two things:

  1. Establish a list of cards that is strong against the format.

  2. Establish strategic superiority over the format.

The reason this approach is correct is that you don’t know what new tech people will be bringing. Because of this, you need to be prepared not for the individual cards that decks play (because those are subject to change), but the actual strategy (which is not subject to change). You can do some extrapolation as to what individual cards are likely or not likely to appear (Strangleroot Geist, Sword of War and Peace, Runechanter's Pike are probably not going anywhere), but in the end, your predictions are just predictions. It’s safer to attack a strategy and not an individual card, so that is what you should seek to be doing.

Having looked at the format, the correct place to be strategically is either a midrange control deck capable of grinding out long games or an aggro deck easily capable of going big. Esper proves to be the odd deck out for the format in that neither of those strategies is particularly good against Esper. Thus, the Esper matchup will probably depend more on sideboarding and play skill than on deck construction.

Having determined this, I took one shot at each area. For the midrange control deck, I revisited my idea of Boat Brew. This is what I ended up coming up with:

"Boat Brew v. 2.0"

The key to this sort of deck is the transition between early-game defensive spells such as Slagstorm into bigger finishers such as Titans. The problem the deck was having before was that it was clunky, and the transition wasn’t going very well. I thought Barter in Blood and Olivia might help out the transition, and they did.

Torch Fiend once again proved to be among the best cards in the deck, and Grave Titan showed itself to be better than Inferno Titan, although not by enough that you couldn’t run Inferno if you so desired. Pristine Talisman proved to be very good for the deck, buying time while ramping up to bigger threats.

I’m not happy with the way this deck plays out against Wolf Run Ramp and Esper, but if your meta is Delver- and Geist-infested, this isn’t the worst place to be. I’ve put this down for testing for SCG: Providence because I’ve found a deck that better suits my play style, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable choice if this sort of deck floats your boat.

If I were working on this for Providence, I would start further refinement here:

"Boat Brew v. 2.1"

Other cards I would look at for the maindeck are Griselbrand, as part of the reanimation package, and Demonlord of Ashmouth to replace Bloodline Keeper.

I said I had put down Boat Brew because I came up with a new deck that I like a lot. Zvi strikes again.

"Hellfires"

(−1 Sunpetal Grove, +1 Kessig Wolf Run could be reasonable)

This is obviously a Zvi-style Fires/Mythic deck and my backup deck. In terms of aggro decks going big (something that seems good strategically now), this is the premiere strategy. Playing a bunch of mana dorks into bigger monsters is a time-honored way of playing “big aggro,” which seems like a really good place to be right now.

Wolfir Silverheart enables this by providing 12 power with one body, which is absolutely amazing. Current incarnations of R/G, Naya, and Delver all have substantial problems with him. Wolf Run can also have difficulty sweeping him away because he’s a 4/4 naturally.

I’m less comfortable playing this style of deck than I used to be, but I would be comfortable taking this deck into battle at Providence. I feel that it’s in a good place strategically, is consistent enough for a long event, and powerful enough to take games off anyone. It’s a little soft to Esper, but other than that, I can’t really find a fault with the main. I really, really like this deck.

Having said that, I would prefer to play something more in line with my play style (something durdly, preferably with Islands), so I will continue to look. However, in the event that I fail to find something I like, it’s nice to know that Zvi has my back.

Hope to see some of you in Providence.

Chingsung Chang

Conelead most everywhere and on MTGO

Khan32k5 at gmail dot com

TAGS articles, standard, constructed, review, analysis, deck analysis, deck lists, deck list, chingsung chang, avacyn restored

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