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Main » Articles » Looking at Dark Ascension, Part 2

Looking at Dark Ascension, Part 2

Chingsung Chang
Posted on February 6, 2012
 Reddit

It’s time to do some more brainstorming. I’m writing this before Star City Games Richmond, so I don’t have access to those results, but I’m going to take a look at the upcoming format and talk about my ideas and general views. Last week, I talked about Gravecrawler and Sorin. This week, I want to take a look at some of the other archetypes. I am going to skip Delver, though—it’s boring.

As for my two cents on Delver, I don’t really think the deck changes much. I think Drogskol Captain is a mediocre inclusion for many Delver decks. It’s better in the versions that are going to rely more on Midnight Haunting and/or Lingering Souls than Geist of Saint Traft and/or Invisible Stalker, but I feel that the Geist versions are much stronger. Porcelain Legionnaire is also quite good and fits better in the non-Spirit versions as well. Having dealt with Delver, let’s move on to more interesting decks.

Birthing Pod

Birthing Pod is perhaps the old card that gains the most from Dark Ascension. Undying as a mechanic is really helpful to Pod decks in general, and I think they will fare well at the beginning of the upcoming metagame. I do have a feeling that control will take over after a little while, though. The main issue I have with Birthing Pod’s continued success is that the deck is weak to various token strategies and Grafdigger's Cage. Of the former, I expect to see quite a few, and the second is definitely a viable sideboard card.

Looking at Pod, I think a strong direction to take is to be two colors and splash red for Kessig Wolf Run. Let’s take a look at two angles of attack. First, we’ll go with a more midrange approach, which I feel is best when green is paired with black. The reason for this is Curse of Death's Hold and Massacre Wurm, both of which are extremely strong in a metagame filled with small creatures.

"B/G Pod"

The mana base for this deck is a bit hellacious due to the black requirements, but I think the fixing along with four Emissaries and three Solemns should suffice. This build takes heavy advantage of undying to generate card advantage, and you can see how Grafdigger's Cage would be useful against it. I don’t think this is a bad direction to take with Pod, but I also don’t think it’s the best.

I think a better direction to take two-color pod decks is an aggressive one. For that, there really is only one color pairing worth exploring: G/W.

"G/W Aggro-Pod"

Now let’s look at what I feel might be the best three-color variant of Birthing Pod.

"Naya Pod"

I feel that the Naya and B/B Pod lists are significantly better because they do the best jobs of mitigating Pod’s greatest weakness. Pod’s fundamental strategy is that of a ground-based creature assault, and I feel that is perhaps the worst way to go about winning with creatures in Standard currently. Why? The answer is simple: Day of Judgment, Sorin, Lord of Innistrad, and Elspeth Tirel.

Those three cards combine to create a very strong basic shield for buffering ground-based damage. Not only do they trade off small creatures, but they also gain life, allowing their controllers to take damage in strategic situations to set up better Days or other such nonsense. Starting from here already puts any ground-based assault at a huge strategic disadvantage. Then, put the backbreaker on top of those three cards: Timely Reinforcements.

You see, the strength of tokens allows many more decks to maindeck Reinforcements, and that is really, really bad for decks that plan on attacking. If you consider that Reinforcements is best used in a defensive, controlling capacity and tie that to Day of Judgment, Sorin, and Elspeth, you see why the token control deck is so good. Things such as Lingering Souls only make life even harder for decks like Pod, as it provides extra blockers to punch through in front of a Day of Judgment. All in all, it adds up to a nearly impenetrable barrier for ground-based decks—especially after sideboarding.

This is the problem that I have with Strangleroot Geist. A lot of people are very high on that card, whereas I’m pretty sure it is just outmoded by the format right now. It’s a good card in a vacuum, and even when you put it into decks, but the problem is that the format is extremely hostile to cards like that.

Think about it this way: You play Strangleroot Geist and get in once or twice. Then, your opponent plays Timely Reinforcements. What are you going to do? Your opponent is up in life and has the ability to trade his tokens for your Geist. You are either going to have to give him a ton of time or lose at least one half of a Strangleroot Geist while trying to beat your way through the Reinforcements. Thus, when Day of Judgment comes up, it still wipes your board.

Sure, you’ve mitigated the card disadvantage of Day of Judgment, but that never was the most important part of the card. I talked about it before, but when you play sweepers, it isn’t about cards, it’s about time. Day of Judgment will still buy a tremendous amount of time against you, and that’s all it needs to do before the planeswalkers, White Sun's Zenith, and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite come to the party and clean things up.

Strangleroot Geist is extremely bad against a token-controlled field, and that is what I see in the future of Standard.

But what about Kessig Wolf Run? That card allows you to punch through cheap, small blockers, right? Well, the reality here is that Sorin and Elspeth Tirel push this off the map as well. Wolf Run requires a huge time investment to use, which is exactly the type of investment a control deck wants you to make. Before, it was fine—control couldn’t afford to take the damage—but now with main-deck Timely Reinforcements, Sorin, and Elspeth Tirel, it is very likely that the control player can, in fact, afford to take somewhere between one and three Wolf Run hits. That means that the card is basically going to keep your opponent honest, but it isn’t going to turn the paradigm back in your favor.

So then, how do you beat tokens? Reality is pretty bleak, as token decks really only have two major problems: Curse of Death's Hold and Massacre Wurm. Sure, they’re big problems (they’re of the I-can’t-beat-that-card variety), but I would put my money on various token-based strategies being prepared for two specific cards. Once you know your weaknesses, you can prepare for them and account for them. Covering a fundamental strategic flaw (like Pod has) is much more difficult.

The card that honestly could bring things back in the favor of decks like Pod is Inkmoth Nexus. It flies and has infect, so tokens can’t block it, and the life-gain doesn’t help. However, there is a problem with Inkmoth Nexus: it’s a 1/1, so it dies to Tragic Slip. People who have played it should know that Tragic Slip is now the premiere removal spell in Standard, and Tragic Slip is very good at killing Nexuses. All in all, you reach a situation in which all of Pod’s potential lines of attack are quite effectively blunted by token strategies.

The best way to mitigate this is to have cards that are fundamentally strong against tokens. The aforementioned black cards and Inferno Titan are effectively the holy trinity here. A strategy centered around these cards could be pretty effective against tokens, but they are still relatively expensive and definitely beatable, so I’ll put my money on tokens. It’s possible that tokens won’t be able to solve the problems associated with these cards, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Thus, in conclusion, I think that Pod will do fine in the early days of the format while people optimize their token-based control lists. Once those start to come down, I think Pod will drop off a cliff because the strategy is fundamentally weak against the Standard card pool at the moment. I’m sorry—ground-based assaults are just no good right now.

Burning Vengeance

People have been excited about this archetype, so let’s take a look.

"Burning Vengeance"

This is probably what many Burning Vengeance decks are going to look like. Once again, there’s a huge problem: enablers. Secrets of the Dead looks like an enabler, but it actually isn’t—mainly because it doesn’t affect the board. This deck is most often compared to Astral Slide, so let’s do it.

"Astral Slide by Gabe Walls"

So, what makes this deck tick? For people who don’t actually remember the deck, you might go to its namesake card: Astral Slide. However, that really isn’t it. What made the deck tick was Lightning Rift. Lightning Rift being 2 mana was what allowed this deck to set up early enough to do its shenanigans. However, Astral Slide being a backup enabler was equally important. This gave the deck enough ways of taking advantage of its cycling, allowing the entire deck to come together cohesively.

Burning Vengeance doesn’t have this. There are two problems with Burning Vengeance:

  1. Burning Vengeance costs 3 mana.

  2. The deck doesn’t have a backup enabler. Secrets of the Dead doesn’t count because it doesn’t interact with the board

You can try to solve this problem by throwing in extra things like Slagstorm or Pyroclasm or more burn, but in the end, this is going to be why the deck fails. The difference between 2 and 3 for your primary enabler is huge in terms of tempo. That alone means Burning Vengeance is already fighting an uphill battle. Once you add in the fact that there is no backup enabler, you end up with a deck that just has too much vulnerability. It might be good against something like Delver backed by Midnight Haunting and Lingering Souls, but against any deck that is going to apply a significant amount of pressure, you’re toast.

Burning Vengeance does have a significant advantage, though: The spells you use to activate it have an effect of their own. Often, when you cycled a card, it didn’t do anything. Even if you did get something from the cycling, it was small (2 life, a couple damage, or a Plains). The advantage of Burning Vengeance is that flashback spells provide a bunch of more powerful effects, thus you can catch up a little bit easier. However, that doesn’t make up for putting yourself in a much bigger hole before everything actually comes online.

Burning Vengeance at the center of a strategy is no good for the reasons I’ve cited above. However, I could definitely see it as a way of generating advantage for a deck that is already going to make heavy use of flashback anyway. Look at the flashback cards: Desperate Ravings, Snapcaster Mage, Think Twice, Devil's Play, and more all have the potential to be large parts of the metagame. Thus, if you are already going to play a bunch of flashback spells, why not play Burning Vengeance?

However, this means that you are not playing a Burning Vengeance deck. You are playing a deck that happens to have Burning Vengeance in it. This is an important distinction. The reason it works is that your flashback spells are otherwise useful to you without the Vengeance. If you have it, that’s icing on the cake. This is where I believe Burning Vengeance lies at the moment.

Conclusion

There are a number of other strategies available that I haven’t covered. Things like mono-black Zombie aggro, Havengul Lich shenanigans, and G/U mill with Boneyard Wurm, Splinterfright, and Ghoultree, but I don’t really see any of these making a huge impact. Havengul Lich in particular is not really there. Sure, you can do some funny things with it, but the combo is very card-intensive and fragile. Tragic Slip is now the premiere removal spell in Standard, and that really has to be taken into account. If Tragic Slip sees more play, Dismember is also likely to see more play (as it is an easy way to trigger Slip for a low cost). This means that Havengul Lich is really just going to die in many instances—not something you want for your combo piece.

The deck I would keep an eye on is the G/U mill deck. This sort of thing actually might have potential. I think the card quality is too low right now, but I could be wrong. The synergy of a deck like this is extremely strong, and it does have a few very strong threats in the form of Ghoultree, Splinterfright, and the various Skaab creatures (Ruinator and Stitched Drake in particular). It’s possible that there is something there.

All in all, though, I think that Lingering Souls and Sorin are going to dominate this format. Combined with the existing tools that exist for the strategy, tokens is just extremely strong. Delver will end up being one of token decks’ primary foes because of its ability to take to the skies, thus avoiding the legions of ground-based chump-blockers. That leaves every deck caught up somewhere between Delver and tokens, and I feel that most strategies are just going to fall by the wayside.

If you don’t want to play one of those two decks, Curse of Death's Hold, Massacre Wurm, and Inferno Titan are going to be your best friends in this upcoming format. We’ll see if they’re enough; I wouldn’t bet on it.

Chingsung Chang

Conelead most everywhere and on MTGO

Khan32k5 at gmail dot com

TAGS articles, standard, constructed, review, deck lists, dark ascension, chingsung chang

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