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The first time I beat Temur Adventures on Magic: The Gathering Arena, I didn't yet realize that it was going to become the boogeyman of a shifting Standard format.
I was still playing a PTQ-era Mono-Red "beatdown" deck featuring Phoenix of Ash; a card that was eschewed by expert Red Deck players by the World Championships... But thank goodness I hadn't gotten the memo yet.
The Temur opponent had the ground all locked up. I knew from an early one-three punch from Lovestruck Beast that I wasn't going to get much damage in on the ground. It was The Little Phoenix That Could and me, two life points at a time.
Then it hit me; or rather, was about to hit my Phoenix. The opponent had drawn a Fae of Wishes. It could have gone a bunch of different ways. He probably could have just fetched Aether Gust. Maybe it would have been better for him to just cast the Fae of Wishes, as a fat-bottomed Fairy Wizard could have held off my puny 2/2... At least for a little while. But nope, he went fancy and got Domri's Ambush.
... And proceeded to target his own Bonecrusher Giant to fight (and kill) my Phoenix. I didn't have sufficient resources to kill him with it... But he had just done two damage to himself, thanks to that pesky clause on Bonecrusher Giant.
I had him dead on board, I thought. But he just gave me the open.
True, the +1/+1 counter would help him potentially kill me the next turn, but it also gave me a shot to draw Shock for the win.
I didn't.
Perhaps more poetically, I drew a Bonecrusher Giant of my own; and with it, the opportunity to play it properly. You know, FTW.
In that game I learned the three keys to beating Temur Adventures in Standard:
- For a deck with eight flyers, Temur Adventures is remarkably poor at defending itself from flying creatures.
- The key to winning strategically is being really good at something; or at least much better than they are at something they are also trying to do.
- The most significant edges are granted by the opponent's own naivety or inexperience.
Let's break it all down!
First off, regardless of any recent, you know, Grand Prix Top 8 results... Don't kid yourself. Temur Adventures is the Deck to Beat in Standard. All you have to do is log onto MTGA and hit the button to play Best-of-Three and this will become quickly evident. If I said I have played 50% Temur Adventures mirror matches, it would only be an exaggeration because I sometimes change decks myself. This strategy has been white hot since DreamHack, and for a number of very good reasons. You can check out eight of them in my article from last week.
For reference:
Temur Adventures | THB Standard | littlebeep, 1st Place DreamHack
- Creatures (24)
- 4 Beanstalk Giant
- 4 Bonecrusher Giant
- 4 Brazen Borrower
- 4 Edgewall Innkeeper
- 4 Fae of Wishes
- 4 Lovestruck Beast
- Instants (1)
- 1 Incubation // Incongruity
- Sorceries (3)
- 3 Escape to the Wilds
- Artifacts (5)
- 1 The Great Henge
- 4 Lucky Clover
- Lands (27)
- 2 Mountain
- 4 Island
- 6 Forest
- 1 Temple of Epiphany
- 1 Temple of Mystery
- 2 Temple of Abandon
- 3 Steam Vents
- 4 Breeding Pool
- 4 Stomping Ground
A moment ago I referenced flyers. I don't think it is a coincidence that despite the pronounced absence of Phoenix of Ash at Worlds both of the - very different - Top 8 decks at Grand Prix Lyon re-incorporated the card in main or side.
Temur is simply not good at defending flyers!
"For a deck with eight flyers, Temur Adventures is remarkably poor at defending itself from flying creatures."
It can slow them down a little with the Petty Theft side of Brazen Borrower; but its actual flyers are no good at combat. Phoenix of Ash can either mow down a Fae of Wishes or trade with Brazen Borrower with a reasonable expectation of living to fight another day.
Phoenix of Ash is of course nowhere near the most potent - and commonly played - flyer in Standard for beating up Temur Adventures. That title obviously belongs to...
Please don't confuse Dream Trawler being good against Temur Adventures with decks that play Dream Trawler being good against Temur Adventures. Because I think a lot of things have to go right for, say, Azorius Control to like their matchup here.
But Dream Trawler is actually perfectly set up to beat Temur. Even if Temur has an enormous amount of mana, it's quite awkward to try to kill one. The best play pattern I've found is to use multiple instances of Granted (possibly a single Fae of Wishes alongside a Lucky Clover) to get Storm's Wrath and Chandra, Awakened Inferno out of the sideboard.
This has taken a little trial-and-error; and if you err, you're probably just going to lose. Like, having a Chandra in play and casting Storm's Wrath in the wrong order might lower Chandra's loyalty so she can't even [-3].
What you want to do (as Temur) is cast a Storm's Wrath and then cast Chandra; activate the [-3], and go about your business. Two sweeping effects allow Temur to avoid Dream Trawler's hexproof. Other strategies, like softening the Dream Trawler up with a Bonecrusher Giant, require a cooperative or resource-poor opponent to work out.
"The key to winning strategically is being really good at something; or at least much better than they are at something they are also trying to do."
Dream Trawler compacts many of the things that Temur itself is trying to do in a single card, with little or no subsequent mana requirements. Dream Trawler draws cards. And what is Temur trying to do with all its two-for-ones, and all its little engines, but try to draw cards? Most importantly, Dream Trawler is an outstanding racer. We've already talked about how Temur is bad at defending against flyers. But Dream Trawler's lifelink also cuts off Temur's ability to get ya back on the ground.
While I think Dream Trawler's overlap makes it the overall best way to try to attack Temur, there are other focus-centric strategies that present natural advantages over Adventures. The most reliable of these seems to be Simic Ramp.
Think a moment about what Temur Adventures is trying to accomplish. In essence it's a deck that wins with creatures, but generates a ton of card advantage and a pretty respectable amount of mana acceleration along the way.
Simic Ramp does the same things; but because its cards all draw cards or accelerate (or both) without relying on external engines or enablers, it can do so more quickly.
Compare these two cards:
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For three mana, Risen Reef will get you the same amount of acceleration as Beanstalk Giant and will leave a body. You need to spend another seven mana to get Beanstalk Giant's body (even if it will be much bigger).
The Simic deck might just be able to play Cavalier of Thorns the next turn, which will draw even more cards and accelerate even harder. By the time the Temur deck would be able to get that Beanstalk Giant on the battlefield, it might not even be the biggest creature... Or if it is, it might not be in a position to attack.
Temur Adventures can get nicely ahead with cards like Beanstalk Giant (especially following a Lucky Clover) or Escape to the Wilds (I initially didn't realize how powerful Escape to the Wilds was in the deck). While these cards both have high ceilings and accelerate Temur... They're not even close to the best acceleration cards. Growth Spiral does the same thing as Fertile Footsteps, for one less mana. Escape to the Wilds is quite flashy, but it makes Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath look fast!
Anecdotally, I've probably lost second-most to more dedicated Ramp-style Simic decks; specifically the kinds with cards like Castle Garenbrig.
"The most significant edges are granted by the opponent's own naivety or inexperience."
Lastly, you can exploit the It Girl status of Temur Adventures for fun and profit. Because this is the hot new deck, you can expect many of its pilots to have suboptimal command of the deck's nuances and play patterns.
Here's a really simple example:
If the Temur player has a Lucky Clover in play, they are kind of up a creek on Brazen Borrower if you don't present two or more legal targets. They can't decline the Lucky Clover; so if you only present a single target and they fire off Petty Theft they will lose the Brazen Borrower. Petty Theft will go on the stack with its only legal target; Lucky Clover will dupe the Petty Theft; the copy will resolve first, meaning that at the point that the original resolves, its target will have vanished. Meaning a fizzle. Meaning Brazen Borrower hits the graveyard rather than the Adventure Zone.
To close, I had a discussion about what to play in a key tournament this weekend; and asked the other party who the beatdown was between Temur Adventures and any deck with Dream Trawler. "It's pretty obvious that Azorius is the Control," he said.
WRONG!
wrong Wrong WRONG
Dream Trawler is there to race. Once you have Dream Trawler in play, your plan has to shift. Get in there, widen the gap on life total. You up and them down. Drawing cards is your overlap between points one and two, rather than great in the abstract. What surgical tools are you even planning to rip? The opponent not knowing whether he is supposed to be beatdown or control is emblematic of the last bullet.
The deck that puts all these things together in my opinion is Bant Ramp.
Bant Ramp | THB Standard | Davide Tedeschi, 8th Place Grand Prix Lyon
- Creatures (11)
- 2 Dream Trawler
- 2 Knight of Autumn
- 3 Hydroid Krasis
- 4 Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath
- Planeswalkers (9)
- 1 Tamiyo, Collector of Tales
- 4 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
- 4 Teferi, Time Raveler
- Instants (5)
- 1 Aether Gust
- 4 Growth Spiral
- Sorceries (3)
- 3 Shatter the Sky
- Enchantments (3)
- 3 Elspeth Conquers Death
The ability to get Dream Trawler online ahead of time is a godsend for the Temur Adventures matchup. Knight of Autumn (along with Teferi, Time Raveler) give the deck a good ability to hassle Lucky Clover. And perhaps most importantly, the deck seems well-positioned against the rest of the field. I have a PTQ this weekend; and I'm planning on Bant over Temur, despite tremendous respect for the finely tuned machine that is the latter.
LOVE
MIKE
