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People almost immediately started asking why I played LandStill. Didn't I previously criticize it as a Premodern strategy? I did. And I did, at the time, mean what I said when writing about UG Oath as a potentially better structured control deck. But even in a format where cards don't rotate... Things change.
What is LandStill?
LandStill -- the word -- is a portmanteau between "land" (as in the kind of permanent making up 40% or so of almost every Magic: The Gathering deck) and "Standstill" (this strategy's signature card).
LandStill was one of the first decks I ever tried in Premodern, and when I joined the community about a year ago, it was one of the most popular strategies overall. This is the initial build I worked from:
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The underlying concept of the deck is simple. You play Standstill. Hopefully on turn two, and generally before the opponent has deployed a creature. Sometimes they played a creature that that can't hurt you very badly (say a mana creature, or just something that doesn't hit very hard)... But ideally you want the game to be even-or-better when you play the StandStill, which will tend to force the opponent to act first.
This deck has an above-average number of lands; and more importantly, plays a variety of creature lands. A conventional deck basically has to play something at some point; which will trigger Standstill and allow you to draw three cards. If all you do is attack with a Mishra's Factory, the opponent will probably have to try to kill it at some point before it attacks ten times, meaning you get a delayed blast Ancestral Recall. Even if that is sometime in the far future.
Because this deck probably plays more physical lands than the opponent, you are less likely to miss a land drop first. You'll therefore tend to have a little gap in your hand for three extra if and when a Standstill trigger comes up. Finally, Decree of Justice offers this deck a gigantic way to end the game that, like Mishra's Factory or Faerie Conclave, won't trigger Standstill when you eventually go for it.
LandStill was long the default control deck in Premodern. It has the "take on all comers" attitude that we collectively inherited from Weissman nearly 30 years ago... LandStill has some permission; it has very good creature defense; and it can interact with most kinds of permanents and break up combinations. Between Standstill and Fact or Fiction, it can reload into more counters and more copies of Swords to Plowshares to keep defending itself while, ideally, drawing more and more lands to keep hitting its mana drops. LandStill wants nothing more than to keep playing Magic at its predictable, mildly (if ever) advantageous, and glacial pace.
To its credit, LandStill has some truly dominating matchups. The configuration I played this past week (below) is well prepared for multiple top tier Premodern decks. There are some decks that can basically never beat it. Sorry The Rock fans! I recently played a Standstill into a turn-one Treetop Village and the game was never close. Unlike many other control decks, it has a cohesive, synergistic, and easy to execute proactive plan. Play Standstill into a "not dead yet" position; hit your land drops; profit!
The vulnerability of this strategy comes mostly in the form of aggro. In Game One it's just not exactly great against the Red Deck. You have a lot of clunky four drops and they have a lot of incredible one mana plays. At LobsterCon last year, the Red Deck was probably the most popular single archetype... So not an attractive worst matchup by any stretch.
But like I said: Things change.
A year ago Mono-Blue 12/12 looked very different... And wasn't nearly as popular. Today it's one of the most popular and respected decks in the format. More than that, a fast 12/12 makes for a difficult matchup that crowds Jackal Pup and company out of their onetime height of popularity. The Land Tax / Ivory Tower wing of the format was similarly, dramatically, less developed a year ago... And laced together with Enlightened Tutor, that strategy can also be highly effective against the Fireblast contingent.
Imagine attacking Jackal Pup into this on turn two.
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A nearly unbeatable life gain pairing that is easy to assemble via four copies of Enlightened Tutor.
Things change. The metagame shifts. The card pool might have expanded by one total card in the last twelve months... But how all the cards are assembled has proved much more fluid. If you didn't want to play a Blue-White Control deck before because of a weak Mono-Red matchup... It's not that it's less bad but more that Red is currently less popular.
So anyway, I played U/W LandStill at this month's New York meetup. This is how it shook out:
NYC's Premodern Meetup for April was won by @fivewithflores on UW Landstill! Survival of the Fittest + Zombie Infestation + Creatures You Want to Discard took the runner-up spot, followed by Mono U Shrimp and @sgsand1's beautiful Elves deck. pic.twitter.com/O4d22PsDEe
-- Phil Nguyen (@mtgbanding) April 20, 2023
Phil Nguyen is kind of like Premodern's godfather. He's certainly New York's. If you're interested in the format at all, I highly recommend his newsletter, Banding.
A few episodes ago, Phil called me New York's "King of the Hill" in Banding; after which point I could no longer lace together two wins for several meetups in a row. It was nice to put one back together, even if I did it with a strategy I had previously decried.
Tom Metelsky's Take on LandStill
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I played a deck that was 59/60 the great Tom Metelsky's LandStill from the PSS. Tom played one Prohibit, which I replaced with an Absorb.
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Prohibit is obviously just kind of limited. My friend Brian Kowal thinks that Prohibit gets better the better the opponent is; but I just kind of hate it. At three mana, Absorb isn't a perfect Premodern card, but I've had good results with the singleton, particularly when lucking into it against the difficult Red matchup.
The sideboard is heavily influenced by "best deck builder on earth" Sam Black. Tom only played two Annuls in his PSS sideboard, which I upgraded to four. I think that it might be better to play a fourth Seal of Cleansing in place of one of those Annuls; which isn't that much worse than Annul, but is much more synergistic with the one Replenish.
Sam helped put me on to U/W because he asked me what I would play if I only wanted to beat his Bant Land Tax deck. We agreed on basic structure, but he insisted on adding Replenish to get back Seal of Cleansing. Lo and behold: Tom's PSS LandStill already had a lot of that machinery in place.
The bigger change was just including four copies of Meddling Mage in the sideboard. If there is a single reason I've changed my tune on LandStill, it's that Meddling Mage was not present in the sideboard of earlier builds. Chris Pikula's Invitational card is probably better in Premodern than any other format where it's been available to play... And Meddling Mage won the first Pro Tour where it was legal.! The reason it's so good in Premodern is that some of the decks against whom it is most effective (i.e. Mono-Blue 12/12) can't effectively remove it. As a sideboard card, Meddling Mage often gets additional percentage because the opponent has cut ineffective point removal just as you are adding precision Grizzly Bears.
A Wednesday Night in Midtown
Round One - Ryan with LandStill
Many players characterize aggro mirrors as mindless slugfests and control mirrors as cerebral chess matches, but I've never found either stereotype to be wholly accurate. Go back and think about Finding the Three Gears and what goes into thoughtful Burn play before casting your vote.
I think that my control mirror match with Ryan was not particularly thoughtful or skillful from either side; rather mostly dictated by the cards. In Game One Ryan drew all the Counterspells and resolved multiple copies of Fact or Fiction whereas I died with the Humility in my hand.
We took pretty different routes in sideboarding, though. My deck played more Seal of Cleansing main; and I left those in. All I did was swap one Humility for one Decree of Justice. Lots of cards stink (like Wrath of God) but sometimes the opponent will get ahead with Decree of Justice and you actually need a Wrath-type effect to even up the battlefield. Swords to Plowshares isn't exactly good; but you can hit the opponent's creature lands during combat, so it has text.
Ryan sided more heavily; adding a lot of his anti-artifact / anti-enchantment stuff, removing the symmetrical Standstill. I think that's reasonable because you can, in fact, Dismantling Blow a Mishra's Factory during combat; and there are certainly targets. I will say I played at least one Standstill in each of the sideboard games, and was successful in drawing each time.
Like I said before, I don't think either Ryan or I particularly out-played the other. I just drew different cards, especially in Game Three. Tom put the one Parallax Tide in this build, so I was able to lock Ryan's blue lands out with it to get a tremendous positional advantage on the battlefield. If you read my North American Premodern Championship report from last year, you know that the removal of power level errata on the Masques Block fading enchantments makes them a little more attractive in Premodern than they might be in the abstract. Metelsky's U/W isn't a Replenish deck per se; but it does have one Parallax Tide and one Replenish which can be assembled with the help of Enlightened Tutor; so has the additional angle of locking up an opposing slow deck.
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Peanut Butter and Chocolate
We went to time, but Ryan graciously conceded to my superior position on the board.
1-0
Round Two - Jordan with Mono-Blue 12/12
All other things held equal, Mono-Blue 12/12 is probably the best deck in Premodern. The combo is super simple:
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You play a Phyrexian Dreadnaught for 1, then cast one of Stifle, Vision Charm, or Reality Ripple to make it "not immediately die". A 12/12 -- with trample mind you -- puts the opponent on a two-turn clock; and everything else in the deck is Counterspells to Protect the Queen. Many of them free Counterspells.
In Game One, Jordan and I danced for over a dozen turns. I drew a ton of extra cards, but in the end, he just got me with a resolved 12/12.
This is how I sided:
- -2 Enlightened Tutor
-1 Absorb
-1 Humility
-1 Replenish
-2 Wrath of God
- +4 Annul
All the cards I sided out actually have text. Parallax Tide is kind of awful against a deck with Gush and Daze, but some of the other cards I swapped are in fact close to Game Over. Wrath of God can be effective if all it does is kill one 12/12; while a resolved Humility is almost impossible for the Mono-Blue deck to overcome.
Why did I take some of these cards out?
You can Enlightened Tutor for Powder Keg or Seal of Cleansing, right? Like we already said, Humility -- resolved -- probably can't be beat. But Game One was the only game all night I cast Absorb; and I lost it. Most of the rest of those cards cost four mana, and getting jammed up on lands -- when you have lands -- is one of the worst ways to go.
The stuff coming in all costs one or two. If you can stick a Meddling Mage before a Dreadnaught resolves, you're more likely than not to just beat the opponent to death with it. Annul's superpower of being one mana makes it an important line of defense against 12/12's best draw.
On the play the opponent can go 12/12 + specifically Vision Charm on the second turn in a way that proactively defends the Dreadnaught from Swords to Plowshares or Seal of Cleansing until you can untap with UU again. Annul won't save you if they also have a Daze, but two Islands, Phyrexian Dreadnaught, exactly Vision Charm and Daze is a pretty specific set of cards come the second turn.
In Games Two and Three I drew at least three Annuls and / or Meddling Mages each game, so Jordan couldn't get his combo going. Nice comeback after the Game One loss.
2-0
Round Three - Phil with "The Perfect Cure"
Premodern's godfather is industrious, creative, and smart. However he also has a weird blind spot. He wants to make False Cure good! When I first met Phil, he was playing False Cure in a Golgari build; combining it with the alternate casting cost on Reverent Silence.
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This time Phil added the combo to the "Parfait" shell of Enlightened Tutor, Land Tax, and Scroll Rack. To his credit, Parfait can take a long time to actually end games that it's in essence already won, so a combo kill might be exactly what it needs! He certainly got me in Game One... And I was supposedly playing the anti-Parfait deck!
I won the roll in Game One so went first, playing a land.
Phil played Plains + Land Tax.
"No problem," I thought. I played my second land and pointed a Seal of Cleansing at the Land Tax.
Phil didn't play a second land; rather he just played a second Land Tax.
It didn't get much better from there.
Phil was drawing nine cards a turn for a while, so could have beaten me with basically anything. On the final turn he resolved two False Cures and then Reverent Silenced all his own Land Taxes away... Along with my life total.
In Game Two I just got a bunch of my anti-enchantment stuff. With the Parfait engine offline, Phil never drew enough cards to assemble his False Cure combo.
In Game Three he just had to double-mulligan and was never able to get the machinery chugging. Normally Land Tax decks are the best at mulligans; but what if you can't get and / or keep the Tax?
3-0
Round Four - Alex with Survival Infestation
This matchup was super weird. In Game One I got a lot of my advantage building machinery on the battlefield and Alex just conceded with two Swamps and a Forest in play or something. I might have killed a creature or two? I didn't see much of his deck.
For Game Two I sided in the third Wrath of God (he has creatures?) and cut one Seal of Cleansing, leaving two. I didn't even bring in the Phyrexian Furnace.
On the one hand I would need that Wrath of God; on the other, Seal of Cleansing would have been nice to have!
I didn't know what Alex was playing so was quite surprised at a Survival of the Fittest followed by a Zombie Infestation.
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You can do a lot of different things with this deck. Basking Rootwalla and Arrogant Wurm are nice to discard; but the simplest way to go is to just use Survival to get all your Squees and just make multiple 2/2 Zombies every turn.
The bigger issue was the Alex got me with a Cabal Therapy for three -- three out of four -- copies of Swords to Plowshares on turn two. I was down not only three cards, but three relevant spells for containing creatures on the battlefield.
The game was whack. I decided I just had to attack with Faerie Conclave because I couldn't stop whatever Alex was doing anyway. On the second-to-last turn, I drew one of the remaining two Seals; it helped me to stabilize. Whew~and needed all three Wraths to stay alive long enough to win with that Faerie Conclave. This was all pretty lucky because Alex's own City of Brass proved an essential part of my game plan.
4-0
So MichaelJ, you might be asking... Are you going to play U/W at LobsterCon?
I have no idea!
I lost a bet to Flint Espil last year; meaning Flint gets to pick my deck for the 2023 North American Premodern Championship. When I asked if he could nicely pick Sam Black's Land Tax control he just laughed at me.
For his part, Flint is on the precipice of winning this month's Premodern webcam monthly with a unique take on Mono-Red. I'll obviously run whatever the Prince of Premodern says! And you already know how I feel about Red Decks. Flint's is a spicy and quite different take on the Red Deck, opening on this classic:
I've played a lot of one drops in my day; but never paid echo for one in a tournament.
LOVE
MIKE
Post Script
Thanks for reading my latest Premodern article; and thanks to Evan Erwin for continuing to let me write about Premodern, my favorite format. For a lot of CoolStuffInc readers, I realize that the most exciting content probably has to do with the recent release of March of the Machine. Your old buddy MichaelJ has got you, don't worry!
I'm sure we'll talk about the March of the Machine metagame soon (probably next week?) but for now let me wet your collective beaks with some videos I've done around new cards. Please give them a look! I know I have some room for improvement and am very happy to take your feedback.
Still,
LOVE
MIKE
Focus on Vorinclex
Focus on Elesh Norn
