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Main » Articles » Novel Mana Acceleration Technology

Novel Mana Acceleration Technology

Michael Flores
Posted on July 24, 2018
 Reddit

A General Rule

Folks who have been reading my stuff for a while -- in this case it would be since about 2001 and Invasion -- know this general rule: When two decks have the same end game, the faster deck is favored to win.

I figured this out grinding IBC games with future Hall of Famer Brian Kibler over Apprentice late at night, prior to Pro Tour Tokyo. Basically there could be a br Aggro deck with the equivalent of Grizzly Bears and a br Control deck with the equivalent of Hammer of Bogardan; both decks finished with Ghitu Fire, which is the equivalent of Banefire.

Over and over the faster "Grizzly Bears" deck would win. This was non-intuitive as the other deck had all the card advantage. Sure, the beatdown deck would get some damage in, but it was typically stop signed as the slower deck would kill all its dudes, then start to draw extra cards. But win, Win, WIN the little Bears did.

The reason was that both decks had the same end game. Both decks sought to finish off an opponent with the same x-spell. So even if one had more cards, the fact that the other was ahead in the race made it easier to close the numbers on that end game.

I was reminded of this general rule the last couple of weeks testing Magic 2019 Standard on MTGO.

The cards that were exciting to me were not actually new cards. Commune with Dinosaurs and Thunderherd Migration seemed like they were going to be big payoffs. Thunderherd Migration -- provided it finds a home in the right deck -- should go straight to "best card in the format" level. Both cards have a peculiar liability to them, though . . .  The question was finding sufficient Dinosaurs to play.

It seemed to me we might just have enough Dinosaurs! I tried a couple of decks, both rg and Mono-Green.

First was my rg Build:

R/G Dinosaurs -- Magic 2019 Standard | Michael Flores

The big thing here is just combining mana acceleration and Banefire. I figured that if Control decks were going to be big again, having a reliable Banefire for 5+ would be very desirable. Not only could you close games like the 2001 Grizzly Bears deck, you could kill Teferi no matter how many Counterspells the opponent was packing.

Novel Mana Acceleration Technology #1: Commune With Dinosaurs and Elvish Rejuvenator

Commune With Dinosaurs
Elvish Rejuvenator

One of the things that excited me about this strategy was building workable redundancies around all the mana acceleration cards. While beating down with Dinosaurs was exciting, the backup plan of Hour of Promise made me think this deck might be a winner.

The problem -- for rg in particular, but also Mono-Green if you wanted to go that way -- is the paucity of playable Deserts. You can't play too many colorless Deserts. You can't go the way of the bg decks with Ifnir Deadlands because . . . Well . . . They banned the playable Red Desert. So you're largely "stuck" playing Hashep Oasis.

This is where Commune with Dinosaurs and, to a degree, Elvish Rejuvenator come in . . . 

Both cards find or flip over lands indiscriminately. Unlike Attune with Aether or Wood Elves that came before them, these cards can find basically any land . . .  That means that Hashep Oasis is up for grabs; you know, to be literally grabbed.

This -- especially in the case of my one Elvish Rejuvenator -- increases your chances of having a Desert in play before you play Hour of Promise dramatically. That, in turn, increases your chances of getting paid off with 2 2/2 Zombies. Commune with Dinosaurs might not technically be a mana acceleration card, but it does make your un-novel one stronger in certain color combinations.

There is nothing "wrong" with the rg build. The mana curve is very weird, yes. Probably I should cut some of the expensive cards to make room for more Elvish Rejuvenators. But what would happen to the Dinosaur count? I don't know either. While there's nothing wrong, I wasn't winning an insane amount, either; anyway I wanted to try just increasing the consistency of my deck. This led me to exploring Mono-Green:

Mono-Green Dinosaurs -- Magic 2019 Standard | Michael Flores

I cut Hour of Promise but kept Commune with Dinosaurs; in this version, the Commune is much more likely to grab a Dinosaur than a land. The five spot and thereabouts is heavy on middle turns powerhouses like Nissa and Reid.

This deck, while lacking in the Banefire department, is kind of awesome.

Emphasis on "kind of".

It has two problems. One of them is that it both wins and loses very big. If you have two decks, and one of them has produces win expectation of 40%, 40%, 40%, 40%, 40%, 60%, 60%, 60%, 60%, and 60%; and one of them makes a 10%, 10%, 10%, 10%, 10%, 90%, 90%, 90%, 90%, and 90% . . .  Which do you think is better?

In theory they both have the same average value. But a good player will tend to choose the first. A value of 4/10 is close enough that if the opponent screws up he can steal enough percentage to get to 51% a lot of the time. Meanwhile, he'll tend to hold his 60% most of the time.

On balance, even though the 1/9 deck is arithmetically the same as the 4/6 deck, it is very difficult for even a great player to dig out of a 10% spot . . .  And he doesn't need the extra margin of the 90% games.

This Mono-Green deck was a destroyer . . .  except when it wasn't.

It's not that it wasn't fun to play (it was very fun). It's not that it wasn't powerful (it was one of the most powerful decks I tried) . . .  I became disillusioned with it largely because of its intersection with our General Rule.

A conventional StOmPy deck is faster out of the gate than this deck . . .  And it also tops up on Ghalta, Primal Hunger. I think you might know where I'm going with this.

I'd be behind because the opponent got 6 points in with 2-drops while I was setting up my mana, and then when I hit my first Dinosaur, he'd have Rhonas the Indomitable already. I'd have to figure out how to make a stand-off, only to end up with Ghaltas staring at each other across The Red Zone . . .  and that life total lead would just get me.

The door isn't shut on Commune With Dinosaurs and Thunderherd Migration. In fact, I have never been so high on the 5-drop Planeswalkers! But I did want to try out some of my other ideas.

Templating

In How to Train Your Dragons, I posted a Mono-Red riff on one of my old hits. In the meantime, a competing take on Sarkhan and Nicol Bolas cracked the Top 16 of an SCG Classic.

Grixis Dragons -- Magic 2019 Standard | Trevor Mensinger, 11th Place SCG Classic Worcester

Trevor certainly has some good ideas going on here.

While I liked my own deck list all right, I figured there were some lessons I could take from his Grixis Dragons and iterate on myself.

In Magic, the notion of "templating" is largely borrowing from previous builds when you go to make a new deck, rather than starting from scratch. In my own experience, I find that borrowing mana bases is one of the most useful ways to template. Here I liked two things that weren't in my five-color version:

When I made my initial big-big mana version, I was starting with my Mono-Blue deck from Utah. A better template might be the current Mono-Red or br midrange decks in Standard. A Dragons deck is slower, but that doesn't mean you have to throw out all the speed.

You can play Goblin Chainwhirler easily in a multicolored deck! Trevor played twenty-four lands that can tap for Red!

Scrapheap Scrounger is just generally good . . .  But can be even better in a deck with Sarkhan, Fireblood.

Sarkhan, Fireblood

Sarkhan, Fireblood is already great with cards like Spit Flame. You want to be able to discard cards whether you have Spit Flame or not. It's not just that Scrapheap Scrounger is "a card" you can discard . . .  You might have played it the previous turn. You can also discard future fuel for the Scrapheap Scrounger!

Any time we have cards that are good / already good . . .  And can add on additional functionality for little or no additional investment, we have the opportunity to print value. In the business world this is often called a "1+1=3". In Magic, we borrow the term . . . 

Synergy

Sarkhan is awesome with Spit Flame. It's awesome with Scrapheap Scrounger. Once you get to his next ability it's awesome with any Dragon, but in particular a difficult-to-cast dragon like Nicol Bolas, the Ravager. Sarkhan isn't just awesome, he's highly synergistic with the other cards in the deck. Exploiting the synergies between such cards gives us a little more for our mana (and cardboard slots) than we would get in the abstract for them.

An underappreciated card that Trevor did not play was Dragon's Hoard.

I had Dragon's Hoard in my How to Train Your Dragons build, and kept it once again, here. I couldn't get 100% behind his de-emphasis on Spit Flame, but think Unlicensed Disintegration is an awesome add.

Given my experience with getting beaten up by other people's 12/12 Dinosaurs, I wanted to have a "kill anything, no matter how big" card in my "Red removal" deck . . .  And that meant Unlicensed Disintegration. Unlicensed Disintegration is obviously great with Scrapheap Scrounger . . .  But it's deceptively great with Sarkhan, too!

It has the potential to be one of the best cards in Standard; but Unlicensed Disintegration is generally relegated to two-of status in br midrange. Why? Because when it's bad, it's baaaad. However a deck with Sarkhan, Fireblood can potentially convert Unlicensed Disintegration into a useful card while actually advancing its game plan. While that's not a pure synergy in the "1+1=3" sense, it does reinforce the investment in playing the card main deck.

Of course, it gets even more points with Dragon's Hoard!

Novel Mana Acceleration Technology #2: Dragon's Hoard

Dragon's Hoard

Controlling for all the times it will be hit with Abrade (which will be "sometimes") . . .  Dragon's Hoard is awesome in this strategy. I was really surprised how many cards I was drawing with it; typically two or more extra cards per game! Drawing even one extra card after getting a fast Glorybringer is like winning the lottery.

To recap, Dragon's Hoard can:

 . . .  All while making Unlicensed Disintegration and any random Dragon good!

This is what I've been playing. It's super fun and has been quite effective for me:

Grixis Dragon -- Magic 2019 Standard | Michael Flores

John C. Ramos III had the excellent idea of upgrading Fight with Fire with Banefire; if there are other such improvements I've missed . . .  Suggestions are quite welcome!

As with Commune with Dinosaurs and Elvish Rejuvenator, I think you should try this novel mana accelerator. I am not sure any of the decks presented in this article are going to win the next Pro Tour, but hopefully some of the ideas presented will be helpful steps in getting to a new, killer, deck.

LOVE

MIKE

Magic Core Set 2019 is Now Available!

TAGS articles, standard, constructed, dragons, decklist, michael flores, magic 2019 standard, 07242018, dinoaurs

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