First of all, I just want to express gratitude to a bunch of people... Evan Erwin and Robert Burrows here at CoolStuffInc for continuing to let me write about Premodern; and the New York Premodern community - most notably Phil Nguyen, Roland Chang, and Matt Perlman for reasons that will become evident later in this report. TY all.

Last week I was invited to a Premodern "meetup" (which was essentially a small tournament), hosted at the offices of aforementioned Matt. I didn't know most of the people who would be attending, so I didn't have a great POV of the metagame ahead of time.

But if there is one thing that Premodern has done for CoolStuffInc, I can assure you, it's been to transform me from "just" a Tuesday morning contributor to a full-on customer! I can build LOTS of decks! Given my lack of specific context, I put it out to my Twitter followers as to what I should bring to the battlegrounds of Midtown Manhattan:

Playing #Premodern event tonight. Should I play...

— Michael Flores (@fivewithflores) July 20, 2022

Had they picked the first, I would have been tempted to play my Astral Slide deck, which I was originally planning to play in the North American Premodern Championship before accidentally discovering Parallax Replenish. And you know how that went :)

If they'd gone with the third, I would have made a Selesnya Life deck. I think Life is one of the most important underrepresented archetypes in Premodern. My version plays two of the three signature cards that are quickly becoming synonymous with my personal entrance to the format - Abeyance and Gaea's Blessing - whereas most incumbent versions play zero and zero.

But by a narrow margin the wisdom of crowds chose Option B: A deck I had built, but had never yet played. That meant Simic Control.

My 2d Place UG Control deck that @mtgbanding alluded to last week (I think of it as a UW Control variant more than an Oath deck). Actually have some changes in mind that the nice people at @CoolStuffInc will let me write about ? Thanks to @zdch and @KcirtapOHG for testing help pic.twitter.com/YihfGhs6YC

— Michael Flores (@fivewithflores) July 24, 2022

Simic Control | Premodern | Michael Flores

• Creatures (3)
• 1 Spike Feeder
• 1 Spike Weaver
• 1 Triskelion

• Instants (20)
• 1 Capsize
• 1 Dissipate
• 1 Forbid
• 1 Mana Leak
• 1 Miscalculation
• 2 Fact or Fiction
• 2 Intuition
• 3 Impulse
• 4 Accumulated Knowledge
• 4 Counterspell

• Sorceries (3)
• 3 Gaea's Blessing

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Oath of Druids

• Artifacts (4)
• 4 Powder Keg

• Lands (26)
• 3 Forest
• 6 Island
• 2 Dust Bowl
• 3 Treetop Village
• 4 Thawing Glaciers
• 4 Wasteland
• 4 Yavimaya Coast

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Phyrexian Furnace
• 2 Nevinyrral's Disk
• 1 Annul
• 1 Hydroblast
• 2 Seal of Removal
• 2 Naturalize
• 4 Ravenous Baloth
• 1 Spike Weaver

Buy This Deck Export text format

I woke up one day and invented this deck spontaneously with no input from anyone or anything.

And what I mean by that is that it is quite obviously heavily influenced by three-time Pro Tour Champion Dirk Baberowski's Oath Deck from Pro Tour Chicago 1999. The more famous Oath of Druids deck from specifically that tournament was lots of colors, and took the title in the hands of Hall of Famer Bob Maher; so many people don't even remember Dirk even played an Oath deck.

While I did take inspiration from his list, I don't even think about mine as an Oath deck, if that possibly makes any sense. Rather, I think of it as an upgrade to Control.

Control is one of the most popular decks in Premodern. It has some variation right now, with many builds borrowing Parallax Tide from Azorius Cousin Replenish; and others leaning hard into creature lands and Dust Bowl for Standstill synergies. But on an informed incentive basis I'm not sure why Control exists at all, let alone as one of the format's most popular decks.

First of all, it is pretty bad against Mono-Red. Second of all, while it is supposed to have the advantage against combo opponents like Replenish, I've always been happy from the Replenish side. I might win at 4 life from my own Ancient Tombs, but I do tend to win after just jamming a bunch of must-counter spells via my prolific double lands.

Instead of thinking about Simic as an "Oath" deck, what if you just thought about it as a deck, properly built? You aren't a mile better against Mono-Red, but you not only are better, you get better and faster sideboard cards than . You don't suddenly start beating Replenish on the front-side at a greater rate than , but Simic has far greater consistency and recovery in attrition battles just because it has Thawing Glaciers.

Simic is a better creature lands / Dust Bowl deck - without Standstill - than could ever hope to be. One of the reasons to play it is simply because it's dominating in the quasi-mirror!

More importantly, the main thing it gets from Green - Gaea's Blessing - cuts off a double digit percentage of opponents from ever being able to win the game. The Premodern Spring Fling was conquered by a novel combo deck that has two ways it can potentially win:

1. Gaining an arbitrarily large amount of life via "infinite" Claws of Gix [typically resulting in concession]
2. Exhausting the opponent's library

Just one Gaea's Blessing invalidates both ways to win. I play three!

If you want to watch a very handsome and smart person commentate the Spring Fling Finals you can check it out on The Cloudgoat Ranger's YouTube page:

One of the most reliable combo decks in Premodern wins with this one-two punch:

Again, we see a deck where Gaea's Blessing can severely narrow the opponent's ability to win, if not invalidate it entirely. It's not that Devourer combo can't win; but they can't win with Altar as their kill; which cuts off more than half their wins (some of which would have been on the back of Tinker).

Gaea's Blessing does so many other things. You can just loop Wastelands against another control deck, improving your likelihood of hitting land drops while crippling the opponent's battlefield position.

You can "let" a Life opponent go off. Sure, they might have thirteen trillion life... But can they actually finish you off? That's at least a question. If you get Oath of Druids going, between Spike Weaver and Triskelion, the answer is "probably not". Blessing will get them, even if it takes twenty minutes.

The cost to playing Gaea's Blessing is extremely low: If you just decide to be a deck instead of a one. Once you pair Blue with Green, extremely powerful synergies start to come together. Each card is an ace on its own, but together they become mini-combos and even quasi-wins.

Have you ever flipped a Gaea's Blessing with Fact or Fiction? It's positively bad/good. Bad in the sense that sometimes you don't want to shuffle your library... But at least you can pick the Gaea's Blessing pile if that's the case. Good in the sense that sometimes an opponent is laser focused on stopping Gaea's Blessing... But crossed their fingers and let FoF through. If that happens it's already too late to stop Gaea's Blessing and their plans to deck you will have probably already failed.

One of the privileges of being a THREE Gaea's Blessing deck is that you can more frequently Intuition for two copies. This is an inexorable shuffle, provided the opponent lets your Intuition resolve. Again, not what you necessarily "want" to do [especially given you are an Accumulated Knowledge deck], but a powerful tool and one-card way to win.

The other important card in this deck is Thawing Glaciers.

I introduced Thawing Glaciers at the North American Premodern Championship... And mostly got weird looks. I didn't lose a single game that Thawing Glaciers was in my deck; and my Replenish deck wasn't even "a Thawing Glaciers" deck!

Simic IS a Thawing Glaciers deck! This is a deck whose mana base - and game plan entire honestly - is deeply informed by the presence of Thawing Glaciers. As such, you can't go under three copies of Thawing Glaciers (the minimum for Intuition reliability); and I don't think you want to stray below four anyway. It's a card you frequently want in your opening hand, and the best card you can draw against almost any midrange deck.

For instance, I don't think The Rock - for all its Cabal Therapies and Pernicious Deeds - can reliably beat a Thawing Glaciers. Thaw interacts on the wrong axis for their signature disruption, and out-classes their land advantage measures very quickly, and in sustained fashion over the course of the game. My friends and I played a lot of against over the weekend, and Thawing Glaciers was not only predictably impressive against Slide; PT Top 8 competitor Zac Hill concluded Slide should probably just sideboard it themselves: Thawing Glaciers might be the best card in the Slide deck come Game 2.

The knock on Thawing Glaciers is that it's too slow. First off, I played against three decks with 1-drops and 2-drops in this week's tournament... And Thawing Glaciers seemed just fine against all three. Even against Elves, I needed it to get for my Oath!

What everyone who has seen the card in action seems to agree on, though, is that in every matchup where it's not definitively "too slow" Thawing Glaciers is unbeatable.

"I did not find it too slow against Red. The thing is, the operative number of mana is two; if you need to cast a 2-drop v. Elves, you can just sequence such that that happens... Unless Thawing Glaciers and the other land are your only two lands; but in that case you need the Thaw anyway. Thaw is also really important for getting UUGG for Ravenous Baloth and Counterspell."

-Zac Hill

Patrick O'Halloran-Gannon disagreed with Zac about the Red (and potentially Elves) matchups; but concluded "in every other matchup it's the best card in Premodern."

That's the thing about Premodern. It's this wonderfully dialectical format where turn-three combo or beatdown kills exist... But play/draw doesn't really matter. A one-card Braingeyser for 11 is too slow... But you can play it in a context (like Simic Control) where you can slow the opponent down enough to make up that speed.

In long games, this deck does something that no one else in Premodern does (in part because they don't play Thawing Glaciers)... It turns Thawing Glaciers card advantage into interactive leverage. Dust Bowl + Thawing Glaciers is really difficult for any control or midrange deck to beat. You use Thawing Glaciers to fuel Dust Bowl. If the opponent ever misses a land drop, that's probably it for them. As a Thawing Glaciers player, you don't miss land drops. In fact, Thawing Glaciers is so good that after you're done finding all the Forests and Islands in your deck, Thaw itself becomes Dust Bowl fuel.

Capsize is a one-card conceit to anything I might not have prepared for. In a very long game the strategy is to get to 12+ lands and bounce two permanents per turn (probably lands); lock the opponent at zero permanents, and then win however. If literally everything goes wrong against Rich Shay's masterwork of a deck, I can - nay will - win with Thawing Glaciers and Capsize so long as I simply Counterspell Armageddon.

I took a note from Rich's second-place deck from the North American Premodern Championships. Shay devoted 4 Oath and 4 Swords to Plowshares to defense so he could muster the space for his Land Tax engine, Cunning Wish package, and Zur's Weirding kill. My color combination can't muster StP, but I thought 4 Powder Keg was a reasonable stand-in. Keg really is too slow much of the time, but far, far better any time it's not; so, it's kind of a wash. Rather than imagining myself an "Oath deck" I wanted to use a small number of cards on creature defense, to give myself the time to do all the slow, grinding, long-game Inevitable things with Gaea's Blessing, Intuition, and Thawing Glaciers.

Anyway, I've said it before and I'll repeat it here: Rich's interview with Bryan Manolakos following his Silver Medal in Boston is literally the best piece of Magic content in years. You don't need to be a Premodern fan to learn more from it than any five streams put together; but these two masters might just make you a Premodern fan.

Going into my one tournament (so far) these are the assumptions I would have made about the Simic Control deck:

1. Dog to Survival of the Fittest decks in Game 1 (including Elves), but still winnable
2. Behind against Mono-Red in Game 1; but in a really deceptive way... The Red games all look heavily contested, but unfortunately tend to end pretty consistently.
3. Overwhelming advantage against most other decks. For instance, I would consider half a dozen top tier decks ( Control, The Rock, Parfait Oath, stock Life, most combo decks in general) almost un-loseable

Elves and Red might be the worst two decks to have underdog matchups against, but I felt Simic was going to serve almost everywhere else + I could just do some weirdo sideboarding, like 100 Ravenous Baloth. Anyway, I didn't even play against Red!

So how did it all bear out?

Round One: Matt with "Pink Tax Midrange"

Matt opened up with a Land Tax.

Wow that card is powerful.

If there is one thing Randy Buehler ever taught me, it's to never let them Tax.

But I couldn't not let him Tax! My deck can't do anything on one mana!

I actually assumed he was Rich Shay's deck, initially. "We prepared for this," I said to myself. "We built this deck so that he can Tax all he wants and we'll eventually win. Just don't panic!"

I told Matt it was going to be a fight between Land Tax and Thawing Glaciers, and we were off to the not-races.

Matt was actually playing a White Weenie variant with Silver Knight, Soltari Priest, and Devastating Dreams. Devastating Dreams is like a discounted Armageddon in a deck with a Land Tax engine, that also synergizes nicely with Protection from Red.

He had a lot of other powerful permanents - Winter Orb, the predictable Scroll Rack, and of course Mox Diamond - but you'll notice most of them cost two mana. My Powder Kegs did great work, sweeping $500 Mox Diamonds and cleaning up Silver Knight and Scroll Rack simultaneously.

Oath of Druids found Triskelion and I won Game 1 via slow - very slow - beatdown. Also Thawing Glaciers is great post-Devastating Dreams recovery!

We went to time Game 2.

1-0 / 1-0-1

Round Two: Roland Chang with Madness

Mike Flores.

Roland Chang.

Asian sensation.

Asian sensation who is also a Vintage and Legacy World Champion, and honestly has a better version of my haircut.

Yavimaya Coast.

Yavimaya Coast into... Careful Study for Basking Rootwalla and Deep Analysis.

Roland had to play the Coast on turn one, and then followed up with Forest + Wild Mongrel. This is nearly the sick opening for his deck, but it's not perfect. Had he played Island turn one, I would have paused a looooong time on my turn-two play. But Yavimaya Coast can't Daze. And Oath of Druids resolved!

In Game 2 Roland started out manascrewed and I had double Thawing Glaciers, so was basically drawing three cards a turn starting turn two or something. He put out guy after guy after guy, but I held them off with Spike Weaver and Spike-counters movement.

Poor Roland was down to no cards in hand after all my shenanigans, whereas I had six.

"How many of these do you think are lands," I asked.

"Five?"

"Under."

Game 3!

We were dangerously close to going to time, but I managed to win in extra turns thanks to Spike movement on my trampling Treetop Villages.

2-0 / 3-1-1

Round Three Brett with Control

Game 1 I opened on Thawing Glaciers and Brett opened on Flooded Strand.

"LOL," I commented. "That goes to the graveyard? How novel."

There was a lot of interplay but I eventually outmaneuvered Brett's double Dust Bowl with Dust Bowl + Thawing Glaciers, with a couple of Wastelands in the mix. He conceded for time.

Game 2 I was... A dummy.

I basically knew that I could lose to Decreee of Justice, so I left in some Oaths. My strategy was to trade Powder Keg one-for-two against every Decree of Justice; accepting that I would sometimes take five or eight damage on the way; but that Oath of Druids was actually pretty good defense.

That would have been fine except I literally forgot to Oath something like five times. Brett drew three Decrees.

Game 3 was another one of those "jockey for mana resources" games where we traded for things like Powder Keg and short Counterspell wars. My second-to-last card was Counterspell. My last one was Capsize; which drew a concession.

3-0 / 5-2-1

At this point I was all ready to go home, but there was enough interest in a fourth round that we kept playing. I wasn't going to be one of the people who bailed early (because then I couldn't claim ULTIMATE VICTORY) but the room was casual enough that some players, like, switched decks for the extra round.

Round Four Cam with Elves

Game 1 I had the audacity to play my Oath of Druids on turn three. I needed to Thaw for my Forest, etc. Brett killed me with Biorhythm on his turn three. WHO PLAYS BIORHYTHM MAIN DECK?!?

Game 2 was actually a super drawn out affair where I was behind to double - and then triple - Tangle Wire, but had just enough life to hold on to come back with two long-, long-awaited pair of Oath activations.

Game 3 was for all the marbles. A handful of things all had to go wrong for me to lose, but they all did. My open two mana Counterspell was Miscalculation; so Cam could pay for it (even if he couldn't then flip his Nantuko Vigilante that turn). So, my Oath got to live... But every other Counterspell in my deck would have had it living indefinitely. My ONE Oath trigger... was the Spike Feeder. Had it been either Weaver (two were in my deck) or Triskelion I likely would have won on the spot. Instead, it took a couple of turns, but Cam eventually went super wide, including a Masticore (the main card that matters sidebaorded).

In hindsight, both Miscalculation and Spike Feeder were in my deck so I probably can't complain. Elves can mostly only win via combat damage, so there's a reasonable argument that you shouldn't have Feeder in your deck at all, sideboarded. I played a ton of one-ofs - Mana Leak, Miscalculation, Capsize, Dissipate, Forbid, sideboard cards - specifically because I want randomness. I want miracles and unpredictability. I've been happy for Miscalculation's cycling side a ton in testing; its lack of Mana Leak-ness just happened to get me this time.

Final Result:

3-1 / 6-4-1, second place

What's Next?

Changes I'm likely to make:

• -1 Dissipate
• +1 Forbid

There is only one card in the format I really care about Dissipating and that's Masticore in a sideboarded game. To be fair, I didn't even side in Phyrexian Furnace against Cam, so maybe I don't care all that much.

Forbid is not just a potential lockdown card in a deck with all kinds of Thawing Glaciers and Accumulated Knowledge action, it's an important way to get the creatures you accidentally drew out of your hand. They're better off in the graveyard (where Gaea's Blessing can recover them) than your hand!

• -1 Dust Bowl
• +1 Island

There is a lot of talk about -1 or +1 Treetop Village, and going to three Thawing Glaciers, but I'm not ready for those swaps yet. I do think that if I cut a Dust Bowl, I'll end up with two in the sideboard to enable an Intuition combo.

Changes I'm considering seriously:

• -1 Miscalculation
• +1 Mana Leak

Because of Cam.

• -1 Fact or Fiction
• +1 Intuition

Fact or Fiction is powerful; and I still get a lot of its ability to keep opponents honest with one copy. But Intuition for five mana is on the order of Fact or Fiction (Accumulated Knowledge combo), and can be broken up over two turns. Intuition is also faster - and far more reliable - on Gaea's Blessing setup.

We did a lot of Red Deck sideboard testing over the weekend, and I think I'm inclined to cut at least one Ravenous Baloth and add "a ton" of Hydroblasts and Naturalizes.

My dream of Ravenous Baloth was to set up Baloth v. Pyroblast in the middle turns. What I underrated was just how dominating Sulfuric Vortex was going to be against a Baloth sideboard plan. This deck really wants 4 Naturalize because it is far less likely to lose to Elves if it can contain Survival of the Fittest; and Naturalize is one more card that can answer the main Red Deck threat that matters in Sulfuric Vortex.

I don't think I want more than one Phyrexian Furnace (aggressively medium) but would consider any number of Stifles. Stifle seems great against , not only countering their Dust Bowl, but doubling down on Simic's own Dust Bowl and Wasteland theme. And of course, while you'll technically be behind a card on the exchange, any Stifle on Decree of Justice is going to radically move from being able to win at all. It is also a card I'd side in against Elves. You don't care about a 3/2 body... You care about a Vigilante trigger; and a one mana Counterspell that stops exactly what needs to be stopped is actually good counterplay to the Elves deck's primary - and overwhelming - advantage.

Thanks for reading.

Now go play some Premodern and see what we've all fallen in rapt adoration with.

LOVE

MIKE