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Less than two months ago…
My roommate and I decided we might be interested in playing Magic again. While we were both veterans of countless other CCGs, we had never been serious Magic players. I think the last FNM I played was during Visions or Weatherlight when I was 10 years old.
Instead of running headfirst into buying tons of product, we decided to go to draft night, and evaluate if we liked the game and wanted to commit to it. I was watching a game between two local veterans waiting for my draft to start when I saw one them attack first, and then play a creature during the second main phase. A pretty standard move, one of the first 'strategic' things you learn in Magic.
"Wait, could you always play creatures after attacking? Or is that a new M10 thing?" I asked confused.
The player told me that it was an Alpha thing. His opponent scoffed. Another scrub enters the local scene.
I watched the coverage of Pro Tour: San Diego looking for inspiration. My roommate and I had committed and bought a ton of Zendikar and Worldwake, now we just needed to know what to do with all of it.
Searching through the breakout decks, I gravitated to Boss Naya, and him to Mythic Bant. Overwhelmed at the cost of the cards, we had to decide then and there whether we could just buy a Jund deck for cheaper, or go our own path. We opted for the expensive, and probably more naïve route. We thought we could carve out our own little section, no matter how small, of the metagame that would be uniquely ours. Such a rookie move.
Thane is a Saxon term for a feudal lord.
As the playtesting rolled by, we began to merge the ideas. I hated the mana base of Naya, but liked the Aggro-Control feeling. My roommate liked the mana acceleration of Mythic, but wanted more tricks and toolboxes. We began to merge the decks, borrowing some of Craig Wescoe's WW tech for the Jund matchup, and ended up with as hybrid we called 'Thane Bant.'
Two weeks before the StarCity Open in Orlando, our deck has been steamrolling FNMs and any small tournament we could find. In fact, any tournament we took it to for a 2 week period, at least one of us Top 4'd. We had done it! We had solved Magic! On top of the world, ma!
A week before the open, I went 1-2 drop at FNM, my roommate didn't do so well either. Suddenly we had a crisis of faith. 'Do we know what we're doing?' 'We don't even own Baneslayers!' 'We're in over our heads!' The panic had fully set in. We made a few tweaks, but fully expected to enter the StarCity Open just to get some experience at the high levels, lose twice and head out in time to catch UFC 111 at a local bar.
I woke up the day of the SC Open feeling awful. There was a $500 FNM at CoolStuffGames the night before, and it ran until 4am. I Top 8'd that, but didn't see that as an omen of a good day. There would be plenty of good players at the Open, and I would get creamed. My hair was a mess, my clothes looking scrubby; I never thought my picture would be taken this day, facing 10 rounds of Swiss on 4 hours of sleep.
The last few rounds flew by in a surreal blur. It's like it wasn't real. Here I was, a total scrub, with little to no Magic experience, felling names like Charles Gindy and Julian De Los Santos on my way to an 8-1-1 record, and a #1 ranking after the Swiss rounds. For a game heavily about the juggernauts crushing the nobodies, I felt pretty good taking a homebrew to the top. For once, the little guy wins.
The deck I ran, as said earlier, it sort of a hybrid between Boss Naya, Mythic Bant, and White Weenie, borrowing tech from all of them. It establishes an early board presence of supporting creatures using the mana acceleration of all the Knightfall variants.
Like Boss Naya, once it's set up it's a pretty strong lock. Unlike Boss Naya, its lock is not based on removal (Sparkmage combo) but rather on anti-removal. With Dauntless Escort on the board, Negate in hand, and an untapped Knight, you aren't going to budge my board position even a little.
Unfortunately, like most Standard bad-beat stories go, eventually I fought a Jund that just Jund'd out on me. My opponent in the top 8 was running more removal than stock lists, and he knew by then my deck wasn't running BSAs and did not hesitate to blow out removal on everything I put down. A mixture of that and two consecutive land struggles means the underdog story comes to an end. But it got there, and that's the important part.
On paper it may not look as explosively powerful as Mythic, or as tricky as Naya, but you can play off the expectations. Your opponents, worried about things like Baneslayer Angel and Rafiq, hold removal and counters, allowing things like Dauntless Escort, Rhox War Monk, and Qasali Pridemage to hit the field. At some point they find themselves over their head, and when you drop a bomb, they simply can't remove it.
[cardlist]1 Basilisk Collar
1 Behemoth Sledge
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Rhox War Monk
4 Knight Of The Reliquary
3 Rampaging Baloths
3 Rafiq Of The Many
2 Dauntless Escort
2 Stoneforge Mystic
2 Negate
2 Path To Exile
2 Elspeth, Knight-errant
5 Forest
1 Island
3 Plains
4 Celestial Colonnade
1 Dread Statuary
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Sejiri Steppe
2 Stirring Wildwood
4 Verdant Catacombs
Sideboard
1 Dauntless Escort
3 Perimeter Captain
3 Qasali Pridemage
3 Vapor Snare
2 Negate
2 Path To Exile
1 Bojuka Bog[/cardlist]
The lack of Baneslayers jumps out to a lot of people. It's partly because I don't own them, but if I really thought they were necessary I'd get them. Rafiq grants double strike, Elspeth grants flying, the War Monk / Sledge have lifelink, I can piecemeal together a BSA out of any creature if I need to.
What I need is trample to get around a single Thrinax stalling me for 4 turns, and something non-white to get around a Malakir Bloodwitch just stone cold stopping my attacks. Enter Rampaging Baloths. They're big, they're green, and they trample. Hey, they are also card advantage when the game is sputtering into Draw-Go and both players are top decking. They top deck a land and pass, you topdeck a land and gain a beater. They bailed me out a lot, and are a killer against Jund when they board in the Bloodwitch.
Vapor Snare and Negate go together like basketball games and t-shirt cannons. You steal their BSA, Bloodwitch, or KotR, and every turn reuse Sejiri Steppe or Bojuka Bog to bypass their defenses or power down their Knights, keeping enough open to Negate their Maelstrom Pulse while you beat them to death with a Rafiq'd version of their own end game.
Dread Statuary is borrowed from Craig Wescoe's WW deck. He played 4 Statuaries for his Elspeths to pump whenever there was a tricky defender like a Malakir Bloodwitch. The same theory works against Knight tricks, when you can read they are looking to fetch up a Sejiri Steppe for a big trade, they don't have that option against the colorless manland.
Sideboarding Strategies
Jund
Pretty easy sideboard, most of the maindeck is geared to Jund. Bring in all the Malakir Bloodwitch hate and they don't have too many great answers, especially when you can drop an Elspeth and fly over their walls of chump blocking tokens.
+2 Negate
+3 Vapor Snare
Vampires
Vamps are painfully weak against spot removal, and if you can avoid a Nocturnus alphastrike, then you will just overwhelm them. Your creatures are bigger, they don't have enough removal to pick apart your board, and you play out your hand before they can Sludge.
-2 Negate
+3 Vapor Snare
Boss Naya
This is your worst matchup, as the Sparkmage Combo is beyond frustrating to deal with. You need to blow up the Collar, but if you lead a Pridemage on the board you have to spend Negates and Escorts to keep them up, or hold them in hand but allow them a free use of the combo. It's tricky but winnable. You need to keep their Knights out of the game as much as possible, early Paths, but that sucks to mana fix them. You really want to bait and draw out their (hopefully one) Steppe, then punish them for a lack of counters as you disable their board with either Vapor Snare, Bojuka Bog, Pridemages, anything you can.
-2 Negate
+3 Qasali Pridemage (full on Sparkmage builds) / Vapor Snare (Lightsaber builds)
+1 Bojuka Bog
This sideboarding seems really scatterbrained, and because it's truly not finished. Boss Naya is such a slippery deck with so many different things to disable, that it's hard to easily meta for it.
Mythic
Just like you, except you can disrupt theirs.
Pure Mythic Bant doesn't have any sort of reactionary stuff. They may board in some Negate, but overall they aren't really about protection, just playing threat after threat. Just like you, except you can disrupt theirs. Path to Exile is a hard card to side out (and in some cases you may not want to), but mana accelerating a deck full of fatties is just a bad call. Similar to Naya, you need to draw out their Sejiri Steppe and then they are looking down a field of bad trades when there's Basilisk Collar, Dauntless Escort, and if they ever tap out their KotR, you just take their big beaters. Elspeth is a life saver in this matchup, since not a lot on either side flies, and if you can get one turn of evasion with Rafiq, the game can be over.
-2 Negate
+3 Vapor Snare
Red Deck Wins (splash or not) / White Weenie
Since rush decks are more about surviving than winning, I want stacked early game hands and lots of lifelink.
For RDW, the burn is annoying but won't kill you, since they just have too many targets to try and kill, and War Monks, Perimeter Captain, and a 4/4 KotR just stonecold stop them. What you lose to is Hell's Thunder or Ball Lightning, so make sure to have cheap spot for them.
For WW, you don't lose to their scrubby guys, you lose to Brave the Elements punching through too much damage. So you focus on stopping Harm's Way, Honor of the Pure, and Brave the Elements from hitting the board. If they are equipment builds, you can bring in Qasali Pridemage, but don't bring them in for just Honor of the Pure, because your guys are just going to be bigger.
RDW: -2 Negate, +2 Path to Exile
WW: -2 Path to Exile, +2 Negate
Open the Vaults
You pretty much can't win against OtV if they get the combo off. So you focus on stopping it. You have a lot of great answers, as Dauntless / Negating a Day of Judgment then dropping Rafiq or Elspeth can likely kill them before 6. If you get off a Bojuka Bog, they are pretty much done. To buy extra time, Pridemages can blow up their Borderposts and try to get them stuck on 5 lands, as well as breaking your KotRs or Rafiqs out of Oblivion Ring / Journey to Nowhere.
+2 Negate
+1 Bojuka Bog
U/W Control / Polymorph
Similar to Open the Vaults, just without the graveyard hate. This is a matchup that can be great (They tap out to play Jace, you play Rafiq and they lose), or a complete flub. The games are total demolishings one way or the other, and thus the matchup is kind of a coinflip. Polymorph has a really interesting strategy, you pretty much want to not play stuff after turn 3 or so and keep mana open, psyching them out of Polymorphing for fear of Negate. Punch through bits of damage with Lotus Cobra to get them as low as humanly possible, then if they get off the Polymorph anyways, they can't really swing with Iona for fear of dying, and you'll evenly draw a Sejiri Steppe, turn on a manland and punch through the damage.
+2 Negate
