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Saturday, August 18, 2018
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Breaking Down the Breakdown
I don't know what to call the Pro Tour right now. Pro Tour 25th Anniversary? Pro Tour M19? Everyone is calling it PTA25, which maybe makes sense in French. Tour de professionale anniversaire vingt-cinque? Whatevs. We're gonna talk about the decks they are playing and how to beat them.
I used to like the Humans matchup, until they printed this card. This card is just what the doctor ordered to swing the matchup in Humans' favor against stuff like Jeskai and midrange decks. It is pretty slow, as far as Modern cards go, but if the rest of your deck is disruptive, cheap creatures, then it's definitely worth it. Luckily, we play Thoughtseize.
The best way to beat Humans is to have some cheap removal to protect your life total and then overwhelm them with card advantage. Noble Hierarch and Aether Vial give them a huge tempo advantage, but trying to interact with their acceleration rather than saving your removal for their real threats is oftentimes a mistake, but sometimes not, and knowing when to use that Kolaghan's Command or Abrupt Decay on a Vial is tricky. In addition to having the cheap interaction to fight off their fast starts and Thalias, your late game stuff is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting due to their own late game value generators: Bugler, Dire Fleet Daredevil, and the virtual card advantage of having few lands in the deck to topdeck late. Even if you make it to the late game, you can have a board locked up and lose it all to a topdecked Mantis Rider or two, so turning the corner quickly is important. That's why I like Huntmaster so much in this matchup (and since it's the most popular deck, the format as a whole), it keeps on generating value for you over time that clears the path to let you kill them.
Nothing in the deck has four toughness, except for gigantic Champion of the Parishes, so Bolts are great. Fatal Push is also okay, but setting it up to hit a Mantis Rider can take time that you might not have. Dreadbore, as great as it is in other matchups, isn't at its best here when compared to the instant speed Abrupt Decays and Terminates you could play instead, but at least you usually don't get them hit by Meddling Mage. Out of the sideboard, Anger of the Gods is clearly great, but it's not that versatile of a card, so you might not have space for it. Grim Lavamancers are good but slower than Shadow Guildmage, which does most of the same job.
UW Control
If you played Type 2 in 2000, then you know basically everything you need to about this deck. Almost, since along with counterspells and Wrath of Gods, you have 8 copies of Jayemdae Tome that also kill your opponent. The good news is that they don't pressure your life total, so Bitterblossom is even better here than against Jeskai, but it's tough to keep up on cards against them. The bad news is that it's harder to keep up on cards against them, since what they lack in ability to pressure you, they gain in inevitability. Also, unlike against Supreme Verdicts and Bolts out of Jeskai, we can't utilize our graveyard as much with Kolaghan's Commands and Kitchen Finks, since their removal is Terminus and Path.
I'm not especially scared of this deck, unless they are playing the version with Spreading Seas, which is not usually a difference maker but just counts as another way to randomly lose. Also, watch out for Rest in Peace out of the sideboard. Usually it's not the hugest of deals, but the games go long enough that you will lose out on some utility that you would have liked to have had. The prevalence of this deck is making me reconsider whether I want Kitchen Finks in my sideboard at all, since against the Rest in Peace/Path to Exile/Terminus deck that doesn't pressure life total, it may as well be Balduvian Barbarians. Permanent card advantage cards, like planeswalkers, Bobs, Bitterblossoms, and maybe even Phyrexian Arena are the key to getting ahead here. A single 2 for 1 from a Bloodbraid Elf helps, but doesn't swing the tide like you'd want, since their whole deck is card advantage.
Ironworks
The key that I've found here is that, since their deck is so redundant and they have so many cantrip effects, you need early pressure to stop them. A bunch of discard spells and Kolaghan's Commands isn't going to get it done without a Goyf or Tireless Tracker or whatever. Liliana is great because it taxes their total resources if you can live long enough, and Scavenging Ooze helps stop Scrap Trawlers and Myr Retrievers that they'll draw. Fatal Pushes and Dreadbores are dead of course, and Bitterblossom is awful, but drawing them isn't a death sentence, since you'll need something to discard to your Lilianas.
Out of the board, the cool tech is to play Wurmcoil Engine against Jund. I don't think it's as good as just playing more card advantage, since Jund is just going to board into a bunch of ways to kill artifacts anyways. I'm not sure how prevalent that plan actually is, and I could honestly see people shying away from it since Jund numbers are down. Ironworks runs into a lot of the same problems that Storm does post-board, since you can beat them with a multitude of different disruption effects. Discard spells, artifact destruction, and graveyard hate all work wonders, and that's without counting more targeted stuff like Damping Sphere. You'll have enough space in after sideboard to load up when you take out the dead cards.
Tron
Bacteria and viruses have been at war with each other for billions of years. Viruses commandeer and infect bacteria to infiltrate their DNA and use the infected bacteria to reproduce their own viruses. Bacteria fight back by an ever-adapting immune system against the infection to prevent the viruses' attacks. However, long before, there was Jund vs Tron.
Ever since the Eye of Ugin ban, Tron has about 18 really powerful late game draws they can hit once (if) you've stripped their hand of anything relevant. Sometimes your discard spells have to hit their Expedition Maps and Sylvan Scryings to slow them down, but even then, you need a really good clock to kill them, since if they hit six mana and stop you in your tracks with Wurmcoil Engine, you know that Karn and Ugin are coming the next two turns to seal it up.
Pundits like to say that Damping Sphere doesn't do enough in the matchup, and maybe it doesn't, but it's one of the best things we've got. Fulminator Mage slows their good draws down by one turn, but Damping Sphere slows them down by four, and sometimes they just don't draw the six or seven lands necessary to deploy their threats even if you don't have much pressure. Discard is also real good, and this other thing called crossing your fingers seems to work as well. In seriousness, I don't think there's much we can do better than boarding in extra discard and Damping Spheres. If you're really gung ho about beating LeTron James, play a third Sphere.
Hollow One
How good do you think Naya Zoo would be if your creatures got +1/+1 but 15% of the time you had to discard all your creatures for no reason? Instead of Wild Nacatl we have Hollow One and instead of Knight of the Reliquary we have Gurmag Angler, other than that it's bolts and dorky creatures. This is one of the big reasons I shy away from Abrupt Decay, since it doesn't hit either of Hollow One's important threats. However, at it's core, this is just a Zoo deck, and it can lose to removal spells and Tarmogoyfs just the same. You get run over by double or triple Hollow One draws some number of times, but also you sometimes strand them with uncastable cards after Thoughtseizing their single Goblin Lore and win that way some amount of the time too. Unlike Zoo, it's susceptible to graveyard hate out of the sideboard, but not as susceptible as something like Dredge or Living End.
The real way to beat this deck isn't necessarily with sideboard cards as much as it's with keeping it in mind when making your removal suite. Fatal Push is okay but not great, same with Lightning Bolt, since they kill Flameblade Adept, but not much else. Dreadbore, Terminate, Maelstrom Pulse, and Kolaghan's Command are great since they kill the big stuff. They cannot in a million years beat the card Scavenging Ooze, unless you play it sloppily and open it up to Bolts and Collective Brutality, so that's another card to max out on if this deck is on your radar. If there was a one mana card that could kill both Gurmag Angler and Hollow One in red, black, or green, it would turn the whole metagame around for us. Stupid Gurmag Angler.
B/R Vengevine
I still don't know why they printed this card. Why did they make a 0 mana 4/3 haste? Why would you do that?
This deck is brand new, and it's somewhere on the spectrum of the Dredge/Hollow One spectrum of combo-aggro decks that utilize the graveyard to varying degrees. I don't know enough about it, but cheap removal is okay against it, Scavenging Ooze seems awesome, and graveyard hate out of the sideboard isn't an immediate KO, but it's really good.
Bant Spirits
Would the Merfolk matchup be harder if all the Merfolk had flying? Yes. Luckily, there's no Spreading Seas and no Silvergill Adept, but Rattlechains and Drogskol Captains can ruin your removal plans lots of the time to make up for the loss of card advantage.
Grim Lavamancer and Shadow Guildmage are gonna be really good here, much better than Anger of the Gods and stuff like that, since the opponent can have Selfless Spirit and Mausoleum Wanderer to ruin our plans. Bitterblossom should also be solid as long as you focus on killing their Supreme Phantoms and Drogskol Captains. Otherwise, it's all kind of the same as Humans. They have a threat dense deck and lots of creatures that pump their buddies, so cheap removal to reach the midgame safely and big dudes to turn the corner are how you win the game.
Pump the breaks
Gonna stop here since I am headed off to watch the second day of the Pro Tour with some buddies. Before I go, a couple of things I thought were interesting.
1. Alpine Moon seems much worse than Damping Sphere, since Valakut has fallen off and Storm and KCI are alive and well.
2. This is just the metagame breakdown, not, like, a "winner's metagame" (whatever that means) or some matchup predictor. That might not be useful a few weeks from now, but since it's a team tournament, the results don't really matter that much anyways, since you can go 0-14 and make the Top 8 if you break it in the other two formats. Even still, checking out what all these teams figured out was the best after weeks of testing is valuable information in itself.
3. The other neat M19 card, Infernal Reckoning, doesn't have a lot of targets right now, since Eldrazi Tron and Affinity are pretty low on the totem pole, and Wurmcoil Engine doesn't seem to be super prevalent or even hard to beat.
4. Follow me on twitter here and check out my Youtube channel here.
5.
It's teams, so the Modern metagame is different than it normally would be, and it's also the Pro Tour, so it's different there too. In what ways? Well, for a SCG Open that's teams, I like to assume that players just play their pet decks, which usually means lots of control strategies, maybe Storm, something that they enjoy playing. Less players are playing a deck they don't enjoy playing, because they can just play a different format altogether. Pro Tour players, however, don't usually care about having fun, they just care about winning, and that includes how they divvy up their formats between themselves. This metagame seems like a pretty good indicator of the best decks in Modern by the players who know it the best, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a list of the things you're likely to expect in the Magic Online leagues or at FNM or whatever, so let's be aware of that while we take a look:
After this is 19 decks that have just one team playing them and three more that have two teams, "Modular Affinity", UW Spirits, and RG Scapeshift.
Humans
I used to like the Humans matchup, until they printed this card. This card is just what the doctor ordered to swing the matchup in Humans' favor against stuff like Jeskai and midrange decks. It is pretty slow, as far as Modern cards go, but if the rest of your deck is disruptive, cheap creatures, then it's definitely worth it. Luckily, we play Thoughtseize.
The best way to beat Humans is to have some cheap removal to protect your life total and then overwhelm them with card advantage. Noble Hierarch and Aether Vial give them a huge tempo advantage, but trying to interact with their acceleration rather than saving your removal for their real threats is oftentimes a mistake, but sometimes not, and knowing when to use that Kolaghan's Command or Abrupt Decay on a Vial is tricky. In addition to having the cheap interaction to fight off their fast starts and Thalias, your late game stuff is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting due to their own late game value generators: Bugler, Dire Fleet Daredevil, and the virtual card advantage of having few lands in the deck to topdeck late. Even if you make it to the late game, you can have a board locked up and lose it all to a topdecked Mantis Rider or two, so turning the corner quickly is important. That's why I like Huntmaster so much in this matchup (and since it's the most popular deck, the format as a whole), it keeps on generating value for you over time that clears the path to let you kill them.
Nothing in the deck has four toughness, except for gigantic Champion of the Parishes, so Bolts are great. Fatal Push is also okay, but setting it up to hit a Mantis Rider can take time that you might not have. Dreadbore, as great as it is in other matchups, isn't at its best here when compared to the instant speed Abrupt Decays and Terminates you could play instead, but at least you usually don't get them hit by Meddling Mage. Out of the sideboard, Anger of the Gods is clearly great, but it's not that versatile of a card, so you might not have space for it. Grim Lavamancers are good but slower than Shadow Guildmage, which does most of the same job.
UW Control
If you played Type 2 in 2000, then you know basically everything you need to about this deck. Almost, since along with counterspells and Wrath of Gods, you have 8 copies of Jayemdae Tome that also kill your opponent. The good news is that they don't pressure your life total, so Bitterblossom is even better here than against Jeskai, but it's tough to keep up on cards against them. The bad news is that it's harder to keep up on cards against them, since what they lack in ability to pressure you, they gain in inevitability. Also, unlike against Supreme Verdicts and Bolts out of Jeskai, we can't utilize our graveyard as much with Kolaghan's Commands and Kitchen Finks, since their removal is Terminus and Path.
I'm not especially scared of this deck, unless they are playing the version with Spreading Seas, which is not usually a difference maker but just counts as another way to randomly lose. Also, watch out for Rest in Peace out of the sideboard. Usually it's not the hugest of deals, but the games go long enough that you will lose out on some utility that you would have liked to have had. The prevalence of this deck is making me reconsider whether I want Kitchen Finks in my sideboard at all, since against the Rest in Peace/Path to Exile/Terminus deck that doesn't pressure life total, it may as well be Balduvian Barbarians. Permanent card advantage cards, like planeswalkers, Bobs, Bitterblossoms, and maybe even Phyrexian Arena are the key to getting ahead here. A single 2 for 1 from a Bloodbraid Elf helps, but doesn't swing the tide like you'd want, since their whole deck is card advantage.
Ironworks
The key that I've found here is that, since their deck is so redundant and they have so many cantrip effects, you need early pressure to stop them. A bunch of discard spells and Kolaghan's Commands isn't going to get it done without a Goyf or Tireless Tracker or whatever. Liliana is great because it taxes their total resources if you can live long enough, and Scavenging Ooze helps stop Scrap Trawlers and Myr Retrievers that they'll draw. Fatal Pushes and Dreadbores are dead of course, and Bitterblossom is awful, but drawing them isn't a death sentence, since you'll need something to discard to your Lilianas.
Out of the board, the cool tech is to play Wurmcoil Engine against Jund. I don't think it's as good as just playing more card advantage, since Jund is just going to board into a bunch of ways to kill artifacts anyways. I'm not sure how prevalent that plan actually is, and I could honestly see people shying away from it since Jund numbers are down. Ironworks runs into a lot of the same problems that Storm does post-board, since you can beat them with a multitude of different disruption effects. Discard spells, artifact destruction, and graveyard hate all work wonders, and that's without counting more targeted stuff like Damping Sphere. You'll have enough space in after sideboard to load up when you take out the dead cards.
Tron
Bacteria and viruses have been at war with each other for billions of years. Viruses commandeer and infect bacteria to infiltrate their DNA and use the infected bacteria to reproduce their own viruses. Bacteria fight back by an ever-adapting immune system against the infection to prevent the viruses' attacks. However, long before, there was Jund vs Tron.
Ever since the Eye of Ugin ban, Tron has about 18 really powerful late game draws they can hit once (if) you've stripped their hand of anything relevant. Sometimes your discard spells have to hit their Expedition Maps and Sylvan Scryings to slow them down, but even then, you need a really good clock to kill them, since if they hit six mana and stop you in your tracks with Wurmcoil Engine, you know that Karn and Ugin are coming the next two turns to seal it up.
Pundits like to say that Damping Sphere doesn't do enough in the matchup, and maybe it doesn't, but it's one of the best things we've got. Fulminator Mage slows their good draws down by one turn, but Damping Sphere slows them down by four, and sometimes they just don't draw the six or seven lands necessary to deploy their threats even if you don't have much pressure. Discard is also real good, and this other thing called crossing your fingers seems to work as well. In seriousness, I don't think there's much we can do better than boarding in extra discard and Damping Spheres. If you're really gung ho about beating LeTron James, play a third Sphere.
Hollow One
How good do you think Naya Zoo would be if your creatures got +1/+1 but 15% of the time you had to discard all your creatures for no reason? Instead of Wild Nacatl we have Hollow One and instead of Knight of the Reliquary we have Gurmag Angler, other than that it's bolts and dorky creatures. This is one of the big reasons I shy away from Abrupt Decay, since it doesn't hit either of Hollow One's important threats. However, at it's core, this is just a Zoo deck, and it can lose to removal spells and Tarmogoyfs just the same. You get run over by double or triple Hollow One draws some number of times, but also you sometimes strand them with uncastable cards after Thoughtseizing their single Goblin Lore and win that way some amount of the time too. Unlike Zoo, it's susceptible to graveyard hate out of the sideboard, but not as susceptible as something like Dredge or Living End.
The real way to beat this deck isn't necessarily with sideboard cards as much as it's with keeping it in mind when making your removal suite. Fatal Push is okay but not great, same with Lightning Bolt, since they kill Flameblade Adept, but not much else. Dreadbore, Terminate, Maelstrom Pulse, and Kolaghan's Command are great since they kill the big stuff. They cannot in a million years beat the card Scavenging Ooze, unless you play it sloppily and open it up to Bolts and Collective Brutality, so that's another card to max out on if this deck is on your radar. If there was a one mana card that could kill both Gurmag Angler and Hollow One in red, black, or green, it would turn the whole metagame around for us. Stupid Gurmag Angler.
B/R Vengevine
I still don't know why they printed this card. Why did they make a 0 mana 4/3 haste? Why would you do that?
This deck is brand new, and it's somewhere on the spectrum of the Dredge/Hollow One spectrum of combo-aggro decks that utilize the graveyard to varying degrees. I don't know enough about it, but cheap removal is okay against it, Scavenging Ooze seems awesome, and graveyard hate out of the sideboard isn't an immediate KO, but it's really good.
Bant Spirits
Would the Merfolk matchup be harder if all the Merfolk had flying? Yes. Luckily, there's no Spreading Seas and no Silvergill Adept, but Rattlechains and Drogskol Captains can ruin your removal plans lots of the time to make up for the loss of card advantage.
Grim Lavamancer and Shadow Guildmage are gonna be really good here, much better than Anger of the Gods and stuff like that, since the opponent can have Selfless Spirit and Mausoleum Wanderer to ruin our plans. Bitterblossom should also be solid as long as you focus on killing their Supreme Phantoms and Drogskol Captains. Otherwise, it's all kind of the same as Humans. They have a threat dense deck and lots of creatures that pump their buddies, so cheap removal to reach the midgame safely and big dudes to turn the corner are how you win the game.
Pump the breaks
Gonna stop here since I am headed off to watch the second day of the Pro Tour with some buddies. Before I go, a couple of things I thought were interesting.
1. Alpine Moon seems much worse than Damping Sphere, since Valakut has fallen off and Storm and KCI are alive and well.
2. This is just the metagame breakdown, not, like, a "winner's metagame" (whatever that means) or some matchup predictor. That might not be useful a few weeks from now, but since it's a team tournament, the results don't really matter that much anyways, since you can go 0-14 and make the Top 8 if you break it in the other two formats. Even still, checking out what all these teams figured out was the best after weeks of testing is valuable information in itself.
3. The other neat M19 card, Infernal Reckoning, doesn't have a lot of targets right now, since Eldrazi Tron and Affinity are pretty low on the totem pole, and Wurmcoil Engine doesn't seem to be super prevalent or even hard to beat.
4. Follow me on twitter here and check out my Youtube channel here.
5.
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