Zvi and the Magic Invitational, Part 4
**This was my classic deck when I left for the Invitational. I was very confident in the maindeck but very flexible about the exact cards in the SB:
"TRL" (The Restricted List)
I tested it a lot, because testing it was so much fun. It's clearly a control deck, but it has a lot of decisions that need explaining. The mana base is based around Tithe, both to use the Tithe/Brainstorm engine and because I found Tithe to be plain good in Classic. If you go second you almost always get two lands, if you go first you can often get two anyway by using a Wasteland, Strip Mine or the Flood Plain to manipulate your land count, or just by holding a land back for a turn. The reason I used Tithe was that I didn't want to run what I think of as a 'Type I mana base.' Type I mana bases are horrible. Cards like Regrowth are supported by a Mox, a Lotus and a few Cities of Brass. Whole colors, such as red for Gorilla Shaman and Fireball, get only a few extra duallands to help. Even for main colors, the number of sources is often in the low teens, despite all opponents having four Wastelands. The problem is that there are five Moxen, a Sol Ring, a Library of Alexandria and at least three Wastelands that you basically have to play, and you need to splash for off-color power cards. The Black Lotus and running Cities of Brass helps, but not enough. By using 4 Tithe and a Flood Plain, I insured 8 sources of every color of mana. For blue I had five extra duallands and Tolarian Academy to have 14. That's still a really scary number for me, especially with Classic being so fast. Still, this mana base seemed excellent at getting the colored mana I needed.
The creature removal is just The Abyss, Balance and two Swords to Plowshares, plus a Story Circle. There aren't that many creatures in Classic, and it turned out there were even less than expected. Finding The Abyss takes care of most of them. In practice, I found the deck has enough manipulation to find the removal it needs. The deck naturally gets extra cards over time, so you can afford to use Tutors to go get The Abyss or Balance if you have to. If this deck faces a true gun it can be in trouble, but Classic beatdown decks tend not to work so well anymore. Once you get past the first few turns, you normally cast a Morphling against them. Classic decks need to be quick and efficient, so their creatures normally can't beat a Morphling. Often you'd play the Morphling turn three off a Mana Drain. In general, once Morphling hits the table your opponent has to either go off or Balance or he loses the game in four turns. That's why there are two, rather than the one I started with when he replaced the Mirror Universe as the kill due to Sixth Edition rules.
Why Story Circle? That has a lot to do with what I thought other the Classic decks would be like. The Necropotence decks I saw often had zero or one Nevinyrral's Disks as their non-creature removal spells, and only black creatures and sometimes Drain Life as their damage sources. It's hard for them to defeat The Abyss, and if you can keep land on the table it's impossible for them to stop Story Circle. The other problem deck was a burn deck. Without a card designed to stop burn decks, they run over these kind of control decks by just casting burn spells until you die. With a Circle in your deck, you can spend all your effort finding it. There's nothing wrong with using Merchant Scroll for Mystical Tutor for Demonic Tutor for Story Circle, for example, if that's all you need. You do what you have to. There had to be a card in this 'anti-red' slot in the deck, and the Circle seemed best.
The best cards in the deck are Ancestral Recall, the card you want to cast in the first few turns, and Yawgmoth's Will, the card that locks up the game later on. You often wait to cast the Will so you don't 'burn' it to just, say, play a land and draw 3 cards. You want to get more than that. A large part of the deck costs one mana, like Brainstorm and Tithe, and often you have Black Lotus to give you six extra mana to work with. Sylvan Library is the card you go for against control, since it is immune to Balance and lets you convert useless life into 3-4 extra cards, plus Tithe insures you can constantly shuffle the deck. It's also great against Necropotence decks. The last addition was Misdirection, which works on many of the key cards in Classic: Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Hymn to Torach. It's also randomly devastating a lot of the time, and you can use it together with an instant speed threat, especially Ancestral Recall, to counter a spell from a blue mage with their own counter. There's only one Merchant Scroll because I couldn't plan on going for Ancestral every game when Misdirection could lose me the game.
The other decisions were what wasn't included in the deck. Most people play Timetwister and sometimes even Wheel of Fortune, because you would often want to Tutor for it and it's great against Necropotence. However, I found the deck's plan revolved around Yawgmoth's Will. You didn't want to wipe out that juicy graveyard unless you had to. And in general, with the Tithe plan and all the card drawing you ended up with the better hand much more often than not; if your opponent had an edge it was board control. So I decided to sideboard the Timetwister against Necropotence. In general, my biggest decision was not to play any red: No Mox Ruby, no Fireball, no Gorilla Shaman. The Shaman I found to no longer be as good with Yawgmoth's Will in every deck: You wipe out their artifacts, they bring them back. Against non-control decks, the effect didn't matter at all. In addition, not using Shaman let me set up the Oath trap. The Fireball is something I wanted for Necropotence, but it always seemed so artificial, like it was a relic of Classic decks past. More to the point, I found that I didn't have all that much land against Necropotence decks, and if I did I generally won despite their card economy. The deciding factor, however, was that playing Mox Ruby and a Plateau would have messed up my mana base too much.
Some words on the Sideboard. The obvious cards were Moat, The Abyss and Swords for creature decks, Aura of Silence and Disenchant (I was thinking about Seal of Cleansing) for Donate or other artifact/enchantment based decks, Sylvan Library for control and Necropotence, Circle of Protection: Red for burn and some number of anti-Necro cards. The rest was a little anti-control (Misdirection), in addition to being general utility, plus the Oath of Druids trap. Many control decks would go up on Gorilla Shamans after board, and try to drop one early. My plan was to let them and drop Oath of Druids. They would have no Swords since I have no red in my deck and Morphling can't be targeted. So unless they could Balance that turn or Fireball the Shaman, I would Oath up Morphling and win the game four turns later in the air. Losing half my deck wasn't important. The other trick I wanted to pull was using Spiritual Focus against Chains of Mephistopheles, allowing me to gain a ton of life and then Yawgmoth's Will back everything in my deck. I even thought about using 4 Psychic Purge here for comedy value.
Overall, that deck was winning most of its games in practice against whoever I could test with, although it wasn't a very high quality set of decks, and it seemed to run smoothly and was a ton of fun to play. When I got to the Invitational, I told Buehler about the deck, showed it to several people and began testing. At first it did fine, although not great. I switched the Enlightened Tutor to the maindeck to help against Necropotence, since Misdirection wasn't proving that good against them, even though it worked on Sinkhole as well as Hymn to Torach. A lot of people thought I was nuts, especially about the Story Circle. Then a funny thing happened. The deck lost all ability to win games. It was drawing badly, but I could tell it was more than that. Something was very wrong. Then came the last straw:
Bob Maher had come along to the Invitational, partly to hang out and partly to play in the Grand Prix later in the weekend. One thing he did a lot of was play Classic against us in the first two days of the tournament. During day two, he needed a deck, so I let him use mine. The first 3 cards he saw were Oath of Druids, Sylvan Library and Tropical Island. I got his hopes up there for a second. He was playing against Price's Mishra's Workshop deck, designed by Cuneo. His draw was terrible, and he was basically playing for Balance. Every time he asked about the deck, I could tell he thought I'd made a horrible decision. Soon he was pointing out my deck was horrible. Then Mike Long got into the act. He accused me of playing the Enlightened Tutor because it was restricted. When I told him there was a Diamond and no Ruby I think he winced. The two of them agreed I was going 0-3. Both had played Classic a lot more than I had.
By the time I sat down for the next round, a Solomon Draft against Pat Chapin, I knew I was going to have to switch decks. Chapin was going to run monoblue, which I had the cards for and seemed like a good idea given the amount of time I had. He agreed to give me the decklist after the match. When I got back to my room, Mike Long was there with Herzog. He explained what happened. He said I had made every 'rookie mistake' you could make. Tithe was bad because it could be Duressed, for example, which was something I'd begun to realize. His explanations made a lot of sense. Long said monoblue was a good deck, but had some odd suggestions. One I liked was running Mana Leak for a first turn counterspell off a Mox and a land. The strangest one was Intuition, which it seemed to me like you couldn't use on anything that good and you wouldn't have time or space for.
Then I started thinking about the Extended version of the deck, which was extremely solid. I decided Thawing Glaciers was too slow for Classic, with a lot of Necropotence (control and Donate) and other quick decks. It would come down to surviving, and to Ophidian. The counters needed to be faster as well; I found room for one Forbid because it works so well with Ophidian, but no more. I decided I needed 12 basic Islands to make the mana work, so there was room for only three Mishra's Factory, three Wastelands and a Strip Mine. I thought I needed the Factories to stop early creatures. It should have been two Factory, four Wasteland. I played one Treachery from Chapin's version. His argument was with all the search you can often find it in time, and one seemed worth it. I decided on three Morphlings, although everyone else had two in this kind of deck. My judgement was that with Mana Drain, Sol Ring and Black Lotus you would often have the mana for one early on, and often you just wanted to play one and crush Classic decks with it. The Braingeyser was easy to cut, since I didn't want to play a Sorcery. Stroke of Genius came later on. I was thinking: The Extended versions have more room, and they don't use Stroke. Why am I using Stroke? Mana Drain? I'd rather play Morphling. I fit in two each of Annul and Mana Leak to stop the early Necropotence or another threat.
The sideboard was about making sure I hadn't made any terrible mistakes. Two more Annuls were obvious. I put in three Powder Kegs, two Treachery and two Masticore in case I needed creature defense. Back to Basics seemed like a natural for a deck with so many basic lands. The weird card in my board was Scrying Glass. I thought with five Moxen, you could often drop a Glass on turn one, and then it would destroy another control deck. It also could just function as extra copies of Ophidian.
Here's what I ended up with:
I could have playtested against Slemr or Wise, but I decided it would be more fun to find out about the matchup when and if we played at the Invitational itself. I did manage to get a few shuffles and sample draws in, but when I sat down to play Maki in round 10, it was my first game with the deck.
Maki was playing a Replenish deck, with the new combination from Nemesis: Pandemonium and Saporling Burst, which together do 21 damage. A second theme in the deck was Bazaar of Baghdad and Squee, which obviously work great together while helping to find the combination and put enchantments in the graveyard. I assumed I had a good matchup, since I have Wastelands for Bazaar and counter decks should have the advantage against combination ones, especially those with many cards that are not threats. The other problem, which I didn't take into account, was that the mana base of Maki's deck was a normal Classic mana base, which means it wasn't all that solid. He got a bad mana draw game one, and I used Wastelands to keep him from casting his spells while I got down multiple Ophidians and took total control of the game.
Game two he cast an early Saporling Burst, which can do 20 points of damage on its own if nothing is done about it. I had a Morphling in my hand and knew I needed to cast it to stay alive, but I didn't have enough mana. I burned Time Walk as a cantrip and drew into Sol Ring. The next turn I cast the Morphling. He drew Bazaar of Baghdad, but he had nothing else. He used it to draw into one Squee, then two, then, well, "Who discards three Squees to Bazaar of Baghdad?" He was drawing two free cards a turn! Then he put down Library of Alexandria and it was 4. Meanwhile, all I could do was put him on a clock with Morphling; the game was out of my hands. He cast Intuition on my end step and I tapped out to counter it. I asked him if he had me; somehow, he'd drawn all mana and another Burst and couldn't stop the Morphling, which came over for the game and the match.
Next round I played against David Price, who was playing the other really cool Classic deck. As I mentioned above, it was based on Mishra's Workshop. Game one starts out really scary, since the deck has only Morphling to try and stop Su-Chi, although Mishra's Factory can now kill Juggernaught. Still, he has Duress and Mana Drain to back his threats up. The weirdest part is his Icy Manipulators, which still seem like they have to be wrong to me. The rest of the deck I really like. I lost one game to the quick avalanche, but the other two I managed to survive and my counters and Ophidians carried the day.
Last round of Classic I play Slemr, so I won't be getting away Necro-free. He and Gary Wise are playing the strange creatureless version they came up with. It's not as bad as Randy Buehler made it out to be in his report, but it is easier to deal with in a lot of ways. For monoblue, the only card you have to fear is Necropotence; there's no Hypnotic Specter or similar to also stop. Game one I get Morphling down quickly and put him under pressure, along with Mishra's Factory. But he gets Necropotence, then the next turn he plays Mirror Universe, Dark Ritual, Drain Life for one, putting him at 8 while I have 7 points of damage on the table! So he gets to go to 20 and I go down to 1. He draws all the life I'm not going to hit him for, however, and doesn't have a way to do the last point. Basically, his deck fizzled. Game two, I get a turn one Ophidian off of Sol Ring and a Mox and he doesn't have enough land; he scoops after a few turns.
So with some luck and the ability to admit I had a horrible deck, I managed to 3-0 Classic. That brought me back up to 7-5, and I still had a very long shot at the finals if I also swept in Standard...
All questions, comments, and responses welcomed at
** [**](#top)