Survival Away

Published: 2000-01

Original URL: http://www.newwave.org/strategy/articles/jan00/zvmo0113.html

Currently available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20010624232029id_/http://www.newwave.org/strategy/articles/jan00/zvmo0113.html

Zvi Mowshowitz

Congratulations, you have Survival! Now what?

That's a hard question to answer, and just as hard a question to explain the answer to. By putting Survival of the Fittest onto the table, you have totally transformed your deck. Any creature you want can be in your hand or in your graveyard, and you can turn out a basically endless stream of them. All it takes is green mana to go get them, and if you're short on that you can go get some first. With such great options, it's clear what you should do: You should win. The question is, how?

This is the biggest division between Survival decks. Either you have an infinite combination you can get, or you don't. For now, I'm going to assume you do. The normal combination used is the pebbles combination: Enduring Renewal and Goblin Bombardment , with Shield Sphere used as the creature. All the cards here can work without the combination: Goblin Bombardment lets you use your surplus creatures, keep creatures from being removed from the game, and in particular kill Academy Rector . Enduring Renewal can be used as it was originally intended: To keep your creatures from dying. This works well with echo coming into play creatures. In general, it's good once you have Survival, because discarding new creatures won't be a significant problem. Still, you generally don't like to draw it. Bombardment is much more hit and miss. Drawing Shield Sphere is no big deal one way or the other, it's a decent defensive creature and Recurring Nightmare or Survival food, but can backfire against counter decks. The biggest problem is all these cards take up card slots, and each card slot is extra valuable in this deck. Now, it's important to see how this operates in practice. Assume you draw enough creatures and enough lands, plus Survival, and all the lands you want, but somehow never have the right creature (so you have to Survival if you want anything).

Turn one land, go. Turn two land, Survival. Now, you need to sacrifice two Academy Rectors. In practice, however, you're going to be sacrificing three of them, because the first one is going to go get Recurring Nightmare . OK, so it's turn three. You can't play a Rector yet, and don't have a Recur to play either, so your best play is going to be to Survival for Wall of Roots and play it. This means you can Survival twice before your next turn. On turn four, you play Academy Rector , and on his turn get to Survival again. On turn five, you use Bone Shredder (or something else) to kill the Rector into a Recurring Nightmare , then use the Nightmare to get another Rector, replay the Nightmare (you have six mana total), Recur a Rector into a Rector (the winning play generally), use Rector to get Goblin Bombardment , sac Rector to Bombardment to get Enduring Renewal , play Shield Sphere , win. Did you Survival enough times to pull that off? You're just a little short. But it's close enough that if you get a little help somewhere along the line (for example, drawing a Rector or a Wall of Roots), you can pull off a turn five.

Next question is: If you have Survival and Recurring Nightmare right away can you pull off a turn four? Turn two Survival, turn three Wall of Roots ( Nightmare clearly won't work), Survival three times total, turn four Recurring Nightmare , you can't win this turn. No dice. You need to draw Goblin Bombardment . If you can play second turn Survival of the Fittest , turn three Wall of Roots and Goblin Bombardment , turn four Rector, you win. You needed to draw: Wall of Roots , Survival, Bombardment, and either four land or three and the Sphere or Rector. Of course, if you have all the creatures you need you don't need Survival. And Birds of Paradise will cut a full turn off all these times. So will Fyndhorn Elves . Phyrexian Tower can also help out.

This is all looking pretty easy to pull off. Which raises the question of why you're bothering with all this Survival and Recur stuff and don't just build NecroPebbles. Obviously, you play this deck because it has better defense, doesn't pay life and has backup plans. Sometimes, you even sideboard out the combination when you're confident that getting to the point where you could combo kill someone would win you the game anyway. So the combination is going to lock in four Academy Rectors and one Enduring Renewal . How many of the other two cards? Shield Sphere isn't a bad random draw if you either get Survival, get Recur, get the combination or face an aggressive deck. You can certainly afford two, and the biggest advantage of the second one is it lets you Survival away one without worrying about it, or block with one. Goblin Bombardment got a boost from sixth edition rules, and is good if you get Survival (because you then go for the kill), or Academy Rector . In either case it's a huge help, often speeding you up by a turn. It's also going to be good when you face other creatures. Still, you don't want to draw two of them too often and every deck slot is important. Two or three seems right.

But whenever you're building one of these decks, you have to keep in mind: You have nowhere near enough room. Just because you want a card in your deck doesn't mean it's going to fit.

There are two more important spells in this deck, other than creatures: Duress and Vampiric Tutor . You need Vampiric Tutor to speed you up and insure Survival, and Duress to give you the time to win and the opening to get Survival onto the table. From playing other versions of the deck, I wouldn't leave home without four Duress . They're too important, and you're too slow without them. So how many slots do we have left? Eleven enchantments (two Bombardment for now), four Duress , six combination creatures (counting Rector). Four Wall of Roots and four Birds of Paradise are obvious, bringing the deck to 29 cards. Next, the lands go in. Phyrexian Tower can get a Rector out faster and sacrifice it (with extra mana as a bonus), but you also have multiple Bombardments. Of course, it's legendary, so be careful not to go overboard. I want as many 'easy' Rector sacrifices as possible, but with one less land drawing two of a legendary one is more serious. For now I'm going with 3 Phyrexian Tower . Gaea's Cradle is really good in comboless Recur/Survival, because you get to those kinds of situations. Here, that's not the plan. Wasteland was in these decks, but I don't think it belongs. When thinking about Wasteland , there are two questions. One, are there lands you fear? And two, do you want to exchange lands with your opponent? This deck doesn't fear any lands and wants as much land in play as possible in most matchups. You don't want to Wasteland a Thaw, you want to use the Thaw to get Survival on the table and lock the game away. Without Wasteland in the deck, I'm going to shave a land off (I also added some low cost spells not in the Chicago Trix deck), putting the deck back at 23. It's a given you'll use four Bayou , Taiga and Savannah . You want the option to play a basic Forest , but you don't need to go crazy about it. There's no way you'll be able to get good Back to Basics or Price of Progress defense. You can get away with two or three. There's no blue cards you need so you don't need Tropical Island . City of Brass is a good five color land for this deck, and you can get away with three because the rest of your lands are duals. There's three land slots left. Fetch lands work well in these decks, so two of those, and one Volrath's Stronghold , which is too good in these decks not to play. There are eight cards left for utility creatures and maybe Vampiric Tutor.

You need a creature to gain cards with Survival, and Krovikan Horror helps sacrifice Rector. This deck doesn't have too many real creatures to fight with, so using another slot on a Squee seems questionable. Besides, you shouldn't run out of creatures going for the combination and want to bury Rectors. You'll miss Ashen Ghoul here sometimes. Monk Realist and Uktabi Orangutan are automatic, and with Renewal important you need an Idealist. The 'big creature to reanimate' has to be Verdant Force , it's by far the best. That's five already. Spike Weaver needs to be there right now, and you need a life gainer (I choose Radiant's Dragoons). To me there are two reasonable choices for the last card. One is Deranged Hermit as a 'standard procedure' creature to cast. The other is Quirion Ranger . Ranger is unique because if you have no land to play and have a Bird then casting a Ranger will actually gain you one mana. But without any Elves in the deck (there's just no room), I'm going with the Hermit. I also worry a lot about this deck running out of stuff to do if the combo goes out of the picture. One creature I mentioned earlier was Bone Shredder , but it seems like the Shredder's going to have to start in your sideboard.

I'll write some more about Survival, so don't worry that there's a lot that I haven't explained yet. Also note that getting this deck right, really right, requires a lot of testing. It's all about situations, and adjusting your deck to deal with them all as best you can. So here's the 'instinctive' version of the Trix deck:

Versions played in Chicago are available at the Duelist Sideboard if you want to compare notes. This would be my 'alpha' version of the deck, which I would then test and tune like crazy. Hopefully this gave you some inkling of the issues involved. A partial spoiler to Nemesis, which isn't as weak as MM, has been released, so I don't think I'll be able to come back to this for a little while.

Zvi Mowshowitz