Hey there, kids. My name is Nate Price, and I’m a writer (and clearly a master of the obvious). I’ve been a regular contributor to the Wizards of the Coast event coverage team for the past couple of years, and thus have been privy to some of the best high-level play on the planet. After years spent watching the greats play the game (and getting to game with them some on the side), I’m playing the best Magic of my life. I’ve learned a lot from watching and talking to Pros about what made their approach to the game so different from my own. I’m hoping that I can use my observations and the things I’ve learned to help newer players who want to break through the threshold to the Pro level. This column is going to be a series of lessons I’ve learned, observations I’ve made, and stories I’ve picked up along my travels. I hope you all learn as much as I have.
Magic is a game of maximizing your resources. Within the rules of the game, you have access to many different resources to use to kill your opponents. You have the cards you draw, the mana you use to play them, even the life you start with which can all be traded to gain some effect. The player that walks away victorious from most games is the one that is best able to maximize the use of their resources.
Take a look at the de facto “best deck” in Standard going into Worlds: Jund.
"Jund" by David Reitbauer, 6-0 World Championship 2009
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Click the arrow to download the above deck in .txt format(To load a .txt deck into Magic: Online’s Deck Editor, click “Load”, select “Local Text Deck”, find the location of the downloaded deck file and double-click the deck.)
What is it that made Jund such a powerful deck? The secret lies in the cards it was playing. Every card in the decklist is worth more than a single piece of cardboard. Bloodbraid Elf, Broodmate Dragon, and Sprouting Thrinax are effectively two spells in one. Blightning both shortens your clock and reduces your opponent’s ability to catch up, effectively serving two purposes. Maelstrom Pulse has the ability to remove multiple cards for the cost of a single card and three mana. The worst spells in the deck from an advantage standpoint are Terminate and Lightning Bolt, and even those are better than an average card because of their extreme versatility at such a cheap cost. The deck is a card advantage machine, and the fact that it makes the absolute most out of each of its cards is what made it so powerful and difficult to derail.
Considering the lesson of Jund, it seems safe to say that a good way to get an advantage over an opponent is by making as many cards in their deck irrelevant as possible. After all, it doesn’t matter how many more cards an opponent draws than you if they are all effectively blank. Spain’s Joel Calafell built his 6-0 Standard deck at Worlds to do just that. Expecting a field full of Jund and creature-based decks designed to beat Jund, he built a UW monstrosity named Jacerator filled with Fog effects and card drawing that ultimately won by decking the opponent either via Jace Beleren or Archive Trap.
"Jacerator" by Joel Calafell, 6-0 World Championship 2009
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Click the arrow to download the above deck in .txt formatJacerator’s main advantage came from the fact that the creature-based decks have one route to victory: they ride creatures through your life total until you are dead. To combat this, he ran four copies of both Angelsong and Safe Passage. Three copies of Day of Judgment also provided an escape should he run out of Fogs. In addition to negating opponents’ creatures, his creatureless deck provided no targets for opposing Terminates, Path to Exiles, and Bituminous Blasts, negating yet one more facet of their decks. At this point, with his deck nullifying a majority of the cards he was to face, all he had to do was find a way to win the game. His multiple variations on Howling Mine served that purpose wonderfully. Not only did they provide him with an eventual out to decking an opponent, they also kept his hand full of the essential cards to keep his opponents at bay.
Another approach to negating an opponent’s cards came from Gerry Thompson and his Spread ‘Em deck and Conley Woods’ Magical Christmasland. Again looking to defeat the multihued Jund monster, Thompson and Woods took a different approach to defeating it. As powerful as the cards in Jund are, it does have a major weakness: the mana. The deck is powered on a mana base built almost entirely of lands that come into play tapped. In addition, Oran-Rief, the Vastwood is one land that almost never wants to tap for mana. The cards in the deck generate large enough effects that it is usually able to get beyond this potential weakness. Even if it falls behind while setting its mana up, their power level is enough to get the deck right back into the thick of things.
"Spread 'Em" by Gerry Thompson, PTQ at Worlds 2009
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Click the arrow to download the above deck in .txt format
"MCL" by Conley Woods, 5-1 World Championship 2009
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Click the arrow to download the above deck in .txt formatThompson and Woods realized that the one major weakness was the mana, and they came up with two different ways to abuse that fact. Thompson’s approach was to build a cascade deck that trickled down so the chain would always end on either a Spreading Seas or Convincing Mirage. Woods used a more straightforward path: just blow them up. His deck ran on the power of Lotus Cobra, Harrow, and Khalni Heart Expedition to generate large amounts of early mana and use it to play cards like Acidic Slime, Goblin Ruinblaster, Mold Shambler, and the pipe-dream of a turn-four Violent Ultimatum. With their mana base turned into Islands or sitting peacefully in the graveyard, Jund players couldn’t ever get their powerful spells online and climb back into the game.
Top tier players are always looking for ways to deny their opponents the tools they need to win the game. Expecting others to do the same, they also plan for contingencies like this. The best example I have of this came from the finals of Pro Tour-Kyoto earlier this year. Gabriel Nassif was playing five-color control against Luis Scott-Vargas’s BW Tokens deck. The 5c Control deck was similar to Jund now in a couple of ways. It had a terribly slow and precarious mana base, but was able to power through it by having spells that were almost all game-breakingly powerful. The BW Tokens decks packed a sideboard for the 5c Control match up containing Head Games. This would let them replace the 5c Control player’s hand with a bunch of useless (and usually quite slow) lands, thus gaining the required time to beat them into submission.
Nassif knew that the Head Games was in LSV’s sideboard. In the early turns of Game 4, LSV had played a Windbrisk Heights, hiding away a card. Nassif came to the conclusion that it was a Head Games he had hidden away and played the entire rest of the game with a Negate in his hand reserved for the powerful sorcery. even went so far as to let an Ajani Goldmane resolve that was nearly as bad for him as the Head Games would have been. Eventually, after having to play some incredibly tight Magic to weather Ajani’s storm, Nassif finally got the payoff he had been working towards. LSV managed to activate his Windbrisk Heights and play the Head Games, but by this point, Nassif had managed to wither his hand away to almost nothing, negating the cards effectiveness. Even had LSV been able to activate it earlier, the Negate Nassif was packing could have stopped it. In short, he recognized how his opponent planned to counter his deck and played in such a manner as to counter that strategy. Thanks to that, he won the game and ultimately the match.
Show Pro Tour Kyoto 2009 Final »
These are just a few examples I’ve seen over the past year of Pros trying to find some way to negate an opponent’s advantages to gain one of their own. In formats to come, try to stay on the lookout for trends within the format in terms of the popular decks and see if you can’t spot any weaknesses the way these players have. Who knows, if you keep your eyes and mind open, you could be the next person showing up in the Video Deck Tech corner with Brian David-Marshall. Then, we’ll all be learning from you.
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