Anything But: Gates of Change

[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to welcome JustSin aboard. He is joining us after having written a regular column at PureMTGO and on the MTGSalvation forums. This introductory — though substantive — installment of his series was written for a posting date late last week. Because of our shifting calendar, we had to push him to today. His metagame analysis is still very relevant, but any serious non-noted jumps over the last week are not the fault of JustSin; rather, they are an artifact of the MTGO Academy schedule. Thank you for understanding. –PlanetWalls]

An old series with a new home. For almost a year now Anything But has been the go-to place on PureMTGO for the competitive Pauper meta, but now that has changed. Now Anything But is going to find its new home here on MTGO Academy. For those who are not familiar, Anything But is a continued look at casual and competitive Classic Pauper, including an in-depth breakdown of how the Daily Event meta is shaping up. My veteran readers need not fear because the content is going to remain the same, only the location is going to be different.

So as you can see sometimes change can be a good thing. For whatever reason humans tend to enjoy a nice steady lull in their lives, and when the typical routine gets altered, panic can set in. As Magic players, we’re regularly thrown curve balls, given that we expect new sets with new mechanics at regular intervals. This has us, as players, more willing to accept alterations to our way of life (well at least most of the time…). However, when a new set comes out, it can have minimal to no impact on eternal formats like Classic Pauper. This week I’ve got one specific thing in Return to Ravnica that I want to discuss and offer up my opinion on whether or not this can move us out of our current Pauper comfort zone. But as always, let’s first take a look at the current Pauper meta…

The Competitive Corner

For those familiar with my series, there will be only one small alteration to this section as of now. If you’ve paid attention to the dates in this series, you would have noticed that I track the meta starting with Sunday over a period of two weeks. With a new set release date for this series here on MTGO Academy, I’m going to have to switch this up slightly. From here out, my series will track results starting from Wednesday over that period of two weeks. While this will result in an overlap of a few days that will not be tracked, it is going to work out better as far as giving me time to gather information and should have no significant impact on our numbers. Also, for veteran readers, please bear with me as I re-explain the sections of this report.

The one thing I really want to stress with the competitive section of my series is that the most important part is community interaction. Over the many months I have tracked competitive Pauper data, my methods and numbers have changed based upon community suggestions. It is my goal to make this section as useful as possible in order to ensure Pauper players get the most benefit from my articles. Suggestions are always welcome! Ultimately I have the final choice in whether or not I believe the change should be made, but this series has become what it is thanks to readers giving me their input. All I ask is that we keep discussion constructive!

Daily Event Results 10/3 to 10/16

There is one significant threshold for decks in my competitive reports, and it lies at the number 5. Currently, the breaking point that will knock a deck beyond the rogue/homebrew status for the week is five showings. This has been the standard since I started tracking the meta; however, with changes on the horizon I’m looking at this number and thinking that perhaps it is outdated. The number was generated based on a time when my competitive report was weekly and five showings meant a deck showed on average at least once per day. Look for this to change in upcoming weeks now that we’re on a two-week schedule. Also of concern is the recent drop in listed Daily Events. I’m going to assume that Pauper Daily Events are still firing about three times per day, but for whatever reason, the recent updates on the Wizards website are showing only 2-3 events each day. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens and hope it gets resolved. [Editor’s Note: As reported by BlippyTheSlug and others earlier this week, the decreased reporting of Daily Event results was a conscious decision by Magic R&D. –PlanetWalls]

Well it was great while it lasted, but Stompy has dropped out of first place immediately following its top-of-the-charts debut. The deck did, however, manage to stay in the top three alongside Storm and DelverBlue. In an odd rise, Storm stepped up once again in order to hold the top slot by a significant margin. We did see a drop in the total number of overall decks as a result of the missing Daily Event listings, but Storm still managed to show up in force, almost doubling the count of DelverBlue, which took the number-2 spot. IzzetPost has taken a bit of a tumble, which I feel is a result of the fact that DimirPost has shown up once again. The players that run this type of deck are often split between the two guilds and Dimir usually has more control options in place of something like the Rolling Thunder finisher. We also had WeeFiend edge its way over that five-showing watermark after a month where it only managed a total of three showings and looked to be dying off for good. Percentage-wise I am surprised to see that Mono-Blue Control (MUC) has managed to hold onto its 4% share of the showings. The deck really has come into its own now that it has found consistent success as a Cloudpost variant.

Here’s a look at how decks have been trending…

This chart tracks recent trends of currently popular decks. Points on this graph represent the percentage for each deck-type within the meta. The chart tracks only the past six weeks in order to keep the data relevant, and decks must maintain an average of at least 5% over those six weeks in order to remain on this chart. Storm has continued its steady rise over the past few months with a major leap thanks to the fact that it accounted for almost a quarter of the decks for the week. This week’s decline for IzzetPost is part of a larger slide that has also been taking place over the past few months. Its current sink in popularity seems to be the result of a few of its bad matches becoming more popular to balance out that period of time where the number of IzzetPost decks was overwhelming the format. Outside of these two decks, the remaining five decks seemed to hold relatively steady. For what it’s worth, Goblins is finally starting to crawl up to the point where it will reach the mark to show up on this list with a maintained average (so far) of 4%. If it does manage to push that mark, it will clearly be featured at the very bottom of this graph.

Here’s a look at the decks that are most likely to go undefeated…

This chart works off an average of all deck-types for the length of time I have been working on this article series and takes a look at what deck averages the best 4-0 showing. As with the trends chart, we ignore anything that has an average less than five. Storm continues to hold the top spot in not only undefeated average, but overall average as well. The deck has managed to pull ahead of the former number-1 deck, DelverBlue, by five undefeated showings and three overall. With back-to-back big weeks from Stompy, it has managed to pull ahead of Mono-White Aggro for the number-4 slot. At the bottom of our list DimirPost steps up two slots over FissureStorm and Teachings Control, which have both been working hard to fight off “rogue” status.

Here’re the rogue decks for this week…

1. EnchantStorm – 4 (3)
2. RDW – 2
3. Tortured Reanimator – 2 (Black-Red, Black-Green)
4. Esper Control – 2 (1)
5. Teachings Control – 1 (1)
6. Stinkweed Zombies – 1 (1)
7. EnchantAggro – 1
8. JunkPost – 1
9. Hexproof – 1
10. Rock – 1 (1)

For those unfamiliar, the first number listed is the number of showings these decks had overall. The number in parenthesis is the number of times the deck went undefeated during this period. What I used to do was to link each deck that went undefeated so that it could be tracked down on the Daily Events lists. Based on a reader suggestion, however, what I’m going to start doing is linking each name to the deck that it’s associated with. This provides a great opportunity for people to take a look and see what I’m talking about, save you time trying to find the deck, and correct any naming errors that may have occurred. As I said earlier, this section of my articles is constantly modified in order to provide the best possible information for readers.

Taking a look at the rogue lists we have here, there are, as always, a few familiar faces alongside a couple new decks. Going down the list we have DoGBiscuit continuing to not only show up with EnchantStorm, but to pull out undefeated wins as well. Tortured Reanimator not only showed up twice, but both times were during the same event using both the red and green versions of the deck. Now some of you may be familiar with the new black deck that was running four copies of Cry of Contrition as its only non-creature spells (the list has been slightly altered at this point, but the concept is the same). At first I had this deck-type labeled as Mono-Black Aggro (MBA) but decided it really should be considered different from the other MBA decks that we’ve seen in the past. I then renamed the deck Discard Aggro. Thanks go out to thrashjazzassassin from MTGSalvation, who pointed out that this deck was discussed on ChannelFireball and is properly named Stinkweed Zombies. EnchantAggro decks are predicted to start showing up in larger numbers these days, thanks to the printing of Ethereal Armor, and it would seem Nerney9 was the first to jump on that bandwagon. You can also expect Ethereal Armor to bring back Hexproof decks once again at the very least in the Tournament Practice room. The next deck I was quite excited to see and decided to designate as Rock. For those unfamiliar, “Rock” is the term often employed to refer to green-black decks that use the strengths of each color in reference to the earliest Rock deck that capitalized on staples such as Spiritmonger and Pernicious Deed. Feel free to offer a better name for this deck, but this color combination is one of my favorites. I’ve often talked about how I think that Putrid Leech deserves more play in our format and now I think Grisly Salvage might find a great home in a similar type of deck.

One last designation I should clarify, for those readers who are not familiar with my work, is what I mean when I list a deck as “JunkPost”. After one of the recent updates to the Magic Banned and Restricted List, I talked about the biggest complaints that Pauper players had with cards in the format and which ones I thought really held any type of justification for banning. From there, another article was prompted, where I discussed the impact that Cloudpost had on the format and whether or not the combination with Glimmerpost allowed players to put any junk cards into a deck and make it work. This then led to the creation of a series of videos on my YouTube channel where I attempted to build a number of horrible Cloudpost decks and see if they can work (something I’m soon to finish and look forward to talking about here!). From that point in time I realized that we were starting to break down every random Cloudpost deck into its own deck-type, and it was making a mess of our rogue/homebrew list, so I started to designate these random Cloudpost decks as simply “JunkPost” before using these comments to mention what type of build it was. This time around, our JunkPost was brought to us by Shaffawaffa5 with a very interesting Simic build. The deck brought in Kaerveks Torch for a finisher, the Ghostly Flicker combo, and oddly enough, three copies of Temporal Fissure. I think it’s definitely worth taking the two seconds to click the link and check out the build.

Ravnica Has Indeed Returned

I’ve never been one for the speculation game. We’re all aware of it. A new set is announced and finally all of the cards within that set have been spoiled. Immediately the deck builders set out on a mission to make wild guesses over what cards would fit where and how our beloved formats would be changed for the better (or worse, depending whom you ask). Recently there hasn’t been much for fans of Classic Pauper to talk about. In M13 we were presented with your typical selection of reprinted cards and generic, learning-friendly spells. Even Innistrad block had little to offer us beyond Innistrad itself. I would even go as far as to say that in Dark Ascention and Avacyn Restored, we only got four cards that ended up seeing regular play. Maybe this is just the way of the world. The first set of a block always has a bit more hype behind it as we find ourselves on a new plane, experiencing new heroes and villains.

So far, Return to Ravnica has had that first-set impact that we should expect from the first part of a block. A lot has already been said about the possibilities it can grant, and we’re already beyond the point where people can finally start to test their theories. I think the one idea behind this new block that will allow it to break out beyond this one-and-done pattern is the fact that the guilds we all know and love have been spread out amongst the sets. By getting five guilds at a time, important things like guildgates, signets, and charms are now going to be split between the first two sets. Even the promise of guild-specific mechanics have us Magic faithful in high spirits with the hopes of getting high-quality mechanics throughout the whole block.

At this point in time, Return to Ravnica has been online long enough for people to grab the Pauper cards they were interested in and probably even test any ideas they were throwing around earlier. I’m not going to waste time talking about what could be, but beyond all that speculation there is one set of cards that we’ve been introduced to in Return to Ravnica that has the Pauper community buzzing, and I feel I’d be remiss myself to not do so.

These five cards are predicted to have the biggest impact on our format in a long time, but there are still so many questions to be answered…

Why are the guildgates considered so important??

When you first take a look at the guildgates, they don’t seem that fantastic in comparison to the many lands we have access to beyond the Pauper restriction to commons only. A land that comes into play tapped and produces two colors is not anything new to someone who has played Magic for an extended period of time. If we go all the way back to Invasion Block, we were basically provided with precisely the same lands.

When you compare the two cards, the differences are not in the rules text box. Both lands produce the same colors and both enter the battlefield tapped, so how are the gates different? Well the first major point of impact is the fact that they do have that gate subtype. By giving these lands a specific designation (in a similar way that Cloudpost and Glimmerpost are more powerful by being designated as “loci”), we have been granted access to different ways to interact with these lands. Currently we have been granted three cards that become more powerful if you’re running gates; Armory Guard, Gatecreeper Vine, and Ogre Jailbreaker. With five more gates expected to show up in Gatecrash, we can also assume that we’re going to see more cards that will continue to feature similar interactions. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another effect similar to that provided by Gatecreeper Vine, which will allow us to search up gates in some way for limited play.

The second difference is the one that affects Pauper players the most… the gates come in at a common rarity. I won’t go into the always-ongoing discussion of power creep in Magic, but it is definitely a significant change to see that the same card can now be reprinted at a common rarity. If anything, I feel that the addition of the gate subtype makes these lands better than the similar Invasion lands, and yet they were provided to us at the common rarity as opposed to uncommon. Before this point we were given very few choices for lands that produced more than one color of mana in Pauper. Our choices would come down to generically bad lands that produced all colors like Shimmering Grotto and Rupture Spire or the bouncelands from Ravnica block. Of these choices, only the bouncelands have seen regular use, and they have their own handful of drawbacks. While these lands can work to your advantage (if you get to tap the land for mana before you return it) and can be used to generate a significant amount of extra mana per land, they can be slow and cannot be played until a point in time where you have another land to return. In other words, if you have an opening hand that has three lands in it, but they are all Ravnica bouncelands, then you’re going to be forced to mulligan. Not to mention that against a deck like IzzetPost, the use of Capsize can result in a major drawback when they target your Ravnica bouncelands.

Pauper is perhaps the most mono-color-friendly format in Magic. In the competitive environment we’re all familiar with, things like Mono-White Aggro, Goblins, Stompy, Mono-Black Control, and DelverBlue, are each dominant in their individual colors. There are very few decks that win on a regular basis and use more than one color with the biggest contenders being IzzetPost and some form of Dimir control. This restriction on color has been the result of poor options for building a manabase that is friendly to multiple colors.

So does the creation of guildgates make three-color decks possible?

If you’ve read my articles over the past year, you are probably aware of the fact that I hold the opinion that, with the exception of Storm and Affinity, it isn’t possible to have a continuously successful deck that uses three or more colors. There have been a few decks that managed to show up in Daily Events that did have three or more colors, but they never had continued success over a period of weeks, and most of the time they would simply be running a very light splash for a third color. For example, it isn’t unusual to see IzzetPost running three colors for a bit of black, but it often comes down to being used simply for flashback mechanics. The reason behind this is, as I stated earlier, the options that we’ve had available to us prior to this point were so terrible. So has this now changed?

Not yet… and note that the keyword there is yet. I do feel that we’re closer to the point where a deck with three or more colors is viable; however, I think it won’t be a solid option until a point where, at the very least, Gatecrash is released or even when Return to Ravnica Block is finished. At this point in time, any deck that is looking to capitalize on three colors will need to be set into green so they can use Gatecreeper Vines to find the guildgates. As I mentioned earlier I think that we’ll see more cards in Gatecrash that interact with the guildgates and probably another fetch (hopefully it too will be a common). With a bit more support for balancing a manabase full of guildgates, we can finally find a solid deck at three colors. If any deck is going to attempt to hit the mark of three or more colors, they are going to have to overcome the usual problems of finding the mana they need to match the colors in their hand. For now, there are still better ways to do this with things like Prophetic Prism or Chromatic Star, but even these choices have the drawback of wasting your non-land card slots.

Well, if the guildgates are so good, should every multicolored deck switch to them?

Definitely not. While it cannot be denied that the guildgates are a powerful new option for producing multiple colors off of a single land, the guildgates are definitely not for everyone. Starting with the most obvious choice, decks like FissureStorm rely entirely on the ability of the Ravnica bouncelands to produce extra mana. Using the bouncelands alongside untap effects from cards like Snap allows the deck to generate a lot of mana without using rituals like Rite of Flame. Other decks may want the bouncelands to bring cycling lands back from the battlefield so that they can be used as draw, but what about decks like IzzetPost? While many people might instinctively think that these would be an ideal spot for guildgates, I think they’d be missing one of the finer points:

If you’re familiar with the typical IzzetPost list, you’d know that the deck only runs one to two copies of Izzet Boilerworks in the first place for the interaction that allows the deck an extra opportunity to return a Glimmerpost to hand for even more life gain. One reason that IzzetPost tends to run so few copies of the bouncelands has to do with the fact that they come into play tapped. When you already have four lands that come into play tapped thanks to Cloudpost, adding more lands with the same drawback will continue to slow down the deck. IzzetPost is a notoriously slow deck in the first place, but the more tapped lands you have, the slower you get access to the colors you need. If IzzetPost were to bring in a set of Izzet Guildgates, they would be sitting at a high park of eight lands which come into play tapped. The benefit the deck would get from having those lands would be minimal in comparison to the ability to have access to the necessary colors the moment you put a land into play. The one thing that people often don’t realize about IzzetPost is that the deck can run into struggles with obtaining colored mana. While Prophetic Prism is a great card for draw, it really brings the most benefit by being able to take the extra mana generated from a Cloudpost and turn it into a useful color. By using basic lands IzzetPost has immediate access to the necessary colors, while the use of guildgates would mean that you would have to wait an additional turn to be able to access the mana that you need. I know this has been the point of a lot of debate on whether or not Izzet Guildgate will become a staple of this deck, but I really don’t think it fits.

So what about the middle of the road? Decks like Slivers or UB Control variants? Well I think that it really is going to vary deck to deck. There could definitely be some potential for guildgates in a two-color aggro deck like Slivers, but I think you’d need to be very aware of the mana curve. In other words, if you’re hoping to go with a weenie strategy of getting a lot of quick creatures, then maybe having a land that is tapped would be too slow. When it comes to a deck like Teachings or any other version of Dimir control, the Dimir Guildgate will be a great addition for those. These cards will provide a lot of opportunity for variety in Pauper, but they are not to be automatically included the way you would automatically include dual lands. The use of guildgates needs to be evaluated on a deck-by-deck basis.

What about guildgates vs. Evolving Wilds or Terramorphic Expanse?

This is a loaded question. I have seen many a discussion in the MTGSalvation forums based upon this comparison, and I personally think there is no single correct answer. The quick answer here is that again there are pros and cons for each side of things, and it must be evaluated from deck to deck.

Evolving Wilds: Perhaps the only plus for this card is the fact that it allows you to thin out your deck. The concept of thinning a deck is something that has also seen much conceptual debate. The basic idea is that using a fetch land will allow you, not only to shuffle your deck after finding a land, but also to enable you to reduce the size of your deck by one land, thereby increasing the odds of you drawing into any other card. Now any writer worth his weight knows that diving into a mathematic topic with which he is only tangentially familiar is a terrible thing to do, so I’m not going to relive the horror that was my college Statistics class for your entertainment. Without going into these details, I think we can still all agree that mathematical variation significantly impacts the game. If you want more details on how the math works out for thinning, then take a minute to check out this article by Christopher Coppola (oldie, but goodie). If you’re running a deck that has 20 lands and 4 of those lands are Evolving Wilds, then it works almost like you were running fewer than 20 lands without the damaging odds of not drawing enough lands in your opening hand. If you were to run 20 lands and four of those were guildgates, then you’ve got a greater chance to hit land flood but a lower chance to miss potentially important land drops in the mid game.

Guildgates: The obvious plus-side for the use of guildgates is that you get a land that allows you access to either color from that single land. This means that your manabase will be easier to deal with… You know I wrote that last sentence three or four times and realized that no matter how I worded it, it still seemed a bit confusing. So allow me to use this image to help illustrate my point:

First off, thanks go to Psychobabble for allowing me to use the image, as it really works great to illustrate my point. In this situation, with the Izzet Guildgate untapped, the player has the ability to make a play with either the red or blue spell based upon necessity (keeping in mind this is all possible because of the Goblin Electromancer, but you get the idea). If the player had opted to use Evolving Wilds in place of the Izzet Guildgate then he would be restricted to playing either the countermagic or the burn-creature kill. Basically the use of the guildgate has allowed the player to get more utility out of their deck.

So does this mean that the guildgates will finally create that elusive midrange deck for Pauper??

The simple answer is that we are probably closer now than we have been before to a metagame with midrange deck, but again I hesitate to say we’re actually there now. What is midrange? Well, beyond the three major deck types (aggro, control, and combo) there are areas that overlap, where one deck may take on two different roles. In this case, the type that is listed first would be the main focus of the deck. For example, aggro-control would have a heavier creature focus with an undertone of control to it. In the middle is the area labeled as Midrange, for which I found a great description as provided by Luis Scott-Vargas, “If the midrange deck is playing against a dedicated aggro deck, then it tries to be the control, and if it is playing against a true control deck, it tries to take on the aggro role. Against combo it can go either way, but usually has to resort to beatdowns” (the article is worth the read, so click the link if you’re interested). While this definition may not be perfect, I think it still illustrates the point and if you still disagree, well… sorry? Moving on…

One of the biggest issues people have with Pauper is the fact that there is no solid midrange deck that will show up consistently in the Daily Events. Some use this fact as the main fuel to the fire as to why the format isn’t as legitimate as some of the others. To start, I’m not convinced that the lack of a midrange deck is really such a bad thing in the first place. That being said, I think there can be some great potential for midrange to become more solid. Personally, I’m very eagerly awaiting the release of Gatecrash already because I want to see what Simic will have to offer the format. Simic Guildgate will have a lot of potential to be used alongside Gatecreeper Vine in order to create, at the very least, a solid control list. I might almost go as far as to say that the printing of Gatecreeper Vine is almost more important than the guildgates alone because of the fact that it allows you to tutor up what is now the official Pauper dual lands. With the aid of the guildgates, multicolored decks can now clock up to match some of the faster decks that we’re already familiar with in the format.

So final answer… do you think the guildgates are going to live up to the hype?

Well yes… and no. I won’t bore you anymore by rambling about this. The printing of the guildgates (and hopefully the continued printing of gate-interactive cards) will have a major impact on the format without question. These lands will allow decks to access colors easier and make certain deck-types stronger (so if you haven’t already done so, make sure you get a full set of each guildgate). However, I don’t expect a major upheaval in the top decks. While we now will have more access and ability to play more colors in a deck, these single-colored decks have been dominant for so long for a reason.

Wait, is that it?? Where are the decklists???

Ah how did I know that I wasn’t going to be able to get away with that? It’s never an unusual thing for me to sit and just “talk shop” in an article. That being said, you know I can never resist diving into new cards and seeing what we can come up with. I think it becomes more interesting when the new cards you’re looking at are lands because what you can build around those lands is incredibly open-ended. There are two things you should know about me at this point (if you haven’t picked up on it already). The first is that I can go on and on, writing more than you’d ever care to read. The second is that I can’t resist an opportunity to do something such as build a deck for each of the guildgates. If I included those along with the generic discussion over what impact the guildgates may or may not have, it would have taken this article into the “too long, didn’t read” category.

Have no fear though! Like I said, I cannot pass on an opportunity to take a look at each of the five guildgates! You’ll just have to join me next time for another look at the competitive Pauper meta and adventures with five different decks.

As always guys feel free to leave comments!
Also check me out on Twitter @MTGOJustSin.