Unlocking the Vault #39: Classic League QT#2 Wrap-up

Posted on December 25, 2012 by enderfall

This past week, the CQ League Qualifier Tournament #2 finished up with Duranoth taking down the tournament against TommyTopDecker. While yours truly managed to finish a disappointing 2-4 (good for 29th place), there was plenty of exciting action throughout the duration of the tournament. I encourage those with some free time to watch some of the replays posted around the web (Clan Magic Eternal, PlanetWalls, GameMaster 32).

All of the decks can be found listed in Classic Quarter’s deck database but let’s take a look at each of the decks in the Top 8, starting with #8, LordSapphire.

LordSapphire’s deck was one of 2 Workshop decks in the Top 8 (discounting the Affinity deck I’ll discuss later on). It’s a pretty standard-fare Metalworker-Kuldotha Forgemaster deck, except for a couple of unique choices. First, there is a singleton Staff of Nin. Staff is good at picking off little creatures, especially late-game unflipped Delvers. It can also pick off a bunch of creatures in Affinity. Perhaps the best feature is the fact that the Staff is a great source of card draw which allows the deck to reload after its hand has been dumped by a Metalworker.

The second unique aspect to LordSapphire’s deck is the use of Trading Post. Although I haven’t played with this deck, it appears that the Post is used as a card advantage engine in conjunction with Smokestack and other extraneous artifacts in the mid-late game. There’s a lot to like about the Post, though I’d be interested to hear LordSapphire’s own thoughts as to how it performed. On the surface it seems slow and is only geared toward grindy mirror matches and the like. I wonder if Voltaic Key would offer some value in this deck as it can untap a Metalworker or another artifact mana card for additional mana explosiveness. It can also activate Post twice in the same turn.

Moving on, let’s take a look at the 7th-place deck from BlueDiamonds:

BlueDiamonds’ deck was the only Oath deck in the Top 8. This version of GG Oath includes the usual suspect, Blightsteel Colossus, but also newcomer Griselbrand. There are also a few other wrinkles which makes this deck interesting.

First, there are a pair of maindeck Lightning Bolts. This is not something I’ve seen many Oath decks do lately. The Bolts appear to offer little more than some added reach and spot removal for early threats from Tempo decks like Delver. There are also a pair of Mana Drains, which are nice to power out an early Jace, the Mind Sculptor, but I’m not sure what else they do for this deck. I suppose it can have value when you activate a Griselbrand, as it can be used to feed a Yawgmoth’s Will or other tutors after drawing a bunch of cards. I’d rather have Spell Pierce in its place to help win countermagic wars… or maybe a Flusterstorm. You can’t argue with the results, however.

I’m going to skip over the 6th-Place deck for the time being, as it’s a near 75-card mirror to the 1st-Place deck. The 5th-Place deck was piloted by Thewoof2:

Thewoof2 went with his trusty Affinity deck again, and it helped propel him to the 2nd seed after the Swiss rounds. There isn’t much difference between this deck and the ones he had been using leading up to the tournament, but it does have the full complement of Tangle Wires. In my opinion, Wires put this deck in the discussion for Tier 1 status. There is nothing more demoralizing than seeing your opponent drop 5-6 permanents on the board in the first 1 or 2 turns and then following it up with a Tangle Wire. Without some sort of countermagic, the game is effectively over at that point. I can attest to this, as I was felled by Thewoof2 in Round 2 thanks in part to the Wires.

The 5th-Place deck was another Workshop deck, piloted by Thorme:

Thorme’s Workshop deck is quite new to the metagame. It packs a ton of acceleration with Metalworker, Grim Monolith, and the usual artifact mana cards. It appears that it is built to combo out with Staff of Domination as its win conditions are limited to Lodestone Golems and a single Platinum Angel. I suppose you could count Staff of Nin as a win condition as well, but it looks like simply more card advantage and spot removal of aggressive creatures.

Placing 3rd, MTGO Academy’s own PlanetWalls piloted a Blue Control deck:

PlanetWalls took a slightly different approach to building his Blue Control deck, looking to simply go over the top with the difficult-to-remove Frost Titan and grinding out card advantage from Glen Elendra Archmage, Venser, Shaper Savant, Jace, and Snapcaster Mage. The rest of the list is countermagic, card filtering/drawing, and removal. While there are quite a few singletons in a deck that lacks tutors or any way to reliably find them in a pinch, there is a lot of redundancy in their abilities. They can all be classified as bounce/removal and situational countermagic. Some might say it’s a schizophrenic mess, while I prefer to think of it as poetry in motion.

To most Classic veterans, Frost Titan is probably the most surprising card that made a Top 8 list, but it’s not that much of a stretch to understand why it can be good. First, with 4 Mana Drains and the artifact acceleration, there is plenty of ammunition to cast it before Turn 6, and most of the time, you won’t need it until Turn 6 anyway. I’d bet most of the time PlanetWalls cast the Titan, it was well past Turn 6 as the deck is meant to grind out the early-mid game. Against decks like Oath, Titan is as much of a trump to an Emrakul or Blightsteel as a Sower of Temptation is, maybe even more so since you can preemptively cast the Titan before the fatty is Oath’ed up (unless Dragon Breath is flipped up, but Sower won’t be useful there either). It can also tie down lands and other problematic cards. Lastly, the extra mana needed to cast a spell or ability against it comes up more often that one would think. There is only one typical removal spell that is widely played in Classic that can deal with a Titan, and that’s a Swords to Plowshares.

Moving on to the Finals, we have runner up TommyTopDecker piloting a Mono-Blue Delver list:

TommyTopDecker’s list is a streamlined Delver list that avoids the problem that multicolor Delver decks can have: getting color-screwed. It also limits the damage that Wasteland can do in the Delver “mirror”.

Despite being mono-colored, the deck has the tools to beat any deck; Sower is there for Oath, Steel Sabotage can deal with Workshops and Affinity, and Delver and Clique can fly over just about all the creatures in the other Tempo decks.

The deck looks like it could be soft to Dredge, but there were only 4 Dredge decks in the field this time around, and none in the Top 8. Particularly confusing is the single Leyline of the Void in the sideboard. While there are no black mana-producing lands which would lead to Leyline gumming up your hand with an uncastable card, it seems out of place to rely simply on luck to find it in your opener, especially when you consider it’s probably more likely to draw it after your opener than it is to find it in your opener in the first place. I agree that you wouldn’t want a full playset, but I would rather have access to something like a Tormod’s Crypt or a Relic of Progentitus instead.

What I do like about the deck is the sheer number of permission cards. TommyTopDecker has 15 pieces of countermagic (2 more in form of the Sabotages against artifacts). Throw in some Vendilion Cliques and Snapcaster Mages, and there is no shortage of answers.

Finally, we arrive at the winning decklist from Duranoth. Both Montolio and Duranoth built similar decks with 53 identical cards and only 3 different cards separating the 2 lists. Here are both lists for reference:

Both decks are an evolution of the GW Hate decks of the past. Adding black to the core of the deck allows them to access a card advantage engine (Dark Confidant), a tutor package, a rising star in Eternal formats (Deathrite Shaman, and the best removal spell that captures nearly every permanent in the format (Abrupt Decay). These cards give the deck a better chance against decks that are not Oath or Workshop, the traditional best matchups for GW Bears decks.

Between the two lists, Duranoth had more Deathrites, which was a big factor in the championship match. It serves to help prove that Deathrite is here to stay in Classic. In my set review, Deathrite was a card that I missed out on, but not because I thought its abilities weren’t relevant in Classic, rather, I thought it cost a green AND a black mana to cast. At 2 off-colored mana, I believed it would be too slow and too difficult to cast to make a difference. However, at a single green-black hybrid mana, Deathrite is plenty fast and easily castable.

Since I missed out on my review a couple months back, I suppose now is as good a time as any to provide one! Deathrite is one of the most interesting cards that Wizards has developed in the last few years. In a format with both Wastelands and lots of fetch lands, Deathrite has plenty of fuel to act as a Birds of Paradise when you need it. The other two abilities provide a considerable amount of graveyard hate and reach. While it’s not a Leyline of the Void or Rest in Peace with regard regard to Dredge hosers, it offers some maindeck hate that can provide just enough disruption to give some decks a chance in Game 1 against Dredge. Scavenging Ooze makes pre-board matches even better if Dredge doesn’t get off to a blazing start.

Post-board, when combined with traditional graveyard hate, it makes for a formidable combination of cards to hate out Dredge. The ability to both gain life when needed and to deal 2 unblockable damage are highly relevant in Classic. 2-4 points of damage (or 2-4 points of life gain) can be the difference in many matches. Above all, if there happen to be no targets in any graveyard, Deathrite can always attack for 1 damage.

One final card that I’d like to discuss is the use of Ulvenwald Tracker in both decks. The Tracker is a formidable creature stalemate-breaker when combined with a large creature like Knight of the Reliquary, Tarmogoyf, or a pumped-up Scavenging Ooze. It’s perfect as a 1-off to be searched up as a Green Sun’s Zenith target late game.

Changes in the Metagame

Going forward, I expect Deathrite to further assert himself in the metagame. Side by side with Abrupt Decay, there are certainly many possibilities to explore. I firmly believe there is a control deck that can utilize both cards as tools to deal with many different decks. BUG Control decks have not seen much play in the last couple of years, but maybe Deathrite, Decay, Liliana of the Veil, and Jace can form the core of a mean control deck. I’ll have to brew something up during the winter break. Perhaps I’ll be comfortable with the deck to report my findings in another article.

I also expect that the GWB decks that Montolio and Duranoth piloted in QT #2 to be further tweaked and will be a significant factor in the metagame going forward. Perhaps the most important factor is that nearly all of the cards in Duranoth and Montolio’s decks are Modern legal. If we are able to pick up some cross over from the growth of Modern and the imminent release of Vintage, this is a deck that many people can build if they have been playing online over the last couple of years.

Also, with all these creatures with activated abilities running around, does Linvala, Keeper of Silence have a role in Classic? It conveniently costs 4 mana, so it avoids Abrupt Decay as well. I suppose Cursed Totem can also be considered for that role, though it can be hit by both artifact hate and Decay. Totem doesn’t require white mana, however.

One final thought: With the number of creature decks in the Top 8, Oath has to see a bump in play, doesn’t it? There were also 2 Workshop decks, which is traditionally a strong matchup for Oath.

enderfall
Clan Magic Eternal
Follow me on Twitter @enderfall

 

  1. Not sure we’ll see the Oath bump. There were 7 Oath decks in the tourney making it one of, if not the most common deck at the start. Despite that, only 1 made it into the Top 8 and none in Top 4. Cage is just so ubiquitous now…of the other 7 Top 8 decks, 6 of them had 4 Cages in the board and the 7th had one maindeck with Trinket Mages to search it up.

  2. Hey Thorme, that’s a good point. Cage is a significant factor in this metagame. In that case, does Abrupt Decay have a spot in Oath’s sideboard? I think Oath has the tools to adapt around Cage if the builder wants to do so.

    Also, did I analyze your deck correctly, in that you are looking to combo out with Staff and Metalworker as much as possible? Obviously you can still grind out a win a lot of the time with just Sphere’s and a Lodestone, but with 4 Staff it seems that your deck is built to abuse that combo as much as possible.

  3. Agree that Oath can answer Cage in a variety of ways…just makes life a lot more challenging for Oath than the “good old days”.

    And yes, you’re right about my deck…essentially Workshop combo. Metalworker/Staff being the primary along with Key/Vault as secondary. Lodestones rarely win for me (and I don’t even have any spheres), but they’re such an amazing turn 1 play that basically make the opponent scramble to answer while I can go about doing other broken things.

  4. Regarding bolts in the oath list: It is probably good against delver-tempo-decks. But it’s also an efficient answer to Sower of Temp.

    /MOBZ