Unlocking the Vault #54: Looking back on the Invitational

On December 21, the 2nd Classic Quarter League Invitational was held to crown the end of season Classic Champion. Eighteen players were able to join from the 26 eligible to battle it out in 5 rounds of Swiss followed by a cut to the Top 8. The videos from the official stream are archived here.

My tournament did not go so well. I took my stock Null Rod Workshop deck out for another spin, but the results just weren’t there. I was matched up against a Delver deck in Round 1 and lost the coin flip. I think Delver hit the board both games on Turn 1, and I had no answer to it. Round 2 I was matched up against another Fish deck, and while I was able to win one of the games, it was clear that today wasn’t going to be my day.

It’s hard to participate in the tournament you are running, as there are so many other things that you have to worry about that don’t involve the match you have to play. In the end, I don’t think my mind was 100% on the matches, and as a result I dropped from the tournament after going 0-2. Nonetheless, this is a recap of the entire tournament, not just my own experience.

Creatures, creatures, everywhere…

The major story from the tournament was the wildly open metagame. 12 distinct decks were present and only 16 copies of Mishra’s Workshop could be found in the entire field. While Affinity ultimately took the crown (both in Swiss and the Top 8), the story of the day was the prevalence of creatures.

Creature decks came prepared to take on the Classic metagame and performed well in the tournament. Delver, Merfolk, Hate Bears, Fish, and Hussar Weenie combined to go 17-13 in the tournament, but that doesn’t really tell the whole story. Three creature-based decks made the Top 8 (with 2 making the Top 4). Additionally, the runner-up deck marked the return of Delver of Secrets to the Classic metagame. Cronin built an interesting Esper Delver deck which utilized the recently released True-Name Nemesis.

Yes, you read that correctly, that is 2 copies of Theros Planeswalker Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver. In the matches that I both watched and played against Cronin’s deck, I didn’t see Ashiok make much of a difference. In the quarterfinals against Montolio, Cronin managed to get an Ashiok on the board, but Cronin would have likely won that game anyway. That said, Ashiok is a great card against creature/fair decks, so it’s worth watching to see if it catches on going forward considering the number of creatures running around the format. Maybe sweepers will come back en vogue, too? Cronin’s sideboard had a trio of Terminus, something that is easier to cast, even when having to pay a Sphere tax. It should also be mentioned that Cronin’s deck is “Esper” only in spirit. Ashiok is in fact the only card in his 75 that requires black mana.

Wide-Open Top 8

A couple other interesting decks showed up in the Top 8, including a true Control deck piloted by Naoto. The 4-Color Control deck utilized the Gush-Fastbond engine that Naoto loves with win conditions such as Deathrite Shaman, Tinker for Blightsteel Colossus or Time Vault, and Jace. Naoto even managed to maindeck a single copy of Toxic Deluge.

While the deck looks well-suited to deal with many different threats/strategies, I wonder if it is still equipped to deal with Workshop decks. Both straight-Workshop pilots went 0-2 (more on this later), and Naoto lost both of his matches against Affinity (both against ncsu31sb, who won the Tournament). The Gush-Bond engine is much less effective when staring down just a single Sphere on the board, especially if that Sphere can also attack for 5 (Lodestone Golem). I’ll be sure to try and put this deck through the paces, but I do wonder if Workshop’s prevalence will prevent it from making a similar impact in future DE’s or QT’s.

The other interesting deck in the Top 8 was Enric’s Thought Lash-Laboratory Maniac combo deck. Enric’s deck is much more combo-control in the same vein as Oath of Druids than what you might find in your traditional Dark Ritual-Tendrils of Agony Combo decks that you see in Vintage. The premise here is that you drop a Thought Lash on the table and bide your time until you can cast a Laboratory Maniac. Once both are on the table, you can mill your entire library and either wait for your draw step to win with the Maniac, or find another way to draw a card (Brainstorm, Sensei’s Divining Top, or Ponder).

The combo is fragile to any sort of disruption – either with creature or enchantment removal. The tricky part is not in assembling the combo, but in making sure that you can safely activate it. If your opponent is sitting on a removal spell for Maniac, you must have countermagic backup in order to make sure you don’t lose after milling your deck. This is where cards like Swan Song and Dispel come in handy.

The advantage over other combo decks such as Hermit Druid is that it avoids any type of graveyard hate. For anyone looking for a new combo deck in Classic, you could do a lot worse than Enric’s deck.

Rounding out the Top 8 was 1 Dredge, 1 Bant Fish, 1 BUG Fish, and 1 Dark Depths deck. The overall metagame looked like this:

3 Oath
2 Workshop
2 Affinty
2 Fish
2 Dark Depths
1 Dredge
1 Merfolk
1 4-Color Control
1 Thought Lash-Laboratory Maniac Combo
1 UW Hussar Weenie
1 GW Hate Bears
1 Esper Delver

Workshop fails to impress

So what happened to Workshop? A couple of Workshop regulars eschewed their trusty artifacts for creature-based decks. That didn’t stop those players from placing well in this Tournament, however. Montolio and thewoof2 managed to finish 3rd and 9th respectively. As one of the two traditional Workshop builds, I already discussed my tournament experience earlier, while the other Workshop pilot had some rough matchups where a lack of hands-on experience probably contributed to their early exit as well.

There was also a significant amount of artifact hate littered in nearly all of the decks. Energy Flux, Hurkyl’s Recall, and Nature’s Claim were everywhere. Still, Workshop is a powerful deck, and I fully expect it to return to prominence in little time. Once DEs start firing again, Workshop will resume its position atop the Classic hierarchy.

Disappearance of Oath

What’s perhaps more surprising is how poorly Oath has been performing. One would think that in a field littered with creatures, Oath would perform well. Contrary to that belief, Oath decks managed a collective 5-8 record in the Invitational, with one of those wins being a bye. Creature decks have adapted to be able to beat both Workshop and Oath using disruptive creatures. Grafdigger’s Cage also seems to be a problem for Oath as 13 decks had at least 3 copies somewhere in their decklists for an astounding total of 49 in the field. Considering there were 4 Oath/Dredge decks that want nothing to do with the Cage, 13 out of the 14 decks that could use Cage did.

Surprisingly, Abrupt Decay is still not being maindecked in Oath. Only one of the three Oath decks had a mana base that could realistically support Decay, but that deck only had 2 in the main (with no additional copies in the sideboard). While Decay can’t remove multiple Cages, when combined with countermagic to prevent it from hitting the battlefield in the first place, it has worked out well for me in the past. Oath decks should already be playing at least 1 Nature’s Claim in their deck anyway to deal with Workshop decks, which is another option available to them to remove Cage. I also think that Oath might want to consider Thoughtseize and/or Duress, especially out of the sideboard for games on the play.

True-Name Domination?

Only 2 decks in the tournament opted to play the mini-Progenitus, True-Name Nemesis (TNN). In addition to Cronin’s “Esper” Delver deck, Montolio brought a Bant Fish deck equipped with TNN.

With only 2 copies of TNN in each deck, it’s probable that both players were testing the waters. It’s also difficult to understand if TNN made any significant impact in any of the games. In the games that I watched, Knight of the Reliquary seemed to be doing more work for Montolio, as I failed to see a single TNN on the battlefield. I’d be curious to hear each of their thoughts on the card.

In an interesting twist, the lone Merfolk deck did not use TNN. Considering that I played a match in the Tournament Practice room the night before against the same pilot using a Merfolk deck with TNN in it, it’s a curious omission. In fact, one of the reasons why I ultimately chose to play with Workshop was due to the fact that I was summarily trounced by the Merfolk deck when testing out a Bant Fish deck similar to Montolio’s. TNN did swing one game in favor of the Merfolk pilot when I played it in the TP room, so it wasn’t as if the card didn’t perform at all.

It’s likely that there is a little bit of tempo lost when having to ratchet up an AEther Vial to 3 counters in order to drop in a TNN, but Cavern of Souls should be enough to ensure an uncounterable way to play TNN unimpeded. That being said, it’s not really a possibility for Merfolk to play 4 Vial and 4 Cavern when they already play 9 colorless lands. As more people pick up TNN, I wonder if they’ll slot him into Merfolk decks at all.

Next QT

The plan is to hold the final Classic Invitational just before Vintage Masters is released. I’m aiming for a date of June 7th. In order to finish 2 Qualifier Tournaments (QT) in time for the Invitational, I’m going to have to start them earlier than the upcoming release of the next 2 sets in Theros block. This means that the next QT will start on Feb 3rd, a couple weeks before the scheduled release of Born of the Gods. It’s unfortunate that we won’t be able to use any cards in the set that might be Classic-playable, but the trade-off is that we can send off the Classic format with one final celebration as we crown the last Classic Champion.

I have a few changes that I would like to implement that should help fix a few of the problems associated with the last season, but I’m not ready to announce them here. Please check the forums on ClassicQuarter.com.

enderfall
Clan Magic Eternal
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