Breaking Through – From Theory, to Threat, to Throwaway

September 30, 2009 |

Conley Woods

Breaking Through – From Theory, to Threat, to Throwaway

One of the most frequent questions I get asked from curious players is my process for building decks and all the secrets that lay within. It is quite a flattering question, as it implies that they respect your product and are curious as to how it becomes what it does. While flattering however, it is also one of the hardest questions to answer. Most of what I put into deck building comes from an internal level. If for example, I asked you how to be funny, or to be smart, or creative etc. you would likely not have an answer to snap back on a whim.

The mechanical steps to deck building are well documented but this is not what people seek when they ask the question. I can never put into words my exact thought process when evaluating cards, but I can at least work through exactly how I arrive at any given deck.

Today I would like to just go through a recent deck I explored for Extended, trying to recount my thought process as best I remember along the way. It is not quite the same as me just saying how I come up with a deck, but hopefully will shed some light on the topic none the less.

Some time in August, I decided to sift through the entire batch of soon to be legal Extended cards and write down every card that evoked some trigger in my head or that happened to scream "play me." This included well known cards like Heartbeat of Spring or Urzatron, but also a lot of "chaff" like Sway of the Stars and Bitter Ordeal. I’ll give you a second while you go look those up because they are basically on no one’s radar for any format. I tend to not give up on any one card as quickly as most simply because unique effects are bound to be exploited. Sometimes the pieces are not there to work with, or the format is too hostile, but I will generally give the ideas a second thought at least.

One card that I happened to write down was Devoted Druid. Obviously it has some applications in Elves, but I wanted to explore what its explosive mana could do outside of that archetype.

I began looking for ways to abuse its endless untapping each turn. There were ways to remove counters, but all of those seemed pretty bad outside of Quillspike which is a tried and failed combo deck that I just did not want to explore in a format as hostile as Extended. There were always just big dumb 5 drops, but those seemed much too fair in a very unfair environment. And then there were pump spells.

Pump spells with a Devoted Druid out basically act as rituals, only they have the ability to be more explosive and to be more versatile outside of any combo shenanigans. I began looking at viable toughness enhancers and came up with a pretty big list that included the following:

Llanowar Augur

There were others of course, but they didn’t offer enough of a P/T boost to mana cost ratio for me. They essentially acted like a Desperate Ritual when I wanted to be casting Dark Rituals and Cabal Rituals with threshold.

In the back of my mind, one of the advantages to running a combo deck like this was that the deck could easily fall back on its B plan which was essentially a Stompy deck. Martyr of Spores and Llanowar Augur seemed pretty exciting in that type of deck, as they offered combo potential, or a hard body to throw pump spells at when you couldn’t piece together a combo. Giant Growth was looking weaker and weaker so it ended up not making the original cut. Every other spell generated (or had the potential to generate) 3 mana and Giant Growth would only net 2.

It was about now that I realized this combo deck would be trash with only one source of mana acceleration. I may as well just be playing an actual Stompy deck because I was going to see Devoted Druid something like 40-50% of the time on turn 2 with the current tools that I was working with. There was Summoner’s Pact to find him, but then I would be spending an extra turn tapped down trying to generate the mana I actively desired.

I then remembered a pretty Constructed unworthy cycle from Mirrodin that included the famous Spikeshot Goblin. In this cycle was a card by the name of Viridian Joiner who, although one mana more expensive than the Druid, was able to play the role of Doppleganger pretty nicely. With both of these guys as 4-ofs, I would now have 8 ways to generate an absurd amount of mana and the combo should be more reliable.

The engine portion of the deck now had a rough outline. It was pointless to look at kill mechanisms before this as understanding that "Fireball for 20" (Insert any win condition) could kill people is not very helpful. I needed to make sure the foundation for getting to that "Fireball" was in place.

I still had no way to channel all of this mana however and needed some green or colorless way to win with something in the realm of 8-12 mana on turn 3 or 4. The obvious answer came up in Tooth and Nail and we were slowly piecing together an interesting deck. One thing I was worried about was that all of my spells had inherent card disadvantage in them. I wanted some stable way to generate a P/T boost while being mana efficient as well. There was the very cute Umbral Mantle which would be awesome on a Joiner but do nothing except allow for a bunch of untaps on my Devoted Druid. I then ran into the heavily underplayed Grafted Wargear. This would not be so good to play the turn I wanted to go off but would be excellent the turn before, leaving its bonuses on the battlefield once the mess of green mana was no longer needed.

I went in search of some lands that could aid me in my power hungry quest and Llanowar Reborn came up as an obvious inclusion. This allowed me to play a turn 1 ETBT land, turn 2 Devoted Druid, and result in an almost certain turn 3 win. When that didn’t happen, I still had the ability to drop a turn 1 Augur and then Druid for the same inevitability. A lot of redundancy made for a more consistent deck.

A powerful strategy will rarely be a good strategy unless you are able to introduce a high level of consistency. All in Red is a good example of this as it is able to power out the best turn 1 plays in the format. After it blows its load though, it has no protection with which to work with and that is assuming it was even able to go off in the first place.

I wanted to add Horizon Canopy as a random cantrip with basically no drawback and then added Treetop Village to give me another win condition with all of these pump spells running around. After realizing that I would be running white anyway, I went back and refined my search to look for any white pump spells. Only one caught my eye but it was a good one in the form of Inspirit. This would give my Joiner an untap and power boost, potentially resulting in the most mana generation of any of the pump spells, while giving a +3 mana boost when used on the Druid as it added 5 toughness and an untap for 3 mana. Some basics and a few other White duals to support the newly added Inspirit led to the following original list.

This list ended up showing potential but was pretty bad. The beauty of actually proxying up a list midway through construction is that you get to actually see the flaws in your thinking rather than just theorize about them. It also brings a sense of the deck being legitimate which makes following through with new changes much easier as opposed to the list falling behind a desk never to be seen again.

The biggest issue I was having was that, unlike the now 8 copies of mana acceleration, Tooth and Nail could rarely be counted on to show up. It was awesome when it did but when it didn’t you had to go into beatdown mode which was a letdown. In addition, Martyr of Spores was just not holding its own. The problem was that I so rarely held a bunch of Green cards which meant he was normally a Giant Growth, but when I had to play him from hand and pop him in the same turn, he would only be netting me 1 mana. I decided that the ever reliable Giant Growth was just a better upgrade.

My solution to the Tooth and Nail problem was to just start running more creatures that I could actually cast rather than to play stupid win more cards like Progenitus and the Kiki-Mite combo. I decided to go up to 3 Sundering Titan and 2 Woodfall Primus to cement a land death theme. This gave me, in essence, 9 different game winning spells I could cast which meant even more redundancy than the mana package gave me.

Here is a huge lesson, and that is to constantly reevaluate the card pool that you are working with. Going through just one time may give you a skeleton for a deck, but each subsequent time you reach back into the catalogs you will find something new. These small upgrades and improvements will drastically alter the deck over its life span. Had I not looked back into white, Inspirit would have never even been on my radar.

I made the appropriate changes and went back to work playtesting the deck. I was actually surprised by how many turn 3 and 4 wins it could theoretically achieve when goldfishing but the real test would be in actual matchups. It turned out that the combo was just too fragile against counterspells and while it had inherent resistance to damage based removal, a Path to Exile would bring you to your knees when you attempted to cast a Might of Oaks on an unsuspecting Druid or Joiner.

I messed with the list a little more, trying to provide a more solid aggro backup plan but nothing could ever materialize for me to actually give this a shot over some other alternative. The deck would be unsleeved and the list tucked away on the island of forgotten toys.

Flash forward about a month when the full spoiler for Zendikar is almost complete. I had been focused on a lot of the cool looking cards like Vampire Hexmage and fetchlands and completely ignoring that stupid little green list that I had worked on so hard just a few weeks prior. During one of my Sealed games, I was attacking with some 3-power dork into an empty board of my opponent who was at 7 life when he attempted to Hideous End it, which would coincidentally kill me in the process. I stared down at my hand and it hit me. I quickly snapped down a Vines of Vastwood with kicker, killing my opponent and saving the day.

Vines of Vastwood would give that green deck protection in one of the desperately needed areas as it could be held in hand waiting for them to try and blow you out with their Path. You would of course counter their spell and Dark Ritual while you were at it. I went back to the drawing board with the newly discovered Vines in place of the Giant Growths as they seemed like a strict upgrade.

It is here in the deck building process where you are most open to changes that you would not have thought of before. You have opened the door to turn something bad into something good so exploit this and analyze every card in your deck again, skimming for inspiration.

I knew I was helping in one department of weakness by adding the removal resistant pump spell, but I still had no way to deal with counterspells. In walked Summoning Trap. This card turned out to be insane in the deck, turning a turn 2 Spell Snare‘d Druid into a Sundering Titan or Primus. I cut all but one of the Tooth and Nails to make room for this and upped my count on both Titan and Primus to a full 4. This allowed me to have plenty of threats to dump when I hit a large mana count while also protecting me more against counterspells.

I, of course, entertained plenty of other ideas that made the cutting room floor, like Oran-Rief, the Vastwood, but just because a card has synergy with your ultimate plan does not mean it deserves to be in the deck. I did not want more ETBT lands and Oran couldn’t tap for mana and use its ability at the same time which was a huge setback.

Summoning Trap was a very realistic play at 6 mana and I wanted to capitalize on that by making the deck a little less reliant on the mana elves. I turned back to the mana base in search of an answer and found the very underplayed Time Spiral storage lands. Conveniently, there was even a G/W one waiting for me so I gladly took out the painful Brushlands and added in 4 Saltcrusted Steppe.

Sometimes the answers you seek are in the least likely of places, like a mana base. This is one of the biggest downfalls of players these days, as they tend to list a deck as just the spells and then sum up the mana base as "22 lands." You are not deck building when you do that; you are spell structuring which is not a very vital skill in Magic. A deck is 75 cards. Granted you can wait on sideboard structuring until you at least have a rough list for the maindeck but you still need to devote time to it and to the mana base. Anything less than that and you are trying to half-ass something that other players aren’t, which will show in the results.

After many revisions and realizing that I wanted Treetop Village to not enter the battlefield tapped as often but really wanted its evasion, I ended up at the following list:

You can see some radical differences with the philosophy here of a more consistent almost All-in-Green style deck as opposed to a Tooth and Nail based deck. You gain a lot with the resiliency of the Zendikar cards and actually have quite the matchup against things like Next Level Blue. But the job wasn’t done just yet.

Now we had to test the deck against every matchup and here is where we found our fatal flaw. The deck was not fast enough to beat Zoo or Affinity. Sure you could combo off before losing, but now your combo only left a big dude or two in play and did not "just" win. You would often find that you needed to leave your team back for a while as a counter attack was just lethal and when they finally drew that burn spell or Ornithopter things ended in a very bad way. This is not to say that the deck is bad, it just needs some work.

In a normal situation I would be willing to continue working with the deck, but you need to know when to let decks go. In this case, I have 3 or 4 other very viable decks that have been putting up awesome results. I was needing to prune some of the decks on the fringe off anyway, which this deck just happened to be. There is a lot of room for innovation still with this deck, such as adding Deus of Calamity, but I will leave that one for you guys to figure out.

I will note that the deck is very solid and if you are insistent on going rogue in the upcoming Extended season, this may be a good starting point.

The takeaway here is to know your limits. We worked from just an idea all the way up to a hard copy of the deck before moving on. It is never a bad thing to give the wacky ideas a try so long as you are able to remain minimally biased. Forcing a deck to work when its numbers are not cooperating is only going to spell trouble.

Deck building definitely has some science involved in it but the most required component is time and patience. You will never hit that amazing idea with only one try, or if you happen to do just that, it will not be flawless by any means. Working through all of the possible situations, card choices, metagames expectancies, etc. is the only way to actually arrive at a worthwhile product.

Alright, back to the Extended grind for me, as my team and I have some exciting stuff brewing. Thanks to everyone who said hi at the Denver Prerelease as well, as it's always cool to meet people who read my columns. Not sure what I will be writing about next week, but something related to Zendikar Limited is probably a good guess as that is the next PTQ season. Thanks for reading!

Conley Woods

P.S. To anyone brave enough to continue working on that deck, here are a few neat interactions to note:

-Grafted Wargear can be moved around to blow up an extra land with Woodfall Primus or a bunch of lands with Sundering Titan.

-Llanowar Reborn resets Woodfall Primus’ persist counter which is relevant for the above scenario.

-Know when to just beat down with a 4/4 Viridian Joiner and Blinkmoth Nexus as sometimes you won’t draw into a fatty or Trap for a while.

-Using Vines of Vastwood to counter a Modular trigger or Cranial Plating equip can often be the difference in winning or losing the Affinity matchup.

- You will almost always have the mana to play 2 threats when you do go off, or at least a Trap and a big dude. Play the trap last of course, for obvious reasons.

Share This Article

Share |

About This Author

Conley Woods

Conley is known for his love of rogue decks, and his unconventional deckbuilding technique has resulted in numerous success stories. He won GP Orlando to kick off 2012, made Top 8 at Grand Prix Oakland 2010, was the Grand Prix Tampa 2009 finalist, and made top 4 of both Pro...