In Development – A Series of Harrowing Decisions
Posted by Riki
October 20, 2009 | 
25 comments
In Development – A Series of Harrowing Decisions
A little while ago, I was Winston drafting my Kamigawa cube with my friend Shane. Yes, I have a Cube that is one of each card from Kamigawa block. Early on in my draft, I saw and immediately picked a Gifts Ungiven, eventually splashing blue in an otherwise robust black-red deck almost solely for the purpose of playing that Gifts. I eventually managed to Gifts for this spread of four cards, of which I was quite proud: Gutwrencher Oni, Infernal Kirin, Nezumi Bone-Reader, and [card Shirei, Shizos Caretaker]Shirei, Shizo’s Caretaker[/card]. I won that game, and our Winston draft, but did the ability to run a single copy of Gifts Ungiven merit splashing several Islands into an otherwise very strong two-color deck – a deck that might have been stronger without the splash?
Regardless of my answer to that question, the real "answer" in this situation is, of course, that I drafted and played Gifts because it’s a card I just wanted to play. Gifts does things I love doing in Magic, like searching my library, running one-ofs, and having clever packages to deal with and win in different game situations. I may well have made my draft deck worse because I wanted to play this card.
These are what I tend to think of as aesthetic choices. They’re not simply issues of game style, such as preferring to play aggro, combo, control, midrange, or some other definition of an archetype. They’re more about making decisions based on your preference for drawing lots of cards, interacting with the board, or even something as simple as searching your library. These aesthetic decisions can lead us to draft particular cards we perhaps shouldn’t, and unexamined, they may make us think there’s only one way to achieve our goals.
Finding the optimal path to four colors
For the last two years or so of Standard, if you were planning on going over three colors, you pretty much wanted to go with Vivid lands and Reflecting Pools. Although this didn’t obviate the need to think through the exact parameters of your mana base, it was more an issue of which Vivids to combine with which filters, rather than what overall approach you want to take to building that mana base. Now, post-rotation, we have more decisions to make.
This came up for me in the past week as I worked on playtesting the latest Ascension Pulse build against various decks from the recent Philly $5K. As I’d expected, the deck did well after sideboarding against Boros, and it worked just fine against all the other decks except for, sadly, Jund. With Jund being such a dominating presence in the modern metagame, this represented a potentially deal-ending problem for the deck. This, in turn, had me pondering options that would have expanded Ascension Pulse from a three-color to a four-color deck, such as adding in Wall of Denial.
Suddenly I had to think about generating a more complex mana base"¦and just as suddenly, I realized I should already have given more thought to this question for the new Standard. The only reason I hadn’t was because of an aesthetic preference.
On the face of it, there are a number of different options we can include in any current mana base. We have [card Crumbling Necropolis]Alara tri-lands[/card], Rupture Spires, Terramorphic Expanses, M10 [card Rootbound Crag]"I care about basic lands" duals[/card], [card Misty Rainforest]fetchlands[/card], and Zendikar "bonus life" duals. We also have the option of using land-searching cards such as Harrow to find the lands we need to accelerate and fix our mana. These all interact with varying degrees of efficiency with each other, and that’s where we suddenly find ourselves wondering what combination yields the most effective mana base to suit our needs.
Aesthetically, I prefer fetch lands and searching. I admit this is an aesthetic choice, one based on my actual, literal enjoyment of searching my library for stuff. Clearly, these kinds of choices influence why we play the game and how we play it, but if the thing we love is going to lose us the game"¦well, I like winning, too.
So how should we build our four-color mana base? Fetches and duals? Tri-lands and Spires?
In my professional field, biology, there’s a saying that "a day in the library is worth a week in the lab." That is, you should check first to see what other people have done before you waste a lot of time trying to figure it out yourself. In that spirit, I referred back to three different Pro Tour events to survey environments in which people played four or five-color decks without the benefit of Vivids, to generate a baseline for exploring which approach we want to take now. Coincidentally, two of these Pro Tours happened in Honolulu.
Successful mana-fixing in a non-Vivid world
The more recent PT Honolulu speaks directly to our question, as it saw mana-fixing addressed entirely with Alara cards. Consider the following pair of five-color control builds from Honolulu:
Lucas Blohon’s 5CC
Paul Cheon’s 5CC
4 Bloodbraid Elf
1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind
2 Uril, the Miststalker
4 Wall of Denial
4 Bituminous Blast
3 Celestial Purge
3 Cruel Ultimatum
4 Esper Charm
2 Identity Crisis
3 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Terminate
4 Arcane Sanctum
3 Crumbling Necropolis
4 Exotic Orchard
2 Grixis Panorama
2 Island
4 Jungle Shrine
2 Mountain
4 Seaside Citadel
3 Swamp[/deck]
The two mana bases are similar enough, but with one notable difference. Whereas Cheon’s version runs fifteen tri-lands and two Panoramas, Blohon relies on ten tri-lands and four Rupture Spires. In aggregate, the decks are roughly similar in the degree to which they give up tempo to manage their mana-fixing, and both use a full set of Exotic Orchards, which is unlikely to succeed in the current Standard environment. Playing an Orchard into a Boros deck is just no fun. Both decks also rely on simply having a lot of lands to hit their land drops, with twenty-six lands in Blohon’s deck and a whopping twenty-eight in Cheon’s.
Now consider two four-color Gifts decks from the first PT Honolulu and from Worlds 2005:
Frank Karsten’s Greater Good Gifts
Makahito Mihara’s Greater Good Gifts
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Clearly, the entire approach differs here. Both decks run significantly leaner mana bases than the Alara examples, with twenty-three lands. They have access to a number of duals, but maintain a large supply of basic lands because they have to, as they’re rich in land-searching. It’s easy to miss it on a first glance through the list, but both Gifts decks run ten land search cards, eight of which can only grab basics. Instead of continually giving up tempo for the sake of mana-fixing, these decks feature "tempo bumps" where they play two- or three-mana spells to fix their mana and accelerate a bit, but each individual land drop maintains normal tempo.
This sets up our basic dichotomy – do we continually sacrifice tempo to achieve mana-fixing, or do we opt for "tempo bumps" and devote slots in our deck to achieving fixing? Which is better?
To continue my analogy from above, once we’ve gone to the library to do our background research, it’s time for us to develop our hypothesis and set up some experiments.
Testing the two approaches
Since my entire interest in this area was prompted by my desire to generate four-color variations of the Ascension Pulse deck, I put together these two test versions that tried to rely on the different core approaches outlined above:
Alara-style Ascension Pulse (not recommended)
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This build features twenty-six lands, including eight tri-lands and four Rupture Spires. Note that I didn’t eschew the fetches here, but our commitment to having fetch lands is naturally limited by the paucity of basics in the deck.
Ravnica-style Ascension Pulse (not recommended)
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This version goes down to twenty-four lands, but adds in searching in the form of Borderland Ranger and Harrow. There’s an interesting tension here between the fetches and these search spells, since they’re all trying to access a necessarily limited pool of basic lands. That said, we only need to worry about this tension to a degree, because once we hit a certain land count, we’re good and don’t need any more. This mana base can also successfully use the M10 duals, as it will regularly serve up basic lands to bring those in untapped.
The testing process largely involved running both of these variations up against Jund decks taken from the Philly $5K, with a smattering of action against other decks from the same event. I learned a number of useful things here, the first being unrelated to the specific goal of the testing – this happens in biology as well, with the most interesting result having nothing to do with the question we thought we were asking. These adjusted builds still don’t stand up to Jund, although I’ll address that in more detail below. On topic, I learned that there was no significant difference in success and survival between the two approaches. Neither one fundamentally stumbled on mana, neither one had trouble getting the colors it needed, and neither was too slow to compete.
This doesn’t make it a total wash, but it does mean that our choice between these approaches probably depends on how they subtly interact with our other cards. If we’re going to be relying on Knight of the Reliquary as a finisher, then fetches and Harrows are clearly good. If we’re aiming toward a particularly color-intensive finisher, such as Cruel Ultimatum, then tri-lands and Rupture Spires are probably best. The good news is that you can tailor your land choices to these specific needs without worrying that you’re torpedoing your overall likelihood of success.
Back to taking down Jund
As I mentioned above, the inciting incident for all this rumination about mana bases and aesthetic choices was a playtest series against a number of successful decks from the biggest recent Standard event. The good news is that the deck continues to be very successful against many of the archetypes seen in the Philly top sixteen. The Boros matchup, for example, is a little dodgy in game one, but is nicely in our favor after sideboarding. As a fun, take-home fact that I recommend you keep in mind for your own designs, I’ve found that Bloodwitch is a total house in the Boros matchup, as its protection from white means that most of the creatures in the Boros build can’t get past it"¦and, inconveniently for them, the Boros player can’t Path it out of the way, either. Unfortunately, good matchups against much of the variety of the field mean nothing if a deck can’t successfully take down an archetype that constitutes a large percentage of successful finishers. Being unable to take down Jund is a deal breaker right now.
I tested many options against Jund – too many to go into detail about here. Most of the early testing centered on attempting to avoid giving the Jund deck removal targets. Most critically, I wanted to avoid giving it Bituminous Blast targets, as this provides a hook onto which the deck can latch a cascade chain that often churns up a whole new threat to wreck you. This prompted consideration of a blue splash for Wall of Denial or a red splash for [card Uril, the Miststalker]Uril[/card], but I realized there wasn’t a critical mass of shroud critters available to really support that approach. More to the point, I realized that it wasn’t losing my guys to removal that was the key issue, but rather the deck’s ability to hit my hand with Blightnings and to reload its attackers even in the face of mass removal from my side. Obviously, the combination of cascade spells and [card Broodmate Dragon]Broodmates[/card] powers this reload. Less obviously but much more problematically, [card Sprouting Thrinax]Thrinaxes[/card] meant that I couldn’t just wipe the board with a Day of Judgment and call it, well, a day.
Testing like this is an iterative process, and I tried a number of loops through Gatherer searching for cards that generated card advantage for me or that might help pull me back from the edge. I finally settled on two key additions for the Jund matchup, which appear in this current Ascension Pulse decklist:
Ascension Pulse, Jund-tuned
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Clearly, I’ve diverged from last week’s build. [card Nissa Revane]Nissa[/card] and [card Nissas Chosen]friends[/card] are simply gone, banished due to her vulnerability to Blightning. In testing, she was initially pushed to the sideboard, with her Chosen staying in as speedbumps. Eventually, however, her worth in other matchups wasn’t enough to find space in the total seventy-five of a deck that was going to have to face down Jund round after round, and she simply had to go. This build increases the amount of land search, in accord with what I’ve termed the "Ravnica" model, adding in four Borderland Ranger as combined mana-fixers and speedbumps. The most glaring addition is probably those Felidar Sovereigns. They’ve proven to be an excellent top of my curve in the Jund matchup, as they take a lot to kill, and can recover your life total while remaining back on defence. This is distinct from the role of [card Baneslayer Angel]Baneslayer[/card] in this same slot, which requires an active race between you and the opponent. Given how often Jund reloads into a hasty attacker, it’s very useful to be able to have a 4/6 lifelink on both offense and defense. The other potentially curious addition is [card Devout Lightcaster]Lightcaster[/card]. Where other players are running Celestial Purge, I choose to run Lightcaster. Like Purge, it can de-Thrinax the board, paving the way for a devastating Judgment. Unlike Purge, it can also hang around and block Thrinaxes and Leeches all day, dodging Terminates and Bituminous Blasts.
For clarity’s sake, here are the key sideboarding notes:
Against Jund
+4 Devout Lightcaster
+1 Felidar Sovereign
+1 Martial Coup
-2 Malakir Bloodwitch
-1 Luminarch Ascension
-2 Liliana Vess
-1 Identity Crisis
Against Aggro
+4 Pitfall Trap
-2 Liliana Vess
-1 Identity Crisis
-1 Martial Coup
"¦and adjust the Sovereign/Bloodwitch mix to match the opposition. For example, you want a full four Bloodwitches against Boros, versus a full four Sovereigns against Mono-Red Aggro.
Against Control
+2 Malakir Bloodwitch
-1 Day of Judgment
-1 Felidar Sovereign
As I mentioned above, when the differences between fundamental game outcomes of different mana base approaches are slight, it all comes down to how the details affect us on a case-by-case basis. For this Ascension Pulse build, we leverage one of the extremely valuable aspects of the fetch-and-search approach to allow us to run a seemingly curious mix of cards. When we want triple white for Lightcaster in the Jund matchup, we can side out the Bloodwitches so that we no longer need to hit more than one Swamp per game. This, in turn, means we can fetch for, and search for, Plains. Similarly, when we’re in the control or Boros matchup and we want those Bloodwitches as soon as possible, we can devote these same resources to giving us double black as soon as we hit five mana. This is versatility in searching is amazingly handy in this case, but simply would not work in a deck that wants to hit a turn seven Cruel Ultimatum, where on-board mana versatility is probably key.
Happily, it looks like we’ve transitioned from the free pass of Vivids and Pools into a period not of forced mana base simplicity, but of a number of different, entirely workable approaches to building the three, four, or five-color manabase we need for a complex control deck. As far as I can tell, the differences between the approaches are subtle and case-dependent, making them fertile ground for creative design. My homework assignment for myself in the new Standard will be to continue to use this fertile ground to evaluate my own choices, aesthetic or otherwise, and see which ones work best.
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Colin Hong says: October 20, 2009 @ 11:16 pm
How consistently can you hit WWW on turn 3 against a turn 3 thrinax?
Alex says: October 20, 2009 @ 11:25 pm
@Colin – Pretty much never, but the point is not so much to hit it on turn 3 as it is to hit it on turn 4 or 5. In the meantime, your Ranger is standing in the way, or you’ve Pathed the first Thrinax, and so forth. The issue that was killing me in the Jund matchup was taking some early harm (say, from Blightnings) and then facing a board of some huge threat + Thrinax(es), and Judgment not being good enough.
arogers907 says: October 20, 2009 @ 11:39 pm
Awesome article…
rich says: October 21, 2009 @ 12:10 am
is vigilance and +1 toughness really worth +1 mana and – flying, protection from dragons (relevant against jund) first strike and 1 power?
rich says: October 21, 2009 @ 12:13 am
also could room be found somewhere for garruk?
Chris Young says: October 21, 2009 @ 12:22 am
Really good article.
Blind Fremen says: October 21, 2009 @ 12:48 am
I agree with rich; Baneslayer Angel is simply better than Felidar Sovereign in every conceivable way. You play it, and if they can’t remove it right away, then it mitigates one attack (or blocks and gains 5 life), then attacks through the air for a 10 point life swing. Baneslayer blocks Broodmate and friends, and DOESN’T get chumped by Thrinax tokens, etc. Overall, it is a good deck idea, but I think you fell into the trap of being “too cute” with that particular card choice.
locustkiller says: October 21, 2009 @ 3:58 am
This feels like it wants to be a control deck..with zero counters and zero card draw? Does it not just lay down to an on-the-play turn five mind sludge? Or opposing “big spells” that arent creatures like your opponent’s ultimatum or identity crisis?
How are you matching up vs vampires? They seem to have alot of the answers to your threats and enough disruption to put you off clearing the board consistently.
Dartarus says: October 21, 2009 @ 6:00 am
So what if Thrinax can chump Sovereign? The Vigilance is HUGE here. I swing in, you lose a creature, AND I’ve gained four life AND you STILL can’t swing back in at me?
SamB says: October 21, 2009 @ 6:39 am
@Dartarus
By that logic, Serra Angel with Lifelink is just as good.
Pasteur says: October 21, 2009 @ 7:19 am
I think the argument *is* that Serra Angel with Lifelink would be good- Baneslayer is called a “ten point life swing” but it’s a bit misleading, with only five each way, and little chance to build on that. Sovereign also features a resistance to Bit-blast that Angels would fall to.
Additionally, if it could come up, nothing (including a Baneslayer) kills the Sovereign in (single) combat until people start playing Progenitus.
Sith_Mafia says: October 21, 2009 @ 8:08 am
when do you side in duress?
frank says: October 21, 2009 @ 8:13 am
I’m a newer player and am not familiar with the difference between a booster draft and a winston draft.
goldenj says: October 21, 2009 @ 8:18 am
I get the Felidar Sovreign, but Vess and the Bloodwitch make no sense. If the Bloodwitch counted all vampires, maybe, since that gives it a double purpose, but it’s only going to drain for 1. Vess must be playing on your preference to search.
Compare to Baneslayers really making the Sovreigns a threat, the ease on the mana base, the dragon protection against Jund’s biggest threat…
I’d be tempted to -witch -vess – crisis to +4 baneslayer +1 mana fixing. Maybe Expedition Map, given your number of specialty lands and predilection for search. Knight of the Reliquary would be a house. Maybe a Birds of Paradise. Those last two also assist your Ascension quest.
Alex says: October 21, 2009 @ 9:53 am
Thanks for all the comments. I hope, in addition to thoughts about the deck list, the insight into workable mana bases will help you all when you want to make more complex deck designs. I personally found it pretty interesting that either approach basically worked out fine, as that leaves tremendous room for detailed tinkering.
@locustkiller – The vampires matchup is fine, but I’m definitely going back and forth on the issue of what I’ve been calling “haymaker” spells. For the moment, I’m not concerned, because the only one of those that I’ve had to deal with in the current playtest pool is Mind Sludge, and this deck can topdeck well when that occurs. I suspect a Cruel Ultimatum to the face would be much, much worse, especially if the deck running it has some amount of countermagic to follow up.
@Blind Fremen – The “cute choice” problem is always present, and I always appreciate people calling it out when they think they see it. In this case, I do think there’s a lot of value in being able to block + gain instead of just race + gain, but that bears additional side-by-side testing of Baneslayer and Sovereign in the same slot.
@Sith_Mafia – Duress is a catch-all for someone bringing out a random combo deck that I don’t otherwise interact well with.
@goldenj – Very plausible approach, and worth trying.
@Pasteur – Yes, that’s exactly the Sovereign over Slayer logic – I’ve found myself in deep life holes from time to time that a racing Slayer doesn’t seem to help with. That said, Bit Blast alone doesn’t kill Slayer, either (4 points), but I still do approach how much more killin’ the Sovereign takes.
@frank – Winston draft is a super-casual, two-player draft format, described here:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/af59
Alex says: October 21, 2009 @ 9:54 am
That should have read “still do appreciate how much more killin’…”
Gollius says: October 21, 2009 @ 12:29 pm
@Alex. I have to make a case for the Baneslayer here too. It has advantages in two major areas…
It’s just better vs. Broodmate:
When you lay it down it actually shuts down Broodmate the turn it goes into play where-as the earth-bound Sovereign requires you be able to take 8 damage. What’s more with Sovereign you are forced to race at that point (you aren’t with the Slayer actually) and you’re only getting 4 life for every 8 damage.
Sovereign is much easier to kill with bituminous blast:
Without first strike Jund can simply block Sovereign and add blast, not worrying about the two for one because of the cascade. Comparitively Slayer’s first strike makes this particular trade almost impossible for Jund.
If Jund didn’t top out at a flier (say this was a R/W deck or mono red) I think I’d see your side but for the two reasons above I’d say advantage Slayer in this match up.
Chris says: October 21, 2009 @ 2:53 pm
“‘a day in the library is worth a week in the lab.’ That is, you should check first to see what other people have done before you waste a lot of time trying to figure it out yourself.”
Your articles are a joy to read. I’ll have to inspect my Jund deck’s mana base now.
Joe says: October 21, 2009 @ 4:34 pm
How reliably do you actually get 4 counters on the Ascension with that deck against anything even remotely aggro? Seems like that would be an iffy thing with some of the card choices you’ve made.
I also don’t get forcing yourself into W/B/G for the Pulse. Yeah its a powerful card when you’re x/B/G, but the best x/B/G is Jund. You’ve said it several times that this build is pretty much second rate to Jund… so what’s the point exactly? The other black are poor cards in this deck and the green isn’t any better. Filler to flesh out the bad color choices.
Either spend your time making a better Jund list or go completely in a different direction.
With that said, I enjoyed the article… well written and thought provoking.
Chris Young says: October 21, 2009 @ 5:31 pm
I played recently against a friends home brewed “Bant” control luminarch deck and it seemed to do just fine it fairly regularly beat his own Vamps deck
I think there is a luminarch deck out there just will require some rethinking.
Im trying to figure out if I can abuse Bloodchief Ascention at the moment.
Gatch says: October 21, 2009 @ 6:40 pm
I’ve built around luminarch ascension in naya colors using the ff:
4 bloodbraid elf
4 captured sunlight
4 ajani vengeant
4 day of judgement
4 path to exile
4 lightning bolt
4 naya charm
thats a whole lot of removal right there plus the cascades to get to them, luminarch does go online sometimes..the thing is, it takes so damn long to get it going that a lot of times vs. Jund they just hold back a Maelstrom pulse to deal with it before it activates. I’ve since switched to Pyromancer ascension, that gets online faster than luminarch does while you’re busy doing the same thing which is playing control. try the package above with 4 pyromancer ascension. Do you see the synergy with naya charm here? with pyromancer ascension active you get to re-draw cards from your graveyard. lightning bolt becomes your win-con. cascade makes sure you get the ascension in play and online. thrinaxes are no problem when your DoJ fires off twice. just my 2 cents =)
p.s. good job on the devout lightcaster in the side, i’ve been running 4 as well, alongside 4 celestial purge to obliterate the jund meta.
captshetz says: October 21, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Easily the best Channel Fireball article this week. Very enjoyable read, although your decklists may overshadow your manabase work. As for the decklists, even if the choice of sovereigns over baneslayers seems loose, I respect your choice to include them and take the road less traveled. You made the choice for felidar sovereign and backed it up with solid metagaming, and not choosing it just for the sake of going rogue.
Solid article.
Trackback MTGBattlefield says: October 21, 2009 @ 7:48 pm
In Development – A Series of Harrowing Decisions…
Your story has been summoned to the battlefield – Trackback from MTGBattlefield…
NummaNumma says: October 21, 2009 @ 8:55 pm
The consensus seems to be that we love your writing style- it’s so refreshing after reading other magic writers- but you really come out of left field with these decklists.
I just don’t know what to think. Everyone else eyeballed Nissa and said “no way.” You tested her for a couple weeks and THEN said “nope,” too. I hope sometime soon you test something that everyone else wrote off, but becomes a staple.
Pingback In Development - Wishing for Gifts | ChannelFireball.com says: January 12, 2010 @ 9:00 pm
[...] and combo, but the truth is that my heart belongs to Gifts Ungiven. Although this is partially an aesthetic choice, Gifts is also a tremendously powerful card, and a deck built around Gifts offers a "wild card" [...]