In Development – Building Your Extended Reference Library
Posted by Zaiem Beg
January 5, 2010 | 
19 comments
You know what constitutes an excellent reason to not do well in a tournament? Waking up to find out that you're too sick to drive safely to the venue.
I did not end up making it to the Standard Open in Los Angeles this past weekend, which makes me a little sad. You all will get to hear about it from someone else who did quite well, though, so you can be happy. For the record, here's the deck that I (in line with my own advice) had sleeved up and ready to go the night before I learned I wasn't going:
Bant Emeria Angel
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments section. This is the deck I'll be taking to any Standard event until Worldwake releases.
With that out of the way, let's press on to the nascent Extended PTQ season, and the important idea of developing our reference library.
Reference library part one – the present
Back in November of last year, I talked about the value of reviewing deck lists for the ongoing metagame. The reasoning I gave there still stands. We need to see what's winning and what we need to beat if we want to win. This applies whether we're trying something novel or have resolved to play the best deck. We want access to up-to-date information on what people are likely to bring to a PTQ, either in real life or online, and which specific tweaks to known designs have garnered success.
For the current Extended season, you're going to want to check in with a number of sources.
First, as I discussed in November, you can expect to see deck lists from PTQs turn up at deckcheck.net. In fact, the nice folks at deckcheck.net have provided format-specific RSS feeds so that you can automatically have all the top eights from all reported Extended tournaments appear in your feed reader as soon as they're reported. If you're unfamiliar with syndication, RSS, and feed readers, click here to learn more. They're incredibly useful in keeping up with Magic content.
Second, we want to follow the official posting of PTQ deck lists at Wizards. There's the usual Decks of the Week feature which is updated weekly and includes both reported PTQ lists and lists from Extended Daily and Premier events from MTGO. You can find past Decks of the Week entries in the Daily Activity archive. In addition to this, however, Wizards also usually collects all the reported lists for a given PTQ season on their own page. The page for the San Juan PTQ season is not up yet, but you should bookmark it once it appears.
Third, we want to check in regularly with the Magic Online What's Happening? page. This page automatically updates with deck lists from Daily Events, Premier Events, and online PTQs. In fact, it has the top eight lists from the first two Extended online PTQs available right now.
These sources form the "present” part of our reference library for the current PTQ season. We need to follow these results to gauge the metagame, avoid being caught off-guard by the innovations of others, and to decide what we're going to be able to use to win.
Also, deck lists are cool.
However, my recommendation is that we don't just stock our reference library with the current season's results.
Reference library part two – the past
In preparing for this Extended PTQ season, I also want to look to prior seasons. Specifically, I'm going to suggest that it's useful for us to cast a net back to encompass the last four Extended PTQ seasons.
When I first returned to playing Magic, I did this kind of review out of necessity. Especially in a format like Extended, I simply hadn't even been around to play many of the sets in Standard or Block constructed formats, and was going to be ambushed time and again by unfamiliar cards or even unfamiliar concepts. The first [card minds desire]Mind's Desire[/card] deck I ran into in the Hollywood PTQ season was pretty shocking, for example. If you're new, you need the review.
However, I think there are reasons for even experienced players to look back on previous seasons. We forget a lot, and are prone to tunnel vision. By focusing only on the current PTQ season, you're limiting yourself to playing decks that have already occurred to everyone else this year. You may be missing out entirely on a deck that was viable two years ago but not last year, and thus has fallen off of everyone's radar. Given the piecemeal rotation of Extended, it's entirely possible for archetypes to come and go and come again. Dredge was brutal in the Hollywood qualifier season, then negligible in the Honolulu '09 season, and now is once again viable.
We don't want to be the player caught off guard by the sudden resurgence of an archetype. Ideally, we want to be leading that resurgence.
Second, even in deck lists that represent presently nonviable archetypes, there can be excellent ideas. As I've recommended before, loot liberally. Reviewing old lists can give you good ideas of cards to use, or even just a good overview of how to use certain specific cards you're already interested in. When I was really falling in love with Gifts Ungiven for the first time, I carried out a comprehensive review of its use in Extended to see what people had done with it that might not have occurred to me.
You may think I've just set you on some annoying, quixotic quest to find old deck lists, but conveniently Wizards has maintained their deck list pages for prior PTQ seasons. Here are the seasons I recommend reviewing when trying to build or choose a deck for the current PT San Juan qualifier season:
What we can learn from an older season
I made the case, above, for older seasons. However, I want to use the specific example of the oldest season I'm suggesting here to give you an impression of the kind of value I think you can take away from lists from an Extended format that is now five years out of date.
Very generally, the take-home impression from the 2005 qualifier season was that the "best” deck was Dredgeatog. This is interesting in the context of the current season inasmuch as Dredgeatog shares some conceptual similarity with Tezzeret/Foundry and "Protect the Queen” style decks. Namely, they are highly reactive control decks that rely on sticking and protecting an explosive finisher.
With that general impression out of the way, let me focus on some specific things I've picked up in reviewing the Honolulu '05 season so far.
Cool ideas
At this PTQ in Portland, won by our own Max McCall, David Conachan placed seventh with a [card miraris wake]Mirari's Wake[/card] deck that did something that's never occurred to me before – recurring Mindslaver with Bringer of the White Dawn. While this is, in one sense, evidence that there were clunkier times before Academy Ruins showed up, it also gives us another potential means of building a Mindslaver lock into a deck if we don't expect to be able to hit thirteen mana for the Ruins-based method, or perhaps if we want resilience in a world rife with Ghost Quarters.
Someone reviewing the '05 season ahead of the most recent Worlds might also have noticed this PTQ where Charles Overy placed fifth with a white/green control deck featuring [card miren, the moaning well]Miren[/card], [card yosei, the morning star]Yosei[/card], and Pulse of the Fields"¦something that sounds an awful lot like the package Shota Yasooka ran in his Gifts list at PT Austin. Maybe Shota was innovative enough to happen upon that package on his own, but we don't have to be innovators if we can just stumble on good ideas like this while reviewing older lists.
PTQ size effects
I've cautioned previously about the problem of taking winning lists from small tournaments. Our local PTQs are almost universally eight rounds, meaning that anything that makes the top eight has won at least six matches. That's usually enough to shake out any truly terrible designs. However, at smaller venues, you might be able to win three matches and then draw into the top eight, meaning that you might entirely dodge your bad pairings on the way to a win.
If you play in sizeable PTQs, the take-home lesson here is that you need to make sure you're not picking up a chancy deck list from a small tournament. However, if you're going to be playing in one of those smaller PTQs, the lesson may well be "take a chance, you can afford to gamble.” For example, Tooth and Nail may be just fine at the Panama City PTQ. Relating this to our current season, I think Hypergenesis is a tremendously risky choice, given that seeing too many Islands across the board in a given day will just wreck you. However, if you only need to win a handful of matches to make it there? It might be worth it for the raw power intrinsic to the build.
Those lost ideas
The first time I reviewed the Honolulu '05 season, I was struck by how Affinity decks from that season did not resemble the decks I'd found myself occasionally facing. Specifically, check out this representative list from that same Oregon PTQ:
Erayo Affinity (not Extended legal)
After getting over how different it was from what I thought of as Affinity, I started wondering why we weren't seeing modern Affinity decks featuring [card erayo, soratami ascendent]Erayo[/card]. If you're inclined to play Affinity, whether because you love it or perhaps due to the fact that you already have all the important cards, I think it would behoove you to review options such as maindeck Erayo or Dark Confidant to see if they improve your matchups. I think it is not safe to simply assume that these cards are "no longer” good. As with Dredge, archetypes or cards can become "bad” and then return to being "good” as environments change.
This kind of review is especially interesting in light of our very first PTQ results of the season. Contrary to the general wisdom that Affinity is just terrible right now, the second MTGO Extended PTQ was taken down by Rygarrygar with this Affinity list:
Affinity, by Rygarrygar
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This deck made its way through three Qasali Pridemages, four Bant Charms, a Death Cloud deck, and a Dark Depths combo deck in the Top Eight. While this can give you hope for your own Affinity build, it also means that people will be reacting to Affinity more than they were before, so it's definitely worthwhile to review our Extended reference library and see what Affinity has done in prior years to fight the hate.
Later on in the Honolulu '05 season, Terry Richardson took down this PTQ with a Rock deck featuring the usual mix of dudes and removal as well as a giant pile of equipment. Specifically, it has two copies each of Sword of Fire and Ice, Sword of Light and Shadow, and [card Umezawas Jitte]Umezawa's Jitte[/card]. In fact, the '05 season is rife with Rock-style decks featuring some mix of Jittes and Swords, this even in the face of a season featuring Dredgeatog and [card heartbeat of spring]Heartbeat[/card] decks, along with Affinity in the "grotesquely fast aggro” role. I thus found myself wondering, "If a Rock deck with some powerful equipment could do well then, what about now?”
Turn with me now to the winner of the first MTGO Extended PTQ of the current season:
Jittes and Junk by Calcano
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Dudes, removal, and some equipment. Fascinating.
Untunneling our vision
There is a phenomenon you've probably experienced in a classroom where no one asks any questions, even though you all know you have them. All the students, individually, assume that everyone else isn't asking any questions because they already know the answers. Thus, we keep our mouth shut to avoid looking stupid.
During a PTQ season, we often make the assumption that the decks and cards that are seeing play are there because they are strictly the best, and everyone else has already done all the necessary testing to determine this. As a consequence, we develop a tunnel vision about alternate cards and deck selections. We assume that someone, somewhere in the world, has already tested all those ideas and ruled them out.
We might thus believe that "Affinity is bad” or just not think to break out our dudes and equipment. Some of us just don't suffer from this problem and are open to the full range of deck choices. For the rest of us, the solution is to check in on our reference library, to see what options and approaches we may have completely forgotten about in the intervening years.
It may be correct to believe that someone, somewhere has tested your idea. By reviewing your reference library, you have the opportunity to discover that someone did test your idea, and it works.
Give it a shot, and let me know what discoveries you make.
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About This Author
Zaiem Beg
Zaiem Beg is co-editor of channelfireball.com and lives in Seattle. &hellip
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Pingback Tweets that mention In Development - Building Your Extended Reference Library | ChannelFireball.com -- Topsy.com says: January 5, 2010 @ 9:25 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by What’s On Honolulu?, Alexander Shearer. Alexander Shearer said: Read me at CFB –> http://bit.ly/6A3skH #Magic #Extended #PTQ History! [...]
the dough says: January 5, 2010 @ 11:22 pm
Whats with not playing Baneslayers?
Jeremy says: January 5, 2010 @ 11:58 pm
no baneslayers or lotus cobra’s in the standard deck…strange :O
behemoth sledge deserves a slot or two for sure
nice article though, i plan on packing a rock deck for the ptq’s in my area
…i’d like to fit gaddock teegs in the maindeck somehow becuz the card can shut down decks on its own, but i cant find the room…in my current list im runnin 2 profanes, and im runnin knight of the reliquary over doran, it’s been doin very well in the testing 
Feddy says: January 6, 2010 @ 1:33 am
Great article, nice to see the inclusion of tangible resources as well as commentary and advice.
Chad says: January 6, 2010 @ 1:50 am
I’m actually planning on trying out Rygar’s build at a PTQ this weekend. My main problem is determining sideboard cards. Any thoughts? Also, if anyone has any ideas for maindeck slots over Rygar’s, let me know. I would appreciate it.
Summa says: January 6, 2010 @ 3:53 am
Loved the extended part….but about that standard deck…
I know standard is kind of slow, but 4 1-drops, 12 3-drops and 9 4-drops has not been a good curve ever.
Wouldn’t it be better to cut one of the 3-drops (Borderland Ranger?) for something like Steward of Valeron or Lotus Cobra.
Secondly, I would seriously consider being pre-boarded against jund in this meta.
Finally, given the SCG results it seems more likely that something like Wall of Denial or Deft Duelist would be better in the sideboard, since they’re way better against mono-red although being slightly worse against Boros.
That’s just my thoughts anyway..
Garrett says: January 6, 2010 @ 7:37 am
Why play a gargoyle castle?
Trackback MTGBattlefield says: January 6, 2010 @ 8:35 am
In Development – Building Your Extended Reference Library…
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dowjonzechemical says: January 6, 2010 @ 9:04 am
Wow, a whole wealth of content and all ppl can comment on is the fact that someone is not playing Baneslayer. Djeezuz Christ on a crooked crutch…you schills should be working for the marketing dept. of WotC, not that they need your incredibly well thought out insight.
I don’t want to be down to hard on my fellow “meh” generation, but come on. Read between the lines. There is good knowledge to be gained here. No wonder doctors over prescribe ADHD drugs. /rant
Alex says: January 6, 2010 @ 9:39 am
Any comments on the Extended section of the article? No?
As for the deck list, I’ll point y’all back to Tom Ross’s article on his States win, which you can conveniently find on this very site:
http://strategy.channelfireball.com/featured-articles/feature-article-the-boss-on-states/
And quotes like this:
“Thornling turns out to once again be the boss as he eventually has to start chumping (even though it has trample) and eventually kills him. Baneslayer would've died in that spot, followed by me shortly after.”
This is 1,000% true.
Also, I’m aware that the curve looks wacky on first impression, but fun fact — here’s the creature curve from Arthur’s (fairly stock) 2nd place Jund deck at the Standard open in LA:
2 mana — 4 creatures
3 mana — 4 creatures
4 mana — 6 creatures
6 mana — 3 creatures
Before you intuit that a curve is inappropriate for a given play environment, it’s worth quantifying what you’re actually playing against. 16 of my creatures come down on a schedule on which only 8 Jund creatures hit play. Sure, it’s slower than RDW/Boros, but in that match, you’re the control deck.
There’s no benefit in diluting the /power/ of the deck’s current build just to fit some nominal mana curve that doesn’t actually have any relationship to the current Standard environment. In fact, I think it’s a significant risk to our likelihood of success if we just build along the framework of unexamined rules in that manner.
Daveh says: January 6, 2010 @ 10:16 am
I almost didn’t even read this article because you didn’t play baneslayer in your standard deck, but I’m glad I stuck with it. Great article! You should have left the standard stuff till the end tho.
Summa says: January 6, 2010 @ 10:29 am
I actually did note that standard is slow. But another fun fact (I sensed some hostility in the use of this phrase, but seeing as I’d rather interpret it as not being so, I’m also using it), here’s what Arthur had to play on turns 2 and 3:
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Terminate
Now I understand you have 4 paths, but you don’t really want to play those early on. Furthermore, once Arthur hits 3 mana, he can play almost all the strongest 3-drops or play premium removal.
All I’m trying to say is that I think another ramp spell (such as steward, which actually also is a solid creature in itself) seems like it would do more for a deck with 9 4-drops of high quality.
Alex says: January 6, 2010 @ 12:10 pm
@Summa – Oh, definitely no hostility. I sometimes slip into “1950s educational film” mode in my head when I bust out examples.
I previously had more early rampers in my build, but I don’t like them at the end of the day against Jund (see my earlier N-for-1 counting article for why). My strategy against Jund with Emeria Knight is heavily tilted toward threat overload — those Paths you mentioned come out for the sideboarded games. Instead, I’d rather play a cavalcade of durable or N-for-1 threats, which is why I have such a preference for those three drops.
@Garrett – Being able to randomly tutor for a 3/4 flyer with Knight is great in breaking stalemates, stalling opposing flyers for a turn, or just plain old packing more threats into the deck.
@Chad – Do you have specific doubts or concerns about the sideboard as it stands? I’ve done a bit of testing with the deck, and for an Affinity build, it’s pretty solid. I’m considering doing a big review of possible Affinity approaches, but that wouldn’t happen in time for your PTQ, so if you have a specific concern, that might help guide early suggestions.
Josh S. says: January 6, 2010 @ 1:35 pm
The reason I assumed nobody was commenting on the Extended portion was because it was rather obvious. Old Extended seasons might possibly have a resemblance to newer ones? You don’t say! Although I did appreciate seeing our (max + me) old Scepter-Chant deck one more time, back when I could build shit that didn’t involve green or Faeries.
Alex says: January 6, 2010 @ 2:07 pm
@Josh – I’ll posit that if it’s obvious for you, that’s bonus points for you. Watch how many of our, say, middle-tier players at Extended PTQs* are taken offguard by archetypes that were reasonably common one or two seasons ago.
Also, I figured a lot of people wouldn’t know where to find the old lists (one of our esteemed editors didn’t know where to find the event coverage archive, e.g., and the old PTQ list collections are much harder to turn up).
*e.g. Me in my first pass through an Extended PTQ season. I had way too many “What the hell is this?” moments.
Alex says: January 6, 2010 @ 4:14 pm
Update – Here’s the page for lists from the current PTQ season:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/events.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/sanjuan10ptq/welcome
Josh S. says: January 6, 2010 @ 11:30 pm
Oh yeah, I definitely think the article was fine, but I take for granted what I think is obvious. I scrounge that crap alllllllllll the time for ideas. Usually terrible ones! Every once in a while though you hit a gem (usually some sideboard card nobody used in 400 years) and it’s pretty sweet.
TEPS is a good example. Everyone wrote that deck off as not existing anymore after a decent season and with some reworking it won GP:LA toward the beginning of the next one.
dowjonzechemical says: January 7, 2010 @ 2:37 pm
I was thinking TarmoRack…
Pingback In Development - Using Abstractions in Deck Design | ChannelFireball.com says: June 22, 2010 @ 9:50 pm
[...] a useful base to build your playtesting on. It's also super helpful if you, like me, like to scour the Internet for deck lists. When you find that fascinating rogue deck list that Top Eighted a PTQ in Slovenia, you probably [...]