I arrived in Providence Friday afternoon with my car consisting of Alex Hayne, Rob Anderson, Nick Leblanc, David Schnayer and myself. Alex, Rob and Dave were still undecided on their deck choice while Nick and I knew we were going to be playing Merfolk. When we got to the tournament site, my friends from Toronto, SammyT and Dan “DMac” MacDonald, said they had a really good UW Merfolk list and it was close to what I was considering playing so Nick, Rob and I jumped on board and copied their list as it was more tuned than any UW list we were going to play. Here is what we all played (give or take a few cards).

[deck title=Samuel Tharmaratnam – UW Fish]
[Land]
4 Tundra
3 Flooded Strand
3 Misty Rainforest
3 Island
4 Mutavault
4 Wasteland
[/Land]
[Spells]
4 Aether Vial
4 Mental Misstep
3 Force of Will
3 Daze
1 Batterskull
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Cursecatcher
4 Lord of Atlantis
4 Silvergill Adept
4 Coralhelm Commander
4 Merrow Reejerey
3 Stoneforge Mystic
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Mortarpod
2 Disenchant
4 Path to Exile
2 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Force of Will
1 Misdirection
1 Spell Pierce
2 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

Alex couldn’t find all the cards for the Merfolk deck so, like the baller he is, he rolled a die to pick a deck and ended up playing BUG Control and Dave ended up playing some UW Landstill deck.

Saturday morning we decided to kill time during our byes by playing some Type 4, but they all had to go play round 3 so I railbirded some of the Channel Fireball and StarCity guys for a bit before going to see how my friends were doing and eating some Lux Burger.
I won’t bore you with the details of my games as Merfolk games tend to be one sided in either direction depending on what your opponent is playing (if they are playing Blue then Merfolk is way ahead, if not Merfolk is way behind). On a side note, I actually think they should ban [card]Wasteland[/card] as whoever drew more [card]Wasteland[/card]s won the majority of the games I played, and not being able to play Magic because you got [card]Wasteland[/card]ed isn’t what Magic should be about. Anyway I’ll just do a quick run through of my matchups on both days.

Round 1-3 Bye
Round 4 Team America (Win)
Round 5 BW Discard (Loss)
Round 6 Pattern Hulk (Win)
Round 7 UW Stoneforge Landstill (Win)
Round 8 Team America (Win)
Round 9 RUG Tempo (Win)

Going 8-1 felt great as it was the first time I’ve made Day 2 at a Grand Prix, although it sucked that no one else in my car made it, and even worse that some of my friends didn’t even win a match *cough* KYT *cough*. When we got back to our hotel I helped Alex build Caw Blade for the PTQ (with some tech from Drew Levin), Dave built his own version and Rob played UR Splinter Twin, while Nick wasn’t in the mood to play Caw Blade so he decided to just railbird and play some Win-a-Boxes.

After everyone was done building their decks for Sunday, Alex and Dave decided they didn’t want to let me get rest for Day 2 and decided to stay up with the light directly in my eyes and played EDH or something, but I foiled their plans by plugging in my Ipod, blasting some Avril Lavigne and passing out to everyone’s amazement.

They dropped me off at the tournament site and went off into no mans land in search of a Dunkin Donuts. I sat and talked with some other friends who made Day 2 and waited anxiously as pairings went up. I walked up to the pairings sheet to see that I was to play Tom Martell in Round 10, I was a bit nervous going into the match as it was the first time I played against a big name pro, but I knew I had a good matchup so I told myself that this was just another match of magic and to concentrate on said match and put the fact that he was a pro player out of my head.

He was playing UWB Stoneforge with [card]Dark Confidant[/card]s, which is normally a good matchup for Merfolk but the addition of [card]Batterskull[/card] to the equipment package has given the Blue Stoneforge decks a real problematic card that Merfolk has no good way of dealing with. We played 3 tight games with him edging me out in the third after hardcasting the aforementioned [card]Batterskull[/card]. After losing Alex tried to get me to ask Tom to sign some [card]Thrun, the Last Troll[/card]s but I politely declined (during the trip Alex got LSV to sign a bunch of [card]Gruesome Encore[/card]s).

The rest of the day didn’t go very well as I ran into a string of bad matchups losing to Goblins, GBW Junk, and Team Italia and only defeating, what some may consider a bye matchup in, [card]Hive Mind[/card] (all you have to do is [card]Cursecatcher[/card] your Pact copy), as well as punting Games 2 and 3 against Dredge after winning Game 1, although my opponent deserves credit as he played very well and in a way I had heard about but never seen, by just discarding and dredging instead of trying to resolve a discard outlet, and as I had never played any competent Dredge pilot who played that way it caught me off guard and I made some mistakes.

One of those mistakes I feel I need to go a little in depth on as I haven’t seen it talked about anywhere and has really changed the way I play Blue decks vs. Dredge (sorry Dredge players gotta let out the secret). Between the new addition of [card]Mental Misstep[/card] as well as [card]Force of Will[/card], Dredge cannot reliably resolve a discard outlet. The Dredge players will choose to draw so they can get up to 8 cards in their hand and discard a [card]Golgari Grave-Troll[/card] or [card]Stinkweed Imp[/card] during their cleanup step. This circumvents any counters the Blue player may have as well as letting them hold any lands they have so they can use any draw spells to combo off when you are least expecting it. A simple solution I have found that may seem obvious but has not been mentioned (mostly because no one writes about Dredge) is that as a Blue mage YOU should choose to draw and force the Dredge player to either play into your counterspells or force them to wait a turn until they get to 8 cards in hand so they can discard, which just negated any disadvantage you had from going second. Now this may seem obvious to you or downright crazy, but I have been doing this in my Dredge matchups ever since losing to it in Providence and it has helped me gain a small edge against them. It may not seem like the best strategy to choose to draw in Legacy, but try it out and let me know how it goes for you in the comments.

As I was saying before I got distracted, Day 2 did not go as well as I had hoped but although I am very grateful for Sammy and DMac for showing me the list and hope we can continue to share lists in the future. *cough* Pascal *cough* Though, I was divided on how I felt about the deck overall. On one hand I was happy I was playing Merfolk as it is one of the best strategies in the format, but on the other hand I felt as though the White splash didn’t help many of the matchups. [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] did not impress me like I thought it would and I especially did not like the inclusion of [card]Batterskull[/card] in the deck as [card]Batterskull[/card] is more at home in a defensive control deck while Merfolk just wants to put pressure on the opponent and I don’t think Mystic and equipment help that plan. I did like playing [card]Path to Exile[/card], and to a lesser extent [card]Disenchant[/card], but playing Mono Blue with [card]Dismember[/card]s solves the same problems as Path. As well as not leaving yourself vulnerable to [card]Wasteland[/card] on a [card]Tundra[/card], which I think is the biggest strike against the White version.

Coming out of the GP I learned some important lessons, especially how tolling multi-day events can be on your body as well as your mind. I could barely keep my eyes open every time I sat down in a chair to play my matches near the end of the day and actually fell asleep a few times while watching some friends team draft or play in the PTQ. I did not do a good job of keeping myself hydrated and barely ate that weekend aside from going out to dinner each night. Every tournament since I have remembered to drink lots of water from any nearby water fountains (if I don’t bring my own water bottle) and if there is no lunch break to use any free time in between rounds to get a snack if not a full meal.

But wait! My weekend wasn’t done! After I was done playing all the rounds I did what any magic player would do. Get ready for the next tournament of course! There was a Standard PTQ for Philly coming up in a week in Ottawa so I put Legacy behind me and concentrated on the task at hand. I really wanted to do well at this PTQ to get the monkey off my back as I hadn’t made Top 8 of a PTQ in over a year and wanted to redeem myself for my bad Day 2 performance as well as prove that I have gotten over my bad habit of choking under pressure in PTQ Top 8s.

I knew I was 100% going to play Caw Blade as it was the only deck I had played in Standard since Pro Tour Paris and was far and away the best deck in the format at the time. I spent most of Sunday railbirding the PTQ at the GP to get a sense for what cards I wanted to play in Caw Blade as I hadn’t touched T2 since New Phyrexia was released. I watched Edgar Flores and AJ Sacher play to see if they had any spicy tech but I didn’t see much that impressed me. Some players had stuff like [card]Spellskite[/card] which seemed terrible to me as it is a card that just sits in play and does nothing and that is not the type of card I wanted in my deck. I also saw that [card]Mental Misstep[/card] seemed insane in certain scenarios in my head and made a note to try it out to make sure I wasn’t living in Magic Fantasy Land. I talked to Alex who went 7-2 in the PTQ about what he liked and didn’t like in the list he played and the first thing he told me was that [card]Phyrexian Metamorph[/card] was insane (the previously mentioned tech we got on Saturday night from Drew Levin). He also told me what New Phyrexia changed in certain matchups and how the equipment played an even larger role in the mirror and to maybe consider maindeck [card]Divine Offering[/card]s. I gathered a lot of information on Sunday and told myself I would make a decklist using that information and my previous experiences with the deck when I got back to Montreal.

We all rested a day or two after the trip before getting started on testing in the short time-span we had before the tournament coming up in a few days. This is the list I was testing for most of the week

[deck title=Justin Richardson – CawBlade]
[Creatures]
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Squadron Hawk
2 Phyrexian Metamorph
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
1 Jace Beleren
4 Jace, the Mind sculptor
2 Dismember
2 Into the Roil
3 Mana Leak
3 Mental Misstep
2 Spell Pierce
4 Preordain
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of War and Peace
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
[/Spells]
[Land]
3 Tectonic Edge
3 Inkmoth Nexus
5 Island
3 Plains
4 Celestial Colonnade
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Seachrome Coast
[/Land]
[/deck]

I played this list to a 4-1 finish at a local Thursday night Standard tournament and took the following notes down in my head. [card]Mental Misstep[/card] wasn’t working out the way I had hoped it would as it was good but you needed it in your opening hand most of the time and there wasn’t [card]Brainstorm[/card] to dig for it when you needed it and to shuffle it away when it was dead like in Legacy so they were probably getting moved to the sideboard or cut entirely. I kept toying with trying to fit in a second [card]Batterskull[/card] in the main but wasn’t 100% on it so I kept the backup Skull in the sideboard. Alex was right about Metamorph, that card was good in Caw Blade as it just lets you have access to so many more options like copying a Mystic that your opponent plays or copying a Sword out of nowhere and bashing in. Less than 4 [card]Tectonic Edge[/card] was wrong as that card (like Wasteland) can single-handedly win games.

I took in all this information and tested a bit with KYT on Magic Workstation later that night because he was having doubts about playing Caw Blade with New Phyrexia, as he didn’t like how the mirror match had changed and wanted to try out a GW deck with 4 [card]Mirran Crusader[/card]s. The score turned out even but I was really impressed with how good [card]Mirran Crusader[/card] was especially when holding any piece of equipment. I took some more notes down in my head and went to sleep. I woke up on Friday, logged on Twitter and saw something weird. Wizards had tweeted from GP Singapore and they said that Caw with 4 [card]Mirran Crusader[/card]s maindeck won a GP Trial. Then Caw with Crusaders won another Trial. And another Trial. And ANOTHER Trial. The more I thought about it and remembered the games I played vs. KYT the more I liked the idea of Crusader in Caw as the only games I was actually losing were to [card]Vengevine[/card] decks who got off to a fast start and I would get too far behind but Crusader was the perfect solution. I kept that knowledge in the back of my mind and went to test with DMac who came down from Toronto for the PTQ.

DMac showed me his list of Caw that he got from Thomas Ma and it also had maindeck Crusader albeit only one or two of them along with some other card choices that I did not like, including maindeck [card]Divine Offering[/card]. I tried all day to get my list with [card]Mental Misstep[/card] to work but at the end of the night me and, my friend, Joey Smith, who I convinced to play Caw after he didn’t like any deck in the format, decided to play 4 [card]Mirran Crusader[/card]s main without testing them for the PTQ because it seemed really good in theory and that was good enough for us. You may have seen the deck already but here is what we both sleeved up on Saturday morning.

[deck title=Justin Richardson CawBlade (w/ Crusaders)]
[Creatures]
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Squadron Hawk
4 Mirran Crusader
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of War and Peace
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3 Into the Roil
2 Dismember
4 Preordain
3 Mana Leak
3 Spell Pierce
[/Spells]
[Land]
4 Celestial Colonnade
4 Seachrome Coast
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Plains
4 Island
4 Tectonic Edge
2 Inkmoth Nexus
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
3 Oust
2 Gideon Jura
2 Celestial Purge
1 Batterskull
3 Divine Offering
2 Sun Titan
2 Jace Beleren
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The tournament went just about perfect for me, I won’t go into details. I played against a different deck each round, only lost to the mirror and just crushed through the tournament beating Soul Sisters, Mono Red, Eldrazi Green, Vampires, UR Splinter Twin, UB Control, RUG Twin and finally UG Vengevine in the finals en route to an invitation to my first Pro Tour in Philadelphia. Yes, I won a PTQ without ever beating Caw Blade.

There were some changes I was going to make to the deck, but with the recent announcement that [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card] and [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] are banned from T2 as of July 1st there is not much of a point in talking about Caw Blade any more as the deck will cease to exist, much to my chagrin. It hurts a little to know that I won’t be able to play with the deck that qualified me for Nationals and the Pro Tour anymore. I have grown personally attached to the deck in a way. It is one of the few decks I have played for an extended period of time, as usually I cannot stand playing the same deck week after week. Caw Blade was just so good and skill intensive that I had to play it at every tournament I could because it felt like cheating when playing against a non Caw Blade deck.

At the end of the day, as much as I loved playing Caw, it had to be done as explained in Aaron Forsythe’s article which can be read here.

For those looking for what to play in Standard come July 1st, your decks to beat should have Valakut as the number one deck, with aggressive strategies like Vampires and Mono Red right behind. Much as it pains me to say this I think that Blue decks might be unplayable with the loss of Jace. I know there are other sources of card draw, but none are as good or as devastating as being able to [card]Brainstorm[/card] multiple turns in a row and the loss of constant card draw may be too much for Blue decks to handle.

If you are looking for Legacy tech I would recommend either of the following 2 lists depending on your expected metagame. If you expect a lot of Control and Combo (I only lost to aggro and once to control while beating everything else) then I would play something like this.

[deck title=Justing Richardson – Fish]
[Land]
12 Island
4 Mutavault
4 Wasteland
[/Land]
[Spells]
3 Standstill
4 Aether Vial
4 Mental Misstep
4 Force of Will
3 Daze
2 Dismember
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Cursecatcher
4 Silvergill Adept
4 Lord of Atlantis
4 Coralhelm Commander
4 Merrow Reejerey
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
1 Dismember
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
2 Spell Pierce
2 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
2 Submerge
2 Spell Pierce
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

And 4 Extra sideboard slots depending on what type of decks you expect, although I recommend having an answer to [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card]/[card]Batterskull[/card] as they are a beating and will only gain in popularity

If you expect to play any type of aggro at all then I would suggest you stay away from the fishies and play something that I have been playing and enjoying immensely recently.

[deck title=Justin Richardons – UWr]
[Spells]
4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Fact or Fiction
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Mental Misstep
3 Spell Snare
3 Counterspell
2 Repeal
4 Swords to Plowshares
2 Wrath of God
1 Crucible of Worlds
[/Spells]
[Land]
3 Island
1 Plains
1 Arid Mesa
1 Misty Rainforest
2 Scalding Tarn
4 Flooded Strand
4 Tundra
1 Volcanic Island
1 Celestial Colonnade
4 Mishra’s Factory
2 Wasteland
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
1 Aura of Silence
3 Meddling Mage
1 Misdirection
3 Vendilion Clique
2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
2 Red Elemental Blast
3 Path to Exile
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

This is close to the list I used to get 2nd place at the Legacy 1k at the Canadian Magic Tour in Ottawa, the only difference being I played [card]Spell Pierce[/card] in lieu of [card]Spell Snare[/card] due to copying the list and building the deck very fast and not noticing until after the tournament. All credit for the list should go to Drew Levin and anyone who helped build the deck as it is an amazing deck as well as being very enjoyable for me to play. Even if you don’t expect much Aggro I would still probably recommend this deck (or something close to it) if you are a control player as it was the most fun I’ve had playing legacy in a long time, but be warned this deck is not fast and you will go to time often, but if you have the patience and play skill you will be rewarded when you pick up this deck.

I know most of you are tired of hearing about Caw Blade and were rejoicing when the ban list was announced, but I would like to thank any of you that took the time to read this article and I promise that you will never have to see me write about Caw Blade again…unless I play it in Extended lol. Leave any comments or questions you have for me in the comments section or follow me on Twitter: @JustinRich236.

I also want to give a big thanks to anyone who lent me cards for the Grand Prix and PTQ or any other tournament I want you to know that I really appreciate it even though it can get annoying to have to lend cards to a bum like me but I hope you continue to lend me cards in the future.

Thanks for Reading,
Justin