Uncategorized

WMCQ: Act II (and III)

In the last couple of weeks, I played in two Magic the Gathering WMCQs. Two, because the Netherlands, where I currently reside, is fairly small. The furthest WMCQ is a maximum of 3 hours away. Drive any further from anywhere in any direction and you’ll have to start speaking a different language, or start swimming (about 50% of our border is coastline). You also only need 300 Planeswalker Points to enter the WMCQ. Despite all this, the first WMCQ didn’t even have 200 players, and the second more central one only had 106.

Should be easy money, right?

It probably is. Frank Karsten tried to prove that at the second WMCQ, by piloting a no-spell, no-sideboard Naya Blitz deck to a top-eight finish, losing in the quarterfinals to Mono-Red.

Myself? I went 0- Mono-Red, drop—but I get ahead of myself. I promised a short recap of the first WMCQ in the Netherlands and to share the lessons learned there.

I played Junk Reanimator in the first WMCQ, and ended up 4-4, being out of contention after round four but still playing because my teammates were doing better. Joris Korver made top 16 by going 6-2, and Marco Hoonderd started off strong, but the wheels fell off in the later rounds, and he ended 5-3. Marco played the [card]Fog[/card] Control list from my last article , and Joris played his own version of Naya Blitz (more on that later).

My Junk list was based on Bryan Gottlieb’s list from his latest article but incorporated the full four [card]Restoration Angel[/card]s and maindeck [card]Acidic Slime[/card]s from the SCG tournament that same weekend. I figured that while Reanimator was the top deck, most people were still fighting it the wrong way. It is at heart a midrange deck, and you’ll notice that while playing it. You’ll hardcast Angels about as often as you reanimate them, and a [card]Rest in Peace[/card] after board frequently does nothing, as your main plan is not to reanimate something; it’s to get to a near unbeatable endgame of recurring Angels, to grind someone out with [card]Thragtusk[/card]s, to destroy their manabase by blinking [card]Acidic Slime[/card]s, or to kill them out of nowhere with a [card]Craterhoof Behemoth[/card]. [card]Rest in Peace[/card]? [card]Tormod’s Crypt[/card]? They barely do anything.

I lost to Blitz after some mulligans, Aristocrats where I couldn’t deal with [card]Silverblade Paladin[/card] + [card]Knight of Infamy[/card] twice, an Esper midrange deck like the one Simon Goerzten was playing around that time, and a Staticaster-Jund deck. I won against a BU [card]Crypt Ghast[/card]-[card]Griselbrand[/card] deck with a gazillion clones ([card]Griselbrand[/card] drawing a bunch of cards is nice but still doesn’t beat recurring Angels if you have no real answer to it in your deck) and beat two Esper control decks and a mirror.

What I noticed was that, in the games I lost, I wasn’t doing enough in the early game. Further playtesting against Blitz-type decks confirmed this. Playing only mana dorks and [card]Mulch[/card]ing is risky business unless you hit the right tools to reanimate an Angel on turn four or so.

I was playing three [card]Centaur Healer[/card]s main, figuring they would be good with the four [card]Restoration Angel[/card]s I was playing, but often they would die to [card]Searing Spear[/card] or Rampager before I could blink them. [card]Loxodon Smiter[/card] would’ve been better almost every time. What I’d try next is not Smiter, though. I’d go with [card]Lotleth Troll[/card]. Regeneration is very useful against Jund decks, [card]Supreme Verdict[/card], and all the conventional ways of removing it out of most aggro decks. It’s also a two drop, which further justifies cutting down on mana dorks and playing [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card]s main.

[card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] in this deck is like a more awesome mana dork that happens to be very good in the mirror but doesn’t produce a third mana on turn two. So you want two drops over three drops. This is the list I’d play if I were to play Reanimator in a tournament now:

[Deck title=”Junk Reanimator by Jay Lansdaal”]

[Creatures]
*4 Avacyn’s Pilgrim
*2 Deathrite Shaman
*3 Lotleth Troll
*3 Restoration Angel
*2 Acidic Slime
*3 Thragtusk
*3 Angel of Serenity
*1 Craterhoof Behemoth
[/Creatures]
[Planeswalkers]
*2 Garruk Relentless
[/Planeswalkers]
[Spells]
*4 Grisly Salvage
*3 Mulch
*1 Orzhov Charm
*2 Lingering Souls
*4 Unburial Rites
[/Spells]
[Land]
*2 Cavern of Souls
*1 Forest
*2 Gavony Township
*2 Godless Shrine
*3 Isolated Chapel
*4 Overgrown Tomb
*2 Sunpetal Grove
*4 Temple Garden
*3 Woodland Cemetery
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
*1 Deathrite Shaman
*2 Duress
*1 Tragic Slip
*2 Abrupt Decay
*1 Golgari Charm
*1 Fiend Hunter
*2 Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice
*2 Acidic Slime
*2 Obzedat, Ghost Council
*1 Thragtusk
[/Sideboard]
[/Deck]

The decision between a fourth Angel and the one Craterhoof is a difficult one. For now I’m leaning towards having an extra angle of attack, but it could easily be unnecessary.

Another question might be why there aren’t four [card]Thragtusk[/card]s in the mainboard. The reasoning behind it is that you simply can’t play an infinite amount of five drops in your maindeck, and you want access to a playset of both [card]Thragtusk[/card] and [card]Acidic Slime[/card] in your 75. [card]Acidic Slime[/card] is the worse card overall, but it is so much better than [card]Thragtusk[/card] against control that I don’t mind hedging a bit.

This list, however, is not the list I played in the second WMCQ—I didn’t even play Reanimator there. Instead, I opted to play Aristocrats: Act III. I had already been testing the Aristocrats for the first WMCQ and liked the deck, but because most decks I saw that week weren’t as well prepared for Reanimator as the people that played them seemed to think, I decided to go with the more powerful deck in the abstract. The weekend of the WMCQ itself, a lot changed. GR Aggro with Bonfires and Thundermaws was suddenly a deck. Aristocrats: Act II debuted. The metagame moved, and people were building decks that were better and better against Junk Reanimator.

Then, a week later, the results from a PTQ in Japan came in.

There was an Aristocrats version that cut both the [card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card]s (as people had been doing), and the [card]Blasphemous Act[/card]s that were signature to Act II, in favor of maindeck [card]Mark of Mutiny[/card]. In short: this was a stroke of genius. [card]Blasphemous Act[/card] can provide free wins, but when everybody knows what’s up, they’ll play around it, save a removal spell to blow you out, etc. etc. Also, being stuck with multiples against a deck that plays very few creatures is the worst. Also, being stuck with them because your opponent played a [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] is the worst. Also, being stuck with them while you don’t draw Reckoners or [card]Blood Artist[/card]s is the worst. Also… Did I tell you I thought the card was the worst in a lot of situations?

This is the list I tested and liked so much that I jumped ship and registered it for the second WMCQ:

[Deck title=”Aristocrats: Act III by Jay Lansdaal”]

[Creatures]
*4 Doomed Traveler
*4 Blood Artist
*4 Cartel Aristocrat
*4 Boros Reckoner
*2 Vampire Nighthawk
*4 Falkenrath Aristocrat
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
*2 Tragic Slip
*4 Searing Spear
*3 Mark of Mutiny
*1 Blasphemous Act
[/Spells]
[Land]
*4 Blood Crypt
*4 Dragonskull Summit
*2 Cavern of Souls
*4 Godless Shrine
*4 Isolated Chapel
*2 Plains
*3 Sacred Foundry
*1 Vault of the Archangel
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
*2 Duress
*1 Tragic Slip
*3 Gloom Surgeon
*2 Olivia Voldaren
*3 Slaughter Games
*2 Sorin, Lord of Innistrad
*1 Obzedat, Ghost Council
*1 Blasphemous Act
[/Sideboard]
[/Deck]

This list had everything I wanted: power, synergy, a surprise factor in Mark of Mutiny, the ability to race out of nowhere, enough removal and early plays to feel comfortable with my aggressive matchups, and a sideboard that let me change gears depending on the matchup.

I kept a single [card]Blasphemous Act[/card] in the deck, in favor of a third Nighthawk, which could easily have been wrong. I figured having a single Act main could get me out of sticky situations or could sometimes win a game out of nowhere, but Nighthawk has been awesome for me in testing and the few games I got to play in and outside of the WMCQ. You might want the third main and could move the Act to the sideboard.

I was very confident I’d do well with this list. I convinced my teammate Marco to play it as well (which wasn’t very hard). And then I lost the first two rounds to Mono-Red, both 1-2, both close, and both felt winnable if some things had gone slightly better for me or slightly worse for my opponent.

This meant an unfortunate end to the tournament for me. Quite the bummer, I must say. Obviously these things happen, but this time I didn’t bring any trade stuff (hey, I was planning to do well, right?), and I had to wait around for my teammates who were still in contention.

Marco did better with the same 75 but got knocked out by two Jund-type decks that kept miracling Bonfires while slamming him with [card]Thragtusk[/card]s or by simply drawing all the answers. Still, we couldn’t leave, because the third member of our crew was working his way to top eight, beating Jan van der Vegt (DzyL) and GP Bilbao champion Mitchell Manders on his way there, with his own version of the Blitz deck:

[Deck title=”Human Blitz by Joris Korver – Top 4 at WMCQ Utrecht”]

[Creatures]
*4 Boros Elite
*4 Champion of the Parish
*4 Wolfbitten Captive
*4 Burning-Tree Emissary
*4 Hamlet Captain
*4 Lightning Mauler
*4 Mayor of Avabruck
*3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
*4 Frontline Medic
*1 Ghor-Clan Rampagers
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
*4 Searing Spear
[/Spells]
[Land]
*4 Cavern of Souls
*1 Clifftop Retreat
*1 Rootbound Crab
*4 Sacred Foundry
*4 Stomping Ground
*2 Sunpetal Grove
*4 Temple Garden
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
*2 Electrickery
*4 Boros Charm
*2 Gruul Charm
*1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
*2 Boros Reckoner
*2 Fiend Hunter
*2 Mark of Mutiny
[/Sideboard]
[/Deck]

Now with even more humans (and werewolves)!

While I’ve seen people online move to [card]Wolfbitten Captive[/card]s over [card]Experiment One[/card], the full four [card]Hamlet Captain[/card]s is the real unique selling point of this list. [card]Hamlet Captain[/card] often functions as Mayors five through eight, while being a respectable bear itself. It’s not a great card, but most people were playing [card]Flinthoof Boar[/card] in its place—a creature that had no synergy with the rest of the deck (except for being a two-drop to go with [card]Burning-Tree Emissary[/card], a trait easily reproduced), and was often just a Grizzly Boar with only eight mountains in the deck. Three mana 2/2 haste creatures don’t get me excited, but two mana Crusade effects that come with a warm body? Sign me up!

As soon as you play [card]Hamlet Captain[/card], you realize that [card]Experiment One[/card] will almost never be bigger than a 2/2, at which point [card]Wolfbitten Captive[/card] becomes more and more attractive. I’ve seen Joris win multiple games by attacking with flipped ones with four mana open, threatening to hit for 6 damage or eat almost anything, even something silly like an [card]Angel of Serenity[/card].

Personally, I think I’d like to replace a [card]Searing Spear[/card] with an extra [card]Ghor-Clan Rampager[/card]. Frank Karsten’s list played no spells at all (he played an extra land, two extra Rampagers and a [card]Silverblade Paladin[/card] over the [card]Searing Spear[/card]s), but I don’t like that too much. I do like having an extra Rampager. The card often has to be played around, or it will turn a good block into a bad one, on top of dealing some damage to your opponent. I’m also intrigued by the idea of adding a [card]Silverblade Paladin[/card], but [card]Frontline Medic[/card] is too important, and I don’t really want to add more three-drops, as the deck functions on one- and two drops.

So where do we go from here? Mono-Red won the WMCQ, and could be a good choice in a metagame filled with Reanimator, Blitz, and slower midrange and control decks. I personally still like the Aristocrats list I played, and it is very capable of beating Mono-Red, which Marco proved during the Swiss as well.

However, the meta is sure to change with Dragon’s Maze on the horizon. I for one am excited to have an actual control finisher available to me. I’ve always liked UWR Control but often felt that it needed a finisher to close out games, especially when you weren’t playing Reckoners (and even then, [card]Harvest Pyre[/card] is also just a one-of), so one or two [card]Aetherling[/card]s main might make me go back to playing blue.

We’ll see! Have fun at the prerelease everybody!

Jay Lansdaal

iLansdaal on Twitter and MTGO

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments