I hate losing.  Whether it be not getting the girl, not acing the test, or just getting top-decked in a friendly game of Magic, I absolutely hate it.  I will be a good sport about it, shake my opponent’s hand and move to the next endeavor but in my head the loss continues to burn and the challenge continues.  I am a very competitive spikey player who is willing to invest the time to learn new tactics, make adjustments, and attack from alternate angles to better achieve my objective.  This article, my first for Mana Deprived, addresses a hole in the meta-game that can be exploited using new technology from the recent Magic 2013 Core Set release.  My deck, while a common archetype that is attempted often, attacks the staple cards of the Standard format in an unconventional way and asks my opponents questions that they have trouble answering.

The Metagame

At the moment the meta-game consists primarily of Delver-based aggro-control decks, Birthing Pod Variants, Black-X Zombie aggro-combo, Green-X aggro decks and the occasional midrange and control decks.  We are experiencing a hyper-aggressive format during the part of the season (just before rotation) where the quantity of cards in Standard generally favors control decks.  Currently however, control decks lie mostly dormant and cards like Delver of Secrets are providing early aggression while [card]Thragtusk[/card] is resistant to removal and helps win races and miracle [card]Bonfire of the Damned[/card] is the ultimate trump in aggressive creature mirrors.

I had been very averse to playing control lately, as there are so many aggressive decks that can simply go over-the-top of your Spot removal, permission, and mass removal. Also, your mana-base is usually sub-optimal due to the fact you are likely running three colors to pair permission with effective removal and win conditions.  My feelings towards control changed when I looked at the full spoiler of Core Set 2013 and absolutely fell in love with two amazing four-drops that each have four potential abilities.

Lynchpins

When I do decide to brew I look for one to two “lynchpins” for the deck: cards that the deck’s functions and interactions are centered around.  Two of my favorite cards from the M13 spoiler were Liliana of the Dark Realms and Trading Post so that is where I started.  These four-drop permanents offer a great deal of versatility, offering the potential of four abilities each, but also constrain the deck-building requirements.  In this particular case the power of the cards was worth the constraints that they provided.

Lynchpin 1: [card]Liliana of the Dark Realms[/card]

Many people view Liliana 3.0 as nothing more spoiler for the reprint of shock-lands in Return to Ravnica.  While I am excited for the potential return of shock-lands I see a four-mana Planeswalker with four abilities.  Only three abilities are printed but her {-3} ability offers a choice: attempt to win the game or spot-remove your opponent’s biggest threat.  The {-3} ability does cost you 100% of her initial loyalty so she does not protect herself as well as the only other four-mana, four-ability Planeswalker but if you are expecting Wizards to make a [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card]-caliber mistake again you are either delusional or a hardcore-Blue mage.  Liliana functions as a way to always make your land drop in a control deck, a very important ability while offering options to defend herself and create situations that lead you to winning the game via emblem or pumping a creature into lethal damage range.

Lynchpin #2: [card]Trading Post[/card]

[card]Trading Post[/card] is an extremely versatile card that functions in a similar manner to another Planeswalker in the deck.  The card draw and recursion provided by this card help you grind out an incremental lead in the mid to late game and the ability to create chump-blockers and gain life make combat very difficult for your opponent.  The ability to perform these actions at instant-speed gives game situations the feel of having a “Planeswalker” on their turn.  In all of my testing with this deck and other decks I have tried with Trading Post in them if you have five mana and a Trading Post in-hand it is almost always correct to play the Trading Post, regardless of the other options you have in hand.  I can’t think of another artifact I’d rather have in play in Standard and that includes [card]Batterskull[/card] and [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card].

Expanding from the Lynchpins

It is necessary now to expand from our lynchpin cards and build synergies and find ways to win the games.  Some cards, because we are Mono Black, will be in the deck out of necessity. We will have a pretty default removal suite with [card]Doom Blade[/card]s, [card]Go for the Throat[/card], [card]Murder[/card], [card]Mutilate[/card], [card]Black Sun’s Zenith[/card], [card]Curse of Death’s Hold[/card] and [card]Life’s Finale[/card].  These cards don’t necessarily contribute to synergy or winning the game but it helps us as the control deck slow things down so we can get our lynchpins online and working on turns three through 6.

Ramp cards that are also artifacts will help us get out our four-mana lynchpins early and thus minimize the strain we put on our removal suite early.  The main cards I looked at were [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card], [card]Pristine Talisman[/card] and [card]Sphere of the Suns[/card].  I didn’t end up running [card]Sphere of the Suns[/card] since it is only a ramp card for three activations while [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card] provides a blocker and/or a creature/artifact to be sacrificed to [card]Trading Post[/card] and [card]Pristine Talisman[/card] provides life gain while accelerating your mana which is invaluable for a controlling deck.

“The Wellspring Engine” is what I call the next set of artifacts and lands that I chose to interact with Trading Post.  This “engine” consists of four copies of Ichor and [card]Mycosynth Wellspring[/card] and four copies of [card]Phyrexia’s Core[/card].  For those of you that don’t know: [card]Mycosynth Wellspring[/card] lets you search your library for a basic land and put it into your hand when it enters the battlefield or is put into the graveyard from play, [card]Ichor Wellspring[/card] draws a card when it enters play or is put into the graveyard from play and [card]Phyrexia’s core[/card] is a land that taps for a colorless mana or allows you to sacrifice an artifact to gain a life.  Before [card]Trading Post[/card] “The Wellspring Engine” was good enough for non-Blue mono-colored control decks that were lacking card draw and needed to make land drops frequently.  With [card]Trading Post[/card] the Wellsprings are able to be sacrificed for even more value: for the same cost to sacrifice as [card]Phyrexia’s Core[/card] you can sacrifice the Wellspring and draw a card.

Liliana wants us to have a way to make her -3 ability lethal (the one that grants +x/+x where x is the amount of Swamps you control.)  The best way to ensure a one-shot kill given the presence of [card]Thragtusk[/card], [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card], [card]Sword of War and Peace[/card] and other ways to gain life is via Infect damage.  The best evasive Infect creature in Black is the legendary [card]Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon[/card] who can gain haste at the cost of one black mana and can regenerate for two black mana.  Combined with [card]Liliana of the Dark Realms[/card] Skithiryx provides the one-shot combo-kill option this control deck needs to finish our opponents off once we establish the control of the board.  We can also afford to run four [card]Inkmoth Nexus[/card]es to support our Infect offensive as eight non-basic lands (4 [card]Inkmoth Nexus[/card], 4 [card]Phyrexia’s Core[/card]) that don’t produce colored mana is not to our detriment in a heavy artifact mono-colored deck.

Cards like [card]Mindslaver[/card], [card]Diabolic Revelation[/card] and [card]Spine of Ish Sah[/card] are awesome sideboard cards that can benefit in games where we are not playing against a hyper-aggressive deck and can try to lock out opponent out of the game after benefiting from not missing land drops and accelerating with our [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card]s and [card]Pristine Talisman[/card]s:

• Twelve mana, [card]Mindslaver[/card] and two [card]Trading Post[/card]s lets us create a [card]Mindslaver[/card] lock (Cast [card]Mindslaver[/card], sacrifice it to [card]Mindslaver[/card] them, Post 1: Make a Goat, Post 2: Sacrifice Goat to return [card]Mindslaver[/card], rinse and repeat.)
• A [card]Spine of Ish Sah[/card] lets us remove things that black has trouble with like artifacts, enchantments and planeswalkers and can be a lock in itself if we get a Liliana emblem with enough sacrifice outlets.
• [card]Diabolic Revelation[/card] is a card that is any situation can get us the piece of the combo we need, the removal we need or sometimes multiple combo pieces.

Finally, [card]Sorin Markov[/card] and [card]Karn Liberated[/card] give us other ways to win the game via Planeswalkers and Sorin provides the possibility of another combo kill via [card]Sorin’s Vengeance[/card].

Forming the Decklist

After considering the lynchpins and the cards that are required I arrived at the list below for my local Star City Games Super Invitational Qualifier on 28 July, 2013 at Amazing Discoveries in Tucson, AZ:

[deck title=Star City Games Invitational]
[Creatures]
2 Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon
4 Solemn Simulacrum
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
1 Karn Liberated
3 Liliana of the Dark Realms
1 Sorin Markov
1 Black Sun’s Zenith
1 Curse of Death’s Hold
2 Doom Blade
1 Druidic Satchel
2 Go for the Throat
4 Ichor Wellspring
1 Life’s Finale
1 Murder
3 Mutilate
4 Mycosynth Wellspring
3 Pristine Talisman
1 Staff of Nin
2 Trading Post
1 Tribute to Hunger
[/Spells]
[Land]
4 Inkmoth Nexus
4 Phyrexia’s Core
14 Swamp
[/Land]
[SIDEBOARD]
1 Curse of Death’s Hold
1 Diabolic Revelation
1 Elixir of Immortality
1 Go for the Throat
1 Mimic Vat
1 Mindslaver
1 Ratchet Bomb
1 Sever the Bloodline
1 Sorin Markov
2 Sorin’s Vengeance
1 Spine of Ish Sah
3 Tumble Magnet
[/SIDEBOARD]
[/deck]

As you can see the price point of the deck is very attractive but I did not set out to build a budget deck, it just turned out that the correct cards to complement our lynchpins were relatively inexpensive.  I wanted to focus on the Liliana plus Skithiryx kill as post-board wipe it seemed the most effective with the other Planeswalkers supporting the main kill.  “The Wellspring Engine” and [card]Trading Post[/card] helped me see more cards while [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card] and [card]Pristine Talisman[/card] allowed me to ramp to my more expensive spells a few turns early.

This deck blanks [card]Bonfire of the Damned[/card] as your [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card]s draw you a card when they die and Skithiryx, if he hasn’t killed you on a 10-poison swing with haste with Liliana, can regenerate for BB.  It is also very productive against Delver, spot removing where necessary and cleaning up the board when they over-commit.

I finished the Invitational Qualifier at the top of the Swiss standings losing only one match to an Esper Planeswalkers control build that managed to out-grind my deck in straight sets in a very slow control battle.  If this list looks ill-suited to battle a nearly creature-less, Planeswalker and Enchantment-heavy deck it’s because it actually is.  I erred on the side of hating-out all the creature decks in the format and did not include enough to deal with the random control deck that managed to ascend into the X-0 bracket.

It was also unfortunate that while I finished first in the Swiss at X-1-0 my Esper Control opponent managed to run the table and go X-0-2 and finish eighth in the Swiss, pitting us against each other again in the Top Eight.  My opponent is a good friend and play-testing teammate of mine but it still burns me that I lost the rematch.  I managed to take this match to three games this time but two well-timed [card]Celestial Purge[/card]s and his one sideboard [card]Negate[/card] turned off two Sorins and a [card]Spine of Ish Sah[/card]. A [card]Timely Reinforcements[/card] took him out of [card]Sorin’s Vengeance[/card] range allowing an eventual [card]Karn Liberated[/card] Ultimate. In game 3.5 (restarted game three) I faced a Skithiryx, [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card], [card]Mimic Vat[/card], [card]Trading Post[/card] and Swamp on Turn 0 and lost rather quickly.  After around 90 minutes of battling in the untimed round I ended the day with just $50 a playmat and a pin instead of $300-$400 and an Invitational invite.

The determination to fix this gap in my planning for the meta-game has taken me to this current deck list that I will sleeve-up for M13 Game Day and likely for an upcoming Standard Pro Tour Qualifier in Phoenix, AZ:

[deck title=Pro Tour Qualifier, Phoenix AZ]
[creatures]
2 Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon
4 Solemn Simulacrum
[/creatures]
[planeswalkers]
1 Karn Liberated
3 Liliana of the Dark Realms
1 Sorin Markov
[/planeswalkers]
[spells]
1 Black Sun’s Zenith
1 Curse of Death’s Hold
2 Doom Blade
1 Druidic Satchel
2 Go for the Throat
4 Ichor Wellspring
1 Life’s Finale
1 Murder
3 Mutilate
4 Mycosynth Wellspring
3 Pristine Talisman
1 Sorin’s Vengeance
2 Trading Post
1 Tumble Magnet
[/spells]
[lands]
4 Inkmoth Nexus
4 Phyrexia’s Core
14 Swamp
[/lands]
[SIDEBOARD]
2 Beast Within
1 Curse of Death’s Hold
1 Diabolic Revelation
1 Elixir of Immortality
1 Forest
1 Go for the Throat
1 Mimic Vat
1 Mindslaver
1 Ratchet Bomb
1 Sever the Bloodline
1 Sorin Markov
1 Sorin’s Vengeance
2 Spine of Ish Sah
[/SIDEBOARD]
[/deck]

Notice the inclusion of the extra [card]Spine of Ish Sah[/card] and the card that Michael J Flores calls “Best Within.”  I realized that I needed more ways to destroy permanents that Black can’t handle and at different parts of the curve.  The inclusion of one Forest in the sideboard allows me to have nine cards in my deck that get Green mana for my splash (1 Forest, 4 [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card], 4 [card]Mycosynth Wellspring[/card]). [card]Beast Within[/card] allows me to take a card that is troublesome for Black to deal with and turn it into something Black can easily deal with.  In this deck it is essentially [card]Vindicate[/card] at instant speed while [card]Spine of Ish Sah[/card] is Vindicate with Buyback 4.

The cards that got the axe in this version were: [card]Staff of Nin[/card], [card]Tribute to Hunger[/card], [card]Doom Blade[/card] x1 (SB), [card]Tumble Magnet[/card] x2 (SB, x1 moved to Main Deck.)  These five cards were considered the weakest for the following reasons:

• Staff, while effective, costs six and doesn’t do enough for a six-mana card.
• [card]Tribute to Hunger[/card] can take care of Hexproof threats but only if they are alone on the battlefield.  Most of the time this three-mana edict eats an elf or [card]Birds of Paradise[/card] and not actually what you want to get rid of.  The life gain is inconsequential and can be made up via other means.
• [card]Go for the Throat[/card] in this meta-game is better than [card]Doom Blade[/card] and [card]Murder[/card] provides the versatility I want in the main so a third [card]Doom Blade[/card] is not necessary.
• [card]Tumble Magnet[/card] is good enough for main deck but I don’t want more than one.  If I need to reset it I should be able to re-buy it late game after drawing a card off of it with [card]Trading Post[/card] or sacrificing it for 1 life off of [card]Phyrexia’s Core[/card].

With regard to sideboarded games I am more of a “sideboard by feel” guy in matchups but from every Magic article I’ve read I get the feeling that the readership will eat me alive in the comments if I don’t provide at least a few sideboard tips:

• Sorin plus [card]Sorin’s Vengeance[/card] almost always comes in for games two and three.  I moved one of the sideboard [card]Sorin’s Vengeance[/card] to the main for this reason.  Normally 1 Liliana and 1 Skithiryx come out for these two but it depends on the matchup as there may be removal that is not effective that is coming out.
• Curse #2 and [card]Ratchet Bomb[/card] are quite good versus Delver decks.
• [card]Mindslaver[/card], Elixir, [card]Diabolic Revelation[/card], Spine and the [card]Beast Within[/card] Package are my nods to control decks. These cards often come in for some of your removal which is bad versus creature-light decks.
• [card]Sever the Bloodline[/card] is less about hitting multiple targets (though I always board it in versus [card]Sun Titan[/card] plus [card]Phantasmal Image[/card]) and more about #1 Exiling the target and #2 Being a dual-use removal spell.
• [card]Mimic Vat[/card] is amazing versus undying creatures, titans and [card]Blade Splicer[/card]s.

I went with so many one-of cards in my sideboard because many of them functionally do what other cards in the main or side do but in a slightly different way at a different part of the curve which is important when you pull you least effective cards in a match-up out and put the best answers that fit the curve in.

I will leave you with some answers to questions I anticipate about the deck (if you have questions that are not covered below e-mail them to me at yettidurdles@gmail.com or post in the comments below):

• [card]Druidic Satchel[/card] #1 is better than [card]Trading Post[/card] #3 and provides life gain while helping to ensure that you don’t flood on your draw step.  It also interacts well with Wellsprings being sacrificed and with Liliana to shuffle cards away you don’t want to draw.
• [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card] is not as good as Skithiryx in this build and the life gain from other means is sufficient to preserve your life total versus even the most aggressive decks.  Wurmcoil is not necessary.
• [card]Murder[/card] was either going to be [card]Go for the Throat[/card] #3 or [card]Doom Blade[/card] #3 until I realized the versatility was worth the extra mana and I went with a singleton [card]Murder[/card].  It makes your deck look more removal heavy to opponents when they see three different spot removal spells and assume you have more than one of each.
• 22 Lands is more than enough.  Liliana and “The Wellspring Engine” will ensure that you receive the quantity of lands you need on-time and because of our simple mana-base we don’t require additional lands for fixing.  The goal is not to flood and more than 22 lands will likely flood us.  If you bring in the Forest you almost certainly want to cut a land for it.
• This is a complicated and challenging deck to play.  Make sure to test extensively before sleeving it up for a big event or you may be disappointed in your results.

Thank you for reading my article.  Please let me know what you thought about it in the comments.  If you’re in the Tucson area or see me at a GP/PTQ come say hello: I’ll be the one in the tan bucket hat Mutilating all the dumb creatures off the board.

Until next time, cheers!

Brad Dutiel (Yettipike1 on MTGO)