It’s the first round of the top 8 playoffs at a PTQ. It was sometime around the fifth round of swiss play that I was pretty confident I would be here. Eight players were prepared to conclude a rather unexciting PTQ, not dissimilar to what the present standard metagame has provided worldwide for the past few weeks. Not surprisingly, 7 of 8 players on this stage had selected Caw-Blade as their weapon of choice. Then there was the 8th player: me.

I won’t tell you just yet exactly what I was playing. I wouldn’t want to ruin the suspense, but I should tell you that I ought to be writing a winning tournament report right now. It was during game 3 of the final round that I had the game locked up. I could say it was the fatigue of 10 rounds of play, or that 2 cokes, a coffee, an apple juice, and a quarter pounder was the only sustenance I had ingested in the last 20 some hours, but the important thing is that in a game I should have won, I managed to find the one and only line of play that could prevent me from becoming PTQ champion then I took it.

Instead of winning a PT invite and airfare to Philadelphia, the big prize was taken down by my good friend and local playgroup member Jeff Sagstuen (Sorry Jeff if I’ve spelled your name wrong). I don’t want to take anything away from him though. He was the better mage when it mattered most and got to enjoy the feeling of winning your first PTQ, an experience I had the pleasure of having not so long ago. GGs old boy, Red Deer is proud of you.

After a full night and part of a morning beating myself up, it’s time to put some words down to ensure that the lessons to be learned from the tournament are remembered and maybe to pass some of those learnings on to you guys. There is a lot to be learned about over-extending, playing not to lose, keeping focus after several hours of play, observing proper nutrition, etc., but the most exciting thing I learned, and certainly the one you all will be most interested in, is how to crush Caw-Blade I’ll say that again, in case you think you’ve misread something.

I learned how to crush Caw-Blade.

Wind the clock back two days. Due to a recent move, a new job with long hours, and plans to attend school, Magic has taken a temporary backseat in my life. There was virtually zero testing behind my deck choice. Three rounds of standard with Caw-Blade since the spoiling of NPH was the entirety of my knowledge on the format. That being the case, I did what I always do in this situation: took an older, slightly off the radar standard deck that I have had some previous, albeit minor, success with and just ran with it. Manadeprived.com editor, Craig Cameron-Weir, who was in a similar situation, had me build him the U/R [card]Splinter Twin[/card] deck designed by Mike Flores. A few hours of running our decks into each other a night before the tournament and a couple sideboard tweaks later, I was ready to duel.

Without further ado!

[deck title=Levy Style G/W Quest by Brady Boychuk]
[Lands]
4 Razorverge Thicket
4 Sunpetal Grove
1 Stirring Wildwood
8 Plains
6 Forest
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
4 Memnite
4 Ornithopter
4 Glint Hawk
4 Squadron Hawk
4 Fauna Shaman
4 Vengevine
2 Kor Skyfisher
1 Birds of Paradise
1 Sylvan Ranger
1 Stoneforge Mystic
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Quest for the Holy Relic
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
1 Sword of War and Peace
1 Argentum Armor
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
1 Sword of Body and Mind
1 Sword of War and Peace
1 Mortarpod
1 Phyrexian Revoker
1 Stirring Wildwood
2 Stoneforge Mystic
2 Beast Within
2 Naturalize
2 Kor Firewalker
2 Mirran Crusader
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The rationale behind this choice was pretty simple. Jace decks lose a lot of ground to [card]Fauna Shaman[/card] and [card]Vengevine[/card] decks. The reason this type of strategy has been unpopular lately has been due to a poor match up against Valakut decks. Fortunately for my favourite 2/2 and 4/3 of all time, the Mind Sculptor has gone into business with [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card], a partnership that is manufacturing swords (and frowny faces) at a pace unseen since the last time I planeswalked from Mirrodin to Kamigawa. With a full squadron of hawks to keep production churning around the clock, the Molten Pinnacle has gone from insurmountable to a nice weekend getaway, the kind of place you take the kids during Heritage Day, ride the gondola to the top where there are refreshments and seating and hopefully, if you are lucky, you might catch a glimpse of some local wildlife. The fledgling griffins are just starting to leave the roost this time of year.

Enter [card]Vengevine[/card]. I have no idea who did what to make this plant so angry, but he just absolutely loves causing serious damage. At present, he is extremely well positioned for doing just that. Killing Jaces, mowing down hawks by the squadron, and trading in combat with just about every non-endgame monster, this guy does it all. With [card]Fauna Shaman[/card] providing the miracle grow for these nasty flora, he doesn’t do it just once either, he does it again, and again, and again. If you love attacking as much as I do, you no doubt have noticed how homogenized the Caw-Blade metagame has gotten; some lists don’t even pack a [card]Day of Judgment[/card] anywhere in the 75! The lists are heavily inbred to beat each other, with little regard for the rest of the field on account of the already superior position over the other prime antagonist [card]Primeval Titan[/card]. It’s time to start punishing these guys.

Now for some bad news. Valakut and similar titan decks beat this list up pretty badly. I’m not sure how much help [card]Beast Within[/card] is against these decks, as I haven’t tested against them much. It never came up in the tournament though, since playing Valakut in a field of so many Caw-Blade opponents would be very much like bringing a knife to a gun fight. It’s likely that something could be done to improve the match-up, though I don’t think Valakut is popular enough to warrant much concern for the time being anyways. The worse news is that you are a pretty big dog to everyone’s new favourite combo of [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card] and [card]Splinter Twin[/card]. I’m not a fan of the [card]Splinter Twin[/card] decks as I feel Caw-Blade has way too many ways to interact with it. Craig and I have some ideas to improve the [card]Splinter Twin[/card] deck, but that’s a different article for a different day. Regardless of how I personally feel about the deck, everybody loves the fresh new combo after a new set release and you should expect it in some numbers for the next few weeks. That being said, [card]Beast Within[/card], [card]Naturalize[/card], and even [card]Phyrexian Revoker[/card] can oft-times disrupt them enough that the match is far from unwinnable.

The Tournament

I won’t go through a round by round breakdown of events for a couple of reasons. Chiefly, they are boring, but also I don’t really take many notes during games and I’m not a disingenuous enough individual to just make up what I don’t remember. I will go over a few interesting things that did happen and comment a bit on sideboarding. Also, I will eventually let you all in on what happened during game three of the final round. (Spoiler Alert: I lose)

Including the top 8, I played ten rounds of standard on that day. During those 10 rounds I actually played games against Caw-Blade 7 times (I took a last round draw with Shaun Mclaren, who was on Caw-blade before beating him in the top 8), losing once in the swiss to a combination of multiple mulligans and an opponent drawing very strong hands in all three games, games that I was still very much in regardless. To put it another way, 80% of the decks I played against were Caw-Blade where I lost only two matches, once in the swiss, as described above, and a second time in the top 8 after the deck handed me the win on a silver platter, and I promptly shipped it across the table to Jeff. Now I am not much of a numbers guy, and I don’t want to come out and say that G/W Quest has an x% win rate vs Caw-Blade, but I can tell you that in that match-up you are firmly in the driver’s seat. As long as you understand their plan and what they are capable of, losing is difficult.

Game ones against Caw-Blade are fairly elementary. Most opponents are prepared for mirror matches mostly and are embarrassingly under prepared for a creature beat down. Winning the die roll is pretty important, since being on the play in game three is actually much better than being on the play for game one. Losing the die roll isn’t the end of the world, however. There is a lot of outside the box thinking with this deck, compared to other creature based aggro decks. For example, when you are on the draw game one, doing nothing but drawing a card and then discarding a vine is a play that you should take way more often than you might think. When you follow that up with a turn two land, quest, [card]Memnite[/card], [card]Ornithopter[/card], and [card]Vengevine[/card] trigger, suddenly your opponent is way behind. They’ll often have to spend a turn stifling a [card]Vengevine[/card] assault rather than tutoring up a piece of equipment or advancing their position in some other manner. It’s this proactive approach that actually turns their strongest openings into very real liabilities that allows the quest deck to perform so well.

Another thing about game ones vs Caw-Blade opponents are your mulligans. Usually, a hand without quest or [card]Fauna Shaman[/card] is sent back but against Caw, a hand with two [card]Glint Hawk[/card]s and a [card]Memnite[/card] or [card]Ornithopter[/card] is sometimes fine. In this scenario, one of two things will typically happen either they spend their mana and cards in the early turns killing [card]Glint Hawk[/card]s instead of generating a scary board position, leaving [card]Vengevine[/card] and co. a clear path to play cleanup (good for you) or; they literally just get pecked to death by the birds (better for you). When keeping hands with quest, also remember it’s usually a bad idea to immediately go searching up holy relics at the first available chance. I usually keep an active quest on board to fetch up the appropriate sword in response to removal. You will be surprised how often you will win against Caw with an active quest on board while their [card]Divine Offering[/card]s rot in their hand.

Sideboarding against Caw-Blade, as is the case against most other opponents, is pretty simple. You remove the quest combo ([card]Glint Hawk[/card]s, Quests, [card]Ornithopter[/card]s, and [card]Argentum Armor[/card]) and bring in everything but the Firewalkers. Usually your opponents will be so focused on sideboarding to beat your combo that sideboarding it out actually gives you an extreme edge. Games are also going to inevitably go longer due to opponents bringing in cards like [card]Pyroclasm[/card] or [card]Day of Judgment[/card], so siding out the explosive starts and preparing yourself for a longer more mid-range style of game is more helpful to you than it is to the control deck anyways. During the tournament, several opponents sideboarded in [card]Mental Misstep[/card] against me, which was excellent for me because the only target left in my deck was a single [card]Birds of Paradise[/card]. In fact, one of my opponents actually [card]Mental Misstep[/card]ped a turn one [card]Birds of Paradise[/card] during a game two, which essentially turned my birds into a turn one shock to the dome, which is actually way better than a turn one birds in the match-up

After removing the combo you have a bit more room to interact with your opponents. [card]Fauna Shaman[/card] gains value every turn it survives in games that go longer and you can apply enough pressure with [card]Vengevine[/card]s and random beaters to force the Caw-Blade opponent to have to regularly tap out for multiple hawks or spells like [card]Gideon Jura[/card]. This makes your sideboarded [card]Naturalize[/card]s and [card]Beast Within[/card]s relatively easy to stick when you need to. Again, you mostly just play around their removal by leaning on [card]Vengevine[/card] and mostly not caring what happens to your own life total. I don’t think I need to go into great detail on how good a [card]Mirran Crusader[/card] holding a [card]Sword of War and Peace[/card] is against them.

My round one opponent was Lane Budgell, a good player and all-around righteous dude, playing U/R Flores Twin. Like I said earlier, the match-up is pretty bad for us, but the sideboard helps immensely. After taking out the quest combo and bringing in everything but the [card]Mortarpod[/card] and a Firewalker, you can disrupt them long enough with Revoker, [card]Beast Within[/card], or [card]Naturalize[/card] to hopefully stick a [card]Sword of Body and Mind[/card] on a decent creature. After you’ve accomplished that, it really is a matter of holding onto a [card]Beast Within[/card] or [card]Naturalize[/card] and tapping attackers with one hand, while you cross your fingers with the other. Luckily, that exact plan happened to work for me in round one and for some reason or another (I was in the winning record bracket?) I didn’t encounter the deck again.

The other non-Caw-Blade deck I played against was the updated Soul Sisters deck with an infinite life combo. This was a deck that had me slightly concerned due to the amount of life they could gain and was the secondary reason for including a [card]Sword of Body and Mind[/card] in the board. The match was a lot closer than I imagined it would be. In game one, my opponent led with a [card]Soul Warden[/card] and then an [card]Ajani’s Pridemate[/card]. He applied pressure with the Pridemate, which was blocked by different [card]Glint Hawk[/card]/[card]Memnite[/card]/[card]Ornithopter[/card] every turn while [card]Vengevine[/card] and the Squadron endured to deal an amount of damage that was greater than twenty plus however much life he gained. Again, I sided out the Quest package (notice a trend yet?) and brought in everything but the [card]Kor Firewalkers[/card].

Game two was much of the same only my opponent forged a sword before I could and won the race. Game three was a real heart stopper as I fumbled on mana a bit in the mid-game and was unable to use [card]Mortarpod[/card] to off his [card]Suture Priest[/card] before he gained infinite life with the [card]Phyrexian Metamorph[/card]/[card]Leonin Relic Warder[/card] combo. When I didn’t concede with my opponent at nineteen trillion life, he told his friend who was watching that I must be playing for the draw. I explained I had outs, and eventually found a [card]Sword of Body and Mind[/card]. I ate away at his library, fortunately milling his artifact removal, while an army of incorporeal wolf tokens blocked his creatures. Eventually, [card]Mirran Crusader[/card] arrived with his [card]Sword of War and Peace[/card], grabbed the U/G Sword in his off-hand and shredded my opponent’s deck. It was the final turn of overtime in the match before my opponent was finally without a library. Realizing that a draw was as bad as a loss for each of us, he picked up his cards on my end step and extended the hand.

That is more or less it for the general recount of the tournament, save of course the story of how I lost in the top 8. To make a long story short, after crushing Jeff game one and then losing on a mull to 4 in a closer-than-you’d-expect game two, I found myself with a threat light opener in game 3. I keep, and decided to compensate for the land heavy draw by fetching a [card]Batterskull[/card] with my mystic. The game evolves to a point where Jeff is forced to cast [card]Day of Judgment[/card]. Post judgement, I tap out to cast the [card]Batterskull[/card], leaving Jeff a one turn window to get it with [card]Divine Offering[/card]. Luckily for me, he doesn’t have it, and I am able to start sending meanies into the red zone again. Not thinking clearly enough, I tap low to cast [card]Mirran Crusader[/card] on the following turn. Naturally, the single card Jeff has drawn since then is a [card]Divine Offering[/card], and he gets the [card]Batterskull[/card]. A turn later, his [card]Sun Titan[/card] is holding off my [card]Mirran Crusader[/card]. I have a two turn window to draw a creature to pair with the [card]Memnite[/card] in my hand, which would trigger a [card]Vengevine[/card] in my graveyard for the win, but it never happens before Jeff casts Emerita Angel and follows it with a land. Jeff ended the game at five life, the same five life he gained off the [card]Divine Offering[/card] I let him cast, meanwhile [card]Vengevine[/card] rotted in the yard, while [card]Mirran Crusader[/card] sat helplessly on the battlefield, unable to help my [card]Memnite[/card] revive the vine.

Lesson learned though, I suppose, and losing in the finals to a good friend does help take a bit of the sting away. That’s it for me this time kids. I hope you guys enjoyed my first article and you can probably look forward to more after the summer when magic can once again start competing with school for domination of my life. Cheers.

-Brady Boychuk
BBGun403 on Twitter and BBGun on MTGO

Props

Imposter Brian – Gj on top 8 homeslice.
BlitzCraig – For reminding me that [card]Mirran Crusader[/card] was a house.

Slops

Jared Gushattey – For not recycling.