Christopher Morris-Lent
6/8/2012 11:09:00 AM
Crashing on Speed

Once upon a time (OK, about a week ago), the Reveillark was riding high. The deck, led by the poorly illustrated Elemental I had christened “the Mothership,” had just won a Daily Event on Modo. So what if everything had gone right when it needed to? That was Magic; like poker, it was much harder on the Internet, and one needed to “run good” to “get there,” if you will.


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Then the Mothership crashed. I lost something like seven matches in a row. Though it is willfully ignorant to say luck is cyclical – Magic, like poker (and life), has no memory, and nothing ever happens for a reason, etc. – it certainly felt like Fortuna had spun my wheel downward, crushing my collarbone, smashing my skull, twisting my torso, puncturing my pelvis, sorrowing my soul. I tried to improve the deck: the two-drops sucked; they were situational; I needed cards that were good all the time. Being unimaginative, I put in Snapcasters and Remands. Things went even worse. Being desperate, I tried Coiling Oracle. Things got still worse. Being insane, I tried a mix. Things got worse than ever before. And so on.

Can you see where this is going? The list was turning into something odious, something terrible, something conventional. It was turning into … Faeries. Yes, Faeries. “But Bitterblossom is banned!” you say. So! Let me explain. Faeries (Monoblue, UR, maybe even UG) does exist as a deck in Modern. It is “soft” – none of its creatures approach Tarmogoyf or Knight of the Reliquary for sheer beefiness – but it is strong. I recall it won some PTQs. Mutavault is pretty good, I hear.

But that is not what I am talking about. That is the literal Faeries, and the literal Faeries is annoying but harmless. I speak of the metaphorical Faeries: a deck that has a solid and painless mana-base, is stuffed with all the best counter-magic and removal, and operates exclusively at instant speed, with the exception of one permanent that is oppressively difficult to interact with. I speak, of course, of “Caw-Blade.”

I am reminded of a quotation from Voltaire: “This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Well, Modern Caw-Blade was called Caw-Blade and still calls itself Caw-Blade and has neither Caws nor Blades. Those cards, being situational, slothful, and sorcery-speed, suck. Instead, smart builders just play Vendilion Clique and Restoration Angel, alongside cross-format game-ruiner Snapcaster Mage.

I should stress that it doesn't matter that these cards have relatively tame interactions with one another: because they're all so powerful, the deck works; and when it works, which is often, you can't do anything against it. The one sorcery-speed permanent I mentioned is, of course, Geist of Saint Traft. Geist is actually better than Bitterblossom because, instead of killing its controller slowly, it kills its opponent very quickly. I don't know what Wizards was thinking; if they wanted to give Blue a nice, efficient beater, one that requires cunning and Guile and numinous bluffing skills, they could have reprinted Cheatyface. Instead, we get this. I will conclude this rant by saying that Modern is a compendium of the biggest design mistakes of the last decade, but at least this is more entertaining than Standard (the biggest design mistakes of the last two years). Wizards didn't want Faeries in Modern? Now they have Faeries in Modern.

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Enough of this. Whining can only take me so far – Snapcaster is unfair, but so is life. So I scrapped the Reveillark deck. This dismantling is always a painful process. I have to emotionally ready myself for it, though losing a bunch of matches helps get me there. The metaphor to which I always return is David Foster Wallace's brilliant comparison, of a rough draft of something to a “baby dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid.” It's disgusting, it's bad, it's taking up your time; and yet, inescapably, it's your responsibility, and you can't just ignore it. In my case, I handed my baby over to the local crematorium; it was dead; there was nothing else to be done. It was a relief to be finished with it. You know how, at the end of A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist's baby is stillborn, his wife dies horrifically from a massive hemorrhage, and yet you can tell from his tone that his main emotion is relief? That was me.

It's still a little sad: brewers love to hold onto their ideas. And Modern, being the most open-ended of formats (lacking both the restrictive card-pool of Standard, and the established metagame of Legacy), is the most brew-tastic of formats. But brews are usually bad. This happens to everyone. Caleb Durward is a far better Magic player than I am, but he wrote an article advocating GW Vengevine in Modern, even though it was painfully obvious how terrible that deck was. So too could I only take my Reveillark idea so far; in the end, I could not square the circle. It was too fair, too reliant on synergy, too fragile, too slow. In Modern, you better have a damn good reason for doing things at sorcery speed. Creatures that are cute when blinked were not that reason.

The practice was not for naught; it never is. Though I got my *** handed to me repeatedly, I did divine some vulnerabilities in the UW game-plan. They need a critical mass of mana and draw to realize their deck's full potential. I could go for raw speed, but then I'd get eaten alive by stuff like Jund and Loam. And those decks need a critical mass of mana as well! So I thought to myself, What if the UW player was the one doing nothing, and not me?

Seeing Red

Modern is full of dynamic tensions. An example is Grim Lavamancer: he hates on weenies; yet he, himself, is a weenie. Painful and reliable mana-bases versus painless and sketchy ones, power versus synergy, speed versus vulnerability to hate: the list goes on. As my dad and I labor on our kids' primer for Magic, we end up spending several pages describing a very “simple” combat situation; the point is that we're continually reminded of how complex and beautiful of a game this is. And yet, the simplest conclusions are the best ones. Here are some Modern Convictions of mine:

-Cheap threats are good.
-Burn is good.
-Resource denial is very strong.
-Counter-magic is popular for a reason.
-Dorks are good, but being overly reliant on them is folly.

Taking these principles all together, I drafted this deck:

Crash! Bang! Wallop! by Christopher Morris-Lent Main Deck Sideboard 4 Birds of Paradise 4 Bloodbraid Elf 2 Deus of Calamity 4 Fulminator Mage 2 Noble Hierarch 4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben Creatures [20] 2 Ajani Vengeant Planeswalkers [2] 4 Boom // Bust 4 Lightning Bolt 4 Molten Rain 2 Primal Command Spells [14] 4 Arid Mesa 4 Flagstones of Trokair 3 Forest 3 Mountain 2 Sacred Foundry 2 Stomping Ground 2 Temple Garden 4 Verdant Catacombs Lands [24] Deck Total [60] 3 Cryoclasm 3 Guttural Response 3 Kataki, War's Wage 2 Lightning Helix 3 Sowing Salt 1 Surgical Extraction Sideboard [15] View a Sample Hand! Solitaire this Deck! Click for full deck stats & notes!

Pretty bad, isn't it? Here I'm running far fewer “good” cards than any list, and yet it doesn't matter if they can't cast any of them.

I'll talk about the list's strengths first, just to get it out of the way. The disruption idea is strong. The few synergies that exist (Flagstones and Boom, fetches and Boom, Bloodbraid and Bust) are fairly magnificent. Bloodbraid Elf, “Jace's natural enemy,” is one of the best cards in the format right now: she's fast, she's brutal, and she gives the finger to Counterspells in a way that Thrun wishes he could. Fulminator Mage is also a splendid card. The deck's final virtue is its cheapness: throwing this list together won't cost you much, especially after the shocks are reprinted in Return to Ravnica.

Now for the weaknesses. This list is quite capable of doing nothing. It can kill all their lands, draw no threats, and watch in agony as the once-screwed opponent overcomes the flood. There is also little card advantage, and no library manipulation. What tutoring there is comes in the form of a card that is charming, flavorful, powerful, and dismal (Primal Command). Deus of Calamity is an atrocity of a Modern card; it's even worse here, since you can't cast it off Flagstones. Thalia screws up everything from third-turn Molten Rains to Bloodbraid cascades. I bet you can come up with more reasons the deck sucks.

All the deck's deficiencies were on my mind at work yesterday. In the early afternoon, I rushed home to amend the list, but I had just enough time to jump into the Modern daily without altering a single slot. I am glad things happened this way: the tournament was hilarious. In round one, I faced a Twin player. He loved his deck; I don't know why, but he did. After a quick split of games one and two, we were off to the finale. I killed some lands and did nothing. He durdled. I made a Deus of Calamity. He chained cantrips. I connected for six and blew up a land. In desperation, he enchanted his Spellskite. I got him down to two. He tapped out to fry a Thalia with a Lavamancer. I pointed a Bolt at his face. He said, “Your [sic] a lucksack and you're [sic] deck sucks.” I replied, “No kidding.” He spammed the event chat, predicting I would go 1-3. It was almost as funny as the time a certain Pod player “thanked” me for “stealing his six tickets.” You see, I make brews largely to puncture the egos of net-deckers – to annoy them – and there is no better way to annoy them than by beating the list they labored long and hard to copy and paste.

But that is neither here nor there. One and three was not to be. In round two, I faced Faeries, piloted by a Brazilian of modest renown. I Boomed with a fetch on turn two; he didn't have the Remand. I resolved an Ajani. Game two was even better. I remember top-decking a Bloodbraid and cascading like a champ. With one land to my seven and his hand slowly leaking into the graveyard, he lingered in what I must imagine to be considerable agony before typing out a derisive “hahahah” and quitting.

Then the Magic stopped happening. I lost the next two rounds. I learned the following things: my list really sucked, and Geist of Saint Traft is a fast clock on an empty board! At least it was a more educational experience than an Ayn Rand book, and actually enjoyable as well.

There Will Be Blood

Combing over the various Zoo lists with Boom // Bust and Molten Rain (yes, I am a net-decker too, and a hypocrite!), fusing their ideas with what I had learned from an afternoon of jamming matches, I came up with two ideas:

-The deck needed something to do on turn one. Some Zoo lists had solved this by playing Steppe Lynx. I prefer Grim Lavamancer; we really need to fry their dorks.

-The deck needed way more threats (that is to say, dudes). Not only does this synergize well with Thalia, but it also gives us a clock to go along with our disruption.

This is my current version. It is still a rough draft (and I know that Nabokov says it's vulgar to pass around rough drafts, but, really, what the hell isn't a rough draft?):

Boom Goes the Dynamite by Christopher Morris-Lent Main Deck Sideboard 4 Birds of Paradise 4 Bloodbraid Elf 4 Fulminator Mage 3 Grim Lavamancer 3 Knight of the Reliquary 1 Noble Hierarch 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben 3 Vinelasher Kudzu Creatures [25] 2 Ajani Vengeant Planeswalkers [2] 4 Boom // Bust 2 Lightning Bolt 3 Molten Rain Spells [9] 4 Arid Mesa 4 Flagstones of Trokair 2 Forest 1 Ghost Quarter 4 Misty Rainforest 2 Mountain 1 Plains 1 Raging Ravine 2 Sacred Foundry 2 Stomping Ground 1 Temple Garden Lands [24] Deck Total [60] 1 Aven Mindcensor 1 Bojuka Bog 2 Combust 2 Everlasting Torment 4 Lightning Helix 2 Relic of Progenitus 3 Stony Silence Sideboard [15] View a Sample Hand! Solitaire this Deck! Click for full deck stats & notes!

A few brief comments: the sideboard is meant to address matchups where our LD is not the greatest – we have Stony Silence for Affinity (also very good against RG Tron), Lightning Helix for any aggro, Everlasting Torment for Martyr / Sisters, Relic and Bog for Loam. Finally, I love Vinelasher Kudzu (though perhaps it, and Thalia, should be Tarmogoyfs). But isn't it more fun to play with suboptimal cards? Only when you win, I guess.

Conclusion

A friend of mine, with whom I like to collaborate on long-form creative projects, once presented me with some valuable advice. “Throw out your babies,” he said – meaning, what you love the most as the writer will often mean nothing to the reader; it will not be a viable idea. I have found the same is true for building Magic decks. I feel that I'm really on to something with the LD idea, and I'd be very happy to hear everyone's suggestions for how to improve the deck (I do actually like to optimize, or try.)

Until next time, may your decks be well-conceived but terribly executed, may your opponents spam you with derisive chat after you beat them, and may your brews be more original than my sign-off lines.

Thank you for reading!
CML

Bonus list: 4cc LD! A list that loses to itself (because it's suicidal, and because both players would color-screw one another):

I Drink Your Milkshake by Christopher Morris-Lent Main Deck Sideboard 4 Birds of Paradise 3 Bloodbraid Elf 2 Deus of Calamity 4 Fulminator Mage 3 Tarmogoyf Creatures [16] 2 Ajani Vengeant Planeswalkers [2] 4 Boom // Bust 4 Inquisition of Kozilek 4 Molten Rain 3 Phyrexian Arena 1 Primal Command 2 Terminate Spells [18] 4 Arid Mesa 1 Blood Crypt 1 Forest 2 Graven Cairns 1 Mountain 1 Overgrown Tomb 2 Raging Ravine 1 Sacred Foundry 3 Stomping Ground 1 Swamp 1 Temple Garden 2 Twilight Mire 4 Verdant Catacombs Lands [24] Deck Total [60] 3 Jund Charm 2 Kitchen Finks 2 Lightning Helix 2 Maelstrom Pulse 1 Obstinate Baloth 3 Sowing Salt 2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben Sideboard [15] View a Sample Hand! Solitaire this Deck! Click for full deck stats & notes!