Steve Guillerm
7/11/2012 10:42:00 AM
Remember Jace, the Mind Sculptor? Best planeswalker ever, banned in multiple formats, cost roughly three times what any Standard card used to cost? He's back! Well, if you remove the “Jace,” “the,” and “or.”
Mind Sculpt might not be Big Jace, but at least it captures the spirit. Except for that milling part.
Jace, the Mind Sculptor is the only Jace that doesn't
mill. Well, at least it's blue, right?
Let's start again.
Mind Sculpt is the most powerful milling spell we've seen in a while. Standard has the largest available card pool since last October. Maybe M13 has given us the tools to make a decent Standard mill deck!
First, a quick history lesson: a long while back, Mike Flores wrote an article describing “The Philosophy of Fire.” This detailed how to build a red aggro/burn deck with sufficient redundancy that each of the cards was worth a few damage to the opponent. The notion is that it doesn't matter what is drawn, so long as you draw enough “business” spells, the opponent is dead. Today's Legacy Burn decks are built according to this principle, packing 4 each of
Lightning Bolt,
Chain Lightning,
Lava Spike and
Rift Bolt, before bothering with any other spells. 1 red mana, 1 card, 3 damage. Fling six of those, let your opponent crack two fetchlands, and that's game.
What does this have to do with a mill deck? Actually, a whole lot. You see, the Burn player's not committing much to the board while it's flinging spells at the opponent's head. A
Lightning Bolt means nothing unless it's taking away that last point of life. Similarly, mill is typically considered “bad” because knocking some cards off the opponent's library isn't doing much to disrupt their plans. If we're going to succeed, we're going to need some pretty powerful cards!
A typical Standard deck will be 60 cards, and by turn 4, your opponent will have drawn 10 of those cards. Our target will be to mill about 45-50 cards, so one
Mind Sculpt is approximately 1/7 of their deck, or equivalent to an
Incinerate. Let's take a look at the tools available to us:
The numbers within parentheses indicate Flashback costs and results. It's really unrealistic that we'd ever have the mana to flash back
Chill of Foreboding, so we can mostly ignore that one.
Shriekhorn is easily giving us the best effect per mana, while
Sands of Delirium, Jace, and
Increasing Confusion are the heavy hitters. The middle range gets somewhat out-classed:
Chill of Foreboding is a worse
Mind Sculpt,
Dreadwaters is a worse
Increasing Confusion, and
Curse of the Bloody Tome costs 2 more than
Shriekhorn, and doesn't outpace it until the fourth turn.
I proxied the following to determine how fast an all-out mill deck could kill:
I goldfished a few games, and as might be expected, the deck was just a bit too slow. Killing on turn 6 or 7 is kind of poor if we're not even playing defense. The nut-draws are fun:
Turn 1: Island,
Shriekhorn (2 milled, 5 in hand)
Turn 2: Island,
Mind Sculpt (11 milled, 4 in hand)
Turn 3: Island,
Thought Scour,
Mind Sculpt (22 milled, 3 in hand)
Turn 4: Island,
Snapcaster Mage,
Mind Sculpt (29 milled, 2 in hand)
Turn 5: Island,
Jace, Memory Adept, (39 milled, 1 in hand)
Even with a nice, smooth curve, we've come up about 10 cards short, with only a
Snapcaster Mage for defense, and you can bet Jace is going to die unless they're attacking us for lethal. If our best-case scenario's too slow, then it's time to change tack.
Curse of the Bloody Tome and
Sands of Delirium were absolutely miserable, and don't make the cut. Similarly, we're not likely to need 4 each of Jace or
Increasing Confusion. We can cut two of each, and cut two lands to free up 14 slots. M13 gave us the best defender of all time in
Fog Bank, and we'll definitely run 4 of those.
Kraken Hatchling does a decent job of holding off early aggressors like
Strangleroot Geist.
Evacuation would be the best thing ever, but
Devastation Tide does a pretty good job as an imitator. Finally, a couple of
Tamiyo, the Moon Sage might draw fire away from Jace, and keep the bad guys away.
Going back to the Philosophy of Fire analogy, we can see that the mill deck comes up a little bit short.
Dream Twist is equivalent to a burn spell that does 2.5 damage, at sorcery speed, only to players, for 3 mana. We'd never play Burn if that were the case! On the other hand, if you've got a friend who likes to play slow, ponderous control decks with lots of
Forbidden Alchemy, you're golden. A slow control deck literally will never beat this deck without
Elixir of Immortality.
Mill does seem to point toward
Jace's Phantasm, but the strategies are kind of at odds. A 5/5 isn't helping to mill, and the milling (beyond the first 10 cards) isn't helping the 5/5 to beat down. Instead,
Jace's Phantasm probably best belongs in the sideboard of a Delver deck, ready to fight the mirror. At 1 mana, it slips under
Mana Leak, and is easy to cast again after a
Vapor Snag. As a 5/5 flyer, it laughs at bare
Restoration Angels and even any other creature with a Sword.
Despite what it might seem at first blush, a card like
Jace's Phantasm actually weakens Delver. By printing a strong anti-Delver card that fits nicely into a Delver sideboard, any player without
Jace's Phantasm is at a disadvantage. The metagame might quickly get to the point that Delver players have 4 in the sideboard, effectively reducing the sideboard to 11 cards, and weakening the deck against non-Delver decks. At the extreme end of things, if Delver becomes too popular,
Jace's Phantasm might even see main deck play. Good against other Delver players, and a
Flying Men against non-Delver players.
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Wizards of the Coast is aware of this effect, and you can sometimes get a good read on where the metagame might go by recognizing which cards can do this. Another good example would be
Vulshok Refugee from New Phyrexia. Before
Timely Reinforcements completely skewered Mono-Red's metagame presence, there was actually a very powerful Standard red deck. If it ever got too popular, though, Vulshok Refugee's existence would set the red decks upon one another and provide breathing room for other decks. Remember, not all sideboard cards need be narrow hosers like
Celestial Purge or
Flashfreeze.
So, what about everyone's favorite perennial contender, Monoblack Control? Is it good yet? Mutilate's almost entirely better than
Black Sun's Zenith, and
Liliana of the Dark Realms provides a steady stream of card advantage while still managing to do a very good
Murder impression in the worst-case scenario. If ever managed to ultimate Liliana 3.0, what would we do with all of that mana? Well,
Consume Spirit is still Standard-legal for 3 months!
Utility? We've got that in spades.
Duress is back to show
Distress and
Despise how it's done.
Sign in Blood gives us card draw at a better price than
Tezzeret's Gambit.
Nihil Spellbomb neuters flashback and undying without costing us a card. There's an embarrassment of riches in the removal department, frankly.
Creatures, though? Given how creature-heavy Standard is right now, it seems better to avoid creatures entirely.
Grave Titan is a heck of a finisher, but why give them a target for their Vapor Snags? Instead, I want to concentrate on removal, planeswalkers, and card advantage:
I split between
Despise and
Duress because you want them for different roles.
Despise proactively handles a difficult creature like
Geist of Saint Traft or
Wolfir Avenger, and you'll want to cast it as soon as possible.
Duress, on the other hand, should be used a bit later. You'll want to either flush out a
Mana Leak to resolve a Planeswalker, or knock out an important spell like a Sword.
The removal suite's kind of a grab-bag for now. Until I see how M13 shakes up the metagame, I'd rather have some removal that's suboptimal than committing to the wrong one. I threw in a few
Sorin's Thirst to offset the lifeloss from
Sign in Blood, and between that and
Consume Spirit, it shouldn't be too hard to stabilize at a higher life total.
Liliana of the Veil precludes casting
Liliana of the Dark Realms, but it's not a huge issue. If cast on turn 3, she can make your opponent sacrifice two creatures and discard one card. She gets out of the way on turn 5 just in time for
Liliana of the Dark Realms to come down and even find that missing fifth swamp. A fourth or fifth turn Liliana will ensure that Karn can come down on turn seven, and from there, it's basically game over. Sitting in the “littlest planeswalker” slot is one copy of
Druidic Satchel. Best activated during your upkeep, it helps ensure that you're drawing live cards by putting top-decked lands onto the battlefield instead of into your hand.
What really puts this over the top is
Mutilate. No matter how many Swamps you have, Mutilate's better than
Black Sun's Zenith. Both get past
Regeneration, but the “counters” aspect of Zenith has seldom actually ever been relevant. Being able to cast the Zenith for X = 1 is a corner case, but at the four mana spot, -4/-4 is enough to kill just about anything.
As far as a sideboard? I'd probably run 2-3 Phyrexian Obliterators, which become a lot better when the opponent sides out creature removal and Vapor Snags. 1-2
Elixir of Immortality isn't halfway bad; sometimes you just need to
Recycle the good stuff if they're really taxing you. Beyond that, it's largely a metagame call;
Curse of Death's Hold,
Mimic Vat,
Ratchet Bomb,
Nihil Spellbomb,
Griselbrand and many other cards all could be right.
Magic 2013 has me really excited; it looks like they worked to make it the “weird, cool reprints” set without being completely loaded with junk.
Omniscience is going to make someone very happy, and on Tuesday, Twitter was abuzz with suggestions for
Clock of Omens combos with
Gilded Lotus. Rancor's got plenty of fans including yours truly, and a whole new generation of players will be learning just how hard it is to shuffle 230 cards while durdling along with
Battle of Wits. Is there a combo hiding in Standard now that
Fervor is legal? Probably not, but it'd be neat if there were!
Despite having hit a brief patch of stagnation with Delver dominance, Standard's proven to be pretty robust and diverse in the past year. I think we'll continue to see a wide variety of decks over the summer, as the archetypes with the most to gain from M13 are not the currently dominant decks. Because they design the core set knowing that rotation's impending, we can sometimes get really great breakout decks that then
Disappear 3 months later. For example, when M10 came out,
Elvish Archdruid turbocharged Lorwyn/Shadowmoor/Alara Elves. Suddenly the deck could cast turn 3
Regal Force, and it easily outpaced
Spellstutter Sprite. I have no idea whether it would have taken over Standard, though, because it was gone a short while later, and we didn't have weekly GPs and $5k opens to push the metagame forward back then.
Join me next week, when I stumble through Modern in preparation for GP Columbus!
Steve Guillerm
@SteveExplosion on Twitter and MTGO
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