Conley Woods
7/13/2012 11:00:00 AM
So, with the release of M13 tomorrow, quite a few cards have sparked my interest but I have not had the chance to play with them as of yet. Cards like Touch of Eternal are quite intriguing, even if I do not find them to be particularly amazing on Standard. There is a card that is both intriguing, and likely quite powerful in Standard though; Talrand, Sky Summoner. Now, plenty of people have looked at this card and immediately want to break it, so it is not as though I am the only one investigating him, but rather than just talk about his potential, I thought that today, we would do go through an in depth breakdown of his game play, deck building constraints, and weaknesses.


Misconceptions

First things first though, and that is to address the two big no-nos surrounding this card that I have seen tossed around on various forums or whatever. Yes, he is indeed a Merfolk and I know the trend with our little fishy friends is to immediately look to see if he fits into the "Merfolk" deck we all tend to think of, but the answer is almost assuredly "no." Spending 4 mana on a card that adds no value to the rest of your Merfolk and is quite weak in the legs (or fins) is pretty bad. Just because this happens to be a Merfolk does not mean he is confined to only that space. The second place I have seen this mentioned is with his namesake spell from M13, Talrand's Invocation. Yes, the two cards do synergize to a certain extent, but the fact that they are both 4-drops and that making three different 2/2 fliers on turn 5 is barely unfair, means that you likely should be looking elsewhere for Talrand's home.

Requirements

So, if we can safely eliminate those destinations from our search, what types of things should we be looking for as far as signals to call down the Blue Knight that is Talrand. Well, lets start at the base point that we can, and simply read the card in front of us. We obviously want to be playing Instants and Sorceries in order to take full advantage, but there is hidden text on Talrand. The text implies something that is not explicitly stated, and that is that the more instants and sorceries you can cast in the first possible turn you are able to do so, the better Talrand is going to be. You see, Talrand is on the surface, quite weak. Spending 4 mana on a 2 toughness creature is asking for trouble. So the longer you go with a Talrand in play, the more likely you are to lose your engine. If instead, you take advantage of Talrand immediately or as soon as possible, the chance for the advantage he provides to take over a game is that much more likely.

So, thus far, we have:

-Cheap instants and sorceries.

Now, again, it is tough to talk about Talrand and not mention how weak he is to most removal and most combat situations. If you are going to have the engine of your deck be a 2/2 creature, it probably shouldn't cost 4, but if it does, as in this case, you better have ample ways to protect it. Now, because Talrand is Blue, the natural thought is countermagic, but there are plenty of other options as well. Protections spells, pump spells, even self-bounce are all viable, as you are both stopping their removal, and producing a 2/2 flier for value.

There is also value in non-instant or sorcery protection elements, so long as they accomplish the goal of keeping Talrand alive. Just because you are not getting a Drake out of the deal does not mean your Spellskite is not still synergizing with the rest of your plan. Protecting Talrand leads to big payoffs, even if he is not essential to you winning, which he very easily could be.

-Cheap instants and sorceries.
-Protection elements.

You can try to break Talrand down to more than needing those two things, but you really won't be able to. This is why I think he might end up being very powerful before all is said and done. He does not ask you to jump through hoops to make him good. Instead, all he asks for is for you to execute a game plan that involves doing things you already wanted to do. All he wants is for you to slightly skew the mana cost of those spells and he gets quite fed. But, that is not all we need to successfully build a deck involving Talrand. In fact, we need to know what game plan we are trying to execute.

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Where He Fits

Talrand can very easily end up being some control element. You play him in the late game, cast some card draw and counterspells, and win from there. I don't think that is even close to his best application though, so lets move on.

Another area he can fit into is an aggro-control shell, similar to Delver. Here, he provides a fast clock and turns your tempo elements into threats, which can end a game quite quickly. The problem is that 4 is a lot of mana for these days, and he already has to compete with a better 4 drop in Restoration Angel, so he probably doesn't work well there.

Then there are two different types of decks built around Talrand. The first is an actual combo deck, where Talrand is your win condition. This would look to use Talrand as your engine, and produce a huge number of threats at once. I could see this happening with something like Rituals and Past in Flames in Modern for example. Now, there is a good chance that any combo deck that could use Talrand as a win condition could probably use something else a little better.

The second type of deck is more of a Puresteel Paladin sort of feel. This means the deck heavily revolves are Talrand, but can still function, at a decreased rate, without him. In a combo deck, Talrand is essential to winning. In this other type of deck, Talrand simply turns your deck from a 6 to a 9, but is not a must-have in any sense. I think that given the confines of Standard, this is likely the best route to attempt. Let's move on to look at specific cards that interact better than most with Talrand.

Specific Card Synergies

So, here we want to be a little more specific than looking at what Talrand asks for, and instead look at the specific cards that scream Talrand. The obvious place to start our search here is with Phyrexian Mana. Specifically, we want to focus on what we talked about earlier; protection elements for Talrand and cheap ones, which in this case is free. Once we narrow our search down to 0 mana spells and protection spells, the Phyrexian mana cards we are most interested in looks like this:

Mutagenic Growth
Gitaxian Probe
Gut Shot
Apostle's Blessing
Surgical Extraction
Mental Misstep
Noxious Revival
Postmortem Lunge

Technically we can also lump Marrow Shards and Corrosive Gale into the 0 mana spells, but one of them is way too situational while the other kills your Drakes at high numbers and does nothing for 0 mana like most of these do. You can see that there is enough 0 mana spells to theoretically play a Talrand on turn 3 or 4 and then immediately make 3 to 4 Drakes with a good draw. This is almost assuredly enough to win the game once you untap and can protect that scenario with some countermagic or discard. You essentially need to dodge Day of Judgment or a Pyroclasm effect for one turn before essentially winning. And Gitaxian Probe and Surgical Extraction provide us with free Peeks at their hand, so you can generally know when such a thing is coming.

Apostle's Blessing, Mutagenic Growth, and Mental Misstep all offer some forms of protection as well, although they can all be unreliable for different reasons. With Mental Misstep, they may not even be casting 1 drops, which forces you to counter your own spell with this in order to enjoy your Drake. Mutagenic Growth does not protect anything when the opponent is just playing hard removal like Doom Blade. Apostle's Blessing is actually pretty good for the job, but unfortunately, it actually costs 1 mana, meaning there will be games where you cannot afford to wait until turn 5 for Talrand and your Apostle's Blessing is sort of dead in head until you manage to untap. Next on the list is a little card we talked about earlier, but it would be nice to go into more depth now.

Spellskite offers Talrand most of what he wants in life. First of all, coming down before Talrand is huge. Being able to play my Talrand on turn 4 without any mana open, and still know that my Merfolk captain is safe from anything not named mass removal is an awesome feeling. And even mass removal might not work if it is in the form of burn damage, like Whipflare or Bonfire of the Damned, as those Mutagenic Growths get to go on the Warpath in that case. Being what is essentially a Blue card also does not hurt Spellskite here, as you don't have to jump through a single hoop to play the card. Spellskite does make a mana ramp plan worse though.

Consider that with Talrand being a 4 mana card, one of the popular ideas regarding him, would be to accelerate to him, through a Rampant Growth or Sphere of the Suns type of card. In this world, your turn 2 play is taken up by the accelerator and your turn 3 play is Talrand, making Spellskite kind of get lost in limbo where he has no chance to come down before Talrand. Now, maybe that is fine, and Spellskite essentially fills in as a 2 drop accelerator in this deck, allowing you to open up on either line of turn 2 Spellskite or turn 2 Sphere of the Suns, both resulting in more powered up Talrands than normal.

Going Deeper

So now we actually have a pretty decent blue print for how to build our Talrand deck. We know the core engine and options surrounding it and we know the types of decks we can build out of that shell. We still have to actually execute on that and composite a list, but that is the easy part. Once you have all of the pieces in front of you, rearranging them to make them look correct is much more simple than trying to jump straight to that point, only to realize that you never had all of the pieces in the first place.

But, before I go, I did want to talk about going a little deeper with Talrand, as there are a few things we have implied about the deck that might need solving. First of all, the deck costs a ton of life if we were to go through with it as it stands right now. We can assume 12-20 Phyrexian Mana cards in the deck, and that adds up quickly. Therefore, something to Negate some or all of that life loss would be awesome. Whether this is just some lifelink thrown on to something, or an actual life gain card, we most likely need something here.

Second of all, we can also take a quick look at a more combo feeling Talrand. I think the big card that enables this is Past in Flames. Past was already pretty spicy with all of these 0 mana Phyrexian cards in the first place, and now with Talrand, you actually get to put yourself ahead. This game plan most certainly requires some sort of life gain, as the damage overwhelms you pretty quickly, but the idea of Past in Flames is pretty neat, and I would like to try that at some point in the near future.

Wrap Up

I am not sure how much of Talrand we will be seeing initially, as the card does require a lot of moving pieces and essentially an entirely new archetype to be built around it. That said, I would be surprised if our little Merfolk friend did not make an impact somewhere in constructed Magic. I will be giving the little guy a shot, and I hope you will be too! Thanks for reading and enjoy your release events throughout the weekend!

--Conley Woods--