Justin Gary
4/16/2003
[Premium Members] can discuss this article [here].
Hey all, Justin Gary here for another installment of the match-up series. Before I move on to this week's match-up, I would like to talk briefly about the response to my last article on MBC because I think it illustrates an important element of solid tournament preparation strategies.
I knew I was going to get disagreement from many people when I said that MBC was dead. It was a provocative statement and I only had one decklist, sporadic tournament results, and a small personal game sample size to work from in order to determine it. People made valid suggestions about altered builds (both in mail to me and on the message board discussions) and suggested that I was dead wrong about MBC. Maybe they are right.
The long and short of it is, I think I'm right and when it comes to preparing for a relatively diverse and established metagame, making strong assertive decisions when dealing with a tier 2 deck is critical. When preparing for a Pro Tour, Regionals, or even a local tournament many times you need to look at a relatively small sample size (20 or less games) and be able to evaluate whether or not working on a particular deck is a valuable way to spend your time, not because it doesn't have the potential to work out, but because you are more likely to get better results from spending your time on other projects. In economics, this is referred to as an opportunity cost.
If you have only a set amount of time to prepare for Regionals, time spent on one deck detracts from the time spent practicing with and tuning other decks. It is more important to focus on improving the decks that have more promise, than to try and build decks up that seem to have critical flaws. This becomes more true the less time you have, and Regionals is fast approaching. Original, rogue and other "pet" decks are fun and interesting and worth exploring. But if after a reasonable amount of investigation one path seems clearly superior to another, do not take the road less traveled. You need to decide what is most important to you at Regionals: impressing everyone with how creative and original you are, or winning.
When you meet your teammates to test matchups, make sure that your time is being used efficiently. Spend more time and preparation on the most likely matchups and make sure to focus at least half your energy on post-sideboard games. You will get diminishing returns on game one games if you play too many, and time spent on sideboarding strategies is invaluable. Considering opportunity cost is an important element of tournament preparation. Do not ignore it.
Whether or not MBC is a valuable investment for you is entirely up to you. My advice (like all advice) should only be a part of your consideration. If you have lots of personal results that contradict what I say or you find my arguments unconvincing, then of course go with what you know. But for most people who aren't sure or don't have the time to invest in testing every matchup, my advice to you is to spend your time investigating other things besides MBC. Take that for what you will.
O.K., enough of that, on to this week's matchup. This week there is little opportunity cost since we are investigating one of the most common and critical matchups in standard, UG vs. RG.
For this matchup I was paired against Jeff Cunningham. Jeff was armed with his signature deck, UG madness and I was armed with the powerhouse of standard, RG. Both Jeff and I knew this matchup was going to be one of the most important ones out there for this Regionals field, since both UG and RG are popular tier one decks. In the end, whichever deck won this matchup would have a huge edge as a deck choice for Regionals. So who takes it? Whose cuisine reigns supreme?
Sorry to Iron Chef fans out there, but this time it looks too close to call. Jeff's UG seemed to have a definite edge game one, but after board that advantage all but disappeared in the face of
Ensnaring Bridge. There is a lot to discuss in this matchup and there is room for improvement on both sides. Jeff's maindeck felt particularly good against RG and I would like to discuss it a bit before discussing my build. Here is Jeff's most updated UG deck:
I really like this build. The unusual things about the maindeck are the 3
Unsummons and only two
Roar of the Wurm. For purposes of this matchup, the loss of Wurms hurts a little, but the addition of
Unsummon helps a lot. I'm sure that Jeff will talk more in his matchup article about his build, but it certainly seemed powerful from my end of the table. I will be interested to see how he compares his new build to Zvi's recent updated version of blue-green.
In this fight, I was using Kai's RG build found on the Sideboard. I decided against the changes that Zvi made to the deck (in a
recent matchup article) because burn is so important to your plan in this match. Extra
Skirk Marauders would do almost nothing as they pale in comparison to every other creature in the matchup. Extra mana efficient burn is far more desirable in this match.
This matchup is about tempo, and you as the RG player are the beatdown. The RG deck has to deal quick damage before giant flying 6/6's start bashing your face. You will win very few long games as the powerful engine of the UG deck gives it Inevitability™ [I urge you to check out
Zvi's excellent article on that topic]. If you don't get them, they WILL get you. You have a lot of things working against you.
1. Their Mongrels are better than yours. They have Rootwallas, Arrogant Wurms, Roars, and Deep Analysis to power their Mongrels. You only have Rootwallas and Violent Eruption to power yours.
2. Quiet Speculation is just about a 6 for 1 against you. Once they start taking advantage of it, the game will quickly run out of control since you need multiple cards to answer a Wurm, and if they have the life and time to use Deep Analysis, their card edge will grind you out in short order.
3. Unsummon, Unsummon, Unsummon. I can't tell you how many times I had to work hard around Unsummon or just pray that Jeff didn't have one in hand. An efficient tempo card on its own, Unsummon also completely nullifies Elephant Guide and seriously undermines Call of the Herd. This is a powerful weapon against you.
4. Wonder. By now everyone knows how powerful this card can be. You are a red/green mage. You can't remove anything from the graveyard and you can't block flyers. Got the picture?
All hope is not lost, however. You have a couple factors working in your favor game one.
1. Grim Lavamancer. Oh, my God, is this guy good when your opponent plays no removal. With this guy on the board, suddenly your Mongrels are better than theirs and you have the ammunition to burn them out even past big Wurms.
2. Mana - Remember what a smooth mana base is like? UG players don't and Jeff's deck in particular is living on the edge. At the Masters in Chicago, I lost with UG to Marco Blume playing RG because I ran two City of Brass and a Centaur Glade and drew them all, forcing me to take too much damage before I could stabilize. Jeff avoids that problem by only having one City of Brass, but he lost several games due to a missing color. (I personally think that two City is probably still right, but Jeff has a lot more experience with UG, so you should probably listen to him.) RG has plenty of mana smoothers and you WILL get random wins when UG doesn't get its land.
The game one match ended 7-3 in favor of UG, though I would say it felt more like a 60% edge. Many of the games were very close and could have gone either way. The basic strategy as the RG player is to be very aggressive. The long game is not your friend unless your opponent's life is very low. Since Jeff was running
Unsummon, I tried to drop
Elephant Guides whenever I had a good window to swing. Against U/G decks without
Unsummon, an
Elephant Guided Mongrel could win you the match single-handedly. Against three
Unsummons, he is merely an avenue for card and tempo disadvantage.
Grim Lavamancer is so good in this matchup its ridiculous. He is really the only way you win a long game by either forcing through the last points of damage as burn, or by working their creatures enough to overcome the card advantage of
Quiet Speculation,
Deep Analysis and
Roar of the Wurm (Jeff only having two
Roar of the Wurms helped this be possible).
Wonder is your nightmare. If not for
Wonder, your weenie hordes could actually intimidate the few big monsters on the other side with the threat of a chump or gang block and a counter swing. With
Wonder, the UG player can be assured that his creatures will deal damage, which gives them the ability to kill you in 1-2 attacks without assuming a huge risk to themselves. Since this matchup is so much about tempo, I have to imagine that it gets closer to 50-50 when playing against a version of UG that doesn't have
Unsummon, though against this version of the deck, you are undoubtedly at a disadvantage game one.
I followed Kai Budde's advice on sideboarding (which seemed appropriate since I was using Kai Budde's decklist) and cut the
Elephant Guides in exchange for
Ensnaring Bridge. This change seemed clearly correct - the Guides were not that good and the Bridges were amazing. Suddenly, I had stolen Inevitability™ from Jeff. Instead of me killing him quickly or losing to flying Wurms, it was him finding an answer to Bridge before he got burned to a charred crisp. Jeff quickly learned that his
Diverts were relatively useless and easy to play around. We both agreed that this matchup would be helped for the UG player if he had an extra answer or two to Bridge instead of
Divert.
Tips for playing post-board: if you have a Bridge in hand, try not to walk it into a
Circular Logic. They usually have to tap out to respond to your pressure at least once during turns 2-4 and you can capitalize on this. Also, without a madness enabler on the board, they can't keep Logic mana for long, so occasionally it's right to use burn on Mongrel and
Aquamoeba if you clear a path and can open up a window for Bridge later. Try to get through whatever early damage you can to make burning them out easier once the Bridge locks everything down. Remember, card advantage doesn't mean much of anything with a Bridge on the board, so watch for spare points you can grab with discards to Mongrel or weenie attacks into a big blocker.
The question of the game is a simple one once the Bridge hits: can they find an answer to Bridge and enough power to kill you before their life total hits 0. If they are unprepared and don't have a good answer to Bridge (
Upheaval is rarely a "good answer" in time), this matchup is very hard for the UG player. If they have the answers, then they are still in the game. Our postboard matches ended 6-4 in favor of RG. I think that is probably about right against Jeff's list. Some of the loses were due to color screw from the UG deck, but I think those have to be factored in to any long series versus a UG deck (especially with only one City of Brass). Versus a UG deck without
Unsummon, I would say that this matchup overall favors the RG player with game one about even and post board in your favor. Versus this build, it seems like a toss-up.
There is no doubt in my mind that
Ensnaring Bridge is the way to go in this match. I know some people like to use
Threaten as an alternative strategy, but I can't see that being right. As Jeff said to me,
"Threaten only seems to help when you are in good shape already." It is much easier for the UG mage to play around
Threaten than to play around the Bridge, and the Bridge wins you games that no other card in the format could. I have to imagine that it is also good vs. the Beasts deck, though I haven't tested that matchup. I think four bridge is automatic and necessary in the RG sideboard. It is a perfect fit for this deck.
That being said, I think that more could probably be done to improve this matchup. There are still several cards in the deck postboard that are unimpressive -
Call of the Herd, Llanowar Elf, and
Skirk Marauder. These cards are all useful, but I couldn't help but feel that if I had more cards to bring in, at least some of these could happily sit on the sidelines. I didn't have the time to test every board card that could be brought in vs. UG, but I have put some thought into the matter so that I can give suggestions on strategies you can test before Regionals.
The way I see it, this matchup is won or lost on the strength of your early pressure, your ability to punch through their midgame defenses, and how much burn you have to finish them off.
Ensnaring Bridge combos particularly well with cheap or reusable permanent based burn. Cards along this line include Jeska,
Goblin Sharpshooter,
Chainflinger,
Seismic Assault, and
Words of War. Of these permanent based burn sources, I would say Sharpshooter looks by far the most promising. Efficient one-shot burn is good too, but you already have four each of the best burn cards.
Threaten is probably the next best pseudo-burn spell, but I don't know if that is all that much better than, say,
Lightning Blast.
As for pushing through their defenses, one option is to literally undermine their defenses with cards like
Bedlam and Flash of Defiance. These cards provide quick punch and undermine the disadvantage of not having
Wonder, but they do require a reasonably good board position already in order to be useful. The other option is to use better creatures to supplement your offense or better creature enhancers. Cards like
Goblin Goon and
Phantom Centaur are tough creatures that are hard to take down, but they combo poorly with the Bridge and can be outclassed by your opponent's creatures in bad scenarios. More likely to be effective on this front is
Giant Growth.
Giant Growth can help punch through early defenses and acts as a pseudo-burn spell in some situations. It has obviously bad interactions with opponents playing
Unsummon, and may be useless under a Bridge, but its worth thinking about.
I'm not sure if these or any other sideboard options will be worth inclusion after you have already added four Bridge to your board. That will entirely depend on how effective they are and how prevalent you think UG will be in your Regionals metagame. Without changes, this matchup is already decent, so you may want to devote more space to other matchups.
As always, feel free to email me with questions or comments about this article at
grendel@allofyourgodsaredead.com. I read all of your letters and they do have an impact on my articles even if I can't respond to them directly. Good luck with your Regionals preparation. See you next week.
- Justin Gary
.gif)
.gif)
Voice of Resurgence - as low as $32.00
Return to Ravnica
RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter