Chad Ellis
8/6/2002
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Last week we looked at some ways to make final tweaks to your deck in order to bring it to the next level. While those rules were largely general, this week we’re going to look at the very specific situation that arises when you are faced with a very predictable metagame.

Late in a PTQ season, it is often the case that the great majority of decks reach a fairly stable point. When this happens, the players in the PTQ will fall into roughly the following categories - Between 20% and 40% won’t metagame at all. They will just play the deck they like, perhaps with some slight tweaks. These decks are usually not very good, and will often include mediocre beatdown decks and decks that are OK but that flat-out lose to the most popular deck. Another chunk will play one of the top decks. In my experience, only 5-10% really take aim at the metagame and try to work it. You want to be one of those 5-10%.

Let’s start with a bit of history. Not ancient history; I haven’t been playing that long. We’ll just go back to the early days of Urza’s Saga, when Tolarian Academy decks were making their presence felt. Academy decks were too powerful for random decks and suddenly the Boston metagame (as well as most other strong regions) had a fairly narrow metagame. Academy, Sligh and Counter-Phoenix were played by nearly all the strong players.

This was in my natural rogue phase, so of course I wanted something that could fight with each of these decks. What I had was Tradewind control. Walls and Spikes and stuff were great against Sligh, and the combination of Armageddon and a really nasty sideboard meant that I was at least holding my own against the Blue decks. And, of course, Tradewind decks tend to be great against random stuff, with a nice mix of permission and disruption.

As with most “good” rogue decks, I was doing fine but not great. So naturally I looked for things I could do to take advantage of the unusually predictable metagame.


Rule one: When the metagame is stable, look for cards in your deck that are weak vs. the specific decks you expect to face and see if you can replace them with something better.

That looks incredibly obvious, but I’m surprised at how hard it can be for players to follow. We tend to think of cards as being “good” and even very good in our deck. Sometimes, however, those good cards simply aren’t good in the environment.

In my deck, the obvious candidate for replacement was Legacy’s Allure. The Allure is a great card in a Tradewind deck. It gives you card advantage and a friend for the Tradewind to work with, and your walls usually buy you time for it to work. And, of course, it’s insane when lots of people are playing Tradewind decks (which they were when I first put the deck together).

Against Sligh, the Allure was OK, but not great. You took damage while waiting for counters and if you stole a Jackal Pup you still took damage when they killed it. Not so hot. Against Academy, of course, it was dead, and against Counter-Phoenix it was at least mortally wounded with no Monty Python characters giving it hope. What had once been great had to go.

In replacing it, I wanted to set my sights high. I needed something that was better than Allure against all three decks, and that was hopefully good against all three. Why not? Surely there was a card that was good against beatdown, control and combo.

What I found was Disciple of Law. Against Sligh the Disciple was clearly insane. Once a Spike counter got on it (or Armageddon resolved), it couldn’t even die to Cursed Scroll. Against Academy it wasn’t much, but at least it cycled and it was a guy to go with my Tradewind if I needed one.

At first I assumed that against Counter-Phoenix it wouldn’t be much better than against Academy. Sure, it could swing, but one a turn was very slow. Telling CP that it had only twenty turns in which to gain control and either kill me or resolve a disk wasn’t too exciting. But again, if all I ever did was cycle it it would still be better than Allure.

Which brings us to our second rule:

When you have something you think might be good, try it out. Theory only goes so far.

I’m a good player but not the best. But even the best players will misjudge how something will change a game. Once I tested the Disciples against Counter-Phoenix it became clear that they were much better than I had thought.

Why? Spike Feeder.

Spike Feeder was pretty marginal in the original matchup. It died to Shock or an angry Phoenix. The fact that I gained some life didn’t matter. Spike Weaver was a bit better, but not much. Basically, both spells could be contained far too easily.

But not if there was a Disciple in play.

Once a Disciple hit the table, every Feeder or Weaver became a must-counter spell. If it lived, the Spikes would find their way to the Disciple. Suddenly the twenty-turn clock was cut to ten, or five. That was a lot less room for the Phoenix player to work with. Suddenly he would have to get aggressive and try to force through a Disk.

Do you know what happens when you’re playing a permission deck and you have to get aggressive with your Disks, while your opponent is running Lobotomies and permission and Armageddon? Bad things happen.

Now we move forward a bit. Academy was banned, so we didn’t have to worry about it in Extended…no, just High Tide. High Tide was such an insane deck; believe me, you’ve never played Magic until you’ve had all of your land in play on turn four, floated more mana than you know what to do with and then gone and picked up a new hand of seven cards. That’s seven cards from a deck with no lands in it, by the way.


Rule three: So what happens when there is one best deck? The best deck is the version that wins the mirror match.

With Tide, it was decks that splashed Red for Pyroblast. Maindeck Pyroblasts are a perfect example of what can happen in a stable or highly-distorted metagame. Tide was so powerful that no beatdown deck could really hope to stand up against it. Suppose you played the fastest version of Sligh you could make and then gave it four maindeck Pyroblasts. If you went first and you had a Pyroblast, you might win. But you might not. If you didn’t, you pretty much just lost. No other beatdown deck stood a chance. So basically your choices were Blue or lose. Even if you thought you could beat tide with something like Draw-Go you had to play Blue. So the metagame was such that you could run a sideboard card like Pyroblast standard.

Suppose the OBC metagame turned out to be mono-B control vs. Quiet Roar. What would be good in such an environment? Envelop is an obvious card to look at. Both decks run very powerful sorceries; if they make up the field you suddenly have a counterspell for U. Sorceries aren’t as good as instants, but Envelop is a card to keep track of as you enter tournament cycles. There will probably come a time when decks built on powerful sorceries will dominate the field, at which point Envelop may earn spots in your deck.


Rule four: If the metagame presents your deck with a single major issue or several minor ones, ask whether there are maindeck solutions that aren’t too painful.

My favorite example of this is adding Fire/Ice to U/r Illusions/Donate. Lifegain wasn’t game breaking against Donate decks, but it could certainly be irritating. So could Elvish Lyrist. Fire gave Donate decks an easy way to do a bit of extra damage, kill utility creatures, or take the gas out of a quick beatdown start. At its worst, it cycled and tapped a land…and often enough, that was excellent.

Another example is running Cremate in Nether-Go. It provided an answer to opposing Nether Spirits (which was particularly important against Turbo-Obliterate, but also quite good in the mirror) and also helped avoid problems where two of your own Spirits ended up in the graveyard. Considering that opponents would often go to great lengths to make this happen (i.e. making very aggressive Fact or Fiction splits, or throwing everything they had at a Spirit in play once another had died), you could sometimes get amazing card economy out of it. And, provided either player had a spell in the graveyard, it cycled for B.

And finally, rule five:

When you know how your opponents are going to sideboard, try to punish them for it.

When EDT published his sideboard strategy for Counter-Trenches, he wasn’t just giving people a good strategy. He was giving metagamers a wonderful target. Before his win, Trenches hadn’t gotten much press and relatively few players really had much idea about how it should be built, let alone how it should be played. After his article, most people who played Trenches probably ran his sideboard strategy. After all, when one of the game’s top theorists wins a tournament, you know the strategy has to be good.

It’s important to remember, though, what one of the inherent strengths of Draw-Go (and Trenches is clearly just a variant on the basic Draw-Go style) is. In addition to efficient countermagic and card drawing, it gives the opponent dead cards. Creature removal in particular is dead against a deck like Trenches. Sure, you can cast it eventually, but when you use it to kill a 1/1 you’re already in serious trouble. Flametongue Kavu was a powerful card that was almost useless vs. Trenches.

EDT’s sideboard plan was a transformation. He brought in Lightning Angels and a bunch of other creatures, reasoning in part that his opponents would often take out their creature removal. As a result, the post-sideboard deck was far more vulnerable to Flametongues than it was pre-sideboarded.

As a final example, at Pro Tour New Orleans I played against Turbo Elves and faced some horrible enchantment whose name I can’t even remember. Fecundity or something. It said that if a creature died it’s controller could draw a card. It was a great choice for a deck that lived in mortal fear of Perish and Earthquake and knew that lots of its opponents would be able to run one or the other. In essence, my opponent was sideboarding against the sideboard strategy (mass removal) he knew he was likely to face. It would be poor against a different strategy, but the mass removal strategy was so likely that it made sense.

Hugs ‘til next time,
- Chad