MTG Standard - Drawing 4 for 3 mana

A week or two ago, I ran across a player on Magic Online who cast a maindeck Lost Legacy. I scofed a bit to myself - the card does not seem very main-deckable, plus I didn't have many good targets even if they knew my decklist (and as you might guess, I was on a brew, and being early in the game, they didn't know what I was about almost at all).

They targeted themself.

And named.... Eternal Scourge

This combination is incredibly sweet. As long as the Scourges aren't in play or exile, you effectively "draw" four cards, since you get to cast the Scourges from Exile. Note that this isn't even messed up by drawing Scourges, since you get to "cycle" them in that case, putting them into exile (where you can still use them) and drawing a replacement card.

I am very intrigued by this combination, and set out to build a deck around it. Naturally you need the 4 Scourges, and if it's good, I think you want a pretty high number of Lost Legacy as well. The problem is that the remaining Lost Legacy in your deck are pretty bad. Of course, even if you draw two, you're still at a 3 mana draw three, which isn't the worst ever, but you do need to dock that Eternal Scourge isn't exactly the epitome of Constructed Power-level. Well, I could call it "Modern GP winning Eternal Scourge", maybe that would make me feel better. Point is, you want to be able to do something with excess copies, ideally. Fortunately, standard is full of discard themes, so it was just a matter of finding the right one(s).

Furthermore, the biggest weakness of Scourge is generally that it just trades in combat, and ok, that's fine, but it would be nice if we could do more. (Really the biggest weakness is that if there's a way to repeatably target it, you effectively can bounce it over and over - but fortunately there aren't too many of those in Standard). The card that really pops up as doing well in terms of interacting from the Graveyard  is of course Scrapheap Scrounger, which with Eternal Scourge, not only returns itself, but gets you access to the 3/3 again as well.

This let to a couple additional directions. First, I wanted to use Vehicles. Lost Legacy for Scourge is a bit slow, Scrounger doesn't block, so you need to survive, and Vehicles let Scrounger let you do that. Plus all this stuff has three  power, so it can be used for Crew 3 vehicles. Second, we go towards a Zombie shell. That lets us have discard outlets, which work well to get rid of excess Legacies, as well as playing pretty nicely with the Scroungers.


And that's the basic ideas of the deck. Let's look at the list:

I would have loved to have more Skysovereign, but it does cost 5, I think Pariah is generally a bit more important, and you can only have so many 5s in a deck with this kind of curve. Also note that if we can have more of these 23 lands be discard fodder, that's pretty desirable. Mindbenders are genearlly good, but also provide a nice way of getting stuff from play to the 'yard.

Amalgams are the only blue in the deck, but we are playing the full 8 duals. Maybe you can cut a few here, but they're not all that expensive to run (mana base is quite good), and if you think about what we have to get it in play, there's 8 discard outlets plus those 8 blue sources. Yeah, it looks like 12 discard outlets, but while Copter and Cryptbreaker work fine, Haunted Dead only gets you there if it's in the 'yard itself, which happens far more from having one of those other outlets in play at some point first, rather than naturally getting cast and then dying.

I'd like to make a few notes on the sideboard. First, Liliana as a one of here is kind of a joke - that card should almost certainly have a bigger role in the deck. Second, Shamble Back is probably even cheekier. When you have a scourge in the 'yard, it's a 1 mana 2/2 gain 2 draw a Trained Armodon - we're talking Legacy levels of efficiency there. When there's just some random creature, that rate is ok against aggro decks. Plus it's a bit of a mise on Graveyard hate.



In general, there are two ways you can lose - people go under and murder you too fast, or people go over the top. This is about the grindiest possible deck I can think of in the format, so I don't think going over the top in that sense is plausible, but it's possible of course to go taller, most notably with Emrakul. Marvel could be an issue. Fortunately enough, though, we have four main deck Lost Legacy that can help us with that issue. And we get access to a bit more help in the board.

Probably we should be a bit more concerned than we are with the aggro matchpus then - WRx is probably too fast for the way we're configured currently at least. I think we can hang with UW, but would be concerned that their cheap spells are simply more powerful than ours. Anyway, the deck is untested, but it's just the kind of mad scientist idea that I think really ought to be worth a test.

More Standard Brews - with Panharmonicon

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/507851#online

The first brew I'd like to look at today was inspired originally by one Benjamin Weitz on the latest episode of the 2/3 fantastic Podcast Allied Strategies (https://alliedstrategiespodcast.wordpress.com/) The idea is, with a Panharmonicon out, Eldrazi Displacer plus Drowner of Hope (could be any card that makes multiple scions, but Drowner seems best) makes infinite Scions. Which also means infinite Mana, infinite taps, and, with Thought-Knot Seer, infinite milling. It was further devloped watching Kenji "Numot the Nummy" Egashira play a vaguely similar deck on his stream this week, though that one went into significantly more colors and was overall fancier I think, and a bit less focused on Eldrazi Displacer.

Given that I wanted to be Blue, White, and Colorless already, and with Eldrazi Displacer, I had to include my favorite Standard interaction, Eldrazi Displacer plus Spell Queller, which locks opponents out of casting cheap spells, once you have enough mana.

Speaking of mana, getting there is hard. Without painlands especially, fixing for this color combo is not great. Fortunately, Prophetic Prism helps us out. Plus Hedron Crawler is pretty nice in a deck that's looking to be pretty mana hungry anyway. I'm not sure that the current build is exactly where we need to be, but I think it's pretty close. We have a bit of an artifact theme built up, and so along with our ETB theme, Pilgrim's Eye made a lot of sense. with infinite mana, you can use the card to draw all the basics in your deck - along with Evolving Wilds, the Eye value makes you want to play a lot of basics, but I think it's worth it.

The deck is very raw and untuned. It likely doesn't have sufficient interaction right now, and the mix of creatures is probably not quite right. Crane Might also be not good enough to be a 4-of in the deck, though I think it's worth a try anyway.


The sideboard especially isn't very tuned. But it has some ideas, anyway.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/507862#online

The second deck I want to look at today is another Panharmonicon deck. This one is UR Colossus, which is reaosnably known. But my twist is to use Combustible Gearhulk for a bit more Oomph. It's another card with ETB triggers for Panharmonicon, a good emerge target for your EDF, your CMC are fairly high thanks to Colossus and EDF... this seems to be a pretty good deck for the card, and I'd like to see if we can make it work. Additionally, I'd like to note that the Sideboard plan goes in for big energy; some Whirler Virtuoso action, with the potential for infinite thopters - but even a lot of thopters is going to be nice. It's a nice way to diversify threats against control decks or Pick the Brain. There's a good chance you need more defense against the aggro decks, but I think this should be a fun starting point worth trying out.

MTG Standard: BR Control

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/507776#online

The card that received perhaps the most hype when spoilers for Kaladesh were first being released was Chandra, Torch of Defiance. And yet, that card has seen not much play. Now largely it was overhyped, but I still think the card is good. This deck started out as a way to try to maximize the card. To that end, you want a deck that can play for enough time to accrue advantage from the 'walker, and you want to have enough cards that are fine to good to play at sorcery speed (which means probably not a counterspell deck).

This led me to looking for lots of removal. And there's lots of removal in red and black, so here we are. Obviously there's some more nuance than that, but things aren't rocket science here.

There's plenty of removal here to be able to handle most of the aggressive decks, and they are of high enough quality to still be quite useful against the midrange decks. Control decks can be somewhat problematic, but your six main-deck planeswalkers do significant work here. Still, the biggest problems I find are with decks going 'over the top', since this deck doesn't really have a great way of locking up that endgame. Thus, the two biggest cards I've had problems with are things like Fevered Visions and Metallurgic Summonings. There's no way of dealing with these cards once they hit, and the deck doesn't have enough of a proactive gameplan to be great there.

I've tried a number of sideboard configurations, and I haven't found one I really feel is particularly great yet. 6 Mana Chandra has been a nice find, but of course you can run into a problem of too many Chandras. Liliana is good in some of the grindier matchups (like delirium) as well as decks with lots of X/1s, but you aren't running super many creatures, and you have ot think about how many you have post-board in those matchups. Gideon is a tough card for the deck to deal with, and that's what the Skysovereign is about, but I am not really convinced by it, especially in this deck. Incendiary Flow vs Harnessed Lightning is interesting - I've mostly given the nod to Flow because it's better against go over the top decks, Scrapheap Scrounger, Prized Amalgam, and planeswalkers, and you have a lot of instant speed removal anyway. But it's a real cost against vehicles and creatures lands (plus the increased flexibility of multiple HL).


The worst matchup for the deck is probably Aetherworks Marvel. It's just incredibly hard to win any time they find Marvel, which they usually will. If that deck gets popular again, this one needs to shift dramatically.

Finally, I'd like to note that the manabase isn't entirely clear - 18 black sources and 16 red is okay, but you have a reasonable number of tap-lands, you get no creature lands, and you could use a little more in terms of sources, and maybe even slightly more in terms of total land count.

Overall, I think the deck is pretty good and pretty well positioned, but it needs some tuning - slightly better proactive plan probably, and better plan against 'walkers like Gideon. Maybe some of the Unlicensed Disintegration should turn into Ruinous path? At which point maybe you switch some Flow back to Harnessed Lightning.

A Real "Brew-y" Post-Kaladesh Brew

So far, I've heard some buzz around Paradoxical Outcome in two contexts: One is in an Aetherflux Reservoir combo deck, and the other is with Moxen in Vintage. Today, I'd like to take a look behind door number three:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/484311#online

The deck is cheap, both in that it's inexpensive and in that the average converted mana cost of cards in the deck is a lowly 1.1 despite having only 19 lands. The main concept is to use Reckless Fireweaver for some face damage, as well as pushing through more from fliers, all while using Jori En and Paradoxical Outcome to keep the cards flowing, with many many free or cheap creatures. Paradoxical Outcome also has some extra synergy with Enter the Battlefield abilities, like those on Glint-Nest Crane, Prophetic Prism, and Oath of Chandra (this is why we're playing Oath rather than Incendiary Flow, even with 0 Planeswalkers). Speaking of Planeswalkers, this deck might be a reasonable home for Saheeli Rai (though I'm not really convinced she has a home anywhere in the format).

The sideboard is more about different ways the deck could go than it is actual sideboard cards. Specifically, Salivating Gremlins can be a lot of burst damage (though it's quite bad against removal), and Crush of Tentacles can cost 5 and be surged pretty consistently here, AND it also re-triggers all the ETB stuff we wanted to Paradoxical Outcome anyway. A 'real' sideboard plan might have us board into an Aetherflux Reservoir combo deck, but it would almost certainly have more counterspells - particularly Dispels, but also Negates.

The deck could be made even more budget-friendly by taking out a number of Wandering Fumaroles (there's diminishing returns, and activating them is not part of the gameplan very often). Spirebluff Canal is likely the most expensive card in the deck, but it's going to be hard to get around having it - with so few lands, we have to make sure we have enough sources for everything, and with the low curve, we want our lands untapped. (Indeed, 4 taplands may be too many as is, but 14/13 sources is kind of light). If you have to cut sources, you might want to up the number of Prophetic Prisms.




I've also taken a look at adding white to the deck, because we are running so many equipment, and that color has cards that do well in that regard:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/484314#online

Stone Haven Outfitter is obviously incredible here, and is the real pull to this version. Toolcraft Examplar is good, but it's hard to fit many in.

The mana is the biggest drawback to this version, and to get everything to fit, while still having enough artifacts, etc. is a challenge. Probably you need to be pushing harder in some direction or another than what I'm doing here, but this is merely a Rough Draft.

Post-Kaladesh Standard Brews: Ghirapur Orrery, Key to the City + Robowolf, Artifact Aggro

Kaladesh, a new set, meant for inventing. And my brewing brain is really going off, so let's dig into some more.

The first card from Kaladesh that really jumped out at me as being one I wanted to build around was Ghirapur Orrery. There are two halves of the card, and I suppose it's the third different play-an-extra-land effect in Standard nwo, but really the thing that interested me here was the ability to draw three extra cards fairly consistently. You need to do it once (once more than your opponent, to be more precise) to get to a 4 mana draw 3, which is a good but not outstanding rate in Standard. Getting there twice is an enormous advantage - game-winning.

Obviously the card wants you to play your stuff out. This suggests to me you want to be proactive, and for the most part, reasonably aggressive. My first thought, then, was for a RG aggressive deck, leveraging Noose Constrictor's ability to empty your hand out. The esteemed Dr. Frank Karsten had a similar idea as deck #17 in his list of Kaladesh brews on ChannelFireball.com. Here's my version:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482358#online

One card I want to highlight here which I think is very good, but is missing from the above-mentioned list from Frank Karsten, is Key to the City. It discards things for benefit to help you keep handsize down when you want it, loots through to find important cards when you need that, is a discard outlet for Fiery Temper (and the miser's Stromkirk Occultist), and of course pushes through damage. It's good here with Noose Constrictor, letting you 6 them or something out of nowhere, and it's also very good with the RoboWolf itself.

A couple other notes on this list: I have a Ravenous Bloodseeker as a 5th way to empty your hand at any point (yes, it will kill itself in that process, but you can do it - make sure you hold priority and respond to the ability's activation). I'm pretty unsure of exactly what the right suite of Burn spells is, but I like the aggro creatures, the hand emptying, and having a lot of burn in this kind of deck.


My next take on Orrery was built around some ideas I first saw in Neal Oliver's excellent stream (twitch.tv/nealoliver88) - from Neal himself, as well as fellow viewers Blm4l and wujo444. It takes a GB spin on things:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482377#online

I'm pretty dubious of this one in many ways, but it does have some sweet things going for it. In some ways it's very similar to the GB Delirium decks we've seen. And we have Olivia's Dragoon in the party to help us empty our hands out. But we've also got The Gitrog Monster as a payoff, and that gets us a few things going on. It turns our Noose Constrictor to turn all lands into spells (by repeatedly discarding - Gitrog draws you a card). There's some definite synergy in that fashion.


Finally, we get to the Orrery deck I expect to be the best of them all.... Vampires?!

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482382#online

Obviously, the deck needs a much better name (I'm taking suggestions!). Who would have guessed that it was the set AFTER Innistrad block, in which there are 0 Vampires, that we would see the vampire deck finally succeed? I guess it's me, because I really think this can be a player. We have Olivia's Dragoon as a way to get insta-hellbent. We have Stromkirk Condemned, Heir of Falkenrath, and Key to the City (and to some extent, Olivia, Mobilized for War) to fuel discard synergies/madness and help us to get to that hellbent status. We have lots of Madness effects to get value from those discards at all times. Plus we have other synergies, besides Orrery, that care about us being hellbent - from the Wolf to Bloodhall Priest to the Miser's Asylum Visitor. I definitely expect the exact numbers to be wrong here, but I really like the general look of this deck - lots of evasive threats, lots of burn, and some efficient, big creatures that can hold the board a little bit, too.



This takes me to the second half of the post. It also looks to me like there is another powerful Black/Red Aggressive deck in the format. There are certainly some overlaps between the two, and it's possible that the best build is somewhere in the middle, but for now, let's look at the straight-up Red/Black Artifact Aggro deck:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482399#online

Obviously here we have some of the same synergies we saw before, with Madness (now also enabled by Smuggler's Copter), but we also have some nice aggressive artifact and artifact-related cards. The Copter itself is almost certainly the best of these. Nerd Ape and the Lookout chip in as early attackers for 2. Lookout is also particularly good with vehicles of course. I'm not sure how good Bomat Courier is - I am skeptical, but reports I've heard say it's good...... This is probably near the best area for Unlicensed Disintegration. I think I'm much lower on Pia Nalaar than most other people, and a big part of me wants to lower the curve even more and cut some lands, but it's a bit difficult to know how right that is.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/483010#online

On this one, we've swapped out the black for white. This gets us access to a couple good 1 drops (most notably Toolcraft Exemplar), along with cards like Depala. It also gets us Fragmentize in the sideboard, along with the potential for Gideon. I think this deck is not quite there, but wouldn't at all be surprised to something along these lines doing well. Also notice the Built to Smash which are present here - I think they might be important for a deck like this having success.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/483013#online

This is obviously a spin off of the previous deck, but more on the equipment theme. Inventor's Goggles get you another cheap equipment (12 creatures in the deck it equips free to). Weapons Trainer gives us a nice bonus, and between it and bushwhacker, reason to go wide. My number balance is probably not correct here - needs more equipment perhaps, or to focus more or less on the wide theme. Maybe you cut some Smuggler's Copters even. But I do think this is another interesting direction to explore.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/483016#online

Finally, when you try to mash the Boros and Rakdos versions of the artifact aggro decks together, you get this disgusting monstrosity. I can't say I really recommend this one - the manabase is really bad, and the payoffs aren't much higher than the 2 color versions. But it's there to try, if you're ambitious.

Vehicles: Analogy and Analysis

One of the two hot new mechanics from the upcoming Magic: the Gathering set, Kaladesh, is Vehicles. There's a lot of hype, a lot of discussion, a lot of comparisons being made. In the end, it's pretty hard to grok quite how they'll play - we don't have experience with them at all. But let's try to start breaking them down.


Comparison One: Equipment
The thing I have seen Vehicles compared to most often are Equipment. I think this is largely from a conceptual level - both are artifacts, both require creatures to do anything, both take two cards to make one larger creature, both represent tools which augment a person/creature's ability to perform tasks, especially from a real-world perspective. But while there are a number of parallels, there are also a number places where the comparison doesn't really work. The most obvious is probably that, once you cast the Vehicle, it doesn't require more mana to do its thing, rather a creature. Also, with a vehicle, the only attribute of the 'base', small creature that matters is its power.

But the biggest difference comes when an opponent kills the combined giant monster. With equipment, you just move it over, and presto change-o, you have a new giant monster. Or, at least you did back when they would print substantial buffs on equipment, from cards like Vulshok Battlegear or Vulshok Morningstar. Because that was such a huge advantage, so hard to beat, they've generally stopped doing that - equipment tends to be much weaker nowadays. (Similarly, you used to be able to move equipment to have effect on both attack and defense, but that's dampened by weaker equipment and higher equip costs).

You can't do this with vehicles; kill the vehicle, you're left with [a] smaller creature[s]. And that's it - there's no way to go big again. So of course, this makes vehicles in some way inherently 'worse' than equipment... except that R&D understands all of this, so the development team has thus balanced the cards... accordingly? It remains to be seen if they're actually stronger or weaker in practice, I suppose, but the point is that you actually need to look at the rates on the cards to know for sure. Gaining Life is 'inherently weaker' than doing damage, but W for gain a billion would be stronger than Shock.


Comparison Two: Bestow
So bestow also has many similarities to vehicles - again, you're using 2 cards to make one bigger creature, investing a reasonable amount of mana to get this, but in two chunks. And in this case, if you kill the big creature, you're left with a small one, just like is the case with vehicles. This analogy still has the smaller creatures total attributes mattering though, which is still different from how vehicles work. 

Comparison Three: Emerge
The last comparison I'd like to draw is with Emerge creatures. We just saw these, of course, so they're fresh in everyone's mind. And once again, we're using two creatures, and a requisite amount of mana split into two chunks, to get one large creature in the end. Emerge is a better analogue to vehicles in the sense that, in the end, your big creature is just what's printed on that big card. But vehicles lack the on-cast triggers of emerge cards, and Emerge creatures,  when killed, leave nothing behind. They do, though, point out nicely that how the cards are balanced by the development has the biggest impact on the cards' strength, and not just the inherent mechanic. If the emerge creatures didn't get you card advantage from their cast triggers, just putting two cards in for one big body would be pretty bad. But they did give us these effects, and the cards turned out strong.


Analysis
So I think all three of these provide decent analogies for Vehicles, but as I said at the top, none are perfect, and you really need some independent analysis to go on. I'm going to try my hand at this, but I do want to note that I'm going to be talking about general/generic case here, which applies more to limited than anything else - in constructed, you're obviously only aiming for good case scenarios.

The first thing I want to note here is what I'm calling "Effective Power" - on a board where your opponent has no creatures, your vehicle is hitting them with only their power minus their crew cost, since you have to sacrifice attacking with that much power in order to animate your vehicle (best case - sometimes, you sacrifice more). When you do this subtraction, their at-first-gaudy numbers start to look significantly worse.

On the flip side, of course, when you're squaring your vehicles off against opposing creatures, they still trade with the full force as printed on the card. In this case, they're an excellent deal. Thus, we get to a simple conclusion/motto: with vehicles, trading is good, racing is bad. (No, the irony that vehicles don't want to race is not at all lost on me).

Still, this isn't exactly a huge secret, so of course when you're playing against vehicles, you'll be working cross-purposes to that. When someone activates a vehicle and attacks, the best response is generally going to be not to trade with it, but either take the damage, or chump block. Attacking with a vehicle is going to open up a weakness - you're tapping what's probably a significant portion of your board presence, leaving yourself open to a crack-back; this kind of play leads to, you guessed it, racing (so the flavor isn't all lost, I guess?)

So in order to get advantage with vehicles, you have a few options:

1. Be so far ahead that they HAVE to trade/can't race
2. Have the board so clogged that they can't crack back
3. Use them on defense more than offense

To expound on the last point a bit, having the vehicle back on defense means you just have a big creature threatening to eat anything small, which means they can only attack with very large things themselves, which mitigates the fact that your effective creature count on board is lower than if the vehicle were just a creature. Or, they go really wide and just accept losing some creatures, at which point they have to flunge with a LOT of stuff, at which point you get to milk the natural defender's advantage for all it's worth. You might have an objection that one of the advantages of vehicles is that when you attack with them, you get to dodge sorcery-speed removal, and by blocking, you give that up. This is somewhat true, but in order to get you to yield that, they have to be attacking with something large enough that your other creatures can't handle it. So for the privileged of using that sorcery-speed removal, they have to 2-for-1 themselves, with a pretty good creature as one of those two, to boot. It is worth noting, though, that this is a pretty real downside of activating just to have your vehicle "bounce", so you might want to avoid that where possible.


Of course, I would be remiss to not note that the Development team has understood this play pattern, where vehicles tend to inherently be better on defense. They have compensated for this by giving very many of them offensive-minded abilities. Trample, Menace, Haste, Attack triggers, blocking restrictions on opposing creatures... even flying is generally more useful on offense than defense. Look at the vehicles in the set, and you'll see that a huge percentage of them have something like this, and you'll see it's pretty clear that there is this inherent defensive nature to the subtype. These inducements will probably make it right to attack a lot of the time, but they of course won't always. And it's extra worth noting that, on the few vehicles which don't have these kinds of incentives, blocking is going to be the go-to way to be.


To learn more, you really need to look at individual cards... but that's a separate post.