Adam Koska
About Adam Koska
Adam is an experienced player from the Czech Republic who has a number of high-profile finishes under his belt:
- 9th at Worlds 2009
- 9th at Pro Tour Kyoto 2009
- 45 Lifetime Pro Points
- Top 32 GP Vienna 2008
- Top 64 GP Krakow 2007
- Three times Czech Nationals Top 8
Recent GP Recountings
Hey everyone and welcome!
It’s that time of the year again when several months have passed and formats
have evolved into rather stable shapes with most of the innovation coming not
from discovering something brand new, but rather from finding the best solution
to a current shape of the metagame. Several GPs have taken place in the recent
weeks and today, I would like to look at the results of the ones that were
constructed and pick and analyze a couple of specific decks that I think
brought something new to the table in terms of correctly reacting to how the
metagame has evolved. It’s pretty hard to surprise people when a format has
been thoroughly explored, but I think that these decks that I’m going to talk
about today did just that and if you haven’t seen them yet, I highly recommend
giving them a closer look (and perhaps even sleeving them up).
GP Nagoya
As Standard is by far the
most popular format, the GP that probably raised the most interest for data
miners all around the world recently has been GP Nagoya, also for the
additional reason that Japanese players are known for coming up with ideas that
might seem clunky at first, but miraculously turn out to work just fine.
Needless to say, GP Nagoya didn’t disappoint and there was a handful of
decklists that are well worth analyzing.
The most interesting deck
of GP Nagoya has to be Yuuji Okita’s winning Reanimator deck, as it’s truly a
unique piece of deckbuilding and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like that in
Standard before. Here’s the list, if you haven’t seen it yet in the coverage:
| Colors |
|---|
| Black | 4 |
|---|
| Blue | 4 |
|---|
| Gold | 10 |
|---|
| Green | 9 |
|---|
| Land | 23 |
|---|
| Red | 5 |
|---|
| White | 5 |
|---|
| Converted Mana Cost |
|---|
| 1 | 4 |
|---|
| 2 | 15 |
|---|
| 3 | 4 |
|---|
| 4 | 5 |
|---|
| 5 | 5 |
|---|
| 7 | 4 |
|---|
| Type |
|---|
| Creature | 18 |
|---|
| Enchantment | 4 |
|---|
| Instant | 2 |
|---|
| Land | 23 |
|---|
| Sorcery | 13 |
|---|
1st place at GP Nagoya 2012, Standard
The deck combines two
powerful strategies that have been played separately before – the Izzet Staticaster + Nightshade Peddler combo that we could see played in Bochum by
Jan-Moritz Merkel and a couple of other players, and a reanimator shell with
the self-mill and Unburial Rites engine. However, Yuuji Okita made a very interesting
twist even on this part, completely eschewing black and choosing Chronic Flooding as his primary self-mill tool. Not playing any black sources means
that the deck is not able to hardcast Unburial Rites under any circumstances
(unless you count stealing a Swamp from your opponent with the singleton Zealous Conscripts). Is this significant loss worth it? Apparently yes – a
five-color manabase would not be stable enough and all the other colors are
needed: green, blue and red for the combo (Nightshade Peddler + Izzet Staticaster) and the mill part of the deck (Mulch, Faithless Looting, Chronic Flooding, Tracker's Instincts) and white for the flashback of Unburial Rites
and hardcasting Angel of Glory's Rise (not that unlikely to happen with four Cavern of Souls in addition to your white sources). Most reanimator decks don’t
play blue, but apart from the anti-aggro pinging combo, Okita’s deck relies
heavily on Chronic Flooding, possibly one of the best self-mill tools there
are. It doesn’t refill your hand like Mulch or Tracker's Instincts, but given
some time, it can provide by far the most efficient mill engine, without any
mana investments after the initial 1U, which is more than fine for milling 15+
cards in the long run.
When you take a closer look
at the deck, there might be some numbers that look a bit odd at first glance.
What’s with the two Izzet Charms? Well, it turns out that Deathrite Shaman is a
card that’s really awesome against graveyard-based decks, both pre-board and
post-board and Izzet Charm can deal with that card effectively, as well as
digging for action or catching Bant opponents by surprise by countering their Sphinx's Revelation (who would expect a counterspell in a reanimator deck,
right?).
There are some other
numbers that I imagine can cause some raised eyebrows. Why one Goldnight Commander? It turns out that this guy’s in the list against control decks that
can undo your „Living Death“ turn by a Supreme Verdict. Brad Nelson and Martin
Juza’s „Hoof, there it is!“ deck had the „instant win“ factor included simply
by their choice of win condition which has haste, but if you’re reanimating Huntmasters of the Fells and Nightshade Peddlers, your one turn can become a
lot less impressive against decks with sorcery-speed mass removal. However,
with the singleton Goldnight Commander, when you dump your graveyard into play,
a large number of creatures enter the battlefield at once, giving your army a
major P/T boost. So either you win with a big swing of some small dudes you
already had in play or you inflate some of the Izzet Staticasters that just
came into play and – because these have haste and despite their 0-power aren’t
defenders – you swing with gargantuan izzet attackers that used to be 0/3 just
a short while ago. Also, if you manage to dig for your singleton Zealous Conscripts, you can do a very similar trick with these, untapping one of your
other creatures and giving it haste, effectively creating two massive hasty
attackers. It’s true that there’s only one Goldnight Commander in the whole
deck, so you won’t usually have access to it until you dump a rather big part
of your library into your graveyard, but Chronic Flooding can mill you at quite
a brisk pace and control decks that play Supreme Verdict usually give you
plenty of time to find your one-ofs anyway. There are two more Commanders in
the board exactly for the purpose of having an „instant kill“ option against
decks with sweepers.
The fact that this
particular build of reanimator has been more successful in Nagoya than some of
its more traditional cousins is to a big extent caused by the creature suite it
plays. Apart from the anti-creature deathtouch-pinging combo, the deck also
packs a playset of Huntmasters of the Fells, which is among the best cards you
can deploy against Zombies. Okita also has Faithless Lootings and a singleton Tracker's Instincts to dig for the Huntmasters, which goes a long way towards
beating the R/B menace. Despite Yuuji Okita’s claims that the deck is weak
against Zombies, I believe that you actually have a lot better chances against
R/B with this particular list than with a traditional Reanimator deck, and the
fact that Okita beat four R/B aggro decks on his way to win the GP speaks for
itself.
The reason why it’s that
important to be prepared against red-black becomes clear when you take a look
at the archetype breakdown at the top tables in Nagoya. Out of the top sixteen
decks, eleven (!!) played a mix of Swamps, Mountains and aggressive red and
black cards. That’s right – five in the top 8 and six more finishing in the top
16, Nagoya was literally plagued with R/B aggro decks. And I’m calling them
„R/B aggro“ instead of „Zombies“ on purpose, since a big part of them actually
didn’t play any Zombies at all.
If you take a look at the
eleven top finishing R/B decks in Nagoya, it’s like looking at an evolution of
a deck in slow motion. You can still see some „old fashioned“ Zombie decks with Blood Artists and Threaten-type effects. Right next to these, you can catch a
glimpse of Zombie decks with Vampire Nighthawks in order to improve their
chances in the mirror. Then you can see a pack of R/B decks with the bigger red
threats (Hellrider, Thundermaw Hellkite) and shakier manabases – a shift that
has been recorded in some of the recent GPs and that stands for pretty much the
„stock Zombies“ list now. And then, you can see the deck evolving even further,
jumping the borderline between black and red and leaning a lot more towards the
red part – keeping the best easy-to-splash black cards, but adopting more burn
and aggressive non-zombie creatures. This improves the manabase a lot, because
you no longer have to worry about being able to cast triple-black spells
alongside the double-red ones, as Knight of Infamy and Falkenrath Aristocrat
are generally the only black cards in the maindeck. And because the manabase is
a lot better now, it’s possible to reap some reward for that. Ryuji Murae, a
top8 finisher in Nagoya, fitted three Cathedral of War into his maindeck, for
example. And Stromkirk Noble makes for almost as good a one-drop as Gravecrawler when everybody plays Pillar of Flame.
I’m not saying that one of
these R/B builds is better than the other. After all, the card-quality in the
current Standard format is generally so high that no matter what colors you
play, you should always end up with a deck whose power-level is high enough to
compete with the others. Sticking to guild-colors obviously helps, but the
point that I’m trying to make here is that there are many possible builds of
most Standard decks and none of them are „right“ or „wrong“. It all depends on
what other people are playing. In Nagoya, if you were on the R/B train, it
seemed to have paid dividends to switch gears and drop Zombies for some red
aggressive dorks. The reasons for that are numerous – Ash Zealot is awesome in
the creature mirrors, for example, and the Gravecrawler – Geralf's Messenger
duo is weak against the omnipresent Pillar of Flame. It may very well be true
that next week, playing Zombies will be a better idea again. But it’s worth
keeping in mind that there are always many different possibilities, regardless
of what deck you’re playing. In Zombies, you can shuffle your creature-base
around a bit, in Reanimator, you can go for different colors and different win
conditions, and even in Bant control, you can decide whether you want to splash
red for Pillar of Flame against Zombies or black for Nephalia Drownyard against
other control decks, for example.
GP Toronto
Nagoya wasn’t the only GP
that has taken place recently. Toronto hosted a Modern GP this past weekend,
with Willy Edel winning the trophy. A couple of months ago, pretty much
everybody took it for granted that PV is almost locked for the South-American
Players Championship slot, but Willy Edel is running away with the invitation
right now. It makes me wonder if PV has some winning streak prepared for the
second part of the season to claim the slot for himself.
So, what’s new in Modern?
The GP has been won by Jund, but the build is far from the stock list, as Willy
decided to run stuff like Lotus Cobra and Thundermaw Hellkite in his list and,
as far as I can tell, it has worked pretty well for him. If you haven’t seen
his list, I highly recommend looking it up, especially if you’re also on the
Jund bandwagon. But the Jund list is not what I’m going to talk about. For some
time now, it seemed that a pure control list is impossible to play successfully
in Modern. All the combo and aggro decks had too much disruption and tempo and
with Jace, the Mind Sculptor banned, control decks didn’t really have any card
advantage engine on their side. Even the U/W decks opted for aggressive
creatures like Geist of Saint Traft rather than rely on the lategame entirely.
Well, Collin Morton top8ed the 1000+ people tournament with a purely
controllish list. The whole creature suite consists of three Wall of Omens and
the win conditions are Batterskull, Lingering Souls and three different
planeswalkers, each of them appearing in three copies in Collin’s deck. Here’s
the list:
| Colors |
|---|
| Artifact | 4 |
|---|
| Blue | 7 |
|---|
| Gold | 6 |
|---|
| Land | 25 |
|---|
| White | 18 |
|---|
| Converted Mana Cost |
|---|
| 1 | 5 |
|---|
| 2 | 9 |
|---|
| 3 | 7 |
|---|
| 4 | 9 |
|---|
| 5 | 5 |
|---|
| Type |
|---|
| Artifact | 4 |
|---|
| Basic Land | 4 |
|---|
| Creature | 3 |
|---|
| Enchantment | 7 |
|---|
| Instant | 2 |
|---|
| Land | 21 |
|---|
| Planeswalker | 9 |
|---|
| Sorcery | 10 |
|---|
6th place at GP Toronto 2012, Modern
What I really like about
this deck is how clearly it aims at the weaknesses in the metagame. I can still
remember destroying Jund in Standard with Spreading Seas and Tectonic Edges and
I’m happy to see that this plan still works even in Modern, despite the fact
that Deathrite Shaman acts as a mana-stabilizer. Nevertheless, Collin’s U/W
control has plenty of removal for the pesky Golgari mage and keeping the Jund
opponents off their colored mana shouldn’t be all that hard. The absence of
countermagic in the maindeck might seem surprising, but the whole Modern format
is very much skewed towards creatures now, with even combo decks relying on
dorks (Melira, poison guys, Pestermite), so betting all your marbles on this
type of defense is not that bad of an idea. I really hope that the U/W control
deck will find its place in the Modern metagame, even if Jace stays banned.
Diversity is always healthy for a format and even though Modern seems to be
quite diverse right now, a true control deck is something that’s missing from
the puzzle. If that will still be the case in the coming weeks and months,
we’ll see – Collin Morton and his U/W control seem to disagree.
As always, thanks for
reading and see you next time!
Adam Koska
