Lino Burgold
About Lino Burgold
Lino is the 2009 Rookie of the Year from Germany and he has a number of high-profile finishes under his belt:
- Level 6 Pro Players Club member
- Winner Grand Prix Hanover
- Two Grand Prix Top 8
- 32 Lifetime Pro Points
Hey guys!
There are a lot of changes
going on. We are in the midst of a spoiler season, and so far it seems that,
while M10 has made a good effort, M11 is going to be, like, the best Core Set ever, and that on a level that easily
competes with expert level sets. The cards look awesome so far!
But with just half of the
spoiler revealed, I don’t really have enough information to do an in-depth
analysis. Instead I’m going to focus on the Extended changes. You should have
all heard it by now, but Extended gets cut to four years – from Time Spiral to
the latest set. Now, you see, I usually love most of the changes Wizards makes.
I find myself always in the defending
position of pretty much everything they do. And now, for the first time
I’m not happy with a change, but I see a lot of players who are supportive of
the changes. Oh well, I guess it’s just me…
Just a short essay on why I
don’t like this change.
You see, Extended was never
a widely played format. Quite the contrary, it was only played at tournaments. I understand that this is not the best
possible scenario for a format, but there isn’t anything inherently wrong with
that. Sure, you could say people would only play it when they were forced to. But, returning to the “only
played at tournaments”, this is also a huge opportunity! Why? Well, in a
competitive atmosphere, a lot of different things can happen that couldn’t in a
format that also cares about things like casual players. There was a lot of unfair
stuff going on in Extended. And no one was really complaining. Of course there
was a combo that put a 20/20 flying indestructible into play as early as turn
two (I know it’s possible on turn one…). This is absolutely unacceptable in
Standard. Why? Because it’s too strong? No, not really… DDT was a powerful deck
in Extended, and it was dominant, but the metagame was able to somewhat adapt
to it. It probably was the best deck, but not absolutely dominating. And I
loved this unfair stuff. In a competitive mind, it isn’t unfair; it is just
what it is: A threat you have to deal with. It reminded me of cards like Armageddon and Counterspell – not inherently broken, just… unfair. Counterspell
would probably be worse than Mana Leak in Standard now, but I have already
ranted about why Counterspell is just out of place in the current world of Magic,
so I’ll skip that here. The point is, in Extended you were able to do really cool things that weren’t possible
in the other constructed formats (it is possible in Legacy, but, yeah, that’s
not Constructed). I absolutely loved how Extended matchups played out. Every
matchup was absolutely distinct from the others, and there was so much dynamic,
it was incredible.
And now they took
everything.
At least everything unfair.
Combo in Extended
So, with all the unfairness
gone, I want to look at – not a complete metagame analysis, it is a bit early
for that – a breakdown of combo decks in this format, some of them might turn
out to be playable and some of them won’t be playable.
In short, I’m searching for
unfairness.
This combo is banned
simultaneously with the format change. I think it is a good thing, because the
combo is – especially with Academy Ruins – notoriously hard to handle. Also, it
is pretty easy to tutor this combo up, with things like equipment searchers, artifact
searchers, even multicolor searchers work…
Another deck that
immediately got banned. I also agree with this banning, with things like Chalice of the Void gone, a lot of colors would be really limited to how they
could respond to this combo. Blue still had some awesome answers to it (Spell Burst and Spellstutter Sprite come to mind), Black has some discard, but White,
Green and Red are pretty helpless against this combo.
This is like the successor
of the Hypergenesis deck. It was already played a bit in the old Extended, but
just on the sidelines. It was a less explosive, but more resilient Hypergenesis
deck. I never liked this deck. The advantage of Hypergenesis was that it was so
fast, it only had to worry about very few things. Living End could handle those
few things (like Ethersworn Canonist, Blood Moon and Chalice of the Void), but
it was exposed to a lot of other hate in
addition to the Hypergenesis hate. For example, you pretty much never went
off before turn four with this deck, which means counters are a lot better to
handle this combo, because you even get your Cryptic Command online, and there
isn’t much instant cascade in this deck. Also, with just three or four Living Ends in the deck, you might even run out of them before your opponent runs out
of counters. And yes, you can win with hardcasting your guys – that’s just not…
good.
Obviously, another thing is
the graveyard hate. It can survive that as well, actually, it isn’t too bad,
but this combo can just be attacked from so many angles, it is really hard to
make it work.
Swans Assault
This was a deck based
around Seismic Assault, Swans of Bryn Argoll, and Dakmor Salvage. There is also
a version of just lands, Seismic Assault, Swans of Bryn Argoll, and Cascade spells.
In today’s Extended, you can actually combine those two combos, i.e. build a
land heavy deck that also runs Dakmor Salvage. Also, the Gaea's Blessing of
today actually got a lot better with the Eldrazis (because they work when you
discard them), unless you are trying to play Ad Nauseam too, of course. Another
big addition for this deck are the new manlands. In the past Standard, you
actually often won with Seismic Assault supported manland beatdown. With Raging Ravines and stuff like that, this might work a lot better today, but this combo
has never been the best deck in the format. Actually, it is more an out of the
box deck, sometimes winning everything, but I think it is a lot easier to
handle than other combos, although it is pretty resilient, considering the
alternative beatdown route. Also, the combo parts are actually pretty good on
their own, so this gives the deck a bit more power in the midgame. This is definitely
a deck to keep an eye on.
Somehow, all of the combo
acceleration rotated out. Pentad Prism, Rite of Flame, Seething Song – they’re
all gone. The only ones remaining are Lotus Bloom and Simian Spirit Guide. The Hive Mind combo itself (Hive Mind + one of the pacts) is still legal though.
Being slower, this means that you have to play quite a lot of different pacts,
to adequately deal with each deck. It also helps to just play more than one
pact though, because you won’t be able to take out a deck like 5 Color Control
with a single pact anymore – you’re not going off on turn two or three these
days. It is pretty tough to pack the Hive Mind combo into a solid control
shell, but at least you have one really easily accessible combo part – you have
a lot of pacts and also Tolaria West, while there is only one tutor for Hive Mind
in the format (besides Diabolic Tutor and more expensive rip-offs of it), and
that is Idyllic Tutor… not exactly the cheapest one.
Scapeshift didn’t lose a
combo part, but suffers heavily from the lack of dual lands. Now, there are two
options. One, you actually play Red.
Ugh! That doesn’t seem right? Well, it would still be possible to play three
colors, you can play up to fourteen dual lands… but that isn’t enough, you are
at least forced to play a good amount of red, which is not exactly what this
deck wants. The other option is to play Prismatic Omen. This has some
advantages and some disadvantages. The disadvantage is pretty obvious: You lose
the most important thing of the previous Scapeshift combo: The potential for a
one-card combo. Now it’s to a normal two card combo. But it is mono-green, and
you don’t need Red anymore, so you can easily pair it with Blue and/or Black.
In addition, you only need 6 lands to go off with Scapeshift if you have the
Omen, because Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle is a Mountain itself. And you think
18 damage isn’t lethal these days without duals? Damn right, but you can
actually do 18 damage per Valakut you
tutor. Since Valakut + Prismatic Omen is a pretty decent combo even without Scapeshift, this deck could actually run like three or even four Valakuts,
which would mean a 6-land Scapeshift can deal up to 72 damage… and yeah, that’s
definitely lethal.
This was a combo built around Reveillark, Body Double, and either Mirror Entity or Greater Gargadon. This
allowed you to infinitely recycle any two-power creature from your graveyard or
battlefield, like Venser, Shaper Savant, or Mulldrifter. Once you are able to
do this with Venser, Shaper Savant, the rest is pretty easy… you
just smash your opponent to pieces. However, I doubt this combo will see much
play, because even back in Standard, I think straight-up UW Reveillark Control
was a better choice, even though you could have included things like Body Double and Mirror Entity to combo off, but Reveillark on its own (or with Momentary Blink) is just so resilient and strong, you don’t need to build a combo around
it.
Elves
There was a short time
where players played a Ranger of Eos-based Elves deck, searching Nettle Sentinels, Heritage Druids and stuff like that. Combined with Elvish Archdruid
and Regal Forces, this deck was able to go through the whole library a few
times and put all of its opponent’s noncreature permanents on top of their
deck. However, this deck was always pretty inconsistent, so unless it gains
some good card from the two additional blocks, I don’t see this becoming
viable.
Cascade Shenanigans
There are some sick cascade
interactions that may see quite some play in the new Extended. Bloodbraid Elf
into Boom/Bust is the obvious one, and Armageddon sure became a lot better,
because the format is a lot slower. But even Bloodbraid Elf into Ancestral Visions is not out of the question…
This is probably going to
be the most format-defining combo until the next rotation. It is easily added
into every red deck. It is not a combo that wins you the game, but it can
support you easily and is probably going to be the backbone of your deck if you
are trying to fight Faeries for the next few months, or any aggressive deck. It
is also pretty good at shooting down Planeswalkers, should they appear in this
format (which I am pretty sure of).
And last but not least, the
artifact combo deck. I actually like this combo deck a lot, especially because
it seems to gain the most from adding more blocks. And I don’t want to leave
you without any decklist at all, right?
This deck forms part of my feature article:
Lino Burgold discusses the
changes to the Extended format and explains why he doesn’t like them. In
addition he goes over the most important combo decks of the new format and
presents an interesting bonus decklist!
| Colors |
|---|
| Artifact | 20 |
|---|
| Blue | 11 |
|---|
| Gold | 11 |
|---|
| Land | 14 |
|---|
| White | 4 |
|---|
| Converted Mana Cost |
|---|
| 2 | 25 |
|---|
| 3 | 8 |
|---|
| 4 | 2 |
|---|
| 5 | 7 |
|---|
| 6 | 4 |
|---|
| Type |
|---|
| Artifact | 31 |
|---|
| Artifact Creature | 2 |
|---|
| Basic Land | 10 |
|---|
| Instant | 2 |
|---|
| Land | 4 |
|---|
| Planeswalker | 3 |
|---|
| Sorcery | 8 |
|---|
This deck gained two cards: Prophetic Prism, and Mind Stone. With the 20 2-mana artifacts, this deck gained
a lot of resilience. However, I don’t
know how good this deck will be; Faeries always was a nightmare, and with them
regaining Mana Leak, this might spell trouble. Also, this deck is another one
of those attackable by both counters and graveyard hate. It can fight through
both as long as not too much pressure is applied, but anything combined with
some early beats can usually handle this combo pretty easily. It might be
playable in some way, depending on how the metagame will evolve, but until
then, we just have to keep brewing.
To sum it up: Every single
combo deck in Extended sure needs a lot of tuning to become viable. Obviously,
this is true for every single deck, but for example, it is a lot easier to get
together a Faeries list than a Swans combo deck. All the combo decks either
have two more blocks to work with, or three less. No matter what, they’ll all
undergo big changes.
As a side note, have you
ever tried to convince rules officials that there is an error in a ruling / the
rules? That’s truly mindboggling… I just let you know one thing…if I succeed
(and I plan to do so!), you will never play Magic the same way you have before!)
(I am a exaggerating a bit, but, I will explain it to you once I succeed! ;P)
Thanks for
reading,
Lino
PS, don't forget to bid on my latest deck analysis auction:
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While I realize that it isn't truly combo, I think you should have mentioned Scapeshift Zoo.
Great as usual Mr. Burgold.
Normally I ´d let myself be surprised, but as a judge, I´m definitely in for a hint - what are you talking about? I konw of three possible grey areas. A little hint might point me to the right direction.
Why's nobody taliking about "dredge" for this format? The whole bridge from below, dread return, narcomoeba package is still available, along with a load of unearth creatures and dakmor salvage (if you want it). Decks in current standard use hedron crab to bin the whole deck, and sanity grinding could also work (that might be pushing it, as you need a load of non-blue cards). I think it could turn out to be very playable, especially if nobody's expecting it.
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