Getting Inside the *Psychatog* Archetype

Getting Inside the Psychatog Archetype
Zvi Mowshowitz

This year's State Championships featured a wide variety of decks, but very few involved Psychatog. If a deck was Blue/Black, it was probably built around Upheaval and Zombie Infestation. But then, at the Masters Gateway, several Psychatog decks showed up. Enter the Masters tournament itself, where Psychatog was dominant. (Note that if it wasn’t for the presence of so many Psychatog decks in the gateway, there would have been at least two additional copies in the Masters, as Rob Dougherty and Darwin Kastle switched to different decks at the last minute.)

There are four questions that come to mind. What’s the best way to build a Psychatog deck? Why did so many people find the deck at once? Why didn’t anyone find it before? And what makes it so good?

I’ll deal with the issues of development first. For Godzilla, our version started with John Ormerod, as he posted a control deck with a Cephalid Coliseum, only twenty-one lands, and only Psychatogs for creatures:

I have to admit, it didn’t look very appealing at first sight. If nothing else, it didn’t seem like enough lands and it didn’t seem like you could afford the Probes or Disrupts. There was no Duress anywhere to be seen. If nothing else, no one thought the Coliseum was a good idea. Still, the English kept saying it was worth trying, so eventually I did. A few games later, I was totally convinced. My dreams of playing Domain were certainly out the window. I kept the deck exactly the same for a while, since I wasn’t sure exactly why it was working and didn’t want to mess with success. Eventually I understood what made it tick, which was central in making the changes that resulted in the final version played by Godzilla.

Realizing that there would probably be other Psychatog decks, I wanted to get rid of Ghastly Demise. In order to do that, I had to find a way to keep up tempo early on. I decided on Force Spike, and with the Spike version testing well against Red/Green we all went over to the new built. It also shored up worries about opponents forcing out an early Shadowmage Infiltrator.

In addition, we managed to find room for Duress. We all felt that a version with Duress would have a huge advantage on a deck without Duress, and with Duress we would have a much larger edge on other control decks. We couldn’t pass it up. The central focus was keeping the entire deck useful all the time, and I suggested we add a second Coliseum in order to get a 22nd land into the deck. With such a good deck, why risk mana screw? As is standard for good decks that get a lot of testing, the decklist got extremely tight and we started agonizing over every card.

This was the final version I played, with the rest of Godzilla within a few cards at most:

Psychatog By Zvi Mowshowitz

San Diego Masters: 2002 - 17th - 32nd Place

Format: Type2

Main Deck

Sideboard

Most of the Godzilla Masters players ran 2 Engineered Plague in the board, allowing 3 Innocent Blood.

As usual, even while playing a deck everyone else had we still did a number of things differently. We had Duress maindeck, and were actually quite surprised that everyone else hadn’t done the same. Ryan Fuller didn’t even sideboard it, and I think that’s just plain nuts. I still think that this version is very good, and while I’m sure that extensive mirror matchup testing would reveal a few minor changes still left to be made, I think the basic outline is correct.

The two biggest things to look at are replacing Opt with Peek due to the large number of mirror matchups and going back to playing Slay in the sideboard. We anticipated a cheap, quick attack from green decks but it turned out that fat was more common. My biggest worry is the ability of opponents to play mind games with Nightscape Familiar against the Engineered Plagues, since they could potentially have enough sideboard cards to take out all their vulnerable creatures now that the mirror matchup is a big issue. The Familiar may even have to make a comeback, as much as I dislike them on principle.

Speaking of which, in my opinion the biggest decision a player has to make when building a Psychatog deck is whether to include Nightscape Familiar in it. That decision will then shape the rest of the decisions. Nightscape Familiar forces the deck to tap out early on to cast it, which causes it often to die when faced with burn. It gives the deck a second creature, and even if Shadowmage Infiltrator isn’t in the deck it makes it much harder to strand creature removal or bounce in the opponents’ hand. Burn becomes much more useful against you, because unlike Psychatog the Familiar can be killed. If the Familiar starts blocking, that starts to get mana intensive quickly.

On the other hand, if the Familiar comes out and lives the deck has a much easier time casting and double casting its spells. In counter wars, the Familiar can be invaluable when combined with spells like Fact or Fiction and Memory Lapse, and it gets the card out of your hand to prevent discarding. While it’s not much of a clock, even a little damage can threaten to put an opponent into the range of a large Psychatog.

If the Familiar makes the deck, then there will hopefully be a Familiar in play much of the time, which makes it worthwhile to switch around the spells in the deck to take advantage. Undermine becomes a very annoying spell to cast when compared with a Memory Lapse or a Syncopate. Without a Familiar, Undermine is highly useful. Shadowmage Infiltrator only makes sense in a version with Nightscape Familiar, because it can be protected and because the burn is already being drawn out. The problem is that if the extra creatures enter the deck then the deck can no longer sit back as a pure control deck, and it also cannot find the space for a lot of counters and for Duress. In fact, those players that used a lot of creatures generally didn’t have very many counters in their maindeck, and Duress became a sideboard card. Both versions have their advantages and disadvantages, and only extensive mirror matchup testing would convince me that one was definitely worth playing over the other right now.

What makes the deck so good in its various forms? Psychatog is by far the purest form of control available in Standard. The only card it has to play that requires an opposing creature in order to work is Repulse, and the deck doesn’t even need four copies of it. Depending on the situation, it can even get away without any at all by playing four Recoils and going a little light on bounce. It only has to play four damage sources, and we actually did consider playing three. Aside from those cards, everything else in the deck can be turned toward the card economy war that should decide most control matchups. There are even Cephalid Coliseums among the lands to get rid of extra lands in the late game! On top of it all, Duress is a very potent weapon in these fights. Together, these facts ensure that Psychatog decks win their control matchups.

Psychatog is by far the purest form of control available in Standard.

The second reason that Psychatog decks do so well is that they’re not constantly falling far behind on tempo. The deck has Force Spike on turn one, Memory Lapse, Counterspell and sometimes even Nightscape Familiar on turn two and plenty of action on turn three and later. Even going second against a Llanowar Elf, if the deck has its tools each turn it’s very hard to get much of a tempo advantage once the second turn spell is countered by Force Spike. To top all of this off, Psychatog may be the easiest way to make up for lost time in Magic’s history. At the cost of an otherwise useless graveyard and sometimes extra cards in hand, the Psychatog is a three mana creature that can get arbitrarily large at a moment’s notice. It can’t continuously face huge monster after huge monster without a lot of help, but it erases a loss of time in a hurry. When Psychatog comes out early, it takes a Flametonge Kavu followed up with major fat before there are worries about running out of gas. If it comes out turn five backed up by permission, that’s virtually game.

Psychatog wins in a fight versus anything on the ground that doesn’t have regeneration or protection from black or blue. Mystic Enforcer can beat it if the Psychatog isn’t ready to do lethal damage yet, Nightscape Familiar can hold it off, but that’s about it. Once the potential for lethal damage in one turn enters the picture, there’s virtually nothing that can do better but fight it to a draw, and an unanswered bounce spell will end the game at any time. Together with its cheap price, this makes Psychatog decks clear favorites against most aggression.

As a pure control deck, anything that doesn’t either go for the throat or have the tools to beat you at your own game is in deep trouble from turn one. Many games against decks like Snaketonge or Draino are as simple as sitting there until suddenly your opponent is down by a ton of cards and the Psychatogs start setting in. What can they do to you? Their threats are creatures, and creatures are easy enough to stop. Every turn you draw not only more tools for the counter wars than they draw, but a card that will end up in the graveyard to fuel good old Psychatog when the time comes.

Psychatog may be the easiest way to make up for lost time in Magic’s history.

The only remaining deck that even has the potential to cause trouble is Balancing Act, because it has a threat that can win in one turn. It can easily play Balancing Act to strip the table of permanents, then win with the mana still in its pool, the most likely method being a Terrivore. Even there the deck has some big advantages, because it can naturally sideboard Innocent Blood or other extremely cheap removal and Psychatog itself is a very problematic creature. If Psychatog is in play when Balancing Act is cast you can respond by discarding your hand, and the game starts over. All the counters plus Duress give the deck a lot of ways to fight the combo, and pure control is normally a very difficult deck for a combo deck to stop. Even then however, Obliterate can keep things interesting regardless of how many counters you have.

Neither side of this matchup is a safe place to be. When I talked to Scott Johns, he told me he’d talked to many Psychatog players who didn’t like their side of the matchup. Reading articles and tournament reports about Balancing Act gave me the opposite opinion, that Psychatog should win. Why do both sides dislike the matchup? My theory is that the Psychatog player is looking at his hand and thinking about all the terrible things that the Balancing Act player can do to him if the Act player has the Balancing Act, the right land to play and a Memory Lapse, or an Obliterate, or any number of nasty things.

Meanwhile, the Balancing Act player is looking at his hand and knows he doesn’t have any of those things, and when he considers the matchup he thinks about all the times that a Tog player can tap out without fear or win with any counter. A similar situation often pops up with combination decks, where the control player becomes paralyzed with fear even though it’s unlikely that his opponent can actually do anything. I don’t know which side has the advantage, but my instinct tells me that the worried Balancing Act players should have a better read on the situation than the Tog players.

In short, Psychatog has all the advantages of Pure Control without its disadvantages and vulnerabilities. Combined with many of the best and most efficient cards in standard, that has created a dominant archetype that’s probably going to be around for a long time. WotC’s official comments about Torment recognize that the lack of worthwhile cheap creatures make Standard naturally friendly to both blue and control even without Psychatog’s extra advantages, and they’re trying to make up for it with some new cheap creatures to enable quicker attacks. It’s a good place to start, but I doubt it will be enough to disrupt this decks’ dominance.

All of that is pretty clear upon playing with or against the deck, but the way the deck evolved is still a little mysterious. How come everyone found the deck for Masters but not States? There are several possible explanations, and they probably all contribute to the full picture to some extent.

First, pure control is a deck type that appeals to stronger players much more than it appeals to most players likely to play in the State Championships. More than half of the Masters and probably more than half of the Gateway would like nothing better than to hide behind a fistful of counters, and that can’t be said for casual players. Second, the players involved in the Masters approached the situation more seriously with so much more at stake. Third, they had the States results to build on, and that always helps. Fourth, Psychatog decks evolve naturally out of decks built around Shadowmage Infiltrator or Upheaval (or both). First a player tries out Psychatog in them as an additional creature, quite possibly after witnessing its prowess in Limited formats. Many players probably thought to try it because they were using the card to proxy their Infiltrators! Seeing how good the Psychatog is, more copies are added, and eventually the other damage sources are eliminated as unnecessary. A second method is to make the leap all at once, but I suspect that wasn’t as common.

What does this mean for the future? For one thing, my estimation of the ability of the rest of the Pro Tour to find the best deck has gone way up. It was reasonable to think that the deck would not be found, but it was found. In the past, I’ve always thought the rest of the Tour would have more technology than they did, but lately I’ve been showing up to find a more advanced metagame than I expected. Maybe Magic is getting easier, maybe the players are getting better. Maybe both.

On the other side of the coin, everyone’s now stuck with what many think of as a very boring deck. It sits there and does the same thing every game, and it invalidates most decks in Standard. If a player is looking to win, it’s a major drain on his creativity. If nothing else, the mirror matchups aren’t particularly interesting to many people. Hopefully something will come along to challenge the deck, but right now I don’t know what it would be.

• Zvi Mowshowitz