States Preview

Welcome to my States Preview. Consider this a companion piece to Sean McKeown's excellent article. He gives out deck lists for the major deck types and some non-major ones as well. Instead, I'm going to talk about the Bargain deck, and the attempts that can be made to stop it. Later on, I'll go back and examine successful versions of the major decks, analyze and refine them. That's assuming the plural form really applies. Until then, here's how I view this format, keeping in mind my lack of testing. I won't be playing in the State Championships.

First, the shadow that looms over the format: Yawgmoth's Bargain. The traditional Bargain decks divide into three types. There are Turnabout versions, which have been significantly weakened by the loss of Mox Diamond and Scroll Rack. They may survive, but if they do, they'll be few in number and a shadow of their former selves. There are variations on "Dark Tide," which use Bubbling Muck and then untap Swamps a lot. Finally, there are Skirge Familiar versions, which I expect to be the most popular.

The important one is Skirge/Feast Bargain. It's going to stay W/B, or possibly become W/U/B. With both of blue's allied colors and no Wasteland left, it makes a lot of sense to run a lot of duals in order to run at least one Show and Tell, have access to Delusions, etc. You could also modify the land to include Rishadan Port, which is also a possible sideboard card. A lot of people have reported that Renounce is excellent, as another way to sacrifice Rector and a way to grab a lot of life. It doesn't help pre- Bargain except to sacrifice Rector, which is bad, but it significantly reduces the life you need to win so I've come over to liking it. With four Vampiric Tutors in the deck, there's not much room left. Exhume /Dragoons is a good engine; whether these decks have the space for it, for a partial version or run without it is a question of space. The other question of space is whether to run copies of single cards in the deck. In particular, Disenchant probably has a place. The sideboard gets the gift of Vampiric Tutor as well. This version seems to have it all: It wins from low life totals, has more Bargain access. One really funny problem is that players might use Cursed Totem (or even two Engineered Plague, which I saw Brian David-Marshall have out on Imps) after sideboarding or even before to try and stop you. Keep in mind that there's no reason to scoop just because your imps are dead unless you're under great pressure. You can just cast the Soul Feasts with lands over the course of a few turns. With a solid fundamental turn of 3 and a very low chance of fizzling, this is the deck that more than any other will spoil everyone's fun.

I never really liked "Dark Tide." I felt that the deck had a lot of ways to go wrong and only one way to go right; you needed exactly the right mix of land, you needed Muck, you needed untap, etc. Vampiric Tutor helps out how, as it helps all combination decks from UBC. But this one's biggest problem is that it can't take advantage of Peat Bog or the other great lands in Type II anywhere near as much as the other decks, even with allied colors. You need basic swamps. You'll also have a rough time running Rishadan Port. The deck is certainly playable. Can it go off on turn 3 on a consistent basis to keep it on a par with Skirge Bargain? Seems very unlikely. If nothing else, the matchup against Skirge Bargain seems likely to be awful, unless Cursed Totem can save the day.

You could also play Yawgmoth's Bargain and not go off. But I wouldn't recommend it.

From here on in, every deck has a mission: It must stop Yawgmoth's Bargain. There's one very good method for any deck, which is not to play against it. This may actually be viable if there aren't that many of them. This is where my ideas tend to go wrong when they do go wrong. I know my way of thinking about Magic formats is radically different from the average player, or even the average pro player. One reason I play against "random" players sometimes is to get a better feel for what everyone else is playing. How many people will actually play Bargain? Every player I respect except one that gave his opinion on the Skirge Bargain deck thinks it's amazing. And yet, not all of them are playing it. Some don't like playing that kind of deck, some don't want to face the hate, some want to be original and some don't want to play endless mirror matchups. Or maybe they've developed an anti- Bargain deck. No matter how good a deck is, in the early period of a format it never really gets played that much. Academy and Bloom were only about one fifth of their respective Pro Tours. At last year's NY State Championships, the field was only about 10% Academy decks, and they were only 4 of the final 8. This leads to the following Theorem:

Theorem (The Fundamental Theorem of Metagaming?) In an unestablished environment, there will never be enough players either playing the best deck or playing decks to beat the best deck to prevent the best deck from being the best choice.

This holds true even if it is common knowledge what that best deck is. When everyone knows what the best deck is, it's because the deck is overwhelming. Decks that totally dominate environments (like the black summer or Tide at GP:Vienna) come from envionrments established over previous major tournaments. They start out small. This is why I don't worry too much about things like matchups and sideboarding when I prepare for tournaments like Nationals, where you don't really have enough time or incentive to learn everything there is to learn. I knew Bargain was the fundamentally best deck, so I ran it. For regionals I had a deck (Cassandra) that I thought was fundamentally better than the other decks around, so I ran that.

Anyway, it's time to try and stop the Bargain decks, in particular Skirge Bargain. There are two ways to do that: Stop the Bargain deck or kill it first.

Racing Bargain isn't easy. There are two other combination decks that seem practical. Enchantress seemed extremely dangerous for a while. Problem is, this deck doesn't really win on turn three that often. It seems at first like it could, but in practice the only time the deck killed on turn three often was when it had Earthcraft. Without Earthcraft, the deck ends up killing on turn four. That's not bad, and might even be considered a problem in the format WotC wants Type II to become. It's not much worse than Bargain because it has no life requirement. But with Bargain looming this large, it's doesn't seem like a very good choice. Just as Hunka knew at Nationals that he couldn't beat the Bargain decks, you still don't have a chance against them. Similarly, there's the deck that uses Gaea's Cradle and Collective Unconscious. Again, you can win from one life, again you have significant defense, again you can't deal with Bargain because you're a turn slower. You can also try to play Replenish or Sneak Attack, but you'd run into the same problem. The issue of the Fundamental Turn is really important here: With a Fundamental 3 combo deck running around, it's really hard to use a Fundamental 4 one.

If you don't race with an engine, it'll have to be with the beatdown. You can run beatdown in any color, but red's no longer fast enough to pose a serious threat unless you run it purely for speed, and then all the Bargain player has to do is slowplay the deck, even with Radiant's Dragoons, since the only way to stop the turn 3 is going to be to go first and then start wasting your burn and creatures with Reckless Abandon. White never really did beat Bargain; soon after Nationals (which I came into without knowing the "Delusions trick") I figured out how to beat them. And they're a lot weaker now. Blue's not going to assemble that kind of beatdown, so its efforts will be to stop Bargain instead. All that leaves are black and green. Both decks are going to use almost all Urza's block cards. Neither gets anything extra anywhere near as good as Vampiric Tutor, with one important addition being Rishadan Port. The best stompy can realistically do on turn 2 is 7-8 damage. That's pretty good, but won't stop a normal turn 3 kill that often. If the deck goes first (and therefore gets three turns) it can do a lot better, with the aggressive draws putting Bargain into the single digits. That doesn't lock up the game, but it certainly doesn't make things easy. Still, the match advantage seems to be with the Bargain deck. One note is that a lot of Stompy players seem to be complaining about losing to black removal; Distorting Lens is one good way to stop that. The situation with Suicide Black is similar. With the right draw, you can do 8 damage on turn 2, but again, if you don't go first that won't do it. The problem here is that if you don't draw a Ritual, the deck is probably not fast enough. Duress is the only weapon that black has left, and it's not going to be enough. The old Suicide Black was scary, the new one is much less so. If nothing else, Light of Day is still waiting in the wings to save the day. And this time, you actually have plains in your deck.

There's one last chance: The Bargain must be stopped. Stopping the Bargain deck after the Bargain hits the table is almost always a bad idea. If they're playing the right cards, they can work around whatever you dropped. Defense against a Bargain on the table only works together with a clock. So what stops Bargain? First, you can try discard with Unmask and Duress, but that won't be enough. That leaves counterspells. And here's where Rishadan Port ruins everything: there's no way to really defend against Bargain armed with the Rishadan Port. If you don't run mono-blue, you're toast, because the blue mana gets tapped. Even mono-blue, if Bargain goes first, it can drop a turn-three Bargain and only has to face Annul. If it can spare two mana, even that isn't a problem. The good scenario: You go first. You could win, but you probably won't. On turn two they tap a land, and if they have spare mana they once again can tap a second land and face only Annul. The big problem, of course, is if the key card is Academy Rector then Annul does nothing. You can't keep the Rector off the table, then you can't stop the Phyrexian Tower, so the Rector is sacrificed, and the game ends. And that's all she wrote for the counterspells as well. Game over.

I could be wrong, of course. Sideboard hate or an anti- Bargain deck could take out the Bargain decks since they're out in the open. The Bargain decks could be played by so few people they don't dominate. Or least likely of all, they could just not be that good. If that happens, it's because the format has ceased to be unestablished.

Good luck to everyone at the State Championships. I may or may not be at the NY State Championships, although I know I won't be playing.