Zvi's Grudge Match Report *Champion*

**The story of the Grudge Match finals is really a story of playtesting more than anything else. It begins at the end of ProTour: Chicago. I'm talking to Darwin Kastle on the way out of the tournament area, and I'm asking about his deck choice for the tournament. He mentions that it beats rebels, but it's not very good and he wouldn't use it at the Grudge Match. I mention I still have to grind my way in.

Why wasn't I already qualified? I'd come to about three early qualifiers for the second Grudge Match. I did make one top eight with my Worlds deck, Son of Hermit, but I lost in the quarterfinals to a Replenish deck when I drew poorly. Magic just isn't much fun for me when everyone's playing the established decks and those decks include stuff like Replenish and Tinker all over the place. Did I feel like playing that format all day on one of my few Sundays in New York instead of off somewhere like Helsinki to see if I could draw well in the top eight? Not really. Later on it was even worse, because the format would be the same as Pro Tour: Chicago. There was no way I could play in those. So my only real choice was to try and win one of the meatgrinders after I got back. Luckily, I liked the deck I played in Chicago a ton and was still having a ton of fun with it. For the grinder, I didn't change the maindeck at all, cutting Tangle out of the sideboard so I could add Simoon . Four rounds later I was in the Grudge Match without too much trouble.

The Grudge Match itself was the next day, and I once again brought my Fires deck. This time, I did change the maindeck slightly, making room for two copies of Kavu Chameleon by cutting out the Earthquake and an Assault and Battery. The reason I felt I could cut an Assault out of the deck was that I now had Simoon in the sideboard, which meant that in those matchups where cheap removal was important I'd have more ammunition in the sideboard. For some reason, everyone keeps telling me Assault and Battery isn't that good even as they adopt everything else in the deck including Seth's amazing Two-Headed Dragons. Despite all that, I still love the card. It kills things, and when it's not killing things it's just annoying enough to insure a steady supply of annoyance against blue decks. Still, whenever something has to go even I tend to stare at splitsville. For the exact decklist for both the Grudge Match and the grinder, just use the final version and work backwards from the changes - it's only a few cards off.

The first four rounds went quickly, as I went into autopilot, had a lot of fun, and always seemed to have what I needed. I'd give a more complete description but it's been a while since then. I don't remember them as being all that eventful, although I do remember them being a lot of fun. The big developing threat of the tournament was Russell Harnew, also known as The Little Miser. He was using Kibler's deck, which meant that his sideboard was full of Armadillo Cloaks and they went onto Rith. We finally met in round five, and it somehow felt inevitable. We were both in the final eight regardless of whether we drew, I offered the draw and he refused, backed by Mike Flores' and other people's strong encouragement not to draw. Game one is where my version has the edge over the Red Zone, and I had the superior draw and won. Game two he had the better draw and won. Then he offered a draw, justifying it by saying I would go first in game three, and I accepted it. Flores yelled at him afterward. Next round I drew with Sean McKeown because I wanted both him and his deck in the top eight.

This would be a good time to tell Flores' story that day: He had apparently come up with what he considered an amazing deck that beats everything in the format infinitely often. Sound familiar? It should, because Flores seems to think he has one of these every tournament. The best part is listening to The Flores Lecture about how his deck is so amazing, and this time was no exception. His latest brainstorm was to play Nether-Go with four maindeck copies of Probe , Massacre and Submerge , which of course beats everything. This leads to him complaining later on about losing all his matches and how he should have won, and the whole thing is rather amusing. For someone who only knows five words he can express new ideas every time he comes in, and he really helps take the edge off waiting between rounds.

At any rate, it was time for the top eight. In the quarterfinals I played against what I think was a Rising Waters deck, and I just cast creatures until he died. Fires tends to do that a lot, just bashing the opponent's head in before he can even make it clear exactly what he's playing. I did some recasting but there wasn't anything he could do. The semi-finals were more interesting, as I went up against Eric Ziegler and his Fires deck, which I remember as a cross between Red Zone and normal Fires. The first game he has the Wane for Saproling Burst when he needs it and my position collapses; there was no way to play around all of them. One game I think I won in normal fashion. Then there was the last one. I drew two Simoon and a bunch of lands. That was it. All I could hope to do was stall the situation until I had something worth doing. Luckily I had multiple Rishadan Ports and a Dust Bowl . So I started using the Ports, keeping him from getting the mana to cast anything serious. The entire time I was walking a tightrope. Finally, I found a free mana and put out a Birds of Paradise . He put out a Bird and a River Boa , I used Port to respond to a regeneration shield and killed both with my second Simoon without quite letting him out. I kept drawing lands, and kept using them all to keep him under control, eventually with all four Rishadan Ports. Meanwhile, I finally start drawing cards to cast. One turn, I finally tap nine mana and cast both Fires of Yavimaya and Saproling Burst , playing around Wax and Wane for the win.

For the finals, the mighty Russell had fallen in the semi-finals to mana problems and my opponent was playing a Tangle Wire version of R/G with land destruction. He's surprised he's made it this far. My goal is just to keep mana on the table and eventually win because my cards are better. Having 25 lands helped out a lot here, and I drew more than enough land to stay active. Cards were traded, I think I outmaneuvered him slightly the game where he drew a little more stuff to fight with than I did and I won the right to represent New York in the finals. Earlier, prior to the top eight, we had heard that Mouth had won Boston. There were cries of "Free Money!" all around the room, and the note that Boston had seemingly turned to the Dark Side once again after Guevin. He won with Kibler's deck, and just as I was rightly assumed to be playing Fires in the finals, Mouth was assumed by me to be using Kibler's deck.

Then came the preparation period. The format was Unified Standard, which means that each of us builds three decks that when combined are Standard legal. (I.E. only 4 ports between all three decks, etc) The first deck was an easy choice. There was no question I was going to play a Fires deck. In order to take maximal advantage of the format, it's clear that a green deck must be one of the three even if I didn't love Fires. The important cards in the deck that other decks want were Rishadan Port and Chimeric Idol , which are always in demand. I made a quick decision that they were best in the Fires deck and the other two decks would just have to do without them. The big question was what the other two decks would be.

The card that generates the most conflict between the rest of the decks is Counterspell . Any deck that wants to run normal counters needs Counterspell desperately, and there's no real way out. Power Sink was another problem, because I felt that the heavy duty counter decks both needed Power Sink and Counterspell to survive. That ruled out a split such as Counterrebel and Nether-Go, with Counterrebel able to give up Counterspell and go mainly white if it has to. I knew I would play 'a Counterspell deck' and Fires. Skies at first seemed like the logical first choice for the last deck. It uses none of the cards that control decks want, bypassing Counterspell and Power Sink for Thwart and Foil . The only fights it has are over Chimeric Idol and Rishadan Port , and it can live without either one of them without too much trouble. At least, that's what I thought.

I asked around to get the opinions of various other players. Alex Shvartsman was big on his version of Counter-rebel, and Mike Pistulnik liked his own as well. Mike's version was a modification of Kornelison's deck, with its oddities smoothed out and Tsabo's Web added. I liked a version very similar to Mike's but without the Webs, since I didn't feel this format required them outside real control given the chance of facing Ports and I really wanted to squeeze in more rebels. I too was happy with Counter-rebel and considered it a very strong second deck. Both of them supported Skies as the third deck, and I agreed with that for a time. I consulted with Ben Ronaldson, we speculated for a while but never really got very far. I talked to Kibler and he revealed he now liked my deck with Ghitu Fire , although I had to get that info through the Little Miser himself first. The most useful person I talked to was Kai Budde, and we did some playtesting as well.

The key issue was finding a version of Skies that I liked. With this as well I'd talked to a bunch of people and I also scoured the decklists from Chicago. At first I used Cloudskate and Withdraw , and passed on Foil in order to get enough creatures. Playing four Washout was a given and there wasn't room for much else. If there's one thing I don't like about most Skies decklists it would be a lack of creatures. In a deck fundamentally based around bounce and tempo, it is absolutely vital that there be sufficient beatdown in the house. After a while I cut Withdraw and went down to two Cloudskate , finding that I preferred other creatures. I loved Cloud Sprite, and I loved having 22 creatures although I did cut one out to fit in Opt . This was the decklist I thought I was going to run, leaving me to choose basically any deck to finish out my three:

(Note for those who may want to build this deck: Swamp out Dust Bowl and 3 Island for Rishadan Port since it is once again legal, and probably add at least 2 Chimeric Idol for [Cloudskate and something else])

The problem was that the deck was horrible. I didn't believe that, but Kai did and decided he was going to prove it. First I played against Kibler's deck, and I won before sideboarding with better draws and lost afterwards with worse ones. Sideboarding didn't seem to be making a difference either way. The matchup was certainly reasonable, but nothing amazing. Then Kai moved on to rebels.

He destroyed me. He totally destroyed me. It wasn't that the game score had become insanely bad, but it was clear that I was not going to be the winner very often; I got to that point where I felt like I understood the flow of the matchup and it wasn't pretty. I don't know just how much losing Port and Idol cost me, so it's hard to tell whether this applies to Standard in general or not. Regardless, Skies clearly was not the deck I thought it would be. This was bad. What choices were still out there? The key would still be finding a good deck without using Counterspell . Right now, there are only two real decks other than Skies that use neither Counterspell nor Birds of Paradise . Those two decks are R/B and the Rebels. I hate rebels and I hate playing with rebels, but I disliked the idea of running a R/B deck even more.

The question quickly boiled down to what kind of rebel deck to run. Counter-rebel was out of the question. That left monowhite rebels, W/G rebels and the deck that I didn't think of until later, W/B rebels. Kai had convinced me to look into Nether-Go, and I had a version that I actually liked, but I felt better with W/U control. The reason I thought Nether-Go was realistic was that I expected to face Kibler's deck rather than normal Fires, and Red Zone is actually a reasonable matchup according to preliminary testing. At any rate, I settled on W/U control. That meant that Wrath of God would not be available to the rebel deck. Wrath of God doesn't go into the maindeck, but it is vital to the sideboard. Without it, I would be at a significant disadvantage if I hit a mirror matchup. Mageta and Rout were still available, but I was still looking for a better solution than that. In addition, there was the Flashfires problem. Red Zone doesn't normally use Flashfires because it uses Tsabo's Decree instead, but there was still that risk. Playing too many Plains is dangerous and losing Port and two of the Dust Bowls only made things worse. It's an interesting interaction, with Flashfires actually falling in popularity because the rebel decks are paying heavy prices to not use too many Plains , which in turn allows Plains to be used in large quantities again. Regardless, right now the deck was clearly using many more Plains than it needed. Even if I went with a green splash, I would basically be getting almost nothing just to get rid of some Plains . Even with the green, the rebel engine required the deck to play more lands than it wants if it can't use Port.

My solution to this problem was simple. Since I couldn't use Rishadan Port and had a low chance of facing them, I decided to splash black. That gives the deck Tsabo's Decree and Perish , which together take the place of Wrath of God nicely. Together, I now was using all five colors and most of the best cards in the format. I already had a W/U deck I was happy with, and when I cut the enchantments out of the maindeck I got even happier. The last few days were spent on the W/B rebel deck. The engine itself was based on Kai's model with almost no modification. At Alex's insistence I realized that it would be better to use one Vampiric Tutor instead of one of the maindeck Tsabo's Decrees. Because of that I also put in a maindeck Armageddon , which I wanted anyway. The sideboard had to include a Rebel Informer, more copies of Armageddon and the fourth Seal of Cleansing as well as the remaining Tsabo's Decrees and four Perish . Adding in Mageta the Lions left very little room, and the last slot was the only one left up in the open. The lack of sufficient black sources kept me from running additional black spells, especially Snuff Out and more Vampirics.

At this point, the story skips ahead to what happened in New Orleans, where Mouth and I had agreed to play the finals. I'd asked Alex and Mike to bring along a few cards that I needed, but as usual things didn't quite go as planned. First I discovered that while I'd traded for a lot of what I needed with one of my foil Vampiric Tutors, I'd forgotten to switch off the rest of my box after changing the deck lineup. So everything that wasn't in the old plan wasn't there and I suddenly needed a lot of stupid cards. Mouth was racing around looking for cards too, backed up by Kibler who apparently was building the decks for him. Meanwhile, I was waiting with Justin Polin for Alex and Mike to arrive, but they were delayed. Justin informed me that I was expected to play my old plan, Fires, Skies and Counter-rebel. The reasoning given had to do with my past history with Skies (which was at best misunderstood) and Mike's success on New Year's with Counter-rebel. At that point, I knew I couldn't go back to the old plan.

Of course, when Alex and Mike did get there (by now Rob Dougherty was trying to get things moving) Mike said he really liked my old plan a lot better and that his deck was insane; I told him I basically agreed it probably was but that I was too unhappy with Skies. Some last minute tinkering followed with the three decks, and a search turned up all the cards except for Ruins of Trokair . Luckily, a second dealer had showed up and this one had random cards so I found them. The Ruins were in to help against Flashfires and to help cast Tsabo's Decree and Armageddon . I still owe Dan McNeil four signed Coastal Towers from this, and I'm sure he's not about to let me forget.

Rob also has one other question for us, asking whether we should specify an order for the three decks or it should be random. I didn't feel I had a much better chance to outguess Mouth than he had to outguess me, so I chose random. He did too. There was actually one slight preference I had, which was that I wanted to run the rebel deck before I ran W/U control because that would prevent him from knowing the rebel deck did not have Wrath of God. Otherwise the plan was to go in random order anyway.

Here are the three decklists I used:

Fires of Yavimaya:

W/U Control:

:

W/B rebels:

This is where it gets weird. I gave Rob my decklists, but I forget what my 15th card was and apparently I gave it back so it's not in the deck for me to look it up.

On to the matches:

For the first one, the dice gave me Fires and Mouth ended up playing his Skies deck. His Skies deck did not work well during the match. He took the second game when I drew nothing but mana and three copies of Simoon against a Troublesome Spirit , but the other two I drew creatures, played them and attacked for the win. For the second match, I got to play W/U control against The Red Zone, again a great matchup. I won the flip, mulliganed and played a turn two Tsabo's Web but didn't have many counters. He got out a River Boa and then started test-spelling me. I never had the chance to use the two Accumulated Knowledges in my hand, and I ran out of counters so Armageddon resolved. That at least let me use the AKs, which combined with good drawing to get me back to four lands the turn after the Boa got some backup. I used a Wrath and from that point on I was in control. Game two was similar, except that this time I had three lands in hand when Armageddon resolved. I rebuilt without a problem and killed him with his own River Boa . Afterwards, he explained that he did little testing because he expected it all to come down to matchups. I love when my opponents think like that.

- Zvi Mowshowitz

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