Breakdown of MoggSquad's NY Rising Waters Deck

** Rising Waters has been called a metagame call, and it has been called an anti-rebel deck. Every card in the deck is to a large extent anti-rebel, and most of our testing went towards beating the rebel deck, but it's not an anti-rebel deck so much as it's the other really good deck in the format. The statistics actually had the deck going even against rebels, but our record was insane against the other half of the field. The basic idea of the deck is to lock your opponent under Rising Waters while stopping him from attacking with a series of creatures that are very hard for the cards in this block to get through. As I have with other decks, I'll go card by card.

Here is the decklist I played:

"Everyone's Just Going To Call It Rising Waters " (AKA The Pokey, AKA Alcatraz).

Designed by Mogg Squad (more on the details later, but basically I tuned the deck from public versions I played against, and Scott Johns came up with the basis for the sideboard. The rest of the team helped test.)

Rising Waters . This is the most important card in the deck. Most decks in MBC simply cannot operate properly under Rising Waters . The low casting cost cards in the format are incapable of winning games. The only deck that really can afford to run that many cards that cost one and two is actually the aggro-rebel deck, which is the real reason that deck gives you so much trouble. If green had some Grizzly Bears , it might well have had a viable beatdown strategy. Without them, it doesn't. The ultra-fast mercenary decks should give you trouble for the same reason the aggro-rebel decks do, but the deck is otherwise horrible. Beyond that, every deck tries to take full advantage of its lands, and that makes them vulnerable. Once you have people under Waters, you have two jobs. The first job is to protect Waters from removal and keep them under as much of a Port lock as possible, and the second is to keep their remaining ragtag group of permanents from winning the game. That's where the rest of the deck comes in.

Eye of Ramos . The Eyes allow you to have more than one mana under Waters on a continuous basis, and let you Thwart and Gush early on without wrecking yourself. Your permanents, oddly enough, tend to have mana in their activation costs, so you'll often need Eyes to use them without using up your one mana a turn from your lands. The best trick of all under Waters is often just to untap an Eye and a Port, then use them to tap the land your opponent untaps. You will play significantly more new lands than your opponent because of Daze , Gush and Thwart , and will draw into additional Eyes, and operate better without much mana than they do. Eye is the standard third turn play if you have a choice, unless you need a Drake desperately and losing the mana won't be too painful. If your opponent plays a Ramos part, fight it if you can; if your opponent fights yours with counters, it's likely he's playing this deck. They invalidate Daze to a large extent, so if you can Daze one it's almost always worth doing.

Rishadan Port . It's important to have one when you stabilize the Waters lock to keep them from untapping lands by using an Eye with one, similar to the old Icy Manipulator / Winter Orb lock. Early on, they're great at stalling the game. While you use less mana than they do, stalling the game is to your advantage, since it lets you draw into Rising Waters , into protection from Rising Waters , into a good creature mix and gives you land plays. Most opponents will run out of lands in their hands quickly, but you almost never will if you use Gush and Thwart regularly. As always, Ports help combat your opponent's Ports so you can cast your spells, which is why all four Ports ended up in virtually all our decks. This deck could be said to be the deck that makes maximum use of Rishadan Port . Still, there is one small downside to the card, and that's that you cannot use it for Gush and Thwart . Eighteen Islands should be fine, and you don't want to pick up all your lands that often anyway (if you have an extra Port doesn't matter), but this was a big enough concern to keep some other players from using all four Ports, in some cases keeping them from playing more than one. I think that was a huge mistake, and that when Port is banned from the block it will do enough damage to the deck to keep it from being broken, assuming the only other card banned is Lin Sivvi.

Island . You're constantly picking them up for Gush and Thwart , which is the reason you have so many of them. If you only needed Islands to get blue mana you'd be able to use Rath's Edge and Dust Bowl in the maindeck. Instead, only Rishadan Port is powerful enough to justify playing. The issue with both the number of Islands and the number of lands is to play the minimum number that won't stunt your early development. Between Daze , Gush and Thwart , you should replay a total of 23 lands, which combined with the 22 lands in the deck means if you draw your deck you get a total of 45 land plays. Because of Gush and Brainstorm you're playing a 50 card deck, which means if you start with seven cards on average you never run out of land plays. Once you get going, all the Islands in your deck aren't just not that great. Hopefully, they're useless, serving as Bouncer fuel. That's why I tried to make the deck work with only 21 lands in it, but it didn't quite work out. Under that plan it had four Brainstorms. What finally convinced me was a comment from Sigurd Eskeland: "If I think I have a great deck there's no way I'm running only 21 lands." Excellent point.

Brainstorm. Brainstorm is the one card I added that wasn't in the versions I played against before building the deck that ended up making it. The basic idea is just to shrink the deck. There are several cards, especially Rising Waters and Waterfront Bouncer but also Gush , Thwart and Drake Hatchling , that you'd like to play more than four of. Brainstorm shrinks the deck, letting you play slightly more of them. It does cost you one mana, but before Waters hits there's generally a chance, often on turn one, when your mana curve isn't perfect and you can use Brainstorm . The reason that Brainstorm is really good is that often games come down to finding a card on the turn you have to find it - the land for Eye of Ramos , the Thwart for the Disenchant , most often the Rising Waters , and Brainstorm lets you see three extra cards on that turn. Instead of looking for a way to burn Brainstorm , you look for a way to not burn it until you have to. If you have everything you need for a few turns, you hold it in reserve. Of course, it also has a minor side benefit against Unmask and Extortion , letting you hide key cards. The one time you sometimes don't want to see it is under Rising Waters , and even then you'll often have an Eye you can spare for one turn.

Gush . Gush is a great card for this deck; I cannot understand why the Your Move Games version only used three. Under Waters, the only reason it might not be amazing is if you need your Islands for Thwart , in which case it will be useful a little later when you get more Islands on the table. It gets you an extra card and returns two tapped Islands to your hand, both very nice. Early in the game, you'll often have to play more land than you need in the long run, both with and without Waters, and often it's a very good thing to put those extra lands back in your hand to throw to a Bouncer now that you've used your hand up. On turn three, Gush will let you get your third mana to cast Eye of Ramos while getting you more cards for later, or you can use it this way any time later if you're one mana short . In some situations when Waters isn't on the table you'll pay the alternate cost of 4U for it, and if you have the mana that's great too. I find that Gush should be held if you don't need to replay a land and have all the cards you need, but unless you'd have to discard you shouldn't hold it back once you run out of lands to play without a good reason like Thwart.

Thwart . Thwart has a more reasonable alternate cost than Gush Ed. Note: we used the alternative casting costs of [Gush and Thwart so often, paying 4 for a thwart and 5 for Gush became the "alternate" casting cost!], and with Thwart you pay it more often. Still, more often than not you end up picking up three Islands. This looks crippling a lot of the time when Waters isn't on the table. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it matters a lot less than it seems to. This deck has nothing in its hand worth casting more often than you'd think, in which case not being able to cast spells for a while doesn't matter. The deck is very good at not being killed, so it's common to have your opponent think you're crippled but be unable to capitalize. Thwart can still be misused, however. The biggest problem is when you have to Thwart and then have to cast Rising Waters , instead of casting Rising Waters and then getting to Thwart . If you have Thwart and can cast Waters, you generally want to cast it if there are spells you would have to Thwart , such as Parallax Wave. The worst is when you go down the Thwart spiral, where having to Thwart once prevents you from paying 2UU for the second one. The strangest situations are when you want to Thwart so you can throw the lands to a Bouncer or replay them, but your opponent refuses to cast a spell. There are times when you'd Thwart literally anything.

Counterspell . Counterspell is not as good a spell in this deck as it seems to be. Your first few turns your plan is to tap out for creatures and Waters. Once the Waters hits, keeping two mana open is difficult again for a while. It's still a good card, especially since the only one casting cost problem is Ramosian Sergeant , and after a while it becomes amazing if you stabilize the board. The dilemma between casting a creature and holding back the mana is terrible for this deck, though, because it relies on tempo to win. The worst is when your opponent gets a rebel searcher into play and you get a hand full of counters that do nothing. After sideboarding, Counterspell becomes more important, because there are more threats you have to deal with and more ways to remove Rising Waters you have to stop. Against some decks, Counterspell is great, like control black or the Affinity decks. For these reasons, there is an additional Counterspell in the sideboard. We also expected everyone else to assume we had four Counterspells, so by playing only two or three we figured we'd throw them off. The reason I cut the others out at first was more basic - I needed the Brainstorms and couldn't cut anything else.

Daze . Daze is a better first game card for this deck than Counterspell . At first, we were worried too many people would play around Daze . That sounds like a good idea at first, but in practice it's not easy. If you always leave one of your lands untapped, you're costing yourself most of a turn. The first few turns are not when you want to play Daze , since returning the land would hurt, but the next few are perfect for it. What sold me on running more copies of Daze than Counterspell was realizing that not everyone would use Daze in their blue decks or even their Rising Waters decks. If you can't even be sure that there are Dazes to play around, you have almost no choice but to walk into the first one most of the time. The other dilemma was under Rising Waters: Are you willing to wait to draw another land (since I'm using Rishadan Port to keep you from gaining mana any other way) to cast what you need to cast, with every turn giving me another chance to draw Counterspell or Thwart ? Most people, including Warren Marsh in the finals, decided they could not afford to wait. After sideboarding, what to do with Daze becomes more difficult. The deck becomes even tighter, and they know you have Daze available to you. A lot depends on the player at that point, as well as on whether you're going first or second.

Seal of Removal . Seals are in the deck because four Bouncers just isn't enough, because they give you a time and mana advantage and help with your mana curve, and because sometimes you can't use Bouncers. There are creatures like Thrashing Wumpus that will kill the Bouncer first if they reach the table, and the most important of these is Stinging Barrier in the mirror matchup. If you want to turn a losing position around in the mirror, you generally need Seal of Removal to do it, so that you can deploy your Bouncers without them getting bounced or killed. Sometimes Seal of Removal just buys you a little time, especially before Rising Waters hits, or is nothing more than a one shot Bouncer while you desperately try to find one, or is useless because it would otherwise just be Bouncer fuel anyway. But at other times you have to have Seal to save the game. After sideboarding, these come out in matchups where they are no longer important.

Waterfront Bouncer . This is the card that really lets Rising Waters shine. In many ways, the deck is set up perfectly to win entire games off of Waterfront Bouncer. Gush and Thwart give you more fuel, Rising Waters prevents them from replaying their creatures and slows the game down so you can draw more cards to discard, as well as taking away the mana you would need to use them. Discarding a card a turn seems like a huge disadvantage, but for this deck it is much less of one. A significant portion of the time you'll discard a card a turn for a long time, and be on the edge of running out of cards to discard the entire time. If you stall on mana early or cannot find Rising Waters , often Bouncer will let you give up card advantage slowly to keep the board from collapsing for a long time, often long enough to draw into Waters or a set of creatures they can't break through. When you have neither this nor Waters, often the deck will collapse. With both, it almost always shines.

Drake Hatchling . Drake Hatchling is the best creature in the block. Let me repeat that. Drake Hatchling is the best creature in the block. It's not the best card with power and toughness, since you have to consider Lin Sivvi and some other powerhouses, but those are really spells. Of the creatures whose purpose in life is attacking and blocking, the Drake is the best there is. All the cheap creatures in the format can't get through it, and most of them will get killed by it. No rebel that costs three mana or less can kill it, and only one that ever sees play, Lin herself, doesn't die to the Drake. For four mana you can get creatures that bounce off it, but it takes a Ramosian Sky Marshall to deal it a death blow. A single Drake can normally hold off an entire rebel army for much longer than you would think. Combine it with a Bouncer for that Sky Marshall or Queen and you have a ton of time to draw Rising Waters.

Stinging Barrier . You need Stinging Barrier to insure that you'll draw a 'real' creature to deal with their low casting cost creatures you can't afford to keep bouncing. No longer do you need to keep discarding to deal with a Ramosian Sergeant . This is actually great with Bouncer - if it can't be bounced, Barrier can often kill it off instead, and it deals with one of the 2/2s without having to worry about Ramosian Rally . Once two of these come down you can start mowing down their side of the table, or even killing your opponent directly. Even without a Drake they do a pretty good job of protecting the air, since Gliders die to them. The third Barrier means that almost everything is going to die. Barrier also gives you a great edge in wars between Drakes, and against many offensive decks it will cut their creature count dramatically, even in half. It also kills Waterfront Bouncer , combining with it to create a board that's very difficult for the Waters deck itself to deal with. That interaction makes it likely that one player will take control of the board in any given game, which is often worth a gigantic sacrifice of card economy.

That takes care of the maindeck. The other half of the deck analysis will deal with the sideboard and with the alternatives we had, including variants played at the ProTour that included Flowstone Armor in their sideboards and Accumulated Knowledge in their maindecks.

- Zvi Mowshowitz

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