Best Team Best Decks

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This past weekend I played Worlds for the fourth time in my career. It was weird this time. Of all my prior groups of friends I tested with none had qualified. I got to experience testing with a relatively new group of Eli Kassis, Jakub Toth, and Jim Davis. While it’s always exciting to test with new players, this time was an absolute blast. 

 

We first started out with Limited, which is my cup of tea. We drafted a lot in the first couple of weeks to learn the cards and focus on preferences. I preferred blue like the rest of the field and my teammates. The issue is this was common knowledge, so you couldn’t expect to fight everyone for blue. My next preference was BG with a blue splash for kickers and cards like Rona’s Vortex. Unfortunately, my draft seat was very difficult, and I had to find a lane and stick to it. I ended up going 0-3 with medium draws. 

 

 

The Constructed rounds were Explorer and Standard. Standard was more of a priority since it’s in the top four. We first worked on Explorer. We tried a few brews, and at first we thought the focal point of the field should be BR Midrange. BR Midrange is a popular and successful archetype in the deeper format of Pioneer, so it must carry over, right?

 

Well, wrong. It became obvious to us in a day or two that BR Mid without being was pretty bad. In fact, I’d call it unplayable.There are dozens of decks that are ahead of it, and my guess is those are held deeply in check in Pioneer by the existence of Mono Green Devotion. Regardless, it became apparent to us that Greasefang was the deck to beat. 

 

We created a matrix of BR Mid, BR Sac, Greasefang, Mono U Spirits, and various Yorion Fires decks. Mono U Spirits slightly performed the best. Eli and Ivan Floch were sold on Mono U. I thought that we should play Mono U, but I was scared to say it because it looks so bad. As a side note, Ivan helped us test and was an incredibly huge help, and we couldn’t have had close to the success we had as a team without him. 

 

 

Eli wanted to focus on Mono U because he thought it was the best deck and he wanted to try Leyline of Combustion. I made the mistake of only doing a card search for blue cards, but Eli remembered Leyline of Combustion tech from Sacrifice mirrors. Leyline did a lot of things for us. Originally for BR Mid, but we knew it would be great against Mayhem Devils and any midrange deck trying to play a one-for-one game. 

 

                    

 

What puts it over the top is that in a lot of these midrange match-ups we want to trim Curious Obsessions to not get blown out. There are also expensive counterspells, and we could leave in Geistlight Snare. Leyline made Snare cheaper to compensate. We played the BR match-ups with Leyline, and it was obvious we were onto something. 

 

We waited until just before submission for some minor finetuning. We should have been better prepared for mirrors and maybe included more Shacklegeist in the sideboard since it’s one of the best cards in that and the Greasefang match-ups. That said, our deck list was near perfect, and the best deck in the event. I drew poorly and went 1-2 against BR Sac, but the rest of the team didn’t drop a match to the deck and used Leyline to shut down the deck entirely. 

 

Here’s the final list: 

 

 

 

 

Cobbled Lancer is basically unplayable and a holdover from when we didn’t have Leyline of Combustion for BR Mid. The boys still wanted a single copy but we all agreed it should be a Mystical Dispute or Shacklegeist. 

 

 

                               

 

 

This won over 80% of matches and was by far the most successful archetype in the event. Its worst match-up was UW Control, as playing around Supreme Verdict and Shark Typhoons is tough. UW Control might currently be in a good spot in the format, but it’s likely not a good deck long-term. It’s good against spirits and against Greasefang. 

 

         

 

It was fun watching BR Sac players licking their chops to play against our deck, only to fear it later. Nathan Steuer, our new World champion, played against Jim, Jakub, and Eli and was defeated by the genius Leyline tech. 

 

We focused solely on Standard the last week of testing. Ivan and Ondrej both did well in the Arena Qualifier with Esper and put our ideas for how to build the deck out there, but not many paid attention. 

 

We spent the week focusing on the midrange match-ups and trying new brews. I spent a lot of time on ladder trying ideas to see if they were viable and dismissing them when they failed. Basically, everything I tried that was unique had a huge Raffine problem. For me, Raffine became one of the toughest cards to beat in Standard. While Fable of the Mirrorbreaker is the best card, I think Raffine is a close second.

 

         

 

Our matrix for Standard relied on finding the best version of each deck. Grixis was obviously an Invoke Deck, and of course Nathan Steuers’ list is excellent. This was also true of Jund. There were tons of ways to build Jund, but Invoke Jund was the best version. We were close to registering it and thought between that and Esper we really couldn’t go wrong. We felt Grixis was the strongest deck in the midrange mirrors but only slightly, and it had the worst match-ups against the “other” category. This made it a little tricky. We could play Esper, which is far ahead of the “other” decks, or an Invoke BRx deck that was slightly favored in the known metagame of heavily black midrange decks. We thought we had a great Esper build and agreed to finetune that deck. While I liked playing Invoke decks more, I thought Esper was the right decision. 

 

I saw a lot of talk about how Standard is broken again (with more than 80% of the field at Worlds being Esper Midrange). Esper is not a deck good enough to cover 80% of the field. It just doesn’t have any truly bad match-ups and has some very good match-ups against tier decks. 

 

While Ivan had strong opinions on Esper, we still hadn’t figured out which two-drops were best. We tried a lot of cards in what ended up being the Ludavec spot. We tried Selfless Samurai, Intrepid Adversary, Tainted Adversary, and Cathar Commando. While Eli suggested Ludavec quite early, I had suggested Selfless Samurai and we all thought it sounded good in the Sheoldred and pray games. Curving out Samurai into Raffine into Sheoldred sounded incredible, but it wasn’t as strong in practice. 

 

                                         

 

We circled back around to Ludavec when not impressed by Samurai. A few hours before submission, Eli said he wished we had tried Ludavec more. We then got into an actual conversation about the card. Three toughness was an important stat against Fable tokens, but we also got some value milling with three Tenacious Underdogs and Dennicks. The biggest factor that came up in the few games we played was that it was an incredible hit off Ao. 

 

           

 

Ao looks like a mopey slow card, but it’s the best finisher in the mirror and an incredibly good proactive play leading into Invoke. With Ludevic, if Ao died we could take a Ludevic from the pile and put Ao back into play. Ao in play and attacking almost always means you’re winning, so this was just another great proactive play in the deck. I firmly believe at this juncture that we got the two-drop slots exactly right, but our biggest error was probably the Ertai main deck. That should have been a cheaper card, maybe a fourth Dennick in my list. 

 

Here’s the list I registered: 

 

 

 

The Standard rounds went well for me. I went 4-1 and lost to Greg Orange on UW Control—a deck we expected exactly one copy of from exactly Greg Orange. We thought maybe Shota could go control but found it unlikely. Greg’s approach to MTG is admirable. He plays what he loves and in two formats. I thought control was horrendous, but he manages to do quite well. It’s impressive. 

 

Esper is a deck that wants to be more proactive and load its sideboard up with the appropriate reactive cards. We realized that our sideboard cards provided marginal upgrades in most of the major match-ups, so we added options for decks we may see and built our deck so that we could play proactively with Raffine. The toughest decisions of the format are front-loaded to mulliganing and how you play the first three or four turns of the game. We wanted to be proactive by giving the opponents more difficult early-turn decisions and punishing any missteps in their play or draws. Our team went 15-5 day one of the event, a clean 75% win rate on day one in Standard with three of the four of us going 4-1 and Eli the only one with two losses. 

 

While we weren’t the closest of friends before this event, we worked together and balanced out incredibly well. 

 

Jakub is a master planner. He created tasks for us to complete, managed our Google sheet, and created a regimen for testing with Ivan. 

 

My job, as usual, was the workhorse. I just put the hours in. They needed an opponent? I’m there. I worked mostly on decks we didn’t end up playing, but I built a great version of Greasefang and Jund Invoke. 

 

Eli was the mad genius. He pushed to try tons of new cards, which is something I now realize my testing teams haven’t done enough of as I’ve gotten more experienced. 

 

If an idea sounds crazy but plausible, try it for a few games. Good players are too quick to dismiss an idea because it seems inconsistent with deck-building heuristics they’ve developed over the years. When I first started playing professionally with team F2F, we just tried everything. 

 

Jim was busy with things like having a child during testing, and I think he felt guilty about not putting in as many hours into the Discord as we did, but he was still incredibly useful. Jim was like me, a voice of dissent on many things. He wouldn’t just blindly agree. He always asked us to prove it and check our work. We’d do that, and he’d hop on board. This is super important. You don’t want to work with people who just say “yes” all the time because they feel left out if they’re the only ones who think it doesn’t sound right. A lot of times, attempts to prove it reveals that we couldn’t prove it because our sample was too small. Back to the drawing board. 

 

 

Our team absolutely savaged the event. Three of four members in the top five for a team many would have called underdogs, as we’re not known as great deckbuilders. However, we brought the best decks and ended up with likely the strongest team performance in the tournament. 

 

While I didn’t personally do well, as I won half my matches and drew fairly poorly in a lot of spots, I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of work done by a team I was a part of. We came together to build great decks and make something of our opportunity. Watching hard work pay off is incredible in a team setting. Whether it’s you or your teammates having the success, it’s amazing knowing your hard work mattered. 

 

I’m happy I got this opportunity. While small Worlds no longer exists, I hope some day I get to play the event again. It’s the pinnacle of competitive Magic because everyone wants to win so badly. 

 

Huge congrats to Nathan Steuer. He’s clearly one of the best players, if not the best, playing right now. He always plays tight and never misses a beat. The most impressive thing to me is how he does it across all formats when there are so many of them. He won a tournament that was Cube and Pioneer and a few weeks later won the World Champs in three entirely different formats while the entire field was focusing on just the three formats. He’s an incredible player and an inspiration to us all. 

 

Thanks for watching, I hope to be back again soon.

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