This week, February and March seems to be video game season again. Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2 and Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth come out within weeks of each other. And Final Fantasy XIII is soon to come.
Doesn't it feel like end of the year holiday season? It sure does to me. I'm beginning to wonder if some of these releases were pushed back - sometimes one would think the answer is yes.
Now that you’ve tested your deck, pre-sideboard, post-sideboard and maybe even against itself (arguably a pretty important match up), what do you do with the information you have? You have to think of changes to make for your deck. Remember that list of key cards you should’ve made? These are the cards you should be looking at keeping – or making better by putting other cards that work well with these cards, like fetchlands for [card]Knight of the Reliquary[/card] or [card]Esper Charm[/card] for [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card].
Too much of a good thing can be bad. If you have a lot of cards doing the same thing, they could hurt you in a different matchup. If you find yourself losing to a particular deck quite badly – think about why. It could be because you don’t have any flying creatures. It could also be because you don’t have a blocker – these things happen when your deck has too narrow a focus, and only wants to keep trouncing a particular type of deck, rather than the whole range of them.
Sometimes, you might have to trade a whole set of key cards for another, simply to give you a better chance against a particular deck – this could change your deck’s focus, or it might simply streamline your deck’s theme. Be sure to be mindful of this – I did this when I switched from Naya Ramp to Naya Zoo – and while they might share a similar mana base, the deck’s strategy, speed and methods changed entirely. This might not be to your liking.
It’s just as important to like the changes as it is to change your deck. Transforming your deck from simple Unearth + Discard strategy to a pure Unearth combo strategy could easily turn it from mediocre to awesome – but if you don’t like how a pure Unearth combo strategy plays – there’s really no point. The point to playing Magic is to have fun. If you can’t win with it, have fun with it.
There’s really nothing quite as exciting as pulling off that [card]Luminarch Ascension[/card] – over say, simply attacking with small white creatures. It’s rewarding to make your own strategy work rather than use someone else’s tried and tested crazy token deck instead of building your own token producing engine. It’s also fun to watch your opponent’s get a sense of foreboding as your innocuous looking [card]Khalni Heart Expedition[/card] gets ready to chop his life count via [card]Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle[/card].
Sometimes your deck just doesn’t work out – it doesn’t matter how much testing you do, how much tuning you do – you just keep losing. Don't keep working at it – try a new deck. Sometimes the deck simply doesn't suit your play style, and sometimes it just simply doesn't work. Some decks sound like awesome ideas – but they have some vulnerability only a larger card pool could fix. When rotation came along, the deck may have lost only a few important cards – but sometimes that's enough to take it from the top to being just mediocre.
A note – if you recall, many years ago I talked about why you might want to play 61 cards. However, fetchlands provide many of the advantages of playing 61 cards – while allowing you to play a 60 card deck. Fetchlands easily provide that half-a-land effect needed for that just-right land ratio – they also thin your deck of lands for the latter half of the game – so there’s really no good reason to play 61 cards currently. So don’t. (If you’re poor like me, play Panoramas and [card]Terramorphic Expanse[/card]s – unless your deck absolutely needs to have less comes into play tapped enter the battlefield tapped lands)
The most important thing to learn from testing is how to play your deck. There’s nothing more embarrassing like playing TEPS and not knowing how to pull off the turn 1 win.
[deck title=All-In-Red][land] 14 Mountain [/land] [creatures] 4 Demigod of Revenge 4 Deus of Calamity 1 Dominus of Fealty 3 Magus of the Moon 4 Simian Spirit Guide [/creatures] [other spells] 4 Desperate Ritual 4 Manamorphose 4 Seething Song 4 Empty the Warrens 4 Rite of Flame 3 Blood Moon 2 Chalice of the Void 4 Chrome Mox 1 Chandra Ablaze [/other spells] [/deck]
This deck is a fun, fast deck that proves Magic is still an unpredictable game.
The deck aims to do two things - play [card]Blood Moon[/card] or [card]Magus of the Moon[/card] early enough to screw most other Extended format decks over - punishing them for their over reliance on nonbasic lands for mana and their mana fixing. The other is to drop something big and scary that costs 5 mana.
There's also always [card]Empty the Warrens[/card] - with its Storm count being fueled with your mana spells for extra craziness.
Every once in a while you can pull off the turn 1 drop - and really wreck their day. I haven't tried the deck with [card]Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs[/card] - but I bet in some metagames he's way awesome.
Before one begins testing, one must build a deck – to do this, one must familiarize themselves with the card pool. It’s a good idea to limit your card pool to say, Extended or Standard – because building within limits makes for good practice. You might be wondering why you’d want to practise building decks with limitations – and the answer is simple; because it leads to problems. The most difficult problem most people still aren’t good at solving is a deck’s mana base. To some of us, building a multicoloured mana base as easy as pie – to others, it’s like an unfathomable pit of despair. This is among the first problems you must always be on the watch out for during testing.
This is among the most limiting factors for a deck – fixing your mana. In Extended and Legacy, there’s lands for nearly every situation – and fetchlands allow you to play more lands than you normally would – you could easily see decks with less than 12 mana producing lands that nearly never get bad starts, simply because they play with a well tuned mana base. This is something that you need to do a lot of testing to get right.
It might never seem like it, but taking out one land, swapping lands and even adding lands change the deck’s consistency a lot. You’d never think swapping out one [card]Swamp[/card] for one [card]Caves of Koilos[/card] would help too much in a black-white deck – but even [card]Caves of Koilos[/card], which has been now superseded by the likes of [card]Marsh Flats[/card] and [card]Godless Shrine[/card] – is way better than a Swamp.
The next thing to watch for is for key cards. Watch which cards in your deck win you games, like [card]Baneslayer Angel[/card], [card]Vampire Nocturnus[/card], [card]Hedron Crab[/card] and so on. Even better – play against your own deck and see which cards are really putting pressure on your opponent. A lot of good cards which might seem mediocre in your initial judgment like [card]Qasali Pridemage[/card] and [card]Chandra Nalaar[/card] may change your opponent’s play style in such a way that you never notice how good they are.
You should also identify every other popular decks’ key cards. [card]Lotus Cobra[/card], [card]Nissa Revane[/card], [card]Hedron Crab[/card], [card]Luminarch Ascension[/card] and even [card]Wall of Denial[/card] are some examples. This are cards that could easily win games for you and your opponent. Think about solutions – remember to think about whether you need to treat the symptom, or deal with the underlying problem.
For example, you could get rid of [card]Lotus Cobra[/card] – but the real problem is actually stuff being put into play with [card]Lotus Cobra[/card]. Similarly with [card]Hedron Crab[/card] in Unearth decks, destroying it might slow him down – but he might still eventually win. It might be wiser to steal stuff being put into play – stealing a [card]Baneslayer Angel[/card] is an awesome way to ruin someone’s day; [card]Act of Treason[/card] might be way more useful than [card]Pyroclasm[/card] in dealing with [card]Lotus Cobra[/card]. Graveyard hate like [card]Jund Charm[/card] and [card]Ravenous Trap[/card] might be a little better than trying to kill their [card]Hedron Crab[/card] (when they probably still have [card]Tome Scour[/card], [card]Traumatize[/card] and so on in their decks).
Make sure you know what your best hand looks like. A really awesome hand for one deck can be a nightmare for another – for an Unearth deck, [card]Hedron Crab[/card], [card]Grim Discovery[/card] and 5 fetchlands is an awesome hand – but most people will probably mulligan a hand with 2 spells costing less than 2 mana containing 5 lands. Similarly, make sure you know what the best hand for the popular decks in Standard looks like against you. Imagine how you’d deal with their ideal hand – it’ll help you a lot when it actually comes up instead of staring in wonder at your opponent’s miraculous plays. More importantly, imagine what cards you need to take on their ideal hand.
Why do you need to know these things? Your sideboard can only be at most 15 cards. Generally, unless your match up against a particular deck is ridiculously bad, you won’t be putting very narrow cards in your sideboard to deal with the problem. You want to put in cards that can deal with the problem in general. [card]Oblivion Ring[/card] is an example – it can hit everything but lands. It helps if you need removal against something unusual (like a planeswalker), it also helps if you just happen to need more removal to deal with something.
I don’t believe in single cards in the sideboard (unless you are playing tutoring cards like Gifts or Wishes), so in general that leaves with a choice of 4 cards to deal with the problem (4 + 4 + 4 + 3). Most of the time in Standard, it’s some kind of removal to deal with noncreature threats or graveyard hate. This can easily range from something simple like [card]Pyroclasm[/card] to something as complicated as [card]World Queller[/card].
Occasionally, people use a transformational sideboard – which can be useful for surprising your opponent in both the earlier games! Some people don’t even need a sideboard – because they’re playing a deck with multiple strategies. Hybrid combo decks are generally slower than their focused parent versions, but they’re something to be wary of as you can’t always tell what’s going to happen next!
Popular sideboard choices should also be taken into account during testing – you must know how vulnerable your deck is to disruption. If your Unearth deck strategy is vulnerable to [card]Jund Charm[/card], it might be wise to put counter spells into your deck – [card]Negate[/card] is a good choice – and it is bound to counter something else you don’t like – [card]Path to Exile[/card], [card]Lightning Bolt[/card] or even [card]Nissa Revane[/card].
Sometimes the card you might have to deal with is resistant to tampering – like a [card]Sphinx of Jwar Isle[/card]. You might need to look into less (or perhaps more) conventional manners of dealing with it, like blocking it with a [card]Vampire Nighthawk[/card] or hard casting an [card]Extractor Demon[/card] (how usual sounding if you don’t play Unearth).
It’s just as important to know how your deck does after sideboarding. It’s no good to win game 1, and then lose games 2 & 3. It’s important to ensure your deck isn’t easily disrupted, and make sure that you’re not particularly vulnerable to popular sideboard choices.
This was written just around Worlds 2009, believe it or not. That's how delayed this is. Now bloody Worldwake is out and it's out of date. Grrr. We all call it testing, yet in fact; it’s also a lot of practice. Some Magic decks play themselves – and require little to no skill to play, probably needing little more than a novice’s knowledge of the rules. Some decks on the other hand are so convoluted, so complex and so confusing that rules knowledge is useless.
Testing a deck is really not as complicated as it sounds. Sit across another person who’s pretty good at piloting the deck you want to test against – and play. There’s no need to be complicated, take statistics and all just to know everything. Really, most good players know quite well from maybe 3-5 rounds of Magic how well a deck actually performs against another.
Taking numbers really only helps in borderline cases – where your advantage over another deck is slim. The most important thing to take out of testing is which cards are important, which cards are great and which cards are just so-so.
The easiest way to build a deck currently is pretty simple – pick two or three colours, look at the pool of cards available to you and choose those that are the best – and fit your play style. The Standard card pool has shrunk considerably in recent years, and the focus on creatures has made building good decks easier than ever.
No longer do you have to ponder for hours over which card draw to run, which removal to put in and which enchantments and artifacts to play, you simply put in the best creatures at each converted mana count up to 5 or 6, and then just play.
This might seem mindless – but it isn’t. Subtle differences are extremely important to decks. Currently, the few dominant decks in Standard are Jund, Naya, Vampires, Nissa Aggro and maybe a few others.
A Jund deck ran by simply playing cards that gave incredible card advantage. It wasn’t fast, it wasn’t great – it simply trounced your opponent by simply playing cards that became 2 spells instead of being the 1 spell cards traditionally are.
A Naya deck aims to do differently – it tries to play situation changing cards. The idea is to drop a big creature every turn past turn 3. To me, this was the deck to play – it had a good chance of beating Jund, simply because everything that it could play was simply better than anything Jund could play.
There were two variants of the Naya-based decks: Naya Zoo and Naya Ramp (I consider the Naya Lightsaber deck that won the World Championships to be a Naya Zoo variant containing [card]Ajani Vengeant[/card]). The defining difference (to me at least) was that Naya Ramp ran [card]Lotus Cobra[/card]. I tested Naya Ramp for three games against an old mono-green aggro deck. The old mono-green aggro deck isn’t really representative of Standard currently – but it is fast, hits hard and plays like a lean mean damage dealing machine.
Even without testing against Standard archetypes (which are slower than this green aggro deck), I decided immediately against [card]Lotus Cobra[/card]. I never saw what others saw in [card]Lotus Cobra[/card] – besides a possible turn 3 [card]Baneslayer Angel[/card]. In the 3 games I played using Naya Ramp, I found myself either never needing [card]Lotus Cobra[/card] in the first place – or I was drawing it late game, where it was a dead card. I hated that fact that I was, at times, contemplating holding land for the next turn where I’d be able to cast something big. Maybe this was just my lack of experience with the deck, but [card]Lotus Cobra[/card] was so dependent on land drops to be useful that it just didn’t fit my play style.
I eventually tuned the deck to be closer to a Naya Zoo build. I’m no Pro Player – and my play style has become very sloppy after many years of not playing – but I’m still an excellent deck builder. The Naya Zoo deck I built from the wreck that was Naya Ramp made me feel happy. I wasn’t yet familiar with planeswalkers (although I later built a deck filled with planeswalkers to remedy that) – so I opted to not put anything besides 3 [card]Qasali Pridemage[/card]s for removal.
The deck then became something I was more comfortable with – it no longer mattered that I had removal, just that I could play creatures. [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] and [card]Noble Hierarch[/card] became my turn-1 drops – and what made them even better was that I didn’t mind playing them late game. While a turn-3 [card]Baneslayer Angel[/card] wasn’t possible anymore – I had a lot more problems for my opponent to deal with.
Even without my best possible hand, [card]Arid Mesa[/card]s made sure [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] was always a nice 3/3, and [card]Noble Hierarch[/card]s enabled my turn-2 [card]Woolly Thoctar[/card]s. A 5/4 on turn 2 or 3 is ALWAYS a problem. It’s gonna hit for something on turn-3. It doesn’t matter how small or how big – you’ve probably made your opponent’s plays for the next few turns problematic. It falls out of the range of most removal, and [card]Noble Hierarch[/card]s and [card]Qasali Pridemage[/card]s often made those problems bigger for my opponents. More often than not, my [card]Woolly Thoctar[/card] was a 6/5 or my [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] was a 4/4 when attacking – at that early point in the game, few decks can compensate.
The idea was simple – attract removal so that when it comes time for your [card]Baneslayer Angel[/card] or [card]Scute Mob[/card] – your opponent was out of solutions. I find that a lot of people don’t main deck artifact and enchantment removal – in the current state of Standard (the last time I played it was still [acard title=Umezawa's Jitte]Jitte[/acard] wonderland, it still is in Extended) – I’d forgive you – most decks don’t play much of either – and when they do, it’s rarely important to their strategy.
However, I’ve always liked artifact and enchantment removal in my main deck. It’s just my style. I’ve never liked playing against artifacts and enchantments – most people play them for a reason, and it’s rarely going to be good news for you. [card]Luminarch Ascension[/card], [card]Eldrazi Monument[/card], even the innocuous looking [card]Khalni Heart Expedition[/card] can easily mess with your path to victory. Although, ever since the dominance of [card]Umezawa's Jitte[/card], we haven’t really seen much equipment again – although I think that might be a sign that equipment is going to get important real soon.
Of course, nowadays, there’s a new problem – planeswalkers. It’s rarely good news when one hits the table – and it’s almost always a must to get rid of them ASAP. There are few, if any, good answers to a planeswalker besides a good thrashing – or even better – your own planeswalker (which I believe is pretty common :D).
I realise I’ve deviated quite a bit from testing – so I guess I should make another post on testing. Which will probably get sidetracked. Again.