Gifts Ungiven

I like seeing rogue decks make it into the top eights at PTQs. Deck design is, at all levels, a rewarding component of Magic gameplay. This is a significant part of why we even like reading deck lists (with "playing good decks and winning" being the other major part - but I think the love of design is why we, at times, almost fetish-ize deck lists, since if we all chose to stick to the narrow range of truly optimal builds, alternate lists would be less interesting). With that in mind, this last set of results was particularly good, both in terms of supplying new game options and off reminding us that seemingly utterly random decks can still top eight a major event.

In fact, let's start there.

Stuffy Conscience

Brian Monmaney took this deck to a seventh-place finish at the Little Rock, Arkansas PTQ on the last day of February. For the unfamiliar, this is a combo deck, looking to win by sticking a Guilty Conscience on a Stuffy Doll and then doing infinite damage to your opponent. Brian wrapped this combo in a sort of disruptive-control shell, and apparently did well enough to beat out a not-insignificant field and top eight his PTQ.

So what's so odd here?

Well, first of all, Stuffy Conscience is a clunky combo, especially in a deck with no acceleration. You need to somehow resolve a five-mana creature (and not have it Pathed, Sowered, or Shackled away) and then need to find and resolve Guilty Conscience (not losing it to a Spellstutter Sprite). While it's not unheard of for a deck to win off of a costly spell (think of last season's Ideal decks), that's usually done with lots of acceleration and powerful ways to find or draw into the combo. Brian's deck has neither of those things, being almost* completely devoid of acceleration and having a solitary Diabolic Tutor to help find the combo engine components.

(*'Almost' because the Knights are acceleration on the draw.)

From there, the weird continues. The deck runs triple Basilica and no fetchlands. It has four Wraths with four more in the side. It maindecks four Extirpates, and has four Disenchants as well, although I must admit I'm far from clear on what they're there for (the Shackles, perhaps?). It simply doesn't feel like it should be able to function smoothly, well, or perhaps even at all, and it prompted one poster on the WotC Magic forums to ask what was wrong with the world.

Nonetheless, Brian used it to take seventh place.

The rest of the Little Rock top eight was two Storm, one Some-Level Blue, one RGW Zoo, one Faeries, one Bant, and the winner, one Swans deck.

So it was an eccentric day in Little Rock. Unfortunately, we can't really see what the field was like based on the top eight, as we only really know that those eight decks let their pilot outperform the field (so we have to ask "what kind of field lets two Storm decks win," which is so fuzzy as to deny utility). I do wonder what matchup stopped Brian in his quarterfinals.

As for running this as a deck in future PTQs...I think it would be reasonable to make a more consistent version of it, with better access to the combo cards and better resistance against more potential opponents. Fundamentally, you could fit the Stuffy Conscience combo into a Rock frame, and from there you'd be playing a deck rather like the Lybaert-Hill-Stark-etc Rock N Nail deck from PT Valencia, where you play aggro in the early game and then finish with one explosive play. That, I think, would be a reasonable approach.

Mostly, Brian's result suggests that you, as a PTQ player, need to be able to respond to seeing a card you've perhaps never even heard of come into play across the table, because that's one way people win PTQs.

Tarmorack Update

William Lowry ran this update of the former Standard "Tarmorack" design to a first-place finish at the San Antonio PTQ on the 21st. Unlike in Brian's perplexing build, in Lowry's deck the reasoning behind his choices seems fairly clear.

We can start with the manabase, which has been updated to include four fetches and four Mutavaults. As a two-color deck, this design is resilient enough to accommodate for lands that don't generate colored mana. These in turn provide resiliency on the attack for a deck that spends a lot of its cards making sure the opponent has no plays.

Over in the spells, we see an updated discard suite featuring all the expected suspects, with a side helping of Jitte to make the sparse collection of creatures more effective.

Among the creatures, we have the expected Augurs and Goyfs combined with the very reasonable Dark Confidant (note that almost the entire deck costs 2 mana or less) and the expected Tarmogoyf. The triple Nyxathid is 100% expected for an update of this archetype. Indeed, if William hadn't included the clearly synergistic Elemental we'd all be questioning his judgment right now.

William beat a top eight that consisted of two RGW Zoo, two Faeries, one Beasts, one wacky U/W aggro, and one Elves. Outside of Keyafar Saleh's entirely unexpected U/W build, that's a fairly conventional top eight, suggesting that William's chosen Tarmorack design was perfectly capable of annihilating the kind of field you'd expect at a normal PTQ.

The Lowry Tarmorack update seems like a perfectly serviceable design. If you played Tarmorack when it was Standard legal, now might be a good time to reintroduce yourself to the deck and use it to make a run at a PTQ.

Looking at the two decks, I think we can safely say that Lowry's deck could be taken into a tournament with minimal tuning. In contrast, reading Monmaney's list makes me want to pull out the combo engine and stick it in a much saner-seeming build. Both decks are rogue, but for the outside observer, one seems as if it must necessarily be clearly "better," with the other seeming kind of random.

But yet again, both top eighted PTQs. It gives us something to think about.