Gifts Ungiven

The Onslaught cycle of fetches represent the "best" fetches to appear in Magic to date. There are other options of course, but the Onslaught fetches are the most seamless in that they come in untapped and, for the cost of 1 life, produce the desired land untapped as well (compare, for example, with Terramorphic Expanse, which can grab a broader spectrum of basic lands, but can't yield an untapped land). If you're unfamiliar, here's the Plains/Forest fetch:

In Extended, these lands are hyper-flexible, with each being able to dig up at least eleven lands, and often more. Here's everything you can fetch in Extended with Windswept Heath:

Breeding Pool
Dryad Arbor
Forest
Godless Shrine
Hallowed Fountain
Mistveil Plains
Murmuring Bosk
Overgrown Tomb
Plains
Sacred Foundry
Sapseep Forest
Snow-Covered Forest
Snow-Covered Plains
Stomping Ground
Temple Garden

In impending Zendikar Standard, fetches will pretty much be grabbing basics (as far as we know). This is comparable to the situation during the time when the Onslaught fetches were Standard-legal as well. With that in mind, let's look at the course of fetch use during this period.

Odyssey-Onslaught Standard

The Onslaught lands appear in the top eight of U.S. Nationals 2003 (click here for the top eight) in an environment featuring mono-black control, R/G aggro, Astral Slide, and various flavors of Zombie deck. An aside - I like how the flavor of Magic can make some perfectly serviceable deck builds sound like "little kid" choices. "I brought Zombies!"

The mono-black decks do not use fetches, sticking with Swamps and Cabal Coffers. This may seem obvious, but it's just as reasonable to use fetches in a mono-land-type deck for late-game thinning as it is to just avoid them entirely. However, with the MBC decks curving up to giant Corrupts, it's not surprising to see them wanting to keep drawing lands even into the later game.

Here's an expected use of fetches:

Joshua Wagener's Red-Green Beats

That's four R/G painlands and four R/G fetches. Seems reasonable.

Hall-of-famer Mike Turian took a more aggressive approach with fetches in a similar build:

Mike Turian's Red-Green Beats

That's four R/G fetches and two G/W fetches, with the latter two solely there to grab Forests. With a deck that curves out to a maximum of 4-5 (5 if you want to flashback Firebolt), it's reasonable to aggressively thin. Given that the deck clearly wants early Forests, a couple extra Heaths seems fair.

Neil Reeves, running a combo deck, upped the aggressive thinning by going for a full four extra fetches that could only hunt up one land type in his deck:

Neil Reeves' Upheaval Zombie Infestation

We next switch over to Worlds 2003, where Wake decks were king. Interestingly, though, a full complement of fetches is not an automatic choice in each of the top-performing Wake decks as featured here.

Jin Okamoto's Mirari's Wake

What I find rather fascinating here is that Okamoto's deck, like other Wake decks appearing at Worlds, uses the rather clunkier Judgment fetches (e.g. Krosan Verge) instead of the Onslaught fetches. Clearly, avoiding deck thinning is not the issue. It's possible that life loss was a concern, with powerful Goblins and Madness decks running around, but the tempo loss involved in using Verge and Expanse seems like it could lead to significantly more life loss than the 1 life from cracking an Onslaught fetch. Some Wake deck's, such a Tuomo Nieminen's from the top eight, use some number of Flooded Strands, but none of them use Windswept Heath, despite being U/W/G builds.

Onslaught-Mirrodin Standard

Let's jump ahead a year to the second half of Onslaught's Standard life. Odyssey rotated out and was replaced by the Affinity-warped Mirrodin block. U.S. Nationals of 2004 saw the last run of fully-powered Affinity decks (prior to the Skullclamp ban), making the metagame a mix of Affinity and thing that beat Affinity. In the top eight from U.S. Nationals of that year, every deck that could benefit from a fetchland ran four copies of that fetch, although none used "one-type" fetching for extra deck thinning.

Brian Kibler's G/W Control

This is a reasonably representative control build, with four tap-duals and four fetches. Notice how the deck runs the fetches even though it hopes to get to big mana later (that's what those Temples are there for, after all). Would this deck have run the Judgment fetches instead, a year earlier? I suppose we could ask Brian.

An unrelated aside - that is a fascinating sideboard. I like the idea of boarding into a Tooth and Nail deck (surprise!).

Alex Melkinow's Elf and Nail

The Elf and Nail builds from this top eight display fetch use that's starting to look more like what we're used to seeing in Extended of recent years - powering out just a few cards in the deck (think of how fetches grab shocklands in Extended Faeries to crank up the power on Engineered Explosives). These decks effectively run nine maindeck sources for a single red - four Foothills, one Mountain, four Birds. One serious advantage to this approach, of course, is that you don't have to dilute the pace of your deck by removing more Mountains or adding cranky tap-duals just to accommodate a useful splash card (and as we've seen, this is important).

Worlds 2004 doesn't do much to change up this pattern, as the winning Standard decks tend to continue running a full four of the appropriate fetch, when such a fetch exists.

Conclusions from these two seasons

You know, I'm not precisely sure what I can conclude. I trawled through the article archives over at Star City Games in hopes of finding an article that would clearly articulate why one would choose to run Krosan Verge and friends over Windswept heath et al, but even this Scott Johns article about the Wake deck simply offers a manabase featuring four Verges and one Flooded Strand with no additional comment. It does serve up this fun quote:

"While it's true the original deck was a bit low on soft-porn content, it should be pointed out that the Angels have been added to further improve the control aspect of this archetype."

If anyone who was playing during the early days of Onslaught can offer an explanation, I'm glad to hear it. Certainly, Onslaught Block Constructed decks didn't skimp on the fetches (check out the top eight from Venice) so I find the lack in Standard Wake decks utterly quirky.

Fetches in the new Standard

Just so we know what we're talking about:

The first and most interesting feature here, of course, is that these are "enemy" fetches - grabbing non-adjacent colors. To put that another way, they straddle the mana needs of the various Alara Shards. Our first exemplar here, Arid Mesa, brackets the color distribution of Naya, meaning that you could potentially include it as a four-of in any Naya-oriented build.

The second feature, of course, is that we have an orthogonal set of duals from M10 that very much care what types of lands are in play.

With both these points in mind, what kind of mana base might be generate for a Naya deck that would, perhaps, like to drop a turn one Nacatl and see it go big in the nearish future?

4 Arid Mesa
10 Forest
2 Plains
2 Mountain
3 Rootbound Crag
3 Sunpetal Grove

That's just an untested draft, but it's good food for thought. We effectively have some sixteen green sources, ten of which are accessible on the first turn. We have nine each of our red and white sources, with six Mountains and six Forests. Is that enough to reliably give us a powered Nacatl? Maybe not. I generally hesitate in recommending a mana base until I've been able to actually test it.

What if we instead are making a general-purpose Naya base that doesn't care as much about having a one-drop? We could do something like this:

4 Arid Mesa
4 Jungle Shrine
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Sunpetal Grove
2 Plains
2 Mountain
4 Forest

You could, of course, really go nuts and add in Terramorphics, but that slows down the deck overall and may no longer be necessary with the power of the Mesas. The mana base as written is already on the slower side given the dearth of Forests in this version.

So that's exciting enough in three-color builds. At the same time, the fetches give us the fascinating dynamic of having orthogonal (there's that word again) color-balancing strategies present in two-color builds depending on which build were going for. Neat, right?

As always, I reserve further judgment and analysis for when we have the full set to evaluate, but I think there will be a lot of ground for interesting work in generating mana bases in the new Standard, and it always helps to have something to look back to when we do so.