Gifts Ungiven

As a player who preferentially fights my way through Cryptic Commands and Riptide Lab engines rather than playing them myself, it's with some measure of relief that I look forward to the pending rotation that will move the former out of Standard and the latter out of Extended. Focusing on Standard for the moment, I'm happy to watch pretty much the entire Faeries engine leave the format. Lingering on that thought a little longer, I started to wonder if there were enough decent counterspells to actually have players piloting countermagic-oriented control builds in the foreseeable future.

I have some deck-design-related ulterior motives at work here, of course.

To answer that question, I culled a list of available counterspells from Shards, M10, and the officially spoiled portion of Zendikar, and then considered the quality and efficacy of those counterspells. Click through to the extended entry for the list of cards and commentary. And, of course, spoilers.

In this week's In Development, I've mentioned Iona as one card I have my eye on going into the new Shards-Zendikar Standard, as she has a tremendously powerful effect. As I discuss there, the most likely way to deploy Iona effectively in Standard is going to be via reanimation, but with about half the cards spoiled at the time I wrote the article, I wasn't sure if that option was going to be available or not.

It's looking rather like we won't be reanimating any Ionas, unfortunately, as I just crosschecked the Zendikar orb of insight against the now much-more-robust Zendikar spoiler at MTGSalvation. The verdict? 21 instances of "graveyard" in each. This suggests no additional reanimation spells yet (we can hold out hope for Worldwake and the third set in this block).

That still leaves open the entirely real possibility of Iona as a full-on, nine-mana finisher of doom. There may also be other ways to cheat her into play. I'll discuss my final verdict on Iona in next week's In Development once we have the full spoiler in hand. Given her ability to simply declare a game over, I'm not willing to rule her out even without obvious ways to cheat her into play - at least, not without completing a solid preliminary understanding of the new play environment.

In the meantime, Tooth and Nail for Iona + Painter's Servant is hilarious. Just saying.

Head on over to ChannelFireball.com to read my latest In Development column, Developing a Context. This week, the discussion focuses on giving form to an unplayed Standard environment, and putting together deck lists to face down the challenges of our imagined Standard.

I do recommend reading the whole article rather than just skimming for the deck lists, as the former will be rather more informative than the latter.

Also, on a wholly related side note, Ascension is so far proving to be a house in the G/W Walker build in testing. More on that next week.

Apropos of some testing that I'll likely discuss in next week's In Development, I found myself back at Gatherer trying to suss out options for life gain in the now days-away Shards-Zendikar Standard.

The news is not so good.

Click through to the extended entry for a list of potentially viable life gain options in the new Standard, as well as the requisite discussion.

My latest In Development, Red Teaming, is up at ChannelFireball.com. This week, I discuss how to give a deck concept a shakedown cruise, and settle in on one control and one aggro build.

Outside of the column, work has been eating my brain a bit in the past couple weeks. Thus the lack of Gifts Ungiven posts. There should be some in the coming days, as even though I'm on a business trip, I finally have some time to do a little more additional thinking about formats new and old, so there may be actual posts.

My latest column, Tensions in Sideboarding, is up. Click on over to CFB to see what is likely to be the only Magic article this week (or quite possibly this year) that uses Excel.

Also read about my first ever competitive misplay, circa Ice Age or so. Have you been killed by the combo the site you're writing for is named after? I have.

Thursday's Daily Deck List at the mothership is the Nayamorphic build that I've been talking about over at ChannelFireball.com. If you'd like to learn how the deck came to be, click here, and if you want some advice on building a sideboard to go with it, click here

I'm looking forward to seeing how much uptake this generates (if any). It's neat, at any rate.

This week's In Development focuses on post-Reflecting-Pool mana bases for 4+ color decks. If you enjoy my posts that are full of analysis and references to older formats, then you'll like A Series of Harrowing Decisions.

There are 169 instances of the word 'whenever' in the current pool of Standard cards.

Can any of these instances support a combo deck or combo element in another deck? Hard to say.

This week's In Development is Building Up From Good Enough, and it's all about how we can work to improve a design that's already working pretty nicely. The subject matter these week is Nayamorphic, and at the end of the day we keep some things, lose others, and come out with a better deck.

This week's In Develoment has gone up, and the subject is Building the Enemy - looking at recent deck lists and figuring out how that should influence our own design choices. It also includes a brief tournament report from a recent County Championship winner in the U.K.

I've included some "liner notes" for this week's In Development in this post. Click through to the extended entry to see my current gauntlet, culled from the Decks of the Week data I talked about in my column.

Barring any last-minute issues, I'm going to be at this Saturday's Star City Games Standard Open. Per one of my recent articles, I am preparing my deck list and sideboarding notes ahead of time, and will, of course, be taking my usual notes at the event.

If you see me, feel free to say hi. Not coincidentally, I look like the picture at the top of my column.

This week's In Development is Stoneforge Mystic Junk at the 5K, which is a pretty straightforward title. I top 16ed our most recent 5K using a W/B/G deck featuring that new lovely Standard power card, the Stoneforge Mystic.

I had a great deal of fun with this deck -- and hey, won some cash, too. Head on over and check it out.

Video coverage of the ChannelFireball February 5K is up. Here's my match in the top 16 against Tristan Shaun Gregson (of Magic TV fame) playing Boss Naya:

For the record, I didn't have to die that turn in game two. As I mentioned in my column earlier this week, I literally miscounted my mana and, having done so, made the "aggressive" play that made no sense. Ah, well. It was midnight.

I think these videos turned out quite well. Head over to the ChannelFireball YouTube channel to see videos of several matches from the top 32, including the finals, all with quality narration by Eric Levine.

I just turned off the latest episode of The Proffessors a few minutes in after Anthony complained about the Jund matchup being "random" and flashed Bituminous Blast and Bloodbraid on the screen. While I appreciate Anthony's production quality, this is one more in a chain of people complaining about Jund on the basis of it being basically braindead to play.

I think it's the Bituminous Blast that just did it for me this time. Here's PT San Diego champion Simon Gortzen's Jund list:

Notice the absence of Bituminous Blast anywhere in that list. Indeed, Simon's main deck is relatively "removal light," running just Bolts and Pulses, where other Jund lists run Terminates and Bituminous Blasts as well. Gortzen also chose to run twenty-seven lands and two copies of Rampant Growth, putting the emphasis on smooth mana progression.

I'm not really surprised by that choice.

As Mike Flores pointed out, Gortzen also made sound strategic choices with how he played his cards, keeping his Blightnings in hand to use as planeswalker removal rather than just autopiloting them out on turn three. You'll notice this in playing against Jund players as well. When your opponent just runs on autopilot, it's easy to beat them.

The idea that Jund plays itself, or is just "random," fundamentally misunderstands how the deck works. In playing against Jund, you should take a page from Nassim Taleb and assume that their Bloodbraids will hit the "worst case" for you. Likewise, in playing Jund, you should assume that your Bloodbraids are likely to be blanks, and plan accordingly.

The complaints about Jund now sound a lot like the complaints during Pro Tour Honolulu about cascade generally. I actually enjoy playing with and against Jund, and I think Simon Gortzen made a tremendous update to the deck and played quite cleverly.

I understand that players get a little bored when there seem to be "only a few" viable deck types in Standard. This is in one sense a product of the size of the card pools. There are just a handful of reasonable decks in Block, more in Standard, many more in Extended, and tremendously more in Legacy. However, it's also a confluence of other factors such as the fact that not everyone feels like designing and testing a deck, so reasonably stable designs are going to see a lot of play from people who just want to play.

I'd also suggest that the perception that there are just a few dominant decks relies on a very shallow review of the decks, as I alluded to above. Gortzen's Jund is a significant update on pre-Worldwake Jund. Indeed, it relies critically on new cards from Worldwake, and does not just "autopilot" on the prior Jund plan. As someone who pretty reliably plays novel or semi-novel deck designs, I have a great deal of appreciation for players who can tweak or significantly update a known archetype to deal with a shifting metagame or to accommodate a new set.

It's only "Jund wins again" if you're not paying attention. If you're so inclined, go back to the Pro Tour San Diego coverage and compare the top Standard lists to all the others. There are differences there, and they're interesting and fun.