The Deckbuilder's Dream Revisted - Elves in Pioneer

About a year ago, I made a post where I described what I call "The Deckbuilder's Dream". The dream is described as "making a deck that is perfectly positioned to win the tournament". In the past year, I've had some experiences that have caused me to re-evaluate what the true Deckbuilder's Dream would be.

While building a deck and taking it to a tournament and winning with your creation is certainly a rewarding goal, the true greats of deck building will do it for more than personal glory from winning a tournament. They will strive to build decks that shape metagames for years to come. They will build decks for their friends playing in tournaments they aren't playing in, and take just as much pride from their friends' success with their creations.

Building for your Friends

I've been asked by friends and acquaintances many times over the years for feedback on various decks they are playing. Many times the feedback is simply "I don't like this deck in this metagame", or "I like this deck, but not Card A". Outside of help with limited decks, it has been very rare that I've built a deck for a friend that I wasn't also going to play.

The first time I remember building for a friend was the 2003 Event Horizons Invitational. This was a 16 person invite-only tournament for the best of the Texas / Louisiana region. It was put on by Tim Weissman, the regional TO of the area back when those were still a thing. My friend Michael Musser was invited based on his successes on the PTQ circuit and his recent top 16 finish at Pro Tour Venice. 

One of the formats of the event was Onslaught Block Constructed. With only Onslaught and Legions released, the competitors were allowed to choose any previous released third set to complete the block (the options were Weatherlight, Exodus, Urza's Destiny, Prophecy, Apocalypse, and Judgment). I don't remember the specifics of banned cards, but I do remember there weren't a lot on the banned list, if any.

When discussing which options he had, I realized that some very broken cards from Urza's Destiny were legal, the main one being Yawgmoth's Bargain. I began to look through the various Onslaught and Legions cards to see if anything could be used with Bargain to make a potent deck. I discovered Words of Worship, which combos with Bargain quite well in a lower-powered format like Onslaught block. With a bunch of mana in play, ever mana you spend will net you 4 life. Eventually you can have enough life to avoid dying and draw your deck. The next question is how can you kill? Luckily, Words of War lets you kill even with an empty deck! 

The pieces starting fitting together almost magically. All the cards are enchantments so we can use Replenish to put them into play. Read the Runes can dig to find our cards and put enchantments in the graveyard for Replenish. Read the Runes also lets you sacrifice Academy Rector to put Bargain or another combo piece directly into play. The Explosive Vegetation mana engine that had served Mike so well in Venice would help set up the combo so you had plenty of mana at your disposal.

The final deck list was something very close to this (mana was probably different and/or better):

Words of Bargain played by Mike Musser at Event Horizons Invitational

4 Yawgmoth's Bargain

3 Words of Worship

1 Words of War

4 Replenish

4 Academy Rector

4 Read the Runes

4 Wirewood Elf

4 Explosive Vegetation

2 Thran Dynamo

3 Krosan Tusker

4 Grand Coliseum

2 Swamp

1 Island

1 Mountain

4 Windswept Heath

2 Flooded Strand

2 Polluted Delta

4 Plains

7 Forest

Sideboard

Unknown, but I remember 4x Masticore or maybe 4x Phyrexian Negator.

I don't know exactly who among the 5 people in the room at the time came up with which part of the deck in the brewing process, but I did feel a different sense of attachment to the results. I would have been rooting for Mike to win the event regardless of what deck he played for the three rounds of this format, but this felt more personal. When he lost after playing for 3-0 and the format trophy, I felt like I had let him down, despite the absurdity of the situation in general.

Recent History

I'm still a very active player, so rarely do I help build decks that aren't also for me. Some recent examples have happened that make me think it wouldn't be too bad of a gig for when I don't play so much. At GP Atlanta, Collin and I used our same iterative process that lead to Bant Snowblade to build his top 8 Jeskai Mentor deck. It wasn't a big departure from other lists, but our change to include Accumulated Knowledge to fight against the card advantage of Wrenn and Six was rewarded.

A much more potent example was at GP Austin last month. I went early on Friday to play the Pioneer PTQ with Elves. I got the idea to play Elves from an MTGO Challenge, but made some significant changes. I cut all the Chord of Calling and added Icon of Ancestry and Thorn Lieutenant to have a better game plan against the Medium Red decks that were popular at the time. I went 4-2 in the event, but I learned quite a lot. One of the biggest takeaways was that Elvish Visionary was not a playable card. I knew if I had to play the PTQ again on Sunday, I would replace them with more Thorn Lieutenants. 

As luck would have it, I wouldn't need to play the PTQ on Sunday. I was 8-1 in the main event heading into day two. My good friend Will Lowry, however, was looking to play a PTQ. He could have chosen to play his Modern Urza deck, but he was somewhat interested in my Pioneer list. We were both beginning preparations for PT Phoenix, so it seemed like a smarter choice to play Pioneer. He wasn't sold on Elves, but I explained to him what I thought the deck was good at and where I thought it was lacking. 

We were discussing various options to increase the size of the creatures in the deck against red and also looking for something to stop the flying army out of the Dredge deck. I did one last Gatherer search for Elves in Pioneer when I discovered gold: Wildborn Preserver. Of course a card from Throne of Eldraine would be better than just about every other elf in the format! At this point, I bought 4 Preservers from the dealers immediately and added them to the deck. We laid out a 75 that we both agreed on, and I knew Will was going to win the tournament the next day. If only I had discovered the card sooner!

Sure enough, Will won:

Congratulations to William Lowry on winning Sunday's Pioneer PTQ at #MTGAustin with Elves!

Here are the Top 8 deck lists (thread) pic.twitter.com/Gou946DifS

— ChannelFireball (@ChannelFireball) January 13, 2020

Elves in Pioneer

Since that event, Pioneer has changed quite a bit. Theros: Beyond Death added two very potent combos with Underworld Breach and Inverter of Truth. It did not add any Elves to the deck. I share the Elves list a month ago because we were still considering it for PT Phoenix, but now its safe to say it won't be a major player in the metagame going forward. I'll have to achieve that last part of the deckbuilder's dream some other time.

In the meantime, Will has been working with Adam and Dana Fischer to keep the list up to date. Dana plays Elves whenever she can get the chance, and Will has been happy to help out. She went 5-1 at GP Phoenix before losing the last two rounds to miss day 2. Maybe if there are changes to the format in the future, Elves will be a real player.

Elves! played by Dana Fischer at GP Phoenix:

4 Dwynen's Elite

4 Elvish Clancaller

4 Elvish Mystic

2 Gnarlroot Trapper

4 Llanowar Elves

4 Shaman of the Pack

4 Steel Leaf Champion

3 Thorn Lieutenant

4 Wildborn Preserver

4 Collected Company

2 Icon of Ancestry

4 Blooming Marsh

4 Forest

4 Llanowar Wastes

2 Mutavault

1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx

4 Overgrown Tomb

2 Unclaimed Territory

Sideboard

3 Assassin's Trophy

1 Fatal Push

2 Reclamation Sage

1 Scavenging Ooze

3 Stain the Mind

4 Thoughtseize

1 Ultimate Price

Players Tour Phoenix Report

This past weekend I played the first Regional Players Tour in America in Phoenix, Arizona. I went 11-5 overall for a 26th place finish. This is by far my best finish in a Pro Tour type event and it qualifies me for the next RPT in Charlotte in May.

The event had a strange circumstance where the other two PTs would happen the week before. It was also three weeks after the prerelease for Theros: Beyond Death. This meant making some slightly different decisions in the preparation process. While there was still work being done on Pioneer, the majority of the early effort was on Limited. The idea was to see what did well in the European and Japanese PTs and go from there for constructed.

For this event, I worked with Team 5% (actually over 7%). The roster was so large I'm not even sure I could name them all if I had to, but it did include both my usual collaborators Collin Rountree and Will Lowry.

Limited Preparation

Once drafts were live on MTGO, the team went hard at doing as many as possible and collecting the data. I was sick with the flu for the first weekend and only managed to do one, but managed to do about a dozen drafts before the PT. Some team members had over 30 drafts in, with the high score being Rob Pisano with 62!

A significant portion of the team attended Grand Prix New Jersey the week after the prerelease. At the end of that weekend, a survey went out to the team for each player to rate every card in the set on a 0-5 scale. This data was averaged and used to generate our preliminary rankings for each color. Then we had a series of three Skype calls where these rankings were adjusted and combined to generate an overall pick order with lots of individual card evaluation notes. For more information, check out this tweet.

At the end of the preparation, I felt fairly comfortable, but not confident. I knew I could draft all the White archetypes, as usual with any format. I also liked most of the green combinations, especially more than other people. I had a lot of success with Green Red in my drafts and knew a lot of the cards would be not as high on other players lists (including my own teammates). I think Warbriar's Blessing is the 3rd best common in the set for instance. I wasn't high on the self-mill, high-escape decks. I didn't have much experience with the Blue control archetypes, but got to see them in action a lot at our local Houston draft camp when Austin Bursavich would draft Blue every time.

Pioneer Prepartion

I still need to do a write-up about the Elves deck I built for Will Lowry at GP Austin PTQ that he won. Besides that and some games messing around with Merfolk and Temur Energy, I hadn't done much with Pioneer until the new set released.

The early days of testing (pre-Breach) resulted in several different decks being considered. The mono-white devotion deck was the front runner for many of the team. Teammate Ethan Gaieski played mono-white to a top 20 finish at the European PT. The deck did very well against the expected field of Medium Red, Mono Black, UW Control, Niv-Mizzet, etc. It even was reasonable against Inverter with multiple Gideon of the Trials in the maindeck. I was leaning towards playing a UG Turbo Uro deck that was quite different from other versions. The deck included Sylvan Advocate, Nissa Who Shakes the World, and Mutavault as a late game threat suite as well as the full playset of Tamiyo Collector of Tales and Cyclonic Rift. 

Sometime around Sunday the results of the focused testing sessions started to trickle in to the team chat. The breach deck was beating everything very easily. It would beat multiple counterspells and hate cards routinely. Players were finding more and more deterministic kills from very limited starting resources. The sideboard cards were devastating to so many decks and it had incredible access to them. One by one the players on the team switched to the deck.

Spirits had always been my backup deck due to my experience with it in Modern. I knew I wanted to play with 4 Selfless Spirit and 4 Nebelgast Herald. I was also unimpressed with Brazen Borrower in the various decks I had tried with it. I was skeptical of the Collected Company version because the mana wasn't great, but the success of it at the early PTs made me think it wasn't as big of an issue as I had initially thought. 

I continued to work on the Uro sideboard to make sure it could beat the Breach deck as well as the expected large number of Inverter decks, but I couldn't find a way to make me comfortable. I also began to notice the internal inconsistency of only having 4 Uro in the deck and losing games where I would see half my deck and not find one. I was having second thoughts.

I switched to playing Spirits about three hours before decklists were due. I didn't play any games or make any changes to the stock team list that Max McVety, Jarvis Yu, and Tommy Ashton had finalized earlier that day. Here is what I registered:

4 Mausoleum Wanderer

4 Spectral Sailor

4 Selfless Spirit

4 Rattlechains

4 Supreme Phantom

4 Spell Queller

4 Nebelgast Herald

4 Empyrean Eagle

4 Collected Company

4 Botanical Sanctum

4 Breeding Pool

4 Hallowed Fountain

4 Temple Garden

4 Glacial Fortress

2 Island

2 Plains

Sideboard:

4 Mystical Dispute

2 Disdainful Stroke

3 Reflector Mage

2 Deputy of Detention

2 Remorseful Cleric

2 Permeating Mass

I decided to trust the team on the list and sideboard (especially nice to have a sideboard guide ready to go), but with the benefit of hindsight and my personal biases, would have like to cut 4 Dispute for 3 Damping Sphere and another Disdainful Stroke. I think Dispute is a bit overrated as a card as its very narrow, but I also don't like playing Pyroblast in my Legacy decks. 

The rest of the team was on Breach or Inverter, except for some lone wolfs. Oh and three players played UW Control, including Will Lowry and Austin Bursavich.

Draft One

Draft deck one 2-1: pic.twitter.com/XU3RfdO1sz

— Ty Thomason (@ceciliajupe) February 9, 2020

I started with Warbriar's Blessing over Tymaret Chosen From Death pack one pick one. I picked up some more green cards and a red omen. I then got a 5th pick Furious Rise. I struggled the rest of the draft to get my curve where I wanted. I didn't have enough three drops. I also didn't play the Wings in the main deck in order to play a green omen, but this was a mistake I fixed after sideboarding every round.

I went 2-1 in the first three rounds. The big highlight was probably missing lethal game three against teammate Austin Bursavich. I had somehow got in my head I needed to use the mana from my Ilysian Caryatids to pump my Skophos Warleader instead of attacking with them. They were both 2/2s from Renata and I had enough damage with Nylea's Forerunner giving trample to win through the 12+ life he gained from Daxos but I failed to attack with everyone and he found any enchantment to kill me before I got another turn. Despite the punt, I'm not sure I would have 3-0 as the deck that did end up winning our pod was way better than both Austin's and mine.

Pioneer Day One

My first match was against mono red. I hadn't actually played with Spirits in Pioneer before this. I quickly learned that it is a completely different format than Modern. I was behind early game one but managed to stablize with three creatures in play against his two prowess guys and no cards in hand. I was at 6 life, which would be dangerous in modern, but in Pioneer felt like having 12 life since his spells were mostly Shocks not Lightning Bolts. He bricked out anyway, and then mulligans to five in game two and I win the first match .

My next opponent was on Breach. I won game one on mulligan to five when his deck failed to find what it needed. Game two he had Hour of Devastation to stop me and easily kill me afterward. Game three I get a board of Selfless Spirit, Remorseful Cleric, and Emryean Eagle to pressure him but he has a 1/4 Faerie to block for a few turns. When he gets two Lotus Field into play he casts Hidden Strings. I use Spell Queller to stop him, tapping out. He has two more Hidden Strings though, and I am most likely dead. He uses them and another Faerie for Granted and gets Underworld Breach. He then casts Breach, which I respond to by activating Remorseful Cleric. He starts shaking his head and I realize he forgot I had the Cleric in play! he can only play the Faerie from adventure and pass the turn. If he had Granted for any sweeper or Ugin I probably can't win, but now I get to untap and play a second lord to win the game and the match!

The next round I lose to Conor Cole on a bigger version of mono-red. He is a cool dude from DFW who ended up finishing in 9th place at his first PT. I hope he does well at the finals in Houston.

My next round I lost to the Spirits mirror when game three I keep two lands on the draw and never find a third. I did get to use Permeating Mass in game two to do a lot of damage when he didn't realize they were spirits.

I have to win my last round to make day two. I play against Mono White Devotion, and that deck just didn't have anything relevant in either game. 

5-3 going into day two.

Draft Two

Draft deck two 2-1: pic.twitter.com/EgrPdqIOka

— Ty Thomason (@ceciliajupe) February 9, 2020

This draft was hard to read. I first picked Banishing Light over Furious Rise. I then picked up a Final Death, a Destiny Spinner, and an Indomitable Will. My fifth pack has a Thirst for Meaning and not much else. The rest of pack one is a lot of late blue cards. I basically stay mono-blue for the rest of the draft, just picking up a Dreadful Apath and Heliod's Pilgrim to facilitate a white splash. The deck was very controlling but overall solid. I needed maybe another win condition or something more reliable than Triton Waverider.

The highlight from these rounds  was in round nine I was facing a large attack and only had a Witness for Tomorrow and Riptide Turtle to block. My only card in hand was Thirst for Meaning. I chose to block the 4/2 with the witness, block a 4/5 with Turtle, and take 6 damage going to 6 life. I scry 1 before Witness dies and put a land on the bottom. On my turn I untap and draw Nadir Kraken. I play it and pass the turn with six mana open. When he attacks with the team, I play Thirst and make three 1/1 Tentacles as well as my Kraken into a 5/6. This lets me block very favorably and avoid taking any damage. I am able to easily win from there.

I lost the finals of the draft to the GR drafter with Furious Rise and Tectonic Giant. He had more fatties than I can deal with. I did make the mistake of attacking my Shimmerwing Chimera into his Flummoxed Cyclops, but I don't think it would have made a difference.

7-4 after second draft. I need to go 4-0 to qualify for PT Finals, and 3-1 to get the invite to next Regiona PT.

Pioneer Day Two

The first challenge is against UB Inverter. Game one he has several Thoughtsieze and Fatal Push, but no real way to win. Eventually I stick a threat and then another and he can't keep up. Game two I draw a lot of shocklands and he has enough removal to kill my crew plus attack me with Inverter twice to kill me. Game three he doesn't have a Thoughtsieze and I get to set up a Collected Company that he can't counter. Eventually he finds a Thoughtsieze which he needs to turn on his Drown in the Loch, but my hand is two lands and both spells end up blank for him and he dies.

8-4

The next round I played against is another Mono-Red player. I get run over game one when he calls my bluff that I don't have Supreme Phantom. Game two I get value from Rattlechains and Spell Queller and tempo him out. Game three he mulligans to six and doesn't have much besides removal so I have plenty of time and resolve two Collected Companies to easily win.

9-4

The third test of the day was a UG Uro Ramp deck. I win the die roll so I can set up Spell Queller for his turn three and turn four Uro and he dies. Game two he gets to ramp out and eventually finds Ugin while I don't have any interaction. Game three I keep Wanderer, Selfless, Eagle, four lands on the play. By turn five I have drawn four more lands and he has recovered from his initial mulligan to get an Uro into play. He soon finds Ugin and I'm no longer live for the PT Finals.

9-5

This next round is effectively a PTQ finals. I play against Sultai Delirium. I realize early in game one that not many of his cards are that scary for me. I stick to being as aggressive as possible since he has no sweepers in his 75. I do lose a game two to a giant Scavenging Ooze but the other games I was never really in danger.

10-5

The last round was mainly for a shot at top 24 money and the fractional invite points. I once again beat Sultai Delirium. Game one I was facing down a giant Scavenging Ooze again but managed to draw chump blockers for four turns in a row before drawing Nebelgast Herald to stop him from killing me and kill him in the process. In the mean time, he drew nothing but blanks. After the match, I pointed out he had a Murderous Rider that stayed on an Adventure the entire time! My opponent took it well, since he was also happy like me to be qualified for the next RPT. He ends up in 48th still after I win the next game so it didn't cost him any money as I only got 26th place.

11-5

Impressions of the First Players Tour

It definitely felt way more like a PT than a GP. It was a smaller field with tons of Hall of Famers and big name pros everywhere. Compare that to the similarly sized GP OKC from last year where there were only two big-ish names in attendance. The quality of play was probably less good than the older PT but I'm sure its still way better than what was happening in the GP across the room. Nothing can take away the special experience of drafting before round one at a PT.

I'm very happy with my performance. To finally go to an event and chain an invite to the next one is something I've always wanted to do. My goal has always been to play as many PTs as possible, and I'll keep playing these events as long as I'm qualified. I'm now qualified for Charlotte and I have 95% fractional invite for the third Players Tour. 

Props / Slops / Condolences / Thanks

Props to Team 5% for putting people into 50% of the top 8

Props to Conor Cole for crushing it in his first PT

Props to judges for doing effective investigations on calls that could easily be mistakes, but just as easily be cheating

Props to Ben Weitz for recovering from his horrific punt in round 5 against me to go on and win the Grand Prix

Thanks to Jarvis Yu, Max McVety, Tommy Ashton, Tim Wu, and anyone else from the team on the Spirit Crew for having a deck I could audible to that performed so well

Thanks to Ari Lax, Allen Wu, and everyone else responsible for the team limited meetings that were super helpful.

Condolences to everyone who tried to play fair decks like Mono White and Mono Black

Condolences to Nathan Zamora for casting Hidden Strings fewer times than the number of Unmoored Egos cast against him

No Slops, it was a great weekend