I wanted to take a quick break from Redhanded to write about actual Magic: The Gathering for a minute. It gets dark in this brain when this is all I’m focusing on. I’m not the same person I was 12 years ago (7 years ago… 2 years ago… LAST WEEK?!).
What are you rambling on about?
Right, there’s a point to all this. Recently, I came in 2nd in a PPTQ. Rough beats! Sure, but I lost to friend and fellow grinder Hugh Kramer, so It wasn’t all bad news. On the ride home on the F train, I confessed to Hugh that maybe I should have just offered him the whole of the prize in the finals and taken the invite. It was the closest to the Pro Tour I’ve ever come, and who knows the next time I’ll have a run like that (I only lost to Hugh the entire tourney in the First and Last round). Hugh assured me that, I had a pretty good chance of making to an RPTQ in time. Not in that way that, a person tells you because they don’t want to see you cry in public, but genuinely. He said something about how I like to win on my terms and this particular brew was well positioned for that early meta. I was certainly playing a deck the field didn’t know about, it answered conventional sideboard issues that it normally wouldn’t be able to handle.
RG Aggro
Cut to 2 more PPTQs that week and I was still not making it. One was sealed (blah!) and the other was another Standard tourney that I went undefeated in Swiss to make top seed and lost in the first round to the exact same deck Hugh was playing a week before.
At this point I decided I needed to change something. This deck was losing to the same deck. So I tried to make it better VS RDWs. After testing it was able to marginally beat to RDWs and terrible against everything else. So I shaved off the changes and just made a few tweaks, added some Dragon synergies and some Dragons for what felt like a overall better deck.
RG Aggro
Then Game Day happened.
Game Day was a huge punch in the nose. 3-3 on Game Day? Now I’m 10-5 with this deck. Which isn’t bad but those last 3 basically came in a row. I won my last 3 matches, which is what ever. I feel like this deck’s time has come.
That’s a hard thing to do, but I feel like in standard there’s a wave of the meta. One week a deck is strong, especially before the Pro Tour, because no one is particularly optimized just yet. Then the next week people shift their decks and you might be washed up in the tide.
Is there a solution to that?
Well, yes and no. Decks sadly come and go. thats the nature of this game. It’s also one of the reasons I gave up on Standard for 2 years. Then the PPTQs happened. And surprise surprise without Wizards regulating the format nearly every card store chose Standard for their PPTQ. Why? Because the constant flux of Standard and the importance of the format (thanks to the PPTQ system) means players like me with an eye on the Pro Tour one day, have to build Standard decks. Which is largely a money sink. I’ll go on about that some other time. Basically it means the players with the most cards/expendable income are going to excel in PPTQs. That’s neither here or there, though. The solution, the only one available to me, is to change my deck.
You can …”or Die” too?
Like I said, I’ve gotta change my deck. I’m from the school of “if you can’t beat ’em join em”. My best runs are from giving up embracing the Dark Side and just playing the best deck with tech for the mirror. So the best decks in the format are RDWs and UB Dragon control. One of these decks is currently the best choice for standard. Truthfully either one is. RDW offers enough whoops I won games and UB Control has the whoops you lose games. I was losing to both of these decks during testing and now this all about the choice. Do I feel like durdling or do I cast off my pseudonym and get aggro? Thanks to doing relatively well with my previous deck, I have a few options as I’m only a few cards off either deck. For once, I’m actually able to metagame standard, and that feels like a win at least.
@Durdlemagus
Zac Clark
Founder of Hipsters of the Coast. Zac started playing during Fallen Empires. He began taking the game seriously during Alliances. Stasis, Titiania’s Song, then a long love affair with Mono Blue Control, finally settling on Replenish before taking a 12 year break. Now that he’s back he’s been favoring control and combo decks. Constantly, on the prowl for a new deck Zac often looks at the Meta in Modern and Standard formats.