Play Magic With Tom LaPille

The mana cards that are available in a constructed format define it in a lot of important ways. The number and quality of mana fixing cards determines how many colors you can justifiably play, and the nonbasic lands that act like spells determine the rewards for not straying into a ton of colors. The mana cards we have to work with in Lorwyn Standard have changed dramatically with the rotation of Ravnica, so it’s worth it to think for a bit about what is left and what is new before we start building mana for States. This is intended to help you see the big mana picture, make sure you aren’t missing any good nonbasics, and get you thinking about how the mana in a format warps decks.

Ravnica’s dual lands, bouncelands, and signets enabled people to get very ambitious with colors; without them, our options are much more limited. We are left with only the following lands to fix our mana:

• Pain lands (Adarkar Wastes and friends)
• Future Sight rare lands
• Lorwyn tribe-aligned rare lands
• Coldsnap tapduals
• Gemstone Mine
• Terramorphic Expanse

These are not going to let us do what we could do in Ravnica block, but it’s also plenty to work with. The question that you will have to answer before you build any mana base in this format is how quickly you need your mana. The most common drawback on nonbasic lands in this format is coming into play tapped, and assessing how much of this you can handle will dictate how crazy you can get with colors. Your life is going to be easiest if you are a Lorwyn tribal deck or you are playing an allied color combination. In this case, you have four painlands and four future sight lands or tribal lands that make both your colors all of which come into play untapped. If you are playing Goblins, Faeries or Merfolk, your life is even better, with a full twelve good fixing lands. These decks can probably stop here. If you need more than this, you are going to have to take a hard look at slower lands. If you can handle a lot of lands that come into play tapped, then you have more than enough tools to choose from between Coldsnap dual lands, Terramorphic Expanse, and Lorwyn lands. Gemstone mine will work if you are desperate for colors and don’t need a lot of lands.

The odd thing about this selection of lands is that because of the irregular cycles in Lorwyn and Future Sight a few color combinations are left in the lurch. Nimbus Maze is great when you can play a lot of basic lands, but now that we are outside of block and have real lands like Adarkar Wastes and don’t have dual lands it gets a lot worse. Grove of the Burnwillows is fine, but it is unplayable in a deck that wants to attack and burn the face. There is actually zero support past the painlands and Terramorphic Expanse for any kind of blue-green, black-white, or red-blue deck. Keep this in mind if you are considering one of these combinations. Your opponents will have better mana than you not because they get their colors more often, but because their better mana fixing lands allow them to fit in more lands that do interesting things and act like spells. You’ll be at a disadvantage because all your lands have to be dedicated to finding the right colors while your opponents are doing more interesting things with their mana bases.

This dovetails right into my next point: playing a lot of mana-only lands when you don’t have to is a good way to throw away effective spell slots in a constructed deck, and right now we are blessed with a proliferation of lands that don’t fix colors but do interesting things. Generally, you should be trying to play as many of these cards as you can. I’ve listed all the reasonable ones here to make sure you don’t miss anything. Note that some of these lands come with entourages. There’s very little reason to play those lands if you aren’t willing to let them dictate a few spell slots so you get maximum value.

• White- Flagstones of Trokair is probably terrible now that it doesn’t fix colors with Edge of Autumn, but you might still want this. Playing one of this can’t hurt as protection against Boom/Bust I guess.
• Blue- Academy Ruins can give you a long game with Triskelavus, Ironfoot, Razormane Masticore, or whatever other artifacts you like. Tolaria West lets you build really wonky manabases with tutorable one-ofs including Pacts. Faerie Conclave is worth thinking about but probably worse than Tolaria West in most decks, and coming into play tapped is a problem.
• Black- Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth fixes all of your black mana problems for the rest of the game. It also turns on Korlash and Tendrils of Corruption if that interests you.
• Red- I guess Ghitu Encampment? Just splash Treetop and Tarmogoyf instead.
• Green- Treetop Village is amazing. If you are playing green and do not have four of this card in your deck you are probably wrong not to. Pendelhaven is a nice free way to get a quasi-spell out of a Forest, but don’t bother if you don’t have any 1/1’s since every other green deck is doing that and there’s no reason to get Wastelanded unneccesarily. Llanowar Reborn is fine if you decide you can handle more tapped lands than four Treetops, but I don’t think you can.

There are plenty of colorless nonbasics that are interesting. These are the important ones:

• Desert is a dream come true for a mono-colored deck that plans on having untapped lands during other people’s untap steps. Basically that means blue, unless there’s something I don’t know about.
• Quicksand is worse than Desert because it kills itself. I don’t know who would want this, but it’s out there if you decide you want more than four Deserts.
• Urza’s Factory gives you a long game if you can handle two colorless lands. This card doesn’t look that impressive but it is a great free way to have a long game plan. It remains to be seen how long “long games” in this format are, so this may be outclassed now.
• Vesuva is an awkward Wasteland for legendary lands. One of these goes in any deck with a Tolaria West engine.

Perhaps the best way to get effective spells out of your land slots is to utilize Coldsnap’s snow theme. This lets you play incredibly efficient cards like Skred and Phyrexian Ironfoot. Obviously this also involves Coldsteel Heart, snow basic lands, and snow duals. The relevant non-mana lands are:

• Mouth of Ronom is amazing if you can spare the colorless land slots. At least one of these goes in any deck with Tolaria West and snow, and I like playing this card randomly if you can make a reasonable amount of snow mana.
• Scrying Sheets is there for those who really want to play a lot of snow. This really only works if you have upwards of twenty or more snow cards to find, but for those people this card is spectacular.

One strange quirk of the current mix of lands is that so many good lands come into play tapped. All the Future Sight uncommon lands, all the Coldsnap dual lands, all the Lorwyn Hideaway lands, and all the manlands come into play tapped every time. For those who are not using the appropriate tribe, the Lorwyn tribal lands suffer the same fate. No deck can handle very much of this. I have eight comes-into-play-tapped lands in my teachings deck, but that’s the slowest deck I can think of in the format and I don’t know if any other deck can handle that many. This forms a bottleneck that forces you to make some hard decisions. If you are green, you are pretty much trapped into playing Treetop Village, and you probably can’t play any more tapped lands. If you are blue, Tolaria West is an engine that makes a lot of sense. Other decks will have to decide how many tapped lands they can handle and build accordingly.

Tolaria West deserves a little bit of its discussion. The more Tolaria Wests you play, the more you should have in the way of interesting targets. A Teachings deck with four of them should probably play one each of blue and black pact, an Academy Ruins, an Urborg, a Mouth of Ronom, an Urza’s Factory, and a Vesuva at minimum to get the maximum value. A pickles deck with only two might have a blue pact, a Factory, and a Mouth. However, the more interesting one-ofs you can fit, the better off you will be.

The final piece of the mana equation is mana artifacts. The good ones are Prismatic Lens, Mind Stone, Coldsteel Heart, and Coalition Relic. If you are snow, you will play Coldsteel Heart. For those who don’t need to fix colors but want to accelerate, Mind Stone is incredible and allows you to play “too much” mana acceleration with the knowledge that you can just trade mana sources for cards later on. For people who want to play a ton of colors, we have Prismatic Lens and Coalition Relic. Block constructed teachings decks were very reliant on these to make colors, and they were vulnerable to random artifact destruction cards like Ancient Grudge. Don’t rely too much on these for your mana, or you may find them pulled out from under you.

There are many viable ways to build a mana base in Lorwyn Standard. Being aware of all of the possibilities ensures that you aren’t missing something when you build yours. Make sure that you are getting your colors in the most painless way possible and try to get as many effective spells into your lands as you can. Your spells deserve as much help as you can give them.

So in the last post, I closed with the suggestion that playing goblins would have been a mistake even if I knew how to play them. The reason is that the goblin deck is inconsistent, but not in the way that you might think.

Going into Valencia, the consensus among most players was that the fundamental turn of the format was turn four; that is, the overwhelming majority of games would be decided by turn four. TEPS and Enduring Ideal are generally four-turn clocks that are hard to interact with, and aggressive decks have warped themselves around the requirement that they goldfish by then. Affinity, domain zoo, and goblins are all aggressive decks that win on turn four unopposed. Any other decks, like Urzatron or rock decks, are built to interact with these other two kinds of decks by turn four with hand disruption, removal, and counterspells.

Because decks are built with turn four in mind, everyone can tell you exactly what happens in games that go according to plan. A TEPS player will tell you that he will have cast a huge Mind’s Desire and killed with Tendrils of Agony, and an Enduring Ideal player will tell you that he has cast, well, Enduring Ideal by turn four. This is all well and good. What is not immediately obvious is what happens when these games don’t go according to plan. Let’s look at some decklists:

Andre Mueller
Pro Tour Valencia 2007, Extended
2nd Place

3 Sulfur Vent
4 Ancient Spring
3 Flooded Strand
1 Godless Shrine
1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1 Plains
3 Sacred Foundry
4 Tinder Farm
3 Windswept Heath

4 Lotus Bloom
4 Pentad Prism
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Honden of Seeing Winds
2 Dovescape
1 Pernicious Deed
4 Burning Wish
3 Form of the Dragon
4 Seething Song
3 Enduring Ideal
4 Orim’s Chant
3 Solitary Confinement

Sideboard:
3 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Cranial Extraction
4 Leyline of the Void
1 Vindicate
1 Pyroclasm
1 Enduring Ideal
1 Morningtide
3 Boseiju, Who Shelters All

Ari Capristani
Pro Tour Valencia 2007, Extended
Day Two

4 Gemstone Mine
2 Tinder Farm
2 Ancient Spring
4 Sulfur Vent
4 Geothermal Crevice

4 Lotus Bloom
4 Chromatic Star
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Burning Wish
4 Rite of Flame
3 Mind’s Desire
4 Cabal Ritual
1 Tendrils of Agony
2 Infernal Tutor
4 Seething Song
2 Sins of the Past
1 Chain of Vapor
3 Channel the Suns

1 Mind’s Desire
1 Channel the Suns
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Hull Breach
4 Duress
3 Orim’s Chant
1 Deathmark
1 Krosan Grip
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Chain of Vapor

So we know what happens when these decks do their thing successfully. What happens when they miss? The TEPS deck is full of rituals and tutors, so it’s just going to sit there with either not enough mana or nothing to do with all the mana it has and then die. The Ideal player, however, is not in as bad of shape if he has mana. The fact that Andre played three copies of Form of the Dragon means that he doesn’t mind drawing it at all. In fact, he wants to draw it a decent amount of the time. He makes the same statement about Solitary Confinement. If he wanted to just make sure there was always one in his deck to search up, he would be playing two of it, like he does with Dovescape. However, three is a different story. Andre knows that he is going to sometimes not have an Enduring Ideal, and when that happens, he is going to turn into a dragon and ask you what you are going to do about it. Next turn, he might hide behind a bubble with Solitary Confinement. Andre and Ari both are going to have games not go according to plan some of the time, but while Ari is shuffling up for the next one, Andre is going to be breathing fire at his opponents and wondering if that will be good enough. This is exactly how Andre won one of his games against Nakamura in the top eight. Nakamura’s Meddling Mage named Enduring Ideal, so Andre shrugged, became a dragon, and then won. Andre can even just play out his Hondon and then a Confinement for the full lock against an aggressive deck. TEPS can kind of do this with Empty the Warrens, but 1/1 goblin tokens are much less fragile than a seven mana moat.

Now let’s talk about why Goblins fails this test. Here are lists for Goblins and Domain Zoo:

Takayuki Koike
Pro Tour Valencia 2007 Top Eight, Extended

1 Stomping Ground
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Windswept Heath
1 Blood Crypt
1 Steam Vents
1 Temple Garden
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Godless Shrine
1 Mountain
1 Sacred Foundry

4 Grim Lavamancer
4 Kird Ape
3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
3 Mogg Fanatic
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Dark Confidant

4 Tribal Flames
4 Firebolt
4 Lightning Helix
4 Vindicate
2 Umezawa’s Jitte

Jon Swearingen
Pro Tour Valencia 2007, Day Two

3 Barbarian Ring
4 Ghost Quarter
12 Mountain

4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Skirk Prospector
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Mogg War Marshal
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Goblin Matron
3 Gempalm Incinerator
1 Goblin King
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
4 Goblin Ringleader

4 Rite of Flame
4 Chrome Mox

4 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Overload
1 Pendelhaven
1 Siege-Gang Commander
1 Goblin Sledder
1 Gempalm Incinerator
2 Fury Charm
4 Seething Song

The goblin deck obviously has a ton of synergy. Goblin Warchief makes every card in the deck crazily efficient, Skirk Prospector and Mogg War Marshal can work together to make a ton of mana while you go off with Goblin Ringleader and Matron, and Goblin Sharpshooter can do crazy things with a Prospector. Goblin Piledriver is also obviously a massive offensive threat when it comes with friends. This is all great, but what happens when things don’t go well? Without Goblin Warchief, a lot of these cards start to look really embarassing. Mogg War Marshal is very inefficient compared to Tarmogoyf or Dark Confidant, Skirk Prospector without a team is a Mon’s Goblin Raiders, and Goblin Matron at three mana is no bargain. When the goblin deck’s plan doesn’t come together, it plays like it is a deck made entirely out of terrible inefficient creatures. It may not just immediately lose like TEPS does, but the effect is the same. When the plan doesn’t work, the goblin deck doesn’t have enough power to compete with other extended decks, and it will lose. The domain zoo deck takes the opposite approach from the goblin deck. All it asks of its draws is appropriate land, some guys, and a little burn. It doesn’t have the synergy that the goblin deck has, and it can’t win before turn four, but games can’t go that wrong when the plan isn’t very specific. Domain zoo is not nearly as potentially powerful as goblins, but it doesn’t have a plan that can go wrong. The story of my Pro Tour is essentially that my goblins didn’t come together in the right way very often, and when they did my opponents had enough removal to make sure that the engine never fired.

In this extended format, most decks are going to do something decisive by turn four if everything goes according to their unfair plan. During the buildup to the pro tour, I thought that the important feature of these decks was how good the unfair plan was. It turns out that the more important question was what happens when the plan goes awry. If I could play the tournament over again, I would play a deck similar to Andre Mueller’s. He has a really strong unfair plan, but he has by far the best backup plan of all the unfair decks. That backup plan is what set his deck apart and took him to the finals, and my lack of a good backup plan was what turned me into a Goblin Machinist.

How good is your backup plan?

Okay. I’m back from the Pro Tour. I didn’t win a match in five rounds before dropping. At the time, I was shellshocked and had no idea what had happened. Now I think I know what happened. I made two big mistakes, and hopefully after reading this and my next entry you won’t make either of them in your own tournaments.

Both mistakes spring from my deck choice: Goblins.

4 Skirk Prospector
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Mogg War Marshall
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Goblin Matron
3 Gempalm Incinerator
1 Goblin King
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
4 Goblin Ringleader

4 Rite of Flame
4 Chrome Mox
4 Barbarian Ring
4 Ghost Quarter
11 Mountain

This deck doesn’t look hard to play at all, and it’s easy to confuse it for a simple aggressive beatdown deck. That could not be further from the truth. Many goblins in the deck have a purpose that is only tangential to beating down; Skirk Prospector is a mana engine, Goblin Matron is a tutor, and Goblin Ringleader is a card-drawing spell. Gempalm Incinerator isn’t even a creature. Against more aggressive decks, you have to play goblins like a control deck. Matroning for a Mogg War Marshal is very often correct, and your plan is to outlast an assault with tokens and removal until you can build up critical mass with Ringleaders and Matrons. Against control decks like blue-white Urzatron, you are an aggressive deck, but with the caveat that the only cards that are actually good at being aggressive in your deck are the Piledrivers. Against combination decks, you have a real shot at outracing them, since the deck goldfishes on turn four if it is completely unmolested. Ghost Quarter is also outstanding against decks that have crazy manabases with few basics.

The first mistake was that I assumed I knew how to play this deck, which I can only assume now that I didn’t. I picked up the deck with about a week and a half to go before the tour, which was not enough time. My traveling companion Jon Swearingen played the same 75 cards as me, but he was winning a lot more in playtesting and he ended day one at 7-3, a far cry from my 0-5. There was also a copy of this deck playing for top eight in the last round.

The most obvious signal that I had no idea what I was doing was that I went 0-5 while others were succeeding. I can explain one of my match losses with a poor judgment call, but the other matches I literally can’t tell you why I lost. It would be naive to believe that I played them perfectly, though, because I lost them all. During the week leading up to the Pro Tour, my colleague Adam Yurchick was trying to decide between playing Goblins and Enduring Ideal. Others in our group were succeeding with goblins, but Adam and I were not. Adam, however, refused to believe that it was his fault. Our conversation went something like this:

Adam: Goblins sucks. I can’t win with it.
Tom: I am not doing well with it either. I think we are playing it badly, because others are winning with it.
Adam: That can’t be true because I don’t know what I could do differently.
Tom: I don’t know what I can do differently either, but how would we know that if we were playing it badly?
Adam: THIS. IS. NOT. MY. FAULT. [I cannot accept the idea that my poor play is responsible for my results with this deck. Stop suggesting that, because it threatens my perception of myself as a skilled player.]

so I let it drop after that. Adam, however, had the good sense to, well, not play goblins. I did not.

Another hint that I can’t play goblins is the following historical results of me with goblin decks in big tournaments:

Pro Tour Los Angeles 2005: 0-5 drop. (Sound familiar?)
Legacy World Championships 2006: 5-3, miss top eight.
Grand Prix Columbus 2007: 5-4, miss day two.

This would be the world telling me that I don’t know how to play the deck at all. Tim Aten remarked to Ervin Tormos that my choice of Goblins for this Pro Tour represented a giant middle finger to logic and reason. The man has a point. Extended is a strange world in that many of the decks are very old, so you might find people who have been playing Goblins since Onslaught was released. Those people have actual years of experience playing it, and it’s arrogant to think that you’ll be able to get that good at it in just a month of practice. Sam Stein knew going into the Pro Tour that he didn’t have time to practice at all, so he just played a deck he knew- Affinity. Look where he ended up. That probably would have worked out better for me, since my tournament match win percentage lifetime with affinity is something like 85%.

One of my two mistakes was playing goblins and thinking I was actually capable of playing the deck well. All the signs pointed to me being really bad at playing Goblins, and I just didn’t see them. I will probably never touch a goblin ever again. I’ll talk about my second mistake in the next entry.

Side note: does anyone want to buy some Goblin Piledrivers? They are in EX+ condition, and are signed by Matt Cavotta in exquisite silver sharpie. I’m hoping they can find a better home, since clearly I’m not doing any favors to them.