BW Midrange for SCG Worcester

Hey guys, this weekend is SCG Worcester, featuring a Saturday Team Sealed Open and a Sunday Standard Open. I'll be playing in the latter, so I'm going to be building a deck. What follows is the process by which I came to my deck, which I think is pretty sweet and well positioned for the weekend. I started writing this on Wednesday morning, and spent the majority of the morning building, testing, and discussing it with friends. Here's the result - hope that it's interesting.

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It's Wednesday morning, just before noon. This weekend, I'll be working SCG Worcester. I'll be judging the Team Sealed on Saturday, but I was unable to get on staff for Sunday's standard. As a result, I'll be jamming a few games of Standard in the new format, and that means I need a deck. Last week, I promised that I'd run you guys through the process of building my deck, and deciding some of the more important choices.

I've been keeping up with some of the articles that have been spoiled, and there's a ton of decks that people have been tossing around. I think that, when building a deck, it's important to first define what we're expecting to see. That will let us tailor what we're doing to try and combat it as effectively as possible.

Burning Earth and Red Deck Wins

This is the definition of 'Format Warping'

We're coming off of a multicolored block, and multicolored cards are going to make up a significant portion
of the field. As a result, I definitely think that Red Deck Wins (or some red-based aggressive deck) running Burning Earth is one of the more solid choices. Burning Earth has been shaping the metagame. A ton of people are going to try and jam three colored decks, but ultimately, I feel like too many of them are going to auto-lose to Burning Earth for me to be comfortable running them. Some would argue that you could devote sideboard slots to combating the card, but I'm not a fan of that method against aggressive decks in particular. There's too many ways that you're dead anyway. If you draw yours and they don't, then you have a dead card against the creature threats. If they get Burning Earth and you don't, then you're just dead. If either you both draw, or neither draws, you're fine, but that gives us a lot of situations where our sideboard card isn't terribly useful. When we could also combat this by just building our deck in such a way that it doesn't fold to a commonly played enchantment, getting greedy with our lands feels like a losing proposition. Given all this, I'm leaning towards a two color list.

Drawing Cards for Fun and Profit

Also worth noting is that Control decks have lost significant ground, but not the core of what made their decks work. They still have a powerful suite of removal spells backed up by Sphinx's Revelation. They have a powerful cadre of planeswalkers – Both Jaces, Chandra, new Elspeth – that are sure to give anyone fits. Most of all, they have the most resilient finisher since Jace, The Mind Sculptor: Aetherling. I've seen countless people posting UW Control, UWR Control, and Esper Control lists, trying everything from recreating Flash to a new Ashiok-centric list.

A Look at What We've Lost

The hole that Innistrad left in the format is gigantic. Without Huntmaster, Geist of St. Traft, Olivia Voldaren, Lingering Souls, Unburial Rites Checklands, Kessig Wolf Run, two different Garruks, Snapcaster and most importantly Thragtusk, nearly every card in the format needs to be re-evaluated. Like it or not, Thragtusk was the heart of every midrange deck in the previous format, and without it, we're going to need to find another way to stabilize against aggro decks while still putting threats on the table to pressure Control.

Not Going to Miss This Guy

I'm a midrange player at heart. I don't have the wherewithal to battle to time every round with a control deck. I hate the lack of options that an aggressive deck gives me. While I'll prefer my lists to have a strong pro-active plan, I don't want them to be easily trumped by what the control decks are doing. If you'd like, you could describe it as 'Big Aggro' or something along those lines.

As the general archetype that has lost the most, I think that Midrange is also the area where the most effective brewing could come right now. Control and Aggro both have their paths laid out for them, but Midrange was set adrift on the currents and left to fend for itself.

For those that follow me, you also know that I adore Orzhov colors. I play it in Legacy, and I've been trying to make a grindy BW Midrange deck work in Modern. (No successes yet – more on that in a later article). While I may be insanely biased in this, I do think that there currently exist the tools in Standard to build an incredibly powerful BW deck, with a powerful pro-active plan that is difficult to deal with. Between the powerful cards we have access to from RTR Block, plus a couple of choice weapons from Theros, I think there's something here. I'm initially attracted to Elspeth, Obzedat, Blood Baron of Vizkopa, and the wide array of very versatile removal spells that are available to the colors.

First Tries

So, keeping in mind that I want to avoid losing directly to Burning Earth, while still being able to fight a three-color control deck and put up a healthy toe-to-toe fight with anything else that comes my way, I came up with this initial list:

Those of you who are paying attention will notice that there's only 56 cards in this list. I could think of a couple things to fit into those slots, but at this point, there's enough of a shell to start sending to people to figure out what they like and don't like about the list.

I can not state enough how valuable a testing team is when trying to come up with a list to take to a tournament. I also can't stress enough how important it is to have multiple groups like this – because they won't have the biases of the others. The groups that I spoke to had the following to say:

Group A:

Another Elspeth, and then 3 early removal spells. Probably another Doom Blade, another Devour Flesh, and maybe a 1-of Merciless Eviction.

Group B:

Add an Elspeth, a land, and probably more removal spells. Also, this deck seems like it needs more Desecration Demon.

Group C:

Your curve doesn't even start till turn 3. Try something earlier – like Tithe Drinker or Baleful Eidolon

Group D:

I tested this deck already. Alms Beast doesn't do what you want. Desecration Demon is also pretty bad in the list. Trying Archangel of Thune, and early results are good.

Group E:

I think you're just cold to RDW. They'll just run you over. 4 Cheap Removal spells, possibly cut Thoughtseizes for more, or play my UW Deck. Seriously. I'm not using it Sunday.

Of the five, we had an enormously divergent set of responses. I'd like to note that two of these people are regular SCG grinders, and the other three have been playing Magic since the Weatherlight Crew were regulars on the cards. Judges are prevalent among the list, but don't make up the majority of it. Suffice to say it's a decent cross section of people you'd talk to at an SCG Event.

First, something that multiples of them had to say – I do like the second Elspeth. It shores up our late game and makes us have a good amount more inevitability. I decided to go with the more removal spells option here. A couple of people talked about that, and I'm inclined to agree with them. I added in an extra Doom Blade and Devour Flesh. For the last card, I was torn on another removal spell, but since we're still testing, I opted for the one-off Merciless Eviction. If it ended up not playing dividends, we could always cut it for removal.

That gave us the following list to test with:

At this point, I've got a list, with no sideboard, and that's what I'm going to test with. This is the kind of deck that wants to at least have reasonable game 1's against the field. It's not like a control deck where Game 1 is your weakest, and it only gets better from there. Since the field is pretty wide open – with a number of styles of control, aggro, and midrange all being tested extensively – I feel like we're going to have a generalized sideboard to handle broad archetypes, rather than a focused one aimed at specific cards and game plans.

I test on Magic Workstation – partially because I don't have cards on Magic Online, partially because Theros isn't available on Magic Online, and partially because it's quick and easy. If given the chance, I'd be testing in real life with friends, but unfortunately, my friends have jobs and such – and I'm a little time crunched for this deck. Future iterations will go through a gauntlet of whatever does well at Worcester – in person.

Testing – Round 1

My first match is against a GW aggro deck that comes out the gate quickly. I'm shocked by how much life my deck goes through, between Read the Bones, Shocklands, and Thoughtseize, I do almost as much damage to myself as my opponent does in the first game, and he takes me down. Second game I play a lot more conservatively, and despite a mulligan to six cards, I win. Third game is a nail biter, where my Obzedat and Blood Baron come online just in time to take over the game. I take control at one life, and swing back up to 15 before he leaves the room. Not a clean win, but I noted some misplays and am confident that the sideboard will help the aggro match up a lot.

Second match is against a BWR list very similar to the one that GerryT has been peddling around. While his red cards are extremely powerful in game 1, in games two and three, his mana base fails him. Once drawing him a Come Into Play Tapped land when he needed one extra mana, and the other time just locking him off red. Another flaw in playing three color decks at the moment is that sometimes, your deck just kills you, and they don't even need a Burning Earth.

Final match with this version was against a UW Control deck. I played it pretty conservatively, but after a Thoughtseize took his only Sphinx's Revelation, and he couldn't find an instant-speed answer to Obzedat, he crumpled.

C-C-C-Changes

I was very happy with the first run of the deck, however, I did notice a few clunky bits. I disliked how Alms Beast didn't actually seem to do much. While the synergy with Erebos was pretty awesome, I'm only playing two of the God, and it seemed like my friend was correct – Alms Beast is never really the Abyss that I wanted. Most often, it ate a removal spell and we moved on.

I also wasn't very happy with how the deck preformed against the aggro match ups. While we won the matches against GW, I felt like a good draw could provide us issues if we're only relying on removal. (Voice of Resurgence, in particular, was fairly annoying to deal with.) I decided to make a couple of changes for the second iteration of testing, trying out some tech that a friend of mine has been working with.

Finally, I was hemorrhaging life the entire time, and I wanted to do something about that before making any huge changes. Removing one Read the Bones for more removal seemed like the best option.

Changes:

+3 Tithe Drinker

-3 Alms Beast

+1 Devour Flesh

-1 Read the Bones

Testing – Round 2

We're still working without a sideboard here, because I don't really have a good enough feel for what people are testing and working with. After those changes, I went back into the trenches for a couple more matches.

Boros:

Soldier of the Pantheon is extremely strong in this deck, and with the help of an Anthem, he takes Game 1. I was heartened by the fact that I was about a turn away from balancing out, but just couldn't get there quite quickly enough. In game two, I draw a ton of removal into a Blood Baron, and he can't handle it. Game three is much the same, except with an Obzedat instead. Didn't need to cast the Elspeth that I almost certainly would have sided out. Hammer of Purphoros strikes me as a very strong card here. It nearly won him the game after I'd firmly established control.

GW:

This went a lot like my first round did, except that he had a Scavenging Ooze and I played around it VERY poorly. He won in three, but I think I could have played significantly better and not time walked myself multiple times over the course of the match by playing into his responses.

Esper:

His lands ended up crushing him in the first game, and he never really got rolling the second after a mull to six. A turn five Obzedat ends up going the distance after he can't respond to it.

Esper:

The first two matches, we trade games – him narrowly losing the second, and me the first after a mulligan to five. The third match was one of the best games of Magic I've ever played and went all the way to turn 35. In an epic match dominated by a number of different cards, I feel like I really got a feel for the match up. He was leaning hard on Jace, Aetherling, Blood Baron, and Sphinx's Revelation, while I had Read the Bones, Obzedat, my own Blood Baron, and Elspeth.

Fittingly, the changes I made to the deck all came into play, with a Devour Flesh killing off his early blocker to allow a lot of early damage through via Tithe Drinker (responsible for over 20 points of life swing over the third game). Merciless Eviction ended the life of one of his Jace's, and the second Elspeth (after the first was Thoughtseized away) killed off two of his Blood Barons and made the three tokens that finished the job.

I couldn't be happier with the deck's performance in this game. The scry effects felt very relevant (both Read the Bones and Temple of Silence), the manabase never gave me significant trouble, and the late game felt powerful.

Given the strong showing, I'm going to work on a sideboard now. While I was playing these games, I noticed that I constantly wanted some more early blockers against the aggressive lists, though the removal seemed about right. On the other side of the coin, a little more card draw would have been very useful against control. Sin Collector was a card that I was considering for the main deck, if control was very prevalent, but I think we can make room for it in the side.

I've got a bunch of cards with varying use against varying decks here. I'm not specifically targeting any archetypes, but I made sure that I've got cards useful against a couple different types of aggro, as well as other midrange match ups (attrition based) and control match ups (resiliency based). This is honestly the part of the deck that is gonna undergo the greatest amount of change from week to week, especially this week, when we're in a Day 0 format with no established decks. Obviously, in the future, we're going to want to metagame a little bit more against some of the decks you're likely to see.

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That's it for me this week everyone. Tune in next Wednesday to see how the deck did (assuming that you don't see me on Coverage this week). How did you like the deck? Let me know in the comments - either here or on Reddit, Twitter, etc. Also, let me know what you thought about the article. It's quite a bit longer than my typical article, and I'm interested in hearing what you guys thought about it.