Magic: Deck Decision?

Last weekend saw two more countries hold their national tournaments. Australia and France have now thrown their hats into the ring along with Japan and the overall results are interesting. A rough compilation of the top 8 decks from those events:

4 Hawkward
4 Mono-Red
3 Valakut
2 Caw-Blade
2 RUG Pod/Twin
2 Vampires
2 UB Control
1 Elves
1 UW Control
1 UWG Birthing Pod
1 Caw-Go
1 GW Aggro (w/ pod)

So it looks like 14 aggro decks, 5 combo decks, 3 control decks and 2 midrange decks. A wide variety of different deck types within those archetypes (the hawkward and mono-red decks may have 4 top 8s each but they varied drastically from deck to deck). Really what it looks like is the format is reasonably wide open and there's nothing truly degenerate going on, at least to this point.

What does this mean? Well, in an open format I think the most important thing is to play a deck you know how to play. I was at my best in constructed back during the Modo alpha and beta tests when I played an obscene amount. Psychatog and I go way back. So if I had any experience with any of these decks at all I should probably go with it. Alas, I don't. So what next?

In general I think it's stronger to be asking the questions and not trying to answer them. (Hence why the aggro decks are well represented.) But I've never really enjoyed that style. Throw out some cards and hope they kill you with as little interaction as possible? That's not fun. It might be winning, though. The idea of beating down with an army of 3/4 ornithopters does have some appeal...

Another alternative when the field is wide open is taking an off-beat tact. There was a deck in the Australia nationals that featured a card called Mass Polymorph. It's like the original Polymorph but you hit all your creatures in play instead of just one. So you play with a lot of mana acceleration and some token creatures and then suddenly have many unfathomable monsters in play. It also plays that gigantic 15/15 flying dude I posted about last week, though the odds of actually hard casting it seem even lower in this deck. It looks fun and it definitely seems like it asks questions that people couldn't possibly have answers for since no one else is asking them.

Similarly, the elf deck seems insane. It plays terrible creatures that wouldn't even make the cut in draft but it plays a lot of them in a real hurry. It has access to some really powerful sideboard options and it beats down in a little bit of an odd manner. I am a fan of odd...

That being said, one of the decks from Australia that actually did well (2 people in top 8 including the winner and another guy in 9th) calls out to me as being awesome. I mentioned in my first post about standard with M12 that I really liked the idea of Birthing Pod. Here's a birthing pod deck which just includes a mostly unrelated 2 card combo on the side. A lot of decks are focused around winning with those two cards but haven't seemed to do well since it seems like there are a lot of good answers running around. But having them as an aside in a different deck, where both cards actually fit in ok on their own, seems really strong. If you happen to be in a position to combo out without them having an answer you can. If they have the answers you play your real game and win some other way. It's sweet! For reference, the cards in question:




The combo involves putting the red enchantment on the blue creature. You can then tap the creature to put a copy into play that has haste. When the copy comes into play you can untap one of your permanents. Like, say, the enchanted creature. Tap it again to put another copy into play. Repeat until you have an arbitrarily large number of 1/4 haste creatures and then attack with them all. Victory!

Now, birthing pod lets you sac a creature to get a slightly more expensive one for free. Since you lose the old creature you typically want to be using creatures with comes into play abilities so you still have some of the power from the original creature lying around. Splinter twin goes very well with creatures like that even if it doesn't instantly win you the game. You can also sacrifice the copies to your birthing pod to get real creatures. On the other hand the exarch isn't great on its own but at the very worst you can use it to untap the birthing pod to sacrifice it immediately which lets you jump from 2 mana to 4 in one go. Also, birthing pod can ramp into the exarch when you have drawn a splinter twin already giving more chances to put the combo together in a hurry.

I saw a version which cut the birthing pods and went more heavily into land destruction (one of the comes into play creatures can destroy a land) which is tempting too, but birthing pod just seems too awesome. At any rate, I think I've found a deck I want to play around with, so I should look into getting some of these cards on Magic Online to play with after WBC next week.