Brainstorming Standard, Flores Style

Hi again!

Today is an all-Floresian inspired journey into the new Standard format, care of two recent statements made by Mike on SCG. Roughly approximated:

"

The best deck is the deck that plays most of the best cards.

"

and

"

The top 10 cards in Standard:

Jace, the Mind Sculptor Stoneforge Mystic Primeval Titan Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas Preordain Sword of Feast and Famine Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle Tectonic Edge Squadron Hawk Spreading Seas

"

I wanted to use these rules to find the "best" deck to play, so I started with the obvious comic attempt to jam all ten together.

10/10
2 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle	2 Stoneforge Mystic
9 Mountain	4 Squadron Hawk
2 Tectonic Edge	4 Primeval Titan
2 Darkslick Shores	10 Creatures
4 Seachrome Coast
2 Forest	4 Preordain
1 Island	2 Spreading Seas
1 Plains	4 Prophetic Prism
1 Swamp	4 Sphere of the Suns
3 Evolving Wilds	2 Sword of Feast and Famine
27 Lands	4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
	3 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
	23 Other Spells

Shockingly, the mana is a bit sketchy; Valakut puts a major strain on the rest of the deck by requiring so many Mountains just to function when there is no other use for red mana. The inclusion of Tezzeret oddly helps with this, as it drives the need for more artifacts in the deck and thus the inclusion of Sphere of the Suns and Prophetic Prism.

Safe cuts from this build: Primeval Titan and Valakut are both on a completely different plan from the rest of the deck and can be shown the door.

8/10
3 Tectonic Edge	4 Preordain
4 Celestial Collonade	2 Spreading Seas
4 Seachrome Coast	2 Contagion Clasp
4 Creeping Tar Pit	3 Tumble Magnet
2 Darkslick Shores	4 Prophetic Prism
2 Marsh Flats	3 Sphere of the Suns
2 Plains	2 Sword of Feast and Famine
3 Island	4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Swamp	4 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
25 Lands	28 Other Spells
3 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Squadron Hawk
7 Creatures

The mana becomes much better with these cuts, and we get reliable access to eight manlands into the deal. Because the deck doesn't need so many lands to fuel Valakut there is room for more artifacts to support Tezzeret. When we examine the roles of the cards in more details, it becomes obvious that this is the core of two distinct decks smashed together:

U/W Caw-Go	Common Cards	Tezzeret
Stoneforge Mystic	Preordain	Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
Squadron Hawk	Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Sword of Feast and Famine	Spreading Seas
	Tectonic Edge

Unsurprisingly, if we look at the deck that can use the most of these remaining cards we get a familiar list:

7/10 (Caw-Go Update)
4 Celestial Collonade	4 Preordain
4 Glacial Fortress	3 Spell Pierce
4 Seachrome Coast	1 Sylvok Lifestaff
4 Tectonic Edge	1 Deprive
1 Marsh Flats	2 Spreading Seas
1 Scalding Tarn	2 Mana Leak
4 Plains	1 Stoic Rebuttal
4 Island	1 Sword of Feast and Famine
26 Lands	4 Day of Judgment
	4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Stoneforge Mystic	3 Gideon Jura
4 Squadron Hawks	26 Other Spells
8 Creatures

Using the Rule of Flores this should be the best deck in Standard, which seems to have been borne out by the PT Paris results.

(Alternatively, we simply find that the list of top 10 cards was drawn up based mainly on the Pro Tour top 8. Either way the moral of the story is that playing the best performing deck from the latest big tournament is never going to be an awful idea.)

Have fun!

Steve

p.s One last bonus list, attempting to combo off Tezzeret, Throne of Geth and Semblance Anvil:

3/10
4 Inkmoth Nexus	3 Mox Opal
4 Tectonic Edge	4 Preordain
4 Creeping Tar Pit	3 Throne of Geth
4 Darkslick Shores	4 Ichor Wellspring
2 Island	4 Sphere of the Suns
2 Swamp	4 Contagion Clasp
20 Lands	4 Prophetic Prism
	4 Everflowing Chalice
0 Creatures	3 Semblance Anvil
	3 Tumble Magnet
	4 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
	40 Other Spells

Mirrodin Besieged Set Review

It looks like everyone else is rolling out the usual set review malarkey, so might as well jump on that bandwagon, amiright?*

* Copyright the "cool" kids, 1998

I'm pretty sure there are more qualified people than me who have 15,000 words describing exactly how the new set will impact constructed and limited formats. Instead, I thought I'd cover some of the more obscure things that occurred to me as I read through the visual spoiler.

"We lost our homes and our kin. We won't let those rotters take our future as well."
"This war is not about loxodon or leonin, Sylvok or Auriok. To defeat these rotters, we must do it together."
"I never move the same way twice. Those rotters can't grasp chaos."

Rotters? Really? I mean, I can see where the flavour text writers were going with this; rotter is clearly being used as a pun since the zombie hordes of Phyrexia are literally rotting. What they've failed to notice though is that instead of conveying the fear and hatred of the people being quoted, they have instead implied that the Phyrexians are some kind of comedy villains.

"Oh no! Here comes that bruiser, Vorinclex! He's such a rotter, he took Dean's lunch money and roughed up Billy too!"

Last I heard, Phyrexia wants to murder, desecrate and torture an entire plane. Perhaps I misunderstood and they are really just planning to raid the tuck shop while Mr Jenkin's back is turned.

Also, I may be (deliberately) misunderstanding the flavour text of Loxodon Partisan, but is interracial sex really the way to win this war?

"That new recruit sure is ardent, bring in the cat ladies!"

From a gameplay point of view, I'm excited to see if this is an effective answer to Primeval Titan (banish it with the search trigger on the stack to force them to shuffle it into their library). Ultimately it will probably be too expensive for standard though.

More interestingly, why have they decided to specifically prevent it from getting planeswalkers? The standard template for this type of card tends to be "target non-land permanent". Especially at this much mana, you would think the more elegant wording would have won out.

For some reason, this card reminds me of the comments on Ethan Fleischer's submission for round 4 of the Great Designer Search 2.

Common Card #8 – Visceral Augury [Brain Drain - http://community.wizards.com/magicthegathering/wiki/Labs_talk:Gds/gds2/pariah_press/challenge4skeleton] B Sorcery As an additional cost to cast CARDNAME, sacrifice a creature. Target player discards a card and you draw a card. Art: A shaman inspects the organs of a vivisected sacrificial victim, while a relative weeps.

Mark Purvis, brand manager of Magic: The Gathering said:

"MP: Magic is edgy, and often violent, but the art description on this one really pushes the boundaries of what we would likely be willing to print."

Vivisection appears to show a human face stretched over a wire mesh, with a zombie horror investigating the opened chest cavity. If this is acceptable, I can only assume that Mark's objection is to the suggestion that the art in Visceral Augury depict a weeping relative. So we can have a picture of a slaughtered human, but showing the consequences of this event is too "edgy"? Maybe the flavour text should have been used to convey that the guy being dissected was a dick, and nobody's particularly bothered he got killed. Then we can carry on setting fire to people, or enjoying some elephant on cat action, without having to think anything beyond "war is cool!"

Awkward numbers. With the name Hexplate Golem, this would have been a perfect card to illustrate how crappy commons are compared to mythic rares by having a 6/6 for 6 mana. Then they could have six words in the flavour text, just to give Mark Rosewater something to talk about in his round-up column.

"My creation; I call it Shititan!"

The words, look at all the words! If I remember Ken Nagle's statistic correctly, this card has more words on it than all the cards in M10 combined! I imagine the only time I'll see this in play is after an opponent plays several ramp spells, stacks his deck with Jace, the Mind Sculptor, then sets about explaining to me how he's going to win. If this happens to you I recommend just conceding so you don't have to spend any more time with these tedious people.

Okay, so there's been a lot of speculation over whether Blightsteel Colossus represents good design, or if it was a hack job to create a chase mythic under the guise of "OMG the Phyrexians are corrupting everything, even bent Tooth and Nail targets that were eventually obsoleted in their own block by Mephidross Vampire!" For me though, Myr Turbine is the laziest card in the set by a massive margin.

For starters, the art is a straight copy of Myr Matrix. Not merely a tribute, this goes beyond being "influenced" by the original and out the other side to "photocopying the original and painting on a couple more myrs". I actually had to get both cards next to each other before I even realised that the viewing angle was slightly different.

This leads to the next conceptual problem with the card; since the artwork is clearly showing the same structure, what is it? Are we looking at a Myr Matrix or a Myr Turbine, or are they meant to be the same thing? If it is, there's been some very lax maintenance carried out from Darksteel times, because this thing has somehow stopped being indestructible.

But beyond falling into disrepair, this homage continues to fail to satisfy on multiple other counts. The Matrix had one static ability and one activated ability costing 5 mana; Turbine has two activated abilities, both with a tap activation. Even more annoying; despite the different costs to do so, both cards can produce 1/1 Myr tokens. But while this is the last ability on the Matrix, it's the first on the Turbine.

So to summarise: copied art, confusion of subject matter, failure to align ability types, costs and positioning. Sweet card, dude.

Also, would it have killed to make the type line "Tribal Artifact -- Myr"? I know that tribal isn't fully supported as a card type, but you know what people really dig it? The people you're aiming this card at who already have tribal Myr decks just waiting for more cards to slot into them!

"Vulshok flail, Viridian shield, loxodon blade... Tazzir, bring the Moriok hook and assemble the rookies."
--Vy Covalt, Neurok Agent

These two cards are next to each other on the spoiler, which is what triggered this final suggestion: how much better would the flavour text be as:

"Vulshok gauntlets, Viridian claw, leonin scimitar... Tazzir, bring the grappling hook and assemble the rookies."
--Vy Covalt, Neurok Agent

All this grumpiness is bringing on a migraine. I'm off for a lie down.

Steve