Back to the Drawing Board

Its amazing how quickly the meta shifts in Magic the Gathering. Just a little while ago I was celebrating getting to Platinum Standard Ranked with my mono black deck and now I'm getting beat around the face like no one's business, languishing in Gold 3 and 4.

Not Climbing The Ladder :(

The big issue is that when Field of the Dead was banned, decks around Oko, The Thief of Crowns started to dominate the format, typically in green ramp decks that overwhelmed the opponent and turned their best pieces into 3/3 Elk tokens.

Oko Oh No!

The meta shifted in response to this with more focus on controlling decks, either based around something like Esper Doom Foretold or Fires of Invention enchantments. There is also a fair number of Red and Gruul aggro decks.

My black mono decks, both last season's version and my new one based around Ayara and Midnight Reaper/Liliana Dreadhorde General, do decently against those aggro decks, but the Oko and control decks are very difficult for me to deal with because they have the tools to dismantle parts of my engine fairly easily in the midgame and then overwhelm me with big powerful spells/creatures in the late game.

Look at my stats:

Doesn't look too bad in the matchups, right? Yeah, the Simic is crushing me but everything else is ok...

OMG OUCH! A lot of those decks are really similar Fires of Invention variants which are dragging me down from a win rate of 63% last season to 55% this season, hence the stalled at Gold 3/4 tier.

So I'm going back to the drawing board, just not sure if I'm going to ride the rest of this season out and try again fresh next one, or craft some sort of deck that can get me over the hump.

Reaching for Platinum

Last week I posted about the Mono-Black mid-range deck I got from the Arena Boys at Channel Fireball and how it started to lift me from Silver to Gold in Standard Ranked Best of One games.

After the shocking 9-1 start to rocket out of Silver last week the win rate settled to a still impressive ~75% as I climbed through Gold 4 and was well on my way to Platinum on the weekend... or so I thought.

I was three wins into Gold 1, only two wins from Platinum on Sunday and then I went 2-2. Just a hiccough I thought. Then for the last three days I went 5-10, a dismal 33% win rate. I was frustrated. I thought this deck was going to get me to my goal of Platinum this season but it looked like that was not to be. I started looking at other options, deck from the Mythic Championship and other decks on Channel Fireball posts, but most of them required a lot of Rare and Mythic Rare cards I didn't have, and didn't have the wildcards for crafting them as I spent quite a few on this current deck.

Why did the win rate change so suddenly? I'm not sure. Maybe it was the ban announcement on Field of the Dead to cripple Golos/Field of the Dead decks so a bunch of people abandoned those decks for more aggro focused decks and Simic food decks? Or maybe I was just facing higher caliber players at this level now? Or was it a combination of bad luck and bad play from becoming tilted?

Last night I logged in deciding to accept that Gold 1 might be the high water mark for me this season (it was still a personal best after all) and just enjoy playing while I planned for next season's climb. I won 1... and lost 2. Then won 3 in a row... and lost 1. That put me two wins in on Gold 1. Then I won the next 4, including a 14 minute slugfest against a UBW planeswalker control deck! YES! Platinum 4 baby!

Platinum!

Needless to say I'm pleased as punch and ready for next season to improve on this season. Here are some stats and final thoughts on this Mono Black Midrange deck.

The final win rate was 63% (50 wins, 29 losses) and had a statistical advantage going first. The best match ups were anything that was aggro based creatures: mono red, mono black, knights tribal, mono blue mill decks and things in a similar vein.

The worst match-ups were decks that had a better long range plan than I did, or could get the pieces into place before I could get my best combos going. Going against Simic Food was a nightmare as they weathered any early or mid game push fairly soundly and had an endgame that was just punishing.

My deck had two main win conditions. The first was the Arya + Dread Presence combo that levels incidental damage through swamps and creatures entering the battlefield, especially when Arya could recycle the recurring Gutterbones and Sanitarium Skeletons. This win condition worked well in slow games where the opponent didn't have a lot of removal and/or big creatures.

The second win condition was basically beat-down from Cavalier of Night on the ground and Rankle in the air. Since they both had built in removal it worked really well against decks that needed creatures, and worked best in games that were moving faster.

And if I managed to get  both win conditions going at the same time, it was game over for my opponent.

However, that being said, the struggles I've had this past few days have demonstrated a weakness to this deck. Both win conditions need multiple pieces to be in place to pull it off: Arya or Dread Presence is not enough on their own to complete the deed usually, nor can Rankle or the Cavalier overwhelm the opponent by themselves. And one piece from each is usually insufficient as well: Rankle and Arya are both competing for sacrifices for their effects for example, and one or the other is negated somehow.

The upshot of this weakness is that if the cards don't cooperate this deck needs time to get rolling and the decks it is weakest against are decks that also need time to get rolling but have a bigger long range payoff. The 50% win rate versus the Golos-FotD deck is a microcosm of this issue: I needed to get the engine rolling and win before they could start creating fields of zombies.

So this feels like a hybrid mid-range / aggro deck. It needs to win before the long game. I think this is why it works very well against aggro decks: it has the wherewithal to survive the initial blitz quite well and dominate in the mid to late game. And useless against Simic Food where the long game engine was far more powerful and resilient.

In summary: decent deck, I'll keep it around as my gold standard that I compare other decks too for the time being (or should I say, platinum standard?).

Back In Black

Last week I talked about how I was going to use my friend's Grixis Reanimator deck to try and climb the standard ranked ladder. It started out ok and I climbed into high silver but then stalled and fell a little. Basically, in many game I had a lot of trouble making all the moving pieces get into the right place before I died: Bond of Revival in hand, Drakuseth or Agent of Treachery in the graveyard, mana to cast it... and even if all the pieces were ready one kill spell or counter spell could spell my ruin. Don't get me wrong; when it works, it works really really well at turning games around, but lacking any life gain or ways to handle big creatures while I set up was severely hurting me. I tried some minor modifications but didn't really help the major weakness: just too slow to get going most of the time.

So I went back to the drawing board and in my RSS feed I saw this article titled Mono-Black Midrange on Channel Fireball website. Well that had my attention! I had previously made use of mono-black deck in my Dreadhorde Invasion deck which I enjoyed even if it failed to succeed like I wanted at the higher ranks so I read it with keen interest.

One of the problems of trying new decks is having the cards to make them in Arena; a deck that has a lot of rares or mythic rares that your collection is missing can be very costly to craft with wildcards, especially if the deck turns out to not work like you wanted. Crafting the missing pieces of the Grixis Reanimator deck was not too bad since I already had the three Drakuseth cards, but there were some other decks I had interest in (a Golgari and a Blue-Black reanamator deck) that would have been expensive to craft just to try out.

But this mono-Black deck in the article leaned heavily on rares and mythics I already had for the most part: Murderous Rider, Cavalier of Night, Dread Presence were all features of my Dreadhorde Invasion deck, and Liliana Dreadhorde General was a card I had from an earlier Zombie tribal deck. The only rare cards I needed to actually craft were a few copies of the perennial Gutterbones that is a feature of many black decks anyways, and the new Throne of Eldraine card Rankle, Master of Pranks.

So I put together this deck in Arena, crafted the missing cards once more, and tested it out in quick play matches to string together 6 wins and 1 loss. I was very pleased needless to say. It felt a lot like my Dreadhorde Invasion deck with the removal but was more solid on the ground with more win conditions. I could either go with the straight up beat down with creatures led by the Cavalier of Night and Rankle, kill them through incidental damage from Ayara, First of Lochthwain and Dread Presence, or curve into Liliana which almost never hits the board without swinging it in my favour.

So I took the deck into Standard Ranked and let loose the dogs of war... only to lose horribly to a defensive green deck that built up mana to a ten mana Finale of Devastation. I wish I had a screenshot of all the creatures with double digit power and toughness. Egads.

Nevertheless I persisted and won the next 9 games in a row.

Wait, what? Holy shit! Seriously, 9 wins in a row.

This deck (that I've called Liliana's Night) has propelled me into the first rank of gold and shows no signs of stopping yet. Now some of those 9 wins were extremely close and due to luck but I'm ok with that. At least the deck is working to put me into those positions right now.

We'll see if the trend continues as I've yet to face a serious control deck and only one poor representative of Red Deck Wins.