Deck Analysis: Nether Go

Mike Krzywicki

What ever happened to Nether-Go? This much talked-about deck type, which was expected to be a force to be reckoned with at Pro Tour-Chicago, quite simply didn't bother to show up. Although a relatively high percentage of the Nether-Go decks that did show up at Chicago did rather well (Two of the handful of players that chose to bring the deck to Chicago finished in the Top 32), this was probably due more to the preponderance of W/U control decks in the field (which have an inherent inability to deal with Nether Spirit) as a reaction to the expected high frequency of Fires decks at Chicago. What's wrong with this deck? All the cards look great, and the deck has some incredible synergies built within. Here's a sample decklist, Dan DuBois' deck which he used to finish 17th overall:

Nether-Go
Dan DuBois - PT Chicago
Main Deck
	
Sideboard

12 Island
4 Underground River
4 Salt Marsh 
2 Swamp	
	
3 Nether Spirit
1 Air Elemental
	

	

4 Opt
4 Accumulated Knowledge
4 Fact or Fiction
4 Counterspell
4 Undermine
3 Foil
2 Power Sink
3 Recoil	
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Probe
1 Tsabo's Decree
1 Massacre
1 Tsabo's Web
1 Dominate
	

	

3 Perish 
3 Millstone
2 Tsabo's Decree
2 Cremate
2 Misdirection
2 Disrupt
1 Rebel Informer	
	

For a great reference tool as to a good build of Standard W/U control, check out Zvi Mowshowitz's article on the topic.

Card Drawing: This deck has a lot in common with W/U control decks, and the card-drawing department is no exception. Accumulated Knowledge and Fact or Fiction are seemingly requisite for inclusion into any competitive Standard control deck, yielding the card advantage necessary to always have an answer ready for the many powerful aggressive threats available in the format. Opt, while questionable due to the important slots in the deck that it occupies, serves a fairly important function in Nether-Go by speeding through the deck to its victory condition, and making sure that the card-advantage engines in the deck show up when needed. It's hard to argue with Probe, given its potential four-for-one effect (for the Probe, you get a card off the Probe [1], have the ability to discard Nether Spirit off of the search effect [2], and can knock two cards out of your opponent's hand by paying the kicker in the process [4]), but casting Sorceries in a control deck that aren't game-ending is usually a pretty dangerous proposition, considering how it leaves you ill-prepared in the mana department to deal with any threats your opponent might drop on their turn. This is probably why the builder of the Nether-Go deck above chose to only include one Probe in his deck.

Countermagic: Once again, there is a lot in common among Nether-Go and W/U. Counterspell, Foil, and Power Sink all find homes in both decks with a fair degree of regularity. However, it is also here that we find the first big difference between the two control decks. Nether-Go gets Undermine, while W/U gets Absorb. Both are great cards, which serve the decks that house them quite well, but one definitely outshines the other when put in the context of a control strategy. Control deck typically want time (turns) to gain control of the game versus aggressive decks, and gaining a seemingly small amount of life while countering a spell actually amounts to a lot more than it looks at first glance. For instance, let's say you're playing control and staring down a Chimeric Idol that just hit the board, and then your opponent lays a fourth land and casts Blastoderm before attacking with the Idol. An Absorb here is perfect; it stops the Blastoderm, and negates the damage that the Idol would deal, essentially giving you another turn to get control of the game. Undermine wouldn't be bad either; it also stops the Blastoderm, and nails the opponent for three life, but that Idol still gets a solid swing at your life total. Sure, that three life that they lost off the Undermine will definitely matter once it's safe to hit back with Nether Spirit, but, if you lose before that happens, then it was nothing more than a three mana basic counter, which isn't particularly impressive. Absorb keeps you around so that the card advantage off of Fact or Fiction, Accumulated Knowledge, and Wrath of God has time to pay real dividends, whereas Undermine lets you win one turn earlier after control has been established...this is one of the big reasons why W/U control has been enjoying so much more success recently than Nether-Go.

Permanent Removal: Nether-Go has some nice tricks in the form of Recoil, Massacre, and Tsabo's Decree, but nothing that really compares with Wrath of God and Disenchant/Dismantling Blow. Recoil is very versatile, serving as a Stone Rain versus control decks, a pseudo-Dark Banishing versus pesky creatures, and a Disenchant versus every other permanent type in a color combination that otherwise can't address those permanents. However, what it provides in terms of versatility, it concedes in its unreliability. Unless you have managed to empty your opponent's hand while keeping mana back to counter their threats, Recoil will act as nothing more than a temporary solution to all the aforementioned types of problems it addresses. If the deck were more aggressive, allowing it to exploit the temporal permanent removal that Recoil provides, perhaps it would be more effective, but, if you've ever played with or against Nether-Go, you know that it takes that little 2/2 fella a good long while to end a game, even with multiple successful Undermines thrown in. Massacre and Tsabo's Decree are both included to deal with the deck's otherwise nightmare matchups, aggressive Rebels, like the one Kai Budde used to win Chicago, and Counter-Rebels (see Kamiel Cornelissen's 2nd place Chicago deck for a great example of this archetype). Both of these suffer from serious drawbacks stemming from the build of Nether-Go and that of the various Rebel decks, however. Massacre only costs as much as Wrath of God, and can potentially be free-cast if you have a swamp, but it is not equipped to deal with one of the biggest threats that Rebels will throw at you, the legendary Lin Sivvi. Thus, if they get Lin Sivvi down, all a Massacre will usually do is set them back a few turns, if that. Also, the temptation to play with it since it is potentially free to cast is greatly diminished once you look at how many swamps are in most Nether-Go decks. The one listed above has a whopping two basic swamps, and most have anywhere from three to six floating around in their decks. Tsabo's Decree can definitely be a devastating card against Rebels, since it strips their hand of Rebels they would otherwise drop in response to a typical mass creature removal spell while also knocking out all the ones that already made it into play, but this effect comes with a hefty six mana price tag, which means it won't always get to go on the stack before you die to a recruited swarm of white creatures. Combine its already high cost with cheap counters available to Counter-Rebels and the mana disruption that aggressive Rebels play in the form of Rishadan Port and Armageddon (usually out of the sideboard), AND the fact that it doesn't always deal with everything that's coming at you (aggressive Rebel decks often include Longbow Archers and Chimeric Idol), and you have a potentially devastating, but equally potentially useless card. Both decks have the ability to use Dominate and Bribery, and, while both are solid card that have their respective merits, it appears that Dominate's instant speed and potential for card advantage gives it the edge over the five mana sorcery for inclusion in the main deck. Permanent removal is another area where there is a huge gap between what W/U's cardpool offers and what B/U's cardpool offers, with W/U once again having a significant edge.

Victory Condition: Where W/U has Blinding Angel, Mageta, the Lion, Air Elemental, and Millstone, the consensus best option for B/U is Nether Spirit. In stark contrast to the other areas, Nether-Go has a big edge in terms of victory conditions with the tough little 2/2. Where all the aforementioned W/U victory conditions can be answered fairly inexpensively, there is no answer in terms of conventional removal spells for Nether Spirit. It serves as a reliable blocker for larger creatures until a permanent answer can be found, it is essentially immune to countermagic, and, often times, it comes into play at absolutely no cost by being tossed in the graveyard from a Foil, Probe, Fact or Fiction, or simply an excess of seven cards in hand when the turn is over. The sampled Nether-Go decklist has also included one Air Elemental to help to end the game quickly, but it is not a necessary component for a successful Nether-Go deck and the slot it takes up could easily be occupied by additional Domimates, Tsabo's Webs, countermagic, etc.

Miscellaneous: Vampiric Tutor could potentially be classified as card drawing, and, similarly, Tsabo's Web could probably fit under permanent removal as its most prominent use is to "turn off' Rishadan Ports, Dust Bowls, and to a far lesser extent, Kor Havens, but they are probably best addressed under this class of card. Most Nether-Go decks shun Vampiric Tutor altogether, and the few that do choose to include it do so in quantities of one or two, as the builder above chose to. The combination of a loss of card advantage and two life, which can be absolutely vital against Standard's more prominent aggressive decks, make it a questionable card, but it is the only search spell in Standard which will always get Nether Spirit every time it is cast, and so it has a feasible application in this deck. Between Vampiric Tutor and the other search cards in the deck, the possibility for several single copies of situational cards exists, once again exhibited in the sample decklist, but versatility may not be as sound of a concept as focus and consistency in this sort of deck. One of those single copy cards, Tsabo's Web, is necessary for every classic blue control deck in the current environment because of Rishadan Port and Dust Bowl. These two uncounterable mana manipulators have the ability to singlehandedly take over an otherwise under-control game by destroying and tapping a control deck's blue mana sources, leaving the deck incapable of countering threats on the opponent's main phase. The Nether-Go deck sampled has one Web, plus a Vampiric Tutor and an abundance of other search cards to get to it, but that is probably not nearly enough to survive in the post-PT Chicago environment, which is full of Fires, Aggressive Rebels, and Blasto-Geddon decks, all of which pack four Rishadan Ports standard. In fact, the only right number might be four. Unfortunately, this deck is rather tight on space as it is, and getting the second, third, and fourth Webs in there might force some difficult decisions as to what stays and what goes. Most W/U decks don't really have any cards other than Tsabo's Web that would fit into this category, and that is probably a good thing, since cards that aren't easily classified in the four aforementioned categories are most likely dead weight anyway.

The Mana: This is the only other place where Nether-Go has an edge over W/U. Blinding Angel, Mageta, and Wrath of God all require two white mana, which wouldn't be so much of a problem in a White-based deck, but they usually come in the same package as Counterspell and Absorb, which leads to mana issues on more than a few occasions, especially in the face of mana disruption imposed by the opponent. The casting costs of the black cards in Nether-Go, however, almost universally require only a single black mana to play, with the exception of Nether Spirit, which can be gotten into play at no mana cost, and Massacre, which can be played at no mana cost if you can fulfill the requirements. This makes the mana base a lot smoother, since decks largely based on blue countermagic and blue card drawing want to have as much blue mana as possible at their disposal. The sampled decklist exemplifies this, with a total of two out of twenty-two lands that aren't capable of producing blue mana. Many other builds of Nether-Go exclude Underground River in favor of more basic lands to reduce exposure to Dust Bowl's devastating capabilities and to avoid taking self-inflicted damage, but having both Salt Marsh and Underground River makes it less likely that a Rishadan Port keeps you from casting Counterspell and Undermine.

The reason why Nether-Go has essentially dropped off the face of the earth at and after PT-Chicago is because people have realized that it is simply inferior to other control decks in most respects, and have since chosen to break out their Coastal Towers and Adarkar Wastes instead of Salt Marshes and Underground Rivers. So, should we be making funeral arrangements for this unrepresented archetype? I don't think so...

Up Next - the new Nether-Go