Top-Notch Tech: Green-Red Brian Kibler Sligh. Stompy. Hatred. Fires. They're the decks you love to hate. Amidst the elegant and complex combo decks, in the shadows of the iron fortresses of control, and in the wake of the deadly aggro-control decks, they lie in wait, coming out of nowhere to tear out your jugular just when you least expect it. Everyone knows about them, everyone prepares for them, and yet, everyone still loses to them. They are the beatdown. You are the beatdown. We've all seen it. The CoP: Red/Chill/Worship deck goes down in flames to Sligh as it fails to draw any hosers. The Vampiric Tutor/Perish deck watches in disbelief as it falls to a horde of Elves. The u-w control player slumps forlornly as he is taken down 2-0 by his "best matchup", Fires. All the Story Circles and Wraths in the world can't do anything when they're hiding at the bottom of your deck. Some of the best players in the game of Magic have made their mark on the game playing almost exclusively aggressive decks. David Price has been known as the "King of Beatdown" since he rode Jackal Pups to the 1998 PT-LA title, and Kyle Rose won twelve matches in a row in that very same tournament by turning all of his cards 90 degrees every turn. These great players' predilection for attacking with "dorks", as Limited format beatdown king Mike Turian calls them, is far from simplemindedness or bloodlust. Rather, it's the result of a sophisticated understanding of why decks win and, more importantly, why decks lose. I've come to call this understanding "Threat-Answer Theory", after an explanation attributed to Dave Price about why he prefers to play aggressive decks - "There are no wrong threats, only wrong answers." In essence, Threat-Answer theory is based on the premise that in Magic, "answer" cards are generally fairly narrow. Swords to Plowshares can only remove creatures, Disenchant only artifacts and enchantments, and Counterspell only spells that are currently on the stack - and only if you have mana available at the time. A fist full of Disenchants won't do a thing about a Shivan Wurm, and all the Counterspells in the world are of no help against a turn one Jackal Pup. Drawing the wrong answers at the wrong time can lead to the unfortunate demise of any control player, despite his best efforts at preparation. On the other side of the coin is the beatdown deck. The most finely tuned aggressive decks play as few purely reactive cards as possible, opting for the highest concentration of threats to keep pressure upon their opponent. Randy Buehler even commented on the fact that the Team CMU monogreen "Iron City Beatdown" deck from 1998 PT-LA was at a disadvantage against the Deadguy Red deck Dave Price piloted to the title, simply due to the fact that it played a few more lands in slots where the red deck had spells. Even the reactive cards in beatdown decks tend to be aggressive in nature, as Sligh decks - perhaps the epitome of beatdown - demonstrate with their use of burn spells as a combination of creature and opponent removal. The beatdown deck just wants to keep asking questions and let the opponent do the answering - "Can you deal with this?" Cards like Ironclaw Orcs, Rogue Elephant, and Erg Raiders may not have the raw power of Wrath of God or Fact or Fiction, but they get the job done. Beatdown decks have the advantage of redundancy. They don't care quite so much about what the opponent is doing - they're just going to play their game and beat you before you can play yours. Each game more or less plays out the same way, because beatdown decks are generally constructed with many cards that perform the same or similar functions. While it's extremely significant to the control deck whether the creature control card it draws is Wrath of God or Swords to Plowshares, the beatdown deck will get by just the same with Wild Dogs or Ghazban Ogre. How many times have you heard a u-w player bemoan his fate, because he went through some arbitrarily large number of cards and saw no Wraths, or no Counters, or no Disenchants? Far more times than a Stompy player has gone without a one drop, I'm sure. That's exactly what happened this past April at Pro Tour-Tokyo, when Team ABU stormed the Top 8 with their red-green beatdown deck. When they ran out of Skizziks, they put in Kavu Runners. When they ran out of Thornscape Battlemages, they put in Flametongues. Every card in the deck was devoted to the singleminded purpose of reducing an opponent's life total to zero, and it accomplished that goal well every single game, if results are to be believed. Even come the Barcelona Masters series, when everyone was prepared for g-r with their Go-Mar and b-r and Domain decks, Jay Elarar stormed the finals to be stopped only by Masters wonder Ben Rubin, earning himself a hefty chunk of change on the back of the consistency of beatdown. Jay Elarar, Barcelona Masters Main Deck Sideboard 4 Shivan Oasis 1 Keldon Necropolis 10 Forest 9 Mountain 4 Thornscape Familiar 4 Skizzik 3 Thornscape Battlemage 2 Kavu Titan 3 Kavu Chameleon 4 Raging Kavu 4 Blurred Mongoose 2 Flametongue Kavu 4 Urza's Rage 4 Ghitu Fire 3 Scorching Lava 2 Wallop 4 Overabundance 3 Thunderscape Battlemage 1 Magma Burst 1 Thornscape Battlemage 1 Scorching Lava 1 Kavu Chameleon 2 Flametongue Kavu Everyone thought that g-r was dead in the wake of Tokyo, as everyone would be prepared for it. Everyone said that the Kavu hordes would be no match for the Galina's Knights and Questing Phelddagrifs that would show up at the Masters in throngs. Indeed, Galina sent her brigades in force, and Hippos crowded the tables left and right, but even the weight of numbers couldn't squelch the beatdown, as Jay Elarar cruised 2-0 past both his quarterfinal and semifinal opponents before falling to Rubin in the finals. With the inclusion of Apocalypse, things seem like they ought to have become even grimmer for the devoted g-r mage. Cards like Gerrard's Verdict, Jungle Barrier, and Spiritmonger all contribute to the whispers of g-r's demise, with the ubiquitous Spectral Lynx taking top billing as the proverbial nail in g-r's coffin. With the Lynx popping up in Solution, Gomar, No-Mar, and countless other decks, g-r wasn't even on the metagame radar for most players around the start of the season, but a few PTQs can certainly show us the error of our ways. Jason Means Worlds PTQ Winner Green-Red Main Deck Sideboard 1 Keldon Necropolis 4 Shivan Oasis 10 Forest 9 Mountain 2 Flametongue Kavu 4 Skizzik 4 Raging Kavu 4 Blurred Mongoose 4 Kavu Titan 4 Thornscape Familiar 4 Thornscape Battlemage 4 Ghitu Fire 4 Scorching Lava 2 Urza's Rage 3 Dodecapod 3 Jade Leech 4 Thunderscape Battlemage 1 Urza's Rage 2 Flametongue Kavu 2 Obliterate So why is g-r still winning? Why hasn't it gone the way of the dodo as conventional wisdom would have us believe it should have? For one, that conventional wisdom suggests such is a big point in its favor, as players won't test against it nearly as vigorously as they did in the past. When g-r was the "deck to beat", most serious players wouldn't be caught dead playing a deck they hadn't extensively tested against swarms of hasted Kavu, but now, far fewer players construct with g-r specifically in mind. This often leads to builds far less resilient to an early creature rush backed up by direct damage. A little pain never hurt so much More specifically, the incentive Apocalypse offers toward the construction of many colored decks can only be in the g-r player's favor. Even beyond the obvious fact that players taking advantage of the Apocalypse pain lands will suffer a few points of damage here and there for their trouble - which is actually extremely significant in matchups involving haste creatures and burn spells - the even slightly higher possibility of a player's draw stumbling for a turn due to lack of the appropriate colored mana greatly benefits aggressive decks and their consistency. This simple consistency makes the g-r deck fairly easy to analyze on a card-by-card basis. The cards essentially divide into "creatures" and "removal", with a good deal of the former doubling as the latter, in the cases of Flametongue Kavu and Thornscape Battlemage. The creatures in the deck are fairly straightforward, all chosen essentially for their ability to give the most bang for their mana cost, with many also providing other significant advantages as well, such as the Familiar's mana cost reduction and the Mongoose's untargetability. The haste creatures - Raging Kavu and Skizzik - serve to cut the deck's clock by a full turn, allowing for degenerate draws such as attacking for five on turn three and ten on turn four. To back up this fine selection of animals, one generally chooses only the best burn spells there are to offer. Jay Elarar is apparently some kind of precognitive wunderkind, as he managed to divine the necessity of Scorching Lava in the maindeck even before the release of Apocalypse and the printing of Spectral Lynx. This is the only big change in the deck from Tokyo-era versions, but it's an extremely important one. The Lava kicks the deck's biggest nemesis - the Spectral Lynx - out of the game for good, and on top of that is actually a fairly nice spell to have in the current grizzly bear defined format. Unlike Urza's Rage and Ghitu Fire, the Lava takes down opposing bears for a cost equivalent to what they require to cast, and even less with a Thornscape Familiar in play. Additionally, it's always nice to diversify your removal portfolio in a format wherein Meddling Mage is a prominent card, as long as it doesn't cost you in efficiency. Sideboarding with the deck is fairly self-explanatory, with Dodecapods coming in against discard strategies, Battlemages against decks with dangerous enchantments, Flametongue and Rage in matchups where additional (and uncounterable) removal is desired, and Jade Leech against other decks reliant on direct damage for creature kill. Obliterate isn't as clear as the others, but it takes the spot of the once-MVP Kavu Chameleon, who has since been set to rest as obsolete with the introduction of a regenerating blocker into the arsenal of the format's most prominent control deck, serving as a no-nonsense board reset for those games that have gotten just a tad out of hand. Is it pretty? No, certainly not. Is it creative? Nope, far from it. Is it effective? Certainly, despite what all the naysayers out there might be preaching to you. Let them have their Jungle Barriers, their Spectral Lynxes, their Questing Phelddagrifs. Let them have their Vodalian Zombies and their Galina's Knights. If you've ever seen a Sligh deck break out of a Cop: Red, triple Chill "lock", you understand what I mean. You are the beatdown. It doesn't matter what they've got. Send all questions and comments about this article to majesk@aol.com - I'm still digging myself out from my pre-Worlds email load, but I'll respond to you soon enough.