Trix in the Current Extended Environment Kai Budde A few Englishmen put a lot of effort into finding a good Extended deck for 1999 Pro Tour-Chicago. Warren Marsh, John Ormerod and Ben Ronaldson worked on a w-b-r-Enduring Renewal/Goblin Bombardment/Shield Sphere design. They broke the deck by using Necropotence as a way to set up the combo. Tony Dobson got the design from them and used it to make Top 8 while John Ormerod posted a 9th place finish and Warren Marsh made Top 32. NecroPebbles was born, but it was not good enough to dominate the Extended scene in this version. Soon after the PT, the Extended PTQs started and with it came GP-Seattle. Michelle Bush of team Your Move Games fame started to playtest the English deck and, after awhile, she replaced the Enduring Renewal-combo with Illusions of Grandeur and Donate. Suddenly the whole thing was reduced to a two-card combo that only required a single non-black mana and you had access to one of the best Extended cards out there - Force of Will. Additionally, Illusions gives you 20 additional life points which you can be used to power up the Necro even more. Team YMG failed to put a single player into the Top 8 but Michelle, Dave Humpheries and Darwin Kastle all finished Top 16 and from that point Trix, as Michelle called it, started to dominate the Extended environment, winning PTQs and GPs all over the world. After the PTQ season, WotC decided to do something about the deck and banned Dark Ritual and Mana Vault in Extended. It didn't help enough. For the Masters in NY, the European Alliance (Ormerod, Ronaldson, Marsh, Jorstedt, Kettil, Shvartsman, Baberowski, myself) designed a version that used Mox Diamond as mana acceleration and was almost as effective. This deck dominated another set of Extended PTQs and eventually the nonsense was stopped when Necropotence itself got the boot. After that, the format was put aside for quite a long time. 2000 PT-Chicago was Standard and so the next Extended event was Day 3 of the 2001 World Championships. We put a lot of work into the format but couldn't come up with anything original. Mike Krzywicki posted an article on the Sideboard claiming that monoblue Illusions/Donate was again the best deck. Intuition and Accumulated Knowledges replaced the Necropotence, Duress turned into Counterspell and Demonic Consultation and Vampiric Tutors became Merchant Scroll and Impulse. Sapphire Medallion gave the deck the needed acceleration. Trix - by Mike Krzywicki Main Deck Sideboard 21 Island 4 Illusions of Grandeur 4 Donate 4 Helm of Awakening 4 Sapphire Medallion 4 Intuition 4 Merchant Scroll 4 Accumulated Knowledge 4 Frantic Search 2 Brainstorm 4 Force of Will 1 Capsize My team (Johns, Mowshowitz, Comer, Selden, Wise, Ronaldson, Ormerod, Mello, Luehrs) tested this a little bit but we found it needed some work. Then Felix Schneider showed Dirk Baberowski his version, replacing some of the weaker cards (Frantic Search, Helm of Awakening) with others and suddenly the deck looked a lot better. We weren't convinced that it was the best deck by any means but we were running out of time and our only options beside Trix were Secret Force and Draw-Go which I knew I did not want to play. So Trix it was. This is what Scott Johns, Brian Selden, Patrick Mello and I used: Trix Scott Johns, Brian Selden, Patrick Mello Main Deck Sideboard 22 Island 4 Sapphire Medallion 4 Intuition 4 Accumulated Knowledge 4 Merchant Scroll 4 Impulse 4 Counterspell 4 Force of Will 1 Thwart 4 Illusions of Grandeur 3 Donate 1 Rushing River 1 Mana Short 2 Morphling 3 Ophidian 2 Hydroblast 1 Capsize 3 Disrupt 2 Hibernation 1 Thwart 1 Misdirection Unfortunately, we could not test this as much as we wanted and so our sideboard turned out to be quite random. The Ophidians were not very good at all and we definitely should have had a third Morphling. Overall, the performance was good but not stellar. I went 3-3, beating two red decks and a white weenie, losing to another white weenie, Stompy and Three Deuce. Brian got horrible matchups and played five of the white weenie decks out there going 1-4 in those matches while Scott and Patrick both ended up with 5-1 records. After that, we were not that impressed with the deck. It had problems against green creature decks, as they could generate enough mana to pay the Illusions for too many turns and the matchup vs counter-heavy decks didn't seem all that great either. In the testing for New Orleans, it was Dirk Baberowski who solved most of those problems by putting eight red duals into the deck and adding easily the best split card that came out of the Invasion block - Fire/Ice. Meddling Mages and Elvish Lyrists were now no longer a problem, if someone gained a small amout of life, through Swords to Plowshares, for example, you just deal two to their head. And a turn two Ice on a land ends up as a Time Walk a lot, especially if you go first. And as the blue part, Ice, is an instant, you can fetch it with Merchant Scroll. One other testing group came to the same conclusion independently. Brian Kibler and Ben Rubin also thought that Trix with a red splash was the deck to play in New Orleans. They took a slightly different approach though. They did not want to run any non-basics as they were afraid of Wastelands in varous aggressive decks and played three basic mountains to support three red cards in the board. I will come to that later as I am going to discuss the main deck first. The deck Benedikt Klauser, Scott Johns, Patrick Mello, Marco Blume and I used at 2001 PT-New Orleans: Trix Benedikt Klauser, Scott Johns, Patrick Mello, Marco Blume Main Deck Sideboard 14 Island 4 Shivan Reef 4 Volcanic Island 4 Sapphire Medallion 4 Counterspell 4 Force of Will 4 Merchant Scroll 4 Accumulated Knowledge 3 Intuition 2 Brainstorm 1 Impulse 1 Capsize 3 Fire/Ice 4 Illusions of Grandeur 4 Donate Brian Kibler, Ben Rubin, Matt Linde, Wiliam Jensen and Eric Froehlich used this listing: Trix Brian Kibler, Ben Rubin, Matt Linde, Wiliam Jensen and Eric Froehlich Main Deck Sideboard 19 Island 3 Mountain 4 Sapphire Medallion 4 Arcane Denial 4 Force of Will 4 Accumulated Knowledge 4 Merchant Scroll 3 Intuition 2 Impulse 1 Mystical Tutor 1 Rushing River 1 Mana Short 2 Fire/Ice 1 Earthquake 4 Illusions of Grandeur 3 Donate In retrospect, I think that our version was a little bit better. I don't think that it is a good idea to run only basics. You want access to the red cards and you want to cast your red cards turn 2. Without that kind of mana stability, the matchup against decks like Sligh gets weakened. With Fire/Ice, it is still a very favorable matchup. I think that adding a few basic mountains to our design is very likely the way to go as you want them for the sideboard. Arcane Denial over Counterspell is also a metagame decision. Counterspell is superior against all kinds of decks that have permission or are slow in general. Denial is at its best against aggressive decks to slow them down and draw cards off it while the additional beatdown cards they get from the denial don't really matter as they hit play too late. Right now there are not too many of those decks in Extended though. Basically that description fits only Sligh and Stompy and then only before board because they will bring in more reactive cards afterwards. The other aggressive decks right now are white weenie and Three Deuce. Those decks carry a ton of cards that you have to deal with - Swords to Plowshares, Meddling Mage, Seal of Cleansing, Elvish Lyrist and Wax/Wane. My opinion is that Counterspell is just a stronger card overall and the deck already has enough card drawing so that you don't need something that can backfire as badly as Arcane Denial does sometimes. Even though I was unsure before the event, I am convinced now that three Intuitions is the correct number, as both teams decided that the fourth is excessive. You really want one in your opening hand but every additional copy is pretty annoying. After you searched for the Accumulated Knowledges, there is not much else you want to Intuition for and you also don't want to remove all your business spells from the deck if you can't win with the fetched card right away. With the Merchant Scrolls, you should find the one Intuition that you really want to draw. Both teams also had three red removal spells. We chose to run three Fire/Ice while the Rubin/Kibler based team went with two Fire/Ice and one Earthquake. The Earthquake has a few advantages, the biggest is probably that you can deal enough damage to overcome serious life gain. It also kills Shadowmage Infiltrator, which is a nice bonus. On the other hand, it does not cycle; it's a sorcery and you can not pitch it to Force of Will. Fire/Ice was so amazing for me during the tournament that I would definitely go with three of them but there are moments when you would rather have that Earthquake and I would not rule it out in the future, maybe the environment will change in a way that makes Earthquake superior. A card that teams up well with the Quake and that you probably need if you want to run it is Mystical Tutor. One of these makes perfect sense in Trix as it basically fetches you any card in the deck with the exception of Illusions of Grandeur. We had one Tutor in our Worlds deck for a long time. The problem with it is that you rarely want to draw it. You always want it to hide in your deck until the right time has come to use a Merchant Scroll to fetch that game-winning Donate or Earthquake. Personally, I am not a big fan of card disadvantage effects and I don't like to play with cards that I don't want in my opening hand, so the tutor is not going to make my final listing of the deck. When we had our deck almost finished, we were discussing about the last three slots. We knew that they should be more library manipulation but we did not know if we should run Brainstorms or Impulses. Both have advantages and disadvantages and it is a pretty close call. In the end, I convinced everyone to run two Brainstorms and one Impulse. My reasoning was that especially with nonbasics, the land count is a little tight but I am usually willing to keep a one land hand if it contains a Brainstorm. The one Impulse was there to provide a good target for the Merchant Scrolls later on. If you already played four Knowledges and draw into a Scroll, you don't have much useful stuff left if you don't need a Counterspell. Fetching a Brainstorm is acceptable but not very exciting, as you usually have nothing left to shuffle your library with and this is why the one Impulse made the cut. Overall, the field in New Orleans was quite slow so I think that this Impulse should be replaced with a Stroke of Genius to give you a powerful card in mid/late game. Three vs. four Donates is another close call. At Worlds, I was using three Donates as well but sometimes you need to combo twice or use Force of Will pitching a Donate and then you look at the Inuition in your hand and wonder why you are only playing three copies of that card. Drawing two or even three Donates is still very annoying but I would go with four anyway. Probably just because Trix should be quite popular in the coming Extended season and in the mirror you can always send your opponents Illusions back to his side of the board. Last but not least, there is the issue of Rushing River and Capsize. Before boarding, the River is superior in a lot of matchups. Fire/Ice steps in fortunately as you don't need to bounce multiple Elvish Lyrists or Nevinyrral's Disks any more. Killing or tapping those works just fine. The real reasons for the Capsize are the games after boarding. If you bring in the Morphlings and transform into an u-r-control-deck, Capsize is just a lot better. We already figured that out for Toronto and so we put the Capsize into the board and would just switch them accordingly. The problem is that with a second color the board is suddenly quite tight and I don't think you have enough space to fit a Capsize. That's why we moved it into the main deck. If someone drops two Seals of Cleasing game 1, you have to scoop with this configuration. We figured that we should be able to stop the second Seal from hitting the board and that there wouldn't be all that many decks running four Seals anyway. We were mostly right on all of those. Most b-u-w control-decks running Shadowmage Infiltrator and Meddling Mage were running only three seals and there was not a lot of white weenie out there. Anyhow Scott Johns, Patrick Mello and I each lost a game due to our opponents knowing that we were running Capsize and not Rushing River and tutoring for a second Seal of Cleansing. My vote is still going out for the Capsize, but if people start running four Seals in a lot of decks again, the River will have to claim its place again. Sideboards That is where the two versions were the most different. We had a pretty standard board, using only cards that have seen a lot of play before. Our sideboard was very solid though and I used every card in there multiple times to great effect. Godzilla-board: 3 Morphling 1 Hibernation 3 Pyroclasm 4 Pyroblast 2 Hydroblast 2 Stroke of Genius The three Morphlings were great and I would call anyone crazy who plays with less than that. The Hibernation is also needed. You can go and get it with Merchant Scroll and you need a good way to bounce Choke. The Pyroclasms were there to fight decks like white weenie, Stompy and Secret Force of Cradle/Elves/Overrun-designs. Pyroblasts were along with the Morphlings the MVPs in my board. They saw play against b-u-w Meddling Mage/Infiltrator, Stasis, Trix, Oath and all other control-decks running more then four blue cards that are worth to counter. Pretty much every card I listed so far is horrible against Sligh and that is why we chose to run two Hyrdoblasts. The matchup is very good but it definitely got worse as we gave Wastelands eight targets so we wanted to have at least some sort of defense. In the end I did not play against a single Sligh-deck but I brought in the Hydros against a w-u-r Lightning Angel deck that boarded Pyroblasts, Oath with Pyroblasts and Wild Research and once I even boarded in one against Darwin Kastle who was playing mono-black reanimator and threatened to animate a Crosis, the Purger on turn two or three. The Strokes of Genius are there to fight any sort of control-decks. Just the Accumulated Knowledges don't provide you with enough card drawing to overload their countermagic and also if you have counter superiority, you want something to finish the game with and a big Stroke does exactly that. You also have to play at least one whenever you board into the Morphling/Pyroclasm deck against creature decks as you need more card drawing against them too after you burned your AKs. Eric Froehlich's board: 1 Earthquake 1 Evacuation 1 Flashfires 1 Hibernation 3 Morphling 3 Ophidian 1 Pyroclasm 3 Ruination 1 Stroke of Genius I am not absoultely sure if everyone in that group was running the same listing, as I know that their main decks varied by 1-2 cards sometimes. While we just put solid cards into our board, they came up with some very good technology here: Ruination. They figured that b-u-w control and designs like Oath would give them trouble and those decks run usually 90-100% non-basic lands so Ruination absolutely wrecks them. Flashfires serves mainly the same purpose as a few of those decks are based on Tithe and so their duals are mostly white. I would not expect too much white weenie though and I don't think that Flashfires is really needed. The Evacuation is basically a combo with those cards. I saw Wiliams Jensen pulling it at least once - end of his opponent's turn, he cast Evacuation, untapped and played Ruination leaving his opponent without any permanents. Even though that was very impressive, I think it is just too expensive at 3 ManaBlue ManaBlue Mana. Pyroclasm seems more effective to me. Also I don't think that running Ruination and nonbasic lands is a problem at all. If you kill all of your opponent's lands and a few of your own, it should hardly matter as you are winning anyway. I was not very impressed with Ophidians in Toronto as I said earlier and I think that Pyroblast is a better anti-control card. I liked our sideboard overall a little better but some number of Ruination definitely belongs. If you made it through all this, I would suggest you run this version of Trix in the upcoming PTQ-season: Trix 2002 Main Deck Sideboard 14 Island 4 Volcanic Island 2 Shivan Reef 2 Mountain 4 Sapphire Medallion 4 Counterspell 4 Force of Will 4 Merchant Scroll 3 Intuition 4 Accumulated Knowledge 2 Brainstorm 1 Stroke of Genius 1 Capsize 3 Fire/Ice 4 Illusions of Grandeur 4 Donate 3 Morphling 4 Pyroblast 3 Pyroclasm 1 Stroke of Genius 1 Hydroblast 2 Ruination 1 Hibernation Maybe three Ruinations are needed, but if you remove a Pyroclasm for the third one, you are in trouble against Secret Force. You want to remove the eight combo cards but you have only seven cards you can possibly put into the deck. And I am not a huge fan of leaving in two Illusions and one Donate or something like that. I think the mix of Ruinations, Hydroblasts and Pyroclasm should be altered to what you expect at the tournament you are playing in. The Morphlings generally see play against all decks that threaten to have too much enchantment removal for you to handle. They also come in against all blue decks as you want to bring in so many cards that you can not afford to have 8 combo parts in the deck. Against Stompy and Sligh, you definitely have to use the combo, as you can't win with Morphling against them. Secret Force is different. The deck is so vulnerable to Pyroclasm and usually has quite a bit enchantment removal in the board that it is generally better to bring in the Morphlings. Three Deuce is a problem. Against fast versions, like Alex Borteh's from Worlds 2001, it is better to bring in the combo. Versions like the one Anton Jonsson used in New Orleans without Jackal Pups, only eight turn 1 drops and with Call of the Herd are a lot less affected by Pyroclasm. When I tested the matchup in New Orleans, it turned out to be a lot better to just stick with the combo. So if that deck is going to be the standard, I would just switch the stroke for the Hibernation and the Brainstorms for the Ruinations.