Odyssey Block Constructed - Week 1 Alex Shvartsman Tuesday, February 19, 2002 The new Constructed format is upon us. Perhaps it is truly more interesting than recent Block Constructed formats, or perhaps Standard is simply too predictable at the moment. Maybe it's just that Magic keeps growing - but OBC has been a subject of extreme interest to many players who are not even qualified for Pro Tour-Osaka - the tournament where OBC will be used for the very first time. However high the interest, most players are either content or simply forced to wait until the Pro Tour to find out what's good in this format. Information is a precious commodity in the Magic community, and small groups of qualified players spend countless hours testing the new format in secret, hoping to get the drop on their competition. Imagine showing up at Pro Tour-New Orleans with Miracle Grow - it would blow competition out of the water! So why is it that the decks designed in the weeks after the Pro Tour are so much better than the decks played at that Pro Tour? Think back to 1999 Pro Tour-Chicago. Although all the cards were available, not a single player arrived wielding a NecroDonate deck - which would have almost guaranteed a Top 8 finish at that tournament. We do not have to go this far back. Imagine showing up at Pro Tour-New Orleans with Miracle Grow - it would blow competition out of the water! Why have these decks not been discovered in time for the Pro Tour yet showed up (in both cases, pioneered by players who were not qualified) in the weeks that followed? The answer, in my opinion, is easy access to the information accumulated during the testing for that Pro Tour. Let's go back to 1999 Pro Tour-Chicago for a moment. Several Japanese players used monoblue Illusions decks, without much success. On the other hand, a group of British players took the tournament by storm adding Necropotence to traditionally blue-white-red Pebbles deck. The connection may seem obvious now, but it wasn't. It took some time and effort, but players eventually arrived at it. Notably, Michelle Bush and the rest of the Your Move Games crew who then used the deck at Grand Prix-Seattle. The rest is history. Now to arrive at the point of this article - can a large group of average or even mediocre deckbuilders design Pro Tour quality decks? Certainly, some people are better than others at building decks. Players like John Ormerod, Brian Kibler and Ben Rubin are head and shoulders ahead of you and I. However, testing often comes up to a matter of man-hours. In a small format like Block Constructed, best decks can be found by trying out every possible idea, which a large group of people can do easily. To this end, I am going to post my OBC decks in this article. Actually, I am going to post my OBC decks from about a week ago. That was my starting point, and I will update them for you weekly based on my testing as well as the information you email me, up until a few days prior to Pro Tour-Osaka. I will hold nothing back. If you email me a deck idea, make sure you do not mind the rest of the world seeing it too. These decks are probably not very good at the moment. However, if this experiment succeeds you may see decks that are good enough that some of the qualified players will play them in Osaka. You might wonder why I chose to do this. Certainly, as someone with enough free time and connections, I stand to gain from the majority of the field knowing less about the format than I do. Zvi Mowshowitz and some of his teammates (who stand to lose the most from this public exchange of information) have even argued that this experiment may hurt the Pro Tour as a whole as the format would be less exciting if everyone knows in advance what is going on. I don't really buy that, though it is impossible to predict the full implications of such a project. We'll never know until we try. If you want to participate, simply drop me an email at ashv80@hotmail.com with your ideas, metagame analysis, deck lists, or even simply testing results with the decks posted here previously. Although I feel this series of articles will be beneficial to Sideboard readers, I am not by any means being altruistic. In fact, I believe that I stand to gain quite a bit from an established metagame being in place before PT-Osaka. My greatest strength in Constructed Magic is to tune decks and to make the right metagame decisions, rather than to build decks from scratch. Thus, I feel that I have a greater chance to "break" or at least fully understand the metagame that is created and do well in Osaka this way, rather than by working in a relative vacuum of private testing. At least several qualified players I've talked to feel similarly, and consider joining me by revealing their decks here in coming weeks. If you want to participate, simply drop me an email at ashv80@hotmail.com with your ideas, metagame analysis, deck lists, or even simply testing results with the decks posted here previously. I will be away for a few days, but I will read and try to respond to as many emails as possible on Monday-Tuesday, and incorporate information from them into. Without further ado, here is our starting point: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Deck To me, the most intriguing archetype in OBC so far, is a u-g tempo deck utilizing the powerful madness and flashback spells. There are about a million ways to build it. For example, you could use much faster creatures such as Nimble Mongoose and Werebear and play more ways to achieve threshold quickly. There are plenty of cards that would work fine in this archetype and the trick will be to figure out which of them should truly make the cut. My current version stands as follows: 4 Basking Rootwalla 4 Obsessive Search 4 Wild Mongrel 4 Aquamoeba 4 Arrogant Wurm 4 Roar of the Wurm 3 Breakthrough 4 Circular Logic 3 Turbulent Dreams 3 Rites of Refusal 12 Forest 10 Island With 16 cards you want to discard, and 17 ways to discard them, virtually every turn of the game will include pulling off a bit of a combo. The deck is all about synergy, but what are the right cards to play in it? Are 22 lands the right number? Should there be more, or less, copies of Breakthrough? Should we make room for cards like Call of the Herd, or Syncopate, or Compulsion - and what do we cut? Flexing the Muscle Burst 4 Chatter of the Squirrel 4 Basking Rootwalla 4 Wild Mongrel 4 Seton's Scout 4 Call of the Herd 3 Centaur Chieftain 2 Gurzigost 4 Muscle Burst 4 Sylvan Might 2 Narcissism 2 Overrun 23 Forest Green creatures are really good in OBC. What is the best way to utilize them though? Besides the u-g archetype discussed above, I have seen versions that splash red for direct damage and Reckless Charge, or black for Chainer's Edict, or even white for Shelter. I am not convinced any splash at all is necessary. There are some excellent pump effects ranging from Muscle Burst to Overrun, and this deck's creatures should have a chance to fight their way through anything. Global removal like Mutilate and Kirtar's Wrath could be a serious problem, but the mono-green deck is well worth testing. Black Is Back How cool is it to force your opponent to drop his entire hand and then kill all of their creatures, and finally drop a huge monster that might have trouble dealing with? Mind Sludge and Mutilate are a very attractive pair of cards in a monoblack deck. The big question is how exactly to build the deck around them. Since this deck would want to wreck opponent's hand before casting a creature anyway, it makes sense to use large, more expensive monsters. Currently I have Shades, Carrion Wurms (that card seems extremely good to me) and Laquatus's Champions. The rest of the deck is removal with a tad of card drawing thrown in. The "tech" card is Gravestorm. Even if an opponent will be able to prevent you from drawing extra cards a lot of the time, this deck is in it for the long game and, especially with a pair of them in play, should have a chance to "go off" at times. With so many good flashback cards, Gravestorm seems very reasonable. Only testing will tell whether I am right on that one. 4 Carrion Wurm 4 Nantuko Shade 2 Laquatus's Champion 4 Gravestorm 4 Mind Sludge 4 Mutilate 4 Chainer's Edict 4 Innocent Blood 2 Ghastly Demise 3 Skeletal Scrying 25 Swamp Another thought for this deck is that it would find it very easy to splash a color. What splash would make it more powerful? Let me know if you think you know the answer. Just Like in Standard Well, not exactly - but if Psychatog decks dominate Standard, they should be at least seriously considered in Block as well. Problem is, Psychatog loses much of its charm against other decks packing Innocent Blood and Chainer's Edict - and you can hardly expect to protect him with enough countermagic in this format. Perhaps there should be cards like Morgue Theft in the sideboard? 4 Shadowmage Infiltrator 4 Psychatog 4 Obsessive Search 3 Peek 4 Circular Logic 4 Syncopate 4 Chainer's Edict 4 Aether Burst 2 Innocent Blood 3 Compulsion 2 Darkwater Catacombs 2 Tainted Isle 2 Cephalid Coliseum 10 Islands 8 Swamp Burn, Baby, Burn Sligh is near and dear to my heart, so I feel obligated to put together a monored aggro deck in every format I try out. Grim Lavamancer is the kind of card that just might put it over the edge, but I suspect red will have a very difficult time dealing with 6/6 Roar of the Wurm tokens and other children of the jungle. Can this version stand on its own and what can be done to further improve it? 4 Spark Mage 4 Grim Lavamancer 4 Mad Dog 4 Minotaur Explorer 2 Savage Firecat 4 Firebolt 4 Fiery Temper 4 Violent Eruption 4 Flame Burst 3 Reckless Charge 4 Barbarian Ring 19 Mountain Well, that is all of my (very limited) wisdom for now. I will post new decks and the changes I've made to these decks after actual test sessions next week. And, hopefully, your comments and ideas too.