Monday 18 August 2014

4th at the Toronto WMCQ with BW Midrange.

Deck
60
Elspeth Suns Champion
2
Desecration Demon
4
Pack Rat
4
Nightveil Specter
2
Obzedat, Ghost Council of Orzhova
3


Banishing Light
1
Thoughtseize
4
Bile Blight
4
Devour Flesh
2
Sign in Blood
4
Hero's Downfall
3
Whip of Erebos
1
Durress
1
Godless Shrine
4
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
1
Mutavault
4
Caves of Koilos
4
Swamp
8
BW Temple
4


SB:
15
Lifebane Zombie
1
Sin Collector
2
Durress
2
Underworld Connections
2
Drown in Sorrow
3
Deicide
1
Last Breath
1
Banishing Light
1
Doom Blade
2

I have been experimenting with a lot of versions of Bx in the past few months. Before the PT I was interested in exploring versions which were similar to standard jund decks of old. In other words:

-Lots of Removal
-A few insane finishers
-A little bit of card advantage
-A couple of anti-control cards

Key to these builds were moving away from the standard MonoB synergy power and towards individual card power.  Channelfireball had already moved towards this direction, but I had enough experience with the deck to recognize a lot of things I didn’t like in their PT build.

After grinding for a week (including winning a Bye for WMCQ), I came across BBD’s build at 8am on Sunday morning. His biggest innovation was 3x Obzedat and 0 Bloodbaron’s main. Its also where I saw 4 sign in bloods.

I did see his article on SCG, but mostly adopted the changes based on a couple of things that really clicked for me after playing around with something closer to CFB’s list.

No BBoV: This card is good against MonoB and GW. But MonoB had already adopted 4 devour fleshes and 4 lifebanes main.  Rabble Red and Jund Planeswalkers had also adopted a million ways to answer it.
Meanwhile Obzedat is a faster clock (though worse at stabilizing) and more resilient. Basically demons 5-7. The clock part is highly relevant, because even if you tear their hand/board to shreds you can’t control the top of their deck (as a true control deck can). So you need to kill them.

Sign in Blood: Underworld connections becomes a debatable inclusion when not playing with grey merchant. It’s definitely great against UW and decent against the mirror. But sign in blood as a couple of key things going on. First, it lets you play 25 lands. Secondly, it makes your deck better on the draw. There is a significant portion of the field where connections is a mulligan on the draw (MonoU, GW, rabble red, even planeswalkers sometimes). Your deck is already bad on the draw because pack rat loses so much power.  Against MonoB sign in bloods are great because you want to start drawing cards in the midgame rapidly after you are getting thoughtseize and lbz’ed. They also make your curve much smoother since:

Sign -> 3 Drop or Removal ->Sign-> demon is much less awkward than when you have a Connections.

2 NVS, 1 LBZ: Lifebane Zombie is slowly becoming awful. Big green idiot decks are pretty poorly positioned and I am tired of getting chandra’ed. The card is good against GW, but NVS is reasonable there also. Meanwhile NVS is much better vs MonoB, MonoU, UW and Rabble Red. The 4 most important decks in the format. In general I am not high on 3 drops and almost cut them all from my deck. If you noticed my analogy to Jund, than the 3s don’t really fit anywhere in it. You could definitely save some sideboard slots and run 2 LBZ (cutting the one from the board).

4 Demon: Playing less than 4 demon is completely idiotic. Its your anti-bullshit card. People obsess over pack rat, without realizing that demon kills them just as quickly.

Duress Main: Very good against jund planeswalkers. Decent against rabble, GW and the mirror. Pretty bad against MonoU.

SB: The sideboard really only has one interesting decision. Either you respect Rabble Red (and play 3 drownn) or you use those slots to beat up on Midrange Green decks or GW. On Modo I saw barely any GW all week and the dealers were sold out of Legion Loyalists. So I decided on 3 drowns.


Erebos is an awful card. Only good against UW and then often just turns on Deicide.
The second last breath, LBZ and BBoV are the cards you want to beat GW.
You don’t really need to sideboard in the mirror.

The only mistake in deck construction was the Whip of Erebos. It should probably just be an interactive spell or a bloodbaron. I have never liked Whip in MonoB or Bg. But because this was my first time playing 3 obzdaddy, I decided to try it. Since BBD and Ben Friedman were clearly on board, I figured it might be better in BW than the previous MonoB versions I was more familiar with. I only drew it g1 twice and cast it once (vs Hayne and I lost).  I included it to try and be better against UW (since I was cutting connections), but am not sure it does enough.

I side it out versus basically every deck since I am not really interested in racing in any matchup except the mirror.

WMCQ:
Bye
W - MonoU
W - Jund PW
W - UW

W - UW
W - Br
W - Jund PW
Draw
Draw (I couldn’t play for seed because I got paired against a friend).  This would come back to bite me because I would be on the draw vs GW in the semis (which probably swings matchup by ~10-20%).

QF: Beat GW on play.
SF: Lose GW on the draw.