Spoiler Alert: We ran bad at Worlds.
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December 6th 2015 – Final Meeting and the story of our WMC decks
Team Decards (minus Shawn and Obama) met up at Decards stronghold at Summit along with Syed for one last meet-up before we fly off the next day. We did a final count on all the tools we would be needing and finalise our deck selections. After much and much deliberation on testing we were settling on:
Syed – GR Ramp
Wei Han – Abzan Aggro with Cracking Doom
Pang Ming – Esper Dragons
This was to be the main lineup with Atarka Red on the bench to substitute Abzan if required. But more importantly, how did we come to this lineup in the first place?
We had the following lineups set as placeholders and did our testing separately to mix and match. The combinations were:
1. Bant Megamorph, Mardu Dragons, GR Ramp
2. Abzan Aggro, Mardu Dragons, GR Ramp
3. Esper Dragons, Atarka Red / GR Landfall, GR Ramp
The Story of Ramp
Ramp was the obvious “zero-fetch” deck in the format. It was consistent, it was explosive. I piloted it myself to a GPT top 4 finish. Though I didn’t take stock on that result alone, but the deck “auto-pilots” itself and should it not stumble, it can be a big force to be reckoned with.
However, Ramp was no Trojan Horse, in fact it was the big target on everyone’s test gauntlet. Ramp didn’t fair well early on versus Atarka Red and Esper, which would be the main reason why many teams chose to shy away from the deck in the first place. But aside these two, we knew Ramp could hold its own against the rest of the metagame as Ugin and Ulamog were basically lights out. So our process was basically testing and testing versus Red and Esper. Syed did the most work here, trying out various combinations without disrupting the core the deck. In the end, we were in love with a sideboard plan against red, and it show good results. Esper was still a coin toss, but I was hoping people would go for a more consistent 4C Rally deck, which was hopeless versus Ugin.
The Story of Atarka Red
What I loved about Atarka Red – it was fast. It was resilient.
What I didn’t love about Atarka Red – It had poor sideboarded games. It can be easily played around. It ate too many resources (notably fetch lands).
I tested plenty of Atarka Red with Chye for his preparation for Pro Tour BFZ. I knew how good it was. I also knew how bad it was. But for all the positive points, I knew it was going to be the favourite deck coming into the WMC. One of the biggest plus points was it that Atarka Red was a fair deck that you would let your Player #3 pilot. Most super teams had at least two very experienced players so they could easily rely on Pilot #3 to handle the Atarka Red without much supervision.
For the Malaysian team, Syed was the natural choice to pilot such a deck. In fact, Syed did minimal testing on Atarka / RG Landfall due to his familiarity of the archtype and I wanted him to focus more on something new ie the GR Ramp. I strongly believed that if we could harness the Atarka Red matchup across all three decks (no matter how bad it originally looked on paper), we had a shot. It was a gamble.
The Story of Esper Dragons
Esper Dragons was the first deck on my gauntlet. It got chaffed after two days of testing. Crackling Doom murdered it. But weeks later, I realized Crackling Doom was actually hard to fit into a 3 man WMC deck lineup. Many teams realized this too and with a strong GP performance by Team Cabin Crew, Esper Dragons was reintroduced into the lineup.
I had a test run with it in the XPax challenge which I came in second. Loved the list. Wei Han also agreed that Esper Dragons should be the centerpiece in the lineup and we shouldn’t do much to change the core lineup other than several shared cards ie Duress.
The Story of Abzan
At one point it was Abzan Aggro everywhere. Almost identical starting 60 with a metagame sideboard. It was consistent, it was strong. But it also ate 4 Flooded Strands. Wei Han and I agreed that a lineup with Gideon, Siege Rhino and Wingmate Roc would be awesome, only if we could make the manabase work. Wei Han went into the tank.
A week later, we had our manabase. It was heavier on black (which can also activate Warden of the First Tree), but this meant more unreliable turn 4 Gideon. But the deck (now with Bloodstained Mire over Flooded Strand) gained 3 Crackling Doom, a card that didn’t have a home in most WMC decks. And best of all Crackling Doom was Abzan’s best answer to its biggest threat – Dragonlord Ojutai.
Other Stories
I gave myself 10 days to brew. Basically in that 10 days between end of October to early November, I was playing a host of decks online and offline from Mono Red to BW Control to Mardu Tokens to even Sphinx’s Tutelage! Everything worked at some point but most of them were very inconsistent. Mardu Tokens almost came to fruition as the curve of Seeker of the Way into Horderling Outburst into Butcher of the Horde is massive. But the mana was awkward and I couldn’t get any buy-in from my teammates so the deck got shelved.
So in the end, we stuck to our guns for Esper Dragons, Abzan and GR Ramp lineup.
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December 7th – The Journey begins….
Syed, Wei Han and myself flew off on the Monday before the tournament with Raymond only joining us on Wednesday. We gave ourselves one full day of rest and sightseeing and planned to get to work only on Wednesday when we checked in together into the apartment.
Barcelona…. To sum it up in a simple word – Beautiful.
We had a whole day tour ahead of us and the weather was perfect. I won’t be boring anyone with our tour but our highlight of the day was the visit to the home of Lionel Messi – Nou Camp FC Barcelona!
Before we were off, Chye advised us to grab Messi’s shoes as a souvenir. Alas it was just a replica so we had to settle for a cool photo instead.
December 9th – Work time
After some breakfast, Raymond joined us around noon and we checked into the apartment. The apartment… was a delight. It was everything we hoped for and was exactly pictured. I was pleased and we all settled in pretty quickly.
The rest of the day we did three sealed deck practices and game plays. We had two straightforward builds and one not so. We were getting the timings right as we got along and was pretty certain with our abilities to build. The direction was simple:
Wei Han – Devoid or Blue/x
Raymond – Allies or White/x
Me – everything else or Green/x
Wei Han practically crashed after 10 hours straight of testing (and skipped dinner) and after a few more games of standard between Syed and Ray til about 1am, we were off to bed for the eve of the battle.
End of Part 5
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