Roughly a month away before we fly off to Rotterdam. Preparations have been okay and pretty much on schedule, at least for my part. The World Magic Cup format is a lot different compared to last year. Firstly its Modern, meaning we get a lot of advanced time playtesting and just need to pick the best of the bunch from existing archetypes. Secondly, there is that constraint of making it Unified (meaning no deck can share a copy of a non-basic land card, eg. You can’t have both Affinity and Infect as both decks share Inkmoth Nexus), but this constraint also helps narrow the field a lot on basically what are playable combinations, rather than just focused on individual power level of the decks. And lastly, aside from the first three rounds of Day 1 play of Kaladesh Team sealed, its Modern the rest of the way. Meaning from the possible 17 rounds all the way to the Finals, 14 of them will be Modern. So there is a lot of pressure to get this right.
Six weeks or so ago, I mapped out a testing matrix (along with a whole mess of tables etc) to figure out how we, and also other countries, will be able to put together a combination of decks. Bear in mind, WMCQ 2 and WMCQ 3 were both Modern, so the tendency of having those WMCQ champions repeat their decks for WMC are pretty high considering that Modern rewards faith, devotion and lots of practice time in their respective archetype. There are always exceptions to bigger countries such as the Americans and Japanese, but we could expect most of them to be piloting similar decks. Hence we cleared the field into two categories:
Tier 1
Abzan / Jund
Infect / Affinity
Dredge
Naya/Boros Burn
Tier 2
Collected Company decks
Merfolk
Ad Naseum
Boggles
Titanshift / TitanBreach
Bant Eldrazi
Based on our statistics, we fully expect 70% of WMC metagame would comprise a combination of Tier 1 decks. For example you would probably see:
Abzan / Affnity / Naya Burn
Jund / Infect / Dredge
Abzan / Affinity / Dredge
Where the Tier 2 comes in is when (a) it’s the WMCQ champions pet deck (eg. China WMCQ 3 winner was with Ad Naseum) or (b) the teams would like to avoid a potential incoming hate for the Tier 1 strategy or both reasons.
Chye and myself discussed about considering a cohesive strategy as a method of deck selection. For example, we would consider a combination of decks that was (a) not susceptible to graveyard hate and (b) play lots of graveyard hate. This strategy has its pros and cons. The obvious pro would be every deck would be immune to roughly 2-3 sideboard cards coming out of opponents deck and also, all three decks would be capable of knocking out the graveyard deck player in the opposing team. The obvious flaw would be if the opposing team DIDN’T run a graveyard strategy, which basically negates our “advantage” and also may turn into a disadvantage.
Dredge
Hence, the starting point would be to test the best graveyard deck in the format – Dredge. We all knew how powerful Dredge was and it received a very power gasoline card in Catharic Reunion from Kaladesh which so far in testing, is the absolute bonkers. And throughout our testing, Dredge was the real deal, despite the multiple hate cards targeted on its back. To the point the way we’re testing Dredge post board games now is to have a Relic of Progenitus /Grafdiggers Cage or Rest In Peace in your opening hands to see how Dredge fairs in the post-board hate environment. The results were 50/50 or maybe 40/60 in favour of the non-Dredge deck. But that’s % that you ALWAYS have your hate in your starting hand. Dredge will accept these odds any day considering you probably may actually mulligan to oblivion to hunt for that one piece of hate, which may or may not come.
Burn
Burn was very surprising to us. We knew how proactive and brutal burn was, but it never really spiked any major tournaments (aside from GP Indianapolis winner Brandon Burton) or at least recorded consistent Top 8 appearances. Then I realized Burn was kept pinned down regularly by Tier 2 strategies in my list – Boggles and Ad Naseum (both running Leyline of Sanctity) and Collected Company decks (with Kitchen Finks or infinite life combo. Even fringe strategies such as Bant Eldrazi has Chalice of the Void which is not aimed directly at Burn, but its splash effect can pin a Burn deck down. It’s also interesting to note that WMCQ 2 Malaysia had plenty of Burn in the top tables but not so in WMCQ 3. What changed was people adapted to Burn and Affinity as part of their metagame gauntlet and prepared accordingly. Hence while Dredge has a big target on its back, but Burn may just slip through everyone’s radar. When we compared it to the expected Tier 1 metagame table, Burn actually has a shot.
Kaladesh
I was rather busy during Kaladesh pre-release weekend, but I made up for it playing a bunch of Magic Online pre-release sealed. Kaladesh is great so far and quite easy to play as compared to Eldrich Moon where there were tonnes of interactions you needed to be aware off. Kaladesh brought the return of splashing – sometimes not one but even two colours!
Check out my monstrosity here:
But sometimes, things don’t always go according to plan especially when your key Prophetic Prism becomes “Malfunction”-ed.
The irony.
But of course sometimes luck goes your way and you get:
And:
What I’m thankful for this WMC is we got Chye, who is probably the Limited guy you want on your team, to iron out the sealed portion of the WMC. Hence it takes away some of the pressure and allow me to just focus on Modern. We got some way to go and WMC preparation takes a week off next week to work on Standard for the upcoming Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur. In the meantime, lets get set for what likely will be Pro Tour Smugglers Copter aka Airwolf!
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