{"id":1209,"date":"2019-08-09T00:45:28","date_gmt":"2019-08-08T22:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/premodernmagic.com\/blog\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2019-08-10T07:41:19","modified_gmt":"2019-08-10T05:41:19","slug":"deck-archetypes-in-premodern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/premodernmagic.com\/blog\/deck-archetypes-in-premodern\/","title":{"rendered":"Deck Archetypes in Premodern: A Closer Look at Swedish Nationals 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this article I do an overview of different Premodern deck archetypes, using the decks from the Swedish Nationals as examples.<\/em><\/p>\n

In my report from the Swedish Nationals<\/a>, I showed the top 8 decks and commented particularly on the breakout Devourer Combo deck and the Dementia Drake deck. Aleksi V\u00e4\u00e4n\u00e4nen also wrote a deck tech about the GW Tron deck<\/a> that Sakari Castr\u00e9n played. Erkka Jouste and runner-up Ville Kaukoranta also wrote an in-depth report<\/a> from the tournament, covering their experiences with UW Standstill, Full English Breakfast and, umm, what they had for breakfast. But there were, of course, other interesting decks played as well, in the rest of the top 8 and among the remaining 38 players. I’ve also received quite a few comments asking to see a particular deck, so in order to please all of you netdeckers and statistics nerds, this post includes two appendices with all 46 deck lists and the final Swiss standings, showing the performance of each player and deck. If you didn’t know already, the decks look best when browsing in desktop mode, in which case they are shown as pictures.<\/p>\n

As an aside, this is enabled by an online deck list submission system through the website (courtesy of the web wizard Mattias “Slanfan” Berggren), which we tried out for the first time in this tournament. This system provided some validation for the players, since it was only possible to select Premodern legal cards<\/a>, and there was a warning when trying to submit fewer than 60 cards in the main deck etc. From an organizer’s perspective, it made it possible for us to show the decks on the stream<\/a>, and it makes it possible for me to push the decks to a blog post like this, without having to manually decipher and input a huge pile of hand-written paper lists. Yay! The whole thing worked smoothly, so the plan is to use the same system for the European Championships in October.<\/p>\n

Deck archetypes in Premodern<\/h2>\n

In order to show the forest rather than the trees, I’ve classified the decks into five broad archetypes: aggro, control, prison, combo and midrange. This classicification isn’t original per se, but this is how I interpret the archetypes in a Premodern context.<\/p>\n

The main plan of a<\/strong>ggro<\/strong> decks is to play cheap threats and reduce the opponent’s life total to zero as quickly as possible. These decks don’t care much about “value”, i.e. card advantage and other resources like one’s own life total. A Suicide Black player is happy lose a card by playing a Dark Ritual<\/a> to get some creatures out quickly and doesn’t mind taking damage from cards like Carnophage<\/a> and Flesh Reaver<\/a>, as long as the opponent can be hit even harder. Likewise, a Sligh player is happy to lose a card by directing a Lightning Bolt<\/a> to your face.<\/p>\n

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Aggro decks could still deliver some value or staying power, e.g. in the form of Goblin Ringleader<\/a> or Cursed Scroll<\/a>, but it’s just not the main plan. In Premodern, we expect aggro\u00a0decks to typically win around turn four or five in goldfish mode, i.e. if they’re not hindered. Turn three kills are uncommon but possible, if you get really good hands with cards like Hatred<\/a>, Fireblast<\/a> and Goblin Lackey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Control<\/strong> decks, on the other hand, go for a longer game and care a lot about value. They are happy to play mana efficient reactive one-for-ones like Counterspell<\/a>, Swords to Plowshares<\/a> and Disenchant<\/a>. As long as they stay alive, they will eventually get ahead with draw spells like Standstill<\/a>, Fact or Fiction<\/a> and Accumulated Knowledge<\/a>. Board sweepers like Wrath of God<\/a> can gain card advantage but also regain “tempo” at the same time, in the sense that your opponent has spent more mana and turns summoning the creatures that are destroyed.<\/p>\n

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Prison<\/strong> decks are similar to control decks in that they also go for a long, controlling game. But rather than relying on more or less situational one-for-one answers, they gain control by shutting down the opponent’s plan completely, with powerful reactive cards such as Solitary Confinement<\/a> and\u00a0Ensnaring Bridge<\/a>. Hard core prison strategies shut down the opponent’s mana, with cards like Winter Orb<\/a> and Mishra’s Helix<\/a>. Both the soft and the hard prison elements create indirect card advantage, by making your opponent’s cards useless. Some of the most powerful prison cards could simultaneously shut down both your opponent’s creatures and mana, like Stasis<\/a>,\u00a0Devastating Dreams<\/a> and Tangle Wire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Prison decks can create very fun games, but that fun is not distributed evenly between the players. Whichever side you’re on, we have to live with the fact that there are quite a few potent prison cards in Premodern. This is in contrast to the the card design philosophy in more recent sets, in which not even a card like Stone Rain<\/a> would get printed.<\/p>\n

Magic is a game full of combos, e.g.\u00a0Thicket Basilisk<\/a> and Lure<\/a>. But jamming these two in your lizard deck doesn’t make it a combo<\/strong> deck, which is instead characterized by that it’s built around a more or less degenerate card combination or engine that wins the game on the spot or within a few turns. An example is the mono-blue Trix deck\u2014it’s only route to victory is by Donate<\/a>‘ing an Illusions of Grandeur<\/a>. Besides the actual combo cards, most combo decks typically include a mix of mana acceleration, card filtration and tutors, e.g. Sapphire Medallion<\/a>, Impulse<\/a> and Intuition<\/a> in Trix.<\/p>\n

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In a nutshell, a deck can be classified as combo if it’s unable to win if the opponent could remove all copies of a certain card from the deck. We could call this the\u00a0Jester’s Cap<\/a> test (pretending that we could grab four instead of three cards).\u00a0Combo decks typically want to be faster than the aggro decks. In Premodern this means being able to win on turn three or four, if undisrupted. However, combo decks may include some amount of disruptive and reactive cards to buy additional time or to protect the combo, e.g.\u00a0Cabal Therapy<\/a> or\u00a0Arcane Denial<\/a>.\u00a0Combo decks don’t care about value, unless it’s drawing cards instrumental for setting up the combo.<\/p>\n

Last, we have the\u00a0midrange<\/strong> decks. I think of this in a broader sense as sort of a residual category, including decks that share characteristics of the other four categories, but without clearly belonging to either one of those (it could thus also include hybrid strategies such as “aggro-control” or “combo-control”). As the name suggests, midrange\u00a0decks typically don’t aim for a quick nor for a very long game. They care about value, to varying degrees. Ideally, they can be flexible and take a controlling role versus aggro decks and an aggressive role versus control decks. They want to play bigger threats than the aggro decks, but the trade-off is that they can’t be too slow versus the control decks. Ravenous Baloth<\/a>\u00a0is a midrange card which illustrates this well. Nantuko Shade<\/a> is another example of a midrange card\u2014it’s cheap to play but its power scales up as the game goes on, making it relevant at all stages of the game. Since the midrange decks are not that fast, they need to include a sufficient amount of disruptive and reactive cards in order to have a chance versus prison and combo decks. Midrange decks can also include a combo package themselves, but it’s not essential to their game plan.<\/p>\n

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Archetype breakdown of the Swedish Nationals<\/h2>\n

The breakdown of the field, according to the broad archetypes outlined above, looks as follows:<\/p>\n