Tournament Report: Laughing Dragon 1k - 10th Place (49 Players)


Event List:

4x Boarding Party
4x Creative Technique
4x Maelstrom Wanderer
3x Aurora Phoenix
2x Sweet-Gum Recluse
2x Let the Galaxy Burn
1x Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

4x Sandstone Needle
4x Saprazzan Skerry
4x Hickory Woodlot
4x Ancient Tomb
4x City of Traitors
4x Dwarven Ruin
4x Otawara, Soaring City
3x Crystal Vein
2x Sulfur Vent
2x Havenwood Battleground
2x Gemstone Cavern
2x Karakas
1x Mountain

Sideboard:

4x Pyrokinesis
4x Maddening Hex
2x Boom Pile
2x Pithing Needle
2x Leyline of the Void
1x Aeve, Progenitor Ooze


Round 1 (Red Painter):

Round one was against Heather, a local I know from the Card Kingdom Weeklies. Unfortunately, this means she knows what I’m likely on as I’ve been focusing on this brew for a few months now and I haven’t been quiet about it.

Game 1 I win with a quick combo without much interesting interaction that I can recall.

Game 2 I keep a hand with Gemstone Cavern and she drops an early Thorn of Amethyst into Painter’s Servant naming blue. Before my 3rd turn I tap Gemstone Caverns, Sandstone Needle, and a colorless Sol-Land to channel Otawara and bounce the Thorn. She responds by red-blasting my colorless Sol-Land. After the game she’ll note that this may have been a mistake and she should have gone for the Sandstone Needle, but was more concerned at the time with the more “permanent” mana-source. I agree with her assessment since colors are often a bigger weak point than ‘access-to-land’ with my 40-land-but-fetchless manabase. For context, Aurora Phoenix, which is the only spell I have in hand at the time, requires double-red pips. The good news is I topdeck a Creative Technique which is castable off a single red-pip. The bad news is that I don’t have another Untapped Sol Land to go off on my Turn 3 so I play another ETB-Tapped Sol-Land and pass the turn back where she redeploys Thorn of Amethyst. My turn 4 I get up to 7 mana despite the Sol-Land being blown up and I chain out a couple beaters through the Thorn. With Emrakul still in the deck providing one layer of grindstone insurance I’m assuming this is going to be a fair game and I soon do another “short chain” through the Thorn for 3 more beaters including Maelstrom Wanderer and she scoops.

I’m 1-0.

Round 2 (Jund Smog):

Game 1 I win with a quick combo without much interesting interaction that I can recall, although the first card I demonstrate him into is Witherbloom Apprentice so I’m quite conscious that there is some small chance that I demonstrate him into Chain of Smog while I continue to combo. I demonstrate anyways, reasoning I need to make sure I have haste or an extra turn to ensure he can’t combo me back on his turn with his new Apprentice.

Game 2 I keep a hand with Gemstone Cavern on my opponent goes from Turn 1 Thoughtseize to Turn 2 Golgari-Magecraft-Combo-Guy whose name I don’t remember. I play an untapped land on Turn 2 so that I have 4 mana up. Turn 3 he goes for the Chain of Smog on himself and I Otawara-bounce the combo-creature back to his hand in response. When he reverses the Chain of Smog back on me I keep Sol Land + Cascade Threat and discard the other two cards, untap, and combo kill him on my Turn 3.

I’m 2-0.

Round 3 (Blue-Red Delver):

Game 1 he wastelands me twice but he’s not putting on much of a clock until his 3rd or 4th turn so I just combo kill him on my Turn 5 without much he can do. The combo chain starts off a little weak though (Creativity into Creativity without intervening Cascaders), so – given that he’s expressed confusion as to what I’m doing – I pull out the Storm Counter I use for the sideboard Progenitor Ooze and start keeping track of storm. This causes him to decline casting a Dragonrage Channeler that I Technique him into which I figure is one less blocker if I variance very poorly. Rest of the chain goes fine though.

Game 2 he knows what’s up now. He keeps on 7, I eat an early wasteland, and he races to a 6/6 Murktide. Alongside DRC he swings in for 7 taking me down from 17 to 10 while I’m still on 4 or 5 mana. I start the turn on 10 facing down 7 damage and two options. I can play an untapped Sol-Land and combo off this turn. Alternatively, I can play an ETB-Tapped Masques Sol-Land and play for a hardcast Maelstrom Wanderer the following turn. Given how eagerly he kept his opening hand I assume he has to have at least two pieces of interaction, and I’ve already seen a bolt (and I believe two wastelands), so I reason that the best play is to risk death on his turn to overpower his interaction on my next untap. Even Flusterstorm or Double-Force of Will shouldn’t but a sufficient answer to Maelstrom Wanderer so I bet on him not having another bolt/wasteland rather than not having Double-Force/Flusterstorm and pass the turn. On his turn he hydroblasts my land to achieve delirium and attacks me down to 1. On my turn I untap, play a land, and cast Maelstrom Wanderer. After a little chaining from the first cascade I end up with a Cascader and an Aeve, Progenitor Ooze with 4 ‘oozlings’. I’m over 20 power now but without any other legendary hits I’m still reliant on the Maelstrom Wanderer resolving for haste. When I go to resolve the 2nd Cascade and hit a Creative Technique, with no other unresolve cascade triggers on the stack, he makes his move and double-counters to stop the chain. Unfortunately for him that means that Maelstrom Wanderer resolves and I already have enough to win this turn. We talk after the game and I point this out to him, but he says he felt he just had to “stop the chain”. I concur that letting me continue to chain was still a major threat, but it was still non-deterministic and there was always the chance I’d have to keep demonstrating to build up enough and demonstrate him into a lightning bolt.

I’m 3-0.

Round 4 (Bug Reanimator Brew):

Game 1: He entombs a threat so I put him on some sort of reanimation deck, but the BUG Manabase reads to me as more “Worldgorger Dragon Blue Midrange” than classic reanimator. I combo kill him on Turn 3 without much resistance.

Game 2: He Thougtseizes the only spell in my opening hand (Sweet-Gum Recluse) but I draw another before Turn 3. On his 2nd turn he plays Baleful Strix. On my Turn 3 I play Aurora Phoenix cascading into Creative Technique and I demonstrate. With the demonstration triggers on the stack he double-forces my combo so I resolve just the 5/3 flyer, which isn’t too impressive eyeing a Baleful Strix from across the table. He reanimates my Sweet-Gum Recluse and its trigger make it a 3/6 with reach. I’m silently amused by how well one of my unplayed draft threats lines up against my other unplayed draft threat. Double-Forcing didn’t leave him with a lot of other resources though, so a couple turns later I draw another spell, cast it, and win the game.

I’m 4-0. Since he’s also playing a deck he brewed himself and we played at Table 1 going into Round 4 of a 49-player event, we make some sarcastic comments about the inferiority of “net deckers”.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Between Rounds: So I’m talking with people between rounds. 1MrLee (twitch name) tells me that I should be able to draw into Top 8 at this point, which gets me noticeably excited as the attention of a larger event Top 8 could potentially further my goals of getting Creative Technique onto MTGO, as I originally brewed the deck as a donation list for streamers but started playing it myself after finding out the card wasn’t ‘in digital’. He runs me though a hand-wavey version of the math with a calculator. The math I’m not doing in this moment, however, that I should be, is calculating how many other undefeated players there are in a 49 player tournament. It’s a pretty quick calculation to do, and the answer is 2. This is the math I should have been doing. Looking at the other players at the top tables I’m pretty happy with my odds against all of them except for one, and I know he’ll draw with me in his own interest.

Before the round begins I end up chatting with another local I know, Lauren Mulligan, and I mention that I’m glad I dodged her because she’s the hardest matchup that I know of in the room, as she rarely sleeves up cardboard without Life from The Loam. I can handle a couple wastelands from a tempo deck, but my weird little brew can’t really do a lot against an infinite number of wastelands coming online before I get to 5/6 mana (which is why the sideboard has two “desperation pithing needles”; I’d run more, but they can brick the combo chaining). She confirms that I’m safe from her evil clutches because she’s 2-2, after hitting a run of 3 combo players. I ask her what combos she’s run into, and I note that I feel pretty good against two of them, but I don’t think I can beat Oops All Spells.
Anyways, I’m just sitting happy getting ready to draw into the Top 8.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Round 5 (Oops All Spells):

So, to my surprise (because I didn't do the math and overestimated the number of undefeated players), I get paired down. This means my opponent has no incentive to draw, and I don’t recognize them from the top tables so I don’t know what they’re on.

Game 1 I lose.

Game 2 we both Mulligan to 5. I keep Leyline, and the 4 cards I need to go off on Turn 3. After I pass on Turn 2, they Force of Vigor my Leyline and go off.

I’m 4-1.

Round 6 (Classic Ruby Storm):

Game 1 I lose the die roll and he kills me on his Turn 3 before I have a chance to kill him on my Turn 3. In retrospect, losing the die roll was a big mistake.

Game 2 he leads with Ruby Medallion Turn 1. I play a Maddening Hex on him Turn 2. After Taking 12 damage from the Hex after casting a few spells he seems to realize he cannot combo under it and starts attacking with Birgi. I hardcast a Maelstrom Wanderer and he scoops.

Game 3 I keep another hand with a Turn 2 Maddening Hex. On his turn 2 he wheels both of us into new hands. This hand doesn’t have Maddening Hex, so the shields are now down. It does have a cascader though, so the one glimmer of hope is that I should theoretically win if I manage to get a Turn 3, as it will either combo or get Maddening Hex. I don’t get a Turn 3.

I drop down to 4-2, and I end up 10th/49 in the Tournament.

Closing Thoughts:

I remain in favor with the most recent changes I’ve made to the deck, but there are a couple areas I suspect I’m still being sup-optimal.

The spell package has been trimmed to 20, which allows for 40 lands. This makes the deck weaker to Thoughtseize but more consistent overall, and I don’t think Thoughtseize is a big threat. At the current time this is as trim as I think I can make it without inducing other problems.

There are two lessons that I picked up from the list that Andrea Mengucci posted after seeing someone run the deck at a European tournament and also just miss out on Top 8. The first is that 4 Maelstrom Wanderer and 1 Emrakul is sufficient and therefore almost certainly better than the splits I was running previously. To be completely honest, 4 Maelstrom Wanderer and 0 Emrakul may actually be correct, but at this moment I like having the Emrakul in the mix, particularly with the uptick of Painter decks that I’m seeing in paper. Maelstrom Wanderer is simply more integral to the deck, the haste it provides, the fact that it is a chain-starter itself, the way it further increases the decks resiliency to interaction, and it’s even a red card for relevant pitch spells. The original 3/3 split was naïve, and hitting a 2nd Maelstrom Wanderer isn’t actually a problem as the additional cascade triggers will prevent the duplicate legendary from reducing the value of the chain. You want to hit Maelstrom Wanderer so much, and even want it from hand some times, that it’s worth running all 4 copies and is yet another reason to keep the total spell-count in the deck as trim as you can manage.

The thing that I’ve learned from other players is the value of Let the Galaxy Burn. It’s not a threat and it increases the weight of taxing effects when you have to combo through them, but … it’s more maindeck answers to Archon of Emeria, and it’s one of the easier 6-Drops to cast, so even with their drawbacks in mind they’ve been great. As shown above I’m currently on 2 while the list that inspired me to move towards them was on 4. I may be wrong here, but 2 is the most I feel I can get away with since I don’t want more than 20 spells and I want enough creature density to still win when I have to play scrappy fair-games, as came up in the tournament above. It’s a good card, but 20 spell slots isn’t a lot to work with.

Another change I’ve made recently is to focus the creature threat more on the manabase than focusing the manabase on the suite of creature threats. This is why there are 3 Aurora Phoenix and 2 Sweet-Gum Recluse, despite Aurora Phoenix being both easier for the deck to cast and a more aggressive beater in smaller chains. The least flexible parts of the deck can be found in the manabase. If you want Masque Lands, which this deck could not function without, then you’re kind of committed to only the first 4 being red. Given the number of colorless lands already in the deck, and the incentive for the opponent to play towards maximum numbers of wasteland, you need some non-red 6-drops. Moving the deck from the original tri-color split to a “red version” has increased its consistency, but given the nature of the manabase I feel like 100% red 6-drops is wrong. You do want some starters that you can cast off of Hickory Woodlot + Saprazzan Skerry + Ancient Tomb, for example. The deck still leans red because the spells automatically bias towards red, which incentivizes the manabase to move further towards red, but the manabase isn’t able to make the full journey to a mono-red deck so I don’t think the spells suite should either; just primarily red. I’m currently very happy with the 20 maindeck spells.

If there is a current shortcoming in the maindeck, it’s probably the 2 copies of Karakas. There’s a very strong chance that one or both of them should just be more Gemstone Caverns. I initially moved away from Gemstone Caverns after Jarvis recommended them because they were a 5th or 7th mana in a deck that so often just wanted to cast a 6-drop. However, when I moved them back in after increasing to 40 lands they’ve just proven themselves time and again. Even when they don’t give you the Turn 2 Creative Technique, they alleviate the burden on the deck for an untapped Sol-Land on 3 and they fix blue mana for a more consistent Turn 2 Otawara-channel-bounce.

The sideboard I have some mixed feelings on.

Pyrokinesis was a recommendation of a local who borrowed the deck from me for a weekly. I didn’t think of it first because I’m dumb, but it’s a great add, avoids muddying the combo chains the way Fury does, and really helps make the initiative matchup viable. The 4 Maddening Hex have also proven to be an excellent Plan B in more matchups than they were originally intended for.

As weird and silly as they look, the Boompiles have pulled their weight so far. If you play them Turn 2 they have a 75% chance of wiping all permanents from the board before your next chance to combo and can also buy you time in the process. Obviously the card is not ideal because it has a random element and a CMC of 4, but it’s colorless in a deck without fixing, enchantment removal with a primarily colorless-and-red manabase, an incidental anti-aggro card in an aggro-leaning metagame, and a catch-all hatepiece-answer in a deck without card filtering for the ‘appropriate’ answer. Worst case scenario, if you Cascade Threat into Boompile, you have a 50% shot of wiping the board and dropping a medium-fat creature which should buy you the time to combo again. They’re undeniably clunky, but with a combo deck so naturally resilient to hand-based interactions, 4-mana colorless board wipes have so far been worthwhile in otherwise problematic matchups with an abundance of hate-pieces. Combined with Pyrokinesis that does not clutter up cascade chains in the same way and maindeck Let the Galaxy Burn, Archons of Emeria have been much less scary of late.

The 2 Pithing Needles so far have been worthwhile, but they are admittedly taking a couple horrible matchups (the mox diamond, wasteland, loam style ones) and promoting them to … winnable but bad matchups. Without some very specific cards printed in the future fair green decks will always be one of the two unavoidable weaknesses of this archetype. Currently the needles are winning me enough matches that I would otherwise lose that I feel incentivized to keep them. However, “upgrading matchups to only be bad” is definitely questionable at its core if there are better ways to use these slots.

The 2 Leyline of the Void is highly questionable. They’re clearly insufficient against Oops All Spells, which means they’re just here for Reanimator. I’ve actually done quite well against reanimator to date since when they combo they generally shred your hand except for the lands and pass the turn, and all I need to win is to plays lands and cast any spell I draw, which goes over the top of them. I can’t really put in 4 Leyline if I want my combo to reliably good against them, though, since they’ll combo first. So I’m … what, buying 10% to 15% matchup increase against specifically reanimator, taking it from a bad-ish matchup to a ‘meh’ matchup, at the cost of … 2 sideboard slots? I’m probably wrong in doing this, but as of my typing these words those are still the 2 cards that in those sleeves upstairs.

Finally, the Aeve, Progenitor Ooze I’m unsure of. I originally put him in here because when Bob Huang offered to test the deck for me for a bit he specifically warned me about Delver siding in Surgical Extraction and countering the paper copy of technique and then extracting it as I start the chain. However, I keep boarding it in against Delver and they keep not doing that. It … hasn’t actually hurt me at all by ending a chain too short as of yet, but I keep paying a cost to counter a move that I’m considering optimal from my opponent, and they keep not making that move. Whether that’s their build, or their actual play, or unfamiliarity with what I’m doing, how long do I keep paying the cost to rent a safe in a building no one is breaking into? Isn’t the old adage that you lose a game of magic by being one level below your opponent or exactly two levels above them? I’m still happy to keep oozing people for now, but it’s starting to feel a little bit like a “two levels above them” thing. I don’t know … maybe those Delver players will read this, and then start going for surgical extraction thinking I’m no longer doing this, and *then* I’ll get them. Maybe.

Currently Considering:
2 Karakas -> 2 Gemstone Caverns
2 Leyline of the Void -> 2 Other Anti-Combo Cards

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More places I've seen the deck popping-up recently:

Andrea Mengucci mentioning it "just missing" Top 8 at a large European Tournament:

https://youtu.be/tjcw1FgUMi0?t=382

(Amusingly, at least for me, he ends up attributing the origin of the deck as "[he thinks] some small Japanese Tournament")

It also appeared on ELD's Time Vault Games a couple months back: