The Apprentice's Workshop - Episode 6

The Apprentice's Workshop

KrazyCaley

19 February 2013

2532 views

The Apprentice's Workshop

In which we take a look at a community deck that has asked for our help, and tune it up a little. First of all, I take a look at it and suggest some changes. However, I am but one man, with a very peculiar style at that, and so the best medicine comes in the comments below when you all start tossing out some suggestions. Basically this is a hyper-charged version of doing what we do all the time on this site, which is take a look at each others' decks and soup them up. The only real limitation I abide by is to try and minimize the cash cost of the deck by not using ultra-expensive cards unless absolutely necessary.

The deck

Today we have a look at Mono Bracer Control by dcarpntr. You can click on the decklist if you want, but just to prevent you from having to click the mouse at all, you lazy bastard, let's republish it here.

Creatures (18):

2x Bloodline Keeper  ^Flip

2x Dark Impostor

4x Pack Rat

4x Ravenous Rats

3x Tavern Swindler

3x Typhoid Rats

Instants (5):

3x Murder

2x Tribute to Hunger

Enchantments (2)

2x Underworld Connections

Sorceries (6)

1x Immortal Servitude

1x Increasing Ambition

3x Mutilate

1x Sever the Bloodline

Planeswalkers (3):

1x Liliana of the Dark Realms

2x Liliana of the Veil

Artifacts (2):

2x Illusionist's Bracers

Land (24):

24x Swamp

Sideboard:

2x Appetite for Brains

2x Curse of Death's Hold

2x Duress

1x Mutilate

2x Pithing Needle

1x Sever the Bloodline

2x Tormod's Crypt

3x Witchbane Orb

The deck's idea

What is this standard deck's idea? From its description, it "uses Pack Rat and Illusionist's Bracers to take the game over. Most other creatures in the deck have synergy with the bracers as well."

So we have a black bracer deck, basically. With that in mind, let's evaluate the deck as it currently stands.

Weaknesses

1. Generally, the deck is spread a little thin, which I would say is the most common weakness for a Magic deck. This deck is trying to do a little bit of everything, and in the process is watering down its main idea a little too much. Let's get into some specifics.

2. There are numerous creatures that either do not work with Illusionist's Bracers at all, or else have suspect abilities. We should at least consider their presence in the deck. The suspect creatures are:

   a - Ravenous Rats. Usually found in discard decks, RR here does not work with Bracers. He's clearly really here to pump Pack Rat and make our opponents discard, of course, which may indeed be a worthy purpose, but we should consider whether this is more important than having another creature that works with bracers.

   b- Typhoid Rats. Here to pump the Pack Rat and provide defense, but again, utterly useless with the bracers. This card isn't necessarily a cut, as it is an excellent defensive creature, but we need to carefully consider possible alternatives.

   c- Tavern Swindler is all too appropriate a name. Without a Krark's Thumb in standard for us to cheat, the Swindler might as well just be a 2/2 for 2; her ability is going to hurt us as much as it helps us, plus we're going to have to put a bunch of resources into casting her, etc. I am strongly inclined to cut this card.

Our other creatures fit in well and are very nasty when hooked up to the Bracers; let's leave them alone for now.

1. Some of the removal in this deck bears questioning. Namely:

   a - Mutilate is very lethal indeed in this 24-swamp deck, but it will kill our own creatures just as dead as it'll kill theirs, rendering it of very limited use.

   b - A singleton copy of Sever the Bloodline seems a little confusing: what purpose does this serve, and could it be better served in another way? Probably we're worried about tokens with this deck, but there are better answers.

   c - Our spot removal includes 3x Murder and 2x Tribute to Hunger. Tribute to Hunger seems a little out of place here; it is really most valuable in a deck that can ensure that its opponent will only have one creature out to sacrifice. Tribute to Hunger goes greatly down in efficiency as our opponents get more creatures out. Probably we would prefer some more targeted removal in this deck to the tribute, but other than Murder itself, mono-black removal is a little suspect these days.

2. Other cards in the deck seem a little scattered about. We have three Lilianas of two different kinds, a couple of Underworld Connections thrown in, and only two copies of the central card, Illusionist's Bracers. Immortal Servitude is here in one copy, and the builder says it's here to retrieve a bunch of creatures after a Mutilate or other wrath. This is plausible, but very clunky and a bit inefficient. We can't really rely on this strategy at all with only one copy, either. There is one copy of Increasing Ambition as well. This card is a good general-purpose card for any black deck, but it will have to justify its place as being better than possible alternatives.

Recommendations

Generally, my instinct with this deck is to really focus it in on Illusionist's Bracers, a potentially very dangerous artifact that our opponents won't really feel threatened by as the deck currently stands. Three of our creatures, constituting eight total cards, are really worthwhile with the Bracers. I want to increase that number. If we must, we will sacrifice some of Pack Rat's supporting rat pack, as he can get out of hand by himself if need be.

I also want to generally tighten up the deck and make it more deadly against certain matchups by sacrificing a little versatility. Generally, decks, especially competitive standard decks, should be REALLY GOOD at what they do at the cost of not being really good at as much different stuff. A deck that tries to do too many things will do none of them well, and that's a very bad thing. Let's dig into some specifics:

First, let's take a look at these creatures. The first thing I did is search Gatherer for standard-legal rats, to see if any of them have activated abilities we care about. Alas, there were none. So I expanded my search to black and colorless creatures generally, looking only for ones with activated abilities that I considered remotely decent. Here's what I found:

Bloodflow Connoisseur - Has some synergy with Pack Rat, but we'll need a lot of Bracers to do anything but just cancel each other out. Meh.

Brain Weevil - Really expensive, and by the time we actually managed to hook this guy up with the Bracers, our opponents might not HAVE four cards left. Possible, but again, meh.

Chronomaton - Intriguing, and nice and cheap, to boot. This is a very good one-drop with the bracers - it can potentially be incredibly dangerous later if our opponent doesn't stop it, and if our opponent does stop it, no harm done. The only annoying thing is that it's not ideal against aggro decks since it has to tap to grow, but that's a minor drawback. Let's add it to our potential list.

Deathrite Shaman - Oh yeah. This bad boy is always good news, and he has THREE potential things for us to copy.

Evernight Shade - Ye olde temporary pumper. A little more survivable, but much more expensive.

Gateway Shade - More standard-issue pumping shade business. Would require us to use gates.

Griselbrand - Fourteen cards is probably a little bit of overkill.

Liliana's Shade - Another temporary pumping shade.

Skirsdag Flayer - Very good ability, but hard to pay the cost. Still, by himself, he kills two targeted creatures with the bracers. It takes 9 mana spread out across a couple turns though, which is pretty distasteful.

Skirsdag High Priest - Now THAT'S an ability worth copying. Alas, the conditional nature of the ability makes it REALLY hard for us to actually use it.

Xathrid Gorgon - A very nice creature, but very expensive and a little redundant with Dark Impostor. Still, her effect is crushing against other creature decks, especially with Bracers. Worthy of strong consideration.

All right, so the champions of that group seem to be Chronomaton, Deathrite Shaman, and Xathrid Gorgon. Let's add in 3x Chronomaton, 4x Deathrite Shaman, and let's say just the 2x Xathrid Gorgon to keep our curve lean. I think we should also go up to 4x on the absolutely-brutal Bloodline Keeper  ^Flip and 3x on Dark Impostor. To make room, we can cut the Ravenous Rats, Tavern Swindler, and Typhoid Rats, leaving us with two more creatures as we started with.

The best thing about our creature base right now is that it is pretty cheap, but still very lethal if left unchecked. Any one of the creatures above is really nasty when equipped with Illusionist's Bracers, and can potentially swing the game our way, and yet they're mostly reasonably-priced, mana-wise.

Kill Spells

First of all, Mutilate has got to go. Nine times out of ten with this deck, we are going to wish it was a targeted kill spell instead. Let's cut it, and along with it, let's cut the one copy of Immortal Servitude, whose only real purpose was to recover from our own Mutilates. This leaves us with four free slots. Let's use one of them to go up to four copies of the always-invaluable Murder.

Tribute to Hunger will justify itself if we can add in a few more kill spells, so let's leave it for now. In fact, let's add a copy of it, and then two copies of another kill spell. Our plausible options are Devour Flesh, Ultimate Price, and Victim of Night. Victim of Night is not the best kill spell in today's metagame, but Ultimate Price is quite servicable, and Devour Flesh also works well since we have a lot of kill spells. Between those two, it's a matter of style. For myself, I prefer Devour Flesh, but your mileage may vary.

Sever the Bloodline will primarily be useful against token decks. Our author also points out that it can be reused once discarded with Pack Rat, which is a valid point. Still, with many other kill spells now in place, it is probably a card best used elsewhere. In fact, let's use this extra copy to go up to 3x Illusionist's Bracers, which is, at a minimum, what we need for this deck.

We now have a more precision-guided set of kill spells, and more importantly, ones that won't hurt ourselves in the process.

Everything Else

I like Underworld Connections in this and in most black decks. It has much greater rewards than Sign in Blood, and we have enough kill spells to afford a little bit of the patience it requires. I am inclined to leave it alone or perhaps add a copy if opportunity allows.

The Planeswalkers are a little confusing. Liliana of the Dark Realms makes a lot of sense for this deck. Even if we don't NEED swamps, we can discard them to Pack Rat, and of course Lily D's other two abilities are always nice. Liliana of the Veil, on the other hand, grinds a bit when mixed the rest of the deck. Her +1 is not something we generally want to do at all, her -2 is nice, but not really necessary given other cards. Her -6 is, as ever, filthy. Still, I'm not sure she's worth it. Let's adjust the planeswalkers to 2x Liliana of the Dark Realms on her own, leaving us with another free spell slot that I'll use to offset the extra creatures we got into up above.

This leaves us with Increasing Ambition, which again we should probably ditch in favor of the extra creatures above. It's generally useful to almost any black deck, but we're just not getting good enough value out of it here.

This leaves us with one very important question: is 24 Swamps enough? Our curve has a little bit more oomph at both ends; we added in a lot of one-cost creatures, but we also made a our Planeswalkers a bit more expensive, and we added Xathrid Gorgon. Illusionist's Bracers decks are generally very mana-hungry, and our activated abilities are pricey. I think that 24 will suffice, though, given that we really just need to get to Murder and Tribute to Hunger to prolong the game long enough for Liliana of the Dark Realms to come out and fix our mana problems if we still have them. Even if we get a bit stalled, which we occasionally will with this deck, we can put the mana into Deathrite Shaman and Chronomaton.

Sideboard

Let's have a look at this sideboard. First, I'm going to cut Mutilate for the same reasons I cut it from the mainboard, Sever the Bloodline because there are better ways to do what it does, and the 3x Witchbane Orb because that card is very pricey for its limited effect.

We're well-equipped now against creatures as well, so let's switch over to 4x Duress instead of splitting our discard spells between 2x Duress and 2x Appetite for Brains. Duress will do the best job of compensating for our deck's weaknesses, thus why we're using it and cutting Appetite. Our deck is going to be weakest against control decks, so 4x Duress will help us a great deal.

Curse of Death's Hold is a brutal anti-token killer. Let's put in another copy of it since we have a bit of space. Reasonable Magic players can disagree on whether it or Illness in the Ranks should occupy this slot; both are excellent cards. I prefer Curse, myself, but in no case should you have both, at least not in this sideboard.

Let's do the same for Pithing Needle, which is incredibly effective in a ton of matchups, going up to 3x of it. Tormod's Crypt is still useful, but less and less so as time goes on, and 2x is probably quite enough of it.

This leaves us with three open spots. What to use them on?

Well, we might consider Sepulchral Primordial or Rise from the Grave for use against decks with big fatties. They would net us many a Thragtusk after we killed it, and would also serve us well against reanimators. Alas, both these cards are a bit pricey and we might hesitate to make our deck that heavy.

What is our deck weakest against? Hm. Against big fatty decks we already have pretty good answers in the form of large amounts of targeted removal to tide us over until our Illusionist's Bracers shenanigans take over the game. Fast aggro decks aren't too much of a worry since we have lots of small creatures, especially the Chronomaton, which can be pumped as the aggro threats grow. We also have plenty of kill spells, once again.

Really the problem is going to be control decks. Counterspells we don't care too much about since we're faster than they are, but we do care about removal, as we're a little sensitive to it. We do have Duress. Alas, Memoricide has cycled out and Slaughter Games requires red mana.

Glaring Spotlight is perhaps a good idea. It's as close as we can get in black to protecting our creatures, and it has the added advantage of giving us a huge weapon against decks that run hexproof creatures, which are actually pretty numerous. Let's add in 3x of those and at least see how often we board it in.

And that's it! Let's see where we ended up.

KrazyCaley's Recommended Build (60 cards)

Creatures (19)

3x Chronomaton

4x Deathrite Shaman

3x Dark Impostor

4x Bloodline Keeper  ^Flip

4x Pack Rat

1x Xathrid Gorgon

Instants (9)

4x Murder

3x Tribute to Hunger

2x Devour Flesh

Enchantments (2)

2x Underworld Connections

Planeswalkers (2)

2x Liliana of the Dark Realms

Artifacts (4)

4x Illusionist's Bracers

Land (24)

24x Swamp

Sideboard

4x Duress

3x Curse of Death's Hold

3x Pithing Needle

2x Tormod's Crypt

3x Glaring Spotlight

Now we have a leaner, meaner deck that abuses Illusionist's Bracers as badly as any black deck can, can kill enemy creature threats fairly reliably, and can develop some nice card advantage while still being able to use Pack Rat. The sideboard is well-equipped to slam control decks, token/weenie decks, decks that use hexproof creatures, and has some limited utility against reanimators/flashbackers.

That's what I think, but of course, the deckbuilder really wants to hear from you! Post your thoughts in the comments below! If you want your deck featured in this space, let me know on my wall (KrazyCaley!)