My MCVII Trip Report + Deck Breakdown: Golgari Henge
Introduction- Trip Report
(First section is a short blog, skip to next for deck analysis)
Wow! My first arena MC was easily the best MTG experience I've had to date. What a wild ride! The event itself had an absurd production value that added to the grandiosity of it all. Put the pro tour I went to in Spain to shame.
Besides the competition, the highlight for me was undoubtedly the people I met. High level competitive magic has an awesome community of players full of unique personalities. Their attitudes weren't remotely predatory or parasitic despite the zero-sum competition dynamic (for you to win, your friend has to lose). Truly great sportsmanship. It was an honor to compete against many players I'd followed and respected for years.
Overall, I was happy with my performance and very happy with my deck choice. Felt like it was the second or third best positioned deck in the room. (Simic Flash was incredibly built).
Went 5-0 on Day 1 and 3-4 on Day 2 for a 66% winrate against slightly unfavorable pairings and 9 MPL players!
Unfortunately, there is a much greater emphasis on day 2 performance. My mediocre performance in day 2 left me with bad tie breakers and out of the top 16. I finished 5th place among the challengers, theoretically missing an invite to the next event. Since Kvartek is taking an MPL contract , it's possible it bumps me up to 4th, but will have to wait and see.
The difference in my mental clarity between day 1 and day 2 was night and day. While I only got about 5.5 hours of sleep before day 1, I got about 1-2 hours of sleep before day 2 and realllly noticed the difference... For my feature match vs Ally, my brain was buzzing. A few times I went to query my brain for an analysis, the answer it returned was "Dunno.. ZZZ" and was forced to rely on my auto-pilot.
Re-watching the coverage I made a critical mistake on my first major decision point in game 1 when I played Questing beast over Vivien on turn 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5fZFquzLaU
3:30
Vivien would have allowed my flyer to get up to 6 points of power the following turn, allowing me to Great Henge into either Regisaur or questing beast. It does basically the same amount of total damage (~1 less), but gives me near guaranteed inevitability and precious life gain of Henge.
Playing Vivien would be slightly worse if Ally top decked land -> murderous rider, but I'd still be in great shape with Dino -> Henge if I ever drew a 5th land.
Even if my mind were 100% I doubt I would have played around triple Swordmaster. However as a general heuristic, sacrificing ~1-2 damage was easily worth the card draw , mana ramp and lifegain of the Great Henge being in play for an extra turn.
Around 20 minutes in, my brain completely crapped out on me. I thought up the plan to play innkeeper pre-combat after +ing Vivien on the Lovestruck beast. But then when I went to execute the plan, I clicked through my attack phase reflexively before playing the innkeeper. These are exactly the type of mistakes I frequently make when sleep deprived, as anyone whos cubed with me long hours can attest to :P
One of the biggest lessons I've taken from this event, is that despite my healthy eating , exercise, and meditation. If I don't sleep, none of that really matters. I need to come into the event knowing that this is a recurring issue and take more drastic steps to improve it. Before my next competition, I plan to get my sleep schedule on a consistent wake up time well before the event start time, so that the competition's schedule becomes second nature.
If I can, I also plan to arrive a day or two earlier to the hotel, so I become more familiar with the sleeping environment.
I also intend to experiment with some more heavy duty solutions (sleeping pills) and see how much sleep I get and how groggy I feel the next day. It may be sub-optimal, but deep sleep and grogginess, may be better than a 50%+ chance of Insomnia.
I'm glad I lost. Insomnia is an issue in my life in general, and this loss gives me greater motivation to manage it smarter.
The event was incredible fun, and will undoubtedly look back on the memory fondly for the rest of my life.
Deck analysis - Golgari Dino Henge
The deck I played was a very interesting one and one I'm quite happy I picked up.
It's fundamentally an aggressive midrange deck, that has a lot of big bodied creatures, a powerful planeswalker to push those creatures through and multiple card draw engines.
It's in a unique position in the format, as it's the only aggressive deck where the bulk of the aggressive draws interact favorably with what Jeskai fires was doing. In testing, my winrate was around 80% against mediocre pilots on Jeskai fires. Jeskai fires forced the aggressive decks out of the format, which made most people at the event to try to go over the top of Fires or beat them via counter magic....
Which was also good for our deck.
Given the 9 days Chris Kvartek and I had to prepare, I'm happy with what we came up with, but I think a hybrid of ours lists is better than each of our lists individually. Chris had abandoned the archetype for Jund most of the final few days, and I was desperately focused on improving the Jund matchup. Eventually I found a way to do it, but in hind sight I sacrificed a bit too much for it. This is why our decklists turned out quite different. Chris played a similar version of the deck he had built early in testing, and I played a deck that had gone deep down a rabbit hole of winning a particular matchup.
More on that later.
I personally over-estimated the presence of Jund/Golgari sacrifice at the event and devoted too much of my sideboard for potential iterations of those lists. Late in testing, I figured out that our deck was the beatdown against the big two decks of the field and leaning on an aggressive gameplan was the way to go... What I didn't anticipate was that our deck was going to be beat down against the entire field!
The only decks where you compete on the value axis against are some variants of control, the mirror and the flash decks.
The two major areas where our decks differed was his list featured less interaction and an increased emphasis on Regsiaur/Henge and he liked paradise druid much more than I did.
Aside on Rotting Regisaur
To understand the direction I want to take the deck, you have to first understand the significance of Rotting Regisaur and it's role in the deck.
The strength of Regisaur in the deck is extremely difficult to evaluate.
There are some gross anti-synergies as well as some busted synergies.
Rotting Regisaur's discard clause offsets the value that Edgewall Innkeeper generates.
With no Vivien or Henge and a single innkeeper, it ends up being quite bad if it can't end the game by itself. The single innkeeper prevents you from being hellbent, and the Regisaur offsets the innkeepers card draw. The raise dead mechanic of order of midnight requires lands to fully leverage, which you are often forced to discard to the Regisaur.
The mana curve is also a bit high for Regisaur. If you play Regisaur on curve, the probability that you will be hell bent within a turn or two is quite low. You often end up discarding at least one 4-mana haymaker.
On the flip side, without disruption, Vivien + Regisaur FORCES your opponent to kill the Regisaur/Vivien within 1-2 turns or they WILL die. Who cares if you pitch a few spells if they are dead! There's a lot of removal light decks in the format that this interaction punishes.
Regisaur + Henge is the synergy that puts the card over the top. Very few , if any decks can compete with the card advantage and lifegain it generates.
The velocity it generates in combination with innkeeper and your aggressive gameplan is potentially the most powerful thing to be doing on turns 5-7 in the format.
Having Regisaur as a potential top deck gives you the chance to get the Henge out of your hand against decks with plenty of removal... as you can do it as early as turn 5.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the way I see the card, is I see it as a supplement to your strategy as opposed to one of your major focal points. I want to have the OPTION to cast it when a good situation presents itself, or once you've deployed your other threats and are hellbent.
The interaction is too powerful to cut, but going forward, I want to heavily experiment with only 2 copies.
Return to Paradise Druid
I think my decision to cut paradise druid was an innovative way to combat Jeskai Fires and Jund Sacrifice, but ultimately made the deck weaker against a balanced format.
The meat of the power against Jeskai and Jund is curving your 3-drops->4-drops, so the 2->4 acceleration to 4 isn't super relevant... and drawing multiple copies is a big liability against their deafening clarions and Mayhem devils. In order of midnight, I found the 2/2 flyer , innkeeper triggers and the option to raise dead an innkeeper more impactful in these matchups.
However, with the success of Simic flash and Simic ramp, I think developing your mana fast will be a big deal going forward. You need to be as proactive as possible against the ramp decks, so getting all your heavy hitters and big spells on the battlefield asap trumps nearly everything.
Also, I expect a slight rise in Embercleave decks to combat Simic going forward. Against those decks, Order of midnight is actively bad, and accelerating into your massacre girls, Brontodon + sac and double removal spells is key.
Maindeck Return to Nature + Epic Downfall
For the event, I was a big fan of the main deck epic downfalls. A single wicked wolf ,Mayhem devil or Korvold can stop your plan dead in it's tracks. The card has no dead matchups, because even the control decks in the format run adventure creatures that can be killed by downfall.
Considering the amount of card draw and velocity in the deck, I think having only 4 expensive removal spells + Vivien is too little. Epic downfall was the best black maindeck 2-mana removal spell currently and is an efficient answer against cards very good against the deck.
You have a very proactive gameplan, but a couple reactive cards doesn't detract significantly enough from that gameplan. Beating down with creatures is one of your win conditions, and you need ways to push those creatures through.
Maindeck return to nature was a mistake and a consequence on my hyper focus on Jund. I under-estimated the amount of flash decks, ramp decks and control decks where the card was dead. However, it was a very small mistake, given the power of the enchantments/artifacts in this format.
I dislike maindeck Brontodon, as it's horribly inefficient against Oven/Trail of crumbs and unimpressive against everything that isn't Fires of Invention , Wilderness reclamation and Embercleave.
How I'd build the deck going forward
https://www.streamdecker.com/deck/3tuzWNWx
I don't think the deck will be as well positioned going forward as it was for the event, but It will still be a fine choice.
I expect a down-tick in Jeskai, which was the deck this version primarily preyed on. The flash matchup is at worst 60/40, but the Simic ramp matchup I think you are a small underdog and it will likely be more popular . Rakdos knights is surprisingly not that great of a matchup either.
I expect an uptick in both main deck aether gusts and sideboard noxious grasps which is bad for the deck. However, the deck has some very high win% matchups and is only a big underdog vs Rakdos Sacrifice with Priest of Forgotten gods/Claim the firstborn, which did bad at the MC and isn't popular.
(First section is a short blog, skip to next for deck analysis)
Wow! My first arena MC was easily the best MTG experience I've had to date. What a wild ride! The event itself had an absurd production value that added to the grandiosity of it all. Put the pro tour I went to in Spain to shame.
Besides the competition, the highlight for me was undoubtedly the people I met. High level competitive magic has an awesome community of players full of unique personalities. Their attitudes weren't remotely predatory or parasitic despite the zero-sum competition dynamic (for you to win, your friend has to lose). Truly great sportsmanship. It was an honor to compete against many players I'd followed and respected for years.
Overall, I was happy with my performance and very happy with my deck choice. Felt like it was the second or third best positioned deck in the room. (Simic Flash was incredibly built).
Went 5-0 on Day 1 and 3-4 on Day 2 for a 66% winrate against slightly unfavorable pairings and 9 MPL players!
Unfortunately, there is a much greater emphasis on day 2 performance. My mediocre performance in day 2 left me with bad tie breakers and out of the top 16. I finished 5th place among the challengers, theoretically missing an invite to the next event. Since Kvartek is taking an MPL contract , it's possible it bumps me up to 4th, but will have to wait and see.
The difference in my mental clarity between day 1 and day 2 was night and day. While I only got about 5.5 hours of sleep before day 1, I got about 1-2 hours of sleep before day 2 and realllly noticed the difference... For my feature match vs Ally, my brain was buzzing. A few times I went to query my brain for an analysis, the answer it returned was "Dunno.. ZZZ" and was forced to rely on my auto-pilot.
Re-watching the coverage I made a critical mistake on my first major decision point in game 1 when I played Questing beast over Vivien on turn 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5fZFquzLaU
3:30
Vivien would have allowed my flyer to get up to 6 points of power the following turn, allowing me to Great Henge into either Regisaur or questing beast. It does basically the same amount of total damage (~1 less), but gives me near guaranteed inevitability and precious life gain of Henge.
Playing Vivien would be slightly worse if Ally top decked land -> murderous rider, but I'd still be in great shape with Dino -> Henge if I ever drew a 5th land.
Even if my mind were 100% I doubt I would have played around triple Swordmaster. However as a general heuristic, sacrificing ~1-2 damage was easily worth the card draw , mana ramp and lifegain of the Great Henge being in play for an extra turn.
Around 20 minutes in, my brain completely crapped out on me. I thought up the plan to play innkeeper pre-combat after +ing Vivien on the Lovestruck beast. But then when I went to execute the plan, I clicked through my attack phase reflexively before playing the innkeeper. These are exactly the type of mistakes I frequently make when sleep deprived, as anyone whos cubed with me long hours can attest to :P
One of the biggest lessons I've taken from this event, is that despite my healthy eating , exercise, and meditation. If I don't sleep, none of that really matters. I need to come into the event knowing that this is a recurring issue and take more drastic steps to improve it. Before my next competition, I plan to get my sleep schedule on a consistent wake up time well before the event start time, so that the competition's schedule becomes second nature.
If I can, I also plan to arrive a day or two earlier to the hotel, so I become more familiar with the sleeping environment.
I also intend to experiment with some more heavy duty solutions (sleeping pills) and see how much sleep I get and how groggy I feel the next day. It may be sub-optimal, but deep sleep and grogginess, may be better than a 50%+ chance of Insomnia.
I'm glad I lost. Insomnia is an issue in my life in general, and this loss gives me greater motivation to manage it smarter.
The event was incredible fun, and will undoubtedly look back on the memory fondly for the rest of my life.
Deck analysis - Golgari Dino Henge
The deck I played was a very interesting one and one I'm quite happy I picked up.
It's fundamentally an aggressive midrange deck, that has a lot of big bodied creatures, a powerful planeswalker to push those creatures through and multiple card draw engines.
It's in a unique position in the format, as it's the only aggressive deck where the bulk of the aggressive draws interact favorably with what Jeskai fires was doing. In testing, my winrate was around 80% against mediocre pilots on Jeskai fires. Jeskai fires forced the aggressive decks out of the format, which made most people at the event to try to go over the top of Fires or beat them via counter magic....
Which was also good for our deck.
Given the 9 days Chris Kvartek and I had to prepare, I'm happy with what we came up with, but I think a hybrid of ours lists is better than each of our lists individually. Chris had abandoned the archetype for Jund most of the final few days, and I was desperately focused on improving the Jund matchup. Eventually I found a way to do it, but in hind sight I sacrificed a bit too much for it. This is why our decklists turned out quite different. Chris played a similar version of the deck he had built early in testing, and I played a deck that had gone deep down a rabbit hole of winning a particular matchup.
More on that later.
I personally over-estimated the presence of Jund/Golgari sacrifice at the event and devoted too much of my sideboard for potential iterations of those lists. Late in testing, I figured out that our deck was the beatdown against the big two decks of the field and leaning on an aggressive gameplan was the way to go... What I didn't anticipate was that our deck was going to be beat down against the entire field!
The only decks where you compete on the value axis against are some variants of control, the mirror and the flash decks.
The two major areas where our decks differed was his list featured less interaction and an increased emphasis on Regsiaur/Henge and he liked paradise druid much more than I did.
Aside on Rotting Regisaur
To understand the direction I want to take the deck, you have to first understand the significance of Rotting Regisaur and it's role in the deck.
The strength of Regisaur in the deck is extremely difficult to evaluate.
There are some gross anti-synergies as well as some busted synergies.
Rotting Regisaur's discard clause offsets the value that Edgewall Innkeeper generates.
With no Vivien or Henge and a single innkeeper, it ends up being quite bad if it can't end the game by itself. The single innkeeper prevents you from being hellbent, and the Regisaur offsets the innkeepers card draw. The raise dead mechanic of order of midnight requires lands to fully leverage, which you are often forced to discard to the Regisaur.
The mana curve is also a bit high for Regisaur. If you play Regisaur on curve, the probability that you will be hell bent within a turn or two is quite low. You often end up discarding at least one 4-mana haymaker.
On the flip side, without disruption, Vivien + Regisaur FORCES your opponent to kill the Regisaur/Vivien within 1-2 turns or they WILL die. Who cares if you pitch a few spells if they are dead! There's a lot of removal light decks in the format that this interaction punishes.
Regisaur + Henge is the synergy that puts the card over the top. Very few , if any decks can compete with the card advantage and lifegain it generates.
The velocity it generates in combination with innkeeper and your aggressive gameplan is potentially the most powerful thing to be doing on turns 5-7 in the format.
Having Regisaur as a potential top deck gives you the chance to get the Henge out of your hand against decks with plenty of removal... as you can do it as early as turn 5.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the way I see the card, is I see it as a supplement to your strategy as opposed to one of your major focal points. I want to have the OPTION to cast it when a good situation presents itself, or once you've deployed your other threats and are hellbent.
The interaction is too powerful to cut, but going forward, I want to heavily experiment with only 2 copies.
Return to Paradise Druid
I think my decision to cut paradise druid was an innovative way to combat Jeskai Fires and Jund Sacrifice, but ultimately made the deck weaker against a balanced format.
The meat of the power against Jeskai and Jund is curving your 3-drops->4-drops, so the 2->4 acceleration to 4 isn't super relevant... and drawing multiple copies is a big liability against their deafening clarions and Mayhem devils. In order of midnight, I found the 2/2 flyer , innkeeper triggers and the option to raise dead an innkeeper more impactful in these matchups.
However, with the success of Simic flash and Simic ramp, I think developing your mana fast will be a big deal going forward. You need to be as proactive as possible against the ramp decks, so getting all your heavy hitters and big spells on the battlefield asap trumps nearly everything.
Also, I expect a slight rise in Embercleave decks to combat Simic going forward. Against those decks, Order of midnight is actively bad, and accelerating into your massacre girls, Brontodon + sac and double removal spells is key.
Maindeck Return to Nature + Epic Downfall
For the event, I was a big fan of the main deck epic downfalls. A single wicked wolf ,Mayhem devil or Korvold can stop your plan dead in it's tracks. The card has no dead matchups, because even the control decks in the format run adventure creatures that can be killed by downfall.
Considering the amount of card draw and velocity in the deck, I think having only 4 expensive removal spells + Vivien is too little. Epic downfall was the best black maindeck 2-mana removal spell currently and is an efficient answer against cards very good against the deck.
You have a very proactive gameplan, but a couple reactive cards doesn't detract significantly enough from that gameplan. Beating down with creatures is one of your win conditions, and you need ways to push those creatures through.
Maindeck return to nature was a mistake and a consequence on my hyper focus on Jund. I under-estimated the amount of flash decks, ramp decks and control decks where the card was dead. However, it was a very small mistake, given the power of the enchantments/artifacts in this format.
I dislike maindeck Brontodon, as it's horribly inefficient against Oven/Trail of crumbs and unimpressive against everything that isn't Fires of Invention , Wilderness reclamation and Embercleave.
How I'd build the deck going forward
https://www.streamdecker.com/deck/3tuzWNWx
I don't think the deck will be as well positioned going forward as it was for the event, but It will still be a fine choice.
I expect a down-tick in Jeskai, which was the deck this version primarily preyed on. The flash matchup is at worst 60/40, but the Simic ramp matchup I think you are a small underdog and it will likely be more popular . Rakdos knights is surprisingly not that great of a matchup either.
I expect an uptick in both main deck aether gusts and sideboard noxious grasps which is bad for the deck. However, the deck has some very high win% matchups and is only a big underdog vs Rakdos Sacrifice with Priest of Forgotten gods/Claim the firstborn, which did bad at the MC and isn't popular.
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