Standard

Greater Good – Diamonds Are Forever

Back in October I wrote an article write here on Mana Deprived about lands in Battle for Zendikar. One of the things I talked about was the tug of war between playing All The Colors with Fetch and Battle lands vs. playing one or two colors with a bunch of good colorless utility lands. I was leaning towards the utility lands, but Standard pulled very hard towards four color decks this fall. Well, Oath of the Gatewatch brings a whole bunch of heavyweights to the other side of the rope, so it’s time to revisit the topic.

Colorless mana symbols and explicit colorless costs changes the playing field. First, as a pesudo-sixth color, those colorless lands now tap for a type of mana you may specifically need. Using lands that only tap for colorless is no longer strictly a drawback. Now it’s a necessity if you want to play the new Eldrazi spells. That wasn’t a big deal when all we knew about was Kozilek, who would be an obvious finisher if not for the likes of Ugin and Ulamog, but now we’ve got some much cheaper colorless utility spells to consider.

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1 Spatial Contortion
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[card]Nameless Inversion[/card] was a staple in Standard formats that had [card]Doom Blade[/card] and [card]Lightning Bolt[/card]. When BFZ came out I was giving [card]Gideon’s Reproach[/card] a long hard look just as a two mana instant that could kill some attacking creatures. This is miles better. Sure, it doesn’t have the fun tribal/changeling interactions, but there’s plenty of “colorless matters” synergy you might run into incidentally. Red and Black definitely have better options for two-mana removal, and White has options, but Blue and Green are likely drooling over the prospect of having cheap removal that’s this good.

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1 Warping Wail
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This card is just a little toolbox of goodies. Like [card]Spatial Contortion[/card] it’s a conditional two-mana instant removal and that’s probably going to be its most popular mode. It can make an unimpressive creature. It’s a one-time ramp spell. It’s a very narrow counterspell. People are already calling this “Eldrazi Charm” and rightly so. It’s on par with the Guild charms, and better than a lot of them. Getting access to these effects outside of the normal color pie – a non-Blue counter, Blue or Green removal, non-Green ramp – is a big incentive to play this spell in almost any two color pair. Warping Wail does many of the things you would happily dip into a third color for.

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1 Thought-Knot Seer
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Speaking of effects you’d get from another color, this is a very Black effect. It’s not the early interaction you would get from [card]Duress[/card] or [card]Despise[/card], but if you’re just looking to take the top off of your opponent’s game plan or strip a sweeper or removal spell they were sandbagging, this does that without black mana. That’s a big deal. Unlike its predecessors, they never get that card back. Instead, they just get a random draw when it dies. That’s a huge difference, and a big part of why it’s got some early hype. I’m still a little skeptical about how good a four mana 4/4 is in Standard, but if it is, this is a top option.

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1 Reality Smasher
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This is such a Red creature that most Red creatures are envious. It’s very comparable to [card]Stormbreath Dragon[/card]. It’s a big, hasty creature with a defensive ability. The trigger isn’t protection, but you just can’t one-for-one it without the sort of spell that gets around protection already. Trample isn’t flying but it is technically a form of evasion. Outside of Red, Black sometimes gets small haste creatures and Green only typically gets haste on very big creatures. It doesn’t look like a control card, but it is worth noting that Blue just doesn’t get 5/5s for 5 without drawbacks, let alone this kind of upside. White’s gotten some sweet 5/5s for 5 but they’re usually highly vulnerable to removal. [card]Reality Smasher[/card] still probably fits best in a Red deck, but everyone has to have their eye on it.

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1 Mirrorpool
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[card]Mirrorpool[/card] is both a colorless utility land and a colorless utility spell! I don’t see myself activating the clone side of this very often, but banking a Fork in a land is big game, regardless of color. The top targets for this are going to be [card]Dig Through Time[/card] and [card]Treasure Cruise[/card], and that’s just nasty. Red might want to copy a burn spell. Black never gets fork effects and would gladly get an extra removal spell late.

[card]Mirrorpool[/card] is also transitions us nicely into discussing the new colorless utility lands we get in this set to entice us to join the Grey Side.

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1 Sea Gate Wreckage
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[card]Fool’s Tome[/card]! It was never good enough as an artifact, but repeatable card draw tacked on to a land? Sign me up. A control deck would probably rather have [card]Blighted Cataract[/card], but what Red deck wouldn’t be tempted by a land that draws cards and doesn’t enter the battlefield tapped?

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1 Crumbling Vestige
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[card]Corrupted Crossroads[/card] might be the shiny rare with the gold frame, but I’ll take Crumbling Vestige (almost) any day. It’s a lot like Tendo Ice-Bridge, except that you only get the colored mana when you first play it. The important thing to remember is that it provides multiple colors of mana on turn one. Since Theros block rotated we’ve only had the Khans fetch lands doing that for allied colors and the Pain Lands for enemy colors. Going from four to eight turn-one sources is a big deal when you’re building an aggressive deck. Red decks were splashing green, but not for their core creatures. Crumbling Vestige isn’t everything you want it to be, but it’s enough to make two-color aggro decks playable.

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1 Shivan Reef
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Speaking of pain lands, these aren’t new, but they’re the easiest way to get colorless mana without sacrificing access to your main colors. They’re a big incentive to play an enemy color pair as your base colors in an Eldrazi-heavy deck. Another card we’ve had for a while deserves an honorable mention is [card]Evolving Wilds[/card]. It can fetch your colored basics and [card]Wastes[/card], allowing you to run just one of the colorless-only basic.

Mana Bases:

So what kind of mana bases can we build for a deck that wants to pay <> for things? I think the Pain Lands are a strong incentive to start with an enemy color pair, probably splashing the middle color of the shard. how would I build a colorless mana base? Without knowing exactly what cards I want to play, I’d want to start with:

Shards:

[deck]
4 Shivan Reef
4 Crumbling Vestige
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Polluted Delta
1 Smoldering Marsh
1 Sunken Hollow
1 Mountain
1 Island
1 Mirrorpool
1 Corrupted Crossroads
1 Blighted Cataract
1 Blighted Fens
1 Sanctum of Ugin
1 Haven of the Spirit Dragon
[/deck]

Those 1-ofs are mostly just examples of the sort of utility lands you could play. Chances are you want 2-3 of one and zero of another. Counting [card]Crumbling Vestige[/card], those 26 lands have 18 each of Blue and Red sources and 14 ways to get Black or Colorless. Grixis has the most Eldrazi/Devoid cards so I gave that as the example, but the structure works for any Shard.

Wedges:

If we want to get greedy we can start with those same 8 Pain Lands and 4 [card]Crumbling Vestige[/card] but cut down on the utility lands in favor of being able to really play all three colors. We still want to be primarily in the color with both Pain Lands but we can still run some pretty powerful spells. I don’t think Abzan is going to want to do this because that deck has been more of a base GW deck, though [card]Grasp of Darkness[/card] and [card]Flaying Tendrils[/card] could push it back towards a Black base. Sultai probably wants to be fetching more, and doesn’t gain much that its colors don’t already have. Jeskai is interesting as it is a strong combination already that likes rolling around in a pile of powerful spells and wondering how it will ever fit all of them into one deck.

4 Battlefield Forge
4 Shivan Reef
4 Crumbling Vestige
4 Mystic Monastery
2 Needle Spire / Wandering Fumarole
3 Evolving Wilds
1 Mountain
1 Island
1 Plains
1 Wastes

The almost-four color deck eschews utility lands, just packing a pair of man-lands depending on which secondary color is favored. This is also where [card]Evolving Wilds[/card] for [card]Wastes[/card] becomes worthwhile. It also goes up to 25 land by default.

Mono-Colorless:

I don’t mean playing without colored mana, I’m talking about an otherwise mono-colored deck with colorless as the functional “second color. The color that I think can gain the most off-color effects from colorless spells is red. The removal spells have advantages over what Red can do for two mana. [card]Warping Wail[/card] and [card]Thought-Knot Seer[/card] can counter or take away some of the more back-breaking cards that Red would normally fear and we already talked about what a monster [card]Reality Smasher[/card] is. Red is also the color most likely to appreciate [card]Sea Gate Wreckage[/card]. Red also cares the least about playing a mess of Pain Lands.

[deck]
4 Battlefield Forge
4 Shivan Reef
4 Crumbling Vestige
4 Blighted Gorge
2 Sea Gate Wreckage
1 Mirrorpool
4 Mountain
[/deck]

23 lands is a good starting place for a fairly aggressive Red deck. If you need another land or two I’d go for the second [card]Mirrorpool[/card] or a 5th [card]Mountain[/card]. This group has just 16 Red sources but a massive 20 Colorless sources. This deck probably wants to leverage some other colorless/devoid synergies in red and only the best truly Red cards.

Two-Color:

Your instincts probably tell you to play just one color in a mostly-colorless deck, but there’s one card that’s drawing me to “splashing” two colors in my mostly colorless deck, and that’s [card]Herald of Kozilek[/card], which reduces the cost of all of your colorless spells. It wasn’t long ago that a 2/4 for three mana that helped your mana was one of the best creatures in the format. There wasn’t quite enough in Battle for Zendikar to support it, but I think Oath brings enough tools to go for it. Here’s my first run at a two-color-colorless:

[deck]
[Lands]
4 Corrupted Crossroads
4 Crumbling Vestige
4 Foundry of the Consuls
1 Sea Gate Wreckage
4 Shivan Reef
4 Swiftwater Cliffs
1 Tomb of the Spirit Dragon
2 Wandering Fumarole
[/Lands]
[Spells]
2 Ghostfire Blade
3 Spatial Contortion
4 Warping Wail
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Eldrazi Skyspawner
4 Endless One
4 Hangarback Walker
4 Herald of Kozilek
4 Reality Smasher
4 Ruination Guide
4 Thought-Knot Seer
[/Creatures]
[/deck]

This leaves out a lot of cool devoid spells and the very strong [card]Thought-Knot Seer[/card] in favor of a bit of a token theme to go with [card]Ghostfire Blade[/card] and by [card]Ruination Guide[/card]. That push also shows up in the mana base with 4x [card]Foundry of the Consuls[/card] and a [card]Tomb of the Spirit Dragon[/card] over things like Blighted lands. There’s a lot of effecient answers to [card]Hangarback Walker[/card] but it still scales well and sometimes will leave Thopters behind. [card]Endless One[/card] scales even better, especially with a Herald out. You’ll play it for one or two when you have a Blade or need a cheap blocker. Otherwise you sandbag it and get a big dude.

On the whole the deck is about mana efficiency and a near inexhaustible stream of threats. It’s probably rough on control but may have a tough time with big-mana decks. It will need to lean heavily on a good sideboard to be able to adapt to each opponent. As the meta shapes up cards like [card]Spell Shrivel[/card] or [card]Wild Slash[/card] will likely cycle in and out of the main deck.

This deck was super budget when I wrote this, but then the PT happened and half the cards in it spiked. Whoops.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve had any success with colorless-heavy decks in Standard!

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