From: edt@admin.lsa.umich.edu (Eric Taylor) Subject: a new [long] analysis of the 5cgreen Date: 6 Jun 1997 21:37:19 GMT I made the deck that Cathy Nicoloff posted about Matt Place's 5cgreen. For some reason I wasn't one of the people that got sent a copy of this monster before regionals, so this past week was the first time I had a chance to make the deck and do some extensive testing on it. * * * 4 Quirion Ranger 4 Granger Guildmage 4 Whirling Dervish 4 River Boa 2 Jolrael's Centaur 4 Birds of Paradise 1 Karoo Meerkat 3 Maro 2 Disenchant 2 Terror 4 Arcane Denial 4 Incinerate 1 Armageddon 2 Armor of Thorns 3 Winter Orb 3 City of Brass 4 Undiscovered Paradise 9 Forest Sideboard: 4 Hydroblast 4 Pyroblast 2 Gloom 2 Terror 1 Disenchant 2 Simoon Here a long-ish quote from Cathy's analysis: * * * The deck looks funny, but as long as it doesn't double mulligan, it performs outstandingly well. With some Bird/Ranger tricks and a forest, 4 mana on turn 2 is quite possible. Cast bird on first turn, Cast Ranger on turn 2, tap bird, return forest and replay it to untap bird, tap bird and forest again for an extra three mana. Armageddoning with only one land in play is quite possible. Holding cards in hand is pretty vital for the deck. If this deck is played like a weenie swarm, it will die rather quickly to mass creature removal. The idea is to trickle out the weenies until your opponent deals with them. I spent a lot of matches against R/U attacking for one over and over again. By the time we had exhausted that avenue, I was able to build up to a Winter Orb and a Maro, which made me glad I saved cards in my hand. The Ranger's ability is really unique, and somewhat crucial to the deck. The 4 mana trick is nice. Ranger beats Stasis all by itself if it remains in play. It also defeats Dream Tides and Flood. If you have a 6/6 Maro and they double Incinerate it, you can return a forest to your hand and save him. (Returning a forest to the hand is part of the cost of the untap effect, and therefore happens at a speed faster than fast effects.) Terror wound up being critical in matches against blue, because the ever present Suq'Ata Firewalker was a deadly threat as well as Wall of Air. Disenchant was effective against Disks and all the normal enchantment based stuff that tried to protect my opponent from an onslaught of green weenies. Arcane Denial allowed the deck to survive the occasional mass-destruction spell as well as pull out of some sticky situations. The rest of the deck is probably self-evident. Most of the cards are just hosers for one deck style or another. * * * First of all, my comments about why this deck is suddenly a good deck. Why couldn't people play 5cgreen before? There are several reasons. 1) no easy 1 costing spell to deal with creatures. Typically, if a red player saw a bird in the old environment, he could just bolt it. He had plenty of bolts, 4 bolts, 4 incinerates and then the rest of the fire. In the current type 2 environment, you have to ration your fire a bit more, because you only have 4 bolts, and if you see a 1st turn bird, a red player is much more likely to let it live. That can be a critical error against 5cgreen, but it is a good play against green weenie swarm. Swords to plowshare is gone. This means if you set yourself up by throwing your forests back into your hand and playing out a Maro, you don't lose anything. If swords to plowshares was still in print, you may be left with just a bird, a quirion ranger and 6 life. Against a control deck, the extra life won't be critical, but by throwing your forests back in your hand, you have given up some resources by giving up a turn that you could have an extra piece of land in play. 2) 2 auto-win paths to victory. If you can get a river boa out against mono-blue or a dervish out against mono-black, you have a good chance to win the game right there, especially if you can hold on to an armor of thorns and use it to get past the quicksand. Mono-color decks have been steadily gaining favor for a variety of reasons this past year, and against these mono-color decks, a dervish or a river boa can spell victory. These nearly instant victory conditions are important. They may only happen 1 in 5 games, but it boost the overal win percentage of a deck type to a significant extent. Against multi-color decks, the river boa and dervish are not quite as important, but they are still fine creatures. Just imagine what it would be like if they would give black a creature like the river boa: 2 to cast, 1 black to regenerate, 2/1 with forest walk. This would be unthinkably powerful for black, yet there it is in green. 3) enchantment/artifact/land destruction spells are less prevalent in the current environment. There is a big emphasis nowadays on being able to deal mass creature destruction with the disk, the wrath of god, or else to swarm your opponent with ants, dervishes, or knights. Because of this, there isn't quite as much land/artifact/enchantment destruction as there used to be in type 2, and this means that a winter orb/quirion ranger lock can be very effective, because it can be very difficult for a modern type 2 deck to destroy the winter orb. With less land destruction around, your city of brass/undiscovered paradise is less likely to be destroyed. With so many colors and so little ways to get the 5 colors, destroying a multi-land can spell doom to the 5cg. Additionally from David Swasey: 4) No hypnotic spectres. With spectres around, black had the best weenie creature set so there wasn't as much incentive to play green weenie. Spectres would be a pain for this deck ; you need to have a rainbow mana available (and a black player would contagion / weakness / drain, etc the bird when he has a spectre, for starters it gets the spectre through) and one of your 4 incinerates or your support spells get sucked away, and your dervish gets disked. As long as I am talking about black weenies, how about witches? My instincts tell me that a 2 mana 1/3 tim would slow down this deck... 5) No Arrows. Good old 2nd turn artifact mana, 3rd turn arrows would hurt this deck a lot in my opinion. 6) Perhaps sideboards were not prepared enough. When infernal darkness was around, red oriented (sligh, counter-hammer for example) might have 4 pyrokenisis in their sideboard. That's gotta hurt. - - - One of the greatest weaknesses of the deck is that there is so little land. This places a huge dependence of the deck on its creatures for mana. If you can blow up both the bird of paradise and the quirion ranger and then pillage the city of brass/undiscovered paradise, suddenly the 5cgreen has no more mana. For a mono-red running 4 pillages, 4 incinerates, a couple of pyrokenesis/pyroclams/earthquake, this strategy is incredibly effective. However, using a wrath of god to blow up these creatures isn't as good because the 5cg can just often arcane the wrath and then slap down a winter orb. White/blue is better served with the Suqata Firewalker which costs one less and is fairly easy to protect if a granger guildmage is not already in play. The Firewalker can really give the 5cg deck a hard time. Likewise, if a black player uses his contagion early to kill the bird and quirion ranger, black can often swarm. 5cgreen is not a fast kill deck. It is slow and steady. Cathy says that you have to play it with restraint. I've found in my testing that really you have no choice but that the deck forces you to play it this way. You draw a card, and chances are very high it's not a land. You look at your hand, you see 3 creatures, and some of the 5 color spells. You use the quirion ranger to tap the forest for 2 green and play out a river boa. Done. Draw again. What, another creature? Ok, you play it out using the same trick. Etc. The deck plays incredibly slow for a "mono-green" deck, what with the quirion ranger throwing forests back into your hand and the undiscovered paradise going back too, so even if you wanted, there is little chance of playing your entire hand out by the 4th or 5th turn, which I suppose it good. The deck prevents you from misplaying it by rationing the mana sources. If you get into the mid-game against a control deck, you will typically have 3 or 4 land in play and your opponent will have 10-15 lands. However, the 5cg will probably have at least 4 or 5 cards in hand, just like a control deck will, so the game isn't as unabalanced at that point as the land situation would seem to indicate. It certainly looks odd to see this disparity in played land, but you know as the 5cgreen player that even if your opponent has thawed the entire game, you often have less chance of drawing a land than he does, because, after all, there are only 16 land. - - - Against a balanced deck with a lot of fire, this 5cgreen has a terrible time. The player with fire can so easily burn all of the creatures. However, the player with fire has to know to burn that bird. If he doesn't, there is a very good chance that a 2nd or 3rd turn Maro will appear and apply some Fatty Loving. Against any control deck, the 5cgreen has an excellent chance. I think that one of the reasons this deck did so well at regionals is that so many good players and pros played it. The 5cg deck is a deck type that I would not normally expect to see in the hands of a pro because it has an attribute that they normally shy away from. The 5cgreen has a very good chance to get a "draw from ass". You can get a granger guildmage, a quirion ranger, 3 incinerates, a terror, some arcanes, and what is this? Voila 3 forests and no other colored mana. This means you suck, and you lose this game. Or you can get land like this: city of brass, city of brass, city of brass and no bird. Ouch! Or you can double mulligan. Now even when the deck performs at its best, it never has has that vicious beatdown you expect from something like a white weenie or speed greenie or black ice. Instead the best you can hope for is a medium sort of draw like a bird, forest, maro and quirion ranger. Sure you can put out a Maro on the 2nd turn, but what if your opponent plays a disk or a nekratal? Even the best draws of the 5cg don't look godlike. The 5cg is surprisingly effective despite (or perhaps because?) of its inability to do a speed kill. Pros normally would like to play a deck which every time they play they have a chance to win by outplaying their opponent, by playing their resources more effectively and such. While the 5cgreen does have the attribute that you can play it in a variety of ways and use skill to win, it also has the dreaded ability to completely crap out, which is the kind of luck in a deck type a pro normally shies away from. Another reason this deck type did so well is that it's a new concept. I think historically this deck type is best understood by looking not at the type 2 decks, but at the history and theory behind type 1.5 decks. In type 1.5, you would often get a quick weenie, like an ape or lion and then protect it with counterspells. In 5cgreen you have the same sort of mentality. You play a quick creature and then if your opponent lays out something big to handle it like wrath or disk, you can arcane the big thing, and lay out the winter orb to protect your weenies from further abuse. The 5cgreen differs most markedly from the 1.5's in the way the deck relies on creatures instead of land for mana production. This makes a lot of sense when you consider a typical 1.5 deck could have 4 real bolts, 4 chain lighnings, so poofta, there goes your mana in 1.5. The Swedish "Gun" had 20 land (and 4 urza's baubles and 3 barbed sextants, which really gives you effective land of 23 or so), with a bunch of weenies and bolts. Notice that the Gun like the 5cg has 2 disenchants, but 2 armageddons instead of the 5cg's 1 armageddon. Matt Place played the "Monkey May I?" at the 1.5 in World's. Monkey May I had 3 arcanes, 4 forces, 4 kird apes, 3 Erhnam Djinns, with Jayemdae Tomes plus mana crypts for card drawing, providing for a quick beatdown by the ape protected by counterspells, plus the big fattie erhnam. The kird ape corresponds to the fast greenies and the 3 erhnam's correspond to the 3 Maro's. Overall, the 5cg is one of the more interesting decks in quite a while. As for its future, it is very difficult to predict anything because on July 1st, type 2 is going to have a massive shakeup when ice age returns and weatherlight enters the mix. I'll have to wait and see if 5cg is one of the surviving deck types once July rolls around. --- Eric