[Outdated] UW Hippoblade.

[Alex]

This is an article I wrote about a deck I was working on a few weeks before the banning of Bloodbraid Elf and Seething Song. I am posting this primarily for archival purposes, although I do welcome criticisms on the deck despite the fact that it doesn't exist anymore in the pursuit of knowledge and insight.


Armor Clad Angry Birds

Hello Modern players! As I'm sure many of you are aware, the Modern metagame is anything but stagnant, and there’s plenty of room for innovation. Last weekend (1/20/2013) there was a Modern PTQ on Magic Online, and the results seemed to be pretty unanimous. Jund, Birthing Pod, and a few variations of Storm absolutely dominated the top 32. However, I'm not here to talk about those decks. There was one spade out of the list of the winning decks that caught my eye. I'm talking about the 21st place finisher, a UW list piloted by a
MODO user named Gernardi.

What's interesting about this deck, you might ask? At first glance, not a lot. Gernardi's version looks and feels like Jon Finkel and Brian Kibler's deck from the Player's Championship, but erred more on the side of control rather than tempo. This wasn't horribly relevant to most people, I'm sure. But to my friends and I, this for some reason shouted "Hey! Play a UW control list!" I'm not terribly sure how we arrived on that conclusion based on this list, but what I do know is that tapout control is actually fairly well positioned against decks like Jund and Birthing Pod. These decks rely on their creatures to win the game, and UW tapout is traditionally good at keeping creatures dead. So taking this revelation to the drawing board, my play group and I sat together one evening and tried to figure out what the best type of tapout list would be.

We knew that it had to be good against Jund and Pod; that much was obvious
based on the most recent results, but beyond that we wanted to try and be versatile enough out of the board to cover as many of our bases as we could. When we got to the core of things, we knew that creature removal was going to be a large part of the deck, while also hanging on to one of the biggest strengths that Brian Kibler thought their UW list had, the man-land game plan. After an undisclosed amount of time in the thinktank, I was reminded of a deck that was tuned specifically for the meta of Scars/Innistrad, and that deck was known as "Hippoblade." This list was originally crafted by a Magic Online player known as MarthaJones, and was later picked up and played at Grand Prix Orlando by Caleb Durward, who had high praises of the list.

As you can see in Caleb's deck tech from Pro Tour Dark Ascension, the list during that era played as a RW deck and was suited to its metagame due to the abundance of token decks and red decks at the time that simply folded to [card]Whipflare[/
card]. I had the pleasant experience of talking to Caleb during that Grand Prix, as I'm an Orlando native, and he jokingly said to me "Yeah I think the deck could be played in any color combination with white, permitting that the second color brings a relevant sweeper to the table." I had adopted the list as my own not long after that GP, and as such, I was perfectly aware of the issues I had with it back then. The first problem with the deck in Standard was that it was terribly inconsistent. During that time, you did have some of the best cantrips in the history of Magic available to you, but they were outside of your color range. It was difficult to play three colors in the list, as all of your board wipes demanded your colors to be available as soon as possible, and one of them was 2WW while the other was 1R or 1RR. The second problem is that the deck was absolutely horrible versus combo, and back then the combo deck to beat was Splinter Twin, which wasn’t blaringly fast by any
means, especially not compared to the Modern Storm decks, but fast enough that you needed to keep yourself open to Galvanic Blast at a moment's notice.

Armed with my experience playing the archetype, I proposed the idea to the group. "Why don't we play a deck with a lot of board wipes, man-lands, and some recurrable threats or threats that die for value to board wipes?" Everyone seemed intrigued by the idea, and I explained to them how the old list worked, and some of the new tools we had available to us in Modern that could make the deck playable. I knew right away that I wanted to be playing blue, and with Supreme Verdict still fresh in my mind thanks to a lot of Bant control in Standard, I managed to convince the rest of the group to let me brew up something for us to test against the gauntlet.

What I ended up with was eerily similar to the UW tapout lists that people who played during Zendikar/Shards Standard grew to know
all too well. This wasn't upsetting to me at all, though, because these decks played some of the most grindy games in the history of ever, which was exactly what we wanted to be doing. On top of that, the sideboard addressed the matchups I wanted to prepare for pretty perfectly, while also having a few sinister tricks against any decks that played mana bases more ambitious than my own.


[deck]Angry Birds[/deck]Artifacts (4)
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Sword of Light and Shadow

Creatures (17)
2 Razor Hippogriff
4 Sage of Epityr
2 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Squadron Hawk
2 Vendilion Clique
2 Wurmcoil Engine

Instant (5)
4 Path to Exile
1 Sphinx's Revelation

Sorcery (8)
4 Supreme Verdict
4 Wrath of God

Planeswalker (2)
2 Gideon Jura

Mana (25)
1 Academy Ruins
3 Buried Ruin
4 Celestial Colonnade
1 Inkmoth Nexus
6 Island
6
Plains
4 Hallowed Fountain

Sideboard (15)
1 Consecrated Sphinx
3 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Leonin Arbiter
4 Spreading Seas
4 Negate
2 Timely Reinforcements[/deck]


During early testing we played Serum Visions as our go-to 1drop, and although Serum Visions is an excellent card, I realized that we could tighten up our first couple of turns a lot by playing Sage of Epityr instead. The reasoning behind this is that if you play Sage on 1, you see more cards than you would have with Serum Visions. The fact that he is a body is relevant because this offers you a few different options for your following turns. If you want to draw a few of the cards you revealed, you can simply leave him on the board until you've drawn the cards you want, and then use a shuffle effect later via Path to Exile, [card]Squadron Hawk[/card:
5cpurf84], or Solemn Simulacrum. If you don't like the cards you see, you're still going to be drawing one of those cards like you would have with Serum Visions; however you get to pick which card that is, and then play your desired shuffle effect when you choose. In a way, Path to Exile gets played a lot more like a ramp spell in this deck than a removal spell, but that's absolutely fine because being ahead on mana in this deck allows you to play better removal in the form of board wipes. It'll also save you some life occasionally, as you can block/Path your own guys to save a little life and gain a little extra value. Some people like Sage Owl, but I really wanted to be playing this guy on turn 1, so I didn’t even consider Sage Owl. He hasn’t been disappointing to me yet.

To add to that, one question I got from a lot of the people I tested
with was "Why are we playing Spreading Seas in the board instead of Tectonic Edges in the main?" The answer to this isn't terribly obvious, but I felt as though it was important to make untapped, on-color mana early into the game. Being able to play your Sage on turn 1 is important. As well, in game 1 against a new opponent, being able to represent countermagic early into the game makes them play far more conservatively, which gives you ample time to set up and identify their game plan. What I wanted to do with Spreading Seas was have it be versatile. Tectonic Edge is a great card, but it isn't going to let you ruin someone's mana base on turn 2, and it isn't going to cantrip for you when it does its thing. Spreading Seas basically did what I would want Tectonic Edge to do in the deck, only it did it
better. The cost was 4 sideboard slots, but considering how good it has been against...well, almost every deck I was aiming to beat, I certainly can't complain or claim that I would make a better use out of those 4 board slots otherwise. Tectonic Edge IS better against decks that play no basic lands, but I'd rather play the safer card than assume that my opponent's mana base is helpless against things like Path and Tec. Edge.

[card]Sphinx's Revelation[/card] and Inkmoth Nexus were both miser cards that I threw in to address an issue I had with long board stalls. This happened to me a few times when playing against other UW control lists. Between me board wiping forever, and them Snapcaster'ing Path to Exile on my artifact dudes and Gideon, me and my opponent would often just stare at each other with empty boards for turn after turn, knowing that our lands would crash into one another if we activated them. In these
board stalls, I realized that there were two very important things to consider: What the clock was, and whether or not I had a sword on the board already. Adding [card]Sphinx's Revelation[/card] was my attempt at not only changing the clock on my opponent, but finding the "missing piece" I needed to break through. Inkmoth can't get there in the face of an enemy Celestial Colonnade, but a Sword can, and if you have both of those things together, chances are you're in a pretty good place. It sucks getting blocked by Mutavaults or enemy Inkmoths, but the fact that yours has a sword and theirs doesn't always makes it look pretty good. I don't miss the Solemn or the Island I removed to make these changes at all.

Now let's talk about the sideboard. Earlier in this article I talked about how good the sideboard was against combo. Obviously Ethersworn Canonist is there for that
reason, but the 4of Negate is generally what saves your neck in combo matchups. You're very rarely in a hurry to do anything against a combo player, so mulling aggressively to a Negate means that you can just play as a landgo deck for as long as you want, because it isn't likely that they're going to try and go off as long as you are leaving 1U up. If they do, you punish them. This is especially easy to do against Storm and [card]Pyromancer's Ascension[/card], because you can see it coming from a mile away. Surprisingly, Leonin Arbiter also does a lot of work in these matchups, because if the combo player keeps a hand with a lot of fetches and you're on the play, you can punish them for it, while not hurting any card in your deck except for Squadron Hawks. The thing that sucks about these matchups is that you're pretty likely to lose game 1. However, your
sideboard plan is super easy to execute and you know exactly which cards to board out. I like to go pretty deep into the sideboard in these matchups, boarding in everything except Timely Reinforcements, and going -4 Path to Exile, -4 Supreme Verdict, -4 Wrath of God, -1 Solemn Simulacrum. Usually your combo opponent will simply scoop if you can equip an Ethersworn Canonist with Sword of Fire and Ice, so keep this in mind when playing post board.

Against Jund there are fewer cards to play with, but those cards are pretty good at what they do. I absolutely love Leonin Arbiter and Spreading Seas in the matchup, as Jund generally tends to fumble pretty hard early in the game if you can disrupt their mana. On top if this, [card:
5cpurf84]Spreading Seas[/card] keeps them off of the manland game plan later in the game once you board wipe them enough times. Negate hits things like Liliana of the Veil and Maelstrom Pulse. This matchup is all about keeping them from having a Bob or a Planeswalker, so post board you want to have the tools to do that. Even main board you have a pretty easy time of keeping Dark Confidant at bay, and getting Bloodbraided isn't the end of the world as long as you can keep it from hitting you too many times. Having so much lifelink and life gain in your deck makes it difficult for them to grind you out, so keeping this in mind, I generally tend to board out Solemns, Squadron Hawks, Gideons, and one Sword of Light and Shadow, and I bring in 4 Negates, 1 [card]Leonin Arbiter[/
card], 4 Spreading Seas. As much as it hurts the deck to lose Squadron Hawk, the early consistent turns always make me feel more comfortable against Jund because I know turn 1 Thoughtseize can, and likely will, bin my Hawk if it's alone in my hand anyway. Without a Hawk for them to bin, generally your hand has too many things that they don't want you to have, so no matter what they hit you're probably still in good shape.

Birthing Pod has been the most interesting deck to board against for me, because I have a really difficult time finding cards to side out. Birthing Pod is a deck with such high variance that sometimes they will just aggro-out and kill you with dudes and no pod, and other times they'll rely on grinding their way up the chain or Kikki the shit out of you. I really wanted to be playing Vapor Snag out of the board because
it meant that I could bounce their Restoration Angel before Kikki trigger, but I elected to play Timely Reinforcements instead because it was better in a lot more matchups. Pod’s another deck that plays a shaky mana base that can be disrupted by Spreading Seas, but unfortunately you can't be sure that ruining their mana base is even going to stop them from simply playing a Pod and a dork and going over the top of you. That being said, I tend to simply board into Timely and Negate, losing my 2ofs in Wurmcoil Engines, Gideons, and Razor Hippogriffs. This tends to give you the defense you need to not get blown out while also leaving you with most of the tools you'd need to grind the game out with your lands and swords.

There are still decks out there that can completely blow you out, and most of them are hyper aggressive creature decks, but for the most part resolving a board wipe or a Timely makes them winnable, albeit not great matchups.
Patrick Chapin had a quote from the Magic Cruise 2012 that really stuck with me when I thought about these matchups, though. “If your goal is to win the tournament, make sure that you play a deck that can actually win the tournament.” Long story short, his advice is that you can’t prepare for everything, but if your goal is to win the tournament, you want to make sure you’re not playing a deck that’s just good against the field but bad against the decks that you know you’ll be playing on day 2.

Depending on my work schedule during the weekend of GP Charlotte, I may or may not be trying this deck out in a side event. Wish me luck!

[LP, of the Fires]

I was wondering if you could really get much value out of razor hipporgirf. Then I realized you can just fetch all your hawks and discard wurmcoil engine ;P SoLaS seems pretty tech here as well getting back value guys post wrath and extending games.

Didn't read the whole boarding guides since as you stated, this deck isn't necessarily viable anymore, but Siding Gideon out against pod seems unintuitive to me since he's the one card that lets you not die randomly to kiki.

[Alex]

I was wondering if you could really get much value out of razor hipporgirf. Then I realized you can just fetch all your hawks and discard wurmcoil engine ;P SoLaS seems pretty tech here as well getting back value guys post wrath and extending games.

Didn't read the whole boarding guides since as you stated, this deck isn't necessarily viable anymore, but Siding Gideon out against pod seems unintuitive to me since he's the one card that lets you not die randomly to kiki.

Path to Exile also lets you not die randomly to Kikki.