June.1.04 - Beasts

            First off, I’d like to say I’m a little confused.  Now, I played in one tournament, only one.  A very small tournament of about thirteen people.  I won the preliminary three round Swiss, and followed it up with an undefeated finish in top eight, that’s six total match wins.  Today I check, and my ratings up to 1692!  That’s insanely high.  I did the math, I would’ve gained roughly 15-16 points of each opponent for those wins.

            The way DCI points normally worth is if you have the same rating, you get roughly half the K value, so if you and your opponent just started your DCI numbers at FNM which is 8K, you should gain about 4 points.  Now, this is twenty points in any one day of given work.  I gained five times that much in three hours.  What am I getting at?  It’s ego people.

            Right now, the game is in it’s infancy, and no big super mega huge events have been scheduled.  Don’t get insanely cocky at it just because you’re highly ranked in your state or even country.  While I will admit there are 2000+ people in the US alone, when you compare it to magic, that’s not that much.  Hopefully, all I can say is that my rating won’t go too high, yes, I’m proclaiming this.  I don’t want to walk in with a 2000-something constructed average at my first event and then lose 200 after a few losses.  Such drastic K-values can either mean one of two things.  First, it’s not being calculated correctly or the K-value is whack a bit. Or, what I fear, it will be insanely easy to gain DCI points.

            I’m against this because half the fun in playing is improving an working your way up the ladder.  It took me two years to get my 1837 rating in magic, and I’m proud of that.  If I reach that after a little more than a month of Duel Masters, I’ll be fairly upset.  But maybe I’m overreacting, and sounding a bit big-headed of myself.  I am still basking in the glory of another undefeated day at our JDC night, and if my rating is near 1750 sometime next week, I may have to shed a tear.  Anyways, down to business…

Beasts	Ronald Waclawski
4 Barkwhip, the Smasher	4 Dimension Gate
4 Bronze Arm Tribe	4 Natural Snare
4 Burning Mane
4 Essence Elf
4 Fighter Dual Fang
4 Golden Wing Striker
4 Silver Axe
4 Steel Smasher

            Now Beasts is in my opinion one of the best decks around.  Unfortunately, Fighter Dual Fang is harder to find around here than Arcbound Ravager.  Yeah, I said it!  We just seem to have hit a dry spot in the packaging.  We have a healthy supply of the other Ultra-Super-Mega Rares, or whatever you guys call them, but the green one eludes me.

            If I went up to a big tournament in a week, I would know my matchup against this deck inside and out, it’s that good.  And the reason it’s so good is the environment?  Envision a month ago when Aqua Snipers, Vampire Silphy, and Scarlet Skyterror were the only blinged out cards seeing play in your area.  Domain was the deck of choice for the few that could afford it.  Everyone’s deck lost to it, but did decent against anyone not running it.

            Unfortunately, when you get an overly dominant control deck, the environment sours up really badly after a while.  The control deck has to have an aggro deck that is in every way bigger, meaner, and faster than it.  Deadly Fighter Braid Claw used to be the only way to combat this powerhouse deck, and even that wasn’t enough sometimes.  Fortunately, we’ve been sent to things to combat this dreadful onslaught of controllish cards.

            One is Evolution Creatures, and the other is Lost Soul.  I’m going to take this article to defend Lost Soul for a while, and why it’s good at doing what it does.  Domain runs off of your cards, taking advantage of the fact that you will waste cards on pointless big creatures.  Secretly, they were never afraid of Hanusa or Deathliger, no matter how big it was.  They knew they could kill it.

            Now they have to worry about keeping those creature kill cards in their hand, and if not worry about that, the threat that two of their shields could be gone next turn, due to a double breaker evolution creature, and that they can’t do anything about it.

            With that being said, Black will stay the control color for the time being… deal with it.  No color is more effective at permanently dealing with creatures now.  Blue can be argued for, but comes nowhere close in true comparison at overall creature removal.  Black will run Lost Soul, because it allows it to be the control deck that can now beat domain and other control decks with that card.  In addition, it’s the number one control color because it has the tools to beat the old Aggro deck.  Now that you’ve established the new control deck, you have to find the aggro deck to beat it.  And it’s not that hard.

            Any double-breaker based deck can go card for card with my build of Suicide Black/Red, which is here, in the exact version I used last week mind you…

Suicide Black/Red	Ronald Waclawski
4 Bloody Squito	4 Burst Shot
4 Chaos Worm	4 Death Smoke
4 Horrid Worm	2 Lost Soul
2 Poison Worm	4 Terror Pit
2 Scarlet Skyterror	4 Tornado Flame
4 Swamp Worm
2 Ultracide Worm
2 Vampire Silphy

            Now, not every deck has the tools to beat it.  Water seems kind of slow, and Light gets crippled badly by Lost Soul.  This leaves Beasts and Humans.  Both are nice notable colors, and in testing they can both beat Suicide Black, but one deck beats it a little more than the others, and that’s Humans.

            Humans, in my testing, has about a 70% chance of beating it, while Beasts gets about 60%, which is still rock solid.  You can generally sacrifice this percentage as long as the matchup is still in your favor, which it clearly is.  Now it all comes down to which deck can beat each other, since both will see the most play against Black Control.

            Beasts gets the nod over humans, because of two main concerns, and that’s speed.  Yes, I am aware of braid claw, but it’s no concern of yours.  Steel Smasher roasts any 1-2 mana creature fire throws, and evolves when he’s ready.  If your deck isn’t running it, redo the decklist.  Crimson Hammer is your biggest concern, until Barkwhip comes out.  Dimension Gate is key to get it out early, and late game for Fighter Dual Fang to clear the arena.

            Now, my testing may have been different from any other given persons, but in my personal preference, Beasts seems stronger as a whole and has a much stronger force to it Humans seems to lack.  Not only that, Beasts can be insanely fast, synergetic, and usually more stable, as you’ll be making a lot of the same plays continuously.

            Now, any of the four colors would go well into this deck, and you could make a case for either.  However, I do believe if you truly wanted to have the deck shine as a two color one, you’d have to eliminate half the evolution cards it runs now, as civilizations are so thin.

            A more control version would be an updated version of Water-Nature control decks, which sufficed impressively well in the pre-EVO environment, where you use water for bounce spells and effects, and card draw, while mostly relying on Nature’s brute force.  While I personally wouldn’t recommend it to anyone playing in our environment, I do believe it could turn out to be the right call in some cases and may well lurch into a Tier 2 deck.

            The aggro version would be a smaller version of Red-Green Beats, which before ran evasion creatures like Stampeding Long Horn, would now run 8 cheap Evo creatures, and as much rush and removal as they could.  The two hybrid decks do very different things in their own right, but are worth a nod in their own respects and will play a vital role in the future metagame.

            The basic version of the beast deck up above is about getting these evolution creatures out ASAP.  Barkwhip assists phenomenally early game and in synergy with your other creatures while Dual Fang helps you predominately with mana and beating down.  A mixture of insane early game with a strong finish.

            Unfortunately, a lot of the builds seem reminiscent of misbuilt magic decks, that have all intentions of working, but a stupid attachment to a Tier 2 card usually brings about their downfall.  In this case, Elf-X.  I have no sentimental attachment to this card.  The main reason I think it’s seeing heavy play is it has the Stewart factor, the little kid from Mad TV that says “Look what I can do!”  It likes showing off cool tricks, but the 4-drop slot is the main beat down slot for you in this deck, and a 2000 creature won’t cut it, especially when it dies to a plethora of spells at this point, along with mass removal like Vampire Silphy and Burst Shot.

            In case you were wondering, Elf-X is the card you should NOT run in beasts under any circumstances.  Unless the make of the deck changes severely, you won’t be seeing any in my deck, and hopefully I won’t be seeing any either.  It has it’s place… somewhere.  But until that day comes, try to break off that emotional attachment you may have to cool rares.  And for the two people who are going to send me a twelve page thesis on how good it truly is, don’t worry, I’ll read.

            I hope that gives you a little in depth look at why Beasts is better than bland and a little more insight into strategy on how decks evolve and get good or bad.  Because next week that’s what it’s all about.

            Over the next few weeks, I’ll have some articles about the forming of the duel masters metagame.  This is a very important thing to note indeed, because it will shape the popularity of decks as they stand now, and what you need to test against for big events when they come in the future.  It will also give new players and vets alike a rough guideline on the basis for building if you’re stuck.

            I am only one person though, so I ask that anyone with a detailed matchup, complete with deck lists and strategy send them to me, as I’m more than welcome to accept them and it may help me in my research on how to build.

            Until then, may your Beast Folk get bigger…

Email: kian1602@hotmail.com

AOL: hydromorph1602