Is your favorite aggresive spellslinger underperforming?

It may be time to give your deck a benchmark test.

At it’s core, cards in Spellslingers fall into two categories - threats and answers. Threats are cards played with the goal of furthering victory, and answers are cards aimed at preventing an opponent from reaching victory. Threats are given a natural advantage in Spellslingers for a few reasons. 1) Answers in and of themselves can never win a game without the aid of threats. 2) Not all threats can be answered with the same card. Surviving Kaya’s evasion and rushdown requires a very different set of cards to answer than In the most simple terms, your deck strategy can be defined by the ratio of threats to answers with aggro being highly ‘threat’ dense and proactive, and control being highly ‘answer’ dense and reactive. Midrange decks attempt to stradle the line, being both more threat dense than control and more answer dense than aggro at the cost of being less focused than either extreme.

The Spellslingers card pool continues to grow more robust with each set release, so naturally the pool of answers continues to expand as well. Still, there exists standout cards in each color that show up again and again across multiple decklists. One of the first things you can do to improve your ability to evaluate the power of individual cards, is through understanding format constraints provided by the most popular ‘answer-type’ cards. This means searching for gaps in the available answers to ensure that you are choosing the most resilient threats. This article will take a look at popular strategies across all Spellslingers to identify areas to optimize your card choices when deckbuilding.

Pyroclasm

Pyroclasm is the premier benchmark if you are playing a swarm-strategy. This also includes cards like Infest that give creatures -2 health across the board. The strength of pyroclasm lies in it’s ability to clean up a problematic board with positive tempo and card advantage. With the growing popularity of Ral, any swarm deck you build should have a plan in mind for limiting the impact of this card.

Gideon

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This Gideon deck by BossMTG is built to extract value from higher health creatures above other more aggressive options, which is helpful for neutralizing this card. One of the reasons for Gideon’s success in recent seasons, is due to it’s resiliency to these type of ant-swarm effects. If you want to make your own swarm deck, there are many options to consider to include cards that increase health like Invoke the Dawn or Glorious Anthem. If your deck can apply creatures to the board profitably against pyroclasm on turn 3, you have scored an A+ when it comes to passing this benchmark test.

Runeshell

This innocuous-looking 3/3 has been stalling for blue decks since the very beginning of Spellslingers. With a stat line that makes the average red-player fume, this guys strength lies in its ability to trade efficiently, with positive tempo, taking out two drops like kolonian tusker with ease. From Jace, to Teferi, to Ashiok, expect to see this little guy jumping in the way of your Raging goblins and Untested Rookies. Because it only cost your opponent a single mana, trying to remove it with a spell is always tempo-negative. Isn’t this the perfect defensive card?

The turtles main weakness is in how very narrow it is to use as an answer. It is not effective against evasive threats. It also cannot attack, or kill a creature who has gained more than 3 toughness. That means the best strategies in a crab heavy metagame will involve including ways to increase the base stats of your creatures to survive combat with the turtle and develop at the same time, or relying on evasion to ignore the turtle entirely.

Domri

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BossMTG included Elvish Infuser for the purpose of enabling attacks on key turns that would otherwise be shut down by cards like Runeshell Crab. On top of that, all of the one mana plays in the deck can attack and trade with this pesky crab without losing tempo or having to spend extra cards. You can see an increase in performance from your deck if you build with a plan for minimizing the impact of this defensive one drop.

Stay tuned to mtg-ss.com for more deckbuilding strategy articles!