Hello again everyone, and welcome back! It’s getting to that wonderfully hectic time of year, with the holidays, finals and paper deadlines fast approaching, and some quite important Magic-related happenings. With Worlds next weekend in Japan, the StarCityGames invitational in Richmond this past weekend, the Extended PTQ season coming soon, and some big news involving a certain Japanese pro, there is a lot going on in the world of Magic: the Gathering.

Last week, I looked into Standard and presented a few decks that I would recommend for any upcoming tournament. I think that those three decks (UG Fauna Shaman, U/B Control, and Mono Red) are still excellent choices. Despite that, in my testing this week, I have also finally seen the light. In my stubbornness, I refused to believe it, but now I’m ready to admit something quite embarrassing: I really, really like the B/r Vampires deck.

Here is my current list:

This deck is surprisingly versatile and resilient. While you are definitely an Aggro deck, this is much closer to Midrange than Boros or Mono Red. Your clock is slower, but you have so much reach in the form of burn spells and Kalastria Highborn.

The main difference in this version is cutting the Pulse Trackers for Abyssal Persecutors. Persecutor is extremely well positioned in a deck that doesn’t rely on him as the only clock and has 12 ways to sacrifice him when necessary. RUG and BUG decks, U/B Control, Valakut, and even other aggro decks have a real hard time dealing with this guy. It’s been said a million times before by men much wiser than I, but the prevalence of Doom Blade and Lightning Bolt as the removal spells of choice make the Demon incredibly hard to deal with once he hits the board. And when he hits, he hits hard.

I won’t go into too much detail on this deck, since Todd Anderson wrote a primer over on StarCityGames.com, but I would say that if you were the type who, like me, refused to believe Vampires should be taken seriously, I’d recommend you reconsider.

A Matter of Time

If you haven’t heard, long time Japanese pro and Hall of Fame inductee Tomoharu Saito was recently suspended from all DCI events for 18 months. The reason: his DQ at Grand Prix Florence for stalling. I’ve heard many things about Saito, and I’m not one to pass judgment without knowing all the facts, but I think this opens up the door to discuss an important issue in the competitive Magic community: stalling and tournament etiquette.

Politically, I identify as a libertarian. In it’s most simple state, libertarianism is the belief in a tiny, laissez-faire government with a small budget and only a minimal number of laws: those required to guarantee basic safety. This stems from the core philosophy that, generally, people are the best judge of their own interests, and should be left to make decisions on their own.

Now, I tend to use these types of ideas as a framework for many of my beliefs, both inside and outside the realm of politics. This means that, when I first learned that stalling was a DQable offense, my instinct was to question why. I’d been told that the stalling rule was in effect largely because it’s not fun to play those types of games. However, there are a lot of things in Magic that aren’t fun. Should we make a rule against mana screw? How about bad matchups, or opponents with good mental games? I argued that time in a match was very much an in-game resource, a resource that players should feel free to try to gain an advantage with. In football, it is a common and well accepted practice for the team in the lead to stall out the clock in order to win. I saw this as parallel to Magic, in that, if one were say up 1-0 in games, and the round timer was ticking down, there is no reason one shouldn’t drag out the game as long as possible.

However, I had this discussion with numerous friends in the wake of Saito’s suspension, and my opinion was swayed. I now believe that there is a good reason for the stalling guidelines, and it’s not just because playing against someone who stalls isn’t fun. You see, as someone who largely plays Control decks (my first five years of Magic we spent playing almost exclusively Mana Drain control in Vintage), I always viewed time as an extremely important resource. I had no problems winning a match 1-0, or playing for a draw rather than losing. I still think these are perfectly fine tactics that are well within the rules of the game.

However, these things are not stalling; the difference lies in how you achieve the management of time. It is not the same, in my newly minted opinion, to tank for 5 minutes about every simple play, read and reread a card multiple times, or flip through your graveyard before every decision, and to use the game state to achieve legal time management. For example, assume a Control player has game one of a match all but locked up. Let’s also say his opponent is at 19 life with no relevant board. Our Control player has a Grave Titan in play with two zombie tokens. Let’s further assume that this isn’t a great matchup, especially post board, for the Control player. He definitely doesn’t want to lose game 2 and force a game 3, which he might also lose. Instead, he chooses to sit there with his dominant board position and not attack with his Titan. While the only reason to do this is obviously to keep the game going, this is what I would call time management rather than stalling. Of course, the locked-out opponent is free to just scoop up the cards at any time, but, as the Control player, there is little advantage to starting game two any sooner than is necessary.

To bring back the football analogy: you can only run down the clock when you have the ball. Having the ball is something one must work for, and must expend resources to achieve. The Grave Titan player most certainly has the ball in the aforementioned game. However, let’s say the tables were turned. Now, it’s game three. The Control player is still in the same position (having the ball), but now he’s trying to get the last few attacks in before time is called. His opponent, wanting to draw rather than lose, goes deep into the tank on the declare attackers step, looking at his hand, reading the Titan, flipping through both players' graveyards. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the ball. He is not using in game decisions (whether to attack with the Titan or not), to run out the clock. This, my dear readers, is most certainly stalling. While I get the feeling that I am one of the few who ever even questioned the stalling rules, I’d love to hear what you guys have to say about this issue. Where do you draw the line? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

Experiments:

As promised, I’ll be signing off every week with a new, rough and untested decklist. With one of my good friends, Anthony Eason, going to Worlds (good luck Team USA!), and with the new PTQ season coming up quickly, I’ve started to take a serious look at Extended. While I’d love to play Jace, the Mind Sclulptor and Cryptic Command in the same deck, this one looks too fun to ignore:

Everything Has Haste.dec

I didn’t play Magic during the Lorwyn/Shards era, so I probably have forgotten at least one important card that I don’t know exists yet. I also have no idea what the metagame will look like, so I never made a sideboard, but viable options (or cards that could go in the maindeck) include:

Let me know what you think!

-Josh Lalo

@joshlalo on Twitter

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joshualalo @ gmail dot com