Sultai After The Face to Face Regina Classic

It's been far too long since I last made a post about Sultai. Since that last post I've played in two tournaments on the Face to Face Series: the Edmonton Open in July and the Regina Classic in September. While I didn't manage to bring home the trophies, I did manage to top 8 both of these events, making me three for three on top 8ing Face to Face tournaments that I've played in the last 12 months. My recent performance makes me feel much less bad about my lackluster performance at GP Toronto earlier this year. In this post I'd like to talk about the more recent tournament in Regina; how I prepared, what I faced, and about my decklist.

The Tournament

Most of my tournament preparation lately has been focused on two things: sideboard building and playtesting matchups with popular decks that I think I might be inexperienced against. My approach to sideboard building lately is fairly simple but I've found it to be very effective. First I pick what I expect to be the six most popular decks in the current metagame. The number six is completely arbitrary, but has felt like not too few and not too many to try and target so I've stuck with it. I tend to just pick the current top six decks on MTG Goldfish but you could choose these however you want. Second I make lists of all the main deck cards that I want to cut in each of these matchups; the number of cards for each matchup can vary wildly. The next step is to try to start filling the appropriate number of slots for each matchup. I usually start with some of the more specific "silver-bullet" cards like land destruction (i.e. Fulminator Mage) and graveyard hate. Slot these cards in for any of the six matchups you would want to bring them in for. Then I just go through the matchups, usually starting with the ones with the most open slots, trying to fill them all as well as possible. Try to get a balance of more effective cards that might only fit into one matchup, and more flexible cards that could fit into several. I find this method makes your sideboard pretty flexible, and will often be effective against most decks in the format. The six matchups I took into account while planning for this tournament were Humans, Azorius Control, Burn, Hollow One, Tron, and Storm. I also was keeping KCI on my mind a little bit as well as I knew a few skilled local players were going to be playing it.

The matches I played against at the tournament were as follows:

• Round 1: Living End - Win 2-1
• Round 2: Humans - Win 2-1
• Round 3: KCI - Lose 0-2
• Round 4: Abzan Traverse - Win 2-0
• Round 5: Opponent didn't show up - Win
• Round 6: Infect - Win 2-1
• Round 7: Infect - ID
• Quarterfinals: Infect (round 7 opponent) - Loss 0-2

I started the tournament scared, being paired against Living End, which is one of my worst matchups. Thankfully my opponent was a fairly new Magic player who had only borrowed the deck and was also very unfamiliar with Modern so I was able to outplay the terrible matchup. A funny thing happened from this point on in the tournament. For those who don't know, I live in Saskatoon, and somewhere around 15-20 people from Saskatoon drove down for this event, making up maybe 20% of the field. Other than round 1, every person I played against was a fellow Saskatoonian who I've played against before and also knew my deck.

Humans is still a matchup I used to not like but now think is favourable if you navigate it carefully. They can still run you over sometimes.

KCI was rough, as this was my first real time playing against it. It also didn't help that it was a friend playing it and he already knew I was playing Surgical Extraction and not Leyline of the Void so he didn't need to bring in Nature's Claim, which would have been a dead card. In game 1 he just did his thing. In game 2 I don't think I drew a single sideboard card, but still almost got there (got him to 1 life). Seemed like every time I blew up a KCI he drew another one immediately, and every time I killed a Scrap Trawler he drew another one immediately. Not much I can do about that.

The Abzan Traverse was your typical grindfest; both games I think I just took over with planeswalkers.

The Infect matchup I still think is slightly favourable, but still very tricky, and they can just kill you out of nowhere. For those unfamiliar with this matchup, never try to force the issue of killing their creature mid-combat. That's how you get blown out by Blossoming Defense or Vines of Vastwood. The most frequent time you try to kill their creature is in their end step, to force them to waste their protection+pump spells by using them for only protection. Timing can also vary depending what they're doing and how much mana they have of course; be smart about it. Also worth noting, try not to get wrecked by Spell Pierce. I don't think there's a ton to say about my two Infect matches. My quarterfinals losses I had some completely reasonable but definitely not steller hands, and Infect can really just punish that sort of thing. Fatal Push is the card you usually want the most in this matchup, and I don't think I saw any this match. I drew mostly 2-mana removal, and this is a matchup where 1-mana interaction is key.

Saskatoon players did great at this event, and my tiebreakers were also really good going into top 8. My opponents from rounds 2, 3, and 7 were all in top 8, and 6 of the 8 players were Saskatoon players. Sadly none of us got to bring the trophy home.

The Deck

Tireless Tracker has generally been an all-star for me in this deck lately, but strangely I rarely drew it at this event. I created maybe two Clue tokens throughout the entire event, and never got a chance to crack a single one. At this tournament, Grim Flayer was great. I drew him frequently, and had him in play on turn 2 in what felt like a majority of my games. An unchecked Flayer will often take over a game, quickly becoming a 4/4 and making all your future draws high quality. Jace, the Mind Sculptor is another card that has continuously impressed me, and I think that this type of deck is a great shell for him.

One card that I've found less good lately is Serum Visions, as you may have noticed I've only been playing 2 copies. I still like Serum Visions, but only in the mid-to-late game. I've been finding that Modern is fast enough that I need to be playing cards that affect the board in the first couple turns, and having an opening hand with multiple Serum Visions was often a death sentence and I just didn't have time to cast them. The manabase of my deck could probably be changed as there are still artefacts of when the deck had 4 Serum Visions. Back when I played 4, I played 3 Darkslick Shores to faciliate them. This made me want to fetch basic Forest on turn 2 more often then now, which led to the 2 copies of Misty Rainforest, even though black fetchlands are generally better for this deck. I'll probably do a complete overhaul of the manabase sometime soon.

Things I've Been Testing

Search for Azcanta is an extremely powerful card, so I've been trying it out at a few FNMs. As powerful as it is, I don't think this deck is a good home for it. This deck just plays too many cards that you can't get or don't want when activating the back side. Basically all you want to impulse into is your removal spells and sometimes planeswalkers, but often you'll just hit some mixture of lands, creatures, and discard spells.

The Sideboard

• 2 Collective Brutality
• 1 Damnation
• 1 Damping Sphere
• 1 Engineered Explosives
• 3 Fulminator Mage
• 1 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
• 2 Liliana, the Last Hope
• 2 Stubborn Denial
• 2 Surgical Extraction

About Certain Cards

My only change from the Face to Face Edmonton Open was swapping a Night of Souls' Betrayal for a second Liliana, the Last Hope. This was because Liliana is almost as good against 1-toughness creatures, and I wanted an extra card to bring in against control. Liliana is just an incredible card and I basically always want 2 somewhere in my 75.

I've never been crazy about Collective Brutality, but it's impossible to deny the flexibility of the card. With the exception of the removal mode, I try not to bring it in if only a single mode is useful. Bringing in a 2-mana discard spell is not good enough in my opinion. It's an absolute must-have for any matchup where you can consistently use multiple modes though.

I used to always play more sweepers, but have been happy with 2 lately. Damnation has been consistently good for a long time. In matchups where you want it, it's obviously great. The Engineered Explosives is a card I've only recently started playing with, and I still haven't gotten a good feel for it. I've had plenty of opportunities to board it in, but it seems like I never draw it. When I do draw it it's often when I'm already ahead on board and don't need it. The only time I've ever activated it, it was a one-for-one with a Drogskol Captain. I'll keep playing it, hoping that it actually does something someday.

The split of 3 Fulminator Mage and 1 Damping Sphere is what I've been calling the Reid Duke special, as I started trying it out after seeing it in some of his lists. The Fulminators are a fairly obvious inclusion to any BGx sideboard and they do good work. I was skeptical about the Sphere at first but it has continued to impress me over and over. Sphere plus your regular disruption plus a clock will often just slam the door against the decks it's good against. It's a fairly small sample size, but my match win percentage against Tron since playing the most recent versions of my deck is 100%.

Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet is a great multi-purpose card. He's a threat, a lifegain card, and a hate card against many graveyard decks. He's incredible at breaking parity on a stalled battlefield, by starting to generate zombies as you pick off opposing creatures. I recently played an FNM where I didn't have Kalitas in my board and deeply regretted it.

Even though I don't play any counterspells in the main deck, I always like having some number of them in the sideboard. In the past I've played both Disdainful Stroke and Ceremonious Rejection. I love both of those cards and think it's reasonable to play them in these slots. I went with Stubborn Denial this time simply because I wanted something a little more flexible. I think it's more often than not that you have a 4-power creature with this deck so I'd always recommend Denial over Negate or even Countersquall.

I've been a fan of Surgical Extraction in this deck for a while, mainly because of being able to flash it back with Snapcaster Mage. However, I just don't think Surgical is good enough of a graveyard hate card in Modern right now. With many of the popular graveyard decks, hitting one thing just isn't enough. Right now I think we need things that hit the whole graveyard, most likely Nihil Spellbomb or Leyline of the Void. I also think I need to go up to 3 or 4 graveyard hate cards opposed to only 2. For the immediate future I'm probably going to be testing out Leylines.

Overall, I'm very happy with my recent performances and look forward to continuing to play this deck. I'm also looking forward to getting a new toy in Guilds of Ravnica, Assassin's Trophy. I've also been hoping that these new Ravnica sets give us a sweet Dimir or Simic card so we have a card that Jund and Abzan don't have access to. Dimir appears to have struck out, except for maybe Unmoored Ego, so here's hoping Simic gets something awesome next set. As always, I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has about my deck, either here or on Twitter. Thanks for reading.