When deciding on where I would start my more in depth break down standard deck Faeries seemed like the obvious choice.  Just about every where you go you’ll find someone rambling on and on about how it’s the best deck hands down and it’s getting hard to argue.  Alex Bertoncini just won both the 5k and 2k standard opens with the deck with the Faerie mirror being the final match of both tournaments.  

So just what makes Faeries such a house?  To try and find out I’ve complied several different Faeries lists to try and see what they all have in common.

ave the main deck from four fairly different lists. Mine from the blog I wrote a few days ago, the top 2 lists from the 5k open and the list provided by Gerry T. on SCG.com.  First the easy part, what do all the decks have in common?

4 Mistbind Clique

4 Scion of Oona

4 Spellstutter Sprite

4 Ancestral Visions

4 Bitterblossom

3 Cryptic Command

4 Rune Snag

We’ll leave the mana for later, but right now we have a deck with 27 cards, plus the 25 lands in each deck.  That gives us 8 cards to work with. Since only one of the 4 isn’t running 4 Cryptic Commands, I’m going have that be the first of our 8 cards.

Next in line I want to include some number of Terrors.  Since only my list is excluding the card I’m going to assume that I’m wrong on this one and include it our list, but how many?  My gut tells me 4, so I’ll start there and see where it takes us.

The final 3 cards are different in all of the remaining lists.  Our choices seem to be Pestermite, Sower of Temptation, or Nameless Inversion.  All three of the cards do different thing for the deck, but in some ways Sower of Temptation and Nameless Inversion step on each others toes.  Sower can act as a pseudo removal spell and can handle more threats, but is obviously vulnerable.  Against any deck that is light on removal Sower is probably much better than Nameless Inversion, but since the format is full of removal, especially the board sweeping kind like Firespout it feels like a Sower wouldn’t be very effective against anything that Nameless Inversion wouldn’t be. 

So that leaves us with Pestermite or Nameless Inversion.  At a glance the deck seems to be lacking threats and Pestermite would help on that front. The card is also effectively a Time Walk against the various Big Mana or any kind of real control decks that are running around. 

On the flip side Firespout is already extremely popular and Pestermite is pretty terrible against a Firespout, and those match-ups are already some of better ones that Faeries has seen.  Nameless Inversion also seems very strong against any of the many aggro decks in the format, RDW, Merfolk, B/G, and the like.  It also makes the deck more controlling and gives you more chances to try and out play your opponent, which may or may not be a good thing.  One final argument for Nameless Inversion is that Brett Blackman put 3 copies of the card into his sideboard, which we’ll get to in a bit, so the card must have some merit.

This one is a close call, but for now I think we should go with the Nameless Inversions.  With the popularity of Revilark waning and the absence of any other real control decks in the format I don’t think that 7 removal spells will be too many, especially considering how aggro heavy the format is.  I could see someone making a case for Pestermite as the card is still really strong, but until a real control deck rears its head I think we should stick with Nameless Inversion.

The mana isn’t quite as interesting, but here is what the decks have in common.

2 Faerie Conclave

4 Island

4 Mutavault

1 Pendelhaven

4 River of Tears

4 Secluded Glen

4 Underground River

That gives us 23 out of 25 cards.  The real questions here are, “How many Pendelhavens do we play?” and “How many Faerie Conclaves do we play?”

The answer to our first question is fairly simple in my mind.  Pendelhaven is so strong that you really want to play one almost every game.  So a second one seems like a must.

The next question is a tad more difficult.  The real dilemma here is being able to play suspend an Ancestral Visions on turn one.  If we only play 2 Faerie Conclave that will give us 13/60 cards capable of playing a turn one Visions.  If we play 3 Faerie Conclave we’ll have only 12/60 cards that give us turn one Visions.  That’s a difference of less that two percent, which doesn’t seem like a lot.  So the real question is “How much more important is a turn one Visions verses a Faerie Conclave?”  Since playing a turn one Visions might just be the best play this deck can make I think we can safely assume that making that happen even two percent more often is good.  Taking all this into consideration it leaves us with this.

4 Mistbind Clique

4 Scion of Oona

4 Spellstutter Sprite

4 Ancestral Visions

4 Bitterblossom

4 Cryptic Command

3 Nameless Inversion

4 Rune Snag

4 Terror

2 Faerie Conclave

5 Island

4 Mutavault

2 Pendelhaven

4 River of Tears

4 Secluded Glen

4 Underground River

As I mentioned before I don’t think there is anything with playing the Pestermites over the Nameless Inversions, but keeping the current meta-game in mind I think Nameless Inversion is probably better right now, but if the control decks make a comeback Pestermite would certainly be the card of choice.

Now for the sideboards, since I didn’t post a sideboard with my deck I’ll just leave it out.

So first we’ll take care of the easy stuff.

3 Damnation

4 Thoughtseize

That gives use 8 cards to work with and a lot of options.  I think we can safely eliminate all the spot removal cards as our main deck is already sporting seven of them, so out goes, Nameless Inversion, Peppersmoke, and Slaughter Pact, leaving us with some combination of Bottle Gnomes, Fledgling Mawcor, and Flashfreeze.

Fledgling Mawcor is extremely strong in the mirror, and if the top 8 of the SCG 2k open is any indication the of this decks popularity then we’ll want as many as we can post board.

Now we just have to decide between Bottle Gnomes and Flashfreeze.  I really like Bottle Gnomes in such an aggro heavy environment. It can soak up a pretty hefty amount of damage and helps you stay alive when you have a Bitterblossom on the table.  Flashfreeze may not be able to block and won’t keep you dieing from Bitterblossom, but it can deal with a lot of cards that Bottle Gnomes cannot.  Cloudthresher and Firespout come to mind, and we already have Damnation to deal with other creature based strategies.  As much as I love casting me some Bottle Gnomes I think we will probably be better off with Flash Freeze.  Which brings us to the following.

3 Damnation

4 Flashfreeze

4 Fledgling Mawcor

4 Thoughtseize

I’m actually surprised at the level of flexibility that was offered to us in card selection.  When I started I pretty much figured I’d be copying and pasting something and while we ended up with a list nearly identical to GerryT’s I think you could easily fit Pestermite into the deck without hurting it at all.  This deck is clearly extremely powerful and should be a part of any testing you do.  As far as testing goes I’m not going to do that part of the process for you, stop being so lazy.

Up next on my list are the B/G decks that have been pretty popular as of late, but if any of you have an archetype that you would like me to explore let me know.  Until next time.

Bob

Tags: Magic Standard