Of Temporal Thopters

Apologies for the long delay on this article -- I was sick after my last one, and then my muse decided to abandon me. But, she's back now, I guess, so here's a new article!

When Temporal Mastery was spoiled, it sparked a raging torrent of opinions ranging from the traditional "oh, that's just being overhyped and isn't actually that good," to the equally traditional "yeah, I think it really is that good and maybe we should ban it before it sees legacy." The biggest problem with Mastery is the Explore Problem, which states that if you Miracle it on your turn three (when you have two lands in play), you are essentially just "Exploring" -- you're only getting an extra land drop and an extra card from it. To my knowledge, nobody has ever played Explore in a legacy deck, so this would appear to be a problem. Sure, later on when there's actually a board state it can always do work...but you have to prepare your deck to abuse the Explore option as well. Obviously a eck in legacy that wants to use Miracles effectively needs to start with 4x Top. It didn't take long, then, for my thoughts on Temporal Mastery to turn to Thopter Foundry. Thopter decks run multiple planeswalkers in varying numbers, the Thopter/Sword engine itself, Enlightened Tutors, and a host of card advantage and board lock options...they have plenty of things to abuse an extra turn, and they're a deck that already wants 4x Tops in the maindeck. The issue is one of space, which Thopter decks are notoriously short on. Before proceeding, here's what I came up with. Note that I'm not sure how to get card tags to work on a blog, or if that's even possible (I'm guessing it is and I just don't know it).

Temporal Thopters

4x Sensei's Divining Top
3x Thopter Foundry
1x Sword of the Meek
1x Crucible of Worlds
1x Ensnaring Bridge
1x Engineered Explosives

1x Counterbalance
1x Humility
1x Oblivion Ring

4x Brainstorm
3x Enlightened Tutor
3x Force of Will
2x Spell Snare
3x Swords to Plowshares

3x Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3x Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas

3x Temporal Mastery

1x Academy Ruins
1x Drowned Catacomb
3x Flooded Strand
1x Glacial Fortress
2x Inkmoth Nexus
2x Island
1x Isolated Chapel
1x Plains
3x Polluted Delta
1x Scrubland
1x Swamp
2x Tundra
1x Underground Sea
3x Wasteland

//SB
1x Cursed Totem
2x Engineered Explosives
1x Grafdigger's Cage
1x Pithing Needle
1x Tormod's Crypt
1x Phyrexian Metamorph
1x Aegis of Honor
2x Counterbalance
1x Karmic Justice
1x Enlightened Tutor
2x Flusterstorm
1x Force of Will

A few words about the more obviously questionable card choices:

--The M10/Innistrad duals are an idea that came originally from Thomas Tyson, who was using them for a completely different reason than why I have eventually adopted them: availability. He didn't have access to the full range of legacy duals that he wanted at the time, so he substituted. And while they did hurt him due to the large number of them that he was running, we did learn something pretty nifty in the process: they're immune to Choke, which is one of the primary weapons that Maverick has been using effectively to hate on blue decks. As a result, I have adopted that technology for this deck, and have been quite pleased with it so far. Running one of each color combination smooths out the mana a bit while rendering some level of immunity/functionality to Choke. The Chapel probably isn't necessary after testing...it's more there because of the symmetry. It should probably be a Seat of the Synod, to increase the artifact count for Tezzeret, and to allow for the awkward hands where you have white mana and an ET, and you need to grab a blue source. The Drowned Catacomb and Glacial Fortress have been perfectly fine, and I would recommend their adoptation in small numbers in other blue decks -- Stoneblade comes immediately to mind, as I don't believe that the deck that really wants outs to Choke can actually support them (Thresh).

--Inkmoth Nexi and Wastelands. In a deck with stringent color restrictions like this one, running 5 colorless lands can be a little awkward. However, the raw power granted by these lands is worth the risk, especially since some of the risk is offset by running 4x Top. Inkmoths provide a solid backup win condition which can get extremely fast if Tezzeret is involved. Even without Tezz, however, the Inkmoths will slowly chip away until they eventually win, and with Crucible providing inevitability, they -will- get there assuming you can protect them from Swords to Plowshares with Countertop. As for Wasteland, that particular effect is one of the strongest in the game right now. The current boogeymen of the format all run significantly fewer lands than traditional legacy decks have done. Yesterday's enemies, Maverick and Stoneblade, can still be injured by locking them with Crucible, but nothing like the pressure that Canadian Thresh, Show and Tell of various types, and Dredge can feel from even one Wasteland.

--The countersuite took the hardest hit when moving Temporal Mastery into the deck. Traditional Thopter lists tend to run 2-3 more counterspells at the least, and upwards of 4-5 more at the top end. I believe this is offset by both the meta and the sideboard. If you run into a Storm deck, you have 3x Counterbalance (with 4 ETs to find them), 2 Snares, 4 Forces, and 2 Flusterstorms. That's a pretty hefty amount of countermagic, and it definitely allows you to fight toe-to-toe with Storm. That said, you usually want to be locking Dredge down with permanents more than with counters, as Dredge tends to ignore counterspells other than on Breakthrough where X=0 or LED. You don't really want to get into a counterwar with Thresh, but instead be more threat-dense than them. If you stick either planeswalker, Humility, Bridge, Thopter/Sword, or just generally out-value and out-draw them with Top, you're in good shape. Thresh is really obnoxious early game, but it runs out of gas really quickly when it runs into a true stage III deck, and that is a role that Temporal Thopters is really comfortable playing. As for Show and Tell decks, it depends somewhat on the specific variant. If you're vs Sneak Attack, you have Bridge + Humility to annoy them, as well as a respectable enough countersuite to at least make them to fight over your threats. Metamorph from the board also shores up the Show and Tell problem, although if they Show Griselbee things can get sad. Counterbalance is actually amazing here, because the deck runs enough 3s and 4s to fight for both Sneak and Show, as well as being able to Enlightened Tutor in response to the Counterbalance trigger for permanents of those costs. Even if you don't have access to a 3 or a 4, having access to a 1 or a 2 can be a lot of help, as it will aid you in winning counterwars against their Dazes and Spell Pierces. Hive Mind is arguably the easiest of the three, since you have the ability to counter your own Pact trigger (Counterbalance is again amazing here), and the Show/Emrakul plan gets O-Ringed, Humiliated, or Bridged. Dream Halls can be a little awkward, since Counterbalance is basically useless unless it comes down really early and fights their cantrips. All that being said, though, the bottom line is that although the countersuite has been lessened to make room for the Temporals, it is still sufficient, especially considering that there are definitely decks in the meta (Maverick and New Frontiers/Nic Fit) that you absolutely do not want an overload of counterspells against.

--Finally, the Masteries themselves. I feel that as they are the main purpose of this writing, I should elaborate my points about them a little bit more. With 6 Planeswalkers, Thopter/Sword, Tops + shuffles, Enlightened Tutor, and so on, this deck has a -lot- of ways to abuse the extra turn. The Thopter shell also passes the initial test, as well: it is very okay with "just Exploring." If you're Exploring, you're getting closer to dropping one of your walkers, to setting up a board lock, to having enough mana to effectively hunt with Top, or to assembling Thopter/Sword. Furthermore, I believe that IF there is a deck in legacy that is capable of effectively using Temporal Mastery, it is roughly this deck (card choices may vary, but I mean specifically the archetype/core philosophy of the archetype). Would it also work in other situations? Sure. I can think of a half-dozen situations where Mastery would be jaw-droppingly amazing. But guess what -- it's HORRIBLE in 90% of the rest of the situations that the deck containing Mastery would get itself into. Consider the Delver situation which was brought up a lot when the card was spoiled. Ideally, t1 Delver, t2 Delver/Brainstorm, t3 reveal Mastery, flip Delvers, cast Mastery, bash for 12. Your opponent would be so far on the back foot at this point, right?!?! Yeah, he would. But then you have to consider the amount of nut draw that is needed for this to happen, to say nothing of your opponent's interactive abilities. What if the first Delver gets Bolted and the second one Forced? I guess you're okay with that, but then what do you do with the Mastery? At the point at which you add necessary components around Temporal Mastery to make Temporal Mastery good, especially fragile ones like creatures, the card steadily gets worse and worse. You could say that I'm proposing the same thing with Temporal Thopters, but it isn't really the same. Rather than trying to build a Temporal Mastery deck, what I have done is take a deck that synergizes well with Mastery, and added copies of that card to the deck. Temporal Thopters isn't a Temporal Mastery deck, it's a Thopter deck with Masteries. I believe this is the biggest problem with Mastery in legacy, and the biggest obstacle to its adoption -- people want to build Mastery decks, but the very act of building a Mastery deck makes the card bad.

I do believe that a few Terminuses would be a welcome addition to the deck, but I'm not sure where I would put them at the moment. Regardless, they are something that is on the consideration block, at least, although I don't think I would put in more than two. Legacy isn't block, where you can run 20 miracles and get away with it. The deck is also already reliant on using Swords, Forces, O-Ring, or a few other options at keeping Gaddock Teeg off the battlefield, so replacing some of the deck's current removal with Terminus seems like a horrible idea. I believe that once the format implodes on the Show and Tell decks sufficiently, Maverick will return, and I'd rather not have my pants down when that happens.

These are my thoughts -- if you disagree or have comments in general, by all means, let me know. My next article, whenever that might be, will probably involve Veteran Explorer somehow since I haven't written about that on here yet. If you have any questions specifically involving Explorer or the decks surrounding it, I'll certainly do my best to answer them.

Oh, also: how's the length on this one? I had a few people tell me that my last article was way too long, so I tried to keep this a bit shorter.