FCG and The Gauntlet

[Kaiser von Hugal]

I have reviewed Vegeta2711’s FCG primer and various Gauntlet lists.  I put together a worksheet, summarizing basic tenets of the various archetypes.  I looked at main deck options, not sideboards.  I did this with the idea of maximizing game one.  A disclaimer, I realize that there are many versions of each archetype and that my classifications are debatable.  I have presented them here for discussion and like to hear your feedback.  The decks in italics are considered Tier 1.  To be included as a major finding, I wanted results to focus on at least 50% of the Gauntlet.  These are my findings:

1.   In 10/14 match-ups, FCG should go combo (5/6 Tier 1)
2.   9/14 decks don’t like Blood Moon (4/6 Tier 1)
3.   8/14 decks will be running at least 4 counters (4/6 Tier 1)
4.   7/14 decks have at least 7 “0” drop cards (All Tier 1)
5.   7/14 decks have at least 8 “1” drop cards (All Tier 1)
6.   7/14 decks have at least 15 “0” or “1” drop cards (All Tier 1)

TnT
Blood moon friendly
0 counters
7 “0” drops
6 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Madness
Hates Blood moon
0 counters
6 “0” drops
2 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Stompy
Blood moon friendly
0 counters
3 “0” drops
1 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Tog (UBG)
Hates Blood moon
8 counters
7 “0” drops
9 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Tog (UBGR)
Hates Blood moon
8 counters
7 “0” drops
10 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Keeper
Hates Blood moon
10 counters
5 “0” drops
10 “1” drops
FCG should beatdown

Landstill (UR)
Hates Blood moon
10 counters
3 “0” drops
3 “1” drops
FCG should beatdown

Landstill (UW)
Hates Blood moon
14 counters
3 “0” drops
5 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Mask
Hates Blood moon
4 counters
4 “0” drops
15 “1” drops
FCG should beat down

TPS
Hates Blood moon
0 counters
10 “0” drops
19 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Dragon
Hates Blood moon
4 counters
6 “0” drops
5 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Smmenen
Hates Blood moon
4 counters
8 “0” drops
17 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Slavery
Blood moon friendly
4 counters
11 “0” drops
8 “1” drops
FCG should combo

Trinistax
Blood moon friendly
0 counters
11 “0” drops
8 “1” drops
FCG should beatdown

With these findings in mind, I made the following deck construction decisions:
1.   Focus on the combo aspect of the deck.  Look for alternate ways to accelerate mana development and increasing the chance of drawing key combo elements
2.   Include Wasteland and Stripmine
3.   Include Bloodmoon.  The three decks running heavy counter do not like Bloodmoon.  Bloodmoon is key because 2 out of 3 of them don’t fear Chalice.  I could exchange Chalice for Defense grid but I feel that Chalice provides greater flexibility against Tier 1 archetypes.
4.   Include Chalice of the Void.  Its flexibility can fight many deck strategies.  By including this card, I will need to limit the number of “0” and “1” drops in the deck.  

Here’s the deck:
1 Forest (green is key to combo and BM is maindecked)
4 Mountains
4 Taiga
4 Wooded Foothills
1 Strip Mine
4 Wasteland
3 Ancient Tomb (alt speed)
1 Black Lotus (must keep, even with Chalice maindecked)
1 Mana Crypt (ditto)
4 Elvish Spirit Guides (alt speed)
2 Gamble (must get combo early) – these could be Mirri’s Guile, swap Mountains for Karplusan Forests
4 Matrons (ditto) - could drop 2 for Gempalm’s
4 Food Chain
4 Recruiters
4 Ringleaders
4 Pile Drivers
4 Warchiefs
1 Siege-gang Commander
3 Blood Moons
3 Chalice of the Voids

I believe that including Lackey is committing to the ‘beats’ version rather than combo.  It also competes with Chalice.

[Eastman]

Your attempt at an analysis is admirable but some of the choices you made (particularly concerning what is 'tier 1') are questionable.  We're trying to push the quality of the open forum so we'd rather threads like this, though useful and often intriguing, go in the newbie forum.
MOVED

-Eastman
[/b]

[Kaiser von Hugal]

I understand.  I took the Tier 1 listing from a Gauntlet posting.  Please let me know what your take on it is.

[GodzillA]

While I can appreciate any attempts to innovate FCG, as I worked closely with Vegeta to optimize the archetype, I feel as though some of your conclusions may be questionable. I myself did some heavy testing with the notion of taking the deck in a less aggro, more combo-oriented direction. This involved dropping Wastelands for better mana consistency, going to 4 Matrons for tutoring for combo pieces, and running Gamble as search for Food Chain.

After extensive testing with various builds working in this direction, I came to the conclusion that these changes made the deck significantly weaker overall.

First, Gamble is simply too inconsistent to be viable. Too often you get rid of one of your important combo pieces after its use. Because the combo requires Food Chain, Ringleader, and Recruiter or Matron in hand to go off, there's a high chance that Gamble may cause you to discard one of your key pieces.

Second, by cutting slots for Gambles and MD hate, the deck's overall synergy drops significantly. One of the deck's inherent strengths is that nearly two thirds of the deck are goblins, all of which have excellent synergy with one another.

Third, by dropping Prospectors and Sharpshooters, you lose the ability to kill your opponent via direct damage, should your ability to attack be restricted in some way (Spore Frog, Moat, whatever). It's also an excellent way to respond to mass creature removal like Starstorm after you've comboed off and all your threats are on the table. This secondary kill method is part of what makes the deck so versatile.

Fourth, Bloodmoon has terrible synergy with Food Chain. A single MD Forest and 4 ESG's has not proven to be enough to counter this lack of synergy. While I agree that Blood Moon can be an absolute house against certain decks, it effectively slows the combo overall, and makes it less reliable. It belongs in the board, especially if your intention is to go with a pure combo build.

Fifth, by removing Lackey, you're removing the deck's number one way to beat Control. This is not an exaggeration by any stretch of the imagination. Lackey wins more games against control than Blood Moon, Wasteland, Chalice of the Void, REB, and Xantid Swarm combined. Which leads me to the most important point of all:

Sixth, the fundamental reason why this deck is so viable is that it has a way to win if its combo is disrupted. Not only does it have a secondary way to win, but it's a really, really, REALLY good way to win. Removing the aggro backup to the deck is in essence removing the most important reason for its viability. The aggro backup basically allows you to ignore combo disruption - an option not available to pure combo decks like Dragon, Draw7, 2-Land Belcher, etc.

In many respects, it's better not to think of FCG as a combo deck, but rather as an aggro deck with a really potent combo backup.

[Kaiser von Hugal]

Thanks Godzilla, thats just the kind of feedback I was looking for.
-Dominic

[jCoKn]

I've been playing a different tweak of FCG every week now for 2 months. My current favorite has only 4 basic mountains, and 2 off-color moxen. The deck isn't always very red-hungry, esp. with Food Chain giving you the red you need, and the benefits are an increased chance of an early combo, or even better, quicker hate in game 2 (blood moon and null rod being personal favorites). Another addition I made was the inclusion of 3 Rancor MD. It's an awesomely powerful card, and having 40/2 Piledrivers blocked by 1/1 soldier tokens ain't fun.

Also, Godzilla hit it hard on the button here:

Fifth, by removing Lackey, you're removing the deck's number one way to beat Control. This is not an exaggeration by any stretch of the imagination. Lackey wins more games against control than Blood Moon, Wasteland, Chalice of the Void, REB, and Xantid Swarm combined.

Lackey is a TRAIN. I've seen the craziest stuff dumped on a Force of Will just to take out this menace. People simply don't like him (but I do!). Hitting ONCE is enough to end the game. Which, in fact, reinforces my inclusion of Rancor, to bounce over manlands and rootwallas!

Also, I have to agree with Godzilla that your maindeck hate is too much. Leave hate for the SB and facesmashers for the main.

Anyways, great analysis of the matchups! However, as a poll to the TMD community; what is FCG's hardest matchup? I think it's Control Slaver, but that's just me...

[GodzillA]

I actually tried Rancor in FCG for awhile, because its synergy with Lackey and Piledriver is undeniable. However, the bottom line is that Rancor isn't a goblin, and therefore lowers the synergy of the rest of the deck. More importantly, the amount of early blockers in Type 1 is so low that it hardly justifies including 3 non-goblins to get around them. I suppose in an aggro-heavy meta they might be a good call, but in most metas I think they are probably best left out.

As for the off-color moxen, I'm wary of their inclusion. I disagree with the statement that this deck isn't red-hungry. It is in fact very red hungry. First, colorless mana has pretty poor synergy with Warchief. Also, it's unsafe to assume that you'll always have Food Chain for color smoothing. In fact, if you do have a resolved Food Chain, you've probably already won the game.

As an example of a time when it's very important to have multiple red sources: It's all too common to play Recruiter without a Food Chain in play. The most common stack for this circumstance would be: Ringleader, Warchief, Piledriver, Piledriver, Piledriver. Now, once that Warchief hits the table, the thing you most want is 3 red sources to get all of those Piledrivers in play and attacking on the same turn. Incidentally, this is another reason Rancor isn't all that necessary. They may be able to chump block one lethal Piledriver, but 3 tend to make that a lot more difficult.

To answer your last question about FCG's worst matchup: While I agree that Control Slaver is a real pain, I wouldn't say it's the deck's worst matchup. First, you're going to want to side out the cards in your deck that Slaver can really use against you. Specifically, Prospector and Food Chain. With that many open slots, you've got plenty of room for extreme hate, and your board options are actually rather good here: REB, Pyroblast, Naturalize, Artifact Mutation, Rack and Ruin, Mogg Salvage and Null Rod all come to mind.

In my experience, by far the deck's most difficult matchup is Landstill. Near every card in the deck is hate for FCG. 8-12 spot removal cards (including Fire/Ice which is often 2-for-1), 3-4 Stifle (which affects nearly every key play in your deck), 8 countermagic, Nev's Disk, Standstill, and manlands as blockers all make this matchup a nightmare. Note that I've just listed nearly every card in Landstill. You'd be lucky to win 9 out of 10 games against Landstill with FCG.

What's worse, your game doesn't get much better after board. Sure, you get REB and maybe Naturalize, but they get Chill. So the match actually gets worse for you post board. Contrary to popular belief, Blood Moon actually does very little for you in this matchup, as Landstill tends to run a reasonable amount of basic Islands, and they can use either Chain of Vapor or Nev's Disk to get rid of it. If anything, it's just a difficult-to-resolve speed bump.

I have yet to see a worse matchup for FCG than Landstill.

[jpmeyer]

Whatever happened to just killing the blockers with Goblin Sharpshooter/Siege-Gang Commander/Gempalm Incinerator? :/

[GodzillA]

jp, are you asking that with regards to Rancor? If so, I agree completely. There's MD removal aplenty for forcing through your attackers.

If you're asking the question with regards to Landstill though, it just never gets that far. Sharpshooter never stays on the board long enough to do any real damage, SGC almost never resolves, and Incinerator often doesn't have enough goblins on the board to do the job. Even if it does, there are usually only 2-3 in most builds, which isn't enough to finish the job.

[jpmeyer]

With regards to Rancor

[BreathWeapon]

I had a really bad showing with FCG yesterday. Losing to, Ravager Affinity, Mask, Some strange form of Show 'n tell and the Mirror of all match ups (he was powered I wasn't). The one thing I wish the MD did more than anything else is pack more disruption. I was never really happy with the Incinerator (What exactly can they kill besides Welder and Manlands with any reliability?) and think i'll go back to Goblin Vandal just so I can blow Moxen up and buy a few extra turns. I really can't stress how dissapointing Incinerator was all day, including extra fun games, and I think even Mogg Fanatic is probably better in that slot.

[Suckamouf37]

Breath Weapon:  I've had really good experience with Incinerator.  He kills anything Fish throws at you sans Firewalker, RG Beatz creatures, anything in the mirror, not to mention Sui's otherwise unstoppable guys. :lol:   Plus, there are sometimes when the cycling will speed up your combo by a turn.

Godzilla:  Did/have you and Vegeta ever try Skullclamp?

Kind of on the same topic as Rancor, I was joking with my friends about how much I wanted to run Berserk a Piledriver.