Is Keeper a dead Archetype?

[Viceroy]

Actually I think there`s no reason to play Keeper, if you can play Tog.
There`s a lot of discussion about this two decks, but here`s a poll for the final verdict. Discuss your votes.

[Zherbus]

I played against a few matchups this weekend that Keeper should be and WAS better against than Tog - Dragon and Slaver.

[FireFall26]

There should be more options in-between.  I am sure there are many people who think its good, but dont think it is EXCELLENT, and people who don't feel its SUCKS.  Nothing productive is going to come out of this poll.

[Methuselahn]

wow, Sucks or is Excellent.  No middle ground?  

The Keeper theories will always be strong in Vintage.  However, Keeper is at its' best when its' meta is stagnant.  This gives the Keeper player time to carefully tune and meta their deck, right?  Sure, it may not be the deck to beat ever, but it has too much brokenness in it to ever be "dead."

Please include more options or make your available choices not as narrow.

[wicked chicken]

I think that it is terrible to say that any archtype is dead,if you've been playing this game for any amount of time you'd know that keeper is one of the decks that define type 1. It is constantly evolving just look at all the variants in the last year. Plus you are going to really stir up the shit by making statements like this ,keeper players are really commited to their decks and get really pissy when you trash talk about it.

[BreathWeapon]

Keeper has better tools MD to deal with Xantid Swarms and Welders, which makes it the "better" choice vs Trinistax, Slavery, Dragon and Twister ... Trinistax being debatable even. IMO, Keeper really doesn't have any bombs left worth playing. The only match ups it will ever be "better" than Tog at are the ones where Tog's philosophey of no MD removal is a hinderance, Xantid Swarm/Welder, and the Psychatog itself is a liability, Mindslaver. Thats such a narrow margin of decks that I just don't think Keeper is worth playing. Keeper needs to become a more dynamic deck, which makes me think that Eastman's Chains of Mephistophelese tech is the way to go.

[Zanetanos101]

Keeper isn't dead.  I would pick the middle ground on this question.  Its not too good, but its still viable.  I personally would play Gro-a-Tog or 'Tog over Keeper anyday, but I would say that keeper is still viable.  I think it will be a very long time (if ever) before we see Keeper being overall "bad" deck.

[defector]

I think Keeper is a good deck, I certainly struggle with it regardless of what I play.  It is not the best deck in the format, I don't think a best deck exists currently.  For many, not being the best or losing the best deck status means tha the deck is no longer playable.  The very question in the poll reflects this all or nothing attitude.  I think keeper does require the best players, skill means more here than draw, wish, 'zerk, cast illusions then donate.  It's pure control and needs to keep control for a few to several turns even while its winning, this is not easy.  Many people play keeper because it was the "best deck", now that tog is the "best deck", hopefully they will quit.  I've always held the idea that Keeper is the highest skill deck in the format due to the "everything is a timewalk", and in my view is it is still in the first tier. It just has to share that space with more decks than it's had to historically.  Now that there is another "best deck" to chase, hopefully the number of bad keeper players will decrease and some of this question will be settled.
defector

[jpmeyer]

Keeper is the best example of a deck that looks deceptively good, since any deck that starts out like this:

19 land
5 Moxes
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Balance
1 Mind Twist
1 Yawgmoth's Will

will be able to win games regardless of what the other 17 cards are.

[Dr. Sylvan]

My article this week is gonna be so relevant! Hehe.

BTW, JP, the only cards that have been in every one of 21 Keeper builds in my monthly data are:

1 Ancestral Recall
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Time Walk
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Yawgmoth's Will

1 Mox Jet
1 Sol Ring
1 Strip Mine
3 Underground Sea
4 [Blue fetchlands]

And yes, you may consider that a teaser.

[LoA]

I went to Newington with Keeper and going into it I was a little down on the deck's chances.  I didn't T8, but I do like the deck a lot more now and I feel like I have a much better sense as to what needs to be tweaked to make the deck stronger in the New England metagame.  Sure, there are bad matchups out there, but that's true for any deck.  There are some really interesting Keeper variants out there (like Eastman's) as well, so I'm beginning to hope that innovation is finally happening with the archetype more often than semi-annually.

[MaxxMatt]

I like playing Keeper becuase it need to approach every match in a different way. So I have to think and weight about playing my cards more carefully than any other deck ( excluding some combo decks ). It has no preferred path for victory rather than the usual broken start that any deck with a few restricted in it can sometimes do.

Tog go broken in a different and usually more consistent way, but almost win drawing cards.

Keeper can win drawing a lot OR can win keeping board control OR can win stealing games with his uncounterable winner.

His way of winning is so "bond" with the player who is piloting the deck that is a lot due of play skill and knowledge of the field.

And this of course involve good AND catastrofic results.

A player, who take his Keeper deck and go to an unknown tourney with it, without knowing well a lot of the players and the decks involved, can't think of having the possibility to Top8.

An Hulk player in the same situation can do it with a good winning rate.

It is better?

NO!

It is only a different way of spelling the word "Control" talking about this game.

If you want consistency for 8-9 swiss round, then play 'TOg
If you want "a satisfactory challenge", then  play Keeper all the Life, But "metagamize" it or die!


I'm totally with Zherbus about his brief matchup analysis.

[heiner]

lets check out these results:
http://www.morphling.de/coverages/top8decks.php?id=117

Top4 owned by 3 Keepers

I think Keeper is a very balanced Deck that has no real bad matchups, but also no autowins, and that makes good playing skills very important. It can just handle everything, fetching the adequate answer for every threat with its removal spells.

Its not easy in the fast meta nowadays to win with Keeper, but it still works out if played correctly, i think.

[Ric_Flair]

How to put this...hmmm.  Well here is my take on the issue:  Keeper is no longer a good choice.  Tog is a better control deck, it draws more and wins faster.  Slaver Control is a better control deck, it has a more solid lock mechanism.  Against Tog's bad matchups, Dragon and Slaver, there are decks out there better than Keeper.  So really there is no reason to choose Keeper other than nostalgia.  

The problem with Keeper is that this deck, for some reason, has a firm grip on the hearts of many players.  It is crafty, hard to play, and inconsistent.  It can win big or lose big.  I guess this appeals to some people's personality, but I would much rather just win, even if it means winning with a netdeck.  The irony is that Keeper is the ultimate netdeck, with only a few slots really open for tinkering.  And the fact is that as JP pointed out, the open slots are really irrelevant.  With the high number of busted cards Keeper can win almost in spite of a good win condition.  After all it ran Morphling until Decree was discovered and Morphling is just not good, nor has it been for a long time.

Some people have played Keeper for so long and know the deck so well that they can power through matchups on playskill alone.  For the rest of us, Keeper is like Rock was in Extended, the 55% deck, except here Keeper is 55% when played by a great player, while Rock was relatively simple.  

The long and the short of it is that great players can win with Keeper but they could win more with other decks.  And bad players should stay far away from this deck.  It just does not have what it takes to win right now.  

My vote: SUCKS

[Zherbus]

The long and the short of it is that great players can win with Keeper but they could win more with other decks. And bad players should stay far away from this deck. It just does not have what it takes to win right now.

That's a wrong assumption, plain and simple.

There are 3 major factors that dictate a decks success:

1) Luck
2) Deck Building
3) Playskill

I was with you up until this point. Tog has a low playskill cap. It has a specific set of plays you should make, and it doesn't take a genius to make those decisions. The mirror comes down to who got the better draw spells, and very little about outplaying.

If I play Keeper, I know I will do at least as well as I will with Tog or anything else really; certainly it is not better if I play Tog. With Tog, I know exactly what I'll get beaten by (and beat) with the only major gray area being the mirror, which the only factors that comes into it is luck and deck building (since you can adjust your luck by playing more Deep Anal's and REB's).

Give me Tog, and I can lose a mirror to a lesser skilled player or to Slaver  because it's not a fantastic matchup for me. With Keeper, I can and have beaten 'better' decks that I could just have easily lost to with Tog.

Right now, for example, typical Keeper is better against Dragon and Slaver because of it's removal. It's worse for Tog since Dragon and Slaver are both faster and Tog lacks the removal required to regularly deal with these.

EDIT: My vote is that it's a good deck. It is NOT, however, something you can just netdeck like Tog and expect to do well. Each Keeper deck should be reflective of the metagame it is to be played in. It's an ambush deck - each build I play is fresh and I guarentee you everytime you see a build from me, it's outdated by the time I've posted it.

[FORCE-OF-WILL]

IMHO....Keeper may well be the best deck. Period.

If only for the fact that the archetype will survive as long as the format does.....the concept of having a control deck that can and will constantly flew and flow with current metagames to remain a force is an amazing one. Some cards may comeout in the future that ruin or boost other decks in the format, even cards that make todays build of keeper obsolete ot just plain crappy. But neveretheless Keeper will endure as its strengths come from its ablity to adapt.....

Of course ive only been playing type 1 for for 7 months......So I could have everything bas-akwards.......my bad if that the case, Do YOU think i am?

I usually play keepr and/or tog.....At this point I really dont have a favorite between the two of them.

[jpmeyer]

...and if you look at my post, it's obvious why Keeper is so "adaptable"

[DEA]

[quote="since any deck that starts out like this: *snip* will be able to win games regardless of what the other 17 cards are.[/quote]

ooh, ict?

[jpmeyer]

Well, ICT didn't run most of those cards

[Razvan]

Yes, no, hopefully?

I never really had any fun playing Keeper. It's the ultimate in a re-active deck. It is fun to play once or twice, see how far you can take it, but in the end, I don't think it's even a top-tier deck anymore.

The best version I have ever seen was Arend's (specialK), Urw version. It's damn hard to beat, and it's tuned perfectly to the metagame (at least the local Toronto metagame).

As wuaffiliate once said, Arend is the metagaming whore . No vulgarities intended.

[Blackest Lotus]

I believe what Zherbus has about Keeper is the truth. Every build of Keeper is dependent on that player's metagame. Keepers not a control deck, its the enigmatic 6th point on the star, its a Metagame Deck.

Keeper is the best example of a deck that looks deceptively good, since any deck that starts out like this:

19 land
5 Moxes
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Balance
1 Mind Twist
1 Yawgmoth's Will

will be able to win games regardless of what the other 17 cards are.

This is true, due to the very obvious power level of the cards. BUT I believe the last 17 card choices are crucial to the decks success. 10 cards can be the difference between two decks, GAT and Hulk for example, 17 will radically alter the way the deck is played. Choose to play Misdirection, or maybe another Swords, or Matrix main, or FoF, how many Wishes? There really are a great number of cards that can be played in those 17 slots.

So, is Keeper Teh Suck? No. There are no bad Keeper decks, only bad metagamers.

[jpmeyer]

While the other 17 slots determine whether you'll end up with an OK deck or a great deck, the power level of those first 43 are going to win a lot of games just because they're there.  It's like how in Standard the best aggro decks are Ravager Affinity and Goblin Bidding, but yeah, random White Weenie or random Elves can like randomly win a lot of games simply because they drew Skullclamp.

[Petko]

The best version I have ever seen was Arend's (specialK), Urw version. It's damn hard to beat, and it's tuned perfectly to the metagame (at least the local Toronto metagame).

As wuaffiliate once said, Arend is the metagaming whore . No vulgarities intended.

Metagaming is absolutely key. Pretty much everything I would want to add has already been said. A netdecked Keeper may not really stand a chance, but a finely tuned, in regards to the local metagame, version is a competitor. Level of skill is also an critical factor.

[CSeraph]

JP - Not to be a dick, but I remember a thread recently where you laid out the basic 'skeleton' of Hulk Smash and noted the many slots left open for adaption as a positive thing - an opportunity for metagaming and superior deck construction. Presumably the implication was that the Hulk skeleton was sufficiently powerful to win on its own much of the time, but that tweaks in the remaining cards could improve its particular matchups.

Your Keeper-ish skeleton sounds somewhat the same - its certainly strong enough to win on its own sometimes - and you note that the remaining cards can tweak it from an ok to a good deck - which sounds like what you said about Hulk. Is your criticism the genericity and apparent lack of a focused game plan of Keeper's core? Isn't the a large part of point of Keeper as a control deck bringing together the most stupidly broken cards from its colors?

If you've got a devastating response saved up, I'd love to hear it - probably make me better as a player .

Addendum: I thought a bit more and decided I could put it more cogently: Isn't the "skeleton" of Keeper the absolutely most powerful control cards in the game, and its flexible portion the most powerful controls/hosers/bullets in a particular meta?

[jpmeyer]

No, actually it was Smmenen that had a "skeleton" for Tog.  Personally, Tog for me has about 57 cards in the maindeck pre-built (excluding changing the color base around for purposes of the sideboard.)  It's really the sideboard where any metagaming can occur.

I listed only 43 cards, because I:

1) needed to include mana in there because that really never changes and if i didn't include it it would make it seem much more customizable
2) I otherwise only included the really powerful stuff

After those 43, there's a lot of other stuff that almost always shows up, like 2-3 Cunning Wish, 1-2 Gorilla Shaman, Fact or Fiction, 1-3 Skeletal Scrying, 2-4 kill cards, and so on.  I consider Keeper prebuilt as well to about 55ish cards (points of contention mostly being number of Shamans, number of Skeletal Scryings, and number of Stifles.)  It's just the tuning and tightening.

The cards in common come down to:

23 mana
8 counters
3 win conditions
3 non-Ancestral draw
1 "oh shit" button
4 Brainstorm
3 Cunning Wish
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Mind Twist
1 Yawgmoth's Will

From there you've only got 10 more cards, personally it just seems that Tog chooses to choose more powerful or more generally useful cards rather than Keeper's more "safe feeling" cards.  Duress over Stifle is a good point of comparison.  More draw over removal is more subtle, but still works in a simlar way.  There, you're choosing to draw now (read: take extra turns now) rather than to use a card to remove a threat (read: take extra turns later.)  After all, winning the game provides more virtual card advantage than Waste'ing an opponent's land and stranding 2 spells there.

[FreddieNDB]

First off, I have to say that Keeper is the deck that brought me into T1 (Of course that's because I started playing online) and I geuss I do have a biased attachment to it. But I will attempt to look at it in two different perspectives.

When I first began playing Keeper, I sucked balls. I could never win because I just couldn't play the deck (I think it is the most difficult deck to play in Magic). But after about two months of redundant playtesting (jeese how did I ever get myself to do that) I started wooping ass with it. I played so solid especially since I perfected the use of Future Sight (I still run one in my Keeper build today). The bottom line is that Keeper is really just a pile of broken cards that you have to learn to play right. (I will also note that Long.dec was originally considered a pile of cards before people figured out how to play it). So a player who says keeper sucks, IMO, is just not really dedicated to learning to play something because they don't want to figure things out and go through trial and error in play testing. Keeper really shows the player and not the deckbuild(although of course metagming correclty is very important) because its all on the player to make Keeper work. IMO, I can't say Keeper is an excellent deck ( and currently I think the gaunlet is so diverse that there is no really excellent deck) but it is still a vialbe deck that is still competative.

However, Keeper is a very very old archetype. It originated when T1 was still not as diverse. Considering the gaunlet then Keeper was an excellent deck (or sometimes a sub-par deck, but I will refer to that later). I can't rember the person who said this, but I rember reading in an article where the player said in 96 or 97 that Keeper was only good because there were no other good decks at the time. So is keeper dying now because the gaunlet is so diverse that it is shoving keeper out of top-tier spot?

I can't really say much about whether Keeper is dieing. I can refer to the fact that Keeper is a deck that has stayed in T1 for the longest time( and as Zherbus called it "Clinger" in his new primer). The fact of the matter is that Keeper has gone through stages of tier 1 to sub-par, with each new set bringing new cards and thus "morphing" Keeper into a new form. My opinion is that Keeper may be going through one of its sub-par phases and may blossom yet again later. Of course I don't want to be bashed on this because I may be wrong, its just a thought to discuss and go ahead and give your thoughts if you think I am wrong.

[CSeraph]

*ahem*. My bad.

The point on removal (/answers) vs. winning-the-game cards is well taken... and helps clarify the Tog/Slavery vs. Keeper/Still/Phid distinction.

A question for anyone/everyone that I find both interesting and on topic, then, is what kind of cards does Keeper as an archetype want to see in new sets to improve its competitiveness?

Without making a particular card, it seems to me the ideal Keeper card would be highly flexible, either "cycling" when not needed and/or being useful against several different classes of permanents or effects; have 2+ for 1 card built-in, at least by the late game; and be white, limiting the ability of other decks to play it.

One example that crossed my mind looked like:

W1 Instant
Counter target activated ability. If a non-land permanent's ability is countered this way, destroy that permanent.

Other thoughts?

[jpmeyer]

An ideal Keeper card, that wouldn't just be as good or better in another deck (Cunning Wish and FoF, for instance are GREAT Keeper cards but they're just as good in Tog) would somehow have to be flexible and/or never dead, but more importantly it would have to give you a good reason as to why winning later would be better than winning now.

[jshields]

it seems like my metagame has switched over the past year from bad aggro -> decent aggro and combo -> almost entirely control.  keeper has done OK here, but it just no longer has the power that it once did where I live.  maybe it WAS wrong of me to living wish for an ascendant evincar in my FEB design game 1 and then side in plague spitter and win game 2, but keeper just no longer is able to keep up with most of our metagame here and probably if anything needs to be completely replanned to deal with threats like Stabilizer, Blood Moon, and Tormod's Crypt here

[CSeraph]

Psst- Decree can be hard cast for 4/4 Angel Tokens, too. The only thing worse than bad Keeper players is bad anti-Keeper tech.