[Deck] Stratego: Control-Combo with Strategic Planning

[AngryPheldagrif]

Or, alternatively, how AngryPheldagrif put Strategic Planning into combo before you did and doesn't give a damn about secrecy.
 
Basic premise: It's Control-Combo based around casting a lot of draw spells, countering your opponent's threats, inevitably finding Will and casting it for the win. If Will isn't workable, find Tinker and win. Even you muppets can't possibly screw that up. Simple.

Strategic Planning is perfect because it allows you to stack the yard on a comparable scale to Gifts and Fact or Fiction (both of which are obligatorily included) so that virtually any Will will be lethal. The deck also abuses Recoup with it. Recoup is so good in combination with SP that I actually considered adding a second copy, except that I'd rather not have the hand clogged up.

Notice that the list runs a humungous glut of tutors. Basically, you want to have access to Will/Tinker without delay and you are damn well going to make it happen. Just use any of the million cantrips to make your own Demonic Tutor. Even Personal Tutor is great in the role. The bloated complement of topdeck tutors also facilitated the inclusion of Gush.

Before I go on, here's the list:

Stratego
Control
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
1 Duress
2 Thoughtseize
2 Misdirection

Draw/Tutoring
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Ponder
4 Strategic Planning
1 Time Walk
1 Gush
1 Brainstorm
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Imperial Seal
1 Personal Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor

Win
1 Recoup
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Tinker
1 Darksteel Colossus

Bounce
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Rebuild

Mana
3 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
2 Volcanic Island
2 Island
1 Snow-Covered Island
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mana Crypt
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring

Notice how painfully straightforward it is. You have counters which counter things. Mana Drain doubles as your handy accelerant. You have 8 hard counters, 2 soft counters, and 3 Duresses, as well as a pair of bounce spells. Play control for awhile. You can win once your graveyard reaches critical mass.

Please note: This is not a deck that uses Will to win small. Will is your win condition the overwhelming majority of the time. You become a Tinker deck only against randomly vulnerable aggro or if they get a Leyline or Crypt which you absolutely can't solve any other way. You aren't PitchLong. You don't have a bunch of Draw-7s or Rituals to fuel a non-Will Tendrils. Don't be a bellend and screw yourself up that way.

On sideboarding: Here is a sample sideboard I'm testing with.

4 Leyline of the Void
2 Extirpate
2 Pithing Needle
2 Rack and Ruin
1 Shattering Spree
1 Sundering Titan
3 Slots of your choice

You get a good overlap, with 8 slots against Ichorid, 5 against Slaver, 3-5 against Shops, 2+ against combo, etc. Needle is for Welder against Slaver, because Welder is a damn wanker to deal with. Which is also why Thoughtseizes are main. Because Welder sucks.

Match notes:

Painter: Assuming they operate via the combo kill, you can completely negate their strategy at any point by accumulating either 7 mana, 3 mana+Will in hand, or 5 mana + Recoup in hand. Colossus gives you a turn to survive the grind, and Recoup really kicks them in the nuts if they're not expecting it. Obviously counter backup or Duressing their REB helps in that situation.

Slaver: Welder is annoying as hell. This much should be clear. You have more counters than them. Abuse that. Try to get a Duress in to slow them down, then steamroll them with a timely Will.

Ichorid: Derf derf derf Leyline derf derf derf

Fish: Is terrible. No one plays this anymore.

Combo: You're the one with the counters, so grow some bollocks and play control for a bit. Combo them out when you see fit and not a moment before.



Hopefully that's simple enough for you muppets, now post some bloody critiques or go away.

[Ufactor]

...okies, I'll ask the Captain Obvious questions.

1) Erm, so no Accumulated Knowledge, huh?  I can see that.  Do you ever feel like the deck does not draw enough cards?  Do you ever feel like you can recover if your first bomb gets countered?

2) Why Merchant Scroll?  In a deck that is centered around Tinker and Will, Scroll searches for big, fat neither :\

[Watanabe]

2) Why Merchant Scroll?  In a deck that is centered around Tinker and Will, Scroll searches for big, fat neither :\

Find Trall and/or counter 

[AngryPheldagrif]

...okies, I'll ask the Captain Obvious questions.

1) Erm, so no Accumulated Knowledge, huh?  I can see that.  Do you ever feel like the deck does not draw enough cards?  Do you ever feel like you can recover if your first bomb gets countered?

AK w/o Intuition = bad times. This is not Drain Tendrils. This is a more efficient, less vulnerable version. You play a million counters, so chances are they're more worried about you countering theirs than vice-versa. 6 pitch counters and 3 Duress-effects helps.

2) Why Merchant Scroll?  In a deck that is centered around Tinker and Will, Scroll searches for big, fat neither :\

Merchant Scroll for Ancestral is still an incredibly powerful play. Later, at worst, Scroll finds Gifts or even Mystical which find Will.

[Nehptis]

OK, so I'll ask the next obvious question.

If the plan is to play control as you say plus the fact that you have a good number of mana acceleration, why is SP better than TFK in this deck?

-Clearly, 1 more mana is not going to cripple this Control-Combo deck with all its mana producers
-Instant Draw > Sorcery "Draw"
-With TFK there are more options based on drawing 3 cards vs. only "drawing" 1 of 3 cards.  If Will is the big Win here then TFK allows you to possibly play multiple spells then REPLAY them with Will.  SP only let's you play / re-play off Will the 1 card you put into hand and the other 2 are Will targets only.

Edit: Forgot to mention..I like the deck name though!

[Clint_NZ]

I'll have to test this out before I can make any comment on how it plays out.

But, Why is everyone so intent on putting Strategic Planning into every deck right now?

I understand it is the hot "new" thing, but I do not believe it is as broken in other
decks as it was in Slaver.

So far I have seen it jammed into a few decks.

If I was to make a SP Tendrils deck, It would definitely be ritual based.
SP helps fill the yard, which in turn helps Cabal Ritual.

Although after saying that, I do not think I could put it inside of
Pauls deck without cutting cards that do a much better job in making the whole deck tick.

Just my 2 cents, I could be wrong.

Clint

[Vegeta2711]

If the plan is to play control as you say plus the fact that you have a good number of mana acceleration, why is SP better than Night's Whisper in this deck?

Fixed.  But yeah, we've already had a sorcery speed 2 mana draw 2 spell for a while now.

[AngryPheldagrif]

Basically, the reasons SP is better than TFK and Nights Whisper:

TFK: 2 mana vs 3 is HUGE. Basically, you get 2 mana on the first turn on a regular basis and are playing everything to ensure this. The difference, strategically, between having a turn 1 play and not is the difference between taking the initiative in the control role or rolling over and dying. You have 4 SP, Ponder, BS, and 3 Duress-effects to ensure this, on top of a ton of tutors. By the second turn, you generally have either Drain up, or are casting second-tier spells such as FoF, Gifts, etc. with pitch counter backup. That TFK only provides a card advantage if you have a spare artifact is critical, because you generally want to see any artifact you can other than DSC. Otherwise, it is on par with SP. That Thirst discards out of hand is actually largely irrelevant. Almost the entire deck is either cheap or pitches to FoW. The fluency is insane.

Night's Whisper: It's black, forcing you to fetch Seas, it consequently doesn't pitch to Force/MisD, and it processes one less card. Change any one of those and maybe it'd be as good as SP. Altogether, they're not.



As for Rituals, the builds started out with 4, then 1 of each, then 1 Cabal, then 1 Dark, and finally none. You're designed to reach the lategame where Will is highly lethal just off Lotus and Academy, and Rituals are dead cards until then that don't pitch to Force. At best they let you cast FoF and Gifts a tiny bit earlier, which is painfully narrow in use.

Jamming it into things wasn't a kneejerk reaction. I looked through all the possible shells, then finally realized that pure combo was a bad angle because Ritual combo is already Will-centric enough. I ended finding an old Twilight Gifts shell that operated under principles that SP follows neatly. Clearly losing 3 Gifts, Scroll, and BS hurt, but the overall gameplan of counterpunch control goes hand-in-hand with the filtering and graveyard enabling strategy it was built on.

[Clint_NZ]

Cool, Will proxy up and give it a whirl.

Just for a heads up, what are your usual Gift piles?
I understand that it depends on board state, just after a
brief breakdown. (never played Vintage Gifts)

Cheers
Clint

[AngryPheldagrif]

Cool, Will proxy up and give it a whirl.

Just for a heads up, what are your usual Gift piles?
I understand that it depends on board state, just after a
brief breakdown. (never played Vintage Gifts)

Cheers
Clint

If it's being cast at the end of your opponents turn (aka you're untapping with the 4 mana you cast it off) it tends to find: Recoup, Will, Lotus, Academy. If you've burned through other spells but no tutor you can swap Demonic in for Academy. If you've found Academy, either Crypt (for more mana) or Recall for extra gas. You can even throw Tendrils in there if it's likely to be lethal.

Generally there's no such thing as a 'setup Gifts' unless you're casting it purely off Drain mana, in which case you probably want to find tutors, mana and broken, and go from there.

[JACO]

Dan, this is almost the identical version of what I came up with after thinking about abusing Strategic Planning in the Drain Tendrils type shell. Good work. I also tried Empty the Warrens main. To abuse the top-deck tutors even more, I have Street Wraith. The tempo loss from Gush is minimal, but still crappy, and it's a huge Mana Drain target. Street Wraith slims the deck, and makes your top-deck tutors actually pretty decent. My version was basically:
-1 Merchant Scroll
-1 Gush
-1 Personal Tutor (I didn't even think to add this, because it can't get Lotus or Ancestral)
-2 Misdirection
+1 Duress
+3 Street Wraith
+1 Empty the Warrens (to help win smaller)

-1 Island
+1 Swamp
EDIT: Also:
-1 Flooded Strand
+1 Polluted Delta /EDIT

I also have Darkblast in the sideboard to deal with Goblin Welder, rather than trying to hope Pithing Needle sticks around. Darkblast is reusable, good against Confidant, and eminently tutorable.

[Bongo]

Night's Whisper: It's black, forcing you to fetch Seas, it consequently doesn't pitch to Force/MisD, and it processes one less card. Change any one of those and maybe it'd be as good as SP. Altogether, they're not.

Duress is also black and forces you to fetch Usea, and doesn't pitch to Force..
Yes, NW "processes" one card less, however, you're up one card in hand. NW actively draws cards, while SP is only a cantrip. SP also makes you very vulnerable to graveyard hate.

[HuntedWumpus]

+1 Duress
+3 Street Wraith
+1 Empty the Warrens (to help win smaller)

-1 Island
+1 Swamp

Very strong tweak Jaco.

Though I'm still unconvinced that SP is entirely better than previous Drain Tendrilsesq engines. Especially if you're running main board Duress effects. It seems to me that the goal with SP is to have a solid turn one play to start loading the Graveyard and Keeping the card quality of your hand high. However, take the generic scenario where I'm playing against and unknown deck and opponent. I would rather fire my duress at his hand turn one to start establishing control, then be ready to have mana drain on line the following turn. So I'm not sure I'm comfortable with casting sorcery cantrip so early. Any thoughts on this?

[T00L]

Cool idea i'll have to give it a try

[JACO]

Night's Whisper: It's black, forcing you to fetch Seas, it consequently doesn't pitch to Force/MisD, and it processes one less card. Change any one of those and maybe it'd be as good as SP. Altogether, they're not.

Duress is also black and forces you to fetch Usea, and doesn't pitch to Force..
Yes, NW "processes" one card less, however, you're up one card in hand. NW actively draws cards, while SP is only a cantrip. SP also makes you very vulnerable to graveyard hate.

In this deck you really don't care about accumulating cards. Thirst for Knowledge and Accumulated Knowledge both do that better than Night's Whisper anyways, are blue, and aren't sorcery speed. But if you're wanting to draw more cards, try Drain Tendrils instead with the Intuition/AK engine. That's not what this is about.

The focus is on digging deeper from turn 1 onwards, and quickly fueling the graveyard for a lethal Yawgmoth's Will. The theory is that Strategic Planning does this very cheaply, and better and earlier in the game than the available alternatives. You have so much disruption/protection that most of the time you just simply don't care what the opponent is doing, because you can Duress or counter nearly everything you need to. Dig for counters to keep you alive, or bombs to kill your opponent, all while dumping goods into the graveyard to be abused at a later date.

As Dan said, the deck is extremely reliant on the graveyard, but that's what you have Tinker for. If you don't think you're going to get there with a massive Yawgmoth's Will turn, just hold on to some counters and force through a Tinker for Colossus, or against the Drain mirror Sundering Titan. Tinker and Yawgmoth's Will are probably two of the four best cards in Vintage (with Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus being the others in the debate), and this deck is built squarely on the focus of abusing them.

[forests failed you]

I don't see how Strategic Planning helps the deck become better.  I understand that Planning is a good card, since I played with it at world;  however, it seems to me that since you run so much black mana that Night's Whisper would probably be strickly better in this deck. 

[Vegeta2711]

and this deck is built squarely on the focus of abusing them.

Hasn't every Brassman deck since the beginning of time been built around this concept? I mean you can say this deck is doing it more simply because it's draw puts cards into the grave 'to make will better', but seems a little sketch in practice. I mean has combo really needed to aim any part of it's strategy specifically around making Will better over the past few years?

[zeus-online]

I think people need to slow down, strategic planning is a good card, but i really don't think it should be put into everything....if you want a card that makes will better, Intuition does this waaaay better then SP.

I really don't see SP being all that good in other decks then slaver.

/Zeus

[Pomaxx]

I don't see how Strategic Planning helps the deck become better.  I understand that Planning is a good card, since I played with it at world;  however, it seems to me that since you run so much black mana that Night's Whisper would probably be strickly better in this deck. 

the same question araised in me when i evaluated the uses of the card. in CS the card does 2 things: dig deep and look for buisiness and (not unimportant) put a robot in the yard if needed.

in the given deck you can use Impulse or Telling Time  for digging as well. Filling up the yard for a Will seems like overkill.  a resolved Will is GG most of the time anyway.

[ErkBek]

in the given deck you can use Impulse or Telling Time  for digging as well. Filling up the yard for a Will seems like overkill.  a resolved Will is GG most of the time anyway.

Your Yawg Will isn't going to be lethal if your graveyard is filled with crap like Impulse and Telling Time.

[Pomaxx]

Your Yawg Will isn't going to be lethal if your graveyard is filled with crap like Impulse and Telling Time.

but with SP it is?

i was pointing out that just for digging there are other cards around as well. (not that they are needed)

my second point was, that filling the yard intentionally with cards like SP seems like wantig to win even bigger.

[ErkBek]

Your Yawg Will isn't going to be lethal if your graveyard is filled with crap like Impulse and Telling Time.

but with SP it is?

Yes, that's sort of the point.

When you play Impulse you ship away Moxes, bounce spells, and Tendrils all day. Even having a single one of those in your graveyard will help comboing.

Drain based Will decks have traditionally needed some way to work its graveyard to generate lethal Wills. These rolls have been filled by Intuition and Gifts Ungiven. Dan's deck is a little more cantrip based to abuse Strategic Planning.

[LordHomerCat]

It seems like a solid deck Dan but I just worry about the fact that you don't really have any card advantage outside Gifts, Fact, and Ancestral.  There's not another spell in the deck that puts more than 1 card in your hand (you don't even want to go for small Wills, as you said, since you have a lot of trouble winning without it; and using Gush before you win is like the worst tempo ever).  I hate playing topdeck tutors in something like Slaver which is full of Thirsts in addition to most of your cantrips and broken stuff, I can't imagine playing 4.  I mean, drawing 2 has always been really awful for me, I can't even imagine what happens when you draw 3 and your opponent has a draw that does anything.  Is personal tutor *really* good enough to play?  It just seems like the deck is really awkward, and unless you draw Gifts or Fact you are either gonna have to choose between casting sorceries or casting Drains, without a whole lot to do if you don't actually use your drain (like, no thirst or intuition or AK or anything to cast on the end-step).  I guess you could argue that in that kind of matchup, you'll just go aggro and use your drains to protect your own sorceries, but if that's the plan why not just play TPS?  What matchups are you that much better than TPS against, and where do they have the advantage?

[Ufactor]

I guess you could argue that in that kind of matchup, you'll just go aggro and use your drains to protect your own sorceries, but if that's the plan why not just play TPS?  What matchups are you that much better than TPS against, and where do they have the advantage?

Technically, Recoup yields two cards, but only if you have sorceries in your graveyard.  Using Recoup on something small, like Duress or Strategic Planning, is still ok.

The major difference, that I can observe, between this and TPS is the ability to transform into a wall of counters

[Tin_Mox5831]

With the B&R update, do you think the deck could benefit from a second copy of Personal Tutor, perhaps even a third? It's quite tempting to just toss 'em in there, but with some discretion, I think that another copy or two might help. They're slow, but they tie up a minimal amount of mana in a deck that's more than happy to assume the control role more often than not anyway. Also, they do a great job of helping the deck to "switch gears". For instance, PT -> Duress/Thoughtsieze in the early game, PT -> Strategic Planning to process cards in the midgame, and the obvious endgame scenarios where PT -> any number of big bombs.

The requisite cuts would prove difficult, though. Just glancing at the list, my first thought would likely be to trim Gush for the second copy of PT. Then, if PT tests well enough to merit another copy, perhaps cut one of the Misdirections for it. The second cut is much more difficult to make though. In the end, the hand disruption in the deck may allow for it. (I really like Duress effects in Mana Drain decks.)

By the way, any thoughts about a single Mind Twist as a strong PT target that combos with your Mana Drains?

Later,
Dave