Making (use of) advantages in Kaldheim Standard

Recently, Sam Black wrote an article on the free side of StarCityGames that touched on the topic of (card) advantage in a way that is pretty similar to something that has been rattling around in my brain when I think about Kaldheim standard. For reference, I ended ~#1000 on MTGA last month and am around there at the moment too, and I wrote a brief twitter thread about the deck I've been playing, and how I got to it after starting with the Temur Timewalks deck that was briefly popular at the end of last month. Many of the cards that this piece revolves around are either in my Izzet version of the deck or in the original Temur variant.

Compounding and converting advantages

A complaint I've heard a lot about Standard lately is that "everyone has everything all the time": Every deck for a while kind of had to be able to snowball out of control, and there were plenty of cards that enabled that pattern. We've lost Uro, Nissa and Omnath in Standard, but we still have Edgewall Innkeeper (and, technically, The Great Henge), and new cards like Alrund's Epiphany, Goldspan Dragon and Toski threaten to do much the same thing. The same thing can be said of many of the Yorion piles that play a bunch of value permanents and then double that value with their companion.

All of these engines naturally push towards what Sam describes as "big games": They generate more and more material, be it cards, mana and/or time. You can use those to compound your advantage and, the theory goes, eventually win the game.

It is my impression that a lot of players and a lot of decklists focus on this aspect of the game: Get far enough ahead, compound enough advantage, and eventually you will win. But - again, similarly to a point made by Sam in his article - I think this has diminishing returns and that, if you want to get better at actually winning, you should probably dedicate more focus to converting that advantage into a win.

This, I think, was some of what led me from the Temur build to the U/R Snow build of the Timewalks deck. The Temur deck has Goldspan Dragon, Edgewall Innkeeper, The Great Henge and Alrund's Epiphany. It is so clearly designed to just find some way to get an unreasonable advantage and just compound that until it gets completely out of control. But the deck also has several problems.

First and perhaps foremost, the manabase in the deck is atrocious: Having twelve Pathways is nice, ostensibly, in a three-color deck, but when you are trying to have GG on turn 3, RR on turn 5 and UU on turn six, it often means you have to pick which of your advantage engines you actually want to be able to cast each game because you can't have it all. The deck has real fail cases due to its mana.

Secondly, the green part of its advantage-engines are mana-hungry, which both makes the manabase issue worse and means that it plays incredibly poorly with the maindeck counterspells in Saw It Coming and the Obosh Companion, some of the only tools the deck has to make the game it is playing "smaller" and keep an opponent who is also trying to do something absurd in check - or checkmate them.

For these two reasons, my reconstruction of the deck resulted in cutting the green. It was definitely the most demanding part of the manabase, and the payoffs for playing it did not actually play well with what the rest of the cards in the deck were doing. Removing all of that clunkiness makes the main synergy one-two-three punch of Goldspan Dragon into Epiphany into Obosh so much more reliable. You lose some of your potential to compound advantages, ostensibly, but you become much better at converting advantages. At the same time, it becomes realistic to cast cards like Saw It Coming and Soul Sear that helps make sure the game stays "small" enough that what you are doing is actually powerful enough to win.

Countering opponents' advantage engines

One of the decks I've played against most is the default Yorion Sultai Ultimatum pile, and I've been very happy with the matchup. The Ultimatum decks play a bunch of low-impact cards like Omen of the Sea, Cultivate, etcetera, that helps set up their powerful endgame of getting to resolve Emergent Ultimatum and win from there. They are very good at compounding advantages when it comes to cards and mana and very bad at converting it into a win. Especially in game one, every copy of Saw It Coming you draw drastically decreases the chance that the Sultai deck will ever get to actually do anything meaningful. In those games, you are not in a hurry to actually kill them, and as long as you do not let them get enough value from their Yorion or their black sweepers, they almost always lose because they have less relevant cards than you do despite having ostensibly drawn more raw cards than you. 

Similarly, having efficient interaction with the linchpin engine cards in other decks (lots of removal for Innkeeper, Soul Scar and Petty Theft against Toski, and counterspells for cards like Showdown of the Skalds and opposing Dragons and Epiphanies) is very appealing. In a world where everyone is trying to play the biggest game, I really like the balance the UR deck hits between keeping others fair and having the potential to do something unfair itself. 

Notably, what the deck is trying to do once it gets rolling is to not simply keep rolling, but to get across the finish line sooner rather than later. I think the Unleash Fury Naya decks are an attempt at getting the same closing speed, but it obviously lacks the blue interaction spells that makes the plan viable in this UR deck.

I will happily admit that at least part of my attraction to this play pattern is that, as a player who learned their fundamentals and mindset mostly from Limited, I simply do better (and enjoy playing more) when the game is kept small enough to not spiral into infinite complexity. But I also believe that, though the idea of compounding an advantage forever can seem appealing, it often opens you up to real risks if an opponent understands how to interact with what you are doing in the correct way, or simply goes over the top of you. And right now, I think the combination of efficient interaction on the stack and the battlefield, coupled with my own package of Dragons and Epiphanies (that I often slim down during sideboarding) is a good way of counteracting many of the most popular decks in Standard, at least on the BO3 ladder on MTGA.

Not Cycling, though. I will show that deck the respect of preparing for it once other people start showing it respect by actually playing it.