How to Stop your Brews from Dragging you Down

Tonight I was thinking that I would love to build a Standard-legal red/green werewolves deck.  Who couldn’t love a deck full of aggressive, shape-changing humans?  Because red and green are probably my two favored colors, I quickly started throwing werewolves into a deck.  After I added more and more and I saw which spells were available to fill-out the deck, I realized that it should not be a standard deck, but would be better suited to ISD Block Constructed.

So I took out the few spells that restricted the deck to Standard and decided to make it legal for ISD block.  After completing that, I had the following list:

4 Reckless Waif
4 Gastaf Shepherd
4 Mayor of Avabruck
4 Daybreak Ranger
2 Kruin Outlaw
3 Instigator Gang

4 Geistflame
4 Moonmist
4 Brimstone Volley
3 Garruk Relentless

9 Forest
3 Ghost Quarter
3 Kessig Wolf Run
9 Mountain

Sideboard:
3 Ancient Grudge
3 Full Moon’s Rise
4 Gnaw to the Bone
3 Bramblecrush
2 Witchbane Orb

Now, with this deck in hand, my first thought was to head to the tournament practice room and give it a go. My other thought was to just jump in a 2-man queue (because that’s often the only decent way to test a deck).   But, for some reason, before I went to actually play the deck, I decided to review what decks were popular in the format.

What I discovered were decks that were faster than mine (White human decks) and decks that would have a fairly easy time of controlling my wolves (Bloodgift Control). It’s a good thing I did this, because I’m pretty sure that my brew would have been slaughtered at the hands of these superior builds.  So without even playing a single game, I came to the conclusion that my lovely brew (awful as it was), was unplayable. This is probably the correct conclusion given that I scanned at least five tournaments worth of finishes and didn’t see a single werewolf deck.

Just a quick comparison of my deck to Bloodgift Control shows that Brimstone Volley kills all of my guys if they’re not transformed, Curse of Death’s Hold is tough to beat through, Devil’s Play is kindof a catchall (even for transformed werewolves), geistflame kills 8 of my creatures easily, and sever the bloodline is bad as well. On the plus side, Full Moon’s Rise out of the board would be highly effective.  But that’s it. In truth, my deck would just get spanked repeatedly.  So because I took the time to think out card interactions and possible game states, I avoided several hours of failed testing.

I am not abandoning the concept, though. I think that things will get a lot better for R/G Wolves when Dark Ascension comes into play.  Fling, Briarpack Alpha, Lambholt Elder, Scorned Villager, Wild Hunger, Wolfbitten Captive, Young Wolf, Huntsmaster of the Fells, and Immerwolf. There are some nice options in there that will hopefully give the cuddly, fuzzy werewolves more of a chance.

For now I’m going to test out the Bloodgift Control deck and see how fun that is. I have a feeling it will be good to drop 5/4 demons and wipe out human hordes. Rawr.

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~ by Doug on 01/28/2012.