You can spot a couple things right away: the black/red cards aren't very good, and the blue/white cards are excellent and plentiful. The first thing I did was eliminate black/x as a possibility and cut anything with a black mana symbol. The only viable combination with red after that was UWR, which would only add Explosive Impact and maybe an Izzet Staticaster, so I cut the red too. Here's where I was at after only looking at the white, blue, and green cards.
OK, so it's clear that I'm playing some kind of UWG deck. The green cards aren't plentiful enough to form a foundation, so green will be a splash if anything. Based on that I cut the Deadbridge Goliath, Stonefare Crocodile, Aerial Predation (which I would likely not start anyway), Gatecreeper Vine and Centaur's Herald, meaning that if I'm going to play any green at all, it would be splashing for Courser's Accord, Risen Sanctuary, and Grove of the Guardian. Splashing is pretty easy with two GW dual lands so I definitely consider it. After that, I focused on making the best U/W deck possible. Removing the green cards and the less-than-desirable blue and white cards (Armory Guard, Phantom General, Seller of Songbirds, Sphere of Safety [which shouldn't have made it through my first pass anyway], Fencing Ace, Downsize and two Rootborn Defenses) leaves me with 26 cards and the 3 lands. I decided to reduce the splash to just Risen Sanctuary and Grove of the Guardian, since most of what I want this deck to be doing is stopping the ground with all my Hussar Patrols and getting in through the air. Here's the final product:
Some notes about card choices:
Four copies of Hussar Patrol is a lot but I like the card and I think it gives my deck some consistency. I also potentially liked that some situations could come up where my opponent would think "there's no way he has a second/third Hussar Patrol" and make a crappy attack. They were often cut from my deck for more useful cards depending on the matchup, but I still like starting all 4.
Dispel is very very good and I would not hesitate to start one copy or maybe two if I had them. This card kind of took me by surprise because I didn't think it would be as good as it was when I first played the set, but a lot of the key cards in every strategy are instants so I hardly ever find myself thinking a Dispel wouldn't be useful.
Risen Sanctuary is kind of a goofy splash, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that when games get to late game parity where each player has tons of mana and not much action, cards like Risen Sanctuary and Horncaller's Chant are the last things you want to see your opponent play because it immediately increases what you demand from your next few draw steps (and makes every brick that much more dangerous). Plus, an 8/8 guy is enormous, and 7 mana is a much better deal for it than it looks. This guy has earned a lot of respect from me lately.
I didn't start Seller of Songbirds or either of the Rootborn Defenses because I didn't have much populate action, but I'd be more than willing to board them in for matchups that call for them, like removal heavy / big combat matchups, or matchups where I just need a lot of dudes on the board. Downsize is the same thing - it could be very useful sometimes, but not often enough for me to want to start it.
At any rate, when I submitted this deck I thought it was only OK, but after I won round 1 I really liked it. It had a very proactive gameplan with strong cards and a decent curve on 3-4. It had 1.5 late game "bomb" (Risen Sanctuary) and a couple OK answers (Judgment and Voidwielder).
I played all 7 rounds of the PTQ, I went 3-0, lost in round 4, won two more and lost in the last round playing for top 8 (since I couldn't draw). I was mostly impressed with how the deck performed. The match I lost in round 4 was to a really strong GW deck with turn 2 Call of the Conclave in each game, backed up with two Common Bonds in game 1 and turn 3 Loxodon Smiter in game 2.
Round 7 is what inspired me to post about my deck on the blog. After thinking about the games in my head during the long car ride home, I was able to verbalize a thought I had been having about modern-era limited formats in general.
I had a really strong curve-out draw in game 2 and I lost a long grindy game 3 to a turn 4 Desecration Demon that I needed just one more good card to outlast, but game 1 is what got me thinking.
My opponent had a turn 3 Brushstrider on the draw, but missed a drop. After a failed ambush with a Hussar Patrol on my turn 4 (he had Giant Growth), I played Skymark Roc and I was cracking for 3 every turn and keeping pretty solid control of his smaller creatures. After another Hussar Patrol came down, I started feeling like I was in firm control of the game, and I just wanted to take my time and consider all my plays so that I could eventually win. Unfortunately, after I got 3 cracks with Roc in, he put Stab Wound on it, which prompted me to go to 12 on the next turn, attack him to 10, and play a Soulsworn Spirit that had no detain targets. I had an opportunity to play it earlier but declined, thinking that I had a decent clock going as-is and I would rather save it to detain something that could get in the way of the Roc (or something huge that could kill me, or etc.) I had the ground locked up, so I was all set to kill him in 4 turns before I would die to the Stab Wound, but once I got to 4 he had Explosive Impact to kill me a turn before I could kill him. Sucky timing.
That game basically confirmed a suspicion that I had about most newer limited formats: you are never safe. When I started playing limited, good fundamentals mostly involved making sure you got decent value out of all your cards so that you'd take control and win in the long run. Just as control decks were typically the best constructed decks in old-era Magic, more often than not playing limited games with a mind towards controlling the game was the right approach and would result in eventual victory. (That was my impression, anyway.)
These days, I feel like things are different. Rather than constantly having your mind on value, you should mostly be concerned with ending the game. Cards are so much stronger and swingier. Value and card advantage are still important concepts, but there are so many angles of attack and dimensions of gameplay that the only reliable way to play around everything is to kill your opponents before they can play anything. Eight years ago, it might have been correct to hold Soulsworn Spirit and get a little extra value out of it. Today, the extra damage I missed out from having it in play earlier meant that my opponent completely swung the game in his favor with two commons.
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