GP Phoenix thoughts - Affinity in 2018

While preparing for GP Phoenix, Mark Jacobson linked an interesting blog post by Allen Wu. (You can find his blog here.) The post was about using Monte Carlo simulations to find the likelihood of certain opening hands for Eldrazi Tron. The conclusion he had drawn (at least, with respect to Eldrazi Tron) was that you should be willing to mulligan to 5 cards in search of a busted opening hand, because it happens more often than you might think. The blog post is super interesting and I recommend reading it.




More importantly, he took the simulation framework he built and applied it to Affinity - specifically, the likelihood of having two mana on turn 1. The conclusion he came to was that, in addition to four Ornithopters, every zero cost card you play increases the likelihood of having 2 mana on your first turn by around 2 percent. Furthermore, it doesn't matter much if it's a Memnite or a Welding Jar - as long as it costs zero, you're getting a huge gain on your busted openers.

Some of Allen's other blog posts have more thoughts about Affinity, and specifically the first two turns of the game. It's pretty easy to notice after a few matches with Affinity that if you have an unchecked Steel Overseer, your chance of winning goes way up. As a result, your opponents tend to make it an enormous priority to get rid of it, often at the cost of their first or second turn. Modern is a format where the majority of the action in most games takes place in the first two or three turns, so throwing your opponents off on their most important turns by essentially forcing them to react to you is a really strong strategy. (This also neatly explains why powerful one mana cards are so important in Magic in general, but more specifically Modern - giving yourself the option to react on turn 1 when you'd otherwise be doing nothing, with the backup plan of easily fitting the use of that card on a later turn with little to no tempo loss, is something that will allow you to take control of, and therefore win, a lot more games.)

Consider the following example sequence:

BR Hollow One turn 1: Land, Flameblade Adept
Affinity turn 1: Land, Mox Opal, Vault Skirge
BR turn 2: Land, Goblin Lore, Hollow One, attack for 4
Affinity turn 2: Land, Steel Overseer

In this case, not only is the BR player way ahead, but they get to untap with potentially 3 mana, only one of which they need to remove the Steel Overseer. They are not going very far out of their way to both further their gameplan and stop Affinity's.

Compare it to this one:

BR turn 1: Land, Flameblade Adept
Affinity turn 1: Land, Mox Opal, two other 0-drops, Steel Overseer
BR turn 2: Land -

Should they ignore the Overseer and cast Goblin Lore? Or should they spend a mana to Bolt it and hit for 1 with their Adept? Option A lets them develop their board at the cost of letting Affinity's board develop explosively, while option B temporarily prevents both players' development while passing the initiative back to Affinity. Neither seem particularly attractive. In one single turn of the game, Affinity has basically neutralized the disadvantage of going second while stealing the opponent's most important turns.

The conclusions I came to after reading Allen's posts were that I should be building my deck to optimize my first few turns a bit more, and that I should be a lot more mindful of how I sideboard on the play vs. on the draw.

I took all those conclusions and came up with this list:

4 Arcbound Ravager
4 Ornithopter
4 Vault Skirge
4 Signal Pest
3 Etched Champion
3 Steel Overseer
2 Memnite
1 Master of Etherium

4 Mox Opal
4 Springleaf Drum
4 Cranial Plating
2 Thoughtcast
2 Galvanic Blast
2 Welding Jar

4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Spire of Industry
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Inkmoth Nexus
1 Island

SIDEBOARD:
2 Ceremonious Rejection
2 Spell Pierce
1 Master of Etherium
2 Ghirapur Aether Grid
2 Ancient Grudge
1 Wear/Tear
1 Dispatch
1 Ray of Revelation
1 Etched Champion
1 Relic of Progenitus
1 Grafdigger's Cage



Notable features of this list:

-2 Memnite and 2 Welding Jar.
Four total 0 drops. I wouldn't have came to this configuration without reading Allen's post. I never liked Memnite, but now I realize how important it is for maximizing the broken-ness of this deck. Welding Jar, on the other hand, is really awesome and does a lot of things. On top of adding 2% to your busted turn 1 equity, it also provides a layer of backup for when you do play Overseer on turn 1.

-3 Steel Overseer
Yeah, I get that I just spent several paragraphs going on about how good having this card on turn 1 is only to shave a copy from my deck, shut up. The reality is that this card can be a lousy topdeck, drawing 2 can sometimes be awkward, it's pretty underwhelming on the draw without Mox, and it gets significantly worse after sideboard when decks load up on artifact hate. I don't think playing 4 is bad, but I'd rather have more 3s and more enablers.

-3 Etched Champion and 1 Master of Etherium
I found this split by looking at some of my old lists from 2012 and 2013, when Jund with Bloodbraid and DRS was the best and most popular deck. It makes sense to build your main deck for the opposition you expect to face, and with everyone thinking Jund is the best deck and everyone else wanting to try to make Jace decks good, I wanted to choose my threats appropriately.

I kept one Master because you would still like the occasional option to be really fast in some matchups, like Storm or Ad Nauseam, and also because overloading on Etched Champion can be a huge liability if you draw some colorless matchups like the mirror, or Tron, or Eldrazi decks, etc.


-2 Thoughtcast and 2 Galvanic Blast
More inspiration from 2012. When Jund and other BGx midrange decks were on top, having a lot of Thoughtcasts to reload was really important. That fell to the wayside when Bloodbraid got banned and the popularity of Twin exploded, requiring you to have 4 Galvanic Blasts in your deck to prevent from just dying to the combo on turn 4. Even after Twin got banned, BGx decks didn't magically get better, and creature combo decks kept popping up out of nowhere, meaning that you didn't have time to draw cards and needed the utility of the blast.

I originally had the split as 3/1 with the second Blast in the board, but I made it an even 2/2 to create an additional sideboard spot.

-2 Ceremonious Rejection
Somewhere along the line, my Tron matchup went from pretty favorable to kind of unfavorable. I'm not sure why exactly, but I suspect it's because the Sanctum of Ugin & Ulamog package increased the deck's consistency and inevitability more than Eye + Emrakul ever did. All they have to do to win is pop an Oblivion Stone and follow up with this to remove any lingering nexus lands. Previously I was attacking the matchup with versatile cards like Thoughtseize and Spell Pierce, but pierce can't reliably hit important cards like Karn or Oblivion Stone, and attacking early mana development like Scrying & Map is a pretty bad strategy I think, and not something I have much time for anyway. Thoughtseize is a bit more effective in this matchup, but still pretty underwhelming - if they have two threats and you're equipped to deal with zero, you didn't really accomplish much.

Rejection was the card I was looking for because it stops Oblivion Stone no questions asked, and also forces them to commit their enitre turn to a threat. You are often getting a huge trade-up on mana with it. I think this card single handedly turns this matchup back into one that I don't mind facing.

-1 Ray of Revelation
If you look at my 2012-2013 lists, you'll probably notice that this is kind of a pet card of mine - I almost always had one and I was almost always the only one. Back then I didn't have Aether Grid as a reasonable plan against Stony Silence, and I also liked having a card against Bogles, which was at peak popularity back then (until a couple months ago, anyway). I also occasionally used it against Twin, since it destroyed Splinter Twin. Nowadays, Bogles is a premier strategy in Modern, and on top of that I don't have as much concern about not having colored mana in the mid game since Spire of Industry is such a huge upgrade over Glimmervoid. It's also not hard to find some fringe uses for it, like killing Detention Spheres out of UW Control or having a card against Phyrexian Unlife out of Ad Nauseam. Pretty happy to get to play this card again.

-ZERO Thoughtseize or other discard effects
Like I was saying in the Ceremonious Rejection section (and the beginning sections sorta), these days I am much more into having my opponents commit their mana and their key turns than I am trying to remove single threats with discard spells. For the time being, I don't think Affinity is a good Thoughtseize deck.


As for the event itself, these were my matchups:

R3 - Humans - lose
R4 - Burn - win
R5 - Jund - win
R6 - UB Mill - win
R7 - UW Control - win
R8 - Burn - win

R9 - Madcap Moon - lose
R10 - Bant Spirits - win
R11 - Eldrazi Tron - win
R12 - Storm - win
R13 - Humans - lose
R14 - BR Hollow One - win
R15 - Naya Zoo - win

12-3, good for 16th place, $1000 and 3 pro points. Now I only need one more point to lock Silver and qualify for two more PTs.

I lost to Humans twice. In the second match vs. Zan Syed on day 2, I made a lot of really bad errors in game 3. I just plain didn't have enough reps against Humans with Affinity, since it kind of exploded during a period where I didn't think Affinity was very good. I think that matchup is good for Affinity, but not by very much, and it's easy for that edge to disappear if you don't know all the complicated ways that the Humans cards can interact with each other.

A lot can change in a month, but I really like Affinity for now - I think it's good against Jund and against bad Jace decks. I need to do a lot more work on figuring out how to adjust my sideboarding on the play vs. on the draw, but I don't feel like the deck is underpowered relative to the other Modern decks like I did a few months ago. Really strange that the catalyst for this was adding even more power to the other decks by unbanning two cards and not taking any away.

Props to Allen Wu for giving me a new way to look at Affinity. Not easy to do for someone who has a decade+ of experience with a deck.