School Set Constructed - Quandrix vs Witherbloom With Strixhaven recently having come out and the schools being all the rage right now,
ArkiThe7th and I played a few quick games of "Set Constructed" in which we could only use cards of a school of our choosing. While we were both interested in Silverquill at the start, a bit of pondering led me to pick Quandrix while Arki signed up with Witherbloom. (Interestingly enough,
Daemogoth Titan was the card that both got us starting to pivot - seems like Witherbloom's Timmy pitch just wasn't enough for me.) I'll leave it to him to talk more in depth about the differences between Witherbloom and Golgari if he wishes, but I'll also write about some of the experiences from my end.
The deck I settled on was ultimately what I thought would be a straightfoward Simic value plan that ran a bunch of +1/+1 counters that would hopefully ramp alright into
Tanazir Quandrix. It worked better than I'd expected, with
Dragonsguard Elite and
Mentor's Guidance being a surprisingly potent interaction that helps make us much more aggressive early while scaling us well into the lategame.
Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy also puts in a lot of work, allowing us to not get trapped in the 1-for-1 value battle by Jund/Golgari midrange by acting as ramp early and heavy card draw later on.
Some things that particularly drew my interest were:
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"Simic" and Blue-Green aren't quite the same. Everytime we've seen the Simic as a faction, their mechanic leans heavily on +1/+1 counters - Graft, Evolve, Adapt, they lean very heavily into the Green aspects of growing creatures and playing big stompy things. The more recent (and possibly infamous)
value-based draw and play lands strategies promoted by cards like
Growth Spiral and
Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath actually take on an entirely different angle of Blue-Green, one that is much more Blue than how one might perceive the Simic as surface value.
Dreamscape Artist in particular doesn't look so out of color now - really, all it needs is a Green mana cost somewhere and it'd be a perfect representative of more recent UG value strategies.
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Standard sure feels a lot land-heavier! Despite Arki running a lower-than-average land count of 22 and me running large amounts of filtering and draw, we both saw a large amount of mana flood throughout the games. It's quite an unusual feeling coming from other formats like Modern where fetchlands such as
Bloodstained Mire are plentiful and often help to 'thin' a deck in the long run. Choosing to play a school that works well with drawing and playing lands turned out to be a wise choice here.
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Dragonsguard Elite reminds me a bit of Thing in the Ice. Despite being a completely different color, I feel like
Thing in the Ice is played with the similar intent of becoming a dangerous powerful threat in the lategame once you've cast enough instants and sorcereries. While Dragonsguard Elite can't act as removal, it can threaten to win quickly and effectively if something isn't done about it.
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Evasion? I found that my deck ultimately didn't have a lot in the ways of Trample or Flying that fit with my strategy.
Tanazir Quandrix was key to breaking board stalls, but I can't see myself fitting more
Gnarled Professor or perhaps even
Augment Pugilist/
Symmetry Master.
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Lessons aren't as bad as they look. We both used lesson to decent effect - the incidental lifegain of things like
Environmental Sciences combined with
Necrotic Fumes was a thorn in my side for both games, while on my end
Introduction to Annihilation provided much needed hard removal and
Expanded Anatomy helped me push through extra damage on a locked board. I remember seeing a recommendation involving
Professor of Symbology as a budget
Stoneforge Mystic - while it might seem like a far comparison to most people who play the latter, I think for casual games it's decent substitute if you don't want to break the bank.