http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?31855-DTB-UWx-Miracle-Control&p=1036840&viewfull=1#post1036840

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kenta hiroki asked me a couple questions about miracles after the MTG First 40 duals event. You can find the link here: http://www.hareruyamtg.com/article/s...esmartphone=on . The article is in Japanese (and has trimmed some of what I wrote), but you can find the unabridged English version below. Enjoy!

Q:so the first question is basic. Why do you like Miracles and how long have you playing the deck?

A: I started playing Miracles in the spring of 2014 after challenging myself to improve at Magic. I had only recently started playing competitive Legacy and found myself losing more than I wanted with my deck at the time - Show & Tell. After some serious self-reflection, I realized the reason I was losing so much was partly due to my play but also a function of the deck I was playing. I found myself too many times in situations where my linear deck simply didn't have the options available to handle unfavorable board-states or allow me to leverage my skill as player against my opponent. Around this time Reid Duke wrote an article, "The Best Way to Win in Legacy", in which he described how the recipe to success in the format was sticking with one deck and mastering it. Admittedly, I was guilty of flip-flopping through a number of decks, so I decided then and there to follow Reid's advice, pick 1 deck, and never let it go. After lots of browsing, I stumbled on the Miracles gameplay of Brian-Braun Duin and Joe Lossett, and the spike in me instantly started drooling as I watched the two masters Matrix-dodge their way through all the tricks and traps their opponents threw at them. And yeah, it was love at first spin. Sure, I had no idea what I was doing when I started, but I could sense the seemingly limitless depth and flexibility the deck presented. Today, thousands of spins and a ban later, the deck has a lot less raw power but still retains that depth of options that rewards me for playing the deck well.

Q: Yeah, from my experience, miracles was the deck that I didnt know the right play every single game how many I tried to go back and think. so Speaking of top, how did top ban change? I know that was the drastic change, but the deck has still been keep up in top tier.

A: Yeah the Top ban was devastating both for the deck and for me personally. From the deck's perspective, the most obvious loss was the Top-Counterbalance soft lock. No longer is there this low-investment late game destroyer. But for me, what I missed the most was being able to stop all the turbo xerox nonsense the hyper-efficient Legacy decks are capable of, like Probe into Ponder, Therapy, flashback Therapy gg kind of thing. The lock was very good at slowing down the pace of the game, and after the ban I was definitely struggling with Miracles to beat those strategies. Don't get me started about dying to Bolt!! Of course, there were other downsides too - not being able to reliably cast Terminus at instant speed or hide critical spells from discard or even have a consistent engine to support my favorite card, Predict. The deck just felt a lot less consistent, but that made sense since you no longer had the reliability of Top. Playing matchups the way I did before the ban also just didn't work. Turns out, the deck changed a lot more than I initially thought. It was the subtle things - like having to use my removal more aggressively against Delver to not get burned out or having to Force of Will creatures more often or even playing with cards I never played with before like Leyline of Sanctity. When I first started playing right after the ban, the deck seemed really bad. It still had some power behind Terminus, but it just kept dying to itself, aka too inconsistent to keep up with the more efficient decks. Let me tell you - Portent is no replacement for Divining Top. In fact, that card is really, really bad. It just happens to work really well with Terminus and Terminus is almost the only reason to play this deck now. Things had to change. And they did! The first few drafts that were succeeding, largely due to the innovation of Callum Smith, Nicklas Lallo, and friends, were just UW Predict-value piles that maxxed out on cantrips and card draw and tried to bury the opponent in card advantage. There were some obvious flaws with this early version. Storm using Cabal Therapy was just too efficient at shredding the defensive 7-card hand. Hymn to Tourach allowed Czech Pile to snowball into the better Snapcaster control deck. Loam and Punishing Fire in game 1 were unbeatable. And even Grixis Delver, a matchup that was favored (slightly) for Miracles, would just counter Predict and make the Miracles deck too inconsistent. In other words, if our answers didn't line up well with the threats our opponent presented, we lost. Previously we had CB+Top to handle the random elements, but now... not so much. I don't remember where on the timeline it happened, but I had been keeping track of the players who had been succeeding with UW control, mostly players from Japan and Dan "61/14" Miller. And the common card that they were playing that I wasn't was... surprise! Counterbalance. My gut reaction after the ban was that the card was just too inconsistent to rely on. The closest we could come to locking someone out was with Jace, the Mind Sculptor in play, but even then we could only eliminate a single CMC. But after playing with the card some, I realized that it was more than good enough, and significantly better than the other cards it was replacing, like Ethersworn Canonist and Leyline. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Lock out CMC 1 vs the Probe/Therapy decks or put two CMC 2 spells to beat Lands. Blind flip to reveal for fetches and Predict. And so on. Also, playing more with the deck we were able to learn how we needed to adapt our play to start winning matchups again. The deck is a different beast and now requires different strategies and tactics to win. But what made the deck "okay" to "reasonably good" in my eyes was the 1U Ixalan enchantment - Search for Azcanta.

Q: so from your list last weekend, how did you come up with the list. Some interesting approach like No mentors in the main and SB, total 4 Flusters main and sb, 3-1 split sweeper, Back to basics.


A: My list is definitely impacted by my preferences in playing the deck. To explain this it is necessary to understand my deckbuilding philosophy, which is built on the pillar of favoring consistency over power. The idea here is that, even though I will have fewer of the glamorous 1-of "whammy" cards, my deck will be packed with generic answers that are applicable across the broad spectrum of all Legacy decks. For example, instead of playing 2 Ethersworn Canonists that are good mostly vs Storm, I have the 3rd and 4th Flusterstorms which can come in against Delver and Czech Pile. Or, instead of Izzet Staticaster for Death & Taxes/Infect/Elves, I have Supreme Verdict for ALL creature decks. Sure, Canonist and Staticaster are more powerful in the matchups they are great in, but Flusterstorm and Verdict are more powerful in the matchups the other two cards are worse in. I would be okay with Flusterstorm in the Storm matchup, but definitely not be okay with Canonist in the Delver matchup. Additional justification for playing the 50/50 cards over the 70/30 cards is I can leverage my skill to bump that 50 to a 51 or 52 so that over the course of infinite games I win more matches overall than with the 70/30 cards. Thus, I prefer cards with a high floor and low ceiling.


To go through specific card choices for the maindeck:

2 Portent vs 3 Portent - I think this was one of the tougher choices to make, as silly as that might sound. Its actually really difficult to measure the impact of playing or not playing a single cantrip because the metrics to evaluate it are just too subjective. Its not as easy a decision as Swords over Bolt where I can see the Bolt not kill the Tarmogoyf, its always a question of whether I am finding my deck consistent "enough". Did I draw the Disenchant for the Sylvan Library on time? Did I find my 4th land drop on turn 4 for Jace? In those situations I just think its easier to be lazy and default to the safer choice of 3 Portent. It means I'll have fewer 1-land hands with no cantrips. It means I'll be able to proc Terminus on my opponent's turn more often. It means I'll have one less card to have to worry about boarding out. Its the type of stress thats probably not worth the trouble of worrying about. So why not 4 Portent, Anuraag? Let's be clear - Portent is still a bad card. A baaaaaaad, bad card. I've already come to terms with playing it, but too many times I've been at 4 life looking for that Plow to stop my opponent's Deathrite only to draw...

3 Search For Azcanta, 2 Snapcaster Mage, 2 Predict - The way I came about these numbers was interesting. My list from the SCG Team Open in November featured 3 of each of these cards. If you know me, you know I love me some Predict. And Snapcaster Mage has been a 3-of staple in the deck for who knows how long. Most lists only play 2 Search. Anuraag, what are you doing?! Let me explain. Remember, my deck needs to operate as consistently as possible. On turn 3, Predict drawing two cards is far, far more powerful than Search for Azcanta's pseudo-scry ability. But what are the worst case scenarios, especially in the highest ELOs? In my experience, an early Predict is very difficult to resolve postboard in the fair blue matchups. The card has proven its value and (I like to think) it's earned the respect it deserves. So unlike before, my opponents now aggressively counter it when possible. When I can't fight to protect it, the card can be so painful to play with. The reason is that it just costs too much. I am okay with spending a turn to try to draw some cards - playing Terminus gives me that luxury. But what I am not okay with is sacrificing percentage points by suboptimally stacking my cantrips in a way that punishes me if Predict doesn't resolve. Before, I had Top to simply reorder the cards. But now, my cantrips work one time and one time only, so drawing even 1 card is an inefficiency I have learned I cannot afford. Cutting the 3rd Snapcaster Mage is something new for me - I did it back when I won Eternal Extravaganza 6, but like every other blue mage, if I can play 4 I most definitely will. The issue with Snapcaster I find comes very specifically from the Grixis Delver matchup. Arguably (Bob, if you're reading this close your browser now) the current best deck in Legacy , I want to win this matchup all the time every time. The situations I find myself losing are the ones where I can't escape the early game. Maybe I draw too many duals, maybe my opponent YOLOs into a Terminus but doesn't get punished. But the one that feels the worst is looking at a hand of 2 or 3 Snapcasters on turn 4 with a graveyard of Ponders and a Deathrite on the other side of the table. It's great in the late game when both sides are topdecking, but in the early game it can be a little clunky and too easy to interact with. My solution for the lack of Predict and Snapcaster is to play 3 Search for Azcanta, the card I think is almost solely responsible for the deck's recent success. The card is an engine all on its own - in the early game it filters away cards you don't need, in the mid-game it ramps you to snowball faster, and in the late game it drowns the opponent in card advantage. Of these 3 effects, transforming into a blue source is probably the most powerful, followed by the early game filtering and lastly the card draw. However, the takeaway should be that the card functions by itself. It doesn't require me to know the top card of my deck or need me to have cast certain spells to be especially useful. It is more consistent, but less powerful. Sound familiar?

3 Terminus 1 Supreme Verdict - This split is a function of playing Search for Azcanta. While Terminus is the reason to play Miracles, there's a slight issue with finding it off a Sunken Ruin activation and then not being able to cast it for a turn or two. Verdict solves this issue by giving me something I can dig for and cast with relative (-to-Terminus) ease. And let's be real - "uncounterable" is silly. Really silly. Verdict doesn't come without downside though; there are definitely situations where it is strictly worse than Terminus. On turns 1 to 3, it does almost nothing. It will only ever be sorcery speed in this list. The worst part of this card is the WW cost. Playing Verdict actually disrupts the deck's entire construction. On turn 4 I'd ideally have UUUW to maybe play Counterbalance or Snapcaster+Cantrip and protect it with Flusterstorm. Now there are more situations where I find myself fetching UUWW to cast Verdict through Wasteland. With UUWW, boarding patterns and the range of counterspells I can play is affected, which brings me to the next point...


2 Counterbalance, 1 Counterspell, 1 Flusterstorm - Mana is everything in Magic. It's the fundamental axis on which the game revolves around. Accordingly, the spells I want to play must align with what I can cast. As I mentioned earlier, UUU in a world of WW spells is difficult to accomplish. My tradeoff is limiting as many UU spells as I can, and the result is this countermagic configuration. I still want at least one copy of Counterspell as its universal applicability makes it a great card to draw to in the mid and late game. Unfortunately I am not a fan of additional copies in the 75 as the card can actually be quite inefficient in stages of the game where I need to operate as low to the ground as possible. Specifically this is on turn 1 to 3 for matchups like BUG Delver or Czech Pile where Counterspell could be a great card, but not necessarily in that moment or against more cheaply costed spells. To retain the density of countermagic in my maindeck, I've opted for a single copy of Flusterstorm. Flusterstorm is still great in the fair blue and combo matchups in game 1, to the point where the downside is a risk I am comfortable taking. In this situation, I err to power over consistency because without Flusterstorm in the deck, I do not feel like I meet the baseline power-level the deck needs to perform. Finally, the Counterbalances. Counterbalance is a card I am torn on. It has the potential to be backbreakingly powerful, yet is clearly imbued with blind-flip variance. It's a great tool to have in game 1 against decks like Lands or Storm, where you can manipulate the top of your deck to almost completely shut down their strategies. It's also great to prison out your opponent on turn 10 when your Jace is drawing cards every turn. The situations where I am not a fan are the low-resource game states where you've burned all your cantrips trying to survive and are now in topdeck mode. Its just very disheartening to have your opponent topdeck a creature of a random CMC only to have you flip a fetchland. Don't get me wrong though - the card is absolutely necessary. It gives the deck a semblance of inevitability that gives Miracles its very draw-go essence. But to rely on it like we did in the past with Top is definitely a trap.

1 Back to Basics - To make up for not playing the 3rd Counterbalance yet still wanting more prison aspects to the deck, I chose to play 1 Back to Basics. I was never a huge fan of this card but lately have really enjoyed this effect against the tier 1 decks. Obviously this card shines when your opponent (correctly) assumes you play no Wastelands and only fetches duals. It's also great very specifically against Rishadan Port, one of the few cards that can steal inevitability away from this deck. But despite being vulnerable to freshly drawn lands in a way Blood Moon is not, I think that Back to Basics forcing my opponent to commit more resources is a very underrated benefit of the card. One of the most sinister poisons in high-octane Legacy matches is drawing your 5th or 6th land and immediately committing it as a resource. Unlike other formats, Legacy is extremely efficient, so the diminishing returns in land drops is especially real. You don't (usually) need 8 lands in play to cast the 3 1-mana spells in your hand. Instead, its probably better to save those lands for a more powerful Brainstorm down the line. But, when Back to Basics forces any player to commit more lands to cast spells, those unrefundable resources become a liability that the Miracles player can capitalize on. One downside to Back to Basics is that it does not synergize well with Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin. As poor as it sounds, in testing these situations usually do not matter too much as either Back to Basics has locked up the game, will stay in my hand uncast, or Azcanta has drawn enough cards to not be necessary anymore.

1 Entreat, 0 Mentor - "So what's the consensus now? Mentor or Entreat? Which is better?". I hear this question a lot, and every time I say what I say now - it's preference. In a deck like Miracles, the actual threat that ends the game rarely matters from a theoretical perspective. As Miracles-Master-turned-vegan-monk Philipp Schoenegger once said, "If I could win all my matches with a single copy of Raging Goblin as a wincon, I would do just that". To determine whether Entreat or Mentor or something else is "better", the first question one must answer is "How do I want to play this deck?". Personally, I prefer the style of playing to "not lose" rather than playing to win. It may sound a little backwards but the idea is that once I have established control using cards like Jace, Counterbalance, or Back to Basics, the actual win will ...inevitably... come, so I focus entirely on stabilizing and pulling ahead when I can. For this kind of strategy, I choose to play Entreat as it is the most powerful and resilient one-card combo available. Even though the flurry of angels isn't as readily available on my opponent's endstep, 20 to 28 power worth of flyers is still impressively difficult to manage for the average opponent. Monastery Mentor is definitely a powerful counterpart to Entreat. Untapping on any turn with Mentor in play is usually lights out. My issue with Mentor is that a lot of things have to go right for Mentor to take off. The biggest issue with Mentor is that it is significantly less resilient. Dying to almost every removal spell especially sucks since its a lot harder to protect Mentor with Counterbalance. This fragility means I'll likely have to play multiple copies of Mentor since I can't rely on just the single copy. Suddenly, my deck becomes more focused on winning rather than not dying, and that is not in line with my overall game plan. Mentor is really good against postboard nonsense like Bitterblossom or Winter Orb in ways that my current list is not. However, I believe the other situations one might call for Mentor are sufficiently handled by other card choices, like the 2nd Verdict or 4th Blast. I might lose some percentage points against really narrow hate, but the percentage points I gain by playing Entreat are for now more than I am losing otherwise.


Manabase - 5th Island over 3rd Tundra to complement Back to Basics.


With regards to the sideboard, I think the individual choices make sense when you look at how they perform against the different subsections of Legacy decks - Flusterstorm is great vs combo, Blast is great vs fair blue decks, Surgical for graveyard hate, and the remaining removal spells and mana denial for the non-blue decks. However, you'll notice when looking at my sideboard that there is a lot of redundancy. Cards you might find in my list and not others are the 4th copies of Flusterstorm and Blast. Postboard I really want my deck to be as lean as possible, and these 1-mana spells are probably the best in the business. 4 Blast is nothing new, but the 4th Flusterstorm needs a little justification. As a control deck, I typically have targets in the back of my mind for what I want to beat. Notably, the decks I am interested in absolutely crushing are Delver and Czech Pile. What I've learned through infinite games is that Flusterstorm is phenomenal both offensively and defensively against this deck. On the play or draw it's absolutely remarkable at stopping Hymn to Tourach (the most important threat Pile can present), Stifle, Force, Blast and any Brainstorms along the way. Most people might not enjoy the extra Flusterstorms in these matchups, but on turns 1 and 2 I always found myself begging to have just one copy in my hand. The downside is that in the late game the card is not as great, but my focus in these matchups is to survive first and let my stronger cards (Search, Jace, etc) do the heavy lifting later on. The way my sideboard is constructed at the moment, there are some glaring weaknesses. But currently the meta is not in a position to take advantage of those weaknesses so I will keep playing this configuration.