PlayMAX #2 Champion Interview
The following is an edited interview with the champion of our PlayMAX #2 tournament , BattleShatner conducted by Cryptic. A high intensity multiplayer tournament from March 2022, featuring only the strongest decks and strategies in the format.
BattleShatner piloted a very interesting deck with K’rrik, Son of Yawgmoth at the helm. The decklist can be found here and embedded at the bottom of the article.
Many people have had questions about the viability of mono or even low color commanders at the highest level of play so I sat down with Shatner to explore his deck, card choices, and play philosophy a bit more in depth. In the weeks since this article other mono-colored decks have gone to post impressive results, though unlike PlayMAX, the variation in the strength of those fields is considerably greater.
Cryptic: Alright, let me pull up the questions the Max players had!
BattleShatner: I just want to say, I think that PlayEDH, even as people are going back into in-person play more often, is still the largest EDH server by a pretty significant margin and has earned the right to throw that weight around a little bit.
Cryptic: Thanks. So here we go. The big one that everyone is curious about and I think you've answered it a little bit elsewhere, but why aren't you running a Tainted Pact manabase?
BattleShatner: Well, the main reason is that I really like Lake of the Dead. I think that Tainted Pact is the better of the two forbidden tutors, but without a one-two combo with the forbidden tutors they get a lot worse. It could be a silver bullet card for me too if I have one piece I'm missing from a win attempt to go grab that, but I like the list being more resilient than that.
Because I don't have access to counterspells in mono-black, it is challenging to back up a win attempt or force one through interaction. There are other great pilots, and I talk to them a lot who are on a Tainted Pact mana base and they like it because they have access to every utility land you can imagine, but I just don’t think it's justified for the way I want to play this deck.
If K'rrik is removed and every land you have only produces colorless mana, you're pretty much offline until you get him back on board because you don't have any other way to produce black unless you've hit some color-producing mana rocks. K'rrik is mostly a colored deck and I've had to use the cards in my deck and in my hand to win without him plenty of times and having access to black mana outside of paying life is an absolute necessity if you ever want to win the game without your commander on the field.
Cryptic: This next one is more specific to PlayEDH. You played in the previous PlayMAX. Is there anything that you decided that you wanted to do for PlayMAX 2 specifically with your prep whether deck-building or mindsetwise?
BattleShatner: As far as mindset goes yes, cause I've played recently in other cEDH tournaments and there was not any approval process for decks. People just submitted and played whatever they wanted. You definitely notice a quality difference in decks when you're playing in a PlayEDH Max tournament instead of just a broader cEDH tournament. I think there is a mentality change that comes with that too. The players seem more competitive because they are not trying to play something cute in a Max power tournament.
As for card choices, there's only a couple of things I changed about the deck to play it in PlayMAX. This is a list that I have in paper, in real cards, with only a couple of exceptions. I added a proxy of Imperial Seal, which I don't have a copy of, and one other card - a creature called Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed, also from Portal: Three Kingdoms and there's a Judge print that I proxied as well.
Cryptic: I know him. It's got really cool art and a really interesting effect.
BattleShatner: Yeah cool card, unique effect for a black card to return any black card to your hand. It plays a key role in some creature-only win lines.
Cryptic: Did either of those inclusions make a difference? Did they give you some critical velocity in any of your games?
BattleShatner: Neither of them really made an appearance during the tournament. Imperial Seal is the better one and you know, knock on wood, if they ever reprint it I'll buy one.
Cryptic: Hopefully in whatever it is Triple Masters or Double Double Masters?
BattleShatner: Double Masters 2022, that'd be nice.
Cryptic: Some people have brought up the point that maybe K'rrik is not the best deck, obviously you have the deck so you like it, but I think last go-around you played Najeela, the Blade-Blossom. Why did you pick K'rrik this time over what people consider one of the ‘better’ cEDH decks overall?
BattleShatner: Tracking my journey into playing Max started with me taking a blue artifact list I had and converting it into Emry, Lurker of the Loch. It started out as a Muzzio, Visionary Architect deck so I converted that into I guess what would be considered into a 'cEDH' Emry list - In the end Emry fell short of Max.
When I was thinking about going from playing a High power deck into playing a Max deck, I really wasn't sure what I wanted to play and Najeela is cool. It’s widely considered one of the easiest decks to start playing cEDH with so I proxied up a list and played it.
Because that was the only Max deck I really had experience with when the first PlayMAX tournament rolled around, that's what I played. After the tournament was over, I took a pretty decent break - probably the rest of October and a little bit of November - from playing anything really, playing any Magic.
I had played K'rrik before - it was like a Mid list - And it did one of my favorite things in magic, which is cheating mana costs. It's one of the most broken things to do and I love doing it.
I initially started putting a K'rrik list together as I had a binder full of black cards I wasn't using because I had taken apart a Kaalia of the Vast list I had for ten years or more. So there was a binder full of black cards that weren't going anywhere. I wasn't doing anything with them, so I put a K'rrik list together for High Power out of cards I already owned. Loved playing it, so I sold off some more cards and bought more cards to get it into Max in paper. That's why I didn't have the Imperial Seal. It does more of the things I like to do and the deck has evolved a lot since it made its first appearance in cEDH years ago. I can't tell you how many comments I get about people thinking I'm going to tutor for Doomsday, and there's no way I would play that card in this list.
Cryptic: Fair enough. Yeah, Doomsday is I think a pretty controversial card generally. I know on staff we've talked about it quite a bit - Doomsday into Opposition Agent can be scary.
BattleShatner: Well, Doomsday even in the best deck - the best pile, the best colors - is such a risky proposition, even if you're in Grixis or Esper where you have ways to set up to protect a Doomsday pile. In mono-black, you're asking for trouble - I mean playing K'rrik is a risky deck anyway - you're already playing with fire. That's just you know… too much. You're playing with napalm when you play mono-black Doomsday.
Cryptic: Since playing the tournament, have you made any adjustments to the deck, like small tweaks?
BattleShatner: Yeah, I changed a couple of things to try them out. I haven't gotten to play the deck since I made these changes but I just swapped a mana rock. I added Fellwar Stone to add some more utility to Praetor's Grasp to increase my chances of being able to use some off-color stuff, and I cut a card called Gonti's Machinations (which is just lifegain) for a Leyline of the Void.
In some other Max games I've played, Leyline has performed really well when other people have it, so I think I'm going to give it a shot and see how it works. Just figuring out which two-drop mana rock to include in the list is tricky because Thought Vessel gives me options if i get stopped after a Peer Into the Abyss or Vilis, Broker of Blood for a lot of cards, I get to keep all of them but having access to black or other colors of mana is also good.
Cryptic: Praetor's Grasp is a very powerful card for a reason so improving the utility on it seems worth a shot at least.
Cryptic: Speaking of some of the pitfalls of low color count decks, do you have any suggestions to other players that like low color and/or non-blue cEDH lists?
BattleShatner: One of the nice things about running a mono-color list - pros and cons, a lot of people I think could easily list the cons but there are pros - is I don't have to make any compromise on card quality for another color. If you have three, four, five colors of cards, there are good cards that are going to be left on the cutting room floor when you edit that deck down to a hundred cards because you have to make room for good stuff from another color. That's not to say multi-color lists are bad. Multi-color lists are the best, but in terms of hard quality, I don't have to make any concessions. I can run the absolute best black cards period. That goes with mono-blue, mono-red, whatever it may be.
One thing that running a mono-colored list that is not blue will teach you is the importance of patience and timing. You don't have counterspells to back anything up. I've gotten used to forcing my opponents to stop me. That's really one of the things a K'rrik list in particular wants to do, is make you stop them.
Playing through things, deciding whether or not you're going to play through interaction early on. I've done it before and won the game when my opponent before me played Mystic Remora and that's fine. I'm going to give you fifteen cards and you have to stop me or you're going to lose.
If you want to have that kind of playstyle - where you are what everybody is going to be responding to, when you decide - fast mono-colored lists can do that. Decks like Godo, Bandit Warlord or Magda, Brazen Outlaw, whatever it may be.
One of the things I like about K'rrik is I could either seize that tempo early on and try to set the pace for the game, but if I get stopped even two or three times it does not count me out of the game so it's in a really good spot. If you want to play something with a little more nuance without blue that's going to teach you the value of your cards and patience and timing, play a non-blue, mono-color list.
Cryptic: I guess from your comment there about having lots of resilience and backup lines, one of the questions Sigi (PlayEDH admin, labmaniacs.com) was curious about was what some of those various lines are and were any of them used in the matchups. I know it's coming up on some weeks since the tournament so if you don't remember exactly, no problem. Do you remember a decision point where you had to pick between two lines or three lines. He was curious about that - I know he's a fan.
BattleShatner: Yeah, Sigi's been playing K'rrik in a lot of Conquest so I'm glad he had some questions. In the final - and this is really the key moment out of the games that we played during the tournament - Baal (PlayMax2 finalist) played a Rest in Peace after I had Entombed a Vilis, which hurt my feelings -but the deck has ways to win around a Rest in Peace, it's a commonly played card. Graveyards are very powerful.
Underworld Breach is a card, so people play graveyard hate, and they should. At that moment Rest in Peace comes down, exile stuff from my graveyard. I have another graveyard focus card in my hand that is now useless. So my thought at that time is "Okay, this win attempt I was going to build up to is totally screwed over so what am I going to do now?"
A couple things I can do from that point and still win the game with the Rest in Peace on the battlefield is go for Peer Into the Abyss and manual storm for Tendrils of Agony or put together a win attempt that way, draw my whole deck, whatever I need to do. A Bolas's Citadel-Sensei's Divining Top-Aetherflux Reservoir combo is still possible because that doesn't use my graveyard either.
Some of the ways that the deck over the past few months of editing and trying new stuff has gotten more resilient is using more creature-based win lines. There are ways if there's a Rest in Peace or Rule of Law - it's also another really common stax piece - or Rule of Law type effect like an Archon of Emeria or a Deafening Silence. Though Deafening Silence is actually pretty easy to get through when you have creature-only win-lines.
You can use some of the stuff like Dimir House Guard and Fleshwrither which has been a home run in the list cause it tutors creatures to the battlefield from the battlefield.
Counterspells that hit creatures are not that common in Max - people are really worried about those, you know, bomb spells like Peer or Ad Nauseum or Breach - so when you are able to pivot to a creature-only win-line, it makes a big difference because it doesn't matter how much interaction people have in their hands unless it's the Force of Will or just a Mana Drain or original Counterspell, which you don't see very much at all. There's not that much you're going to be able to do.
They have to have just the right removal or just the perfect counter spell. If you're only using creatures to win and a lot of times people will kind of leave you alone if they see a Rule of Law effect on the battlefield and think “oh well you're not going to be able to do anything because of that stax piece”.
Give me a little bit of mana and some wiggle room and I can play through it and go for the win. Baal’s Rest in Peace was probably the only moment in those games where I definitely had to think, "Okay, the strategy I've been going for, that's all gone for the rest of the game. I've got to switch to something else." Luckily there was another player in the pod who wanted to do some graveyard stuff and remove that Rest in Peace and that ultimately let me set up for the winning turn.
Cryptic: Very good. Why don't you play the card Feed the Swarm? Is it too slow for what your deck wants to do?
BattleShatner: I'm on the fence about it. I have played it, and I have and used it to remove a problem enchantment so it is something that could go back in at some point if I'm encountering a lot of enchantment stax that is hurting. Right now I haven't really missed it because if somebody plays one of those stax cards, you know what? That's okay. I can win around that card - I can win through that card. I don't need to destroy it. If I can maneuver around it, I can leave it there and let it hurt other people - If they get hurt by it, that's fine. I just don't need to remove enchantments often enough to include it.
It's not a bad card because it's creature removal too, but I have the instant speed removal for creatures I'd rather use instead of sorcery speed removal - like Baleful Mastery and Deadly Rollick - and the enchantments just don't impact me enough to force me to.
If the meta shifts such that I'm seeing Rule of Law in every game and graveyard hate pieces at the same time, all the time, I'll put it back in - right now, I haven't missed it even though it's the only real piece of enchantment removal in black. The enchantments that are coming down that I'm seeing are not worth the tempo and life loss most of the time cause I can just work around it.
Cryptic: Reasonable. Now about the tournament structure and the organization, I know we had a few issues with Discord technicalities or the Discord.py SquireBot code whenever we first were kicking off, but as far as the structure and the process - you've done it twice now - how do you feel about it?
BattleShatner: Really good. I think anytime you're organizing a tournament it's pretty much understood that things aren't always going to run on schedule or start and stop exactly when they're supposed. I think the addition of the bot was very helpful behind the scenes, helping keep antsy players busy in between rounds because they could use the bot for standings instead of asking tournament organizers. It cut down on the down time between rounds as well.
And no big deal that there was a hiccup at the beginning. Got it working and everybody registered fine and got the tournament started and hopefully having some experience with the SquireBot with PlayMAX2 will make the next one run that much easier so we can iron out some kinks.
As far as structure, organization, and timing, I think it went really well. I knew that the rounds of Swiss were going to take all day. Then playing the top sixteen, especially since an extra game had to be played in between those, it was a long day. Hopefully nobody signs up for a competitive tournament believing that it's going to be a short thing. We all go into it knowing it's going to take all day. Having good games and playing with good players doesn't necessarily make it go faster, but it makes it more fun.
Cryptic: I thought we had a pretty neat spread of decks and players from around the world and from many time zones. Was there any deck or pilot that you played against that just stood out, like you really liked the way that they played, anything like that?
BattleShatner: Yes, I definitely want to give a shout out to all three of my opponents in the final. I think we were all very good players and could win a rematch at any time. You know, Baal was playing forever and with him being in Portugal, I don't think the game ended until it was just a few hours before he'd be going to work on Sunday morning. I definitely want to give a shout out to Vasher (author of Green CST), Baal (SplitSecond YouTube), and Takato (Yukarin cEDH) who were in the final with me. They did a great job. I played Takato in round one as well and played once with him previously in the Playing With Power tournament and he's fun to play with.
I think that my top sixteen pod, oddly enough, was where I kind of felt the most pressure to really perform because that was going to get me to the final. That pod had a really really good rapport. I feel like it was more like an LGS or a forum. We sat down. We knew what we were there for. Really enjoyable pod so I want to thank my top sixteen pod for calming my nerves because I was really, really nervous about going into that game. They were really good to play with.
Cryptic: I think that's basically everything they wanted to ask. Do you have any additional comments or anything you want to wax poetic about?
BattleShatner: Well, just that I appreciate the work that goes into putting on the tournament I know it's a lot of work behind-the-scenes for Smerz and Josh and everybody else who might not get a shoutout and it's a long day for them too and the Judges as well cause they're not doing any less work than the players are.
I look forward to the next one, I think it's a pretty big hit. I also want to give a shoutout to whomever put together the prize pool because I think it's one of the best ones I've seen for an EDH tournament.
Cryptic: That was me, Smerz, and Sigi.
BattleShatner: Yeah, it was great. So thank you for the prize pool! The City of Brass is just a magnificent card. It's beautiful. I think that it's one of the best prize pools that I've seen for a competitive tournament , even compared to other ones that have already passed or are still coming up.
They have prize support, or cash support, or you can win packs. You can win some cards but not any of them I think is maybe prestigious as a foil Seventh Edition City of Brass. A lot of times they'll put up a dual land like a Savannah for the winner or something like that and sometimes you'll get Underground Sea, but usually it's one of your less sought after dual lands. I'm really happy with the prize pool for this one. I thought the prize pool was great for the first edition (Judge Promo Mana Crypt for 1st place, 4 Magicfest Sol Rings for top 4), but this one in particular, you guys outdid yourselves. And I look forward to trying to win the next one!
PlayMax #2 Prizes. City of Brass for the winner, and every top 4 player a promo Command Tower
And that’s a wrap! If you enjoyed this article, or are interested in participating in future tournaments, please join our discord, and consider supporting us on Patreon. The support we get on patreon makes it possible for us to bring exquisite prizes to our community in addition to our normal fully-moderated and curated play environments. We will also have a set review of Streets of New Capenna going up on our podcast PlayEDH Radio, 903.1 in the coming days from publication, so be sure to check that out as well.
This article is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.
