Being the Bigger Man: Why My Chane Doesn't Belittle

My goal today is to give you a peek into my preparations for Pro Tour: New Jersey, the deck I took, and some lessons I learned along the way- lessons that can help you not just with the deck at hand, but with deckbuilding in general.

While trying to predict potential bans, me and my testing team (The Southampton crew - Joe, Jack, Bruno & Francesco) tested a lot of decks across the board to in hopes of finding what could be good into a few different possible scenarios. I won't go too deep into that here, but we were preparing for:

1. Starvo hit
2. Starvo & Viserai hit
3. Starvo, Viserai, & Prism hit

When the real bans came into effect, a few realities became obvious. We have full time jobs, and sometimes even pretend to have lives outside of card games, so we didn't have time to 'break' the format with something not currently popular. This is compounded by the brutal pressure that Starvo demands against trying to do anything with setup. We had to work from existing archetypes.

1. Oldhim is in the same metagame spot as Starvo, but is mostly a weaker deck, primarily due to how much it accepts a nigh-unwinnable Prism matchup.
2. Viserai losing his combo plan to overcome his weak matchups took him out of contention.
3. Briar is powerful, but the Starvo matchup is brutal, with their disruption hitting the deck on two axes: Channel Lake Frigid and Frostbites are difficult to play through, and on-hit effects disrupt our ability to hold a full hand. 
4. Prism is powerful, but struggles vs Briar and Chane, both of which I expected to be popular at the PT now that Viserai was less appealing.
5. Chane... was actually not obvious.

Why is Chane not obvious? And how did I end up playing him?

At first glance, Chane seemed like the clear cut choice I should take. I've got experience with the deck, it's good against Prism, and in ProQuest season the matchup was pretty close to 50/50 against Starvo. So surely now, with the bans, it’ll just be Chane favored, right?

Unfortunately, Chane suffers from a problem I want to coin as the "Flip Flop" (I will be taking reader suggestions on a better name).

With most other decks in the field, you can make a good guess at the game plan your opponent will be presenting for the match and prepare accordingly. For example, a Prism player against Starvo is aware they're going to try to control their auras, so they can add additional auras in an effort to overwhelm them. The Chane mirror match is a hotly contested race, so most Chane players will sideboard in cards that try to swing that in your favor- whether with a Sink Below to buy you time or a Razor Reflex to push through the last few points of damage.

However, Chane struggles with guessing at the opponent's tack specifically within this meta, because some of the best decks in the format can take more than one approach in response to him, and guessing wrong can be brutal. We'll focus on Starvo as an example, as I was expecting him to be the most common deck by far.

This was the first barrier I came up against in testing: the Flip-Flop™ barrier. Not only was this an awkward position to find myself in, but after playing a lot against control Starvo, the matchup felt absolutely awful for Chane. Although the casino variant appeared to be the common response to Chane within Callings, given how overwhelming the advantage felt when Starvo went control against the poor Chane players, I assumed this would be the approach the Pro Tour players would take.

Just when I was close to giving up & playing the villain himself, I hit upon a solution. All I had to do was cut one of the cards that the majority of people all agree is a key enabler for the deck.

Conventional wisdom has Belittle as a mandatory card in Chane, and certainly for good reason. I played with the little chap & his oversized axe the entirety of the previous Pro Quest season, and am no stranger to how good he is. The combination of helping to ensure you could play a Non-Attack Action (NAA) & Attack Action (AA) on a turn, or provide additional resources while keeping some pressure on, is a powerful enabler for the deck.

However, as I was trying to fix the fatigue matchups for Prism & Starvo, I began to wonder if there was merit to trying a list without Belittle. There were, after all, some downsides of the card that I didn’t think were being examined in detail:

Once I began trying lists with no belittle, a lot of deckbuilding space opened up.

Fixing The Flip Flop™ Issue
In the interest of not being classified as a short novel, I’m just going to bullet point a few of the non-standard cards and explain their purpose. The key point to note in the deckbuilding here is that the majority of cards are there to both be good against fatigue & standard builds- pulling us back from the dangerous dichotomy of choosing wrong.

Lead the Charge is in the deck to usually function as a slightly worse yellow Captain's Call, but with the high upside against Prism when considering Arc Light Sentinel. It's also good against Blizzard, and reduces the amount you need to break the chain against fatigue Starvo.

A secret all star in the deck, Enlightened Strike helps improve damage output on the traditionally weak early turns, presenting damage even when under a Spinal Crush effect. It combos with almost all of your go again effects to be a true powerhouse in the draw a card mode.

Sting of Sorcery can present almost unblockable damage against Briar & Chane in the late game, while being a 0-cost NAA enabler where required and blue pitch to help support the high cost reds you bring in for these matchups. Additional blues are also a valuable part of the plan against Prism & Starvo.

Last Ditch Effort was one of the most valuable additions that was gained from removing Belittle. This functions as a reasonable blue 3 block where required, much as Shrill does, but has the very real upside when a game goes long of presenting an additional 8 alongside an Ursur to push through the last points.

Against any matchup with the potential to fatigue, Mutated Mass offers what is frequently a 4th Ghostly Visit, with the upside of helping to keep the blue count high. Just 1 copy is included, due to the not-insignificant downside of 0 block, but it's a valuable role player.

This could almost be a separate article in itself, but if there's anything I can advise for you to take away from this piece, it's this: don't think of your decks as a main deck of 60 cards and a 20-card sideboard. Your deck should be looked at as a core configuration that never changes, and then a lot of flexible slots that can move based on a given matchup. Thinking about your deck like this will not only help with deckbuilding, but will help ensure that you still sideboard correctly when playing against something you may not have explicitly prepared for.

This thought process also influenced my deck construction, and is why I value flexibility so highly in my deck. At something like the Pro Tour, I want to make sure that I can give myself a shot at beating anything, regardless of how they sideboard.

With that in mind, I present the core 48 cards.

1. 14 Red Blood Debt cards: Keeps consistency of powerful Shackle reveals high.
2. 3 Enlightened Strike & 1 Soul Reaping: Powerful cards to be able to pressure on low Shackles.
3. 2 Nimbleism: Helps enable high damage turns & cast blood debt cards with the NAA requirement.
4. 12 Go Again NAA cards: Enables powerful mid & late game turns.
5. 3 Art of War: Best card in the deck.
6. 8 Non-Red Blood Debt cards: Reduces variance with turns that miss on the most powerful hits.
7. 5 Blue 3-Blocks with Upsides: Blue cards are how you have your most powerful turns, so a critical mass is required.

You might be curious as to why I present 64 cards against Prism and Starvo - but assuming that you’re trying to keep your deck size as small as possible to ensure consistent blood debt hits while ensuring you get the best chance of drawing Art of War, 64 actually sees more Art of Wars than 60 cards (assuming a Shackle every turn). There’s a lot of complex math behind this that goes a bit over my head, but essentially with 64 there’s another 4 cards from the original configuration of cards that don’t get banished and are drawn instead.

This is a theory and deckcrafting article, so I don’t want to talk too much about the Pro Tour event itself. Unfortunately, my record ended up as a disappointing 3-4. The conclusions we drew from testing that Starvo would aim to fatigue Chane ended up not being the consensus, and I fell to some brutally aggressive Starvo gameplans.

That being said, if you looked at the top tables, a lot of the Prism builds were finding success with the fatigue strategy. My friend & testing partner Francesco Giorgio also had a positive record against Chane across the tournament employing a fatigue Starvo strategy, so I think our logic was sound, but we just underestimated how much other people would want to employ the fatigue strategy.

There’s just one last lesson, and then I’ll let you have fun trying to play with the Eclipse puzzles, which are like Kano puzzles but they don’t require an advanced doctorate.

If you want to play Chane, one of the most important parts of playing a fatigue matchup is being able to do your Eclipse turns in a reasonable timeframe, while still playing around key cards. We’ll use Starvo as the opponent as it’s the most complex to plan the turn against, because you need to consider Blizzard and if you can afford to play around it - while making sure to break the chain as little as possible to prevent a shield getting extra value.

For each of these puzzles (constructed from real game states that were stumbled into during testing), the challenge is to do as much damage as possible, while playing around Blizzard and minimizing the amount of times you break the chain! For each of these, assume that you have Snapdragon Scalers in play with no deck remaining - and if you want the bonus challenge (and how I ended up on my boots choice), try to see what difference a Spellbound Creepers makes as the footwear. As a hint, I’d recommend counting total resources available, and then counting how much resource potential lines will cost as a total.

Thanks to you for following along, and thanks again to my great testing team, Ben J for helping me with the math, everyone from the UK group & the Rathe Times for helping me to go very in depth on some thoughts I had on how to build everyone’s favorite Runeblade.