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Main » Articles » Standard Scryb Sprites Recursion

Standard Scryb Sprites Recursion

Adrian Sullivan
Posted on May 10, 2019
 Reddit

Grand Prix Madison is right around the corner, and I can't emphasize enough just how pumped I am!

I've been living in Madison for most of my life. It's a city that I've loved the entire time I lived here. Way back in 1999, I started figuring out if I'd be moving to New York City. Opportunity beckoned in the form of working as an editor of the first major Magic website: The Dojo. It was a pretty important decision to have to grapple with: leaving the city I loved or turn down an incredible opportunity. I left, but with a heavy heart, though lots of hope.

One of the funny footnotes to that story I wouldn't be living in Madison with friends James "Scout/Mascot" Meyers and Dan Bock (of PowerNine fame), the two people who came up with the concept of "Scryb Sprites Recursion".

Scryb Sprites

I remember a conversation in James and Dan's apartment about the idea, and it went something like this:

Me: Okay, this deck looks cool, and the engine seems sound. But how do you win?

Dan: You could win with anything. I could literally put a Scryb Sprites into the deck and just recur it. (That might even be good, too, because it could block a creature early, and evade most creatures later.)

James: It really doesn't matter. Once it gets going, you win.

Dan: Yeah, you win with Scryb Sprites Recursion!

That might not have been the full conversation verbatim, but it is close enough.

Dan's deck that they were talking about was a deck he called "Premature Green", named after the Patrick Chapin Sapphire Medallion deck called Premature Blue, which was a Turbo Time Warp deck. In a world where the top decks were mostly White Weenie, Premature Green was the first deck to go for a full on Turbo-Fog that we now know as an occasional, if rare, player in the metagame.

He would play it to a 4-1 in the US Open, affectionately nicknamed "The Meatgrinders" because single-elimination, two-hundred-plus person events would grind relentlessly, with only a few making it to the other side to play in US Nationals. This would also be the weekend I would introduce the world to Counter-Oath and David Williams would introduce the world to Rec/Sur.

Amusingly, Dan beat all of his hard matchups, and lost to White Weenie, which would actually win US Nationals that year in the hands of Matt Linde.

Here is what he wrote about the event, later:

When I ran it in The Meatgrinders, it went 4-1 destroying Tradewind, Big Blue, Oath, and something else silly. It lost to White Weenie because I am incapable of drawing the right cards.

Premature Green | Dan Bock

Good matchups:

SRB and Sligh and red blitz *

Suicide black *

White Weenie *

Jamie Super Secret Green tech deck

Godzilla

Stompy

Green Spike decks

And the bad matchups:

Tradewind

ProsBloom

The asterisked matchups were the most popular ones of the time.

In the case of this deck, the good matchups were good because you simply would dominate anyone who was attacking unless things went quite strangely, but the bad matchups cold go poorly because they could just win through any life gain or didn't care about a card like Fog (or the better versions like Constant Mists).

The "Scryb Sprites" - your afterthought card you could use to win the game could be one of the three Spikes, be it Spike Feeder or Spike Weaver, or it might end up being Jester's Cap. Technically, the recursion engine of Gaea's Blessing itself could be the "Scryb Sprites", but stopping the eventual potential problems from some decks made it important enough to consider using.

Dan called the card Summer Bloom the deck's finisher because it would put you so up on resources on the table, there would be practically no way a Constant Mists wouldn't last forever, and you'd be able to play multiple cards in the late game that would put you well out of range of any deck being able to manage everything you could do in a turn, even if they were a controlling deck.

All of this isn't just a history lesson of a footnote; it relates to a massive change that has happened in the Magic metagame at this moment.

When Ali Aintrazi started blazing a trail with Simic Nexus, it made a big ripple into the Standard metagame. The deck can definitely trace its ancestry back to 1997-era Magic in both Patrick Chapin's Premature Blue and Dan Bock's Premature Green, running Root Snare as its Fog and Nexus of Fate as its Time Warp.

Here is Ali's early build:

Simic Nexus | Allegiance Standard | Ali Aintrazi, 3rd Place SCG Classic Baltimore

His initial ideas on what made the deck tick seem quite likely to have served as the basis from which other people would build their decks, including one of my favorite Magic players:

Michael Bonde Lampalot GIF from Michaelbonde GIFs

Simic Nexus | Allegiance Standard | Michael Bonde, 8th Place Mythic Championship 1 Cleveland

Both of these decks are fairly straightforward decks that build up to a combo of taking all the turns, or at least taking enough of them to pull ahead such that a Root Snare will bridge you into taking all the rest of the turns (or enough for a Hydroid Krasis to finish it). Ali's deck can add in some beat down from Frilled Mystic, but this card was often a part of the more clunky draws that the deck could produce.

Bonde's build of the deck didn't do very much to change the formula, but it was significant. Frilled Mystic became Sinister Sabotage, increasing the searching in the deck for the combo to win. Four Opt was introduced, shaving a number of cards to make it all fit (the fourth counterspell, the 25th land, the second Precognitive Perception, and the third Hydroid Krasis).

Aside from getting Bonde to the Top Eight of the Mythic Championship (formerly the Pro Tour), this streamlined build also served as the basis for the main deck of Simic Nexus ever since its inception. It wasn't a full on Scryb Sprites Recursion, but it was close; Hydroid Krasis would always be the clunkiest part of the deck, but it was still fairly solid in being able to push through a control deck with the power of card advantage or potentially gaining enough life to be able to escape range from a Red deck. Occasionally, it could just form a massive flying brick wall against the midrange decks, buying a tiny bit of time before you got back into the business of winning the actual game.

One reason it wasn't full on Scryb Sprites Recursion is that if your opponent stopped both Hydroid Krasis in Game 1, you wouldn't have any way to recur cards to win the game. Ultimately, even after sideboarding, the finishers mattered: somehow answer the Hydroid Krasis and the other finishers, and you'd be out of luck for winning the game. As a practical matter this wouldn't happen very often, but especially after board, with the inclusion of Unmoored Ego by some decks, becomes more possible.

Now, it isn't necessary for a deck to include Scryb Sprites Recursion to be a good, powerful combo deck.

Of course, when you are a deck that has the ability to win with Scryb Sprites Recursion, it's pretty fantastic.

Let's take it back to Wisconsin, with my good friend, Representative Jonathan Brostoff, or, as you might know him from Twitch, "teamjbro":

Simic Nexus | War Standard | teamjbro, 5-0 Competitive Standard League

Amass, welcome to Standard.

Jonathan/"teamjbro" decided to do a much more ambitious Amass spell: Commence the Endgame.

Commence the Endgame

Uncounterable is no joke, nor is the likely size of a Commence the Endgame. It is, in Game 1, the only way to win the game.

Of course, unless it gets taken out by Devious Cover-Up, it's going to be all you are going to need. Tamiyo, Collector of Tales will see to it that you can recur anything whatsoever.

Tamiyo, Collector of Tales

This card steps up Simic Nexus to the next level. Being immune to discard is wild, since discard is going to be one of the better ways you could fight a key spell. Being immune to sacrifce effects is less important, but not meaningless by any means. Importantly, though, the -3 ability to return a card to hand from the graveyard means that you have effectively put the most powerful Eternal Witness ever into your deck, and you'll be able to recur anything you have in your deck. In addition, the +1 ability on Tamiyo doesn't even need to hit to be impressive. Missing entirely, you can still find Chemister's Insight. Even if you hit nothing that increases the value of the cards in your deck, the shrunk size of your deck will mean that you will be able to win absurdly often. By way of example, in the old builds of this deck, I used to estimate that a deck larger than 33 or so cards might still fizzle; with Tamiyo, Collector of Tales in play, it feels like this number is (frighteningly) closer to 45.

Altogether, this puts the deck in a new space.

Does this mean that it is unstoppable?

Clearly not - the deck was pushed around just a bit by Red decks this weekend at the SCG Open in Richmond, where three of the Top Four were Red compared to no such Simic Nexus decks in even the Top 8.

Is Commence the Endgame the only way to play this? Far from it.

My fabulous friend Jody Keith won his MCQ in Birmingham, Alabama with the more common card seeing play in that slot, Callous Dismissal:

Callous Dismissal

Callous Dismissal might be the perfect card for enacting Scryb Sprites Recursion. You get to answer a problem on the table and have a finisher all in one, but it is also cheap enough that it could have an impact on the early game as well. The fact that it starts out as a 1/1 is a little poetic in the realm of talking about Scryb Sprites Recursion as well.

But Jody wasn't finished just winning an MCQ - he had other thoughts about what might be the better option:

Sure, we can see that there is also a God-Eternal Kefnet in the graveyard, but that could well be a sideboard card. Regardless, Lazotep Plating, a quasi-Counterspell, has clearly made the mix of cards to consider for the best finisher in Scryb Sprites Recursion form for the Simix Nexus deck.

Ultimately, a quick examination of the card pool for other cards that might be worthy for inclusion in the Scryb Sprites Recursion camp boils down to those three cards: Callous Dismissal, Commence the Endgame, and Lazotep Plating. Each of these cards is fully capable of winning the game because of the recursion elements that Tamiyo provides, while also being able to help support the deck into finding its way into victory.

The first two, Callous Dismissal and Commence the Endgame, are quite simple: bouncing a permanent or drawing cards can clearly help the deck make it to a win. The last one is more complicated, as Lazotep Plating is slightly more subtle, but it is nonetheless important. Basically, Lazotep Plating can be a cheap means to stop the opponent from nearly any card that they might choose to interact with you. Are they going to blow up your Wilderness Reclamation or Tamiyo with a spell? You can say no. Are they aiming discard at you, or are they trying to heave burn your way? No.

It doesn't need to be such a small spell to be doing that work of Scryb Sprites Recursion however. There are a few other possibilities.

Perhaps Jody Keith is onto something with that God-Eternal Kefnet! I'm inclined to believe that the card could be an incredible one-of, and it is also quite resilient at being hated out. As a large, flying body for cheap, this card might be the real deal in the deck.

Jace, Wielder of Mysteries could also do the work of helping to accomplish the combo while also winning the game. Importantly, though, it is fairly unwieldy from a mana perspective, and I could imagine it rotting in your hand in the way that these other cards are less apt to do (though Commence the Endgame does seem like it would have a bit of rotting in the hand it might do).

Nissa, Who Shakes the World is another potential card here, albeit perhaps better from the side since it is so expensive. At this point, we've started entering the territory where the help it creates in getting to the combo succeeding (a massive mana boost) is not as noteworthy as the cost for that help - five mana as a sorcery seems like it would be better replaced by a Hydroid Krasis; if cost is no issue, why not just go all in with Planewide Celebration?

None of this has much to do with the upcoming Grand Prix in my favorite city, but it certainly has a lot to do with one of my favorite, if rarely seen elements in Magic, in my favorite two-color combination. I know I expect to be monkeying with the last couple of cards in this deck, trying to beat one of my other loves, Red, because, you know me, I can't get enough of brewing!

Goodbye, Madison! Hello, New York City!

I started by talking about Madison and New York; if you've been reading my articles you know I'm moving soon. After the Grand Prix, I'll be taking my first big trips worth of things out to my new apartment. This move wasn't something I expected, but what is exciting about it is that while I'm sad to be leaving the city I love, I can say I'm leaving with a heart as light as air, and all of the hope you can imagine.

It's almost exactly 20 years since I last left Madison for New York City. I love that beautiful coincidence, and I'm excited to be continuing my journey onward there, albeit with a new regular set of characters in my most regular Magic life.

If you are in Madison for the Grand Prix, make sure to say hi!

- Adrian Sullivan

Follow me on Twitter! @AdrianLSullivan

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TAGS articles, standard, constructed, analysis, decklist, adrian sullivan, war standard, simic nexus, 05102019

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