I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been myself recently. There’s something that’s been weighing on my mind for some time now, and no matter how hard I try to eject it out of the VCR that is my mind, this particular tape stays lodged in there. I actually thought that I had begun to pass through the worst of it; I thought that I could indeed see the light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, I’ve never been on the good side of the Bitch Goddess called Irony, so I should have taken that into consideration.

The email I received this morning scared the shit out of me. As I was reading it, I could feel the blood draining out of my face as my mind raced through a thousand different possibilities of what might have happened. You see, the email was rather vague, merely an urgent pleading for my help. Normally I would have thought that it was someone exaggerating things immensely, but not this person. No, this person I know better than I know myself, and that’s what worried me so much. This particular person could have raised me from the dead with an email like this.

Once I followed through on the email and realized the person wasn’t in any physical danger, it still took an effort to get my pulse down to a reasonable level. Nothing like the cold fear that the most important thing in your life is being stripped away from you to get the blood pumping, I suppose.

For nearly ten years now, I’ve been in the Magic trenches. I was present for the evolution of card advantage. I was proudly slaughtered by The Deck when the concept went public. Necropotence sat proudly on my “Things to Do” list when Ice Age was released.

Hell, I was there to scratch my head in confusion when Dingus Egg was banned.

Throughout it all, the one constant is that I never lost my stoic attitude towards the game. No matter what was going on in my life, I could sit down to a game of Magic and, win or lose, my concentration would never wander. It’s a talent I picked up from years of playing baseball. There’s a zone that you go into, a sort of forced tunnel vision that keeps out distractions. On more than one occasion I was told that I was a completely different person when competition was involved. Sure, during playtesting it was all fun and games, but come tournament time I would play to win, no questions asked.

I can’t say that anymore. Through a variety of circumstances, some within and some beyond my realm of control, I can no longer concentrate the way I used to. In particular, there’s one person that I see often at tournaments that I absolutely cannot help loathing to the point that I become waspish and generally pissed off towards. My record against this person reflects this; when I’m not concentrating, I make mistakes. If I’m focused on a game, a mistake is highly rare, but when I’m not…well, that’s when the rating points begin to disappear.

Is my anger towards this person his/her fault? Not really. The anger is probably more directed at myself than anything else, because hatred isn’t one of my favorite emotions. The problem lies in the fact that as I delve deeper into parts of my subconscious that I’ve never taken out and looked at before, I find that there’s no changing the current state of concentration I’m in. It’s actually not just centered on Magic, either. It’s a general feeling of sadness and unfulfilled yearning that has had an affect on just about every part of my everyday life.

The person who sent me the email once told me that this person was happy just being secure. I’m not like that. Yes, security is all well and good, and it’s often a comforting feeling. However, if I was in a setting where I was secure and yet not taking a chance on what I felt I needed to be whole, I say screw security. Security is a concept for those that can’t take a risk on change. There’s a word for not changing and settling for something less than what you really want, and that word is “dead”. This person shouldn’t settle for less than optimal just because it’s the safe bet. For instance, I’m certainly not going with the “safe bet” by putting this at the beginning of one of my articles, because if certain people figure out exactly what I’m talking about, it’s going to lead to hours of teasing and being made fun of. Not to mention one rather loud “I told you so” from one person.

But you know what? I didn’t write this for the benefit if everyone reading this. I wrote it for the benefit of one person, the only person who will really understand exactly what I’m saying with all of this. For those of you that may think you know what I’m rambling about, I assure you that you don’t, but feel free to believe that you do.

Even though you don’t.

To all those that actually expected Magic strategy in all of this, begin reading…now.

Regionals is just about upon us once again, and guess what? This year we don’t have to worry about an army of Saproling tokens with Haste coming at us on turn four. No more “end of turn, I’ll search for a Rebel”, and no more 2/2s popping out of the graveyard during your opponent’s upkeep. Now we just have to deal with a Bitch that thinks she’s a Smokestack, random 4/4s that come out of the graveyard at instant speed, and Shocks that come back for one last hit before leaving the game completely.

Right then, well, let’s get down to business, shall we? After all, we’ve gotten through Masticore assaults and Fireblasts raining down all around us, right?

With his usual flair, Ted Slone pointed out in his latest article that Braids is likely to be one of the most-played cards at Regionals. Wait, forget “likely”. It’s a guarantee that the Bitch will show up in force. She’s simply just that strong. When the spoiler for Odyssey first came out, I didn’t so much miss Braids so much as put her a few notches too low when considering her power. I basically just thought that she’d be good in Odyssey Block Constructed, then moved on.

Well, I was wrong on that, of course. Braids is raising hell on the Standard scene in a variety of decks.

And now for a complete swerve, I might as well let on that this article is about getting through a Tog-heavy metagame. Why bring up Braids at all? Well, I figured since everyone else was, I might as well, too.

In any case, while those “in the know” realize that Braids will quite possibly be the deck(s) to beat, the general population of Magic players thinks of Psychatog when trying to come up with the top deck. To be honest, it just might be the best all-around deck in the field, so the general population may have a point.

I could go into decklists of various Tog decks and such, but that’s not the point of this article.

When Tog was going through its first wave of popularity, a deck, dubbed Frog in a Blender, was created by Jay Schneider. If Tog has a weakness, it’s that it has a very difficult time dealing with a fast creature rush. Frog took it to that particular chink in the armor like no other deck could.

4 Karplusan Forest
7 Mountain
6 Forest
4 Barbarian Ring

4 Raging Goblin
4 Grim Lavamancer
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Yavimaya Barbarian
4 Wild Mongrel

4 Reckless Charge
4 Firebolt
4 Sonic Seizure
4 Fiery Temper
4 Violent Eruption

The deck has gone through some changes at the hands of various individuals since it was posted, but the theme remains the same: beat hard and beat fast. The red zone is your friend with this deck, so good of a friend that people will be asking if the two of you are dating. If you can’t figure out exactly how to play Frog, well, then, um, I’m sorry. It takes about as much of a brain to pilot as Sligh, and while any deck certainly needs a level of skill to play correctly, this isn’t high up on the IQ scale.

The problem with Frog is that it really takes a massive beating from the slower, but generally more powerful, R/G decks. A Wild Mongrel simply can’t compare to a Shivan Wurm in terms of combat, and Basking Rootwalla will normally not be able to stop a Beast Attack token. Since R/G is considered to be one of the top decks at the moment and is enjoying a well-deserved moment in the spotlight right now, Frog becomes a bit less attractive in the larger metagame. Yes, it will be Tog and any Enforcer decks that decide to show up, but large creatures are its bane.

I toyed around with Frog for quite some time, testing it and trying to figure out what could be done to improve the R/G matchup. Finally, though, I gave up. The more I tuned it against R/G, the more it simply became a R/G deck itself, and that in turn weakened it against Tog.

The general philosophy of Frog is much akin to the older Sligh decks. There are differences, obviously, but the “kill the opponent at all costs” mentality is the same. I was very reluctant to try out Sligh, as the archetype is notorious for losing to large creatures much in the same way as Frog. However, for the sake of argument I scratched together a decklist and tried it out. As expected, it would beat Tog quite easily, but R/G would leave it bleeding in a ditch and crying like a dying puppy. Ensnaring Bridge out of the sideboard was suggested to me, so I tested out that route. It certainly improved the second game noticeably, as I would basically hide behind a Bridge while using burn and a Lavamancer to slowly wear down my opponent’s life total. The problem would be game three, when the Hull Breaches would come in and the big monsters would once again enter the red zone.

And, of course, I would outright lose to Circle of Protection: Red, but that’s a different story.

So I went back to the drawing board. My problem, of course, was that I had no way to level the playing field against R/G, even though I would beat nearly every type of control deck out there. U/G Upheaval was a bit easier of a matchup, but it was still nowhere near perfect and there was a built-in answer to the Bridge in the form of Upheaval. For a time I toyed with white as a splash color, using Captain’s Maneuver to turn Beast tokens and Shivan Wurms back on their controllers, but although it worked often enough, the strategy would fail an equal amount of the time.

It was about then that I became obsessed with blue. A voice in the back of my head, as sweet as an angel’s, said to me, “Hibernation, my child. The answer lies in Hibernation.” At first, I was hesitant to board so many cards against R/G, but the realization quickly hit me that, if I was winning nearly every other matchup, didn’t it make sense to stack my board against the bad match? The rest of the slots I’d devote to Price of Glories and things for the Braids matchup, and I should be set.

I wasn’t completely happy with just using blue for Hibernation. In the maindeck, I stripped out some of the burn and added in Aquameba. Now THIS was something I could definitely get into. Not only was it swinging for three on every turn, but it was a madness machine, tossing out Fiery Tempers and Violent Eruptions like it was its job. Come to think of it, abusing Madness kind of IS Aquameba’s reason for being. In any case, I was incredibly happy with this addition, and I was even getting use out of the Ice half of Fire/Ice occasionally, especially in game one against R/G.

So here, ladies and gentlemen, is the deck that I’ll be playing at Regionals.

4x Grim Lavamancer
4x Goblin Raider
4x Mad Dog (yeah, it’s bad, but I needed another quality two drop)
4x Aquameba
4x Flametongue Kavu
4x Firebolt
4x Fiery Temper
4x Violent Eruption
4x Fire/Ice

4x Shivan Reef
2x Island
18x Mountain

There’s more mana than is tradition in a Sligh deck, but consider the fact that, if an Aquameba isn’t in play, I have twelve spells with a three or more casting cost, not to mention Firebolt’s flashback cost. Besides, it allows me to throw out a lot of burn and still have Lavamancer mana open. Still, I might end up cutting down the manabase to 23, adding in City of Brass in place of a few Mountains (possibly). The current sideboard is this:

3x Ensnaring Bridge
4x Hibernation
4x Price of Glory
3x Rushing River
1x Boil

The Boil is just sort of…there at the moment. I can’t figure out what I want in that last slot. The Price of Glories may get chopped down to three, but this is tuned against the current local metagame, which consists of a lot of cards that read, “Counter target spell”. Rushing River is “da bomb” against Circle of Protection: Red.

So that’s my current choice for Regionals, but I’ll be taking along a copy of B/G Braids in the event of an unexpected metagame shift. You never can be too careful, after all.