5 Color Green (5CG) Deck: May '97

The 5CG deck did very well at the U.S. Regionals, coming out of nowhere and capturing a total of 5 Regionals Championships for its players, along with at least 12 more qualifying slots. Notable was the finish of Cathy Nicoloff, reigning "BeatDown" Queen of Magic, at the  Florida Regionals, capturing 1st with this 5CG Deck:
Cathy Nicoloff's 5CG Deck
4 Quirion Ranger
4 Granger Guildmage
4 River Boa
4 Whirling Dervish
1 Karoo Meerkat
2 Jolrael's Centaur
3 Maro
4 Birds of Paradise
 4 Incinerate

4 Arcane Denial

2 Terror

2 Armor of Thorns

2 Disenchant
1 Armageddon
 3 Winter Orb
4 Undiscovered Paradise
3 City of Brass
9 Forest
 Sideboard:
4 Hydroblast
4 Pyroblast
2 Gloom
 Sideboard (cont):
2 Terror
1 Disenchant
2 Simoon

After Regionals, Cathy posted this tournament report and analysis:

The deck looks funny, but as long as it doesn't double mulligan, it performs outstandingly well. With some Bird/Ranger tricks and a forest, 4 mana on turn 2 is quite possible. Cast bird on first turn, Cast Ranger on turn 2, tap bird, return forest and replay it to untap bird, tap bird and forest again for three available mana. Armageddoning with only one land in play is quite possible.

Holding cards in hand is pretty vital for the deck. If this deck is played like a weenie swarm, it will die rather quickly to mass creature removal. The idea is to trickle out the weenies until your opponent deals with them. I spent a lot of matches against R/U attacking for one over and over again. By the time we had exhausted that avenue, I was able to build up to a Winter Orb and a Maro, which made me glad I saved cards in my hand.

The Ranger's ability is really unique, and somewhat crucial to the deck. The 4 mana trick is nice. Ranger beats Stasis all by itself if it remains in play. It also defeats Dream Tides and Flood. If you have a 6/6 Maro and they double Incinerate it, you can return a forest to your hand and save him. (Returning a forest to the hand is part of the cost of the untap effect, and therefore happens at a speed faster than fast effects.)

Terror wound up being critical in matches against blue, because the ever present Suq'Ata Firewalker was a deadly threat as well as Wall of Air. Disenchant was effective against Disks and all the normal enchantment based stuff that tried to protect my opponent from an onslaught of green weenies. Arcane Denial allowed the deck to survive the occasional mass-destruction spell as well as pull out of some sticky situations. The rest of the deck is probably self-evident. Most of the cards are just hosers for one deck style or another.

I'm glad that John posted a tournament report, because I honestly cannot even begin to remember my opponents' names or even what decks I played against during the swiss rounds. To my vague recollection, Florida Regionals was a sea of blue control, and red/blue, with some splashes of odder decks here and there during the earlier rounds.

The mono blue seemed to be divided among a couple different classes. There was the standard blue control with big flyers, and there was blue control with Winter Orb, Force Spike, Man O' War and Dream Tides standard. I remember a couple Unsummons, too, somewhere in there.

The R/U seemed pretty standard. Some with Efreets, some without, almost all with Walls of Air and Firewalkers and massive numbers of Pyrokinesis and Earthquakes.

Matt Place has termed the deck "G5C" (short for Green 5 Color) and it seems to have stuck. He developed the deck with the help of his younger brother Daniel Burdick, Nate Clarke (yes, Nate), and myself. Matt was very generous with the deck and gave it to practically everyone who asked. I think the main reason that it was not played more is because nearly everyone who saw it unanimously thought it was a pile of garbage. I received more than a few disparaging comments during the swiss round at Regionals.

As the rounds of the tournament progressed, there was a general buzz in the air of something amiss. By the time I got to round 5, it was next to impossible to have an opponent who did not know what I was playing. This disturbed me, but it didn't seem to affect the outcomes much. Much to my displeasure, the only opponent I actually managed to sweep was a Squandered Stasis deck. Every other round, I lost first game only to come back for the next two.

I took a heavy loss against a R/G deck in round 7. I spent one game with only a City of Brass in play and the other waiting to draw an Undiscovered Paradise/City of Brass so I could cast my rather meaty hand of creature kill (2 Terror, 1 Incinerate, 1 Simoon). Alas, it did not happen for me. I will say that if I got ordinary draws, it probably would have been my toughest match, and I may have emerged defeated anyway.

I took my draw in round 4 against one of the Blue Dream Tides decks. It was really both of our faults... I was playing very carefully to avoid being overwhelmed by his control and he was playing very carefully to avoid being tricked to death by my Ranger. We timed out on game three, score was 1-1.

If I remember correctly, I played against three R/U decks in the swiss. Most of the matches ended the same way. A big Maro backed with a little countermagic. A couple matches ended with a 1/1 doing the lion's share of damage, with my opponents too afraid to Quicksand it and unwilling to waste mass creature kill. Winter Orb played a key role in all matches againsr R/U and I am very glad that G5C had the ability to cast a Winter Orb backed by a Pyroblast on turn 2.

I played against one Sligh deck in round 8, with him winning the first game. If I remember correctly, the next two games were a fest of Hydroblasts, Guildmages and Terrors, stopping Sandstalkers and Ball Lightnings and ending with an eventual Winter Orb, ending his fun-romping days with menacing three casting cost creatures. Maro played a key role in both of those games as well. Come to think of it, I don't think his deck was based around a mana curve. I'll just think of it as a mono red with major mass creature kill abilities.

As it turned out, all three of the G5C players made it to the round of eight. This feat was to be duplicated almost exactly at other regionals around the country. Walter unfortunately did not make it past the round of eight, but John progressed to the finals in the time it took for me to play my quarterfinals match.

In quarterfinals, I was paired against a R/U deck I had faced that day already. To his credit, Taer (my opponent) was truly a very nice person to play and we had a lot of fun. It was unfortunate that the third game was decided by mana screw. He quickly won the first game with a Suqata Firewalker. I won the second game with a Maro and a WInter Orb. I won the third game with a Maro and a Winter Orb. Taer drew only a Soldevi Excavations in his opening hand and could not declare a mulligan. I was very baffled when he did not play a land his first turn and told me to go. I figured it out quite a bit later into the match. I was sorry that it had to end that way because he was a good player and a very nice person. He conceded the third game at faster than interrupt speed the turn after the Maro hit the table. I was so tired I found that to be remarkably hilarious.

In semifinals, I faced a B/U deck. I do not know if it was Forgotten Orb, because he never played a Winter Orb. First game I got a poor mana draw and could not take control of the game before he Drained me to death. Second game, I got out an early Dervish which he matched with a Quicksand. We had a Guildmage war which I won and I attacked him endlessly win non-dervish weenies until he had to use the Quicksand. I think I had a Winter Orb out, too. The third game ended with a Maro and an Armageddon.

By that time, John had decided that he wanted to go home and conceded the final match to the winner of the semifinal match I was playing. In such an irregular way, I won the right to the title of Florida Regional Champion. I am not sure how the finals would have turned out. I'm probably going to challenge him to a rematch when I see him at the card shop, just to make the whole thing solid.

After the swiss rounds, I felt that people had begun to accept this rather crazy deck as being somewhat brilliant, and many people asked for a decklist. I think that somebody from Team Stupid lost a bet that I would lose to the R/U in the quarterfinals. Good thing he only bet a dollar. Pete Leiher was knocked out of the running for top 8 by John playing the G5C, which was a rather unpleasant match to listen to (as I was playing at the same table). I was pleased to see that John seemed to be undisturbed by Pete's characteristic psychological play style.

I'm not sure about the future of this deck, because I feel that, in some ways, it resembles the Stasis fiasco at Nationals. Nobody expected it and it took over. Once people begin to expect to face this sort of deck, the metagame will change and I feel it will probably be unable to win. It was simply a surprise assault on the expected metagame and dominant deck themes.

Thanks again to Matt Place, Dan Burdick and Nate Clarke for helping to devise such a fiendishly fun deck to play. See you all at Nationals!

Eric Taylor had these comments:

First of all, my comments about why this deck is suddenly a good deck.

Why couldn't people play 5cgreen before?

There are several reasons.

1) no easy 1 costing spell to deal with creatures.

Typically, if a red player saw a bird in the old environment, he could just bolt it. He had plenty of bolts, 4 bolts, 4 incinerates and then the rest of the fire. In the current type 2 environment, you have to ration your fire a bit more, because you only have 4 bolts, and if you see a 1st turn bird, a red player is much more likely to let it live. That can be a critical error against 5cgreen, but it is a good play against green weenie swarm.

Swords to plowshare is gone. This means if you set yourself up by throwing your forests back into your hand and playing out a Maro, you don't lose anything. If swords to plowshares was still in print, you may be left with just a bird, a quirion ranger and 6 life. Against a control deck, the extra life won't be critical, but by throwing your forests back in your hand, you have given up some resources by giving up a turn that you could have an extra piece of land in play.

2) 2 auto-win paths to victory. If you can get a river boa out against mono-blue or a dervish out against mono-black, you have a good chance to win the game right there, especially if you can hold on to an armor of thorns and use it to get past the quicksand. Mono-color decks have been steadily gaining favor for a variety of reasons this past year, and against these mono-color decks, a dervish or a river boa can spell victory. These nearly instant victory conditions are important. They may only happen 1 in 5 games, but it boost the overal win percentage of a deck type to a significant extent. Against multi-color decks, the river boa and dervish are not quite as important, but they are still fine creatures.

Just imagine what it would be like if they would give black a creature like the river boa: 2 to cast, 1 black to regenerate, 2/1 with forest walk. This would be unthinkably powerful for black, yet there it is in green.

3) enchantment/artifact/land destruction spells are less prevalent in the current environment. There is a big emphasis nowadays on being able to deal mass creature destruction with the disk, the wrath of god, or else to swarm your opponent with ants, dervishes, or knights. Because of this, there isn't quite as much land/artifact/enchantment destruction as there used to be in type 2, and this means that a winter orb/quirion ranger lock can be very effective, because it can be very difficult for a modern type 2 deck to destroy the winter orb. With less land destruction around, your city of brass/undiscovered paradise is less likely to be destroyed. With so many colors and so little ways to get the 5 colors, destroying a multi-land can spell doom to the 5cg.

Additionally from Erik Lauer:
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4) No hypnotic spectres. With spectres around, black had the best weenie creature set so there wasn't as much incentive to play green weenie. Spectres would be a pain for this deck ; you need to have a rainbow mana available (and a black player would contagion / weakness / drain, etc the bird when he has a spectre, for starters it gets the spectre through) and one of your 4 incinerates or your support spells get sucked away, and your dervish gets disked. As long as I am talking about black weenies, how about witches? My instincts tell me that a 2 mana 1/3 tim would slow down this deck...

5) No Arrows. Good old 2nd turn artifact mana, 3rd turn arrows would hurt this deck a lot in my opinion.

6) Perhaps sideboards were not prepared enough. When infernal darkness was around, red oriented (sligh, counter-hammer for example) might have 4 pyrokenisis in their sideboard. That's gotta hurt.
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One of the greatest weaknesses of the deck is that there is so little land. This places a huge dependence of the deck on its creatures for mana.

If you can blow up both the bird of paradise and the quirion ranger and then pillage the city of brass/undiscovered paradise, suddenly the 5cgreen has no more mana.

For a mono-red running 4 pillages, 4 incinerates, a couple of pyrokenesis/pyroclams/earthquake, this strategy is incredibly effective.

However, using a wrath of god to blow up these creatures isn't as good because the 5cg can just often arcane the wrath and then slap down a winter orb. White/blue is better served with the Suqata Firewalker which costs one less and is fairly easy to protect if a granger guildmage is not already in play. The Firewalker can really give the 5cg deck a hard time. Likewise, if a black player uses his contagion early to kill the bird and quirion ranger, black can often swarm. 5cgreen is not a fast kill deck. It is slow and steady.

Cathy says that you have to play it with restraint. I've found in my testing that really you have no choice but that the deck forces you to play it this way.

You draw a card, and chances are very high it's not a land. You look at your hand, you see 3 creatures, and some of the 5 color spells.

You use the quirion ranger to tap the forest for 2 green and play out a river boa. Done. Draw again. What, another creature? Ok, you play it out using the same trick. Etc.

The deck plays incredibly slow for a "mono-green" deck, what with the quirion ranger throwing forests back into your hand and the undiscovered paradise going back too, so even if you wanted, there is little chance of playing your entire hand out by the 4th or 5th turn, which I suppose it good. The deck prevents you from misplaying it by rationing the mana sources.

If you get into the mid-game against a control deck, you will typically have 3 or 4 land in play and your opponent will have 10-15 lands. However, the 5cg will probably have at least 4 or 5 cards in hand, just like a control deck will, so the game isn't as unabalanced at that point as the land situation would seem to indicate.

It certainly looks odd to see this disparity in played land, but you know as the 5cgreen player that even if your opponent has thawed the entire game, you often have less chance of drawing a land than he does, because, after all, there are only 16 land.

Against a balanced deck with a lot of fire, this 5cgreen has a terrible time. The player with fire can so easily burn all of the creatures.

However, the player with fire has to know to burn that bird. If he doesn't, there is a very good chance that a 2nd or 3rd turn Maro will appear and apply some Fatty Loving.

Against any control deck, the 5cgreen has an excellent chance.

I think that one of the reasons this deck did so well at regionals is that so many good players and pros played it.

The 5cg deck is a deck type that I would not normally expect to see in the hands of a pro because it has an attribute that they normally shy away from. The 5cgreen has a very good chance to get a "draw from ass".

You can get a granger guildmage, a quirion ranger, 3 incinerates, a terror, some arcanes, and what is this? Voila 3 forests and no other colored mana. This means you suck, and you lose this game.

Or you can get land like this: city of brass, city of brass, city of brass and no bird. Ouch!

Or you can double mulligan.

Now even when the deck performs at its best, it never has has that vicious beatdown you expect from something like a white weenie or speed greenie or black ice. Instead the best you can hope for is a medium sort of draw like a bird, forest, maro and quirion ranger. Sure you can put out a Maro on the 2nd turn, but what if your opponent plays a disk or a nekratal? Even the best draws of the 5cg don't look godlike. The 5cg is surprisingly effective despite (or perhaps because?) of its inability to do a speed kill.

Pros normally would like to play a deck which every time they play they have a chance to win by outplaying their opponent, by playing their resources more effectively and such. While the 5cgreen does have the attribute that you can play it in a variety of ways and use skill to win, it also has the dreaded ability to completely crap out, which is the kind of luck in a deck type a pro normally shies away from.

Another reason this deck type did so well is that it's a new concept.

I think historically this deck type is best understood by looking not at the type 2 decks, but at the history and theory behind type 1.5 decks.

In type 1.5, you would often get a quick weenie, like an ape or lion and then protect it with counterspells. In 5cgreen you have the same sort of mentality.

You play a quick creature and then if your opponent lays out something big to handle it like wrath or disk, you can arcane the big thing, and lay out the winter orb to protect your weenies from further abuse. The 5cgreen differs most markedly from the 1.5's in the way the deck relies on creatures instead of land for mana production. This makes a lot of sense when you consider a typical 1.5 deck could have 4 real bolts, 4 chain lighnings, so poofta, there goes your mana in 1.5.

The Swedish "Gun" had 20 land (and 4 urza's baubles and 3 barbed sextants, which really gives you effective land of 23 or so), with a bunch of weenies and bolts. Notice that the Gun like the 5cg has 2 disenchants, but 2 armageddons instead of the 5cg's 1 armageddon.

Matt Place played the "Monkey May I?" at the 1.5 in World's. Monkey May I had 3 arcanes, 4 forces, 4 kird apes, 3 Erhnam Djinns, with Jayemdae Tomes plus mana crypts for card drawing, providing for a quick beatdown by the ape protected by counterspells, plus the big fattie erhnam. The kird ape corresponds to the fast greenies and the 3 erhnam's correspond to the 3 Maro's.

Overall, the 5cg is one of the more interesting decks in quite a while.

As for its future, it is very difficult to predict anything because on July 1st, type 2 is going to have a massive shakeup when ice age returns and weatherlight enters the mix. I'll have to wait and see if 5cg is one of the surviving deck types once July rolls around.
Finally, Cathy Nicoloff had these comments on the 5CG deck in the July-September '97 environment:

As for the deck, all I'd really want to say is why it worked. Red/Black decks are a perfect foil for it and the real reason g5c worked was because everyone was metagaming against blue. For some reason, this excluded R/B decks, which paved the way for the ultimate blue hoser (the g5c deck).

In the current environment, there's so much black I can't imagine why people would want to play it. The deck changes would probably involve Gemstone Mines, possibly a couple more land, Swords to Plowshares, and I've seen some interesting variants with Wall of Roots. I haven't tried that out, though. Swords to Plowshares being in the environment is a big deal for the five color green, simply because first turn Birds are more vulnerable (whereas you could originally have until turn 2 to get set up and rolling). Contagion is too devastating against this deck and, like I said, there's so much black in the environment it's probably too risky to attempt to play it. Five color green succeeded when the environment was control-based, with slow Thawing Glacier decks and big blue flyers. It doesn't succeed in very fast environments, with speed black weenie, four-color black decks and tons of mono red.

I haven't played the deck since Regionals (I disassembled it the next day, somehow accurately guessing that it would never do that well again). I'm not qualified to comment on how it does in the current environment, except I played against a couple of them in the State Championships (I was playing 4 color black) and crushed them with COntagions and Incinerates and Nekrataals and Man O Wars. Fallen Askari is simply the bane of five color green.
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