I’m back this week to report on the outcome of Level With Me, an article I wrote last week discussing the process of building a deck around Leveler. I must say that I had a blast building, testing, and writing about this deck. Thanks to Basic Land, MaverickGTG, Shivan Bird and DaSpatula for all their tremendous help in making the deck and the article much better than it would have been otherwise.

Level With Me, Version 1.0

Level With Me.dec is quirky despite its seemingly straightforward build. It has a plan (putting Leveler in play while Pandemonium is on the board, then attacking) and it plays with a strategy to specifically put that plan into action. I’m afraid that it is straightforward to a fault. Besides being a true nail biter in quite a few of the games, the deck had some real spunk that made it truly enjoyable. Plus, I’ve never really played with cards like Words of Wilding or Leveler. To play with these “new” cards (well, new to me), was a fresh change of pace.

How did it fare?

Here are the first ten games I played:

(Author's note: I could easily identify the theme of most of the decks my opponents played with. In the following game descriptions, I attempt to summarize each deck based on its color and win condition(s). For example, "UG" would be a "blue green" build with various creatures and spells. "GRb beats," then, would refer to a fast creature deck, typically called "beats," with its primary colors being green and red while running a splash of blue. Each opponent's name and deck have been printed with permission.)

Lost to Nochance30, playing UG
Not sure what his deck was about. He pulled out Keiga, the Tide Star and put his own Lightning Greaves on it to deal 10 in one turn. On the following turn, he attacked then Cloned his own Keiga for the win. I had Words of Wilding on the table with Leveler in hand and decided to skip the draw long enough to get him in killing range. That may have been a bad strategy. I would have won if I could have lived through that turn.

Record 0 – 1

Lost to artyfax, playing GRb beats
He got out some quick creatures and started laying the beats. After I played my Pandemonium he dropped a Brawn followed by two Rift Bolts. I had Leveler in hand with Words of Wilding on the table and was looking to win on the following turn.

Record 0 – 2

Won against halinkies, playing mono U
halinkies pulled out two quick Kraken’s Eyes, which worried me. I knew with his gaining life, my ability to kill him after 10 directly and then 10 through attacking would be difficult. Also, I saw him cast two counterspells: Rewind and Memory Lapse. I pulled off a Harmonize, then cast an Eternal Witness targeting the Harmonize for a total of 6 cards. That really helped my situation. He threw down a Mahamoti Djinn whilst Pandemonium was on the table and wrecked me. Luckily, I had two Essence Wardens with two Lightning Greaves. After getting Memory Lapsed, I baited a counter with my Viridian Zealot before playing the Leveler a second time. I’m not sure why he countered the Zealot, maybe he had something in his hand he wanted to protect in the future, but I dropped the Leveler then equipped it to attack for the win.

Record 1 – 2

Lost to Sleepy Knight, play UB disruption
This was another very close game. I pulled out 2 Pandemoniums and, after a Harmonize, drew a Leveler. He countered the Leveler – no worries, I had an Eternal Witness in hand. On his turn he attacked then cast a Skeletal Vampire, which dealt a combined damage of 16 with both Pandemoniums on the board. Ouch. Would have helped to have an Essence Warden out.

Record 1 – 3

Lost to mdbutphy, playing Gr Beats featuring Nacatl War-Pride
This one wasn’t close at all. He brought out some quick Stalking Tigers and would have probably overwhelmed me without the assistance of his Nacatl War Pride. He had some well-placed Giant Growths that quickly reduced my life total.

Record 1 – 4

Won against Maelzeloth, playing UG Enchantress-Combo
As soon as he played Enchantress’s Presence with Dawn’s Reflection and Priveleged Position on the board, I knew I had to act fast. I used my Viridian Zealot to knock of the Priveleged Position first, then brought him back with a Witness to destroy the Presence. Once the Presence was gone and his hand was empty, I took the following two turns to lay down a Pandemonium and then invite Leveler to the party.

Record 2 – 4

Lost to Maelzeloth, playing MBC
Maelzeloth was looking for the rematch and I certainly wasn’t going to refuse him. He whipped out a unique Mono Black Control build. He slapped down an early Seizan, Perverter of Truth and followed it with a Promise of Power demon token. I was able to stave off the Seizan attacks and meanwhile dropped Words of Wilding followed by Leveler (without Pandemonium). I felt that I had a great position with 3 Essence Wardens on the board and I hoped to be able to overwhelm him consistent attacks from Leveler. With my library gone but the Words of Wilding safely on the table, I passed the turn. He proceeded to cast and then activate Oblivion Stone... At least it was worth a few laughs. With my empty library in plain sight, he typed “gg” and passed the turn. I would have been scooping but Leveler already scooped for me.

Record 2 – 5

Lost to Coexistence, playing GW Slide
Many thanks to Coexistence for sticking around while I got my internet connection back online. I thought I had won the game on turn 6 with a Leveler in hand and two Pandemoniums on the board. I played my second Pandemonium and passed the turn with every intention of finishing the game on the next, only to have him cast Akroma’s Vengeance (much to my chagrin). I tried to recover but it was slow work. I drew 4 straight lands before finally pulling a Harmonize. That sped things up a bit but his Krosan Tusker was giving me a fit. The real beast of his deck was his combination of Life from the Loam with Secluded Steppe and Tranquil Thicket – I’m convinced he was able to win the game from the card advantage generated from that ghastly machine. I managed to eliminate his Slide using my Zealot, then played a Pandemonium followed by everyone’s favorite 10/10 juggernaut. I plopped a Words of Wilding down and passed the turn but his saproling tokens (from Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree) overwhelmed me.

Record 2 – 6

Won against Mullet the Great, playing Zombies
I thought his Mesmeric Fiend and Nantuko Husk were going to wreck my combo, but the entire game we only saw one Fiend (which was used to remove an Eternal Witness from my hand). His Zombies were fast and strong. I was able to get 3 Essence Wardens on the board, which kept me alive long enough to play Lightning Greaves followed by Pandemonium followed by Leveler for the win.

Record 3 – 6

Lost to Cheapredwine, playing The Deck
He had an impressive array of Ravnica block duals that were brought into play using Onslaught fetch lands. His creatures consisted of a Meddling Mage (calling Eternal Witness) and a Mystic Snake (which countered my Harmonize, and two Loxodon Hierarchs. Needless to say, my Sakura-Trible Elder and Essence Warden were no match.

Overall record (first ten games) 3 – 7

Pleasantly Surprised

I’ll say again that I was pleased with how the deck worked. From the beginning, I knew I wouldn’t be able to create a deck that would be able to compete on a serious level. Winning only three out of ten is bad, however, the idea of losing that often is much more bearable knowing that I played against some really strong decks and enjoyed some really close games.

In general, I expected to lose every game against a legitimate control deck because as soon as Leveler placed his fat self on the stack, I assumed he’d get countered. Thus, you can imagine my surprise when I pulled out a win against a mono-blue deck running counterspells. I knew board clearing effects, Akroma’s Vengeance in particular, would give me serious problems – and they did. I thought decks that gained life would give me trouble when, in reality, it never seemed to matter as the deck was capable of dealing loads of damage. I knew spot removal would be tiresome – and it was. By spot removal I mean spells that directly targeted and eliminated my Pandemonium or another piece of my fragile combo. In each case that this happened, I was able to bring the missing piece back from the grave via Eternal Witness (or just find another one, usually through drawing with Harmonize). The problem with that route is that it required mana and time, neither or which were very copious.

I played several more games than just those ten. Putting the deck through its paces was necessary, in my opinion, to finding out what could be removed and what needed to be added. Most importantly, I had to figure out how to most effectively abuse Leveler’s synergy with Pandemonium, as that seemed to be the key to making the deck work. Attacking played a critical role in each game I won. In two of those games, it was an equipped Leveler who secured the win. I found that it was often pretty easy to eliminate my opponent’s creatures through Pandemonium. And in most cases, my opponents would swing with their entire team, so to speak. If this onslaught didn’t kill me (which it usually did), the path was made clear for an equipped Leveler to take home the surprise victory.

I think the best way to approach making changes to the deck is to break it down card by card, analyzing whether or not each card adequately performed its duties.

Know Your Role

Essence Warden Probably the clutch card of the deck. Not only was it a first turn drop, it kept the deck alive in crucial situations. The only way we could get away with not having to run four copies would be to significantly speed up the deck. Verdict: IN Eternal Witness Vital to the strength of the deck. When the combo was disrupted, it was there to save the day. I was able to gain life in two ways: first, due to Essence Warden being on the board, second, because Eternal Witness was used to block rather large opposing creatures. Verdict: IN Harmonize This is a tough one. On one hand, I could argue that the card drawing it produced was necessary for finding the cards needed to win. On the other hand, I could just as easily argue that Harmonize is terribly slow. It required an entire turn to cast, a turn that could have been devoted to playing Pandemonium. I would often return it via Eternal Witness in order to be cast again. I think this alone exposes the deck’s desperate need to generate cards. In order to be more consistent, I believe I need to find a better way to draw cards – not an easy task for a red/green deck. Verdict: OUT

Lightning Greaves

I want this card every single game!!!

It was necessary to keep my Essence Wardens alive and allowed Leveler to attack the turn he came into play.  This spelled victory on a couple of occasions.  Unless we find another way of giving Leveler haste, I think we should run four copies of this card.  
Verdict: IN +1
Reito Lantern

Utterly useless; I never once used this card in all the games that I played. I either had Words of Wilding in play or was simply unable to activate and use its ability because of its surprisingly heavy mana investment. I never needed the card and I don’t think we need to worry about replacing it in any way.

Verdict: OUT
Sakura-Tribe Elder

He’s your friend, he’s my friend – everyone loves him! Everyone except Leveler, for some reason. As nicely as he seemed to fit the deck, more often than not he was just another card. I would chump block and gain life on occasion, but for the most part I just didn’t find him being very useful.

Verdict: OUT

Viridian Zealot

This guy saved the game on a couple of occasions in which I needed to disrupt an artifact or enchantment before proceeding. At, 1G and GG it is an expensive route to take in the case of an immediate need for artifact/enchantment removal. He was useful in killing a few smaller creatures and even dealing some damage when assisted by Lightning Greaves.

Verdict: IN
Words of Wilding

I never really was able to make use of the bonus synergy with this and Pandemonium. I always wanted a deck with Pandemoniums and bears in some fashion, and deck I could fondly refer to as “Pande-bear.” I almost always lost before I was able to get Words of Wilding going. It is still such a viable way to play Leveler and live that I hesitate to remove it. Maybe there’s a better option out there…

Verdict: OUT

As far as mana, there’s not much to be changed. Running 24 lands seemed to be just right. I never once had a problem not being able to find a Mountain and the (Wooded Foothill)s were excellent at thinning the deck out a little bit. The one life I had to pay to activate it never seemed to come back to haunt me.

Here's Where We Stand

How do we solve these two problems? First, we have to find a better way to draw cards and get our combo online. In this case, card drawing isn’t necessarily our focus as much as card selection. When I talk about card selection, I mean the ability to consistently peel off cards from the top of the library while only keeping the necessary cards.

What Would Daniel Do?

In 2003, Daniel Zink won the World Championships with a deck people simply referred to as “Wake.”

I missed another mechanic when I was initially brainstorming: dredge. However, it doesn’t really work out like I wanted it to. I thought if I had a card with dredge in my graveyard before casting Leveler, I would be able to just return that card using its dredge ability and concordantly keep myself alive. Unfortunately, I didn’t fully understand the ruling on dredge. “Dredge will not save you from an empty library. If you try to replace a draw with a dredge that fails, the "if you don't" clause forces a draw anyway. Repeating this process is a loop, but not a mandatory one, so you'll eventually have to choose not to try and dredge. [CR 421.2]” But let’s not give up on dredge so quickly. While it may not keep us alive on an empty stomach, it could serve as a way to gain serious card advantage. In the current extended metagame, Dredge decks are a real force (especially with the likelihood of a kill on turn two). Besides being incredibly fast, one of the reasons I think the Dredge decks are having so much success is their ability to amass card advantage through utilizing graveyard effects. Instead of drawing one card, you get a graveyard full of options to choose from. I think we can use this tactic in Level With Me.dec on a much smaller scale. Through running graveyard manipulators like Eternal Witness, we could theoretically pitch a bunch of cards to the grave through a dredge effect and return them on one of the following turns. Concerning dredge, there are a whopping five green spells with that ability, and only one of them can be played easily and dredge-returned: Life from the Loam. Golgari Brownscale has potential in that he’s a 2/3 body that can gain life for us in a pinch. The problem I see with Golgari Brownscale is that we have no easy way to send him to the graveyard so that we can abuse the dredge ability. Life from the Loam can be cast for a cheap 1G, even if there are no targets for it in the graveyard. Right now, the only potential targets would be Wooded Foothills. If we were to run the cycling lands from Onslaught (Forgotten Cave and Tranquil Thicket), we would have a way to generate a little bit of card selection. Combined with Life from the Loam, those lands could be very effective at finding useful cards or missing combo pieces.

Before we put up another deck list, I want to address the “quick creatures” problem I consistently encountered during play testing. I had originally thought that the Sakura-Tribe Elders and Eternal Witnesses would suffice at keeping opposing creatures at bay. Those eight cards (four copies of each) were rarely enough to hold off attacking creatures. Worse still, when they died they didn’t take anyone with them. I was never able to trade my creature for one of my opponents. I was always on the losing end of that race and I felt like I was constantly being beat by creatures before I could get my combo working. I thought about running Moment’s Peace, but that only puts things off for a turn or two. It doesn’t really solve the threat. I would run Pyroclasm but most of the creatures that were finishing me off had toughnesses greater than two.

Having gone through all that, the deck now looks like this:

Level With Me, v2.0

Of the first ten games I played, I won eight. All but one of those wins happened by turn seven; some games were done earlier than that. The deck performs remarkably well. The dredge function is simply amazing. In a few of the games, I did not have to look very hard in order to find all the pieces of the combo. Most games, however, required quite a bit of land cycling and dredging before coming across the needed elements. Lightning Greaves proved to be especially useful as it really geared up Leveler to swing for the kill. In four games I aimed a Beacon of Destruction at my opponent’s dome for the win.

The deck feels much different with the added cycling and dredge. It requires a bit more thinking and planning. Knowing when to lay a Tranquil Thicket versus when to cycle it is tough to figure out. On top of that, I learned that it wasn’t always a good time to dredge back Life from the Loam – sometimes it was better to leave it in the yard and press the action on the board. Version 2 is much more enjoyable in that the deck can respond to various threats and situations.

My two losses of the series came from getting out raced by creatures on the board and having my Beacon of Destruction get countered. In the first loss, I didn’t draw a Carven Caryatid to fend off the attacks of several quick, double strike creatures. By the time I got some sort of defense online it was too late as his fliers came in for the kill. In the second loss, my opponent had countered a number of my early spells. Thanks to Eternal Witness, I was able to continue playing those spells until they finally got through. On my turn, I cast Leveler, Pandemoniumed ten to the face, attacked into a blocker and passed the turn with my Beacon of Destruction in my hand. On his turn, he top decked a (Sensei’s Divining Top), which he used to sift for the Remand that countered my Beacon.

Those were the only threats the deck encountered, even after playing several more games against different decks. I’m very happy with the way things turned out. It has been a good experience play testing this deck from the ground up. It has been rewarding playing with the deck in its various stages and watching it go terrible to decent. It’s still far from being competitive, but for the sake of practicality, if I had to run a sideboard it would probably look something like this:

4x Dosan the Falling Leaf
4x Fury Charm
4x Pyroclasm
3x Tin Street Hooligan

After reading my article, Basic Land suggested using Endless Whispers. He suggested this even before Rob Rogers wrote his article on it. Luckily for me, no one mentioned our good buddy Leveler in the message boards so I feel that I can legitimately create a deck around that little combo and get away with it being somewhat “original”, whatever that term means. Here’s what I came up with:

Level With You.dec

The Edicts and Innocent Bloods are in to keep opposing creatures at bay while making efficient use of Endless Whispers. I put in the one Damnation (because that’s all I own) and the two Decrees for the same purpose. Diabolic Tutor and Night’s Whisper help to get both the enchantment and Leveler into the hand while Mind Stone and Lotus Bloom help put them in play. Mind Stone, of course, doubles as last ditch card drawing just in case you still can’t find what you’re looking for.

I found Level With You.dec to be faster and more efficient than the green/red counterpart this article series has been based on. I’m not sure if that should be funny or sad – maybe it’s a little of both. Regardless, the deck works surprisingly well and it gets some really funny comments from the other side of the table. Mostly comments of surprise, but I can’t deny that I was called a plethora of derogatory names for leveling my opponent on turn five or six. Rob Rogers wasn’t kidding when he said Endless Whispers “has a strong effect on the game environment.”

I hope you’ve had as much fun reading about my adventures with Leveler as I’ve had playing with it. I am eager to hear about any adventurous games you’ve come across or any ideas you have for making any of the decks better. I’d also love to see any ideas on different ways to abuse Leveler, especially involving different colors.

Until next time!