Interview With a Winning Naya Shaman Player (David Campano)
August 22, 2010 | Posted by Dee
As I said in my previous post about Naya Shaman, I emailed my friend, David Campano, for some tech on the deck. He’s been playing it a lot on Magic Online and has been winning a good percentage of his matches.
He emailed me back some great information (thanks, David!).
The questions in bold are the ones I sent him. The rest of the article is David’s replies. Enjoy 
1. When you first started playing the deck on Magic Online, your results weren’t so great. But then you started to win a lot. What do you think caused the poor start and what turned your record around?
I initially did really terrible with Naya Shaman. My record after five matches was 1-4, which was disheartening considering I had just dropped close to $200 on the deck. I went to sleep that night feeling like I had flushed my hard earned money down the drain. But the next day things changed.
My draws got better, things began to “click,” and I started to learn how to play the deck inside and out. I also started to get a feel for some of the deck’s good and bad match-ups and how to play in each one.
Naya Shaman is, at its core, an aggro deck. However, thanks to Fauna Shaman you can easily switch to a pseudo control deck and lock the game down with Knight of the Reliquary and bombs like Sun Titan and Realm Razer. Knowing when to play what and what to fetch off of Shaman is key in every single matchup. I’ll run down some of the matchups a bit later on.
I think overall my initial losing streak was caused by the combination of misplays and frustration on my part, as well as some unfortunate draws. But ever since that first losing streak, I’ve been winning 75-80% of my games, which definitely shows the power this deck has.
2. What’s the best way to beat Valakut (sideboarding and playskill)?
Valakut is by far Naya Shaman’s worst match-up. Naya runs very few removal spells, and can’t interact with Valakut until it’s too late. Once a Primeval Titan or Avenger of Zendikar hits the table, Naya’s chances of winning drop below 10%.
Due to the fact that Valakut is a huge chunk of the MTGO metagame, I’ve spent a lot of time playing this match-up. My friend/Twitter companion, Smi77y (he runs the Magic site 60cards.com), also plays Naya Shaman, so he and I spent close to a week learning the Valakut match-up and the best ways to beat it.
Game 1 is literally a dice roll. Naya’s only chance in this game to race Valakut’s combo. Generally Valakut can produce a Primeval Titan by Turn 4-5, which means Naya only has 4-5 turns to deal 20 damage. This may seem difficult, but it’s definitely not impossible. My first tip is mulligan aggressively. Keeping a slow hand will almost guarantee a loss. A turn 1 Bird/Hierarch is ideal, as getting Knight of the Reliquary out on turn 2 is a huge advantage both power wise and mana wise.
Your next goal is to start dealing as much damage as possible. If you stick a Fauna Shaman, start grabbing Vengevines and Bloodbraid Elfs right away. Alternatively you can attempt to ramp into a Turn 3-4 Realm Razor, to which Valakut has no answer to if all they’ve done is play ramp spells. Other than that, you just have to get lucky Game 1.
Post SB, however, things get better for Naya. My list runs 2 Leyline of Sanctity which make things very difficult for Valakut. Also, the newest piece of tech I’ve discovered is Silence. My buddy Smi77y and I were chatting on MTGO between rounds of a Daily Event when I asked him how he felt about Silence against Valakut. He immediately realized that I had just stumbled across some of the best tech ever.
As I stated earlier, Naya has to kill Valakut before they drop Primeval Titan or Avenger of Zendikar. Where Silence comes into the picture is on that crucial turn where Valakut has six mana available to use. During Valakut’s upkeep, Naya casts Silence, which is essentially a one mana Time Walk. This gives Naya one extra turn to push through enough damage to win the game. It may sound underwhelming, but I’ve played the match-up enough times to know that one extra turn makes all the difference.
3. What does your current list look like?
My current list of Naya Shaman (in real life) looks like this:
| Naya Shaman | |||||||||||
Creatures (31)
Spells (5) | Lands (24)
Sideboard (15) |
| |||||||||
A few notes about this list:
I recently took this exact list to my local FNM and won with an overall record of 6-1-1. You might notice that Silence, the card I advocated earlier, is absent from this list. The reason I decided not to run Silence in this version is strictly a meta-call. Only 1 player at my local gaming store plays Valakut, so I felt it wasn’t worth using 2-3 SB slots for a match-up I might not face. On Magic Online my list is slightly different (again, for metagame reasons). The changes are:
Maindeck: -2 Lotus Cobra, +2 Nest Invader (budget reasons)
Sideboard: -2 Ajani Vengeant, -1 Qasali Pridemage, +3 Silence (I don’t own Ajani on MTGO, and Pyromancer Ascension isn’t very popular, so cutting a Pridemage is fine)
These numbers aren’t final, as I’m always adjusting things as the metagame adjusts, but for now this list is the list I’d sleeve up for a tournament tomorrow.
Another thing I want to mention, Whispersilk Cloak is insanely good. I had so many people laugh at me as I’d reveal Cloak off of Stoneforge, but their laughter quickly went away after I began attacking through all their blockers with Knight of the Reliquary and Vengevine. Cloak also protects Fauna Shaman to ensure she will live turn after turn so you can continually fetch and get an advantage over your opponent. Trust me on this one, Cloak is the real deal.
4. What are the favorable matchups? 50/50 matchups? unfavorable ones?
Other than Valakut, Naya doesn’t really have a bad match-up. The deck is able to transform so well that most decks can’t keep up.
Against aggro decks like RDW, Bant, and Jund, your goal is to keep pace with them, trade blows, and eventually let the absurd amount of card advantage pull you ahead. I’d say about half the time you want to play aggro versus those decks whereas the other half you want to play more controlling. It really depends on your draws as well as your opponents draws.
If they hit hard early, you want to sit back on your creatures until you gain the advantage whereas if you come out of the gates quickly, you want to do everything you can to force as much damage through as possible. It’s really hard to say which method is the best in these match-ups, it really just comes down to how you board and how your draws go. Knowing when to play what is something pretty hard to explain that you start to learn after playing the deck for many hours.
Control, on the other hand, is much easier to fight. Your one and only goal in this matchup is to kill them as fast as possible. Many UW Control lists nowadays are running Sun Titan as their win condition. Similar to Primeval Titan in Valakut, Naya has few ways to deal with this card, so you simply have to force as much damage through as possible before it’s too late.
Keeping a slow hand in this matchup will almost always result in a loss. Also, Vengevine is key. It makes Day of Judgment a very risky play because it leaves the board wide open to an assault of Vengevines that have been freshly recurred from the graveyard thanks to a Bloodbraid Elf.
Lastly, the combo match-ups are interesting. Currently the two combo decks in Standard are Pyromancer Ascension and Polymorph. I’ve only played these matchups a few times, but I’ve played them enough to know how to win.
Against Polymorph, game 1 you have to race them. It’s as simple as that. Game 2, however, your goal is to use Sparkmage/Collar to destroy all their Polymorph targets as well as their Emrakul if it does happen to hit the board. You also have Oblivion Ring to deal with Emrakul if things get out of hand.
In the Pyromancer Ascension match-up, your number 1 goal is to interrupt their combo in any way. Currently Naya has 4 ways to do this. You can Qasali Pridemage the Ascension, O-Ring the Ascension, Bojuka Bog their graveyard, or protect yourself with Leyline of Sanctity, forcing them to deal with it before they can deal with you.
Pyromancer Ascension is such a fragile deck that one or two interruptions is all it takes to throw them off completely and win you the game.
5. What made you switch from Pyromancer Ascension to Naya Shaman?
I had just started to get back into Magic Online and with the help of my buddy on Twitter, I was able to get a solid Pyromancer Ascension list. I began entering into Daily Events but my results were less than desirable.
Pyromancer Ascension is a very powerful deck, but it is also very fragile. The entire deck revolves around activating Ascension. This means two things: (1) getting Ascension active will almost always win you the game and (2) not finding Ascension or not being able to activate it means you have a very small chance of winning.
It was this inconsistency that led me to choose to build Naya Shaman. I had heard good things about the deck and it seemed absurdly powerful, so I decided to ditch my Ascension deck in favor of Naya Shaman, and I’m sure glad I did. (Note, I’m not saying Pyromancer Ascension is a bad deck, I just felt it was too inconsistent when I would play it.)
One last thing, I suggest all Magic players reading this to get a Twitter account. You may not be huge into social networking, but Twitter has become a haven for Magic players. All the latest tech and deck ideas are discussed as soon as they happen, and you also meet a large group of players from around the world, all who share a love for Magic and have some interesting conversations.
If you do decide to get on Twitter, you can follow me at @dcampa93. I’ll gladly answer any further questions anyone may have about Naya Shaman, or Magic in general.
If you need to contact me, Twitter is your best bet, but you can also talk to Dee, and I’m sure he’ll relay the question to me so I can answer it. Thanks for reading!
[From Dee: Also, you can leave your questions in the comment section below and I'll relay them to David.]
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