Hybrid mana is a contentious subject in EDH. People are usually of the opinion that the current rule isn't as fun as it could be, but I've also heard people talk about how restrictions breed creativity. The whole reason that color identity exists in the first place is to push people away from just playing the best cards. This is a hard partition. It exists to cut up the card pool and make things more interesting. This system works, but it does have a few faults. Hybrid mana just happens to be the most visible. I'm going to talk about the problem presented by Hybrid mana and my solution to it, but first I want to talk about why its important. Hybrid mana has been referred to by MaRo as being, "Not used in every set, but any set that needs it can have it." They are saying that Hybrid will crop up at any moment. In the set we just got, most of the marquee cards were hybrid. Not just two color hybrid, but three color Hybrid cards. These gold cards were made to be playable in two color decks as opposed to the two color Hybrids we had gotten in the past. They are going to keep exploring and doing more with Hybrid as time goes on. Magic is really all about the mana system and Hybrid is a novel way of trying different things with mana.
Now that I've established why Hybrid mana is important, lets state the problem with it. Hybrid mana is supposed to represent an OR state. (R/U) is Red OR Blue. The color identity rules currently treat it as an AND state. This is done, I think, for clarity and to keep the game as close to normal Magic rules as possible. In the expansion Eventide they had a cycle of Mimics that were Hybrid cards that had triggered abilities whenever you played a card that was both of its colors. A Riverfall Mimic, would trigger on casting another Riverfall Mimic. So even though the design goal of Hybrid was to make cards the were in the OR state, the game itself still treats them as an AND state. This is ok in normal Magic because there are no color identity rules and there is nothing stopping you from producing any color of mana. Going outside the box is cool, encouraged, and makes the game better as a whole since it comes with the risk of making your deck more unstable. However, we begin to see the problem emerge with the release of the most recent set. Mardu Hordechief is a great card that won't see any play in EDH because his cost is too restrictive. The same is true of virtually all of the Hybrid cards. The way that color identity works these cards can only be played in wedges. Since Commander is showing no signs of dropping off in popularity anytime soon, this means a few different things can happen. R&D shy away from putting Hybrid into places where it would be cool because Hybrid isn't fun for their EDH only players. This isn't likely, but they have begun paying attention to the format. The Primordial Cycle, the inclusion of more Legendary creatures, MaRo even talked about ensuring the cycle of wedge Commanders in FRF since it was unlikely that they'd get a chance to do more of them. The other possibility is that the rules committee just lets more and more Hybrid cards pile up without making any effort to include them. The number of Hybrid cards is relatively small right now, but that number is only going to grow. It will be a hassle to fix the rules, but in the end it will be worth it.
The easiest fix I can think of to solve the problem is to make this change to the Hybrid mana rules:
X.1 - A card with Hybrid mana is a legal card if removing one color from each of its Hybrid mana symbols causes it to match the color identity of the Commander.
Example: Removing the Red from the Hybrid mana symbol of Soulfire Grand Master would cause its color identity to fit into Gisela, Blade of Goldnight.
X.2 - A card with Hybrid mana symbols that has removed one of its colors due to color identity rules loses that color.
Example: A Nightveil Spector in a Thassa deck would not benefit from a Bad Moon since it would be a mono-blue card.
X.3 - A legendary creature with Hybrid mana can't be matched to a Commander and must use its whole color identity.
These changes make it pretty intuitive and keep the spirit of the current rules. The current outgrowth of the rules are a function of the rule where you can't generate mana of colors outside your Commander's color identity. It was found that this rule didn't go a good job of stopping things like reanimation or Sneak Attack from putting in large creatures outside of what we know now as color identity. Its why MaRo's suggestion of repealing color identity was poor since the non-mana rule doesn't stop everything. Hybrid mana is caught by this rule since you can generate mana to cast the card, but you can't include it since you would technically be breaking the flavor by including outside colors. The color purge would ensure that the cards were only of the color identity that they should be. There are bugbears. What happens when the card is stolen? Is it still a mono-white Debtor's Knell when its confiscated by a Blue/Black player? How do you track the identity of the card? I don't know. I would have to test it, but I don't want to see a number of awesome cards not get played because of rules.
The real problem is the implementation. Commander is played everywhere, including on MTGO. Changing a rule of this magnitude could be a problem since it would require re-coding the online system and disseminating the information of how the new rule works. The truth is though, that if the identity rule is going to change we should change it soon rather than later.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Deck Retrospective: Mimeoplasm Dredge
This is my entree for number three on the scale. This deck has been around since C11. It was originally Karador when he was spoiled. I had always loved the play pattern of Dredge and Karador lent himself to that process more than anything else at the time. When the full decklists were revealed, I quickly split that deck in two. I kept the incremental value creatures and used them with Ghave. I took the dredge cards and the graveyard interaction and ported them to The Mimeoplasm. Mimeo is perhaps my favorite deck. It's built entirely around the graveyard. The card that you Entomb almost every time is Life From The Loam. The list is here: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/mimeoplasm-09-01-14-1/.
The deck breaks down into a number of categories. First off we have the creatures, who break down into Targets, Size, and Utility.
Targets are the creatures you actively want to make Mimeo into. They have a variety of effects, but they are all very strong plays.
Prime Speaker Zegana - Capable of drawing your whole deck Putrefax - The easiest one shot in the deck Stormtide Leviathan - Moat Fish buys you crazy amounts of time and is capable of killing players Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon - Similar to Putrefax, Skittles hangs around, but costs more mana to kill in one turn. He is also resilient and has a low threshold Triskellion - Combined with Lord of Extinction or Multani, Trike can kill whole tables if large enough
The next category of creatures is the guys for size. These are huge dudes that give you the ability to make Mimeo a game ending monster.
Lord of Extinction Multani, Maro-Sorcerer Consuming Aberration
The next category I call utility, but honestly it could just be called 'The Rest". These are dudes that give you a variety of effects. Creatures are inherently more valuable than non-creatures due to the nature of the deck. When dredging constantly, creatures are what you have the easiest access to through your general.
Bane of Progress - Great for us since we run virtually no artifact mana Body Double - Mimeo Lite, can do cool things with persist creatures Deathrite Shaman - Lowish value, gives me some gy hate without nuking my yard Disciple of Bolas Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord - Important threat that can end games by eating Mimeo Hermit Druid - I run basics, there just isn't a much better way to fill the yard. Golgari Grave Troll Krosan Tusker - Replaces itself, gets a land, feeds Mimeo. Great card Lotleth Troll - Discard outlet that makes a decent target with Trample and Regen Prophet of Kruphix - Gives the deck the ability to make more use of its mana Phyrexian Delver - A creature reanimation spell Puppeteer Clique River Kelpie - Draws tons of cards. Lots of things in the deck trigger him
Satyr Wayfinder - Enabler that can block Stinkweed Imp
Sidisi, Brood Tyrant - Efficient enabler that gives bodied for sacrifice
Soul of Innistrad - Fine Milled or in play, draws three action cards. Snapcaster Mage - My way of accessing milled spells.
Tasigur, the Golden Fang Terastodan - Huge dude that doubles as triple disenchant.
Titania, Protector of Argoth - Provides bodies. Plays well with LFTL Varolz, the Scar Striped - In theory he gives me tons of giant growths Woodfall Primus - Persist + Disenchant = win. Wonder - Free flying for my whole team by doing what the deck wants to do anyway
There are plenty of big guys in the rest, but the point of the card is not the size of the creature, but rather what the creature does. There are a lot of interconnected pieces here. The Persist creatures are great on their own, but when in the presence of sac outlets, a general that can copy them and then return as something else and remove the counter, they become extremely powerful. Glen Elendra Archmage hasn't made it in since I don't often have free mana to leave up, but the card is on my radar. Titania has been great. Getting me ahead on mana and providing a steady stream of 5/3s. Tasigur is new, but he's been quite strong. I'm contemplating going for Gurmag Angler. The extra point of power does make a difference, and the extra card really doesn't. Tasigur's ability is decidedly meh with how many cards I have in my graveyard, but he becomes a real powerhouse when combined with Prophet of Kruphix. Cards on the block include Varloz, who is a good sac outlet but we don't have a lot of cheap creatures to scavenge. He is a decent Mimeo target since he regenerates, but no natural evasion is a bit of a problem.
Of course, the creatures are only half the story. The problem with non-creature spells is that we don't have a lot of good ways to recover them. I tried Eternal Witness and I would it quite slow at recovering these things. As such, non-creatures without flashback or some strong reason to be included have been cut. The remainder are the cream of the crop, and have also been divided into categories.
Setup: Crucible of Worlds Entomb Frantic Search Grisly Salvage Life from the Loam Mulch Sylvan Library Survival of the Fittest Unfulfilled Desires
Intuition
Thought Scour
Mental Note
Monastery Siege
Restore
Card Draw:
Deep Analysis
Greater Good
Treasure Cruise
Protection: Cabal Therapy Krosan Grip Mental Misstep Pact of Negation Stifle Mana: Mana Crypt Sol Ring
Other:
Berserk
Dread Return
Worm Harvest
As you can see, the fast majority of the non-creatures are there for the pre-dredge phase. Of particular note is Life From The Loam. Loam is one of the major cards in the deck's scheme. It is a go-between for dredge to cards with the cycling lands. It gives me mana early, fills my yard and lets me play a land every turn. Its important in a dredge deck like this one to play land every turn since I eschew artifact mana and play very few land search effects. Building my graveyard is of paramount importantence to ensure Mimeo is dangerous early and often. This is not intended to be blisteringly fast, its designed to be very hard to deal with. Most EDH groups have an unwritten rule not to play hardcore mana denial. No Armageddons, no taxing effects, and most if not all land hate is single target in nature. Mimeo exploits this weakness by only having lands and the graveyard matter. The protection spells are mostly to protect the graveyard. The vast majority of gy hate is Relic, or Bojuka Bog type effects that Stifle and Mental Misstep are great at protecting me from. Mental Misstep has the bonus of stopping turn one Sol Ring and Swords to Plowshares targeting Mimeo. With all this emphasis on the lands, lets have a look at them.
Land:40 Ancient Tomb Barren Moor Bayou Breeding Pool Bazaar of Baghdad Command tower Cavern of Souls Crystal Vein Centaur Garden Cephalid Coliseum Dakmor Salvage Dimir Aquaduct 2x Forest Golgari Rot Farm Hinterland Harbor Hall of the Bandit Lord Island Lonely Sandbar Misty Rainforest Mosswort Bridge Miren, the Moaning Well Overgrown tomb Polluted Delta Phyrexian Tower Rupture Spire
Simic Growth Chamber Sunken Ruins Swamp Temple of Deceit
Temple of Mystery
Temple of Malady Twilight Mire Tranquil Thicket Tropical Island Urborg Underground Sea Volrath's Stronghold Verdant Catacombs Watery Grave
This mana base is littered with cool effects, Hall of the Bandit Lord is unbelievably scary when it can produce a general damage lethal attack at any moment. Volrath's Stronghold lets me retrieve any creature if the game starts going long. The deck has a number of lands that trigger Titania beyond fetchlands. Bazaar is an all star, churning through the deck with incredible velocity. Bazaar is especially great in combination with Loam. Turning the lands that Loam returns into real cards. The bounce lands are really good at extending my land drops and resetting effects like Temples and Mosswort Bridge. Temples have been surprisingly good at helping to navigate whether to dredge or draw, and the deck is very color dense, the duel lands aspect of them helping to maintain cast-ability of my cards.
I hope you enjoyed this overview. My next experiment is likely to include Summer Bloom, Exploration, and Explore. These might help me not fall behind a table. With the increased power of non-creatures in the deck, including Eternal Witness again might be worthwhile.
Leave any questions in the comments,
Cheers!
The deck breaks down into a number of categories. First off we have the creatures, who break down into Targets, Size, and Utility.
Targets are the creatures you actively want to make Mimeo into. They have a variety of effects, but they are all very strong plays.
Prime Speaker Zegana - Capable of drawing your whole deck Putrefax - The easiest one shot in the deck Stormtide Leviathan - Moat Fish buys you crazy amounts of time and is capable of killing players Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon - Similar to Putrefax, Skittles hangs around, but costs more mana to kill in one turn. He is also resilient and has a low threshold Triskellion - Combined with Lord of Extinction or Multani, Trike can kill whole tables if large enough
The next category of creatures is the guys for size. These are huge dudes that give you the ability to make Mimeo a game ending monster.
Lord of Extinction Multani, Maro-Sorcerer Consuming Aberration
The next category I call utility, but honestly it could just be called 'The Rest". These are dudes that give you a variety of effects. Creatures are inherently more valuable than non-creatures due to the nature of the deck. When dredging constantly, creatures are what you have the easiest access to through your general.
Bane of Progress - Great for us since we run virtually no artifact mana Body Double - Mimeo Lite, can do cool things with persist creatures Deathrite Shaman - Lowish value, gives me some gy hate without nuking my yard Disciple of Bolas Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord - Important threat that can end games by eating Mimeo Hermit Druid - I run basics, there just isn't a much better way to fill the yard. Golgari Grave Troll Krosan Tusker - Replaces itself, gets a land, feeds Mimeo. Great card Lotleth Troll - Discard outlet that makes a decent target with Trample and Regen Prophet of Kruphix - Gives the deck the ability to make more use of its mana Phyrexian Delver - A creature reanimation spell Puppeteer Clique River Kelpie - Draws tons of cards. Lots of things in the deck trigger him
Satyr Wayfinder - Enabler that can block Stinkweed Imp
Sidisi, Brood Tyrant - Efficient enabler that gives bodied for sacrifice
Soul of Innistrad - Fine Milled or in play, draws three action cards. Snapcaster Mage - My way of accessing milled spells.
Tasigur, the Golden Fang Terastodan - Huge dude that doubles as triple disenchant.
Titania, Protector of Argoth - Provides bodies. Plays well with LFTL Varolz, the Scar Striped - In theory he gives me tons of giant growths Woodfall Primus - Persist + Disenchant = win. Wonder - Free flying for my whole team by doing what the deck wants to do anyway
There are plenty of big guys in the rest, but the point of the card is not the size of the creature, but rather what the creature does. There are a lot of interconnected pieces here. The Persist creatures are great on their own, but when in the presence of sac outlets, a general that can copy them and then return as something else and remove the counter, they become extremely powerful. Glen Elendra Archmage hasn't made it in since I don't often have free mana to leave up, but the card is on my radar. Titania has been great. Getting me ahead on mana and providing a steady stream of 5/3s. Tasigur is new, but he's been quite strong. I'm contemplating going for Gurmag Angler. The extra point of power does make a difference, and the extra card really doesn't. Tasigur's ability is decidedly meh with how many cards I have in my graveyard, but he becomes a real powerhouse when combined with Prophet of Kruphix. Cards on the block include Varloz, who is a good sac outlet but we don't have a lot of cheap creatures to scavenge. He is a decent Mimeo target since he regenerates, but no natural evasion is a bit of a problem.
Of course, the creatures are only half the story. The problem with non-creature spells is that we don't have a lot of good ways to recover them. I tried Eternal Witness and I would it quite slow at recovering these things. As such, non-creatures without flashback or some strong reason to be included have been cut. The remainder are the cream of the crop, and have also been divided into categories.
Setup: Crucible of Worlds Entomb Frantic Search Grisly Salvage Life from the Loam Mulch Sylvan Library Survival of the Fittest Unfulfilled Desires
Intuition
Thought Scour
Mental Note
Monastery Siege
Restore
Card Draw:
Deep Analysis
Greater Good
Treasure Cruise
Protection: Cabal Therapy Krosan Grip Mental Misstep Pact of Negation Stifle Mana: Mana Crypt Sol Ring
Other:
Berserk
Dread Return
Worm Harvest
As you can see, the fast majority of the non-creatures are there for the pre-dredge phase. Of particular note is Life From The Loam. Loam is one of the major cards in the deck's scheme. It is a go-between for dredge to cards with the cycling lands. It gives me mana early, fills my yard and lets me play a land every turn. Its important in a dredge deck like this one to play land every turn since I eschew artifact mana and play very few land search effects. Building my graveyard is of paramount importantence to ensure Mimeo is dangerous early and often. This is not intended to be blisteringly fast, its designed to be very hard to deal with. Most EDH groups have an unwritten rule not to play hardcore mana denial. No Armageddons, no taxing effects, and most if not all land hate is single target in nature. Mimeo exploits this weakness by only having lands and the graveyard matter. The protection spells are mostly to protect the graveyard. The vast majority of gy hate is Relic, or Bojuka Bog type effects that Stifle and Mental Misstep are great at protecting me from. Mental Misstep has the bonus of stopping turn one Sol Ring and Swords to Plowshares targeting Mimeo. With all this emphasis on the lands, lets have a look at them.
Land:40 Ancient Tomb Barren Moor Bayou Breeding Pool Bazaar of Baghdad Command tower Cavern of Souls Crystal Vein Centaur Garden Cephalid Coliseum Dakmor Salvage Dimir Aquaduct 2x Forest Golgari Rot Farm Hinterland Harbor Hall of the Bandit Lord Island Lonely Sandbar Misty Rainforest Mosswort Bridge Miren, the Moaning Well Overgrown tomb Polluted Delta Phyrexian Tower Rupture Spire
Simic Growth Chamber Sunken Ruins Swamp Temple of Deceit
Temple of Mystery
Temple of Malady Twilight Mire Tranquil Thicket Tropical Island Urborg Underground Sea Volrath's Stronghold Verdant Catacombs Watery Grave
This mana base is littered with cool effects, Hall of the Bandit Lord is unbelievably scary when it can produce a general damage lethal attack at any moment. Volrath's Stronghold lets me retrieve any creature if the game starts going long. The deck has a number of lands that trigger Titania beyond fetchlands. Bazaar is an all star, churning through the deck with incredible velocity. Bazaar is especially great in combination with Loam. Turning the lands that Loam returns into real cards. The bounce lands are really good at extending my land drops and resetting effects like Temples and Mosswort Bridge. Temples have been surprisingly good at helping to navigate whether to dredge or draw, and the deck is very color dense, the duel lands aspect of them helping to maintain cast-ability of my cards.
I hope you enjoyed this overview. My next experiment is likely to include Summer Bloom, Exploration, and Explore. These might help me not fall behind a table. With the increased power of non-creatures in the deck, including Eternal Witness again might be worthwhile.
Leave any questions in the comments,
Cheers!
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Partitions are Hard
A couple weeks ago Day9 was talking about partitions on stream in relation to Magic and Hearthstone. I just wanted to express my thoughts on the matter. This relates very closely to the earlier work I did on Inclusive versus Exclusive games. Essentially, Day9 was saying how it was interesting that effects in Hearthstone are not partitioned between classes. Multiple classes have weapons, have access to power/toughness boosts, etc. In Magic, effects are absolutely partitioned. Red is the only color with burn, Blue is the only color with counterspell, etc. I know you can go back far enough to have this not be true, but in the era of modern design they just don't make cards like Pyroblast anymore. There are some interesting aspects here that I don't think were explored in the conversation that spawned. The first is that while effects are more loosely distributed in Hearthstone, what each class has access to is absolute. There is no way to cast a Warlock spell as a Paladin. Its just impossible. In Magic, you lean on the mana system. You can make a Blue/Red deck if you want access to both burn spells and counterspells. So in Magic you can't proliferate effects since one of the main balancing points of the game is resource management and distribution. You have to build your deck in such a way to support the cards you want to play. Its like the difference between buying books in a bookstore or buying them online. When you walk into a bookstore you have to buy from what they have, but things are a bit cheaper overall. When you buy online your options go from the relatively small number of books a bookstore has to essentially anything you want, but its a bit more expensive in both money and time so you have to plan accordingly. In much the same way, if they don't print cards in Paladin to kill large creatures, then you just can't kill large creatures. If they don't print any cards in Green to kill creatures, then you have the option of making your deck a little more unstable to add in Black cards to do that job for you. Hearthstone tries to overcome this problem by having neutral cards, which leads me to my next point. Lets say for the sake of experiment that an expansion for both games is coming out and its 100 cards apiece. The Magic expansion would likely break down into 10 artifacts and 18 cards of each color. Multicolor cards screw with this a little, but not a lot since the balance of mana symbols would still be around this ratio. A Hearthstone expansion has to make a number of cards for each class, and neutral monsters. If you made 10 cards for each class, then you would only make 10 Neutral cards and you would be cutting out the game's mechanism for accessing effects that your class normally can't get. Therefore, you have to make many fewer class cards than you do neutral cards. So a lot of the power of a new release of Hearthstone is going to be in the neutral cards. Take the most recent release of GvG. Playing with that expansion felt like everyone was playing mechs, and the class you chose was just about the cards you were supporting your mechs with. That's the problem with having so few class cards in the system. They essentially become just flavoring the linear strategy of the day. Magic had a similar problem on the first trip to Mirrodin with affinity. Affinity was mostly colorless cards that you flavored with a few chosen colored cards that you wanted. Unlike Affinity, this pattern of play is not going to be limited to a single expansion for Hearthstone since the inherent need to have so many neutral cards and support so many classes dilutes the card pool, letting linear neutral decks run away with the meta-game every time there's a new release.
TLDR: Partitioning classes leads to situations where the waters are very muddy and strong linear strategies overcome the much smaller pool of class cards. Partitioning effects and then using a resource system ensures that the increased power of your deck comes at the cost of consistency.
TLDR: Partitioning classes leads to situations where the waters are very muddy and strong linear strategies overcome the much smaller pool of class cards. Partitioning effects and then using a resource system ensures that the increased power of your deck comes at the cost of consistency.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Build of the Week: Gisa's Ghoulish Good Times
This week we're going to do something a bit more themed than my previous decks. We are going to build mono-black zombie tribal. There are actually a few generals that line up with zombie tribal, and not all of them are mono-black! I almost made this a Sedris deck, but he's going to show up in the deck retrospective series and kind of wants a different play style. I settled on Gisa since she reinforces the main two things that zombies want thematically, swarm style attacks and sacrificial fodder. Zombies also have a strong tie with the graveyard and coming back over and over again.
Lets start with all the zombies worth playing:
Self recursive dudes:
Value:
Coffin Queen
Corpse Connoisseur
Festering Goblin
Fleshbag Marauder
Gempalm Polluter
Grave Defiler
Graveborn Muse
Gravespawn Sovereign
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Khabal Ghoul
Lifebane Zombie
Liliana's Reaver
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
Necromancer's Assistant
Noxious Ghoul
Phyrexian Delver
Skin Render
Twisted Abomination
Undead Gladiator
Vengeful Dead
Viscera Dragger
Withered Wretch
Lords:
Cemetery Reaper
Death Baron
Lord of the Undead
Soulless One
Undead Warchief
Zombie Master
Zombie Trailblazer
That's 40 cards! I never though zombies would be this plentiful. We could look at non-zombies...but for flavor reasons we are only putting zombies in the deck. I'm going to cull a few right off the bat because 40 creatures plus 37 lands doesn't leave us much room for cool support cards.
Cut:
Gnawing Zombie
Putrid Imp
Festering Goblin
Graveborn Muse - This card is great, but its really likely that we will manage to kill ourselves.
Skinrender
That gives us some about 30 cards to fill in. We definitely want to stick with what makes our deck cool, so lets put in the zombie themed cards of note:
Wake the Dead
Dread Return
Living Death
Army of the Damned
Necromantic Selection
Endless Ranks of the Dead
Grave Pact
Necropotence
Tombstone Stairwell
Necromancy
Phyrexian Reclamation
Entomb
Patriarch's Bidding
Zombify
Oversold Cemetery
Palace Siege
Call to the Grave
Zombie Apocalypse
These cards are all about the grave. Tombstone Stairwell in particular is really cool as it provides us with just so many zombie bodies for effects like Noxious Ghoul or Kabal Ghoul. The Palace Siege pulls double duty as both another Oversold Cemetery and as a way to drain people for the health we will undoubtably be spending on our various effects. We don't need to worry about pumping up our devotion too much as a mono-black deck, and by golly do we get so much devotion out of our permanents.
We only have a few slots left to play with now, but we will likely end up with more. There are just too many support cards that we want. Some more zombies are going to get the axe, but since we started with a high count we will only be dropping to reasonable numbers.
Artifact mana:
Sol Ring
Worn Powerstone
Grim Monolith
Thran Dynamo
Gilded Lotus
Caged Sun
That's a much smaller commitment than I usually advocate for artifact mana, but we aren't really trying to blitz the game down here. More like we are trying to slowly consume the table. That brings us to 97 slots, so we go back to our zombie list a figure out the weakest ones to cut.
OUT:
Dregscape Zombie
Liliana's Reaver
Twisted Abomination
Cemetery Reaper
Zombie Trailblazer
Liliana's Reaver is a very good card, but its obvious that we want to have more of a etb bent to the deck. Cemetery Reaper costs a bit too much to activate, and while he does eat other people stuff, I don't want to be exiling creatures from my yard.
That gives us enough room for the final pieces, Mass Pump, more wraths, and Gisa speed.
IN:
Obelisk of Urd
Eldrazi Monument - This works wonders with Gisa's ability, and is hilarious with Tombstone Stairwell.
Coat of Arms - This card increases the power of Gisa's ability exponentially.
Thousand Year Elixir
Swiftfoot Boots
Lightning Greaves
Damnation
Mutilate
Decree of Pain
Skullclamp
And for the last section, our mana:
Ancient Tomb
Cabal Coffers
Crypt of Agadeem
Deserted Temple
Hall of the Bandit Lord
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
29x Swamp
Unholy Grotto
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
And everything altogether:
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/gisas-ghoulish-good-times/
Just a whole lot of Swamps! There are some pretty big mana plays black is able to make, but none of them seemed on theme so I went another way. I hope you guys liked the mono-black tribal and I'll be back again next week for some more shenanigans. Soon enough I might even be making some Dragons!
Lets start with all the zombies worth playing:
Self recursive dudes:
Ashen Ghoul
Balthor the Defiled
Dregscape Zombie
Geralf's Messenger
Gravecrawler
Sac Outlets:
Carrion Feeder
Corpse Harvester
Gnawing Zombie
Gutless Ghoul
Nantuko Husk
Putrid Imp
Balthor the Defiled
Dregscape Zombie
Geralf's Messenger
Gravecrawler
Sac Outlets:
Carrion Feeder
Corpse Harvester
Gnawing Zombie
Gutless Ghoul
Nantuko Husk
Putrid Imp
Value:
Coffin Queen
Corpse Connoisseur
Festering Goblin
Fleshbag Marauder
Gempalm Polluter
Grave Defiler
Graveborn Muse
Gravespawn Sovereign
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Khabal Ghoul
Lifebane Zombie
Liliana's Reaver
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
Necromancer's Assistant
Noxious Ghoul
Phyrexian Delver
Skin Render
Twisted Abomination
Undead Gladiator
Vengeful Dead
Viscera Dragger
Withered Wretch
Lords:
Cemetery Reaper
Death Baron
Lord of the Undead
Soulless One
Undead Warchief
Zombie Master
Zombie Trailblazer
That's 40 cards! I never though zombies would be this plentiful. We could look at non-zombies...but for flavor reasons we are only putting zombies in the deck. I'm going to cull a few right off the bat because 40 creatures plus 37 lands doesn't leave us much room for cool support cards.
Cut:
Gnawing Zombie
Putrid Imp
Festering Goblin
Graveborn Muse - This card is great, but its really likely that we will manage to kill ourselves.
Skinrender
That gives us some about 30 cards to fill in. We definitely want to stick with what makes our deck cool, so lets put in the zombie themed cards of note:
Wake the Dead
Dread Return
Living Death
Army of the Damned
Necromantic Selection
Endless Ranks of the Dead
Grave Pact
Necropotence
Tombstone Stairwell
Necromancy
Phyrexian Reclamation
Entomb
Patriarch's Bidding
Zombify
Oversold Cemetery
Palace Siege
Call to the Grave
Zombie Apocalypse
These cards are all about the grave. Tombstone Stairwell in particular is really cool as it provides us with just so many zombie bodies for effects like Noxious Ghoul or Kabal Ghoul. The Palace Siege pulls double duty as both another Oversold Cemetery and as a way to drain people for the health we will undoubtably be spending on our various effects. We don't need to worry about pumping up our devotion too much as a mono-black deck, and by golly do we get so much devotion out of our permanents.
We only have a few slots left to play with now, but we will likely end up with more. There are just too many support cards that we want. Some more zombies are going to get the axe, but since we started with a high count we will only be dropping to reasonable numbers.
Artifact mana:
Sol Ring
Worn Powerstone
Grim Monolith
Thran Dynamo
Gilded Lotus
Caged Sun
That's a much smaller commitment than I usually advocate for artifact mana, but we aren't really trying to blitz the game down here. More like we are trying to slowly consume the table. That brings us to 97 slots, so we go back to our zombie list a figure out the weakest ones to cut.
OUT:
Dregscape Zombie
Liliana's Reaver
Twisted Abomination
Cemetery Reaper
Zombie Trailblazer
Liliana's Reaver is a very good card, but its obvious that we want to have more of a etb bent to the deck. Cemetery Reaper costs a bit too much to activate, and while he does eat other people stuff, I don't want to be exiling creatures from my yard.
That gives us enough room for the final pieces, Mass Pump, more wraths, and Gisa speed.
IN:
Obelisk of Urd
Eldrazi Monument - This works wonders with Gisa's ability, and is hilarious with Tombstone Stairwell.
Coat of Arms - This card increases the power of Gisa's ability exponentially.
Thousand Year Elixir
Swiftfoot Boots
Lightning Greaves
Damnation
Mutilate
Decree of Pain
Skullclamp
And for the last section, our mana:
Ancient Tomb
Cabal Coffers
Crypt of Agadeem
Deserted Temple
Hall of the Bandit Lord
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
29x Swamp
Unholy Grotto
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
And everything altogether:
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/gisas-ghoulish-good-times/
Just a whole lot of Swamps! There are some pretty big mana plays black is able to make, but none of them seemed on theme so I went another way. I hope you guys liked the mono-black tribal and I'll be back again next week for some more shenanigans. Soon enough I might even be making some Dragons!
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Deck Retrospective: Dralnu Storm
The next deck in the series of Retrospectives is Dralnu. Dralnu is my longest standing deck. I have had him together in some form since Shards of Alara, back when Tolarian Academy was legal and there were no where near as many people playing the format. Over the years he has morphed from a control deck, to combo/control, to today when he is an unabashed storm deck.
The list: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/dralnu-13-01-14-1/
This deck is a very clear example of a four on the Bullshit Scale. It is very efficient at winning the game and really requires some specific interaction in order to contend with it at specific points during the game. That might not even be enough though since the deck uses colored cards for fuel and can have a number of counterspells ready.
Dralnu is built on a number of different engines, but the most important card in the deck is Dream Halls. Dream Halls lets you skip paying retail for spells by instead using other cards for fuel. This means that a card like Meditate that gives you a huge net positive of cards can keep chaining into other draw spells to pull you through the deck. So the deck has tremendous velocity once its firing on all cylinders. There are several engine cards in the deck though:
Dream Halls - Lets us skip mana for our spells
Mind Over Matter - Let's us turn useless cards into mana. At its strongest when Glided Lotus is in play
Future Sight - Increases our hand to a potentially infinite size and combos well with our library manipulation.
Null Profusion - Adds "Draw a card" to every card we play. The draw backs are harsh, but we rarely get stuck. Combos incredibly well with a storm oriented hand.
Tidespout Tyrant - Tyrant lets us loop our artifact mana and generate infinite storm. He also can deal with problems or bounce value cards of our own to use for Dream Halls or etc.
Can you spot what trips them all up? It also trips up our Mind's Desire. Lands! All of our engines hate lands. They clog the pipe and make it much more difficult to get spells. The one exception is Mind Over Matter, but honestly we can just as easily pitch spells as lands. This is why the land count seems so low. A measly 26 land, and I've been trying to convince myself to go down to 25 just so that I can say 25% land definitively. We can get away with such an outrageously low number of land because we don't need that much mana to operate, and we run tons of artifact mana since artifact mana increases storm count, interacts favorably with a number of cards in the deck, and gets us to the critical 5 mana mark faster. In addition, we play just so many cantrips. Cantrips are colored spells for Dream Halls, they increase the storm count, and they set up good combo hands. Early cantrips can dig into lands since we will likely only need 3-4 lands to cast our Dream Halls or Future Sight. After the printing of Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time the cantrips also fuel the delve cards.
Cantrips:
Brainstorm
Impulse
Opt
Remand - Its worth noting that we just as often remand our own spells for storm count. And bouncing our Mind's Desire with the copies still on the stack is super sweet.
Shadow of Doubt
Gitaxian Probe
Omen
Ponder
Preordain
Serum Visions
Sleight of Hand
Forbidden Alchemy
Baleful Strix
Most traditional lists wouldn't put Shadow of Doubt or Remand in the cantrip lists, but honestly that's their function. They might buy some time for us to develop but they get cast on turn two if you didn't have anything else to spend mana on. Baleful Strix is also a cantrip. Its a great card to ward off people from attacking you, draws you a card and is an artifact. That its blue and black means it pitches to cast anything in the deck. Being a permanent pumps up any potential Myojin plays that you have and pitches to Thirst for Knowledge.
Other card filtering effects include:
Unfulfilled Desires
Sensei's Divining Top
Frantic Search
Frantic Search has the ability to generate mana off of Ancient Tomb or if it gets cast via Dream Halls. It also can turn useless lands into cards. Unfulfilled Desires almost got listed under engine cards since its so good at sculpting hands, but it really doesn't do much mid-combo as mana is generally the bottleneck. It is dual colored, so we can pitch it to Dream Halls for anything. Top has many synergies in the deck. You can use it with Null Profusion to draw extra cards, the same with Future Sight and Mind Over Matter. With MOM you can tap Top to draw, then discard a card to untap the Top and active it again. Top combined with Etherium Sculptor lets you pull tons of bullshit.
The next category of note is the fast mana category. This includes both artifact mana and ritual effects:
Cabal Ritual
Dark Ritual
Chrome Mox
Gilded Lotus
Grim Monolith
Lotus Bloom
Lotus Petal
Mana Vault
Mistvein Borderpost
Mox Diamond
Sol Ring
Thran Dynamo
Most of these are self explanatory, but a couple should get some attention. Lotus Bloom is slow, but getting some free storm + mana is really strong. Unlike Ancestral Visions, we can't get around the [] mana cost through Dream Halls but it can still be cast off Mind's Desire and can be searched for by Tezzeret's -X ability. Mistvein Borderpost is not generally 'fast' mana, but the bounce clause can be used to extend our land drops and its colored for Dream Halls.
Of course all of this is moot without net positive draw spells:
Ad Nauseam - This is greedy and can't be used in every situation but its normally a draw 6 which is crazy
Careful Consideration
Dig Through Time
Fact or Fiction
Gush
Intellectual Offering - A lot of people don't like this card, including Sheldon, but I think it is unequivicably the strongest offering as it is possible to generate mana with the card with artifact mana. In this deck specifically its been nuts everytime I've cast it,
Meditate
Opportunity
Thirst for Knowledge
Ancestral Vision
Deep Analysis - Uniquely cool here since you can discard it to pay for something else with Dream Halls and then cast it at the discounted price to maintain velocity.
Enter the Infinite
Ideas Unbound - Not a true draw spell, this doesn't discard till end of turn, meaning its +2 until end of turn.
Night's Whisper
Read the Bones
Recurring Insight
Time Spiral
Treasure Cruise
Myojin of Seeing Winds
These are our setup spells. Usually you want to cast one of these prior to your combo turn to have enough resources, but they can also be used to dig during your storm turn. Speaking of the Storm turn:
Mind's Desire
Yawgmoth's Will
Tendrils of Agony
Mana Severance
These are cards you really only use on the turn you're going off. In addition to the regular level of complete insanity that Yawgmoth's Will is capable of, you can use Dream Halls to cast the cards in your graveyard. This means that you can fill your yard leading up to casting the Will by discarding to Dream Halls effect, then cast all of the cards you pitched under Will's effect.You can cast Mana Severance the turn before, but it really is at its best to cast right before you start chaining draw spells to ensure that you don't get clogged with land while going off. Off course going off is much easier when you have protection
Arcane Denial
Misdirection
Pact of Negation
Snap
Traumatic Vision
There should be a Force of Will in the deck, I just haven't gotten around to picking one up. Not a real one anyway, I've got a couple gold bordered ones kicking around. All of these spells are great for us. Misdirection can play spoiler to peoples Time Stretches and can even save us from uncounterable spells. Arcane Denial is a 1U counterspell that even replaces itself, and we care far less than normal about the cards our opponents draw since they likely only have a few cards that can interact with us at all. Snap can bounce our Myojin or Balefire Strix and can be used to generate mana while also getting rid of something like Teferi or Teeg on the combo turn without spending mana. Traumatic Vision looks weird, but under Dream Halls the text of a card is all that matters, and having the auxiliary mode of searching for a land makes it very like a cantrip. In fact, several of the cards in this pile and the cantrip pile could have been in either. I sorted them by how often they have been used in their various functions. The next set only has one function, but are proxies for the other functions.
Tutors:
Mystical Teaching
Mystical Tutor
Vampiric Tutor
Demonic Tutor
Diabolic Tutor
Increasing Ambition - Increasing Ambition doesn't care how its cast from the graveyard so playing this off of Yawgmoth's Will is just super awesome.
Lim-Dûl's Vault
That's a lot of tutors. Tutors increase the overall consistency of a deck and in 100 card formats are incredibly powerful deckbuilding tools to make a deck play the same from game to game. Lots of tutors push a deck more toward the 4-5 range. Reliability comes with playing your strongest game more often. The strongest game in a format with Yawgmoth's Will, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and other crazy cards being legal is often completely bullshit. On the tutors themselves, Lim-Dul's Vault often elicits the response of not being worth it, but I can't tell you the number of times end of turn Vault has won me the game on the following turn. Diabolic Tutor is a stand in for Grim Tutor, but its honestly a pretty marginal upgrade in this deck with the way that Dream Halls obviates the extra mana. More tutors would probably improve the deck overall, but all the other options are either worse than what I'm already running or not enough better to warrant the real world cost.
The Rest:
Tezzeret the Seeker
Spelltwine
Etherium Sculptor
Notion Thief
Snapcaster Mage
These cards are all good but don't slot neatly into a category because of their flexible nature. Tezzeret is usually a mana play, letting you get 3-6 mana usually, but he can also function as a tutor for a variety of important artifact like Sculptor or Top. Spelltwine is able to generate a monstrous amount of storm on its own, representing three spell casts. Under Dream Halls you can even discard the card you want to play with Spelltwine. Sculptor is the most important of the bunch, letting you either get to combo mana earlier or enabling Top shenanigans in a number of situation. Notion Thief can steal an opposing draw spell and then let you untap with a surplus of cards in hand. He was originally Consecrated Sphinx since the Sphinx does the same thing but is more reliable at it. I found that the flash nature of Thief plays better with our tutors and his UB cost makes him more valuable if draw mid-combo. Snapcaster Mage is just a great versatile card for re-casting anything from a cantrip at the end of an opponents turn to getting a re-go on your Treasure Cruise.
Finally we come to the land. The land is almost entirely perfunctory mana. With so few land we don't really have much room for frills.
Land:
Ancient Tomb
Cephalid Coliseum
Crystal Vein
Drowned Catacomb
Flooded Strand
11x Island
Marsh Flats
Polluted Delta
Seat of the Synod
Sunken Ruins
Svyelunite Temple
Swamp
Underground River
Underground Sea
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Watery Grave
The 1 Swamp is mostly for Traumatic Visions, but I also found that Marsh Flats ran out of fetch able lands a little too quickly. Black mana is important, but most of the time we'd rather have blue mana since casting multiple cantrips needs lots of blue mana and very little to no black mana. We also have Rituals which give us a significant amount of black mana, but there are no blue rituals so we need more blue lands.
And that's the deck! Its a blast to play and string together a win. The whole thing became way easier to pilot after they printed Enter the Infinite as can be imagined. You don't actually cast Dralnu all that much honestly. Once you get to 5 mana you are usually all about casting Dream Halls, but at a non-red table he can be a value engine on his own. A strange thing happens when you play at tables that don't know what you are up to. People imagine that you have a million counterspells since that's what Dralnu naturally reinforces. Well that and extra turn effects, letting you surprise people with the combo nature of the deck and leading them to not play the strongest game that they could. This advantage disappears on repeat sessions but is valuable when playing at a SCG pod or something else of that nature.
Various things that I've considered for the deck include adding Force of Will, Mox Opal, High Tide, Thought Scour, and Mental Note, Grim Tutor, Lion's Eye Diamond. All of these cards are very potent. Mox Opal would require a bit more support to ensure that it would be active, but three artifacts isn't that much honestly. I have seriously considered cutting Mox Diamond because of the low land count. The biggest argument against cutting it is that its ok pre-combo and essentially Lotus Petal during the combo. I envision a similar situation for Mox Opal. Its worth trying. Force of Will deserves a slot since its the primer free counterspell and we have plenty of blue cards. Grim Tutor is just another tutor and would be great but its exorbitant price has kept me from including it willy nilly. Lion's Eye Diamond is conditional, and we don't want Infernal Tutor due to it only really working with Lion's Eye Diamond. That said, Yawgmoth's Will is a card and it dovetails with LED extremely well. High Tide is interesting. We would probably need more reset card to make it work regularly. I could see Cloud of Faeries as an option since it has fucking Cycling on top of everything else, but I would have to do a lot of digging in order to find other options that I would be ok with. Mental Note and Thought Scour have worked out in other decks and we can always use more cantrips. The self mill helps us get rid of a bad Top look or Brainstorm, and putting cards in the graveyard can be useful for Treasure Cruise or Yawgmoth's Will. One card I didn't list was Time Twister. Not only is it almost a thousand dollars, but Draw 7s are actually not that good in the deck since Dream Halls is symmetrical.
Hope you guys liked the rundown and I'll be back in a day or so with another of my favorite decks.
The list: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/dralnu-13-01-14-1/
This deck is a very clear example of a four on the Bullshit Scale. It is very efficient at winning the game and really requires some specific interaction in order to contend with it at specific points during the game. That might not even be enough though since the deck uses colored cards for fuel and can have a number of counterspells ready.
Dralnu is built on a number of different engines, but the most important card in the deck is Dream Halls. Dream Halls lets you skip paying retail for spells by instead using other cards for fuel. This means that a card like Meditate that gives you a huge net positive of cards can keep chaining into other draw spells to pull you through the deck. So the deck has tremendous velocity once its firing on all cylinders. There are several engine cards in the deck though:
Dream Halls - Lets us skip mana for our spells
Mind Over Matter - Let's us turn useless cards into mana. At its strongest when Glided Lotus is in play
Future Sight - Increases our hand to a potentially infinite size and combos well with our library manipulation.
Null Profusion - Adds "Draw a card" to every card we play. The draw backs are harsh, but we rarely get stuck. Combos incredibly well with a storm oriented hand.
Tidespout Tyrant - Tyrant lets us loop our artifact mana and generate infinite storm. He also can deal with problems or bounce value cards of our own to use for Dream Halls or etc.
Can you spot what trips them all up? It also trips up our Mind's Desire. Lands! All of our engines hate lands. They clog the pipe and make it much more difficult to get spells. The one exception is Mind Over Matter, but honestly we can just as easily pitch spells as lands. This is why the land count seems so low. A measly 26 land, and I've been trying to convince myself to go down to 25 just so that I can say 25% land definitively. We can get away with such an outrageously low number of land because we don't need that much mana to operate, and we run tons of artifact mana since artifact mana increases storm count, interacts favorably with a number of cards in the deck, and gets us to the critical 5 mana mark faster. In addition, we play just so many cantrips. Cantrips are colored spells for Dream Halls, they increase the storm count, and they set up good combo hands. Early cantrips can dig into lands since we will likely only need 3-4 lands to cast our Dream Halls or Future Sight. After the printing of Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time the cantrips also fuel the delve cards.
Cantrips:
Brainstorm
Impulse
Opt
Remand - Its worth noting that we just as often remand our own spells for storm count. And bouncing our Mind's Desire with the copies still on the stack is super sweet.
Shadow of Doubt
Gitaxian Probe
Omen
Ponder
Preordain
Serum Visions
Sleight of Hand
Forbidden Alchemy
Baleful Strix
Most traditional lists wouldn't put Shadow of Doubt or Remand in the cantrip lists, but honestly that's their function. They might buy some time for us to develop but they get cast on turn two if you didn't have anything else to spend mana on. Baleful Strix is also a cantrip. Its a great card to ward off people from attacking you, draws you a card and is an artifact. That its blue and black means it pitches to cast anything in the deck. Being a permanent pumps up any potential Myojin plays that you have and pitches to Thirst for Knowledge.
Other card filtering effects include:
Unfulfilled Desires
Sensei's Divining Top
Frantic Search
Frantic Search has the ability to generate mana off of Ancient Tomb or if it gets cast via Dream Halls. It also can turn useless lands into cards. Unfulfilled Desires almost got listed under engine cards since its so good at sculpting hands, but it really doesn't do much mid-combo as mana is generally the bottleneck. It is dual colored, so we can pitch it to Dream Halls for anything. Top has many synergies in the deck. You can use it with Null Profusion to draw extra cards, the same with Future Sight and Mind Over Matter. With MOM you can tap Top to draw, then discard a card to untap the Top and active it again. Top combined with Etherium Sculptor lets you pull tons of bullshit.
The next category of note is the fast mana category. This includes both artifact mana and ritual effects:
Cabal Ritual
Dark Ritual
Chrome Mox
Gilded Lotus
Grim Monolith
Lotus Bloom
Lotus Petal
Mana Vault
Mistvein Borderpost
Mox Diamond
Sol Ring
Thran Dynamo
Most of these are self explanatory, but a couple should get some attention. Lotus Bloom is slow, but getting some free storm + mana is really strong. Unlike Ancestral Visions, we can't get around the [] mana cost through Dream Halls but it can still be cast off Mind's Desire and can be searched for by Tezzeret's -X ability. Mistvein Borderpost is not generally 'fast' mana, but the bounce clause can be used to extend our land drops and its colored for Dream Halls.
Of course all of this is moot without net positive draw spells:
Ad Nauseam - This is greedy and can't be used in every situation but its normally a draw 6 which is crazy
Careful Consideration
Dig Through Time
Fact or Fiction
Gush
Intellectual Offering - A lot of people don't like this card, including Sheldon, but I think it is unequivicably the strongest offering as it is possible to generate mana with the card with artifact mana. In this deck specifically its been nuts everytime I've cast it,
Meditate
Opportunity
Thirst for Knowledge
Ancestral Vision
Deep Analysis - Uniquely cool here since you can discard it to pay for something else with Dream Halls and then cast it at the discounted price to maintain velocity.
Enter the Infinite
Ideas Unbound - Not a true draw spell, this doesn't discard till end of turn, meaning its +2 until end of turn.
Night's Whisper
Read the Bones
Recurring Insight
Time Spiral
Treasure Cruise
Myojin of Seeing Winds
These are our setup spells. Usually you want to cast one of these prior to your combo turn to have enough resources, but they can also be used to dig during your storm turn. Speaking of the Storm turn:
Mind's Desire
Yawgmoth's Will
Tendrils of Agony
Mana Severance
These are cards you really only use on the turn you're going off. In addition to the regular level of complete insanity that Yawgmoth's Will is capable of, you can use Dream Halls to cast the cards in your graveyard. This means that you can fill your yard leading up to casting the Will by discarding to Dream Halls effect, then cast all of the cards you pitched under Will's effect.You can cast Mana Severance the turn before, but it really is at its best to cast right before you start chaining draw spells to ensure that you don't get clogged with land while going off. Off course going off is much easier when you have protection
Arcane Denial
Misdirection
Pact of Negation
Snap
Traumatic Vision
There should be a Force of Will in the deck, I just haven't gotten around to picking one up. Not a real one anyway, I've got a couple gold bordered ones kicking around. All of these spells are great for us. Misdirection can play spoiler to peoples Time Stretches and can even save us from uncounterable spells. Arcane Denial is a 1U counterspell that even replaces itself, and we care far less than normal about the cards our opponents draw since they likely only have a few cards that can interact with us at all. Snap can bounce our Myojin or Balefire Strix and can be used to generate mana while also getting rid of something like Teferi or Teeg on the combo turn without spending mana. Traumatic Vision looks weird, but under Dream Halls the text of a card is all that matters, and having the auxiliary mode of searching for a land makes it very like a cantrip. In fact, several of the cards in this pile and the cantrip pile could have been in either. I sorted them by how often they have been used in their various functions. The next set only has one function, but are proxies for the other functions.
Tutors:
Mystical Teaching
Mystical Tutor
Vampiric Tutor
Demonic Tutor
Diabolic Tutor
Increasing Ambition - Increasing Ambition doesn't care how its cast from the graveyard so playing this off of Yawgmoth's Will is just super awesome.
Lim-Dûl's Vault
That's a lot of tutors. Tutors increase the overall consistency of a deck and in 100 card formats are incredibly powerful deckbuilding tools to make a deck play the same from game to game. Lots of tutors push a deck more toward the 4-5 range. Reliability comes with playing your strongest game more often. The strongest game in a format with Yawgmoth's Will, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and other crazy cards being legal is often completely bullshit. On the tutors themselves, Lim-Dul's Vault often elicits the response of not being worth it, but I can't tell you the number of times end of turn Vault has won me the game on the following turn. Diabolic Tutor is a stand in for Grim Tutor, but its honestly a pretty marginal upgrade in this deck with the way that Dream Halls obviates the extra mana. More tutors would probably improve the deck overall, but all the other options are either worse than what I'm already running or not enough better to warrant the real world cost.
The Rest:
Tezzeret the Seeker
Spelltwine
Etherium Sculptor
Notion Thief
Snapcaster Mage
These cards are all good but don't slot neatly into a category because of their flexible nature. Tezzeret is usually a mana play, letting you get 3-6 mana usually, but he can also function as a tutor for a variety of important artifact like Sculptor or Top. Spelltwine is able to generate a monstrous amount of storm on its own, representing three spell casts. Under Dream Halls you can even discard the card you want to play with Spelltwine. Sculptor is the most important of the bunch, letting you either get to combo mana earlier or enabling Top shenanigans in a number of situation. Notion Thief can steal an opposing draw spell and then let you untap with a surplus of cards in hand. He was originally Consecrated Sphinx since the Sphinx does the same thing but is more reliable at it. I found that the flash nature of Thief plays better with our tutors and his UB cost makes him more valuable if draw mid-combo. Snapcaster Mage is just a great versatile card for re-casting anything from a cantrip at the end of an opponents turn to getting a re-go on your Treasure Cruise.
Finally we come to the land. The land is almost entirely perfunctory mana. With so few land we don't really have much room for frills.
Land:
Ancient Tomb
Cephalid Coliseum
Crystal Vein
Drowned Catacomb
Flooded Strand
11x Island
Marsh Flats
Polluted Delta
Seat of the Synod
Sunken Ruins
Svyelunite Temple
Swamp
Underground River
Underground Sea
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Watery Grave
The 1 Swamp is mostly for Traumatic Visions, but I also found that Marsh Flats ran out of fetch able lands a little too quickly. Black mana is important, but most of the time we'd rather have blue mana since casting multiple cantrips needs lots of blue mana and very little to no black mana. We also have Rituals which give us a significant amount of black mana, but there are no blue rituals so we need more blue lands.
And that's the deck! Its a blast to play and string together a win. The whole thing became way easier to pilot after they printed Enter the Infinite as can be imagined. You don't actually cast Dralnu all that much honestly. Once you get to 5 mana you are usually all about casting Dream Halls, but at a non-red table he can be a value engine on his own. A strange thing happens when you play at tables that don't know what you are up to. People imagine that you have a million counterspells since that's what Dralnu naturally reinforces. Well that and extra turn effects, letting you surprise people with the combo nature of the deck and leading them to not play the strongest game that they could. This advantage disappears on repeat sessions but is valuable when playing at a SCG pod or something else of that nature.
Various things that I've considered for the deck include adding Force of Will, Mox Opal, High Tide, Thought Scour, and Mental Note, Grim Tutor, Lion's Eye Diamond. All of these cards are very potent. Mox Opal would require a bit more support to ensure that it would be active, but three artifacts isn't that much honestly. I have seriously considered cutting Mox Diamond because of the low land count. The biggest argument against cutting it is that its ok pre-combo and essentially Lotus Petal during the combo. I envision a similar situation for Mox Opal. Its worth trying. Force of Will deserves a slot since its the primer free counterspell and we have plenty of blue cards. Grim Tutor is just another tutor and would be great but its exorbitant price has kept me from including it willy nilly. Lion's Eye Diamond is conditional, and we don't want Infernal Tutor due to it only really working with Lion's Eye Diamond. That said, Yawgmoth's Will is a card and it dovetails with LED extremely well. High Tide is interesting. We would probably need more reset card to make it work regularly. I could see Cloud of Faeries as an option since it has fucking Cycling on top of everything else, but I would have to do a lot of digging in order to find other options that I would be ok with. Mental Note and Thought Scour have worked out in other decks and we can always use more cantrips. The self mill helps us get rid of a bad Top look or Brainstorm, and putting cards in the graveyard can be useful for Treasure Cruise or Yawgmoth's Will. One card I didn't list was Time Twister. Not only is it almost a thousand dollars, but Draw 7s are actually not that good in the deck since Dream Halls is symmetrical.
Hope you guys liked the rundown and I'll be back in a day or so with another of my favorite decks.
Friday, February 20, 2015
Deck Retrospective: Kaalia the Punisher
Of all of my EDH decks, Kaalia is the only one that jumps out as being incredibly full of shit.
Kaalia is the only deck I have that scores a 5. The decklist can be found here, http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/kaalia-13-01-14-1/.
As you can see its a brutal list. I came to it almost by accident. I was looking to build a deck that was able to win sans any combo. What I found when playing the deck was that without some way to immediately win the game one of my opponents would eventually find the Mind Over Matter to pair with their Temple Bell. So I started adding in Hate cards and just never stopped. It was significantly more effective than I anticipated but this method also made it so that games would last forever with me being the only person still able to take actions. I now only bring the deck out went faced with other people who have 4s-5s.
Above I mentioned Hate cards. Some readers might not know what a Hate card is. A Hate card is what would normally be a sideboard card. It is a narrow answer card for a specific strategy. The Hate cards in Kaalia are:
Ob Nixilis, Unshackled
Erebos, God of the Dead
Iona, Shield of Emeria
Linvala, Keeper of Silence
Spirit of the Labyrinth
Grafdigger's Cage
Torpor Orb
Aura of Silence
Chains of Mephistopheles
Moat
Nether Void
Rest In Peace
Stony Silence
Stranglehold
Tainted Aether
Rix Maado, Dungeon Palace
These are the cards that purely exist to cut off options from the opponent. They ruin linear strategies and some things that EDH decks commonly rely on. We don't have too much artifact mana for a couple reasons. The first being that Kaalia costs three colored mana, so accelerating into her is difficult. So the only artifact mana we run are the broken ones, Sol Ring and Mana Crypt, and the signets. Signets actually make playing Kaalia on turn three realistic. As such, we can play Stony Silence to shut off the crazy amount of mana rocks everyone plays without hurting our self too much. We do have a couple other artifact activate-able effects, In fact, the deck has a number of anti-synergies in it. That's a price you pay for playing so much Hate. Unsurprisingly, most Hate cards are enchantments, the most difficult to remove permanent type in EDH. Of special note is Torpor Orb, which is just so hard to beat. So many decks rely on creatures with etb disenchants to solve non-creature problems that Torpor Orb is often the best card to defend itself.
The goal of the deck is to put the game into a locked up state and then smash with huge monsters. Kaalia lets us short-cut the step where we play them and wait a turn. She's also fast enough that she can get in under a lot of the answers and if your opponents spend their time answering her, eventually you'll have the best creatures on the table with all of your opponents synergistic components disabled. There are a few big players in making this happen:
Land Tax
Necropotence
Scroll Rack
These are the most important cards in the deck. Necropotence more so than the other two. Necropotence doesn't actually draw cards, getting around Spirit of the Labyrinth and Chains of Mephistopheles. It gives you a land drop and a monster every turn. Land Tax merely gets you lands for the rest of the game since there's almost always going to be a green player at the table. Scroll Rack is at its best here since you have tons of conditional cards that you want at specific times and it also doesn't draw cards. Scroll Rack can get shut off by Stony Silence so you have to be more away of that. That doesn't stop it from being so good that I've considered running off color fetches since the real advantage comes when you can shuffle away the useless cards. When you combine Land Tax and Scroll Rack you get a to turn the basics into real cards and keep shuffling away whatever dregs you don't need.
The rest of the deck are huge dudes to put into play with Kaalia, tutors, mana denial, removal, and some card draw. Most of the creatures have strong board control elements to them like Steel Hellkite, Scourge of Kher Ridges, and Balefire Dragon. These police the board and make sure you don't get overrun by small aggressive creatures(or in the case of Balefire really any creatures). Several of our monsters line up well with functions the deck wants to reinforce. I already mentioned the various creatures that act as hate cards, but we also have Angel of Despair as removal, and Rune-Scarred Demon as a Tutor. Gisela does lots of work blunting aggro and increasing our clock by a ton. Avacyn, Angel of Hope is some of the best protection in the format and also makes our Mass Land Destruction asymmetrical. We run Armageddon, Boom//Bust, and Catastrophe as our mass LD. Armageddon is a classic and is super cheap. Boom//Bust has the utility that we can use Bust to pick off someones Cradle or what-have-you without having to use it to blow up all the lands. It also can reset our Land Tax, which is sweet. Catastrophe can also be a Wrath in a pinch. The mass LD gives us the dimension to be able to shut our opponents off mana completely while we are holding a bunch of land from Land Tax, or have a Kaalia on the table letting us cheat our monsters into play. It combines well with the various Tax cards. Taxing is making people pay more mana for their cards. Its entirely possible that we want more of them since the deck is really trying to slow down the game, but without dedicating to them more only the big ones that stand on their own are worth it.
The removal and tutors are just the most mana efficient that we can get. There should be more tutors, but we want them to be cheap on mana since we need flexible answers quickly. Grim Tutor should probably make an appearance, and maybe Idyllic Tutor since Necropotence is so important, but I dislike not being able to get a monster or even a Hate card outside of an enchantment. The card draw is suspect since we are running multiple cards to hate out card draw, but I found that you really do need it in order to smooth out your early game, and the two often don't collide as you are more likely to draw into your hate with the draw spell than to naturally draw the Night's Whisper/Read the Bones/Phyrexian Arena after your Chains or Spirit. In the case of Wheel, its almost fine since you can make everyone play off the top of the deck, and Arena + Chains just means that you loot a card every turn, still giving us great selection.
The miscellaneous cards,
True Conviction and Whip of Erebos are both fantastic and fueling our life total, which we spend a not insignificant amount of. They both have other functions, TC can just end the game when played, especially if you have Gisella in play. Whip can give us some solid utility with our huge dudes. Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots are standard EDH cards and let us both protect our general and get her to the attack step early. Also, if the are equipped when we cast Stony Silence then they get to keep doing their job. Cabal Conditioning is on the edge of the deck, as is Debtor's Knell. They are both so expensive. Cabal Conditioning is brutal, but if you a huge monster in this deck odds are you are already winning. Debtor's Knell is just super cool and I have no where else to play it, which is most of the reason that Moltensteel Dragon is in the deck. If I ever build Scion of the Ur-Dragon they would both be out.
Our mana base has some tricks in it, but not as many as normal since the deck is incredibly color dense. That's why Chromatic Lantern is present, since it just makes all our mana problems go away. Among the lands in our mana base that get more of a mention are,
Temple of Triumph
Temple of Silence
Hall of the Bandit Lord
Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace
Flagstones of Trokair
Spinerock Knoll
These are the ones that have effects other than mana. The Temples help us control our draws a little since we are lite on draw effects. There should be a Temple of Doom(I know that's not what the R/B is, but its how I'll always think of it), I just haven't got one yet. Hall of the Bandit Lord is great when you have a general that you want to attack with or use a tap ability immediately, It also supports casting our monsters naturally. Rix lets us put pressure on people's hand without having to use a card slot. I kind of want to have a Liliana of the Veil in the deck for the same reason, and also be able to have a solid answer to decks like Uril. I am always dubious of Planeswalkers in EDH, but we have enough ways to stop attackers that she might be worthwhile to try. Flagstones combos with Boom//Bust and our other mass LD spells, as well as Tainted Aether, to let us get some mana after the fact. Spinerock Knoll is pretty easy to trigger in EDH as you don't even have to be the one doing the damage.
Potential refinements include cutting Debtor's Knell, Moltensteel Dragon, Yosei, and Academy Rector. Yosei is fine to include with the RIP since it can always attack for 5, but its really in the deck to lock people out with Debtor's Knell. If the Knell goes so would Yosei. Academy Rector is a bullshit card, but I find I don't have enough ways to reliably kill it myself, especially immediately after I play it, and its turned off by RIP. Moltensteel Dragon gives us a way to kill people at really high life totals, but unfortunately for him so does general damage. He could go without much fuss. In their place, the adds would probably be some combination of Grim Tutor, Liliana of the Veil, Polluted Bonds, Elesh Norn, Night of Soul's Betrayal, Earthquake. Elesh Norn costs a lot and we have no way to cheat her out, but by god is she one of the strongest hate creatures in the game. The rest of the cards reinforce various aspects of the deck.
That's my only five. Its a lot of fun to play and watch the table try to squirm out from under the lock, but its only for tables that can handle it. I've probably only played it two hundred or so times, whereas the deck I'll be doing next has thousands of games under its belt.
Kaalia is the only deck I have that scores a 5. The decklist can be found here, http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/kaalia-13-01-14-1/.
As you can see its a brutal list. I came to it almost by accident. I was looking to build a deck that was able to win sans any combo. What I found when playing the deck was that without some way to immediately win the game one of my opponents would eventually find the Mind Over Matter to pair with their Temple Bell. So I started adding in Hate cards and just never stopped. It was significantly more effective than I anticipated but this method also made it so that games would last forever with me being the only person still able to take actions. I now only bring the deck out went faced with other people who have 4s-5s.
Above I mentioned Hate cards. Some readers might not know what a Hate card is. A Hate card is what would normally be a sideboard card. It is a narrow answer card for a specific strategy. The Hate cards in Kaalia are:
Ob Nixilis, Unshackled
Erebos, God of the Dead
Iona, Shield of Emeria
Linvala, Keeper of Silence
Spirit of the Labyrinth
Grafdigger's Cage
Torpor Orb
Aura of Silence
Chains of Mephistopheles
Moat
Nether Void
Rest In Peace
Stony Silence
Stranglehold
Tainted Aether
Rix Maado, Dungeon Palace
These are the cards that purely exist to cut off options from the opponent. They ruin linear strategies and some things that EDH decks commonly rely on. We don't have too much artifact mana for a couple reasons. The first being that Kaalia costs three colored mana, so accelerating into her is difficult. So the only artifact mana we run are the broken ones, Sol Ring and Mana Crypt, and the signets. Signets actually make playing Kaalia on turn three realistic. As such, we can play Stony Silence to shut off the crazy amount of mana rocks everyone plays without hurting our self too much. We do have a couple other artifact activate-able effects, In fact, the deck has a number of anti-synergies in it. That's a price you pay for playing so much Hate. Unsurprisingly, most Hate cards are enchantments, the most difficult to remove permanent type in EDH. Of special note is Torpor Orb, which is just so hard to beat. So many decks rely on creatures with etb disenchants to solve non-creature problems that Torpor Orb is often the best card to defend itself.
The goal of the deck is to put the game into a locked up state and then smash with huge monsters. Kaalia lets us short-cut the step where we play them and wait a turn. She's also fast enough that she can get in under a lot of the answers and if your opponents spend their time answering her, eventually you'll have the best creatures on the table with all of your opponents synergistic components disabled. There are a few big players in making this happen:
Land Tax
Necropotence
Scroll Rack
These are the most important cards in the deck. Necropotence more so than the other two. Necropotence doesn't actually draw cards, getting around Spirit of the Labyrinth and Chains of Mephistopheles. It gives you a land drop and a monster every turn. Land Tax merely gets you lands for the rest of the game since there's almost always going to be a green player at the table. Scroll Rack is at its best here since you have tons of conditional cards that you want at specific times and it also doesn't draw cards. Scroll Rack can get shut off by Stony Silence so you have to be more away of that. That doesn't stop it from being so good that I've considered running off color fetches since the real advantage comes when you can shuffle away the useless cards. When you combine Land Tax and Scroll Rack you get a to turn the basics into real cards and keep shuffling away whatever dregs you don't need.
The rest of the deck are huge dudes to put into play with Kaalia, tutors, mana denial, removal, and some card draw. Most of the creatures have strong board control elements to them like Steel Hellkite, Scourge of Kher Ridges, and Balefire Dragon. These police the board and make sure you don't get overrun by small aggressive creatures(or in the case of Balefire really any creatures). Several of our monsters line up well with functions the deck wants to reinforce. I already mentioned the various creatures that act as hate cards, but we also have Angel of Despair as removal, and Rune-Scarred Demon as a Tutor. Gisela does lots of work blunting aggro and increasing our clock by a ton. Avacyn, Angel of Hope is some of the best protection in the format and also makes our Mass Land Destruction asymmetrical. We run Armageddon, Boom//Bust, and Catastrophe as our mass LD. Armageddon is a classic and is super cheap. Boom//Bust has the utility that we can use Bust to pick off someones Cradle or what-have-you without having to use it to blow up all the lands. It also can reset our Land Tax, which is sweet. Catastrophe can also be a Wrath in a pinch. The mass LD gives us the dimension to be able to shut our opponents off mana completely while we are holding a bunch of land from Land Tax, or have a Kaalia on the table letting us cheat our monsters into play. It combines well with the various Tax cards. Taxing is making people pay more mana for their cards. Its entirely possible that we want more of them since the deck is really trying to slow down the game, but without dedicating to them more only the big ones that stand on their own are worth it.
The removal and tutors are just the most mana efficient that we can get. There should be more tutors, but we want them to be cheap on mana since we need flexible answers quickly. Grim Tutor should probably make an appearance, and maybe Idyllic Tutor since Necropotence is so important, but I dislike not being able to get a monster or even a Hate card outside of an enchantment. The card draw is suspect since we are running multiple cards to hate out card draw, but I found that you really do need it in order to smooth out your early game, and the two often don't collide as you are more likely to draw into your hate with the draw spell than to naturally draw the Night's Whisper/Read the Bones/Phyrexian Arena after your Chains or Spirit. In the case of Wheel, its almost fine since you can make everyone play off the top of the deck, and Arena + Chains just means that you loot a card every turn, still giving us great selection.
The miscellaneous cards,
True Conviction and Whip of Erebos are both fantastic and fueling our life total, which we spend a not insignificant amount of. They both have other functions, TC can just end the game when played, especially if you have Gisella in play. Whip can give us some solid utility with our huge dudes. Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots are standard EDH cards and let us both protect our general and get her to the attack step early. Also, if the are equipped when we cast Stony Silence then they get to keep doing their job. Cabal Conditioning is on the edge of the deck, as is Debtor's Knell. They are both so expensive. Cabal Conditioning is brutal, but if you a huge monster in this deck odds are you are already winning. Debtor's Knell is just super cool and I have no where else to play it, which is most of the reason that Moltensteel Dragon is in the deck. If I ever build Scion of the Ur-Dragon they would both be out.
Our mana base has some tricks in it, but not as many as normal since the deck is incredibly color dense. That's why Chromatic Lantern is present, since it just makes all our mana problems go away. Among the lands in our mana base that get more of a mention are,
Temple of Triumph
Temple of Silence
Hall of the Bandit Lord
Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace
Flagstones of Trokair
Spinerock Knoll
These are the ones that have effects other than mana. The Temples help us control our draws a little since we are lite on draw effects. There should be a Temple of Doom(I know that's not what the R/B is, but its how I'll always think of it), I just haven't got one yet. Hall of the Bandit Lord is great when you have a general that you want to attack with or use a tap ability immediately, It also supports casting our monsters naturally. Rix lets us put pressure on people's hand without having to use a card slot. I kind of want to have a Liliana of the Veil in the deck for the same reason, and also be able to have a solid answer to decks like Uril. I am always dubious of Planeswalkers in EDH, but we have enough ways to stop attackers that she might be worthwhile to try. Flagstones combos with Boom//Bust and our other mass LD spells, as well as Tainted Aether, to let us get some mana after the fact. Spinerock Knoll is pretty easy to trigger in EDH as you don't even have to be the one doing the damage.
Potential refinements include cutting Debtor's Knell, Moltensteel Dragon, Yosei, and Academy Rector. Yosei is fine to include with the RIP since it can always attack for 5, but its really in the deck to lock people out with Debtor's Knell. If the Knell goes so would Yosei. Academy Rector is a bullshit card, but I find I don't have enough ways to reliably kill it myself, especially immediately after I play it, and its turned off by RIP. Moltensteel Dragon gives us a way to kill people at really high life totals, but unfortunately for him so does general damage. He could go without much fuss. In their place, the adds would probably be some combination of Grim Tutor, Liliana of the Veil, Polluted Bonds, Elesh Norn, Night of Soul's Betrayal, Earthquake. Elesh Norn costs a lot and we have no way to cheat her out, but by god is she one of the strongest hate creatures in the game. The rest of the cards reinforce various aspects of the deck.
That's my only five. Its a lot of fun to play and watch the table try to squirm out from under the lock, but its only for tables that can handle it. I've probably only played it two hundred or so times, whereas the deck I'll be doing next has thousands of games under its belt.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
The Bullshit Scale
What I refer to as the Bullshit Scale, goes from 0 to 5, and is a measure of what a deck is willing to do to win the game and in the effort to do so makes the opposing players mutter Bullshit. It could be thought of as the degree to which the deck has been Spike-ed. There is nothing wrong with ruthlessly machining a deck to be the best possible version. The desire to win is inherent to people that play games. The danger comes from mismatching decks inside a playgroup. I usually phrase this as, "How fast are we going?", but what I mean is, "How much Bullshit are we allowing?"
0 is essentially reserved for first time creations, like the Karn player I once encountered whose mana base was nothing but basic lands. If you encounter a 0 player they likely need help more than anything. 0 is not really playable.
1's are generally things that have some kind of plan. These creations have some kind of direction but they aren't constructed very well. These might also be people that just stepped up from a 0 but have serious budget constraints. 1's can also be some outrageous idea just to see if it would work, like Snake Tribal. These decks have a theme and might even be somebodies baby, but the cards that they need to play to stay on theme makes the deck underpowered.
2 is where I put the unaltered pre-constructed decks. The description I would use for 2 is legitimate. They have solid themes and are built appropriately, but have not received enough machining and tuning to be up to the standard. The pre-cons are great for jumping a player stuck at 0 or 1 up to a 2. From there they can learn the process of deck construction to generate a 3.
3 is where most people build for. Decks at 3 have strong cards and are capable of winning the game. They can be fanciful creations like Zombie tribal but the deck has a good shot of winning the game without being oppressive. Most EDH players like to play at a 3. They want their decks to have some amount of Bullshit. They want the games to have grandiose plays. They just don't want things to be so explosive that the game is over before players have a chance to do anything. If you are going into an unknown playgroup playing a 3 is your best bet.
A 4 on the Bullshit Scale is when people start wanting to either avoid playing against the deck or change decks to something more competitive. 4's tend to win the game efficiently, and I actually classify these as being the more combo oriented decks that you run across. 4's have strong internal consistency, lots of tutors and will win the game in a relatively short amount of time. The problem with 4's is that they demand interaction. If you play against a combo deck and you don't happen to have a way of disrupting their combo due to color restriction or poor draws, you will cry Bullshit every time. The positive side is that 4's will win the game. They make the game be over so you can try again. They aren't oppressive.
5 on the Bullshit Scale is staggeringly full of shit, so only build a 5 if your playground is competitive in nature. These decks win the game, but it keeps going for a significant period of time afterward. These decks tend to have: Non-infinite extra turns, Stasis or other mass mana denial, lots of strong hate cards. Decks at 5 will do whatever they need to in order to win. There isn't anything wrong with a deck that's ruthlessly efficient but they tend to be 'fun-sapping'. We all know someone that plays a deck like Thalia or Hokori and doesn't get why people don't want to play against it. These sorts of decks are more fun for you to play than for the opponent to play against. They slowly squeeze the table and leave a bad taste in your mouth. More competitive players tend not to mind these games as much, so there is a place to play these sorts of decks, but never surprise a table with a 5.
So as a quick rundown/summary:
0 - Everyone is playing the game except me
1 - Everyone is playing the game, but I'm not doing much
2 - Everyone is playing the game and I get to do some cool stuff
3 - Everyone is playing the game
4 - I'm playing the game and most people can't
5 - No one else is playing the game
Over the next few days I'll be doing a retrospective of various decks that I have and where I put them on the Bullshit Scale.
Cheers!
0 is essentially reserved for first time creations, like the Karn player I once encountered whose mana base was nothing but basic lands. If you encounter a 0 player they likely need help more than anything. 0 is not really playable.
1's are generally things that have some kind of plan. These creations have some kind of direction but they aren't constructed very well. These might also be people that just stepped up from a 0 but have serious budget constraints. 1's can also be some outrageous idea just to see if it would work, like Snake Tribal. These decks have a theme and might even be somebodies baby, but the cards that they need to play to stay on theme makes the deck underpowered.
2 is where I put the unaltered pre-constructed decks. The description I would use for 2 is legitimate. They have solid themes and are built appropriately, but have not received enough machining and tuning to be up to the standard. The pre-cons are great for jumping a player stuck at 0 or 1 up to a 2. From there they can learn the process of deck construction to generate a 3.
3 is where most people build for. Decks at 3 have strong cards and are capable of winning the game. They can be fanciful creations like Zombie tribal but the deck has a good shot of winning the game without being oppressive. Most EDH players like to play at a 3. They want their decks to have some amount of Bullshit. They want the games to have grandiose plays. They just don't want things to be so explosive that the game is over before players have a chance to do anything. If you are going into an unknown playgroup playing a 3 is your best bet.
A 4 on the Bullshit Scale is when people start wanting to either avoid playing against the deck or change decks to something more competitive. 4's tend to win the game efficiently, and I actually classify these as being the more combo oriented decks that you run across. 4's have strong internal consistency, lots of tutors and will win the game in a relatively short amount of time. The problem with 4's is that they demand interaction. If you play against a combo deck and you don't happen to have a way of disrupting their combo due to color restriction or poor draws, you will cry Bullshit every time. The positive side is that 4's will win the game. They make the game be over so you can try again. They aren't oppressive.
5 on the Bullshit Scale is staggeringly full of shit, so only build a 5 if your playground is competitive in nature. These decks win the game, but it keeps going for a significant period of time afterward. These decks tend to have: Non-infinite extra turns, Stasis or other mass mana denial, lots of strong hate cards. Decks at 5 will do whatever they need to in order to win. There isn't anything wrong with a deck that's ruthlessly efficient but they tend to be 'fun-sapping'. We all know someone that plays a deck like Thalia or Hokori and doesn't get why people don't want to play against it. These sorts of decks are more fun for you to play than for the opponent to play against. They slowly squeeze the table and leave a bad taste in your mouth. More competitive players tend not to mind these games as much, so there is a place to play these sorts of decks, but never surprise a table with a 5.
So as a quick rundown/summary:
0 - Everyone is playing the game except me
1 - Everyone is playing the game, but I'm not doing much
2 - Everyone is playing the game and I get to do some cool stuff
3 - Everyone is playing the game
4 - I'm playing the game and most people can't
5 - No one else is playing the game
Over the next few days I'll be doing a retrospective of various decks that I have and where I put them on the Bullshit Scale.
Cheers!
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Build of the Week: "We Eat!"
This is a deck I've wanted to put together for a long time since it turns so many traditional resources on their head. Borborygmos Enraged is a unique and interesting creature. He makes you want to still be interacting with lands at 8 or more mana. Thankfully green loves land enough that going big is very possible. Red isn't great in the mix, but it does offer some key pieces for a lands centric deck. Gamble for Life From the Loam is going to be our standard play with the card, but its flexible as far as tutors go. You also gain access to Seismic Assault and Aggressive Mining, two cards that give you great reach into the late game and back up your eight mana general. As always, this is a first draft and I don't build for a budget. If something seems like it would be too much just sub it out for something else.
Our engine is going to be the most important aspect of our deck since we are going to have to have all the pieces in place before we cast our commander for the first time. I took some inspiration from the Tiny Leaders Azusa I was working on.
Engine:
Burgeoning
Life From The Loam
Aggressive Mining
Seismic Assault
Exploration
Azusa, Lost But Seeking
Courser of Kruphix
Oracle of Mul Daya
Horn of Greed
Crucible of Worlds
Storm Cauldron
Seer's Sundial
Abundance
Recycle
Titania, Protector of Argoth
Sylvan Library
These form the core of our deck. We are going to put in more support for our theme, but these are our the cards that we want to find to make our deck run. They push us through our deck and add to our mana development at a really fast pace. We are going to be playing significantly more land than normal to make all these effects work, and we are going to need tons of mana for our Battle-cruisers.
Tons of Mana:
Mox Diamond
Lotus Cobra
Mana Reflection
Sol Ring
Mana Vault
Mana Crypt
Gilded Lotus
Grim Monolith
Basalt Monolith
Cultivate
Kodama's Reach
Skyshroud Claim
Boundless Realms
Orcish Lumberjack
Yavimaya Elder
Some amount of land to play is going to be valuable due to Aggressive Mining's drawback, but land to hand is also valuable because lightning bolt is fun. We have our Engine block and our Mana block. Now we need a Payoff block.
Payoffs:
Tooth and Nail
Regal Force
Avenger of Zendikar
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
Genesis Wave
Praetor's Council
Terastodon
Karn Liberated
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
Vorinclex, the Voice of Hunger
I don't normally include mana tutors this early, but our deck already has a really solid theme and some marquee cards.
Tutors:
Expedition Map
Sylvan Scrying
Gamble
Crop Rotation
Realms Uncharted
The rest are a balance of draw sevens, utility, and removal. This section will be the recipient of the initial change list.
The rest:
Wheel of Fortune
Memory Jar
Rings of Brighthearth
Grafted Exoskeleton
Mulch
Journey of Discovery
Hull Breach
Decimate
And the most important part of the the deck...
Land:
Taiga
Stomping Ground
Wooded Foothills
Misty Rainforest
Windswept Heath
Gruul Turf
Temple of Abandon
Terrain Generator
Barbarian Ring
Centaur Garden
Tranquil Thicket
Forgotten Cave
Blasted Landscape
Slippery Karst
Smoldering Crater
Kessig Wolf Run
Rootbound Crag
Reliquary Tower
Command Tower
Thespian's Stage
Dark Depths
Vesuva
Terramorphic Expanse
Evolving Wilds
Raging Ravine
Fungal Reaches
Ancient Tomb
Glacial Chasm
Petrified Field
Temple of the False God
Dust Bowl
Wasteland
Strip Mine
Fire-Lit Thicket
9x Forest
1x Mountain
This list is, as they all are, a first draft.
I'm dubious as to the usefulness of Recycle, Mox Diamond, Terrastodon, and Decimate. Recycle might just straight up not work. It seems like it would combine well with our Explore type effects, providing a continuous stream of lands. It obviously stops being useful unless we can chain cards together for it. Its possible that outside a Storm shell we just can't use it. Mox Diamond is essentially a free roll, but its possible we just don't care about the card. Especially since at two colors the fixing aspect of it isn't going to be very useful. Terrastodon is a great card. I identified it for possible exclusion because our payoff cards should be as tight as possible. If we need room for more engine or protection (something we lack entirely) than Terrastodon is the first cut from that pile. Regal Force almost got the initial identifier, but the ability to draw so many lands to hand is so explosive. It does vary wildly, but I'm going with explosive here. Decimate is awesome but even in EDH lining up all the card types can be hard.
Obvious cards that could find a home are Eternal Witness, Swiftfoot Boots/Lightning Greaves, Rubblehulk, Terravore, Nostalgic Dreams, other Regrowth effects, Elvish Pioneer, Sylvan Safekeeper, and Groundskeeper. Essentially protection effects for our fatties and our engine. We are also a bit lighter on land than intended, so we might want to sneak in 1-4 more land.
Well I hope you guys like this one. Next week I'll be back with some more hilarity.
The sorted list:
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/we-eat/
Our engine is going to be the most important aspect of our deck since we are going to have to have all the pieces in place before we cast our commander for the first time. I took some inspiration from the Tiny Leaders Azusa I was working on.
Engine:
Burgeoning
Life From The Loam
Aggressive Mining
Seismic Assault
Exploration
Azusa, Lost But Seeking
Courser of Kruphix
Oracle of Mul Daya
Horn of Greed
Crucible of Worlds
Storm Cauldron
Seer's Sundial
Abundance
Recycle
Titania, Protector of Argoth
Sylvan Library
These form the core of our deck. We are going to put in more support for our theme, but these are our the cards that we want to find to make our deck run. They push us through our deck and add to our mana development at a really fast pace. We are going to be playing significantly more land than normal to make all these effects work, and we are going to need tons of mana for our Battle-cruisers.
Tons of Mana:
Mox Diamond
Lotus Cobra
Mana Reflection
Sol Ring
Mana Vault
Mana Crypt
Gilded Lotus
Grim Monolith
Basalt Monolith
Cultivate
Kodama's Reach
Skyshroud Claim
Boundless Realms
Orcish Lumberjack
Yavimaya Elder
Some amount of land to play is going to be valuable due to Aggressive Mining's drawback, but land to hand is also valuable because lightning bolt is fun. We have our Engine block and our Mana block. Now we need a Payoff block.
Payoffs:
Tooth and Nail
Regal Force
Avenger of Zendikar
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
Genesis Wave
Praetor's Council
Terastodon
Karn Liberated
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
Vorinclex, the Voice of Hunger
I don't normally include mana tutors this early, but our deck already has a really solid theme and some marquee cards.
Tutors:
Expedition Map
Sylvan Scrying
Gamble
Crop Rotation
Realms Uncharted
The rest are a balance of draw sevens, utility, and removal. This section will be the recipient of the initial change list.
The rest:
Wheel of Fortune
Memory Jar
Rings of Brighthearth
Grafted Exoskeleton
Mulch
Journey of Discovery
Hull Breach
Decimate
And the most important part of the the deck...
Land:
Taiga
Stomping Ground
Wooded Foothills
Misty Rainforest
Windswept Heath
Gruul Turf
Temple of Abandon
Terrain Generator
Barbarian Ring
Centaur Garden
Tranquil Thicket
Forgotten Cave
Blasted Landscape
Slippery Karst
Smoldering Crater
Kessig Wolf Run
Rootbound Crag
Reliquary Tower
Command Tower
Thespian's Stage
Dark Depths
Vesuva
Terramorphic Expanse
Evolving Wilds
Raging Ravine
Fungal Reaches
Ancient Tomb
Glacial Chasm
Petrified Field
Temple of the False God
Dust Bowl
Wasteland
Strip Mine
Fire-Lit Thicket
9x Forest
1x Mountain
This list is, as they all are, a first draft.
I'm dubious as to the usefulness of Recycle, Mox Diamond, Terrastodon, and Decimate. Recycle might just straight up not work. It seems like it would combine well with our Explore type effects, providing a continuous stream of lands. It obviously stops being useful unless we can chain cards together for it. Its possible that outside a Storm shell we just can't use it. Mox Diamond is essentially a free roll, but its possible we just don't care about the card. Especially since at two colors the fixing aspect of it isn't going to be very useful. Terrastodon is a great card. I identified it for possible exclusion because our payoff cards should be as tight as possible. If we need room for more engine or protection (something we lack entirely) than Terrastodon is the first cut from that pile. Regal Force almost got the initial identifier, but the ability to draw so many lands to hand is so explosive. It does vary wildly, but I'm going with explosive here. Decimate is awesome but even in EDH lining up all the card types can be hard.
Obvious cards that could find a home are Eternal Witness, Swiftfoot Boots/Lightning Greaves, Rubblehulk, Terravore, Nostalgic Dreams, other Regrowth effects, Elvish Pioneer, Sylvan Safekeeper, and Groundskeeper. Essentially protection effects for our fatties and our engine. We are also a bit lighter on land than intended, so we might want to sneak in 1-4 more land.
Well I hope you guys like this one. Next week I'll be back with some more hilarity.
The sorted list:
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/we-eat/
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Tiny Builds
So having seen some tiny leaders in action, I have an idea of a really strong, archetypal deck. One of the better win conditions in the format is Thespian Stage plus Dark Depths. The combo is easy to assemble
and, with a little love, hard to stop.
On the quest for finding out the best suited deck for the combo, the first question we should ask is, what color/colors do we want to be? This combo is colorless so we can actually go anywhere. Green is the obvious color to support lands, but Blue is also a strong contender with card draw and Intuition. Black has the best removal in the format in the form of edicts. White gives us Weathered Wayfarer but not a lot else on its own, and Red is pretty unsuited to this particular style of deck. Lets go through our options one by one.
The clear winner to focus a deck around the combo is green though. It has the most tricks and the closest tie to land. Black has tutors and Vampire Hexmage, and blue has Intuition. While solid contributors they just aren't deep enough to make the central point of the deck. Green definitely has enough depth. In fact it has enough that I had to cut a bunch of cards to make the following list.
Mono-Green
The general for mono-green Depths is a toss up between Azusa for speed, and Omnath for being a huge threat on his own. We don't have Seedborn Muse, but we can lean on some X spells for explosive plays. Ultimately I settled on Azusa since I want to be more land oriented.
Azusa, Lost but Seeking
Enchantments:
Exploration
Sylvan Library
Courser of Kruphix
Songs of the Dryads
Sorceries:
Gelatinous Genesis
Explore
Life From The Loam
Mulch
Sylvan Scrying
Genesis Wave
Artifacts:
Mox Diamond
Zuran Orb
Expedition Map
Sensei's Divining Top
Crucible of Worlds
Horn of Greed
Creatures:
Budoka Gardener
Fa'adiyah Seer
Genesis Hydra
Vinelasher Kudzu
Dungrove Elder
Reclamation Sage
Unyaro Bees
Instant:
Crop Rotation
Constant Mists
Sprout Swarm
Realms Uncharted
Land:
Ancient Tomb
Bazaar of Baghdad
Dark Depths
Deserted Temple
Dust Bowl
Glacial Chasm
Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
Misty Rainforest
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
Petrified Field
Scrying Sheets
8x Snow-Covered Forests
Thawing Glacier
Thespian's Stage
Tranquil Thicket
This is my first crack at a mono-green version of the deck. This one is very focused on getting the two lands together as fast as possible. There are some pay-offs for going big with our mana. Genesis Wave is going to be huge for us, but unfortunately limits the number of Hydras we can put in our deck. Scrying Sheets are a way to draw some extra cards every once in a while, but unless we dropped several more non-basics the percentage hits are going to be quite low. It goes up when you consider Top and Library. Courser is going to be an all star for us. It not only lets us gain a significant amount of life, but also extends the range of our Explores. Playing extra lands is all well and good, but you run out of them pretty fast unless you can draw cards. Its the same logic behind including Crucible of Worlds and lands that eat themselves or other lands. Courser is even better than that since it lets us use our library manipulation to essentially draw extra cards. We are somewhat lacking on removal, but that isn't green's strong suite. Between the Glacial Chasm and Constant Mists we should be ok to prevent getting attacked to death, but only having two disenchants is disconcerting.
I can see several ways to adjust the deck and what other colors we can add to spin the deck into other things, but they deserve their own post. Sideboards will vary wildly depending on your meta-game but having more solid disenchants is where I would start.
and, with a little love, hard to stop.
On the quest for finding out the best suited deck for the combo, the first question we should ask is, what color/colors do we want to be? This combo is colorless so we can actually go anywhere. Green is the obvious color to support lands, but Blue is also a strong contender with card draw and Intuition. Black has the best removal in the format in the form of edicts. White gives us Weathered Wayfarer but not a lot else on its own, and Red is pretty unsuited to this particular style of deck. Lets go through our options one by one.
The clear winner to focus a deck around the combo is green though. It has the most tricks and the closest tie to land. Black has tutors and Vampire Hexmage, and blue has Intuition. While solid contributors they just aren't deep enough to make the central point of the deck. Green definitely has enough depth. In fact it has enough that I had to cut a bunch of cards to make the following list.
Mono-Green
The general for mono-green Depths is a toss up between Azusa for speed, and Omnath for being a huge threat on his own. We don't have Seedborn Muse, but we can lean on some X spells for explosive plays. Ultimately I settled on Azusa since I want to be more land oriented.
Azusa, Lost but Seeking
Enchantments:
Exploration
Sylvan Library
Courser of Kruphix
Songs of the Dryads
Sorceries:
Gelatinous Genesis
Explore
Life From The Loam
Mulch
Sylvan Scrying
Genesis Wave
Artifacts:
Mox Diamond
Zuran Orb
Expedition Map
Sensei's Divining Top
Crucible of Worlds
Horn of Greed
Creatures:
Budoka Gardener
Fa'adiyah Seer
Genesis Hydra
Vinelasher Kudzu
Dungrove Elder
Reclamation Sage
Unyaro Bees
Instant:
Crop Rotation
Constant Mists
Sprout Swarm
Realms Uncharted
Land:
Ancient Tomb
Bazaar of Baghdad
Dark Depths
Deserted Temple
Dust Bowl
Glacial Chasm
Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
Misty Rainforest
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
Petrified Field
Scrying Sheets
8x Snow-Covered Forests
Thawing Glacier
Thespian's Stage
Tranquil Thicket
This is my first crack at a mono-green version of the deck. This one is very focused on getting the two lands together as fast as possible. There are some pay-offs for going big with our mana. Genesis Wave is going to be huge for us, but unfortunately limits the number of Hydras we can put in our deck. Scrying Sheets are a way to draw some extra cards every once in a while, but unless we dropped several more non-basics the percentage hits are going to be quite low. It goes up when you consider Top and Library. Courser is going to be an all star for us. It not only lets us gain a significant amount of life, but also extends the range of our Explores. Playing extra lands is all well and good, but you run out of them pretty fast unless you can draw cards. Its the same logic behind including Crucible of Worlds and lands that eat themselves or other lands. Courser is even better than that since it lets us use our library manipulation to essentially draw extra cards. We are somewhat lacking on removal, but that isn't green's strong suite. Between the Glacial Chasm and Constant Mists we should be ok to prevent getting attacked to death, but only having two disenchants is disconcerting.
I can see several ways to adjust the deck and what other colors we can add to spin the deck into other things, but they deserve their own post. Sideboards will vary wildly depending on your meta-game but having more solid disenchants is where I would start.
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