I'm normally a Legacy player. Ham on Wry II was my first Classic event and I had no time or partners to playtest the deck, except maybe one match against Nagarjuna whom I know from the Legacy Tribal Wars PRE. In the qualifier I had to learn the Shops matchup on the fly, since theory-crafting it was different than playing against it. I actually think I overestimated Stax a little, I thought it would be all god-hands from them and didn't notice how threat-light the deck is (except enderfall's version, which I thought was the best.) I really could have kept more hands than I did in this tournament if I'd realized how often I would have been able to StP their only threat. I mulliganed pretty aggressively all tournament. I also got "lucky" and dodged a couple popular matchups, but unfortunately that leaves me with no practice against those decks going into the Invitational.
I thought that with the qualifier being open to all players, there would be budget decks like mono-red and goblins, and aggro-control decks are actually pretty awful against those decks, so I kept the Chill in the sideboard. Turns out I didn't need it.
I'll have an article coming up on this site soon with my tournament report and some videos. I have been doing video deck techs and replays w/commentary for the Tribal Wars PRE for several months, and decided to start doing it for competitive eternal formats now in preparation for Vintage. So anybody interested in my deck and how the tournament went can check that out soon.
I've played a deck that had the fathom mage enter with +1/+1 counters on it (from Zamek Guildmage) and it drew cards then, I don't see why it wouldn't here.
Yes that is the interaction I was referring to. I've heard it both ways however because Fathom Mage is being created by the Mime so it doesn't "see" the counters that this particular clone effect puts on itself. But like I said, I don't have either card so I cannot take a look myself in a solitaire game. Maybe I will get Shikogpro to do that for me >_>
First I want to say great article on the comparison of the original Alpha cards to where we are today, it must have taken a lot of time to put it together. It was an enjoyabe read.
I don't think the phrase "power creep" really applies here, though. The small percentage of broken cards in Alpha/Arabian/Antiquities/Legends (P9, Sol Ring, Sinkhole, Mana Drain, Berserk etc.) aren't really relevent to a discussion on power creep. They were mostly never reprinted, and most were banned or restricted. I think in examining the actual power creep, you need to take it from the time of late 1994 onwards (Dark/Fallen Empires), when the power level was reset with proper play testing.
Arguably you could start "power creep" discussions from 1998 onwards as there was another smaller bubble of broken cards around the Tempest/Urza's era.
I guess my point is that we didn't creep from Alpha to now, we had Alpha/Arabian/Antiquities/Legends, and then fell off that cliff within a year, and then the creep started from there.
Also, it would still be fun to do it for the creatures...
Thank you for the feedback, I knew of the pic=cardname tag, but if I were to use it on one I would want to use it for everything and aesthetically I do not know if that would have made sense. I cannot change the decklist. When I previewed it it looked fine, it seemed whenever I would preview the list something about it would change.
Due to my budget even though a playset of caverns would have made sense I did not have the funds to for it. The same for fetch lands. When it comes to match-ups in the article I state as is stands the list itself is not that competitive yet, while it can steal some games. It has some holes in its game that is holding it back (hopefully m14 solved this). Also I stated in the article when I update the list and write my follow up article I will be going over match-ups and so forth and really looking delving into that. As it stands though this article is a precursor to an article that will be more on a more competitive list. I wanted to write about something fun I brewed with my stream and to lay the groundwork for the follow-up.
Hopefully you enjoyed the article though. I have another in the works that I am excited about. So hopefully you will give that a quick read also.
Nice first article. Couple of pointers - for less than commonly played cards, it's worthwhile putting the picture, using the (pic=[cardname]) tag, directly in the article. The ones where it would be good here are hte individual slivers which you talk about in detail, it saves people having to click through to know what you're talking about. Pictures help to break up the wall of text too. Also, there's something very broken with the formatting of your decklist, make sure to preview the article before submitting to pick up things like this.
On the list itself, other than the slight odd-ness of something which is already obsoleted in paper magic, it looks pretty interesting although it'd be interesting to hear at least some match reports to see if it's at all viable given that slivers has never really been a modern deck to my knowledge. Does the list want the full four caverns? seems good as a mana fixer with anti-counter utility.
At 7 cents try replacing the sphinx with Yeva, Nature's Herald. 4/4 for 4 isn't horrible plus she has Flash. Giving all of your other green creatures Flash lets you leave mana open on your turn for counters. It turns your Eternal Witness into a pseudo Snapcaster at 5 or more mana and you can safely drop scutes or tuskcaller into play eot. Heck, she might be better than Garruk in this deck?
Also, as far as cost to power, the Goblin deck floating around in the Tourney Practice room costs about $25 with just basics. Taking out the Goblin Guides brings it down to a whopping $2! (Even cheaper if you scrounge around on the Pennybot.) For $2 that deck can blaze out some t4 wins. I'm pretty sure you can build an non-optimized Affinity/Robots deck for about $20 as well that can still bash in wins.
That's why I love Modern, you don't have to spend tons of money for a fun and effective deck on MTGO.
Some observations though. I believe AEther Vial is used in Yasooka's deck as soft lock with Eternal Witness and Cryptic Command. With Vial set to 3 you can flash in a Witness and return Cryptic Command to your hand at any time, then use Command's bounce ability to put Witness back in your hand and repeat. You may be aware of that interaction but it wasn't clear from your article.
Dissipate seems like a pretty simple upgrade on Cancel - exiling the spell you counter can be relevant. I agree with your conclusion that Sphinx of Jwar Isle isn't really appropriate. Modern is quite a fast format and it's quite rare for people to play six drops just generally - unless they are Primeval Titan.
In terms of being the cheapest deck in Modern I'd suggest that you could make a Red Deck Wins deck for under $60 and be just as competitive.
May I also suggest playing matches in the Tournament Practice room. I think matches are a better representation of how a deck performs and also of the five games you played I'd suggest that only Elminster's deck was a recognised archetype in the format. I feel if you're comparing your deck to a tournament deck then it would be appropriate to take on tournament level opposition.
That said it's clear that a lot of effort went into this article and I think the decklist is very interesting. Good work!
While a little trickier with the budget manabase, at .08 Counterflux is certainly more powerful. (Funny, Dissipate currently costs more at .17.)
I also like Sphinx of Jwar Isle as a cheap solid finisher. If that card was printed anytime before original Mirrodin block people would have done nothing but complain how over powered it was....now, meh, barely even saw standard play.
(edit: hmm, I never realized the card tags don't work in the comments.)
I wonder how people would have sideboarded against it, it's rare to see those 1 drops that care about number of lands, and I agree in the idea they are overlooked/underrated.
Getting Serious, I think. Played single games mostly because I was interested in how the deck would fare against a variety of decks off the bat - if I was going to write up multiple games there'd have been time and space for fewer decks to test against.
I forgot to include that. My deck comes in at $59.15 at today's prices on MTGO Traders, that's $560.03 cheaper than the original deck, but with most of the same power.
And if you swap out the lands for all basics (but as I said, keep those Evolving Wilds in as additional Witness targets), it's even cheaper at $49.80. So that's a top Modern deck for under $50. Damn, I should've made that the title!
I'm normally a Legacy player. Ham on Wry II was my first Classic event and I had no time or partners to playtest the deck, except maybe one match against Nagarjuna whom I know from the Legacy Tribal Wars PRE. In the qualifier I had to learn the Shops matchup on the fly, since theory-crafting it was different than playing against it. I actually think I overestimated Stax a little, I thought it would be all god-hands from them and didn't notice how threat-light the deck is (except enderfall's version, which I thought was the best.) I really could have kept more hands than I did in this tournament if I'd realized how often I would have been able to StP their only threat. I mulliganed pretty aggressively all tournament. I also got "lucky" and dodged a couple popular matchups, but unfortunately that leaves me with no practice against those decks going into the Invitational.
I thought that with the qualifier being open to all players, there would be budget decks like mono-red and goblins, and aggro-control decks are actually pretty awful against those decks, so I kept the Chill in the sideboard. Turns out I didn't need it.
I'll have an article coming up on this site soon with my tournament report and some videos. I have been doing video deck techs and replays w/commentary for the Tribal Wars PRE for several months, and decided to start doing it for competitive eternal formats now in preparation for Vintage. So anybody interested in my deck and how the tournament went can check that out soon.
I've played a deck that had the fathom mage enter with +1/+1 counters on it (from Zamek Guildmage) and it drew cards then, I don't see why it wouldn't here.
Yes that is the interaction I was referring to. I've heard it both ways however because Fathom Mage is being created by the Mime so it doesn't "see" the counters that this particular clone effect puts on itself. But like I said, I don't have either card so I cannot take a look myself in a solitaire game. Maybe I will get Shikogpro to do that for me >_>
If you are referring to copying Fathom Mage and putting counters on it with another exile from the Mime, it does draw you cards, as far as I'm aware
First I want to say great article on the comparison of the original Alpha cards to where we are today, it must have taken a lot of time to put it together. It was an enjoyabe read.
I don't think the phrase "power creep" really applies here, though. The small percentage of broken cards in Alpha/Arabian/Antiquities/Legends (P9, Sol Ring, Sinkhole, Mana Drain, Berserk etc.) aren't really relevent to a discussion on power creep. They were mostly never reprinted, and most were banned or restricted. I think in examining the actual power creep, you need to take it from the time of late 1994 onwards (Dark/Fallen Empires), when the power level was reset with proper play testing.
Arguably you could start "power creep" discussions from 1998 onwards as there was another smaller bubble of broken cards around the Tempest/Urza's era.
I guess my point is that we didn't creep from Alpha to now, we had Alpha/Arabian/Antiquities/Legends, and then fell off that cliff within a year, and then the creep started from there.
Also, it would still be fun to do it for the creatures...
Good catch. I copied the .html code for the image from an old blog and forgot to strip back out the link. I fixed that for Part Two.
Thank you for the feedback, I knew of the pic=cardname tag, but if I were to use it on one I would want to use it for everything and aesthetically I do not know if that would have made sense. I cannot change the decklist. When I previewed it it looked fine, it seemed whenever I would preview the list something about it would change.
Due to my budget even though a playset of caverns would have made sense I did not have the funds to for it. The same for fetch lands. When it comes to match-ups in the article I state as is stands the list itself is not that competitive yet, while it can steal some games. It has some holes in its game that is holding it back (hopefully m14 solved this). Also I stated in the article when I update the list and write my follow up article I will be going over match-ups and so forth and really looking delving into that. As it stands though this article is a precursor to an article that will be more on a more competitive list. I wanted to write about something fun I brewed with my stream and to lay the groundwork for the follow-up.
Hopefully you enjoyed the article though. I have another in the works that I am excited about. So hopefully you will give that a quick read also.
Nice first article. Couple of pointers - for less than commonly played cards, it's worthwhile putting the picture, using the (pic=[cardname]) tag, directly in the article. The ones where it would be good here are hte individual slivers which you talk about in detail, it saves people having to click through to know what you're talking about. Pictures help to break up the wall of text too. Also, there's something very broken with the formatting of your decklist, make sure to preview the article before submitting to pick up things like this.
On the list itself, other than the slight odd-ness of something which is already obsoleted in paper magic, it looks pretty interesting although it'd be interesting to hear at least some match reports to see if it's at all viable given that slivers has never really been a modern deck to my knowledge. Does the list want the full four caverns? seems good as a mana fixer with anti-counter utility.
Oooh, Yeva is an awesome call! Might just try that.
At 7 cents try replacing the sphinx with Yeva, Nature's Herald. 4/4 for 4 isn't horrible plus she has Flash. Giving all of your other green creatures Flash lets you leave mana open on your turn for counters. It turns your Eternal Witness into a pseudo Snapcaster at 5 or more mana and you can safely drop scutes or tuskcaller into play eot. Heck, she might be better than Garruk in this deck?
Also, as far as cost to power, the Goblin deck floating around in the Tourney Practice room costs about $25 with just basics. Taking out the Goblin Guides brings it down to a whopping $2! (Even cheaper if you scrounge around on the Pennybot.) For $2 that deck can blaze out some t4 wins. I'm pretty sure you can build an non-optimized Affinity/Robots deck for about $20 as well that can still bash in wins.
That's why I love Modern, you don't have to spend tons of money for a fun and effective deck on MTGO.
Interesting article.
Some observations though. I believe AEther Vial is used in Yasooka's deck as soft lock with Eternal Witness and Cryptic Command. With Vial set to 3 you can flash in a Witness and return Cryptic Command to your hand at any time, then use Command's bounce ability to put Witness back in your hand and repeat. You may be aware of that interaction but it wasn't clear from your article.
Dissipate seems like a pretty simple upgrade on Cancel - exiling the spell you counter can be relevant. I agree with your conclusion that Sphinx of Jwar Isle isn't really appropriate. Modern is quite a fast format and it's quite rare for people to play six drops just generally - unless they are Primeval Titan.
In terms of being the cheapest deck in Modern I'd suggest that you could make a Red Deck Wins deck for under $60 and be just as competitive.
May I also suggest playing matches in the Tournament Practice room. I think matches are a better representation of how a deck performs and also of the five games you played I'd suggest that only Elminster's deck was a recognised archetype in the format. I feel if you're comparing your deck to a tournament deck then it would be appropriate to take on tournament level opposition.
That said it's clear that a lot of effort went into this article and I think the decklist is very interesting. Good work!
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FBcI-JwPU6g/SpBgBE7BRDI/AAAAAAAAACc/AdW-4AEJ3G... <---not the image you probably intended to link to with Accursed Spirit...Or for that matter the other m14 cards.
Hey, thanks for replying. It has Immortal Servitude, how could you not like it?! I can't wait to see what your next Modern brews might be.
While a little trickier with the budget manabase, at .08 Counterflux is certainly more powerful. (Funny, Dissipate currently costs more at .17.)
I also like Sphinx of Jwar Isle as a cheap solid finisher. If that card was printed anytime before original Mirrodin block people would have done nothing but complain how over powered it was....now, meh, barely even saw standard play.
(edit: hmm, I never realized the card tags don't work in the comments.)
I wonder how people would have sideboarded against it, it's rare to see those 1 drops that care about number of lands, and I agree in the idea they are overlooked/underrated.
Cool I will have to try this out.
Getting Serious, I think. Played single games mostly because I was interested in how the deck would fare against a variety of decks off the bat - if I was going to write up multiple games there'd have been time and space for fewer decks to test against.
What room? I find that information can be helpful to know when reading the match (or game) report. Was there a reason it was just single games?
Um, on MTGO.
Where did you play those matches at?
Thanks!
I forgot to include that. My deck comes in at $59.15 at today's prices on MTGO Traders, that's $560.03 cheaper than the original deck, but with most of the same power.
And if you swap out the lands for all basics (but as I said, keep those Evolving Wilds in as additional Witness targets), it's even cheaper at $49.80. So that's a top Modern deck for under $50. Damn, I should've made that the title!
This is a pretty cool deck, I love it. :D
Looks fun though what was the final price on the deck?
I learned a lot from this one. I think this is reliable though. - KSA Kosher
I like this one. Good job on this. - KSA Kosher