I like the Animar list. You have a lot of little game winning 2 card combos in it, which is obviously your cup of tea. The biggest omission I see for this type of deck is Tooth and Nail. That can search up answers, or one of your combos. Crystal Shard may be worth considering as well, even though you already have Aluren and Curio. Thorn of the Amethyst and Heartwood Storyteller can be a lot of fun, I've never actually seen the Thorn played and I'm curious as to how it actually works in practice. Plow Under is interesting, I'm not a huge fan but I can see how it would be useful sometimes. You also have to watch out for non-basic land hate. There are a lot of Ruinations running around out there now, as well as Back to Basics. I have found that the hate for non-basics has been increasing. You do have some counterspells to help, but getting caught with your pants down can be a problem. Good times.
I really like this new format of State of the Program. With the improved content here I no longer bother to listen to Freed from the Reel - This article has everything I need in a much more accesible/referenable format. I think Freed has jumped the shark but thats another story. You clearly do your research sir and the Gush list presented for classic is evident of that. Ill be honest I have not been a fan of your other columns for this site but State of the Program really puts you on the map and it is one of the best and most consistent articles on this site now.
The prerelease will be starting NEXT week. It takes most of the week to pull all this together, and I have to pull results from the last week, TNMO from the future, and sometimes I screw up.
Thanks for the comment, I re-watched my Round 1 Game 2, and it wasn't that my opponent misread/understood Forced Worship for a full pacifism effect, it was the Sword of War and Peace that prevented him from blocking.
However, about reading my opponent and trying to think what he might have, that's something that is lacking from my own commentary and I'll definitely try to take that into consideration in future videos, probably starting with M12 since that's the next few videos I'll make.
I just wanted to point out that while Scavenging Ooze could potentially be crippling against Hermit Druid as you pointed out, that's only splash damage, that's not actually not why I am testing it. Bear in mind that Ooze could also help in the dredge matchup if I can stall with leyline long enough to get him active. Further, the Ooze could cripple Tendrils decks (gush or LED varieties), and it adds game against the crucible plan in Shops. This will become more important when Buried Ruin starts being added to Shop (and potentially Blue control/Oath) lists. Finally, there is a neat little interaction with Ooze where if he is facing Tarmogoyf in a mirror, he can shrink the Tarmogoyf while sometimes growing himself...
So it has a lot of potential and I am interested to see where it goes in testing. So far it has been good.
I can attest to the power of Shoath. I got skullf@#*%ed by Zach with an EOT Mystical into Channel into Emrakul into GG. Go-go first turn Metalworker... fail. I like how the meta has more or less adjusted to the Shop match up. As a Shop player, I think it's healthy for the format to see a bunch of viable decks rather than "oh darn, my worst match up, gg". BlueDiamonds, for example, put together a Gush packing control deck that steamrolled over 3 Shop decks in the first three rounds of the Classic League Season 1.
I like the new banner. A big improvement on the last one.
Maybe it's my bias as being part of the League thing, but I feel there's an energy and excitement about Classic in the air that I haven't felt since the release of ME4, which was basically excitement over the emergence of perhaps the most hated Classic deck (Shops), thereby turning =D into >_< pretty soon after. This time we are seeing lots of new decks and quite few new players: awesome sauce!
Very nice job and much appreciated. I love having the archtypes of a new format laid out. It is interesting how much of an affect bloodthirst is having - it appears to dominate the format, and is a major factor in at least half of the archetypes listed. I'm glad that the dominance of U/W fliers is over, but given the all or nothing approach of bloodthirst, I'm a bit worried that many games will be decided very early with little chance for real interaction. Too early to tell for sure; hopefully I'm wrong.
Wow, what a diverse metagame. Contro,Aggro, Infect, burn.. only missing Combo to really make it perfect.
got to hand it to wizards. On Pauper level, things seems to be in order.. I applaud all the fantastic deckbuilders out there that make this a fantastic time to play Standard pauper!
Let's cross our fingers that V4 will have some love for standard pauper.
Sensor Splicer is generally kind of bad, but I didn't mind too much with the potential to "go big" a little, boost metal-craft, and get multiple blockers if the game was going badly.
I don't totally disagree that I could have stayed Blue but I didn't this time. I tend to stick it out with blue or black too frequently.
I really hate Glint Hawk Idol, but there it probably would have been the better card although Vamps definently were valuable in my deck.
Oculus might have been a wiser pick, but I wouldn't have touched any of the other cards at that point. While I like me a darksteel jugg, he tends to be a bad blocker too, so Carapace gave me the "reach" I needed; it wasn't great, but it filled a very similar role to what Jugg would have done. I'm not saying it is right, but it was solid.
@ Char49d: I think I over looked Glissa's Scorn to be honest and didn't add it in, or at the time I probably wanted to push a faster clock with the extra creature or equipment.
@this isnt: that was my first draft to be honest and i liked volt charger because i was hoping to get some infect or a tumble magnet or some stuff like that and wanted the proliferate but thanx for the advice next draft i do im picking Lifes Finale big time.
*The thing about Sensor Splicer is that, unlike many other splicers, multiples just don't do anything. You're just vomiting overcosted guys onto the battlefield. Rough to have to play 3.
*I know you eventually switched out (the necessity of this we can argue another time), but once you start taking blue P2P1, I can't imagine why you didn't go whole-hog ... you NEED cards like Oculus and Gust Skimmer to fill the empty 2-slot in your very top-heavy deck. Seems like a flaw in the process.
*On the whole, I generally would take Glint Hawk Idol over Vampires there, even with your deck as currently constructed.
*Given how slow your deck was already, Copper Carapace seems very awkward P2P4, especially given the other options (all seem better). "Catching up on damage" might happen, but if you're behind on the board, trading 3 or 4 mana for 2 extra damage (and losing the ability to block) seems like a poor trade.
If you're referring to my joke about Timmy/Johnny/Spike liking the Sundial, that was indeed a joke, but my Spike was talking about an answer to Hive Mind decks.
It's funny that you say it's a pretty obvious combo. I agree totally, but the teenage me totally thought he was terribly clever finding this combo.
I built this deck back in the day as a type 1 deck. I had been staring at Cadaverous Bloom for a while, when a friend brought a z-fold dot matrix printout of a visions spoiler to our play night. While I was annoyed that this instantly killed any hopes of gaming that evening, I was enthralled with several cards in the set. Particularly Retribution of the Meek, Desertion, Undiscovered Paradise (which for a while I thought to be an improved City of Brass) and Prosperity. Oddly the combo didnt actually occur to me till after I had managed to trade for 3 copies on the sets release. Originally I liked it just because I like massive card draw in general. After a day of abusing it with Underworld Dreams and Black Vise, I built the combo as a 4 color type 1 rebuild of an old combo deck. Somehow the drain life was not obvious to me, and never made it into my deck. Instead my build was run off the kill of Storm Seeker, with Underworld Dreams as a backup.
I have built this deck (in lesser versions due to missing cards from MTGO) many times, sadly remembering each time how boring it is for the opponent after 1-2 games, and retiring it again.
My first version (or as close as I can recall):
3 Prosperity
4 Cadaverous Bloom
2 Underworld Dreams (man these were hard to find then)
4 Storm Seeker
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Fork
3 Reconstruction
1 Black Lotus
1 Black Vise
1 Demonic Tutor
2 Desertion
4 Arcane Denial
4 Dark Ritual
1 Jester's Cap
1 Feldon's Cane
4 Force of Will
1 Regrowth
1 Recall
1 Reverberation or Deflection (my builds at the time usually had one of the two)
20 assorted duals and mishra's factories
Not the best build I did of it, but was great fun. The ideal hand for the deck had nothing to do with Bloom, or Prosperity actually, and killed first turn (almost never happened, and not once in competitive play) with
Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, 2 Reconstruction, Fork, and a Storm Seeker. Play Lotus, sac for Blue Ancestral on opponent bringing them to 10 cards, play reconstruction on lotus, sac for Green, play reconstrucion on lotus, sac for Red, play storm seeker... fork it.
I used to love (bordering on obsession) playing creatureless decks with Desertion, and killing my opponent with their best creature, thus the 2 copies in the maindeck.
A fun read and trip down memory lane as always Pete, thanks...
Round 1, Game 2 I would have liked to see some commentary on what your opponent was thinking. Clearly he was misunderstanding Forced Worship as a full Pacifism type effect, rather than just a "can't attack" spell. If he realized he could block with the affected creature, he would have played differently at several points, and would have waited another turn or two before conceeding, hoping to topdeck an answer. Clearly his odd plays are explained perfectly if he thinks the effect is "can't attack or block", so you should have read him as thinking that way.
Solemn would be in top-3 most definitely, if this would have been a Standard centric list. Because his return effected only Standard (okay Extended too but no one plays it anyways). Solemn isn't something new for Legacy, Modern and all those casual/semi-competitive formats.
The same way I left the Titans at number 20 even though we all know they're much, much better than that. I placed cards that made me say "Wow" much higher than those which were only "yeah, been there, done that" for me.
Legacy article will come in about 1 month. Next week it's Sundial of the Infinite week, then two weeks in a row it'll be casual stuff (a part of me really loves doing those silly & fun things), and then I'll come with a very nice Legacy article. There could be another article in between too, I'm not so sure about it now.
The reason of this delay is that I need some cards from M12 by the way. I need to get them (they're not even online yet), build the deck, test the deck in the TP Room, tweak it, take it to 2mans etc... This will take time.
I basically do 4-3-2-2 exclusively. I've noticed that staying open in pack can almost be punishing since people go "oh, here's a decent U card after he took a phyrexian mana blue card... BLUE IS OPEN" and you never see another blue card, as an example. I felt like the Anatomist was amazing going into this, having had three in the last day, I can say he's good, but burn would have been correct, or at least probably correct.
I like the Animar list. You have a lot of little game winning 2 card combos in it, which is obviously your cup of tea. The biggest omission I see for this type of deck is Tooth and Nail. That can search up answers, or one of your combos. Crystal Shard may be worth considering as well, even though you already have Aluren and Curio. Thorn of the Amethyst and Heartwood Storyteller can be a lot of fun, I've never actually seen the Thorn played and I'm curious as to how it actually works in practice. Plow Under is interesting, I'm not a huge fan but I can see how it would be useful sometimes. You also have to watch out for non-basic land hate. There are a lot of Ruinations running around out there now, as well as Back to Basics. I have found that the hate for non-basics has been increasing. You do have some counterspells to help, but getting caught with your pants down can be a problem. Good times.
Its just trust in those you invite, so you have to be very cautious.
I really like this new format of State of the Program. With the improved content here I no longer bother to listen to Freed from the Reel - This article has everything I need in a much more accesible/referenable format. I think Freed has jumped the shark but thats another story. You clearly do your research sir and the Gush list presented for classic is evident of that. Ill be honest I have not been a fan of your other columns for this site but State of the Program really puts you on the map and it is one of the best and most consistent articles on this site now.
how do you prevent fraud - people joining the cube then "borrowing" the cards for the cube and never returning them?
The prerelease will be starting NEXT week. It takes most of the week to pull all this together, and I have to pull results from the last week, TNMO from the future, and sometimes I screw up.
Prereleases start Thrusday, the 28th.
Hey Felorin,
Thanks for the comment, I re-watched my Round 1 Game 2, and it wasn't that my opponent misread/understood Forced Worship for a full pacifism effect, it was the Sword of War and Peace that prevented him from blocking.
However, about reading my opponent and trying to think what he might have, that's something that is lacking from my own commentary and I'll definitely try to take that into consideration in future videos, probably starting with M12 since that's the next few videos I'll make.
Thanks for the kind words guys.
I just wanted to point out that while Scavenging Ooze could potentially be crippling against Hermit Druid as you pointed out, that's only splash damage, that's not actually not why I am testing it. Bear in mind that Ooze could also help in the dredge matchup if I can stall with leyline long enough to get him active. Further, the Ooze could cripple Tendrils decks (gush or LED varieties), and it adds game against the crucible plan in Shops. This will become more important when Buried Ruin starts being added to Shop (and potentially Blue control/Oath) lists. Finally, there is a neat little interaction with Ooze where if he is facing Tarmogoyf in a mirror, he can shrink the Tarmogoyf while sometimes growing himself...
So it has a lot of potential and I am interested to see where it goes in testing. So far it has been good.
I can attest to the power of Shoath. I got skullf@#*%ed by Zach with an EOT Mystical into Channel into Emrakul into GG. Go-go first turn Metalworker... fail. I like how the meta has more or less adjusted to the Shop match up. As a Shop player, I think it's healthy for the format to see a bunch of viable decks rather than "oh darn, my worst match up, gg". BlueDiamonds, for example, put together a Gush packing control deck that steamrolled over 3 Shop decks in the first three rounds of the Classic League Season 1.
I like the new banner. A big improvement on the last one.
Maybe it's my bias as being part of the League thing, but I feel there's an energy and excitement about Classic in the air that I haven't felt since the release of ME4, which was basically excitement over the emergence of perhaps the most hated Classic deck (Shops), thereby turning =D into >_< pretty soon after. This time we are seeing lots of new decks and quite few new players: awesome sauce!
Very nice job and much appreciated. I love having the archtypes of a new format laid out. It is interesting how much of an affect bloodthirst is having - it appears to dominate the format, and is a major factor in at least half of the archetypes listed. I'm glad that the dominance of U/W fliers is over, but given the all or nothing approach of bloodthirst, I'm a bit worried that many games will be decided very early with little chance for real interaction. Too early to tell for sure; hopefully I'm wrong.
Wow, what a diverse metagame. Contro,Aggro, Infect, burn.. only missing Combo to really make it perfect.
got to hand it to wizards. On Pauper level, things seems to be in order.. I applaud all the fantastic deckbuilders out there that make this a fantastic time to play Standard pauper!
Let's cross our fingers that V4 will have some love for standard pauper.
I really enjoyed these videos! I hope you'll do some more in the future, since I can't possibly enter any TNMO. Keep it up! :)
Sensor Splicer is generally kind of bad, but I didn't mind too much with the potential to "go big" a little, boost metal-craft, and get multiple blockers if the game was going badly.
I don't totally disagree that I could have stayed Blue but I didn't this time. I tend to stick it out with blue or black too frequently.
I really hate Glint Hawk Idol, but there it probably would have been the better card although Vamps definently were valuable in my deck.
Oculus might have been a wiser pick, but I wouldn't have touched any of the other cards at that point. While I like me a darksteel jugg, he tends to be a bad blocker too, so Carapace gave me the "reach" I needed; it wasn't great, but it filled a very similar role to what Jugg would have done. I'm not saying it is right, but it was solid.
@ Char49d: I think I over looked Glissa's Scorn to be honest and didn't add it in, or at the time I probably wanted to push a faster clock with the extra creature or equipment.
@this isnt: that was my first draft to be honest and i liked volt charger because i was hoping to get some infect or a tumble magnet or some stuff like that and wanted the proliferate but thanx for the advice next draft i do im picking Lifes Finale big time.
*The thing about Sensor Splicer is that, unlike many other splicers, multiples just don't do anything. You're just vomiting overcosted guys onto the battlefield. Rough to have to play 3.
*I know you eventually switched out (the necessity of this we can argue another time), but once you start taking blue P2P1, I can't imagine why you didn't go whole-hog ... you NEED cards like Oculus and Gust Skimmer to fill the empty 2-slot in your very top-heavy deck. Seems like a flaw in the process.
*On the whole, I generally would take Glint Hawk Idol over Vampires there, even with your deck as currently constructed.
*Given how slow your deck was already, Copper Carapace seems very awkward P2P4, especially given the other options (all seem better). "Catching up on damage" might happen, but if you're behind on the board, trading 3 or 4 mana for 2 extra damage (and losing the ability to block) seems like a poor trade.
glissa scorn and parasitic implant in sb of sealed....in a deck with 0 removal.
You picked a volt charge over the strongest non mythic card in new phyrexia...Lifes finale is by far the pick.
In Legacy, Stifle, Angel's Grace and Trickbind are already better answers in my opinion.
I'm sure this card will see some play because it does appear broken, but not in a manner relating to hive mind decks.
Heh, yes that's true but also there is another one I need for the sideboard.
Any guesses?
LE
If you're referring to my joke about Timmy/Johnny/Spike liking the Sundial, that was indeed a joke, but my Spike was talking about an answer to Hive Mind decks.
You need Sundial for the Legacy deck, confess! :)
Kudos, that is the first sealed pool I have ever seen with 0 creature removal, amazing. Glissa's Scorn in the sideboard though? C'mon son.
Very useful article!
I'm gonna bookmark this for future reference. ;)
It's funny that you say it's a pretty obvious combo. I agree totally, but the teenage me totally thought he was terribly clever finding this combo.
I built this deck back in the day as a type 1 deck. I had been staring at Cadaverous Bloom for a while, when a friend brought a z-fold dot matrix printout of a visions spoiler to our play night. While I was annoyed that this instantly killed any hopes of gaming that evening, I was enthralled with several cards in the set. Particularly Retribution of the Meek, Desertion, Undiscovered Paradise (which for a while I thought to be an improved City of Brass) and Prosperity. Oddly the combo didnt actually occur to me till after I had managed to trade for 3 copies on the sets release. Originally I liked it just because I like massive card draw in general. After a day of abusing it with Underworld Dreams and Black Vise, I built the combo as a 4 color type 1 rebuild of an old combo deck. Somehow the drain life was not obvious to me, and never made it into my deck. Instead my build was run off the kill of Storm Seeker, with Underworld Dreams as a backup.
I have built this deck (in lesser versions due to missing cards from MTGO) many times, sadly remembering each time how boring it is for the opponent after 1-2 games, and retiring it again.
My first version (or as close as I can recall):
3 Prosperity
4 Cadaverous Bloom
2 Underworld Dreams (man these were hard to find then)
4 Storm Seeker
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Fork
3 Reconstruction
1 Black Lotus
1 Black Vise
1 Demonic Tutor
2 Desertion
4 Arcane Denial
4 Dark Ritual
1 Jester's Cap
1 Feldon's Cane
4 Force of Will
1 Regrowth
1 Recall
1 Reverberation or Deflection (my builds at the time usually had one of the two)
20 assorted duals and mishra's factories
Not the best build I did of it, but was great fun. The ideal hand for the deck had nothing to do with Bloom, or Prosperity actually, and killed first turn (almost never happened, and not once in competitive play) with
Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, 2 Reconstruction, Fork, and a Storm Seeker. Play Lotus, sac for Blue Ancestral on opponent bringing them to 10 cards, play reconstruction on lotus, sac for Green, play reconstrucion on lotus, sac for Red, play storm seeker... fork it.
I used to love (bordering on obsession) playing creatureless decks with Desertion, and killing my opponent with their best creature, thus the 2 copies in the maindeck.
A fun read and trip down memory lane as always Pete, thanks...
Round 1, Game 2 I would have liked to see some commentary on what your opponent was thinking. Clearly he was misunderstanding Forced Worship as a full Pacifism type effect, rather than just a "can't attack" spell. If he realized he could block with the affected creature, he would have played differently at several points, and would have waited another turn or two before conceeding, hoping to topdeck an answer. Clearly his odd plays are explained perfectly if he thinks the effect is "can't attack or block", so you should have read him as thinking that way.
Solemn would be in top-3 most definitely, if this would have been a Standard centric list. Because his return effected only Standard (okay Extended too but no one plays it anyways). Solemn isn't something new for Legacy, Modern and all those casual/semi-competitive formats.
The same way I left the Titans at number 20 even though we all know they're much, much better than that. I placed cards that made me say "Wow" much higher than those which were only "yeah, been there, done that" for me.
Legacy article will come in about 1 month. Next week it's Sundial of the Infinite week, then two weeks in a row it'll be casual stuff (a part of me really loves doing those silly & fun things), and then I'll come with a very nice Legacy article. There could be another article in between too, I'm not so sure about it now.
The reason of this delay is that I need some cards from M12 by the way. I need to get them (they're not even online yet), build the deck, test the deck in the TP Room, tweak it, take it to 2mans etc... This will take time.
Thanks for the comments everyone.
LE
I basically do 4-3-2-2 exclusively. I've noticed that staying open in pack can almost be punishing since people go "oh, here's a decent U card after he took a phyrexian mana blue card... BLUE IS OPEN" and you never see another blue card, as an example. I felt like the Anatomist was amazing going into this, having had three in the last day, I can say he's good, but burn would have been correct, or at least probably correct.