Kor Firewalker is not the biggest problem in that matchup IMHO.
The problem is that if they have a good strategy, they can easily block and trade 1-1 our initial rush and after replenish their hands and rebuild their squad with Squadron Hawk, Stoneforge mystic and other tutoring effects. Perilous myr is not a solid option since they obviously never block it and I found myself burning it down because he is not able to block their army of flying (and equiped) creatures. (did i mention ornithopter??). This matchup is were arc trail and forked bolt really shine. you really need 2 for 1 here.
and please do not try to use mark of mutiny against and argentum armor equiped creature.... :/
Another fine article as always. I can't wait for the new product. The one rule change I can't wait for is when they finally update the rules to match and have the Comamnders loose thier super legendary status. The other day in a game I tried to clone a general 3 times in the same game because I kept forgetting they have supper legendary as opposed to EDH where if you clone a general, it goes to the GY due to the legendary rule.
Tangucho
Thanks for reading and thanks for the insightful comments :)
I like the thopter idea. I might experiment right now cutting 1 mox for the thopter.
What's your mana base and decklist?
I think the quest match-up is VERY dependent on them having their engine (Turn 3 Armor) vs. your engine (Turn 1 Kuldotha + Turn 2 and 3 Bushwhacker/Chief). So far with the sideboard, I haven't had that much trouble with Kor Firewalker. It's only an issue when they drop a Quest and a couple of him. I think the match-up is at worst 60-40 in their favor. When they don't have their broken Armor draws, their deck is really slow, even with the Caw'd advantage they have.
You could do what the first poster does and side in 4 Perilous Myr. That should remove all Kor Firewalker problems. And you just have to hope they don't draw Turn 1 Quest.
this is my first post on puremtgo and I follow this article because i play this deck too. I do feel that RED has all the tools needed to play a great deck right now.
My list is quite similar to yours, I toyed with several options (almost of all the discussed here). I´ve ended playing a list with no-moxes. mainly because its a little expensive and its legendary (and rarely i have metalcraft for it) In that direction i rather play ornithopter that at least can protect your koth (if you play it) and can land some extra valuable 1 damage if you have bushwhacker.
I do really like the KoTH inclussion since i often auto scoop when I reach turn 6 and havent win already. It´s quite unexpected and you really have an army to defend him if needed. I am not really into the furnace celebration strategy. cost activation is quite high for the mana base and not sure about the ruling but i think that you need to pay the activation cost for each land sacrificed with devastating summons. it means you need at least 5 lands to deal 4 extra damage (and if you have bushwhacker in hand there is no need to do it)
Regarding non-basics and/or utility cards I do like some anti-blocker strategy. I do prefer smoldering spires over teetering peaks. Also tried to find a spot for flame slash since overgrown battlement and wall of omens are a pain for this deck. Oh it also deal with baloths!.
totally agreed with galvanic blast. That was my first observation when i read your first article.
WW Quest its really a difficult match. it is almost 20/80 for me. Quite frustrating.
Let me start off by saying thank you for the great honor of becoming the newest Heirloom Godfather! It was a totally unexpected and welcome surprise :)
I think the sideboard for my Merfolk deck is actually Nagarjuna's Hypergenesis 2.0 sideboard. My sideboard was this :
My favorite thing about your decklist is the PRICE!!! It's a thing of beauty. I'll try to play it, list it as a "budget"/full-powered version, and credit you.
I like the Kuldotha + Spellbomb combo, however, I feel like there are a lot of match ups where it feels too slow. 3 mana, spent over 2 turns, and 1 card for 3 1/1s is certainly above the curve. But knowing Baloths and Titans and Jace and Argentum and stuff is coming in 1-2 Turns makes really nervous about spending 3 mana for a 3/3. That being said, I still play 3 Spellbomb and really like the combo in certain match-ups like the Mirror and Vamps, etc. But I think the Rogue Elephant style of card disadvantage suits this deck better.
I agree with the rise of Aggro. When I first started grinding a few weeks back, Pyromancer's Ascension was played fairly heavily, and maindeck Arc Trail against them, and Spagnolo/Gerry T control, etc. made me want to cry. However, I haven't played a U/R Ascension in the queues in weeks.
Maybe we just play different queues, but I just never get the Mirror/RDW en mass. Last night I played 6 matches in TNMO and got 1 Mirror for the first time in a long time. I never see the mirror in the 2-mans either.
I tuned the deck this week to specifically crush Valakut and put up good games against U/B, U/W, and RUG, and
good games versus R/B Vamps and Boros.
I'm very surprised that a lot of the mono-colored aggro decks don't run 3-4 Tectonic. For me, I'm just scared about the mana base. Out of the 50-100 games I played this week, the shuffler was tossing me 1-land hands, and even on the draw, not finding another land for 2-3 turns like 8% of the time. As such, the fear is in me now to stick to Basics. I really would like 2 copies of Teetering for Valakut and a couple of Tectonics would be nice. Deadguy Red ran 17 Mountains 4 Wasteland with 4 Ball Lightnings and 4 Fireblast in the main, so it seems doable.
Finally, in testing Furnace Celebration last night, I have mixed feelings. In a couple of games, I drew it and it was great, definitely a big reason why I won those games. But other times, I would just use it to bait a counter so I could stick a Koth next turn. The issue for me seems that when I draw hands like 2 Scalding, 1 Spellbomb, Furnace Celebration, Lightning Bolt, Goblin GUide, Kuldotha Rebirth, you often have to sacrifice a lot of your sacrifice outlets before Furnace Celebration sticks.
Even a Turn 3 Celebration, I feel like I will have used 1-3 Fetchlands and a Kuldotha and/or Spellbomb by that point, reducing my Furnace targets from 16-20 to 10-15.
Thanks for the continuing comments and analysis. It's giving a TON of testing work to do. But I love the new ideas and tweaking the deck to make it better :)
I'm hoping to draft twice this weekend so maybe I can change it up a little and try this style. See if it works out for me.
RE: Metalcraft - you're correct to avoid it, as it is a trap. Much like anything but the most auto-draft infect decks, dedicated metalcraft asks you to play subpar cards to enable a few good ones. I tend to only play metalcraft cards that are already at least decent (carapace forger, ghalma's warden, bladetribe berserkers, galvanic blast etc...) unless I have a sure fire method to get tons of great artifacts on the table (i.e. myr smith). Chrome steeds and rusted relics can just languish on the board when you don't have enough artifacts, or even worse, can cause you to play lousy artifacts to enable them.
RE: Argentum Armor - Your assessment is fair, and there was nothing else really that great for you in that pack.
Dang that decklist looks so familiar, oh wait a minute, I played against it last night lol. Summons is the better pick imo. You almost never summons without bushwacker so DOJ shouldn't be as big of an issue if played properly.
Of all the beautiful women in the world, you pick Katy Perry. Ugh, what has the world come to! Not only does she not make the top ten list of best looking celebrities, her music sucks!
Maybe its best to sort out what kind of deck you want to play against certain matchups, so you can mix it up when you see a deck rise in popularity.
I spoke to Dunkle_stille about this too. It seems like a good idea to swamp between both Furnace Celebration and Devastating Summons.
For me Furnace Celebration is perfect against any slow or control deck. popping a fetchland to deal with a threat is great and it also provides you with the necessary range when they seem to stabilize.
Devastating summons is awesome against any aggro strategy, Vamps cant deal with 4/4's. The burn/red aggro mirror gets awkward when both players have dragon's claw out. Devastating summons for 5+ wins that matchup. So basically any deck that would counter your Devastating Summons or Day of judgements after, loses to furnace celebration.
As for the maindeck, I really want to play 9 CMC 0 artifacts (8possibilities* 7 cards drawn =56/60 chance of having at least one on turn 1)But i just can't find a card that has value. I toyed with an accorder's shield, but cut it a few games after. I also really like to play a drawn kuldotha from a spellbomb.
The weakness of the deck is often a clasm or Day of judgement. The Chimeric Mass dodges both and rapes any deck that relies on sorcery speed removal.
Speaking of which, I currently play 3 Arc trail maindeck because of the increase of aggro decks like boros, vampires and argentum wheenie. It's also nice against Caw-go (Though i'd rather have the Searing Blaze to demotivate them even further.)
Furthermore, i really wanted to play a set of tectonic edge to further improve the matchup against control and get more activations for furnace celebration (kill your manland and take 2 to go! B*tch) but ended up with only two copies sticking in the maindeck due to mountain count and goblin chieftains who require 1RR.
Sideboard
3 Shatter (Argentum wheenie)
3 Mark of Mutiny (valakut ramp etc.)
3 Furnace Celebration (Control)
1 Devastating Summons
4 Dragon Claw/ Perilous Myr (Firewalker) I'm looking for a balance between those, at the moment i see more red and no firewalkers, but with the increase of red, more firewalkers will come. So I guess it will be 2/2 most of the time) Right now i have 3/1 because it seems no one plays firewalkers.
1 Arc Trail
Wow, so I won the Heirloom Media Contributor award! Thank you!
Also I'm very happy that Naga won the season zero finale. Not only because he spent so much time perfecting that deck and finally managed to turn it into a Tier-1 deck, but also because he really is a staunch defender of the format and dedicates a lot of time and energy to it. So it was a much deserved win.
Sorry about that Jarunik, I guess the Snip-It tool that comes on my comp is a bit limited in usefulness, I'll certianly take a look at other options for the next one.
Thanks for the good article. One point though: Could you please try to increase the quality of the screenshots next time? It is a bit hard to decipher.
I am really looking forward to the next season and constructed tournaments.
An excellent walkthrough for deckbuilding in this format. (Most of the advice is really applicable elsewhere as well.) Well worth the wait. :) Monoblack has it a bit rough but commander choice aside I think your deck is about as tuned as it gets for the color. Obviously some things come down to choices/preferences and I am sure for instance I would rather not cut Visara if possible because she just ends games but your way is just as good as mine (perhaps better.) I hope to see more of this in future articles as there are techniques for building multicolor decks which are less applicable in mono color decks.
In Re getting your article back after submitting, you can email Josh directly at joshua.claytor@gmail.com. Also you can use the text box in the Workflow area. Though I don't know how much more effective that is.
Congratulations Nagarjuna! A more worthy person is hard to think of. You certainly have come quite far with the hypergenesis deck. Glad to see you stuck with it.
The first season of Heirloom constructed was a blast and the second one brought up a lot of great new decks! The Sealed League is far beyond anything i experienced in limited before! I played 64 matches in 4 weeks so far with a card pool for 2 tix and won more than 10 tix! Thinking about the upcomming possibilites to play limited with different pools (standard, block...) I can't wait for it!
Note: The abstract of the article still says that the combo event runs for the /12/25/2010
Tribal events are also 60 min a round in total, I missunderstood the formulation about it at first too.
I'm working on my Heirloom Commander deck, with Pheldagrif heh, figure it should be a fun engine to make friends in ffa, or at least fail miserably with.
I'll refer to this a bit along with Lythand's recent article to at least try to make something worth muster.
Kor Firewalker is not the biggest problem in that matchup IMHO.
The problem is that if they have a good strategy, they can easily block and trade 1-1 our initial rush and after replenish their hands and rebuild their squad with Squadron Hawk, Stoneforge mystic and other tutoring effects. Perilous myr is not a solid option since they obviously never block it and I found myself burning it down because he is not able to block their army of flying (and equiped) creatures. (did i mention ornithopter??). This matchup is were arc trail and forked bolt really shine. you really need 2 for 1 here.
and please do not try to use mark of mutiny against and argentum armor equiped creature.... :/
Another fine article as always. I can't wait for the new product. The one rule change I can't wait for is when they finally update the rules to match and have the Comamnders loose thier super legendary status. The other day in a game I tried to clone a general 3 times in the same game because I kept forgetting they have supper legendary as opposed to EDH where if you clone a general, it goes to the GY due to the legendary rule.
Tangucho
Thanks for reading and thanks for the insightful comments :)
I like the thopter idea. I might experiment right now cutting 1 mox for the thopter.
What's your mana base and decklist?
I think the quest match-up is VERY dependent on them having their engine (Turn 3 Armor) vs. your engine (Turn 1 Kuldotha + Turn 2 and 3 Bushwhacker/Chief). So far with the sideboard, I haven't had that much trouble with Kor Firewalker. It's only an issue when they drop a Quest and a couple of him. I think the match-up is at worst 60-40 in their favor. When they don't have their broken Armor draws, their deck is really slow, even with the Caw'd advantage they have.
You could do what the first poster does and side in 4 Perilous Myr. That should remove all Kor Firewalker problems. And you just have to hope they don't draw Turn 1 Quest.
Grats Chris,
Oh I didn't even notice till just now, must have forgotten to delete that half of the list when I put it up, Sorry about that. (silly of me heh)
see you then =)
X-
hi.
this is my first post on puremtgo and I follow this article because i play this deck too. I do feel that RED has all the tools needed to play a great deck right now.
My list is quite similar to yours, I toyed with several options (almost of all the discussed here). I´ve ended playing a list with no-moxes. mainly because its a little expensive and its legendary (and rarely i have metalcraft for it) In that direction i rather play ornithopter that at least can protect your koth (if you play it) and can land some extra valuable 1 damage if you have bushwhacker.
I do really like the KoTH inclussion since i often auto scoop when I reach turn 6 and havent win already. It´s quite unexpected and you really have an army to defend him if needed. I am not really into the furnace celebration strategy. cost activation is quite high for the mana base and not sure about the ruling but i think that you need to pay the activation cost for each land sacrificed with devastating summons. it means you need at least 5 lands to deal 4 extra damage (and if you have bushwhacker in hand there is no need to do it)
Regarding non-basics and/or utility cards I do like some anti-blocker strategy. I do prefer smoldering spires over teetering peaks. Also tried to find a spot for flame slash since overgrown battlement and wall of omens are a pain for this deck. Oh it also deal with baloths!.
totally agreed with galvanic blast. That was my first observation when i read your first article.
WW Quest its really a difficult match. it is almost 20/80 for me. Quite frustrating.
With 2 votes for Devastating Summons, I'll look into it more.
Let me start off by saying thank you for the great honor of becoming the newest Heirloom Godfather! It was a totally unexpected and welcome surprise :)
I think the sideboard for my Merfolk deck is actually Nagarjuna's Hypergenesis 2.0 sideboard. My sideboard was this :
4 Celestial Purge
4 Flashfreeze
3 Unsummon
1 Hibernation
3 Spell Pierce
Thanks again and I can't wait until tomorrow!
She makes music?????
My favorite thing about your decklist is the PRICE!!! It's a thing of beauty. I'll try to play it, list it as a "budget"/full-powered version, and credit you.
I like the Kuldotha + Spellbomb combo, however, I feel like there are a lot of match ups where it feels too slow. 3 mana, spent over 2 turns, and 1 card for 3 1/1s is certainly above the curve. But knowing Baloths and Titans and Jace and Argentum and stuff is coming in 1-2 Turns makes really nervous about spending 3 mana for a 3/3. That being said, I still play 3 Spellbomb and really like the combo in certain match-ups like the Mirror and Vamps, etc. But I think the Rogue Elephant style of card disadvantage suits this deck better.
I agree with the rise of Aggro. When I first started grinding a few weeks back, Pyromancer's Ascension was played fairly heavily, and maindeck Arc Trail against them, and Spagnolo/Gerry T control, etc. made me want to cry. However, I haven't played a U/R Ascension in the queues in weeks.
Maybe we just play different queues, but I just never get the Mirror/RDW en mass. Last night I played 6 matches in TNMO and got 1 Mirror for the first time in a long time. I never see the mirror in the 2-mans either.
I tuned the deck this week to specifically crush Valakut and put up good games against U/B, U/W, and RUG, and
good games versus R/B Vamps and Boros.
I'm very surprised that a lot of the mono-colored aggro decks don't run 3-4 Tectonic. For me, I'm just scared about the mana base. Out of the 50-100 games I played this week, the shuffler was tossing me 1-land hands, and even on the draw, not finding another land for 2-3 turns like 8% of the time. As such, the fear is in me now to stick to Basics. I really would like 2 copies of Teetering for Valakut and a couple of Tectonics would be nice. Deadguy Red ran 17 Mountains 4 Wasteland with 4 Ball Lightnings and 4 Fireblast in the main, so it seems doable.
Finally, in testing Furnace Celebration last night, I have mixed feelings. In a couple of games, I drew it and it was great, definitely a big reason why I won those games. But other times, I would just use it to bait a counter so I could stick a Koth next turn. The issue for me seems that when I draw hands like 2 Scalding, 1 Spellbomb, Furnace Celebration, Lightning Bolt, Goblin GUide, Kuldotha Rebirth, you often have to sacrifice a lot of your sacrifice outlets before Furnace Celebration sticks.
Even a Turn 3 Celebration, I feel like I will have used 1-3 Fetchlands and a Kuldotha and/or Spellbomb by that point, reducing my Furnace targets from 16-20 to 10-15.
Thanks for the continuing comments and analysis. It's giving a TON of testing work to do. But I love the new ideas and tweaking the deck to make it better :)
I'm hoping to draft twice this weekend so maybe I can change it up a little and try this style. See if it works out for me.
RE: Metalcraft - you're correct to avoid it, as it is a trap. Much like anything but the most auto-draft infect decks, dedicated metalcraft asks you to play subpar cards to enable a few good ones. I tend to only play metalcraft cards that are already at least decent (carapace forger, ghalma's warden, bladetribe berserkers, galvanic blast etc...) unless I have a sure fire method to get tons of great artifacts on the table (i.e. myr smith). Chrome steeds and rusted relics can just languish on the board when you don't have enough artifacts, or even worse, can cause you to play lousy artifacts to enable them.
RE: Argentum Armor - Your assessment is fair, and there was nothing else really that great for you in that pack.
Dang that decklist looks so familiar, oh wait a minute, I played against it last night lol. Summons is the better pick imo. You almost never summons without bushwacker so DOJ shouldn't be as big of an issue if played properly.
Of all the beautiful women in the world, you pick Katy Perry. Ugh, what has the world come to! Not only does she not make the top ten list of best looking celebrities, her music sucks!
Follow-up
Maybe its best to sort out what kind of deck you want to play against certain matchups, so you can mix it up when you see a deck rise in popularity.
I spoke to Dunkle_stille about this too. It seems like a good idea to swamp between both Furnace Celebration and Devastating Summons.
For me Furnace Celebration is perfect against any slow or control deck. popping a fetchland to deal with a threat is great and it also provides you with the necessary range when they seem to stabilize.
Devastating summons is awesome against any aggro strategy, Vamps cant deal with 4/4's. The burn/red aggro mirror gets awkward when both players have dragon's claw out. Devastating summons for 5+ wins that matchup. So basically any deck that would counter your Devastating Summons or Day of judgements after, loses to furnace celebration.
As for the maindeck, I really want to play 9 CMC 0 artifacts (8possibilities* 7 cards drawn =56/60 chance of having at least one on turn 1)But i just can't find a card that has value. I toyed with an accorder's shield, but cut it a few games after. I also really like to play a drawn kuldotha from a spellbomb.
The weakness of the deck is often a clasm or Day of judgement. The Chimeric Mass dodges both and rapes any deck that relies on sorcery speed removal.
Speaking of which, I currently play 3 Arc trail maindeck because of the increase of aggro decks like boros, vampires and argentum wheenie. It's also nice against Caw-go (Though i'd rather have the Searing Blaze to demotivate them even further.)
Furthermore, i really wanted to play a set of tectonic edge to further improve the matchup against control and get more activations for furnace celebration (kill your manland and take 2 to go! B*tch) but ended up with only two copies sticking in the maindeck due to mountain count and goblin chieftains who require 1RR.
With all being said I.O.U. a new decklist.
Maindeck Kuldotha
4 Chimeric Mass
4 Memnite
4 Panic Spellbomb
2 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Arc Trail
4 Goblin guide
4 Goblin Bushwacker
4 Goblin Chieftain
4 Kuldtoha Rebirth
2 Devastating Summons
4 Teetering Peaks
2 Tectonic Edge
7 Mountain
4 Arid Mesa
4 Scalding Tarn
Sideboard
3 Shatter (Argentum wheenie)
3 Mark of Mutiny (valakut ramp etc.)
3 Furnace Celebration (Control)
1 Devastating Summons
4 Dragon Claw/ Perilous Myr (Firewalker) I'm looking for a balance between those, at the moment i see more red and no firewalkers, but with the increase of red, more firewalkers will come. So I guess it will be 2/2 most of the time) Right now i have 3/1 because it seems no one plays firewalkers.
1 Arc Trail
I don't want to break your heart, but I heard that she kissed a girl (and she liked it).
Sorry man.
Wow, so I won the Heirloom Media Contributor award! Thank you!
Also I'm very happy that Naga won the season zero finale. Not only because he spent so much time perfecting that deck and finally managed to turn it into a Tier-1 deck, but also because he really is a staunch defender of the format and dedicates a lot of time and energy to it. So it was a much deserved win.
And great read as always!
LE
Great article, I'm really enjoying this format, can't wait for more!
Sorry about that Jarunik, I guess the Snip-It tool that comes on my comp is a bit limited in usefulness, I'll certianly take a look at other options for the next one.
X-
Thanks for the good article. One point though: Could you please try to increase the quality of the screenshots next time? It is a bit hard to decipher.
I am really looking forward to the next season and constructed tournaments.
Thx Paul!
As you know some of the tweaks for the deck were brought up by you! :-) So thx again for that and don't miss my next tuning for that deck ;-)
An excellent walkthrough for deckbuilding in this format. (Most of the advice is really applicable elsewhere as well.) Well worth the wait. :) Monoblack has it a bit rough but commander choice aside I think your deck is about as tuned as it gets for the color. Obviously some things come down to choices/preferences and I am sure for instance I would rather not cut Visara if possible because she just ends games but your way is just as good as mine (perhaps better.) I hope to see more of this in future articles as there are techniques for building multicolor decks which are less applicable in mono color decks.
Another great article!
And I can't wait to play the combined event, that will be fun :)
In Re getting your article back after submitting, you can email Josh directly at joshua.claytor@gmail.com. Also you can use the text box in the Workflow area. Though I don't know how much more effective that is.
Congratulations Nagarjuna! A more worthy person is hard to think of. You certainly have come quite far with the hypergenesis deck. Glad to see you stuck with it.
Great article as always!
Can I get my Planswalker in foil please :-)
The first season of Heirloom constructed was a blast and the second one brought up a lot of great new decks! The Sealed League is far beyond anything i experienced in limited before! I played 64 matches in 4 weeks so far with a card pool for 2 tix and won more than 10 tix! Thinking about the upcomming possibilites to play limited with different pools (standard, block...) I can't wait for it!
Note: The abstract of the article still says that the combo event runs for the /12/25/2010
Tribal events are also 60 min a round in total, I missunderstood the formulation about it at first too.
Naga
I'm working on my Heirloom Commander deck, with Pheldagrif heh, figure it should be a fun engine to make friends in ffa, or at least fail miserably with.
I'll refer to this a bit along with Lythand's recent article to at least try to make something worth muster.
X-
...