I'm actually a Vintage man! I only used Standard as an example most people could relate to. If I had my way I'd be playing Legacy Enchantress or ANT but that damn money barrier keeps getting in my way. Luckily, MED 4 is just around the corner and they'll be reprinting Power in it. They will... you just watch!
Nice article, I'm at that point at the moment where I keep taking decks to TP room to play but never take it that last step to an offical event or 2 the mans. I really want to but something keeps holding me back.
I'm currently running Vampires and Poly in std and Natural Order/Progenitus in Legacy without FoW.
What formats do you most compete in online? I'm a legacy man myself and it appears you might lean that way as well. Although you do talk of Jace 2.0, then again these days, who isn't talking about him.
Why worry about chalice at one, you can still use the sac ability of cabal therapy to get your bridge tokens. I'm going to go back and reread your article as I have some other things to ask. I'll edit this post in a minute.
Edit: Ok you said you believe reanimator is a favorable matchup and I have to disagree. Most lists run Blazing Archon which seems like it would be an auto win for them. Dredge runs no counters or removal. Chain and Truth aren't good enough as they do run a counterpackage. I'd be curious to see some testing data on this matchup.
Also curious how you have been matching up to Death and taxes, Landstill and the Mirror. As the meta starts to shift I am wondering how dredge will be.
Pretty good article, my only suggestion would be to utilize the deck editor. It gives the article some beauty in a manly way lol.
I was nervous coming out of the gate with an article like this, but this small bit of feedback has been very uplifting. I hope I can continue to write for this great site! Thanks!
so im in my 8th sealed deck, having only payed 24 tix and 2 urzas saga boosters to start it all off. Imo, your green is ultra week and dosent offer anything but fixing. with two prisms however i would have just gone ubr. 4 colors was your first mistake, not playing every removal spell maindeck in the colors your playing is #2(forked bolt out of the board. its rough since you dont have anybombs but kozilek, but there is so much synergy you dont even need bombs to 3-1 this format. out of the 8 sealeds i have played green has been in i think 6 or 7 of my builds with black and or red being in 6-7 as well. The base g splash b,r for removal deck is pretty good and the removal is deep enough to make it most of the time. only time i dint play g was a sick ub lvler deck that hated me (2-2) and the only time i didnt play b or r was an even sicker wg deck that had linsalva(what a bomb)
i went
3-1 brg
3-1 brg
4-0 brg
2-2 ub
2-2 gr
3-1 wg
3-1 brg
and the one im in now at 1-0 after rd 1 is also brg.
unfortunatly i have opened up bupkiss in most of these events. out of the 8 sealed decks i got sinvala, all is dust, awakining zone, and a foil wall of omens as cards worth more then 3 tix.
hope that helps people for the next 5 days. cheers.
Maybe some dredgable type creatures or ones with unearth(viscera dagger, et al) could play a similar role to pro black. Not sure how this interacts with Pestilence and whatnot(not too good with the rules with that one) Stinkweed imp could be brought back for the added quality/reliability of MBC. Not sure if this is better than your current list though, I'll try and brew something. Castigate could be replaced easily by duress.
White has some really nice utility that is showcased by your transmuters/sideboard as well as the pro mono guy. I'm willing to bet your list is better, but the power of tendrils and corrupt is very tempting to try and make work.
not bad but you made some unwise picks in there, ie dual land as others have said. air elemental and winning packs is deffanatly better then a card youll be lucky to get 2 for. i understand the alure of drafting $ rares, but garuck is $ a 2 dollar land is not. you would have had a much better chance with the air elemental. also in building the negate should have been the siren, and at least one of the illusions should have been the excomunicate, wjile the other would have been air elemental two. illusion is just awful in this format, so many things that target.
ray of revelation is a turn slower than nature's claim, but every time i boarded the ray i would board in 2 chains which worked alot more than i hoped.
i did not run into any jailers at all so the darkblast has not been awesome in the deck so far i have used some combat tricks with it like oppenant blocking ichy with a 3/4 tarm then eating a darkblast, little things like that. also i added in 2 truths just in case people go chalice for 1, i feel chalice for 1 is a lot more common than a chalice for 2, since chalice for 1 is stopping stuff like cabal therapy, aether vial, entomb, reanimator, mongoose and sensei's top.
i haven't used terastodon much i would board it in against things like stax or enchantress hoping to blow up a lot of their needed defence if worse comes to worse but it has not seen any play what so ever. i have used the duplicant a couple of times usally against reanimator, i had a game where we both had opening hand leylines, we both kept dropping our lands trying to dig for some kind of bounce then he played a show and tell dropping iona, i responded with duplicant and he scooped.
since this article has been posted i have joined 2 more events due to scheduling and went 3-1 and 0-2 but have been doing quite well in the 2mans
I've also been having a lot of fun with summoning trap. I put together a bant summoning trap, with some of the same green dudes you have along with Birds, Rhox, Ponder, and other fairly obvious choices to help with the plans. Gaining an extra 6-9 life along the way goes a long way, and after trying some other colors, it seemed like I needed at least white for removal, or red for removal + some solid spawn generators.
Jyalt - really? You cite the main problem of his build as having too many colors "4 is too many; heck even 3 is too many unless the third is only a small splash " and then propose a 4-color build?
I think the best deck here is GBr. For me, blue has been underwhelming unless you get the key cards, while with GBr you're deck would have been more stable. Mulligans happen, but you specifically reference half of the ones you made due to bad colors in your opening hand. I would have built..
1 Ancient Stirrings
1 Broodwarden
1 Growth Spasm
1 Might of the Masses
1 Ondu Giant
1 Stomper Cub
1 Wildheart Invoker
1 Brimstone Mage
1 Forked Bolt
1 Staggershock
Even though Last Kiss, Forked Bolt, and Bala Ged Scorpion are situational, I still think they are good enough to run. I get why you wanted to run blue, with a couple of decent cards, but how often with you get tour kiss/staggershock together with a fully leveled mage for a nice turn, compared to how often you'd rather just have that 2nd green mana for stomper cub? Playing all the best cards in a sealed pool never works, you really need to punish the people that do with a more stable deck.
Ultimately, your sealed pool really had no identity anyway, so you couldn't really have a focused archetype, and I would have been happy with 2-2.
I would've absolutely cut Blue from the get-go. GBr is pretty obviously the way to go, unless you prefer to splash white over red (which I don't) for Oust, Smite, Wall of Omens, and Eland Umbra. You have some ramp, solid beaters and plenty of removal, not to mention Kozilek is a game ending bomb.
I also agree with the above poster - the scorpion is awesome in this format. Even if it just kills a spawn token, you've gotten some card advantage. And often it will kill a leveler, a wall, or one of the multitude of 1 power creatures in this set.
About Renewed Faith: It does look like a straight up bad card, but I think it works in this deck. Having a confortable life total by turn 5 is crutial (there's nothing worse than having pestilence on the board and not being able to use it). And the card is great against red decks. In a control heavy metagame it looses a lot of its appeal, but the 2 man queues are loaded with agro decks so I've been quite satisfied with it (and I don't think it's the right deck to play if you expect to face a lot of control decks anyway).
On the Castigate/Augur of skulls issue: that's something I've been asking myself too... The idea behind Augur of Skulls main and Castigate SB is to make them side in more removal than they should (Augur of Skulls on turn 2 is a removal magnet) and improve game 1 against control and storm (since agro match ups are already good). But I can see a point being made for going the other way, I'm not sure wich one is the best.
I'd really like to see a MBC/Pestilence list works (Pestilence would be a lot better in a deck that runs only Swamps obviously), but I can't think of good creatures that would fit in this type of deck. There are no real option for pro black dudes and I've tested Chittering Rats and Phyrexian Rager in the BW version and they are awfull (well really any creature with less than 3 toughness is bad with Pestilence, because a lot of creatures in pauper have 2 toughness and you want to be able to activate the enchantment for 2 most of the time). I'd be really interested to see a list if you manage to make it work some way though :)
I'm marginal at best when it comes to drafting, but I honestly wouldn't of taken the rare land. Double Elemental ftw? You already had garruk, if you just won one round you would easily be breaking even. At that point I'd go for the gusto.
As long as we're talking about Rise of the Eldrazi's impact on tribal, I think Training Grounds will have a huge impact on Tribal.
There are so many creatures that it greatly improves. The Ravnica Guildmages and Lorwyn red elementals being the ones that stand to gain the most, however there are a lot more tribes that could use a bit of training.
I know, just wanted to mention that since this article was shelved for awhile :) like if anyone would run this I'm saying definitely take the suggestions I made as to dropping the other lords, they just aren't good enough
Actually you're not the first person who asked for videos and I'm afraid you won't be the last. The problem is that I'm not a *high tech* guy. To be honest I don't know how to make a video (I should be ashamed, I know), I don't know how to format it and besides I don't have a mic as well.
Of course none of those are big problems but I think I'm a bit lazy when it comes to technology. So for now I will continue with screenshots but no one knows what will happen in the future. Maybe one day I'll decide to learn how to make a video.
But first I have to learn how to write and send an SMS, what an IPod is and how to use it, how to use the microwave etc...(yeah, I know I sound hopeless).
Excellent article, great points all around. Taking a net deck and tweaking it to my liking is exactly what I love to do. I don't mind taking a decklist from scratch from time to time, but I do take quite a bit of joy knowing I took a semi-proven list or even a proven list and made it my own. Having said that, I wouldn't change anything initially when you start to test. To many times ppl take a net deck and just immediately make it their own so they don't feel "dirty". This logic is highly flawed because you don't see the value of the original list and how it was meant to interact with eachother.
I know the Fire/Ice was perhaps the oddest choice in the deck, but I'm a big fan of the extra tricks it provides... neither spell is overwhelmingly good, but having the options such as were already said is a big plus for me...
Ice allows me to tap out the only blocker and/or pump Lorescale Coatl and/or tap an opponent's land to slow him down (yes I know borderline casual, but oh well)
Fire allows me to kill a creature that may grow through leveling/allies/+1 counters/lords... it can kill lords... it can add the final damage to a heavy blocker.. it can finish off an opponent and it can be split as well
Not everyone's favorite, but since I had the duals it's never a color problem
^ I totally hear that one, but I know what's holding me back lol I'm horrible when it comes to sideboarding, that's why I like tribal lol
some nice tips in this article, look forward to reading more
I'm actually a Vintage man! I only used Standard as an example most people could relate to. If I had my way I'd be playing Legacy Enchantress or ANT but that damn money barrier keeps getting in my way. Luckily, MED 4 is just around the corner and they'll be reprinting Power in it. They will... you just watch!
Nice article, I'm at that point at the moment where I keep taking decks to TP room to play but never take it that last step to an offical event or 2 the mans. I really want to but something keeps holding me back.
I'm currently running Vampires and Poly in std and Natural Order/Progenitus in Legacy without FoW.
What formats do you most compete in online? I'm a legacy man myself and it appears you might lean that way as well. Although you do talk of Jace 2.0, then again these days, who isn't talking about him.
Why worry about chalice at one, you can still use the sac ability of cabal therapy to get your bridge tokens. I'm going to go back and reread your article as I have some other things to ask. I'll edit this post in a minute.
Edit: Ok you said you believe reanimator is a favorable matchup and I have to disagree. Most lists run Blazing Archon which seems like it would be an auto win for them. Dredge runs no counters or removal. Chain and Truth aren't good enough as they do run a counterpackage. I'd be curious to see some testing data on this matchup.
Also curious how you have been matching up to Death and taxes, Landstill and the Mirror. As the meta starts to shift I am wondering how dredge will be.
Pretty good article, my only suggestion would be to utilize the deck editor. It gives the article some beauty in a manly way lol.
I was nervous coming out of the gate with an article like this, but this small bit of feedback has been very uplifting. I hope I can continue to write for this great site! Thanks!
so im in my 8th sealed deck, having only payed 24 tix and 2 urzas saga boosters to start it all off. Imo, your green is ultra week and dosent offer anything but fixing. with two prisms however i would have just gone ubr. 4 colors was your first mistake, not playing every removal spell maindeck in the colors your playing is #2(forked bolt out of the board. its rough since you dont have anybombs but kozilek, but there is so much synergy you dont even need bombs to 3-1 this format. out of the 8 sealeds i have played green has been in i think 6 or 7 of my builds with black and or red being in 6-7 as well. The base g splash b,r for removal deck is pretty good and the removal is deep enough to make it most of the time. only time i dint play g was a sick ub lvler deck that hated me (2-2) and the only time i didnt play b or r was an even sicker wg deck that had linsalva(what a bomb)
i went
3-1 brg
3-1 brg
4-0 brg
2-2 ub
2-2 gr
3-1 wg
3-1 brg
and the one im in now at 1-0 after rd 1 is also brg.
unfortunatly i have opened up bupkiss in most of these events. out of the 8 sealed decks i got sinvala, all is dust, awakining zone, and a foil wall of omens as cards worth more then 3 tix.
hope that helps people for the next 5 days. cheers.
Maybe some dredgable type creatures or ones with unearth(viscera dagger, et al) could play a similar role to pro black. Not sure how this interacts with Pestilence and whatnot(not too good with the rules with that one) Stinkweed imp could be brought back for the added quality/reliability of MBC. Not sure if this is better than your current list though, I'll try and brew something. Castigate could be replaced easily by duress.
White has some really nice utility that is showcased by your transmuters/sideboard as well as the pro mono guy. I'm willing to bet your list is better, but the power of tendrils and corrupt is very tempting to try and make work.
not bad but you made some unwise picks in there, ie dual land as others have said. air elemental and winning packs is deffanatly better then a card youll be lucky to get 2 for. i understand the alure of drafting $ rares, but garuck is $ a 2 dollar land is not. you would have had a much better chance with the air elemental. also in building the negate should have been the siren, and at least one of the illusions should have been the excomunicate, wjile the other would have been air elemental two. illusion is just awful in this format, so many things that target.
ray of revelation is a turn slower than nature's claim, but every time i boarded the ray i would board in 2 chains which worked alot more than i hoped.
i did not run into any jailers at all so the darkblast has not been awesome in the deck so far i have used some combat tricks with it like oppenant blocking ichy with a 3/4 tarm then eating a darkblast, little things like that. also i added in 2 truths just in case people go chalice for 1, i feel chalice for 1 is a lot more common than a chalice for 2, since chalice for 1 is stopping stuff like cabal therapy, aether vial, entomb, reanimator, mongoose and sensei's top.
i haven't used terastodon much i would board it in against things like stax or enchantress hoping to blow up a lot of their needed defence if worse comes to worse but it has not seen any play what so ever. i have used the duplicant a couple of times usally against reanimator, i had a game where we both had opening hand leylines, we both kept dropping our lands trying to dig for some kind of bounce then he played a show and tell dropping iona, i responded with duplicant and he scooped.
since this article has been posted i have joined 2 more events due to scheduling and went 3-1 and 0-2 but have been doing quite well in the 2mans
I've also been having a lot of fun with summoning trap. I put together a bant summoning trap, with some of the same green dudes you have along with Birds, Rhox, Ponder, and other fairly obvious choices to help with the plans. Gaining an extra 6-9 life along the way goes a long way, and after trying some other colors, it seemed like I needed at least white for removal, or red for removal + some solid spawn generators.
Jyalt - really? You cite the main problem of his build as having too many colors "4 is too many; heck even 3 is too many unless the third is only a small splash " and then propose a 4-color build?
I think the best deck here is GBr. For me, blue has been underwhelming unless you get the key cards, while with GBr you're deck would have been more stable. Mulligans happen, but you specifically reference half of the ones you made due to bad colors in your opening hand. I would have built..
1 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
2 prophetic prisms
2 Bala Ged Scorpion
1 Bloodrite Invoker
1 Corpsehatch
2 Last Kiss
1 Nirkana Revenant
1 Skeletal Wurm
1 Vendetta
1 Virulent Swipe
1 Zulaport Enforcer
1 Ancient Stirrings
1 Broodwarden
1 Growth Spasm
1 Might of the Masses
1 Ondu Giant
1 Stomper Cub
1 Wildheart Invoker
1 Brimstone Mage
1 Forked Bolt
1 Staggershock
Even though Last Kiss, Forked Bolt, and Bala Ged Scorpion are situational, I still think they are good enough to run. I get why you wanted to run blue, with a couple of decent cards, but how often with you get tour kiss/staggershock together with a fully leveled mage for a nice turn, compared to how often you'd rather just have that 2nd green mana for stomper cub? Playing all the best cards in a sealed pool never works, you really need to punish the people that do with a more stable deck.
Ultimately, your sealed pool really had no identity anyway, so you couldn't really have a focused archetype, and I would have been happy with 2-2.
I would've absolutely cut Blue from the get-go. GBr is pretty obviously the way to go, unless you prefer to splash white over red (which I don't) for Oust, Smite, Wall of Omens, and Eland Umbra. You have some ramp, solid beaters and plenty of removal, not to mention Kozilek is a game ending bomb.
I also agree with the above poster - the scorpion is awesome in this format. Even if it just kills a spawn token, you've gotten some card advantage. And often it will kill a leveler, a wall, or one of the multitude of 1 power creatures in this set.
I could easily see this pool going 3-1.
About Renewed Faith: It does look like a straight up bad card, but I think it works in this deck. Having a confortable life total by turn 5 is crutial (there's nothing worse than having pestilence on the board and not being able to use it). And the card is great against red decks. In a control heavy metagame it looses a lot of its appeal, but the 2 man queues are loaded with agro decks so I've been quite satisfied with it (and I don't think it's the right deck to play if you expect to face a lot of control decks anyway).
On the Castigate/Augur of skulls issue: that's something I've been asking myself too... The idea behind Augur of Skulls main and Castigate SB is to make them side in more removal than they should (Augur of Skulls on turn 2 is a removal magnet) and improve game 1 against control and storm (since agro match ups are already good). But I can see a point being made for going the other way, I'm not sure wich one is the best.
I'd really like to see a MBC/Pestilence list works (Pestilence would be a lot better in a deck that runs only Swamps obviously), but I can't think of good creatures that would fit in this type of deck. There are no real option for pro black dudes and I've tested Chittering Rats and Phyrexian Rager in the BW version and they are awfull (well really any creature with less than 3 toughness is bad with Pestilence, because a lot of creatures in pauper have 2 toughness and you want to be able to activate the enchantment for 2 most of the time). I'd be really interested to see a list if you manage to make it work some way though :)
In my 100 singleton snake deck, I have found Sosuke Summons + Natural Order to be really good ... drop your Seshiro into play quickly.
Other standout cards in my deck were Eldrazi Monument, Opposition, Mutavault, and even Sleep.
I'm marginal at best when it comes to drafting, but I honestly wouldn't of taken the rare land. Double Elemental ftw? You already had garruk, if you just won one round you would easily be breaking even. At that point I'd go for the gusto.
Good article though.
definitely Training Grounds + Izzet Guildmage + Manaorphose = win
DA said that the missing cards are 4x Journey.
As long as we're talking about Rise of the Eldrazi's impact on tribal, I think Training Grounds will have a huge impact on Tribal.
There are so many creatures that it greatly improves. The Ravnica Guildmages and Lorwyn red elementals being the ones that stand to gain the most, however there are a lot more tribes that could use a bit of training.
I know, just wanted to mention that since this article was shelved for awhile :) like if anyone would run this I'm saying definitely take the suggestions I made as to dropping the other lords, they just aren't good enough
Hey Roman, thanks for the comment.
Actually you're not the first person who asked for videos and I'm afraid you won't be the last. The problem is that I'm not a *high tech* guy. To be honest I don't know how to make a video (I should be ashamed, I know), I don't know how to format it and besides I don't have a mic as well.
Of course none of those are big problems but I think I'm a bit lazy when it comes to technology. So for now I will continue with screenshots but no one knows what will happen in the future. Maybe one day I'll decide to learn how to make a video.
But first I have to learn how to write and send an SMS, what an IPod is and how to use it, how to use the microwave etc...(yeah, I know I sound hopeless).
But hey! I can play Magic!
Thanks for the comment.
LE
Of course it worked well, nobody says otherwise. I just saw snakes and a few ideas popped in my head and I wanted to share them.
LE
Excellent article, great points all around. Taking a net deck and tweaking it to my liking is exactly what I love to do. I don't mind taking a decklist from scratch from time to time, but I do take quite a bit of joy knowing I took a semi-proven list or even a proven list and made it my own. Having said that, I wouldn't change anything initially when you start to test. To many times ppl take a net deck and just immediately make it their own so they don't feel "dirty". This logic is highly flawed because you don't see the value of the original list and how it was meant to interact with eachother.
Again, great article!
Just as an additional note this is the deck I ran for the PRE... I took my own suggestions and dropped the useless lords and all.. it worked well
I know the Fire/Ice was perhaps the oddest choice in the deck, but I'm a big fan of the extra tricks it provides... neither spell is overwhelmingly good, but having the options such as were already said is a big plus for me...
Ice allows me to tap out the only blocker and/or pump Lorescale Coatl and/or tap an opponent's land to slow him down (yes I know borderline casual, but oh well)
Fire allows me to kill a creature that may grow through leveling/allies/+1 counters/lords... it can kill lords... it can add the final damage to a heavy blocker.. it can finish off an opponent and it can be split as well
Not everyone's favorite, but since I had the duals it's never a color problem