I looked at that, yes. I think I saw that it happens at a time I'm not available to play, otherwise I would.
r
I'm pretty much only able to play after my son goes to bed or wakes up (that's also the time I've been writing my articles). It's not so bad, but the lack of sleep catches up with me sometimes.
If I'm ever available, I'd love to play in your event.
Just a word of advice for future articles. I think you need to expand more on the construction of your decks, Why you choose certain cards and how they interact with others in the deck. Also add the cards picture as this helps grab peoples attention instead of having a wall of text. I don't know half the cards you choose so am none the wiser after reading your article on what I've actually missed out on and need to pick up for my collection.
You also need to double check that your deck html code isn't missing something other wise you end up with raw code in your article which doesn't look good. This can easily be checked before submitting.
I enjoyed the content of the show but in the future could you please do something so the listener doesn't think you're doing a tap dance on the microphone?
If you check you'll see that steve7876 and kol222 both list their favorite color as "shahbaz" whatever that is supposed to be.
I'm thinking it's the same tool posting under two ID's. Notice that this tool gave his own comments a five fireball rating.
You know I run a Modern event every Thursday at 19:00 GMT, right? :)
It's usually the larger of the two Modern events on Gatherling, probably due to the Euro-friendly time and digital-only prizes.
That's really cool. Having more ways to play competitively besides daily events is important to me.
I hardly ever get to play a daily. 8 man tournaments mean that a round one bad match up means you pay 6 tix to play one game. I played a lot of 2 mans because i usually break even at the worst.
Back when Classic was still around, the folks that do Yawgmoth's Soap Opera and some others did a Classic Quarterly League similar to the VSL. Off the top of my head: you played against one opponent each week for a set amount of time, then best records at the end of the "season" cut to Top 8 for awesome prizes.
It always seemed like a cool idea to me, but I think it would take several people pooling resources to really get it to work the way it did for them. Plus, I'd say talk to them first to get the details of what worked or didn't work well to really get the entire picture.
Ellmaris was running a weekly Modern League event for while earlier this year, I sadly didn't discover it until the last few weeks it was around. It was great for testing ideas because people were going to play out the matches and there was a lot of variety between decks.
I would love an event with a flexible schedule, so I hope WotC finally gets leagues to work 2015.
Thoughtseize, sin collector, and entomber exarch are the only things I really miss when I'm playing kiki pod. Melira Pod was what I built first, and I eventually sold a few cards to build kiki pod as well. I just started having so much fun with kiki pod, I've decided to make that deck my main focus, and try to become a deadly assassin with it.
I did really like facing combo decks with junk colored pod, and doing the whole "rip your hand apart with sin collector, pod into entomber, and maybe blink them with restoration angel".
I bought a Vendilion Clique to try and fill a similar role to sin collector, but i'm not sure about it entirely yet.
I've been playing in Overdrive! for the last few weeks, because it's fun, and I can't ever get time to do daily events (and the modern 8-mans aren't a good value in my opinion). I tend to build my decks for the metagame posted on mtggoldfish, even though the meta at a PRE may differ.
Speaking of PRE's, how cool would it be if someone could run a player-run league? I'm thinking of something kind of like the vintage super league but for modern.
As I said, it's "two Archangels and no Kikis at all" for me lately.
But I'm also known for building Pod decks that aren't combo (you might be interested in my old article about "Pod theory" — now your article made me want to update it!), and in those decks, you want to have a couple powerful 6-drops at least.
The beauty of the Pod archetype(s) is that the possibilities are almost endless, and even when the endgame is common, there's not one agreed-upon list, basically every player comes up with their customized version based mostly on the meta they face at the moment. For instance, in online PREs I never found a real reason to maindeck Linvala (or even bring Linvala at all), while Bogle decks (and previously, infect) are so damn popular I couldn't allow myself to go to battle without a Spellskite maindeck and at least other two in the sideboard.
I agree 4 CMC is a crucial area, and it's overstuffed with options. Using one over the other might just become a matter of personal tastes and style of play. But what you wanna do in the early turns is you wanna build your board, anyway. With up to 8 1-drop accelerators, and up to 12 overall, is easy to have a 3-drop by turn 2, or a 4-drop by turn 3, and that's where you start shining. That's why I'm not a big fan of Voice of Resurgence. Okay, it's been mostly for the inflated price, but it's also a 2-drop that's more for Zoo than Pod, despite the death trigger. It doesn't build your strategy the way Kitchen Finks do: Finks stop two attacks, likely trade, give you 4 life (so basically stop yet another attack), combo with Resto, and provide two jumps to CMC 4. Finks is the secondary engine of the deck, Voice is just cute.
I use Siege Rhino only in Abzan Pod decks (I usually only play 3-color Pod, although splashing for a 4th or even a 5th color is easy enough nowadays. Actually, Pod decks are mostly either Selesnya decks or Golgari decks, the blue and red splashes are minimal, even with Kiki-Jiki costing RRR). Melira Pod always had the advantage of bringing black to the field, which means the support of Thoughtseize, potentially Abrupt Decay. White only offers Path to Exile as support, but that's not very versatile in the meta. Playing white and black together is great creature-wise, though.
I also don't like Domri Rade too much in these builds. The only Pod-worthy planeswalker to me is one singleton Garruk Relentless, which acts like a 5th Pod. But not in combo builds that need all the 4-CMC room they can get.
I suggest you to give a try to Sublime Archangel, you'll be surprised how effective she is. And they won't expect it, which is important. If you time it right, they'll see you with a few mana dorks and a Kitchen Finks, they won't predict the Finks fetching Sublime and letting a BoP swing for 5-6 in the air. And next turn, they either have a way to deal with her, or you might well win the game.
There's a lot of new tech yet to explore in Pod decks. Bloodsoaked Champion lets you build a great Aristocrats type of deck in a Pod shell. Maybe a Human Pod deck with Glory Rise combo at the top. It's a fun family of decks.
I tried the Huntmaster and was also unimpressed. Domri Rade is a card I wish I could get behind, but I run into too many combo decks.
My lists don't make black, other than four Birds of Paradise, so I don't put Siege Rhino in my lists. I wish I could, but I want to have the possibility of hard casting it.
Are you running archangel main deck with two kiki jiki and a zealous conscripts as well?
I'm always concerned with running too many five drops, or even four drops. That's the reason I didn't like the four restoration angels in Brian Liu's GP Richmond list. That's another reason I cut Huntmaster, I realized I had too many four drops again.
In my experience, the issues the deck can have (besides mana problems) are not drawing enough early interaction, and drawing too many of your singleton cards that aren't useful at that time.
The Archangel of Thune combo DOES deal infinite damage. You just need something as unassuming as a Birds of Paradise around, and it's good game. You don't actually want to build the combo in one turn, because you want for the Archangel to be able to attack, being threat number 1. They have a removal? No biggie, they can't stop the infinite counters to happen anyway, and you'll win via Birds. They'll need 2 instant-speed removals at that point (possibly more, you might have more infinitely large creatures, even if most of them won't be evasive). At the very least, you'll be a 100+ life, with a deck that's fully capable of hitting hard even without combo-eing, something that Melira Combo can't do as effectively.
Compared to Kiki combo you have:
- more resilient combo (Kiki is killed by one removal)
- Archangel of Thune provides inevitability on her own
- none of the pieces are that hard to hardcast (compared to Kiki's RRR cost)
- you laugh at Ghostly Prison
- if something goes wrong and you don't seal the deal, you still find yourself ahead most of the times thanks to the lifegain
- in a Pod deck featuring red people expect Kiki first, will side and act accordingly
- combo-eing is super-easy click-wise, takes very little time and you can't wrong-click; once you automatize the effect, it's basically like rapid-clicking on an arcade game, and sometimes the opponent lets you play it out without realizing they're wasting more time than you are (it happened to me a couple times: they didn't automatize the effect and lost precious clock while thinking they were making me lose clock!)
Once you tried Archangel of Thune maindeck, you never go back. In fact, I started using it as a primary battleplan, and lately I'm even building Pod midrange decks with two Archangels and no Kikis at all, and cards like Siege Rhino and Sublime Archangel instead (I always marvel at how little Sublime Archangel is used in Pod builds: they're decks with 30 creatures, you can often find yourself in the position of Podding a Sublime in for an instant-win out of nowhere).
As for the Huntmaster, I dropped it from my Pod lists long ago. I was always underwhelmed by it, it felt like bad durdling. It's a static creature (meaning you don't want to Pod it further, so it stops your chain), nothing it does is impactful enough to devote one precious 4 CMC slot on it, and yet it's so conspicuous it often gets dealt with on sight. Better an Obstinate Baloth in its place, then, while Siege Rhino is in another league entirely.
Thank you. In most formats I've always done the same: find a deck I like and play it a lot. That way I know the deck and its match ups very well and usually find good strategies against some decks that were problematic in the beginning.
I have only played against a deck that I felt I had a really bad match up but I only played against it once: it was a Show and Tell deck with Omniscience and Eldrazis and the card that made the match up feel that way was Boseiju. I only played against that deck once so I obviously don't have enough data or experience but it seems pretty hard to win the late game against it but I can always win with an early Oath.
From the more usual decks, fastbond combo can be difficult when I don't win early because in the late game, they can sometimes get into a fight that even if you "win", they still can still play a big enough Tendrils.
Some grixis control decks that showed up in VSL I also prefer to avoid. I haven't faced any recently but when I faced those I lost more than I won.
Delver, although I think I'm favoured, they can bring a lot of hate and some games are really hard to play.
I think Dredge is the easiest match up. Not only I have enough hate to be very favoured after SB, I can steal game 1 often because Oath is also very fast.
I also feel I'm favoured against Shops but that match up is always very swingy and the dice roll is very important.
I haven't played much against pure storm, but I faced two recently and it felt like they struggled more to go off than me.
But I don't think there's anything that really scares me (maybe the show and tell deck but it was just one match) and the only match up I feel I have a big advantage is dredge but I'm playing 8 hate cards and I already have a decent game 1 against it.
Cage is obviously pretty good. I have ways to deal with it but it forces me to have those. I'm playing Show and Tell mainly because of Cage as a way to sometimes ignore it.
I'm playing 3 Grisel because I'm playing 2 Show and Tell. That way Show and Tell is a bit more consistent. I moved the extra Show and Tell and Grisel I had in the SB to the maindeck and took out Gaea's Blessing. With only 2 Griselbrand I would certainly play Blessing. I've lost at least one game because I don't have Blessing anymore and I've had some close ones as well. But I think it's worth it because I was siding in those almost all games anyway and it gave me 2 more SB slots.
I agree that I would be happy to see Batterskull reprinted. It's a card I would really like but I don't like the price tag.
Skullcrack is a card that I'm not always super excited by but given that life gain is such a beating for a Burn strategy it is nice. I could certainly see upping the numbers to 4, probably what I would do while cutting the Mutagenic Growths. Thragtusk is nice sideboard tech for Tron against Burn, not something I would be necessarily expecting. Kitchen Finks is also great against burn, particularly as it can trade with any two of their creatures pretty much while also gaining you that extra life.
Stop reading my mind! I've been planning to ask Patrick to do a Q & A for an article for a while now! Aw, my thunder is officially stolen. :)
I've been enjoying your journey into Modern. Let me know if you want to playtest matches online, I have a lot of different things built now. (Variations of CFB's Jeskai Combo have been my recent Tourney Practice toy.)
I do suggest a more friendly picture; that ones gives me a sense of disapproval for clicking on the article. :)
Nice to see my Hexproof deck make your article. Since I changed my list by four cards I just wrote an update to explain the value of the change with video from three daily events.
The vintage deck you showed is Calebs, his was recording his matches and posted them to CFB. Cool list and I'm only missing the probes as far as the main deck goes.
Congratulation on your 3-1 and it is great to have you here writing about a specific arch-type. You're becoming the Oath expert!
Now since you are our Oath expert, what would you say is the worst and best matchups for oath? What are your views on how good cage is against you since you have abrupt decay, mental misstep and FoW? Why do you run three Grisel-daddys while many list run only two?
I looked at that, yes. I think I saw that it happens at a time I'm not available to play, otherwise I would.
r
I'm pretty much only able to play after my son goes to bed or wakes up (that's also the time I've been writing my articles). It's not so bad, but the lack of sleep catches up with me sometimes.
If I'm ever available, I'd love to play in your event.
Just a word of advice for future articles. I think you need to expand more on the construction of your decks, Why you choose certain cards and how they interact with others in the deck. Also add the cards picture as this helps grab peoples attention instead of having a wall of text. I don't know half the cards you choose so am none the wiser after reading your article on what I've actually missed out on and need to pick up for my collection.
You also need to double check that your deck html code isn't missing something other wise you end up with raw code in your article which doesn't look good. This can easily be checked before submitting.
Looking forward to the next article :)
I enjoyed the content of the show but in the future could you please do something so the listener doesn't think you're doing a tap dance on the microphone?
If you check you'll see that steve7876 and kol222 both list their favorite color as "shahbaz" whatever that is supposed to be.
I'm thinking it's the same tool posting under two ID's. Notice that this tool gave his own comments a five fireball rating.
You know I run a Modern event every Thursday at 19:00 GMT, right? :)
It's usually the larger of the two Modern events on Gatherling, probably due to the Euro-friendly time and digital-only prizes.
http://www.gatherling.com/event.php?format=Modern&series=&season=&mode=F...
That's really cool. Having more ways to play competitively besides daily events is important to me.
I hardly ever get to play a daily. 8 man tournaments mean that a round one bad match up means you pay 6 tix to play one game. I played a lot of 2 mans because i usually break even at the worst.
There was also the 100cs league and tribal league in 2010.
Back when Classic was still around, the folks that do Yawgmoth's Soap Opera and some others did a Classic Quarterly League similar to the VSL. Off the top of my head: you played against one opponent each week for a set amount of time, then best records at the end of the "season" cut to Top 8 for awesome prizes.
It always seemed like a cool idea to me, but I think it would take several people pooling resources to really get it to work the way it did for them. Plus, I'd say talk to them first to get the details of what worked or didn't work well to really get the entire picture.
Ellmaris was running a weekly Modern League event for while earlier this year, I sadly didn't discover it until the last few weeks it was around. It was great for testing ideas because people were going to play out the matches and there was a lot of variety between decks.
I would love an event with a flexible schedule, so I hope WotC finally gets leagues to work 2015.
Thoughtseize, sin collector, and entomber exarch are the only things I really miss when I'm playing kiki pod. Melira Pod was what I built first, and I eventually sold a few cards to build kiki pod as well. I just started having so much fun with kiki pod, I've decided to make that deck my main focus, and try to become a deadly assassin with it.
I did really like facing combo decks with junk colored pod, and doing the whole "rip your hand apart with sin collector, pod into entomber, and maybe blink them with restoration angel".
I bought a Vendilion Clique to try and fill a similar role to sin collector, but i'm not sure about it entirely yet.
I've been playing in Overdrive! for the last few weeks, because it's fun, and I can't ever get time to do daily events (and the modern 8-mans aren't a good value in my opinion). I tend to build my decks for the metagame posted on mtggoldfish, even though the meta at a PRE may differ.
Speaking of PRE's, how cool would it be if someone could run a player-run league? I'm thinking of something kind of like the vintage super league but for modern.
As I said, it's "two Archangels and no Kikis at all" for me lately.
But I'm also known for building Pod decks that aren't combo (you might be interested in my old article about "Pod theory" — now your article made me want to update it!), and in those decks, you want to have a couple powerful 6-drops at least.
The beauty of the Pod archetype(s) is that the possibilities are almost endless, and even when the endgame is common, there's not one agreed-upon list, basically every player comes up with their customized version based mostly on the meta they face at the moment. For instance, in online PREs I never found a real reason to maindeck Linvala (or even bring Linvala at all), while Bogle decks (and previously, infect) are so damn popular I couldn't allow myself to go to battle without a Spellskite maindeck and at least other two in the sideboard.
I agree 4 CMC is a crucial area, and it's overstuffed with options. Using one over the other might just become a matter of personal tastes and style of play. But what you wanna do in the early turns is you wanna build your board, anyway. With up to 8 1-drop accelerators, and up to 12 overall, is easy to have a 3-drop by turn 2, or a 4-drop by turn 3, and that's where you start shining. That's why I'm not a big fan of Voice of Resurgence. Okay, it's been mostly for the inflated price, but it's also a 2-drop that's more for Zoo than Pod, despite the death trigger. It doesn't build your strategy the way Kitchen Finks do: Finks stop two attacks, likely trade, give you 4 life (so basically stop yet another attack), combo with Resto, and provide two jumps to CMC 4. Finks is the secondary engine of the deck, Voice is just cute.
I use Siege Rhino only in Abzan Pod decks (I usually only play 3-color Pod, although splashing for a 4th or even a 5th color is easy enough nowadays. Actually, Pod decks are mostly either Selesnya decks or Golgari decks, the blue and red splashes are minimal, even with Kiki-Jiki costing RRR). Melira Pod always had the advantage of bringing black to the field, which means the support of Thoughtseize, potentially Abrupt Decay. White only offers Path to Exile as support, but that's not very versatile in the meta. Playing white and black together is great creature-wise, though.
I also don't like Domri Rade too much in these builds. The only Pod-worthy planeswalker to me is one singleton Garruk Relentless, which acts like a 5th Pod. But not in combo builds that need all the 4-CMC room they can get.
I suggest you to give a try to Sublime Archangel, you'll be surprised how effective she is. And they won't expect it, which is important. If you time it right, they'll see you with a few mana dorks and a Kitchen Finks, they won't predict the Finks fetching Sublime and letting a BoP swing for 5-6 in the air. And next turn, they either have a way to deal with her, or you might well win the game.
There's a lot of new tech yet to explore in Pod decks. Bloodsoaked Champion lets you build a great Aristocrats type of deck in a Pod shell. Maybe a Human Pod deck with Glory Rise combo at the top. It's a fun family of decks.
I tried the Huntmaster and was also unimpressed. Domri Rade is a card I wish I could get behind, but I run into too many combo decks.
My lists don't make black, other than four Birds of Paradise, so I don't put Siege Rhino in my lists. I wish I could, but I want to have the possibility of hard casting it.
Are you running archangel main deck with two kiki jiki and a zealous conscripts as well?
I'm always concerned with running too many five drops, or even four drops. That's the reason I didn't like the four restoration angels in Brian Liu's GP Richmond list. That's another reason I cut Huntmaster, I realized I had too many four drops again.
In my experience, the issues the deck can have (besides mana problems) are not drawing enough early interaction, and drawing too many of your singleton cards that aren't useful at that time.
The Archangel of Thune combo DOES deal infinite damage. You just need something as unassuming as a Birds of Paradise around, and it's good game. You don't actually want to build the combo in one turn, because you want for the Archangel to be able to attack, being threat number 1. They have a removal? No biggie, they can't stop the infinite counters to happen anyway, and you'll win via Birds. They'll need 2 instant-speed removals at that point (possibly more, you might have more infinitely large creatures, even if most of them won't be evasive). At the very least, you'll be a 100+ life, with a deck that's fully capable of hitting hard even without combo-eing, something that Melira Combo can't do as effectively.
Compared to Kiki combo you have:
- more resilient combo (Kiki is killed by one removal)
- Archangel of Thune provides inevitability on her own
- none of the pieces are that hard to hardcast (compared to Kiki's RRR cost)
- you laugh at Ghostly Prison
- if something goes wrong and you don't seal the deal, you still find yourself ahead most of the times thanks to the lifegain
- in a Pod deck featuring red people expect Kiki first, will side and act accordingly
- combo-eing is super-easy click-wise, takes very little time and you can't wrong-click; once you automatize the effect, it's basically like rapid-clicking on an arcade game, and sometimes the opponent lets you play it out without realizing they're wasting more time than you are (it happened to me a couple times: they didn't automatize the effect and lost precious clock while thinking they were making me lose clock!)
Once you tried Archangel of Thune maindeck, you never go back. In fact, I started using it as a primary battleplan, and lately I'm even building Pod midrange decks with two Archangels and no Kikis at all, and cards like Siege Rhino and Sublime Archangel instead (I always marvel at how little Sublime Archangel is used in Pod builds: they're decks with 30 creatures, you can often find yourself in the position of Podding a Sublime in for an instant-win out of nowhere).
As for the Huntmaster, I dropped it from my Pod lists long ago. I was always underwhelmed by it, it felt like bad durdling. It's a static creature (meaning you don't want to Pod it further, so it stops your chain), nothing it does is impactful enough to devote one precious 4 CMC slot on it, and yet it's so conspicuous it often gets dealt with on sight. Better an Obstinate Baloth in its place, then, while Siege Rhino is in another league entirely.
Thank you. In most formats I've always done the same: find a deck I like and play it a lot. That way I know the deck and its match ups very well and usually find good strategies against some decks that were problematic in the beginning.
I have only played against a deck that I felt I had a really bad match up but I only played against it once: it was a Show and Tell deck with Omniscience and Eldrazis and the card that made the match up feel that way was Boseiju. I only played against that deck once so I obviously don't have enough data or experience but it seems pretty hard to win the late game against it but I can always win with an early Oath.
From the more usual decks, fastbond combo can be difficult when I don't win early because in the late game, they can sometimes get into a fight that even if you "win", they still can still play a big enough Tendrils.
Some grixis control decks that showed up in VSL I also prefer to avoid. I haven't faced any recently but when I faced those I lost more than I won.
Delver, although I think I'm favoured, they can bring a lot of hate and some games are really hard to play.
I think Dredge is the easiest match up. Not only I have enough hate to be very favoured after SB, I can steal game 1 often because Oath is also very fast.
I also feel I'm favoured against Shops but that match up is always very swingy and the dice roll is very important.
I haven't played much against pure storm, but I faced two recently and it felt like they struggled more to go off than me.
But I don't think there's anything that really scares me (maybe the show and tell deck but it was just one match) and the only match up I feel I have a big advantage is dredge but I'm playing 8 hate cards and I already have a decent game 1 against it.
Cage is obviously pretty good. I have ways to deal with it but it forces me to have those. I'm playing Show and Tell mainly because of Cage as a way to sometimes ignore it.
I'm playing 3 Grisel because I'm playing 2 Show and Tell. That way Show and Tell is a bit more consistent. I moved the extra Show and Tell and Grisel I had in the SB to the maindeck and took out Gaea's Blessing. With only 2 Griselbrand I would certainly play Blessing. I've lost at least one game because I don't have Blessing anymore and I've had some close ones as well. But I think it's worth it because I was siding in those almost all games anyway and it gave me 2 more SB slots.
Thanks for the comments guys.
I agree that I would be happy to see Batterskull reprinted. It's a card I would really like but I don't like the price tag.
Skullcrack is a card that I'm not always super excited by but given that life gain is such a beating for a Burn strategy it is nice. I could certainly see upping the numbers to 4, probably what I would do while cutting the Mutagenic Growths. Thragtusk is nice sideboard tech for Tron against Burn, not something I would be necessarily expecting. Kitchen Finks is also great against burn, particularly as it can trade with any two of their creatures pretty much while also gaining you that extra life.
That's better
I think so - but if you can sell any at that price, go for it.
Correct price is $18.11.
I presume that Dark Confidant spike is a typo?
Well I look forward to reading it :)
I am going to change the picture asap. I did it last night, and by the morning, I no longer liked it.
How appropriate! My next article shows Yuuya's deck as an example of a deck that an affect the metagame! Read your article and will link it.
Stop reading my mind! I've been planning to ask Patrick to do a Q & A for an article for a while now! Aw, my thunder is officially stolen. :)
I've been enjoying your journey into Modern. Let me know if you want to playtest matches online, I have a lot of different things built now. (Variations of CFB's Jeskai Combo have been my recent Tourney Practice toy.)
I do suggest a more friendly picture; that ones gives me a sense of disapproval for clicking on the article. :)
Nice to see my Hexproof deck make your article. Since I changed my list by four cards I just wrote an update to explain the value of the change with video from three daily events.
The vintage deck you showed is Calebs, his was recording his matches and posted them to CFB. Cool list and I'm only missing the probes as far as the main deck goes.
I have UW Heroic built and for now a budget Jeskai Tokens list. Just missing Elspeth and 3 Rabblemasters. I always enjoy testing.
Congratulation on your 3-1 and it is great to have you here writing about a specific arch-type. You're becoming the Oath expert!
Now since you are our Oath expert, what would you say is the worst and best matchups for oath? What are your views on how good cage is against you since you have abrupt decay, mental misstep and FoW? Why do you run three Grisel-daddys while many list run only two?
Sheoldred is the best target in my reanimator decks.