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If you are only playing 8 threats, blocking is going to be pretty important. It would have been instrumental in some matchups for trading resources and stabilizing. I will say this several times during this post: Vantress Gargoyle is not a good card.
Ok, but you are going to be cutting some other card that also does the role of "trading resources" (e.g. Hymn) and a lot of other tempo creatures aren't very effective at blocking either (Delver, Arcanist, Borrower). Angler and Pyro are fine and like I keep saying you can play a very similar deck with Anglers if you want
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Maybe, but they have more threats and an ability to play the same disruption game. If I had haymaker plays further up in the curve I could do a passable impression of a Grixis mid-range deck, but the options weren't there.
This is like, almost getting it, but I think this has been explained in the thread before
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1) Mystic Sanctuary was fine, even re-bought me a Hymn once and allowed me to play lands on curve to play a Jace. Being a 19th land is it's floor, which it accomplished admirably,
I'm not trying to suggest that all of my concerns would have become immediately apparent in 3 matches but in the long run it's something I would be concerned about
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The one positive thing I learned was that Mystic Sanctuary is a great card in the sideboard, not just for being an extra land against Wasteland and casting 3-drops easier, but simply because re-buying a removal/discard/counter in the mid-late game is the kind of card advantage needed to grind through the control matchups.
Yes, being able to turn an extra land into a reclaim for a counterspell is very useful when you're ahead on board
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Jace is still fine as a 1-of where games might go long, it's a card that has the right power level higher in the curve to help when you need it. Of all the things that went wrong, sideboarding Mystic Sanctuary was not one of them, even if it was 'questionable' without infernal contract.
I'm still not sure it offers anything that isn't served better by other cards considering the high manacost and the vulnerability to red blast.
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2) My budget mana-base didn't prevent my deck from working, it worked fine, I played my cards. They just weren't good enough together to actually win. I only had 1 situation where basic Island was in my opening hand, and it still didn't prevent me from turn 3 Hymn. In fact, the basic Island was instrumental in casting a Jace, several Brazen Borrowers, and hardcast Force of Will. Don't use the 'budget manabase' minor variance to excuse a list that is fundamentally flawed by having too much disruption and too few threats (half of which are unreliable, basically having to hit the perfect mix to make it useful at all.)
Again I'm just saying this manabase will cause issues in the long run, I'm not trying to say that it was directly responsible for your 0-3
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More than 1-2 Hymns is questionable, having 4 maindeck is a liability against anything short of combo decks. When people get on the board faster, and in greater numbers, top-decking another hymn is useless. So I would need a Gargoyle to stabilize, threaten blocking to hold the fort, but it can't do that while you try to play out the cards you actually have to actually play the game. Vantress Gargoyle is not a good card. It wasn't about 'not liking playing the list without delver', it was the fact that there was too few threats period, then doubled-down when half of them were garbage. I mentioned in an earlier post that splitting the blue threats would be a bad idea because the blue count for Force of Will/Negation is borderline low already. Depending on how you manipulate the maindeck between 20-22 blue cards total, which is pretty tight considering 5-6 Force variants. I would rather work back in Gurmag Angler, an actual good card. Vantress Gargoyle is not a good card.
Ok
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I think this is pretty amusing. When all else fails, point in another direction. The combination of Thoughtseize and Delver is perfectly fine on it's own, both cards pulling their own weight but also working together (dealing with removal/threats, clearing the path for Delver, flipping delver on the top of the deck.) Compare that to Gargoyle which needs the perfect mix of criteria to do anything, mostly with the consent of your opponent. Delver and Thoughtseize don't care what your opponent has done, they are still good regardless. Gargoyle is depending on your opponent getting threshold to attack, but also making you somehow have 4 cards in hand to be a big enough threat to play defense (and you're playing a lot of defense when you are only playing 8 threats.)
There is a real inherent tension in playing a deck with 4 Delver of Secrets and 0 burn spells and again I'm not going to elaborate on this because it's all been said before
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I'm not sure if I've said this already, but Vantress Gargoyle is not a good card. Playing 3-4 Hymns main might be ok alongside Gurmag Angler and Delver, both of which don't require it but benefit from it. Your main argument was that 4 Hymn is correct and Gargoyle just benefits from that. Four Hymn is certainly not correct, except against combo decks that don't play Veil of Summer, which as of right now are practically non-existent.
If you say so
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I think you played a quirky list at a local paper event and got lucky.
Ok cool, I think you played at a local paper event and got unlucky? You're not going to win a sample size argument with your 3 matches
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The list doesn't follow the traditional templates of any sort of proven strategy, so it's flawed.
There are upsides to this kind of ruthless pragmatism but you obviously don't really subscribe to this philosophy otherwise you wouldn't be posting in the development forum trying to brew a UB Shadow/Dreadnought/Standstill deck
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The threats don't pull double duty to play well like a mid-range deck (like Baleful Strix, Snapcaster Mage) and there are too few of them to be aggressive enough to race slower decks (minimum 12 in Delver decks, most are playing upwards of 13-14 lately.)
You don't need many threats to race when 4 of them are a 1 mana 8/8 and the other 4 are a 2 mana 5/4 flyer.
The "minimum 12" idea is silly as well, all I have to do is scroll a few tweets down my feed as I'm typing this post and see this list with 11:
https://twitter.com/birchloreranger/...60037972639744
It wasn't uncommon for people to play RUG with 10