That's what I meant by removal. I agree that the card is useful in the right situations (and that there certainly is a range of creature between barbarian ring and Karakas). That being said, decks playing delver tend to be very favorable matchups and batterskull isn't the end of the world either. non-TNN fair decks in general we should have a good matchup against.
Speaking of depths, playing both in our deck means there are now 2 lands that do not produce mana, 1 land with summoning sickness and often one manland that enters play tapped. Urborg fixes some of this but that is a lot of clunky hands.
I know someone else took the path of pack rats based upon other people in this forum and has had moderate success with it in the following list:
4 Dark Confidant
4 KotR
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Gaddock Teeg
2 Pack Rat
3 Punishing Fire
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Life from the Loam
1 Green Sun Zenith
4 Chalice of the Void
4 Mox Diamond
1 Sylvan Library
3 Liliana of the Veil
4 Wasteland
4 Fetchland
3 Grove of the Burnwillows
2 Bayou
1 Dark Depths
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Horizon Canopy
1 Karakas
1 Maze of Ith
1 Savannah
2 Scrubland
1 Taiga
1 Thespian Stage
2 Tranquil Thicket
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
What are people's thoughts on pack rats and the decklist above? It seems like people have been flexing the spots of goyf and gszs.
Could you detail more about the person's results with Rat Pack?
I tried the rat pack build a couple weeks ago, and wasn't effectively successful at testing it as I never drew the card!
It seems okay, if slow. It's nice that it can be big without strictly relying on the graveyard, which gives you something to do under a Leyline or RiP. There aren't may decks that can kill multiple Pack Rats, so if you cast it with 2B up you're probably good to go.
Hi there AggroLoam!!
1st of all, I´m a legacy player, and I´m in the middle of a choice, Im thinking to build D&T or aggro loam, D&T Its awesome and powerfull, but I love Life from the loam and my favorite card ever its KnightOTR. :D
I was looking a few pages and I saw, the 4cc loam, but not the BOM version, I saw with DD combo D:
Im interested in this type of decklist and on the JeffH decklsits (The more focus DD junk version and others)
Thanks for all!! :D
Went 3-0-1 in the weekly at my LGS, 25 participants, resulting in a 2nd place. So here is a small report.
Round 1 vs. UWx Landstill with RiP+Helm combo
He plays 4 RiP and 3 Enlightened Tutor main deck…
Game 1: He turn 1 tutors and turn 2 RiP. We grind a million years, he has but finally he decks me with Helm.
Game 2: He keeps a hand with just 1 land because it has RiP. He doesn’t draw any lands for a couple of turns but I have a slow start as well. I build up my graveyard and get Punishing Grove online. He removes my graveyard twice and puts Humility in play, wee. I assemble Punishing Grove once again and I manage to kill him just before we go to time.
1-1 draw
Round 2 vs. Grixis Thopter Welder
Hmm.
Game 1: Takes a long time. He has Transmute Artifact as a tutor for hate. He eventually starts making Thopter tokens after keeping me under control.
Game 2: I just steamroll in with 3 5/5 Knights on turn 5 iirc.
Game 3: The first card that I draw is a Leyline of the Void, wish it’d been in the starting hand instead. Oh well, I loam so I get to 4 lands fast and drop it, it resolves. I start building board presence and he scoops not soon after, saying he doesn’t have a real out to the Leyline.
2-1 win
Round 3 vs. UBw Tezzeret
It’s like a normal UB Tezz but with SFM as a tutor for Sword of the Meek, in addition to Jitte and Batterskull. Ooh, and Humility and RiP..
Game 1: I cast Dark Confidant on turn 1, turn 2 and turn 4, they all resolve and stick around. This results in me having answers for everything he does.
Game 2: I have about the same starting hand (Bob centric that is) and a Ancient Grudge, so I snap keep. He drops a early Batterskull, I grudge. He drops a Humility and a Jitte to go along with his Baleful Strix, good times.. My grudge flashbacks for the Jitte and we start trading vanilla 1/1s while I keep dredging, digging for a Grove to go along with my Punishing Fire. I find it, and then another one, and a million other lands, so Punishing gets me there.
2-0 win
Round 4 vs. ANT with Burning Wish
Is the correct term TnT?
Game 1: I know he is on a Storm deck so I mull for specific answers. I’m on the play and keep a hand with 2 Chalices and not much else. Turn 1 Chalice for 0 and turn 2 Chalice for 1. Props to him not scooping as I guess he has outs if he gets enough mana and a Burning Wish. But when I get Loam and Wasteland going in addition to a Liliana it’s too much for him.
Game 2: My starting 7 has a Leyline of the Void as it’s only hate, I consider it for a long time but then mulligan. My six has a Ethersworn Canonist and a Mox Diamond, I’m golden if I he doesn’t have turn 1 discard. He of course turn 1 Probes and Therapies my Canonist. I get a clock in play in the form of the Knight, I do the math and see that the clock is the same if the Knight keeps attacking or if I go for Dark Depths so I stick with the Knight. He goes of with Ad Nauseam, gets a boat load of black mana, Past in Flames and Burning Wish, with a Infernal Tutor already in the graveyard. He does not find a red mana source though and ends up killing himself. His next card, after he went negative, was a LED, which would have won the game for him.
I asked him why he went off now and didn’t wait a turn or two because I wouldn’t be able to kill him for 2-3 turn. He said he didn’t want to gamble me drawing a hate card. We looked at the top card of my library, which was a Chalice of the Void.
2-0 win
I’m happy with the results as I pretty much just faced combo decks packing nightmarish hate (RiP and Humility), which goes to show that the deck is highly flexible and resilient.
What exactly is it you wish to know?Originally Posted by Elfkid
I used to play Junk Depths before switching over to the BoM9 4-Color Loam list, but with DepthsStage.
Death & Taxes and 4-Color Loam have some overlapping philosophies, such as being non-blue denial/control decks, so I can see why you’re considering them both.
4-Color Loam is susceptible to non-basic land hate (Blood Moon) and graveyard hate, which Death & Taxes doesn’t really care about.
D&T is also strong vs. blue combo which is among the more unfavorable matchups for 4C Loam.
4C Loam on the other hand has immense card advantage in the form of the namesake Life from the Loam, Punishing Fire, Sylvan Library and Dark Confidant so it can grind out pretty much any fair deck, which D&T can struggle with. Jund and Shardless come to mind.
D&T is susceptible to sweepers or high number of removal which 4C Loam is not.
In addition to the card advantage, 4C Loam has tutors in the form of Knight and Green Sun’s Zenith so we can tutor “bomb answers” in the form of Karakas, Maze of Ith, Gaddock Teeg and Scavenging Ooze/Qasali Pridemage, as well as the highly flexible Abrupt Decay.
You can also get free wins from time to time with either a early Chalice of the Void for 1 or Loam Wasteland lock.
The Dark Depths combo has been working wonders for me.
1. It’s not graveyard dependant, so even if a Rest in Peace is in play you can tutor it up with the Knight or draw it naturally.
2. Is a win con that you can dredge into. If for some reason the board is locked down (opposing Jace and Liliana in play for instance) or the board is clear on both sides but you want to keep a lock with Loam Wasteland and/or cycle lands, you can keep dredging knowing that eventually you’ll hit it.
3. It allows your Knight to stay back on defensive all the time and just end of turn tutor. This comes up very often vs. decks with Goyf, among others.
4. Sometimes you can have it fast, turn 3-5, the opponent just doesn’t have an answer for it and you get a free win.
5. Thespian’s Stage has other uses, such as becoming an extra copy of Grove of the Burnwillows, Wasteland, Maze of Ith, et al.
Hi there man, thanks for your answer, I was thinking a lot, and I will decide to run D&T, I was playing the two decks, and I finished more confortable with the D&T, love the ports, and the vial its too good
But obviously, I feel very confortable too with 4c Loam, chalice on turn 1, and the loam engine its awesome, but I dont like be vulnerable to the grave hate, and there is a lot of rip in my meta, and wur delver decks, and show and tell, so I think I choose the best option
I will continue reading and watching this treath, and who knows, maybe I can build this deck too^^
Regards and thanks for all!
Ultimately, my friend was saying that Pack Rats was a card you never wanted to draw where you couldn't play it with 3 spare mana or without the ability to untap with it in play. Which is why he didn't need it as a tutor target for anything. I'm pretty sure he was having it shine in decks where there are board wipers or tons of removal.
He was saying that once a Pack Rat hit the board, it would take over any game he dropped it in, albeit it took a few turns. His thought process was "I can create an army of Nimble Moongeese"
Against Miracles, he would wait for Terminus to happen, drop a Rat and flood the board. Against Fair decks they couldn't keep up with the flood...basically once you hit 4 rats that's the game. For decks with lots of spot removal, he would drop pack rat first, and make his opponent waste their removal trying to get rid of rats...then eventually he would drop a KotR and win from there.
He also said that its more of a game 1 card, and he found himself siding them out 50% of the time. Take this advice for what you will, I myself haven't had a chance to sleeve up the deck yet (currently rocking Jund) but I am in an Elves / Delver heavy meta and like the idea of having access to Chalice.
That description of pack rat sounds like half of the good and most of the bad cards for this archetype. They all take time to set up and they all win the game/get value if allowed to do so. I don't see what it offers that Liliana + manland does not. Even GSZ to some extent behaves this way if you have the right bullets.
I think the big plus to pack rat (not saying it is good or bad) is that it can win a game on its own and it doesn't rely on the graveyard like most of our deck.
I won’t say that Pack Rat isn’t good in this deck as I haven’t tried it myself. But I would think that in most cases you’d rather spend the mana on Loaming and/or Punishing.
When I end up losing it’s almost always to one of the following:
- A fast Delver with heaps of disruption and protection to back it up
- Multiple early Goyfs that I don’t have a answer for (Abrupt, Liliana, Maze or Knight are the answers in question)
- TNN with equipment (and my Liliana never shows up)
- Combo such as Show & Tell, High Tide and Imperial Painter
I don’t see how Pack Rat would be off any assistance in these situations.
Not being graveyard dependant is a big plus though. However, if the graveyard is compromised you won’t be able to get “free” rat tokens via Loam or Punishing.
Between Marit Lage and all the creatures is the deck actually lacking in ways to win the game without using the graveyard? With a RIP in play I have 3 dead cards and 6-7 cards that are weakened (far from useless) in the deck. Practically speaking graveyard hate actually stops me from doing something once in maybe 10 games. Post board it is also pretty common to board in all of the hate bears and play maverick against an opponent with a bunch of useless grave hate.
There's very few decks in the format that can effectively answer Pack Rat once you start making more of them. Miracles is pretty much it unless you want to count "losing to combo" as a form of answering Pack Rat.
@Dosferra: At least two of those problems (Delver, Goyfs) would go away if you ran Bolts and DRS, but then you'd have to give up Chalice and probably also surrender the Technicolor Prismatic Greed-o-Max mana base. Honestly, that's probably fine. I think people tried to get too cute with this deck, running Lilis and Knights with land packages and Chalices and whatever else. Legacy doesn't reward you for getting cute, though. It rewards you for finding one thing and then doing that thing really, really well. There was a period of time where Chalice-less builds strictly in Jund colors were very, very good and I wonder if it isn't time to go back to them and explore whether they're viable today.
Ooh ooh, over here! Look at meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I played a pretty old-school Jund list for a while recently and thought it was pretty good. Miracles matchup is really solid with Koth and Slaughter Games out of the board and Seismic/Liliana main. Seismic also destroys RUG, Patriot, and D&T if it resolves. Manabase is less susceptible to hate and plays around Price much easier with a basic Forest and Mountain.
Honestly the worst (fair) matchup was Jund because it's just a boring mindless grind fest where whoever ends up with the last unanswered permanent wins.
Of course, I was also running Chalice main because it seemed pretty good against DelverVsMiracles.meta, but I'm not sure I wouldn't rather have something else main, since the combo matchup still felt awful. That said, it's still a really good card in a lot of matchups, and I'm not sure I'd want to devote four board slots to it.
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
Jund is on the down-and-out these days from what I can tell, so there's that.
It's easy to support both Liliana and Seismic Assault if you're running DRS and you're not opposed to running some Graven Cairns. You don't even need to sweat it too much because you probably don't want more than two Assaults these days.
Having access to Bolt on top of Abrupt Decay and Punishing Fire mean it's really hard for opposing DRSs to hit your Loams, so cards like Pack Rat and Assault start to make a little more sense.
You can run discard in the sideboard to deal with decks where you'd want Chalice the most. Honestly, how many decks are there in Legacy where Chalice - and Chalice alone - is the make-or-break factor? What percentage of the metagame consists of decks where your win rate would drop below 50% if you didn't have access to Chalice in your 75? I'm willing to wager the actual number is quite small. Chalice helps make certain favorable matchups even more favorable, and it helps make certain tough matchups easier, but honestly the chances of a turn one Chalice on the play are vanishingly small and mid- to late-game Chalices feel like a waste of maindeck space. Plus, you almost never want to set Chalice to anything but one, so subsequent Chalices are just missed draw steps/Bob draws. In practice the card just never felt anywhere close to as good as it seemed on paper, which is probably why Chalice isn't dominating the meta despite perennial discussions about how good Chalice would be in the meta.
I ran Seismic and Lili without DRS or Cairns and without issue. Punishing fire is actually harder because it doesn't play well with fetches or Koth, and with Lili and Abrupt decay in the deck Taiga suddenly becomes the least important land you run. My last list was trying a miser's 2 Fire and 2 Grove, but it was still pretty meh. I was also trying to build in such a way that the dependence on the yard goes way down postboard. RiP is still a thing I hate losing to, and there are usually better targets for Decay.
As for Chalice, it's really not about beating combo. Really it's more useful for shutting down cantrips and StP, which is good at any phase of the game. Even in the matchups where it's not great, it's got a surprising amount of utility. Against Jund it stretches their Abrupt Decays thinner and keeps multiple Deathrites off the board, same with BUG Delver. Against Burn it's a huge speedbump, kills a bunch of key spells in Turbo Eldrazi, pretty good against Elves, and so on. It's generally best early, but turn 0/1 isn't a requirement. Multiples are generally pretty miserable, although sometimes useful in matchups where they have removal for it. Naturally this also applies to a lot of postboard matchups as well, since the decks it hurts the most will inevitably bring in artifact hate against it.
In fact, I don't even think the "turn 1 on the play" aspect should really even be part of the discussion because the chances of hitting it are so low. Chalice on 0 is slightly more probable, and pretty decent against storm combo and Belcher, but again it's not going to just "fix" combo. Discard from the board helps some, but I still found it to be an uphill battle. Possibly because I was running Hymns to play nice with Chalice and get a bit more impact out of just 4 cards. At this point I'm wondering if it's even a matchup worth fixing. IIRC at some point Antonius just decided to just ignore that matchup and did pretty well. I think that was in the heyday of Merfolk, but the current meta isn't exactly kind to combo either.
I'll still probably end up putting the deck back together soon, and I may try without Chalice this time. Bolt just felt so underwhelming in a deck with Lili, Decay, and Seismic. I should probably just run DRS, but I'm just so fucking sick of that card.
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
Aggro Loam can't beat combo because its clock is bad and it doesn't run enough disruption. To have enough space to fix those things, you'd have to take out the Loam engine, and then you're not playing Aggro Loam anymore.
But once you give up on wasting a lot of space to try to "fix" something that is inherently unfixable, I think Chalice starts looking pretty questionable. The card is a drag in the tempo matchups because having it in your deck keeps you from having a relevant early game - you're not playing enough cheap spells to slide under the disruption, so you end up needing to have a fast Chalice or you're just derping around, playing half a turn behind your opponent even when you went first. It's okay versus control because it keeps them from burying you in the mid-game with cheap card advantage spells, but I feel like Liliana does sort of the same thing these days. Running a real mana curve also means you can simply do more in the mid-game, which lessens the chances of them being able to break your momentum with one or two key FoWs. The place where a Chalice would be most valuable are all-in combo decks (set to zero, it eats a lot of their important mana) or something like Sneak and Show where they're using cantrips to both set up their combo turn and hide important combo pieces from discard by leaving those cards on top of their library until they're ready to cast them. All-in combo is kind of a crapshoot for you anyway (see above), and I don't recall Sneak and Show being all that favorable regardless. Then again, I haven't played against the deck in years, so maybe things have changed.
Resolving a turn four Chalice against blue decks was also very hard, IIRC. You had to kind of just cross your fingers and go for it because playing around counters at that point in the game meant you'd never end up casting your Chalice. You'd cast a threat and they'd let it resolve because they could Brainstorm/Ponder to an answer, so you'd cast another threat just to be sure and they'd let it resolve again because ditto, so you'd figure the coast was clear to cast Chalice and then bam, the Force of Will your opponent was sitting on. Weaker opponents would just slam Force against the first scary card, but then you didn't need Chalice to beat weaker opponents - it just made them scoop faster. It's the same reason I hated DD against blue - reasonable competent blue players who knew what you were up to also knew that realistically there were maybe five cards in your main they had to counter, so they could save Forces for those and use weaker counters on tempo plays or nudging themselves ahead a little bit. You had to just go for it and hope if you were even or behind because if you were far enough ahead that they had to counter your big threats then Chalice or DD were interchangeable with any of those threats as ways to force concessions.
I think a build that focuses on board control and uses Liliana and Thoughtseize or Inquisition to force your opponent into topdeck mode would be worth exploring. You could even board Raven's Crime against control to reduce the value of long-term card advantage. They'd have to use cantrips to leave all the good cards on top of their libraries, which frees your hand somewhat in the short term to close out the game.
Played four-color Loam at my local Monday night. I was on prettymuch the stock list, with Dark Depths combo and no Goyf, plus I swapped out Urborg for an extra fetch in hopes of mulling slightly less.
I ended up 3-1 (though I kindly ID'd the last match, so it went down as 2-1-1 on paper) losing 0-2 to Doomsday combo (Shelldock > Emrakul or Lab Maniac kill. How/do we even board against this?) then beating Death'n'Taxes, Pox and finally Elves. Marit Lage stole I think a good three games where I would've had to grind and probably luck out to win otherwise. Against Pox it won me a game where my opponent started (and ended) with Leyline of the Void jamming my whole graveyard. 20/20 flyer don't care.
Engineered Plague is also just barfably good out of the sideboard naming humans (DnT) and Elves.
Chalice of the Void definitely pissed some people off, but at least once against D&T I got it and just lost that game anyway due to meh action, plus I think getting blown out by a well-timed Aven Mindcensor. Still, in general this deck is fun and pretty far from boringly narrow. Draw your own conclusions, I guess.
"It possesses no intelligence, only counter-intelligence."
Ooh, lot’s of good discussion going on here!
My thoughts on Chalice and the white splash.
I live in Sweden/Europe, so the meta might be a bit different here than in the US. Miracles is by far the most common deck here, especially in the later rounds of the swiss and top8. Chalice is absolutely amazing against them. A Chalice on 1 and a Gaddock Teeg trumps their CounterTop lock. You will definitely want to draw more than 1 during the game as they will cast Council's Judgement on it as soon as they get the chance.
Storm variants are the most popular combo decks here, followed by Elves. Chalice is sensational against both of them (as is Teeg) and against Storm you’d ideally like two chalices, one on 0 and one on 1.
A lot of people seem to think that Chalice is only good on turn 1, but just as Richard Cheese pointed out, it’s actually a great draw in the late game when it’s top decking mode, cutting of the blue decks from cantripping, protecting your creatures from Swords, Bolts and so on.
It’s the card I’ve had Forced and Abrupted the most, in addition to people pointing out how awkward it makes their deck, so I doubt it’s just me looking through rose tinted glasses.
I more or less just board them out against other Chalice decks.
At least for the current meta over here where I live, the deck (4-Color Loam) is absolutely viable. I’ve got to top8 in the two tournaments (albeit small ones with about 40 players) that I played the deck in, going undefeated in the swiss portion both times.
I’m not looking to revamp the whole deck, which removing Chalice would entail, as would removing the white splash, but rather try and iron out what kinks it has.
Adding a fourth Abrupt Decay is something I definitely want to do, as it helps in the tempo situations against Delver and Goyf (and everything else).
Totally disagree regarding tempo. Chalice shines in that matchup because they have no removal for it game 1, and it shuts off their burn, so reach + removal for Lili/creatures, and their cantrips, which they generally use aggressively to maintain pressure. Basically it's playing the same role it does in the Burn matchup, only better - slowing them down enough to let you execute your game plan.
As for actually sticking one, you could say the same about Liliana or Seismic or Bob. I don't think the fact that counters exist is any kind of reason not to play objectively powerful cards.
I think going with more discard over Chalice has its merits, but you're going to be in the same boat where you get a bunch of sub-par draws in the mid/late game. I think it's also generally worse against blue decks early because cantrips > Loam for card advantage/quality over the first several turns. Eventually Loam pulls ahead here, but that's assuming you find your Loam fast enough in a deck with no cantrips (on a side note, this is why I still love the Crushinator). Discard has it's upsides for sure, but I think you'd want more than 4 pieces, so then you have to start looking at what else to cut.
If you're going Jund colors and the board control/discard route, the real question then becomes "why not just play Jund?". That's part of why I put the deck down again recently. Jund is such a boring deck, but it's proven its place in the meta and runs a lot of the same pieces. It's like trying to take a bunch of parts from a perfectly good beige Camry to try and get an old Celica GT running.
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
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