Originally Posted by
Eldariel
Ever since seeing The Antiquites War, I've been mulling over a bit of a crazy thought: trying a hybrid of Steel Stompy and FS. The principal idea is pretty simple: we have lots of cards that care about counters and plenty of artifacts that tend to go dead down the line. We also already play 3-4 Trinket Mages and 2 Hangarback/Walking Ballista. All we really need is to add few more HBW/WB and the 4 Ravagers alongside perchance some Steel Overseers and we have most of the same power (not quite all of it; our Ravagers aren't as good but the Ravager + Hangarback/Ballista is just as potent here) but we can also run stuff like Zahid, Umezawa's Jitte, Force of Will, Back to Basics and company. It does raise some interesting tensions that would have to be solved for the deck to have acceptable reliability though:
- Chrome Mox can't imprint artifacts so it gets significantly worse. Probably at least some number needs replacing.
- Force of Will naturally suffers of the lower blue card count but I believe we can keep the ~20ish blue cards for reasonably reliable FoW access (3 Zahid, 4 Trinket, 4 FoW, 2 Antiquites War, some number of Stratus/GEAs/Vensers/etc.) while still having enough artifacts to make Ravager and company good.
- Need enough artifacts for Ravager and Antiquites War (should we choose to run it). For 5 cards to contain an artifact at least 90% of the time (my threshold for reasonable reliability), we'd need 23 artifacts. We already run 4 Chalices, 4 Moxen, 1 Seat, 4 equipment, 1 Needle, 2 Ballista/Hangarback for 16 artifacts. The addition of 4 Ravagers, some Ballistas/Hangarbacks would naturally push us over the threshold though of course we could also add more Seat of the Synods too (at the cost of becoming more vulnerable to Wasteland and B2B getting slightly worse).
- Blue artifact creatures?? Master of Etherium, Esperzoa, none of them look particularly appealing for what we're doing.
Benefits:
- Mox Opal becomes an option instead/in addition to some Chromes/Petals. 0-drop artifacts are pretty key to enable Ravager anyways.
- Jitte gets significantly stronger with Ravager being able to counterdump it for either massive damage, or removal, or even lifegain.
- Some fringe options with Ravager to set a particular Chalice without having to pay for it.
- Our 2-drops get stronger and more synergistic. Overall, more power through synergy, but some cards that aren't amazing on their own.
The numbers would have to look like
24 mana sources (20 lands, 4 Mox/Petal/etc.)
16 artifacts between creatures and spells (3 Seat of the Synods would push us to 23 artifacts though blue/artifacts would also work)
20 blue cards
It's possible to hybridize blue cards and artifacts to get a larger number of each or go down to 18-17 blue cards; 16 would be the absolute minimum and at that point I wouldn't even consider running Chrome Mox anymore.
Perhaps it doesn't belong in this thread and I should go to New and Developmental to play around with this but ultimately I feel like the 2-drops we'd get this way are stronger than most of what we currently play, at least accounting for the combo potential (but lacking additional ways to add counters is of course a bit of a downer). Compared to Steel Stompy we have the obvious advantage of having blue cards including FoW, B2B, Zahid, Trinket Mage and company but the equally obvious disadvantage of having a less streamlined plan, fewer artifacts to feed the artifact synergies, and we run the risk of losing to color screw. Of course, we're also less reliant on artifacts and thus cards like Null Rod, Energy Flux and even Ancient Grudge are far less bothersome for us. The curve is higher but that's partially offset by running more mana and Trinket Mages being able to fetch mana in case of emergency. On the other hand it's also an advantage in enabling us to better use Chalice for 2 and having more to do while flooding.
I don't know if this stew will amount to anything but the pieces feel like they're there if the ratios and the cards tying it all together are set right.
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