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Thread: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

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    The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    The winning list from Bazaar of Moxen got me thinking, how effective really is the miser singleton tech?

    http://www.eternal-central.com/?p=1512

    He plays 1 Wasteland with 2 Mutavaults and 4 Factories. He has no Loam/Intuition and no Crucible to fully abuse that 1 Wasteland. I highly doubt he aims to manascrew an opponent with just 1 Wasteland. However if you think about it, if your opponent sees that 1 Waste in any game (especially G1), he will try to play around it the whole Match. If he scouted you before the match, he would play around it from the beginning of the match!

    The same applies for Daze. I have a friend from Singapore who ALWAYS plays 1 miser Daze no matter what blue deck he plays. He testifies to it's effectiveness as the psychological effect of seeing that 1 Daze causes the opponent to play around it the entire match! You can even purposely "oops I flipped my Daze" while shuffling up for G1 to start the mind games every single match!

    Is this really effective? It just got me thinking and if this adds even a single percentage point to my Win %, it's pretty worth it. Thoughts?

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    This is one of these non-consistant techs that I believe to work exactly because the opposite of consistancy is diversity. when you put a singleton at your deck, that card can fit the role of another card, but just as effective in certain matches, to which you have one extra card. Or it can end up fitting no role, but since it's a 1-of, you are certain to have only one screwing, so it's not a huge screw, specially for a card such as Wasteland, a rarely dead card

    The effectiveness is debatable, but under statistical %s, you still have 10% chance of opening with it at your 7 every game, more if you mull a few times. By the end of the day, out of 10-20 matches, you'll see it more regularly then you'd have thought, since every game you draw, let's say, at least 5 cards (and with control-subtype decks, more)

    Besides, miser singleton cards like Nevyn or Academy Ruins has proven to be strong in the past.

    As an example scenario, if the card can grant you a counter to a lock situation, say Krosan Grip vs CB, if you are locked, you are likely to be drawing and hoping to get it, but with none you couldn't, and with 2, you would be pissed by its draw in games where it's not worthy.

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    Has anyone played with the miser slot as card #61?
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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    He probably had one less land in testing, wanted more mana, but didn't want to flood. Another Mutavault wasn't what he wanted as it doesn't really allow for interaction in the midgame, but Wasteland does.

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    Quote Originally Posted by AriLax View Post
    He probably had one less land in testing, wanted more mana, but didn't want to flood. Another Mutavault wasn't what he wanted as it doesn't really allow for interaction in the midgame, but Wasteland does.
    I believe a big part of his list with his 'odd' choice of manabase was to have a decent game 1 to resolve Standstills (6 manlands help a ton against aggro except merfolks), and to fuel a transformational aggro SB with Bobs + Goyfs when opponents boarded out removal. I'm more interesting when and which matchups did he decide to transform his SB.

    Regarding singletons in the MD, I think many people don't understand that singletons may look odd e.g. 1 Daze out of nowhere, or 1 Spell Snare with 4 Counterspell instead of a 3-2 or 2-3 split. The reason is fairly simple. When you build a deck, you're optimizing card selection in response to a given metagame. I've talked about the 4-1 counterspell/snare split v.s. 3-2 counterspell/snare split in Landstill because some people don't understand the purpose of singleton. The deal is really when you are looking at a meta, you decide the cards that you need the most to fight that meta e.g. in a meta of KotR/NO/Show and Tell, you really want 4 counterspells, despite the fact that 2cmc spells are still abundant in the format. at that point when you made the decision on solidifying 55 cards in your deck and your only room for tweaking is 5 cards (counterspell/spell snare mix), you ask yourself, which configuration is more important: having 4 counterspell or 3. When you've arrived at that answer, you only have 1 slot left, and the best card that fills that slot is the miser Spell Snare/Daze etc. Similarly, if a metagame is heavily 2cmc-centric e.g. Survival metas, then a 1-4 Counterspell/Snare could even make more sense because Snare is valued much higher than Counterspell.

    There's also the added benefit that if you played a singleton e.g. daze that appears in game 1, your opponents will be playing around it on games 2/3. But even ignoring this added benefit, singletons should never be analyzed as singletons. They need to be analyzed with reference to the entire decklist e.g. what else could be cut to up the singleton count to 2? If nothing can really be cut without providing a huge benefit, then the singleton configuration is ideal. For the same reasons, my Landstill list in the past played 1 Etutor. Many people get irked by the singleton Etutor feeling that you don't get to tutor up things as reliably as you can, but people don't refer to the actual decklist and realize that the 1 ETutor is actually not needed for most parts because it is inherently a card disadvantage card that can be avoided if a deck is optimally built, but it definitely helps in increasing potential number of 3Standstill/3EE/2Top/1Crucible/1Humility/1Disk to higher configuration. Any additional ETutor added just signifies that the deck's strategy falls on an ETutor strategy e.g. Thopters, and to which Landstill is not a deck that is built with that strategy in mind, and any additional ETutor without careful consideration on the overall deck performance is going to cost more games than it can win games.

    That's my opinions on singletons: it looks ugly at first sight, but that only happens when you're looking at the singleton. You need to look at the entire list to find how and why the singleton got there in the first place.
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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    I love miser 1-ofs when appropriate. Daze is the perfect example of this because people have to respect it and play around it.

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    Interesting question! The short answer is: usually not. When competitive Magic was in its infancy, the theory went that you could get a lot of mileage out of running off-the-wall singletons. Your opponent would be stuck playing around cards you didn't draw and would be surprised by things they hadn't seen yet. They'd never know what you were holding, and this was deemed to be a big advantage. Eventually, people realized that while playing Jedi Mind Tricks with your deck can win games, playing a solid and consistent listing will win a lot more. If you look at the transition in deck construction across the first 4 Worlds, you'll see what I mean. Zak Dolan's 1994 World's deck only runs Swords and Serras as 4-ofs. So when your friend runs a singleton Daze in every deck list with blue because it will cause people to play around it, he's subscribing to a theory that has been obsolete for the better part of 15 years.

    The Nassif sideboard is an idea that most people find intriguing but which generally just doesn't work in practice. The only exception is when it comes to graveyard hate, where the more varied your options, the better. This is because of Pithing Needle and Dredge's reliance on it as an answer to the various yard hate artifacts. There are slight functional differences between Spellbomb, Relic and Crypt, but they're similar enought that any advantage one might have over another is less than the disadvantage of walking directly into Needle.

    Of course, you see a lot more cards in a game today than you did 15 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago. The list of card draw/selection played in Legacy is too long to spell out, but whereas you might've seen 15-17 cards per game 10 years ago, you'll now see 20-25. If you're running a tempo based deck like TA or Rock, you're probably seeing upwards of 35 or 40!

    And there are instances where a singleton card is so powerful that it must be boarded around, in the instance of cards like Humility or Back to Basics. there, a singleton, even without tutoring, is acceptable because if the opponent knows you run it, they have to play like you have it or risk getting blown out if you are actually gripping it. In those cases, I'd say the reward outweighs the inconsistency.

    Finally, sometimes, in order to get the correct ratio of a given effect, it's necessary to run singletons. My Bant deck runs 4 Swords to Plowshares and 1 Path to Exile. I'd rather run 5 Plows, as I cannot choose when I draw Path instead. Sometimes, it works out, like when I draw Path instead of Plow against Affinity. Sometimes I draw Path against turn 1 Lackey and have to accelerate my opponent into an early Ringleader. But in order to get the amount of single target removal that I wanted, I had to run the singleton. So for instance, I could see running 1 Daze if you needed to get the blue count up for FoW or if you needed an extra 2cc spell for your Counterbalance curve. But doign it for Jedi Mind Tricks is bad juju.
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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    I still do that occasionally, but only with a card that a person is going to fear hard. It's not worth the trouble most of the time, but here and there you can add a card that people have to think about each turn. Singleton Extirpates are usually a good one. Right now the only deck I have that does that is a Reanimator that can bring in a Teeg (I can hard cast it). Really throws off people playing Storm since they expect that Thoughtseize, Duress, or Force more. Not that I don't have those, but I sure love a good surprise.

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    Belcher only runs one Taiga in one land form. Do I win a cookie?

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    The deck has ALOT of card manipulation(BS,Tops,Jace) in a lategame deck(you see more cards) , it also solves some problematic lands pre board(Volrath,Academy,?) , also it can wastelock with loam at lategame.. it seems very reasonable.
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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    That's just it, there is no loam or crucible and I don't buy the late game argument because wasteland is even worse as the game goes on.. I didn't win a 600 man tournament but I don't see how the 1 wasteland is good. I can't think of any lands that the deck needs an out to and if there was clearly a couple more would be better? To me the 3rd mutavault fits the decks strategy or even a swamp to cast deeds and all the removal?

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    The guy might have just not owned a set and replaced them with a good replacement? Wasteland would be an odd choice for a singleton anyway. Not exactly a card you have to keep in mind to play around much. Sometimes you do with lands like Chasm or Maze, but most of the time, if they have it, they have it.

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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    One reason I can imagine for running 1 wasteland (as opposed to 0) is to hit Academy Ruins in the control mirror. Since AR becomes relevant usually very late in the game, you have time to search for your singleton. I don't know if it's the correct reason of course, but it's something I would keep in mind when building a control deck.
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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    Belcher only runs one Taiga in one land form. Do I win a cookie?
    FULL OF WIN !

    Finally, sometimes, in order to get the correct ratio of a given effect, it's necessary to run singletons. My Bant deck runs 4 Swords to Plowshares and 1 Path to Exile. I'd rather run 5 Plows, as I cannot choose when I draw Path instead. Sometimes, it works out, like when I draw Path instead of Plow against Affinity. Sometimes I draw Path against turn 1 Lackey and have to accelerate my opponent into an early Ringleader. But in order to get the amount of single target removal that I wanted, I had to run the singleton.
    Although this is a much better answer. :)
    Actually, I really like the fact that his list plays more manlands ; gives you somewhat of a clock under Standstill, seems like a good idea. Better than not being able to hit basics and/or losing because you miss a color/a mana because you waste automatically and not optimally. (I've seen my fair share of people wasting the first non basic they see, without thinking about their action - this, is bad.)
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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    Quote Originally Posted by frolll View Post
    FULL OF WIN !



    Although this is a much better answer. :)
    Actually, I really like the fact that his list plays more manlands ; gives you somewhat of a clock under Standstill, seems like a good idea. Better than not being able to hit basics and/or losing because you miss a color/a mana because you waste automatically and not optimally. (I've seen my fair share of people wasting the first non basic they see, without thinking about their action - this, is bad.)
    This is why I generally attempt to lay my least necessary land on turn 1, even if it means dropping a Horizon Canopy and taking a point for Hierarch in order to sandbag the duals I need. The way most people pilot TA/Dark Thresh decks is to try and blast you with land disruption early every game, so you just play with that in mind and attempt to weather the onslaught. Of course, the decks are built to apply a lot of pressure to mana bases, but because people tend to play them in such a linear fashion, attempting to keep me off mana entirely, they become predictable and easy to play against. There are times when the stronger plan would be just to keep me off a double color; cut me off from white (probably the easiest one) so I can't cast KotR/RWM/Plow/etc.
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    Re: The Miser Singleton Tech, How effective is it?

    I like the singleton in distinct cases. Other than obvious situations with tutors, if I'm going to run a singleton it will meet these parameters:
    1. Not vital to the deck'e strategy
    2. Typically very good when drawn
    3a. Rapidly loses power in multiples OR
    3b. Essentially a 5th copy of a similar but better card

    So single Sylvan Library, Crucible, Wasteland, Path to Exile would all be previously stated examples of this. I do see the merits of running something just to make them play around it, but I think it should still meet these requirements so you aren't weakening the deck just to play mind games, because then you're playing a weaker deck. I had a single Stifle for awhile and I think it's close to this, but it does turn dead often in the late game, which is when you're most likely to see it.

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