I have no respect for this attitude.Originally Posted by Michael Keller
The past successful results of a deck don't indicate that you should play that deck, or that you should play the same 60 or 75 cards.
They do indicate that the deck was right for that tournament and that metagame. Successful finishes are the one thing you absolutely cannot simply dismiss. You can dismiss theorycrafting, you can explain away test results, you can ignore people's opinions on the deck, but you cannot dismiss actual tournament finishes and expect to get results. Period.
It's not an attitude, it's the unspoken truth. That's a jab. I didn't say one derogatory thing about anything. There are questions unanswered, here. If me stating my opinion about this bothers you, oh well. I congratulated the guy and spoke my criticism. That's my right.
Then explain to me what the point of playing something proven to be successful means. Nothing? What's the point of this forum? Why waste your time developing something?The past successful results of a deck don't indicate that you should play that deck, or that you should play the same 60 or 75 cards.
Not quite.They do indicate that the deck was right for that tournament and that metagame. Successful finishes are the one thing you absolutely cannot simply dismiss. You can dismiss theorycrafting, you can explain away test results, you can ignore people's opinions on the deck, but you cannot dismiss actual tournament finishes and expect to get results. Period.
I never once disputed it was a poor meta choice, because it wasn't and isn't. However, whatever it is your babbling about confuses me. In a given tournament with eight rounds, you play against varying types of decks. That's undisputed. How are we as a community supposed to evaluate a deck on how good it is unless we know what the placer played against? What, RUG eight times?
I'm sorry, but your reasoning is inherently flawed here. Someone coming out and saying "A" card is better than "B" card because you did well with it in one tournament - without explaining why - seems egregious in the face of evolution. I mean, excuse me for being overly critical here, but I want to be sold - like the rest of us - as to why we should drop what we're going with and move into a different direction.
There are a multitude of variables missing here. Unmask is fine, but in testing from all of the folks working and testing it here, it hasn't worked. I want to know why I should play it. If that bothers you, oh well.
You know you're treading odd water when Final Fortune and I both agree on this.
This thread is about manaless dredge, so let's just keep it to that.
I don't know what to tell you and FF, because you really don't seem to be open to hearing it, but Unmask proved better than Force during g1. There is no mandate to use Unmask if you draw it. I had hands where I was on the draw and simply went good ol' DDD and held that Unmask until t2 when I could dredge and use it without throwing a kink in my chain.
Force is going to be unpowered more often than Unmask even with more blue cards, like Whirlpool Rider, which is much worse than Spy or Griselbrand. I agree that there is likely very little difference between Spy and Griselbrand, but there is certainly a gap between them and Rider. It is those hands with Phantasmagorian that cause a problem, even if you think it's not major (which I don't see how it isn't). It boils down to I dredge enough to win or I dredge three times and don't.
And here's the bone that I think you've been waiting to be thrown, Force is better MB against combo! But IMO the inconsistency isn't worth it g1 and the best play against combo is a combination of Wraiths and Probes so that you can Therapy their hand to shreds, not Unmask or Force them. Those both help, but it's more likely you beat combo by dredging well early. G2 and g3, I want Force just like you because I don't see this deck every getting through a top 8 without them, like FF said.
Here's what I played in the swiss, and it does confirm that manaless was an excellent meta choice more than anything else. I think we should all concede that's going to be the more decisive factor, regardless if you play Unmask or Force.
Rd 1 - Esper Blade (RiP x3) 2-0
Rd 2 - DnT (RiP x2) 2-1
Rd 3 - RUG Delver 2-1
Rd 4 - Burn 2-0
Rd 5 - UWR Delver (RiP x2) 2-1
Rd 6 - UWR Delver (RiP x2) 2-1
Rd 7 - Affinity 0-2
Rd 8 - Lands (MB Bojuka Bog) 2-1
Rd 9 - Sneak and Show ID
The Quad Cities: twice as nice as the Twin Cities.
I think you did an awesome job and represented the archetype well!
@igri_is_a_bk:
Congratulations for the top8!
It was nice to see Unmask in your list, it's a card i've always liked, but i had to drop it due to overabudance of Deathrite Shamans.
I don't agree on the Whirlpool Rider topic, though, it's worked quite well for me, even though it's obviously not as good as Griseblrand/Spy as a DR target. Being a pitch for FoW allows me to bring in FoW from the board without boarding Shoal with it.
Did you not read your own comment? You literally said you didn't want to believe all the Manaless finishes show that a particular build is better because it was against 'unskilled' players who were 'unprepared' for it.
How can you not see that that takes an absurd amount of hubris? "I'm just going to ignore ALL the actual tournament data because these players are bad." How is that not obviously a shitty attitude?
That's B.S. I said that it would be beneficial to sell a point on why one card is better than another as opposed to just saying it for the sake of saying it. When you have a sample size of one tournament - and one person - saying one card is superior to another - that has been tested and proven efficient in the current general meta - you're going to draw skepticism. It goes without saying that Star City Opens have a tendency to be saturated with inferior Eternal competition - especially in the early rounds. I've already explained where I'm coming from and am not doing it again - so stop antagonizing; I dropped this a while ago.
Again, you're putting more words into my mouth. Look, I'll be honest with you: I don't even care. I'm an open, honest person who enjoys hearing what others have to say. But I also don't have time for bullshit, because I've read a lot of it having been a regular here for eleven years. So, when someone tells people - people that have spent countless hours and accumulated hard data on a subject - that one option is better than another, please cite specific examples and give the community a reason to believe you. Every piece of tournament data is important, sure. But to claim something is better than something else because you did well in one tournament is not practical - hence the critical nature of my response.How can you not see that that takes an absurd amount of hubris? "I'm just going to ignore ALL the actual tournament data because these players are bad." How is that not obviously a shitty attitude?
That goes for myself, too.
Emphasis added. I didn't put anything in your mouth. Also, it's slimy to claim I'm putting words in your mouth immediately after repeating the claim which 'I put in your mouth' as something that "goes without saying".
This is a toxic attitude, and the only reason I'm still upset about this. You CANNOT simply disregard tournament results and you should be ashamed of calling people who look at the actual tournament record of being "incredibly deceiving".
You keep saying this is a single tournament but even in your initial derisive comment you acknowledged it was multiple SCG Opens. Forgive me for taking that at face value and assuming you were familiar with the tournament record.
As you're ignorant of Spy's results in general: Please examine Michael Boland's SCG Los Angeles list (Top8 against a field of 374 Players). Please examine Alan Villamayor's Top8 list at the TeTe Open (113 Players). Please examine Theo Van Doosselaere's Top8 list at SCG Philly last fall (280 Players). Please let me know if the Whirlpool Rider list has managed a single Top8 anywhere - I can't find any instance in the tournament record. The closest I can find is a single list in Milan with Force of Will in the sideboard and Griselbrand in the main-deck.
Even if we assume a full half of the players at those SCG tournaments were totally incompetent, then that places Spy Manaless with Top8's in fields of 187, 140, 113, and (most recently) 188.
You absolutely can make an argument that Whirlpool Rider is the way forward, but it is not "incredibly deceiving to believe" that the Spy version is better. Even if Spy only had the one tournament, it wouldn't be incredibly deceiving - it would be sketchy data but you still draw the best conclusions you can. On such limited data, the best conclusion would be that the Spy build is probably best. It wouldn't be certain, or proven, but it would be the best conclusion and not deceitful.
@igri_is_a_bk: I'm convinced that most of your opponents knew what they were doing. I'm convinced that you had to exercise a degree of skill and creativity during matches as well as a degree of thoughtfulness and foresight beforehand in deck selection. I'm sorry that Michael doesn't. I'm sorry that he feels it would be "incredibly deceiving to believe" that you were capable of choosing the best deck, or of analyzing your own tournament performance.
Now, that is putting words in his mouth - but they're his words. It's "incredibly deceiving to believe" that Spy is the best deck, and you chose it anyway. It's "incredibly deceiving to believe" that you can identify after-the-fact that your deck was indeed the best option, but you make that claim.
I'm sorry you actually took the time to type that mess out; you get the gold star for the day.
Moving right along: Has anyone else considered shifting Unmask to the main?
I listened and I have a lot of experience with Unmask already, probably more than you do in all honesty, and while I don't think Unmask and Balustrade Spy are significantly better than Force of Will and Whirlpool Rider they may be marginally better game 1. That's really not the point tho' because you don't play Force of Will and Whirlpool Rider for game 1, you play them for a match in a meta where you want to maximize your SB space. I find them "good enough" at what they do game 1 and "absolutely great" at what they do games 2+ because I have a MD that transitions into my SB plan to fight hate instead of ignore it.
I just don't lose games because I had Force of Will instead of Unmask or Whirlpool Rider instead of Balustrade Spy, but I do lose games to a resolved Rest in Peace. I think the longer you've played Manaless Dredge, the less you care about your game 1 win% and the more you care about your match win% because those are really the only games that test your skill cap.
I'm not saying what you're doing is wrong by any means, if you can put up results with the cheapest version of the deck than that's great, but I walked away from Unmask specifically because it couldn't deal with combo or hate and leaves the deck vulnerable to both. You beat a lot of decks with SB RIP tho', so if anything I guess it shows that you still have a chance if you play Fearless. I've just been raped by RIP really hard in the past and I'm tired of games being decided by it, it's not like the good ol' days where I had to think about Surgical Extraction and Relic of Progenitus and felt rewarded for play skill
Any way like I said, keep playing it, it just makes Cabal Therapy worse against us.
And I think that's what this boils down to: personal preference. I just don't see how Unmask is worth the slot. If an opponent has hate, it's hitting the table; Unmask isn't stopping that from happening.
So then what? Why play it over something else? What's its purpose?
Yes and no .
Unmask and force are a one or the other proposition for me, and you choose the dread return target to suit.
That said, when I ran spy with unmask it was actually okay, but bear in mind I found it more useful as a tool to dredge than discarding on opponents.
I would argue that talk of whirlpool rider being bad, tells me you simply haven't tested with it, or used it in a tourney very much. I find the card dredged most of my deck on almost every occasion. Having access to counter is a big fucking deal.
I get that spy does it every time, I tested it exclusively for close to a year (go through the thread for %'s and thoughts) but spy has weaknesses too. I would argue that since spy is the cheapest version of the deck, that this is a ffairly large reason why the spy version is turning up regularly
It sounds like that's how igri_is_a_bk was using Unmask.
My testing with Whirlpool Rider shows it being quite good most of the time, but it does prevent you from being able to Phantasmagorian aggressively + then use Whirlpool Rider, unless you want it to be a straight downgrade to Sphinx of Lost Truths (who at least discards the same number of cards as you just dredged). This has an associated speed penalty - you can't dump an entire hand of Bridge from Below, Cabal Therapy, key dredgers and free creatures like you can with Spy, Griselbrand, or the "traditional" blue draw creatures. If you're running Force only, then something like River Kelpie is probably better.
The big problem I have is that if you're not hitting Rest in Peace in particular, your counter suite is much, much worse. Tormod's Crypt you have around 30% chance of countering, and will probably get double Time Walk'ed doing so. Leyline of the Void you still just scoop against, and Bojuka Bog (out of a Knight of the Reliquary deck, mostly) can be frightening as well. You have good odds of countering a non-tutored Scavenging Ooze, but that's something you race in many situations. The most-played hate cards in the format at the moment are 1 mana, unless I'm very much mistaken. This includes Deathrite Shaman, Grafdigger's Cage, Relic of Progenitus, and (less critically) Nihil Spellbomb. Grafdigger's Cage seems to be the most popular as well as the most powerful against Blue Manaless. To counter Grafdigger's Cage, you have Force of Will or Disrupting Shoal + Gitaxian Probe, which should come out to around a 45% chance altogether. (for Tormod's Crypt that number is more like 30-35%)
I'm not totally convinced that those odds are high enough to be worth this particular plan.
Edit: Forgot Surgical Extraction. You can add that to the list of 1-mana spells that you're not likely to counter.
Edit 2: I still think Spy vs not-Spy is a discussion worth having. Let's cut the rhetoric and actually look at the numbers. Since Spy was printed there have been 5 high finishes (Top8 or better) by Manaless Dredge at major tournaments (100+ Players). 4 of these used Balustrade Spy. Of these, 3 were at SCG Open events with 200+ players each (so all 4 events would still qualify as 100+ even if you assume half the SCG players are incompetent). The last list of the 5 used Griselbrand with 0 lands anywhere in the deck and Force of Will in the sideboard. Using that same yardstick (Top8 /100+) there have been zero finishes for Whirlpool Rider of any kind. I think the conclusion to draw is quite clearly that Spy is the way to go, pending further high finishes from some other variant.
Last edited by ajfirecracker; 04-10-2014 at 02:36 AM.
Force of Will has to be able to deal with RiP and Cage, because those are just gg. I think there's no need to counter crypt/relic/bomb/extraction, as we have ways to play around that. Force can stop bojuka to a certain extent: countering crop rotation/kotr/expedition map won't allow them to cheat bojuka into plan.
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No offense but it sounds like you're behind the times, RIP is the most common grave yard hate out of the SB bar none, and honestly Nihil Spellbomb and Surgical Extraction aren't hate - they're a speed bump. Just wait until you hit the 4 Deathrite Shaman, 3 Rest in Peace match ups and you'll really feel differently about the necessity of Chancellor of the Annex and Force of Will.
If you're not discarding 6 cards to Phantasmagorian just because you want to Whirlpool Rider for more cards than you're probably misplaying the deck, you should be able to win from Whirlpool Rider for 3 cards just fine and I think too many people are obsessed with the combo kill in this deck because it's really Dread Return that wins the game. I could probably MD 4 Cephalid Sage and have a pretty equivalent win rate, what makes Whirlpool Rider the best Dread Return target in my book is that he's more than a Dread Return target, he's a pitch to Force and Shoal. Yeah I know Spy is a pitch to Unmask and Ichorid but honestly black cards and creatures aren't exactly in short supply.
If you guys want to claim like the deck is 1% better with MD Unmask and Spy game 1 then that's cool, but you are cold to RIP and that's the difference between Top 8ing and having any chance to take 1st place. Likewise if you play the deck in a local meta, you can expect to see way more hate than at a tournament. If you manage to dodge RIP all day good for you, not everybody is as fortunate.
Spy seems to fit fearless well, but fearless banks on racing hate.
I won't argue that spy can be better game1, but I''ve found rider is better game2 onwards. Against combo/storm etc a fearless approach can work, but so much of that is based on them not having a good hand. A ssingle force is usually enough against storm to buy us time for zombie stompage.
Your assertion that spy is better based on your quote above is not fair. It's not like people have been playing with rider for long, or that many manaless lists run it. Spy is cheap, force is not = why.
Spy isn't even the fastest combo kill, Dryad Arbor and Griselbrand is. I always thought the only point of Spy was that it was the cheapest kill and some people have a complex about not having 7 life when they DR Griselbrand and a 7/7 flying life link not being good enough for 1 turn.
I realize Surgical is more of a speed-bump than proper hate, but it does have some uses. Nihil Spellbomb I do think is actually hate. It's a Tormod's Crypt that can still be played and activated on the first turn. It seems foolhardy at best to simply dismiss that.
Regarding the draw creature, you could run another blue creature and still pitch to Force. It is only Shoal which requires you to warp your deck to that degree.
I did a little digging to see what hate is actually being played.
Methodology: pull up mtgdecks.net, search for the number of decks running the given card in their sideboard. I realize it may take a while for people to adopt Rest in Peace and to acquire them, so I went a year out from their release. They were released on Oct 5 2012. From Oct 5 2013 to present (April 10 2014) this is the number of decks running each of the following graveyard disruption cards:
Keep in mind this is all decks that appeared for that search in that time period. This will include some small tournaments, as well as some Top16s. Additionally, this is sideboard only, and does not account for the number of a particular card being played in a single deck. Finally, note that there may be some overlap.
Surgical Extraction - 711
Rest in Peace - 602
Grafdigger's Cage - 581
Relic of Progenitus - 334
Tormod's Crypt - 226
Nihil Spellbomb - 189
Scavenging Ooze - 172
Extirpate - 100
Bojuka Bog - 82
Leyline of the Void - 62
Faerie Macabre - 62
Deathrite Shaman - 5
Ravenous Trap - 5
Jotun Grunt - 5
Yixlid Jailer - 3
Cremate - 3
Wheel of Sun and Moon - 2
Loaming Shaman - 2
Morningtide - 1
Total, by converted mana cost:
CMC=0 - 308 (Tormod's Crypt + Bojuka Bog)
CMC=1 - 1923
CMC=2 - 782
CMC=3 - 64 (but basically all Faerie Macabre)
CMC=4 - 62 (all Leyline of the Void)
CMC=5 - 5 (all Ravenous Trap)
The above is 3144 card instances. Of these, 306 cannot be countered by any means. 539 cannot be countered by Disrupting Shoal (in the Whirlpool list as we've seen it so far, anyway).
Let's assume you can play through any number of Surgical Extraction, Extirpate, Faerie Macabre, and so on. Let's assume we only care about cards that permanently remove your graveyard/abilities or remove the entire thing.
In that case we get:
CMC=0 - 308
CMC=1 - 1104
CMC=2 - 608
CMC=3 - 2
CMC=4 - 64
CMC=5 - 5
This isn't apples-to-apples with the above, but since Deathrite Shaman was printed (Oct 2012) there have been 75 lists which run DRS main+RIP side. 0 with both main, 0 with RIP main+DRS side, and finally 0 with both in the sideboard.
Maybe it's possible to get a real bad beat and see both from a single deck, but it doesn't look like something you should worry too much about.
The maindeck is more than capable of dealing with all but rip,leyline,cage. The blue side answers effectively rip and does a decent job with cage. That's what the counters are there for. It's good at countering Crop Rotation,too, but that's a plus. You shouldn't consider the rest when thinking about the effectiveness about the blue side.
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Relic of Progenitus is definitely a card. The main-deck may be able to play through it, but it takes a lot of gas to do so, and can buy enough time for the opponent to win with aggro or find a better solution. The same goes for Tormod's Crypt, although that requires more pressure (and allows more pressure, as it's free to cast and to activate).
We all know Force of Will is good, my point is that Disrupting Shoal isn't as strong. It counters one threat fairly conditionally but the other biggest threat miserably.
Why not run Force main + Unmask in the side?
You can run whichever blue draw creature you like with this plan, and maintain the same blue count game 1 as the Whirlpool list. This also has the benefit that Force / Shoal / blue card + 4 non-blue cards is less awkward.
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