Which is fine for him. The deck I'm discussing, the one that this thread is about, plays both Cloud of Faeries and Seal of Removal. His deck only shares 35 out of 75 cards with the deck that this thread is about. So if he's having issues with beating Sneak and Show, well, I'm not sure what else to tell him in this thread other than to play this deck. As it stands, this deck has a good matchup with Sneak and Show, because it plays Seal of Removal.
It just seems like it doesn't really benefit anyone to exclude candle/sanctum decks from the thread. The enchantress playerbase is already small enough that fragmenting it further doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, especially given that a lot of the discussion in this thread in 2018 has been about candle builds (which Fjaulnir and TJG have played to 5-0 modo finishes etc).
I'm in the discord and I'm subscribed to this, the solitaire thread, the witch house thread, and the opalwave thread - so it doesn't affect me all that much if people decide that we need yet another thread. It just seems like a bit of a waste.
I agree... Against Show and tell decks, I feel happier if I can cast a Choke (or even In the Eye of Chaos) on T2.
The odds to get both 1 blue seal and 1 green seal in the early game are very low (about 15-20%, considering you play 4 blue and 2 green seals). I expect a SB card to have a strong effect on its own, and in my case it doesnt.
Plus I don't play faeries, so...
Pox -- Miracles -- Lands -- Candelabra Enchantress -- Dragon Stompy -- Eldrazi Stompy -- Sultai Control
Pox -- Miracles -- Lands -- Candelabra Enchantress -- Dragon Stompy -- Eldrazi Stompy -- Sultai Control
I do not read or post in any other Enchantress threads because this is the only version of Enchantress that I think is viable in terms of being able to take down a large tournament (a GP or an Open). This is based on the strength of the lists presented in the OP, along with the pedigree (Andrew Cuneo is no joke) and the fact that it had in the past found success in the hands of players other than the guy who created it. The fact that your deck doesn't function in any way like the deck that this thread is based on can only lead to confusion; case in point, your question "how do you beat Sneak and Show", or your issues with Diabolic Edict + Snapcaster Mage, just become confusing when you're asking in a thread about a deck that is not even half the same as yours. Which is fine, you're free to ask the question, but you have to understand that you're going to get answers and strategies that revolve around the deck that people who come here looking for UG Enchantress are actually discussing, not the one that you've been evolving off to the side. Which might still be useful information to you, but you can't expect people to cater their responses to exactly your pet deck when it looks and acts nothing like this deck. If we are all playing and talking about the same deck, then the answer to that question makes perfect sense and can actually do some good. I have answers to those questions that involve playing with the cards in this deck. You may take that however you'd like.
I think the player base for Enchantress is just going to be fragmented since apparently no one can agree on what a competitive Enchantress deck looks like. The point of this thread is to discuss this deck, which is very distinctly different from both traditional G/W Enchantress and different from a build that plays with Candelabra of Tawnos. It's different in the cards it plays, the way it wins the game, even the basic philosophy of deck construction. It is different in the fact that it has put up results in large tournament fields in the hands of several people, which is why it's in the "Established Decks" section. This is not me trying to say one is actually better or worse (I think one is, but then you think yours is better, too, otherwise you wouldn't be playing it), but come on man. You're not playing Green Sun's Zenith, Cloud of Faeries, Eternal Witness, Seal of Removal, and you've turned the actual payoff card of this deck, Words of Wind, into a secondary or tertiary win condition. Those are all cards that make this deck distinct, and all of them were carefully chosen to perform a specific role, to make the deck work a certain way. You're just playing a different deck. It does no one any good for me to continuously point out the issues that I have with your deck (consistency, susceptibility to Wasteland, playing a dedicated win condition, playing a bunch of cards that do nothing...) which I think are solved in the deck that this thread is about, which is the whole point of why I think this deck is competitive where many other versions of Enchantress have struggled in the big tournaments. And you might not want to build a deck that is designed to win big tournaments, or might want to win "your way". That's totally fine, but this thread exists to promote and discuss a deck that is brutally efficient and has the ability to do very well in the format.
The fact that there has been significant discussion here on the Enchantress deck that plays with Candelabra of Tawnos suggests that a thread dedicated to that deck would do just fine. I don't own this thread, and it definitely doesn't matter to me. If everyone here wants to talk about a Candelabra deck instead, I will just stop reading and discussing, and I'll keep developing this deck on my own. But if that's the case, what is even the point of having threads that delineate between different strategies?
Good to have you Ben, I was kind of lost in all those Candelabra lists. I don't mind different lists here and there, but I rather see lists that are true to UG Enchantress in the UG Enchantress thread
I am working on a list to bring to SCG Baltimore. I will post shortly what I have, which by the way is pretty close to Andersen's list.
I feel like the deck has legs in this meta where storm is somehow evaporated and where big threats are black (Elephant Grass). Decks are a tad slower from the DRS ban.
Thx. Its good to hear that somebodyelse have the same feelings like me.Good to have you Ben, I was kind of lost in all those Candelabra lists.
I am still reading here but dont have a lot of time to write here but n1 to have you both.
At the moment i need some new ideas for my anderson list.
Start land.... turn... iam near to win.
The deck at its core cannot change all that much. Among other things, I reduced the number of Carpet of Flowers I played MD for a Mirri's Guile and another land. I found that lately there were too many matchups where the card was dead. It's debatable from one meta to another.
For the SB, I tried a few things. I tried to play white as my third colour for Teeg and Renegade Rallier. I tried red for Blood Moon and Words of War. I tried black for Doomwake Giant and Parallax Nexus. Each had its advantages. Teeg makes for a great card against Storm. Rallier is great against Chalice decks to get back that Seal of Primordium and the like. Blood Moon gets you random wins and Words of War helps creature matchups such as Infect and control matchups. Doomwake Giant is awesome against any non white deck, as a premium creature, and against D&T as a sweeper. Parallax Nexus, although coming online on turn two, has won me quite a few games against Storm and burn.
Right now, I am on the sole Black splash, for Doomwake Giant and Duress. Duress is an odd one, but I found it to be very potent against combo (evidently) but also burn. With Eternal Witness, we can easily keep a combo opponent from assembling his cards.
Overall, I feel like this deck needs to play to its strengths. That is, it must always be able to develop its board using Fast Mana and Enchantress Effects. If this strategy goes well, you will most probably win. That is why you need redundancy in Fast Mana and Enchantress Effects, and why Green Sun Zenith is so important (being both acceleration and an enchantress). We lose when we cannot establish our board fast enough or if our control pieces require us to slow down too much.
Having said that, my current build tries to respect the following criteria:
1. Make sure there is a reasonable chance to draw at least two enchantresses within the first 3 turns. (with 12 enchantresses, >64% chance)
2. Make sure that cards that do not advance your plan (mana, enchantresses and controlling enchantments) do not slow you down (i.e. use free to cast cards when possible, such as Tormod's Crypt, Mindbreak Trap, Faerie Macabre, Surgical Extraction, etc.)
3. Make sure the controlling cards are appropriately dosed for the expected meta (Elephant Grass, Seal of Removal, Seal of Primordium)
Full list:
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Verdant Catacombs
2 Tropical Island
1 Bayou
1 Dryad Arbor
7 Forest
2 Island
Creatures:
4 Argothian Enchantress
4 Cloud of Faeries
2 Eternal Witness
Spells:
4 Wild Growth
4 Utopia Sprawl
4 Green Sun's Zenith
4 Seal of Removal
4 Elephant Grass
4 Enchantress's Presence
2 Words of Wind
1 Seal of Primordium
1 Mirri's Guile
1 Mindbreak Trap
SB:
2 Seal of Primordium
2 Compost
1 Reclamation Sage
2 Tormod's Crypt
2 Carpet of Flowers
2 Doomwake Giant
1 Mindbreak Trap
2 Duress
1 Flusterstorm
Any thoughts on my list?
I agree with Ben. Words of wind and Cloud of Faeries are what make this deck what it is. The Candle deck is completely different and you can tell that there have often been 2 different conversations for each deck.
I agree: Words of Wind is still a core card in the Candelabra version, I don't know which lists you are looking at @dredge90 but you seem to be suggesting that there are lists playing Candles but not WoW
Candelabra is just a way stronger card than CoF for what the deck is doing
I agree with that.
OK Ben, my 4c deck you gently qualify as a pet deck differs from yours, but I really think we share a common philosophy and (in general) common issues.
Plus, I think it is good to weight the pros and cons of different builds, especially when any some players do have experienced both builds.
I also play Pox. There are many ways to play Pox : classical Pox with Sinkhole / Nether Void / Tabernacle / Chains (the one I play), aggro Pox with Bloodgasts, Budget Pox etc etc. Sometimes the builds share less than 35 cards, and yet we discuss about all these Pox decks, their strengths, weaknesses, in a single, very active, Pox thread.
That's just my own opinion, but in the end if people are confused with a mixed thread, I would be happy to create a new one... or just stop sharing.
Pox -- Miracles -- Lands -- Candelabra Enchantress -- Dragon Stompy -- Eldrazi Stompy -- Sultai Control
To be very clear, this is not a budget issue. When I say that our philosophies are different, I am not meaning to be vague. Here are some of the specific differences between your deck and ours:
1) Mana Base. In UG Enchantress, there is almost never a need to play a non-basic land into Wasteland. It is rare, on the order of once in 7-10 games, that I even have a non-basic on the board and most of the time that is the Dryad Arbor. In your build, you play only 5 Forest and you have to rely on inferior cards like Abundant Growth and Sylvan Library to fix colors. That is not a benefit, it is a liability. Additionally, you play a large number of Serra's Sanctum. That card does a great job of helping you win when you are already winning, and it actively hurts you when you are behind. It produces 0 mana on an empty board and it is a mulligan if it is the only land in your opening hand. I don't choose not to play it because I can't afford it. I choose not to play it because I think it is bad.
2) Win Condition. In UG Enchantress, there are no cards that have the sole purpose of winning the game, like Emrakul. This is intentional. If you draw Emrakul when you are losing, you will keep losing, and even harder. If you draw Eternal Witness when you are losing, you stand an excellent chance of being able to get back into the game. The deck is designed that way, intentionally, to eliminate dead draws at every point, which greatly decreases mulligans and greatly increases the potency of top-decks.
3) Consistency. UG Enchantress plays 12, sometimes 13 Enchantress effects where your deck plays 9. This is intentional. It greatly increases the odds of hitting a second Enchantress by turn 3, it ensures that your engine (which is having 2+ Enchantress effects in play) is more robust in the face of disruption, and it increases the consistency with which you go off. It decreases mulligans, and makes the negative effect of the mulligans you have to take much less pronounced. The more consistent mana base also decreases mulligans, as the range of hands you can keep is greatly increased when you're not playing with Serra's Sanctum. It gets Words of Wind in play and then bounces the entire board nearly 100% of the time by turn 5, even through disruption. It has no backup plan, because it is consistent enough to not require one.
4) No Do-Nothing cards. I've tried to be polite about this part, but I think I need to be more direct as to why I don't play the same cards that you do. Candelabra of Tawnos is not too expensive for me to own, it is trash. It is a terrible top-deck, it only adds to the power of the deck when you are already winning (with either a Serra's Sanctum and a board full of enchantments, or with a few lands with a lot of Wild Growth effects) and it's not even an enchantment to draw you cards when you are still setting up. Abundance is trash. Estrid's Invocation is trash. Sterling Grove, Ixilan's Binding (and other Oblivion Ring effects), Emrakul, Solitary Confinement, Karmic Justice, all trash. In place of cards that do nothing a large percentage of the time, UG Enchantress plays Seal of Removal that slows down the opponent, progresses the combo by bouncing Cloud of Faeries, or functions as a draw engine with Eternal Witness when you have tons of mana but are short on enchantments. It plays Green Sun's Zenith, which functions as an Enchantress, a Wild Growth, an Eternal Witness, or a sideboard bullet, depending on what you need at that exact moment. It sometimes plays Carpet of Flowers, which either adds a good amount of mana, or at the very least is a 1 mana enchantment so it draws 2-4 cards for very little tempo investment. It plays Cloud of Faeries, which is an accelerant, a flying blocker, a draw spell, or a win condition, depending on what you need in the moment. Every card in this deck either progresses you towards winning the game or stalls the opponent long enough for you to win the game. No wasted space, no inefficient movement.
You can play whatever you want to play. Make no mistake, I am not playing the cards you are playing because they are worse in this deck than the cards I am playing. This deck costing very little to build is a positive thing, but if there were more expensive cards that were better at doing the job, I would be playing those. I have a stack of expensive Enchantress cards sitting right next to me that are not in the deck because they were tried and found to be worse than the cards that are in it. These are all differences in philosophy, but in the end they all kind of say the same thing: I play good cards that are selected to increase consistency at every point, and any card that is inconsistent in any way does not make the cut. That is a massive, massive difference in deckbuilding philosophy, and I am surprised that you wouldn't recognized it, or would misclassify it as some sort of "budget" issue.
You are free to disagree with me, 100%, on the things I value in building Enchantress. But these philosophies are all reasons that UG Enchantress is different from every other Enchantress deck that exists, and they are reasons why this deck has it's own, separate thread. It is so that we don't have to spend endless time telling you why this deck doesn't want to play Serra's Sanctum. Please, respect that.
This attitude is baffling to me but I have no interest in arguing with anyone. Florian (and others) if you are interested in talking about decks I highly encourage you to join the Enchantress discord. Feel free to PM me for an invite link if you can't find one otherwise.
Man what a toxic community
Early one morning while making the round,
I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down;
I went right home and I went to bed,
I stuck that lovin' .44 beneath my head.
I know man, I know. It's so rude of them to not keep their commentary germane to the topic at hand.Originally Posted by SpatulaOfTheAges
I like the list, Turboninja. I think what I've found in my time playing the deck is that, from the original list, there is a set of 2-4 cards that are the "flex" slots that can come out in almost every matchup, and then there are the 8 anti-creature cards (Elephant Grass and Seal of Removal) that can sometimes come out in some number. In the original list, those were the 2 Carpet of Flowers, 1 Mindbreak Trap (or Living Wish if you're Chranderson) and 1 Seal of Primordium. Not that you always would get rid of all of those cards, but the rest of the deck doesn't really move. But realizing that really helped me crystalize my sideboarding strategy, to the point where I had to avoid putting more than those 2-4 (usually 3 is the magic number) cards in. So against decks like Eldrazi or Death and Taxes, which are creature-based with lots of artifacts, I'd just side in the three Disenchant effects for the 2 Carpet and 1 Mindbreak Trap, and I'm golden. Which means adding any cards to deal with those matchups is pretty bad, since I'd be removing strong cards to make room.
It's not hard-and-fast, of course, and some matchups Seals are worse and Elephant Grass is better, or vice versa, but it helped me form a sideboard that right now looks something like this:
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Carpet of Flowers
2 Seal of Primordium
1 Reclamation Sage
1 Compost
2 Deep Analysis
1 Garruk, Primal Hunter
1 Kitchen Finks
1 Chill
2 Invasive Surgery
2 Mindbreak Trap
This lets me board out a lot of what's terrible without sacrificing too much to make the deck function worse. Sometimes Seal of Removal is just better than a random hate card, even if it's not great, because it can keep the combo going and keep drawing cards, for instance. But it lets me get more resilient in the face of Discard or counterspells or Abrupt Decay decks (Deep Analysis, Compost, Garruk), lets me play some combo hate (Invasive Surgery, Mindbreak Trap and Tormod's Crypt all come in against storm, and some come in against some other decks), and still gives me one or two cards against Delver, since I don't need much more than that. It keeps moving a little bit, and I'd love to have some other cards that target Death and Taxes more directly, as I said before, but I think it's pretty balanced and doesn't have any huge holes.
Now, your deck, you cut the Carpets for two cards that you probably wouldn't ever board out, so it's probably a little different for you. For me, I like being pre-boarded in that slot a little bit, even if it's not directly with Carpet of Flowers, just so that it gives me a little more depth in my sideboard. But I like a lot of what you're doing in yours, just my thoughts on what I'd play to face the metagame as of today.
Last edited by benthetenor; 08-23-2018 at 09:55 PM.
Congrats to y'all's recent success with the Anderson list tho
Early one morning while making the round,
I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down;
I went right home and I went to bed,
I stuck that lovin' .44 beneath my head.
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