^
Unlikely with Miracles in the format unfortunately. Can you imagine playing against eight Terminus?
EDIT: Talking about Mystical Tutor unban. Got ninja’d.
Last edited by crowe_1; 04-26-2018 at 09:47 PM.
I don't disagree, however, those grindy match ups usually have some form of incremental creature damage that drops your life total to a point where it gets difficult to use Reanimate and Griselbrand's draw 7 ability...Originally Posted by owerbart
What's your strategy for those games?
Mystical tutor will aid every other combo deck. I like it.
Regarding UB reanimator "grinding" matches out....
I do see it as possible, but most deck that can grind out wins have a lot more inevitability on their side. Reanimator doesn't have that, unless its a devastating silver bullet.
Just a thought experiment: Let's say a bunch of high cost creatures come out, each of which instantly wins you the game in specific matchups. Reanimator would still not be a powerhouse because of the glaring weakness of the GY.
In order for Reanimator to really become a T1 deck we need a gameplan that is synergistic with the reanimation plan whilst attacking from a different angle other than the GY.
People have hatebears and flusterstorm to fight spellbased decks, then they have edict and surgical to fight lands. Then they have all those cards versus Reanimator. It's hard to become tier 1 with that kind of post board hate. Playing fattys that can be hard cast in the late game, like grave titan, might be the most resilient plan?
“Return a creature to the battlefield from exile” would be interesting.
The "grind out" nature of UB Reanimator stems out of the math that it's a two card combo that plays ~10 copies of each of the combo cards. So play against certain decks goes like:
"Reanimate targeting Griselbrand"
"Force of Will"
"Okay, Reanimate targeting Griselbrand"
"Flusterstorm, all copies on Reanimate"
"Okay, Exhume?"
"..."
We're not totally immune to blow outs, but in more cases than other combos, a well timed Counterspell doesn't leave us hobbled for the next 6 turns until we die. The classic combo decks lean way into their combo, they're devoted to winning that turn. Often times if we know they're holding onto a Counterspell, drawing a second Reanimate is the same as drawing a Thoughtseize. You just jam and jam and jam until it sticks. Then ideally the thing that sticks is a total murder for the other side. Whatever silver bullet that we need is the one we get. Often times that bullet is GBees, but even if he's not, often times he'll be very helpful in finding the one that is.
So the grind is the sense that not one interruption is enough to stop us. Yeah getting Griselbrand Surgical'd is rough, but we're not dead yet. I've won lots of games in that position. You just keep going, exercise patience as owerbart said, and see what happens. Yes there will be games when they keep you hobbled with DRS all while draining you so by the time you can do anything you're already dead. But a single Stp or Force isn't as crippling as it is to the faster Reanimator decks, so that's what people mean.
We've had Pull from Eternity for a while now. Way off color and not good enough to splash, but it is a thing available now for bold brewers.
^
Pull puts the card back in the yard, so it wouldn’t help against Leyline or RiP. Even DRS probably just eats the creature again. Creature coming straight to the field from exile dodges those. If too powerful, you could add the life loss clause from Reanimate. Of course, then people might just move to Cage as hate, so...
Either way still not a card that’s likely in the pipeline unfortunately. But I think it would help us a lot if it was.
Yeah, even if WoTC were to print such an effect they'd cost it waay to high. The only things they seem to dare print for Constructed are goodstuff removal, creatures and GY hate. All which fuel the goodstuff turbo Xerox phenomenon we're seeing.
if you wanted to, take inspiration from the Bizarro stompy deck & start running mainboard silent gravestones. Yes, this shuts off our reanimate spells save for exhume but it does blanket most of the current meta GY hate. Obviously, you'll have to start running more exhumes (4x), shallow graves, & corpse dance and cut petals to become more grindy but I think its a possible avenue to explore as we're the control player regardless. Note that this is a large shift in how the deck plays out so testing would be needed. I'd also experiment with green splashes so that we can have additional anti-gy hate and run decays (decay own stone -> reanimate for example)
I keep coming back to an Intuition/ Unburial Rites/ City of Traitors package against slower fair decks and prison decks.
I hate losing to Trinisphere or Chalice on 1, this package gives an out to it in addition to counter magic or Echoing Truth. City also makes it easier to play around Daze or Thalia effects and makes it easier to ramp into Show and Tell.
Intuition for an Unburial Rites, Fatty, Fatty gets you a guaranteed Fatty in the yard and a Unburial Rites in the hand or yard. It's a second Entomb effect or occasionally lets you find triple Force, triple Faerie Macabre, triple Echoing Truth, or triple Exhume/ Reanimate.
Against combo decks where speed and early interaction is everything, like Reanimator mirrors or all-in-combo like Belcher or OopsAllSpells, I take out the 5-card Intuition/ Rites/ City package for more interaction, like Faeries and Thoughtseize.
Against Delver or other permission-heavy control decks I am taking out Force of Wills and Lotus Petals for Thoughtseize, Collective Brutality, Echoing Truth and Show and Tell. My logic being I don't want to 2-1 myself against their wall of counters, and Show and Tell is usually very asymmetric against them.
Against Trinisphere and Chalice decks I want to keep the Force of Wills but play a slower and more resilient game, since I have a few turns to land a threat and they don't usually have means to answer a big fatty. I'll take out the Lotus Petals and Reanimates, maybe Spell Pierce or Elesh Norn/ Iona depending on their threats for Show and Tell, Echoing Truth, Thoughtseize and Ashen Rider.
I don't have a clue what the best strategy against Death and Taxes is. I try to go full in on landing a Griselbrand or Jin-Gitaxias as fast as possible, keeping Lotus Petals, since their only interaction turn 1 or 2 is a Swords to Plowshares and I want to reload my hand. Elesh Norn can wipe their board once but I hate seeing her go farming. Iona is good if they don't have Karakas or Vial yet, which isn't often. I think I want to take out Force of Will and Spell Pierce and put in things that kill creatures and attack hands (Collective Brutality, Massacre, Thoughtseize). Do I want to leave in the Intuition and Unburial Rites? Do I want to put in Show and Tell or Echoing Truth? Containment Priest and Rest in Peace are a brutal tandem. Maybe I want a sideboard Archetype of Endurance?
4 Underground Sea
1 Tundra
1 Scrubland
1 Swamp
1 Island
4 Polluted Delta
1 Flooded Strand
1 Marsh Flats
2 City of Traitors
4 Lotus Petal
4 Reanimate
4 Exhume
4 Entomb
4 Careful Study
4 Brainstorm
2 Intuition
1 Unburial Rites
3 Griselbrand
1 Elesh Norn
1 Jin-Gitaxias
1 Tidespout Tyrant
1 Grave Titan
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
3 Thoughtseize
2 Spell Pierce
4 Force of Will
Sideboard:
3 Faerie Macabre
1 Thoughtseize
1 Ashen Rider
4 Show and Tell
3 Echoing Truth
1 Massacre
2 Collective Brutality
I've played Ground Seal in Necrotic Ooze Reanimator, before the Sensei's Top ban; it seems about like the same card as Silent Gravestone but a different part in the curve.
I think that 4x Exhume and 4x Shallow Grave is a fine reanimation package. The Shallow Graves in particular push you towards a fatty that can win the game on the spot, typically either Griselbrand drawing tons of cards (which can Tin-Fins things out or just put you way ahead) or Necrotic Ooze doing the Phyrexian Devourer/ Triskelion thing.
You can have Reanimate in game one and replace it with Gravestone/ Ground Seal in game two in anticipation of Surgical Extraction/ Faerie Macabre/ Extirpate/ etc.
I think the best anti-grave hate is still Show and Tell, it gets around Relic of Progenitus, Grafdigger's Cage, Rest in Peace, Scavenging Grounds and Leyline of the Void as well as the targeted stuff that Gravestone/ Ground Seal answers. It's also a more proactive thing to cast instead of having sideboard slots that just destroy their sideboard slots. What Show and Tell sucks against is Containment Priest and other unfair big-stuff decks like Sneak/Show and OmniTell.
(I think Ooze Reanimator is a better deck against a fair meta due to its ability to dodge gravehate, I've never been happy with its permission suite in a combo or prison-filled meta though.)
Just as pirate king said, as long as you tune in your list and you can dodge the blowouts, reanimator is a two-card combo that unlike sneaky show, you don't need to execute everything in the same turn.
I don't play petals nor dazes which means that as we enter the mid game, I'll have better topdecks and much more resiliency in my cantrips to never stop attacking. I also can go now to 6 discard spells which means that i can play accordingly to the hate they got. IMO one of the things you should always consider is to not be afraid to run decays into creatures to gain time, and even if you wanna, maybe throw a reanimate at them if you think they can be impactful. Lately i've been thinking that there are some very interesting cards that i would like to try in the sideboard:
Strategic Planning
Bomat Courier (in UBr builds)
Search for Azcanta
I've been fiddling with a acceleration-less build for a while since we need a good reason to not play BR right now. I was thinking 2-3 Azcanta in the maindeck might help smooth games and keep the blue count up. We still want to go off in the early turns if possible but since we lack the T1 potential, we ought to make sure our T2-5s are safer.
If we're gonna postpone our combo by 2-3 turns, maybe we should be playing more hard counters like dispel. The only downside is it only protects our combo and can't stop opponent's but there's so few combo in the meta atm that it might not matter. We'd still be 1-2 turns faster than Sneak, and have lots of disruption for ANT (the two most popular combos). What is certain is 3x brutalities maindeck not only helps with drs/strix, it plays the slower combo role very nicely.
Dispel might be a good bet now that Surgical Extraction is the go-to grave hate. However, Search for Azcanta seems two or three turns too slow.
If you're wondering how I produce blue mana, I copy my opponent's Island with Thespian's Stage
My Youtube and Twitch usernames are DNSolver.
I am the Legacy metagame:
-2016 Eternal Weekend Europe won by BR Reanimator (I wrote the primer)
-2016 Eternal Weekend North America won by Turbo Dark Depths (I write about and develop the winning version specifically)
-Refiner of Hogaak Depths.
You're probably right. I'm trying to find more U cards that shine in turns 2-5 and interact with graveyard but there are not many of those. Jvp and Hapless researcher are canditates once again but I fear they're just going to be lightning rods in the end.
Last edited by Cpt-Qc; 05-13-2018 at 11:36 AM.
Brutality is a card that i could definitely see being run in the side as a way to smooth our delver matchup. Usually G1 you will have enough gas and velocity to take it out, even without mana acceleration. If you want more counters Misdirection has been working great for me, specially because once you get griz out, it can protect it while still generating value, but even as a 5-6th semi-fow has been doing the trick for me. The issue i have with Azcanta is that it might make the game a bit TOO LONG for what we are planning to grind, and now that i think about it UW already feels like a fine matchup. My idea against decks packing pyroblasts (which they will ALWAYS bring in) is to just minimize the number of blue cards i play, so they die with the REBs in hand.
Hapless Researcher is a card that just increases in value after sideboard because it can act as an instant way to ditch a fatty, like in lines with exhume->surgical-> sac reasearcher. Dispel feels like suboptimal since post sideboard they will have better counterspells. We could go into the avenue of playing Flusterstorm, but I've been trying 2 copies of it in the sideboard and i've felt that the card isn't that good. Maybe I'm playing it wrong, but it only has been shining in combo matchups which are already good matchups for reanimator.
To round up the idea, not running petals will take out the ability to go off T1, but you will have much more chances of going off t2 or t3 since probabilistically you will get smoother hands.
This is what my sideboard looks like, i'm in a non-acceleration build:
2 Thoughtseize (2 main)
2 Duress
2 Show and Tell
3 Abrupt Decay
2 Echoing Truth
1 Pithing Needle (i play one main, 61 cards)
1 Keranos, God of Storms
2 Flusterstorm (This could be exchanged for 2 Collective brutality maybe?)
Other cards that have been going in-an-out of my SB, but all have been proven and i liked them, are:
Blazing Archon: Another non-legendary reanimation target, and it's surprisingly good in more matches that what it may seem
Teferi's Realm: Great against permanent based hate, because you can deploy it proactively and it will start working as soon as it enters. Prison decks feel, with 3 decays and 2 truths, already as very favorable matchups, but if your meta starts to pick up on them again, this is the card that you wanna play, since it will nullify whatever you need.
Massacre: Good vs hatebears, specially if you can bait the containment priest with some discard, you can nuke it afterwards, or against DNT if you need to buy time.
Sorry for the messy writing, I just woke up haha. But yeah, I definitely recommend switching to non-acceleration builds for better grinding
How many lands do you play? I used to play 15 with 3 petals. Since then I've cut the petals but stayed at the same number. I'm now leaning towards 17 but it's hard to cut 2 spells... maybe 16 is enough.
I play 17 lands: 2 swamps, 1 island, 3 under, 1 trop, 1 bayou, and 9 fetches. It's also important to remark that if you are going for the petal less builds you should definitely cut daze, since the card loses a lot of value after turn 2.
http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=19187&d=321457&f=LE
My list from Birmingham. Felt ok. I did not see that many Karakas, so I will get Gitaxas into the Main deck again.
Also: i hat deathrite
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