Sometimes a 7/7 life linker is enough to clinch the game. I typically would use the draw 7 ability in response to something trying to remove my Griselbrand, having extra cards to reanimate something else is a bonus.Originally Posted by Brentane
In matchups where they have no ways to remove your guy, and they can't race it, there is no reason to draw cards. Aside from like 3 tarmogoyfs being like 4/5s, there are almost no scenarios where rug delver can race griselbrand. When drawing cards, you often put yourself liable to lose to things like stifle and multiple lightning bolts. In other matchups, where power is more easily surmounted, like ur swiftblade delver, you might need to draw some cards and resolve something like an elesh norn or an archon etc. It is pretty rare that in the delver matchups that you will need to draw any cards.
Against other decks such as midrange and miracle matchups, it is often correct to use every point of life you have to protect your griselbrand, since their few ways to get it off the board are all you care about. These decks often pack things like swords to plowshares and terminus, so drawing down low is often fine, especially due to the lack of pressure that they can present. Just be careful with bing numbers when it comes to drawing and reanimating, as 2,3, and even 6 can be huge depending on the matchup. Just try not to die, be conserved when you feel apt to, and get aggressive if you feel that you need more gas.
As for the other combo matchups, it is often correct to again draw with everything you have eventually, except for storm. There are scenarios that you need to be cognizant of in which they can just like run 3 spells into permission, and then tendrils you through any counter magic. Best way to prevent this is to put sire of insanity into play ASAP. :) Otherwise, use discard aggressively, and you should be fine. The odds that they have the tools to tendrils you through your permission is slim as it is, if you use your cards correctly, you should be fine.
This has been a public griselbrand announcement, use it as you may.
what are your guys thoughts on running 8 creatures main board while taking out a ponder. Or putting iona in sideboard and running main deck grave titan or sire of insanity. Been trying to see if it might be worth it to change the main deck 7 fatties or not
After this weekend.
Quick thoughts:
Thoughtseize >> Daze. But your life total is too pressured in delver matchups for me to want to play 4 TS at the moment. Daze is actually kind of awful since it only helps turn 1/2, and doesnt help against proactive hate nearly as much.
Tidespout Tyrant is bad. It is basically only good vs Maze of Ith, which is too small a consideration to be worth it. Iona gives you a good target vs Burn, and is better off of careful study in 90% of mus so I think its much better maindeck.
I like a land in the board if you play 15/3. Mostly for wasteland decks, though vs control mus, +1 land -1 petal is also good.
4 Decay is no longer optional to me. The card is by far the best thing vs delver (since you want to be able to answer early threats & cage & deathright). Threads of disloyalty also a consideration for that matcup.
I would consider a chain of vapor or wipe away in the board. I had opponents bring in Leyline and Humility against me which I have no way of beating normally.
Didn't play a competent miracles player, but so far Delver Variants & Death and Taxes were tough.
You should play 4 thoughtseize. Life is a resource to resolve your threat, and in the delver matchup, if you are not clear to go by turn 4-5, then you are dead anyway, and turn 4-5 is when your life total would have been depleted by the more aggressive strategies. That being said, i agree with thoughtseize being better than almost all of your other permission.
Tryant is awesome i think. Other than maybe sire of insanity, it is your only answer to a game one karakas, which is imperative with the increase of death and taxes in the metagame coming shortly. Tyrant is pretty much un-raceable if you even cast like 2 spells after he resolves. I think that having it main deck also deals with incidental threats to the strategy before you have access to abrupt decay after board. Keeping your opponent off of things like liliana and jace in the matchups without much pressure is also valuable.
Decay is great, i agree, but i contest that 4 is too many. You should never need to draw more than one, and with the amount of selection in the deck, i think that you can afford to play one less. As for threads, it is definitively too expensive.
I like chain of vapor, just be cognizant of the "Bounce your thing" clause on chain. If you think that this clause is a real detriment, than play void snare at will. The speed of the spell is often something of redundancy. Wipe is probably too expensive to want, as once the thing that we need to bounce is off the board, we want to kill them asap, and waiting till turn 4 at least to do that is a little ambitious.
I disagree with all this crapping on daze. It is the best card ever. For one thing Daze is the best answer to other Dazes!!! Thoughtseize is fine but it slows you down by a turn, eats your life, can't pitch to force, cant nail top decked Jaces and is approximately as bad late game as Daze.
Ashen Rider is another out to Karakas. It seems to fallen out of favor I guess. I am not sure why. Tidespout I guess can pull you back from really bad board states but Ashen rider is perhaps more reliable.
Sire has been discussed to death now.
I am in favour of putting a grave titan in the main but that could be because in my meta there are quite a few karakas decks. I also like how grave titan gums up the board against most fair decks.
My 7:
4 griselbrand
1 sire of insanity
1 grave titan
1 elesh norn
In s/b:
1 grave titan
1 ashen rider
I have a lot of DnT in my meta, but to be honest the second grave titan may not be desirable. Could be replaced with tidespout/inkwell/Iona I guess. I do find and have won a couple games off of just hard casting him
I think 7 creatures is the right number g1. You might tweak that number g2/g3 especially if you are on the show and tell plan.
I should of been more clear about creatures I was playing:
Maindeck:
Sire
Elesh
Iona
3x Griselbrand
SB:
Aetherling
Grave Titan.
If you think Karakas will be more popular than Burn (not true for me personally in a local context) than having a titan main over iona is certainly reasonable.
Against most of the decks you bring in decay against, you are not unhappy drawing any number of them (delver variants and elves mostly). Since they need a clock and/or disruption to win. And decay answers the most common forms of both.
List is really nice and I recommend giving it a try for those on the fence, will be refraining from any more public musings until after NJ.
Hello people.
I have been testing some reanimate builds over the last couple of days. And i have some questions. For me it seems like reanimate is a pretty fast combo deck when you have your combo pieces (like show and tell). The diffrence is that you have som answers vs some decks that will give you an auto-win, ex. elesh norn, sire of insanity etc. But it seems like you'r valnuable to too many diffrent cards. You can be discarded against, countered against, GY-hate, creature removal, medling mage, and the list goes on. Many SBs are packed with good cards against reanimate. Ive been playing against D&T, Miracles, Deathblade, UWR delver, as the 4 most played against decks, and they are boarding up to 13-14 cards in, not because their boards are build directly against reanimate, but because soo many cards are good against the deck. For me this is a problem since these are some of the most played decks in legacy.
Here are the most testet builds i've been running:
3 Griselbrand
1 Sire of insanity
1 Tidespout Tyrant
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
1 Blazing Arcon
4 Fow
4 Daze
4 Brainstorm
4 Entomb
4 Carefull study
4 Exhume
4 Reanimate
4 Thoughtseize
3 Ponder
3 Lotus Petal
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Bayou
1 Tropical island
3 Underground sea
4 Polluted delta
2 Misty Rainforest
2 Verdant catacomb
SB
2 Duress
2 Spell pierce
2 Show and tell
3 Abrupt decay
3 Pithing needle
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Ashen Rider
1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind
Build 2:
-1 Lotus Petal +1 Underground sea (Better in grindy matchups and vs landhate).
-2 Daze +2 Pithing needle (needle main seems good since there are soo many karakas and DRS) + it seems like what you wanna counter is and creature removal after you've comboed off, and daze doesnt do that. Thoughtseize is better helping you go off than counterspells.
Build 3:
-2 Daze +2 Show and tell (more ways to combo off, and good vs MD hate.)
My expirience is that abrupt decay is really good in sideboard, aswell as needle. these cards gives you the possibilty to actaully grind your way to victory which gave me lots of wins against deathblade. Show and tell gives another wincon against GY hate which is good. But no my questioning starts; if you wanna board in S&T, and/or even have some MD, why not just play Sneak and tell?. another argument is that this deck fill so many slots with combo pieces: 4 entomb, 4 exhume, 4 reanimate, 4 carefull study, 7 creatures = 23 cards. this leaves very few slots left for search engines, protection etc. comparing to S&T which have 8 creatures and 8 combo cards = 16 cards og combo pieces, rest search and counterspells. Another thing is that this deck can be attack from fewer cards. GY hate and creature removal is very bad in this matchup. the same thing counts for Storm. fewer ways to counter it, and the discards spells in this deck are more efficient.
My conclusion is that there are too many good cards against this deck, and too many of them are MD (karakas and DRS). Its easy to board against, and you can spend too much time diggin. For example careful study is really bad if you have no creatures. then you just looses cards from your hand. the same thing goes for entomb (way better though). you just loose one card in your hand. again show and tell can do this with only one card (sneak attack or show and tell), Reanimate needs 2.
I have many thoughts about this deck. I really like it a lot especially since i use to play Lands. It is clear to me that there are a lot of play to it. Which i imagine is on the contrary to show and tell. Its also possible to win many grindy matchups.
What i would like is you guys enligten me of why i should play Reanimate over Sneak&Show and Storm. Thanks for your time :)
- Attemanden.
First off, it's worth noting that Reanimator has access to an astonishing amount of natural redundancy, more than most other combo decks. Careful Study, Hapless Researcher, Entomb, and even Thoughtseize are powerful T1 setup plays. Reanimate, Exhume, and Animate Dead are all stupidly undercosted allowing for an easy T2 fatty as a followup. That's 12+ copies of each enabler without making the combo more expensive with Wishes or Tutors. That also still leaves plenty of room for interaction and business cantrips, although the non-Entomb combos (all 3 pieces due to discarding a fatty) do take up more slots as you mentioned.
Secondly, Reanimator very capably races combo since its lockout targets are instant losses for linear strategies. Its game 1's against the field, both fair and unfair, are very favorable imho.
Naturally, the great equalizer is postboard hate. G2 and G3 against white decks can be tough, and plenty of color-neutral hate gets us. But the third point is we have plenty of room for boarded disruption, and insofar as Legacy goes we can run the best (Thoughtseize + Force alone is a beating). We can even afford the splash for Abrupt Decay to answer a wide swath of permanent hate (and Nature's Claim if Leyline is a card in your meta).
I like your list a lot and agree with a lot of the numbers by themselves, but I think that Lotus Petal is strategically at odds with Thoughtseize in this deck. Petal is obviously there for accelerating the combo when you "just have it" so that your opponent doesn't have time to sculpt, and Thoughtseize lengthens the game by spending mana and trading cards to clear the way for the combo. I'm not saying they can't be run together in some mix, but your build has the full 12 Force/Daze/Thoughtseize disruption package which would probably play more nicely with 18 lands or 17 lands + an Animate Dead as reanimation spell #9 (more consistent combo, pound through countermagic, etc.) instead of the 3 Petals. The other direction you could take is shaving some number of Thoughtseize and/or Daze for more combo pieces to go off more reliably on T1-T3.
I also suggest trying more aggressive mulligans if you're having troubles finding the combo. This deck can easily win off of a 4-5 card opener (some can be very strong with Daze backup). My rule is to open with the whole combo or at least 2/3 of the combo (Entomb, or any 2 of: fatty, discard, reanimation) AND a cantrip to find the missing piece. I'll take the first two mulligans as freerolls and only sweat if I can't get a good 5. I'm also much more lenient with Ponder + Brainstorm hands since Ponder T1 can set up an amazing Brainstorm T2 into the combo + protection or acceleration. Other people might have better advice, that's just what I do.
So I plan on bringing a list quite similar to the one Jake M./Gilderbarin used in SCG NJ to a large local tourney. I expect there to be a strong contingent of DnT players (many of who repeatedly top 8), BUG Delver, UR Cruise Delver, Miracles, and maybe some deathblade or shardless.
I feel very confidant in the maindeck ( Same as Jake's), my concern is with the sideboard. With there being a real lack of graveyard centric decks in the meta, I feel comfortable in moving the 2 tormod's down to just one coffin purge. I have also taken out 1 spell pierce for the third duress. This leaves me with the following SB:
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Duress
1 Spell Pierce
1 Aetherling
1 Iona
1 Blazing Archon
1 Coffin purge
1 Crippling Fatigue
2 Pithing Needle
1 Massacre
So given the meta of delver and DnT with a splash of miracles, should I change anything up? Thoughts were adding a second massacre for the spell pierce or just going all out with 2 dread of night. Also would inkwell Leviathan or grave titan be better than Blazing Archon and/or Aetherling? Final concern is some of the BUG or shardless players will have leyline, would one echoing truth in the board be a good idea?
Thank you all and I look forward to enjoying the deck for some time to come.
Aetherling is only there for Miracles to hedge against Terminus. For everything else Inkwell Leviathan is better. If you're expecting only a splash of Miracles and heavy D&T then I'd run Inkwell.
Grave Titan helps in sheer power (10) as well as a hedge against Liliana. Doesn't really do much else besides beat hard on the ground.
Between the 3 Abrupt Decay and 3 Duress I think you could fit an Echoing Truth in there, depending on what angle you expect the hate to come from. If you've already maxed out on Thoughtseize in the main, 7 discard seems like a bold meta call.
Current Board looks something like this:
4 Abrupt Decay
3 Duress
2 Torymods Crypt
2 Pithing Needle
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Blazing Archon
1 Aetherling
1 Iona
This is what i think my board will look like for sommerset. With BUG and UR delver getting the amount of publicity that it is, i think that 4 decay will be alright. As someone said before, i think that now drawing 2 a game is actually not too much of a detriment. Good v Elves to an extent as well. I think the chain could be a void snare, not sure at this point if the bounce clause is really too relevant, since you are rarely gonna need to bounce anything then you have a threat in play.
I dont think that any deck besides Nick fit, manaless dredge, and leylines really play leyline, so i think that it is not really too much of a concern. Surgical is picking up though, which makes duress and thoughtseize increasingly better.
If you think that death and taxes is really that much of a chunk in the meta, i would consider something like
-1 decay, -1 Chain, + 1 massacre, +1 darkblast or something along those lines. I would stay away from dread of night due to it's specificity. We want something that can kill deathrite too i think.
I think that Torymds crypt is important because the only graveyard based decks that are ever faster then us, are the dredge decks, and coffin purge leaves much to be desired in that matchup. 2 mana, for two cards is often not efficient enough, you need to kill them before they have access to a pile of therapies and unmasks etc. Regardless, i think that the free yard wipe is really crucial. Need 2 as well.
The only reason I hesitate on the crypts is that other than myself, I expect at most one other reanimator player and 1-2 dredge players in a >30 man tournament. It would be a gamble I guess to go without them.
And have you found aetherling to be as effective in the miracles match-up as you were hoping?
Thanks for the input.
Fair enough on the crypts, as to aetherling, it is the only creature that plays around everything in the miracles matchup. Beats red blast, swords, terminus and jace. While in the early game, you are gonna get griselbrand or site everytime, later in the game when a top and counterbalance are in play, aetherling is the best option to actually kill them.
Do you not like S&T? I feel like I've gravitated towards it again because it gives the deck a different angle of attack. It makes it so that fatties in your hand aren't only good when paired with a Careful Study. It helps beat multiple hate on the board, because 1 Abrupt Decay can't deal with a DRS, Cage, and whatever Relic/Tomb etc.. they have on the board already. S&T makes it so you can play around all those things with a single card.
My problem with show and tell is that it creates opportunities for interaction on the part of our opponent. While out deck is fast, and our combo efficient, the real reason that the deck is good is because of our ability to have permission. When you cast show and tell, sure it gives you an avenue to beat a hate card, but it also gives your opponent another chance to interact through permission. If you cast a turn two show and tell, you not only open yourself up to more interactive cards like reb, spell pierce and daze, but you also give them a "free roll" on their resolving a spell. That and I think that city of traitors takes away the consistency of the deck.
Went 8-2 at the Legacy Champs in Philly with my weird no thoughtseize version. http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...l=1#post838456 Yipee $100 bucks of store credit I am rich!
The metagame was something like 50 percent Delver at least. Played UR 3x, and played against bug twice.
Lost to UR delver and a Death and Taxes deck.
I think I have to retire my favorite Card sphinx of the steel wind and jump on the Tidespout Tyrant bandwagon. Sphinx, is there in no small part for his non legendary status as a hedge against Karakas, but he does not cut it against stupid d&t. They assemble mother of ruins + flyer and the beatdown party comes to a grinding halt. I need the power of the human raindrop.
You can not run show and tell, but I feel it really makes the deck way more consistent. I also think you need 8 fatties if you do run em so you can consistently get a fatty in hand and another in the yard. I like picking a fight over the reanimation spell and exhausting hopefully multiple counterspells from my opponent and then holding the harder to resolve Show and Tells for back up if I lose the first skirmish.
For those that run Tidespout Tyrant do you run animate dead in your lists? The one tactic I've seen when Tidespout is reanimated with Animate Dead and your opponent attempts to remove it, the reanimator pilot would use any instant to bounce the animate dead putting the tyrant back to the yard to animate again. In my local meta it doesn't work since Krosan Grip is making a comeback as sideboard hate.
I'm still looking for options against D&T. I have Empyrial Archangel mainboarded, 2 massacres in the sideboard, and even a helm of obedience since they love RIP so much.
That is a pretty cool trick not sure if it is worth giving your opponent's Abrupt Decay's an actual target besides lotus petal.
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