[Article]Eternal Europe: Magic 2015

[Mon,Goblin Chief]

Well, review time is a little early for once:

http://www.starcitygames.com/article...agic-2015.html

[amalek0]

Carsten oh Carsten, wherefore wert thou oh Carsten? In all seriousness, in the glimpse affinity list, where were the ravagers? Did you make a conscious decision to cut them, and if so, what was your reasoning? If you're gonna play cheerio's, play cheerio's, otherwise it feels wrong to cut the namesake card of affinity from an affinity list. Oh, and your PM box is full FYI.

[lyracian]

The nice thinkg about Spirit Bond is you do not have to actually cast the creature; vial them in and pay 1 for a token.

Waste Not is very much a build around me card. A Pox deck with plenty of land destuction, Nether Void and Anvil of Bogardan should make it playable and stop it being a bad top deck card.

Sliver Hive cirtainly sorts out the mana base for casting slivers they just still have problems with any other spells; Ziggurat can be dropped so the deck has a better chance of casting T1 Vial. They are another tribe where Military Intelligence might help; and any card with Awesome makes Force better. Perhaps just focus on Slivers and counter magic...

Lands 20
4 Sliver Hive
4 Cavern of Souls
4 Fetch lands
2 Tundra
2 Tropical Island
1 Island
3 Mutavault

Slivers - 25
4 Galerider Sliver
4 Crystalline Sliver
4 Muscle Sliver
4 Predatory Sliver
4 Sinew Sliver
3 Phantasmal Image
2 Virulent Sliver

Spells - 15
4 Aether Vial
3 Daze
2 Spell Pierce
4 Force of Wil
2 Military Intelligence

[Sisyphos]

Guess it’s time again to remind you of some fringe implications of cards in decks nobody plays anyways.

1.) Goblin Rabblemaster

Will not return back Goblins to its once dominant self. Agreed. Also agree that everything attacking every turn is a substantial disadvantage as suiciding into TNN or Goyf and dying on the return swing is a realistic situation.

The deck I could see this card in is less Goblins but rather the Dragon Stompy list based on using Moggcatcher. In those lists Goblin Rabblemaster provides two things. At a casting cost of three it fits the curve and should reduce the problem the deck had of needing 4-5 mana to deploy anything aside from the disruption pieces. Running the deck in the past I sometimes got stuck at 3 mana so long that my opponent had time to draw out of Trinisphere or Chalice soft locks. Rabblemaster (especially with Kiki support) should also give the deck a faster clock then the previous versions had access to if you want (or have) to go into beatdown mode, making it more comparable to the Werewolf-lists in finishing the game quickly instead of grinding everything out. T1 Chalice/Trini into T2 Rabblemaster is a lot faster then T1 disruption, T3 Moggcatcher, T4 search for SGC. As the creature base of the deck is not 100% Goblin, the chance of simply dying to a counterattack due to the disadvantage of Rabblemaster should not be as high as when using him in a traditional Goblin deck. At least in theory the card seems playable in such a deck.

2.) Sliver Hive

In the past Slivers was pretty much considered a bad Merfolk list, as it was going for a similar game plan but with worse mana. The new land and the additional lord from M14 might make the two more comparable in powerlevel, as mana problems could indeed be a thing of the past for the deck. You lose a form of interaction as there is no Force-Spike-Sliver-Catcher (yet), but you gain shroud, a trade off that sucks against combo but is actually quite nice against decks with removal. So the verdict could be that Slivers might turn from a deck you see once every 6 years into a deck you see once every 6 month. Still not enough, but we're getting there.

Eagerly waiting for your Transmute/Dack Fayden-deck, but I guess that's a given anyways.

[Vicar in a tutu]

Waste Not is very much a build around me card. A Pox deck with plenty of land destuction, Nether Void and Anvil of Bogardan should make it playable and stop it being a bad top deck card.

I have playtested Waste Not in monoblack pox and the card is quite good. However, I don't believe in using Anvil of Bogardan. You already have more than enough discard effects in the form of Hymn, IoK/Thoughtseize, Smallpox and Liliana. Also, it sucks when your opponent discards a land card on his turn, giving you that you can't use since you almost never play instants (you could use it to activate Cursed Scroll). Also, Anvil is not high enough impact on its own. You are already playing with Waste Not, you can't afford to play another card that is useless on its own. Also, Anvil depends on Waste Not to be good, at least Waste Not works with 16 cards in the deck, Anvil would only work with 4. Besides, giving the opponent card selection is not something Pox wants to do.

I certainly don't think Waste Not will make Pox tier 1 or anything, but it provides something Pox really needs: Permanents that further its game plan. Liliana is awesome and integral to Pox, Waste Not is good as well when the board state is that of a typical pox-game: Extremely few permanents on either side of the board. And Waste Not can provide fuel to the Pox-deck in such a situation while you continue to attack the opponent's hand and board (smallpox is amazing). This is my current build:

Waste Not Pox

4 Mishra’s Factory
3 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Wasteland
13 Swamp

1 Nether Spirit

4 Dark Ritual
4 Smallpox
4 Innocent Blood
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Sinkhole
2 Cursed Scroll
2 Toxic Deluge
4 Waste Not

4 Liliana of the Veil

Sideboard

4 Leyline of the Void
4 Leyline of Sanctity
3 Engineered Plague
4 Unmask

[Mon,Goblin Chief]

@amalek0: Lol, in Prague apparently ;) Thanks for letting me know about my inbox. As to the Affinity-list, it's obviously a very rough draft but I don't think Ravager is that good in regular Legacy Affinity (Plating is just that good and going all in is often not great with it) so I conciously didn't play any. Might be wrong, though, as the deck operates very differently and might want a Ravager simply to enable an easy "sac all my artifacts, hit you for 20" at the end of the draw-chain.

@lyracian: The Vial-synergy is pretty nice, actually. Good catch. Spending mana on 1/1s - even ones that don't cost you a card after the first one - is still a little suspect, though.

The Sliver-deck looks interesting, Crystaline Sliver even gives you a good reason to be Slivers instead of Merfolk. However Dazes with 8 Islands counting fetches isn't going to fly, I don't think.

@Sisyphos:

You always try to put things into the weirdest decks :p

Rabblemaster: I could see it working in the Goblin Stompy deck, true. Being able to cast it of off a Sol land on two gives you an army that grows quite rapidly and you're hoping to keep your opponent from participating in the game anyway. Seems solid.

Slivers: Agreed, though the deck might just want to do something totally different (maybe involving Thalia and friends?) for disruption.

Check today's article for the latest updates on Dack and friends :)

@lyracian&Vicar in a tutu:

Pox is another place where Waste Not might be quite good. Chaining Hymns by hitting lands and getting repeated Zombies/drawing cards for using your disruption is a pretty solid pay off. It's rather dead if they end up not having a hand but at that point you're already in a pretty bad spot because that means they can actually cast the card they're drawing every turn. Sounds like it might be a pretty solid finisher here. That's the fair use of the card, though, and as Waste Not actually has the potential to be a full-blown self-contained combo-engine, well, that's even more intriguing to me.
Vicar, one thing I really don't get is why there are Leylines of Sanctity in your sideboard. I don't see any matchup where that would actually be your best option.

[TsumiBand]

@amalek0: Lol, in Prague apparently ;) Thanks for letting me know about my inbox. As to the Affinity-list, it's obviously a very rough draft but I don't think Ravager is that good in regular Legacy Affinity (Plating is just that good and going all in is often not great with it) so I conciously didn't play any. Might be wrong, though, as the deck operates very differently and might want a Ravager simply to enable an easy "sac all my artifacts, hit you for 20" at the end of the draw-chain.

I agree with this assessment.

As for the all-in trick, it may as well be an Atog at that point; you get more bang for the buck and if you get your creature StP'd or something similar, you only lost half as many artifacts.

I held onto my Ravagers for a little while after first getting rid of Disciple of the Vault, and then later when m10 took combat damage back off the stack, I let the poor robots languish for a while, but ultimately tore them out of the deck. Perhaps if Modular were a more playable ability on multiple creatures, I'd have kept it; after all it is still decent to respond to removal by sacrificing a guy to put its counters somewhere else. But really, Ravager wasn't explosive enough and losing the ability to stack damage was a big nail in the coffin for me. That really was one of the biggest strengths of the deck IMHO before the rules change; it could mitigate 1-for-1 trades by throwing all those counters to another creature, so you were still technically down a creature but you had roughly the same amount of power on the board. It was a fantastic trick and I can't think about it for too long without putting the theme from Max Payne on repeat and deeply inhaling 40 oz. of Steel Reserve.

[lyracian]

@lyracian: The Vial-synergy is pretty nice, actually. Good catch. Spending mana on 1/1s - even ones that don't cost you a card after the first one - is still a little suspect, though.
The Sliver-deck looks interesting, Crystaline Sliver even gives you a good reason to be Slivers instead of Merfolk. However Dazes with 8 Islands counting fetches isn't going to fly, I don't think.

Thanks. It is actually 9 Islands (counting fetches); could possibly drop a Sliver Hive or two to make it 10-11. The main reason I stopped playing Slivers was I never had enough blue cards to free-cast Force. It will need some play testing to find out how many Islands I need to be consistently cast Daze and all the Slivers.

[Mon,Goblin Chief]

@TsumiBand: Well, compared to Atog, Ravager has the huge advantage of having "pseudo-haste" if you started with a random creature in play, which seems relevant in a deck like this.

@lyracian: Oops, somehow overlooked the basic Island. Why would I count that one? ;) I'd probably want at least 12 Islands before I decided to play Daze tbh, you really need it on turn 1 or 2 to be actually good, after all.

[Zombie]

I agree with this assessment.

As for the all-in trick, it may as well be an Atog at that point; you get more bang for the buck and if you get your creature StP'd or something similar, you only lost half as many artifacts.

I held onto my Ravagers for a little while after first getting rid of Disciple of the Vault, and then later when m10 took combat damage back off the stack, I let the poor robots languish for a while, but ultimately tore them out of the deck. Perhaps if Modular were a more playable ability on multiple creatures, I'd have kept it; after all it is still decent to respond to removal by sacrificing a guy to put its counters somewhere else. But really, Ravager wasn't explosive enough and losing the ability to stack damage was a big nail in the coffin for me. That really was one of the biggest strengths of the deck IMHO before the rules change; it could mitigate 1-for-1 trades by throwing all those counters to another creature, so you were still technically down a creature but you had roughly the same amount of power on the board. It was a fantastic trick and I can't think about it for too long without putting the theme from Max Payne on repeat and deeply inhaling 40 oz. of Steel Reserve.

As a former Lark-Blink player, I know the feeling.
R.I.P. Momentary Blink. 2006-2009

[Vicar in a tutu]

Vicar, one thing I really don't get is why there are Leylines of Sanctity in your sideboard. I don't see any matchup where that would actually be your best option.

This is basically just a metacall, there is quite a lot of burn in my meta. The burn-matchup is horrible, as close to an autoloss as you can get. Normally I play Spinning Darkness, but I'm trying something new this time. It doubles as useful sideboard against ANT / Belcher. Against burn, my only hopes are: 1) Nether Void (which I'm not playing in this build) and 2) Destroying their lands and trying to kill them with Mishra's Factory before they recover. So yeah, pretty bad odds.

[datanaga]

Regarding slivers vs merfolks, imho slivers desperately need card advantage like silvergil adept to be comparable.

[Finn]

Regarding slivers vs merfolks, imho slivers desperately need card advantage like silvergil adept to be comparable.

True. I don't even know that the Merfolk comparison works any longer though. Why emulate a tier 2 deck? I am using Lead the Stampede and Arcane Denial-Cavern for card advantage. It is plenty. Too much, in fact.

On that note, who would use the new sliver land over Cavern of Souls?

[Ralf]

On that note, who would use the new sliver land over Cavern of Souls?

I'm afraid nobody !
This new "sliver" land is cute but I cannot see it helping Slivers.deck to get back to tiers 1.5...
5 mana to produce a colorless 1/1 sliver ? Oh come on !!!

Or, at least, surely not in a standard countersliver decklist but rather in a (36-40) slivers one !