Further analysis on the new DTBs. Because we're combo I usually base my analysis on "cards I care about them casting" and "cards I just ignore".
Miracles. Preboard cards I care about: 4 Counterbalance, 4 Force of Will, 2 Counterspell. Honestly, if they don't get CB, it's a slow clunky deck with few counterspells and no pressure. Postboard is different because they bring in additional cards we care about, being: 1-2 Containment Priest, 1-2 Rest in Peace, and 1-2 Flusterstorm. Abrupt Decay takes care of two of those, Reverent Silence one, and discard (or heaps of mana) the third. Of course, hardcasting Ooze and then using Entomb/Buried Alive can be a very effective way to take Flusterstorm out of the equation.
Grixis Pyro. Preboard cards I care about: 4 Deathrite Shaman, 4 Daze, 4 Force of Will, (sometimes) 1-2 Spell Pierce, and (sometimes) 1-2 Cabal Therapy). Lightning Bolt takes out the hardcast Ooze plan and speeds up their clock, so it can be difficult. Postboard, additional cards I care about are: the additional Cabal Therapys, and some number of Pithing Needle and Surgical Extraction. Ground Seal appears to be key here, but you'll need your Abrupt Decay too.
D&T. Preboard cards I care about: 4 Thalia, 4 Revoker. 1-2 Vryn Wingmare. Preboard, you get the following additional cards I care about: 2-3 Rest in Peace, and 1-2 Containment Priest. Abrupt Decay and Massacre do work here.
Eldrazi: Preboard cards I care about: 4 Chalice, 4 Thorn, 4 Thought-Knot Seer, 2 Warping Wail Postboard: 2 Sphere, 2 Wail, 2 Pithing Needle, 2-3 Relic. Having said that, I revise my feelings about the matchup. That's a bloody hard slog, as us Aussies put it.
UG Infect: Preboard: 4 Force of Will and whatever number of Daze, Pierce, and Flusterstorm they have. Postboard: Pithing Needle, Bojuka Bog (and therefore Crop Rotation), Surgical. Raystar's anecdotes say this is a slightly favourable match for us.
Just trying to work through the developing meta in preparation for GP Prague in early May. I'm coming all the way from Australia to play, so I'm not leaving without a fight!
Miracles, as you said, is Miracles. They have way too much permission for us to deal with, and that gets even worse when we have to dilute our game plan post board to make room for stuff to deal with CB and RIP. I still haven't beaten Miracles with paper cards, but I've had some 1-2s.
I've yet to face it (thanks, MODO!), but Eldrazi looks bad in my opinion. Very bad. In G1 a resolved Chalice or Thorn makes us too slow to beat their fast clock. We must pretty much combo off before either of them resolves, and that's very early, easily T1. We can combo off through these cards against slower decks, but they just come out swinging immediately.
D&T is fine. I think the matchup is quite favorable with some practice, but it does require practice and you do have to know the deck well. Sometimes all we have to do is deal with Thalia. There's a lot of variance in difficulty depending on how experienced the D&T pilot is, because they do have a lot of nest little tricks to pull out I hope they don't adopt that colorless eldrazi charm that counters sorceries.
Grixis Delver is slightly unfavourable, but manageable, I think? They mostly rely on DRs for yard hate, which is good for us because we gan play around it G1 and easily disable it post board. But sometimes they have more permission than we can handle.
Infect is favourable in my opinion. They barely have more permission than we have disruption, and we are at least as fast as them. I've done well against it.
So all in all, I think we're ok. Not great, but ok. We have two incredibly hard matchups among these top decks, which looks bleak, but we do well against the wider field of other decks. As long as Miracles is a top deck in the format, there's a ceiling for how well this deck can do.
Edit: Should mainboard Decays be considered for high-level events such as GP Prague? All five of the DTB have important mainboard targets: Thalia, DRS, Chalice, CB, Glistener Elf. Elf and Chalice get around our discard on the play, so we might want to swap a Therapy and something else for a pair of Decays?
Last edited by Havrekjex; 04-17-2016 at 05:05 AM.
Yes, that is an idea with a lot of merit. I think we should test some Decays main. Great thought!
EDIT 1: Dear MODO, fix Devourer so I can actually test...
EDIT 2: The "hardcast Ooze and swing Entombing for Devourer next turn" isn't particularly attractive at the moment given the current DTBs, in my view. Miracles has StP+Terminus, Grixis has Bolt, D&T has StP. It's a technique primarily for BUG and combo, and BUG's fallen out of the DTB and combo likely more out of favour the more popular Eldrazi gets. So could we cut to two copies of Necrotic Ooze maindeck and have the third in the sideboard?
Yes, I was actually thinking that the third Ooze might be a candidate to cut for the second Decay.
One thing about Decay main is that it makes us a bit weaker to Wasteland in G1, as we need to fetch duals when we want access to green. Probably worth it and not that hard to pull off.
Took this to my weekly Legacy tournament yesterday and did poorly, hah!
R1: Lost to Burn. G1, I was forced to Reanimate Griselbrand and he had the Searing Blaze + Fireblast to kill Griselbrand. I got G2 with Ooze shennanigans. G3 I kept a hand with two Reanimation spells, Pimp, Ooze, but no cantrips and died before I could find the other half of the combo.
R2: Lost to Miracles. Won G1, but died to the overwhelming amount of hate in g2 and G3.
R3: Got paired up vs Infect. I gave him the win because I was out of t8 contention anyways and we played for fun. I got g1 after a long grindy game of me building up mana to get through his stacked hand of soft counters. G2 I YOLO'd a t1 Griselbrand and got there.
R4: Bye
The deck is hilariously fun and of course it's great when your opponents don't know what's going on until it's too late.
That`s not too shabby, considering one of your two losses was Miracles and the other one could easily have gone your way. If you see a lot of Burn in your area, consider Iona in the sideboard. You`ve probably got the Exhumes there anyway, so it`s just one single sideboard slot to have an easier-access auto-win button against mono-colored decks. She`s not very good against the top tier decks, but she just crushes a lot of random other decks, and the opportunity cost of just one sideboard slot is very attractive.Originally Posted by Esper3k
Thanks! I think I just got unlucky vs Burn, but yeah I've seen Iona in some lists. Seems great vs combo too.
She`s not great against that many decks. You don`t want to side her in against any deck where you aren`t guaranteed to win when she sticks, because with just a little more effort you can combo out. If the Iona plan demanded more than the solitary SB slot, I wouldn`t bother. But sometimes at LGS level you come across some deck that just straight up dies to her, such as Pox or Goblins, and that makes her worth the one slot imho.
In other news, people keep buying out those AQ Triskelions. They were $70 a while ago and now seem to have stabilized at $55. It`s nice to sit on a copy of those.
Hah yeah I actually have a signed AQ Trike that I picked up years ago when I was playing around with the older version of this deck that tried to use Fauna Shaman + Vengevine.
Sometimes Burn is just faster than you, don't worry too much about it. I've lost the matchup before, too.
(Warning, whinging: MODO has just broken Dream Halls. So I can't play either Oozing or my build of Omnitell.)
I've also been taking the old-school list (pre-Griselbrand) for a blast IRL, it's been nostalgic!
Jesus fucking Christ, they seem to break more things than they fix these days.
The latest is that they hope to include the Devourer fix in the 4 May update.
Ok, I saw a blog by Koby with a match report of Tin Fins, with a transformational sideboard.
When I saw the sideboard, I was intrigued and also thinking, this can work for Oozing.
The Sideboard was as following:
1 Shelldock Isle
3 LED
1 Pithing Needle
1 Chain of Vapor
4 SDT
1 Ideas Unbound
4 Doomsday
And he would board out all graveyard reliance.
Ok, LED won't do us any good. So you can still keep some abrupt decays or other things from our sideboard in. We need to put an Emrakul in this SB to make it work (since we can't use it maindeck that good)
And after thinking a while about it, Tin Fins can do more with this sideboard because of the storm plan.
I was at first thinking, "Oh this is perfect with Ooze, keeping a Reanimate/Shallow grave in, cast Doomsday, put our 3 combo pieces in and a petal/DR and 1 Ideas unbound. Drawing our combopieces and discarding them end of turn and shallow graving our combo ftw!"
And then the thought crossed my mind: "Wait a minute, we need our library for our combo to work..." :-D
But I still think this can have something to get this working:
4 Doomsday
1 Shelldock Isle
1 Pithing Needle
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Emrakul
(1 Ideas Unbound)
With Shelldock Isle you can hardcast the Emrakul, and you use the pithing needle to protect you from wasteland or karakas.
And you can easily slip a Labman in the 5 cards with some protection/probe and a shallow grave. So you can still reanimate the labman in your upkeep (or drawstep) if they manage to kill it. (Damn doesn't work with a STP)
So having a transformational sideboard and even keeping in some of the reanimation spells to still be able to execute the combo.
Food for thought?
P.S.: Pandaman, I'm also coming to Prague, not sure yet if I'm going to be Oozing, but it would be cool to meet up :-)
Definitely, let's meet up in Prague. I'm arriving on 9 June. Grinding 10 June. Hopefully 5-0'ing the first one and then drinking :P I'll have Oozing with me I would imagine. I'm not sure if I'm Oozing yet, either.
It- It's alive!! IT'S ALIIIIVEEEEE!!!! Moaahhahahahahahahhah#%¤
They finally fixed Devourer online, get your Ooze on tonight!
Get 'em guys :)
This is what I'm doing at the moment: Abrupt Decay mainboard. As was mentioned a few posts back, there are mainboard targets in all the DTBs right now. I'm very happy with this setup so far, it feels so good to take out DRS and Thalia in G1s.
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Polluted Delta
2 Swamp
1 Island
2 Bayou
2 Underground Sea
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
1 Putrid Imp
1 Griselbrand
1 Phyrexian Devourer
1 Triskelion
3 Necrotic Ooze
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Gitaxian Probe
2 Reanimate
4 Shallow Grave
4 Entomb
3 Buried Alive
2 Cabal Therapy
3 Abrupt Decay
Sideboard:
2 Cabal Therapy
2 Reverent Silence
2 Exhume
1 Duress
2 Massacre
1 Necrotic Ooze
1 Pithing Needle
3 Ground Seal
I understand the 3 abrupt decays maindeck, especially cutting the therapies and the mox for it. Although you might miss the mox game 1 when you are going off with grissel.
I have 3 questions regarding the SB:
- against what matchup are you using the 4th Ooze?
- pithing needle, against top/DRS? Or anything specific? Ok, Just thought about Relic and Spellbomb.
- how are you battling the storm matchup? Without the mox and few discard spells? Especially game one.
1. The sideboard is not completely set yet, I'm definitely not sure about the fourth Ooze. It comes in against anything BUG, since they have a hard time killing it. It's so easy to win with Ritual-Ooze into turn three Buried Alive or attack-Entomb, because Ooze is pretty safe on the battlefield against those colors.I understand the 3 abrupt decays maindeck, especially cutting the therapies and the mox for it. Although you might miss the mox game 1 when you are going off with grissel.
I have 3 questions regarding the SB
- 1.against what matchup are you using the 4th Ooze?
2.pithing needle, against top/DRS? Or anything specific? Ok, Just thought about Relic and Spellbomb.
3.how are you battling the storm matchup? Without the mox and few discard spells? Especially game one.
2. Needle is mostly the sixth card against Miracles, but it's also a good catch-all. I rarely board it in against DRS though, I prefer to let Decay and Ground seal do the job, though it can be considered if it's a DRS deck that doesn't use Decay. I haven't ever done that yet, five cards is enough.
3. Yes, the Storm matchup probably has a significantly weaker G1 because I've replaced discard with Decays. Those Decays don't come for free. But taking out Chalices, Thorns and Trinispheres have higher priority with me right now. Another notable concession is that I'm slightly softer to Wasteland because it's more desirable to fetch for Bayou and less desirable to fetch for Island, thugh in most matchups that's no worse than what it's like is post-board anyway, I mean we almost always board in Decays anyway.
what?? Does it really work??????
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Reply With Quote