The times where you would want 2 Grim Tutor are definitely all-in situations with a high amount of risk. Grim Tutor for Infernal Tutor w/ an LED generates 4 mana and with Dark Petition generates just 3. Ultimately, in big mana situations where >9 mana is in pool you could simply start a Dark Petition loop searching for another copy or Infernal. It all depends on the contents of your hand, if you have one, and your graveyard.
Oddly I've been using the non-Hellbent feature of Infernal Tutor more often than not because Dark Petition doesn't care about your hand-size. You're behooved to have multiple rituals. Spell Mastery should be a condition that is almost always satisfied. I've had to Petition cold just once, which was pretty ugly, but being able to more naturally tutor a piece of sideboard in Echoing Truth or Abrupt Decay, and keep your hand has its benefits.
We're lucky to have such a polite new member. Welcome! I'm fine with the deck having a thread here, since I don't think the ANT or TES threads want a 4 Dark Petition list discussed without results to back it up. I'm pretty sure there's already another deck or two in this section named 8 Ball or something similar to it, so I wasn't thrilled with the name. I think Dark Petition Tendrils would be a more accurate and descriptive name and would key people into what you're doing right up front instead of having to read through the list and find out it's just ANT plus Dark Petitions. I encourage you to keep testing your list and reporting your findings here. The bar is always high for new cards in this format, so the default position is usually not to test things as much as we should. Ultimately, results speak the loudest, so if your list is good, people will pay attention.
the correct location is in the ANT thread as this is just another mere variant of ANT like the 16 cantrip one or Grinding Station. They have the same fundament, the same core and essentially the same speed (which is tied to t.holded Cabal Rituals).
Speed is ergo not compareable to TES which is a turn 2 deck while all ANT variants aim reach t.hold at turn 3 unless the hand is totally nuts in the first place and if you play 4 Preordains or 4 Dark Petition or whatever else in these flex-slors doesn't affect that at all. There is seriously no reason to go over the outdated name of "ANT" which isn't accurate since the printing of PIF in the first place and therefore even SCG moved away from the term but calls all decks simply "Storm" which is the smartest thing you can do to evade all the dumb naming of subtypes like ANT, TNT, TES, TRS, Grinding Station, etc.. Mind that the deck we know as "Doomsday" is still discussed on this board in the thread named "Fetchland Tendrils" and its maybe an admins duty to change the thread name for these at a given time, but there is no point in starting a new thread just because of the name and replace a thread with a full primer and a lot of compiled knowledge. Its a Cabal Ritual deck and shoukd be discussed in the respecrive thread.
Like most other storm players, I tested with DP in ANT already since the spoilers and this thread gave zero new impulses, but stating the obvious. What it however lacks is a critical analysis of how clunky the deck gets with 8 Tutors, ToA and PIF as natural draws as these cards are basically doing nothing for the first ~3 turns unlike Preordains which would at least feed t.hold and offer the option to dig for lands/rituals/tutors aka creating a wider term of redundancy than DP does. According to my personal testing even three DP is too much and I would rather play 4 Preordains and 2 DP than the other way round for what its worth (Which is funny as 14 lands, 4 Preordains, 2 DP is my current list)
www.theepicstorm.com - Your Source for The Epic Storm - Articles, Reports, Decktech and more!
Join us at Facebook!
If you're going to cut Ad Nauseam, at least brew something cool with Force of Will in it.
"I'm willing to imagine a TES where Past in Flames replaces Ill-Gotten Gains entirely, and we just don't play Diminishing Returns." - me, 29/09/2011
Founding member of Team Scrubbad: Legacy Legends
www.theepicstorm.com - Your Source for The Epic Storm - Articles, Reports, Decktech and more!
Join us at Facebook!
I'm going to work on addressing a number of the above mentioned items.
Often times you see the only Counterspell in decks with Dark Ritual is Flusterstorm. I don't really think this is correct; theoretically it's a very hard, aggressive counter and a piece of next-leveling to Flusterstorm another player's Flustestorm. It's much too narrow for my liking. Force of Will interacts extremely poorly in a deck whose only blue spells are pure power and manipulation, and whose aim is to LED the hand size to zero. Swan Songs, Pact of Negation and Daze could be suitable pieces of permission, but really impose a lot of deck building constraints and ultimately affect how you have to build the storm count and our fundamental turn. I would argue to you that Daze is the best and free-est of the free counters and can be used creatively to build storm and even ritual up. But we're not trying to operate a lot quicker than sorcery speed most of the time (the huge exception being Brainstorm).
We are a better discard deck because of the presence of Thoughtseize. It really helps when making decisions to just have perfect information and maximum flexibility. Ultimately, I'm interested not in finding the cool new piece of Counterspell technology but instead achieving the most powerful, consistent and reliable Storm deck. I think the power of consistency is where we win against permission, along with considerate sideboarding.
[As an aside: Necrologia, Quicken and Tendrils-based Storm decks exist, and should you really want to play Force of Will and/or Pact of Negation along side a powerful Storm engine, that would probably more suited to your tastes.]
I think the nomenclature issue needs to be addressed. We're not even playing Ad Nauseam. If we were I could see calling this Ad Nauseam, Ad NauseamX or ANTx. This deck would be a very poor Ad Nauseam deck because of the Dark Petitions. We're at a point where we don't need them and where the name doesn't serve it's purpose. 8 Tutor-Mono Black-Past in Flames, Quadlazer-Storm, Rice Crispy-Total-Chex Storm - I just kind of like the way 8 Ball sounds, so come off of it.
I think we can all agree this is far more powerful and consistent than anything with Grinding Station in it. That particular deck is a labor of love that has little to do with what we're talking about so I'd like to leave it there, ostensibly in the hands of a Greg Hatch or Conley Woods.
Infernal Tutor, in this particular 60 card deck, is as powerful when searching for a duplicate card in hand as it when we're abusing Lion's Eye Diamond. I would argue that this is an even better Infernal Tutor deck because of this. So if you choose to look a little deeper into what's going on here, I think you might find that we're taking a spiral staircase down into our storm kill - as opposed to the ladder approach of ANT or jumping out of the window like TES.
I think there's room for improvement, but I am certain I like the feel of it. This deck has some really amazing, unique and puzzling draws so far. I can tell you that the RUG matchup is better because of the hand disruption spells and because they can't counter all of the Tutors before they run out of cards. If a Dark Petition gets blown up, you have a hand still. In all my testing this has been pretty huge. RUG's best draws are hard to beat anyway, but that match up hasn't given me trouble since switching to this build.
More updates to come soon. Ty for reading.
You're running ad nauseam in the side, the same can be said for the storm variants running 2x PiF, 2x Tendrils, 1x Empty. You're not doing anything special and innovative by jamming 4 dark petitions in a storm list. The ANT thread should just be renamed Cabal Ritual Storm or something so people can stop trying to take credit for discovering "dark petition storm" or whatever everyone thinks they're doing.
Slight differences in storm builds does mean that the decks will play differently and value different cards (cantrips, key spells, etc.), because storm decks tend to be really tight in construction those differences relatively speaking are pretty large to storm players. That being said, this isn't the stormboards. No one really gives that much of a damn about the fine details of marginally different storm builds.
While all storm decks are marginally different in terms of card choices because the core for a storm deck is as follows:
4 Dark Ritual
4 LED
4 Infernal
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 G Probe
6-7 Discard Spells
1+ Lotus Petal, 4 in everything outside doomsday
12-14 Lands always including 4 delta and 2 sea's among others
Leaves very little customization. But decks play quite differently. TES is aggressive. ANT is not. This is somewhere inbetween the two since drawing naturally winning hands is a lot easier and you don't necessarily have to burn cantrips looking for a tutor like ANT typically does.
Having a tutor countered is a blowout? Thanks for that revelation. We're a storm deck attempting to resolve demonic tutor with zero cards in hand or little more than that. The entire goal of storm as an archetype is to discard opponents relevant cards so they can't interact with the tutor that you're going to use to win the game whether that tutor is doomsday, wish, infernal, or dark petition. Only other cards you want to resolve other than those are ad nauseam in decks that run it and empty, which is pretty easy to resolve due to it having storm if you draw it naturally otherwise you're tutoring for it deliberately. There are numerous differences between this deck and normal ANT. 4 DP is a big one. Is it right? Only testing and time will tell what number is right but 'normal' ANT runs 1-2 DP at most from what I've seen.
You don't run 4 grim tutor because grim costs more life, mana, and money. Grim tutor has never been that good at all in legacy and is even worse now that clocks are faster than ever/that 3 life is a big deal especially in conjunction with the past in flames you're likely grabbing with it.
Bread Connoisseur on MTGSalvation Forums
Currently Playing:
All flavors of storm combo
Originally Posted by Vacrix
If you're playing four each of Infernal Tutor, Dark Petition, and Cabal Ritual, maybe Helm of Awakening is good enough?
"I'm willing to imagine a TES where Past in Flames replaces Ill-Gotten Gains entirely, and we just don't play Diminishing Returns." - me, 29/09/2011
Founding member of Team Scrubbad: Legacy Legends
Helm of Awakening as an enabler is an idea I like and one that got lost way down here on the thread. I would want to play copies of Sensei's Top maybe because that would be pretty valuable. It certainly makes Cabal Ritual even better, the problem is finding space for this, and also I'm not sure if 8 Tutors is the most efficient way to abuse the helm. I think this was what Storm used when Priest of Gix was a card it played. Maybe just a straight Red-Black list could take full advantage of this?
You may be overtaxing brainstorm's ability to correct lopsided hands with 4x Dark Petitions in the main, possibly to the point of needing effects like Rain of Filth, Bubbling Muck, Lake of the Dead, Eladamri's Vineyard, or Carpet of Flowers in the main. Given the loss of speed inherent in running so many petitions, tutor 6-8 slots may better serve you as Personal Tutor.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)