I'm not trying to discredit the Black splash anymore than splashing in general.
You are absolutely right that discard is the most versatile combo hate, but in this case being the most versatile does not equal the best. I wish it was the best! If it were, then the combo matchup would be much, much easier. Every Goblins deck (and every fair deck in general) would just pack a Black splash and 8 discard spells in the side. Unfortunately combo has a lot of resiliency to discard. They generally have Brainstorm to stack the top of their deck, or they have Ponder to dig for what they need. Or they have enough redundancy to go off through a discard spell. Discard spells also do not help our gameplan of bringing the beats because we theoretically need to keep drawing and playing discard to keep combo from going off. If we're drawing discard then we're not drawing Goblins, so we're not closing out the game. I think this is why Goblins likes permanent based hate so much. We can spend one card worth of resources on messing up our opponent's plans (say with a Thorn or Chalice) while the rest of our hand can bring the beats and aggro them out of the game.
The other problem with a splash (and here I'm just reiterating my points from earlier) is that you will lose games where you draw your discard but no B mana to cast it, and you will lose games where your opponent exploits your manabase that was built to give you access to splash colors.
All that being said, I have never run 8 discard spells in the side that I can recall, so I cannot speak from experience to their effectiveness. However, I also don't see decks built like that putting up results on tcdecks or other sites. If your testing or tournament performance shows otherwise please do share. We'd all love to hear about how it improves your game.
I'm all for the stable mana base and running 10 basic mountains. There's a lot of games where I'm more than happy to have two in my opener or to draw into them and not have to sweat out a stifle because I really needed the red mana for something.
As far as how to attack combo, from what I've heard from every combo player is the best strategy is attacking from multiple angles. There is permanent based hate (cotv, thorn, enchantments, hatebears), discard, and counterspells. Probably missing something else, surgical for Past in flames decks...If you are running just discard with nothing else I think this is the worst, because a lot of these decks can win with a top deck brainstorm and win off of 4 cards in hand...My success has always been with getting 1-2 thorns out and porting (4 ports, no less) them while lackey connects and i'm able to chip in for 4-5 a turn. Usually once they're below 10 Ad Nauseam becomes less of a thing and they have to jam empty, where chainwhirler puts in work.
I'm never super pumped to be sitting across from combo, but it's winnable. Games can always go any number of ways so don't get discouraged. I would also say, playing these decks myself and understanding how they operate has helped me out tremendously...a lot of these "boogeyman" decks come with their own set of problems. Sometimes the correct play isn't trying to do what you want, but making the play that your opponent least wants you to make...some chess saying that I butchered.
This doesn't make any sense
- A big reason for why Stoneblade plays black is for discard
- Grixis Delver played/plays discard over other forms of SB combo hate
- So did Elves, usually
- Nonblack fair decks like RUG and Miracles have counterspells so they have less need for discard. DNT has combohate in the form of Thalia, Revoker, etc, and doesn't want to splash for Thoughtseize because it gets taxed by your own Thalia
I admit that my adapted paragraph isn't very convincing, but that should illustrate how your original statement wasn't very compelling eitherUnfortunately combo has a lot of resiliency to Spheres. They generally have Echoing Truth or Chain of Vapor to get rid of them, or they are playing SNT or Reanimator and don't care. Or they have enough speed to kill you before you can cast them. Spheres also do not help our gameplan of bringing the beats because Spheres don't attack. If we're drawing Spheres then we're not drawing Goblins, so we're not closing out the game. I think this is why Goblins likes discard so much. We can spend one card worth of resources on messing up our opponent's plans (say with a Thoughtseize or Duress) while the rest of our hand can bring the beats and aggro them out of the game.
There is some inherent inconsistency in splashing ("What if you don't draw the color you need to cast the hate spell") so you just have to make an honest assessment of the probabilities. With 8 black sources in the deck you are over 75% to draw one in your opening 7. If you're playing a SB like
3 Mindbreak Trap
3 Confusion in the Ranks
3 Relic
3 Thorn
3 Pyrokinesis
And you come up against SNT then you have your 3 Thorns and 3 Confusion, sure, but:
- This is a low number of cards to be bringing in, because all your SB cards narrowly target specific different matchups, because you aren't playing discard
- Thorn isn't even very good in this matchup, I get that the 'permanent based hate' meme makes sense for like Thorn vs Storm or Containment Priest vs Show and Tell etc but there are many matchups where a given hate permanent is worse than a discard spell and we only have 15 slots
I just don't think the odds necessarily favour this SB configuration
Last edited by kombatkiwi; 07-27-2018 at 04:04 AM.
Since we're having this very interesting and imho very important discussion about splashing in Goblin:
1/ One big upside for the white splash is also that you can also bring in Thalia in every control match-up. Having her against Miracle or Blade Control is huge (any slow blue deck). However, against all black combo decks, I find it always a bit slow, since discard hits Thalia often (against blue decks, you can make her uncounterable with Cavern, so it helps bypass counterspells). In those cases, I think I prefer play cabal therapy (huge with MWM!), and comes one turn before Thalia does. Against non-black combo decks, I find Thalia and Containment Priest to be better.
2/ Back to basics in UW decks is a thing. And it makes us loose game that "we normally shouldn't", especially against all UW control decks, against which we are a bit favored (feels like ~60/40 to me). And that is frustrating.
Also, loosing a game (especially against wasteland.decks) because I'm missing my 2nd red source or my 4th land is really sad, and unfortunately not that uncommon. So the Mono Red list has definitely some advantages here, because I feel it improves our favored / 50-50 match-ups. And we need to win those matches as often as possible, since combo is so bad.
3/ About the black splash: what do you think about having 2-4 Cabal Therapy maindeck in a Rb list? I read on another forum, some years ago, that a respected goblin player (cannot remember the name) played 4 Cabal MD alongside 3-4 Skirk Prospector, 4 MWM and 3 E-Squad in the sideboard (the idea was to be able to E-Squad T2 against combo). Have you tried it / what do you think about that? When I tried it, some years ago, I was a bit confused, also because the deck was a bit harder to play, and I didn't test it long enough to be able to figure out if this was a good idea or not. But I mentioned it here, since I think the idea is worth noting. Anyway, I will try the 8 discards in the sideboard. @Hanni: btw, how do your 15 look like, with 8 discard and 2 surgical? Would you share the 5 others cards with us, please?
4/ Would you side-in / keep your discard spell post-side against Blades decks (especially Cabal Therapy) ? I found that the card is good against Blade Control, but I feel it is not that great against D&T (because our manabase will be more subject to mana denial, because we are fetching for our badlands). Do you guys have the same feeling?
5/ How is the Post Ramp match-up? I had no chance to play against this archetype yet, and I was wondering how our little Goblins were doing against those big fat eldrazis.
Thanks in advance, guys!
I'd be interested in hearing from Olaf Forkbeard or someone else experienced in the Rw builds with Thalias and so on.
Eldrazi MU is fine, ports and wastes are very important here. bring in artifact hate and pyrokinesis and just outgrind them... they really die to our mana denial.
But i have another matchup question. how do you board against RUG delver? what is the strategy here? if you have access to stuff like warren weirding or relic of progenitus would you board it in? as far as i experienced this, RUG is the most difficult of the fair matchups. When they are on the play i nearly always lost...
Boarding is pretty easy. Relic is great. RIP is even better. Chalice of the Void is great. Weirding is ok (it usually eats a redundant counterspell).
Play around Daze when you can. Play around Waste when you can. Try to have a Vial in your opener. Don’t play into Stifel. Don’t start chump blocking until you’re under 10 life; build your board presence instead. Kill Delver ASAP to help keep your life up. Play Mogg War Marshal (2 or 3 copies).
Why splash if you can play mono Red with Blood Moon? It's a better hate than what other colors can offer.
Lands [21]
4 Wasteland
4 Cavern of Souls
2 Rishadan Port
9 Mountain
1 Pendelhaven
1 Karakas
Creatures [27]
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Goblin Matron
4 Goblin Ringleader
4 Warren Instigator
3 Goblin Chieftain
1 Gempalm Incinerator
1 Goblin Chainwhriler
1 Stingscourger
1 Mogg War Marshal
1 Siege-Gang Commander
1 Krenko, Mob Boss
1 Goblin Piledriver
1 Goblin Trashmaster
Spells [12]
4 AEther Vial
2 Chrome Mox
2 Tarfire
1 Pyrokinesis
3 Blood Moon
Sideboard [15]
4 Chalice of the Void
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Mindbreak Trap
2 Abrade
1 Blood Moon
1 Goblin King
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
Let your Dredge 6 be: Narco, Narco, Narco, Bridge, Bridge, Dread Return
Who says you can't run Blood Moon with a splash color? As long as the splash is minimal, it's mostly irrelevant. In the matchups where I bring in Blood Moon, I'm not boarding into splash cards. The only matchup where I consider bringing in both discard and Blood Moon would be against Turbo Depths.
I play Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, because she is so many things. She disrupts, she locks people out in conjunction with Port and Waste, and she attacks. Thalia is excellent against a combo deck's average hand. I don't want to beat their nut draw, that's theirs, rare, and a corner case. I want to beat them when their deck is just simply working, because that's the majority case. If I was going to lose turn 1, their hand is definitely good enough to go off turn 2 or 3 without much more effort through hate, and since we don't have a clock in that time span, usually, I see no point in preparing for something our deck can't do.
Against fair decks, we have inevitability, we are control.
Against unfair decks we do not have inevitability, we are beatdown.
In that vein cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Containment Priest, [cards]Eidolon of the Great Revel[cards] are the types of cards I want to be playing because they enable the beatdown plan, not the control plan. You can jam hate piece after hate piece, but if there is no clock it does not matter in the slightest. I really like the core gameplan of dropping a passive card, and then adding a reactive card to the pile. It's two routes of interaction. Even Relic is technically instant speed for the purposes of enabling two sided interaction.
Basically, if Thalia, or some passive hate bear wasn't good enough by turn 2, their hand's lineup theory for beating us was really high, and I'd rather beat them 80% of the time, and I do not care about the other 20% where they just had it. Don't Sideboard to beat nut draw, sideboard to beat average hands.
On another note:
If I were running one, I think I'd probably be on Damping Sphere over Thorn of the Amethyst in pretty much every case. Sphere does every thing thorn can do in the macro, and has more applications. The only real difference here is that Thorn retards cantripping once a turn to find removal for hate pieces if they are low on mana.
If I edit a post without an explanation, I am just correcting typos and / or formatting.
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Blood Moon hits drastically different things than any of the splash colors? I don't understand what your comment here means. The splashes (more or less) are all dedicated to the "beat combo" plan. Blood Moon is completely useless against any combo matchup other than Turbo Depths.
Also, as Hanni has said, splashing does not stop you from playing blood moon in the slightest.
On a more metagame level, I think maindeck blood moon seems really bad when the top fair decks are D&T and Miracles....
I play damping sphere quite often and I've had the symmetry of the card only come up a few times, and most of those were from me wanting go cabal therapy + creature + flashback therapy. It's really not a big deal at all. The vast majority of the time, you're only playing 1-2 things a turn. It also is nice with Vial and Lackey, which sidestep the issue entirely.
If I edit a post without an explanation, I am just correcting typos and / or formatting.
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This is true. Blood Moon has targets right now, but I'd argue they are decks we don't necessarily need the help against, or they're too uncommon to warrant sideboard slots. Damping Sphere also kinda pulls a lot of weight vs Eldrazi while having wider effect in the meta than moon.
I also agree that Blood Moon is not a very good maindeck card. We cannot turbo it out turn 1 like Dragon Stompy can, it's a non-Goblin card, and it's only going to be great in a couple of matchups. As a sideboard card it's great, I personally have two in mine, but I would never consider playing it maindeck.
I guess Dragon Stompy is tier 1 because they run Damping Sphere, right?
Blood Moon is the most degenerate card in the list beside Goblin Lackey. A great part of this deck's plan is mana denial. It has won me so many game 1s I wouldn't even consider building without it. Postboard, if it's useless, you can always switch for Chalices or whatever.
Let your Dredge 6 be: Narco, Narco, Narco, Bridge, Bridge, Dread Return
I'd say so, since I'm generally not worried about bringing it in against non-combo.
I don't feel like I need the help against Eldrazi personally, but others have found success in that route, or so I hear.
It's kind of how I one day realized that 2 of my Pyrokinesis's are for fair match-ups (D&T, Delver Variants, etc), and the third is for specific match-ups (Elves, Dredge, Infect, Eldrazi, etc). You don't have to bring in your sideboard cards if you got the match covered. It's really not intiutive though.
If I edit a post without an explanation, I am just correcting typos and / or formatting.
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Dragon Stompy almost certainly isn't tier 1 after the bans, I haven't seen it post many significant results since the bannings.
What matchups specifically do you think get significantly better with mainboard blood moons vs having more goblins in your deck for matron/ringleader/lackey/winstigator/gempalm? There is a high deckbuilding cost to putting non-goblins in your maindeck.
The decks I would want blood moon for are: Eldrazi, Post, Lands, Turbo Depths, BUG control, Maverick, and Grixis Delver. It's technically "good" against RUG delver, but very difficult to resolve, especially in a game 1 situation where they still have all their FoWs, Dazes, and Spell Pierces. Of those decks I listed, Eldrazi/Post is the only popular one, with Lands, Grixis Delver, and Maverick being lower tier but still reasonably popular. That said, blood moon isn't even that good against Post because of all their ramp artifacts, I've resolved t3 blood moon against post plenty of times and have it do basically nothing. I'd also much rather have just more removal spells against a deck like Maverick. If they get a knight out early and you can't kill it, you will eventually lose to it. Postboard I'd still bring in blood moons if I have them, but it's not a KO, which is what it basically has to be in order to get a maindeck slot over the more synergistic options.
On the flip side, the decks I don't want blood moon: D&T, Miracles, Grixis Control (they sideboard their own blood moons now), Sneak and Show, Storm, Stoneblade, Reanimator, Infect, other blood moon decks. Those first 6 constitute what I'd argue are the current best decks in the format, plus Eldrazi. Mainboarding a card that is near-dead against almost the entirety of the decks to beat does not makes sense to me.
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