I also thought of this, it's likely not feasible but awesome and hilarious for casual games! Also, Thundermaw could be played for free off of a HUF. Too funny! I don't like any of the creature plans in a competitive build though, not even Guttersnipe. I just couldn't get it to work.Originally Posted by Mr. Safety
@pettdan: Not that I'm a fan of this tech but as far as Bitterblossom goes wouldn't Goblin Rabblemaster just be better? He has to be answered and you don't have to splash black.
@Everyone: Although the deck can be ran without them, Lion's Eye Diamond should just be a no brainer in competitive builds. It does so much with at least 12 cards in the deck: Burning Wish, Act on Impulse and Past in Flames. Not to mention Hazoret's Undying Fury and Reforge the Soul. IMO, competitive builds should cut Desperate Ritual, Simian Spirit Guide and/or Helm of Awakening for it. It's just better.
"WaaaauuugghhhaaaauuugghhhaauuugghhhaaauuugghhhW" -Chewbacca
I'm not too impressed by the Bitterblossom suggestion myself, but I reasoned like this for the small amount of decks already splashing black for discard. My first idea was that a lot of opponents won't be able to deal with an enchantment post sideboard (although thanks to the Medallions people may keep Decays in). If you're playing Guttersnipe, and playing it game 1, opponents will keep Lightning Bolt in, and they may anyway as it represents the chance of a quick win - so Rabblemaster could be a less reliable alternative win condition. Bitterblossom seems slow but it does deal an exponentially increasing amount of damage every turn, so I was thinking a t1 Bitterblossom would do the job while your opponent prepares to fight a storm matchup. The tokens also potentially buy a lot of time by chump blocking Gurmag/Goyf or two tokens trading with a Delver.
Pyromancer seems better, it's a proactive Empty the Warrens that ignores Thalia, Thorn of Amethyst, Flusterstorm and most of the common storm hate, it should work well with Grapeshot too for dealing a medium sized chunk of damage, and if the opponent answers the Pyromancer + Tokens that means your goblins from Empty could win instead. And Pyromancer could be a reason to run a few Badlands, Pyromancer + Probe + Therapy is very strong. I'm not sure it fits into the deck, and I'm not sure a few 1/1 tokens are enough of a threat, and I'm not sure if you can make room for Pyromancer and Therapy after boarding (this seems unlikely)... But it seems to me like 4 (+ potentially Therapies) cards in the sideboard that fit very well with the maindeck's strategy and help you mitigate the common storm hate you can expect opponents to board into.
I'm not a big fan of Bitterblossom but good point that it is harder to deal with an enchantment. I do like the idea of Pyromancer and I did actually test him for a bit. He seemed decent but still vulnerable. Also splashing black (which I haven't tested) for Therapy seems not great. I still like Mr. Safety's suggestion of not messing with the mana base and running Overmaster. At the very least it cycles and can be cast twice with PiF protecting both your PiF and your Wish. Also, messing with the mana base makes you more susceptible to Wasteland / Delver tempo strategies. I have toyed with the idea of splashing white for Abeyance. It cycles and it must be countered. Another one is Orim's Chant which you can also use as a Time Walk giving you another turn to set up your combo or to attack with your EtW goblin army. Haven't tested these though and I still like the mono red mana base. Plus you get more value from Blood Moon.
"WaaaauuugghhhaaaauuugghhhaauuugghhhaaauuugghhhW" -Chewbacca
Board wipes are really rare ATM, at least it seems that way to me. The ones I see are Toxic Deluge, Golgari Charm, and Zealous Persecution (and the last 2 hardly ever.) However, many people are playing Engineered Explosives, which is essentially a board wipe against our gobbos. I'm not really worried about board wipes. G2 should be about avoiding grave hate, which usually leads into a board wipe with Warrens, but I think we can do a reasonable Tendrils win if we need to outside of gobbos. I haven't run into board wipes yet...but I haven't tested against the decks that might have them. I've spend almost all of my testing time on Grixis Delver, Death and Taxes, Sneak/Show, BUG Leovold, Storm, and Stoneblade. I've done a little testing against Deadguy Ale/Junk but it's not a difficult matchup needing time to figure out. Bitterblossom isn't anywhere near what we want. We need cards that reward our high spell count and create overwhelming advantage.
In my opinion, the only non-storm win condition we should be considering is Blood Moon. Blood Moon and HUF are, for me, the reasons to be running this deck. If I want black I'll play Br reanimator, a very good deck in its own right. If I want LED, I'll play TES/ANT. Those are both incredibly powerful decks that can make the best use of it (again, my opinion.) I want to do something different with Ruby Medallion.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
I'd argue that if you want the best use of led, it's probably dredge.
Given that vieko has at this point a near infinite amount of 4-1s with this deck, I'm not really sure how much better ant/TES is with regard of its use of led.
The goal here is to optimize the last few cards of viekos build.
For the budget build, there might be a best hazoret's build, but it will always have the chance to lose to randomness a lot more. I would however, be interested in finding out what this build is. Somebody mentioned that 50 life 50 damage card, it might be worth testing.
-rob
As long as you are O.K. with losing a high percentage of your games to the randomness HUF brings to the table, please feel free to continue pushing it. Blood Moon is not a win condition, it is a blanket statement :) As a mainboard card (which I tried for a few leagues) it doesn't always win you games and does little to feed the engine this list requires to generate wins. As a SB response, Defense Grid is leaner and better in the current meta: greedy manabases have adapted to Blood Moon already.
The LED list does not suffer from randomness – AOI's potential whiffs can be accounted for / minimized when timed properly. The LED list is one turn slower than TES and one turn faster than ANT with higher resilience than both and no discard. Both approaches make use of Ruby Medallion for busted lines of play... so you ARE doing something different with Ruby Medallion ;)
EDITED:
You'll never see the benefits and drawbacks of either list until you run both against a decent spread of live opponents, a decent amount of times. At this point, I think I've got mistercakes 90% convinced that the LED list is superior.
I agree the LED version is superior, it is more consistent and more explosive at what it does and if you wanted to take this deck to a big tournament the LED list is what I would take. It has its drawbacks though, it is harder to play and can't go as big as the Reforge Configurations.
Fair statement.
I only play Blood Moon out of the board, and I'm down to 1x HUF. It may be incorrect, even in the budget version that I am using, to play any copies. And your record speaks for itself when validating LED. I wasn't making a broad statement for the format; I was making a personal statement based on my own decisions. If LED is what it takes to be competitive, I'm probably not going to stick with the deck. If I can do a version without it and still be competitive, I will. I don't foresee myself going to major events, so I need to be careful how I present my posts because I know many people use this forum as a way to prepare for serious competition.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
And yet its your LED-less version that caught the attention of MTGgoldfish...SaffronOlive will be very disappointed if you raise the price tag by $500, lol...
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
It's only bc it was posted earlier. :)
I'd take anything he says with a grain of salt. I am happy any version got the attention.
I am curious though safety, who are you playing against for your testing?
-rob
Let's be fair. It's this threads deck and I am just one of the many people who have enjoyed playing it. I got lucky that's all. I think the led version is better. That being said it doesn't make the other configurations less competitive or worse. It's just my personal opinion. I still have the reforge version built because I find it more enjoyable to play
I also find the non LED version more fun, but as a thread we should also find the objectively best deck. I asked vieko to just add up all of his matches so that he can provide some numbers.
I think it will be a very surprising number of games he's played.
got to play some casual room tonight:
2 tomb
2 city of traitors
10 mountain
4 petal
4 rite of flame
4 probe
4 wish
2 desperate
4 manamorphose
2 helm
4 ruby
4 act on impulse
4 song
3 spirit guide
3 past in flames
2 reforge the soul
1 aetherflux reservoir
1 alhammarret's archive
same old same old sb
still haven't drawn the reservoir. would probably run another archive but only have 1 on modo.
this card is super fun:
[card]alhammarret's archive[/card]
prob will like to test it with all the draw 4 discard 3 at random. there's a portal 3k one and another one called goblin lore. then there's burning inquiry for R and faithless looting.
that's a lot of bad cards together that become incredible with this artifact. dunno how viable it is, but i'm excited to try. with a rock and this artifact, R -> draw 8 discard 3 at random.
Last edited by mistercakes; 08-29-2017 at 05:01 PM.
-rob
Aetherflux Reservoir and Alhammarret's Archive look interesting. I'd like to test those as well, especially Aetherflux Reservoir. It does appear however that you would likely run into the same problem you have with Guttersnipe. You'll really want them in play before you go off however with their cc it appears you will need to ramp into them thus blowing your storm engine wad before you can get any value. I can say though that with Archive it appears you could recover fairly quick. I'd like to hear your testing results.
One thing I've noticed about this deck is the lack of one drops. Could Chalice have a place here? Ruby Red Stompy Storm? Swap the Rite of Flames with Desperate Rituals and there are no one drops. You'd get more value from a turn one Ancient Tomb aside from Medallion, plus your ANT / TES match ups would be considerably better.
EDIT: As far as LED vs. Non-LED versions go, both work great. I wouldn't give up on this deck if you don't have them.
"WaaaauuugghhhaaaauuugghhhaauuugghhhaaauuugghhhW" -Chewbacca
Read my earlier posts in the thread, for a while I wasn't playing rof at all. Then I played 3 maindeck and 1 sb. Then I realized it's busted so the deck should run it.
There's a few variants without rof that I tested and I think it's just worse. Chalice is like blood moon. It can steal you some games, but in the end it's not worth the resources and decks that are weak to it generally prepare. I think you're still better off with grid.
Chalice also cuts off probe, which despite my wanting to not play it, always creeps back in and finds a way.
Please read older posts! All the stuff is there.
-rob
Based on my very limited goldfish experience, R.Flame is far superior to D.Ritual in this deck. So much superior that dropping the Chalices makes sense. R.Flame powers up a t1 Ruby without a Sol Land and snowballs the mana out of hand once we get rolling with the extra copies in gy clause.
Non LED builds are likely to be slower than LED versions, so I would focus on extra resilience instead of speed in those lists. Black spot discard, Overmaster, MD Defense Grid, SB red blasts, SB creature wipes (Kozilek's Return, Pyroclasm?), something towards that effect.
Personally, I feel that the main card from monored stompy our deck might be interested in is not MD Chalice or SB Chandra. It's SB Ensnaring Bridge, which has random synergy with LED + PiF lines of play. Always stops Marit Lage, Emrakul and typically also Griselbrand from running us over, but with an early LED, it can buy us a bunch of turns in some mus.
Been trying Chandra TOD again in the board and I really am digging it but I have a soft spot for her and the reason Dragon Stompy is my main deck so I will always look for reasons to play her. In all seriousness she really helps in matchups like Delver with all the effects allowing to play a more control based game especially with the discard package. I like it vs some of the bad MU's like Grixis and Bug variants.
Also I found the LED version to be worse and I was looking for a reason to use LED. I find the Rocks to be superior.
I keep meaning to retry Gamble as well but keep forgetting.
I promise I'll get to this... gonna start a spreadsheet or something.
I have been goldfishing with 2x Infernal Tutor splashed from black instead of using MD spot discard for the splash. If all of our spells are red, we don't really need the LED color fixing, and if we have a Ruby or 2, some of our rituals are effectively LEDs without the drawback of discarding our hand, with the additional benefit of being castable twice with the help of PiF. So in my opinion, if you want to justify running LED, you should have a synergistic off-color gas/tutoring device, e.g. Slithermuse, Infernal Tutor and/or Ill-Gotten Gains to make it worth your while.
I use magic workstation. I have a gauntlet of decks loaded and I play both sides. It can sometimes feel awkward, but I try to be objective. I have played maybe 20 real games against real opponents. I just don't have the time/opportunities to play a lot. Test games on workstation = well over 100.
Not giving up on the deck just yet, probably won't really. I can recognize however that LED could be a necessary card for an optimized list. I just don't want to shell out $500 for a set lol...
Edit: I'm gaining a ton of experience on how to play legacy' s best decks at the same time I'm testing, which can only help out regardless of deck choice. I can always fall back on Junk/Deadguy ale, my go-to fair deck.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
It's good that you're trying to get the testing in there. I've tried even doing that myself. The truth is that unless if you exclusivley play a deck for a while, you'll never play it optimally and because of that the testing is skewed. Even playing a delver deck can be tricky because of the amount of decisions that go into it. Opening hand keep vs mulligan, sb decisions, turn 1/2 plays.
Unfortunately it's just a bit too hard to be objective especially when you're using this data to make blanket statements about what is good/not good. I would say at best this is comparable to playing in the casual room - tournament practice. This is also where i have around an 80% win rate with any deck. I also don't take these testing numbers very seriously, even though some players are good and many are playing net decks card for card.
Just playing in leagues you'll see your win % go down drastically at least for some time. Unfortunately if you don't play in this environment you'll just have to believe me. This is why I trust viekos LED data more than anyone else on here. He's won and lost enough matches with the list to understand what is the right play at the right time. I tried the led version quite a bit, and I can tell you right now that I still don't play it correctly. It's only something that can be learned through playing a huge amount until of matches vs very good opponents.
(forgive any weird words,phone spellchecker)
-rob
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