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Thread: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

  1. #21

    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Just picked up this new list and I must say that it is a lot of fun to play. Need to get more comfortable with it though. I caught a real beating from death and taxes so that is definitely a match up I need practice with. I think it might have just been a matter of not drawing any sideboard cards though. Pretty much playing Seth’s list but I like Kozilek’s return instead of pyroclasm. I feel like the one extra mana is worth it for instant speed and the fact that it’s colorless. Too many times I’ve gone to pyroclasm against death and taxes and a flickerwisp saves one of their creatures and a mother of runes saves the flickerwisp. Do you think trinisphere is really necessary in the board? I feel like it’s just going to slow us down vs storm especially since we already pack three canonists in the 75. (Seth, are you still -1 red elemental blast +1 canonist in the main). I’m thinking of packing a containment priest instead of 3ball for reanimator and sneak and show.

    Hoping to get to try this out at my LGS on Monday. Great job with breathing life back into the best deck/combo in legacy.

  2. #22
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Any thoughts to Welder + Faithless Looting as an engine or is that bad? Looting helps filtering and finding combo as well as filling yard for Welder and Lavaman. I'm sure you've tried it in the past. Just curious as to why it isn't good enough
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  3. #23
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    @SD- Glad you like the list. I think your suggestions are all very reasonable. The Cannonist is probably the weakest card in the deck and I can totally understand why you would make that swap. Yes I am still 5 blast, 1 cannonist main.

    With respect to the board, out side of 2 Cannonist, 3 mass removal spell, and 4 grave hate, I would say anything could be reasonable and correct. I listed a sideboard bc I thought it would be helpful as most games you play post board, but that being said it was only in the last 50 matches or so that I really started to try and fine tune the board. With that in mind many of those cards have only been played in ten games after we tuned the main deck. So I fully expect a lot of changes there and would love to get the communities suggestions and results. Different mass removal is very likely the correct call. For me I went with Pyroclasm bc its been so strong in the past and I have been fairly happy with it. That and it doesn't kill Painter which matters when you have Painter and Copter on the board. 3ball is sort of a card I added to combat delver and Elves actually. I do bring it in against Tendrils, but that wasn't the main reason why I added it to the board.

    @Faithless looting- It was in the in the original Shortcake list in 2012. It fell out of favor for the power of controlling your next draw with E tutor. After the SDT ban I tinkered with 4 Looting lists and they all felt fairly weak. While the filtering is nice, you need to flash it back or have a Welder live to really get value from it. With the current Delver and Elves lists, committing 4 mana over two turns is sort of brutal for card parity. There may be a way to up the welder count, remove the blasts, and add in Looting to the deck to augment the Welder/Copter plan, but I don't know. I actually think just running Gitaxian Probe would be better in that situation as the information is enormous as it helps so much with sequencing, especially on the play. And to be honest you are probably paying 2 life to flashback the Looting so the Phyrexian mana is sort of a push.

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  4. #24
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Yea Mega the main problem is that looting starts to infringe into tutor pieces and blasts/moon territory if we stay committed to the e tutor plan. If we decide to dial back the tutors to fit in lootings then we basically start moving back to bootleg mono red versions that can’t find grindstone and then also lack the chandra/bridge end game they use. A big part now is just accepting that we’re a shitty red/white deck and will sometimes draw a dead piece. But the overall synergy trade off is at least worth a shot to use the existing shell.
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  5. #25
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    I really need to correct that it's Canonist, not Cannonist.
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  6. #26

    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Do you think Painters is well positioned in this meta?

  7. #27
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    @Hopo- I am glad it didn't even take 2 pages to get our first dumpster fire of a comment. Good to see that is the take away from all the theory and testing we went over.

    @polski-That is a tough question to answer I think. Using DTB as a starter I think you have serious game against a large portion of that field. Elves, Grixis, BUG, and Miracles all feel positive to me. Eldrazi and Stompy lists in general have been a tad rough. Storm is really all over the place. The ability to test against good storm players is relatively rare. I think against your average storm player, you would be favored. Hard to say how you would do against the handful of truly good storm players, as the are had to find. But I am inclined to think its a dog fight, and very dependent on who goes first game one. I am still trying to work through the Lands match up, and it may just be closer to even these days. So overall I think it is a reasonable list to a varied meta. The deck was constructed to combat Grixis and other DRS decks in the current meta.

    I am not really addressing decks like Death and Taxes or Maverick variants at this time as I think we need to still develop the board along with really needing to see what happens with the next banned and restricted announcement. I doubt much would change to the maindeck, as some Delver variant, along with Elves will continue to be a strong part of the meta. But I could see a lot of changes to the board, which may have sweeping effects to the overall performance.

    Seth
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  8. #28
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    I don't hang on to typos but that was no typo, it was systematic. Not sure why so edgy about it.
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  9. #29
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    It's due to autocorrect on my computer, which happens if the post is typed in word before posting. Still annoying, like please contribute to the actual deck discussion.

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    Last edited by sroncor1; 04-10-2018 at 09:12 AM.
    …no matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

  10. #30

    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    you and jack going to stream sometime?

  11. #31
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    So playing a couple more leagues with the deck i've noticed that i've been running into some problems kind of semi regularly. The first is still the grim lavamancer problem where early on where he's at his finest I just don't have enough fuel for him. I was thinking about remedying this by replacing the Great Furnace in the list with another fetch since it's value kind of diminishes with top being out of the format, since your ability to turn a land into a spell later on in the game is kind of limited now. Lavamancer in general has been excellent, i'm very surprised that we weren't running him as a silver bullet target before. As an added benefit he also helps to negate surgical extraction type effects since you can always eat the cards that they're trying to surgical and he eats a removal spell, making sure that your painters live to see another day.

    The other big problem i've been having I frequently run into board states that just stall out. I'll draw a recruiter and have a board state of something like double painter, welder, lavamancer and a couple of lands and not much else going on. Is there some tutor target that we for just random "value" plays in this kind of board state? The ones that came to mind originally were Pia and Kiraan Nalaar and Direfleet Daredevil, however looking through a bunch of cards fitting the criteria, something like Palace Sentials also seems kind of good although a tad bit award with all the strixes, pyromancers and snapcasters in the format. What do you guys thing? Obviously maindeck space is very tight, but I think that a singleton like this would actually be really beneficial.
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  12. #32
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    @CptHaddock: a card I'm currently testing in my very different build is Hangarback Walker. It has much better synergy in my list, for different reasons, but why I would even suggest it here is because it's a pretty nice follow up to a t1 Copter. If the opponent destroys it you'll still get a token to crew the Copter with, it's also playable with the same land as the Copter. [edit: probably the opponent would rather destroy the Copter, if they can, but I still thought it worth suggesting.] And if you draw it in such a standoff as you describe you get to grow it +1/+1 each turn which is relevant. You also have Welder to set it off if you need the tokens to get under Bridge or whatever.
    Last edited by pettdan; 04-16-2018 at 07:45 AM.

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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Quote Originally Posted by CptHaddock View Post
    So playing a couple more leagues with the deck i've noticed that i've been running into some problems kind of semi regularly. The first is still the grim lavamancer problem where early on where he's at his finest I just don't have enough fuel for him. I was thinking about remedying this by replacing the Great Furnace in the list with another fetch since it's value kind of diminishes with top being out of the format, since your ability to turn a land into a spell later on in the game is kind of limited now. Lavamancer in general has been excellent, i'm very surprised that we weren't running him as a silver bullet target before. As an added benefit he also helps to negate surgical extraction type effects since you can always eat the cards that they're trying to surgical and he eats a removal spell, making sure that your painters live to see another day.

    The other big problem i've been having I frequently run into board states that just stall out. I'll draw a recruiter and have a board state of something like double painter, welder, lavamancer and a couple of lands and not much else going on. Is there some tutor target that we for just random "value" plays in this kind of board state? The ones that came to mind originally were Pia and Kiraan Nalaar and Direfleet Daredevil, however looking through a bunch of cards fitting the criteria, something like Palace Sentials also seems kind of good although a tad bit award with all the strixes, pyromancers and snapcasters in the format. What do you guys thing? Obviously maindeck space is very tight, but I think that a singleton like this would actually be really beneficial.
    I don't think I would ever drop the 1 furnace, because sometimes you need to e-tutor for it if you are light on land. I think lotus petal is actually an all-star for feeding lavaman. You can do things like crack petal, weld something to get petal back and crack it again to get 2 cards in your graveyard. You also have copter, and you can grindstone yourself for fuel, or even pyroblast random things just to get more cards in the yard if you really need to.

    In the case of stalled board, I usually just recruit more recruiters, and sometimes suicide them into the enemy to fuel lavaman. I'm not against the idea of more tutor targets, but I'm not too keen on Pia and Kiran or Daredevil. I would probably personally look towards something that will let you dig more, like Mad Prophet for instance. Post-board peacekeeper is a common target for me, I've won a few games I had no business winning by just casting a peacekeeper and doing nothing for 10 turns waiting to draw a blast or wincon.

  14. #34

    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Solemn Simulacrum too cute as a card advantage engine? Fetches out that basic Plains through Moon if you run one, and potentially draws a lot of cards with Welder...

  15. #35
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    @ Solemn- a awesome card but I think its more the danger of cool things. I would love for him to be viable in the deck, but right now I don't know if he is something we want to run. The key would be to figure out what to cut for him. I d not think there are many situations where you would get him with Imperial Recruiter. So that means you really are looking to just draw him. While his effect are really strong, I think he is having a rough tough time competing at 4 mana. The new Karn just seems better for the mana. But this could change if the meta switches today.

    @Lavaman- I think the biggest issue is managing expectations. He works as a dude that is on curve, can easily crew, draw removal like a champ, and can fairly consistently shoot a dude before turn 3. While he has a much greater upside as the game goes long, that is how I see his floor, and its great for what the deck needs. His ability to kill a DRS, Delver, SFM, Pyromancer, or random elf is enormous. Usually you will only need one activation to open the window to win. Hopefully you are able to have this happen. When I was doing the bulk of the testing I was running 3 and loved it. He was sort of dead against Show and Tell, Storm, and Reanimator lists, but was fantastic against the rest of the field. Unfortunately space was tight and only 5 one drops could fit and the Welder is slightly stronger in general. Now his place in the deck may shift later today. I would also not argue with changing one Lavaman into a Walking Ballista.

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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Quote Originally Posted by pettdan View Post
    @CptHaddock: a card I'm currently testing in my very different build is Hangarback Walker. It has much better synergy in my list, for different reasons, but why I would even suggest it here is because it's a pretty nice follow up to a t1 Copter. If the opponent destroys it you'll still get a token to crew the Copter with, it's also playable with the same land as the Copter. [edit: probably the opponent would rather destroy the Copter, if they can, but I still thought it worth suggesting.] And if you draw it in such a standoff as you describe you get to grow it +1/+1 each turn which is relevant. You also have Welder to set it off if you need the tokens to get under Bridge or whatever.
    This is a very intriguing card. The affinity stompy deck can afford to play this card because you can put mass counters it on relatively quickly through either Steel Overseer or Arcbound Ravager and then sac it to Arcbound Ravager for the tokens. Seems like a lot has to go right to get a big one, or a bunch of tokens with Painter and if those conditions are going right it seems like you should be winning anyways?

    Quote Originally Posted by NormalGuy View Post
    I don't think I would ever drop the 1 furnace, because sometimes you need to e-tutor for it if you are light on land. I think lotus petal is actually an all-star for feeding lavaman. You can do things like crack petal, weld something to get petal back and crack it again to get 2 cards in your graveyard. You also have copter, and you can grindstone yourself for fuel, or even pyroblast random things just to get more cards in the yard if you really need to.

    In the case of stalled board, I usually just recruit more recruiters, and sometimes suicide them into the enemy to fuel lavaman. I'm not against the idea of more tutor targets, but I'm not too keen on Pia and Kiran or Daredevil. I would probably personally look towards something that will let you dig more, like Mad Prophet for instance. Post-board peacekeeper is a common target for me, I've won a few games I had no business winning by just casting a peacekeeper and doing nothing for 10 turns waiting to draw a blast or wincon.
    I think you are missing the point of my original complaint with lavamancer. I'm more than happy with him in the mid to late game phase since you have plenty of fuel by those points. What i'm saying is that I would like to make him better in the early games, i'm fine with wasting a blast on a cantrip or something to get him active especially if I can kill a critter + blast a cantrip at the same time. There have been plenty of times early on in the game where I just don't have enough fuel for him and I would like to remedy to some extent.

    You don't think that P&K are good but actively like a bad 4 mana looter?
    Quote Originally Posted by ThatDeleuzeGuy View Post
    I want to play as close to possible a 100% reactive deck that also approached 0% variance in how it played. I want to play magic with as little variance as possible. Also had a foiled out miracles deck that was an investment of about 6 grand that is now nearly worthless.
    Quote Originally Posted by Secretly.A.Bee View Post
    My original post did that.

    I'd love to have a battle of wits with you but I see you lack the necessary equipment.

    Good day.

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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Quote Originally Posted by CptHaddock View Post
    You don't think that P&K are good but actively like a bad 4 mana looter?
    The bad looter is more on par with your Palace Sentinel suggestion, but more on color and can't backfire and draw your opponent a bunch of free cards. I don't think P&K is an effect I would want in this deck. I would rather just draw a grindstone and win than spend a ton of mana for 2 1/1 flyers. I would prefer Jaya Ballard to P&K even.

  18. #38
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Four mana for that looting effect is a rough price to pay. Isn't there a 3 mana red looter with the same wording that was 1/1. He is from a recent set, although his name escapes me at this point. Since the power doesn't really matter that would probably be a better starting point for you I would think.

    @ Cpt- I understand your concerns and I have to agree that sometimes he doesn't have fuel. But I do think that cutting the artifact mana is not where you want to be. As mentioned previously, having an uncounterable artifact that happens to be an easily searchable consistent mana source has a lot of upside. I would suggest just cutting a mountain to add an additional fetch land. while normally this would be a fairly low land count, I think Blood Moon's ability to turn fetch lands into mountains may make it ok. You could also cut a SSG for the fourth petal to help fuel the yard. Your creature count is probably ok in general, although personally I would rather have the dude in the deck than the artifact mana.

    @Hangerback- He is an intriguing card. I think with DRS not getting banned, removal is just better than the ability to go wide. With that in mind Ballista is a reasonable card to try out. The issue would be in what match up is Hangerback best? What situations would you rather have Hangerback over the versatile removal of Ballista. I do agree that Hangerback grows easier, but does that and the bodies it leave behind mean more than colorless pinpoint removal? And none of these are rhetorical, I am really asking bc I want to know if I am missing anything, or we should be considering different things.

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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Quote Originally Posted by sroncor1 View Post
    Four mana for that looting effect is a rough price to pay. Isn't there a 3 mana red looter with the same wording that was 1/1. He is from a recent set, although his name escapes me at this point. Since the power doesn't really matter that would probably be a better starting point for you I would think.
    You are thinking of Rummaging Goblin, he doesn't have haste though. Etched Champion is another possibility if you want a hard to deal with body that can't be blocked.

  20. #40
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    Re: [Deck] Strawberry Shortcake

    Quote Originally Posted by sroncor1 View Post
    @Hangerback- He is an intriguing card. I think with DRS not getting banned, removal is just better than the ability to go wide. With that in mind Ballista is a reasonable card to try out. The issue would be in what match up is Hangerback best? What situations would you rather have Hangerback over the versatile removal of Ballista. I do agree that Hangerback grows easier, but does that and the bodies it leave behind mean more than colorless pinpoint removal? And none of these are rhetorical, I am really asking bc I want to know if I am missing anything, or we should be considering different things.
    This is just theorycrafting, and it probably won't quite fit. I was thinking that Ballista has some overlap with Lavamancer, while being perhaps too inefficient in comparison. With Ballista it costs you 6 mana, or 8 if you need to pump it, to destroy a Deathrite and still have the Ballista around. It seems potentially too inefficient. But in a board stall it is still very very good, of course. And as a t1 play vs Infect, DnT or other decks with creatures you need to interact with quickly. What seemed to be the upside of Hangarback was that it helps crew the 4 Copters. If you are having problems with crewing Copters and with late game board stalls, then just maybe Hangarback Walker could be worth testing.

    In what matchups is Hangarback better? I'm thinking that it should be better vs Pile, since it is likely to soak up more of their removal, trade with more of their Strixes and Snapcasters, pressure their planeswalkers slightly better (I'd like to think it does, not sure). And I guess it may be better vs any deck trying to keep Copters from being crewed. It's a support card for Copter that can be good in a board stall.

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