One of the funniest decks that ever appeared on these Forums (for me at least) was Pitch World . Pitch world was designed to just pitch random cards with the help five-color cards and then win with multiple Blazing Shoal Beats. That was a long time ago in 2011 at the latest. Since then we've had many more pitch cards printed and some of them are great. The best pitch cards are actually only in three colors - Blue, Black and Green. Looking at only these three colors I feel like it is possible to design a Pitch deck that doesn't need to use Blazing Shoal (and can run lands). Since the deck will be running so many Pitch cards which are instants and sorceries, I feel like it is best fit for a Delver Deck. While the blue spell requirement for pitching fills up pretty easily, the remaining green and black pitch requirement is harder to grasp - luckily there are a couple great and cheap black and green spells that could be pitched for the black and green cards and be useful on their own.
Here is the first draft of Pitch Delver
4 Delver of Secrets
4 Putrid Leech
4 Hexdrinker
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
4 Daze
4 Force of Negation
4 Abrupt Decay
4 Assassin's Trophy
4 Unmask
2 Force of Despair
2 Force of Vigor
16 Lands
The Pitch Cards are all pretty explanatory, the real question is whether you need so much of them. From quick play testing, the Unmask and Blue forces are great against combo, and the Black Force works like a great kill spell to round out the Decay/Trophy. Green Force is awkward in the MD, but when it's used its scary effective.
So building blocks moving forward:
- Hex Drinker is a decent card, but one may be tempted to use Nimble Mongoose or Goyf instead - however, since this deck is pitching so many cards it doesn't really fill up the graveyard enough for Mongoose or Gofy to be great.
- We are playing a ridiculous amount of pitch cards, and like Pitch World before us the main issue is CA. Most of what we run is a 2 for 1 and this deck is desperate for some type of Card Advantage (not necessarily Card Quality like the rest of the cantrip suite). Cards like BOB are ineffective since our average CMC is so high. Not sure how to address this.
- Fine Tuning - this is a general concept in that I am not sure the deck needs to run 4 of Force of Negation and 4 Daze, or even 4 Hex Drinker - or 4 Trophy and 4 Decay, or can't get away with running 15 lands, etc. The current list is a rough draft and I'm sure cards can be cut down to three of's or 2 of's and make room for other cards.
- Another issue that this deck has had in quick testing is zerg rush decks - it has plenty of spot removal and Force of Despair is great at battling against decks like elves and empty the warren type decks that dump a huge amount of stuff on the same turn, but it struggles against decks that generate threat after threat turn after turn.
Hope this is a fun idea that we can explore together
Since your threats are mostly 1 drops, maybe Chart a course to help make up for card disadvantage? Also can just get rid of the pitch spells that are dead in that particular matchup. Could also try Sylvan Library
Originally Posted by Richard Cheese
+4 Ponder
-2 Force of Vigor (sideboard)
-1 Force of Negation
-1 Assassin's Trophy
Also once you have lands you need to ask yourself how often Thoughtseize beats Unmask. The other pitch deck partly makes up for the 2-for-1s by not needing lands (lands are another source of card disadvantage required to cast spells). With both lands and pitch cards you run out of cards fast, and because you have lands you could often pay the full cost for a spell.. especially if the effect only costs 1 mana like Thoughtseize.
The best interaction with pitch cards here is Hexdrinker. You can use all your mana to level up while you cast spells for free. Otherwise you will be casting spells for free with unused mana open.... Cantrips help mitigate that.
Those are great points! My worry though is that removing Trophy would make the Black and Green card count each below 18 cards which seems too low for pitching.
Other Notes:
- Sylvan Library is also a good suggestion by Megadeus, and may replace Force of Vigor in the main.
- My friend suggested leaning into the putrid leech life loss by running Death's Shadow?
Leaning Death's shadow here as well. You can also include other "free" spells such as dismember/snuff out to supplement the theme.
If leaning into Death's Shadow then Dismember is an obvious inclusion. The issue is that it takes up the same spots as FOD and the Green Black kill spells.
Keep in mind that in terms of deckbuilding constraints this deck has many:
- At least 28 Instants or Sorcieries (Delver)
- At least 9 Islands (For Daze)
- At least 15 Lands (To cast 2 mana spells on turn 2)
- At least 18 Blue Cards (For FOW/FON)
- At least 18 Black Cards (For Unmask/FOD)
- At least 18 Green Cards, Post Board (For FOV)
This gets a bit easier if we're moving some of the green cards into the SB since their primary purpose is to support FOV.
In fact we can do something like this (working off of FTWs work) and also in recognition that Sylvan Library goes great with Death's Shadow:
+4 Death's Shadow
+3 Thoughtsieze
+3 Sylvan Library
+2 Snuff Out/Dismember
+2 Ponder
-2 Putrid Leach (sideboard)
-2 Hex Drinker (sideboard)
-2 Force of Vigor (sideboard)
-2 Unmask
-2 Assassin's Trophy (sideboard)
-2 Abrupt Decay (sideboard)
-2 Force of Negation
Moving all removed Green cards to the SB so far, since we need 18 green post-board to support FOV. This can later be fine-tuned, since many of those SBed green cards are terrible SB material and only exist to allow you to cast FOV.
Last edited by Cire; 07-16-2019 at 04:48 PM.
I ran into a guy at legacy this week who was playing mono blue, lots of pitch cards and then narset/days undoing to refill. We're already in the colors to do a similar thing with leovold, though at that point it's moving more towards midrange and less towards delver since we'd want to be casting 3 drops.
An interesting angle to consider for the card-advantage problem though.
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Definitely thought about Leovold since he's in the colors - but the biggest advantage of pitch cards is the need to run less lands which Leovold sort of requires being 3 mana. Currently, test FTW's list at first impressions are really good. Honestly, this isn't a new deck and is instead Death Shadow with a splash for green and more pitch spells. Not sure that it is an innovation or better than UB death shadow decks, as I don't have much experience, in the genre.
How are the 4 ADs + 3 Assassin's Trophy in your testing?
The more I think about it, seems like overkill. I wonder if the deck would be a better Death's Shadow deck with -3 Trophy -1 Library +4 Daze and then just cut the 2 green pitch spells in the SB. There are already enough black cards to support the SB black pitch spells, the green count is exclusively for those Force of Vigors, and they may not even be necessary with so many maindeck answers to enchantments and artifacts (counters, discard, 4 Decay).
Or maybe -3 Trophy -2 Hexdrinker +4 Daze +1 Leovold. Maybe 1 3-drop could work.
How does it compare to UB Shadow? No Street Wraiths (bad card just to enable Shadow). More pitch spells for tempo. Sylvan Library to both recoup cards from pitch spells and control life total for Shadow (I'd rather pay 4 life to draw a card than 2 life to cycle Street Wraith). Decays to answer permanents UB normally struggles with. More fragile manabase though.
RE ADs and ATs - 7 total is a bit much - I feel the magic number is 6. However, whenever I board in FOV it is a complete gem (even with counters, discard, decay - with a deck with so little pure card advantage the redundancy is a plus. In effect this deck prioritizes card quality over advantage and banks on the idea that quality in the short to mid term can win before card advantage buries it) and I am loath to remove it from the SB, and that makes me want to keep a 18 green count between the board and sideboard. Additionally, in terms of splashing green for JUST FOV, I don't think that is true - AD and AT are great spot answers for everything and hexdrinker is actually great.
RE comparing this to UB shadow, no idea - I have never played UB shadow so can't tell if this is better or worse even at the same things. I can only compare this to delver decks and I feel the amount of answers to everything in this one leaves me better prepared against a wider variety of decks.
Another note - I've been having trouble against Wrenn and Six + Wasteland decks (Lands, and various delver/mid range builds that run Wrenn). We have plenty of answers - but again the issue is that we can only answer one to three things a game. Decks that run lots of cheap threats that must counter (wrenn and six and dreadhorde ect) are hard. The same goes for D&T - almost everything feels like a must counter or must kill and with no CA, we stop 3 things and then we either have enough board presence to win or we die.
I didn't mean that the green splash was just for FOV. I meant the constraint of 18ish green cards was just for FOV (which is only a SB card). Otherwise you wouldn't need so much green in UBg Shadow, so you could cut down on some numbers to free up space for other tools.
I think Daze would be really good here and give more 1-for-1 answers against decks like Wrenn and Six and D&T. The easiest way I could see to add more 1-for-1 interaction like Daze was to cut down on the green count. Then again, AD and AT are both great answers too.. just worse tempo.
With D&T you can board into Dread of Night to regain some CA. Against Lands/Wrenn ideally you want to bring in some card that answers multiple of their cards at once or slows them down for a few turns (e.g. Relic of Progenitus), because you're right we can't hope to grind them out.
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