[Deck] Four Color SnowDrift

[morgan_coke]

So, looking at the spoilers revealed so far for Ikoria, cycling makes a surprise return, and even more surprising, they stopped adding random amounts of mana to all the cards casting and cycling costs. So, based on what we've seen so far, this is a potentially not horrible list.

Enchantments - 8
4x Astral Drift
4x Lightning Rift

Planeswalkers - 5
3x Oko, Thief of Crowns
2x Teferi, Time Raveler

Instants - 15
3x Swords to Plowshares
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
4x Censor

Artifacts - 4
4x Arcum's Astrolabe

Creatures - 7
4x Yidaro, the Wanderer
3x Ice-Fang Coatl

Lands - 21
4x Prismatic Vista
4x Ash Barrens
4x Snow-Covered Island
3x Snow-Covered Plains
2x Snow-Covered Forest
2x Snow-Covered Mountain
1x Irrigated Farmland
1x Sheltered Thicket

Sideboard
3x Containment Priest
4x Leyline of Sanctity
2x Red Elemental Blast
2x Rest in Peace
2x Surgical Extraction
2x Blood Moon

Not entirely sure about that list, it's more of a starting point, but there's a ton of cyclers and cards that otherwise replace themselves, you've got some countermagic and a bunch of removal, and your win conditions all double as other effects. You're immune to most mana denial, and you've got a lot of game vs. other 'walkers with Rift. Maybe Sweltering Suns should be in there somewhere? 18 cyclers total, and another 13 cards with the text "draw a card" on them. Maybe Teferi should be Narset? Maybe you need the fourth Oko? I dunno. Also not certain about the sideboard. Might also be correct to ditch Oko, Coatl, Arcum's, and the color green but that seems like a lot of power you'd be giving up for not a ton of reasons. Not a huge fan of the Farmland and Thicket, just mostly needed another two cyclers in the manabase and didn't have any great options after the Ash Barrens.

[Fox]

Astral Drift doesn’t really do anything in your deck; you’ve got a lot of this 3cmc card that doesn’t really do much unless they have made a Marit Lage. I mean it’s cool to upgrade an Astro to a 3/3, swing, and then flicker back to an ETB artifact...but it’s all a bit slow. You can add the cycling-turtle to the mix and some addition dead draws (Lightning Rift), but you could also just replace those 12 cards with a single copy of Sevinne’s, 2 copies of Uro, some Snapcasters, and some other value staples.

To even begin thinking about the cycling-Turtle, your deck is probably starting with Karakas. Given how slow getting that 8/8 is going to be, you kinda need Karakas anyways as a ‘spell’ to maybe not die to Reanimator or SnT, while you build towards cycling him, getting the hit in, bouncing to hand, and endlessly repeating.

Staying alive is the issue here, as it is with any Oko-centric deck, and you’re slowing down even more and adding in jank (trying to get Astral Drift and Lightning Rift into play and having cycling-turtle in hand), and none of this passes the dies to Goyf test. I don’t think there would be an appreciable difference on the outcome of a game where you had those three things versus having 1-card combo Uro. If you’re behind (contrasting to last scenario), Uro by himself is more likely to pass the Goyf test and get you back into the game - playing slow cards does not work well with counting to 20; you should be much more concerned with not dying~gaining life.

If you’re going to unlock a card like Astral Drift, it kinda needs to count as removal, so you’re probably building around Containment Priest and asking yourself why this is better than Displacer.

As far as the Oko/Astro/Teferi/Ice-Fang/Veil stuff goes, you don’t have creative space to do something that combos. There is a profound lack of slots, and anything you add has to be a 1-card combo (which is why Uro was able to be added). Whatever you’re doing with Astral Drift, it’s not playing Oko-magic.

[FTW]

Are you implying that Snowko is weak and needs a boost so badly it would benefit from high-variance control cards?

Until Oko and Astrolabe are banned this concept seems moot. Slide and Yidaro don't really add anything to shore up Snowko weaknesses.

[Fox]

Are you implying that Snowko is weak and needs a boost so badly it would benefit from high-variance control cards?

It doesn’t need a boost, but we all know the weak point: good combo (see also Breach era). The 4c Oko piles can’t really slow down any more (stacking up on 3 drops, 2 mana cyclers, and a do-nothing 2 drop that adds to all cycling costs). You voluntarily slow that shell down by a turn or more and it will lose a whole lot more, particularly to combo with less broken enablers than 2 mana Yawg Will.

[aedemiel]

I think the weak part of the deck is the Red.

As mentionned before, it's seems just better to play Uro.

Harcast Uro->Cycle in response to the trigger.
Obviously that's expensive, but it's in our colors.

[FTW]

The 4c Oko piles can’t really slow down any more (stacking up on 3 drops, 2 mana cyclers, and a do-nothing 2 drop that adds to all cycling costs). You voluntarily slow that shell down by a turn or more and it will lose a whole lot more

I mean that's exactly what I was saying... adding slow high-variance control cards doesn't help the Snowko shell. It's already tier 1, so unlike some tier 4 deck, adding this conditional engine doesn't improve it unless it surgically addresses the deck's weaknesses (which the Slide engine doesn't).

[morgan_coke]

Honestly, you guys are looking at this wrong, the correct "fix" to the deck isn't to make it more Snow/Oko oriented, it's to pull the green and view it as a list that's more similar to Miracles, but can deal with 'walkers like Oko very easily thanks to Drift and Rift and eventually, Yidaro.

Something like:

Enchatnments - 10
4x Astral Drift
4x Lightning Rift
2x Shark Typhoon

Instants - 16
4x Brainstorm
4x Swords to Plowshares
4x Force of Will (or Force of Negation?)
4x Censor
2x Renewed Faith

Creatures - 4
4x Yidaro, the Wanderer

Sorceries - 6
3x Sweltering Suns
3x Boon of the Wish Giver (maybe this should be Neutralize? or Heiroglyphic Illumination?)

Lands - 21
4x Ash Barrens
4x Prismatic Vista
1x Irrigated Farmlands
4x Island
4x Plains
4x Mountain

That's 27 cyclers, a very stable basic centric manabase, a bunch of uncounterable win cons that hit at instant speed, and lots of board control. Think of it as bad miracles with more removal and better answers for 'walkers and Marit Lage. Maybe Force of Will should be Force of Negation too, not sure how many creature spells you really need to counter for free with this given that all the really threatening creatures you can't stall with Drift don't actually get cast anyways.

[Fox]

Right, but you don’t have anything to blink with Astral Drift now, so why is it in your deck? It looks a lot like a Forcefield.

The cycle-turtle does what most strategies [that would want it] need - it acts like a Dreadnought. The issue is that it takes waaaay longer to set up, and these decks have a problem dying early. It’s really close to being the Dreadnought, but you now not only need Wrath-effects, but you also have to not just straight up die to Oko/Uro as well. This is a pretty massive amount of timing window pressure, and the cards probably don’t exist to alleviate it.

We all know you have cycle-turtle, Standstill, Karakas, Teferi, and have thus gotten the PW killer/value engine/uncounterable/uninteractive/combat trick~removal/quick wincon (aka anti-mill) thing solved. The late-game plan is incredibly high quality and completely ignores problems like PWs and milling out, when it gets to this point. The issue remains, you just never get there b/c you didn’t have the option to win a bad matchup with “I guess turn 2 12/12 just wins, cool deck oppo.” That’s one thing you just can’t understate with Dreadnought - how easy it is to effortlessly brutalize tier 2 decks, brews, and combo decks without ever going out of your way; they just all naturally lose to us, it’s fairly comical. You play cycle-turtle and you end up getting beat down by the random stuff of legacy, b/c your strategy kinda only has one way to play...so you have to react to everything the format has to offer on your trip to your end-game.

On the Lightning Rift stuff, you’re losing a turn you can’t afford to. Their followup is Goyf or Uro or Oko, and you’re kinda screwed, and nothing your deck is doing matters anymore, particularly if your plan is to pay to cycle and pass turn again.

[Fox]

Excuse the double post, but let’s change gears for a bit here and break down how your list works:
-Astral Drift doesn’t really have text outside of triggering Rift. The opponent won’t ever attack this card with resources.
-Boon, Censor, and Renewed Faith do nothing outside of triggering Rift.
-You’re probably dead before Shark’nado can make a dude that can win the game. We’re in the losing to the PW stage of the game, if this is making a real threat.
-Sweltering Suns is like....fine, but far from perfect. There’s certainly a world where this card can see maindeck play.
-StP has no recursion, and you’re nowhere near competing onboard (so you need to be able to recast this)

You’re not getting to a gamestate where cycle-turtle will appear on board (even if you did, you know their hand has removal for it as you haven’t taxed that removal at all before this point). I mean if they just counter Lightning Rift, or you don’t find it, or it’s not fast enough...you’re just never winning that game. Very linear, very fragile, very slow - just a bad place to be.

You start out with Karakas, Teferi, cycle-turtle, and Standstill and you’re:
-onboard with Factory
-using Teferi’s passive (manlands/cycle-turtle); Teferi being able to replace itself and/or answer a problem just by itself.
-having asymmetry for Standstill (game actions, higher land counts, ability to sometimes go Teferi->then Standstill->pick up Standstill->deploy threat->redeploy Standstill).
-Karakas to complete the almost completely uninteractive value engine of Teferi + cycle-turtle

^we’re doing something coherent and everything is micro-comboing together without being useless by itself. You’ve got this vision for moving the gameplan forward on all fronts with interchangeable parts (oppo can’t just FoW or remove one card to great effect). Now just support that plan with some removal and permission and get to that endgame you want. You’re still straight-up losing to Uro/Oko, but Oko gets banned (should happen soon) and Karakas+StP kinda nullifies Uro as you’re plans are quite a bit larger; like maybe there’s a deck here now with Standstill/game actions punishing the mainstream strategy of cheesing PWs.

Any time you’re making a brew and it kinda looks like Wilderness Reclamation (i.e. worthless by itself, yet central to everything else in the deck), you’re not making an effective deck. It shouldn’t be surprising that do-nothings that compete seem to always be comboing with ETB value scummers (Aluren/Food Chain), and they’re doing everything they can to tank total copies of the do-nothing card (like Watcher enabled Aluren to drop namesake copies to ~2x).

[morgan_coke]

Are you always this much of a tool, or are you working extra hard at it during quarantine?

Dude, you don't know this deck even remotely close to as well as I do, that's fine, pretty much no one does. But stop telling me what the stuff does and how it's played, because it's really clear you don't know what you're talking about.

[Fox]

Are you always this much of a tool, or are you working extra hard at it during quarantine?

Dude, you don't know this deck even remotely close to as well as I do, that's fine, pretty much no one does. But stop telling me what the stuff does and how it's played, because it's really clear you don't know what you're talking about.

Your second list straight-up dies to not resolving Lightning Rift.

-Why is Astral Drift in the second list?
-What is Astral Drift blinking?
-Since you don’t have blink targets, how is this not directly comparable to a card like Forcefield?
-How are you going to live long enough to cycle the turtle 4x?
-The opponent dumped all effort into countering your Lightning Rift, then did something as simple as Surgical the turtle - how can you possibly win? (that shark token isn’t gonna bail you out)
-How are you ever resolving Lightning Rift in this format?

These are basic observations, so I’m pretty sure I’ve correctly identified that the entire deck fails if you target 1 card.

[aedemiel]

https://scryfall.com/card/iko/48/evasion-protocol This exist now.