Hey, just checking in.
My limited testing with Tombstalker thus far has been extremely positive. I've been putting him in place of chimeric idol and basically always play him as a 2 drop, which is just perfect. Sometimes I've had problems poxing to two lands and holding onto an idol, waiting for the 3rd land that took too long to come. Tombstalker ends games all by himself.
Can you imagine getting hit with turn 1 duress, turn 2 sinkhole, turn 3 hymn to tourach, turn 4 pox, turn 5 smallpox (discarding nether spirit), turn 6 return spirit and cast Tombstalker? Tombstalker has been insanely good, effectively decreasing my overall mana curve and making me want to replace powder keg with vindicate (thus maintaining the same number of 3cc cards as before). I'm not sure yet though, I've used powder keg to mop the floor against some affinity decks...
Irregardless, tombstalker is awesome so far.
Thanks Andro.
Sorry I hadn't been posting much, I had been preoccupied with Vaka Beatz for a bit. But from my little time with Tombstalker, yeah the card is indeed exceptional. I don't think I'm going to cut it.
Congrats on your GPT performance tyler. God I wish I could take weekends off to go to tournaments.
But way to represent us pox players everywhere.
Thanks, pox power. I need a shirt of that card.Originally Posted by Clark Kant
Congrats on your GPT performance tyler. God I wish I could take weekends off to go to tournaments.
But way to represent us pox players everywhere.
Tyler: Can we Get a tourny Report?!
Matches, Sideboarding, misplay's, etc. Thanks!
I think tyler said he wanted to keep his tech a secret for GP Columbus, perfectly understandable given how big a tourney it is imo. It's pretty obvious that he cut Trinisphere if that helps.
Trinisphere is too clunky, it's on my board for Combo, and Combo it owns.
How does this deck deal with combo? Trinisphere & Cabal's out of the board? What about against belcher decks? The slow clock seems to allow combo to refill.
I'm glad you brought up combo. Now that FS is readily available and on the brink of being legal, I would love to get some input into optimizing the post FS build of the deck.
There is nothing wrong with the old build, but this is very much a metagame game, and the recent trend of combo decks displacing Goblins decks suggests that some new metagaming is in order. For one, running Duress seems more important, and the card itself seems dead less often now. Especially since the deck started running Tombstalker, being able to take out your opponents removal is a very powerful play. In addition, Tombstalker is such a powerful threat here that it seems worthwhile to modify the deck to incorporate it.
I've been very pleased with Judge Unworthy as removal. Not only is it instant speed removal that can do cool things like kill your opponents Serendib Efreet when they block your Mishra's Factory, but it seems be superior to Innocent Blood for three reasons...
a.) Unlike Innocent Blood, it doesn't force you to sacrifice your own Tombstalker.
b.) Its targeted removal, which works well given the huge number of choose and sacrifice effects that you already run. If your opponent has two creatures for example, you can kill their small creature with this and take out their large creature with a Pox effect. But if your opponent has multiple weenies, being able to choose and kill the most annoying one is nice.
c.) It's similar to Magma Jet in that it's not dead versus nonaggro decks. You can always target your own Tombstalker to provide some very solid card selection. Sure you can't deal 2 damage to the head like Magma Jet can, but the fact that you can Scry for 3 rather than 2 makes up for that.
The question is, how can the deck make room room for both Judge Unworthy and Duress. Here are the opitons...
Dark Ritual - Always was one of the weakest cards in the deck imho. This deck goes well into the midgame so you topdeck it far more than you see it in your opening hand. Plus it doesn't disrupt your opponent.
Trinisphere - A solid card for locking your opponent from playing any spells entirely, but sometimes dysnergic with your own cards and not always the card you want to see.
Sensei's Divining Top/Rancid Earth - Judge Unworthy somewhat already fills the role that Top did. But Top does have some synergy with it, letting you know when you have a Tombstalker near the top to let you kill something as large as an 8/8 with a Judge Unworthy.
Basically; swap Ghostly Prison for Duress in the MD for the new combo meta?
Should chalice be included in the SB? The problem is chalice at 1 destroys the rest of your combo hate; maybe siding in 3sphere and chalice?
This unfortunately then becomes a race to get some hate down before you lose, which isn't always going to happen.
What about pithing needles? Too shallow?
Judge unworthy appears weak to me; although I haven't tested it. There is the fact that you basically can only do 3 damage at most and are not even garanteed that. I also am still unconvinced about tombstalker; yes it is a fast clock, but in my testing has proved un-synergistic. Making me lose threshold on my cabal pits and not allowing my N. spirit to come back to life.
I feel there is still work to be done; but progress is being made.
Vaka Pox - Current Post Future Sight Build
// Lands
4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Wasteland
4 Scrubland
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Swamp
3 Mishra's Factory
3 Polluted Delta
// Threats
4 Tombstalker
// Disruption
4 Duress
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Smallpox
4 Sinkhole
4 Vindicate
4 Pox
3 Crucible of Worlds
2 Ghostly Prison
2 Sensei's Divining Top/Rancid Earth
// Sideboard
2 Ghostly Prison
3 Infest
3 Trinisphere
3 Chains of Mephistopheles
4 Cabal Therapy
The current builds sideboard allows the deck to be very moddable.
If you're playing against goblins for example, post board you have 2 additional Ghostly Prison bringing it to 4 Ghostly Prison, 3 Infest and 4 Cabal Therapy. (I usually cut 4 Duress, 2 Sensei's Top and 3 Crucible of Worlds).
The strategy is to lock them out from attacking with Ghostly Prison, buy time until you can do so with Infest and the various Pox and Hymn effects. Once you get them under Prison and your land destrucion, you have all the time in the world and can eventually use Cabal Therapy to take out their Gempalm Incinerators so that you can swing in with the 5/5 flying Tombstalker for the win while simultanously blowing up their lands. It sounds complicated but the individual pieces work very well by themselves even if you can't do all of them together at the same time and the plan works very well.
If you're playing versus combo, post board you have 4 Pox (great discard), 4 Duress, 4 Cabal Ritual, 4 Hymn, 3 Chains of Mephistopheles, 3 Trinisphere and if you expect that your opponent will go for the Empty the Warrens win, two additional Ghostly Prison and three Infest. Yes, that is a total of 22-29 anticombo cards but I think the current meta justifies it and you can usually cut most of your land destruction (except for Pox since that's such a potent discard spell) versus combo to make room for all these cards. And the disruption is dense and potent enough that you will rarely have trouble slowing them to a complete crawl while Tombstalker + Mishra's Factory provide you with a 2-3 turn clock.
The deck already performs very well against control but postboard, Chains and/or Cabal Therapy or sometimes Trinisphere are well worth bringing in.
Loam decks are a problem for the newer build especially with the loss of Jotun Grunt (which was solid in the older build), but you still have a pretty good shot at disrupting and mana screwing them long enough to lock them out entirely with Crucible and Wasteland or beat them down with Tombstalker. And Chains of Mephistophles is very strong against a lot of loam variants. I am also looking at Extripate in place of the other anticombo cards if the Loam matchup proves to be an uphill battle and traditional combo subsides a bit.
Just out of curiosity, how does Tombstalker have synergy with Pox and the sac creature spells? Do you find yourself playing around him most the time and do you only play him when you've already established board control? I'm just curious as to how well he's done in testing and if he's really worth it over Nether Spirit.
I too feel like the synergy is being dismantled by tombstalker / no neither spirit. Pox / small pox is such ridiculous card advantage when you can discard a NS and have a crucible in play that I can't imagine cutting them. The clock maybe slower, but the inevitability is definately there, also I found scooping occurs more than beating for the final points. Have you found hitting BB turn 2 or BBB turn 3 to be a problem? I was having a few issues with both factories, and wastelands ( unless I hit a urborg). I suppose this is also why you have 25 lands.
Leyline of the void I feel is a necessity in the sideboard, at least while flash is around, it also ruins loam, igg, thresh, mirror (to an extent).
I do miss Nether Spirit a lot. And I can't yet say for certain if Tombstalker was the right call. Something like that is very hard to gauge precisely because all the games that Tombstalker won for me, it's probable I might have won if it was Nether Sprit too, it would have just taken me longer. The two cards are so different functionally that it's hard to tell which strategy wins you the game more often. Just play whichever card feels right for you but switch it up and try both and eventually it'll become clear based on how often you win which is the better idea.
Tombstalker is really there as a finisher. You are supposed to use up all Pox effects and most of your disruption on hand before casting it. Tombstalker has synergy with the Pox effects in that each Pox effects adds atleast 3 cards to your yard, throw in a fetchland, and a sinkhole or wasteland or Hymn or Duress or Vindicate or something and you can easily cast Tombstalker while your opponent's mana is heavily disrupted. Not only is it bigger than anything your opponent can cast thanks to all the land destruction, but it flys above your opponents threats and is a very fast clock. And it has great synergy with Duress letting you take out your opponents removal.
Seeing as how it's a finisher, I fully plan on cutting back to 3 and am trying to figure out what to fill the empty slot with. It needs to be a threat clearly, as the 6 threats is too few. Ideally, I can got up to 8. But it's hard to decide as all the options have poor synergy either with Mishra's Factory, or Tombstalker.
More on tombstalker...
This deck does a great job of heavily disrupting your opponent. Pox knocks out a lot of life.
Duress steals aways Swords and other removal that can take out Tombstalker.
And Tombstalker acts as a three turn clock letting you race any deck after a flurry of disruption.
Many times, it's size lets it serve as a blocker and stabilize (long enough to cast Infest or Ghostly Prison postboard). But it's main role is to end the game fast.
Well after doing some testing, tombstalker is doing pretty well. As sad as it makes me, nether spirit, although netting CA was not much of a force to be reckoned with. The evasion that Tombstalker offers is nice, as with the Ghostly prisons out your opponent may have a few creatures on the board, but with no land can't attack back as the tombstalker beats for 5 each turn. More testing will show whether or not this is optimal. But, as I was being skeptical toward Clark, I wanted to state that this *could* be the path to take.
I am also going to try testing a couple copys of skeletal scrying; yes they have poor synergy with tombstalker, but I may try them in the build without it. It just seems so good for refilling your hand
I'm going to agree that tombstalker is perfect in Pox. I'm an avid pox player myself and one glaring weakness of the archetype is the lack of a decent way to end games immediately post-disruption.
While Nether Shade and Chimeric Idol were nice and very synergistic with the decks themes (evading all of your pox effects), they weren't perfect win conditions. The lack of evasion and fat make them very poor clocks as any puny 1/1 could chumpblock all day long giving your opponent the chance to topdeck into gamebreaking spells.
Tombstalker solves this problem in one fell swoop. It operates on the same principle as Nantuko Shade in Deadguy Ale in that it kills quickly in 2-3 turns after unloading all of your sinkholes, hymns and pox effects. Imagine a 5/5 beater against a mana screwed, handless opponent with only 8-13 life remaining. That is the exact purpose of tombstalker. Basically, you don't give them time to recover from your disruption and this wins you the game.
The presence of hulk flash has however put the use of tombstalker in Pox into question. The preponderence of leylines of the void makes stalker a dead card. Perhaps once flash gets banned....? I'm not really counting on that happening though.
I also think maindeck leylines is the way to go to fight hulk flash. Use those over sinkholes as ld effects are starting to become less useful with the existence of a 2cc card that says "win the game". Leylines are also useful against threshold and Iggy pop.
I would also like to ask Clark Kant, exactly how good is this deck against Hulk Flash? I really want this deck to do well in Legacy and the existence of Hulk flash is a severe hindrance, IMO, to that dream.
Good question and I wish I had an answer for you. My local group had preeminently banned Hulk Flash before Wizards could get to it, so my testing against the deck is too limited.
I really see not a single good reason to think that Hulk Flash will infact be around after June 1st though...
a.) The community is now at near unianimous consensus that the deck is a problem, invalidates far too many strategies and should have something done about it.
b.) The deck makes this format pretty much identical to Vintage, which kind of defeats the whole point of Legacy in the first place.
c.) We're talking about the dci here, the same people that felt that a easily disruptable green based two card hard to tutor for combo that produces infinite 1/1 squirrel tokens and passes the turn is too broken for legacy.
So I'm really not going to waste a lot of effort into figuring out a way to beat a deck that's not going to be around in 9 days imho.
If it turns out that I am wrong, then I'll get to work on an answer for you.
Well that is quite an answer. I want Hulk Flash to be banned to come june 1. I know its beatable. Same way Raffinity was beatable with 20+ maindeck artifact hate...
Anyway, I think maindeck/sideboarded leylines could be more useful than say sinkhole. Leylines really are one of the best - and fastest - disruption available against Hulk Flash. So if you want to play pox NOW while Hulk Flash is out in force, I guess thats one way of fighting the combo. And probably use the traditional Nether spirit/Chimeric idol win as stalkers will get hit by other decks packing leylines.
But then again, that would severely mangle the decklist. *Sigh*
The thing is, at the GP today I saw 5x more Fish and Threshold than Flash-hulk. I beat those easily and Sinkhole was a major player in mana-denial. They try to run with as few lands as possible so punish them for it. Leyline was on the Sideboard, but really, I boarded in Chalice so many times to Chalice for 1 against Threshold and Fish, which can really lock them out of the game.Well that is quite an answer. I want Hulk Flash to be banned to come june 1. I know its beatable. Same way Raffinity was beatable with 20+ maindeck artifact hate...
Anyway, I think maindeck/sideboarded leylines could be more useful than say sinkhole. Leylines really are one of the best - and fastest - disruption available against Hulk Flash. So if you want to play pox NOW while Hulk Flash is out in force, I guess thats one way of fighting the combo. And probably use the traditional Nether spirit/Chimeric idol win as stalkers will get hit by other decks packing leylines.
But then again, that would severely mangle the decklist. *Sigh*
What was your list?
Judging from the results of the Grand Prix, Legacy remains a variable format despite the warping of Hulk Flash. A mono-black aggro deck managed to top four!
Maybe Pox could be a contender? Dunno, we'll have to wait to see how the format further changes. Especially with the addition of FS.
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