[Deck] Faerie Stompy

[dlg]

Lets start with a quote from a german magic site about prison-decks: "..während Faerie Stompy fest schläft. Obwohl – wann hat eigentlich jemand zuletzt nachgesehen, ob das Deck noch atmet?"
A short translation for all non german-speaking players: Are we dead, yet?

In my opinion we are. in 2009 we got 16 top 8 and 2010 we got only 2 (and there were MANY qualification tournaments).

How can we revive? How is it possible to come a threat again? I know that there weren't any impossibly god-like cards since 2008 but we have to look forward or try something stupid ;)

How do you think?

[Aleksandr]

Are we dead, yet?

Qasali Pridemage.

It kills too much of our relevant stuff, namely Chalice. Without COtV they can cantrip for answers/threats (Thresh) or burn us out of game (Zoo, Sligh). I hope that something broken happens pretty soon...

[socialite]

Qasali Pridemage.

Yup. Can't reach escape velocity anymore since Grip and Mage were printed. It's fucking ridiculous we need to start seeing some busted 2U cards being printed in the upcoming sets before I'll ever feel confident again. That or combo needs to make a comeback and start shitting on ZOO.

[Eldariel]

Lessee, now. What does FS need to do to become top competitor again? Well, first of all, it needs to be played again. There was a time when the metagame was difficult for the deck. Now, though? What needs to happen is people need to realize how perfect the metagame is for the deck. Our best MUs are on the top. Difficult match-ups have all but disappeared. I'm not sure what's the optimal build at this point. In fact, this is the first time in years I'm not sure how to best build Faerie Stompy to match the expected metagame. I do know it involves maindeck Jitte and SoFI, but beyond that, I'm not sure.

Glen Elendra Archmage MD? Sower of Temptation? I'm liking my Sowers, but I can see more and more arguments for Glen Elendra. Also, how many Pestermites? I'm not sure, but the card seems amazing right now. I am, however, absolutely certain that no less than 4 Chalice, 4 Mage is correct, especially with Sigil of Distinction making Mage a decent combatant.


But a quick look at the metagame. First, Zoo:
- People are saying it's a bad match-up. I can't understand that. Djinn went like 4-1 against it at the GP. My own experiences are that it's highly favorable. What's the deal? Qasali Pridemage? Wait, since when has opponent having 4 ways in the MD to remove Chalice been a problem. They fold to Chalice. They die to it. They lose all their good removal, most of their important threats and their ability to deal with our airforce. We have 8 Chalices. They have 4 Pridemages. I like those odds.
- Chalice at 1 Chalice at 2 is GG anyways and double Chalice at 1 makes Qasali bit weak. Also, Qasali is 3 mana to play and blow up an arti. We play equivalent to their 1 mana to pay the Chalice. In other words, even if they DO have the Qasali, it's a huge tempo advantage to us. And that still doesn't do anything to stop us from raping them with Jitte, SoFI or similars. And that's assuming we don't just Force the Qasali. I guess we won't if we feel we don't need to. Hell, if we happen to draw our Needle, we can Needle Qasali and then Chalice at 1. Whatever. Bottomline, Qasali is way insufficient.
- Post-SB, they bring in Grips. Oh woe, world is at an end, am I right? Well, not exactly. 3 mana is a lot to them. 2 mana is not to us. If they use Grip to remove Chalice, it's again tempo advantage to us. Sure, it stops them from losing outright, but do we really care? It's really expensive, it doesn't deal with the fact that we're smashing their face while gaining life and dancing on their grave for good measure. Also, if we have multiple Chalices, it still does nothing. What the hell folks? Did we suddenly become afraid of opponent's Force of Wills and Dazes? I recall we've been kicking various Thresh-builds' ass since 2005 in spite of said Force of Wills and Dazes and that's more than our Zoo-opponent has to bring to bear. Give me a memo when Zoo starts sideboarding Ancient Grudge. Then I might care. Or just Chalice at 2 and beat their one-drops the oldfashioned way, I haven't decided yet.
- No, seriously, when have we ever been afraid of a pile of creatures? An unaccelerated one at that? Why the hell do we give a shit? Why am I not losing to it as much as people say I theoretically should? Hell, the last time I lost to "Zoo" was when I was actually facing off against Goyf Sligh, but with Plateau to support Nacatl. Obviously I wanted to Chalice at 2 to stop Qasalis and all that; turns out his manacurve was almost all 1 with only Goyf at 2. So yeah, if your opponent plays an incredibly non-standard list and you only see the normal cards and misassign your role, you can lose. It's not easy tho.
- They're busy SBing against combo so they probably don't have that much for you.

ANT:
- So yeah, we're pretty much their worst MU. Glen Elendra Archmage, Chalice, Trinket for Chalice, Trinket for EE, Force of Will, hell, Back to Basics if they're playing more-than-2cc build (yeah, it requires them to tap out, but they generally have to to Wipe Away/Hurkyl's the Chalices, or to Doomsday or whatever). ANT becoming more popular is the best thing that could ever happen to FS. Look at the GP - it's among the most popular decks and they're extremely favorable for us.
- They usually focus their SBs more on dealing with hatebears, Counterbalances and such than us, since our angle of attack (combination of creature-, artifact-, enchantment- and spell-based disruption) is quite unique, they don't usually have a comprehensive sideboard for us.

Canadian Thresh:
- Bla bla bla, Chalice at 1, bla bla bla. That deck folds to Chalice at 1, mostly. Sure, they'll occasionally steal games from under it, but mostly they hate cards you play. All of them. Their efficient manacurve and disruption CAN steal them games, but honestly now, who cares? It's slightly favorable.

Merfolk:
- Like Canadian Thresh except with 100% less cards that matter, but the ability to deal with Chalice through Vial (though you wanna Chalice at 2 if you can neutralize them anyways). They lose to SoFI, Jitte, don't deal with Sowers terribly well, have no removal and overall, don't really like anything we're doing. The only real way for them to win is to get the turn 1 Vial turn 2 Standstill without us having a turn 1 play, and then proceed to counter every spell we play.

Goblins:
- Same as ever. No, we don't particularly care if they add 4 more Lackeys since what we care about is turn 1 Lackey, not turn 2 Lackey. They removed removal spells/arti removal for them so it's just good for us.

Lands:
- Ridiculously easy MU; Needle the Mazes, get anything in play, kill them, Chalice at 2 if you get the chance (stops Glacial Chasm recursion among others). Your basic Islands kick their rear. Only possible problem is Glacial Chasm recursion with Crucible of Worlds without access to Force (for Crucible) or Crypt (for Chasm). Otherwise, we have inevitability and that's not a position control wants to be in. Get few guys in, equip 'em, pwn with Chrome Moxes and Islands (seriously, just Trinket for Chromes as necessary), etc. Their manlands can't block you nor tangle with equipped guys. Without Mazes, they're nothing. Now, the builds with EE recursion are a bit harder, so you may need to Crypt that or Needle Academy Ruins too. Luckily, all these problem artifacts play poorly with Manabond and aren't that good against other decks than us so they're a tad rare. Oh, and we SB Back to Basics too.

Reanimator:
- We have more Crypts than just about any other deck, Chalice at 1 just fucks over their engine something severe and we have Forces too. This isn't terribly difficult even with all the protection they have. Hell, I've won through Iona before; get equipment in play, go to town with whatever guy you played first. Sword of Light and Shadow is particularly amusing for that. May warrant 3rd and 4th Crypt/Relic on the SB finally though. But yeah, the birth of this deck could only know good things to us as another low-curve extremely-vulnerable-to-Chalice protection-light deck. Oh, and their non-Iona reanimation targets are hilarious to Sower. They rarely have removal to speak of as they don't expect fast-enough Sowers.

Such decks are usually built to deal with Counterbalance, but our Chalice is just much faster due to 2-mana lands and not needing another half of the combo to function which is why it tends to function so much better in MUs where both are seemingly the nuts; such decks are generally built to deal with Counterbalance through pressure to force opponent to play it at an inopportune time without protection enabling them to deal with it, or just win as it doesn't land. As we are so much faster to lock the game down, we can abuse that design pattern by shutting them down before their gameplan is able to deal with it, at best winning the game and at worst, forcing them to Force way earlier than they'd want to, or to spend tons of mana and generally a turn to remove Chalice (in case of e.g. Zoo). Honestly, Chalice being dealt with isn't the worst thing in the world; it's still generally done its job.

Countertop:
- This is so ridiculously varying an archetype that saying absolutely anything about it probably doesn't apply for some builds. Bad news is that they tend to universally run 3-drops nowadays, which means Counterbalance is suddenly a bitch to deal with and as such, we want to expend some amount of resources stopping Top if at all possible. Chalices, Needles, you know the drill. Natural Order is also a bad news; while it's occasionally raceable, generally we don't want to deal with it too early. Again, if Chalice lands their lack of Hierarch makes it slow enough to easily deal with. This has provoked me to consider SB Llawan as it would also further improve the Merfolk MU, give us an out to Progenitus and hit much of the Bant-crap that gets played in Rhox War Monk, Trygon Predator and even fcking Rafiq. Another bad news is that they tend to often have access to Qasali Pridemage which they annoyingly can afford on equipment more over than not, which is the real issue here.
- This match-up ranges from bad to good to be honest. UWG lists with Shackles, Trygon Predators, a large number of StP-effects, Qasali Pridemages, Sowers and Natural Order? Bad. More Supreme Bluish lists? Much better. Classic Countertop with some 3-drops, 4 removal-spells and randomness? Excellent. Counterbalanceless builds? I don't know; haven't really seen how much difference replacing it with threats really makes in the long run. They generally are slower, but try to catch up with efficient removal and rule the midgame. Generally, that midgame smackdown it comes down is specifically what it comes down to, except in the builds eschewing Daze which are much, much easier to beat. They're more like Landstill which was never a terribly difficult MU outside the 4c builds.


So, umm, some SB considerations may be in order, but as it stands, the deck seems to be in a perfect position with regards to the metagame. There's very little Rock (which can cause a headache), Survival (which can be exceedingly annoying to deal with though Needle of course helps), grinding heavy-removal control and overall, stuff that causes us trouble. There's a ton of low-curve archetypes with very few ways to deal with Chalice, and a ton of archetypes extremely vulnerable to our equipment.

The arti removal of choice is Krosan Grip thanks to Counterbalance, making our life all that much easier by being slow, inefficient and overall just not-impressive against us. So yeah, I think what needs to happen for the deck to become competitive again? Well, it needs to start played. That. Is. All. For real. It's in a fcking perfect position right now with almost all archetypes on the field being good or very good MUs. It's better now than in 2005 when the deck premiered and it was a complete metawrecker back then (lowcurve Thresh, Goblins, High Tide, remember?).

[dlg]

So let's start the "new" list aka Faerie Stompy '10^^

I hope these are the sure points:

4 Sea Drake
4 Serendib Efreet
4 Trinket Mage
4 Mulldrifter

4 Challice of the Void
4 Force of Will

4 Ancient Tomb
4 City of Traitors
8 Island



Unsure points:

1. Trinket Toolbox: EE, Crypt, Needle, Sigil, Relic, Cursed Scroll, Basilisk Collar
They're all nice but which are the best and how many can we play?

2. Chrome Mox or Mox Diamond or even a split?
I hate the situations without lands or with too much and i hate it to imprint a useful card another point is EE

3. Equipment
Jitte and SoFI but how about SoLS? How many equipments are the right choice?

4. Creatures
Sower, pro red, Glen, Pestermite, Cloud of, Esperzoa, Spellstutter Sprite, Shoreline Ranger...
Even here we're not sure which one is our first choice

5. Other Spells
Here we got Psionic Blast, Misdirection, TfK,...
An option, a chance or just crap?



Weird options:

1. Ancestral Vision - better idea in times with many suicide decks
2. Standstill - funny idea, usually WE flood the board with bigger beaters
3. Even Manlands? - once we did it^^
4. many more i didn't think of ;)

[Aleksandr]

Eldariel, your points are true, but believe me that I've lost many games to Pridemage. The problem with them is threefold:

- There were times when the DTB (be it Zoo, Thresh-like.dec) did not play any maindeck artifact removal. Now they have it and moreover it's an efficient beater that supports their Goyfs if we put something bigger than QP into play
- Namely the Thresh decks are harder to control, now when they don't play Goose anymore, stretched out their curve, play Jittes of their own and hinder with RWM. Once again, QP helps this tactics.
- With all our life-loss, Zoo can easily win, namely if they start and put some drop into play beofre we can react. After some scramble we end at ten life with Chalice, Jitte, some beast and an empty hand. They draw QP, destroy Chalice and burn us to death. Or they draw QP, destroy Jitte and race us. Real life story.

I don't wanna sound like a whinner, but more spread curve of NQG decks and/or maindeck answers to artifacts did not make those matchups more favourable for us.

[Skeggi]

Chalice @ 1 obviously has alot less effect these days. But we do need to protect our creatures from common removal like Swords to Plowshares. Kira also isn't an option, because equipment totally nullifies her effect and costs more mana. So what do we do? Is there perhaps a way to add CounterTop to the deck and make it work?

[dlg]

if we wanna go for countertop we have to drop challice and configure our whole list to make it work with the balance^^
our manacurve starts at 3 and we got atm 1 one mana spell and only with jitte 2 mana spells.

[Eldariel]

Eldariel, your points are true, but believe me that I've lost many games to Pridemage. The problem with them is threefold:

- There were times when the DTB (be it Zoo, Thresh-like.dec) did not play any maindeck artifact removal. Now they have it and moreover it's an efficient beater that supports their Goyfs if we put something bigger than QP into play
- Namely the Thresh decks are harder to control, now when they don't play Goose anymore, stretched out their curve, play Jittes of their own and hinder with RWM. Once again, QP helps this tactics.
- With all our life-loss, Zoo can easily win, namely if they start and put some drop into play beofre we can react. After some scramble we end at ten life with Chalice, Jitte, some beast and an empty hand. They draw QP, destroy Chalice and burn us to death. Or they draw QP, destroy Jitte and race us. Real life story.

I don't wanna sound like a whinner, but more spread curve of NQG decks and/or maindeck answers to artifacts did not make those matchups more favourable for us.

Well, Zoo didn't really exist before Qasali; I still find it a better MU than decks that occupied the same metagame niché previously. Generally, I find you can save your Force for Qasali and be just fine. I think the addition of Zoo to the metagame wheel is really to our benefit. Countertop, yeah, I totally agree. It's much worse than it used to be against many builds. But note that there are builds eschewing RWM and even Qasali; Jitte is a rarity, and some builds are cutting Dazes. Builds without those tend towards being good MUs.

That said, I'm actually willing to accept a difficult MU against the NO midrange lists with tons of 3-drops. That's only one pillar of the metagame and one that's attacked by most of the rest of the metagame. And it's our only really difficult MU on the top tier right now. If we have good MUs vs. rest of the meta and can come up with slightly negative MU there, we are definitely at an excellent position metagame-wise. There's nothing in the metagame that beats everything, and as much should really be obvious; the metagame is too wide-open to really be able to beat everything consistently.


I find FS has so many good MUs that your EV is quite high, and the difficult MUs aren't unbeatable either.

[Clark Kant]

Quick question, do you guys think Wizards might reprint Sea Drakes if the reserved list goes away? If so, would they reuse the exact same art as the Portal version and thus possibly cause the price of hte card to collapse. Or will they use some really ugly drawing to keep the card a collectable?

Back to topic, I still feel that the deck suffers from inconsistency. It's more consistent than when the deck first emerged, but is no where near as consistent as a deck like Zoo.

Their burn spells can kill off almost of our flyers before we can equip them. And they have Pridemage to blow up Chalice at 1. And Zoo has quickly emerged as one of the if not the most popular deck in the format.

Our deck is light on threats and has practically no removal. Their deck is packed with both threats and removal. Until we find a way to address this, we may have a problem.

God how I wish Psionic Blast could take out Goyf or didn't cost shock us for 2.

[Eldariel]

Quick question, do you guys think Wizards might reprint Sea Drakes if the reserved list goes away? If so, would they reuse the exact same art as the Portal version and thus possibly cause the price of hte card to collapse. Or will they use some really ugly drawing to keep the card a collectable?

Back to topic, I still feel that the deck suffers from inconsistency. It's more consistent than when the deck first emerged, but is no where near as consistent as a deck like Zoo.

Their burn spells can kill off almost of our flyers before we can equip them. And they have Pridemage to blow up Chalice at 1. And Zoo has quickly emerged as one of the if not the most popular deck in the format.

Our deck is light on threats and has practically no removal. Their deck is packed with both threats and removal. Until we find a way to address this, we may have a problem.

God how I wish Psionic Blast could take out Goyf or didn't cost shock us for 2.

How much have you actually tested this match-up? 'cause while Zoo is consistent in executing its gameplan, it mulligans a lot to gain aggressive hands, leading to the card count generally being comparative with us mulling for the right combination of cards and them mulling for aggressive start. While Zoo's removal means we have some trouble sticking a guy to equip, I've found Chalice and FoW generally sufficient to force a guy through. While Zoo's beatdown tends to be frighteningly fast, if they can't keep their removal operational, they won't win. While their guys are big, one equipped creature can hold the whole horde back while the rest of your guys beat their face. While they have Qasalis, the inherent tempo loss that card causes combined with your ability to often just play a second Chalice means you can defeat it more often than not. While it may be annoying to be unable to rely on "Chalice -> Win" now, play experience from various pilots suggests that in the long run, we are still great favorites in this match-up.

If we get a Chalice down, we tend to be able to just drop Sower of Temptation which alone wrecks them. They are weak to large creatures and generally only have one-two to play each hand. Stealing one just wrecks them. We also tend to have about as many creatures as the creature-heavy Zoo lists so I wouldn't necessarily say we're threat light or anything. That said, I've been pondering about new sideboard. In fact, I'm going to write a proper primer and am already half-way through. I'm going through a lot of cards that were rejected due to being unnecessary or win-more back then; as those MUs have grown harder, how about bringing them back to the limelight?


A short list:
- Control Magic: Weaker than Sower on card-for-card basis, but much more difficult to remove with only Zoo's and Bant's overworked Qasali Pridemages truly able to do so MD, and the equally overworked Krosan Grips coming in from the SB. Stealing a Goyf is as brutal as ever and as new, bigger things are being played, there are more juicy targets around. It may even be worth maindecking nowadays. Decks like Merfolk don't like losing their Reejereys one bit either.
- Submerge: Long-time-ago unnecessary, this is an absolutely lethal tempo swing in a match-up and with forests being so ridiculously common in these parts, it seems quite usable. With 10 Islands, we tend to have enough to consistently find one over the first few turns and if necessary, unlike every other deck ever, we actually have the capability to hardcast this if need be. Goyfs, Trygon Predators, Knights of Reliquary, you name it, back on top it goes.
- Llawan, Cephalid Empress: You know how I keep saying Progenitus-running Countertop lists with Rhox War Monks, Trygon Predators and company are difficult? Well, this is sort of a blowout there. The only drawback is that they may run this too, but we are faster and this is a total beating on Natural Order. Oh, there's that Merfolk-deck somewhere too. Also other "bounce color"-cards like Hibernation should be considered here. I recall someone brought these up few pages ago.
- Daze: Ok, so this should really be a maindeck consideration. We're pretty fast and our Island-count has gotten rather high. While we don't play mana denial, the various Countertop-lists over the years have proven you don't need mana denial to make efficient use of Daze; all you need is a fast-enough gameplan to make both players tap out. Seems we could consider Daze for a second free counter in quite a few MUs, not least of which is Countertop. We'd need to cut some non-creature spells and that obviously sucks, but Media314r8 ran quite well with that Mox Diamond-list only sporting 4 SoFIs for equipment, so it's something to consider.
- Misdirection: Well, this card has had its ups and downs, but it's absolute beating against Zoo. So...yeah. Misdirecting their Paths to their Goyfs is good fun. Great when you don't establish Chalice or when you merely use it as a tempo tool rather than a lock piece.

Just some...food for thought there. If you wanna BEAT Countertop, SB enough and you most certainly can. The tempo approach could also be considered; hell, SB Standstills might not be so out there against slow, grinding decks. That said, I'm fairly happy with the present guise, but I'll definitely be testing to try and find superior MD and SB guise to see if there's something there.

[Clark Kant]

That sounds great.

I look forward to reading the primer. :)

[DukeDemonKn1ght]

One random idea from someone who doesn't really test this deck all that much... But have y'all considered Trinisphere in the sideboard to help out with the Zoo matchup? Particularly if you're running some form of Moxes in addition to your lands, it seems like it would be a pretty back-breaking first turn play, and it would give you more lock-pieces against them in general. I know that ANT etc. are good matchups for y'all but I think that Trini has more applications than just shutting down combo. I mean, the way most decks' mana-curves are getting more and more aggressive, Trini wrecks a large percent of the format if you can lay it down early enough to make a difference.

[Nihil Credo]

Thread obsoleted, refer to the new one.