[Help] Looking for advice on new deck

[Damnosus]

So I have been playing the same deck (sui black) for a while at my local store and I have come to the conclusion that I really need something new that I can swap it with to keep things exciting. That being said, I want it to both be decently cheap but also competitive (I mean we only play for store credit, which isn't much and their singles selection is pretty bad, but it does help me buy some things for my gf so winning is definitely something I want to have happen).

So with those two things in mind, I have drawn up two options for a deck: MUC (permanent based, without fetches) and Dragon Stompy. I have most of each deck (sadly not everything though). Dragon stompy will probably be the more expensive of the two (of the expensive stuff, I am missing 3 chrome moxes, 4 city of traitors and 2 pithing needles, whereas I am missing 3 fact or fictions, 4 ancestral visions and vedalken shackles), but I also think it will be the more competitive of the two.

So my question is which deck should I spend some money on to make? The decks I usually see are as follows: thresh of a bunch of colors (I think last night it was some weird mix of U/G/w/b), 4 color landstill, mono red goblins (though he is gonna splash black soon, and he doesn't have ports or wastelands), painter's stone, belcher, SI (well I haven't seen this yet, but I know its been played), and then a bunch of other random jank (raffinity, mono black reanimater, G/R gruul, fires of yavimaya, boros deck wins, angel reanimater, a weird deck that kills off its own phage giving it to the oppenent and forcing the loss, and a bunch of other stuff).

I would be probably try and build one of the following lists:

Dragon Stompy:

10 Mountain
4 Ancient Tomb
4 City of Traitors
4 Chrome Mox
4 Seething Song

4 Simian Spirit Guide
4 Magus of the Moon
4 Gathan Raiders
4 Rakdos Pit Dragon
4 Arc-Slogger
3 Taurean Maulers
1 Akroma, Angel of Fury

4 Chalice of the Void
4 Blood Moon
2 Umezawa's Jitte

SB:
4 Pyrokinesis
4 Pithing Needle
4 Tormod's Crypt
2 Trinisphere
1 Umezawa's Jitte

Though I might MD the trinispheres for the jitte cause I think that will be more effective against things, not sure though.

MUC:

3x Powder Keg
3x Vedalken Shackles
2x Morphling
1x Rainbow Efreet
3x Back to Basics
4x Counterspell
4x Propaganda
4x Fact or Fiction
4x Force of Will
4x Spell Snare
4x Ancestral Vision
24x Islands

Sideboard
1x Powder Keg
4x Tormod’s Crypt
4x Blue Elemental Blast
1x Back to Basics
2x Pithing Needle
3x Echoing Truth


Any help would be much appreciated!

-and I really hope I put this in the correct forum. My apologies if it is the wrong one.

[herbig]

I'd go with the MUC as Sui and Dragon Stompy play similarly. That way you'll have a control deck and an aggro deck to really switch up your play styles, which will really help improve your game as well.

For some reason I really love the MUC deck from Coppola's latest article here:
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/16190.html

You could try that out. All the control magic action might work really well in local tournaments, where creatures abound, but I can't say for sure.

[Damnosus]

Thanks for the input herbig, though as far as improving my playstyle, it really isn't too necessary. Prior to getting more involved at tournaments/returning to magic, I played U/W control almost exclusively. It was actually the aggro aspects of the game that I had really lost touch with. But that is definitely a valid point.

You really think MUC would be more competitive in my area? I mean I think it would be pretty good, but that goblins deck would definitely make me unhappy.

Also, after going through some of the MUC thread, I am not sure what to think of the MUC list that won that tournament. I mean force spike appears to be disliked by most because it is often a dead card, forbid appears to be a win more card/or a dead card, Kira is interesting but it takes up some valuable spots and doesn't get around deed (which I definitely see often), it only has FoF for drawing, and no propaganda. I am just not sure how effective it would be in a more mixed meta. I mean against goblins, it can only steal so many creatures, and they are too small to make an impact. Against Landstill, a good number of the cards are dead because of the low creature count. I am not totally sure how it would do against thresh. Anyone else's thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[purlqg]

If you eventually decide to build Dragon Stompy then don't drop Jitte! It's a must because of the random decks you might end up playing in a Tournament. They might seem like overkill sometimes but when you face some random deck where you really need remowal or life then you realize that DS can't afford to sideboard it imo..

Anyways you only need to put trini main if your meta is full of storm combo.

[Xurcks]

I agree with herbig in choosing MUC vs DS.
The option of having a control deck and a sui is very good to have alternatives.
Also , Dragon Stompy , imo , is better against more developed metagames , with more duals and the like , where moons can really shine , and because it can really lose to random jank and itself.
Personally , i love control decks.

I don't like that version of the deck.The lack of MD propaganda could hurt against most aggro decks.
If you want help against goblins , you can also run REBs and Chills in the SB.

[rleader]

Get the cards for Pox.

Dragonstompy is fun every once and a while, but playing it week after week is probably less interesting than MUC. Especially those times when you get paired up against one monocolor deck after another, which sometimes happens: it's a metagame deck, after all.

[Damnosus]

Thank you all for the advice so far-I was definitely ready to go for DS, and I am really glad I asked all of you first. As for my MUC list, how does it look (other than the board, which I am gonna work on)?

[Xurcks]

I like the looks of your list.

For the metagame you pointed , i think this list idraleo posted on the MUC thread could do really well , maybe with one or two changes :


// Lands
24 [CS] Snow-Covered Island

// Creatures
1 [US] Morphling
2 [SHM] Godhead of Awe

// Spells
4 [AL] Force of Will
3 [FD] Vedalken Shackles
4 [TE] Propaganda
3 [IN] Fact or Fiction
4 [MM] Counterspell
4 [TSP] Ancestral Vision
2 [US] Back to Basics
3 [LRW] Cryptic Command
2 [UD] Powder Keg
4 [MR] Chalice of the Void

// Sideboard
SB: 1 [US] Back to Basics
SB: 1 [UD] Powder Keg
SB: 4 [TE] Chill
SB: 4 [A] Blue Elemental Blast
SB: 3 [MR] Sun Droplet
SB: 2 [OD] Divert

[Damnosus]

Xurcks: That is an interesting list-yea I saw it earlier. There are a couple of things that I am not a big fan of though: Godhead of Awe will be great against the random jank, but against the decks that I usually lose to (namely landstill, belcher, thresh, goblins) it will do very little, especially as those pack enough removal to make its non shrouded butt bite the dust pretty quickly, no matter how many counters I have.

What usually happens at these tournaments is that I play some random deck to begin with (like mono black reanimator, affinity, Gruul, zombies, etc.), I beat them, and then I go up against something really good in round 2. Thus I want to make sure that I can take out the random jank while still being able to keep up with the real competitive decks. I dont think godhead can do this.

Second, I am not shelling out the cash to buy cryptic commands, especially as I feel that it isn't super necessary for the deck.

Chalice is an interesting-I really like the card. However against the random jank it will do very little.

I think I will make the list that I have posted, and depending on how it performs, I might slowly add elements of the godhead deck into it.

Thanks for the input!

[rleader]

(namely landstill, belcher, thresh, goblins)

Have you considered Armageddon Stax? It's more expensive than Dragon Stompy, but OTOH it would let you switch to Dragon Stompy in the future for a minimal investment.

Not to complicate your decision making process here, but City of Traitors is a pretty good investment (I was *lucky* to get mine at $7 each just a few months ago!) for the amount of semi-budget decks it can enable. Dragon/Demon/Garruk-stompy, 8-sphere affinity, stax decks, etc. If you're not planning on every having a playset of every original dual land, and thus have to play these sort of deck lists, pick these suckers up NOW, even if you're going with MUC.

Buy your V. Shackles now, too, while all the kids are obsessed with block constructed; they'll go way back up in price once EXT comes back into play.


Chalice is an interesting-I really like the card. However against the random jank it will do very little.


FWIW, a lot of people here would consider your (and anybody else's for that matter) SUI Black list to be random jank at this stage of the game. ;)

Chalice of the Void is the best friend of any mono black or blue deck: not only does it improve your matchups against decks you're flat out slower than (being able to chalice for zero vs. belcher, etc.), it increases the number of answers you have by creating dead cards in your opponent's hand. Not sure about playing it maindeck, though.

I wouldn't buy Cryptic Commands for $80 either.

[Damnosus]

Have you considered Armageddon Stax? It's more expensive than Dragon Stompy, but OTOH it would let you switch to Dragon Stompy in the future for a minimal investment.

Not to complicate your decision making process here, but City of Traitors is a pretty good investment (I was *lucky* to get mine at $7 each just a few months ago!) for the amount of semi-budget decks it can enable. Dragon/Demon/Garruk-stompy, 8-sphere affinity, stax decks, etc. If you're not planning on every having a playset of every original dual land, and thus have to play these sort of deck lists, pick these suckers up NOW, even if you're going with MUC.

Buy your V. Shackles now, too, while all the kids are obsessed with block constructed; they'll go way back up in price once EXT comes back into play.



FWIW, a lot of people here would consider your (and anybody else's for that matter) SUI Black list to be random jank at this stage of the game. ;)

Chalice of the Void is the best friend of any mono black or blue deck: not only does it improve your matchups against decks you're flat out slower than (being able to chalice for zero vs. belcher, etc.), it increases the number of answers you have by creating dead cards in your opponent's hand. Not sure about playing it maindeck, though.

I wouldn't buy Cryptic Commands for $80 either.


Yea, I don't want to touch stax just yet-gonna keep things simple for now. Thanks though, I will definitely look into for anything I do in the future.

Yes I do realize my black deck is random jank. That being said, it was pretty cheap to build, and it has been pretty effective (beating belcher without blue feels pretty good)-plus it makes any causal games I play much less one sided. So don't knock it.

[Xurcks]

@Damnosus :
Yeah , i think your list is fine , and didn't really know that cryptics were so high priced , they're just not worthy buying just for one deck. (i'm not updated in card prices lately , especially the newer ones).
Chalice is good , at least test it.
Maybe we should finetune the sideboard a little?

@rleader :

He wants to build one of these because he already has most of the cards , and Armaggedon Stax is not so cheap with cards like , 4 Mox Diamonds , Exalted Angels , Crucibles , Flagstones , not even mentioning Moat or Tabernacle.
Man , I bought a playset of City of Traitors for like 8 dollars last year (good times for building up Stompys =)

[Wallace]

If you eventually decide to build Dragon Stompy then don't drop Jitte! It's a must because of the random decks you might end up playing in a Tournament. They might seem like overkill sometimes but when you face some random deck where you really need removal or life then you realize that DS can't afford to sideboard it imo..

Anyways you only need to put trini main if your meta is full of storm combo.

Not true, Jitte is really meta dependent, I no longer play in in the MB or SB. I would also drop the number of Blood Moons in the MB to 2. With 4 Magus, 4 moons is really over kill, by putting 2 Blood Moon in the SB you open up 2 MB slots but still have access to the 3rd and 4th Blood Moon if needed.

I also suggest Trini in the MB, I run the full allotment of 4 as my local meta is combo heavy at the moment. Pyrokinsis is a great removal spell and really does the job, if you are worried about Goblins then I would run X Pyroclasms too. Hope this helps...

[rleader]

Yes I do realize my black deck is random jank. That being said, it was pretty cheap to build, and it has been pretty effective (beating belcher without blue feels pretty good)-plus it makes any causal games I play much less one sided. So don't knock it.

I wasn't, I was more like knocking the popularity of the "jank" expression because it doesn't really describe the validity of a deck in a given metagame. And it's a bad verbal shortcut as it keeps people from describing decks very thoroughly: for instance, I'd consider any reanimator deck that runs bogardan hellkite to be a horrendously bad matchup for sui-black, so treating the entire archetype as jank is kind of iffy. Not that you did, particularly, just saying that the danger is there.

It's kind of like that stupid "danger of cool things" mantra that gets repeated here. "This 5CC dude seems like it would rawk in deck xyz! But maybe that falls under cool things!" (This is every other post in the dragon stompy thread...)

Of course it's flipping cool, that's why it costs five mana. It's not like you discovered some super sekrit combo: stuff with high mana costs do cool stuff, news at eleven.

I was in your situation: I got dragged back into the game two years ago after a decade hiatus and I started with sui black although I quickly turned it into Pox (aka how'd I sink a ridiculous amount of money into a monocolor deck?). You might consider pox, it seems like a decent metagame solution for you. OTOH, after playing it for a while, I've come to the conclusion that it's really just a budget four-color Landstill deck: Pox has a few advantages of course, but the drawback is that discard is worse than counterspells and mass removal in that your opponent doesn't pay mana for the things you make them discard.

Then I built Affinity to have a second deck. And then a U/B reanimator like the one with the offical thread here. And then Dragon Stompy. If I knew I was going to get into the game to that extent, I would have probably just bought dual lands upfront (aka cards with resale value), but then it would have been impossible for me to know that, going in.

OTOH, it's nice to have several complete decks on hand at any given time, which isn't quite possible when you have sets of fetches and duals to manage, trying to create decks without overlap.

Just random things to think about there, I guess.



Moat or Tabernacle.

I had no idea those were really still being played; I haven't touched stax since the sun tower period. My bad. I remember reading up recently and Magi were being used, but I wasn't looking too closely.

[Damnosus]

I wasn't, I was more like knocking the popularity of the "jank" expression because it doesn't really describe the validity of a deck in a given metagame. And it's a bad verbal shortcut as it keeps people from describing decks very thoroughly: for instance, I'd consider any reanimator deck that runs bogardan hellkite to be a horrendously bad matchup for sui-black, so treating the entire archetype as jank is kind of iffy. Not that you did, particularly, just saying that the danger is there.

It's kind of like that stupid "danger of cool things" mantra that gets repeated here. "This 5CC dude seems like it would rawk in deck xyz! But maybe that falls under cool things!" (This is every other post in the dragon stompy thread...)



Oh I always took the term "jank" to mean any deck that isn't an established archetype (whether tier 1 or not), not meant solely for the format (like playing a type 2 deck in a legacy tournament-which does happen at my store with some of the newer players), or that is incredibly quirky (i.e. the phage deck which is really cool, but definitely not competitive). So maybe I was wrong in its usage?

While I realize normal reanimator is not jank, the ones at my store definitely are. I mean the angel reanimator was definitely jank: I don't know if he had any discard outlet other than drawing and discarding (or at least I didn't see any). The mono black one played weird things like the dwarf (something the defiled?), and a single grindstone (meant to grind himself), an LED too. It was pretty weird (though surprisingly effective one tournament when he went 4-0. That has since changed as now I have beaten him pretty easily, and my sister who had her first tourney last tuesday beat him 2-0 with affinity :laugh: ).

As for spending money on dual lands and such, I would love to but I am spending a great deal of money on some gifts for someone, and I don't make a great deal of money during the school year (one more year of college), so I don't really want to invest just yet. So MUC it is.

Yes the sideboard definitely needs work. I mean I want to keep the crypts for the reanimator, possibly thresh, and maybe even ichorid (I know some people can make it though I have yet to see it) matchup. BEB is staying due to the goblins decks/painter decks that it is effective against (oh there is also burn sometimes too). Other than that though I am not sure. Any suggestions?

[rleader]

Well, Chalice of the Void is the best weapon against burn. Not sure why Chill is in the sb of that list or what it's used for, so I guess this thread is pretty much over and you should turn to the MUC area for people who know better.