[Article] Eternal Europe: Impressions From The City

[Mon,Goblin Chief]

Ravnica is spoiled and I love the looks of it - and that means it's time to brew again! Check out what I've come up with so far :)

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/24904-Eternal-Europe-Impressions-From-The-City.html

Enjoy!

[preddi]

I really love your articles and the new set is interesting aswell. Rest in Peace combo might be a new contender in a control shell. But I think that other cards might have a bigger impact on legacy, not by creating new archetypes but cards like Abrupt Decay or Supreme Verdict could easily be used in other decks.
Jarad's Orders "combo" with Loyal Retainers doesn't look impressive, but I would snap build the deck if I had the Retainers for fun games :). Maybe the card could also be used in a NicFit deck as Green Sun's Zenith replacement for bigger or non green creatures.
I'm grateful that there is no additional Show and Tell target again, which could be abused or even creates another attack angle like Omni did.

[lyracian]

I was also thinking about an Esper Rest in Pieces deck.
My thought was the black discard to get rid of counters/stifle making it easier to land Helm and 8 main-deck Gravehate gives you a very good game 1 vs Dredge and co.

[xfxf]

I wanted to make Energy Field work in a control deck since it was legal in standard so I'm curious to see if the deck will be able to grow into an established deck.

[sco0ter]

Oh, I love your deck idea. Never thought about abusing Energy Field with RIP.

Makes me think if there could be some form of UW Enchantress variant with Field, RIP, Detention Sphere...

[Arianrhod]

Carsten: if you think Retainers is impressive, look into BUG for Body Double instead. The biggest problem of Retainers is that there is a pisston of hate for legendary creatures currently (Karakas) thanks to Sneak/Omni/Reanimator/HyperGen/whatever. Body Double fixes that problem, allowing you to get whatever creature you want. It's also on-curve, since you can Orders with 4 and then Body Double with 5 (I hesitate to say "on turn X" because that gets warped in Nic Fit).

That said, I'm unconvinced that Orders is actually better than Gifts Ungiven, and that's the major problem that I'm having with it in brewing. While Gifts requires a shakier manabase (4-color, because Unburial requires white), it's a tremendously more powerful card.

I dunno. There's definitely some room to explore options with Orders, but it needs some brewing. IMO, until legacy's meta changes or Emrakul (Show and Tell) gets banned, Retainers is more of a liability than it is good, which is a shame because it's a really cool card.

[Offler]

Ok... Helm/Leyline combo now in white... :D

[(nameless one)]

Ok... Helm/Leyline combo now in white... :D

Quinn (and to some extent, White-based Stax and Parfait) has a better combo win condition.

Grindstone gets hit with Chalice at one.

Painter's Servant dies to creature removal which the format has an abundance of.

Rest in Peace shuts off a lot of decks by itself, unlike the previous two by themselves.

[bowvamp]

Yeah, after some serious testing I'm finding that RIP doesn't really work all too well as a four-of. Your mini combo RIPfield actually hoses tribal pretty well. Another combo with RIP is misthollow griffin. It's not as good as the other two though.

[Mon,Goblin Chief]

Happy you enjoy it :)

@preddi:I agree that there are other cards that will probably have a big impact, but the first thing I like to do with new cards is brew new decks - so that's what I did ;)
Totally agree on the S&T comment. That card is already easily dangerous enough.

@lyracian: I guess you could build the deck with a fast combo-plan in mind, running MD Leyline and RIP. The problem I have with that approach is the cost of the combo (seven with RIP, 5 with Leyline) which is simply more than what other decks bring to the table (especially S&T), meaning you're probably better of just running the more mana efficient - and therefore faster - combo-deck. Hence the direction I took the list.

@sco0ter: I suppose you mean Bant instead of UW (given you need the Enchantresses and all that)? Sounds like another approach that might have potential.

@Arianrhod: I guess the Legend-hate is a valid concern. Body Double makes it even less likely to pull the combo off in a single turn, though :/
As for Gifts, I'm probably one of the biggest fans of Gifts in the world (all thanks to Vintage *g*) but I think the fact that you can try to pull of your combo multiple times instead of being all in on the single try is one big argument for running with Orders. Straight up being able to go for Genesis and Shriekmaw (plus cast that) on six mana is kind of valuable, too, I think (much harder to engineer with Gifts if I'm not mistaken).
Also, four color manabases definitely are a pain that should be taken into account in a format with Canadian Thresh in it (basically all the games I've seen Nic Fit loose to that deck have come down to them mana-screwing the Nic Fit player).
Another Option would be to just use both for redundancy to have a deck that consistently goes four mana, next turn you're (effectively) dead, not sure how good having that many four-drops is going to be, though.
All of that means lot's of options that need to be brewed around - which is sweet.

@bowvamp: RIP/Field is actually insane against RUG, Maverick (it's been pretty easy to set up Needle in addition in testing so far) as well as the Tribal decks. The lock feels extremely powerful so far, especially because it's so cheap. Lackluster against control/combo, though, for obvious reasons.

[ScatmanX]

Just read the article. The 2nd deck looks sweet.
While reading the decklist, I wqas thinking that it might want Mox Diamond and Land Tax, and them you mentioned them. Nice. I'd really like to read how you develop it.
Do you think Abrupt Decay may be too big of a drawback for this deck to succeed?
Thanks for the Article.