The Current Metagame: Junk vs Canadian Threshold

[Hanni]

This started off in The Rock thread, but I figured I'd toss it into Format Discussion instead.

With a metagame consisting of Miracles, Show and Tell decks, RUG Delver, with fewer aggro decks being played than in previous months (thanks in part to the first two mentioned decks), I'm not sure why Junk isn't seeing any play as the go to "tempo" deck.

RUG Delver is better equipped at beating fast combo decks like Storm with its free countermagic, and better equipped at beating swarm aggro like Goblins and Merfolk with its more efficient red removal options.

On the other hand, the black disruption package of Junk seems much better equipped for dealing with pure control like Miracles, slower hand dependant combo like Show and Tell, and favorable in the "tempo mirror" (Junk vs RUG).

For reference, here's a decklist for those unaware of what a Junk deck looks like:

B/g/w Deadguy Rock

Lands (23)
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Marsh Flats
3 Bayou
3 Scrubland
1 Savannah
2 Swamp
1 Karakas
1 Horizon Canopy
4 Wasteland

Creaturues (10)
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Tombstalker

Spells (27)
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Thoughtseize
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Sinkhole
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Abrupt Decay
4 Vindicate

This is just a rough list I threw together. Sinkhole seems like it would be good against Show and Tell and Miracles, situationally bad against RUG Delver*, and decent to good everywhere else. I'm not defending whether the card does or does not belong, just justifying why I put it into this list. With the format slowly becoming slower over the years (playing more and more spells outside of the 1cc-2cc range), it seems like it's starting to become a well-positioned card again. However, the Sinkholes in this list could be something else instead.

*By situationally bad, I mean bad most of the times, except when you hit the opponent with discard first to prevent losing alot of tempo to something like Daze, and are capable of either manascrewing their 18 land manabase, or colorscrewing their 14 colorsource manabase.

Have I been away from Magic too long to understand the game anymore, or am I thinking in the right direction and people just haven't adapted yet?

Discuss.

EDIT: For those that disagree with Sinkhole (understandable), those slots could become 1-2 Tombstalker, 1-2 Terravore, a Forest, the 4th Thoughtseize, a couple more 1cc spot removal spells, some Dark Rituals, or whatever.

[(nameless one)]

Isn't that what Esper Stoneblade variants are doing, beating on Show and Tell decks and Miracle decks?

Also, someone made a point on how Chalice at one needs to see more play. It shuts down Brainstorm which seems to be what's holding together the decks you mentioned.

Also, you're missing Pernicious Deed in that list.

[damionblackgear]

This was parts of my response from The Rock Thread.
Hanni, the answer is two fold, simple, and unwanted. Not only are we not blue, but the thread is full of random archetypes mixed together.

There's a huge push for blue decks by both Pro and popular Joe players. There's also a heavy criticism for any non-blue player as having had made a sub-par choice. So, when new players start, they're typically handed blue decks now and told to never do anything else because Brainstorm is the strongest card in legacy*. Filters allow for mistakes as you have a better chance to recover from a mistake. So, in essence, the "traditional" blue decks are playing with a crutch. In this case, a lot of players are unwilling to get rid of the assistance and stand on their own.

The different archetypes become apparent as you search even the last 10 pages of this thread. Different packages, which in other decks warrant different threads (current AnT and TES are the best example as the real difference lies in the manabase at this point) are something that's overlooked here and advised on as a group. The confusion leads people to stray away as they get multiple viewpoints telling them to go many different routes. Example, I say play the Mox and 23 lands and Matt says play 24 and no Mox. While that may be small, when you start getting into packages - like Stoneforge, Green Sun, Discard, Planeswalkers and Removal - many new players become afraid to try out the different archetypes inside this one thread.

[Hanni]

Isn't that what Esper Stoneblade variants are doing, beating on Show and Tell decks and Miracle decks?

Also, someone made a point on how Chalice at one needs to see more play. It shuts down Brainstorm which seems to be what's holding together the decks you mentioned.

Also, you're missing Pernicious Deed in that list.


I suppose so, although most of the Esperblade lists I've seen are a little slow. They beat Show and Tell just as effectively through the discard/countermagic + flashback discard package, but the clock is still worse than something like Team America or Junk.

And I'm not sure that Esperblade is "destroying" Miracles as opposed to having an even to favorable matchup, but maybe I'm wrong. A few discard spells is nice if drawn early, but a topdecked and resolved Counterbalance is still going to give Esperblade fits, and Detention Sphere now deals with a swarm of 1/1 flying tokens. EE might destroy Counterbalance, but it takes SFM/Snapcaster/Jitte along with it. Even then, that still doesn't stop Miracles from sweeping the board. Aside from the Jace vs Jace battle, I don't see how Esperblade has any additional tools available to it, to deal with a swarm of 4/4 flying tokens, than Miracles has to deal with a swarm of 1/1 flying tokens. But none of this directly answers my original question.

The original question was not why Junk isn't seeing play while Esperblade is.

The original question is why RUG Delver isn't sharing some of it's played %'s (of the field) with Junk. Both of them fill the "tempo aggro/control" niche, but to me, Junk seems better suited for the current metagame.


Also, you're missing Pernicious Deed in that list.

Pernicious Deed is a slow control spell. Junk is a relatively fast aggro/control deck. Deed may or may not be a strong sideboard option, but it's not a maindeck card. I didn't list a sideboard, but that may have been the wrong call on my part. Possible sideboard options that Junk has against the current metagame vs what RUG has is pretty important. For now, I'm going to leave that area open for discussion.

[death]

Any tri-color deck that doesn't run Stifle is never favored against any real Tempo deck. I would prefer playing a two-colored deck with more basics any time of day.

[Hanni]

Any tri-color deck that doesn't run Stifle is never favored against any real Tempo deck. I would prefer playing a two-colored deck with more basics any time of day.

Even with 23 lands (or more), a ton of discard to get rid of all that reactive countermagic (including Stifle), bigger threats (in both the air and on the ground), which all dodge RUG's removal, while only Mongoose dodges Junk's removal?

If RUG gets the nuts and starts first with Stifle/Waste/Delvers and the Junk player durdles and then gets their creature(s) Dazed, sure. If the Junk player hits them with some discard to clear the countermagic, kills the Delver, and drops a 5/5 Knight in front of a 3/3 Mongoose, then no.

In this matchup, RUG has a limited time to disrupt and race before getting outclassed by Junk's stronger midrange aggro and removal. Also important to note is that the proactive black disruption package trumps the reactive blue disruption package in the control war, especially when Junk has the permanent removal to deal with what slips through the cracks while RUG does not (again going back to RUG having ineffective removal, where Junk's hits everything but Mongoose).

Stifle alone doesn't change the structure of this matchup. I'd argue that this deck has a better RUG matchup than Maverick does. The only advantage that Maverick has vs RUG that I can think of (as opposed to Junk vs RUG) are the mana dorks, since they help to negate RUG's Stifle/Waste/taxing counter plan. That plan is susceptible to Lightning Bolt and Forked Bolt though, whereas Inquisition and Thoughtseize nullify everything but Wasteland.

[damionblackgear]

Any tri-color deck that doesn't run Stifle is never favored against any real Tempo deck. I would prefer playing a two-colored deck with more basics any time of day.

Sir, I'm no doctor but, I see you suffer from foot in mouth syndrome. :wink:

http://blip.tv/scglive/scgmad-lgc-rnd-3-justin-uppal-vs-ian-ellis-6147519

http://blip.tv/scglive/scgmad-lgc-top-8-jeff-rasmussen-vs-ian-ellis-6148090

http://blip.tv/scglive/scgmad-lgc-finals-bennett-snyder-vs-ian-ellis-6147446

[sdematt]

Don't worry kids, we know what we're talking about.

-Matt

[Koby]

Hanni, I think the deck you posted in the opener needs Brainstorm, because fuck it why not? You're already playing 3 colors.

[Hanni]

Hanni, I think the deck you posted in the opener needs Brainstorm, because fuck it why not? You're already playing 3 colors.

I know you're being sarcastic, and it's pretty comical after reading the 'Miracles running rampant' thread in Format Discussion, which turned into a 'Ban Brainstorm' discussion for a page or two. However...

Your statement (outside of the sarcastic context) is one of the reasons why the metagame continues to be blue dominated. I wish people would realize that more non-blue decks are not only viable, but can be better than their blue equivalents in the right metagames.

Yet, instead of thinking outside of the box (and netdecking the latest and greatest from the SCG Circuit instead), we have 'Ban Brainstorm' discussions every other week. :rolleyes:

Can I have an A+ for effort anyway?

[death]

Sir, I'm no doctor but, I see you suffer from foot in mouth syndrome. :wink:

http://blip.tv/scglive/scgmad-lgc-rnd-3-justin-uppal-vs-ian-ellis-6147519

http://blip.tv/scglive/scgmad-lgc-top-8-jeff-rasmussen-vs-ian-ellis-6148090

http://blip.tv/scglive/scgmad-lgc-finals-bennett-snyder-vs-ian-ellis-6147446

These videos sum it up then. Is this you? Well that explains it. Why are we still durdling around with our pet decks, please tell us exactly what to sleeve so we can beat the best deck (which is RUG) and become a "Deck To Beat" coz ya know Junk has a loongg way to go, as in not-there-yet.

FWIW, the deck I'm hinting at is Eva Green, in case that didn't strike you as you were too busy with self-indulgence.


I know you're being sarcastic, and it's pretty comical after reading the 'Miracles running rampant' thread in Format Discussion, which turned into a 'Ban Brainstorm' discussion for a page or two. However...

Your statement (outside of the sarcastic context) is one of the reasons why the metagame continues to be blue dominated. I wish people would realize that more non-blue decks are not only viable, but can be better than their blue equivalents in the right metagames.

Yet, instead of thinking outside of the box (and netdecking the latest and greatest from the SCG Circuit instead), we have 'Ban Brainstorm' discussions every other week. :rolleyes:

Can I have an A+ for effort anyway?

Netdecking has been part of Magic since thedojo days. Can we stop arguing about how powerful Brainstorm and Force of Will now, cause they've always been and always will be, and stick to the subject: Junk pwns RUG.

[Hanni]

Netdecking has been part of Magic since thedojo days. Can we stop arguing about how powerful Brainstorm and Force of Will now, cause they've always been and always will be, and stick to the subject: Junk pwns RUG.

Those of you actively discussing Legacy on a forum aren't the majority of netdeckers, so when I toss that term around, I'm not referring to everyone. It wasn't a personal insult.

Also, the subject wasn't Junk pwns RUG. The subject was that I think Junk is the better tempo deck right now in the metagame. That's why I created this thread, and that's the discussion I'm trying initiate.

People keep getting stuck on the smaller picture, i.e Junk is bad because Esperblade is better, RUG beats Junk, etc (just citing two examples that were brought up).

I'm still waiting for the discussion to start, regarding the niche of Junk vs RUG in the current metagame.

[Hanni]

Double Post I know, but I'm trying to jumpstart the discussion.

Three of Junks worst matchups are currently missing from the metagame due to other Tier 1 decks: Burn/Sligh, Zoo, and Storm Combo.

Burn/Sligh has problems against Counterbalance, and Show and Tell races Burn (especially with countermagic buying time).

Zoo is outclassed by Maverick, can't race Show and Tell, and can't handle 1cc Wrath of Gods + Counterbalance lock.

Storm Combo is dead in the water right now. It is outclassed by Show and Tell as the formats combo deck, and has very bad matchups against Counterbalance and RUG Delver.

Junk has a good matchup against Miracles, Show and Tell, and RUG Delver. Junk also has a good matchup against Merfolk if it picks up in popularity (due to Miracles and Show and Tell), and Junk can board into Engineered Plague to handle Goblins if it picks up in popularity (due to Miracles).

The only relatively bad (popular) matchup I can see right now is Maverick. This deck can board into EE/Deed, maybe even Virtues Ruin or other removal, to dramatically improve that matchup postboard.

I need to get to bed now. Hopefully when I get off work tomorrow, I'll have several pages of stuffs to read through. ;)

[menace13]

I'm still waiting for the discussion to start, regarding the niche of Junk vs RUG in the current metagame.

Why play a deck without Brainstorm and FoW?

No seriously, the best cards in eternal are always blue. Playing a deck with 3 colors and none of them blue is a terrible thing to do to someone. Someone said Bstorm is crutch(seen the same weak shit said about FoW on these boards too), Best players play the best decks and the best decks play the best cards.

Why would anyone want to play a deck without blue when you can play Brainstorm, Ponder, Daze, FoW, Delver.....

[Phoenix Ignition]

Why would anyone want to play a deck without blue when you can play Brainstorm, Ponder, Daze, FoW, Delver.....

Oh, I dunno, maybe to win the SCG open? Blue is a great color, but not necessary to win.

[sdematt]

The Maverick game postboard isn't bad at all. You're usually running 2-3 Deeds, EE, and Virtue's Ruin in the board. It's fine.

-Matt

[damionblackgear]

That is me (... and my ego loves that you recognized me by username). Don't worry though, we'll get there when more than 10 people pick up the deck :wink:

To get back on subject. There's a big downplay to people playing discard over counters so, more people are inclined to play counters vs discard. That's probably a good starting point for figuring it out. Counters are also a lot easier to play than discard as they're entirely reactive (you get to know what you're getting when you pull the trigger) and discard is proactive (you probably get to take something, but you don't know until you pull the trigger).

Remember, you are wondering why people aren't playing a deck that's extremely touchy with lines of play, has no agreed upon way to be designed, forces the pilot(s) to be well versed in the overall legacy meta, and be able to adapt in order or they'll be punished.

There is an "agreement" between the two. The "current things" are BU Death's Shadow deck and BUG Delver (Black tempo thresh) which have access to both counters and discard as a way to fight the different things in the meta.

[sdematt]

Part of the problem is this:


To get back on subject. There's a big downplay to people playing discard over counters so, more people are inclined to play counters vs discard.

Topdecks beat discard, but we have superior board control, so it should be good.



That's probably a good starting point for figuring it out. Counters are also a lot easier to play than discard as they're entirely reactive (you get to know what you're getting when you pull the trigger) and discard is proactive (you probably get to take something, but you don't know until you pull the trigger).

It's much easier to just counter something good than to pinpoint something for discard and understand the fundamentals of the deck you're playing against, and what answers you have or don't have and when you will have those answers. That takes a ton more skill in some ways that just Force of Willing a card that's good against you. This isn't to say choosing what to counter is a mindless job on assembly line, they're just different intricacies that I think more people are comfortable with in one way (blue) than the other (discard).

-Matt

[menace13]

Oh, I dunno, maybe to win the SCG open? Blue is a great color, but not necessary to win.

Yeah, I guess, but, I mean, going by past winners blue decks out number the others. Same for GPs.

Three out of the top 4 decks in the format now are blue,a nd before Miracles it was 2 out of 3. And before that it was all blue. The only time recently in the past 3 years that it wasn't blue was during Survival.

I'm not saying Junk is bad, but blue is just so much more powerful and the ease of use(Diamond and Matt Stated above^) is just one of those reasons.

[Tammit67]

Storm Combo is dead in the water right now. It is outclassed by Show and Tell as the formats combo deck, and has very bad matchups against Counterbalance and RUG Delver.



CB is admittedly a bad matchup, but RUG isn't as bad as you would imagine for storm, usually around 55-45%.

The only problem I have with Rock is the problem I have with a lot of the non-blue decks: Once your opponent deals with your opening hand plus the 2-3 relevant impactful cards you drew over the first handful of turns, how can you find threats faster than the blue deck can find answers with all its filtering effects?

This is why I feel we haven't consistently seen Junk/Rock/Eva green at the tables beyond the lack of people playing the deck. In order to go the disruptive 'tempo' strategy, you potentially make your topdecks terrible. RUG at least can brainstorm them away or pitch them to Force. Or hell, maybe that turn 6 daze will be useful anyway, much more so than similarly late thoughtseize.

So how to make it work? Instead of running spells that have these effects, try what maverick has done and run creatures that have utility and you are rarely disappointed to have drawn later on in the game. Punish them for their filtering with your consistency, as maverick does now and Zoo/merfolk did before it.

[damionblackgear]

I don't know how many other Rock/Junk/NameXhere are on right now so I'll keep fielding question/comments from "our" perspective for a while (if another one of us jumps in I'll let them take the swings). I'm not arguing the Storm/Belcher matches though. Someone else can do that. I know it's not the best, every deck has weaknesses.


The only problem I have with Rock is the problem I have with a lot of the non-blue decks: Once your opponent deals with your opening hand plus the 2-3 relevant impactful cards you drew over the first handful of turns, how can you find threats faster than the blue deck can find answers with all its filtering effects?

This is why I feel we haven't consistently seen Junk/Rock/Eva green at the tables beyond the lack of people playing the deck. In order to go the disruptive 'tempo' strategy, you potentially make your topdecks terrible. RUG at least can brainstorm them away or pitch them to Force. Or hell, maybe that turn 6 daze will be useful anyway, much more so than similarly late thoughtseize.

The same way they plan on getting the ability to keep gas inbound, with cards that get/find other cards. Bob in play for a turn is a cantrip, for 2 is advantage (I know he's fragile) and Top/Library are able to filter/draw cards as need be. They provide something most current blue decks son't have access to, continuous filter/draw capability.

Even early discard is good when you're able to turn your next spell into a hymn (forcing them to use force of will) or even forcing a brainstorm to protect "vital" components of your opponent's hand. Liliana also beats a lot of the scenario's presented as they want cards in hand and we're more comfortable playing off the top.

It's true that a late Thoughtseize isn't exactly the best thing in the world to see late game but, if it's late game and you topdeck daze, you're probably in the same mood yourself. Both have about the same chance of being useful, "we" at least have tools which allow us to deal with it proactively (Top and Library) and reactively (Liliana).

I think that the issue with the top tables is more play consistency based than anything. It's almost impossible to play a perfect game (as there is always another route and no way to fully judge it without doing it). The archetype rewards you based on multiple things and one of those is play skill. So, choosing a more correct line of play counts. As a tournament goes later, the opportunity to choose those worse lines increases.

Example: I lost a game to Maverick this weekend because I decided to Zenith for BoP this weekend instead of Arbor + Waste (had 2 in hand) or Ulvenwald Tracker. I could have reset my opponent's board and had 3 lands + Liliana on the field and a Mystic in hand. Instead, I lost the game from one choice that I never recovered. (If you're wondering, game 1 I mulled to 4 and game 2 wasn't close)

The "trick" is to figure out how to adjust your worse line into a better one. In my above scenario, I didn't figure it out before the game was out of hand and I lost because of it.

So, how to make it work? More practice for the people playing? More testers to help refine the lists? Sure, that's how any deck gets better. More people playing means more opinions being given and the better the deck works overall.

All of that being said, it's not as though we're dead in the water here. There are multiple descent to great finished from the deck even with it's limited numbers. Considering so much of the deck is blue, our chances increase drastically as we trend towards preying on "non-combo" based decks (I use quotes because the show and tell combo decks, aren't as bad as the others).

[lavafrogg]

I feel that this argument is flawed from the very beginning. The "suicide/dead guy/eva" lists have been tier three for a while now. The mana curve of the average legacy deck is just too low. maverick has noble, rug has ways to protect the one land it needs and miracles runs basics and counters. Going after someones lands all out is a good way to just lose games when you are just drawing the wrong cards in the wrong situations.

In a format where the early game is turn zero-1, the mid game is turns 2-4 and the late game is anything after that keeping someone off of 1-2 mana is extremely difficult. All most players have to do is untap, play a land and play a scavenging ooze/SFM/goyf/delver that you can not answer because your hand is full of mana disruption and discard.

RUG is the best deck because its disruption package is relevant from turn 0 and it can get a nut draw and just win games at a fairly consistent rate. Some draws, no deck can keep up with RUG.

Without blue filtering, Rock/Junk players have been experimenting with tops, libraries, zeniths, mystics and planeswalkers to ensure we have options no matter what deck we are playing. The problem is that not enough people are willing to test a BGW deck when the decks players cannot even decide what awesome cards it should be playing.

We know we should be playing discard but can't agree on what cards to play, removal cannot be decided on after swords to plowshares(decay might fix that), mox vs no mox, zenith vs SFM, goyf vs SFM, what sweeper is the best(EE vs Deed), planeswalkers at all?, until these questions are answered we will never know what deck we should even be playing past personal preferences.

p.s. I would compare the current junk lists to Esperblade and not to RUG. RUG is a monster.

[catmint]

The list you posted Hanni is bad for several reasons and cannot be compared to RUG at all.

You have a very expensive curve and you just basically play 1 spell per turn until you might play 2 spells per turn. you have no way to gain Tempo advantage like RUG which does it by operatione on 1-2 lands while disrupting the opponents mana development and playing free counterspells. Discard has its advantages versus combo (& control without SD.top) but it is a negative tempo play (you trade and spend mana and the opponent does not), whereas free/cheap counterspells are a positive tempo play since the opponent has to usually invest more mana than you do to answer.

Also I don't see any card advantage. Except for Hymn to Tourach you trade 1:1 and you draw a bunch of very bad topdecks/situational cards like discard and sinkhole with no way to card filter. Compare that to the inherent card advantage of RUG filtering a lot to only draw gas and putting all lands/bad spells back because they can operate on 2-3 lands.

I think the reason why 11 discard spells and 4 Sinkhole are not good card choices has been pointed out.

But I don't think I read somewhere that you just so dead to UWx conrol decks. They play more removal than you threats 6-7 swords effects + 4 snapcaster mage or less of those but 4 Terminus. You can't beat SD.top and even without they just draw their spells to handle your threats.

Decks winning with creatures today have certain tools that you have not:
-RUG: shroud, tons of cheap/free counterspells, burn/vortex
-maverick: mother, teeg, tons of creatures beating
-goblins: come into play effects with card advantage, vial, cavern, tons of threats
-merfolk: islandwalk, fast goldfish, counterspells

If you want to be successful with the Junk colors I think it is basically Maverick splashing black or Nic Fit. Both are very grindy decks in nature and beat RUG.
Both of these decks have a much better RUG matchups than your list. Altough you have the right "tools" to win against RUG, your Strategy is a lot weaker to Stifle, Daze, Waste compared to Nic Fit or Maverick.

[lavafrogg]

You could essentially call this thread: why do people not play non blue decks?

Sarcasm aside, bwg has awesome internal synergy and stupid powerful cards and is really just one to two cards out of being super competitive and in the spotlight. Black has not received its share of broken cards and is due for something overpowered.

Grisly salvage might be that card, allowing abuse of the graveyard and a way to filter through your library. Abrupt decay could also be the card that pushes junk to super competitive, I'm on the train that deathrite shaman is the card to break the deck but that is for another thread.

Once junk can do something better than another deck it will take off in popularity and placements.

[lordofthepit]

Why do you consider Junk good against Miracles?

Sensei's Divining Top is one of the best cards you can have against discard. To add insult to injury, whatever discard you have left goes from bad to dead when Counterbalance eventually hits.

Junk will try to trade 1-for-1, perhaps getting ahead with a Hymn or Confidant, but that seems terrible against a deck that can out-attrition you with Snapcaster and Terminus, eventually pulling ahead with Jace.

Certainly, any deck can be tuned to improve a particular matchup, but what is the strategic advantage Junk has against Miracles? Discard for your removal + early Confidant is a start, but is there anything else?

[BlackStarDeceiver]

Extripate/Surgical combined with early discards is pretty good, the redsplash might as well be worth it for Slaughter Games, i think Sdematt played around with it when Blade was big to get a hold on Ancient Grudge.

Decay is stupidly strong from testing when you can make the mana work reliably. Maybe Red Rock aka Jund might be a possible route to take with Shaman and Diamon Moxes. But thats just a big "maybe" ;)

[Final Fortune]

There's nothing inherently wrong with G/w/b mid-range aggro other than calling it a tempo deck, because it's definitely not a tempo deck, but it's a viable metagame deck regardless of whether or not people recognize it en masse or not. Eva Green or Deadguy Ale are definitely not the roads to go down tho', but there are a lot of PT Junk style decks that have game vs. most of the field and can take advantage of anti U specific SB hate like Choke etc.

I think the main problem with Junk based decks is that they have to risk losing to the strategies that RUG doesn't risk losing to, which are bacially the Storm, Dredge and Reanimator match ups where you get rolled too quickly without Force of Will.

RUG isn't that good of a deck, it's just that the archetypes that punish it aren't really popular in the metagame right now and the worst it has to deal with is Miracles and Esperblade in terms of strategies that challenge it for supremecy. I personally think playing that deck in this metagame is suicide frankly, because Miracles and Esper have the advantage and it isn't particularly good at dealing with Show&Tell, which is the last combo deck standing at the moment.

[xfxf]

You could essentially call this thread: why do people not play non blue decks?

Actually a thread about this would be more to the point imo. I don't ever play non-blue decks even though I get the itch from time to time, I just can't bring myself to take one for a couple of months as my primary deck. The first casual deck I brewed in Tempest block was blue (with 4 Brainstorms) because I figured that color was obviously the best color and it had the best spells. Since then every deck I played with was (or contained) blue, contained counterspells and card filter and I just don't have the incentinve to give up all that luxury.

[damionblackgear]

I think the main problem with Junk based decks is that they have to risk losing to the strategies that RUG doesn't risk losing to, which are bacially the Storm, Dredge and Reanimator match ups where you get rolled too quickly without Force of Will.

I can agree that the Storm match is bad. The other two are no where near as bad as they look on paper. Some of us HAVE NOT lost to Reanimator in the real world and Dredge players are typically more terrified to see us, than we are of them. The deck is more than capable to fight in 3 zones, Board (I mean battlefield), Hand, and Graveyard.

[Arianrhod]

This looks interesting, so I'll hop in and provide the Nic Fit perspective.

First off: if you Rock guys think you have it rough with multiple card choices, take a look at the Nic Fit thread sometime :P . We can't even agree on colors. We've had to put our specific versions in our signatures and refer to each other in bold to get each others' attention due to the rapid, protean discourse in our thread. Not saying it's a bad thing, but if you want to try to reduce confusion in your thread, there are ways of doing it.

Now, as per the topic....

What Hanni is advocating here is nothing more or less than a meta deck. I hesitate to call Rock a meta deck in the same way, because the very concept behind Rock is that it's solid vs basically everything, with few good or bad matchups across the board. Rock is -always- around, and whether it's actually good or not, people will play it. I do think that over time, Rock has evolved to be too aggro (too Junk), and Nic Fit is now the "heir" to the Rock throne with the concept of a non-blue control deck in mind. However, that's irrelevant.

The problem that I have with a deck like the OP's over a traditional Rock or Junk style deck is that its disruption never works out. Discard is fine, but it has the age-old problem wherein you lose to a topdeck. Additionally, once you declare a discard spell, such as a Thoughtseize, you have no choice but to take something. This seems blatantly obvious, but think about it. A counterspell can be held for something you actually care about. A discard spell can't. The best you can do is hold your discard spell until they've drawn a few cards that you don't have information on (from your first discard spell), and hope that they've drawn something relevant.

Also, you have 10 wincons, none of which are 1-drops that become flying wild nacatls on t2, or 3/3s with shroud. It's no secret that Goyf dies to literally everything anymore. KotR and Tombstalker are a bit better in the threat department, but it's not like the format doesn't have commonly played answers to them (Perish, Submerge, Terminus, etc).

Obviously there are games where all the nuts and bolts come together and it works fine. You get just the right amount of discard, LD, and threat to close the game out quickly and efficiently in true tempo style. But for every game where that happens, there'll likely be at least two more where you don't draw a threat before they dig out, or you draw all dudes and no disruption, or whatever. The strength of these kinds of Eva Green-esque decks is that they slaughter certain decks, which is why I call it a meta-deck. In the right meta, I have nothing but respect for them. I'm not convinced, however, that we are in the right meta for them.

Now that the OP has been address, let's go a little further afield.

I think that what Hanni wants to get at, as others have noted before me, is that it's possible for a non-blue control/tempo deck to be a serious contender in the meta. And I think that, same as it's ever been, the way to go about this is split between Control (Nic Fit) and Aggro (Junk). Nic Fit plays better (bigger/stronger) creatures than any other fair deck in the entire format. It can be built to have a positive matchup vs damn near anything, even Belcher, although each version has its own problems. Unlike most legacy decks, which function on 2 fields at a time (in play, on stack, in hand, in graveyard, in deck), Nic Fit functions on 4, with blue versions capable of functioning on all five. By contrast, Junk is much more effective at actually closing games, and it's a hell of a lot easier to play (although not "easy"). Junk strikes quick and hard with disruption into efficient dudes.

Nic Fit is power, Junk is efficiency.

I believe that this dichotomy is what Hanni is looking for. Either option is an effective way to attack the meta, but both are also solid decks that are good beyond this specific meta. Both have intrinsically favorable matchups against RUG -- Junk mirrors its efficiency, but can attack their manabase and has a slightly bigger threat (KotR vs Goyf); while Nic Fit ignores their tempo, sweeps the board, and drops huge bombs (Baneslayer/Grave Titan vs Goyf).

There's no denying the power of the blue decks, but I think that if you dismiss the nonblue decks just because they don't play Brainstorm, you're missing out. Honestly, I tend to view Brainstorm as a crutch anymore. Yeah, it's a really strong card, but mostly all it does is it allows less skilled players to try to keep up with their betters. Obviously when you get a truly skilled player + Brainstorm, that's a bit harder; but my experience is that a lot of mediocre players tend to gravitate towards blue decks because it covers their weaknesses as a player. Unfortunately, for as much as blue decks tend to attract mediocre players, Rock and Nic Fit tend to attract worse =(

In my opinion, a -good- Rock or Nic Fit player can easily keep up with blue decks. It all comes down to skill and deck design. Unfortunately, -good- Rock and Nic Fit players are rare. It takes time, determination, and a certain desire to achieve things the hard way, rather than copping out and playing Brainstorm. I think it's a lot more rewarding once you get there, though. I used to play blue decks almost exclusively a few years back (hell, I played Dreadstill. You're not going to find a much bluer deck than that). The feeling I get when I'm battling with Nic Fit is so far above and beyond anything I got playing with blue, that I only play blue decks locally for a change of pace anymore.

I'm going to stop rambling. Anyone in the Nic Fit thread is used to me doing this, lol. I'll shut up for now and try to refocus on the subject at hand and whatever comments people make.

[Zirath]

I don't have much to add to this discussion since most of the relevant information about Junk has been said. Maverick was so successful at beating RUG because of the high threat density. Goblins has the same advantage. Moving into a 10 threat Junk list does not solve the problem inherent with RUG, especially with 0 acceleration. In general, Black is currently sitting as the weakest color with it's strongest card as Cabal Therapy. The successful black decks abuse Therapy. As far as Price of Progress decks not being present, that's only partially true. They will show up as soon as the format gets too fair.

Also, I have this to share:

http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=9075&iddeck=66308

I understand it's not really the tempo deck that is in mind, but as far as pushing the envelope with Junk, this might be a direction to take.

[sdematt]

I can also field questions, I'll be on here forever :P

Maybe the 10 threat Junk list isn't where it's at, maybe it's other lists, but let's consider the archetype as a whole.

I'll pick on LordofthePit since we've met in person:


Why do you consider Junk good against Miracles?

It's fine, but I wouldn't say it's out best matchup. However, definitely not the worst.


Sensei's Divining Top is one of the best cards you can have against discard. To add insult to injury, whatever discard you have left goes from bad to dead when Counterbalance eventually hits.

True, Top is great, that's why I'm running it as well. Plus, I'm running uncounterable cards to blow up your counterbalance. Hooray for me! I'm also running 8 slots of card draw and manipulation, just like you are.



Junk will try to trade 1-for-1, perhaps getting ahead with a Hymn or Confidant, but that seems terrible against a deck that can out-attrition you with Snapcaster and Terminus, eventually pulling ahead with Jace.

That is the inherent weakness of the deck, unfortunately. You are just 1-for-1'ing them, but, what is Miracles doing? Counterbalance is good for sure, but I'm making sure not to play out all my creatures to have you Terminus them away. That's just not happening. Miracles is one of the best late game decks in the format at the moment, aside from Stax/Lands/Enchantress/Loam, so that's why we have to try to pound you in the early game.


Certainly, any deck can be tuned to improve a particular matchup, but what is the strategic advantage Junk has against Miracles? Discard for your removal + early Confidant is a start, but is there anything else?

Like I said in my long post on the first page, you can build a Junk list that fuck Miracle's shit up, but you're probs going to lose to everything else. The trick is making something that has a shot against everything.

Play disruption backed with card draw and threats, and play answers to your things. Sure I can't counter Jace, but I can sure as hell attack him/blow him up/etc.

For everyone's interest or whatever, here's what I'm playing right now:

4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Marsh Flats
1 Windswept Heath
1 Forest
1 Swamp
1 Plains
3 Wasteland
1 karakas
1 Maze of Ith
3 Bayou
2 Scrubland
1 Savannah

4 Knight of the Reliquary
4 Dark Confidant
3 Tarmogoyf
1 Qasali Pridemage
2 Scavenging Ooze
1 Ulvenwald Tracker

3 Thoughtseize
3 Inquisition of Kozilek

4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Abrupt Decay
2 Maelstrom Pulse

2 Sylvan Library
2 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Garruk Relentless
3 Green Sun's Zenith

--BOARD--

3 Hymn to Tourach
2 Timely Reinforcements
2 Pernicious Deed
1 Virtue's Ruin
3 Surgical Extraction
1 Gaddock Teeg
2 Choke
1 Life from the Loam


-Matt

[Aggro_zombies]

Topdecks beat discard, but we have superior board control, so it should be good.

It's much easier to just counter something good than to pinpoint something for discard and understand the fundamentals of the deck you're playing against, and what answers you have or don't have and when you will have those answers. That takes a ton more skill in some ways that just Force of Willing a card that's good against you. This isn't to say choosing what to counter is a mindless job on assembly line, they're just different intricacies that I think more people are comfortable with in one way (blue) than the other (discard).

-Matt
Part of the attraction of counterspells over discard is that one random counter does more than one random discard spell. For starters, you force the opponent to commit resources with counters, usually more than you have to commit to counter the spell. Counters are also better against topdecks, as has been stated, but I want to add that this means counters are also better topdecks late in the game than discard spells are since your opponent will be more likely to have the resources to immediately play or protect his best draws. Finally, counters are good with and against the best card advantage spells in the format - Brainstorm and Ponder - while discard is neatly trumped by decks that can work off the top of their libraries.

So yeah, that's part of the reason why RUG's counterspell suite is more attractive than Junk's discard. Junk also has the problem of being one of those decks that seems really good on paper yet never quite lives up to that in tournaments.

[Koby]

Aggro_Zombies hit the nail on the head. Even when counters cost :u::u: (but in reality :0: for Fow and Daze), you are trading 2 mana and 1 (2) cards to nullify your opponents card + mana + time. In every situation, counterspell will be superior to every reactive answer possible due to their flexibility. Swords to Plowshares might be a close runner up due to the efficiency it can answer creature threats, but that's limited to a sub-set of cards.

@Hanni - of course I'm being sarcastic. You made a similar call in the Aggro Loam thread some moons ago. There, it made little sense because Aggro Loam isn't limited by it's threat density, rather by it's mana ramping.

A deck like Rock/Junk, the choke point is the options to maintain control of the game. Discard is efficient for short-term tempo, but loses it quickly to a topdeck. The deck runs perpetual card advantage engines (Bob, Library) and card selection (Library, Top).

The point remains, Why not run Brainstorm? The deck does not lack shuffle effects. The deck runs sometimes situational cards that could be cycled away. The worst case is that the mana base is skewed, but the deck already runs numerous fetchlands. If mana consistency is a big factor, there are ways to adapt the deck to reduce or minimize that impact. Noble Hierarch and BoP can help to ramp/fix much like Maverick. You would lose the sweepers, however.

Does Junk/Rock want to be playing a Trump, Board-control, or Tempo strategy? Each will dictate how the deck will be built.

[Richard Cheese]

A lot of Junk builds are still heavy on disruption and light on threats, which I just don't think is a feasible Aggro strategy anymore. RUG gets away with it because they combine shroud and free counters to keep their threats around. Maverick has mom and GSZ to keep the threatmobile rolling, and plays almost nothing but creatures.

Then you have junk trying to shoehorn every strategy into one "pile of good cards" with 3 Diamonds, 2 SFM + 1 Batterskull, 2 GSZ, Deed, Hymn, Pulse/Vindicate, Liliana, Loam, SDT. It's just all over the place.

Personally I think Junk (and probably all green-based aggro decks) need to take inspiration from Maverick if they want to succeed in a meta with StP, Snapcaster, Jace, and Terminus. Run 4x GSZ, protect your dudes, interact with combo via hatebears. Off the top of my head, maybe something like this:


4 Thoughtseize
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Abrupt Decay

1 Swamp
1 Forest
1 Plains
4 Marsh Flats
4 Verdant Catacombs
2 Bayou
2 Scrubland
1 Savannah
1 Karakas
1 Maze of Ith
4 Wasteland

4 Mother of Runes
4 Green Sun's Zenith
1 Gaddock Teeg
3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
4 Dark Confidant
1 Dryad Arbor
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Deathrite Shaman
1 Tarmogoyf
4 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Scavenging Ooze


Is it objectively better than Maverick? No idea, but I think emulating a deck that is currently successful is probably better than just hoping the planets will align and make an old list magically viable again.

[HammerAndSickled]

I think the reason Blue is dominant is for security purposes. It's very safe to play a blue deck with Brainstorm and FoW, knowing that if some douchebag comes to the table with Belcher you have a shot. There are unfair combo decks out there and Brainstorm/FoW are really the only way to fight it. Sure, if you're on the play you can Thoughtseize them and take their combo piece, but some decks are capable of going off with flexibility in combo pieces, others can hide their most important cards with a Brainstorm, and still others can just topdeck the card you just Seized.

[Zirath]

A deck like Rock/Junk, the choke point is the options to maintain control of the game. Discard is efficient for short-term tempo, but loses it quickly to a topdeck. The deck runs perpetual card advantage engines (Bob, Library) and card selection (Library, Top).

The point remains, Why not run Brainstorm? The deck does not lack shuffle effects. The deck runs sometimes situational cards that could be cycled away. The worst case is that the mana base is skewed, but the deck already runs numerous fetchlands. If mana consistency is a big factor, there are ways to adapt the deck to reduce or minimize that impact. Noble Hierarch and BoP can help to ramp/fix much like Maverick. You would lose the sweepers, however.

I guess I should state here that Dark Confidant, Library and Top are all inherently slow cards. By playing them, you commit card advantage to the board but you are not necessarily gaining board advantage, which delays you a turn, causing a tempo loss. Brainstorm does not have that limitation. It can be cast in a way to gain advantage immediately, allowing you to minimize the tempo lost from spending your mana on a cantrip. I think this is a big factor of the cards in question which allows for Brainstorm's strong position.

[ahg113]

I think the reason Blue is dominant is for security purposes. It's very safe to play a blue deck with Brainstorm and FoW, knowing that if some douchebag comes to the table with Belcher you have a shot. There are unfair combo decks out there and Brainstorm/FoW are really the only way to fight it. Sure, if you're on the play you can Thoughtseize them and take their combo piece, but some decks are capable of going off with flexibility in combo pieces, others can hide their most important cards with a Brainstorm, and still others can just topdeck the card you just Seized.

Now why is the guy with Belcher a douchebag, but the guy sitting across the table saying- "Nope, you can't play magic cause this free card says so," not a twat? Or was your lack of saying U player (or possibly W with Mana Tithe) wasn't a twat not an omission that U player could be a twat?

[damionblackgear]

Why not run Brainstorm?

There isn't much room in the lists as you start incorporating and manipulating. Adding 1-4 Brainstorms as your only blue card in a deck seems to be more of a strain on the deck's already exhausted manabase. It's the Fear was the 4-color (no red) deck and it was down out by the decks of old. those decks were less efficient than they are now.


Does Junk/Rock want to be playing a Trump, Board-control, or Tempo strategy? Each will dictate how the deck will be built.

The best way (I've found) for the deck to be built is as all of them. Getting it closer and closer to a fluid consistency (basically able to consistently change between the rolls). There is no way to do this 100%. So, we're stuck getting as close to each and preforming as we're allowed. That's also where the pilot's own skill comes into play. If you can't run as a certain aspect, you're stuck working in a sub-optimal version.


A lot of Junk builds are still heavy on disruption and light on threats, which I just don't think is a feasible Aggro strategy anymore.

I agree with you entirely. It's a poor aggro strategy. Good thing it's not an aggro deck.


Then you have junk trying to shoehorn every strategy into one "pile of good cards" with 3 Diamonds, 2 SFM + 1 Batterskull, 2 GSZ, Deed, Hymn, Pulse/Vindicate, Liliana, Loam, SDT. It's just all over the place.

I'm seeing a start but you're still missing key components. The deck isn't just jamming things in and saying, "Look at me, I've got cool weapons. You should play me." The deck, and the different packages available to it, are chosen by the pilot and manipulate match-up percentages. example: A pure GSZ package has a worse game vs Elves as it lacks access to 4 virtual copies of Jitte (stoneforge).

Jamming in cards just because they're strong in other decks is poor deck design regardless of colors. By that right, every green deck should be jamming 4 Natural Order with Progenitus, Empyrial Archangel, and Thrun because they've worked well in other decks at some point.


Personally I think Junk (and probably all green-based aggro decks) need to take inspiration from Maverick if they want to succeed in a meta with StP, Snapcaster, Jace, and Terminus. Run 4x GSZ, protect your dudes, interact with combo via hatebears.

I think that's most definitely a mistake. You're asking the Junk players to change to a different deck all together. More to the point, it's a deck that has a negative win overall percentage against similar Junk builds. I've got nothing against Maverick. I just say it's in a similar situation with less of an ability to maintain against the same things (Library and Zenith does not equal Library, Zenith, Bob, and Top).

I understand Mom is annoying but most decks have adapted at this point and new players are learning how to adapt to her or have adapted decks that don't care about her.



...I think emulating a deck that is currently successful is probably better than just hoping the planets will align and make an old list magically viable again.

There must not be too many planets in that system you're checking against. The Junk decks have 2 on camera wins (that I know of within the last 6 months) with top 16 placements across multiple not so heavily covered events. By no means are we not doing it correctly.

Arianrhod gave another example earlier.
Unfortunately, for as much as blue decks tend to attract mediocre players, Rock and Nic Fit tend to attract worse =(It's not exactly that people are worse. They have to re-train their thought process to not rely on being reactive. Preemptive is traditionally easier than reactive (easier to stop buildings from burning if you stop the first from every starting) but that's very rarely the case in Magic.

Because of that, we're stuck having to re-teach people to adapt to things that are happening and respond to possibilities before they exist. Most skilled Junk/Nic Fit players can tell you their opponents hand based on their plays on speculative information that's surprisingly accurate.

Another issue is the "I've gotta keep my Forces no matter what" crowd. It's hard to get people who are familiar with the different archetypes when no one is willing to let go and take a step forward. It's very rare that you find a "Blue Mage" who's willing to let go of the Forces and try something else. So, we're also stuck dealing with newer players who are then punished for being "new" to the format.

Even after all of that, Junk isn't getting 10+ people representing the archetype at any particular tournament and at most, it's probably getting <5 at most. So, for it to have a win at all should be saying something. Let alone 2.

-----

On Belcher - It's a bad matchup. Everyone's got at least a couple. No, the Belching player's not a douche unless they're not willing to have fun with (not at their expense) their opponent while doing it. At least have the decency to treat them as a person because, by playing Belcher, you're implying that you just want to get away from them asap.

[Claymore]

It's important to note that the discard is not only early disruption, but can also be means of clearing the path for late game finishers...something that Junk doesn't quite do as far as I can tell, where Scape Fit for example can at least clear out counters to kill with Scapeshift. Trying to use a proactive class of cards in a reactive style all game won't quite get the job done until they print a playable, instant-speed Duress.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Aggro_Zombies hit the nail on the head. Even when counters cost :u::u: (but in reality :0: for Fow and Daze), you are trading 2 mana and 1 (2) cards to nullify your opponents card + mana + time. In every situation, counterspell will be superior to every reactive answer possible due to their flexibility. Swords to Plowshares might be a close runner up due to the efficiency it can answer creature threats, but that's limited to a sub-set of cards.

That's an oversimplification. Temporally, counters have less flexibility since they can't answer what's already resolved. The StP on top of your deck is a lifesaver, the Force often mocking.

The greatest advantage that counters have is that a range of them are free. If there were a pitch-Vindicate it'd see play.

[Richard Cheese]

I'm seeing a start but you're still missing key components. The deck isn't just jamming things in and saying, "Look at me, I've got cool weapons. You should play me." The deck, and the different packages available to it, are chosen by the pilot and manipulate match-up percentages. example: A pure GSZ package has a worse game vs Elves as it lacks access to 4 virtual copies of Jitte (stoneforge).

Jamming in cards just because they're strong in other decks is poor deck design regardless of colors. By that right, every green deck should be jamming 4 Natural Order with Progenitus, Empyrial Archangel, and Thrun because they've worked well in other decks at some point.


You misread. Good in other decks != "good cards". My point is that Junk/Rock decks are not going for the type of synergy you find in Dredge or Goblins. Bob has nothing to do with Goyf or Knight or Vindicate, they're all just objectively good cards. Maverick is really in the same vein, it's just a lot more focused on a strategy of playing threats and protecting them.



I think that's most definitely a mistake. You're asking the Junk players to change to a different deck all together. More to the point, it's a deck that has a negative win overall percentage against similar Junk builds. I've got nothing against Maverick. I just say it's in a similar situation with less of an ability to maintain against the same things (Library and Zenith does not equal Library, Zenith, Bob, and Top).

I understand Mom is annoying but most decks have adapted at this point and new players are learning how to adapt to her or have adapted decks that don't care about her.

There must not be too many planets in that system you're checking against. The Junk decks have 2 on camera wins (that I know of within the last 6 months) with top 16 placements across multiple not so heavily covered events. By no means are we not doing it correctly.


The numbers speak pretty clearly here.

http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?5460-DTBF-Philosophy-amp-Deck-Selection&p=673531#post673531

I'm sure there are the usual excuses of "underplayed", "not reported", "european meta", and so on, but I'm of the opinion that change is good and necessary. Sometimes you get a couple gifts from a new set, sometimes you need to go in another direction entirely. If the deck is working great for you, stay the course. That just doesn't look to be the case for most people, based on tournament results.

[damionblackgear]

Statistics are an interesting thing. While they may say one thing, they omit more. I'll leave it alone for now and take the chart with a grain of salt because that's another thread.

I will say however that the design philosophy behind Junk/Rock is pretty far. There's more underlying themes than just smashy with "good cards" but, I said I'd leave it alone.

I need to apologize to Hanni as I may gone astray with your thread original intentions. Junk vs Canadian Thresh and why they're not sharing more of a percentage. While I feel my original statements were in deed correct (basically, because we're not blue).

I think the purpose of this thread would be better served by analyzing match-ups of the two (Rock and Canadian Thresh) vs the format. than comparing discard to counterspells (that's like arguing faith). Objections?

[Hanni]

Wow, so much to address. Since I'll probably be at this all night anyway, I'm going to try and address everything 1 by 1.


The only problem I have with Rock is the problem I have with a lot of the non-blue decks: Once your opponent deals with your opening hand plus the 2-3 relevant impactful cards you drew over the first handful of turns, how can you find threats faster than the blue deck can find answers with all its filtering effects?

This is why I feel we haven't consistently seen Junk/Rock/Eva green at the tables beyond the lack of people playing the deck. In order to go the disruptive 'tempo' strategy, you potentially make your topdecks terrible. RUG at least can brainstorm them away or pitch them to Force. Or hell, maybe that turn 6 daze will be useful anyway, much more so than similarly late thoughtseize.

So how to make it work? Instead of running spells that have these effects, try what maverick has done and run creatures that have utility and you are rarely disappointed to have drawn later on in the game. Punish them for their filtering with your consistency, as maverick does now and Zoo/merfolk did before it.

The point is that your opponent doesn't deal with your opening hand, you deal with theirs. You discard several spells, and then blow up what resolved. You land a threat, and both decks go into topdeck mode. They need to find an answer within a limited timeframe or they die. Even if they find an answer, you have more threats, and the permanent removal can deal with stuff off the topdeck.

Blue may have better card quality to recover while in topdeck mode better, but blue decks aren't usually comfortable with an empty hand. This still doesn't change the fact that they are on a quick clock and do not have unlimited amounts of time to find an answer.

A few cantrips in RUG can help aleviate dead spells, but it doesn't change the fact that alot of their spells are not really any better than discard later on in the game. Discard is also alot better in the mid or even late game against some decks, where everyone seems to automatically assume that discard is always a dead card at that point.

Mavericks hatebear disruption is an interesting approach, but it doesn't impact the gamestate as fast as efficient discard spells. 2/2's and 2/1's are fairly bad clocks unless you equip them or get multiples down, which is a fairly mana consuming process either way.

The fact that mass removal is a major factor in the format right now also makes dropping 1 big cost effecient beater a better strategy than a bunch of small inefficient beaters (in regards to cost for p/t).


feel that this argument is flawed from the very beginning. The "suicide/dead guy/eva" lists have been tier three for a while now. The mana curve of the average legacy deck is just too low. maverick has noble, rug has ways to protect the one land it needs and miracles runs basics and counters. Going after someones lands all out is a good way to just lose games when you are just drawing the wrong cards in the wrong situations.

In a format where the early game is turn zero-1, the mid game is turns 2-4 and the late game is anything after that keeping someone off of 1-2 mana is extremely difficult. All most players have to do is untap, play a land and play a scavenging ooze/SFM/goyf/delver that you can not answer because your hand is full of mana disruption and discard.

RUG is the best deck because its disruption package is relevant from turn 0 and it can get a nut draw and just win games at a fairly consistent rate. Some draws, no deck can keep up with RUG.

Without blue filtering, Rock/Junk players have been experimenting with tops, libraries, zeniths, mystics and planeswalkers to ensure we have options no matter what deck we are playing. The problem is that not enough people are willing to test a BGW deck when the decks players cannot even decide what awesome cards it should be playing.

We know we should be playing discard but can't agree on what cards to play, removal cannot be decided on after swords to plowshares(decay might fix that), mox vs no mox, zenith vs SFM, goyf vs SFM, what sweeper is the best(EE vs Deed), planeswalkers at all?, until these questions are answered we will never know what deck we should even be playing past personal preferences.

p.s. I would compare the current junk lists to Esperblade and not to RUG. RUG is a monster.

Tier 3? lol... I normally stay away from troll posts, but I'll bite.

The mana curves are too low? Have you looked at Legacy lately? The curves keep getting higher and higher.

Junk doesn't specifically go after a persons lands. Wasteland is general utility, whether its destroying manlands, utility lands, colorscrewing someone, or taking advantage if someone happens to stumble on mana. Plus, it taps for mana, so theres little downside. Vindicate hits any permanent, not just lands, so that entire point is moot. The only spell that is narrow is Sinkhole, which I've already stated can be something else. RUG also needs more than 1 land to operate if it wants to have access to all 3 colors, and it's not improbable that they keep a 1-2 land hand and don't see any more lands in a relevant timeframe, where the LD plan actually would be devastating (provided that Junk has answers to the cards that get played before the landscrew). That's still besides the point, as the mana denial attack is much worse against RUG and much better against the mana hungry decks out there.

It seems that you also failed to notice that the list I posted runs 12 permanent removal spells (only 4 being specific to creatures only).

I'm assuming you've played some Rock type decks before, but never Junk. The fundamental strategy of RUG and Junk is alot similar than you think. Esperblade is in absolutely no way a tempo deck... it's a slow grindy aggro/control deck. Comparing this deck to RUG is a good parallel... comparing this deck to Esperblade is like comparing Sligh to Big Zoo.


The list you posted Hanni is bad for several reasons and cannot be compared to RUG at all.

You have a very expensive curve and you just basically play 1 spell per turn until you might play 2 spells per turn. you have no way to gain Tempo advantage like RUG which does it by operatione on 1-2 lands while disrupting the opponents mana development and playing free counterspells. Discard has its advantages versus combo (& control without SD.top) but it is a negative tempo play (you trade and spend mana and the opponent does not), whereas free/cheap counterspells are a positive tempo play since the opponent has to usually invest more mana than you do to answer.

Also I don't see any card advantage. Except for Hymn to Tourach you trade 1:1 and you draw a bunch of very bad topdecks/situational cards like discard and sinkhole with no way to card filter. Compare that to the inherent card advantage of RUG filtering a lot to only draw gas and putting all lands/bad spells back because they can operate on 2-3 lands.

I think the reason why 11 discard spells and 4 Sinkhole are not good card choices has been pointed out.

But I don't think I read somewhere that you just so dead to UWx conrol decks. They play more removal than you threats 6-7 swords effects + 4 snapcaster mage or less of those but 4 Terminus. You can't beat SD.top and even without they just draw their spells to handle your threats.

Decks winning with creatures today have certain tools that you have not:
-RUG: shroud, tons of cheap/free counterspells, burn/vortex
-maverick: mother, teeg, tons of creatures beating
-goblins: come into play effects with card advantage, vial, cavern, tons of threats
-merfolk: islandwalk, fast goldfish, counterspells

If you want to be successful with the Junk colors I think it is basically Maverick splashing black or Nic Fit. Both are very grindy decks in nature and beat RUG.
Both of these decks have a much better RUG matchups than your list. Altough you have the right "tools" to win against RUG, your Strategy is a lot weaker to Stifle, Daze, Waste compared to Nic Fit or Maverick.

Very expensive curve, as in what, exactly? The 4 Vindicates and 4 Knights at 3cc? Looking strictly at the mana costs of the spells is wrong anyway. Emptying an opponents hand and board with resource denial, with the opponent going into topdeck mode with an empty board, can often be the same as casting Time Walk over and over. Ramping up to 3 lands is a pretty easy endeavor when the discard and resource denial slow the state of the game down drastically.

Tempo advantage... a strategy that everyone seems to know the name of, but so many people fail to understand the widespread applications of. Tempo exists in every game of Magic, even in a Control mirror. Casting spells for free is an easily identifiable form of tempo, as is casting spells for very low mana costs. Casting more spells in a turn than an opponent can cast in a turn doesn't automatically equate to a tempo advantage though.

Looking at a discard spell solely based on the fact that it costs 1 mana and 1 card to remove 1 card (i.e the discard player is down 1 mana in tempo) is not the whole story. What if you rip the opponents only turn 1 play away from them? Now your both down 1 mana. What if after a few discard spells, you gas the opponent, and they topdeck dead spells/lands a few turns in a row? Is gaining virtual card advantage not essentially gaining tempo? Simply put, Junk is a resource denial deck, and if you empty your opponent's resources and then drop a big creature, every turn they are unable to do something relevant is a big tempo gain. Sure, RUG Delver gains tempo faster (by faster, I mean sooner), but if both decks are playing against an opponent with nothing on the board, a 5/5 flier will provide more tempo per turn than a 3/2 flier.

People seem to be unfamiliar with the way Junk works. I posted a list for those unfamiliar with it, but maybe I should have posted a 10+ paragraph detailed explanation of how the deck works? Or better yet, and article of the similarities and differences of tempo between RUG and Junk? Ooo wait, better yet, a 10+ page article on tempo itself! =/

By the way, the deck doesn't need actual card advantage, because it creates enough virtual card advantage to carry it. I'm sorry, but cantrips aren't actual card advantage either. The quality of a spell in and of itself can be a means of card advantage (I'm talking about actual spells themselves, and not spells that increase card quality like cantrips)... for example, two 2/1 Jackal Pups may be two cards, but those 2 cards are worth less than a 7/7 Knight of the Reliquary in a card for card basis (obviously Sligh decks make it work by exploiting life totals, an often unconsidered resource in relation to tempo).

By the way, this deck can filter through lands by having Knight munch on excess to fetch up Wastelands (or the lone Canopy)... it doesn't need cantrips to do that.

11 discard spells and 4 Sinkholes not being good is you providing me with fluff as opposed to some actual proof as to why its bad. In some randomly grindy slow midrange Rock deck, sure. In a deck built to take advantage of the tempo gains... yea, I haven't seen anyone explain why it's bad.

Fore reference, I've played U/W CounterTop Control for years, well before Miracles was printed. I've played the deck plenty after Miracles was printed.

At this point, it's pretty obvious that you do not understand how Junk works. It doesn't matter if Miracles has as many or more removal spells than what Junk has creatures, if the Junk player is able to discard the removal out of the opponent's hand and clock them before they draw another removal (or in most cases, follow up with another guy, and so on depending on how frequently the Miracles player can topdeck removal). If Miracles stumbles on land and cannot assemble UUW at whatever point in the early to midgame, they lose the ability to use alot of their control options. Snapcaster flashing back StP costs 1UW, and if they topdeck Snapcaster a turn before they can assemble 1UW, Snapcaster is liable to be lost to discard. This isn't going to happen in every situation obviously, but your post neglects all of these small interactions that add up and make a big difference.

Top is a strong defense against discard, but it doesn't instantly pull a 180 and make discard bad vs the deck. Miracles isn't a deck that wants to have an empty hand and rely on Top the whole game, especially if it has to tap Top to draw reactive spells like Counterspell. I've played Miracles enough to know that you won't always hit a fetchland to look at a fresh 3 every turn, and sometimes the top will get clogged by dead spells... so even if you can see the top 3, you're still only seeing 1 new/fresh spell a turn till you hit a shuffle effect.

Junk doesn't need to overcommit its threats to kill a Miracles player. 1 threat at a time is more than sufficient to kill the opponent while still providing a dangerously fast clock.

In regards to your statement about other aggro decks having tools that I don't... first of all, this is an aggro/control deck not an aggro deck. Second of all, this deck has tools that those decks don't. I have no idea what you were trying to get at there, other than trying to say that Junk is bad because it doesn't have X/Y/Z.

I also don't understand where you are basing your assumptions that decks played in a BGW color combination have to play Maverick/b or Nic Fit to work, since it seems to me that based on the majority of stuff you've already said, that you don't fully understand how Junk actually works.

Anyway, I didn't intend that post to be as flamey as it is, and I'm going to apologize up front because I'm not trying to attack you personally. You started off your post with calling Junk a bad deck, and maintained that position throughout your argument, so my response is a bit aggressive, sorry.

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As an aside, I'm not even done responding to stuff on page 2 yet, and this post is already super mega long, so I'm going to respond to the other stuff in a seperate post.

[Hanni]

You could essentially call this thread: why do people not play non blue decks?

Sarcasm aside, bwg has awesome internal synergy and stupid powerful cards and is really just one to two cards out of being super competitive and in the spotlight. Black has not received its share of broken cards and is due for something overpowered.

Grisly salvage might be that card, allowing abuse of the graveyard and a way to filter through your library. Abrupt decay could also be the card that pushes junk to super competitive, I'm on the train that deathrite shaman is the card to break the deck but that is for another thread.

Once junk can do something better than another deck it will take off in popularity and placements.

No, this thread is about the difference between Junk and RUG, and which one is the better positioned "tempo aggro/control" deck for the current metagame.

Also, Junk DID just get the card it needed to be competitive and in the spotlight in Abrupt Decay. Is this card already being overlooked when it hasn't even been printed yet?

Aggro/control decks aren't about overpowered and broken cards. If you want overpowered and broken, go play Show and Tell or some other combo deck. The strength of aggro/control decks lie in their strategy and synergy; the strength lies in the ability to control the gamestate sufficiently enough to overwhelm to the opponent. Some decks do this through card advantage like Esperblade, while others do this through fast clocks like Candian Threshold, Team America, New Horizons, Junk, so on and so forth.

In regards to Grisly Salvage... a 2 mana cantrip to draw a creature (or land) and put some possibly useful stuff in the yard has the potential to be a great card in the right deck, but its place is not in Junk.

In regards to Deathrite Shaman... if it would have been a 2/1, the card would be seeing play in alot more decks. As a 1/2, the cards is pretty much limited to midrange decks. Shaman is not appropriate for Junk.

Junk already can do some stuff better than some other decks. This format is full of reactive blue spells, and wanting to have specific cards in hand for the situation (or to combo off, in the case of SNT decks). Proactive disruption (discard) trumps the reactive control (countermagic) by virtue of the way the mechanics work. Countermagic itself may be a better "answer" to stuff than discard because it is reactive, but it loses alot of value against discard itself. Junk also has access to some of the best permanent removal in the game with Vindicate, and now Abrupt Decay.

Very few decks in the format are capable of dealing with resolved permanents the way that Junk can; the versatility of Junks removal is something that way too many posters in this thread are ignoring for some reason. Free countermagic is awesome and all that, I know that, I've played my fair share of blue-based aggro/control decks in Legacy, from 2006 to now. Red removal can be very flexible, and Lightning Bolt is a fantastic spell... but the options that red has available to it are far more limiting than the removal options BGW has to it, especially for dealing with large creatures and noncreature permanents.


Why do you consider Junk good against Miracles?

Sensei's Divining Top is one of the best cards you can have against discard. To add insult to injury, whatever discard you have left goes from bad to dead when Counterbalance eventually hits.

Junk will try to trade 1-for-1, perhaps getting ahead with a Hymn or Confidant, but that seems terrible against a deck that can out-attrition you with Snapcaster and Terminus, eventually pulling ahead with Jace.

Certainly, any deck can be tuned to improve a particular matchup, but what is the strategic advantage Junk has against Miracles? Discard for your removal + early Confidant is a start, but is there anything else?

I consider Junk good against Miracles because Miracles is a deck that values the cards it has in its hand, regardless if it has a Top or not. Counterspell, Snapcaster, Spell Pierce, etc... these are cards it wants to have in hand to react to a play made on its opponents turn. Some reactive spells are also good for specific situations, and not so good in others. For example, having a Spell Pierce instead of StP when your opponent resolves a Tombstalker. I'll quote a popular... quote: There is no such thing as wrong threats, only wrong answers.

Tapping Top to draw into reactive spells works, but it's not want Miracles wants to be doing. Also, Top doesn't change what the intention of the discard is being used for in Junk anyway... which is to reduce an opponent's resources, and then land a fatty.

Miracles can only run 4 Top's (sadly), so it's not guaranteed to come down on turn 1. On the draw, it's likely that Junk will proactively discard a Top out of the Miracles players opening hand.

Outside of Top, this deck has big cost efficient fatties. It only needs to resolve 1 to put the Miracles player on a dangerous clock. Compare this to other aggro decks that need to put multiple smaller guys into play to apply the same clock (Maverick is turning more and more into a fishy G/W deck, for example). This deck is capable of mitigating the power of Terminus in this way.

The deck also has 8 maindeck answers to Counterbalance (and Detention Sphere/O Ring/EE/Shackles), 4 of which are uncounterable, and 4 of which can destroy an opponents Jace (if they are capable of resolving one in the first place).

It's not just one apsect that makes Miracles a good matchup. Running only discard, only land destruction, only whatever, isn't going to automatically make the Miracles matchup a good matchup. What makes Junk a good matchup against Miracles is that it is able to attack multiple different resources which are all essential to their gameplan, and then drop a big fat clock while they are trying to recover. Miracles wants alot of cards in hand, alot of lands in play, and it wants to have a few high value permanents in play. Miracles can't cast Jace without 4 mana, it can't cast a Jace that gets discarded, and it has to gain incrimental card advantage throughout the game to keep up with its demand for a relatively high land count. If you're atacking all of these resources, instead of them digging for the next lock piece or what have you, it's digging for another white or blue source, etc.

Also, to address the card advantage question... Junk is not about card advantage. It's no different than any of the other blue-based "tempo" aggro/control decks in the format in that regard. Threshold -> Thrash -> Canadian Threshold -> RUG Delver... the evolution of this deck has always been about 1:1 trades. Junk eschews card advantage for a faster clock. Junk doesn't want to grind the matchup out whatsoever. Junk wants to play the resource denial game, disrupting its opponent as sufficiently as possible so that it can resolve a "finisher," and kill the opponent before they are able to recover. It's the same fundamental gameplan as Threshold, it just uses different disruption elements and creatures to achieve a similar result (i.e with the opponent at 0 life before they are able to get back into the game).

I'm also not claiming that this is some crazy autowin matchup for Junk, either. Junk doesn't destroy Miracles 95/5. The only thing I'm claiming is that A) Junk is the favored matchup here, and B) it has a much better matchup against Miracles than RUG Delver does, for numerous reasons.


There's nothing inherently wrong with G/w/b mid-range aggro other than calling it a tempo deck, because it's definitely not a tempo deck, but it's a viable metagame deck regardless of whether or not people recognize it en masse or not. Eva Green or Deadguy Ale are definitely not the roads to go down tho', but there are a lot of PT Junk style decks that have game vs. most of the field and can take advantage of anti U specific SB hate like Choke etc.

I think the main problem with Junk based decks is that they have to risk losing to the strategies that RUG doesn't risk losing to, which are bacially the Storm, Dredge and Reanimator match ups where you get rolled too quickly without Force of Will.

RUG isn't that good of a deck, it's just that the archetypes that punish it aren't really popular in the metagame right now and the worst it has to deal with is Miracles and Esperblade in terms of strategies that challenge it for supremecy. I personally think playing that deck in this metagame is suicide frankly, because Miracles and Esper have the advantage and it isn't particularly good at dealing with Show&Tell, which is the last combo deck standing at the moment.

Junk is not a midrange aggro deck. For starters, it's not even an aggro deck, it's an aggro/control deck. It's creatures are midrangey in comparison to RUG Delver's creatures, sure. New Horizon's creatures are more midrangey than Canadian Thresholds creatures too. Back when Zoo was the most played deck in the format, NH saw alot of play... and people still called NH a tempo deck...?

Junk is a tempo deck. I don't understand why people assume tempo has to be blue, and has to include Daze and Stifle. Free and 1cc spells are definitely a way to generate alot of tempo. Threshold is proof of this, Sligh decks are proof of this. It's easy to classify these strategies as tempo strategies. That doesn't mean that decks without free or boatloads of 1cc spells don't utilize tempo. I classify Junk as a tempo deck because it is relying on tempo gains in order to win just as much Threshold does. It just gains tempo in a different way, and since the peak of its total accumulated tempo gains start at around turns 2-4 instead of turns 0-2, it is able to drop more expensive creatures (2cc and 3cc instead of 1cc).

Junk compensates for gaining the tempo a turn or two later by running bigger guys. The p/t effiencies in relation to the total clock are not drastically different... a 3/2 Delver is a 7 turn clock that can start swinging on turn 2, whereas a 5/5 Tombstalker is a 4 turn clock that can start swinging on turn 4, for example. I mean, if you're holding U open for Stifle, or you need to Ponder on turn 1, you're not dropping Delver until turn 2 anyway. Instead of trying to drop cheaper cc creatures into play while it disrupts on turns 1-3 like RUG does, Junk focuses on just disrupting on turns 1-3 and then drops a larger creature afterwards. Junk is definitely the slower of the two decks, without a doubt. That doesn't make it any less of a tempo deck, though.

Again, like I mentioned in another reply, using resource denial against an opponent to put them into topdeck mode & have nothing relevant in play, while you have a single creature on the board, can oftentimes have the same effect as casting a Time Walk over and over, especially if they draw nothing but lands and/or dead spells for several turns (dead spells in this situation can easily be things like Daze, Force of Will, Counterspell, Spell Pierce, etc... it's not just limited to blue spells, either. Drawing Jitte when you have no creatures on the board, Vial when you have no creatures to cheat into play... there's tons of ways to achieve this result, and it happens all the time). If that's not tempo, then I don't know what is.

I will agree with you 100% that this deck does have some pretty bad matchups, whereas RUG has game against everything... I can't think of a single deck that RUG rolls over to. This thread is not a RUG bashing thread. RUG is an amazing deck, and clearly the tournament results speak for themselves. This is a thread about the current metagame, and to discuss opinions on both sides about RUG vs Junk as the better positioned tempo deck right now. Junks bad matchups are non-existant in the current metagame, while some of its best matchups are "Tier 1, and everyone and their mothers are playing them right now."

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As an aside, I'm going to take a break again from replies. I will continue with the replies after this brief commercial break.

[Hanni]

Actually a thread about this would be more to the point imo. I don't ever play non-blue decks even though I get the itch from time to time, I just can't bring myself to take one for a couple of months as my primary deck. The first casual deck I brewed in Tempest block was blue (with 4 Brainstorms) because I figured that color was obviously the best color and it had the best spells. Since then every deck I played with was (or contained) blue, contained counterspells and card filter and I just don't have the incentinve to give up all that luxury.

Don't misunderstand the point of this thread. I'm not trying to blue bash, I'm not trying to permanently end the ban brainstorm threads (good luck with that), and I'm not trying to discuss blue vs non-blue in the format. I want to specifically discuss why so many players are running RUG Delver in the current metagame, and why few to no players are running Junk instead.

I'm a blue player at heart myself. The deck that I was first known for on these forums, was U/W/b Fish... an aggro/control deck setup similar to Threshold that dropped the green (and thus Threshold) aspect to play a more controlling shell with Confidants, Meddling Mages, etc.

One of the decks I've spent the most time working on, which happens to still be my favorite pet deck, was U/W CounterTop Planeswalkers. I spent years working on that deck despite massive criticisms from the U/W Control (i.e Landstill) community. The deck has always been a good deck, but trying to get people to play it when the format was dominated by Merfolk and when it had a much slower clock than it does now, was pointless at best. All of a sudden, Terminus gets printed to push the deck from Tier 1.5 to Tier 1 DTB top king shit, the thread gets renamed "Miracle Control," and people seem to think its some totally different deck now, when it's not.
/end rant

Anyway, my point was that I feel you on the blue. I love blue, I definitely agree that it's the best color in the format, and I also believe that Brainstorm is the best card in the format.

However, I've built, playtested, tuned, and played with alot of non-blue decks too. Just because blue is the best color in a vacuum, doesn't mean that non-blue decks cannot be metacrushers. Have we all forgotten the SCG event that put 7 Maverick players into the Top 8?


The problem that I have with a deck like the OP's over a traditional Rock or Junk style deck is that its disruption never works out. Discard is fine, but it has the age-old problem wherein you lose to a topdeck. Additionally, once you declare a discard spell, such as a Thoughtseize, you have no choice but to take something. This seems blatantly obvious, but think about it. A counterspell can be held for something you actually care about. A discard spell can't. The best you can do is hold your discard spell until they've drawn a few cards that you don't have information on (from your first discard spell), and hope that they've drawn something relevant.

People keep saying this, but never explain the context. If I'm playing some sort of midrange slow controlly aggro deck like Nic Fit, obviously too much discard is going to be bad. That deck only wants a light amount of discard to allow it to either stabilize early to get to the mid-late, to strip a bomb away, or to ensure one of its own bombs resolve. Nic Fit does not have the aggressive clock to capitalize on the sort of tempo gain that a massive amount of discard creates... i.e until the opponent hits that "topdeck" that you "lose" to.

The other dimension here that has been neglected by every single person that I have responded to so far, is what that "topdeck" that I "lose" to is. With 12 spells that nuke permanents (4 being creature only), most of those "savage" topdecks are going to eat some removal. Esperblade opponent resolves SFM and grabs a Jitte? Great, I'll go ahead and nuke the Jitte, you can keep the 1/2 Squire. Sure, they are up +1 CA, but if they are in topdeck mode and I have a 4/5 Tarmogoyf while they have a 1/2 Squire, I'm cool with that.

If you're talking about Swords to Plowshares or Terminus as "I lose" instead, the beauty of Junk is that it does not need to overcommit against sweepers, and that it only needs single creature to put on alot of pressure. Because of this, it can easily recover by dropping another (single) creature. Thanks to all of the discard, chances are pretty good that it's going resolve through all of the blue countermagic that's prevalent in the format right now.

10-12 creatures may seem light, but when you only ever need 1 in play at time (with more obviously being good against aggro strategies, of course), 10-12 is actually plenty. Against blue-based aggro/control strategies specifically, the quality of Junks threats (due to them being more midrangey than RUG's, and larger than Esperblade's), combined with the 12 removal spells, help ensure red zone dominance. With the black disruption package giving Junk yet another edge vs the blue disruption package in the blue-based aggro/control decks, these should be some of Junks better matchups.

I got off tangent, sorry. I agree that discard is a worse "answer" than countermagic against spells in general. There is a reason countermagic has always been favored over discard. I also agree that what I am advocating is a metagame deck. That's exactly what I'm doing... I assessed the metagame, and came to the conclusion that Junk is better positioned than RUG right now, and wanted to have a discussion about it...

... and in regards to the discussion of discard vs countermagic in relation to the metagame, I think discard is the better option. Discard loves it when every single deck runs a boatload of reactive blue spells. Discard eats that stuff up.


Also, you have 10 wincons, none of which are 1-drops that become flying wild nacatls on t2, or 3/3s with shroud. It's no secret that Goyf dies to literally everything anymore. KotR and Tombstalker are a bit better in the threat department, but it's not like the format doesn't have commonly played answers to them (Perish, Submerge, Terminus, etc).

I didn't present a deck with 10 creatures and a bunch of durdly things like Life from the Loam. Again, you need to look at the context. 11 discard spells clear the way of removal, and each creature is a threat on its own that is an absolute "must" deal with. Each one is a stand alone finisher on its own. A single topdecked Swords to Plowshares doesn't bend the deck over backwards with a wooden stick, as it simply drops another threat that must be dealt with. The opponent has a limited time frame to find an answer or they die.

3/2 fliers are just as vulnerable as Goyf, and RUG runs Goyf too, right? Shroud or no shroud, a 3/3 is still small and easily ignored by decks with larger creatures. It doesn't dodge Terminus any differently either.

Honestly, I'm not sure how these arguments are any different against Junk than they are against RUG. The only difference, albeit a big one, are the cantrips, which increase the chances of drawing one of its creatures.

RUG's reactive countermagic as an answer to topdecked spells have little weight when 1cc Wrath of God's and Swords to Plowshares dodge Daze (and even Spell Pierce) all day long. Junk doesn't come out of the gates swinging as fast, but each of it's threats have more value per card (more expensive but more powerful) to compensate.

Again, not sure where you were going with that exactly, but 10-12 creatures is more than enough in Junk because of its disruption to get rid of removal. Against other aggro strategies, Goyf might get chumpblocked all day while a Delver can swing in the air, but Junk doesn't run conditional removal like Lightning Bolts either. Delver is nice because it can pass by a big Knight or whatever that Lightning Bolt can't kill. Junk runs 12 removal spells that can deal with pretty much everything, which makes it alot easier to swing with a Goyf. It even has answers postboard to deal with constant chumblocking annoyances like Mother of Runes with Virtues Ruin, Deed, EE, etc... and this deck can just as easily run 4 Tombstalkers, or some sort of Tombstalker/Terravore split, if "evasion" is the issue.


Obviously there are games where all the nuts and bolts come together and it works fine. You get just the right amount of discard, LD, and threat to close the game out quickly and efficiently in true tempo style. But for every game where that happens, there'll likely be at least two more where you don't draw a threat before they dig out, or you draw all dudes and no disruption, or whatever. The strength of these kinds of Eva Green-esque decks is that they slaughter certain decks, which is why I call it a meta-deck. In the right meta, I have nothing but respect for them. I'm not convinced, however, that we are in the right meta for them.


This happens to any deck due to variance, and less so to blue decks because of cantrips, I understand that. That fact in and of itself is the biggest reason for blues constant and continued dominance in Legacy. Non-blue decks compensate for that by using redundancy. Plenty of non-blue decks have been successful over the years through redundancy. An easy to cite example is Zoo.

Redundancy is exactly why this deck is running 11 discard, 12 removal spells, and 10 creatures. The deck also has access to 12 LD spells, virtually 16 if it uses Knight to tutor up Wastelands. Besides, those numbers can be tweaked, the deck I posted was a rough list for discussion purposes. The list I posted is not some heavily fine-tuned list, it's just a general shell of what a Junk deck looks like. Sinkholes can be cut for more threats, if you feel that 10 is too few, for example.


I think that what Hanni wants to get at, as others have noted before me, is that it's possible for a non-blue control/tempo deck to be a serious contender in the meta. And I think that, same as it's ever been, the way to go about this is split between Control (Nic Fit) and Aggro (Junk). Nic Fit plays better (bigger/stronger) creatures than any other fair deck in the entire format. It can be built to have a positive matchup vs damn near anything, even Belcher, although each version has its own problems. Unlike most legacy decks, which function on 2 fields at a time (in play, on stack, in hand, in graveyard, in deck), Nic Fit functions on 4, with blue versions capable of functioning on all five. By contrast, Junk is much more effective at actually closing games, and it's a hell of a lot easier to play (although not "easy"). Junk strikes quick and hard with disruption into efficient dudes.

Nic Fit is power, Junk is efficiency.

I believe that this dichotomy is what Hanni is looking for. Either option is an effective way to attack the meta, but both are also solid decks that are good beyond this specific meta. Both have intrinsically favorable matchups against RUG -- Junk mirrors its efficiency, but can attack their manabase and has a slightly bigger threat (KotR vs Goyf); while Nic Fit ignores their tempo, sweeps the board, and drops huge bombs (Baneslayer/Grave Titan vs Goyf).

There was no dichotomy. I wasn't addressing whether Nic Fit could be a metacrusher too. I was comparing Junk (a black-based aggro/control deck utilizing tempo elements) to RUG Delver (a blue-based aggro/control deck utilizing tempo elements), and why so many players are playing RUG Delver while so few are playing Junk when Junk seems like the better aggro/control deck utilizing tempo elements, for the current metagame.

Nic Fit may or may not be an even better metacrusher than Junk, but I'm not trying to widen this discussion that far, although the discussion seems to be rediculously wide open right now to the point of many people talking about blue vs non-blue decks.
/Le sigh


I don't have much to add to this discussion since most of the relevant information about Junk has been said. Maverick was so successful at beating RUG because of the high threat density. Goblins has the same advantage. Moving into a 10 threat Junk list does not solve the problem inherent with RUG, especially with 0 acceleration. In general, Black is currently sitting as the weakest color with it's strongest card as Cabal Therapy. The successful black decks abuse Therapy. As far as Price of Progress decks not being present, that's only partially true. They will show up as soon as the format gets too fair.

I understand the statement and where you are coming from, but you didn't explain why a 10 threat Junk list doesn't solve any of RUG's problems. RUG has some pretty big problems right now. It's soft counters don't do enough to stop Show and Tell from resolving, it gets completely locked out by Counterbalance, a couple of Lightning Bolts and Stifles are not enough stop Maverick from getting enough mana and outclassing its threats, and a resolved Batterskull is a big problem.

Junk fixes alot of those problems.



-Matt
Part of the attraction of counterspells over discard is that one random counter does more than one random discard spell. For starters, you force the opponent to commit resources with counters, usually more than you have to commit to counter the spell. Counters are also better against topdecks, as has been stated, but I want to add that this means counters are also better topdecks late in the game than discard spells are since your opponent will be more likely to have the resources to immediately play or protect his best draws. Finally, counters are good with and against the best card advantage spells in the format - Brainstorm and Ponder - while discard is neatly trumped by decks that can work off the top of their libraries.

So yeah, that's part of the reason why RUG's counterspell suite is more attractive than Junk's discard. Junk also has the problem of being one of those decks that seems really good on paper yet never quite lives up to that in tournaments.

That's looking at countermagic vs discard in a vacuum. Yes, there are many benefits to countermagic that outweigh the benefits of discard. What you failed to mention is how powerful discard is against countermagic. The last time I checked, nearly every single deck in the format is running countermagic. That would make discard really good in the current metagame, no?


A lot of Junk builds are still heavy on disruption and light on threats, which I just don't think is a feasible Aggro strategy anymore. RUG gets away with it because they combine shroud and free counters to keep their threats around. Maverick has mom and GSZ to keep the threatmobile rolling, and plays almost nothing but creatures.

Then you have junk trying to shoehorn every strategy into one "pile of good cards" with 3 Diamonds, 2 SFM + 1 Batterskull, 2 GSZ, Deed, Hymn, Pulse/Vindicate, Liliana, Loam, SDT. It's just all over the place.

Personally I think Junk (and probably all green-based aggro decks) need to take inspiration from Maverick if they want to succeed in a meta with StP, Snapcaster, Jace, and Terminus. Run 4x GSZ, protect your dudes, interact with combo via hatebears. Off the top of my head, maybe something like this:

Maybe I'm calling the deck by the wrong name or something? The Junk I'm familiar with doesn't shoehorn in SFM's, GSZ's, Deeds, and durdly stuff like Loam. Junk is structured just like any other "tempo" deck, with alot of disruption and a smaller threat density composed of aggressive creatures (8-12 for blue-based ones and 10-12 for black-based ones, usually).

I can see obvious benefits towards going the Maverick route, which most of The Rock decks have been doing for quite a while now. I'm not hating on that style of deck at all. I do think Junk is better positioned for the current metagame though. The large amount of smaller creatures plan has lost alot of strength because of Terminus, and discard is alot more effective against SNT than hatebears are. I'd say the Esperblade and RUG Delver matchups are favorable for both Junk and Maverick, despite the different gameplans. I'd much rather be playing Junk than Maverick or Maverick/b right now. Junks bad matchups are currently not being played right now, and all I'm seeing are good matchups for the deck at the moment.

---

Gonna take another commercial break.

[Julian23]

Although I lack the resources to read most of your last post atm, there's a reason I consider Hanni to be one of the best strategic analysts on here. Keep going.

[Hanni]

Oops, missed this one:


The point remains, Why not run Brainstorm? The deck does not lack shuffle effects. The deck runs sometimes situational cards that could be cycled away. The worst case is that the mana base is skewed, but the deck already runs numerous fetchlands. If mana consistency is a big factor, there are ways to adapt the deck to reduce or minimize that impact. Noble Hierarch and BoP can help to ramp/fix much like Maverick. You would lose the sweepers, however.

Does Junk/Rock want to be playing a Trump, Board-control, or Tempo strategy? Each will dictate how the deck will be built.

Well, the option to go 4 colors to splash for Brainstorm is definitely a possibility, and entirely dependant on the hostility of the format in regards to non-basic hate. So many strategies right now seem to be using multi-colored manabases with more and more larger cc spells, so I think sticking to 3 colors makes the most sense at the moment. The format is usually pretty quick at adapting to nonbasic hate when manabases start getting greedy.

The second question is a very good question, but it's not the purpose of this thread. This thread is about Junk vs RUG and which one is the better positioned aggro/control "tempo" strategy right now.


It's important to note that the discard is not only early disruption, but can also be means of clearing the path for late game finishers...something that Junk doesn't quite do as far as I can tell, where Scape Fit for example can at least clear out counters to kill with Scapeshift. Trying to use a proactive class of cards in a reactive style all game won't quite get the job done until they print a playable, instant-speed Duress.

Huh? That's exactly what Junk is doing. It's using discard to clear a path for finishers. Except, in this case, late game finishers is replaced with "finishers that are big aggressive creatures with efficient p/t to cost ratio, and can actually kill the opponent before the late game." Junk's philosophy seems alot better, since discard typically gets progressively worse over time.

---

That looks to be the last thing I wanted to address. Phew, that was alot of typing.

Aside from the sidetracks about the different types of BGW decks, and the blue vs non-blue and other unrelated discussions, I see alot of good discussion going on here for both sides of the fence. At this point, I think finding someone with a similar schedule to my own and running both RUG and Junk through the same gauntlet (enough times to be relevant) would be the best course of action. Hopefully the results turn out in my favor, but it seems like a valuable endeavor either way.

I'm usually available from 6PM to 12PM Mon-Fri, with weekends open. I'm in the Eastern Time Zone EST (East Coast, United States). I think it's GMT -5:00, but I'm not 100% on that. I've never used Cockatrice, and I've only ever used MWS Workstation and Apprentice (lol), but I'm willing to use either MWS or Cockatrice (I'll have to download Cockatrice, etc).

Send me a PM if you'd like to help me playtest and record the results of this "experiment" at some point in time.

[Zirath]

I understand the statement and where you are coming from, but you didn't explain why a 10 threat Junk list doesn't solve any of RUG's problems. RUG has some pretty big problems right now. It's soft counters don't do enough to stop Show and Tell from resolving, it gets completely locked out by Counterbalance, a couple of Lightning Bolts and Stifles are not enough stop Maverick from getting enough mana and outclassing its threats, and a resolved Batterskull is a big problem.

Junk fixes alot of those problems.

Sorry I didn't address that well. The issue is that RUG's low threat density means it has to actively use its cantrips to dig for the right configuration of cards. Switching to Junk has the benefit of stronger removal but a 10 creature list that can't protect it's threats well seems like a dangerous plan. At some point, if you cannot keep a threat down, you can get overpowered. Maybe it is that your particular list is rough but one advantage of RUG is that free counter spells allow you to be the aggressor at many stages of the game, even if you tap out for a threat. You do not have that luxury in a Junk deck. If you are unable to capitalize on a disruption heavy hand with a powerful threat, you can quickly lose control. 10 threats just does not seem like enough in a deck that can only get ahead on cards (either advantage or quality) with Hymn.

Another issue to a lesser extent is your curve. For a tempo oriented deck, your game will start on turn 2 a lot, which is a pain especially without cantrips since it's hard to count StP as a 1-drop. You want a lot of lands in the early part of the game but you want to stop drawing lands past 4 or 5, which of course won't necessarily happen and is also out of your control without manipulation.

Reading again, I may have partially misunderstood your goal; however, the lack of cantrips seriously hurts the tempo plan. You have powerful spells, but you may not be able to cast them in the way RUG does to generate tempo.

A thought occurs: what prevents you from playing Nimble Mongoose?

[sdematt]

Nothing, except playing better creatures.

Also, I like what Hanni's saying, and I'm pretty sure I've written all of that on the Rock thread, but having it condensed and aggregated into several posts where people will read it is great. Thanks for doing that.

-Matt

[Hanni]

Sorry I didn't address that well. The issue is that RUG's low threat density means it has to actively use its cantrips to dig for the right configuration of cards. Switching to Junk has the benefit of stronger removal but a 10 creature list that can't protect it's threats well seems like a dangerous plan. At some point, if you cannot keep a threat down, you can get overpowered. Maybe it is that your particular list is rough but one advantage of RUG is that free counter spells allow you to be the aggressor at many stages of the game, even if you tap out for a threat. You do not have that luxury in a Junk deck. If you are unable to capitalize on a disruption heavy hand with a powerful threat, you can quickly lose control. 10 threats just does not seem like enough in a deck that can only get ahead on cards (either advantage or quality) with Hymn.

Another issue to a lesser extent is your curve. For a tempo oriented deck, your game will start on turn 2 a lot, which is a pain especially without cantrips since it's hard to count StP as a 1-drop. You want a lot of lands in the early part of the game but you want to stop drawing lands past 4 or 5, which of course won't necessarily happen and is also out of your control without manipulation.

Reading again, I may have partially misunderstood your goal; however, the lack of cantrips seriously hurts the tempo plan. You have powerful spells, but you may not be able to cast them in the way RUG does to generate tempo.

A thought occurs: what prevents you from playing Nimble Mongoose?

Those are very valid questions. That's actually one of the best responses I've seen, thanks.

I agree that the deck doesn't always get to execute its gameplan perfectly every game. Sometimes, it will only see 1 creature in the early and midgame. Other times, it might get an aggro heavy hand that is light on disruption. Variance is always a factor, even for blue decks, albeit less so.

I'm glad that you acknowledged that the list I posted is just a rough draft. The numbers are definitely up for debate, to small extents. Cutting the Sinkholes for 1 Tombstalker and 3 Terravore could be the right call, for example. I'd need to playtest the deck a bunch to really figure out the nitty gritty though.

The free counterspells do allow RUG to be more aggressive early game, I agree. At the same time though, there are different ways to define aggression. Who's the control and who's the beatdown isn't as simple as being the one who's doing damage, etc.

Junk is still aggressive early (albeit less so); it's just aggressive in a different way. Hitting the opponent with several discard spells at the beginning of the game is aggressively attacking the opponents resources. Slip a Swords to Plowshares in with a discard spell on turn 2 to deal with the Mother of Runes that resolved as additional resource denial, and you are being very aggressive, despite doing so with control. I'd still define Junks role at this point as the beatdown, where Maverick would be the control. Maverick wants to play defensively at this point, and try to stabilize against the resource denial attack. It becomes more noticeable that Junk is the beatdown once they let off the resource denial and drop a fatty and push the red zone, but the deck is still the aggressor in the early game (in this example, anyway).

I agree that Junk can lose control when it is not capable of capitalizing on the tempo gains, but I disagree that it is worse in this regard than RUG. RUG does have cantrips to help them have cards more relevant to the situation, and reactive countermagic to answer spells off the topdeck. However, their countermagic is still just as bad (or worse) than discard once the opponent can pay the extra 1 or 2 mana to play around it, and a 3/3 Shroud has less value at that point than a 5/5 flier or a 7/7 that can chain tutor Wastelands if the situation calls for it.

Junks larger, more midrangey creature base combined with its versatile removal gives it better lasting power in the midgame. RUG's burn can just go to the dome instead to close the game out, which is why it's such a great combination with the free countermagic and cheaper threats... but they can just as easily crap out in the midgame if they cannot get the opponent low enough in life early.

Basically what I'm saying is, the ability to lose the game because it could not sufficiently disrupt the opponent and then kill them during the window of opportunity, is something that affects both decks.

The lack of cantrips is not a major issue for Junk because of its redundancy. If for whatever reason it does not have enough redundancy to be consistent, the numbers can be tweaked to fix that problem. Most Zoo decks (back in its heyday) ran 10-12 1cc removal spells, which was more than enough for Zoo to consistently get rid of the opponent's creatures. That deck ran no cantrips, but was highly successful for a long time.

Also, after this deck passes a certain amount of lands drops, it does have the option to convert those excess lands into Wastelands or the lone Canopy with Knight of the Reliquary, if need be. Not as universally effective as Brainstorm obviously, but it does have that option. The deck could include a Maze of Ith to get more mileage out of Knights ability; whether that is necessary or not, I'm not sure yet.

The curve is a bit higher, but not enough so to make the strategy ineffective. Like I said in a different response, Junk doesn't start amassing tempo gains as soon as turn 0, but it has the ability to gain a ton of tempo by turn 4 through resource denial. The resource denial isn't free, and some of it is expensive, but emptying the opponents hand and then destroying the permanents that they resolve is still effective at slowing down the gamestate drastically. Destroying lands against mana hungry decks also has the same effect. If you drop a 7/7 Knight during this downtime, the opponent has 3 turns to topdeck an answer or its game over. Tempo generated, tempo capitalized on. If the opponent topdecks an answer, Junk needs to either have a replacement, or it has a limited amount of time to find a replacement. If Junk has a replacement, there's a good chance that Junk wins. If not, or if the opponent finds another answer, it goes back to back and forth power struggle. Junk loses when its opponent is able to recover sufficiently enough, and Junk wins whey they cannot find an answer in time. (Answers do not necessarily have to be creature removal).

The back and forth power struggle is constantly ongoing... and it's a similar sort of back and forth struggle that RUG Delver has. That's the nature of these sorts of tempo stratgies; that's how they work.

[HammerAndSickled]

It seems you overlooked my post, so I'll re-summarize: the point being that the advantage of Blue is that a) cantrips minimize variance and allow you to "play out of" some bad situations, and b) playing Blue acts as a safety net, with FoW giving you an out to degenerate combo that non-blue doesn't have.

Yes, if the metagame you posted in your OP was the list of all decks you could see at a tournament, Junk-type rock decks would see more play. But that isn't the ENTIRE metagame, that's just the top decks at the moment. And the fact that THOSE decks are even there is partly influenced by the tier-2 decks you DON'T see, because those decks battle the lower tier decks well while also having game against other top-tier decks. Junk seems to have the edge vs. the "fair" decks listed in the OP, but that's not the whole picture.

[Hanni]

It seems you overlooked my post, so I'll re-summarize: the point being that the advantage of Blue is that a) cantrips minimize variance and allow you to "play out of" some bad situations, and b) playing Blue acts as a safety net, with FoW giving you an out to degenerate combo that non-blue doesn't have.

Yes, if the metagame you posted in your OP was the list of all decks you could see at a tournament, Junk-type rock decks would see more play. But that isn't the ENTIRE metagame, that's just the top decks at the moment. And the fact that THOSE decks are even there is partly influenced by the tier-2 decks you DON'T see, because those decks battle the lower tier decks well while also having game against other top-tier decks. Junk seems to have the edge vs. the "fair" decks listed in the OP, but that's not the whole picture.

Sorry about that. There was alot of content to reply to, so I'm sure I missed some stuff.

I probably skipped past it because I was trying to avoid responding to stuff unrelated to the topic. In your case, you were discussing blue vs non blue.

I've already listed most of the bad matchups Junk has, and why they have little to no presence in the current metagame. What other Tier 2 strategies does Junk have horrible matchups against that the Tier 1 decks have great matchups against? It's alot easier for me to evaluate those sorts of questions when there are more specific examples as opposed to general/vague statements.

I'm also not sure that I would call the Tier 1 decks "fair" right now. Nearly all of them seem to be doing some pretty busted shit, minus a few.

[Richard Cheese]

When exactly did Junk and The Rock become different decks? Maybe that's the source of a lot of confusion here.

Also, just to be devil's advocate, here are some "you lose" topdecks:

Entreat the Angels
Infernal Tutor
Burning Wish
Price of Progress
Time Spiral
Emrakul (Sneak Attack in play)
Reanimate/Exhume/etc.

[Hanni]

Entreat the Angels - Requires alot of mana to actually be "I-lose"
Infernal Tutor - Depends on what else is going on, but I already said Storm is a bad MU
Burning Wish - See Infernal Tutor
Price of Progress - Dependant on the gamestate, not always going to be "I-lose"
Time Spiral - See Infernal Tutor, except discard and LD are savage against Tide
Emrakul (Sneak Attack in play) - Costs 4 mana, can be destroyed, Karakas...
Reanimate/Exhume/etc. - Could go either way after 3 games with sideboard hate

Added my comments in the quote.


When exactly did Junk and The Rock become different decks? Maybe that's the source of a lot of confusion here.

In all fairness, I did post a decklist in the OP for reference on what I meant. There's also more than enough description of what I meant in my various posts.

[Phoenix Ignition]

Also, just to be devil's advocate, here are some "you lose" topdecks:


But there are plenty of "you lose if you kept this hand and get 1 card removed from it" situations as well. Hand hate can flat out win the game on turn 1 if someone kept a fragile hand and you take the one thing that fixes it (Noble Hierarch, brainstorm, ponder, their 1 threat, their 1 removal, etc.)

And it isn't purely from people keeping hands they shouldn't (although that ratio is also pretty high), mulligans can affect this as well.

EDIT: I should say this before people make the argument. Yes, you could counter the spell that you just discarded, screwing them over by the same amount, but without the perfect information that you get from seeing their hand, you wouldn't know to Daze their 1st turn Ponder.

[HammerAndSickled]

"Fair" decks refer to decks that interact on a known axis of tempo-cards-"philosophy of fire"/whatever you want to call it that progresses the game towards a win. They're the decks that you can beat through attrition, the ones where card and board advantage matter, etc. Decks in this category are Junk, Maverick, RUG Delver, Miracles, Stoneblade, Tribal aggro, Team America, etc. "Unfair" decks are those that operate on a different axis and are hard or impossible to meaningfully interact with without specific hate. Storm, High Tide, Dredge, Belcher, etc. What I meant was that those decks DO show up, even if infrequently, and by playing this Rock-styled list you're giving away huge percentage in those matchups. Storm is not a good matchup for RUG by any means, but at least RUG can possibly have enough counters and a quick threat to win. Your gameplan pretty much revolves around discard, which is worse than counters right now for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the topdeck variance.

[catmint]

The point is that your opponent doesn't deal with your opening hand, you deal with theirs. You discard several spells, and then blow up what resolved. You land a threat, and both decks go into topdeck mode. They need to find an answer within a limited timeframe or they die. Even if they find an answer, you have more threats, and the permanent removal can deal with stuff off the topdeck.

Blue may have better card quality to recover while in topdeck mode better, but blue decks aren't usually comfortable with an empty hand. This still doesn't change the fact that they are on a quick clock and do not have unlimited amounts of time to find an answer.


I understand the gameplan that you want to discard their hand and then ride 1-2 threats to vitory. I have an unhealthy love for dicard (and this gameplan) and can safely say that now more than ever this plan won't work out against todays UWx control. Discard hurts them but brainstorm, sd.top, pierce & snapcaster mage (for plow) just makes your plan fail more often than not.




Very expensive curve, as in what, exactly? The 4 Vindicates and 4 Knights at 3cc? Looking strictly at the mana costs of the spells is wrong anyway. Emptying an opponents hand and board with resource denial, with the opponent going into topdeck mode with an empty board, can often be the same as casting Time Walk over and over. Ramping up to 3 lands is a pretty easy endeavor when the discard and resource denial slow the state of the game down drastically.

Tempo advantage... a strategy that everyone seems to know the name of, but so many people fail to understand the widespread applications of. Tempo exists in every game of Magic, even in a Control mirror. Casting spells for free is an easily identifiable form of tempo, as is casting spells for very low mana costs. Casting more spells in a turn than an opponent can cast in a turn doesn't automatically equate to a tempo advantage though.

Looking at a discard spell solely based on the fact that it costs 1 mana and 1 card to remove 1 card (i.e the discard player is down 1 mana in tempo) is not the whole story. What if you rip the opponents only turn 1 play away from them?...


So let's talk about tempo, since the understanding if Junk can be a tempo deck and therefore be compared to RUG is what we disagree on.

I think the term comes from chess. According to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo_(chess)#Gaining_a_tempo
When a player achieves a desired result in one fewer move, one "gains a tempo" and conversely when one takes one more move than necessary one "loses a tempo".

Converted to magic I would say: When a player achieves a desired result with fewer resources (cards, mana, turns,...) one gains tempo.

As I said in my last post. RUG can play multiple spells per turn: Play a threat and protect it with pierce. "Card select and counter". "Kill a creature and play a threat". This is gaining tempo advantage - Doing multiple things in one turn. Just imagine RUG would play Serendib Efreet & counterspell instead of Delver & Spell Pierce. The effect of the spells are more powerful, but since they are more expensive you cannot do multiple a turn and you cant gain tempo advantage.

So when I said you have an expensive curve that does not mean you have 6cc spells like nic fit. It means you are usually limited to 1 spell a turn and it will be very hard to gain tempo advantage.

Therefore your evaluation of discard as a positive tempo play is wrong. It is a negative tempo play (you invest more resources than your opponent to trade 1 for 1) but it can be very effective in preemtively protecting your threat or stopping the opponents gameplan.





By the way, the deck doesn't need actual card advantage, because it creates enough virtual card advantage to carry it. I'm sorry, but cantrips aren't actual card advantage either. The quality of a spell in and of itself can be a means of card advantage (I'm talking about actual spells themselves, and not spells that increase card quality like cantrips)... for example, two 2/1 Jackal Pups may be two cards, but those 2 cards are worth less than a 7/7 Knight of the Reliquary in a card for card basis (obviously Sligh decks make it work by exploiting life totals, an often unconsidered resource in relation to tempo).

By the way, this deck can filter through lands by having Knight munch on excess to fetch up Wastelands (or the lone Canopy)... it doesn't need cantrips to do that.

11 discard spells and 4 Sinkholes not being good is you providing me with fluff as opposed to some actual proof as to why its bad. In some randomly grindy slow
midrange Rock deck, sure. In a deck built to take advantage of the tempo gains... yea, I haven't seen anyone explain why it's bad.


I disagree that your deck creates virtual card advantage. RUG does by playing 18 lands and card selecting with Ponder and Brainstorms. And I think it is so obvious that 11 discard and 4 sinkholes is bad that I did not want to point it out. Look at the successful discard based control decks like BUG variants & Pox... 8-9 discard is the maximum played and even these decks suffer from bad late game decks. 4 Sinkhole and 4 Vindicate surely wrecks the opponent at times, but we have again the 1 spell per turn problem. You also want to discard and play threats to kill... can't do everything at once..

So my explation why its bad is related to the fact that you cannot gain tempo advantage.



At this point, it's pretty obvious that you do not understand how Junk works. It doesn't matter if Miracles has as many or more removal spells than what Junk has creatures, if the Junk player is able to discard the removal out of the opponent's hand and clock them before they draw another removal (or in most cases, follow up with another guy, and so on depending on how frequently the Miracles player can topdeck removal). If Miracles stumbles on land and cannot assemble UUW at whatever point in the early to midgame, they lose the ability to use alot of their control options. Snapcaster flashing back StP costs 1UW, and if they topdeck Snapcaster a turn before they can assemble 1UW, Snapcaster is liable to be lost to discard. This isn't going to happen in every situation obviously, but your post neglects all of these small interactions that add up and make a big difference.

Top is a strong defense against discard, but it doesn't instantly pull a 180 and make discard bad vs the deck. Miracles isn't a deck that wants to have an empty hand and rely on Top the whole game, especially if it has to tap Top to draw reactive spells like Counterspell. I've played Miracles enough to know that you won't always hit a fetchland to look at a fresh 3 every turn, and sometimes the top will get clogged by dead spells... so even if you can see the top 3, you're still only seeing 1 new/fresh spell a turn till you hit a shuffle effect.

Junk doesn't need to overcommit its threats to kill a Miracles player. 1 threat at a time is more than sufficient to kill the opponent while still providing a dangerously fast clock.

In regards to your statement about other aggro decks having tools that I don't... first of all, this is an aggro/control deck not an aggro deck. Second of all, this deck has tools that those decks don't. I have no idea what you were trying to get at there, other than trying to say that Junk is bad because it doesn't have X/Y/Z.

I also don't understand where you are basing your assumptions that decks played in a BGW color combination have to play Maverick/b or Nic Fit to work, since it seems to me that based on the majority of stuff you've already said, that you don't fully understand how Junk actually works.

Anyway, I didn't intend that post to be as flamey as it is, and I'm going to apologize up front because I'm not trying to attack you personally. You started off your post with calling Junk a bad deck, and maintained that position throughout your argument, so my response is a bit aggressive, sorry.


I think your win% against UWx is quite low, but I don't think there is more point in speculating here. We judge the strengh of Miracles/Esper (or of the tools this decks use) differently. 1 comment to not overcommiting. I certainly think that is an important concept. It is much better though if you can stop the opponent from playing Jace with Teeg or Spell Pierce. Imagine you have 2 threats in hand and 1 out there. They remove or bounce it with jace and you'll likely won't revocer even if you play 2 threats next turn.

The other "aggro decks" I listed are also aggro/control decks, so I don't know why you are pointing out that Junk is an aggro/control deck

RUG - obv.
Maverick - control with hatebears
Goblins - used to disrupt manabase more - nowadays not control altogh adopting Thalia, but just very resilient with combo potential (lackey) and lategame stuff like ringleader, krenko, SCG - all stuff that you are missing.
Merfolk - also obvl. aggro/control

The reason I think this color combination is best off in a Maverick or Nic Fit shell is because this decks are proven tiers and solve all of the problems that your approach has.

No offense with your arguments of "junk being a tempo deck" I don't think you understand how junk works. Looking at recent successful Junk deckslist you can see that the gamplan is a lot more grindy and has the tools for the lategame and not a hopeless "dicard based all-in on some threats aggro plan"
For reference:
http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=9037&iddeck=66015
http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=9153&iddeck=66892
http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8856&iddeck=64686
http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8757&iddeck=63935

Please don't explain me now that Rock and Junk are different decks and things are labeled wrong. The point I am making it that this kind of deck is what the color combination is successful in and its surely not a tempo deck.

Btw:
Thanks for the apologiy. I also try to talk to the subject and not to sound like a douchebag, but if we so fundamentaly disagree on something it can get personal because one of us is arguing intensively and completely wrong and that can hurt so I understand emotional postings.

[lavafrogg]

Richard- Hanni refers to Eva-green/Deadguy/tarmogoyf+tombstalker aggro decks as junk. The rock is still the midrange aggro control deck you know and love.

Hanni- in your examples with RUG you mention the junk players and RUG players reaching a point where their disruption is no longer affective. At that point the RUG player can switch to the burn him out plan of attack and just start cantriping into burn instead of disruption. The BWG player then still gets to look at cards it draws off of the top of its library.

I think this is why dark confidant was played in Deadguy, Eva green and dark horizons, they couldn't be as efficient as the tempo decks so they dropped a 2cc beater that wins the game for the player. I feel that you could make a better BWG tempo deck with mongoose, confidant and goyf, while playing sinkhole-vindicate-wasteland with discard instead of counters.

You can drop a goose without fear of removal, bob wins if unanswered and the goyf brings the beats. Either goose/confidant or drop white and add red for lavamancer and lightning bolt! I still feel the goose fits in the deck along with goyf/confidant and lavamancer. Tombstalker is good but bob is a better card, by switching to goose you can drop him on turn one and disrupt the game away.

[Arianrhod]

Hanni -- my apologies. I thought you meant this to be a wider-reaching topic more based in theory than in the actual decks themselves. Judging from the number of significant non-Brainstorm-playing-players that have been posting in this thread thusfar, I'm guessing that I was not alone in that assumption.

The problem with running Mongoose in Junk is that the deck lacks the true disruption to protect him, he gets hit by gy hate (which people may bring in anyway because KotR and Goyf), and he's small. I think that one of the greatest strengths that the theoretical concept of a Junk-as-Tempo deck has, is that its threats are enormous. Goyf and KotR grow large in a Junk shell very quickly, and Junk has the removal to "win" Goyf wars so the board doesn't stall.

My question to you, Hanni, is not RUG vs Junk. My question to you is why Junk vs New Horizons? New Horizons got replaced in the meta by Maverick and RUG, to the best of my understanding, but it seems as that some sort of New Horizons + discard is what you're looking for (I hesitate to say Dark Horizons, since that was only ever SCG's horrible naming conventions...DH was just Junk in the first place).

You're overlooking something when you note that you don't lose to topdecks, by the way: you're assuming that you're topdecking as well as they are. Sure, if you opponent rips a Jace and then you rip a Vindicate, obviously you don't care. But if your opponent lands Jace and you flood out, then what? Or you draw more meaningless discard spells while Jace pushes all of your business to the bottom. This is just one example. You can't assume that you'll be sitting there with a full grip and a Cheshire grin plastered on your face while your opponents don't have anything. Your deck is based around resource denial and 1-for-1s. RUG can get away with that because their entire deck is sheer efficiency, distilled and boiled down into its truest form. They run 18 lands + 8 cantrips, which helps them make the land drops that they need, while also pushing useless Dazes and drawing Delvers, burn, Pierces, or whatever else they need. Even if you go 4-color and add Brainstorm, you're not going to keep up with them. You can't just make a 4-color RUG in GBWU with 18 lands, 8 cantrips, 12 creatures, and 22 disruption spells. It isn't that easy. Junk's strengths come in other places, in other forms. If you just 1-for-1 your opponent, you're probably going to lose. And don't cite Hymn because ermagerd 2-for-1. Hymn's really, really good, but it's not enough by itself.

Also, /barn Catmint. The best discard is either in Esperblade, which runs like 4-6 on average, but has Snap to get value later, or in Nic Fit/Zombies, because you only have 4 discard spells in your deck, but those 4 are actually 8 (Therapy).

Also, Leyline of Sanctity IS a card. If they have Leyline, how do you interact with your opponent meaningfully?

Note, I'm really not trying to come down on you for wanting to play Junk. I just think that your thought process is flawed here, especially with regards to the specific variety of Junk that you desire to play. It just won't work the way you want it to. By all means, try it anyway if you want. But I'm not hopeful.

[Tammit67]

This is actually a really good thread.

Until you find a better way to blend consistency and power in non-blue decks, I don't think a deck with so few threats can ultimately succeed. They are large, yes, but do very little to protect themselves and/or evade blocks. If they ever print something delver-esque it would work but until then...

[Aggro_zombies]

That's looking at countermagic vs discard in a vacuum. Yes, there are many benefits to countermagic that outweigh the benefits of discard. What you failed to mention is how powerful discard is against countermagic. The last time I checked, nearly every single deck in the format is running countermagic. That would make discard really good in the current metagame, no?
I'm not incentivized to play discard if countermagic is better in a vacuum. This problem is further compounded by the fact that black has no comparable cards to Brainstorm and Ponder, causing decks eschewing blue to take a hit in consistency.

[Zirath]

The free counterspells do allow RUG to be more aggressive early game, I agree. At the same time though, there are different ways to define aggression. Who's the control and who's the beatdown isn't as simple as being the one who's doing damage, etc.

Junk is still aggressive early (albeit less so); it's just aggressive in a different way. Hitting the opponent with several discard spells at the beginning of the game is aggressively attacking the opponents resources. Slip a Swords to Plowshares in with a discard spell on turn 2 to deal with the Mother of Runes that resolved as additional resource denial, and you are being very aggressive, despite doing so with control. I'd still define Junks role at this point as the beatdown, where Maverick would be the control. Maverick wants to play defensively at this point, and try to stabilize against the resource denial attack. It becomes more noticeable that Junk is the beatdown once they let off the resource denial and drop a fatty and push the red zone, but the deck is still the aggressor in the early game (in this example, anyway).

Aggression is in a way based on the damage done if you consider it in terms of board development, which is of course tempo. RUG can develop its board while hindering your progress quite easily. In the situation where you are utilizing that much disruption, you are behaving more on the control side of the game. You are delaying your opponent, and trying to react to their line but without the benefit of having an advanced board. This does produce tempo but it does not produce as much as some of the RUG plays.


I agree that Junk can lose control when it is not capable of capitalizing on the tempo gains, but I disagree that it is worse in this regard than RUG. RUG does have cantrips to help them have cards more relevant to the situation, and reactive countermagic to answer spells off the topdeck. However, their countermagic is still just as bad (or worse) than discard once the opponent can pay the extra 1 or 2 mana to play around it, and a 3/3 Shroud has less value at that point than a 5/5 flier or a 7/7 that can chain tutor Wastelands if the situation calls for it.

Junks larger, more midrangey creature base combined with its versatile removal gives it better lasting power in the midgame. RUG's burn can just go to the dome instead to close the game out, which is why it's such a great combination with the free countermagic and cheaper threats... but they can just as easily crap out in the midgame if they cannot get the opponent low enough in life early.

Basically what I'm saying is, the ability to lose the game because it could not sufficiently disrupt the opponent and then kill them during the window of opportunity, is something that affects both decks.

It does effect both decks but part of the question is who does a better job. Junk has very powerful threats at it's disposal but without permission based protection, it becomes a much more difficult battle (at least in my opinion) to end the game in a timely fashion. A lot of players lose because they heavily disrupt their opponent but then have no way to end out the game because their starting hand was shallow against a Show and Tell combo. RUG tries to solve this issue by playing cantrips to replace dead cards with a threat. I guess one of my underlying fears is that Junk will naturally gravitate towards Dark Horizons and always play the tempo game as a secondary play due to the spells at it's disposal being heavily midrange.


The lack of cantrips is not a major issue for Junk because of its redundancy. If for whatever reason it does not have enough redundancy to be consistent, the numbers can be tweaked to fix that problem. Most Zoo decks (back in its heyday) ran 10-12 1cc removal spells, which was more than enough for Zoo to consistently get rid of the opponent's creatures. That deck ran no cantrips, but was highly successful for a long time.

Also, after this deck passes a certain amount of lands drops, it does have the option to convert those excess lands into Wastelands or the lone Canopy with Knight of the Reliquary, if need be. Not as universally effective as Brainstorm obviously, but it does have that option. The deck could include a Maze of Ith to get more mileage out of Knights ability; whether that is necessary or not, I'm not sure yet.

Zoo has lots of redundancy in both removal and threats. The idea of Zoo is to take the plan of RUG and cut the cantrips for more Bolts and 1 mana 2/3s 3/3s or w/e and just play pure aggro. In this situation, you only have 2-3 1 mana removal spells (if you want to count Ghastly Demise) and 2 1 mana discard spells at your disposal. Your other powerful spells all require you to make it to turn 2 unscathed. You don't quite have the redundancy that Zoo has.

I agree that Knight can have a lot of utility but you want to be careful that you don't load your manabase with lands that will cause you to lose tempo (Maze, Bog, etc). I think the fact that you don't have the luxury to lay down a land tapped in the early game greatly outweights its utility in the late game.


The curve is a bit higher, but not enough so to make the strategy ineffective. Like I said in a different response, Junk doesn't start amassing tempo gains as soon as turn 0, but it has the ability to gain a ton of tempo by turn 4 through resource denial. The resource denial isn't free, and some of it is expensive, but emptying the opponents hand and then destroying the permanents that they resolve is still effective at slowing down the gamestate drastically. Destroying lands against mana hungry decks also has the same effect. If you drop a 7/7 Knight during this downtime, the opponent has 3 turns to topdeck an answer or its game over. Tempo generated, tempo capitalized on. If the opponent topdecks an answer, Junk needs to either have a replacement, or it has a limited amount of time to find a replacement. If Junk has a replacement, there's a good chance that Junk wins. If not, or if the opponent finds another answer, it goes back to back and forth power struggle. Junk loses when its opponent is able to recover sufficiently enough, and Junk wins whey they cannot find an answer in time. (Answers do not necessarily have to be creature removal).

The back and forth power struggle is constantly ongoing... and it's a similar sort of back and forth struggle that RUG Delver has. That's the nature of these sorts of tempo stratgies; that's how they work.

How soon do you think you can start to produce tempo from your plays on average? I think that's the big question. If turn 4 is your average turn, the game is decided. Obviously it's not going to be that late in reality but even turn 2.5 is pushing it. Slowing the game state is a control deck's plan as well. Yes you have a huge tempo swing from a line like Thoughtseize, Sinkhole, Hymn + Waste, KotR but many of the decks right now are designed to be less susceptible to a resource denial heavy plan as a result of RUG. Decks Omniscience play almost 20 cantrips because they don't need to play Sneak Attack. Cards like Hymn to Tourach (everyone remembers Team America last year) have dropped off significantly because they are just not powerful enough in this meta.

I understand you have more powerful threats than Goose in these colors but part of the reason Goose resurged was because of Shroud. It forces players to take a completely different approach to protect themselves from RUG. Decks like NH or DH fell through because they have a low threat density and it is difficult to consistently protect their threats. RUG attempted to solve this with Mongoose and Bolt, which are supposed to combo Sword to Plowshares and Jace, which has lead to a decline in Stoneblade. Nimble Mongoose has a lot going for him since he provides a form of evasion that no other card can as efficiently.

On the point of Jundk or Tempo Jund, I actually believe there are merits to this idea. Yes you lose on the very large threats in Junk and you lack the manipulation of RUG but you preserve the flexibility of Bolt and the black disruption. We did briefly see Grixis and it failed. Lack of Goyf and Goose are not a little thing. The other issue with the Jundk idea is the competition between Stalker, Goose and Grim. Maybe things will shake up more but I guess I see white only giving you Vindicate and KotR as significant factors where as Bolt and Goose have a lot of merit that I think are not appreciated as much as I think they should be.

I re-read what I wrote here and it's a mess (I've been writing it between meetings). I need to rethinking what I'm trying to say as I get bombarded with hate. I think my point is that non-RUG tempo decks are very unexplored and I think a lot of work still needs to be done to get them able to compete with RUG.

[bowvamp]

Re: discard vs. countermagic
I find that discard is much more effective than countermagic in the early game. That is to say, discard is very good at removing things proactively which allows the game state to stabilize sooner. If you run countermagic, the opposite is true. You can't drop anything sorcery speed because it gets in the way of your permission.
That means discard is greater than countermagic in today's meta. The problem is that it's in black. Ouch.

Re: OP
Junk looks very good what with abrupt decay coming in. I'd expect maverick w/ black to be better though.

[DrJones]

Re: discard vs. countermagic
I find that discard is much more effective than countermagic in the early game. That is to say, discard is very good at removing things proactively which allows the game state to stabilize sooner. If you run countermagic, the opposite is true. You can't drop anything sorcery speed because it gets in the way of your permission.
That means discard is greater than countermagic in today's meta. The problem is that it's in black. Ouch.Except that countermagic in legacy is free, so you don't have to waste a turn looking at the opponent's hand to see if he or she has something worth discarding, and you can instead waste the opponent's turn when he or she tries to cast the spell (spending mana, life, and maybe several other cards in the process).

[menace13]

Force of Will.

I missed this.

[ReinVos]

Regarding RUG vs. Junk from a tempo point of view:

Tempo is much easier obtained when you play at least two spells over two turns (yours and opponents). Blue decks are better at this than non-blue decks. Cast a creature and have a counter ready for your next play. That's the most basic it's gonna get. Junk can't really do such things. Most things they do happen at sorcery speed; casting discard, casting creatures or casting utility like Top and Library. I don't see Junk as a tempo deck, it's midrange. It's a pile of the format's most powerful cards. In that sense it's the complete opposite of a tribal deck. In tribal decks you have a bunch of bad cards that suddenly become very good when you put them together. Junk is all individual class. The cards go well together simply because they are all good cards. It's not about synergy, it's about quality. Powerful creatures backed up by disruption in the form of discard and board control in the form of removal.

Why do you think Junk is one of the most expensive decks to build? ALL the cards in that damn deck are good and see play in other tier decks.

[DLifshitz]

Re: discard vs. countermagic
I find that discard is much more effective than countermagic in the early game. That is to say, discard is very good at removing things proactively which allows the game state to stabilize sooner. If you run countermagic, the opposite is true. You can't drop anything sorcery speed because it gets in the way of your permission.
That means discard is greater than countermagic in today's meta. The problem is that it's in black. Ouch.

Discard is indeed better than a counterspell if you're on the play and open with a Thoughtseize or Hymn to Tourach off of Mox Diamond. In this case, your opponent's options are very narrow indeed: either they have Force or the dreaded Misdirection, or the discard will resolve and get its job done. And if it does gets forced, you will gain card advantage. That's a win-win situation.

But if they're on the play, they will get to play a 1-drop and/or become able to play a Daze or Spell Pierce, or to Brainstorm in response to discard. And quite often that's enough to make discard not matter anymore, because they may already have resolved a significant threat (Delver, Goblin Lackey) or a Divining Top which greatly helps to recover from your discard. If you're on the play, discard just doesn't get the job done even if it does resolve and remove a card.

Anyway, the "dynamic" of playing sorcery speed discard and counterspells is fundamentally different and in favor of countermagic. Any deck that plays spells at instant speed can respond to discard simply by playing these spells. In topdeck mode, players will cast sorcery speed cards right away, again leaving no window of opportunity for discard. (You can think of it as giving your opponent free counterspells against your discard - it's that bad.) On the other hand, counterspells don't suffer from these problems.

[Hanni]

Why does the discussion keep getting sidetracked into countermagic vs discard? =/

Explaining why countermagic is better than discard in general has nothing to do with why discard works well in Junk and why discard is strong against countermagic. If I haven't stated this enough already, discard is positioned well right now because almost every single deck is running tons of countermagic.

I guess in a way, the countermagic vs discard discussions are an answer to my question. The mass majority continue to play RUG in this meta with few to none playing Junk because people believe countermagic is superior to discard in every way, regardless of the situation or metagame.

There's a ton of stuff from yesterday I didn't respond to, but none of it is really anything new that hasn't already been discussed, so I'm not going to prolong the topic any further. The original question has basically been answered for me. At this point, I'd rather stop discussing and just playtest both RUG and Junk through the same gauntlet, and then post the results.

Anyone else that would still like to continue the discussion is more than welcomed to.

[Aggro_zombies]

You also know that RUG is an enormously expensive deck to build, right? The Legacy metagame is fairly inelastic because card expense makes it difficult to just switch decks on a whim, particularly when there's nothing inherently wrong with the deck you're currently playing.

[Hanni]

That makes sense too. I still think it has more to do with people playing what's popular, people playing what's already been proven to work, i.e flavor of the year and all that jazz. The frequent 'countermagic is better than discard' discussions help strengthen that assumption.

I also forgot, but I did want to comment on this tidbit:


But if they're on the play, they will get to play a 1-drop and/or become able to play a Daze or Spell Pierce, or to Brainstorm in response to discard. And quite often that's enough to make discard not matter anymore, because they may already have resolved a significant threat (Delver, Goblin Lackey) or a Divining Top which greatly helps to recover from your discard. If you're on the play, discard just doesn't get the job done even if it does resolve and remove a card.


That's why Junk runs a bunch of permanent removal spells too. The list I posted actually runs more removal (12) than it runs discard (11).

Meh, I said I was gonna stop by I'm finding pieces that I don't need to write an essay on to respond to:


I'm not incentivized to play discard if countermagic is better in a vacuum. This problem is further compounded by the fact that black has no comparable cards to Brainstorm and Ponder, causing decks eschewing blue to take a hit in consistency.

Zoo never ran cantrips, and if memory serves me correctly, it was one of the most consistent decks during the era of its heyday.

[Rico Suave]

With a metagame consisting of Miracles, Show and Tell decks, RUG Delver, with fewer aggro decks being played than in previous months (thanks in part to the first two mentioned decks), I'm not sure why Junk isn't seeing any play as the go to "tempo" deck.

I'm not sure you understand what tempo means, or how it relates to Legacy. The decklist you put in your opening post is most certainly not a tempo-oriented deck.

[Final Fortune]

I'm not sure you understand what tempo means, or how it relates to Legacy. The decklist you put in your opening post is most certainly not a tempo-oriented deck.

+1, the premise of this thread is flawed to begin with, if anything you should just be conentrating on whether or not G/b/w aggro is viable in the metagame or not vs the field and not whether or not it can replace RUG.

G/w/b Maverick as a mid-range aggro deck is more than viable, finding a G/w/b deck that uses 8 discard effects and is viable is another question.

[catmint]

Very elegant Hanni. You make a bunch of statements that some people disagree with and they (including me) put a lot of effort to outline their thoughts. Instead of something like "thank you for the effort of explaining me what your understanding of generating tempo is and why you think Junk should be a grindy/midrangy deck - I agree/disagree" or the very seldomly words in this forum of "Thank you, I think I have a better understanding now" you just decide not to respond.

In my opinion you got a lot of discussion going because you are a respected member of this forum. If an unknown would have posted your opening statement my guess is it would be done with a couple of answers and links to other threads. Therefore I find it bad sportsmanship on your end to just sneak out like that.

[dunk]

In my opinion you got a lot of discussion going because you are a respected member of this forum.

Why is he actually? Because of his 2000 posts e peen? Having read some of his posts he makes the impression of not understanding the game and the format well.
Especially statements like:

The frequent 'countermagic is better than discard' discussions help strengthen that assumption.
makes him look like he if never played the format. If it wasn't for free counterspells discard would have an edge, but as it is, discard is mediocre at best. Right now I only like discard in storm decks, because the information is worth a lot more than for other decks and you get to cast it during the combo turn. Otherwise discard costs tempo and is nullified by topdecks too easily. Really, the high density of good cards and cantrips is what makes discard mediocre, but the influence of Brainstorm and SDT makes it really bad.

Also, regarding the opening post: Why ever would you try to compare an unfocussed rockdeck without any sort of library manipulation to rug? Because they both run low on crits?...

[Final Fortune]

Counter magic and discard have different roles, if you're only looking at it from the perspective of preventing your opponent from doing something, then Counter magic is better than discard because it forces the opponent to expend resources by casting the card and then eliminates the threat. But when it comes to protecting your own threats, and by threats I mean a game winning spell or combo and not a creature, then discard is better than counter magic because you can look at the opponent's hand, discard the opponent's answer and then decide whether or not it is or it isn't time to try to win or wait. With counter magic, you're forced to cast your threat before your counter magic in order to protect it, which means you have to unnecessarily risk losing the game if he can out counter you and you have to have all of the resources to cast your threat and protect it on the same turn where you can cast discard at any time.

You can't compare reactive to proactive disruption in a vacuum and say reactive disruption is better because it forces the opponent to expend resources, you have to ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish with your disruption and then decided whether or not the information and mana efficiency of discard is worth it.

In the case of Junk, its discard is played as pseudo counter spells, which is problematic because Junk is just trying to disrupt its opponent and not protect its own threats so clearly discard is worse than counter magic in this case. But if you're playing Nic Fit for example, where discard is helping to resolve Pernicious Deed, Natural Order or just absolutely ball busting cards, then discard is preferable to counter magic.

I'm not going to take Hymn of Tourach into consideration, because it's a fairly unique card as far as discard goes, and I honestly consider it more of a card advantage and land destruction spell then strict discard, but Junk's problem compared to RUG is that it can only resolve its threats with discard and not protect them after they've been resolved.

[Zirath]

makes him look like he if never played the format. If it wasn't for free counterspells discard would have an edge, but as it is, discard is mediocre at best. Right now I only like discard in storm decks, because the information is worth a lot more than for other decks and you get to cast it during the combo turn. Otherwise discard costs tempo and is nullified by topdecks too easily. Really, the high density of good cards and cantrips is what makes discard mediocre, but the influence of Brainstorm and SDT makes it really bad.

Also, regarding the opening post: Why ever would you try to compare an unfocussed rockdeck without any sort of library manipulation to rug? Because they both run low on crits?...

The idea that permission is stronger than discard in Legacy is partially empowered because believe that to be a fact. The free permission has a slight edge but not as big as people believe.

[Awaclus]

I don't know if discard is better than countermagic in terms of raw power or anything (EDIT: Actually, I think that T-16 is, indeed, stronger than any of the counterspells in Legacy even in terms of raw power, as long as the deck is capable of dragging the game a little bit), but at least when they're playing against each other, discard wins (obviously when both decks have also creatures to actually win the game with). And counterspells are very popular in today's metagame.

Junk doesn't want to protect its threats, and it doesn't want to disrupt the opponent. Junk, like every other deck, wants to win the game above anything else. Playing something that beats the opponent's strong point usually means having a good chance of winning the game.

[damionblackgear]

The idea that permission is stronger than discard in Legacy is partially empowered because believe that to be a fact. The free permission has a slight edge but not as big as people believe.

Agree'd. There is a reason that everyone complains each week about a new card to be banned (Reference all of the Ban X card threads). The most recent card was show and tell. Interesting that the combo deck - actually a pretty fragile one at that - was the target. The reason? They were able to fight your counters with their own. It's actually less of an issue when using discard as brainstorms and ponders are used to find and protect instead of enable. So, free or not, there are periods where discard is better.

The argument is supposed to be why isn't Rock taking up more of the Canadian Thresh slots and I was pretty sure I hit it on the head in my post before. Now, I'm feeling like I'm dead on. People would rather play a sub-par blue deck that's putting up numbers. Not realizing that it's putting up numbers because it's such a larger percentage of the field.

If you're missing the point there here is a brief exaggerated example: If 80/100 people play Canadian Thresh, what are it's chances of placing in top 8?

There were some other points made, expenses of decks, personal preference (oh wait, that doesn't count), expenses of decks... pretty much just cost of changing decks for players who are new(er) to the format or have sold their collections and are just rebuilding.

As far as cost, this is estimated form one site for an arguably "sub-par" Canadian Thresh (http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/deck.asp?deck_id=265177) and the most recent winning Rock (http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/deck.asp?deck_id=1044399). Obviously, Rock is more expensive.

Now everyone's been eating away at the opening post list like it's a gosple for the archetype, and I've been amazed as he states,
For reference, here's a decklist for those unaware of what a Junk deck looks like

Which pretty much means, here's an overly generalized way of looking at things for people who aren't aware of anything else about the deck. That is not an in stone list. It's very basic and simple to scratch off. Look at the SCG Minnesota (http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=9037&iddeck=66015) list, the GP list (http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8757&iddeck=63935), or even the SCG Washington (http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8856&iddeck=64686).

All of these lists are considered Rock/Junk. All of them are different than the list in the opening post. All Lists placed in prize (two made top 8) while probably having less than 5 pilots (Ghent may have had 10) playing them in their respective tournaments. The deck wins all of the same matches including a positive match-up vs Canadian Thresh -if you need proof it's on video from earlier in the thread. You can look at my chubby loving face or possibly ask someone I've played if you can find them.

As for the don't use numbers as an excuse to show win percentages argument, fine: Ghent had 1 person playing Rock day two (http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/gpgnt12/day2#4). He top 8'd against a field of Brainstorms and counterspells. So, we're 1/1 and Canadian Thresh is 0/36. How do you like those odds?

Also, this has boiled down to a religious argument.

"Do you have faith?"
"Yes."
"Then you're never going to accept something else could be correct."

[Final Fortune]

I don't know if discard is better than countermagic in terms of raw power or anything, but at least when they're playing against each other, discard wins (obviously when both decks have also creatures to actually win the game with). And counterspells are very popular in today's metagame.

Junk doesn't want to protect its threats, and it doesn't want to disrupt the opponent. Junk, like every other deck, wants to win the game above anything else. Playing something that beats the opponent's strong point usually means having a good chance of winning the game.

That's an oversimplifcation of comparing Junk vs aggro-contro, compare aggro-control vs. Miracles or Junk vs Miracles and the problem of not being able to counter the opponent's removal in order to maintain your board position becomes clear.

[Rico Suave]

I don't know if discard is better than countermagic in terms of raw power or anything (EDIT: Actually, I think that T-16 is, indeed, stronger than any of the counterspells in Legacy even in terms of raw power, as long as the deck is capable of dragging the game a little bit), but at least when they're playing against each other, discard wins (obviously when both decks have also creatures to actually win the game with). And counterspells are very popular in today's metagame.

Junk doesn't want to protect its threats, and it doesn't want to disrupt the opponent. Junk, like every other deck, wants to win the game above anything else. Playing something that beats the opponent's strong point usually means having a good chance of winning the game.

Some things are wrong, and other things are so critically wrong that they must be corrected.

Counterspells and Discard are both tools one would use to try and control the opponent. That is all they do - target the opponent's cards. To say that discard beats countermagic head to head is short-sighted and incomplete because it doesn't take into account every other aspect of the game like mana, threats, manipulation, removal, or tempo; nor does it take into account the interaction of those elements.

Junk absolutely does want to protect its threats and absolutely does want to disrupt the opponent. These are steps in the deck's plan that it takes towards the goal of winning the game.

[Awaclus]

Some things are wrong, and other things are so critically wrong that they must be corrected.

Counterspells and Discard are both tools one would use to try and control the opponent. That is all they do - target the opponent's cards. To say that discard beats countermagic head to head is short-sighted and incomplete because it doesn't take into account every other aspect of the game like mana, threats, manipulation, removal, or tempo; nor does it take into account the interaction of those elements.
In fact it does. It also takes into account a huge amount of testing I've done a few years ago.


Junk absolutely does want to protect its threats and absolutely does want to disrupt the opponent. These are steps in the deck's plan that it takes towards the goal of winning the game.
Sure, but a Junk player shouldn't think "How do I protect my threats? How do I disrupt the opponent?". He should be thinking "How do I win the game?". That's also true while he's building the deck. Any decision shouldn't be made just because you want to do that, because winning games usually results in more top8s than doing what you want.

[Aggro_zombies]

Sure, but a Junk player shouldn't think "How do I protect my threats? How do I disrupt the opponent?". He should be thinking "How do I win the game?". That's also true while he's building the deck. Any decision shouldn't be made just because you want to do that, because winning games usually results in more top8s than doing what you want.
This is a specious distinction. Every deckbuilder and player asks, "How should I win the game?", but how they ultimately answer those questions depends on their decks. In the case of Junk, the questions of how to disrupt the opponent and protect its threats are the natural follow-up questions to how to win. How else is he supposed to answer? "I'll dredge five, cast a Dark Ritual to go to seven storm, then cast Show and Tell to put Thalia into play"?

[Rico Suave]

In fact it does. It also takes into account a huge amount of testing I've done a few years ago.

That's great, but why are you so quick to pull out your epeen? Do you whip your natural one out in public too? Put it away where it belongs because nobody wants to see it, nor are you talking to the right person if you want to talk about experience, testing, or length of time with this game.


Sure, but a Junk player shouldn't think "How do I protect my threats? How do I disrupt the opponent?". He should be thinking "How do I win the game?". That's also true while he's building the deck. Any decision shouldn't be made just because you want to do that, because winning games usually results in more top8s than doing what you want.

You seem to have missed the point. "How do I win the game" is full of circumstancial, contextual, variable lines of play. It naturally leads to other questions like "how do I win the game when my opponent combos out before my creatures can kill him?" In this particular instance winning is a multiple step process. One step along that path is "how do I stop him?" This is a question every Junk player must answer if they hope to win against anything that is faster or more powerful (which is nearly every deck in the format). To say, like you said, that Junk doesn't want to disrupt the opponent is mindless and wrong, as there are many situations like the above where it must disrupt the opponent if it wants to win.

[Mirrislegend]

The sample list has way too much discard and removal, not enough pressure, and plenty of other issues. Using such a skewed list really really stifles productive discussion.

When going for a tempo version of Rock, usually between 6 and 8 discard spells are used. I am a HUGE proponent of Hymn, but playing 4 is not necessarily realistic in a format where drawing it late game SUCKS (also, constantly going for BB ruins your ability to fight Wasteland). I currently run 3 Thoughtseize, 2 Inquisition of Kozilek, and 3 Hymn and I'm very happy with it.

Dark Confidant is a must play. It's easy to set up a curve that can handle this for advantage. And the card advantage is staggering. The CA from Confidant alone can auto-beat Maverick. And even RUG has to be wary of Dark Confidant (yes, it aides their aggro plan, but their idea of stifling our resources kinda falls apart when you draw 2 cards per turn).

Mox Diamond is excellent in this deck. The acceleration significantly increases your combo MU numbers. Also, it allows you to play around RUG's Wastelands and Dazes with ease.

Green Sun's Zenith is pretty universally agreed upon for tempo/aggro Junk these days. Playing with (effectively) extra Knights and Goyfs in your deck is always lovely. But the toolbox it provides is FANTASTIC. Qasali Pridemage is a great silver bullet and Scavenging Ooze is just phenomenal. Besides these obvious choices, there is a growing option of Gaddock Teeg in the maindeck. Ruining Miracle's and combo's day is great fun.

Equipment is also a common staple. Stoneforge is not always necessary (she's a little too slow these days, despite the power of Batterskull), but equipment always gives you more bang for your buck (and more utility) from your creatures. I was a huge proponent of Stoneforge, but including her in your deck lends to a significantly slower build.

Lastly, I must note one of the most glaring omissions from the opening list: card selection. Not playing blue leads to the lack of Brainstorm, which turns people off from this deck entirely. This is a legitimate concern. Most builds play at least 2 card selection items. This usually consists of some combination of Sensei's Divining Top and Sylvan Library. Which is chosen and the amount of each is very dependent on personal preference and individual deck build.
(For reference: I play one of each and would never play less. I've seen a version with just 3 SDT. The best controlling build I've seen, courtesy of sdematt, plays two of each. More than 4 total of these type of elements seems excessive in my opinion)

I just had to add this to the discussion, so that participators had a better understanding of the deck than the opening post provides. Also, Rock involves more than just a tempo deck. There are many builds and options out there. I should be able to provide lists that cover different archetypes if people are interested.

[Hanni]

So I just spent the last 4+ hours typing up some responses... and then my internet decides to crash on me and delete the whole thing. So fuck it. There's still a couple of things I want to address, but most of my responses have been lost in cyberspace. Sorry folks.


I'm not sure you understand what tempo means, or how it relates to Legacy. The decklist you put in your opening post is most certainly not a tempo-oriented deck.

I'm digging the one liner where you tell me that I don't know shit about tempo. Especially the part where your one liner doesn't enlighten us and explain what tempo really is, since you know what tempo means and how it relates to Legacy, and I don't.


+1, the premise of this thread is flawed to begin with, if anything you should just be conentrating on whether or not G/b/w aggro is viable in the metagame or not vs the field and not whether or not it can replace RUG.

Yes, the premise is flawed. I should have known better than to try and think outside the box. Trying to start discussions that challenge the status quo is always flawed. This is why playing anything but the most popular decks is flawed. The same reason why shifts in the metagame, outside of high impact card releases, is flawed. The same flaw that causes so many 'ban this' discussions day in and day out.


Very elegant Hanni. You make a bunch of statements that some people disagree with and they (including me) put a lot of effort to outline their thoughts. Instead of something like "thank you for the effort of explaining me what your understanding of generating tempo is and why you think Junk should be a grindy/midrangy deck - I agree/disagree" or the very seldomly words in this forum of "Thank you, I think I have a better understanding now" you just decide not to respond.

In my opinion you got a lot of discussion going because you are a respected member of this forum. If an unknown would have posted your opening statement my guess is it would be done with a couple of answers and links to other threads. Therefore I find it bad sportsmanship on your end to just sneak out like that.

I sat at my computer for 8 hours straight, responding to everyone the first time around, repeating myself over and over. The repitition was understandable the first time, as I wasn't able to respond right away.

Once the next wave of the same stuff came around, I just didn't feel like repeating myself again. The discussion already answered my question, and I already said what I wanted to say. There are plenty of other people to keep the discussion going, and now after all the personal attacks made against me... yea, I've lost interest.

Catmint, I do want to thank you though. I have a much better understanding now of why you (and others) think I'm wrong, but I still disagree with you.


Why is he actually? Because of his 2000 posts e peen? Having read some of his posts he makes the impression of not understanding the game and the format well.
Especially statements like:

"The frequent 'countermagic is better than discard' discussions help strengthen that assumption."

The frequent 'countermagic is better than discard' discussions help strengthen that assumption. makes him look like he if never played the format. If it wasn't for free counterspells discard would have an edge, but as it is, discard is mediocre at best. Right now I only like discard in storm decks, because the information is worth a lot more than for other decks and you get to cast it during the combo turn. Otherwise discard costs tempo and is nullified by topdecks too easily. Really, the high density of good cards and cantrips is what makes discard mediocre, but the influence of Brainstorm and SDT makes it really bad.

Also, regarding the opening post: Why ever would you try to compare an unfocussed rockdeck without any sort of library manipulation to rug? Because they both run low on crits?...

lol

If one of the arguments is that Junk sucks and RUG is a million times better is because countermagic is strictly better than discard, why would that not strengthen my assumptions for why so many people continue to play RUG and no one is playing Junk?

You're misinterpretation skills are spot on. It is EXACTLY because everyone is playing all their free (and not free) countermagic that makes discard positioned well in the metagame right now. I'm well aware of what Brainstorm and Top do, and it still doesn't change the fact that proactive discard is strong AGAINST reactive countermagic.

Since I don't know shit about the format, is it fair to assume that you know alot? I'm sure you at least know about that new U/W control thingy-ma-doo that has the most recent Top 8's right now, what's it called, Miracles? I wish I could come up with brand new decks ideas like that :(


In the case of Junk, its discard is played as pseudo counter spells, which is problematic because Junk is just trying to disrupt its opponent and not protect its own threats so clearly discard is worse than counter magic in this case. But if you're playing Nic Fit for example, where discard is helping to resolve Pernicious Deed, Natural Order or just absolutely ball busting cards, then discard is preferable to counter magic.


I had a super long post written up in response to this that was really informative, but alas, my internet swallowed it up. Since I'm definitely not typing out another 20 paragraph response again, I'll keep it short and sweet. I agree with you 100% regarding the virtues of discard for its ability to help make sure that your bombs resolve. On the other hand, I think you are understimating the strength of what discard does for Junk.


That's an oversimplifcation of comparing Junk vs aggro-contro, compare aggro-control vs. Miracles or Junk vs Miracles and the problem of not being able to counter the opponent's removal in order to maintain your board position becomes clear.

I still don't get how Daze is any better than discard at "countering the opponent's removal in order to to maintain board position," when Swords/Bolt/Terminus all cost 1cc, and Abrupt Decay is uncounterable. I don't think enough people truly realize what the last 2 sets have done for this format in terms of removal efficiency. Sure you still have Spell Pierce, but even that's not guaranteed once the opponent hits 3 mana.

The only truly guaranteed protection is Force of Will.

...but I'm not even disputing that countermagic is better than discard at protecting its creatures. I just don't understand why countermagic (in general) is constantly overestimated as some sort of unconditional creature protection, when it's not.

----

Before I move on to something else, I just wanted to leave it off with this:

When I say the word Junk, I'm talking about a strategy that is focused on using a boatload of disruption first, then following it up with efficient p/t creatures to finish the opponent off, before they can recover. I'm not talking about the slow as balls Maverick lineup, I'm talking about straight up aggressive beats like Tombstalker. Suff like SFM is something people run in Midrange Rock decks. That's not what I'm talking about. I refuse to call this strategy Dark Horizons, when this strategy predates New Horizons by at least 2 years. People apparently forgot about this strategy, so from now on, I'm just gonna call it Deadguy Rock like I used to.

I also want to reclarify the strategy that I've been talking about for those who may still be confused. Again, I'm not talking about different variations of Rock, just one specific type.

Deadguy Rock is an aggro/control deck that utilizes a primarily black disruption package. The package consists of relatively equal amounts of discard and permanent removal. The disruption package is focused on resource denial, using discard to empty an opponent's hand, while using removal to keep the battlefield empty. This progresses the game to a state where the opponent has little to no resources left (both in hand, and on the battlefield). At this point, the deck begins to put creatures into play that have a very high p/t to cost ratio, attacking as aggressively as possible in order to kill the opponent before they are able to stabilize.

---

There's a big difference between running 4-6 discard spells + 4 removal spells, vs running 12 discard spells + 12 removal spells. The first strategy is only using the disruption as a small jab; it's primary gameplan is to overwhelm the opponent with aggro. The second strategy is using disruption as straight up ground and pound. The fundamental differences between Midrange Rock and Deadguy Rock is no different than the fundamental differences between Sligh and Zoo. It may seem like a small difference on paper, but it's a big difference in actuality.

I also cannot stress enough that the list that I posted in the OP is just a rough list to give people a general idea about what the deck looks like. It's not some fine-tuned machine. The 4 Sinkholes are just a placeholder in the list that can easily become some Sylvan Libraries for those nitpicking that it has no library manipulation, more creatures for those nitpicking that the threat density is too light, so on and so forth.

[joemauer]

A lot of Junk builds are still heavy on disruption and light on threats, which I just don't think is a feasible Aggro strategy anymore. RUG gets away with it because they combine shroud and free counters to keep their threats around. Maverick has mom and GSZ to keep the threatmobile rolling, and plays almost nothing but creatures.

Then you have junk trying to shoehorn every strategy into one "pile of good cards" with 3 Diamonds, 2 SFM + 1 Batterskull, 2 GSZ, Deed, Hymn, Pulse/Vindicate, Liliana, Loam, SDT. It's just all over the place.

Personally I think Junk (and probably all green-based aggro decks) need to take inspiration from Maverick if they want to succeed in a meta with StP, Snapcaster, Jace, and Terminus. Run 4x GSZ, protect your dudes, interact with combo via hatebears. Off the top of my head, maybe something like this:


4 Thoughtseize
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Abrupt Decay

1 Swamp
1 Forest
1 Plains
4 Marsh Flats
4 Verdant Catacombs
2 Bayou
2 Scrubland
1 Savannah
1 Karakas
1 Maze of Ith
4 Wasteland

4 Mother of Runes
4 Green Sun's Zenith
1 Gaddock Teeg
3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
4 Dark Confidant
1 Dryad Arbor
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Deathrite Shaman
1 Tarmogoyf
4 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Scavenging Ooze


Is it objectively better than Maverick? No idea, but I think emulating a deck that is currently successful is probably better than just hoping the planets will align and make an old list magically viable again.

I don't think this post got enough attention.
Junk really needs to be more streamlined. Whether this pile Rich, posted is the most optimal or not, who knows. This certainly is the direction junk should move in.

Also, @Hanni: epic post. You conquered this thread with your mighty e peen.

[Hanni]

After 5 other personal attacks, and being what I felt was pretty mild in my responses, I'm just gonna pop on and respond to this last one.

I'm sure there are still more to come, but this is the last one I'm actually going to respond to.


Also, @Hanni: epic post. You conquered this thread with your mighty e peen.

Fuck off.

[Chikenbok]

I just want to quickly chime in with two small points.

A) It appears that no one, apart from Hanni himself, is addressing Junk as such and this thread seems to have diverged into: Attacks on OP, Disruption vs. Counter Magic, and discussions about mid-range Rock decks. (Can someone please talk about my 'epeen')

and,

B) Hanni, mad, mad, mad respect for putting up with this shit and handling it well, when I get back to NY I'll shoot you my schedule for some online testing.

[Richard Cheese]

This is still the first I've heard of Junk and The Rock being two different decks.

[Zirath]

Also, @Hanni: epic post. You conquered this thread with your mighty e peen.

That's very mature.

I addressed the counterspell vs discard issue but it fell on deaf ears: counterspells are continually played because people believe they are stronger. The reactive vs proactive argument does not really hold up because of how powerful Jund is in Modern. The cards that counterspell decks have access to are also more powerful than the cards that discard deck have access to in Legacy. If black had Brainstorm or Delver, this discussion would be heavily different. The cards we focus on are coupled with cards that are not touched on. You can't abstractly say permission is stronger than discard without respecting the fact there are cards that warp the power level of those cards because of how well they perform with the cards in question. Daze and Delver happen to work quite well together. Same with Force of Will. Same with Ponder and Brainstorm. Same with Lightning Bolt. The cards in RUG Delver work exceptionally well together. Considering them in vacuum is not a flawed way of thinking, which appears to come up a lot.

[Aggro_zombies]

That's very mature.

I addressed the counterspell vs discard issue but it fell on deaf ears: counterspells are continually played because people believe they are stronger. The reactive vs proactive argument does not really hold up because of how powerful Jund is in Modern. The cards that counterspell decks have access to are also more powerful than the cards that discard deck have access to in Legacy. If black had Brainstorm or Delver, this discussion would be heavily different. The cards we focus on are coupled with cards that are not touched on. You can't abstractly say permission is stronger than discard without respecting the fact there are cards that warp the power level of those cards because of how well they perform with the cards in question. Daze and Delver happen to work quite well together. Same with Force of Will. Same with Ponder and Brainstorm. Same with Lightning Bolt. The cards in RUG Delver work exceptionally well together. Considering them in vacuum is not a flawed way of thinking, which appears to come up a lot.
Yeah, but see, counters are stronger than discard for the reasons people have outlined. The fact that Brainstorm and Delver exist in the counterspell color and not the discard one is just the final nail in the coffin.

Assuming there is a tempo version of Junk - and honestly, "Junk" is a really nebulous deck - it won't be played over RUG for the following reasons:

1) Counters are better than discard as disruption.

2) Black has no good cheap card selection. All of the card selection available to BG/x usually takes several turns to have the same impact as a Brainstorm.

3) Black has no reasonable threats outside of Tombstalker. Blue has Delver at a minimum, but also Clique if you want more flying creatures. It's also worth noting that Tombstalker does not play well with black's other good creature, Dark Confidant.

4) RUG has the better reputation. People are arguing here like RUG is somehow not a good deck anymore, which can't be further from the truth. People aren't incentivized to switch from a deck that works, is optimized, and has a good history to a deck that isn't optimized (if it were, people wouldn't keep arguing about what constitutes a Junk deck) and doesn't have anywhere close to the same performance record. If you want to put this in a disparaging light, you can call it "flavor of the month/year" or "bandwagoning," but I think most people would think of it as a rational decision.

5) Team America is pretty much like Junk but better. Oddly, it's better because it has Brainstorm and counters.

[Zirath]

Yeah, but see, counters are stronger than discard for the reasons people have outlined. The fact that Brainstorm and Delver exist in the counterspell color and not the discard one is just the final nail in the coffin.

Assuming there is a tempo version of Junk - and honestly, "Junk" is a really nebulous deck - it won't be played over RUG for the following reasons:

1) Counters are better than discard as disruption.

2) Black has no good cheap card selection. All of the card selection available to BG/x usually takes several turns to have the same impact as a Brainstorm.

3) Black has no reasonable threats outside of Tombstalker. Blue has Delver at a minimum, but also Clique if you want more flying creatures. It's also worth noting that Tombstalker does not play well with black's other good creature, Dark Confidant.

4) RUG has the better reputation. People are arguing here like RUG is somehow not a good deck anymore, which can't be further from the truth. People aren't incentivized to switch from a deck that works, is optimized, and has a good history to a deck that isn't optimized (if it were, people wouldn't keep arguing about what constitutes a Junk deck) and doesn't have anywhere close to the same performance record. If you want to put this in a disparaging light, you can call it "flavor of the month/year" or "bandwagoning," but I think most people would think of it as a rational decision.

5) Team America is pretty much like Junk but better. Oddly, it's better because it has Brainstorm and counters.

The cards surrounding permission are stronger, that's a bigger fact than permission being more reliable than discard.

1) If permission was truly stronger than discard, that fact would come through in Modern, where Jund is stronger than UW. People conveniently forget to mention that the permission is free in Legacy which makes it slightly more reliable even if most disruption is highly efficient at 1 mana.

2) + 3) Yes and yes. This was part of my point. Blue fundamentally has stronger cards than black. The point about Tombstalker and Dark Confidant is also spot on. If you were disagreeing with me on that one, I was actually trying to express this point.

4) RUG is a very old deck in Legacy. The rise of Merfolk, Zoo and Bant is what put it out initially but the metagame shifts and the printing of Delver have really revitalized it. Delver was the 3rd threat it needed to be revived. The fact is that RUG sets a large number of barriers to other decks in the format. In order to be better than RUG you have exceed it's disruption by overloading on threats (threatening cards in addition to creatures). This is a tough feat to accomplish without give up other match ups.

5) This I don't agree with. Team America is horrible at the moment. Team initially took advantage of the sloppy reconfiguring of the format after Survival was banned when cards like Noble Hierarch were scarce and decks were soft to Hymn to Tourach. This ended when Stoneblade hit the scene fueled by Mental Misstep. Since then, I think Team is considerably worse than Junk because it has no place. It doesn't have the threat density to match Maverick or the reach to compete like RUG. At least Junk has versatility by increasing its curve and not adhering to a tempo plan. Even BUG control has fell off after an initial burst.

[Aggro_zombies]

The cards surrounding permission are stronger, that's a bigger fact than permission being more reliable than discard.

1) If permission was truly stronger than discard, that fact would come through in Modern, where Jund is stronger than UW. People conveniently forget to mention that the permission is free in Legacy which makes it slightly more reliable even if most disruption is highly efficient at 1 mana.
I'm not really sure what the point of this distinction is. For starters, blue in Modern has gotten pretty hollowed out by bannings; even setting that aside, the power level of the counters in the format is significantly lower. Okay, I'll concede that Legacy's counters being very cheap or free is important, and I'll grant that grant that context matters, but it still doesn't change things like, "If you draw a discard spell late game it will be worse than drawing a counterspell because the opponent's hand is likely to be fairly empty."

If Brainstorm were black, there would still be a strong draw into counters for those reasons. The fact that it's blue simply means there is no contest.


2) + 3) Yes and yes. This was part of my point. Blue fundamentally has stronger cards than black. The point about Tombstalker and Dark Confidant is also spot on. If you were disagreeing with me on that one, I was actually trying to express this point.
That list was meant to be a more general reply to the thread. Hanni is arguing that the counters vs. discard arguments are proving his point, while I'm arguing they're part of why he's wrong.


4) RUG is a very old deck in Legacy. The rise of Merfolk, Zoo and Bant is what put it out initially but the metagame shifts and the printing of Delver have really revitalized it. Delver was the 3rd threat it needed to be revived. The fact is that RUG sets a large number of barriers to other decks in the format. In order to be better than RUG you have exceed it's disruption by overloading on threats (threatening cards in addition to creatures). This is a tough feat to accomplish without give up other match ups.
Exactly. Junk, historically, has been at best fringe playable; GBx strategies in general have a much harder time gaining traction in this format. That makes them significantly less attractive even if the metagame seems favorable to them.

It's also worth noting that the "top tables metagame" that gets reported does not give us a clear picture of the "round one/Swiss pairings metagame" for which people actually prepare and spend most of their time battling. RUG is a very strong deck capable of weathering a lot of random challengers, which is why it continues to perform so well. Junk...well, who knows? People in this thread apparently can't even decide what the deck is, let alone whether it would do as good or better against a broad, random field than RUG.


5) This I don't agree with. Team America is horrible at the moment. Team initially took advantage of the sloppy reconfiguring of the format after Survival was banned when cards like Noble Hierarch were scarce and decks were soft to Hymn to Tourach. This ended when Stoneblade hit the scene fueled by Mental Misstep. Since then, I think Team is considerably worse than Junk because it has no place. It doesn't have the threat density to match Maverick or the reach to compete like RUG. At least Junk has versatility by increasing its curve and not adhering to a tempo plan. Even BUG control has fell off after an initial burst.
Hanni was talking specifically about whether a tempo build of Junk could take some of RUG's metagame share, which is why I brought up Team America. Honestly, the concept of Junk is vaguely defined enough that people can argue it any way they want, which to me sounds like a symptom of a deeper problem.

[catmint]

Also agree on Aggro-zombies post. Team America might be better than Hannis Junk (I mean literally junk aka crap list), but the optimized more midrangy Rock lists are better positioned I than Team America I think.

This thread is real good example how you can destroy your reputation.

1) Talking nonsense (Junk is a tempo deck, Discard is good tempo play, Discard is better than countermagic btw.:my 2c. there is not black/white answer - both forms of disruption have their strenghts/weaknesses and purposes)

2) Denying & ignoring any good explanation about why what you say does not make a lot of sense.

3) Focus on some statements & flame about it - also complain about personal attacks.

4) Claim that you had really really good content to proof your points, but the "internet" deleted your post.

I think people were much more respectful than to the average person beeing stubborn and sticking to nonsense belives and gave Hanni enough time to get out of this in an honorable way. But unfortunately a lot of the kiddies around these forum seem to build their life around MTG and if they have to admit to themselves that they don't know everything than their ego suffers so much pain that they do everything to protect their believes.

EDIT: It is not embarrassing to be wrong. It is embarrassing not to admit it - everyone is wrong from time to time. Growth can only happen if you can see it.
For example my recent non-sense:
- I thought 2 Temporal Mastery would be good in RUG and bought 2 for € 25 a piece.
- I build a Grixis Tempo list and thought oona's prawler would be a potent flier until my friends came and said: "how about dredge, reanimator, lingering souls,..." - was a funny moment
- I think Vraska will be the first legacy 5cmc planeswalker - solving some problems for BUG control decks. :)

[lavafrogg]

One time we tried to define Rock/Junk/BWG Goodstuff in the rock thread.....it didn't end well...

[Rico Suave]

RE: The differences between Junk vs Rock

Junk started out as a deck that was based G/W and has roots in the "toolbox" style of magic. It has a variety of utility cards designed to answer a variety of different cards and it tries to play efficient, multi-purpose cards because it expects more use out of any given card than other similar decks.

Rock is a B/G control deck. In the early stages of the game it looks to generate mana ramp, play small-scale card advantage, and then proceed to the late game where it is most powerful and end the game with a strong finisher. It runs more board control and hand control than average to buy enough time to reach its more expensive cards.

In modern Legacy, the colors are a little closer because Junk can easily splash black and Rock can easily splash white. The creatures and finishers are also much closer in casting cost nowadays, so you can't really easily identify a 3 mana threat vs. a 5 mana finisher. The strategies are still much different.

The closest thing to a traditional Rock deck is Death Cloud. Other decks may be called Rock but it's really only to try and identify a deck in shorthand (since it's awkward to say "my control but not too controlling or slow B/G based mid-range deck" instead of "my Rock deck").

Junk is basically what you call a G/W based creature deck when Survival of the Fittest is not present, or some similar card that enables a "toolbox" like perhaps Living Wish, except there's still this idea of a utility deck.

As for this whole tempo thing, I'm sorry but none of these decks are remotely close to "tempo" decks. If you take a G/W base and want to make it tempo oriented, you would be playing cards like Wild Nacatl and not an overabundance of 3 drops like most Junk lists (which are pure and straight mid-range decks).


I'm digging the one liner where you tell me that I don't know shit about tempo. Especially the part where your one liner doesn't enlighten us and explain what tempo really is, since you know what tempo means and how it relates to Legacy, and I don't.


It would take a very long essay to explain what tempo is, and frankly I don't feel like typing it up because you can google up several different books on the subject and I'll save hours of time. The real question is why you feel like talking about this criminally over-used term as if you are a basis of authority, when it's quite clear you should be quiet and learning instead of talking.

[death]

RUG Delver is a prime example of a Tempo deck, a deck built with efficiency in mind. Here's how I would break down RUG to its essential parts:

Cheap threats - Delver, Mongoose, Goyf
Free 'counter' spells - Daze, Force of Will
Free 'removal' spells - Submerge, Dismember
Cheap removal spell - Lightning Bolt, Forked Bolt
Undercosted land destruction - Wasteland, Stifle

As you can see there are 25+ CMC:1 and <10 CMC:2. Free, cheap, and underscosted are the defining traits of a Tempo deck. Nothing costs 3 here. Comparing this to the list in the OP, I'd say only Swords to Plowshares, Wasteland, Tarmogoyf and Tombstalker would count as ''Tempo" components. I'm on the fence with Sinkhole because its counterpart in RUG, which is Stifle, costs a mere 1. As a Tempo deck, BGw is ill-equipped if you'd ask me. Until they start printing Stifle in black and Thoughtseize/IoK as instants with free alternate costs.

Since most legacy decks rely heavily on use of fetchlands and dual lands, RUG Delver can easily prey on an unsuspecting meta – as long as the RUG player sticks to a Tempo gameplan and don't durdle around with 1/2 Tarmogoyfs.

[DrJones]

It is very easy to explain what tempo is. You set a clock for X turns, then stop the opponent from doing anything that would mess with your clock for those X turns.

What The Rock does is not tempo. It's a strategy focused on a concept called momentum. Momentum comes from the formula mass * speed, which in magic terms equals to threats * clock. Here are the differences with other decks:
1. A deck based on tempo (fixed clock, early threats that don't grow) has a fixed amount of momentum that varies little as the game progresses;
2. A deck based on speed (a.k.a. following the blitzkrieg strategy) focus on an initial (temporal and huge) boost of momentum, then tries to win before it runs out of it.
3. A deck based on momentum starts with low momentum and generally includes cards to slow the opponent's momentum to a halt (discard, removal, etc.), then slowly but steady builds up momentum until it becomes unstoppable (for example, mana-ramp decks, death & taxes, etc).

Linear decks follow a simple strategy known as "human wave", which is pretty bad except under some circumstances, for example when they focus all strenght on a single well known "weak point" that the opponent didn't protect well (for example, dredge, burn, or turbo-fog).

There is not a single "control strategy", but a bunch of different strategies. There are decks following the exhaustion strategy, then there are decks following strategies known as trench warfare, the spanish "tercio", attrition, inertia, etc. I have the full list somewhere.

In sum, any deck ever built in magic has an equivalent to a firmly established war strategy. The ways to play the decks can also be categorized under already established war tactics. Magic players have never tried to apply real world strategy to the game, and as such they're stuck with flawed definitions with lots of overlap such as combo, aggro, control, or card advantage, that are irrelevant and useless for the most part, and don't provide enough information about how a deck should be played, what tries to do, and what strategies are good against them.

[damionblackgear]

Junk started out as a deck that was based G/W and has roots in the "toolbox" style of magic. It has a variety of utility cards designed to answer a variety of different cards and it tries to play efficient, multi-purpose cards because it expects more use out of any given card than other similar decks.

Rock is a B/G control deck. In the early stages of the game it looks to generate mana ramp, play small-scale card advantage, and then proceed to the late game where it is most powerful and end the game with a strong finisher. It runs more board control and hand control than average to buy enough time to reach its more expensive cards.

In modern Legacy, the colors are a little closer because Junk can easily splash black and Rock can easily splash white. The creatures and finishers are also much closer in casting cost nowadays, so you can't really easily identify a 3 mana threat vs. a 5 mana finisher. The strategies are still much different.

The closest thing to a traditional Rock deck is Death Cloud. Other decks may be called Rock but it's really only to try and identify a deck in shorthand (since it's awkward to say "my control but not too controlling or slow B/G based mid-range deck" instead of "my Rock deck").

Junk is basically what you call a G/W based creature deck when Survival of the Fittest is not present, or some similar card that enables a "toolbox" like perhaps Living Wish, except there's still this idea of a utility deck.

Your origin story's a little off so... Correction.


I know that's a joke but I don't think are people aware that Rock (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/pthou02/tech1) was a B/G ramp deck. Ramping with Birds of Paradise, Yavamaya Elder, and the like to play large threats the impacted the board quickly. The last Rock decks that I remember seeing played Spirit Monger as a finisher. Then it became popular to maximize on threats instead of Ramping. Thus, changing the decks playstyle and basic premise (a.k.a. We became a new deck). Mind you, this was an extended Deck as well.

We're also not PT Junk (http://www.mtgnews.com/showthread.php?t=48749) (although we are about as similar as T.E.S. to AnT) as it was an aggro deck that used creatures that would defend themselves (regeneration, protection, or be large) and usually ran 14+ (pseudo)creatures (Spectral Linx, River Boa, Simian Grunts, Call of the Herd). It could be best described as being Dead Guy splashing green (which that thread talked about for a while when every deck was trying to run Goyf). This was also an extended deck.

We got stuck with the name Rock because people couldn't differentiate between the different B/G/W lists and even PT Junk was called Rock (Hence the difference between Aggro Rock, Mid-Range Rock and Control Rock...) and that extended's card pool was very similar to Legacy's card pool for a long time. There was a time where you could play any B/G/W deck and you would be The Rock in either format.

There are actually other decks which were renamed as well due to the ignorance of players. The Truffle Shuffle (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?3816-Deck-The-Truffle-Shuffle&highlight=truffle+shuffle) was actually a control based deck that didn't use Blue. It was semi-successful but still respected enough to be considered when designing a deck.

Currently, Nic Fit (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?20983-Nic-Fit-(GBW-Explorer-Zenith-Control)) is also being considered a Rock deck (before it's even been really run into the world). Oh. Wait... Ramping into a threat... and maintaining position via disruption... That is the closest there is to an active Rock list... I personally like this list (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?20983-Nic-Fit-(GBW-Explorer-Zenith-Control)&p=592765&viewfull=1#post592765) and would use that as a starting point if I was going to play this deck... even if it is splashing for Gifts Ungiven.

Technically, because most of us haven't fought it, we're now The Rock, PT Junk, and Dark Horizons (http://sales.starcitygames.com/deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=35502). Or are we This one? (http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=37412)

Just figured I'd give a quick history lesson.

Since the junk link isn't working I figured I'd just give THIS (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/mastersnice02/guide). You can figure out the age of the article by the fact that it's referencing REAL extended and using an old wizards formatting.

edit - That quote of mine is from 2011 as Nic Fit was really starting to pickup (before it declined again as all of us non-blue decks have).

Edit2 - I believe the example deck Dr Jones is looking for is Goblins.

[Rico Suave]

It is very easy to explain what tempo is. You set a clock for X turns, then stop the opponent from doing anything that would mess with your clock for those X turns.

When people talk about a tempo deck, it is often shorthand for what you are describing. It is an overload of the opponent's defenses before they can be established.

Tempo however is simply time. It is a lot more broad than what you are describing, and what you are describing is a specific strategy that utilizes tempo as its primary focus point. Keep in mind that every strategy makes use of tempo in one shape or another.


What The Rock does is not tempo. It's a strategy focused on a concept called momentum. Momentum comes from the formula mass * speed, which in magic terms equals to threats * clock. Here are the differences with other decks:
1. A deck based on tempo (fixed clock, early threats that don't grow) has a fixed amount of momentum that varies little as the game progresses;
2. A deck based on speed (a.k.a. following the blitzkrieg strategy) focus on an initial (temporal and huge) boost of momentum, then tries to win before it runs out of it.
3. A deck based on momentum starts with low momentum and generally includes cards to slow the opponent's momentum to a halt (discard, removal, etc.), then slowly but steady builds up momentum until it becomes unstoppable (for example, mana-ramp decks, death & taxes, etc).

Linear decks follow a simple strategy known as "human wave", which is pretty bad except under some circumstances, for example when they focus all strenght on a single well known "weak point" that the opponent didn't protect well (for example, dredge, burn, or turbo-fog).

There is not a single "control strategy", but a bunch of different strategies. There are decks following the exhaustion strategy, then there are decks following strategies known as trench warfare, the spanish "tercio", attrition, inertia, etc. I have the full list somewhere.

In sum, any deck ever built in magic has an equivalent to a firmly established war strategy. The ways to play the decks can also be categorized under already established war tactics. Magic players have never tried to apply real world strategy to the game, and as such they're stuck with flawed definitions with lots of overlap such as combo, aggro, control, or card advantage, that are irrelevant and useless for the most part, and don't provide enough information about how a deck should be played, what tries to do, and what strategies are good against them.

Yes this is very applicable, and very insightful.


Your origin story's a little off so... Correction.

I don't see how anything you said disagrees with what I said. Decks do evolve over time, and names ebb and flow with those decks. The name is just a quick way to describe a strategy and as long as the basic strategy is communicated through a name then that is all that's necessary.

PT Junk, btw, evolved from Survival of the Fittest decks.

[Zirath]

I'm not really sure what the point of this distinction is. For starters, blue in Modern has gotten pretty hollowed out by bannings; even setting that aside, the power level of the counters in the format is significantly lower. Okay, I'll concede that Legacy's counters being very cheap or free is important, and I'll grant that grant that context matters, but it still doesn't change things like, "If you draw a discard spell late game it will be worse than drawing a counterspell because the opponent's hand is likely to be fairly empty."

If Brainstorm were black, there would still be a strong draw into counters for those reasons. The fact that it's blue simply means there is no contest.

...

Hanni was talking specifically about whether a tempo build of Junk could take some of RUG's metagame share, which is why I brought up Team America. Honestly, the concept of Junk is vaguely defined enough that people can argue it any way they want, which to me sounds like a symptom of a deeper problem.

Thank you. I think that was the point I was trying to make. And you are correct, counter spells scale better than discard with game length. I should have stated that since I realize I made it seem like I believed otherwise.

I did not understand your point about Team America but I think I do now. The linchpin of this is really black in many ways. Black is the weakest color in Legacy most of the time and it partially stems from the same point you made about in blue in modern: it has lost its most powerful cards to bannings but Wizards has not made changes to recoup the loss. Black is more or less defined (in recent sets) by discard spells, tutors, creature removal, card draw at the cost of life and 1 mana 2/Xs with a draw back. If we think about Legacy, discard spells are the only thing black has over the other colors (and even in that field Vendilion Clique kinda trumps a lot of black's discard plan because of the large flying body combined with flash). All of blacks tutors are horrible right now since all the powerful ones are banned. Dark Confidant and Phyrexian Arena are the only draw engines playable and they are extremely slow and are usually outclasses by Blue's cantrips or the engine generate from Life from the Loam. Even with all the 1 mana 2/2s, Gravecrawler is the only one that shines out because of the engine it provides through recursion. Cards like Kird Ape and Loam Lion are no longer good enough when compared to Goblin Guide and Delver of Secrets so what chance does Sarcomancy or Carnophage have.

I guess all of what I have said is more or less obvious but I like to be a little analytical.

@DrJones: That was quite interesting to read. I enjoyed the definitions a lot. However, as far as tempo is defined, it literally means a turn. Gaining and losing tempo has to do with how each player's board is developed. This is the definition from chess. Every play made causes a gain or loss of tempo. You make a larger tempo gains when you cause your opponent to lose board position without compromising your own. Delver + Daze means that you can prevent your opponent from developing without compromising your aggressive plan. As Rico Suave said, you are describing a Tempo deck. A number of decks can make tempo plays without being a tempo deck. If I am playing NLT and I Ice a Knight of the Reliquary so I can attack on the ground with Tarmogoyfs to pressure my opponent's life/creatures, that can produce an enormous tempo swing because I am forcing my opponent to trade his board position for the Fire/Ice. NLT is a control deck primarily but this is a tempo producing play nonetheless.

Again, maybe this is obvious and I am just rambling.

[catmint]

It would take a very long essay to explain what tempo is, and frankly I don't feel like typing it up because you can google up several different books on the subject and I'll save hours of time. The real question is why you feel like talking about this criminally over-used term as if you are a basis of authority, when it's quite clear you should be quiet and learning instead of talking.

Nailed it... hehe.
Well Hanni is quiet now... not sure if he is learning or still believing everyone else is wrong. :laugh:

[damionblackgear]

I don't see how anything you said disagrees with what I said. Decks do evolve over time, and names ebb and flow with those decks. The name is just a quick way to describe a strategy and as long as the basic strategy is communicated through a name then that is all that's necessary.

PT Junk, btw, evolved from Survival of the Fittest decks.

The off point was that it started out as a GW base deck. The original lists were running green and white creates alongside black disruption. The color counts were became more even over about a 3 month period of it being tested but it started out closer to BG than GW.

The name came from the idea that all of the creatures were "junk". People were dying to Spectral Lynx and River Boa which had been chosen because they could survive all but two cards at the time (Swords and WoG) which being able to swing past almost every deck at the time. The terrible create mark held when porting to legacy almost past the introduction of Goyf, although they had opted to incorporate him over skip past him. Spectral Linx being the link to the old deck.

Less so a more aggressive version of Rock (which had been popularized in 2000 by Sol Maka (Titled The Rock and his Millions) was the origin. Not Survival decks. Survival used a toolbox of creatures where Junk used specific answers via their creatures. Majority of the creature base was actually used in popular Survival at the time (I'd get you proof but the Vengevine version keeps popping up) because they were considered "Junk" and they didn't want to have to tutor for "junk".

As time when on, people began to look at both decks as being the same thing. Rock having limited/lost the Deranged Hermit and Phyrexian Plaguelord for cards like Spirit Monger and Troll Acetic. where the Simian Grunts and Call of the heard eventually turned into Bob, Goyf, and Tidehollow Sculler.

Both decks began to evolve together and indeed attempted using many different cards, i.e Survival. Neither side could really use the other's tools as well. I.e. Recurring Nightmare is a Rock card, where Tidehollow Sculler turned into a popular maindecked Junk card.

The ideology behind each (speed vs control) was maintained between all the different builds. Interestingly enough, it was the Rock, which was arguably more popular because of Spirit Monger (Penis Monger to some) was more popular in The Rock, although both actually played it for a while. So, the Junk title was lost and both decks became known as Rock. From there, it was easy to associate all BG(w) decks as being, The Rock. So, we lost names such as Truffle Shuffle, Deadguy Rock, and others.

Recently, some decks have been pulling out. Nic Fit is the more popular of these but Trisomy 21 (closest to a BG/w Pox Rock) managed to sneak out as well by relying on cards not typically associated with The Rock.

The current builds of The Rock are actually neither of the starting two.

Junk is dismayed because the starting reason behind the creatures was their natural durability, evasion, and cost. Knight lacks for evasion or durability (from anything except lightning bolt) and Bob lacks any form of protection or evasion at all. The cards lead to a more grounded game than a smooth flow of unsuspected threats that are hard to deal with.

Rock decks focused on getting to the late game early and crushing with a large, hard to deal with creature. Using the tools available, Rock attempted to take control of board, and hand as graveyards were a thing. Just not as big a deal as currently (Phantom Nishoba and Akroma, Angel of Wrath being some of the better targets throughout reanimators earlier years, pre-Ravnica1).

Current builds are actually built towards consistency and speed. Most lists lacking even the "preached" about Pernicious Deed, instead opting for a different approach of just stop it from happening. By using creatures as the basis for gaining and advantage (Junk) the current lists allow for the spells to play the control aspect (Rock). So, the current iteration of (commonly referred to as) The Rock/Junk, is actually a different deck that's merged both of them.

There is the rest of the history lesson (although, most doesn't belong in this thread).

[Kich867]

It may not belong but that was interesting as hell to read.

[Richard Cheese]

So is it a rule that every GBx deck has to have a terrible name?

[Rico Suave]

The off point was that it started out as a GW base deck. The original lists were running green and white creates alongside black disruption. The color counts were became more even over about a 3 month period of it being tested but it started out closer to BG than GW.

The name came from the idea that all of the creatures were "junk". People were dying to Spectral Lynx and River Boa which had been chosen because they could survive all but two cards at the time (Swords and WoG) which being able to swing past almost every deck at the time. The terrible create mark held when porting to legacy almost past the introduction of Goyf, although they had opted to incorporate him over skip past him. Spectral Linx being the link to the old deck.

Well, then I suppose now would be a good time to share some history.

The PT Junk you referred to in the wizards article was in Extended, circa 2002. That was not the beginning of PT Junk. PT Junk was originally created as a reaction to the 2000 standard season as a way to beat Fires, which was tearing up standard at the time. That PT Junk deck was strictly G/W. Strictly. And it also had a very, very good match against Fires.

Your analysis of the creatures is also off. Swords to Plowshares didn't exist in this format, for starters, and I won't go into details about the other ins and outs.

PT Junk was later ported to Extended, where it had some success (though not much) but it needed black because 2002 Extended was full of decks like Turboland, Trix, Psychatog, and other dangerous decks which could circumvent board removal and needed to be fought with discard. This is the deck you were referencing.

Both Junk and Rock have both evolved from those days, of course. It is over a decade later so this would be expected. It's also possible to say that neither one really exists in its true form anymore, and the only reason we continue to use those names is simply because people "know" what you are talking about when you say them and coming up with a new, accurate name that sticks is nearly impossible.

As for the rest of your post, I'm going to leave it alone.

[damionblackgear]

Well, then I suppose now would be a good time to share some history.

The PT Junk you referred to in the wizards article was in Extended, circa 2002. That was not the beginning of PT Junk. PT Junk was originally created as a reaction to the 2000 standard season as a way to beat Fires, which was tearing up standard at the time. That PT Junk deck was strictly G/W. Strictly. And it also had a very, very good match against Fires.

Your analysis of the creatures is also off. Swords to Plowshares didn't exist in this format, for starters, and I won't go into details about the other ins and outs.

PT Junk was later ported to Extended, where it had some success (though not much) but it needed black because 2002 Extended was full of decks like Turboland, Trix, Psychatog, and other dangerous decks which could circumvent board removal and needed to be fought with discard. This is the deck you were referencing.

Both Junk and Rock have both evolved from those days, of course. It is over a decade later so this would be expected. It's also possible to say that neither one really exists in its true form anymore, and the only reason we continue to use those names is simply because people "know" what you are talking about when you say them and coming up with a new, accurate name that sticks is nearly impossible.

As for the rest of your post, I'm going to leave it alone.

As I said, that link was because the link from my initial quote no longer worked (404: page not found to be specific). The list on it was from 2000-2001 (same era as Flores btw)

The PT Junk you're referencing the Mike Flores PT Junk deck (http://www.magicdeckvortex.com/DDB/pt_junk.htm) (Voice of All, Rebels, and the rest) That's about as close as the two decks labeled Dark Horizons I listed earlier (Since I'm now pretty sure you missed/skipped it, Here (http://sales.starcitygames.com/deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=35502)and Here (http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=37412)). This isn't, and wasn't, a common occurance but does happen. I could understand your misunderstanding.

The two decks share about as much as Maverick and real Rock (http://www.magicdeckvortex.com/DDB/the_rock_and_his_millions.htm). In fact, the only really shared aspect is, the name.

So, if you didn't notice or just wanted to do some quick look-up, that's not a port to switch from that to something like this (http://www.magicdeckvortex.com/DDB/pt_junk.htm)to this (http://www.wizards.com/sideboard/article.asp?x=ptnor01%5C729decksah) (I'm expecting you to be able to search for either junk or Bryan Hubble). The later is a blatant mod of a similar deck, not a tooling to a different archetype (Aggro to mid-range).

Points for trying though. :wink:

[sdematt]

More interesting thoughts about Junk can be found in the Rock Primer, the first post in the Rock Thread. Hint: I wrote it :)

-Matt

[lavafrogg]

I love everyone that has posted in this thread. Especially the rock guys and their shameless self plugs:)

[Rico Suave]

As I said, that link was because the link from my initial quote no longer worked (404: page not found to be specific). The list on it was from 2000-2001 (same era as Flores btw)

The PT Junk you're referencing the Mike Flores PT Junk deck (http://www.magicdeckvortex.com/DDB/pt_junk.htm) (Voice of All, Rebels, and the rest) That's about as close as the two decks labeled Dark Horizons I listed earlier (Since I'm now pretty sure you missed/skipped it, Here (http://sales.starcitygames.com/deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=35502)and Here (http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=37412)). This isn't, and wasn't, a common occurance but does happen. I could understand your misunderstanding.

The two decks share about as much as Maverick and real Rock (http://www.magicdeckvortex.com/DDB/the_rock_and_his_millions.htm). In fact, the only really shared aspect is, the name.

So, if you didn't notice or just wanted to do some quick look-up, that's not a port to switch from that to something like this (http://www.magicdeckvortex.com/DDB/pt_junk.htm)to this (http://www.wizards.com/sideboard/article.asp?x=ptnor01%5C729decksah) (I'm expecting you to be able to search for either junk or Bryan Hubble). The later is a blatant mod of a similar deck, not a tooling to a different archetype (Aggro to mid-range).

Points for trying though. :wink:

The point is if you're going to go back in time and reference the origin of a deck, it would be best to clarify where its true origin is. PT Junk has its roots, and even the name was used, before the point in time you were claiming it came from. The original deck did not have black - it was G/W. The overall archetype from whence PT Junk spawned was also G/W, and it was around for many years before PT Junk was even named.

Now it's true that variations have come up since then, and we've seen the name Junk used in everything from Extended to Vintage since that time. Over a long period of time decks will change drastically, but it doesn't change too quickly to warrant a name change. A name is just a quick way to describe a deck anyway. In Vintage our "control" decks are often comboing out on turn 3-4.

Regardless it's quite clear that the term "Junk" has very little resemblance to any sort of tempo based strategy, which is why I was originally posting in this thread.

[damionblackgear]

The point is if you're going to go back in time and reference the origin of a deck, it would be best to clarify where its true origin is. PT Junk has its roots, and even the name was used, before the point in time you were claiming it came from. The original deck did not have black - it was G/W. The overall archetype from whence PT Junk spawned was also G/W, and it was around for many years before PT Junk was even named.

Now it's true that variations have come up since then, and we've seen the name Junk used in everything from Extended to Vintage since that time. Over a long period of time decks will change drastically, but it doesn't change too quickly to warrant a name change. A name is just a quick way to describe a deck anyway. In Vintage our "control" decks are often comboing out on turn 3-4.

Regardless it's quite clear that the term "Junk" has very little resemblance to any sort of tempo based strategy, which is why I was originally posting in this thread.

I think you missed the overall point of my last post and haven't really opened up anything new to talk about. Basically my past couple of posts have already dealt "most" (I will actually address this) the topic of debate.

As for name changes, they're finicky things. Most people don't like ot have a deck's name changed (Hence the similarities between the different BGW decks and their common name). On occasion, there are simple changes that influence a name change. The best example would be Canadian Tempo Thresh and Rug Delver (+4 Delver, -x Lavamancer -y cantrip/mongoose | x+y=4). They literally added one card and overnight, it became a new deck.

Another Example would be Nic Fit. While an evolution of this (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?728-Deck-The-Rock-Adapted-to-Legacy&p=216385&viewfull=1#post216385)(Not saying this is the first ever, just using it as a recorded example), because it disappeared for so long, it was allowed a new name. The concept isn't new nor was it unknown when it "came out" but it didn't have enough people aware of it.

More drastic changes occur all the time but do not warrant name changes. Say for the different choices between the Rock decks (Aggressive levels varying). It's not like we call every UGW deck Bant (New Horizons exists!). So, why do we do the same thing for the BGW decks?

It's not really important, and I honestly don't want to deal with naming conventions anymore, SCG killed any chance of it :cry: Miracle Whip (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?20529-DTB-Miracle-Control), 34th Street (http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8882&iddeck=64889) (reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_34th_Street)), Count Chocula (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?23888-Brainstorming-Griselbargain/), and Weird Science (http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8971&iddeck=65533) are all lost deck names. It's just an observation.

I'm pretty much done with it at this point. If you present something new/interesting, please feel free to pm me (I really do respond to them). Otherwise, don't expect more of a response (Everyone can start the "Oh he quit" flames now).

[Mirrislegend]

I thought we could all just agree that Junk is a GBW deck with high quality threats, good removal, and good discard. The specifics of it vary, but that's what the original conversation was about: tempo builds vs Stoneforge builds vs Pernicious Deed builds, etc.

Personally, I believe the point Hanni was trying to make in the opening post was this: Deadguy Ale was a great concept, but in the modern day Black and White alone do not provide the necessary threats. By adding in Green, you get the beats of Goyf and KotR, goodies like Abrupt Decay, and great SB/silver bullet options. At least, that's how I see his concept.

[sdematt]

I would agree that Junk could be very solid right now, but the biggest discussion is based around whether or not to play tempo builds vs Stoneforge builds vs Pernicious Deed builds, etc., just like Mirri said.

-Matt

[death]

The bigger question is if you want to play tempo why not play say, Thresh or Team America?
If you want GWx bash with Knights and have a positive combo matchup why not play Maverick?
Why risk getting blown out by Stifle + Wasteland, when you can play Deadguy Ale or Eva Green?

[Mirrislegend]

The bigger question is if you want to play tempo why not play say, Thresh or Team America?
If you want GWx bash with Knights and have a positive combo matchup why not play Maverick?
Why risk getting blown out by Stifle + Wasteland, when you can play Deadguy Ale or Eva Green?

This is a question that cuts right to the heart of things. Thank you for asking good questions and slicing through the rhetoric!

Here's my personal opinion:
I play Junk over Thresh, because I don't like the "win by the skin of my teeth or don't win at all" mentality. I play it over Team America because TA is fragile (if I remember correctly). I play Junk over Maverick because Junk has card advantage and Maverick does not (This is why Junk beats Mav and can be good against control even without Mav's maindeck hate). Stifle + Wasteland is a significant vulnerability, counteracted wonderfully by Mox Diamond. Junk has more power than Deadguy and more utility and resilience than Eva Green.

[Rico Suave]

I think you missed the overall point of my last post and haven't really opened up anything new to talk about. Basically my past couple of posts have already dealt "most" (I will actually address this) the topic of debate.

As for name changes, they're finicky things. Most people don't like ot have a deck's name changed (Hence the similarities between the different BGW decks and their common name). On occasion, there are simple changes that influence a name change. The best example would be Canadian Tempo Thresh and Rug Delver (+4 Delver, -x Lavamancer -y cantrip/mongoose | x+y=4). They literally added one card and overnight, it became a new deck.

Another Example would be Nic Fit. While an evolution of this (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?728-Deck-The-Rock-Adapted-to-Legacy&p=216385&viewfull=1#post216385)(Not saying this is the first ever, just using it as a recorded example), because it disappeared for so long, it was allowed a new name. The concept isn't new nor was it unknown when it "came out" but it didn't have enough people aware of it.

More drastic changes occur all the time but do not warrant name changes. Say for the different choices between the Rock decks (Aggressive levels varying). It's not like we call every UGW deck Bant (New Horizons exists!). So, why do we do the same thing for the BGW decks?

It's not really important, and I honestly don't want to deal with naming conventions anymore, SCG killed any chance of it :cry: Miracle Whip (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?20529-DTB-Miracle-Control), 34th Street (http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8882&iddeck=64889) (reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_34th_Street)), Count Chocula (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?23888-Brainstorming-Griselbargain/), and Weird Science (http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8971&iddeck=65533) are all lost deck names. It's just an observation.

I'm pretty much done with it at this point. If you present something new/interesting, please feel free to pm me (I really do respond to them). Otherwise, don't expect more of a response (Everyone can start the "Oh he quit" flames now).

No worries. We are basically in agreement anyway.


I would agree that Junk could be very solid right now, but the biggest discussion is based around whether or not to play tempo builds vs Stoneforge builds vs Pernicious Deed builds, etc., just like Mirri said.

-Matt

This is thing...what exactly is a "tempo build" of Junk? It defies the nature of the archetype as well as the nature of a "tempo" deck as we commonly know it.

Tempo decks are largely designed to win before the opponent's defenses are fully established. This is nearly impossible, to my knowledge, with basically any B/G/W incarnation.

[ReinVos]

Why don't we compare Junk to Bant? Instead of comparing Junk to RUG? I think it's best to keep ''tempo'' out of this discussion because it has little to do with Junk.

I think it would be an interesting discussion. Ok, so you choose to play with Knight, Goyf and Plowshares. Which color do you use to complete the deck? Black for more powerful removal and discard? Or blue for Brainstorm, counters and a Jace or two?

You have to ask yourself the same questions when building the deck. Do I want SFM, GSZ, or do I want neither?

Bant and Junk are the most alike. This is probably the reason why GWB was called Dark Horizons when New Horizons (Bant) was doing well.

[Kich867]

This is thing...what exactly is a "tempo build" of Junk? It defies the nature of the archetype as well as the nature of a "tempo" deck as we commonly know it.

Tempo decks are largely designed to win before the opponent's defenses are fully established. This is nearly impossible, to my knowledge, with basically any B/G/W incarnation.

I have to pretty much agree with this. The defining factor, in my opinion, of RUG Tempo is that it can almost fully operate on one land. This means aggressively waste-landing is fine, it runs super cheap / free counterspells to take advantage of the fact that it can run off 1-2 lands and you probably need 3 or 4.

If we were to see some sort of Tempo GBW deck, I feel it would have to follow this same general ideology. Run a lot of cheap / free answers to threats, aggressively attack a resource, and sit on an insanely low curve.

Unfortunately, I think the biggest thing holding this strategy back is the lack of ultra-aggressive / hard to deal with cheap threats in these colors. Nimble Mongoose is too hard to properly utilize without blue, and delver resides in blue.

White has Steppe Lynx, and while Steppe Lynx -often- serves as a one mana tarmogoyf if your manabase is setup correctly, there's times that he's not. Green has Goyf, which is superb, but doesn't offer a ton else (Scythe Tiger maybe? Seems bad though) in conjunction with these colors. Black actually has quite a few cheap beaters, but they all seem fairly bad. At best they swing for 2 instead of 3, which is a huge deal.