Griselstorm (I need help building a sideboard)

[walker]

The deck:

4 Griselbrand
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
4 Entomb
4 Shallow Grave
3 Infernal Tutor
1 Grim Tutor
4 Thoughtseize
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Dark Ritual
4 Lotus petal
2 Chrome Mox
4 Polluted Delta
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Bloodstained Mire
3 Underground Sea
2 Swamp
1 Island

The reason I'm posting this deck is to ask for help building a sideboard.

This deck is awesome. It's incredibly fast and powerful and it's a blast to play. That said it has some glaring weaknesses. It relies heavily on the graveyard, and there is a ton of hate that hoses this deck post sideboard.

I've been working on this deck pretty much since Griselbrand first came out. The allure is the explosiveness and simplicity of the 2 card combo: Entomb + Shallow Grave. Entomb's power is obvious, but Shallow Grave is a unique and powerful card that can combo using LED as a discard outlet. The key to these shenanigans is Shallow Grave is an instant that doesn't target. It also gets better in multiples when needed to fight around counters or grave hate. When your opponent responds to your first shallow grave with surgical, it feels great to respond with another shallow grave (good thing no one's playing extirpate these days.)

Other cards/interactions of note:
Thoughtseize can damage your opponents hand, but I often use it to discard Griselbrand.
Ill-Gotten Gains is awesome. It can discard Griselbrand, fuel storm, or get back tendrils that you may have discarded earlier.
Grim Tutor- this used to be the 4th infernal tutor, but Grim Tutor does some things infernal cannot. First of all it gets entomb/LED/Thoughtsieze/IGG which can be critical if you need to get Griselbrand in the yard. It can also get tendrils if you don't have an LED to pop for infernal tutor.
Brainstorm, ponder, and probe are insane in this deck.

Sideboard:

The sideboard has been incredibly challenging. The deck is so tight that I have not been able to successfully cut maindeck cards for sideboard cards. There are plenty of cards that seem solid, but cutting maindeck cards = cutting consistency which this deck cannot do without. This leads me to believe that I have 2 choices for sideboarding- 1 choice is a transformational sideboard, and the other choice is to keep the maindeck mostly in tact and pray. The one card i will like to sideboard no matter what is emrakul, since it gives me a way to battle leyline of sanctity/ storm hate

These are the ideas I have for transformational sideboards:

Splash red for a storm sideboard with burning wishes that doesn't rely heavily on the graveyard. It might be possible to adjust the mainboard slightly to accommodate this plan.

Leyline helm combo. this seems pretty weak without counter backup. Maybe there's a way to make it work.

Creatures- delvers, nivmagus elemental, tombstalker.... this seems pretty bad

If I decide not to transform:

defense grid (haven't tried this, it was just recommended to me, possibly promising)

splash white for silence effects

darkblast/massacre/kill spells to battle hate bears

bounce spells

duress/therapy

I'm pretty much at a loss when it comes to the sideboard and I'd like to build one from the ground up. If anyone has any ideas or advice I'd be very appreciative.

[RaNDoMxGeSTuReS]

Find the Count Chocula thread.

[.dk]

There is sort of already a thread for this, although we're not currently running LEDs in it:

http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?24104-TinFins-3-Return-of-the-Onion-Burst

We started out with a very similar build, but moved away from LED/IT eventually. It could still be right now....

[walker]

Thanks, but I've read the tin fins thread and the count chocula thread. The conversation in the tin fins thread was not open to LED lists and therefore unproductive for me. Since LED makes this deck totally different, I made a new thread. I put a lot of work into this list to make it hum and I really need to find sideboard plans. If you have any insight I would greatly appreciate it!

[.dk]

Nah, post it in the tin fins thread. Been thinking about an LED version lately again anyway. :)

[Richard Cheese]

I think if I were going to play with LEDs again, I'd just board into UB AnT with Cabal Rits, bounce, the 4th IT, and AdNaus. Either that or Show and Tell and a ton of protection.

That said, I stopped running LEDs because the deck was basically a worse AnT pre-board. The main advantages (that I see) of running Griselbrand over AdNaus is that you need less mana and usually less storm count to win. The downside is that it takes up way more slots with Entomb, Griz, and reanimation spells, so you generally have less protection. Bad news when you have to dump your whole hand to go off. It just didn't seem to fix any of the deck's real problems.

I guess I'm biased, but I would look at TinFins and see where we're at currently (yes the sideboard is still the biggest issue). Emrakul as a primary win-con is proving to be more compact than Tendrils, makes it easier to play around Thalia, and avoids Teeg altogether. The deck is already pretty resilient to counters since we dropped LED/IT in favor of more reanimation spells and Careful Study, so you can attempt to reanimate over multiple turns, or even multiple times in one turn.

[walker]

I think if I were going to play with LEDs again, I'd just board into UB AnT with Cabal Rits, bounce, the 4th IT, and AdNaus. Either that or Show and Tell and a ton of protection.

That said, I stopped running LEDs because the deck was basically a worse AnT pre-board. The main advantages (that I see) of running Griselbrand over AdNaus is that you need less mana and usually less storm count to win. The downside is that it takes up way more slots with Entomb, Griz, and reanimation spells, so you generally have less protection. Bad news when you have to dump your whole hand to go off. It just didn't seem to fix any of the deck's real problems.

I guess I'm biased, but I would look at TinFins and see where we're at currently (yes the sideboard is still the biggest issue). Emrakul as a primary win-con is proving to be more compact than Tendrils, makes it easier to play around Thalia, and avoids Teeg altogether. The deck is already pretty resilient to counters since we dropped LED/IT in favor of more reanimation spells and Careful Study, so you can attempt to reanimate over multiple turns, or even multiple times in one turn.

I don't think you can rightly say the deck is worse that AnT pre-board because they are so different they aren't really comparable. Entomb + Shallow Grave is a compact combo that pretty much always wins if you get it off, like you said it cost less mana and even less if you divide it over two turns, and has a much higher turn 1 kill rate, and probably a much higher turn 2 and 3 kill rate too, and it's really strong at taking game 1's. If I were to compare Griselstorm to another combo deck it would be belcher, because of the speed. You are right that the cost of this power is taking up so many slots in the deck. Certainly very costly, but I'm trying to find a sideboard to make it work.

I truly mean no offense when I say this, but looking at the most current UBr version of the deck posted by dk. in the tin fins thread, I can't imagine this deck is giving you good results. My main reason for saying this is that you rely solely on entomb and faithless looting to discard griselbrand. My experience with careful study made me realize that this effect is horrible with only 4 creatures in the deck. I can't imagine it gets much better with 5. Looting has flashback, yes, but if you're investing resources flashing back looting you are probably really far behind. Burning wish is bizarre without LED. Has it been effective for you? It doesn't seem likely to wish for tendrils and have the mana up to cast it. You don't run gitaxian probe which has been an absolute all star in my deck. Knowing what you're up against is incredibly valuable information at the bargain cost of 2 life. My main critique is that you're not focusing entirely on resolving a shallow grave with a griselbrand in the graveyard as fast as possible. Where's thoughtseize? I've won countless games ripping griselbrand out of my hand with thoughtsieze. If nothing else cut duress for thoughtsieze. Emrakul seems unreliable in your deck. If you don't rip entomb or emrakul + looting in the top 14 what is your plan? Give them another turn?? On average what turn do you kill?

My deck proposes a different strategy. I maximize the possibility for a turn 1 hand. That is my ultimate goal, and cutting LED is counter intuitive. They will have force in their opening hand roughly 40% of the time. I will have a turn 1 or turn 2 hand more often than that, and roughly 40% of the time the probe in my hand will tell me if they have the force. My philosophy is do whatever it takes to kill as fast as possible. Slowing down the maindeck is not an option.

Something else I noticed- this deck is tricky to play. I've lost multiple games to my own mistakes, which is why I keep playing it. If all of my losses came at shortcomings of the deck I would give up the dream and play something proven. But as long as I'm at fault I will stick to it and hope to improve myself and go on to prove that Griselstorm is the real deal.

[phazonmutant]

This list is similar to a list on the storm boards that I tested after playing with Tin Fins for a bit. Honestly, Tin Fins is way better against a non-goldfish. LED and IF is cute (and fast), but very vulnerable to disruption.

So the way I see this style of Griselbrand deck from a fair bit testing (from most belcher to least):
LED-IF - style Tin Fins (very weak to disruption and doesn't have much selection, but fast)
regular Tin-Fins (slightly slower with a 20%+ t1 win rate, but still has some disruption)
"Next-Level" Reanimator (lots of disruption, but no Dark Rituals and storm kill)

And off somewhere, Count Chocula (which has the occasional quick kill, but is otherwise slow, has consistancy issues and is probably hated out by now).

I really seriously think that next level reanimator is the best of the bunch right now. People aren't playing creature hate like Humility or Thalia, they're playing Stifle-able grave hate and lots of Force of Wills. Maybe the answer is a combo of NLR with Dark Rituals and cutting some Forces? Dunno. But definitely not LED. You're a Belcher deck that's also vulnerable to grave hate.

[Richard Cheese]

I don't think you can rightly say the deck is worse that AnT pre-board because they are so different they aren't really comparable. Entomb + Shallow Grave is a compact combo that pretty much always wins if you get it off, like you said it cost less mana and even less if you divide it over two turns, and has a much higher turn 1 kill rate, and probably a much higher turn 2 and 3 kill rate too, and it's really strong at taking game 1's. If I were to compare Griselstorm to another combo deck it would be belcher, because of the speed. You are right that the cost of this power is taking up so many slots in the deck. Certainly very costly, but I'm trying to find a sideboard to make it work.

I truly mean no offense when I say this, but looking at the most current UBr version of the deck posted by dk. in the tin fins thread, I can't imagine this deck is giving you good results. My main reason for saying this is that you rely solely on entomb and faithless looting to discard griselbrand. My experience with careful study made me realize that this effect is horrible with only 4 creatures in the deck. I can't imagine it gets much better with 5. Looting has flashback, yes, but if you're investing resources flashing back looting you are probably really far behind. Burning wish is bizarre without LED. Has it been effective for you? It doesn't seem likely to wish for tendrils and have the mana up to cast it. You don't run gitaxian probe which has been an absolute all star in my deck. Knowing what you're up against is incredibly valuable information at the bargain cost of 2 life. My main critique is that you're not focusing entirely on resolving a shallow grave with a griselbrand in the graveyard as fast as possible. Where's thoughtseize? I've won countless games ripping griselbrand out of my hand with thoughtsieze. If nothing else cut duress for thoughtsieze. Emrakul seems unreliable in your deck. If you don't rip entomb or emrakul + looting in the top 14 what is your plan? Give them another turn?? On average what turn do you kill?

My deck proposes a different strategy. I maximize the possibility for a turn 1 hand. That is my ultimate goal, and cutting LED is counter intuitive. They will have force in their opening hand roughly 40% of the time. I will have a turn 1 or turn 2 hand more often than that, and roughly 40% of the time the probe in my hand will tell me if they have the force. My philosophy is do whatever it takes to kill as fast as possible. Slowing down the maindeck is not an option.

Something else I noticed- this deck is tricky to play. I've lost multiple games to my own mistakes, which is why I keep playing it. If all of my losses came at shortcomings of the deck I would give up the dream and play something proven. But as long as I'm at fault I will stick to it and hope to improve myself and go on to prove that Griselstorm is the real deal.

So we agree that the deck doesn't really need the mana LED provides. Maybe I'm missing something, but how much does LED actually speed the deck up or increase the turn 1 percentage?

I agree that binning Griselbrand is the main weakness of this whole archetype. We need to update the TinFins thread to reflect current lists that are running Thoughtseize (I'm also testing out Cabal Therapy, which I strongly suggest you try as well). I don't think counting on 4x Thoughtseize to do double duty as a discard outlet and your only protection in an LED list is the way to go though.

On Emrakul, personally I've found it more reliable than Tendrils, and more compact. If you do happen to whiff, you just swing and set yourself up to go off the next turn. .dk runs both, but his white splash list has the potential to draw far more cards than the straight UB version (I'm not going to spoil it if he's keeping the tech under wraps for the GP).

[walker]

@phazonmuant- where/what are the storm boards? I've heard them mentioned several times before but I haven't found them. Sounds like a wonderful place. Comparing my LED list to belcher is a good comparison. What my deck has that belcher lacks is the ability to draw a bunch of cards, more ability play around countermagic and grave hate (by responding with a 2nd shallow grave, or disrupting their hand with thoughtsieze), and the ability to combo without dumping your whole hand (ex. t1 cast entomb, t2 cast shallow grave it gets countered you still have cards in your hand and 2 lands on board.) You might be right that NLR is the best shallow grave deck, I haven't checked out that deck much, but I'll look into it. I could definitely see using more creatures to activate careful study being really good. Regardless of what the best shallow grave deck is, I still want my LED griselstorm to be optimized. I'm really not concerned with playing the best deck. If I was I never would have built this deck lol. I don't really play legacy much besides at tournaments so I like storm decks because they are fun to practice solitaire. And this one's my baby.

@RichardCheese- You don't need LED mana to reanimate griselbrand, unless you used LED -> IT discarding griselbrand. The point is LED opens up more winning combos, besides entomb/shallow grave, that are possible to get off on the first turn (here are my combos- entomb/SG, thoughtsieze/griselbrand/SG, LED/griselbrand/SG, LED/griselbrand/IT, probably something with IGG, LED/IT/mana[rare occasion you dont even need gman to win t1] and there might be more.) More combos makes your brainstorms and ponders way better at pulling a t1 out of thin air, or ensuring your t2 or t3. Once griselbrand is on the board LED is still beastly, at worst it's still free storm, and it's nuts with IGG.

As far as running more protection maindeck- it's impossible. There's no room. Cutting the consistency for protection is the wrong way to approach this deck. I don't mind because I'd be playing belcher otherwise. In the sideboard... maybe, but I think the list is too tight, and my only option is transformational sideboard. I came up with a cool idea that I hope will work, I'll post it after scgLA this weekend. If it does work it might be the best thing ever.

[phazonmutant]

@phazonmuant- where/what are the storm boards? I've heard them mentioned several times before but I haven't found them. Sounds like a wonderful place. [...] Regardless of what the best shallow grave deck is, I still want my LED griselstorm to be optimized. I'm really not concerned with playing the best deck. If I was I never would have built this deck lol. I don't really play legacy much besides at tournaments so I like storm decks because they are fun to practice solitaire. And this one's my baby.

Just google search teamstormboards. They have an application process but it's easy. It's kinda dead though.

From that perspective of just optimizing this strategy, I'd probably cut the Grim and the IGG from the main at least and add another Tendrils and the 4th Infernal. I'd also want to find room for the third Chrome Mox. Also, replace Thoughtseize with Cabal Therapy in the main. The life loss can hurt and you pretty much always name Force of Will game 1. The sideboard is definitely the tricky part, even over in TinFins. One option is to become sorta like the Show and Tell deck at GP Ghent and board in 4 Show and Tells, 4 Progenitus, and some sol lands. That might push you to have a Grim Tutor in the main... But yeah, you can sorta transform into Chocula and it's not awful. Another option is to add Tundra or something and play Pull from Eternity, but that's a little ambitious. It does allow you to still have nut t1 draws if they don't have it though.

[walker]

Just google search teamstormboards. They have an application process but it's easy. It's kinda dead though.

From that perspective of just optimizing this strategy, I'd probably cut the Grim and the IGG from the main at least and add another Tendrils and the 4th Infernal. I'd also want to find room for the third Chrome Mox. Also, replace Thoughtseize with Cabal Therapy in the main. The life loss can hurt and you pretty much always name Force of Will game 1. The sideboard is definitely the tricky part, even over in TinFins. One option is to become sorta like the Show and Tell deck at GP Ghent and board in 4 Show and Tells, 4 Progenitus, and some sol lands. That might push you to have a Grim Tutor in the main... But yeah, you can sorta transform into Chocula and it's not awful. Another option is to add Tundra or something and play Pull from Eternity, but that's a little ambitious. It does allow you to still have nut t1 draws if they don't have it though.

Cool thanks for letting me know, I've seen that site before but I didn't sign up because I wasnt sure what I was signing up for. I'll definitely check that out now.

I won't cut IGG for a second tendrils... IGG has so much more utility and can always get tendrils either from the yard or get back a tutor if I need to search for tendrils. Sometimes it's a dead draw, but always just as dead as tendrils would be. About cutting grim for the 4th IT, it's debatable, but I've never had grim and wished it were IT, while on the other hand I've found myself stuck with no way to get gman in the graveyard and a dead IT in my hand, that's why I cut the 4th IT for the grim and haven't looked back. I've used grim to get entomb several times. A 3rd Chrome Mox might be good but I don't think I want to cut a land for it and I don't have any other cards to cut. Cutting thoughtsieze for therapy is something I've thought about, if my deck had a higher turn 1 rate I would make the switch, but sometimes when you lose the roll with a turn 2 hand you need to take a counterbalance or teeg.

I've thought about splashing white mostly for silence out of the sideboard. I'm sure I don't like that much because getting a winning hand will be less likely. Pull from eternity counters surgical, but that's about it, if they have surgical + cage or rip or any the other possible hates then I'm toast. If I go the show and tell route progenitus seems pretty amazing, but last time I tested SnT it didn't impress me. It's probably time to try again.

From my experience I have a high percentage of winning game 1, from which point I just have to not lose game 2 in order to take the match. So my idea is, side into a new combo-> RIP /energy field, I will also include a helm. If I can set up that combo, (they might even help me with their own RIP) my opponent will hopefully not be able to win, and eventually I can land a helm to seal it if they don't scoop. I would probably fill up the rest of the slots with some more targetted discard and perhaps an enlightened tutor. I need to analyze some decklists to find out what matchups that strategy can work against. It's definitely pretty out there, but I need to find out if it might be effective because if I can make it work I will be pleased.