Delverless BUG

[Agrippa91]

Hi together!

The deck I'm presenting is similar to BUG Delver, but has enough difference that I think an own thread is justified. Main reason is that this deck doesn't actually play Delver.
See, I played BUG Delver and there seem to be two reasons why this deck imo has difficulties in what it does:
1. The curve is too slow. As it turns out 2 mana for a simple removal spell is a lot, meaning it's a major tempo investment everytime we want to kill off a creature, especially in the earlygame. Also a lot of the other cards cost 2 mana, making for clunky draws.
2. We have to balance between the blue count for Force of Will on the one side and the instant/sorcery count on the other side, making both cards much worse than in other decks. There're not many blue instants we want to play. I have bad experience with Stifle because unlike Grixis and RUG BUG can't hold open spells that often.

Daze offers BUG early game interaction that helps gaining an early advantage. The thing with BUG Delver I fear most are its card advantage cards paired with disruption: A t2 Hymn to Tourach or Dark Confidant that gets paired with a t1 thoughtseize or backed up by a Daze can gain an early lead. Also Liliana helps a lot with a deck that plays her as a top curve and has no problem dumping its hand. But there's a new 3-drop on the block:

The new card Leovold, Emissary of Trest helps a lot with the disruption plan. Here's why:
Against fair decks he's good when your opponent doesn't have removal. We play already creatures at 1 and 2 that are "have to be removed" material. Now Leovold makes finding additional removal extremely difficult. Not does he stop the opponent's cantripping, he also trades 2-for-1, drawing a card as soon as he gets targeted by removal.
Against combo Leovold pitches to FoW, prevents the opponent from cantripping and draws a card every time we get targeted with Discard.
Things he does include:
- preventing Jace from using any ability profitably except fatesealing oneself.
- preventing Griselbrand from drawing cards
- drawing you a card any time the opponent uses targeted abilities like Jitte, Rishadan Port, Wasteland or Maze of Ith, effectively shutting these abilities off most of the time.
- drawing a card every single time a copy of Tendrils of Agony targets you. Note that we have 2 Mindbreak Traps in the sideboard.
- Prevents draws from Glimpse of Nature and Elvish Visionary, shutting down 2 of the 3 avenues from Elf players to win (third being Natural Order)
- draws a card any time a burn player plays a burn spell.


The relatively high 3 toughness offer offensive as well as defensive potential against Thalia, Young Pyromancer, Shardless Agent, Snapcaster Mage and other utility creatures.


So here's the plan: We have 10 "payoff" cards that give us card advantage: Hymn to Tourach, Baleful Strix, Dark Confidant, Liliana of the Veil and Leovold. Sticking one of these early is really important with this deck. We ensure this with Thoughtseize and Daze as early interaction and Ponder to dig for it backed up by FoW.

Of course we can't play a tempo oriented BUG list without 4 DRS, 4 Goyfs (push through damage) and 4 Abrupt Decay (since this deck is more midrange we'd rather play this than Lightning Bolt, even if we had the choice). Note that these goyfs tend to be biggere than "Delver-Goyfs" at 4/5 because we have 2 Artifacts and 2 Planeswalkers in the deck. Getting it up to 5/6 is quite important since this can block the opponent's Angler and Reality Smasher which are pretty big players in the metagame (we have a healthy distribution otherwise and e.g. have enough sorceries in the gy).

I tried out Jace, but having to go up to like 22 lands made Daze very weird (we got stuck with too much lands in hand and had to delayJace because we kept bouncing back lands with Daze). Daze is really at its best when you can use the land drop because you have no other land in hand. I also overestimated the difference between 3 and 4 mana. So I went back to 20 lands and smoothed out the early game.

This deck plays pretty much like a Delver deck only that it's not damage you're trying to gain early on and leverage to the end game but card advantage. Similar decks would be Stoneblade of any flavor. I have the feeling though that we're better against combo than they are.

Enough talk, here's the list I've been working on:

Lands (20):
4 Underground Sea
3 Bayou
1 Tropical Island
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Polluted Delta
4 Wasteland

Creatures (14):
4 Deathrite Shaman
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Dark Confidant
2 Baleful Strix
2 Leovold, Emissary of Trest

Instants and Sorceries (24):
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
2 Thoughtseize
2 Hymn to Tourach
4 Abrupt Decay
4 Daze
4 Force of Will

Planeswalkers (2):
2 Liliana of the Veil

Sideboard (15):
2 Pithing Needle
1 Nihil Spellbomb
2 Invasive Surgery
2 Mindbreak Trap
1 Surgical Extraction
2 Disfigure
2 Marsh Casualties
1 True-Name-Nemesis
1 Maelstrom Pulse
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor


The matchups should be rather 50/50 across the board, here's some boarding plans for the most common matchups:

Miracles (going full midrange):
-4 Daze
-4 Wasteland
+2 Pithing Needle
+1 Nihil Spellbomb
+2 Invasive Surgery
+1 True-Name-Nemesis
+1 Maelstrom Pulse
+1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Shardless BUG (grinding, but with more tempo):
-2 Thoughtseize
-4 Force of Will
+2 Invasive Surgery
+2 Disfigure
+1 Maelstrom Pulse
+1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Eldrazi:
-2 Thoughtseize otp/-2 Hymn otd
-2 Leovold, Spymaster of Trest
+2 Disfigure
+1 Maelstrom Pulse
+1 True-Name-Nemesis

Grixis Delver:
-2 Thoughtseize otp/ -2 Hymn otd
-2 Liliana of the Veil
-2 Force of Will
+2 Disfigure
+2 Marsh Casualties
+1 Maelstrom Pulse
+1 True-Name-Nemesis

RUG Delver:
-2 Thoughtseize otp/ -2 Hymn otd
-2 Force of Will
+1 Nihil Spellbomb
+2 Disfigure
+1 True-Name-Nemesis

Death & Taxes:
-2 Hymn to Tourach (Wiltleaf Liege, hard to cast with Thalia out)
-2 Daze
-2 Liliana of the Veil (Wiltleaf Liege, hard to cast with Thalia out)
-2 Force of Will
+2 Pithing Needle
+2 Disfigure
+2 Marsh Casualties
+1 True-Name-Nemesis
+1 Maelstrom Pulse

Lands:
-2 Thoughtseize
-2 Hymn
-2 Abrupt Decay
-2 Baleful Strix
+2 Pithing Needle
+1 Nihil Spellbomb
+1 Surgical Extraction
+2 Invasive Surgery
+1 True-Name-Nemesis
+1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Elves:
-2 Baleful Strix
-2 Liliana of the Veil (clunky, just eats a 1/1)
-2 Force of Will (we have 2 Surgeries to counter Glimpse and NO, GSZ if need be)
+2 Invasive Surgery
+2 Disfigure
+2 Marsh Casualties

Infect:
-2 Hymn to Tourach (we'd rather affect the board or pick/see with Thoughtseize)
-2 Liliana of the Veil (too clunky, just runs into Spell Pierce and Daze)
-2 Leovold, Emissary of Trest (too clunky, abilities don't matter that much against aggro)
+2 Pithing Needle (Inkmoth is especially hard to hit with Decay as standard removal)
+2 Disfigure
+2 Marsh Casualties

Burn (thoughtseize for assured t1 interaction needed I think):
-4 Wasteland
-2 Dark Confidant
+2 Disfigure
+2 Invasive Surgery
+1 Maelstrom Pulse
+1 True-Name-Nemesis

Matchups in general:
I hope this deck provides an approach to tempo that allows to play more midrange against Miracles (4 Decays help a lot) with having the chance to grind out the games post-sideboard. It also seems rather good against Aggro thanks to the huge goyfs, Lilianas and Strixes, at least as far as I've tested against Delver. Leovold is just insane against lands as I had to witness just the other day.
I think this deck might be bad against other grindy decks that go "bigger" like Esper Deathblade and Shardless BUG, I'm not too sure though because I haven't tested these matchups yet.

I switched to MtGO a while ago and only play casually with Proxies in paper so unfortunately I don't get to test as much with this deck as I'd love to. I'll eventually build this deck online though once Conspiracy is out there. So far (playing paper with a friend) it has really impressed me and is a blast to play.

[ashent]

Note: You missed 4 lands in your OP. I assume they are 4 Wastelands.

I played Leovold as a 2 of today, and have been working on Delverless BUG myself for a while.

After testing today, and looking over your list, I would actually run this instead:

20
2 Bayou
3 Tropical Island
3 Underground Sea
4 Polluted Delta
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Wasteland

14
4 Deathrite Shaman
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Baleful Strix
2 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
2 True-Name Nemesis

26
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
2 Thoughtseize
2 Hymn to Tourach
4 Abrupt Decay
2 Spell Pierce
4 Daze
4 Force of Will

Let me know what you think. I unfortunately do not have time right now to go into the list I played today and what worked and what didn't, but I think the main thing I would argue against is the Liliana. We're playing Leo so now we get to rock countermagic, and it feels awful to have reactive cards stuck in hand that you want to hold onto while attempting to tick Lili up. I like having 2 in the sideboard that come in while counters do not (as in the opposite of the matches where we are bringing Flusterstorm in for.)

[H]

Not to be a jerk, but I don't see why this doesn't fit in to this thread: [Deck] Team America (Midrange/Control Thread) (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?23429-Deck-Team-America-(Midrange-Control-Thread)/page61) since this is just a midrange version of TA.

[Fox]

You could also put it in any other BUG thread that features DRS as the only 1-mana threat/Decay/FoW/cantrip cartel. The color requirements in this Daze deck are all over the place :b::b: here, :u::u: there, and some :b::g::u: for good measure. The higher and more color-intensive mana curve doesn't work well with a game plan of picking up Islands, Wasteland activations, and avoiding Bayou in opening hand.

Every time you pick up that first land for a Daze, you'll probably counter something...but you'll be an additional turn from reaching the 2cmc threat, which gives your opponent a pressure-free draw plus another land drop to help invalidate your 5 remaining soft counters. That's not a great situation to be in when the deck doesn't recover via a combo. In theory the deck seems to want to go in two different directions at the same time.

[Agrippa91]

The thing with Daze is that you never daze something that doesn't lose you the game when you only have 1 land and no DRS out. It's perfectly fine to Daze when you have 2 mana since most of the time you just want 2 mana next turn anyways (at least in my experience).

The reason why I figured this would need an own thread was that I experienced with Grixis Delver and Grixis Pyromancer that these decks play quite differently. A single thread is kind of counterproductive there, e.g. Grixis Delver would never ever play Baleful Strix in the mainboard and Snapcaster Mages are also pretty much never seen, but they're both staples in Grixis Pyromancer decks.
I could be wrong in case of this and BUG Delver, I'll leave it up to the mods to decide what to do.

@Ashent: I think that Spell Pierce is a card that doesn't go well at all in BUG. It's ok in some Stonblade lists, but only really great in an aggressive red delver deck (optimally with Stifle).
This deck really wants to tap out almost every turn since it has stuff that for Legacy proportions is really clunky and expensive. Getting to 3 mana for Liliana, Leovold (or TNN in your case) is not always easy, but doable. Holding up Spell Pierce consistently in the meanwhile is not.
I really understand your urge to want countermagic, I just don't think it's the kind of tempo that a deck full of 2 and 3 drops supports. It's just better to go T1 Thoughtseize T2 Hymn/Bob/Tarmogoyf T3 wasting+play2drop/dazing+2drop/3drop than holding up spell pierce at any time here.

You're right that Liliana is bad with reactive cards, but FoW as well as Daze are easily pitchable the turn after she comes into play forcing your opp to sacrifice stuff: Daze because it's already later in the game, FoW because now the grind phase begins and you don't want to 2-for-1 yourself here. Exceptions are of course when playing e.g. against storm, but there you'll be able to keep your FoW and just pitch whatever you draw.

[H]

The reason why I figured this would need an own thread was that I experienced with Grixis Delver and Grixis Pyromancer that these decks play quite differently. A single thread is kind of counterproductive there, e.g. Grixis Delver would never ever play Baleful Strix in the mainboard and Snapcaster Mages are also pretty much never seen, but they're both staples in Grixis Pyromancer decks.
I could be wrong in case of this and BUG Delver, I'll leave it up to the mods to decide what to do.

The tread that I linked to does not have Delver lists in it though, it's for all the non-Delver lists.

Just a suggestion, I don't make these kind of decisions.

[Agrippa91]

The tread that I linked to does not have Delver lists in it though, it's for all the non-Delver lists.

Just a suggestion, I don't make these kind of decisions.

Oh ok my bad then, I thought this was the BUG Delver thread. I'll shift this over there then so please leave your comments in Team America (Midrange/Control Thread) (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?23429-Deck-Team-America-(Midrange-Control-Thread)/page61)

So any mod coming by may delete this thread then.