(s)NO and Tell

[LynterriaHatake]

A love story as old as time...

...fatties...

https://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=193452&type=card https://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=179496&type=card

...and ways to cheat them out.

https://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=5697&type=card https://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=3671&type=card

History

With the printing of Progenitus in 2009, a number of Natural Order decks, all Bant (outside of a lone Survival of the Fittest deck), all containing the big, dumb 5-color avatar, top-8ed Legacy events big and small over the next year. Legacy had only seen very few NO decks up until this point, usually with the much-inferior Simic Sky Swallower as the fatty of choice. These ProBant decks continued to do well for the next few years, finally tapering off in 2012-2013, minus a 2nd place finish in 2017 by Niwa Takahiro. A possible reason for the decline? The printing of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Almost immediately after she was printed, Sneak & Show emerged as a fresh, new, powerful way to win with a huge creature. A few Bant S&T decks existed then, adding the new A+B to the old ProBant shell, but the coming of Griselbrand and Omniscience in 2012 cemented Sneak & Show and Omnitell as the premier options for cheating in fatties (without using the graveyard).

Inspiration

The idea to create a deck like this came from considering what Green could bring to the table as a splash color in Omnitell. Eureka is often discussed in the Discord channel and certainly has more synergy with Omniscience than Natural Order does, but it is not an easy card to acquire in paper and is played in virtually no other decks. Eventually I thought of some modifications with parallels to Sneak & Show decks - mana acceleration (Noble Hierarch vs Lotus Petal), another A (Natural Order vs Sneak Attack), and another B (Progenitus vs Griselbrand). A clear downside to this strategy compared to Sneak & Show's is there is less synergy between different As and Bs - the only cross-over between Show-Emrakul and NO-Prog is Show-Prog - but preliminary testing with this deck has been fairly successful. There is a short history of decks like this, however: the ProBant decks in the window between the printing of Emrakul and the death of the archetype. Using these decks as a base, I constructed a more modern incarnation of this NO and S&T, taking advantage of some new tools that have been printed since 2013.

The Deck

There are 3 main axes to consider when building this deck - UG vs Bant, Omniscience + Cunning Wish vs just fatties, and Snow vs no Snow. These all have pros and cons - Bant gives access to fancy tools like Teferi, Time Raveler and Stoneforge Mystic, and Noble Hierarch already produces White, but a 3-color manabase is naturally less resilient than 2-color compared to the days before Delver and Moon Stompy; the OmniWish package is great in providing an instant-speed win with S&T and allowing a wish-board full of silver bullets, but it takes up a lot of deck space and adds even more non-synergy between the combos of the deck; being a Snow deck lets you run the fresh new Ice-Fang Coatl, often a flash-able Baleful Strix you can sac to NO, but needing to run some density of Snow Basics alongside duals leads to some tension in the manabase, even in just two colors.

There is some correlation between these axes (you probably wouldn't want to be Bant and Snow for manabase reasons, OmniWish probably takes up too much space to fit in the W/x tools of Bant, etc...) so there are probably only two optimal versions of the deck - Bant Snowless Omniless, and UG Snow Omni. Coming from an Omnitell background I settled on the latter for myself, but Bant is probably worth testing.

~UG sNO and Tell~

//11 Creatures
4 Noble Hierarch
3 Ice-Fang Coatl
1 Progenitus
3 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

//13 Instants
4 Brainstorm
1 Impulse
3 Cunning Wish
1 Intuition
4 Force of Will

//11 Sorceries
4 Ponder
4 Show and Tell
3 Natural Order

//5 Enchantments
2 Sylvan Library
3 Omniscience

//20 Lands
2 Ancient Tomb
1 City of Traitors
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Flooded Strand
1 Wooded Foothills
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Polluted Delta
2 Snow-Covered Forest
4 Snow-Covered Island
2 Tropical Island

//9 Wishboard
1 Flusterstorm
1 Hydroblast
1 Noxious Revival
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Veil of Summer
1 Eladamri's Call
1 Release the Ants
1 Force of Vigor
1 Firemind's Foresight

//6 Sideboard
2 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
1 Hydroblast
2 Narset, Parter of Veils
1 Elderscale Wurm



~Bant NO and Tell~

//15 Creatures
4 Noble Hierarch
3 Birds of Paradise
3 Progenitus
3 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

//6 Planeswalkers
2 Narset, Parter of Veils
2 Teferi, Time Raveler
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

//8 Instants
4 Brainstorm
1 Flusterstorm
1 Spell Pierce
4 Force of Will

//11 Sorceries
4 Ponder
4 Show and Tell
3 Natural Order

//20 Lands
2 Ancient Tomb
1 City of Traitors
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Forest
2 Flooded Strand
3 Island
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Tropical Island
2 Tundra
2 Windswept Heath

//15 Sideboard
2 Hydroblast
2 Surgical Extraction
2 Veil of Summer
4 Stoneforge Mystic
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Force of Vigor
1 Batterskull
1 Elderscale Wurm


Card Choices

(coming soon)

Matchups

(coming soon)

[Fox]

Suggest tutorable sac fodder: Dryad Arbor.

[FTW]

Dryad Arbor does seem important, even if it hurts the Snow count. You need enough easy fodder for NO. Facing removal you can fetch Arbor and immediately cast NO without passing priority, giving opponent no window to kill your creature.

What does this build offer over OmniTell or SneakShow? What's the purpose of this direction? There's no synergy between some of the combo pieces (Emrakul and Omniscience are dead in hand if you're going for NO), which leads to more variable card quality and higher variance than SneakShow (where any cheaty + any fatty = combo). Is Griselbrand really not good enough? Does Progenitus help that much that it's worth the hit to synergy?

Show and Tell is also slightly worse here than in other decks, with only 7 live targets to deploy. It would make more sense if you ran the full set of Progenitus. Progenitus also pitches well to Force of Will/Force of Negation/Chrome Mox, opening up some other synergies and card choices.

[LynterriaHatake]

Suggest tutorable sac fodder: Dryad Arbor.

Dryad Arbor does seem important, even if it hurts the Snow count.

Can't believe I overlooked Dryad Arbor, definitely necessary even in the Snow version.


What does this build offer over OmniTell or SneakShow?

This deck has the same basic benefit over Omnitell that Sneak & Show has: more combos. Omnitell is extremely weak to Surgical Extraction and often can't find A+B in time against more aggressive decks. The benefit over Sneak & Show is a bit more subtle (and probably not enough to justify this deck to S&S players who like the deck because it's competitive), boiling down to having access to powerful Green cards, some very new (Sylvan Library, Veil of Summer, Force of Vigor), being able to easily be a Bant shell with great anti-control cards like Teferi, Time Raveler, and having the element of surprise (T1 Forest+Hierarch -> T2 S&T or Sol Land+NO).


It would make more sense if you ran the full set of Progenitus.

Makes sense, in the few matches I've played pitching Progenitus to FoW has been relevant, as well as drawing my only Progenitus when wanting to NO.

[KobeBryan]

Can't believe I overlooked Dryad Arbor, definitely necessary even in the Snow version.



This deck has the same basic benefit over Omnitell that Sneak & Show has: more combos. Omnitell is extremely weak to Surgical Extraction and often can't find A+B in time against more aggressive decks. The benefit over Sneak & Show is a bit more subtle (and probably not enough to justify this deck to S&S players who like the deck because it's competitive), boiling down to having access to powerful Green cards, some very new (Sylvan Library, Veil of Summer, Force of Vigor), being able to easily be a Bant shell with great anti-control cards like Teferi, Time Raveler, and having the element of surprise (T1 Forest+Hierarch -> T2 S&T or Sol Land+NO).



Makes sense, in the few matches I've played pitching Progenitus to FoW has been relevant, as well as drawing my only Progenitus when wanting to NO.

This deck has promise

I would rather play a full set of omni, 2 emrakuls, 1 prog, and 2 griselbrand. This would give you 9 targets for show and tell.

I would also ditch the sylvan and play 4 of those baleful strixes....these are your primary blockers and to stall the game out.

The weakness of sneak and show is game 2 where they bring in counter spells and side out removal. I would actually play a full set of goyfs or Tnns to next level them.

[LynterriaHatake]

The weakness of sneak and show is game 2 where they bring in counter spells and side out removal. I would actually play a full set of goyfs or Tnns to next level them.

I'm actually currently testing the Bant version with a set of Stoneforge Mystic and a Batterskull in the sideboard, and it seems to be doing pretty well. There's so much sideboard room without the OmniWish package that it wasn't difficult to find space.

[freakish777]

Hey LynterriaHatake, I was playing to your right with 8Wish when your opponent was KDorgs.

It was nice to meet you last night. I should have properly introduced myself.

Your deck in some ways reminds me (as a compliment, because of the creativity) of a deck I played once (and only once because it was mediocre) that played a Landstill Strategy, where after an opponent would break Standstill, I would fetch up a Dryad Arbor and play Polymorph to find a 1 of Emrakul.

The Sno version could maybe benefit from Green Sun Zenith and a couple toolbox creatures to grind with.