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Originally Posted by frogboy
Force of Will is bad in Landstill. Discuss.
Edited in reasoning:
Your Force is terrible because your blue count is incredibly low. (16-18 cards)
This fact makes FoW less impressive than it could be, but it does not make it worth cutting on its own (lots of decks run FoW successfully with low blue card counts, see: ATS). So moving on:
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Given that you usually don't want to pitch Standstill to counter a threat because you can just kill it and then drop Standstill,
If you can "just kill it", you should just kill it. Absorb or FoW would be equally useless here.
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...plus seeing as how pitching Fact to it is rarely right past turn three, you don't really have many good options here.
If pitching Fact isn't right then it probably isn't the spell you need to counter either way. You need to save your counters, FoWs or Absorbs, for the real threats that are hard to deal with in other ways.
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I'd side it out against green aggro. Maybe white, too. Depends on how much I was afraid of Geddon.
Since when was this deck not afraid of Geddon? And wtf is green aggro?
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I guess it'd be good in the mirror, but like any other control deck is going to shred you by virtue of having a better draw engine.
No other control deck has a draw engine that even comes close to being better than Standstill. What else is there that can beat three cards for two mana?
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Cut Force from Landstill and move it to the board for combo and mirror matchups, and replace it maindeck with Absorb. There's like, three spells that matter that come down before you can get up CSpell (Lackey, Vial, SotF)
Let's grant that for a moment. Counterspell is a four-of. You can't just assume a single four-of is going to handle all the spells you need to counter on turn two. The reasons for this should be pretty obvious, involving statistics, and the fact that there tend to be more than four, sometimes a lot more, cards in the other guys deck you want to counter.
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...and those are sort of irrelevant if you have Plow/Wrath/Disenchant/Vengeance.
Uh huh... Lackey is killed by StP. Vial is killed by Disenchant (if at a horrible cost to your tempo). Survival is sometimes answered by Disenchant. Not, of course, if they have the mana to get Genesis in the yard. You'll lose if that happens. Oh, let's not fail to mention that, at least in the case of ATS, you have to worry about their own FoW. Absorb isn't going to make that turn two Disenchant resolve.
Wrath and Vengeance, it so happens, are completely irrelevant to all of these cards. They are much too slow. Any half-decent Goblin deck will have generated such a huge amount of advantage with Lackey by turn four or vial by turn six that either you'll be dead or they'll have a full hand. Also remember that the turn you tap out for the sweeper, you can't counter. This is ignoring their mana denial. Vengeance against Survival? Neat, you may still have enough lands to cycle it by turn six. Not for much longer.
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Well okay SOTF is bad if you don't have Disenchant and they bin Genesis but RGSA has been pushed out of the meta more and more. Absorb is better once you've stabilized because you'd be hardcasting Force anyways and this is cheaper + has that neat little gain life thing.
I'm not sure if you're talking about a specific matchup here or not. If you are talking about RGSA, FoW is still so much better it's ridiculous, because you need to counter a turn two Survival and three points of life hardly makes up the difference. If you're talking about the cards in general, you are correct that Absorb is usually much easier to hardcast. That's not the same as "better once you've stabilized", because, for example, waiting for seven mana to refill with a FoF isn't so hot.
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For your Solidarity matchup, it'd be a straight up switch for Absorb or some other hard counter, so mostly you wouldn't be tapping out early, which doesn't happen much anyway.
Tapping lands and swinging is Landstill's plan against Solidarity. You have to force them to go off before they abuse their velocity plus fact that they have a lot more must-counters than you have counters.
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Basically you can't beat with Factory for an extra turn.
An extra turn? the card is three extra mana you need to leave open. For each one. It keeps you from attacking at all for a while.
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Besides, you're toast game one anyway. And I might put the FoWs in the board, so I'd go up to 12 hard counters against combo postboard.
That's not so hot, because if you want to raise the matchup to actually good post-board, you'll need another 4-8 slots, leaving about 5 for the mirror and the color red.
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I'm mostly not sure if Force would be good in the Landstill mirror relative to a nonpitch counter that didn't cost a million mana to hardcast.
I don't actually know, but WUU is dangerously close to a million, against a deck with Wastelands and in a deck with eight colorless sources.
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Points some have made and I'm sure others will:
[about Lackey]
You have like six maindeck Wrath effects PLUS Swords PLUS your sideboard hate of choice. It's not Lackey you're usually losing to, it's the fact that you run out of Wrath effects before they run out of beaters. Look, if you kept a hand that didn't have Plow or Wrath, you're probably retarded or went to five and thus were going to lose anyway.
Do you know why you run out of Wraths before they run out of creatures? There are two reasons:
A) Their draw engine is not only functional but it's now uncounterable.
B) Your draw engine, instead of being the best in the format, is total shit because they dominate the board until turn four, at which point you tap out ensure that whatever threats they've drawn into with their massive card advantage are resolving next turn.
All because you had Absorb instead of FoW for the turn one Lackey. Oh, and sometimes, instead of any of this, you just die.
[about Aether Vial.]
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Eh, this is the biggest factor. My Landstill list has 3 Disenchant and two or three Vengeances, but this is probably the biggest issue.
Vengeance is about as bad at answering Vial as Wrath is at answering Lackey, but you seem to be conceding this point anyway.
[about Survival]
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Do people even still play these? Somewhat addressed by the Disenchant issue, you can also just Wrath their board a couple times and then murder them with Eternal Dragon/Decree while they rebuild with Genesis.
Where have you been for the past year? Resolved Survival most certainly does not lose to a Wrath. Dragon costs more than FoW (2 million or something); ATS will Tradewind or Drake it, and any other Survival deck will kill you long before then. As for Decree, it just so happens that every Survival deck I know of plays Goblin Sharpshooter. They'll have Squee to fetch it, Genesis, so you can't effectively counter it, and Anger, so your tokens die the same turn they play him. So with the win conditions out of the way it's just a matter of repeated card advantage that not even Wrath or, at this point, Disenchant will stop. Even if they don't stop the win conditions, Genesis will destroy you long before they're an issue. Survival must be countered, or at the very least Disenchanted before they untap.
[about Solidarity when you have two lands]
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That doesn't happen very often. I also said I'd keep the Forces in the board for this matchup. I might not even do that, because of Lab and Mage, but I dunno.
It doesn't have to be two lands; a Plains, Factory, Conclave, Tundra setup, for example, will only let you play one counter even after a High Tide.
[about Gro, specifically Daze]
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Hold off on the Wrath? They're usually not threatening lethal damage at that point.
True enough; the more relevent question is, what about turns six through eight where you want to play a FoF but can only back it up with one counter?
[about tapping out for Disk and protecting it]
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Or stop playing Disk.
Sure.
[about other combo]
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See Solidarity. Or win round one.
So you admit these matchups suffer as well, moving on...
[about PoP]Do you have a proposed manabase? Keep in mind, you need WUU on turn three.
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And Circle Red or some damn thing.
Much harder with four board slots taken up by a card you should run maindeck.
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Okay, as I said, the downside of FoW is a lack of blue cards, especially ones that you want to pitch. It's almost never right to Force pitching Standstill unless you're going to die RIGHT NOW because that Standstill was probably going to find you an answer to whatever you Forced.
Exactly, you have to know what will kill you and what won't. Without FoW, you would lose in all of the latter situations.
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I also said that most of your permission is best utilized once you've stabilized, and Absorb is really good at staying ahead at that point.
It's more important - i.e. you'll die if you don't have it - when you're being pressured, either before you have WUU or when you need to tap to less than that.
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It's also cheap enough to be not bad.
I disagree; it puts a lot more strain on the manabase, which is a very bad thing.
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You could stick FoWs in the board so you could board up to twelve hard counters against combo or control mirrors. Note also that when you'd want FoW you'd usually be bringing in blue cards as well. Cool how that works.
This would be a simple matter of causing a problem and fixing it later on, but damage has already been done.
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Originally Posted by frogboy
Re: Port: Yeah, it's insane, but if it's cutting off WW all that means is your opponent didn't draw a fetchland. It can delay the Wrath a turn, yeah, but it's rare that turn one Vial leads to the turn five kill because Vial lends itself to a slower game plan. It's really Lackey that makes you fear the quick kill, and you still have Plow/Factory/countermagic.
Right, but Wrath still leaves the Vial perfectly functional, ready to pump out uncounterable Matrons into uncounterable Ringleaders. Plus, you aren't just worried about dying, you're worried about overwhelming card disadvantage.
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Landstill taps out only to reset the baard.
That is not true. Landstill often taps out to play Standstill, or at least it is able to with FoW. Holding onto it often makes it dead before you can play it with counter backup.
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The only time that's really going to hurt you is if your opponent untaps and plays either Armageddon or Goblin Ringleader.
And Survival of the Fittest, and a few other things. Leaving yourself completely open isn't a small issue.
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Geddon basically kolds you. That does mean you need to hold off on your Wrath until you have permission up (Although depending on the number of cards your opponent has in hand, you can just Wrath, not play a land, then go back to square one if they decide to Geddon instead of playing a creature.) against WW decks. Fortunately, their clock is such that this is possible.
Turn six, or turn seven if you only have Absorb, assuming no Wastelands? And the Wrath isn't going to answer any equipment on the board.
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Ringleader averages 2-3 Goblins drawn. You can use Factory and Plow to make your opponent drop another creature then reset the board over and over again to eventually trade your opponent right out of cards.
Costing you another sweeper, which you've already stated are hard to get enough of, instead of just a counterspell.
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Absorb is better in this scenario because it negates reach and buys more time for the next threat.
Three life is not going to save you against a deck based on permanent threats. I'd rather have FoW here, because the Plow, Factory, and sweeper you're talking about will all cost mana, and potentially limit your options.
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FoW is ONLY better IF you have the blue card AND you have them both when the Ringleader is played.
"Better" in this situation is quite the understatement.
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Using Force of Will in conjunction with Standstill is like Probe without the kicker.
Yeah, except it costs only two and is a counterspell. Probe would be pretty damn good if it did that.
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Standstill is only really good when you're not discarding from it.
Often, discarding one or even two is acceptable. And this is assuming your cards were all useful.
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Granted Force is better at depleting your hand size, you really want to continue trading one for one and making land drops then playing Standstill when you're lower on cards.
That's good too, but in the early game you often want to get a Standstill on the board as soon as possible so it isn't too much work to make it work later.
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Okay now can someone actually address the points I'm making rather then going "omg fow is the best card in existence noob."
I believe I've done that. Well, one more:
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I'm not denying Force of Will is a good card in a vacuum. I'm saying that you don't need the permission on turn one often enough to make the loss of a card worth it, nor do you have the card to pitch often enough.
First of all, if his turn one play isn't worth two cards, hold on to the FoW. If he never plays anything worth two of your cards, you'll probably win anyway. Secondly, as mentioned, it isn't just turn one. It's every time you have less than WUU open. That can even apply in the late-game.