If you can't win after the DR in that situation, you are dead. You can't give your opponent a fresh 7 and seriously hope to not get blown out by Hymn, thoughtseize, counterspells or an attack.
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If you can't win after the DR in that situation, you are dead. You can't give your opponent a fresh 7 and seriously hope to not get blown out by Hymn, thoughtseize, counterspells or an attack.
Today played some games with friend and an interesting scenario came up:
He's playing UR delver, no cards in hand are known. He has 5 cards, 2 volcanic islands and steam vents on board. He has wasteland in the graveyard and he has tapped out to cast crucible of worlds. I have city of brass in play and my hand consists of these eight cards: silence, petal, petal, petal, LED, dark ritual, burning wish and infernal tutor. My opponent is at 18 and I decide to try my luck. My thought is that I'll try to play petals into the board and then try to silence him if needed. As I cast the first petal, he dazes it. I pay for it with city of brass. Petal resolves. I play another petal and he dazes it, forcing me to either let it be countered or sacrifice one petal to let another one resolve. I have an brilliant idea, I'll dark ritual with the petal on board! I break petal for B and cast dark ritual, my opponent casts force of will exiling stifle or spell snare. Either way, I now have petal, silence, LED, wish and infernal tutor in hand. No mana floating, my only land tapped and it'll get wastelanded next turn. I pass the turn - and proceed to win after few turns. But I think there was something that I could have done so much better with my 8 cards. How would you have played that situation? My plan was to play lotus petals on board and then try to silence, leaving dark ritual in reserve if needed to pay for the soft counters.
Also Lemnear, how do you do your notes? I'd like to become a better player and it would be pretty nice if I could write up all the plays so people could help me see where I could have played better. I'll need some training though since I'm an awfully slow player even without making notes. ;)
Opponent on UR delver: 18 life, 3 tapped islandmountains, crucible of world in play, wasteland in GY, 5 cards in hand (which are daze, daze, FoW, stifle/snare + X)Quote:
Originally Posted by Machahiko
Us: city of brass in play, petal x3, LED, Dark Ritual, Wish, Tutor
it's going to be tougher to win if the opponent gets to untap 3 land, plus has wasteland every turn, so it make sense to try and do something
The opponent is tapped out, so we only have some combination of daze and FoW to worry about. At most they could cast 4 Daze, 3 Daze 1 FoW or 1 Daze 2 FoW. Hopefully something less than that.
Lotus Petals are your least valuable card so it makes sense to play them first to draw out counters (or build up mana for paying for Dazes if they don't use counters.)
I think the crucial turning point here is that you decided to use Dark Ritual before the third petal, opening yourself up to have it countered. I don't see the reason for exposing the Ritual to a counter when you still had a petal to play. Paying 1 to stop Daze on a lotus petal doesn't get you any extra mana.
How about this:
First couple of plays:
Petal - daze, 1 mana, opponent has 4 cards
Petal - daze, 1 mana, opponent has 3 cards
Let's say we play a 3rd petal here instead of opening up Dark Ritual to counter spells
Petal
You still have LED, Dark Ritual, Silence, Wish, Tutor in hand.
At this point you cast Silence (storm 6), hoping that the opponent's 3 remaining cards are not Daze + FoW
If the opponent has either Daze or FoW then you can draw it out with a Silence and then Dark Ritual, LED, IT -> Empty (or Tendrils if you have it main.)
If you have a really strong read on the opponent that they have a third Daze and no FoW, then it might be better to lead with Dark Ritual (no silence.) If the opponent Dazes, you pay. If they don't, this lets you use Wish instead of Tutor.
I'm sure the correct sequence is to play all 3 petals and just Pay for the first with CoB, let the Second get countered, play the third, Silence off one Petal (meeting FoW), DR off the other, LED, Infernal -> EtW for 22 goblins.Quote:
Originally Posted by Machahiko
I feel you just wasted your Ritual for the lesser Petals here.
On my writeups: Normally you may use your Opponents turn to Write up what happend and you can do it with all the known shortenings like "CoB, 19, Po (DR2, BS1, BW3), ..." For Cory of Brass, Tap it for Going Down to 19 and cast Ponder Stacking Brainstorm as the Top card, above Dark Ritual and Burning Wish. This should work for most notes. I myself use a combination of this and Stenography to Take advanced notes of complex interactions even during my turns while managing my Life and mana with a sheet of paper and dices.
Hint: I recommend a 4-dice-System, one Blue, Black and red and a 4th (clear one in my case) for stormcount
Hi all,
i have to say that i'm not a storm player - to be honest, i've always tried to fight storm decks rather than embrace them, but now i think i'm changing my mind. I've been running many different fair decks lately to some discrete success, but now my meta is infested by any kind of combo deck you could immagine, and there's nothing i hate more than losing from the mono-U dumbest deck ever seen (Omnitell) and its older brother (Sneak-Show). I mean, i think even a lobotomized guy could pilot those deck to a discrete success. But they are only the top of the iceberg, since i have to face Solidarity, Elves, Dredge, ANT and Food-chain combo as well.
So i'm seeking my vengeance, and i may seek it here.
I'm looking for something fast and brutal, something that could make them weep about how perfect was their hand if they had the time to play it, and this deck looks promising. I've tested Tin Fins too, but it doesn't look really solid to me. My main concern is that TES is really hard to test it on the net, because people tend to ragequit after seeing what they're up against and i do not have a group of friends to test with. So i'd like to ask you TES-veterans how this deck performs against the combo decks reported above. Thanks in advance!
TES is a bad matchup for Omnitell from what I know. Doiscard-heavy Jund or something along those lines is apparently less than desirable, too.
I can only offer insight against ANT and several S&T archtypes. You may wanna read some of the reports in my Signature for detailed info about those matchups.Quote:
Originally Posted by Davek
However, I feel that the "new" Mono Blue S&T decks are so easy and resiliant that my honest advice to combo-freshmen is to either run Meddling Mage in their Blue decks (SB) or run easier combo decks than TES is. The deck is a beast which has a sheer unlimited angles of attack but that makes it insanly difficult to Pilot. If you just wanna "punish" other combo players, there are much easier options to do so
Show and Tell matchups are difficult, but with Swarm it's at least 50-50. Mono-U Omnitell should be better for you. Solidarity is going to be tough because of maindeck Flusterstorm, but they are slower than Sneak and Show, so maybe 45-55.Quote:
Originally Posted by Davek
I've rarely lost against Elves, Dredge, ANT, or other durdly combo decks. Those are all easily 60-40 matchups, might be better.
I play TES on cockatrice all the time and rarely have people ragequit. Many more ragequit when I played TinFins :rolleyes:
I like Elves' game vs. Storm postboard a lot nowadays. It might even be in Elves' advantage, but it's by no means free for either and G1 Elves are pretty free for TES. Just don't underestimate the little gits postboard. You'll regret it.
That really hasn't been my experience. Very few have Mindbreak Trap, so they're hoping to what, Therapy you a couple times and then Hoof you around turn 3 or 4? That's just not going to work if the TES player aggressively Silence-walks and knows how to use all the tools at his disposal. For example, a non-lethal Grapeshot to nuke the board and stave off a hoofy death has won me a couple games. Every match I've played against elves with fast combo (this or TinFins) has felt like Elves was horribly outclassed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zombie
Does paying for the lotus petal help in this case? I guess if you pass the turn and they waste your city, at least you have a petal left, but for the immediate turn, does it actually matter if you pay or don't pay?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Not for you on the bill directly, but paying for the Petal with a City of Brass sends a clear signal to the opponent and potentially provoke additional counters on lesser accelerants (which happend as it seems).Quote:
Originally Posted by Star|Scream
It's a pure mental cheat on your opponent's perception which carries the nice side effect of battling Daze/Wasteland if you have to Pass the turn without serious action, which however isn't the intention as my example showed (aka creating a lethal amount of Goblins)
Edit: in essence, you'll use the Petal, one generic mana and 1 Point of Life to cast a virtual Hymn to tourach (stripping 2 Daze here)
I strongly disagree with this statement. If you want to play TES, do it. After all, this is just a TCG and not topology; like any deck, you can play TES pretty well by relying on heuristics. And to develop these heuristics, you need to play the deck. People telling you ex ante that you are too inexperienced with the deck to even try it tend to glorify their pet deck a bit too much, in my opinion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Also, the number of kill conditions is limited to the number of 3 (EtW, Tendrils, Grapeshot) and the number of storm engines to fuel these kill conditions is limited to 5 (natural, PiF, AdN, DR, IGG). Even though it's of course possible to combine multiple kill conditions or multiple storm engines in one gigantic kill shot, I wouldn't really say that this results in a sheer unlimited number of angles of attack. In addition, most hate pieces tend to affect the greater part or even all of your engines in a very similar manner, so these angles are really not that different.
@Davek
TL;DR: Please join the storm troopers. It's fun and it's definitely not rocket science. If you're willing to spend some money, check out MTGO. I've never experienced anyone ragequit and I play a lot of DDFT or TES there. It's also very rewarding to play there, since usually you're not paired with Average Joe from your LGS but some pretty high class players (not implying that I'm one of the latter).
Relying on heuristic with TES only results in a flurry of frustrating losses because you can't manouver you out of difficult situations. Players trying to Pilot the deck on such a level struggle to win without the obvious Infernal into Ad Nauseam or Wish into EtW, PiF.
TES isn't a deck to pickup the night before a tourney ... especially not if your Goal is to "punish" other combo decks.
To be fair, the OP never said he wanted to pick the deck up the night before a tourney. He asked for a "fast and brutal" combo deck that could beat the other decks in his meta. That's all.
Any deck in the MTG universe is too complex to play optimally (in a statistical, expected value maximizing kind of sense) in any match for anyone but an autistic prodigy. That means you use heuristics (only the mentioned prodigy doesn't). You're not relying on your mind to solve hypergeometric expressions in a tournament setting to calculate the exact probabilities for your or your opponent's next draws. You're relying on your experience and maybe some calculation shortcuts. Which is not bad! Even in chess you have to rely on heuristics because it's getting too complicated very quickly for our limited human brains.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Of course, you still have to count mana and storm (preferably before going off). And know your interactions (retain priority and crack LED in response to this and that...). But that's easy and, as you're probably very well aware off, although one of the first but by far not one of the biggest challenges when playing TES.
I agree that the probability of doing well with a deck in a tournament is positively correlated with the length of the time span you've been playing it. Yet, I expect a dedicated person to be capable of doing already pretty well with TES after 5 (estimation method is pooma) hours of playtesting against a diverse field of decks (and reading this outstanding primer). The learning curve always becomes flatter. That's also true for TES.Quote:
TES isn't a deck to pickup the night before a tourney ... especially not if your Goal is to "punish" other combo decks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ogh!
Dude, Magic cards are way harder than topology. Optimal play in Magic is certainly no easier than EXPTIME, and proving theorums in Topology is merely NP-Complete :cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by Ogh!
Anyway. Davek - TES is a hard deck, but if you want to play it, then just do so! ANT might be less frustrating to start with though.
Let's say you think storm beats elves 70% of the time preboard (based on their basically no disruption and slower combo in general, might actually be low?) but postboard elves brings in 50 cards and suddenly storm loses 60% of the time. Let's ignore the possibility of a draw.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zombie
Storm wins iff (means if and only if)
- Wins games 1 and 2
- Wins games 1 and 3
- Wins games 2 and 3
Assuming independence between games that leads to
- Storm wins games 1 and 2: .7*.4 =.28 =28% of the time
- Storm wins games 1 and 3: .7*.6*.4 =.168 =16.8% of the time
- Storm wins games 2 and 3: .3*.4*.4 =.048 =4.8% of the time
for a combined total of 49.6% of the time.
Now I don't think even remotely elves is that favored post board (even at best maybe but their combo is very diluted by sideboard material) and therefore I'm not worried about elves in the slightest. If we change the predicted matchup to 45%-55% storm to elves postboard we get an overall win percentage of 54.9% in storm's favor. You shouldn't have to worry about a matchup that you obscenely crush preboard unless their postboard puts it nearly as unfavorable for you as it was for them preboard. And nothing in the format does that 180 in preboard/postboard matchups
You can deduce another pretty good reason for playing storm from this quote. The nerd level is definitly above average compared to the population of MTG players. It's chic to be a nerd! Or so I've been told. By mom.Quote:
Originally Posted by phazonmuant
A combo-oriented plan postboard with Elves vs. other fast combo decks is wrong, and will lose you games. Expect lock pieces and discard, don't expect Glimpse. There won't be any unless the pilot is bad in which case you can thank him for free win%.
The warning was more to just not underestimate Elves or think they're free postboard, little else. With smart play it's at least even, perhaps a bit better. Just remember to play smart like a TES pilot should ^^