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RE: Mox Diamond vs Chrome Mox
Both are great in the situation where you have a fist full of cards. I think we should consider which is better in the case that we haven't gone off yet.
In this deck with 13-14 lands, Chrome Mox has a better chance of providing mana than Mox Diamond. In the situations in which the deck is short on mana makes Chrome Mox a better fit.
Diamond, much like Chrome Mox is only good post Grisel draw. Id say that Diamond is better post draw, but opener wise, I think Chrome Mox is a little bit better. With 12-13 lands There will be many hands that you draw Mox Diamond and dont have an extra land to pitch :/
Anyone have tested Defense Grid and Unmask in SB to combat counter decks and surgical SB's?
Why Unmask, if we can just cast Duress / Thoughtseize / Cabal Therapy?Quote:
Originally Posted by novatinhu
Defense Grid is fine however, but discard does the job just as well and costs less mana.
Unmask is nice becouse you can cast it for "free", for example, you can discard and combo off with a hand:Quote:
Originally Posted by Koby
1 Unmask + 1 black card (Shallow, reanimate, goryo, therapy...) + 1 lotus or land + 1 dark ritual + 1 Shallow or Goryo's + 1 Entomb + 1 other card different than: Lotus, land and ritual.
And I agree with you that discard is better, but i want to hear from better players than me about Defense grid.:wink:
Thanks
Defense Grid is good in sneak and show where you are slower casting cantrips and using sol-lands. Countermagic can be handled well with discard & redundancy + most of the times if you have to board against countermagic you also have to board against permanent hate... and permanent hate is usually more important and imo gets the nod over anti counter cards.
Speaking of permanent hate. Submerge sounds nice, but it is too conditional for me. I know from playing tons of (and vs.) RUG, BUG, Jund that deathrite can sit there cast from a swamp and once they know you play submerge that is even more likely. Having Island is often also less important than having a swamp. Another argument is random stuff like Death and Taxes with a thalia/canonits - they won't bring a lot of forests. To me that 1 mana is worth it.
on a different topic:
Calebs version runs 4 Brainstorm and 1 Ponder. The way I feel the deck works the "sick value" of brainstorm "renewing a hand" with a fetchland is less likely to happen than with a slightly slower combo deck. I don't think you can keep a hand full of cantrips without any gas - and the deck mulligans well making it easy to keep something where only 1 piece is missing with a cantrip in hand. I don't think running a lot more cantrips is good for the mentioned reason of speed, but there were situations where I wished my brainstorm was Ponder because I was missing the shuffle effect. Any thoughts if something odd like 3 BS, 2 Ponder or the other way round could be correct?
Since we're running a lot of fetches (currently), I don't see how you can't run 4 BS. I get where Caleb was going by cutting Ponders for Careful Studies - Careful Study doesn't cantrip, but it does filter and acts as a combo piece. Worst cast, you get a "shuffle effect" in that you can bin your top 2 cards to see a fresh one on top. I haven't played that version yet, but seems like a very reasonable swap to me. I could also see a 2/2 split of Ponder and Study since we really only have 5 good targets (assuming that you're running the full 4 Griselbrand) to bin off of Study.Quote:
Originally Posted by catmint
I also don't think Defense Grid does enough work - we're already pretty decent against counterspells - Force of Will in particular - due to so much discard and redundancy. Grave hate is where we have our problems - specifically Rest in Peace, Surgical, and Extirpate. That was actually the reason I originally thought of City of Solitude since it deals with almost all grave hate and has added value against countermagic. But as a few people have mentioned, it's likely too slow to actually be good.
I'll likely be testing a couple different sideboard configurations this week (Green splash and some kind of Serum Powder/Pull from Eternity/Abeyance/Chant thing) - finally get some cycles in with the deck for the first time since GP Denver. :o
Agreed that Submerge cannot be the correct card there. Free options I would play far before that are Massacre (since all the hate-bears are white implying Plains) or Slaughter Pact if I'm not worried about Mom.Quote:
Originally Posted by catmint
I will never play a combo deck without Brainstorm. There's just too many dead pieces to draw and a lot of time Brainstorm is Ancestral because you're actually just killing them before you would draw those cards. Also there's a reason I prefer to play 9 fetches if possible (and Entomb is another shuffle that you can do on upkeep). That being said, I still prefer Ponder. I've played like 15 tournament rounds with Careful Study and I can remember discarding Griselbrand with it about twice. Because this deck is so much more constrained on deck space than normal reanimator, we can't necessarily afford to run dedicated backup ins in the form of Careful Study (and we have fewer creatures), so our ins have to serve double duty as disruption.
In all fairness, if they aren't playing their green sources to avoid Submerge, then they're cutting off the Deathrite ability we actually care about, unless they have two active. Still don't think Submerge is the best option though.
Also, Ponder > Careful Study. CS is really good at what it does, but it's mostly been replaced by having 7 discard effects that can self-target. I still mess around with a UB version that runs CS, but only because I've cut Tendrils in that list, so getting Emrakul in the yard is paramount.
Not really, they can just leave a fetch up and not have to worry about it, and some decks have non-forest green sources (Grove of the Burnwillows comes to mind). I definitely would not want to be on Submerge.Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Cheese
Nice to see this deck getting a lot of attention. I't might even end up in DTB section.
I've played with 6 discard effects and 1 intuition. Still it felt not enough ins. So next tournament i will try 4 CS instead of Ponder. Also 4 griselbrand. A 4th Goryo and 2 reanimate next to 4 therapy, 2 thoughtseize and 1 intuition.
Seems like a bit overkill but i was missing ins in quite a few games. More mulligans perhaps.
Love beating the crap out Jund... just as a sidenote.
I went 1-3 postboard against Brian playing Jund and he wasn't even boarding correctly the first 2 games! I think that matchup may be tougher than you think against a good player. My draws weren't the best ever, but I think it was reasonably representative.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobmans
Agreed. I think a lot of the scarier games two and three are against the decks with no combo hate main, as they tend to overload in the board and TinFins gets hit by hate for storm, graveyards, even red blasts to some extent.Quote:
Originally Posted by phazonmuant
Tendrils has to stay. Won't play a version without it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Cheese
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Cheese
I don't really get it. If i play Griselbrand i draw pre-combat 14 cards and look at them. At this point i see if i can kill by tendrils/emrakul. If i'm not, i attack to draw another 7.
Why would you attack with griselbrand right away?
Another thing: Game 1 on the play (don't know what my opponent plays), when you got Ritual/Entomb/shallow grave and perhaps a Seize. Do you go everytime for the Turn 1 reanimation or do you play safe and play t1 seize t2 grisel?
Thanks for your help.
Against unknown on the play I would seize first, since you gain a lot of information for g2 altough I think and the scenarios where it sucks is if they have multiple disruption spells, topdeck or run brainstorm into disruption. This might be even a bit more likely than having a random opponent with a FoW in hand, but it sucks going into g2 on the draw not knowing what you are up against whereas your opponent has perfect information.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jules
Edit: Different question
Transformational plans have been discussed already. To me transforming into a creature deck would have this surprising factor making the opponents hand of spell pierces, surgicals and what not really bad.
15 slots could include Delver, Dark Confidant, and some number of Illusory Angel (!),serendib efreet and maybe a couple of removal spells.
Based on calebs build you could board –7 instant reanimation, -3 Emrakul & Chrildren, -1 Tendrils, -2 Entomb, -2 Griselbrand, leaving in 2 Entomb, 2 Reanimate, 2 Griselbrand, the acceleration and careful study as suboptimal spells. This “crap” could have some corner-case utility (entomb-reanimate, chrome-mox imprint, cast Griselbrand, reanimate some dead dude you discarded from opponent or flashback cabal therapy and reanimate your dude again), but the idea would be to mitigate the disadvantage of a bad creature deck by totally surprising the opponent with something explosive i.e.: ritual into thoughtseize & confidant followed up by 1-2 flyers. Also brings up some funny mindgames in case a g3 happens.
Did anyone test something like that?
I think Koby's match 4 game 3 last night made a damn good case as to why we want tendrils as a win-con I've just Emrakul. Was an awesome game and match, actually - would recommend people watching it to see how the deck can play through hate - Relic in this case.
@catmint - Richard Cheese and I had discussed a man plan a long long time ago, but never got around to testing it. I was thinking something like T1 - swamp, petal, ritual -> phyrexian obliterator. A fliers plan could work fine as well - illusory angel seems pretty cool. Would be interested to see some testing results with a man plan since most decks will have boarded out their decays and other removal.
Hello everyone, I'm quite impressed about this deck, seems very solid and fun to play with. So here is my contribution:
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
2 Children of Korlis
4 Griselbrand
1 Swamp
1 Island
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Underground Sea
2 Chrome Mox
3 Goryo's Vengeance
4 Lotus Petal
3 Pact Of Negation
4 Shallow Grave
4 Brainstorm
4 Dark Ritual
4 Entomb
1 Ponder
1 Tendrils of Agony
2 Reanimate
3 Careful Study
4 Thoughtseize
I have replaced the Cabal Therapy for Careful Study, since most of time we will use for our-self discard process and we have no guarantee the discard of our opponents hand and we will not use the flashback ability most of times, also, Careful Study will help us digging into the library and draw 2 extra cards, so 3 Ponder was replaced too with the same card. This changes release 3 slots for some defensive cards like Pact of Negation. We always need all the mana sources possible, and since we will probably win the game in the same turn that Griselbrand hits the game, Negation Pact seems quite good as a preventive card. We can always discard/shuffle/imprint it if we don't need it, but it will give as a little protection for no-cost, neither mana or cards.
Congratulations for all the deck developers!
@Catmint - I definitely think the man-plan still deserves testing at this point, and Illusory/Serendib sound pretty saucy. Originally I was mainly looking at Delvers and Tombstalkers when I ran Careful Study. really I think EVERY sideboard strategy still needs extensive testing, and that we should probably start tracking results somewhere. I have an old Google docs spreadsheet I was using early in development, maybe I'll break that out again and make it public. It may be that there are several viable options, and we can change them up as the meta adapts.
@Jules - I think we're making the same point about drawing as many cards as possible before attacking. If they don't have something like Maze/Karakas/Bridge in play, there's really no reason to pass on the potential Emrakul win if you're presented with it. Gives you a lot more time to eat between rounds.
@Grave - I'm not really convinced that Pact is where we want to be over Ponder, but let us know how it goes. One thing I would definitely change though is dropping a couple Underground Seas for Scrubland/Tundra.
yes the sideboard is where i am having the most difficulty.
I've just been goldfishing the deck in my apt and am hoping to bring this to a Legacy even this weekend and play against some decks for real.
this is the list i will be running:
Creatures:
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
4 Griselbrand
2 Children of Korlis
Spells:
2 Chrome Mox
4 Lotus Petal
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
3 Careful Study
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Dark Ritual
2 Reanimate
4 shallow Grave
3 Goryo's Vengeance
1 Tendrils of Agony
Lands:
1 Island
1 Swamp
3 Underground Sea
1 Misty Rainforest
4 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
1 Marsh flats
my first thought was to go anti hate and expected matchups
I know I'll be facing Goblins, 12 Post, Dredge, BUG Control, Jund, and RUG Delver. all of which i should have a very good game 1 agaisnt.
possible sideboard:
3 Blue Elemental Blast
3 Duress
3 Chain of Vapor
2 Pithing Needle
3 Disfigure
1 Dismember
but then i've been toying around with the idea of making a Laboratory Maniac sideboard as alt win condition. it gets used a lot in Vintage in Doomsday Decks.