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Edit: Nevermind. Misread the text...
My brain wanted to read "Sorceries and Instants", but the text on In the Eye of Chaos reads "Interupts and Instants".
Which makes it much worse then a plain Thorn of Amethyst or Thalia in my opinion. Thoughts?
Sorry in advance, reading cards on my phone isn't always practical.
@ Elephant Grass
Quote:
Originally Posted by yell
Outside of Empty the Warrens and dredge zombie tokens what creatures kill you by turn 4? ...all I can think of is a turn 2 Phyrexian Dreadnought that was stifled. ...that is if they were on the play, and it could still swing through an Elephant Grass.Quote:
Originally Posted by benthetenor
Is Elephant Grass more of a sideboard card?
@ In the Eye of Chaos
It is true per each Ritual effect you can slow ritual decks down a turn. However, in the same vein ritual decks can make you discard it at least equally as consistent as you can play it. The games when you do drop a ItEoC you slow your development down a turn in an effort to slow the ritual deck down a turn possibly 2. Because at that point they would have already had the opportunity to have used their Gitaxian Probe(s) and Brainstorm to sculpt their hand if they did not have the discard. Depending how many rituals vs. LED's they have it may not affect them at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by benthetenor
A better all around card for this MU would be Leyline of Sanctity as it makes the combo deck work harder or play into Elephant Grass. It can be high variance, but I don't think it is much more high variance than ItEoC would be in most situations. It also is far better vs. burn than ItEoC. Contol... In the Eye of Chaos wins, but again it is likely better as City of Solitude at that point so it stops Counterbalance and all other counter effects till dealt with.
If you want to use Oblivion Ring to fight Show and Tell Mirri's Guile only makes that plan more consistent.
@Mirri's Guile
I used to think Mirri's Guile was a durdle card that didn't affect the game / board the turn it came down, and on-and-on, but I was wrong. It is very good at turning the games that do not go your way up front as it allows you to present the right answer at the right time.
Now i'm not a Words of Wind enchantress expert nor an enchantress expert by any means (building and playing with friends for decades playing competitively for the better part of this year), but I can safely say the versions I have built with [cards]Mirri's Guile[cards] vs. the ones I built without it the ones with, the ones with it are just feel overall more resilient to the meta as it allows me to dial up the right line, and wish less.
If you can really fairly consistently draw your entire deck by turn 4 then it is likely Elephant Grass is better as Mirri's Guile so you can vastly increase the chance of success by turn 5 and win rather than stall and allow your opponents to draw answers as you pay for Grass.
@ Seal of Primordium
It also deals with Chalice of the Void another common way this deck can be hated out.
cutting more than one grass is insane. rug delver and goblins will crush you without it.
seems like you guys are cutting cards just for the sake of changing something. Stop. Dont make a change until you have a problem with a card. The main deck just so happens to be very very good. If you must change something look to the sideboard.
Chill and Force arent pulling their weight. This gives you 5 slots to figure something out. I want something to help against combo, but i dont like trap at all, and sometimes you dont have a blue card to force. Maybe flusterstorm, maybe Into the Eye, maybe something else. I think high tide is the most important combo matchup right now, its putting up the best results. What are cards that high tide legitimately has a problem with?
I think i want to cut chills for meekstone to help against rug delver. Chill isnt good against goblins really, and Burn is just terrible for you anyway, and not very popular at all. Delver is a close matchup that I wouldnt have any problem devoting slots to considering its popularity.
You're not going to win consistently turn 4 against a deck with counterspells or any other form of disruption, like Merfolk or RUG. Daze and Spell Pierce are very good at pushing the game past the first few turns. But having Elephant Grass in your deck allows you to slow down a little bit and play around Daze and Spell Pierce so that you don't just walk right into them. In every deck that uses creatures, the plan to beat a combo deck is to get down as many creatures as you can as quickly as you can to give the combo player as few turns as possible. Simply having an Elephant Grass in play means that they can only attack with one, maybe two a turn. Having two in play means that they probably cannot attack anymore. The number of turns (and more importantly, land drops) it buys you is ridiculous. You usually only need it to buy you one or two extra turns, which it is certainly capable of doing. Without Elephant Grass, the deck would be a little bit too slow to beat even an average aggro draw.Quote:
Originally Posted by Freggle
For Ritual-based combo, they have to cast rituals to go off, which means that they have to deal with In the Eye of Chaos in order to even start going off. Rituals are much more stable than LED or Lotus Petal, and getting mana out of LED is a bit tricky. If they can't cast Rituals, they are in a lot of trouble. If we were playing with something like Leyline of Sanctity, then they could do everything but kill us, which makes it much more likely that they could find the Chain of Vapor and beat us. Simply casting a large Ad Nauseum is a play that's not restricted by Leyline of Sanctity, which is probably their best path to finding the Chain of Vapor. When they have to find the Chain of Vapor first, they're much more constrained. That being said, it's entirely possible that a Sphere of Resistance effect is the correct one to deal with any sort of combo matchup, but having In the Eye of Chaos also gives you live cards to bring in against Force of Will decks and against Burn, as well as being a completely asymmetrical effect in our deck. Where a Thorn of Amethyst would slow us down as much as it slows him down (we're better able to deal with it, but it still adds to our spells as much as to his), In the Eye of Chaos only hurts him.
Put another way, for ANT, there are only three paths to victory. In order of increasing difficulty, they are: Ad Nauseum (which will cost 10 under ItEoC), Past in Flames (which requires you to use Rituals, rather than LED) and Ill-Gotten Gains. IGG can be more or less unaffected, but that's also draw dependent. With ItEoC, you force them to either have an answer, or to go down the most difficult path to victory, which still isn't a guarantee that they won't have an answer. If you're also playing some number of Flusterstorm or Mindbreak Trap, they're in a lot of trouble. Saying that it can just be discarded is true of any answer that isn't Leyline of Sanctity, though if you've ever played as a combo player against Leyline of Sanctity, you know that it doesn't actually do anything against you because of the way that your deck operates.
I'm not going to say (and haven't said) that Mirri's Guile is a bad card, just that it's not doing anything that the deck needs. Against a pure control deck that's going to give you lots of turns to sculpt your hand, Mirri's Guile is better than Elephant Grass, for the same reason that anything is better than Elephant Grass in that matchup. But the only one of those in the format is U/W Miracles, and you're not going to beat RUG or Merfolk or Goblins or Dredge or Zoo without Elephant Grass. I guess it's a metagame card in that sense, but I have no idea what metagame you're playing in that doesn't have any creatures.
Right now my board has 2 ItEoC and 2 Flusterstorm with a third one main (in place of Living Wish/Mindbreak Trap/whatever), as I think that those are the strongest answers we have to combo, and since Flusterstorm is probably the only card that does anything of worth against all of the different combo decks. I could easily see getting all 4 in there somehow, if you have the space.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrandersen
I like the idea of In The Eye of Chaos. It's pretty much good against every storm, high tide or belcher deck since most of their rituals are instants anyway. It also makes Force of Will do nothing for your opponent, and daze much worse. I do think its much better then Mindbreak Trap and Leyline of Sanctity as neither of them are actually good against counterspells.
Hi,
Has anyone considered Mana Blooms maindeck instead of the 2 Carpet of Flowers. In my limited testing I've found them pretty good. Compared to Carpets, they're never "completely dead" and the Blooms also help wash mana when going off which can be critical at times. I've also found the recastability being useful before fully going off as you don't always resolve 3 Enchantresses and chain cheap Enchantments the way the deck is supposed to :)
To rephrase, how important are the MD Carpets against the blue decks? Is it worth having few possibly dead cards (apart from being enchantment) in the deck to gain edge against blue based decks?
Br,
kortero
The problem with Mana Bloom is that it really provides very little actual acceleration. Had the card read "Remove ANY number of counters," rather than "One per turn," I might be a bigger supporter. Frankly, one mana/turn can barely be called acceleration for our deck, and while the recycling of Bloom might seem advantageous, the fact is that at best it devours a portion of your mana that turn to POSSIBLY provide acceleration later, and at worst it becomes essentially a junk G enchantment you use to CA. You need to consider that at best its only providing meager mana each turn while contrariwise possibly drawing resources away from other cards like Grass/Confinement, or just general spells. Not to mention that if you're running Solitare or UGw then Confinement prevents it from returning to hand.Quote:
Originally Posted by kortero
The benefit of Carpet of Flowers is that it requires no additional investment on our parts and even if we assume the opponent decides for some nonsensical reason to stop laying lands or they get mana-screwed, Carpet provides at bare minimum 3-5 mana.
Sure, one could argue that the recycling of Bloom is beneficial, however our deck struggles against blue not for lack of enchantments, but because we can't resolve an Enchantress. Recycling isn't all that necessary, especially when you could just as easy run a Mirri's Guile to fix your draws.
Forlorn Egoist
I've read Mana Bloom probably 50 times because for some reason people keep suggesting it, and I just don't get it. So I keep re-reading it to see if there's something I'm missing, but I don't think there is. I think the card is probably just not very good. If we wanted another 1-mana accelerant, Exploration would be much, much better.
Carpet of Flowers is really pretty great. You don't need all that much explosive mana if the opposing deck isn't playing blue, since you're not going to have to fight through Daze and Spell Pierce and your Elephant Grasses are going to be really good in those matchups, so the fact that it is dead against non-blue decks is somewhat irrelevant. But regardless, I'm not sure that investing a lot of mana on a critical turn (in the early game) is worth basically having one extra land in play for X turns. There's a card that does that better, and it's called Exploration. It's even cheaper!
Thanks for you answers benthetenor & Forlorn Egoist. I'll keep the Carpets in and try to get more actual games played with the deck.Quote:
Originally Posted by benthetenor
Fun fact: I had this deck built in 2003 in the old extended and it's finally nice to see a proper legacy version of the deck. Just waiting for the unbanning of Frantic Search.. ;)
Br,
kortero
I'm gonna be playing UG Ench this weekend in a big tournament we got here in my city with duals and other staples as prizes. I took the SCG list and put the ItEoC and MBT in the sideboard replacing FOWs and Chill. I was thinking too, if we replace living wish maindeck we should change the wish targets in sb too right? I dont see myself taking away Gaddock Tegg or the Sliver, but Verduran and Emrakul kinda fall down of my sideboarding strategy if i cut the wish. My question is: ¿Wich changes would u do to the sideboard if u cut the wish?
i wouldnt play mindbreak trap fwiw. Its pretty bad against storm because they will just duress it away before you can use it. also it doesnt do anything against show and tell. Only actually useful matchup is against belcher.
I was having a conversation with my friend and we both agree that emrakul is better main board than living with for him since living wish can just get countered.
living wish has a lot of utility that md emrakul can't compete with. Getting a harmonic sliver, scavenging ooze, verduran enchantress etc. MD emrakul is actually useless unless you have already won more or less. The only real reason emrakul is needed at all is so that wins dont turn into draws because youve comboed in game 3 during extra turns and cant actually finish off the game.
Living wish gets countered, play E.Wit and get it back.
Agree, for the most part. But the good thing about MBT is if turn2-3 you get it back with witness, you can also cast it that turn.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrandersen
Am I mistaken about ItEoC and Flusterstorm being a nonmbo?
Some brainstorming... what about Spellstutter Sprite, and Divert?
I was goldfishing this deck while a good buddy walks in and he starts talking about if he were to play legacy, he'd run tranquility in the side just for enchantress.
I told him that's understandable, but he's most likely not going to be able to play it against this build. He laughs and says why. I quickly whip out words of wind and he just walks away.
This deck is awesome, just wish my shipment would be here in time for the GPT :/
In the Eye of Chaos and Flusterstorm sure don't make each other better (for the most part), but it's much better than if the Flusterstorms were Force of Wills or Mindbreak Traps. Paying 2 isn't such a big deal, and I think you do need some other sort of thing to combat their discard and/or Chants. I do agree 100% with Chranderson, that the only matchup where Mindbreak Trap is superior to anything else is Belcher. It just doesn't do very much against anything else in the field, and Belcher clearly isn't something you expect to see more than, say, once in a big tournament
If you think they're a heavy discard version of the combo decks, or of any deck, I'm also running a Compost which helps you recover from quick discard, in addition to being a great card against Dredge. Against combo it can help draw you into Flusterstorms, and against Dredge it ensures that if they start going off, you will beat them unless they win that turn. Having played against a lot of Dredge, most of the time they will half go off, dredging 6-10 cards on one turn, then go off the rest of the way the next turn. If just a few of those cards are black, it gives you a lot of draws to find Elephant Grass, if you don't already have it. It wouldn't be better than, say, another Tormod's Crypt or some other form of Dredge hate, but its utility in other black matchups earns it a spot.
Ok,Quote:
Originally Posted by benthetenor
I wasn't sure if you had to pay 2, or pay for each copy. I wasn't sure if the copies actually looked at what was paid for being played although I figured you'd have to only pay 2, but I didn't want to be pointed out the other case if I were in a tournament. 2 isn't that big of a deal. Thanks for clearifying.
And what do you guys think of Spellstutter or Divert? Spellstutter seems it could be abused with Seal of Removal and Cloud of Faeries and can't be Duress'ed, and Divert seems like you can mess up some Storm player's first turns of the game.
edit: the 100 mark reached 8-)
The storm copies of Flusterstorm also have a CMC of 1. But their CMC is irrelevant, because storm copies aren't "cast", the copies are just put on the stack. In The Eye Of Chaos triggers when a spell is cast, so it does not trigger for storm copies.Quote:
Originally Posted by TraxDaMax
It's similar to Shattering Spree versus Chalice of the Void.