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^^ all the reasons why I run him over wretch.
My creature base for my build looks something like this:
2x Jotun Grunt
3x Nantuko Shade
4x Hypnotic Specter
4x Bob
2 MD and 2 Side seems to be the best combination, but I'm not sure...might try to sqeeze in a 3rd one, simply because he solves so many problems (namely being a big beater to finish games) and is so synergystic with a deck based on dark confidant.
I plan on trying this deck out for the first time tonight at our local Wed. tournament. I assume it'll do relatively well, being that tier decks are rarely found there unless I loan them out. I'm going with a creature base of:
4 Confidant
4 Shade
4 Specter
3 Wretch
And the rest of the package being:
4 Duress
4 Hymn
4 Sinkhole
4 Ritual
4 Vindicate
2 StP
2 Jitte
I'm not sure about the SB yet. I'm gonna wait and see who all shows and then go from there, but it will probably contain the 4th Wretch, a couple Grunt if our shop has them (He's been pretty slow in getting Coldsnap singles), the two remaining StP's, and perhaps some Infest. The rest will be based on attendance.
I'm not sure about that build, but I thought I'd give it a go. I thought I read in here that Jitte wasn't really that hot in the deck, but I don't know what else to put in as Scroll hasn't really appealed to me. And I'm thinking it'll trash what I'm expecting to see tonight, since most of our players have that, "ZOMG JITTE, I'M BONED!!!11!1" mentality whenever I drop it. I'll definitely look into Mutilate when I can. Anyway, I'll get back to you all.
I just wanted to post this here...
Serra Avenger WW
Creature - Angel (R)
Flying, Vigilance
You can't play Serra Avenger during your first, second, or third turns of the game
"Those who endure in the face of suffering, those whose faith shines long in evil days, they shall see salvation."
-Song of All, canto 904
3/3
It would work in a deck like Deadguy Ale if the deck ran more 4 more fetchlands for more consistency. You spend your first three turns playing disruption or Confidant or Hypnotic Specter anyways. Vigilance is a very nice bonus for something that won't cost you a ton of life when Confidant reveals it. 8 Fetchlands + 1 Tainted Field + 4 Duals means you can run this along with 4 Swords (the best removal ever printed) and maintain consistency.
If you're stuck at 3 lands, you can supplement this with a duress on turn 4.
Do you guys think Deadguy will start running this?
Over Jotun Grunt?
No way. It's double white(which is retarded for a splashed color to attempt), is smaller than Grunt, and has no utility to deny any resource of an opponent's whatsoever. If that p.o.s. was the only creature in my hand, I'd mulligan. How do I cast it off of a Dark Rit? Also, unless I drew into Duress on turn 4, it would have already been cast, turn 1, then in the graveyard and finally RFG'd to either Grunt or Rotting Giant. The synergy with this deck and that angel sucks.
Speaking of which.
What's with the Tundra suggestion? I'd rather run Godless Shrine or Plains over a Tundra-the deck *still* has no blue. That's like the 4th time in this thread someone suggested Tundra. STOP SUGGESTING TUNDRA. PLEASE.
Thank you.
Good point.
I wouldn't run this over grunt. But I was saying to possibly run both.
I just though that an undercosted creature with both evasion and vigilance is exactly what this deck needs to help against weenie hoards, even goblins.
The disruption and sinkholes can slow golbins down, but if they recover you usually lose.
Having a creature that can not only fly over all of them to deal damage, but still remains able to block most everything short Piledriver is pretty strong.
Especially one that unlike Exalted Angel doesn't deal a ton of damage when revealed by Confidant.
laststepdown's explanation really sums it all up against Avenger for this deck... It's a good card, only not for Deadguy...
If this were straight B/W Control or B/W Stompy, maybe it has a place... but for a mono-black control deck that splashes white, I don't think it could be fitted in, or even needed at all...
My biggest problem with it is that it's incredibly underpowered. For a dual white spell, it's a 3/3 body, from turn 4 on. On top of that, it has no protection abilities, and short of flying, does really nothing in this deck.
In comparison, Confidant = card advantage, Hyppie = disruption, Shade = threat, and Wretch = utility. Even Grunt can be considered disruption/threat/ and when necessary utility.
We want our creatures to either A) Trade blows, and win, a la Shade/Grunt style, B) have utilitarian purposes, or C) have a faster clock than 6 turns. 3 power really isn't any better than 2 in most cases with this deck, even if it does fly. It'll still get shot down by anything else this deck's creature base loses to.
At this point, it still comes down to the deck needing something that's threatening in the 2-3cc range, even possibly 4cc. As long as it's clock is better than 5 turns, it's got potential. If it can't at least meet that requirement, it's more than likely not worth the effort.
Yeah, I think you guys are right. I was just trying to speed this deck up a bit.
I saw that Green Death deck thread and I wound up with this.
White Death
//Disruption
4 Duress
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Sinkhole
//Creatures
4 Phyrexian Negator
4 Nantuko Shade
4 Hypnotic Specter
3 Jotun Grunt
1 Flesh Reaver/Wretched Anurid
//Removal and Reach
4 Vindicate
3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda/Vendetta/Swords
//Mana and Lands
7 Swamp
3 Duals
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Polluted Delta
4 Wasteland
4 Dark Ritual
I haven't tested this and you're probably much better off with Red Death.
The main things this deck has going for it are the versatile bomb that can double as land destruction that is Vindicate, and the massive size of Jotun Grunt which doubles as a bomb versus Threshold.
Vendetta is on the table because the life gain your opponent gets from Swords might be bad. Taking out a blocker can deal as much damage as Bolt to a player does. Of course, burn is better against solidarity but then again so is... Vindicate. Though it doesn't double as removal and burn it does double as removal and land destruction.
Removing a land when your opponent already got Sinkholed or Wastelanded forces them to take your beatings for anywhere from one more turn to several more turns. The idea that it can take out big blockers like Werebear that Red Death can't take out, letting your Negator punch through to deal more damage is a nice bonus too.
Grunt is also a bigger beater, though it also stays around for less time. This deck is better than Red Death against the Solidarity (because Vindicate can help mana screw them) and Threshold matchup IMO though likely worse against goblins, which seems to be seeing less and less play. Maybe this should be moved to the Red Death thread.
Once again, this is all completely untested. I just got the idea from Green Death.
I think the problem with this deck is the combination of two different goals that tend to contradict each other more than complement. Adding white instead of red slows down your kill rather than speeding it up, even though you get to use the versatility of vindicate. B/W, I feel at least, is much more suited to a controllish route (even though we do get grunt, which is about as undercosted as a beat stick can get).
With "green death" I simply thought that the addition of berserk (and to a lesser extent rancor) to a suicide style deck, running large creatures like negator and flesh reaver, would let you speed up the clock, even more so than with red's burn...not only because of damage, but because it gives us the ability to have our monsters trample right over anything in their way to pound damage through.
These are just my opinions though...the "hybrid" approach could definitly work, but on the surface it seems like a bad idea. Worth testing at least.
The gameplan for Deadguy was always a slow one with it's win conditions, the whole concept of the deck, though, is to basically slow your opponent down to even less speed than you have.
Once Shade hits the board, they've seen the decks best play. Deadguy really only has to protect him for a few turns, this is where all the land, hand, and creature destruction comes into effect. The reason the deck did so well overall was because it's disruption made it's win condition a pretty much guarantee, when it's played out correctly.
What we're seeing now though, is a general shift of the metagame. Goblins are still around, but not in full force, because Solidarity, Iggy Pop, and Deadguy all have relatively good matchups against them. With more decks beating out Goblins, Deadguy has to either shift it's focus on something else, or basically evolve again, from the original concept of Sui-black with a white splash.
It's not necessarily our clock that needs to be looked at, though that has been a focal point as of late. It's mainly just trying to figure out what would keep this deck it's "metagame" status, rather than it just being another deck that did it's job in disrupting the top contenders, then died out because it didn't beat anything else.
Does anyone really know exactly what the problem is for the deck? I was thinking that with the format leaning towards Solidarty, Iggy-Pop, and Gro (And apparently now, to a lesser extent, Goblins) it would actually make Deadguy a more viable option. I'm not sure about the creatures, but at my tournament the other night, I really felt there was nothing wrong with them. I think that the creature base is pretty solid, though the addition of Grunt MD may be needed eventually.
So do we need to sit down and focus on just what it is that is making the deck unviable? Find what's hamstringing our game and try to fix that. Last night between Sinkhole's, Hymns, Duresses, and efficient creatures, most of the decks couldn't keep up (Save for that one odd deck that ran a ton of Pro-Black dudes, making me wish I had Virtue's Ruin). I've sorta kept up with the deck's discussion, but briefly, can someone tell me what people are having trouble with?
What is making the deck unviable is its inherent lack of power. It has a hard time dealing with resolved perments, it only has one draw engine, which is extremly easy to stop, as well as the rest of the threats it has are vunerable to removal. It doesn't do anything that is overly powerful, most decks can still top deck and resovle things through discard, and most decks can deal with the land destruction. The main problem with the deck is the cards its using are just too underpowered for the legacy format.Quote:
Originally Posted by Anarky87
I think this gets to the heart of the matter.Quote:
Originally Posted by DeathwingZERO
The problem it seems to me isn't combo though. Deadguy is the ultimate answer to combo. The problem is nongoblins aggro.
Deadguy can deal with Goblins decently though it's still not a matchup to look forward to. But a couple of pumps of Shade, Cursed Scroll, Plague, they can all answer goblins.
The problem is decks designed to beat goblins, because they run bigger creatures, like Faire Stomy, Angel Stompy, Zilla Stompy etc.
As someone said, this deck has awesome disruption. It just can't deal with resolved threats.
I think the best route maybe to either go all aggro as I suggested above, or better yet, take out the dependence on creatures altogether.
Play 4 Swords, 4 Mutilate and some grand finisher that can survive Mutilate. Perhaps Exalted Angel (I know the double white hurts your ability to play it, or something like that.
The disruption is there to severely impede combo. Swords is there. We just need a way to deal with permanents, which Mutilate offers. Lets see any of the ____ Stompy decks that keep beating this deck deal with that.
Of course Mutilate runs counter to both Hypnotic Specter and Confidant. I guess I would consider slowly heading in the direction that Truffle Shuffle does.
The difference would be, this deck would refuse to go the 4 color route that can't support Wasteland or Sinkhole to supplement the Vindicate. Both are insane cards that we need to retain. But that doesn't mean we can't looking at Truffle Shuffle strategy. Sure Mutilate isn't as good as Deed, but Deed eats two turns anyways. The deck however would need to run 8 Fetchlands to reliably get White.
P.S. Please lets not slow the deck down TOO much though. We don't want to essentially end up with Dirt and put a 7cc creature in here as our win condition. Mutilate should probably be the top of our curve. If we splash green for Deed like Dirt however, we could always run Nantuko Monastary/Mystic Enforcer or possibly even Spiritmonger. Eternal Witness would've been a huge bomb here if it costed 2G instead.
Also I was looking at an old Pox deck I used to have and I was thinking that a Pox, Pikula hybird could work very well. The white splash for Vindicate adds a ton. Vindicate can take out the permanent of your opponents that would best enable you to abuse Pox. For example, if they have 2 creatures, one of which is Untargetable, you Vindicate the other one so they have to sac the other one to Pox. It's also one more Land Destruction spell.
At this rate, my biggest "flaw" I feel this deck has: Total lack of recursion or continuous effects.
1- We have 11-13 creatures depending on the build, NONE can come back from being killed off to the easiest of kills.
2- We have awesome disruption, but none of it (except those few of us willing to try Cabal Therapy on the whim it may come back more than once a match), has any repeated threat aspect, and most decks catch up
3- Removal. We have Vindicate, StP, and Cursed Scroll. Possibly need to look into something of the likes of Chainer's Edict, or even something that can be used more than once/ x-for-1 removals.
I'm seriously pondering throwing in Volrath's Stronghold as a 1 of, just to keep threats recirculating. Everytime I play the deck, I look at creatures that have gone to my graveyard and think they're such a waste of power in there.
I'm also still thinking twice about excluding Nezumi Graverobber, or Shortfang. Both are in the casting cost ratio we'd want (between 2-4), and both have abilities that are very useful to the decks focus (discard, graveyard hate, then direct damage or reanimation). Graverobber would be downright sick against the right decks, by stealing away their creatures after hitting their single card in the graveyard off a turn 2 Ritual. If there isn't much to reanimate through your opponents deck, he's still a 4/2 after the flip. Not a bad threat there. Shortfang has the problem of needing to tap, but he is continuous discard, and his flip would make him even more dangerous, especially if you're able to keep their manabase corrupted.
I'm also thinking of adding in more consistent means of land destruction. Far too often I'm seeing Wasteland becoming even less of a threat, most decks either pack their own, or have so many lands it's not really slowing them down (Rifter for example). Unfortunately, nothing has really compared to Sinkhole, other than Crucible + Wasteland lock, and there's really very few decks right now that consistently works against. So far this has left me with Vindicate + Sinkhole, and most of the time Vindicate is either going after annoying critters, or even more annoying enchantments or artifacts.
I was also considering Pox in this one, to make it more of a Deadguy Pox deck, because the manabase and creature base are both very tight, you're almost always going to 1 up your opponent on everything. We may need to look into that style of a build.
All of these are ideas, but at the very least, it should be very obvious now that we have a large amount of areas we can cover with this deck, it's basically back to the drawing board with a really solid base to work with.
I'd think by the time Graverobber's ability would be useful, they'd have an answer for it-regardless, it wastes their removal on something other than Shade or Grunt(who, in theory, has excellent synergy with the action of getting Graverobber flipped in late game-which is currently when we're winning).
Crucible could be an option-but then I'd want it immediately-it makes me want to run 3-4 Enlightened Tutors-with a package of Jitte(by preference of the rest of the board), Scroll, and E Plague.
I don't know. That's a lot of slots to fill up in an already tight base. You're right though-as for recurrable threats, Darkblast was about as good as it got-and it didn't quite meet the requirements we were looking for.
The thing I've noticed about this deck, is that there really isn't a late game. Either you can disrupt them long enough to hold off, or they come rushing you from the gates and just murder your guys.
I know at this point we've got pretty much nothing to go on when it comes to removal free creatures, but I do like the idea of Graverobber basically being a backup to wretch, and another 2 power creature in the 2 casting cost slot. Flipping him really wouldn't be hard, unless of course he's being followed up by a huge amount of discard. Even late game he'd be a decent creature to throw mana into, and potentially turn him into a threat. I guess more testing will be the only way to really tell at this point.
What I'm noticing, though, is that we're starting to be able to lessen our MD slots. From Pikula's original build, we're already bumping as far back as 20 lands, cutting the Plagues to SB (or completely out of the deck, in some instances), and modifying the maindeck to be more aggressive. We may very well be on the verge of making Deadguy into what it was originally crafted from, a sui-black with white control elements.
For a Suicide Black with white for controlcards, the metagame might be too red i think.
Suicide Black (I played it long time ago in Vintage) has huge problems with burn. And Gro, as well as Goblins and Landstill all have a couple of them.
The problem of Negator might be solved with Sarcomancy and maybe another 1-Drop. For example a 1st Turn Scroll is often useless until turn 4 or 5. If a bolt hits your Negator u might sacc it for him.
On the other Hand, a turn 3 Negator is far from being a such big tread, as a first turn Negator is.
Wretched Anurid isn't that well for an aggrometa as well. Of course he can block many Weenies without dying to them, but he might cost you a lot of life.
I think it might be better, letting Dead Guy be Dead Guy and maybe add a little more treads. For that, we have the Grunt and the Giant, which both have good bodies (for blocking). And the Grunt is kinda utility too. Still I'd say 11-15 creatures should absolutely be the maximum for Ying-Yang (or maybe some more in the SB).
Probably Mutilate is still vailable for the SB or MD. You could see it like this:
1st Turn you want to Disrupt. Or you want to get a Confidant or Specter into play. Most of the time it'll hit some removal.
2nd Turn you want to Sinkhole, Hymn or lay down a Wretch most of the time.
Until turn 4 - when u might cast Mulitate (or Infest on turn 3) you should have between 0 and 2 creatures on the board. If you then hit 5 to 7 Goblins, it's worth it, I'd say.
On the other hand u can get rid of things, StoP and Vindicate (and maybe even Scroll) cant handle. Infest might handle it. Mulitate WILL handle it. If you can stall enough, even an Enforcer will not kill you, until you Mutilate (or it will not do it very often). Mongoose can be easily Mutilate'd as well.
I played
3 Scrolls
3 Vindicate
4 StoP
for removal the last weeks. But I was testing with Mutilate in the Scrolls Slots, and it often did well. Still, against BDW (RW Aggro) I liked Scroll much more.
Whatsoever, I don't see why you should do cruel things to Pikula's list, cause it's really good in the basics (Slots like Plague not included). And if you want to go Suicide Black, you should imho not think of Pikula's list. You should think of Vintage lists. With Sarcomancy, Negator and Hatred for the win ;)
So far,
I didn't really have that much trouble dealing with resolved threats, for the most part. In the first couple turns, I played disruption and used my creatures defensivley. My removal base was 4 Vindicate and 2 StP (And to a lesser extent Jitte, but hey, it worked). But I would never really blow a Vindicate unless it was needed; like they were playing more than one color and I had the opportunity to screw them. I just kinda hung onto it in case of an emergency.
But maybe the package as a whole needs to be reworked. Perhaps we need to just go through the creature base, and agree upon what's solid and what's kind of...bleh. Then do the same with non-creature base, and finally the lands. And this would give us the opportunity to think about the idea of recursion (Which may be what's needed to give the deck longevity).
I liked the idea of Shortfang, as his ability would become more relevent coupled with all the other discard you run. Upon flipping he becomes a nice 3/3 beater with a built in Rack. Along with your other creatures, that would be a pretty decent clock, which is something the deck lacks. Graverobber would be nice to grab their discarded/killed creatures to add to your army.
I'll have to admit, I've had 3 Jotun Grunt in place of Withered Wretch for quite a while. It's huge compared to Wretch-while it comes down the same turn-That's sideboard though-I still run Rotting Giant main. Perhaps I should just take the leap and pull out Giant?
My appologies on referring to Sui-Black and not giving adequate terms of which I was referring to, I was actually speaking of the original Sui-Black, around the time of Black Summer, not the newer and more well known, with Hatred, etc. That version actually ran a lot like this list's core, with efficient creatures and removal, unfortunately......it had Necro. *tear* Wish we'd have gotten an adequate replacement to that card.
My main thoughts with that was keeping the manabase to 3, and if at all possible, taking Scrolls out of the maindeck completely. I've started actually modifying my deck towards a more controllish route than originally crafted (Scrolls, Plagues both went SB for Wretch and StP maindeck, 2 Wastelands turned into Verdicts), and in all honesty, it's really smoothlined the deck. The loss of 2 colorless sources isn't bad, and most times I'll hit one of the 2 Wastes if I really need them, though Vindicate and Sinkhole REALLY pick up where Wasteland can't, hitting the lands I actually want to: basics. But getting in another 2 slots of disruption, 4 slots of beef, and 3 slots of instant removal, that's done a TON to what the deck wanted for it's curve.
In most cases now, aggro is pretty fair of a matchup. The deck lost Scroll, but in all honesty, when you count Wretch in as a replacement to it, you really didn't lose much for early-mid game, when Scroll would be really useful against it. StP in place of the E.Plagues means I have removal I normally wouldn't, which has helped the matchup against various Gro decks incredibly, and in combination with Wretch, Mongoose isn't nearly as threatening as he used to be.
I don't actually have my list on me, but when I get to the shop, if I'm still the last post, I'll edit it in, if not, I'll add it down a few posts. I've been looking into putting Grunt into the deck somewhere, but it's really hard to decide where (it might be in place of the other 2 Verdicts and last 2 Wasteland).