[Deck] Deadguy Ale (B/w Confidant)

Your reasoning is off Lego Army Man.

Yes, if you haven't dealt with your opponents threats, then Juzam/Plague Sliver isn't going to deal with them for you.

But Masticore will be able to take out your opponents threats. Masticore does deal 2 damage to any target you want you know. Saying that it's a win more card is akin to saying Cursed Scroll and Jitte are win more cards.

All three of these cards... Masticore, Jitte and Cursed Scroll are disruption. Picking away your opponents threats is disruption. What makes Masticore and Jitte superior to Cursed Scroll IMO is that both Masticore and Jitte can quickly switch roles from a disruptive card, into a 3 turn clock after they do regain you control of the board.

In addition, the regeneration does make him a great blocker against cards like Iwamori of Open Fist. And the regeneration makes him a hard creature to kill as well unless you are playing a white mage and haven't already duress away their Swords.

Masticore is not a win more card. Masticore swings the game from a losing position to a winning one by letting you deal with all of your opponents threats especially in a build like mine below...

8 Swamp
4 Duals
4 Wasteland
3 Bloodstained Mire
2 Polluted Delta
1 Volrath's Stronghold

4 Dark Ritual
4 Sinkhole
4 Vindicate

4 Duress
4 Hymn to Tourach
3 Jitte

4 Hypnotic Specter
4 Dark Confidant
3 Rotting Giant (Withered Wretch in a select few metas) (Originally tested Jotun Grunt in this slot)
2 Nantuko Shade
2 Masticore

But I admittedly didn't test Juzam Djinn in place of Masticore very throughly in the above build as only some of hte people that I play against let me proxy cards. So I was wondering if anyone thinks Juzam Sliver warrants more testing in the above build.

Also wondering if there's any changes you guys recommend to the above build. All of the card choices and numbers in the build above were explained in detail in my post on the last page. So I would be appreciative if you please read that before critiquing the deck. Thank you.

n

Before I even get started, I want to make clear that in no way am I saying the following is better than this deck. Just putting it out there.

Well, this started as a joke of me trying to get Zombies to be playable, and throughout the day, I was brainstorming the best way to do so. I decided to try a Deadguy (get it?) build, and it actully worked out. The biggest problem I've had with it is it's nature to kill itself off Graveborn Muse, and the fact that Nantuko Shade is not a Zombie. In exchange for this, you get

- Graveborn Muse: Well, it's a little spending, but it's a Bob. Only, you know, it can draw way more cards, for very little life. I'm in a good place with that

- Call to the Grave: Well, anyone who uses this knows that it can flatup win games by itself against the decks problem Matches (Stompy, RGSA, 5/3) since their creature base isn't that heavy. The only issue is if they sweep your board.

Those are the huge bonuses. The things you lose are

- Nantuko Shade's ability to go, Dark Rit, oops I win. The games take longer, meaning that unless you get Cabal Interrogater, they can recover.

- Your Bob is $$$er. Yes, it lives through Goblins and can kill someone itself. But 4 CC can hurt.

- Hippy. Cabal Interrogater and Haunted Cadaver work, but there is a reason this guy is hated by Combo everywhere.

But now the list

4x Withered Wretch - He's a Zombie, and good enough to be played in the norm. version.
2x Rotting Giant - Could be Cabal Interrogater. Meta call.
2x Cabal Interrogater - Could be Rotting Giant. Meta call.
4x Graveborn Muse - The Best Junk Rare ever!
2x Haunted Cadaver - Could be Rotting Giant/Interrogater/Sinkhole/Cursed Scroll. But I think he's pretty good, actully.
1x Bob - Yeah, he's good. I know. Could be any of the non 4 of things.

4x Dark Ritual
4x Duress
4x Hymn to Tourach
4x Vindicate
3x Sinkhole - I only have three
4x Swords to Plowshares - Could be any number of things... but it's always good.
1x Gerrard's Verdict - Could be a 2nd Bob, with 5 Bobs in here Life Gain's good.

10x Snow-Covered Swamps
3x Polluted Delta
1x Windswept Heath
2x Bloodstained Mire
4x Scrubland
1x Godless Shrine
1x Tomb of Urami

SB
4x Call to the Grave - Helps the horrid MU, and can randomly win against Goblins. Not so hot with Bob.
4x Gangrenous Zombies - A Clasm vs. Goblin? And it walks! And it has toughness larger than 2!
1x Verdict (Burn, Combo, w/e)
3x Planar Void
3x Umezawa's Jitte - Wanted to main it, not enough room.
This is just me trying to take the deck in a direction that hasn't been tried to my knowladge, and hopefully improve it. (Wait, I play Stax and Combo... do I really want to help!?!)

http://www.starcitygames.com/phpBB2/...c.php?t=293235

Whit3_Ghost may have found our answers, or at least something to test out a bit.

So Smallpox in deadguy. It allows a sometimes useful out for bob, acts as NON-TARGETED removal, coupled with discard (a weak effect), as well as another quazi-sinkholeish effect. The life loss part seems like somewhat of a useless addition, but in theory, it counts as reach. Not very much, and I can count the games it would have won as reach on one finger, but the options is still open. The first card that this seemed similar to that I wanted to draw a comparison on was funeral charm. I had been quite taken aback by funeral charm's versitility, but not by its sheer power. Small pox seems like a multi-tasker of the same versitility, but at a much greater calibur, all for a mirror drawback.

So, is the tempo-loss of saccing a land not worth the benefit of untargeted removal in the same package? We should be ahead on resources. Perhaps this is what we were looking for, but perhaps not.

This is definitely something that we've been looking for. The deck so far has constantly been messing with trying to split between land destruction and hand destruction while still keeping a balance, now we have a 4 of with both abilities, IN ADDITION to killing off a random creature. I now honestly have even less reason to want to run Wasteland, since this is our Sinkholes 5-8, and our discard is HUGE now (14-16 in my build, after this addition).

Personally, I fully believe much like Bob made this deck viable as a B/w Sui-black control deck, Small Pox is going to make this deck viable against the entire format. Aggro decks hate the idea of losing both a land and a creature, and in addition, they lose a card. This is completely savage for us, we'll never lose tempo advantage now, as most of the times we won't mind pitching a card to 2-1 or 3-1 the opponent.

On top of that, it now means Grunt is even more viable, as a single cast of this tosses a good 3-4 cards into the two graveyards on average.

Looks like we've got some serious playtesting to look forward to. Hopefully we get this thing back into the LMF.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DeathwingZERO

I now honestly have even less reason to want to run Wasteland, since this is our Sinkholes 5-8, and our discard is HUGE now (14-16 in my build, after this addition).

---

Why would you cut wasteland again? Tha manabase can support it, and it makes the land draws infinitely more consistant while providing more land destruction.

Lands (20)
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Polluted Delta
4 Scrubland
4 Swamp
1 Tainted Field
4 Wasteland

Creatures (14)
4 Dark Confidant
3 Nantuko Shade
4 Spectral Lynx
3 Jotun Grunt

Spells (26)
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Small Pox
4 Sinkhole
4 Swords to Plowshares
2 Umezawa's Jitte

Spectral Lynx gives this deck a much better game against aggro, especially Goblins, by blocking aggro (usually killing it off) and surviving through regeneration. The pro green can be useful against Goblins, as well as other decks. The Jotun Grunts provide fat to a deck that will easily fill the graveyards (I stress both yards here) and it hoses alot of decks in the format. 14 creatures allows this deck to run to Jitte, a card which even further strengthens the Goblins matchup and other aggro matchups (and it's much better than Cursed Scroll IMO).

The lack of Hypnotic Specter may be discouraging, though I think that the Specter isn't really that great against aggro. The deck should already do fairly well against control and combo to not need the additional discard that the Specter provides, especially with Small Pox in the deck now.

The sideboard can consist of whatever is necessary in a given meta.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by rsaunder

Why would you cut wasteland again? Tha manabase can support it, and it makes the land draws infinitely more consistant while providing more land destruction.

---

Because, as I've said before, our metagame doesn't need it. The only decks that I can effectively control via wasteland vs card disruption don't show up here. Thresh/Sliver Control plays around it, Goblins have Rishidan Port + Wasteland, so mine are typically useless, and Rifter has enough basics to go around it no problem (plus dragon to search). The only other decks I'm seeing besides those are usually even more in their favor, as it's completely dead.

Honestly, I'd much rather pack more hand disruption or creatures anyways, since land destruction serves very little purpose with the way our metagame is shaping. Rarely will it win out games because most decks revolve around 2 mana anyways, and we don't pack enough of it to hate them out long enough for our threats to go online for more than a turn. If Wasteland were Strip Mine, that'd be completely different altogether, but alas, that's TOO good for us in in the tournament scenes. Every deck would pack 4 Strip.

What do you mean our meta isn't hurt by wasteland. I find that statement to be false.

The only monocolored decks are solidarity and goblins, and you already beat both anyways if you're running Masticore and Jitte.

Everything else is packed with duals. They can't play around wasteland because of Sinkhole and Small Pox. Any basics they fetch gets blown up too forcing them to play their duals.

Turn one Hyppe, Turn 2 Sinkhole, Turn 3 Wasteland + Hymn is still the best play this deck has.

Small Pox is Sinkhole 5-8.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Clark Kant

What do you mean our meta isn't hurt by wasteland. I find that statement to be false.

---

I think he's referring to the metagame in his own area. Mine is the same way where Wasteland is borderline useless.

Correct. For multiple pages now I've said I've been running with 20 lands completely sans Wasteland, because the entire Portland area is completely unaffected by it. I actually had noticed I wanted to cut them only a few weeks into playing this deck, because I saw that the metagame was shifting away from requiring so many nonbasics and duals to play.

Aggro builds are two color at best, and could care less about losing lands past turn 2, and will fetch accordingly in the meantime, and anything 3 color is pretty much hosed by aggro, so they won't show, with the exception of Control Slivers, which packs enough basics.

Solidarity, Iggy= autodead card. Solidarity is monocolored, and Iggy packs 4-5 basics, JUST because it wants to be able to keep itself from dying to Wastelands and nonbasic hate. It rarely needs more than a single blue to go off anyways, so the Undergrounds are pretty much a last ditch effort when fetching, and on the turn before comboing off, or the turn they do.

Survival, and any other deck that requires Taiga for Anger or anything of that janky sort packs Witness and can recur her, so their lands come back at little cost, which causes us to attempt to race an acceleration we already are far behind. G/B Rock already packs Wasteland or land recursion, so it's unaffected as well. Both these decks are better beat by hand disruption and creature destuction.

All in all, it's honestly better this way anyways, as less land destruction = more threats or card dirsuption, which is much more solid a way to win in this format. Very little is affected by Wasteland, as it's a staple control card now.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DeathwingZERO

[...] as less land destruction = more threats or card dirsuption, which is much more solid a way to win in this format.

---

Ok... so you want to cut 4 Wastelands to put in 4 Disruption Spells? Even if Wasteland is dead in your Metagame, this sentence doesn't make ANY sense.

You could at best cut them for 3 Swamps (Or Tomb, Stronghold, ...) and ONE disrupting card. That won't make any more then the "random" Wasteland against some Decks. Oh - and casting a Witness after a Sinkhole and a Wasteland isn't that easy.

The Argument of recurring lands is if you would say "My opponnent plays V. Stronghold, so I side my removal out" or "He has got Counterspells. I better concede, cause he has an answer to everything in my deck, except lands."

At least recurring a Land costs them a Turn or three Mana for a Crucible. And who the f*ck wan't to Witness a Land anyways? Ofc, this sometimes happens, but most of the time you will recurr a FTK, a Survival, another beater or a Duress or...[...the list is nearly endless, so what?].

In your Meta cutting Wastelands might be ok, but you won't get more space for disruption by cutting Wastelands only.

So far,

Who would need to cut more than just the 4 Wasteland to pack in more disruption? My point in posting that Wasteland now has an adequate replacement in Small Pox is in multiple factors:

1- Doesn't require the land to be non-basic
2- Kills off a creature
3- Hits a card in hand

Wasteland already has poor synergy with the deck, with Hymn, Hyppie, Shade, Wretch, and now Small Pox requiring core double black. Reverting back to a gameplan of having ALL lands tap for black mana streamlines us again, and with Small Pox taking the place of Wasteland, means we're going to have the same number of land destruction, with an additional 4 slots of creature removal and hand disruption. The only drawback: It's a turn 2 cast on the average. Oh well, at least then it'll guarantee to hit something.

In all honesty, even if Wasteland was so-so in the meta out here in Portland, I'd still cut Wasteland over any other 4 of this deck has for Small Pox. It's the least powerful card in the deck when disruption is concerned, Sinkhole and Vindicate both have it beat out on effectiveness, because they can hit basics. Plus, the format is too fast for it to be something viable as a solid tempo advantage, if we use it on the first turn, it means we didn't have Duress.....second turn means we more than likely didn't use Hymn, and anything past that, we've already either established good disruption, or a single loss of land is not going to swing the game in our favor.

Small Pox, however, can.

Quote:

---

You could at best cut them for 3 Swamps (Or Tomb, Stronghold, ...) and ONE disrupting card. That won't make any more then the "random" Wasteland against some Decks. Oh - and casting a Witness after a Sinkhole and a Wasteland isn't that easy.

The Argument of recurring lands is if you would say "My opponnent plays V. Stronghold, so I side my removal out" or "He has got Counterspells. I better concede, cause he has an answer to everything in my deck, except lands."

At least recurring a Land costs them a Turn or three Mana for a Crucible. And who the f*ck wan't to Witness a Land anyways? Ofc, this sometimes happens, but most of the time you will recurr a FTK, a Survival, another beater or a Duress or...[...the list is nearly endless, so what?].

---

I've been playing a list of 20 lands for some time now, the deck DOES NOT need 23 lands. Ever.

Survival has a tendency to recur lands solely for the fact of getting ahead, this being either ATS or an Advantage build using E. Witness + Fetch for tempo gain. It's not completely uncommon for ATS style builds that only have 1 Taiga to Witness it back, and bounce her if able. While these are the only builds that do it, these are also the only ones playing more than a single set of non-basics, short of Thresh, which loves us throwing stuff in their graveyards, everything they have is 2 mana or less, sans Enforcer.

Neither of these situations are the same as your statements about Stronghold and Counterspells, mainly because Wasteland isn't a viable threat anymore. Decks play around it.

Wasteland gives the deck additional reach with instant speed land destruction. Maybe it's not good in your meta, but it's better for a large event. The decks focus is to create tempo advantage via land differential and card quality/advantage via Duress/Hymn to Tourach. It might lower your land count, but in combination with Sinkhole and Small Pox, creates and even lower amount for the opponent (locking out key colors and sometimes causing land screw). The deck desperately needed Small Pox, but not at the expense of Wasteland.

Wasteland in itself is NOT a tempo piece. Wasteland was used to breakdown decks that are already packing light numbers of basic sources, or abused in decks that recur them. When you combine it with Sinkhole, it's still only going to be a +1 in your favor AFTER the Sinkhole.

If there weren't an already fast aggro clock on this deck, and more decks packing an absurd amount of non-basics, I'd completely agree, typically your 1 for 1 is a fair trade. But with the number of double core spells, coupled with the fact that both Sinkhole and Small Pox are what we would consider tempo advantage (ie not killing off an equal amount of your own resources/threats in the meantime), then we could easily consider it a fair trade, by swinging in our favor. Wasteland doesn't pull this off.

If you look over my list, you'll see that I put in more creatures, and additional disruption for the lack of Wasteland. Since we had an ever increasing flow towards aggressive decks and a total lack of a dominant control build, we've seen an ever increasing number of decks that are now throwing down the same range of spells as our own, with more reliable threats than our own.

The argument has always been our creatures were lacking, and we would have to kill off either land destruction, or hand disruption, in favor of creating a larger threat base. Even Pikula spoke of this early on. Sinkhole = 100% success rate at destroying a land (basic or no), short of being countered. Small Pox, the same. Wasteland, possibly dead vs very important matchups, and whats worse, it's a colorless source, which could very well possibly hinder us.

At this point, the number of creatures is up enough to handle a very aggressive format, the number of card disruption is enough to easily 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 our opponents, and without Wasteland, we've lost 4 possible ways of taking down an opponents non-basic sources, which in all honesty to black, are nothing more than a basic land that taps for 2 types of mana. Black spells never care if it's non-basic, this already 1up's them compared to Wasteland.

We still pack a possible 12 land destruction spells, in addition to now 12-16 hand disruption spells. Do we honestly care that much about losing out on 4 "possibly dead" cards, when their replacements (Small Pox) never are?

Just remember, what my argument comes down to, is that I have added in Pox in place of Wasteland. If you want to still run both, remember that cuts your creature count, or your hand disruption. We can't have a balance of all 3, that's what the deck originally had, and we've already seen the results, it's not enough. Either disruption, or destruction needs to imbalance the other, and I favor disruption.

Huhm, 20 Lands with Smallpox? :rolleyes:
Seems as if u would hurt yourself MUCH with that.
Don't understand me wrong, I'm not a very big fan of Wasteland, as I often have to mulligan a Hand with 2 of them as only permanent Manasources.
I'm Playing 21 Lands and this seems to be the lowest possible imo. With Swamps for Wastelands 20 might be okay, but with Smallpox you definately need 22+ Lands, even without Wastelands.
Or do you want to screw yourself with Smallpox? Oh, and Goblins will even more screw you with their Wastelands.
A hand like that:

Swamp, Scrubland, Ritual, Duress, Sinkhole, Smallpox, Wretch/Shade/Vindicate seems quiet solid imo. But after you smallpoxed and lost a land (probably swamp, cause u might want W for Vindicate) this hand doen't look that solid anymore. IF you then get hit by a Wasteland, your just f***ed up, imo.

That's why I'd say with Smallpox you'll need at least 22 Lands.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Summoner

Huhm, 20 Lands with Smallpox? :rolleyes:
Seems as if u would hurt yourself MUCH with that.

---

I think he's taking the term sui black variant a little too literally.

There's no way you should only run 20 lands, even if you cut wastelands and aren't running Small Pox. 21 is the bare minimum. With Small Pox, I would run 23 (that's how many Pikula ran in the only build of the deck that has done extremely well and that was before Small Pox). This deck runs too many 3cc cards from Vindicate to Engineered Plague to Cursed Scroll activations to Cursed Scroll's replacements Jitte and Masticore.

If anything Small Pox makes Wasteland even more of a must play even if only half the decks you play run nonbasics. It's 4 additional pieces of land destruction. This makes the land destruction strategy that much more viable making Wasteland extremely strong. It also gives you a way to destroy the few basics your opponents manage to fetch making Wasteland even stronger. And lastly it gives you an outlet to sacrifice Wasteland in those rare few matchups (9 land stompy, burn) where Wasteland does no good.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Clark Kant

I think he's taking the term sui black variant a little too literally.

There's no way you should only run 20 lands, even if you cut wastelands and aren't running Small Pox. 21 is the bare minimum. With Small Pox, I would run 23 (that's how many Pikula ran in the only build of the deck that has done extremely well and that was before Small Pox). This deck runs too many 3cc cards from Vindicate to Engineered Plague to Cursed Scroll activations to Cursed Scroll's replacements Jitte and Masticore.

If anything Small Pox makes Wasteland even more of a must play even if only half the decks you play run nonbasics. It's 4 additional pieces of land destruction. This makes the land destruction strategy that much more viable making Wasteland extremely strong. It also gives you a way to destroy the few basics your opponents manage to fetch making Wasteland even stronger. And lastly it gives you an outlet to sacrifice Wasteland in those rare few matchups (9 land stompy, burn) where Wasteland does no good.

---

I think that summed it up about perfectly. If your opponent is playing around wasteland, thier deck is not performing optimally. Getting them to play around it could be just as much of a good thing as acually hitting land.

And the small pox awesomeness, too.

I've listed off all the decks I see on a regular basis, and out of all of them, Goblins are the only ones playing 4 Wasteland. On the average, 0 Goblin players show up around here. The deck is that hated already. Two players have it, and both would rather play their better choices (Solidarity & Thresh, respectively) than constantly deal with hate. So for that instance, I'm never worried about losing out to opposing Wastelands.

As for Smallpox hitting off my own lands, that has yet to be fully tested. With the few games I had tested it, I only screwed myself out of mana once, and even if Wasteland was one of them, it wouldn't have helped (I was doing it off a Dark Ritual with 2 Swamps in play, for Duress backup), as I didn't get to draw into another land for 6 turns. With an even 1 in 3 odds of drawing a land, that just comes up as one of those "random statistical errors" that just screws you.

By no means am I advocating this deck to be a suicide or Pox based build. I'm merely stating that before, the deck didn't need 23 lands, it's cc ratio cuts at 3, and after removal of Scrolls, the only 3cc left were Hyppie and Vindicate. A lot of people have cut it to 21, but cutting out 4 Wasteland for a 4 of, I put it back to 19, which I decided I'd rather have the extra Swamp than a 4th Shade, because it's usually a bad choice to have 2 or more of them on the table at the same time (overextending into WoG 4TW).

In place, I've added in more disruption. As before, my argument comes down to land destruction vs card advantage. If you see a lot of nonbasics, Wasteland is fine. Cut back a couple creatures, and Verdict, which is what I added in in place originally. If like mine, however, you see no opposing Wastelands, no R.Ports, and decks packing 4 or less duals, it's bad. A colorless source, and like stated, a sacrificial outlet for Small Pox at best.

I have a few friends around today, so I'll be playtesting. We currently have IGGY, Solidarity, Goblins, Thresh, Deadguy, Rifter, U/G Madness & Affinity built. I'll run a gauntlet with a buddy of mine, and come back with results. We'll also make adjustments, as I assume it might be a good idea to go back up to 22 lands with Small Pox, but I have a gut feeling it actually won't be necessary. A new decklist will be coming later this evening.

Smallpox has so far been awesome for me, although I kinda feel like I'd want another draw engine, since occasionally Smallpox forces me to discard cards I wouldn't want to. Still, among other things, I've wrecked Thres by playing 'em into position to double-Pox, taking out Werebear, Mongoose, their 2 remaining handcards and dropping them to 1 land in the process. I've also got a trackrecord of nuking Mystic Enforcers with them. The one problem is that you don't want to cast it with a dude in play, but it's powerful enough to usually make up for that. I wouldn't drop Vindicate, but I'd drop something; it's hard enough to fit it in but if one does, it gives us pretty nice figures with 4 Edict-effects, 4-10 spot removal (Cursed Scroll, Funeral Charm and the omnipresent Vindicate), ~3 sweepers (in my case, Bane of the Living), 16 LD-spells (Sinkhole, Vindicate, Smallpox, Wasteland), while still maintaining some 16 discard-spells or so (Hymn, Funeral/Duress, (Verdict), Hypno, Pox).