Relying on just entomb is a poor decision. Get some careful study or intuition in that list.Quote:
Originally Posted by kikkofrio
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Relying on just entomb is a poor decision. Get some careful study or intuition in that list.Quote:
Originally Posted by kikkofrio
I don't think Careful Study is very good in lists with only three or four creatures. Ponder will be better almost all of the time you cast it. I Googled "60 card deck probabilities" and used a calculator I found...if you run four creatures, lose the die roll (and draw first), and cast Careful Study (so you've seen 7+1+2 cards), what are the odds that you'll have found a creature to pitch to Careful Study? I get 53%.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Kruchkow
If I run that again, with 4 Careful Study and 4 fatties, I get a 24% chance of having both in the first ten cards (which is cheating, because you really need Careful Study in the first eight). On the play, that's 20%. Ponder will be better most of the time you cast Study.
I like Intuition, but the problem with Intuition is that if you search for your three fatties, the one you need is going to your hand. You could Intuition for Entombs, or have some redundancy in your creature base, but neither one of those sounds very impressive.
Sorry I don't have any more constructive help. A card like Buried Alive or Tog seems better than Careful Study, though.
Why do you think 3-4 creatures is the optimal build in the first place? What do you do when you're facing Ichorid and you're facing 11 2/2 Zombies ready to smash you into the ground? Or when MonoGreen Chalice Aggro brings out a turn 2 Progenitus via Natural Order? Or a turn 2 Stifle+Dreadnought?
Reanimator is not the only way to bring out giant fatties, other decks are now capable of bringing out the biggest fatties in the game; creatures that far outclass the ones Reanimator uses. No one creature that can be reanimated can end the game in two turns, aside from Sutured Ghoul and the like, which we are not using. In order to compensate, we should have a tool box approach instead of just using 3-4 of the best creatures.
Say you're on the draw. On turn 2, your opponent brings out Progenitus/Dreadnought. Turn 2 Iona/Inkwell will not save you from this. Blazing Archon will. Visara/Woodfall Primus/Angel of Despair would take care of Dreadnought. The unbanning of Entomb has enabled Reanimator to use a toolbox approach and we should abuse that to the best of our ability.
Intuition is too clunky at three mana. Entomb and Mystical Tutor do its job more effectively at lower mana costs.
Playing only 2-3 creature, I have more slot for distruption and protection of combo my combo.
Playing Iona and Leviatan, I don't worry about apponent Stp, and I can focus all my resurces on opponent's play.
In addition to that, I play this deck as I would play a Vintage Oath, so I don't want to see my creature in hand.
Having a creature in opening hand is a mulligan at 6, and playing a study don't give me any effective advantage.
Dark ritual is too strong. I often take it with tutor to make in second turn ritual-seize entomb reanimate.
With enough protection, 8 free counter and 7 brain/ponder, playing tyrant is fantastic. Try it please.
Anyway, please give me a full-creature list.
This was my pet deck for AGES! I loved it so much. Problem is, it just can't be consistent. At all. Even with Entomb. I put so much thought, I played every possible combination of colors, and admittedly I was not as good a player, I still failed. It just is not consistent enough. You use 3 cards to get a creature out and they counter the final spell. Or you draw all reanimators or all discard/deck to graveyard or too many of the creature of choice and get screwed. Entomb doesn't change that much :[
Vintage Oath runs Hellkite Overlord in order to kill as fast as possible. There are many games where the Oath player activates his Oath plan only to lose because it simply does not kill as fast. Legacy follows a similar speed. Inkwell Leviathan and Iona, while resilient, will not be nearly as speedy.
The main problem I have against a 3 creature Reanimator is that it has basically zero chance of winning against Ichorid in game 1, whereas a toolbox with say, Thunder Dragon or Blazing Archon would have much more of a chance. An auto-loss to a popular archetype is severe.
Dreadstill also tears it apart, as it runs more counters, more draw, and a creature bigger than anything Reanimator and pull out of the grave.
Also, if you are only running Entombs as your sole graveyard enabler, you NEED to run a Mystical Tutor-toolbox with Wipe Away and the such. Meddling Mage for Entomb = gg. Also if you are really running it as a pure combo deck. Why not just use Iona + Painter's Servant + Tidespout/some board clearer. Iona+Painter's basically does win the game assuming your opponent doesn't already have board control.
After playing around with Daze, I don't feel it is at all suited for this deck. Most things that you would want to counter, such as Edict and StP cost very little and the opposing player usually would not need to tap out. If you want another free counter, I'd rather go with Misdirection.
Tidespout Tyrant is very interesting though, I will try it out.
Here are the reasonings behind the creatures that I would use.
Akroma/Hellkite Overlord: Pure speed. Against decks that dont pack StP, reanimating one after another usually means a fatal 20 damage in two turns.
Sphinx of the Steel Wind: A better Phantom Nishoba. Beats Goblins to death. Laughs at Tarmogoyfs. Vigilance is the shit. Also makes sure the life loss from Reanimate doesn't bite you in the ass.
Blazing Archon: GG Ichorid. If aggro cannot answer this, they die.
Iona, Shield of Emeria: We've all been through why this is awesome.
Inkwell Leviathan: this too.
Thunder Dragon/Crater Hellion/Bogardan Hellkite: sometimes aggro can make more things than you can deal with and run you the hell over.
Woodfall Primus : Permanent control. I would DEFINITELY run these if I were using Cabal Therapy. I almost want to cut some Thoughtseizes and Hapless Researchers in my build for Therapies in order to accommodate this guy. Tidespout might be a legit replacement though.
Woodripper/some artifact/enchantment killer: Reanimator doesn't like to face Dreadnoughts.
Well, Entomb allows you to tutor for your creature, allowing you to run only 2-3.Quote:
Originally Posted by UberNewHacks
I ran Reanimator and Angry Hermit when they were Extended legal and I had no problems with consistency in general. Of course, at that time there was Vampiric Tutor in addition to Entomb. :cry:
Originally, I was trying to think of all the reasons I could to prove this statement wrong. Entomb's unbanning got me more excited to play than anything else since I started Legacy.Quote:
Originally Posted by UberNewHacks
So, I did some goldfishing (shuffle and play 100 hands, which may not be statistically significant, but I will run the numbers with pure stats later to check my results) with entomb reanimator. I used: 4x tutor, study, entomb, exhume, reanimate, FoW, brainstorm, duress, 5 creatures and 1 show & tell (22 land manabase). Every card in the deck is geared toward getting the combo off as fast as possible or protecting it as well as possible. There are no fewer than 8 cards for everything I need: protection, discard, reanimation, tutoring. In some cases I have more.
As much as I hate to say it, my results found the above completely true. Reanimator (for me) wasn't just inconsistent, it was slow.
-About half the time I didn't get to choose what creature to reanimate. If I couldn't draw or tutor entomb, it was whatever I drew in my opening 7 or off careful study. Not cool.
-More than half the time, I went off without protection. A single hard counter (not something crappy like daze or cursecatcher, but something like counterbalance or FoW) would have screwed me because the combo basically dumped my entire hand.
-Usual turn to go off was 3-4. That's not just slow, it's solidarity slow. ANT/NLS/TES and all those can consistently go off on turn 2. And that's with 20 damage to tendrils, not just casting a 6/6 or 7/7.
The problem I saw was that the combo just needs too many pieces to be put together. The combo needs 3 pieces to assemble: discard/ pitch (entomb, study), reanimate, creature. A tutor can find 1 of those, but assuming you optimize your manabase to draw 2 lands in your opening 7, thats 5 cards to draw 3 different pieces, plus any protection you might need. To me, what makes DTB decks so good is their ability to consistently draw winnable hands no matter the combination of pieces they have. So what if Zoo never sees burn, it has creatures. Or Merfolk doesn't see folk, it has counters and super CA to find them. Even combo decks like ANT have fewer prerequisites for going off. Of course 1 card won't make reanimator a DTB, but still needing so many pieces with so few ways to consistently draw them for a turn 1-2 fattie is discouraging.
I haven't given up on the archetype yet and I'm completely open to the fact that my draws may have been skewed (though 100 draws was an awful lot to do with paper magic and the results were generally consistent with the amount of cards dedicated to whatever purpose).
So, what about fitting stiflenought in the reanimator shell? Stifle has been suggested as a useful SB card, so adding +3 dreadnoughts (or moving all 7 to the MD) could be a useful second win condition, especially since dreadnought only pings you for 1 with reanimate. It's just another creature and stifle is useful protection if you draw it without nought.
I also haven't used hapless researcher, though I don't know if he's the right panacea (though digging + discard is a nice effect and both are needed). I agree with a toolbox creature base, but I don't think the creature base is the problem. I think ensuring the combo goes off and does so as fast as possible is more important, but I haven't found a way to do this yet. I just don't see what the point of playing this over ANT or Ichorid is if both of those are way more consistent and considerably scarier to face than a single fat creature (even if it has shroud or other anti-removal built in).
@ IsThisACatInAHat?: if you were to stick to Dreadnought only creatures maindeck, you could run Unearth instead of Exhume.
Has anyone tried mono black Reanimator? As in just putting in more reanimation effects and discard to power through the counters instead of trying to play control on their home turf so to speak. I think I'll need to try that.
I meant to suggest adding dreadnought in addition to the others, not instead of. Dreadstill is a obviously much, much stronger shell for stiflenought alone; I only meant to suggest that it could be added because stifle's in the deck (or SB) anyway and dreadnought fits rather seamlessly. The idea behind it is much easier to reanimate dread+ expensive fatty than 2 expensive ones (with dread, reanimate can be used twice without risking losing to a single burn spell, otherwise it can only be used once and then you basically need to wait for exhume to bring another guy back). I'll try testing it but I suspect needing yet another card will make it unsuccessful. I'm just trying out as many possibilities as I can to make the deck more powerful.Quote:
Originally Posted by MMogg
This is my next project, as I retried my above list with -2 swamp/-2 island for 4 putrid imps and the average turn to reanimate fell to 2 (especially if I wasn't picky about exactly which creature came back). I only did ~20 or so trials though, so results are inconclusive. Still, careful study is an important discard outlet even if FoW and brainstorm can be dropped for a monoblack version. I've been looking through old pages of '01-'03 extended decks to find what they used in both types (monoblack and b/u splash).Quote:
Has anyone tried mono black Reanimator? As in just putting in more reanimation effects and discard to power through the counters instead of trying to play control on their home turf so to speak. I think I'll need to try that.
I think monoblack may have a lot of trouble finding the pieces without vampiric tutor, which is essentially filled by mystical tutor in b/u splash (old extended decks didn't run both even in the b/u splash).
In any case, even with the best versions I've been able to find yet, after turn 2 my entire hand is gone (supposing combo+1 piece of protection), so if my opponent has more than 1 answer (say, counter+ removal, 2 counters or 2 removal, all of which are common) then the deck basically flounders and dies.
Dont play monoblack Reanimator. The deck NEEDS Mystical Tutor. If Vampiric Tutor was unbanned, then I could see monoblack working, but without it, it becomes terribly inconsistent.
I tried the following, using the 2001 Infestation Reanimators as a shell.
Mana (22)
18x Swamp
4x Dark Ritual
Spells(28)
4x Reanimate
4x Exhume
1x Animate Dead
4x Entomb
4x Zombie Infestation
3x Buried Alive
3x Duress
4x Cabal Therapy
1x Contamination
Creatures(10)
1x Akroma, Angel of Wrath
2x Krovikan Horror
1x Squee, Goblin Nabob
1x Nether Spirit
1x Inkwell Leviathan
1x Iona, Shield of Emeria
1x Empyrial Archangel
1x Blazing Archon
1x Thunder Dragon
The deck was stupidly inconsistent. Without tutors/draw, the deck is trash.
The problem with Reanimator isn't that its inconsistent. Actually with Mystical Tutor and Entomb, its stupidly consistent. It's that it generally loses to top deck removal and counters. 4 FoW isn't enough to win counterwars, and Duress/Thoughtseize doesn't take care of topdecks.
Reanimator is still a Tier 2 pet deck I'd say, but there's no reason to run it over Ichorid/Cephalid Breakfast aside from personal attachment.
Speed is a big reason to not run Reanimator, simply because it uses alot of resources to set up a combo that generally doesn't win until 2-4 turns after it is executed. Reanimating Hellkite and Akroma afterwards is the only 2 turn win condition it has, and doing so probably requires you to go off without protection.
Once they unban Hermit Druid, which I assume they will soon, Angry Ghoul might be more viable but it's alot harder to pilot and one slip makes you lose the game. In a field full of StP and counter, it might not really be that strong. That, and a Narcomoeba strategy would probably replace the Reanimator strat.
Still, just because its not a DTB doesn't mean it wouldn't be a fun time piloting it, since it doesnt actually AUTOlose to any deck.
im testing this right now:
4 lotus petal
4 bloodstained mire
4 polluted delta
4 underground sea
2 swamp
2 island
1 empyrical archangel
1 iona, shield of emeria
1 inkwell leviathan
1 blazing archon
1 sundering titan
4 putrid imp
4 careful study
4 brainstorm
4 entomb
4 thoughtseize
4 stifle
4 reanimate
4 exhume
3 animate dead
SB:
15 slot
so far ive tested a few games against zoo. beat the living shit out of it. all you need is to go for archangel or archon with protection and you are in the clear, though fast leviathan works too.
my game against gobs/elves will try to be to go for iona fast, or archon, or archangel.
my game against control is shifty right now. hopefully i can get the jump on them with stifling fetch land or opening with thoughtseize and then going for archangel or leviathan or titan.
ive been getting consistent turn 2 or turn 3 with protection at this point. quite a few times too i get turn 1 with a lotus petal and either a creature in hand, putrid imp, and reanimate, or entomb and reanimate.
entomb is unbelievably good and so far im liking the tool box. keep in mind all of you that are running just like 2 or 3 creatures taht you will get all your win cons raped by grave removal or that new kicker 7 black spell taht removes 3 cards from your library.
Currently i'm testing a monoblack list with beseech the queen instead of vampiric tutor and dark ritual to power up the occasional first turn discard + something else.
Beseech is slow compared to vamp, true, but nonethelss i'm liking it. 6 duress effect are usually enough for me to go through countermagic.
Why not run Street Wraith? I run 4x in my reanimator and it helps. I think that reanimator needs more mana acceleration than people have been giving it (lotus petal, dark rit, or even chrome mox).
First off, congrats to the un-banning of Entomb. My Re-An pieces are now gonna be off the card album. Now, if I may suggest some "new combo:"
Kokusho in the gyard, re animate him and play this
Rite of Replication 2UU
Kicker 5
Put a token that is a copy of target creature onto the battlefield. If Rite Of Replication was kicked, instead put five of those tokens onto the battlefield.
Dark Ritual to pull it off?
IDK if this seems viable im not that familiar with the UB Re-An since the banning of Entomb.
Maybe in casual, competitively using that doesn't seem like it would be very good at all
Now that this thread's been "reanimated", I see some good discussion.
Just my 2 cents:
1) I'm glad to see that some people see the incredible value of Sphinx of the Steel Wind. When I first mentioned it in this thread, I got bashed for it. They are a salvation against Goblins or Burn decks (see next point). Iona is really incredible too.
2) Why not reconsider Reanimate? I really don't like this card, and greatly prefer Animate Dead/Exhume/Victimize. Reanimating a creature like Iona or Inkwell Leviathan takes almost half your life, and when you add in your pain lands, you are extremely vulnerable to fast decks, especially Burn. Against Burn you die so quick you won't believe it. The other problem is that if you draw it later in the game, you probably won't have enough life left to even use it.
3) Someone mentioned Victimize. The card is better than it seems at first glance. Cards like Bogardan Hellkite, Angel of Despair, or Sundering Titan are still awesome even if they come into play tapped. Plus Victimize has a better chance of getting past a Counterbalance than Reanimate or Exhume.
4) Entomb is unbanned (yay!). Keep in mind that it's not just a faster version of Buried Alive. It can put any card in the graveyard, not just creature cards. That means that you simply have more options with cards that can work from/be pulled from the graveyard, like Dread Return, Anger, etc. There are a lot of combos here, and I'm just starting to work them out.
5) Someone mentioned Street Wraith. If you are going that route, I think Scion of Darkness is better.
5) What CatInAHat said is true. Reanimator is damn inconsistent. One thing that helps more than you might expect, is to have some cards that you can hardcast. I know Legacy is a fast format but you would be surprised how many matches drag out. And if you don't have a reanimation spell handy (or you're facing a Counterbalance), you end up wishing you were holding a Tidespout Tyrant in your hand instead of that Akroma, because you have 8 lands on the table, and you could have already cast that fat creature already.
Just curious, but why do people like Chrome Mox over Dark Ritual so much?
It seems like the potential for a T1 Entomb+Reanimate/Exhume is just too good to pass up...
It is good, HOWEVER, there is one big problem. If your opponent counters it with a FoW or whatever, you just used up at least 3 cards (Entomb, Ritual, Reanimate) in the process. Dark Rit is great, but you take a risk because this deck type already suffers from card disadvantage. And if you draw a Ritual later in the game, it's usually a wasted draw. Same problem with Chrome Mox, which unlike a land, can be countered.Quote:
Originally Posted by Esper3k
Why is this deck considered inconsistent if Entomb Hulk is not? I've seen talk about the new Flash Hulk decks being pretty amazing, but the opinion is that Reanimator is tier three because of consistency problems. If one is super consistent, then their ought to be a way to build the other to be similarly consistent.Quote:
Originally Posted by John Rohan