[Deck] CounterSliver 2.0 (MeatHooks.dec)

CounterSliver should do fine against Burn, since it has a decent clock backed up with countermagic. That's how Gro beats the deck.

Try sideboarding out Crystalline Slivers for Meddling Mages. Making your guys untargetable is poor because it shuts off your ability to Swords them for life, and because you should almost always be happy if a Burn player aims a burn spell at one of your creatures instead of at your face.

Mage is nice because it can name Flamebreak, which should often force the opponent to spend a card removing it.

Burn is a combo deck without any draw, which means that it loses easily if you force it to interact. It can't afford to actually trade cards with a deck with superior card manipulation and more effective damage sources (creatures).

If you really want to board for the deck, though, Blue Elemental Blast or Chill would be the way to go, depending on which you find is better against Goblins (since that's a real deck you should actually care about).

Dont know about the versions you played against but trinisphere is tough.

this version was mono white

trinisphere, chalice, tangle wire, smoke stack, crucible, wasteland and only the 4 angels for the win, it was tough

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Originally Posted by Obfuscate Freely

Try sideboarding out Crystalline Slivers for Meddling Mages.

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Wait, what?

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Making your guys untargetable is poor because it shuts off your ability to Swords them for life

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So, making them unable to remove our threats is bad, because it makes us unable to do it for them?

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and because you should almost always be happy if a Burn player aims a burn spell at one of your creatures instead of at your face.

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There is some truth to this, but when them picking off one of your creatures gives all of your other creatures -1/-1 (because when are they ever going to kill something other than Muscle or Sinew?), that also slows down your clock, which is no good. Usually them killing your creature rather than damaging you is a good thing, but when it also prevents a good 4-6 damage (from the Sliver itself and from the extra damage your other slivers aren't dealing), it can be a hassle.

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Mage is nice because it can name Flamebreak, which should often force the opponent to spend a card removing it.

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Winged Sliver > Flamebreak, with the added bonus of not having a double color requirement, and often coming down with 3 or more power for 2 mana. If I'm going to name anything with Mage, it will likely be Price of Progress.

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If you really want to board for the deck, though, Blue Elemental Blast or Chill would be the way to go, depending on which you find is better against Goblins (since that's a real deck you should actually care about).

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Well, good thing we beat Goblins into the dirt. As far as board options, I think that Chill is probably the best, because it's hard for red to deal with, and sticks to the table for a lasting effect whereas BEB is a one-shot thing. Also, Chill > Warmth IMO due to Force pitchability.

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Originally Posted by Pinder

Wait, what?

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Try sideboarding out Crystalline Slivers for Meddling Mages.

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So, making them unable to remove our threats is bad, because it makes us unable to do it for them?

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Making them unable to remove our threats is bad, because we want them to do it. Their cards are, individually, more precious to them than ours are to us.

Being able to Swords our own creature sounds like bad Magic, but it's not. Trading a Swords and a Sliver for a Fireblast and two Mountains is a fine way to keep ourself from dying. It isn't even very likely to impact our clock, since by the time we're resorting to using STP we should be within a turn or two of winning.

When I play Gro, and I find myself with more than couple of creatures in hand against Burn, I will often play unthreshed Werebears hoping that the Burn player will fry them. Unless it buys them multiple turns, a Burn player simply cannot allow an opponent's creatures to function as Counterspells. If Gro can take advantage of this, than CounterSliver (and its higher creature count) certainly can, too.

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There is some truth to this, but when them picking off one of your creatures gives all of your other creatures -1/-1 (because when are they ever going to kill something other than Muscle or Sinew?), that also slows down your clock, which is no good. Usually them killing your creature rather than damaging you is a good thing, but when it also prevents a good 4-6 damage (from the Sliver itself and from the extra damage your other slivers aren't dealing), it can be a hassle.

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A Bolt on a Muscle Sliver may slow down our clock, but rarely by more than a turn. Them losing that Bolt will usually slow them down by as many turns as it takes for them to topdeck another Bolt to replace it, which is to say at least a turn. This sort of trade favors Slivers considerably.

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Winged Sliver > Flamebreak, with the added bonus of not having a double color requirement, and often coming down with 3 or more power for 2 mana. If I'm going to name anything with Mage, it will likely be Price of Progress.

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You might be right on this. My point was just that Mage is decent since it forces them to trade another card.

Have you found it impossible to play around PoP? It seems like the deck is fairly capable of accessing and functioning off of mostly basics. How difficult is it to keep just one nonbasic (Tropical Island) on the board at a time?

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Well, good thing we beat Goblins into the dirt. As far as board options, I think that Chill is probably the best, because it's hard for red to deal with, and sticks to the table for a lasting effect whereas BEB is a one-shot thing. Also, Chill > Warmth IMO due to Force pitchability.

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Percentage points against Goblins are still far more important than percentage points against Burn. If you are preparing for any sort of competitive Legacy tournament, Burn isn't worth the slightest bit of consideration. Local metagames are different, though.

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Originally Posted by Obfuscate Freely

Making them unable to remove our threats is bad, because we want them to do it. Their cards are, individually, more precious to them than ours are to us.

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That could be argued, but I see your reasoning.

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Being able to Swords our own creature sounds like bad Magic, but it's not. Trading a Swords and a Sliver for a Fireblast and two Mountains is a fine way to keep ourself from dying. It isn't even very likely to impact our clock, since by the time we're resorting to using STP we should be within a turn or two of winning.

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I know that Swordsing your own creature can be a solid play, but if we're talking postboard, I doubt I will still have swords in the MD. Unless you're suggesting we keep them in solely for the purpose of removing our slivers to keep ourselves alive?

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When I play Gro, and I find myself with more than couple of creatures in hand against Burn, I will often play unthreshed Werebears hoping that the Burn player will fry them. Unless it buys them multiple turns, a Burn player simply cannot allow an opponent's creatures to function as Counterspells. If Gro can take advantage of this, than CounterSliver (and its higher creature count) certainly can, too.

A Bolt on a Muscle Sliver may slow down our clock, but rarely by more than a turn. Them losing that Bolt will usually slow them down by as many turns as it takes for them to topdeck another Bolt to replace it, which is to say at least a turn. This sort of trade favors Slivers considerably.

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You may be right about this. And if you have multiple Plated/Sinew/Muscle, they would have to use 2 or more burn spells to kill a sliver. At any rate, you've convinced me to at least try the matchup without Crystalline.

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You might be right on this. My point was just that Mage is decent since it forces them to trade another card.

Have you found it impossible to play around PoP? It seems like the deck is fairly capable of accessing and functioning off of mostly basics. How difficult is it to keep just one nonbasic (Tropical Island) on the board at a time?

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This is true. PoP in reality shouldn't hurt you as much as I was assuming it would because even though we have so many nonbasics you can function off of basic lands. But on the other hand, sometimes you don't always start with your fetches and you have to lay down early game nonbasics to get started. It's not terribly uncommon for me to still find myself with 2-3 nonbasics on the table because I laid them down before I started fetching. I also sometimes fetch nonbasics to cope with color commitment (for example, if I have a tapped Island in play and a fetch, I would most likely fetch a Tundra so I can SV this turn and still play a Crystalline/Mage/Sinew next turn, etc.) But you're right about it not being as serious a threat.

On further thought, I would probably name Fireblast with Mage, because that's typically what they use to kill you.

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Percentage points against Goblins are still far more important than percentage points against Burn. If you are preparing for any sort of competitive Legacy tournament, Burn isn't worth the slightest bit of consideration.

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True, but it's not a bad exercise to theorize.

what do you guys do in the mirror match? do you have any tech? in a local tourney, the 2 finalists were playing the absolute same deck, seems like the person with the busted draw will win it, they just split

Well the deck isn't popular enough to bother with any sideboard tech against it. But usually mages are sided in, and the game is about tempo and denying your opponent threats using the magi; one neat trick is to resolve the first crystaline sliver and then mage crystaline since it will always be the biggest sliver on the field.

If you see the matchup alot try ensnare in the sideboard.

Yeah, what he said. But if this deck rises in popularity (and I'm sure it will), it's probably best to side out all your StP's and bring in all Slivers you have in the SB (I run 3 Harmonics and 2 Essence SB), as well as Stifles to take out fetchlands.

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Originally Posted by Maverick676

If you see the matchup alot try ensnare in the sideboard.

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QFT. The mirror, even if someone tends to get the advantage in the early game, tends to stall once each player has 2-3 slivers on the table. Between 16 Muscle Slivers and 8 Plated, each creature ends up being huge, and having a toughness larger than it's power. Since combat favors the defense in this situation, it is very hard to push through damage. An EOT Ensnare while you have lethal damage piled up (not hard to do with 16 Muscle effects) will let you untap and swing FTW. Just make sure you have counter backup. And that they don't have another Ensnare of their own.

Engineered Explosives is also pretty techy in the mirror if you have it board or main. If you can afford to hold slivers in hand, letting them overextend into an EE at 2 will allow you to drop the slivers in your hand and hopefully gain enough of a lead that you can kill them before they come back.

Heaven help you if you play against a bad sliver deck, though. Since the matchup inevitably goes to the late game, they will almost always have the mana to play their 4/4 tramplers for 6 or their 5 mana 3/3 first strikers. Normally these slivers suck, but with the added bonus of all the good slivers your essentially playing for them, their base power and toughness being larger than all of yours makes them hard to deal with. Luckily if they're playing SliversIOwn.dec, you can hopefully beat them before it gets that far. Hopefully.

I'm pretty sure the tourney murderface is talking about is the one from saturday here in vegas. I was one of the 2 Countersliver players. I've had this deck together since before this topic even existed, but this was the first time i've been able to pay it in a tourney. I totaly wasen't prepared for the mirror, since no one else around here has ever played it before. I found out the other guy was playing it after the first round started, and i was dreading faceing him all day. We were both lucky not to face each other till the finals, cause i doubt either of us had any tech like ensnare to help swing the mirror in our favor. I know i didnt.

A brief record of my day was:

Round 1: Bye
Round 2: 0-2 (somehow lost to charbelcher. I kept crap hands)
Round 3: 2-0 (some type2 red/green agro deck)
Round 4: 2-0 (guy playing type2 GW Glare)
Round 5: 2-0 (Mono Red Sligh)
Round 6: 2-1 (Survival)
Round 7: Split aganist mirror matchup

Note worthy things being my sad loss to Charbelcher. I wasent in a very good mood in part to getting the bye, finding out theres someone else playing the mirror, and just not haveing enough caffine. I pretty much gave up on doing well that day before i even started the round, and i kept absolutely retarded hands knowing full well what deck he was playing.

Round 6 against survival i lost the second game due to him getting over kill out with Spore Frog, Spike Weaver, and Dawnstrider, while i couldnt rip a Swords for nothing. Also for some damn reason i didnt bring in mages. Dont ask me, i have no clue why i didnt. I brought them in 3rd game, droped one 2nd turn nameing survival, and he could never do anything about it.

In the finals against the mirror we played out game one alittle. I kept a hand with 2 land and 5 slivers (3 being muscle/sinew). I managed to get a advantage early by haveing more creatures, but things soon balanced out. We desided to split the pot just as he was starting to get a advantage.

Very odd day for me.

Anyway, the list i played was kind of thrown together in the few minute before the tourney, so i dont remember it all. Just i only played 3 plated cause thats all i have. 2 harmonic and 1 Talon main. And my sideboard was a mess. If i had more time it would have been alot better, and i would have been all around more prepared (cept for the mirror. Honestly would never have suspected that).

Sort of off topis but, Does anyone know what to expect at gp columbus?
I think thats the name of the legacy grand prix thats going on in like a month or so.
Just asking.

Lots of Gobos and Thresh. Past that I'll expect to see everything from TES to Landstill.

So I have no intention of slogging through 48 pages of posts on countersliver, and I'm going to ask a question that has probably already been beat into the ground. Why bother with the counters? The reason that I ask is this:

Solidarity and TES will be present at a large tourney, but they will not make a significant percentage of the field. These are the matchups that you need counters for, as slivers is not a fast deck, per se, and has no other disruption for combo.

Gro and variants will make up a significant portion of the field, but the problem with Gro is, you have to have an excessive amount of Slivers to win, or you have to keep all their creatures off the board. One on one, even with 8 Muscles, you're not likely to be running over Bears or Dryads or Grunts. So you either have to get 1-2 big swings for the win, or counter all their creatures. They're better set up to play the aggro control game than you are, so trying to beat them that by denying their threats is probably not going to work.

Goblins is probably a very good matchup for CounterSliver. Since I'm not reading all 48 pages, I don't know how good, but I know that Slivers without counters runs 90% plus(no bullshit) against Gobbos, at least, out of the dozen or so games I've played, I have yet to lose one or even come close to losing a game. Goblins also will make up a significant portion of the field at any large tournament, it will likely be the most populous deck.

Slivers (obviously) are more scary the more of them you have. Even if the additional slivers are not adding anything to your list of abilities (your second Winged Sliver), likely they're going to constitute a significant threat in their own right (say a 3/4 flyer for 1U, which is better than Serendib Efreet, I've heard 'dib is some good).

The reason that I pose this question is because on a whim, I decided to put together a 1.5 Slivers deck about a week ago, in the hopes that it would give me something to smack around Goblins with. I didn't expect it to actually be good, because, well, it's Slivers. I considered going CounterSliver, but I felt that there wasn't really anything in Goblins that I'd want to counter, and after having played it against random people on MWS and against a few tier decks in my roomate's hands, I haven't found anything that constitutes a bad matchup, outside of combo decks.

Not surprisingly, I'm running all the slivers from the listing in the OP, but I'm also running Quilled, Sidewinder, Victual and Quick Sliver, along with Eladamri's Call.

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Originally Posted by Pinder

On further thought, I would probably name Fireblast with Mage, because that's typically what they use to kill you.

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I wouldn't. I'd name Price of Progress. If they kill the mage, you then know they're holding a Price (or think they have to draw into one to win) and can save your counter accordingly.

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Originally Posted by murderface

what do you guys do in the mirror match? do you have any tech? in a local tourney, the 2 finalists were playing the absolute same deck, seems like the person with the busted draw will win it, they just split

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If the mirror became serious, Turnabout would be neat. Tap all your opponent's creatures down to Fog and allow a lethal swing next turn. Or if your opponent Turnabouts you and swings all in, Turnabout them back.

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Originally Posted by SpikeyMikey

Not surprisingly, I'm running all the slivers from the listing in the OP, but I'm also running Quilled, Sidewinder, Victual and Quick Sliver, along with Eladamri's Call.

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On that note, may I suggest Aether Vial?

Indeed, more slivers would give you a better game against Goblins, but near as I can tell not having counters would make your matchup horrible against heavy board control as well as combo. From what you've told me, I can only imagine that Deed/EE/Disk/WoG bends you over the table. All I know is that a resolved WoG et al is pretty bad for us, although you might be able to recover faster between a higher threat density and Call.

Either way, feel free to pursue this thought, but for now I'm sticking to my counterspells. I guess I'll just have to settle for 70-30 against Gobs. *sigh*.

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Originally Posted by Tacosnape

If the mirror became serious, Turnabout would be neat. Tap all your opponent's creatures down to Fog and allow a lethal swing next turn. Or if your opponent Turnabouts you and swings all in, Turnabout them back.

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That's why we have thought about Ensnare. If you time it right (i.e., during your opponent's turn) it's basically the same thing, but Ensnare is all kinds of free, which makes it better here IMO.

Also, it doesn't require UU. Of course, I doubt getting UU will ever really be a problem, but it's there.

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Originally Posted by Pinder

On that note, may I suggest Aether Vial?

Indeed, more slivers would give you a better game against Goblins, but near as I can tell not having counters would make your matchup horrible against heavy board control as well as combo. From what you've told me, I can only imagine that Deed/EE/Disk/WoG bends you over the table.

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That's the reason why I'm running the 4color build with Hibernation Sliver, it renders all mass removal useless. Between Crystaline and Hibernation you cover every possible removal spell.
Aether Vial is also included, since the interaction with Hibernation Sliver is so damn good, it accelerates, colorfixes and circumvents counters. With more Slivers, your threat count is now high enough to justify Vial.

The only matchup where I really want the counters is combo. Since combo is not very prevalent right now, I think it's acceptable to leave your combo hate in the board, therefore bettering all your other matchups.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this approach.

I disagree with the assumption that combo isn't very prevalent atm. While Solidarity and IGGy may be slightly on the down swing, TES and Aluren sure aren't. I also disagree with the assumption that our counters are only good against combo. Daze is excellent against Gobos and any black disruption decks (I'll daze your sinkhole. Go ahead, pay the 1, I dare you). FOW is good against.... everything. This deck doesn't have the speed, resiliency, or card advantage to exist as purely aggro. That is, until we get the much salivated over sliver ringleader :tongue: .

Kronicler

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Originally Posted by Bongo

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this approach.

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If you want those, just go back through this thread and search for 'Hanni'. You'll see all of the opinions we gave him on the 4c build. Long story short, I'm not a terribly huge fan of the 4c build. It's not like it's horrible, but I just don't think it warrants the black splash just for Hibernation and neato combat tricks. And I'm not sure that adding a whopping slivers justfies Aether Vial, but I can see how it would be useful while you're busy bouncing your Slivers to play them again for free.

Try it, and if you like it, go ahead. I'm sticking to UWg for now.

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Originally Posted by Pinder

That's why we have thought about Ensnare. If you time it right (i.e., during your opponent's turn) it's basically the same thing, but Ensnare is all kinds of free, which makes it better here IMO.

Also, it doesn't require UU. Of course, I doubt getting UU will ever really be a problem, but it's there.

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Getting UU won't be a problem in any match you -want- the Turnabout. The more interesting part of it is that you can Turnabout your own guys to untap them in response to the Ensnare, causing serious mayhem once they've committed to the swing.

Still, though, Ensnaring back would work just as well and is probably the better idea. Peer Pressure is also an amusing concept.

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Originally Posted by Tacosnape

Peer Pressure is also an amusing concept.

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:O. I never even thought of that. Reeks of win-more (since you have to have more than them anyway), but it would be fun to spring on someone...