[Deck] UW Tempo

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Originally Posted by Ryoku

Perhaps you should take your own advice here. You're assuming that the data is so flawed that it must have no bearing on real results whatsoever? You must be right, zoo must beat us 200% of the time.

Or, perhaps you should take the initiative, and put your own time into testing, and give us your results. Either way, please do not waste the time of people who have put far more work into this deck than you.

However, the fact remains that, with the direction zoo is shifting, it is becoming more of a positive matchup. They are beginning to maindeck Price of Progress more. As stated previously by Forbiddian, we can play around this easily. Also, more and more Teegs are getting maindecked. Please, in the future, try and back up your posts with a bit more substance, rather than attempt to preach about how to tell if a deck is bad or not.

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There's a ridiculous amount of irony here. I mean, the guys with the most experience ever with the deck said, "Hey, our bad, the Zoo lists we were testing against didn't look like the lists anyone else is testing with; that's why the results varied so much." And you said, "Hey, you shouldn't waste the time of people who have more experience with the deck."

Punishing Fire is actually going to be worse for you than Grim Lavamancer. After all, all but one or two of your creatures dies to the combo. And unlike Lavamancer, he can use it more than once per turn. EOT Punishing Fire your MoM (you tap it), rebuy Punishing Fire. Untap, Fire MoM, bolt your Avenger?

I'm much, much, much, much happier vs. shitty Punishing Fire than strong Grim. Punishing Fire requires a combo and is raped by wastelands, both on any random land to shut down its ridiculous casting requirements, or the combo land.

Only a noname player and noname designer would think that Punishing Fire is better than Grim against UWT.

How does this look for my board for the GP in columbus?

2 Burrenton Forge-Tender
1 Ethersworn Canonist
2 Condemn
2 Enlightened Tutor
2 Aura of Silence(Devout Witness if I can find them)
1 Ghostly Prison
1 Wheel of Sun and Moon
2 Relic of Progenitus
1 Thorn of Amethyst
1 Tormod's Crypt

Any suggestions are appreciated, I would like to make room for 2-3 Submerge but I'm not sure what to take out for them. Maybe -2 Condemn +2 Submerge?

I'm pretty sure that Submerge is much better than condemn is. I still don't think that Ghostly Prison is needed in any matchup, since you already should win goblins, and it doesn't do enough against Zoo or Merfolk. So, with your sideboard, I'd probably go -1 Prison -2 Condemn +3 Submerge.

Thats what I was thinking too overall, I'll go ahead and make the changes

Do people still play Goblins?

If so, nice! But yeah, what Ryoko said, and good luck!

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Originally Posted by rayaj

2 Burrenton Forge-Tender
1 Ethersworn Canonist
2 Condemn
2 Enlightened Tutor
2 Aura of Silence(Devout Witness if I can find them)
1 Ghostly Prison
1 Wheel of Sun and Moon
2 Relic of Progenitus
1 Thorn of Amethyst
1 Tormod's Crypt

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Is Devout Witness that awsome?? I understand the choice cause you can discard lands to disenchant things ant protect it with mom but aura prevents more efficiently I think.

Aura is really just a one use thing and while witness is subject to removal, it can be used multiple times and can carry a jitte if you need it to.

It also prevents them from casting artifacts and enchantments in the first place. Witness is a 2-card combo that requires your opponent to have more land than you. Aura is massive virtual card advantage unless your opponent can generate enough mana to play through it, but even then it's slowing effect is powerful enough to give you time to find another. Enchantress and Stax can effectively fight through an active Witness, where an Aura or two is usually game.

Aura's utility is much less in its disenchant effect than in its one-sided hosing effect. In the mean time, against decks with singleton problem cards (Survival, Vial, etc.) you can just pop it for the disenchant and be done. Not considering creatures are much easier to remove than enchantments, I know Tinefol and a couple others like Witness. Could any of you answer the question: under what (real) conditions is Witness ever better than Aura?

The reason why Tinefol (myself too) is playing Witness is a metagame. Sure, Aura is better vs Stax-like decks, vs Landstill. But here a version of GWb Survival is quite popular (I described it a couple of pages ago, and this very difficult, if not horrible, match). Witness could be protected with Mom, and Aura could be a subject to Krosan Grip, forcing you to play it as a Disenchant on sorcery speed (unless you have a suberb board position). More, Witness is reusable, and often you face too many targets you want to broke. My conclusion to the moment is to play 2 Witnesses, 1 Aura and 1 Tutor.

How about Soltari Visionary in place of Witness?
Has Shadow, does not need mana cost or a card in hand to work. Downside harder to hardcast and does nothing to Moat.

Edit: Artifacts too. Overall the Witness would be better, but if you are looking to beat Survival, Soltari might be better.

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Originally Posted by IsThisACatInAHat?

It also prevents them from casting artifacts and enchantments in the first place. Witness is a 2-card combo that requires your opponent to have more land than you.

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Haven't tested Witness, but it's definitely not a two-card combo.

Almost all the time, the worst card in your hand is worse than the best artifact/enchantment that your opponent already invested mana into. Aura can only be used to take out their single extremely problematic enchantment or artifact. Witness does this also, but unloads a fuckton of collateral damage on everything else in their deck.


The stall ability is nice, but I've been fairly underwhelmed by it recently. Realistically, all the reasons I used to point out are gone.

Enchantress sucks now. It was a cool pick a long time ago when it autostomped Goblins (thus half the meta), but Zoo actually has a decent Enchantress matchup with Qasali and being about 1-2 turns faster. Even with the lack of Combo, Enchantress is a pretty awful pick. And at any rate, Witness is probably better than Aura vs. Enchantress.

Stax runs Metalworker, which turns Aura into Seal of Cleansing. Yes, they can play Metalworker before you can play Aura of Silence.

Storm Combo has really fallen by the wayside. ANT is effectively dead, and so are the storm combo decks running 14+ 0 and 1 mana artifacts.

Counterbalance decks are also not as prevalent.


I'm not sure if it's worth running (honestly, I haven't had time to test that much recently), but I see Witness as having a lot of upside.

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Originally Posted by menace13

How about Soltari Visionary in place of Witness?
Has Shadow, does not need mana cost or a card in hand to work. Downside harder to hardcast and does nothing to Moat.

Edit: Artifacts too. Overall the Witness would be better, but if you are looking to beat Survival, Soltari might be better.

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To beat Survival I am talking about, you need to destroy artifacts too, namely vials and equips. Opposite Stoneforge Mystic (and they run 4 copies) could be a real problem for UW Tempo.

Played in the GP and went 1-3-1 before dropping, some play errors on my fault but I enjoyed playing with the deck and 18 land may be where I go to.

Match 1 - Merfolk

G1 - I go fetch tundra, wayfarer. He played an unhinged island and my heart soared, I put him on merfolk before I saw him cast the vial. Beat him through two vials, swords gave two LoA the axe and force kept another one from hitting the table. Pretty textbook game, serra avenger and mother of runes were good.

G2 - Countered both of his vials but he played a coralhelm which caught a swords to the face. Just payed myself down too much and took too much damage and didn't find enough gas to win, oh well.

G3 - Countered his vials again and had some damage come my way again on the back of a coralhelm. Took too much damage and didn't see an avenger when I needed it to come off top. I topped a couple wayfarers to block his lord at the end, the second of which got countered by a hard casted force. Can't believe I lost this one in the end, but still a good match.

0-1-0

Match 2 - Dragon Stompy

G1 - I fetch tundra, wayfarer, pass. He played ancient tomb, chrome mox imprinting simian spirit guide and tried to magus of the moon me which gets dazed. I put him on dragon stompy pretty easy and had a spell pierce in hand so I saved that for the eventual chalice at two. Mom blocked a gathan raiders a couple times, I got an avenger out and wasted his ancient tomb so his only land was city of traitors before blood moon hit and I got to use some mountains.

G2 - More of the same, he played an akroma face down which later died to a swords. Another pretty boring game and I take it pretty easily with a little countermagic and some good creature drops.

1-1-0

Match 3 - GW Maverick

G1 - Pretty boring, he played noble and I thought he was playing bant so I thought he'd get out some nonbasics for the wasteland I was holding and the second I drew but nothing of the sort happened and I saw too much land and not enough business. Off to game two.

G2 - Pretty good one-lander and I fetch tundra, play wayfarer. He wastes me and a turn later swords takes out wayfarer. I see no more land and there's my second loss of the day. Didn't really know what he was playing even at the end otherwise I would have grabbed a plains first and gone for the basic route that game.

1-2-0

Match 4 - LED Ichorid

G1 - Won on the back of grunt, avenger mom, pretty boring game and I did some good countering.

G2 - Bad play on my part loses games, I need to practice the Ichorid matchup a little more so I know what to counter. In my defense, he had some pretty good dredges this game.

G3 - Turn 0 leyline was annoying and since it was off to the side I forgot about it and ended up punting the game when I should have been able to take it but I ended up punting it and thought about just dropping then.

1-3-0

Match 4 - Next Level Ichorid

G1 - Won this again, pretty easy, grunt and avenger blah blah blah.

G2 - Lost this one since he did some weird play with playing his dredgers and stuff I guess to block and kill my stuff and mom didn't make an appearance.

G3 - Started this about 30 seconds before time was called so it ended up as a draw.
As an aside, this guy was god awful at playing his deck, drew off of a lot of thnigs when he should have dredged instead and all kinds of other stupid things. I think it was his first time playing the deck but he was bad, the fact that we went to time should attest to that.

1-3-1

I dropped here since I was hungry, didn't really want to play anymore and hadn't gotten to go see Chris Moeller yet. In other news I got my plain white mat signed and doodled on by Moeller and Steve Prescott. Got Prescott to do the moonstone from Augury Adept on it and Moeller made Patagia Viper coming out of it. Now I just need to get some other cool stuff on the left side. Moeller was a really cool guy and was taking cards as payment for alters or other doodles.

I went 2-0-2 today at Pop Culture Paradise, in Tempe, AZ. Could have easily won my first match if I wasn't retarded. Yep, forgot to Vial in an Avenger after an EoT Brainstorm or Fathom Seer flip. Would have been able to swing in with a Jitte and pick off goblins ftw. An observer pointed out that could have E Tutored for Jitte early on (instead of Ghostly Prison). I usually notice these things. Feel like I regressed a bit today. Oh well.

Still playing the 3 Vial/ 1 Sphinx version. Same board as before, w/ 2 Condemns, a third Grunt, and a random Pithing Needle...

Goblins (mono red) (1-1-1)
Game 2 (draw): -2 Spell Pierce, -1 Daze, + 2 E Tutor, +1 Ghostly Prison
Game 3 (play): I don't think I boarded...

b/r Goblins (2-0)
Game 2 (draw): -2 Spell Pierce, -1 Daze, + 2 E Tutor, +1 Ghostly Prison

Survival Bant (1-1-1)
Game 2 (draw): - 3 Daze, +3 Aura
Game 3 (play): +3 Daze, -3 Aura (maybe should have left Auras in; he road a Jitte to victory).

Merfolk (mono u) (2-0)
Game 2 (draw): -3 Daze, + 2 Condemn, +1 Ghostly prison.

I can't remember if siding out Daze on the draw is the right move with this deck. We keep Daze active for longer with mana denial, etc. It seems okay against a deck like mono u Merfolk though. I really liked Condemn against Merfolk today. It totally saved me from Jitte equipped attackers!

On a side note, I knew I woudln't make top 4 today at 2-0-2, so I actually conceded to my Merfolk opponent (even though I won the match). At the beginning of top 4 there was one person with 10 points, and 4 people with 9 points (including my Merfolk friend). He actually was the odd man out and didn't make the cut at 3-1, which was a bummer.

On a further side note, the person who one won the tournament was also playing u/w Tempo. His deck had KotWO instead of Sphinx, and he played 61 cards to fit in an eqpipment package of 1 Jitte, 1 SoLaS, and 1 SoFI. Dunno how I feel about that, but he had good results today...

Edit: As for Witness vs. Aura, I find that Aura stops EE fairly well. With Aura on the board, they need 5 mana just to set EE to 1 and blow it. I think Witness would be a bit to slow to stop them from EEing our board...

After two weeks vacation I'm back and going to play UWT tonight. I'm puzzled to see the lack of activity there, did anybody play the deck at the GP?

Yeah, I played and didn't do so well. I think I heard a guy using weathered wayfarer at my table but I didn't get to see what he was playing it in. I also met Ryoku there but I didn't find out how he ended up doing. If you look at my post above I did a little rundown of how things went. I need to personally test a lot more against 16 lord girlfolk so I can get the matchup more under control, I like submerge but I think more general removal may have been welcome.

Went 3-1 today, beating Food Chain Combo, Aluren, Dragon Stompy and losing to monoG progSur. Also got a bunch of pimp asian stuff for UWT, might post some pics later. I'm still far from what I'm aiming for, but I'm getting there eventually :)

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Originally Posted by Tinefol

Went 3-1 today, beating Food Chain Combo, Aluren, Dragon Stompy and losing to monoG progSur. Also got a bunch of pimp asian stuff for UWT, might post some pics later. I'm still far from what I'm aiming for, but I'm getting there eventually :)

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XD, rock on!

I want a set of Japanese Mother of Runes if you can find any ft.

Lol why do people want cards in Jap, I don't understand. I bet you the Japenese are all like: "Fuck this I need to pimp out my deck with American cards."

Also, I'm surprised UWT wasn't too present at GP. What gives?