[Deck] Elves Combo

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Originally Posted by Kich867

I also wasn't asking for criticism of the list, just showing that with the generic core cards there seemed to be a lot of hands where you want to say "this is good", but when examining the upcoming cards you would surely lose just from draws. Even with that list, it would consistently goldfish a Banefire win, but the number of hands that were fantastic that would just lose because of the upcoming draws was still somewhat alarming.

I found it to be less problematic in actual testing--I also found the overreaction by catmint to be a little ridiculous (I'm not new to this thread and have been following it). The post was explicitly to ask "What happens when you have a nice looking hand, but with no tutors / glimpses / win conditions in the opening 7, what do you do?" Or I guess to clarify the question, "When you draw a hand with no glimpses or win conditions in them, or ways to find them, should you just mulligan?" Granted it seems unlikely, but it's something to consider--is it safe to keep a hand of something like, Land / Land / Llanowar / Symbiote / Priest / Quirion Ranger / Heritage?

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Sorry for my overreaction!
I tried to answer your specific question of what to do if no wincon/tutor is around by just playing more tutors so you can cast regal force more consistantly. I took the chance to point out other things in your list, so you can get the most out of it...

If I play my build with 4 Pact & 4 wish or 4 pact & 4 GSZ I have no problem keeping a hand with Land / Land / Llanowar / Symbiote / Priest / Quirion Ranger / Heritage.
4 Glimpse, 8 Tutors, 1 Regal Force, 3-4 Visionary. Thats a lot of possible topdecks and surely better than an average 6.

That is not the list IBA uses, to my knowledge. I have no clue where you got it. Here is the latest version of IBA's list that I have on record:
Rice Krispies:
Creatures:
4x Elvish Archdruid
3x Elvish Spirit Guide
4x Elvish Visionary
1x Ezuri, Renegade Leader (alternatively Kamahl, Fist of Krosa)
4x Fyndhorn Elves
3x Heritage Druid
4x Llanowar Elves
3x Nettle Sentinel
4x Priest of Titania
4x Quirion Ranger
1x Regal Force
1x Wirewood Symbiote
Lands:
12x Snow-Covered Forest
Sorceries:
4x Glimpse of Nature
4x Green Sun's Zenith
4x Living Wish
Sideboard:
2x Elvish Champion
1x Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1x Eternal Witness
1x Faerie Macabre
1x Heritage Druid
1x Nettle Sentinel
1x Phyrexian Revoker
1x Sylvok Replica
1x Terastodon
1x Vexing Shusher
1x Wirewood Symbiote
1x Gaea's Cradle
1x Wasteland

That is somewhat close to my list. In this metagame I would cut ESGs for probably +2 Symbiote, +1 Dryad Arbor/Forest, not sure which.

Summoner's Pact kills you all the time, especially if your opponent is good. People always try to defend the card by arguing about how you play it cautiously, which means generally keep it in your hand doing nothing. People of course don't do this in real life, and then when it costs them the game they chalk it up to a play mistake rather than blaming the card. If there weren't already a host of other really good green tutors, it might be worth biting the bullet. But there are.

Elves was just a very different creature in Extended, and porting that deck, or even most of it and the same core strategies isn't going to work, or it's going to leave you with suboptimal results. New cards have come out, older cards are available; you didn't have to deal with Force, Hymn and Mental Misstep in Extended, you didn't have Natural Order, Green Sun's Zenith or Fauna Shaman available; you had Living Wish, but you didn't have the two strongest Wish targets, Emrakul or Cradle. There weren't combo decks maindecking Orim's Chant. Most of these things push against running Pact.

Also running multiple colors and 18 lands kills, in my opinion, one of the deck's real strengths, which is its ability to get away with 12-14 lands and still run out lots of threats reliably. Not being vulnerable to Wasteland/Stifle is a big deal, especially when you're inherently so vulnerable to cards like Mental Misstep and Jitte, Lavamancer etc.. Opening yourself up to further hate seems more foolish than productive.

I've also just never seen an Elves list, other than some of the NO/Shaman lists, that couldn't be strictly improved by cutting three or four jank cards for Living Wishes. Like, you run 1x Emrakul? It is nearly strictly better to run 1x Living Wish. You run 1x Emrakul and 2x Cradle? Same deal. It's just that then adding Wish, there's not a lot of reason to hold onto Pacts.

I support non-Wastelandable mana bases. *signs signature* I personally have never been a fan of Living Wish, it seems to be better here though than any other deck I would imagine.

Also, if your running Elfs even if it is close to IBA's list I highly recommend that you practice before being gung ho going into a large tourney atmosphere with some evil 'pals' playing stuff like Firespout, Submerge..

So, I'm somewhat hooked on this Elf-Ball idea. Here's another take on making a dedicated Elf-Ball style deck (an improvement on my last venture into this idea for sure):

1x Birchlore Ranger
4x Elvish Visionary
4x Priest of Titania
3x Elvish Archdruid
4x Llanowar Elves
4x Arbor Elf
4x Quirion Ranger
4x Wirewood Symbiote
3x Heritage Druid
3x Nettle Sentinel

1x Banefire
4x Burning Wish
3x Glimpse of Nature
3x Living Wish

4x Wooded Foothills
2x Misty Rainforest
3x Taiga
6x Forest

//SB:
1x Regal Force
1x Emrakul, The Aeons Torn
1x Banefire
1x Elvish Archdruid
1x Birchlore Rangers
1x Faerie Macabre
1x Gaea's Cradle
1x Mountain
1x Sylvok Replica
1x Viridian Zealot
1x Heritage Druid
1x Nettle Sentinel
1x Glimpse of Nature
1x Eternal Witness
1x Living Wish

To an extent this is just for fun, but, to give it credit, I goldfished exactly 20 hands with the deck and it went off on turn 3 close to 90% of the time, turn 4 a few times, and only fizzled once. Going off being: I was able to drop a lethal banefire. That's all I really had time for tonight but I'll be continuing to work on it tomorrow. I got the idea for this from the new ANT lists running Burning Wish and felt it might be applicable here as an alternate means to casting Glimpse.

The first thing to notice is obviously that it doesn't run any tutors, it relies mostly on living wish for that, but to an extent--instead of running the things I'd be tutoring for I'm just running those things, I could shave 1's here and there to fit a playset of GSZ's in, but in the brief testing I've done it's yet to be an issue. I'd rather draw A mana elf, A mana lord, An untapper, one or two lands, and at least one part of a combo (Heritage / nettle / glimpse).

The second thing is that it only runs 3 glimpses mainboard, Burning Wish operates as Glimpse 4-7. It also operates as Banefire 2-4. Living Wish operates as a means to hit everything it could ever possibly need to and interacts well with Banefire--in the super long shot they have a Leyline down, after going off you can simply wish for a means to remove it and then Banefire them, with 8 untap effects you can ride a single mana lord into the ground. It also operates as an alternate means of winning in the event you just don't see a Burning Wish or a Banefire in the meantime via Emrakul. There's also a Living Wish in the board, so that in an incredibly awkward situation, with 19 available mana you could Burning Wish into a Living Wish into an Emrakul and win (just in case there's some Meddling Mage or something).

With surprising consistency, I was able to turn 1 mana elf, turn 2 mana lord, turn 3 burning wish into a glimpse or glimpse > drop an untapper, and eventually play my deck / hit them for lethal banefire at some point. One hand had to take it to turn 4 as I just didn't see what I needed, but Living Wish into Regal Force let me ride to a win.

Arbor Elf becomes a total boss as the first turn drop as he lets you untap Taiga to produce red in the event you can't wish/find a birchlore to produce red and need to tap Taiga.

The wishboard eventually started to run out of relevant slots, so I added in a Living Wish to do everything it does, and a Mountain in the event that for some reason you had all of the mana and pieces available just no means to produce red... Those situations never occurred in goldfishing so far, but it gives it some flexibility to work around those situations. Eternal Witness is there so in the event they actually do have a Mindbreak Trap that you didn't see coming, you can bounce however many Elves you can with Wirewood's back at the end of their turn (a good practice if you hit that "I need to bounce visionaries to dig" situation, as it lets you play them twice on your turn instead of once) and just go off again.

This list obviously had more thought put into it, so criticisms and ideas are encouraged.

This was only goldfishing, so only ideal circumstances were taken into consideration, which is obviously not the norm, but it at least goldfished extremely consistently.

The reason I feel a Banefire win is justified is that there are zero answers to it. After you combo, it is almost impossible to not win as there is no way to stop Banefire. Leyline can be destroyed, and Mindbreak Trap can be played around if they even have it.

-- Different topic: I playtested the Buried Alive / Vengevine style, and presumably this is similar to the Intuition Vengevine style, but I found that having Venges in my opening hand was annoying, and when I found a Buried Alive it was really cool and good, but when I didn't it wasn't that great. Instead of dedicating 7 slots to non-elves, all 3cc or higher, I could just run 7 more elves, like lords and joraga warcaller and crossroads and impact the combo far far less.

Interesting idea to use burning wish (this idea came up before I was in this thread I think). I don't think it "magically" adds another 20-30% to the turn 3 win%, because you basically cut the turn3 regal force percentage by adding turn3 glimpse%... I also think it is easier to disrupt this plan than the plan to cast a MD regal force... However I am curious and therefore will test before I judge. The "tech" to run a ton of lords to play them consistantly turn 2 and do unfair stuff turn 3 is not new though!

What I would suggest for that idea is to:
- cut banefire from the MD to free up a slot
- run more fetches to support red, so you can actually cast your "virtual glimpse" + 3-4
- run 1-2 less mana-lords because you actually don't rely too much on untapping to cast regal force, but you rely more on having a lot of 1 drops after your glimpse
- run 4 birchlore because you need red mana - therefore I would also put the 4th nettle in the MD, so you can maximize their synergy.
- run 4 living wish MD, because burning wish for living wish is too fancy as you said and its more important to access important pieces directly!
- run a gleeful sabotage in SB.
- Add some MD tutors MD to gain stability and maybe also a regal force, so you can fall back to that plan.

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Originally Posted by Kich867

1x Birchlore Ranger
4x Burning Wish
3x Glimpse of Nature

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I don't mean to be rude. You can test this, but as you said that would be more "for fun", and there's enough people arguing in this threat to start discussing "just for fun" lists, that haven't even been tested.

Playing Burning Wish was discussed long ago, and everyone just dropped the list, eventually. Nowadays, it is more pointless, since you are making a deck 100% dependent and focused on resolving a Glimpse, and with MM around that is not gonna work...
Anyway, if you wanna test that, you should definitely run 4x Birchlore, 4x Nettle, and maybe not so many lords. Test the list, and post actual results, not just an idea for a deck, please.

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

That is somewhat close to my list. In this metagame I would cut ESGs for probably +2 Symbiote, +1 Dryad Arbor/Forest, not sure which.

Summoner's Pact kills you all the time, especially if your opponent is good. People always try to defend the card by arguing about how you play it cautiously, which means generally keep it in your hand doing nothing. People of course don't do this in real life, and then when it costs them the game they chalk it up to a play mistake rather than blaming the card. If there weren't already a host of other really good green tutors, it might be worth biting the bullet. But there are.

Elves was just a very different creature in Extended, and porting that deck, or even most of it and the same core strategies isn't going to work, or it's going to leave you with suboptimal results. New cards have come out, older cards are available; you didn't have to deal with Force, Hymn and Mental Misstep in Extended, you didn't have Natural Order, Green Sun's Zenith or Fauna Shaman available; you had Living Wish, but you didn't have the two strongest Wish targets, Emrakul or Cradle. There weren't combo decks maindecking Orim's Chant. Most of these things push against running Pact.

Also running multiple colors and 18 lands kills, in my opinion, one of the deck's real strengths, which is its ability to get away with 12-14 lands and still run out lots of threats reliably. Not being vulnerable to Wasteland/Stifle is a big deal, especially when you're inherently so vulnerable to cards like Mental Misstep and Jitte, Lavamancer etc.. Opening yourself up to further hate seems more foolish than productive.

I've also just never seen an Elves list, other than some of the NO/Shaman lists, that couldn't be strictly improved by cutting three or four jank cards for Living Wishes. Like, you run 1x Emrakul? It is nearly strictly better to run 1x Living Wish. You run 1x Emrakul and 2x Cradle? Same deal. It's just that then adding Wish, there's not a lot of reason to hold onto Pacts.

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Is there any metagame where you would consider playing less than 4 Wirewood Symbiote in the 75? It's the best creature in the deck.

On Summoner's Pact: I've lost 1 game (during testing) to a pact trigger that was played turn 2 as a calculated risk after mulling to 5 cards. In 42 tournament matches, I've not lost a single game to it, nor have I come particularly close. Simply put, when played correctly (not necessarily conservatively), pact should almost never lose you a game. Obviously it becomes higher risk against decks that bring in more removal, especially sweepers, which is why pact comes out for the Vengevine plan against those decks.

On land counts: Running 12-14 lands may make you less vulnerable to wasteland, but it makes you more vulnerable to spot removal since you rely on creatures for most of your mana production, especially in the early turns. With Quirion Ranger to protect Arbor and Duals, wasteland isn't even an issue for my version of the deck. Playing more lands allows you to play through the occasional wasteland, it's only when you cut down to 12-14 that making wasteland a blank becomes important.

On Living Wish: You imply that there is little to no opportunity cost in adding Living Wish to the deck but you neglect the fact that it takes sideboard space away from you. While it may be true that a deck as linear as this one does not want to board excessively for most matchups, Legacy is still the format that requires the most sideboard space to be effectively prepared for the wide range of decks you can expect to see at any tournament. The list bakofried posted essentially does not have a sideboard, which hurts against hate like Perish and any combo matchup where some light disruption would put you on nearly even footing. Having access in game 1 to cards like Terastodon, Phyrexian Revoker, Faerie Macabre, and Wasteland hardly justifies the loss of a sideboard. Added to the fact that Living Wish is much slower than the other tutor options and I can't see how to justify playing it. There is a reason the extended version of the deck did not play Living Wish, and it's not lack of access to cradle/emrakul. The card just isn't very good.



@NihilObstat: With 13 lands, the result changes to 33%, a very slim difference. To answer your question, most of my calculations are based off of the Hypergeometric Distribution, which you can find information on with a quick Google search. It essentially describes the chances of getting x successes in y trials given a population size p with s total successes in the population. For our purposes, a success is the kind of card you're looking to draw, (which makes it very easy for opening hand-land calculations) the population is your deck, and the number of trials is the number of cards you see off the top of your deck. More complicated questions that involve multiple desired parts (Like what are the odds of hitting a mana elf and a forest/fetch in my opener?) are more complicated. For the most part I use a combinatorial approach, where I count the total number of hands with the desired attributes and divide by the total number of hands, (60 choose 7).

@Kich867: At the risk of sounding rude, I will be blunt: Burning Wish is awful. It does nothing but find Banefire, (a worse win condition than Emrakul since it's vulnerable to Mindbreak Trap, Solitary Confinement, Leyline of Sanctity etc.) Glimpse of Nature, and Living Wish. Chaining Wishes is not a viable line of play in this format since it's incredibly slow so you essentially play red for the sole purpose of getting extra access to Glimpse, which is the card in the deck most of the format is prepared to deal with. Your list sacrifices the entire SB to support a dual wish plan, which I discussed earlier in this post as a poor choice. I'm skeptical of the consistency which you can produce the draws you described, and even given that you are correct in the abstract, relying on mana lords (which playing 7 2 mana sorceries forces you to do) makes you much more vulnerable to spot removal, as I've also explained earlier. The last thing I'd want to do is drive you away from this thread, but I can't support Burning Wish at all.

I never thought I would say this, but people are habitually over-rating Wirewood Symbiote. It doesn't have the versatility in Glimpse-Elves that it does in, say, a Food Chain list, where it has more to play with sans Glimpse than just Visionary and sometimes Quirion Ranger with a Priest. I don't think it's the best creature. I would play a fullset now because there are more aggro-control strategies where you want to stall and delay, especially against Jitte. Also because it helps draw down Missteps.

Also I am not sure that, "Running only twelve basics makes you vulnerable to removal and anyway Wasteland doesn't even matter because I run Ranger" is an argument that survives its own internal forces.

As for Living Wish, cutting cards like Cradle/Emrakul won't slow you down in most instances, and it's better to have access to them. It's not necessary to have eleven wish targets. And this argument;

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There is a reason the extended version of the deck did not play Living Wish, and it's not lack of access to cradle/emrakul. The card just isn't very good.

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Is nonsensical. The card is as good as the tutor targets available. To say that it doesn't matter that Extended didn't have access to the best targets is to hogwash. You might as well say that the reason the Extended list didn't play GSZ had nothing to do with the card not having been printed yet, except yes obviously it did.

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Originally Posted by theross

@NihilObstat: With 13 lands, the result changes to 33%, a very slim difference.

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Thanks for the info ;)

Alright so, after some math, I have this results:

Hands//////13 Lands deck////14 Lands + 4 Cradle
0 Land-----16%---------------14% counting that a single Cradle doesn't work
1 Land-----36%---------------24%
2 Land-----31%---------------34%
3 Land-----13%---------------23%
4 Land-----3%----------------9%

There's almost no difference in getting 0 lands from both lists:
13 Lands: 16%---------18 Lands: 14%-------We have a +2% of having to mull for not seeing any
A single Cradle wouldn't do the work, so we should count the chances of drawing 0 lands as though you ran 14 lands, which would be 14%

I think we can ggree that either 1 or 2 land are the best hands, and are what we usually want to get. So adding those up:
13 Lands: 67%---------18 Lands: 58%-------We get a +9% of having Sweet hands

The difference of getting 3 or more, which I usually consider weaker hands, is:
13 Lands: 16%---------18 Lands: 32%-------Therefore a +16% of slower hands

I hope this shows that for drawing more Fuel, having a better combo clock, and having optimal hands, 13 lands is probably the best for our deck.

14 Lands + 4 Cradle only grants slower hand, and you don't have any better % of not having to mull than we do. So, the only thing left to test is better those Cradle are actually worth some very, very tight spots.

Is this also taking into account that a hand with multiple Cradles and no Forests as a 0-land hand?

Aside for taking up many sideboard slots, the biggest issue -to me- with Living Wish is its increased overal mana cost as compared to Pact and GSZ.

Living Wish costs 1 to 2 mana more than GSZ/Pact depending on what creature you're grabbing. That's an extremely significant cost for this deck and can easily throw a wrench in your attempt to start combo-ing off.

I don't think grabbing a cradle for 2 mana makes up for that.

I'm also completely on board with Summoner's Pact...the card is perfect for the deck.

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Originally Posted by Absolutflipz

Aside for taking up many sideboard slots, the biggest issue -to me- with Living Wish is its increased overal mana cost as compared to Pact and GSZ.

Living Wish costs 1 to 2 mana more than GSZ/Pact depending on what creature you're grabbing. That's an extremely significant cost for this deck and can easily throw a wrench in your attempt to start combo-ing off.

I don't think grabbing a cradle for 2 mana makes up for that.

I'm also completely on board with Summoner's Pact...the card is perfect for the deck.

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Living Wish is just flexible, it's basically a 2 mana Summoner's Pact that won't lose you the game and in the offchance (read: offchance) they throw an Extirpate at something worth hitting (mana lords, heritage), you can still get them out of the SB.

Flexible cards are bueno. Grabbing a cradle for 2 mana usually makes up for it. I know my elf-ball decklist gets a lot of flak, but the list I run in tournaments is more like IBA's, and wishing for a cradle is frequently an incredibly good idea. Sometimes paying 2 to get an extra 4-5 mana is all it takes to keep going and get pretty explosive.

Back when i ran Wish in my Elf deck my most common targets were Cradle to combo off Heritage (didn't run Nettle back then either), Emrakul in case I had 15 mana and wanted to win now or Wirewood Symbiote otherwise. Nothing else even came close, as Symbiote can and will improve most board positions capable of generating 5-6 mana more than whatever silver bullet you'd otherwise Wish for.

In any case I feel like GSZ is better than both by far, and that the deck doesn't really require more than 4 tutors.

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Originally Posted by Kich867

Living Wish is just flexible, it's basically a 2 mana Summoner's Pact that won't lose you the game and in the offchance (read: offchance) they throw an Extirpate at something worth hitting (mana lords, heritage), you can still get them out of the SB.

Flexible cards are bueno. Grabbing a cradle for 2 mana usually makes up for it. I know my elf-ball decklist gets a lot of flak, but the list I run in tournaments is more like IBA's, and wishing for a cradle is frequently an incredibly good idea. Sometimes paying 2 to get an extra 4-5 mana is all it takes to keep going and get pretty explosive.

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I can't find in here where you state why Living Wish is better than GSZ/Pact...or at least belongs over 1 of them.


I don't buy the "flexible" argument because GSZ and Pact are just that..flexible...they get you any creature in the deck, wherein the deck revolves around creatures for the most part. The only difference is being able to tutor up a Cradle.

I still maintain that the added effective mana cost to your tutored creature heavily outweighs being able to tutor up a cradle for 2 mana. Maybe I'll have to playtest some games with it...but I just see the card slowing down the ability to combo-off by a turn or two.

And Everyone should be playing 4 Cradles, as has been said before.

I've been running an odd mix of tutors to take advantages of each. I agree with IBA regarding the danger of Summoner's Pact and Living Wish, but at the same time I appreciate that Summoner's Pact is insanely powerful at its purpose.

To that end, I run a hybrid mix of tutors:

4 Glimpse of Nature
3 Living Wish
3 Green Sun's Zenith
2 Summoner's Pact

I've been pretty happy with this mix, and have been successful in large tournaments as well. This was before MM was legal, and my only absolute horrible matchup was Storm combo.

I don't like wish because it doesn't let you sideboard. You're still as cold to deedstill as you were in game one, storm decks still beat you before you can go off since you can't board in disruption, and humility is even more of a game ender than if you could get out grips or beast withins from the board. I think that wish might be better for a local meta where you know what decks you're likely to face, while the non wish version that actually gets to sideboard is better to take to a big event with an open meta, because then you have a change against the BUG deck, the storm deck, the countertop deck.

The "as has been said before" argument blows, especially when it's still a huge point of contention. And Living Wish can grab Emrakul (no other tutor can) as well as provide clutch access to hate in game 1, and games 2 and 3 with zero boarding in.

There's basically no excuse not to run Wish if you're running 8 mana lords. It obviates so much need to actually find/resolve Glimpse, much more so than Pact or GSZ which can't straight up win when you're producing a shit ton of mana.

And if you're not going for the Vengevine or NO plan you really need 8 mana lords, as you're not going to be able to reliably play Glimpses in Misstep.metagame.

If nothing else, do as Ruckus said and run 2-3 L. Wish where you would normally run Cradles/Emrakuls. The only absolutely necessary Wish targets are those two, Regal Force and Symbiote. Not that I know what the Hell you're going to board against Deedstill that's going to significantly improve that matchup.

4 vengevines makes the deedstill matchup not an autoscoop, even though you're still a dog, and why would you put a symbiote in he board, so you have more access to it with wish?t