[deck]Morgan's Big Pile o' Jank

[morgan_coke]

OK, so true story, I actually built the frame of this deck when I was so drunk I didn't remember doing it until I accidentally loaded it up in an MTGO match.

Both me and my opponent were surprised the deck wasn't atrocious. So, a little sober tuning later and it's a long way from horrible. As it exists now it's a Classic list on MODO, so I "fixed" it for legacy (upgrade sacred foundry to plateau, etc.)

Just to warn you it looks really, really odd at first.

Morgan's Big Pile o' Jank
Maindeck

Creatures - 10
4x Noble Hierarch
1x Eternal Witness
1x Kitchen Finks
1x Ravenous Baloth
1x Loxodon Hierarch
1x Etched Oracle
1x Fleshbag Marauder

Planeswalkers - 2
1x Garruk Wildspeaker
1x Elspeth, Knight Errant

Sorcery(s) - 10
4x Glittering Wish
2x Gaea's Blessing
1x Wrath of God
1x Akroma's Vengeance
1x Pyroclasm
1x Life from the Loam

Enchantments - 3
1x Pernicious Deed
1x Collective Restraint
1x Recurring Nightmare

Artifacts - 4
1x Nevinyrral's Disk
1x Engineered Explosives
1x Tormod's Crypt
1x Sensei's Divining Top

Instants - 9
3x Intuition
3x Gifts Ungiven
3x Brainstorm

Lands - 16
3x Windswept Heath
3x Flooded Strand
1x Bayou
1x Plateau
1x Savannah
2x Tropical Island
1x Tundra
1x Underground Sea
1x Taiga
1x Mutavault
1x Wasteland

Basic Lands - 4
1x Island
1x Swamp
1x Forest
1x Plains

Legendary Lands - 2
1x Volrath's Stronghold
1x Academy Ruins

Sideboard

Wish Targets - 10
1x Ajani Vengeant
1x Pernicious Deed
1x Vindicate
1x Firespout
1x Research/Development
1x Teferi's Moat
1x Wheel of Sun and Moon
1x Gaddock Teeg
1x Meddling Mage
1x Tidehollow Sculler

Combo/Burn Hate - 5
1x Ethersworn Canonist
4x Chalice of the Void

I know it looks like a big pile of "dude, just pick on card already and run 4x it instead of that big mess", but the setup isn't really that bad. The lifegain critters are a perfect example.

Baloth, Loxodon, Angel, and Finks all work slightly differently, but they all do the same basic thing - i.e., give you life on a body. The way they do it however is different. You can combo baloth with garruk or mutavault to gain oodles of life repeatedly. Finks are easy sacrifices to edict effects + really hard to kill. Angel gives you life whether it's dead or alive and self recurs around counter effects.

It's like that with most of the deck. E.E./Deed/Disk/Wrath/Damn/Firespout is six sweeper slots that all have pros and cons but can combine to do some pretty situationally abusive stuff.

The intuitions and Gifts are what tie the whole deck together, instantly assembling whatever mini-combo you're looking for. R&D out of the sideboard eliminates RFG effects as a hindrance to your plan since you can just wish for R&D, then get a couple cards that have been RFG'd plus some more wishes.

Gaea's Blessing lets you tutor up the same combinations of cards over and over again to keep giving your opponent fits.

The deck is pretty fun to play, but there are still a couple of things I don't like about it.
1) No Genesis, no Loam. These would serve as secondary engines in addition to Stronghold and Crucible.
2) It's a midrange board control deck, so the combo matchup isn't the greatest. Canonists and Chalices out of the board make it something like 35-65 overall as a matchup. (It would be higher, but you have to assume you lose game 1, and a 50/50 game 2+3 matchup yields about a 35/65 match %)
3) If you could somehow fit Brainstorm in here it would be great. Same with some hand destruction or counters. Or another gy effect like Recurring Nightmare, or some manabirds. But space wise, it doesn't work.

Comments? Hates? Questions? Suggestions? Clarifications? I'm interested in hearing any you've got on this.

[Nihil Credo]

For the much-needed 4x Brainstorm, cut Liliana Vess, Pithing Needle, Firemane Angel, and a land.

The manabase also makes baby Jesus cry. -4x Elder, +4x Birds of Paradise, and cut most if not all of those basics.

[morgan_coke]

Solid picks on the Brainstorm cuts Nihil, the only one I'll really miss is Needle. That might need to make its way back in eventually. The land cut is the Scrubland.

On the manabase/birds/elders/basics issue I really, really have to disagree with you. There isn't a Recurring Nightmare or Cabal Therapy type engine in this deck to DO something with birds if they're not drawn in the first two turns. Also, basics are some good right now, there's a lotta LD running around these days. BtB, PoP, Wasteland.. running basics is a good thing, and the mana isn't really unstable. There are six cards that need double colored mana in the deck after making the BS changes (wrath, damn, elspeth, garruk, baloth, witness) and three of those want double green. That means with just your basics you can cast every single spell in the deck except wrath, damn, and 'peth. That's like good stuff secret sauce tech right there man.

[Nihil Credo]

Having the required basic lands in your deck isn't the same thing as having them when you need them. With your current configuration, a single LD effect (including things like Stifle on STE) is quite capable of setting you back several turns. BoPs and fetch/dual lands will provide badly-needed colour redundancy, and BoPs over STEs will provide badly-needed speed. You don't win games in Legacy by doing nothing in your first two turns, let alone three.

[morgan_coke]

there already ARE quite a few fetches and duals in the deck. 4 fetches, 7 duals, i'm not seeing your argument. also, arguing that stifle on STE is devastating while arguing FOR birds is pretty insane given that creature destruction in legacy is about 1 billion times more common than stifle is.

i find your argument to lack internal consistency

- but in a polite non-flamey thoughts/advice is appreciated sort of way

[DeathwingZERO]

I gotta go with Nihil on this one.

Not only do the Birds speed you up in comparison to STE, they serve to fix all situational mana issues, not just one. Both cards might as well be dead in the late game, because you won't see the mana from either for an additional turn.

I'd actually consider cutting STE for BoP, and then cutting back all but the colors that need double to 1x basics and put fetches or duals in place of the others. It would honestly take dedicated destruction to seriously hinder you this way, in addition to using their removal on Birds.....which is hilarious considering what they aren't hitting.

As an aside, has the 3 other non-basics done anything for you? It seems odd to have 1 of's on Wasteland, Mutavault, and Mouth of Ronom, especially when you aren't going to be typically using your search to find them, and they don't seem to really capitalize on their usefulness without Crucible in play.

[Captain Hammer]

I know this is off topic. But this should make for a really really strong highlander deck in a casual game.

[Aggro_zombies]

It seems like some number of Noble Hierarchs would be good here. The deck is almost straight Bant colors, and exalted can be relevant.

Maybe something like 4 Birds, 2 Hierarch.

[Finn]

Sean, if you would replace the Chalices with Orim's Chant, you would have turn 1 protection against combo. it makes a big difference.

[morgan_coke]

Finn,

I drop the chalices @ zero vs combo on t1. I'm not opposed to chant by any means, just not sure it's better than chalice. what's your reasoning on that aside from the one mana-ness? vulnerability to duress strikes me as uncool (chalice is only vulnerable to duress/seize on t1, once it's on the table they need to hit it with bounce, chant has to stay in your hand and wait)

Zombies,

Yeah, I think i'd like hierarch better than birds, but they both suffer from the same problem. they die easy and HAVE to stay in play and you have no sac engine to exploit them later on (though exalted makes that much less of an issue)

Hammer,

Ya, thinking about it you're right, this would be easy to adopt to a highlander type format

deathwing,

you're right about mouth, it doesn't kill anything outside of fish and goblins due to size/shroud issues, i cut it for a second basic island. which should possibly be a second tundra instead. I also cut the lone mountain for a second basic plains because I realized the only thing that required red was firespout + some wish targets, and you don't need basic mountains to dodge moon effects.

also, i grab lands with intuition/gifts all the time. like vs. burn, you can giftstuition for some mix of baloth, mutavault, stronghold, crucible/loam, garruk. That gives you recurring +4 life dudes every turn for basically zero mana. (baloth + crucible in play, vault in play/bin = 4 life a turn, garruk in play + baloth in play = same thing)

The deck is all about setting up little "screw you" combos like this and using giftstuition to piece them together. Marauder + stronghold is another of these, killing everything from tombstalker to progenitus to mongoose.

Also starting to doubt the maindeck Damnation. it's cool/useful for gifts piles, but it's the only BB spell in the deck, pulls on the mana uncomfortably. Without it the deck is basically u/g/w with r/b splashes. I think I'm going to look for a replacement for it.

EDIT: I think the primary options for replacing Damnation are Hallowed Burial, Rout, and Akroma's Vengeance. suggestions on which one is best? I'm currently leaning towards Vengeance due to cycling.

EDIT EDIT: Ok, so given that everyone in the thread was like, noob, put in some gosh darn hierarchs already, i finally gave and tried it. And, yeah, you guys were right. noble hierarchs are better than StEs in this deck a majority of the time. The ichorid matchup gets slightly worse, but that's it. I'm going with hierarchs over birds because after cutting damnation for akroma, black and red are pretty small splashes. although now i do want to squeeze in a recurring nightmare to take advantage of the little mana dudes. o-t-h, this deck has a pretty crazy lategame anyway, not sure that extra kick is necessary. although trading elspeth/garruk tokens for random dude sounds pretty good to me.

[Aggro_zombies]

replace

This seems poor, given that most combo decks now pack some amount of discard main to answer things like this. Chanting in response to their Duress may stop them for a turn, but it's not going to change the fact that they probably have the win in hand. Losing on turn three is not any different than losing on turn two, it just eats up more of your fifty minutes.

Chalice, on the other hand, forces them to find an answer, but Chalice at one will often shut down a lot of their ability to do so (TES still has Wish, but ANT is basically screwed if it can't find Wipe Away or Rushing River in time). Granted, it's slower, but it's still much, much better than Chant at stopping the combo.

If you're worried about turn one protection, I would still run Chalice, but supplement it with Chant. You only need to buy yourself a turn to get to two mana for Chalice at one.

[morgan_coke]

I've continued tinkering with this a lot. really liking it. current changes are as follows:

maindeck
-1 brainstorm +1 sensei's divining top -they're pretty similar in function and this just seems like an easy swap to make. experimental, may change back.

-1 crucible of worlds +1 recurring nightmare -having both loam and crucible in the deck seemed redundant, and nightmare has good interactions with the recurring manland, birds, finks, and comes into play creatures. might be superfluous considering stronghold is already present

-1 plains, -1 forest, -1 island, +1 windswept heath, +1 flooded strand, +1 tropical island -u/g are the two most common colors in the deck, so the extra trop helps with that, and the reduction in basics in favor of fetches helps loam, BS, and color-fixing. permanent change.

-1 firespout +1 pyroclasm -pyroclasm is cheaper and hits everything spout does except mongoose, kird ape, and nacatl. also slighty worse vs. merfolk given their propensity to have two lords on the table at any given time. significantly better vs. goblins and bob.

sideboard
-3 ethersworn canonist +1 gaddock teeg, +1 meddling mage, +1 tidehollow sculler. game one vs. combo is bad, this makes it slightly less bad in theory, in practice combo = too fast to make much of a difference. improves glittering wish utility in many matchups. very experimental. none of the other members of the fish dude brigade are as good as canonist at shutting down combo, all are also harder to cast.

I'm also considering cutting the blessings, but recasting the same gifts or intuition pile in a game multiple times can be pretty useful. the protection from painter/grindstone is also relevant a large portion of the time.