New Twist Merfolk

[Quooter]

Hello Everyone! I am not new to Magic, but the last time a seriously played was during 9th edition. I used to play like no other and participate in tournaments. I now have a 10 year old son who found my cards and wanted to learn how to play, so low and behold, the addiction returns.

I have already familiarized myself with all the rules updates and all that jazz. After playing some games in the area and talking with the locals, I have found that many of the people in the area play combo and control more than aggro. I used to be a big control freak, but I think the best way to beat the current combo and control decks is to smash them in the face like Sligh used to, yet do my best to dis-mantle their game plan at the same time.

Here is my deck list and my reasoning to follow:


17 Lands//
17 Island

23 Creatures//
4 Cosi's Trickster
4 Silvergill Adept
4 Grimoire Thief
4 Lord of Atlantis
4 Master of the Pearl Trident
3 Merrow Reejerey

4 Instants//
4 Psionic Blast

8 Sorceries//
4 Portent
4 Extract

8 Artifacts//
4 AEther Vial
4 Psychogenic Probe

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Developing Sideboard
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3-4 Daze
3-4 Memory Lapse
2-4 Rapid Hybridization
1-4 Mind Bend
4 Rootwater Thief - testing for Grimoire Thief
4 Psychic Surgery - testing for Psychogenic Probe



The Why - why I picked what I picked and what you need to critique for me... please.

Lands-
All Islands - Wastelands, Ghost Quarter, Stripmine, Dust Bowl all do nothing to me and more than likely weaken my opponent when they are useless against me.
Considerations - mutavault

Creatures -
4 Cosi's Trickster - 1. Every deck has fetchlands. 2. Most decks have search cards. 3. Works well with Portent, Extract, and Rootwater Thief.
4 Silvergill Adept - Card advantage and a 2/1 for 2cc.
4 Grimoire Thief - Complete disruption and the ability to counter something important if needed. Good synergy with Portent and Memory Lapse.
4 Lord of Atlantis
4 Master of the Pearl Trident - I don't think I need to justify these two choices.
3 Merrow Reejerey - pump and untap tricks.

Instants -
4 Psionic Blast - creature removal when needed and can be a great finisher.

Sorceries-
4 Portent - can be devastation for Dark Confidant decks, early game control by stacking their deck against them, and works with Cosi's Trickster and Psychogenic Probe / Psychic Surgery if nothing else.
4 Extract- see Portent

Artifacts-
4 AEther Vial - most of the creatures are 2cc
4 Psychogenic Probe - extra damage (see Cosi's Trickster)

Sideboard-
3-4 Daze- sometimes you just need to have counterspells to get things though.
3-4 Memory Lapse- Counterspell with a trick that works great with this deck.
2-4 Rapid Hybridization - there are some silly bad creatures out there that make this necessary.
? Mind Bend- I have not tested it much but I think it will come in handy.
4 Rootwater Thief - More direct removal of threats.
4 Psychic Surgery - Again, more threat removal.

I have more play testing to do and obvious adjustments to make, but I am excited about this build.

Thanks!

[Lemnear]

There are no decks based on dark Confidant in the Format. The whole trickline with the shuffle effects and portent is too cute and slow for Legacy, more so if you don't have a Way to defend.

Mutavault is a Meerfolk die to his Ability and in combination with the Lord-effects an insanly good manland.

You'll need Daze and FoW in the Mainboard or loose miserably against ALL combo decks and most midrange Aggro of the Format

Wasteland is essential for all the Tool-lands of Legacy especially because you can Afford to Set you back on lands with Aether Vial as Source of pressure.

Psyonic Blast and Memory Lapse are outdated for like a decade. Consider Standstiil for extra value with Vial and Mutavault to grind out advantage.

Please Check the Meerfolk thread in the DtB-section in this forum for further advice.

[HammerAndSickled]

While I agree with the rest of the post, how in the hell can you say there are no Dark Confidant decks in the format?!

[Ozymandias]

While I agree with the rest of the post, how in the hell can you say there are no Dark Confidant decks in the format?!

He said "Dark Confidant based." In other words, just because a deck has Bobs doesn't make it Bob-centric in the way a Vintage deck would be--which I can sort of agree with. On the other hand, running Confidants does exert a downward pressure on the mana curve of decks featuring it.

[Lemnear]

Yes, I had strategies in my head close to the Vintage Bob+Trygon+Jace decks. There's no deck comparable reliant on Confidant in Legacy atm.

Even if the Death Blades containing Deathrite Shaman and Dark Confidant continue to rise it just doesn't justify adressing Bob with mainboard cards, because unlike in Vintage it's a narrow strategy (Reling on Bob) due to all the bigger creatures and removal in the format. Aside from that, Deathblade still remains more of a Stoneforge Mystic centric deck than Confidant.

Dark Confidant in Legacy is nothing but support

[HPB_Eggo]

To be fair there are decks that rely heavily on Dark Confidant - UB Dreadnought with Confidant/Countertop is a great example - they just aren't super good or popular right now.

All that being said, basing a large portion of your deck on ruining people's deck manipulation just isn't a working strategy - while some decks are much, much better when they're allowed to stack, there are very few good Legacy decks that fall apart because you wreck their Brainstorms with Extract/Portent and also adding an extra counter to Trickster isn't going to make that significantly better when you have no way to protect Trickster.

Blast is just worse than Dismember in a lot of ways, and even that is a questionable card in Merfolk.

My advice? Remove Portent, Extract, and Probe. Run some counters - probably FoW and some combination of Pierce/Daze/Snare. Go up a few total lands and run Wasteland and Mutavault, they're really too good to pass up on. Thief and Trickster aren't bad, so it's probably worthwhile to pay a lot of close attention during testing to see if they do what you want them to do better than alternatives - is Grimoire Thief really better than, say, Cursecatcher? Is Cosi's Trickster really that much better than Coralhelm Commander or Wakethrasher? I don't know, but those are questions you'll have to find the answers for yourself.

[JPoJohnson]

Mutavault has just been reprinted and would be a fantastic addition that would be semi-budget (last I saw it was priced at a quite affordable $15 a pop or so?).

[Quooter]

I have been able to run some games but unfortunately not against any DtB decks... just variations of those decks.

Some things I have learned:
1. Probe sucks and I hated drawing it every time, I will replace that with Daze/FoW.
2. Trickster is very effective in making your opponent think twice in mid/late game shuffling with their own spells, especially when you have them against the ropes. I like this guy much more than Cursecatcher.
3. 4 Extract and 4 Grimoire Thief is a lot of removal so I will replace the extract with something else. (suggestions welcomed.)
4. I am going to keep Portent in the deck. It is very useable/playable but it would be better at instant speed.
5. Psionic Blast is always helpful but four is way too many. (even if it is old school.) I will work out how many I need and replace the rest with Fow/Daze.
6. Mutavault is too good not to play so it will find it's way into the deck list also.

I am going to do some more playing and listen to some more of your suggestions before I post a revised deck list. I don't want it to run the same as the traditional Merfolk DtB or I would have posted this in that thread. I want it to have a bit more disruption without relying on counterspells.

And for the record, I did not write "Dark Confidant based" decks. I wrote "Dark Confidant decks" which should imply decks with Bob in them.

[Lemnear]

- Extract and Grimoire Thief are no removal. They are pure card-disadvantage (this isn't '94 where people refer Millstone as a potent wincondition because it "removes Opponents Key Spells")
- Psionic blast does nothing better than Dismember
- how is potent any better than Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain or Standstill? It's outright inferior to any card named.
- Dark Confidant isn't a Prime player in Legacy and decks running it have Sensei's Divining Top and/or Jace the Mindsculptor in it too. Trying to meddle with Opponents topdeck is pointless to the fact that they STILL get ahead in cards even without the 2 supporters which negate your topdeck Manipulation completely.
- Trickster is a early game card which doesn't shine before the mid-/lategame. To that Point you should either have overwhelmed your opponent with Lords, the opposing combo deck killed you, the opponent has a bigger threat or the opponent has removal. A form of defense in cursecatcher is preferable

[Quooter]

Boy, Had I known this site and this DEVELOPMENT forum was about telling me how my deck sucks compared to a DtB instead of helping me Develop the deck then I never would have joined it. I will go find someplace else to post. Thanks anyway.

[Lemnear]

Boy, Had I known this site and this DEVELOPMENT forum was about telling me how my deck sucks compared to a DtB instead of helping me Develop the deck then I never would have joined it. I will go find someplace else to post. Thanks anyway.

Excuse me?

You take a well explored archtype and replace vital parts with single-card-extraction effects in a format which is defined by 4-offs (aside from the Stoneforge/Batterskull-core or ANT) aka trying to make a strategy out of pretty useless card-disadvantage to grow Cosi's Trickster within a deck filled with Lords and islandwalkern which will kill the opponent faster than Trickster ever could.

What did you even try to achieve? This deck is 50% Swarm Aggro and 50% force shuffle (without mentionable effect tbh) to grow Trickster. Both parts don't work well together and dropping all Defense like FoW, Daze or Cursecatcher for it just doesn't make sense for me and you seem to lack any reasoning for doing so. I have no clue how you want to "disrupt" an opponent in Mono Blue without running any Form of counterspells. Again there is no feedback, just the wish to be "different" than traditional Meerfolk. Same with the Suggestion of Dismember over Psionic Blast. Same with the Ponder over Portent which you defended with a questionable hint at Confidant-decks.

If you are not interested in discussion or can't even come up with a clear concept there's no room for DEVELOPMENT

[Grollub]

Boy, Had I known this site and this DEVELOPMENT forum was about telling me how my deck sucks compared to a DtB instead of helping me Develop the deck then I never would have joined it. I will go find someplace else to post. Thanks anyway.

Well. Asking for help with development of anything usually means you'll get constructive critique...


My thoughts on your deck,
you're mentioning you want to play a Sligh-esque deck, yet your deck has basically nothing in common with it. Sligh is extremely cost efficient creatures + burn/removal. At the presented deck there's really no reason it is blue instead of red, since to be fair - you're not using blue's strengths, but their weaker version of red cards. If you wish to keep the Merfolk theme, why not splash red so you can run it as merfolk with Sligh's removal/reach package?

If you keep it mono blue and want to play like Sligh, I feel like you'll end with a deck that's stuck as a mediocre version of Sligh and Merfolk.

[HPB_Eggo]

Lemnear's just being an ass about his points, but the fact is if you really want competitive advice a lot of it is eventually going to boil down to "While this is cute, a lot of it just worse than the current best iteration of this archetype." Especially true in Tribal, where your pool of cards is already severely limited.

That being said, a few things he's pretty wrong on...

1) Psionic Blast isn't always worse than Dismember, it just usually is. Blast costs more mana and can't hit creatures for as hard. On the other hand, you only take two casting it, it pitches to Force, and it can double as reach with the four damage to players option.

2) Portent is fine. Particularly since this isn't a deck full of fetches and other shuffle effects, as Brainstorm would almost certainly be 100% better if that were the case.

3) Trickster and Thief are both fine. Are they necessarily best in those slots? No. Are they fine and do a fine job? Sure. It's still worthwhile to be open about Cursecatcher as a disruptive guy and Wakethrasher/Coralhelm as big guys.

As to what to replace Extract/Probe with, I'd go with 4 FoW and 4 Daze for the free counters. They really shore up a lot of your worst matchups, i.e. any sort of fast combo or removal-heavy deck. You should probably also go up to 18 lands if you're running 4 Mutavault, and you should probably drop one LoA to do so. A Psionic Blast or Portent might not be bad, either.

[Machahiko]

I don't know why you should be offended if you ask for help and people come and tell you (bluntly) why the current iteration of Merfolk is so good and why it's so hard to change cards from it. You shouldn't take critique and suggestions about how to improve your deck as a personal offence. I wonder are you ever going to come back, but don't take suggestions as an offence against your deck. ;)

Check out all the merfolk from lorwyn block, there's a lot of goodies there and give cursecatcher a try, he's always been my favorite fish.

[Lemnear]

Point is, if you remove P. Surgery and Extract, what is left for Trickster or Probe to activate them from your side of the table for value? Nothing. Both remain Conditional damage sources. Those suffer from the same conceptional weaknesses like mana barbs or Ankh of Mishra which today neither find place in sligh-like decks because you can't afford to invest mana into a huge random factor.

For Psionic Blast I have to question if you need the "reach" it provides in a deck which can basically dump hasted islandwalkers in a Blue metagame (topic: eot vial) to push through or if you rather wanna have a on-Color 1-mana solution to annoying creatures on the other side of the table which can race you like the omnipresent SFM -> Batterskull. I have no doubt that the later should be the choice.

In general I just get a Bit pissed if i wanna help peeps in their regards, write Down a Wall of analysis and reasoning and peeps respond with "nah, not my flavor. Other suggestions?"

[HammafistRoob]

This thread is exactly how I thought it'd be before I even opened it. Don't go to a different site for Legacy, this is the only good one. If you wanna be original and still win I wouldn't do it with an already established Tribal deck. Make a crazy frog deck or something.