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Thread: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

  1. #241
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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by ChemicalBurns View Post
    Also have cut Containment Priest - haven't found it particularly useful outside of S&S and Prelate does as a good a job.
    I am just curious about your experience with Renanimator without Containment Priest. I like the idea of freeing up some spots, but boy do I like having a strong out to random graveyard strategies beyond 2x Crypts.

  2. #242

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by cosmiccoil View Post
    I am just curious about your experience with Renanimator without Containment Priest. I like the idea of freeing up some spots, but boy do I like having a strong out to random graveyard strategies beyond 2x Crypts.
    I guess I do feel less worried about Reanimator these days, but I will agree I'm a little soft to it currently. Wail and Bridge at least also do something in these matchups, so that's something.

  3. #243

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    When your combo winds up being infinite mana with only an Urza's Bauble, how do you guys play it out?

  4. #244

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by f7eleven View Post
    When your combo winds up being infinite mana with only an Urza's Bauble, how do you guys play it out?
    Draw 40 cards, try to win on next turn.

  5. #245

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    That's what you do with Mishra's Bauble. I'm specifically asking about Urza's Bauble.

  6. #246

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    They're functionally the same in the deck.

    Unless you're asking mechanically how to go about doing so given the random aspect of Urza's Bauble, in which case you should've been more clear.

    Assuming that's what you want to know, at lower REL with a friendly opponent they'll reveal their hand. At comp REL and above you'll randomly pick one each time so I have them shuffle their hand, place it face down, then use a die. I track which ones I'll get to see and stop the process once all have been picked. Then I look at their hand and we move on.

  7. #247

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    I was clear enough.

    There are some pieces of interaction, that once upon learning they have you may no longer want to draw your library low enough that decking becomes a path to losing. This makes announcing that you will repeat the loop x times a suboptimal play. Further, if they have two or more of any specific card(s) in hand (barring distinguishing art/wear/altering), you cannot be 100% certain that you've seen every card. The most common way of determining a random card in an opponent's hand is that they randomize their hand from 1-n then roll a die to determine the card(s) that is revealed/discarded. Urza's Bauble has odd wording in that the card seen is not public knowledge, requiring the opponent's hand be randomized again after the ability. Let's say you can repeat this process four times in one minute. You're looking at 10 minutes to repeat this loop 40x.

    Sure, if they just reveal their hand then there's no issue, but they are under no obligation to do so, and the larger their hand/higher the REL, the more likely they are to be able to/want to keep hidden information hidden vs a finite number of looks.

    TL;DR: Urza's Bauble's quirky wording is annoying (including even when you're only resolving it once a turn).

  8. #248

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by f7eleven View Post
    Urza's Bauble has odd wording in that the card seen is not public knowledge, requiring the opponent's hand be randomized again after the ability.
    FYI if you're targeting an opponent with Urza's Bauble you essentially treat the card as if it said 'reveal' instead of 'look'. Source. The reasons for this are pretty shitty, IMO - it's only slightly more of a pain in the ass to resolve Bauble the way it's worded, and it only really matters if you're looping it... in which case there isn't a shortcut unless your opponent is cool with just revealing their hand so it's kind of moot that it's a pain in the ass. And the 'it's basically changing zones' argument is kind of odd.

  9. #249
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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    So I went 4-0 at the Card Kingdom Weekly yesterday. (If anyone was watching, I was the Round 3 Feature Match).

    Over the past few months I've attempted to test with every conceivable construction of this deck (I have admittedly not yet tried the Board the Weatherlight variants), including a few more off the wall ones, and I continue to feel like the 4-Color Unclaimed Territory build is where I want to be with this deck. I agree that the consistency of playing a mono-color deck is ideal in an archetype with a notable amount of colorless lands and without the ability to play a significant number of fetches, I just think that the color "Human" offers a lot that the color "White" does not.

    Here's the list I ran:

    4x Monastery Mentor
    4x Auriok Salvager
    4x Dark Confidant
    2x Imperial Recruiter
    2x Trinket Mage
    1x Walking Ballista

    4x Chalice of the Void
    4x Lion's Eye Diamond
    4x Mox Opal
    4x Lotus Petal
    4x Urza's Bauble
    3x Mishra's Bauble
    1x Lodestone Bauble

    4x Unclaimed Territory
    4x Cavern of Souls
    4x Ancient Tomb
    3x City of Traitors
    2x Remote Farm
    1x Spire of Industry
    1x Inventor's Fair

    SB:

    1x Karn, Scion of Urza
    2x Quicksmith Rebel
    2x Sanctum Prelate
    1x Containment Priest
    1x War Priest of Thune
    2x Manic Vandal
    1x Magus of the Disk
    1x Surge Node
    1x Engineered Explosives
    1x Sorcerous Spyglass
    1x Tormod's Crypt
    1x Spatial Contortion


    Match 1: Storm (ANT)

    Game 1 - I keep a grindy hand and get stormed-out turn 2.

    Game 2 - I'm forced to mulligan down to 5 cards no land, but it has a Chalice and two Baubles. I'm using Baubles to dig for lands with what little of a hand I have, so I don't feel that I can play Chalice on 0 in the early game. He takes the first Chalice from me before I can play it, but I draw a second. He ends up taking that one too, again before I can play it for anything other than 0 which would prevent me from digging for mana and even turn a fair amount of it off. My board is Tomb, LED, Opal and I have a Trinket Mage in hand. I crack Mishra's Bauble on his end step and see a 2-mana artifact answer (I can't remember this much time later whether it was a Hurkyl's or a Perilous Voyage, but I'll assume it was a Huryl's). I top-deck the Tormod's Crypt from one of my draws, play it, and then follow up with Trinket Mage. If I had not seen the top of his deck, I think I might have been tempted to crack the LED with the Trinket Mage trigger on the stack and play Chalice on 1 because I'd be worried about him storming off the following turn, but given that I know he has the 2 CMC answer the right play is to lean on the Tormod's Crypt cutting off any lines he might have been comfortable with on his next turn and then playing the Chalice on 2 the next turn. I proceed to do that, and then follow it up with a Sanctum Prelate.

    Game 3 - I keep a hand with 2 Chalice. He takes one turn 1, and on my turn I play the other Chalice on 1. On my following turn I destroy his LED with my Manic Vandal. From then on the gameplan is just to play as many hatebears as I can grab and swing in with them and clock him out.

    Match 2: Astral Slide

    Game 1 - I got to play against Astral Slide, which was great. I turn 1 Remote Farm. Turn 2 Ancient Tomb into Salvagers and LED, recur a Bauble and draw most of my deck on his 2nd upkeep. With my deck in hand Turn 3, I play another Salvagers and some Chalices on 1 and 2 just to be extra cautious, drop the LEDs, cycle one of them and then force him to draw himself to death on his 3rd upkeep.

    Game 2 - If I had known his list, I would have boarded in Surge Node and Engineered Explosives since apparently he was running Chalice. I didn't have any incling going into game 2 though, and he drops a Chalice on 0. I play Mentor. Next turn I play another Mentor, run 3 artifacts into the chalice to make 6 monks, and swing with the Mentor for 5. Next turn 2 more artifacts, swing for 26.

    Match 3: Punishing Dack (Chris Wessel)

    The video archive of this match can be found here

    Game 1 - Turn 1 I lead on LED, Ancient Tomb, Lodestone Bauble, Opal, Float White, Opal, and attempt to resolve Salvagers to combo off T1, but Salvagers meets a FoW. I draw another Opal T2 and go for it again; this time he doesn't have a FoW. My remaining card in hand was Imperial Recruiter though, so even if he did I'd feel pretty good about my position.

    Game 2 - Game 2 was a disaster. Between you and me I have on occasion noticed that I have a subtle weakness as a player, and that's that I'm dumb and bad at Magic. In this context, this manifests itself as me somehow talking myself into identifying him as on Sneak and Show based on the cards I had seen game 1, and then boarding hard into this match-up as if I knew for a fact that this is what he was on. I keep a hand based on this understanding. I begin to play based on this understanding. By the time it's clear to me that I'm going all in on something that just doesn't line up with reality, I don't have a lot of resources with which to back-peddle. I attempt to assemble the combo to steal a win, but I can't get there in time. As I scoop to his Deathrite's presenting lethal, I ask him across the table "So, you're not Sneak-Show, than?". Chris gives me a friendly chuckle.

    Game 3 - Chris leads on Deathrite, and subsequently misses his next land-drop. I attempt a Chalice on 1, but it meets a force. My opponent cantrips, and next turn I drop an uncounterable Prelate on 2. On his subsequent turn I get thoughtseized and reveal a hand of LED, Mentor, Opal, Quicksmith Rebel. Chris takes the Mentor, so on my turn I land an Opal and an uncounterable Quicksmith Rebel and beat him to death with it. I play a little poorly by dropping out a Confidant unnecessarily which is predominantly clock-neutral, but it hardly ends up mattering.

    Match 4: Bizarro Stormy (Greg Mitchell)

    Game 1 - He keeps a no-lander on 5, and I try to clock him with Mentor and a Ballista. If I had 1 more mana I could have pumped Ballista once and gotten there, but as it stands I'm one turn short and he does his Bizarro Stormy thing and I die.

    Game 2 - Game 2 I land a Chalice on 1, a Containment Priest, a Chalice on 2, I Imperial Tutor up a Prelate on 3, and he scoops.

    Game 3 - I hit an early Chalice on 1. After he plays an LED, I destroy it with Manic Vandal (which seemed like a decent 1-of to bring in due to Silent Gravestone) and starting digging for more Control action with a Karn. I find a Prelate but obviously that goes into exile. He Hurkyl's me end-step and proceeds to combo off on his turn. Unfortunately, he gets himself in the situation where his Magus of the Mind is the lowest creature in his Graveyard, he has a Griselbrand in play, he puts two Shallow Graves on the stack and sac's LED for Blue. Since Griselbrand is Legendary, the first Shallow Grave revives Griselbrand and immediately sends another one back to the graveyard, and the second Shallow Grave only repeats this process instead of digging down to the Magus of the Mind. Realizing his error, he expresses his regret and quickly identifies the best out he can play for. At this point I am at 9 and he is at 8. He goes down to 1 to draw more cards, and then casts Collective Brutality, killing the Vandal and draining me for 2 bringing me down to 7. He passes the turn to me and I look through his graveyard to see what I don't have to worry about anymore. I count 4 copies of Shallow Grave, so I call the judge over to ask for the Oracle text of the other Shallow Grave card which is Corpse Dance and has a CMC of 3. Not wanting to go to 4 from Ancient Tomb and Spire of Industry as he still may have some Brutalities and an Acquisiton, I crack the LED for white, grab the Prelate with Karn and play Prelate naming 3 while staying at 7 life, believing that the out he's playing to is Corpse Dance. He offers me the handshake.

    Thoughts on the deck:

    I continue to love the deck, and feel like even if it became more widely adopted and the novelty of the deck wore off, I would remain on it or at least keep it assembled and sleeved as a permanent fixture.

    The reason I prefer the Unclaimed build is that the Confidants make it easier to get rolling off a small pool of mana, and the tutors lets you lean into the combo game 1, while giving you the greatest access to your sideboard game 2 and/or allowing you to board out the majority of the combo to lean into the fair-plan and still have more then reasonable access to the combo when the opportunity arises. Essentially, it feels both more versatile and consistent. What it gives up is Swords out of the board, a more powerful fair-game game 1 without the maindeck Karns, and has slightly lower access to natural white mana for kickstarting Salvagers (which honestly is the point I lament more than the first two). The preponderance of non-basics, on the other hand, does not feel like an issue at all. The difference in susceptibility to wasteland is marginal, and in a 4 Opal, 4 Petal deck that can also use Imperial Recruiter / Karn to turn LED into color fixing-ramp, Blood Moon isn't the biggest threat, and giving up on a small handful of basics in order to be able to easily tutor up answers to opposing Chalice, for example, is a trade I'm happy to make. The primary synergy of the deck is so powerful though that there's plenty of other hypothetical builds to explore, and I would hope that other people experiment with all sorts of variations. For the time being though, and barring someone having a massively positive result with a yet unseen build, I'll stick to iterating Mono-Human.

    Speaking of, I'm running out of iterative improvements I want to make maindeck. I finally chucked the Karakas for a 9th Gold Land, as the effect just isn't worth compromising the manabase. I'm beginning to suspect the 4th Mishra's Bauble may be more valuable than the 4th Urza's Bauble. I want to give this thought some time to make sure I'm not just falling prey to experience bias as in theory Urza's Bauble should be stronger (consistently gives you information regardless of how opponent sequences their fetching, gives you immediately relevant information, can give you cumulative information on the opponent when multiples are used in one turn, etc), but in practice I haven't been noticing an effect-based difference in the information the two cards have been giving me, and the synergy that Mishra's Bauble has with Dark Confidant is very alluring, particularly given the CMC distribution of the deck.

    As strong as the deck is and I believe it will remain, I suspect the current metagame weather is darkening for us slightly, not getting brighter. Steel Stompy seems a bad-matchup, and that's a deck on an upswing that I expect to continue. This is a bit anecdotal, but Thalia is also creature I suspect to see some growth in after the printing of Brightling. RIP I also wouldn't be shocked to see begin to see more play, as Surgical seems to be at a saturation point based on the numbers coming out of the CFB 2k, and the metagame has already pretty strongly adapted to its ever-presence, meaning that its relative utility should now be notably less. People playing with Brightling would also mean more people playing with White Cards as well, obviously.

    That's all for now. Looking forward to seeing how other people are fairing and what specific lists they're working on.

  10. #250

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Hey, you got the 4-0, congrats! I've not been able to play for the past two weeks and probably won't be back for another two weeks so the monowhite testing has been at a halt since the back-to-back 4-0s.

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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by Kaono View Post
    Hey, you got the 4-0, congrats! I've not been able to play for the past two weeks and probably won't be back for another two weeks so the monowhite testing has been at a halt since the back-to-back 4-0s.
    Thanks. Still curious to hear how maindeck Prelates work out when you get back; they are so consistently good across a variety of matchups that that really does sound like a promising option.

  12. #252
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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    I have played the human version for quite somme time and you are right that Dark Confidan seems to be made for this deck. The Problem I have with cutting Walking Ballistas you make the deck more complicated by making the 3 card combo (Salvagers - LED - something) into a 4 card combo (Salvagers - LED - Tutor - something) which is not the way I want to play the deck. I like the sideboard space that Recruiter opens, but Trinket Nage has been consistently mediocre and I will play your list minus the trinket Mages plus Some Walking Ballistas and with a few different Sideboard humans:

    //Lands
    2 Ancient Den
    4 Ancient Tomb
    4 Cavern of Souls
    3 City of Traitors
    1 Inventors' Fair
    1 Spire of Industry
    4 Unclaimed Territory

    //Spells
    4 Chalice of the Void
    4 Lion's Eye Diamond
    1 Lodestone Bauble
    4 Lotus Petal
    4 Mishra's Bauble
    4 Mox Opal
    4 Urza's Bauble

    //Creatures
    4 Auriok Salvagers
    4 Dark Confidant
    3 Imperial Recruiter
    4 Monastery Mentor
    2 Walking Ballista

    //Sideboard
    SB: 2 Containment Priest
    SB: 1 Ethersworn Canonist
    SB: 1 Manic Vandal
    SB: 2 Sanctum Prelate
    SB: 2 Tormod's Crypt
    SB: 2 Sorcerous Spyglass
    SB: 2 Karn, Scion of Urza
    SB: 1 Engineered Explosives
    SB: 2 Warping Wail

    I could also see playing 2 Recruiters and instead 3 Walking Ballistas.
    Last edited by hofzge; 06-07-2018 at 07:11 AM.
    Chalice on 1

  13. #253
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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by hofzge View Post
    The Problem I have with cutting Walking Ballistas you make the deck more complicated by making the 3 card combo (Salvagers - LED - something) into a 4 card combo (Salvagers - LED - Tutor - something)
    I want to present a counter-argument, as I think this is a good thing to think about.

    I think the fundamental metric you're employing in your argument here, counting cards cast in a very literal sense and "complicated"-ness, is inherently flawed, and I think I can reasonably demonstrate this. Feel free to correct me if you find fault with anything I'm about to say, as I've done all of this fairly quickly just to try to visually convey my understanding of respective probability.

    All else being equal (meaning assume the same basic vulnerability to interaction, etc) what really matters with respect to the issue you raise is only two things, Accessibility of the Combo and, to slightly distort a term, the Tempo of the Combo. Rather than calling it a "4 Card Combo", than, as it remains an interaction between only 3 starting elements, only 1 or 2 of which you actually generally spend a finite non-zero amount of mana on, let's instead recognize it as a consistent combo between 3 elements and look at some combinatorics of different ways those three elements could be assembled depending on our deck construction, and the relative speed at which those combinations are able to then go off.

    I spent half an hour or so while I was eating my lunch and drew up this small diagram. Forgive the MS-Paintey-ness.



    So in the above, I started with two sets of the "core" elements we seemed to agree on, and in the top set I added two Trinket Mage, while in the bottom set I added two more Walking Ballista. That's the only difference between the card pools they represent. This is not an attempt to calculate any specific probabilities, this is merely to measure the respective combo "speed" that is endowed by running Walking Ballista over Trinket Mage in this scenario.

    So let's walk over my simplifying assumptions.

    In both scenarios, I assume that 3 elements must be combined. Just to establish some terms, let's call it an Engine (Beige)(1), Fuel (Purple)(2), and a Spout (Green)(3).

    The 3rd element - the 'Spouts' - I have separated into two categories labeled (+0) and (+1). This is to identify which are "quick" wins, and which are wins that require one extra turn (meaning you must give the opponent one more opportunity to end the game before sealing victory). Again, this involves simplification - for example, using Inventor's Fair as a spout relies on it not being needed as a manasource, as well as at least two other artifacts having been pulled out of the library at some point, etc, but simplified calculations are all we're actually able to do.

    I chose to make the simplifying assumption of treating Mentor as a member of the (+0) element-group as opposed to the (+1) element-group, as the actual play-patterns of the deck seem to suggest that treating it as a pre-existing board element is the most appropriate. This is probably my most "assault-able" assumption here, as I can imagine the scenarios where you've assembled elements (1) and (2) but have not come across any spouts (the most numerous element) and draw a single Mentor off the top, or where your opponent has some massive board presence where the existing monks cannot break though - in which case it would function more as a (+1) element - but choosing between the two I feel (+0) is more fitting.

    Finally, I chose not to subdivide elements (1) and (2) into respective speeds. Given that our scope here is strictly comparative, and Walking Ballista performs absolutely no role in satisfying (1) and (2) - meaning that the speed of any tutor in this hypothetical board-state would be at most compared to having to actually hard-draw said component in any comparison to Walking Ballista - the speed of the tutor-based line would almost automatically outspeed the comparitive. Furthermore, given how tutors turn LED's into Black Lotuses, and the mana-threshold that can be reached in a 9 Sol-Land deck with Moxes and Petals on top of that, I find they usually don't delay the combo used in this fashion.

    So, at this point we just run the numbers and see how many different (+0) speed and (+1) combination of elements can be found in the respective decks.

    On the left you can see the respective diagrams just running through the arithmetic here. The reason why it branches in the way that it does is that I'm starting with the "left-most" element (Engine), and if that element represents part of the possibility space accredited to the subsequent elements, I'm removing the appropriate elements for that section of the arithmetic. (If we use an Imperial Recruiter in element 1, clearly there will be 1 less in element 3, and so on).

    So, this was a lot of words and numbers, but it should provide us with a very strong estimation of our comparative ability to assemble a combo at different speeds.

    The soft conclusion I draw is this; not only am I (the Trinket Mage player) the far more consistent Combo deck with more than double your number of (+1) element combinations, I'm also faster with a greater amount of access to (+0) speed combinations. Sure, this doesn't account for the occasional turn added onto the combo by utilizing tutors to access Engine or Fuel, but those are times where I a already have the option of combing where the Walking Ballista deck simply does not, and this is an element of consistency that in practice does translate into speed.

    I am definitely not saying there are no trade offs in running Trinket Mages over Walking Ballista, but your argument I'm responding to above is strictly advocating Walking Ballista as a Combo Element in direct comparison to Trinket Mage, and I respectfully think that extra Ballistas simply don't make you a better combo-deck. Counting spells doesn't matter, and being "complicated" in the abstract doesn't matter. What matters is Speed and Consistency, and I put forward that in this matter Trinket Mage is the clear winner.

    The bottle-neck of the combo is not Spouts. The deck is littered with Spouts and Walking Ballista as a card has enormous diminishing returns, as it's mana-intensive when played fairly and the entire premise of the card is that the first Ballista continues to do in subsequent turns the same resource conversion that it did on the turn you cast it. I honestly believe Walking Ballista, while a strong card and necessity of the deck, is over-rated in multiples.

    Quote Originally Posted by hofzge View Post
    Trinket Nage has been consistently mediocre
    I would strongly disagree with this in general, although I obviously can't argue against your personal experience with the card. What I can say is that he not only makes the combo massively more consistent (see above), but he provides easy access to Chalice, sideboard answers to opposing Chalice, Tormod's Crypt, converts LEDs into Lotuses for Ballista / Chalice / EE, and at worse grabs a Bauble in order to play the part of a low-rent if Monk-Enabling Shardless Agent.

    If I'm overvaluing Trinket Mage, I would love to hear any points that I'm overlooking so that I could improve as a player myself.
    Last edited by Rationalist; 06-07-2018 at 11:45 PM.

  14. #254
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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by Rationalist View Post
    I am definitely not saying there are no trade offs in running Trinket Mages over Walking Ballista, but your argument I'm responding to above is strictly advocating Walking Ballista as a Combo Element in direct comparison to Trinket Mage, and I respectfully think that extra Ballistas simply don't make you a better combo-deck. Counting spells doesn't matter, and being "complicated" in the abstract doesn't matter. What matters is Speed and Consistency, and I put forward that in this matter Trinket Mage is the clear winner.
    I think it is clear that if you runa deck full of tutors you run a better chance of running the combo - but the caveat is that trinket Mage in my experience is not good at fetching Chalice, as that is much better T1 than T3.
    Fetching EE is a somewhat good thing as it gives you outs to stuff you have no outs against otherwise. Fetching Walking Abllista or LED is obviously golden.

    If we would follow your logic we should also play Infernal Tutor (early versions played that) and any kind of other tutor for 2 or more pieces. I guess in that case an argument can be made to better just scrap many of the "bad" baubles and just play Spellbombs like Aether or Pyrite that can influence the game and if you drive the consistency argument the furthest you get to Imperial Bomberman with 4 Trinket, 4 Recruiter.

    I did not like that deck as the double tutor draws are extrremely slow and with less moxen due to less baubles = acceleration & less sol lands you get slow hands. If you play chalice, also go the mox opal and petal way and play a stompy deck so as to play Chalice T1.
    That is just my opinion.
    Chalice on 1

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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by hofzge View Post
    If we would follow your logic we should also play Infernal Tutor (early versions played that) and any kind of other tutor for 2 or more pieces. I guess in that case an argument can be made to better just scrap many of the "bad" baubles and just play Spellbombs like Aether or Pyrite that can influence the game and if you drive the consistency argument the furthest you get to Imperial Bomberman with 4 Trinket, 4 Recruiter.
    Well what's certainly true is that running more Ballista will give you a more comfortable game 1 vs DnT, which I expect you might see an small uptick in thanks to Brightling experimentation.

    I disagree with your interpretation of the logic I'm putting forward, as it was a strictly comparative estimation of combo speed and accessibility between two alternatives in response to a one sentence argument that was the same, and not an appeal for combo reliability above all else (It was only that exact sentence I was responding to there and I feel like I established that early on, but perhaps I did a poor job at communicating that); so I feel like you're misunderstanding what I've said.

    If your stance on the deck you want to play, however, amounts to, instead of being interested in comparative combo potential and speed, "I want to only accept Combo-outs that meet this strict threshold of setup speed as an 'I-win-button', and I want to play the absolute strongest fair deck I can outside of that", might the 1st Karn be more valuable than the 3rd Walking Ballista? (Since you were waffling between 3 Recruiter / 2 Ballista, and 2 Recruiter / 3 Ballista) Just a thought for consideration.

    Post-Script: And if you want to take the stance outlined above, you can certainly find specific fault with the estimation I went into, as there are lines I designated as (+0) speed under a comparative argument that are actually being weighed against objectively faster lines as I didn't differentiate between mana requirements in the first two elements, so my previous post in all its simplification does a pretty poor job of saying "here's an absolute line of objective acceptable 'Combo Tempo'" and 'cutting off the fat', if you will. I was just trying to show with some really rough magnitude-estimations that Walking Ballista isn't a superior combo-piece, as the sentence I was responding to was treating it as such.

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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Top 32 SCG Duel for the Duals, Austin Gattuso

    Running 3 Ensnaring Bridges, Mono-White with 4 Horizon Canopy.

    Congrats Austin.

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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Hi everyone,
    I tried the deck the last 2 weeks a bit myself
    After a view changes (for my testing the just karn or just bob versions run out a bit fast of gass)
    I had online and in paper quite a lot of success and even managed to reach the finals of your local FNM

    Result in full Matches:
    Combo:
    3:0 S&T
    4:0 BUG Food Chain
    0:2 Dark Depths
    5:1 ANT
    2:0 UB Reanimator
    1:0 Dreage
    1:0 Big Red
    1:0 TES
    Aggro:
    1:0 Eldrazi Aggro
    2:2 Grix Delver
    2:0 Burn
    1:0 UWr Mentor Control
    1:0 BUG
    1:0 Goblin Food Chain
    Control:
    2:0 4c Pile
    0:1 UBR Kess
    5:1 8Moon
    9-1-1 Miracle
    0:6 Big Eldrazi
    1:2 Nic Fit
    6:1 D&T
    2:1 Brews

    pretty nasty ~74 winning % in matches
    sure some where because of the "brew/unknown" factor and some by missplayes
    but looks great so far

    Deck

    4 Chalice of the Void
    4 Lion's Eye Diamond
    4 Mox Opal
    3 Lotus Petal
    4 Mishra's Bauble
    4 Urza's Bauble
    1 Lodestone Bauble
    1 Engineered Explosives
    4 Monastery Mentor
    4 Auriok Salvagers
    1 Walking Ballista
    4 Dark Confidant
    4 Ancient Tomb
    3 City of Traitors
    4 Cavern of Souls
    1 Karakas
    2 Inventors' Fair
    1 Scrubland
    1 Plains
    2 Marsh Flats
    1 Swamp
    3 Karn, Scion of Urza

    Sideboard:

    2 Ensnaring Bridge
    2 Tormod's Crypt
    2 Sorcerous Spyglass
    1 Engineered Explosives
    2 Containment Priest
    2 Sanctum Prelate
    2 Ethersworn Canonist
    2 Disenchant


    SB still not sure so far the plan was
    -vs each blue fair non delver deck take out the 3 Petals
    -combo bring in all the hate cut karn
    -8moon bring in Spyglass EE Sanctum (on 4 is nearlly gg) Disenchant
    -most times you can cut 1 win coin

  18. #258
    In Response - Podcast
    hofzge's Avatar
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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    I love this list - The one card I always missed in the monocolored lists was Confidant and I first played something like this after Angelbakas idea.

    Quote Originally Posted by Arcanis001 View Post
    Sideboard:

    2 Ensnaring Bridge
    2 Tormod's Crypt
    2 Sorcerous Spyglass
    1 Engineered Explosives
    2 Containment Priest
    2 Sanctum Prelate
    2 Ethersworn Canonist
    2 Disenchant


    SB still not sure so far the plan was
    -vs each blue fair non delver deck take out the 3 Petals
    -combo bring in all the hate cut karn
    -8moon bring in Spyglass EE Sanctum (on 4 is nearlly gg) Disenchant
    -most times you can cut 1 win coin
    I like those ideas too, but as a lot of people play Sneak and Show here I would personally play more hate cards directed towards them like more one Containment Priest or Oblivion Rings instead of Disenchants. I don't particularly like Bridge as a sideboard card in a deck that has Karn and Mentor as Plans B/C and where you empty your hand rather fast.

    Also I don't like Ethersworn Canonist that much and would rather play more Sanctum Prelates.

    Keep up the good work spreading the Bomberman gospel :)
    Chalice on 1

  19. #259
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    Manroe's Avatar
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    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy

    Quote Originally Posted by Rationalist View Post
    So I went 4-0 at the Card Kingdom Weekly yesterday. (If anyone was watching, I was the Round 3 Feature Match).

    Over the past few months I've attempted to test with every conceivable construction of this deck (I have admittedly not yet tried the Board the Weatherlight variants), including a few more off the wall ones, and I continue to feel like the 4-Color Unclaimed Territory build is where I want to be with this deck. I agree that the consistency of playing a mono-color deck is ideal in an archetype with a notable amount of colorless lands and without the ability to play a significant number of fetches, I just think that the color "Human" offers a lot that the color "White" does not.

    Here's the list I ran:

    4x Monastery Mentor
    4x Auriok Salvager
    4x Dark Confidant
    2x Imperial Recruiter
    2x Trinket Mage
    1x Walking Ballista

    4x Chalice of the Void
    4x Lion's Eye Diamond
    4x Mox Opal
    4x Lotus Petal
    4x Urza's Bauble
    3x Mishra's Bauble
    1x Lodestone Bauble

    4x Unclaimed Territory
    4x Cavern of Souls
    4x Ancient Tomb
    3x City of Traitors
    2x Remote Farm
    1x Spire of Industry
    1x Inventor's Fair

    SB:

    1x Karn, Scion of Urza
    2x Quicksmith Rebel
    2x Sanctum Prelate
    1x Containment Priest
    1x War Priest of Thune
    2x Manic Vandal
    1x Magus of the Disk
    1x Surge Node
    1x Engineered Explosives
    1x Sorcerous Spyglass
    1x Tormod's Crypt
    1x Spatial Contortion


    Match 1: Storm (ANT)

    Game 1 - I keep a grindy hand and get stormed-out turn 2.

    Game 2 - I'm forced to mulligan down to 5 cards no land, but it has a Chalice and two Baubles. I'm using Baubles to dig for lands with what little of a hand I have, so I don't feel that I can play Chalice on 0 in the early game. He takes the first Chalice from me before I can play it, but I draw a second. He ends up taking that one too, again before I can play it for anything other than 0 which would prevent me from digging for mana and even turn a fair amount of it off. My board is Tomb, LED, Opal and I have a Trinket Mage in hand. I crack Mishra's Bauble on his end step and see a 2-mana artifact answer (I can't remember this much time later whether it was a Hurkyl's or a Perilous Voyage, but I'll assume it was a Huryl's). I top-deck the Tormod's Crypt from one of my draws, play it, and then follow up with Trinket Mage. If I had not seen the top of his deck, I think I might have been tempted to crack the LED with the Trinket Mage trigger on the stack and play Chalice on 1 because I'd be worried about him storming off the following turn, but given that I know he has the 2 CMC answer the right play is to lean on the Tormod's Crypt cutting off any lines he might have been comfortable with on his next turn and then playing the Chalice on 2 the next turn. I proceed to do that, and then follow it up with a Sanctum Prelate.

    Game 3 - I keep a hand with 2 Chalice. He takes one turn 1, and on my turn I play the other Chalice on 1. On my following turn I destroy his LED with my Manic Vandal. From then on the gameplan is just to play as many hatebears as I can grab and swing in with them and clock him out.

    Match 2: Astral Slide

    Game 1 - I got to play against Astral Slide, which was great. I turn 1 Remote Farm. Turn 2 Ancient Tomb into Salvagers and LED, recur a Bauble and draw most of my deck on his 2nd upkeep. With my deck in hand Turn 3, I play another Salvagers and some Chalices on 1 and 2 just to be extra cautious, drop the LEDs, cycle one of them and then force him to draw himself to death on his 3rd upkeep.

    Game 2 - If I had known his list, I would have boarded in Surge Node and Engineered Explosives since apparently he was running Chalice. I didn't have any incling going into game 2 though, and he drops a Chalice on 0. I play Mentor. Next turn I play another Mentor, run 3 artifacts into the chalice to make 6 monks, and swing with the Mentor for 5. Next turn 2 more artifacts, swing for 26.

    Match 3: Punishing Dack (Chris Wessel)

    The video archive of this match can be found here

    Game 1 - Turn 1 I lead on LED, Ancient Tomb, Lodestone Bauble, Opal, Float White, Opal, and attempt to resolve Salvagers to combo off T1, but Salvagers meets a FoW. I draw another Opal T2 and go for it again; this time he doesn't have a FoW. My remaining card in hand was Imperial Recruiter though, so even if he did I'd feel pretty good about my position.

    Game 2 - Game 2 was a disaster. Between you and me I have on occasion noticed that I have a subtle weakness as a player, and that's that I'm dumb and bad at Magic. In this context, this manifests itself as me somehow talking myself into identifying him as on Sneak and Show based on the cards I had seen game 1, and then boarding hard into this match-up as if I knew for a fact that this is what he was on. I keep a hand based on this understanding. I begin to play based on this understanding. By the time it's clear to me that I'm going all in on something that just doesn't line up with reality, I don't have a lot of resources with which to back-peddle. I attempt to assemble the combo to steal a win, but I can't get there in time. As I scoop to his Deathrite's presenting lethal, I ask him across the table "So, you're not Sneak-Show, than?". Chris gives me a friendly chuckle.

    Game 3 - Chris leads on Deathrite, and subsequently misses his next land-drop. I attempt a Chalice on 1, but it meets a force. My opponent cantrips, and next turn I drop an uncounterable Prelate on 2. On his subsequent turn I get thoughtseized and reveal a hand of LED, Mentor, Opal, Quicksmith Rebel. Chris takes the Mentor, so on my turn I land an Opal and an uncounterable Quicksmith Rebel and beat him to death with it. I play a little poorly by dropping out a Confidant unnecessarily which is predominantly clock-neutral, but it hardly ends up mattering.

    Match 4: Bizarro Stormy (Greg Mitchell)

    Game 1 - He keeps a no-lander on 5, and I try to clock him with Mentor and a Ballista. If I had 1 more mana I could have pumped Ballista once and gotten there, but as it stands I'm one turn short and he does his Bizarro Stormy thing and I die.

    Game 2 - Game 2 I land a Chalice on 1, a Containment Priest, a Chalice on 2, I Imperial Tutor up a Prelate on 3, and he scoops.

    Game 3 - I hit an early Chalice on 1. After he plays an LED, I destroy it with Manic Vandal (which seemed like a decent 1-of to bring in due to Silent Gravestone) and starting digging for more Control action with a Karn. I find a Prelate but obviously that goes into exile. He Hurkyl's me end-step and proceeds to combo off on his turn. Unfortunately, he gets himself in the situation where his Magus of the Mind is the lowest creature in his Graveyard, he has a Griselbrand in play, he puts two Shallow Graves on the stack and sac's LED for Blue. Since Griselbrand is Legendary, the first Shallow Grave revives Griselbrand and immediately sends another one back to the graveyard, and the second Shallow Grave only repeats this process instead of digging down to the Magus of the Mind. Realizing his error, he expresses his regret and quickly identifies the best out he can play for. At this point I am at 9 and he is at 8. He goes down to 1 to draw more cards, and then casts Collective Brutality, killing the Vandal and draining me for 2 bringing me down to 7. He passes the turn to me and I look through his graveyard to see what I don't have to worry about anymore. I count 4 copies of Shallow Grave, so I call the judge over to ask for the Oracle text of the other Shallow Grave card which is Corpse Dance and has a CMC of 3. Not wanting to go to 4 from Ancient Tomb and Spire of Industry as he still may have some Brutalities and an Acquisiton, I crack the LED for white, grab the Prelate with Karn and play Prelate naming 3 while staying at 7 life, believing that the out he's playing to is Corpse Dance. He offers me the handshake.

    Thoughts on the deck:

    I continue to love the deck, and feel like even if it became more widely adopted and the novelty of the deck wore off, I would remain on it or at least keep it assembled and sleeved as a permanent fixture.

    The reason I prefer the Unclaimed build is that the Confidants make it easier to get rolling off a small pool of mana, and the tutors lets you lean into the combo game 1, while giving you the greatest access to your sideboard game 2 and/or allowing you to board out the majority of the combo to lean into the fair-plan and still have more then reasonable access to the combo when the opportunity arises. Essentially, it feels both more versatile and consistent. What it gives up is Swords out of the board, a more powerful fair-game game 1 without the maindeck Karns, and has slightly lower access to natural white mana for kickstarting Salvagers (which honestly is the point I lament more than the first two). The preponderance of non-basics, on the other hand, does not feel like an issue at all. The difference in susceptibility to wasteland is marginal, and in a 4 Opal, 4 Petal deck that can also use Imperial Recruiter / Karn to turn LED into color fixing-ramp, Blood Moon isn't the biggest threat, and giving up on a small handful of basics in order to be able to easily tutor up answers to opposing Chalice, for example, is a trade I'm happy to make. The primary synergy of the deck is so powerful though that there's plenty of other hypothetical builds to explore, and I would hope that other people experiment with all sorts of variations. For the time being though, and barring someone having a massively positive result with a yet unseen build, I'll stick to iterating Mono-Human.

    Speaking of, I'm running out of iterative improvements I want to make maindeck. I finally chucked the Karakas for a 9th Gold Land, as the effect just isn't worth compromising the manabase. I'm beginning to suspect the 4th Mishra's Bauble may be more valuable than the 4th Urza's Bauble. I want to give this thought some time to make sure I'm not just falling prey to experience bias as in theory Urza's Bauble should be stronger (consistently gives you information regardless of how opponent sequences their fetching, gives you immediately relevant information, can give you cumulative information on the opponent when multiples are used in one turn, etc), but in practice I haven't been noticing an effect-based difference in the information the two cards have been giving me, and the synergy that Mishra's Bauble has with Dark Confidant is very alluring, particularly given the CMC distribution of the deck.

    As strong as the deck is and I believe it will remain, I suspect the current metagame weather is darkening for us slightly, not getting brighter. Steel Stompy seems a bad-matchup, and that's a deck on an upswing that I expect to continue. This is a bit anecdotal, but Thalia is also creature I suspect to see some growth in after the printing of Brightling. RIP I also wouldn't be shocked to see begin to see more play, as Surgical seems to be at a saturation point based on the numbers coming out of the CFB 2k, and the metagame has already pretty strongly adapted to its ever-presence, meaning that its relative utility should now be notably less. People playing with Brightling would also mean more people playing with White Cards as well, obviously.

    That's all for now. Looking forward to seeing how other people are fairing and what specific lists they're working on.
    I played this version of the deck last night at my weekly legacy event and really enjoyed it. The deck and manabase felt so fluid. I went 3-1 beating Elves, Enchantress, and a post deck. Lost to aggro loam after stealing game 1.

    I will probably play a side event or two with this in Vegas this weekend.

    Sent from my ONEPLUS A5000 using Tapatalk
    Once you go Legacy...

  20. #260

    Re: Chalice Bomberman/Bomberman Stompy



    Another "fun-of" for the humans build perhaps?

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