Basic rules in legacy:
1- No Brainstorm without 7x or 8x Fetch
2- No playing worse mana than Delver. 8x Fetch target 6x U sources...with very conditional option for 7x Fetch target 7x U sources. Your magic number is 14.
Mycosynth Gardens came in the mail yesterday and the card has been excellent. Just leave it always up once you have a Dreadnought online and youre hedged vs removal. A couple of copies are well worth including in Dressnought.
Fox pointed out elsewhere that, Ark4n's 4-1 ed with the below list yesterday.
4x Dragon Rage Channeler
4x Phyrexian Dreadnought
1x Grim Lavamancer
2x Currency Converter
1x Phyrexian Furnace
2x Scroll of Fate
4x Dress Down
4x Stifle
4x Brainstorm
4x FoW
4x Bolt
3x Minor Misstep
4x Vista
4x Tarn
4x Mycosynth
3x Island
2x Saga
2x Wasteland
2x Otawara
1x Mountain
1x Volcanic Island
I felt the list can be slightly more focused but its a great starting point.
Edit: I understand the logic of not playing Ponder or EI due to the low number of blue mana sources and high density of colorless lands but I would personally make the following changes to the above list…
-1 Currency Convetor
-1 Scroll of Fate
-1 Minor Misstep
-1 Bolt
-1 Island
+1 Volcanic Island
+1 Street Wraith
+1 Mishra’s Bauble
+1 Manamorphose
+1 Daze
The free cantrips all enable delirium and help fill the yard for Lavamancer.
I would also replace the last remaining Scroll of Fate with Torpor Orb if your local meta has a decent number of Initiative decks.
Last edited by Clark Kant; 02-12-2023 at 11:25 AM.
Ok out 1 S. Library and 1 basic LandOriginally Posted by Fox
In 2 fetch
Tot 19 Land
1 basic island is useful against many decks.
Since you're playing Uro (mana hungry), you should be fine going up to 20 lands. That's only 15 real mana sources (+ Wasteland and Boseiju) so you shouldn't mana flood.
8x blue fetch
3x Underground Sea
3x Tropical Island
1x Island
4x Wasteland
1x Boseiju
To make space you can cut Sylvan and 1 Daze. You don't want to be on 4x Daze when building up to big mana plays like Uro, Loam, Lazav activations... 4 Daze is for decks that play turn 1 creatures like Delver.
Thank you, in fact 18 lands were few,-)
Do you have any recommendations for the side?
I would focus a little more on what happens you have these enabling-Nought cards...but:
1- someone Surgicals your Noughts and has something as simple as Relic to control escape fuel
2- someone kills your Noughts and Wastelands you off escape mana
These are the problems you're not going to fix with a SB. These flaws hard lock your deck into bad matchups against every tier 1-1.5 deck that is not combo or Delver. You can get away with this in combo-boosted leagues...but it probably doesn't work in short challenges anymore due to Tomb/Chalice [Initiative] depriving you of ability to get paired vs Delver. For reference, we used to be seeing about 30% of the winner bracket being Delver. To get back into the 6-7 round challenge scene, you need to guarantee 3-4 pairing autowins vs inbred meta [online-only phenomenon]. You need to keep the overwhelmingly favorable matchup vs Delver and also construct to also autowin against the Initiative fraction that stole Delvers representation total (which Stiflenought was totally reliant upon).
All the issues above creates a ceiling these 3c Stiflenought decks can never break through, having tied their strategy completely to the most-hated zones in the format (graveyard followed by battlefield). If you want to play near [but always below] that ceiling, the data shows you are on RUG getting CA from Iteration and Uro with SB Blasts. URB with Iteration and Kroxa with Blasts is a worse approach by the numbers, but still second place.
BUG however is horrendous, and this really tracks back to UB being the absolute worst color set to support Nought. It's also the single worst color combination at killing artifacts - and it's so bad that Karn is the best UB answer to Chalice. Recall that you have to chase that Chalice win %, discussed above, particularly when leaving the league environment. While Decay/Trophy-types require black mana, green by itself already has that covered (FoV, Boseju, etc).
Here's the net effect of black:
1- you get removal spells that are more powerful than white removal, but less reliable. Sheoldred's Edict, Bloodchief's Thirst, Murderous Rider all directly target PWs and Sudden Edict has split second. Problem is they're more expensive, and overloading on dual lands is antagonistic to casting these.
2- you get the single best maindeckable, mana-requiring counterspell in the format with Drown in the Loch...but you need removal that puts their stuff in the GY rather than exile...and we're getting back to the issue with overloading on duals vs higher mana costs.
3- you get access to single color pip, 3 mana wraths...but you need to get to that mana, and if you want to avoid hemorrhaging life on a Toxic Deluge that gets countered, then you need snow basics to split with Dead of Winter.
4- you get Cling to Dust, which requires creatures to be put into the GY to give the deck access to lifegain...and you need to develop your mana to use this as your [anti-titan] alternative to Uro/Kroxa. The dual land issues again rear their ugly head.
5- you're still trying to be Stiflenought, and you still need to beat Chalice...and Karn is still the best way to do this...and you need basics to get you to this mana total.
6- You get 2x SB Plague Engineer and 1x Nihil Spellbomb. Cool...oh I can't access easy wins against blue decks, nor can I deal with Murktide as well without 4-5x SB Red Blasts.
Black either adds nothing you need or it takes you down a not-Dreadnought-friendly decision tree. If you want Strix, play Ice-Fang (people play Meltdown, get ahead on cards). If you want discard, draw cards instead with Uro and Iteration (get ahead on cards). If you want Plague Engi, throw Uro into deathtouchers and recur Uro (get ahead on cards). If you want Decay, play the best green spell in the format: FoV (get ahead on cards). If you want Decay, mulligan less b/c Boseju is a land (get ahead on cards). If you want Nihil Spellbomb, play Endurance (block Delver and DRC or flash in to steal the initiative, get ahead on cards). A theme should be standing out here: get ahead on cards...and also have Red Blasts while doing it.
At a baseline you should heavily associate Black + Dreadnought with a 40% winrate...in combo-boosted leagues (it's worse in paper weeklies and tournament settings). If it's Black + Kroxa/Iteration/Red Blasts, way better than 40% but significantly less win % than same thing with Uro/Iteration/Red Blasts.
The reason for no Ponder or EI is because Fox designed the deck and Fox doesn't play Ponder or EI with Dreadnought. But there is enough blue mana. It has 14 blue lands + 4 Mycosynth. Ponder or EI would be better than those bad free cantrips.
Bauble is a mistake. DRC does not need Bauble. UR Delver needs Bauble because it doesn't have artifacts or enchantments, so it needs Bauble to add a card type. Urza's Saga & Dreadnought already give you 2 more card types than Delver has, so you don't need Bauble to reach Delirium. Saga into Dreadnought or Phyrexian Furnace gives you 3-4 card types out of nowhere.
Manamorphose & Street Wraith are bad too... DRC already fills the yard for itself and Lavamancer. It doesn't need much help. Currency Converter helps fill the yard too.
Scroll of Fate is much better than Torpor Orb because it can make end of turn Dreadnoughts and convert dead cards into 2/2 threats. Torpor Orb also makes your Uro worse. You could play Torpor in the SB vs Initiative, but the main deck already has Dress Down and Stifle to hate on them.
The net effect of your suggested changes @Clark Kant is cost increase of $800 and significant loss of winrate. My deck costs about $1900, and it uses 1x Volc. That means the cost of entry to legacy is $1100 with a Steam Vents. This gives you a deck with a card pool and a play experience that have use outside of DnT, and has drastically better matchup profile vs the entire format than Shadow ever could.
On the 2nd Volc, you just suggested having 4x Vista and only 3x targets.
On the 1x Daze, that list has 11 lands that do not have descriptor Island.
On the Bauble, turning Mycosynth into a sacrifice rod with zero continual impact on the board state is the worst way to turn the land into a cantrip.
One cutting Scroll, you have to have a plan versus Chalice.
On two completely worthless cards with zero impact on the gamestate (Wraith, Manamorphose), wtf? I have zero interest drawing deeper into a deck with an anti-Chalice plan you just suggested removing.
Here's how this works:
-1 Nought, +1 Lavamancer
-1 Mycosynth, +1 Mountain
-1 Dress Down, -1 Minor Misstep, +2 Shark Typhoon (look at my mana progression, look at DRC, look at Currency Converter)
On things to test to determine max winrate:
-2 Minor Misstep, +2 FoN
-1 Stifle for +1 flex slot (singleton Misstep, another cantripping artifact like Map, another burn spell, another spell land like Spikefield Hazard to go from 83.5% odds of opening hand with 2 land minimum to 85.7%)
This is very important to understand: the reason you don't see Standstill in here is that *maybe* it's good enough CA if Mycosynth can cantrip itself, tap to counter removal, decrease mulls due to color fixing, and on top of all that result in higher slot investment in Dress Down (more CA). Also understand that this is a Standstill manabase, and we don't have Standstill - and that means we need to have anti-flood built in (spell lands, Converter, useful Mycosynth CA targets, Scroll). Almost everything you suggested turns the mana base against the deck's own winrate.
Thank you, you were really kind to write all this explanation about the best choices based on the current metagame, I will treasure it.
To add to what @FTW is talking about:
-Playing a deck with <60 cards (via adding Gitaxian Probe clones) helps decks with too few lands not get mana screwed.
-Bauble + Fetchland work together to increase the odds of Delver flipping (despite sabotaging the flip with card type artifact reveals).
-Free cards that cantrip by going to GY, and then become +1 delve mana are effectively cantripping Lotus Petals.
So having stated all 4 mechanisms by which Delver decks specifically benefit from using Bauble, we declaratively know that my deck will never be able to use Bauble as well as or better than Delver can. My list doesn't cheat on land totals, it doesn't need help assembling delirium, it doesn't need to flip a Delver of Secrets, and it doesn't delve. Simply by stating these facts we know that my deck can only play Bauble worse than Delver, meaning it is a winrate-lowering decision (that needs no testing).
Not disagreeing with bauble or not here (I don't play the deck), but this argument is wrong. It is not because a deck plays a card better that another one shouldn't play it.
Or stop playing brainstorm in Uxx decks and StP in D&T because miracle use them better?
The way people play Brainstorm is with Fetches. You absolutely should never use Brainstorm if you can't use it as well as everyone else (averaging 8x Fetch).
No matter what deck Plow is in, it requires the opponent to provide targets, otherwise it rots in hand. About the only decks that can't achieve this level of success with Plow are the Chalice on 1 team.
Now think about putting Plow in a Dreadnought deck where no other Plow user can goldfish to gain 12; that's playing the card better (not a great line vs non-Bolt decks, but also only a matter of time before a playable card comes along that says "when you gain X, drain opponent X").
The way to maximizing winrate is always going to be finding something novel that others can't use or doing "the thing" better than any other deck. You are allowed to make sideways moves with staples as long as they allow other aspects of your deck to do "the thing". If that means buying time with Bstorm/Fetch or treading water with Plow, it's good enough.
These sideways moves affect the gamestate, but Bauble doesn't. You are required to get mana out of Bauble in this format whether you funnel it into something like delve, threshold (eg Cabal Rit), metalcraft (Mox), or improvise. Again you have to accomplish this before ever testing the card.
The Mycosynth has been great. It enables Nought and it also protects Nought from removal.
I think its finally time to cut Stifles from the Dressnought as both Dress Down and The Mycosysynth are stronger and have more utility and warrant 4 copies.
I have the gardens in anticipation of this but I just love stifle too much for that to be the cut.
Can't be forgetting where your winrate comes from. Stifle beats combo, allows you to mangle Delver's mana base, and creates games where opponents have to trade resources ineffectively (eg discard 2 cards to counter Stifle). The backup mode of Stifle has always been to make a Nought. Making Noughts with Stifle is a salvage line, and you do not want to be losing a land drop to force this line of play. It's also a three land play...so you might want to protect that glass cannon manabase with Stifle.
I think dte's point was a general one, not specific to any card (Bauble, Brainstorm, StP, etc). It's a fallacy to go from "deck B cannot use the card as well as deck A" to "the card would definitively lower deck B's win rate, without testing needed". There are other reasons you reached the conclusion for Bauble vs for staples like Brainstorm & StP, but that argument itself is faulty.
For example, adding Black Lotus would increase many decks' win rates (ignoring game loss for illegal deck). Just because some combo deck uses Black Lotus even better doesn't mean it wouldn't also increase other decks' win rates.
The relevant question is "does this card increase my deck's win rate?" not "is this card even better in another deck?" (either way Bauble fails)
This works up to a point. When you start imitating a deck and have the same slot totals invested in Ponder, Brainstorm, FoW, Iteration, etc; and then add more copying to it with Bauble, we have to start directly comparing the deck winrates. The slots necessary to accomplish distinctly different gameplay are rapidly diminishing. At some point you are just worse Delver with jankier dudes. Copying slots is just speedrunning your way to a less competitive endpoint if you can't do [insert thing] the same or better.
As far as Black Lotus goes, it would be like wanting to make a Null Rod tribal deck with 4x Lotus (but we also need to pretend Karn doesn't exist, because every deck would be a Lotus deck, and thus be forced to jam 4x Karn). We know such a deck can't possibly use Lotus as well as other decks since it is killing its own topdecks. Same thing a Chalice deck will run into if they jam Plow. In the first case you can't use the mana at least as well as other decks, and in the latter you can't use the card/effect as well as other decks. We can explain the lower win rates in all sorts of ways, but at the end of the day they used the same tool worse; and that's the crux of the problem. It's the same as jamming Tarmo vs Murktide: same thing, just crappier.
Cards like Brainstorm and Plow don't determine a direction. They don't move the advantage bar or produce overwhelming advantage or force opponents to answer a question. If you rearrange things with Bstorm or buy time with a Plow you're left with a multitude of novel paths to take (aka deck construction). You still need to select a novel path and do it better than anyone else. Differing novel paths are like apples and oranges; they have different matchup profiles. It doesn't matter if staples lead to a single, knowably best aggro build (like say Delver)...it doesn't mean everyone has to play aggro, and it certainly doesn't mean aggro beats every other novel approach to the game.
I think if your self given example is "I would not play black lotus, given the chance" then maybe your deck building heuristics are utter trash and you need to throw them out
Backed up by the fact there is a format we can point to and say "wait a minute, people play null rod and lotus together all the time"
Re-read it. I said every single deck would have to start at 4x Karn and 4x Lotus. So if we pretend Karn doesn't exist...I said nobody would get ahead by ramming their 4x Lotus into their own Null Rod tribal - it would be a monumental failure. Null Rod would be soft-banned b/c every not-Rod deck would use Lotus better.
Learn to read.
---
So going back to the suggestion to play Bauble, it shows a fundamental deficit in understanding how magic works. That card is a cantripping Lotus Petal via the delve pathway in the Delver deck. This pathway is not in my list. If you think Bauble would better my deck (completely skipping on the cantripping Lotus Petal effect), it means you forgot that mana is the most basic and important currency to pay attention to in the game.
This is a weird gaslight because your post is still up, unedited:
You opened right up saying that you were going to pretend Karn doesn't exist. So no, you didn't say every deck would be 4 Karn 4 lotus, you said you were going to intentionally exclude it from the example.As far as Black Lotus goes, it would be like wanting to make a Null Rod tribal deck with 4x Lotus (but we also need to pretend Karn doesn't exist, because every deck would be a Lotus deck, and thus be forced to jam 4x Karn). We know such a deck can't possibly use Lotus as well as other decks since it is killing its own topdecks. Same thing a Chalice deck will run into if they jam Plow. In the first case you can't use the mana at least as well as other decks, and in the latter you can't use the card/effect as well as other decks. We can explain the lower win rates in all sorts of ways, but at the end of the day they used the same tool worse; and that's the crux of the problem. It's the same as jamming Tarmo vs Murktide: same thing, just crappier.
You also are so far into your own make-believe land you don't seem to understand that they do run null rod and lotus together. In the same deck. The whole thesis of this tangent was you saying not to run the cards that would be worse in your deck.
So, once again, you're wrong about just about everything and shame on everyone (especially me) for still engaging with you. How do people fall for your shtick every time? Go back to fucking off.
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