@Rationalist
At the risk of summoning another math paper that I mostly can follow, I have been goldfishing the deck -2 LtGB, -2 Recluse -1 Havenwood Battleground, +3 Throes of Chaos +2 Tibalt's Trickery and it seems solid (with the 4th Throes in the board still). The combo turns end up with a smaller board, but you don't generally need 70+ power to kill someone, and the ability to have turn 2 wins in the first game seems valuable against the deck's bad match-ups. Additionally, it allows for more actual sideboard cards, even if some of those end up being the LtGBs or Recluses for matches where being slower and more consistent is better. The main drawback I see is that Throes into Trickery can be stopped with one counterspell, but the deck seems so powerful against "normal" interaction that I don't feel like that's a huge weakness, though I'm willing to be wrong there, and obviously there is a huge delta between a turn 2 attempt that uses a Sandstone Needle + Ancient Tomb vs one that uses Sulfur Vents + Crystal Vein, the latter of which would be very risky against counter magic.
Also, I noticed that this deck has been popping up a few times on MTG Top 8, and one thing I notice in common among all of those Tinder Farm over Gemstone Caverns. Obviously it makes the goldfish more consistent, and I have noticed the "making the 5th mana in a deck that wants 6 mana" problem that you have mentioned before when I have been testing. Daze protection is great, and the occasional turn 2 CTs, but I think the turn 2 attempts are better served by the Throes + Trickery plan. I've yet to make the switch myself, but the more I read your primer section for Caverns the more it feels like Caverns is a good card in vacuum in a deck like this but I'm not convinced that it actually does all that much lifting for us.
If the deck isn't running throes/trickery, then it seems like the only card that cares about daze is the one that costs 5.Originally Posted by LennonMarx
There also aren't any Throes of Chaos/Tibalt's trickery piles in those lists.
The way the lands in this deck are set up, by necessity, makes Gemstones Caverns only really daze protection on curve for even mana cost spells, it's your 5th mana on turn 2 or your 7th on turn 3. From the lens of a protection spell, it might actually be the case that you play Caverns with the throes package to make the turn 2 a little more resilient and then cut the caverns in builds of the deck that only go for the 6+ Drop cascaders/side them out entirely when you're not on the throes plan.
Yeah, and some of the sideboards are fairly rough, too. I think this thread/Rationalist has the better list, but that one particular piece of the configuration (Farm over Caverns) seemed noteworthy to me. Might try it out the next time at the LGS.
@LennonMarx
This is great feedback and I highly appreciate it.
As it stands, I'm not (personally) swayed by the idea of playing this package main deck as I'm far more interested in the increased resiliency of the combo than the 1 turn against most decks I'm expecting to face. What's main deck and what's sideboard is always a meta call, however, and since by necessity we're playing in local metas, unless you also happen to be in the greater Seattle area, we're not necessarily playing in identical ones so I can't actually say you're "wrong" here, it just seems like a big sacrifice against blue-matchups across the board to level-up against fast combo. Maybe you're just seeing more fast combo, though.
As to the Gemstone Caverns, you seem to have the sentiment that I had early on when I first started playing around with the card (GC as the 5th mana out of 6 when counting by 2's). What I can say is that eventually I found GC to do more than I initially identified.
- It enables Turn 2 Creative Technique (if we assume 50% chance of being on the draw, never mulliganed, and never top-decked CT, this acceleration would happen in ~7% of all hands, so likely somewhere between 10% and 15% in practice)
- It provides insulation against Daze / Thalia / Thorn / Sphere effects
- It's another source of blue-mana for activating Otawara
- It makes Maelstrom Wanderer's 3-color requirement far easier to hit
- When counting to 6/8, it upgrades untapped singleton lands into effective untapped-Sols.
I encourage you to keep playing divergent lists if another way seems better to you (even just on a selfish level because it's good data for me) but I'm not currently interested in cutting Gemstone Cavern personally unless I really, really needed that space for something else.
So far I'm disagreeing with most of the ideas you're saying, but I'm still glad to have the input as if people only said things I already agreed with I wouldn't learn nuthin'.
The last thing you mention is Tinder Farm. It's a reasonable card and there are certainly reasons to run it, but I like Sulfur Vent more as I have little use for the singleton untapped green mana, and UR helps cast Maelstrom Wanderer which is often worth playing towards to go over the top of a sculpted, interactive hand, and I'm not even on the 4th Sulfur Vent currently.
Do you know what sideboard card actually felt great for me recently? Mirrorshell Crab
I initially tried bringing him back into the sideboard because being able to stifle Wastelands against Delver seemed worthwhile just because of how much you run into that deck and its analogues even at the lower Seattle-area numbers but he actually gave me a large amount of play against T3feri, as it's easy to hold open 2U as of Turn 2 (although technically Turn 1 is possible off of GC), he slowly turns into combo protection if they refuse to play into him, and the Otawara as additional Blue sources on top of GC make 2U a pretty reasonable ask.
Would hurt to summon one in off a CT in the early stages of chaining against most of the same decks you'd want him in hand against but he's a 5/7 with Ward 3 so that's still better than hitting Pyrokinesis in most situations where you're already comboing and a card like that is clearly worth the concession in its respective matchups.
... I'm really starting to dig the guy's flexibility.
Spotted another person playing the deck on Youtube this morning. Looks like it did not go well:
I guess double force of will into a turn 3 combo is the sort of power level that we should expect in legacy. Though that does look like a match-up where Mirrorshell Crab could win games.
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