I tried out something very similar to that at my LGS about this time last year.Originally Posted by cdnza
My findings:
1.) Even with Deathrite Shaman and four Mishra's Factories, this deck has a painfully slow, fragile, and inefficient clock. This matters because without some sort of pseudo hard lock (such as CounterTop in Miracles, for example), you often find yourself in situations where you have cleared the board of all threats and "gained control", but then are unable to capitalize on it. You sit there either without a threat waiting to draw one, or slowly chipping away at your opponent's life total with a manland or Deathrite while they inexorably recover in front of you by drawing into Wasteland/Abrupt Decay/more threats/whatever it is they need. This is a frustrating experience that will make you want to tear your Standstills in half...
In order to address this, I would suggest adding a couple more efficient win conditions. I experimented with Tombstalker with mixed results. Tasigur might be decent here.
I'm doubtful about Worm Harvest because of it's casting cost combined with the manlands' activation costs, but would be curious to hear about your results. Same for Vraska.
2.) I often found Pernicious Deed less effective than I had hoped (again due to mana costs in a field full of Delvers, Thalia's, Wastelands, Dazes, etc.), and eventually switched them out for Engineered Explosives. This enabled me to deal with turn one Delvers more effectively (often responding to my opponents turn one Delver play by dropping an EE at zero followed by a Standstill on my second turn), and overall seemed just as effective at removing problems from the board as deed.
3.) The lifeloss from Thoughtseize is quite relevant in this deck (particularly against stuff like Delver, Burn, and Storm), and cost me several games. I eventually switched them out for Inquisition of Kozilek...again to mixed results, but they did seem somewhat better than Thoughtseize here.
Hope that helps, and best of success to you with this deck!
I recommend you to teach yourself to play very quickly (30 seconds per your turn max). That way you will buy yourself time for one or two deeper thoughtful turns when you really need it and close the game under 15 minutes.
I'd say 15 seconds per turn! You can go 10 seconds or less on most turns.
*as a goal of course, turns you're making your move will need longer.
Alright guys, I've stalked this thread for some time now and I feel that this deck has sort of stagnated in it's 2012 form a bit. I feel that the best deck to take advantage of the tap-out control plan in BUG colours is Shardless BUG, but as this is the Landstill thread lets brew with that. One of the problems I've always had with the classic tap-out shell of BUG Landstill is that standstill wants you to play a more reactive game if possible, which playing walkers, discard and loam sort of goes against. With this in mind I will post a brew that I have tested just briefly that tries to capitalize on the key-card Standstill more than just playing tap-out goodstuff.dec
So I will present a brew that is in no way meant to be the "new best deck" or the correct way to build this deck, but I think that it might be a good starting point for discussing different approaches when it comes to constructing this deck.
I present BUG Standstill Draw-Go With Pearl Lake Ancient (Still Lake or LakeStill might be a cool name for those of you who likes cool, non-descriptive deck names):
CREATURES (2)
2 Pearl Lake Ancient
ENCHANTMENTS (6)
4 Standstill
2 Pernicious Deed
INSTANTS (27)
4 Stifle
4 Abrupt Decay
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
2 Dig Through Time
3 Spell Snare
3 Counterspell
3 Disfigure
ARTIFACTS (2)
2 Crucible of Worlds
LANDS (23)
4 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
1 Forest
1 Swamp
2 Polluted Delta
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Creeping Tar Pit
2 Wasteland
SIDEBOARD (15)
3 Thoughtseize
1 Notion Thief
1 Null Rod
1 Flusterstorm
1 Krosan Grip
1 Night of Souls’ Betrayal
1 Toxic Deluge
2 Vendilion Clique
1 Leyline of the Void
3 Tarmogoyf
This is a deck that just wants to play draw-go throughout the entire game, only tapping out for Deed and Crucible.
You can certainly question the Stifles, but I can motivate it's inclusion for two reasons: Firstly, it's really good on the play to slow the opponents down so that we can have time to develop our mana a bit so Counterspell/Decay becomes live earlier, or we can just stifle their fetch and drop standstill, while it at the same time on the draw is a good protection against wasteland and a nice tempo play. That it also deal with things such as Visions, Batterskull and Stoneforge mystic is just a nice sidenote.
Dig Through Time is super good in the deck and it's what enables us to pull ahead together with standstill. Usually you kill the opponents early threats and counter their stuff, resolve a DTT or standstill, preferably with a Crucible in play, and then you just play lands and drop PLA.
Pearl Lake Ancient: As you've already stated in this thread, BUG Landstill has always lacked a good way to close out the game, and while PLA certainly is no Entreat the Angels, it actually kills very quickly once you've got to seven mana, which isn't very hard in this deck. Being both Flashy and uncounterable (and if they don't play white, almost unkillable) makes it pretty ideal as we just want to hold up mana during their turn anyways.
The absence of planeswalkers is mostly due to the fact that they are pretty hard to resolve and forces us to tap out on our turn, which we don't like. I can see adding a few jaces, but Liliana would just be poor with all the reactive spells in the deck.
Deed is mostly better than EE, but I can definitely see either play a mix between deluge, Deed and EE, or just playing 2-3 EE in the main deck and replacing a Creeping Tar Pit with Academy Ruins.
Overall, the deck has a very low curve for a traditional control deck and that makes it very easy to pilot as there is very few clunky cards overall. I recommend testing something similar, again, it does not need to be this deck at all, I'm not saying everyone should sleeve up stifles and PLA, but I think that it's interesting that there is so little discussion about a more Draw-Go approach to this deck and the possibilities that DTT has brought us.
Have a nice time guys! :)
Miscanthus, I tested this deck (no creatures version though) about a year ago briefly and although my results were good overall my observations were very similar to yours. I think my results were due to me being very familiar with draw-go board control decks from days bygone and this deck playing very very similar to those old school control decks.
However, and I've also discussed this in the Golddigger thread before, I think in today's Legacy if you want to play a successful control deck you have to a have a lock/semi-lock and a quick kill condition. So if you look at the other established pure control decks in the format:
Miracles:
Counter+Top lock. End of turn Entreat for a quick kill.
UB Tezz:
Chalice+Trinisphere lock. Thopters and Ensnaring Bridge lock. Tezz ultimate or Helm combo for an insta kill.
RUG Lands:
The whole deck locks up the board preboard. Post board locks up the whole stack. Marit Lage kill once it has control.
In my testing once I reached the late game and established a strong winning position, I was going through multiple iterations of answering follow-up threats and re-establishing control until I could actually win. Although it is satisfying and fun, it didn't feel optimized or competitive. Also, this strategy sucks against combo because sometimes they can just topdeck a single card and end the game there after you've countered all of their previous attempts.
I couldn't come up with a reasonable lock that would fit into this deck's plan (draw-go, counter, blow up stuff) in BUG colors so I tried to incorporate a combo kill to at least make up for its inability to maintain control. Thinking that I was already playing with Loam I tried fitting in the Dark Depths combo but it made the manabase a mess and was still quite vulnerable to Deathrite Shaman which was rampant at the time. It didn't feel like it was worth the slots.
One last thing I've tried recently was Dig Through Time. My logic was, if this deck plays like an oldschool control deck we now finally have some actual card advantage to refill after trading with the opponent like back in the old days. The problem with Dig however is, it doesn't slow down the game in the early turns like Standstill does and if you run them both you are hard pressed for deck space to have enough counters and removals. This is assuming you will play a 4+4 or 4+3 split at least because just throwing in 2 Digs doesn't really make an impact.
My conclusion is, in the absence of a lock and a quick kill condition this deck and Golddigger will be fun decks which can do well in certain metas but are far away from being established tier decks that can be competitive in the long run.
Legacy: Rituals
Vintage: Drains
I can't really advocate cutting all the Planeswalkers and adding Artifacts. Nastaboi's design is efficient in that you can drop and pop Deed on any number with almost no concern for wrecking your own board state. Pernicious Deed is an absurd Magic card, easily one of my three favorites, but it informs you deckbuilding in very stringent ways. The idea of this deck was to abuse the fact that it hit everything except Planeswalkers. Adding more things that only get swept up in your own Deed is not very effective.
Frankly, I consider the heart of the deck to be:
4 Brainstorm
3-4 Force of Will
3-4 Abrupt Decay
2-3 Pernicious Deed
3-4 Standstill
3 Jace
2-3 Liliana of the Veil
1-2 Loam
3-4 Mishra's Factory
2 Creeping Tar Pit
That said, this deck is painfully slow. That is one reason why Nastaboi is running Deathrite. It increases your clock, can protect a Walker, can gain you life to help you stabilize, and fixes/accelerates your mana. That is honestly way too many things to not have it in this deck. It's unfortunate that it doesn't survive a Deed, but it's not that big of a deal. It also helps greatly versus Graveyard-based strategies.
On Loam versus Crucible, it is not even close, Loam is vastly better in this deck. As theBloody said, Loam doesn't get dealt with by a single counterspell and has good synergy with Liliana. It can allow you to continually up-tick Lili, while still keeping countermagic in hand plus make land drops. Lastly, it doesn't get caught by your own Deed.
Reasons to run Nastaboi's build:
Favorable versus Miracles (You can pressure them with manlands and Planeswalkers, all while keep their board in check with Deed)
Favorable versus Stoneforge decks: Although Death and Taxes can sometimes be difficult, UWR is a favorable matchup, along with most 'Blade varients.
Favorable versus Delver: RUG Delver is the worst matchup for you, since sometimes they just draw 4 Nimble Mongoose and 3 Stifles and you just lose. BUG Delver is reasonable and UWR Delver is hilariously bad for them.
Favorable versus rouge trash: One great thing about Deed is it is really good versus all sorts of janky aggro/midrange nonsesne people sometimes try to run.
The real problem of this deck is that you need and want Deed, yet, there are such great permanent-based hate cards that you would love to run, but you can't. This is a big reason why I switched to BUG Delver actually.
I'm not really trying to squelch creativity, but I think that you have to understand why the deck was made the way it was before you can make a lot of changes.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
And the discussion is on! Nice! :D
I realise the strong points of the deck but my point of starting the discussion was mostly that this deck has sort of fallen behind team america and especially shardless, which have almost all the strengths of the deck but has no issue with going to time etc. So my point is more that I think that it could be a good idea to try to actually talk about other alternatives than the standard core, which I feel is good, but again BUG Delver and Shardless just seems like a better idea if you are going to play a BUG deck that wants to just tap out for stuff.
The Crucible/Deed interaction hasn't come up for me more than once during about 20 games, usually you either don't have crucible out when you deed, or you deed for less than 3. In a deck that wants to play draw go and also play standstill then crucible is a better alternative because it has better interactions when you have standstill in play, but again, the tap-out version can go ahead and play loam, I think it's definitely unclear whether the tapout deck deck should really play standstill at all though.
Well, once you cut the Factories, it begs the question, why run Standstill? If you cut Standstill, why run this deck over Shardless or just BUG Control?
I think it's often a slippery-slope that goes in to tinkering much with this deck. The beauty of Standstill is that once you land a Walker, you can Standstill and that is an awful lot of pressure on the opponent. Even more so if you have a manland. By cutting the manlands and Walkers, you are making it much more difficult to advantageously be able to drop the Standstills.
In the list you proposed, the only way to win under a Standstill is 3 Creeping Tar Pit. This doesn't bode well for being ahead on board to be able to Standstill with a realistic chance to win. That means you almost always need Crucible on board to Standstill. In the current meta, Decay is on the rise, so I don't feel that is a given. Lets not even get in to if they Decay your Crucible in response to Standstill, then Waste the Tar Pit.
The problems I had with the deck were: first Shardless BUG, second being unable to win fast enough, third decks like Burn and Elves that we can't really grind out, fourth (and probably the biggest) inability to play great sideboard answers because of the tension between Deed and permanent-based hate.
I would still advise you test your list, I certainly could be wrong.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
Sure, if you get to stick a planeswalker on an empty board and then slam standstill you're in a good spot no doubt, but I felt at least in my version I really didn't need to kill the opponent under standstill, actually the opposite was true. Several times I would just play a standstill and we would both sit there, and then when we both reach like 7 lands in play and 7 cards in hand the opponent would break the standstill, and I would just win as suddenly he has to try to resolve stuff through all the countermagics, digs and removal while also fending of Pearl Lake Ancient. I feel that people get too cute with Standstill sometimes and think that you need to stick a planeswalker/delver/dreadnought/Aether Vial under it and force the opponent to break it immediately, when you can rather just play it on a neutral board and be like: Ok, none of us are doing anything, so either we sit here and make our land drops (which is great for the draw-go control deck) or the opponent breaks it (which is great for the draw-go control deck).
With Pearl Lakes you mostly want to get to 7 mana anyway, so not pressuring the opponent right away I feel is fine. Not to say that pearl lake is amazing or anything but it sort of solves the deck building dilemma when it comes to utilizing standstill and the board stalls it can produce.
That's true but it just seems like that makes this deck even slower. I'm by no means a master, in fact, I only comment because I happen to have played the deck before.
I guess I am just fearful of only playing 5 ways to win the game, 2 of which are seven mana. Post board, it gets better, but then you are almost a Shardless deck with Standstill instead of Visions. I'm literally completely unsure if that is better, worse, or what. I guess it bears testing, but for right now I am slinging as many Hymns and seeing how far that can take me.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
Glad this thread came back to life!
Funny that you guys mention the long games this deck has. I was actually just recently thinking about Cunning Wish so I can have better %s in game one...
Re: cutting Standstill, if we replace Standstills with Dig Through Time (on the grounds that its waaay better when you're behind) there's some argument that we could also cut manlands. Does freeing up those colourless lands give us the potential to play cycling lands alongside some conventional win condition (is Grave-Shell Scarab playable!?) or perhaps play Dark Depths combo?
Gigapede is probably a better win-con than Pearl Lake Ancient in a list playing Life from the Loam.
It comes online earlier, is effectively un-counterable since you'll just get it back and cast it next turn if they counter it this turn, and loam can find it for you.
Quick clock (6/1) and doesn't leave due to Swords to Plowshares (shroud). You don't care if someone trades because you get it back. Seems like a really interesting option to explore.
I used to get quite a bit of mileage out of worm harvest as a win-con
Do you run it in the main? I can imagine it being quite good (especially if you have Intuition).
Tentative board for my list (same as previous page, but -1 trop +1 bayou for the time being). Freely admit this is heavily derived from Nastaboi's p82 SB:
1x Darkblast
1x Disfigure
3x Hydroblast
2x Nihil Spellbomb
2x Spell Pierce
2x Surgical Extraction
1x Thoughtseize
3x True-Name Nemesis (I don't particularly want to pay for Goyfs right now...)
Worm harvest is nice, though it could be problematic to open up our wincon to graveyard hate, same goes of course for Gigapede, which is also a nice card otherwise.
I think that generally in these control decks in the BUG colors, there is no perfect wincon like Entreat, we sort of have to choose from a variety of worse options. But that opens up for creative durdling which is nice.
I'm definitely not arguing for Pearl Lake Ancient to be superior though, but I think that there is merit in opening up the design space of the deck a bit now that we have some new nice draw-go spells to choose from like DTT. Maybe Landstill is a thing of the past but it feels exciting to explore some new alternatives when it comes to deck construction.
Ad Intuition + Loam + Harvest. It is strong, sure. It is especially nice versus miracles because they have no way to get rid of recuring swarm of 1/1s.
The problem of Harvest is that it is dead cart until lategame. Also with Dig you are forcing yourself to have more cards in graveyard because you want to leave all lands here for maximum Harvest later.
If your opponent saw Harvest g1, you can be sure he will bring in all the graveyard hate g2. Which is sometimes not that bad (you have still Jace + lands as win con), but you lost Loam and Dig as consequence.
Also Intuition is often dead card when drawn early game and we want as little dead cards as possible (cards with cmc >= 3). Also as little conditional cards as possible.
Loamstill
Win-cons
2 Gigapede
2 Jace, the Mindsculptor
2 Creeping Tarpit
Permission
4 Force of Will
3 Spell Pierce
3 Spell Snare
Removal/Disruption
4 Abrupt Decay
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Pernicious Deed
1 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Wasteland
1 Raven's Crime
Draw/Select
4 Brainstorm
3 Standstill
3 Life from the Loam
1 Barren Moor
1 Tranquil Thicket
Mana Lands
4 Polluted Delta
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Misty Rainforest
3 Tropical Island
2 Underground Sea
1 Bayou
1 Forest
1 Island
1 Swamp
Is this going to work in the current meta?
No Stifle is bad in some matchups, like Miracles and Elves. No Counterspell is a mixed blessing. Maybe both in the sideboard for when needed?
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