Quote Originally Posted by Fjaulnir View Post
Question to other poxers here.



I have recently started playing these Japanese lists which feel very powerful:
http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=15182&d=292071&f=LE

but the other day I was wondering, could there be any merit to replacing 1 (or both) of the Phyrexian Totems with Serum Powder(s)?

Card advantage is very important in Pox so not mulliganning too often is key. Getting free mulligans makes the threshold of mulling questionable hands much lower.

It only makes colorless instead of black, and doesn't attack, but it didn't happen *that* often I got to attack with it anyway. In last night's games I maybe only attacked with it 2-3 times, whereas it got tapped for mana 10x as much.
3-Mana Fractured Powerstone would be a bad card in basically every single matchup. Remember that you have no card that costs more than 4 so it's strictly worse than a land in every situation. (And in many spots in this deck it is slightly worse, e.g. Disk kills it, doesn't interact with Crucible, gets countered by Nether Void etc)

Serum Powder gives you the following scenarios (this discussion assumes you are looking at a 7 card hand but it applies at any point in the mulligan process).
a) GOOD: You have a bad combination of 6 other cards plus Serum Powder. Serum Powder gives you a free mulligan.
b) BAD: You have a good combination of 6 other cards plus Serum Powder. You like all the cards in your hand except Powder. Either you keep (effectively 6 cards because Powder doesn't do anything) or you get another random 7 cards

The reason why e.g. Vintage Dredge plays Serum Powder (or at least has played it in the past, I don't keep up with vintage) is because
1) Situation 'a' happens a lot when 'a bad combination of 6 other cards' roughly translates to 'any combination of cards without Bazaar of Baghdad in it'
2) You don't care about situation 'b' because Bazaar is so strong (and your gameplan revolves around discarding your hand, so you don't care about the loss of card advantage of having a dead Powder in your hand)

In Pox what I anticipate by playing Powder is:
I) Situation 'a' happens a non-zero amount, but many times only by virtue of the fact you have Serum Powder in your hand and therefore the amount of playable cards to consider in the rest of your hand has decreased (e.g. You have 1 land 5 Nonlands and Serum Powder: While you are glad to have Serum Powder in this instance it is a bit of a Red Herring because this would likely be an acceptable hand if Serum Powder was just another land instead)
II) Because the power level of cards in this deck is relatively even it does not seem likely that in situation 'b' you have many hands where "This 6-cards-plus-blank is better than an average 7, I will choose not to use Serum Powder" ends up happening.

Therefore by putting Serum Powder in your deck you would (mostly) end up indiscriminately using it every time it's in your opener and just diluting your deck with blank topdecks. The premier complaint about this deck from a broader strategic perspective is 'I have stripped my opponents resources but they end up topdecking their way out of it before I can end the game'. Suggesting the replacement of what is potentially a 5/5 attacker for just a mana rock therefore seems quite poor to me.

I agree that Phyrexian Totem doesn't look very good on paper but there are other options you could consider instead, you don't necessarily need a card that taps for mana, especially when you have no card costing more than 4 and your deck already has 27 lands in it.