Quote Originally Posted by Valleysdai View Post
I am intrigued by the white you both run, did you try other colours before choosing white?

I'm on the UG plan with some spice (omniscience, intuition, amulet of vigor, urborg and notion thief in the side).

I do get hampered by chalice and few recurring draw engines. Combo decks are an instant lose too. How do your decks fair with those issues?
I tried a red splash very early on and it was bad, i tried splashing blue for Leovold for a while, but isn't worth it and having a bigger splash for Brainstorm takes too many slots and doesn't fit into this style of deck. If you are running GSZ, especially on Magic Online where Storm is still probably the 2nd most played deck even though it's bad in the current metagame, you really want to have Gaddock Teeg to have a shot to win game 1, and postboard white also provides better hate than other colors. Also, Knight of the Reliquary is really strong if you untap with it. I experimented a little bit without the white splash, but couldn't make it work against combo without the white hate cards - just discard isn't good enough.

Chalice isn't very good against me. It hits a few cards and that can occasionally be relevant, but if i would play a Chalice deck against my deck, i would board it out. (It hits Crop Rotation. It kinda hits Cabal Therapy, but i board that out very often, and even in game 1 the most important thing with Therapy against those decks is to have it as a sacrifice outlet for Veteran Explorer. It hits Veteran Explorer too, but in only play 2 and it's far more likely i search for it with GSZ.) This deck is probably favored against most Chalice decks (my winrate against Eldrazi is positive and my winrate against Mono-Red Prison is even better).

Overall the deck beats pretty much every fair deck - i really need a bigger sample size to say that with confidence about all the different decks, and many matchups are pretty close, but there isn't a single fair deck i'm really worried about (apart from my bad run against Miracles, but that has to be mostly variance). Tracker is very good as a draw engine.
About combo decks, it depends:
Storm is unfavorable, but close - almost certainly over 40% (my winrate on Magic Online is around 45% against Storm, and i lost many games to my own mistakes because for that matchup all my testing on xmage was worthless).
Turbo Depths is favorable, my guess is at least around 60%.
Dredge is very favorable, my guess is over 70%.
Elves is close, can't say either way but definitely between 40 and 60%. All the boardwipes help a lot, and Elves is slow enough for my own DD combo to be very relevant and occasionally fast enough even without any hate.
BR-Reanimator is close, i think slightly under 50%.
SnT is really bad. I think it's winnable (30-40% maybe) if they don't play Omni, but if they do it's probably under 20%. Nothing to do about that, i tried for a while, but playing sideboard cards specifically for that matchup hurts too many other matchups, and SnT isn't a large part of the metagame right now.
Can't really say anything about other combo decks, all the glass cannon decks that go for T1 kills are probably pretty bad, but they aren't really a big part of the metagame. Midrange combo decks like Aluren or Food Chain should be fine.