Originally Posted by
Hanni
Miracles did lose with bannings though... they lost Sensei's Divining Top. The Miracles matchup still isn't great, but not having to worry about the hard softlock of CounterTop makes the matchup significantly better than it was before.
I realize you are talking about them not losing anything in the most recent bannings, but losing Probe is honestly not as big of a deal for this deck as it was for ANT and Grixis Delver. You lose a couple of points of free damage, which matters, but not to the extent of major significance. Stormchaser wasn't a very good card in the first place, and Swiftspear is still a perfectly good and legitimate threat. The Miracles matchup will always come down to the last few points of damage because that's how the dynamic of that matchup shakes out. At least now, the threat of being locked out behind a Counterbalance is much less likely.
It's difficult for me to talk about matchups like Grixis Control in a vague way, because I play Sligh, not traditional UR Delver. I can totally understand why that matchup would be difficult for traditional UR Delver... you're far more dependent on creature damage, lack the density of one drops to overload their spot removal early game, and don't have the same burn density to close the game out. Hymn to Tourach is certainly problematic, but if they are attacking your hand, they aren't attacking your board... although this is less of an issue for my Sligh list, which dumps its hand more quickly. Basically, my Sligh version gives up game one percentages against combo decks to greatly improve my fair matchups, so decks like Grixis Control and D&T become great for me.
The Grixis Control deck, even with basics, is still going to regularly take 4 or more damage from a well-timed PoP.
ANT isn't a great matchup, but them losing Probe slows their deck down considerably. They can still turn 1 you, they can still turn 2 you, but it's much less consistent and much riskier for them. Sometimes they don't have it until turn 4. Racing them is a legitimate plan again. They also lost Cabal Therapy, so they can no longer destroy a double FoW hand with a single discard spell before going off. The matchup still isn't great, but it is considerably better now without them having Probe.
The Chalice matchups are only bad if they have/resolve Chalice on turn 1 or 2. They are easily beatable otherwise. I have 4 Smash to Smithereens in my sideboard, so I'm often able to beat Chalice postboard. My D&T opponent resolved two Chalices against me postboard, on turns 2 and 3, that I conveniently had two Smash's for (I Brainstorm'd into the second copy).
What I am saying is that my Sligh list is favorable against all of its fair matchups by giving away percentages against combo matchups in game one, including Miracles and Grixis Control. Since the combo matchups aren't actually that good for traditional UR Delver in game one anyway, I'm perfectly fine with making that tradeoff. I believe that doing this makes Sligh much better positioned in the current meta than traditional UR Delver is.
I think if you're going to go away from traditional UR Delver and into a more tempo-based approach, you would be better off going RUG or Grixis instead.
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