Originally Posted by
Reeplcheep
All good points. The minus is pretty bad mainboard but returning a agent or plague engineer could be devastating in the right matchup. Perhaps I should focus the sideboard on creatures so I can keep her in for more matchups.
The reason I didn’t consider Liliana was because untargeted discard is really bad in prison and you need so many lands to function. The deck is hyper focused on card quality over card quantity, between chalice/3ball/no creatures/threats that dodge decay. If you go t1 mox chalice, t2 urborg Lotv you only have 2 cards in hand and they have 7. Trading a curse for plow there seems absolutely aweful. She also doesn’t actually kill the opponent.
I do like Deaths majesty but being castable off of t1 dark ritual and can win the game are the primary considerations. I loved agent for that reason but turning on removal was really bad, and attacking with a x/2 7 times was more difficult to accomplish than protecting her for 5. The list of cards that can do that without turning on removal is quite short: phyrexian arena/treacherous blessing/bitterblossom are all going to kill you.
Having more t1 things off of dark ritual also helps with the chalice/drit problem. City/chalice/deaths majesty/dark ritual is considerably more awkward to sequence than city/chalice/dark ritual/Last hope. There is no 1 cmc removal for lily other than needle so just play her first and then chalice around daze. Agent was awkward for the opposite reason, you had to choose between ritualling it out or protecting it from plow.
Once you get to 4 mana and beyond it’s a lot harder to justify over helm. It may not seem like it, but 5 mana is a lot easier in this deck than 6 mana so I don’t think I would play the general. Between sol lands and my acceleration you usually end up at an odd number of mana (tomb plus swamp plus drit, city plus 2 lands plus mox.)
With oko gone I feel like my mainboard removal should care more about delver/Thalia/daze than JTMS/karn/mentor. Those cards at least can be handled by pelakka some of the time.
Reply With Quote