[Deck] Nogoyf.dec (UW)

[pi4meterftw]

Hey all.

So Forbiddian and I were playing our "Tournament" format one day (Legacy Round Robin we each brought 3 decks.) We didn't play all 9 matches because one of the "rogue" decks I had brought blew all 3 of his choices out of the water, and we were playing best out of 9. It was a UW fish list, running wayfarers, ninjas, countermagic, draw, etc. It was pretty bad, back then, but with some edits, we arrived at a list that has stood hundreds, if not thousands of games of testing. We're college students and sometimes when I have an hour in between classes or need a study break, he and I just hop on MWS and test this. Before I proceed, here is the list:

1 island
2 plains
3 windswept heath
4 flooded strand
4 tundra
4 wasteland

4 weathered wayfarer
4 meddling mage
3 jotun grunt
4 serra avenger
3 epochrasite

4 brainstorm
4 swords to plowshares
3 ancestral vision
4 Force of will (Often boarded out versus aggro since there are better removal spells that do not waste card advantage.)
3 umezawa's jitte
2 daze
4 aether vial

sideboard:
1 jotun grunt
2 blue elemental blast
2 hydroblast
4 thorn of amethyst
2 aura of silence
2 mind harness
2 oblivion ring

Before I break down what the cards do in the context of the deck, the overwhelming strength of this deck is it's consistency. Notice the deck runs 1 and 2 casting cost, which makes it so that it rarely ever gets mana screwed. Being 2 colored makes avoidance of color screw very easy. Also, brainstorms aether vials, and weathered wayfarer act as fixers, and brainstorm can even fix the offhand mana flood.

Another point in general is that this deck is a bunch of timewalks plus a bunch of ticking clocks. Ancestral vision and epochrasite are both very good suspend spells. Umezawa's jitte takes time to build up. Serra avenger is a 2 drop, but it needs to wait until turn 4. Weathered wayfarer only activates once per turn, so the more turns it's in play, the closer the game is to over. That brings me to the card choices:

Wayfarer is an insane 1 drop. A strength of this deck is that it always gets 1 drops, and all the 1 drops (Ancestral visions, weathered wayfarer, aether vial, and sometimes swords) are insane starts. Wayfarer synergizes with daze quite well, as well as saclands. (Sac, retain priority, activate wayfarer.) and wasteland (same deal). But wastelands are good in another respect. Before they were added, wayfarer was a relatively harmless deck thinner and brainstorm powerer. But now, a deck that plays its second land before we do gets ravaged for both their lands because we EOT fetch a wasteland, our turn fetch a wasteland. Wasteland is a useful target because while wayfarer could grab 2-4 lands if not immediately removed, we only need 2, and our opening hand normally already has 1-2 land, plus maybe a vial. So we want a target that can actually be useful, and most decks require more than 1-2 land to function.

I won't cover the self-explanatory card choices, but epochrasite might have caught a few eyes. First let me say that when I noticed the synergy between it and aether vial (you vial it in as a 4/4) I was quite alarmed by the sheer power it seemed to promise. Well, it wasn't quite that good because it was a two card combo, but it was pretty close. Epochrasite in multiples is good also because they help to ensure that each other come into play. Epochrasite is often times a wall. (This deck often plays as the control deck.) It's easily the weakest card in the deck. We've been looking at options such as knight of meadowgrain, knight of the white orchid, but epochrasite just seems to be the best. If we could run a white tarmogoyf, epochrasite would be the first creature to go.

Lastly, Forbiddian runs a build that differs from mine by -1 FOW +1 daze. I think this weakens the TES matchup, but he thinks that it's worth it for the additional synergy with wayfarer and utility of daze.

In our sideboard, we have chosen 4 BEB effects (with the usual 2/2 split) todeal with goblins and red TES, and thorn of amethyst has been deemed better than ethersworn cannonist.

What follows is our testing results with approximate win percentages and the suggested sideboard plans:
threshold (red): 75%
-4 FOW
-1 daze
+1 grunt
+2 oblivion ring
+2 mind harness
This deck is strictly weaker than the white version against us because swords>lightning bolt, mystic enforcer is useful, and the white version also runs better other removal such as oblivion ring, and it sometimes sports the counterbalance lock. (By the way, counterbalance and chalice of the void look like formidable threats, but in our testing, it's rarely significant due to vial and countermagic.) Against the red build, a meddling mage naming lightning bolt usually means your creatures are here to stay, whereas against white, not only can you not name swords (because you play them) but they have other removal anyway. We win this matchup off of superior creatures (our creatures are better than theirs except goyf, which grunt trumps, and swords as well.) Also, jitte increases this board presence superiority. The card advantage we can reap off of wayfarer and ancestral visions is pretty great.
We have tested this matchup on quite a few occasions, but not as much as against white threshold where we have only about a 60% matchup:
same sideboard plan but -1 more daze, -1 epochrasite +2 aura of silence if they are running the counterbalance lock or threads/oring, and if not, just 1 aura of silence and don't remove the epochrasite.

Against TES, we basically board out everything irrelevant for everything relevant in our sideboard. This matchup is roughly 50%. Meddling mage and FOW maindeck, as well as daze are good, but you don't always outdraw their orim's chants.

Ichorid is approximately 40%. We only played 15 games here and won 6 of them, but we figured that was enough since there's good reason we should be slaughtered by ichorid considering that they make a lot of our cards insignificant. This is the matchup that we write off. The sideboarding plan is the rather self-evident +1 grunt -1 anything useless. Ichorid we could easily pick up by running more hate, like crypts and relic of the progenitus. But we choose to have strong other matches and just to lose ichorid. The 40% figure might be slightly inflated because I felt like I got a little lucky in my portion of the testing with this deck.

We slaughtered Faerie stompy because weathered wayfarer stops them cold, and approximately 40% of the games you already open with weathered wayfarer. The rest of the 60% we still win most of because we play a (roughly speaking) similar strategy as they but we have white and wasteland. Here we board out the force of wills for oblivion ring and aura (They run chalice and equipment, as well as other trinket mage targets.) We won about 75% of these games, and the testing was rather extensive. (I'd say at least 50 games.)

We beat goyf sligh (75%) and any other kind of R/X slighish kind of deck. The reason is, again, that our creatures are superior and mind harness from the sideboard is quite a temposwing also. We board out FOW, 2 epochrasite (or perhaps 2 dazes in some situations) for mind harness and all 4 BEB effects.

Goblins was about 60%. We have some troubles game 1, but game 2 when we board out our useless countermagic for 4 BEB, 2 mind harness, as well as weathered wayfarerx4 for 2 oblivion ring 2 aura of silence (You'll find that Goblins wins if and only if it gets an active vial against this deck.) You'll see that our game gets much better.

Team America: 80% (10-0 matches, which was rather unbelievable, but then we played some other games a random collection of sideboarded and not, and that was more believable.) It's hard for Team America to beat wayfarer. We win if we get wayfarer to stick, but we also win about 60-70% of the games where we don't because we run more creatures and Team America often starts the game at 10 life.

Aggro loam we beat because we run grunts, meddling mage, swords, and wayfarers. Wayfarers are often at roughly parity with their loam engine, but then while they twiddle their thumbs running their loam engine, our Ancestral visions, epochrasites, grunts, and jittes are ticking.

Again, the strength of this deck is that it comes out the gates right away with consistency, but it also has inevitability against basically everything. It's pretty shocking that an aggro control deck has longevity, but in fact, ours does because of wayfarers, ancestral visions, and jittes. Obviously, serra avenger jitte is quite a wrecker.

Lastly I mention that when I say games, we test sideboarded games and preboard games roughly equally.