Quote Originally Posted by Forbiddian View Post
Children of Korlis (I was mistaken in thinking it'd be great earlier) does about a fat zero against combo. I playtested multiple goldfish orders and it only marginally increased the fizzle rate. If TES resolves Ad Nauseum and then Tendrils of Agony, they can almost always continue playing and resolve either IGG, another AdN, or another Tendrils of Agony. Also, they can Chain of Vapor or suicide banish the CoK after AdN but before Tendrils. They see like half their deck after AdN and usually dig a solution.

The situation that it stops are ones where the combo player gets a bad AdNauseum, and the ones where the combo player tries to go for a non AdN kill (like with Hurkyl's midgame).
I'm actually surprised that you're having such a hard time with TES to begin with. You run daze, force, and wastelands, which all screw the crap out of TES. Adding in Cursecatcher, while seemingly bad on paper, has playtested very well for me. Usually 2 well timed dazes are enough to stop the TES player from going off, and thus wastes their set up spells and storm count if they played their 0 cost artifacts. It is not easy for a TES player to play around a lot of annoyances and still go off, so if you are holding any sort of daze/counter in your had you probably should be able to stop them with a Cursecatcher on the board. I can see how CoK would crap out against AdN, but Cursecatcher completely stops them from getting it out.

That leaves Burrenton Forge-Tender and Cursecatcher. To solve that problem, you have to look at what we're taking out:

4x Blast
2x Mind Harness
2x Aura of Silence
2x Oblivion Ring
4x Thorn of Amethyst
1x Jotun Grunt

Ok, so, I think just cutting four blasts for Cursecatcher would weaken the Goblin MU significantly. Cutting Thorn for Cursecatcher is ridiculous, because Cursecatcher is shitty next to Thorn and that would weaken our TES matchup a lot. It's like a sinkhole for 1, which is decent, but nowhere near the serious lock element that Thorn is.

Cutting anything else weakens fringe matchups that would not benefit from Cursecatcher.
I'm going to first argue that cutting Thorn for Cursecatcher is not shitty against TES. Maybe it was just my playtesting (which was over 10 games when I played Triton's Minions against TES... a similar deck in terms of control), but in a deck with wastelands vs TES, daze and Cursecatcher are going to be nuts. Your initial mana denial from wasteland is going to hurt them enough that the daze/CC are going to stall them much longer than they can handle. A 1 turn clock is good against them because going off with AdN starting at 10 life is usually not game over for you as long as you've been doing your job controlling their mana. Thorn is just overkill when you get it, but turn 2 is much worse than turn 1 since TES averages turn 2-3. It's also much more easily destroyed (multiples don't even help you) by shattering spree, which they all run. Many of the new TES don't run Grapeshot in the sideboard, but having a 1/1 swinging at them will damage them enough that AdN will go on to suck.

Burrenton Forge-Tender, on the other hand, is solid against Goblins as an answer to turn 1 lackey and it trades with Piledriver (as well as often walling out smaller critters). It also is a target for Umezawa's Jitte, unlike BEB. These situations are common enough to the point that I actually think BFT is BETTER than Blue Elemental Blast. I hope you understand that the sacrifice ability is rarely used. He's mainly a 1/1 Pro Red with a sometimes useful ability. He's like a Mother of Runes (which is just garbage, but at least one person kept thinking she'd be good) that has no summoning sickness. I don't understand why you think BEB would be so much better against Goblins.
Any 1/1 creature is generally solid against a turn 1 lackey, but if you're talking about BFT vs BEB then either would work. 1/1 pro red is so much worse than BEB against gobbos that it shouldn't even be a contest. We all know that a wall vs gobbos doesn't beat them. It's obviously way better to counter their Ringleader, Warchief, Kikki Jikki, Siege Gang, and Matron rather than chump block it. And if you top deck the BEB it auto kills their warchief, which slows them down way more than them having to get around a 1/1. But goblins aren't your top competition with this deck, so it isn't as big of a point as how good BEB is against dragon stompy and aggro loam. Obviously you'd rather run BEB against them.

The TES matchup is slightly weakened, but Blue Elemental Blast was rarely part of the main strategy. Often we'd tap out because it's better to drop threats on the board and put TES on an actual clock than hope this is the turn that they cast a red spell. Against the other forms of Ad Nauseum Tendrils (FT, AdN), Blue Elemental Blast is basically dead and doesn't get boarded in.
I don't think tapping out is necessary against combo. You need to stop them from going off, not out-tempo them with creatures. You'll always lose that battle. I don't think that "tapping out" is a strategy that this deck has to follow against everything you come up against, especially if you want to BS for the FoW to beat them. If you kept your BEB for one of their accels or a burning wish, then you probably have a much greater chance of winning than if you played a Jitte or something. Remember that AdN does require a lot of starting life or it starts to suck. Even at 10 it's just barely enough to win usually.

I'm not saying this in a mean way at all, but you should really try playing TES against a deck like this if you haven't. Finding mana starters is hard as hell in TES if you keep getting wastelanded. TES usually needs a black and a red mana to go off, and if you can stop either of these then it is usually going to be game.


AG, which I tested, although not in the Epochrasite slot, is horrible all the time. Apart from gimmicky tricks like vialing in to counter a Deed activation, it's really weak. It will never individually form a clock worth speaking of, so even if it trades 3 land for their Tarmogoyf, we're left in a bad situation where they can easily dig out more Goyfs. 2/2 is the anemic clock everyone's complaining about. 4/4 will kill someone with tempo. Oh, and Epochrasite sorta-counters Deed, so it seems silly to run such a gimmick card for a situation where Epoch isn't that bad.

This deck really doesn't have that much trouble with Goyfs or single-creature strategies anyway -- Swords, Jitte, and Jotun Grunt are typically enough.
Yeah, epoch is okay but I'm sure we can find a better creature out there. I wouldn't say that it counters deed either, just because it takes so long to recur and generally the deed player is going to Volrath's Stronghold their recurring creature faster than you are.