Quote Originally Posted by Lejay View Post
This is precisely the reason why he had a lot of success.
Currently people are running a lot of extra-hate because I presented a lot of confidence on this forum about Omniclash being the best deck in the format. This can be checked by watching people's sideboards and the answers people gave in the top8 profiles from last week-end. With a spotlight on his face the deck is hated a ton and that hate has some splash damage on the rest of the combos. There was only 1 non-omnitell combo deck in the last SCG top16 : elves, that either can dodge several kind of hates or has alternative plans.
With everybody hating a lot the deck (which still placed one player in the top8 and another one top16), bonus goes to people letting the others do the job for them, having most combo decks crushed in the early rounds. People like Todd Anderson, with a deck able to out grind very reliably these decks that focus on beating combo with their sideboard or even their main deck, have a very good time navigating into this kind of metagame.
In Columbus, Todd Anderson's only loss was to Omnitell.
I was his OmniTell opponent, recurring discard game 1 got me good.. Game 2 he did not keep any disruption but kept a t2 Geist hand, I just happened to have the nuts and kill him turn 2 after he tapped out. Game 3 I opened 3 Brainstorms and got my Show and Tell taken away with Thoughtseize, and then I floated a Dream Halls + Enter the Infinite on top of my library until I got to hardcast-Dream Halls mana. He didn't see the play of Wasting my fetch, I don't blame him. Meddling Mage was actually deadly if Dream Halls were named instead of Cunning Wish, I happened to remember his list the previous week and boarded in a Sapphire Charm and killed him after drawing my deck.

I think I got a lot of free-wins due to this deck being somewhat "newer". And a BUG opponent mulling to Deathrite Shaman since I was on the draw 80% of my matches.

Stoneblade is still a scary deck to play against, I'm still not very confident about my game 1s against Stoneblade or BUG. Although permanent based hate is every combo player's nightmare. You must have an alternative plan against Leyline, experienced combo players will even mulligan until they see it because their opponent have no other relevant interactions. Running Ethersworn Canoist / Meddling Mage is an excellent part to start hating out combo, even Detention Sphere is somewhat hard to play against and flexible against other decks. Todd's deck was set-up even more fair than the older Deathblade decks, but dedicated powerful silver-bullets in the sideboard to hate out popular combo decks. Most newer storm player will straight up fold to a Meddling Mage / Ethersworn Canoist because they don't expect Stoneblade to bring in those cards in most cases.

Since counterspells seem very mediocore in the current meta against these "fair" decks, I suggest a mixture of heavy permanent-based hate in the sideboard for Stoneblade in the future.