[DTW] Faerie Stompy

[SuckerPunch]

Sea Drake does in fact have NO disadvantages with it's CIP ability. There is no danger in casting Sea Drake without the required lands in play. The current wording states that you simply return two lands you control. That is it. If you control only 1 land, then it's returned. There is no "or sacrifice" clause on it.

You're actually wrong. If you control only 1 land, it is not returned. You get to keep both Sea Drake and the land in play. That's the best part about Sea Drake. The turn one Chrome Mox + Ancient Tomb play (City of Traitors isn't always a land you want to play turn one, even for the sake of a Sea Drake), unfortunately it's close to a three card combo and happens in only a minority of games.

The subtext of your entire argument is that Sea Drake costs far too much to acquire, which isn't really that bad compared to Grim Tutor.

Wrong again. I actually got my hands on 4 Sea Drake for a realatively reasonable price over 2 months ago. I can send scans of them if you don't believe me. The subtext of my argument is tempo loss. Returning two lands to my hand (except for that rare turn one chrome mox, ancient tomb combo), slows you down by a two turns. To avoid the tempo loss, you have to wait a few turns to play it, and when the only real threats in the entire deck are it and Serendib Efreet. That means that usually you have a much slower clock than you would if you had and played Efreet on the second turn.

Once again, I'm not saying the card is bad. Just that perhaps it's not as good as people are hyping it to be.

One issue I had with my build were mana issues, which I don't think can be fixed without loosing alot of the deck's speed. In my final matchup I scrubbed out hard to B/W LD. I think perhaps running four Misdirection in the sideboard might be in order, as it can deal with both Wasteland and Sinkhole. Pithing Needle only deals with Wasteland, and is not very compatible with the Chalices.

Also, I'm not entirely convinced a creature like Sea Sprite is the best choice. SotF gives your creatures Pro red anyways, and Chalices do quite alot to mitigate the deck's suseptibility to burn. Soratami Cloudskater is something I'm considering, but I'm still trying to determine if I even need a fifth type of creature.

Running one Pithing Needle maindeck didn't seem very helpful to me. When I dropped a Trinket Mage, I would fetch Chalice, as it almost without exception would do more to improve my position then a solitary Pithing Needle would. I think a better approach would be to move all the Needles to the board, and then when playing against Goblins or whatever, side out all the Chalices and side in the Pithing Needles.

I agree with you on all counts. The deck occasionally does have mana stability issues because of the nature of it's mana base. But that's also what makes the deck so powerful. Getting 3 mana from 2 lands is what let you play so many broken cards like Fact or Fiction. I had trobule with Pikula on occasion. But I've wrecked them plenty of times too. With that matchup, you either lose big or win big. Most builds including mine runs MisD in the side.

Yeah, I don't like Sea Sprite either. I run the 4th Trinket Mage and 1-2 War Beasts instead. War Beast provides a great clock and is out of bolt range. The more I use him, the more I've grown to like him, to the point that I'm going back and forth on cutting the 4th Sea Drake to run the 2nd War Beast. Soratami... sounds like it could be great or horrid based on how much mileage you get out of his ability, since he doesn't have much of a clock either. How useful has his ability been for you?

Pithing needle is iffy at times but it's only one slot.