If you read the rest of the comment, I continue that "loses to counterspell" thought into "it's risky as a starter" and conclude with "Dino competes for non-Starter slots" (lands, interaction, Wanderer, etc.). Then ask what ratio PirateKing is using, not challenge Dino's usage. Both of us have 3-4 copies.Originally Posted by rufus
Yes, the main risk is starting the chain. The deck is also a careful balance between starters, lands, and other effects. There are many posts earlier from multiple users with simulations and math to decide on the optimal balance between these effects to go off the most consistently. If Dino replaces a non-starter slot, it changes that balance, and maybe the other numbers need to change too. In other words, adding Dino could fundamentally change the deck ratios and composition in a way that was never considered before.
I started addressing this by adding new math and testing other build ratios, but this is still an open question. Dino is new tech and the stock build may need to change to best accommodate it.
I tested Sakashima's Protege. It copies Carnosaur to double "cascade", but that extra branch can only hit Creative Technique directly (no 6 cmc creature first). Since you'll normally run out of all 4 CTs no matter how many branches you make, that extra branch doesn't actually add more bodies to the board. The other multi-cascaders (Maelstrom, Apex) do add more bodies because the extra branches can hit creatures, but the Carnosaur copy can't. To use Sakashima as a starter, you'll want 8 UU lands (Saprazzan Skerry & Teferi's Isle probably). As a non-starter it's worse than the other multi-cascaders. Overall it seems unnecessary.
Edit: Dress Down specifically is a problem for builds too heavy on Carnosaur & Maelatrom Wanderer. It stops Carnosaur's trigger (ends the branch) and Maelstrom's haste, passing the turn. Emrakul's Time Walk does get through Dress Down since it happens on cast, so going up on Emrakul copies is one way to hedge against losing to Dress Down.
Good to know. Having the option of a Flash starter is useful as long as the mana can consistently support it. Sweet-Gum is probably better than Sakashima's Protege.
Did Caverns help cast Maelstrom Wanderer or activate the cycle lands?I'm actually not so sure on Gemstone Caverns.
I fundamentally love the card so jumped at a chance to play them, but they only add +1 mana, so it's not shaving a turn outside of specifically the natural Creative Technique start. They help with the cycle lands I'm still on so I've kept them in, but I mulligan aggressive to at least 5 card hands and sometimes the exile cost of getting the luck counter makes medium keeps into greedy keeps. I was looking at trying out the other cycle cards like Crab, since having more use for odd numbered amounts of mana does make Gemstone Cavern more useful.
Other than the rare turn 2 CT, the color fixing seems to be the best benefit. But I wonder if that happens consistently enough. If Gemstone exiles a land and you need 4 other lands to make 5RUG...
I get not wanting wasted SB space. But just because you didn't face Oops, Reanimator, Breakfast etc. at EW doesn't mean you never will. Reanimator is a top deck. Those matches are unwinnable without Leyline. Do you just gamble you won't face them often and board for other decks? What's Leyline of Sanctity for? If just Thoughtseize/Grief, you can also protect by running extra starters (and those won't break the chain!).Final change on the table was Leyline of the Void or Leyline of Sanctity. I didn't want to lose to Oops or Breakfast or very fast Reanimate, but I faced zero of those decks. The reanimate targets were always Grief, and honestly I didn't care about the 3/2 body as long as my hand wasn't being messed with. Feels like Sanctity would get brought in more often, but feels like overkill just to protect from the occasional Thoughtseize or whatever if it means including genuine dead ends into the combo math. Leyline of the Void has such a narrow set of decks I'd bring it in against, but the failcase of those decks is literally "I lose the game" so maybe the card is warranted, but I've yet to have to face that decision. So right now it feels like wasted space, and I abhor wasted space in a sideboard.
Yeah, I've got brain damage where I get stuck on silly things. I do find myself wondering how often the extrain casting cost on Etali is offset by the better triggered ability in comparison to the Carnosaur, even if the discussion about whether to play Leyline of the Void is probably more relevant to winning matches.
I've never liked Sakashima's Protege, the creatures I want to copy are legendary so it was always just another 6/3 or 5/3 flying. As soon as something better came out it was the first to go. Unless we're doing some crazy Commandeer tech or something, it was just what was left over as a 6cmc Cascader after all the good ones were used.
Cavern does help cast everything, but it's so uncommon it's hard to measure. You're right that beyond the 5 mana turn 2 CT it's just a fixer, but then a simple City of Brass would do that better. I just has an excuse to run it so I did, but if I want to make the deck "good" then I'll need to come to terms with my pet preferences. When it does get the luck counter it's mostly never an issue, the deck has so many redundancies it's not difficult to find a pitch. It'll only come up after an aggressive set of mulligans where you can keep a 5 of Cavern, pitch, land, land, CT and have a turn 2 that's soft to wasteland and folds to discard, or a normal speed hand of land, land, land, CT, 6cmc starter. It's a very narrow problem but for me it's happened more often than Trumpeting Carnosaur being my only starter and losing to Counterspell. I just like Gemstone Cavern lol.
You're very likely correct on Leyline of the Void, I just saw much more Scam decks around me that made me realize I don't even really want LotV against them, the double Grief was never about the body it was about leaving my hand bare of any spells. It is very much a meta call, so you could flex it into something you're anticipating to face against more often. I was also contemplating the Pyrokinesis since having the dinosaur fit that slot main makes 7 copies a lot of removal, but I know here locally I have a lot of D&T players so I don't mind always killing Thalia forever. I'm very happy with the Throes/Trickery package, the rest is likely to change based on day before tournament whimsy.
I suppose it gets better with Mirrorshell Crab in the SB. Cavern lets you hold up both Crab/Dino as early as turn 1 on the draw, allowing more interaction with opponent on pre-combo turns.
Otherwise you're probably right. It only beats City at getting Turn 2 CT, but that only happens with some hands and on the draw, and that line makes you softer to Wasteland or discard. Boarding into ThroesBalt is probably more reliable if you need speed. More random, but protected from discard & LD.
Imho that's because you didn't cut starters for Carnosaur. You're still on 9 6cmc cascaders (+3 Carnosaur). I'm on 10 6cmc cascaders, about the same. At that level most hands have another starter. At those ratios the chance of having only Carnosaur and opponent having a counter are small, though it has happened to me rarely (against Delver, where Daze is a risk against 4RR cards when they also have Wasteland and/or a fast clock).It's a very narrow problem but for me it's happened more often than Trumpeting Carnosaur being my only starter and losing to Counterspell.
Earlier stock builds had 40+ lands and sometimes the same or fewer starters. If Carnosaur replaced another 6cmc in those builds, the Counterspell/Dress Down risk would be more of a problem.
I've also played against Dreadnought decks where Carnosaur is just dead (4x maindeck Dress Down), but with enough other cascaders I still won.
Agree that you don't need LotV against Scam. It's for fast decks like Reanimator. Scam is slow.You're very likely correct on Leyline of the Void, I just saw much more Scam decks around me that made me realize I don't even really want LotV against them, the double Grief was never about the body it was about leaving my hand bare of any spells.
Vs discard, an extra starter seems better than Leyline of Sanctity. Both protect you, but Leyline can break the combo. Otherwise maybe board into ThroesBalt? Throes is immune to discard.
Since so much of the SB is in flux, and the deck mechanic is so sensitive to small changes in deck composition, what if the approach to sideboarding changes?
Instead of doing the normal thing with designated slots for different matchups (grave, combo, creatures, counters, etc.), what if the sideboard is approached modularly as different transformational plans?
//Sideboard A: 5
3 Throes of Chaos
2 Tibalt's Trickery
//Sideboard B: 6
3 Gemstone Caverns
3 Mirrorshell Crab
//Sideboard C: 4
4 Leyline of the Void
3 different transformational SBs within 15 cards.
Sideboard A: go off 1 turn faster
Sideboard B: be grindier and more interactive pre-combo (Carnosaur & Crab)
Only have Caverns on the draw.
Sideboard C: don't scoop to turn 1 decks
Accept that the main combo is compromised.
Realistically the deck is very narrow in what it can do. Maybe we should be boarding into a cohesive plan instead of boarding in isolated tools. The ThroesBalt plan is proven, but Plan B & C could be adjusted to see what works.
Maybe plan B is better with other tools (Pyrokinesis, Boseiju, Otawara, Skyturtle). Maybe plan C is better with other tools (Leyline of Sanctity, Mindbreak Trap, Commandeer??). The idea is to shift the deck into a different plan that's better in that type of matchup.
Thinking about it that way, plan C doesn't make sense against Scam but does against Oops, even though both are "graveyard decks". If the meta has few fast decks, maybe you don't want Plan C at all and spend more slots on A and B.
Last edited by FTW; 12-14-2023 at 05:57 PM.
What would you aim to take out?
I use the 3 cycle lands and the 2 least favorite starter creatures for the Throes/Trickery package.
The other cards I just sort of wing it, honestly couldn't tell you one match from the next what comes out
I usually board the same way: cut 2 worst starters (usually Let the Galaxy Burn), cut worst lands, then cut 1 Emrakul/Maelstrom.
But overall I've been winging it too. Since the combo is so sensitive to deck composition, it makes me think the SB strategy should be better planned. Both what comes in and what comes out. Otherwise boarding could accidentally handicap the winrate. Or the tools we bring in might not be usable often enough (due to mana or pitch costs) to compensate for the reduction in combo efficiency.
The deck is so sensitive to changes that imho sideboarding needs a deeper look.
It's a fair question. Etali, Primal Conqueror has a better ability and bigger body.I do find myself wondering how often the extra
5RR instead of 4RR means +1 land and +1 turn (minimum). That not only slows down the combo but increases the resource requirement. More resources = mulligans & Wasteland are more punishing. Resources already get tight sometimes. Imho there are enough playable starters at 6 mana, no reason to go higher.
Carnosaur was added mainly for the 2R ability. Etali doesn't have that. Trumpeting Carnosaur uncounterably kills "you lose" cards like Teferi, Time Raveler, Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, and Sanctum Prelate @ 5. EOT kill, untap and go off. Discover just means it doesn't mess up the combo when revealed (and it has some corner case uses vs Show and Tell or Exhume). It's a Pyrokinesis-type card that doesn't stop the combo, a maindeckable answer. Without the 2R ability, it's not as good. Could be Otawara or Sweet-Gum instead.
I love the thought put into this post. This is close to where I ended up in my testing at home. I would add that Mississippi River becomes a poor choice in a field with more than a few fast combo decks. In such a case, your chances of winning would be greater if you simply played a deck that preys on fast combo. So if you feel like you're being pulled to Sideboard C to solve problems, it's probably time to shelve the deck and return to it when fast combo is less popular. The structure of the deck allows it to play out a redundant and consistent game plan that's resistant to countermagic, but the same structure restricts its ability to shift.
Good point ESG. Maybe the smarter choice is to just not play Mississippi River in certain metas. Accept the bad matchups. Leyline & Commandeer are weak plans. None of the Plan C options are good, just "lose less".
So instead of assembling a pathetic plan C, hope for better matchups and dedicate slots to those. Plan B could perhaps be broken into 2 sub-plans:
B1> Board in Mirrorshell Crab + Gemstone Caverns on the draw against certain decks
B2> Board in other faster grindy interaction (Pyrokinesis, Boseiju, Who Endures, Otawara, Soaring City, or Colossal Skyturtle)
There isn't room to bring in all of it at once, so it could be broken into different groups depending on which interaction is better in that match.
Example...
//MAINDECK
//Spells: 6
4 Creative Technique
2 Let the Galaxy Burn
//Creatures: 17
4 Boarding Party
4 Aurora Phoenix
4 Trumpeting Carnosaur
2 Maelstrom Wanderer
3 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
//Lands: 37
4 Ancient Tomb
4 City of Traitors
4 Crystal Vein
4 Sandstone Needle
4 Dwarven Ruins
4 Tinder Farm
4 Saprazzan Skerry
3 Teferi's Isle
3 Sulfur Vent
2 Otawara, Soaring City
1 Gemstone Caverns
//SIDEBOARDS
//ThroesBalt Plan: 5
3 Throes of Chaos
2 Tibalt's Trickery
//On the Draw Counters: 6
3 Gemstone Caverns
3 Mirrorshell Crab
//Removal: 4
2 Otawara, Soaring City
2 Pyrokinesis
The maindeck already has 6 removal for hatebears (Carnosaur, Galaxy) and 2 more removal for generic prison cards (Otawara).
The sideboard includes the ThroesBalt plan (better against fast combo, discard, and LD; worse against FoW).
It also has answers to spells/abilities (Crab), removal for hatebears (Pyrokinesis), and removal for prison pieces (Otawara). RU makes sense as long as Crab is a SB plan.
Rough sideboarding plan.
ThroesBalt:
+3 Throes, +2 Tibalt
-2 Galaxy/Phoenix, -3 Teferi's Isle (too slow)
On the Draw Crab:
+3 Gemstone, +3 Crab
-2 Galaxy/Phoenix, -3 Tinder Farm, -1 Emrakul
On the Play Crab:
+3 Crab, +2 Otawara
-1 Gemstone, -3 Tinder Farm, -1 Emrakul
On the Draw Hatebears:
+3 Gemstone, +2 Pyrokinesis
-4 Invasion sac lands, -1 Emrakul
On the Play Hatebears:
+2 Pyrokinesis
-1 Gemstone, -1 Emrakul
Vs Noncreature Hate:
+2 Otawara
-2 Carnosaur
In many matches you would just leave the main unchanged.
Is CT into crab/turtle a relevant failure line?
You also can't really mull into hate or board many cards so maybe dino + lands + thoughts&prayers are the better plan then.
Can't win everything and maybe focus on less unwinnable matchups.
BTW with the dino you can also put the card in your hand instead of casting it so you can turn a win more CT into a backup for next turn.
Yes. You have to Demonstrate around it, but if you're down to only 1 branch then it could "fail".
So you have to weight the risk of terminating the chain vs getting blown out by interaction before you go off. In many matchups, there is no point in bringing in Crab. The SB is only for matches where the main plan won't work.
If the maindeck already has decent odds, just play the main plan.
If the ThroesBalt plan is better than holding up Crab, do that instead.
If both of those look bad, that's what Plan B is for. You have 10 more SB slots. Might as well use them for something.
Delver might be a good usecase. The ThroesBalt plan is bad there (too many counters). But the main plan can also get disrupted by early Wasteland/Daze. I've lost a few matches that way, where they double Waste me off red or double counter the first attempt (Daze + FoW), then DRC and Murktide kill me before I can try again. UB Shadow may be the same. If you bring in Caverns + Crab on the draw, you now start ahead on mana (better vs Daze & Wasteland), you can hold up Crab to counter Wasteland or big Murktide, or you can even just kill DRC with Carnosaur to buy time. That interaction hopefully buys you tempo to actually go off, instead of losing before you can cast a starter. You won't vomit 50 power on the board, but Delver will struggle to remove just a 7/5 trample Dino + 5/7 crab even if that's all you get.
With 4 Caverns (1 main + 3 SB) and 12 untapped sol lands, that's a good chance of 2U/2R open on turn 1. Without Cavern, at least by turn 2. 4 maindeck Dino + 3 SB Crab = 7 pieces of interaction at 3 mana. A decent amount of time you can threaten either Carnosaur or Crab as early as turn 1. That's a lot more early interaction than the deck can normally pull off (normally you can't activate Carnosaur until turn 3). The hope is that's enough that you don't need to mull into them, and only 3 break the combo chain.
Those 7 pieces all answer big problem cards: Teferi, Time Raveler, Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Sanctum Prelate, Gaddock Teeg. Now you have 7 answers to "you lose" cards and better mana to hold up those answers early.
In matches where you want only Crab and not Carnosaur, then it gets less consistent and may not be worth it.
The question is what else do you do with those SB slots? Any nonland will threaten to terminate the chain. Do you just play lands (Boseiju, Otawara, Petrified Field, Blast Zone)? Otherwise any nonland will disrupt CT. But that risk is better when it's a creature with 7+ cmc (does not disrupt cascade) and 5/5 or bigger (not the worst body to get). Revealing Pyrokinesis or Leyline is much worse than revealing Crab!
You could play a companion but the only possible ones are Keruga, the Macrosage and Jegantha, the Wellspring which give you no or very little benefit.
Karakas deals with a fair share of the cards you listed and also helps vs avatars and spaghetti monsters.
Scavenger Grounds is probably to slow vs combo and can be played around but might buy you the round you need if you just slam it T2.
Island of Wak-Wak might be a semi-legit way to buy time vs delver and would be funny as hell but is really expensive.
It's been a while since the last time I posted here. (Mind's Desire unban and the following increase in MBT post sb made me stay away from this deck).
Since then I discovered a couple of questions I could not answer with the previous simulation engine. I got around to rewriting it over the weekend, so expect some more data to come in the following days.
Questions I'm mostly interested in:
- How does declinging demo triggers change the math?
- Are there circumstances where we want different numbers than 2/3 for Trickery/Throes?
- Is Etali worth a try in this deck and how does he affect Trickery math?
Here's a detailed list of questions I'd like to see answered at some point. I'll highlight the ones I think I can answer myself in green, and the ones I might be able to answer with more time in orange.
New Cards:
- Trumpeting Dinosaur
- at first glance, this is the same as any other cascader, but in terms of mulligans, it is a lot weaker than a boarding party (due to its weakness to counter magic).- Call forth the Tempest
- I'd like to know the probability of finding a better hand when looking at a hand that only casts the dino on T3, in game 1.
- extra copies of wanderer, that might be easier to cast. In particular, I'd like to investigate how likely it is, that boarding party + sweet-gum can assemble a winning board state without ever hitting a wanderer/emrakul.- Balrog of Moria
- most people run only 1 copy of this, but maybe something extreme like 4 wanderer, 4 tempest has actual legs.
- List with this guy have been popping up on mtgtop8 recently.- Etali, Primal Conqueror
- I thought this to be a meme at first, but the more I tested it, I started to realize that hitting a sweet-gum > CT > boarding party > CT > balrog is still a lot of hasty damage. (he also sits at 7cmc, such that wanderer can hit it)
- I assume when you just demonstrate always, some numbers of this card make wanderer/tempest more castable.
- I won't be looking into how much more likely you are to cast the 8 mana spells, but I will look into how much this decreases your winrate.
- Or differently put, how much more you need to demonstrate, such that you maintain the same winrate
- My first thought was that this is just a win-more card and that this deck does not want non-cascaders.
- However, playing with Trumpeting Carnosaur made me realize that in practice, people fight over the first copy of CT, meaning that if you ever CT into an Etali, it might as well be uncounterable.
- I've demonstrated people into removal that suddenly had a legal target when playing with the dinos, but I will not look into this downside for this analysis.
- Instead, what I want to see is, how Etali being just under the 8cmc restriction of Wanderer/Tempest changes the math, as now you have CT and Etali that can 'go up the chain'.
- Maybe this turns out to be useless, maybe it means that we can get away with demonstrating less while having more backup starters in a pinch.
- As said before, I can't look into anything that you could hit with it from your opponent, so for all analysis, the opponents' deck will be considered empty
Demonstrating:
- In previous analysis, I always assumed that we demo every CT we hit.
- I now try to Demo n times where n is [0, 1, 2, 4, 999]
- Why those numbers?
- 0: happens when you play against stax and don't want to demonstrate them at all.
It also happens when you demo once into an opposing force deck, and they have 1 force, then CT resolves and you don't demo any longer from there.
- 1: I assume that in the dark you always demo the first copy just to play around force. sometimes they don't have a force and now you get to have a copy.
- 4: This is the most common 'demo all' case.
- 2: I ran some isolated simulations with 2 and 3 and noticed that a lot of the time, 2,3,4 are very close, while 0 and 1 are noticeably worse.
I opted to save some time here by not running with 3, but kept the 2 just to validate that it will be close to 4 in most cases.
- 999: With enough Emrakuls, you can start to shuffle your GY over and over. I want to see how relevant that is in practice.
I want to see how reliable it is to get enough extra turns such that you can draw into an otawara and bounce that ensnaring bridge that your painter opponent has been hiding behind.
Sideboarding:
- Assume you know what your opponent is doing: Which SB strat maximizes your winrate?
- I'll consider the following scenarios:
- Force of Will
- Force decks tend to bring in more elemental blasts and Force of Negations. We want to take out dino's here. What configuration gives the best winrate?- Discard
- If they are a Daze deck, we probably want to win on T4, meaning either a 6cmc cascader + extra mana for daze, or an 8cmc double cascader.
- How does the math change if we consider 8cmc cascaders as plausible starters?
- This are decks like reanimator or mono black scam. All I want here is a throes of chaos and as many lands as possible to retrace it.- Force + Discard (e.g., UB Scam or Doomsday)
- Which sb configuration maximizes the winrate, assuming I hard mull for a T2 throes? e.g., are we supposed to take out all/most cmc6 cascaders?
- I pair these decks because they run a reason to bring trickery in either a fast combo or heavy discard, but are not all in on that plan and sometimes you need to go through more than 1 force.- Hatebears
- This is a group of decks where I bring in Throes/Trickery but don't hard mull for it, i.e., keep a hand that wins on T3 while sometimes you get to do it on T2 already.
- What configuration maximizes this win, assuming that I want either Throes, or a T3 starter that is not Dino?
- Assume no Force/Discard, we just need 1 starter fast, how to sb such that we can make room for utility lands like karakas/ottawara/gemstone caverns?- Deafening Silence
- If the main thing you have to play through is Deafening Silence, we
a) take out Let the Galaxy Burns and Call forth the Tempest, but
b) maximize our creature count. > Does this also mean that I am supposed to trim a CT or two? How would that change the math?
I will NOT consider these cases:
- SB
- opponent has a hatebear I need to remove via X, e.g., a gaddock that can be removed with karakas, ottawara, carnosaur, ...- Manabase
- I still assume every land is Ancient Tomb. This is arguably the biggest Achilles heel of this whole analysis.
- With proper mana base, I could look into the odds of casting Wanderer or casting 2 starters in consecutive turns.
- I could assess how likely we are to play around daze.
- There would be more hands that can't be kept because they don't cast a relevant spell or have only 3 tapped lands.
- I also don't look into sequencing, e.g., if the draw for your third turn contains the 3rd land you need, I don't consider it to come into play tapped. I just assume you always have an untapped land#3 if you have 3 lands at all.
- I could see how likely we are to cast an interaction spell, e.g., discarding dino or channeling a land, while also doing the combo on T3.
- I could check the odds of casting spells in the face of a Wasteland or how likely we are to cast non-red spells for different manabase configurations. Since 2/3 or our deck are lands, this seems very relevant to me.
- In general this skews the mulligains toward only caring about the right spells and I fear that it leads to a bias in the analysis that I can't account for.
I really appreciate that you're updating the simulation! Some of the deck design considerations have changed, and these are good questions to answer.
My solution to this, when doing the math above, was to treat Trumpeting Carnosaur as an "extra" (like Emrakul or Wanderer) in the opening hand math but then treat it like any other 6cmc cascader during the combo chain. Perhaps your simulation code could do the same? It's not a starter but also doesn't terminate the chain.
In my testing there are a non-negligible number of hands where your first 3 lands are all tapped sol lands, delaying the combo by 1 turn or changing mulligan decisions. That has an even bigger impact on any slower starters (Maelstrom Wanderer).
Getting red by turn 3 is fairly reliable but the other colors are harder, depending on the manabase. You can run more green & blue double lands, but then getting red is reduced. Either way, this affects starters that require non-red (Maelstrom Wanderer, Sweet-Gum Recluse, Sakashima's Protege). From actual testing I found it better to rely on mostly monored starters even if the card is overall less good. The math & simulations don't show this because they treat all Sol Lands equally.
Experience has shown outside of on board permanent hate cards like Teferi or Deafening Silence or Teeg, which by nature are known and can be played around, the biggest backbreaking play from the opponent is Force of Will plus Surgical Extraction. Just about every tempo deck should be expected to have a couple in their sideboard, which will be brought in to counter the original CT and then Surgical it away. You get 1 hit off your demonstrated copy and you hope to ride that all the way home, maybe hardcasting a 6 drop along the way. At least in my local meta (because of me, I'm sorry guys) Mississippi River is a known quantity, everybody knows this and I know to expect it.
Maybe if you're deviant enough to bring this to a 5k or something you could get people not knowing, but I feel that age is ending.
My trick over the years (in local paper) has been to never bring the same deck 2 weeks in a row, especially with fringe decks or brews. That maintains some sense of brewer's advantage and prevents people from sideboarding too aggressively against you. Otherwise any deck can get hated out locally.
Mississippi River has gotten enough coverage that even at some non-local event, players may know what it is. They may not have mastered how to beat it though.
Last edited by FTW; 01-23-2024 at 01:19 PM.
Oh I haven't been playing it often or relentlessly to affect their sideboards, but at least here, every Delver player knows to side in their Surgicals along with any Flusters or blue Blasts they have. Which was not the case when I started playing, in fact there were open arguments against it at the beginning. But once they saw the play pattern I described above, it's the main source of misery I have with playing the deck now post sideboard.
I didn't have time to read through all of this thread yet, so apologies if this has already been said: This is where we board in Aeve. you cast party, then CT, demo it, they cast their demo spell, force your CT, surgical it, your copy resolves > boarding party > aeve (storm 7+). There is a 20% chance of hitting aeve over CT on the first cascader.
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