Thanks for the comments, everyone. It's nice to see that people are interested in this deck. I think that some of the numbers are a tiny bit inflated, but I'd be happy to bet even money against any deck listed except Ichorid and TES.
Pretty much whenever people post a new deck and matchup analysis, they're full of shit/didn't test it/made some wild extrapolation based on hope/were just plain wrong. I might be wrong, but the first three are definitely out of the question. We tested these matchups a lot (except Goyf Sligh, which we really should get back to).
To tie up a few loose ends:
I really don't see how that'd be superior to Thorn of Amethyst. It pitches to Force of Will, I guess.Have you ever tried mana maze as a sideboard for the combo match up? It can be used at times against control decks as well.
On the downside, though, it doesn't stop attempts to destroy it at end of turn. Thorn of Amethyst makes Chain of Vapor cost 1U. More importantly, it makes Wipe Away cost 2UU. Bam. A second Thorn of Amethyst also makes it nearly impossible to win the game whereas a second Mana Maze does little to nothing.
As another downside to Mana Maze, TES players can simply play an artifact in between every cast. Orim's Chant, Dark Ritual, Chrome Mox, Cabal Ritual, Lotus Petal, Ad Nauseum. Resolving your anti-combo hate and watching the combo player barely even jump through any hoops and beat you has to be a real piss off.
I like Kitchen Finks a lot. Three reasons why he didn't make it into this deck: The casting cost.On a side note, Kitchen Finks is one of the best creatures ever printed, especially for aggro-control. He creates card and/or tempo advantage, and is aggressively costed.
Requiring 3 mana to play out anything is really not what this deck wants to do. It would hurt our ability to keep pressure on while playing Dazes, it would also hurt our ability to Wayfarer. If we want to vial it in, we basically have to waste our Vial. Vial @ 2 lets us play ANYTHING. That's a big advantage, since anything we draw into can potentially be a combat trick to 1:0 on a Nimble Mongoose. Vial @ 3 is like throwing a Vial away.
I run 3 daze in my version. I do not like Stifle, because this deck cannot abuse it and it's very anti-synergistic. If the opponent doesn't have fetchlands, Stifle is dead. Secondly, if the opponent just plays them well, Stifle is dead. Lastly, Stifle requires you to stay open, which is the opposite of what the deck wants to do. The deck wants to play out a minimum of land and use Wayfarer or Brainstorm to abuse that.I am definately on the bandwagon of moar Daze & Stifle to increase the deck to insane mana-disruption levels.
@Mirrislegend: AV is just straight card advantage. I didn't realize epochrasite was a usual choice for fish. But Wayfarer is more than just card advantage. Very few decks play on as few lands as us. Therefore, wayfarer can sometimes end a game. Even if it doesn't, it's still a significant swing if one locks his opponent out of a color or two, or out of nonbasic lands altogether. (So essentially out of lands altogether these days.)
You don't just fetch lands and then try to throw them away brainstorming. You fetch wastelands and get your opponents to stop trying to hit the 3-4 land they want to have in play and just to be "content" with 1-2.
If the mana disruption is a significant element, as you're implying, the deck NEEDS to capitalize on it by running Stifle and Daze. It's really just that simple. The question is what to drop for it. Maybe 1-2 Vial, 1-2 Avenger, 1 Epochrasite?
Originally Posted by Tacosnape
Referring to the art on Stasis:
Do you tell Epic Painter players that they should run Millstone because decking the opponent is a significant element of their deck?If the mana disruption is a significant element, as you're implying, the deck NEEDS to capitalize on it by running Stifle and Daze. It's really just that simple.
We don't run Stifle to randomly try to mana screw opponents. We run Wayfarer to prevent them from doing anything, forcing them to use creature removal on Wayfarer, and then we move on to Plan B, which is: "Play Aggro Control against an opponent who used his creature removal taking out our one-drop." We also occasionally get lucky like if they have to dig for creature removal and we can sculpt a winning board position even before each player has a second land on the table.
Fetchland kill is not a strategy that the deck needs to support, and not one that the deck really can support. Wayfarer does that just fine on his own.
Also, don't forget that stifling the opponent's land prevents wayfarer activations. Why spend U and a card to nail the land when we can just spend W and no card instead? Daze is good. I prefer 2 just because I like the marginal + to the TES matchup, as well as the fact that I'm not a particular fan of 2 dazes in my hand, since it always feels like there's probably not going to be 2 good opportunities to daze. (Yes, there will be 2 opportunities to daze, but good spells? Probably not, since it has to be that twice, a good spell was the spell that my opponent tapped out for.)
But Forbiddian makes a good point that Force of will is often times a disadvantage, since you have to pitch a blue card, and sometimes it's even uncastable for that same reason. Drawing more than one is never a problem, though, since you just pitch one to the other.
We are, in particular, looking for suggestions on ways to hate ichorid and TES so we can pick up our bad matchups. If you happen to have insight as to how to hate these concurrently with all the stuff we're hating now, tell us!
Ex: If there's a card that is like, as Forbiddian has once suggested:
leyline of the oldschool player:
2WU
you may begin the game with leyline of the oldschool player in play if it is in your opening hand.
No storm spells, cards going to graveyards instead are removed from the game. No taking more than 5 minutes on a given turn. Leyline of the oldschool player cannot be targetted.
Obviously nothing will exist that is such an obvious answer to our question, but if it's possible even to hate ichorid or TES concurrently with anything else, we'd be interested.
Against TES:
True Believer, Glowrider (too slow), Ethersworn Canonist, Orim's Chant, Abeyance, Children of Korlis (sac after X storm went off), CotV, 3sphere(too slow), Rule of Law (too slow), more daze, stifle (Not good through their chant), Cursecatcher, Counterbalance + top (dunno how good your mana base is for that) Back to Basics (meh).
Against Ichorid:
More Jotun Grunt, Cursecatcher (sac on your own spells when it gets bad), Children of Korlis, Glowrider (marginally), Crypt, leylineotV, Relic, Propaganda, Ghostly Prison, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale (great with Wayfarer, not so much since they have ~no lands though so you can't fetch it), Moat, Magus of the Tabernacle, Magus of the Moat (lol), echoing truth, Pendrell mists, Wispmare.
Brainstorm of cards that hurt either. Looks like Children of Korlis is actually your best choice to stop either. I like Cursecatcher as well, it's really a pain in the ass for TES to play against. I would also suggest adding in a The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale in your sideboard for the off chance that you can search for it with Wayfarer against the Ichorid.
I don't understand your anti-stifle comments.
The deck has an agressive mana-denial plan, Stifle is a further tool to supplement this. Nine out of ten decks in the metagame run fetchlands in spades; and Stifle does not read "Counter target fetchland activation." Even those that do not run a complement of Fetches usually have plenty of targets.
Off the top of my head: Mono-U Control has Powder Kegs and Shackles at the very least. Chalice Stompy decks have equipment and Chrome Moxen (although this matchup they would be boarded out agianst, unless you have a unreasonable amount of Stompy in your meta this isn't much of a consideration).
In "playing their fetchlands well", by which you mean playing their fetchlands around Stifle, the opponent is slowing down their gameplan considerably, which this deck seems quite capable of taking advantage of.
Are you regularly playing brainstorm and activating Wayfarer during your mainphase? These are not sorcery-speed abilities, yes I understand you are going to want to abuse Wayfarer to Wasteland the opponents resources ASAP, but you can do that instead of holding Stifle. Having Stifle in your hand doesn't transform your gameplan the moment you draw it; it supplements your gameplan. Additionally, if you don't have an additional mana up it doesn't matter what that card in your hand is, you wouldn't be playing it anyways.
Children of Korlis looks really good, actually. Gets in play turn 1 and the effects stack. It's not as much of a lock as like, Thorn of Amethyst, but it's half the price and it contributes to the clock slightly.
Cursecatcher also looks amazing. Against Ichorid, don't sac at your own spells, you sac at their spells. Their only sac outlets are Cabal Therapy and Dread Return. You can always respond to those before they get the tokens (and there's an intervening 'if' clause so if you can remove the bridges before the tokens resolve, they don't get tokens).
Thanks for the suggestions, those are great finds!
Unless I'm missing something, Cursecatcher looks better against Ichorid and Children of Korlis looks better against TES, but I'll have to test both to find the right blend. Either way, Thorn of Amethyst is no longer in my sideboard and both our matchups are stronger for it.
I'm gonna have to +1 what Swing4Five just said. He words the arguments for Stifle very well. Forbiddian and pi4meterftw, please please take some time to respond to them thoroughly, as they're very solid points.
Referring to the art on Stasis:
How do you ever beat white thresh with Counterbalance or any of the Intuition/Counterbalance/Deed decks?
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
Playing their fetchlands "well" usually does not involve any sort of wholesale manipulation of their game plan. At least when I'm playing against stifle, I have never saw anything like. "Dangit. I wanted to play X. But then I couldn't sac my sac land for fear of stifle. So I didn't play X." I also rarely paid for this mentality.
I addressed your first point about why I am not interested in fetchland stifling anyway. We'd rather just kill their lands with wayfarer since it's also card advantage. And if we can't do it, then we don't care about killing one of their lands. The way wayfarer works is: games I get it, I play mana denial. Games I don't get it, I play aggro versus control, and control versus aggro. But then, as I said, in either case, stifle is all for nought.
Lastly, I, at least, regularly mainphase wayfarer activations. A common situation is one in which you have 1 fewer land than your opponent (especially in the beginning of the game) but then you also want to play a land. I also commonly mainphase brainstorm because I might draw something that is only castable at sorcery speed. In any case, there is nothing to lose since all my countermagic is free. I'll admit that it, at first, seems compelling that our argument of "not having the mana for it" is a little suspect because we, then, could not afford other spells. But that's not the entirety of the argument. The important points are above. But to answer this question, what everything drives at is that we actually don't want to cast stifle anyway. We'd rather have the open option of an extra card. To be precise, suppose we have card X, which we are debating on whether to run stifle or card Y. We'd rather have card Y assuming it's anything remotely useful, since we would never play card X. It might be that our entire hand is < card Y, so if we had it, we would actually play card Y instead of whatever spells we just spent our turn casting. Also, we eventually end up casting almost everything. (obviously, or else we'd have to work on our curve. The exception is when I play against opponents so blind to the power of wayfarer that they actually keep playing land even though they need to stop. Then I keep just drawing a wasteland and a card per turn and they wonder why they get mana screwed. Of course this never happens when forbiddian and I test.)
Lastly, stifling shackles and other repeatable effects is not an excuse for stifle. One ought not merely to name a bunch of things stifle *can* target, but only things where one could conceivably want to stifle. (Actually, something stronger is required. (stronger since most cards people run are good.) This stronger requirement is that the stifle targets have to actually be on the average worth more than the card we're cutting. Let's stick to somewhat vague requirement of "good" for now though.)
It's just like the argument to run swords to plowshares is not to kill eager cadet or scornful egotist, but rather to kill tarmogoyf and the like. Only this time with stifle, there's no analog of tarmogoyf of which I'm aware. (As we stated, we don't agree that fetchlands are this analog.)
Counterbalance Thresh isn't too bad. It's a tough matchup, but I'm not scared of the Counterbalance part of it. Aether Vial plays out about half of our deck just right there. Also, we have a decent number of counters and Meddling Mage has proven pretty effective at stopping the two card combo. One trick is vialing him in or just casting him when the opponent puts their SDT on top of the deck. It's definitely hard AFTER the combo gets up, but assembling a two card combo with no redundancy at the start of the game happens fairly rarely and we have a lot of outs before that happens.
Even after CT hits the table (second game and third game) we have some sideboard removal, although we're often on the back foot if the game comes to that.
White Thresh IS a tough matchup, though. It depends a lot on luck and what the sideboards look like and what they choose to bring in.
Deed out and resolved sucks, and we're generally set back very much by Deed. But assuming that Deed just magically appears in play and wipes the board out isn't looking at the matchup correctly.
0) We play out Weathered Wayfarer and prevent you from getting to 3 land. Usually we don't draw him or you have a counter for it or removal, but keep in mind that this is our first line of defense against Deed.
1) It's hard to find (although I generally count on players being able to get the good cards out of their decks, it's worth noting that some games they just won't be able to draw one).
2) It's hard to get BG for Deed, even if they ignore trying to secure UU with basic lands, they still need at least two nonbasics out.
3) They need to be able to get BG without broadcasting Deed because we have potentially Meddling Mage.
4) If we don't overextend, they can usually only get a 2:1, sometimes a 3:1 trade with their Deed. Ancestral Visions does the same for us, effectively countering the Deed. Also, in general, we require way fewer lands than they do, so we usually have more business spells anyway.
5) Speaking of counters, yeah, we run 6. It's not inconceivable that they spend all this time setting up Deed and then we just have the Force of Will and keep playing.
6) It takes a turn to play Deed and a turn to activate. This gives us time to respond with sideboarded answers if it's game 2-3. Or if we get to three land first and get a bit of luck, we can play Aura of Silence and make it extremely difficult for them to play Deed.
7) Now Deed has presumably activated. We now might get back Epochrasite. If not that sucks. Maybe you're low on life and we can drop out another creature.
If you were able to Deed away all our threats and you still have a lot of life remaining and a big hand and lots of land in play and we don't have AV or Epochrasite suspended to try to recover, then NoGoyf seriously failed that game. I can't think of any way we'd let that happen without a fight except for like the Great Flood of 2008.
Yeah, Deed sucks for us, but NoGoyf is not UW Fish. We don't need 4 creatures on the table to set up an efficient clock. We also run more creatures total in the deck, so we recover faster, and again some of our creatures come back.
Lastly Weathered Wayfarer and Ancestral Visions are at least as scary for Deed Control as Deed is for us.
Don't get me wrong, I love this deck idea and absolutely hate tarmogoyf so am trying to find aggro decks that don't need him and can fight just as well against him, but stifle really does seem like a good card in this deck. The main reason to run it would be your terrible matchup to anything with Deeds + goyf. I can't see how this deck is going to come back from someone middle to late game (so you aren't usually holding removal in the form of swords) popping a deeds and laying down a goyf. None of your creatures can put up a decent fight vs goyf on their own.
You could argue that you'll just name that with Meddling Mage, but most decks with deeds either run StoP + vindicate, or Snuff out, or EE, or other cards that are going to first wreck your mage, and then nuke the board.
I'm also still not sold on your epochrasites. It may be more of just a cool card than a solid contender in here, and I haven't heard a convincing enough argument to validate it's spot in here. You've mentioned it as the worst creature slot in your deck and I'm in complete agreement.
The creature that should take it's place is logically Whipcorder. Don't drop me a point just yet, you really should try him out before any sort of judgment is made. A 2/2 for 2 makes sure he isn't terrible, while his ability is far better than epochrasite's at being a wall. His control aspect has slipped under the radar as being any sort of decent creature, but I feel he fits the current meta game so perfectly that he should be included.
Most decks only run 8 creatures (goyf, tombstalker), and almost every deck runs a goyf. Your white dudes have to either die to him to charge up your jitte enough to be a threat, or you chump block him and hope they don't get multiples. Whipcorder clears the path for your creatures against this creature low metagame, and ensures you don't have to worry about a goyf.
If you had more slots you could even throw in Ramosian Sergeant for good way to get card advantage. She works nicely with my previously mentioned combo-hoser Children of Korlis. Just disregard this paragraph though, I'm daydreaming of the days where fun decks could win tournaments.
I'll give you an example of what I mean by playing fetchlands well and what I mean by staying open:In "playing their fetchlands well", by which you mean playing their fetchlands around Stifle, the opponent is slowing down their gameplan considerably, which this deck seems quite capable of taking advantage of.
You're playing some deck with fetches against an unknown opponent. You're on the play. You play a land and immediately fetchland without passing the turn. Now Stifle does not affect you. I don't see how that slowed you down.
You're playing NoGoyf on the draw. Your opponent messed up. He has a fetchland that he didn't crack. You play out a Tundra and you have Weathered Wayfarer (or any other 1 drop) and Stifle in hand. Do you play the Wayfarer? If you do, you'll definitely miss out on any possible shot of Stifling. Even if your opponent had TWO fetchlands, when he sees that you're playing blue and tapped out, he'll run out his other fetchland and crack them before passing his next turn. Again, he's playing around Stifle, but I don't see how that slowed him down. If you don't play the Wayfarer to stay open for Stifle, well... I think I just proved my point about Stifle. It forces you to make suboptimal plays just to stay open.
What I was talking about with Brainstorm/Wayfarer is this very common situation:
You have two land in play and one in hand. Between those three, you have one fetch. Also in hand is a brainstorm as well as a decent two drop (and the dreaded Stifle). If you play your two drop and pass with the fetchland open (to stay open for Stifle) you run into some problems:
If they don't display a Stifle target and you try to brainstorm endstep, you're stuck with the garbage that you get. Best case scenario: You get a fetchland with your next draw, but you're still stuck with 4 land (which is too many, especially since you're bound to draw step into a few more during the rest of the game). Also there's a tiny chance that you draw two cards that you don't want and a fetch. A better chance is drawing no fetch and two cards you don't want. THAT sucks. Or worse you Storm into two land. jeez. Now you're running two extra dead cards over ideal play.
The other option if you passed your turn with fetch open (and they don't present a Stifle target on their turn) is to pass the endstep without trying to resolve Brainstorm. This is obviously unideal because it slows you down (but I think superior to Brainstorming without a fetch immediately open when I'm staring at a potential mana flood).
What you really want to do is Brainstorm immediately. You see if you get a better play than the two drop you had in mind. Also, if you draw into any extra land, you can shuffle it away and not get stuck with four (or potentially even five). That play is much, much better than staying open for Stifle (so much so that I'm sure my play would be to Brainstorm immediately and then shuffle away my Stifle).
The last alternative is that you leave the fetch open and they present a Stifle target. Again, you stranded your Brainstorm if you fetch and then Stifle. You're hoping to draw into fetchlands but at the same time land is dead weight. You wouldn't have had to bear that crap if you'd just mainphased the Brainstorm. Maybe you lucksack a mana screw on them with your Stifle or you stifle a surprise Deed, but whatever your Stifle did, it'd better make a huge impact because it slowed your brainstorm by a turn and left it stranded to the card gods and the top four cards of your deck.
A similar situation happens on turn 2 when you have hard land + fetch and you want to resolve Brainstorm and a 1-drop.
These are all situations where you have to play around your own deck in order to prevent Stifle from being a dead card (and one situation where you're opponent got a free +1 for not being an idiot and timing his turn properly).
It boils down to this: Unless you Stifle in the first turn or two, you're very unlikely to find a juicy fetchland target that will really set your opponent back. This deck cannot afford to waste its first turn staying open, as it runs like 11 one drops that are time sensitive not counting Brainstorm and Swords (unlike Team America, which has like 0 1-drops and can support Stifle disruption with Sinkholes).
I fail to see when you think you're going to cast Stifle or how this doesn't fuck up our gameplan. We always have a turn 1 drop. We always have a turn 2 drop. Either you postpone those plays indefinitely in order to try your luck at the Stifle game, or you play like normal for the first two turns and then try to Stifle something after your turn 3 (and even then, I listed a very common situation where Stifle is terrible on turn 3, pretty much that situation comes up every time you have a Brainstorm).
And we haven't even started to talk about what you'd cut for Stifle and how much more useful those would be. Someone suggested Vial, Epochrasite, Serra Avenger. Yeah. Clearly our primary threats are much less helpful to the deck than occasionally nabbing a poorly played third turn fetchland.
I don't get what there is to talk about Stifle, but I guess people really want to see ALL the analysis since it's great in Team America or Dreadstill. We don't run Sinkhole, we don't run Dreadnought, and we have 19 spells that cost 1 mana that we'd rather play than Stifle.
You could always play Stifle and Whipcorder: http://magiccards.info/di/en/141.html
The Guildmage also acts as landdestruction for fetches to prevent them from getting the few wasteland-proof lands they have.
Additionally he can tap more then one creature once you get to (sometimes it does happen) 6 mana.
Dunno how good he/she is, but looks like it might be considered to run.
Isn't this strategy basically incapable of beating, say, a fetchland? Your clock is fairly anemic and you don't have any burn so your Dazes get blanked pretty quickly and at that point virtually every spell in the Deed deck is insane and your relevant cards are Force, Jitte, and random small animals.0) We play out Weathered Wayfarer and prevent you from getting to 3 land. Usually we don't draw him or you have a counter for it or removal, but keep in mind that this is our first line of defense against Deed.
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
So, why exactly aren't you running 4 dazes? Isn't that the best way to capitalize on your mana disruption? I mean, when you're disrupting their mana, it makes daze so much better and functional. But not only that, it lets you return a land to your hand, which lets you abuse wayfarer even more.
But still...I don't see why preventing an opponent from getting to three mana is really super relevant in the format. Maybe two, but they have to get to that anyway. It just seems like a weak denial plan to me, compared to moon effects that just shut land down, or Team America that goes all out and wants to keep the opponent off 1 land.
We discovered burrenton forge tender. Seems to be better than BEB effects since it still functions as hate versus red, and it can still trade for a burn spell, but on top of all this, it is able to hate ichorid. We tested another 10 sideboarded games and I won 5 of them on nogoyf. (We alternated who played first, which actually really matters.)
However, since our chances of winning game 1 are rather poor, we calculated that we now have about a 44% chance of winning the match versus ichorid. That's not stellar, but it's good to know that we're not walking into the tournament ready to scoop a match just because of an unlucky pairing.
But now you still have a worse MU vs TES and ANT. I really don't get why you like Burrenton over Curse Catcher or Children of Korlis. Both of these would help a lot in any combo MU, and did you really want to replace your BEB with it? BEB will take out goblins and burning wish while Forge-tender sucks at pretty much everything. I would not agree with your current change.
And to answer my previous comment, have you tried Azorius Guildmage or Whipcorder in the Epoch slot. Epoch just isn't good enough and if you wanted a wall either of these two provide a much better one.
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).
Children of Korlis does not even stop the turn 1 win. Especially when I draw and resolve hate cards, I don't like them using their plan A and winning. COK is 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.
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.
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.
The matchups that I'm actually worried about with the shift away from BEBs are Dragonstompy and Aggroloam. Depending on your meta it might be better to keep BEBs in, and Ichorid is still a losing matchup with BFT, just it's at least possible to win. I think it went from like about 10% to 30%, maybe even 40%.
Ichorid sees less play after TES, but it's still a common enough matchup that the 20% increase in win ratio is pretty significant. Dragonstompy and Aggroloam are together as common as TES, but I don't think the trade between BEBs and BFTs will hurt the matchup 20%. Although getting Anarchied really sucks ass.
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.And to answer my previous comment, have you tried Azorius Guildmage or Whipcorder in the Epoch slot. Epoch just isn't good enough and if you wanted a wall either of these two provide a much better one.
This deck really doesn't have that much trouble with Goyfs or single-creature strategies anyway -- Swords, Jitte, and Jotun Grunt are typically enough.
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