^ so good, captain.
I disagree with with the opening statement. While Crypt is strictly FASTER because it's free, strictly BETTER it is not.Originally Posted by IsThisACatInAHat?
-Yes, Crypt is free, but a one-shot effect. What you didn't mention was relics ability to slowly grind the Dredge players graveyard. Relic can simply sit on the table and chew a card a turn, disrupting the common g2 dredge tactic of slow-rolling. While they can dump more cards (via Tribe or PImp), that relic is forcing them to over-commit, or use a piece of anti-hate. If they over-commit, you pop relic. While this forces you to keep mana up, it also makes the dredge player either a) burn more potential threats to RFG, b) use a piece of hate (if they have it), or c) force the relic pop by dumping 2 dredgers. All these results are negative for the dredge player.
-Relic actually has a use against every other grave-related deck EXCEPT Aggro-Loam due to their chalice at 1, which they side out on the draw. Relic can shrink goyf, knight, terravore, stop lavamancer, EE recursion via Academy Ruins, vengevine and other survival deck tricks. Dredge isn't a terrible matchup for Merfolk. We run counters to stop the discard outlet, cursecatcher to break bridges (and possibly counter something good), and depending on list you have either jitte, plague, or spell pierce SB, and you run dudes who can put on a clock. If you can stop the DR, you can win the match. So why put narrow cards in your sideboard when an equally effective card that can occasionally be used in other matchups is available?
Crypt is a great card, but we don't worry about OUR graveyard. Crypt is just a one-shot boo-boo for dredge. Relic can at least grind and grind until they have the answer to it. And really, how often do you get the perfect curve draw? The one where you NEED to spend every mana available to you on your turn? I doubt very often.
"Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk."
"You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?"
"If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from A to B."
Re: Relic 'grind and grinding' against Dredge. They have an ability to dump a lot of cards, and can dredge a lot more each turn. Grinding by one a turn does nothing vs a Dredge deck, they have ample chaff they can get rid of. I'd say a mix of either Crypt/Macabre and Propaganda is ideal against Dredge. Both cards slow them down and attack them from different angles. This means in Game 3 they may dilute their deck with more counter-answers. Macabre comes out of nowhere so has a surprise factor, costs 0 mana and can hit the cards you want to. Combined with Propaganda, any artifact hate they brought in is now dead (tho may be aimed at Vial, no huge loss tho). I know I have lost to a Bant player before playing Dredge as he boarded in Propaganda and countered my Chain of Vapor. Just my 2c anyways!
On a different note, has anyone done much testing against UG Survival Madness? I'm guessing a Saito-ish build would have an edge over '16-lord' due to SB options. Keen to hear any testing results in this space with either version.
Only the heroic and the mad follow mountain goat trails.
It's important to note that I said Crypt is better than Relic specifically "in Merfolk" even if that's not true for other decks or in the abstract. Against Dredge specifically, they've got tons of chaff to pitch once it bins and even a slow Dredge plan is almost definitely more than 1 card per EOT can match. The tap is essentially irrelevant, so the question is, "is cantripping worth 2 mana?" at which point the question becomes more obvious.
Merfolk is undeniably mana-intensive: Waste, Vault, Daze, Commander and now Pierce all demand attention. For a deck that plays to win in the midgame trading long-term resilience for short-term tempo gains, it's unreasonable to expect to have 2 free mana when you absolutely must be developing your board. The difference is probably less than I make it sound, but the truth is Saito, Bertoncini and Rohner (the 3 most successful Legacy Merfolk players) all use Crypt for the above reasons and probably more.
Edit- guy above beat me to it in fewer words
Great success!
That is terrible, relic is 100x better then crypt vs dredge or any other graveyard deck for that matter.No way the tap is irrelevant and the cantrip is never irrelevant. All you need to beat dredge is 4 force, 4 daze, 4 cursecatcher, 4 relics.. even better with some echoing truths and wastelands. Any card you hold in your hand is terrible vs dredge, there is no surprise factor. They have cabal therapy so holding anything but counters in your hand is bad.
Any one that thinks Saito's list is good vs madness (or zoo) is just wrong. Perish is pretty terrible and is complete suckage vs madness. Merfolk can't play any sorcery speed spells esp when they are comboing off on their turn while you are holding perish..... So good
Swords is still the best splash
I disagree that Perish is terrible against Madness. It allows to Merfolk player to clear every single creature off the Madness players side (besides Aquamoeba if they play it). Unless they get the most broken hand, they probably can't kill you that turn. It should be used to get rid of the Hierarchs and Mongrels ASAP so you take away most of their outs besides Survival. Honestly, if they don't have Survival out, they're stone cold to Perish.
Which leads to the second point of White being the best splash since you get Swords and PtE for the Vengvines and Seal of Cleansing (my personal choice) for the Survivals/Jittes.
i would say that even with survival, it's not so easy to recover from perish.
They have to topdeck another creature card , discard it to SotF, search for a rotwalla, discard with madness to search for another rotwalla and discard it again...basically they need GGG in a turn, and they always fetch for duals, so your wasteland shine. Wastelands win matches against Vengevine surv., just try to keep em away from GGG.
Are you into Jazz? Have a look at the Lp's I have for sale on Discogs!
Do keep in mind that dredge loses something like 1/4th of its games to itself. I've won most of the game 1's where I had any sort of countermagic to stop their discard outlet.
That said, I finally cut all my discard hate a couple weeks ago. I realized that I never wanted to bring it in against decks like aggro loam, lands, intuition loam, control, stax, or enchantress because it did the exact opposite of my main plan, which is to out-tempo them and kill them with stupid bad blue creatures.
I can't speak for those who run the black sideboards, but as a mono blue player I now have 4x Propaganda in my sideboard. Mainly they're for goblins, elves, and merfolk. The thing about dredge, though, is they absolutely can't beat a Propaganda. Even if they manage to get two lands going you can usually just Wasteland one. To me it just seems like a much better use of sideboard space.
Saying the grind ability of relic is "irrelevant" or "does nothing" shows how much testing you two have done against dredge. They do have the ability to dump lots of cards, but they don't want to. The only chaff they have in their hand would be drawn narcs, excess land, and maybe an extra discard outlet. Everything else is a possible threat, or will lead to a possible threat. The grinding ability is simply an EXTRA feature on an already effective hate card. Besides, if you're running the Saito version, you already have a better match against dredge than any other version of Folk. Engineered Plague on Illusion, Horror, or Zombie is already backbreaking enough, especially when dredge only has 4 claims to deal with it (most dredge players don't side in chain g2 because it's generally not necessary). I know this only because I have PLAYED dredge against variations of merfolk and very often, the Blue Man Group wins it. The Saito version need not worry about Dredge. And although Merfolk does sacrifice late-game power for early tempo advantage, relic is simply a better topdeck against non-dredge grave decks. Drawing a card is EXTREMELY relevant. Crypt is just inferior against other decks. And I'll repeat my closing statement of my last post: Why side narrow cards against an already EVEN matchup when an equally effective card that is not as narrow exists?
On the note of UG Madness, I've found that it is very even, and winning the die roll is hot tech against them. On the play they will drop a mana dude, then often follow up with a survival backed up by pierce/daze/fow. From that point on, you pretty much lost. On the draw, if you MD spell pierce, you are favored. Keeping mana up to pierce their Survival/Intuition (just as dangerous as survival) will stunt their growth dramatically. They also have no removal for lords so your dudes can quickly get out of hand. Just be careful of Wonder out of nowhere. He can completely win the game out of nowhere with unblockable hasty vengevines.
Throw in you chosen grave-hate, jittes, and spell pierces if you don't MD them for standstills and some number of cursecatchers/dazes. They will have Grip post side, so don't get to greedy with your Crypt/Relic.
EDIT: Malakai made an excellent statement in the post before mine: Dredge WILL spontaneously self-destruct every 5 games or so. It just happens. Some games dredge will do what it does and blow you out on t3-t4 through force/daze/pierce/cursecatcher/whatever, and some games it will randomly shit out nothing on it's dredges or mull to oblivion. This combined with the fact that dredge is a difficult deck to play post-side, make self-implosions quite common, regardless of dredge build. Unless you are playing against Parcher or someone who has been playing and testing for an equal amount of time, you can often lure dredge to burn up anti-hate and counter it. They also tend to make your cursecatchers counterspells AND bridgebreakers.
"Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk."
"You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?"
"If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from A to B."
as a dredge player that spends half his playtesting time against merfolk(and now survival) Relic is much better than Crypt against me since all i want to do dredge. i want to DDD and THEN start casting outlets & draw. Relic forces me to 'play fair' and resolve an outlet before i am swum over by fish.
For against Zoo:
Has anyone tried running
tidal warrior
stifle
wasteland
stifle their fetches, wasteland their duals, and tidal warrior their basics into islands during their upkeep... mana locking them?
Hey all,
Any recommendations for a sideboard against an unknown meta where there will probably be a mix of casual or underdeveloped decks, possibly kitchen-table type decks? Using a standard monoblue list.
I take it that by "casual or underdeveloped decks", you mean random jank, which folk' happen to be pretty good against.
I would go with:
3-4 spell pierce between the main and the side
3 artifact grave hate of your choice (relic/crypt)
~2 threads of disloyalty, because random decks often incorporate green, and if there's green, there's goofy in there somewhere.
3-4 Hydroblast/BEB if you think people will be running red jank like RDW, Sligh, Burn, ect.
2 Kira, because she's just awesome against a range of stratagies.
2 echoing truth, because people love to bring in their random artifacts/enchantments to the kitchen-table and truth is a catch-all solution to a lot of stuff that can sometimes come out of nowhere.
If it's a truly unknown and random metagame, try to diversify as much as possible. But do your best to be prepared against the typical bad matchups of Zoo and Gobs, and Goyf.dec. Everything else you should have a 50/50 chance or better.
"Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk."
"You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?"
"If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from A to B."
Thanks for the suggestions. I don't have time to get kira before I play, so how about 2 jitte in her stead?
Jitte would be a good proxy for Kira. Once you get Kiras be sure to drop the Jittes.. those 2 cards are like Whitney and Bobby.
I disagree with this. Merfolk will win a decent number of games against "casual or underdeveloped decks" just by nature of running much stronger cards than scrub decks, but it's not as good as something like combo or Zoo that runs a whole bunch of broken cards. Merfolk is a top tier deck in Legacy more because it is metagamed to beat other good (blue) decks, rather than because it's inherently broken.
First of all, please read my post. I never said Merfolk was broken, and in fact just made a statement that said "fish is good against random crap". I didn't elaborate further because anybody who has played the deck for a few weeks knows this and why.
1) The deck is a Blue Aggro-deck. Swinging with dudes who get big fast and often have evasion while countering relevant spells for free or U is ballin'.
2) No card hoses the deck. There is no perish for blue dudes. No grave to hate. No effective angle of attack other than "kill as many lords as possible as fast as possible and try to kill them in the process.
3) Wide variety of sidedeck options giving fish great versatility post-side.
Of course fish is not broken. Neither is Zoo for that matter. Neither is Combo without MT. In fact, I can't think of one deck in Legacy that is currently warping the format. Everything is pretty balanced/fair. Merfolk just happens to be the most-blue deck and by far the most (keyword here) CONSISTENT. Otherwise you would have seen a lot more Zoo lists at the GP.
"Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk."
"You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?"
"If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from A to B."
Merfolk is good against random decks because all it has to do is stick to it's plan... Which is to disrupt your opp and put them on a clock with creatures.
I would agree with this but I think survival madness is really strong and it is tearing up the formatIn fact, I can't think of one deck in Legacy that is currently warping the formatSeems like a tough matchup for Merfolk.
Surviival madness is not bad at all, I helped my best friend make it before it became popular at GP columbus and it all comes down to keeping the right hand, you have to counter the survival and they may or may not have counter magic. I found the versions running spell pierce to be much more efficient. If they do land a survival or get a crazy mongrel/aquamoeba/vengvine/rootawalla start, you can sometimes race with Lord and islandwalk but the smart survival madness players will only keep one island or sometimes none at all, just be smart not to run in to daze for his island when you can race.I would agree with this but I think survival madness is really strong and it is tearing up the format
SB gets easier for us with our graveyard hate but make sure to be prepared for stifle. My friend runs a transformational natural order progenitus sideboard so he can avoid GY hate and enchantment hate altogether.
Like when reanimator blewup from GP madrid no one was prepared to play against it and it did well until people started learning correct plays against it and correct SB cards, same with survival madness now.
You misinterpreted what I said, but essentially, while Merfolk is one of the top decks in the format, it's not one of the first decks I would bring to smash a field of junk decks. It preys on "good" decks in the format, particularly the blue based ones that run non-basics which try to do broken things. I'm not sure why you would have brought up "more Zoo lists at the GP", because the GP is far from a scrub metagame, and from a cursory glance of the top finishers, you'll see it was a metagame hostile to Zoo but relatively weak to Merfolk.
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