[Deck] Fetchland Tendrils

[Bahamuth]

I run a full set of Petals, and I don't think I want to change that any time soon. The Petals actually make your mana work much better. I'm very often able to win through a Wasteland because I have acces to black or white from Petal. Another advantage is that it makes the sideboard EtW much better.

I don't like running the ToA mainboard. The only really relevant pile where you need the ToA, is a double cantrip pile without SDT. That pile costs just 1 more mana without the ToA main though.

[Pulp_Fiction]

Number of Petals is debatable, but I always preferred 3-4. I guess I just like lists that are more explosive hence why I play Emrakul main. Most of the lists I see now pack such little acceleration, it seems like you are trying to be a consistent turn 4-5 deck. Petals fix mana, add storm, help against Wasteland, and speed the deck up, especially with Emrakul. However, I have always seemed to take a different approach to this deck, but each meta is different.

Cutting Tendrils just seems bad ... all over the place. They dabbled with that concept in TES a LONG time ago when MT was still legal ... and it always sucked. There were random placings with it ... but overall its just kind of wrong to put all of you eggs in one basket. BW is good but should not be the only way 2 win.

@Jeff: I actually played Needle in the main before and ... really liked it sometimes. Overall its just clunky and usually a 100% dead topdeck. Maybe it needs another try though. Its just I am not worried about Wasteland at all. The first time u play the Faeries trick they don't expect it, but if they start keeping Wasteland open ... sweet, all that does is play into my plan and slow them down, giving me additional time to setup the Tendrils kill. The only dead draw is Emrakul. Faeries cycle and cantrip into a pile if needed and SI is damn good by itself. Half the time I just run it out there and stick a land under it (if I don't find a cantrip) to filter Top and give me a new set of cards to look at. I realize Wasteland is everywhere but it doesn't make the plan bad and I like having access to non-storm kills.

[Chikenbok]

Pulp, in a meta like mine that involves almost 100% of decks packing 20+ counterspells, stifle, wasteland, etc. would you consider swapping out the emrakul plan or, if not - perhaps splashing a 4th color (white) for silence/chant?

I don't want to give up playing the deck but a duress that shows 7 blue cards is sometimes hard to fight through and having a 4c manabase seems like a complete problem in a world of wasteland.

I've been sticking to a 3c UBw list but Burning Wish's piles and flexibility seem to be giving it serious warrant.

[Bahamuth]

Cutting Tendrils just seems bad ... all over the place. They dabbled with that concept in TES a LONG time ago when MT was still legal ... and it always sucked. There were random placings with it ... but overall its just kind of wrong to put all of you eggs in one basket. BW is good but should not be the only way 2 win.

What's this based on? I don't ever intend to win with Tendrills through anything but Doomsday. If we look at useful Doomsday piles strictly, you can see the mainboard ToA doesn't help much at all. This deck functions completely differently from what TES is trying to do.

Saying something is wrong without argument doesn't sound convincing to me. I need a very good reason to run a completely dead card in my mainboard.

[Namida]

Last question for the evening - I understand the mandatory 1 of petal in the deck but why is it that some people chose to run a full set, sometimes 3. I suppose the question is, in a deck that isn't designed to simply crap out 10 storm and pew pew the opponent, are petals really optimal after the first?

I play four Lotus Petal because that's how the deck was handed to me when I first started playing it. I'm learning how to play the other versions of the deck that people are posting, but I currently have four Lotus Petal, four Infernal Tutor, and Ill-Gotten Gains. So basically, the way I play the deck, it *is* designed to be able to crap out ten storm. I don't end up playing against a lot of blue, so being able to use Ill-Gotten Gains or a pass the turn pile on turn two is very nice, and having so many ways to get the mana to enable either of those is what the extra Lotus Petals are for. That being said, if you're not playing Ill-Gotten Gains because you hate it or because you play against a lot of blue, I'd say that going down to the one Lotus Petal is probably for the best.

[Dark Ritual]

I run 1 lotus petal currently. The reason I'm not running 3 is because cabal ritual is better IMO since it lets you cast doomsday a lot easier than petal when you don't have BB available prior to petal. And you can reach threshold quite a bit with this deck in my experience, making cabal ritual quite lucrative and making it so you aren't required to have LED for meditate mana but instead you just cast a threshed cabal ritual and have a blue land untapped for meditate.

Cutting tendrils from the main isn't the worst idea but it also isn't the best. Sometimes I like raw drawing the tendrils into my hand for a mini storm or against those annoying stoneblade decks with loads of countermagic so I can just raw tendrils them out.

On shelldock isle plan. I might decide to run it in the SB since the reanimator MU is horrid in my experience and shelldock makes the MU a whole lot better since a resolved doomsday = GG's against them usually unless they can race us.

[tangram]

On shelldock isle plan. I might decide to run it in the SB since the reanimator MU is horrid in my experience and shelldock makes the MU a whole lot better since a resolved doomsday = GG's against them usually unless they can race us.

They don't need to race us. Pithing Needle, Angel of Despair and Terastodon can be their outs if you can't COF SI.
Still I agree: its our best plan vs Reanimator. I was also having problems with Reanimator and SI + Emaruk improved the matchup A LOT.

[Pulp_Fiction]

@chikenbok: I think you can tune Emrakul to beat that but .. I wouldn't bother. I would run a slow 17-18 UBw list in that meta. I would not run Burning Wish at all since I would imagine blue-blasts are everywhere. The Burning Wish stacks are good, but those decks give you ample time to setup, and when running 4: Top, BS, Ponder, and Probe ... u will find what you are looking for, and if u don't like IT, then u can always run LDV.

@bahamuth: Meddling Mage: Burning Wish .... lose. My reasoning behind not cutting Tendrils and relying on BW is just simply ... its a bad idea. Maybe if u were also running Emrakul main but ... no, its just bad. Against decks with lots of counters the mini-Tendrils wins a lot of games. You also win some portion of your games on Meditate ... get there with Tendrils. The deck is DDFT ... I can not see any logical reason for cutting the T. Even though when running Burning Wish my primary pile is: Meditate, Petal, LED, LED, BW with Top in play .... what if Top isn't in play and I have marginal mana floating after DD? I have to cantrip into it and can't win with BW and have to build: Meditate, Petal, Rit, Rit, Tendrils. Removing Tendrils seems like a particularly bad plan if you are running a slower 4c list as well since ... you don't play a lot of acceleration anyway. Why handicap the deck and lose games you shouldn't just cause Tendrils isn't there?

Emrakul is just fucking amazing against Reanimator and if you are running discard it gets even better. You just Duress, take Entomb, DD .. go. Don't even need to worry about what they are going to reanimate, and even when running Chant ... just DD .. go and Chant upkeep. You can keep them off the plan and annihilate them. The matchup is really pretty good with SI, just don't go hurling DDs out there until you are ready to win and know if your opponent has any viable answers.

On the other side of making Emrakul better, I am going to start experimenting with Gigadrowse. EOT tap them out and use Cloud to get there, doesn't seem like the worst plan and it buys you time against aggro. This is totall untested but I am just trying to find ways to better abuse the card since it requires such little investment 2 win.

[mdc1010]

How does the DD into Emrakul plan work?

[Chikenbok]

4 Polluted Delta
2 Underground Sea
2 Tundra
2 Volcanic Island
1 Island
2 Flooded Strand
2 Scalding Tarn
1 Swamp
1 Plains

4 Brainstorm
4 Dark Ritual
3 Doomsday
4 Burning Wish
1 Tendrils of Agony
4 Orim's Chant
3 Silence
4 Ponder
1 Rain of Filth
4 Gitaxian Probe
1 Ideas Unbound

1 Lotus Petal
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
4 Sensei's Divining Top


'Thar She Blows.

[Chikenbok]

Fun question: Can you win through this?

Opponent has Chalice on 1, and show and tells an Emrakul into play. They're tapped out playing 12 post - your opponent is at 19 life.

You have LED, Dark Rit, Cabal Rit, Cabal Rit, Doomsday, Ill-Gotten Gains, Tendrils in hand.

You've got 2 underground seas and a tundra in play, and your graveyard consists of 2 fetchlands and a brainstorm - you're at 18 life.

What do you do?

[Lejay]

I concede.

[tangram]

Yeah I see 7 storm + TOA dealing 16 life loss. More than that I can't see how, after-all you can't draw into DD with BS as Chalice is at 1.

[bennotsi]

I agree with tangram here. Either you forgot to mention something or there is simply no way you can draw into your pile and make enough storm.

@mdc1010: You cast Doomsday and make sure that in your 5 cards there is at least a Shelldock Isle and an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. You can then cast a draw spell to draw the Shelldock Isle and play the land the same turn. You can also just pass the turn two times, one turn to draw the land, one turn before you can use it, to cast Emrakul and get an extra turn. You should get two attacks before you are forced to draw a card from an empty library. You can also include a Doomsday in your pile to make a new deck of 5 cards and gain a few extra turns.

[Chikenbok]

So Forsythe is talking already about the banning of Misstep... Does Combo get to come off of the benches now or rather, does counterbalance come back out to make sure we don't do bad things on turn 2.

[Namida]

I mean, if counterbalance becomes popular, don't you just kill with Emrakul?

[tangram]

@ Chikenbok
Is he? Can you post a link or something? (evil grin)
I think the next banned announcement should be on the 20th. Can someone confirm?

Counterbalance can be solved with SI + Emrakul. In fact some ANT/TES sideboards when out of their way to have DDs, SI and Emrakul on their boards. For DDFT it's just 2-4 slots (Emrakul, SI, COF and maybe Pithing Needle/Wipe Away).

[Sims]

It's in the B/R discussion thread... Basically he was asked during PT Philly if they have any plans for Legacy considering Missteps dominance and he said (paraphrasing) that they "designed the card not expecting it to have quite this impact and felt that they would be having a discussion about it for the upcoming B/R announcement"

[Chikenbok]

http://www.channelfireball.com/home/...o-tour-philly/

Run in about 11 minutes and wait for Forsycthe to come on - you'll see what I'm talking about. Yes, the announcement will be this coming Tuesday, the 20th of September so lets all cross our fingers.

[GGoober]

Fun question: Can you win through this?

Opponent has Chalice on 1, and show and tells an Emrakul into play. They're tapped out playing 12 post - your opponent is at 19 life.

You have LED, Dark Rit, Cabal Rit, Cabal Rit, Doomsday, Ill-Gotten Gains, Tendrils in hand.

You've got 2 underground seas and a tundra in play, and your graveyard consists of 2 fetchlands and a brainstorm - you're at 18 life.

What do you do?

2 Seas, 1 Tundra (UUB)

1) Drit (UUBBB)
2) Crit (UUBBBB)
3) Crit (UUBBBBB)
4) LED
5) IGG (UUB), dump hand return [Drit, BS, DD]
6) Drit (UUBBB)
7) DD (UU), crack LED in response for any color e.g. B (UUBBB) into a pile of [Med, LP, Drit, Probe, ToA]
8) BS (UBBB)
9) Med (B)
10) LP for black (RB)
11) Drit (RBBB)
12) Probe (RBBB)
13) ToA

13 storm, 26 life swing GG.

At 7), you can basically get any pile that wins since you have an LED in play which helps alot. If you're playing BW, you can crack LED for red, and then go for a wish pile. The LP in the pile at 7) could be a Drit, if you cracked LED for black. Once you can get to the DD pile, it's easy. Now, if you're going to make the question harder, by playing around Misstep, I'm afraid you would have to scoop it up.

I have a spreadsheet that actually helps me build and analyze piles :)

EDIT: NVM, HE HAS A CHALICE@1. It's GG simply because you can get a pile but never draw into one. If Emrakul isn't in play, you can make a Pass the turn pile and win, but oh well. RTFPost