Well thanks for those replies. Especially the part about taking a long time to become a good pilot. I have about 6 months experience with the deck and still find myself fizzling at points, etc; so I know I have a ways to go before I am decent with it. And Emrakul does not normally hit the board to be scary, I have done the Surgical Extraction trick; but then I find that I don't always have enough gas to Brainfreeze/BsZ the opponent out for the win (Basically I Fizzle it somewhere in the combo).
Cheers and good luck at all events you go to.
So did you just say you've started the Surgical operation, and cut the patients heart out, but it right next to the replacement heart and at random threw one of those into the bin and started stiching the one that was left into its place?
...err, what I meant to say was, yes, if you did the wish for surgical without enough gas left, then it was not a time to make that play yet. Instead just wish for a meditate or something to get more gas...
The pure "fizzle rate" has seriously diminished a HUGE amount due to the 3-4 reusable regrowths, when playing correctly. Naturally with mistakes, it is easy....
Oh, and; "Hello there mister Snapcaster, may I introduce you to a Sir Cunning wish and his friends; sir Echoing Truth and Ms. Twincast"...
(I just realised it is possible and relatively easy to wish every single card out of your sideboard, when one really wants to go for the overkill) ;)
Everyday you learn something new...
Cunning Wish is exiled on resolution. No flashbacking with Snapcaster.Originally Posted by Nuorukain
*cough cough* I was thinking more along the lines, of flashbacking the twincast that targeted the wish, but yes, realised that; no it still doesn't work, unless you play some pretty weird stuff... (like krosan reklamation or so) but nevermind, that ain't never feasible anyhow...
Ah, I feel such a fool now! ;)
I actually playtested two versions of solidarity that could loop itself; the goal being to drop kill conditions from the main and kill with Blue Sun's out of the board. This deck could actually Twincast Cunning Wish infinite times (and wish the whole board like you said). You can accomplish it with Brain Freeze and an Eldrazi (Kozilek, Butcher of Truth most probably) in the main or with Mnemonic Nexus out of the board.
In the end I dropped it because it was hard to play, and looping your deck around is probably the only thing to rival Stasis in the ranking of annoying plays.
I'm in the middle of a lot of testing (right now, to prove or disprove if Visions of Beyond is better than Opt) and a thought occurred to me. In my version, with 4 Snapcaster Mage main, is Blue Sun's Zenith in the board better than Stroke of Genius?
The thought is, in the few games where I need to stroke myself (lots of mana, and only a Cunning Wish), then Blue Sun's Zenith vs. Stroke of Genius is a wash; they're basically the same card. But then, if I need to also instant kill them, I need to find it again in the (usually much smaller) deck. The most efficient way to do that (usually) is to SCM Impulses to dig really quickly, but it would be way, way more efficient in that situation to just SCM the Stroke of Genius that's sitting in my grumper. In theory, if I had a bunch of Impulses in my hand but no Snapcaster Mage, then Blue Sun's Zenith would be better, but in practice, that never happens since I usually use my Impulses to try and continue the combo/find Meditates or Brain Freezes.
Thoughts? It's a very small corner case. I'm just having trouble thinking of very many situations where shuffling the BSZ back into the library is beneficial.
It probably actually doesn't matter considering after BSZ or Stroke resolves it should be GG.
Team FireBrothers
I kinda disagree with that statement. True, stroking yourself for a lot puts you in a great position, but if you need to also kill them immediately (say, with lethal burn on the stack), then you need to be able to cast a draw spell on them. With the only targeted draw in the deck being a single copy of Blue Sun's Zenith, there could conceivably be a situation where it gets difficult to find the BSZ in the deck. Or, at least, more difficult than if it were just sitting in the graveyard.
You've got an interesting question there. Stroke of Genius might be better than Blue Sun's Zenith in builds running Snapcaster Mage. But the difference is marginal at best, and only if you are in a very tight spot. If you resolve a Zenith or Stroke for anything more than 7, then it's GG. You'll be able to Force or Remand the burn on the stack, Turnabout their creatures, whatever. So you could just keep track of games you play where you Stroke yourself and then check whether Stroke or Zenith would be better. I think that playtesting Opt vs. Visions of Beyond is much more relevant.
Also, saw this Dark Ascension spoiler on the T.E.S. thread:
The Stroke vs BSZ question is probably only a once-in-thirty-games-or-so play, though I do often find myself stroking them for the last card, rather than messing with remands on their burn, etc. It's usually just way easier. It's just rather rare that I have to go so far as to stroke myself, but, clearly, it does happen.
Opt vs. Visions, so far, seems to be leaning towards Visions. The two are surprisingly close in terms of setting up, digging for land, etc., but then Visions just blows Opt away in terms of mid-combo power. There are times when you want it to be Opt, but so far it's 11-4 in Visions' favor.
I'm also testing the 13th Island vs. the 6th fetch. That one's a lot closer, and I think it may come down to whether or not you feel that that last point of damage is important in a faster format. Cutting into Brainstorm's power really sucks, but again, everything's a tradeoff.
As for that creature, I guess we'll see where he goes into a deck. There's already enough out there to make a BW hate deck that would just wreck us, and if one pops up, maybe Evacuation would be worth another look.
i have not yet tested with visions of beyond, but im guessing that if we are to play that, we prob have to up the brainfreeze count to at least 2-3, so we can use mid combo to fuel snapcaster and visions better.
Thought Scour: U - Instant
Target player puts the top two cards of their library into their graveyard.
Draw a card.
Plays well with Brainstorm and Visions of Beyond.
If that card was playable, someone would at least have tryed Mental Note already.
Super Bizarros Team. Beating everything with small green dudes and big waves.
Thought Scour is slightly better than Mental Note, but I'm not sure that we have room for another 1 mana cantrip.
Even so, it seems to be pretty bad. I really wish we could turn Visions of Beyond into Ancestral Recall, but using these bad cantrips doesn't seem to be the way to go.
# The Bizarro Super Powers Team
Well considering X is zero when you flash it back...
Edit: Yep, you can apparently set x to something besides 0. My apologies.
Last edited by Tammit67; 01-18-2012 at 09:20 PM.
Matt Bevenour in real life
...what? I'm not sure you understand how flashback works. Or casting cards, for that matter. I appreciate that you kind of want to further the discussion, or maybe want to prove that you're so incredibly smart, but an incorrect, one-line reply with flippant ellipses at the end is really much less productive than saying nothing at all.
Moving things along, I'm fully sold on Visions of Beyond as being strictly better in this deck, on average, than Opt. The full logic is that there are two situations where you could cast either card: in the setup role, or mid-combo to dig for more pieces.
In setup, the role of the 1-mana cantrip is to dig for land, almost exclusively. Opt will always have a chance of being better than Visions of Beyond in this situation, if only because VOB will almost never (except against Dredge or a particularly long control game) meet the requirements to have it's full effect. The question is, in what situations will Opt be better?
Let's consider the very common T1 Island, endstep cantrip. For Opt to be better than VOB here, the top card of your library has to suck (or else you would probably take it), the second card down has to be not land, and the third one has to be land. If the top card is good, like, say a High Tide, you're going to take it, or if it's land, mission accomplished. In either case, Opt and Visions of Beyond are identical. If the top card sucks, but the second card is land, again, the Opt and VOB are identical; you will be able to make your land drop by the time you legally can (after your next draw step). Only in the situation where the top two cards aren't land (but the third one down is) is Opt superior to Visions of Beyond, as it will allow you to continue to make your land drops on time. In testing, while casting Opt/Visions of Beyond in the setup role, Opt was superior 5 times, whereas Opt's benefit was irrelevant 19 times.
Mid-combo is a whole other matter. As I've played more and more games, the number of times when I've had to use Visions of Beyond as a mere cantrip mid-combo was extremely low. As such, there is only one instance where, if Visions of Beyond were Opt, I would have won. It was that particular case that caused me to look into this more rigorously, as I'd just been assuming that Visions was superior. But since then, in my testing, in casting this card-slot mid-combo, Visions was necessary to win 16 times, vs. the 1 time as Opt. In an additional 27 times that I cast the card mid-combo, it was irrelevant, in most of those games because I'd already had the means to win.
It should be noted though that, in my opinion, drawing cards >>> card selection. While the extra cards drawn may have been irrelevant in going off in over half of my games, in other situations, the extra cards drawing positively enabled me to win. Visions of Beyond opens up plays like pulling off a mini freeze against 3-4 counterspells, then using Visions to refill my hand against a defenseless opponent. Against Dredge, a difficult matchup that I test for all the time (as one of my teammates is one of the premiere Dredge players, both in Vintage and Legacy, in the country), the card draw makes it much easier to recover from getting your hand raped by multiple Cabal Therapys. Any matchup that presents discard + a fast clock can only be improved, if only by a small amount, by having Visions of Beyond main, rather than Opt.
For me, testing has borne out that Visions of Beyond is better than Opt by a margin of 16-6, and in the remaining 56 cases, the differences between the two were irrelevant. That's a large enough sample size that I can feel comfortable saying that Visions of Beyond is better than Opt a statistically significant amount of the time in this deck. The downside of VOB (digging for land in the setup phase) can also be lessened by simply tightening up your standards for keeping/mulliganing so that you don't have to lean quite as hard on the 1 mana cantrip to dig you into lands. There are certainly times when you will wish that Visions of Beyond is Opt. But almost three times more often, you're going to wish that Opt was Visions of Beyond.
What needs more testing is whether Peek is offering me enough of an advantage to stay in the main, over more copies of Visions of Beyond. I'm currently running a 2/2 split. Peek is such a weird card though, since you only really want to cast it once a game, but to get it consistently into the opening hand or within the first 2-3 draws, you need to run 3 or 4. 2 feels really random, and dropping it to 1 would be so random as to pretty much negate any benefit it's giving me, so I feel it's probably a 2-3 of, or none at all. But then, it's never dead, since it cantrips away for a single mana, so maybe I'm just getting greedy.
Opt see's 2 cards. Visions often see's one card. Visions might as well read U: Draw a card and 1 percent of the time draw 3 cards. Unless you build around visions i.e. you run 3 brain freeze, allowing you to get 20 cards in their graveyard or your graveyard with freeze relatively early in the combo. I could potentially see a new build of solidarity once DKA comes out utilizing visions via self mill cards like mental note, this mill 2 draw a card for U, and loads of one mana cantrips to be able to go through your deck quite fast.
If you snapcaster stroke/BSZ you determine X when you announce you're flashbacking stroke. X is only zero on cards when you use an alternate cost of payment i.e. with dream halls you can cast stroke for free pitching brainstorm per se but X will be zero.
On peek. I don't run peek anymore and you should just max out on VoB if you think it's better than opt because I'm of the opinion that peek is just worse than VoB; at least VoB can be an ancestral recall some of the time while peek is just a mere cantrip that provides good information some of the time.
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Opt doesn't actually work that way. You only get to see one card before making your decision. It's not half of an Impulse, it's half of a Preordain. What it does give you is a false sense of control over your draws, when in fact you only get to make a single choice: take the top card or not. Putting a good card on the bottom with Opt is always a gamble because the card that you're forced to draw will very likely be worse. You don't get the choice with Visions of Beyond, but I would argue that you usually don't get much of a choice with Opt, anyway.
I also didn't build my deck towards Visions of Beyond. I'm running two Brainfreeze with a third one in the board, which is, I believe, the median number. In fact, my build is only 6 cards off of the last build that we got from David Gearhart's (mono U), with 4 of those cards being Snapcaster Mages, and two being 2 Visions of Beyond over 2 Opt. It is, by all accounts, a more conservative build than you're probably running, and certainly a more conservative build than you have run in the past. (No Hunting Pack, no High Tide in the sideboard, no Intuition + Snap) But Visions of Beyond is Ancestral Recall 95% of the time mid-combo, and that is without making sub-optimal plays or bastardizing the deck simply to ensure that the card goes off. The card works. Very well.
I can understand your hesitancy, I suppose. I just started posting here a few days ago. But I have read the entirety of the thread, and was likely playing Solidarity before you were. I've done a lot of testing to come to the conclusions that I have. I ran 100+ games for this Visions of Beyond study alone. I'm not Gearhart, but I know what I'm talking about. If you don't believe me, test it yourself. If you can't make it work, then...I don't know. Maybe I'm just better than you. Or a savage cheater. I guess that's always an option.
Maybe we're playng this deck a little differently. If I want to dig for lands, I'll usually wait untill after my draw step to cantrip, because if I find the land I need "naturally" I can wait and make the right decision with Opt. Of course, with VoB this is irrelevant.
But consider a situation were you have 2 lands in play and no lands nor cantrips in hand (it doesn't matter how things get this bad). In your third turn, you draw Opt. If there's a land in you next 3 cards, you're not screwed. If you draw Visions Of beyond and your top deck is not a land, you're in bad shape.
# The Bizarro Super Powers Team
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