Congratulations on the finish, it's very impressive, and thanks for sharing the report! I really like your deck, even though I rarely play unfair combo decks, as I've mentioned here before, one of the two times I ever laughed while losing a serious tournament Magic match was agaisnt Eureka. It's sick, when it gets to do what it wants.
Also, is there a video up for the deck tech yet?
The reason Preordain is good isn't just because of the card draw, but because it lets you see up to three cards when you're trying to dig for something. The next best option in this regard would probably be Serum Visions, but that's only if you want to go past 12 cantrips.Originally Posted by mrblueduck
Thank you very much!
Thank you!
The deck tech was an article, not a video; it can be found here. If you have any questions about the deck, please feel free to ask them on this thread and I'll be happy to respond.
Congrats man! Well done. I've also tinkered around with Show and Tell an Eureka. I've tried a lot of different approaches including Mosswort Bridge, Dreadnought and Stifle as well as a Personal Tutor build. The added utility (Eye of Nowhere or Personal into Sylvan Tutor) was cute but too slow and clunky.
I like your build and I'm impressed you did so well. I'm really looking forward to watching the coverage. I'll have to wait until I get home because I'm at work but watching you beat a top tier deck with this monstrosity sounds hella fun.
I've been planning on buying Eurekas someday. If they increase in value I'll hold you responsible!
Me and my test group were playing with Nicol Bolas around 8 months ago. The big difference between our build and yours is the following.
We didn't play any Angel of Despairs, although I can see why that would be a good inclusion. We played Mossworth Bridge in addition to Eureka and Show and Tell. It gives you even more angles of attack and makes the deck more consistent. It also allows you to put Nicol Bolas under a Mossworth Bridge, so the awkward Show and Tell/Bolas situations are offsetted by more awesome Bridge and Eureka activations. We ran 4 emrakul, 4 progenitus and 1 or 2 Nicol Bolas, so our bomb-count was lower.
At some point we also tested out Jace 2.0, but I'm not sure if that is good enough. The brainstorms help sculpt your hand though, and the occasional Jace+Nicol Bolas eureka is awesome. I personally played with only 2 Misdirections and some dazes, but the meta was different back then, so I don't know.
We also tried 1 dryad arbor to avoid edict-effects against us using fetchland, and Noble Hierarchs vs Lotus Petals for more explosion.
Congratulations on the finish.
That's funny. Bruizar is talking about me/us here. What are the odds?
BTW if you like Nicol Bolas as much as I do, you could also try Dream Halls with Time Stretch and Nicol Bolas. It allows you to ramp Nicol Bolas to ultimate and go off before your opponent gets a turn. I think there are definite-2-card kill conditions with dreamhalls, but imo this is the coolest finish there is :-)
Yep :-) ReinVos has a lot of experience with this deck.
Awesome feature match. Too bad he had the misers O-Ring for your Nicol Bolas. I think you played it really well. I don't get why your opponent left in the Spell Snares (common logic that Spell snare is horrible against Show and Tell decks) and Swords to Plowshares (way too narrow when there's only two Blightsteel Colossus). But all in all it was an exciting feature match.
When playing this deck I used to have trouble against Vendilion Clique (Can't be Misdirected or Spell Pierced) and is an excellent response to a Show and Tell or Eureka. In the feature match, your opponent didn't have any Cliques, but what are your thoughts on this? How do you deal with it? Stoneblade and Bant are popular decks so running into Clique isn't all that uncommon.
Thank you both for your encouragement and support!
To bruizar: The Bridge seems interesting, but it looks like a win-more on paper. There's no way to assure you'll get a bomb on the top, and the fact that it comes into play tapped and can get blown up by Wasteland. The fact that you also have to wait another turn means the game will probably be over when you swing. My playgroup suggested Jace (one member in particular was adamant about him), but I've found he just typically just Brainstorms once and dies a horrible death. I played around with the ideas of Noble/Petal/Spirit Guide, but I wanted the consistency of the cantrips instead of the explosiveness that the mana ramp spells provided. Also, Daze is just worse than Misdirection in my opinion because they can just pay and force their counterspell through.
To ReinVos: Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a problem with VClique before. It happened to me only once, and I just drew another bomb to drop into play. You really should pick those Eurekas though. The deck is so much fun to play.
Maybe Reinvos can post the list we used to work with.
The idea of the list was
4 Phyrexian Dreadnought
4 Emrakul
4 Progenitus
1/2 Nicol Bolas, I won't tell you our pet name for the card
4 Stifle
4 Mossworth Bridge
4 Show and Tell
3/4 Eureka
The lines of play are:
Show and Tell - Emrakul / Progenitus
Stifle - Dreadnought, or stifle wasteland
Mossworth Bridge / Dreadnought - Activate bridge in response to Dreadnought. You can put any card on Bridge, including Nicol Bolas, Stifle or another Dreadnought (Dreadnought eats the Dreadnought being cast. Or cast stifle for free and use it on the dreadnought that you cast to activate Mossworth Bridge
Eureka - Anything, including Nicol Bolas, not so hot with Dreadnought.
That's 4 ways of cheating a fatty into play. Mossworth Bridge is reliable with Brainstorm/Ponder, but yes, sometimes you don't flip a creature. One thing that's very important to understand about Mossworth Bridge is that it gives you an extra turn with Emrakul, so it's actually better than Eureka or Show and Tell when it goes off.
@Daze/Misdirection. I think you are right. If I recall correctly, I think ReinVos was more in the camp of Daze whereas I was more in the camp of Misdirection. Perhaps he could give his rationale for using daze, but remember, this was a while ago so the meta was very different.
I think your choice to play without lotus petals/esg/noble hierarch is a good one. I actually can't believe we never tried ESG, because it is like a lotus petal that can double as protection against edicts. That said, perhaps you don't want to ramp and only draw cards that will win you the game. The ramp of the deck should be Ancient Tomb or City of Traitors.
I just ran a hypergeometric distribution in excell to calculate the odds of flipping atleast one creature, stifle or nicol bolas. The chance of having one in your opening hand is 91.65% with 17 4xstifle/1x bolas/4x dreadnought/4x emrakul/4x progenitus. With an extra Nicol Bolas the chance is 93.01%. For simplicity case, let's assume we have one less of those cards in our deck, because it landed in our opener. That leaves us with 16 or 17 cards that we want to flip. The chance to hit one of the remaining 16 cards is 77.45%. The chance to hit one of 17 cards is 79.88%. This assumes a first turn Mosswort Bridge. This means, in roughly once every 4 or 5 times you play Mosswort Bridge, you are going to find chaff. This doesn't take into account the fact that you can use cantrips to put back bombs stuck in your hand, nor scenarios where you look at the top 3 cards, find nothing and then choose to shuffle with ponder or fetchlands.
That list seems more like a new spin on Aeon Bridge. It does seem very interesting though, and I will sit down and play with some of the numbers.
At the time, this is what we played:
4 Show and Tell
3 Eureka
4 Ponder
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
3 Stifle
4 Phyrexian Dreadnought
4 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
3 Progenitus
1 Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker
4 Lotus Petal
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Flooded Strand
1 Polluted Delta
3 Tropical Island
2 Island
1 Forest
3 Mosswort Bridge
3 Ancient Tomb
The reason I liked Daze instead of Misdirection is the more aggressive approach this deck takes. Danny's deck tries to make land drops and cantrips until it hits three or four mana, then it blasts a (protected) Show and Tell or Eureka. I can see why Daze isn't very good then. As long as the opponent knows what he's up against, he will be more than happy to leave open at least one mana.
This build is probably a turn faster on average, making Daze more relevant. Also, sometimes Stifle and Daze worked well together in stopping the opponent from executing their gameplan. In testing, we had a lot of trouble beating this deck with storm. The combination of Force of Will, Daze, Stifle and a serious clock was hard to deal with.
The manabase was the thing that bothered me most. Only eighteen lands (three of them come into play tapped) and four Petals made it difficult to reliably cast Eureka. So we soon found out that Eureka was only good when we had no other way to combo, or when our opponent countered our first attempt(s) at going off. This is another reason why I chose Daze over Misdirection. The redundancy of the deck allows the pilot to try and go off two or three times before it rolls over.
I think this build might be reasonable right now. In a format where Lightning Bolt is good, Phyrexian Dreadnought is even better. At the time, Dreadnought was like plan Z. If I really had nothing better to do, I would Stifle a Dreadnought into play and keep my fingers crossed. Needless to say, the Giant Robot bit the dust more often than not. Right now, Canadian Threshold, Delver Burn, Team America (with Go for the Throat as removal of choice) and Storm are weak to Dreadnought.
I wrote a short primer on the deck on mtgsalvation. You can find a lot of my reasoning behind the list over there. It's old, but some of the ideas still hold true in today's meta.
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=331019
I'm really curious what you think, Danny.
I actually made my own version last night. I've just been goldfishing with it, but here is what I came up with:
4x Emrakul
4x Progenitus
4x Dreadnought
4x Eureka
4x Show and Tell
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
4x Misdirection
4x Stifle
2x Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker
4x Mosswort Bridge
4x Tropical Island
4x Misty Rainforest
2x Flooded Strand
2x Windswept Heath
2x Ancient Tomb
2x City of Traitors
1x Forest
1x Island
I went with Misdirection over Daze just because of how well it performed for me in this style of deck. I also felt that this build really doesn't want the tempo loss of having to bounce a land back to your hand that Daze gives. While it is true that Daze + Stifle can mess up their game plan, I feel that the protection spells in a combo deck are to protect your game plan. You're doing much more powerful things than they are, so if you can go off it doesn't matter what they've done. For that same reason, I upped Stifle to four. Wasteland is very big right now, and I don't want my Bridge to get blown up. I didn't think about Petal/ESG just on the basis of how the previous deck ran, but it could be right in this build. I also have 22 lands in this due to my reduced number of cantrips, and have 4 Bridge/Eureka/Prog/Bolas for the same reason. If I were to add another cantrip to the deck, it would probably be Preordain. The reason being that the scry on preordain lets you know that you're putting bad cards to the bottom before you use Bridge.
That's my opinion on it so far. I really do like it though, and depending on testing I might show up to the next local tournament with it.
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