I think -Adarkar Wastes for 2 City Brass, 2 Glimmervoid. 2 Looters and 2 Vault Skirge = 4 Tezz. DS Cit 4 = Vault of Whispers 3 + Cranial Plating #4. That's what I'm working on now. I ran another really diff list the other night, and being able to Force a Daze on my Chalice won me a game easy. The two are really powerful together; what Chalice doesn't soak up, FoW usually gets. I think the power level of the cards here is higher than normal Aff, perhaps over 9000. Except for the Looter, but I could always use suggestions for another card in that slot. Prob not Jace or anything, because I run so few shuffle effects for the Brainstorm. I'd still like something of that power level, maybe V Clique though I know UU is tough to come by.Originally Posted by frogger42
Final Ritual: "I was your round 14 opponent with the 3 giant goyfs. I didn't know what the fuck you were piloting."
Drunken Master strategy. If I don't know what I'm doing, how would you?
I'm pretty doubtful of this claim. You run way less creatures than the normal Affinity builds so I fail to see how your list can overpower other decks better than normal Affinity builds. Also, you're overvaluing Force of Will in this deck. The problem with Force of Will in Affinity is that you almost never want to exile some of the blue cards you're holding just to cast Force of Will. Thoughtcast is blue, but you would almost never exile it to cast Force of Will, because A) you would probably cast Thoughtcast right away and B) why would you sacrifice a draw spell just for a counterspell?
To be honest, you're running a lot of cards that are just straight terrible for any Affinity build. Chrome Mox is absolutely unnecessary when there's other mana sources that aren't card disadvantage, and Looter il-Kor is inferior to Invisible Stalker or Etched Champion since both of those creatures can't actually be targeted by conventional spot removal.
I don't think that cards like Looter belong in this deck. The protection from colors of Etched Champion is far more important than the pseudo card drawing ability of Looter.
Note that Affinity's manabase is not as reliable as the ones of normal legacy decks. From time to time there are situations in which you haven't got access to a certain color. That's why I'd run 4 Mox Opals and 4 Springleaf Drums in every list and run as few colored cards as possible except for Tezz and Toughtcast.
@Shawon: I won't be able to test Cursed Scroll in the near future due to MWS issues but I will when my tests in March are over.
The creatures I run are the heavy ones, other than Thopter to help Metalcraft. SFM wins games on its own, and if you suspect your opponent has a bolt, you can snag Cranial or something other than Batterskull that'll get through early. It's better here than in Stoneblade even. You always have another card that you want to keep with FoW, I mean, there's never a dead blue card unless you're running Stifle and/or Daze. Sometimes Jace gets pitched because it's the early game. Force is the best spot removal spell in the game, as it keeps problem cards off the table, protects Chalice, and in Aff stops Hurkyl's Recall type effects.
Chrome is to help get down Chalice/ SFM early. On the play, it's a huge difference and wins games on its own; on the draw, still a difference, but not as much. Between Chrome and Opal, there's a decent chance that you can make a power play Turn 1, though I'm guessing less than 40%. Looter is blue for Force and imprint on Chrome, because Stalker is only good when it's equipped. It's a concession, not perfect, but fills the last niche here. I'm not sure why these cards are considered terrible for Aff other than they're not Artifacts; they play pretty powerful I'd say, though feel free to prove me wrong card-by-card. I guess I'm done posting as people seem more intent on their pet builds being the best. I always thought new ideas helped development, but maybe I'm not a good player I guess.
PS - True that you get mana-screwed sometimes. That's the worst part about running SFM and the like. It happens every now and then, and the only other way I can see to fix that is with some # of Lotus Petals, and I really like my Thopters right now. Oh well.
Final Ritual: "I was your round 14 opponent with the 3 giant goyfs. I didn't know what the fuck you were piloting."
Drunken Master strategy. If I don't know what I'm doing, how would you?
I run 1 SFM myself. It's good, but to say that it makes up for the surprising lack of creatures in your list is absurd. Creature removal exists (and so does consistency), and if your opponent is able to wipe out your offense, it doesn't matter that you run 'the heavy ones.' If you depend on SFM so much, then what do you do when it gets removed? You can say you gained an Equipment off of it, but if your opponent is clearing your board of any creatures, then that Equipment just becomes a dead card. Batterskull won't help you much if SFM gets bolted, because then you're going to have wait until you have 5 mana to cast it, and in many games that would be too late for any significant impact.
Also, do you mind explaining to me how SFM is worse in StoneBlade than Affinity when they can protect SFM better than you can (don't you rely on SFM?), take more advantage of life gain so they can cast removal or Jace, or Brainstorm any unwanted equipment for card quality?
Gladly.I'm not sure why these cards are considered terrible for Aff other than they're not Artifacts; they play pretty powerful I'd say, though feel free to prove me wrong card-by-card.
Chrome Mox is terrible in your deck and in any Affinity list because you don't need a mana source that's inherent card disadvantage. It's that simple. Your plan of using Chrome Mox to fuel a turn 1 SFM/Chalice is short-sighted because you're talking about a plan that requires at least 3 cards just to cast ONE card (land + Mox + exiled card)... that can be removed easily! Have you gotten a chance to play against Abrupt Decay yet? I'd like to know how your first turn Chalice shuts down the game when they can just Abrupt Decay it and you sit there unable to use your Force to counter it.
Looter il-Kor is also terrible because it has shadow. Shadow makes it effectively unblockable in the context of Legacy, but it also means... guess what... it effectively can't block anything! Why on earth would you want that? If your opponent is has a 5/6 Goyf swinging at you, why would you be content with a 1/1 creature unable to block it? All the equipment in the world wouldn't make Looter a good card in Affinity. Did I explain that well enough for you?
Chalice isn't bad, but I'm not as firm a believer as you are that it's awesome in the MD, considering that people play Abrupt Decay nowadays.
If you're running 4 SFM, then I guess Batterskull isn't bad (actually it still is, since it depends on you resolving SFM), but I have no idea why you would rather run Sword of X&Y over Umezawa's Jitte, the card that ruins you if your opponent connects with it. You at least want to have 1 Jitte in the whole 75 to neutralize an opponent's Jitte if you're running SFM.
Lastly, I already told you why Force of Will isn't so great in Affinity, but I'll add to my point earlier that you can't depend on Force of Will being a catch-all, because it does nothing against Abrupt Decay. When building Affinity to stand up against the metagame, you have to answer the question of how to deal with Abrupt Decay.
You've got it wrong, my friend. Your list is the pet build that YOU'RE insisting is the best ('over 9000'). Your ideas aren't new either, as other people currently play or have played SFM and Chalice, and even Force of Will (see AfFOWinity). So, your only contribution to innovation is Looter il-Kor and I've already explained why it doesn't belong in Affinity.I guess I'm done posting as people seem more intent on their pet builds being the best. I always thought new ideas helped development, but maybe I'm not a good player I guess.
Jesus.
I'm not going to defend my deck point by point, because we're just going to end up yapping like two annoying lapdogs. I don't feel a special need to prove my record to you, though suffice it to say I have done respectable in a couple large tournaments. I came here looking for advice and innovation, and while I appreciate your concerns, meh. I like building outside the box, because every now and then something pretty good comes of it, and I think this list might get there at some point. I'm not really looking to tinker 3-4 slots in a 60-card list. That's why Looter and some of the other choices, fyi.
Try it. You might like it. (Probably not.) At least 9000, btw.
Final Ritual: "I was your round 14 opponent with the 3 giant goyfs. I didn't know what the fuck you were piloting."
Drunken Master strategy. If I don't know what I'm doing, how would you?
Right, because we all know that tournament placings exempt the deckbuilder from any criticism. [/sarcasm]I don't feel a special need to prove my record to you, though suffice it to say I have done respectable in a couple large tournaments.
There's nothing wrong with innovation, so don't act like you're the only one seeking it. I'm always reconstructing my lists, more than 3-4 slots at a time. However, at least do some amount of extensive testing before you go posting your list and bragging how you think it's better than everyone else's.
So I dont play affinity or know whats currently going on in this thread, but I saw a mention of looter il-kor and thought Id suggest Saprazzan heir as perhaps a carrier of plating. Apologies in advance if this suggestion is terrible. Now that I think about it it probably is since they would just chump if the game depended on it.
Last edited by Atikin; 01-21-2013 at 07:28 PM.
Hey guys as you probably know there will be legacy MOCS this weekend, I never played Legacy on MODO and I dont have milion tixs to buy duals + I have Affi in modern, so I'd like to know if any of you could ship me some affinity list, ideally great against MODO meta (which I have no clue how looks) thx.
Mana
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Vault of Whispers
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Ancient Den
4 Mox Opal
4 Springleaf Drum
1 Academy Ruins
Creatures
4 Ornithopter
4 Vault Skirge
4 Etched Champion
4 Arcbound Ravager
4 Frogmite
2 Stoneforge Mystic
Everything Else
4 Thoughtcast
4 Cranial Plating
2 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
2 Cursed Scroll
1 Umezawa's Jitte
SB
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Relic of Progenitus
3 Ethersworn Canonist
3 Oblivion Ring
1 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
I'll spare you exhausting matchup advice, and share with you some pro tips about this deck:
- Etched Champion can block Batterskull tokens all day. No lifegain. Same against any attacker equipped with Jitte. No counters.
- If your opponent casts Terminus and you have Ravager, sacrifice all of your robots, including Ravager itself. Even if you don't have an Academy Ruins in play, if you draw one, you can always Reclaim Ravager as a single recursive threat that can get big very quickly and reliably stops Swords to Plowshares from exiling it. Speaking of Ruins + Ravager, in response to Swords, if you have Drum + Ravager + Ruins + another land, you can tap Ravager for mana, sacrifice Ravager, and then while remaining in that phase, you can Ruins targeting Ravager.
- You probably don't need to be told this, but always cast an Ornithopter/Memnite after a Springleaf Drum. I see way too many awful Affinity players on MWS who do the reverse. When I used to run Galvanic Blast, I shut down a mirror opponent for the entire game because I Blast'd his Thopter when he cast the Drum after he played Thopter.
- You know you can sacrifice Ravager to itself right? I'm assuming you do. Just remember, if you have multiple Ravagers, don't just sacrifice a Ravager to itself in response to removal, use the other Ravager's ability to sacrifice the targeted Ravager. You get at least 2 counters of value as opposed to the minimum of 1 you would get from sacrificing the targeted Ravager to itself to trigger Modular.
- Here's another Ravager tip. If you have Tezzeret down and you choose to -1 to make Ravager a 5/5 artifact creature, Ravager becomes a 6/6 since its base p/t is 0 with a +1 counter on top.
- Ok, no more Ravager tips. Oh, one more. You can make use of excess Opals in your hand with Ravager. Use this caveat conservatively and try to wait until after you untap with Ravager so you can fully utilize the Ravager trick for mana acceleration, into say something like Tezzeret.
- Seriously, no more Ravager tips. We're moving onto Tezzeret. Using his -1 ability on a Darksteel Citadel makes it into a 5/5 indestructible Artifact Land Creature. It can't be destroyed by Wasteland (nor even targeted by Abrupt Decay), but it can be tapped by Rishadan Port. If they play a The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, then you can 'choose' to let Darksteel destroy itself, but nothing will happen since it's indestructible!
- Be mindful that you can use Tezzeret's -1 ability to target your opponent's artifacts, especially an opponent's Equipment, be it Jitte or Cranial Plating. The equipment you target with Tezz becomes a 5/5 robot and it unattaches from any creature it was equipping. It's not a common interaction, but it's a desperate interaction you can sometimes rely on as opposed to facing the alternative of Jitte ripping apart your board.
- I could've used this interaction yesterday, but I missed it. If your opponent has a Humility and Pithing Needle, you can use Tezz's -1 on the Pithing Needle. This not only makes it a 1/1 due to Humility, but you effectively just shut down Pithing Needle from shutting down whatever card they named with Needle!
- Post board, if you're running Cabal Therapy, keep in mind that Ravager is one of your favorable Cabal sacrifices as the modular counters it has transfers onto another robot once you sacrifice Ravager. You get more value this way.
- Against Deathrite Shaman, if they target anything in your graveyard and you have Relic of Progenitus, you can just target yourself with Relic's first ability and effectively counter DRS's ability on the stack.
- You can activate Cursed Scroll in response to Thoughtcast or Stoneforge Mystic's ETB trigger.
- Against Thalia, Guardian of Thraben or any taxing effects ala Lodestone Golem, Thoughtcast's cost reads =+ additional mana costs - Affinity for Artifacts. If you have 5 artifacts and they have Thalia, Thoughtcast will always cast
There's probably more tips I can include there. If I think of anything useful or relevant, I'll edit this post to include it. Hope this helps, good luck on MODO! Don't suck!
Last edited by Shawon; 01-22-2013 at 02:40 AM.
Wow thx for the quick and useful answer, Im kind off interested how good is the deck against combo preboard, I checked some results from dailies and it seems that combo is half of the meta atm + I'd like to know whats the matchup against Burn because a lot of players will obviously play that.
You gotta be more specific about what combo you're referring to. There are many, many, different combo decks in Legacy that are all viable and competitive.
Against fast combo such as Storm and Belcher, you lose g1. Post-board games are winnable, but you need to play to a T. Otherwise, it's unlikely for you to win matches consistently.
Show and Tell can be addressed by O-Ring and Cabal Therapy. Use them wisely.
As for Combo Elves, try to get Jitte online early, and save any Jitte counters for Heritage Druid or Wirewood Symbiote. Canonists stop them from comboing out with Glimpse.
MUD is our nightmare matchup. You can try to use O-Ring and Cabal Therapy, but you will probably lose the game if you let your opponent untap with Metalworker even once.
Relic of Progenitus is good against Dredge and Reanimator obviously. Reanimator does have a Show and Tell backup plan, so don't forget to bring in O-Rings along with your Relics.
Burn has been historically a dicey matchup. A lot of people say it's an unfavorable matchup, but to me, it just comes down to who plays better or who has a better draw. Keep 2 Tezzerets post-board, as you want to threaten them with imminent life gain if they refuse to direct any Burn towards to it.
Cabal Therapy is a good card here, but O-Ring isn't bad if you know they run Ensnaring Bridge or Grim Lavamancer.
Hey, Just wanted to share a list I've been playing with.
I've been having ok results while playing with this deck so far, the sideboard has some wierd choices, mostly a local meta game thing with the red and blue blasts. But the maindeck has been very solid, I'm only running 12 lands but I've also cut any cards that cost more than 2 realistically.
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Great Furnace
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Mox Opal
4 Springleaf Drum
4 Galvanic Blast
4 Thoughtcast
4 Cranial Plating
4 Memnite
4 Ornithopter
4 Frogmite
4 Myr Enforcer
4 Invisible Stalker
4 Vault Skirge
4 Signal Pest
SB: 2 Echoing Truth
SB: 1 Tormod's Crypt
SB: 4 Relic of Progenitus
SB: 2 Whipflare
SB: 3 Red Elemental Blast
SB: 3 Blue Elemental Blast
invisible stalker in the deck? I assume you have no etched champions? Well, you should if you have the money to buy them(about 5$ each) or trade them then do so. They will be of much help to you.
Hello everyone, I already posted that on MTG Salvation, but as I'm more of a "The Source" guy, I wanted to post it here too;
There was someone on MTGS that said he thinks we should change the deck as the archetype changed a lot since the begining, and as far as I'm concerned, I agree; now here is what I'm working on for the moment :
// 16 Lands
4 Glimmervoid
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Tree of Tales
4 Vault of Whispers
//29 Creatures
3 Etched Champion
3 Master of Etherium
3 Ornithopter
4 Arcbound Ravager
4 Baleful Strix
4 Memnite
4 Shardless Agent
4 Vault Skirge
//3 Planeswalker
3 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
//8 Artifacts
4 Cranial Plating
4 Mox Opal
//4 Sorceries
4 Ancestral Vision
I'm basically trying to build something with more CA than the older version, but I'm also trying to keep an explosive deck that can come out really quickly, that's why I kept Memnite and Ornithopter, although they are not so great cascaded spells.
What do you think of the deck, do you have any advice?
thanks a lot!
-SaintS
You should run Thoughtcast, it's one of the most powerful cards in the deck.
''The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.'' Lord Eddard Stark - A Game of Thrones
-Adsum
-ChrisMeister on MTGO
That's funny because the first version I posted on salvation was with thoughtcast, but someone suggested AV as it could be cascaded. I don't really know which one I should play ... Any advice or comment on the rest of the pack?
Play Thoughtcast. It's not even close. It draws you cards right away for U. Ancestral Vision is very conditional. Sure, you might be able to draw three with it after a Shardless Agent, but most of the time it will cascade into a different card (such as Ornithopter or Memnite). If you draw and suspend AV, you have a wait a long time to get your card. Agent/AV might be OK in some control decks, but they aren't good in an aggro deck like Affinity.
Your mana curve is also poor. You run only 16 land with four legendary moxen. That's way too light, considering all the three and four drops you are running. You should add 3-4 Springleaf Drum to your deck in place of creatures.
I see more than others do because I know where to look.
I think the first step anyone can take to remodeling Affinity for today's Legacy metagame is to stop putting so much importance and emphasis on Cranial Plating. Then, the next step would be to try to keep a balance between holistic synergy within the deck and individual card quality.
To put this into perspective, I'm going to post my list, which I feel is competitive in today's Legacy metagame:
Mana
16 Artifact Lands (UWB + Darksteel)
4 Drum
4 Mox Opal
1 Academy Ruins
1 Paradise Mantle
4 Memnite
4 Ornithopter
4 Ravager
4 Master of Etherium
4 Etched Champion
3 SFM
4 TC
3 Tezz
2 Plating
2 Night's Whisper
1 Leonin Bola
1 Jitte
SB:
2 Canonist
3 O-Ring
4 Cage
4 MB Trap
2 Vedalken Certarch
After two months of running SFM (finally came around to it) and noticing how often I was boarding out 2-3 Cranial Platings against Jund or even Show and Tell, cutting 2 Cranial Plating from the MD has made sideboarding much easier. Because I run SFM, I still run the same threat density of 4 MD Cranial Plating, except with SFM I have increased versatility as I can also tutor for Jitte in games 1-3 as well as Paradise Mantle.
BTW, Paradise Mantle has AMAZING synergy with Stoneforge Mystic. I'm surprised how so many Affinity players run SFM in their list, but I have never seen a list that uses SFM and Mantle. Try it!
Last edited by Shawon; 02-22-2013 at 06:59 PM.
I changed the Night's Whispers to Leonin Bola and the 3rd Mystic. Having Leonin Bola along with Paradise Mantle, Umezawa's Jitte and Cranial Plating as fetchable targets for Stoneforge Mystic make SFM a real skill-tester in the deck.
Moreover, Leonin Bola turns itself and SFM into actual answers to S&T Emrakuls. I beat a g1 S&T player by S&Ting my Mystic, searching up Leonin Bola, tapping my fresh Mystic w/ Drum and land to Vial in Bola with my 1st Mystic.
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