In the Eye of Chaos seems nice in a storm heavy meta. A lot of ANT/TES or SpiralTide, Belcher maybe, but unfortunately bad against Show&Tell decks wich would be more important for me (My meta).
About the Tombstalker. To be honest, I absolutely don't like him in this build. Why? He is clunky and we don't need more clunky stuff in this deck (And to cut the strix?!?! Strix is a solid 2 mana drop, perfect blocker, pitch card, cantrip, does a better job then the Stalker in this deck.) The second more relevant point is that he removes the whole GY. Bad for the shaman and Goyf. I really don't understand why we need this fat faerie!?! I mean the stalker is nice and he is a fast clock, but why do we need him?? Wich matchup gets better because of him??
About the other utility stuff. Glissa and Ruins/Stronghold. In theory very nice, and a quite good synergy with the other cards. The problem is that they are too situational. Glissa is most of the time just a 3/3 with FirstS and DeathT and in a lot of games you better want your Wasteland then the Ruins/Str.
Don't misunderstand me. I allways like to add/test new cards, but for Shardl.BUG the card quality is so high atm that it's hard to cut or switch something.
I played at a small tournament at saturday and went 4-2 (Not impressive I know). Won against 2x Goblins, PunishLands, TinFins, Lost against RUG and Burn ;). Burn is maybe not the best matchup for us (chill did basically nothing), but overall I really like this deck (Main) and I thinck depending on the meta you are expecting, that we only should change the number (up/down) of lands, discard, planeswalker, strix. Everything else is fine. So all the new and fancy cards/techs that people are thincking of atm are not necessary or not strong enough in my opinion. The only card that I don't understand why people don't play it is SenseisDiviningTop. It's "cheap" and awesome with the agent, but maybe fighting for a slot with Jace not sure(played Top before I played Planeswalker). Maybe someone else has experience with the Top too.
Tombstalker is a card that will do well when things go right. When you need to hit land drops or find solutions I'd much rather have the strix. Same when I want a blue card or get the advantage after an early attrition game. If a strix is stuck in your hand, tombstalker will be 99% of the time too. The reverse isn't true at all.
About In the eye of chaos I don't see the point especially when you are running fow. I wouldn't think too much about techs from people who want to cascade into snapcaster mages.
CLICK HERE FOR THE RULES OF A VERY FUN MULTIPLAYER CASUAL FORMAT
You very likely can build it without spending any money, just out of what you already have.
An example with my (very large) list in a visual form
I played a similar list this weekend in a small (34 people) tournament yesterday. I lost to Goblins and RUG.Originally Posted by lochlan
General ideas: Boros charm was underwhelming. Snapcaster was great because it just gave a little bit of extra reach. I used it a few times to use my abrupt decay again. 2 Jace seemed fine. In several cases I would have liked Whipflare but still not sure about the mana base.
I tried Ratched bomb but never really got any use out of it.
I love the deck and will try another version next time.
Currently Playing: Scapefit , Shardless BUG, Team America,
Boros? I guess you meant Golgari. I had the exact opposite experience this weekend. GolgariCharm was awesome. Not only Against LeylineofS. but this spell won both games Against Goblins.
The Point about Snappy..............ehh.....oh Never mind. I just read again what Lejay wrote last
Do you have the link to Lejays list / explanation or whatever of his list? Cant find itBoros? I guess you meant Golgari. I had the exact opposite experience this weekend. GolgariCharm was awesome. Not only Against LeylineofS. but this spell won both games Against Goblins.
The Point about Snappy........
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...403#post731403
That was the last time I saw Lejay's list posted here. I suspect it hasn't changed much, if at all, from this configuration.
Question to other Shardless BUG players: How many basics can this deck afford in fighting against Mana denial decks like RUG, Maverick, D&T, Goblins, etc.? Reason I ask is because I often face at least one of those decks at the stores I go to for Legacy. So far I only have one swamp (trying out Lejay's list). Sometimes these decks just run me over though.
I have been testing several things online lately and was satisfied by two of them.
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Digital.../tourn/5625472
However if I would play in a meta without many show and tells I would definitely play the list linked by Dragonslayer_90. Explanations are disseminated, but I wonder if you really searched for them since I summarized the general philosophy on page 14 and page 16, and the decklist given by Dragonslayer_90 was page 15.
CLICK HERE FOR THE RULES OF A VERY FUN MULTIPLAYER CASUAL FORMAT
You very likely can build it without spending any money, just out of what you already have.
An example with my (very large) list in a visual form
Okay, so I think I should explain why I believe tombstalker is better than strix in this deck in more detail; in particular why he is neither clunky nor win-more. I will preface this by saying that I have only been playing and tinkering with this deck for about 1-2 months and there are many here who have had more experience. I should also say that my current meta lacks true aggro decks (decks that aim to kill you by turn 3-4 with redundant creatures and burn). Thats not to say there aren't aggro-control decks such as delver, but those are fundamentally different because they win with card quality rather than sheer redundancy.
So let me begin by examining how tombstalker fares versus strix against the midrange decks that I am typically facing.
Jund: This is basically the red version of this deck, trading visions for confidant and adding in an extra punishing fires engine. In my experience, the board usually comes down to a stall of my goyf vs his goyf with a couple of drs's on each side of the table. In these stalls, he usually has the advantage since he has a recurring burn engine that he will eventually assemble to both win goyf wars and kill off all of my shamans. From my experience, this win the top-deck situation is common versus not only Jund, but the mirror and virtually all other GBx decks. In this case top-decking a strix is fine--it'll draw you an extra card and give you an extra blocker (if he doesn't already have the punishing engine assembled), but it really doesn't impact the board. Stalker, on the other hand, comes down and applies immediate pressure. In doing so, I make both sylvan and confidant a lot worse for him because his life is no longer an expendable resource.
The other complaint is that I remove my own graveyard making goyf smaller and taking away shaman food. In these GBx matchups, I believe that this is a good thing. Due to the critical mass of removal from the opponent (swords +decay from GBW and bolt+decay from GBR), we tend to have less goyfs and shamans than our opponents. The result is that they need the fuel more than we do; by depriving them, we can starve their shamans and goyfs while the stalker flies over and pressures their life total.
Deathblade: This deck also relies heavily on confidant for card advantage, but it has far more ways to remove stalker than other decks so its a less attractive options. Instead of punishing fires, deathblade uses umezawa's jitte to grind out card advantage versus the smaller creatures in the format. There are definitely ways to deal with jitte in this deck (4x decays), but there are often more imminent threats than the jitte such as confidant that we want to decay first. Once a jitte has 1-2 counters on it (shitty situation, but not completely uncommon), our strixs become UB: draw a card. Stalker, on the other hand, is in fine shape and requires 5 counters to kill (since they dont actually play any fliers to equip to now).
As for removing my graveyard versus deathblade, again I think this is often an advantage. Deathblade runs snapcaster mages, so they want to hit your graveyard with drs saving juicy targets like brainstorm and stp to snap back later on in the game. Once you don't have targets, they will either need to remove their chaffe (fow, thoughtseize) or hold back their drs's drain. I will admit that delver does often make goyf 1 or 2 power smaller, but since the deck wants to make land drops (opposed to delver), you do not need to delve 6 (I often delve 3-4 if I have nothing else to do with the mana to keep an artifact in the graveyard).
As for why I don't think a stall is in our favor versus other midrange decks: In my understanding, the deck's strength lies in its burst card advantage--by this I mean that around turn 4-5 you tend to suddenly draw 3 extra cards out of nowhere. This is opposed to the incremental card advantage that the other midrange decks are currently running: resolving confidant and continually drawing 1 extra card a turn. This isn't to say that the deck cannot grind people out with lilianas, jaces, and shardless agents, but most opposing midrange decks run cards that are the exact same or functionally the same (bloodbraid vs agent; deathblade runs the jaces and snapcasters instead of lilianas). Due to this burst advantage, this deck has the most advantage right after a vision resolves and that advantage will often get worn down as the turns go by. Given enough time, both jund and deathblade will have better outs to a board stall than this deck does: fires recursion to kill walkers+small dudes from Jund and jitte+skull equipped to anything to outclass all of our creatures. The only advantage BUG has over these decks is that all of our threats cost less: goyf is a 1G and stalker is XBB; after the 5th or 6th land, jund and deathblade can utilize the mana better than we can.
The final point I want to make is that we should consider the threat density of the deck versus removal density of most mid-range decks. Most typical midrange decks run about 6-7 hard removal spells to deal with must kill-now creatures (4 stps + 2 snap from blade, 4 decay + 3 liliana from jund along with 7 burn spells, 4 decay+ 3-4 wishes for pulse + 3 fires from aggro loam, 4 stp + 3 decay from junk). Correspondingly, looking at how many "must-kill creatures" (creatures that will often take over the game if not dealt with) other decks play is around 10-12 (4 goyf/drs/confidant from jund, 4 goyf/confidant+3 kotr from junk, 3 kotr + 2-3 goyf + 4 confidant from aggro loam, 4 goyf/drs/delver + 2 stalker from bug delver, 4confidant/drs/mystic from blade). Our deck, with strix, runs less than any of these; our "must-kill" threat density with strix is only 8: 4drs/4goyf.
I stopped reading at this point because i realized there can be no valuable information due to inexperience. You know Control doesn't mean Force of Will plus Brainstorm?
Aggro-control decks are capable of performing well at every single stage—you can play the early game, the mid-game, or the late game. RUG Delver can't play the midgame or lategame. Caw Blade in Standard could, so it was defined as Aggro Control.
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That was poor word choice on my part. I meant to say aggro-control decks that are on the more aggro part of the spectrum, ie delver decks. These tend to follow an earlier game plan that is more in line with pure aggro decks, ie trying to kill you as soon as possible rather than gain enough incremental card and board advantage that your opponent cannot come back from. As such, they do not have very many ways to gain card quantity over the course of the game and rely on both tempo (amount of mana they spend vs what you spend) and by getting to the mid-late game, you are often able to out advantage them with cards such as jace, liliana, and visions.
As for brainstorm+force of will, this combination is present in pretty much any blue deck that has enough blue cards to support them. Having counters as a way to interact with the stack is a fundamental part of control. I would say that any deck having a way to interact with the opponent (discard, counters, silence) has an element of control. I know that strictly speaking, this would make Show and Tell and Storm decks a control/combo deck, but I believe that is what they are. They sacrifice sheer speed for more control of the game state (as opposed to decks like charbelcher and SI which are pure combo).
I don't mind longer posts, but here it was quite unnecessary. Instead of taking examples (2 decks, even if they are popular, isn't much in legacy) you should reason more in terms of game plans and roles. You'll also notice this way of thinking will stay coherent with your post about Jund and blade.
I didn't say tombstalker was bad. I only talked about how often stalker will be weaker than strix in a general way (ability to cast it, topdeck wars, is blue and artifact) in this deck. You answered with examples of it being good. That isn't a wrong example, but I would criticize relying on specific match-ups. I can sell just about any card with examples. The more specific an example can be, the more I can sell you a weak card.
Let's reason in terms of roles. Fundamentally strix is a control card. It's supposed to make 2 for 1s. Tombstalker can have a control role as well, although weaker. A 5/5 flying is definitely good at attacking and it isn't a sure blocker for goyfs or equipped creature (by the way the jitte with counters you talk about will probably just boost the equipped creature and win the race in a way or another).
So now is BUG shardless more of a control deck or an aggro deck ? I definitely experimented both roles since I played 4 goyfs from the beginning so that an aggro/tempo plan is available (4DRS, 4 Goyfs, 4 wasteland, 4 fow). But in the huge majority of the matches I play I am the control deck. That is because I have amazing card advantage tools.
Like I said a few pages back, when talking about fair match-ups the deck will have a very strong late game. That's why you want to be a control deck. And that's why your flex slots' goal should be to survive the early game. Tombstalker doesn't help a lot in doing that. If everything is perfect, it's a 4th turn creature in this deck. A 3rd turn creature in a ponder/daze deck. Once cast it trades with less removal but still trades 1 for 1. If things go wrong it sits in hand. The fact you are so often in control is the reason why I compared strix and stalker in early games situations, and in situations where you have to reverse the flow of the game.
You are using the punishing jund example to demonstrate stalker's value. The precise reason of why it's good in this match-up is because this is a game where you will most of the time be the aggro deck. Going into the late game isn't that good against it when your opponent has recurring removals for most of your creatures and card advantage with confidant, BBelf and liliana. The same is true for the deathblade deck. This one has a very good late game against almost all decks and a ton of control elements.
If you think about all decks where you need to be the aggressor (mainly against control decks and "slow" combo decks) you'll notice that strix is always inferior to the stalker. However those aren't the majority of the format. So I play the strix, and my sideboard is designed to replace those in these match-ups (except Jund, but that's because thanks to the 2 leylines, 4 wasteland, 4 liliana, and 3 whipflare I can be a fine control deck and fow and 4 mana drops are too weak to stay post board).
If you play stalker, even if it isn't stuck in our hand I'm afraid it won't help a lot our unreliable aggressive game plan, and will be pretty poor at reaching the late game or winning the attrition wars.
About your final point, only focusing on numbers for what you qualify of "must kill creatures" is a mistake. One of the reasons I play this deck is that it has the biggest goyfs in the format AND it's the deck with the most goyfs in it. From what I know nobody currently uses goyf + GSZ (NO RUG isn't played) so with shardless agent and all your draw spells you will find several goyfs much more than your opponents in a goyf mirror. You dig a lot and you can consider shardless a 3 mana goyf (+ a 2/2) a decent percentage of the time.
CLICK HERE FOR THE RULES OF A VERY FUN MULTIPLAYER CASUAL FORMAT
You very likely can build it without spending any money, just out of what you already have.
An example with my (very large) list in a visual form
Perhaps its my metagame that is filled with more of the grindy matchups, but I do expect about 50% of my matchups to be against decks that can grind the late game as well, if not better than this deck. Punishing Jund, miracles, deathblade, aggro loam and the mirror are very common for me to face. The two examples I posed are extremely common for me (ground stalls) and extra goyfs to clog up the board does occasionally help, but not always.
I will admit that strix is better than stalker on turn 2 versus delver decks, but I don't believe stalker is as bad as you make him out to be in this matchup. He typically comes down turn 3-4, which is a slower, but he is always a wall that is extremely difficult to deal with. As a 5/5 flying, RUG needs to trade delver+burn or 2 burn spells to kill him; BUG needs to trade a stalker for him. Even with all of Rug's burn, the first 1-2 tend to hit your drs's and they will be hard pressed to have 2 in hand when the stalker resolves. All of this being said, I do believe that strix is better against delver, but stalker is about as good. In testing, I found that the stalker hasn't hurt my delver matchup too much while improving all of the midrange matchups greatly.
As for having more and bigger goyfs, the size doesn't matter if goyf is on both sides and you have a stall. Having more doesn't help if they can block+burn yours and come out on top.
@somethingdotdotdot: Is there a chance that Mtgdeals is going to post your list and the rest of the top 8 or 16 list of the legacy portion? I'm interested to see the kind of decks that were in the field you were battling with your list, partly to see if adding Tombstalker may have helped more than it hurt you.
Lots of grindy decks, a good mix of Vials, some fast combo, some S&T decks. Not very many red decks outside of a pair of goblins and A few Jund decks. I think there were less RUG decks in the top tables than BUG.
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In that case you are right to prefer Tombstalker, 50% is a lot.
Once again I didn't say stalker was bad, but agaisnt delver + mana denial strategy I'd much rather have strix even if stalker does some job. Delver also isn't the only deck where I prefer baleful.
CLICK HERE FOR THE RULES OF A VERY FUN MULTIPLAYER CASUAL FORMAT
You very likely can build it without spending any money, just out of what you already have.
An example with my (very large) list in a visual form
Jace is still the best card in a grindy matchup, so i prefer playing cards that support Jace. From my experience Tombstalker is very underwhelming against every white deck
TheRiedl on Magic Online
About Magic Online:
I can play legacy whenever I want. Cardboard has no value. Data has no value. My time and enjoyment has high value to me. More legacy = more fun. Buy in.
In case anyone is interested, I just updated the primer with a new list and some additional notes (taking into account DrShaman and Abrupt Decay). Anyone want to add anything?
Whack lists currently playing:
Rector Nic Fit
Bizarro Stormy
Rest In Pieces
I feel like it's almost criminal not to give Liliana of the Veil a mention in the sb options section. There should be something that says what she does for the deck (More Removal and discard in one essentially), how most lists run at least 2 in the sb, and how some lists even md her because she's that good.
You should add Lejay's list - seems to be the best build currently.
Humphrey is always correct.
I went 3-2 in a local tournament playing a list similar to Gerry T, losing to Jund and a mirror running Lejay's list. Overall I was happy with the deck's preformance, though I would have liked 3-4 Lilianas MD.
I wanted to ask what we need to do to beat Jund - What are our best cards and how do we win this matchup?
Looking back I should have muligined into safer hands, and I wished I was running more wastelands.
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