Better question is what did you take out for the Council's card slot?Originally Posted by Dzra
I am curious...which 3 mana cards do you think i should be worried about?
True-name nemesis, vendilion clique comes to mind.
Other than that there's blood moon/moon man...but those cards pretty much gives me the 3rd colour
EE seems a little worse if it can't hit 3. You might also want a Karakas if you do decide to go with the Cliques which are great vs. control or combo. They're ok at stealing equipment from DnT, but somewhat mediocre against fair decks in my opinion.
If you're interested in a list without cliques you should check out Einherjer's build of miracles. You could probably cut the splash out and end up with something similar.
I cut Celestial Purge and Pithing Needle from the SB and moved the fourth FoW to the board. Alternatively, I was considering cutting the two REBs from the main for a second Ponder and a Council's Judgement (again cutting Purge and Needle from the SB). For that tournament at least, I'm still glad that I went with the cheater build. It was still good, regardless of Council's Judgment.
Liliana and Sword of Fire and Ice are also prime suspects.
This. TNN, Liliana, SoFaI (or any Sword for that matter), Metalworkers, KOTR, Aven Mindcensor, all sorts of random stuff.
I mean EE for 0-2 is still solid, but I think having access to a third color to be able to EE for 3 is usually worth it.
So I am considering taking this deck to a couple scgs in july. I am running the 4 ponder and zero vendilion clique list that i saw on eternal central. However, not having a ton of experience with the deck, and not having any weekly legacy tournaments, i want to know how i can get better with this deck in a month. I have a brother i can play against, who is a decent player. Thanks.
I'd recommend playing something else to be honest. Miracles is a difficult deck to play, and even harder to play well. Practice is definitely important with the deck. Its not like picking up deathblade or Team America where if you have cast brainstorms or FoW before, you will probably do fine. Also, you will probably draw a lot. New players of the deck that don't test it enough always do.
@Zeus:
EE is fine with 2 colors. 3 Jace is perfect, you don't need more. My biggest issue with your list is your lack of fetchlands. If you are going to run less duals you can run more fetches. I'd add 2 blue fetches and 2 white fetches, cutting basics. Having so many basics will actually make your manabase more prone to disruption. Rishadan port is a thing and you don't need a 2nd plains till turn 4+ so drawing 2 plains in your opening hand is really bad usually.
Hello,
yes miracles is a diffcult deck but it becomes easier to play if you have deep format knowlegde and control deck and Cb lock expirienece so unless he is completly new to this I would not discourage him so hard because
with enough effort he can do well with the deck. The question is if he want to take the time he needs.
I think if you want to play miralces at tournement Level in the given time you have to do a lot of testing against other decks. A good start would be 10 hours per day agianst different decks to beat and tier 2 decks. Yes this sounds huge
but then you should give you enough insight to get a good starting position for the tournements.
It is imporant to know that this will you no transform into a pro Miracle player but will help to do well at the tournements because of the knowlegde advance you made during the testing.
As partner I would sugest players who know their deck well allready and did good on tournements with it, if you don“t have access to them then your brother would be an alternative I think.
Also you can watch streams to see how other people play miracles and learn from their failures and vitories.
Last but not least find out if the playstyle suits you because if not any time spent in the training with the deck wil only lead to supotimal results.
Best Regards Teveshszat
Wait..you think having 8 fetch lands...is few? :P
My usual format is vintage, where i consider it a luxury to be able to fit in 6 fetchlands (Although vintage decks obviously isn't playing 4 brainstorm and 4 tops - Thus lessening the importance of shuffling effects.).
Rishadan port and wasteland are definitely something i am worried about, but with loads of basics wasteland should be a minor problem (Although my 2 tundra's are probably gonna be glorified lotus petals against a deck with wastelands), while port is much harder to guard against.
The only colour i would be able to splash currently, would be black. But i see very little gain in doing so. (I only own 1 scalding tarn, and would prefer not to add another expense to the deck)
I am still looking for alternatives to vendilion clique. I am worried about its value against non-control, non-combo decks.
So I played in a local legacy event last night, probably 15 people.
went 1-1-2
Played a 1-of Council's Judgment in the main, cutting a spell pierce for it.
My list is as follows:
2 tundra
1 volcanic
4 island
2 plains
1 mountain
4 tarn
4 mesa
2 strand
2 mystic gate
22 lands
2 ponder
2 counterspell
2 entreat
4 terminus
1 spell snare
4 fow
4 brainstorm
3 counterbalance
4 top
3 jace
1 Council's Judgment
4 stp
34 spells
3 Snapcaster
1 Clique
4 creatures
SB:
1 REB
2 pyroblast
1 e tutor
1 bloodmoon
1 clique
2 RIP
1 Luminarch Ascension
1 pithing needle
1 EE
1 flusterstorm
1 wear//tear
1 supreme verdict
1 entreat
Round 1 vs Jund
Tough match up, he is a very good jund player.
Game 1 I get him through top lock plus jace. Game 2 I dont see much removal, and never get a top lock going
Game 3 board is 3 angels for me and pithing needle naming DRS. He has 2 wolf tokens from a garruk, and 2 DRS. draw
0-0-1
round 2 vs legacy blue angles
Game 1, he lands a turn 3 jace off DRS, I have no response. Dont see any counters and he takes care of the council's judgment I draw.
game 2, I think I'm agains deathblade so I sb blood moon, e-tutor, etc. Taking out entreats to go the long game. He restos in bouncing his stonforge in response to removal, I dont see any more removal so clique plus equipment get me.
0-1-1
Round 3 vs WUR Delver
Game 1 I think he has a greedy keep of 1 land and no clock so I quickly take over. Entreat wins it.
Game 2 he has an early clock and meddling mages out my swords. He has all the answers to the terminus.
Game 3 I top lock him, but have to blow the counterbalance with an EE at 2 b/c of his 2 meddling mages locking me out of terminus and swords. a huge entreat wins it as his hand is double REB.
1-1-1
Round 4 vs POX:
Really really grindy match-up.
Game 1: I keep a good hand of top but only a volcanic and mountain. He easily keeps me only just the mountain for a good 6 turns as im drawing dead even with top in play. He has a board of lilliana plus cursed scroll and gets it.
Game 2: See the Luminarch Ascension around turn 5 or so. He has no way to deal with it and no factories in play. He concedes as it goes active.
Game 3: I have a board of jace plus top counterbalance, he has 2 factories in play trying to race me. I draw swords and have snap in hand for the factories. Jace is at 11 at turn 5 and we draw.
1-1-2
So I think the hardest thing with this deck so far is sideboarding. I have a really tough time figuring out what to take out more so than what to put in. In retrospect I should have left the entreats in for pox, but it was my first time playing that match-up. I also know I need to speed up my playing a bit, but its hard to play quickly particularly against decks I have never played against before. Agains something like WUR Delver, which Ive played a lot against, time is not an issue.
I really loved the council's Judgment. During the day it took out 2 lilliana's and 1 jace. Was particularly awesome with snapcaster as playing it on turn 4 with another land in my hand, allowing them to 2 for 1 themselves with a fow, then snapping it back a turn later was really great. I'm def going to take out the 1 main deck clique, as it was taken out post board in almost every match I played. Will probably replace it with a 3rd ponder, or maybe another counterspell.
Also I know people have been leaning towards the spell snare, but I think I might go back to the pierce as it would be nice to have in counter wars.
Also I learned that counterbalance does not counter every copy of flusterstorm! That was a new one!
You want to maximize your fetchlands, which in most lists is unfortunately only 10. You can run more though if you are just UW. You don't actually need scalding tarns to splash red btw. I've tried the basic mountian, but find just 2 volcs better. I don't even own tarns. I don't think the black splash is really worth it.
Vendilion clique is very useful against any deck with planewalkers, vial decks, stoneforge mystic and obvious combo/control. The only decks I think it is bad against is stuff like RUG, UR, dredge or burn. And clique is best card in the deck against combo and control. Having clock AND disruption that you don't have to tap out for is huge! He's also really good with Karakas. With 2 cliques MD, I use the 1of karakas at least once every round at least, and in some rounds it is essential in my victory. I win probably 30-40% of my games with clique beats for reference.
Without RED, venser or cliques a resolved planeswalker is basically game over. You might want to consider adding 1-2 council's judgment in there somewhere.
Also, the 4 Ponder set up might also be worth considering. You can go down to 21 lands pretty easy since you don't have a splash or karakas anyways. I also highly recommend the 4 ponder version of anyone running a "budgeted" version, even if its just the lack of a couple volcs or fetches, the more consistent you make your deck the better you can compensate for having less than optimal numbers of the cards you "should" have.
Took Ernheirjers list to 3-1 my local.
Match 1 was 0-2 loss to Punishing Jund. I had a tough time dealing with the discard, the abrupt decays and the robust mid game. Any tips on this match up is huge.
Match 2 was 2-0 over Burg. Terminus did lots of work both games.
Match 3 was 2-0 vs Hypergenesis. The counter suite shut down him down.
Match 4 was 2-1 vs shardless.
Any tips for the June match up?
Counterbalance as well as Chalice of the Void only triggers on cast, so that means that either one will only counter the original spell and will never counter any of the copies (off the top of my head this includes Flusterstorm, Tendrils of Agony, Brain Freeze, and Shattering Spree).
Something else you might not know is that you can counter a Krosan Grip or any split second spell with Counterbalance if the top card of your library is already the correct cmc. You can trigger the Balance, you just can't activate Top or Brainstorm to set it up.
Entreat is the biggest thing. If you never see an Entreat, it can be a very difficult matchup but finding an Entreat almost makes it trivial. I would rarely if ever Brainstorm and shuffle away an Entreat from hand in the early game and would instead rely on finding another Brainstorm effect to set it up later on.
Yeah, Entreat is huge. I play the full 3 entreat post board, side out fow, in lots of removal too. If you can survive till their hand is empty and have top balance in play, the game is yours to lose at that point. Before that, it is kinda rough, particularly with an experienced Jund player.
I was wondering if anyone had an updated list to share with the printing of Council's Judgement. I like the 4 ponder list with 4 counterbalances. I am looking at the following list and playing the deck to set the top + balance look asap.
Main Deck:
4 Island
2 Plains
2 Arid Mesa
4 Flooded Strand
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Tundra
2 Volcanic Island
4 Brainstorm
3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Counterbalance
2 Counterspell
4 Force of Will
2 Supreme Verdict or vendelion clique
4 Swords to Plowshares
2 Council's Judgment
3 Entreat the Angels
4 Ponder
4 Terminus
Side Board:
2 Pithing Needle
2 Flusterstorm
3 Red Elemental Blast
3 Rest in Peace
1 Izzet Staticaster
1 Disenchant
1 Grafdigger's Cage
2 Engineered Explosives or supreme verdict
Im experimenting with a build including 2 Council's Judgment main (along with snapcaster mages and cliques). I cut all of the Entreat to make room. I think with judgment we can go 1for1 with most tier1 decks. Entreat is only very good versus bad decks anyway.
Judging the Judgment.
Ok, it's been a while since I promised you to give all of you my my opinion on Council's Judgement. Here we go, then.
Versatility is its strength!
The strength of Councils Judgement does not lie in what it does - it lies in what it can do, across a variety of MUs, situations and so on. There are cards to our disposal that to their job in a superior way. But we didn't have access to a card that can get rid of literally every nonland permanent, circumventing any kind of protection or tricks. That's an upgrade for sure. Whenever I talked about Miracles vs Esper I came back and tell everybody how superior Snapcaster Mage was in Esperstoneblade, being a sure 4of due to the plethory of versatile cards he could flashback. I soon became a disciple of Snapcaster in Miracles too, but ever since this card has entered the light of day it seems to be rather obvious that Snapcaster is a constant part of Miracles, giving it as much versatility as it had in good old Esper.
But Judgements versatility has another aspect to it that is pretty essential. Due to its potential to deal with literally everything you have to put the first copy of this card in your mainboard, not in your sideboard. I've been playing Counterspell in my SB ever since GP Paris and I am still under the assumption that this is the correct way to go - but before I put the 3rd Counterspell in the SB, I've had two of them in the mainboard, reaching the cards threshold of mainboarded copies. Same thing goes for Councils Judgement - leading to the next point:
How many Judgements can one pass?
It's a tricky question, to be honest - and it does depend on the build. Being harder to cast then most spells in our deck puts up limitations to this card, that's for sure. It should be pretty obvious that 4 is too much, whereas three seems pretty painful at best. I think the maximum amount of Judgements you should be having in your deck distributes as follows:
4 Ponder - build: 1-2 Judgements in your 75, at least 1 mainboard.
Other builds: 1-3 Judgements in your 75, at least 1 mainboard.
Cantrip-heavy builds have traditionally been shaving on individual copies of a card to make up for the increased consistency - so I am under the assumption that 2 is the perfect threshold for this card, whereas other variants can go up to three, but 2 should be the thresholded mark for mainboardable Judgements across the whole field.
Whats the pawn sacrifice?
One may not simply add cards to the deck without cutting some of them, as 61 cards is no option. (has never been) So what can different lists cut in order to support this spell? Should any of this lists be built in a bad way you can still cut inferior cards, should you still play them - I am referring to cards like RIP/E-Tutor/D-Sphere or whatever. Ya know, bad cards.
But what can you cut when you play a good implementation of Miracles? Two kinds of things: a) versatile ones and b) specific ones. Why is that? Well, if your list has cards that are designed to deal with a plethora of different threats it might be a good idea to switch to a card that actually deals with most of them in a superior way. I am talking about cutting cards like:
Spell Pierce
Vendilion Clique
Counterspell
Those cards aren't exactly the same, but share big parts of their area of application. They are all meant to deal with a lot of different things. While Spell Pierce excels in the early game it's Counterspells time to shine later while clique stays a powerful threat in many matchups (but not enough of them - that's why I still don't mainbeck Clique) - Judgement can easily deal with most of those permanents, with the upside of being a better draw once those permanents have entered the battlefield already.
You could also cards that are in your mainboard to deal with very specific threats. I am talking about those cards, among others:
Disenchant and Wear//Tear
Supreme Verdict
Engineered Explosives (MB)
Pithing Needle
...
Those cards had their right to be in the mainboard for some lists, in some metagames - but I think they have ceased to do so - as Councils Judgement does this job in a clearly superior way. Pretty easy cut, if you should be playing those cards.
Repositioning in a dance called metagame.
So what do I think about the impact that Judgement will have on the current metagame and our position within it? Well - simply put - this card is a clear buff for Miracles, even though other archetypes can profit from it aswell. Versatile cards that impact already resolved threats has always been a problem of UWR - it now seems to be solved, in one way or another. It will make MUs that have been close, traditionally, better. I am mostly thinking of the BG/x archetype. It's been a race to Entreat the Angels for 9 out of 10 games. With Judgement I see these MUs improving by a lot, due to the ability to delay the kind of inevtiable Liliana long enough to massacre them with an army of flashy angels.
It'll also improve the MUs against Random, admittingly though Miracles has been having the best MU against Random from most of the tier1-decks, regardlessly.
Even though it doesn't help with traditionally tough MUs like SnT and DnT it offers interesting angles of attack to this very two MUs, namely being able to get rid of Vial+SoFaI mainboard (once you've survived the mana-screw) and nuking Sneak Attack itself, if they tap out to cast it. Not really making it better - but interesting angles, nontheless.
I think this card will make Ponder an even better card, supplementing my claim that 2 Ponder is the bare minimum, with 4 being my personal (!) optimum. Being able to dig for a card that deals with everything is about as good as it can get.
Judgements affects on my list.
Based on my latest list I will go ahead and cut my (altered) Spell Pierces. (You know how much it hurts to cut recently acquired altered cards?) Both of them, despite the fact that I will be only adding a single Councils Judgement to the mainboard. As the second card that will be cut I have decided to cut the recently added Pithing Needle in favor of the Councils Judgement. I don't think that I have to explain why I cut those two cards - just see what I wrote above about the possible cuts.
But what do I do with the one last slot in the mainboard that once was property of Spell Pierce? Playing a miser Spell Pierce doesn't sound too good - so it'll be something different. It won't be a 2nd/3rd Councils Judgement due to the color requirements and the low count of disruptive blue cards for the Combo/Control-MUs. So it has to be something blue, more or less disrupting/countering. I have been thinking about the following cards:
3rd Counterspell (moving the sideboarded one to the mainboard)
Spell Snare
Vendilion Clique
Counterbalance
Red Elemental Blast
Admittingly, I am not completly sure that this last slot is as correct as the rest of my list is, at least to me. I stand behind pretty much every single slot - with the exception of this very 60th mainboarded card. I ultimately decided in favor of Counterbalance due to the good position in the current metagame that this card has right now. Counterbalance is very good against a plethora of strategies right now, ranging from Elves over Delver to Storm and even Sneak and Show - due to this list having 3 cc3 and 3 cc4, making it a possibility to lock them out in the preboarded games.
As said, I am not too sure on this one and I would be happy to receive some opinions on this one, even though I've asked many people I trust in already. But there is no such thing as too many opinions.
Other than that, here it is - my Judgemental Miracles-list.
3 Tundra
2 Volcanic Island
4 Flooded Strand
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Arid Mesa
4 Island
2 Plains
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Sensei's Divining Top
2 Counterspell
4 Counterbalance
4 Force of Will
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Terminus
2 Entreat the Angels
1 Council's Judgement
3 Snapcaster Mage
3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
SB: 2 Red Elemental Blast
SB: 2 Rest in Peace
SB: 1 Pyroblast
SB: 2 Engineered Explosives
SB: 1 Counterspell
SB: 2 Flusterstorm
SB: 1 Disenchant
SB: 1 Entreat the Angels
SB: 2 Vendilion Clique
SB: 1 Council's Judgement
Greetings
Solid thought process, Einherjer. The only thing I'd say is that I'm not sure that the EE in your SB are better than Supreme Verdicts. It's likely that your more Snapcaster-heavy build is better equipped than mine at dealing with creatures on a one by one sort of basis and so a general sweeper might not be as welcome. Still, I feel that EE loses a lot of value with the addition of Council's Judgment. Although EE has the upside of occasionally hitting multiple permanents, both Council's Judgment and EE are usually only hitting a single problem on the board except that Council's Judgment does it more efficiently. Supreme Verdict seems to fill in the gap against creature decks by unconditionally wiping the board of creatures regardless of countermagic.
Reid playing Miracles now. Was cheering for him but felt bad for Strong. Did a lot to lose that game.
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