[Deck] T.E.S. - The EPIC Storm

[Lemnear]

Trygon Predator is interesting, but I don't think the sol lands are a relevant factor for moving to the card as It can't be powered out earlier than normal using them. My biggest concern with the card is turning on the opponents Pyroblast(s)/Red Elemental Blast(s), but answering both Top and Counterbalance is a big deal, so I'm eager to see how it tests.

It isn't primary a matter of "earlier", but of "reliable" and "through Thorn/Daze/Thalia/Lodestone/Sphere of Resistance/etc." which got me thinking of this combination

[vercadium]

It isn't primary a matter of "earlier", but of "reliable" and "through Thorn/Daze/Thalia/Lodestone/Sphere of Resistance/etc." which got me thinking of this combination

That's a fair point; I understand your reasoning now.

EDIT: That said, I wouldn't be wanting to bring it in against decks that cast Daze and it can be played through Thalia regardless as it's a creature. Seems amazing against MUD though and I'm hopeful for its effectiveness against Miracles.

[Lemnear]

That's a fair point; I understand your reasoning now.

EDIT: That said, I wouldn't be wanting to bring it in against decks that cast Daze and it can be played through Thalia regardless as it's a creature. Seems amazing against MUD though and I'm hopeful for its effectiveness against Miracles.

Well, I should have highlighted that the Thalia/Thorn-aspect was more aimed at Abrupt Decay for comparison, which would cost 3 total as well, but is a one-shot, while I hope that TP is able to stall those decks endlessly as Trygon can block Thalia and kills about all threats coming from MUD/D&T/Painter/etc.

It even survives Massacre if you throw it at your opposing Blade/Patriot/D&T/etc. players head!

[TheYoungster]

Burning Wish would be a waste of sideboard slot. You'd be better off just cutting 1 or 2 in the main deck.

@Trygon Predator - it will be countered/Plow'd before it even touches a Counterbalance. Against MUD, again too slow, by turn 4 you're already locked out or dead. Against D&T, aren't you supposed to be more worried about hate bears?

Might as well go with a beatdown plan with Desecration Demon or Master of the Feast.

I think you are vastly overestimating the ability of MUD actually lock decks out. I've been playing MUD for about a year now and it is by no means a prison deck. Assuming you lost game 1 and you are on the play, you will almost always be able to cast trygon on turn 3 with their best starts (T1 Chalice 1, T2 Trinisphere T3 Lodestone), in that case chalice and trinisphere don't stop it and Lodestone is too late. Even if Lodestone comes down turn 2 then if you play a sol land you can cast it. If you are playing Post MUD then there start might be really slow (T1 cloudpost go) and you can cast trygon on time, or just kill them before they get the chance to play anything. MUD is a very fragile deck at times and 1 discard spell can really muck things up for the deck because of the nature of it being a chalice Sol land deck. MUD can lock storm out of games with no answers but it is very hard for the deck to prevent decks from playing 3 drop creatures, even a deck as land light as TES. Storm is one of the few decks that can be locked out by MUD with consistency but only 4 of the most consistently played cards in the deck stop trygon (Lodestone, thorn of amethyst or other forms of disruption that impede Trygon aren't unanimous)

Against miracles I would assume they just have terminus, red blasts and one or two swords(though I have never played miracles and am just getting into TES so I could be wrong) so I think Trygon could be reasonable there.

Against D&T just blanking 2 of their hatebears and stopping vial so they can't port you freely sounds good enough to warrant the inclusion to me.

[Lemnear]

I think you are vastly overestimating the ability of MUD actually lock decks out. I've been playing MUD for about a year now and it is by no means a prison deck. Assuming you lost game 1 and you are on the play, you will almost always be able to cast trygon on turn 3 with their best starts (T1 Chalice 1, T2 Trinisphere T3 Lodestone), in that case chalice and trinisphere don't stop it and Lodestone is too late. Even if Lodestone comes down turn 2 then if you play a sol land you can cast it. If you are playing Post MUD then there start might be really slow (T1 cloudpost go) and you can cast trygon on time, or just kill them before they get the chance to play anything. MUD is a very fragile deck at times and 1 discard spell can really muck things up for the deck because of the nature of it being a chalice Sol land deck. MUD can lock storm out of games with no answers but it is very hard for the deck to prevent decks from playing 3 drop creatures, even a deck as land light as TES. Storm is one of the few decks that can be locked out by MUD with consistency but only 4 of the most consistently played cards in the deck stop trygon (Lodestone, thorn of amethyst or other forms of disruption that impede Trygon aren't unanimous)

Against miracles I would assume they just have terminus, red blasts and one or two swords(though I have never played miracles and am just getting into TES so I could be wrong) so I think Trygon could be reasonable there.

Against D&T just blanking 2 of their hatebears and stopping vial so they can't port you freely sounds good enough to warrant the inclusion to me.

Thanks for finding your way to this thread and giving more first-hand insight about MUD. Against D&T you find targets in Spirit of the Labyrinth, Canonist, Revoker, Vial and the complete SFM package including Batterskull, so I have high hopes on Trygon pretty much negating half their deck. For Miracles, I have to take some Terminus, Blasts, Plows alongside the FoWs into consideration. Will be hell to get out decent data from that matchup

[Asthereal]

Against Miracles the effectiveness of Trygon Predator depends on a great number of things. What would Miracles usually board?

The list Lossett plays (legends, main deck Pyroblast) will postboard have at least 3 Pyroblast effects, which counter or kill Trygon. On the other hand, he now runs 2 Pyroclasm in the board, which they might prefer over Terminus, since it doesn't require a Miracle to cast against a row of Goblin tokens. Clasm doesn't kill Trygon, so that's nice, but there's no guarantee they'll board it over Terminus, since the latter only costs W, where the Clasm costs 1R. Also, the Legends list runs 3 Clique, which blocks and kills Trygon, so that's pretty nasty. So for the Legends/splash red Miracles list, I feel Trygon is not that strong in theory.

The Helm/RiP list is of course a different story. They have more targets for Trygon, and they have no creatures that can block it, except for Entreat. So there Trygon looks a bit better.

The Ponder&No nonsense list that is rather popular right now has the REB/Pyroblast effects on side, and no Cliques main (usually also not that many one side), so that's a bit in between.

I'm not sure how this looks theorycraftingwise (wow, such word ).


EDIT: On a lighter note, I kind of like the newish list with 2x Chrome Mox, 2x Cabal Ritual.
The extra mana that sometimes makes is pretty awesome. Awesome enough for me to be tempted to try out weird stuff as Wish targets, like Entreat the Angels (for when I have low Storm count) or Epic Experiment (because, well, it's Epic!).

[Royce Walter]

Awesome enough for me to be tempted to try out weird stuff as Wish targets, like Entreat the Angels (for when I have low Storm count) or Epic Experiment (because, well, it's Epic!).

What the fuck?

[d0nkey]

What the fuck?

Actually, Epic Experiment is interesting...

[Asthereal]

What the fuck?

Can't a man have any fun anymore these days?

But okay, I'll explain.
In my test run against Jund I had on two occasions 2x LED on the board and not so much life.
I draw Wish (second time I Pondered into Wish), and natural spell chain, Ad Nauseam or Past in Flames weren't an option, so I was wondering what other cool stuff I could do with 7+ mana post Wish, and those two came up. I'm not saying you should play either of them, but both are pretty cool and will make the opponent make a sound quite similar to what you wrote down here.

[d0nkey]

Can't a man have any fun anymore these days?

But okay, I'll explain.
In my test run against Jund I had on two occasions 2x LED on the board and not so much life.
I draw Wish (second time I Pondered into Wish), and natural spell chain, Ad Nauseam or Past in Flames weren't an option, so I was wondering what other cool stuff I could do with 7+ mana post Wish, and those two came up. I'm not saying you should play either of them, but both are pretty cool and will make the opponent make a sound quite similar to what you wrote down here.

I actually thought of Jund and Pox when you mentioned those 2 cards. Not sure they would make the 75 for me, but that scenario you mention does come up from time to time.

[laserstone]

Do any of you folks have a list for sol-land TES?

[Asthereal]

I actually thought of Jund and Pox when you mentioned those 2 cards. Not sure they would make the 75 for me, but that scenario you mention does come up from time to time.

We used to run stuff like Diminishing Returns for situations like that, but it got the axe.

Against Pox I usually end up either managing a late Past in Flames and just easily winning (their clock is quite slow), or I don't find anything and they kill me on turn 15 or so. If Jund manages to get control, it can be a serious nuisance though. Pretty serious clock, card advantage engines and some extra disruption. If they draw well and we have a slow hand, things can get pretty tricky. Perhaps we should just mull the really slow hands, but I never stop thinking about other options. Especially fun ones.

[death]

@TheYoungster, glad to see a MUD player here. I have piloted MUD and Stax, UB Tezz was my pet deck. You overlooked the fact that MUD can cast a first turn CotV@0/1 and 3sphere or Crucible by turn 2 using Mox Opal + artifact land + Sol land and essentially Wastelock you. There are many variations of the deck, this may not happen often but MUD is not a cake walk if the opponent knows what he is doing. Trygon was good in vintage. Why? You have acceleration in the form of Black Lotus, 5 Moxen, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and Mana Drain. Trygon was effective in legacy years back, in a BANT shell with Noble Hierarch as perma-mana accel and Force of Will protection. If you want to push Trygon in the early game with TES you will have to rely on Lotus Petals. In the end, you have Abrupt Decay on legs (wings?) that is 2 turns slower and a slow clock that is answerable by any means of spot or mass removal.

[Lemnear]

Do any of you folks have a list for sol-land TES?

You can simply replace the Moxen and the Cabal Rituals with Crystal Veins, shave the 3rd Duress for the 4th MB Infernal and you have my testing MB. Of course the SB looks different.

[TheYoungster]

@TheYoungster, glad to see a MUD player here. I have piloted MUD and Stax, UB Tezz was my pet deck. You overlooked the fact that MUD can cast a first turn CotV@0/1 and 3sphere or Crucible by turn 2 using Mox Opal + artifact land + Sol land and essentially Wastelock you. There are many variations of the deck, this may not happen often but MUD is not a cake walk if the opponent knows what he is doing. Trygon was good in vintage. Why? You have acceleration in the form of Black Lotus, 5 Moxen, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and Mana Drain. Trygon was effective in legacy years back, in a BANT shell with Noble Hierarch as perma-mana accel and Force of Will protection. If you want to push Trygon in the early game with TES you will have to rely on Lotus Petals. In the end, you have Abrupt Decay on legs (wings?) that is 2 turns slower and a slow clock that is answerable by any means of spot or mass removal.

I'm not saying trygon is going to be great, but it does seem worth testing to me. And yes, I did overlook MUDs best starts I didn't have much time to post this morning so I couldn't elaborate more on that. What I do think about trygon is that unless there is a lot of MUD in your meta or something then I don' think preparing that drastically is necessarily the best idea since it is a very small portion of the meta, so unless trygon can be pretty useful in other match ups then it probably doesn't warrant inclusion because of the fact that MUD is a fringe deck.

Even if the opponent doesn't know what he is doing if he is playing MUD he could just derp into a win because of the fact they are playing trinisphere and chalice against a storm deck. MUD is very high variance so I think that it really just comes down to winning the die roll, having a quick kill, and hoping to get a little lucky with their mulligans, if you are not dedicating much hate. Anyway I' going to try to stop talking about MUD unless absolutely necessary considering this is the TES thread.

[d0nkey]

I'm not saying trygon is going to be great, but it does seem worth testing to me. And yes, I did overlook MUDs best starts I didn't have much time to post this morning so I couldn't elaborate more on that. What I do think about trygon is that unless there is a lot of MUD in your meta or something then I don' think preparing that drastically is necessarily the best idea since it is a very small portion of the meta, so unless trygon can be pretty useful in other match ups then it probably doesn't warrant inclusion because of the fact that MUD is a fringe deck.

Even if the opponent doesn't know what he is doing if he is playing MUD he could just derp into a win because of the fact they are playing trinisphere and chalice against a storm deck. MUD is very high variance so I think that it really just comes down to winning the die roll, having a quick kill, and hoping to get a little lucky with their mulligans, if you are not dedicating much hate. Anyway I' going to try to stop talking about MUD unless absolutely necessary considering this is the TES thread.

Trygon destroys the D&T matchup which is a difficult matchup for us. It could also be randomly good against miracles if it sticks.

I don't know if it is good enough to make the cut, but it is worth looking into with real data.

[Lemnear]

Trygon destroys the D&T matchup which is a difficult matchup for us. It could also be randomly good against miracles if it sticks.

I don't know if it is good enough to make the cut, but it is worth looking into with real data.

There a quite some fringe matchups containing Chalice or Resistors like Painter or Lands which you have to consider for your boarding of Decay (which doesn't create cardadvantage) and boarding Xantids against Miracles seems to be fine as well, so I don't see a general Problem (except Pyroblast) of maybe trying to split Decays/Trygons where we used to reserve spots for CoV/Decay/Needle to battle all kinds of problematic permanents and increase the density of Artifact/enchantment removal we Desire especially for SDT/CB. Having an Auto-pilot for longer games against MUD or D&T which can get out of hands if you can't combo T1/2 (less Chance for that w/o MB EtW anyways) is nice. Like with Needle I'm looking for flexible SB slots and with Reanimator/S&T not being THAT popular, I'm willing to look at other card that are helpful against Miracles, but also do some Splash damage against the metagame and want to try out the Trygon rather than stuff like Krosan Grip which was/is a topic in the ANT thread, but share the downside of Decay aka not creating advantage and costing the same amount of mana.

For me the more interresting point than the sheer gambling against Pyroblasts is how the cmc affect AN and how this relates to the potential of lowering the required stormcount for a natural chain. In short: IF a Trygon can stick and help to make stormcounts of 6-7 deadly, we don't rely on a engine to kill.

[Lemnear]

Will visit Family in Bavaria next week and plan to attend the Munich Legacy the upcoming Saturday.

Afaik I have to expect several Miracles players, so this gonna be a Hardcore test

[Bryant Cook]

On a different note: I'm cutting Massacre from my sideboard. Death & Taxes has been driven away due to Treasure Cruise and I'd like something a little more versatile with a similar role, I'm opting for a pair of Pyroclasm as you can bring them in against UWr to kill Delvers/Meddling Mages as well as Elves.

New list is on opening post.

[iGrok]

I'd be a little careful about that. Maverick is still a thing. But pyroclasm is usually just as effective anyways.