Do you post about anything else? It's getting incredibly boring.Originally Posted by MGB
It's not about 'way better' though, I have Wear//Tear in my SB as well which come in. But we want as many effects like this as possible in those matchups. CJ is clunkier, but deals with everything.
Congrats! Nicely played, looking forward to reading your report.Hi, i'm Claudio Bonanni
I'll do the report about the GP, but i need some time, my english is not very good!
Thx to all!
Big congrats Claudio Bonani! I was rooting for you through Top 8 live in Lille and i am hot for your report!!Just registered to congratulate you!
This line seems very powerfull to me and i want discuss more inticart plays like this one. But i think Prono needs to learn that this line loses to everything. I still apprecimitate his effort and value his contributions in this thread very much.
Btw, i also played Grand Prix Lille and you can expect my raport soon. I used a traditional list that I tested on Cockatrice with my testing group.
Oh, and sorry for bad english, is not my first language.
that line is wrong unfortunately. it works only with Karakas and not with Containment Priest.
Sorry about that. Welcome anyway
I am interested to hear this as well. I agree with the other guy that it probably only works in a Mentor build which is more control/aggro than the traditional control/"combo" that we're used to seeing.
Fallout from GP Lille:
Personally, I love the new Mentor build. It doesn't play as many clunky, high CMC cards as traditional builds. Running 3 Daze really helps out with tapping out in the early turns and allows it to play more proactively instead of reactively -- which is very helpful against combo in particular. It has plenty of cheap spells to fuel the timely casting of Dig Through Time, one of the most busted cards at the moment (and one of the reasons why a GP winning deck is running 2 Pyroblast maindeck).
Mentor is an elegant, compact win condition. It can end games nearly as quickly as Entreat the Angels, but unlike Entreat it doesn't really require setup and can threaten closing out a game far sooner. It forces your opponent to leave in a bunch of removal spells, which are otherwise pretty dead against the rest of the deck. It's absolutely ridiculous with 2 SDTs on the field. It doesn't die to Pyroblast, can't be Spell Pierced, and can often be grown out of Bolt range (but your Counterbalance should be dealing with that concern). I expect fewer tournament matches going to time thanks to Mentor.
Aggro-control has *always* been the best archetype overall, as it can switch roles to beat any and all opposition. It just requires some time to settle on which configuration(s) is(are) the best. For now, it looks as though UWr Mentor/Tempo Miracles or 4-color Delver are going to be 'The Decks To Beat' going forward. Both decks have foils to each other's strategies, e.g. Abrupt Decay answers Counterbalance, and Dread of Night shuts down Mentor for the most part. Yet Miracles is fairly well positioned against Delver in general thanks to its removal and methods of card advantage.
I'm interested to see how the metagame evolves from this point going forward, especially if DTT ends up getting the banhammer. I'm sure there will be some adjustments and tweaks made to both decks' Main 60 and Sideboards, not only in response to each other, but also in response to the rest of the metagame shift as these decks become more frequently adopted.
I wonder how effective Daze will be after this tournament though. Surely, part of its effectiveness comes from opponents never expecting to play around Daze in a Miracles deck. In decks like RUG Delver and Stoneblade, Daze is at top efficiency because your opponent can't afford to play around it by slowing down for a turn, else they get killed by Mongeese and Nemeses. Even with a Mentor, I don't see Miracles being able to pressure an opponent so quickly that they have to play into Daze. And the Monk tokens die to a lot of the same answers as Elemental tokens, so now all the hate that people bring in against Grixis decks apply to us too.
I have no doubt a lot of people are going to be trying this, but I don't think it's enough to replace either of the two "established" sub-archetypes. Now the choice is Ponder vs. Legends vs. Mentor.
I'm not Claudio, but here are my assumptions regarding Daze:
1. Very few UWr Miracle decks have run Daze recently, so I'm sure the surprise factor was hugely relevant. I'd venture to guess that quite a few opponents just decided to 'go for it' under the assumption that if he was tapped out, they would only have to worry about 1 FoW at most, and then proceeded to get blown out by a timely Daze they didn't see coming.
2. Seeing as his curve is lower, being set back a land drop probably didn't matter all that much, especially as he is likely able to survive well into the mid/late-game and make enough land drops for everything needed (his curve pretty much ends at 3).
3. Having another free counterspell to Dig for is hugely relevant for those times when it really matters.
4. Daze, unlike Spell Pierce, can answer creatures. I'm sure it came in handy against decks like DnT, Elves, Merfolk, etc. where Spell Pierce is often a dead draw.
5. I see his build being hugely versatile in general. By maxing out on Ponder, Bstorm, and SDT, he can often avoid drawing Daze if it's bad in the particular matchup/board state.
6. Daze probably got sided out a lot -- pretty much always on the Draw, against slower control decks, and if he thinks the surprise factor wouldn't be in his favor. However, it's only 3 slots: it's potential upside far outweighs its occasional deadness.
7. I have always been an advocate of all Legacy Blue decks always playing at least 1 Daze for all of the above reasons.
I think you're right on all accounts, but even with proper sideboarding, Miracles is a tough matchup for a lot of decks.
With there being 3 discrete options for UWr Miracle builds, and also perhaps with some hybridization/middling approaches happening (e.g. a Legends-heavy build adopting 2 Mentors + 2 Daze), opponents will have even more difficulty approaching the matchup. The psychological threat of Daze is often just as powerful as the physical reality of having it in-hand*. And like intentionally "missed" CBalance triggers, a savvy player can withhold an actual Daze to trick an opponent into walking into it with a more relevant spell.
I wouldn't be shocked if the next few evolutions of the deck adopts a few copies of Stifle and/or Wasteland and veers even closer to resembling a Delver tempo build.
*this psychological aspect of assumption also applied to Stifle, which is why I never ran the card back in my RUG Delver days. My opponents always assumed I was running the card and thus played around it, while I reaped the benefit of them doing so without actually playing copies of a card that would've been dead due to their playstyle. Daze likewise will trip up some players -- playing around it sets them back in the same way as if they actually were holding it, and yet deciding to just play into it will likewise lead to some otherwise unnecessary blowouts.
In the Dig-infested meta, don't worry about Ponder Miracles. Just look at GP Kyoto and GP Lille. If you play Ponder Miracles in its purest form, you won't get too far. Rather, I would suggest that Mentor Miracles is the natural evolution of Ponder Miracles. Before Lille, some people including me have already mentioned that Ponder Miracles plays like a combo deck, you are barely controlling the board state. When you are cutting lands down to 20, running Daze, cutting Jace, tap out main phase to present Mentor as a threat with Daze/FoW backup, how much control are you really? I am not saying this is wrong, I am just saying that is the direction of Mentor Miracles. Without Jace MD, I question the reliability of putting Terminus back on top of Library. However, why bother doing that since you intend to smash with Mentor to begin with. It's as if you just treat Terminus as a dead draw/dead card in your hand and move on.
The state of Legacy and Miracles as a whole, you either play Mentor Miracles without Karakas to be as pro-active as possible, or you have to MD Clique with Karakas in your Mana base. Looks like being pro-active in an intelligent manner can crush Omni-tell and get you a GP trophy.
Congratulations!Hi, i'm Claudio Bonanni
I'll do the report about the GP, but i need some time, my english is not very good!
Thx to all!
Great points. I wanted to talk more about #4. By playing Daze, he's changed the way he approaches matchups. Usually, Miracles doesn't care much about creatures because we run 7+ removal spells. He has chosen to run 3 Terminus. The cutting of the 4th Terminus makes sense because he wants to flood his board with creatures and constantly drawing wipes isn't going to help him advance that gameplan. He seeks to tap out early for Mentor to apply pressure against other creature decks, so Daze'ing the creatures that his opponents will respond with is the most logical change to the list.
I am still an advocate of playing Spell Pierce in Miracles decks that aren't reliant on an aggro strategy and take a more control approach because you can always deal with the creatures later, so a lot of the time you don't care about them resolving. For those Miracle Control decks, countering non-creature spells is more important.
It definitely makes for an interesting change in the archetype, though I wonder if the deck can be called Miracles or is it now Mentor Control with a Miracles package. We didn't call that GP Kyoto deck Stoneforge Miracles, it was Stoneblade with the Miracles package.
It certainly will not replace either of the other 2. People will still play Legends, and people will still play Ponder. Each one does well in certain metas, and hybridizing between them can even out the MU percentages so that you don't necessarily have a super unfavorable MU but you might also lose "points" in your once-more favorable MUs.
Anyway, that deck plays 3 miracle cards.
It is much more a Countertop, controllish, Stoneblade with Mentor instead of Stoneforge.
Grixis drops 2 creatures and defend them to win.
his deck drops his mentors and defend it to win.
one is faster the other is more solid. same strategies around.. I see Terminus much more as a plan-b button there than as the main strategy in Claudio's deck
It is correct to discuss the deck here, but that,s not a real Miracle deck.. the metagame has taken measures to regular Miracle (blasts everywhere, Choke, Vexing Shusher, Decay, Boseiju)..
That's not correct. While you can play aggro or control in G1 - for example, the countersuite is exactly the same (+Daze) as in normal Miracle decks - you can chose if you want to be the agressor or land back and go for board control before you deploy mentor. And then you have the possibility to board into a "normal" Miracle G2 if you want to. So while it's not a regular Miracle deck, the core and strategy are mostly the same.
don't know.. Daze is so much aggresive that I really don't know if that deck is designed to lie back.
Daze is also a card I have wanted so much for a turn 2 CB even on the draw, but to lose a land is something impossible for a Jace-Entreat deck.
Daze surely requires a hybrid like that.
Anyway, we have the luck to have Claudio here. If he feels like it, he will tell us how he designed the deck and why
I don't think the deck can afford to play Stifle. Daze plays into the general gameplan of countering stuff. Stifle only punishes opponents for keeping land-light hands and hopes they don't draw more. We don't really care if our opponents make land drops (same goes for why Miracles will never run Wasteland in a meta that isn't flooded with Boseiju or Cloudpost); we only care that they don't resolve a spell. Stifle is too narrow for our decks and is better suited for fast decks that can utilize the mana-denial strategy. While Mentor is more aggro than Entreat, it's still not fast enough to take advantage of the tempo gained through Stifle.
In what context? in which MU? Why do you feel that Stifle is only good for Mana-denial strategy? I can think several instances where Stifle would make a world of difference.
1. Imperial Recuiter trigger
2. Ancestral Vision trigger
3. Liliana Ultimate activation
4. CA generated via cards like Ringleader
5. Anything that says cascade
6. Primeval Titan trigger, annihilator trigger
The list goes on and on. I actually feel Stifle is More diverse than Daze.
Obviously Claudio will be able to speak more to the deck after 18 rounds than I can with 3, but I'll try to give a little insight as well.
I ran the mentor list last night at a local with the following changes.
My local meta is very unpredictable and less than 50% blue.
-1 Pyroblast / +1 Misdirection
-1 Mentor / +1 Jace (helps up blue for Misdirection & personal preferance bc I wasn't sure how I felt about seeing multiple mentors)
SB: -1 Jace / +1 REB effect
R1: 1-1-1 vs Junk Deed stuff
Had lethal on board g3 and he wouldn't concede. His pace of play was glacier slow and we shouldn't have even been in that situation.
R2: 2-1 vs Aggro Loam
R3: 2-0 vs Grixis Delver
First, I agree that this should not be considered Miracles. It's mentor control. Terminus was the worst card in the deck, almost never wanted to see it. Daze was absurdly good. I even snapcasted back a daze 2x during the night (CS strictly better in that scenario, but it was amusing). This was my first time playing 'miracles' again in over a year, so I was surprised to find how shitty I thought DTT was in this shell (I'm coming off of playing a lot of Gold Digger). Your mana is just too taxed; it's likely necessary for control matches though.
You still play control the whole game, until the last 2 turns where you kill people with giant monks (forgive me, Buddha, for I have sinned). And your only aggression is with playing dazes. Don't be afraid, but have a few turns mapped out. They function similar to how they do in delver, with you gaining more tempo than your opponent loses, but it's control tempo, not aggro tempo (getting CB/Top set up, protecting Mentor via free pump + make monk, etc...)
I think this is harder to play than other versions of miracles because there are more decisions compacted into the early/mid game, and your mana is much more relevant, but your are rewarded even more for tight play. This reminds me of the Jace race, except on that critical turn you're landing mentor. The difference is that it only takes 1/2 more turns to win rather than 7+.
I am happy with cutting the 4th mentor, but ymmv, meta/playstyle dependant.
The shell is very strong, but definitely has plenty of room for improvement. I'm convinced there are significantly better, novel builds out there and am excited at the new design space finally.
Gegengewicht, Weissagekreisel - Du bist dran.
Grixis and 4c Delver play 18 lands
Omnitell play 19.
If we could find room for Wastelands, I would play them so much...
Stifling those triggers gets nothing accomplished.
1. You've wasted a card and they have a creature.
2. Stifle has been rotting in your hand waiting to stop this one trigger, whereas if it was another card you could have been more proactive in your plays. Also, CB with a land on top counters AV anyway.
3. Lili's ult isn't super backbrekaing. An opponent's Jace ult certainly is, but at that point you cannot expect Stifle to be in your hand when he does ult because of the +2 and even if you manage to cast it, the chances of it resolving are slim to none.
4. A corner case where Stifle would actually help, but the same principle as #1. Also, if you want to stop Goblins you play a card that stops them dead like Moat or Verdict, not a card that stalls them.
5. And they still have a creature on the board. Cascade for them is value, not something that is a necessity.
6. Wouldn't you rather that Stifle be a counterspell instead? Stifling Prime Time's ETB is useful but again, they still have a creature that you have to get rid of. It's a 2 for 1 in their favor. Annihilator trigger is another corner case, and by that point the chances of you winning that game are slim to none and Stifle won't save you there.
So you mentioned that Terminus felt like the worst card in the deck.
I suppose the deck could shift from UW(r) to UR(w).
For example:
-3 STP
-3 Terminus
+4 Lightning Bolt
+2 Bonfire of the Damned
*maybe* still keep in some copies of StP in the maindeck for the occasions when you need to kill a Tarmogoyf or whatever. Definitely keep some White board sweepers in the sideboard for the creature heavy matchups. Other changes might be to fit in the 4th Daze, play around with some of the slots and numbers, add another Snapcaster and/or other creature(s), etc.
Justifications:
-SDT/Counterbalance is one of the strongest things you can be doing in Legacy right now. SDT provides reduction of variance, massive digging power for singleton bombs, and combined with CB a repeatable form of stack control. Needless to say, in tandem they are absolutely broken. These 8 slots can pretty much destroy anything not running Vial, Cavern, or Decay, and even then it can still be problematic for such decks if the lock is established early enough. A UR(x) deck employing this combo is nothing new, but it's worth restating since most people approach building an Izzet deck from a more purely aggressive angle. This need not be the case; providing a bit of midrange staying power may be a safer bet in the current metagame than banking on closing out the game early with quick beats and an 8-point Price of Progress. Commonly played cards like Batterskull make such an approach less reliable.
-Then why still retain White? Mentor is more powerful than Pyromancer and alone provides justification for the White splash (beyond just providing amazing sideboard cards and efficient removal). Mentor dodges -1/-1 effects itself and can close out games in short order thanks to the explosive nature of Prowess triggers. It being a 3-drop is actually a bonus for a deck that plays Counterbalance.
-Bonfire of the Damned is often a one-sided Wrath of God against smaller creature decks, with the added benefit of tacking on a Fireball for your opponent's face. It's also slightly more feasible to cast for its natural CMC even without the help of the Miracle trigger. Admittedly, it is bad against bigger creatures and much more mana-intensive, but once you have some creatures on-board you don't have to worry about nuking your own army like you would with Terminus.
-Needless to say, but Lightning Bolt is versatile in that not only does it kill most creatures in Legacy, but it also helps close out the game and can be directed at Planeswalkers. You can cast it even when your opponent has no creatures on board to build up a Monk army. Bolt Snap Bolt is an easy way to get in for the final bits of damage. This is all particularly useful against creatureless decks, as StP would just end up stranded G1.
This all said, I'm wary about cutting out White removal. Tarmogoyf is still a card, and Terminus is a God-send when you're staring down an Emrakul or Marit Lage. I am really just thinking out loud, moreso than making serious suggestions to the established UWr Miracles archetype.
BTW, Sudden Shock is probably very good for the soon-to-be-common mirror match. CBalance triggers aside, this is a way to kill Pyromancers and Mentors before they get out of hand.
Somewhat unrelated and a bit out of the scope of this thread, but I wonder if there's a decent UR(x) deck that employs Helm of Awakening + Grapeshot (or Brain Freeze) along with the SDT/CBalance combo. Perhaps also using Intuition (or Muddle the Mixture)to help find the missing pieces.
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