Thank you, good sir. That's what we're trying to do. By defining requirements and specifying what functions we want our deck to perform we open up a lot of room for creativity. I really hope this project takes off and others join in.Originally Posted by Warden
@everyone: I'd love to get more input on the manacurve and distribution across the defined functions. We may also need to further expand the requirements model, since that might lead to changes in the distribution across the various functions. After we have those hammered out, we can start considering which cards could possibly fit which slots (and only after that do we start putting together an entire list).
Quite possibly, yes. It's one of the conclusions we may come to.
Keeping the curve at 4 with the only outliers: Sigarda and Sorin seems best way to go. 3 Top, 3 painful truths seems to be appropriate. I believe the deck is strong against most mu's but Combo is our natural weakness and Miracles is like getting hairs removed from your asshole. Our 15 needs to reflect our weaknesses and we need solid tech to fix those matchups. I witnessed junk fit 2-0 belcher sunday, I cried and shit my pants. there was some variance but the nic fit deck capitalized on everything it could and pushed through.
All this pessimism surrounding variance with the deck may seem to the writer that its reality but to every reader it displays inherent lack of confidence as well as a lack of respect for the other contributors. I enjoy this deck and I work on it because I want to make it better. I would love for one of us to take down a gp or a major tournament. I believe this deck is capable of it.
MTGO: Ricardio
Nic Fit: legacy's magical EDH deck
I came here to party and resolve prime time triggers.
"Well, I ain't calling you a truther." -Josh
IMGUR:http://ricardio69.imgur.com/all/
@ SE Fit:
In order to reduce as much variance as possible, I would not play the following cards MD:
1) Cards with conditional effects and without intrinsic value (poor power or toughness mana ratio)
- Qasali
- Rec Sage
- Gaddock
Playing GSZ should not allow us to play those conditional cards MD. They are far too MU dependant.
Ask you this simple question:
What if you draw it instead of tutor for it ? Chances, that it would be an empty sleeve, (in most cases) are too high.
You ain't playing brainstorm nor many card advantage spells that would make up for this empty sleeve.
Thus, by maindecking those cards, you are adding a bit more variance.
2) Cards without "real" immediate impact and low/high intrinsic value:
- Meren
- Courser
- Etc...
I believe one should really assess whether or not such cards should be played at all...
For example, Meren is really nice BUT it does not provide an immediate impact (another conditional one) and is "easy" to counter in the Legacy metagame. No to mention that you expose yourself a bit more to antigrave strategy coming from postboard. And we are already exposed to gravehate (cabal therapy & veteran to a lesser extend)
As a matter of fact, to reduce/ hedge our variance, our creatures should be "good enough" on their own to be maindecked:
1) Provide mandatory utility effects (Veteran)
2) Be as resilient as possible (Hard to remove)
3) Hit hard (power/mana ratio invested) and/or hit as often as possible (evasion) clockwise
Legacy & Homebrew **ONLY**
Brown Stax
Rainbow SWAT
Dimir Mill
Morph my Ride
Wally Wallah
Corona Syndrome
I don't think Gitrog can really be considered a CA engine. Obviously he is, but generally he's more of a game ender that happens to do so by drawing you lots of cards. He doesn't find you a wincon, he is one. If you're making 5 drops you probably want them to win rather than set up.
With regards to the deck building plans, IMO the setup we want is something like this:
- Nic Fit generally wants to play some number of cards that disrupt the opponent's plan, then resolve something which wins the game on its own. This is fundamentally a control plan rather than a tempo one (i.e. we make our threats, generally, after we deal with our opponent's answers, rather than before).
- That means we generally don't need a game ending threat immediately, or early in a game. Often we don't actually want to draw one early.
- What we do want to draw early is interaction. We do need some number of consistency cards to play the role of Brainstorm / Ponder and actually find us the cards we need when we need them.
Consistency cards have two types, really.
- Filtering and Tutors get the cards from our deck/graveyard into our hand.
I think we have almost enough of these at the moment. We don't want to brick on interaction. 4 GSZ, 3 Top, 2 Truths, 1 Witness, 2 other choices, totals 12 which is more than most agressive lists (Delver variants are often on 8-12), though less than Miracles (which is often on 15+ draw effects). We could use another option her. Personally I'm tempted to give 1x Scroll Rack 1x Sylvan Library a shot. Tireless Tracker may also be worth a look.
- Ramp and other enablers get the cards from our hand onto the stack.
We usually want to see no more than two pure Ramp cards under any circumstances. I don't think triple Veteran is ever a good thing to see unless we are all-in on a super expensive game plan, so let's assume that scenario unless we have to. That makes filtering more imortant, since it lets us prevent our dead draws of Vets, second Tops, etc. Veteran is the only pure ramp card in the deck - Do we want to reduce Vet to a 2x to prevent the triple - Vet draws from ever coming up? The second Explorer is normally fine, and we have additional virtual copies with GSZ. If we wanted to we could get to similar levels of ramp cards - in the lists I put up before I had ~10 (Vets, DRS, GSZ, Nissa).
Green Sun's Zenith is probably one of the best cards in the deck, because it's both a consistency tool and a finisher. Sometimes it's interaction as well. It gives us the open deck slots to play large numbers of both card types because of its versatility. Since it's so good, has anyone considered running more than four copies? Now that Track Through Ulvenwald is out, we could theoretically run a 4/2 GSZ/Track split to improve consistency.
Edit: One of the reasons I remain interested in Track is its interaction with Witness. Because it doesn't shuffle in after resolving, you can return it with Eternal Witness after searching for it, letting you assemble some form of engine (for example, Track -> Witness -> Meren -> Phyrexian Tower) from a single card.
Removal effects- we only have so many slots that we don't devote to winning the game, but stabilising is important. Path, Deed and Decay are pretty much fine here, and between them deal with basically anything short of a Keranos. The singleton unconditional removal spell is nice to have, which one seems to be situational - personally I'm actually leaning towards Anguished Unmaking for the ability to deal with Lage as well as the aforementioned Keranos.
I mean I don't want to beat a dead horse into the ground but.. What you're talking about Echelon is why I play SFM
It lowers the curve, is a threat, gives you selection (tutor for life gain? removal? resilient threat?) card advantage (if they answer the SFM or you use it with therapy), gives the deck a synergistic consistency (more cards for therapy, tower and recursion), pressures opponents to react to you which can help push the game to the mid/late game, and its a great mana sink/top deck, like gsun. Also equipment is good versus miracles..
The problem is that adopting SFM takes between 4-7 slots in your deck.
With regards to our mana curve, you want to look at how you want to play throughout the game, and perhaps you want more interaction in the lower part of your curve and don't want to waste those curve slots on threat/card advantage.
Turn 1-2 is about interaction and deck manipulation
Turn 3-4 is about card advantage so that you can interact and manipulate more than your opponent
Turn 5+ is about ending the game.
So your curve should line up with that. It's why good interaction and manipulation is cheap (one of our problems is our deck manipulation usually costs 2 mana (top, gsun, diabolic intent, library, SFM) but for blue decks only 1 mana), then we get to take advantage of our mana by playing card advantage and other spells in the same turn or resilient board impacting bombs (deed, truths, ewit, sfm, sigarda, tusk, rhino etc).
The likelihood is always the same if you are playing by the legal tournament rules. Each game consistency is independent of any other. The more games you play, the more you'll see problematic hands, but you'll see more successful hands overall. As humans we are biased toward the negative outcomes and see patterns where there are none, such as the roulette wheel.
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What package do you normally run? I'm looking at something like this for a deck core:
21 lands as before
14 interaction
4 therapy
4 path
2 decay
3 deed
1 unmaking
13 filtering/CA engines
4 Zenith
3 Top
2 Truths
1 Witness
1 library
1 nissa
1 meren
10 ramp
3 vet
2 DRS
(1 nissa)
(4 zenith)
10 wincons
3 Rhino
1 sigarda
1 sorin
(4 zenith)
(1 meren)
37 cards, 2-3 slots left. For a small SFM package (2 sfm, 1 bskull, 1 sofi/jitte with other one in board) I guess you cut some ramp cards since you don't need to accelerate to lategame so badly when you have the efficient threat that is SFM? I suppose you could just lose the Nissa and shove it there, but I dunno how low in ramp we can go.
Navsi, this what I run if it helps.
21 land
4 Gsun
1 Dryad Abor
4 Vet
1 Drs
1 Scooze
1 Ewit (truths instead?)
1 Meren
(won me many games agains black decks that no other card would)
1 Tusk/Rhino
(prefer tusk right now: bigger board impact + card advantage)
1 Sigarda
3 SFM
1 Jitte
1 SoFaI
1 BSK
2-3 Top
4 Therapy
2 Thoughtsieze
8-9 removal spells (between path, decay and deed)
0-2 Painful truths (depending on if you want 60 or 61 cards and whether you cut others for them)
The fuzziness in the numbers is because I've recently come to similar conclusions to Echelon and have been discussing in private message with Plm about optimal ratios between card selection, advantage and removal (and removal curve..)
Bu thats minimum 14 cards that let you look at your deck
8 cards that put you ahead on cards, 12 with gsun (not including therapy or deed)
14-15 cards that interact with your opponent (16 if you count Jitte and SoFaI as potential removal spells)
SB
2 Needle
2 Surgical Extraction
2 Thoughtsieze
1 Teeg
2 Abeyance
2 Truths (replace one with a reclamation sage or something if running 2 main deck)
2 Deluge
1 Engineered Plague
1 Sorin
Pettdan explained what I'm trying to say better than I could. I'll make a closing comment with some historical data:
Seattle
RG Lands
Grixis Delver
Miracles
Reanimator
Shardless
Grixis Delver
Aluren
Shardless
Kyoto
ANT
OmniTell
Grixis Delver
Miracles
UWR Blade
Miracles
RUG Delver
OmniTell
Lille
Miracles
Miracles
Infect
AggroLoam
4c Delver
4c Delver
RG Lands
AggroLoam
Paris
BUG Delver
Miracles
Reanimator
Miracles
BUG Delver
Deathblade
Imperial Painter
Miracles
This is a short list of Legacy GP Top 8s going back to GP Paris 2014 -- I probably missed one or two here or there (although I should note that I just threw out GP NJ as irrelevant due to Dig and Cruise).
Across these four legacy GPs, there were 5 entire decks (out of 40) that did not run Brainstorm. Two of them are RG Lands, which is arguably even more consistent than Brainstorm allows, just off of how the deck works with Gamble and Loam. Imperial Painter was A: probably a statistical anomaly because t1 Blood Moon vs correct matchups, and B: was Lejay, who is a much better Magic player than I am, at least.
The most interesting thing, though, is the 2x Aggro Loam decks from Lille. I'm guessing that this is mostly due to the absurdity of t1 Chalice for 1, but I don't really know beyond that.
Bottom line: I fail to understand how it's not immediately obvious that there is a correlation, if not explicit causation, between Brainstorm and top 8ing.
I'll insert another disclaimer here. I have full confidence that Nic Fit can deal with it. I have full confidence in the minds that we have here working on this, and on the deck archetype itself. Furthermore, I'm actually a Brainstorm defender whenever it comes time for banlist updates, despite not playing the card personally. I'm not whining, I'm not complaining, I'm just pointing out data with a call to arms that if we want to take down one or more top 8 slots at Columbus / Prague, which I think would be pretty baller personally, we clearly need to approach this problem from a different angle than we have been.
This conversation is happening now, and I'm fine ending this argument here.
I'm sorry you thought I was being rude Tao, although you came across as awfully rude yourself. Pettdan already went where I was going, better than I was saying, to answer your 8+8 question -- you can run well, run well, run well...but eventually you're going to run not-well, and the more rounds you play (whether in one long event or two shorter ones), the more likely it is to happen. I mean, it happens to Brainstorm decks too. Sometimes, a deck of 60 magic cards will just literally implode on itself, regardless of what cards are present within it. Deckbuilding is an exercise in futility: all decks fail, the only question is how long you can stave off that failure and how well you can compensate when it happens.
I'll freely admit I'm somewhat on the warpath about this at the moment after playing in an event on Sunday wherein I mulled 11 out 12 games...and down to 5 several of those. You can say that's a statistical anomaly all you want, but that doesn't change the experience of the event. I literally went to an event and it felt like I spent more time shuffling than I did actually participating in the event. That is not enjoyable, nor is it conducive to winning. As such, I'm rather on the warpath about increasing consistency at the moment. Again, apologies if my tone is coming off as rude.
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Okay, let's talk turkey.
I'm going to approach this from a Junk perspective, since that's almost certainly what I'm playing on Saturday, whether Thune is involved or not.
First question: how many lands is appropriate?
I've run this manabase for basically the last five years:
3 Verdant
3 Heath
3 Bayou
2 Savannah
1 Scrubland
3 Forest
2 Swamp
2 Plains
1 Tower
1 Karakas (sometimes this was a 2nd Tower)
With a sometimes floater 22nd land that's usually either a Taiga, a 3rd Plains, or a 7th Fetch.
It's been very, very solid for me. That being said, with Courser rising in everyone's estimation atm (and my wanting to play one on Saturday mostly because of Thune degeneracy), that might encourage an 8 fetch setup. This likely means cutting either Savannah 2 or Bayou 3, although Swamp 2 is also a possibility. Alternatively, sitting at 21 lands as set up above, without a floater 22nd, is an interesting idea. It forces you to rely a little bit more on your spells to achieve land drops, but makes you a bit more resistant to flooding out in exchange.
Let's be conservative and run 22 lands, which leaves room for 38 cards if we're looking at 60. I still think that the deck runs better at 61, but if we're specifically looking for consistency, it would be disingenuous at best to suggest 61 at this point. It's possible that we consider the 22nd land as the 61st card, though. Anyway.
Let's mirror 4 Brainstorm / 4 Ponder as best we can, so 8 things that let us interact with our deck. We'll fill out cards later, just looking at numbers at the moment, although something of note is that it occurs to me that because of Zenith we're actually over this number currently.
I think that it bears remembering that random dorks and utility bros can close games effectively -- just look at how many games blue decks with with just Snapcasters beating down. That means that we probably only need 6 slots at most dedicated to actual wincons, not including Zenith tutoring. That gives us plenty of bombs to combat removal and such, as well as reasonable quick access to a game-closer. I'm fine beating down with Eternal Witness the rest of the time, or draining with DRS.
Speaking of which, I think that we're all fairly happy with 4 Vet 2 DRS (or 3/3) as a 1-drop accelerant package. There are arguments for going to the full 4 Deathrites, but I worry about that ending up in hands with too much mana and nothing productive to do.
My problem with a Sligh curve is that 2-drops are basically useless for our deck. We have Sakura-Tribe Elder, Scavenging Ooze, Sylvan Library, and Abrupt Decay as viable 2-drops, basically, and of those, only Decay is run in multiples.
8+6+6=20 slots filled so far, with 18(19) left.
I think that 8 removal spells is a good number to be at, including sweepers. I personally still prefer to bias sweepers, but I'll grant that the prevalence of other lists running spot removal is likely one of the reasons I've been struggling with Painful Truths viability whereas others are raving about how great it is. Therapy hasn't been jotted down yet, so let's lump removal and discard together under "Interaction," and pencil that in for 12 cards.
This leaves 6-7 slots left for packages, sub-version engines, and utility creatures.
To pull it together:
6 ramp creatures
6 utility creatures / package creatures
6 bombs
8 card adv/filtering
12 interaction spells
22 lands
----
60
If 22nd land is 61st card, there's one more floater spot that we can put anywhere.
I'm not nearly proficient at match to judge probabilities of opening hands of these things. But in general I think that we want 1 ramp creature, 1-2 interaction spells, 1 utility creature, 1 card adv card, and 2-3 lands in our opening hands, ideally. Like when I fan out my opening hand and I see that spread of cards, it's a snap-keep, type of scenario. Ramp creatures might be a little low on the face of it, but Sakura is likely under utility creatures, and Zenith lets us cheat a lot.
Let's fill in some boxes:
4 Veteran Explorer
2 Deathrite Shaman
1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
1 Eternal Witness
1 Courser of Kruphix
2 Spike Feeder
1 Spike Weaver
2 Siege Rhino
2 Archangel of Thune
1 Sigarda, Host of Herons
1 Dragonlord Dromoka
4 Green Sun's Zenith
2 Sensei's Divining Top
2 Painful Truths
4 Therapy
2 Path to Exile
2 Abrupt Decay
3 Pernicious Deed
1 Toxic Deluge
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Windswept Heath
3 Bayou
2 Savannah
1 Scrubland
3 Forest
1 Swamp
2 Plains
1 Phyrexian Tower
1 Karakas
This is 60 cards, and in this set up I would likely include Nightmare as the 61st.
It's noteworthy that this list has slightly less "traditional" CA than what I'm used to -- only 2 Truths and 2 Tops, no Sylvan...but I guess the addition of Courser helps with that. I'll turn this over to minds brighter than mine now, so you can all poke holes in what I did :P
@everyone: Try to refrain from complete lists. I know it's what we normally do, but that only gets us so far.
Functions, distributions. Hammer that out first. I'll be joining the fray again tomorrow.
Keep it going people!
This argument goes back to what people are ok with in their deck. Someone asks why isnt blue viable? They answer - The upside is too low, threats suck, etc. OK? That is the trade off. You can make your deck with a higher upside but you lose the best cards that provide consistency.
I wont get into whether that is right or wrong but BS/Ponder are the cheapest cards that reduce variance. If you dont want to play them then fine, but it will hurt. Dont play Strix because it isnt path? fine but Strix cantrips, sacs to therapy and trades with a creature or removal spell. Those kinds of synergy add up.
I actually thought that Traverse is a playable card. Things like strix add 2 card types. Nic fit plays all the relevant card types. The downside is that it is not turned on in the first few turns consistently but I bet it is after turn 4+ fairly often. Havent tested it all yet though.
Yeah, I agree that I think there's something there with Traverse, especially for the BUG versions. Maybe I'll see if I can brew something up for it at some point...BUG isn't really my specialty though.
Of course there is a correlation between Brainstorm and Top8ing. That is because Brainstorm is an imbalanced, ultra strong card. Not because it magically becomes an even better card with additional tournament rounds.
It adds absurd consistency to your draws - in every single game. In a best of one, in a two round tournament,in a 20 round tournament or in a 2000 round tournament. The length of the tournament is completely irrelevant.
Being consistent helps in the long run dude, you can win a 3 round event with belcher way more likely than a "2000 round" one
"You either die a Onesto-Player, or live long enough to see yourself become a Dredger"
BTW @Arianrhod - I don't know if you can afford to play 5 ramp - only creatures in a list. If we have 5, then we have about 10% odds of drawing 3 or more in the first 15 cards we see. We can sometimes get rid of them via top + shuffle, but it still looks a little worrying when you consider that the second Vet/STE isn't that great either, and you have a 36% chance of drawing two or more copies.
What odds do we want to reach of having 1+ ramp cards (vet/ste/drs/gsz) in the opening hand? We can pretty easily get to 70% with nine cards, but it depends how many do- nothings we are comfortable with drawing over a game.
That only depends on the win rate of the deck. And Belcher is simply a bad deck with a low winrate. So of course it can't win in the long run. You can win a 3-round Legacy event with any Modern.dec, but the more rounds you play the lower your chances will get - no matter how inconsistent or consistent it is.
A good deck with ultra low consistency has a better chance to win than a mediocre deck with the highest consistency imaginable, no matter how many rounds. Bring Vintage Belcher (still inconsistent, just much better) and you dominate in Legacy, in 3 round event and even more so the more rounds you play.
So, I've talked extensively with Warden in particular about this. I would really love to be able to cut that Tribe-Elder from the deck, but every single time I do, it feels like the deck's consistency nose-dives. I've tried cutting him three or four different major tournaments, as well as a handful of locals, and I always run into significantly more problems as a result. Sometimes it's because of matchups like Miracles, where Vet is actively detrimental but you still want to have a ramp guy in the deck somewhere, sometimes it's because you just don't draw the right combination of things to set a Vet off and you need to force the issue yourself.
Furthermore, Sakura has a bunch of quiet interactions that have added up a lot over the years -- he's probably the best card in the deck g1 vs Dredge, he stonewalls Batterskull without lifegain for a turn, he ramps Meren (although admittedly Meren isn't in my list at this particular moment), he's another shuffle for Top (or a 2x shuffle with Zenith), and he helps save your ass vs Blood Moon. Sakura is probably my most loved/hated card in the deck all at the same time. He feels bad to run, but he always overperforms for me.
If STE is invaluable, maybe he takes a Vet slot? If you went to 2 vet / 2 drs / 1 STE / 4 GSZ, you're still at 70% to get one in your opening hand but your odds of getting 3 vets/ste in the first quarter of your deck go down to 1.2%.
That might be worth looking into. My only real issue with it is that you don't generally want to Zenith for Explorer in particular -- it's much better to naturally draw one, and then use the mana from it on the Zenith to get a threat. That might be offset though just by having a slightly higher quality of draws throughout the game -- probably at the point at which you draw your second Zenith of the game, it's better. Definitely worth thinking about.
On the other hand if you replaced those two Explorers with threats, then you end up with the same plan, just reversed. Vet from hand into GSZ for a threat is functionally similar to GSZ for vet into a threat from the hand.
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