[Primer/Deck] Nic Fit

[Warden]

@Kev: I'm on board with you about Sakura. Dude fucking sucks on paper. Feels like I'm writing Vizzardrix on the decklist. But that little turtle is sneaky good. I think he's good because he plays into this "consistency / see your library" idea.

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'm quoting this entire thing so others can see what is being referenced.
@Navsi: I'm right there with you in the think-tank LOL.
I think @Ralf's comments are also spot-on. Maybe we need to re-evaluate all the cute things, packages, choices and ultimately "cut the fat" if cards aren't contributing/powerful. I'm willing to drop some of my utility guys and jump head-first into "consistency" cards. I'm coming around to SFM, who I still have problems with in NicFit, but she appears to be exactly what we're asking for. Thanks @Jain_Mor.

===
Let's aim high for ~50% "card X mitigates variance". In other words, ~30 of the 60 cards in the deck would hedge against variance. There is some degree of interpretation with what I mean, but those who are in this conversation seem to be on the same page. Maybe this vision sucks. Maybe it's some secret sauce. Who knows!? But that's why we discuss. Bounce ideas. Pick each others' brains.

Where to begin? Let's start with "Filtering and Tutors", as Navsi writes. Easiest starting point is our manabase. 21 or 22 lands...it doesn't matter to me as long as we're using 10 fetches.
+10

Now we need our equivalent of Brainstorm/Ponder/Probe (I'm echoing most of what others have written). Navsi classifies them as "Filtering and Tutors". Let's aim to cover Bstorm and Ponder's 8x. The probe will be swapped out for Veterans in the next section. 4 Zenith + 4 of some combination of: top, truths, scrying, library, intent, traverse, or our own gitaxian probes.
+8

I went back and forth here. I think we should run 12 "Ramp and other enablers". Before you laugh, we're going to let 4 GSZ double-dip here. That means we only need 8 additional cards. Off the bat, 6 Vet + DRS are automatic. Now pick 2 of: Nissa, Sakura, Courser (all of which boost your "consistency" numbers).
+8

That brings us to 26 of 37/38 cards. If we stopped here, we'd have 26 of 60 cards that mitigate variance...translating into 43.33% of the deck. I'm not even factoring in threats that double as tutors (SFM, KotR) or CA machines outside of Courser (Meren, Witness, Walkers, Titans, etc).

With 22/23 slots to go, we need a small corp of "utility", a fair amount of "interaction" and a small amount of "finishers". The only Finisher I'm including is Sigarda, as she's universally approved as closing out games.

***
22 Land

4 GSZ
4 filter and tutor
6 Vet/DRS
2 additional ramp
/16

4 therapy
10 removal-interaction
/14

1 Sigarda
7 utility and finisher
/8

The list could be re-written in a more traditional format as:
22 Land

6 Vet/DRS
2 additional ramp guys (or Traverse)
7 utility and finisher
1 Sigarda
/16

4 GSZ
4 filter and tutor
4 therapy
10 removal-interaction
/22

***
I'm being vague on purpose, as I'm looking to give ratios and ideas. This is a shell for 22 lands/60 cards. It's not definitive. Feel like running 9 removal instead of 10? Go for it! Feel like I'm providing too much ramp? Change it! It took me more time than I'm willing to admit to write this. But I think this is ONE way to interpret things. I'd be curious to see someone run 4 Probes in place of some of these choices here. I'm also curious to see how SFM fits in.

*I can't figure out who would constitute my creature team. But it requires me to think about what's important and beneficial to my matchups this weekend.

[Brael]

Apologies for the book length, but I have trouble being succinct.

As a bug pod player and a player that never tryed junk may i ask why no one is picking up the blue version?

Probably you lose some raw power, but i find brainstorm and now more than ever baleful strix to be powerhouse to not be understimated.

I see you talking about variance in a grand prix, my version has plenty of draws, your main problem is not to be stable and efficient, but you just tend to have a bad time when facing some situation like token generatos and jace with even board.

Junk just runs smoother, and the raw power of Rhino is real, you also get better mana. I ran BUG Pod for a long time and the problem I found was that the list is very, very tight. Most of the cards you want to pod for are non green which makes GSZ worse, but a few of the cards still push your mana in a heavy green direction. Additionally, all of the best blue cards are heavy blue most with UU in their costs, which pushes your mana very far blue. The tension between trying to have a GSZ toolbox and the best pod targets causes the deck to really work against itself. There's also the issue that there's a minimum number of creatures you need in the deck in order for Pod to function, but this is an archetype that's very spell heavy particularly in the blue version which is trying to make room for FoW post board.

Here's an open question: how many card advantage / manipulation cards, in number, is correct? I've been on 5 for a while, and have run 6 at points. Perhaps we should try to push to 8 (3 Top, 1 Sylvan, 3 Truths/Whispers, 1 Courser) in an attempt to mirror the 4x Brainstorm 4x Ponder engine (except ours are better because we can actually put mana into them)?

Right now I'm using 4 Top, 1 Truths, 2 Courser, 1 Library. I keep going back and forth on 3 vs 4 tops. I find that I get them stuck in my hand a lot with 4 and that 3 is probably the better number but at the same time with 2 Courser I'm relying pretty hard on getting a Top engine going at some point. The one thing I do like about having multiple tops is I can often times cash them in for a card and then shuffle them away. I think if you want to go the Whispers route that Abzan Charm is better, it's also a draw 2 but it has the flexibility of being a removal spell and going up so far on card advantage leaves you without versatility in your draws.

Again, explain to me how I'm wrong. Give me reasons, and that's fine. Don't just say "that's bullshit," and not back it up.

If you don't have Brainstorm, Ponder, Probe, and sometimes Preordain, all it means is you need your own consistency tools. This deck fights on that axis by having a higher threat density, the ability to use top very similarly to Brainstorm, and GSZ which is effectively a cantrip that always hits well. 8 cards that find things with 17ish threats is just as consistent as 12 cards that find things with 12ish threats.

Personally, I find the most inconsistent aspect of the deck to be Cabal Therapy. It's the card where it's crucial to get your calls right, but even when you get them right you can still miss at times where there's multiple things you need to name. Making Therapy more consistent would probably go a long ways in making the deck more consistent as a whole.

First couple of requirements:
- Must be able to go over the top of most opponents
- Must be able to handle/mitigate mana denial strategies
- Must be able to break through lock pieces
- Must be able to handle opposing threats on the board
- Manabase must be able to consistently produce green mana on turn 1
- Manabase must be able to consistently produce black mana on turn 1
- Manabase must be able to consistently produce white mana on turn 2
- No card may cost >5 mana

Taking a Systems Engineering approach to MTG!

This is the approach I take to all of my decks, or try to atleast. It's easiest with Burn which I've got a pretty extensive amount of data on. The problem though is that creatures are highly variable and in a couple years of thinking about it I've never come up with a good way to model them. In many decks this isn't too much of an issue but Nic Fit runs 16-18 creatures and then 4 GSZ for another 4 creatures so we're pretty creature oriented.

Lets start with the mana though. First you need to define the constraints to generate mana, personally I like the constraint of a mulligan to 6 on the play. Meaning you have 6 card draws to generate your first mana, 7 for your second, and so on. I came up with that approach prior to the scry rule, but I see little reason to compensate for scry as the scry effectively just lets you go to 5 and maintain consistency instead of loosening up your requirements on 6. Also, in a hypergeometric distribution I like to shoot for 75% consistency minimum, higher is better but it imposes severe costs and at 75% you can mulligan aggressively to get it (another reason I set the requirements assuming you mulligan). Also worth noting is that we often run 61 cards which does change the percentages slightly. Here's the guideline I try to go by:

T1 - C 13 sources (preferably basics so you can't get Wastelanded)
T2 - D 12 sources, CD 15 sources, CC 21 sources
T3 - C 10 sources, CC 18 sources, CCC 26 sources, CD 13 sources, CDE 14 sources
T4 - C 9 sources, CC 16 sources, CDE 13 sources

So looking at that, the biggest constraint on green is generally in hitting CC for Witness/Courser which needs 18 green, for black it's a t2 Decay at 15 black, and for white it's generally 13 for a Rhino. This is in addition to wanting 13 green basic sources T1 and 12 black.

I've never been a fan of the 14/14/14 manabase for this reason. Instead I prefer the 15/14/13 and supplementing the rest with Veteran Explorers+Deathrite Shamans. This is also why I remain unconvinced there's room for two Phyrexian Towers, and part of why I like Dryad Arbor so much because an opening of Forest into Scrubland still enables an early Courser of Kruphix on the back of a GSZ.

Anyways, I use
3 Forest
2 Swamp
2 Plains
4 Windswept Heath
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Marsh Flats
2 Bayou
1 Savannah
1 Scrubland
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Phyrexian Tower

This results in a 15 (11)/14 (7)/13 (7) manabase. There's an argument that the second Plains could become something else though.

Also, aside from a single 5 drop, I think you don't want cards to cost more than 4, because 5 mana is the decks sweet spot and a GSZ for X=4 uses your 5 mana.

Specifications first, implementation/realisation later.

Continuing this concept - maybe we can consider a Sligh curve for our 39 slots. That means:
17 CMC 1 cards
10 CMC 2 cards
5 CMC 3 cards
4 CMC 4 cards
3 CMC 5 cards

I don't like this curve, I think it's better to aim for optional mana sinks as the way to use our excess mana. GSZ is obvious since the cost is variable but cards like QPM, Ooze, DRS are excellent because they offer ways to use mana (DRS in particular being both a mana source and a mana sink). This is also why I'm leaning towards Volrath's Stronghold over Phyrexian Tower because it's a mana source and a mana sink while the tower is just a double source.

The curve I like most with this sort of deck is higher on 2's and 3's, lower on 1's, and seeks to use mana sinks. Something like
Land - 22
1 CMC - 11
2 CMC - 14
3 CMC - 8
4 CMC - 4
5 CMC - 1

Note that this approach also compensates for a lack of cantrips, when you're light on mana you simply ignore the mana sinks, but when you flood you still have things to do.

@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).

Creature count is a big one in my opinion. Each creature makes your followup creatures better because your opponent has less removal to deal with them. To give an example, it's not a single Rhino that wins us a game, it's the fact that Rhino is hard to deal with and our other cards already used up their removal that could handle it. Therefore one of the requirements is finding the number of creatures you need in your deck in order to absorb X removal spells but still have things to play. Part of this also involves looking at how many cards you see per turn or per game, because seeing more cards means you need fewer in your deck.

ering 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.

I beat people to death with Eternal Witness and Courser of Kruphix as often as I beat people to death with Rhinos. This deck plays the attrition game well. Once you run your opponent out of answers it doesn't really matter what you use to win the game with, almost all of our 2 and 3 drop creatures beat the opponents 2's and 3's in combat (excepting Goyf which we can remove). That's why I like having incremental value on the creatures and don't really like having a win condition category. Just about every creature in our deck except for Arbor and Explorer is a legitimate win condition.

[Ralf]

@ thread: I (we) went that path already...somehow.

The main problem is that "we don't have any real core deck" ala Temur Delver (54 slots + 6 free).

For those interested click here.

This is a POD list but if you don't like it you can easily transform into something more "standard" like Jain_Mor (exchanging POD and a few utility creatures for something more linear).

This POD list has evolved since. Mainly thanks to intensive testing.

Abzan POD by Ralf

1 Dryad Arbor
1 Plains
2 Bayou
2 Savannah
2 Scrubland
2 Swamp
3 Forest
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Windswept Heath

1 Dragonlord Dromoka
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kitchen Finks
1 Mirran Crusader
1 Orzhov Pontiff
1 Reclamation Sage
1 Restoration Angel
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Siege Rhino
1 Sigarda, Host of Herons
2 Veteran Explorer
4 Deathrite Shaman
4 Stoneforge Mystic

1 Batterskull
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Umezawa's Jitte
3 Birthing Pod

1 Eladamri's Call
2 Path to Exile
3 Abrupt Decay

2 Green Sun's Zenith
2 Thoughtseize
4 Cabal Therapy

SB: 2 Hymn to Tourach
SB: 2 Engineered Plague
SB: 1 Pithing Needle
SB: 1 Dryad Militant
SB: 2 Liliana of the Veil
SB: 2 Surgical Extraction
SB: 3 Abeyance
SB: 1 Gaddock Teeg
SB: 1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben


In a POD list you can play "conditional" creatures because eventually you can translate them into something powerful which is not possible with a standard Nic Fit one.

This list is as stretch as it gets.

But, I'm still assessing a few things:

1) Do I really need Dromoka. Mirran is an all-star and Mirran #2 might be a better option
2) I kinda want a 22th land. But to avoid flooding, I am considering 2 options (Canopy or Stirring wildwood). Obviously, with another land, Dromoka seems more appealing...
3) If I go to 62 cards, I'll be adding a 3rd Path and try 63 cards.

Anyway, here are some food for thoughts:

a) if you wanna try SFM; 4 seems to be quite the right number (and I have tested every possible config from 0 to 4). It wins you game. Period.
b) GSZ is not the only "good" tutor we have access to (in GW colors); Eladamri is quite busted as well without mentioning that you don't need to stick to green creatures. The fact that it does not care about cage or priest (postboard) is another big go-for-it.

Well, the next path for me seems to be in the Rock thread... AHAHAHAHAHA


Happy brewing everyone.

[Ralf]

Lets start with the mana though. First you need to define the constraints to generate mana, personally I like the constraint of a mulligan to 6 on the play. Meaning you have 6 card draws to generate your first mana, 7 for your second, and so on. I came up with that approach prior to the scry rule, but I see little reason to compensate for scry as the scry effectively just lets you go to 5 and maintain consistency instead of loosening up your requirements on 6. Also, in a hypergeometric distribution I like to shoot for 75% consistency minimum, higher is better but it imposes severe costs and at 75% you can mulligan aggressively to get it (another reason I set the requirements assuming you mulligan). Also worth noting is that we often run 61 cards which does change the percentages slightly. Here's the guideline I try to go by:

T1 - C 13 sources (preferably basics so you can't get Wastelanded)
T2 - D 12 sources, CD 15 sources, CC 21 sources
T3 - C 10 sources, CC 18 sources, CCC 26 sources, CD 13 sources, CDE 14 sources
T4 - C 9 sources, CC 16 sources, CDE 13 sources

So looking at that, the biggest constraint on green is generally in hitting CC for Witness/Courser which needs 18 green, for black it's a t2 Decay at 15 black, and for white it's generally 13 for a Rhino. This is in addition to wanting 13 green basic sources T1 and 12 black.

I've never been a fan of the 14/14/14 manabase for this reason. Instead I prefer the 15/14/13 and supplementing the rest with Veteran Explorers+Deathrite Shamans. This is also why I remain unconvinced there's room for two Phyrexian Towers, and part of why I like Dryad Arbor so much because an opening of Forest into Scrubland still enables an early Courser of Kruphix on the back of a GSZ.

Anyways, I use
3 Forest
2 Swamp
2 Plains
4 Windswept Heath
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Marsh Flats
2 Bayou
1 Savannah
1 Scrubland
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Phyrexian Tower

This results in a 15 (11)/14 (7)/13 (7) manabase. There's an argument that the second Plains could become something else though.

Also, aside from a single 5 drop, I think you don't want cards to cost more than 4, because 5 mana is the decks sweet spot and a GSZ for X=4 uses your 5 mana.

Well said Sir.

Could you rewrite the C/D/E part using Green, Black and White ?
I had to reread several times and trust me I'm pretty familiar with deck building and hypergeometric distribution.

Just to make it crystal clear for everyone.

Your choice are debatable but I agree with you about the 15 G. We ain't not playing any cantrips and any hand without a green mana should be an automatic mulligan.

14 mana sources is the standard accepted by the Legacy community for any T1 spell.
14/14/14 is a valid option if you ask me especially if you want to be able to use a PTE or STP on T1.

This is very rare and I can live with only 13 W.

14 B is mandatory (to my taste) in any Nic Fit shell. This parameter is usually decided by the sideboard where a T1 discard can be a matter of life or death.

I'm glad we have another math geek among us :)

[Tao]

3) If I go to 62 cards, I'll be adding a 3rd Path and try 63 cards.

Anyway, here are some food for thoughts:

I am all for creativity but this thread needs to start accepting mathematical facts... your deck does not get worse the longer a tournament goes and playing more than 60 cards will decrease your consistency.

[Jain_Mor]

@Warden, what kind of concerns do you have SFM, maybe I can alleviate them? Or PM if we don't want the thread cluttered with rehashed SFM discussion.

I agree with most of everything else you said, except again the nissa/courser discussion.. I'm in the "they are bad camp" nissa can be replaced by eternal witness getting back a fetchland (fixes your mana (if only she said Forest card..))

@Ralf, yes I think most threads start to go in circles after a year or so, also keep pod fit alive <3

@Tao, I appreciate your presence, you say things so I don't have to :)

[Brael]

Well said Sir.

Could you rewrite the C/D/E part using Green, Black and White ?
I had to reread several times and trust me I'm pretty familiar with deck building and hypergeometric distribution.

When I wrote it I was referring to C as color 1, D as color 2, E as color 3, so C=Green, D=Black, E=White in this case, but there's probably some builds where Black could be color 1 such as something that's focusing on Hymn, in which case you would want a different set of fetches and to try and get up to 18 black or so (you can subtract one in Strongholds case).

I realize that most talk about 14 of a source being right in Legacy but I'm not sure how right that is. Wastelands and mulligan rates are both things, and most decks play all duals. Basics cause certain combinations of spells to not work, for example if you go Forest/Plains you can't cast Abrupt Decay even if you have 14 black sources where most decks with Decay can cast it off of any combination of two lands.

The more I think about it though, the more I want to go down to 12 white and play a second colorless land. My main reason for not doing it so far is Sigarda's double white, I like having two white basics to cast her. Plus I've been known to run Baneslayer from time to time which also uses WW.

[Ralf]

I am all for creativity but this thread needs to start accepting mathematical facts... your deck does not get worse the longer a tournament goes and playing more than 60 cards will decrease your consistency.

Yes, indeed.

But it happens that I'm using the term "assessing" and not "playing" nor "advising to".

[Brael]

One of the points I brought up in my large post above was the value of having cards that are mana sinks, especially if you're lowering the curve. One area of deck building I've really come around on in the past few months is cards that just let you use excess mana even if it's not efficiently. At the top of that list are cards that are simultaneously mana sources and mana sinks. DRS is the best example of this, but so are many lands like Horizon Canopy, Mutavault, Treetop Village, Stirring Wildwood, Hissing Quagmire, Volrath's Stronghold, and Blighted Fen. What are peoples thoughts on any of these? I'm thinking that if you pay more attention to the curve it's important to include these cards because they're versatile. Not only are they mana sources/sinks but they can fill spell slots which might be in high demand. Versatility is huge, and in a deck that ramps efficiency isn't super important.

Can anyone think of other creatures that act as good mana sinks? The only other ones that came to mind for me were Scavenging Ooze, and the land bouncers Quirion Ranger/Scryb Ranger (which enable some Dryad Arbor tricks and combo real well with DRS). Has anyone ever tried either of the Rangers?

[Koby]

Can anyone think of other creatures that act as good mana sinks? The only other ones that came to mind for me were Scavenging Ooze, and the land bouncers Quirion Ranger/Scryb Ranger (which enable some Dryad Arbor tricks and combo real well with DRS). Has anyone ever tried either of the Rangers?

Tireless Tracker
Recurring Nightmare (with critters to abuse with it, like Rhino)
Spike Feeder/Weaver
SFM / equipment
etc

[Brael]

Tireless Tracker
Recurring Nightmare (with critters to abuse with it, like Rhino)
Spike Feeder/Weaver
SFM / equipment
etc

Tireless Tracker would be one to look at, I'm not sure about the rest. Meren is a more efficient Recurring Nightmare, the Spikes are pretty bad and SFM saves mana more than spends it.

I do like the idea of Tracker, it plays real well with both Courser/Explorer too (plus the Rangers if you were to use them), and even well with fetches. The question in that case would be what is the cut for it? Maybe Tracker over Painful Truths? Replace raw CA with slightly less reliable CA but the ability to hit the opponent (and not pay any life)?

[Bobmans]

@ thread: I (we) went that path already...somehow.

Well, the next path for me seems to be in the Rock thread... AHAHAHAHAHA

Happy brewing everyone.

@Ralf, yes I think most threads start to go in circles

That's how the wheel got invented 
We always go in circles in here, but that's ok.

Speaking about the Rock, what is the argument for running RhinoTime over the Rock?

[sdematt]

That's how the wheel got invented 
We always go in circles in here, but that's ok.

Speaking about the Rock, what is the argument for running RhinoTime over the Rock?

Rock has better combo and Miracles matchups, but can drag behind against longer attrition matchups that go bigger.

[Bobmans]

Maybe we need to re-evaluate all the cute things, packages, choices and ultimately "cut the fat" if cards aren't contributing/powerful. I'm willing to drop some of my utility guys and jump head-first into "consistency" cards. I'm coming around to SFM, who I still have problems with in NicFit, but she appears to be exactly what we're asking for. Thanks @Jain_Mor.

I'm being vague on purpose, as I'm looking to give ratios and ideas. This is a shell for 22 lands/60 cards. It's not definitive. Feel like running 9 removal instead of 10? Go for it! Feel like I'm providing too much ramp? Change it! It took me more time than I'm willing to admit to write this. But I think this is ONE way to interpret things. I'd be curious to see someone run 4 Probes in place of some of these choices here. I'm also curious to see how SFM fits in.

*I can't figure out who would constitute my creature team. But it requires me to think about what's important and beneficial to my matchups this weekend.

So if i sum up the discussion of the last couple days: more focus, cut the (cute) crap, layout with better digit's, Siege Rhino...
This is basically the most streamlined version of NicFit i was able to build with the numbers that turn me on.

4 Green Sun's Zenith
3 Sensei's Divining Top
2 Painful Truths

1 Batterskull
1 Umezawa's Jitte

3 Veteran Explorer
3 Deathrite Shaman
3 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Siege Rhino
1 Sigarda, Host of Herons

4 Cabal Therapy
3 Pernicious Deed
3 Abrupt Decay
4 Path to Exile

2 Bayou
2 Savannah
1 Scrubland
2 Forest
2 Swamp
2 Plains
4 Windswept Heath
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Karakas
1 Horizon Canopy

SB: 1 Gaddock Teeg
SB: 1 Scavenging Ooze
SB: 2 Ethersworn Canonist
SB: 1 Reclamation Sage
SB: 1 Garruk Relentless
SB: 1 Sorin, Grim Nemesis
SB: 1 Pithing Needle
SB: 2 Thoughtseize
SB: 2 Surgical Extraction
SB: 1 Toxic Deluge
SB: 1 Golgari Charm
SB: 1 Choke

Rock has better combo and Miracles matchups, but can drag behind against longer attrition matchups that go bigger.

My Goyf's have been catching dust for too long..

[Sergi]

Tireless Tracker would be one to look at, I'm not sure about the rest. Meren is a more efficient Recurring Nightmare, the Spikes are pretty bad and SFM saves mana more than spends it.

I do like the idea of Tracker, it plays real well with both Courser/Explorer too (plus the Rangers if you were to use them), and even well with fetches. The question in that case would be what is the cut for it? Maybe Tracker over Painful Truths? Replace raw CA with slightly less reliable CA but the ability to hit the opponent (and not pay any life)?

What about Nylea, god of the hunt? Zenitable (only 5 mana), gives evasion and pumps your other creatures. Also not being a creature at first instance is a plus.

[Echelon]

Alrighty. Let's recap what we've cooked up so far.

Requirements:
- Must be able to go over the top of most opponents
- Must be able to handle/mitigate mana denial strategies
- Must be able to break through lock pieces
- Must be able to handle opposing threats on the board
- Manabase must be able to consistently produce green mana on turn 1
- Manabase must be able to consistently produce black mana on turn 1
- Manabase must be able to consistently produce white mana on turn 2
- No card may cost >5 mana
- No card may have triple mana of any 1 colour in its manacost
- GSZ'able cards must have intrinsic value
- Creatures must either provide mandatory utility effects, be very hard to kill or have a very high power/mana ratio

Does anyone want to add to this list?

Slot distribution:
21-22 land
16 removal/interaction
16 CA/library manipulation
11-12 Finisher

Taking Navsi's configuration for the optimal opening hand and stretching it a bit to the following:
2-3 land
1-3 removal/interaction
1-3 CA/library manipulation
0/1 finisher

To achieve the highest probability for each, hypergeometric distribution suggests we're best off with 22 land, 16 removal/interaction and 16 CA/library manipulation and whatever is left can be a finisher. So mathematically we're spot-on for slot distribution. 21 land gives a 0.17% increase in probability to have exactly 2 or 3 land in our opener, but if we're more comfortable with 22 land I'm perfectly fine with that as well. The difference is so small I think we can afford to ignore it.

I think we're fine with the categories and their distributions as-is?

Mana curve:
17 CMC 1 cards
10 CMC 2 cards
5 CMC 3 cards
4 CMC 4 cards
3 CMC 5 cards

OR

1 CMC 11 cards
2 CMC 14 cards
3 CMC 8 cards
4 CMC 4 cards
5 CMC 1 cards

We need more input on this. What does the rest of you think the curve should look like?

In my opinion, looking at the lists we've come up with up until this point we're quite close to the Sligh curve. 4 Veteran Explorer + 2/3 Deathrite Shaman + 2/3 SDT + 3/4 PtE + 4 Cabal Therapy = 15-18 1 CMC cards. With counting 2 GSZ to Siege Rhino as 5-drops, that puts us right on the spot there as well. There might be some room to switch around the 2/3/4 CMC distribution, but we're getting there.

@Arianrhod: I understand your aversion vs. the number of 2 CMC cards. First off it's a starting point - feel free to change it up. Do remember though that quite often we'll GSZ for Veteran Explorer, allowing us to regard GSZ as either a 2 CMC card or a 5 CMC card (since the other thing it'll often get is Siege Rhino) and put it in the according slots.

One other important thing we need to figure out:
Mana curve per category

Who wants to take the first crack at that?

[Brael]

Slot distribution:
21-22 land
16 removal/interaction
16 CA/library manipulation
11-12 Finisher

I've come to similar numbers on my own, except my threat count is much different. I don't worry about the quality of my finisher, I've finished people off with Dryad Arbor before if necessary. A better finisher might be more resilient, but if you run your opponent out of answers (which you can do with a combination of tough to answer creatures plus card advantage/library manipulation) it really doesn't matter what you're hitting them with. As a result I think of the finisher category as just being any threats, and I go much higher on the number.

So in order to figure out how many threats you need I would say you need their answers+2 and you need to figure out some sort of turn number. I'm just going to say turn 7 to throw out a number where we should have the game locked up. With 17 answer spells and seeing an average of 3 cards per turn, that suggests the opponent on a good hand is going to see 9 answers which means you need 10-11 threats. Seeing an average of 2.5 cards per turn in order to see 10 threats you need some combination of 25 threats/answers to their answers. If you include 4 Cabal Therapy and 4 GSZ that implies 17 other threats rather than 12.

I think we're fine with the categories and their distributions as-is?

Mana curve:
17 CMC 1 cards
10 CMC 2 cards
5 CMC 3 cards
4 CMC 4 cards
3 CMC 5 cards

OR

1 CMC 11 cards
2 CMC 14 cards
3 CMC 8 cards
4 CMC 4 cards
5 CMC 1 cards

I agree these are good curves in general but I'm not sure they're what this deck wants to look like. I'm finding it pretty difficult to add two drops while the 1's and 3's are much easier to fill.

In the list I'm messing with right now, not counting GSZ as anything it's 16/5/9/4/1 which is pretty ugly but at the same time I'm pretty sure it's right to not be turning more Paths into Abrupt Decays just so the curve is more balanced.

This approach ultimately probably leads back to using Diabolic Intent as a way to shore up numbers across the board.

[Echelon]

This approach ultimately probably leads back to using Diabolic Intent as a way to shore up numbers across the board.

Or to the conclusion that we really want to skip on the 2 drops, as 1 Veteran Explorer allows us to jump from 1 to 3 or from 2 to 4 naturally. That'd be perfectly reasonable too, as long as we can explain why.

[Navsi]

As another way of looking at things, I've had a dig through the standard lists in the DTB forums, thinking about how many threats they present to us and how many removal effects they have. I'm thinking that generally we want to either have more removal than the enemy has threats, or more threats than the enemy has removal. Obviously we would love to have both of those, but that's pretty difficult when they play the same number of cards as us, or thereabouts.

Miracles:
7-10 threats (Jace, Mentor, Entreat, Clique, Snapcaster)
15-20 removal (swords, terminus, fow, counterspell, Judgment, snapcaster)
+ counterbalance

Infect:
12-14 threats (Glistener, Agent, Inkmoth, GSZ)
6-10 removal (force, daze, pierce, stifle)
+ threatens to kill you whenever they untap with a threat. I think this inclines us towards having access to a bare minimum of 12-14 effects that can prevent a creature from being able to turn sideways at us.

Eldrazi Stompy:
17-25 threats (TKS, Smasher, Endbringer, Reshaper, Endless One, Displacer, Mimic)
~4 removal (Wail, Dismember)
+ Chalice of the Void & Thorn of Amethyst. We can't pack enough removal to answer everything here, so we need to win the ground war basically.

Grixis Delver:
~14 threats (Delver, Pyro, DRS, Angler)
~16 removal (FOW, Daze, Stifle, Bolt)
+ Lots of both. With a standard interaction package we will probably not have enough to prevent all their threats (since we'd be even, but they have counterspells) so we'll probably end up having to make the advantage up in board position.

Death and Taxes:
~20 threats (Thalia, Revoker, SFM, Avenger, Flickerwisp, Batterskull, Mirran)
~12 removal (Swords, Mangara, Jitte, Flickerwisp, Karakas)
+ Mother of Runes, misc shenanigans.


From the Infect list I think we can say that we definitely want at least 14 interaction effects, when you take into account that they have 12 creature threats + some number of counterspells. Also some of our removal doesn't hit Inkmoth, so we probably need higher numbers to increase our odds of failing to find the wrong answer.

From the Grixis and DnT lists, we definitely want at least 8 game enders which can win through FoW/Bolt/Swords/Mangara. The obvious options here are 1 Sigarda / 4 GSZ / 1-4 Rhino / 0-4 SFM / 0-1 Batterskull. If they can win on the ground against a 5/5 Angler / Smasher, even better (which inclines me towards Stoneforge).

With regards to the Miracles lists, I don't think we can have more threats than they have removal in their deck (unless Witness beatdown etc. counts) and their game enders are hard enough to deal with that we probably can't plan to remove them all (unless they run nothing but Jace and 1 other or something and we take Slaughter Games) so the sideboard is probably important here. If we can get up to 7 threats which are resistant to swords/terminus (planeswalkers, batterskull, sigarda) we can potentially overload their counterspells.

[Echelon]

Lots of good stuff

So what you're saying is that we need >30 cards in the combined removal/interaction and finishers categories, am I right?

Right now we only have 27-28 slots assigned to those particular categories, so that means at least 2/3 library manipulation/CA slots have to perform double functions to be on par with the DtBs. Probably preferably in the 2-3 mana range..?

Updated slot distribution:
21-22 land
16 removal/interaction
13 CA/library manipulation
11-12 finishers
2-3 CA/library manipulation AND (removal/interaction OR finisher)

Starting to add some boolean algebra there. If we want to further expand upon this, we'll have to look for ways to increase the number of cards that fall in the last category. CA + removal/interaction probably means some sort of sweeper effect. CA + finisher probably means CA on a stick.