Entreat plan is fine post board but the issue is that even if you plan on "blanking' opponent's removal in post board games, this simply isn't possible by virtue ohow your deck is constructed. The plan has always been to establish cb/top lock before trying to win with mentor, so you blank removal this way. Any other mentor that lands before you establish the lock should be seen as more of a way to control the board, get out from underneath something like a Young Pyromancer, etc; a way to steal initiative back from your opponent when otherwise you're just digging for removal, etc. You should be OK with them killing the first few mentors because you should be engineering them into a board state where you have 1-2 tokens while continuing to cantrip and eventually landing a cb/top and then killing them. Mentor is only going to be reliable after you blank their removal for it. Otherwise, be prepared for it to die.Originally Posted by KingOfThePanda
The issue with this approach overall though, is that it takes one of miracle's greatest strengths (the blanking of game one removal) and turns it into what can be perceived as a weakness so some added flexibility is nice. You want to be able to at least get 1-2 tokens out of each mentor that you send out, unless it vs a matchup where you need pressure and are less worried about removal (storm comes to mind here).
What the entreat plan does while being in the board isn't necessarily to "blank" this removal, but it's to add some power to the deck when the plan of mentor + balance isn't the most reliable. Matchups that come to mind here include Shardless BUG, RG Lands, and Death and Taxes. So the entreat plan out of the board helps out a bit in these matchups because neither cb nor mentor are reliable enough to kill the opponent, and you need that added power. If you're confident in your ability to beat these decks with different angles of attack or different strategies altogether, you don't need to have Entreat in your 75, you just need to play smarter and find the spots in which to land Mentor a little bit better.
Otherwise, focus on those slots in matchups where mentor is a threat that doesn't cut it. If you go back a few pages, you'll see where I talk about how I don't believe mentor to be a good enough card vs lots of combo decks. It's good at holding off Empty the Warrens, and...that's pretty much it. You don't want to tap 3 mana on your own turn vs many combo decks, if not all of them, and I think you need to approach those matchups differently. The plan vs combo is of course to ride Cb/Top to victory, but after playing enough magic vs JPA and Rodrigo Togores, I'm of the opinion that cb is just not going to be reliable and you have to be as disruptive as possible. I am still not sure where this answer lies, but I'm currently still testing out Vendilion Clique as my alternate threat of choice. Whether I stick to them remains to be seen, but I figured I would provide this input in helping you design your 75.
I hope my wall of words helps even a modicum amount and best of luck when you do play! Feel free to post back your results and continue asking questions, we're all more than happy to help! Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions that you don't feel like discussing in the main thread as well.
EDIT: Re Gitaxian Probe: It's something that I've been meaning to test out, but I dislike it on paper. It's a huge detriment vs decks that pressure your life total, but it's a strong card in conjunction with Mentor only. My argument has always been that you don't necessarily need to have additional cards that only serve to make Mentor better, because you should be engineering states where Mentor does its job without a cute card like Probe. However, I feel like there's a shell that exists with Mentor, Meddling Mage, Probe, etc that could be a decent option against combo decks. Whether the ability to fight on this more proactive axis against combo vs being consistent and relying on our main plan of permanent based disruption and overloading of stack based interaction is better simply remains to be seen. Feel free to test it out yourself and let me know what you find!
Thank you so much for the reply, that is a lot of very useful and insightful information.
Deck I'm working towards: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/02-05-16-miracles/
Guys, you all should check out the latest developments from Death & Taxes:
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...l=1#post964722
The most recent lists have been a merger of W(/g) Eldrazi with Thalia, Heretic Cathar and using a traditional Death & Taxes shell. While it's a merger of a Chalice deck with a mana denial deck, and it looks like its engine is positioned favorably against Miracles. While neither have card advantage nor selection, this looks like a strategy we're going to all need to heavily test for its inflection points.
(In my off days from Miracles, I'm an Imperial Taxes player so I keep up with their thread).
I would significantly rather play against this vs regular DnT because they forgo Vial and Port, and those are the most difficult cards to beat.
That being said, this is still a huge nightmare to play against, but I think it's about on par with regular Eldrazi and the regular strategies vs eldrazi still apply here. New Thalia is quite powerful, however. I'll jam against some friends that have this put together and report my findings later.
On the surface, this looks like a difference between Vial vs Chalice. Here's the thing, Chalice is most damaging turn 1. Say by turn 5, after Miracles has landed SDT, played couple 1 CMC cantrips, the single chalice is not the worst that could happen to Miracles. Vial on the other hand, whether you play it turn 1 or turn 5, it's almost always a good commitment to the board.
The DnT-Eldrazi aggro hybrid isn't the most innovative ones. The Blue-Taxes for Spell Queller is the experimental version that concerns me.
Indeed, a friend of mine was goofing around with a UW Death and Taxes deck awhile ago (maybe a year, before Spell Queller) and it was just the most hostile thing to play against. Between Vendilion Clique and Aether Vial --> Meddling Mage, I never got to resolve a Terminus in any of the test games we played. Mother of Runes and more Meddling Mages made StP unreliable too, so in most games I was reduced to digging for 1-2 outers (the combat trick Entreat) and not making it.
He never got all that far in testing the deck because, in spite of its crushing Miracles matchup, it failed wretchedly elsewhere. Jund, the mirror, the Delver family, and Shardless were all considerably worse than the original DnT. Spell Queller might definitely help with these things without messing up the deck's potency against Miracles. Wouldn't it feel great to catch a Punishing Fire with it?
Re: The new Thalia (THC), I was having trouble against her with a Mentor build. Mentor's board control mode doesn't really do what it's supposed to do when the tokens come into play tapped.
Back to Basics looks like it would be pretty good against DnT, I think, shutting down Port, Karakas tricks, and potentially even catching Horizon Canopy with its pants down.
Well that was my point in referencing the recent developments of the whole thread. There's a LOT that they still have to explore, and the inherent strength of Thalia, Heretic Cathar shouldn't be ignored. Just imagine the curve-into-fetchland-lock if U/W Death & Taxes resolved Chalice on Turn 1, THC on Turn 2, and a Back to Basics Turn 3.
Admittedly that's an extreme case, but I believe it bears a hallmark on the power level available to the archetype (and enabled by THC). Like I said, those of us who can need to test this matchup with different configurations. It, like Eldrazi, isn't magically unbeatable, but it won't use all the same tactics as mono-W or Imperial Taxes.
I am testing Main Deck Energy Field + Rest In Peace, and a single Helm as a win con. Since we want the game to go on anyway, I think this is a good path.
So I went to my locals with the list I posted a little while ago, and I went 1-2. I think there were 8 people. Although I didn't do well at all, I am still happy with the deck. I'll explain later, here were my matchups:
Round 1: Lands 2-0
Game 1- I landed a Jace and controlled his topdecks until he just died by Jace. He landed a Candle, but it wasn't enough to make a difference.
Game 2- So he goes Turn 1 Map and I play a Top. Turn 2 he plays a Candle and I Containment Priest on my turn. He plays a land and I land a Back to Basics. From there, it was all Snapcaster and Priest beats.
Round 2: Eldrazi 1-0
Game 1- This game was VERY grindy. Actually, this particular game I am very proud of. We played until there were 12 minutes left on the clock, and my favorite part: He cast the new Emrakul 4 times. It was fantastic. My biggest misplay was that I had a board of Top, counterbalance, 5 lands, and a Polluted Delta. He dropped the Emrakul and what I needed to do was fetch. Because he used my turn to draw with Top and then fetch away the Top. But I am really happy with the way the game went.
Game 2- I literally cast 4 draw effects and topped/Fetched until I was almost out of cards, trying to find a Back to Basics. I didn't find a B2B. Either way, the game ended by him dropping new Emrakul on his turn 3 to waste my turn 4, then give me my turn 5 to get a draw.
Round 3: Sneak and Show 2-0
Game 1- Admittedly, I have never played against this deck before. I saw a Tarn, 2 Brainstorms, then I was dead. I was just too busy trying to establish a plan to think that I could be playing against Sneak and Show.
Game 2- So the cat was out of the bag and I sideboarded hard. He kept a mediocre hand with 2 Beseiju and no colored mana. So I put a Needle on Sneak Attack, which I figured was correct. After a bunch of just durdling and passing turns, he used Beseiju to cast a Show and Tell. BUT, being the genius I am, I played Clique in response. His hand was Land, Land, Emrakul. So I threw back the Emrakul and he topdecked a Gristlebrand. Yeah... That was great.
So as I said, I am happy with the way the deck played. It was very smooth and I am now a huge advocate of the Mentor build for people who want to be more aggresive. It matched my playstyle perfectly.
This is the deck if you didn't see it before:
4x Mentor
2x Snapcaster
2x Jace
4x Brainstorm
4x Ponder
4x Top
3x Counterbalance
2x Predict
4x Swords
2x Counterspell
4x Terminus
4x Force of Will
4x Flooded Strand
4x Polluted Delta
2x Marsh Flats
2x Tundra
6x Island
3x Plains
Sideboard:
1x Containment Priest
1x Baneslayer Angle
1x Clique
2x Back to Basics
1x Council's Judgement
1x Jace (I didn't have anything else)
1x Spell Pierce (Same as Jace)
1x Surgical Extraction
2x Flusterstorm
2x Pithing Needle
2x Rest In Peace
I wouldn't make any changes to the Main deck but I just didn't have a lot of cards for the sideboard. Jace was just a shoe-in because I couldn't think of anything else that I owned. HOWEVER, I have ordered 2x Disenchant, which will be going in in place of those two. A second Containment Priest is also coning in in place of Council's Judgement. This is because I had Judgement in there as an out to Chalice. But I may keep the Judgement in there because it is a non-targeting removal spell. I'll decide when my cards come in, but feel free to tell me your opinions.
Deck I'm working towards: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/02-05-16-miracles/
If by a good path you mean completely unplayable then I totally agree with you. The Energy Field/RIP/Helm strategy is not competitive in the current Legacy metagame because of its fragility. Every tier deck has methods of breaking this up with Abrupt Decays/Blasts/Artifact Hate etc etc etc. I actually watched someone play RiP Helm in the Swiss at a Legacy 2k I participated in 2 Sundays ago get trounced by Elves. It was pretty embarrassing. He kept on resolving random lock pieces - Decay that, Reclamation Sage that, kill you. The bottom line is that you need to be casting cards that actually impact the game and the RiP Helm components do nothing by themselves.
"Take your time."
Legacy: UWR Miracles
Vintage: UW Landstill
I've been working on RIP/Helm for awhile now, and this is the list I've arrived at currently.
20 lands, nothing fancy just the usual fetches, duals, and basics
28 "core" Miracles spells, all the 4-ofs (Top, CB, StP, Terminus, Brainstorm, Ponder, Force)
...after that you get to the hard work, which is finding the best configuration of the remaining 12 cards.
2 Rest in Peace
1 Blood Moon
2 JTMS
1 Entreat the Angels
2 Enlightened Tutor
1 Helm of Obedience
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Moat
1 Spell Pierce
...I found that Energy Field was better off stored safely in the sideboard, where there's extra space due to the MD enchantments that would normally live in the board anyway.
The thing about builds like this is that they're clunky, there are cards whose power level fluctuates wildly from matchup to matchup and even in the course of a single game. It might even be clunkier than Legends builds without Ponder, although IMHO it feels less clunky than that because of the extreme lockdown effect that some of these permanents have. Joe Lossett on his interview with Legacy's Allure remarked that it could be hard to know what to do to stay alive in the early game with his build, that this takes a good deal of practice. With RIP/Helm it's usually pretty obvious what to do to stay alive, just find and resolve a particularly strong enchantment.
The payoff for all of this clunk where you could have been running Snapcaster Mage, Counterspell, Predict, and Council's Judgment is that a lot of matchups change, with some previously tough customers like Dark Lands, Jund, and Shardless often rolling over to the enchantments along with everything graveyard-centric. Some ground is lost against Delver and the mirror is certainly worse (except those all-in Monastery Mentor decks that cut Jaces getting randomly obliterated by Moat). The clock is also much easier to deal with thanks to the instant win button, added on to the quick concessions from opponents unpleasantly surprised by the naughty enchantments.
There's also the fun of switching up the enchantment/artifact suite, tweaking the tutor numbers, and adjusting the choice of silver bullets in the sideboard to suit one's metagame. I think this type of build is at its best in a relatively closed meta, where you know the local players and what they'll probably bring to the table at any given store. I personally live in such an isolated Legacy ecosystem that Llawan, Cephalid Empress constitutes super-secret tech (against Food Chain, which would otherwise be an utterly atrocious matchup). RIP/Helm is pretty neglected these days, but I think there's still a lot of kick to the archetype.
Isn't Back to Basics the ONLY* advantage of straight UW? It seems like a huge mistake to not try to leverage that.
*Budget concerns are, of course real, and a fair reason.
I am running B2B in my sideboard, but a lot of people play it in the Main. I am really thinking about putting in in the main though. The only thing stopping me is that there are 2 D&T players and a Maverick player in my meta, so it tends to not come in every game. But due to my last results, I may just try it anyway. Is 2 a good number?
Deck I'm working towards: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/02-05-16-miracles/
2 is fine, but you should know that the vast majority of people will agree that UW should only be played if you're on MD B2B these days. The red splash is almost always strictly superior otherwise.
Our own Einherjar has written a primer series on Star City Games a few years ago, and has some very good explanations of the why this splash is as good as it is, so I believe it's something that every miracles player will at least want to have access to, if not just outright play. Here's his article series for reference:
http://www.starcitygames.com/article...er-Part-1.html
http://www.starcitygames.com/article...er-Part-2.html
http://www.starcitygames.com/article...r--Part-3.html
Those were really good articles. Could we possibly use Stifle for ourselves? I was also thinking about Ensnaring Bridge for the Eldrazi matchup. If we have cards in hand, we are probably winning, but if we run out, we are probably going to lose. It just seems like a neat idea.
Deck I'm working towards: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/02-05-16-miracles/
There are a lot of "neat" or "cute" things you could do with Miracles and I'm sure you'd even see some success with them, but over a large amount of games (read the limit of x going to infinity) you'll lose more games than you win because you chose to go with the "cute" or "neat" route over something tried, true, and consistent.
This is something I'd like to explore it further. You have succinctly stated what I'll call the Theory of the Standardized Decklist, the idea that a player (especially a new one) will experience the greatest success (defined by number of game wins) by copying a list that's proven to work well.
Doesn't our faith in this rest on a questionable assumption, however?
It's the idea of card independence. However, the cards don't play themselves. Even if we grant that a single, optimal decklist exists, does it follow that any given player will necessarily get his or her best results with this list? I don't think so. Would you use [insert famous Miracle pro here]'s deck if he handed it to you 5 minutes before GP deck registration if you looked at the list and were confused by some of the card choices, even if you had certain knowledge that this pro had tested the list and found it to be 5 percentage points higher than the nearest contender against every tier 1 and 1.5 deck?
I think most of us would not use that deck, but would instead wield the one we'd brought and worked on ourselves in preparation for the tournament. In my opinion, that would be the correct decision because we're more likely to win by playing a suboptimal list accurately than floundering around with the best list. This rests on another questionable assumption, that player decisions are the decisive factor in the outcome of most games, but since we're going to have to hold a questionable assumption to maintain anything at all about the game, I think we might as well choose this one.
Ah, but it'll be rejoined that it isn't 5 minutes before a GP, that now we are in that long period of preparation during which there is time to become familiar with the lines that exist in that best deck. According to our assumption that this is the best list, once a player is able to operate it with maximum accuracy, it follows that this player must necessarily win the greatest number of games.
This is logical, but the part we need to examine is the process by which a player can become proficient with the best list. Consider two hypothetical players.
Player A: netdecks the best list and jams 200 games with it against a variety of opponents
Player B: starts with any given list, jams 10-20 games with it, and adjusts until arriving at the best list; then jams the remaining games with it until reaching 200 games total
Which player is better at Magic, which one had more fun, and which player is better prepared for Chiba? Who will be better off next year? Add in the fact that Player A will quickly be playing an "outdated" list. In reality, all of our assumptions about there being a known best deck don't work out so well.
My beef with this thread, and the reason it has a reputation for toxicity, is that every time a (possibly new) player comes here with an idea or a question there's always someone whose response is purely negative. Minniehajj, I respect a lot of your ideas and I have sleeved up your list in the past, but in this case you provided absolutely no help or new information. The quality of that particular post was pretty low, and you're capable of real contributions. However, you're far from alone. Practically every page of this thread has a post like that on it, and your post is more an example of how a well-meaning player can get drawn into the negativity of this thread than anything else.
@KingOfThePanda, the card Ensnaring Bridge has recently seen a miniature resurgence in Miracles due to Monastery Mentor, and if you dig around you will find a few lists that have done well at small and medium-sized events. It doesn't synergize perfectly with the rest of the cards in the deck. You can't really run Entreat with it at all, and Jace tends to fill up your hand in a manner that counteracts the Bridge itself. Furthermore, it's pretty fragile at CMC 3, so any sacrifice to hand size you make by not Brainstorming with Jace to keep it on is liable to bite you later in the game.
In your meta, though, if you're sure to be playing against Eldrazi and Sneaky Show often, Ensnaring Bridge's effect is probably worth the drawbacks. Ensnaring Bridge has never been popular in Miracles, but that's probably because
Eldrazi hasn't existed for too long and Miracles always ran Entreat in the past. Bridge has a very long history of use in Countertop Thopters and UW Landstill, so if you want a history lesson about the card you can check out the archives for those decks.
Stifle has rarely been seen in UW pure control lists because the typical target, fetchland activations, isn't something we need to worry about in the archetype. We want the opponent to reach their endgame because their endgame isn't as good as ours. Without any need (or ability) to kill the opponent before they start casting 2-4 mana spells, few have ever considered it necessary to pack Stifles in a control deck.
My main thought is that almost every deck tries to kill you with damage, Energy field doesn't stop storm, and only one or two stray decks main decay or enchantment removal at all, I don't recall CB getting sided out in the face of removal, or divining top. If I am missing a huge glaring flaw in resolving Energy field that isn't solved by playing differently, I would love to know it. Rip and helm is just a secondary interlocking combo piece.
I was also trying out thing in the ice and standstill, for various reasons. I like standstill, but doesn't seem to be strong enough.
Unless pox shows up randomly I am not worried about the handful of discard spells in the current popular decks.
But this is all for testing. I go to small events, maybe I will succeed, maybe I wont.
Thank you for this, you're absolutely right. I didn't have the time nor patience to give substance to what I said, while you, very clearly, did. You backed up your claims with concise thought processes. Normally I do as well, but my post brought nothing to the table, and you're right, this shouldn't be the case. This very line of thought, how you described the Player A vs Player B situation, is how we even arrived at the "Predictable" shell, so who the hell am I to condone testing and learning on your own?
I am sincerely sorry for my lack of candor, and I'll make sure my posts have the quality to them that members of this community have learned to expect from me.
And how's your version, in which you did not bother to post a deck list, related to Miracles control? There is a thread about Rip-Helm, probably another thread about Standstill.
There is no point in discussing something in the vacuum without a deck list. If you insist on running rip-helm, long story short, your version would have to have very little control, you have to commit yourself to that combo by running stuff like Enlightened Tutor, in order to make that combo somewhat competitive. At some point, your path will just drive you out of miracle control, because it doesn't belong. It's been discussed, tried with.
Shoeneggar for a period of time is like that. If you cover up the name, you cannot tell the difference in the tune of the post between Minniehajj and him. Was Shoeneggar correct in his push on Ponder? Yes, and he has the result to back it up, but that's besides the point.
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