the main pro is that the counters stay even when it dies, which has always been the problem with Lords in DnT. On the other hand, only pumping humans already on the battlefield when it comes into play means this is still not gonna do its job reliably. Imo, Crusade effects are not, and have never been, a truly effective way of fighting hate. Incidentally, Prelate (and, to a lesser extent, the new Thalia) have provided us with a much more functional solution, by 1) allowing us to up our X/2 count and 2) preventing -1-1 effects from being cast.Originally Posted by mykatdied
Also Thalias Lieutenant is good way to play around punishing fire if need be. But it might be too narrow for the meta right now, might have to wait to see if pyro or return gets played more in miracles.
Any black deck can likely play Dread of Night safely without affecting their creatures (I know I have one in my Grixis Delver sideboard), but what decks can afford to play Massacre? Storm and Reanimator? I haven't seen it in anything else before.
The extra 2 power creatures (Prelate, THC) will survive Dread of Night and Golgari Charm, but not Massacre.
The purpose of this discussion is to get out in front if the hate which is certainly coming.
Opponents are going to recognize the increased number of 2-toughness creatures and adapt. Massacre and Pyroclasm are coming.The extra 2 power creatures (Prelate, THC) will survive Dread of Night and Golgari Charm, but not Massacre.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
Perhaps, but don't you think Kozilek's Return will be Miracles' answer to it rather than 'clasm? Or even Devastation Tide?
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Miracles might be able to get away with Kozilek's Return, but lots of people will be on Sudden Demise, Rough/Tumble, and Pyroclasm too. Black has even more varied options.
Black decks will also consider Virtue's Ruin and Toxic Deluge -- ignoring P/T altogether.
@RobNC thanks for the FNM report!
Good point, Warden. Deluge is a lot less narrow. I can see a strong case for maindecking it even, as the guys in my meta do. I don't think we have an especially good answer for it. But I do think that we are even better at bouncing back from it than before.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
Burrenton Forge-Tender is often used in Modern to protect from Pyroclasm and Anger of the Gods, but I don't know if it would protect us from much else. Kozilek's Return is colorless (Mom doesn't help either). Would be a cool trick with Vial on 1, though. Absolute Law is a more permanent answer but again really only helps with Pyroclasm/Anger.
Deluge is common in my meta, too. Prelate on 3 is probably the only way we're going to be stopping that.
(Side question: how do I get card names to be a link that shows the card when the cursor hovers?)
Put the word "cards" inside brackets, then type out the cards you want, then, "/cards", inside brackets.(Side question: how do I get card names to be a link that shows the card when the cursor hovers?)
Last edited by alohazendo; 09-05-2016 at 11:30 AM.
Some thoughts:
3-4 recruiter is imo definitely the way to go. It smoothly fixes the main issue we have: card selection. This, however, weekens us against tempo oriented decks, as we're mostly forced to cut most beefy beaters (avenger/crusader/brimaz) to make space for recruiter.
To consistently drop a recruiter as early as possible, we need cavern of souls. Getting our turn 3 recruiter dazed in said tempo matchup will most likely end in losing us the game. Cavern virtually speeds us up as we can play around possible (soft) counters. With recruiter and prelate and the exclusion of avenger, we play even more humans than before, making cavern less clunky. I think playing 3 caverns is the right number. It's also insanely good vs miracles.
Thus, this leaves us with a problem: Flickerwisp, undoubtedly one of the greatest creatures in our deck, costs WW and is no human. Shortening the pure white sources for cavern makes flickerwisp pretty hard to cast, especially because we dont have access to the likes of brainstorm etc. Yet we don't want to cut it. With more ETB effects on our creatures (eg recruiter) flickerwisp seems stronger than ever.
At this point, we probably have to decide between wisp and cavern. Wisp helps us a lot vs tempo decks, eg by blinking delvers. But so does cavern.
I came to the conclusion to play 3 of both. While this is pretty damn greedy and leaves us with pretty bad draws, it also pays out a lot. This is just my point of view, i also understand playing 2 or less caverns for more consistency.
This leaves us with only 3 flyers. I chose to both play 1 stonecloaker 1 kor skyfisher in addition. This helps us force through some damage over the air, trade with delvers and bring more card advantage with the rise of ETB effects. Both require only W and are therefore easier to cast. Still, they are both worse than wisp: stonecloaker is clunky most of the times, skyfisher cant be recruitered and requires vial on 2 which we dont really want to keep. However, it only costs two, which smoothens out our curve, and bounces a land which we can then replay at its worst (note: possible cavern reset!) This helps a lot in tempo matchups.
I also think maindecking 1 thalia got 1 banisher priest are a must.
This way, we still keep a good g1 vs tempo decks despite giving up tempo/ beef due to recruiter.
Orzhov pontiff is a beast in the mirror and vs elves, so i really want 1 in my board. 3 caverns make him castable as well. 5 resets make him even better.
Magus of the moon is also something i enjoy.
All in all, I'm playing a greedy list, but testing so far has shown good results.
Skyfisher and cloaker might still be cut, but i like both - at least atm
Thanks for reading my thoughts, hope you dont consider them complete garbage :)
I know it's a while yet, but perhaps a Vehicle will allow for the playing of a tutorable flying creature for the delver matchup. There's that 2cmc 2/3 flyer, Crew 1 that recently got spoiled.
Edit: Sky Skiff is the card.
Edit 2: never mind, it's a 2/3
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How about Mark of Asylum to avoid all 'damage' sweepers? No matter color or amount.
It still doesn't solve Virtue's Ruin, then Selfless Spirit solves that, but it's a one-off use card.
None of those solve Toxic Deluge from BUG and other black control-ish decks, nor the Marsh Casualties from Elves, but toxic deluge paired with a couple hits from dudes makes it risky sometimes.
Maybe the actual solution is Vryn Wingmare to make any sweeper un-castable? Or maybe the solution is just not care about the hate and go straight up for Sanctum Prelate for the CMC that will wipe us in each MU.
I don't think that I would want to lean heavily on cavern for tempo match ups. It means we are much less resilient to wasteland which sets us back mana allowing daze and force to become live again. Which also means the tempo plan works better now that they can waste us off a land and stifle a trigger of recruiter. If we are stuck on a 1/1 for 3 mana before being wasted and then having recruiter potentially removed, that is what tempo wants us to do. The 1 or 2 of cavern was nice to at least commit a thalia to the board to return the tempo loss by taxing their spells. I'm not going to say it is the worst idea, but trying to consider cavern a perfect answer to tempo and running more just means we are less resilient to wasteland and also more likely to die to a delver while we have swords to Plowshares stranded in hand.
I've been trying to solve this problem with Imperial for a while now.
Cavern is good against tempo, as it lets you play 3 drops past Daze. It doesn't solve the tempo issue on its own - you still have to deal with their Delver/TKS/whatever. So the answer is...just play more removal. Playing a bunch of Path to Exiles has worked out great, I lose very rarely with Imperial vs Delver (and even Infect) when I'm playing 3 Path in my SB. I don't even think 4 is crazy.
We generally don't die to Delvers (or Young Pyro, or Reality Smasher, or Blighted Agent) because we can't cast STP, we die to them because we only have 4 STP and no search effects for them.
Im with MYkatdied on this one. I just this week dropped Horizon Canopy for Cavern of Souls. I never felt that I was losing matches to countermagic. Force of Will is weaksauce against this deck and Spell Pierce really only gets the turn 1 Vial anyway. We now crush Miracles and (apart from infect) anything that wants to use Daze, which is itself terrible against this deck. Caverns really feels win-even-more to me now. I'm tickled at the idea of stranding Force of Will in someone's hand, but I'm usually happy to see someone cast it anyway.
Also, -x/-x effects circumvent indestructible, so as much as I like Selfless Spirit, I just don't see it having much application. I bet there is no particularly good way out of the sweepers. But honestly, the decks that will run these sweepers are going to be miserable against D+T unless they contort themselves considerably. The one guy popped in here to say that he was going to go red in Miracles for Pyroclasm and Izzet Staticaster. Sure. Go three colors in Miracles, please. THC is going to buttfuck you. Just ask the Shardless guys and the RUG guys what she does to greedy manabases. (I'm dying to go to three of these, btw.)
What I would fear is a value Jund deck that found a way to profitably play Toxic Deluge main with Gurmag Angler while keeping their manabase reasonable. THC gapes current Jund decks without lube, but I think it can be done if they play Sakura-Tribe Elder and Rancor. Those cards hurt.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
Nobody needs to worry about Jund. Jund's a pretty fringe deck and it's probably gonna stay that way because it has so many bad matchups. Shardless is what you get when you turn Jund into a legacy deck.
Also I think people might be a little too concerned about beating DnT hate before we first solve the first level 'what's the strongest g1 deck' question w/ the new toys. Looks like there were a grand total of 0 DnT decks in the t16 of the Legacy Classic this weekend, so it might take a little bit longer before everyone is playing 4 Dread of Nights in their main.
I'm thinking we should likely stick close to what we know and slowly develop and build the deck to what we need to react to. If we are seeing a bunch of massacres then maybe our prelates should just be naming 4. If we are seeing a bunch of pyroclasm, kozilek's return etc then maybe some selfless spirits that we can tutor for. If we see a bunch of dreads then we can prelate for 1 or get some armorer to deal with that. I think what is important in this new design is to try and keep it simple, then react SD the hate comes. If you spent the last 1-5 years running roughly the stock list, then basically completely redesign the deck because you're worried about hate that may not exist you're likely going to pick up losses.
I haven't post much recently because I was testing something a little different. Here's my write-up from Richmond.
Worth noting that kavu is tutorable off recruiter! Nice article. I love kavu. One thing in the section about that is if you somehow have the mana up on an opponents clear board if you have displacer online and mana to drop kavu you can play kavu targeting another creature you control then displace the targeted creature to apply additional pressure
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