You shouldn't be missing anything. I thought drocker23 did a reasonable job explaining his point. I don't agree with the concept, but sometimes you will certainly get paid off for it.Originally Posted by phg22
Partially agree.
One reasoning you didn't mention and I feel people often overlook is the bonus that you gain the knowledge of your opponent's hand AND you look through opponent's library. This knowledge is often under-rated, but a huge deal in SB games. I wouldn't do this against any decks that have Red in it and lightning bolt is a card he might run, even if he's playing a fair deck.
No.
And no.
There is a thing in magic called "being cute" and its pretty easy to see that these validations fall into that category. Leveraging Surgical Extraction as "disruption" in fair matchups is poor utilization of resources. In fair matchups you are looking to fight resource for resource and to navigate your cards based on whatever your game plan is. Using Surgical Extraction to "disrupt" Tarmogoyf or a Delver deck does not accomplish this. Going into a match, you as the Miracles player must have a specific game plan, not just "disrupt them and stay alive". For example, versus Shardless my game plan might be "Resolve/ride Jace" or versus Grixis Delver it might be "Clear board and lock them out with CounterTop". If I asked, "How does Surgical Extraction contribute to this game plan?", you wouldn't be able to give a proper answer because outside of graveyard hate, Surgical Extraction is fundamentally a highly volatile card. You have little control over what your opponent draws or how your opponent chooses to interact with you and therefore cannot guarantee that Extraction will succeed. At least other cards will trade with your opponents resources - which is the point that needs to be driven home. If your plan is to grind out, you do NOT want to start with a mulligan, even if it means getting to see your opponents hand and deck (which, by the way, is not even close enough of a pro to validate the con of losing a card).
Totally agree.
Drocker23 already answered the question anyway, 'Surgical is great against ANY deck looking to set up and find very particular cards.'
Neither Shardless or Aluren are looking to do this vs Miracles. Aluren doesn't need the combo to win, in fact after board it just grinds and utilizes Carpet of Flowers a lot more than Aluren itself. And Shardless is aiming to win with CA, nothing particular at all.
If you play 4 Mentor then I think the grinding gameplan is a joke. If you try to Plow, Snap Plow, and Terminus everything for 20-30 minutes, then I think you are going to run into issues. The majority of Miracles players will do the latter against Aluren which is why they will stick with the grinding approach post-SB, and those of us playing 4 Mentors will be well-positioned against that strategy.
What does everybody think about the Anti-Thalia?
Personally, I don't think he slots in well enough with our gameplan since we'd just wrath him away eventually, but maybe someone else can think of a way he can be good in Miracles (without forcing him into the deck)? Or would he be better in a Stoneblade-type of control build.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
I'm going to quote my friend mzfroste:What does everybody think about the Anti-Thalia?
Personally, I don't think he slots in well enough with our gameplan since we'd just wrath him away eventually, but maybe someone else can think of a way he can be good in Miracles (without forcing him into the deck)? Or would he be better in a Stoneblade-type of control build.
"Counterspell decks that would be willing to play a creature that isn't aggressive (so non-delver decks) like this tend to not have many targets for their opponents spot removal. Like a lot of cards this would be good in miracles in a vacuum, but it just isn't as powerful as other cards we are running. Don't need more cards that make the blue permission control plan better. That and miracles can't really take advantage of the cost reduction, only ETA, hardcast Fow / Terminus, and Predict."
I agree. As in, I don't see Surgical as a method of disruption whatsoever. When Counterbalance is no longer reliable in this so-called "fair" match-up, and when your opponent is better than you at valuing; when the best value-play you can do is flashback via Snapcaster, it would be nice to find other avenue to go about this.
This is where I feel the reasoning differs. If you want to criticize the card for the volatility because it requires your opponent's certain draw, that's totally fair. To try to use the I-must-follow-my-game-plan as the reasoning to not run a card, that's a stretch.
This might be another case of mis-using Surgical. I don't suggest anyone to cast Surgical on opponent's first fetch in the grave in the early turns, just because Surgical is in your opening hand and you want to see opponent's hand and deck.
Overall, I am just looking for ways to fight these Value Train BUG decks: Shardless BUG has overwhelming CA, BUG Aluren has the Value Train as well as key combo pieces. I might ultimately be wrong with my experiments, that won't be a first and I would like to keep my mind open.
Against Shardless, you just need to realize which cards matter: Ancestral Visions, Creeping Tar Pit and, from both players side, Jace, Sculptor of Minds.
A common theme is, as you can obviously tell, is that all of these cards are weak against Pyroblast.
Surgical does nothing against the cards that matter; You are planning to ride either Terminus > Jace or Entreat the Angels to victory against the fair BUG decks. Surgical doesn't help in the slightest there. It doesn't help in grindy matchups, it doesn't help further your own gameplan, which is what AnziD is talking about, I assume.
it might be slightly better vs BUG Aluren, because you don't even have to fear them topdecking an Aluren lategame and just winning, but they aren't playing Hymns, so you can manage your ressources much better there. Carpet is, imo, their best card in sideboarded games.
*I also think "Shardless is a bad matchup for miracles" is untrue. I think the matchup is close to 50/50, and very much rewards the person most familiar with the matchups.
I still play with 2x Entreat the Angels and my gameplan against Shardless is to either create a boardstate where Jace is free to do his thing or simply resolve an Entreat. Now I would never board a card like Surgical in against a deck like Shardless (there's no way to get the card they sandbag into their graveyard), but that Force of Will they're inevitably holding when I go to Entreat is always a problem. Their deck has more card advantage than Miracles once you take Counterbalance out of the picture, but Entreat ignores every 2-for-1 they've managed up until that point. My point is, an argument can be made that if Surgical wasn't so hard to pull off it could very well help to execute a gameplan. I haven't played much with Mentors against them, but if you Surgical Abrupt Decay, are they going to beat a Mentor? Abrupt Decay is an easy card to get into the graveyard, especially if you leave in Counterbalance. Again, I'm not suggesting Surgical is a good sideboard card in that matchup. Just think that in what's fundamentally a "Prison Control" deck like Miracles, you've got to keep an open mind about how certain cards can fundamentally change the dynamic of a game. You look at the sideboard of the "legends" builds and you see 50% lock pieces, for example. It would make for some interesting discussion to actually pick apart the contrasting strategies.
I think Surgical also gains value the worse a matchup gets. If you are losing anyway, it might occasionally allow you to get lucky. This happens often in Modern with Tron where the opponent has no realistic chance. If they board in surgical and somehow get a tron piece in the grave (thought scour or singleton ghost quarter maybe) then they can steal a game. There is probably some equivalent in legacy usage.
I played a fair amount against aluren over the last few days. My practice shows that the straight BUG version is not nearly as hard as I thought, but the recruiter builds are very difficult. Someone told me this was the reverse of their findings. I don't know what to think now.
I don't think Surgical is great against Shardless because of the speed at which they can kill you. Tarmogoyf, Tar Pit and Deathrite Shaman can close out a game pretty quickly. You don't have time to set up and durdle with cards like Surgical that don't do anything. You're often forced into the grind plan.
BUG Aluren, however, is much slower to kill, so you have time to set up cute tricks. I think Surgical is fine there. They're going to draw more cards than you anyway, so being behind a card isn't that bad. Using Surgical to lower their overall card draw equity is valuable.
Recruiter version is more annoying IMO because they can just value-chain their Recruiters so Terminus does "less."
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
Why is there all this talk about boarding in surgical vs Shardless. I was talking about bringing it in vs Aluren!
I love Surgical Extraction, and I was convinced I boarded it in way more liberally than anyone else.
But the price has spiked like crazy overnight, and I attribute it to players in this thread boarding it in against the likes of Burn and Shardless.
Played against straight BUG Aluren yesterday, 2-0'd it. Granted, the pilot may not have been the best at the deck but he was playing the Recruiter version for a while before just recently switching so it wasn't like he was unfamiliar with the concept.
Countering Aluren is probably the best-percentage play in terms of getting us the W. Then comes countering Parasitic Strix, and then Cavern Harpy. What's always a fun move is Swords'ing their only blue or black creature in response to a Harpy on the stack with Aluren on the field. At one point he had a Leovold (which ended up drawing them 0 cards) and 2 Harpies on the field as well as an Aluren and I had a JTMS. ETA gave me infinite blockers while I slowly ticked up Jace. Like I said before, the BUG "value game" isn't as robust as the Recruiter version's, so it's easier to establish a "lock" against them where they do nothing as you slowly amass blockers (or flip a Terminus) for their weak creatures and countermagic for their combo pieces and tick up Jace for the win. With the Recruiter combo, our Terminuses are worse, though ETA blockers are still live. But with the Recruiter version they can rely less on turning creatures sideways to beat us, whereas with BUG they either combo or play a bad midrange deck, and we eat bad midrange for breakfast.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
Day 2 top 100:
Deck # of copies Miracles 17 BUG Delver 12 SnS 10 DnT 9 Elves 6 Infect 6 4c Delver 5 Omnitell 4 BR Reanimator 3 4c "Goodstuff"(?) 3 Shardless BUG 3 Stage Depths 2 Burn 2 ANT 2 Eldrazi 2 Lands 2 All others 22
A pretty poorly designed graph:
A good sign for us, but not a good sign for us.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
Yeah, you guys better not get Top banned
Only one miracles deck made top 8, so that's a bad/good sign for us.Day 2 top 100:
Deck # of copies Miracles 17 BUG Delver 12 SnS 10 DnT 9 Elves 6 Infect 6 4c Delver 5 Omnitell 4 BR Reanimator 3 4c "Goodstuff"(?) 3 Shardless BUG 3 Stage Depths 2 Burn 2 ANT 2 Eldrazi 2 Lands 2 All others 22
A pretty poorly designed graph:
A good sign for us, but not a good sign for us.
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Hey Anuraag,
Congratulation for your finish :)
Did you stick on your 4 predicts list ?
I'm very curious about the 75 you had registered
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