Nice deck quite like it , been so focused on Modern since my return to magic not even really looked at the origin cards
Seems like a deck we both would have liked back when we was playing a lot together
Thanks for featuring my snake deck. I like the name you gave it, and I may have to give it another try. This was the first time I tried to run it as a tribal deck (and not just simic tempo) I'm not sure if the changes to make it tribal legal also made it too weak, but I think with some minor tweaking it could be good.
Somerset did not go as well... but yea the land count in that deck works out fine. The deck curves out at 2 so it has worked out quite well. Especially with the Knight of the White Orchid. I have since changed the deck though and gotten away from Steppe Lynx.
I've never seen a deck based on Cloven Casting. Very cool!
I would cut back on Wheel of Sun and Moon. Every additional copy is a dead card. You can find it with Demand and if they destroy it, its own replacement effect will put it back into your library - ready to be tutored up again! You could go down to one, but two seems fine as well. This opens up more space for more cool silver bullets!
And let's not forget that many players who could potentially profit from playing constructed, just use the prizes to draft so they don't actually profit.
Also, every single event means profit for them. It doesn't matter how many packs they give because when people enter with tix and get boosters as prizes, it takes tix away from the system. Since tix can only be bough in the store, that means profit. Obviously an absurd ammount of boosters prizes would destroy the economy but so do bad prizes because less people play.
I had never seen a Modern DE fail to fire under the old system. The first one I tried to play under the new system didn't fire. Standard is fine because it has enough players to function but every other format is suffering.
1 Loxodon Hierarch
2 Mystic Snake
1 Brago, King Eternal
1 Armada Wurm
1 Prime Speaker Zegana
1 Progenitor Mimic
# 17 non-creatures
4 Supply/Demand
3 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
3 Bant Charm
2 Detention Sphere
1 Teferi's Moat
1 Aura Shards
1 Wheel of Sun and Moon
1 Behemoth Sledge
1 Supreme Verdict
I kept the deck in bant colors, mainly to have a cheap mana base. The complete deck costs less than 20 tix.
Demand gets used to fetch several nice silver bullets. Aura Shards for example destroys decks with a lot of enchantments or artifacts, Teferi's Moat sometimes just wins and Supreme Verdict can be cast, when we are behind on board. Wheel of Sun and Moon can be cast on us, against Mill and for recursion purposes and on our opponent if he wants to abuse his graveyard. If no specific answer is needed, we can go for value cards like Brago, King Eternal (abusing enters the battlefield abilities) or Prime Speaker Zegana (to draw cards).
Kiora is currently quite affordable at two tickets. The game can often be centered around her. Protecting her up until the point she reaches the ultimate can be a rewarding task. Or you can just use her to draw a card once in a while.
The deck provides a lot of card advantage and interaction. Depending on which cards you draw, games can turn out very different. Coiling Oracle into Edric into Loxodon Hierarch could be a very pro-active plan, ramping with Sakura-Tribe Elder and clearing the board with Supreme Verdict could be the controllish route.
I agree entirely. We all pay to play already, and the events should pay out something more. I know they can't flood the market with packs, but the current offerings are not adequate in my opinion.
To me, it would be like going to a paper FNM, having the entry be expensive, and first prize is "here's a free tournament entry ticket and five bucks of monopoly money we photocopied".
MTGO had tournaments that allowed a bigger % of players to profit consistently for years and their profits were still very good. All other online games don't require an investment of at the very least $100 (but more likely twice or more) to start playing (constructed here). We have to get something back for that investment.
Meh, I still feel there are good answers available. I've been running a few gut shot between the main and board to great effect against cloud of faeries, or the rest of Delver for that matter.
If you pay for a tournament, there should be prizes worth paying for, period. There are local FNM tournaments with a better prize pool at an equal or lesser than entry fee, and those tournaments are run in physical spaces with real costs.
Then there's the fact that you're sharing a real, social experience in the real world with actual friends.
We all paid a lot to play the game already, we bought cards. I can't even begin to imagine that under the old system they were somehow losing money. They just realized that they could make even more. That's all it is.
Besides, this is a trading card game, why should we be playing to win objects that can't be traded?
OK CLEARLY IDK how to reply to a comment propperly. MY BAD.
this was a response to:
~~~~~~
He's not wrong by howlett23 at Sat, 08/29/2015 - 11:07
howlett23's picture
He didn't say it could NOT be done...he said its unrealistic and absurd..which is very much accurate. It's also absurd for a football or baseball player to make 25$ million a year, but it happens.
~~~~~~
i admit it should be possible and even literally mathematically required for the top 1 or 2 % of all players to make a profit ****CONSISTENTLY***** but i have the feeling that most of the more vocal complainers just desire easy free prizes and they aren't thinking about objective logistics. they aren't comparing this situation to other competitive sports or games where people might be "paid or rewarded" for top performance. they also aren't comparing this situation to most other collectible hobbies: baseball cards, beanie babies, sports memorabilia, antique furniture, automotive restoration....
MTGO isnt a 401k. its a game. this isn't pro sports, its a CCG.
So, we're picking up on the conversation I started last week, within your hexproof deck, eh?
Seems you're getting the same responses I got, bro.
Thanks, though, for coming to my defense when I pitched this idea, and for crediting me oh so long a week ago.
So let's start with the decklist:
4 Supply/Demand
4 Wheel of Sun and Moon
4 Cloven Casting
4 Terminate
4 Utter End
4 Firespout
4 Dreadbore
4 Call of the Conclave
4 Advent of the Wurm
4 Pillar of the Paruns
4 Exotic Orchard
4 Vivid Creek
4 Vivid Grove
4 Unknown Shores
1 Forest
1 Plains
1 Mountain
1 Island
1 Swamp
So let's talk about the deck for a while - manabase is as budget friendly as I imagined it. If something were to change with a bigger amount of cash Unknown Shores -> Reflecting Pool is an easy choice.
The core of the deck is a Demand toolbox with a twist- with both wheel and cloven casting on board we can pay 2UB to search for two multicolored cards, then our demand gets put on the bottom of our library. Which means we can search for it with another Demand (preferably the one we tutored with the last one). Not only that, but our other tutored spell can also be copied and then searched for again. We want to use terminate and dreadbore as early removal, eventually clearing the board with firespout/ exiling problem pernaments with utter end. If we get our "combo", we can keep casting copied advent of the wurms/call of the conclave/supply.
If someone wants to make it more budget, terminate is the card to go with as it is one of the most expensive cards. Wheel is on the expensive side too, but it is a powerful card which "makes" the deck, along with cloven casting and the wheel.
I wouldn't lose any sleep over classifying Familiars as tier 1, Delver, Stompy, and MBC (and maybe Goblins) as tier 1.5, and everything else as tier 2 or worse. Not to say that tier 2 decks can't win, just that over the long run nothing in this format will post results comparable to Familiars in the hands of a highly skilled pilot. The only deterrent to just always running familiars is how incredibly boring the games can get.
Delver into Cloud of Fearies + Sprite is pretty scary but in my opinion the real problem is the stupid combo that takes 5 to 10 minutes to kill you. I have played a lot of Pauper in the past but I started playing much less when the combo deck with cloudpost and temporal fissure was all over the place. There aren't many decks in the history of magic that I have found as annoying as that one. They banned the deck and the format got much better but eventually the deck came back in the form it is still played today. I stopped playing Pauper and never got back to it because of that deck (although the 3 rounds DEs also make me not want to play no matter what)
I don't know how far back Goldfish tracks stats (on their page it only goes back to August 20th). That's 11 days of data.
I've been tracking the numbers for over two years. Delver outpaces everything in that time and despite having a small metagame percentage than Stompy and MBC, Esper Combo has an outsized win share.
Considering that Stompy and MBC are currently the number one and number two decks in the format via Goldfish, I think they are defined as tier 1 decks.
You are a brave man running only 18 lands in your WW deck. Even with 20 lands, I found that I got stuck on 1 mana too often. I hate handing victories to an opponent on a silver platter.
When you are stuck on 1 mana, I fear it will be very difficult for you to win games. (How many modern decks worry about a single 2/1 hitting the battlefield each turn).
Are you still convinced about the 18 land count, or have you changed your mind since this article?
If you cut Cloud of Faeries from Delver the deck will still be around but it loses the soul crushing opening of "Delver into Cloud into Spellstutter back up lock you out of the first two turns of the game. If you want to talk about "feel bad" it doesn't get much worse than that. Cloud of Faeries is not "low impact". It masquerades as a 1/1 flyer but the card enables so much for its respective decks.
And as for Izzet Blitz, that deck has hardly experienced the dominance of Delver or Combo, or heck, even a tier 1.5 deck like Stompy or MBC.
"Adapt and overcome" would make sense if this was a new problem. It's not. It's almost five years old.
While I personally find the combo build to be a bit too resilient and consistent..
I don't think the delver lists are actually so format warping as the cards you want to disrupt delver are also usually good or at least useful against things like infect/elves/tokens and etc.
You should be running some cheap creature removal main-board.
Even with CoF gone you would still want the same cards to answer an early delver and still likely have to fight through counters.
Granted delver would have more difficulty applying pressure while countering.
My point is that removing CoF is relatively low impact in Delver functioning as Delver does.
But the combo deck actually feels distressing to play against unless you can just blow them out via izzet blitz/infect/burn/stompy/affinity nut draws.
Then again if we are going to talk about storm being degenerate for the format then I don't see how izzet blitz doesn't come up as "creatures with storm".
That deck seldom cares about blockers and usually has dispel and co. to protect the creature on the key turn.
I wouldn't mind the cards being banned as it would make my games easier in general I suppose, but I always felt it made more sense to adapt and overcome when possible.
Being able to play cards like Dig Through Time, Brainstorm and Ponder is the reason I like Legacy. I certainly hope they don't turn in into Modern with real Duals!
Nice deck quite like it , been so focused on Modern since my return to magic not even really looked at the origin cards
Seems like a deck we both would have liked back when we was playing a lot together
keep up the good work Flip
Thanks for featuring my snake deck. I like the name you gave it, and I may have to give it another try. This was the first time I tried to run it as a tribal deck (and not just simic tempo) I'm not sure if the changes to make it tribal legal also made it too weak, but I think with some minor tweaking it could be good.
Somerset did not go as well... but yea the land count in that deck works out fine. The deck curves out at 2 so it has worked out quite well. Especially with the Knight of the White Orchid. I have since changed the deck though and gotten away from Steppe Lynx.
I've never seen a deck based on Cloven Casting. Very cool!
I would cut back on Wheel of Sun and Moon. Every additional copy is a dead card. You can find it with Demand and if they destroy it, its own replacement effect will put it back into your library - ready to be tutored up again! You could go down to one, but two seems fine as well. This opens up more space for more cool silver bullets!
And let's not forget that many players who could potentially profit from playing constructed, just use the prizes to draft so they don't actually profit.
Also, every single event means profit for them. It doesn't matter how many packs they give because when people enter with tix and get boosters as prizes, it takes tix away from the system. Since tix can only be bough in the store, that means profit. Obviously an absurd ammount of boosters prizes would destroy the economy but so do bad prizes because less people play.
I had never seen a Modern DE fail to fire under the old system. The first one I tried to play under the new system didn't fire. Standard is fine because it has enough players to function but every other format is suffering.
# 23 lands
4 Seaside Citadel
3 Evolving Wilds
2 Sunpetal Grove
2 Glacial Fortress
2 Simic Growth Chamber
2 Plains
4 Forest
4 Island
# 20 creatures
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Coiling Oracle
2 Centaur Healer
1 Trygon Predator
1 Edric, Spymaster of Trest
1 Harmonic Sliver
1 Loxodon Hierarch
2 Mystic Snake
1 Brago, King Eternal
1 Armada Wurm
1 Prime Speaker Zegana
1 Progenitor Mimic
# 17 non-creatures
4 Supply/Demand
3 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
3 Bant Charm
2 Detention Sphere
1 Teferi's Moat
1 Aura Shards
1 Wheel of Sun and Moon
1 Behemoth Sledge
1 Supreme Verdict
I kept the deck in bant colors, mainly to have a cheap mana base. The complete deck costs less than 20 tix.
Demand gets used to fetch several nice silver bullets. Aura Shards for example destroys decks with a lot of enchantments or artifacts, Teferi's Moat sometimes just wins and Supreme Verdict can be cast, when we are behind on board. Wheel of Sun and Moon can be cast on us, against Mill and for recursion purposes and on our opponent if he wants to abuse his graveyard. If no specific answer is needed, we can go for value cards like Brago, King Eternal (abusing enters the battlefield abilities) or Prime Speaker Zegana (to draw cards).
Kiora is currently quite affordable at two tickets. The game can often be centered around her. Protecting her up until the point she reaches the ultimate can be a rewarding task. Or you can just use her to draw a card once in a while.
The deck provides a lot of card advantage and interaction. Depending on which cards you draw, games can turn out very different. Coiling Oracle into Edric into Loxodon Hierarch could be a very pro-active plan, ramping with Sakura-Tribe Elder and clearing the board with Supreme Verdict could be the controllish route.
I agree entirely. We all pay to play already, and the events should pay out something more. I know they can't flood the market with packs, but the current offerings are not adequate in my opinion.
To me, it would be like going to a paper FNM, having the entry be expensive, and first prize is "here's a free tournament entry ticket and five bucks of monopoly money we photocopied".
MTGO had tournaments that allowed a bigger % of players to profit consistently for years and their profits were still very good. All other online games don't require an investment of at the very least $100 (but more likely twice or more) to start playing (constructed here). We have to get something back for that investment.
It's due to the interactions with Lion's Eye Diamond making it basically Demonic Tutor. Played in storm decks mostly.
Meh, I still feel there are good answers available. I've been running a few gut shot between the main and board to great effect against cloud of faeries, or the rest of Delver for that matter.
If you pay for a tournament, there should be prizes worth paying for, period. There are local FNM tournaments with a better prize pool at an equal or lesser than entry fee, and those tournaments are run in physical spaces with real costs.
Then there's the fact that you're sharing a real, social experience in the real world with actual friends.
We all paid a lot to play the game already, we bought cards. I can't even begin to imagine that under the old system they were somehow losing money. They just realized that they could make even more. That's all it is.
Besides, this is a trading card game, why should we be playing to win objects that can't be traded?
those "elite" are the drastic minority.
OK CLEARLY IDK how to reply to a comment propperly. MY BAD.
this was a response to:
~~~~~~
He's not wrong by howlett23 at Sat, 08/29/2015 - 11:07
howlett23's picture
He didn't say it could NOT be done...he said its unrealistic and absurd..which is very much accurate. It's also absurd for a football or baseball player to make 25$ million a year, but it happens.
~~~~~~
REMOVED * EDIT * POSTED IN WRONG SPOT
i admit it should be possible and even literally mathematically required for the top 1 or 2 % of all players to make a profit ****CONSISTENTLY***** but i have the feeling that most of the more vocal complainers just desire easy free prizes and they aren't thinking about objective logistics. they aren't comparing this situation to other competitive sports or games where people might be "paid or rewarded" for top performance. they also aren't comparing this situation to most other collectible hobbies: baseball cards, beanie babies, sports memorabilia, antique furniture, automotive restoration....
MTGO isnt a 401k. its a game. this isn't pro sports, its a CCG.
So, we're picking up on the conversation I started last week, within your hexproof deck, eh?
Seems you're getting the same responses I got, bro.
Thanks, though, for coming to my defense when I pitched this idea, and for crediting me oh so long a week ago.
So let's start with the decklist:
4 Supply/Demand
4 Wheel of Sun and Moon
4 Cloven Casting
4 Terminate
4 Utter End
4 Firespout
4 Dreadbore
4 Call of the Conclave
4 Advent of the Wurm
4 Pillar of the Paruns
4 Exotic Orchard
4 Vivid Creek
4 Vivid Grove
4 Unknown Shores
1 Forest
1 Plains
1 Mountain
1 Island
1 Swamp
So let's talk about the deck for a while - manabase is as budget friendly as I imagined it. If something were to change with a bigger amount of cash Unknown Shores -> Reflecting Pool is an easy choice.
The core of the deck is a Demand toolbox with a twist- with both wheel and cloven casting on board we can pay 2UB to search for two multicolored cards, then our demand gets put on the bottom of our library. Which means we can search for it with another Demand (preferably the one we tutored with the last one). Not only that, but our other tutored spell can also be copied and then searched for again. We want to use terminate and dreadbore as early removal, eventually clearing the board with firespout/ exiling problem pernaments with utter end. If we get our "combo", we can keep casting copied advent of the wurms/call of the conclave/supply.
If someone wants to make it more budget, terminate is the card to go with as it is one of the most expensive cards. Wheel is on the expensive side too, but it is a powerful card which "makes" the deck, along with cloven casting and the wheel.
I tend to run a fair number of one mana kill cards so I don't find it to be as problematic in Delver.
Losing CoF would probably send Delver lists back into running Phantasmal Bear and Stitched Drake again.
Either way it goes will be fine with me.
I wouldn't lose any sleep over classifying Familiars as tier 1, Delver, Stompy, and MBC (and maybe Goblins) as tier 1.5, and everything else as tier 2 or worse. Not to say that tier 2 decks can't win, just that over the long run nothing in this format will post results comparable to Familiars in the hands of a highly skilled pilot. The only deterrent to just always running familiars is how incredibly boring the games can get.
Delver into Cloud of Fearies + Sprite is pretty scary but in my opinion the real problem is the stupid combo that takes 5 to 10 minutes to kill you. I have played a lot of Pauper in the past but I started playing much less when the combo deck with cloudpost and temporal fissure was all over the place. There aren't many decks in the history of magic that I have found as annoying as that one. They banned the deck and the format got much better but eventually the deck came back in the form it is still played today. I stopped playing Pauper and never got back to it because of that deck (although the 3 rounds DEs also make me not want to play no matter what)
I don't know how far back Goldfish tracks stats (on their page it only goes back to August 20th). That's 11 days of data.
I've been tracking the numbers for over two years. Delver outpaces everything in that time and despite having a small metagame percentage than Stompy and MBC, Esper Combo has an outsized win share.
Considering that Stompy and MBC are currently the number one and number two decks in the format via Goldfish, I think they are defined as tier 1 decks.
Good Luck in Somerset.
You are a brave man running only 18 lands in your WW deck. Even with 20 lands, I found that I got stuck on 1 mana too often. I hate handing victories to an opponent on a silver platter.
When you are stuck on 1 mana, I fear it will be very difficult for you to win games. (How many modern decks worry about a single 2/1 hitting the battlefield each turn).
Are you still convinced about the 18 land count, or have you changed your mind since this article?
If you cut Cloud of Faeries from Delver the deck will still be around but it loses the soul crushing opening of "Delver into Cloud into Spellstutter back up lock you out of the first two turns of the game. If you want to talk about "feel bad" it doesn't get much worse than that. Cloud of Faeries is not "low impact". It masquerades as a 1/1 flyer but the card enables so much for its respective decks.
And as for Izzet Blitz, that deck has hardly experienced the dominance of Delver or Combo, or heck, even a tier 1.5 deck like Stompy or MBC.
"Adapt and overcome" would make sense if this was a new problem. It's not. It's almost five years old.
While I personally find the combo build to be a bit too resilient and consistent..
I don't think the delver lists are actually so format warping as the cards you want to disrupt delver are also usually good or at least useful against things like infect/elves/tokens and etc.
You should be running some cheap creature removal main-board.
Even with CoF gone you would still want the same cards to answer an early delver and still likely have to fight through counters.
Granted delver would have more difficulty applying pressure while countering.
My point is that removing CoF is relatively low impact in Delver functioning as Delver does.
But the combo deck actually feels distressing to play against unless you can just blow them out via izzet blitz/infect/burn/stompy/affinity nut draws.
Then again if we are going to talk about storm being degenerate for the format then I don't see how izzet blitz doesn't come up as "creatures with storm".
That deck seldom cares about blockers and usually has dispel and co. to protect the creature on the key turn.
I wouldn't mind the cards being banned as it would make my games easier in general I suppose, but I always felt it made more sense to adapt and overcome when possible.
Being able to play cards like Dig Through Time, Brainstorm and Ponder is the reason I like Legacy. I certainly hope they don't turn in into Modern with real Duals!