MTG Salvation

Seriously, this thing with the discord invites is what stops it from directly replacing all forums around. I hope they add an option to be able to browse through servers or something. When is salvation going down?

Yup, the deck's kind of his brew atm. It runs Dreadhorde Arcanist and at the moment was running some Monastery Swiftspears, Atarka's Command and some number of Become Immense so he also just caught me unaware in some of the games. The deck has reach. I agree that this kind of matchup should improve post-board. I never fetched non-blue source, but sometimes you just draw the basics or Blast Zones (which were almost dead cards here, while Field of Ruin can almost always in a pinch T3 go fetch an Island at least), and there was some pressure on Pushes and Paths to stem the bleeding from little critters. I do recall a major punt of mine where I left an untapped swamp to draw into an Archmage's Charm which would have most probably won me a game and I couldn't cast, so I guess it should have been a 2-4, plus the punts that I did not recognize. I did run 1 Gearhulk 1 FoF, but never drew the FoF so it made no difference. There was 1 game in which I opted into gearhulk with 5 lands and died when it would have let me stabilize, so most games were in fact close. I'll let you know if I get some more games, but I doubt it'll be so for a couple of weeks.

I played 6 games maindeck against an electrodominance deck with the new rhinos suspend card andi got pretty wrecked, I think I won 1 game. Definitely the mana base felt lacking, mostly because of archmage charm. Drawing into swamp, plains or godless shrine hurted a lot. Maybe get rid of godless for another U shock?

Not that the match up seems easy mainboard though. 2 mana instant that puts 2 4/4 tokens is pretty spicy and blast zone doesn’t help there. Charm does steal a rhino but some games he went electrodominance into finale and just overwhelmed me. I’ll give it some more tries.

Nice! I realized afterwards that blast zone could blow up planeswalkers, that's nasty... Lil' Teferi might be kind of inocuous, but what worries me the most about him is a follow-up Jace which we can't answer, but I agree that Teferi by himself doesn't do much. Tonight a friend is coming over to play some games so I'll give it a try.


Sad to see that the forum is closing; I sign up for the invitation link to the Discord server too.

Nice write up, BloodyRabbit! what new cards did you come across while playing with Horizons? Were the Gearhulks great? The perspective of a T3 Teferi while on the draw worries me with this style of deck as you only have 2 Knots and 2 Vetos as outs. Do you feel that the Gearhulks could be swapped for more early interaction?

Edit: What about Fact or Fiction? Did you give it some consideration?

Edit2: What about the manabase? You have slightly more white than black in your main (the 2 Vetos) but you are running 4 extra black sources in the Tar Pits. Do you think a 2-2 split between Tar Pit and Colonnade would be appropiate or do you value the Tar Pit that much more?

Welcome FoF to modern!! I don’t think it will be as appealing with Jace in the format, even more with the newly spoiled Force of Negation but we definitely spent time waiting for it.

Jumping from 4 mana to 8 or 10 with land drop is sick. Rec is basically a 0 mana card that in your next turn will let you teachings for the cryptic and cast it. Teachings for cryptic on turn 4 without rec means you lost a turn doing nothing, as does transmuting for teachings, that’s seven mana for null tempo advantage. You can’t afford that unless you are very ahead or have a rec out imo

I understand that one of them gets boarded out quite often. That being said, the card is the most broken in the deck and what allows all the nonsense, so you wanna draw it. Playing rec t3 or t4 really puts you ahead and brings you into the realm of the unfair. Yet it’s true that you need gas to take advantage of it, so I guess 3 is just the sweet spot.

Remember that playing teachings was never good in modern: it’s the mana from reclamation that makes it good.

I feel that panglacial wurm only taking one slot is much better than the other route. Both get blown by Path anyway, and it lets you keep Zenith in which imo is a great card in this deck. I’d go with that but I don’t feel like it’s an “I win” button as opponents might have high life totals and a pretty good board in the situations you described. It kind of encourages you to go on a couple extra turns with nexus, but then you’ll need a billion mana... not in love with the ideas

Hi fellow esperers, yesterday I had time to play at lgs again. 2 sfa, 4 snaps, 2 teferi, 2 jaces, 2 verdict and 1 settle

Round 1: 2-0 against uw control (esper charm was mvp)
1-0
Round 2: 2-1 against storm (again, esper charm Was mvp here)
2-0
Round 3: 2-1 against junk
3-0
Round 4: 0-2 against serum powder eldrazi (really got stomped beyond chance here)
3-1
Round 5: 0-2 against dredge (really got close to stabilizing in both games)
3-2

Overall good taking into account this was the first time playing in months (some plays were sloppy AF, some even blatant misplays).

I’ve been curious about Terminus so next time I’m going up to 3 jace and 4 terminus, - 2 verdicts, 1 settle, 1 snap and 1 snare. I’ll let you know how it works! Cheers

Edit: I’ve been reading the last page and it’s a pity that this thread has gone that way -I’ve always played fringe decks and there’s always the “just play TIER1” argument-, but I’ll chime in saying that esper charm is really great in control mirrors which are at an all time high nowadays. I do realize that playing terminus has it’s great benefits and that’s why I’ll be trying it, but mana stability has never been an issue for 3 color decks in this format as most of the good fair decks are in fact 3 colors, at least splashing the 3rd.

I also think that “numbers speak for themselves” is an argument that has to be taken with a grain of salt, because most people will just play whatever deck they see being good, and the fact is most that people have to read esper charm twice to see what it does. I’m not claiming that esper is the underground top deck, but I’m certain that if a comparable amount of people to those playing UW played the deck it would certainly be working it’s way up and we would see it a lot.

Thank you for the fast response!

Okay, couldn't find an answer to this. Let's say I have Masked Admirers in play and I want to cast a card with emerge (let's say Elder Deep-Fiend) by sacrificing Masked Admirers and paying 1UU. Can I pay GG to return Masked Admirers to my hand when I sacrificed them to pay for the emerge creature?

Alright, that's pretty clear. Thanks!!

Alright, I've got a couple of nitpicky questions about Arixmethes, Slumbering Isle to which I couldn't find an answer online:

1) Does Arixmethes keep it's colors while being a land? This is kind of relevant because a friend of mine plays Jaya Ballard, Task Mage as his commander.

2) Does it turn on Lieutenant ability while being a land if it's your commander?

3) The rulings says that "Arixmethes’s effect causing it to be a land overwrites any earlier effects that gave it additional types". Does this erase the subtype Kraken too? I don't even know if Kraken is a valid land subtype and how this could be relevant, but I'd still like to know.

I’ve also found Jeskai to be pretty difficult in G1. Even Esper Charm isn’t that sick when they have dead paths and verdicts rotting in hand, and they can burn out our planeswalkers with ease while their Teferis are pretty much impossible to deal with in a timely fashion once resolved.

That being said, I feel Esper Charm gives us more game against combo and big mana, though I don’t have a lot of games against said strategies to back it up. Having played both decks I also feel Esper is insanely better at playing through Blood Moon or dealing with it.