Thought's on the green siege, in regards to the "Khan" choice for it? Do note that its each Main Phase, so thats 2 Ants every turn. While better in something like Omnath, it doesnt seem too bad as a thought in here.
It's an interesting card, but we have better. Patron acceleration wise, this is as good as a Ranger's Path, as you only have 2 extra mana at a time. However, the aforementioned twin Rampant Growth variants come with the boon of responding to Patron untaps, netting you more mana in the end than what this will offer.
The other option is hilarious, mind you. Combine with Eldrazi Monument to literally hail down 2/2 indestructible token bullets of doom. Nowhere near worth a slot, but an amusing concept nevertheless.
EDIT: I may not have stressed this enough, but the card you brought up only triggers for each of your main phases only.
I know it only gets you 2 on each main phase. I just wanted to bring it up so that there was at least acknowledgement for if someone asks later.
Also, the deck does have an infinite combo, but its extremely hard. Basically, you need 4 mana bonuses (so lands tap for 5), your lands being creatures (Kamahl) and Staff of Domination. Tap land for 5 and use 4 of it to untap it and the staff. You now have 1 green floating. But again, you need 7+ cards to pull this off (4 bonuses, Staff, Kamahl and a forest).
Well, that wasn't conscious design. I'll keep that in mind and pile on the enchant ramp on the same land if I happen to have a staff of domination on hand as well
I'm actually quite psyched about the Temur Sabertooth. Re-use the handful of ETB effects the deck has, hide good stuff back to the hand in case anything removal'y/wrath'y rears its ugly head, and the thing even lives through wraths on its own if it gets to do its job. Now, how do I make room for this, assuming I make room for this.
The Temur Sabertooth is probably the biggest upgrade to the deck since the graveyard recursion package. My initial response when seeing him was to think of him as a removal protection tool. Someone wrathed the board out? Ah well, just bounce all of my stuff back to the hand, handily making the Sabertooth indestructible and effortlessly outlasting the wrath. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. Now all the ETB stuff gets to be recycled at will! Extra recursion from Eternal Witness! Extra ramp from Wood Elves! Tuck all of the everything with Brutalizer Exarch! In fact, if you bounce Patron and have a way to haste him up when he comes down, you get infinite mana to work with as well.
You can put that infinite mana to some pretty hilarious use, especially if you have access to a draw engine as well. Get your whole deck in hand, tuck away all the enemy non-creatures with Brutalizer Exarch, turn any enemy creatures you don't want there anymore into 3/3s with Beast Within (recycle it with Reito Lantern or Eternal Witness), animate your lands with Kamahl, make them stupidly large and kill everybody. The "wiping the board clean" part sounds more like something blue would do, but hey, I ain't complaining. I'm sure the Sabertooth will become an EDH staple and find a home in all the goodstuff decks as well.
Speaking of goodstuff decks, Craterhoof Behemoth shoves Mana Reflection/Defense of the Heart off the most expensive card in the deck pedestal. It's worth it, though - the thing stopping good ole hoof before was his weakness to fog and my irrational paranoia that someone may wrench my fatal swing in some way. Now, the ole sabertooth will make sure that the hoof doesn't lose his utility even if he gets fogged out. Or, better yet, the pair can be abused to fuel ludicrous beyond-lethal alpha strikes, abusing hoof's ridiculous mana to pump efficiency.
Cuts needed to be made. Well, hoof is a new finisher, so Elder of Laurels can go be inefficient somewhere else. He fit the philosophy of the deck, but Kamahl did everything far better than him and there weren't really many times where he got to shine.
The second cut is a token engine. Wow there. To be fair, I never had to dig deep enough to get the Jade Mage online, and I'd always wince when I'd draw her early on instead of a ramp piece or something. It's funny, really - the deck started out with so many token makers, and now it's down to two. Still, the two seem to be sufficient.
*duly high fives* in fact, Song of the Dryads makes it so you can just wipe the entirety of the opposing board when in ENTER THE INFINITE mode. Just turn all their creatures into forests and tuck them with the exarch. The only thing that will dodge this is shrouded/hexproof stuff. Yes, it doesn't make much of a difference, but still
Good news everyone! This thread is now officially a primer, tag and all! Many thanks to all the folks at the Primer Committee for putting up with the development of this thread and finding time to give it the seal of approval in spite of a primer application surge.
What better way to celebrate than with a complete sideboard do-over?
Temur Sabertooth means that if I want to, I can completely obliterate pillow forts main deck. Calming Verse is no longer needed. This was the trigger that resulted in the rest of the list getting tweaked as well.
Duplicant is a great card, and is far easier to tutor than Helvault in case you actually need it for something. Hm. Tutoring. Tutoring... if you're actually changing the composition of the deck for a game, you probably have a reason to do so, and should be able to easily access whatever it is that you sided in. As such, cue redesigning the sideboard to all creatures! All non-stax/hate non-creatures get automatically dropped, and the seven sideboard slots that aren't Winter Orb et al. get filled up with the best of the best. Sort of.
Archetype of Endurance - Mass hexproof is a very good thing to have if targeted disruption is likely to show up en masse in a game.
Gaea's Herald - Dear Commander Rules People, kindly accept that hybrid mana is the intersection of two colours and let me run Vexing Shusher. This guy isn't anywhere as good but will have to do for now.
Soul of Zendikar - The answer to static -X/-X is making tokens that are fat enough to survive. Slows the deck down quite a bit, but at least lets it stay in the game.
Ulvenwald Tracker - There will probably be some stuff on the board that would rather not have a 7/7 Patron headbutting it, so why not make the 7/7 Patron headbutt it and make the life of said stuff's controller harder?
...well yeah, I said "sort of". If I missed any cool creature tech that you think would work well out of the sideboard given the current list, let me know! The card most likely to get sided out to make room for this at any point is Reito Lantern - true, it's a really cool tech piece, but it is the weakest of the 99 and whatever gets sided in is likely to be more useful
It started out inconspicuously. I asked a friend with a sizeable backlog of cards whether he has a spare Arbor Elf as it struck me as the sort of thing that would be nice to have in my card pool, and he pulled one out of a shoebox and brought it to EDH night. The Elf sat on the table, catching my eye every now and then, and I started wondering about giving it a chance...
Reito Lantern was a bit of a relict of times gone by, times when I couldn't Temur Sabertooth that Eternal Witness for all my recursion needs. True, it was a gut-wrenching resilience upgrade with Planar Portal, but in about 95% of the cases where I drew it I wished I hadn't. Now, if I get the Portal online, I can do far dumber stuff than just Lantern recursion. It's been acknowledged as the worst of the 99 previously, even openly in the sideboard post right above.
So I de-sleeved the Lantern and put in the Elf for a spin. True, he's a dork. Dorks tend to die. I am not cutting any land-based ramp for him though, just some janky fringe tech unrelated to ramp. As luck would have it, I got him in my starting hand for the very next game. He worked beautifully in conjunction with a turn three Extraplanar Lens, and once my board state was sufficiently ridiculous he saved my life by valiantly chumping a Xenagodded 24/24 Polukranos, World Eater.
I think he gets to stay, at least for now. It's not like I have Three Visits in the mail.
So far, the only potential card I see that may be of use from the new set is Shaman of the Forgotten Ways. Really punishes people who try and run pure spell control. Issue is that it seems really iffy and a much stronger meta choice. Its a weird on the fence for SB territory in my mind.
Also, it looks like while its a primer, its not in the primer thread. Just a heads up.
*shrug* it's got a primer tag in front of it, and it appears with a primer tag in the decklist database. Don't know how up to date the primer thread proper is.
So far, there's nothing in the set that fits here. There's no point forcing cards in because they're new. Shaman of Forgotten Ways will most likely get banned, as he's a Biorhythm on legs. When we're in a position to get good value out of the thing, we're also in a position to just kill everybody with the token swarm. When not Biorhythming, he's just an inferior Fyndhorn Elder-style mana chicken. Creature spells only? Yeah, that'll turn out just fine here.
I dont think he'd get banned full snap, but thats a different topic altogether. Shaman is probably the closest thing to an include here, and even then, he is so far away from being included that its not even funny.
It's faring well. My playgroup figured out I die if they throw stuff at me early, which helped temper my outrageous win percentage Still, I'm happy with it mechanically.
EDIT: No real reason to bump the thread, but in case it matters in the slightest, nothing from KTK is going in. Need to figure out how to handle new set releases. On one side, why should cards get special treatment because they're new? If something relevant comes out, I can just add it to the primer as an option, or into the list proper. On the other side, there's making posts acknowledging that there's nothing interesting in the set, like the Arcum primer does, but then that thread is pretty much just the occasional bump of "yeah nothing in this set" and nothing else happening. This thread is sufficiently ghost-town'y without that going on. Feh. I got nothing. Carry on.
EDIT 2: Once again, no reason to bump, the tuck change does very little for us. If Patron got tucked previously, you just cracked a tutor and had him right back. I went through the primer at some point, kicking out some mentions of tuck where they cease being relevant. Your engines may end up being shunted back into your deck via Terminus etc, so the fact the deck gives little damns about that is still quite handy.
Welp, it happened. In a state of poor judgement, in an attempt to pat myself on the back or pull myself out of a lake by the bootstraps, hard to say, I bought a 20 euro piece of cardboard which does the same thing as Nature's Lore. The reality check came 13 seconds after I finalised the PayPal transaction. Ugh.
Well, I can't condone doing something this stupid openly, so I introduced a new mini-section to the primer, the Moneybags Edition! In there, I take out the Wayfarer's Bauble (as it is the weakest piece of ramp currently in the deck, aside from the rare Rings of Brighthearth shenanigans... but more often than not, it's a 3-mana Rampant Growth, possibly split across two turns) and make room for this. This got me thinking on how to possibly improve the deck with budget being no constraint, and I'm unsure how to proceed.
Earthcraft is a beast of a card, but it only comes online when I'm making tokens. If I have a token maker, I'm probably fine. Not really needed. Survival of the Fittest et al have been dismissed time and time again for insufficient creature density. Same for Genesis Wave et al. The only options that seem to make sense are already mentioned in the primer as pimping options - Mana Crypt and Sylvan Tutor. The former's a great rock, but it doesn't respond to Patron untaps and sometimes bolts me. Patron tends to get aggroed in my playgroup, so every chunk of life matters. The explosion the crypt provides is not exactly likely to do anything meaningful, probably just ramp into a Patron on six lands. The tutor, on the other hand, is quite legit. Not sure what I'd cut to make room, probably something non-tutor'y. The jankiest thing around is Vedalken Orrery, but that also serves a purpose. I'll have to mull this over. Three Visits was an obvious upgrade over some stuff in the deck, so there was no trouble slotting it in.
This is really not the home for it. The mass is generated via tokens, not casting actual creature spells. With all of 15 creature cards in the deck, it doesn't seem like that good an idea to do it. Thanks for the thought though.
It actually feels quite nice to draw into the Three Visits and play it in its bizarre white bordered glory. In the end, I don't regret the purchase as much as I thought I would. It did minimally improve the deck, so there's that. In terms of the core, I'm thinking of sliding in a Dryad Arbor, but haven't quite gotten around to that yet.
I did decide to tweak the sideboard a tiny bit though.
The Tajuru Preserver is pretty niche. Getting aggroed hard and fast and dying is less niche. Spike Weaver handles that quite superbly, so in he goes. If creature spells can't be countered, then the tutor will be countered to make the token engine not show up in my hand in the first place. Dosan the Falling Leaf shuts off countermagic from harshing your mellow, but is a bit of a double-edged sword by also turning off your Chord/Kamahl shenanigans, so proceed with caution.
What are your thoughts on the new Cultivate? Its odd in that in most cases its better, but with the number of land tutors, we'd rather seem to want to keep the lands in our deck. On the other hand, it does ensure land drops and if we see it, it can mean that we can keep slightly more land light hands to ensure we have land drops to make.
It's totally going in as a minimal upgrade. Spell mastery is not triggered early on in the game, and late in the game you get the about-as-fringe-as-possible single land out of deck filtering to help you draw into good things. My current problem is deciding whether I keep Cultivate or Kodama's Reach for it I'm leaning towards the latter due to teenage year memories, in spite of the existence of Hisoka's Defiance I'm just a maverick like that
I'd have immediately slotted in the new Freyalise if she put the land on the battlefield. Alas, no such luck.
Unsurprisingly, Origins didn't bring much else to the table apart from Nissa's Pilgrimage. That's still quite satisfactory, as it's always an upgrade to the ramp package. It's a pity, as a few cards came pretty close - the Nissa would have been instantly slotted in had she actually placed the land on the battlefield, and some sort of X cost variation of Woodland Bellower capable of hitting things bigger than Wood Elves. Speaking of the elves, actually...
Well, I had to make room for the new ramp spell. Wood Elves is objectively the worst ramp spell currently present in the deck in terms of raw ramp ability, as it just gets a single land for 3 mana. True, you get a chump, and you can occasionally make shenanigans happen with Temur Sabertooth. Cultivate variants are stronger on the whole, though - you get a second (or in the case of the new kid, possibly even third!) land to your hand, and the tapped land doesn't really matter that much. This option offers more ramp stability, so it can be viewed as an upgrade to the list.
This oh so slightly decreases the potency of Citanul Flute digging you out of crappy ramp stalls, but you still get Arbor Elf, Joraga Treespeaker and Sakura-Tribe Elder. Plus there's less chumps to hurl in the way of other people punching into you. Also one less body to anchor Diviner's Wand to, or take Lightning Greaves off Patron. I don't expect it to make a huge deal of difference though.
Also bumped up the Three Visits inclusion over Wayfarer's Bauble to the "official list" as why not. It's quite a fun feeling, playing a 20 euro piece of white bordered cardboard and getting a forest.
And last, but certainly not least, I tore down the forest homogeneity in the land department, and slotted in the first nonbasic. Contrary to what I stated previously, I went with Myriad Landscape. In order to evaluate if it's a good idea to add said card, I did a number of dry test draws with the landscape in hand, similar to the testing that ended up putting Joraga Treespeaker and Search for Tomorrow into the deck around the time that I made the primer. Conclusions? Unsurprising, really - great turn one play, helps overcome the extremely important 3 -> 4 land hurdle, combos like a boss with Khalni Heart Expedition, Rings of Brighthearth, mana doublers and Patron himself. It's a little unwieldy with other possible turn one plays, with Joraga Treespeaker being the most awkward to play around, and feels like a loss of gas if the deck's stalled out around 6 or so mana. Note the feels - it's a slightly longer term investment, but returns more than just topdecking the forest it replaces unless you're literally one mana short of Patron.
I really like your deck. It is something I haven't seen before in my playgroup. I saw you were talking about Iona being a thorn in your side in your playgroup and I was trying to think of some solutions you could run. With Temur Sabertooth out you could use Thelonite Hermit for token production as all morph creatures will get past Iona if cast face-down and the hermit gives you four 1/1s for 7GGG total (cast + flip + bounce), I agree it's not ideal but I'm just spitballing ideas here. Root Elemental is another fun trick to sneak things into play past Iona and most counterspells. Then there is the good old standby of Æther Vial if you have it and Summoner's Egg can be fun too, if you can crack it open with something.
Though I do think you're maindecking the best answer in the form of Duplicant and it really is too bad that Predator, Flagship isn't a creature you can tutor for.
Sylvan Scrying & Reap and Sow can be worthwile additions to your ramp package if you decide to try out some non-Forest, non-basic lands and need tutors for them. Reap is particularly good since it can also take out an opponent's Gaea's Cradle, Cabal Coffers, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and just about every other ramp and utility land ever printed.
Thanks for the feedback, glad you liked it Iona's actually not really a thorn in my side, I'm just designing around things that I know would harsh this deck's mellow. It's turned out with time that my main problem is getting aggro'd hard and fast, if the table joins forces they can usually kill me just before I'm about to stabilise. Hence the addition of Spike Weaver in the most recent sideboard update, and I'm even considering Elderscale Wurm in spite its impracticality.
Thawing Glaciers is a card advantage monstrosity for long-game control grind builds, but it's too slow in a temperamental mono red shell with little in the way of non-mana-rock ramp, let alone here. You do bring up a valid point that it can be abused with Rings or Kamahl animation, but that's not all that likely to happen. And if it does, as in if I have Rings or Kamahl, I'm probably in pretty decent shape already
Good catch with the Reap and Sow, if I notice utility or power lands harshing my mellow I'll be sure to slip it in. I'm maturing towards debuting my first nonbasic in the list - Myriad Landscape. It's been performing amazing in my mono black list, and here it can just sit around in its original form until I have a little bit of spare mana to give it the extra mmph into its "true form". We'll see how it goes, gotta give it a few test spins.
EDIT: Did some testing with Myriad Landscape, it performed okay. In order to not update spam, I'll just update the ORI update.
After getting my EDH on for multiple hours every single day for a week a few weeks ago, I'm slightly magicked out, and the bit of magic attention span I get is devoted to fine-tuning the black list, the little nooks and crevices. Still, today I decided to get another goldfishing session in with the Myriad Landscape...
Yeah. No. Sorry, mis-assessment. The landscape is best dropped turn one, but there's a decent number of turn one plays that offer better returns turn two. Joraga Treespeaker in fact demands active two-mana follow up turn 2, and quite often the turn one ramp hit segues into a turn two three mana ramp spell, making it difficult to sneak the landscape in. Anything later than that becomes awkward, as often the mana could get put to better use setting up a permanent base or something. If set down turn one, sometimes there was a lack of opportunity windows to crack it for land later on. The decisive case came when I wasn't able to cast a T4 Patron off a T3 Vernal Bloom, as this is not a forest.
Is the landscape a bad card? No. It combos well with parts of the deck, like Khalni Heart Expedition (the two, equipped with two accompanying forests, lead to 6 tapped lands turn 3) or Rings of Brighthearth. However, its clunky inability to get along with quick ramp bursts is heavily annoying. Back to 100% basics for me it is. I'll keep running the landscape in my red and black lists though. It's awesome there.
I wound up at my LGS early today, chatting about landlords and whatnot, and I felt sorry for them and their troubles, so I picked up an Origins booster to show my support in a cheap bastard way. I don't crack boosters on principle - it's not financially justifiable, and you're better off just scoring the singles you need. Surprise surprise, Woodland Bellower rears his ugly head from the back of the pack. I head off to grab a bite to eat and ponder if I can do anything with him.
Vedalken Orrery's one of the cards that's been grandfathered into the list, along the lines of Tower of Fortunes, and coasted around forever without even doing that much. It earned my trust relatively early on with a fantastic game where I ramped with it like crazy and then dropped a token maker on a well developed board. Most of the time since then, it did nothing and got mulled away from opening hands, sitting in the 99 as a "tech" card that combos well with draw engines, plus enables the occasional instant-speed Enter The Infinite TM mode. That was enough for it to feel like it does something, it was definitely more functional than Reito Lantern. Still, in a simple card 1v1, what would I rather have - a card that combos with draw engines, or just a decent tutor that will get me an engine/finisher online and let me carry out my game plan by itself? Thought so.
I pondered whether the newly opened slot would go better to the Bellower or Sylvan Tutor, and the Bellower is just better value as you sequence him into Fierce Empath and just cast the engine/finisher you need. To-hand tutors are just about always superior to to-top-of-deck tutors in this shell.
It's a high-price low-upside move but how about adding in a few fetchlands? They play very well with Rings of Brighthearth and Khalni Heart Expedition and present very little in the way of opportunity cost. They also "synergize" with Three Visits in that you get to use an expensive card to fetch up a basic forest.
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You would never guess, at the terrifying sight of the man, that Hunding was as charming a companion as one could wish for.
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540 Peasant cube- Gold EditionSomething SpicyThe other option is hilarious, mind you. Combine with Eldrazi Monument to literally hail down 2/2 indestructible token bullets of doom. Nowhere near worth a slot, but an amusing concept nevertheless.
EDIT: I may not have stressed this enough, but the card you brought up only triggers for each of your main phases only.
Also, the deck does have an infinite combo, but its extremely hard. Basically, you need 4 mana bonuses (so lands tap for 5), your lands being creatures (Kamahl) and Staff of Domination. Tap land for 5 and use 4 of it to untap it and the staff. You now have 1 green floating. But again, you need 7+ cards to pull this off (4 bonuses, Staff, Kamahl and a forest).
540 Peasant cube- Gold EditionSomething SpicyI'm actually quite psyched about the Temur Sabertooth. Re-use the handful of ETB effects the deck has, hide good stuff back to the hand in case anything removal'y/wrath'y rears its ugly head, and the thing even lives through wraths on its own if it gets to do its job. Now, how do I make room for this, assuming I make room for this.
1 Elder of Laurels
1 Jade Mage
1 Craterhoof Behemoth
1 Temur Sabertooth
The Temur Sabertooth is probably the biggest upgrade to the deck since the graveyard recursion package. My initial response when seeing him was to think of him as a removal protection tool. Someone wrathed the board out? Ah well, just bounce all of my stuff back to the hand, handily making the Sabertooth indestructible and effortlessly outlasting the wrath. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. Now all the ETB stuff gets to be recycled at will! Extra recursion from Eternal Witness! Extra ramp from Wood Elves! Tuck all of the everything with Brutalizer Exarch! In fact, if you bounce Patron and have a way to haste him up when he comes down, you get infinite mana to work with as well.
You can put that infinite mana to some pretty hilarious use, especially if you have access to a draw engine as well. Get your whole deck in hand, tuck away all the enemy non-creatures with Brutalizer Exarch, turn any enemy creatures you don't want there anymore into 3/3s with Beast Within (recycle it with Reito Lantern or Eternal Witness), animate your lands with Kamahl, make them stupidly large and kill everybody. The "wiping the board clean" part sounds more like something blue would do, but hey, I ain't complaining. I'm sure the Sabertooth will become an EDH staple and find a home in all the goodstuff decks as well.
Speaking of goodstuff decks, Craterhoof Behemoth shoves Mana Reflection/Defense of the Heart off the most expensive card in the deck pedestal. It's worth it, though - the thing stopping good ole hoof before was his weakness to fog and my irrational paranoia that someone may wrench my fatal swing in some way. Now, the ole sabertooth will make sure that the hoof doesn't lose his utility even if he gets fogged out. Or, better yet, the pair can be abused to fuel ludicrous beyond-lethal alpha strikes, abusing hoof's ridiculous mana to pump efficiency.
Cuts needed to be made. Well, hoof is a new finisher, so Elder of Laurels can go be inefficient somewhere else. He fit the philosophy of the deck, but Kamahl did everything far better than him and there weren't really many times where he got to shine.
The second cut is a token engine. Wow there. To be fair, I never had to dig deep enough to get the Jade Mage online, and I'd always wince when I'd draw her early on instead of a ramp piece or something. It's funny, really - the deck started out with so many token makers, and now it's down to two. Still, the two seem to be sufficient.
High five!
Most Used (of many dozens) EDH Decks:
Brago, King Eternal - Stax
Grenzo, Dungeon Warden - Aggro Combo
Wort, the Raidmother - Spellslinger Swarm Control
Animar, Soul of Elements - Tempo Combo
Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder - Spellslinger
Exodia the Forbidden One:
Oona, Queen of the Fae - Combowins.dec
What better way to celebrate than with a complete sideboard do-over?
1 Calming Verse
1 Centaur Glade
1 Helvault
1 Homeward Path
1 Duplicant
1 Gaea's Herald
1 Tajuru Preserver
1 Ulvenwald Tracker
Temur Sabertooth means that if I want to, I can completely obliterate pillow forts main deck. Calming Verse is no longer needed. This was the trigger that resulted in the rest of the list getting tweaked as well.
Duplicant is a great card, and is far easier to tutor than Helvault in case you actually need it for something. Hm. Tutoring. Tutoring... if you're actually changing the composition of the deck for a game, you probably have a reason to do so, and should be able to easily access whatever it is that you sided in. As such, cue redesigning the sideboard to all creatures! All non-stax/hate non-creatures get automatically dropped, and the seven sideboard slots that aren't Winter Orb et al. get filled up with the best of the best. Sort of.
...well yeah, I said "sort of". If I missed any cool creature tech that you think would work well out of the sideboard given the current list, let me know! The card most likely to get sided out to make room for this at any point is Reito Lantern - true, it's a really cool tech piece, but it is the weakest of the 99 and whatever gets sided in is likely to be more useful
1 Reito Lantern
1 Arbor Elf
It started out inconspicuously. I asked a friend with a sizeable backlog of cards whether he has a spare Arbor Elf as it struck me as the sort of thing that would be nice to have in my card pool, and he pulled one out of a shoebox and brought it to EDH night. The Elf sat on the table, catching my eye every now and then, and I started wondering about giving it a chance...
Reito Lantern was a bit of a relict of times gone by, times when I couldn't Temur Sabertooth that Eternal Witness for all my recursion needs. True, it was a gut-wrenching resilience upgrade with Planar Portal, but in about 95% of the cases where I drew it I wished I hadn't. Now, if I get the Portal online, I can do far dumber stuff than just Lantern recursion. It's been acknowledged as the worst of the 99 previously, even openly in the sideboard post right above.
So I de-sleeved the Lantern and put in the Elf for a spin. True, he's a dork. Dorks tend to die. I am not cutting any land-based ramp for him though, just some janky fringe tech unrelated to ramp. As luck would have it, I got him in my starting hand for the very next game. He worked beautifully in conjunction with a turn three Extraplanar Lens, and once my board state was sufficiently ridiculous he saved my life by valiantly chumping a Xenagodded 24/24 Polukranos, World Eater.
I think he gets to stay, at least for now. It's not like I have Three Visits in the mail.
Also, it looks like while its a primer, its not in the primer thread. Just a heads up.
540 Peasant cube- Gold EditionSomething SpicySo far, there's nothing in the set that fits here. There's no point forcing cards in because they're new. Shaman of Forgotten Ways will most likely get banned, as he's a Biorhythm on legs. When we're in a position to get good value out of the thing, we're also in a position to just kill everybody with the token swarm. When not Biorhythming, he's just an inferior Fyndhorn Elder-style mana chicken. Creature spells only? Yeah, that'll turn out just fine here.
So how has the deck been of late?
540 Peasant cube- Gold EditionSomething SpicyEDIT: No real reason to bump the thread, but in case it matters in the slightest, nothing from KTK is going in. Need to figure out how to handle new set releases. On one side, why should cards get special treatment because they're new? If something relevant comes out, I can just add it to the primer as an option, or into the list proper. On the other side, there's making posts acknowledging that there's nothing interesting in the set, like the Arcum primer does, but then that thread is pretty much just the occasional bump of "yeah nothing in this set" and nothing else happening. This thread is sufficiently ghost-town'y without that going on. Feh. I got nothing. Carry on.
EDIT 2: Once again, no reason to bump, the tuck change does very little for us. If Patron got tucked previously, you just cracked a tutor and had him right back. I went through the primer at some point, kicking out some mentions of tuck where they cease being relevant. Your engines may end up being shunted back into your deck via Terminus etc, so the fact the deck gives little damns about that is still quite handy.
Well, I can't condone doing something this stupid openly, so I introduced a new mini-section to the primer, the Moneybags Edition! In there, I take out the Wayfarer's Bauble (as it is the weakest piece of ramp currently in the deck, aside from the rare Rings of Brighthearth shenanigans... but more often than not, it's a 3-mana Rampant Growth, possibly split across two turns) and make room for this. This got me thinking on how to possibly improve the deck with budget being no constraint, and I'm unsure how to proceed.
Earthcraft is a beast of a card, but it only comes online when I'm making tokens. If I have a token maker, I'm probably fine. Not really needed. Survival of the Fittest et al have been dismissed time and time again for insufficient creature density. Same for Genesis Wave et al. The only options that seem to make sense are already mentioned in the primer as pimping options - Mana Crypt and Sylvan Tutor. The former's a great rock, but it doesn't respond to Patron untaps and sometimes bolts me. Patron tends to get aggroed in my playgroup, so every chunk of life matters. The explosion the crypt provides is not exactly likely to do anything meaningful, probably just ramp into a Patron on six lands. The tutor, on the other hand, is quite legit. Not sure what I'd cut to make room, probably something non-tutor'y. The jankiest thing around is Vedalken Orrery, but that also serves a purpose. I'll have to mull this over. Three Visits was an obvious upgrade over some stuff in the deck, so there was no trouble slotting it in.
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Edric Spy and die
Azami the lady of the draw
Naya Zoo
Past decks
Orloro
sharuum the hegemond
Mono black control
splinter twin
I did decide to tweak the sideboard a tiny bit though.
1 Gaea's Herald
1 Tajuru Preserver
1 Dosan the Falling Leaf
1 Spike Weaver
The Tajuru Preserver is pretty niche. Getting aggroed hard and fast and dying is less niche. Spike Weaver handles that quite superbly, so in he goes. If creature spells can't be countered, then the tutor will be countered to make the token engine not show up in my hand in the first place. Dosan the Falling Leaf shuts off countermagic from harshing your mellow, but is a bit of a double-edged sword by also turning off your Chord/Kamahl shenanigans, so proceed with caution.
540 Peasant cube- Gold EditionSomething SpicyI'd have immediately slotted in the new Freyalise if she put the land on the battlefield. Alas, no such luck.
1 Snow-Covered Forest
1 Wayfarer's Bauble
1 Wood Elves
1 Myriad Landscape
1 Nissa's Pilgrimage
1 Three Visits
Well, I had to make room for the new ramp spell. Wood Elves is objectively the worst ramp spell currently present in the deck in terms of raw ramp ability, as it just gets a single land for 3 mana. True, you get a chump, and you can occasionally make shenanigans happen with Temur Sabertooth. Cultivate variants are stronger on the whole, though - you get a second (or in the case of the new kid, possibly even third!) land to your hand, and the tapped land doesn't really matter that much. This option offers more ramp stability, so it can be viewed as an upgrade to the list.
This oh so slightly decreases the potency of Citanul Flute digging you out of crappy ramp stalls, but you still get Arbor Elf, Joraga Treespeaker and Sakura-Tribe Elder. Plus there's less chumps to hurl in the way of other people punching into you. Also one less body to anchor Diviner's Wand to, or take Lightning Greaves off Patron. I don't expect it to make a huge deal of difference though.
Also bumped up the Three Visits inclusion over Wayfarer's Bauble to the "official list" as why not. It's quite a fun feeling, playing a 20 euro piece of white bordered cardboard and getting a forest.
And last, but certainly not least, I tore down the forest homogeneity in the land department, and slotted in the first nonbasic. Contrary to what I stated previously, I went with Myriad Landscape. In order to evaluate if it's a good idea to add said card, I did a number of dry test draws with the landscape in hand, similar to the testing that ended up putting Joraga Treespeaker and Search for Tomorrow into the deck around the time that I made the primer. Conclusions? Unsurprising, really - great turn one play, helps overcome the extremely important 3 -> 4 land hurdle, combos like a boss with Khalni Heart Expedition, Rings of Brighthearth, mana doublers and Patron himself. It's a little unwieldy with other possible turn one plays, with Joraga Treespeaker being the most awkward to play around, and feels like a loss of gas if the deck's stalled out around 6 or so mana. Note the feels - it's a slightly longer term investment, but returns more than just topdecking the forest it replaces unless you're literally one mana short of Patron.
Though I do think you're maindecking the best answer in the form of Duplicant and it really is too bad that Predator, Flagship isn't a creature you can tutor for.
The other suggestion I have is Thawing Glaciers since it can give you some crazy ramp if you pair it with the Rings of Brighthearth and ways to untap it multiple times before the end of the turn with Staff of Domination and cards like Voyaging Satyr, Krosan Restorer, and Magus of the Candelabra (or you could just make it a creature with Kamahl).
Sylvan Scrying & Reap and Sow can be worthwile additions to your ramp package if you decide to try out some non-Forest, non-basic lands and need tutors for them. Reap is particularly good since it can also take out an opponent's Gaea's Cradle, Cabal Coffers, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and just about every other ramp and utility land ever printed.
Thawing Glaciers is a card advantage monstrosity for long-game control grind builds, but it's too slow in a temperamental mono red shell with little in the way of non-mana-rock ramp, let alone here. You do bring up a valid point that it can be abused with Rings or Kamahl animation, but that's not all that likely to happen. And if it does, as in if I have Rings or Kamahl, I'm probably in pretty decent shape already
Good catch with the Reap and Sow, if I notice utility or power lands harshing my mellow I'll be sure to slip it in. I'm maturing towards debuting my first nonbasic in the list - Myriad Landscape. It's been performing amazing in my mono black list, and here it can just sit around in its original form until I have a little bit of spare mana to give it the extra mmph into its "true form". We'll see how it goes, gotta give it a few test spins.
EDIT: Did some testing with Myriad Landscape, it performed okay. In order to not update spam, I'll just update the ORI update.
1 Myriad Landscape
1 Snow-Covered Forest
Yeah. No. Sorry, mis-assessment. The landscape is best dropped turn one, but there's a decent number of turn one plays that offer better returns turn two. Joraga Treespeaker in fact demands active two-mana follow up turn 2, and quite often the turn one ramp hit segues into a turn two three mana ramp spell, making it difficult to sneak the landscape in. Anything later than that becomes awkward, as often the mana could get put to better use setting up a permanent base or something. If set down turn one, sometimes there was a lack of opportunity windows to crack it for land later on. The decisive case came when I wasn't able to cast a T4 Patron off a T3 Vernal Bloom, as this is not a forest.
Is the landscape a bad card? No. It combos well with parts of the deck, like Khalni Heart Expedition (the two, equipped with two accompanying forests, lead to 6 tapped lands turn 3) or Rings of Brighthearth. However, its clunky inability to get along with quick ramp bursts is heavily annoying. Back to 100% basics for me it is. I'll keep running the landscape in my red and black lists though. It's awesome there.
1 Vedalken Orrery
1 Woodland Bellower
I wound up at my LGS early today, chatting about landlords and whatnot, and I felt sorry for them and their troubles, so I picked up an Origins booster to show my support in a cheap bastard way. I don't crack boosters on principle - it's not financially justifiable, and you're better off just scoring the singles you need. Surprise surprise, Woodland Bellower rears his ugly head from the back of the pack. I head off to grab a bite to eat and ponder if I can do anything with him.
Vedalken Orrery's one of the cards that's been grandfathered into the list, along the lines of Tower of Fortunes, and coasted around forever without even doing that much. It earned my trust relatively early on with a fantastic game where I ramped with it like crazy and then dropped a token maker on a well developed board. Most of the time since then, it did nothing and got mulled away from opening hands, sitting in the 99 as a "tech" card that combos well with draw engines, plus enables the occasional instant-speed Enter The Infinite TM mode. That was enough for it to feel like it does something, it was definitely more functional than Reito Lantern. Still, in a simple card 1v1, what would I rather have - a card that combos with draw engines, or just a decent tutor that will get me an engine/finisher online and let me carry out my game plan by itself? Thought so.
I pondered whether the newly opened slot would go better to the Bellower or Sylvan Tutor, and the Bellower is just better value as you sequence him into Fierce Empath and just cast the engine/finisher you need. To-hand tutors are just about always superior to to-top-of-deck tutors in this shell.