Definitely a cool deck! I do love me some Tromokratis! Made his deck last summer, but went with the krakens of the deep theme. I kept the mana rocks and other artifacts as 'sunken treasures' protected by the sea beasts. Let me know if you'd like to see a deck list. I offer since our decks are different in concept, but may have new ideas to explore.
Another piece of Aether Revolt's magic is that it reminded me that this deck exists, shunted off somewhere to the side of my deck drawer. The list needs a solid makeover - I'm not sure what old me's deal was, but not having Pongify or Fact or Fiction in here is just unforgivable. For now a quick obvious fix that doesn't really turn anything on its head:
This is how this list got resurrected to some degree - spotted this while looking through spoilers, and the immediate thought was that it slots into here perfectly as it's finally a tapper that can be fetched with Trinket Mage. The worst tapper in the 99 makes room. Simple swap days.
Sometimes, it's a silly thing that inspires you to go back and do something you meant to do. Tromo was overdue for an overhaul. I love the concept of the deck, but the execution was a bit wonky, tuned in a weird metagame'y direction. The deck never really recovered after the 2014/2015 meta fell apart, as instead of giving it the attention it needed to get properly into its own realm I just moved towards other builds. I mean, Daxos the Returned worked out. The others - not so much. One of those that whiffed were Prime Speaker Zegana, which saw me get a lot of the stereotypical blue power lifters. As such, I was well set to power this bad boy up if I ever finally got around to it... and I finally have. Supreme Will, of all cardboards, persuaded me to do it. A silly little spell, a Mana Leak or an Impulse for three mana. Nice utility though. So I finally sat down and started reworking the list.
Too many changes to go card by card, really. The gist of it is that I'm dropping a lot of the cutesy wutesy theft, creature-based tapdown and other nondescript silliness for a more streamlined, competent shell. Old me didn't run Fact or Fiction. Why? Hell knows. But he didn't. Same for Pongify and Rapid Hybridization. Also, powering the thing up allows the trading of Control Magic variants for Gilded Drake, plus slamming a healthy helping of fair and balanced mana rocks. Slapped some more mass bounce in there - a nice tempo slug to keep the table from fragging you if needed, and some of it has the power to be asymmetric. Also, seeing how the deck generates obscene amounts of mana, Expopriate and Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur offer up stupid payoffs.
The list doesn't feel perfect as is, but it runs better. It retains a good helping of the quirkiness of the original build while adding the polish and smoothness of a more reasonable set of blue utility spells. Nevertheless, I feel like I could get away with a Temporal Mastery in here, as well as a Back to Basics (notice the heavy basic island tilt partly in preparation). Plus, some reasonable draw wouldn't hurt - a lot of the stuff I have is cantrips, which isn't necessarily bad, but a fat grip is a nice thing to have. What do you folks think? I'd welcome your opinions, as always.
So, what does playtesting this new version tell me? Bonus turns are good. Extra cardboard is nice. Both of those are obvious things, yes, but the list will have to learn to embrace them in a manner most comfortable for its playstyle. For the time being, Reliquary Tower is reintroduced as sometimes grips get pretty bananas, and Crawlspace was rather underwhelming so it gets replaced with Temporal Mastery. Eyeing Rush of Knowledge for inclusion.
The deck works well. Maybe a smidgen too well, in fact. People aren't particularly fond of Forbid showing up when you have +15 hand size from Recurring Insight for some reason. Not a lot of magicking has been going on over the past few months actually. I failed to gel with the paper meta here, and there's only so much Cockatrice I can handle. Today I walked Tromo on there as a final test before tossing an update up, I one-shot a guy as he had a tapped creature, to what he ignored me and said his token can chump. After being presented with the official ruling, he instead sent me a picture of a mountain of duals and demanded photographic evidence of my deck for some reason. What. So yeah, I'm largely limited to my crudely 1.5-monthly 2014/2015 meta regroups. Nevertheless, I slightly spiffed the list up, and time to make a note of it!
I'm just one bloke, but from my perspective Iconic Masters finally did what I expected those sort of releases to do - drove prices of its reprints into the dirt. Mana Drain fell another five euro since I deemed it cheap enough to score, and everything else in the set took a gigantic collateral damage hit that should hopefully keep it affordable for quite some time. So yeah, Drain in, no-brainer there. Replaces Negate as the weakest part of the counter suite. However, the counter suite also gets extended with Cryptic Command - if I'm getting all the power lifter cards all of a sudden, may as well go all in. Not bothering with Pact of Negation or Force of Will though, these seem like higher priority.
Also, given a high number of low CMC instants, plus some artifact tutors, Isochron Scepter says hello. I go way back with this card - back in 2005, when an early days Rumpy slapped Blanchwood Armor on a Thorn Elemental and felt like the king of the world, said Thorn Elemental would often die to a Sceptered Terminate. The friend I played against had a rather brutal, and probably quite proper, Grixis Psychatog control shell with Scepters galore, no fair game for mono green fatsticks dot deck. As such, it ingrained itself pretty well into my mind, and it's quite fun to be the one dishing out the pain for once. In the interest of upping the Scepter package, Ponder becomes Anticipate. Feels bad to run a strictly worse Impulse, but it lives on the stick, and I've never been ultra fond of Ponder anyway.
The other cuts are more budget'ish options from the early list that perform okay but aren't anything to write home about. Deep Analysis draws cards, but given the fact I now have Recurring Insight etc. it feels worse. Drift of Phantasms was never particularly crucial, it stemmed the bleeding a bit sometimes in the 2014/2015 meta games back in the day, but the 3cmc toolbox wasn't be-all, end-all - Capsize, Fireshrieker, Forbid... also, as Puppet Strings largely lived in the list to be part of that toolbox, it can be replaced with Frozen Aether now. Another way to get a kraken hug - dare have a creature come into play
The recent bunch of changes have all taken pretty well. Isochron Scepter is a dream come true, it's perfectly happy with a counter, cantrip, or Pongify. Frozen Aether also works pretty well, serving as a particularly brutal tempo hit against fetch-heavy mana bases. I'll take that. The deck's become quite happy to draw, do some minimal Tromo setup, maybe hug someone, and pass with a lot of mana up. Essentially a spin on the classic draw-go template, albeit inherently less brutal as there's a whole table to police. That sort of play style really benefits from instants, as you can sit around, hold mana and cards up, look scary, and then if nothing worthy of interacting with happens (or you badly need an answer on the fly) you whip out the instant-speed card acquisition engines. As such, taking the deck a bit further down the instant speed road.
The swaps are reasonably straightforward. You lose Fabricate's potential to split across two turns to get Whir of Invention out of nowhere, though it also comes at a price of a heavier coloured investment. Whipping out a Scepter out of thin air on someone is delicious. Preordain goes one less deep, but becomes instant as Opt (and it can live on the Scepter in a pinch). Ugin's Insight gets a bit fiddlier with cost, but becomes Tromo independent in terms of depth and fetches one card less as Dig Through Time.
That pretty much rounds up the instantification, at least as far as I can see now. You can't exactly swap out Expopriate for a similar instant The deck plays pretty okay, scaling fine into a four man game. I feel like there still is some room to eke more performance out of it, but the answer I may be looking for here could be to swap to something like Azami in the driver's seat. I am quite unwilling to do that.
For a deck full of instants and as desperate to make it's land drops as mono blue control is, I am very surprised to see neither terrain generator nor thawing glaciers, with glaciers being the apparent weaker of those two choices. I still consider it quite strong, especially if you have ways to untap it (many blue ways of tapping down permanents will also offer you the option of untapping permanents. No, I didn't check your list specifically for them). That said, detain seems an incredibly strong mechanic for your general. There might be spells with it worth considering.
Good catch! I'll be sure to test those lands, although I'm a bit leery towards including colourless lands in the 99 as the strong rocks aren't exactly good at making blue. Detain is actually not that good here, it's a one-shot effect and then what, especially given the three crap mono-blue options (Choking Tethers is better than the best one of those). The current options offer longer duration, i.e. more hug enabling. However, you got me thinking about yet more ways to enable hugs, and Thassa, God of the Sea is a card I keep forgetting about whenever I start revamping this deck. I'll consider if I can find some room for it. Void Winnower seems like a good time too, make life harder and occasionally enable hugs, but it'd take some testing to see if the curve can handle another high CMC option.
The reason I suggest terrain generator is because you only play one mana doubler and this only takes a land slot. When you're drawing mass amounts of cards, or don't have anything better to react to for your opponents turns, you can instead use the mana to drop a land in your hand onto the battlefield. As much as I hate mono blue decks for the ease of instant speed interaction, the land is a good fit.
Older, but no less reliable is the thawing glaciers tech. This little guy returns at end of turn during the cleanup step, so if you have some untap ability left and no need to use it on your opponents, then it becomes "pay some mana, get a land or three out of my deck, and replay the glaciers on my turn." It can be really amazingly reliable land drops over a slow game, which almost all games with your general of choice will be. It also offers repeatable shuffle affects in a color which is known for drawing and seeing a lot. Not an easily repeatable thing to use in edh. Stupid good with Jace, the mind scultpor, in my opinion (I think in terms of the brainstorm ability alone. I know the other abilities are good, but I dislike using such a strategy).
Yeah, I understand how those lands work I've ran both of them in decks before. My concern lies elsewhere. The Glaciers are, well, glacial, and I'd need to see if their slow advantage engine is actually worth it in a deck that has one-shot people turn three before, especially as my tap tech doesn't double as untap tech anymore. The Generator doesn't tap for coloured, while tapping for coloured is a rather heavy requirement for the lands as rocks make plentiful colourless. My first test with the Generator went reasonably okay, it got me an extra land drop early on and then the deck stalled a bit for reasons out of the Generator's control
The list is a bit dormant in terms of development. I've been largely busy with a fish deck, but Tromo gets whipped out every now and then. During one of those whip-outs a friend observed that he can do a thing because I have no haste in the deck, and given the lack of the kraken on my board at that point I wouldn't be able to punish him for it. That's actually a good call. Some haste wouldn't hurt.
This small change is inspired by me ripping apart my Mardu heap to re-use the sleeves for the fish deck. In terms of cool stuff to fit, more extra turns would be nice. More haste would be nice. More draw would be nice. The list doesn't feel clunky enough to merit immediate tinkering though.
Yep, the list is still largely dormant. I do whip it out from time to time, but it's not particularly beloved by the meta. The hatred for Expropriate and Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur is very pronounced, and while I oddly enjoy the first card I was always mildly disturbed by the praetors. As such, when a good card for the deck got printed, the cut wasn't that hard to make.
Hello, I'm a deck with blue in it with good cheap instants, why yes I'll happily run Spellseeker. To nobody's surprise, the card is pretty obnoxious, and has been known to get Mana Drain and Cyclonic Rift the most often. It's not uncommon to get both - mass bounce exists, and this dudebro plays super well with it. After landing a particularly juicy Engulf the Shore, I started fiddling with the list in the back of my mind in search for Archaeomancer room. But then, may as well add Vedalken Aethermage and some Time Warps. And why not swap to Azami and leave all this mono blue voltron clunkfest behind. But the mono blue voltron clunkfest is the point!
1 Stonybrook Angler
1 Pacification Array
This is how this list got resurrected to some degree - spotted this while looking through spoilers, and the immediate thought was that it slots into here perfectly as it's finally a tapper that can be fetched with Trinket Mage. The worst tapper in the 99 makes room. Simple swap days.
1 Arcane Lighthouse
1 Arcanis the Omnipotent
1 Azami, Lady of Scrolls
1 Blatant Thievery
1 Callous Oppressor
1 Coldsteel Heart
1 Confiscate
1 Control Magic
1 Deprive
1 Dominating Licid
1 Empress Galina
1 Fatestitcher
1 Fellwar Stone
1 Fog Bank
1 Foresee
1 Lonely Sandbar
1 Palladium Myr
1 Puppeteer
1 Reliquary Tower
1 Remote Isle
1 Ring of Gix
1 Sky Diamond
1 Star Compass
1 Stoic Rebuttal
1 Take Possession
1 Temporal Adept
1 Thalakos Deceiver
1 Tideforce Elemental
1 Tolaria
1 Tower of the Magistrate
1 Vedalken Aethermage
1 Volition Reins
1 Willbreaker
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Basalt Monolith
1 Consecrated Sphinx
1 Crawlspace
1 Disallow
1 Dragon Wings
1 Engulf the Shore
1 Evacuation
1 Expropriate
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Gilded Drake
1 Grim Monolith
1 Hedron Archive
1 Imprisoned in the Moon
5 Island
1 Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
1 Mana Crypt
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Mind Games
1 Mind Stone
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Pongify
1 Rapid Hybridization
1 Recurring Insight
1 Supreme Will
1 Tezzeret the Seeker
1 Thought Vessel
1 Wayfarer's Bauble
1 Whelming Wave
Too many changes to go card by card, really. The gist of it is that I'm dropping a lot of the cutesy wutesy theft, creature-based tapdown and other nondescript silliness for a more streamlined, competent shell. Old me didn't run Fact or Fiction. Why? Hell knows. But he didn't. Same for Pongify and Rapid Hybridization. Also, powering the thing up allows the trading of Control Magic variants for Gilded Drake, plus slamming a healthy helping of fair and balanced mana rocks. Slapped some more mass bounce in there - a nice tempo slug to keep the table from fragging you if needed, and some of it has the power to be asymmetric. Also, seeing how the deck generates obscene amounts of mana, Expopriate and Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur offer up stupid payoffs.
The list doesn't feel perfect as is, but it runs better. It retains a good helping of the quirkiness of the original build while adding the polish and smoothness of a more reasonable set of blue utility spells. Nevertheless, I feel like I could get away with a Temporal Mastery in here, as well as a Back to Basics (notice the heavy basic island tilt partly in preparation). Plus, some reasonable draw wouldn't hurt - a lot of the stuff I have is cantrips, which isn't necessarily bad, but a fat grip is a nice thing to have. What do you folks think? I'd welcome your opinions, as always.
1 Crawlspace
1 Island
1 Reliquary Tower
1 Temporal Mastery
So, what does playtesting this new version tell me? Bonus turns are good. Extra cardboard is nice. Both of those are obvious things, yes, but the list will have to learn to embrace them in a manner most comfortable for its playstyle. For the time being, Reliquary Tower is reintroduced as sometimes grips get pretty bananas, and Crawlspace was rather underwhelming so it gets replaced with Temporal Mastery. Eyeing Rush of Knowledge for inclusion.
1 Deep Analysis
1 Drift of Phantasms
1 Negate
1 Ponder
1 Puppet Strings
1 Anticipate
1 Cryptic Command
1 Frozen Aether
1 Isochron Scepter
1 Mana Drain
I'm just one bloke, but from my perspective Iconic Masters finally did what I expected those sort of releases to do - drove prices of its reprints into the dirt. Mana Drain fell another five euro since I deemed it cheap enough to score, and everything else in the set took a gigantic collateral damage hit that should hopefully keep it affordable for quite some time. So yeah, Drain in, no-brainer there. Replaces Negate as the weakest part of the counter suite. However, the counter suite also gets extended with Cryptic Command - if I'm getting all the power lifter cards all of a sudden, may as well go all in. Not bothering with Pact of Negation or Force of Will though, these seem like higher priority.
Also, given a high number of low CMC instants, plus some artifact tutors, Isochron Scepter says hello. I go way back with this card - back in 2005, when an early days Rumpy slapped Blanchwood Armor on a Thorn Elemental and felt like the king of the world, said Thorn Elemental would often die to a Sceptered Terminate. The friend I played against had a rather brutal, and probably quite proper, Grixis Psychatog control shell with Scepters galore, no fair game for mono green fatsticks dot deck. As such, it ingrained itself pretty well into my mind, and it's quite fun to be the one dishing out the pain for once. In the interest of upping the Scepter package, Ponder becomes Anticipate. Feels bad to run a strictly worse Impulse, but it lives on the stick, and I've never been ultra fond of Ponder anyway.
The other cuts are more budget'ish options from the early list that perform okay but aren't anything to write home about. Deep Analysis draws cards, but given the fact I now have Recurring Insight etc. it feels worse. Drift of Phantasms was never particularly crucial, it stemmed the bleeding a bit sometimes in the 2014/2015 meta games back in the day, but the 3cmc toolbox wasn't be-all, end-all - Capsize, Fireshrieker, Forbid... also, as Puppet Strings largely lived in the list to be part of that toolbox, it can be replaced with Frozen Aether now. Another way to get a kraken hug - dare have a creature come into play
1 Fabricate
1 Preordain
1 Ugin's Insight
1 Dig Through Time
1 Opt
1 Whir of Invention
The swaps are reasonably straightforward. You lose Fabricate's potential to split across two turns to get Whir of Invention out of nowhere, though it also comes at a price of a heavier coloured investment. Whipping out a Scepter out of thin air on someone is delicious. Preordain goes one less deep, but becomes instant as Opt (and it can live on the Scepter in a pinch). Ugin's Insight gets a bit fiddlier with cost, but becomes Tromo independent in terms of depth and fetches one card less as Dig Through Time.
That pretty much rounds up the instantification, at least as far as I can see now. You can't exactly swap out Expopriate for a similar instant The deck plays pretty okay, scaling fine into a four man game. I feel like there still is some room to eke more performance out of it, but the answer I may be looking for here could be to swap to something like Azami in the driver's seat. I am quite unwilling to do that.
Credit to DolZero for this awesome sig!
Older, but no less reliable is the thawing glaciers tech. This little guy returns at end of turn during the cleanup step, so if you have some untap ability left and no need to use it on your opponents, then it becomes "pay some mana, get a land or three out of my deck, and replay the glaciers on my turn." It can be really amazingly reliable land drops over a slow game, which almost all games with your general of choice will be. It also offers repeatable shuffle affects in a color which is known for drawing and seeing a lot. Not an easily repeatable thing to use in edh. Stupid good with Jace, the mind scultpor, in my opinion (I think in terms of the brainstorm ability alone. I know the other abilities are good, but I dislike using such a strategy).
Credit to DolZero for this awesome sig!
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Hall of the Bandit Lord
This small change is inspired by me ripping apart my Mardu heap to re-use the sleeves for the fish deck. In terms of cool stuff to fit, more extra turns would be nice. More haste would be nice. More draw would be nice. The list doesn't feel clunky enough to merit immediate tinkering though.
1 Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
1 Spellseeker
Hello, I'm a deck with blue in it with good cheap instants, why yes I'll happily run Spellseeker. To nobody's surprise, the card is pretty obnoxious, and has been known to get Mana Drain and Cyclonic Rift the most often. It's not uncommon to get both - mass bounce exists, and this dudebro plays super well with it. After landing a particularly juicy Engulf the Shore, I started fiddling with the list in the back of my mind in search for Archaeomancer room. But then, may as well add Vedalken Aethermage and some Time Warps. And why not swap to Azami and leave all this mono blue voltron clunkfest behind. But the mono blue voltron clunkfest is the point!