MTG Salvation

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Pir & Toothy, Imagine a better friend!

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Do you like to draw cards? Do you you like to punch your opponents with really big creatures? Do you like having a plan B just in case? Then this is the duo for you! Let me introduce you to Pir, Imaginative Rascal and Toothy, Imaginary Friend!

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Getting Started

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The goal of this deck is very straight forward. You want to stick Pir & Toothy on the board as soon as possible, then you want to draw a lot of cards. From there you use a massive Toothy to inflict commander damage on your opponents, or you can use your draw triggers to setup one of 3 alternate win conditions. Those alternate win conditions are:

Psychosis Crawler - Make each opponent loose life for each card you draw.

Laboratory Maniac - Draw your entire library for the win! It is so easy to do that you must be watchful not to so prematurely.

Simic Ascendancy - New with Ravnica Allegiance. If you have both Pir & Toothy on the board, you get 3 counters on ascendancy with each draw trigger. You will only need 7 of those triggers.

To make sure Toothy can make a meaningful connection with your opponent, the deck includes a pretty standard collection of evasion spells. Rancor, Herald of Secret Streams, Rogue's Passage and Overwhelming Stampede really do not need an explanation. One card I do want to single out is: Mu Yanling. Initially she was only included as a pet card with pretty artwork, but I feel that the utility of this card has earned it a place in this deck as I push the power level to 75% and beyond. I can't recommend it enough.

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Deck Death, your Achilles Heel.

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The finesse of this deck comes from micro-managing Toothy. He is your best bud, but as touched on above, he will kill you if you are not paying attention to how many cards are left in your library. More than once an opponent has eliminated me without even planning to do so. All it takes is one board wipe to resolve at the wrong time. There are a few strategies for avoiding this:

Plan A - Remove the counters from Toothy with Bioshift or Galloping Lizrog. This is your best option. Many of the support spells depend on a big creature. The deck has also used Ooze Flux in the past, but I found it to be mana intensive.

Plan B - Keep your library as full as possible. The deck cares about drawing cards, so why not re-draw a card? In an ideal world, you don't want to be doing that too often, so I only put in two options: Memory, and Day's Undoing.

Plan C - Counter Toothy's triggered ability when he leaves the battlefield. This deck includes Stifle and it's clones just for this reason. They also come in handy against an opponent hard casting an Eldrazi titan, or a planeswalker ultimate.

Plan D - Remove Toothy from the battlefield before he outgrows your library. The deck has lots of positive sacrifice effects, like Miren, the Moaning Well or Eldritch Evolution, so don't hesitate to kill him if you need too. Lorescale Coatl and Chasm Skulker may thank you.

Plan E - When all else fails, you can enchant Toothy with Song of the Dryads or Imprisoned in the Moon. It will not feel good to use these cards this way. They are first and foremost a removal option meant for your opponents, but at least you will survive.

My last tip is that you want an additional pair of 10 sided dice to track your library count as if it is a life total. It will avoid holding up the game since you won't need to count your hand, graveyard pile, exile pile, and non-token permanents all the time.

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Not a Simic Tribal Deck.

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Master Biomancer, Fathom Mage, Doubling Season & etc. are all fun and fantastic cards, but they do not belong in this deck. I have tested them, and many other Simic +1/+1 staples. This deck needs to focus on drawing cards, evasion and avoiding deck death. Cutting cards from either of those categories or from your pool of protection spells will cause the deck to loose focus. I have made a few exceptions:

Hardened scales is almost a back up to Pir. Using them together is a win-more strategy if there ever was one, but at CMC 1, the indulgence is safe. Doubling Season or Primal Vigor are just a waste of mana for the same gain.

Kalonian Hydra is simply a good beater, and will close a game if it goes unanswered.

Deepglow Skate spends a lot of time in my hand, but when combined with a smaller draw spell, it has helped me reclaim my board state after a wipe.

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The Decklist

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I have made a few changes. Master Biomancer was swapped for Forgotten Ancient. The later is simply more efficient at making utility creatures larger. I also made room for Commit // Memory because I wanted more removal and I needed a plan B in case of deck death. I had a couple games where my Laboratory Maniac found himself in exile and my library was dangerously small.

A massive update has been made to both the decklist and the body of the main post. More is to come, but I am not a natural writer so it will take me a while.

Have you considered abusing Toothy, imaginary Friend with (off the top): Displace, Ghostly Flicker, Essence Flux, Siren's Ruse and Illusionist's Stratagem?
When combined with just a few counters on toothy, those just go nuts. Toothy re-enters before you draw your cards. Putting back the counters you saved for another pop.

Quote from SmauG »

Have you considered abusing Toothy, imaginary Friend with (off the top): Displace, Ghostly Flicker, Essence Flux, Siren's Ruse and Illusionist's Stratagem?
When combined with just a few counters on toothy, those just go nuts. Toothy re-enters before you draw your cards. Putting back the counters you saved for another pop.

In the past I had used Deadeye Navigator with the same intent. Flickering Toothy is a valid tactic, but it does have a few drawbacks. Most draw spells are more CMC efficient than flicker effects. For those flicker effects to pay out more, Toothy already has to be pretty large. You also cannot use them as a pump spell before the combat step since they will make a new instance of Toothy.

A delayed bounce like Voyager Staff can help reset Toothy if you feel he is getting to fat. Flicker spells will just compound the problem. Remember that Toothy can get too big.

On advantage that I can see is the ability to change Toothy from tapped to untapped for use as a blocker. They can also be used to reset Toothy as an attacker to avoid a bad block you didn't see, or to avoid a Settle the Wreckage. Those combat tactics a worth one or two card slots, but I wouldn't over do it.

Have you thought about flickering Toothy? He would leave play adding his draw trigger onto the stack, and then return to the battlefield before it resolves. Then you would resolve the trigger to draw cards and put the counters back onto him immediately.

Edit: sorry, looks like this has already been discussed.

Elixir of Immortality to keep your library full to avoid decking yourself?

It's usefulness is directly proportional to the amount of discarding you have done, which depends on the draw spells you have been using. If most of your deck is in your hand, deck death can still occur. That's why I choose Day's Undoing & Commit // Memory, since they will recycle the most cards overall.