MTG Salvation

I was more commenting because I love RW Taxes but it fell out of flavor since Recruiter of the Guard came out. I was pumped to see it on stream, I'll definetly go check his tournament report out. Hoping Harsh Mentor really makes RW Taxes a better thing. In a vacuum he's not amazing but we have Thalia, Wasteland, Rishadan Port to force our opponents to crack fetches if they want to interact. Hopefully this makes it modern viable too so I can just play the same deck in both formats.

There have been a ton of great finishes with D&T in the past few days, so I wrote up my thoughts.

Trying not to spam here, but if you want prints of Johannes Voss' work, including some D&T critters like Thalia, Thalia, Resto, and Stoneforge, you might start kicking some funding crowds.

I'm writing up a primer about the Food Chain matchup. I'd love to hear how you sideboard for this one. I'm mostly interested in what you are trimming or cutting from the main.

Yeah, I'll write those eventually. I think those matchups are pretty straight forward and common enough that people won't get a ton of good from them.

Thanks for the writeup and compiling these decklists @Medea. Excellent thoughts as usual.

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Nice article about Imperial Taxes: http://thegraymerchants.com/?p=1786

I want to give this list like this a shot. 3 plains seems terrifyingly low, though!

@Permanence

I'd run this if I was going to play in a big event this weekend. I'd probably swap the Faerie for a Surgical or a 3rd Path though.

I've been playing around with this.

Here's my primer for Food Chain.

Quote from Curby »

Congrats! With two Avengers and three Crusaders, you're getting pretty close to the super-aggro pre-THC list. Is it weird that these new cards (THC/Recruiter/Prelate) were seen as such boons, but now they just fill two slots in the 75? Is this an example of the deck evolving with the meta, or showing that the new cards aren't as necessary/great as we once thought?

THC was never good in this deck though, if your deck doesn't contain fast mana then she's just too slow to be more impactful than your other options.

Sensei's Divining Top is banned. I'm too excited to process what this means for us!

It feels like the inevitable shift to more unfair nonsense is going to be great for us, though it's tough to say for sure. More deathrites even doesn't bother me that much, feels like we have the tools to beat those decks.

That is the single biggest shake-up in a very long time, if we don't really count the Delve Draw Winter, which essentially as brutal in Legacy as the Eldrazi Winter was in Modern, and about the same amount of time, but which didn't reduce the format to 1 deck, so much as it reduced the format to decks that could abuse Treasure Cruise and/or Dig Through Time. This might radically alters the format as any deck that was unplayable largely thanks to Miracles can now fly free.

My biggest concern is that, at face value, Elves is the absolute biggest winner from this ban. The hope is that slightly faster combo and Chalice/Trinisphere decks get an uptick in response, and we can use our solid main decks against those while having a solid sideboard to fill in the gaps against combo while also bringing back some tools to combat a likely rise in TNN and Delver decks. But, no matter what, I would expect a lot more Elves running around, and that isn't going to be good (at least in the short-term future.)

Quote from Permanence »

Sensei's Divining Top is banned

Interesting news! Source: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/april-24-2017-banned-and-restricted-announcement-2017-04-24

Be prepared for more Elves, fast combo, 4 Color Control, and Blood Moons, imo. This change is likely a slight net negative to our deck, though it's a little hard to tell now.

I think more elves and 4-Color/BUG Control, not too sure about fast combos, for fast combos I never thought miracles was the worst matchup for them, I always considered delver to be even worse for any t1/t2 turn decks. Delver usually could fight with discards(for black splashes), the FoWs and Dazes on the play, miracles only had FoW and needed to stablish a lock via CB on T3 and on, sure it was a bad matchup, but I think delver is even worse. Not sure about it, but I wouldn't pack a Belcher/TES/All Spells even without Miracles, but if other people are doing it... Then its not so good for DnT xD. Reanimator might struggle more, it will have much more hate on G2 and G3 than before, so the RB version might get more of a negative hit than positive.

My guess is that DnT gets a little hit from elves, but not from the fast combo decks, I still consider it will be on of the decks to beat, lets see how the format evolves.

Quote from Medea »

Be prepared for more Elves, fast combo, 4 Color Control, and Blood Moons, imo. This change is likely a slight net negative to our deck, though it's a little hard to tell now.

Agreed that this is the the direction we're heading. With a playset of Gaea's Cradle being $750+ and minimal overlap with other decks, I imagine Elves won't increase that much, but as you said, we'll see.

But before we get to that point, anyone have a new D&T decklist taking into account that Miracles is RIP?

I'm imagining Sword of War and Peace no longer has mainboard consideration. I'll admit, I've always been terrible at sculpting sideboard so I'm curious what people decide to cut/replace.

Here's what I wrote about it.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills:

Quote from Medea »

Here's what I wrote about it.

Cool thanks! I checked the site but must have just missed your update.

EDIT: The fact that I might be able to break out my Onslaught Goblin Sharpshooters brings joy to my cold black heart.

GW Taxes is probaly dead as it doesn't do well against endless Goyf spam, I guess it will depend on how much Delver is being played now.

I think I'll go back to my 24 land Resto list as that deck has lots of game against Shardless and more importantly Food Chain.

We need to do something vs Elves though.

Also something needs to be done about DRS, it's getting absurd when random decks like ******* Esperblade and Maverick splash green and black just to get access to that guy and become top tier decks because of it. I completely expect the next GP Top8 to have 24+ copies of DRS with the only exceptions being UR Delver and Sneak. The format was fine before RTR, even with Miracles running around.

Well, the general attitude seems that, with Miracles gone, duals will be player in a higher % of the meta. I haven't seen a lot of Goyf resurgence just yet given the past couple days of MTGO 5-0s, but perhaps not the BEST indicator. However, it was a lot of Storm, Elves and Delver, so mayyybe 1-2 Maindeck Path to Exile is needed? Perhaps Sunlance is good again, considering it hits Leo?

It remains to be seen how good Elves will be, but I'd bank on its success, personally. At the same time, it's "what cards are good against Elves than can be maindecked?" Big Thalia comes to mind, perhaps Aven Mindcensor. I wouldn't try Containment Priest maindeck, BUT if Storm also becomes a Deck To Beat, then a single Ethersworn that can be tutored with Recruiter is pretty good. However, between THC/Mindcensor/Canonist, THC shuts off more of their deck through a different means of taxing, whereas Mindcensor only goes after Natty O and GSZenith, and Canonist only goes after Glimpse, or even just a straight dump of their hand to get ahead on board.

Black splash still looks good as a result. I've felt Pontiff is good enough to maindeck for almost a year, and have done it myself to the tune of a few SoCal Top 8s. It *still* may not be enough for Elves though....

I 4-0'd with a red splash build tonight, beating Burn, Bomberman, Merfolk, and Elves. Build is basically this one from the source:

26 Creatures:
4 Mom
4 Thalia
4 SFM
2 Revoker
2 Spirit of the Labyrinth
3 Flickerwisp
2 Recruiter of the Guard
1 Mirran Crusader
1 Sanctum Prelate
3 Magus of the Moon

Spells:11
4 Vial
4 STP
1 Jitte
1 SoFI
1 Batterskull

Land: 23
3 Plains
3 Plateau
4 Flooded Strand
2 Marsh Flats
3 Karakas
4 Wasteland
4 Port

SB: 15
1 Path
2 Surgical Extraction
3 Sudden Demise
2 Canonist
2 Containment Priest
1 RIP
1 Manriki-Gusari
1 Council's Judgment
1 Mirran Crusader
1 Pia and Kiran Nalaar

@Medea

I dig the list and your brain dump article. I've been pondering the sideboard Miracles un-warpage and then Elves re-warpage we are about to go through. How did the Elves match go? Were there any anomalies in other decks you noticed?

@All

Just theory crafting now... have a small legacy event coming up this weekend. I think I may be interested in maxing out on Revokers and playing Linvala, Keeper of Silence in the board. Peacekeeper also comes to mind though he does get hit by decay.

Game 1 against Elves still felt rough (but better than previous iterations of what I've been playing). Post-sideboard games felt even. I had so much hate that I was actually more worried about getting beaten to death by idiots rather than losing to a combo of some nature.

Bonde is going the route of maxing out Revokers in the Legacy Premier League. I'm going the route of trimming them. I don't think either Linvala or Peacekeeper are particularly good right now. Linvala is expensive, and Peacekeeper has never been great in decks that need to win via slowly pecking their opponent to death.