I want to play Thing in the Ice, but have no time to test or indeed play much Modern at the moment- lots of draft, Legacy events locally, esp as EMA is released............
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I'm not playing mtg due to lack of time right now, and when I do, there's a ton of pauper decks I'm testing before turbo fog.
I'll try the counterspell sb plan once I have time, and I'm dying to try runeflare trap but xmage needs to fix it before I can do that (wrong wording on the alternative cost). Otherwise I could try cockatrice or sth, but I really like rules enforcement xmage has.
Last time I played fog, I was hosed by a blood moon deck.
One thing I noticed about this archetype is that the pivotal struggle this deck faces is the problem of needing mana to land a turbo and use a fog on turn 3 - without a Howling Mine in your opener, it's rough to get the ball rolling. That's why it seems to me (from an outsider's perspective) that Rites of Flourishing serves as a rare but plausible Howling Mine 5-8 (play Rites, then land, with a 1-mana Fog). Even with the increased severity of the potential backfire, the potential upside seems like it could be worth it. Incidental ramping also makes unwieldy sideboard options more possible (Circle of Protection: Red, sweepers, colorless exile-target-permanents, color splashes, etc. Other notes about green - Abundance is an amazing singleton to find lategame, Beast Within is a beast out of the sideboard, and landfall lifegain guys are a little bit interesting if red decks side out Searing Blaze.
Another thing I thought is that this deck really wants lifegain, but every card slot not devoted to drawing or fogging feels pretty bad. Then, I had an idea that sounded so bad it actually sounded fun - what if you devoted land slots rather than nonland slots to lifegain? Of course, this isn't possible in 3-colors.
Playing any number, let alone a large number, of CIPT lands sounds fatal, but pinging yourself every turn is also dangerous for different reasons. The damaging lands seem to offer an infinitely more consistent turns 3 through 4, whereas the lifelands sound a lot nicer on land drops 5-XX. Not sure how much playing tapped lands turns 1 and 2 while gaining some life hurts this deck's performance. No untapped land drop on turns 3 or 4 definitely seems like it'd mean death, though. Maybe a more conservative mix would work, running some fetches to get basics in order to protect against Moon.
Also, dedicating deck slots to a win condition at the exclusion of more reliable turn-by-turn functionality seems like it harms the deck. Sure, it makes time more of a liability, but you signed up for that when you sleeved 10+ fogs. And although Fevered Visions is the grand dream, at this moment in time (as far as Turbo-Fog is considered) it looks like a trap to strain manabases or change decks entirely.
I want to play Thing in the Ice, but have no time to test or indeed play much Modern at the moment- lots of draft, Legacy events locally, esp as EMA is released............
Would love to hear how Thing performs here. Thinking of building a standard deck just to play TITI plus Tutelage.
If you run 10-12 pieces of turbo, it's not that hard to naturally draw a turbo pieces in the first few turns and get rolling. I've never rly had that problem.
@aaaaannnts, First of all, we don't really need to cast a fog t3 unless we're facing infect or some really fast aggro deck (blistercoil weird maybe?) . The golden rule for playing is turbo fog could be something like "don't play a fog unless they're swinging for lethal, and whenever you're not playing a fog, play a turbo piece". "Look out for burn spells" might be added as well.
I’d play green only for beast within, it’s exceptional removal and we don’t really care about the 3/3. That’d certainly improve our range/odds against our bad matchups which are essentially anything with a low creature count (Tron/Burn/Control, etc), but I don’t think we need the ramp rites of flourishing provides as much as our opponent, since we’re not able to flood the board with threats, combo off, or do anything relevant with that extra mana (unless you’re playing a version that does so).
Rites of flourishing helps non-creature decks go off faster, think of ad nauseam, tron, scapeshift, through the breach, and even burn among others. We don’t need extra land there as much as they do.
And regarding gain lands, I don’t think those can help us much, maybe against burn but even there I’d prefer to have an untapped land and just play my tech one turn before rather than having an extra life point.
Fevered Visions sets a <slow, but real> clock on our opponent and forces them to discard to less than 4 cards if they don't want to take 2 dmg.
It does force you to play red, but I've already said red has some cool stuff like intimidation bolt, lightning helix, crumble to dust, runeflare trap, etc.
It's true that it's harder to build a manabase, but going 3 colors already is, and I didn't have much issues with that as I play Forbidden Orchard to fix that.
I agree with the above statements. I've changed my build to run visions and netsuke with Silence and render silent. Haven't been able to test it yet sadly as I've been rly big on edh so. Working on getting cards from E.M. lol
The good thing about black is that it has some useful removal for our tough matchups, specially tron, but also against newer archetypes which feature more planeswalkers (Nahiri/emrakul ones, superfriends, etc.). You have Anguished Unmaking, hero's downfall, ruinous path for instance as well as extraction stuff, extirpate, memoricide and friends.
About building with megrim/liliana's caress, I don't know how that'd work, I'd probably use them in a more discard-focused deck like 8rack or stuff, but I'll keep my comments until you share some results and a decklist I can test online. The only question I have is, do we want to "win more"? Or do we want more consistency and versatility regarding the threats we can handle? I mean, how far can we "punish" our fog/turbo "core", in the search for faster wins? Is that the way? Trying to win faster? Or is it better to stall the game for ages while progressively killing our opponent?
The more win conditions we include in a deck, the less we can turbofog and viceversa. That's my point. Shall we go more all in, changing some consistency for better win conditions? Or shall we work on our resilience?
BTW, I moved out to a new place, countryside kind of thing, so I won't be able to playtest until they set up the internet at my new home.
But I'll post here as usual.
My most successful version was with megrim/caress and silence. After they draw, you Silence them, they can't play anything, discard down to 7. When youreading drawing 4 or more a turn, that's 8 damage with 1 megrim/caress out. Having 2 is basically gg
I just picked up a playset of Azor's Elocutors . I'm going to try them out with a u/w she'll with counters, fogs, lighting Greaves and 2 Swiftfoot boots. Maybe a few proliferate cards too
Anyone done much lately? I haven't been to a modern event in awhile. Been playing edh. Taking a break from competitive modern. And playing competitive edh
Xmage fixed Runeflare Trap!!! I only played a match against nahiri jeskai and won 2-1.
I have to say burning your opponent's face for 11 damage which only costed you R was a trascendental experience haha.
They just don't see that coming, at least game 1, game 2 he played more conservatively and eventually got me with an ultimated Nahiri, the harbinger into emrakul, the aeons torn. Game 3 I bribery'd his emrakul after he tapped out to counter an EOT runeflare trap (powered by fevered visions, which would've dealt him 7/8 damage). It was the first time I won as early as turn 6 with turbofog, and I have to say it was awesomely unexpected.
Probably just lucky, but I'm gonna keep testing this stuff.
Done nothing here. Played modern recently twice in the past week, going 9-2, but that was with RW landkill stax. Other than that not really, just done Legacy and Draft for a fair chunk of time.
I am looking at an Owling Mine type deck with some fog in myself (featuring thoughts of ruin perhaps), but as for UW, I did at least work out that Bribery is the way to beat Tron game 2, even if I did little with that. I will get back on working on the fog deck, but as time progresses I seem to run less fogs....
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The new Fog looks interesting: Repel the Abominable. It buys you a turn against a lot of decks, but Humans are pretty common, so you can't rely on it at really low life totals.
What do you think about grafdigger's cage? I haven't tried it yet, but it's possibly the best we can get on graveyard hate since it doesn't exile our graveyard like rest in peace, it doesn't have a prohibitive cost like leyline of the void, it's not slow as relic of progenitus and it doesn't need to be activated/sac'd like tormod's crypt, and the best part, it doesn't affect us at all since we only need our graveyard for reshuffling some cards with either elixir of immortality/kozilek, butcher of truth or old school eldrazis.
drmarkb, i think owling mine decks are fairly viable now with fevered visions, board wipers like whelming wave and even thing in the ice. Sadly its thread it's pretty much dead now. Bribery is certainly a blast against tron, I'd like to see what it can do for us against emrakul/ulamog-less decks though. What's the best we can get from each matchup?
But right now, that card is the only non temporal solution I have against that, and stealing an eldrazi it's fun enough to keep 2 copies on my sb.
If they do not run either then happy days either way......they get milled rapidly. Tron always has something to nick.
I have enough on my plate with T Fog/Ideal/Pillow-fort and even Boros-Bridge needing attention this summer (I have 7 weeks off work though). I doubt that I will get more than one of these to a state where I am happy. It took two years to get my Landkill-Stax to a point where it won events consistently, and that was with some SCG placed lists (and helpful players) to work with.
The problem with TFog is the number of fogs gets smaller, more flexible stuff comes in and then its just another Snapcaster deck with Nahiri etc. replaced by other control cards- in this case fogs and the like. More flexible Dawn charm-esque fogs would change my priorities, and any new Pillow-Fort pieces would make me revisit the deck.
Generally Modern works on combining strategies - a Plan A and B. Exemplars would be Living End runs a landkill element, Co-Co decks can operate as beatdowns or Melira, Twin used to be a control deck that could combo and the 4 color decks that abound are all beatdown/control midrange decks capable of both modes. Weaker are strong but narrow decks are ones like Ad Nauseam- it has two wincons but both require the signature card. RG Tron too, it only really gets away with it because it really has two plans- a durdle plan and a ramp into t3/4 goddies plan.
A mixture of permanent types helps avoid blowouts, but cards that restrict opponent's ability to do things are often key. Trouble is decks like TF by definition work on one type of effect and one gameplan. That is why I think they are better with a hybrid approach, part-pillow fort if you like. Most of our opponents have a multi-color tool box removal suite. To beat this we need a lot of flexibility ourselves......
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If they do not run either then happy days either way......they get milled rapidly. Tron always has something to nick.
Yeah, I know, but what I actually meant is to discuss how much wide can bribery go regarding other archetypes. It works against Tron, Nahiri, Eldrazis, and emrakul-cheating decks (tooth and nail, polymorph, possibility storm, etc) . But how would it work against other archetypes?
Yeah, the issue about turbo fog is that only has one plan, and it's not even a lethal one. It only prevents combat damage (great at that though), but it relies on symmetrical draw-engines for that, which means we're getting no card nor board advantage at all, and we're letting our opponents draw their deck hoping they don't find an "answer".
I think the key here is using our turbo fog core as a means to actually win the game and not just hoping to win through natural mill, potentially speeded-up by sphinx's tutelage. Otherwise we're going to 12-15 turns games and still hoping they don't have a solution on their deck.
That's why I'm trying 4x runeflare trap and also considering sudden impact on my build, they just steal games out of nowhere.
I'd like to see Tylerstegman's build with liliana's caress and megrim which is somewhat in tune with what I'm trying to do, actually winning a game.
It'd be great if we had access to some fog which actually gave us some card advantage, say, "2W: prevent all combat damage, draw a card", or something like a deflecting palm, shining shoal or comeuppance, that lets us prevent combat damage while dealing damage at the same time. Like "3W, prevent all combat damage this turn, deal that damage to target player", like divine deflection, but without the "X" . Dreaming too high perhaps? Comeuppance isn't that far from that. It's a shame we can't choose either players or creatures.
I could even try going with some burn spells on sb as a plan b, but I'm not sure how that'd work. Switching some fogs for lightning helixes and lightning bolts, may be sth to try.
Tutelage is a must have or a Jace (3 or 5 mana version)- we want to get to the position where they are not going to see an answer card in their deck, and that means some milling which might deny them their get out cards.....
I think burn spells are a great board idea but you would have to go all in on the change- in the end you might end up in Jeskai control with a few fogs.....
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Yeah, sphinx's tutelage has an awesome synergy with the deck, and I know mill can potentially deny them some key cards, but my point here is we probably need to speed up our wins a couple turns. Playing 4x sphinx's tutelage it's not really efficient at doing that, firstly because we don't always get to draw it, and secondly because it's still a slow win condition (it usually takes me at least turn 10 to beat them through that, if they don't have removal or sth). Maybe we can improve our consistency drawing a similar wincon by adding some number of jace's erasure, or "typical" mill spells like glimpse the unthinkable/archive trap.
Jace Beleren is great, basically a harder-on-CMC howling mine which can steal us a game eventually, I still play a singleton on my list, sometimes it's a pity I have to spend my fogs defending it while I have enough life to resist an attack, but that's not really usual.
So, I'm just working here with the way to win. Mill vs burn. I still need to test a lot, but as usual, I'll share my results and thoughts with you.
Oh, and BTW, I've been trying to record a couple matches, but I couldn't find a good recording software. Any suggestions on that?
Do I need to buy a good graphic/video card for doing that? Or the onboard card should work perhaps?
Shall I ask these questions elsewhere?
My megrim list was like 16 fogs, 2 Elixir, 2 wrath, 2 megrim, 2 caress, 4 silence, 4 mines, 4 font (temple bell wasn't out at this time) 22 assorted lands and I think 2 Hoofprints of the stag. Right now, I need to sleeve up some either Swiftfoot boots or Lightning Greaves with azor's elocutors. Just straight u/w
Tbh... that guy is trash. Plus look at his list. 1 Lightning Greaves? How would you expect to protect it with 1 Greaves? He doesn't build stuff anywhere near competitive lvl. He does his decks as jks to get a laugh and have fun. He never builds to be competitive. I'm sure it'll work with more Greaves, boots, fogs, and Leyline. With Greaves he avoids everything but a wrath and black Suns zenith. If you rly look at the list he played, it isn't tuned like turbo nor to actually focus on winning with elocutors. Btw... How's the primer going bud?
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I'll try the counterspell sb plan once I have time, and I'm dying to try runeflare trap but xmage needs to fix it before I can do that (wrong wording on the alternative cost). Otherwise I could try cockatrice or sth, but I really like rules enforcement xmage has.
Last time I played fog, I was hosed by a blood moon deck.
Cheers.
SST.
Another thing I thought is that this deck really wants lifegain, but every card slot not devoted to drawing or fogging feels pretty bad. Then, I had an idea that sounded so bad it actually sounded fun - what if you devoted land slots rather than nonland slots to lifegain? Of course, this isn't possible in 3-colors.
Playing any number, let alone a large number, of CIPT lands sounds fatal, but pinging yourself every turn is also dangerous for different reasons. The damaging lands seem to offer an infinitely more consistent turns 3 through 4, whereas the lifelands sound a lot nicer on land drops 5-XX. Not sure how much playing tapped lands turns 1 and 2 while gaining some life hurts this deck's performance. No untapped land drop on turns 3 or 4 definitely seems like it'd mean death, though. Maybe a more conservative mix would work, running some fetches to get basics in order to protect against Moon.
Also, dedicating deck slots to a win condition at the exclusion of more reliable turn-by-turn functionality seems like it harms the deck. Sure, it makes time more of a liability, but you signed up for that when you sleeved 10+ fogs. And although Fevered Visions is the grand dream, at this moment in time (as far as Turbo-Fog is considered) it looks like a trap to strain manabases or change decks entirely.
Would love to hear how Thing performs here. Thinking of building a standard deck just to play TITI plus Tutelage.
@aaaaannnts, First of all, we don't really need to cast a fog t3 unless we're facing infect or some really fast aggro deck (blistercoil weird maybe?) . The golden rule for playing is turbo fog could be something like "don't play a fog unless they're swinging for lethal, and whenever you're not playing a fog, play a turbo piece". "Look out for burn spells" might be added as well.
I’d play green only for beast within, it’s exceptional removal and we don’t really care about the 3/3. That’d certainly improve our range/odds against our bad matchups which are essentially anything with a low creature count (Tron/Burn/Control, etc), but I don’t think we need the ramp rites of flourishing provides as much as our opponent, since we’re not able to flood the board with threats, combo off, or do anything relevant with that extra mana (unless you’re playing a version that does so).
Rites of flourishing helps non-creature decks go off faster, think of ad nauseam, tron, scapeshift, through the breach, and even burn among others. We don’t need extra land there as much as they do.
And regarding gain lands, I don’t think those can help us much, maybe against burn but even there I’d prefer to have an untapped land and just play my tech one turn before rather than having an extra life point.
Fevered Visions sets a <slow, but real> clock on our opponent and forces them to discard to less than 4 cards if they don't want to take 2 dmg.
It does force you to play red, but I've already said red has some cool stuff like intimidation bolt, lightning helix, crumble to dust, runeflare trap, etc.
It's true that it's harder to build a manabase, but going 3 colors already is, and I didn't have much issues with that as I play Forbidden Orchard to fix that.
Cheers.
SST.
About building with megrim/liliana's caress, I don't know how that'd work, I'd probably use them in a more discard-focused deck like 8rack or stuff, but I'll keep my comments until you share some results and a decklist I can test online. The only question I have is, do we want to "win more"? Or do we want more consistency and versatility regarding the threats we can handle? I mean, how far can we "punish" our fog/turbo "core", in the search for faster wins? Is that the way? Trying to win faster? Or is it better to stall the game for ages while progressively killing our opponent?
The more win conditions we include in a deck, the less we can turbofog and viceversa. That's my point. Shall we go more all in, changing some consistency for better win conditions? Or shall we work on our resilience?
BTW, I moved out to a new place, countryside kind of thing, so I won't be able to playtest until they set up the internet at my new home.
But I'll post here as usual.
Cheers.
SST.
I have to say burning your opponent's face for 11 damage which only costed you R was a trascendental experience haha.
They just don't see that coming, at least game 1, game 2 he played more conservatively and eventually got me with an ultimated Nahiri, the harbinger into emrakul, the aeons torn. Game 3 I bribery'd his emrakul after he tapped out to counter an EOT runeflare trap (powered by fevered visions, which would've dealt him 7/8 damage). It was the first time I won as early as turn 6 with turbofog, and I have to say it was awesomely unexpected.
Probably just lucky, but I'm gonna keep testing this stuff.
Cheers.
SST.
I am looking at an Owling Mine type deck with some fog in myself (featuring thoughts of ruin perhaps), but as for UW, I did at least work out that Bribery is the way to beat Tron game 2, even if I did little with that. I will get back on working on the fog deck, but as time progresses I seem to run less fogs....
What do you think about grafdigger's cage? I haven't tried it yet, but it's possibly the best we can get on graveyard hate since it doesn't exile our graveyard like rest in peace, it doesn't have a prohibitive cost like leyline of the void, it's not slow as relic of progenitus and it doesn't need to be activated/sac'd like tormod's crypt, and the best part, it doesn't affect us at all since we only need our graveyard for reshuffling some cards with either elixir of immortality/kozilek, butcher of truth or old school eldrazis.
It stops snapcaster mage/jace, telepath unbound's flashback, dredge, chord of calling/collected company/summoning trap, persist, undying, goryo's vengeance, goblin dark-dwellers, etc.
What'cha think?
drmarkb, i think owling mine decks are fairly viable now with fevered visions, board wipers like whelming wave and even thing in the ice. Sadly its thread it's pretty much dead now.
Bribery is certainly a blast against tron, I'd like to see what it can do for us against emrakul/ulamog-less decks though. What's the best we can get from each matchup?
But right now, that card is the only non temporal solution I have against that, and stealing an eldrazi it's fun enough to keep 2 copies on my sb.
Cheers.
SST.
I have enough on my plate with T Fog/Ideal/Pillow-fort and even Boros-Bridge needing attention this summer (I have 7 weeks off work though). I doubt that I will get more than one of these to a state where I am happy. It took two years to get my Landkill-Stax to a point where it won events consistently, and that was with some SCG placed lists (and helpful players) to work with.
The problem with TFog is the number of fogs gets smaller, more flexible stuff comes in and then its just another Snapcaster deck with Nahiri etc. replaced by other control cards- in this case fogs and the like. More flexible Dawn charm-esque fogs would change my priorities, and any new Pillow-Fort pieces would make me revisit the deck.
Generally Modern works on combining strategies - a Plan A and B. Exemplars would be Living End runs a landkill element, Co-Co decks can operate as beatdowns or Melira, Twin used to be a control deck that could combo and the 4 color decks that abound are all beatdown/control midrange decks capable of both modes. Weaker are strong but narrow decks are ones like Ad Nauseam- it has two wincons but both require the signature card. RG Tron too, it only really gets away with it because it really has two plans- a durdle plan and a ramp into t3/4 goddies plan.
A mixture of permanent types helps avoid blowouts, but cards that restrict opponent's ability to do things are often key. Trouble is decks like TF by definition work on one type of effect and one gameplan. That is why I think they are better with a hybrid approach, part-pillow fort if you like. Most of our opponents have a multi-color tool box removal suite. To beat this we need a lot of flexibility ourselves......
Yeah, I know, but what I actually meant is to discuss how much wide can bribery go regarding other archetypes. It works against Tron, Nahiri, Eldrazis, and emrakul-cheating decks (tooth and nail, polymorph, possibility storm, etc) . But how would it work against other archetypes?
Yeah, the issue about turbo fog is that only has one plan, and it's not even a lethal one. It only prevents combat damage (great at that though), but it relies on symmetrical draw-engines for that, which means we're getting no card nor board advantage at all, and we're letting our opponents draw their deck hoping they don't find an "answer".
I think the key here is using our turbo fog core as a means to actually win the game and not just hoping to win through natural mill, potentially speeded-up by sphinx's tutelage. Otherwise we're going to 12-15 turns games and still hoping they don't have a solution on their deck.
That's why I'm trying 4x runeflare trap and also considering sudden impact on my build, they just steal games out of nowhere.
I'd like to see Tylerstegman's build with liliana's caress and megrim which is somewhat in tune with what I'm trying to do, actually winning a game.
It'd be great if we had access to some fog which actually gave us some card advantage, say, "2W: prevent all combat damage, draw a card", or something like a deflecting palm, shining shoal or comeuppance, that lets us prevent combat damage while dealing damage at the same time. Like "3W, prevent all combat damage this turn, deal that damage to target player", like divine deflection, but without the "X" . Dreaming too high perhaps? Comeuppance isn't that far from that. It's a shame we can't choose either players or creatures.
I could even try going with some burn spells on sb as a plan b, but I'm not sure how that'd work. Switching some fogs for lightning helixes and lightning bolts, may be sth to try.
Cheers.
SST.
I think burn spells are a great board idea but you would have to go all in on the change- in the end you might end up in Jeskai control with a few fogs.....
Jace Beleren is great, basically a harder-on-CMC howling mine which can steal us a game eventually, I still play a singleton on my list, sometimes it's a pity I have to spend my fogs defending it while I have enough life to resist an attack, but that's not really usual.
So, I'm just working here with the way to win. Mill vs burn. I still need to test a lot, but as usual, I'll share my results and thoughts with you.
Oh, and BTW, I've been trying to record a couple matches, but I couldn't find a good recording software. Any suggestions on that?
Do I need to buy a good graphic/video card for doing that? Or the onboard card should work perhaps?
Shall I ask these questions elsewhere?
Cheers.
SST.
I use 4 Howl, 4 Dictate, 1 Jace (small) 1 Jace (big), Jace is always good. Tutelage I use at 2 copies.....
You should check SaffronOlive's experience tring to brew with that, it didn't go that well.. http://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/against-the-odds-azor-s-elocutors