Has anyone seen this new SaffronOlive deck from mtg goldfish? Helix pinnacle as a wincon is arguable, but the curse of exhaustion + knowledge pool combo lockdown seems like it would be great in this kind of deck! Just replace the counterspells for lockdown pieces!
Don't Know if this is the place, but I recently decided that trinisphere was too good not to find a home in modern. I'm taking a different (NAYA) approach to the deck, but used several card suggestions from this thread (Outpost Siege is an ALLSTAR).
I threw it together and 4-0ed FNM, which doesn't mean a lot except than it isn't AWEFUL.
I played:
2-0 a bad UW control, no contest
2-0 affinity, t2 Trinisphere followed by t3 crucible GQ was too much for him game 1, game too suppression field shut down his manlands, equipment, and ravager long enough to land 2 magus and swing in for 2-4 a turn.
2-0 grixis twin. G1 he tempos me down to 4, but stablize with helix into ajani helix. G2 the board gets locked down by suppression field again, his mini jace vs my gideon. No contest there, 3 Booms later he concedes.
2-1 Rakdos reanimator brew. He never resolves a fatty, I lose one game to casting bust, leaving only permanents my darksteel and outpost siege. He has 3 lands on top and Alesha, cleans up. I have 0 lands in my top 10 cards.
Suppression Field felt really good most of the time. In many matchups it's similar to ghostly prison, and sometimes can seriously hurt mana development.
Thanks for the feedback drmarkb. I have been siding in the trading post quite a bit against different matchups to include the BGX matches. So I could see moving it main. as it also catches against Burn which is always nice. My biggest issue is Hivemind wish i had an answer for it. That was more reliable though i could use something like nevermore.
It is not an answer to hivemind, but we do have tools.
(a)You have named the best one, Nevermore, naming hivemind. A surprisingly large number of decks, like Jeskai Ascendency or Ad Nauseam, Grishoalbrand, Scapeshift etc. are very vulnerable to this plus other hate- it overwhelms them. The key is to have more hate, and not just rely on nevermore as they board with enchantment kill/bounce. Our issues tend to be with Tron and good-stuff decks with multiple ways of winning like Grixis. Decks like amulet have two ways of winning, and are easier to hate on than decks with lots of board control.
(b) Aura of silence makes it cost 8, hardly a road bump in their deck, but with Moon can do the job. T2 bridge stops Primetime remember. If Aura is down then they need the pact there and then.
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Don't Know if this is the place, but I recently decided that trinisphere was too good not to find a home in modern. I'm taking a different (NAYA) approach to the deck, but used several card suggestions from this thread (Outpost Siege is an ALLSTAR).
I threw it together and 4-0ed FNM, which doesn't mean a lot except than it isn't AWEFUL.
I played:
2-0 a bad UW control, no contest
2-0 affinity, t2 Trinisphere followed by t3 crucible GQ was too much for him game 1, game too suppression field shut down his manlands, equipment, and ravager long enough to land 2 magus and swing in for 2-4 a turn.
2-0 grixis twin. G1 he tempos me down to 4, but stablize with helix into ajani helix. G2 the board gets locked down by suppression field again, his mini jace vs my gideon. No contest there, 3 Booms later he concedes.
2-1 Rakdos reanimator brew. He never resolves a fatty, I lose one game to casting bust, leaving only permanents my darksteel and outpost siege. He has 3 lands on top and Alesha, cleans up. I have 0 lands in my top 10 cards.
Suppression Field felt really good most of the time. In many matchups it's similar to ghostly prison, and sometimes can seriously hurt mana development.
More than happy to have it here. We always use these sort of cards. The core is RW, not going to argue- your deck's aim is the same as most decks on here. And we all love a Magus.
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I love a good prison deck, having played UB Tezerret forever. This is what I've been running with solid results. I dialed back lands to 23. I found myself flooding out a lot. Yes, with everything having a 3+cc you need lands but I use SSG aggressively early.
Thanks. Something I felt like I wanted was pithing needle. Needle doesn't play nice with chalice on one though, so phyrexian revoker. I also am doing something out of the ordinary and running another assemble the legion to make a 61 card deck. So far I've had really good results except for elves. Without an early chalice those little bastards combo kill quickly.
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Yeah, and they pinpoint kill bridge too.
Grafdiggers stop's co-co and chord though.
Skred red is really favoured against elves though, one of the few prison decks that is, because it deals in multiple 2 damage effects and burns at instant speed to go 1/1 early on. Their koth also becomes active in a couple of turns allowing perpetual control. Basically the more reliance on permanents to control the board, the worse the match becomes, as they can remove them selectively, and can combo beat via EOT turning a mediocre board state into a spectacular one. We really need Humility, which is sadly not legal.
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Skred is an absolute monster against creatures. Multiple pyroclasm, multiple abger of the gods, volcanic fallout, reckoners that 2 for 1 when blocking, just hammers creatures.
The build of elves that kills me worst is the one with summoner's pact and evolutionary leap. Evolution always nabs them another elf, which untaps nettle sentinels, which tap for mana, then you sac a dude to evolution and find dwynnens elite, sac the token, they can draw the deck on turn two. Evolution was the key. Just sick in that deck. Chalice on one would slow it all down, but something like rule of law would do it too.
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Skred is an absolute monster against creatures. Multiple pyroclasm, multiple abger of the gods, volcanic fallout, reckoners that 2 for 1 when blocking, just hammers creatures.
The build of elves that kills me worst is the one with summoner's pact and evolutionary leap. Evolution always nabs them another elf, which untaps nettle sentinels, which tap for mana, then you sac a dude to evolution and find dwynnens elite, sac the token, they can draw the deck on turn two. Evolution was the key. Just sick in that deck. Chalice on one would slow it all down, but something like rule of law would do it too.
Chalice on 0 also stops the summoner's pact issues.
Skred is an absolute monster against creatures. Multiple pyroclasm, multiple abger of the gods, volcanic fallout, reckoners that 2 for 1 when blocking, just hammers creatures.
The build of elves that kills me worst is the one with summoner's pact and evolutionary leap. Evolution always nabs them another elf, which untaps nettle sentinels, which tap for mana, then you sac a dude to evolution and find dwynnens elite, sac the token, they can draw the deck on turn two. Evolution was the key. Just sick in that deck. Chalice on one would slow it all down, but something like rule of law would do it too.
That version is a bit easier to hit if you can deal with the druid. Take that out and the rest lose explosiveness although the chord can put one in and they are golden again. Supression field can hit the leap too, but I don't run it. Personally I dislike the fact that we do not get humility or cursed totem rather than the fact that elves exists- this format desperately needs one of those. Eidolon of Rhetoric is really good for us as a board card- cascade, ad nauseam, scapeshuft and this type of deck, tron, \nd snapcaster all get hit by it and don't bring in specialist removal for it, whilst vs aggro decks it is a great blocker.
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Eidolon of the great revel is a fantastic idea. In another deck I use tunnel ignus like that against decks with primeval titan, amulet and scapeshift. Hilarity.
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I dropped the deck two years ago because as much as I liked playing it and got a decent amount of wins the deck played super slowly. I like long matches but with this deck they seemed to never end. When playing what have you found to be your wincon (besides an opponent scooping or essentially pinging them with magus?) I used Assemble the Legion but since I played a 2 of it would take along time for me to pull it from the deck.
I tried things Like Aurelia's Fury or Myth Realized as faster wincons but neither seemed consistent enough. Myth was good because I never played more than 11 creatures but died to creature kill as soon as I activated it. Secondly, with Oath coming out do you think there will be any new/better land draw or tools for enchantments? I decided I was going to put this back together because I thought that the RW manland would come out in BFZ which would give me some sort of consistency of a Wincon.
I dropped the deck two years ago because as much as I liked playing it and got a decent amount of wins the deck played super slowly. I like long matches but with this deck they seemed to never end. When playing what have you found to be your wincon (besides an opponent scooping or essentially pinging them with magus?) I used Assemble the Legion but since I played a 2 of it would take along time for me to pull it from the deck.
I tried things Like Aurelia's Fury or Myth Realized as faster wincons but neither seemed consistent enough. Myth was good because I never played more than 11 creatures but died to creature kill as soon as I activated it. Secondly, with Oath coming out do you think there will be any new/better land draw or tools for enchantments? I decided I was going to put this back together because I thought that the RW manland would come out in BFZ which would give me some sort of consistency of a Wincon.
What were some results from Luminarch Ascension?
Avoid luminarch like the plague. Its a board card at best, you might want to check out the primer of the Pillow for white-x enchantment decks to see why I don't rate the card. It is slower than assemble in many ways. It gets the thumbs down from most players in practically every prison forum.
I do not think we will get any help from Oath. We got Crumble to dust to make our boards easier at least from BFZ, but that was just a bit of luck. We last got siege before that, and in both cases it was not to support us.
A cheeky banefire may act as a win con, but really I would say play 2-3 Outpost siege and draw wincons quicker that way. ATL is probably as good a we get.
I am never really sure on Magus- and I love the effect (I own 3 Tabernacles in Legacy and enjoy the blowouts they create)- and it is awesomely good when it works, nails tokens and other "go wide" decks on their own, and with landkill can be the nuts. It can also be an annoying body that blocks a lot. It can sadly die to cheap kill spells (eg murderous cut) that would otherwise do zip, and mid-game it is rubbish if the landkill has not kicked in or if they can pay taxes to just smash with a 5/6 goyf. TBH I would say Magus is a 4 of in Stax, and a none of in the bridge/spirit guide based lists in the primer.
Getting a little worried/intrigued by the number of people suggesting Blood Moon should be banned in various articles.
Firstly, I do not want to discuss a potential ban outside of the Ban thread (my personal opinion is, for context only, that I would rather hope people who have an issue with Moon leave Modern, but I won't respond to anyone commenting on this aspect because I dislike those infractions and I am a respectable thread-runner;)).
What I do want to discuss is the impact of Moon not being around would have upon the Stax and Boros Bridge decks.
Stax I don't feel would suffer- indeed if they run Boom/Bust effects then making Flagstones a Mountain or a Citadel a non indestructible Mountain is actually a nonbo. Often making fetches into mana producers is also not good. When you are taxing and blowing up mana and taxing Moon often does not work well..
Bridge decks traditionally use Blood Moon. I have often steered a bit away from it a little, partly because in multiples it is useless, partly because it is rarely the one card combo that wins the game (good players always fetch around it as soon as they have a whiff of your deck, and with the number of discard spells and probes they soon get the idea). Also I am not hugely sold on multiple Moons because I like to get value out of the mana base by using scry-lands or mystifying maze/keldo megalith type lands. I still use the odd singleton Moon, but it is not the focus of the strategy for me, which is about locking behind Bridge using cards like Story Circle/Ghostly prison as back up and Spellskites to help keep bridge intact. Most people play it a bit differently, going in on up to 3 copies of Moon often with cards like Chalice. If it were to bite the dust I am wondering on if our deck would survive?
Obviously the RW Pillow Fort/ White enchantment type route would be available- it is a cousin of Boros Bridge decks. But would a deck with Bridges, Spirit Guides, Outpost Sieges, Leylines actually be viable without Moon?
Thanks. Magus has not steered me wrong yet. At 2 he seems super solid. After the spoil leak a few nights ago I looked back on the deck. Any thoughts on the new Chandra. I'm wary because 6 mana but I don't see her hitting to the face, she draws a new hand or board wipes. If not there's always Big Elspeth, who is similar but lacks card draw. Also there is a RW manland. I hate that it's 1 toughness but with Trin and/or Magus on the board I feel there will be opportunities to swing safely. AS an added bonus the manland pairs nicely with new Gideon who i'm considering adding to the group.
We already have Gitu Encampment that works- I have used it previously and it is fine, The 1 toughness on the RW one is not off-putting per se , if you get control it will slap. We all hoped the new man-lands would have been on a par with the old, only the UG one was decent from BFZ (I have been on the wrong end of it in Legacy and lost to it with a Humility down- hexproof is strong). I am underwhelmed by the others, but just being a r/w manland might just be enough to see play as a 1 or 2 of. I think temples are the best R/W lands in prison decks, even though I run fetches and shocks in RW prisons, the Temples always are MVPs, surprisingly. It is just the nature of our deck- binary cards make scry the most useful of dual land abilities in a format where tutoring is pathetic.
I am not a huge PW man, Gideon, Elspeth KE, and Ajani V set a standard I can't see them beating. If they ever make one that gives us a Ghostly Prison effect as a + I would be with it.
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Not ghostly prison but jace, architect of thought +1 hoses a lot of aggro, and twin for that matter. Not the right color here though.
On a side note, has anyone tested with eidolon of the great revel? It's not a lock piece as much as incidental damage. Hmmm, now that I actually write about it, not as good as I first thought. Alright, you convinced me. forget it.
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Still nothing from OGW, although the colourless kill options might be relevant at some random time in the future.....
The tutor for a planeswalker is superficially on a par with Idyllic tutor in White-X enchantments, but is probably more narrow than that. Those decks can have a multitude of targets- eg 1 cc enchantments, 2cc enchantments- etc. Planeswalkers are all 3 or more cc, Tibalt excepted. Whereas Idyllic can be cast t4 to search for a Porphyr Nodes, this latest tutor means you can't fetch and cast a planeswalker in the same turn before t6.
Given the narrowness of the targets, I am surprised they costed it as expensively as they have. If it could tutor for a PW or a land it would be worth considering, perhaps.
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Helix pinnacle as a wincon is arguable, but the curse of exhaustion + knowledge pool combo lockdown seems like it would be great in this kind of deck! Just replace the counterspells for lockdown pieces!
Do you think this can be playable?
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/against-the-odds-hard-lock-helix
Cheers.
SST-.
3 Trinisphere
2 Crucible of Worlds
4 Boom // Bust
1 Ghostly Prison
3 Magus of the Tabernacle
2 World Queller
3 Leonin Arbiter
1 Ajani Vengeant
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Lightning Helix
4 Simian Spirit Guide
4 Utopia Sprawl
2 Courser of Kruphix
4 Ghost Quarter
2 Plains
2 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Windswept Heath
3 Darksteel Citadel
2 Flagstones of Trokair
2 Gideon Jura
3 Suppression Field
1 Wrath of God
1 Pyroclasm
1 Anger of the Gods
3 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Kor Firewalker
I threw it together and 4-0ed FNM, which doesn't mean a lot except than it isn't AWEFUL.
I played:
2-0 a bad UW control, no contest
2-0 affinity, t2 Trinisphere followed by t3 crucible GQ was too much for him game 1, game too suppression field shut down his manlands, equipment, and ravager long enough to land 2 magus and swing in for 2-4 a turn.
2-0 grixis twin. G1 he tempos me down to 4, but stablize with helix into ajani helix. G2 the board gets locked down by suppression field again, his mini jace vs my gideon. No contest there, 3 Booms later he concedes.
2-1 Rakdos reanimator brew. He never resolves a fatty, I lose one game to casting bust, leaving only permanents my darksteel and outpost siege. He has 3 lands on top and Alesha, cleans up. I have 0 lands in my top 10 cards.
Suppression Field felt really good most of the time. In many matchups it's similar to ghostly prison, and sometimes can seriously hurt mana development.
It is not an answer to hivemind, but we do have tools.
(a)You have named the best one, Nevermore, naming hivemind. A surprisingly large number of decks, like Jeskai Ascendency or Ad Nauseam, Grishoalbrand, Scapeshift etc. are very vulnerable to this plus other hate- it overwhelms them. The key is to have more hate, and not just rely on nevermore as they board with enchantment kill/bounce. Our issues tend to be with Tron and good-stuff decks with multiple ways of winning like Grixis. Decks like amulet have two ways of winning, and are easier to hate on than decks with lots of board control.
(b) Aura of silence makes it cost 8, hardly a road bump in their deck, but with Moon can do the job. T2 bridge stops Primetime remember. If Aura is down then they need the pact there and then.
More than happy to have it here. We always use these sort of cards. The core is RW, not going to argue- your deck's aim is the same as most decks on here. And we all love a Magus.
4 sacred foundry
4 temple of triumph
4 clifftop retreat
6 plains
1 mountain
Spells
4 lightning helix
1 wrath of god
1 day of judgment
1 anger of the gods
Artifacts
4 chalice of the void
4 ensnaring bridge
1 storage matrix
2 damping matrix
2 ajani vengeant
1 elspeth, sun's champion
Enchantments
2 ghostly prison
1 assemble the legion
3 blood moon
2 leyline of sanctity
2 outpost siege
1 war's toll
1 story circle
Creatures
4 simian spirit guide
2 stony silence
2 pithing needle
1 spellskite
2 celestial purge
1 boil
2 sowing salt
2 aura of silence
2 torpor orb
1 grafdigger's cage
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Grafdiggers stop's co-co and chord though.
Skred red is really favoured against elves though, one of the few prison decks that is, because it deals in multiple 2 damage effects and burns at instant speed to go 1/1 early on. Their koth also becomes active in a couple of turns allowing perpetual control. Basically the more reliance on permanents to control the board, the worse the match becomes, as they can remove them selectively, and can combo beat via EOT turning a mediocre board state into a spectacular one. We really need Humility, which is sadly not legal.
The build of elves that kills me worst is the one with summoner's pact and evolutionary leap. Evolution always nabs them another elf, which untaps nettle sentinels, which tap for mana, then you sac a dude to evolution and find dwynnens elite, sac the token, they can draw the deck on turn two. Evolution was the key. Just sick in that deck. Chalice on one would slow it all down, but something like rule of law would do it too.
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Chalice on 0 also stops the summoner's pact issues.
That version is a bit easier to hit if you can deal with the druid. Take that out and the rest lose explosiveness although the chord can put one in and they are golden again. Supression field can hit the leap too, but I don't run it. Personally I dislike the fact that we do not get humility or cursed totem rather than the fact that elves exists- this format desperately needs one of those. Eidolon of Rhetoric is really good for us as a board card- cascade, ad nauseam, scapeshuft and this type of deck, tron, \nd snapcaster all get hit by it and don't bring in specialist removal for it, whilst vs aggro decks it is a great blocker.
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I dropped the deck two years ago because as much as I liked playing it and got a decent amount of wins the deck played super slowly. I like long matches but with this deck they seemed to never end. When playing what have you found to be your wincon (besides an opponent scooping or essentially pinging them with magus?) I used Assemble the Legion but since I played a 2 of it would take along time for me to pull it from the deck.
I tried things Like Aurelia's Fury or Myth Realized as faster wincons but neither seemed consistent enough. Myth was good because I never played more than 11 creatures but died to creature kill as soon as I activated it. Secondly, with Oath coming out do you think there will be any new/better land draw or tools for enchantments? I decided I was going to put this back together because I thought that the RW manland would come out in BFZ which would give me some sort of consistency of a Wincon.
What were some results from Luminarch Ascension?
Avoid luminarch like the plague. Its a board card at best, you might want to check out the primer of the Pillow for white-x enchantment decks to see why I don't rate the card. It is slower than assemble in many ways. It gets the thumbs down from most players in practically every prison forum.
I do not think we will get any help from Oath. We got Crumble to dust to make our boards easier at least from BFZ, but that was just a bit of luck. We last got siege before that, and in both cases it was not to support us.
A cheeky banefire may act as a win con, but really I would say play 2-3 Outpost siege and draw wincons quicker that way. ATL is probably as good a we get.
I am never really sure on Magus- and I love the effect (I own 3 Tabernacles in Legacy and enjoy the blowouts they create)- and it is awesomely good when it works, nails tokens and other "go wide" decks on their own, and with landkill can be the nuts. It can also be an annoying body that blocks a lot. It can sadly die to cheap kill spells (eg murderous cut) that would otherwise do zip, and mid-game it is rubbish if the landkill has not kicked in or if they can pay taxes to just smash with a 5/6 goyf. TBH I would say Magus is a 4 of in Stax, and a none of in the bridge/spirit guide based lists in the primer.
Firstly, I do not want to discuss a potential ban outside of the Ban thread (my personal opinion is, for context only, that I would rather hope people who have an issue with Moon leave Modern, but I won't respond to anyone commenting on this aspect because I dislike those infractions and I am a respectable thread-runner;)).
What I do want to discuss is the impact of Moon not being around would have upon the Stax and Boros Bridge decks.
Stax I don't feel would suffer- indeed if they run Boom/Bust effects then making Flagstones a Mountain or a Citadel a non indestructible Mountain is actually a nonbo. Often making fetches into mana producers is also not good. When you are taxing and blowing up mana and taxing Moon often does not work well..
Bridge decks traditionally use Blood Moon. I have often steered a bit away from it a little, partly because in multiples it is useless, partly because it is rarely the one card combo that wins the game (good players always fetch around it as soon as they have a whiff of your deck, and with the number of discard spells and probes they soon get the idea). Also I am not hugely sold on multiple Moons because I like to get value out of the mana base by using scry-lands or mystifying maze/keldo megalith type lands. I still use the odd singleton Moon, but it is not the focus of the strategy for me, which is about locking behind Bridge using cards like Story Circle/Ghostly prison as back up and Spellskites to help keep bridge intact. Most people play it a bit differently, going in on up to 3 copies of Moon often with cards like Chalice. If it were to bite the dust I am wondering on if our deck would survive?
Obviously the RW Pillow Fort/ White enchantment type route would be available- it is a cousin of Boros Bridge decks. But would a deck with Bridges, Spirit Guides, Outpost Sieges, Leylines actually be viable without Moon?
I am not a huge PW man, Gideon, Elspeth KE, and Ajani V set a standard I can't see them beating. If they ever make one that gives us a Ghostly Prison effect as a + I would be with it.
On a side note, has anyone tested with eidolon of the great revel? It's not a lock piece as much as incidental damage. Hmmm, now that I actually write about it, not as good as I first thought. Alright, you convinced me. forget it.
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Legacy
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The tutor for a planeswalker is superficially on a par with Idyllic tutor in White-X enchantments, but is probably more narrow than that. Those decks can have a multitude of targets- eg 1 cc enchantments, 2cc enchantments- etc. Planeswalkers are all 3 or more cc, Tibalt excepted. Whereas Idyllic can be cast t4 to search for a Porphyr Nodes, this latest tutor means you can't fetch and cast a planeswalker in the same turn before t6.
Given the narrowness of the targets, I am surprised they costed it as expensively as they have. If it could tutor for a PW or a land it would be worth considering, perhaps.