Watching the spoilers and thinking Industrial Tower could be interesting.
A slight improvement on Tendo Ice Bridge for us?
I imagine it lends itself most to a deck which wants to play a variety of coloured spells (Glint Nest Crane, Pyroclasm, Abrupt Decay, Ancient Grudge, Pyrite Spellbomb) and also be able to pay for Spellskite/Academy Ruins abilities consistently in the same 75.
here's a deck guide done by channelfireball. i'm running the golgari version, but this is a good reference for jund lantern players
In the comments, Elsik states you can loop brutality or surgical. Academy can only get artifacts. Am I missing something?
Codex Shredder picks up Brutality from the yard and Academy Ruins puts the shredder back on top. Usually by the time you have that much mana with this deck your opponent is already out of cards. The most practical application is to build a nine mana Grasp of Darkness when you have the game completely locked up but for a lingering Platinum Angel.
In the comments, Elsik states you can loop brutality or surgical. Academy can only get artifacts. Am I missing something?
Crack a Codex Shredder to get back the non-artifact you want to hand, then Academy Ruins to put the Shredder back on top to redraw and replay it. For 8 mana (1 Shredder, 5 activate, 1U put shredder on top) you can rebuy any card every turn.
Is Fatal Push enough toslowdowntheformat? If so, Tron and Valakut will gain more ground, which are bad matchups, but at the same time, we can shift towards Ghost Quarter mana base.
I'm so excited to see what's going to happen, maybe only the time will tell.
here's a deck guide done by channelfireball. i'm running the golgari version, but this is a good reference for jund lantern players
In the comments, Elsik states you can loop brutality or surgical. Academy can only get artifacts. Am I missing something?
Codex Shredder picks up Brutality from the yard and Academy Ruins puts the shredder back on top. Usually by the time you have that much mana with this deck your opponent is already out of cards. The most practical application is to build a nine mana Grasp of Darkness when you have the game completely locked up but for a lingering Platinum Angel.
Having a lantern and a mill rock in play is enough to lock your opponent out for the next several turns though which is already huge for combining two 1 mana artifacts together.
Having the rest of the deck just be more mill rocks and pithing needles and things to strengthen that when everything is going well means you win when you are already winning.
thopter foundry and sword of the meek combine together in a way that ghoulcaller's bell and pithing needle just dont.
What happens when your opponent has early interaction that is used on relevant pieces? Like a discard spell on your lantern out of jund maybe.
or if you dont find your pieces? maybe all 4 lanterns are in the bottom 30 cards of your deck.
basically, when your deck is doing its thing, you are winning already.
But when your opponent can interact with you, or something goes wrong, then what? Do your other cards do anything?
I've answered this last question several times. Have you played with the deck? Plenty of people have put up solid competitive finishes with it. I would suggest seeking to understand how that happened before dismissing large pieces of it as "do-nothing" cards.
If the opponent has early interaction with relevant pieces I'd sure love to have redundant pieces and dig available in order to rebuild the lock. More redundancy in the lock pieces also makes it more likely that we get to the point of starting to win in the first place. If all four lanterns and both inventor's fairs and infernal tutor and the mishra's baubles and academy ruins are all in the bottom half of the deck then we will indeed be in trouble. That's life.
The whole point of the deck is to be as consistent as possible at doing its thing. It is a point in the deck's favor that its win condition merely involves doing its thing. Jamming in the thopter combo flies in the face of that and is going to badly hurt your consistency.
@Morimacil - I think that the miscommunication here is the concept on which the deck is built.
Imagine that you sit down to play an opponent, but instead of just shuffling your opponent's deck, you go through it, pick out cards you don't want them to have, set them aside, shuffle their deck, and give it back.
That's what we're doing. The more mill rocks you have, the more effective you are at simulating this. The more single cards that we have that answer multiple cards in the opponent's deck, the more effective you are at simulating this.
Take Ensnaring Bridge, for example. If you resolve a Bridge, what does Tarmogoyf become? Imagine a spell that costs 1G, resolves, and just does nothing. It just sits on the board, doing nothing. One single Ensnaring Bridge turns every single Tarmogoyf in the opponent's deck into this miserable, worthless card. It's even worse than taking a card out of the opponent's deck - it's replacing it with this worthless thing. And Bridge does, or something similar, to nearly every single creature in the format.
But, you bring up the point about other random cards, right? What if they have something that's not a creature, like, say, an artifact with some ability that could hurt us, or a planeswalker? Notice that Pithing Needle does to those cards what Bridge does to creatures. One single Pithing Needle turns every single copy of a card we name into a worthless, sleeved piece of cardboard.
But what about spells? Notice that we run Surgical Extraction.
So between those cards and the Lantern combo, we are turning the opponent's "machine" into total crap.
But what about whatever cards they have in their opener? Or cards that they draw before we get the Lantern lock out? That's why we run discard spells. We get rid of what we don't like.
So, in your arguments, what you are doing isn't brainstorming options to make the deck better. That would require the willingness to test those ideas. What you are doing is a common trap that many players have made in the past. Humans have this instinct where, when they come up with an idea, they have a tendency to want to think that it has value. Sometimes it does, but that is only truly determined by empirical data.
You have probably witnessed a conversation in which two or more new players are talking about their favorite decks. They've built some deck out of the random packs they've cracked, and they're trying to convince eachother that their deck is better than the other's. One will talk about some combo they put into their deck, and the other person will say something along the lines of, "Oh yeah? Well I have [cardname(s) here] that stop that." The first player will reply with an "Oh yeah? Well I have [card(s)] that stop that!" This goes back and forth. They aren't playing Magic, in the strictest sense. They are playing some imaginary version of Magic where they are trying to create a situation in which their deck is better. So how do they find the truth? They play. And not just once, because the loser will likely try to preserve their ego by claiming bad luck. It requires many games as evidence.
What you seem to be doing is ignoring the very foundation on which this deck is built. This deck is built on an understanding of the game in an engineering sense. We are creating a machine that's sole function is to break other machines. The fewer parts we need to break another machine, the more effective we are at doing it. But this machine we're building is one in which it not only breaks other machines, but it self-repairs. The longer it operates, the more efficient it becomes.
You are (in my opinion) creating imaginary situations that are extremely unlikely to exist in order to justify your arguments. Do you want to know if your arguments are valid? The one true way to find out is to test. Anything short is just as valid as anyone else bringing up an imaginary situation in which we have the answer to your imaginary situation. A friend in the IRC channel calls this the "Imaginary Counterspell Game." That game serves no purpose in the search for truth.
I'm not saying that your ideas should be dismissed outright. What I'm saying is that, if you feel as strongly about your arguments as you seem, then it would serve us all best if you used the surest method towards finding truth. When you think about this game on a deeper level (ignore the pretty pictures, the fancy names, etc) this is an engineering game. These are machines we are building. Anyone can imagine a crazy machine that might work out in some interesting ways in various situations, but it is real world testing that determines if they are efficient and effective.
I don't think it could have been said better, @thnkr.
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Just to add. If you are unable to handle the opponent's opening hand and let us say they were able to discard your key card then you can't avoid that. It's the nature of things BUT this deck is designed to be resilient by either: A) getting that card back by Academy Ruins, Codex Shredder or even Noxious Revival, B) digging up the extra copy of the piece.
If you're looking for a win condition then perhaps Ghirapur Aether Grid or Tezzeret could work for you. If you are leaning towards the Thopter combo then please test it extensively and update the thread. I just want to remind you that the combo has been tested before and you could backtrack to compare notes.
Or do you have another card in mind? Either way, we're all interested and please report back after some testing.
I want to add something, i'm not sure how relevant this is or if it needs to be said, but here goes: This community is, on the whole, very accepting of new ideas. As a person who spends a lot of time scouring Gatherer for new tech to add, i've often come here touting a new card and have been met with encouragement and constructive criticism. And that's exactly it – i was encouraged to test on my own. Nobody tested my ideas for me, or put them in their own decks, unless they happened to be passionate about the card themselves. I had to go out and prove that the direction i was taking my deck in was actually viable, and even then, i didn't expect anyone else to follow suit. This deck is highly customizable, and all you can really do is do your homework, use other people's results, test out some of your own, and share the fruits of your labor.
This deck has been in this form for a while now, but hasn't always been like this. Early on, it had cards like Oust, Condemn, and Porphyry Nodes, and functioned more like a normal control deck. The introduction of Ensnaring Bridge, a card that is now widely considered to be a mandatory playset and changed the underlying philosophy of the deck, wasn't introduced until later, and even then it was a slower adoption than you might think. But first one person tried it out for a while, said it worked for them, then it started creeping into people's sideboards in ones and twos, and eventually everyone figured out how good it was and jammed a playset maindeck. You might be able to come up with the next Bridge, but you'll have to work for it and show the community how effective it is. At that point, maybe someone else will take interest and adopt it, and soon it could be just about everywhere. (For a more recent example, take a look at Kanister and their Mishra's Bauble tech. A lot of people are running those now. I run three.)
It's also possible that you can have a build that's vastly different from everyone else's and still be on the right path. A lot of people (including myself) went wild with the unbanning of Thopter Sword, and tried it out in their decks. Then they realized that having so many 2CMC spells that did little or nothing outside of a combo wasn't worth the space they'd dedicated, so almost everyone took them out. Or consider the recent Crane Train that just crashed. A month ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Lantern player who didn't use Glint-Nest Crane. (I never did though. I always thought they were too clunky, so i never ran them. I played one Welding Jar maindeck instead, and still do.) Now, it seems that Baubles are the way of the future, and probably the more correct way to go, so people are now switching over to using them instead of Cranes, and the once-omnipresent Crane has lost its staying power.
Very few of my ideas have actually worked (Nephalia Drownyard, Ray of Revelation), and most have fallen by the wayside after some testing (Azor's Elocutors, Lens of Clarity, Kessig Wolf Run, Fountain of Youth, Sunbeam Spellbomb). The only way you'll find out what works for your own play style and the community at large is to sleeve up your own deck and play like there's no tomorrow. You'll take note of what cards and strategies work best, and will hopefully share your findings with the community, regardless of whether or not you were right. That way, other people can build upon your work.
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Quite frankly, talk is cheap. Test, present results, then people will listen.
I tested Thopter/Sword and used it for three months, from 3/2, 2/1, to 1/1 combinations. None of them worked, because you keep saying cards like Surgical and Pithing are hit or miss, but they do work on their own, and in the case of Surgical, tells you what your opponent's entire deck is. Thopter on its own is nothing. Sword on its own is nothing. Worse, Thopter isn't even searchable off of Ancient Stirrings, which has been a constant problem for me.
I played Thopter/Sword both before and after Inventor's Fair. It has underperformed and never mattered in any of my wins. Those are my results over months of tournaments and playtesting, and most of my co-Lantern pilots in my community have posted similar results, eliminating the chances of confirmation bias being to blame for this. Ghirapur Aether's Grid is a one-card wincon that fits better than Thopter/Sword. Even a Planeswalker would be better, because one slot to start winning is much better than finding two to do so.
TL;DR - unless you put up amazing and consistent results to prove otherwise, the card has been tested before and found wanting. Bringing it up *again* is just beating on a dead horse with no new data to back you up.
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Vintage: Blue Belcher, Mentor Remora, Burning Long
Legacy: ANT, Sneak and Show, Omnitell, Oops All Spells
Modern: Grishoalbrand, Infect, UR Storm, Ad Nauseam, Lantern Control
@Alexeezay, Good luck! I could definitely see swapping up the sideboard a bit to make room for Spellskites. I threw two Thoughtseize into the two open spots in my sideboard because of their utility against Tron. If I had them in my side, I probably would side them in against Infect and Affinity. Siding them in against Burn is iffy to me. It does turn off Lightning Bolt and Rift Bolt, and blocks, but it also turns on Searing Blaze. It's one of the reasons why I decided to test increasing Brutality to a playset rather than Crane. Both Brutality and Crane have high increased win % correlations on the spreadsheet, but Brutality is higher, doesn't turn on Searing Blaze, is easier on the manabase, and helps dump hands rather than replace itself (Bridge relevant). I would like to test Spellskite in place of Thoughtseize in the side to be sure, but as it stands it appears that Tron has a higher meta percentage than Burn or Affinity, and the full playset of Iok and Brutality does make the Infect matchup much better. And I have had Infect players end up having to use Twisted Image on their own 1/1's, which is great in buying us just a bit of tempo. They can't side out the Image, either, because there is still the 1-of Spellskite in the main that would otherwise make for a bad time for them if they did
I have played for a while with a single Ashiok, and most games where it came up it took the game on it's own with the protection of a Bridge. He works very nicely with the other pieces of the deck, as it's a planeswalker form of top deck manipulation first and it can nuke hands and graveyards to make our soft lock into a very hard one.
Why would you obviously need dead cards in your deck game one? To me, it is obvious that you should avoid having as many dead cards as you can.
You dont need needle to deal with displacer-thought knot. And you dont need surgical do deal with conflagrate, and/or world breaker.
There are many many other cards you could be running that would take care of that.
Basically, as long as you are doing something proactive enough, those scenarios stop mattering as much, because they take too long to set up.
If you thopter sword them out, that takes care of it before it becomes an issue.
But if you do something like liliana, thats fine too. Even though she costs 3 mana, she works well with bridge, and she is useful on her own. And she would also be an effective way of nullifying the threat of displacer-thought knot, or world breaker.
If you do not run anything proactive alongside the soft lock, then it feels like you need pieces to make the soft lock into a stronger lock. But if you are doing something proactive, the soft lock is enough.
Most of the time, once you establish the soft lock, you win.
In some games, you will have the soft lock, and lose
in some games, you dont get to the lock and you lose
The long games where you had the soft lock and then lost are the most frustrating ones, because they take up for ever, and it feels like you should have won because you were winning for a large part of the game. So there is a tendency to add cards that will help with those scenarios. But it would be better to be focusing your efforts on the other games, the ones where you got beat fast because you didnt have the right answers, you couldnt get to bridge and you lost.
Morimacil, we hear where you're coming from, and I want to make sure you don't feel like you can't say whatever you feel you need to.
It makes sense - if you have a soft lock and then a way to win the game quickly, then the lock doesn't need to be as hard or take as long to win.
There are two points I need to make. Firstly, when you got annoyed at the phrase "talk is cheap", you shouldn't - it just means "Go get a better win ratio than the current version of Lantern, and we'll listen. If you can't get a better win ratio, then that indicates the current build is on the right track."
Discussing the theory behind lantern is good to do, but only win ratios will make others change their already-successful decks.
The second thing I have to say is this - you never want your deck to be a worse version of something else.
Sure, if you establish the lock and then the quick, lock-supported win that you're talking about, then everything's dandy. What if it comes in the opposite direction? First you have your win pieces, except you don't have the lock yet, so you don't have enough 'oomph' to actually use them to win. Then later you draw the lock pieces - except now it's too late to lock them out, they've drawn too much stuff.
If your entire deck is lock pieces, then that doesn't happen. Sure, you can draw the 'wrong' lock pieces at the wrong time, and you can draw bunches of dead cards against the wrong matchups. We can make these arguments all day, but that brings us back to the first point.
On the other hand, if you want a quick, proactive win, there are a great many decks available for doing that - if you think locking opponents out then winning is the best strategy, there are also decks to do that - 8rack for example.
Hope you can see where we're coming from. I don't want you to think that the Lantern community is just a big hoax based on not wanting to admit that we love watching others suffer - we play the deck for many reasons, but the exact cards we choose to use are mainly based on win ratios and 'best practices'.
How much experience do you have with this deck? A lot of us have been playing for a year or more, and have collaborated on testing various ideas for a long time. (Take a look at thnkr and his in-depth analysis of individual cards and matches, i'm pretty sure he has dozens/hundreds of games' worth of data.) If you were able to provide specific examples where your statements hold water, i personally would be much more inclined to believe you. Feel free to test on your own and compare your results to those put forth by other lists, but you can't reasonably expect anyone else to follow suit until you've provided evidence instead of just theorycrafting.
Your cards are certainly doing a lot, even if you have your Lantern discarded. Codex Shredder can mill your deck, then return any milled card to your hand. Academy Ruins can return milled artifacts to the top of your library. Ancient Stirrings can dig five cards deep and either find Lantern or something else you'd need. Mishra's Bauble functions as a pseudo-Lantern and digs you deeper into your deck. You can fire off your own discard and remove their turn 2 threat, giving you more time to naturally draw into any of your consistency tools or lock pieces. Or you can just cast Bridge and buy yourself all the time you need.
We don't auto-lose to Chalice either. It's strong hate against us, but doesn't force an auto-concession like Leyline of the Void does for Legacy's Manaless Dredge. I personally will continue to just cast my one-drops and have them countered, and then play a Bridge. If a Bridge wouldn't help in that situation, then how much help would Thopter Sword be? You'd have a two-drop artifact that doesn't do anything on its own. At least Bridge can lock the game down in its own way. And if we don't have Bridge, and they have a threat we can't answer in time, then yeah, we lose. I'd argue here that the solution is to sideboard in Ancient Grudge and Seal of Primordium, cards which have applications in multiple matchups and can accomplish the intended task without additional help.
Lantern is a lot less fragile than most people would believe. A lot of people will say "Oh, the deck dies to Shatterstorm". Yeah, it does, if:
- You're able to get to four mana, two of which needs to be red.
- You're able to draw Shatterstorm, or are able to keep it in hand.
- You're able to kill the Lantern player before they can recover.
If any of these things goes wrong, we're able to recover from having our board blown up, or even prevent it from happening in the first place by either denying them Shatterstorm or denying them the lands they need to cast it. Same thing goes with all the hate cards. You typically have to draw cards in order to cast them, and that's exactly what the deck is designed to do – prevent people from drawing the cards they want.
You can try out Ooze, and i encourage you to rigorously test it out. Make sure that, each time you test a new card, ask yourself if an existing card would be better than what you're using; if so, then use the existing card, and if not, feel free to keep the new tech. but i should let you know that this research has already been done. Years of testing by Lantern professionals have shown that if you play a creature, it's going to eat all those Lightning Bolts, Path to Exiles, Murderous Cuts, and Terminates you've been letting your opponent draw. The goal of the deck is to blank as many of our opponent's cards as possible, and to delete what cards we can't blank. Playing Ooze is essentially saying "Hey, i have a thing you can kill now". The body is irrelevant as well, since it can't attack with Bridge active anyway.
EDIT: Notice that a lot of people aren't really receptive to the suggestions you've made. I suggest that instead of just coming into a new place and overturning everything, you should ask people why the deck is the way it is. You could ask me why i play Welding Jar and Nephalia Drownyard in my deck, or you could ask why people play supposedly do-nothing cards like Mishra's Bauble or Surgical Extraction. You could ask about the philosophy of the deck (every deck has a philosophy), and why it doesn't typically have any win conditions. I get that it doesn't make sense on first examination, so i recommend that you try to understand why things are the way they are. Once you understand this, and have played with the deck a while and have that prerequisite experience, you'll have a much better time identifying weaknesses and making reasonable suggestions to improve them.
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@Morimacil - I accept that your ideas might be interesting. Your ideas sound interesting. How many games have you tested with those ideas? How has it gone? Could you share the replays?
@tiersdonexits: If you dont want to discuss things with logical arguments to improve the deck, I dont see why you are on a forum?
Haha, I don't think I'm the one who's misunderstanding the purpose of the forum.
Look, several veterans of this thread have responded saying the same thing. "We'll listen, but where's your data?"
"If your entire deck is lock pieces, then that doesn't happen. Sure, you can draw the 'wrong' lock pieces at the wrong time, and you can draw bunches of dead cards against the wrong matchups. We can make these arguments all day, but that brings us back to the first point."
This is terrible logic. you say that wont happen, then in the next sentence you say that it will happen, and then it brings us back to the frist point, which is what? that you dont want to listen to logical arguments?
Way to get people to listen to you - criticize their logic. And by the way, my logic is sound.
The 'that' I'm referring to is 'drawing your win conditions at the wrong time'. If your deck doesn't have win conditions, it can't draw them.
Your understanding of my argument is the problem here.
The 'first point' is the same one I made above - "we'll listen, but where's your data?"
I have been testing the deck, quite a lot. What I am sharing is the results of my testing.
Great, maybe we're getting somewhere. Show us your win ratios vs. various decks in the metagame. Show us your innovations exactly, in a decklist. If you can't do this, then you're not sharing your results - you're sharing your ideas.
I've explained myself to my satisfaction. Enough people have said the same things now that if you aren't at least able to say "I understand you want data, I'll put it together for you as soon as I can", I think I won't waste any more of my time responding.
Finally slipped Leyline of Sanctity into my sideboard. Where has this been all my life? It definitely helps survive the burn matchup.
On another note, went a pretty janky way and put Magus of the Tabernacle as a one of mainboard. It's a huge help against elves and goblins, and even pokes affinity which I've found to be a rough matchup.
Thoughts on sideboard rest in peace for the deck? I currently just use Graf cage but RIP stops Living End as well. It turns off our Codex shredder's second ability and academy ruins, but do the pros outweigh the cons?
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Standard: GR Pummeler
Modern: Mono-Red Control, Lantern Control, Eldrazi Taxes, Skred Infect
Pauper: Affinity
EDH: Gaddock Teeg Kithkin Tribal, Meren
Legacy: 8 Rack, Omnitell (Both in progress)
How effective has Magus of the Tabernacle been for you against other strategies? What other matchups have you been testing against? I could see it as being effective in a mana denial strategy, maybe even in the absence of a Bridge.
I've contemplated Rest in Peace myself, but for me, it's just not worth the sideboard slot. I personally don't have any grave hate except the two maindeck Pyxides, but i can definitely see a meta in which sideboard or even mainboard RiP would be justified. You may want to consider Leyline of the Void if you don't like RiP's symmetry. I think its inclusion is just a matter of personal taste and meta.
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In the comments, Elsik states you can loop brutality or surgical. Academy can only get artifacts. Am I missing something?
A slight improvement on Tendo Ice Bridge for us?
I imagine it lends itself most to a deck which wants to play a variety of coloured spells (Glint Nest Crane, Pyroclasm, Abrupt Decay, Ancient Grudge, Pyrite Spellbomb) and also be able to pay for Spellskite/Academy Ruins abilities consistently in the same 75.
Codex Shredder picks up Brutality from the yard and Academy Ruins puts the shredder back on top. Usually by the time you have that much mana with this deck your opponent is already out of cards. The most practical application is to build a nine mana Grasp of Darkness when you have the game completely locked up but for a lingering Platinum Angel.
Crack a Codex Shredder to get back the non-artifact you want to hand, then Academy Ruins to put the Shredder back on top to redraw and replay it. For 8 mana (1 Shredder, 5 activate, 1U put shredder on top) you can rebuy any card every turn.
I'm so excited to see what's going to happen, maybe only the time will tell.
Completely forgot about Shredder. Thanks
I've answered this last question several times. Have you played with the deck? Plenty of people have put up solid competitive finishes with it. I would suggest seeking to understand how that happened before dismissing large pieces of it as "do-nothing" cards.
If the opponent has early interaction with relevant pieces I'd sure love to have redundant pieces and dig available in order to rebuild the lock. More redundancy in the lock pieces also makes it more likely that we get to the point of starting to win in the first place. If all four lanterns and both inventor's fairs and infernal tutor and the mishra's baubles and academy ruins are all in the bottom half of the deck then we will indeed be in trouble. That's life.
The whole point of the deck is to be as consistent as possible at doing its thing. It is a point in the deck's favor that its win condition merely involves doing its thing. Jamming in the thopter combo flies in the face of that and is going to badly hurt your consistency.
Imagine that you sit down to play an opponent, but instead of just shuffling your opponent's deck, you go through it, pick out cards you don't want them to have, set them aside, shuffle their deck, and give it back.
That's what we're doing. The more mill rocks you have, the more effective you are at simulating this. The more single cards that we have that answer multiple cards in the opponent's deck, the more effective you are at simulating this.
Take Ensnaring Bridge, for example. If you resolve a Bridge, what does Tarmogoyf become? Imagine a spell that costs 1G, resolves, and just does nothing. It just sits on the board, doing nothing. One single Ensnaring Bridge turns every single Tarmogoyf in the opponent's deck into this miserable, worthless card. It's even worse than taking a card out of the opponent's deck - it's replacing it with this worthless thing. And Bridge does, or something similar, to nearly every single creature in the format.
But, you bring up the point about other random cards, right? What if they have something that's not a creature, like, say, an artifact with some ability that could hurt us, or a planeswalker? Notice that Pithing Needle does to those cards what Bridge does to creatures. One single Pithing Needle turns every single copy of a card we name into a worthless, sleeved piece of cardboard.
But what about spells? Notice that we run Surgical Extraction.
So between those cards and the Lantern combo, we are turning the opponent's "machine" into total crap.
But what about whatever cards they have in their opener? Or cards that they draw before we get the Lantern lock out? That's why we run discard spells. We get rid of what we don't like.
So, in your arguments, what you are doing isn't brainstorming options to make the deck better. That would require the willingness to test those ideas. What you are doing is a common trap that many players have made in the past. Humans have this instinct where, when they come up with an idea, they have a tendency to want to think that it has value. Sometimes it does, but that is only truly determined by empirical data.
You have probably witnessed a conversation in which two or more new players are talking about their favorite decks. They've built some deck out of the random packs they've cracked, and they're trying to convince eachother that their deck is better than the other's. One will talk about some combo they put into their deck, and the other person will say something along the lines of, "Oh yeah? Well I have [cardname(s) here] that stop that." The first player will reply with an "Oh yeah? Well I have [card(s)] that stop that!" This goes back and forth. They aren't playing Magic, in the strictest sense. They are playing some imaginary version of Magic where they are trying to create a situation in which their deck is better. So how do they find the truth? They play. And not just once, because the loser will likely try to preserve their ego by claiming bad luck. It requires many games as evidence.
What you seem to be doing is ignoring the very foundation on which this deck is built. This deck is built on an understanding of the game in an engineering sense. We are creating a machine that's sole function is to break other machines. The fewer parts we need to break another machine, the more effective we are at doing it. But this machine we're building is one in which it not only breaks other machines, but it self-repairs. The longer it operates, the more efficient it becomes.
You are (in my opinion) creating imaginary situations that are extremely unlikely to exist in order to justify your arguments. Do you want to know if your arguments are valid? The one true way to find out is to test. Anything short is just as valid as anyone else bringing up an imaginary situation in which we have the answer to your imaginary situation. A friend in the IRC channel calls this the "Imaginary Counterspell Game." That game serves no purpose in the search for truth.
I'm not saying that your ideas should be dismissed outright. What I'm saying is that, if you feel as strongly about your arguments as you seem, then it would serve us all best if you used the surest method towards finding truth. When you think about this game on a deeper level (ignore the pretty pictures, the fancy names, etc) this is an engineering game. These are machines we are building. Anyone can imagine a crazy machine that might work out in some interesting ways in various situations, but it is real world testing that determines if they are efficient and effective.
Lantern Control
(with videos)
Uc Tron
Netdecking explained
Netdecking explained, Part 2
On speculators and counterfeits
On Interaction
Every single competitive deck in existence is designed to limit the opponent's ability to interact in a meaningful way.
Record number of exclamation points on SCG homepage: 71 (6 January, 2018)
"I don't want to believe, I want to know."
-Carl Sagan
MODERN – LANTERN (aka Fateseal or Barbershop)
Primer – Subreddit – Facebook – Decklist – Gameplay
Thnkr's Content: Gameplay – Datasheet
Each eye sees a different possibility for tomorrow.
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If you're looking for a win condition then perhaps Ghirapur Aether Grid or Tezzeret could work for you. If you are leaning towards the Thopter combo then please test it extensively and update the thread. I just want to remind you that the combo has been tested before and you could backtrack to compare notes.
Or do you have another card in mind? Either way, we're all interested and please report back after some testing.
This deck has been in this form for a while now, but hasn't always been like this. Early on, it had cards like Oust, Condemn, and Porphyry Nodes, and functioned more like a normal control deck. The introduction of Ensnaring Bridge, a card that is now widely considered to be a mandatory playset and changed the underlying philosophy of the deck, wasn't introduced until later, and even then it was a slower adoption than you might think. But first one person tried it out for a while, said it worked for them, then it started creeping into people's sideboards in ones and twos, and eventually everyone figured out how good it was and jammed a playset maindeck. You might be able to come up with the next Bridge, but you'll have to work for it and show the community how effective it is. At that point, maybe someone else will take interest and adopt it, and soon it could be just about everywhere. (For a more recent example, take a look at Kanister and their Mishra's Bauble tech. A lot of people are running those now. I run three.)
It's also possible that you can have a build that's vastly different from everyone else's and still be on the right path. A lot of people (including myself) went wild with the unbanning of Thopter Sword, and tried it out in their decks. Then they realized that having so many 2CMC spells that did little or nothing outside of a combo wasn't worth the space they'd dedicated, so almost everyone took them out. Or consider the recent Crane Train that just crashed. A month ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Lantern player who didn't use Glint-Nest Crane. (I never did though. I always thought they were too clunky, so i never ran them. I played one Welding Jar maindeck instead, and still do.) Now, it seems that Baubles are the way of the future, and probably the more correct way to go, so people are now switching over to using them instead of Cranes, and the once-omnipresent Crane has lost its staying power.
Very few of my ideas have actually worked (Nephalia Drownyard, Ray of Revelation), and most have fallen by the wayside after some testing (Azor's Elocutors, Lens of Clarity, Kessig Wolf Run, Fountain of Youth, Sunbeam Spellbomb). The only way you'll find out what works for your own play style and the community at large is to sleeve up your own deck and play like there's no tomorrow. You'll take note of what cards and strategies work best, and will hopefully share your findings with the community, regardless of whether or not you were right. That way, other people can build upon your work.
MODERN – LANTERN (aka Fateseal or Barbershop)
Primer – Subreddit – Facebook – Decklist – Gameplay
Thnkr's Content: Gameplay – Datasheet
Each eye sees a different possibility for tomorrow.
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I tested Thopter/Sword and used it for three months, from 3/2, 2/1, to 1/1 combinations. None of them worked, because you keep saying cards like Surgical and Pithing are hit or miss, but they do work on their own, and in the case of Surgical, tells you what your opponent's entire deck is. Thopter on its own is nothing. Sword on its own is nothing. Worse, Thopter isn't even searchable off of Ancient Stirrings, which has been a constant problem for me.
I played Thopter/Sword both before and after Inventor's Fair. It has underperformed and never mattered in any of my wins. Those are my results over months of tournaments and playtesting, and most of my co-Lantern pilots in my community have posted similar results, eliminating the chances of confirmation bias being to blame for this. Ghirapur Aether's Grid is a one-card wincon that fits better than Thopter/Sword. Even a Planeswalker would be better, because one slot to start winning is much better than finding two to do so.
TL;DR - unless you put up amazing and consistent results to prove otherwise, the card has been tested before and found wanting. Bringing it up *again* is just beating on a dead horse with no new data to back you up.
Legacy: ANT, Sneak and Show, Omnitell, Oops All Spells
Modern: Grishoalbrand, Infect, UR Storm, Ad Nauseam, Lantern Control
Can you sense the pattern here?
Lantern Control
(with videos)
Uc Tron
Netdecking explained
Netdecking explained, Part 2
On speculators and counterfeits
On Interaction
Every single competitive deck in existence is designed to limit the opponent's ability to interact in a meaningful way.
Record number of exclamation points on SCG homepage: 71 (6 January, 2018)
"I don't want to believe, I want to know."
-Carl Sagan
Morimacil, we hear where you're coming from, and I want to make sure you don't feel like you can't say whatever you feel you need to.
It makes sense - if you have a soft lock and then a way to win the game quickly, then the lock doesn't need to be as hard or take as long to win.
There are two points I need to make. Firstly, when you got annoyed at the phrase "talk is cheap", you shouldn't - it just means "Go get a better win ratio than the current version of Lantern, and we'll listen. If you can't get a better win ratio, then that indicates the current build is on the right track."
Discussing the theory behind lantern is good to do, but only win ratios will make others change their already-successful decks.
The second thing I have to say is this - you never want your deck to be a worse version of something else.
Sure, if you establish the lock and then the quick, lock-supported win that you're talking about, then everything's dandy. What if it comes in the opposite direction? First you have your win pieces, except you don't have the lock yet, so you don't have enough 'oomph' to actually use them to win. Then later you draw the lock pieces - except now it's too late to lock them out, they've drawn too much stuff.
If your entire deck is lock pieces, then that doesn't happen. Sure, you can draw the 'wrong' lock pieces at the wrong time, and you can draw bunches of dead cards against the wrong matchups. We can make these arguments all day, but that brings us back to the first point.
On the other hand, if you want a quick, proactive win, there are a great many decks available for doing that - if you think locking opponents out then winning is the best strategy, there are also decks to do that - 8rack for example.
Hope you can see where we're coming from. I don't want you to think that the Lantern community is just a big hoax based on not wanting to admit that we love watching others suffer - we play the deck for many reasons, but the exact cards we choose to use are mainly based on win ratios and 'best practices'.
Your cards are certainly doing a lot, even if you have your Lantern discarded. Codex Shredder can mill your deck, then return any milled card to your hand. Academy Ruins can return milled artifacts to the top of your library. Ancient Stirrings can dig five cards deep and either find Lantern or something else you'd need. Mishra's Bauble functions as a pseudo-Lantern and digs you deeper into your deck. You can fire off your own discard and remove their turn 2 threat, giving you more time to naturally draw into any of your consistency tools or lock pieces. Or you can just cast Bridge and buy yourself all the time you need.
We don't auto-lose to Chalice either. It's strong hate against us, but doesn't force an auto-concession like Leyline of the Void does for Legacy's Manaless Dredge. I personally will continue to just cast my one-drops and have them countered, and then play a Bridge. If a Bridge wouldn't help in that situation, then how much help would Thopter Sword be? You'd have a two-drop artifact that doesn't do anything on its own. At least Bridge can lock the game down in its own way. And if we don't have Bridge, and they have a threat we can't answer in time, then yeah, we lose. I'd argue here that the solution is to sideboard in Ancient Grudge and Seal of Primordium, cards which have applications in multiple matchups and can accomplish the intended task without additional help.
Lantern is a lot less fragile than most people would believe. A lot of people will say "Oh, the deck dies to Shatterstorm". Yeah, it does, if:
- You're able to get to four mana, two of which needs to be red.
- You're able to draw Shatterstorm, or are able to keep it in hand.
- You're able to kill the Lantern player before they can recover.
If any of these things goes wrong, we're able to recover from having our board blown up, or even prevent it from happening in the first place by either denying them Shatterstorm or denying them the lands they need to cast it. Same thing goes with all the hate cards. You typically have to draw cards in order to cast them, and that's exactly what the deck is designed to do – prevent people from drawing the cards they want.
You can try out Ooze, and i encourage you to rigorously test it out. Make sure that, each time you test a new card, ask yourself if an existing card would be better than what you're using; if so, then use the existing card, and if not, feel free to keep the new tech. but i should let you know that this research has already been done. Years of testing by Lantern professionals have shown that if you play a creature, it's going to eat all those Lightning Bolts, Path to Exiles, Murderous Cuts, and Terminates you've been letting your opponent draw. The goal of the deck is to blank as many of our opponent's cards as possible, and to delete what cards we can't blank. Playing Ooze is essentially saying "Hey, i have a thing you can kill now". The body is irrelevant as well, since it can't attack with Bridge active anyway.
EDIT: Notice that a lot of people aren't really receptive to the suggestions you've made. I suggest that instead of just coming into a new place and overturning everything, you should ask people why the deck is the way it is. You could ask me why i play Welding Jar and Nephalia Drownyard in my deck, or you could ask why people play supposedly do-nothing cards like Mishra's Bauble or Surgical Extraction. You could ask about the philosophy of the deck (every deck has a philosophy), and why it doesn't typically have any win conditions. I get that it doesn't make sense on first examination, so i recommend that you try to understand why things are the way they are. Once you understand this, and have played with the deck a while and have that prerequisite experience, you'll have a much better time identifying weaknesses and making reasonable suggestions to improve them.
MODERN – LANTERN (aka Fateseal or Barbershop)
Primer – Subreddit – Facebook – Decklist – Gameplay
Thnkr's Content: Gameplay – Datasheet
Each eye sees a different possibility for tomorrow.
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TLDR: Test it.
Lantern Control
(with videos)
Uc Tron
Netdecking explained
Netdecking explained, Part 2
On speculators and counterfeits
On Interaction
Every single competitive deck in existence is designed to limit the opponent's ability to interact in a meaningful way.
Record number of exclamation points on SCG homepage: 71 (6 January, 2018)
"I don't want to believe, I want to know."
-Carl Sagan
Haha, I don't think I'm the one who's misunderstanding the purpose of the forum.
Look, several veterans of this thread have responded saying the same thing. "We'll listen, but where's your data?"
Way to get people to listen to you - criticize their logic. And by the way, my logic is sound.
The 'that' I'm referring to is 'drawing your win conditions at the wrong time'. If your deck doesn't have win conditions, it can't draw them.
Your understanding of my argument is the problem here.
The 'first point' is the same one I made above - "we'll listen, but where's your data?"
Great, maybe we're getting somewhere. Show us your win ratios vs. various decks in the metagame. Show us your innovations exactly, in a decklist. If you can't do this, then you're not sharing your results - you're sharing your ideas.
I've explained myself to my satisfaction. Enough people have said the same things now that if you aren't at least able to say "I understand you want data, I'll put it together for you as soon as I can", I think I won't waste any more of my time responding.
On another note, went a pretty janky way and put Magus of the Tabernacle as a one of mainboard. It's a huge help against elves and goblins, and even pokes affinity which I've found to be a rough matchup.
Thoughts on sideboard rest in peace for the deck? I currently just use Graf cage but RIP stops Living End as well. It turns off our Codex shredder's second ability and academy ruins, but do the pros outweigh the cons?
Modern: Mono-Red Control, Lantern Control, Eldrazi Taxes, Skred Infect
Pauper: Affinity
EDH: Gaddock Teeg Kithkin Tribal, Meren
Legacy: 8 Rack, Omnitell (Both in progress)
How effective has Magus of the Tabernacle been for you against other strategies? What other matchups have you been testing against? I could see it as being effective in a mana denial strategy, maybe even in the absence of a Bridge.
I've contemplated Rest in Peace myself, but for me, it's just not worth the sideboard slot. I personally don't have any grave hate except the two maindeck Pyxides, but i can definitely see a meta in which sideboard or even mainboard RiP would be justified. You may want to consider Leyline of the Void if you don't like RiP's symmetry. I think its inclusion is just a matter of personal taste and meta.
MODERN – LANTERN (aka Fateseal or Barbershop)
Primer – Subreddit – Facebook – Decklist – Gameplay
Thnkr's Content: Gameplay – Datasheet
Each eye sees a different possibility for tomorrow.
CWUBBCCCCCCCBGBGBGCCCCCCCGGURC