MTG Salvation

... if your aim is to cantrip your way through the deck as fast as possible, what is your payoff spell?

"Why" do you want to do that?

The reason we play lands AND draw spells is to build up to 7,8,9+ mana so we can attack with Colonnade + hold up interaction.

Also, as asinine as it might sound: 85 and 92% are drastically different. One misses in 15/100 games, the other misses in 8/100 games. That's twice as many games. As someone who refuses to 61 cards because of the .003% difference in my deck, 7% is pretty substantial.

Yours isn't a deck with a strong late game, which means you shouldn't be trying to get to that stage. I'm sure you're fine against the Midrange decks, go-wide might give you fits, but the two decks I'm most worried about right now are Eldrazi Tron and Valakut - i.e. Decks with a superb late game.

I think you forget the chief aim of the Esper draw go deck: you want to hit land drops naturally because you want to interact with the opponent using all of your mana. By turn 5, the opponent is either out of resources or nearly so, and you start utilizing their turn to draw extra cards.

In today's meta, I rarely find myself casting think twice on turns 2-4. The decks that are letting us have that much time are, generally speaking, not our threatening MUs.

Regarding your build: I'm sure you have game, but not long-game. You have more draw spells than actual answers, and none of your answers are actually going to play catch up duty.

Quote from kodieyost »

... if your aim is to cantrip your way through the deck as fast as possible, what is your payoff spell?

"Why" do you want to do that?

The reason we play lands AND draw spells is to build up to 7,8,9+ mana so we can attack with Colonnade + hold up interaction.

Also, as asinine as it might sound: 85 and 92% are drastically different. One misses in 15/100 games, the other misses in 8/100 games. That's twice as many games. As someone who refuses to 61 cards because of the .003% difference in my deck, 7% is pretty substantial.

Yours isn't a deck with a strong late game, which means you shouldn't be trying to get to that stage. I'm sure you're fine against the Midrange decks, go-wide might give you fits, but the two decks I'm most worried about right now are Eldrazi Tron and Valakut - i.e. Decks with a superb late game.

I think you forget the chief aim of the Esper draw go deck: you want to hit land drops naturally because you want to interact with the opponent using all of your mana. By turn 5, the opponent is either out of resources or nearly so, and you start utilizing their turn to draw extra cards.

In today's meta, I rarely find myself casting think twice on turns 2-4. The decks that are letting us have that much time are, generally speaking, not our threatening MUs.

Regarding your build: I'm sure you have game, but not long-game. You have more draw spells than actual answers, and none of your answers are actually going to play catch up duty.

While I don't have Sphinx's Rev or WSZ, saying the deck doesn't have a good late-game is a pretty bold statement. I'm playing 4 Snapcasters, Liliana, Instant speed draw 3's, Esper Charms, Cryptics, and Colonnades. In addition, the Architects are actually insane late-game draws as Annihilator can attest to; essentially locking your opponent from a turn or more (and giving you perfect information), or finding a CA spell from your own top 3 while presenting a clock. If this deck isn't a strong late-game deck, then there simply isn't one. The deck actually has more 2+:1's than stock lists, but SR/SV is either your worst card or best card depending on the MU, so just adding up cards that can grind you value isn't totally accurate per se, but is a good barometer.

The reason to play more selection and card draw is to increase consistency and mitigate flood, find your SB cards faster, and plays better with Snapcaster Mage. There's a reason most control decks in Legacy only play 21ish lands because of the selection tools, and while we don't have as powerful, ours is powerful enough not to need to play 25 or 26 lands. While we don't have as powerful cards as in Legacy, if the opportunity cost is low seeing more cards > seeing less cards generally speaking, especially if they have selection and upside attached (re: Opt and Architects). I understand that the stock lists base themselves off of standards heuristic of naturally drawing lands, but I think that's just an inefficient way to build control decks in non-standard formats with the availability of selection/cantrips. Hell, not even all standard control decks play 26 lands. I foresee a lot less with both Illumination/Opt available in standard.

You're right if simply the % were final and took into account all variables, but that 85% is actually higher because of the amount of selection/cantrips I play. The 85% is just for natural land draws, which is plenty when you take into account that I play another 3.5 "pseudo" lands (so really you should be looking at the 25-25.5 land %'s) due to the cantrips. I trust the PhD Math whiz on the probabilities and statistics that he's presented. My opportunity cost is 1 mana, which to me, is low especially in decks that would all ready play Think Twice for "mana efficiency" where 2 and 3 mana is substantially more, but people still find time to cast it. I play less Colonnades, so I have more mana early-game to work with as well. It's a balancing act. Ultimately you may be right and I may need to add a land, but the principle remains solid imho.

I have class right now so I'll answer the rest later. (PS: I have more answers than draw spells - Cryptic counts as both - and Liliana is a "pseudo" answer)

Quote from kodieyost »

I think you forget the chief aim of the Esper draw go deck: you want to hit land drops naturally because you want to interact with the opponent using all of your mana. By turn 5, the opponent is either out of resources or nearly so, and you start utilizing their turn to draw extra cards.

In today's meta, I rarely find myself casting think twice on turns 2-4. The decks that are letting us have that much time are, generally speaking, not our threatening MUs.

That's Magical Christmas Land where you draw 2 Paths + Logic Knot and to their 3 creatures. They almost always have a higher number of threats than we have answers; we have to keep up with Think Twice or the more expensive multi-card effects (Cryptic/Verdict/Snapcaster). I almost always Think Twice or Serum Visions on turn 2; what in the world would you have to counter, outside a Blood Moon or Liliana (maybe).

That's part of why Divination Effects pair so well with wraths. You put yourself at a severe tempo advantage by casting 3-mana spells like Esper Charm or Think Twice that don't effect the board. Sweepers help you recoup the positional advantage in a single turn.

Quote from Aegraen »

Cipher's DeckMagic OnlineOCTGN2ApprenticeBuy These Cards
Lands: 22 3 Darkslick Shores 2 Celestial Colonnade 1 Glacial Fortress 2 Watery Grave 1 Hallowed Fountain 1 Godless Shrine 2 Island 1 Plains 1 Swamp 4 Flooded Strand 2 Polluted Delta 2 Marsh Flats Cards that Draw Cards: 20 4 Opt 2 Thought Scour 4 Architects of Will 4 Esper Charm 2 Scour the Laboratory 1 Glimmer of Genius 3 Cryptic Command	Removal: 9 4 Path to Exile 4 Fatal Push 1 Go for the Throat Counters: 7 3 Logic Knot 1 Negate Planeswalker: 1 1 Liliana, the Last Hope Creature: 4 4 Snapcaster Mage	Sideboard: 2 Nihil Spellbomb 1 Damnation 1 Night of Souls' Betrayal 1 Stony Silence 1 Blessed Alliance 2 Collective Brutality 2 Thoughtseize 1 Vendilion Clique 1 Dispel 2 Ceremonious Rejection 1 Disdainful Stroke

...and this deck burns more mana early than any other list, yet has no sweepers whatsoever.

Im intrigued by the architect/delirium thing but not sure about shaving lands for a bunch of cantrips. In my mind the way this deck plays is that all my land drops are live due to my card draw, mana sinks, and x spells while my opponents land draws are usually dead past turn four. Thats virtual and real card advantage which is how we bury people in the late game.

I dont want to get stuck on four lands - I want to make my land drop every turn until the game ends. I dont want to be stuck esper charming on my main phase to make land drops either, I want to draw them either at opponents eot or on my draw step so that I am always presenting interaction.

Think twice flashing back for 3 is fine because by the time I want to do that the cost is largely irrelevant. And while revelation is inefficient at 5 mana its fine at 6 and a blowout beyond that. When we make all our land drops the blowout version isnt just a pipe dream.

I can see how it all fits together though - tt and rev work when you make all your land drops. If you replace them with other cards, you may no longer need to make those land drops and can now shave lands. I dont know - that may be a very different version of the deck because making land every turn is kind of a cornerstone of the esper draw go strategy imo.

I play 24 lands w/ 4x Think Twice and 4x Serum Visions. I still flood out more often than I'm mana screwed. Just this weekend I played in a paper tournament, and took my first loss to a Grixis Shadow deck after resolving Revelation for 5. I was still holding 5 lands when I died.

Ironically, compared to a list with no Serum Visions, I recall calculating that I had an effective higher land count, at the expense of having to pay that extra U to cycle through the deck sometimes.

I think we are all coming to a bold division: play fewer lands, more cheap cantrips to find said lands, and apply some form of early pressure vs more lands, naturally draw them, and bury the opponent in actual card advantage.

Neither deck can objectively claim to be better, because they do different things. A gold fish cannot be compared to a monkey in regards to its ability to climb trees.

Regarding "turn 2 interaction targets":

Blood moon, Liliana, goyf, bob, Cranial, knight of the reliquary, fulminator Mage, TKS, reality Smasher, karn, cost reducers out of storm, t3 gifts if they have a reducer in play, The list just goes on. Most of my interaction is in the early turns, because that's when most of our opponents are trying to get ahead.

I have to admit, having honestly tested all kinds of different draw systems in Esper, playing a bunch of cantrips and a low land count is one of the last things I would do to the deck. It works in legacy because of how threat-light the format is, and how hyper-efficient every single card is. It doesn't improve a thing in Esper unless you cut the bomb late game spells that make Esper's ability to over the top. Sure, a lot of inbuilt card advantage/selection in small increments in is a good late game -- but you know what a great late game is? A Zenith for lethal. A Rev that draws you a new hand and stabilizes your life total, almost guarunteeing you can't lose. I'd much rather be banking on those one-shot "kills" than hard-casting Architects, playing Lingering Souls, Tasigur, or Spell Quellers, and defaulting ECharms to divination mode to continue grinding out a win the slow way. There's just no need to, and the longer it takes, the more likely they are to resolve a real threat and take the advantage back in an instant. Both Rev and Zenith are fine for X=2 too, honestly. Divination + 2 life is definitely something we'd be happy to do (and it still scales), and 2 tokens is a nice buffer with low opportunity cost since Zenith Shuffles back in. People complain about these cards too much, but I've won many games just making due with what my hands deliver me and playing smart.

Tasigur in the main? Ok, I can see the logic behind it (though I wouldn't play it because of the weakness to removal -- that said, it doesn't die to Push, I guess). But building the deck to cycle into most every land drop instead of interacting every with all of your mana every turn, all while taking away the blowout lategame for a grind-out lategame with heavy reliance on the graveyard is NOT what I want to be doing. I like the brews and new strategies (hence why I playtested it all so long ago) but it's just not there to me.

I honestly feel like if you have genuinely good pay-off, either style works quite well. One of the reasons miracles can play 12 cantrips is because of monastery mentor. Delver decks get young pyromancer along with delver itself.
For esper, we have payoff in white suns and rev. If you want to play a bunch of cheap cycling spells/cantrips, thats fine, if you have sufficient payoff.
What that sufficient pay off is, is harder to say in modern though. We don't have an obvious answer like mentor. Maybe the new search will be enough, but its hard to say.

I think legacy control pulls it off because they are facing mostly decks that either:

A) try to win turns 1-4 with a combo, which they try to disrupt

B) try to out-tempo the control player with "free" spells (hence more mana efficient)

Or

C) try to lock you completely out of your game through some resource denial or another.

In legacy, you have FREE counter spells (Daze and FoW), you have Git Probe for perfect info, cabal therapy to decimate an opponents hand, brainstorm to turn junk into good stuff and then fetch it away, preordain is legal, your wincon ends the game in 3-5 turns and isn't readily handled by any commonly played removal... et al

Quote from Cody_X »

I honestly feel like if you have genuinely good pay-off, either style works quite well. One of the reasons miracles can play 12 cantrips is because of monastery mentor. Delver decks get young pyromancer along with delver itself.
For esper, we have payoff in white suns and rev. If you want to play a bunch of cheap cycling spells/cantrips, thats fine, if you have sufficient payoff.
What that sufficient pay off is, is harder to say in modern though. We don't have an obvious answer like mentor. Maybe the new search will be enough, but its hard to say.

As much as I love Search, I don't think it enables turbo-xerox style of build. I do think the payoff is massive, but one of the reasons why I'm so high on the card is that it doesn't require deck building concessions. I started my testing on 24 lands 2 Search since search is actually a land, that effectively puts us on ~>25 lands. Which seems fine with a few extra cantrips in opt.

I want it to be known, I wholeheartedly agree that I think Search is a great card. I haven't flipped it more than a handful of times in a dozen games, but if it sticks it's pretty brutal. Like a zero-resource Impulse is backbreaking against many decks.

I slotted it over 3rd snap and 2nd Blessed Alliance essentially, I kept 26 lands but bumped to 3 Ghost quarter

Can you elaborate Kodieyost? Is it not flipping because you aren't seeing it often? How often are you casting it before you already have threshold, and when you do, are you getting much value off the GY-Scry? I've only got a small sample of games with it so far as well, so the more info the better.

Quote from jayjayhooks »

As much as I love Search, I don't think it enables turbo-xerox style of build. I do think the payoff is massive, but one of the reasons why I'm so high on the card is that it doesn't require deck building concessions. I started my testing on 24 lands 2 Search since search is actually a land, that effectively puts us on ~>25 lands. Which seems fine with a few extra cantrips in opt.

Other way around. Search doesn't enable xerox, xerox enables search. Having it active early is massive payoff as you mentioned, and if xerox is already the "best" style of deck anyways, why not, right?
Its mana light (its even a land), which logically makes sense if you're cutting lands in your deck.

I typically jam it out 1-2 turns before threshold if I have other mana. I never want to jam it T2/3, and rarely T4 unless I have Negate or logic Knot to back it up (MU dependent of course)

The one game it flipped was so long and Grindy against Eldrazi with a sea gate and cavern in play (on construct), I was kind of upset to send Ghost Quarter to the bottom 1/2 times but otherwise it helped me find a lot of gas in the late game. The scry didn't matter a ton because I wanted the verdict and the path

I've been following this thread since March and enjoy reading it, as it has a high information-density and most of the discussions are interesting. Since april I am working on my own esper draw-go deck. There is still room for improvement, such as replacing the shambling vents for celestials and put in 1 more cryptic. Due to the pricing of these cards I'm bound to a slow, but steady, improvement. I hope you guys can give me some feedback.

For those who have done a lot of testing with Search, have you not found playing Snaps and 3 Logic Knots to diminish the ability to flip it? I feel like if you're not flipping it reasonably soon the value of this card goes way down. Think Twice has some funny synergy with this card being both anti-synergy and synergistic (flashing it back from GY removes it from GY, but binning it to the GY from top of library has value). If people are having good results with the card over a significant sample size I'll do some testing with the card myself.

Hey Cipher, how many wraths are you playing in your 24 land list and how many 4+ mana spells are you playing? Have you found that you're generally able to cast these consistently on time? I could see adding a Damnation to the MB, which effectively gives me 3 "sweepers" in the 75 with 1MB/SB and 1 Night of Souls' Betrayal. I feel like my list gets the most use of Snapcaster out of any Esper list - with the selection + cheap spot removal and flashbacking Scour the Lab @ 6 mana (where you never want to flashback Rev when you're on 6 mana). I think people underrate the efficacy of Snapcaster in lists like mine compared to stock lists. Snapcaster is one of the best cards in the format. I think prioritizing its effectiveness and being able to run 4 is important and contributes to higher ceiling for the deck.

Regarding the strength of snapcasters:

I hate to play him as one of my few and sole wincons, because I've played games where the opponent is just jamming down dudes for more consecutive turns than I can jam removal. Does that Make sense?

For example, against Blue Moon on Tuesday (I was playing Living End this week), I just started hardcasing fat dudes starting on turn 5. Granted he didn't have quite so much removal as us; he did have way more counter spells, and more ways even to flash them back with MB Gearhulk. Without even casting Living End I was able to just keep putting a large body on the board every turn until he ran out of answers.

Quote from kodieyost »

I think we are all coming to a bold division: play fewer lands, more cheap cantrips to find said lands, and apply some form of early pressure vs more lands, naturally draw them, and bury the opponent in actual card advantage.

Neither deck can objectively claim to be better, because they do different things. A gold fish cannot be compared to a monkey in regards to its ability to climb trees.

A bit exaggerated. I'm basically running Wafo's list with 1 less land and a Runed Halo main. I know we all like to believe that there are critical thresholds where if you cut a land you'll start getting mana screwed, but I went down to 24 and I'm still flooding hard.

Quote from Aegraen »

Hey Cipher, how many wraths are you playing in your 24 land list and how many 4+ mana spells are you playing? Have you found that you're generally able to cast these consistently on time? I could see adding a Damnation to the MB, which effectively gives me 3 "sweepers" in the 75 with 1MB/SB and 1 Night of Souls' Betrayal. I feel like my list gets the most use of Snapcaster out of any Esper list - with the selection + cheap spot removal and flashbacking Scour the Lab @ 6 mana (where you never want to flashback Rev when you're on 6 mana). I think people underrate the efficacy of Snapcaster in lists like mine compared to stock lists. Snapcaster is one of the best cards in the format. I think prioritizing its effectiveness and being able to run 4 is important and contributes to higher ceiling for the deck.

I think you should probably be running the same 6 spot/3sweeper package as the rest, but so be it. You're missing a positional advantage permanent like Tasigur or Gideons, so why load up spot removal?

Like I said earlier, I run a basic list with Serum Visions and a reduced land count. I have cut 1 Cryptic and WSZ for 2 Gideon of the Trials in a recent version, but Gideon feels fragile to me and is only great against Death's Shadow or Jund. I do think you want to be on 8 or less 4-mana spells, but that's more because only Revelation and Verdict have enough real payoff in this deck to justify sitting dead in your opener. Cryptic feels sweet because it puts you up a card, but so do:

Thought-Knot Seer
Matter Reshaper
Walking Ballista
Reality Smasher
Snapcaster Mage
Tasigur (maybe)
Kolaghan's Command

...and so on. These things all outgrind Think Twices, Cryptics, and Esper Charms (which are 50/50 to just draw more land). You think if you play a critical density of these that you can outdraw your opponent, but in reality you should be outdrawn by almost every deck in the format if you don't cast a Revelation. On average, a 26-land version of this deck should draw 5.2 lands and 6.8 spells by turn 5. A 20-land burn deck will draw 4 lands and 8 spells. This means you need to resolve 2 relevant cantrips or Divination effects to even be up 1 card (Snapcaster's 2/1 body rarely counts, these days). Expensive cards are only worth it to me if they have proportional effects. Verdict completely eliminates the positional advantage of a Death's Shadow player dumping 3 guys on the board after a Thoughtseize, for example.

That's not to say Cryptic isn't worth playing, I just plan on replacing them as I come up with better, cheaper options.

They have key differences in a major area though: Cryptic is reactive, so we don't commit mana to it until it's the most opportune time to do it.

As someone who played BW Eldrazi for quite a while, you whiff with T2/3 TKS more often than you'd expect, and these days most decks have some sort of strategy for dealing with big dumb creatures anyway, from dismember to PtE and up to planeswalker abilities.

Cryptic sitting in my hand for multiple turns (assuming I have the mana to play it) means my opponent isn't doing anything relevant enough to warrant me stopping their progression. I've won more games off of snap-cryptic loops than I care to count, a vast majority of them being games I shouldn't have won (Dredge for one).

Just my $0.02 on Cryptic, of course if you're playing a more aggressive style then there isn't much else to do or say - cryptic just shouldn't be a 4-of.

I've seen several Jeskai control players starting to pop up at locals, so I am assuming they've figured out the Eldrazi and DS matchup pretty well.

My point is that when you have Cryptic in your opener, you have to clear the critical stages of the game without any help from yet another card in your hand. Most decks in Modern have a critical turn of 3 or 4, and you may have effectively lost the game or be in a non-recoverable state by the time you can pass the turn with 4 mana untapped. Cryptic's ability to bounce permanents to reduce some positional advantage is probably it's saving grace (even if it's not used that often), but for the most part its a card best used when you're in a comfy position. If there was a suitable replacement I'd say remove it entirely, but we're short on options in a deck like this.

Once again, nobody's playing "aggressive versions". Even the guy talking about Tasigur doesn't actually have those in his list. On top of that, Cryptic is actually better in lists that get on the board early, since you may very well be ahead on board, come turn 4 and a card like Cryptic becomes all you need to close the game out.