Remand is a tempo card, it's only good if you're killing them or using the alternate "mode" in counter wars.
If you remand their turn 3 play you still need to find a real answer for their threat, which is especially difficult if it's a non-creature, non-enchantment spell. It's a demanding task when 34+/60 cards in your deck are draw spells and land.
I guess if you're remanding against a creature only strategy that doesn't kill you by turn 4 it's fine, but most decks don't care about remand at all.
Esper is a deck that needs to answer every threat before it stabilizes and remand doesn't answer anything.
Additionally, Shadow of Doubt, as I said before, is extremely often UU Counter+Draw or UU Destroy a Land+Draw, sometimes even better with GQ or Path. At worst it cycles when you need it to, not something you can say for Remand.
Remand is a tempo card, it's only good if you're killing them or using the alternate "mode" in counter wars.
If you remand their turn 3 play you still need to find a real answer for their threat, which is especially difficult if it's a non-creature, non-enchantment spell. It's a demanding task when 34+/60 cards in your deck are draw spells and land.
I guess if you're remanding against a creature only strategy that doesn't kill you by turn 4 it's fine, but most decks don't care about remand at all.
Esper is a deck that needs to answer every threat before it stabilizes and remand doesn't answer anything.
Additionally, Shadow of Doubt, as I said before, is extremely often UU Counter+Draw or UU Destroy a Land+Draw, sometimes even better with GQ or Path. At worst it cycles when you need it to, not something you can say for Remand.
You don't have to be killing them with the tempo -- you just have to be making use of it. Remand doesn't have to do damage to them to be good, it just has to forward the game plan while halting theirs. Delver's plan is to get you dead -- so Remand buys them extra damage. If my plan is to survive to the late game while playing lands, delaying them for a turn is 100% worth it. It's true that Remand doesn't always cycle when you want it to, but the tradeoff is that it either is meaningful interaction with the opponent for 2 mana, or it just cycles and forces the opponent to tap more mana in the late game (when they cast something).
To clarify, my experience with SoD has shown it to be relatively useless. I don't care if they get a land from GQ or Path -- playing LD in a deck that goes to turn 20 is pointless. They will draw more lands. Whatever.
Shadow has been great against Chord/Scapeshift/Tron since they operate on search mechanics at varying degrees. Against everything else, it's done literally nothing unless I deliberately play worse to play into the SoD -- like waiting too long on Path/GQ to get "value" from SoD (to make the Shadow actually do something).
Edit: And Remand is also great against Chord/Tron/Scapeshift -- just not a total blowout. But Remand is much more useful elsewhere.
Remand is a tempo card, it's only good if you're killing them or using the alternate "mode" in counter wars.
If you remand their turn 3 play you still need to find a real answer for their threat, which is especially difficult if it's a non-creature, non-enchantment spell. It's a demanding task when 34+/60 cards in your deck are draw spells and land.
I guess if you're remanding against a creature only strategy that doesn't kill you by turn 4 it's fine, but most decks don't care about remand at all.
Esper is a deck that needs to answer every threat before it stabilizes and remand doesn't answer anything.
Additionally, Shadow of Doubt, as I said before, is extremely often UU Counter+Draw or UU Destroy a Land+Draw, sometimes even better with GQ or Path. At worst it cycles when you need it to, not something you can say for Remand.
You're tunneling in on the games you lose to a card you can't deal with. In a game of Magic, both players start with an opening hand of 7. You each take turns, with the 1 land drop you receive each turn dictating the pace at which those cards can be played out. Most decks use this to build up a positional advantage in early turns, whereas (draw-go) Control decks use cheap interaction to extend their life total long enough for card advantage gleaned from draw spells to either snowball the suite of 1-for-1 disruption or hit a singular card that can reset any positional advantage the opponent accrued (Verdict, Stony Silence, Leyline, etc).
After (successfully) playing Control for long enough, you realize that the enemy isn't the creatures and spells in your opponent's hand, it's the positional advantage your opponent can accrue in the early turns while you're establishing your mana base. It's the same with every Control deck, except for the prison variations that goldfish for lock pieces like Ghostly Prison or Ensnaring Bridge. Maybe your opponent is playing a deck like Eldrazi with nothing but creatures; from a card advantage standpoint you have nothing but disruption and cards that draw extra disruption, yourself.
Imagine we remove mana (or tempo, if you want) from the equation and let each player start with Fastbond in play. Can you imagine what the win rate would be for a deck like this? With enough draw spells, you can theoretically always out-draw your opponent, with the bottleneck being the pressure your opponent can exert early while you burn mana simply increasing your hand size and hitting land drops. The way I see it, the real value of Supreme Verdict isn't that it generates card advantage, it's that it wipes away any positional advantage built up while you were busy durdling.
You're using the same kind of logic that makes people look at the original Wafo list, with 7 removal spells, and laugh at the idea that this deck can beat aggro. Personally, whenever I play Control decks (i.e. whenever I play Magic), I'm focused on how much momentum my opponent can build in the first few turns. I always build my decks so that I can snowball in the mid-lategame. That's why I finally quit Standard this year; they nerfed the ability of blue decks to snowball, and forced people to play and vulnerable creatures in order to pull ahead.
Let's say you're playing against a deck with 36 Grizzly Bears, and 24 lands. You build a deck with 2 White Sun's Zenith, 34 Doom Blades, and 24 lands. You're obviously going to lose, right? You need an advantage greater than the percentage chance of hitting WSZ to make up for the fact that removal can't attack for damage and is inherently weaker than what it removes. Now how many Think Twice do you need to add to make that a 60/40 matchup? 8? 16? If you start with a conservative 8, and lose a pile of games to the "1 unanswered Grizzly Bear", are you going to swear up and down that you need to cut another land or Think Twice, because you topdecked that instead of the Doom Blade you needed? The reason you died to the Grizzly Bear wasn't because you needed a Doom Blade, it's because you needed a stronger engine in the first place. Simply answering every threat is a low-percentage gameplan, and if you focus on recreating the games you win as opposed to avoiding the games you lose, you end up with a proactive engine deck, regardless of what people want to label it. This is why most bad Control decks in Standard formats look like a pile of removal spells and counters, with 4-8 planeswalkers. Their strategy is to trade removal until they land a planeswalker, but that's the gameplan for midrange decks, and they do it better. In the absence of a synergistic engine, 90/10 removal/bombs loses to 60/40 removal/bombs all day. Decks like the Lingering Souls + Sorin builds people throw around are never going to perform well. They'll eventually get benched or their pilots will add Bitterblossoms and more planeswalkers till their realize Jund is just better. Same thing goes for those anemic Grixis decks that try and run 8 creatures. All disruption, and then your "Blue 2.0" payoff (read: Jace, Vryn's Prodigy) dies to a Lightning Bolt. No thank you. Quit frontin' and run those Pyromancers, already. Same goes for UWR, at least until they unban the "1-stop card advantage engine" known as Ancestral Visions.
TLDR: A few creature matchups in Modern are essentially Combo, like Infect or Burn, and are inherently weak to 1-for-1 disruption spells. For most everything else, going over the top is the only way this isn't just a bad deck. Remand helps "ramp" to the point where you can go over the top, and should only be replaced if a card shows it can go over the top, itself. Shadow of Doubt, Hallowed Moonlight, Negate, each cause shutdowns in only a small slice of the metagame, and don't currently fit that bill. I think the closest contender at the time is Runed Halo, and I'm running 2 copies in the flex slots that used to be Shadow of Doubt, back in the Birthing Pod/Jund/Tron metagame.
i am still not 100% sold on remand at the moment, but i am going to still run it for a while.
but Runed Halo seems legit, i mean its a complete blow out vs some decks like boggles i need to test it out
do you still have to discard if you name Liliana of the veil (im pretty sure you do but making sure)
Yes, lili does not target so her discard will hit you. But on the upside you're immune to her ultimate!
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i am still not 100% sold on remand at the moment, but i am going to still run it for a while.
but Runed Halo seems legit, i mean its a complete blow out vs some decks like boggles i need to test it out
do you still have to discard if you name Liliana of the veil (im pretty sure you do but making sure)
Yes, lili does not target so her discard will hit you. But on the upside you're immune to her ultimate!
You're also immune to her -2...so your Snapcasters and Cat Tokens are safe
"He plays in a walk in humidor so keep his foils from bending. He once kept an all land hand just to know what it felt like to be mana flooded. He uses power nine for ante. He is the most interesting magic playing in the world." Old man, "I don't always tap basic lands for mana, but when i do, I tap Gurus."
LD provides the same amount or more tempo as remand does, and if they don't hit lands they can't cast their spells on time.
I'd rather the card be stuck in their hand than have them just jam it the following turn.
Also, have fun remanding 1 drops, cause that's what it does right now. Literally nothing.
You're not wrong, I've never thought of it that way -- it's sort of like saying that Shadow "Remands" their land for turn, but they don't get it back (just an attempt to compare the 2 cards). As much as I hate to test out Shadow for the 3rd time since I got on this deck, I'll probably have to keep testing it. Either I'll figure out why I've been wrong, or I'll be able to articulate better why I can't get behind it.
Perhaps the answer is that neither should be run, since they both do nothing a portion of the time. Maybe I just cut those 2 slots for +1 Condemn, +1x Vendilion Clique/Leyline/something.
Remsnd is a fine bridge to get to the mid and late game. We do not have to answer everything and eventually we get to the point were we just go over the top of every deck except for tron. You just need to get to 6 plus lands drops with an empty board and a life total at 10 or higher.
Perhaps the answer is that neither should be run, since they both do nothing a portion of the time. Maybe I just cut those 2 slots for +1 Condemn, +1x Vendilion Clique/Leyline/something.
I was only running a 1 of remand before, and when I picked it up again recently I made changes for Eldrazi meta and cut the Remand for the Condemn in the main. Also cut a mainboard negate for an extra Verdict. Haven't played much with it so I'm not sure how much I'm missing remand or not though.
"He plays in a walk in humidor so keep his foils from bending. He once kept an all land hand just to know what it felt like to be mana flooded. He uses power nine for ante. He is the most interesting magic playing in the world." Old man, "I don't always tap basic lands for mana, but when i do, I tap Gurus."
After as some reflection, I know why I prefer Remand to Shadow: because it usually interacts on the stack. The main reason for that preference has always been Tron, but recently it's been Collected Company decks. It's like you've said, Swiftspear... they do similar things, but Shadow is preemptive (stopping them from casting the card in the first place) and Remand is more reactive (letting them cast first). I personally think the more reactive option is more fitting for Esper. That said, SoD can also be reactive sometimes (like in rsp to a Chord or Scapeshift).
It may just be a proactive-vs-reactive discussion.
I am interested on playing Esper Draw-Go but my pool has "only" 3 Cryptic Command.
How could I replace the fourth? I do know it is just insane and it has "no-replacement" but there must be something flexible to fit in that spot, right? https://gyazo.com/c0f23f18a57700e3571a55cf6e3bcbc9 this is the list (with 4 cryptics, but I own 3 ofc)
Personally 4 path has never been enough for me. I always run at least one more in addition to a pseudo removal spell like detention sphere or soon to be anguished unmaking. Even with 4 wraths sometimes you need something at instant speed or extra 1 for 1 like against infect.
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A completely different opinion: 4 think twice is core. Don't even consider cutting any until you've played a couple games with the list.
The fourth spell snare is pretty good. A second shadow is good (second is better than the first, IMO). I would much rather be playing some of these cards than trying to just cram more removal into the deck.
Love this deck. Been playing for the past two years off an on at my LGS. Just a few thoughts I was hoping to get people's opinions of since the format is likely to shake up a tiny bit in the next month:
1. The first one regards our card advantage slots. It looks relatively common to run a total of 10 card advantage cards (4 Think Twice, 4 Esper Charm, 2 Sphinx's Revelation) with some other options for less guaranteed advantage through spells like Remand and Shadow of Doubt (not in all lists). If there were other instant-speed options for card advantage under 4 CMC (not including Murmurs from Beyond), would you cut Esper Charm? I know Esper Charm is amazing, but the things it does to our mana base are not. If we had other options (like 1UU - Instant - Draw 2 cards), would you run that over Esper Charm? I am wondering if a Think Twice style card from this block could be around the corner. Something like 1U - Instant - Draw a card. Investigate [or U - Instant - Investigate Twice]. Not trying to speculate on cards that may or may not be coming, just trying to get a feel of what's ideal. The reason I ask is that I've played the UW lists as well (more reactive, less tap out) mana base and it feels so much more slick than ours does, especially when it comes to having access to more ability to interact with lands (great in Infect and Tron matchups). You take next to no damage from your lands (maybe running a total of four fetches, and you don't even that to hit your colors). Sometimes against aggressive decks it feels like the pure UW mana base alone helps buy you an extra turn. Most of us aren't running much in the sideboard that is black and in a huge chunk of lists, the only time you absolutely need black mana maindeck is for Esper Charm
2. Celestial Colonnade - Card is great when they have no cards in hand, but activating it sometimes feels very risky, especially with the currently-run removal in the format. Has anyone else experimented with different options? I don't question the ability of colonnade as a clock, but I often feel I have to fire off a Esper Charm at my opponent once or twice before I feel like I'm in the clear to start attacking with the 4/4s. One option I briefly tried is Temple of Enlightenment (the Scry 1 helps with digging). I feel it is a much more early-game orientated land that helps us find what we need to stabilize. Certainly it is much weaker than Colonnade as the game progresses but even as a late game draw the Scry effect when you don't need additional mana does dig you closer to a win-con.
3. Choice of Finisher - I've seen Elspeth, Sun's Champion having a reasonable amount of success over in the UW lists. I wonder if this, as a two of, is a reasonable enough option as opposed to White Sun's Zenith. Anyone able to comment on this?
4. Anguished Unmaking - If we're keeping black, this seems like a card we would love to have if we could ignore the life loss. I feel like we can fit one of these in, but we will feel it, especially if we need to use Snapcaster Mage in conjunction with it. Are there any good modern-playable maindeck lifegain cards we can use to help offset this? Right now we have Sphinx's Revelation. I can think of Tribute to Hunger but I'm not sure we want that.
Love this deck. Been playing for the past two years off an on at my LGS. Just a few thoughts I was hoping to get people's opinions of since the format is likely to shake up a tiny bit in the next month:
1. The first one regards our card advantage slots. It looks relatively common to run a total of 10 card advantage cards (4 Think Twice, 4 Esper Charm, 2 Sphinx's Revelation) with some other options for less guaranteed advantage through spells like Remand and Shadow of Doubt (not in all lists). If there were other instant-speed options for card advantage under 4 CMC (not including Murmurs from Beyond), would you cut Esper Charm? I know Esper Charm is amazing, but the things it does to our mana base are not. If we had other options (like 1UU - Instant - Draw 2 cards), would you run that over Esper Charm? I am wondering if a Think Twice style card from this block could be around the corner. Something like 1U - Instant - Draw a card. Investigate [or U - Instant - Investigate Twice]. Not trying to speculate on cards that may or may not be coming, just trying to get a feel of what's ideal. The reason I ask is that I've played the UW lists as well (more reactive, less tap out) mana base and it feels so much more slick than ours does, especially when it comes to having access to more ability to interact with lands (great in Infect and Tron matchups). You take next to no damage from your lands (maybe running a total of four fetches, and you don't even that to hit your colors). Sometimes against aggressive decks it feels like the pure UW mana base alone helps buy you an extra turn. Most of us aren't running much in the sideboard that is black and in a huge chunk of lists, the only time you absolutely need black mana maindeck is for Esper Charm
It depends on what we get. Right now esper charm is the best card draw spell in the format that doesn't make you want to punch a baby over how terrible it is. We might get AV at some point, maybe FoF will get a reprint, who knows? As it stands a draw spell that's also interactive is a pretty big deal.
2. Celestial Colonnade - Card is great when they have no cards in hand, but activating it sometimes feels very risky, especially with the currently-run removal in the format. Has anyone else experimented with different options? I don't question the ability of colonnade as a clock, but I often feel I have to fire off a Esper Charm at my opponent once or twice before I feel like I'm in the clear to start attacking with the 4/4s. One option I briefly tried is Temple of Enlightenment (the Scry 1 helps with digging). I feel it is a much more early-game orientated land that helps us find what we need to stabilize. Certainly it is much weaker than Colonnade as the game progresses but even as a late game draw the Scry effect when you don't need additional mana does dig you closer to a win-con.
I've tried running temples in esper and in straight UW, but the additional tap lands are too detrimental and lead to you having to shock way more than you normally would. Then add to that the 7+ fetch lands we have the scry becomes almost entirely pointless.
3. Choice of Finisher - I've seen Elspeth, Sun's Champion having a reasonable amount of success over in the UW lists. I wonder if this, as a two of, is a reasonable enough option as opposed to White Sun's Zenith. Anyone able to comment on this?
It's a fine option, but you should absolutely never, ever cut the zenith. It's how we get inevitability, it allows us to beat infinite life which several others in this thread, myself included, have done on more than one occasion. Also against the unfair decks we just can't afford the risk of tapping out for a 6 drop so the instant speed is also a major reason for why the card is too important to lose.
4. Anguished Unmaking - If we're keeping black, this seems like a card we would love to have if we could ignore the life loss. I feel like we can fit one of these in, but we will feel it, especially if we need to use Snapcaster Mage in conjunction with it. Are there any good modern-playable maindeck lifegain cards we can use to help offset this? Right now we have Sphinx's Revelation. I can think of Tribute to Hunger but I'm not sure we want that.
1 copy is fine, but with a second in the main you'll need some proper life gain outside of revelation. I've tried ojutai's command and it was 'meh' at best, but a MD timely reinforcements isn't the worst thing ever and really come in handy often.
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If you remand their turn 3 play you still need to find a real answer for their threat, which is especially difficult if it's a non-creature, non-enchantment spell. It's a demanding task when 34+/60 cards in your deck are draw spells and land.
I guess if you're remanding against a creature only strategy that doesn't kill you by turn 4 it's fine, but most decks don't care about remand at all.
Esper is a deck that needs to answer every threat before it stabilizes and remand doesn't answer anything.
Additionally, Shadow of Doubt, as I said before, is extremely often UU Counter+Draw or UU Destroy a Land+Draw, sometimes even better with GQ or Path. At worst it cycles when you need it to, not something you can say for Remand.
This. Take my plus one.
You don't have to be killing them with the tempo -- you just have to be making use of it. Remand doesn't have to do damage to them to be good, it just has to forward the game plan while halting theirs. Delver's plan is to get you dead -- so Remand buys them extra damage. If my plan is to survive to the late game while playing lands, delaying them for a turn is 100% worth it. It's true that Remand doesn't always cycle when you want it to, but the tradeoff is that it either is meaningful interaction with the opponent for 2 mana, or it just cycles and forces the opponent to tap more mana in the late game (when they cast something).
UWB Esper Draw-Go Control (clicky)
UW Azorius Control (clicky)
Currently pursuing a degree in Biochemistry.
EDH: I've decided I don't like multiplayer formats.
Shadow has been great against Chord/Scapeshift/Tron since they operate on search mechanics at varying degrees. Against everything else, it's done literally nothing unless I deliberately play worse to play into the SoD -- like waiting too long on Path/GQ to get "value" from SoD (to make the Shadow actually do something).
Edit: And Remand is also great against Chord/Tron/Scapeshift -- just not a total blowout. But Remand is much more useful elsewhere.
UWB Esper Draw-Go Control (clicky)
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Currently pursuing a degree in Biochemistry.
EDH: I've decided I don't like multiplayer formats.
I'd rather the card be stuck in their hand than have them just jam it the following turn.
Also, have fun remanding 1 drops, cause that's what it does right now. Literally nothing.
You're tunneling in on the games you lose to a card you can't deal with. In a game of Magic, both players start with an opening hand of 7. You each take turns, with the 1 land drop you receive each turn dictating the pace at which those cards can be played out. Most decks use this to build up a positional advantage in early turns, whereas (draw-go) Control decks use cheap interaction to extend their life total long enough for card advantage gleaned from draw spells to either snowball the suite of 1-for-1 disruption or hit a singular card that can reset any positional advantage the opponent accrued (Verdict, Stony Silence, Leyline, etc).
After (successfully) playing Control for long enough, you realize that the enemy isn't the creatures and spells in your opponent's hand, it's the positional advantage your opponent can accrue in the early turns while you're establishing your mana base. It's the same with every Control deck, except for the prison variations that goldfish for lock pieces like Ghostly Prison or Ensnaring Bridge. Maybe your opponent is playing a deck like Eldrazi with nothing but creatures; from a card advantage standpoint you have nothing but disruption and cards that draw extra disruption, yourself.
Imagine we remove mana (or tempo, if you want) from the equation and let each player start with Fastbond in play. Can you imagine what the win rate would be for a deck like this? With enough draw spells, you can theoretically always out-draw your opponent, with the bottleneck being the pressure your opponent can exert early while you burn mana simply increasing your hand size and hitting land drops. The way I see it, the real value of Supreme Verdict isn't that it generates card advantage, it's that it wipes away any positional advantage built up while you were busy durdling.
You're using the same kind of logic that makes people look at the original Wafo list, with 7 removal spells, and laugh at the idea that this deck can beat aggro. Personally, whenever I play Control decks (i.e. whenever I play Magic), I'm focused on how much momentum my opponent can build in the first few turns. I always build my decks so that I can snowball in the mid-lategame. That's why I finally quit Standard this year; they nerfed the ability of blue decks to snowball, and forced people to play and vulnerable creatures in order to pull ahead.
Let's say you're playing against a deck with 36 Grizzly Bears, and 24 lands. You build a deck with 2 White Sun's Zenith, 34 Doom Blades, and 24 lands. You're obviously going to lose, right? You need an advantage greater than the percentage chance of hitting WSZ to make up for the fact that removal can't attack for damage and is inherently weaker than what it removes. Now how many Think Twice do you need to add to make that a 60/40 matchup? 8? 16? If you start with a conservative 8, and lose a pile of games to the "1 unanswered Grizzly Bear", are you going to swear up and down that you need to cut another land or Think Twice, because you topdecked that instead of the Doom Blade you needed? The reason you died to the Grizzly Bear wasn't because you needed a Doom Blade, it's because you needed a stronger engine in the first place. Simply answering every threat is a low-percentage gameplan, and if you focus on recreating the games you win as opposed to avoiding the games you lose, you end up with a proactive engine deck, regardless of what people want to label it. This is why most bad Control decks in Standard formats look like a pile of removal spells and counters, with 4-8 planeswalkers. Their strategy is to trade removal until they land a planeswalker, but that's the gameplan for midrange decks, and they do it better. In the absence of a synergistic engine, 90/10 removal/bombs loses to 60/40 removal/bombs all day. Decks like the Lingering Souls + Sorin builds people throw around are never going to perform well. They'll eventually get benched or their pilots will add Bitterblossoms and more planeswalkers till their realize Jund is just better. Same thing goes for those anemic Grixis decks that try and run 8 creatures. All disruption, and then your "Blue 2.0" payoff (read: Jace, Vryn's Prodigy) dies to a Lightning Bolt. No thank you. Quit frontin' and run those Pyromancers, already. Same goes for UWR, at least until they unban the "1-stop card advantage engine" known as Ancestral Visions.
TLDR: A few creature matchups in Modern are essentially Combo, like Infect or Burn, and are inherently weak to 1-for-1 disruption spells. For most everything else, going over the top is the only way this isn't just a bad deck. Remand helps "ramp" to the point where you can go over the top, and should only be replaced if a card shows it can go over the top, itself. Shadow of Doubt, Hallowed Moonlight, Negate, each cause shutdowns in only a small slice of the metagame, and don't currently fit that bill. I think the closest contender at the time is Runed Halo, and I'm running 2 copies in the flex slots that used to be Shadow of Doubt, back in the Birthing Pod/Jund/Tron metagame.
Just my 2 cents, anyway. Forums are good times...
Yes, card advantage helps you pull ahead, and that's the gameplan for the deck, I'm not arguing that.
I just think Remand is a bad card right now. You obviously disagree. That's fine. Keep playing it.
Yes, lili does not target so her discard will hit you. But on the upside you're immune to her ultimate!
You're also immune to her -2...so your Snapcasters and Cat Tokens are safe
You're not wrong, I've never thought of it that way -- it's sort of like saying that Shadow "Remands" their land for turn, but they don't get it back (just an attempt to compare the 2 cards). As much as I hate to test out Shadow for the 3rd time since I got on this deck, I'll probably have to keep testing it. Either I'll figure out why I've been wrong, or I'll be able to articulate better why I can't get behind it.
Perhaps the answer is that neither should be run, since they both do nothing a portion of the time. Maybe I just cut those 2 slots for +1 Condemn, +1x Vendilion Clique/Leyline/something.
Why can't Wizards just give us Counterspll? QQ
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EDH: I've decided I don't like multiplayer formats.
I was only running a 1 of remand before, and when I picked it up again recently I made changes for Eldrazi meta and cut the Remand for the Condemn in the main. Also cut a mainboard negate for an extra Verdict. Haven't played much with it so I'm not sure how much I'm missing remand or not though.
It may just be a proactive-vs-reactive discussion.
UWB Esper Draw-Go Control (clicky)
UW Azorius Control (clicky)
Currently pursuing a degree in Biochemistry.
EDH: I've decided I don't like multiplayer formats.
How could I replace the fourth? I do know it is just insane and it has "no-replacement" but there must be something flexible to fit in that spot, right?
https://gyazo.com/c0f23f18a57700e3571a55cf6e3bcbc9 this is the list (with 4 cryptics, but I own 3 ofc)
BURGrixis ControlBUR
BURGrixis DelverBUR (RIP)
UWBEsper GiftsUWB
UWUW Jace ControlUW
GUBSultai ControlGUB
UBTezzeret Agent of BolasUB
BURGrixis ControlBUR
BURGrixis DelverBUR (RIP)
UWBEsper GiftsUWB
UWUW Jace ControlUW
GUBSultai ControlGUB
UBTezzeret Agent of BolasUB
UWB Esper Draw-Go Control (clicky)
UW Azorius Control (clicky)
Currently pursuing a degree in Biochemistry.
EDH: I've decided I don't like multiplayer formats.
The fourth spell snare is pretty good. A second shadow is good (second is better than the first, IMO). I would much rather be playing some of these cards than trying to just cram more removal into the deck.
1. The first one regards our card advantage slots. It looks relatively common to run a total of 10 card advantage cards (4 Think Twice, 4 Esper Charm, 2 Sphinx's Revelation) with some other options for less guaranteed advantage through spells like Remand and Shadow of Doubt (not in all lists). If there were other instant-speed options for card advantage under 4 CMC (not including Murmurs from Beyond), would you cut Esper Charm? I know Esper Charm is amazing, but the things it does to our mana base are not. If we had other options (like 1UU - Instant - Draw 2 cards), would you run that over Esper Charm? I am wondering if a Think Twice style card from this block could be around the corner. Something like 1U - Instant - Draw a card. Investigate [or U - Instant - Investigate Twice]. Not trying to speculate on cards that may or may not be coming, just trying to get a feel of what's ideal. The reason I ask is that I've played the UW lists as well (more reactive, less tap out) mana base and it feels so much more slick than ours does, especially when it comes to having access to more ability to interact with lands (great in Infect and Tron matchups). You take next to no damage from your lands (maybe running a total of four fetches, and you don't even that to hit your colors). Sometimes against aggressive decks it feels like the pure UW mana base alone helps buy you an extra turn. Most of us aren't running much in the sideboard that is black and in a huge chunk of lists, the only time you absolutely need black mana maindeck is for Esper Charm
2. Celestial Colonnade - Card is great when they have no cards in hand, but activating it sometimes feels very risky, especially with the currently-run removal in the format. Has anyone else experimented with different options? I don't question the ability of colonnade as a clock, but I often feel I have to fire off a Esper Charm at my opponent once or twice before I feel like I'm in the clear to start attacking with the 4/4s. One option I briefly tried is Temple of Enlightenment (the Scry 1 helps with digging). I feel it is a much more early-game orientated land that helps us find what we need to stabilize. Certainly it is much weaker than Colonnade as the game progresses but even as a late game draw the Scry effect when you don't need additional mana does dig you closer to a win-con.
3. Choice of Finisher - I've seen Elspeth, Sun's Champion having a reasonable amount of success over in the UW lists. I wonder if this, as a two of, is a reasonable enough option as opposed to White Sun's Zenith. Anyone able to comment on this?
4. Anguished Unmaking - If we're keeping black, this seems like a card we would love to have if we could ignore the life loss. I feel like we can fit one of these in, but we will feel it, especially if we need to use Snapcaster Mage in conjunction with it. Are there any good modern-playable maindeck lifegain cards we can use to help offset this? Right now we have Sphinx's Revelation. I can think of Tribute to Hunger but I'm not sure we want that.
It depends on what we get. Right now esper charm is the best card draw spell in the format that doesn't make you want to punch a baby over how terrible it is. We might get AV at some point, maybe FoF will get a reprint, who knows? As it stands a draw spell that's also interactive is a pretty big deal.
I've tried running temples in esper and in straight UW, but the additional tap lands are too detrimental and lead to you having to shock way more than you normally would. Then add to that the 7+ fetch lands we have the scry becomes almost entirely pointless.
It's a fine option, but you should absolutely never, ever cut the zenith. It's how we get inevitability, it allows us to beat infinite life which several others in this thread, myself included, have done on more than one occasion. Also against the unfair decks we just can't afford the risk of tapping out for a 6 drop so the instant speed is also a major reason for why the card is too important to lose.
1 copy is fine, but with a second in the main you'll need some proper life gain outside of revelation. I've tried ojutai's command and it was 'meh' at best, but a MD timely reinforcements isn't the worst thing ever and really come in handy often.