Vs humans, just crunch in with removal tarmo and ds, and plow through them our creatures, who are way better. As for go wide we have our sb to help with that. DS is one of those decks that can beat anything imo, just comes done to skill of the pilot and some of the card choices in the main and sb. I wanted to see how hymn would work since all the midrange decks would try to play BBE to out value people. DS on the other had out values people by playing super efficient cards similar to legacy delver. Playing a hymn card in modern in a ds deck feel backbreaking for ops imo. I tested sultai ds first as my hymn deck because i wanted access to traverse and tarmo, and thoughtscour. But when testing, i found toughtscour was pure air and did nothing for the deck. So i decided to put in opts. But even they can be replaced imo i think hard to tell. I like the idea of the manamorphose to enable instants in the gy. How ever ds can sometime durdle on 1 land sometimes so thats why i tend to avoid manamophse too much.
Vs humans, just crunch in with removal tarmo and ds, and plow through them our creatures, who are way better. As for go wide we have our sb to help with that. DS is one of those decks that can beat anything imo, just comes done to skill of the pilot and some of the card choices in the main and sb. I wanted to see how hymn would work since all the midrange decks would try to play BBE to out value people. DS on the other had out values people by playing super efficient cards similar to legacy delver. Playing a hymn card in modern in a ds deck feel backbreaking for ops imo. I tested sultai ds first as my hymn deck because i wanted access to traverse and tarmo, and thoughtscour. But when testing, i found toughtscour was pure air and did nothing for the deck. So i decided to put in opts. But even they can be replaced imo i think hard to tell. I like the idea of the manamorphose to enable instants in the gy. How ever ds can sometime durdle on 1 land sometimes so thats why i tend to avoid manamophse too much.
The 1 land hands are what scare me the most about the build I posted. Have you tried Rise // Fall as your Hymn replacement? I have run it in GDS in the past and found it OK.
Rise//fall can be an option, but it can be hard on the mana base. We can all talk the good talk, but we still need to test the lists to see if they work out.
I've been thinking about Whispers for a while and the Hoogland stream inspired me to try my own version. It's better than I expected; both in terms of how good it is when it resolves against a variety of strategies, and how consistently it can be cast on turns 2-4 with delirium online. The sultai deck looks very solid, the numbers look tight and it was gas on stream. The things that stood out to me as not necessarily ideal were the opts (these type of cantrips feel too slow in the deck from previous experience), and not having battle rage, which is just too important against the wide-open modern field IMO.
This is what I've come up with, only about 10 matches deep but it's been smooth:
An extra lili of the veil and push are on the radar for the 75, likely sideboard. Wouldn't mind a Grim Flayer. If anyone tries this list or is running something similar would love to hear input on how to improve the list.
Im personally not a big fan of 4c ds lists. I just hate having the manabase work against me sometimes, like i can def see the stomping grounds kicking you in the butt, cuz black is your highest mana color, but manamophase can help there. I think ds works best as Black Green deck splash X with X being either red or blue. Jund has been considered the best color to ally with, but as you can see sultai looks peaty good also.
Im personally not a big fan of 4c ds lists. I just hate having the manabase work against me sometimes, like i can def see the stomping grounds kicking you in the butt, cuz black is your highest mana color, but manamophase can help there. I think ds works best as Black Green deck splash X with X being either red or blue. Jund has been considered the best color to ally with, but as you can see sultai looks peaty good also.
I can't remember the last time a list that put up results actually ran Stomping Ground.
If you're going for Jund colors, Jund is simply the better option. If you're going for Sultai colors, you're missing out on TBR and a lot of matchups get a lot worse all of a sudden.
4c can be tough as far as mana goes, but if you practice your lines and learn how to play around Blood Moon and Field decks you'll be fine most of the time. Manamorphose is amazing in this regard.
I can't remember the last time a list that put up results actually ran Stomping Ground.
If you're going for Jund colors, Jund is simply the better option. If you're going for Sultai colors, you're missing out on TBR and a lot of matchups get a lot worse all of a sudden.
4c can be tough as far as mana goes, but if you practice your lines and learn how to play around Blood Moon and Field decks you'll be fine most of the time. Manamorphose is amazing in this regard.
The deck that won the modern MOCS or challenge or championship or whatever it was 2-3 months ago ran stomping ground. Straight Jund, 3 TBR main, tarfires, a truly aggressive list. One of the only top finishes Jund Death's shadow has had in a major event other than GP Vancouver in the year since that tournament. Stomping ground is rarely seen these days because the 4c lists are heavier on blue than red, with red being there just for TBR in many cases. Anytime you're running tarfire, stomping ground is a necessity if you want the deck to function consistently, and tarfire has fallen out of favour.
Adding manamorphose to this deck has really put it over the top against blood moon, between discard, stubs, abrupt decay, manamorphose, and simply being fast and getting threats underneath it, I haven't lost to the card in quite a lot of matches now. It's not something you ever really want to see, as you do have to deal with it, but the deck has more tools to deal with it (in a variety of ways) than anyone has blood moons.
Im personally not a big fan of 4c ds lists. I just hate having the manabase work against me sometimes, like i can def see the stomping grounds kicking you in the butt, cuz black is your highest mana color, but manamophase can help there. I think ds works best as Black Green deck splash X with X being either red or blue. Jund has been considered the best color to ally with, but as you can see sultai looks peaty good also.
The list that made T8 at the Modern PT ran 4 colors with a forest, and Jean-Emmanuel admitted afterwards that the forest should have been a breeding pool, as he would have won an extra 2 games. Not the same thing as stomping ground, but a similar philosophy. Many lists with the blue splash being the main colour are still running breeding pool + forest, with the Jund versions running stomping ground instead of Breeding pool. The result is the same, 2 lands that don't produce black mana, backed up by 11-12 fetches. This template has seen success for quite some time regardless of the card choices. The only time you're really in trouble is if the only land you have is one of the forests, or you have both of them. Something that may cause a few mulligans here and there, but comes up to bite you in a very small amount of games (I would guess no more than a deck like traditional Jund might encounter mana issues).
Personally, I like to run an equivalent amount of blue and red. Blue complements the core of the deck better for some matchups, and red the others. Decks like humans, affinity, company variants, etc, I like to have the option to board in to a straight Jund deck. Some control/midrange (grindy) matchups, I board in to a sultai deck. Combo matchups, burn, tron, all 4 colors are good and useful. Modern is just so wide open that you need 4 colors to really have good, powerful options to combat the field. As mentioned, manamorphose really is amazing, and facilitates being able to run all of these configurations so smoothly.
I think the mana becomes less of an issue with more experience. You don't need 4 colors of mana every game; the only blue and red cards in the maindeck are typically TBR and Stub. If you're playing against a creature based deck, you're probably fine skipping the blue, if you do have a stub, there's a good chance its low/no impact, so you can afford to wait to draw another fetchland and enable it later on if you really need to. Against a control deck, I'd do the opposite. Sometimes you can hold manamorphose to cast the card when you need it, especially for a card like TBR, a one time thing that just ends the game most of the time. Post SB in a lot of matchups you are cutting a good portion of one color and leaning on the other, so you can grab crypt/grave depending on your needs after the tomb. Sometimes you have to make a fetching decision and you don't have any blue or red cards yet, by knowing the matchup and understanding how the game is playing out and which cards you're going to need to win, you can decide to grab the color with the highest upside. Most games you just draw 3 fetchlands and it's easy!
I've played this deck so much in the past year, with so many different color configurations, I now feel that 3 colors is too simple. It can play another color for a lot of upside with very little to no downside. If you look at my monstrosity of a list a few posts back, I'm playing stub and tarfire, stomping ground and breeding pool, and I literally have never played a game with the list where I lost because of mana issues. One of my favourite aspects of the deck!
Yeah, used to be you often had to ship a hand with Pool or Forest.. Now with Manamorphose, you can just cast double Inquisition on turn 2 off a UG only hand. It's brilliant.
I've been out of the Death's Shadow game since the BBE unbanning, but I was looking over some of the recently performing lists and noticed that a lot of them seem to have gone down to 17 lands. Was the consensus just that the 18th was unnecessary, or has the overall curve of the deck been going down in that time?
I've been trying The Scarab God lately as a haymaker traverse target that can take over in grindy matchups* in the 4c manamorphose build.
*that don't attack your mana heavily, and don't have Path / Purge. Mostly just Jund.
I don't have much data to work with yet, but so far it's pretty narrow - it's not consistently great against Jund, but there are some spots where they can't beat it. The problem, as always, is that they can kill you with a stiff breeze before it gets going. But it's very complementary with Hazoret - they're good in very different situations.
Interesting. Really needs to stick though and is pretty mana-intensive compared to Hazoret. Any other options you've been considering?
I did some gatherer searches, but mostly came up empty.
Scarab God is sticky on its own though. Sure, they can Terminate or LotV it, but then we just recast it. We just have to make sure we don't die on that turn, and that they don't have Ooze going. Ooze is really one of the biggest problems with this plan.
Would love to hear how you approach the Bant Spirits matchup too. It's always a close one in my experience but they do seem to have the upper hand.
I'm not sure I've played against it, but my knee-jerk reaction is to try to kill them ASAP. The fliers will eventually get us. They have, what, 4-6 removal spells for our fatties? I'd treat it a lot like counters coco, but try to be less reliant on removal - keep the stubs and TBRs in, but leave the Brutalities out. And I guess hope they don't get to stick a Rest in Peace.
Question - just bought into Geneyquakes list). I know budget discussion is frowned upon, but I'm not currently in the position to get the playset of Verdant Catacombs. Barring not fetching the single forest, do you think replacing those with Polluted Delta for the time being is OK? My meta is not infested with blood moon.
There is no avoiding the fact that Verdant Catacombs is the best fetchland in the deck, so playing with Deltas will be suboptimal, but the deck will definitely function. More than Blood Moon, one of the things I would be worried about with Delta is that you will be shocking yourself a bit more, which Burn can definitely take advantage of. You will lose some flexibility points but as long as you are good grabbing shocklands then it is a relatively small concern. I would probably find a way to squeeze in an extra Blood Crypt to give your black fetches a bit more flexibility. Another important point is that if you keep a tally of which fetches get which lands and which colors in your mind while sequencing then you can mitigate some of the awkwardness. It is another annoying thing to keep track of but it will make a positive difference. I know that when I was playing this deck I went kind of fast and loose with the fetchland sequencing at times (which is obviously bad but is just reality, and a luxury having so many on-color fetches can give you), but you have to pay much more attention here if you shift a bit off color.
One thing that I will point out is that the 5-0 list from the most recent MODO batch replaced Wooded Foothills with two Deltas and two Marsh Flats, placing a big priority on black mana. I can't speak to whether his is better than the straight Jund set of 12, but this is a vote of confidence for the idea that a pile of black fetches can be fine, or even preferable.
In any case, have fun with the deck and let me and everyone else know how it performs, what you like and don't like, etc. I have been playing Grixis lately (was gearing up for a GP and opted to stick with my Snapcasters), but this deck is a blast to play and I think there is a lot of exploration to be done.
Question - just bought into Geneyquakes list). I know budget discussion is frowned upon, but I'm not currently in the position to get the playset of Verdant Catacombs. Barring not fetching the single forest, do you think replacing those with Polluted Delta for the time being is OK? My meta is not infested with blood moon.
In any case, have fun with the deck and let me and everyone else know how it performs, what you like and don't like, etc. I have been playing Grixis lately (was gearing up for a GP and opted to stick with my Snapcasters), but this deck is a blast to play and I think there is a lot of exploration to be done.
Thank you for all the advice. I purchased two Verdant Catacombs, so now my manabase is a mix between your list and the one that went 5-0. The list itself is still fully your list, except I'm considering adding one fun-off temur battle rage.
I will keep you updated. I've been playtesting the list on Cockatrice for a while. Although that's not representative, I have a positive winrate against most tier lists. One thing I have noticed is that playing BBE is a bit of a gamble. When you're in a tight spot, getting a Mishra's Bauble or Traverse (when tapped out) or Thoughtseize (when in a topdedcking war) sure feels like a whiff.
On the other hand they can be amazing. You have to like gambling.
Yes it's a gamble but with 4 traverse 4 kcommand 4 shadow 4 tarmo ;; It is really more constent than in tradional jund.
I'm 15-1 at my 4 last fmn (14-16 players) and 5-0 in my last league with BBE jund shadow.
4-0
3-1
4-0
4-0
Last 4 weeks.
-1 dreadbore
+1 dismember
Jace isnt as good as we thought he would be. 1 Dreadbore is enaugh.
Dismember to be more agressive with DS and grow it at instant speed. I like that.
SB changed a bit more. No more blood moon. Magus is enaugh against eldrazi/tron.
I really enjoy 2 temur battlerage / 1 ghor split.
I would say golgari charm has been the MVP in most of my matchup. (when it's good).
The list grind so much. It's amazing;
In the games we dont need to grind, I just sb out Kcommand and BBE then I race.
Always play to make your oponent make mistake.
I often keep Street Wraith a long time (when I dont need to draw absolutly) Then I do my possible to put a 2/2 DS
It gets alot value to kill creature and dodge removal at instant speed.
My list doesnt run IoK. I need more discard against combo deck. (and i'm not missing them in the MD btw.)
Not having stubborn denial make the burn matchup a lil bit harder, so brutality is necessary. (3 could be enaugh).
They are great against Infect/Storm/Burn/Hatebear/8wack/Abzancompany/Merfolk and some more.
The 1 land hands are what scare me the most about the build I posted. Have you tried Rise // Fall as your Hymn replacement? I have run it in GDS in the past and found it OK.
This is what I've come up with, only about 10 matches deep but it's been smooth:
4x Street Wraith
4x Death's Shadow
4x Tarmogoyf
1x Architects of Will
Artifacts (4):
4x Mishra's Bauble
Sorceries (12):
4x Thoughtseize
2x Inquisition of Kozilek
2x Whispers of Emrakul
4x Traverse the Ulvenwald
Instants (14):
2x Fatal Push
2x Dismember
2x Abrupt Decay
2x Stubborn Denial
2x Temur Battle Rage
1x Tarfire
3x Manamorphose
4x Verdant Catacombs
3x Bloodstained Mire
2x Polluted Delta
1x Misty Rainforest
1x Wooded Foothills
1x Overgrown Tomb
1x Watery Grave
1x Blood Crypt
1x Stomping Ground
1x Breeding Pool
1x Swamp
1x Grim Lavamancer
2x Stubborn Denial
1x Collective Brutality
1x Temur Battle Rage
1x Abrade
1x Snapcaster Mage
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
1x Liliana of the Veil
1x Kolaghan's Command
1x Kozilek's Return
1x Maelstrom Pulse
1x Engineered Explosives
1x Hazoret the Fervent
1x Jace, the Mind Sculptor
An extra lili of the veil and push are on the radar for the 75, likely sideboard. Wouldn't mind a Grim Flayer. If anyone tries this list or is running something similar would love to hear input on how to improve the list.
I can't remember the last time a list that put up results actually ran Stomping Ground.
If you're going for Jund colors, Jund is simply the better option. If you're going for Sultai colors, you're missing out on TBR and a lot of matchups get a lot worse all of a sudden.
4c can be tough as far as mana goes, but if you practice your lines and learn how to play around Blood Moon and Field decks you'll be fine most of the time. Manamorphose is amazing in this regard.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
The deck that won the modern MOCS or challenge or championship or whatever it was 2-3 months ago ran stomping ground. Straight Jund, 3 TBR main, tarfires, a truly aggressive list. One of the only top finishes Jund Death's shadow has had in a major event other than GP Vancouver in the year since that tournament. Stomping ground is rarely seen these days because the 4c lists are heavier on blue than red, with red being there just for TBR in many cases. Anytime you're running tarfire, stomping ground is a necessity if you want the deck to function consistently, and tarfire has fallen out of favour.
Adding manamorphose to this deck has really put it over the top against blood moon, between discard, stubs, abrupt decay, manamorphose, and simply being fast and getting threats underneath it, I haven't lost to the card in quite a lot of matches now. It's not something you ever really want to see, as you do have to deal with it, but the deck has more tools to deal with it (in a variety of ways) than anyone has blood moons.
The list that made T8 at the Modern PT ran 4 colors with a forest, and Jean-Emmanuel admitted afterwards that the forest should have been a breeding pool, as he would have won an extra 2 games. Not the same thing as stomping ground, but a similar philosophy. Many lists with the blue splash being the main colour are still running breeding pool + forest, with the Jund versions running stomping ground instead of Breeding pool. The result is the same, 2 lands that don't produce black mana, backed up by 11-12 fetches. This template has seen success for quite some time regardless of the card choices. The only time you're really in trouble is if the only land you have is one of the forests, or you have both of them. Something that may cause a few mulligans here and there, but comes up to bite you in a very small amount of games (I would guess no more than a deck like traditional Jund might encounter mana issues).
Personally, I like to run an equivalent amount of blue and red. Blue complements the core of the deck better for some matchups, and red the others. Decks like humans, affinity, company variants, etc, I like to have the option to board in to a straight Jund deck. Some control/midrange (grindy) matchups, I board in to a sultai deck. Combo matchups, burn, tron, all 4 colors are good and useful. Modern is just so wide open that you need 4 colors to really have good, powerful options to combat the field. As mentioned, manamorphose really is amazing, and facilitates being able to run all of these configurations so smoothly.
I think the mana becomes less of an issue with more experience. You don't need 4 colors of mana every game; the only blue and red cards in the maindeck are typically TBR and Stub. If you're playing against a creature based deck, you're probably fine skipping the blue, if you do have a stub, there's a good chance its low/no impact, so you can afford to wait to draw another fetchland and enable it later on if you really need to. Against a control deck, I'd do the opposite. Sometimes you can hold manamorphose to cast the card when you need it, especially for a card like TBR, a one time thing that just ends the game most of the time. Post SB in a lot of matchups you are cutting a good portion of one color and leaning on the other, so you can grab crypt/grave depending on your needs after the tomb. Sometimes you have to make a fetching decision and you don't have any blue or red cards yet, by knowing the matchup and understanding how the game is playing out and which cards you're going to need to win, you can decide to grab the color with the highest upside. Most games you just draw 3 fetchlands and it's easy!
I've played this deck so much in the past year, with so many different color configurations, I now feel that 3 colors is too simple. It can play another color for a lot of upside with very little to no downside. If you look at my monstrosity of a list a few posts back, I'm playing stub and tarfire, stomping ground and breeding pool, and I literally have never played a game with the list where I lost because of mana issues. One of my favourite aspects of the deck!
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
*that don't attack your mana heavily, and don't have Path / Purge. Mostly just Jund.
I don't have much data to work with yet, but so far it's pretty narrow - it's not consistently great against Jund, but there are some spots where they can't beat it. The problem, as always, is that they can kill you with a stiff breeze before it gets going. But it's very complementary with Hazoret - they're good in very different situations.
Would love to hear how you approach the Bant Spirits matchup too. It's always a close one in my experience but they do seem to have the upper hand.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
I did some gatherer searches, but mostly came up empty.
Scarab God is sticky on its own though. Sure, they can Terminate or LotV it, but then we just recast it. We just have to make sure we don't die on that turn, and that they don't have Ooze going. Ooze is really one of the biggest problems with this plan.
I'm not sure I've played against it, but my knee-jerk reaction is to try to kill them ASAP. The fliers will eventually get us. They have, what, 4-6 removal spells for our fatties? I'd treat it a lot like counters coco, but try to be less reliant on removal - keep the stubs and TBRs in, but leave the Brutalities out. And I guess hope they don't get to stick a Rest in Peace.
There is no avoiding the fact that Verdant Catacombs is the best fetchland in the deck, so playing with Deltas will be suboptimal, but the deck will definitely function. More than Blood Moon, one of the things I would be worried about with Delta is that you will be shocking yourself a bit more, which Burn can definitely take advantage of. You will lose some flexibility points but as long as you are good grabbing shocklands then it is a relatively small concern. I would probably find a way to squeeze in an extra Blood Crypt to give your black fetches a bit more flexibility. Another important point is that if you keep a tally of which fetches get which lands and which colors in your mind while sequencing then you can mitigate some of the awkwardness. It is another annoying thing to keep track of but it will make a positive difference. I know that when I was playing this deck I went kind of fast and loose with the fetchland sequencing at times (which is obviously bad but is just reality, and a luxury having so many on-color fetches can give you), but you have to pay much more attention here if you shift a bit off color.
One thing that I will point out is that the 5-0 list from the most recent MODO batch replaced Wooded Foothills with two Deltas and two Marsh Flats, placing a big priority on black mana. I can't speak to whether his is better than the straight Jund set of 12, but this is a vote of confidence for the idea that a pile of black fetches can be fine, or even preferable.
In any case, have fun with the deck and let me and everyone else know how it performs, what you like and don't like, etc. I have been playing Grixis lately (was gearing up for a GP and opted to stick with my Snapcasters), but this deck is a blast to play and I think there is a lot of exploration to be done.
Yes it's a gamble but with 4 traverse 4 kcommand 4 shadow 4 tarmo ;; It is really more constent than in tradional jund.
I'm 15-1 at my 4 last fmn (14-16 players) and 5-0 in my last league with BBE jund shadow.
4-0
3-1
4-0
4-0
Last 4 weeks.
I fought, jeskai control, burn, jund, infect, dredge, mardu pyromancer, human, merfolk, gideon tribal tokens, storm, RG Eldrazi, Bant Eldrazi and more..
BGUSultai Shadow
BURGrixis Shadow
BGUSultai midrange
BRWMardu Pyromancer
BGRJund
-1 dreadbore
+1 dismember
Jace isnt as good as we thought he would be. 1 Dreadbore is enaugh.
Dismember to be more agressive with DS and grow it at instant speed. I like that.
SB changed a bit more. No more blood moon. Magus is enaugh against eldrazi/tron.
I really enjoy 2 temur battlerage / 1 ghor split.
I would say golgari charm has been the MVP in most of my matchup. (when it's good).
The list grind so much. It's amazing;
In the games we dont need to grind, I just sb out Kcommand and BBE then I race.
Always play to make your oponent make mistake.
I often keep Street Wraith a long time (when I dont need to draw absolutly) Then I do my possible to put a 2/2 DS
It gets alot value to kill creature and dodge removal at instant speed.
BGUSultai Shadow
BURGrixis Shadow
BGUSultai midrange
BRWMardu Pyromancer
BGRJund
Not having stubborn denial make the burn matchup a lil bit harder, so brutality is necessary. (3 could be enaugh).
They are great against Infect/Storm/Burn/Hatebear/8wack/Abzancompany/Merfolk and some more.
BGUSultai Shadow
BURGrixis Shadow
BGUSultai midrange
BRWMardu Pyromancer
BGRJund