MTG Salvation

I'm a complete beginner, and the first deck I spent any money on is a Simic evolve deck, just because I like the feel of the mechanic. I played it for the first time last night and was bitterly disappointed to find that my roommate's mono black deck wiped it off the board with ease.

My big problem seemed to be removal - but when I look at model Simic decks online, the suggested lists don't seem to include any removal either. Is removal worth devoting cards to in a UG deck?

Anyway, here's my planned revision. Please advise! I know nothing!

I'd put in Zameck Guildmage and Fathom Mage. Drawing cards is one of the best abilities. If you have more cards, you can go 1-for-1 with mono black all day. I'd also try to be more aggressive with stuff like that flash fish crab (forget its name.) Oh and play Elvish Mystic.

I will suggest what I always suggest on this type of deck: 4 Elvish Mystic and 4 Sylvan Caryatid. Go fast, swing fast, pwn fast.
Also, 4 Cloudfin Raptor will get nice for the early aggro, almost everything on this deck will make it evolve.



Big creature strategies don't need many removal at all. Your creatures will be big enough to just beat the other ones in battle. Anyway, Pit Fight is better than Time to Feed, 2 mana less is very important.

Thanks! No love for Rapid Hybridization? A couple of other posts have talked about its dual purpose of removal and evolve-speeding.

And: really, Elvish Mystic/Sylvan Caryatid rather than Gyre Sage? Geez, what did I spend all that money on Gyre Sages for?

Welcome to magic! If your goal is to make Evolve awesome, you must first understand what the strengths of Evolve and decide what makes it worth running and dedicating. If you wish to make the best 'evolve' deck, you have to play to all of its strengths.

However, you must understand that there is a difference between "playing to win with 'x' strategy" and "playing to win", and unfortunately they are different. Not all magic cards are created equal, and wizards makes plenty of cool mechanics, but mechanics don't make good cards; having the card be naturally good is what makes the card good.

What I'm trying to say here is decide if you want to make a deck where the goal is to win at all costs, or if your goal is to win on your terms (in this case, with a sweet evolve deck), since your post seems a little bit to me like you're trying to do both. Regardless of what your strategy is I highly encourage you to read this post as no matter what you do it will help you build better decks and make you a smarter person once you understand what is being said:

http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=346315

Anyway, for your deck! I personally think the best thing you can do for an evolve deck is have a proper "curve", in that you select your card choices so that you hit creatures on 1, 2, 3, and 4 so that they're all evolving and you have a field of big dudes. Cloudfin Raptor is a really sweet card that becomes really powerful even if you only evolve once or twice (and much more powerful if it gets to sit there and keep evolving.) Shambleshark is a cool creature at 2 mana that allows you to play some tricks by evolving at instant speed, and even if he evolves once he is quite reasonable as a 3/2 flash for 2. I would cut your curse of the swine and some rapid hybridizations to make sure you have 4 Cloudfin Raptors and 4 Shamblesharks before you make any more tweaks to your deck, as making sure you have a lot of creatures that constantly evolve is a good way to make it all work. Finally, if budget isn't of too much concern for you, Boon Satyr is an amazing guy for evolve and is just a great creature by himself. Gyre Sage is also an excellent two drop that I would recommend getting two more of.

Quote from RedSocialKnight

Thanks! No love for Rapid Hybridization? A couple of other posts have talked about its dual purpose of removal and evolve-speeding.

And: really, Elvish Mystic/Sylvan Caryatid rather than Gyre Sage? Geez, what did I spend all that money on Gyre Sages for?

I have used them in simic deck, and they didn't go as I'd have liked. But in your type, maybe you can sideboard some hybridizations instead of creature counters, that would be better indeed.

I have always tried to make Gyre Sage an awesome card, but standard is not its home; but in animar EDH, now there is AWESOME!
Caryatyd has 4 defense and hexproof, besides it can give blue too. If you don't feel like spending on them, you can keep playing with Gyre Sage, I don't see the problem there either.

Quote from RedSocialKnight

Thanks! No love for Rapid Hybridization? A couple of other posts have talked about its dual purpose of removal and evolve-speeding.

And: really, Elvish Mystic/Sylvan Caryatid rather than Gyre Sage? Geez, what did I spend all that money on Gyre Sages for?

Rapid Hybridization is a great card when the deck you're playing doesn't care about 3/3's too much. Unfortunately that means your deck has to be doing some REALLY big things like dropping 6 and 7 mana bombs that basically win you the game on the spot, since giving them a 3/3 and having it stick around for a few turns goes against your strategy of "kill them quickly with creatures."

And I say run both Elvish Mystic and Gyre Sage!

I find Gyre Sage to be a bit too durdly and slow for Standard. It fits the theme but I'd rather have some other mana dork instead.

Ok - what about my creatures? What should be taken out to insert the mages and cloudfins?

I thought I was being clever by having cheap 3/1 and 1/3 stuff in the deck to have a good chance of evolving stuff. Not so much, though?

I think I can see that the Species Gorger will bounce much too slowly to be of any real use in pumping stuff up - so I'll take him out.

But who should be my real bombs? (I can't afford any Kalonian Hydras - I've spent too much on this deck already!)

More master biomancers.

Quote from Milo666

More master biomancers.

Sigh ... mo' money.

Quote from RedSocialKnight

Sigh ... mo' money.

Unfortunately that's sort of the way things are with magic. If you trade and buy smart (and also ideally win tournaments) then it doesn't end up being too expensive, but regardless of these things you still have to put a bit of a 'down payment' into magic to get started. Once you have a collection it isn't too expensive to keep going as you can just trade for things as they come along.

People are saying Gyre Sage is durdely and he can certainly be slow but I don't think he is outright terrible. Ideally you'd put something like Scavenging Ooze (which would actually be a great investment since he will probably never drop much in price unless he gets reprinted a million times, but thats a discussion for another thread.) I still think Cloudfin Raptor is a really good start for your deck, and in general I think you should be looking at having more creatures and only enough removal to help you get by, i.e. bounce spells like Cyclonic Rift or Voyage's End.

Okay, here's a revision, given the realities of what I have:



Edit: ok - I've further edited it to focus more on bringing out big hydras.

You have too many two-ofs. The consistency of your decks appears to be lacking. You should pick your all star line up and run with that unless you are able to tutor up or dig for the answers for the questions at hand. If you know what I mean.

Basically what he's saying I'd your missing the point. You don't want to run 4 gyre sage and 2 sylvan carytids. Add the 4 elvish Mystic. There is almost no green deck in any format that doesn't run G mana rampers.

Edit: also voice of the hulcave is not that great. I wouldn't run him he's too slow and costs too much. Compare to archangel of thune who gives +1/+1 counters to every creature every time she hits.

How about adding in Ordeal of Thassa, synergizes rather well with evolve creaures, and added CA from mid to late game. Also Boon Satyr is a definite must for this deck with High Power at low cost to trigger evolve among some of your creatures, although recently it jumped in price from $3 to $6 so if you can get them cheap then its a must.

Also the thing about evolve is that its difficult to play, multiple evolve creatures without anyway to trigger them is dead, so adding in creatures with high P/T at low CMC is a must in this kind deck. A few would be Kalonian Tusker, Sylvan Caryatid and Boon Satyr among others, Omen Speaker is also good with 3 toughness tucked in a 2 cmc card.

I would say a definitive core of an Evolve deck would consist of:

Any number combinations of the above, then you add some removal and disruption spells.

Quote from paladin3056

[useful things]

Thanks, that's helpful. I had been looking with curiosity at Boon Satyr and the blue and green Ordeal cards - I'll try adding em in for a couple games, although the deck is now kind of stuffed.

For what it's worth, the deck got dramatically better against my roommate's mono black with just a few added Curse of the Swine and Essence Scatter. It's still not in a final state by any means (and the removal may be less relevant against other decks), but I've at least seen that the evolve mechanic can be decent.

The Gyre Sages work just fine, durdly or not. This deck has a decent number of one-drops, so a slow start is okay here. It's later in the game when a big rush of mana is needed for giant hydras etc -- and if you have a Master Biomancer out, Gyre Sage drops with GG already on it, so it doesn't matter if you don't get them in your first few turns.

I'm definitely keeping the Caryatids for mana -- and for a pretty reliable evolve boost -- but I don't think I need the 1/1 elves.

Quote from RedSocialKnight

I'm definitely keeping the Caryatids for mana -- and for a pretty reliable evolve boost -- but I don't think I need the 1/1 elves.

Yup, the elves are practically useless since it doesn't evolve anything in the deck. And since we are running a slow meta a 1st turn drop is not a must, what you want is a 1st turn Experiment One into 2nd turn Sylvan Caryatid triggering evolve, then go for 3rd turn Ordeal of Thassa play another Sylvan going for 2 +1/+1 counters on Experiment One thus saccing Ordeal upon attack to draw 2 cards while still attacking with a 4/4. In the mid-late game the Elvish Mystic is practically useless that it is a dead card practically most of the time except the 1st turn.

I tried for a while to make Evolve work, and unfortunately with the way magic works, it's never going to be a top-tier deck. Evolve requires synergy between multiple different permanents across multiple turns to get working. It's not as fast as aggro, but not as resilient as control.

That said, it CAN be a strong second-tier type of deck. You have to just ignore removal and accept that you're going to get blown out sometimes because you're running an evolve deck. You can win a lot of games by just shoving a lot of threats at them, letting them evolve and hoping to kill them before your important cards get removed.

I had the most success by not sticking to the simic colors. Either a white or black splash is extremely helpful. I personally found black to be better.

If you splash white, you get Loxodon Smiter, Advent of the Worm and Selesnya Charm and Rootborn Defenses, all of which are excellent for this type of deck.

If you splash black, you get Desecration Demon, Corpsejack Menace, Dreg Mangler, Reaper of the Wilds, Golgari Charm (Holy crap amazing in this deck btw) and card draw in the form of Underworld Connections or Read The Bones.


My personal most successful form of this deck relegated Evolve to being a fairly minor part of the deck, and instead focusing on getting +1/+1 counters in multiple ways, then finishing with Kalonian Hydra to pump all of your guys and overwhelm them. I don't have the decklist in front of me but from memory it was something close to this:




I think the biggest trap you can fall into when making this kind of deck is getting too caught up in all the cute interactions you can make using evolve. There's some truly mind boggling things you can make happen with cards like Vorel of the Hull Clade, Master Biomancer, Rapid Hybridization, Ooze Flux, etc. But the thing to keep in mind is that those interactions only work when you are ALREADY WINNING. None of those things help you to win when you are behind.

You have to consider the cards you put into this deck in light of how they help you when you DON'T have an ideal board state. Against an empty board and an opponent that doesn't fight back, its easy to see how an evolve deck can get out of hand extremely quickly and do it in a flashy way. The problem is that human opponents won't let you do that, so you have to choose your cards in light of how they impact board state when you are NOT in a dominant position.

That said, this is hands down one of the most fun decks to pilot in a casual environment where you can get away with that stuff so if that's what you'll be playing for, go forth and evolve like crazy. If you wanna make casual-level friends' heads explode, look up a thread on here called The Flux Capacitor and enjoy attacking with borderline infinitely large creatures and infinitely respawning armies of huge oozes.

Quote from DesecrationDarwin

I had the most success by not sticking to the simic colors.

Yeah, I can see how a lot of the green-black cards would be perfect here -- but I've got a rigid color scheme of different decks in my head, so no black for me by my own arbitrary rules.

Quote from DesecrationDarwin

My personal most successful form of this deck relegated Evolve to being a fairly minor part of the deck, and instead focusing on getting +1/+1 counters in multiple ways

Yeah, I do want evolve to be one primary pillar of the deck, but I recognize I'll need more than that, since one removal spell can completely wreck your carefully-tended evolve chain.

I already have the hydras (not Kalonian though -- $20 for one card? Are you kidding me?) for +1s that don't depend on having a first-turn weenie survive for several rounds.

I'm also pretty curious about some of the new Green-Blue cards in Theros. I had planned to remove the Horizon Chimeras from my deck when Vorel came in the mail -- but they were doing beautifully for me last night, and they'll synergize well with the card-drawing mechanics of a lot of Theros blue, which I already have to some extent with the Fathom Mages and Zegana. I may try to build that up more to compensate for the early-game setbacks that can throw the evolve mechanic out of whack.

This may end up just being a fun deck, but I think it has some potential so I'll keep working on it for a while. Here's my pile so far:



Why so few 4-ofs? Having four Cloudfins too often resulted in playing a couple early and just having them die off, or drawing too many late when they're just 0/1s. So they got trimmed. Zameck is great, but requires some mana to use, so I don't want too many. Sylvans and Biomancers - currently only have three of each. The Chimeras are okay, but if I can find something better for those slots I'll take it. The Plasm Captures could easily be easier to cast countermagic too. I need to do some real testing with it to find out if they're reasonable... Croconura? Yeah... It's a reasonable guy that evolves everyone else and can provide a huge roadblock. Reach is a relevant ability. I could be talked out of them, but hey, it's a crocodile frog... what's not to like?

I initially was full on Evolve, but it's changed to a weird deck that can sometimes get there with Evolve Aggro, and sometimes just survives til Aetherling comes down and gets all stupid. (Aetherling has some sweet interactions with Evolve guys and Master Biomancer, for added foolishness.) Yes, Bioshift is dumb... I do want to keep one though, as it sometimes just blows them out completely and who doesn't want to spend a mana to Bioshift a ton of counters onto Biomancer and then drop a Raptor

If it turns out to be particularly competitive (hey...it could happen) I would probably get that fourth Biomancer, probably get my Scavenging Oozes in there somewhere, and probably get rid of some of the more cutesy interactions. I'll take it to an FNM sometime and see how it runs, and try to get some testing in against more competitive decks. As of right now it's very much drop some early dudes, counter some stuff, and ride Aetherling to victory. Because Aetherling is dumb.

Of possible interest, I lost to the GW Aggro deck from last weekend's SCG Open, 2 games to 1. Had I not flooded out hard in game 3 I think I had a pretty good shot of taking the match.

Supreme verdict how do you beat it?

Quote from Narvuntien

Supreme verdict how do you beat it?

Aetherling

Yeah, that's about it - against decks packing Verdict I add in more counter magic of my own along with Emo Jace (Memory Adept) and play for a long game and either mill with Jace or land an Aetherling and go from there. Put my focus on countering Revelations and hope.

There's also playing well and knowing that if someone is dropping Islands and Plains to sandbag some critters and not just play out everything at once. Verdict id definitely beatable.

You should put in a few vorel of the hull Clade. He's AMAZING

Quote from NightyNightSpector

You should put in a few vorel of the hull Clade. He's AMAZING

Could be worth trying one. Going overboard with shenanigans is never a bad thing.