The deck mostly maintains itself after rotation. The main thing it is losing is kill-trill and 2 mana removal spells that arent just bile blight.
This is a light I came up with just now and think it could be really good moving forward. I almost want to splash red in here for goblin rabblemaster, but yea...ONTO THE DECKLSIT!!
So far i've loved the reprinting of fetch lands in really aggressive monocolored decks. The thining helps reduce the chance of crap top decks, aka lands. Although the change in chance isnt that high, I'll take whatever numbers I can get.
I played a B/R version of this deck prerotation to top my states. Im curious to see how good crippling blight, hall, and boon actually is.
I really like the look of this. I'm going to try this deck with 1 change: Boon of Erebos replaced by this new aura Molting Snakeskin
Molting Snakeskin B
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature gets +2/+0 and has "2B: Regenerate this creature."
I know being 2-for-1'd isn't great but this on turn 2 triggering heroic on Tormented Hero or on Bloodsoaked Champion which will recur itself seems good. Plus it can regenerate the creature for 2B which may not always be readily available in MBA but it still pretty reasonable.
Also I've contemplated splashing blue off of 4 polluted delta and 4 mana confluence. Blue gives us Triton Tactics which helps to get through drown in sorrow and anger of the gods. Tactics is also amazing vs other aggro decks as we can kill there creatures when they think we have no blockers or just freeze them for a whole turn.
Reason why I like boon over that aura is mostly because boon of erebos is ether a kill spell or a counter spell. That card is rather one of those as its an on board trick. And if they want they could just make regen your guy and time walk you in a sense. Which is not what we want to be doing.
Personally, I'd keep Master of the Feast out of the deck. I don't play the deck, but I've played against it in the past and that card always has helped me stabilize. I gladly let it live for a turn so I can draw a card, then kill it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this.
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Not playing much these days... hope all is well in the MtG community
EDH:
Zur, The Enchanter
Modern:
Burn
Legacy:
Cheeri0s
Burn
agent of the fates could be pretty good. might be better than master of the feast or herald of torment. The 3 drop slots will deffinitely need some toying around with.
I like grim haruspex too, but he feels like kind of a niche card the way the format is starting to look to me.
Athreos isnt too bad, but I def wouldnt want to be playing soldier of the pantheon in my deck with 12 black 1 drops. Especially with duals leaving.
Banishing light is pretty solid but the only thing I could see it getting rid of is other banishing lightys, and if our opp is just 1 for 1ing with us, we will likely win that race.
But not we need white and black on turn 1 meaning you need to play cave and mana confluence for not that much power. And the scarhide has bestow for later benefit later in the game, and sometiems you can win by playing it on your opp's creatures. Solider(imo) is really bad right now. People are jamming coursers and crayatids and he gets brickwalled by both of them. So do your other 1 drops but we dont have to splash another color to get brickwalled by the same cards.
I planned on playing grim haruspex in the board against drown in sorrow to refuel.
And I played master as a 4-of in the past to a top 8 at my states. The card is a must answer, doesnt get burned out by any 1 burn spell. Doesnt die to bile blight and flies over all the creatures.
There isnt many fliers post board and prognostic sphinx dies if he blocks.
I've been splashing blue for Triton Tactics to survive Drown, Anger, and help block on the swing back. Also play Swan Song in the SB for End Hostilities. The bird isn't a problem with Maruader.
Anyone else think this deck is just bad. It seems every deck is just Midrange that plays a huge creature T3 that we can't beat. If I'm on the draw I just can never beat any of these Junk or Jeskai decks.
How cant you? you can downfall their creature. You can marauder past their creatures. You can likely trade boon on your guy with their creature. And there is no wrath that is gonna see a LOT of play and its a little slow. In the games that dont have it we can just jam dudes onto the field until we can marauder them out of the game.
Hows that manabase look? You have temple, which i dont really want to lose the tempo with the ETB tapped land. We have mana confluence which is fine. But thats about it. I rather splash white for atheros since you at least get a pain-land and a mana confluence. You do get the fetch but im not sure if that brings it on par and/or worth the splash.
Festergloom seems like insane sideboard tech against Rabble Red. I went with Pain Seer mainboard with Mardu Skullhunter in the sideboard since skullhunter is never really hitting a crucial card. Feast on the Fallen seems excellent with the new fetchlands and painlands that will be running rampant. With black in a lot of the popular creatures Dark Betrayal is going to be a house. I think Bile Blight will become Murderous Cut somewhere. I think 4 Mogis's Marauder might be wrong since black might be splashed incidentally in a lot of decks and could become a split for Herald of torment. I actually really like Master of the Feast who dodges Stoke the Flames, Banishing Light the turn he makes them draw it, Anger of the Gods, Mardu Charm, which I think will be extremely common going forward. Yes everything dies to something, but dodging that much common removal makes him amazing.
Sign in Blood can be used as a burn spell to end the game but could also be a removal spell. I like how the deck lines up against what we will expect to see. A lot of people taking 4 or 5 damage from their own lands, tripping over ambitious manabases while just a streamlined threat and answer package comes at them.
I didnt even think of festergloom, but yea it seem pretty amazing out of the board for sure.
I think we could get away with running 20 lands. Im also a big fan of running 12 swamps, 8 fetches. It doesnt help that much, but every little thing helps in these hyper aggressive strategies.
I really like the interactions between mardu skullhunter and brain maggot. I've had plenty of times where my opponent discards stuff like master of waves or elspeth to the skullhunter and then trades another card to kill it. This deck also loses hard to stuff like drown in sorrow and anger of the gods, so brain maggot can do big work in that regard. Between these 2 cards and whatever discard you bring out of the board you can tear just about any hand apart.
agent of the fates is pretty much the nuts here with the boons and snakeskins. If you hold your boons and snakeskins until later and manage to untap with an agent then you can do some serious board-wiping.
I'm not 100% on mogis's marauder. He's good at getting through board stalls... once, but sometimes I'd rather just have a big nasty dude like master of the feast to force an answer. If you've had an ideal unanswered curve then mogis's marauder can be a blowout. Otherwise he's just a 2/2 for 3.
I haven't really gotten to play with grim haruspex yet but I imagine I won't really want him unless the format is really durdly and controlling. Right now it looks pretty aggressive. Esper and G/x devotion is still pretty good though.
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I'm thinking of picking up a MBA deck myself after rotation (loved playing Zombies a couple seasons ago and it was largely a Mono-Black aggro deck as well). 12 two-power 1 drops is awesome for an aggro deck as it leads to such explosive starts, and black gives you access to Thoughtseize which is among the best cards in the format. I also get the feeling that Master of the Feast will be very strong in some matchups. It might not be something you want to run maindeck but I can foresee boarding in the full 4 copies against certain decks (like a derpy green midrangey deck, or decks relying on burn spells as their removal) that will have a ton of trouble dealing with the clock it represents. The deck will likely struggle against Anger of the Gods and/or Drown in Sorrow so we'll have to see how prominent those end up being.
There is a lot of testing that needs to be done since I would say the only must-runs are all twelve 2 power 1 drops as well as 4 Thoughtseize. After that I can see a lot of different variations taking shape and it will be interesting to see which is the most competitive.
As far as the creature suite, in the 2 drop slot I'm leaning towards wanting the full set of Pain Seers, but after that it gets pretty murky with Brain Maggot, Mardu Skullhunter, and Spiteful Returned all seeming like possible options. The 3 drop slot is also similarly interesting with Herald of Torment looking like the best card to me at this point with Mogis Marauder as strong in some number, Master of the Feast a possibility (like I said before I think at the very least he'll end up in the board), and then more fringe options in Agent of the Fates, Nighthowler (could be good as a sideboard for attrition matchups), and Grim Haruspex. Doesn't look like there's really any 4 drops worth considering but I think that's okay. We also can play bestow cards on 4 with Scarhide and potentially Spiteful Returned or Nighthowler which can fill in that spot. Topping out at 3 may be just fine.
As far as removal and non-creature spells, like I said 4 Thoughtseize is a certainty for me (perhaps not maindeck if the meta is really fast but they'll be in the board at the least). The removal suite should prove to be a interesting deck-building dilemma. Hero's Downfall is the catch-all, but there's potentially a lot going on at 3 depending on how you build things, not to mention 3 mana removals are pretty clunky for aggro lists running land counts in the low 20s. Unfortunately for us there's no Doom Blade variant at 2, the best option we have is probably Bile Blight and things tail off from there with Pharika's Cure probably being the only other viable option. At 1 there's Ulcerate which may be preferable to Bile Blight. 3 life does sting in aggro mirros and you lose out on the blowout potential of BB, but spending 1 mana is significantly better than 2 for tempo purposes. With Ulcerate you can open up options like
Turn 1: 1 drop
Turn 2: Ulcerate their 1 drop, play another 1 drop
which can be a pretty big swing. Crippling Blight is another interesting option, it saw some amount of play in Zombies decks and compliments Mogis Marauder pretty well. This should be a deck that can race so it could easily be preferable to simply run Crippling Blight for Polukranos (or other big blockers) rather then Hero's Downfall and its more prohibitive casting cost. As far as non-creatures, Boon of Erebos certainly is interesting and it works well with Pain Seer which they almost always will want to trade with in combat. I'm not huge on Sign in Blood in aggressive decks like this as you don't really want to play it early due to the tempo loss and it reduces your threat density, but it might be decent out of the board. I wish we had some sort of utility land we could run but bestow at least helps somewhat with mana flood.
I'm not a huge fan of ulcerate or bile blight (at least in the main) simply because I think initially that courser of kruphix is going to be a major player in the metagame. Just about every green based midrange/nykthos deck is going to be playing him so i think that any MD kill spell you start with should be able to kill it.
I wouldn't mind testing some small number of murderous cut, but I think that the matches where you'll be able to cast it effectively it won't have many good targets, and against the matchups where it has lots of good targets then you won't be able to cast it effectively.
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I'm not a huge fan of ulcerate or bile blight (at least in the main) simply because I think initially that courser of kruphix is going to be a major player in the metagame. Just about every green based midrange/nykthos deck is going to be playing him so i think that any MD kill spell you start with should be able to kill it.
I wouldn't mind testing some small number of murderous cut, but I think that the matches where you'll be able to cast it effectively it won't have many good targets, and against the matchups where it has lots of good targets then you won't be able to cast it effectively.
Hmm i dont see why bile blight/ulcerate will be bade because of courser. Are you afraid of courser because he blocks your creatures? or because of the lifegain? If it's because he blocks then ulcerate and bile blight just kills it in combat which is fine.
The problem is, other than Hero's Downfall (which like I said is kind of clunky at 3 mana) there's not a ton of ways for us to straight-up kill a Courser. Crippling Blighting him might be a reasonable solution but they still get to gain life and play lands off the top of their deck so you better be ending the game in short order if that's your answer. Murderous Cut seems bad in this deck, I don't think it will be online fast enough in the matchups where we need it to be.
Now that I think of it Feast of Dreams actually kills Courser for 2 mana. Might be too narrow though depending on how the meta shapes up.
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This is a light I came up with just now and think it could be really good moving forward. I almost want to splash red in here for goblin rabblemaster, but yea...ONTO THE DECKLSIT!!
12 Swamp
8 Fetches
// Creatures
4 Pain Seer
4 Mogis's Marauder
4 Tormented Hero
4 Bloodstained Brave
2 Spiteful Returned
4 Gnarled Scarhide
2 Master of the Feast
3 Herald of Torment
1 Hall of Triumph
2 Boon of Erebos
3 Bile Blight
3 Hero's Downfall
4 Thoughtseize
So far i've loved the reprinting of fetch lands in really aggressive monocolored decks. The thining helps reduce the chance of crap top decks, aka lands. Although the change in chance isnt that high, I'll take whatever numbers I can get.
I played a B/R version of this deck prerotation to top my states. Im curious to see how good crippling blight, hall, and boon actually is.
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
There are a whole ton of black one drop humans.
Tormented Hero
Cruel Sadist
Bloodstained Brave
Ruthless Ripper
Thoughtseize
2-Drops
Pain Seer
Mardu Skullhunter
Sign in Blood
3-Drops
Grim Haruspex
[card]Obelisk of Urd
[/card]
20 Swamp
Molting Snakeskin B
Enchantment - Aura
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature gets +2/+0 and has "2B: Regenerate this creature."
I know being 2-for-1'd isn't great but this on turn 2 triggering heroic on Tormented Hero or on Bloodsoaked Champion which will recur itself seems good. Plus it can regenerate the creature for 2B which may not always be readily available in MBA but it still pretty reasonable.
Also I've contemplated splashing blue off of 4 polluted delta and 4 mana confluence. Blue gives us Triton Tactics which helps to get through drown in sorrow and anger of the gods. Tactics is also amazing vs other aggro decks as we can kill there creatures when they think we have no blockers or just freeze them for a whole turn.
Jeskai Elder could also be an idea instead of Pain Seer if we go more towards spells like crippling blight, boon of erebos, etc.
Cards like Stubborn Denial help against Planeswalkers or End Hostilities, even Swan Song would be amazing as we can just Maruader through the 2/2 swan.
it's not very good. It being 1 power really sucks, with Maruader we want as much power on the field as possible.
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
4 tormented hero
4 gnarled scarhide
4 bloodsoaked champion
4 pain seer
4 mardu skullhunter
3 spiteful returned
4 master of the feast
4 herald of torment/mogis's marauder
3 boon of erebos
Modern:
Twinning End
Commander:
Mayael the Anema
EDH:
Zur, The Enchanter
Modern:
Burn
Legacy:
Cheeri0s
Burn
agent of the fates could be pretty good. might be better than master of the feast or herald of torment. The 3 drop slots will deffinitely need some toying around with.
I like grim haruspex too, but he feels like kind of a niche card the way the format is starting to look to me.
Modern:
Twinning End
Commander:
Mayael the Anema
Banishing light is pretty solid but the only thing I could see it getting rid of is other banishing lightys, and if our opp is just 1 for 1ing with us, we will likely win that race.
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
And I played master as a 4-of in the past to a top 8 at my states. The card is a must answer, doesnt get burned out by any 1 burn spell. Doesnt die to bile blight and flies over all the creatures.
There isnt many fliers post board and prognostic sphinx dies if he blocks.
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
Anyone else think this deck is just bad. It seems every deck is just Midrange that plays a huge creature T3 that we can't beat. If I'm on the draw I just can never beat any of these Junk or Jeskai decks.
Hows that manabase look? You have temple, which i dont really want to lose the tempo with the ETB tapped land. We have mana confluence which is fine. But thats about it. I rather splash white for atheros since you at least get a pain-land and a mana confluence. You do get the fetch but im not sure if that brings it on par and/or worth the splash.
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
Maruader isn't that good anymore with the wedges. So many decks are going to have black in them that can block.
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
4 Tormented Hero
4 Gnarled Scarhide
4 Bloodsoaked Champion
4 Pain Seer
4 Spiteful Returned
4 Mogis's Marauder
3 Master of the Feast
4 Crippling Blight
3 Boon of Erebos
2 Bile Blight
3 Sign in Blood
Lands 21
21 Swamp
3 Thoughtseize
2 Bile Blight
2 Pharika's Cure
2 Dark Betrayal
2 Festergloom
1 Master of the Feast
1 Feast on the Fallen
2 Mardu Skullhunter
Festergloom seems like insane sideboard tech against Rabble Red. I went with Pain Seer mainboard with Mardu Skullhunter in the sideboard since skullhunter is never really hitting a crucial card. Feast on the Fallen seems excellent with the new fetchlands and painlands that will be running rampant. With black in a lot of the popular creatures Dark Betrayal is going to be a house. I think Bile Blight will become Murderous Cut somewhere. I think 4 Mogis's Marauder might be wrong since black might be splashed incidentally in a lot of decks and could become a split for Herald of torment. I actually really like Master of the Feast who dodges Stoke the Flames, Banishing Light the turn he makes them draw it, Anger of the Gods, Mardu Charm, which I think will be extremely common going forward. Yes everything dies to something, but dodging that much common removal makes him amazing.
Sign in Blood can be used as a burn spell to end the game but could also be a removal spell. I like how the deck lines up against what we will expect to see. A lot of people taking 4 or 5 damage from their own lands, tripping over ambitious manabases while just a streamlined threat and answer package comes at them.
I think we could get away with running 20 lands. Im also a big fan of running 12 swamps, 8 fetches. It doesnt help that much, but every little thing helps in these hyper aggressive strategies.
Standard:RWUJeskai WinsRWU
Modern:GWBMelira PodGWB
Legacy:WDeath & TaxesW
4 Tormented Hero
4 Gnarled Scarhide
4 Bloodsoaked Champion
4 Pain Seer
4 mardu skullhunter
4 Mogis's Marauder
4 agent of the fates
3 brain maggot
3 Boon of Erebos
4 Thoughtseize
3 despise
1 bile blight
4 Pharika's Cure
3 crippling blight
I really like the interactions between mardu skullhunter and brain maggot. I've had plenty of times where my opponent discards stuff like master of waves or elspeth to the skullhunter and then trades another card to kill it. This deck also loses hard to stuff like drown in sorrow and anger of the gods, so brain maggot can do big work in that regard. Between these 2 cards and whatever discard you bring out of the board you can tear just about any hand apart.
agent of the fates is pretty much the nuts here with the boons and snakeskins. If you hold your boons and snakeskins until later and manage to untap with an agent then you can do some serious board-wiping.
I'm not 100% on mogis's marauder. He's good at getting through board stalls... once, but sometimes I'd rather just have a big nasty dude like master of the feast to force an answer. If you've had an ideal unanswered curve then mogis's marauder can be a blowout. Otherwise he's just a 2/2 for 3.
I haven't really gotten to play with grim haruspex yet but I imagine I won't really want him unless the format is really durdly and controlling. Right now it looks pretty aggressive. Esper and G/x devotion is still pretty good though.
Modern:
Twinning End
Commander:
Mayael the Anema
There is a lot of testing that needs to be done since I would say the only must-runs are all twelve 2 power 1 drops as well as 4 Thoughtseize. After that I can see a lot of different variations taking shape and it will be interesting to see which is the most competitive.
As far as the creature suite, in the 2 drop slot I'm leaning towards wanting the full set of Pain Seers, but after that it gets pretty murky with Brain Maggot, Mardu Skullhunter, and Spiteful Returned all seeming like possible options. The 3 drop slot is also similarly interesting with Herald of Torment looking like the best card to me at this point with Mogis Marauder as strong in some number, Master of the Feast a possibility (like I said before I think at the very least he'll end up in the board), and then more fringe options in Agent of the Fates, Nighthowler (could be good as a sideboard for attrition matchups), and Grim Haruspex. Doesn't look like there's really any 4 drops worth considering but I think that's okay. We also can play bestow cards on 4 with Scarhide and potentially Spiteful Returned or Nighthowler which can fill in that spot. Topping out at 3 may be just fine.
As far as removal and non-creature spells, like I said 4 Thoughtseize is a certainty for me (perhaps not maindeck if the meta is really fast but they'll be in the board at the least). The removal suite should prove to be a interesting deck-building dilemma. Hero's Downfall is the catch-all, but there's potentially a lot going on at 3 depending on how you build things, not to mention 3 mana removals are pretty clunky for aggro lists running land counts in the low 20s. Unfortunately for us there's no Doom Blade variant at 2, the best option we have is probably Bile Blight and things tail off from there with Pharika's Cure probably being the only other viable option. At 1 there's Ulcerate which may be preferable to Bile Blight. 3 life does sting in aggro mirros and you lose out on the blowout potential of BB, but spending 1 mana is significantly better than 2 for tempo purposes. With Ulcerate you can open up options like
Turn 1: 1 drop
Turn 2: Ulcerate their 1 drop, play another 1 drop
which can be a pretty big swing. Crippling Blight is another interesting option, it saw some amount of play in Zombies decks and compliments Mogis Marauder pretty well. This should be a deck that can race so it could easily be preferable to simply run Crippling Blight for Polukranos (or other big blockers) rather then Hero's Downfall and its more prohibitive casting cost. As far as non-creatures, Boon of Erebos certainly is interesting and it works well with Pain Seer which they almost always will want to trade with in combat. I'm not huge on Sign in Blood in aggressive decks like this as you don't really want to play it early due to the tempo loss and it reduces your threat density, but it might be decent out of the board. I wish we had some sort of utility land we could run but bestow at least helps somewhat with mana flood.
I wouldn't mind testing some small number of murderous cut, but I think that the matches where you'll be able to cast it effectively it won't have many good targets, and against the matchups where it has lots of good targets then you won't be able to cast it effectively.
Modern:
Twinning End
Commander:
Mayael the Anema
Hmm i dont see why bile blight/ulcerate will be bade because of courser. Are you afraid of courser because he blocks your creatures? or because of the lifegain? If it's because he blocks then ulcerate and bile blight just kills it in combat which is fine.
Unless they kill your guy in response. Or buff heir courser. Or counter your spell. Or don't block, because they have some better play.
Crippling blight is just better against courser. It's... Worse against rabble master.
Modern SplinterTwin
Now that I think of it Feast of Dreams actually kills Courser for 2 mana. Might be too narrow though depending on how the meta shapes up.