MTG Salvation

Quote from Darklich528 »

Have you considered Grim Monolith? Good ramp on its own, and produces infinite colorless with Rings of Brighthearth.

Unless I read the card wrong, I think you are confusing Grim Monolith with Basalt Monolith which is already in the decklist.

Quote from RivenVII »

Quote from Yalpe »

The most frustrating thing to me when playing against prophet is that it slows the game down to a crawl. The player with PoK will always have something to do every turn (mana sink, draw effect, flash in stuff). Provided that prophet is played in the right situation it will win the game for sure but it will take a couple of very boring turn where someone is decksturbating every turn. I agree that on its own it does not do a whole lot and dies easily, but it is the most frustrating card that I see the most often right now in any meta. I'd add Cyclonic Rift to this list because most of the time it is used as a "I hope to get back into this game so I rift" instead of rift to win. This card slows down games so much its almost unbearable.

The PoK player taking forever sounds like more of an individual issue with that player and not a problem with the card itself. Long turns aren't a reason for banning either.

On the bright side, it gives you more time to ponder the value of spot removal while they are playing cards.

Long turns happen due to the player having PoK resolving many triggers. Any good player will have counter magic ready when resolving Pok, its not like you can just bolt it and be done with it. Often times you will need more than 2 cards to deal with it, and that is on the turn it lands, because on the following turns it is usually too late. The player might not be able to win right away but he should have the table locked down at that point.

The most frustrating thing to me when playing against prophet is that it slows the game down to a crawl. The player with PoK will always have something to do every turn (mana sink, draw effect, flash in stuff). Provided that prophet is played in the right situation it will win the game for sure but it will take a couple of very boring turn where someone is decksturbating every turn. I agree that on its own it does not do a whole lot and dies easily, but it is the most frustrating card that I see the most often right now in any meta. I'd add Cyclonic Rift to this list because most of the time it is used as a "I hope to get back into this game so I rift" instead of rift to win. This card slows down games so much its almost unbearable.

I don't think that Standard is dying out... But prices were a lot cheaper back then, and what you said about rares and good uncommons like Kitchen Finks is true. I played 5CC/Cruel Control back then and it was dirty cheap (you could even get the Cryptic Commands and Wrath of God for free as rewards). I play Esper now, anything but the Doom Blade/Ultimate Price/Charm package and Dissolve is rare!

You'll bring back Erebos, but it won't be a creature. "That creature" refers to "the object you returned from your graveyard this way", but since it won't be a creature, it can't have any creature types, and therefore won't be a Nightmare.

Note that if it later becomes a creature again, it'll be a Nightmare as well as a God, because it's a creature again and the effect that brought it back says that it's a Nightmare "in addition to its other creature types".

205.1b Some effects change an object's card type, supertype, or subtype but specify that the object retains a prior card type, supertype, or subtype. In such cases, all the object's prior card types, supertypes, and subtypes are retained. This rule applies to effects that use the phrase "in addition to its types" or that state that something is "still a [type, supertype, or subtype]." Some effects state that an object becomes an "artifact creature"; these effects also allow the object to retain all of its prior card types and subtypes.

205.3d An object can't gain a subtype that doesn't correspond to one of that object's types.

---

Edited because apparently, Vampires and Nightmares are identical. Thanks, Lithl!

@yalpe

If your meta is slivers, Plague Sliver is a great beatdown sliver to make them pay for having out hordes.
The one time I played against slivers I remember [card]Altar of Dementia[card] doing a ton of work to mill them and then reanimate all their good slivers.

Spike Cannibal is a great counter hate card against vorel and other new decks popping up if you want another out than recurring Fleshbag Marauder.

To me, chainer's core is this:

• Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed
  
• Phyrexian Altar
  
• Rune-Scarred Demon
  
• Living Death
  
• Kokusho, the Evening Star

From there you need
1) Tutors and Card Draw
2) Mana Doublers
3) Removal
4) Recursion/Utility
5) additional wincons

IMHO that in order of importance as well, but there are a lot of people that will argue with that order.

Tutors and card draw are pretty straight forward, just play all the best ones that you can afford. For draw, we like the draw x lose x cards and the dmg during upkeep types.
Outside of those memory jar and Disciple of Bolas are the most noteable.

cabal coffers, Crypt Ghast, Nirkvana Revenant, and caged sun are the essential. If you dont see a lot of artifact hate you can run extraplanar lens, and if you dont see a lot of black you can run Gauntlet of Power.

My preferred removal suite is as follows

• Sickening Shoal
  
• Dismember
  
• Fleshbag Maurader
  
• Slum Reaper
  
• Oblivion Stone
  
• Damnnation
  
• Kagemaro, First to Suffer
  
• Massacre Wurm
  
• Duplicant
  
• All is Dust
  
• Decree of Pain

You want creatures that you can recur for removal through chainer, and enough reset the board options to get rid of problem enchantments. You dont mind wrathing, as you can usually recover faster than anyone else can using your general and a mana doubler.


The usual recursion we use is Crucible of Worlds and Trading Post. Crucible lets us replay coffers and more importantly hit every land drop once we have a fetchland in the yard.
The deck is very mana hungry, hitting every land drop is important.
Trading Post works great with getting back artifacts with chainered' guys or bloodghast/reassembling skeleton. Every once in a while you'll discard a card for life, or pay life for a chump blocker, or sac your mana vault for a new card. Its definitely a late game card with a lot of utility.
You dont need sac outlets in chainer to get your worth, but most people agree on 2. Outside of altar, Dimir House Guard is my favorite. Other people like altar of dementia and Spawning Pit... notice none of them cost mana to activate.

Blood Artist and Falkenwrath Noble are probably the best examples of wincons. Early on they trade points of damage, and if you can get into some sort of loop they can add up pings very fast. Exsanguinate is a pretty default mono black wincon.
I used Liliana of the Dark Realms once to make chainer 21 p/t once... it doesnt happen often but its good to remember. Going aggrro with this deck doesnt usually make sense, unless you're steal a ton of fatties from people's yards.

Right now your deck looks like cabal coffers is the general, not chainer.
Its all big black mana beaters. Which is fine, but eventually you'll probably shift more combo or more midrange control.
Chainer is a card advantage engine waiting to be abused.

EDIT:
I updated my decklist.
Out of interest, i put the entire deck in my cart on TCGplayer, went to the cart optimizer and let it choose heavily played cards.
You can get the deck for $585.78, which for an edh deck is pretty well priced IMHO... and probably only b/c of all the fetches I play.

For the lazy people not wanting to click the link in my sig:

Some big changes (8 cards) this time around. The big idea is to get low. Lowering the mana cost as much as possible and adding in more draw! Noteable cuts are:
Decree of Pain I swear by this card, it may come back, but Im afraid of having too many high cc spells- Hopefully Mutilate can fill it's shoes.
Beseech the Queen i loved this with sickening shoal, but it hurts too much with dark confidant/tutelage. Replaced by diabolic intent.
Altar of Dementia and Phyrexian Tower, goodbye to sac outlets hello to more draw.
ADDED
BOB, dark tutelage, lose 2 draw 2. I might change them to the lose 4 draw 4, I need to feel out the deck with bob first.
Withering Boon but we'e mono black! we have creature kill up the wazoo!!! This is an out to stuff like sigarda, uril, azusa, and early game commanders that we need a couple turns against. Generally, trading a card in your deck is pure card disadvantage- but them needing to get the 2 extra mana gives us enough tempo often times to catch up. Also, with wizards printing more and more ETB guys, there are some creatures we just cant let hit the battlefield.
We went from having 7 draw effects to 12. AVG CMC is 3.27

Su-Chi?