4 removal spells? A lot more than 4 dude. I agree pox is for grinding it out but I would rather remove the creatures rather than delay them with a bridge.
Huh? So you are breaking into the 8Rack core for space? Argument immediately invalidated.
Lightning Bolt, Smallpox, Liliana, K Command, Anger of the gods. It ends up being like 16+ removal spells.
Who cares if you break into the "core" whatever that means. As far as I'm concerned the only "core" is the 8 Racks, Lillies and Thoughtseize/IoK.
THe fact that you don't know what the core is and don't know why its immutable tells me you are a long way from mastering this strat and thus I basically ignore your "advice" and suggest to everyone else to do the same. Its pointless to continue discussion about apples when you want to play with oranges.
It's exactly this kind of close-mindedness and pompous attitude that got you kicked out of your old thread in the first place. Literally no other deck is so xenophobic with notions of "That's not close enough to my definition of ____.deck, GET OUT!"
This was a problem with 8rack discussion in the past and I thought we'd matured since then. I hate to see this regression.
I think I would personally edge Harsh Scrutiny ahead of Despise. You're only ever going to run either in a very creature heavy meta. That generally means aggressive aggro decks putting dudes on the ground and up in your face fast. Personally, in that scenario, I'd rather have the scry help ward off bad draws that could cause my deck to stumble and allow the aggro deck to gain a lead.
But in my opinion, IoK and Thoughtseize still have the targeted discard needs of 8rack on lockdown. I don't see that changing for awhile.
I don't think it will be very effective at shutting down our racks. Since priority is active player followed by opposing player, our racks will take resolve before they get an opportunity to draw bonus cards.
We do have our work cut out for us for emptying their hand in preparation for the next turn, but we're in topdeck mode nearly as much as the opponent so there is a good chance that we'll benefit from the card draw as well. Between 4 card draws from 8rack and a discard engine like LotV, we'll generally be in a good position to ravage their hand again. Especially if we have raven's crime at our disposal.
Some decks that vomit their hands onto the field could get some good use out of this potentially. 4 cmc is pretty pricey for those sorts of decks though.
If Smallpox ends games before they start why isn't it top tier? Neither 8Rack (which isn't that good of a pox deck in the first place) neither Loam Pox are anywhere near the top decks, and one of them is specifically designed to abuse Smallpox and play to the "strenghts" of a card that ends games before thay start. Maybe it's just not as good as some think?
Because smallpox backfires too much to carry people though a big tournament and modern lacks the cards that make legacy pox a thing. That doesn't change the fact that it is quite capable of torpedoing the opponent at the waterline on turn 2.
It's not an example of card disadvantage. No more than TS, IoK, or LotV are card disadvantage.
Only the last mode doesn't interact with the opponent's cards or board state. However a 4 point life swing is nothing to scoff at.
Force a discard? One for one.
Kill a creature? One for one.
Force a discard and discard to kill a creature? Two for two.
It's just a charm. The individual effects aren't as potent as a card with a single effect, but it draws its power from being a card that be flexible enough to do multiple things. However with this "charm" you can opt to utilize multiple effects if you want to. This is useful since it lets us turn otherwise dead cards in our hand into useful effects.
I'm not surprised in the least that people are having luck with it. A quick assault on the opponent's resources from multiple fronts is what allows smallpox to have a habit of just ending games before they start. Brutality enables the same sort of multi-pronged attack.
Sorry I'm not sure how to post a deck list the "right" way I'm kinda still figuring things out. Here's my current list and I'm still changing things around with it. I only have 3 Lilianas because money but I will be getting a 4th.
Although it just occurred to me that I don't know if we can specify specific printings for cards within the context of a decklist. Within regular card tags, that's accomplished by appending a pipe and the set name immediately after the card name like so:
To me it looks more like a toy for zombie tribal decks than anything else. Its abilities are more potent if you have alternative sources of zombies, and the discard itself is probably useful since zombies may very well want to have specific cards in their graveyard. And within a zombie tribal shell, the 1 cmc 1/1 is more relevant because of its zombie subtype.
Well we'd have to do the math to see which pulls ahead in lifeloss per card, but I suspect that in a low CMC deck like 8rack it averages about to about equal considering that Bob draws us lands for free.
The biggest advantage of Asylum Visitor over Bob in 8rack are that is that it frequently wins the card advantage math before the opponent has any opportunity to interact with it. Mainly in that it will frequently draw its first card on the opponent's upkeep, essentially cantripping, before they ever get an opportunity to draw removal. Additionally, it lets us avoid wring some card advantage from lili's +1 by changing our discard into a madness cast. So right out of the gate it's shifting the numbers in our favor while we would have been waiting until our next upkeep before we ever started getting returns from casting Bob.
Plus the 3 power trades better than Bob's 2 power.
I think there's merit with what WMP is getting at. After all, the majority of our spells are discard effects which are most potent in the opening turns of the game. I really like the idea of opening the game with twin IoK's. Historically fast mana is SUPER good. It all comes down to at what cost do you get the fast mana?
But I don't know how well the cards in question really mesh with a most 8rack lists.
The T1 double discard is most tempting prospect of faster mana in 8rack, but simian spirit guide doesn't do much to help us there with its red R mana. The notion is great, you can draw parallels with the acceleration of Lotus Petal which is just a bonkers card where its legal, but the mana is just frustratingly not in the right color for accelerated discard. If it was black mana, then I'd probably be jumping at it in a heartbeat.
Gemstone Caverns can do the job of getting us T1 BB, but there are a lot of qualifiers on that card and classic 8rack doesn't really run that many CMC 1 instants that we can use to maximize that T0 land by casting during our opponent's first turn.
edit:
The two cards are IMO a better fit for the 8rackdos variant with its higher concentration of instants (namely lightning bolt) and ofcourse red spells that can utilize SSG's red mana. Gemstone cavern might be able to be squeezed into some more classic 8rack lists to get some extra speed every now and then.
Eight rack occurs here and there at larger events and its popularity is aparently growing.
This time took 6th place @44 people GPT Lille a nice budget build by Alex Burgos Martinez:
I know there are Necrogen Mists instead of Liliana, but after the first glance, this doesn't strike me as a budget list. No cutbacks on the sideboard, where you see them most often, full playset of both Mutavault and Urborg, 3 Thoughtseize seems a lot more like fear of lifeloss, not fear of spending money. Budget lists usually feature Duress or subpar targeted discard like Blackmail, etc.
I don't understand why he is running Mists over Lily, other than that Mists doesn't die to damage, but it definitely doesn't "smell" like budget was the concern here. Maybe I'm wrong, but hey.
It probably has something to do with all the cards that you mentioned being cheap compared to lotV. The entire deck costs less than a lili playset, which has a median price of ~$100 each these days, $80 for damaged and heavily played cards.
I guess I logged in by chance just at the right time. It's weird that it exiles rather than discarding. Maybe the designers were scared of it enabling stronger T1 tarmogoyfs back during time spiral.
It's still a great trick. Our spells are most influential in the early game, so any way we can cast more or larger spells early is nice.
I'm sure there is some way to get off a T2 hymn, but I don't know if it will end up being something useful or something that's just cute.
Edit :
This was in response to feardreaper's post.
I count 3 card types in the yard. Land, sorcery, and instant. The spirit guide is exiled.
Edit:
Response to deleted post about simian Spirit guide . Potentially useful trick for boosting our tempo that is probably worth taking note of in general, but alas it doesn't enable a T2 hymn.
But as MemoryLapse pointed out, we are a control deck and we do tend to draw games out as far as turn counts are concerned.
Well said, but again I will reiterate, mono-Black 8rack is a turn 6+ deck in an increasingly turn 4 meta. Decks are getting faster and stronger it seems in the last year or so (at least to my observation). Tons of fast creature heavy decks seem to be inching their way into the meta. We for sure aren't getting faster. And it doesn't seem like we are getting the cards that make our engine more powerful. To me change is needed. I'm working on my own BR version right now. Put me in the camp that Pack Rat is not the future of this deck unless something comes along to boost its efficiency. We all have our opinions. Good luck whatever your strategy.
For the most part, I agree. It feels as though design is constantly pushing the envelope with creature design, while non-creature spells are frequently being designed by taking an old spell and making it worse unless some condition is met.
I mostly just wanted to voice my opinion about how pack rat does synergize with 8rack and can have a place in the deck. Whether or not it is the best fit for our 75 is a lot more debatable. You can say the same thing about Necrogen Mists. Mists is exactly the sort of discard engine that 8rack strives to use (and frequently is in budget lists), but is muscled out because of essentially universal consensus that Liliana of the Veil is far superior except in fringe cases that almost aren't even worth mentioning. But if LotV were to be banned tomorrow, then 8rack would swap over to mists.
As far as cryptbreaker is concerned, I personally believe rats are superior because the rat swarm is more resilient since each rat token has the token generation ability. Cryptbreaker create generic tokens, so our token generation is shut down when cryptbreaker is killed.
Personally my pet favorite card in 8rack is smallpox. It can be a huge wrench in an opponent's gameplan. It can kill off a fast creature play and throw off the opponent's curve something fierce. In general I think we come out of the exchange better than our opponent 9 times out of 10, however my opinion is that it blows up in our face just a bit too often to expect the card to carry you through a large tournament. I think potential is there and I keep my eyes peeled each spoiler season for cards that might be usable by 8rack and also can potentially shift the smallpox exchange more in our favor.
Setting up delirium to turn whispers of emrakul into a hymn to tourach is intriguing. Whether or not it is reliable enough to be worth the effort to setup a hymn is questionable, but I want to try it. Which brings me to talgardo
I've been thinking in a effective way to use Whispers of emrakul as a replacement of Wrench mind as a start. I also did a modification on the argument of the deck adding bloodghast and using smallpox and fetch but keeping mono black and the wining condition of the racks.
When using Whispers of Emrakul, I think it is important to ask yourself how quickly you can potentially set up a full hymn and how likely such a scenario is to occur. Do you need to make any "weaker" plays to achieve a full hymn early?
To me, it looks like the fastest that you can cast a full hymn is T3 and that you need to cast an instant on T1 and a smallpox on T2 to get an artifact/enchantment/creature into the yard. The T1 play of Funeral Charm or Dismember are generally going to be much weaker plays than a T1 Inqusition of Kozilek or Thoughtseize.
So that you're not completely reliant on a T2 smallpox to setup delerium, you could consider running some copies of Collective Brutality to act as additional smallpoxes of sorts. They're both cards that perform relatively powerful T2 plays by assaulting multiple of your opponent's resources while costing you some cards of your own (in this case, potentially letting you enable delirium by the end of T2).
IMO, you should be playing some dual-typed cards so that it is much easier to set off delerium. By far the easiest to slip into the deck is bitterblossom (it is both an enchantment and a tribal card).
Artifact creatures fit the bill of a dual typed card. You should look through those to see if any catch your eye (most recently Lupine Prototype has been mentioned), but I haven't looked through the full list again this evening. Spellskite is always popular.
Enchantment creatures are things, but most probably aren't useful enough to be worth running. Brain Maggot is probably the closest fit but still sort of weak, Thassa, God of the Sea might at least help use improve the quality of our topdecks, but I don't think I'd give up a slot in my deck for that alone. Erebos, God of the Dead and Mogis, God of Slaughter can help either build card advantage or hurt the opponent, but they're expensive at 4cmc and we probably don't want to use them because the effect is weak for their cost considering that we'll almost never turn them into creatures.
The god-weapon cycle are double-typed as enchantment artifacts, but none of them really mesh with the deck beyond the fact that they all would make bitterblossom's fairy tokens better. Bow of Nylea and Whip of Erebos both essentially counteract the life loss of creating the fairies, and bident of thassa would generate a ton of card advantage with bitterblossom fairies swarming. I personally don't think any of these really have a place in our 75, but I figured it was worth mentioning them for verbosity with dual-typed cards and if you ever wanted try to work work the deck into something with a bit of a token swarm side-theme.
While mutavault is a tried and true card, I would consider playing Darksteel Citadel in a deck that is basically a testbed for Whispers of Emrakul. If whispers proves useful, then I would considering bringing some mutavaults back in. Dryad Arbor is also dual typed, but suffers from summoning sickness.
If I were to try to tweak your list a bit, I might try swapping out some of the pieces to make it look like this instead.
The fastest you can cast a full hymn is still turn 3, but IMO I think that you'll have an easier time setting up Delirum with the addition of these dual typed cards and with collective brutality assisting smallpox in setting up delerium for Whispers. You also don't need to "waste" your T1 by casting an instant instead of TS or IoK. Although if you're going to run all those fetchlands, you should consider trying to see if you can splash some supporting cards from other colors in or perhaps make use other popular lands like Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace.
Replying to the bolded bit, I don't believe that's true.
Let's see if I can voice this right. Pack Rat does synergize with 8rack. While the discard gameplan may not benefit from the rats, the rats benefit from the discard gameplan. As we've already established, an unanswered pack rat can be a game winning threat. Almost comparable to watching a planeswalker inexorably tick up when you have no way to stop it. IMO, 8rack is probably the best deck in modern for placing an opponent in a position where they are unable to answer the rat. Our discard suite both provides intel and limits the opponent's options which can free up an opportunity for rats to just get out of control.
For example, if our T1 Inquisition of Kozilek reveals that they have no removal in hand or only a single piece of removal, we can pave the way to go all-in on rats and play out the game like we're some weird twist on merfolk except every card in our deck is a rat lord instead of lord of atlantis.
The same is true if our discard engines force them into topdeck mode. With no cards in hand and their options severely limited, our opponent is likely only able to helplessly watch as we drop a rat and start the doomsday clock.
If I'm understanding you correctly you're saying that discard acts as a sort of proactive shield and the Rats flourish under said shield.
Is that really "synergy"? I guess so but it seems almost coincidental. Couldn't counterspells also provide a similar "synergy"? Leave 3 mana open for a cancel and at EOT if they don't play something activate the Rat (well maybe not cancel per say...I wonder why nobody does this?).
Doesn't almost every card benefit from this synergy? Would you say Hangarback Walker and Tasigur, the Golden Fang have synergy with the 8Rack core or would you identify them more as "goodstuff"?
I'm not saying don't run the rat. It's very effective and at the end of the day that's all that really matters right? I just don't really consider it a synergy. At least not in the same obvious way Asylum Visitor, Ensnaring Bridge or Lupine Prototype is.
A simple definition of synergy is "the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects."
Technically every creature synergizes with stripping the opponent of their immediate answers. The reason I consider 8rack more synergistic with pack rat is because the payoff for rat is much higher than most other creatures because most creatures can still be fairly readily answered by a topdeck a few turns down the road, yet pack rat only has to live for a narrow window before it becomes signifcantly harder to stop. For example, forcing the opponent to discard their Go for the Throat will protect both Tasigur, the golden fang and Pack Rat. But if they draw a new Go for the Throat in a few turns, then tasigur is out of the fight. But even though GFTT would have been an answer to pack rat a few turns ago, it can't do much at all against duplicate rats. There are comparatively very few cards that can stop a rat swarm once it gets going (Maelstrom Pulse is probably the most prolific).
Pack rat does take some time to get up to speed in offensive power, which is why it isn't adopted by aggro/midrange decks. But as MemoryLapse pointed out, we are a control deck and we do tend to draw games out as far as turn counts are concerned. At its core, what this deck does is disrupt the opponent's gameplan with gratuitous hand disruption and then set a hard to stop clock. A growing pile of rats is as much of a clock as an active rack or liliana ticking up to her ult.
edit:
I also don't view the counterspell situation as a parallel. With the counterspell, you're going out of your way to setup rat. In 8rack, the rat capitalizes on the environment that 8rack strives to create under normal circumstances.
It's exactly this kind of close-mindedness and pompous attitude that got you kicked out of your old thread in the first place. Literally no other deck is so xenophobic with notions of "That's not close enough to my definition of ____.deck, GET OUT!"
This was a problem with 8rack discussion in the past and I thought we'd matured since then. I hate to see this regression.
But in my opinion, IoK and Thoughtseize still have the targeted discard needs of 8rack on lockdown. I don't see that changing for awhile.
I don't think it will be very effective at shutting down our racks. Since priority is active player followed by opposing player, our racks will take resolve before they get an opportunity to draw bonus cards.
We do have our work cut out for us for emptying their hand in preparation for the next turn, but we're in topdeck mode nearly as much as the opponent so there is a good chance that we'll benefit from the card draw as well. Between 4 card draws from 8rack and a discard engine like LotV, we'll generally be in a good position to ravage their hand again. Especially if we have raven's crime at our disposal.
I'm about as concerned about facing Ghirapur Orrery as I am about facing Howling Mine.
Some decks that vomit their hands onto the field could get some good use out of this potentially. 4 cmc is pretty pricey for those sorts of decks though.
Because smallpox backfires too much to carry people though a big tournament and modern lacks the cards that make legacy pox a thing. That doesn't change the fact that it is quite capable of torpedoing the opponent at the waterline on turn 2.
Only the last mode doesn't interact with the opponent's cards or board state. However a 4 point life swing is nothing to scoff at.
Force a discard? One for one.
Kill a creature? One for one.
Force a discard and discard to kill a creature? Two for two.
It's just a charm. The individual effects aren't as potent as a card with a single effect, but it draws its power from being a card that be flexible enough to do multiple things. However with this "charm" you can opt to utilize multiple effects if you want to. This is useful since it lets us turn otherwise dead cards in our hand into useful effects.
I'm not surprised in the least that people are having luck with it. A quick assault on the opponent's resources from multiple fronts is what allows smallpox to have a habit of just ending games before they start. Brutality enables the same sort of multi-pronged attack.
Text that isn't preceded by a number is treated as a header for organizing the decklist. You can name it whatever you want, but I like splitting things up by card type. More info about invoking card/deck tags and creating mana symbols can be found here: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/community-forums/introduce-yourself/399760-card-deck-and-mana-tags-a-beginners-guide
I've gone ahead and put your decklist in a deck tag for easy reading. You can try to quote my post to see what how it's laid out.
Although it just occurred to me that I don't know if we can specify specific printings for cards within the context of a decklist. Within regular card tags, that's accomplished by appending a pipe and the set name immediately after the card name like so:
Terminate
Plus the 3 power trades better than Bob's 2 power.
But I don't know how well the cards in question really mesh with a most 8rack lists.
The T1 double discard is most tempting prospect of faster mana in 8rack, but simian spirit guide doesn't do much to help us there with its red R mana. The notion is great, you can draw parallels with the acceleration of Lotus Petal which is just a bonkers card where its legal, but the mana is just frustratingly not in the right color for accelerated discard. If it was black mana, then I'd probably be jumping at it in a heartbeat.
Gemstone Caverns can do the job of getting us T1 BB, but there are a lot of qualifiers on that card and classic 8rack doesn't really run that many CMC 1 instants that we can use to maximize that T0 land by casting during our opponent's first turn.
edit:
The two cards are IMO a better fit for the 8rackdos variant with its higher concentration of instants (namely lightning bolt) and ofcourse red spells that can utilize SSG's red mana. Gemstone cavern might be able to be squeezed into some more classic 8rack lists to get some extra speed every now and then.
It probably has something to do with all the cards that you mentioned being cheap compared to lotV. The entire deck costs less than a lili playset, which has a median price of ~$100 each these days, $80 for damaged and heavily played cards.
She desperately needs a reprint.
It's still a great trick. Our spells are most influential in the early game, so any way we can cast more or larger spells early is nice.
I'm sure there is some way to get off a T2 hymn, but I don't know if it will end up being something useful or something that's just cute.
Edit :
This was in response to feardreaper's post.
The thread is on fire today.
I count 3 card types in the yard. Land, sorcery, and instant. The spirit guide is exiled.Edit:
Response to deleted post about simian Spirit guide . Potentially useful trick for boosting our tempo that is probably worth taking note of in general, but alas it doesn't enable a T2 hymn.
For the most part, I agree. It feels as though design is constantly pushing the envelope with creature design, while non-creature spells are frequently being designed by taking an old spell and making it worse unless some condition is met.
I mostly just wanted to voice my opinion about how pack rat does synergize with 8rack and can have a place in the deck. Whether or not it is the best fit for our 75 is a lot more debatable. You can say the same thing about Necrogen Mists. Mists is exactly the sort of discard engine that 8rack strives to use (and frequently is in budget lists), but is muscled out because of essentially universal consensus that Liliana of the Veil is far superior except in fringe cases that almost aren't even worth mentioning. But if LotV were to be banned tomorrow, then 8rack would swap over to mists.
As far as cryptbreaker is concerned, I personally believe rats are superior because the rat swarm is more resilient since each rat token has the token generation ability. Cryptbreaker create generic tokens, so our token generation is shut down when cryptbreaker is killed.
Personally my pet favorite card in 8rack is smallpox. It can be a huge wrench in an opponent's gameplan. It can kill off a fast creature play and throw off the opponent's curve something fierce. In general I think we come out of the exchange better than our opponent 9 times out of 10, however my opinion is that it blows up in our face just a bit too often to expect the card to carry you through a large tournament. I think potential is there and I keep my eyes peeled each spoiler season for cards that might be usable by 8rack and also can potentially shift the smallpox exchange more in our favor.
Setting up delirium to turn whispers of emrakul into a hymn to tourach is intriguing. Whether or not it is reliable enough to be worth the effort to setup a hymn is questionable, but I want to try it. Which brings me to talgardo
When using Whispers of Emrakul, I think it is important to ask yourself how quickly you can potentially set up a full hymn and how likely such a scenario is to occur. Do you need to make any "weaker" plays to achieve a full hymn early?
To me, it looks like the fastest that you can cast a full hymn is T3 and that you need to cast an instant on T1 and a smallpox on T2 to get an artifact/enchantment/creature into the yard. The T1 play of Funeral Charm or Dismember are generally going to be much weaker plays than a T1 Inqusition of Kozilek or Thoughtseize.
So that you're not completely reliant on a T2 smallpox to setup delerium, you could consider running some copies of Collective Brutality to act as additional smallpoxes of sorts. They're both cards that perform relatively powerful T2 plays by assaulting multiple of your opponent's resources while costing you some cards of your own (in this case, potentially letting you enable delirium by the end of T2).
IMO, you should be playing some dual-typed cards so that it is much easier to set off delerium. By far the easiest to slip into the deck is bitterblossom (it is both an enchantment and a tribal card).
Artifact creatures fit the bill of a dual typed card. You should look through those to see if any catch your eye (most recently Lupine Prototype has been mentioned), but I haven't looked through the full list again this evening. Spellskite is always popular.
Enchantment creatures are things, but most probably aren't useful enough to be worth running. Brain Maggot is probably the closest fit but still sort of weak, Thassa, God of the Sea might at least help use improve the quality of our topdecks, but I don't think I'd give up a slot in my deck for that alone. Erebos, God of the Dead and Mogis, God of Slaughter can help either build card advantage or hurt the opponent, but they're expensive at 4cmc and we probably don't want to use them because the effect is weak for their cost considering that we'll almost never turn them into creatures.
The god-weapon cycle are double-typed as enchantment artifacts, but none of them really mesh with the deck beyond the fact that they all would make bitterblossom's fairy tokens better. Bow of Nylea and Whip of Erebos both essentially counteract the life loss of creating the fairies, and bident of thassa would generate a ton of card advantage with bitterblossom fairies swarming. I personally don't think any of these really have a place in our 75, but I figured it was worth mentioning them for verbosity with dual-typed cards and if you ever wanted try to work work the deck into something with a bit of a token swarm side-theme.
While mutavault is a tried and true card, I would consider playing Darksteel Citadel in a deck that is basically a testbed for Whispers of Emrakul. If whispers proves useful, then I would considering bringing some mutavaults back in. Dryad Arbor is also dual typed, but suffers from summoning sickness.
If I were to try to tweak your list a bit, I might try swapping out some of the pieces to make it look like this instead.
3 Lupine Prototype
Sorceries (20)
4 Thoughtseize
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
2 Raven's Crime
4 Whispers of Emrakul
4 Smallpox
2 Collective Brutality
3 shrieking affliction
3 bitterblossom
Artifacts (3)
3 the rack
Planeswalkers (4)
4 Liliana of the veil
Lands (24)
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Darksteel Citadel
1 Dakmor Salvage
1 leechridden swamp
6 Swamp
The fastest you can cast a full hymn is still turn 3, but IMO I think that you'll have an easier time setting up Delirum with the addition of these dual typed cards and with collective brutality assisting smallpox in setting up delerium for Whispers. You also don't need to "waste" your T1 by casting an instant instead of TS or IoK. Although if you're going to run all those fetchlands, you should consider trying to see if you can splash some supporting cards from other colors in or perhaps make use other popular lands like Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace.
A simple definition of synergy is "the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects."
Technically every creature synergizes with stripping the opponent of their immediate answers. The reason I consider 8rack more synergistic with pack rat is because the payoff for rat is much higher than most other creatures because most creatures can still be fairly readily answered by a topdeck a few turns down the road, yet pack rat only has to live for a narrow window before it becomes signifcantly harder to stop. For example, forcing the opponent to discard their Go for the Throat will protect both Tasigur, the golden fang and Pack Rat. But if they draw a new Go for the Throat in a few turns, then tasigur is out of the fight. But even though GFTT would have been an answer to pack rat a few turns ago, it can't do much at all against duplicate rats. There are comparatively very few cards that can stop a rat swarm once it gets going (Maelstrom Pulse is probably the most prolific).
Pack rat does take some time to get up to speed in offensive power, which is why it isn't adopted by aggro/midrange decks. But as MemoryLapse pointed out, we are a control deck and we do tend to draw games out as far as turn counts are concerned. At its core, what this deck does is disrupt the opponent's gameplan with gratuitous hand disruption and then set a hard to stop clock. A growing pile of rats is as much of a clock as an active rack or liliana ticking up to her ult.
edit:
I also don't view the counterspell situation as a parallel. With the counterspell, you're going out of your way to setup rat. In 8rack, the rat capitalizes on the environment that 8rack strives to create under normal circumstances.