Agreed regarding B/x decks. I've found the most success vs them keeping redundant hands with few synergistic effects that can be dumped onto the board as early as possible and then, as you mentioned, just rely on Nissa and Garruk to get us there.
Regarding control, I feel like Jeskai is one of our best matchups, especially post board. We just have to sequence around their available mana with pacts in order to land our haymakers. U/W Miracles I've found is much harder since we can't get free Blood Moon wins and the surplus Terminus makes Thrun less good.
As for Eldritch Evolution, I agree--it's out of place. It doesn't quite work the way I was hoping it would. The idea was for it work as Pacts 5 and 6 (I was at 2 before cutting 1), turning Slimes into Queens, Queens into Hoofs, Dorks into turn 2 Staticasters, BTEs into turn 2 Trolls, and Rejuvenators into turn 3 Storm Gods. It almost worked, but I found myself boarding it out in all the situations I was boarding in the things I wanted it to find, or vice versa. So I'm going in a different direction: Evolutionary Leap. The idea here being that I want this slot to provide gas when my resources are minimal, but I'm still grinding, but I don't want it to sit in hand where it can get stripped away by a discard spell in mid game or early game. Primal Command has consistently failed to do that for me. Eldritch Evolution has come close. With this, I can spend excess mana to commit it to board early and turn Nissa tokens and bad blocks into value over time. That's the theory anyways. We'll see how testing goes.
Rejuvenator is bonkers. I really don't want to cut him. Yes he's anemic after he hits board. Yes he only provides one devotion. But the card has won me way more games than Oaths have. Both my opponents and I have been consistently impressed and surprised by the cards power. Turns out digging 5, finding your best land, and effectively jumping ahead a turn is very, very strong. The card is very close to being totally busted for us. I wish I could justify running more than 2, but his lack of devotion and smol body is felt. For now, I'm thinking the 1-of Leap can make up for the lack of a 4th Oath.
I would give Primetime a second chance. Oftentimes, a turn 3 Primetime, fetching up Nykthos and Kessig is enough to close out a game, if not on the back of the Primetime, then on the back of the Kessig and Nykthos.
As you can see it's essentially Anthony's Pact list with a few tweaks that I feel make things a bit more consistent at the cost of some power. I made these changes after a month or so of playing the stock list and getting a really good feel for the interactions, lines, gameplans and overall what I liked/didn't like. I'm willing to discuss/answer questions on card choices, since I know the choices are a bit odd. I'll answer question regarding sideboard stuffs too, but I think I sideboarded incorrectly a lot of the time today.
Here's a super brief rundown of the day:
Match 1 vs Burn: (0-2)
Timely (read, turn 3, then turn 2) Eidolons with no removal in hand on my end got me real good both games.
Match 2 vs Bye: (2-0)
It was a hard fought match, but I vanquished both halves of my sandwich and finished one bottle of water with time to spare in the round. Stay hydrated kids.
Match 3 vs Humans: (0-2)
On the draw. Kept a solid 1 lander with plenty of low cost action cards (like scooze) and ramp to support it so long as I drew one land, then proceeded to miss two land drops in a row as my opponent proceeded to drop his nut hand on me (three champions a vials hierarch and a lieutenant) and I scooped at 10 life with lethal on board having only shown him two birds of paradise.
I get a great start game 2 by mulling to 4, keeping staticaster, sudden shock, a breeding pool, and a nissa voz. Kitesail takes the shock, and I manage to hit land drops into a turn 3 staticaster to kill his heirarch--he drops two vials and passes. I draw a spout, and start making some plants. I proceed to draw a blood moon and cry internally. I pull the trigger a bit early and blow up his kitesail. Then he drops his own staticaster to blow up my plants. We have a very grindy game from here which comes down to a crucial topdeck which he nails, pulling Staticaster two of two to get through my nissa-pumped plant for lethal.
I'm basically out of the running at this point, but I decide to play things out anyways.
Match 4 vs Jeskai (2-0):
He plays an Azcanta, I empty my hand. He blows up my world. I pact when he has two mana up. I can hear his thought process, same as every Jeskai player, "Ummm, I'll just let it resolve, counter whatever she plays next, and get a free timewalk?" We all know what happens next. He scoops to Thrun.
Game 2: This time he correctly counters the first pact. Unfortunately, he taps out to do it with a Cryptic. Which lets me jam in the next pact, play Thrun and slam the Blood Moon I'd been saving for this moment. He dies to Thrun and BTE beats shortly thereafter.
Match 5 vs Titanshift (2-0):
I played this guy before, on the same deck, when I was on the stock list and handily lost 0-2. He's on the play game 1 and mulls to 5. I turn 1 Elves into turn 2, U Nissa, and another dork. His turn 3 he drops his third land...and pacts for sakura tribe. On my turn I pact up acidic slime and we move onto game 2. Later he tells me he top decked two Primetimes, so we both agree that pacting for steve was provs correct since there was no way he was going to win from that position unless he hit his next two land drops.
Game 2 is more interesting. My hand has Rejuvenator and 3 BTEs. Around Turn 3 I run out 2 BTEs and turn one of them into a Rejuvenator with Eldritch evolution, which finds me the Nykthos I need with Primetime in hand. He plays around the Magus of the Moon I used to play by fetching in response to the Eldritch Evolution for a basic forest. This is a mistake on my part because I wanted to get a 4 drop, but I board out my 4 drop. It works out though, so we take those. He keeps me off devotion by bolting my BTE. I draw into pact, and pact for a BTE to try and run out Primetime since I was off of 8, but could hit 6 and also had Ruric Thar in hand. Beast within kills my Nykthos when I try and drop BTE. Which forces me to play Rejuvenator...which finds me another Nykthos! Sidenote: This is the second time 'ol Juves has come in clutch with the pact saves since I've started playing 'em. I swing in to take him 10. He Scapeshifts, but I'm at 19, and he can only get 18 damage, so he wipes my board and deals 6 to me and is left with no basics. That makes the blood moon back breaking. My final BTE, Ruric Thar, and the Primetime close out the game from there.
Match 6 vs Jund: (2-0)
This one vs a friend of mine who is usually on some Grixis or Sultai or UW/Jeskai control variant, but I know what he's on going into this. I keep a very redundant hand. He takes one of the ramp pieces, as expected, but doesn't kill the other one, which lets me feel more confident about dumping my hand on my second/thirds turns. One of those things is a rejuvenator, which finds me Nykthos with one in hand. Yay consistency. He does Jund things, dropping a Goyf and a Bob and growing incremental card advantage as he whittles away at my life and board state. I get insanely lucky and top deck into Nissa (which absorbs goyf beats), and two pacts in a row. The first lets me get a Hornet Queen. The second lets me get a Craterhoof using the nykthos in hand to double my devotion mana-2 to end the game.
Game 2 he played a few discard spells and took my payoffs instead of the ramp this time around. I played a turn 2 BTE + Thrun then a turn 3 Blood Moon (both very lucky top decks as far as sequencing went), which was enough to get there.
And that was the end of that. I finished at the bottom of the 12 point folks with a stupidly low OMW%. Leaving me nowhere remotely close to top 8, which was my goal going into the event. This was probably my last outing with MGD for awhile. I've enjoyed the deck these past months. The power, speed, skillcap, and joy I crave in a deck is there, but the deck is too temperamental and inconsistent for my tastes. Even with Juves finding Nykthos an absurd number of times he's cast, even with the crazy turn 3 kills the deck can pull off, the bad games feel really really bad compared to other decks.
Polyraptor + Kiora emblem + Doubling Season is an interruptable infinite that also wipes an opponents board, and they each synergize well with one another regardless of if you have all three at the same time. If you want to make full use of doubling season and enable additional ways to grow/search for Polyraptor or the other combo pieces then Walking Ballista and Genesis Hydra are good choices. From there you just need to focus on ramp and gas in your two and three slots and you've got yourself some good fun, methinks.
On a non-Jadelight note, this is the latest MGD idea I've been playing with, after taking a lot of inspiration from CurdBros playtesting with Druid, his discovery with Laurels and the classic Vizier combo:
I don't think this deck is super competitive as is (I'm not sure I would sleeve this up instead of my usual build just yet), but it does some fun things that are worth exploring.
Plan A is to dig, pact, CC, or Wave-for-value into one of two infinite mana combos, dump your deck on the field, and win from Lab Maniac after caryatid trigger with Memorial to protect him from bolts and pushes. Plan B--if you've seen paths, snags, and the like (and a big reason I chose Memorial instead of the usual fare of enchantments...besides the fact that if you wave into it alongside a fresh druid and another combo piece you can go off immediately) is to win across the redzone with Garruk, a Memorial Boosted swarm, and/or Craterhoof.
Singleton Witness is a concession to reduce whiffed Wave attempts and allow us a bit of reactive resilience when playing vs removal.
Caryatid is used instead of visionary because buying turns vs little dudes is a necessity and the extra devotion is needed in deck this light on symbols.
Deck is light on 2+ GG CMCs because we're technically in 4 colors and we potentially need to hit 3 of them by turn 3/4 (sprawls on white or blue can make up for this, potentially), which in my experience means more fetches than usable lands (a problem I'd care about more if not for the whole infinite mana thing).
Hey all. Been lurking (on this thread in particular) for ages now. Have been piloting this deck for just as long with a ton of success as I've tinkered and brewed with it over the years. Always love checking back here when new sets are out to see what crazy ideas you all have come up with to see if it sparks any inspiration for my own MGD brews.
All that said, I definitely think Jadelight is a straight swap for Selkie in decks that are already running Courser and Witness. There's a few reasons for this, but it all really comes down to synergy, CA (virtual in this case), and tempo.
Lets examine Selkie first: puts you at +1 CA, with a small beat (no response needed). That's really the extent of it. Whether you hit it on curve, as a "free" drop before a nykthos activation, CC or Wave into it--that's all Selkie is: a bit of gas and a small threat.
Jadelight is a bit more complex: I won't rehash possible options because Uyan did a good job of laying them out. But I think it's wrong to think of Explore as Scry when we have access to E-Witness *and* Courser. With Courser already in play, we can know if Jadelight is going to draw us cards and help us dig out of a potential mana pocket. With E-Witness simply existing in our decks, we can freely send cards like P-Command, Gwave, Company, etc to the grave because then they're available for our use to extend our locks or waves when we try and go off. What's more Jadelight's interactions with Oath after being Waved in are absolutely lovely, allowing you to better shape what 3 you look at and potentially send Instants/Sorceries to the grave for a Waved Ewitness to pick up. And then there's the niche interactions it has with Scooze, letting you fuel it with unneeded dorks. And all of that is just the Explore portion of the card. That alone wouldn't quite be enough to make this card worthwhile. The fact that this synergy is attached to what can be a moderate to heavy threat that demands an answer *does* make this card a worthwhile inclusion.
So yeah...I think Jadelight is a straight swap for Selkie in pretty much all cases. But I think it'll do better *with* Courser not *instead of* Courser. It has too much going for it in terms of synergy and will often have more presence than Selkie to boot.
Agreed regarding B/x decks. I've found the most success vs them keeping redundant hands with few synergistic effects that can be dumped onto the board as early as possible and then, as you mentioned, just rely on Nissa and Garruk to get us there.
Regarding control, I feel like Jeskai is one of our best matchups, especially post board. We just have to sequence around their available mana with pacts in order to land our haymakers. U/W Miracles I've found is much harder since we can't get free Blood Moon wins and the surplus Terminus makes Thrun less good.
As for Eldritch Evolution, I agree--it's out of place. It doesn't quite work the way I was hoping it would. The idea was for it work as Pacts 5 and 6 (I was at 2 before cutting 1), turning Slimes into Queens, Queens into Hoofs, Dorks into turn 2 Staticasters, BTEs into turn 2 Trolls, and Rejuvenators into turn 3 Storm Gods. It almost worked, but I found myself boarding it out in all the situations I was boarding in the things I wanted it to find, or vice versa. So I'm going in a different direction: Evolutionary Leap. The idea here being that I want this slot to provide gas when my resources are minimal, but I'm still grinding, but I don't want it to sit in hand where it can get stripped away by a discard spell in mid game or early game. Primal Command has consistently failed to do that for me. Eldritch Evolution has come close. With this, I can spend excess mana to commit it to board early and turn Nissa tokens and bad blocks into value over time. That's the theory anyways. We'll see how testing goes.
Rejuvenator is bonkers. I really don't want to cut him. Yes he's anemic after he hits board. Yes he only provides one devotion. But the card has won me way more games than Oaths have. Both my opponents and I have been consistently impressed and surprised by the cards power. Turns out digging 5, finding your best land, and effectively jumping ahead a turn is very, very strong. The card is very close to being totally busted for us. I wish I could justify running more than 2, but his lack of devotion and smol body is felt. For now, I'm thinking the 1-of Leap can make up for the lack of a 4th Oath.
I would give Primetime a second chance. Oftentimes, a turn 3 Primetime, fetching up Nykthos and Kessig is enough to close out a game, if not on the back of the Primetime, then on the back of the Kessig and Nykthos.
Here's the list I was on and a quick rundown of the event for folks who want to learn from my mistakes.
Deck: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/mgd-current-1/?cb=1534108123
As you can see it's essentially Anthony's Pact list with a few tweaks that I feel make things a bit more consistent at the cost of some power. I made these changes after a month or so of playing the stock list and getting a really good feel for the interactions, lines, gameplans and overall what I liked/didn't like. I'm willing to discuss/answer questions on card choices, since I know the choices are a bit odd. I'll answer question regarding sideboard stuffs too, but I think I sideboarded incorrectly a lot of the time today.
Here's a super brief rundown of the day:
Match 1 vs Burn: (0-2)
Timely (read, turn 3, then turn 2) Eidolons with no removal in hand on my end got me real good both games.
Match 2 vs Bye: (2-0)
It was a hard fought match, but I vanquished both halves of my sandwich and finished one bottle of water with time to spare in the round. Stay hydrated kids.
Match 3 vs Humans: (0-2)
On the draw. Kept a solid 1 lander with plenty of low cost action cards (like scooze) and ramp to support it so long as I drew one land, then proceeded to miss two land drops in a row as my opponent proceeded to drop his nut hand on me (three champions a vials hierarch and a lieutenant) and I scooped at 10 life with lethal on board having only shown him two birds of paradise.
I get a great start game 2 by mulling to 4, keeping staticaster, sudden shock, a breeding pool, and a nissa voz. Kitesail takes the shock, and I manage to hit land drops into a turn 3 staticaster to kill his heirarch--he drops two vials and passes. I draw a spout, and start making some plants. I proceed to draw a blood moon and cry internally. I pull the trigger a bit early and blow up his kitesail. Then he drops his own staticaster to blow up my plants. We have a very grindy game from here which comes down to a crucial topdeck which he nails, pulling Staticaster two of two to get through my nissa-pumped plant for lethal.
I'm basically out of the running at this point, but I decide to play things out anyways.
Match 4 vs Jeskai (2-0):
He plays an Azcanta, I empty my hand. He blows up my world. I pact when he has two mana up. I can hear his thought process, same as every Jeskai player, "Ummm, I'll just let it resolve, counter whatever she plays next, and get a free timewalk?" We all know what happens next. He scoops to Thrun.
Game 2: This time he correctly counters the first pact. Unfortunately, he taps out to do it with a Cryptic. Which lets me jam in the next pact, play Thrun and slam the Blood Moon I'd been saving for this moment. He dies to Thrun and BTE beats shortly thereafter.
Match 5 vs Titanshift (2-0):
I played this guy before, on the same deck, when I was on the stock list and handily lost 0-2. He's on the play game 1 and mulls to 5. I turn 1 Elves into turn 2, U Nissa, and another dork. His turn 3 he drops his third land...and pacts for sakura tribe. On my turn I pact up acidic slime and we move onto game 2. Later he tells me he top decked two Primetimes, so we both agree that pacting for steve was provs correct since there was no way he was going to win from that position unless he hit his next two land drops.
Game 2 is more interesting. My hand has Rejuvenator and 3 BTEs. Around Turn 3 I run out 2 BTEs and turn one of them into a Rejuvenator with Eldritch evolution, which finds me the Nykthos I need with Primetime in hand. He plays around the Magus of the Moon I used to play by fetching in response to the Eldritch Evolution for a basic forest. This is a mistake on my part because I wanted to get a 4 drop, but I board out my 4 drop. It works out though, so we take those. He keeps me off devotion by bolting my BTE. I draw into pact, and pact for a BTE to try and run out Primetime since I was off of 8, but could hit 6 and also had Ruric Thar in hand. Beast within kills my Nykthos when I try and drop BTE. Which forces me to play Rejuvenator...which finds me another Nykthos! Sidenote: This is the second time 'ol Juves has come in clutch with the pact saves since I've started playing 'em. I swing in to take him 10. He Scapeshifts, but I'm at 19, and he can only get 18 damage, so he wipes my board and deals 6 to me and is left with no basics. That makes the blood moon back breaking. My final BTE, Ruric Thar, and the Primetime close out the game from there.
Match 6 vs Jund: (2-0)
This one vs a friend of mine who is usually on some Grixis or Sultai or UW/Jeskai control variant, but I know what he's on going into this. I keep a very redundant hand. He takes one of the ramp pieces, as expected, but doesn't kill the other one, which lets me feel more confident about dumping my hand on my second/thirds turns. One of those things is a rejuvenator, which finds me Nykthos with one in hand. Yay consistency. He does Jund things, dropping a Goyf and a Bob and growing incremental card advantage as he whittles away at my life and board state. I get insanely lucky and top deck into Nissa (which absorbs goyf beats), and two pacts in a row. The first lets me get a Hornet Queen. The second lets me get a Craterhoof using the nykthos in hand to double my devotion mana-2 to end the game.
Game 2 he played a few discard spells and took my payoffs instead of the ramp this time around. I played a turn 2 BTE + Thrun then a turn 3 Blood Moon (both very lucky top decks as far as sequencing went), which was enough to get there.
And that was the end of that. I finished at the bottom of the 12 point folks with a stupidly low OMW%. Leaving me nowhere remotely close to top 8, which was my goal going into the event. This was probably my last outing with MGD for awhile. I've enjoyed the deck these past months. The power, speed, skillcap, and joy I crave in a deck is there, but the deck is too temperamental and inconsistent for my tastes. Even with Juves finding Nykthos an absurd number of times he's cast, even with the crazy turn 3 kills the deck can pull off, the bad games feel really really bad compared to other decks.
4x Arbor Elf
4x Carven Caryatid
1x Craterhoof Behemoth
4x Devoted Druid
1x Elder of Laurels
1x Eternal Witness
1x Laboratory Maniac
1x Vizier of Remedies
4x Collected Company
4x Summoner's Pact
Enchantments (8)
4x Oath of Nissa
4x Utopia Sprawl
Sorcery (4)
4x Genesis Wave
Artifact (1)
1x Akroma's Memorial
Planeswalker (3)
3x Garruk Wildspeaker
Land (19)
1x Breeding Pool
3x Forest
1x Kessig Wolf Run
1x Misty Rainforest
3x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
1x Stomping Ground
1x Temple Garden
4x Windswept Heath
4x Wooded Foothills
I don't think this deck is super competitive as is (I'm not sure I would sleeve this up instead of my usual build just yet), but it does some fun things that are worth exploring.
Plan A is to dig, pact, CC, or Wave-for-value into one of two infinite mana combos, dump your deck on the field, and win from Lab Maniac after caryatid trigger with Memorial to protect him from bolts and pushes. Plan B--if you've seen paths, snags, and the like (and a big reason I chose Memorial instead of the usual fare of enchantments...besides the fact that if you wave into it alongside a fresh druid and another combo piece you can go off immediately) is to win across the redzone with Garruk, a Memorial Boosted swarm, and/or Craterhoof.
Singleton Witness is a concession to reduce whiffed Wave attempts and allow us a bit of reactive resilience when playing vs removal.
Caryatid is used instead of visionary because buying turns vs little dudes is a necessity and the extra devotion is needed in deck this light on symbols.
Deck is light on 2+ GG CMCs because we're technically in 4 colors and we potentially need to hit 3 of them by turn 3/4 (sprawls on white or blue can make up for this, potentially), which in my experience means more fetches than usable lands (a problem I'd care about more if not for the whole infinite mana thing).
If you want to goldfish it a bit to check for consistency (going off on turn 3 happened more than I thought it would), here's the tapped out link: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/gw-devotion-combo/
All that said, I definitely think Jadelight is a straight swap for Selkie in decks that are already running Courser and Witness. There's a few reasons for this, but it all really comes down to synergy, CA (virtual in this case), and tempo.
Lets examine Selkie first: puts you at +1 CA, with a small beat (no response needed). That's really the extent of it. Whether you hit it on curve, as a "free" drop before a nykthos activation, CC or Wave into it--that's all Selkie is: a bit of gas and a small threat.
Jadelight is a bit more complex: I won't rehash possible options because Uyan did a good job of laying them out. But I think it's wrong to think of Explore as Scry when we have access to E-Witness *and* Courser. With Courser already in play, we can know if Jadelight is going to draw us cards and help us dig out of a potential mana pocket. With E-Witness simply existing in our decks, we can freely send cards like P-Command, Gwave, Company, etc to the grave because then they're available for our use to extend our locks or waves when we try and go off. What's more Jadelight's interactions with Oath after being Waved in are absolutely lovely, allowing you to better shape what 3 you look at and potentially send Instants/Sorceries to the grave for a Waved Ewitness to pick up. And then there's the niche interactions it has with Scooze, letting you fuel it with unneeded dorks. And all of that is just the Explore portion of the card. That alone wouldn't quite be enough to make this card worthwhile. The fact that this synergy is attached to what can be a moderate to heavy threat that demands an answer *does* make this card a worthwhile inclusion.
So yeah...I think Jadelight is a straight swap for Selkie in pretty much all cases. But I think it'll do better *with* Courser not *instead of* Courser. It has too much going for it in terms of synergy and will often have more presence than Selkie to boot.
My two cents...sorry for butting in. =P