Round 1: Free Win Red
Guy has no clue what I’m on and goes turn one Chalice on one. He sees Sram and 2 equipment, then deploys Chalice on 0 and Blood Moon. Since I’m running Caverns, this hurts and I die.
Rise and repeat for the most part. He sees Mentor and casually casts Anger of the Gods.
Round 2: Blue Black Mill
Maindeck Emrakul gets milled and he can’t stop the shuffle. Combo kill on turn 4.
Game 2, turn 2 win.
Round 3: Blue White Control
On turn 2 he had Blue White up, so I casually played a Cavern naming Dwarf, stick Sram, and make my own confused face when I find out he doesn’t have the Path. Turns out he’s on the enchantment removal get there plan. He takes the Sram, and then dies to the following Paladin.
Game two, I go for the cheese. We play draw go for a while, and after I’ve had enough lands, I deploy the Sram and stuffs. He exiles it, or rather tries to, when I Outcome the Sram and rest of my toys for a brand new hand. At this moment, I want to Emrakul him, and he Disallows the extra turn trigger. So I go for Grapeshot, which he responds with Safe Passage. After putting all the equipment on Spaghetti, he proceeds to not find an answer and scoops.
Round 4: Dredge
He starts the dredge chain decently fast, with a Narcomeba, Bloodghast, and Amalgam at decent speeds. However, he ends up tapping out, which meant me drawing the deck and winning.
Game 2 he gets to 2 lands with no dredgers in his yard. I have the kill, but play patient since he won’t tap down. I decent to bait a spell with Riddlesmith, and it dies to Abrupt Decay. Due to discarding to hand size, he ended up with a Loam in his yard, which mills 3 fetch lands. He decided to cast the loam to get his lands and fetch for a basic forest, which game me the chance to cast Paladin, and then a second as I drew up to the Grapeshot.
Round 5: ID into top 8
Round 6: Quarterfinals: White Weenie
I rode with this guy, and gave him a ton of ***** for playing Student of Warfare and Figure of Destiny with only 2 Path to Exile in the 75. However, Canonist is annoying. Mainboard. 4 of. Doesn’t stop us cold, but does a decent enough job. I deploy Sram and 2 Paladins with no equipment across from his Student of Warfares and Canonist. I finally find a Shield, draw into a mentor, then another Mentor, and make a HUGE army. He dies to said army.
Game 2 the first Canonist eats a Fragmentize, and then he watches me play a lot of magic on turn 3.
Round 7: Semifinals: Free Win Red
I thought my tournament life was over since I was on the draw and he knew what I was on. Turn one Chalice on 0. Turn 2 he went for Blood Moon, which I Swan Songed. I then played Mentor and made a dude. His turn consisted of land, Koth, minus 2 Koth, Chandra, plus Chandra, attack with bird. Mine consisted of Sram, chaining equipment spells (don’t care if they get countered cause I still get prowess and cards), made a small army to kill Chandra and Koth, and looked at him with his one card in hand to see if he had it. He started making blockers in Simian Spirit Guides and Magus of the Moon, which was cool until Sigil for 5 meant it didn’t matter.
Game two he mulligans into a Chalice for 0 hand. I use a Cavern to cast Engineered Explosives for 0 (CMC 1 on the stack, 0 counters in play due to lack of color. Technology) Turns out I didn’t need it, as Fragmentize came to my aid and an army brewed forth from the the Mentor.
Round 8: Finals: Eldrazi Tron
This guy was not happy. He opened on 2 different tron lands and his third land was eldrazi temple into…. Expedition Map. He died on my 3rd turn.
Game 2 he mulligans into a Chalice for 0. Turn 2 Fragmentize into Sram. Cast one equipment before he died to Dismember. Mentor the following turn also died to Dismember, but I still had the dude. Prowess plus Grapeshot got him to 0.
To answer questions regarding card choices;
Mentor makes an army. Sometimes, well, a good bit of the time, you need an army.
Outcome is the bees knees. I doubted it at first, but the Statuary makes it super easy to cast. It also allows us to play a longer game, which helps.
Emrakul was originally cheese, but the more I played it, the more I liked it. I only like having one grapeshot main and will move one more to the board, but this lets us use the Grapeshot early if needed and still give us a way to win. Also, if you have a better answer to Angel’s Grace besides “take another turn after this one” let me know.
Cavern resulted if different choices than the norm. I am not a fan of the Serum Visions personally, because while it lets us scry, it doesn’t do much else. Hiding Paladins from discard is fine, but it won’t save them from counters or removal, and if you are geared to play the game and win fast, then I feel you need to be more prepared to mulligan than anything else. While this deck has the ability to win super fast, I didn’t go for the turn 2 kill very often unless it fell into my lap. The vast majority of my games went to turns 5, 6, and 7, which breaks the conventions of this forum of killing people as fast as possible. Also, Cavern allows me to play EE in the board for opposing Chalice and EE without fear, as I can get it past Chalice for 0.
Riddlesmith and Laboratory Maniac allow for wins against infinite life with both infinite storm (discard spaghetti) or just maniac them. I brought in the Riddlesmith a good bit, as a 9th paladin is a 9th paladin, regardless of how bad it may be.
Spellskite eats removal, lets be real. I personally did not like this card because you just pick it up with Retract, but then I changed the way I thought about the game while playing. If I am not trying to kill people on turns 2 and 3 as often, then having the 0/4 that protects me incremental advantage is fine.
At the end of the day, the deck is going to be able to kill people on turns 2 and 3. My personal take is to jam turn one Paladin if you can, because if you aren’t going to win turn 2, at least make them have the removal spell right there on turn one. Be prepared to play a long game. We can all agree that this deck is fast, and that’s mostly what we focus on is how fast the game ends. But what have we gotten out of that? A fragile combo that dies to removal. Take the extra turns to set up and get a feel for what your opponent is doing, and be ready to play a longer game of magic. If you need to race, do it games 2 and 3 where most players will over-sideboard and beat themselves. Go for the kills if you can on turns 2 and 3, but if it’s not there, don’t force it. At least, that’s how I’ve been playing the deck.
If we move to thopter foundry, we need to have some serious gains on it. While I can respect the notion to add cards to this list to fight the mid game better, the cards we play simply aren't built to play the long game. The draw to this list is unnatural amounts of speed, not midrange cards. I don't feel we can play the mid range game as well as Jund or Junk or Grixis, so I hope we aren't trying to do so. We'll just get out classed.
Also, in a lighter mood, my paladins as signed by Serene.
Depending on what configuration I decide to move to, I may have as many as 2 open slots in the main. Which means I could be playing Paladin, Mentor, and Archmage in the same starting 60. This could be an interesting build but I have to wait for a chance to order them. At 2 bucks a piece I'd be paying more to have them shipped than anything else.
And Serene, I accidentally spoiled it already. Real talk. "I'll activate my Inkmoth Nexus." "sir that costs 4 more." "well... I will not activate my nexus" lol.
Archmage costs just as much as mentor and silence, with the added benefit of being only one card. Having to draw the cards can be worked around. This opens up plans for sideboard transformations to throw people off. Might not be the best, but I'm going to try it.
If you're staying with the myth plan, greater auramancy seems sweet.
As a guy who has a lot of different modern decks in his meta, I will concede that Myth Realized is absolutely unreal in a small handful of match ups, namely Twin and sometimes Burn. Twin has no interaction for Myth until they get to a three mana win con or Cyrptic Command, which sometimes takes too long, and burn might forget how to block. In other match ups, Myth gave me the option to poop out my hand and lose most of the time. Against Twin, I will likely jam the ***** out of it, but after plating against enough Jund, Junk, Obliterater Rock, Affinity, Infect, Red Green Tron, Grixis Twin (which actually doesn't care about Myth), Ad Naseum, and Goryo's Vengeance lists that reside in my meta, I have found enough paths, decays, Karn, terminates, and blockers to see that my Grapeshot on a stick isn't getting too far.
Please do not confuse this with me saying Myth is bad, because it isn't. Maybe it's just me believing that I just want to Grapeshot the hell out of people, but I have to get away from Myth Realized.
Sadly, I opted not to play Cheerios at GP Charlotte. I personally felt a rise in decks able to fight ground level games against Bloom and Tron would end up attacking us just as well. Discard and Kologhans Command are actually good against us, hitting Paladin, Mentor and Mox Opal. However, a well stocked creature base plus terminate and abrupt decay put the breaks on Myth too, so I opted for my 2 color (really five color) Blink list that took 9th at states. The deck was positioned to fight Jund and Abzan, but it was not to be. So I got cards signed instead.
Personally speaking, I have one other plan at this point. Granted, I pick up this deck and mostly just want to cast Grapeshot, so that influenced this decision, but I will likely be testing out 6-7 paladins to see how this may work. veldalken archmage is those paladins. I am very aware he costs 4. I am also aware the draw is mandatory. However, if all I'm trying to do is burn someone out, I'm willing to give it a whirl.
For the lulz I picked up a set of Suppression Field for the board. While silly, Twin, Tron, Affinity and other random decks really don't like it. Sort of puts the breaks on them.
In retrospect, I should have jammed Cheerios, but trying to innovate the list for Charlotte led me to a bunch of dead ends for how the meta played out. Had I kept the states list and gone for it, I may have been OK. Hindsight is 20/20.
And once I snap a picture of my Serene signed Paladins, I shall post it. It's 4am right now and I keep to go back to sleep.
Myth Realized is a card that I am now beginning to warm up to. I also cut Sleight of Hand for Thoughtcast, which give more velocity for the one mana I am typically putting into it. I did have to cast it for 3, but I still felt better with both cards in hand rather than having to throw one away.
Personally, while I don't like Myth Realized for it basically being another Grapeshot and being too vertical, but it does attack alot and force our opponents to kill either the paladin or something larger than any creature in their deck. If they happen to have 2 kill spells, then we likely weren't going to win anyway.
Forge Tender is simply put, the truth against burn. I, for one, do NOT want to play a long game against burn, and if they tap out for Eidolon, the on board Forge Tender answers it, or the Path answers it. Firewalker simply won't cut it there. It's also pretty bad against deck packing Lightning Bolt, where Forge Tender has some potential use. And since I know someone is going to simply say to cast a Silence and go for it, the reason some of us are going away from Mentor is because of the three mana, which is what Silence causes us to have. Also, if you have to cast a Silence and they have an Eidolon, it still isn't going well.
Leyline against Abzan is super tits btw. My opponent showed me double Thoughtseize and a Lily (couldn't edict me) while I showed him what my library looked like. I was very happy about it.
I am going to continue testing these cards leading up to Charlotte. The biggest thing is whether or not to play 15 lands. I like the security of 15, but I know its very doable on 14.
Thank you guys, for all that you do.
List:
4 Kite Shield
4 Accorder's Shield
4 Bone Saw
4 Paradise Mantle
4 Spidersilk Net
Testing today against twin, myth is actually very strong. Going all in on it turn one makes a beat stick that they cannot actually kill until turn four, which is almost enough time to run them down with a 5/5 or larger. Granted, it doesn't do much more than be a big dude that eats your hand in other matches, but against twin I could justify it. Having serum visions has been cool, but at times I do miss my 15th land and my counters. However, I'm going to test 15 lands with mentor and can trips and see how it goes. The csntrips have been serving me well so far.
The life is incidental to me. I'm just concerned about them keeping two mana up after you cast the firewalker. Essentially you can't block anymore or you'll lose her, which means you'll still be taking damage.
After recent 4 round events in my town, I'm definitely going to try out the Cantrip style with myth realized. I have personally eaten too many losses to not having access to a third mana, so I'll see how this plays out. Keeping mentor in the board and going threat dense makes sense with the previous strategy of having a decent number of cards we want to see so I have high hopes. Due to the cheapness of burn I will advocate some number of Forge tenders in the board. Granted, I'm still going to try to grapeshot my opponents which is my main case for Forge tender, but I like it's one mana cost. Also, I don't feel the lifegain is going to be relevant against burn anymore. Skullcrack is very strong against it, not to mention atarkas command. While I may very well be wrong, I have to steer clear of firewalker for now.
In other news, I love the new technology we are bringing to the table.
So far, with the 18 equipment count, have you had any issues getting off the ground with the combo? What is now your essential combo turn? With the decrease in cereal, does it push the turn back to 3-4 to ensure you have a mana available to dedicate to a draw spell should you dry out, or has it been consistent turn 2-3 kills? I ask as I like the idea of coming out of the gates at light speed, as that was the key to my success. Just curious as to what you are experiencing with your current can trip style flavor.
BTW. Absolutely love the Forge tender tech. Stops bolts of different flavors, and I'll be damned if eidolon of the great revel isn't a good as target!
List:
4 Cavern of Souls
4 Plains
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Sacred Foundry
4 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
4 Puresteel Paladin
4 Sram, Senior Edificer
2 Monastery Mentor
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
4 Retract
4 Mox Opal
2 Paradoxical Outcome
2 Swan Song
1 Noxious Revival
1 Inspiring Statuary
1 Grapeshot
19 Equipment
Sideboard:
2 Fragmentize
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Riddlesmith
1 Ghirapur Aether Grid
1 Laboratory Maniac
2 Paradoxical Outcome
2 Spellskite
2 Gut Shot
2 Silence
Round 1: Free Win Red
Guy has no clue what I’m on and goes turn one Chalice on one. He sees Sram and 2 equipment, then deploys Chalice on 0 and Blood Moon. Since I’m running Caverns, this hurts and I die.
Rise and repeat for the most part. He sees Mentor and casually casts Anger of the Gods.
Round 2: Blue Black Mill
Maindeck Emrakul gets milled and he can’t stop the shuffle. Combo kill on turn 4.
Game 2, turn 2 win.
Round 3: Blue White Control
On turn 2 he had Blue White up, so I casually played a Cavern naming Dwarf, stick Sram, and make my own confused face when I find out he doesn’t have the Path. Turns out he’s on the enchantment removal get there plan. He takes the Sram, and then dies to the following Paladin.
Game two, I go for the cheese. We play draw go for a while, and after I’ve had enough lands, I deploy the Sram and stuffs. He exiles it, or rather tries to, when I Outcome the Sram and rest of my toys for a brand new hand. At this moment, I want to Emrakul him, and he Disallows the extra turn trigger. So I go for Grapeshot, which he responds with Safe Passage. After putting all the equipment on Spaghetti, he proceeds to not find an answer and scoops.
Round 4: Dredge
He starts the dredge chain decently fast, with a Narcomeba, Bloodghast, and Amalgam at decent speeds. However, he ends up tapping out, which meant me drawing the deck and winning.
Game 2 he gets to 2 lands with no dredgers in his yard. I have the kill, but play patient since he won’t tap down. I decent to bait a spell with Riddlesmith, and it dies to Abrupt Decay. Due to discarding to hand size, he ended up with a Loam in his yard, which mills 3 fetch lands. He decided to cast the loam to get his lands and fetch for a basic forest, which game me the chance to cast Paladin, and then a second as I drew up to the Grapeshot.
Round 5: ID into top 8
Round 6: Quarterfinals: White Weenie
I rode with this guy, and gave him a ton of ***** for playing Student of Warfare and Figure of Destiny with only 2 Path to Exile in the 75. However, Canonist is annoying. Mainboard. 4 of. Doesn’t stop us cold, but does a decent enough job. I deploy Sram and 2 Paladins with no equipment across from his Student of Warfares and Canonist. I finally find a Shield, draw into a mentor, then another Mentor, and make a HUGE army. He dies to said army.
Game 2 the first Canonist eats a Fragmentize, and then he watches me play a lot of magic on turn 3.
Round 7: Semifinals: Free Win Red
I thought my tournament life was over since I was on the draw and he knew what I was on. Turn one Chalice on 0. Turn 2 he went for Blood Moon, which I Swan Songed. I then played Mentor and made a dude. His turn consisted of land, Koth, minus 2 Koth, Chandra, plus Chandra, attack with bird. Mine consisted of Sram, chaining equipment spells (don’t care if they get countered cause I still get prowess and cards), made a small army to kill Chandra and Koth, and looked at him with his one card in hand to see if he had it. He started making blockers in Simian Spirit Guides and Magus of the Moon, which was cool until Sigil for 5 meant it didn’t matter.
Game two he mulligans into a Chalice for 0 hand. I use a Cavern to cast Engineered Explosives for 0 (CMC 1 on the stack, 0 counters in play due to lack of color. Technology) Turns out I didn’t need it, as Fragmentize came to my aid and an army brewed forth from the the Mentor.
Round 8: Finals: Eldrazi Tron
This guy was not happy. He opened on 2 different tron lands and his third land was eldrazi temple into…. Expedition Map. He died on my 3rd turn.
Game 2 he mulligans into a Chalice for 0. Turn 2 Fragmentize into Sram. Cast one equipment before he died to Dismember. Mentor the following turn also died to Dismember, but I still had the dude. Prowess plus Grapeshot got him to 0.
To answer questions regarding card choices;
Mentor makes an army. Sometimes, well, a good bit of the time, you need an army.
Outcome is the bees knees. I doubted it at first, but the Statuary makes it super easy to cast. It also allows us to play a longer game, which helps.
Emrakul was originally cheese, but the more I played it, the more I liked it. I only like having one grapeshot main and will move one more to the board, but this lets us use the Grapeshot early if needed and still give us a way to win. Also, if you have a better answer to Angel’s Grace besides “take another turn after this one” let me know.
Cavern resulted if different choices than the norm. I am not a fan of the Serum Visions personally, because while it lets us scry, it doesn’t do much else. Hiding Paladins from discard is fine, but it won’t save them from counters or removal, and if you are geared to play the game and win fast, then I feel you need to be more prepared to mulligan than anything else. While this deck has the ability to win super fast, I didn’t go for the turn 2 kill very often unless it fell into my lap. The vast majority of my games went to turns 5, 6, and 7, which breaks the conventions of this forum of killing people as fast as possible. Also, Cavern allows me to play EE in the board for opposing Chalice and EE without fear, as I can get it past Chalice for 0.
Riddlesmith and Laboratory Maniac allow for wins against infinite life with both infinite storm (discard spaghetti) or just maniac them. I brought in the Riddlesmith a good bit, as a 9th paladin is a 9th paladin, regardless of how bad it may be.
Spellskite eats removal, lets be real. I personally did not like this card because you just pick it up with Retract, but then I changed the way I thought about the game while playing. If I am not trying to kill people on turns 2 and 3 as often, then having the 0/4 that protects me incremental advantage is fine.
At the end of the day, the deck is going to be able to kill people on turns 2 and 3. My personal take is to jam turn one Paladin if you can, because if you aren’t going to win turn 2, at least make them have the removal spell right there on turn one. Be prepared to play a long game. We can all agree that this deck is fast, and that’s mostly what we focus on is how fast the game ends. But what have we gotten out of that? A fragile combo that dies to removal. Take the extra turns to set up and get a feel for what your opponent is doing, and be ready to play a longer game of magic. If you need to race, do it games 2 and 3 where most players will over-sideboard and beat themselves. Go for the kills if you can on turns 2 and 3, but if it’s not there, don’t force it. At least, that’s how I’ve been playing the deck.
When Emracool is shot down, clutch it, then pile it into those books. No sweat, Clyde.
Also, in a lighter mood, my paladins as signed by Serene.
And Serene, I accidentally spoiled it already. Real talk. "I'll activate my Inkmoth Nexus." "sir that costs 4 more." "well... I will not activate my nexus" lol.
If you're staying with the myth plan, greater auramancy seems sweet.
Please do not confuse this with me saying Myth is bad, because it isn't. Maybe it's just me believing that I just want to Grapeshot the hell out of people, but I have to get away from Myth Realized.
Sadly, I opted not to play Cheerios at GP Charlotte. I personally felt a rise in decks able to fight ground level games against Bloom and Tron would end up attacking us just as well. Discard and Kologhans Command are actually good against us, hitting Paladin, Mentor and Mox Opal. However, a well stocked creature base plus terminate and abrupt decay put the breaks on Myth too, so I opted for my 2 color (really five color) Blink list that took 9th at states. The deck was positioned to fight Jund and Abzan, but it was not to be. So I got cards signed instead.
Personally speaking, I have one other plan at this point. Granted, I pick up this deck and mostly just want to cast Grapeshot, so that influenced this decision, but I will likely be testing out 6-7 paladins to see how this may work. veldalken archmage is those paladins. I am very aware he costs 4. I am also aware the draw is mandatory. However, if all I'm trying to do is burn someone out, I'm willing to give it a whirl.
For the lulz I picked up a set of Suppression Field for the board. While silly, Twin, Tron, Affinity and other random decks really don't like it. Sort of puts the breaks on them.
In retrospect, I should have jammed Cheerios, but trying to innovate the list for Charlotte led me to a bunch of dead ends for how the meta played out. Had I kept the states list and gone for it, I may have been OK. Hindsight is 20/20.
And once I snap a picture of my Serene signed Paladins, I shall post it. It's 4am right now and I keep to go back to sleep.
Personally, while I don't like Myth Realized for it basically being another Grapeshot and being too vertical, but it does attack alot and force our opponents to kill either the paladin or something larger than any creature in their deck. If they happen to have 2 kill spells, then we likely weren't going to win anyway.
Forge Tender is simply put, the truth against burn. I, for one, do NOT want to play a long game against burn, and if they tap out for Eidolon, the on board Forge Tender answers it, or the Path answers it. Firewalker simply won't cut it there. It's also pretty bad against deck packing Lightning Bolt, where Forge Tender has some potential use. And since I know someone is going to simply say to cast a Silence and go for it, the reason some of us are going away from Mentor is because of the three mana, which is what Silence causes us to have. Also, if you have to cast a Silence and they have an Eidolon, it still isn't going well.
Leyline against Abzan is super tits btw. My opponent showed me double Thoughtseize and a Lily (couldn't edict me) while I showed him what my library looked like. I was very happy about it.
I am going to continue testing these cards leading up to Charlotte. The biggest thing is whether or not to play 15 lands. I like the security of 15, but I know its very doable on 14.
Thank you guys, for all that you do.
List:
4 Kite Shield
4 Accorder's Shield
4 Bone Saw
4 Paradise Mantle
4 Spidersilk Net
4 Mox Opal
4 Retract
3 Noxious Revival
4 Myth Realized
4 Puresteel Paladin
1 Grapeshot
4 Serum Visions
2 Thoughtcast
2 Plains
1 Island
3 Hallowed Fountain
4 Flooded Strand
1 Polluted Delta
4 Seachrome Coast
Sideboard:
3 Angel's Grace
2 Gut Shot
3 Path to Exile
3 Leyline of Sanctity
1 Echoing Truth
3 Burrenton Forge-Tender
In other news, I love the new technology we are bringing to the table.
BTW. Absolutely love the Forge tender tech. Stops bolts of different flavors, and I'll be damned if eidolon of the great revel isn't a good as target!