Couldn't have said it better myself. As great as the deck seems on paper, I think there is still some room for tuning the mb.
More specifically, there are two problems I have been having with the deck. The first is the mana base. The deck always needs to have red and black mana on the field in the event of me having or potentially drawing into a Shaman/BBE.
Here's an example I faced. I fetched early on for an overgrown tomb because I had Shaman in my opening hand. Makes sense right? Well I had no way to generate red mana incase I drew into BBE - which I did. Because I had no red mana I could not use BBE on T3/T4 BBE. I lost because of this.
The same situation happened when it was the other way around. I had a BBE in my opener then fetched for Stomping ground with no way to generate black for Shaman and lost because of that as well.
It could have been a really bad day and quite frankly it was only one day of testing so there's not much data but I personally rather be safe than sorry. Here's my solution.
Brace yourself because it's a bit painful. I think adding a Blood Crypt as the 19th land is optimal. Blood Crypt is great in those situations when you need both colors and already have a forest on the field. Why do we need a 19th land? Great question.
Here is the second problem I was facing. It was not drawing enough lands to consistently have 3/4 lands by T4/5. This is a problem when we have 8 4cmc cards. I think 19 lands will give is that safety net we need.
I've settled on 19 lands being the solution also, but I think the answer is the 5th fetch. Can't afford to play a Blood Crypt as it destoys our 1 land opener. Also just as a bit of sequencing advice, always fetch red first. You're more likely to draw a way to cast Shaman than you are BBE, so play safe and get the red source.
Hello elven friends.
Now, after the unban of BBE, where do we go?
I've read the thread and I agree that BBE is worth at least a try. Specially right now when everybody will be playing grindy jund decks or controlling with jace. Before the unbannings I was on GW as I said before, since the format was full of fast decks and we needed a way to be able to win before they did. Now, relying on a 0/2 to win against a LOT of removal seems risky.
I like the lists you people are showing, but I would like to know what you think about Domri Rade. Right now I'm working with this list:
So far I've casted Domri 3 times and it's been amazing all 3 of them, drawing cards, killing creatures and making our opponent spend resources managing it.
I've added 2 Elves of Deep Shadow in place of 2 Nettle sentinel since our explosiveness potential is already lower because we play several cards that can't be casted with only 3 green mana and it provides black mana for our powerful SB cards. I'm thinking about cutting 1 Ezuri (going down to 2) and play a 2nd Domri because I'm loving it.
Thoughts on this forgotten planeswalker?
On the other hand. I've always loved the idea of a creature based toolbox and that's out the ecuation for obvious reasons if we go chord-less. So what's the base of a GOOD elf sideboard with the jund composition?
I think Domri is a great addition out of the board for us in the RG variant of the deck. I'm not so certain its strong in the Jund variant, as I'm pretty sure we don't have enough mana sources to cast it reliably. So if you're keen on Domri, I recommend RG Elves with some Domri's in the sideboard alongside your Blood Moons and Ancient Grudges.
Sideboarding with Jund will be mostly spell based as we can't use the toolbox. I posted previously about a sideboard that looked like this, bristling with removal:
3 Thoughtseize
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Lead the Stampede
3 Graveyard hate (Leyline/Scooze/Relic)
2 Dismember
1 Creeping Corrosion
1 Fracturing Gust
We can also just play something like this:
3 Thoughtseize
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Phyrexian Revoker (as a catch all for all the matchups we were going to bring them in anyway)
3 Lead the Stampede
3 Reclamation Sage
It's certainly something we need to figure out, but Jund's predecessor GB had the same sorta issue with sideboarding too.
A final option, for when you want speed instead of grindy cards, you can park Chord of Calling in the sideboard and increase your velocity while bringing in bullets. Every time you'd bring in Chord of Calling, you'd cut BBE naturally so theres no fear of cascading into it.
3 Thoughtseize
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Chord of Calling
3 Lead the Stampede
1 Phyrexian Revoker
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Reclamation Sage
Alright. I finally finished up the maths on Bloodbraid Elf (hence BBE) vs Collected Company (hence Coco)
Thesis: BBE is a strong card because as a baseline, it generates four power. This makes it worthy to stand up and be counted as a spell worth including in the deck.
Approach: Determine the amount of power the average Collected Company generates.
Assumptions:
a) We are assuming this decklist for the purposes of the simulation:
b) We're casting Coco onto an empty board and a 59 card library. This allows us to have a clean slate to compare both BBE and Coco in a vacuum.
c) For the purposes of the maths, we assume that Archdruid is a 3 power creature as it would pump the creature that also comes into play with it.
d) We are taking the best combination of cards possible every Coco.
e) We are not including Shaman of the Pack's trigger in our simulation.
Working:
With 34 creatures, simple hypergeometric distrubution tells us that statistically, 4.4% of our Cocos are what I dub 'misses' - 0 or 1 creature hits. For the purposes of the simulation, they are Cocos that are worse than the baseline power provided by Coco. This also means that the other 95.6% of our cast Cocos hit at least two creatures.
With that in mind, I needed to assign a power value to each possible creature combination from our deck. To simplify things, we're going to average it out.
As an example, for 2 one drops, the average power (hence avg p.) is (12 x 1)+(2 x 4)/16 which leaves us with 1.25 power. Now, since its 2 one drops, we multiply that by 2 and we get the avg p. of 2.5/Coco. Makes sense, right?
*note* Elvish Archdruid + Dwynen's Elite is 7 power, but the original calulations assigned values of 3 and 3 to each card. This does not change the maths significantly, however.
So for each possible mana combination:
2 one drops: 2.5 avg p./Coco
2 two drops: 4.0 avg p./Coco
2 three drops: 5.6 avg p./Coco
1 one drop, 1 two drop: 3.0 avg p./Coco
1 one drop, 1 three drop: 3.7 avg p./Coco
1 two drop, 1 three drop: 4.8 avg p./Coco
This is already pretty staggering as 3 of the categories are already under the baseline BBE. But, how do we assign these numbers to the original number of resolved Cocos with at least 2 dudes in it of 95.6%? I then added the amounts of cards together that was initially used to divide whilst making the avg p. of each variant of Coco (102), then found the percentage of how much each category gets in terms of percentage from that 102.
2 one drops: 15.69%
2 two drops: 7.84%
2 three drops: 9.80%
1 one drop, 1 two drop: 23.53%
1 one drop, 1 three drop: 25.39%
1 two drop, 1 three drop: 17.65%
In this case, this means that our most likely combination of cards to hit from Coco is 1 one drop, 1 three drop in descending order down to 2 two drops.
I then put these percentages to get the percent of these from 95.6% to get our final percentages:
2 one drops: 15%
2 two drops: 7.5%
2 three drops: 9.37%
1 one drop, 1 two drop: 22.49%
1 one drop, 1 three drop: 24.27%
1 two drop, 1 three drop: 16.87%
Now, we add the percentages of the ones that add over or equal to four average power together, and add the ones less than four average power together with the 4.4% natural 'failure chance' which leads us to...
Cocos with four or greater avg. p: 33.74%
Cocos with less than four or greater avg. p: 66.26%
Working with BBE:
BBE maths is simple, as we don't need to account for lands. If you cascade into:
one drop: 47.06% (4.25 avg. p/BBE)
two drop: 23.53% (4.50 avg. p/BBE)
three drop: 29.4% (5.8 avg. p/BBE)
Conclusion:
The results are pretty comprehensive and they allow me to conclude that, on average, Coco generates less power than your baseline BBE. Infact, only one in three Cocos generate the same or more power.Worst of all for discreditors of BBE, 52.93% of the time, BBE generates more power than 74.10% of all average Coco combinations. Its statistically better from a 'worst' perspective, in a vacuum.
So there you have it. Some mathematical basis to the strength of Bloodbraid Elf.
I’m not too sure about BBE. It is hard to combo (heritage Druid) with it since we need to keep a red/black up. It disrupts our flow and make it difficult to cast sideboard cards. I’m thinking just straight up GB with Lead since meta will shift towards sweeper, Jace lists. I’m actually trying Lead(for value) and Fauna Shaman (getting bullets or extra shaman of the pack) in replacement for visionaries (my opinion as the weakest link). Been working so far.
PS I also think getting up to 4 mana consistently with only 18 sources may be difficult
I thought you're usually the kind to like new tech mike - don't let yourself get too hesitant. BBE has been pretty unreal for me, and 4 mana off 18 sources is an untrue evaluation; try 4 mana off a lot of our dudes making mana and casting spells. You were so quick to jump on the GB gravy train when it started, and Shaman has the same peculiarities about it in how it distrupts our flow and 'is difficult to combo'. Our sideboard cards are still castable! We didn't cut any black sources so Thoughtseize is still a go-ahead! I even park Lead in the sideboard for the grindy matchups (cutting Nettle)and you absolutely bury any grindy deck in permanents, its pretty crazy.
Give it a try before you buy. It's definitely proving to be as good an option as I dreamed it would be years ago.
I’m just struggling to figure out how BBE builds are better than our current builds. It whiffs on CoCo both as a creature and with Cascade. So there’s 0 synergy there. Also, while I completely get where you guys are coming from saying it’s CoCo 5-8, but I still don’t think that’s completely accurate. BBE will almost always net us a mana dork. Leaving us with a 3/2 haste and mana Elf. CoCo let’s us dive 6 deep and select the pieces we actually need at instant speed. If we already have 4 mana available to cast BBE, I don’t think this gets us any closer to winning. Being able to chord at instant speed to get ANY creature in the deck, in my opinion, speeds the deck up. But I guess that’s where testing will come in to see if BBE is relevant at all.
I tried to address this in my long post on the page back. It doesn't need to synergise with Coco as it occupies 'the spell slots' in the deck. If I'm honest, BBE not hitting Coco is an upside if you're trying to stagger your board and grind, then hitting Coco only leads to a massive overextension for punishment via Wrath.
Coco also has the issues of perceieved selection which I also tried to address in the long post. You can't control what cards are ontop of your library, be it the Cascade cards or the Coco cards. The fact that Coco lets you choose which one is irrelevant as long as the average remains the same. When you get two dorks off a Coco do you say you 'chose' to get those? The fact that BBE also doesn't hit lands makes it a guaranteed 2 Coco hit which eliminates the 5% chance of Coco hitting 1 dude only or completely whiffing (based on 34 creatures).
Also, just statistically speaking, lets take the Jund list I put out there as an example. Lets say we play BBE, and cascade on a deck with 34 hits (our 34 creatures).
16/34 cards in deck are dorks, generally unwanted hits. This happens 47.06% of the time.
8/34 are what I dub 'mediocre hits' but they're still quite good - Visionary and Elite. This happens 23.52% of the time.
10/34 are excellent hits, Archdruid, Ezuri, Shaman. 29.41% of the time, we hit gold.
Now note that even the dork hits are the same strength as an average Coco in terms of power gained. Coco math is a little (a lotta) more complex than that, but if in general ~53% of cascades are decent hits, I'm willing to run with it. When I do have the maths feeling right about Coco, then I'll make a nice post about it too.
While yes, Chord does make us faster, its a matter of whether we need to be quick or resilient in the meta to come. There are decks significantly quicker than us either way. But if you do go the Chord route, the Vizier route is the only way to go at the moment. I am unsure what the answer to the question of speed vs resilience is, but I'm going to work the angle I know and at least try it. I'm not gonna let status quo ruin attempts at innovation.
you are talking about regularly casting Talara's battalion, and i agree.
i hope i'm not rude for asking but, did you read the article?
the 4 "secrets" describe deckbuilding around BBE.
The conclusion says:
"In the end, if you take nothing else away from this article, I hope the idea that throwing four copies of Bloodbraid Elf into Jund and calling it a day is not the way to go. The archetype is going to change for the better, and the people willing to do the work to figure out how to best utilize Bloodbraid Elf are going to be the first of the new generation of Jund experts."
What i observe from your arguments is that you're looking through the eyes of the "before casting BBE", not looking to fully utilize BBE.
- Dwynen's elite is situational when cascading into it, since you might not get the token. Talara's Battalion isn't, it will always come in.
- I would cut your 2 Nissa and replace them with Lead. Secret 4 talks about the sideboard where lesser SB options of 3mana are better than not cascadable options.
- From BBE's perspective, Loaming shaman is better than ooze, since it directly does something. hence the "secret2, conditional". (the condition is that ooze needs mana to do something). Still, my previous argument about ooze would make me play a 2/1 or 2/2 split.
In the end, what i'm trying to explain is (as did the article):
The deck will not improve much by simply replacing Chord (or lead for that matter) with BBE.
We should figure out how to fully utilize BBE to really improve the deck.
You mention "explosive starts" while you want to add BBE to improve midrange.
I think you have to let some explosiveness go if you want to go into the BBE route.
The fact that it's quite difficult to fully utilize it in this deck makes me question BBE in general.
There are to many mediocre hits of cascade, where Chord might actually be able to win the game.
I do agree that Chord is bad when behind, where BBE would indeed be better.
But i think Lead or Sylvan Messenger would still be the better option unless we're able to build the deck around BBE.
I did read the article, but we're not Jund, we're Elves. Jadine's article is great when you're a proper midrange deck. When you're a linear based deck that uses BBE for value, you can't afford to deviate from the plan.
Don't get it twisted, we are a linear deck first. Always keep that in mind. Talara's Battalion is exponentially worse without the BBE cascade and is not servicable with it (notably, dies to bolt, doesn't go wide, doesn't replace itself or draw a card or go infinite). Just on raw card evaluation, Talara's Battalion is nothing but bad. If a card is bad on raw card evaluation, its not making it into the deck.
BBE being in the deck doesn't remove t1 Heritage t2 Dwynen's lol, it just makes T3-4 better. If you want to properly build a deck around BBE, then build actual Jund! Emberflux has the rest of what I was gonna say already, so I'm not gonna repeat it.
We're not a deck that will fully use BBE's cascade to its potential. We're simply using it to refill/fill the board. We will however use BBE's body and typeline the best, occasionally squeezing out a 4/3 or a 5/4 haste.
on RG:
I've already backpeddaled from Atarka's Command and straight to Bolts. The cheapness of the card in initial goldfishes show up and while it doesn't do nearly as much damage in a vacuum, its versatility in matchups (imagine cleaning up T1 Overseer or an Inkmoth all in, yummy) gives it the nod on future playtesting. I'll jam some with it again this weekend.
if i'd choose to play BBE, i would take your Jund version.
from this article (secret 4) i conclude that Lead should be at least in the sideboard. i would cut Nissa for them.
I can understand Scavenging ooze, since it's more likely that there's mana left to spend after BBE, although i would still play some Loaming Shaman
I would might still choose to put Rec sage in the side instead of decay.
Another thought is that from secret #2, conditional cards, i would replace dwynen's elite with Talara's Battalion.
Talara's Batallion is more situational than Dwynen's Elite, and Elite is better in our explosive starts (T1 Heritage, T2 Elite + Lord // T1 Dork, T2 Heritage + Elite + Lord). Elite needs to stay. Even on an empty board, Elite + BBE is still 5 power which is better than the average Coco hit in most circumstances. Loaming Shaman tends to perform a lot better with Chord as opposed to BBE, and Scavenging Ooze does some work in the Burn matchup which might be more problematic now due to the fetch mana base.
I'm a bit uncertain about the role of Lead in our sideboard with BBE in the deck. I do know I'd like to be cascading into some Kitchen Finks in the grindy matchups and generally speaking that should be enough with having "twice as many cocos". But if you're set on Lead it can certainly be worked into the sideboard - you simply can't fit both Lead and Kitchen Finks at the same time. There aren't enough slots.
As for sideboarding roles, I'm pretty thoroughly convinced the problem matchups with the Jund Elves list would be decks faster than us, so I'd likely play something like this in the board week one after some thought:
3 Thoughtseize - Big mana, frail combo, tapout control all fall victim to having their thoughts seized.
3 Abrupt Decay - Creature/Permanent based matchups - Bogles, Affinity, Lantern, Humans - you name it, its useful.
3 Lead the Stampede - Decks that ***** on us with value, we try our best to outvalue them. With 4 Visionary and 8 effective Coco's, Lead is sweet icing.
2 Scavenging Ooze - Probably not enough Oozes to deal with Graveyard decks, but hey, who knows? Also chips in against Burn.
2 Dismember - Decks faster than us, has different coverage to Abrupt Decay (having a nice mix of removal in the board is always nice).
1 Creeping Corrosion - Bye Artifacts.
1 Fracturing Gust - Bye Artifacts and Enchantments.
Note how the sideboard is mostly black centric as I doubt our ability to cast any red spells with only 5 red sources, we can't really fit in any Grudges or Moons which is the exciting part of the RG list Madboxxes is working on atm. Having access to Blood Moon and Bolt and Grudge sounds like a great deal of advantage.
edit: I can also see packing 3 Leyline in the board for the graveyard matchups as that's generally an area where GB was attackable, and we can't cascade into them which is nice.
I haven't personally had any time to playtest RG, but it does look very interesting on paper. Chording for Shaman isn't the best part about GB, its the gradual advantage you get with Shaman, which BBE feeds directly into. BBE and Shaman get along quite nicely together as a 6 power combination.
I'm back. This time with a very saucy post. I think for us to properly what Bloodbraid Elf (hence, BBE) brings to the table we need to break things down as much as possible, and as simply as possible. So with that in mind, lets begin.
1. What got unbanned:
Jace the Wallet Sculptor and BBE.
2. Where do the unbanned cards go?
Jace will likely end up in every U based control deck, and even in the Bant shells that want a little more action. BBE will go to Jund, Big Zoo and possibly us (the aim of writing this, really!).
3. What effect does this have on the meta?
Expect to see a rise in midrange and blue decks again. People will want to play with the new toys. As a reaction to this, expect big mana to come out in force to punish the midrange players. Hyper aggro like Affinity and pure combo like Storm will still exist as a check to both midrange and big mana, which leads me to the next question.
4. What part of the meta should we occupy?
The million dollar question for us. Should we shift to hyper aggro and focus on GW, or to a resilient CA based aggro deck in GB/Jund? I think this one for the moment will be personal preference, but I have been a firm believer in resilient CA based aggro that GB/Jund occupies.
So now that I've sorta addressed what my primary concerns are with the unbans, I'll move to what I've been working on - Jund Elves. I've said for a while now that "If BBE was unbanned, I'd snap play it." So here I am.
On a card evaluation level, its best to think of BBE as a 5-8th copy of Collected Company as:
a) on average, it nets 4 power, which is the average coco hit.
b) its floor is 4 power, meaning its floor is higher than coco.
c) its ceiling is 6 power, meaning its ceiling is equivalent or higher.
d) at times, its uncounterable thanks to Cavern *but the cascaded spell is not*
*********a note on perceived selection
A lot of people have argued with me about BBE not being an equivalent to Coco because they can choose the cards as opposed to the cascade from BBE. But to that point, I'll argue that:
a) you don't choose the top 6 cards of your library, just like you don't choose what you cascade to with BBE.
b) you flat out can't miss with BBE.
c) Coco can be countered, with the caveat that it's instant speed.
*********I've also seen a lot of arguments about BBE vs Chord and I'll attempt to address those too:
a) You don't play BBE and Chord in the same deck, that's just a fact.
b) Chord is brilliant when you're ahead, not so brilliant when you're behind. BBE instantly reclogs the board.
c) Chord and BBE are two different axis of the deck, neither is wrong or right, but Chord will bring you to the footsteps of hyper aggro while BBE will lead you to the halls of card advantage and value.
So back to the main point, if we were to treat BBE as Coco 5-8, then there are two approaches to incorporate BBE into the deck: Jund or RG. I'll go into Jund first, as RG is something experimental both myself and @MadBoxxes on the discord have been trying to work out, and Jund is something I've theoretically worked out ages ago; which I'll try to break down in parts:
Part 1: The bulk of the deck - Creatures and Non-Creature Spells
In an effort to fit in BBE, I've cut Chord from my list entirely. The remainder of the list I've taken from my stock GB lists (which I've talked extensively about both in this thread and the old thread):
This gives us the greatest density for Coco while incorporating BBE as Coco 5-8. My usual lists also shave a Nettle for an Eternal Witness but this is the simplest the creatures could be. Coco will be our only non creature spell in this variant.
Part 2: The Mana
So I've tried tinkering around with multiple fastlands, Unclaimed Territory and other ways, but the cleanest manabase I've settled on so far is fetchlands and cavern. The following config has been my go to:
Why this config? It leaves us 13 black sources to cast Shaman of the Pack, 9 black sources to cast Thoughtseize out of the board, and 9 sources to cast BBE. In the Jund configuration, it'll mostly be GB and splashing R exclusively for BBE.
Part 3: The sideboard -
The real attractions in being GB based is Thoughtseize as our ace in the hole, so I'd like to play at least three copies. I also believe Burn will be more of a struggle due to the increase of damage we take from our lands, so that leads me back to Kitchen Finks. Scavenging Ooze is a great sideboard option for us and without Chord, that leads us to a life without Reclamation Sage or Phyrexian Revoker. Nissa has performed overtime in the grindy matchups and she'll be a great help in those matchups if we need the assistance (and against Burn where she outclasses everything on board). The artifact sweepers maintain crucial to our success and a couple of dismembers never hurt (although, they could easily be Abrupt Decay). Relic is also always a good option, and theres a chance we might want Pithing Needle as well.
Its pretty early days, but I can see RG being a future path as well for those faithful to the green bois. I can also see playing Bolts main instead of Atarka's, but its early days. RG looks attractive just due to the options Red provides us in terms of Ancient Grudge, Blood Moon and Bolt alongside BBE.
Conclusion:
Its early days but we need to decide what role we should occupy in the meta, and that's the million dollar question we need to answer. I'll be posting next with maths on BBE vs Coco. I believe in occupying the grindy slot, but I'll leave it to @vipowl to sell the other side. In the meantime, keep brewing. Its only up from here.
Our LGS consistently has two 8-Rack players every fnm. I've played them both and beat them too.. but only because they've had really bad draws against me. Maybe I'm overthinking but in theory, doesn't it seem like 8-Rack is a bad match up for us? They have main board Ensnaring Bridge and Bontu's Last Reckoning. Smallpox and fatal push is making it worse too. What's the general strategy against them? What to board in? Looking for some input from fellow Elves players
Bring in your grindy stuff (walkers, leads, kitchen finks etc). Its supposed to be bad.
In 2016 elves took down first in a pro tournament. There were zero dwynen's elite.
Also, that 3 pyroclasm'd game included a doubling season against 3 planeswalkers post ultimate on the same turn. It was actually probably the most fun I've had because there was a sequence of turns of each of us presenting lethal and then responding. Suffice to say Genesis wave beat 3 ults of planeswalkers the very next turn. Potf wasn't in my deck on that matchup, point is there's plenty of non-creature permanents coco/chord can't use based on probabilities. Just because elves has had some moderate success over the past few years doesn't mean you should immediately accept a pure aggro route as the only thing elves can do. There is absolutely no reason to not test every single option available. Learning the why thousand-year elixir can win and lost games gives added experience to evaluating cards that come out soon
You're in the wrong thread. This is the Coco Elves thread where we've established the following core cards are critical to the strength of the deck:
Collected Company
Dwynen's Elite
Not running them simply puts you in a different category of elves; so I recommend posting in the Combo Elves primer.
I'm rewatching these, hope to catch you again live soon. I noticed two Ewits in one list the other day, just something you're doing with GW? Or just trying it out overall? I figured it was just more resilience for the combo pieces of GW.
I've been running just two dismember in my GB build SB, I've noticed many GW lists run 3 path, any thoughts on adding a 3rd removal spell into GB SB? A 3rd dismember seems painful, abrupt decay seems like an option but doesn't kill everything we would want to.
Watching your GB stream turned me to dropping Nykthos for Westvale, best change I've made to the deck in so long. Flipping westvale is a ton of fun and it happens much more often than I thought it would.
Thanks again for all the Q & A and the time you put into streaming, I've learned some things.
Two E-Wits are to make the Coco's stronger from GW, and to have more combo redundancy while also having a stronger card in grindy matchups.
I think you can run 3 Dismember if you're after that sorta thing, GB can afford it because you can pay for it with your mana. I've been playing GW w/ 2 Dismember and have been happy with it, although Path is excellent against Burn so maybe I should try it. I think Westvale is extremely powerful in GB, and I'm a little uncertain about it in GW despite having won a couple of games with it. The power comes from the reach GB has compared to GW where the mana from Nykthos might be more powerful.
@Syreal94 I was able to skim through some of the matches. After playing a few with GW how do you feel about it vs. GB? Also, against that BW planeswalker/token deck at the 2hr 4min mark you cast Collected Company with Ezuri in hand at the end of their turn while they were tapped out. You flipped two devoted druid along with an Eternal Witness and a couple others. You ended up taking Druid and Witness, but two druids plus a green source and an Ezuri in play will net you infinite mana.
Anyway, thanks for more content! I always appreciate the streams.
I know double Devcted + Ezuri nets a kill, but I also saw a chance to style so I left it hahaha
Stream was fun - watch back the replay if you want a masterclass on how to play the GW v Lantern matchup *then watch how quickly to lose the same matchup the match after*.
I've settled on 19 lands being the solution also, but I think the answer is the 5th fetch. Can't afford to play a Blood Crypt as it destoys our 1 land opener. Also just as a bit of sequencing advice, always fetch red first. You're more likely to draw a way to cast Shaman than you are BBE, so play safe and get the red source.
I think Domri is a great addition out of the board for us in the RG variant of the deck. I'm not so certain its strong in the Jund variant, as I'm pretty sure we don't have enough mana sources to cast it reliably. So if you're keen on Domri, I recommend RG Elves with some Domri's in the sideboard alongside your Blood Moons and Ancient Grudges.
Sideboarding with Jund will be mostly spell based as we can't use the toolbox. I posted previously about a sideboard that looked like this, bristling with removal:
3 Thoughtseize
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Lead the Stampede
3 Graveyard hate (Leyline/Scooze/Relic)
2 Dismember
1 Creeping Corrosion
1 Fracturing Gust
We can also just play something like this:
3 Thoughtseize
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Phyrexian Revoker (as a catch all for all the matchups we were going to bring them in anyway)
3 Lead the Stampede
3 Reclamation Sage
It's certainly something we need to figure out, but Jund's predecessor GB had the same sorta issue with sideboarding too.
A final option, for when you want speed instead of grindy cards, you can park Chord of Calling in the sideboard and increase your velocity while bringing in bullets. Every time you'd bring in Chord of Calling, you'd cut BBE naturally so theres no fear of cascading into it.
3 Thoughtseize
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Chord of Calling
3 Lead the Stampede
1 Phyrexian Revoker
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Reclamation Sage
Thesis: BBE is a strong card because as a baseline, it generates four power. This makes it worthy to stand up and be counted as a spell worth including in the deck.
Approach: Determine the amount of power the average Collected Company generates.
Assumptions:
a) We are assuming this decklist for the purposes of the simulation:
4 Cavern of Souls
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
4 Windswept Heath
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Pendelhaven
1 Stomping Ground
4 Heritage Druid
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Dwynen's Elite
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Elvish Archdruid
4 Shaman of the Pack
2 Ezuri, Renegade Leader
4 Bloodbraid Elf
b) We're casting Coco onto an empty board and a 59 card library. This allows us to have a clean slate to compare both BBE and Coco in a vacuum.
c) For the purposes of the maths, we assume that Archdruid is a 3 power creature as it would pump the creature that also comes into play with it.
d) We are taking the best combination of cards possible every Coco.
e) We are not including Shaman of the Pack's trigger in our simulation.
Working:
With 34 creatures, simple hypergeometric distrubution tells us that statistically, 4.4% of our Cocos are what I dub 'misses' - 0 or 1 creature hits. For the purposes of the simulation, they are Cocos that are worse than the baseline power provided by Coco. This also means that the other 95.6% of our cast Cocos hit at least two creatures.
With that in mind, I needed to assign a power value to each possible creature combination from our deck. To simplify things, we're going to average it out.
As an example, for 2 one drops, the average power (hence avg p.) is (12 x 1)+(2 x 4)/16 which leaves us with 1.25 power. Now, since its 2 one drops, we multiply that by 2 and we get the avg p. of 2.5/Coco. Makes sense, right?
*note* Elvish Archdruid + Dwynen's Elite is 7 power, but the original calulations assigned values of 3 and 3 to each card. This does not change the maths significantly, however.
So for each possible mana combination:
2 one drops: 2.5 avg p./Coco
2 two drops: 4.0 avg p./Coco
2 three drops: 5.6 avg p./Coco
1 one drop, 1 two drop: 3.0 avg p./Coco
1 one drop, 1 three drop: 3.7 avg p./Coco
1 two drop, 1 three drop: 4.8 avg p./Coco
This is already pretty staggering as 3 of the categories are already under the baseline BBE. But, how do we assign these numbers to the original number of resolved Cocos with at least 2 dudes in it of 95.6%? I then added the amounts of cards together that was initially used to divide whilst making the avg p. of each variant of Coco (102), then found the percentage of how much each category gets in terms of percentage from that 102.
2 one drops: 15.69%
2 two drops: 7.84%
2 three drops: 9.80%
1 one drop, 1 two drop: 23.53%
1 one drop, 1 three drop: 25.39%
1 two drop, 1 three drop: 17.65%
In this case, this means that our most likely combination of cards to hit from Coco is 1 one drop, 1 three drop in descending order down to 2 two drops.
I then put these percentages to get the percent of these from 95.6% to get our final percentages:
2 one drops: 15%
2 two drops: 7.5%
2 three drops: 9.37%
1 one drop, 1 two drop: 22.49%
1 one drop, 1 three drop: 24.27%
1 two drop, 1 three drop: 16.87%
Now, we add the percentages of the ones that add over or equal to four average power together, and add the ones less than four average power together with the 4.4% natural 'failure chance' which leads us to...
Cocos with four or greater avg. p: 33.74%
Cocos with less than four or greater avg. p: 66.26%
Working with BBE:
BBE maths is simple, as we don't need to account for lands. If you cascade into:
one drop: 47.06% (4.25 avg. p/BBE)
two drop: 23.53% (4.50 avg. p/BBE)
three drop: 29.4% (5.8 avg. p/BBE)
Conclusion:
The results are pretty comprehensive and they allow me to conclude that, on average, Coco generates less power than your baseline BBE. Infact, only one in three Cocos generate the same or more power.Worst of all for discreditors of BBE, 52.93% of the time, BBE generates more power than 74.10% of all average Coco combinations. Its statistically better from a 'worst' perspective, in a vacuum.
So there you have it. Some mathematical basis to the strength of Bloodbraid Elf.
I thought you're usually the kind to like new tech mike
Give it a try before you buy. It's definitely proving to be as good an option as I dreamed it would be years ago.
I tried to address this in my long post on the page back. It doesn't need to synergise with Coco as it occupies 'the spell slots' in the deck. If I'm honest, BBE not hitting Coco is an upside if you're trying to stagger your board and grind, then hitting Coco only leads to a massive overextension for punishment via Wrath.
Coco also has the issues of perceieved selection which I also tried to address in the long post. You can't control what cards are ontop of your library, be it the Cascade cards or the Coco cards. The fact that Coco lets you choose which one is irrelevant as long as the average remains the same. When you get two dorks off a Coco do you say you 'chose' to get those? The fact that BBE also doesn't hit lands makes it a guaranteed 2 Coco hit which eliminates the 5% chance of Coco hitting 1 dude only or completely whiffing (based on 34 creatures).
Also, just statistically speaking, lets take the Jund list I put out there as an example. Lets say we play BBE, and cascade on a deck with 34 hits (our 34 creatures).
16/34 cards in deck are dorks, generally unwanted hits. This happens 47.06% of the time.
8/34 are what I dub 'mediocre hits' but they're still quite good - Visionary and Elite. This happens 23.52% of the time.
10/34 are excellent hits, Archdruid, Ezuri, Shaman. 29.41% of the time, we hit gold.
Now note that even the dork hits are the same strength as an average Coco in terms of power gained. Coco math is a little (a lotta) more complex than that, but if in general ~53% of cascades are decent hits, I'm willing to run with it. When I do have the maths feeling right about Coco, then I'll make a nice post about it too.
While yes, Chord does make us faster, its a matter of whether we need to be quick or resilient in the meta to come. There are decks significantly quicker than us either way. But if you do go the Chord route, the Vizier route is the only way to go at the moment. I am unsure what the answer to the question of speed vs resilience is, but I'm going to work the angle I know and at least try it. I'm not gonna let status quo ruin attempts at innovation.
I did read the article, but we're not Jund, we're Elves. Jadine's article is great when you're a proper midrange deck. When you're a linear based deck that uses BBE for value, you can't afford to deviate from the plan.
Don't get it twisted, we are a linear deck first. Always keep that in mind. Talara's Battalion is exponentially worse without the BBE cascade and is not servicable with it (notably, dies to bolt, doesn't go wide, doesn't replace itself or draw a card or go infinite). Just on raw card evaluation, Talara's Battalion is nothing but bad. If a card is bad on raw card evaluation, its not making it into the deck.
BBE being in the deck doesn't remove t1 Heritage t2 Dwynen's lol, it just makes T3-4 better. If you want to properly build a deck around BBE, then build actual Jund! Emberflux has the rest of what I was gonna say already, so I'm not gonna repeat it.
We're not a deck that will fully use BBE's cascade to its potential. We're simply using it to refill/fill the board. We will however use BBE's body and typeline the best, occasionally squeezing out a 4/3 or a 5/4 haste.
on RG:
I've already backpeddaled from Atarka's Command and straight to Bolts. The cheapness of the card in initial goldfishes show up and while it doesn't do nearly as much damage in a vacuum, its versatility in matchups (imagine cleaning up T1 Overseer or an Inkmoth all in, yummy) gives it the nod on future playtesting. I'll jam some with it again this weekend.
Talara's Batallion is more situational than Dwynen's Elite, and Elite is better in our explosive starts (T1 Heritage, T2 Elite + Lord // T1 Dork, T2 Heritage + Elite + Lord). Elite needs to stay. Even on an empty board, Elite + BBE is still 5 power which is better than the average Coco hit in most circumstances. Loaming Shaman tends to perform a lot better with Chord as opposed to BBE, and Scavenging Ooze does some work in the Burn matchup which might be more problematic now due to the fetch mana base.
I'm a bit uncertain about the role of Lead in our sideboard with BBE in the deck. I do know I'd like to be cascading into some Kitchen Finks in the grindy matchups and generally speaking that should be enough with having "twice as many cocos". But if you're set on Lead it can certainly be worked into the sideboard - you simply can't fit both Lead and Kitchen Finks at the same time. There aren't enough slots.
As for sideboarding roles, I'm pretty thoroughly convinced the problem matchups with the Jund Elves list would be decks faster than us, so I'd likely play something like this in the board week one after some thought:
3 Thoughtseize - Big mana, frail combo, tapout control all fall victim to having their thoughts seized.
3 Abrupt Decay - Creature/Permanent based matchups - Bogles, Affinity, Lantern, Humans - you name it, its useful.
3 Lead the Stampede - Decks that ***** on us with value, we try our best to outvalue them. With 4 Visionary and 8 effective Coco's, Lead is sweet icing.
2 Scavenging Ooze - Probably not enough Oozes to deal with Graveyard decks, but hey, who knows? Also chips in against Burn.
2 Dismember - Decks faster than us, has different coverage to Abrupt Decay (having a nice mix of removal in the board is always nice).
1 Creeping Corrosion - Bye Artifacts.
1 Fracturing Gust - Bye Artifacts and Enchantments.
Note how the sideboard is mostly black centric as I doubt our ability to cast any red spells with only 5 red sources, we can't really fit in any Grudges or Moons which is the exciting part of the RG list Madboxxes is working on atm. Having access to Blood Moon and Bolt and Grudge sounds like a great deal of advantage.
edit: I can also see packing 3 Leyline in the board for the graveyard matchups as that's generally an area where GB was attackable, and we can't cascade into them which is nice.
1. What got unbanned:
Jace the Wallet Sculptor and BBE.
2. Where do the unbanned cards go?
Jace will likely end up in every U based control deck, and even in the Bant shells that want a little more action. BBE will go to Jund, Big Zoo and possibly us (the aim of writing this, really!).
3. What effect does this have on the meta?
Expect to see a rise in midrange and blue decks again. People will want to play with the new toys. As a reaction to this, expect big mana to come out in force to punish the midrange players. Hyper aggro like Affinity and pure combo like Storm will still exist as a check to both midrange and big mana, which leads me to the next question.
4. What part of the meta should we occupy?
The million dollar question for us. Should we shift to hyper aggro and focus on GW, or to a resilient CA based aggro deck in GB/Jund? I think this one for the moment will be personal preference, but I have been a firm believer in resilient CA based aggro that GB/Jund occupies.
So now that I've sorta addressed what my primary concerns are with the unbans, I'll move to what I've been working on - Jund Elves. I've said for a while now that "If BBE was unbanned, I'd snap play it." So here I am.
On a card evaluation level, its best to think of BBE as a 5-8th copy of Collected Company as:
a) on average, it nets 4 power, which is the average coco hit.
b) its floor is 4 power, meaning its floor is higher than coco.
c) its ceiling is 6 power, meaning its ceiling is equivalent or higher.
d) at times, its uncounterable thanks to Cavern *but the cascaded spell is not*
*********a note on perceived selection
A lot of people have argued with me about BBE not being an equivalent to Coco because they can choose the cards as opposed to the cascade from BBE. But to that point, I'll argue that:
a) you don't choose the top 6 cards of your library, just like you don't choose what you cascade to with BBE.
b) you flat out can't miss with BBE.
c) Coco can be countered, with the caveat that it's instant speed.
*********I've also seen a lot of arguments about BBE vs Chord and I'll attempt to address those too:
a) You don't play BBE and Chord in the same deck, that's just a fact.
b) Chord is brilliant when you're ahead, not so brilliant when you're behind. BBE instantly reclogs the board.
c) Chord and BBE are two different axis of the deck, neither is wrong or right, but Chord will bring you to the footsteps of hyper aggro while BBE will lead you to the halls of card advantage and value.
So back to the main point, if we were to treat BBE as Coco 5-8, then there are two approaches to incorporate BBE into the deck: Jund or RG. I'll go into Jund first, as RG is something experimental both myself and @MadBoxxes on the discord have been trying to work out, and Jund is something I've theoretically worked out ages ago; which I'll try to break down in parts:
Part 1: The bulk of the deck - Creatures and Non-Creature Spells
In an effort to fit in BBE, I've cut Chord from my list entirely. The remainder of the list I've taken from my stock GB lists (which I've talked extensively about both in this thread and the old thread):
4 Heritage Druid
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Dwynen's Elite
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Elvish Archdruid
4 Shaman of the Pack
2 Ezuri, Renegade Leader
4 Bloodbraid Elf
This gives us the greatest density for Coco while incorporating BBE as Coco 5-8. My usual lists also shave a Nettle for an Eternal Witness but this is the simplest the creatures could be. Coco will be our only non creature spell in this variant.
Part 2: The Mana
So I've tried tinkering around with multiple fastlands, Unclaimed Territory and other ways, but the cleanest manabase I've settled on so far is fetchlands and cavern. The following config has been my go to:
4 Cavern of Souls
4 Gilt-Leaf Palace
4 Windswept Heath
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Pendelhaven
1 Stomping Ground
Why this config? It leaves us 13 black sources to cast Shaman of the Pack, 9 black sources to cast Thoughtseize out of the board, and 9 sources to cast BBE. In the Jund configuration, it'll mostly be GB and splashing R exclusively for BBE.
Part 3: The sideboard -
The real attractions in being GB based is Thoughtseize as our ace in the hole, so I'd like to play at least three copies. I also believe Burn will be more of a struggle due to the increase of damage we take from our lands, so that leads me back to Kitchen Finks. Scavenging Ooze is a great sideboard option for us and without Chord, that leads us to a life without Reclamation Sage or Phyrexian Revoker. Nissa has performed overtime in the grindy matchups and she'll be a great help in those matchups if we need the assistance (and against Burn where she outclasses everything on board). The artifact sweepers maintain crucial to our success and a couple of dismembers never hurt (although, they could easily be Abrupt Decay). Relic is also always a good option, and theres a chance we might want Pithing Needle as well.
3 Scavenging Ooze
3 Kitchen Finks
2 Nissa, Vital Force
1 Fracturing Gust
0 Creeping Corrosion
0 Dismember
0 Abrupt Decay
0 Pithing Needle
0 Relic of Progenitus
Now onto RG:
Madboxxes and I have been figuring out the numbers for a RG list that looks something like this:
4 Cavern of Souls
4 Copperline Gorge
4 Windswept Heath
1 Pendelhaven
1 Stomping Ground
4 Elvish Mystic
4 Heritage Druid
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Dwynen's Elite
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Elvish Archdruid
2 Ezuri, Renegade Leader
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Collected Company
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Blood Moon
Its pretty early days, but I can see RG being a future path as well for those faithful to the green bois. I can also see playing Bolts main instead of Atarka's, but its early days. RG looks attractive just due to the options Red provides us in terms of Ancient Grudge, Blood Moon and Bolt alongside BBE.
Conclusion:
Its early days but we need to decide what role we should occupy in the meta, and that's the million dollar question we need to answer. I'll be posting next with maths on BBE vs Coco. I believe in occupying the grindy slot, but I'll leave it to @vipowl to sell the other side. In the meantime, keep brewing. Its only up from here.
Bring in your grindy stuff (walkers, leads, kitchen finks etc). Its supposed to be bad.
You're in the wrong thread. This is the Coco Elves thread where we've established the following core cards are critical to the strength of the deck:
Collected Company
Dwynen's Elite
Not running them simply puts you in a different category of elves; so I recommend posting in the Combo Elves primer.
Two E-Wits are to make the Coco's stronger from GW, and to have more combo redundancy while also having a stronger card in grindy matchups.
I think you can run 3 Dismember if you're after that sorta thing, GB can afford it because you can pay for it with your mana. I've been playing GW w/ 2 Dismember and have been happy with it, although Path is excellent against Burn so maybe I should try it. I think Westvale is extremely powerful in GB, and I'm a little uncertain about it in GW despite having won a couple of games with it. The power comes from the reach GB has compared to GW where the mana from Nykthos might be more powerful.
GW w/ Combo, Shaper's in the board. I miss Kitchen Finks but finding slots seems impossible in the GW deck.
I know double Devcted + Ezuri nets a kill, but I also saw a chance to style so I left it hahaha