I also have been dabbling with a 3-color version, Grixis to be exact. It's the result of converging a lot of brews and threads that I've found around the net. I think 3 colors is fine: between Prism, Hub and Crumbling Vestige I very rarely have color problems. The first 3 or 4 lands will need proper sequencing most of the time, but you get the hang of it quickly.
It is a hybrid of both Reservoir and Colossus decks, mostly because I wanted flexibility. G2-3 people will just sit and destroy your Reservoirs if you rely on them too much, so this deck has a good 3-4 avenues of victory that you can build towards. I also wanted to skew away from the 0-CMC equipment: I tried Caleb's version and while the approach is nice, I felt like it was too all-in. You either have the monster game plan or nothing. Topdecking a Cathar's Shield when you have little going on doesn't advance your board state and I wanted a bit more punch per card. Don't get me wrong, this deck is totally capable of hitting 60+ life, but it's also completely fine chaining 3-4 spells each turn to gain life and buy time until you can dump your entire hand, especially in the midgame when everything costs 1 or 2 mana.
Cards of note beyond the usual suspects: Smuggler's Copter was a bit of a necessary evil, but it helps so much. Sometimes all you have are a bunch of 1/x and your opponent either a) smashes with Copters of his own or b) Durdles around with setup cards. It reduces the Colossus cost, sculpts your hand and can win games on its own if unchecked. If they kill it, that's ok too, one less spell for our cost reducers. We rarely need more than 1 per game though, barring the occasional extra summoning-sick critter coming down and being put to use. Key to the City has also been great: if you manage to chip away at your opponent's life total, one Colossus swing with a key activation can mean game. Again, it reduces Colossus' CMC, lets you dump chaff to advance your game plan, draws you cards and breaks board stalls. I've always been happy to see it, but I think 1 is correct. It's also a great Fair target later on, when you need that last stretch of damage or want to one-shot a walker. I run 4 Herald of Kozilek and 3 Inspectors simply because Inspector doesn't reduce Herald's cost while the opposite is true. Herald also makes Spatial Contortion and Deep Fiend cost less (small advantage, I know, but it's there). Besides, with 2 in play of either type you're already doing fine. The 4 toughness is also a consideration for the Depalas, Toolcrafts, Scroungers and so on that run around. It also survives a single Harnessed Lightning, Spatial Contortion and the first two Galvanic Bombardments.
Flex slots right now are the 3 Familiars (basically pre-boarding for aggro and leveraging Panharmonicon with extra enablers – I'm still trying to figure out if the Pan is worth it in a deck like this), the Puzzleknot / Prism split and little else. Geier-Reach Sanitarium has been meh, I always worry about the card selection for the opponent whenever I use it. I don't know if Sea Gate would do a better job there. Either way, the deck is a blast to play. I love surprising the Bx control / delirium decks with a couple Fevered Visions G2 and 3, they've always won me the game.
I picked up this deck before rotation and I'm glad to see that it still has a lot to say. Here are some random observation of cards I've tried that I see posted around here, beyond the core ones:
- Goldnight Castigator as a sideboard card has impressed me from day 1. 4 flying damage with haste in this new kind of slower Standard is an awesome rate. It's great against the Nissa / Gideon Decks and ramp, or decks that use spot removal instead of damage. It is still off people's radar, they'll gum up the ground with durdly tokens and you just one shot their walker or even just swing for 4 unblockable turn 3. Castigator into Smasher is also just ridiculous. Note that the drawback only affects Castigator and you, all your other creatures receive regular damage. It also replaces TKS nicely against Stasis Snare and Declaration in Stone, with the upside that removing the Castigator doesn't really affect our strategy of going wide with synergistic creatures. It's something they have to answer while you build your real game plan.
- I think at least 1 Hedron Archive belongs in the main. I've shaved a Crawler for it since Crawler is terrible after Turn 3-4. The Hedron is almost never a dead card: on one hand it fits nicely in the ramp progression this deck has with Crawler on 2 to hit 4 mana turn 3, on the other you can play it later on and tap it right away to make up for excess mana. I've never played it on curve, but sometimes it slid in my sequencing nicely by powering out an Engineer, Aggregate or Hangarback right away. I feel like sometimes between playing 2 threats or 1 threat and some 'stability' this deck would rather do the second. There is also the tiny advantage of interacting favorably with P&K, although it's never come up for me.
- Westvale Abbey feels like a Plan Z with the density of threats we run. You'll almost always have to sac a good creature if you're in a rush to flip it and by the time we have 5 creatures on board the game should be over in a few turns anyway. This deck isn't making 0/1 plants here, so the actual gain of a 9/8 flying lifelink most of the time is negligible, you'll be giving up some good synergy when saccing your board. If that's not the case, you are probably saccing mana producers to it and you're low on the land count. I've been running 2 but sometimes I even forget I have them, they're that relevant. It also fights with Foundry sometimes, again with the synergies we run even making just 2 extra Thopters can represent the same amount of damage, with the upside that they can keep you alive an extra turn to alpha strike and win.
- Warping Wail has been underperforming for me, none of the modes are particularly powerful when you consider the alternatives we have in this deck. The removal is nice but Contortion and Roast deal with so much more. The Scion token doesn't seem like enough either. I can see the sorcery counter being relevant, but I still feel like that's not enough. Outnumber seems solid, I like that it can hit flyers which are a huge problem for us. 4-5 damage to a flying creature aren't uncommon and that's almost exactly what we're looking for. With Siege Rhino gone I think Roast is gonna play less of a part in the format and I've found myself wishing it could hit flying creatures (hence the Tears of Valakut in the side).
- I already miss Outpost Siege so much. Chandra 0 is the best we have now ;_;
The fact we have a card that includes <> in the cost makes it even clearer for me. There would be no reason to say Kozilek costs 8<><> instead of 10.
learn the difference between generic mana and colorless mana, then think about what you just wrote and come again
I do understand that one is mana of doesn't matter what color, and the other is mana without color. That's not the point. The point is why create <> if it can be paid for with generic mana like a lot of people here are assuming? <> is a mana symbol like the other 5, Kozilek needs to be paid for with 2 of those. A lot of folks are running away with Sol Ring now produces <><> and that adds a layer of complexity that people fail to understand is completely unnecessary and counterproductive.
First of all, I think calling <> colorless mana is a huge semantical mistake, since it does have a color. It's gray. The fact people feel the need to start discerning between 'generic' and 'colorless' mana makes me believe that the interpretation I see floating around is not the elegant type of work we're used to see in Magic (most of the time).
I also find it surprising that most people here are already assuming that the <> mana symbol can be paid for with colorless mana from sources such as Sol Ring and similars. This would make Wastes and <> a gimmick and nothing more. Without a 6th basic land type, why would you fetch Wastes over any of the other 5? Those can pay for the <> symbol too (according to how most people are interpreting it). It would also be horrible in terms of backwards compatibility, more work for no real gain. 2 is now considered <><>? Highly impractical. For a lack of a better word, I see Waste mana as a more exclusive kind of colorless mana.
The fact we have a card that includes <> in the cost makes it even clearer for me. There would be no reason to say Kozilek costs 8<><> instead of 10. So <><> has to be Waste mana or equivalent (like from Mirrorpool). Kozilek's Channeler can't help with the <><>, Wastes don't have a 6th land type so they doesn't mess with domain but are fetchable with anything referencing basics. I am however interested in knowing how Wastes mana interacts with Converge. They'll probably have a specific ruling that says <> doesn't affect converge or the number of colors of mana used to pay for a spell.
most of the lists that i have seen are running the full set of bolts but the Fabrizio Anteri list ran thoughtseize instead. what are the thoughts on one vs the other? i'm more on the thoughtseize board vs bolt but havent tried either yet; just finished building the deck yesterday.
Fabrizio himself said that he had TS in the board and kept siding them in every g2-3 so they made the jump to the mainboard.
I can see it being as more of a catch all while still paying life, but I do agree sometimes you're a bolt short of winning.
I would say it's a meta call, at the same time not having bolt lets you focus on your game plan of huge unopposed creatures trampling over and not worry if you should bolt the creature or the player.
Besides, there are definitely times where you're looking for extra life loss, Death's shadow is such a game-changer against pretty much every non-path deck that I think it's worth keeping TS in.
Whatever you do, however, don't ever bolt yourself to grow a Shadow
With painlands in Origins, I seriously doubt we will see all 10 fetchlands in Standard. I'd say we're more likely to see the manlands + a new set of enemy color counterparts (to replace the 10 temples rotating out).
Spec aside, this definitely looks like a basic land, and I'm pretty sure even if it turned out to be full art, WoTC wouldn't spoil that just yet. The art could be cropped to the standard size.
Re: Reality Shift, on paper it's good but it represents too much variance. A card like Dismember helps against fast starts, even against burn. Reality Shifting a Goblin Guide is hardly worthwhile. Besides you might be giving your opponent a bigger creature than a 2/2, at which point you're worse off than before. I'd rather take 4 damage and kill whatever's on the other side of the table.
Re: Encase in ice, it's a pretty sweet sideboard tech but again, I'd rather play Dismember since at instant speed you can do a lot more with it, it's got potential for some blowout plays. We already have a pretty tight decklist and we're trying to maximize relevance for each card.
I think Kira is win more, our creatures don't need that much protection in the sense that you can easily plan around removal spells. We're a deck that only needs one or two critters to win, if you play against a removal heavy deck there's always Mindslaver. Besides, the double blue makes it really hard to cast while keeping mana open for counters. Spellskite is better for all those reasons (and I don't even play it).
Needle has definitely been in our sides before, especially when Pod was around. Against Merfolk it's a bit of a blowout, I had a game where I played two, one on Vial and the other on Mutavault.
It definitely is a meta call though, and in an Abrupt Decay heavy meta like the one we're in now I'm not sure it has that many uses. The issue is that on one hand it doesn't do much the turn it comes down (I mean, it shuts a card down temporarily but it doesn't advance your gamestate), on the other a lot of the cards that it's supposed to mitigate can be activated the turn they come down, so it seems to me like the times it will be dead in your hand far surpass the times that not only does it come down at the right time, but also survive long enough to have an impact. Vial and Mutavault are two perfect targets because of this.
Re: Fulminator Mage, I honestly think that LD with this deck is not as big of a problem as a lot of people make it out to be. We are suited for the game to go long and sure it sucks to have your T4 Tron destroyed, but if you plan ahead you can waltz around it and still have relevant plays each turn. The only time I'd be worried about Mage is if it gets recurred turn after turn in a deck like Living End.
I think Gifts is powerful, but extremely skill-intensive since it's so situational. You can't pick certain key cards like Academy Ruins because if it goes into the yard you're screwed unless you play Crucible, which comes in only G2 and G3. So you have to structure it properly, but I see it as miles better than Fabricate since it always helps. I've been running 2 and they work as they should.
Also, in this Lingering Souls / Snapcaster Mage meta, I'd never ever ever run less than 4 Remands. Remanding Flashback spells represents so much value. You can always side them out against low CMC decks for more proper answers.
To wrap up, I don't think I could ever cut Talismans from this deck, they ramp and discard to Thirst in the late game. They make "Tron + blue cards" hands keepable, much like Simulacrum.
I side out Talismans pretty much in every matchup; between Ancient Grudge, Abrupt Decay, Spell Snare and Stony Silence every deck is suited to kill it or shut it off. Especially against any white deck, it's a no brainer.
Speaking of UW Tron, I've found that its upside compared to U-Tron is that it has better lategame as it goes over the top of our stuff with Colonnade, Eldrazi, Iona and Elesh Norn, but it is even more reliant on Tron and nonbasics to assemble the gameplan and as some others have pointed out, in this Blood Moon meta it might not be the best choice.
I think burn is the kind of matchup where you have to weigh the pros and cons of playing defensively or assembling your own wincon before they can get you, depending on the board state. If you have a quick Mindslaver that is probably the best route to victory since they can do very little to interact with you. Even an average activation without Ruins should help you stabilize and dealing 8+ damage to your opponent. If they already have 20 points of burn in hand and you sputter through a turn or two you're in for a lot of trouble though.
I can see them coming out against a combo deck like Twin, if you're on the draw you might care more about not losing in the first 5 turns rather than quickly assemble Tron. I'd rather have a Dismember, Repeal or Spell Pierce in my hand there.
Against fast aggro that doesn't run white I'd keep them in though, T3/4 Wurmcoils are a treat.
Still on the draw, against Abrupt Decay they might not be the best either. Getting your T1 Map decayed isn't exactly fun.
Postboard games tend to go longer so you have more time to naturally ramp into tron. I've seen Shoktroopa even side out Map in some matches. Sometimes all you want to do is counter everything they do while making land drops until you have enough mana for a bomb. No map needed.
I think trying to go deep in trumping hate cards is a mistake with this deck; Surgical Extraction for example is a card that by itself doesn't bother me too much especially G2 and G3 and Sowing Salt on Tower isn't the end of the world either. Blood moon too, it sucks to see it resolve but you can plan around it. Against almost all decks (short of UW Tron) we have the inevitability edge so anything that slows the game down isn't too much of a hassle.
Personally I like to think in terms of our endgame bombs and figure out which one completely undoes their plan; G1 it's tough because you have to keep a hand without information on the matchup, but if I see a Goblin Guide come down T1 my gears instantly switch to assembling Mindslaver as quickly as possible. Sure, you'll have to navigate some hairy turns and earn a little edge by playing the tempo game, probably tap out on 3 for Mage, but if you can drop the slaver there's almost nothing that your opponent can do, regardless of whether you're at 2 or 9 or 15 life. Junk and Jund eat a Sundering Titan or O-Stone and a deck like Merfolk can suck on a Platinum Angel. Low CMC decks like Tokens fold to the Spell Burst lock. We have so many different endgames that one is bound to swing the game in our favor.
I guess what I'm getting at is to not get too caught up in neutralizing their hate cards for the sake of neutralizing them. On one hand it does less to advance their gamestate and on the other we have plenty of game to make up for the speed bump. The only cards I keep in the back of my mind in the relevant matchups are Tec Edge, Fulminator Mage, Stony Silence and Blood Moon. Sowing Salt isn't seeing as much play but it's always a consideration.
I prefer Spell Pierce because it does more to actively disrupt the opponent's plan; Dispel is of better use when you're trying to defend your own spells from counters which we can already do by ramping and going to a counterwar. We run more counters than the average control deck so we have a natural advantage there.
We are soft to fast starts and that is why I personally run 2 Pierce and 2 Snare in the SB, they help against all sorts of ludicrous cards and most of the hate we face G2 and G3.
2 Sanctum of Ugin
3 Sunken Hollow
4 Aether Hub
1 Geier Reach Sanitarium
3 Crumbling Vestige
1 Inventors' Fair
5 Island
3 Spirebluff Canal
Creatures (19)
3 Foundry Inspector
4 Herald of Kozilek
3 Contraband Kingpin
3 Metalwork Colossus
3 Glint-Nest Crane
3 Filigree Familiar
3 Paradoxical Outcome
Artifacts (16)
3 Metalspinner's Puzzleknot
1 Key to the City
3 Prophetic Prism
3 Aetherflux Reservoir
1 Panharmonicon
3 Smuggler's Copter
2 Hedron Archive
1 Turn Aside
4 Fevered Visions
3 Ceremonious Rejection
3 Spatial Contortion
2 Dispel
2 Elder Deep-Fiend
It is a hybrid of both Reservoir and Colossus decks, mostly because I wanted flexibility. G2-3 people will just sit and destroy your Reservoirs if you rely on them too much, so this deck has a good 3-4 avenues of victory that you can build towards. I also wanted to skew away from the 0-CMC equipment: I tried Caleb's version and while the approach is nice, I felt like it was too all-in. You either have the monster game plan or nothing. Topdecking a Cathar's Shield when you have little going on doesn't advance your board state and I wanted a bit more punch per card. Don't get me wrong, this deck is totally capable of hitting 60+ life, but it's also completely fine chaining 3-4 spells each turn to gain life and buy time until you can dump your entire hand, especially in the midgame when everything costs 1 or 2 mana.
Cards of note beyond the usual suspects: Smuggler's Copter was a bit of a necessary evil, but it helps so much. Sometimes all you have are a bunch of 1/x and your opponent either a) smashes with Copters of his own or b) Durdles around with setup cards. It reduces the Colossus cost, sculpts your hand and can win games on its own if unchecked. If they kill it, that's ok too, one less spell for our cost reducers. We rarely need more than 1 per game though, barring the occasional extra summoning-sick critter coming down and being put to use. Key to the City has also been great: if you manage to chip away at your opponent's life total, one Colossus swing with a key activation can mean game. Again, it reduces Colossus' CMC, lets you dump chaff to advance your game plan, draws you cards and breaks board stalls. I've always been happy to see it, but I think 1 is correct. It's also a great Fair target later on, when you need that last stretch of damage or want to one-shot a walker. I run 4 Herald of Kozilek and 3 Inspectors simply because Inspector doesn't reduce Herald's cost while the opposite is true. Herald also makes Spatial Contortion and Deep Fiend cost less (small advantage, I know, but it's there). Besides, with 2 in play of either type you're already doing fine. The 4 toughness is also a consideration for the Depalas, Toolcrafts, Scroungers and so on that run around. It also survives a single Harnessed Lightning, Spatial Contortion and the first two Galvanic Bombardments.
Flex slots right now are the 3 Familiars (basically pre-boarding for aggro and leveraging Panharmonicon with extra enablers – I'm still trying to figure out if the Pan is worth it in a deck like this), the Puzzleknot / Prism split and little else. Geier-Reach Sanitarium has been meh, I always worry about the card selection for the opponent whenever I use it. I don't know if Sea Gate would do a better job there. Either way, the deck is a blast to play. I love surprising the Bx control / delirium decks with a couple Fevered Visions G2 and 3, they've always won me the game.
- Goldnight Castigator as a sideboard card has impressed me from day 1. 4 flying damage with haste in this new kind of slower Standard is an awesome rate. It's great against the Nissa / Gideon Decks and ramp, or decks that use spot removal instead of damage. It is still off people's radar, they'll gum up the ground with durdly tokens and you just one shot their walker or even just swing for 4 unblockable turn 3. Castigator into Smasher is also just ridiculous. Note that the drawback only affects Castigator and you, all your other creatures receive regular damage. It also replaces TKS nicely against Stasis Snare and Declaration in Stone, with the upside that removing the Castigator doesn't really affect our strategy of going wide with synergistic creatures. It's something they have to answer while you build your real game plan.
- I think at least 1 Hedron Archive belongs in the main. I've shaved a Crawler for it since Crawler is terrible after Turn 3-4. The Hedron is almost never a dead card: on one hand it fits nicely in the ramp progression this deck has with Crawler on 2 to hit 4 mana turn 3, on the other you can play it later on and tap it right away to make up for excess mana. I've never played it on curve, but sometimes it slid in my sequencing nicely by powering out an Engineer, Aggregate or Hangarback right away. I feel like sometimes between playing 2 threats or 1 threat and some 'stability' this deck would rather do the second. There is also the tiny advantage of interacting favorably with P&K, although it's never come up for me.
- Westvale Abbey feels like a Plan Z with the density of threats we run. You'll almost always have to sac a good creature if you're in a rush to flip it and by the time we have 5 creatures on board the game should be over in a few turns anyway. This deck isn't making 0/1 plants here, so the actual gain of a 9/8 flying lifelink most of the time is negligible, you'll be giving up some good synergy when saccing your board. If that's not the case, you are probably saccing mana producers to it and you're low on the land count. I've been running 2 but sometimes I even forget I have them, they're that relevant. It also fights with Foundry sometimes, again with the synergies we run even making just 2 extra Thopters can represent the same amount of damage, with the upside that they can keep you alive an extra turn to alpha strike and win.
- Warping Wail has been underperforming for me, none of the modes are particularly powerful when you consider the alternatives we have in this deck. The removal is nice but Contortion and Roast deal with so much more. The Scion token doesn't seem like enough either. I can see the sorcery counter being relevant, but I still feel like that's not enough. Outnumber seems solid, I like that it can hit flyers which are a huge problem for us. 4-5 damage to a flying creature aren't uncommon and that's almost exactly what we're looking for. With Siege Rhino gone I think Roast is gonna play less of a part in the format and I've found myself wishing it could hit flying creatures (hence the Tears of Valakut in the side).
- I already miss Outpost Siege so much. Chandra 0 is the best we have now ;_;
My latest list, for reference:
3 Hedron Crawler
4 Vile Aggregate
4 Thopter Engineer
3 Pia and Kiran Nalaar
3 Thought-Knot Seer
4 Reality Smasher
2 Spatial Contortion
2 Outnumber
1 Roast
1 Hedron Archive
4 Chandra, Flamecaller
4 Foundry of the Consuls
3 Shivan Reef
2 Ruins of Oran-Rief
3 Battlefield Forge
2 Westvale Abbey
10 Mountain
1 Oblivion Sower
1 Spatial Contortion
2 Tears of Valakut
1 Thought-Knot Seer
3 Eldrazi Obligator
1 Rending Volley
2 Crumble to Dust
1 Boiling Earth
2 Goldnight Castigator
1 Roast
I do understand that one is mana of doesn't matter what color, and the other is mana without color. That's not the point. The point is why create <> if it can be paid for with generic mana like a lot of people here are assuming? <> is a mana symbol like the other 5, Kozilek needs to be paid for with 2 of those. A lot of folks are running away with Sol Ring now produces <><> and that adds a layer of complexity that people fail to understand is completely unnecessary and counterproductive.
I also find it surprising that most people here are already assuming that the <> mana symbol can be paid for with colorless mana from sources such as Sol Ring and similars. This would make Wastes and <> a gimmick and nothing more. Without a 6th basic land type, why would you fetch Wastes over any of the other 5? Those can pay for the <> symbol too (according to how most people are interpreting it). It would also be horrible in terms of backwards compatibility, more work for no real gain. 2 is now considered <><>? Highly impractical. For a lack of a better word, I see Waste mana as a more exclusive kind of colorless mana.
The fact we have a card that includes <> in the cost makes it even clearer for me. There would be no reason to say Kozilek costs 8<><> instead of 10. So <><> has to be Waste mana or equivalent (like from Mirrorpool). Kozilek's Channeler can't help with the <><>, Wastes don't have a 6th land type so they doesn't mess with domain but are fetchable with anything referencing basics. I am however interested in knowing how Wastes mana interacts with Converge. They'll probably have a specific ruling that says <> doesn't affect converge or the number of colors of mana used to pay for a spell.
Fabrizio himself said that he had TS in the board and kept siding them in every g2-3 so they made the jump to the mainboard.
I can see it being as more of a catch all while still paying life, but I do agree sometimes you're a bolt short of winning.
I would say it's a meta call, at the same time not having bolt lets you focus on your game plan of huge unopposed creatures trampling over and not worry if you should bolt the creature or the player.
Besides, there are definitely times where you're looking for extra life loss, Death's shadow is such a game-changer against pretty much every non-path deck that I think it's worth keeping TS in.
Whatever you do, however, don't ever bolt yourself to grow a Shadow
Spec aside, this definitely looks like a basic land, and I'm pretty sure even if it turned out to be full art, WoTC wouldn't spoil that just yet. The art could be cropped to the standard size.
Re: Encase in ice, it's a pretty sweet sideboard tech but again, I'd rather play Dismember since at instant speed you can do a lot more with it, it's got potential for some blowout plays. We already have a pretty tight decklist and we're trying to maximize relevance for each card.
I think Kira is win more, our creatures don't need that much protection in the sense that you can easily plan around removal spells. We're a deck that only needs one or two critters to win, if you play against a removal heavy deck there's always Mindslaver. Besides, the double blue makes it really hard to cast while keeping mana open for counters. Spellskite is better for all those reasons (and I don't even play it).
It definitely is a meta call though, and in an Abrupt Decay heavy meta like the one we're in now I'm not sure it has that many uses. The issue is that on one hand it doesn't do much the turn it comes down (I mean, it shuts a card down temporarily but it doesn't advance your gamestate), on the other a lot of the cards that it's supposed to mitigate can be activated the turn they come down, so it seems to me like the times it will be dead in your hand far surpass the times that not only does it come down at the right time, but also survive long enough to have an impact. Vial and Mutavault are two perfect targets because of this.
Re: Fulminator Mage, I honestly think that LD with this deck is not as big of a problem as a lot of people make it out to be. We are suited for the game to go long and sure it sucks to have your T4 Tron destroyed, but if you plan ahead you can waltz around it and still have relevant plays each turn. The only time I'd be worried about Mage is if it gets recurred turn after turn in a deck like Living End.
Also, in this Lingering Souls / Snapcaster Mage meta, I'd never ever ever run less than 4 Remands. Remanding Flashback spells represents so much value. You can always side them out against low CMC decks for more proper answers.
To wrap up, I don't think I could ever cut Talismans from this deck, they ramp and discard to Thirst in the late game. They make "Tron + blue cards" hands keepable, much like Simulacrum.
I'd say that a one land hand is hardly keepable in general. Talisman there doesn't do much to improve it or make it worse.
I think burn is the kind of matchup where you have to weigh the pros and cons of playing defensively or assembling your own wincon before they can get you, depending on the board state. If you have a quick Mindslaver that is probably the best route to victory since they can do very little to interact with you. Even an average activation without Ruins should help you stabilize and dealing 8+ damage to your opponent. If they already have 20 points of burn in hand and you sputter through a turn or two you're in for a lot of trouble though.
For reference, you can watch Estratti play not one but two Burn decks in the same day at GP Boston, this is pre-Khans so even though the meta has changed the decks are more or less the same as now and there is no Cruise or Dig to worry about: http://www.twitch.tv/magic/b/551457114?t=2h21m30s and http://www.twitch.tv/magic/b/551745646?t=44m10s
Against fast aggro that doesn't run white I'd keep them in though, T3/4 Wurmcoils are a treat.
Still on the draw, against Abrupt Decay they might not be the best either. Getting your T1 Map decayed isn't exactly fun.
Personally I like to think in terms of our endgame bombs and figure out which one completely undoes their plan; G1 it's tough because you have to keep a hand without information on the matchup, but if I see a Goblin Guide come down T1 my gears instantly switch to assembling Mindslaver as quickly as possible. Sure, you'll have to navigate some hairy turns and earn a little edge by playing the tempo game, probably tap out on 3 for Mage, but if you can drop the slaver there's almost nothing that your opponent can do, regardless of whether you're at 2 or 9 or 15 life. Junk and Jund eat a Sundering Titan or O-Stone and a deck like Merfolk can suck on a Platinum Angel. Low CMC decks like Tokens fold to the Spell Burst lock. We have so many different endgames that one is bound to swing the game in our favor.
I guess what I'm getting at is to not get too caught up in neutralizing their hate cards for the sake of neutralizing them. On one hand it does less to advance their gamestate and on the other we have plenty of game to make up for the speed bump. The only cards I keep in the back of my mind in the relevant matchups are Tec Edge, Fulminator Mage, Stony Silence and Blood Moon. Sowing Salt isn't seeing as much play but it's always a consideration.
We are soft to fast starts and that is why I personally run 2 Pierce and 2 Snare in the SB, they help against all sorts of ludicrous cards and most of the hate we face G2 and G3.