I'm pretty worried about Gemstone being Legendary. The first copy is pretty much free (besides the "is it really better than island/wasteland/whatever?"), but the copies after have real deckbuilding costs to them. Joe in his Reanimator deck tech talked about how playing 4 gemstone forces 3 lands in the sideboard, which is a limitation I'd rather not have to work around.
Gemstone Caverns: It's a very experimental card, so I'm not totally sure it's even good, but initial results look positive. Why is it helpful? Consider the makeup of our deck vs. most of the decks in the format. We're pretty much mono-2-drops, while everybody else is reliant on 1-drops. This of course allows us to leverage Chalice to punish the meta, but since we don't use Sol lands, we're stuck playing a turn behind on the play.. and *2 turns* behind on the draw. This 2-turn disadvantage is of course alleviated if we're lucky enough to actually open with one of our 1-drops on the draw, but even better is if we can steal back the play. You can kind of think of it as an extra 1-drop in the situation you need a 1-drop the most, but we get to spend a "free" land slot instead of a more valuable nonland slot.
I'm still playing 11 basic islands like I have for a long time now, the mana is still overall quite resilient to wasteland and blood moon, but wasteland does matter a tad bit more now. The biggest issue is that we'd never willingly play a nonbasic as our first land drop because of wasteland, but as Joe Lossett describes, even in that situation the end result is that both us and our opponent is down a card, but we're on the play instead of them, which is still a pretty good situation for us as long as we've still got enough land in hand to function. It's only a really big problem if we're very land light and only have one other land in hand. The power of being on the play is likely worth that risk, though.
Tidal Warrior: It's always been somewhat a meta call for nonblue decks that happens to be just useful enough in blue matchups and from a curve perspective to be worth maindecking, but this top-less meta has gotten way way more blue now, so the power of Tidal has gone down significantly. Copter has replaced those slots by both being overall more powerful and by having less polarized utility. That is, copter is not quite as good as Tidal vs. nonblue, but it's much much much better than Tidal vs. blue. I did try Tidal a bit in the top-less meta myself however most of my current feel for the meta and how effective Tidal is currently comes from being in Ehhh's peanut gallery all last week.
Yeah, I don't think having Tidal or not really effects whether 2 or 3 copter are better. We have just so many dudes that crewing it isn't usually much of a problem.
It's something I've said before, but with only 2 wastelands "mana denial" is a wrong mindset to have. They exist as surgical answers to problem utility lands and absolutely should not be fired off just because you can. I've tapped wastelands for mana quite a lot.
I played stifle as a fun-of in my pre-chalice days and it did many good things for me. I don't like it with chalice, which of course doesn't apply if uh, you don't have chalices.
Pretty much the moment I make this post I'm heading out of town (going to RPGLB and couching for the YsCelceta run on Tuesday) and won't have internet access for a week, so I won't be able to make any more posts during that time.
no more Phantasmal Image that more often than not disappointed me with no interesting targets or too many of them in hand.
This is a sign you haven't played with Phantasmal Image enough. It is the card with by far the highest ceiling, and the floor is not nearly as low as you believe it is. I *rarely* get stuck with Phantasmal uselessly in my hand. You often need to think a little sideways to really exploit the true power of the card.
8 "free" counters: Daze makes me feel more confortable and secure, turn 1 Island Aether Vial GO or simply Island GO is a strong start; with this smooth list and its interactivity, Daze never resulted in a dead card
This sounds like you play with bad opponents that don't know how to play around Daze, that would be the most reasonable explanation for why you feel that Daze is never a dead card. Daze is especially bad in the current meta with so many Deathrite Shamans running around. Island-GO with daze is a miserable opening, as when you actually use that Daze you pretty much straight up timewalk yourself. You will more than likely lose that game due to the tempo loss. The right number of Daze you should run is just barely enough to make your opponent start respecting it. Why? let's consider the 4 main situations w.r.t. Daze:
1. Opponent does not play around Daze, you don't have Daze => +0 (Neutral)
2. Opponent does not play around Daze, you have the Daze => +3 (Major advantage)
3. Opponent plays around Daze, you don't have Daze => +1 (Minor advantage)
4. Opponent plays around Daze, you have the Daze => -2 (Moderate disadvantage)
The goal is to maximize situations 2 and 3 and minimize situation 4. The way to do that is to create uncertainty in the opponent whether or not they should play around Daze or not. Playing all 4 daze is a double-whammy in this regard. By doing so, you make it optimal for the opponent to always play around the Daze and you'll draw Daze more often, which maximizes situation 4 two different ways. Playing no dazes makes it optimal for the opponent to never play around Daze, which while not actively bad for us isn't an optimal strategy. Playing 1-2 dazes is enough to make the opponent have to respect Daze, but not too much. By forcing the opponent to make a decision every turn (rather than just once at the beginning of the match) whether to play around Daze or not, you create the most openings for situations 2 and 3.
From the very small sample size of this morning and last night at my LGS (i.e. take with a grain of salt), Null Rod seems still pretty good even though I initially thought it might have gone down in effectiveness. Particularly, stoneforge mystic and LED has gotten more relevant to fill the gap top left.
I haven't actually touched my SB in paper yet, but I'd be considering
1 Cursed Totem
1 Manriki-Gusari
2 Dismember
2 Submerge
2 Flusterstorm
1 Grafdigger's Cage
3 Relic of Progenitus
1 Misdirection
2 Back to Basics
Unless you were running Null Rod, we've got no real intel on how you need to change your sideboard.
That's a little bit hasty. I agree it's not great for us in the short-term, but we've got the tools to adapt. For as long as the best color in Legacy is blue, we've got a place there.
Swan Song is great if you're not running Chalice. Pretty bad with chalice. Unlike other 1-drops like vial, relic, or cage, Swan Song gets cast late and doesn't sneak under our own chalice. There's enough situations where storm, reanimator, or whatever can piece together a win despite chalice that you need to have a counter that can be used in that situation.
Rule 1: Don't play less than 11 basic islands, unless you're willing to actually care about opposing Wasteland and Blood Moon, and also lose access to Back to Basics. I'm not.
Rule 2: Don't play any less than 2 copies of a nonbasic, or else you won't see it consistently enough to matter. Special exception: Mishra's Factory, it's just Mutavault #5.
Beyond that you can do pretty much whatever you want. The generally most reasonable 4 cavern manabases are 12 island 4 muta or 11 island 3 muta 2 waste.
Tidal Warrior on our own lands is a backup plan, not something we actively want to rely on as a part of deck construction. There's a ton of matchups where you want to side out Tidal, but if you make your mana too fragile without Tidal you're in for a bad time.
I.. don't think you've gotten me and Nikachu crossed? Not sure if you're pro-negate or pro-fluster, I'm pro-fluster and only advocate negate as a budget option.
I'm almost in the camp of us needing all 4 caverns to run him effectively
All 4 caverns is pretty much where you should be anyway, more for TNN than for forcing down a cursecatcher or tidal through a chalice1.
My opponents would rarely tap out in fear of it.
If that's the case, then BtB is already doing its job even if it's not in your hand! I've had games where an early probe showed the BtB, but I jammed a T3 TNN instead, stranding their decay that turn and wasting 2 of their mana. That's almost a timewalk. With a TNN on board, they were forced into getting proactive, which played right into the BtB. If decay is annoying you especially much, jam a Misdirection or two in the sideboard. They're really good with the big surge in BUG lately.
Lands is hosed way harder by BtB than Seas can ever manage. I'm rarely all that concerned about Tabernacle. It's annoying, but doesn't really change the basic game plan for that matchup, which is to get a TNN down and ride it to victory while trying to not die to Marit Lage. In paper a good shortcut is to place a tapped land under each of your dudes so that you're automatically paying the tax and don't need to explicitly remember every single time. Maze of Ith gets hosed either way, they only get to stop 1 dude and then it's locked down. Same for Grove, they only get to use it once. Overall, the matchup is pretty even, maybe slightly favored for us. It's still a hard matchup and when you lose it feels like you couldn't do anything about it (which is often not wrong), which leads to the perception that it's a bad matchup. However, the more typical game has them durdling too much while not being able to handle a TNN (or 3).
12post is also hosed way harder by BtB. They *really* can't play magic after one hits the table, especially as post decks tend to like tapping out a lot. If you've got Reejerey, it's even more brutal. The scary card out of them nowadays is Walking Ballista which in turn makes Trinket Mage scary.
Seas is kind of a 2-for-1. BtB, like chalice, is an X-for-1. Just this morning on MTGO I jammed a T3 BtB into 3 tapped nonbasics, which locked not just those lands, but also almost their entire hand. It was basically a 7-for-1 by the time the game actually ended. If I had Seas in that situation, I would have quickly been run over by at least 2 goyfs, an active deathrite, and who knows what else that got stuck.
It's a reddit thread. Personally, I still prefer Flusterstorm. I tried Negate for a bit after making that comment and the 1 extra mana was brutal. However.. flusterstorm is still casually $80 so that's not always an option.
IMO Spreading Seas is not a good card in Legacy, particularly because Tidal Warrior exists to fill much the same roles, and Back to Basics is way more powerful. Seas is often just a minor annoyance, BtB stops our opponent from playing the game.
untranslated_za, are you sure you're in the right thread? This is for Legacy, not Modern. Hurkyl's and Rejection don't belong in a Legacy sideboard at all. Anyhow, AV is way too slow of a card for us. The traditional aggressive option for drawing 3 cards is Standstill, but that has long fallen out of favor because it's a lot harder nowadays to set up the boardstate required for Standstill. My recommended card engine for the slower, grindier matchups is JTMS, of which you only need or want one copy in the sideboard.
Curby, running less than 4 cursecatcher opens you up to the spell-based combo decks too much. Vial is not really all that important, we don't abuse it with lots of tricks like D&T does. Vial is considerably more dreadful of a topdeck than any 1/1 dork, especially if the 1/1 dork is really a 3/3 flyer.
FANAttIC, cool list. Looks pretty familiar :D, but with the appropriate shaves to fit in the 3 copters. I'm glad you're having a blast with the Tidals and Copters, tempting me to try a bit of whir-whir action myself, even though that means I can't pack my beloved Null Rods.
Curby, I would never go less than 4 Cursecatchers ever. The flex is between number of Tidals and Vials. I've also been running 3 Chalice in paper.. but only because I lent my 4th out for an extended amount of time and couldn't play all 4. I was definitely feeling the lack of the #4, but the deck is still so capable anyway that it wasn't *too* bad. When I first started playing Chalice I was only running 3 anyhow.
I'm still playing 11 basic islands like I have for a long time now, the mana is still overall quite resilient to wasteland and blood moon, but wasteland does matter a tad bit more now. The biggest issue is that we'd never willingly play a nonbasic as our first land drop because of wasteland, but as Joe Lossett describes, even in that situation the end result is that both us and our opponent is down a card, but we're on the play instead of them, which is still a pretty good situation for us as long as we've still got enough land in hand to function. It's only a really big problem if we're very land light and only have one other land in hand. The power of being on the play is likely worth that risk, though.
Tidal Warrior: It's always been somewhat a meta call for nonblue decks that happens to be just useful enough in blue matchups and from a curve perspective to be worth maindecking, but this top-less meta has gotten way way more blue now, so the power of Tidal has gone down significantly. Copter has replaced those slots by both being overall more powerful and by having less polarized utility. That is, copter is not quite as good as Tidal vs. nonblue, but it's much much much better than Tidal vs. blue. I did try Tidal a bit in the top-less meta myself however most of my current feel for the meta and how effective Tidal is currently comes from being in Ehhh's peanut gallery all last week.
Yeah, I don't think having Tidal or not really effects whether 2 or 3 copter are better. We have just so many dudes that crewing it isn't usually much of a problem.
I played stifle as a fun-of in my pre-chalice days and it did many good things for me. I don't like it with chalice, which of course doesn't apply if uh, you don't have chalices.
This is a sign you haven't played with Phantasmal Image enough. It is the card with by far the highest ceiling, and the floor is not nearly as low as you believe it is. I *rarely* get stuck with Phantasmal uselessly in my hand. You often need to think a little sideways to really exploit the true power of the card.
This sounds like you play with bad opponents that don't know how to play around Daze, that would be the most reasonable explanation for why you feel that Daze is never a dead card. Daze is especially bad in the current meta with so many Deathrite Shamans running around. Island-GO with daze is a miserable opening, as when you actually use that Daze you pretty much straight up timewalk yourself. You will more than likely lose that game due to the tempo loss. The right number of Daze you should run is just barely enough to make your opponent start respecting it. Why? let's consider the 4 main situations w.r.t. Daze:
1. Opponent does not play around Daze, you don't have Daze => +0 (Neutral)
2. Opponent does not play around Daze, you have the Daze => +3 (Major advantage)
3. Opponent plays around Daze, you don't have Daze => +1 (Minor advantage)
4. Opponent plays around Daze, you have the Daze => -2 (Moderate disadvantage)
The goal is to maximize situations 2 and 3 and minimize situation 4. The way to do that is to create uncertainty in the opponent whether or not they should play around Daze or not. Playing all 4 daze is a double-whammy in this regard. By doing so, you make it optimal for the opponent to always play around the Daze and you'll draw Daze more often, which maximizes situation 4 two different ways. Playing no dazes makes it optimal for the opponent to never play around Daze, which while not actively bad for us isn't an optimal strategy. Playing 1-2 dazes is enough to make the opponent have to respect Daze, but not too much. By forcing the opponent to make a decision every turn (rather than just once at the beginning of the match) whether to play around Daze or not, you create the most openings for situations 2 and 3.
1 Cursed Totem
1 Manriki-Gusari
2 Dismember
2 Submerge
2 Flusterstorm
1 Grafdigger's Cage
3 Relic of Progenitus
1 Misdirection
2 Back to Basics
Unless you were running Null Rod, we've got no real intel on how you need to change your sideboard.
Rule 2: Don't play any less than 2 copies of a nonbasic, or else you won't see it consistently enough to matter. Special exception: Mishra's Factory, it's just Mutavault #5.
Beyond that you can do pretty much whatever you want. The generally most reasonable 4 cavern manabases are 12 island 4 muta or 11 island 3 muta 2 waste.
Tidal Warrior on our own lands is a backup plan, not something we actively want to rely on as a part of deck construction. There's a ton of matchups where you want to side out Tidal, but if you make your mana too fragile without Tidal you're in for a bad time.
All 4 caverns is pretty much where you should be anyway, more for TNN than for forcing down a cursecatcher or tidal through a chalice1.
If that's the case, then BtB is already doing its job even if it's not in your hand! I've had games where an early probe showed the BtB, but I jammed a T3 TNN instead, stranding their decay that turn and wasting 2 of their mana. That's almost a timewalk. With a TNN on board, they were forced into getting proactive, which played right into the BtB. If decay is annoying you especially much, jam a Misdirection or two in the sideboard. They're really good with the big surge in BUG lately.
Lands is hosed way harder by BtB than Seas can ever manage. I'm rarely all that concerned about Tabernacle. It's annoying, but doesn't really change the basic game plan for that matchup, which is to get a TNN down and ride it to victory while trying to not die to Marit Lage. In paper a good shortcut is to place a tapped land under each of your dudes so that you're automatically paying the tax and don't need to explicitly remember every single time. Maze of Ith gets hosed either way, they only get to stop 1 dude and then it's locked down. Same for Grove, they only get to use it once. Overall, the matchup is pretty even, maybe slightly favored for us. It's still a hard matchup and when you lose it feels like you couldn't do anything about it (which is often not wrong), which leads to the perception that it's a bad matchup. However, the more typical game has them durdling too much while not being able to handle a TNN (or 3).
12post is also hosed way harder by BtB. They *really* can't play magic after one hits the table, especially as post decks tend to like tapping out a lot. If you've got Reejerey, it's even more brutal. The scary card out of them nowadays is Walking Ballista which in turn makes Trinket Mage scary.
Seas is kind of a 2-for-1. BtB, like chalice, is an X-for-1. Just this morning on MTGO I jammed a T3 BtB into 3 tapped nonbasics, which locked not just those lands, but also almost their entire hand. It was basically a 7-for-1 by the time the game actually ended. If I had Seas in that situation, I would have quickly been run over by at least 2 goyfs, an active deathrite, and who knows what else that got stuck.
IMO Spreading Seas is not a good card in Legacy, particularly because Tidal Warrior exists to fill much the same roles, and Back to Basics is way more powerful. Seas is often just a minor annoyance, BtB stops our opponent from playing the game.
Curby, running less than 4 cursecatcher opens you up to the spell-based combo decks too much. Vial is not really all that important, we don't abuse it with lots of tricks like D&T does. Vial is considerably more dreadful of a topdeck than any 1/1 dork, especially if the 1/1 dork is really a 3/3 flyer.
Curby, I would never go less than 4 Cursecatchers ever. The flex is between number of Tidals and Vials. I've also been running 3 Chalice in paper.. but only because I lent my 4th out for an extended amount of time and couldn't play all 4. I was definitely feeling the lack of the #4, but the deck is still so capable anyway that it wasn't *too* bad. When I first started playing Chalice I was only running 3 anyhow.