Nikachu, you have a way overblown fear of SDT. It's very good, but not nearly as game-breaking as you seem to think it is. DO NOT FORCE IT. I used to have similar fears and forced T1 tops, but got punished for it too many times when they just use other cantrips and easily find another Top. Null Rod is really where you want to be, and Rod also stops Engineered Explosives.
I'd recommend siding out Vial and Cursecatcher rather than Image and Harbinger vs. Miracles, and maybe even bring in Tidebinder for threat density and quality, as a 2/2 is just twice as good as a 1/1. It's way too easy for miracles to play around Cursecatcher's ability so it really ends up just being a 1/1 dork. Phantasmal is not great, but still better than Cursecatcher, particularly if it's copying a Silvergil or a Mutavault. Harbinger is actually one of the better cards in the matchup. It's a flash threat and in a racing situation it can bounce mentor, mentor tokens, or angel tokens. Vial, while useful G1 to do EoT stuff, is actually overall bad in the matchup. We're not looking to dump our hand ASAP so it's not even that great in the opener, and even worse than it usually is as a topdeck. I'm very very happy when my Vial gets Forced. That's a Force they don't have when we're fighting over a more relevant card, like terminus or entreat or jace.
That G1 vs. 4-color. That line is just the best feeling in Magic and the reason *that card* is my fav card in the deck.
ReANiMaToR1, if you're consistently available at 7AM PST, I can play against you with any deck you'd like to practice against. Of course, I'm not as good as the true specialists, but I'm definitely better than players that have a, uh, loose appreciation for the rules.
I'll refer back to the notes on Storm I've previously written, particularly sideboarding. For you, that means specifically +2 Rod +1 ETruth +1 Cage +2 Crypt -4 TNN -2 Vial.
I almost always play out my silvergils before playing lords out. In Modern, it makes more sense to play lord-first as there's a lot more removal and the damage margins are a lot closer. In Legacy, the extra card into your deck matters more than a slight bit of extra damage earlier, particularly if that extra card turns out to be a Force. You pretty much always need more gas, whether you know it at the time or not. What if he could have gone off again the next turn before you drew that Force that you would have already drawn had you played silvergil? That's an unnecessary window of vulnerability. Let's also compare the clock for just cursecatcher, silvergil, lord, lord and not drawing a 3rd lord as you had in your game.
Same number of turns and only a very slight decrease in the amount of total damage dealt on each turn before the lethal turn.
It was absolutely correct for you to let the Past in Flames resolve when there's only a cantrip and a ritual in the yard. That's a "value PiF" we don't need to care about and not a must-counter "kill PiF".
Your opponents continue to use horribly illegal plays. LED requires you to discard your hand, he did not do that and played them as straight Black Lotus. Past in Flames also only applies to cards currently in your yard, not cards that enter your yard later, so it was illegal for him to flashback that Dark Petition. You really need better opponents badly. Your level of play is fine enough to not detract from your videos, but the lack of quality resistance means that you aren't getting punished hard enough for your mistakes, which gives you a wrong impression of how you can improve.
Huh, Master of Waves. I remember jamming those some random week, they were just.. "fine". I don't even remember what compelled me to try them.. some vague memory that Saito used them?
I was actually thinking he could have bounced Shaman with Image on the stack, so Shaman is no longer a copy-able creature when Image ETBs. This also shuts off the Mutavault "still kill you" route, which I honestly didn't see until you mentioned it.
Since he vialed it in, there was no opportunity for the opponent to bounce the Shaman before he could see that it was image. It's the same sort of ruling as when you vial in Phyrexian Revoker.
I was going to ask: what is that software? Seems a bit janky to be honest. Sweat
It's real janky, but I think it's a better option than Cockatrice/Untap.in when you're not super strong with rules knowledge and not livestreaming. If he were livestreaming he could partially rely on the twitch chat to help with the rules enforcement.
On Symbiote: you can attempt to untap an already untapped creature, just that part of the card doesn't do anything. As a direct application, your opponent should not have died to the Image copying Shaman, as he could in response to the Shaman trigger use symbiote targeting the image, which then causes the sac trigger and by the time the shaman trigger resolves you don't control any elves anymore. If you had a mutvault on board you could still activate it to make him still take 1 as mutavault is also an elf.
I think it'd make the content a lot better if you used XMage with the rules enforcement engine so there's less focus on rules issues and more on actually playing the deck. When you don't have a rules engine, it's way more important to have an extremely solid understanding of the rules, at least to the level of passing the Rules Advisor DCI exam.
What is your latest list tuxdev? I am having a hard time making it out int he video, thanks for posting by the way, I am enjoying watching others battle with the Fish.
Always fun watching you play, and thanks for the lands advice.
Does this site allow posting of playing online not from MTGO?
If so, I'd love to do some gameplay / commentary myself.
You can use something other than MTGO, MTGO is just the vastly most popular option. If you got any questions about streaming I'll be happy to answer the best I can.
5-0'ed a league once more, 2 matches this morning and 3 yesterday morning. My play felt pretty sub-par.. lucked my way there anyway. To some extent that's just how you got to roll with any Stompy-style deck.
Marit Lage is all that really matters postboard. Their entire game plan is to get marit out and attack with it, our entire game plan is to delay that as much as possible. Actually beating down is important but not the main focus. Preboard we're not as equipped to properly fight them, but we can often enough just aggro them out before they can properly set up.
Saving Vial on 2 + image is more of a last-resort play as punishing fire completely blows that out. When it does work it's hilarious and awesome but rather unlikely. Out of the many many times I've played against lands, I only remember actually killing someone with my marit copy.. twice.
In general, don't counter Loam. Occasionally it is the right play and particularly if it's tempoing them out for 1 critical turn but early on a counter is just futilely fighting the inevitable.
Chalice is relevant on 1 for gamble and crop rotation and on 2 for loam and fire, but overall chalice is pretty medium. They're third on the list to cut after Cursecatcher and Daze. The less chalices you end up with postboard, the more you want to save them to play for 2, but it can be hard to have 4 mana in your mainphase sometimes.
Try to hit Loam specifically with crypts/relics. Individual lands can be annoying, but it's the recursion from Loam that the bigger problem. The main exception is a loam targeting parts of Marit Lage combo.
Bring in the Tidal Warriors and Submerges. Tidal Warrior can help your tempo by blanking Mazes, can prevent Chasm from saving your opponent, and delay a Marit Lage for a turn. Submerge is another potential answer to a resolved marit lage. They can play around it by not having a forest, but submerge is more likely to work than not.
Curby: experienced Lands players can and do sandback the cycle-land if they fear grave hate. They would also avoid tapping out if at all possible.
Yes, you need to save Force for Aluren. We can navigate around most anything else they can throw at us, but if they land Aluren we're Just Dead. We can't really mulligan very hard to Force though, because if we're down cards too much we can still lose to their value game.
A big other matchup Totem really helps with is Elves. Vanilla 1/1s don't get there, and it's important for us to have more targets than they have artifact removal. A more niche matchup that we have a really hard time against is Maverick, it shuts down nearly all of their shenanigans.
Our fair game is very very good vs. them, so the big thing is to not let them combo out. How prevalent is it in your meta? It's very niche online, so I pretty much just ignore it.
When I previously vigorously tested Warping Wail, I was really happy with the card itself but was unhappy with how my manabase needed to end up, and speculated on a mono-color fetchland that could inherently tap for colorless as the U/C "color" fixing I need to properly enable Wail. This isn't *quite* that, but it might be close enough. There's actually a few situations where something like this actually works out *better* than my theorized mono-color fetchland. Particularly, if there's a blood moon down, instead of this thing just being another mountain like a fetchland would be, you could cycle it for a much more useful actual island. If you absolutely must cycle and not just play it out, there is a potential 1-mana tempo loss, so there's definitely a risk to playing too many.
I'll likely try 9-10 island, 4 cavern, 4 muta, and 2-3 of these when it gets possible to do that.
w.r.t. "you need other disruption anyway", we're not in the business of finding silver bullets with cantrips like the more standard blue decks, so we need a raw critical mass of cards. Yes, you need Force to not Just Die to belcher, but after the initial flurry you can still very much lose (and I have on many occasions).
The "downside" of turning off vial isn't really, I naturally side out my vials in matchups I want Null Rod. Also, vial just isn't that critical (we mostly just use it for extra mana) and I'm amused whenever I see one on the other side of the field as they've clearly spent a card and mana for something that probably won't even matter that much. By contrast, D&T uses vial for all kind of crazy trickery - being able to shut down their vials *and* the equipment with a single card is so ridiculously good. Really, against D&T the critical card isn't even null rod or manriki, it's dismember and warping wail.
I dunno about specific advice playing around batterskull. I have the second e-truth, dismember, and jace postboard to help with the germ. It's just never been that big of a deal to me relative to the sheer terror that is sofai and the major headache that is jitte. Waterfront bouncer is a maindeckable answer to the germ to consider that can turn our excess lands into some nice tempo.
The extra flexibility of Null Rod really allows me to fine-tune the rest of my sideboard more effectively.
I generally don't lose to batterskull or germ and the actual scariest part of someone using their first stoneforge to fetch batterskull is the implication that they actually already have a jitte or sofai in hand. If they're fetching batterskull without already having a jitte or sofai, that's 100% a misplay on their part. Even with a jitte or sofai in hand, they should probably fetch the other anyway and only fetch batterskull as a last resort.
It's something to try (as with any card), but I wouldn't call it an "answer to prayers". Carry Away already exists with the "control equipment" effect and I was quite underwhelmed. I still prefer Null Rod as it's more broadly relevant or Manriki because it's tutorable. The big upside to this over the other options is that the other options are cleanly answered with a Disenchant but that same Disenchant is awkward with this.
As a general rule you should run at least 2 copies of a SB card to make sure you can draw it decently reliably at a relevant time, and that's an awful lot of SB space to devote to something this narrow.
That deck is a hard meta-call for metas that lack combo. The only combo deck in that Top8 was the winning Reanimator list, and if that's typical of the whole tournament then this kind of build was absolutely the right choice. Online, there's more than enough combo around that such a list is a probably very bad idea. It *is* possible that nearly just straight scooping to combo G1 and SBing really aggressively actually is the better way even in the general online meta, but I kind of doubt it.. I'm not really a fan of just throwing away games like that. Having a solid game against combo, especially G1, is the biggest reason why we're still relevant and other non-tempo aggro decks like zoo is not. I tend to feel that Eldrazi is the only other contender as an aggro deck and that's because they *also* run chalice, have TKS to interact with combo (vs. our cursecatcher) and Warping Wail as a combo-relevant support spell (vs. our Force of Will).
It's always at least good to keep such a build in mind as a potential option.
I'd recommend siding out Vial and Cursecatcher rather than Image and Harbinger vs. Miracles, and maybe even bring in Tidebinder for threat density and quality, as a 2/2 is just twice as good as a 1/1. It's way too easy for miracles to play around Cursecatcher's ability so it really ends up just being a 1/1 dork. Phantasmal is not great, but still better than Cursecatcher, particularly if it's copying a Silvergil or a Mutavault. Harbinger is actually one of the better cards in the matchup. It's a flash threat and in a racing situation it can bounce mentor, mentor tokens, or angel tokens. Vial, while useful G1 to do EoT stuff, is actually overall bad in the matchup. We're not looking to dump our hand ASAP so it's not even that great in the opener, and even worse than it usually is as a topdeck. I'm very very happy when my Vial gets Forced. That's a Force they don't have when we're fighting over a more relevant card, like terminus or entreat or jace.
That G1 vs. 4-color. That line is just the best feeling in Magic and the reason *that card* is my fav card in the deck.
ReANiMaToR1, if you're consistently available at 7AM PST, I can play against you with any deck you'd like to practice against. Of course, I'm not as good as the true specialists, but I'm definitely better than players that have a, uh, loose appreciation for the rules.
I almost always play out my silvergils before playing lords out. In Modern, it makes more sense to play lord-first as there's a lot more removal and the damage margins are a lot closer. In Legacy, the extra card into your deck matters more than a slight bit of extra damage earlier, particularly if that extra card turns out to be a Force. You pretty much always need more gas, whether you know it at the time or not. What if he could have gone off again the next turn before you drew that Force that you would have already drawn had you played silvergil? That's an unnecessary window of vulnerability. Let's also compare the clock for just cursecatcher, silvergil, lord, lord and not drawing a 3rd lord as you had in your game.
Cursecatcher (20)
Lord, 2 damage (18)
Lord, 6 damage (12)
9 damage (3)
Dead
Cursecatcher (20)
Silvergil, 1 damage (19)
Lord, 5 damage (14)
Lord, 10 damage (4)
Dead
Same number of turns and only a very slight decrease in the amount of total damage dealt on each turn before the lethal turn.
It was absolutely correct for you to let the Past in Flames resolve when there's only a cantrip and a ritual in the yard. That's a "value PiF" we don't need to care about and not a must-counter "kill PiF".
Your opponents continue to use horribly illegal plays. LED requires you to discard your hand, he did not do that and played them as straight Black Lotus. Past in Flames also only applies to cards currently in your yard, not cards that enter your yard later, so it was illegal for him to flashback that Dark Petition. You really need better opponents badly. Your level of play is fine enough to not detract from your videos, but the lack of quality resistance means that you aren't getting punished hard enough for your mistakes, which gives you a wrong impression of how you can improve.
Since he vialed it in, there was no opportunity for the opponent to bounce the Shaman before he could see that it was image. It's the same sort of ruling as when you vial in Phyrexian Revoker.
It's real janky, but I think it's a better option than Cockatrice/Untap.in when you're not super strong with rules knowledge and not livestreaming. If he were livestreaming he could partially rely on the twitch chat to help with the rules enforcement.
On Symbiote: you can attempt to untap an already untapped creature, just that part of the card doesn't do anything. As a direct application, your opponent should not have died to the Image copying Shaman, as he could in response to the Shaman trigger use symbiote targeting the image, which then causes the sac trigger and by the time the shaman trigger resolves you don't control any elves anymore. If you had a mutvault on board you could still activate it to make him still take 1 as mutavault is also an elf.
I think it'd make the content a lot better if you used XMage with the rules enforcement engine so there's less focus on rules issues and more on actually playing the deck. When you don't have a rules engine, it's way more important to have an extremely solid understanding of the rules, at least to the level of passing the Rules Advisor DCI exam.
Threw it into my sig now.
You can use something other than MTGO, MTGO is just the vastly most popular option. If you got any questions about streaming I'll be happy to answer the best I can.
Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/tuxdev/v/98499258
Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/tuxdev/v/98501680
Marit Lage is all that really matters postboard. Their entire game plan is to get marit out and attack with it, our entire game plan is to delay that as much as possible. Actually beating down is important but not the main focus. Preboard we're not as equipped to properly fight them, but we can often enough just aggro them out before they can properly set up.
Saving Vial on 2 + image is more of a last-resort play as punishing fire completely blows that out. When it does work it's hilarious and awesome but rather unlikely. Out of the many many times I've played against lands, I only remember actually killing someone with my marit copy.. twice.
In general, don't counter Loam. Occasionally it is the right play and particularly if it's tempoing them out for 1 critical turn but early on a counter is just futilely fighting the inevitable.
Chalice is relevant on 1 for gamble and crop rotation and on 2 for loam and fire, but overall chalice is pretty medium. They're third on the list to cut after Cursecatcher and Daze. The less chalices you end up with postboard, the more you want to save them to play for 2, but it can be hard to have 4 mana in your mainphase sometimes.
Try to hit Loam specifically with crypts/relics. Individual lands can be annoying, but it's the recursion from Loam that the bigger problem. The main exception is a loam targeting parts of Marit Lage combo.
Bring in the Tidal Warriors and Submerges. Tidal Warrior can help your tempo by blanking Mazes, can prevent Chasm from saving your opponent, and delay a Marit Lage for a turn. Submerge is another potential answer to a resolved marit lage. They can play around it by not having a forest, but submerge is more likely to work than not.
Curby: experienced Lands players can and do sandback the cycle-land if they fear grave hate. They would also avoid tapping out if at all possible.
A big other matchup Totem really helps with is Elves. Vanilla 1/1s don't get there, and it's important for us to have more targets than they have artifact removal. A more niche matchup that we have a really hard time against is Maverick, it shuts down nearly all of their shenanigans.
Our fair game is very very good vs. them, so the big thing is to not let them combo out. How prevalent is it in your meta? It's very niche online, so I pretty much just ignore it.
When I previously vigorously tested Warping Wail, I was really happy with the card itself but was unhappy with how my manabase needed to end up, and speculated on a mono-color fetchland that could inherently tap for colorless as the U/C "color" fixing I need to properly enable Wail. This isn't *quite* that, but it might be close enough. There's actually a few situations where something like this actually works out *better* than my theorized mono-color fetchland. Particularly, if there's a blood moon down, instead of this thing just being another mountain like a fetchland would be, you could cycle it for a much more useful actual island. If you absolutely must cycle and not just play it out, there is a potential 1-mana tempo loss, so there's definitely a risk to playing too many.
I'll likely try 9-10 island, 4 cavern, 4 muta, and 2-3 of these when it gets possible to do that.
The "downside" of turning off vial isn't really, I naturally side out my vials in matchups I want Null Rod. Also, vial just isn't that critical (we mostly just use it for extra mana) and I'm amused whenever I see one on the other side of the field as they've clearly spent a card and mana for something that probably won't even matter that much. By contrast, D&T uses vial for all kind of crazy trickery - being able to shut down their vials *and* the equipment with a single card is so ridiculously good. Really, against D&T the critical card isn't even null rod or manriki, it's dismember and warping wail.
I dunno about specific advice playing around batterskull. I have the second e-truth, dismember, and jace postboard to help with the germ. It's just never been that big of a deal to me relative to the sheer terror that is sofai and the major headache that is jitte. Waterfront bouncer is a maindeckable answer to the germ to consider that can turn our excess lands into some nice tempo.
Grindstone
Sensei's Divining Top
Engineered Explosives
Ratchet Bomb
Aether Vial
Lion's Eye Diamond
Grim Monolith
Candelabra
Goblin Charbelcher
The extra flexibility of Null Rod really allows me to fine-tune the rest of my sideboard more effectively.
I generally don't lose to batterskull or germ and the actual scariest part of someone using their first stoneforge to fetch batterskull is the implication that they actually already have a jitte or sofai in hand. If they're fetching batterskull without already having a jitte or sofai, that's 100% a misplay on their part. Even with a jitte or sofai in hand, they should probably fetch the other anyway and only fetch batterskull as a last resort.
As a general rule you should run at least 2 copies of a SB card to make sure you can draw it decently reliably at a relevant time, and that's an awful lot of SB space to devote to something this narrow.
It's always at least good to keep such a build in mind as a potential option.