What's more consistent about the Traverse build vs Grixis? I thought that consistency (via blue cantrips) was one of the reasons people migrated to Grixis in the first place?
I don't think you want to cut Death's Shadow. I'm looking to trim on removal against control decks and discard against midrange ones, and that looks to free up enough slots for what I want to do. I'm specifically looking to help address the situations where you either can't or don't want to aggressively lower your life total against grindier decks early in the game. Decks like Jund, Jeskai, and Mardu do a lot of incidental chip damage that makes it risky to hose your life total too aggressively. My hope is that Bitterblossom bridges that gap, removing the burden of turboing your life total early while also gradually transitioning to a point where you are playing your Shadows. It also requires a completely different set of tools to deal with than the ones that answer Goyf and Shadow, and is resilient against board wipes in a way that Lingering Souls isn't. This is all academic and might be terrible, and more importantly the meta just may not make it necessary, but I wanted to explore the option.
It is easier for them to interact with sphere, but they can only board in so many cards, and then they need to draw them. We tend to run out of targets for Inquisition anyway, so I could see having the extra discard spells to remove something like a Nature's Claim. Which would be a very annoying card, specifically, to invite them to play. I think we're on the same page here, though.
This is the list I've been running for the past couple days:
I wanted access to more 1 mana removal spells that aren't Fatal Push (thank you Meddling Mage), which led me to include 2 Bolts (I've also been messing with Tarfire in that slot, and a 1/1 split). I think that Bolt is better than Stub against the general meta right now, and that the matchups where I want my countermagic are so much better post-board (Burn, Tron, combo) that I can afford a shakier game 1. I've liked having access to the third TBR, because there are a lot of games where that's the only card you want to draw.
I haven't actually played against any decks where I would board in Bitterblossom, but there was a list a while back that 5-0ed with 4 in the sideboard and it's a pet card of mine, so I wanted to give it a whirl. It's a hard to answer, proactive threat that can run away with the game if played early on, and also provides two uncommon card types for Goyf/Delirium. I've also felt like I want to be conservative with my life total early on against midrange/Jeskai decks so I don't get punked out, but that sometimes makes it hard to deploy Death's Shadow later. Bitterblossom lets me be conservative early while also helping me get to the point where Death's Shadow is powerful. I know that it's not great late in the game or when behind, but the aggressive nature of the Manamorphose builds already dictate that your late game isn't super great.
I'm also hesitant to just drop the forest for the reasons you stated. I actually have all of my countermagic in the sideboard right now, so I haven't had any issues yet with the single blue source.
RG Eldrazi seems like the easiest parts of Bant Eldrazi and Eldrazi Tron for us. It's just big dumb idiots, and our idiots are bigger. I will gladly play against any Eldrazi deck not running Eldrazi Displacer, Drowner of Hope, or All is Dust.
My thoughts on Damping Sphere are that I only want it for the Storm and Tron matchups, and that it'll generally be one of the last cards I play against them. Curving discard -> Goyf -> sphere against Tron seems good, and you could even potentially hold up Stubborn Denial alongside the sphere. It could end up being too narrow, but given the aggressive nature of the deck I think you'll win any game against Tron where it resolves.
I replaced the 4th Manamorphose with Flayer because I didn't want to cut any of the actual spells. It's possible that's incorrect, but for the reasons you outlined I didn't feel like I could cut anything else.
I'm happy to aggressively mulligan 7-card hands, but my issue was 6-card hands that have something like 2 lands and 4 interactive spells, but no threat. I don't really feel like I can mulligan those, but at the same time they can sometimes have a hard time getting to delirium or lowering my life total quickly enough to enable Traverse or Death's Shadow. Or is that a 6-card hand that you guys would still mulligan?
I rearranged my manabase to have 2 red sources and 1 blue after running into the same issues you outlined. I find myself wanting to cast multiple red spells more often than multiple blue spells in most matchups right now, and I'm not currently playing Snapcaster. That also prompted me to run Terminate over Dismember, which is less mana efficient but a little safer against Humans and Hollow One. I think the argument could also be made to swap the basic forest for a Stomping Ground, with Field of Ruin at a relative low point right now.
For those of you running Fulminator Mage right now, do you expect to swap him for Damping Sphere after Dominaria releases?
I've really been digging Manamorphose, but felt like I still wasn't drawing threats often enough. Adding a single Grim Flayer has helped that, but have the rest of you not felt like you've had this issue?
Fair enough, I'd originally started boarding in Souls back in the fall for Humans/Hollow One because I wasn't running enough targeted removal to keep up with them. What you guys are saying makes a lot of sense, and definitely fills in some context for me on why lists moved away from Souls since the last time I really played the deck.
I've been leaning towards playing 5 colors again, largely on the back of how well positioned Lingering Souls is right now. It's a solid card against Humans and Hollow One, while also being good against decks running a lot of single-target removal to try to beat them. I think that it was worse when the other midrange decks were also running Lingering Souls (Abzan, in particular), but it's still a card that Jund struggles with and it allows you to attack into Humans and Hollow One without being afraid of dying on the back swing. Hype_rion, your list is very close to what I've been eyeing up for 5 colors, with one notable exception.
I do not like Liliana of the Veil in the main board of this deck. Because we run so few lands and no way to draw additional cards, I've often found her to just be awkward. You don't want to slam her against control decks because you'll often be discarding spells while they discard lands, she's not good against the go-wide creature decks, and tapping out for her on turn 3 against something like Storm can be a big risk. I think she's a generally fine grindy sideboard option if you don't want to splash for Lingering Souls, but I think that she lines up poorly against the other midrange decks right now. She's hard to defend (and just not good) against Mardu Pyromancer, and with Jund playing BBE and Treetop Village, in addition to more copies of Lightning Bolt, I think she's hard to keep alive in that matchup unless you hold cards in hand.
I did poorly with the Hoogland list, but I think that's more because I had to make budget concessions (Lilianas and EEs). The shell of the deck was really sweet, and is very close to a list I was working on in the fall. Eventually I'll pick up the missing staples, and I'd like to revisit it then.
The normal Manamorphose list was exactly what you'd expect, and did prompt me to pick up a set of Manamorphose in paper. The 5-color list also wasn't surprising one way or another, and after playing with the other lists it was nice to have access to Lingering Souls.
The Faithless Looting list is the one I've been putting the most effort into, because it's the least explored, in general. I was inspired by a Youtube video by a guy named Dylan Hovey, where he played a B/R (splashing Traverse and Lingering Souls in the board) list with Young Pyromancer and Bedlam Reveler instead of Goyf, and a playset of Faithless Looting. While the Young Pyros were okay, the cards that impressed me the most were Bedlam Reveler and Faithless Looting. Having access to the extra filtering was really key in not running out of steam, and alongside cards like Reveler and Souls it was really able to leverage it's graveyard as a card advantage engine in grindier matchups. Watching the way that Mardu Pyromancer can churn through it's deck with Looting and Reveler also made me want to explore then in Death's Shadow.
I'm still working my way through my first league with the deck, and working out some serious kinks in the balancing of my mana base and color requirements, but it's showing real promise so far. The biggest downside is that I'm not running blue, and I'm really feeling the loss of Stubborn Denial. Once I get the current manabase smoothed out I want to look at how to incorporate blue, and my gut says that I'll end up playing a couple of Manamorphose by the end.
It's extremely "work in progress" and I wanted to try some random stuff in the sideboard to try to get more value out of Faithless Looting, but this is what I'm currently testing:
I think that the Flayer is unnecessary and the maindeck Reveler may not want to be there, either. The Abrupt Decays are putting a little too much strain on the mana base, and notably can't be cast off of the basic mountain. If I were to try to squeeze the blue into the deck, I'd probably look at cutting the Flayer, Reveler, Decays, and an Inquisition for some combination of Manamorphose and Stubborn Denial.
Has anyone else been testing with Whispers/Manamorphose? I've been tinkering with a 4-color list splashing blue and have found that both cards are just bananas. I still need a lot more games to be comfortable knowing when and what number to side out, but adding those cards as well as dropping LoTV and going to 17 lands has made the deck feel super smooth. I find myself getting early delirium very consistently, and something like T1 Thoughtseize/Push followed by T2 Whispers normally leads to a steamroll. I'd love to hear other opinions or about other experiences with this!
I've been trying a few different builds lately:
- a Manamorphose/Whispers build similar to the one posted here that Jeff Hoogland 5-0'ed with
- a normal Manamorphose list similar to the one Spooly 5-0ed with a couple weeks ago
- a B/R base build running 4 Faithless Looting and no Manamorphose
- a 5-color list like the ones from late last year, because Lingering Souls seems good right now
I'm also trying to figure out a 5-color list that doesn't run a land in the sideboard, because it seems like Manamorphose can help smooth that out a bit. I've really just been throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
I've been out of the Death's Shadow game since the BBE unbanning, but I was looking over some of the recently performing lists and noticed that a lot of them seem to have gone down to 17 lands. Was the consensus just that the 18th was unnecessary, or has the overall curve of the deck been going down in that time?
I'm not sure that you can afford to ignore the grindy matchups at this point, Snapcaster Mage seems pretty intent on sticking around for now. Depending on what they unban after the PT, something like BBE could really present the need to be able to play a longer game. After playing with and without Snapcaster over the last couple weeks, I'm really not convinced that we need him. He's a fantastic card, but I think that Grim Flayer serves a lot of the same purposes in Traverse Shadow while also being a better workhorse in glueing the deck together. I will say that I played a single Lightning Bolt at the classic this past weekend and would probably drop my 4th Fatal Push for a second one, because it turns out that Lightning Bolt is still a fantastic Magic card.
Fair enough, I would expect your list to do very well against Tron/Scapeshift. After waffling on 4 vs 5 colors all week, I played this last night to a 4-0 finish:
I beat Junk Reanimator, U/W Control, Pyro Prison, and Scapeshift. The deck was like a freight train, and despite how simple the sideboard is I felt like I had a lot of options in each matchup and was very happy with my post-board configurations. I was surprised by how much I liked Fulminator, this deck already has so much resource denial that he just really tips the scales and makes it almost impossible for your opponent to catch up when you get ahead. At this point, this is the list I'm planning to play on Sunday, and I'm not expecting that to change.
@Spooly Enjoyed the write-up, have you played the list you posted against Grixis Shadow very much? More than any other, that's the matchup that's keeping me on Liliana of the Veil right now.
I've been thinking about replacing the 2 Radiant Flames in my Traverse sideboard with straight up Lightning Bolt because I'm starting to come to the conclusion that mana cost is more important than the sweeper effect. Against Humans, in particular, Thalia makes sweepers really hard for us to cast, and for the most part our creatures outclass theirs. I think I die to Mantis Rider out of Humans more than any other card in the deck, which is also a card that Bolt interacts favorably with. Against go-wide decks that don't run Thalia (Affinity, Elves, Merfolk) sweepers definitely seem better, but those decks aren't super popular right now and Affinity (in particular) is already a pretty good matchup for Traverse builds.
I played the list at the top of this page again last night, moving 2 Liliana's to the sideboard and moving a Stubborn Denial to the main, dropping Liliana's Defeat, and adding a second Dismember. I went 1-2-DROP, beating R/G Ponza and losing to Jeskai and Merfolk. It was my first time playing against Merfolk, and I think I had the tools to win but didn't play them properly, which was also how my Jeskai match felt. In general, the 75 felt very strong, though I'm starting to think that Golgari Charm may just be a little too cute.
I'm opting not to run this list for the Classic this weekend, purely on the back of my lack of experience with it. There's a lot of complicated lines and I'm just not confident that I'm savvy enough with some of the more complicated matchups (notably, Jeskai) to want to bring it to a bigger tournament yet. I'm planning to play a more traditional 4-color Traverse list (Jund splashing white) for this weekend and then continue practicing with the BUG based list after that.
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This is the list I've been running for the past couple days:
1x Blood Crypt
4x Bloodstained Mire
1x Forest
2x Overgrown Tomb
1x Polluted Delta
1x Stomping Ground
1x Swamp
4x Verdant Catacombs
1x Watery Grave
1x Wooded Foothills
Artifact (4)
4x Mishra's Bauble
Instant (14)
2x Abrupt Decay
3x Fatal Push
2x Lightning Bolt
3x Manamorphose
2x Temur Battle Rage
2x Terminate
4x Death's Shadow
1x Grim Flayer
4x Street Wraith
4x Tarmogoyf
Sorcery (12)
4x Inquisition of Kozilek
4x Thoughtseize
4x Traverse the Ulvenwald
2x Abrade
3x Bitterblossom
2x Collective Brutality
2x Delay
1x Golgari Charm
1x Radiant Flames
3x Stubborn Denial
1x Temur Battle Rage
I wanted access to more 1 mana removal spells that aren't Fatal Push (thank you Meddling Mage), which led me to include 2 Bolts (I've also been messing with Tarfire in that slot, and a 1/1 split). I think that Bolt is better than Stub against the general meta right now, and that the matchups where I want my countermagic are so much better post-board (Burn, Tron, combo) that I can afford a shakier game 1. I've liked having access to the third TBR, because there are a lot of games where that's the only card you want to draw.
I haven't actually played against any decks where I would board in Bitterblossom, but there was a list a while back that 5-0ed with 4 in the sideboard and it's a pet card of mine, so I wanted to give it a whirl. It's a hard to answer, proactive threat that can run away with the game if played early on, and also provides two uncommon card types for Goyf/Delirium. I've also felt like I want to be conservative with my life total early on against midrange/Jeskai decks so I don't get punked out, but that sometimes makes it hard to deploy Death's Shadow later. Bitterblossom lets me be conservative early while also helping me get to the point where Death's Shadow is powerful. I know that it's not great late in the game or when behind, but the aggressive nature of the Manamorphose builds already dictate that your late game isn't super great.
RG Eldrazi seems like the easiest parts of Bant Eldrazi and Eldrazi Tron for us. It's just big dumb idiots, and our idiots are bigger. I will gladly play against any Eldrazi deck not running Eldrazi Displacer, Drowner of Hope, or All is Dust.
My thoughts on Damping Sphere are that I only want it for the Storm and Tron matchups, and that it'll generally be one of the last cards I play against them. Curving discard -> Goyf -> sphere against Tron seems good, and you could even potentially hold up Stubborn Denial alongside the sphere. It could end up being too narrow, but given the aggressive nature of the deck I think you'll win any game against Tron where it resolves.
I replaced the 4th Manamorphose with Flayer because I didn't want to cut any of the actual spells. It's possible that's incorrect, but for the reasons you outlined I didn't feel like I could cut anything else.
I'm happy to aggressively mulligan 7-card hands, but my issue was 6-card hands that have something like 2 lands and 4 interactive spells, but no threat. I don't really feel like I can mulligan those, but at the same time they can sometimes have a hard time getting to delirium or lowering my life total quickly enough to enable Traverse or Death's Shadow. Or is that a 6-card hand that you guys would still mulligan?
For those of you running Fulminator Mage right now, do you expect to swap him for Damping Sphere after Dominaria releases?
I've really been digging Manamorphose, but felt like I still wasn't drawing threats often enough. Adding a single Grim Flayer has helped that, but have the rest of you not felt like you've had this issue?
I do not like Liliana of the Veil in the main board of this deck. Because we run so few lands and no way to draw additional cards, I've often found her to just be awkward. You don't want to slam her against control decks because you'll often be discarding spells while they discard lands, she's not good against the go-wide creature decks, and tapping out for her on turn 3 against something like Storm can be a big risk. I think she's a generally fine grindy sideboard option if you don't want to splash for Lingering Souls, but I think that she lines up poorly against the other midrange decks right now. She's hard to defend (and just not good) against Mardu Pyromancer, and with Jund playing BBE and Treetop Village, in addition to more copies of Lightning Bolt, I think she's hard to keep alive in that matchup unless you hold cards in hand.
The normal Manamorphose list was exactly what you'd expect, and did prompt me to pick up a set of Manamorphose in paper. The 5-color list also wasn't surprising one way or another, and after playing with the other lists it was nice to have access to Lingering Souls.
The Faithless Looting list is the one I've been putting the most effort into, because it's the least explored, in general. I was inspired by a Youtube video by a guy named Dylan Hovey, where he played a B/R (splashing Traverse and Lingering Souls in the board) list with Young Pyromancer and Bedlam Reveler instead of Goyf, and a playset of Faithless Looting. While the Young Pyros were okay, the cards that impressed me the most were Bedlam Reveler and Faithless Looting. Having access to the extra filtering was really key in not running out of steam, and alongside cards like Reveler and Souls it was really able to leverage it's graveyard as a card advantage engine in grindier matchups. Watching the way that Mardu Pyromancer can churn through it's deck with Looting and Reveler also made me want to explore then in Death's Shadow.
I'm still working my way through my first league with the deck, and working out some serious kinks in the balancing of my mana base and color requirements, but it's showing real promise so far. The biggest downside is that I'm not running blue, and I'm really feeling the loss of Stubborn Denial. Once I get the current manabase smoothed out I want to look at how to incorporate blue, and my gut says that I'll end up playing a couple of Manamorphose by the end.
It's extremely "work in progress" and I wanted to try some random stuff in the sideboard to try to get more value out of Faithless Looting, but this is what I'm currently testing:
1x Arid Mesa
1x Blood Crypt
4x Bloodstained Mire
1x Godless Shrine
1x Mountain
1x Overgrown Tomb
1x Stomping Ground
1x Swamp
4x Verdant Catacombs
2x Wooded Foothills
Artifact (4)
4x Mishra's Bauble
Instant (11)
2x Abrupt Decay
3x Fatal Push
2x Lightning Bolt
2x Temur Battle Rage
2x Terminate
1x Bedlam Reveler
4x Death's Shadow
1x Grim Flayer
4x Street Wraith
4x Tarmogoyf
Sorcery (14)
4x Faithless Looting
4x Inquisition of Kozilek
4x Thoughtseize
2x Traverse the Ulvenwald
1x Ancient Grudge
1x Bedlam Reveler
3x Collective Brutality
2x Fulminator Mage
1x Grim Lavamancer
3x Lingering Souls
2x Nihil Spellbomb
1x Pyroclasm
1x Ray of Revelation
I think that the Flayer is unnecessary and the maindeck Reveler may not want to be there, either. The Abrupt Decays are putting a little too much strain on the mana base, and notably can't be cast off of the basic mountain. If I were to try to squeeze the blue into the deck, I'd probably look at cutting the Flayer, Reveler, Decays, and an Inquisition for some combination of Manamorphose and Stubborn Denial.
I've been trying a few different builds lately:
- a Manamorphose/Whispers build similar to the one posted here that Jeff Hoogland 5-0'ed with
- a normal Manamorphose list similar to the one Spooly 5-0ed with a couple weeks ago
- a B/R base build running 4 Faithless Looting and no Manamorphose
- a 5-color list like the ones from late last year, because Lingering Souls seems good right now
I'm also trying to figure out a 5-color list that doesn't run a land in the sideboard, because it seems like Manamorphose can help smooth that out a bit. I've really just been throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
1x Blood Crypt
4x Bloodstained Mire
1x Forest
1x Godless Shrine
2x Overgrown Tomb
3x Polluted Delta
1x Stomping Ground
1x Swamp
4x Verdant Catacombs
Artifact (4)
4x Mishra's Bauble
Instant (10)
1x Abrupt Decay
4x Fatal Push
1x Lightning Bolt
2x Temur Battle Rage
2x Terminate
4x Death's Shadow
2x Grim Flayer
4x Street Wraith
4x Tarmogoyf
Planeswalker (2)
2x Liliana of the Veil
Sorcery (12)
4x Inquisition of Kozilek
4x Thoughtseize
4x Traverse the Ulvenwald
2x Ancient Grudge
3x Collective Brutality
3x Fulminator Mage
1x Hazoret the Fervent
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
3x Lingering Souls
2x Surgical Extraction
I beat Junk Reanimator, U/W Control, Pyro Prison, and Scapeshift. The deck was like a freight train, and despite how simple the sideboard is I felt like I had a lot of options in each matchup and was very happy with my post-board configurations. I was surprised by how much I liked Fulminator, this deck already has so much resource denial that he just really tips the scales and makes it almost impossible for your opponent to catch up when you get ahead. At this point, this is the list I'm planning to play on Sunday, and I'm not expecting that to change.
I'm opting not to run this list for the Classic this weekend, purely on the back of my lack of experience with it. There's a lot of complicated lines and I'm just not confident that I'm savvy enough with some of the more complicated matchups (notably, Jeskai) to want to bring it to a bigger tournament yet. I'm planning to play a more traditional 4-color Traverse list (Jund splashing white) for this weekend and then continue practicing with the BUG based list after that.