Two things jump out at me; Meddling Mage and the black sideboard plan.
Meddling Mage is not going to be at it's best in a deck with only 3 other creatures. Your opponent's removal is going to be rotting in hand and as soon as you name a key spell they are going to be able to kill your meddling Mage. Since it gains no value on entering the battlefield, this will always be a bad trade for you. Additionally, it plays really poorly with supreme verdict.
With regard to the black sideboard plan, you simply don't have enough black sources to reliably cast inquisition or fatal push. I counted 7 sources (4 flooded strand, 2 watery grave and 1 godless shrine). You really want 14 sources to reliably cast these spells early in the game.
The only other thing that really sticks out to me is Mishra's bauble; even without bauble you already have more cantrips and lands that most other lists are playing. This is going to lead to a lot of games where you are flooding or just spinning your wheels. You might want to consider some more 'action' spells in that slot.
Hello, just wondering if 2 monastery mentor in the sb is necessary since the banning of the Hogaak deck. I'm running two Resto Angels in the spot where the mentors would be. What matchups would I be boarding them in besides humans?
They aren't match dependent; bring them in whenever they are better than your 59th and 60th card. A lot of times that's going to be surgical extraction, verdict, spell pierce/snare etc.
I have a question about whether Jace the Mind Sculptor is really relevant in the UW build. The latest lists I'm seeing are only using him as a one of. I was thinking about doing a 3 Teferi, Hero of Domination, 3 Narset, Parter of Veils and 1 Teferi, Time Reveler planeswalker split and forgo the Jace. Any opinions on this is really appreciated
Jace is not as necessary as it once was but being a full mana cheaper than Teferi, Hero of Dominaria is a big deal and planeswalkers being legendary means there is no way that Teferi number 3 is better than the first Jace. Jace is very strong and not having at least 1 copy is probably a mistake, although it's probably not a gigantic mistake unless you run the 3rd Teferi HoD in it's place. I think the deck would only be marginally worse if you replaced the first Jace with Fact or Fiction, but it's not something I can recommend other than for budget reasons.
I don't understand? Your opponent dragging out the game will not effect how much time you have on your clock.
On MTGO both players have separate clocks, focus on making sure you use your own time effectively. If your opponent drags out the game it can only effect them, not you.
They can claim it on our turn if they're not bad.
Its unlikely that this will be reliable in the future.
Only if you cast the RIP into an open green source, which won't always be the case. They usually spend the first few turns spending their mana. Otherwise we get to untap and can protect with our other countermagic as well.
Surgical is definitely powerful enough to warrant maindeck inclusion right now, but even drawing 2 against non-GY decks is usually game losing. There's no way 4 can be correct.
Force of Negation is the new Force of Will - just hit the Altar and they become a bad dredge deck. A few FoN and a pair of surgical in the main, coupled with a trio of Rest In Peace out of the board should bring that match closer to even without auto-losing to the rest of the format.
Also, Karn isn't doing you any favors in your bad matchups either, especially the ones you seem worried about the most, the GY-Aggro matchups. Spending two turns and 5 mana over turns 4 and 5 on a grafdiggers cage is a losing recipe, and then you're stuck with the crappy situation of deciding between leaving your Cage in the board or having dead Karns.
I feel like it's beating a dead horse at this point, but Karn is awful in UW. Think about how much better your GY-aggro match would be if you had the space for 3 Rest in Peace in the board.
I'd rather play more Cliques and Snapcasters before playing a Fblthp. That is a just Nassif being Nassif. He can get a away with playing really nonsense cards in his deck for the most part. I recall when he got kinda mad for losing to Mill that he started to play an Eldrazi titan in his board in order to get his cards back...
It wasn't even a good plan at that due to Surgical and Extirpate... but hey he's Nassif...
Eldrazi against mill is actually super powerful, even in the face of surgical/extripate you still get at least 1 full GY shuffle. It's basically a 1 card strategy against them. Nassif himself said that he never lost a single game where an eldrazi trigger happened.
That said, I don't think elvish visionary is good enough for UW control. Although, the two drop slot is the weak spot now in UW.
I thought watcher for tomorrow might have been good so I gave it a try. It only felt passable against control - against almost everything else the ETB tapped was too big of a drawback to overcome.
I agree that maybe fetching a snow basic instead of a shock first turn to deal with a creature might be a problem. I just think its the most interesting in the new possible options. Very possible oust or condemn are still just better.
It's not just fetching a snow-basic turn 1, it's fetching a snow-plains - we want to cast logic knot on turn 2 and we have triple blue spells we'd like to cast on curve as well. By the time you factor in 4-5 colorless sources in the deck, you ideally don't want to be fetching plains in there first 4 turns unless you think your opponent is on blood moon.
I think it's better than Oust after turn 1 though, since you can fetch snow-island after having fetched your first shockland.
I was really high on thin ice when it was first spoiled but I'm less excited now - being forced to fetch a snow plains as my first land is really unappealing. I didn't even consider ghost quarter - I know it doesn't see a lot of play, but still something to consider. I don't see a huge upside over Oust - sometimes the 'downside' of Oust is even an upside (forcing them to redraw a manadork or other subpar creature).
I don't think I agree with the assessment that if you can't reliably cast Archmage's Charm on turn 3 then you should just play more cryptics - a 1 mana discount will make the difference of being able to cast a second spell in a turn very often. It's also the case that being unable to cast charm reliably on turn 3 is not the same as never being able to cast charm on turn 3. Something like 60-65 percent of the time you will be able to cast it turn 3. This is not to say that Archmage's Charm is playable, just that saying 'why would you play it over cryptic?' isn't a strong argument against it.
I don't think Fact or Fiction is necessary to support Force, the walkers will likely provide enough CA. Force and Jace are best friends - slamming a Jace onto an empty board on turn 4 used to be a pipe dream in modern against most decks. Not anymore. This doesn't mean FoF isn't worth it though - I really like that FoF gets around opposing narsets for example.
I think I disagree on number of snapcaster though - it's mana intensive and opt-caster mage is a pretty mediocre use of snappy. Though I do think you're right about opt being superior due to Narset....I really like heirogly Illumination for this purpose as well. I've actually just been on 27 land 4 illumination no serum/opt and it's felt good. Solves the blue mana issue for Archmage's charm too.
Im also interested in what happens with arena. I have some strange hopeful feeling (based on the flexibility and design choices of cards like Kaya's Guile, Archmage's Charm and the new cycling sideboard-esque cards like the hurkyls recall one) that Horizons was designed with Arena best of one matches in mind. I wouldn't be surprised to see Horizons be a gateway of some kind into modern or something modern-esque on arena very soon.
Remand on FoN for the 3 for 1 is not going to come up very often - if you're waiting long enough to cast your threats that you have mana left over to cast remand it will be deep enough in the game where opp will be hardcasting rather than pitching.
Remand after Veto is fine, but it's not different than remand after any generic counter spell - it'll come up and it's a nice play, but it means you have remand in your control deck. So, meh.
My only gripe with running 4 negates in the form of 4 FoN is it means no Veto. Veto stands to gain a lot as control decks rise in popularity.
The issue with running too many copies of a card is usually that it gets clunked up in your hand as multiple copies - FoN sort of deals with that on its own by being able to pitch to itself. I mean sure, if you draw 3 copies in your first 10 cards it could be ugly, but that's not going to happen very often and it's only going to be problematic in game 1s. After game 1 you presumably well either want lots of negates or will have less negates in your deck.
4 could be be wrong, but my guess is that the correct number is 3 or 4 because of how much better the card is in the early game, so I'll start testing high to increase odds of having it early and work down from there.
I'll be starting my testing with 4 FoN. I'm not sure exactly what the deck looks like, but I'm pretty sure FoN is a 4-of since its most powerful in the early game when we are normally having trouble keeping up due to being reactive and having lots of taplands. Redundant copies also pitch to themselves are actually castable in the late game anyways.
The structure of the deck post MH1 is in flux in my mind because of Narset though, not because of FoN; FoN makes you want to play high numbers of JTMS, but Narset makes you want to play less JTMS.
We should be favored vs Tron and your list doesn't reflect that you are worried about Tron at all; only 3 field of Ruin? Detention Sphere, 2x Tef3, timely reinforcements,0 Surgical. You can shore up your Tron matchup without too much work just by changing around those numbers alone. We should also be more favoired, heavily favored, vs Tron come MH1 - I can't imagine them ever beating Force of Negation granted you don't cut down on the number of non-Tef3 planeswalkers. They are just never going to beat Narset, JTMS, or Tef5 with Force backup. I think the matchup will be so good that it might be correct to adopt a manabase similar to the one you already have; less than 4 Field and possibly more than 1 Blast Zone.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Two things jump out at me; Meddling Mage and the black sideboard plan.
Meddling Mage is not going to be at it's best in a deck with only 3 other creatures. Your opponent's removal is going to be rotting in hand and as soon as you name a key spell they are going to be able to kill your meddling Mage. Since it gains no value on entering the battlefield, this will always be a bad trade for you. Additionally, it plays really poorly with supreme verdict.
With regard to the black sideboard plan, you simply don't have enough black sources to reliably cast inquisition or fatal push. I counted 7 sources (4 flooded strand, 2 watery grave and 1 godless shrine). You really want 14 sources to reliably cast these spells early in the game.
The only other thing that really sticks out to me is Mishra's bauble; even without bauble you already have more cantrips and lands that most other lists are playing. This is going to lead to a lot of games where you are flooding or just spinning your wheels. You might want to consider some more 'action' spells in that slot.
They aren't match dependent; bring them in whenever they are better than your 59th and 60th card. A lot of times that's going to be surgical extraction, verdict, spell pierce/snare etc.
Jace is not as necessary as it once was but being a full mana cheaper than Teferi, Hero of Dominaria is a big deal and planeswalkers being legendary means there is no way that Teferi number 3 is better than the first Jace. Jace is very strong and not having at least 1 copy is probably a mistake, although it's probably not a gigantic mistake unless you run the 3rd Teferi HoD in it's place. I think the deck would only be marginally worse if you replaced the first Jace with Fact or Fiction, but it's not something I can recommend other than for budget reasons.
On MTGO both players have separate clocks, focus on making sure you use your own time effectively. If your opponent drags out the game it can only effect them, not you.
Only if you cast the RIP into an open green source, which won't always be the case. They usually spend the first few turns spending their mana. Otherwise we get to untap and can protect with our other countermagic as well.
Force of Negation is the new Force of Will - just hit the Altar and they become a bad dredge deck. A few FoN and a pair of surgical in the main, coupled with a trio of Rest In Peace out of the board should bring that match closer to even without auto-losing to the rest of the format.
Also, Karn isn't doing you any favors in your bad matchups either, especially the ones you seem worried about the most, the GY-Aggro matchups. Spending two turns and 5 mana over turns 4 and 5 on a grafdiggers cage is a losing recipe, and then you're stuck with the crappy situation of deciding between leaving your Cage in the board or having dead Karns.
I feel like it's beating a dead horse at this point, but Karn is awful in UW. Think about how much better your GY-aggro match would be if you had the space for 3 Rest in Peace in the board.
Eldrazi against mill is actually super powerful, even in the face of surgical/extripate you still get at least 1 full GY shuffle. It's basically a 1 card strategy against them. Nassif himself said that he never lost a single game where an eldrazi trigger happened.
That said, I don't think elvish visionary is good enough for UW control. Although, the two drop slot is the weak spot now in UW.
I thought watcher for tomorrow might have been good so I gave it a try. It only felt passable against control - against almost everything else the ETB tapped was too big of a drawback to overcome.
It's not just fetching a snow-basic turn 1, it's fetching a snow-plains - we want to cast logic knot on turn 2 and we have triple blue spells we'd like to cast on curve as well. By the time you factor in 4-5 colorless sources in the deck, you ideally don't want to be fetching plains in there first 4 turns unless you think your opponent is on blood moon.
I think it's better than Oust after turn 1 though, since you can fetch snow-island after having fetched your first shockland.
I don't think I agree with the assessment that if you can't reliably cast Archmage's Charm on turn 3 then you should just play more cryptics - a 1 mana discount will make the difference of being able to cast a second spell in a turn very often. It's also the case that being unable to cast charm reliably on turn 3 is not the same as never being able to cast charm on turn 3. Something like 60-65 percent of the time you will be able to cast it turn 3. This is not to say that Archmage's Charm is playable, just that saying 'why would you play it over cryptic?' isn't a strong argument against it.
I think I disagree on number of snapcaster though - it's mana intensive and opt-caster mage is a pretty mediocre use of snappy. Though I do think you're right about opt being superior due to Narset....I really like heirogly Illumination for this purpose as well. I've actually just been on 27 land 4 illumination no serum/opt and it's felt good. Solves the blue mana issue for Archmage's charm too.
Im also interested in what happens with arena. I have some strange hopeful feeling (based on the flexibility and design choices of cards like Kaya's Guile, Archmage's Charm and the new cycling sideboard-esque cards like the hurkyls recall one) that Horizons was designed with Arena best of one matches in mind. I wouldn't be surprised to see Horizons be a gateway of some kind into modern or something modern-esque on arena very soon.
Remand after Veto is fine, but it's not different than remand after any generic counter spell - it'll come up and it's a nice play, but it means you have remand in your control deck. So, meh.
The issue with running too many copies of a card is usually that it gets clunked up in your hand as multiple copies - FoN sort of deals with that on its own by being able to pitch to itself. I mean sure, if you draw 3 copies in your first 10 cards it could be ugly, but that's not going to happen very often and it's only going to be problematic in game 1s. After game 1 you presumably well either want lots of negates or will have less negates in your deck.
4 could be be wrong, but my guess is that the correct number is 3 or 4 because of how much better the card is in the early game, so I'll start testing high to increase odds of having it early and work down from there.
The structure of the deck post MH1 is in flux in my mind because of Narset though, not because of FoN; FoN makes you want to play high numbers of JTMS, but Narset makes you want to play less JTMS.