MTG Salvation

This is my first time playing with stax-style cards so I could really use some helpful feedback.

I have been wanting to punish ramp and creature-based strategies for a while now, and I also have an itch to play me some Thada Adel. I've been collecting the cards for her for quite some time. I still forget a couple of the cards that made it in so there's a few "I Forgot" card slots I'll fill in later.



The goal here is to get there with Thada, play some of their ramp or equips, and start trying to lock the board down with Winter Orb, Pendrell Mists, etc so that Mister Green McStompypants doesn't just walk all over everyone. Winning either through general damage, manlands with swords, Planar Portal/Codex Shredder shenanigans or whatever.

Any suggestions for a better stax environment? Better resilient wincons? I'm pretty new at this archetype but there's only one way to get started and that's to build with it. What do you guys think I could do to improve?

You should run Back to Basics.
Rhystic Study taxes and occasionally draws.
As does Mystic Remora
Invoke Prejudice?

I'm going to think on it some more.

Ah I have remora and study already and forgot to include them in this list. Invoke Prejudice is AMAZING but sadly I can't really afford one for now. Same sort of goes for Back to Basics, again I know it's amazing but I'm going to hold off for now and see if this deck sticks. If I really enjoy it, I'll make the investment.

Edit: B2B is only like 7 bucks? Bah, I can definitely afford that. I thought I remembered it being a lot more.

Thanks very much!

With a lock down deck like this I would cut a fair number of tutors and just go with raw draw power.

1 Expedition Map
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Drift of Phantasms
1 Rhystic Study
1 Trinket Mage
1 Fabricate
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Tezzeret the Seeker

Those three could easily be replaced with Time Spiral, Recurring Insight, and Diminishing Returns. If you use those you definitely want Uba Mask too. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but you should be able to play cards a lot faster than other people and leave them with 6-7 exiled cards with Time Spiral.
Even without those, you should run Uba Mask

I was actually going to build Thada Adel (as steal all the things) but I like this idea alot.

I'm trying to figure out how Opposition can be worked in here.

I think you/we could easily rejigger the deck to include some token spawners. Then we could play Opposition and Smokestack.

That package would look like this?

Myr Turbine
Trading Post (should probably be playing this anyway, infinite artifact recursion is good)
Acorn Catapult
Wall of Kelp
Sword of Body and Mind (yep)
Smokestack
Opposition
???

Potential cuts would be SoWaP, Frost Titan, Pendrell Mists... the rest I will have to work hard at. Body Double would normally go I think but it has great synergy with a Dimir fanatic in my playgroup.

Don't forget Acorn Catapult. It's the most underused token maker in Mono-Blue.

Ooh that's a good one. Much better than Wall of Kelp.

If I went with this I'd probably have to seriously cut back on some removal and card draw. I'm running out of things to cut. I don't know if it's worth it yet but then again I am still new to the stax package so I don't know how badly those things are needed compared to a more typical deck construction. Here's some ideas:

Myr Turbine (Frost Titan)
Trading Post (Pongify)
Acorn Catapult (Wayfarer's Bauble)
Wall of Kelp (??)
Sword of Body and Mind (SoWaP)
Smokestack (FoF)
Opposition (Ward of Bones)

What other cards could I cut? Maybe Quicksilver Fountain but I love how the color screw effect interacts with the Stax cards and Thada Adel.

Quote from Galspanic

Don't forget Acorn Catapult. It's the most underused token maker in Mono-Blue.

Especially when you point it at your spiny starfish.

If he is playing that card, he's already lost

I lol'd. Wow is that an obscure "token" card.

I kind of want to make that work in UB/Grixis Pestilence.dec. Ping/Rez/Ping/Rez... and Starfish tokens!

Quote from Galspanic

If he is playing that card, he's already lost

I couldn't get an emoticon in the right place on my phone. Glad you saw the sarcasm either way - can be tough to express on the internet.

Quote from SuperSonik

I lol'd. Wow is that an obscure "token" card.

I kind of want to make that work in UB/Grixis Pestilence.dec. Ping/Rez/Ping/Rez... and Starfish tokens!

I started to think about finishers on this deck like cyclonic rift/ viscous shadows but I then realised a coat of arms march of the starfish theme would be absolutely hilarious and the preferred route to claim your destiny!

In all seriousness, your deck looks really fun to play. Don't know if you considered Whispersilk cloak or any other 'unblockable' enablers for the deck, but they are certainly a possibility. They seem on theme with your general but not so much with the rest of the deck. I guess ensuring you get to fish things up also gets you smokestack targets...but meh. I am curious how this list plays out for you if you get some games in with it.

Quote from SuperSonik

Ooh that's a good one. Much better than Wall of Kelp.

If I went with this I'd probably have to seriously cut back on some removal and card draw. I'm running out of things to cut. I don't know if it's worth it yet but then again I am still new to the stax package so I don't know how badly those things are needed compared to a more typical deck construction. Here's some ideas:

Myr Turbine (Frost Titan)
Trading Post (Pongify)
Acorn Catapult (Wayfarer's Bauble)
Wall of Kelp (??)
Sword of Body and Mind (SoWaP)
Smokestack (FoF)
Opposition (Ward of Bones)

What other cards could I cut? Maybe Quicksilver Fountain but I love how the color screw effect interacts with the Stax cards and Thada Adel.

Maybe it's because of my stax deck I'll often not have lands in play but I like SoWaP of SoFaF.

I like these changes.

The thing about Feast or Famine is that mono-blue stax actually has very few ways to actually attack lands directly. I have Sunder, Mana Vortex, and maybe if I'm lucky Knowledge Exploitation for Boom/Bust. So it's more likely that lands will be tapped down via Winter Orb than straight destroyed from Jokulhaups/Arnageddon/etc. Also even without the stax question, Thada loves to untap lands and use them to cast those artifacts. I'm thinking that reasoning is good enough to get it in over WaP which is just doing some damage and gaining some life. I do miss the Cyclonic Rift/Sunder blowout though, which kind of makes me sad.

Edit: is Stasis good here? Seems like it's good with the planeswalkers but not a whole lot else.

Changes:

Myr Turbine (Frost Titan)
Trading Post (Pongify)
Acorn Catapult (Wayfarer's Bauble)
Sword of Body and Mind (SoWaP)
Smokestack (FoF)
Opposition (Ward of Bones)

I like Stasis but I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to break the symmetry. Maybe you will have success with it?

Quote from Dracilic

I like Stasis but I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to break the symmetry. Maybe you will have success with it?

I've just been goldfishing once or twice with a Tamiyo in play and though, wow sure would be nice to have Stasis. It's amazing in Planeswalkers.dec but otherwise... I do believe you are probably right... Breaking the symmetry is just too difficult, especially with a general like Thada Adel who wants to be attacking.

I did think of another card I want. My entire playgroup runs Oblivion Stone. I was thinking a Pithing Needle would be appropriate. I could cut Mystical Tutor (which has very few targets really), or go down to 37 lands.

EDITTTTT

Quote from Galspanic

With a lock down deck like this I would cut a fair number of tutors and just go with raw draw power.

1 Expedition Map
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Drift of Phantasms
1 Rhystic Study
1 Trinket Mage
1 Fabricate
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Tezzeret the Seeker

Those three could easily be replaced with Time Spiral, Recurring Insight, and Diminishing Returns. If you use those you definitely want Uba Mask too. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but you should be able to play cards a lot faster than other people and leave them with 6-7 exiled cards with Time Spiral.
Even without those, you should run Uba Mask

I'm sorry, I must have completely missed your post?? I don't even remember reading this. You know what, with the goldfishing I've done so far I can totally get on board with cutting a couple of the tutors. I don't need to be convinced how good the draw 7s are, I use them all the time in T+L.

Uba Mask seems insane with draw 7s. I will have to seriously think about that. Lemme take another look at this tomorrow when I'm awake...

Whenever I run blue, most of the time I like to run a trinket mage package. That card is so good.
List of good targets for a mono blue deck like this:

• Sol Ring
  
• Mana Crypt
  
• Mana Vault
  
• Meek Stone
  
• Sensei's Divining Top
  
• Relic of Progenitus
  
• Tormod's Crypt
  
• Black Vise
  
• Candelabra of Tawnos

The last one isn't so great here but it's still a good target for TM™ in other decks.

Trinket Mage is S-tier and I love having good targets for him.

• Sol Ring
  
• Top
  
• Everflowing Chalice
  
• Relic of Progenitus
  
• Pithing Needle (maybe should be meekstone?)
  
• Chimeric Mass
  
• Expedition Map

Additional changes I'm noodling per Galspanic's suggestions:

Expedition Map --> Recurring Insight
Fabricate --> Diminishing Returns
Muddle the Mixture --> Time Spiral
Drift of Phantasms --> Uba Mask

Those are excellent choices

I've played mono-blue a lot and have played stax a lot. What I find is that you play just a kind of game with the deck that there is no point in searching for combos... you should be building synergies into your deck. Really, there are enough cards that are stand alone awesome that ALSO combo with stuff that you just play draw spells to power that **** out.

Diminishing Returns may not appeal to you since it Exiles 10 cards from yourself, but it also doesn't exile itself AND it only costs 4. So, it's like a black style card printed in blue. If you don't like it you can always try Time Reversal... not amazing, but it does the trick. And, in Thada, if you have started your little Lord of the Rings quest, that 5 mana shouldn't be too bad later in the game.

Quote from Galspanic

Those are excellent choices

I've played mono-blue a lot and have played stax a lot. What I find is that you play just a kind of game with the deck that there is no point in searching for combos... you should be building synergies into your deck. Really, there are enough cards that are stand alone awesome that ALSO combo with stuff that you just play draw spells to power that **** out.

Diminishing Returns may not appeal to you since it Exiles 10 cards from yourself, but it also doesn't exile itself AND it only costs 4. So, it's like a black style card printed in blue. If you don't like it you can always try Time Reversal... not amazing, but it does the trick. And, in Thada, if you have started your little Lord of the Rings quest, that 5 mana shouldn't be too bad later in the game.

I appreciate the insight. I have plenty of mono-U experience but honestly I have been out of that game for a while. And obviously no stax experience. Hoping to bust this one out tonight actually.

I sort of assumed from the beginning that tutoring up key stax pieces would be the way to go (orbs, smokestack, etc) but honestly I would prefer to just draw the cards and play them as I get them. Most tutors between Transmute and Fabricate and whatnot are costing at least 3 mana which in Stax terms can be a whole turn or two and actually they do have a way of slowing you down (and drawing hate amirite? Hey guys I just went and got Winter Orb, don't mind me).

I have no problem with the exile on Diminishing Returns at all- if you play enough key pieces it's ok to exile one. More seriously though... dude, Uba Mask is wild. I like, don't even understand that card. My playgroup is going to go "whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?". In a macro sense it basically reduces your hand resources to what you have RIGHT NOW and what you drew THIS TURN. Which, more simply put, means no saving any cards for later except what's in your hand before it's played.

I'm going to go ahead and make those changes. Hopefully I can report back later about some results, and maybe not have holes in the deck list in the shape of "I forgot what these last 2 cards are".

Actually, should Fact or Fiction get back in there first? I mean over Diminishing Returns.

I'd probably run FoF over Returns. If you can have only 1.... FoF.

Thought so. I'll try to find room for Returns though. Thanks

So I got to play this deck last weekend. It was interesting... and fun!

It really opened up more like a voltron deck. I didn't draw any disruption early so I opened up with Thada, got some Swiftfoot boots, and then Sculpting Steel-d a Sword of Body and Mind, which was especially pertinent because a turn 2 Mesmeric Orb from Karador made mill a very possible way to kill someone. Somewhere along the way we had copies and clones of Sepulchral Primordial fill up the board and a wrath happened, which was OK because Inkmoth Nexus is awesome. I never really had to recast Thada... I suited that baby up and over the course of a game managed to kill a player with that. Unfortunately, of the three of us left in the triangle death hold, one of them decided I was going to get it and I had no one left to block his lethal swing of a couple big derpy attackers. Of course, he was immediately dispatched by the other guy left and that was that. I made mostly the right moves all game I think but did make some key mistakes. I'll just write my thoughts below:

Propaganda was huge and kept me from getting laid out more than a few times, by Thraximundar and an army of Steel Hellkites respectively. It paired REALLY well with Static Orb. It made attacking me pretty much impossible.

Static Orb was wonderful and it was really great to have had some open mana when casting it. In this case it gave me a few swings with a sworded Inkmoth Nexus that no one could really do anything about. I look forward to playing this card more.

Academy Ruins is way better than I even remember from time to time. I continuously forgot to use it to recycle all the cool stax cards that were getting dumped into my yard via Mesmeric Orb. Metamorph, Ensnaring Bridge, etc. Next time I get that land online I will be paying a lot more attention to my own graveyard. I think I was just tired of handing it to the Wrexial player every other untap step so he could see what he could take with it.

I also run an Adel deck, but have had trouble getting her to stick, so have been experimenting with cards like Mox Diamond and Saprazzan Skerry to get her out quicker. Unfortunately, I think I've warped the meta so much that the players in one of my playgroups no longer run shroud/hexproof equipment! This hasn't been a problem for you, has it? Perhaps I need to build a new deck or 2, as my other decks seem to be similarly warping. (though in different ways, of course)

Have you considered any of these?

• Ancient Tomb
  
• Mimic Vat
  
• Portcullis
  
• Unwinding Clock