I finally got this deck put together and I don't want to make any mistakes at my next tournament. Question for experienced players, when sideboarding, what do you side out for Carpet of Flowers, Xantid Swarms and Pyroblasts? The deck is pretty tight. I don't think I want to side out mana ramp, but that is essentially what this deck is. 42 mana ramp spells. So what do I side out?
So my shop is finally going to be adding Legacy to our monthly 'rotating' FNM non-standard slot. With that in mind along with my 4th LED arriving soon, I've been trying to think of a good 75 for an unknown meta. Since Belcher has basically fallen off the map completely, I figure I will get 2-3 good runs in with it while I work toward more fair decks/other LED based decks.
Overall, it's a pretty standard list, but I don't know if my sideboard is good enough to cover everything well.
Burning Wish #4 and Empty The Warrens #4 need little explanation
Carpet/Pyroblast/Xantid are a solid way to hopefully deal with all of the blue I will run into. I'm just wondering if the Carpet/Xantid density are high enough.
Cave-In is presently my main bit of help against D&T along with the artifact hate. I'm hoping to not run into Gaddock Teeg though, since I can't use Cave-In then. On the other hand, I'm more likely to need to handle Thalia/Vryn Wingmare before Gaddock since he isn't a guarantee in their 75.
I do have Diminishing Returns as an option to run over PiF, but I don't like the risk of giving a blue deck a second chance to counter if I need to reload mid combo for any reason. On the other hand, Grafdigger's Cage kills PiF and is generally a common board card for a few decks.
I'm trying a Pithing Needle for now to try and help with trouble spots in general, and have a few more of the common sideboard cards that have been run in the past available.
Overall, is the mainboard good enough or should I mix up my mana producing somehow? Also, should the sideboard be any denser in anti-blue hate or try to keep to a more varied mode until I figure out my meta?
Any help you can give is great, I've enjoyed this deck a lot in goldfishing and find the puzzle of generating enough mana to win to be one of my favorite things when testing it out.
I notice there is no mention of Recross-the-Paths-Belcher in the OP. It's a bit more vulnerable to FoW but it can be extremely powerful because it focuses on winning immediately and avoids those awkward games where you make 8-10 goblin tokens and then stall out. No love here for Recross the Paths?
I notice there is no mention of Recross-the-Paths-Belcher in the OP. It's a bit more vulnerable to FoW but it can be extremely powerful because it focuses on winning immediately and avoids those awkward games where you make 8-10 goblin tokens and then stall out. No love here for Recross the Paths?
Your argument about being somehow more vulnerable to FoW is wrong, because it just doesn't change anything imho. If the opponent has more than 70 IQ and holds a FoW, you'll bend the knee whatever your version of Belcher is. You're probably a bit more sensitive to Flusterstorm (but who cares, honestly, we're not here to play control, hella').
Well, both versions fold to FoW. By "a bit" (emphasis on a bit, and not "much more") I just meant that SOMETIMES in regular Belcher you can get lucky to have an EtW hand with enough mana sources to resolve it even if they Force one ritual. Traditional Belcher does have 3/11 win conditions that don't lose to Force, so they really do have to counter the right ritual to stop you, and sometimes you have a hand where losing one ritual doesn't stop you or they expect a Belcher/Wish and don't counter any rituals. With the Recross version all your 11 win conditions die to Force, so you don't even have that outside shot of getting a lucky EtW hand. The Recross version is at the point where if you T1 Probe them in G1 and see FoW, the optimal play is probabaly just to shuffle up your cards immediately so they have no idea what to board.
Anyway your whole post just says "Recross is not worse", which is not an answer to why there's no discussion of that version in the primer.
I wrote a mini-primer for the Recross version on The Source, and posted some even more flexible piles than Michael Augustine was able to find when he made top 32 of GP Columbus and wrote an article on it (e.g. there's an easy Tendrils pile that comes up more than once in a blue moon, there are piles that win through multiple hatebears from D&T, and there's a pile that wins even if Meditate is stuck in hand and you're short on mana). I think the version has potential. And it's definitely fun to play.
NOTE: List should read "0-4" Tinder Wall and "0-4" Pyretic Ritual, but formatting doesn't like it that way.
Comments:
The deck does suffer from more vulnerable initial mana due to lack of Land Grant/Taiga (which may mean Tinder Wall is less viable). Mulligans can also be tricky with so many cantrips. However, it avoids fizzling in other ways:
-No multiple Land Grant dud hands
-No EtW into 8-10 goblins into chump blocks by Squires FTL
-Less passing the turn
-No vulnerability to Wasteland when passing the turn
-Easier use of Chrome Mox (imprint used Recross after rigging deck to win clash, instead of a mana source)
-Much better at beating Stifle (Recross pile beats Stifle, whereas plain Belching or EtW doesn't)
You're dead on about the cons. The biggest is fewer initial mana sources and fewer pass-the-turn mana sources (making stuff like Xantid Swarm unplayable). But you're also short some pros:
-more resilience against Stifle
-less awkwardness with Chrome Mox (you don't have to imprint a mana source or win condition; you can cheat-win the clash and then imprint a used Recross the Paths, gaining more efficiency from your hand)
-opponent misplaying or misboarding expecting traditional Belcher
-no vulnerability to Wasteland killing Taiga when passing the turn to go off
-easier to find Sideboard answers (either use Burning Wish or Recross into a pile) -no Goblin tokens
The last is a big one and the biggest reason to play Recross. You just Belch right away. No more EtW. No passing several turns hoping to not get outraced by other combo while getting into the red zone. No losing to token hate (-1/-1 hate is quite common thanks to TNN and YP). No losing to double DRS blockers eating all your tokens. No getting randomly stopped by creature hate like Terminus, EE@0, Deed@0, Elephant Grass, Ghostly Prison, Moat, Pyrokinesis, whatever. Glass cannon combo wants to win right away, not plop a bunch of creatures and hope turning them sideways for 2-4 turns (depending on disruption and blockers) will get it done.
I'm not saying that overall the plan is necessarily better than traditional 1-land Belcher. It's hard to say since there's a serious lack of data. Aside from Augustine's top32, not many have even tried this list at high levels of play. What I'm saying is that it's not quite so strictly worse than the traditional like you're making it sound. There are some drawbacks with the plan, but there are also some big advantages that shore up several vulnerabilities of RG Belcher.
As for game time, there's one main pile that gets used 90% of the time. Anyone with any playtesting experience could assemble it in seconds, making the match take maybe a minute or two longer than a regular Belcher match. Plenty of time to get food. Sure, there are some long complicated piles, but you only need those if you're in a situation where you'd otherwise lose to hate. When the coast is clear, you still win quickly. When it's not, you might lose anyway, or you might have an opportunity to steal a win. Counters are a scoop, but hatebears in particular are a bit easier to answer.
I think you pulled some interesting and important arguments, so I'll have to answer to each - always from my point of view, of course - one right after the other. But it would be cool from you to actually post your RtP-decklist first, because being unaware of the presence of a card might lead me to inaccurate assumptions.
---top----
*Street Wraith (if you want to win the clash, e.g. to imprint Recross on Chrome Mox)
*Setup1 (mana needed to get to 2U, usually LED, Manamorphose or Lotus Petal)
Meditate
LED
LED
SSG
Street Wraith
Belcher
LED*
--bottom--
Basically you make 2U somehow and cantrip into Meditate, cast Meditate, drop your mana sources, then cycle Street Wraith cracking the LEDs in response. You end up drawing Belcher with 7 mana floating. GG. Once you learn the pile, it's a heck of a lot easier to use than Doomsday piles involving stacking Top activations...
With 2 cantrips in hand you Belch this turn.
With 1 cantrip and 3 mana of any color you Belch this turn.
With 1 cantrip and Meditate stuck in hand and 2 mana you Belch this turn. (replace Meditate with a ritual)
With 1 cantrip and 0 mana sources you can Belch next turn (pass-the-turn pile).
With 0 resources you can Belch in 2 turns (double pass-the-turn).
Passing the turn twice seems slow, but it's no slower a clock than 10-14 Goblin tokens, except it's resilient to token hate and, if you know the matchup well, you can pre-emptively stack a variation of the pile to work around expected hate. And you only pass the turn twice when you've got no gas left. Whereas an EtW for 14 is usually from a good hand but still has to pass the turn twice. I think this was the main reason Augustine tried the deck in the first place.
Augustine has EtW in the sideboard, but it's more of a plan B. Even when he played it, the plan is to wish for Recross if you have remotely near the resources to pull off a Recross win. If not, you can Wish for EtW just to have better than nothing. Keep in mind even if you do Wish into EtW for 12 goblins, that's still a slower win than wishing for Recross the Paths into a pass-the-turn pile. Plan A is always to Belch. So the deck really only grabs EtW if there's some reason it's safer (e.g. beating Spell Pierce).
He does include Goblin War Strike, but he also didn't actually use like 50% of his sideboard cards. Most of them were on-the-fly "just in case" slots that he hadn't tuned yet. I would guess he'd never have used War Strike. In a deck without Taiga there are very few situations where you're in a position to double Burning Wish but can't just win from a Recross pile. I don't run War Strike. I think a tuned Wishboard would have better options.
You're probably wondering why more resilient against Stifle (since it may not be immediately obvious)? In regular Belcher, Stifle kills storm in EtW and stops a Charbelcher activation. You can Charbelch again, but it usually takes more than one more turn to assemble another 3 mana, so the Stifle tends to stall you a bit. And if you're on the EtW plan (7/11 slots), there's not much you can do. With Recross, you either Belch directly, Recross into Belcher, or Wish into Recross into Belcher. There's usually no storm spell to Stifle (Tendrils and EtW are grabbed less often). If they stifle the Belcher activation, you just draw another LED next turn and Belch a second time. There are also variations you can make if you're worried about people interfering with your LEDs.
Ditching EtW means losing to Phyrexian Revoker or Pithing Needle on Belcher, right? Not so much. If you have a Belcher-only hand, in either build you're screwed. But if you pull off Recross, it's easy to make a pile that hits Tendrils storm 10 and ignores Belcher hate altogether.
---top----
*Street Wraith (if you want to win the clash, e.g. to imprint Recross on Chrome Mox)
*Setup1 (mana needed to get to 2U, usually LED, Manamorphose or Lotus Petal)
Meditate
LED
LED
LED/Lotus Petal
Gitaxian Probe
Manamorphose
Manamorphose
Manamorphose
Burning Wish -> (Tendrils of Agony)
--bottom--
Similar idea, except after cracking the LEDs you just cantrip a few times to build storm and then Burning Wish into Tendrils.
Anyway, I just thought I should clarify the deck plan. Interested to hear your comments.
I've been looking into Recross the Paths Belcher myself as an easy extra deck to add to my current PSI deck (most of the pricey cards carry over).
Being able to really actively make use of your Sideboard beyond random having Burning Wish and the mana to use it is a pretty interesting and desirable feature of RtP to me.
Anyhow my question would be what do people think of Act on Impulse in place of Meditate. My main issue with Meditate is that it's a bit tough to cast Pre-Recross and it's got a clear downside should you cast it and not win that turn. Impulse lets you still get LED, LED, Cantrip * X -> BW -> Trendrils piles which means you can easily win off Impulse just fine. Impulse has the benefit of being much easier to cast and removing cards from the game is generally better than having them in hand with this deck so you can crack LEDs without losing your cards (not that this is a big advantage). Meditate does give you that extra card which is a big deal but...
I'm also curious to see how Act on Impulse can benefit the belcher formula it seems insanely strong with LED.
Anyone have any thoughts on using Act On Impulse?
Just got to say, you've definitely earned distinction as an MTGS hero
Quote from Stardust »
Because he's the hero MTGS deserves, and the one it needs right now. So we'll global him. Because he can take it. Because he's not just our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. An expired rascal.
Quote from LuckNorris »
ExpiredRascals you sir are a god-like hero.
Quote from Lanxal »
ER is a masterful god who cannot be beaten in any endeavour.
Quote from votan »
:ER:, you suck as a hero
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Currently Playing:
Burning Reanimator
Eldrazi and Taxes
Bug Threshold
Enchantress
Dead Guy Ale
Combo Zombies
Pyromancer Pox
1 Taiga
Creatures:
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Simian Spirit Guide
4 Tinder Wall
Artifacts:
3 Chrome Mox
4 Goblin Charbelcher
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
4 Desperate Ritual
3 Manamorphose
3 Pyretic Ritual
4 Seething Song
Sorceries:
3 Burning Wish
3 Empty the Warrens
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Land Grant
4 Rite of Flame
1 Burning Wish
2 Carpet of Flowers
1 Cave-In
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Goblin War Strike
1 Hull Breach
1 Past in Flames
1 Pithing Needle
2 Pyroblast
1 Reverent Silence
1 Shattering Spree
2 Xantid Swarm
Overall, it's a pretty standard list, but I don't know if my sideboard is good enough to cover everything well.
Burning Wish #4 and Empty The Warrens #4 need little explanation
Carpet/Pyroblast/Xantid are a solid way to hopefully deal with all of the blue I will run into. I'm just wondering if the Carpet/Xantid density are high enough.
Cave-In is presently my main bit of help against D&T along with the artifact hate. I'm hoping to not run into Gaddock Teeg though, since I can't use Cave-In then. On the other hand, I'm more likely to need to handle Thalia/Vryn Wingmare before Gaddock since he isn't a guarantee in their 75.
I do have Diminishing Returns as an option to run over PiF, but I don't like the risk of giving a blue deck a second chance to counter if I need to reload mid combo for any reason. On the other hand, Grafdigger's Cage kills PiF and is generally a common board card for a few decks.
I'm trying a Pithing Needle for now to try and help with trouble spots in general, and have a few more of the common sideboard cards that have been run in the past available.
Overall, is the mainboard good enough or should I mix up my mana producing somehow? Also, should the sideboard be any denser in anti-blue hate or try to keep to a more varied mode until I figure out my meta?
Any help you can give is great, I've enjoyed this deck a lot in goldfishing and find the puzzle of generating enough mana to win to be one of my favorite things when testing it out.
Well, both versions fold to FoW. By "a bit" (emphasis on a bit, and not "much more") I just meant that SOMETIMES in regular Belcher you can get lucky to have an EtW hand with enough mana sources to resolve it even if they Force one ritual. Traditional Belcher does have 3/11 win conditions that don't lose to Force, so they really do have to counter the right ritual to stop you, and sometimes you have a hand where losing one ritual doesn't stop you or they expect a Belcher/Wish and don't counter any rituals. With the Recross version all your 11 win conditions die to Force, so you don't even have that outside shot of getting a lucky EtW hand. The Recross version is at the point where if you T1 Probe them in G1 and see FoW, the optimal play is probabaly just to shuffle up your cards immediately so they have no idea what to board.
Anyway your whole post just says "Recross is not worse", which is not an answer to why there's no discussion of that version in the primer.
I wrote a mini-primer for the Recross version on The Source, and posted some even more flexible piles than Michael Augustine was able to find when he made top 32 of GP Columbus and wrote an article on it (e.g. there's an easy Tendrils pile that comes up more than once in a blue moon, there are piles that win through multiple hatebears from D&T, and there's a pile that wins even if Meditate is stuck in hand and you're short on mana). I think the version has potential. And it's definitely fun to play.
Thoughts?
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Simian Spirit Guide
4 Lotus Petal
4 Chrome Mox
//1cc mana: 4-8
4 Rite of Flame
4 Tinder Wall
//Other mana: 12-16
4 Desperate Ritual
0 Pyretic Ritual
4 Seething Song
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Manamorphose
4 Street Wraith
1 Meditate
//Win Conditions: 11
4 Burning Wish
3 Recross the Paths
4 Goblin Charbelcher
//Wishboard: 15
1 Recross the Paths
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Past in Flames
1 Infernal Contract
1 Flame Slash
1 Cave-In
1 Shattering Spree
1 Hull Breach
1 Grapeshot
1 Diminishing Returns
1 Back to Nature
3 Gutteral Response
NOTE: List should read "0-4" Tinder Wall and "0-4" Pyretic Ritual, but formatting doesn't like it that way.
Comments:
The deck does suffer from more vulnerable initial mana due to lack of Land Grant/Taiga (which may mean Tinder Wall is less viable). Mulligans can also be tricky with so many cantrips. However, it avoids fizzling in other ways:
-No multiple Land Grant dud hands
-No EtW into 8-10 goblins into chump blocks by Squires FTL
-Less passing the turn
-No vulnerability to Wasteland when passing the turn
-Easier use of Chrome Mox (imprint used Recross after rigging deck to win clash, instead of a mana source)
-Much better at beating Stifle (Recross pile beats Stifle, whereas plain Belching or EtW doesn't)
-more resilience against Stifle
-less awkwardness with Chrome Mox (you don't have to imprint a mana source or win condition; you can cheat-win the clash and then imprint a used Recross the Paths, gaining more efficiency from your hand)
-opponent misplaying or misboarding expecting traditional Belcher
-no vulnerability to Wasteland killing Taiga when passing the turn to go off
-easier to find Sideboard answers (either use Burning Wish or Recross into a pile)
-no Goblin tokens
The last is a big one and the biggest reason to play Recross. You just Belch right away. No more EtW. No passing several turns hoping to not get outraced by other combo while getting into the red zone. No losing to token hate (-1/-1 hate is quite common thanks to TNN and YP). No losing to double DRS blockers eating all your tokens. No getting randomly stopped by creature hate like Terminus, EE@0, Deed@0, Elephant Grass, Ghostly Prison, Moat, Pyrokinesis, whatever. Glass cannon combo wants to win right away, not plop a bunch of creatures and hope turning them sideways for 2-4 turns (depending on disruption and blockers) will get it done.
I'm not saying that overall the plan is necessarily better than traditional 1-land Belcher. It's hard to say since there's a serious lack of data. Aside from Augustine's top32, not many have even tried this list at high levels of play. What I'm saying is that it's not quite so strictly worse than the traditional like you're making it sound. There are some drawbacks with the plan, but there are also some big advantages that shore up several vulnerabilities of RG Belcher.
As for game time, there's one main pile that gets used 90% of the time. Anyone with any playtesting experience could assemble it in seconds, making the match take maybe a minute or two longer than a regular Belcher match. Plenty of time to get food. Sure, there are some long complicated piles, but you only need those if you're in a situation where you'd otherwise lose to hate. When the coast is clear, you still win quickly. When it's not, you might lose anyway, or you might have an opportunity to steal a win. Counters are a scoop, but hatebears in particular are a bit easier to answer.
My list is posted in the spoiler a few posts up.
For reference, the main pile is:
* denotes optional
---top----
*Street Wraith (if you want to win the clash, e.g. to imprint Recross on Chrome Mox)
*Setup1 (mana needed to get to 2U, usually LED, Manamorphose or Lotus Petal)
Meditate
LED
LED
SSG
Street Wraith
Belcher
LED*
--bottom--
Basically you make 2U somehow and cantrip into Meditate, cast Meditate, drop your mana sources, then cycle Street Wraith cracking the LEDs in response. You end up drawing Belcher with 7 mana floating. GG. Once you learn the pile, it's a heck of a lot easier to use than Doomsday piles involving stacking Top activations...
With 2 cantrips in hand you Belch this turn.
With 1 cantrip and 3 mana of any color you Belch this turn.
With 1 cantrip and Meditate stuck in hand and 2 mana you Belch this turn. (replace Meditate with a ritual)
With 1 cantrip and 0 mana sources you can Belch next turn (pass-the-turn pile).
With 0 resources you can Belch in 2 turns (double pass-the-turn).
Passing the turn twice seems slow, but it's no slower a clock than 10-14 Goblin tokens, except it's resilient to token hate and, if you know the matchup well, you can pre-emptively stack a variation of the pile to work around expected hate. And you only pass the turn twice when you've got no gas left. Whereas an EtW for 14 is usually from a good hand but still has to pass the turn twice. I think this was the main reason Augustine tried the deck in the first place.
Augustine has EtW in the sideboard, but it's more of a plan B. Even when he played it, the plan is to wish for Recross if you have remotely near the resources to pull off a Recross win. If not, you can Wish for EtW just to have better than nothing. Keep in mind even if you do Wish into EtW for 12 goblins, that's still a slower win than wishing for Recross the Paths into a pass-the-turn pile. Plan A is always to Belch. So the deck really only grabs EtW if there's some reason it's safer (e.g. beating Spell Pierce).
He does include Goblin War Strike, but he also didn't actually use like 50% of his sideboard cards. Most of them were on-the-fly "just in case" slots that he hadn't tuned yet. I would guess he'd never have used War Strike. In a deck without Taiga there are very few situations where you're in a position to double Burning Wish but can't just win from a Recross pile. I don't run War Strike. I think a tuned Wishboard would have better options.
You're probably wondering why more resilient against Stifle (since it may not be immediately obvious)? In regular Belcher, Stifle kills storm in EtW and stops a Charbelcher activation. You can Charbelch again, but it usually takes more than one more turn to assemble another 3 mana, so the Stifle tends to stall you a bit. And if you're on the EtW plan (7/11 slots), there's not much you can do. With Recross, you either Belch directly, Recross into Belcher, or Wish into Recross into Belcher. There's usually no storm spell to Stifle (Tendrils and EtW are grabbed less often). If they stifle the Belcher activation, you just draw another LED next turn and Belch a second time. There are also variations you can make if you're worried about people interfering with your LEDs.
Ditching EtW means losing to Phyrexian Revoker or Pithing Needle on Belcher, right? Not so much. If you have a Belcher-only hand, in either build you're screwed. But if you pull off Recross, it's easy to make a pile that hits Tendrils storm 10 and ignores Belcher hate altogether.
---top----
*Street Wraith (if you want to win the clash, e.g. to imprint Recross on Chrome Mox)
*Setup1 (mana needed to get to 2U, usually LED, Manamorphose or Lotus Petal)
Meditate
LED
LED
LED/Lotus Petal
Gitaxian Probe
Manamorphose
Manamorphose
Manamorphose
Burning Wish -> (Tendrils of Agony)
--bottom--
Similar idea, except after cracking the LEDs you just cantrip a few times to build storm and then Burning Wish into Tendrils.
Anyway, I just thought I should clarify the deck plan. Interested to hear your comments.
Being able to really actively make use of your Sideboard beyond random having Burning Wish and the mana to use it is a pretty interesting and desirable feature of RtP to me.
Anyhow my question would be what do people think of Act on Impulse in place of Meditate. My main issue with Meditate is that it's a bit tough to cast Pre-Recross and it's got a clear downside should you cast it and not win that turn. Impulse lets you still get LED, LED, Cantrip * X -> BW -> Trendrils piles which means you can easily win off Impulse just fine. Impulse has the benefit of being much easier to cast and removing cards from the game is generally better than having them in hand with this deck so you can crack LEDs without losing your cards (not that this is a big advantage). Meditate does give you that extra card which is a big deal but...
Anyone have any thoughts on using Act On Impulse?
Please refer to this thread to continue discussion.
Body Count: GRRRUUUUUUUUUUU
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