I wouldn't cut the Path's. You want all 4 against Infect, if nothing else. Honestly I think you could cut the Prisons if you play with Wall and Soul's both. Your still play Crypt Incursion as well so that seems like sufficient aggro hate. I play just the 4 Path and 3 Crypt Incursion and I'm not really worried about most aggro matches personally but that might just be me.
I like Ghostly Prison because while the deck can reliably block / remove one or two creatures very well, it could run into issues with decks that can easily shift to go wide - Zoo, BantDrazi, various token based decks, Affinity, etc. Combined with the natural choke point synergy with Mesmeric Orb, I think they are pretty great.
If you're going to run a 3 drop enchantment that mills, Sphinx's Tutelage would be better because it does the same as curse of the bloody tome plus more. I like twincast btw
Edit: Augur of Bolas may be a good choice for you too, it (hopefully) digs you that extra sorcery spell and is a decent blocker.
Played against a master of cruelties deck. Went 1/2 against it. The third match i drew nothing so that sucked and i lost it more then opponent won it. The master is a pain though and should be pathed asap.
My second match up wasn't anything special tbh. I can't remember what deck he was playing but i remember smashing him first game. ounce again probably should of beat it but had a average draw. May of been a rogue deck. 1/2
Bye. Boo
Against 8 whack goblins. My brother was piloting this and it is actually my deck. This has been one of my first chances to play against this deck since i added in ghostly prisons before this after about 30 goldfish games i have won maybe 2 games. Just super aggro. First game i resolved a Mesmeric Orb turn 2 and a ghostly prison turn 3. Gobos were reduced to swinging for 1 every turn. Truly locked it down and milled at leisure. Game two sided in 2x lingering souls 1x extirpate and 1x Ratchet Bomb. Ended up being able to resolve a ghostly prison on turn 4 and was pathing a bunch of his goblins. I also waited till i milled a goblin grenade and extirpated it.
2/0 and first time i have won 2/0 against this deck.
Ounce again i think i could of gone 4/0 for the night. Master of cruelty is a beatable deck and i had answers to him but didn't get a white source to kill him. Fairly happy at the point with the deck. Ill be adding in about two basic plains on the weekend and ill probably need to buy into 2x flooded strand to make it more resilient to blood moon. Ive seen 2x bloodbmoons in main decks for two nights in a row and 1 other deck sb a choke so having more resilience against these strategies is going to be important.
Ill post a decklist of what im using later today when inget home.
Be careful about adding more than 1 basic plains. I tried it out for a little under two months and that single plains alone caused me a lot of issues. Normally I am all for adding a one of basic land of one of your colors, but our mana base is too restrictive. It's gotta be able to tap for UW or BW to remain consistent. You will encounter a lot of scenarios where you say "If only I had one more Black or Blue source". In most decks this is not a big deal, however, in Mill since you are racing as fast as you can you HAVE to HAVE to HAVE to be able to abuse your lands to their fullest extent. If we weren't essentially playing Combo, this wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal but we have got to be able to cast as many cards as fast and as consistently as we can.
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I wouldn't cut the Path's. You want all 4 against Infect, if nothing else. Honestly I think you could cut the Prisons if you play with Wall and Soul's both. Your still play Crypt Incursion as well so that seems like sufficient aggro hate. I play just the 4 Path and 3 Crypt Incursion and I'm not really worried about most aggro matches personally but that might just be me.
I like Ghostly Prison because while the deck can reliably block / remove one or two creatures very well, it could run into issues with decks that can easily shift to go wide - Zoo, BantDrazi, various token based decks, Affinity, etc. Combined with the natural choke point synergy with Mesmeric Orb, I think they are pretty great.
While I understand your reasoning, a couple decks you mention aren't nearly fast enough to need a Ghostly Prison against so if your playing the card for them, your making a mistake. Tokens is too slow and grindy and so is the Bant Eldrazi. Zoo is even slow enough to only need to rely on Path's and Crypt Incursion. All they need to do is play a Tarmogoyf and run you over with it because it will surely be a 5/6 or 6/7. They won't care about your Prisons and our paths will only feed their ability to attack with more creatures. Ghostly Prison works at its absolute best against Infect, if you don't die before you play it that is. While the interaction with Prison and Orb is wonderful, the deck doesn't necessarily need them in this pretty grindy meta. I don't see how a 3rd or 4th Crypt Incursion wouldn't solve all your problems anyway.
My issue with the Souls/Prison version is that players tend to rely on Mesmeric Orb too much. That's usually one of the reasons I see mentioned when people talk about slowing the game down to combat aggro. 4x Path and 3x Incursion is more than enough in just about every situation. The more and more I have played with Bridge and Prison the more and more they felt just terrible. Players can still play around them, there are too many decks that can ignore them entirely, if they get countered or removed.. oh man does that hurt our tempo. I also despise getting a hand clogged with cards that end up just being blanks without any mill present. From the experiences I have had, every card in our deck needs to have a direct impact or we will end up being too slow and dying. Because they can be played around, that fact alone gives them a disadvantage over other cards that can solve a problem permanently. It's comparable to how Surgical Extraction doesn't make a direct impact on the game but can slow or stop one line of play. Your opponent will still be able to Atarkas Command and Boros Charm you, even if you did take their 4 lightning bolts that they never drew to begin with which makes it all for nothing but adding durdling to the deck.
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Nihilith doesn't seem too bad. Good blocker and attacker if need be. A little janky but in our decks it works. I think I pulled one of these a while ago from a dollar store pack. Might have to go look for it.
Nihilith seems pretty good in an aggro variant. Wight of Precinct Six could be a good addition as well. Also a side note, Jötun Grunt could be an idea. With Mesmeric or and every other mill spell, it doesn't seem that challenging to keep Jötun active. Basically a deck full of creatures at 2cmc or less with 4 or more power and toughness that all have synergy with Mill spells.
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Nihilith doesn't seem too bad. Good blocker and attacker if need be. A little janky but in our decks it works. I think I pulled one of these a while ago from a dollar store pack. Might have to go look for it.
I don't think you need 2 Hallowed Fountains AND a Godless Shrine with a Plains. 3 fetch options should be more than enough since you'll never need 2 white sources to cast any of your white spells. I don't know how I feel about Wall of Shards x4 AND Lingering Souls. Apart from blockers, they sort of work against each other. You could get as much work out of Fog Bank or even MB Ensnaring Bridge or Ghostly Prison if you took out one of them.
My last comment calls into question your ability to actually mill someone out in enough time. I don't know if you can and still be alive by the time you do it. The only reaction you have is Path to Exile and maybe Crypt Incursion (which isn't very good against a lot of decks [SB card IMO]). I can see way too many decks trampling you with ease. You should either make room for more removal/sweepers in your sideboard OR drop some extra spells for more mill cards. I suggest, since you're running 3 colors, that you give Engineered Explosives a shot. It does the thing for 3 color mill. Another card to consider is Timely Reinforcements. Burn is likely our worst matchup, so you should prepare for that. Leyline of Sanctity works too.
Excluding Crypt Incursion from your Main Board is how you'll die against aggro. Aggro flat out will beat you if you do that and Lingering Souls can't stall for as long as Crypt Incursion against aggro. Period. Over 60% of the field is aggro and that's enough to merit MB to combat that. One of the other main reasons currently to play it MB is Emrakul. Nahiri Control is all over and it's a real thing. I just don't see how this list has any real game against Aggro. You've dedicated yourself to the Mill combo yet you have nothing to deal with a resolved permanent. Lists like this unfortunately don't have a great track record. At best you're banking on going first with hand disruption, but what then. If you spend your first two turns durdling then what do you do on t3 when you opponent plays something and your already a whole turn behind on potential milled cards? Do you just scoop when you see a Goblin Guide and Lightning Bolt and pray you get game 2 and 3? I mean you are stacked with 6 shock lands, 7 fetches, and with two Thoughtseize as a cherry on top. That is so much life lost game 1 it's absurd.
Mill has a good match up against decks that aren't aggro. Weakening your mainboard list against our worst general matchup is not how you would win in a tournament of 10+ rounds. Any mill deck present with any kind of results includes Crypt Incursion. It's a staple in this current meta just as much as Glimpse the Unthinkable is.
Personally i think crypt incursion on some level must be part of the mb, its just too good in a predominantly aggro format like modern.
Since racing aggro can be a problem for mill i am in favour of either ensnaring bridge or ghostly prison. The amount of match ups where it is a waster card is small compared to when it is value.
As for walls like wall of denial or wall of shards or fog bank, they all suffer from the same problem. They can stop one creature at best and at worst die to the plethora of removal found in the format. When evaluating if i would be more happy to draw a wall or a ensnaring bridge or ghostly prison i would almost certainly favour the bridge or prison. The hate is less likely to be encountered and they both deal with multiple creatures instead of one.
The other thing that i notice is that in at least my meta if mill doesn't play some form of stall game with removal,prison, lingering souls or something similar then we die. We can not race aggro decks imo. I have gone down the road of trying to race decks with "pure mill" and their direct damage and fast creatures are pound for pound faster then 4x Archive trap,4x Breaking, 4x glimpse the unthinkable 4x Mind Funeral ect all in one deck.
A lot of us have come to the conclusions that playing esper colours is the best way to play mill. The reason it is imho is that it opens the deck up to many stall options like path,prison and lingering souls.
Im wondering myself about including jace vryn's prodigy in the deck as a 2 of and bringing the manic scribe count down to 2 md.
My thinking is if jace gets killed before he transforms that prob would of happened to the scribe so no real tempo loss from running jace in the scribes place. I think Jace's ultimate might be more useful. Also the neg on jace may net me more by being able to cast a glimpse again which would take the scribe 3 turns to match if i had delirium. Jace's i already have instead of running snapcasters.
What does everyone else think of running this split ?
I like Jace in this deck. His ability to loot is pretty good for 2cmc with a 0/2 body and the fact you can play Archive Trap for free off his -3 ability can be a blow out. I am currently testing 2x Trapmaker's Snare over the 2x Manic Scribe that I was playing. Jace would take that spot more than likely if I decided that snare isn't needed to still win consistently. Playing more than 1 trap in a game is incredibly overwhelming for our opponents usually.
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Here is my decklist that im running now. Im thinking of dropping the glacial fortress and moving to two godless shrines but otherwise im pretty happy with the list atm.
Here is my decklist that im running now. Im thinking of dropping the glacial fortress and moving to two godless shrines but otherwise im pretty happy with the list atm.
Do you not have any Flooded Strand available? I'm not too sure how consistent the list will be with less than 22 Lands. Hedron Crab won't bet getting enough value out of your current land base.
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Mill was mentioned today in another article from TCGplayer. The author of the article actually runs the Magic side of one of my local game stores and after he saw me go undefeated two nights in a row he decided to do his next video series and article on the UB mill list from GP LA.
Edit: He's got 5 or 6 full matches on the TCGPlayer YouTube channel. I am almost finished watching them, he makes a few mistakes but is pretty solid with the deck for not having a lot of experience with it. I would suggest people check them out! Very good videos.
Here is my decklist that im running now. Im thinking of dropping the glacial fortress and moving to two godless shrines but otherwise im pretty happy with the list atm.
Do you not have any Flooded Strand available? I'm not too sure how consistent the list will be with less than 22 Lands. Hedron Crab won't bet getting enough value out of your current land base.
I don't have any flooded strands atm. Im planning on picking up one i think. I've never had a problem with mana. Polluted Deltas fetch into anything i want and work nicely overall.
Putting in 8 or more fetches always seemed a bit overkill to me. To simply get more procs on crabs......the crabs are good and anyone worth their salt in mill should be running them but putting so much of my land selection based on them doesn't sit well with me. I would rather have seachrome coasts and other dual lands being able to provide the mana without having to fetch.
The cmc of the deck is extremely low (i would say under 2 cmc since we dont count archive trap in cmc costs) i have always been able to be on the lower end of mana for that reason.
In all honesty the Hedron Crab are there for the fetch lands more or less. Each fetch is double what any other land can do on a single turn and that adds to the consistency and speed of being able to mill our opponents out. The lower land count will also mean less Hedron Crab triggers in general. So you're probably knocking you self to something around 48-46% of Hedron Crabs full potential. If you don't have them then that's totally understandable, but at the very least I would recommend sleeving up 4 flooded strand proxies just to test with. Im sure you'll see the difference, it's quite drastic.
You seem to have everything else the deck would need though. I would highly suggest getting a play set of Flooded Strand as your next trades if possible. Fetch lands are by far the best cards to pick up and hold on to. Decks become so much easier to play when you have the land base you need all ready to go. They are a huge part of our strategy. If you want a way to actually use your fetches for mana, consider using a Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. This way they can tap for actual mana instead of just fetching.
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Mill was mentioned today in another article from TCGplayer. The author of the article actually runs the Magic side of one of my local game stores and after he saw me go undefeated two nights in a row he decided to do his next video series and article on the UB mill list from GP LA.
Edit: He's got 5 or 6 full matches on the TCGPlayer YouTube channel. I am almost finished watching them, he makes a few mistakes but is pretty solid with the deck for not having a lot of experience with it. I would suggest people check them out! Very good videos.
He talks about the UB version though, not the Esper one... I wonder if it's better...
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I like Ghostly Prison because while the deck can reliably block / remove one or two creatures very well, it could run into issues with decks that can easily shift to go wide - Zoo, BantDrazi, various token based decks, Affinity, etc. Combined with the natural choke point synergy with Mesmeric Orb, I think they are pretty great.
Edit: Augur of Bolas may be a good choice for you too, it (hopefully) digs you that extra sorcery spell and is a decent blocker.
UR Niv-Mizzet, The Firemind
WUR Narset's Coinflip Casino
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UB Mill
Played against a master of cruelties deck. Went 1/2 against it. The third match i drew nothing so that sucked and i lost it more then opponent won it. The master is a pain though and should be pathed asap.
My second match up wasn't anything special tbh. I can't remember what deck he was playing but i remember smashing him first game. ounce again probably should of beat it but had a average draw. May of been a rogue deck. 1/2
Bye. Boo
Against 8 whack goblins. My brother was piloting this and it is actually my deck. This has been one of my first chances to play against this deck since i added in ghostly prisons before this after about 30 goldfish games i have won maybe 2 games. Just super aggro. First game i resolved a Mesmeric Orb turn 2 and a ghostly prison turn 3. Gobos were reduced to swinging for 1 every turn. Truly locked it down and milled at leisure. Game two sided in 2x lingering souls 1x extirpate and 1x Ratchet Bomb. Ended up being able to resolve a ghostly prison on turn 4 and was pathing a bunch of his goblins. I also waited till i milled a goblin grenade and extirpated it.
2/0 and first time i have won 2/0 against this deck.
Ounce again i think i could of gone 4/0 for the night. Master of cruelty is a beatable deck and i had answers to him but didn't get a white source to kill him. Fairly happy at the point with the deck. Ill be adding in about two basic plains on the weekend and ill probably need to buy into 2x flooded strand to make it more resilient to blood moon. Ive seen 2x bloodbmoons in main decks for two nights in a row and 1 other deck sb a choke so having more resilience against these strategies is going to be important.
Ill post a decklist of what im using later today when inget home.
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While I understand your reasoning, a couple decks you mention aren't nearly fast enough to need a Ghostly Prison against so if your playing the card for them, your making a mistake. Tokens is too slow and grindy and so is the Bant Eldrazi. Zoo is even slow enough to only need to rely on Path's and Crypt Incursion. All they need to do is play a Tarmogoyf and run you over with it because it will surely be a 5/6 or 6/7. They won't care about your Prisons and our paths will only feed their ability to attack with more creatures. Ghostly Prison works at its absolute best against Infect, if you don't die before you play it that is. While the interaction with Prison and Orb is wonderful, the deck doesn't necessarily need them in this pretty grindy meta. I don't see how a 3rd or 4th Crypt Incursion wouldn't solve all your problems anyway.
My issue with the Souls/Prison version is that players tend to rely on Mesmeric Orb too much. That's usually one of the reasons I see mentioned when people talk about slowing the game down to combat aggro. 4x Path and 3x Incursion is more than enough in just about every situation. The more and more I have played with Bridge and Prison the more and more they felt just terrible. Players can still play around them, there are too many decks that can ignore them entirely, if they get countered or removed.. oh man does that hurt our tempo. I also despise getting a hand clogged with cards that end up just being blanks without any mill present. From the experiences I have had, every card in our deck needs to have a direct impact or we will end up being too slow and dying. Because they can be played around, that fact alone gives them a disadvantage over other cards that can solve a problem permanently. It's comparable to how Surgical Extraction doesn't make a direct impact on the game but can slow or stop one line of play. Your opponent will still be able to Atarkas Command and Boros Charm you, even if you did take their 4 lightning bolts that they never drew to begin with which makes it all for nothing but adding durdling to the deck.
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I could see it doing some work with Jace's Phantasm.
Here's how I've got it built now, sideboard is still being tested - any input here would be welcome
4 Flooded Strand
3 Ghost Quarter
1 Godless Shrine
2 Hallowed Fountain
2 Island
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
1 Plains
4 Polluted Delta
1 Shelldock Isle
1 Swamp
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
1 Watery Grave
4 Archive Trap
3 Crypt Incursion
4 Path to Exile
4 Visions of Beyond
Sorcery (10)
4 Glimpse the Unthinkable
3 Lingering Souls
3 Mind Funeral
Artifact (4)
4 Mesmeric Orb
Creature (9)
4 Hedron Crab
1 Snapcaster Mage
4 Wall of Shards
1 Bribery
3 Disenchant
3 Rest in Peace
2 Set Adrift
3 Stony Silence
3 Surgical Extraction
Hello,
I don't think you need 2 Hallowed Fountains AND a Godless Shrine with a Plains. 3 fetch options should be more than enough since you'll never need 2 white sources to cast any of your white spells. I don't know how I feel about Wall of Shards x4 AND Lingering Souls. Apart from blockers, they sort of work against each other. You could get as much work out of Fog Bank or even MB Ensnaring Bridge or Ghostly Prison if you took out one of them.
My last comment calls into question your ability to actually mill someone out in enough time. I don't know if you can and still be alive by the time you do it. The only reaction you have is Path to Exile and maybe Crypt Incursion (which isn't very good against a lot of decks [SB card IMO]). I can see way too many decks trampling you with ease. You should either make room for more removal/sweepers in your sideboard OR drop some extra spells for more mill cards. I suggest, since you're running 3 colors, that you give Engineered Explosives a shot. It does the thing for 3 color mill. Another card to consider is Timely Reinforcements. Burn is likely our worst matchup, so you should prepare for that. Leyline of Sanctity works too.
Some other cards to think about are: Manic Scribe, Breaking // Entering, Traumatize, Bitter Ordeal, or Haunting Echoes.
If you're looking for stuff to drop to make room, try: 1 Hallowed Fountain or 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, 3 Crypt Incursions (into the SB), and then 3 Lingering Souls or 4 Wall of Shards.
Here's my current list for reference:
3 inquisition of kozilek
3 breaking // entering
3 mind funeral
1 bitter ordeal
4 hedron crab
3 manic scribe
4 archive trap
4 visions of beyond
3 surgical extraction
2 trapmaker's snare
2 ensnaring bridge
4 watery grave
4 polluted delta
3 flooded strand
3 ghost quarter
1 oboro, palace in the clouds
1 hallowed fountain
1 godless shrine
2 island
1 swamp
2 rest in peace
3 crypt incursion
3 set adrift
1 inquisition of kozilek
3 stony silence
1 ensnaring bridge
2 engineered explosives
Mill has a good match up against decks that aren't aggro. Weakening your mainboard list against our worst general matchup is not how you would win in a tournament of 10+ rounds. Any mill deck present with any kind of results includes Crypt Incursion. It's a staple in this current meta just as much as Glimpse the Unthinkable is.
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Since racing aggro can be a problem for mill i am in favour of either ensnaring bridge or ghostly prison. The amount of match ups where it is a waster card is small compared to when it is value.
As for walls like wall of denial or wall of shards or fog bank, they all suffer from the same problem. They can stop one creature at best and at worst die to the plethora of removal found in the format. When evaluating if i would be more happy to draw a wall or a ensnaring bridge or ghostly prison i would almost certainly favour the bridge or prison. The hate is less likely to be encountered and they both deal with multiple creatures instead of one.
The other thing that i notice is that in at least my meta if mill doesn't play some form of stall game with removal,prison, lingering souls or something similar then we die. We can not race aggro decks imo. I have gone down the road of trying to race decks with "pure mill" and their direct damage and fast creatures are pound for pound faster then 4x Archive trap,4x Breaking, 4x glimpse the unthinkable 4x Mind Funeral ect all in one deck.
A lot of us have come to the conclusions that playing esper colours is the best way to play mill. The reason it is imho is that it opens the deck up to many stall options like path,prison and lingering souls.
Im wondering myself about including jace vryn's prodigy in the deck as a 2 of and bringing the manic scribe count down to 2 md.
My thinking is if jace gets killed before he transforms that prob would of happened to the scribe so no real tempo loss from running jace in the scribes place. I think Jace's ultimate might be more useful. Also the neg on jace may net me more by being able to cast a glimpse again which would take the scribe 3 turns to match if i had delirium. Jace's i already have instead of running snapcasters.
What does everyone else think of running this split ?
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2x Ghost Quarter
1x Glacial Fortress
1x Godless Shrine
1x Hallowed Fountain
3x Island
1x Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
4x Polluted Delta
3x Seachrome Coast
3x Swamp
1x Watery Grave
Instant 14
4x Archive Trap
2x Crypt Incursion
4x Path to Exile
4x Visions of Beyond
4x Hedron Crab
2x Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
4x Jace's Phantasm
2x Manic Scribe
Enchantment 3
3x Ghostly Prison
Artifact 4
4x Mesmeric Orb
Sorcery 7
4x Glimpse the Unthinkable
2x Lingering Souls
1x Mind Funeral
2x Disenchant
4x Extirpate
2x Lingering Souls
1x Pithing Needle
4x Relic of Progenitus
2x Stony Silence
Do you not have any Flooded Strand available? I'm not too sure how consistent the list will be with less than 22 Lands. Hedron Crab won't bet getting enough value out of your current land base.
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http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=13331&writer=Corbin Hosler&articledate=6-13-2016&utm_source=tcg-fb-post&utm_medium=tcg-fb-post&utm_term&utm_content=magic&utm_campaign=tcg-fb-post-magic-article
Edit: He's got 5 or 6 full matches on the TCGPlayer YouTube channel. I am almost finished watching them, he makes a few mistakes but is pretty solid with the deck for not having a lot of experience with it. I would suggest people check them out! Very good videos.
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I don't have any flooded strands atm. Im planning on picking up one i think. I've never had a problem with mana. Polluted Deltas fetch into anything i want and work nicely overall.
Putting in 8 or more fetches always seemed a bit overkill to me. To simply get more procs on crabs......the crabs are good and anyone worth their salt in mill should be running them but putting so much of my land selection based on them doesn't sit well with me. I would rather have seachrome coasts and other dual lands being able to provide the mana without having to fetch.
The cmc of the deck is extremely low (i would say under 2 cmc since we dont count archive trap in cmc costs) i have always been able to be on the lower end of mana for that reason.
You seem to have everything else the deck would need though. I would highly suggest getting a play set of Flooded Strand as your next trades if possible. Fetch lands are by far the best cards to pick up and hold on to. Decks become so much easier to play when you have the land base you need all ready to go. They are a huge part of our strategy. If you want a way to actually use your fetches for mana, consider using a Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. This way they can tap for actual mana instead of just fetching.
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