Having access to discard and countermagic gives us options against those decks. I would definitely be playing 4 Stubborn Denial in the 75, and you could also consider options like Annul, Swan Song, or Flashfreeze. It's important to mulligan to a hand that can prevent a turn 2/3 Blood Moon, because Blood Moon is a significant problem if it lands before you can deploy a threat, but once you get creatures into play most of those decks don't have great ways of removing them. My experience against G/R Ponza is that if I can stop an early Blood Moon and get a couple threats into play, they won't have enough time to catch up.
GQ and Field of Ruin are a little trickier because you can't stop them, but you can mitigate their effects through in-game play. You are at risk of having a 2-land hand and getting locked out of the game, but in my experience that doesn't really happen very often. GQ and Field of Ruin don't really gain tempo, and your opponent generally can't afford to do them if they're staring down Goyfs and Shadows, so aggression has been a good approach for me. I also tend to not crack fetchlands once I get 2-3 lands in play, because the idea that you might just fetch whatever color they target will often dissuade players from aggressively using GQ/Field.
Has anyone tried cutting white from the sideboard for Kcomm/snapcaster mage package to go long? After some testing im sold on hazoret over ranger and as big mana decks gain traction im at the point where I want fluminator mages/surgicals or lots of temur battle rages. Once you add fulminator+surgical kcomm and snap start looking really appealing. With access to traverse we can probably be just as good a snapcaster/kcomm deck as grixis with only like 2 of each.
I'm going to run a few leagues with something like this: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/859141#paper. Snapcaster/Hazoret main might prove to be greedy, i could see moving one to the sideboard replacing it with an extra temur battle rage, and removing golgari charm from the list.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing standard:
RUG:
10-3-4(ID)
Venser UW control:
3-0-1
I'm thinking on bringing this deck to a 50-man tournament this weekend, but the meta has a fair amount of Blood Moon decks.
How does this deck plays against decks like Skred Red, Kiki Moon or Mono Red Prison ? What about decks with GQ and Field of Ruin ?
Would you rather play this or GDS in an meta where you expect a certain amount of those cards ?
I would rather play Jund in this meta, but if there really are that many blood moon decks seriously consider adding a forest. My basic heuristic is id rather being playing jund+subborn denial than grixis vs any deck that doesn't play snapcaster mage or fatal push, and id really rather be grixis if they play both. the red & red/blue blood moon decks are really weak to tarmogoyf and deaths shadow as threats, as well as temur battle rage and stubborn denial.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing standard:
RUG:
10-3-4(ID)
Venser UW control:
3-0-1
Here is the list I'm thinking on playing. I like Breeding Pool since it helps us cast either Goy, Traverse or Stubs. But I could replace it for another Watery Grave, perhaps ?
I'm still trying to figure out a decent sideboard, What do you guys think of Dismember on this deck ?
I'm thinking on whether I play white with Souls + Ranger on Sb or if I try to play the Snapcaster + Kommands plan, which I am more used to since I play GDS for 5 or 6 months
What would you suggest ? Our meta tends to be pretty diverse and goes from stabilished decks to rogue builds like the Skred Red dek or Pack Rat and BW Tokens.
Any tips on playing this deck other than the bauble interactions ? specially about how and when to fetch and how to try to avoid as much mana issues as possible ?
I'm 200% sold on Hazoret over Ranger in this deck. She's explosive, surprisingly good against Lantern, is a huge trump in the mirror, and is just generally a pain to deal with. She does die to Path and Dismember, but your opponent usually has to fight through some number of Goyfs and Shadows before you play her, so I've had good experiences with her surviving to end the game. The combination of Goyf/Shadow, Hazoret, planeswalkers, and Lingering Souls makes this deck very difficult to answer post-board in grindy matchups.
Hey guys, pretty new to this deck and i just habe the experience of one fnm tonight. Went 3-1. I dropped white dir a maindeck snapcaster ans one in the sideboard. Playing 2 Pia and kiran Nalaar instead of lingering souls. Deck worked ok. After talking with some friends we had some crazy ideas. What so you think about abbot of keral keep? And goblin rabblemaster as normal jund plays it. I thought about 2 abbot main and rabblemaster in the Side.
Which bad matchups do these cards help us shore up? There's a reason Abbot isn't played - at 2CMC I want to play Goyf or Traverse + Shadow rather than drop a 2/1 that will exile a card I can't cast anyway because we're always tight on mana.
We play the most efficient beaters in Modern, why add vastly less efficient ones? Our bad matchups don't care about Abbot or Rabblemaster.
Any tips vs leyline of the void. It just negates tarmo, traverse, lingering almost half of the deck
It's pretty good against us and there isn't much you can do except play around it. I don't think you usually want Souls against decks that run it anyway. You could play Pulse out of the SB but I doubt it's worth it.
It doesn't stop goyf because they still have a graveyard. So I would try to bring in any threats that you have that don't rely in the yard (like Hazoret or ranger) and a maelstrom pulse if you have it, while siding out some traverses (which is really the only card that leyline actually kills).
And then just kill them anyway while they are going down a card (at least, if they draw it later in the game it does nothing). It rrally only shuts off 4 of our cards. It's not that bad.
I also talk a bit about how to think about the deck going forward. Long story short: there's a lot more work to be done to figure out how to get one of the colors out of the 75, so short of that, play the white.
You mentioned in the article that you want to fit a grim flayer or two in there. How do you think we should fit them? I think we can squeeze one in the main, but I don't know if flayer is really a sideboard card? Idk how to get the second one in there.
Great writeup Spooly, I came to a lot of the same conclusions that you did, in terms of the white splash and the manabase. I've been on the same manabase that you mentioned on Reddit (12 fetches, 1 each of Blood Crypt, Breeding Pool, Overgrown Tomb, Stomping Ground, Watery Grave, Swamp) and have found it to be the smoothest configuration so far.
I've been trying out two Grim Flayers in the main since watching Reid's video featuring only 1, and I think that 1 is correct. The first Grim Flayer is great, but whenever I drew the second one I often found myself wishing it was some piece of interaction. I tried cutting a Liliana and an Inquisition for them and really missed both cards, so I'm not sure what the right cut is to make room.
I've also been messing around with Spell Rupture, which has had mixed results. It's great when paired with a Death's Shadow, but it's a little clunky alongside Tarmogoyf. I decided to try it out after looking for countermagic that I could bring in against Burn, Tron, and Scapeshift, and it was pretty much the only card that was useful against all 3. They don't play a ton of ways to deal with our creatures, so it hasn't really been an issue to have creatures alive to use it. My problems with the card come in the games where I'm digging for a threat because I kept a hand heavy on interaction, and Rupture is a pretty dead card in that scenario.
You mentioned in the article that you want to fit a grim flayer or two in there. How do you think we should fit them? I think we can squeeze one in the main, but I don't know if flayer is really a sideboard card? Idk how to get the second one in there.
Great writeup Spooly, I came to a lot of the same conclusions that you did, in terms of the white splash and the manabase. I've been on the same manabase that you mentioned on Reddit (12 fetches, 1 each of Blood Crypt, Breeding Pool, Overgrown Tomb, Stomping Ground, Watery Grave, Swamp) and have found it to be the smoothest configuration so far.
I've been trying out two Grim Flayers in the main since watching Reid's video featuring only 1, and I think that 1 is correct. The first Grim Flayer is great, but whenever I drew the second one I often found myself wishing it was some piece of interaction. I tried cutting a Liliana and an Inquisition for them and really missed both cards, so I'm not sure what the right cut is to make room.
I've also been messing around with Spell Rupture, which has had mixed results. It's great when paired with a Death's Shadow, but it's a little clunky alongside Tarmogoyf. I decided to try it out after looking for countermagic that I could bring in against Burn, Tron, and Scapeshift, and it was pretty much the only card that was useful against all 3. They don't play a ton of ways to deal with our creatures, so it hasn't really been an issue to have creatures alive to use it. My problems with the card come in the games where I'm digging for a threat because I kept a hand heavy on interaction, and Rupture is a pretty dead card in that scenario.
I'd probably grudgingly cut a LotV for the first Grim Flayer, and I'm not so sure the second is worth it. For testing purposes I'd squeeze two in there, shaving an IoK I guess, but that's just a stand in until I figure out if I want a second flayer and, if so, what to cut for it.
I've also been messing around with Spell Rupture, which has had mixed results. It's great when paired with a Death's Shadow, but it's a little clunky alongside Tarmogoyf.
I've been seeing a set of Delays showing up in sideboards recently, and even though I'm not entirely sure what it's for, I think it might be a better option than Rupture as it'll always be a 'hard' counter.
If we play 2 flayers maybe we can cut the 4th traverse? In general I'm thinking the flayers are probably going to be better than they first seem. All of its abilities are powerful and relevant to this deck's game plan. I definitely think it's worth a shot.
Spooly our minds are treading the same way on this deck. I love it and it's my baby and I love your writeups on it.
Anyway, I am trying cutting blue to go make the mana smoother and sideboard more diverse. I also feel as though the blue spells were counter-productive to the tempo of the deck, which from my experience requires pure aggression. Maybe Im just listening to Reid Duke when he says playing 5c is greedy....
I also think lingering souls main deck helps our worst matchups (grindy/control) and generally hard matchups (affinity comes to mind) more so than matchups in which stubborn denial help us (combo/big mana). Sure, it's nice having that blanket with stub, but a lot of times I feel like I win the matchups I desired it in often enough even if I didn't see it. Stub can also be literally a dead card in certain matchups whereas lingering souls is never a dead card.
I think some number of fulminator and surgical extractions are the post-board way I want to attack these decks, as they go with our aggressive game plan and are often just as devastating. They have utility in other matchups as well (colonnade/snap caster decks/lantern). You can even bring them in the mirror! I'm going hard on the surgicals to test them out but a 2/2 split may be best. https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/863411#paper
If we play 2 flayers maybe we can cut the 4th traverse? In general I'm thinking the flayers are probably going to be better than they first seem. All of its abilities are powerful and relevant to this deck's game plan. I definitely think it's worth a shot.
I doubt cutting a Traverse is right. I want MORE threats, not different threats.
Spooly our minds are treading the same way on this deck. I love it and it's my baby and I love your writeups on it.
Anyway, I am trying cutting blue to go make the mana smoother and sideboard more diverse. I also feel as though the blue spells were counter-productive to the tempo of the deck, which from my experience requires pure aggression. Maybe Im just listening to Reid Duke when he says playing 5c is greedy....
I also think lingering souls main deck helps our worst matchups (grindy/control) and generally hard matchups (affinity comes to mind) more so than matchups in which stubborn denial help us (combo/big mana). Sure, it's nice having that blanket with stub, but a lot of times I feel like I win the matchups I desired it in often enough even if I didn't see it. Stub can also be literally a dead card in certain matchups whereas lingering souls is never a dead card.
I think some number of fulminator and surgical extractions are the post-board way I want to attack these decks, as they go with our aggressive game plan and are often just as devastating. They have utility in other matchups as well (colonnade/snap caster decks/lantern). You can even bring them in the mirror! I'm going hard on the surgicals to test them out but a 2/2 split may be best. https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/863411#paper
The blue spells do more for the deck's tempo than anything else. When you have a creature in play and counter whatever they're trying to do, it's basically a time walk.
I don't think Lingering Souls MD is where I want to be at all, and it is basically a dead card in many matchups because a couple 1/1 fliers do not clock the opponent in a meaningful way. It's atrocious against the big mana decks, the combo decks, and typically only ok vs. the aggro decks (except Affinity of course). It's only good against control and midrange decks and Affinity specificially. That screams a SB card to me.
Fulminator also just seems too slow. Eldrazi Tron doesn't care too much about the land destruction, so the Fulminator plan is not so great, and turn 3 Fulminator on the draw doesn't stop any tron build from assembling tron and getting a haymaker into play first. What we really want here is counters to slow their clock down a turn or two, or stuff like TBR to speed ours up a turn or two.
I agree that 5c feels too greedy, but losing any of the tertiary colors comes with pretty high costs. I'm not sure what the solution is.
My reasoning was that playing the 4 goyf/4 shadow/4 traverse felt like ~10 threats in the deck. By adding the two flayers you don't just up the count to ~12, but really closer to 13 because the flayers help enable delirium and dig through your deck. I wasn't sure if increasing the threat count from 10 to 13 and losing 2 pieces of interaction was needed. You have a lot more experience with the deck than I do though, so I'll trust your judgement.
Flayers were great. One nice thing about them is that they effectively make Traverse more likely to be a threat. For example after getting spellbombed in the mirror, a Flayer got me to delirium again real quick, turning my Traverse on.
I also tried Mana Leak and Opt just to experiment a bit, and wasn't super impressed. Opt got me killed against burn and tron because there just is no time. Leak was fine, but not great. Mostly because it sucked to have to hold up 2 mana for it.
I'm thinking on bringing this deck to a 50-man tournament this weekend, but the meta has a fair amount of Blood Moon decks.
How does this deck plays against decks like Skred Red, Kiki Moon or Mono Red Prison ? What about decks with GQ and Field of Ruin ?
Would you rather play this or GDS in an meta where you expect a certain amount of those cards ?
GQ and Field of Ruin are a little trickier because you can't stop them, but you can mitigate their effects through in-game play. You are at risk of having a 2-land hand and getting locked out of the game, but in my experience that doesn't really happen very often. GQ and Field of Ruin don't really gain tempo, and your opponent generally can't afford to do them if they're staring down Goyfs and Shadows, so aggression has been a good approach for me. I also tend to not crack fetchlands once I get 2-3 lands in play, because the idea that you might just fetch whatever color they target will often dissuade players from aggressively using GQ/Field.
I'm going to run a few leagues with something like this: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/859141#paper. Snapcaster/Hazoret main might prove to be greedy, i could see moving one to the sideboard replacing it with an extra temur battle rage, and removing golgari charm from the list.
RUG:
10-3-4(ID)
Venser UW control:
3-0-1
I would rather play Jund in this meta, but if there really are that many blood moon decks seriously consider adding a forest. My basic heuristic is id rather being playing jund+subborn denial than grixis vs any deck that doesn't play snapcaster mage or fatal push, and id really rather be grixis if they play both. the red & red/blue blood moon decks are really weak to tarmogoyf and deaths shadow as threats, as well as temur battle rage and stubborn denial.
RUG:
10-3-4(ID)
Venser UW control:
3-0-1
I'm still trying to figure out a decent sideboard, What do you guys think of Dismember on this deck ?
4 Polluted Delta
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Blood Crypt
1 Watery Grave
1 Breeding Pool
1 Swamp
1 Forest
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Temur Battle Rage
4 Street Wraith
4 Mishra's Bauble
4 Traverse the Ulvenwald
4 Thoughtseize
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Stubborn Denial
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Terminate
1 Dismember
2 Liliana of the Veil
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
I'm thinking on whether I play white with Souls + Ranger on Sb or if I try to play the Snapcaster + Kommands plan, which I am more used to since I play GDS for 5 or 6 months
What would you suggest ? Our meta tends to be pretty diverse and goes from stabilished decks to rogue builds like the Skred Red dek or Pack Rat and BW Tokens.
Any tips on playing this deck other than the bauble interactions ? specially about how and when to fetch and how to try to avoid as much mana issues as possible ?
Oh forgot hazoret was a she, my bad^^
Seems good, guess I give her a try!
Which bad matchups do these cards help us shore up? There's a reason Abbot isn't played - at 2CMC I want to play Goyf or Traverse + Shadow rather than drop a 2/1 that will exile a card I can't cast anyway because we're always tight on mana.
We play the most efficient beaters in Modern, why add vastly less efficient ones? Our bad matchups don't care about Abbot or Rabblemaster.
It's pretty good against us and there isn't much you can do except play around it. I don't think you usually want Souls against decks that run it anyway. You could play Pulse out of the SB but I doubt it's worth it.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
And then just kill them anyway while they are going down a card (at least, if they draw it later in the game it does nothing). It rrally only shuts off 4 of our cards. It's not that bad.
Traverse is going out on sb
I also talk a bit about how to think about the deck going forward. Long story short: there's a lot more work to be done to figure out how to get one of the colors out of the 75, so short of that, play the white.
Hope you like it!
I've been trying out two Grim Flayers in the main since watching Reid's video featuring only 1, and I think that 1 is correct. The first Grim Flayer is great, but whenever I drew the second one I often found myself wishing it was some piece of interaction. I tried cutting a Liliana and an Inquisition for them and really missed both cards, so I'm not sure what the right cut is to make room.
I've also been messing around with Spell Rupture, which has had mixed results. It's great when paired with a Death's Shadow, but it's a little clunky alongside Tarmogoyf. I decided to try it out after looking for countermagic that I could bring in against Burn, Tron, and Scapeshift, and it was pretty much the only card that was useful against all 3. They don't play a ton of ways to deal with our creatures, so it hasn't really been an issue to have creatures alive to use it. My problems with the card come in the games where I'm digging for a threat because I kept a hand heavy on interaction, and Rupture is a pretty dead card in that scenario.
I'd probably grudgingly cut a LotV for the first Grim Flayer, and I'm not so sure the second is worth it. For testing purposes I'd squeeze two in there, shaving an IoK I guess, but that's just a stand in until I figure out if I want a second flayer and, if so, what to cut for it.
I've been seeing a set of Delays showing up in sideboards recently, and even though I'm not entirely sure what it's for, I think it might be a better option than Rupture as it'll always be a 'hard' counter.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
Anyway, I am trying cutting blue to go make the mana smoother and sideboard more diverse. I also feel as though the blue spells were counter-productive to the tempo of the deck, which from my experience requires pure aggression. Maybe Im just listening to Reid Duke when he says playing 5c is greedy....
I also think lingering souls main deck helps our worst matchups (grindy/control) and generally hard matchups (affinity comes to mind) more so than matchups in which stubborn denial help us (combo/big mana). Sure, it's nice having that blanket with stub, but a lot of times I feel like I win the matchups I desired it in often enough even if I didn't see it. Stub can also be literally a dead card in certain matchups whereas lingering souls is never a dead card.
I think some number of fulminator and surgical extractions are the post-board way I want to attack these decks, as they go with our aggressive game plan and are often just as devastating. They have utility in other matchups as well (colonnade/snap caster decks/lantern). You can even bring them in the mirror! I'm going hard on the surgicals to test them out but a 2/2 split may be best.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/863411#paper
I doubt cutting a Traverse is right. I want MORE threats, not different threats.
The blue spells do more for the deck's tempo than anything else. When you have a creature in play and counter whatever they're trying to do, it's basically a time walk.
I don't think Lingering Souls MD is where I want to be at all, and it is basically a dead card in many matchups because a couple 1/1 fliers do not clock the opponent in a meaningful way. It's atrocious against the big mana decks, the combo decks, and typically only ok vs. the aggro decks (except Affinity of course). It's only good against control and midrange decks and Affinity specificially. That screams a SB card to me.
Fulminator also just seems too slow. Eldrazi Tron doesn't care too much about the land destruction, so the Fulminator plan is not so great, and turn 3 Fulminator on the draw doesn't stop any tron build from assembling tron and getting a haymaker into play first. What we really want here is counters to slow their clock down a turn or two, or stuff like TBR to speed ours up a turn or two.
I agree that 5c feels too greedy, but losing any of the tertiary colors comes with pretty high costs. I'm not sure what the solution is.
So how did the flayers do last night?
I also tried Mana Leak and Opt just to experiment a bit, and wasn't super impressed. Opt got me killed against burn and tron because there just is no time. Leak was fine, but not great. Mostly because it sucked to have to hold up 2 mana for it.