Is Souls really that good against Humans? I am not so sure about that. If the Humans board builds up too quickly, Souls only functions as chump blockers.
Against Hollow One it can buy you some needed time, but if I am pretty sure Hollow One will board out Burning Inquiries which will make Souls less apealing.
I played a lot against Humans recently and I started not boarding in Souls against them because all they do is buying you time. The long game Humans will always end up winning against Shadow because of their persistant flood of threats. MVP against Humans are removal and TBR, and from the board any kind of sweeper alongside Abrade or Bolt.
I learned it when playing Jund that discard is not bad against Humans postboard (especially IOK), therefore I would always leave in discard against them. I don't like Lilianas against Humans because new Lili doesn't kill their threats while old Lili only gets the worst of many threats in most cases.
I've been leaning towards playing 5 colors again, largely on the back of how well positioned Lingering Souls is right now. It's a solid card against Humans and Hollow One, while also being good against decks running a lot of single-target removal to try to beat them. I think that it was worse when the other midrange decks were also running Lingering Souls (Abzan, in particular), but it's still a card that Jund struggles with and it allows you to attack into Humans and Hollow One without being afraid of dying on the back swing. Hype_rion, your list is very close to what I've been eyeing up for 5 colors, with one notable exception.
I do not like Liliana of the Veil in the main board of this deck. Because we run so few lands and no way to draw additional cards, I've often found her to just be awkward. You don't want to slam her against control decks because you'll often be discarding spells while they discard lands, she's not good against the go-wide creature decks, and tapping out for her on turn 3 against something like Storm can be a big risk. I think she's a generally fine grindy sideboard option if you don't want to splash for Lingering Souls, but I think that she lines up poorly against the other midrange decks right now. She's hard to defend (and just not good) against Mardu Pyromancer, and with Jund playing BBE and Treetop Village, in addition to more copies of Lightning Bolt, I think she's hard to keep alive in that matchup unless you hold cards in hand.
I pretty much agree about LotV. I liked her a lot better when the midrange decks we were fighting were mostly other Shadow decks.
I played a lot against Humans recently and I started not boarding in Souls against them because all they do is buying you time. The long game Humans will always end up winning against Shadow because of their persistant flood of threats. MVP against Humans are removal and TBR, and from the board any kind of sweeper alongside Abrade or Bolt.
I learned it when playing Jund that discard is not bad against Humans postboard (especially IOK), therefore I would always leave in discard against them. I don't like Lilianas against Humans because new Lili doesn't kill their threats while old Lili only gets the worst of many threats in most cases.
Agree completely.
Right now, against basically all of the control decks and many of the midrange decks, I would rather Stub + TBR them than try to grind. We can't play a long game against most control decks because they'll either bolt us out or Field of Ruin / Ghost Quarter / Tec Edge us to pieces, or sometimes Bolt + Blood Moon. But we can punch a hole in their hand with discard to stick + protect a threat with Stub/Delay, and close faster with TBR (though I often shave 1 postboard). Against Mardu Pyromancer, LotV is bad, and boarding into Souls is just doing what they're doing but worse, and in the long game they have Blood Moon. I'd rather get under them, use Spellbomb to keep them off Bedlam Reveler, and use TBR to beat the chump blockers. The other main midrange deck of the format is Jund, and unfortunately, getting under them doesn't work. To beat Jund, specifically, we need Lingering Souls, and there Liliana does a lot of work. But that's the only major archetype where I want either of those cards, so it just doesn't seem worth it to me.
If you think Grixis Shadow is becoming more of a player, that's another point in LotV + Souls favor, and LotV is also good against the Bogles menace, but I'm still pretty skeptical. It's so much easier to pick up percentage points in other matchups, in particular against Humans and Hollow one with cheap, targeted removal, and against big mana decks with a couple of ways to interact with lands, that I have trouble committing so many MD/SB slots to 1-2.5 decks that are barely in the top 10 of the format. Maybe there's a way to make Souls work as a reasonable SB card in some of the aggro matchups, but it's not good against Humans and seems only OK against Hollow One, which are pretty big strikes against it.
Fair enough, I'd originally started boarding in Souls back in the fall for Humans/Hollow One because I wasn't running enough targeted removal to keep up with them. What you guys are saying makes a lot of sense, and definitely fills in some context for me on why lists moved away from Souls since the last time I really played the deck.
Not much to say here, Manamorphose is so good I can't even describe it. The deck feels like a freight train. Not impressed with Liliana TLH or Fulminators at all today, wish I had more sweepers. Onwards and upwards.
Not much to say here, Manamorphose is so good I can't even describe it. The deck feels like a freight train. Not impressed with Liliana TLH or Fulminators at all today, wish I had more sweepers. Onwards and upwards.
Nice finish! How did the Mardu and Eldrazi games go? Those seem like difficult matchups when I've faced them, but certainly winnable. Were you using the same list you posted a while back? I'm playing in an invitational in a couple weeks and I'm thinking of running 4C blue, but I'm still unsure of the number of manamorphose to include as well as the sweepers. Do you think Anger of the Gods is doable with 2 red sources + Manamorphose, or would you stick to something like Kozilek's Return or even Pyroclasm for the speed? What would you replace LtLH with in the board for the grindier matchups? Interested to hear your opinion if you'd be up for elaborating some
Yeah, same list I posted the other day, full playsets of all the business cards, 2 each of Stub, Dismember, Decay and 3 Push.
If you're gonna run Manamorphose in your build then I really don't see the point in running fewer than 4 copies. Maybe you can get away with 3 but it's there for consistency so you want to draw it consistently as well in my opinion.
The RG Eldrazi matchup seemed very bad to me but I got a bit lucky as he didn't see any Groves in both games. Discard was key here. Remember that you need Dismember + another card to deal with Smasher. Yes it seems obvious but we're so used to just dumping our hand that these things can really come back to bite you in the ass. TBR pulled me through in the end.
Mardu Pyro - there was no way I could win this but somehow things lined up correctly. Double Nihil Spellbomb kept his yard empty and Revelers stranded in his hand. Shadow for pressure + topdecked Hazoret for exactly lethal.
As for Liliana, I'm not sure what to replace her with. I love her -2 in the grindy matchups but there's just so much aggro right now that her +1 seems awfully anemic sometimes. The Fulminators have been very underwhelming for me but I'm taking Spooly's word for it and keeping them in for now - maybe I haven't hit the correct matchups yet.
I don't think you can run Anger in our deck at all. If you don't have Manamorphose in hand it's a dead card, and you don't want Anger to be a dead card ever. Radiant Flames seems like a decent option right now. Of course I wish I'd had Kozilek's Return against Affinity yesterday but it's not great against the rest of the field. Same goes for Pyroclasm, you need to be able to deal 3 damage with your sweeper.
That said, with 2 red sources Anger might be fine but I don't know if you want to fetch red so aggressively. Depends on your manabase really. I was talking to one of our better players about the deck briefly yesterday and he said that having a second red source post-board is pretty crucial with the current sideboard configuration I'm running. Normally I might not have agreed but throughout the final game I found myself praying for a Manamorphose as I couldn't activate Grim Lavamancer and Abrade in the same turn off of just one Crypt. This cost me a precious few points of damage that would have swiftly locked up the game in my favor. We bring in quite a few red cards in these aggro matchups and if we lose our Crypt it's done. Then again, Manamorphose mitigates this somewhat, but I'm still curious to hear people's thoughts on this.
Give this version a shot, I think it's much better positioned than the ones trying to run Flayer and Liliana of the Veil right now. Manamorphose fixes so many of our problems and speeds things up immensely. Hope this helped somewhat.
I rearranged my manabase to have 2 red sources and 1 blue after running into the same issues you outlined. I find myself wanting to cast multiple red spells more often than multiple blue spells in most matchups right now, and I'm not currently playing Snapcaster. That also prompted me to run Terminate over Dismember, which is less mana efficient but a little safer against Humans and Hollow One. I think the argument could also be made to swap the basic forest for a Stomping Ground, with Field of Ruin at a relative low point right now.
For those of you running Fulminator Mage right now, do you expect to swap him for Damping Sphere after Dominaria releases?
I've really been digging Manamorphose, but felt like I still wasn't drawing threats often enough. Adding a single Grim Flayer has helped that, but have the rest of you not felt like you've had this issue?
Not much to say here, Manamorphose is so good I can't even describe it. The deck feels like a freight train. Not impressed with Liliana TLH or Fulminators at all today, wish I had more sweepers. Onwards and upwards.
Yeah, same list I posted the other day, full playsets of all the business cards, 2 each of Stub, Dismember, Decay and 3 Push.
If you're gonna run Manamorphose in your build then I really don't see the point in running fewer than 4 copies. Maybe you can get away with 3 but it's there for consistency so you want to draw it consistently as well in my opinion.
The RG Eldrazi matchup seemed very bad to me but I got a bit lucky as he didn't see any Groves in both games. Discard was key here. Remember that you need Dismember + another card to deal with Smasher. Yes it seems obvious but we're so used to just dumping our hand that these things can really come back to bite you in the ass. TBR pulled me through in the end.
Mardu Pyro - there was no way I could win this but somehow things lined up correctly. Double Nihil Spellbomb kept his yard empty and Revelers stranded in his hand. Shadow for pressure + topdecked Hazoret for exactly lethal.
As for Liliana, I'm not sure what to replace her with. I love her -2 in the grindy matchups but there's just so much aggro right now that her +1 seems awfully anemic sometimes. The Fulminators have been very underwhelming for me but I'm taking Spooly's word for it and keeping them in for now - maybe I haven't hit the correct matchups yet.
I don't think you can run Anger in our deck at all. If you don't have Manamorphose in hand it's a dead card, and you don't want Anger to be a dead card ever. Radiant Flames seems like a decent option right now. Of course I wish I'd had Kozilek's Return against Affinity yesterday but it's not great against the rest of the field. Same goes for Pyroclasm, you need to be able to deal 3 damage with your sweeper.
That said, with 2 red sources Anger might be fine but I don't know if you want to fetch red so aggressively. Depends on your manabase really. I was talking to one of our better players about the deck briefly yesterday and he said that having a second red source post-board is pretty crucial with the current sideboard configuration I'm running. Normally I might not have agreed but throughout the final game I found myself praying for a Manamorphose as I couldn't activate Grim Lavamancer and Abrade in the same turn off of just one Crypt. This cost me a precious few points of damage that would have swiftly locked up the game in my favor. We bring in quite a few red cards in these aggro matchups and if we lose our Crypt it's done. Then again, Manamorphose mitigates this somewhat, but I'm still curious to hear people's thoughts on this.
Give this version a shot, I think it's much better positioned than the ones trying to run Flayer and Liliana of the Veil right now. Manamorphose fixes so many of our problems and speeds things up immensely. Hope this helped somewhat.
Nice Job! I'm glad the Manamorphoses are catching on. They've seemed insane to me.
RG Eldrazi has felt very winnable to me. Even favorable. I may have just been getting lucky against them, but it feels like the combination of piles of discard and larger creatures than theirs makes it difficult to them. You just have to pick your spots to play around stuff like Reality Smasher. I know you've said you haven't been impressed with the Fulminators, but this is a matchup where just one Fulminator can often devastate them, since unlike Tron their haymakers often can't really catch them back up when they're far behind.
I think Mardu Pyro is a rough matchup, but it's much more winnable than Jund. Spellbomb is a big reason why.
As far as sweepers, I think you're right - Radiant Flames is the way to go, unless for some reason you expect a pile of Affinity. Even if we could cast Anger, I'm not sure we would want it - the exiling only really matters against BR Hollow One these days, and I'd much rather have the consistency of only needing one red source to cast my sweeper than that upside in a single matchup.
The original reason for 2 blue sources was that Tron, E Tron, and even Control would sometimes be able to steal wins by taking away the one blue source in your deck while you had a pile of countermagic in your hands. But given the metagame right now, it probably is better to have 2 red sources, so turn the Breeding Pool into a Stomping Ground. I'm a little less excited about cutting the Forest for the Stomping Ground just because there's still so much random stuff with piles of Ghost Quarters and Field of Ruins (Fields of Ruin?), and also Blood Moon. But it still might be right.
I rearranged my manabase to have 2 red sources and 1 blue after running into the same issues you outlined. I find myself wanting to cast multiple red spells more often than multiple blue spells in most matchups right now, and I'm not currently playing Snapcaster. That also prompted me to run Terminate over Dismember, which is less mana efficient but a little safer against Humans and Hollow One. I think the argument could also be made to swap the basic forest for a Stomping Ground, with Field of Ruin at a relative low point right now.
For those of you running Fulminator Mage right now, do you expect to swap him for Damping Sphere after Dominaria releases?
I've really been digging Manamorphose, but felt like I still wasn't drawing threats often enough. Adding a single Grim Flayer has helped that, but have the rest of you not felt like you've had this issue?
Damping Sphere also hurts us a fair bit --- we generate gobs of tempo by casting multiple spells per turn. Maybe it's still good and we should probably test it, by my knee jerk reaction is 'no'.
I've had a single Flayer in place of the 4th IoK before, but my preference is to stick with 8 threats + 4 traverse just because there isn't much room for interaction after that. Also, it's mostly fine to not find your threat until turn 3, but you really want the discard spells to start on turn 1, so in that sense the pile of cantrips does a better job of finding threats on time than they do interaction. I'm not sure what else you could cut instead of an IoK either - cutting a removal spell or TBR can't be right given what the top tables look like, so that leaves us with a Stub. I could see it, but I'm skeptical.
Alternatively, if you aren't aggressively mulliganing hands that are unlikely to make a threat in the first few turns of the game, that might solve some of the problem.
I'm also hesitant to just drop the forest for the reasons you stated. I actually have all of my countermagic in the sideboard right now, so I haven't had any issues yet with the single blue source.
RG Eldrazi seems like the easiest parts of Bant Eldrazi and Eldrazi Tron for us. It's just big dumb idiots, and our idiots are bigger. I will gladly play against any Eldrazi deck not running Eldrazi Displacer, Drowner of Hope, or All is Dust.
My thoughts on Damping Sphere are that I only want it for the Storm and Tron matchups, and that it'll generally be one of the last cards I play against them. Curving discard -> Goyf -> sphere against Tron seems good, and you could even potentially hold up Stubborn Denial alongside the sphere. It could end up being too narrow, but given the aggressive nature of the deck I think you'll win any game against Tron where it resolves.
I replaced the 4th Manamorphose with Flayer because I didn't want to cut any of the actual spells. It's possible that's incorrect, but for the reasons you outlined I didn't feel like I could cut anything else.
I'm happy to aggressively mulligan 7-card hands, but my issue was 6-card hands that have something like 2 lands and 4 interactive spells, but no threat. I don't really feel like I can mulligan those, but at the same time they can sometimes have a hard time getting to delirium or lowering my life total quickly enough to enable Traverse or Death's Shadow. Or is that a 6-card hand that you guys would still mulligan?
I think if Damping Sphere is good for us, you've perfectly explained why. I'm just worried about whether things will consistently play out like that. For example, it's a lot easier for them to interact with Sphere than with a Fulminator.
If you're already moving all of the countermagic to the SB, I think finding room for Flayer shouldn't be too difficult. Consider this MD:
Where manabase is probably standard with Stomping Ground over Breeding Pool and 2 basics. I'm pretty tempted to try this tbh.
I would not mulligan that 6 in the dark, but if I knew that I was playing against e.g. burn or storm, I would snap mull. Against other fast decks, it depends on how fast I really need a threat and how good the interaction is against them. E.g. against humans I'd keep that hand if it had a pile of removal or even a mix of removal and discard, but I'd be more inclined to mulligan against Hollow One with that same hand because Bloodghast and Phoenix make trading removal for threats much weaker.
It is easier for them to interact with sphere, but they can only board in so many cards, and then they need to draw them. We tend to run out of targets for Inquisition anyway, so I could see having the extra discard spells to remove something like a Nature's Claim. Which would be a very annoying card, specifically, to invite them to play. I think we're on the same page here, though.
This is the list I've been running for the past couple days:
I wanted access to more 1 mana removal spells that aren't Fatal Push (thank you Meddling Mage), which led me to include 2 Bolts (I've also been messing with Tarfire in that slot, and a 1/1 split). I think that Bolt is better than Stub against the general meta right now, and that the matchups where I want my countermagic are so much better post-board (Burn, Tron, combo) that I can afford a shakier game 1. I've liked having access to the third TBR, because there are a lot of games where that's the only card you want to draw.
I haven't actually played against any decks where I would board in Bitterblossom, but there was a list a while back that 5-0ed with 4 in the sideboard and it's a pet card of mine, so I wanted to give it a whirl. It's a hard to answer, proactive threat that can run away with the game if played early on, and also provides two uncommon card types for Goyf/Delirium. I've also felt like I want to be conservative with my life total early on against midrange/Jeskai decks so I don't get punked out, but that sometimes makes it hard to deploy Death's Shadow later. Bitterblossom lets me be conservative early while also helping me get to the point where Death's Shadow is powerful. I know that it's not great late in the game or when behind, but the aggressive nature of the Manamorphose builds already dictate that your late game isn't super great.
It is easier for them to interact with sphere, but they can only board in so many cards, and then they need to draw them. We tend to run out of targets for Inquisition anyway, so I could see having the extra discard spells to remove something like a Nature's Claim. Which would be a very annoying card, specifically, to invite them to play. I think we're on the same page here, though.
This is the list I've been running for the past couple days:
I wanted access to more 1 mana removal spells that aren't Fatal Push (thank you Meddling Mage), which led me to include 2 Bolts (I've also been messing with Tarfire in that slot, and a 1/1 split). I think that Bolt is better than Stub against the general meta right now, and that the matchups where I want my countermagic are so much better post-board (Burn, Tron, combo) that I can afford a shakier game 1. I've liked having access to the third TBR, because there are a lot of games where that's the only card you want to draw.
I haven't actually played against any decks where I would board in Bitterblossom, but there was a list a while back that 5-0ed with 4 in the sideboard and it's a pet card of mine, so I wanted to give it a whirl. It's a hard to answer, proactive threat that can run away with the game if played early on, and also provides two uncommon card types for Goyf/Delirium. I've also felt like I want to be conservative with my life total early on against midrange/Jeskai decks so I don't get punked out, but that sometimes makes it hard to deploy Death's Shadow later. Bitterblossom lets me be conservative early while also helping me get to the point where Death's Shadow is powerful. I know that it's not great late in the game or when behind, but the aggressive nature of the Manamorphose builds already dictate that your late game isn't super great.
Would you consider just siding out all death shadows vs Control/BGx decks and just bring in the bitter blossoms? Is this a legit plan vs them?
I don't think you want to cut Death's Shadow. I'm looking to trim on removal against control decks and discard against midrange ones, and that looks to free up enough slots for what I want to do. I'm specifically looking to help address the situations where you either can't or don't want to aggressively lower your life total against grindier decks early in the game. Decks like Jund, Jeskai, and Mardu do a lot of incidental chip damage that makes it risky to hose your life total too aggressively. My hope is that Bitterblossom bridges that gap, removing the burden of turboing your life total early while also gradually transitioning to a point where you are playing your Shadows. It also requires a completely different set of tools to deal with than the ones that answer Goyf and Shadow, and is resilient against board wipes in a way that Lingering Souls isn't. This is all academic and might be terrible, and more importantly the meta just may not make it necessary, but I wanted to explore the option.
What's more consistent about the Traverse build vs Grixis? I thought that consistency (via blue cantrips) was one of the reasons people migrated to Grixis in the first place?
What's more consistent about the Traverse build vs Grixis? I thought that consistency (via blue cantrips) was one of the reasons people migrated to Grixis in the first place?
I think Traverse is a little more consistent about putting a fatty into play early, but that's about it. Grixis is more consistent in most other ways.
Against Hollow One it can buy you some needed time, but if I am pretty sure Hollow One will board out Burning Inquiries which will make Souls less apealing.
I learned it when playing Jund that discard is not bad against Humans postboard (especially IOK), therefore I would always leave in discard against them. I don't like Lilianas against Humans because new Lili doesn't kill their threats while old Lili only gets the worst of many threats in most cases.
I pretty much agree about LotV. I liked her a lot better when the midrange decks we were fighting were mostly other Shadow decks.
Agree completely.
Right now, against basically all of the control decks and many of the midrange decks, I would rather Stub + TBR them than try to grind. We can't play a long game against most control decks because they'll either bolt us out or Field of Ruin / Ghost Quarter / Tec Edge us to pieces, or sometimes Bolt + Blood Moon. But we can punch a hole in their hand with discard to stick + protect a threat with Stub/Delay, and close faster with TBR (though I often shave 1 postboard). Against Mardu Pyromancer, LotV is bad, and boarding into Souls is just doing what they're doing but worse, and in the long game they have Blood Moon. I'd rather get under them, use Spellbomb to keep them off Bedlam Reveler, and use TBR to beat the chump blockers. The other main midrange deck of the format is Jund, and unfortunately, getting under them doesn't work. To beat Jund, specifically, we need Lingering Souls, and there Liliana does a lot of work. But that's the only major archetype where I want either of those cards, so it just doesn't seem worth it to me.
If you think Grixis Shadow is becoming more of a player, that's another point in LotV + Souls favor, and LotV is also good against the Bogles menace, but I'm still pretty skeptical. It's so much easier to pick up percentage points in other matchups, in particular against Humans and Hollow one with cheap, targeted removal, and against big mana decks with a couple of ways to interact with lands, that I have trouble committing so many MD/SB slots to 1-2.5 decks that are barely in the top 10 of the format. Maybe there's a way to make Souls work as a reasonable SB card in some of the aggro matchups, but it's not good against Humans and seems only OK against Hollow One, which are pretty big strikes against it.
Killing Jace, BGx decks and other midrange decks without Path, racing aggro matchups.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=18936&f=MO
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
Abzan Coco 2-1
Mardu Pyro 2-1
RG Eldrazi 2-0
Zoo 2-0
Affinity 1-2
Not much to say here, Manamorphose is so good I can't even describe it. The deck feels like a freight train. Not impressed with Liliana TLH or Fulminators at all today, wish I had more sweepers. Onwards and upwards.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
Nice finish! How did the Mardu and Eldrazi games go? Those seem like difficult matchups when I've faced them, but certainly winnable. Were you using the same list you posted a while back? I'm playing in an invitational in a couple weeks and I'm thinking of running 4C blue, but I'm still unsure of the number of manamorphose to include as well as the sweepers. Do you think Anger of the Gods is doable with 2 red sources + Manamorphose, or would you stick to something like Kozilek's Return or even Pyroclasm for the speed? What would you replace LtLH with in the board for the grindier matchups? Interested to hear your opinion if you'd be up for elaborating some
If you're gonna run Manamorphose in your build then I really don't see the point in running fewer than 4 copies. Maybe you can get away with 3 but it's there for consistency so you want to draw it consistently as well in my opinion.
The RG Eldrazi matchup seemed very bad to me but I got a bit lucky as he didn't see any Groves in both games. Discard was key here. Remember that you need Dismember + another card to deal with Smasher. Yes it seems obvious but we're so used to just dumping our hand that these things can really come back to bite you in the ass. TBR pulled me through in the end.
Mardu Pyro - there was no way I could win this but somehow things lined up correctly. Double Nihil Spellbomb kept his yard empty and Revelers stranded in his hand. Shadow for pressure + topdecked Hazoret for exactly lethal.
As for Liliana, I'm not sure what to replace her with. I love her -2 in the grindy matchups but there's just so much aggro right now that her +1 seems awfully anemic sometimes. The Fulminators have been very underwhelming for me but I'm taking Spooly's word for it and keeping them in for now - maybe I haven't hit the correct matchups yet.
I don't think you can run Anger in our deck at all. If you don't have Manamorphose in hand it's a dead card, and you don't want Anger to be a dead card ever. Radiant Flames seems like a decent option right now. Of course I wish I'd had Kozilek's Return against Affinity yesterday but it's not great against the rest of the field. Same goes for Pyroclasm, you need to be able to deal 3 damage with your sweeper.
That said, with 2 red sources Anger might be fine but I don't know if you want to fetch red so aggressively. Depends on your manabase really. I was talking to one of our better players about the deck briefly yesterday and he said that having a second red source post-board is pretty crucial with the current sideboard configuration I'm running. Normally I might not have agreed but throughout the final game I found myself praying for a Manamorphose as I couldn't activate Grim Lavamancer and Abrade in the same turn off of just one Crypt. This cost me a precious few points of damage that would have swiftly locked up the game in my favor. We bring in quite a few red cards in these aggro matchups and if we lose our Crypt it's done. Then again, Manamorphose mitigates this somewhat, but I'm still curious to hear people's thoughts on this.
Give this version a shot, I think it's much better positioned than the ones trying to run Flayer and Liliana of the Veil right now. Manamorphose fixes so many of our problems and speeds things up immensely. Hope this helped somewhat.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
For those of you running Fulminator Mage right now, do you expect to swap him for Damping Sphere after Dominaria releases?
I've really been digging Manamorphose, but felt like I still wasn't drawing threats often enough. Adding a single Grim Flayer has helped that, but have the rest of you not felt like you've had this issue?
Nice Job! I'm glad the Manamorphoses are catching on. They've seemed insane to me.
RG Eldrazi has felt very winnable to me. Even favorable. I may have just been getting lucky against them, but it feels like the combination of piles of discard and larger creatures than theirs makes it difficult to them. You just have to pick your spots to play around stuff like Reality Smasher. I know you've said you haven't been impressed with the Fulminators, but this is a matchup where just one Fulminator can often devastate them, since unlike Tron their haymakers often can't really catch them back up when they're far behind.
I think Mardu Pyro is a rough matchup, but it's much more winnable than Jund. Spellbomb is a big reason why.
As far as sweepers, I think you're right - Radiant Flames is the way to go, unless for some reason you expect a pile of Affinity. Even if we could cast Anger, I'm not sure we would want it - the exiling only really matters against BR Hollow One these days, and I'd much rather have the consistency of only needing one red source to cast my sweeper than that upside in a single matchup.
The original reason for 2 blue sources was that Tron, E Tron, and even Control would sometimes be able to steal wins by taking away the one blue source in your deck while you had a pile of countermagic in your hands. But given the metagame right now, it probably is better to have 2 red sources, so turn the Breeding Pool into a Stomping Ground. I'm a little less excited about cutting the Forest for the Stomping Ground just because there's still so much random stuff with piles of Ghost Quarters and Field of Ruins (Fields of Ruin?), and also Blood Moon. But it still might be right.
Damping Sphere also hurts us a fair bit --- we generate gobs of tempo by casting multiple spells per turn. Maybe it's still good and we should probably test it, by my knee jerk reaction is 'no'.
I've had a single Flayer in place of the 4th IoK before, but my preference is to stick with 8 threats + 4 traverse just because there isn't much room for interaction after that. Also, it's mostly fine to not find your threat until turn 3, but you really want the discard spells to start on turn 1, so in that sense the pile of cantrips does a better job of finding threats on time than they do interaction. I'm not sure what else you could cut instead of an IoK either - cutting a removal spell or TBR can't be right given what the top tables look like, so that leaves us with a Stub. I could see it, but I'm skeptical.
Alternatively, if you aren't aggressively mulliganing hands that are unlikely to make a threat in the first few turns of the game, that might solve some of the problem.
RG Eldrazi seems like the easiest parts of Bant Eldrazi and Eldrazi Tron for us. It's just big dumb idiots, and our idiots are bigger. I will gladly play against any Eldrazi deck not running Eldrazi Displacer, Drowner of Hope, or All is Dust.
My thoughts on Damping Sphere are that I only want it for the Storm and Tron matchups, and that it'll generally be one of the last cards I play against them. Curving discard -> Goyf -> sphere against Tron seems good, and you could even potentially hold up Stubborn Denial alongside the sphere. It could end up being too narrow, but given the aggressive nature of the deck I think you'll win any game against Tron where it resolves.
I replaced the 4th Manamorphose with Flayer because I didn't want to cut any of the actual spells. It's possible that's incorrect, but for the reasons you outlined I didn't feel like I could cut anything else.
I'm happy to aggressively mulligan 7-card hands, but my issue was 6-card hands that have something like 2 lands and 4 interactive spells, but no threat. I don't really feel like I can mulligan those, but at the same time they can sometimes have a hard time getting to delirium or lowering my life total quickly enough to enable Traverse or Death's Shadow. Or is that a 6-card hand that you guys would still mulligan?
If you're already moving all of the countermagic to the SB, I think finding room for Flayer shouldn't be too difficult. Consider this MD:
12 cantrips
8 usual threats
4 Traverse the Ulvenwald
1 Grim Flayer
2 Temur Battle Rage
3 Fatal Push
2 Dismember
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Terminate
Where manabase is probably standard with Stomping Ground over Breeding Pool and 2 basics. I'm pretty tempted to try this tbh.
I would not mulligan that 6 in the dark, but if I knew that I was playing against e.g. burn or storm, I would snap mull. Against other fast decks, it depends on how fast I really need a threat and how good the interaction is against them. E.g. against humans I'd keep that hand if it had a pile of removal or even a mix of removal and discard, but I'd be more inclined to mulligan against Hollow One with that same hand because Bloodghast and Phoenix make trading removal for threats much weaker.
This is the list I've been running for the past couple days:
1x Blood Crypt
4x Bloodstained Mire
1x Forest
2x Overgrown Tomb
1x Polluted Delta
1x Stomping Ground
1x Swamp
4x Verdant Catacombs
1x Watery Grave
1x Wooded Foothills
Artifact (4)
4x Mishra's Bauble
Instant (14)
2x Abrupt Decay
3x Fatal Push
2x Lightning Bolt
3x Manamorphose
2x Temur Battle Rage
2x Terminate
4x Death's Shadow
1x Grim Flayer
4x Street Wraith
4x Tarmogoyf
Sorcery (12)
4x Inquisition of Kozilek
4x Thoughtseize
4x Traverse the Ulvenwald
2x Abrade
3x Bitterblossom
2x Collective Brutality
2x Delay
1x Golgari Charm
1x Radiant Flames
3x Stubborn Denial
1x Temur Battle Rage
I wanted access to more 1 mana removal spells that aren't Fatal Push (thank you Meddling Mage), which led me to include 2 Bolts (I've also been messing with Tarfire in that slot, and a 1/1 split). I think that Bolt is better than Stub against the general meta right now, and that the matchups where I want my countermagic are so much better post-board (Burn, Tron, combo) that I can afford a shakier game 1. I've liked having access to the third TBR, because there are a lot of games where that's the only card you want to draw.
I haven't actually played against any decks where I would board in Bitterblossom, but there was a list a while back that 5-0ed with 4 in the sideboard and it's a pet card of mine, so I wanted to give it a whirl. It's a hard to answer, proactive threat that can run away with the game if played early on, and also provides two uncommon card types for Goyf/Delirium. I've also felt like I want to be conservative with my life total early on against midrange/Jeskai decks so I don't get punked out, but that sometimes makes it hard to deploy Death's Shadow later. Bitterblossom lets me be conservative early while also helping me get to the point where Death's Shadow is powerful. I know that it's not great late in the game or when behind, but the aggressive nature of the Manamorphose builds already dictate that your late game isn't super great.
Would you consider just siding out all death shadows vs Control/BGx decks and just bring in the bitter blossoms? Is this a legit plan vs them?
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
I think Traverse is a little more consistent about putting a fatty into play early, but that's about it. Grixis is more consistent in most other ways.