I like the two sideboard Krosan grip, against hate of all kinds, pods, batterskulls, o-stones. never cutting it as long as I'm splashing green in an 8-rack deck.
How do find it? No fetches or Isolated chapel? I really have been feeling the need as Dolzero said a few pages back: to reliably be able to hit both green and black on t2. I'll have to go back and look at that landbase, but I'm struggling to fit GQ/Tec Edge, Manlands, and Mana Base in.
Edit: Thinking about this makes me wish they'd reprint the Tainted lands for modern, haha. Can't see it being important enough though.
Well, I came to this deck from R/G Tron (I still have it sleeved up and go back and forth), but I don't understand all the concern about Tron. Why exactly is this matchup that hard? Having played Tron a lot (very successfully) for the past year and a half, discard makes the deck really struggle. As long as you steal the right pieces with your discard (ie, things that help get tron online), then what makes this so hard? Bridge cancels out wurmcoil and Emerakul pretty handily, most R/G Tron decks only run a solo Ulamog in the side, so isn't it really just Karn that gives us issues? Why are people not talking about fulminator mage and pithing needle against Karn? They shut it down pretty effectively. Now, the R/G tron player can proactively bring in their artifact hate from the side. If you really really wanted to use 8 slots against tron, wouldn't you do 2x Fulminator Mage, 4x Pithing Needle, and 2x Buried Ruin, or some combination of that?
If it's O-stone that scares you, remember this is a deck with 20 lands. Fulminator Mage their urza away and they'll be lucky to see their 5th land to blow the O-Stone by turn 8 or 9.
I haven't played my one deck against the other, which I probably should, but I just need help conceptualizing the issues. Whenever I saw a deck with discard while playing it, a big cringe ensued.
It's the combination of O Stone and Karn. Mage is terrible in this deck; Ghost Quarter is much better but we'd have to run it in the sideboard (unless the meta is Tron heavy), and I'm not sure it's worth it, especially if we're running Pack Rat too. But GQ + Extraction is probably the best way to fight it if we choose to try. Needle is unreliable: you name O Stone and they Karn it away; you name Karn and they O Stone it away. Also, I'd rather be running other things than Needle, anyway.
Play the matchup even just a couple of times and you'll quickly understand. You underestimate the power of your own deck's redundancy; I really have no idea why you'd be afraid of discard in our 16 discard spell deck, let alone a "normal" deck with 2-6 discard spells.
How do find it? No fetches or Isolated chapel? I really have been feeling the need as Dolzero said a few pages back: to reliably be able to hit both green and black on t2. I'll have to go back and look at that landbase, but I'm struggling to fit GQ/Tec Edge, Manlands, and Mana Base in.
Edit: Thinking about this makes me wish they'd reprint the Tainted lands for modern, haha. Can't see it being important enough though.
I have 9 white sources. Main deck the only white is Path to exile. After siding there's maybe 4 or 5 other white, only Leyline needs double. So I don't need to reliably hit BW by turn two. And I don't really like check-lands, I want the option to have my mana now. It's something I hate about Dakmor.
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Okay, I'll maybe start testing that in a bit. I've got a lot more green requirements than you do, though. I may need a heavier investment into getting green mana.
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Not 100% on the pain lands, but I'll keep them in for now. I'll test this out and see if my mana woes get better. If anyone has any ideas on how to squeeze 2 more mutavaults into the list I posted earlier it'd be really appreciated. I do like Treetop Village, but I think if I went that way I'd need to replace the 3 Pack Rats with 3 Scavenging Oozes, as Mutavault's biggest Pro. in the this deck is it's synergy with Pack Rat. Village would give Ooze more G to play with, I guess. Is it worth running 2 Mutavaults? Has anyone tried that with Pack Rat?
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Could you be more specific about what you think we should be doing for the matchup? Like destroying their hand is obvious, but in terms of sideboard (dedicated burn hate, some, or just none?) and what you'd switch out.
I'd rather not play leyline at all and dedicate those spots to harder matches.
If burn is actually trying to beat you and you play Ravens/IoK turn one, Wrench/2 1cmc discard spells turn 2, they'll be at 1 or 0 cards in hand, having dealt 4 to 10 damage. Which is still not worrisome. At this point, if they have Eidolon out it must be killed since it punishes all of our cards, Goblin Guide can be ignored one more turn and then we play racks. If they don't have eidolon out you play racks and win.
So yes, if we were to sideboard against burn, I'd opt for -4Thoughtseize -4Bridge +4Darkblast +4Surgical, maybe get some other removal such as Smother or more VoN in the side because double-Darkblasting an ediolon is stupidity at it's finest.
Burn NEEDS it's cards, card denial is much better than hoping for a card we can't hardcast and that will be a dead draw (you just time-walked yourself against burn, hooray). Burn wouldn't be Tier 1 in Modern and Tier 1.5 in Legacy if Leyline of Sanctity actually beat it.
If you're not playing The Rack, you're not playing 8Rack, add Bob and go play the deck you really want to be playing instead of forcing yourself to play a different deck and forcing us to pretend you're not playing BGx.
What is it about this primer that attracts people who don't really want to play 8Rack?
I have a few reasons not to run them. If I had them, I'd be playing junk, I like that deck.
I also come from my 4c gifts background, which also doesn't run them. They die to everything except single lightning bolts and aren't really all that reliable. Game 1, a rack only dies to abrupt decay, and can also be good for nearly as much damage a turn.
I'm also playing a list that got shipped to me after its pilot was doing really well with it--I'm not really changing anything until I can prove something needs to.
There is also something to be said for brewing outside of top tier cards, which drew me to deck (nostalgia value) to begin with.
@Sirius_B, my hypothesis is that the classic deck isn't built properly, according to 2014 deckbuilding standards, so my build will not look like 8rack, more like 3-5rack without 24 discard spells. The fixing in general is too good to pass up in modern, I've never gotten blown out by an aven mindcensor with my 4 fetches, and blood moon mostly doesn't do anything because you only ever need a black and green at at time to abrupt decay it. It only shuts off massive raven's crimes, and only if they manage to topdeck it.
Now that we have a whole new set of fetches to play with on the cheap, the most expensive cards in the list are really just liliana, no reason for budget concerns outside of the super frugal. I largely blame people who couldn't buy fetches buying into decks like this one jacking up the price of stuff like ensnaring bridge from $5 to $20.
BTW, loam/crime/urborg/ghost quarter in my list is very common, even naturally in the opener and locks RG tron out of the game. If you play just 1 rack in the first 5 turns, the game is yours outside of their nut hand of nut hands, and green makes that possible. Its a repeatable wrench mind and rain of half-tears every turn with only two cards. Its also a great way to bait counterspells to land a liliana and actually win against other control decks.
It's fine to suggest modifications to the deck like splashing colors, going down to 7Rack to accommodate an extra card, ditching something like Bridge for some more aggressive options, etc. It's not fine to just remove most of the cards from the deck. That would be like going into the Scapeshift thread and saying "remove all but one of the Scapeshifts and just use Primeval Titan, then add Through the Breach for a combo finish." Or going into the UR Delver thread and saying to just add Goyf and cut down on Delver because he dies to Bolt anyway. Those aren't the decks being discussed.
I am going to trust that all of you are adults and can make common sense judgment calls on what is appropriate 8Rack development, and what is a totally different deck. If people can't, I'll issue spam warnings/infractions until people can.
I am going to trust that all of you are adults and can make common sense judgment calls on what is appropriate 8Rack development, and what is a totally different deck.
HAH! Fat freaking chance of this ever happening.
The only way out of this current mess is to get an official "mod approved" 8Rack core.
Here is my opinion of the core of the deck:
8 Racks
4 Liliana of the Veil
4 Raven's Crime
4 Ensnaring Bridge
4 Thoughtseize (or equivalent)
4 IoK (or equivalent)
4 Wrench Mind (or equivalent)
2-4 Alternate wincons (Pack Rat, Waste Not, etc)
This leaves some room for personal choice on removal and such, but not much. Splashes must be very delicate, to be used to upgrade a single card or two at the very most.
The core can be adjusted as well, as long as the ideas are WITHIN REASON. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss arguing about whether or not Bob belongs here. Anything would be fine compared to this disgusting mess of a conversation that is currently infecting this thread. At least when we were talking about Bob we were still at least talking about the same deck.
The only way I will continue with this thread is with a mod approved "core" that needs to be respected when posting lists.
@ BatHickey and others playing the BG version: I really like your build and as soon as I complete my card pool I'll definatelly try it out. But I want to ask one question. Is there any reason why none of you are not running tarmogoyf? With the playeset of goyfs, we are maybe talking about an absolutely different deck, but I am really curious what is the benefit of the rack over tarmogoyf. thnx for response.
You play the rack over tarmogoyf because everyone is aware of goyf and has tailored their decks for board control in some fashion. Racks don't care about that. They're harder to remove, you aren't reliant on cards in the GY, and having no/few creatures means all opponent's removal is dead weight.
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I have to say I agree with Ktkenshinx, and to a lesser extent ML. The strengths of this deck are on multiple racks. They're non interactive, and provide a good clock against our opponents. Having two in play means 6 damage a turn that our opponents can rarely deal with. What other deck can boast that? Some combo decks, maybe. Tron, I guess but even then their creatures are always easy to remove/hinder. The deck also thrives on being able to stall out the opponent early game with targeted removal, and while we can build advantage. There's a reason there's no goyf, Nyxathid, etc. Having spent a few weeks testing BG I find myself slowly changing it back to something much more resembling ML's core.
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The only way out of this current mess is to get an official "mod approved" 8Rack core.
Here is my opinion of the core of the deck:
8 Racks
4 Liliana of the Veil
4 Raven's Crime
4 Ensnaring Bridge
4 Thoughtseize (or equivalent)
4 IoK (or equivalent)
4 Wrench Mind (or equivalent)
2-4 Alternate wincons (Pack Rat, Waste Not, etc)
There is not going to be a "mod approved core". We don't have a "mod approved core" in any other thread in Modern and it worries me that people think this deck, one with very few competitive results, needs a 30+ card core to be considered pure 8Rack enough to be discussed here.
As far as I am concerned, decks in this thread just need to have 6-8 Racks (and don't push your luck on the 6 racks), a bunch of discard spells to support those racks (at least 12, probably 16, but that's not a set-in-stone infractable rule), and some synergies with those racks/discard spells. No Bridge or Lilly? Better justify it. Using something off the beaten path? Justify that too.
I am continually baffled by why this is such a problem in this thread. In the UR Twin thread, we have parallel discussions of Tempo Twin and Combo Twin, despite those decks using some different cards. BG Rock sees both true BG Rock with no splashes and stuff like Obliterator, and BGw Souls with some white added (But not enough to make it Junk). Burn sees creature heavy lists and burn spell heavy lists, and everything in between. And all of those decks have way more competitive results than this one. I don't want to say that this is a cultural issue with this thread and its posters, but if you guys keep proving me wrong in that respect, the thread is going to get archived and remade in an effort to fix those problems. There is just no reason that we are having this conversation in this thread alone and in no other thread in Modern. Get it together 8Rackers.
Understood--but 8-rack is 'modern's discard deck' to me, more than it is specifically requiring of explicitly 8 racks.
When scapeshift cuts out scapeshift, its just a neutered RUG deck, my 3-5 rack still wins with what I'm calling enough racks most of the time, just not 8.
I am under the impression that birthing pod decks run 7-8 turn 1 playable dorks so they are best able to land a turn 2 pod--a optimal play against 'the field'. They make sure by building their deck with 8 redundant 1 drop cards that they are able to do this with the maximum frequency possible without suffering diminishing returns on their card slots. The diminishing returns I'm talking about are akin to when you see affinity get their single ravager and cranial plating dealt with and all you see left over is a bunch of 1/1's, and 0/1s that don't really cut it, but its worth it to build for that explosive power.
In my deck exploration, I was finding that 8 rack effects was too many. I rarely wanted to play one, or even two until at least my third or fourth turn, which allows me quite a few extra draw steps to find them outside of my opening hand. If drawing 1 or 2 would begin to win me the game while I locked up the board in early turns and cleared a path to resolve a rack effect unmolested, I didn't want to draw them in place of 'business' spells like thoughtseize or my loam/crime engine first--it would be counter productive.
To respond to Memorylapse's 'shell' list below:
I run:
4 liliana, check
4-5 racks, half check
4 raven's crime, check
4 thoughtseize, check
0 IOK, uncheck
4 life from the loam (what I'm calling the wrench mind equivalent), arguing for a check
4 smallpox (partial wrench mind/raven's crime equivalents), ditto
4 waste nots, which generate value and clog up the board--like an ensnaring bridge, but also doubling as a win con and to help push through damage, these are functional to extra racks, but more versatile., ditto on arguing for a check.
Its the same deck, but green shows up for abrupt decay and sideboard stuff, while loam ties the deck together and adds utility to what this deck can do. I have 4 3-1 or better results in the last 4 times playing this deck, there is something to my build and its functionally related to everything 8-rack.
I was telling phone and raystack, philosophically who cares what the deck is called? Do you need to identify your build with a name, or when you put together a list are you a proponent of a strategy thats you putting your best foot forward? If this forum/thread wants to separate discard lock decks from 8-rack despite the overwhelming similarity of them for the sake of naming conventions that is fine.
To be fair though, in the case of the Twin / BGx discussions ALL of those variants have at least been proven to be effective through widespread use and tourney results.
8rack has one thing and one thing only that keeps it included in the Established forum: the ability of the thread posters here to use it to assassinate the online meta with such a high rate of success. The problem posters in here are trolls that keep suggesting radical departures from the main deck that is actually putting up the only results keeping us here. My core continues to work just fine as a surgical tool that slips through the cracks of netdeckers and their predicable builds.
If you want to keep these loam lock deck in here fine, but their proponents need to start helping fulfill the conditions that keeps this deck Established. Start winning dailies. Start winning big tourneys that count for established criteria. They have to put up useful results or be made to gtfo by a mod.
To be fair though, in the case of the Twin / BGx discussions ALL of those variants have at least been proven to be effective through widespread use and tourney results.
8rack has one thing and one thing only that keeps it included in the Established forum: the ability of the thread posters here to use it to assassinate the online meta with such a high rate of success. The problem posters in here are trolls that keep suggesting radical departures from the main deck that is actually putting up the only results keeping us here. My core continues to work just fine as a surgical tool that slips through the cracks of netdeckers and their predicable builds.
If you want to keep these loam lock deck in here fine, but their proponents need to start helping fulfill the conditions that keeps this deck Established. Start winning dailies. Start winning big tourneys that count for established criteria. They have to put up useful results or be made to gtfo by a mod.
I would think that the goal of this thread is to get 8Rack past just 3-1/4-0 status in a dozen dailies and get it to T8 more paper events, make more GP day 2s, or even sneak into a GP T16. That probably doesn't mean "radical" departures from the maindeck, but it might mean some departures from the so-called core. This deck hasn't changed much in 12 months or so, and yet it still never gets more than just over the bare minimum for MTGO dailies, and never qualifies for Established in any paper venues. People know about the deck. People have tested it, brought to big events, and tried to win with it. But something isn't working in all those instances. I would hope that people here want the deck to make it past this current plateau by whatever means necessary.
Also, this language around "my core", "my thread", "my deck" is really offputting and is likely one of the barriers to further innovation. Not only does it do a huge disservice to every contributor in the thread, it is also just not how Magic deck development works.
I'm concerned about setting a 'dead set minimum' number of rack effects to be qualified as a Rack deck. There is The Rack and Shrieking Affliction which equals 8 possible options. What happens if my build doesn't have Shrieking affliction, but it has 4 Racks? I can't post into this thread? That seems absurd.
Please remember that when you run a tutor in a deck with 4 racks, that is ostensibly running a 5th rack. Add such cards that facilitate dig, search, and draw/cantrips, and you have even more racks. Consider Fabricate or Infernal Tutor or Phyrexian Metamorph.
My thought is simple: if you run a pillar of Discard and The Rack as a primary win condition then you have yourself a Rack Deck. You don't have an 8 Rack deck, but - with all due respect and deference to repeated poor showings of Rack decks that run 8 Racks in large, premier events - you most likely have a better deck. Isn't that where we are supposed to be headed with all of this?
Let's not get caught up in the semantics of the title of this forum. Look to the Win!
22 lands
4 Urborg
4 mutavault
4 godless shrine
4 caves of koilos
4 swamp
1 plains
1 dakmor
I go back and forth on how many urborg and dakmor to run, but this is a fair representation.
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Edit: Thinking about this makes me wish they'd reprint the Tainted lands for modern, haha. Can't see it being important enough though.
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It's the combination of O Stone and Karn. Mage is terrible in this deck; Ghost Quarter is much better but we'd have to run it in the sideboard (unless the meta is Tron heavy), and I'm not sure it's worth it, especially if we're running Pack Rat too. But GQ + Extraction is probably the best way to fight it if we choose to try. Needle is unreliable: you name O Stone and they Karn it away; you name Karn and they O Stone it away. Also, I'd rather be running other things than Needle, anyway.
Play the matchup even just a couple of times and you'll quickly understand. You underestimate the power of your own deck's redundancy; I really have no idea why you'd be afraid of discard in our 16 discard spell deck, let alone a "normal" deck with 2-6 discard spells.
I have 9 white sources. Main deck the only white is Path to exile. After siding there's maybe 4 or 5 other white, only Leyline needs double. So I don't need to reliably hit BW by turn two. And I don't really like check-lands, I want the option to have my mana now. It's something I hate about Dakmor.
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its a bible, go to church, done.
3 Llanowar Wastes
4 Overgrown Tomb
5 Swamp
3 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Verdant Catacoms
2 Mutavault
Not 100% on the pain lands, but I'll keep them in for now. I'll test this out and see if my mana woes get better. If anyone has any ideas on how to squeeze 2 more mutavaults into the list I posted earlier it'd be really appreciated. I do like Treetop Village, but I think if I went that way I'd need to replace the 3 Pack Rats with 3 Scavenging Oozes, as Mutavault's biggest Pro. in the this deck is it's synergy with Pack Rat. Village would give Ooze more G to play with, I guess. Is it worth running 2 Mutavaults? Has anyone tried that with Pack Rat?
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I'd rather not play leyline at all and dedicate those spots to harder matches.
If burn is actually trying to beat you and you play Ravens/IoK turn one, Wrench/2 1cmc discard spells turn 2, they'll be at 1 or 0 cards in hand, having dealt 4 to 10 damage. Which is still not worrisome. At this point, if they have Eidolon out it must be killed since it punishes all of our cards, Goblin Guide can be ignored one more turn and then we play racks. If they don't have eidolon out you play racks and win.
So yes, if we were to sideboard against burn, I'd opt for -4Thoughtseize -4Bridge +4Darkblast +4Surgical, maybe get some other removal such as Smother or more VoN in the side because double-Darkblasting an ediolon is stupidity at it's finest.
Burn NEEDS it's cards, card denial is much better than hoping for a card we can't hardcast and that will be a dead draw (you just time-walked yourself against burn, hooray). Burn wouldn't be Tier 1 in Modern and Tier 1.5 in Legacy if Leyline of Sanctity actually beat it.
What is it about this primer that attracts people who don't really want to play 8Rack?
I also come from my 4c gifts background, which also doesn't run them. They die to everything except single lightning bolts and aren't really all that reliable. Game 1, a rack only dies to abrupt decay, and can also be good for nearly as much damage a turn.
I'm also playing a list that got shipped to me after its pilot was doing really well with it--I'm not really changing anything until I can prove something needs to.
There is also something to be said for brewing outside of top tier cards, which drew me to deck (nostalgia value) to begin with.
@Sirius_B, my hypothesis is that the classic deck isn't built properly, according to 2014 deckbuilding standards, so my build will not look like 8rack, more like 3-5rack without 24 discard spells. The fixing in general is too good to pass up in modern, I've never gotten blown out by an aven mindcensor with my 4 fetches, and blood moon mostly doesn't do anything because you only ever need a black and green at at time to abrupt decay it. It only shuts off massive raven's crimes, and only if they manage to topdeck it.
Now that we have a whole new set of fetches to play with on the cheap, the most expensive cards in the list are really just liliana, no reason for budget concerns outside of the super frugal. I largely blame people who couldn't buy fetches buying into decks like this one jacking up the price of stuff like ensnaring bridge from $5 to $20.
BTW, loam/crime/urborg/ghost quarter in my list is very common, even naturally in the opener and locks RG tron out of the game. If you play just 1 rack in the first 5 turns, the game is yours outside of their nut hand of nut hands, and green makes that possible. Its a repeatable wrench mind and rain of half-tears every turn with only two cards. Its also a great way to bait counterspells to land a liliana and actually win against other control decks.
It's fine to suggest modifications to the deck like splashing colors, going down to 7Rack to accommodate an extra card, ditching something like Bridge for some more aggressive options, etc. It's not fine to just remove most of the cards from the deck. That would be like going into the Scapeshift thread and saying "remove all but one of the Scapeshifts and just use Primeval Titan, then add Through the Breach for a combo finish." Or going into the UR Delver thread and saying to just add Goyf and cut down on Delver because he dies to Bolt anyway. Those aren't the decks being discussed.
I am going to trust that all of you are adults and can make common sense judgment calls on what is appropriate 8Rack development, and what is a totally different deck. If people can't, I'll issue spam warnings/infractions until people can.
HAH! Fat freaking chance of this ever happening.
The only way out of this current mess is to get an official "mod approved" 8Rack core.
Here is my opinion of the core of the deck:
8 Racks
4 Liliana of the Veil
4 Raven's Crime
4 Ensnaring Bridge
4 Thoughtseize (or equivalent)
4 IoK (or equivalent)
4 Wrench Mind (or equivalent)
2-4 Alternate wincons (Pack Rat, Waste Not, etc)
This leaves some room for personal choice on removal and such, but not much. Splashes must be very delicate, to be used to upgrade a single card or two at the very most.
The core can be adjusted as well, as long as the ideas are WITHIN REASON. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss arguing about whether or not Bob belongs here. Anything would be fine compared to this disgusting mess of a conversation that is currently infecting this thread. At least when we were talking about Bob we were still at least talking about the same deck.
The only way I will continue with this thread is with a mod approved "core" that needs to be respected when posting lists.
You play the rack over tarmogoyf because everyone is aware of goyf and has tailored their decks for board control in some fashion. Racks don't care about that. They're harder to remove, you aren't reliant on cards in the GY, and having no/few creatures means all opponent's removal is dead weight.
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There is not going to be a "mod approved core". We don't have a "mod approved core" in any other thread in Modern and it worries me that people think this deck, one with very few competitive results, needs a 30+ card core to be considered pure 8Rack enough to be discussed here.
As far as I am concerned, decks in this thread just need to have 6-8 Racks (and don't push your luck on the 6 racks), a bunch of discard spells to support those racks (at least 12, probably 16, but that's not a set-in-stone infractable rule), and some synergies with those racks/discard spells. No Bridge or Lilly? Better justify it. Using something off the beaten path? Justify that too.
I am continually baffled by why this is such a problem in this thread. In the UR Twin thread, we have parallel discussions of Tempo Twin and Combo Twin, despite those decks using some different cards. BG Rock sees both true BG Rock with no splashes and stuff like Obliterator, and BGw Souls with some white added (But not enough to make it Junk). Burn sees creature heavy lists and burn spell heavy lists, and everything in between. And all of those decks have way more competitive results than this one. I don't want to say that this is a cultural issue with this thread and its posters, but if you guys keep proving me wrong in that respect, the thread is going to get archived and remade in an effort to fix those problems. There is just no reason that we are having this conversation in this thread alone and in no other thread in Modern. Get it together 8Rackers.
When scapeshift cuts out scapeshift, its just a neutered RUG deck, my 3-5 rack still wins with what I'm calling enough racks most of the time, just not 8.
I am under the impression that birthing pod decks run 7-8 turn 1 playable dorks so they are best able to land a turn 2 pod--a optimal play against 'the field'. They make sure by building their deck with 8 redundant 1 drop cards that they are able to do this with the maximum frequency possible without suffering diminishing returns on their card slots. The diminishing returns I'm talking about are akin to when you see affinity get their single ravager and cranial plating dealt with and all you see left over is a bunch of 1/1's, and 0/1s that don't really cut it, but its worth it to build for that explosive power.
In my deck exploration, I was finding that 8 rack effects was too many. I rarely wanted to play one, or even two until at least my third or fourth turn, which allows me quite a few extra draw steps to find them outside of my opening hand. If drawing 1 or 2 would begin to win me the game while I locked up the board in early turns and cleared a path to resolve a rack effect unmolested, I didn't want to draw them in place of 'business' spells like thoughtseize or my loam/crime engine first--it would be counter productive.
To respond to Memorylapse's 'shell' list below:
I run:
4 liliana, check
4-5 racks, half check
4 raven's crime, check
4 thoughtseize, check
0 IOK, uncheck
4 life from the loam (what I'm calling the wrench mind equivalent), arguing for a check
4 smallpox (partial wrench mind/raven's crime equivalents), ditto
4 waste nots, which generate value and clog up the board--like an ensnaring bridge, but also doubling as a win con and to help push through damage, these are functional to extra racks, but more versatile., ditto on arguing for a check.
Its the same deck, but green shows up for abrupt decay and sideboard stuff, while loam ties the deck together and adds utility to what this deck can do. I have 4 3-1 or better results in the last 4 times playing this deck, there is something to my build and its functionally related to everything 8-rack.
I was telling phone and raystack, philosophically who cares what the deck is called? Do you need to identify your build with a name, or when you put together a list are you a proponent of a strategy thats you putting your best foot forward? If this forum/thread wants to separate discard lock decks from 8-rack despite the overwhelming similarity of them for the sake of naming conventions that is fine.
8rack has one thing and one thing only that keeps it included in the Established forum: the ability of the thread posters here to use it to assassinate the online meta with such a high rate of success. The problem posters in here are trolls that keep suggesting radical departures from the main deck that is actually putting up the only results keeping us here. My core continues to work just fine as a surgical tool that slips through the cracks of netdeckers and their predicable builds.
If you want to keep these loam lock deck in here fine, but their proponents need to start helping fulfill the conditions that keeps this deck Established. Start winning dailies. Start winning big tourneys that count for established criteria. They have to put up useful results or be made to gtfo by a mod.
I would think that the goal of this thread is to get 8Rack past just 3-1/4-0 status in a dozen dailies and get it to T8 more paper events, make more GP day 2s, or even sneak into a GP T16. That probably doesn't mean "radical" departures from the maindeck, but it might mean some departures from the so-called core. This deck hasn't changed much in 12 months or so, and yet it still never gets more than just over the bare minimum for MTGO dailies, and never qualifies for Established in any paper venues. People know about the deck. People have tested it, brought to big events, and tried to win with it. But something isn't working in all those instances. I would hope that people here want the deck to make it past this current plateau by whatever means necessary.
Also, this language around "my core", "my thread", "my deck" is really offputting and is likely one of the barriers to further innovation. Not only does it do a huge disservice to every contributor in the thread, it is also just not how Magic deck development works.
Please remember that when you run a tutor in a deck with 4 racks, that is ostensibly running a 5th rack. Add such cards that facilitate dig, search, and draw/cantrips, and you have even more racks. Consider Fabricate or Infernal Tutor or Phyrexian Metamorph.
My thought is simple: if you run a pillar of Discard and The Rack as a primary win condition then you have yourself a Rack Deck. You don't have an 8 Rack deck, but - with all due respect and deference to repeated poor showings of Rack decks that run 8 Racks in large, premier events - you most likely have a better deck. Isn't that where we are supposed to be headed with all of this?
Let's not get caught up in the semantics of the title of this forum. Look to the Win!