MTG Salvation

^^I like the list. What I like most about it is it doesn't rely heavily on the Jace crutch like every other deck that produces blue mana, and it still looks viable to me. Good job.

So I'm running a UB Tezz control deck using proliferate to enable a Tezz ultimate rather quickly. I played it at FNM last night and went 4-0 against some meta staples like kuldotha red and valakut. I'm looking forward to playing against caw-blade, I feel like that matchup wouldn't be too difficult because of the 1 main deck Thopter assembly, which also works really well with Tezz. Here's the list:

4 Tezzeret, agent of bolas

4 Everflowing Chalice
2 Contagion engine
2 Contagion Clasp
2 Chimeric Mass
2 Brittle Effigy

3 Trinket mage
3 Treasure mage
2 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Thopter Assembly

4 Preordain
2 Doom Blade
2 Go for the throat
2 Black Sun's Zenith

4 Darkslick Shores
4 Drowned Catacomb
2 Creeping Tar Pit
4 Inkmoth Nexus
3 Halimar Depths
2 Tectonic Edge
4 Island
2 Swamp



The sideboard looks like this:

2 Memoricide
2 Frost Titan
2 Steel Hellkite
2 Black Sun's Zenith
2 Ratchet Bomb
2 Mindslaver
1 Go for the throat
1 Doom Blade
1 Volition Reigns

I'm surprised nobody is discussing the Martin Juza playlist:

Looks pretty bad since it has only 3 Ratchet Bombs as answers to boros

This was Juza's full list including SB, he went 5-0 in the first round of standard and then did really bad in the first round of limited, another player named Lucas Blohon was playing the same deck and went for 21 points in standard (Round 1(4-1) plus Round 2(3-2) of standard) which is very respectable, if I'm not mistaken... I have been playing this list for about a week an so far really like the deck, very complicated to pick up and learn to play properly... The lack of counterspells MD makes it hard to protect your Kudoltha Forgemaster, the hand distruption helps a bit, but getting to untap with the Forgemaster is quite difficult and requires careful planning

So far my main gripe about the deck is the lack or early card draw and fixing, Jace and Tezz is great if you can get to them but sometimes you just need a Preordain early in the game... I am considering relegating 1 Ratchet Bomb and the MD Duress to SB in favor for 2 more Preordain's... Go for the throat has been 50/50 for me so they are going out of the SB... It's great for killing early stuff but to get it in your openning hand is quite hard when you only have 2 copies... Also I am considering switching 1 Flashfreeze, the Negate and the Spell Pierce for 3 Stoic Rebutal's, my argument for this is that to protect you Forgemaster you need Hard counters since decks like Boros and Caw Go has access to cheap artifact hate, more often then not you will hit Metalcraft so effectively it is a Counterspell... Yes I know we end up losing Metalcraft after activating Forgemaster, but before that we still do and that is all we really need, a good cheap hard counter to protect the Forgemaster so that we can get and activation... Also it's versatility to hit a wider range of spells appeals very much to me...

So here is my tweaked version

I've taken up learning how to play Juza's deck, since Caw-Go isn't really my style of UW and I have much more fun playing combo. I agree with the guy above in noticing that one of the things I think it lacks is more Preordains. I read Juza's article and understand why he favors just two, but in my case I've found that I draw a good number of hands that are missing one step in the sequence and I think that moving to four Preordain is what I'm going to test as well. The MB Duress is going to be one of the cuts, but I'm still trying to feel around for the other, might be a Ratchet Bomb as well but I want some more games against aggro builds before I figure that out for sure. Plus, Preordain has the occasional bonus of letting you move that BSC/Battlesphere/Mindslaver that you just didn't want to draw down to the bottom.

It is much more entertaining to play imo over the UB Grave Titan builds of recent Standard and I think it will have better game in my area as long as everyone hasn't switched to Kuldotha. Going to side disfigures just to be on the safe side I think, lol.