MTG Salvation

Do you think Welder is enough protection against Null Rod? Cause I'm looking at this deck and the first thing I think of is "nearly half of this deck is neutered by Null Rod."

If you want to build a deck disruption/mill deck why make a crazy complex Leveler combo when you could go with the cool new Painter's Adept / Grindstone combo?

The difference is if they counter your combo piece (you're running exactly 2 Endless Whispers) you're effectively dead in the water. It's not even an artifact you can Welder back up. If you run Painterstone you have a 2 piece combo, each useful in it's own right (Grindstone keeps people honest with top-of-library tricks, Painter lets you run REB and Pyroblast as 1 mana counters/destroy target permanent spells) AND they're both artifacts so you can Welder them right up if they're countered.

Half of what you just said greatly indicates to me that you either aren't reading the actual cards and/or don't know what you're talking about.

I'll adress my specific issues:

Painter's Servant is not color-specific, so I don't see why you brought up that whole design issue. No color-specific artifact recently printed is good in any format. Furthermore, color-specific artifacts have existed forever (see:iron star, etc), so it's not a new concept.

Even then, this is not the place for that discussion. Whether or not you "like" a design concept shouldn't have a whole lot do do with figuring out how to play with them. That would be like me saying "you should cut the moxen because the art isn't very good".

I'm not sure what you think Grindstone actually is, but it was never played in vintage or any other recent format until painter's servant. Furthermore, what you fail to aknowlege about this combo over yours is that it is significantly easier to play, is mono-brown, is weldable in both elements, is cheaper, repeatable, and all around just better (in most reasonable circumstances).

Regarding your Dreadnought claim, it actually sees fairly significant play. This indicates to me that you aren't looking at vintage results or have a firm grasp of the metagame; deeznoughts is a fairly significant player, and it is to your disadvantage to ignore that kind of deck.

Now we get to the creativity argument: I am all for creativity, but not for the sake of creativity. You are playing bad and inferior cards; it isn't an issue of innovating at this point, its an issue of an understanding of basic deck mechanics.

Allow me to elaborate.

You have built a rather eclectic casual deck, without clear focus and with serious design flaws. These will mannefest themselves in the speed and ability of your deck, although that may not be obvious in testing. What you have done is found a few (obsolete, for the most part) combos, and tried to throw them into a deck, but payed no attention to what you're up against.

For instance, you have NO disruption. None. This is an irreconcilable design flaw. Look at any given vintage deck. Disruption is a neccessity; esspecially when you have such a slow deck focus. Decks like long and ichorid are going to win before you can even do anything, and decks like slaver, bomberman, etc are going to laugh; drain your big spells and use them to fuel bigger, more effecient threats.

Next, you have an insane amount of really bad mana sources. Over half your deck is mana. This just statistically isn't a good idea as it will directly lead to virtual card disadvantage. I would start by cutting all of the artifact lands; Run more effecient mana sources. You can also incorporate disruptive elements here in the form of wastes; but say you want some sort of five color/big mana theme, why not play with some ancient tombs, some cities of brass; that is, try to mazimize effeciency. You're running power to facilitate fast/quality mana, and then you squander that with a vulnerable and unneccessarilly large land base.

Furthermore, while creativity is good, you still need some focus. You can't just throw random cards into a deck and expect to win with "creativity". There should be a goal. In this respect, your cards choices and quantities need to refelct this. You have a bunch of combos, but you only run 2 of each piece. The conistancy just isn't there, and too often you will be drawing dead cards.

This is compounded by the uselessness of the comob elements outside the combo, coupled with their inneffeciency. If you draw a leveler and a nought, you have just drawn two completely useless cards until you draw an elment to combo with them; which, due to lack of disruption, has a high chance of not resolving. Look at other deck designs; you want to minimize dead deck space. This is why bomberman plays aether spellbomb and not pyrite; although pyrite "combos" better, its less useful outside of the combo. Or painter decks, which make use of painters to strengthen elmental blasts and forces. They also often only run one grindstone, and encorporate elments such as the trinket engine in order to obtain the copy when it's relevent, while similtaneously avoiding situations where they draw it when it isn't.

Looking at your deck, you have all your eggs in a poorly made basket with holes in it, to put it bluntly. You have prolific and eclectic combo elments, lacking consistancy, with no disruption or protecitno, and a disproportionate mana base all in a highly vulnterable framework.

This probably is comming off harsh, but try and get something out of what I'm trying to impress. Playing "fun" decks is fine, but unless your idea of fun is losing every game, I'm really trying to help you out.

Quote from MetalWorker

so please help me turn this from "Eclectic Mess into an Efficient & Dynamic." [/SIZE][/FONT]

That's the root problem, though. I don't think there's a way this deck can be made "efficient and dynamic" without essentially turning it into the Painter's Servant/Grindstone combo. It's trying to achieve the same end (decking the opponent), while relying on a combo that is inherently less efficient as each of the two parts of the combo has little-to-no real value by themselves.

One thing that I tried to cut down on when I was moderator of this forum was threads for decks whose sole reason for existing was "I didn't want to play this other deck that does what I'm trying to do better."

As Glix said, creativity for the sake of creativity doesn't really stand up as a justification for competitive deck-building. If the deck doesn't have a real advantage in a tournament for some reason (it has a better matchup against X archetype, for example) then there's no real reason for it to exist.

And honestly, I just don't see where this deck would ever be better than Painter's Servant/Grindstone.

I'm sorry for coming of as insulting, but I'm not sure where you got to this just about skulkins? Why are you talking about them? I assumed you were talking about painter, because it was the only scarecrow mentioned in this thread, so when you were talking about them, you have to understand that it logically sounds like you are refering to servant. Even then, this argument is irrelevent.

The deck is looking better, but strip mine is restricted (that would be ridiculous if it weren't) fyi.

As per the deck itself, you now have two good cores (drain, shop), but they are conflicting. You don't have the mana base to support double blue turn 2, which is what drain expect. Furthermore, shop is a card that you also want to play as early as possible. To illustrate this conflict, think about this situation: You have an opening hand with shop and a blue source. Which do you play turn 1? If you play shop, you can play those artifacts, but now you can't play your drain until turn 3 at the earliest.

Furthermore, your shop/metalworker core is highly demanding of a large quanityt of artifacts, while your force/drain core is highly demaning of blue cards/islands. These strategies therefore conflict.

I would advise chosing one of these directions and sticking with it.

Due to you seeming to want to stick with the shared fate combo, I would be inclined to go for the blue core, as drain + islands is going to be a much more consisnat level of playing shared fate.

Also, with a blue core, the servant/grindstone combo is looking much more appealing to me. I would advise testing it at least. The combo is both more versitile and more practical, so I don't see it as an issue of creativity so much as effeciency, as it shouldn't alter the play style of the deck too much.

Regardless, that's some serious improvement, keep up the good work.