The latest thing in the Shardless BUG vs. Omnitell (it's not new at all, actually) is stocking a white land in the sideboard along with a set of Meddling Mage. This is intended primarily to shore up the Omnitell matchup. I haven't tried it so I don't know how good it is, but a lot of excellent players endorse the plan.
I've been wondering why Imperial Painter isn't better in the current metagame. Is there anything especially challenging to it aside from the Emrakuls that Omnitell brings to the table?
I suggest taking Shardless, it's still a very good deck that's well under the radar at the moment. Just be sure that you have a plan for all the Dig Through Time decks. However, if you really expect Burn (I never expect Burn), Shardless is a dangerous choice. Still, given the choice between a deck that plays Brainstorm and a deck that doesn't play this card, I side with the Brainstorm deck.
Barbarian Ring is an amazing card, it's uncounterable damage from a land! It's great to be able to get this additional advantage from the cards that cast out spells. After testing it, I wouldn't take it out any more than I would take out a Price of Progress. It doesn't work with Grim Lavamancer though, so one has to play a Swiftspear build to use the Ring.
I am partial to the Unhinged mountains myself, having deemed it unduly difficult to acquire the APAC: Mount Fuji versions in the numbers that I require for the deck. I like how red the Unhinged mountains are, they practically glow with fire.
I agree that one ought to have a plan for Miracles, it is a frequently seen deck. I just find it odd how personally I don't see the deck that much: the numbers don't lie, Miracles is frequently seen on the other side of the board. No one who plays Burn should be unfamiliar with or unprepared for the matchup. For myself, I think that as long as I play intelligently regarding Counterbalance costs and the timing of spells, bring enough sideboard cards i.e. blasts, Vexing Shushers, and the completely over-the-top bomb that is Koth of the Hammer, I'll win around 50% of the games.
It's not the Miracle players who have me spooked and worried about bringing Burn to a tournament, it's the other combo players. The last time I played at the LGS in Beijing, I faced 4 combo players (two on Omnitell) and 1 Team America. The meta there has warped away from Miracles and towards tempo+Omnitell. Shortly afterward I played in Worcester MA, where the only combo player I encountered was piloting Enchantress. I guess it's true what they say, all metas are local.
Does anyone know of a good Taiga list? I've recently acquired one and may want to put it to some use.
One other way to deal with Miracles decks is to dedicate some sideboard slots to Koth of the Hammer. He is utterly ruthless in that matchup. Even in games where they answer every other card in your hand and get an early Countertop, he can still resolve and win the game alone.
I really think that Borowicz burn deck, the Swiftspear build with 19 land and 2 Koth of the Hammer in the sideboard, is a good version of the deck. It has those turn 3 kills that push up the Omnitell win rate, and it also can bring in the red planeswalker for Miracles.
Personally though, I don't really see that many people playing Miracles these days. It's always present in the tournaments I get to attend, but it's always outnumbered by other decks. Delver is back in a big way, but I don't think this is a matchup that Burn is worried about. Sometimes I think about taking out the Koths for some more Blazes because they'd be useful more often, but living the dream is so amazing that I can't bring myself to take him away. It's fun to smack people with Mountains. Nice, expensive mountains.
I think it's worth investigating, I've found it a lot of fun post-Miracles. BURG has a lot of elements I enjoy while minimizing the things I didn't like so much. Instead of first answering threats and developing mana and only later playing the win condition (Miracles), with BURG Plan A is to put down a win condition first and apply the disruption until it gets there. There is also Plan B: card advantage via Digs/Sylvan and hard-to-stop damage via TNN. The thing that I didn't like so much with Miracles was being under time pressure constantly, finishing every round with a few minutes left (at best) is hard to do all day long.
There will be a minor problem to the deck if Dig Through Time gets banned, however. Not only does the deck abuse the card itself, but it functions best in an environment of Omnitell/Miracles that would be substantially altered in the event of a banning. On the other hand, Sensei's Divining Top isn't so safe from the ban hammer either. A fair number of players are of the opinion that it ought to go.
Miracles does do what you think it does, the deck is balanced and powerful against a wide variety of opposing plans. It isn't quite 50/50 against the field, but has comfortably solid matchups against a couple of decks in particular. It also has a few matchups that are tougher (Cloudpost, MUD, Infect, DnT, Goblins).
The other thing you might try is moving onto the more controlling side of Grixis Delver, BURG. I have come to this deck from Miracles myself. It actually offers a similar (control) role in a lot of matchups, and you can view the deck's Dig Through Time, TNN, and Abrupt Decays as a late-game plan. It is a truer 50/50 deck than Miracles, with a flatter matchup profile (in my opinion). Nothing really preys on it (barring Lands and Aggro Loam etc), but it doesn't have a big advantage anywhere in particular.
You don't mention duals as missing from Reanimator. If the implication that you have Underground Sea is correct, you've already got the toughest part of the manabase done. Volcanic Island and Tropical Island remain, so does Wasteland, and Flusterstorm is awesome but optional. It seems to me that you're close enough to this deck to consider it more closely, and if you already liked Grixis Delver, you can almost build two decks at once by this means. 2 Sylvan Library and 2 Tropical Island is most of the difference between them (Grixis and BURG).
I'll speak up a little on Tasigur's side but the answer really depends on what you want to use this card for. What I want out of this slot is a strong trump in tempo matchups because I play the True-Name Nemesis version (without Goyf or TNN, really it's more BURG than Grixis). Resources are at a real premium here. The lower cost matters. These are games with heavy Wasteland and occasional opposing Deathrite Shamans. One turn might be all that a Nimble Mongoose or Tarmogoyf needs to kill me. In addition to all that, I also want to resolve Dig Through Time as soon (and as often) as possible. In straight Grixis I suppose this is less true, with Young Peezy handling those green monsters more handily than ponderous TNN.
The banana man does the dirty work for less than the more sluggish zombie fish, but don't say I didn't warn you. He is decidedly worse in a head-to-head confrontation, and that has feel-bad-loss potential.
As for his ability, one of the reasons we don't get to activate him very often is the opponent's reaction to him. Against Ensnaring Bridge or trapped below a Meekstone, for instance, he still does something. The threat is stronger than the execution.
Re: my Storm comment, timing is everything. When I said "right now" on January 22, that was three days after Treasure Cruise got banned. In the context of those times, there were a lot of players who had newly adopted Storm. Storm is fine now: it even made Carsten's personal tier 1 list. As good as it is now, I think it was even better in the Treasure Cruise meta. In late January, people were going back to Miracles in a big way, and this fact did not bode well for the occasionally new-to-the-deck Storm players.
Storm is a great deck, it just goes up and down. This particular "down" just didn't last that long, unlike the Summer of Maverick (and then the Year of the Miracle) that really put a hurting on the archetype.
Now that people are Digging into midrange decks, Storm has a lot of life in it once again.
As for Legacy gaining popularity, I don't see how that's really possible. Mostly, when I go to the LGS I see the same people I've seen for ages. I imagine a future in which Legacy becomes like Vintage, and I think I can live with that.
Yeah, the mana can definitely be a problem with these decks. There will be some losses simply due to either not finding any or getting that one land Wasted. Your list is more resilient than my Grixis builds were, the one with Liliana played 19 lands only 15 of which were either blue or found blue... and the lonely Bayou. Plus you've got Stifle, which can be used to defend against Wasteland.
The deck I'm running now, which can no longer be called Grixis, also plays 19 lands. It cuts Wasteland to 3 with an extra one in the sideboard. Here the mana is just 6 duals equally spaced along with 10 fetches. It really helps that the deck plays Sylvan Library. It's almost like Deathrite Shaman #5 in that it can shut down opposing attrition plans.
YMMV on the Jitte plan, I haven't tested it myself and probably won't. I can just remember seeing it in some Team America sideboards back in the day. Jeremy Mee played it in his weird very blue 62-card Probe list that got 6th at an SCG.
I have to thank you for the Tasigur suggestion, he really is large and in charge in so many matchups. Since I've started testing with him he's bossed around all manner of green creatures that had really been bothering me. I'm glad there's a solution to those things that doesn't involve me finally buying Goyfs of my own. He hasn't even been too bad in the DnT matchup either. Half the time they don't have a Karakas and aren't well-prepared to deal with the 4/5. Against RUG, BUG, and the mirrors, he's bullet proof. You can't ask for much more from a 1 mana creature!
That's disappointing, your list is strong against Elves to the point where I almost think you're going too far for the matchup. A pair of Grafdiggers' Cages instead of Nihil Spellbomb is a big investment of cards.
A good Burn player is kind of tough for this deck to beat also, I don't think I'm better than 50/50 against it myself.
If Elves and Burn happen all the time in that shop, why not try an Umezawa's Jitte? That card used to do some work in Team America sideboards a long while ago. I don't think it's bad at all, but my meta doesn't warrant it.
I played a few more games against RUG Delver, this time aided by Tasigur... and he's such a beast in that matchup, he wins it almost by himself. All he needs is some help from the Pyroblast and Lightning Bolt department to keep stuff from flying over his head and Submerges far from his banana-loving person.
You might have a point, and certainly Tasigur, the Golden Fang has been a beast to deal with when it's been used against me. The only way I've beaten him is either swinging through with TNN and DTT + double Bolt to close out the last points of damage, or chumping him with Elemental tokens while Liliana ticked up for more edicts.
This might just be the anti-RUG card I've been looking for. I wonder if I can play one of these alongside my three Digs.
A lot of places already do this (allowing proxy cards). Sometimes there's a number limit on the number of proxies allowed and sometimes not. I have played in a few of these small, friendly events, and despite proxies being legal I only once played against an opponent using them. In his case, the proxies were so good that I wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't said anything. He'd proxied Tarmogoyfs in his Team America deck.
There was one guy playing one event with a whole deck proxied out, and again his proxies were pretty nice. It was an unusual deck he had no interest in owning, I believe. It had Imperial Recruiters, and I can understand anyone's hesitation to go 4-of on such a fringe card.
That first player eventually got his Goyfs and piloted that deck every chance he got. We met again at an SCG where a last-round loss to him put me at 34th and him at 9th place. It seems that the proxy-legal event he'd played about a year earlier helped him, to some extent, become a good player and a valuable member of our community. This colors my own opinion on proxies, and I am strongly in favor of allowing them. Without those small proxy-legal tournaments in the neighborhood, would this guy have put a deck together for the Open and done well with it? I think not.
I reserve my disdain for things that are really and truly scummy, like cheating, Adderall abuse, playing lands in front of creatures, the scent of certain venues, and the unjust imprisonment of Black Vise.
Dark Maverick is an interesting proposition right now. I haven't tested it in a long time, but the deck is legitimate. Maverick has a whole summer named after it, and the deck was on the radar for a good bit longer than that.
Any Maverick list that tries to crack the current metagame has a few questions placed before it. Can the particular build go 50/50 or better against Miracles? Can it put up those numbers without surrendering ground against Omnitell? Can it hold its ground against the newest generation of Delver decks?
Currently the "Maverick" deck might be Aggro Loam although it isn't really Aggro Loam: it looks more like a Maverick deck that has switched its Green Sun's Zenith and Mother of Runes for Mox Diamond and Chalice of the Void. It still plays Gaddock Teeg and Knight of the Reliquary though, so to me that'll always be Maverick.
Traditionally, Maverick has done well against tempo decks, but I don't know if that is still true against the midrange-focused Dig Through Time Delver lists that have been cropping up. The question needs to be reexamined. It certainly had trouble with the Miracles lists before Monastery Mentor appeared in them, and that may or may not be still the case. I personally believe Maverick to be a reasonably good fair deck to play against Omnitell. It has a quicker clock than DnT and can drop down Qasali Pridemage off of Show and Tell... possibly killing the Omniscience if Thalia and/or Ethersworn Canonist were also doing their thing. Savannahs have fallen in price a good deal from their peak, so that's good news.
All in all, Maverick is an awesome deck that many people enjoy playing. It's been a very long time since it was tier 1, and I don't know how it would fare in the current meta. Savannah, Scrubland, and Bayou will lock you into this archetype pretty thoroughly if you get all of them, so I'd want to complete my own investigation before buying if it were me. There are a few other nontrivial cards to acquire too, like Sylvan Libraries and possibly equipment.
@Starchild, go for Miracles then. It's a wonderful deck. You'll always get your value out of tournament fees because you spend every moment actually playing!
Just make sure you Top quickly, remember what cards are there, and don't agonize over it too much. Visualizing what I want/need in the current position before I look helps me a lot. I suggest practicing the mirror match if you can. If you think it's awesome, then Miracles is the deck for you, 100%.
Well, it's not perfect, but it's better than the 75 I had managed to come up with on my own after about two weeks of work. I like taking the suggestion offered in the article, switching the Tarmogoyfs for TNNs. This makes the deck more controlling and midrangey (if that's a word), but I've found those TNNs solving a lot of problems for me. It may getting weaker against opposing tempo plans, but here again TNN has been doing work. Although it costs 3 mana, it perversely shores up the mana base: the deck needs G/B for DRS, a single G for Sylvan Library, and after that R is only for Bolts and whatever sideboard cards. Occasionally, Decay is needed, but that's not every matchup. The rest of the deck is blue. Much of the time I have only blue cards in hand, so whatever land gets Wasted I'm still in business.
I'm starting to suspect that Thoughtseize is the card to play over Spell Pierce alongside TNN, Pierce looking better next to Goyf than something that 99% of the time I tapped out for. It would also be great to have a different angle against Omnitell and Storm.
I'm really enjoying the explosion of variety that's appeared in Delver decks, we've come a long way from the days when the stock RUG list with two flex slots was the solved and known best way to build the deck. I've seen Team America in my meta recently playing Dark Confidant, RUG is in the middle of an upheaval, and Grixis has builds out there blurring the lines between itself and BURG... even Delverless Delver lists have appeared. It's a fantastic time to be playing this kind of deck. Mirror matches are seldom boring (except Wasteland blowouts), there are all kinds of interlocking pieces to examine.
I hope that we remain in this stage of development for some time, but with such cracks showing in the Great Counterbalance Edifice that has defined the meta for so long... I'm not sure how long the environment will support it.
I've been wondering why Imperial Painter isn't better in the current metagame. Is there anything especially challenging to it aside from the Emrakuls that Omnitell brings to the table?
I suggest taking Shardless, it's still a very good deck that's well under the radar at the moment. Just be sure that you have a plan for all the Dig Through Time decks. However, if you really expect Burn (I never expect Burn), Shardless is a dangerous choice. Still, given the choice between a deck that plays Brainstorm and a deck that doesn't play this card, I side with the Brainstorm deck.
Folks already pay 1 life for each land because they use fetchlands to get them, it isn't considered much of a cost. It's weak as land destruction and weak as a burn spell: compare this to Price of Progress as burn or Wasteland, Stifle, Rishadan Port, Blood Moon, Choke, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Lodestone Golem, etc as land hate spells.
I agree that one ought to have a plan for Miracles, it is a frequently seen deck. I just find it odd how personally I don't see the deck that much: the numbers don't lie, Miracles is frequently seen on the other side of the board. No one who plays Burn should be unfamiliar with or unprepared for the matchup. For myself, I think that as long as I play intelligently regarding Counterbalance costs and the timing of spells, bring enough sideboard cards i.e. blasts, Vexing Shushers, and the completely over-the-top bomb that is Koth of the Hammer, I'll win around 50% of the games.
It's not the Miracle players who have me spooked and worried about bringing Burn to a tournament, it's the other combo players. The last time I played at the LGS in Beijing, I faced 4 combo players (two on Omnitell) and 1 Team America. The meta there has warped away from Miracles and towards tempo+Omnitell. Shortly afterward I played in Worcester MA, where the only combo player I encountered was piloting Enchantress. I guess it's true what they say, all metas are local.
Does anyone know of a good Taiga list? I've recently acquired one and may want to put it to some use.
I really think that Borowicz burn deck, the Swiftspear build with 19 land and 2 Koth of the Hammer in the sideboard, is a good version of the deck. It has those turn 3 kills that push up the Omnitell win rate, and it also can bring in the red planeswalker for Miracles.
Personally though, I don't really see that many people playing Miracles these days. It's always present in the tournaments I get to attend, but it's always outnumbered by other decks. Delver is back in a big way, but I don't think this is a matchup that Burn is worried about. Sometimes I think about taking out the Koths for some more Blazes because they'd be useful more often, but living the dream is so amazing that I can't bring myself to take him away. It's fun to smack people with Mountains. Nice, expensive mountains.
There will be a minor problem to the deck if Dig Through Time gets banned, however. Not only does the deck abuse the card itself, but it functions best in an environment of Omnitell/Miracles that would be substantially altered in the event of a banning. On the other hand, Sensei's Divining Top isn't so safe from the ban hammer either. A fair number of players are of the opinion that it ought to go.
The other thing you might try is moving onto the more controlling side of Grixis Delver, BURG. I have come to this deck from Miracles myself. It actually offers a similar (control) role in a lot of matchups, and you can view the deck's Dig Through Time, TNN, and Abrupt Decays as a late-game plan. It is a truer 50/50 deck than Miracles, with a flatter matchup profile (in my opinion). Nothing really preys on it (barring Lands and Aggro Loam etc), but it doesn't have a big advantage anywhere in particular.
You don't mention duals as missing from Reanimator. If the implication that you have Underground Sea is correct, you've already got the toughest part of the manabase done. Volcanic Island and Tropical Island remain, so does Wasteland, and Flusterstorm is awesome but optional. It seems to me that you're close enough to this deck to consider it more closely, and if you already liked Grixis Delver, you can almost build two decks at once by this means. 2 Sylvan Library and 2 Tropical Island is most of the difference between them (Grixis and BURG).
The banana man does the dirty work for less than the more sluggish zombie fish, but don't say I didn't warn you. He is decidedly worse in a head-to-head confrontation, and that has feel-bad-loss potential.
As for his ability, one of the reasons we don't get to activate him very often is the opponent's reaction to him. Against Ensnaring Bridge or trapped below a Meekstone, for instance, he still does something. The threat is stronger than the execution.
Storm is a great deck, it just goes up and down. This particular "down" just didn't last that long, unlike the Summer of Maverick (and then the Year of the Miracle) that really put a hurting on the archetype.
Now that people are Digging into midrange decks, Storm has a lot of life in it once again.
As for Legacy gaining popularity, I don't see how that's really possible. Mostly, when I go to the LGS I see the same people I've seen for ages. I imagine a future in which Legacy becomes like Vintage, and I think I can live with that.
The deck I'm running now, which can no longer be called Grixis, also plays 19 lands. It cuts Wasteland to 3 with an extra one in the sideboard. Here the mana is just 6 duals equally spaced along with 10 fetches. It really helps that the deck plays Sylvan Library. It's almost like Deathrite Shaman #5 in that it can shut down opposing attrition plans.
YMMV on the Jitte plan, I haven't tested it myself and probably won't. I can just remember seeing it in some Team America sideboards back in the day. Jeremy Mee played it in his weird very blue 62-card Probe list that got 6th at an SCG.
I have to thank you for the Tasigur suggestion, he really is large and in charge in so many matchups. Since I've started testing with him he's bossed around all manner of green creatures that had really been bothering me. I'm glad there's a solution to those things that doesn't involve me finally buying Goyfs of my own. He hasn't even been too bad in the DnT matchup either. Half the time they don't have a Karakas and aren't well-prepared to deal with the 4/5. Against RUG, BUG, and the mirrors, he's bullet proof. You can't ask for much more from a 1 mana creature!
A good Burn player is kind of tough for this deck to beat also, I don't think I'm better than 50/50 against it myself.
If Elves and Burn happen all the time in that shop, why not try an Umezawa's Jitte? That card used to do some work in Team America sideboards a long while ago. I don't think it's bad at all, but my meta doesn't warrant it.
I played a few more games against RUG Delver, this time aided by Tasigur... and he's such a beast in that matchup, he wins it almost by himself. All he needs is some help from the Pyroblast and Lightning Bolt department to keep stuff from flying over his head and Submerges far from his banana-loving person.
This might just be the anti-RUG card I've been looking for. I wonder if I can play one of these alongside my three Digs.
There was one guy playing one event with a whole deck proxied out, and again his proxies were pretty nice. It was an unusual deck he had no interest in owning, I believe. It had Imperial Recruiters, and I can understand anyone's hesitation to go 4-of on such a fringe card.
That first player eventually got his Goyfs and piloted that deck every chance he got. We met again at an SCG where a last-round loss to him put me at 34th and him at 9th place. It seems that the proxy-legal event he'd played about a year earlier helped him, to some extent, become a good player and a valuable member of our community. This colors my own opinion on proxies, and I am strongly in favor of allowing them. Without those small proxy-legal tournaments in the neighborhood, would this guy have put a deck together for the Open and done well with it? I think not.
I reserve my disdain for things that are really and truly scummy, like cheating, Adderall abuse, playing lands in front of creatures, the scent of certain venues, and the unjust imprisonment of Black Vise.
Any Maverick list that tries to crack the current metagame has a few questions placed before it. Can the particular build go 50/50 or better against Miracles? Can it put up those numbers without surrendering ground against Omnitell? Can it hold its ground against the newest generation of Delver decks?
Currently the "Maverick" deck might be Aggro Loam although it isn't really Aggro Loam: it looks more like a Maverick deck that has switched its Green Sun's Zenith and Mother of Runes for Mox Diamond and Chalice of the Void. It still plays Gaddock Teeg and Knight of the Reliquary though, so to me that'll always be Maverick.
Traditionally, Maverick has done well against tempo decks, but I don't know if that is still true against the midrange-focused Dig Through Time Delver lists that have been cropping up. The question needs to be reexamined. It certainly had trouble with the Miracles lists before Monastery Mentor appeared in them, and that may or may not be still the case. I personally believe Maverick to be a reasonably good fair deck to play against Omnitell. It has a quicker clock than DnT and can drop down Qasali Pridemage off of Show and Tell... possibly killing the Omniscience if Thalia and/or Ethersworn Canonist were also doing their thing. Savannahs have fallen in price a good deal from their peak, so that's good news.
All in all, Maverick is an awesome deck that many people enjoy playing. It's been a very long time since it was tier 1, and I don't know how it would fare in the current meta. Savannah, Scrubland, and Bayou will lock you into this archetype pretty thoroughly if you get all of them, so I'd want to complete my own investigation before buying if it were me. There are a few other nontrivial cards to acquire too, like Sylvan Libraries and possibly equipment.
@Starchild, go for Miracles then. It's a wonderful deck. You'll always get your value out of tournament fees because you spend every moment actually playing!
Just make sure you Top quickly, remember what cards are there, and don't agonize over it too much. Visualizing what I want/need in the current position before I look helps me a lot. I suggest practicing the mirror match if you can. If you think it's awesome, then Miracles is the deck for you, 100%.
I'm starting to suspect that Thoughtseize is the card to play over Spell Pierce alongside TNN, Pierce looking better next to Goyf than something that 99% of the time I tapped out for. It would also be great to have a different angle against Omnitell and Storm.
I'm really enjoying the explosion of variety that's appeared in Delver decks, we've come a long way from the days when the stock RUG list with two flex slots was the solved and known best way to build the deck. I've seen Team America in my meta recently playing Dark Confidant, RUG is in the middle of an upheaval, and Grixis has builds out there blurring the lines between itself and BURG... even Delverless Delver lists have appeared. It's a fantastic time to be playing this kind of deck. Mirror matches are seldom boring (except Wasteland blowouts), there are all kinds of interlocking pieces to examine.
I hope that we remain in this stage of development for some time, but with such cracks showing in the Great Counterbalance Edifice that has defined the meta for so long... I'm not sure how long the environment will support it.