MTG Salvation

Needs 4x Chandra, Flamecaller. That's the best reason to play the deck in the first place.

I just saw another thread on this yesterday but it might be off the front page. That deck was more focused on including Demonic Pact which is fun but risky. I played around with this concept at the beginning of BFZ and it was fun. My advice, for what its worth, would be to add in some sweepers since you're playing B/W anyway. Languish is going to be really strong in the early weeks and you can't just count on 1 for 1 removal to keep pace. Also, I would cut back on the number of Starfield of Nyx. Its a "do nothing the turn it enters play" 5 drop that you don't generally want in multiples. Here's an Esper Version my friend tooled around with that he ended up abandoning. Maybe it can give you some ideas. GL!

Quote from Warewofford »

How do you like mind wrack in this list? Is is better than something like Kalitas or pia and Kiran?

As I'm sure you know Ware, "Better" totally depends on the meta. I like it in our very speculative, artificially created meta. IMO its the strongest against Red Eldrazi because they can't kill it without 2 for 1'ing themselves. But the other two cards you mentioned are very strong as well and much more proven. I am definitely putting Kalitas in the sideboard because its really strong against certain decks. We'd have to tune our manabase a bit to get double red at the 4 drop spot, but Pia and Kiran can be great as well. Time will tell on this one.

BTW, one update I'm thinking from this afternoon's testing, is that Languish might be making the maindeck.. It's just so good against the deck's that I think we're going to see week 1. We have another "testing day" on Wednesday. I'll post an update.

Quote from Wrathberry »

Im trying to force Mardu Midrange/Control too. Works pretty good currently.

Loving to Play with all those walkers currently.

I'd love to see your list if you have time. And have you tested against Red Eldrazi yet? That's the deck that's currently winning our gauntlet. (As stated before, we're proxying: White Weenie, Vampire Aggro, Esper Dragons, G/W Megamorph and Red Eldrazi)

Quote from Son_of_the_Suns »

I'm not calling you a liar, but I have a hard time believing the mana base works out the way you say. In the upcoming format, if you're playing a non-green tricolored deck, the third color must be cut down to no more than a single-symbol splash for the late game. I'm talking about things like Sorin, Grim Nemesis in a blue-black control deck. You actively put yourself at risk of losing against your manabase.

Also, To the Slaughter doesn't seem good in your deck. You're getting to Delirium relatively late. You might run some amount of Dead Weight to help with that, which I think you should be doing anyway.

You might tell me that the downside of the third color is not as huge as I think it is, but I've got to ask you: Where's the upside of running this instead of, let's say, a B/W Midrange deck?

I think you're really overestimating the difficulty in running a 3 color deck. The mana is worse after rotation but BFZ standard was one of the most liberal mana bases we've had in years, so anything would feel worse after that. There are a lot of pro's out there posting articles with 3 color decks with much more ambitious curves than mine. One glance at Starcitygames can link you to Shaheen Soorani's article in which his first deck has both Reflector Mage and Thunderbreak Regent. My curve is nothing that ambitious. My mana requirements are pretty tame honestly.. the only early splash is Declaration in Stone. Control/Mid decks aren't punished as much as aggro decks for having their lands come in tapped.

As far as To the Slaughter is concerned, you generally don't need the delirium part until "later" in the game anyway. Its a bonus, not a requirement. I think some people forget (not saying you've forgotten Son) that its an instant speed answer to a planeswalker the turn it comes down assuming you've cleared the rest of their board, which is what this deck really does well. It's pretty sick to be able to answer a planeswalker on their turn.. I've definitely missed that since Hero's Downfall rotated. We have Dead Weight in the board. It used to be in the main, but we swapped in Declaration in Stone because we needed some exile effects for cards like Hangarback Walker and creatures with indestructible or recursion. It might be wrong in the long run.. its hard without knowing the meta we'll be up against. (I hated playing with Anguished Unmaking btw.. that life loss was killer.. but the effect is so good, probably needs to be in the final 75)

You're last question is a really good one, and I really don't know the answer. I think the B/W Mid/Control deck is going to be very strong and it easily might end up a stronger option than Mardu. Red does give you some excellent cards though. Chandra, Flamecaller will be imho one of the strongest card in standard after rotation, and I think she'll close out a game more reliably than Sorin, Grim Nemesis. Goblin Dark-Dwellers, Kolaghan's Command, Painful Truths and Nahiri, the Harbinger are all really powerful magic cards. There are a couple of spicy sideboard options as well in Red. But I can't be sure that it'll be stronger than having a more consistent 2 color deck.

That's a really smart question. Do I feel like our mana is in a pretty good place? Yes.. but that's because we have no double off color spells until T6. We designed our mana base with the idea that by turn 3, we'd have all three colors plus double black. That does happen the majority of time but we do have enough 2 mana kill spells to play a tapped land on turn 3. If you're really sticking to BR and are just splashing white for Radiant Flames then I'd forgo white altogether and do blue instead since they have better land support.

A Super Friends deck that plays red and leaves out Chandra, Flamecaller is not where I want to be. She is the second most powerful card in the format imo and a much better finisher then Avacyn or Dromoka.

I was curious about the idea of a Naya Humans deck because there are solid standalone cards in Red that happen to be humans like Abbot of Keral Keep, Thopter Engineer, and Pia and Kiran Nalaar. This is the type of deck that wants to go wide so the thopters seem like a good place to be. Here was a quick 5 minute attempt to throw together a list:

A deck with 22 lands and no mana dorks typically curves out at the 4 drop spot. You have 8 cards with a cmc of 5 or more. If you want to reliably cast your higher mana cards, you're going to need to up your land count. Most decks running 6 drops, will have at least 25 lands, with some control decks running 26-27. I know you said it hasn't been a problem in testing, but this is tried and true magic wisdom that the community has agreed upon based on testing from the last 20 years or so.

Another thing I'd recommend doing is to cut back on the number of "1 ofs". You're deck has an extremely high degree of variability due to the number of singletons in your deck. Reduce the randomness and you'll win more over time.

Use something like this as a guide:



I'm not saying this deck is viable, but I just wanted to show you what a cohesive plan might look like so you can mess with it and maybe turn it into something you like more. It has the sacrifice theme you seemed to be going for with some of the more controlling elements.

My friends and I are trying to come up with the best Midrange Deck that doesn't use Jace... which through testing, has been a "challenge" - to put it mildly. Just to state the obvious, Jace is going to continue to be the best card in the format, so trying to design competitive decks in an unknown metagame without using him is a losing proposition. But I play at a highly competitive card shop, so its either try or die.

Here is the list we have going at the moment that's been tested against a gauntlet of: White Weenie, Vampire Madness, Esper Dragons, G/W Megamorph, and Red Eldrazi.



In testing, we haven't bothered nailing down the sideboard yet, so we've been using a rotation of cards to try to figure out what fits best. But its going to be a mix of Duress, Transgress the Mind, Languish or Radiant Flames, Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet, etc..

There are a lot of great options for Midrange in these colors, so I'll attempt to explain a little about our logic, but keep in mind, we aren't set on these either.

Lands
The deck's primary color is obviously black. It makes up over 50% of our mana symbols and the manabase reflects that. Only 3 lands can't tap for Black. There are no double white or red requirements until the 6 drop spot. We felt that this was the safest way to go during the first couple of weeks because the aggro decks will be preying on the midrange and control decks that are trying to be too ambitious with their color splits. The first card removed due to this decision was Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and honestly, I rarely miss it. Nahiri, the Harbinger is really really good in a heavy removal deck, and there's so many flying creatures right now, Gideon just seemed worse most of the time.

Removal
The removal in this deck is so good lol. They're very easy to cast and super powerful (Ultimate Price is really good right now against every deck except Eldrazi). If you haven't had the chance to play with To the Slaughter yet, you are in for a treat. That card is ridiculous, and makes the pain of losing Crackling Doom a lot easier. In a match against the Esper Dragon list, my friend flipped his Jace and cast Dragonlord Ojutai on an empty board. There aren't too many cards that can deal with both simultaneously at instant speed for 3 mana. Actually there might be none.. The one spell here on my maybe list is Declaration in Stone. We need a sorcery removal spell in this slot to enable Delirium, but that clue token is annoying. We'll see..

Creatures
Not much to say here really. We run creature light because we're winning mostly with our planeswalkers. Mindwrack Demon is really good.. but you have to wait to cast it in some games. We enable delirium pretty consistently through our normal gameplay since we have a lot of diversity in our card types (Creatures, Instant, Sorcery, Artifact, Lands, Planeswalkers). Linvala, the Preserver is a bonkers target for Nahiri, the Harbinger's ultimate, which she gets to use surprisingly frequently. Hangarback Walker is the best two drop for our game plan even if it sucks against certain matchups - FU Reflector Mage.

Planeswalkers
These are our main win conditions. I've already said it but Nahiri, the Harbinger is really good. I thought she was going to suck honestly because her -2 ability has that tapped clause, but we have so much removal that there's generally only 1 creature max that's able to swing at her on the turn she comes down, and her loyalty is very high so its hard to kill her in one go. Then you can minus her on the tapped creature, or just +2 her and kill the creature another way. Chandra, Flamecaller is the best way to close out the game right now imo.

So yeah, there you have it. Let me know what you think. I'm posting this for constructive criticism and different view points.. we're pretty high on it right now but its not crushing, so the more eyes the better.

Hi welcome to Magic. Here's some initial feedback. First off, you mentioned you were limited to BFZ because those are the only cards you have. Are you saying that you are unable/unwilling to buy individual cards to improve your deck? That's going to limit you a ton, especially since BFZ's power level is much lower then the previous sets.

Anyway, first thing that sticks out is that you need to try to decide what kind of deck you are building. You have a pretty low mana curve (meaning the majority of your cards are from 1 to 4 mana) which makes me think you're trying to come out fast like an aggro deck. I think you're better off going that route then trying to cast huge threats like Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and Desolation Twin.

You're mana base also needs to be retooled. You should run at least 23 lands if you're trying to curve out into your 3 and 4 drops.. and probably 27-28 lands if you're actually trying to cast the aforementioned 10 drops without using mana acceleration. You also don't have any blue producing lands but you're still using Skyrider Elf.

This deck isn't optimized, but here's the direction I would take it at first glance. It's limited to cheap BFZ spells, no mythics.

Maybe Sultai White so you can add in Siege Rhino? Seems like Siege Rhino would be a solid card in a deck like this that could use consistency.

I don't know the exact number of creatures that you need to have to make Collected Company worth it, but I'm pretty sure its more then the 16 you have there.

Quote from DarklingScribe »

Congrats on going 4-0 TacticalCelebrant!

I was torn between playing standard and doing a draft at my LGS FNM tonight. I decided I was more in the mood for draft and found that I had made the correct decision when I opened an expedition Windswept Heath in my second pack of the draft, which made my night!

Anyway I got to test my own W/x enchantments deck between matches in draft and found the deck to be really strong. I rarely ever had a dead card in my hand, and if anything I feel like I need more draw.

As a result of this testing and seeing for myself how aggro the meta is right now at my LGS, I think I'm going Jeskai and dropping green all together. This way I can feel more comfortable with my mana base and it allows me to main deck a few copies of Radiant Flames.

Outpost Siege has also tested really well for me, as it give me the card advantage that Monastery Siege cannot, this doesn't mean that I'm forgoing one for the other. Monastery Siege still gives unsurpassed value in card selection. I think I'll end up playing 3 copies of Monastery Siege and two of Outpost siege.

Thirding the congrats TC. I also went with draft over standard last night but the deck did well in the random side games I played.

I've been intrigued with the idea of somehow fitting black into our lists for Demonic Pact and Wasteland Strangler. Anyone played around with this? We'd need to figure out a way to bounce or remove our own Pacts without playing worthless cards. We already have one interesting way to do it by default in our deck which is to animate Pact with Starfield of Nyx and then have it deal 4 damage to itself, but that's hardly reliable. I just feel like Wasteland Strangler is such a fantastic tempo play against all the aggro decks I see in my meta. I'm definitely intrigued by it.

Quote from hercules_64 »

Quote from Bonkshebonk »

I think that we need to acknowledge that the two primary ideas that are being tossed around here that are quite different from each other and its important to think of each in its own context.

1.) You have a control version of the deck that is trying to exile or sweep all of our opponents threats, before using their 4x Sigil of the Empty Throne and 4x Starfield of Nyx to close out the game. These are mostly W/U decks though some are going into Bant. These are the decks that are asking for win cons, because by their nature, they are light on them outside of the two aforementioned cards.

2.) Then you have the Bant Versions that are more focused on generating tokens. They stall the game long enough through exiles, lifegain, chump blocks and sweepers for the token army to take over. They don't have as many answers to threats as the more controllish version, but they have inevitability if the game goes on too long.

I didn't realize how different these decks were until I started playing with the W/U Control version.. that deck has so many more answers then my deck has. I can definitely understand why cards like Retreat to Kazandu don't seem worth it. But in the token strategy, this card is amazing, because both modes are relevant and all we're trying to do is stall the game til our generators come online. Basically, the minute we can stall them from attacking due to our tokens, we've turned the corner and will win.

When you mean token generators, you're primarily referring to from beyond and sigil of the empty throne in the bant version right?

But yeah, I think I've been trying to say what you just said but you put it better than I have. I started out messing with the bant version, and while it's very good with the inevitability it brings, I think I just barely like the U/W control-ish version more just for how smooth it runs. Even against hyper aggro we're not totally dead in the water, I just had a match against atarka red and after exiling/countering multiple swiftspears, sliderunners and berserkers and stabilizing at 4 life (thank god he didn't draw exquisite firecraft) he ended up just conceding against a full board of angels and "manchantments" (gonna start using that now) as there was just nothing he could do and had ran out of gas.

I will say though, I'm really missing not having access to Lumbering falls in the U/W version. I guess I could adjust the manabase around if I really wanted to, but idk.

I'm primarily referring to Zendikar's Roil and Retreat to Emeria (and of course Sigil of the Empty Throne which both lists share. Those 2 flood the board with the 12 fetchlands in the bant deck.