MTG Salvation

You could accidentally cascade into a summoner's pact or pact of negation that you can't pay for, then die on your upkeep

Fyi guys, a RG vengevine list is on camera atm at the SCG open with a 10-1 record. They're posting a deck tech later today but this is what I can make out of the deck list so far:



plus some number of Temur Battle Rage, Hooting Mandrills, Cathartic Reunion and Goblin Guide mainboard

Where did we end up with Driven to Despair? Iirc the testing results were in favour of running it, but the latest lists I've been seeing have moved back to rally or scourge devil in the flex slot. Is it best used as a meta call for heavy combo metas?

What do you guys think on how to beat Auriok Champion? That card has been completely backbreaking whenever it's been played against me and we don't have any sideboard options to deal with it. Is it a small enough part of the meta that we can hope to not get matched up against decks playing it?

What was the context of waiting until turn 3 to cast faithless looting? In the article Lee chose to cast darkblast on the opponent's 1 drop instead of looting so he could dredge it on his 2nd turn draw step, but if you had no other turn 1 plays then it's certainly not correct to wait on casting faithless looting

A great quote from the previous page is "darkblast is either a 10 or a 1 depending on the matchup" so sometimes all it does is dredge 3, which loam also does while enabling a core aspect of our late game engine. It's definitely a card you want access to in the 75 as a 1 or 2 of (2 is the correct number imo) though as it can completely dominate certain matchups single handedly

Heading home from the GP now and ended up with 10-5

Bye
2-0 vs RW Prison
1-2 vs Mono-U Turns
2-1 vs Bant Eldrazi
1-2 vs BW D&T (no Eldrazi)
2-0 vs Jeskai Control

Not as good as Team MtgMintCard but I'm satisfied with the result for my first GP

Played in day 1 of GP Brisbane with dredge earlier and qualified for day 2 with a 6-3 record



2-0 vs Jund
1-2 vs Bant Eldrazi
2-1 vs Grixis Control
1-2 vs RG Tron
1-2 vs RW Prison
2-0 vs Elves
2-1 vs RG Aggro
2-1 vs RG Tron
2-0 vs Kiki-Chord

Can post a more detailed tournament report once day 2 is finished if anyone is interested

Since we're not expecting leyline nearly as much these days, switching to Natural State over Nature's Claim is a definite possibility. Those 4 life points matter a lot for an aggro deck

New primer is looking fantastic Lantern, thanks for putting so much time and effort into it

Went 3-1 at modern weekly tonight with this list:



Matchups were:

Affinity 0-2: With the GGT ban this is definitely one matchup we lost the edge we used to have in imo. G1 I mulliganed down to 5 and kept a fine hand with thug, looting and lands, but failed to dredge deep enough to apply any pressure so I was overrun in typical Affinity fashion.
In: 2x Lightning Axe, 2x Ancient Grudge, 1x Nature's Claim
G2 I keep a hand with ancient grudge, a fetchland, dakmor salvage, looting, and a couple of other cards and after I play looting, my opponent plays t1 Grafdigger's Cage so the earliest I can blow it up is turn 3 if I don't hit another land. By t3 my opponent has played a steel overseer, an ornithopter and an inkmoth nexus and on his turn after I destroy cage, he plays an Arcbound Ravager. In response to him activating overseer I flashback grudge to kill the ravager, but on the following turn I wasn't able to find enough lands with loam + conflag to kill enough of his creatures to stay alive after he plays cranial plating on the following turn. He told me after the match that he missed lethal with inkmoth nexus on the 2nd last turn of the game anyway

Werewolves 2-0: Standard dredge stuff. Conflagrate cleans up the board on turn 3 and my opponent scoops pretty quickly :/

Eldrazi Tron 2-0: G1 was standard dredge stuff - got lucky and was able to chain my dredgers together cleanly. Ran him over on turn 4 with a scourge devil when his only play for the game was spellskite.
In: 1x Ghost Quarter, 1x Vengeful Pharaoh, 2x Ancient Grudge
G2 I kept a reasonable hand with lands, dredgers and a looting and I manage to put a couple of creatures onto the board before my opponent plays grafdigger's cage, and the ancient grudge in my hand can't destroy it because he also controls a spellskite. So at this point I decided to kill his spellskite with grudge and dredge until I found ghost quarter so I can loam + quarter to lock him off his mana. (The other grudge I sided in was in the graveyard by being dredged btw) Without access to flashback looting I was pretty slow at finding it, so in the meantime I was getting in for 2 damage a turn with my narcomoeba's. Along the way he plays a TKS and exiles a thug, and when he attacked with it next turn I killed it with vengeful pharaoh. However the unfortunate part of this interaction is pharaoh goes on top then I draw the card from TKS leaving the battlefield, and I didn't have another way to bin it again immediately, but I was able to loam up to 10 cards in hand and bin the pharaoh and a couple of dredgers. Next turn he plays and cracks a relic of progenitus after I'd only managed to ghost quarter him once, but by this point he's at 5 life and can't deal with my two Narcomoeba's so I managed to take the game from there

RG Titan Breach 2-0: G1 I kept the all-enabler hand with two lands, two neonates, two lootings and a reunion and managed to find an imp and a loam in the top three cards. Solid T4 kill with minimal interaction from my opponent
In: 1x Life from the Loam, 1x Collective Brutality
G2: I kept a solid hand with looting, neonate, shriekhorn, imp, two lands and an amalgam and play the looting on t1. My opponent then plays chalice on x=1 on turn 2 so I'm forced into an awkward position at this point. My only shot at winning is by dredging naturally and hoping to find gnaw to the bone before he casts scapeshift (at this point I wasn't sure what variant of RG valakut he was playing) so I start filling my graveyard while he ramps. After a few turns I put out a couple of amalgams / bloodghasts and hardcast a thug, since I have a stack of dredgers rotting in my hand, and he plays anger of the gods. Since I'm putting a decent amount of pressure on him at this point to find his combo and kill me with valakut, I keep dredging and casting dredgers and get him down to 10 or so life before anger #2 drops. In the following turns I flip a few narcomoeba's off a lucky dredge, cast my remaining 1 power dredge creatures and eventually get there with my board presence and a small ish conflagrate

I'm keen to pick up a 3rd copy of loam to replace one of the shriekhorns but otherwise I'm pretty happy with where my list is at. Not sure if 19 is the correct land count but time will tell. Also not sure about the sideboard - does anyone else find that between ancient grudge and nature's claim, we have enough ways to deal with anti hate cards so abrupt decay is rarely relevant? The 2cmc BG casting cost is hard in a deck whose manabase is so deep into red. The main utility for it from my perspective is that it kills scooze or cage in jund and is uncounterable in the control matchup when they've played rest in peace, but I feel like 2 slots is overkill and one can be safely removed. To replace it I'm super keen to pick up a 2nd gnaw to the bone for the aggro matchup - since our deck is slower now than it previously was at filling the graveyard, given that we still need to find a copy of gnaw by the same point in the aggro matchup, it seems like an easy inclusion to me

Quote from RoarMaster99 »

I like the idea of Rotting Rats myself. Triggers amalgam and gravecrawler, is almost always value for card advantage, and lets you dump from hand to grave in a pinch.

This deck doesn't play gravecrawler (you're probably thinking of dredgevine, which you can find the thread for in the developing competitive section), but haunted dead seems like it outclasses rotting rats on almost all fronts - it lets you discard an extra card, can be activated at instant speed, doesn't exile itself at end of turn and creates a 1/1 spirit token. The loss of the opponent discarding a card is probably a fine trade off

Quote from tangleweed »

So. Where can I order custom sleeves with that pic? Totally awesome.

http://www.inkedgaming.com/

This ban also changes our strategy for fighting Grafdigger's Cage immensely as we can no longer keep dredging and start dropping massive fatties. This could possibly put a premium on more than 2x Nature's Claim in the SB but at the same time we can expect people to play less graveyard hate now, since the deck was just banned

Thoughts on this list as a post-ban starting point for testing?

Went 3-1 at my local card store's weekly Wednesday Modern event:

Round 1: 2-0 vs Bant Eldrazi

G1: I kept a gross hand with Simian Spirit Guide, Simian Spirit Guide, Insolent Neonate, Insolent Neonate, Faithless Looting, Golgari Grave-Troll, Bloodstained Mire and killed him on turn 3 after he played Ancient Stirrings and an Eldrazi Skyspawner.
G2: I kept a reasonable hand with T2 Cathartic + dredgers and executed the usual turn 4 or 5 kill game plan with minimal resistance.
(I didn't sideboard in this match because my opponent told me he didn't have a sideboard since it was a new deck, and I decided my deck was already favoured enough for sideboarding to not matter)

Round 2: 2-1 vs Dredge

G1: I lost the die roll and kept a strong hand with Looting, Cathartic, dredgers and 1 land, and drew into my 2nd and 3rd lands off the T1 looting. My opponent kept a slightly slower hand with no T1 play but T2 Cathartic and both of our dredges were kinda medium but I ended up with the bigger board state by the time my opponent began his turn 3. This game was down to the wire but I was able to pull out a victory after Conflagrating for 5 to kill three of his creatures, then unearthing Scourge Devil next turn for lethal.
In: 3x Leyline of the Void
Out: 1x Dakmor Salvage, 1x Simian Spirit Guide, 1x Insolent Neonate
G2: Kept a slow-ish hand with no Leyline, but it had Cathartic + dredgers and I wasn't feeling greedy enough to mulligan a perfectly playable hand. Then my opponent had the nut draw and killed me on turn 3 with Scourge Devil, haha
G3: Kept a 7 with Leyline, Looting, a land and Dakmor Salvage as my only dredger and topdecked two Stinkweed Imps with the Looting, so the game was over soon after that

Round 3: 2-0 vs RG Eldrazi Midrange

G1: Don't remember this game exactly but I think it went in a similar fashion to R1G2 where I kept a decent hand and executed Dredge's main game plan for victory. Iirc he also played an Endless One on 4 on T3 but next turn I cleaned it up with a Conflagrate and swung through
In: 2x Lightning Axe
Out: 1x Dakmor Salvage, 1x Insolent Neonate
Wasn't sure of what level of graveyard hate to expect so I relied on him either not drawing his sideboard hate or the hate being low-impact (e.g. relic, cage) such that I could play through it without diluting my game plan with reactive sideboard cards
G2: I keep a solid hand with Neonate, Reunion, SSG, dredgers and land and my opponent plays T1 Grafdigger's Cage so I have to switch game plans. I cast the turn 1 Neonate and turn 2 Reunion and dredge solidly until I can find a Loam, then dredge & cast Loam on turn 3 and power out an 11/11 Golgari Grave-Troll on turn 4 with the help of Simian Spirit Guide. My opponent kept a low-action hand because of Cage so I had ample time to set up my Loam engine with no pressure. After I drop two more Grave-Trolls the next two turns, each 15/15's, my opponent concedes the game with a Reality Smasher and an Endless One on 1 on his side of the board with him at 4 life

Round 4: 1-2 vs UWR Control

G1: I mulled down to 5 and kept an ok-ish hand with lands and dredgers, then scried a Reunion to the top. The majority of this game played out normally, with me applying pressure after dredging well and him using board wipes and Path to Exile to slow me down. Eventually I got him down to 10 and after a Ghost Quarter, my only land was a Dakmor Salvage. I'd also dredged into four Bloodghasts and he'd just cast Supreme Verdict, wiping out my Amalgams and Narcomoeba's. At this point I'm in topdeck mode looking for another land to trigger Bloodghast and attack for 8. So on my opponent's turn he draws his card, fetches and shocks down to 7, plays Crucible of Worlds and Ghost Quarters my Dakmor Salvage, then next turn I untap, dredge Dakmor Salvage, play it and kill him with Bloodghasts
In: 2x Abrupt Decay
Out: 1x Insolent Neonate, 1x Simian Spirit Guide
G2: I mulliganed to 6 and kept an ok hand, but my opponent slammed turn 2 RiP and I was too late with the Abrupt Decay to answer it. By the time I cast Decay he had mana up to Cryptic Command to bounce + draw then replay RiP next turn. The game ended with Celestial Colonnade getting there
In: 2x Nature's Claim
Out: 1x Dakmor Salvage, 1x Scourge Devil
G3: Mulliganed down to 5 again and kept a no land hand with looting, dredgers and an Abrupt Decay, and eventually managed to put a few threats onto the board before RiP cleaned up the graveyard. After that my opponent cast Elspeth, Sun's Champion + Gideon Jura to close out the game